Friday 10 January 2020

Transmissionism: Do Books Work?

I was reading an article on BoingBoing about how to read long, difficult books.

So this guy's advice is to read the Wealth of Nations twice? Here's some better advice:
don't read it once
.

The tips are fine as they go, but what I'm really interested in the article it the link to the thing the tips were responding to: Andy Matuschak's essay "Why books don't work". It makes a lot of sense if you read it, but it does something that I'm really on guard for these days: it assumes everyone in the same.

The essay talks about "transmissionism" which is a failed theory of teaching and learning. In transmissionism one person puts information out there in sentences and another person reads or hears the sentences, then absorbs the information. It turns out this isn't great. Which is one reason why you may have been to a lecture in school and walked out realizing you basically never understood what the teacher or professor was talking about.

But if you are going to say:
1. Transmissionism doesn't work
You are going to need to have an explanation for:
2. Some people seem to learn from lectures and books
Matuschak's explanation is that you can learn from lectures or books by doing the kinds of things that really make people learn. You take notes. You think about what it being said to you and connect it to other things in your life. You do little exercises and check back to see you understood. It's a lot of metacognition that needs to go into this process and we don't teach those skills directly so most people just don't have them. Basically a lecture and a book put a whole lot of work onto the listener and the reader with no good reason to think that they can or will do that work.

But when you encounter two statements like (1) and (2) above, there's a pretty easy way to reconcile them that I think was overlooked. We say, "Well, what if (1) isn't universally true. What if it's only true for most people?"

I'm pretty sure transmissionism works on me. You encode your thought into a sentence, you write it down or you say it out loud. I encounter the sentence, understand the meaning of the words and then use the meaning of the words to understand your idea. I don't think it works on me because I learned some great techniques to absorb the content of lectures or books. Quite the contrary, I'd sit in classrooms, tortured, wishing I could tune the teacher out but paying attention involuntarily. I barely read because I found it extremely annoying.

I found limits of functions in highschool calculus but the whole process seemed mysterious to me. Then in my first university lecture they said that the limit of a function f(x) as x goes to a is L if and only if for every epsilon greater than zero there is a delta such that if the difference between x and a is less than delta the difference between f(x) and L is less than epsilon and I thought, "Oh! That's what a limit is." My grade 12 physics teacher joked with my mother that I sat there limply in class, slightly slumped, apparently catatonic, then got the highest mark on the test.

None of that had anything to do with thinking critically or taking notes, it's just actually how I receive information. I think transmissionism does work for some people. Not because those people have learned a special set of skills that allow it to work, but because those people are just the kind of people who learn that way.

I also don't think books started as a way of communicating ideas to the world - without a printing press that's not practical. If you wanted to write something for everyone to read you wrote it on a sign or a wall. Books started as a way of archiving knowledge, whether to make sure that multiple people agreed on the specifics later or as a way of passing it on to future generations. Retrieving the knowledge from the archives wasn't something that everyone did, it was the work of very few people: scholars. So I'm not sure the lecture showed up as a bad way of communicating that we accidentally imposed on people. It may well exist because it was a good way of communicating to the small group of people who would ever really be lectured at - future scholars. People who needed to be selected for their ability to be receivers of transmissionism.

None of this really takes away from Matuschak's point that maybe the vast bulk of people are subjected to a school system that doesn't work for them.
That sounds totally plausible to me
. But it feels like there's a much better explanation for how we arrived at using a system like the one we use than "We just didn't know any better." Of course we didn't know any better, but behaviours evolve, there was some reason to repeat it for a long time.

Having finished my commentary on how it's a good idea to contemplate diversity, there was a second problem with Matuschak's essay I want to address. The jump from the presumably familiar experience of absorbing nothing from a lecture to the less intuitively grasped experience of not remembering what was in a book seems iffy. Matuschak tries to convey this by asking the reader what the Selfish Gene said.

If you've read the Selfish Gene you might not have a deep knowledge of what it said. It's possible you think you remember it but under questioning your knowledge would wither. That's what Matuschak expects of you. But that doesn't mean you never understood it, it doesn't even mean you forgot what it said. It may only be that you forgot that the knowledge you acquired from that book came from the book. That is that you retain the knowledge, but the knowledge doesn't have pointers attached to it referencing back to where it came from.

This is especially problematic with the books that Matuschak picks as examples: The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns Germs and Steel. These books were all pretty widely read and they affected popular culture and popular thinking. If you didn't read them right away there's a good chance that by the time you did read them you'd had already been exposed to most of their ideas.

For example, I have read the Selfish Gene, but by the time I read it I already knew the basics of genetics. For a person who didn't know anything of genes the book might have been very educational. For me, it contained very few new or useful ideas. So if Matuschak asked me was the Selfish Gene was about, I'd say
Richard Dawkins trying to use a metaphor of selfishness for survival of the fittest and, despite specifically admitting that selfishness is a bad metaphor because it implies intent, falling into their own trap and ending up laying infrastructure for the popular acceptance of greed as natural and the neoliberal sacrifice of future generations.
I'm not going to remember Dawkins' layperson account of genetic inheritance because I've got a perfectly good layperson account of genetic inheritance. Even if Dawkins had been my first source for that account, I've probably refined it since with other sources of information, and I wouldn't recall exactly the way I was wrong when I finished the book. Remembering what the book said wouldn't just require me to absorb the knowledge that the book contains, it would also require me to having good versioning of that knowledge. The idea that we don't remember what books said doesn't go a long way to proving we don't understand what they said.

I guess, though, what I'm most interested in is the inherent irony of writing sentences to teach people that you can't teach people a thing by writing sentences. To whatever extent you are successful you disprove your thesis. And Matuschak might be tempted to argue, if they were to ever read this blog post, that the reason I might remember what they wrote is because I went to the trouble of arguing against it here, but that would be a deep misunderstanding of what I am doing.

I am not reflecting on the work and learning it as I reflect.

I am reflexively vomiting out a stream of automatic thoughts that whirred around inside me concurrently with reading the piece because it is uncomfortable to contain them.

I'm not learning by taking notes, I'm taking notes to relieve the
unbearable feeling of learning
.

Tuesday 5 November 2019

It Happened Again

I was watching a stream the other day and people were talking about triggered mana abilities for some reason. Honestly I can't remember what card interaction it was that made this a conversation, but it all reminded me of my own observation about the problems with deciding whether a triggered ability was a mana ability. You can read the full post here, but suffice it to say the problem deals with
Quicksilver Elemental
copying the abilities of a
Witch Engine
,
Cytoshaped
into a
Dryad Arbor
with a
Caged Sun
in play.

Anyway, I was going to relate this little story to chat, but before I did I thought I'd check my facts, and I was astonished to see I was wrong. That is, I was wrong during that stream. I had been right at the time.

In that post I quote the comprehensive rules as saying:
605.1b A triggered ability without a target that triggers from activating a mana ability and could put mana into a player's mana pool when it resolves is a mana ability.
But today they say:
605.1b A triggered ability is a mana ability if it meets all of the following criteria: it doesn’t require a target (see rule 115.6), it triggers from the resolution of an activated mana ability (see rule 605.1a) or from mana being added to a player’s mana pool, and it could add mana to a player’s mana pool when it resolves. 
Now the triggered ability from Caged Sun is safely a mana ability because it actually triggers from the mana being added to your pool, not from the activated ability that adds the mana to your pool. That distinction wasn't meaningful when everything involved was a mana ability because mana abilities resolve immediately, but when the activated ability goes on the stack there is a big difference between triggering from the ability vs. from the mana being added.

Obviously I can't say for sure that I'm responsible for this change, but this is the second time in my life I've written to the Magic rules team with a question and had them end up changing the rules to avoid the confusion that the actual answer to my question would create.

I am a Magic rules genius. It's almost like Wizards should hire me; to fix the Oracle wording of old cards if nothing else.

Tuesday 23 April 2019

Prestidigitation

If I were to ask pretty nearly anyone why the National Rifle Association (NRA) runs commercials that promote fear and paranoia, they'd give me one of two answers:
  1. The NRA does not do that
  2. Fear and paranoia sell
I probably would have said the latter. I think I've been duped, and not because I believe the former.

I read a fairly long piece in the New Yorker about Secrecy, Self-Dealing and Greed in the NRA. The short summary is the the NRA, which is a non-profit organization, appears to have a extremely tight relationship with their public relationship firm, Ackerman McQueen, a for-profit organization. That is, many people who work for the NRA are former Ackerman McQueen employees, and many people who are thought of as NRA spokespeople are actually Ackerman McQueen staff.

The result of this close relationship is that the NRA tends to make decisions that benefit Ackerman McQueen rather than its membership. In public filings in 2017 the NRA revealed it paid Ackerman McQueen more than $40 million. It's fine to pay your public relationship firm more than $40 million is you are getting more than $40 million of value from that payment. The evidence suggests they are not.

Glossy magazines, TV spots and launching their own NRATV don't appear to bring in as much money as they pay to produce them. Some of the promotional materials seem outright self-destructive - highlighting rich donors when the NRA gets most of their money from a broad array of small donors who might not like to see them spend it in this way.

It all adds up to why I said I think I've been duped. The NRA doesn't buy TV spots selling the idea that the Democrats are coming to take your guns because that's what gets them money or makes them powerful. The NRA buys those TV spots because the decision making at the NRA is controlled by the PR firm that they pay to make those TV spots. The people doing this know that people like me will believe that fear sells because we are cynical.

We're convinced that fear and paranoia sell, but they are not actually selling. They aren't selling fear, they are paying to put it out there. But they have been paying themselves to put it out there, using donor money. What fear and paranoia have been doing in this instance is make a loud distraction.

If the NRA continues to lose millions of dollars a year at some point it will collapse. I think it would be easy to see that as a victory for a lot of people who oppose the NRA's politics.

But this isn't a story about one half of America supporting gun massacres and another half opposing them and team good winning. This is a story about people who are supporting gun massacres as a distraction while they line their own pockets. Those people are getting away with it, team good is not winning. If the NRA collapses, the people who are responsible both for the poisonous politics and for the collapse of the organization will walk away millionaires. And then they will do it again.

Tuesday 16 April 2019

Improved Epistemology

I once stormed out of a philosophy class because I didn't agree with my professor's point of view that speaking fictionally and speaking literally were a binary and nothing existed in between.

Epistemology is the
"study"
of what it means to know something which is closely connected with what it means for something to be true. Obviously people have had all kinds of wacky, unique ideas about this over centuries of people thinking about it, but I'm going to oversimplify that by putting everything into two big buckets.

The classical idea of truth is basically summed up by the famous
misquote
of Socrates, "I know that I know nothing." In this model actual truth is unattainable, but we console ourselves with calling things true because they seem true to us. If someone points out that we can't know anything is true we just remind ourselves not to invite them to our next party. This is a garbage idea of truth that has no real world application and doesn't even let us distinguish what's true and what's not.

The scientific idea of truth is that the truth is whatever our best evidence points to. This is a useful and self-consistent idea of truth. After all, our best evidence suggests that our best evidence points to the truth. Otherwise that bridge would be falling down. But this kind of truth, it turns out, seems to be impractical for a large swath of people for everyday purposes. It puts evaluating truth claims out of the hands of people who make truth claims. It doesn't align with people's sense of what truth is supposed to be.

Anyway, I experiment a lot with holding contradictory ideas in my head because it turns out that they very nearly don't exist. The only way to get solid contradictory ideas is to say, "Well that's not what I meant" every time you notice a way they can be reconciled. There's almost always more than one way of looking at things.

Hegel is attributed
with the idea of using a dialectical method to arrive at truth using the thesis, antithesis, synthesis approach. That is, you begin with a claim of truth, you formulate its opposite, and then you find something that reconciles the two.

As a philosophical exercise this is stupid. You can't take the statement that water is wet, contradict it with "water isn't wet" and then find some deeper truth by combining the two. But if we look at the world we'll find lots of places where people hold seemingly contradictory ideas, and have those ideas serve them in their lives. These are the kinds of ideas that we actually need to synthesize.

So this brings me to my third bucket for how to understand the idea of truth. Notions connect to truth to the extent that they ought to be taken into account when forming a higher truth. This idea of truth is less obsessive about labeling things as true or false and more focused on understanding things well so that useful parts of them can be salvaged.

I think this is probably actually closer to the ideal embedded in the scientific method than the statement of scientific truth I gave above is. I doubt more than a handful of people ever took the idea of best evidence being truth as literally as I did. But philosophy is primarily about spending a long time thinking about something to arrive at a conclusion everyone else already knew, so here I am.

Tuesday 9 April 2019

Diversity

There's something I have to say, and it's embarrassing to say it, so I don't want to. But let me promise you, I'm not being uncharitable here, this is really an accurate and banal description of what really happened.

One day some years ago someone I worked with found they couldn't attend a continuing education session on economics. They asked me to take the seat because they didn't want it to go to waste. This was basically a few days off work, it was my boss asking me to go, and I love to hate-learn things, so this seemed like a good idea to me.

In the economics course, aimed at professional people who have degrees and work in public policy, they explained a fairly basic idea from economics: trade makes people better off. Here's the explanation:
Alice has a car and Bob needs a car. Alice sells the car to Bob for $3,000. Now, Alice would not have made that sale unless the car was worth less than $3,000 to them. Let's say Alice valued the car at $2,000. Bob would not have bought the car unless it was worth more than $3,000 to Bob, so let's just say Bob values the car at $4,000. Previously Alice had an asset worth $2,000 and Bob had currency worth $3,000. After the exchange Alice had currency worth $3,000 and Bob had an asset worth $4,000. Thus each is $1,000 richer and society is $2,000 richer.
Now I find the majority of my education to be painfully embarrassing, but that little parable seems so dumb to me that I feel like I am being dishonest by recounting it. Surely there was a more intelligent point that I am leaving out.

Actually there are far stupider points that are being left out. Like the idea that the value of a thing is reliably determined by how much the individual willing to pay for it is willing to pay, which pretends to employ the wisdom of crowds but actually allows the value of things to be set by weird outliers. It also holds the value of currency to be equal to each person in contradiction to that previous premise.

But I think there is a more intelligent point being left out. It's just a point not recognized by economics. In physics we say energy can't be created or destroyed. In order to make that make sense we have to acknowledge a thing called potential energy. If I have a large rock fifty feet from the ground it has gravitational potential energy - that is, if whatever is suspending the rock were to cease to suspend it, the rock could crush my body leaving a grisly pulp. The energy to do that was not created when the rock was released. Rather, it was converted from the kinetic energy that was the rock moving up there in the first place to the potential energy stored in the rock's position. When the rock is released it is converted back into kinetic energy.

I think there is a useful analogy in there. Intuitively, the car did not become an inherently more valuable thing when Bob took possession of it,
but rather its potential value was unleashed
. After all, what if Alice was conning Bob and the car is junk that won't work in a week? Economists would try to hold that as an exception by carving out some rule about fraud and coercion
without actually being able to define either
. I think instead we should look at things in the world actually having value, which is not affected by what we choose to pay for them.

A note, I think most economists would agree with me on that and say that market price is just the best way to know the value of things, it isn't the value of things. I think the discipline of economics has entirely substituted the metric for the thing they want to measure.

So let's think of the world as a
real
place with
real
things that
really
exist in it and that have some properties that stand regardless of whether we recognize those properties or not. Things may have value that is unrealized to any person, but unrealized value is only unrealized until it is realized.

There's an undoubtedly apocryphal story of two ancient civilizations living in what we'd consider close proximity that never met. One had domesticated animals, the other had invented the wheel. Because they never met they never combined these two synergistic inventions. Imagine the great increase in well-being in both of these two possibly fictional civilizations had they happened upon one another.

Where would that value come from? The facile argument from my economics course would say it came from trade. But I would say that the creation of value wasn't in the exchange of a
llama
for a wheel. The creation of value was in the invention of the wheel and the domestication of the llama. The explosion of well-being is the realization of the value of both of those things, and in the further creation of spin-off technologies like a harness to have a llama pull a wheeled cart.

Let's take those two civilizations. A traveler from one meets a traveler from another. They check out the wheel and the llama and say, "Wow, what's up with that?!?" They take the knowledge back to their civilizations. Next thing you know everyone is making wheels, everyone is training animals, and everyone is better off.

Instead let's imagine they meet and conspire to figure out how they can make as much personal gain off the new knowledge as possible. There is an agreement that civilization A can have trained animals but must buy them all from person B's farm, and civilization B can have wheels but must pay person A a fee per wheel-kilometer rolled. The explosion is considerably less.

Economists would say that everyone is still better off because of the trade. But in this example people are better off because of the sharing of ideas and worse off because of the trade. The trade part is limiting people's well-being, not expanding it. The point economists would make in rebuttal is that the trade is necessary for the sharing of ideas, but they would make that point because they base their understanding of society on the simple multiplication of number of people in society by the diary of an 18th century philosopher who spent their life obsessing over their trust issues.

So when an economist tells you that trade creates wealth, make sure to let them know that in fact what creates well-being is just that different people are different and thus have different ideas and we can combine those ideas. That is, diversity creates value. Trade is a way to realize that value but trade takes a cut of the value for itself.

Tuesday 26 March 2019

Feeling Wronged is a Thing

Here is an article about a program in California where healthcare "super-utilizers" are tracked and treated in a way that dramatically reduces healthcare costs. About 1% of healthcare users use about 24% of healthcare funding. Some people cost the system in excess of $1M a year.

So the idea of the program was to find these people and coordinate services for them to minimize their use of the emergency room. In the article the program which serves just 37 patients is estimated to have saved $14M over two years without even counting the fact that these people also had fewer police and ambulance interactions.

I remember reading about a pilot for a program like this in the past. It took people who were costing the system over half a million a year each, some of them more than a million, and instead spent about $250k to $300k each. It produced better health results for less. When the pilot ended, the program was scrapped.

Usually better-results-for-less-money is an easy sell. But the program was also doing something else - it was changing which pocket was paying for the program. Instead of the money coming out of a general pot that pays unfunded emergency room visits, it came from a specific fund allocated to serve specific people. It was now easy to say that those people had been made a priority and that they were being treated preferentially. Especially in a place where healthcare isn't free for all, it's a tough political sell to say to a majority who have an average of only a few thousands dollars allocated to their care that a tiny minority ought to have $300k of healthcare a year.

If it were for people who had the most serious illnesses, maybe it could be sold. But the highest users of healthcare aren't even the sickest people, they are usually homeless, often with mental health issues, and simply rely on the emergency room for everything.

You work hard, you pay for health insurance, you pay for your home, for your clothes, for your food. Out there somewhere is a person who has massively more expensive healthcare than you, who is being given a home and clothes and food. It seems unfair.

I'm a technocrat by nature. My instinct is that the best way to run a society is to use the best tools we have available to determine how to produce the best results and then do whatever we need to do to produce those results. If we are going to save $7M a year by providing intensive care to a handful of people and produce better results for those people at the same time, it seems obvious to me that we ought to do so. If someone disagrees, I think that person is allowing pettiness or selfishness or hate for the poor to cloud reason. Reason says that you always pay less for better if you can.

So let's say we've got 40 people who are simply going to cost the healthcare system over $1M a year with their current care. Nothing is going to magically change how those 40 people behave. We can't simply tell them to stop being lazy and get a job. We have to think of solutions that work, that are practical.

Now lets say we have 60% of the population that thinks those solutions feel unfair. Nothing is going to magically change how those people feel. We can't simply tell them to stop feeling so jealous or angry or victimized. We also, here, have to think of solutions that work, that are practical.

California has a population of 39.5M people. If it really is 50 or 60 percent of their population who feel that way, then an extra $14M in healthcare costs is not even a dollar a year for each person. What if they argue that it's worth the state spending a 50-70 cents a year per person to reduce their sense of anguish over what feels like inequitable distribution of resources towards people who aren't contributing to society?

Economic calculus values emotions at zero until those emotions start producing measurable damaging eternalities. The intolerable emotional problems of a person that keep them homeless and sick and using the emergency room twice a day produce a dollars and cents effect on expenditures, and a minutes and seconds effect on emergency room wait times. The everyday small jealousies and resentments of people who feel like they are getting less from society than others are seem hard to measure. We can't draw a straight line between them an a specific cost. Then again, it's not much of a stretch to say that, added together, those hurt feelings are responsible for the US trade war with China, or Ontario's refusal to acknowledge environmental realities, or the mounting catastrophe of Brexit.

Thinking that the large group of people who resent others for getting what they see as handouts should develop empathy is probably even more ridiculous than saying that the 100 top healthcare users ought to get over whatever psychological trauma is contributing to that status. Sure, it's easier for one middle class person to learn empathy than for one homeless person to recover from trauma that has stayed with them for decades, but is it easier to shift empathy up one and a half standard deviations for 400,000 people than for one person to get over trauma? That's not easy to quantify.

And let's not get into the numbers.
No one
cares if facts show that one course of action is better than another. I may change my feelings when exposed to numbers that prove it is foolish to feel the way I feel, but I have a toxic bullying relationship with my feelings that few people can replicate and
they find ways of getting me back for it in the end
.

More and more I feel we have to accept that technocracy just isn't possible. There isn't a right answer to problems. There's no such thing as strictly better. Someone always wants it a different way. We pay for everything - by having to endure our emotions about it if in no other way - and people's individual calculi weight things differently. I think it is probably possible to build a consensus that it's better to pay less money to provide better medical treatment to people. But it's also possible to build a consensus that we need a civil war to sort out our problems. The trick is actually building that consensus, not saying that the numbers prove you right.

I've got a coherent morality system that says we should help each other instead of kill each other, but we do live in a democracy.

Thursday 21 February 2019

Baby, it's cold outside

Another post from the past that I just never posted.

Content warning: This post contains Misfits lyrics and calls half the population "pro-rape". I imagine people could be triggered by both of those things, but the odds that someone here will be I guess are pretty low.

Apparently many radio stations in Canada
won't be playing Baby it's Cold Outside this year
.

First of all, let me say that on it's face this is just a sensible decision. What would my answer look like if one of my children asked me, "Why is she asking what's in her drink like that?"
The song is about a man and a woman who are in love. The man is trying to convince the woman she should sleep over and the woman is saying that she shouldn't. Don't worry, I'll get to the drink part in a little bit. It's like Captain Underpants - before I tell you that story I have to tell you this story.
So you know that mommy and daddy sleep in the same bed. To live together and sleep together is something that people normally do after they've been in love for a while. Just like you might have friends you'd be eager to have a sleepover with and others you like to see at school but don't invite over. And when you grow up and move out, you might move in with a friend you've known a long time but probably not with a new friend. So you can think of people in love going through stages: at first they are usually very excited to be around one another, but they don't organize their lives around one another by doing something like buying a house together.
These days people usually do what's right for them in a relationship. But people also get pressured by their families. Like think about the Boo York movie. Cleo's dad and sister really don't like Deuce, right? And Pharoah's family want to choose who he marries. I'm not going to do that to you, but this is something that happens - people get pressured into making choices their family wants about who to love and who to live with.
Back when this song was written there was a lot more pressure to do what people thought you were supposed to do. One of the things people thought you were supposed to do back then was not sleep together until you were married. But people really thought it was the responsibility of girls to make sure that happened. So if the woman in the song did sleep over at the man's house, she would be the one who would be blamed. That wasn't fair, but it's something she would have to deal with even though it wasn't fair.
I'm getting to the drink soon.
So the man and woman both want her to stay there, not to go home. She also doesn't want people to be angry at her or treat her badly, so she's saying no. The man is thinking about what he wants, not how much trouble she'll get in, so he keeps saying she should stay.
Since she really wants to stay, she's trying to think of ways she could explain it to other people. That's why they sing about it being cold outside. She could stay and then just tell everyone, "Oh, I had to stay because it was so cold." But that excuse wouldn't really work.
So finally we get to the drink. We've talked before about how drinking wine can make people feel different. That's because of something in wine called alcohol. That's also in some other drinks like beer and whiskey. When people drink alcohol it can make them find things funnier, it can make them feel sleepy, it can also make them feel more like doing whatever they want to do without thinking about what will happen. I don't know if you remember this, but sometimes when I'm putting you to bed and you are getting really sleepy you kind of get the giggles and there's this sort of happy sleepiness. Drinking a lot of alcohol sometimes makes people feel like that.
So when she says "What's in this drink?" she's sort of saying she thinks there's a lot of alcohol in the drink. I'm not sure there really is. Just like when they say, "It's cold outside" she might be kind of looking for an excuse to stay over. So she might say to someone else, "I had too much to drink and I couldn't get home." Again, back then people were really mean to women who got too involved in relationships before they got married. So women would sometimes blame their decisions on alcohol, even though they were decisions that they really wanted to make. The alcohol would have been taken as a better excuse that the weather - though she might have been judged for drinking too much alcohol as well.
So basically the women lives with people who will judge her for doing what she wants to do, and she is upset because she wants to do it but also doesn't want to. She is trying to think of ways to excuse herself for doing it. She doesn't want to be blamed unfairly. If I were that man I'd say, "I know we'd both like you to stay, but I also know your parents would be mad, so how about I walk you home. I wish this wasn't so hard for both of us."
I know this isn't really what you asked about, but I want you to know that when you grow up and fall in love if you ever feel torn, like you want to and don't want to do something, I'll support you, not get mad at you.

You'll note that my description of what is going on in the song assumes the woman totally wants to get it on. I'm not saying the guy is trying to rape the woman or that he slipped something into her drink. That's because I do take the song in it's historical context and I know it was written by a man for he and his wife to perform at holiday parties. The author of the story that the song tells was telling a story about horny young people in love, not about date rape.

But of course, in the cultural proxy-war over this song, the issue isn't really whether people want to hear this song or not, or even about the details of this song. It's about people identifying being for or against the song as a flashpoint and taking sides. One comment I saw on a CBC article about this song was that the commenter was going to go listen to the song on repeat.

That'll show 'em.

No one cares if you listen to the song in your own home. I like Bullet by the Misfits, a song about JFK's head shattering when the bullet hits, ending with Jackie Onassis having to jerk the singer off to pay the bills. It's pushing the limits of offensive. Their song Last Caress opens up with:
I got something to say
I killed a baby today
In highschool I used to listen to a lot of Ministry. In their song Flashback they sing about tearing off someone's head, shitting down their neck, and
laughing
while they do it. The thing is, I didn't like that song all that much, but I singled it out as one of the songs I listened to when I listened to the
album
it was on. While I didn't like the song all that much, I liked that the song had that violent, shocking imagery. I think, as a teenager, indulging in things that I knew would be judged as wrong by others appealed to me.

By all means, if you actually like Baby it's Cold Outside please listen to it whenever you want. But if grown-ass adults spend their time listening to music that they don't actually like all that much just to upset imaginary villains, then they need to grow the hell up.

Which brings me to what I really don't like about Baby it's Cold Outside. I can take the fact that "what's in this drink" was really a thing a woman might say in the 40s as a way of suggesting that she ought not be held responsible for her desires. What is a lot harder to take is the part of the narrative that is still part of our culture narrative today. Because I don't actually mind having the above, long conversation with my daughter, punctuated by many interruptions and questions, about the pressures people face in relationships. What bothers me a lot more is not having that conversation and instead having the song be incorporated as one more story into my kid's mental banks of how to navigate romantic situations.

I don't accept that this is trivial or that it's better to stay above it. The reason we have the concept of "proxy wars" is because
during the cold war
the USA and the USSR could not engage each other directly for fear of mutual annihilation. If the cost of a true conflict is too damaging or painful, we fight about something else.

We aren't arguing about Baby it's Cold Outside because either those against it or those for it are taking trivial positions over a song. There is a real, substantive and extremely painful conflict that we aren't willing to have. If we take the song in it's proper historical context we still have a conflict between positions:

  1. Men pursuing women for sex and women being the gatekeepers is natural and fine
  2. Men pursuing women for sex and women being the gatekeepers is toxic; it excuses and promotes rape

I'd love it if we lived in a world where the very gendered message of the song would be missed by children, but we really don't live in the world. Honestly the world of six- and seven-year-olds is even more gendered than it was when I was growing up. The song will be interpretted as an example of how men act and how women act, not as an example of how two people happened to act. And while some of the specifics of the story are anachronistic, the basic idea that it is the man's role to pursue and the woman's role to resist is not. That's still baked into our culture.

Of course, as I point out in my explanation of the song, the reality of the men-pursue/women-resist dynamic is that it is a man's role to try to get what he wants, consequences be damned, and it is a woman's role to balance what she wants against consequences. In other words,
it's a man's role to be a child and a woman's role to be a grownup
.

I think it has to be true that the pursue/resist dynamic contributes hugely to our seeming inability to really denounce and punish rape. Men, we think, have to be forgiven for trying to overcome resistance because otherwise no one would ever get laid. Added to that is the idea that men can't be expected to tolerate their own emotions in service of someone else.
Horny men rape, angry men punch
. There's no, "this is uncomfortable, but I guess I just have to sit with it rather than acting impulsively". That's bullshit we need to unlearn, and it wouldn't hurt us to not teach it to a some future generation.

Because that is pro-rape. I know that men who like pursuing women and women who like being pursued don't - with exceedingly rare exception - think rape is okay. But when people talk about "rape culture" that is the sort of thing they are talking about. A culture that accepts predatory sexual behaviour as normal, creating a blurry line between rape and consent where no blurry line needs to exist. That people might occasionally misunderstand each other or make bad decisions is an unavoidable part of human existence. That the norm for sex doesn't involve asking the other person what they want is culture, not nature.

I'm not telling an old man who is sick of "politically correct" culture that he can't listen to his song because someone might be offended. I'm telling him that he can listen to his song if he likes, but that his highschool, his church, his home town, his mother and father, his grandmothers and grandfathers, all raised him to excuse and promote rapists. Odds are good he thinks rapists are some of the worst of the worst people. He believes in a mythical rapist who jumps out of the shadows to attack stray teenage girls with a knife. The idea that he excuses such people is insulting. The idea that his mom excused such people is infuriating.

It's infuriating but it is also true, and the people defending the song are probably overwhelmingly people who thought the Ghomeshi verdict shows that Ghomeshi was unfairly treated by the media. They probably, more often than not, think we don't have good enough reason to think Brett Kavanaugh assaulted anyone. But if they face the fact that their entire lives have existed within a context of rape-promotion, then they will feel like they have to either repudiate their home town, their parents, their culture; or switch from subtly defending rape to outright defending rape. They can't do the former and I can't accept the latter. That's the mutual annihilation scenario we are avoiding by arguing about an annoying Christmas song from 1944.

"Centrists" are always talking about how there needs to be a road back for right-wing extremists. We can't call someone a racist because they need to be led gently away from their bad views/behaviour in a way that doesn't make them defensive.

I hate these faux-intellectual centrist positions. As if radical left wingers and radical right wingers are having a fight over something as trivial as a Christmas song and sensible people would say, "it's just a song." But really, if we want to be sensible, let's just pull all of the sexy Christmas songs. I mean, what if instead of asking about Baby it's Cold Outside I was asked what is going on in Santa Baby.
Well, the singer is trying to let Santa know that she is down to fuck if he's willing to spend some cash.
I'm not even down on the singer of Santa Baby. While people might disparage her with a derogatory term like "gold digger" I think reasons people get into relationships can be complex, and we shouldn't judge people who are seeking a partner for status or wealth; or people who are willing to make even more direct exchanges.

I don't think children need to be shielded from nudity, and I think that kids' questions they have about sex should be answered correctly, even if those answers make the grown-ups uncomfortable. But little kids aren't sexual. Until your body starts sending out the right hormones,
sex just seems weird and off-putting
. I don't think we need to shield children from the existence of sex, but I also think that it's pretty fucking weird to force it on them by putting bawdy humour that we know they won't enjoy in kids movies and christmas carols.

That's rational. Reflexively taking the middle between two sides is not. Actual synthesis of antithetical positions shows wisdom. Blandly putting yourself in the middle show a desire to conform to a technocratic culture where the social customs of rationality denote status, even when rationality itself fled long ago.

The idea that we need to be careful about harshly criticizing the pro-rape crowd is buying into the same bad cultural messages that I complained about in the song. If someone is promoting a position that we now recognize is part of rape culture, and we tell them that, we are showing that we believe they will be in charge of their own feelings about that. If we try to hold their hands to get them away from that position, we are saying, "I know you can't manage your own emotions, I'll manage them for you".

What I described as a "mutual annihilation" above isn't really one. If I eschewed the proxy war over Baby it's Cold Outside and instead targeted someone directly on the toxic male/female, predator/prey dynamic that we are really upset about, I might make it about them instead of about a song. And that might make them angry or hurt. And that might make them defensive. But
for the most part
we outlive our anger and our hurts. No one is going to be annihilated, we're just going to feel bad.

Let's all fee bad! Let's be pained by the way we've treated one another in our lives. Let's think back with regret on our actions and on the times we justified the actions of others. And then, when that sorrow, pain and regret has run out of energy, let's have fun playing video games.
Because it will pass
.

I'd rather not have Baby it's Cold Outside played for me without my consent. If someone thinks that's an absurd politically correct position, I'd gladly welcome them to my home with their kids to listen to Falling Back in Fields of Rape. If someone wants to talk about the real issues underlying the "debate" about the song, I'll be happy to hurt their feelings.