from synapse to byte

Condemn rioting and looting.

The reasons behind this admonition are transparent. Rioting and looting result in the following:

Directly increases the number of innocent victims. Shop owners have poured their lives into their business.
Damages the local economy indirectly increasing innocent victims who lose jobs or cannot find jobs.
Severely damages the community’s ability to attract outside businesses that could otherwise provide jobs that would strengthen the local economy.
Builds unnecessary long-term resentment among direct and indirect victims of the rioting and looting.
Needlessly creates more opposition to your movement and goals. The victims mentioned above will be less inclined to support your cause.
Associates your cause with violence. Possible allies, holding the view of MLK and finding violent protests foolish and unproductive, will abandon your movement.
Destroys your credibility. Claiming to be defending victims by creating more victims is intrinsically contradictory and self-defeating.

Yet, many on the left either defend rioting and looting as a legitimate tactic, or at minimum, shrug off the lack of insight and character of the rioters and looters by claiming they could not help themselves due to their anger.

The depths of irrationality to which Americans have descended has seemed to reach a new low. This appears to be true on both extremes. However, the left seems to be attempting to legitimize irrationality by appealing to non-sequiturs of many forms. The following is a YouTube comment in response to my clear condemnation of rioting and looting.

@Phil Stilwell (a) You need to realize that you are coming at this from a position of white privilege. You need to realize that your experience is of no use to you in understanding the current situation. (b) No one gives a fuck about the livelihood of a shop owner when people are literally loosing their very lives.
(c) These riots are a product of anger, resentment and fear. (d) You are upset because your little world has been slightly inconvenienced while other are angry because they know a simple traffic stop would end up with them or someone they love DEAD.
(e) So I could try to explain to you but I am pretty sure you would not understand mostly because I am not qualified to explain to you and those who are qualified might be rightfully too angry to explain something to a white guy that needs no explanation to most of the black community.
(f) What is actually strange is that white people who have been watching black people be treated so badly for so long are so surprised that they are lashing out.
(g) It like watching someone repeatedly kick a dog and then being shocked when it bites you when you try to pet it.

Let me work through this comment systematically.

(a) You need to realize that you are coming at this from a position of white privilege. You need to realize that your experience is of no use to you in understanding the current situation.

This is a dishonest attempt to disallow those possessing possible insights emergent of their own experience or research to participate in the discussion. It is marginalizing some messages based on the skin color of the messenger. This tactic has become very common, especially among those on the left. They employ this tactic for one primary reason: They hope to detract from the big picture and to make it about their “current situation“, categorizing any appeal to look at the big picture a distraction.

This is a willful attempt at distortion by removing perspective, perspective that could otherwise be added by those with a greater breadth of experience and deeper understanding of the locus of the “current situation” within the matix of the larger reality. If the messanger of a certain skin color, they can dismiss that messenger’s appeal to the larger context, in spite of their greater experience and research into the dynamics of the situation, by judging them unworthy of opinion based on their skin color, often translated to “[color] privilege“.

Don’t be fooled by such color-mongers. The quality and truth of a message never depends on the color of the messenger.

And don’t think these color-mongers want to listen to the experience of others. The experience of my impoverished “color-of-privilege” nephew who had to have two bullets removed from his head after being robbed and shot by a gang of “color-of-underprivilege” kids in Minneapolis will be shugged away as meaningless.

The experience of my six black friends who continue to provide statistics on where engergies would be best spent if all black lives actually mattered also go largely unheard. While these friends are of the only color worthy of an audience in the minds of the irrational, these blacks can be placed into another artificial category called “sold out“, thus rendering them also unworthy to be heard. It is not honesty that matters to the irrational. It is protecting their position from scrutity and criticism. They have resorted to claiming messages from messengers of the wrong skin color are illegitimate, and that messages from those of the right skin color but in disagreement don’t matter because they oppose their own.

And they imagine all of this is somehow logically coherent.

(b) No one gives a fuck about the livelihood of a shop owner when people are literally loosing their very lives.

Yes, this was actual said.

Shop owners and their dependents most certainly care. And those who depend on a thriving local community care. I’m not sure how anyone could honestly make the claim.

Referring to specific loss of life that neglects loss of life elsewhere is just another example of neglecting the big picture, then accusing others of not paying enough attention to their myopic “situation“. If all black lives matter, research the circumstances in which most black lives are being lost. My conservative black friends are right on this point: there are far more lives lost to gang violence than to police brutality. Proportion focus and resources accordingly. (Lest this be also taken out of context by the less-than-honest, I am saying that we should distribute our energy and resources across all causes of black deaths proportionately, not to irrationally focus on one particular cause of black deaths.)

(c) These riots are a product of anger, resentment and fear.

Correct. And they are also a product of a lack of character, selfishness, myopia, and irrationality. Some seem to have forgotten MLK’s full rejection of violent protests. And they most certaintly have forgotten his reasons.

“As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”
Martin Luther King

Many of those on the left have very short memories. Some even go so far as to absurdly claim the fact that MLK was assassinated demonstrates he was wrong in promoting dignity and discipline in protesting for civil rights. King was right. And it does not take much mental acuity to understand why.

(d) You are upset because your little world has been slightly inconvenienced while other are angry because they know a simple traffic stop would end up with them or someone they love DEAD.

I’m not upset about anything. I do wish the world were more rational, but I never go to bed frustrated by humans acting human. I understand the long road of each individual to rationality. But some have abandoned this road of rationality in exchange for a thorny path of base emotions. Not a good choice. I live in Japan, and I am very grateful to the Japanese culture for setting an example to those in the West who pretend violence will somehow lead to the accomplishment of their agenda.

Let’s stop exaggerating. Take the total number of traffic stops in which the individual stopped complies with the instructions of the officers, and compare that to the times they’ve been shot. The fact that many blacks don’t comply is indicative of their actual fear. They know that the chances of being killed by an officer greatly increase if they don’t comply. Yet they don’t comply. To selectively ignore this factor is to be willfully blind to the “situation” you would like to paint for others. The dishonesty in this is just far too transparent, and your credibility naturally suffers as a result.

If you want to take a small step to salvage your credibility at least learn how to honestly hedge. Changing “would” to “may” in your statement posted above is a good first step in that direction. There are millions of blacks who have been stopped without incident. Police brutality is clearly an issue that needs to be dealt with, but you have no place at the table if you can’t cite the actual statistics or pretend getting shot without cause is common. Once again, your perspective is clearly too narrow for those who understand how the world is actually working to take you seriously.

(e) So I could try to explain to you but I am pretty sure you would not understand mostly because I am not qualified to explain to you and those who are qualified might be rightfully too angry to explain something to a white guy that needs no explanation to most of the black community.

You likely can’t explain it because you suspect your explanation is fundamentally flawed. You won’t listen to MLK’s voice on this. I doubt you’ll give credence to the voices of my black friends who take my view. But I give explanations. Explanations are what matter. If you cannot articulate your explanation, and dismiss the need for it by claiming I won’t listen, then, based on the history of others making parallel claims, you likely don’t have a coherent explanation. Right?

And once again, you bring up my color. Bringing into question my ability to understand because of my color…well, I believe we have a word for that.

(f) What is actually strange is that white people who have been watching black people be treated so badly for so long are so surprised that they are lashing out.

There is no surprise on my part. Wherever you have irrationality, you’ll have irrational behavior. Humans are born largely irrational. It takes time and focus to approximate rationality.

If those rioting and looting don’t want to listen to the message of peace promoted my MLK, myself and others, that is hardly surprising. We are in an age in which rationality has been exchanged for emotions as a way to substantiate opinions.

(g) It’s like watching someone repeatedly kick a dog and then being shocked when it bites you when you try to pet it.

I would suggest it’s not very noble to compare your own team to dogs. I’ve been bit only once by a dog, a dog to which I had done nothing. What did I do to the dog in return? Nothing. Do I understand why it bit me? Yes. It likely had abusive owners. Did biting me improve the dog’s life in some way? No. The action was irrational and could have been quite counter-productive. Did I sit down and lecture the dog on its irrationality? No. Dogs are not humans who have a far greater capacity for reason.

But I do promote rationality to humans. Their reception of my advice is unsurprisingly better than the reception of most dogs. And while this age is replete with irrationality, I intend to do my part to reduce its degree.

I therefore strongly recommend you stop assessing my complexion and address my actual arguments. You have fallen prey to ideologues who would have you replace reason and actual perspective with myopic emotions as the basis for beliefs and actions.

The conclusion is clear. We need to unequivocally condemn rioting and looting if we wish to count ourselves among the rational.

Before I forget the details, I will post an interesting account of an encounter with a fairly well-know atheist activist. We’ll call him Bill.

This activist has a channel on YouTube, and he mentioned that he was in the process of preparing a video on Bayes Theorem.

I thought this was a great idea, and recommend he collaborate with an “actual practitioner” of Bayes Theorem. I personally know many practitioners in the fields of AI and economics.

Bill somehow took offense to this, asking if I thought he was unqualified to speak on Bayes Theorem.

I ask him why he was creating a false dichotomy. Both he and the practitioner could obviously both be competent. I suggested he was quite competent to speak on the theorem, but that having an actual practitioner would perhaps make the episode more interesting.

Bill then told me that I had clearly thought he was unqualified. I said that was untrue. He responded that I was lying about my view on his competency.

Some of his loyal followers on the thread joined Bill in telling me I intended to somehow disparage him.

At this point I messaged Bill directly. You’ll find that exchange below.

At this point I was blocked.

It does seem odd that Bill thought that a degree in philosophy is irrelevant to Bayes Theorem. It is rather central to epistemology and philosophy of science.

Perhaps Bill just had a bad day. But others can learn from Bill’s lack of charitability and unjustified anger.

Let others own their motivations. Don’t tell them what they think. Ask questions if you are unclear about their motivations. Remain charitable. And don’t be threatened by honest suggestions.