Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before

April 17, 2016 essay

“Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

The audience sits in silent expectation.

“A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks the horse, ‘why the long face?’ and the horse replies, ‘oh nothing, I’m just a little horse’.”

“Heard it,” shouts a man from the audience.

“Damn,” thinks the man on the stage. “I guess I should have known that.”

“So three nuns die and go to heave-”

A couple of hands go up in the audience, in the position of the stop signal. It’s the generally accepted sign in the club: We’ve heard it.

The man on stage tries a few more jokes. With each joke, someone in the audience raises their hand.

The man on stage squirms a little, but then regains his composure. He takes a few moments to re-adjust his approach.

“How do you know that anything is true? Think about this microphone. If I drop it, will it fall to the ground, or will it keep floating as though gravity doesn’t exist? You tell me, ‘It will fall!‘ but how do you know? You’ve seen it happened nearly every time you can remember, but does that make it tr-”

A young woman in a red jacket shoots up her hand. Hume’s Problem of Induction. everyone’s heard it before.

“Why is it immoral to kill people? We see hundreds of societies where practises which we think are terrible, they view as right and moral. The Callatians used to eat their family member’s brains after they’d died, and to not do so was a sign of disrespect for the deceased!”

This time an older gentleman with a large bushy beard stick up his hand.

“What if none of this is real and this is a giant simul-“. Hand. He loosens his collar.

“A San Francisco trolley is rolling down a-“. Hand. The man on stage’s speech is getting rapid.

“I have an axe and I replace the handle-“. Hand. Did it suddenly become really hot in here?

“If people want to take body-destroying, mind-numbing drugs, we should let-” Hand. Gee, those lights are bright.

The man on stage pauses, and his gaze goes to the audience. They are seated in a dimly lit jazz bar, everyone is seated around tables with white cloth in groups of two or three. Their eyes are still on the man on stage, scrutinising his reactions just as closely as they had been listening to his words. The man with a large bushy beard looks sympathetic. He only joined the club last year, so he remembers this part of the application process.

The brief from the Diogenes Club had arrived in a large yellow envelope. Say something that no man has said before. There had been a small card attached to the brief that read: And every other gender too. And you can’t read something which has never been read aloud either. We just mean you need to say something original. Don’t try to find loopholes.

They hadn’t given him much time to prepare until the limo and brought him here, where he was pushed onto stage to much applause and their expecting, watchful eyes.

“Blrrrbbbbrrbrrrbbbrrrrbrbrrb!” He yells into the stick microphone. Hands rise from several tables. The man on stage furrows his eyebrows, trying to solve a difficult problem. “I’m assuming no one’s said those exact letters in that order before…”

“Not since Joanne Chu in 1959, although I think there was one more r in there,” think the audience.

“…so I presume your objection is that what I’m saying is ‘nonsense’, and ‘nonsense’ has been said by everyone before,” he concludes. “I mean, just look at politics,” he adds.

The audience nod approvingly. At least he figured that out. A few people raise their hands to acknowledge his joke.

“You know, there’s a new bar called Bar Chemistry that’s opened around the corner. It serves everything in chemical lab containers – beakers or funnels. Like, they have an order called the Benzene Ring. It’s their six most popular shots. Anyway, I went there the other day with my friend Li. He’s the most friendly guy you’ll ever meet…”

Some hands rise. At first, the hands are reluctant to be the first to rise, but as more hands rise they feel less like they’re leaving the herd. Other hands move so that their owner’s arms are crossed. Other hands move to cushion a forehead, which smacks into their palms. This was a heated argument within the Diogenes Club.

“You can’t just tell a story, stories are just a series of facts, they’re not original!” had written Jane of the Those With Raised Hands Clan. “It doesn’t require any mental effort or originality to know a fact. Sure, discovering a fact is original. Discovering a fact requires informed hypothesis forming, careful experiment design and, importantly, integrity to go try to find evidence which would falsify your opinion. But recounting a story, or remembering trivia, or knowing the plot to a movie – unoriginal!”

“I disagree,” had replied Willy of the Folded Arms, “Think about the request: Say something no one has said before. Say something original. A story is the most original creation. The storyteller carefully edits a plot, conjures up images using only their words, and creates a shared emotion with their audience. And most stories have certainly never been said before. A bad plot filled with overused tropes about a villain with Freudian motivations fighting his brother, a rogue spy, who doesn’t follow the rules of people who think security-justifies-the-openness, but which actually get neither: that’s unoriginal. But before you turn down a story, see where it goes before you decide it’s unoriginal.”

Jayant of the Palmed Face Clan believed that stories had facts and opinions. And Jayant believed that facts were important and useful because they helped you understand that if you chose A, then that would cause B, which would cause C, and so on all the way until Z. Facts helped you chain causes and likely effects so you know what will happen.

And Jayant believed that opinions were useless because it was only needed at the final stage. After you agreed that A would cause Z, then you ask, “Now, do you like Z?” which made it not very intensive, mentally speaking. It was the official stance of the Palmed Face Clan that new information which helped you better anticipate the future was original, and that information which was regurgitated but still useful was laudable, but lowly opinion should never be spoken until people are asked. But Jayant had never told Jane or Willy, because they had never asked.

“…and then Li grinned at me through his safety goggles and downed his Metasta-Sized Spanish Flu Shot and said, ‘CRISPR? I hardly knew ‘er!’.”And everyone in the room raises their hands.

“Fine, fine, I’m sorry I should have known. Um…Here’s my recipe for a Diogenes cake. Take two eggs-”

“If this is just a regular cake but you modified the proportions or added an ingredient, that doesn’t count!”

“-Oh… thanks.”

The man on stage begins to think as hard as he can. What was the last original thought he’d had? Sure, I read about other’s opinions and re-apply them in new situations, but I must have thought of something novel.

“I think that Australia doesn’t need to elect parties to power. It’s no longer inefficient for people to individually vote on every single issue any more.”

The audience perks up. It’s not an original thought, but it is promising.

“Um… yeah.” Dammit. Why do I think that? I don’t know why. It seems like a good point, though.

“You know, I think prison is wrong. We shouldn’t send people to prison.”

“Go on,” the audience was urging. “Say something about criminology. Relate it to behavioural psychology and behaviour change. Make an economic argument. Talk about scope insensitivity and the availability bias. Talk about how crime should be about deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation and preventing reoffending, and explain how prison is overly focused on punishment and ignores the other three. Give us alternatives to prison. You’re close!”

“I…. um…. but not as much as I think that we should donate more to foreign aid!”

The man on stage has an idea.

“So let’s say that we have two countries: Country A is well-developed, there’s very little corruption and it’s filled with altruistic people. Country B is less developed, and there’s a bit of corruption. Country A wants to help Country B.”

“This is promising,” thinks the audience.

“For simplicity, let’s look at the median donor in Country A and the median recipient in Country B. Let’s say that τ is the proportion of money which the corrupt people in Country B take from the median recipient in Country B. So if Country B has an income of $e_2$ and are given donations of T, then the median recipient in Country B will have an actual income, net corruption, of

$(1 - \tau)(e_2 + T)$

to spend and a utility of,

$U_2 ((1 - \tau)(e_2 + T))$ ”

“Yes! That makes sense!” No hands are in the air now.

“Now, let’s look at the median donor in Country A. Their utility is defined by,

$U_1(e_1 - \frac{N_B T}{N_A}) + \beta U_2 ((1 - \tau)(e_2 + T))$

where $\beta$ is a measure of the altruism of the median donor in Country A. When Country A is very altruistic, then $\beta = 1$ and the welfare of the median recipient in Country B is equal to the welfare of those in Country A. This would be, say, the rational agents we imagine under a pure utilitarian model. Also, $N_A, N_B$ is the population size of Country A and B respectively. The larger the population of Country B to Country A, the more the median donor needs to donate.”

“He’s using linear equations and using words we hear in philosophy, he must be smart!”

“So, all we have to do is find economic data (the median income, the population of the two countries, etc.). Then we find a corrupt politician in Country A and ask them to rank their corruption on a scale of 0-1. Then we find the median donor in Country B and ask them to rank their altruism on a scale of 0-1. Then all we need is to ask the median donor and recipient about their utility function. They should probably know their utility functions, but for simplicity I reckon we assume everyone in each country has the same utility function and also that it’s linear. And after we’ve done all these simple things, we have a fully functional equation! Then, we’re left with one thing to do, and you know what that is!…”

“Solve the linear equation!”

“…solve the linear equation!”

“Wow! With this model we will change global aid!”

“Now, $\tau$ , the level of corruption, is itself not static. It depends on how much Country A intervenes in the politics of Country B. Let’s say it spends M on military or political pressure to reduce corruption. Now we can represent the corruption as a function of M: $\tau = \tau(M)$ . I’m not sure what this function looks like. We could ask an NGO how much corruption could be solved with $100k, $200k, and so on, and then graph it. But for simplicity I reckon we assume that’s linear. Say $\tau = \alpha M$ ”