In case you didn’t know, John Rawls’ concept of the “veil of ignorance” is the idea that society should be structured by people who have no idea of what role they will occupy in it — that a truly just society has to be defined by principles that are equitable and unbiased. So, for example, when Thomas Jefferson was working on the Declaration of Independence, he should be ignorant of where he’d end up in this new nation — there’s a chance he could end up as a wealthy landowner, and also a chance he could end up a black woman, slave to a wealthy landowner. We’d have a very different country if that had been the case for those founding fathers, who ended up creating a nation designed for their advantage, and black slaves…well, sucks to be you.

You’ve probably exercised something similar to this in the standard cake-cutting problem. If two people are splitting a cake, one person cuts, but the other person gets to choose which half they get — basically, the cutter is behind a veil of ignorance about which piece they get, so they’ll strive to divide the cake fairly.

Straightforward, right? Really hard to implement on a large scale, but I like the idea. Unfortunately, it can also be abused. Carl Bergstrom tweeted this example out.

I was going to write a thread about Rawls, Bostrom, counterfactuals, and observation selection effects—but you know what? I'm just going to go birding. pic.twitter.com/P9P7VFK5m4

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) August 6, 2022

Aaargh. I sympathize with Bergstrom preferring to go birding. It breaks my brain to try and see her warped point of view, and unfortunately, I felt compelled to try.

I just can’t get past “would you rather be conceived…”. Prior to my conception, I did not exist. I would not have even basic preferences, like whether “I” would like to live or die, until “I” had undergone significant biological development. Eggs and sperm do not have preferences. Neither do embryos. Fetuses probably (but not certainly) lack a conscious sense of self, which I suspect is going to emerge in the infant (you need awareness of others to do that). I don’t see how this is even a decent thought experiment.

This is a bit like imagining asking sperm to vote on state laws, or dipping into the gene pool to get their opinion on the equitable distribution of opportunity. Those aren’t conscious agents who can even conceive of a philosophy of personhood, and almost all of them are going to disappear, oblivious of everything, before the next generation which can think & reason & feel & make choices arises.

It’s a really weird premise, too. “You” are a being independent of your physical, biological self, and you’re floating around in the ether making decisions about where you will manifest? It’s like imagining that you had a prior existence wondering whether you’d poof into existence as either a person with a lawn mower or a blade of grass, and invoking Rawls to rationalize how individual blades of grass deserve full social and civic rights. It’s nonsense. It’s totally McArdled.

Screw it, Bergstrom is right. I’m going to go spidering.

What was this guy thinking?

Firefighters in Utah County fight a blaze reportedly started by a man trying to burn a spider with a lighter (Picture: Provo Fire and Rescue)

A man suspected of starting a wildfire in Utah told authorities that he was using a lighter to try to burn a spider.

He’s caught starting a wildfire. He knows he’s in trouble. His brain is scurrying frantically in circles in his skull, trying to come up with an excuse. It was an accident, officer, I was just trying to torture a small helpless animal when the flames got out of control. It’s not just the petty evil of his excuse, but that he thought a fellow human being would be sympathetic.

Having just spent 20+ hours in our little Honda Fit over the weekend, I can still say I’m content with it. It’s solid and reliable, economical, and has held up well over the past decade — I hope we can get another decade out of it. I’d like to switch to an electric or hybrid car someday, but no hurry, and I can say that I’m not in the market for a new car right now.

One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that, if I were, I would not be looking at Tesla. Too much ugly baggage.

Before it was reported Musk had an affair with Sergey Brin’s wife, which he’s denied; before his slipshod deal, then no-deal, to acquire Twitter Inc.; before the revelation he fathered twins with an executive at his brain-interface startup Neuralink; before SpaceX fired employees who called him “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment”; before his daughter changed her name and legal gender after his history of mocking pronouns; before an article said SpaceX paid an employee $250,000 to settle a claim he sexually harassed her, allegations he’s called untrue; Musk’s behavior was putting off prospective customers and perturbing some Tesla owners.

Not to mention that I am disinclined to contribute to the bottom line of a loathsome billionaire. Or that the whole outfit is rather fishy.

It’s kind of weird that a 7 year old company with relatively low revenue and no profits which ships only 1% of the cars of GM and Ford can be valued higher than GM and Ford – but that’s where we are today.

I guess Elon Musk has a lot of people fooled, but not me.

I tried calling the authorities about our little skunk problem.

The humane society wasn’t equipped to deal with skunks. They suggested I call the police.

The police (who have been disbanded) couldn’t do anything. They suggested I call the DNR.

The DNR doesn’t have any officers in town. They suggested I call the police. When I said I had, they told me I’m on my own.

So…I threw an old tarp over the cage, opened the door while wearing goggles and heavy gloves, and the skunk scurried off to our backyard without mishap, fortunately, although the tarp is now rather stinky. Unfortunately, though, we found out where our skunk family lives: under our deck.

We’ve had an animal raiding our compost bin late at night. They’ve been burrowing underneath to get at the rotting vegetables in there, and then scattering them over the yard. This isn’t good. The bin is there to keep the decaying organic material confined rather than just flung about all over the place.

We’ve had this problem before — a couple of times now, we’ve had groundhogs living under our deck. We have a humane trap that we use to catch them and then we transport them a few miles away to somewhere near the Pomme de Terre river, where we release them. This is practically routine now.

So we set up the trap last night, went to bed, and bright and early this morning I go out to check on things. I blithely stroll out to the other side of the garage, and…oh shit.

I backed away quickly. I know that skunks can easily spray 10 or 20 feet, and are shockingly accurate (they aim for the eyes). They can also be mean little guys. This is about the worst thing we could have caught.

My current plan is to wait until 9 to call the local animal control office and make sure they don’t have a policy for dealing with wild animals in city limits. Then if I must I’ll approach the cage with garbage bags as a shield and open it up and let Pepe LePew go.

Lesson learned. Don’t set traps unless you’re prepared to deal with what you catch!

Today is my dull working day.

First up: I gotta go walk a kilometer or two. I’m not in physical therapy now, but I do have to keep up with some exercise.

Secondly, it’s a spider feeding day, and sheesh, but I have a lot of baby spiders who want their living, crawling meat.

Thirdly, I’ve got my Skepticon talk all outlined up in Keynote, with some of the images. Now I have to flesh everything out. The goal is to have it all done this weekend. Gone are the days when I would check into a hotel the night before and hack out the whole talk!

Is this my summer break? Could be worse, I guess.

I got an offer this morning to host a 30 second commercial on my next video — and they’d pay me $1800 for it. Whoa, is a little spot on a video by a little-known YouTuber like myself worth that much? No, it is not, but the money would be nice, and I delude myself into thinking I at least contribute a little knowledge on those things. A niggling temptation wormed its way into my brain.

I was briefly entertaining the idea enough to look up the company making the offer.

It’s one of those crypto/NFT scammer companies.

Well, that made it easy: HELL NO.

At least I was reminded I should get off my butt and implement a couple of the video ideas I have in my head. It’s just that right now I have so many spiders and so many egg sacs that demand my attention and I have to get this developmental timing series done before summer ends and I’m suddenly teaching 3 classes again…

Alan Dershowitz is terribly hurt by his social stigma, and did a long interview in the New Yorker which is basically nothing but Dershowitz having a pity party. What makes it worth reading, though, are italic asides in which he gets fact-checked.

Yeah, of course. So I’ve been cancelled, basically, by the Chilmark Library. That has resulted in lots of people in Chilmark calling me and calling the library and saying, “We’re being deprived of Alan’s annual speech.” [Ebba Hierta, the Chilmark’s director, disputed Dershowitz’s characterization, and said, “Not one single person has contacted me to complain that they haven’t had a chance to hear Alan speak.”]

Or my favorite:

The Abraham Accords. So I played a central role—not a central role, an important role in that. I helped. So they were celebrating that at the White House. I was there anyway because it was the day after I made my speech in the Senate, so I was invited to come. They assigned seats. They sat me right in back of Mike Pompeo, who had been my former student at Harvard Law School. Trump made a very bad joke, and people laughed. I didn’t laugh. [He did.] I thought it was a bad joke. My wife laughed. I didn’t laugh. I patted him on the back, and I said, “Mike, this, too, will pass. You’ll be remembered for what you did in the Middle East.” That was it. That was the entire encounter. I don’t know Mike Pompeo—

I would never have imagined that a serious article about Dershowitz could ever be funny, but this one is hilarious.