Are we all better off with equality?

Posted on January 25th, 2008 by Tim.
Categories: Philosophy, Tim.

Many people argue that the world would be a better place if there was more equality. In the extreme case, equality has become synonomous with “morality”. Would we actually be better off if there was more equality?

Not necessarily. A recent slate article examines the discrepancy between black and white spending on “visible goods” (like fancy clothes, luxury car, etc). The proposed explanation is that black people tend to live in neighborhoods of other black people of relatively similar income levels (compared to that of white people). The increased spending on visible goods has nothing to do with race, but simply a result of increased tendency for “signaling”. The net result of “signaling” is that more money is spent on “visible goods” and less is spent on health care and education.

Does this mean that equality is bad? Probably not, however it certainly means there are significant unintended consequences that are highly unintuitive.

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Become better without suffering.

Posted on October 5th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Philosophy.

Many of us have heard this since we were kids, heard it from elders and from teachers. Why would suffering make us into better people?

I recently had a visit from a friend who was going through a difficult time, with both a career change and personal problems. Through watching him over the few weeks he was here, I observed that he became deeply involved in the teachings of Buddhism, and absorbed information from a tremendous amount of books, analyzing his condition and thinking about how to change it.

It’s a simple observation: When times are hard, we work to change them. We become more observant, we are more willing to try things to get out of our condition.

When we aren’t suffering, we forget to look around us and find ways to improve our lives, or fix things that are currently wrong.

The lesson from this:

The most important time to think about where we are in our lives is not when our lives are going badly, but when they are going well, because that is the time we are most likely to forget.

You always have an image. It's what you do.

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Journalism should not be “objective.”

Posted on March 27th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, Philosophy, Politics.

1) Objectivity is an illusion. I wrote a ridiculous entry on this the other day, but the point is that, simply by moving from an event to writing or videotaping the event, there is an ever present and strong cast that a reporter’s own perception makes on the event.

2) As a result of the societal illusion of objectivity, people can be fooled into believing that news is objective, thus causing them to think in the way the reporter thinks. But much worse than that, people may assume this way of thinking is objective.

Humans have opinions. Trying to judge the world critically and objectively is good. Pretending that one can throw away their biases when doing so for others is dishonesty.

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Assertion cannot always be verbalized.

Posted on March 16th, 2007 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc., Philosophy.

We can, in broad terms, speak of two formulations of knowledge: objective and subjective. Objective truth identifies the existence of reality without human perception; subjective truth claims, vaguely speaking, that no such thing exists outside of human and social construction (constructivism).

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