Some tips on Objectivity

We’re confronted daily with competing demands and claims of people from opposite points of view. Conservatives rail against liberals and vice versa. Creationists fight Darwinists. Pro-life wrestle with pro-choice advocates. How do we decide? There isn’t a foolproof method that ensures everyone will come to the same conclusion. A lot of factors affect our ability to be objective. Since the theme of this blog is about thinking objectively I thought I’d share some ideas on how I try to practice what I preach. In essence I recommend taking the effort to check both sides. (In some cases there are more than two prominent positions.)

• How do they argue? Do they confront the opposition’s positions head on or do they skirt the issues?
• Do they fairly represent the arguments of the other side or do they “refute” these arguments by setting up easily-refuted straw men?
• Do they try to build a cogent argument based on empirical data or do they simply state their final conclusions?

For example, if you’re considering whether global warming is caused by humans or by other causes (assuming there is warming), you could go to a site such as http://climatedebatedaily.com/ which provides links to global warming advocates and skeptics.

Let’s say you want sort out the creationism-evolution debate. This web page at Cal State Fullerton - http://nsmserver2.fullerton.edu/departments/chemistry/evolution_creation/web/#1.%20INTRODUCTION - provides links to various sites on both sides of the issue.

On general political issues, check publications such as National Review (http://www.nationalreview.com/) for conservative viewpoints, The New Republic (http://www.thenewrepublic.com/) for the left and maybe Reason magazine (http://reason.com/) for the libertarian perspective. For detailed analysis of policy issues you can go to The Cato Institute [http://www.cato.org/] (libertarian), The Brookings Institution [http://www.brookings.edu/] (liberal), the American Enterprise Institute [http://www.aei.org/] (conservative), or The Atlas Society [http://www.objectivistcenter.org/] (Objectivist).

A relatively new site and promising has popped up, http://www.opposingviews.com/, which offers debates on a wide variety of issues: politics, society, health, money and religion.

Another good source of information is www.wikipedia.com. The main articles usually refer to other sources on both sides of an issue and provide links to articles in the media and links to related web sites. Be sure to click on the “discussion” tab to see the dialog among the various contributors to the wiki entry. However, you need to be careful with controversial subjects. For instance, an ardent Gore supporter fanatically guards entries on global warming and pounces on any added text that challenges or contradicts the Gore-thodoxy (that global warming is man-made).

As I said at the beginning, checking these sources won’t automatically spoon feed you with answers. What I have found, however, is that people who honestly and fairly look at more than one viewpoint before settling on their own tend to be more reasonable than those who only look at sources with which they already agree. If we are confident in our ability to think critically and objectively we won’t be threatened by exposing ourselves to opinions that might differ from ours. At the very least going through this exercise will better prepare you for counter-arguments.

My main point, which is a theme running through this blog, is that maintaining objectivity isn’t easy! It involves hard work and resisting the temptation to latch onto conclusions. If you work through issues like health care, global warming, abortion, and intelligent design by carefully evaluating the different viewpoints, by comparing the facts each side musters for their case and by looking at how they argue, you stand a better chance of reaching a sound conclusion. Who knows? You might even end up changing your mind? THAT, I believe, is the threat of checking your premises: the possibility of abandoning a position and even disagreeing with friends who share your overall beliefs. Another drawback is that objectivity doesn’t carry the sex appeal of being an ardent advocate of [insert your favorite “ism” here]. It might even sound boring and dispassionate. Yet the overall purpose of being objective is to get you closer to the truth which ultimately can improve the quality of your life. And, if you have done the hard work to sift and digest the facts and arguments you can be justifiably certain of your position. To me that’s the exciting part of trying to be objective!

The Happiness Trap Review

The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living by Russ Harris is one of the best self-help books I’ve ever read. Yes, that’s a bold claim, especially with how many books of this kind fill the shelves of bookstores. I’ve read a lot of these books over the years. Almost all of them offer variations on one of several themes. Think positively. Repeat affirmations to counter negative thoughts. Bolster your self-esteem. All of them, according to Harris, share the same trap. “To find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.” This trap comes from the shared definition of happiness as feeling good. The Happiness Trap
adheres to a different definition of happiness: living a rich and meaningful life.

Living such a life doesn’t automatically mean we’re feeling good all the time. We will still have negative feelings and challenges to overcome. The goal of The Happiness Trap then is to give us strategies to deal with negative feelings without denying them. Harris offers six core principles.

1. Defusion. Painful or unpleasant thoughts are defused by various techniques such as labeling them. When one notices such a thought instead of suppressing or denying
it we create some distance by saying “I’m having the thought that …” In doing so we put some distance between the thought and us. In other words, we strive for objectivity.
2. Expansion: consists of making room for unpleasant thoughts and feelings.
3. Connection: being fully aware of your here and now.
4. Distinguishing between your thinking self and observing self. The various techniques in The Happiness Trap get us out of our thinking self and into our observing self.
5. Values: what kind of person are you and want to be? What is significant and meaningful to you? What do you stand for?
6. Committed action. All of this business about being objective and mindfulness must be followed by a commitment to action if we truly want to change.

These principles form the core of Action and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hays. While Hays and others have published a number of books on ACT they were written for therapists applying ACT to different conditions. The Happiness Trap
translates ACT’s principles for laymen interested in applying these principles. As Harris points out ACT also stands for something else:

A – Accepting your thoughts and feelings and being present in the moment,

C – Connect with your values, and

T – Take effective action.

The Happiness Trap holds a lot more insights and techniques than I can do
justice to here. Overall I like several aspects of The Happiness Trap and ACT.

1. They don’t try to suppress or ignore emotions. The recommended methods aim at honoring these emotions while trying to get beyond them.
2. They emphasize mindfulness and objectivity.
3. The end goal is to get us to act, not just to idly analyze our feelings.
4. Values play a key role because ultimately this is what motivates us to action: what is important to us.

As I said at the beginning The Happiness Trap has joined the small group of my favorite books. It offers a realistic guide with a number of helpful activates to get us to move beyond self-limiting thoughts and emotions so we can obtain, express and enjoy our values.

Obama: Saving us from us?

I recall earlier this year Michelle Obama took some heat because she said Obama was going to save our soul (or something to that effect). At the time I figured her comment was just election-year hyperbole, magnified by talk-show hosts who like to create controversy. Well, looks like I was wrong. To see what I mean please check out Robert Bidinotto's excellent analysis of Obama's recent behavior and statements, "Obama the Presumptious continues his premature victory lap" (dated July 31), complete with humorous animation.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae: The New Deal Legacy Comes Home to Roost

With the Fed pondering what to do to stave off the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae it’s only a matter of time before the pundits start intoning about yet another alleged failure of the market. The Von Mises Foundation has posted several good articles explaining the history of these institutions and their impact on the financial markets.

Freddie, Fannie, and Curses on FDR

Ludwig von Mises had a theory about interventionism:

It doesn't accomplish its stated ends. Instead it distorts the market. That distortion cries out for a fix. The fix can consist in pulling back and freeing the market or taking further steps toward intervention. The State nearly always chooses the latter course, unless forced to do otherwise. The result is more distortion, leading eventually, by small steps, toward ever more nationalization and its attendant stagnation and bankruptcy.

Government intervention is like a vial of mutating poison in the water supply. We can get by for a long time and no one seems really worse off. One day we wake up and everyone is desperately ill, and blaming not the poison but the water itself. So it is with the housing crisis. Lenders are being blamed for the entire fiasco, and capitalism is going to be subjected to a beating as usual, since Freddie and Fannie are traded in public markets. But the fact remains that there is only one reason that this went on as long as it did and became as bad as it is. It was that vial of government poison.

Freddie Mac: A Mercantilist Enterprise

While these institutions have been privatized to a degree, they still remain tied to the federal government in some important respects. In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have access to a guaranteed line of credit of $2.25 billion with the U.S. treasury. This guarantee, coupled by the perception that federal money would be used beyond the extent of the credit limit, allows both companies to maintain lower borrowing costs than would otherwise be the case. In many cases, the companies are able to sell bonds yielding only a few dozen basis points above U.S. treasury benchmarks. If the government's guarantee disappeared, the borrowing spreads for both companies would widen. Beyond the government's line of credit, these companies are also exempt from state and local income taxation and are exempt from SEC filings. Moreover, their securities are listed as government securities and can be held by banks and thrifts as low-risk bonds. These benefits provide a significant advantage since such privileges are not offered to other financial institutions.

Fannie Mae: Another New Deal Monstrosity

Fannie Mae is not a free-market entity, nor is it a private body that must compete on the same playing field as its competitors. Fannie Mae is representative of all that's wrong with central planning institutions: it is a government-created conduit for carefully crafted financial and market socialism that the bureaucrats uphold for the purpose of propping up their fantasies for pandemic social engineering.

There's nothing "American" about this dream. In the eyes of the Republic's visionaries, this particular dream has turned into a nightmare.

God is Green: Part 2

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial by Bret Stephens titled

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis. He touches on how the message of the global warming crowd has strong elements of religiosity to it. Instead of God saving us, we'll find salvation by sacrificing ourselves to a false theory.

Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

Stephens doesn't use the word but there is a key concept behind this antipathy towards the West in general and specifically towards capitalism: altruism, the belief that we don't have the right to exist for our own sake and our own happiness. Because capitalism is based on the profit motive it is considered morally inferior to socialism where everyone is supposed to live from everyone else. Therefore I have a quibble with his use of the word neurosis in the title. The problems inherent in the behavior of the global warming advocates are not psychological. They're philosophical.

Review of The World is Flat 3.0

Do you ever debate buying a book? You know what I mean. Something about the cover or title catches your eye. You pick up the book, skim it a bit then put it back onto the shelf. The next time you go back to the store you go through the routine again. And again. Finally you break down and buy the book. After reading it you wonder why you didn’t buy the book the first time. That’s the story of The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman. I must have picked up the book five times before buying it. I wish I had bought it sooner.

Not that this book is perfect. A 100 or more pages could easily be trimmed with tighter editing and removing repetitive passages and Friedman’s name-dropping stories. But his premise is interesting and particularly applicable to individualists. By “flat” Friedman “means equalizing, because the flattening forces are empowering more and more individuals today to reach farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and that is equalizing power.”

Friedman contends we are in the third version of globalization. In Globalization 1.0 countries were the key agents in the world. Globalization 2.0 shifts from countries to international companies; Globalization 3.0 shifts again with individuals becoming the focal point.

The World is Flat identifies ten flatteners behind this evolution. While I won’t discuss each one they fall into three categories: political, business practices and individual empowerment. The key political flattener was literal: the flattening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 which enhanced the free movement of best practices. Most of the other nine flatteners deal with corporate practices such as work flow software, outsourcing and off shoring which drew formerly isolated countries such as India, China, Mexico and others into the world market. As the corporate practices lowered barriers between countries other developments occurred to enhance the ability of individuals to obtain information and, more important, to express their ideas that normally would have no outlet. Of course, we’re talking about the Internet, search engines and blogging. Traditional media outlets like TV and radio (except call-in talk shows) are just that: outlets in which the participants passively receive media output with limited ability to have their voices heard.

Blogging, personal web pages, etc. allow individuals to express themselves and to form collaborative virtual communities. In addition, as Friedman notes, small and medium size companies hire the most people, not the mega-corporations. Flattening allows these small businesses to compete better with the big boys. All of these developments provide tools to empower individuals like no other time in history.

These developments also could bode well for preventing wars. While some conservative thinkers fear (appropriately) the growth of Islamic terrorism and the rebirth of totalitarianism, Friedman shares something both interesting and hopeful: the Dell theory of conflict prevention. “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.” In other words, economic interdependence can trump political agendas. One can only hope that this theory is true! Of course there are no guarantees. Political leaders can force their agenda onto an unwilling citizenry. However the ease of being able to do this is getting more difficult as the world flattens.

Returning back to the individual, Friedman offers some advice to succeed. “The most important competition is now with oneself – making sure that you are always striving to get the most out of your imagination and then acting on it.”

Ted Kennedy and Universal Healthcare: Do As I Order Not as I Do

Capitalism Magazine has this excellent article on Ted Kennedy's surgery on his brain tumor and how he decided on which doctor would perform the surgery. This quote captures the essence of the situation.

[N]ever mind that Kennedy chose not to go to one of the many "industrialized countries that provide 'Universal Healthcare'." Apparently, Kennedy ignored Michael Moore's claims of the excellent healthcare provided in other “industrialized” communist and socialist nations that provide "Universal Coverage", albeit this is precisely what Kennedy seeks to bring to America at the point of a gun.

While the successful outcome of Senator Kennedy's operation depended on freedom, Kennedy has devoted his political career to legislating freedom out of existence. This is an irony that America's news media will evade, much less report.

This reminds me back when I first moved to Boston in the mid 1970s people were in an uproar over the forced busing of their kids to different schools to ensure racial intermingling. I recall hearing about someone who was fairly well to do who was a vocal advocate of busing but sent her child to private school to avoid the busing issue. When confronted with her double standard her reply, without blinking, was: "I'm not a slave to my principles." Yet she expects others to be enslaved by her beliefs. It appears Ted Kennedy follows the same MO. Nice, huh?