Posted on by Gotamist

Science is…art?

I remember wanting to be a scientist since the time I was in kindergarten.  The people who advanced human knowledge.  They all seemed people highly deserving of admiration and respect. The ones who remained in human memory for hundreds or even thousands of years even as kings and emperors of the moment simply vanished from memory.

This remained unshaken, reinforced by everything I learned at school, everything seen in government messaging.  While, as a child, all adults seemed rich to me, I came to learn over time that some jobs pay more than being a teacher or even a scientist.  But who wanted that? Wasn’t that the same filthy lucre that we were taught to despise?  Going to an MBA program seemed like something that no one seeking a meaningful life would do.  Artists, leaders – meaningful.  Scientists and mathematicians too.  Doctor, nurse, engineer etc – noble enough and not evil, but basically not a creative person. And the rest, well blue collar and vocational, right? Not something to aspire to but fine, a way to make a living. And then the high-paying but professional careers such as lawyer, executive with an MBA – society had taught me that these were scum – greedy and soulless.

Over time, I came to realize that this is just a certain ideology taught to us.  In fact, engineers, workers and business people for the most part built the actual world we live in.  Nevertheless, I was not going to live that ordinary life, was I?  No, I was going to be a scientist, wear a tweed jacket, inspire children, be an intellectual, be a bulwark against the ignorant dogma of the religious right wing.  Of course, I believed in evolution – i’d have to be a bigot not to, right?  

As for material benefits, who cares about money.  I was not so deluded as to want to be rich! How much money do I need anyway?  I could easily be content with a permanent steady pay that placed me squarely in the middle class (yes, I told myself, this was a selfless acceptance rather than a craving for something truly elusive in the world – job security) and the title of scientist is far more prestigious than anything I could have with money.  All the people who matter would respect a scientist, right? In short, I know what it’s like to think that it’s the greatest job in the world and nothing else compares.  I also understood that a lot of people consider engineering to be nowhere near as glamorous as science.  But I never really understood or even probed why. 

The answer is simple.  I was taught to. By something in my education system even in middle school and elementary school. It is no different from PhD programs where everybody – profs, other students, graduates, all reinforce the idea that any career other than academia is a failure.  In a nearly circular argument, if it isn’t the greatest career, how come the acceptance rate is so low? And almost everybody who goes on to an academic role in the US also thinks, “I could easily have gone to the industry and made a lot of money”.  It may be true that from a sheer selectivity perspective, they could more easily have gone to the industry, but it’s not true that they could easily have made money. It is also not true that the people who can make it to academia are a strict subset of the people who can make it to the industry.  I do know a small number of people who did make it to academia, but would not have made it to certain industries. Making money in the world is hard – whether you came from academia or not.  A lot of people toil hard and never succeed.  

There was also romance associated with scientists.  All the scientists of yore, or at least of 18th and 19th century Europe, were gentlemen of leisure or so it seemed.  The same class that engaged in poetry, art etc.  The great engineers one hears about tend to be of the 20th/21st century and are just ordinary people who were trying to make a living.  Even people like Curie and Prandtl just felt so…elite.  I do recall thinking about how such a high-class atmosphere is declining.

But I have come to understand that many parents want to expose their children from a very young age to science – showing them dinosaurs by the time they are less than a year old – an animal they will never encounter in the world.  They do this in much the same way they expose them to art,, music, sport and other markers of high class that were simply inaccessible to lower class people. They raise them to be into science and they also raise them to be pro-science as in pro-scientist.  These are going to be the lady-and-gentleman class and not the apparently grubby working class of the engineer (only engineers don’t quite think that way).  Truly advancing science takes the same work and hustle as engineering.   Treating it as elegant artwork is either misleading or simply about guiding towards a lifestyle choice than towards what it takes to make an advancement.

In the US today, a majority (58%) of students in STEM graduate programs are foreign born. A majority of the students who excel at the high school level of the national talent search are children of immigrants (who don’t have disdain for engineering as a lower than science). We are frequently told that this is because scientists are not paid well enough. I contend that we should add to this that engineers are respected well enough.

People even walk away from engineers at a party at mere introduction while they are keenly interested in the work of scientists. In prestige, in the US, engineers come in after scientists, doctors, firefighters, professors, lawyers, military, nurses and other healthcare professions and teachers. Worldwide, scientists and doctors have significantly higher prestige than engineers. In the 20th and 21st centuries, most of the advances have been by engineers. Yet, engineers are not considered to be advancing the good of society or have some purpose other than earning a paycheck while all the other professions listed above are. Until this changes, forget about natively having the supply of engineers that the economy actually needs. Paychecks are not going to solve this.

I know this is almost a stream of consciousness and I may not have made any clear points or made a coherent argument for anything… just wanted to share things that crossed my mind in the past and the present.

Posted on by Gotamist

How to know who’s living off government largesse

All you have to do is look around and see who’s claiming to be virtuous (and therefore, worthy of financial support). Look to see who’s constantly attacking ‘“the corporations” and greedy private sector people. Look for who’s got disdain for the 9-to-5 slave.

So, who are these? Well, Educational institutions, health institutions, NGOs of many hues, modern scientists, government workers. They are all telling us how good they are.  Stop the spigot of the private sector’s tax money being doled out and all of these collapse immediately. This is why they need to keep telling us about their moral superiority and mission.

Posted on by Gotamist

Why are Democrats the more scientific party?

You must surely have noticed over the decades that the Democratic positions on various topics are supported by Science.  Or that panels of scientists endorse various liberal positions.  There is always “panel of 16 economists” who endorse the Democratic presidential candidate. 

When I was younger, I might have sought to understand it in terms like “liberal positions are more scientific (vs conservative positions that are more religious)”.  But a simpler explanation is simply that scientists as a group tend to support liberal positions. There could be many reasons for this.  One is simply that the Democrats support spending taxpayer money on funding science (and arts and many other things) and Republicans are generally for less government spending.  If your career depends on one party being in power, wouldn’t you support that party?

A friend recently shared that Washington DC, where a lot of Federal government employees live, is also heavily pro-Democrat.

I see a similar pattern in state capitals. For example, in the 2024 election, even in states that went for Trump, the capital city of the state, where a high fraction of residents are government workers, went for Harris. There are only 12 states where the capital went for Trump. These are almost all hard core red states, with the exception of Carson City, NV, which is in a swing state.

StateCapital City (or county containing it)
AlaskaJuneau
ArizonaPhoenix
IdahoBoise
KentuckyFrankfort
MissouriJefferson City
MontanaHelena
NevadaCarson City
N. DakotaBismarck
OKOK City
S. DakotaPierre
W. VirginiaCharleston
WyomingCheyenne

Election data is only available at the county level. So, the table above is about the county containing the state capital. I’ll note that Phoenix and Carson City both went for Trump by only a narrow margin.

I’m not saying they are wrong.  Even broken clock can be right about the time sometimes.  Rather, that they have lost credibility.  Because of their relentless advocacy of the left, people don’t take scientists seriously. 

Posted on by Gotamist

Why people lie

No, I’m not speaking of the motivation for lying – it is always, of course, the greed for the short-term benefits from not speaking the truth.  As most of us know, the long term harm from lying far outweighs any short term benefit.  Most importantly, it causes a loss of trust and how can you have a relationship with anyone when trust is not present.  Leading figures, from the Buddha, to Kant, Gandhi and many others have, therefore, taught that speaking the truth is important in all contexts.

However, despite the long term harm being well known to most adults, lying has not disappeared.  As people grow up, they know that lies get caught and they stop saying some obvious lies without stopping lying. Why?

My observation is that they can outsmart others and can lie so convincingly that they think they will not get caught.  And this is the reason they lie. 

And the reason they get caught in lies is that they were wrong – people around us are very smart relative to us and it is not, in fact, possible to keep the pretense.

I have heard objections of the type: “That’s not true.  For example, children know quite well that they’ll get caught but they’ll still say with ice cream on their face that they did not eat it – just to escape punishment or someone’s displeasure in the moment”.  That’s actually not a counterexample, but an example of the very thing I’m talking about.  Why do they stop saying it – because they learn that this kind of obvious lie does not fool anyone.  They then continue telling other lies that they think they can fool people with.

In summary, liars lie because they think they are smarter than those they’re lying to.  So next time when you tell someone a lie, remember that not only are you endangering trust and the relationship, you’re also implicitly insulting their intelligence.

Posted on by Gotamist

Bring back Globocop!

It is my belief that the US must maintain itself as the dominant military power in the world.  I mean, beyond a “muscular foreign policy”.  I think it should not just be strong but a threatening power.  Yes, to the rivals, of course.  These aren’t just rivals, but sometimes enemies and certainly are enemies of a world order that the free world takes for granted. 

But the US should also be a bit feared by its allies.  That the US will not tolerate their dalliances with their enemies and become dependent on them for some short term welfare.  That they need to shape up in their own strength so that they be themselves a deterrent and also be actual allies to each other instead of just expecting to run crying to the US in times of crisis while in non-crises times laughing at the US for being a gun-obsessed, war minded country to which the idea of focusing on welfare had simply not occurred.

This is distinct from the “earning the respect of our allies” that the some liberals often talk about.  This “leadership” involves following the Europeans on the climate agenda and whatever else they want to do collectively.  Most of them, welfare expansions that work for them while they enjoy the American security umbrella.  Those agendas simply view the US as a big pot of wealth that ought to make big monetary contributions to all the saintly causes or risk being judged by the Europeans. No, thanks.  The US doesn’t need the approval of Europeans and the label of virtuous.  It leads the world in charity and some other good deeds already, whether the Europeans agree or not. 

This doesn’t mean being involved in wars. But that threat is necessary to be able to stay away from war.  This may seem counter intuitive.  So, let me explain with the example of personal safety.   Petty criminals tend to target people they think are weak and unlikely to put up a fight.  So you’re most likely to be in a fight with a thug when you do not appear strong (and have fighting skills to back it up – it’s very visible to potential trouble makers).

Posted on by Gotamist

What should technologists do?/Is a liberal arts education better?

I was struck by a tweet from Sci-Fi author and engineer Devon Eriksen that a friend mentioned to me. I disagree with this Devon almost entirely (except for the fact that people need to learn to make their own judgements from data – even this I disagree that teaching it in school is the way to get there). 

This is the classic argument we have seen for some 70 years from (generally) leftists who have been vehemently pro college-is-the-solution-for-all despite being the party of the working class.  It’s part of their general pantheon – worship work-from-home, the 4-day workweek, ever more benefits, ever fewer hours and fewer demands on workers.  They mock professional education whether blue collar or white collar as code monkeys etc (and ask Elon Musk to stay in his lane as a technologist and out of politics) while glorifying art, literature, social work, poetry.

Here is a typical statement/wish/argument used as a criticism of AI, for example. It’s about what someone wants out of AI and technology.  The tweet forgets what that AI must be made – by human beings. And that the usual process for all products entering the market is that inventors /producers create the product and put it out on the market with people deciding only whether they want it or not.  While they try to tap into latent demand or long standing wishlists of society, it rarely ever starts with innovators being commissioned by “thought leaders” to go out and invent this or that. 

They want technical people to be workers who produce all the conveniences.  They, as the literary and intellectual class, will then appropriate all the goods of innovation using an equally-for-all argument.  Further, they will decide the direction of society by force because they can “critically think” while technologists need to shut up and continue working.

Back to Eriksen’s tweet, Harari’s point was just this – back then, you knew what skills you needed to be better off than without them, regardless of whether you conquered the Mongols or the Mongols conquered you.  Today, you don’t.  Devon Eriksen’s reading of  “servant” into this is wrong.  If you were a servant, you learned sheep-shearing.  If you were a lord, you learned horse-riding and archery (and you were decidedly not a servant).  

The lords were lords because they had coercive power (to inflict pain/death) and were thus able to make other people do the work for their basic needs while they had the luxury to enjoy fine things and also pursue arts and poetry. They did NOT become powerful through the pursuit of poetry and arts, but by the sword.

Those ages were decisively put to an end by the industrial revolution.  The new middle class were all people with an actual skill – the professional in a town lives better than a landlord in a village. As for the new lords, they are those who understood technology and were able to marshall others’ labor (own companies) or invest in them in a non-managerial capacity.

The warrior class is no longer wealthy and is not feared by their own population – still very much respected for their blood sacrifice, but only that.  All the richest in the world today are skilled technologists or business builders (descendents of these).  The only old guard members still rich are the ones investing in companies shrewdly (eg. British and Saudi Royal families).

Finally, to Eriksen, I say that one of the pieces of education that the unproductive leftist intellectual class says with great pride they impart to people in the humanities is “we TEACH critical thinking” while technologists don’t have that.

For some reason, all political science departments are full of leftist profs and students.  The only reason they can see why 50% of the population supports the other side is “well, they’re stupid”.  That doesn’t seem like a whole lot of critical thinking to me.

What do I think gets one ahead? – producing things or services that other people value, that you can trade in a consensual market.

Whether they are high art or basic necessities.  Kids learn math, grammar, sales (persuasion) or be excellent at entertaining (singing, painting, sports), learn to build things that people want to buy or employ you for.  These are hard enough that character building is an automatic side effect from the failures and restarts you’ll inevitably have to do.

Posted on by Gotamist

Living with uncertainty and fear

I’ve been noticing in recent years that a lot of the extreme polarization (and a warlike enemy-making in the mind) on certain public topics comes from fear.  More specifically, the unwillingness to tolerate risk and fear.

An example is the vaccine debate during COVID pandemic. Those who were on the side of the vaccine feared getting COVID and got the vaccine and since the vaccine is imperfect, they also wanted everyone else to get it to minimize the chance of getting COVID. On the other side were people who were afraid of the vaccines – that they might have adverse health consequences or even death from it.  But some pro-vaccine folks wanted a mandate (or at least something that was effectively a mandate by denying services to unvaccinated people).   They mocked the fears of the other side because they weren’t their own fears.  They felt that they needed to eliminate all chance of having to risk COVID and be free from their fear.  So, their solution was to force the other people to live with their fear.  Likewise, in the case of the anti-vax/anti-mask people, they did not want to deal with their fear of the vaccine or their fear of the government taking over their freedoms by wearing masks etc.  And so they walked around in a manner that forced the elderly/frail (or just scared) people on the other side to live with their fears.

The current Israel-Palestine conflict is another example.  It’s well-known that each group in the conflict thinks the other side poses an existential threat to them.  Furthermore, they feel that the only way to feel secure is to exterminate the identified enemy on the other side (and destroy a lot of innocents on the other side if that’s a by-product).  This desire to be entirely free from a fear of the other (given beliefs about the other – no doubt in the mind well supported by numerous pieces of experience) is a root cause of why each side poses an existential threat.

I also see this in the politico-social polarization into echo chambers in the my own country – with more and more people viewing people who adhere to opposite viewpoints or values as a threat by their very existence/thinking.

The dhamma suggests that living with what is, is a fantastic inner weapon for achieving peace. And that includes living with certain risks and fears. Pema Chodron even has a compilation of teachings on this topic, aptly named “Living with uncertainty”. These teachings show us a way towards fearlessness that is through allowing certain fears rather than seeking to eliminate them entirely.

Posted on by Gotamist

Caste, cows and curry

A large part of the lack of knowledge about social stratification in one’s own country comes from some myths learned from childhood, some even systematically taught in schools.  While I was not at all surprised to find a wide range of familiarity with India among Americans, when I first came to this country (after all, it is a far away land), I was surprised to find that everyone’s perception included “caste, cows and curry” (maybe the stereotype in the opposite direction is sex, fat, gun-happy, maybe even irreligious).

The cow situation (so radically different from other countries) and “curry” (btw, there is no such dish in India, you know that, right?) being widely known were quite understandable to me, but the caste bit was puzzling to me because many societies are strongly stratified, many of them on by-birth criteria and professions too – so many examples of caste on every continent [“caste” is a European word to describe something that was seen in Europe, for example].  I can see that India’s is the largest and most current application of the term and there’s a good argument for it being currently the paradigmatic example because of it’s slowness of change but it’s hardly unique. (And India has been slow in all aspects of modernizing, anyway).

Not that any of this means India’s caste system is “not so bad” or anything. It was and remains (despite vigorous attempts by many to rid society of this scourge) horrible. But I hope people across the world can stop using other countries’ caste mechanisms to willfully avoid looking at what’s right around them. Because, everyone’s strongest sphere of influence is first their own mind, then their immediate circle of people, then their own broader network, then their own societies and much further along is some society far away. So it’s worthwhile thinking about our own situation.

Nor is it the case that Isabel Wilkerson’s explanation is going to find an exact one-to-one mapping of the stratifications in the two countries that all of us here have become closely connected with. I’m drawing attention to the fact that while it’s easy to find some difference to hold up, why did it take so long for the glaring similarities to be brought to the surface?

Another seemingly misunderstood aspect is the idea among many people that Indians are for the caste system. It must be, right? Why else does it exist? That’s poor logic. It’s like saying Americans support racism. Why else does it exist? (and it certainly does exist). For more on how caste and race are analogous, I have to refer you to a different post. Let me state clearly for those unfamiliar with India (obvious to most Indians already) – from the day India became independent (1947), successive governments have worked tirelessly to end this scourge – obviously with the support of large swathes of the population.

It’s also worth pondering why exactly are children in American schools (and in those of allied countries) are taught about the caste system? In contrast, children in Indian schools learn about the marvels and good qualities of other societies, not their ills. They do get an education on social ills, but those of their own country, not other lands. This question is not a trivial one and is related to American introspection.

Posted on by Gotamist

Guns, Liberalism and Conservatism

There is an infinity of articles out there about the right and wrong of gun rights and people tend to come down for or against the topic in a stance that is highly correlated to where you stand on in the political left/right dimension. [I’m well away that not everything falls into this dichotomy, but it’s a decent first principal component ]

It was hard to see what abortion or gay rights or tax cuts/hikes had to do with guns – were people taking positions just from tribalism?  It’s dawned on me, though, that the stance on guns is not incidental but central to leftist or right wing ideologies and where they stand on the role of the state and state power. Allow me the liberty to use broad-brush (and somewhat ridiculing) choice of language to describe what the groups want.

Liberals believe in the state being a major actor, making itself wealthy and powerful and cramming down “the right things” (high taxes, mask mandates etc) onto individuals who do not support whatever great social project that the right people have decided.  Individuality is not a desirable quality and individual rights stand in the way of achieving “the greater social good”.  Well, guns in every household is quite a hindrance for a government forcing people to do things.  So, to achieve leftist goals, it’s natural to not want easy availability of guns.

Now, think about a situation where everyone has a gun: Suddenly, your safety depends on what people all around you think of you.  You can’t behave wildly and have to observe certain social norms. The state is not able to effectively protect your rights to do what you please.  Suddenly, it’s like the old societies where everyone is involved in everyone’s affairs, people “give respect to get respect” and other such macho notions, women have to dress based not just on what is allowed under the law but based on what everyone in the neighborhood thinks, the beliefs of the majority prevail and minority values have a hard time. In other words, conservative values will rule the roost automatically by the mere fact that everyone has lethal power with them.

So, in a gun-carrying community,  the state can’t force anything on you, but it also can’t effectively protect you from your neighbors.

Posted on by Gotamist

Father’s day and Mother’s day are for all

As Father’s day approaches, I’m reminded that every year, it’s common to hear people say things like “For those of you who are fathers, Happy Father’s Day!” or “Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers I know).  And of course, we hear similar things for Mother’s day.  It’s become a day to celebrate someone’s (often one’s own) fatherhood. 

This is not the spirit in which these holidays were instituted.  When Anna Jarvis campaigned for Mother’s Day and Sonora Scott Dodd created Father’s day (yes,  both days were created by women), they meant it to be a day to honor one’s mother or father. Not to celebrate one’s own motherhood or fatherhood.  In fact, Anna Jarvis did not even have children of her own!

Jarvis specifically noted that “Mother’s” should “be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.”

So, what happened? The church happened.  Some strains of conservative Christians saw it as a way to push their agenda that the path that women should take is motherhood and not other pursuits.  So they used the holiday to celebrate motherhood instead.  And they were successful.  This irked Anna Jarvis so much that by the end of her life, she started campaigning for the holiday to end, now that its meeting had been so perverted.

To summarize: Happy Father’s Day to you if you have a father (or had one or had a father figure).  Appreciate your father and celebrate him! 

It’s not about your fatherhood. There is only one holiday in the year to celebrate yourself. And that is your birthday.  Every other holiday is to honor and celebrate someone else in your life.  Don’t bend it to suit your own purposes.