On Black Lives Matter, Migrant Labour Crisis, and Elephant Killing

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/asia/india-elephant-death-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
https://www.ndtv.com/entertainment/abhay-deol-is-twitters-new-hero-for-calling-out-woke-indian-celebs-2240094

Please do speak up against the violent death of the elephant, but question yourself, why do we move so swiftly from compassion for the elephant to blaming an entire state and people for supposedly ingrained violent tendencies? No act of violence can define a people at large; is there any other state entirely clean of violence? And while you're at it, cultivate the healthy skepticism that you may not know the full story yet, that the elephant's death might have been an accident, an unintended consequence of saving crops from boars*?

*But then again, question yourself, why it is OK to kill boars intentionally, not elephants unintentionally, with the explosive pineapples? Looking for a reason more convincing than "they damage crops", we are talking about internal explosions here, after all! Are different levels of sensitivity warranted for different species of animals? Is that an extension of how different levels of sensitivity are the norm for different races** of humans?

**Or genders or nationalities or religions or orientations or classes or castes - pick the discrimination that moves you most; and again question yourself, why do I only feel moved to speak up by that particular style of discrimination***, even though they all are in principle the same, that is, discrimination against someone for something that was determined for them at birth, with no input of their own?

***But then again question yourself, what's so wrong with speaking up for only a few of all the injustices? Should one not speak up for any injustice, if he does not speak up for all? If one doesn't speak up for injustice against migrant labour in India, does he have no right to speak up for injustice against the black people in the US? If he remained silent about one injustice, is it better if he keeps shut about all injustices? Would the world be a better place with that approach?

On why, and why not, to condone Virtue Signaling

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/virtue-signaling.html

Interesting article that compels you to re-consider your own assumptions, and discourages one from dismissing other people's outrage as mere virtue signalling. The authors point out that doing so is ill-advised, because "virtue signalling does not mean that their outrage is not authentic."

Virtue Signalling is when someone expresses outrage over something not so much because he is truly outraged, but because he thinks that doing so will signal to others how he himself is morally superior to those he is outraged by. After all, it is easier to appear environmentally conscious by expressing outrage on social media about carbon dioxide emissions from big corporations, than by turning off your own AC, or even forsaking consuming the products manufactured by those corporate houses. Additionally, it is impolite to just come out say "I care a lot about the environment" - that would just seem vain and off-putting - so expressing outrage at someone else who's being careless about climate change is more clever.

The authors of the article above, however, reached this conclusion (that outrage can be both authentic and virtue signalling simultaneously) in a convoluted way that is far from convincing. 

To summarize their experiment, they showed a group of people a video where a person is given some money, and then given the option to share some of it with another person if he so wishes. The person in the video chooses not to share the money, and keeps all of it for himself. Then the people watching the video are asked how outraged they felt by seeing this behaviour, and they all responded anonymously. The interesting part is that prior to watching the video, half of these people were also given some money and the option to share it (privately and anonymously such that it couldn't be identified by anyone, including the researchers, who those people were that got this deal). It turned out that the half that had got the deal prior to watching the video ultimately reported far less outrage on seeing the video, than the half that did not get the deal themselves.

The researchers' inferential reasoning seems to coersively bring 'virtue signalling' into the picture. They suggest that the first experiment (some participants being given money and the option to give away some of it) reduced the incentive for virtue signalling. This argument is made articulately. To paraphrase the authors: "After all, if a participant chose to share, she would look virtuous regardless of how much outrage she subsequently expressed toward the selfish person. And if she chose not to share, she would look dishonorable regardless of how much outrage she later expressed." And I agree, if there was an incentive for virtue signalling in the first place, it would have been greatly reduced after the first option-to-give-away-money experiment.

However, since the experiment was anonymized the entire time, there isn't a strong basis to suggest that such an incentive ever existed. The argument that there was a hypothetical incentive on the part of the participants (i.e. they acted as if the experiment wasn't anonymous, although it was and they knew that it was) seems to be drawn on a whim out of thin air, and therefore the subsequent assertion that this incentive was reduced is also weak. It would have been better if the experiment was anonymous at large but not to the researchers themselves - then the inference they drew would have been more meaningful. 

To my mind, there is a more plausible route of inference that the researchers could have taken, but didn't, based on their experiment's results; which is that people have incomplete and inaccurate knowledge of their own volition. That is, of what they would do under a given situation. As an example, in this case, they overestimated their generosity, except in cases where their generosity had already been put to the test. 

Again, it might well be true that outrage can be "both" authentic as well as driven by a desire to look morally superior, but their study does not establish it. Their conclusion, on careful scrutiny, seems more like their hypothesis, which their experiment was ill-equipped to prove.

Ultimately, there is a much simpler way to conclude that shaming people for virtue signalling is inappropriate: it is simply hypocritical. When you dismiss someone's outrage as virtue signalling, you may be indulging in virtue signalling yourself. If your retort to this is that only you know your own motivations with certainty and therefore 'know' that you're being authentic, then the argument could be reversed: only the people whose outrage you're dismissing as virtue signalling know their own motivations with certainty. 

Therefore, if you must express your disagreement with a certain expression of outrage, address the outrage expressed and its merits, not the person expressing outrage and his motivations.

How to be good

Don't be good in order to get favours. It will make you wicked.
Don't even be good in order to get praise. It will make you vain.
Don't even be good in order to get love. It will make you needy.
Don't even be good to get respect. It will make you judgmental.
Don't even be good to get good karma. It will make you fearful.
But be good anyway.

A competition of virtues

Striving for equality is a virtue.

Cultivating generosity is, too.

But whenever the two conflict, choose generosity.

If we choose the former as our policy to break a tie, we will eventually break all ties.

A good and a bad

For the last couple of days, I've started coming to Starbucks for getting my personal coding things done. And so far, it has been so good that I have wondered why I never tried this earlier. True, sometimes, you need the intensity of being alone in the quiet of your room and your bookshelf next to you, but a great majority of the time, you don't, and what's much more crucial is that your practice is more habit-forming. To that end, I think, a kind of quasi-alone state that you get in a cafe where you are surrounded yet by yourself, is a lot more conducive than being in a locked up room. Or so I feel, for now. We'll see.

The other thing I've realized is that good textbooks are a way better way to learn something new, or even re-learn something, than video lectures. At least for me.

I've been thinking a lot about the pursuit of money and what it does to us, lately. I've long held that the utility I, and in my opinion others too in all likelihood, derive from accumulating money tends to zero, even negative, after a certain threshold. The threshold, however, where you feel like you should stop caring about accumulating still more comes much later, and for most, never at all.

I have been thinking about the second stage lately. On the one hand I feel convinced that I do not care about any pursuit the only payoff from which is more money, I think I still have some ways to go before I can say the same about external recognition, even though from what I can tell, it is entirely frivolous, whereas having money (a reasonable amount of it, at any rate) is actually pretty darn important. And yet when I see an old classmate on LinkedIn I've always thought of myself as much smarter and hard-working than, and see that he is head of so and so fancy thing at so and so fancy company, something tells me that I cannot stop running after external recognition just yet, not until I "right that wrong". I know it is immensely ignorant and small of me, but where would I confess it if not here, to nobody and everybody?