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.