A Letter From an ExMuslim Woman

Hey Eiynah,

I intended to write this letter for a very long time, in part, because I wanted to let you know how glad I am that you exist in this world, but  mostly because after reading, seeing and listening to your work, I peddled to be a liberal again, only this time better, more empathetic and listening. When I left my faith as a Muslim woman from Pakistan, I had soon found myself among a hostile community. This made me bitter and lonely with depressive periods coming my way. At that time, atheist and secular bloggers were under crackdown by the government, and having to live in constant fear was something, I never imagined could come my way. Gradually, my political leanings begun to shift towards the Western right, because that was the only ‘community’ which could recognize and hear me. In a short span of time, I went from ‘left does not listen’ to using words like ‘cuck’, ‘regressive left’, and ‘libtard’. Not only did I not realize that I was being used as a scapegoat—a convenient narrative feeding off of my misery and frustrations, but I had been tricked into thinking, mostly by the New age rationalists, champions of reason, boasters of facts, that a bunch of college students and their angsty hormones were the biggest national threat to Western civilization. That being angry at social inequalities was worse than inequalities themselves. So much for their moral relativism. I had remembered then, how in my own country, people used to look down upon my college—the very education which made me question my faith and become aware of political and social forces of Islamism—and used to say how we were getting ‘brainwashed’ to look through discrepancies of Muslim societies. For them, education was brainwashing, and this was a theme shared by Western conservatives as well, where ‘calm’ ‘rational’ adults were sucking off on the immaturity and childishness of teenagers and college students. The exMuslim community is predominately right wing—people who laugh at left for considering personal experiences, but who admire Ayaan Hirsi, whose entire work and discussions are based on personal experiences. If there is anyone who nourishes from the personal experiences of atheists, women and LGBT in Muslim countries, it is the New Right, albeit for all the wrong reasons. People who otherwise justify patriarchy in West will suddenly rant about patriarchy in Muslim countries. People who otherwise don’t think transsexuals and their harassment are that big of an issue, will suddenly forward social media posts about how transsexual community is treated in Muslim world. People who otherwise are blind and deaf to racism in West or think it is over will suddenly become experts on the Sunni-Shia dynamics of Muslim world, like the Hindu nationalists who think just because caste system is abolished, means caste discrimination is over in South Asia. According to these people, hundred century long institutions and fractionalizations can be ‘gotten over’ in a few decades. ExMuslims overwhelmingly side with these people, and then complain about Western liberals and leftists not taking them seriously. Heck, even I have a hard time taking them seriously. The logic ‘Muslims treat exMuslims like shit, so we should make sure Muslims are treated like shit, that way Muslims surely will take us very seriously’. Of course, that is totally not a college-student level immature approach.

It is true that people like me, have to constantly live in fear of our lives. I also know that brown liberals have it worse than Western liberals, which to my hilarious surprise is identity politics, the kind which right wingers engage in even though they deny. I hate it when conversations about minorities in Muslim countries are silenced by bringing up equally problematic injustices elsewhere. But it is also not a far-fetched truth that we are often scapegoated to silence the home issues in the West. 

Liberals, no matter where they are from, have one thing in common—the tendency to look inside first before looking outside, which means criticizing their own societies before anything else. They see what others around them miss. They can cut through the cloths of social, political and religious dynamics of their own societies. And so, when I am reflecting on how Islamism sustains itself, a form of institutional ideology systematically perpetuated by religion, state and school textbooks in Pakistan, there is a reason moderate Muslims can’t see it. For them, being Muslim is just practicing religion, when in fact, being a Muslim in Pakistan that too a Sunni Muslim, that too a man, comes with invisible brownie points which they themselves are not aware of, apart from the fact that the State affords them first class citizenship. It is true that I get enraged when Muslims cannot understand how their own ideologies and societies contribute to Islamic fundamentalists and provide a cloak to them, and how beliefs they consider ‘just a belief’ have consequences over and above their own selves. However, I feel equally infuriated when Western liberals conversations about race, urban poverty or violence get hijacked with ‘oh what about the slave past in Islamic history’ or healthcare and women issues get taken by ‘oh look Muslim women have it worse, and since you are not getting stoned to death therefore crying about healthcare or reproductive rights ain’t a problem’. That would be the last thing I want to hear in such a dialogue.

The essence of liberalism does not involve standing up for your own self, but standing up for others and others standing up for you. This is a lesson I have learned with most difficulty. This was even more difficult than questioning faith, coming to terms with the hostile surroundings and debating people at the risk of my own life. When one is full of bitterness and hate, they can’t see above their own misery and situation. The changes we talk and hope for is going to take tens of years, it is gradual process which involves what many are not willing to give. To side with New Right, is to plough your own feet. To condemn religious fanaticism, but to defend nationalistic chauvinism is probably the greatest intellectual sin one could commit. To condemn Islamism but to defend fascism or Nazism is probably the greatest hypocrisy one may ever display. Being in a situation where my life and identity is at stake, I could choose to be bitter or empathetic. And it took sheer discomfort, even more than that of the uncertainty of my life, to choose the latter. 

For this, I thank you. For a very long time, I lamented at the lack of good brown atheist women role models, but now I have found one. Please continue to do what you do, and if you ever feel hopeless, just know that you are probably the only sensible person in exMuslim community. Also you are not alone, as a few other exMuslims are shifting away from the opportunistic, pseudo rational, and past romanticizing place which New Right is. Though, other atheists are naïve that they harbor conservative beliefs or that they have picked up the talking points of right-wingers, almost like moderate Muslims are. 

Regards,

Rushi Jae

10 Documentaries Every Curious Thinker Should Watch

There are instances in life when you know something, but cannot make sense of it in a neat, nice and tidy way. Below are the 10 hand-picked documentaries which will take you to places from the ruthless scientific investigations, to fringes of culture and politics, and to the heartfelt emotions, self and psychology.

Credits to http://worldofwonder.net/tag/secrets-of-the-living-dolls/

1) The Secret Life of Chaos

Can science explain the springing of life? Can it explain chaos, disorder and uncertainty? Till now, science has been expected to explain the order and precision of the natural world. Many other phenomenon such as creation of life, division of cells, movement of sand dunes, unpredictable weather, formation of shores, and economic and financial disasters are seen as areas where science does not have much to say. However, Jim Al-Khalil explores the beauty and neatness of the chaos theory. He uses it to answer questions such as how does order emerge out of chaos? And how come nature has such seamless, and charming patterns, which could only be seen as an act of a Greater Artist.

2) Is Seeing Believing?

This is a sister documentary to “Do you see what I see?”, and covers the mind-gasming topic of reality and perception. It takes us on the journey of various visual and auditory illusions which basically shows how vulnerable our perception is. If you want to understand the contemporary insights of brain and consciousness, this documentary is for you. The world surely will make more sense after watching these two documentaries.

3) Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimensions of the Universe

What explains the repetitive shapes of snow flakes, spider-webs, sea stones, sand dunes, and galaxies? There is a neat mathematics, underpinning all seemingly random yet recurring patterns of everyday life. Find out the mathematics of irregular, disorderly solids, and appreciate the power of science.

4) Born Good? Origins of Morality

Are we born good or bad? What explains altruistic behavior in humans possessed by no other species known? What explains psychopathic behavior, discrimination, tribalism and violence? This documentary looks at centuries-old argument, which has kept both philosophers and scientists awake at nights.

Evolution equips us with both social behaviors of cooperation and empathy, and tribalistic instincts of us-versus-them. Cooperation and empathy are common in-group behaviors, while tribalism is expressed as an out-group behavior. People who look like us, think like us, and lead lives like us, are more likely to attract empathy and altruism from our side. Hence, empathy has limitations. And many of our earlier notions about human kindness and love seems to be wrong all this time.

5) Middle sexes: Redefining He and She

What happens to children whose genital inspection fail to categorize them as either male or female? How do ambiguous genitals look like, and how doctors assign the sex of a child at birth? In India, the State has long recognized such people as Hijda, third-sex but the Western world still harbors taboo attitudes towards the “Middle sexes”. The documentary takes us through the personal lives of many people, which includes those whose genitals had been declared ambiguous by doctors at birth, those who had undergone surgeries because of that, and those whose hormonal dynamics after hitting puberty led them to live as a different gender than what they were born and socialized in.

The documentary also looks at an experiment to determine people’s acceptability and tolerance towards such members of society. The results found that men and women who are insecure about their own sexuality are more likely to be discriminatory and harbor phobic attitudes towards the middle-sexians.

6) An Inconvenient Truth

Climate change is real, it’s man-made and it’s going to impact our economic, technological, and social prospects. Al-Gore explores the mismatch between scientific consensus and popular media, and looks at reasons of skepticism among politicians, economists, business owners and the wider public.

7) Secrets of Living Dolls

This is probably the most psychologically exoteric documentary one could watch. It shows men, who choose to live their lives as female dolls. An epic case of cross-dressing and trans-genderism.

8) Nice Guys Finish First

This documentary is a reply by Richard Dawkins to his infamous book, “The Selfish Gene”. He explores cooperative and altruistic behavior, which seems to be at odd with natural selection and cut-throat competitive machine of evolution. He incorporates insights from game theory, prisoner’s dilemma, and some common social behavior examples. Dawkins explains how, even self-less and altruistic individuals, contribute to the survival and propagation of genes of the whole species.

9) The Cost of Free

Google is free, and so is Facebook..or maybe not. The cost of free investigates the hidden price we all pay for using social media and how the age of Internet is re-wiring our brain and feeding onto our evolutionary traits.

10) Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

It is a series by philosopher Alain De Botton, who looks at various Greek and Roman philosophers and their perspectives of life. The series reminds us how philosophy is still relevant to different spheres of our lives whether it is Socrates on self-confidence, Epicurus on happiness, and Nietzsche on hardship, all can teach us something.

God Given Rights: A Closer Look at the Claims of Islamic Feminism

On May 28^th, 2016, a Huffington Post article with a bombastic title “Muhammad was a feminist” appeared in my newsfeed. The article became quite popular among the people of my country, and it was shared with me by one of them. Reading it, and absorbing it made me realize the “Aha! moment” which my passionate Muslim folks must have had, when they first read that piece. It looked like, everything they had wanted to say about the status of women in Islam and the overly negative light in which their views are usually expressed on popular media forums, just got a voice, in the form of a sensible, nicely written article; which could be aimed at the bigots, the right-wingers and the new wave of Trumpists.

The article, however, was not about something new. It was just a flavor of the larger, stronger and more popular movement of “Islamic feminism”, which I came across during a talk at my college. In case you don’t know its premise, it sees “Islam as a theology which is inherently feministic which have only been interpreted in distorted ways by Muslim politicians, religious leaders and institutions. The current state of women in Muslim countries hence, is solely the result of culture and politics and not the tenets of faith”

The aim of Islamic feminism is plain and simple. Standing for women's rights in the Muslim world. I know this because I had long associated myself with this movement, partly because it was appealing to me as a young woman, but mostly because it seemed to work. It did make people talk about feminism and paved the roads for discussions which seldom used to happen before in Muslim countries. However, there was a fundamental flaw in my approach and the larger approach of Islamic feminism. A flaw so great and obvious, that I regret not seeing it earlier.

The rhetoric of Islamic feminism was trying to legitimize feminism by the use of religion, as if feminism needed the validation of a theology or ideology to stand and get its voice heard in the Muslim countries. A closer observation of the origins of Islamic feminism would reveal that it began to gain pace during the increasing friction between Muslim countries and the Western world in the 21^st century, which had been described by Huntington as the “Clash of the Civilizations”. When feminism emerged as a powerful global movement, and gradually casted its steps into the Muslim world, it faced such a backlash, and still does, in ways that are gruesome to describe, with women ending up jailed and expelled, their writings getting banned and social media pages and forums getting filtered out. In the amidst of all this, a movement seeming to “soften down” the stance of feminists, and attracting much less backlash arose, which now has solidified into “Islamic feminism”, whose lines of thinking has also become part of mainstream liberal feminism in West. Its evidence is the article I mentioned above and many others like that which continue to see the daylight on blogging platforms like these.

The problem with Islamic feminism is not necessarily the flaw in its premise, but its practical implication as well, that is women‘s rights are pretty much at the discretion of wisdom of Islam. Where Islam supports the rights of women, it might work. Where it does not, what about that? What are we supposed to do in that situation? What if after playing all the mental and lingual gymnastics, we still could not find a single verse which could save us? I am raising all these questions because this has happened before and still continues to happen. Islamic feminists will enthusiastically give speeches about the inherent feministic nature of Islam, and will bring abolishment of burying females in 6^th century Arabia; they will talk about the status of respect for the mothers and sisters in Islam as if other women do not deserve one, they will talk about the use of polygamy to shelter women without questioning why those women need the shelter of marriage in the very first place, they will talk about the role of Muslim women in wars during the expansion of Islam but won’t bring their status as a material possession in the events after hijrat from Makkah to Medina, which is celebrated as a great example of brotherhood and fraternity which was achieved by exchanging food, clothes, utilities and women. They will talk about the non-religious basis of hijab, but emphasize modesty of clothing as if that’s an idea not rooted in misogyny and control of a woman’s body. And lastly, which happens to be my favorite one, is when they talk about “respect” of women in Islam. The same respect which lead many Muslim men to compare women’s bodies to gold or candy. I mean, you are free to compare women with diamonds in the hope that you are showcasing respect for them, but how I see it is that it’s a gross example of objectification which fuels the culture of ownership, ‘protection’ and honor. And we are talking about pretty basic things here. When it comes to homosexuals, transsexuals and expression of genders, where feminism has played an unprecedented role, Islamic feminism miserably fails, like it fails in addressing concerns about pre-marital sexual relationships, the verse about beating wife on dissent, the Sharia laws which no sensible woman can take seriously and “the second sex” status of women in Quran.

Voicing these concerns in conversations with Islamic feminists, as I have done many times, will often get you this response every time, which according to me is a cheap tactic to deflect criticism,“Oh, but what about Christianity? Hinduism? Buddhism?Why don't you look at them?” as if some oppression rat race is going on to see which religion oppresses women the most. This is a major downside of basing the arguments for human rights on religion, which has mostly been fruitless in this regard. It’s for the same reason that democracy has not thrived much in the Muslim world, because many well-intentioned Muslims are still stuck on the debate of whether democracy is Islamic or not.

The appeal of Islamic feminism, especially among the liberal Western feminists, arises from the fact that the movement’s most loud and forefront voices are Muslim women speaking for themselves, rather than someone dictating them about liberation and freedom. But it is also not a far-fetched truth that a lot of bullshit passes down as “feministic” and without much questioning or scrutiny just because the person saying it has brown skin. Using the placard of culture or religion, and thinking that it somehow immunes you from criticism or ending the debate with “But that's part of my culture” rather than beginning with it, is a grotesque example of moral relativism, which in my eyes is a feministic sin. Saying a practice is fine as long as it let's you celebrate "diversity" and multi-culturism does not make you a liberal; it makes you an intellectually dishonest person who needs history lessons. 

If a Muslim woman is okay with the Sharia laws or glorification of hijab and modesty culture, it does not really mean anything. I don’t get why these women are used as propaganda tools to basically say “Oh look she is fine with this so that means this must be feministic or nothing is particularly wrong with this practice”. I mean there are women who support Trump, and there are women who support Al-Sisi in Egypt. Interestingly, those same women are often used by MRAs and right-wingers in West to discredit feminism. The point is that for the most part, women have been used to upheld and justify their own oppression. There is no shortage of deluded women, and just because a woman is “okay” with a practice or a norm should not prevent it from criticism. This is why the popular MRA argument “So many women in West are okay with disliking feminism, that means it’s wrong” resembles so closely to the argument of Muslim men “So many Muslim women are okay with the hijab and modesty, that means nothing is wrong” which I am tired of hearing.

All and all, seeing Muslim community as a monolith and taking the narrative of dominant, Sunni Muslims and allowing it to shape your perception is a marked example of anti-liberalism. The Islamic feminists' voices are loud, because they form the mainstream Muslim societies, while women who raise conflicting voices are silenced or labeled as 'bigots' thanks to toxicity of political correctness. If you seriously think feminism needs the approval of a religion to validate itself, or you grossly cherry pick and choose the parts of scripture and try to forcibly white-wash and suger coat it, or if you see hijab as a tool of empowerment but fail to explain the slut-shaming, harrasement and rape which women face on the streets because their clothes were not modest enough, then I have nothing to say except gape at your hypocricy.  You cannot fight patriarchy unless you fight religion which continues to be the justification of many misogynistic practices. If in 2017, you are writing articles about how 7th century women in Arabia had more rights, you are basically naive about the decades long struggles of women in West who have fought along the civil rights movement, liberal principles and democracy of the 20th century to stand against the Church and question every fringe of culture, religion and politics. 

Numbers Don't Speak: Misleading Statistics Come To Science

Humans are bad with numbers—mainly because centuries of evolution molded them to think quickly and intuitively, not abstractly. Though this method of thinking, known as heuristics was enough to get them out of savannas and settle into small subsistent communities—it did not make them the ‘masters of the planet.' In fact, it was their ability to bend the laws of nature and manipulate the strings of earth—which involved observation, exact measurement, and scientific thinking. This recipe allowed them to weasel out truth from sham, hunch from ‘hit,' and luck from meaningful occurrences.

There are a variety of tools which help humans do this. One of them is statistics. Though not old, statistical tools have profound applications in almost every realm of our lives. Google uses it. Netflix and Amazon depend on it, but most importantly, our source of knowledge—published research and journals, won’t exist without it. However, among the goodly proportions of scientists and researchers who use it, only a few truly know how to. This realization came with the paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” written by John Ioannidis at Stanford.

Statistical illiteracy is not just an epidemic among ordinary people, who get misled by poor statistical reporting of mainstream media, are ignorant of sampling, errors, and fallacy of averages. But, as the paper reveals, the scientific community is neither immune from it.

A lot can go wrong while doing statistics. Choosing a faulty sample, ignoring extreme values, maneuvering graphs and visuals, proposing causation instead of correlation for example, implying pornography as a ‘cause’ of sexual violence, and finding nonsensical correlations, like correlating the number of Hollywood movies released per year with the number of bird deaths in that year, are some among the well-known. Other problems are inherent, which one can never eliminate such as randomness of real world or complexity of the system. Others result from scientific conventions—popular practices developed over time. Those are rampant in the fields of experimental psychology, neuroscience, medicine, health, and nutrition.

Probably the most articulate book on the topic Statistics Done Wrong highlights many of the statistical sins committed by academicians and researchers in different study areas. A handful of them is given below.

Everything wrong with ‘statistical significance.'

This phrase has become a de facto of statistics, whether in textbooks or prestigious journals like Nature and Science. A study is said to be statistically significant when its p-value is lower than a certain cutoff, usually set to p < 0.05. However, this p-value cutoff is somewhat arbitrary in nature—a mere convention tracing its lineage to RA Fisher, the god-father of significance tests.

But that is not the only problematic thing about p-values. In fact, it is their frequent and much-widespread misinterpretation which are troubling. Most people think a p-value of 5% means there is a 5% chance that a result is a fluke, or put in a better way, a 5% chance that a result is because of luck—which is downright false. The probability of getting a lucky result is much higher; a good 38%. Besides, there is not much difference between a p-value of 6% and 4%. But, as David Colquhoun in his paper puts it, “one of them gets your paper published, and the other does not”.

P-values are handy when used correctly. They are meant to be used as a gauging tool for researchers only to make informal guesses about whether the results make sense. They are not intended to be strict engraved rules for hypothesis testing.

Another head-scratching quality of p-values is that they are simply probabilities. They have no practical value. They don’t tell whether your medicine works, or there is a difference between two bacteria cultures, and therefore to try and lower your p-value as much as possible and present it as proof that you have found something is—futile. P-value is only supposed to tell you how good your data is. It’s not meant to tell whether you have made a discovery. And even if you want to judge your data, the confidence interval is a much better option because it calculates the variation bar, which gives you insights about uncertainty in your data. Sadly, however, only 10% of research papers in experimental psychology use confidence intervals, and in journals like Nature, 89% of papers involve p-values without any confidence interval.

It is precisely this reason that editors and scientists have screamed about the ‘replicability crises’ in many disciplines, especially the nascent ones which lack vigorous standards to test against such as neuroscience and behavioral studies. The p-values should not be deciding what has been ‘discovered,' the replication studies should.

Little Extremes

Little extremes were aptly explained by Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow through an example which goes like this. In the US, for instance, it was found that counties with the lowest rates of kidney cancer tended to be Midwestern, Southern, and Western rural counties. And also counties with the highest rates of kidney cancers tended to be in the Midwestern, Southern and Western rural counties. How is that so? Well, because the countryside have less population than urban areas, and therefore extreme values were supposed to be found in the countryside, instead of urban settings where they averaged out.

The way of correcting this is to account for the population by using weighted averages instead of simple averages.

Pseudo-replicability

This erratum too is a common disaster. It involves collecting thousands of data points to give the illusion that you have replicated the results when in fact you have pseudo-replicated. It is when you take a smaller sample but measure your parameter again and again, with that same sample, For example, I want to know the average IQ of my class. I chose two people from the class and measured their IQs five times a day for twenty days. I collected 100 data points now. But they are useless. I should have taken 100 different individuals, may be measured their IQ five times and then averaged those five data points to make a single one. Now, I still collected 100 data points, but they are much robust.

Statistics can be quite baffling. Thier counter-intuitive nature sways even the best of people. I remember, once my father was cursing the weather prediction on his phone and said: “Look it says here that there is only a 20% chance of rain today, but see it’s raining so much”. Well, the problem did not lie with the prediction, it laid with his naïve understanding of probability. The chance of rain was 20% if you repeat your observation on several different days a good amount of time. Think of it this way, if you flip a coin, you get head. You flip a coin again, and you get head. And so you reach the conclusion that probability of getting a head is more than a tail—even though it is 50/50. Probability does not tell you the exact outcome on your next toss, and it only shows you the outcome if you repeat the experiment an enormous number of times. You won’t get a 50/50 head and tail ratio with just one toss, or ten tosses or even hundred tosses. That is why we simulate tosses millions of times using random numbers. Another quirky use of statistics is in the modern American rhetoric that “most people are above average”, which is laughable (most people cannot be above average. They are just average. ‘Average’ is called average for a reason).

But statistics is not only counter-intuitive, it also remains beyond the reach of those who don’t study them. A researcher cannot possibly run hundreds of simulations (even though they should), or apply sophisticated techniques. However, statistics is not the only reason science faces the perils of non-replicability. There are many other reasons as well, and it would be unfair not to bring them. Since the replicability crises mostly occur in behavioral sciences, can it be that the nature of those fields renders them unavoidable complexity and randomness — something you cannot ever eliminate? And, therefore it may not be that alarming that studies of those disciplines fail to withstand re-tests. Well, there is a difference between science failing to replicate, which is good, and science not attempting to replicate, which is horrendous. Replication is at the heart of scientific query. It cannot be detached from the scientific organism.

Therefore, when replication studies are treated as “lowly” than new and original endeavors by journals, or when replication stalls career growth of a researcher or hampers her from being funded, it all should be a violent blow to the integrity of science. In fact, nascent fields should be more careful about replicability, because they have yet to establish strong credibility. They should be the ones getting wrong most of the time, by putting their studies to test often. Being wrong is okay in science, not trying to prove wrong is disastrous. Hence, it should concern every one of us when universities or academia puts unnecessary pressure on researchers to ‘get published.' Instead, they should be propagating academic attitudes, most importantly, scientific attitudes —which hold replication dearest.

References and Further Reading

Reinhart, Alex, Statistics Done Wrong, 2015.
LA Times, "Why Failure To Replicate Findings Can Actually Be A Good Thing", 2016
The Economist, "Trouble At The Lab", 2013

Robotonomics: Why Economics Needs To Take Robotics Seriously?

In 1932, Bertrand Russel penned a bombastic essay called In Praise of Idleness, which made a harrowing observation of “the leisure gap.” His much heathen genius recognized the way work was organized in modern societies with some people sitting idle all day and others working ceaselessly like labored donkeys. Russel, was, of course, referring to our long-sought value of work-ethic which says that donkiness is virtuous.

Parallel to this radical thought extended the arm of technology and machines geared to replace much of the “big dirty work” on factory floors and assembly lines in the late half of the 20th century. Despite the whines of economists and policy-makers, the coming of technology did not only alter the work landscape but led to greater productivity, consistency and safety standards in the economy, with previous skills of workers though slowly, transferred to other areas such as retail and service. But as we tread further up, affording a bird’s eye view, the picture looks different this time. In The Rise of Robots: Technology and the Threat of Jobless Future, Martin Ford argues that the rocketing pace of informatics will absorb jobs more than it will create or transfer thus building a giant crater pooled by mass unemployment in the economy. Some of these jobs are what can be called “bad jobs”, not because they are inherently bad but because of the nature of their work which is often too repetitive, meaningless sometimes even dangerous and which churns out the least satisfaction among workers. One such example is fruit-picking, which Agrabot, a Spanish company is trying to robotify. The machine only picks the ripe fruit and can reach to heights and angles which a tall Sapien cannot. Another is driving, which Google’s self-driving cars with its camera sensors, GPS, and horse-like computing power, are taking over preventing a sobering 5 million road accidents per year, reducing congestion, fuel consumption and carbon print in the atmosphere. Box-picking, which is being mastered by Industrial Perception’s robot has the visual perception, spatial location, and dexterity to move boxes in warehouses without back injuries or fatigue. There are bot waiters at Japan’s Kura Sushi restaurant who are helping to make sushi and serving customers through conveyor belts.

The demise of bad jobs

It is not an under-rugged truth that these jobs and many others such as cleaning, lawn-mowing, burger-flipping, packaging, quality-checking, and mining are driven to extinction. Fearing that these jobs would be lost, or trying hard to keep them for the mere sake of employment simply shows a lack of a visionary direction and good policy making. It is like searching for a quick fix while keeping the real problem under the rug. In other words, it is like saying “Oh let’s keep low-paying, low-satisfaction jobs so that we distract ourselves from bigger, louder and more pressing issues in the framework of our economy. Let’s keep these jobs so that low-skilled workers have something to hold onto, and let’s ignore the gushing cracks in the education and social system which churns them out in the first place”. It is no wonder that Trump’s campaign which played on the rhetoric of “savior of jobs” did so well.

The Good Jobs

The discussion should ideally begin when we consider what happens to “the good jobs” as they are slathered on by technology. Jerry Kaplan in Humans Need Not Apply makes exactly this point. The 20th century notion that “computers can only do what they are programmed to do” should be match burned and buried deep in the bowels of earth (or thrown in a bot bin) because this hour’s feats in machine learning and AIs are enabling soul-less robots to teach themselves anything from cooking, teaching, caring to accounting, medicine, law and even coding. If what you do, can be learned by reading textbooks, attending lectures and passing tests, chances are that a learning algorithm can easily do that.

Machine-learning, which tells you what stuff to buy and read on Amazon, what to listen and watch on Netflix and YouTube, who to make friends with on Facebook, and what to declare spam in your emails, is also being used in medical diagnoses, legal research, stock markets, and writing programs. The bonded ‘soul of machine’ exists and it is here by the name of Big Data. There cannot be any artificial intelligence without data as there cannot be good statistical inferences, pattern recognition and correlation without it. AI is only fated to succeed because we are all creating data at furious speeds such that almost all of the humanity’s knowledge was materialized just in the last two years. And so, every time you write a post, snap a photo, search a query or just browse the web, you are helping machines get smarter.

When IBM’s Watson sits in front of petabytes of published medical journals to learn diagnosis or reviews past legal cases to predict court’s decisions, it should seem intuitive that it can do a much better job than any of our human folks. Some might find this preposterous. It seems far-fetched to allow robots to, in a way, ‘play God’, by letting them make medical and legal decisions. The truth however is, they can play God, and they do a pretty good job at this. They can diagnose diseases with much fewer errors and more accurate ‘hits,' lack of which kills thousands of people every year or predict legal decisions which are brimming with vulnerabilities of cognitive and social biases. One of the popular AI memes of this half of the century is that robots will make decisions ‘on their own,' which directly emerges from our anthropomorphic view of the objects. Ethicist and technologist, Nick Bostrom has talked about the AI fallacy, which basically makes us think that robots are human-like, or that their thinking mechanism mimics the human brain, the way nature evolved it. “Airplanes don’t flap their wings” is an eloquent summary of it put famously by Frederick Jelinek.

The Creative Snowflakes

Looking past the big dirty jobs and the predictable white-collars, a lot many harbor the idea that creative and empathetic jobs will always remain the unclaimed territory of humans, even though bots are doing their best to push those boundaries as well. Music, much of which is already deluged by mechanized ghosts, some of them have started creeping up onto art, writing, and entertainment. As far as empathy goes, there are bot receptionists, nurses, babysitters and teachers, jobs traditionally thought to remain at the discretion of humans. It is true that the ‘care’ these robots exhibit is fake, or it is one-way, such that only humans get the pleasing effect during their interaction with the robots, not the robots. However as the future may unfold, it may not be far enough that a bot writes and produces a piece of blog article like this one (and does a better job at it!) 

All of it surely is overwhelming, no matter how much one reads up on it, give talks about it, or write papers on it. In all pinching reality, there bubbles a few good ton of questions, which we as a futuristic human society need to consider and attempt to answer. The biggest of them is “What next?” After most of the work has been unintentionally put at the discretion of robots, and a large chunk of the population is unemployed, which is an educated hunch corroborated strongly by most technologists and academicians, what will we all do in that era?

Thomas Paine had an answer in the 1930s. Universal Basic Income, an idea hugged by both liberals and conservatives, business people and employees, blue-collars and white-collars, individuals in the East and the West, mostly because it is to a good degree, huggable. It is workable, it has already been experimented in countries such as Netherlands, Finland, and India and it is producing results. For example, the MINCOME project by Canadian government from 1974 to 1979, gave a basic income to residents of a small town consisting of about 10,000 people. The experiment did not only help most recipients get above the poverty line, but it also improved graduation rates, health and birth control.

However many skeptics of this too-good-sounding deal, bring up the already present welfare state and unemployment benefits in developed countries, which they argue, has discouraged many job-able recipients from seeking out work. And if UBI was to be implemented, which frankly is another form of welfare state, one should better expect masses of individuals who feel meh about work. Apart from that, critics also blame the idea for its naïve approach, which is seeing work just as a means of earning a livelihood, when the fact is that there are many psychological and social surpluses to ‘work’ itself which cannot be measured by Econ101 apparatuses. And just because it cannot be measured, does not mean that it stays out of our policy decisions, and therefore, some might call an out-of-work society even worse than a collectively wealthy, post-scarce, and equal society. In "Why UBI is a terrible idea", the author aptly points out some of the slippery areas in our discussions, including the assault on America’s most heartily cultural values of work and life.

But here is the problem. The author was answering the question, what would happen if we implemented UBI right now, at this very moment, which in all honesty would surely be a terrible idea, considering the loopholes in our educational, economic, governance, and social capacities. It would not be an over-statement when we say that we might not be ready for it yet. Not just yet. Good policy does not only need a good idea, but it also needs supportive and compatible institutions for it to work and therefore, we are a long way from doing the necessary duct-taping and gluing.

The author also seamlessly laments the current loss values of work and hard-work, which is fair considering that the robotic future is a radical shift. It might as well turn out that work itself gets fundamentally re-defined in ways it never did before. Work in principle would become optional. A choice pursued solely for fulfillment, joy or to afford better holidays. But what will work really become like? Many theorists think volunteering, championing causes, art and most important, entertainment is what most of us will be doing. Nevertheless, our risen education levels might give us more illumination on more productive uses of our time. Is it, however, possible that we all become couch rats, maybe stacked away indoors playing video games till our last breaths? Well, Japan is facing that problem with its newer generation, who mostly remain unbothered from bills and familial restraints, thus almost corkscrewing its population growth.

Is Idleness that bad?

Studies show that the people who remain in the unemployed demography suffer from sheer psychological and social loss comparable to that of losing a loved one, mostly because work is tied so closely to their social status and integrity. However, idleness is different from unemployment. Idleness, which in Russel’s definition is mostly engaged in by feudal lords and elitists, who frankly, have both social status and integrity. And if we microscope history, it turns out many of our groundbreaking achievements and discoveries did come from people with plenty of time on their hands or those who were not hampered by financial and social constraints. And so, will a UBI spur a never-seen era of creativity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship? Well, we don’t know yet even though it seems quite logical. 

Between Luddites and Singularitians 

On a scale of Luddite to Singularitian, where should we all lie? Luddite is another name for "computer-phobic", a person who fears technology and its implications, the kinds which make movies like Terminator. Singularitians, on the other hand, are optimists who see a human-robot cooperation as an invariable outlook. We don't know yet which side is winning, or rather which is more robustly entrenched in evidence. However, it is crucial to make sure that we are not drawing castles in the air, but taking educated and also practical policy decisions. And thus there are some of the things which every nation ought to do, like reforming education system so that it produces liquid and agile workforce as opposed to ‘specialized skills’ chambers of Econ101. Or re-designing tax-policy to bridge gaps in income equality. Some economists are proposing taxing the robot workers, which discourages businesses from investing in technology to start with. It might sound like a good idea, but when looked closely, it too is a quick fix. All in all, the focus today must lie with the root-grass institutions which inevitably shape the fate of human civilization.

Further Reading

Thompson, Derek "A world without work", 2015 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

Eric and Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in the Time of Brilliant Technologies 

Barrat, James, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of Human Era

Minsky, Marvin, The Emotion Machine

The Science Behind Funny

 

Art Parody via Pin-interest

It all starts when I came across a blog post with the title “Three Types of Jokes Ellen Uses to Make People Like Her”, which pointed out very specific aspects in Ellen’s content, explaining why has she managed to be the most likable celebrity host over the years. A few arresting observations made about her were self-depreciating humor, or the humor which focuses on one’s own self, rather than on making fun of others. Consider this “I sat on my ass all day long, drinkin’ tequila and imaginin’ ghosts of baby goats”. This sentence, parts of which are spoken frequently by Ellen, implies that she is unproductive and useless at home, but it does not come off as critical to the ears.

OK. So, it might seem, far of a stretch to call something ‘science’, but as we will see later, in greater detail that characteristics like these are shared by most giant comedic performances and literature in our culture. Another worthy to mention observation would be the presence of a story, or a story-like background. A very good example of this, would be when Ellen tells the story of Finding Dory….to comment on the travel ban, even though she makes it very clear that she finds politics exceptionally boring.

What makes Ellen funny takes us to another question, what makes something funny in the first place?

Scott Weems in his book, “Ha! The Science of when we laugh and why” takes up the challenge to answer exactly that. He gives an example of the movie Pompeii, which is about the destruction of the city, Pompeii in historic Rome, by a volcano. The audience, which remains in laughter the whole time during the movie, which was not meant to be funny, is explained by him in terms of conflict and surprise. Why do people laugh at tragedies? is another nook in the bigger story. Charlie Chaplin, in the settings of class-divisions in Victorian era and the monotony brought by Industrial life, or Bean, an all-lonely fella with whom nothing right ever happens. The answer is conflict and surprise, something which Daniel Dennett et el also mention in their book “Inside Jokes”.

To sum up, there are two major things which makes something funny. One is incongruity. It is an instance when an absurd iteration of a normal event takes place, thus disrupting our expectations. Good humor makes excellent use of what we already know about the world and the predictive faculties of our brains. It takes the normal chain of events, which exhibits in the form of unwritten, unsaid rules of our daily lives and then derails them.

Another is conflict, which is an integral part of all forms of art. Good humor involves some sort of conflict with the external agents, which builds the emotional and intellectual tension wanting to keep us going, pretty much what a good novel or story does to our minds. Humorous conflict then branches further into irony and satire, a more sophisticated way to express conflict. Consider this, we know that our society is obsessed with sex, but we also know that we hate to admit it. (I am not talking about the West here, where in most countries porn is legalized. I am talking about particularly puritanical societies such as India or Pakistan, marked by strict segregation of the sexes which ranks repeatedly on the frequent consumers of porn)

Moreover, there is another convoluted question which underpins all of this “Why do we have humor?” Many have explained it in terms of the function it serves, and some still give it an evolutionary color that is humor serves as a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty. Well, that sort of explanation is good, the problem is that it can be made about every other thing. What purpose did Neanderthals making laborious pearl jewelry serve? What function did pre-historic humanoids carving paintings on cave walls serve? I mean, one could say it provided a hobby in their long free times, to prevent them from dying of boredom. We can see, this is a slippery area. However, there is another way to look at it. Mainly, that humor or any other complex intellectual activity is the result of some of the cognitive and psychological faculties which evolution equipped us with. This is especially true of religion and art. Humor is not one thing, it is a combination of separate propensities coming together once in a while to get us into a chuckle.

Now, some might find this a naïve approach, especially when you look at humor, which historically has been used to perpetuate stereotypes, roll bad ideas, or objectify. This is true, and that is why it is important to differentiate between shallow humor, lacking in sophisticated understanding of social wits, the kind which might make someone laugh in the moment but is going to alienate someone and thus is not not capable of reproducing the effect. Deep humor on the other hand cuts right through the fabric of power dynamics and institutionalism and has the potential to sweep audiences on their feet over and over again. Put in another way, the latter has a strong mental takeaway and induces a lasting effect. 

We don't know yet, what more there is to humor, or that when we will be able to dissect any of that. Till then, lets keep our fingers crossed and keep...humoring.

Further Reading 

Inside Jokes. M.Hurley & Dennet. 

Ha! The Science of When we laugh and why? Weems, Scott.

Imagining Other Worlds

Will our encounter with alien life change everything?

Star-nosed mole. Image by Google

In 2009, Jonathan Foer in his mind provoking book Eating Animals wrote: “If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

Thought-experiments involving aliens, have been great mental tools to debate and answer several of the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas like these. Other similar speculations had heartened us to ask questions such as “How will religions stand the discovery of aliens?” “What sort of power hierarchies will emerge once we encountered extraterrestrials as we imagine them?” “What sort of moral obligations will we have towards our galactic neighbors?” The possibilities are boundless, but our imagination, as it turns out, not very much.

We seem to know a lot about alien life, thanks to sci-fi sensations of 20^th century. Sometime gluey eyed monsters, blue, green, usually with two hands, two feet and a head. How bloody anthropomorphic! For centuries, we have looked up at sky wondering about the presence of other worlds and possibly other lives. Put another way, we have done a good job in casting our own image unto the universe. Our inklings have never left the bounds of our earthly existence. And why not? Is not everything we have ever dreamed, penned and painted bears witness? From homo-fictitious to gods and supernatural.

This explains our quirky methods till date to hunt for our galactic brothers (or rivals). The short-wave radio waves which we hope to catch as a “sign” from outside world, which SETI has been doing for long. The biggest assumption being that the alien life must have technology advanced enough to send radio signals for communication. Too far-fetched? According to astronomer, Avi Loeb, we might as well search for spectroscopic signatures of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmospheres of alien planets, in the hopes of finding fridge-using aliens. Or perhaps hairspray-using ones. And yet others propose to look for polluting cities, Dyson circles for electricity, nuclear-war torn planets. Sounds…familiar.

Any attempt at musing on alien life, is in actuality a musing about us, our own very selves. Our tribalism instinct has drawn our fear of an invading human-hating monsters. Same could be said about techno-phobias and artificial intelligences. And so, the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas reflect our own mental epidemics. We can shot our best guess, that earth-centric religions will have a very hard time grappling with the alien find. Most rabbis, imams and popes will be extremely disappointed at the non-mention of alien life in their holy books. Maybe, Golden Rule works, which basically states that you should treat others like you want to be treated, something used a lot in vegan ethics and animal rights arguments. Maybe, there are other better ways to organize society, than ours’ crude hierarchical ones. For science, however even finding a bacteria will be revolutionary. Any rudimentary form of life, will change everything. Maybe, that life form is so unfamiliar that we won’t be able to recognize it as life at all.  And maybe, we do happen to find legged and armed species, because in the course of earthling’s evolution, locomotion devices such as arms and legs have appeared and evolved separately and independently quite a times. Or maybe, we have been wrong all along and we should focus on finding other species on earth, which to our awe and even astonishment can be deemed as 'aliens' themselves. Nevertheless, whatever the case, it will be the ultimate test for our scientific understanding.

And so maybe, we should keep our fingers crossed and till then, let our imagination venture far.