Cryptocurrency and Goldbugs

For years I’ve been listening to cranks talk about how fiat money is worthless and how we should return to the gold standard. Now, I’m not an economist, and I have only the most rudimentary understanding of economics as a field, but I do understand one simple economic principle: value isn’t inherent in anything, value is imposed by common interest. As I understand it, gold became a value standard in part because of its beauty but also because of its rarity. Aluminum (aluminium for you fans of the mother tongue) was once the province of kings because of its rarity before we learned to pull it out of the very soil. We prize things that are difficult to get, which is the argument goldbugs use to explain why paper, or “fiat” currency is trash. How can paper money be valuable when all we need to do is give ourselves permission to print more of it?

That brings us to cryptocurrency. In 2008 someone introduced the idea of a digital currency that requires computer resources to “mine” the complex blockchains that validate them as the real thing. The encryption is so complex and monitored that it’s allegedly impossible to hack. This artificial scarcity for cryptocurrency makes it difficult to obtain and therefore valuable. But why should anyone care about a complex series of bits and bytes on a hard drive? Well, because we said so, that’s why. Bitcoin isn’t any less arbitrary as currency than gold or paper currency. It’s valuable because we agree it’s valuable, and therefore can be used in exchange for goods and services by those willing to deal in it. Advocates say that digital currency ought to replace fiat currency because it’s stable (spoiler: it isn’t) and can’t fail like the US dollar (it can).

Why do I bring this up? Because of the hilarious news I saw about a man who lost a hard drive with something like eight thousand Bitcoins he had mined, currently estimated to be worth $760 million dollars. It turned out that his ex-girlfriend threw it away. The story itself is comedy gold, but the part that I think is lost on most people is the fact that cryptocurrency has still failed to live up to its promise of replacing physical currency as the standard. Note how the title of the article calculates the estimated value of the Bitcoins in US dollars.

Over a hundred years ago, the US pegged its monetary system to gold, and our economy was in a constant state of boom and bust because the value of gold isn’t as reliable as goldbugs claim it is. Silver didn’t do any better. What stabilized our economies the best was monetary policy, where smart professionals used their training and expertise to adjust economic conditions via interest rates and public policy. This smoothed out the market highs and lows so ordinary people like you and I didn’t suffer so much during market failures. In the 1980s, conservative lawmakers started rolling back those policies and regulations to give markets a freer hand at operating, and we got the Savings & Loan crash in the late 80s, then the 2007 market crash that made my 401k accounts disappear. Economic stability doesn’t come from pegging our currency to anything in particular, it comes from careful regulation and maintenance of our economic environments.

Last, but not least, cryptocurrency is a ponzi scheme. Unless you’re mining it yourself, buying cryptocurrency with your own money just enriches everyone up the chain who invested before you. Any benefit you get depends on others following you to buy it after you. If you are mining it yourself, then you’re depending on suckers to pay real money to inflate the value. It’s valuable because we think it’s valuable, not because it has any inherent value in itself.

There are other problems inherent with cryptocurrencies that invite criminal activity and international espionage, but they’re not really germane to the point I’m making here. I don’t do cryptocurrency in part because I don’t think it’s ethical, and largely because it’s not the magic spell its backers would have you believe. I hope you won’t fall for the scam, either.

Life Under Secularism

Pick any nation that is not secular or industrialized and compare it to one that is.

http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries

While you may find exceptions, practically speaking every nation that falls under the categories of both “secular” and “industrialized” will rank higher in terms of human progress. That means not just gross GDP but civil rights, quality of life, opportunities and so forth. Human progress means individuals are free to pursue whatever they feel makes them happy in such a way that they’re not in constant strife with their neighbors. While religion may have been a prominent part of their past it no longer has the power to compel people in these nations to be religious or to behave according to religious values. Religion is a choice, not an obligation. The most respected people in these societies are not those who wear their religion on their sleeve but people who contribute the most to their societies without needing to broadcast their religious affiliation. Religion has a largely ceremonial function in these societies and as a consequence a growing percentage of those societies identify with no religion.

People in these nations aren’t desperate. They’re not worried about where their next meal is going to come from or how they’re going to pay the bills coming due. They’re generally not worried about getting sick and losing everything because they can’t work or having to toil in a menial job until they die because there’s no way to pay the cost of living otherwise. What we’ve learned is that there’s a demonstrated correlation between inequality and religion.

https://www.russellsage.org/awarded-project/relationship-between-inequality-and-religion

The more inequality people perceive in their societies the more religious they tend to be. High inequality makes it hard for people to ignore their own plight. They can’t help but face the fact that they don’t have security in their daily lives, that a bad accident or an unexpected bill can tip them over the edge of hanging on into destitution. So they turn to anything that offers hope, even if it’s a lie. Religion feeds on fear and insecurity.

If you wish to nitpick the HDI rankings then look at others.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/quality-of-life-rankings

https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp

https://worldinfigures.com/rankings

You may find exceptions where highly religious societies rank higher in specific indexes, but by and large the vast majority of places where it’s good to be alive are secular. That doesn’t mean religion is forbidden in these places, it means religion doesn’t dominate people’s lives. If civil rights is even remotely a concern for you then secularism is the way.

We also have contemporary research showing that religious indoctrination doesn’t promote progress:

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914). In this period, technology became skill-intensive, leading to the introduction of technical education in primary schools. I find that more religious locations had lower economic development after 1870. Schooling appears to be the key mechanism: more religious areas saw a slower adoption of the technical curriculum and a push for religious education. In turn, religious education was negatively associated with industrial development 10 to 15 years later, when schoolchildren entered the labor market.

So why does the world work this way? In part, it's because modern governments are held accountable by the people they govern. When they're not then abuses and atrocities escalate. But it's also because people have the ability to compare promises made against promises kept. When governments make promises that they don't keep, those governments ultimately fall. But religions make promises [that can't be checked, let alone kept which is what makes them uniquely harmful in ways that governments aren't.

Here is independently verifiable evidence that human progress happens in spite of religion, not because of it. The goal is not to turn the world atheist; that's a choice everyone should be free to make for themselves. The goal is to turn the world secular, so no one is coerced into a choice they don't agree with. The end result is that the demand for religion diminishes with each generation as people discover they simply don't need it.

The Mind-Killer

I've always been a big fan of Carl Sagan since I was young watching Cosmos on broadcast television with my father. I'm still a fan of the recent reboots produced by Seth McFarlane and starring Neil deGrasse Tyson, but Dr. Sagan will always have a special place in my heart for the way he clearly explained what we know and how we know it. If you have a chance to read his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark then I highly recommend it. Listening again to his slightly less-famous clip talking about the pale blue dot (the Earth as viewed in the distance from space) made me think about our current situation and what I think he might have had to say about our current circumstances.

Fear is an emotion that is in no way unique to humans. If you've ever watched a nature documentary in which a small animal or insect recognizes the danger it's in from a predator and tries to escape, you know that fear is inherently biological. It's a fight-or-flight reflex that heightens our awareness, boosts our strength and stamina and helps us prepare to do whatever needs to be done to survive the danger we face.

Not everything we fear is an immediate threat. There's fear of circumstance, social fear, metaphysical and existential fear. We fear death even when we're not directly confronted with it. We fear loss and hardship. Our fear reaction increases our awareness of these threats but running faster or hitting harder won't help us overcome them. Fear is a disadvantage to abstract threats because it focuses our resources on physical response when what we most need is to think our way out of the problem. There's no shame in being afraid, but fear isn't an emotion we can afford to overindulge.

To be clear, fear is not something we can simply turn off when we choose. That's why I mentioned that it's inherently biological: it's part of us as much as love or wonder or any other emotion. When the bombs fell on the British Isles and the British population waited in bunkers there wasn't much for them to do except be afraid. But even in those trying times they came together and helped each other. They looked out for the welfare of those in need and waited out the storm until the time came to rebuild. Had the entire nation succumbed only to fear and abandoned their resolve the world would look very different than it does today. Can you imagine a world where the Beatles sang in German? But I digress.

Fear will always be with us, but we still have choices. We can choose to surrender to fear or we can focus on what's in front of us. We can look after the welfare of our families and neighbors. We can identify those in need and do our part to help them. We've done this before and we can do it again, but we have to make an active choice. When we see the other side we'll have reason to be proud of ourselves and our community not because we weren't afraid but because we didn't allow it to make us less than who we can be. Courage is not the absence of fear but the dedication to do what's right in spite of it. Let's not allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear but use it to identify what we can do to make the world a better place for everyone.

Labels and Semantics

Stop me if you've heard this before: "You can't be an atheist because atheists believe there is no God!" Maybe you've said it yourself, I don't know. Whether you've said it or simply heard it, I would like to explain why this statement is pointless no matter what definitions you've embraced.

Labels aren't important. They're really not. We use them as mental shortcuts to help us decide how to respond at a glance. You may be aware of my previous comments on mental scripting if you want a more in-depth examination on the topic, but the point here is that these shortcuts don't tell the whole story. Labels are descriptions of things, they're not prisons.

I am a liberal. To you that may mean I want to steal all your money so I can redistribute it around to make everyone poor. It may mean you think that I support killing babies to slake my lust for blood. If you're stuck in the Nineteenth Century you might think it means I support unregulated capitalism to cure all societal ills. To me it means I support progressive economic and social policies for the good of all. As a liberal I don't object to people being rich, but I do object to rich people using their wealth and influence to block the wellbeing of others. Identifying as a liberal is a label that I use as shorthand to describe my political positions, but any assumptions you make on specific positions are unlikely to be accurate unless you know me well enough.

Likewise with atheism. Atheism means I don't believe in any gods. This doesn't mean I claim to know there are no gods. If you insist that I can't be an atheist unless I stoutly deny the existence of gods then good for you, but that has nothing to do with me. I will continue to use the label of atheist as shorthand and I will not accept your authority to insist I must stop using it. I can tell you precisely what atheism means to me as well as why I identify that way and if you don't understand me after that then your insistence on playing semantic games will make me lose any interest in talking with you.

You can't pin me down with a label. You can't force beliefs on me simply because you think your definition of something is better than mine. I'm not going to stop being a liberal just because you think liberals drink the blood of the unborn, nor am I going to stop being an atheist because you think atheists can only say there are no gods. I understand why you'd prefer if I conform to your expectations, but I have no interest in complying. You can either choose to understand me or you can stick with your misconceptions. Either way, I accept no obligation from your assumptions.

The Injustice of Sexual Abuse

I want to apologize in advance for touching on a subject that's probably going to trigger a few people, so this is your advance warning: if discussions about sexual abuse, rape and the difficulty of prosecuting those crimes are likely to provoke some bad memories or feelings please skip this post.

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Here in the US we have a problem with rape and sex abuse. The problem is that we're not treating it like a problem, just as an embarrassment that we'd rather see go away. That doesn’t mean addressing the problem so it doesn’t happen again or treating the problem like a genuine crime to be investigated and prosecuted like theft or murder, it means we just seem to throw up our hands and ignore the problem until people stop talking about it. For a while it seemed that the #MeToo movement would start moving the needle but I’m still seeing the same old attitudes and problems. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are being held accountable for their abuse but Brett Kavanaugh, Michael Shermer and David Silverman all look like they’re going to get away with a slap on the wrist at most. No real investigation, certainly no prosecution and no indication that this will ultimately end their careers. Today I encountered a fellow who argued that David Silverman is not a rapist because there’s no proof. Of course, Silverman admits to several of the encounters but insists they were consensual in spite of the testimony of the women who came forward to accuse him. It comes down to “he said, she said.”

That’s the problem. When it comes to personal testimony they’re not weighted the same. Rape and other sexual abuses aren’t like other crimes where it’s possible to dig until you arrive at the truth. Even where evidence has been collected there’s little hope of action. We’ve known for decades that rape kits aren’t being tested but in spite of that the status quo has not changed and doesn’t look like it’s going to be. Otherwise the evidence is ephemeral at best since bodies heal and witnesses tend to be scarce. The only thing the victims have left are the mental and emotional scars that will stay with them for the rest of their lives, and that’s difficult to display on trial because no one is willing to believe them. We’re willing to blame and convict pedophile priests without the kind of physical evidence we demand in adult cases. Is that really holding to a consistent standard of evidence? When so few rape charges lead to conviction is it any wonder that women give up trying to pursue justice for it? Women who accuse their rapists more often end up getting more abuse heaped on them as society blames the victims.

To add insult to injury, efforts to put a dent in the frequency of rape and sexual abuse have likewise failed. We’d much rather tell women they shouldn’t get raped than to teach men to not rape. We’d rather blame women for dressing provocatively or flirting or simply not taking enough notice of their surroundings than blame men for abusing them. I see more outrage over claims of false accusations than I do rape itself. When it’s pointed out that women get raped regardless of how careful they are, how modestly they dress or how directly they say “no” it’s disregarded. We don’t want to hear it. We’re not willing to lay the blame where it lies: on the rapist rather than the victim. Instead we demand evidence we know can’t be presented because it’s not a crime that leaves the same kind of evidence. We blame the woman for making the accusation because one false accusation somehow invalidates all rape accusations. We protect the men because their privilege matters more than women’s safety and call that justice.

As a man I am ashamed of my gender. I know this makes me a “bleeding heart liberal.” I know I’m a “social justice warrior.” I see no reason to reject either label because I don’t see these as bad things. There’s a moral rot at the heart of our society revealed by how often men get away with rape and sexual abuse and I want to see it come to an end. If that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right. Use all the slander and libel against me you want, I don’t care. I refuse to provide cover to systemic failings in our society.

If Your God Lied To You, How Would You Know?

An article of faith for many believers is the assumption that their god or gods do not lie to them. I realize this doesn't apply to all gods but for the ones assumed to be good and honest and forthright, how would you know if anything they told you was a lie?

Most con artists offer just enough of the truth to make their lies sound right, and many of the best never lie outright but are instead selective with the truth in order to lead you to a false conclusion. They'll tell you things you want to hear and use that to lead you to an assumption that follows their agenda. If they can they'll try to control the information available to you and make you dismiss any information that contradicts what they want you to believe. They rely on you having faith in them, to gain your confidence so you won't turn on them. Notable examples of con artists include Jim Jones, Peter Popoff and of course Charles Ponzi.

Is it acceptable to jump into a confidence scam because it gives you hope? I don't think so. Con artists rely on our willingness to trust and count on embarrassment making us unwilling to admit a mistake. Hoping that we've been given all the information we need isn't enough, and it's impossible to calculate the amount of harm that can be caused because we believe in lies that tell us what we want to hear.

There some very famous tropes focusing on lies, such as the greatest trick the devil ever pulled and its counterpart God is really the devil. So the question I think everyone really needs to answer is if you disregard the same faith invoked by the followers of Buddha, David Koresh, Jesus, Mohammad, Sun Myung Moon and Joseph Smith, how would you know if your god or prophets have lied to you? I submit that if faith is your only justification then what you believe is actually a lie.

Stress

The following is a fairly meta post about stress and dealing with stressful times. I'm neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist so I do not have an expert opinion on the topic, I have only my personal experience and the tactics I've learned to deal with it. People who are close to me often describe me as extremely calm and patient, which always surprises me. I never really think of myself that way but in the end appearances matter.

The reason I bring this up, of course, is because I'm feeling a lot of stress at the moment. A lot of it is personal and per my usual policy I won't go into details here. My usual response to events that provoke me is to stop, take a step back and breathe, let myself feel the emotion and once the moment has passed try to look at the problem as objectively as I can. It's important that I feel emotions but it's even more important that I act more than react.

In this article in the Washington Post (I strongly recommend you view the page in Privacy or Incognito mode of your browser unless you have an active account with the Post, also strongly recommended) they discuss a political issue revolving around stress and panic. The point that stands out for me is is this:

A new book by neuropsychologist William Stixrud and my friend Ned Johnson provides an explanation. The book, “The Self-Driven Child,” explains how calm parents give their kids more sense of control and help them perform better.


The science is simple. If you are calm, your executive functions handled by the brain’s prefrontal cortex — organizing, problem-solving, self-control, decision-making — perform well. If you are overly stressed, those functions decline as your brain floods with cortisol. Stress is contagious, and if you are in the presence of somebody who is out of control — a parent, an employer or, say, a president — your own executive functions decline.


“It’s a terrible thing for a chief executive of anything to be fear-mongering or emotionally reactive,” Johnson explained, “because all the bright capable people around you become less bright and less capable if they’re overly stressed.”

By creating an atmosphere of calm around me I encourage other people to be likewise calm and focused. My best man brought up this quality about me during the reception for my wedding, and my wife has commented on it as well. So tonight when I shared with my wife an angry letter I was writing she expressed a bit of surprise that I was really angry. It's true, I was and I still am. I'm struggling not to let my anger dictate my actions but I can't avoid allowing it to color them. The reason I wrote and sent the letter is because there's a problem that's been going on for a while with someone else and I needed to respond. I needed to take action, not simply react, and decide what I'm going to do going forward. I took some time to mull it over and I kept coming back to the same conclusion. So I made the decision and acted on it. I'm not happy about it. I'm angry that I've been forced into this corner. But after a great deal of thought I can't come up with a better solution. All the good choices have been taken away from me.

That's life, sometimes. We recognize we are powerless to correct or resolve a problem and all we can do is worry. We rant and rave and do everything we can think of to release that stress but so long as the circumstance remains unchanged it's a coping mechanism at best. Until change happens the stress never truly goes away. In this case there is something I can do to create change, but it carries consequences that I can do nothing about. It carries consequences for people on the periphery of the problem that they can do nothing about. It affects people I care about and I can't help them, I can only choose between evils. I hope that I've chosen the lesser of them but opinions will vary. In time I hope that my choice will be vindicated, but that's something only time will reveal.

History is repeating itself with my problem. I can't help but feel I'm repeating mistakes that others have made before me. There are people in my life whom I have mostly walked away from because they create too much toxicity and nobody needs more of that. I know some of them regret what they've done to me in the past because they've expressed it to me, but frankly I don't care. I don't trust them enough to believe that they truly feel regret, that they don't still believe everything they said and did was absolutely justified. I don't trust them enough to give them the chance to do it again. I'm worried (and will always worry) that I'm committing that mistake now, that the action I feel is justified at this moment will forever poison my relationship with people I care about deeply. Of course I run that risk no matter what I do; I know what some people want me to do but thanks to the corner I've been placed in I don't see how I can. So this is me trying to process the stress and powerlessness I feel over the options available to me. I've chosen to take a stand with as much openness and honesty as possible. I have offered to explain everything to the people affected by it but I can't make them listen and if I tell them anyway I can't make them believe me. I have to give them the choice and to honor whatever decision they make.

I'm not the only one with problems. I'm not the only one who is stressed. As the article I linked points out, everyone's stress has gone up significantly over the last eighteen months even for people who think our nation is on the right track. It's impossible not to feel stressed when there's so much insecurity and unpredictability in our daily lives. No one can see the future, but some have a clearer understanding of outcomes than others. I try to follow those who have a better track record but no one is infallible. So stress is something we just have to learn to live with. You can bury your head, block out the news and pretend nothing is happening outside of your bubble, but eventually life is going to intrude anyway. The path I choose is to acknowledge the stress and its sources and having done so continue moving forward. I can't change the past or present, I can only decide what I'm going to do about the future. Some of those decisions are going to be mistakes. I can't change that, either. But I can try to learn from my mistakes and try to make tomorrow better than today. If we all do that then we can ultimately forge a better world for everyone.

Wouldn't that be a welcome change?