Redistributing the wealth

I'm sick of hearing of people up in arms about this "redistributing the wealth" business.  It's complete nonsense.  There's a couple of reasons for this.

First is practical.  Obama doesn't plan to raise taxes to outrageously high levels.  They will put things back somewhere around what they were in the Clinton years.  And let's be honest—nobody was shouting about socialism then.  In fact, everybody seemed to be doing pretty well.

Second of all, the point of a progressive tax is that the rich pay proportionally more—and this makes sense.  We are all supposed to contribute equally to society, but what exactly do we mean by "equally"?  At the extreme right of the scale, "equal" means percent, or even dollar amount.  But these don't really take into account the nonlinear nature of money.  A better system is an equal burden.  20% of the income of someone who makes $30,000 dollars per year is a much more significant burden than 20% for someone making $3 million per year; this is because there is a certain absolute minimum amount of money that a person needs to survive.  The cost per dollar of losing any of this income is much greater than the cost per dollar of losing some of a large income, and the ratio far exceeds the ratio of incomes (that's is the nonlinearity part).  We therefore scale the tax percentage to equalize the sum of the costs.  This is why we have tax brackets: we linearize this cost function over each interval (of course, we cap the percentage at a certain point).

Lastly (and this is most important), when discussing "redistribution of wealth", people almost always are pointing to systems where the haves are giving to the have-nots.  But this is not the only wealth-redistribution scheme.  The best examples are perhaps feudal societies, indentured servitude, and sharecropping; all of these systems unfairly transferred the fruits of labor from the workers to the owners due to legal or economic leverage.

Some people respond with "it's a free market!"  But this isn't really an excuse.  I am for Pareto efficient markets, but the number of deregulated markets that approach this is negligible.  Basically, the more deregulation you have, the more the rich are able to gain economic leverage over the middle and working classes, in effect causing a redistribution of wealth upwards.  Over the past 8 years, the economy has grown significantly, but median income has not kept pace: the wealth is being generated by the middle class, but being kept by the investor (or executive) class.  To promote fairness (because that's what this is about, right?  Joe the Plumber doesn't want Obama taking his hard-earned money away, and so shouldn't he be against that for everybody?), the two big ways to decrease this imbalance of power is regulation (which can actually improve the efficiency of markets when done correctly), and increasing the tax burden on the rich.  What they unfairly take through economic means, the government unfairly takes back through taxation.

Presumptuousness

It frustrates me when people are presumptuous with their opinions. The particular impetus is the financial bailout.  I was having a discussion about it after the last presidential debate (during which we talked about the candidates avoiding giving direct answers to questions), and a couple of people asked me if I supported the bailout or not.  I told them that I thought some sort of bailout was probably necessary, I didn't have the information to make a good judgment on the specific bailout proposal.  They accused me of avoiding the question.

But many people have very strong opinions about the bailout.  Some of them are justified; for example, libertarians are against government intervention on principle.  But most of them are based on ideas about what the bailout does and what effect it is intended to have.  That itself is a very complicated economic topic, but people go further.  They proclaim that it won't work because of one reason or another.

None of these people are qualified to make those kinds of judgments.  It's part of that "Joe Sixpack" mentality that Sarah Palin embodies: that average people are wise and qualified to take on complex topics, by golly.  This is patently false.  National issues, especially financial ones, are incredibly intricate and take years of study to understand.  This is why there are people who are paid to figure this stuff out.

Arm-chair quarterbacking in inappropriate ways is rampant.  Government is probably number one—the idea of a representative democracy is that you pay people to study the issues and decide because the factors are far too many for the average person to reasonably understand given their free time (not to mention the average level of intelligence).  But that doesn't stop people from asserting their ill-informed opinions strongly.

Is there an answer to this?  A culture of science, perhaps.  Presumptuousness stems from a love of certainty, and science is the antidote to certainty.

Animacy

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=646

An interesting post on language in general, but I think there's a much more interesting point about human psychology in there (emphasis mine):

The ranking of the politicians and the IT firms puzzled me a bit at first. But then I conjectured that perhaps the scale is measuring a sort of unpredictable agency — what you might call the "Maverick factor". Maybe by changing all their connectors every 18 months, and building laptops that freeze up every other time you plug them into a projector, Apple gains in (this measure) of animacy, just as a cantankerous old car comes to seem more alive every time you have to beg it to start. On this theory Google and Obama, by being more reliable, seem a bit less agentive.

This makes sense, as less predictable things—and especially those with greater agency—warrant more attention. The correlation between unpredictability and agency is strong in living things, I think, and that would explain why people assign agency to unpredictable things when the mechanism isn't clear—for example, Zeus and lightning. Once the mechanism behind those things becomes clearer (e.g., weather conditions, electricity, etc.), the less agency it appears to have.

Wikipedia, information and knowledge

I think Wikipedia has failed, or maybe is headed towards failure in a certain sense. The whole idea of wikis is a success, in that a community can collate information in a relatively quick manner. But Wikipedia is so large, the community can no longer maintain that information. Clear vandalism on high-traffic pages gets caught quickly. But on little-visited pages it can last for years.
An even worse problem is that if the vandalism is largely like a real edit (say, changing a date), it can very easily damage the information.
The problem is that Wikipedia has no information model, and a knowledge model that is close to non-existent.
Since the content is just flat text, the information in Wikipedia is entirely opaque to the program. When you enter information, Wikipedia doesn't gain access to that information. So, for example, you can't tell Wikipedia the population of New York and then later ask it for that information. You have to provide it to Wikipedia every time you need it, and if it needs to be updated, it must be changed whereever it is used.
In a similar way, the talk pages are completely wrong; instead of using the same content model that the article pages use, it should use a forum-like thread/message structure, which could provide notification of replies, etc. It would make communicating about the information so much more efficient.
Anyways, I think Wikipedia has failed on that front. How would I do it better?
You have to start with something that has a very strong information model. Freebase and dbpedia are very good starts. Add to that a forum system for discussing the information.
Now that you have a program that is semantically aware of its content, which can fully take advantage of wiki-like community information gathering, you run into the fundamental problem that is plaguing technology now: knowledge.
Technology is missing semantic awareness. That's the whole thing that Powerset is trying to change. Plus there's the whole semantic web thing. But ok, so how do you make a system like freebase able to assert the veracity of its information?
I would do it with two parts. First, you have to have references. But since you have a strong information model, the references can be directly tied to pieces of information (unlike Wikipedia).
Second, a system for people to vouch for a reference. But that's incomplete. One of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia is that it makes the assumptions that edits by all people are equally trustable. So I would use a sort of web of trust.
People would be assigned a trust number between 0 and 1. If a person's trust number is one, the system considers them completely trustworthy—when they vouch completely for a reference, the system believes that reference is flawless and therefore the information is verified. Now, a trust number of one is only admin-assignable. Everyone else gets trust that flows from those people. If a person provides a reference that gets vouched for by someone trustworthy, that person's trust level goes up.
The confidence level of a piece of information is based on how many people have vouched for its references, prorated in some way by each voucher's trust level. If someone believes a piece of information needs to be changed, they submit the changed information, which can then have references provided and vouched for. If the confidence level of the new information meets some criteria based on the confidence level of the old information, it replaces it.
There are a couple of complexities to add to it. First, in vouching for a reference, you have to be able to say whether you are very confident in the reference, only vaguely confident in its veracity, only vouching that the referenced material does indeed support the information, etc. Second, when entering a piece of information, you need to be able to say what kind of information it is—basically, how likely it is to change. If it's something that should never change (e.g., the birth and death dates of a recent president), it should be very hard to change once it has a high confidence level. On the other hand, some information *will* change—for example, the population of New York. It should be relatively easy to change such information regardless of its confidence level. Because of the strong information model, it would be possible to mark data as time-varying and deal with changes accordingly.

The biology of Jesus

I often think about the details of events in the Bible. Like Jesus: did he share half of his chromosomes with Mary? If so, it must have been from one of her eggs. Was there a holy sperm that appeared in her uterus? If not from one of her eggs, a completely fertilized egg must have appeared. Did it arrive implanted or not?
So if Jesus was divine, was each of his cells also inherently divine? Did the dead skin cells he shed all the time carry this divinity, and if so, did that have any effect on the surrounding environment?
Similarly, when Jesus appeared after death to his followers, was it an actual image that produced photons, or was it a simulation of an image implanted in each person's brain?

When I ask these questions of religious people, they tend to dismiss them as if they can't be asked, but they are certainly completely valid questions. Biology and physics didn't just stop working around Jesus. Another example would be: when Moses parted the Red Sea, what would have happened if you had thrown an object from the seabed at the water being held back? Would it bounce off? Get sucked into the water? I hate that people don't think of these as valid questions that must have answers, even if those answers are unknown.

The sanity paradox

The sanity paradox is a concept that comes up often in my beliefs, related to two propositions being functionally equivalent with no possibility of independent verification. I will define it here:

Consider the question "Am I sane?". If a person is sane, they generally perceive themselves as sane. They will therefore answer "Yes, I am sane.", and will be correct. If a person is insane, they may perceive themselves as sane and all others as insane. Such a person will also answer "Yes, I am sane.", but will be incorrect. Because the perception of sanity is inherently tied to sanity itself, there can never be independent verification of the property. Therefore, the two cases are equivalent, and as such any person may well consider themselves sane, since there is no possible way of discovering the truth.

This concept comes up in various situations. For example, the god of Deism. If the god of Deism exists, this god created the universe and subsequently does not interfere with it. If the god of Deism does not exist, the universe exists in its present state and such a god does not interfere with the universe. These two statements are functionally equivalent for the present and future. It is therefore an example of the sanity paradox, and the choice between existence and non-existence is arbitrary.

Parenting licenses

Parenting licenses—that is, requiring permission to have children—is a concept I think is not only morally acceptable, but morally good. A lot of people have a very negative reaction to that statement, but I think it's a very reasonable idea that, unfortunately, is very nearly impossible to implement practically. Also, when I say "prevent people from having children", the method is unspecified—do not assume I am speaking of sterilization or forced abortions. With that said, this post is about the abstract concept in moral terms, unmuddled by practical concerns.

We already say, as a society, that people don't have a right to raise children. If parents aren't doing a good enough job, we as a society reserve the right to revoke that privilege, to take the children away and place them in the care of the state. I think it's a very small jump from saying that people don't have the right to raise children to not having a right to have children.

The issue is, at its core, the same as with foster care: children's rights. Children have a right to a childhood free from abuse and neglect. Parenting licenses are based on the concept that if a child has no chance of having a decent childhood, they should not be conceived in the first place. This concept is already present as one reason for abortion—if the mother does not think that the child will have a proper environment in which to develop, she can terminate her pregnancy to prevent that from happening. People can voluntarily give up their children to foster care, but in certain cases society can force it upon people to protect the child's rights—and in analogy to voluntary abortions, society should be able to (in an ideal world with ideal methods) prevent people from having children.

Now, on to the objections. A lot of times that I bring this up, people's first reaction is a very strong but very vague objection—they think it's wrong, but cannot provide me with a coherent thought as to why they think it's wrong. I imagine this has to do with very base biological instincts relating to procreation.
Most objections relate to practicalities—that it would be excessive government intervention, a tool for oppression, classist, etc. None of these are arguments against the morality of it, only against any actual implementation of it. I have yet to hear a coherent argument against the fundamental morality of parenting licenses, and welcome anybody who wishes to provide me with one.
I agree wholeheartedly that parenting licenses would be a bad idea. The first issue that comes before all others is how to determine who is fit to be a parent. Such a psychological evaluation would be incredibly complex and would surely give many false positives. Beyond that, the methods used to control fertility are another huge barrier—we would need near 100% reliability with a near 100% certainty of re-enabling fertility. IUDs come closest to this, but I would be opposed to a system where the prevention rests solely on females. Finally, the potential for abuse is enormous. Not only would it probably tend to be classist (the argument that there is a certain level of funding that a child deserves is a pretty easy one to make), but it could easily descend into eugenics. So obviously the system cannot be implemented, but that has no bearing on its morality.

The arrogance of creationism

A lot of people don't realize how arrogant creationism is. It's like this: literally tens of thousands of very smart people have dedicated their entire lives to the subject, and have collectively come to the same conclusion. A person who is almost entirely uneducated in the subject to claim that they know better is extremely insolent.

People think they're smart, that they know everything—or even that they can know everything. And because of that, they think that their opinion on some subject matter should have weight. But it doesn't. The fact is that biology is far too complex for an uneducated person to truly understand it. The body of knowledge is so vast that only people whose careers are in the field have the time and capability to absorb it all. To criticize its findings without knowing the field is preposterous.

This is part of a bigger lack of integration of science in society. Science is about the method. If you trust in the method, you should trust in the results. You don't get to pick and choose. But people think they know better than the scientists. I had a conversation with a guy about global warming. He was saying, "See, they aren't taking into account the cycle of this or that." I asked him, "So you think you're smarter than the thousands of scientists who have all come to this conclusion?" And he said, "No." "But," I responded, "if you know about this certain aspect that either none of the scientists have thought of, or none have been able to get convincing data on, then you must surely be smarter than all of them!" And that's really the problem.

Accepting science is in large part about accepting one's own limitations. The point of peer review is that one person alone is not enough to ensure quality. The most committed scientists, when someone derails their work by pointing out a flaw, will thank that person. Science is about the wisdom of collective study—that though one person can only work in a very limited scope, they can use information from others, trusting that the process made the information reliable. Science is about admitting that there are people who know more than you, to whom you could never catch up. Science is about admitting that people, but more specifically that you yourself are biased, and that the only path to truth is trusting the data.

Give me liberty or give me death

I wish some politician had the guts to stand up and say that preserving our liberties means that we may be more vulnerable to attack. It's political suicide, of course, but it has to be done. The fear mongering that is going on is absolutely unacceptable. And of course the irrational public buys into it. There is a great willingness to sacrifice liberties, especially the liberties of others. The detention center at Guantanamo Bay being used to deny people their civil rights by virtue of being off U.S. soil. Wire tapping. The Boston bomb scare, with its absolutely ridiculous idea that somehow misinterpretation is the fault of the creator. The quote by the attorney general that "[The device] had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires." For heavens sake, don't let her inside a Radio Shack. But seriously, we cannot hold accountable people for things that are clearly not intended to instill fear or misinterpretation. We cannot let people who live in irrational fear prevail. We must accept that to truly be free, we must live our lives as though we will not be attacked. By that I mean of course the general public - clearly there needs to be anti-terrorism work done.

Mitt Romney is the antithesis of these thoughts. Not only is he for doubling Guantanamo, but he has said, "Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive." I can't put it any better than Jon Stewart did: "That will go over great in New Hampshire, where the state motto is Live Free Or...Do Everything You Can To Stay Alive." We cannot let him, or anyone else like him, gain power. Our liberties would be perhaps irrevocably damaged under a person like Romney.

Someone needs to step up. This is infringing on our freedom to live our lives. We must not live in fear. We must not shut down our cities over things that are not likely to be bombs (what terrorist would make bombs conspicuous?). We must safeguard our liberties against fear mongers.

Ironic note: the New Hampshire license plates, on which "Live Free Or Die" is inscribed, are made by prison inmates.

Also, a quiz on this topic.

Scientific determinism

When I get into discussions of free will and intelligence and the nature of things, I often point out that the universe is deterministic. In its strictest form, determinism says that everything that will happen is as good as happened already, that everything is perfectly predictable. However, the type of determinism that I subscribe to is looser, and based on science. It is basically this:

Everything that occurs happens in accordance with strict rules.

Now, this doesn't say anything about predictability, and indeed we shall see that the predictability is far from perfect. However, I hold that my statement is a statement of determinism: everything is determined at a certain level of abstraction - nothing occurs that does not follow very definite patterns.

I will now proceed to throw three wrenches into the works and show how my statement defeats them.

1. Measurement problems
There are certain apparently nondeterministic processes, like the double pendulum. An arbitrarily small change in the initial conditions can cause a large change in the resulting motion. However, the process is actually deterministic - it is just that, to predict the motion, infinite precision of the initial conditions is needed, and this is physically impossible. It is a limitation in the measurement, not the process - the actual system follows very strict, deterministic rules. This applies to all related chaos theory-type problems.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle may appear to come under this category as well, but that is based on a misconception.

2. Quantum probabilities
At the microscopic level, quantum mechanics is not all deterministic in the traditional sense. However, it still follows strict rules. The probabilities involved in quantum mechanics are well-defined. When you have a probability curve, it means that not all choices are equally likely. This is a form of determinism - there are clear constraints on the future. These probabilities exist for repeatable processes, so that it can be shown the probabilities exist. This is because all of quantum mechanics is based on equations that are defined as probabilities. It is our natural, innate understanding that predisposes us to expect determinism in a low-level form like classical mechanics and to think of quantum uncertainty as nondeterministic. It's not that there's only one way for a process to unfold, but there's only one way for a process to operate. Nonuniform probability distributions are a form of (weak) determinism.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle falls under this category. It defines a limit not on measurement, but on state. For example, a particle constrained in position must have a certain uncertainty in its momentum, and this gives rise to higher lowest-energy states. Virtual particles are another example.

3. Stochastic processes
Stochastic processes, such as Brownian motion, are another source of randomness. They are truly random, as they are not based solely on initial conditions. However, they still do not weaken my statement of determinism, since all stochastic processes that exist are governed by equations describing the actions of its constituents that give rise to the random output. In general, they are also constrained by probability distributions, which as stated above is a form of determinism.

So the point is that the laws of physics constrain all that occurs in well-defined ways. This is the form of weak determinism I subscribe to, and from this many of my beliefs follow.

A short note: It could be argued, perhaps, that the probability inherent in so many physical processes is where god interacts with the world, or where the mind interacts with the brain. I would give this thought more weight if the output of the processes were uniformly random (that is, all values are equally likely), instead of having a distribution.

Down the rabbit hole

I've come up with a metaphor to explain how some of my beliefs work. It's not totally fleshed out, but I figured I'd present the preliminary version.

The very core of my beliefs (although I like to refer to them as my understandings) is that in the end, it's all just physics. The universe is nothing more than matter and energy acting in well-defined ways. One of the immediate consequences of this is that almost all aspects of the human experience don't have independent existence. For example, free will. Our brains operate according to the laws of physics, and therefore operate like machines (quantum uncertainty is little more than nuance at this level). This means that there is no such thing as choice - everything is more or less determined. Another example is meaning, purpose, etc. Meaning is a human construct. Physical reality, what actually is does not include meaning.
Now, people often get tripped up by that. They start talking about their ability to make choices, and how the universe can't be meaningless because we perceive meaning. Or they ask why do I continue living if there's no free will and no meaning. The problem is that they're looking at the wrong level. They're looking at the human experience level, which is separate from the physical reality level. For almost all intents and purposes at the human experience level, free will exists. But then once I cede that, they can't make the jump with me to free will not existing on the lower level.

This is where the metaphor comes in. The metaphor is the Matrix. The connection I'm making is between the existence of concepts (e.g., free will or meaning) at different levels and the physical actions of people inside and outside the Matrix, where the Matrix is basically standing for human experience.

People are hooked into the Matrix. They have a physical body outside the Matrix and a representation inside it. In the same way, I exist both at the physical reality level (there are certain patterns of atoms that persist in time) and at the human experience level (as I perceive myself to exist). Now, all physical actions within the Matrix (like walking around) do not have independent existence - that is, without the Matrix, they do not exist. Similarly, concepts within human experience such as free will do not exist at the physical reality level. However, inside the Matrix, there's no reason to act as if you can't walk around. This is how, within human experience, there is good reason to treat free will as if it exists.

That's about as far as I've taken it at this point. I feel like there's still some room to grow the metaphor a little, about how understanding that you are in the Matrix enables one to do things not normally possible, but there's potential for that to be misinterpreted. And of course, in the metaphor, there's no way to exit the Matrix.

Objectivism

[This was a forum post I made in response to a guy touting Objectivism.]

Objectivism, ugh. First off, the proposition that there are objective moral truths is by nature a supernatural claim. Since I don't believe in anything supernatural, Objectivism is right out.

Since I am a relativist (which I can easily defend as the only consistent moral position for a philosophy without supernatural elements), morality is the set of rules a society agrees upon. Now, this is not to say there can't be guidelines. It's a fairly simple rational argument to make that civil and political rights and equality are necessary for this process to function correctly (that is, each member of society must be free to partake in the making of the rules). So civil and political equality are what we may call "inalienable" rights. I think it is far from clear that there exist similar economic rights (for example, the right to own land or the right to the entirety of the fruits of one's labor).

Your attack on government, taxation, etc. are based on the naive subset of relativist moral structures in which the role of society is deemed irrelevant. Well, ok - it's generally naive, but can also be rooted in greed and selfishness. Basically, society doesn't exist to take away your freedoms - instead, exactly as you think of it, its purpose to ensure self-fulfillment.

It's a little like people who hear about the prisoner's dilemma and reciprocal altruism, and take this to mean (or as evidence of) that being vindictive and not helping others if they have not helped you is the best strategy. You aren't seeing the forest for the trees. A game like Snowdrift explains how cooperation and even always-generous strategies can be beneficial to one's situation.

Now, you'll probably argue "Well, it's ok as long as it's voluntary - you can't force people to pay taxes." This is again a problem of not seeing the forest for the trees. It is beneficial for the members of a society to agree to create a government that can force its citizens to do certain things. A good example of this is taxation. Governments are necessary. You have to build roads. To have roads, sometimes you need to take people's lands (Would you rather not have interstate highways? If you are against eminent domain, you are against having interstates.). To build roads, you need money. Once you have a road, you can conceivably use tolls to pay for maintenance, such that the only people who pay to maintain a road are the ones using it. However, to build it, you need money, and you have no way to know who will use and who won't. Therefore, it is in your interest that the government take money from everybody - sometimes you'll help pay for a road you won't use, sometimes somebody else will help pay for a road they won't use but you will - but if it wasn't forced, then people who would use the road could refuse to pay for it (the road would still get built if enough people needed it badly enough).

Government taxation of this kind is sort of a form of insurance. You are making sure that things get paid for by people who will benefit, at the expense of sometimes paying for things from which they won't benefit. Again, the short-sightedness and also greed/selfishness of people often obscures for them the benefits they will reap from certain things - allowing people with a broader view (e.g., politicians and bureaucrats - remember that we're talking ideally here, not as the system stands today) to evaluate these things and then tell us what to do (i.e., enact laws) is a way of both delegating decision-making and ensuring that the selfishness of others doesn't cause them to skip out on their obligations.

An example of the above is public transportation. Public transport is paid for partially by people who don't use it. But viewing it as "This is theft because I don't use the service" is naive. Public transport keeps a lot of people off the road, especially commuter transport. If the whole populace wasn't paying into it, the fares would rise, which would cause ridership to drop, which would put a lot more cars on the road, especially during rush hour. Congestion would skyrocket. Paying taxes for public transport when you don't use it is about paying to keep congestion low.

Another problem with Objectivism and related philosophies is that the idea that everyone is rational and can make informed decisions on all things is just false. Not only are most people not rational, but most people are uninformed. Read up on rational ignorance. As I touched on earlier, part of government is a contract between the people and their representatives for the representatives to spend their time gathering and considering that information that the people don't have time for. The stipulation is that once the representatives make their decision based on the information, the people are going to abide by that. Again, this ends up benefiting the people.

Now, on to collectivism in its proper forms (government, taxation, etc. alone are not collectivism). The above arguments are absolute, whereas the following paragraph is more a matter of the discretion of a society. Beyond the basic provisions of a society and government as hinted at above, there are many different options for a society to treat itself. From a libertarian viewpoint to full socialism, they aren't inherently wrong, but rather different approaches that each society must consider and choose between.

The welfare state is a form of further insurance, basically insuring that all people are supported in the most basic form such that they can achieve happiness. If you look at de-regulated laissez-faire capitalism, it tends toward a pseudo-feudalism where there are powerful economic entities to which most people are subservient. It's not a hard argument to make that the people at the bottom levels of these kinds of hierarchies are being oppressed, that economic circumstances prohibit them from pursuing and certainly from achieving self-fulfillment. Protecting people from such economic oppression and providing all citizens with a suitable basis for achieving self-fulfillment is the goal of the welfare state. In fact, it's actually striving to achieve what you claim is your goal by recognizing the practical implications of economic strategies (If you are born into abject poverty with no hope of getting out of it, then you have no hope of self-fulfillment. Objectivism doesn't ever correctly recognize these situations.).

Summary of beliefs

I'm going to maintain this post as a summary of what I believe.

Philosophy

• I'm an atheist, although a more correct term is probably physics chauvinist.


• I maintain that all that exists are particles and energy, and that they are governed by strict (though probabilistic) laws [post].

Morality

• I'm a relativist.


• I consider any claim that there is an absolute morality separate from human constructs to be a supernatural claim.

Politics

• I'm a progressive.


• I believe that people have a moral responsibility to help one another, that this strategy is beneficial, and that it can be rationally determined based on deep-seated beliefs that are common to all humans.

Religion

• I believe that religion is damaging to society and will always be damaging and an impediment to progress. It has benefits, but its negative effects far outweigh the positives.

I will update this list periodically, adding and revising items as necessary, and adding links to relevant posts.