So then I realized I could just download the script from the Twitter site, modify it slightly, and free myself from the horror of invalid XHTML. UnFail.

A con report will be up on ConGypsy.com soon.

I work primarily in bright aluminum since I like the way it feels and sparkles, and I prefer to use 5/16″ ID 16 gauge rings.

I recently overheard the utterance “@thomblake No one has any good reason to like \s indent. Either you like \t, or you don’t care. It’s not life-and-death, but \t is clear win” (via isaacschlueter on Twitter). I assented, as I really only started using space-indent because it’s a best practice at my workplace. But on reflection, I really do have good reasons for space-indent, based on the way that I use indentation in code.

When writing say, C code, I use 2-space indent for most things. This looks equivalent to tab-indent with the tab stop set to 2:

for (int i=0; i<5; i++) {
  something(i);
  something_else();
}

However, there are situations where this doesn’t work out so well. At the office, we use 80-character columns and linewrap is strictly prohibited, so complicated statements get offset (where possible) by indenting to the relevant brace:

int func (int argc, char **argv, map m) {

  ...

  for (int i=0; i<5; i++) {
    something(/* type */ TEXT,
              /* 1st  */ 1,
              /* 2nd  */ i,
              /* last */ 9,
              /* name */ "Fred",
              /* flag */ FL_FOO|FL_BAR|FL_BAZ|FL_HIP,
              /* froz */ m.asInt("zip"), 0);
    something_else(m("Fred").match("^(1|2|3|4)$")
                   || m("Bob").match("^((test|live)(1|2)?)*$"));
  }

  ...

}

One could not rely upon an editor to properly format this using tab characters. The number of spaces indented to “/* 1st */” must be equal to the amount of characters in “something(”. Of course, with the proper Emacs setup, the number of spaces to the open-paren can be filled in automatically using the tab-key.

Another reason I would use differing indents in code is when mixing programming languages in a source file. For example, in MXML I use 4 spaces and in Actionscript I use 2 spaces, for aesthetic reasons. It would make no sense to interpret that as “2 tabs and 1 tab” for other tab stops. (Not to mention the 3-space indent I use after a “<![CDATA[”.) For example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mx:Application styleName="plain"
    xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
    creationComplete="initApp()">

    <mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
           private function initApp():void {
             for (var i=0; i<5; i++) {
               something();  //do something clever to box1
             }
           }
        ]]>
    </mx:Script>

    <mx:HBox id="box1" width="100%" minWidth="50" />

</mx:Application>

Yet another reason to use spaces rather than tab characters is for tabular layout (counterintuitive!):

[
[1,     900,    30,     ]
[40,    80,     200,    ]
[999,   22,     1,      ]
]

With a tab stop of 2, for instance, this table’s layout would break if it used tab characters.

One solution to this would be to mix tab and space characters. One could use spaces for the applications where tabs don’t do the job, and tabs for everything else. But that would be, at the least, annoying. With the proper setup, much of the work being done by spaces above can be done automatically by an editor using the tab-key; losing that functionality (or making it intelligently choose whether to insert tab or space) isn’t worth the trouble (neither is C-T for tab). And mixing tabs and spaces for indenting is not a good idea, since \t and \s are both whitespace characters, and thus the distinction will be missed by the naked eye.

For more thoughts on why space indenting is a good idea: Tabs versus Spaces.

And for someone who already responded to nearly all of my concerns: Why I love having tabs in source code. However, Why Tabs Are Evil agrees that mixing \t and \s in front of your code can lead to problems, and so the distinction between “indentation” and “alignment” might not be relevant.

Isaac recently wrote a post reflecting on his experience as a programmer and the difficulty of becoming an expert. Apparently, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master anything.

I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience or drive to become an expert at anything. Well, I’ve probably put in the requisite hours for Dungeons & Dragons, but (as in the case of Sickboy) that’s hardly a substitute. But I guess that’s why I’m in philosophy. Being a generalist (know-it-all) is something I’ve spent virtually my entire life practicing.

When I first decided to major in philosophy (some six years into my academic career) I would often apologize for my lack of experience. I would claim that I’ve never studied philosophy (sometimes with the qualifier “formally”). But that’s not true at all. I’ve always taken the philosophical approach - seeking truth, questioning everything, and trying to get into the heart of the matter, for starters. And I actually had studied philosophy, even in school! In past classes, I’d read the Allegory of the Cave, The Republic, bits of Locke and Mill, and some Nietzsche, just not in “philosophy” classes. I’d even read some Aquinas in Catholic grade school.

I guess that the reason why I never felt comfortable claiming I’d studied philosophy is I’m aware of how much it takes to be an expert. That’s the same problem I have with virtually any field I have something to say about. I expect that there’s someone in the back of the room waiting to say, “Sorry, but those of us who work in the field have already studied and solved this problem - if you knew what you were talking about, you’d know that already and wouldn’t have to make a fool of yourself.” (Is it an artifact of my attending an English institution that I imagine my detractors beginning with an apology?)

But that’s the beauty of being a generalist. Sure, if I justify something using modal logic then there will be a modal logic expert waiting to shoot it down. But if I can justify the move in modal logic based on Wiener’s metaphysics, and I can justify the metaphysical move based on pragmatism, and I can justify pragmatism based on epistemology or physics or Aristotle’s theory of human action… well, there aren’t many people who can keep up. (This of course is just a rough abstract thought experiment, and I don’t claim to have these particular justifications at hand.)

Of course, knowing this doesn’t ease my worries one bit. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder if I should know a lot more about quantum physics, computer hardware, software development, business, art, home repair, robotics, ethics, any of the many branches and sub-disciplines of philosophy, or anything else that I end up talking about or using on a daily basis. But as The Doctor said, when I know everything there won’t be any point to going on.

Happy Birthday, everyone.

The discipline of cybernetics, created in the 1940’s by Norbert Wiener, is the science of information processing systems. Recent developments in cybernetic technology have given us reason to re-evaluate the way we think about knowledge. This is because knowledge is certainly related in some way to information. However, I do not think it has been made clear in exactly what way they are related. When I sit down at a computer with access to the internet, I feel smarter; I am able to answer questions that I would never be able to otherwise, with very little effort on my part. One likely explanation of this phenomenon is that I am somehow more knowledgeable when I am sitting at a computer. But this does not fit into the usual conception of knowledge; I doubt that sitting down at a computer automatically changes any beliefs of mine, nor does it justify them. This leads me to think that there should be a theory of knowledge that allows for this kind of thing to be called knowledge. Generally, I believe that a claim to knowledge is a claim to a certain competence; it is commonly said that knowledge is power, and “power” is often used analogously with other types of competence. I intend to show that a claim to knowledge (in the sense of knowledge about the world) is a claim to have access to information.

Suppose someone asks me, “Do you know what time the movie is playing?” I respond, “Yes, it’s playing at 7:00.” In epistemology, many people would say that my claim to knowledge is justified in the event that “The movie is playing at 7:00” is a justified true belief. I will later show that this formulation is flawed, but for now the question I would like to ask is, just what steps am I allowed to take before answering? Let us examine some cases to find the answer to this question.

Now suppose I could not remember right away but had to think for a second or two before responding. I think we would still say that I know what time the movie is playing, even though I did not necessarily remember at the exact instant that the question was uttered. But did I know before or after I remembered? It is not obvious how the justified true belief model will answer this question, but more on this later.

Suppose I had the movie time written on a notepad in my pocket. Someone asks me, “Do you know what time the movie is playing?” and I answer “Yes,” look at my notebook, and say, “it’s playing at 7:00.” Was I still correct in claiming knowledge in this case? I believe I was, and this is certainly an ordinary manner of speaking.

Now suppose it was a PDA I looked at, where I had written the movie time. Does this change the case at all? Certainly when it comes to epistemology an electronic notepad should not be viewed any differently than one made of paper. And so I think it is at least obvious that the claim to knowledge in the PDA case is reasonable in the event that it is also reasonable in the notepad case.

Now suppose instead of my notepad, it was a newspaper with the movie times in my pocket. I hadn’t actually read the times yet, but I knew it had accurate times for the movie and that’s why I picked up the newspaper. In this case, it seems as though answering “Yes”, looking at the newspaper, and saying “it’s playing at 7:00” is at least as justified as the notepad case.

Now let’s combine the previous two examples. Suppose I took out my PDA, clicked on a bookmark to the theater’s website, and then read the time. I could conceivably do this even faster than remembering, and in terms of observable action it seems to be the same as using my PDA as a notepad, though I’m accessing someone else’s information, like I did in the newspaper case. Then when I answered, “yes” and took out my PDA and answered, “It’s playing at 7:00”, I was making a true statement about my knowledge, even though my knowledge preceded my accessing the information via the Internet. This suggests that the knowledge is actually my ability to access the information, not any particular propositional attitude I may have had about the movie theater.

So if knowledge is merely access to information, don’t we know everything knowable? In principle, we have access to every knowable piece of information, even though the process of access may take a great deal of time and effort on our part, and may even include the possibility of faulty results. However, this does not seem to match our usual use of the term, “to know.” If I had answered “Yes,” to the question and then started asking passersby until I learned when the movie was playing, I think we would ordinarily say that I was being untruthful in claiming knowledge. But our usual assertion that we do not in fact know everything can be addressed by appeal to contextualism in epistemology, as described by Keith DeRose.

According to DeRose, the context of utterance affects the truth conditions of knowledge attributions (DeRose, 111). Such factors as what has been said in the conversation so far and the importance of being right will affect whether “S knows that p” is true. This should not be too hard to accept – it is common to say that a proposition’s context must be fixed in order to determine its truth value. “It is raining” is true in some contexts, false in others, but once the context has been fixed it is either true or false. And so DeRose asserts that contextual factors about a claim to knowledge will affect its truth value.

If knowledge is defined as the ability to access information, surely some methods of access are better than others. In fact, some methods might be so bad that in a relevant sense they do not count as knowledge. Thus by appeal to contextualism we can see how depending on context we can set the bar for what counts as a good method of access to information. It matters how quick, easy, and reliable the method of access is (though this is not intended as an exhaustive list of the virtues of such methods). Thus, “I don’t know” is shorthand for “I do not have access to the information within acceptable parameters of ease, quickness, and reliability.”

This can be seen in DeRose’s bank cases (DeRose, 109). My wife asks me, “Do you know whether the bank will be open tomorrow?” and I answer, “Yes; it will be.” She then says, “Are you sure? A lot of banks are changing their hours, and it is really important that we get to the bank by tomorrow.” And I admit, “No, I guess I don’t know – let’s call the bank.”

This sequence of events can be explained in terms of standards for speed and accuracy (amongst other concerns) of information access. When I am first presented with the question, I of course assume that my memory of the bank’s hours should be a sufficient way of determining what the bank’s hours will be tomorrow. However, my wife points out that banks have been changing their hours, which suggests that my method is not as reliable as I thought. She also points out that it is very important that we are correct about the bank being open, which suggests that our standards for reliability in this case should be relatively high. Thus I admit that I do not know, which is simply a way of saying that my method of information access does not meet acceptable parameters for this particular job. I thus suggest that we call the bank, which is a different method which sacrifices ease and quickness in favor of reliability.

What, then, of justified true belief? I believe that this model of knowledge is lacking in many ways, but one of its main problems is the assumption that knowledge is propositional in nature. This is simply not the way that we normally talk about knowledge (at least when we’re not doing epistemology). Someone might ask me, “Do you know the phone number for the pizza restaurant?” and I would respond, “Yes, it’s 203-555-1234”. However, I would not likely find myself in a situation where I would report, “I know that the phone number for the pizza restaurant is 203-555-1234.”, at least I would only say such a thing in the context of talking about knowledge. Thus, one who claims to know does not have a proposition in mind, but is rather talking about information (a fact).

According to Wittgenstein, “’I know’ is supposed to express a relation, not between me and the sense of a proposition (like ‘I believe’) but between me and a fact” (Wittgenstein, 16). Thus, knowledge is not a type of belief. He goes on to say, “I know that a sick man is lying here” is “nonsense … And ‘I know that a sick man is lying here’ used in an unsuitable situation, seems not to be nonsense but rather seems matter-of-course … the words ‘I know that…’ are always in place where there is no doubt” (Wittgenstein, 15). This tells us that “I know that” statements, or to put it another way “S knows that p” statements are actually not the usual way of talking about knowledge. I contend that knowledge is not propositional, and statements of propositional knowledge are only constructed in the act of talking about knowledge. I will further examine the implication of this when I discuss Heidegger.

In the above case about the pizza restaurant, my knowledge entailed an ability to give the phone number when asked. This is a pragmatic way of looking at knowledge; the meaning of my claim to knowledge is composed entirely of its material consequences. (According to Peirce, the meaning of any term is the sum of all practical effects it might have (Peirce, 48).) In this way, any time I claim to know anything, I am promising that I can perform some action which would follow from the meaning of my knowledge claim.

So working under the pragmatic view, if it is true that I know that the color of the ball is red, how would I know that it is true that I know that the ball is red? Someone asks me, “What color is that ball?” and I answer, “Red”. Or to put it another way, someone asks me, “Do you know the color of that ball?” and I answer, “Yes; it is red.” The only consequence of any knowledge is that the knower can perform some action; thus, this is the entirety of what we mean by “knowledge”.

The idea that knowledge is performative and not propositional is not without precedent. Peirce associated all meaning with action, but there was a Neo-Confucian philosopher in China who specifically made the connection between knowledge and action. Ch’eng I explained that when one claims to know evil and still does evil things, this is not truly knowledge (Koller, 533). This is because evil is against the ends of the agent, and thus knowledge of evil entails acting in a way that is not evil. (This analysis should be familiar to those who have read Plato). Ch’eng I spoke of “true” knowledge, where true knowledge has a special relationship to action. True knowledge entails being able to act appropriately in a test of knowledge. Clearly, Ch’eng I was touching upon the same idea of knowledge that I put forward here.

Some critics of this view, including Armen Marsoobian, have raised the following objection: I am describing knowledge completely in terms of degree, but in effect I am denying any difference in kind (between the one who knows and the one who does not know). I believe this is not really a problem. It has become commonplace to assert that all differences in kind are merely the way in which we (humans; oneself) carve up the universe. The chair and the table are part of the same continuum of matter and space; at the particle level it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. However, we make distinctions between them because it is useful. There are phenomena which emerge from the scattered motions of particles, and those phenomena which are relevant to us become distinctions. In this way, the continuum of the universe is seen as the multitude of distinctions with which we are familiar. This is what the Buddhists would call “interdependent arising”, or “dependent origination” (Koller, 233). It also may reflect the pragmatist concept of theory-laden observation; we need background theory to carve up the world and we might end up carving it up different ways with different background theory.

Let me give an example of how this applies to a “difference in kind”. We say that a woman is either pregnant or not pregnant, and one cannot be a little pregnant. However, when does this transition take place? There is a sperm which starts interacting with an egg, and some time later we have a fetus. But between there, the sperm enters the egg, the tail falls off, the membrane around the genetic material of the sperm breaks down, the genetic material of the sperm attaches to the genetic material of the egg, the genetic material starts multiplying, and the egg starts dividing. And in each of those steps, we can see many smaller steps which can be further divided. What we see is that pregnancy is a process which does not involve a sudden change from pregnant to not-pregnant. The distinction is merely one way of specifying the overall biological state of the woman, in a way that is convenient for us.

And so it is with knowledge. For there to be some sudden change from one-who-does-not-know to one-who-knows would mean that knowledge does not work like any other process in the world. Why should we expect knowledge to be anything other than a useful distinction amidst a continuum of possible distinctions?

Another objection that has been raised to my theory of knowledge is as follows: If I can know something simply by having access to a machine, then wouldn’t that make the machine an extension of the knower? I have no problem with this characterization, but this is an important issue in the field of cyberphilosophy (Okay, nobody uses that term anymore). But I do not think it is out of the ordinary to consider objects a part of ourselves. Objects like my clothes, my eyeglasses, the fillings in my teeth, or an artificial limb may seem just as much a part of myself as any living tissue. (Is non-living hair an object or a part of the body?) Once again, this seems to be a distinction that is made on the basis of its usefulness.

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger expresses this relationship between “equipment” and the person who works with it (Heidegger, 158). To Heidegger, equipment is a thing that is used for work and thus becomes a part of the self. He describes a pair of peasant shoes, which are even moreso a part of the peasant because she is not aware of them while she is working. As she works in them, one can look at the shoes and see the worker. And so it is not strange to think of a thing as an extension of the self. For more on this connection as it relates to computers, see Michael Heim’s “The Computer as Component: Heidegger and McLuhan”.

I believe there is something else that can be taken from Heidegger’s examination of the peasant shoes. Heidegger claims that when the shoes are not being used to work in the fields, an examination of the shoes will not show what the shoes are in truth. This is because what the shoes are is actually a thing that is used for work. This analysis relates to what I said earlier about propositional knowledge (by way of Wittgenstein): The times when we talk about knowledge in terms of propositions are not the times in which we are using knowledge; in these situations, it is not even properly knowledge. Only by examining the way knowledge is actually used (for example by answering a question) can we get at what knowledge actually is, and this supports my claim that knowledge is non-propositional by nature.

This theory of knowledge has some interesting implications. This explains why in philosophy of education we would like to say that it is more important to teach children how to think than to fill their heads with facts. According to my theory, helping a child to grow into a knowledgeable person is helping him learn how to find those facts. Making a child memorize the capitals of every African country is useless if the child will not be able to use this information when he is called upon to do so.

This also explains why people from the humanities are sought-after in Information Technology. In Information Technology and other computer-related fields, employers have found that they would prefer a college-educated person with a good background in the humanities to someone who has extensive job training and certification. This is because a good education helps one learn how to be knowledgeable – how to access and use information – unlike computer certification training which aims to teach specific information about computers (which will doubtless become obsolete in a matter of months).

This theory of knowledge also has implications for the Fitch-Church knowability paradox. If knowledge is not categorical, then it makes sense to say that everything is known to some extent; thus one of the assumptions of the Fitch-Church knowability paradox is false (that some things are currently not known). However, it also has the same effect on many logical methods in epistemology; such arguments rely on the modal knowability principle Kp, where p is a proposition. If what we mean by knowledge is not about propositions, then Kp does not refer to knowledge, and so such logical arguments have nothing to do with knowledge.

This also provides answers for questions that come up in the study of the cybernetic integration of humans with machines. If I have a computer chip in my brain which provides massive amounts of data, traditional views of knowledge would leave us asking whether or not any of the information there is known. This theory of knowledge does away with such questions, since it does not matter where the information is stored when making a knowledge claim, only how accessible it is.

At this point I feel that I have written on a very diverse set of topics and so I must summarize what I have uncovered about the nature of knowledge. My pragmatic leanings tell me that knowledge, like all concepts, should be understood entirely on the basis of its practical effects. The practical effect of knowledge of a fact is the ability to perform some task, such as answer a question, that requires one to successfully access some information. Furthermore, whether a putative claim to knowledge should be considered valid is based on the context in which it was uttered, and this has to do with the importance of speed, ease, and reliability of the method of information access. Therefore in most cases, knowledge does not merely imply the ability to access information from memory; in many cases, one can be knowledgeable by use of some equipment, such as a computer, which allows fast, easy, and reliable access to information. In this way, computers and other tools are constantly reshaping our identity and becoming a part of who we are.

Works Cited
DeRose, Keith. “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions.” Epistemology: The Big Questions. Ed. Linda Martin Alcoff. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993.
Heim, Michael. “The Computer as Component: Heidegger and McLuhan.” Philosophy and Literature. 16.2 (1992): 304-319.
Koller, John M. and Patricia Koller, eds. A Sourcebook in Asian Philosophy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Definition and Description of Pragmatism.” Pragmatism: The Classic Writings. H. S. Thayer, ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “On Certainty.” Epistemology: The Big Questions. Ed. Linda Martin Alcoff. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.

The issue of same-sex marriage oft gets bandied about in the public forum. People are essentially arguing over whether marriage is a legal right, and whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman. The issues involving “gay marriage” are addressed fairly well (in a rather one-sided fashion) by Scott Bidstrup in Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives. But the question that has not been sufficiently addressed is why marriage is a legal institution, and more importantly whether it should continue to be. I intend to demonstrate that marriage should not be an institution of the state, specifically in the US.

Marriage for love

One reason in favor of state-sponsored marriage is that the institution of marriage is an essential part of a loving relationship between two people. Marriage, along with the wedding that begins it, is seen as an important social bond. This can be broken down into three cases: marriage as a sacrament before God, marriage as a declaration to one’s community, and marriage as a promise between two individuals.

Obviously the first case should not be considerable in the US, where such religious concerns are not allowed to work their way into legal institutions. However, it should be noted that were marriage not a state institution, religious marriages could still take place; there would simply be no need to tell the government about them. Therefore, the removal of state influence on marriage does nothing to challenge the religious institution of marriage.

The second case, marriage as a declaration to one’s community, also has several parts. A couple wants their friends and family to join in the celebration of their love and/or emotional commitment, usually in the form of a wedding. However, it does not seem obvious that the ceremony of a wedding requires state approval; for example, couples who have what is known as a ‘second wedding’ are doing something socially acceptable but they do not get another marriage license from the state.

A couple might also want to let other people know that they are both romantically unavailable; to be introduced as a person who is married lets others know they should not begin courtship rituals or attempt sexual advances. It is not apparent, however, that state sanction of a marriage is any guarantee of such an introduction; and indeed, such introductions can be made without a marriage license. For example, a couple who was wed in another country but visits the US would not be expected to obtain a marriage license in order to have the right to call themselves a married couple.

The third case, marriage as a promise between two individuals, is a common reason for a couple to get married. They wish to give the vows of marriage to one another, promising that they will be faithful, that they will love each other for the rest of their lives, and other such things. This situation is similar to the second case in that it is not clear why the couple would want or require state approval of these promises. The only obvious reason is to add the weight of law to their promises. It seems absurd, however, that the government should have a mechanism in place to punish those who fail to remain in some emotional state. Furthermore, if a couple really wants the benefit of legal penalties for breaking their promises, then they already have the option of drawing up a legal contract. Therefore, there is no need to have an institution in place to protect such interests.

Marriage for family

Another reason in favor of state-sponsored marriage is that marriage is essential to the family unit. This basically breaks down into three parts: A marriage is necessary for the raising of children; marriage is necessary to protect one spouse from problems caused by the other; and marriage carries with it certain legal rights which are essential to the family.

I will not attempt to determine or whether marriage is necessary for the proper raising of children, or whether marriage is essential to the family unit, or even whether the family unit is important in the raising of children; those questions should be settled empirically, and are beyond the scope of this paper. They are also not relevant to the current discussion. If marriage is not necessary for the proper raising of children, then this line of inquiry is contradictory. Assuming then that marriage is necessary for the proper raising of children, there is still no reason to think that the state’s knowledge or approval of that marriage should be important.

That the legal institution of marriage is in place to protect one spouse from problems caused by the other requires some explanation. Using the word spouse assumes, of course, that the couple is considering itself to be married, and the question assumes that they have some sort of influence over one another’s lives. I think this question should best be examined by use of examples.

Suppose that a husband and wife both buy a house together, establishing it as jointly owned property, and the husband later grows tired of the wife and kicks her out. The law would allow the wife to obtain a divorce and split up the property or its value fairly. It seems like this is something the wife should be able to expect from the legal system, and so it seems to support the idea that marriage should be a legal institution.

Now imagine the same situation, except the two people are male best friends who buy a house together. The same result should be expected by the friend in this situation: he should expect to get his fair share of the property. Therefore the legal institution of marriage should not be needed to resolve this dispute, since the dispute should be resolved in the same way whether the two people are married or not.

That the legal institution of marriage carries with it certain legal rights and privileges is a fact, and whether the legal institution of marriage should carry those rights and privileges is a difficult question. I will to examine in general the sorts of rights and privileges guaranteed to married people, and where possible I will show that these rights and privileges should also be guaranteed to unmarried people.

Alan M. Dershowitz wrote a good article on the separation of religious and secular marriages, To Fix Gay Dilemma, Government Should Quit the Marriage Business, which roughly outlines the sorts of things one should expect from a ‘civil union’: “the financial consequences of divorce, the custody of children, Social Security and hospital benefits, etc.”

The financial consequences of divorce represent two different kinds of expectations. On the one hand, we have the situation described above: joint owners should be compensated when one decides to bail out. On the other hand, there are financial expectations in marriage which go beyond joint ownership. If a husband and wife have an arrangement where the husband works full-time and the wife takes care of the house, it seems like it would be unfair for the wife to get nothing in the case of a divorce, even though she did not contribute financially to the arrangement. I use “husband” and “wife” here because this is the stereotypical arrangement. However, there is no reason why unmarried people should not be able to enter into similar arrangements.

What if this arrangement occurred between two sisters? It is not inconceivable that sisters would choose to live this way, where one takes care of the house and the other works at a job. For example, suppose the older sister, Abby, is a very successful business executive, and the younger sister, Betty, is an unsuccessful aspiring artist. They might decide to enter into a similar arrangement, where for an indefinite period of time Betty takes care of the house and Abby works full-time. In this case, if Abby decides to kick Betty out, should Betty get compensation? And if not, why should the housewife mentioned above? Clearly if the financial consequences of divorce are justified, then Abby and Betty should have the option of entering into the same sort of arrangement, whereby Betty is guaranteed some compensation if Abby decides to bail.

But what about the custody of children? Sadly, where legal rights are concerned, children are never an easy case. Societal custom may be the best way of resolving this issue, for want of a better answer; custody of the children should be decided between the children’s parents. Thus, if Abby has children, then Betty will not get custody of them in the case of the ‘divorce’ above, as Betty is not a parent. And even if the father of Abby’s children is not married to Abby, he should still be given consideration in any dispute over custody of the children.

I think it is clear that Social Security, hospital visitation, and related benefits should be available to anyone. My wife should be able to visit me in the hospital, but so should anyone else I want to designate. If I have a close relationship with my best friend, then I should be able to designate him as: someone who can visit me in the hospital, a beneficiary for various benefits, a member of my family, my next-of-kin, or any other status that has to do with an association to myself. The government should not be the sole arbiter of which relationships are relevantly important for these things; I should have the final say on this.

It is because of the state institution of marriage that these things cannot be guaranteed to all people. Wanting to receive these benefits is conflated with receiving a religious sacrament, being in love, and many other cultural constructs that people rightly don’t want violated. And so people will stand in the way of the rights of others, in the name of protecting marriage or some other such thing. If “marriage” were not a state institution and was not necessarily related to the “civil union”, then there would be no reason for gays to be upset that the government denies them “the right to be married”, and there would be no reason for anyone to stand in the way of the benefits of the civil union for any two people.

And so we see that there is no good reason for the state to be involved in marriage. Everything that we can fairly expect from the state regarding marriage can be accomplished better without such an institution, and there are many harms which come directly from the state institution of marriage. The debate over same-sex marriage is merely one of the many disputes which could be avoided entirely by eliminating this wasteful practice of the government.

And so I will leave you with the following thought experiment:
It is the future, and “marriage” is no longer a state institution. Two men, Gary and Steve, are very good friends. They live together - Steve is a very successful investment banker, and Gary stays at home and takes care of the house. They have been very close and had this arrangement for many years. The house is in both Steve and Gary’s names, and they are both listed as beneficiaries on each other’s wills. Steve is a widower, and has an 8-year-old son, Billy; his wife died in childbirth, and Gary has been helping to raise Billy ever since. Steve and Gary decide to get a civil union, guaranteeing them the right to hospital visitation and ensuring that if anything happens to Steve, then Gary can continue to raise Billy (amongst other benefits).

Are Steve and Gary gay? Do they commit sodomy?
Is it any of your damn business?

UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.

As I noted before,

Since they first reported on this, Hacking NetFlix posted a much more thorough response from the company, in which it was revealed that the primary reason for this change is that they’ve been using bad software design. Apparently, the profiles system was a kludge in the first place, and they need to remove it to try to clean up some of the cruft and implement everything in a better way. They also hope to implement a multiple-queues feature that will work for those on 1-at-a-time plans (profiles, as they stand now, don’t.)

Somehow, it doesn’t make me feel better to know that the reason for this inconvenience to me is that NetFlix has crappy developers who use bad software design. Again, I’m not feeling good about giving my financial information to such people.

This situation was also handled very badly. If they had an alternative set up before they notified us of the change, or if they’d even had a solid plan and could explain how much better the new system is going to be, then people may have been satisfied. Here is how it should have gone:

1. Introduce new, better feature
2. Announce old feature deprecation
3. Painlessly migrate users to new system
4. Remove old feature

Here’s how they’re apparently doing it:

1. Announce old feature deprecation and the lack of any migration
2. Remove old feature
3. Lose tens of thousands of customers
4. Introduce new, better feature

Of course, NetFlix has announced that they don’t care about losing tens of thousands of customers, as they have 8 million to please. I don’t care how big you are - 80,000 people are a lot of people to impact adversely, and one should not trod roughshod over them. That is no way to treat your customers, and every other customer knows they could be next. How long will it be before we hear, “We’ve decided to get out of the DVD business - we’re getting more revenue from ‘watch it now’”?

And NetFlix is still promoting this feature to draw in customers, even though it is being discontinued.

But none of this is the main problem with the change. What people are most upset about, and rightly so, is losing data. NetFlix has a great deal of personal data in the form of rental history, queues, and ratings which is currently separate by profile. NetFlix’s plans are:

• Merge rental history from all profiles into the main account
• Delete secondary profiles’ queues
• Delete secondary profiles’ ratings

This will totally screw up the recommendation system. Different profiles can have different ratings which will generate different recommendations. At the urging of NetFlix, with the promise of better recommendations, many people spent a large amount of time rating movies, generating lots of data. Now instead of making good on their promises, NetFlix is simply deleting all of this data on secondary profiles. Mishandling data generated by users is an unforgivable offense on the part of an internet company, and is a troubling sign with respect to their lack of professional ethics.

This isn’t the first time NetFlix has shown their lack of concern for ethics. This has appeared before in their practices of throttling (Advertising unlimited dvd rentals then limiting your dvd rentals if you make use of the service), bait-and-switch (giving better service during the free trial period, largely due to throttling), lying about the quality of anime DVDs, and harassing critics.

And so we see that NetFlix has a complete lack of concern for professional ethics. They admit to creating bad software, they do not put their users first when making changes to their service, they mishandle users’ data, and they use unethical business practices. No one should ever again do business with NetFlix.

UPDATE:successfully imported using the Wordpress import from rss functionality.