Do Big Corperations Feel Sorry for Handicaps?

When my friends and I went to the movie theaters the other day one of my friends made a compassionate yet naïve observation. He took particular notice at the ‘movie ticket ripper guy’ and how he was clearly mentally retarded. (We’ve probably all witnessed the disabled movie ticket ripper some time in our lives. I’ve once had my ticket stub sniped by a man so physically deformed he needed scissors to successfully do his job.) He commented on how wonderful and beautiful society is that they find jobs for such people. After all, they could have hired some able-bodied teenager to do the same job for equal pay.

Does corporate America feel bad for cripples? Is this an act of charity?

Unfortunately, this is no evidence for big corporations having a soul, but instead a prime example comparative advantage. Simply put, physically or mentally handicapped people have less opportunity cost, in most cases, ripping ticket stubs for a living. A fully functioning teenager has more opportunity cost i.e. ‘more to lose’ spending his time ripping tickets. A teenager can instead acquire a new skill set or invest in his education. Ripping tickets would rob the teenager of a better use of his time.

Handicapped people, more often than not, have less return investing in their own human capital. Having these people rip our tickets is not an act of kindness, but a rational economic decision that leads to a more efficient allocation of resources.

The Most Dangerous Meme

Daniel Dennett introduced us to the many dangers of certain memes, like terrorism and behaviors justified by faith. The reason as to why these memes are so prominent in the meme pool may still be a mystery, but what is certain is the diabolical consequence these memes have on their hosts, humans. Dennett, however, fails to mention what I believe to be the most dangerous meme of all: racism.

To be clear, by racism I mean - the belief that one race is more superior to another. This dangerous meme, unlike suicide for instance, does not directly lead to the annihilation of the host. Its destruction extends far beyond those who have been hijacked by the meme.

You may believe that some breeds of racism memes are harmless or benign if anything. I would argue that racism allows us to be comfortable ignoring an inconvenient moral obligation we all have – to help another suffering human being. Of course, some people’s suffering may be self-induced or even desired, but otherwise we have the moral duty of helping those whose suffering can be reasonably stopped.

Racist thoughts pardon us from feelings of sympathy for a race we believe to be less superior to our own. These thoughts may not completely destroy our sympathy for others, but it may eliminate enough sympathy to deter us from taking a moral initiative. In a sense, the racism memes can cause more damage than any terrorist meme. Many harmful memes like terrorism and genocide depend on racism in order to survive. Eliminating or reducing racism will reduce the memes that piggy back on it.

We cannot even begin our war on terrorism without a war on racism.

It’s All So Convincing

Growing up, you and everyone you knew made the resolution that one day you would get a paying job. No one questioned the legitimacy of such an endeavor – money was the magical resource that would cater to your every whim. Living without money was seen more as a death sentence than a choice.

Well, here we are… still looking for that one job, that one investment, that one gamble that will make us more money. If money is so important why don’t we just produce a lot of it and give it to everyone? Shouldn’t we start the printing presses and fire our cash cannon in everyone’s face?

There exists an important distinction between legit and non-legit money. Money is supposed to be interchangeable with some unit amount of goods and services. Money is supposed to be meaningful in this respect; as opposed to being a flimsy piece of paper. In other words, money is suppose to represent something.

Money is like a casino chip, it represents something.

One reason casinos use poker chips instead of real money is because gamblers aren’t attached to their chips as they are to their money – too much emotional baggage attached to it. Casinos don’t want their customers to see the chips as grocery bills and mortgage payments; they want them to be lost in the game.

I feel that we often forget what makes most of our thoughts and actions intelligible. The thoughts and actions I am referring to are the ones that revolve around money. We waste are days and our health with our financial pursuits. We literally stress ourselves to sickness - agonizing over our shortcomings. Sometimes we need to step back and make sure we aren’t lost in the game too.

Boycott sweatshop Boycotters!

Let’s be honest, your clothes were probably made by an over-worked mother of six earning a dollar a day in a decrepit sweatshop. Her body suffers from malnutrition and fatigue as she forces herself to get past the 12 hour work day. After she finishes her job as button handler #256 she somehow manages to feed and take care of her six dying children.

We’ve all heard the same sob story so why haven’t we all boycotted sweatshop-using companies? Because that would be stupid.

From the same armchair activists that told you to “Boycott OPEC!” and “Boycott the Olympics!” are telling you to boycott companies who use sweatshop labor. Being a lazy generation of activists, telling us to not do something to help a cause always sounds intriguing. Just search the word boycott in Facebook groups and see how much of nothing people are delighted to take part in. Unfortunately, the sweatshop boycotters don’t realize their inaction will do more harm than good.

Let’s say the boycotters succeed in dismantling Nike’s infamous sweatshops. Great, now they’ve turned a sob story into a tragedy as thousands of workers lose their jobs. There is a good reason why those workers choose to work in sweatshops. The horrible working conditions of sweatshops should demonstrate how much worse any other available alternative would be. Prostitution and digging through landfills don’t look as rewarding when you can work for a multinational firm that can better guarantee a wage at the end of the day.

Sweatshops aren’t a result of heartless profit-driven corporations; they are a symptom of poverty. In poverty stricken towns high paying jobs are a scarcity, probably because the lack of skilled labor. Workers in poor villages don’t have the opportunity, health, or even the incentive to raise their skill level. They seem to be stuck in what they think is the best alternative.

If anything we should encourage more multinational firms to expand to the poor countries. Imagine if Adidas set up shop near by a Nike sweatshop. The two firms would be forced to raise wages or improve working conditions in order to attract a share of the labor force. Additionally, workers would have an incentive to improve their skill level in order to work in the better company. Not only would everyone be better off, there would also be a better efficient use of resources with the rise in skilled labor. Corrupt governments make it financially impossible or implausible for poor people to start their own businesses. Multinational firms may be poor people’s only hope in escaping the poverty trap.

What is it like to be something other than human?

When I was a naïve teen I tried breaking the mental barrier by imagining what it would be like to be dead. I thought I championed this enigma when I concluded it was like being in a deep sleep without ever waking up. At the time, I didn’t realize I was in for a meaningless endeavor. It doesn’t make sense to imagine the state-of-being a non-conscious entity would have. There is no point of trying to figure out what it is like to be a rock because rocks aren’t capable of knowing what it is like to be themselves!

In order to transcend my human state of mind I have to imagine what it would be like to be another conscious entity, like a dog or cat. In my opinion, imagining what it would be like to be a dog is a relatively simple task. As animals ourselves, we know what it is like to have desires, emotions, pleasures, pain, etc. It still is impossible for us to know exactly what it is like to be a dog, but we have a pretty good idea (most dog owners have a good idea of what their dog is feeling without thinking too hard).

I wanted to imagine a state-of-being that is truly mind blowing, some state of mind foreign to any conscious creature we know of. The first thing that came to mind was artificial intelligence; an AI with intelligence that far surpasses that of any human. How the hell can we imagine how a super smart AI would think like? If we knew how this AI would think, wouldn’t we be equally smart as it? I don’t think we can know exactly how it would think, but either way I am going to take a shot at it.

This AI would be able to change its own source code i.e. it can reprogram its brain whichever way it wants. You might be wondering how you can imagine this on an intuitive level. It would be as if you were to fundamentally change the way you think. I know this doesn’t make you any less confused so I will give an example. If you relocate the trash bin in your room there will be many instances where you throw your trash in the old location of the bin. Your mind has been conditioned to expect a bin in a certain location and sometimes you may forget it’s in a new place. Your weak brain has disabled you from efficiently throwing away your trash (without wasting time with a misfire). An AI wouldn’t have a problem here because it can erase any conditioning and reprogram itself to adjust for the different environment. Our minds are constantly fluttered with these impulses that have been conditioned in our mind. For instance, if I tell you to not think of a white elephant, you’ll think of it. An AI could choose whether his mind should be vulnerable to such impulses. You can imagine how this would help with the AI’s problem solving skills. It would have no bias, no obstacles in attaining new skill sets.

The AI would be able to discard bad or faulty ways of thinking and replace them with better ones. The ‘better’ ways of thinking would be the ways that help the AI solve more efficiently a problem or reach a goal. If you were an AI you might be able to solve Fermat’s problem in a matter of minutes. I have made a big assumption here; I assumed that the AI would want to do things. We humans constantly solve problems because we must in order to survive. We are faced with challenges, death threats, scarcity, etc. and that motivates us to problem solve. The AI would have to be programmed with desires similar to humans in order for it to want to solve similar problems we have. It would be in our interest to program an AI with the same desires as us because it would be interested in solving problems that we too care about. Of course the AI doesn’t have to be programmed to share our desires, but it does have to have some desires. Otherwise it wouldn’t be intelligent because it wouldn’t do anything!

In short, being a super smart AI would be much like being an intentional agent that can much more efficiently get what it wants. More efficient because it wouldn’t deal with the same handicaps are weak minds have like poor memory, biases, social conditioning, and any other concept you learned about in psychology.

The Evolution of the Meme

In Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, there is a fascinating yet controversial chapter about memes. A meme, or i.e. a cultural unit of information, has the same interesting property a gene has – the ability to replicate. It might seem peculiar to consider a meme as a thing, much like how a gene is a thing you can observe. A meme is a thing, or specifically, a certain mental state. For example, if you think about the idea of God, a certain mental state is assembled in your mind. This state may not be a localized sector of your brain, but it is nevertheless a specific neural structure that corresponds to your God idea.

These memes replicate in a much different manner than genes do. A meme replicates by any sort of human communication, like any verbal or written language. Clearly not all memes replicate themselves throughout the meme pool. Similarly, all genes do not get passed on to future generations because they are outcompeted by genes that are more fit. But what constitutes a meme that is fit? Fit memes are ones that have a special property about them that leads them to their frequent replication and therefore proliferation in the meme pool. For example, the internet phenomenon of “Rick Rolling” has been a successful meme for its inherent nature of wanting to be replicated. If rick rolling didn’t include another participant, I would question whether it could have the same success.

Dawkins’ meme of memes has had me reflect back at all the cultural ideas lurking in my head. My meme portfolio is a product of a long meme evolution. I would assume that my memes greatly differ from the memes present in a random given individual 500 years ago. However, I don’t think it’s a sufficient answer to simply say that they differ greatly; after all, my memes have the additional 500 years of evolution with different selection pressure. The evolution of memes, as well as genes, is not random – there is a direction in where these replicators evolve to be. So are my memes merely more ‘catchy’ than their 500 year old predecessors? In my opinion, arriving at this false conclusion is the consequence of confusing between the meme and gene selection pressure.

Memes, unlike genes, are not a product of their environment. In the gene world, the environment ultimately decides which genes are selected for; this is not the case for memes. Compare the genes of organisms today versus ones 500 years ago. You would find that the genes code for organisms that are better fit in their respective environments. Do the same comparison between memes and you will not come to the same conclusion. I am sure that our memes of technological ideas and scientific thinking would outcompete the memes in 1508. Their relative usefulness would be no match for existing memes that explain the world. Maybe even today’s interpretations of certain religions would outcompete older interpretations. Could be that intelligent design theory would be much more convincing in 1508.

This is because our memes are selected by intelligent goal-seeking agents. Our intelligence allows us to select memes that work in accord with our goals, namely survival, entertainment, etc. This intelligent selection, as opposed to natural selection, means that our present memes are ‘better’ than the earlier ones. Better in the sense that they are more useful in doing what we want them to do.

Evolution of the Super Model