I won't state this is common and therefore some kind of major concern. But I have been seeing this with increased regularity. Some people who write about an abstract and gender neutral person (eg. "the salesman") will write "she" when referring to this person, apparently just to be on the safe side vis a vis sexism. This is yet another case of being concerned with the wrong issues and expending energy on things that don't matter.¹

If you are a reader who actually finds fault with use of the male pronoun to describe a non-specific gender neutral person, stop victimizing yourself (if you're a woman) or stop sympathy-victimizing (if you're a man). (See how I neatly handled both cases, I'm so politically correct.)

Guy Steele said it best, on a completely different subject, in his talk "Growing a language":

To keep things short, when I say "he" I mean "he or she", and when I say "his" I mean "his or her".

But it really shouldn't be necessary to make this qualification to anyone who can understand that use of a pronoun in a context where it appears incidentally is not a covert plot to put you down. Monty Python also had an elegant and hilarious contribution to this discussion in Life of Brian.

1. Of course, this whole blog entry is just an example of that too, but I can still argue that I'm the only person arguing this issue while there's many more wasting their energies on the issue at hand. :P

I'm always perplexed when people say things like you know five years ago I was into Britney Spears. Boy was I stupid back then *self deprecating laugh*. Why would you say that? Aren't your observations and conclusions from 5 years ago valid anymore? Surely if you had reason to like her music then, you still have reason today? Maybe it's not your favorite anymore, but why would you want to cut yourself off from your own past? By induction, whatever beliefs you hold today will be equally laughable five years from now.

This is the kind of thing people say about childhood. They say they didn't like something then that they do like now, and say they were just being silly. Parents say things like when you grow up, you'll see, as if childhood is just a protracted waiting room, where everything is fake, before you can actually step into the real world and trust your instincts. Or they say when I was your age, I thought so too, as if that's going to convince me that even though they apparently were completely wrong at the time, they have a grip on things now. Above all, it's as if some people have completely forgotten what it's like to be a kid.

The absolute majority of conclusions I reached in childhood still stand today. I had good reason to reach those conclusions at the time, it wasn't on a whim. Some of them need to be revised now and again in light of new facts, but my process hasn't changed at all. You collect data by analyzing the factors that effect certain results and if the trend is consistent, it's a no brainer. In essence, a basic scientific process, although less rigorous and precise than the scientific method. Sometimes groups of factors form so called network effects that change the perspective on a certain question, but that is relatively uncommon. In any case, as long as you're open to new facts, you'll always be on top of things.

*

It's fun when kids challenge adults. Physical sports obviously discriminate against kids for their size and inferior strength. But a sport like chess doesn't, and in chess kids routinely compete and win against adults. How do adults respond to that? That'a amazing! Why is that amazing? It's certainly rare that someone has such a wealth of talent in some particular field, but it's hardly unexpected. Kids are not intellectually inferior to adults, they just have far less experience and knowledge in their favor.

A lot of parents underestimate their kids and don't realize that they actually have another fully functional person. Kids hate being treated as children, because it's a euphemism for treatment that's plain insulting. Kids have to be smart, if for no other reason than the difficult environment they grow up in. The first thing you have to learn as a kid is how to live in a dictatorship. I mean, sure the dictator smiles at you and thinks you're cute (and them underestimating the opposition is totally in your favor), but at the end of the day it's your freedom that's on the line here. One of the first things you learn is that you can suck up all you want, but if they mean no they won't budge.

Any kid worth his salt knows that repeated success comes through deception. Kids have far richer lives than parents know about. If you want to do something they don't want you to do, you can get your way as long as they don't know about it. But once they find out and you get that question have you been doing this even though we told you not to? you don't need the Soviet ambassador to explain that those missiles in Cuba need to go.

This isn't a game, this is your life. What we do out of necessity. They have all the power, so you have to appear to act in good faith. But you have an advantage: you know how they think. If they tell you don't do this and you get caught, you know that the second time being told not to do something is perfectly safe. No repercussions will come from this. The condemnation-punishment pattern is very obvious, and perfectly easy to predict which straw will be the final one to bring punishment. Parents could mix it up and stop being predictable, but frankly they're not clever enough. :D

So when parents don't want you to have access to something they think they can put it out of your reach and that will do it. What they don't realize is that between you coming home from school and them coming home from work there are buckets of time to figure out how to get it. And what's more, you're far more motivated than they are.

Kids don't care about political parties, but they do understand politics very well. The question is: how do I get what I want even when I'm relatively powerless? Some kids are extraordinarily talented at this, they basically exert power through a battle plan of crying, sulking and nagging. And to exert power from a position of such disadvantage is an artform in itself.

*

Another thing parents don't understand is that kids love to use their mind, and that doesn't mean doing extra homework. This is just epic amnesia, seeing as how no parent ever filled their spare time with more homework. When a kid tells you I'm bored, what can I do? you answer why don't you read a book. FAIL. You know, this is your fault. Since you are the self-appointed dictator of this kid's life, it's you who's limiting his options.

Kids enjoy being mobile. They hate walking, they prefer running around, climbing trees, playing games. You're not helping when all you're good for is taking a walk and doing some talking. Kids have a lot of things that rank higher than talking, there'll be plenty of time for talking later.

Life is an epic of learning and using your mind. It starts with putting the right shape of block in the right hole and pretty much keeps going until you end up an office drone. Whenever possible, kids like to learn with their hands. This is why it's good for kids to have a lot of toys and a lot of different toys. It's the kind of hands on learning that we would love to do ourselves, but unfortunately you can't open up an atom and play with the pieces.

In physics class, the question once was: suppose you have a ball coming at you from the right and you want to strike it to place it straight ahead (ie. divert it 90 degrees), at what angle should you strike it? It was shocking to see that certain people rather inexperienced in the field of ball mechanics didn't know that the answer is: slightly to the right to counteract the existing motion. Meanwhile, I was embarrassed to give the right answer cause it was so obvious. Sports is just about the best physics lab you could imagine, studying dynamics hands on. Meanwhile, no kid would ever come up with the idea of the gym where you watch tv and pedal a bike that doesn't move.

So it's not a question of whether kids want to learn. They do. You just have to let it be on their terms. Remember what kids don't have enough of? Experience. So use yours and figure out how you can stimulate them. For that matter, if they figure it out for themselves, get involved. If it's a video game, ask what it is about the game that is challenging, what it is that keeps them coming back to it.

*

It isn't a matter of intellect. It's a matter of experience and above all, emotion. Small wonder, since emotional stability is what adults struggle with themselves. So don't treat your kid as a child, treat him as an equally intelligent person who needs encouragement and a push in the right direction. This is really easy, cause you have all the power, but you still have to understand this person's motives and intentions, or you'll probably fail. Do yourself a favor and use gravity whenever you can (ie. align your common interests).

Lots of mistakes will be made on both sides, so don't dwell on the past, just figure out what happened and learn from it. With great power comes great responsibility, so use it for good.

The issue of altruism has long tickled our collective fancy. Our civilization admires acts of altruism, even when we as individuals rarely consider them in our best personal interest. Hence they remain exotic to our behavior. Those two facts are congruent; if it were commonplace it would not be admired.

So the question is: what causes altruism?

A completely "pure" sort of altruism, in the sense that the act you perform to help someone has no conceivable benefit to you, seems plain absurd. We just don't do anything for no reason, everything we do is motivated by something, a root cause of some kind. And if we have no relation to that cause, then it's absurd to undertake this action. As absurd as it would be to do anything that isn't motivated.

I suspect the reason why we idolize this notion is precisely because it makes no sense. It's a fantasy, and people like to indulge in fantasies that give you something for nothing.

The biological perspective

So apparently Darwin had trouble explaining altruism in terms of his theory of evolution, whose slogan is survival of the fittest. If an individual organism is fitter than another, why should the fitter help the less fit, who is also his competitor, when his self interest is better served by letting the competitor perish? It turns out that Darwin is not the last biologist, and others have since added to his work.

William Hamilton suggested that survival of the fittest was the right slogan, but with the wrong meaning. It wasn't exactly individuals that were competing, it was genes. And it wasn't so much about survival of individual as it was about survival of genes, which means the individual could be sacrificed as long as the gene survived (reproduction). Now, Hamilton wasn't a crackpot outlier, Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene apparently explains all about this, and other biologists have bought into this view as well.

So if selection is driven by genes, we're playing a different game. Hamilton explained altruism in terms of kin selection. That is, an individual will share 50% of its genes with its parents and siblings. Subsequently, it will share 25% with its grandparents and cousins, and so on. Therefore, the genetic material found in the individual's kin is going to be a lot more valuable than that in a completely unrelated individual.

Hamilton's rule is an equation that captures this insight. The equation (or inequation, to be precise) describes the balance in an altruistic act.

C < rB,

C : cost to the individual
r : genetic relatedness
B : benefit to the other individual

So if my cost is 0.25 (likelihood of survival when doing this), the relatedness is 0.5 (a sibling or parent) and the benefit is 1.0 (save the individual's life), then 0.25 < 0.5 x 1.0 and I'm likely to do this.

Notice that is r is zero, ie. this person is a stranger, then I will not lift a finger.

Hamilton's rule has never been proven, but it formalizes an intuition that we already have when we perform acts of altruism: there is an equation of some kind. It *is* a calculation we perform when deciding whether or not to help someone. When people are asked for a favor, the first thing they always say is "what is the favor?". We need to know, because we'll factor that into our calculation.

And the reason we calculate is obvious: it costs something. If you could help without giving up anything then you'd have no reason to refuse. But the only person we know who has that opportunity is God (and even he doesn't do it).

It also explains why acts of altruism that incur a high cost to the individual, with a low benefit, are not common.

Altruism is egoism

It's not really important that Hamilton's rule applies at a genetic level while our calculations are cognitive. What's important is that there is an equation that relates our cost against another's benefit, but not without some sort of relatedness factor that accounts for our benefit out of the deal. And this is very obvious, because if C < B is all that describes the relation, then every time we have a chance to help someone, and it costs us less than it benefits the other person, we would do it. Everyone would constantly go around helping other people and altruism would be as unique as oxygen.

The implication here is that there is no "pure" altruism. Everything we do is motivated by some kind of self interest. And the self interest is captured in the relatedness factor one way or another. In Hamilton's rule this describes the kin relationship between individuals, which works quite well in our world too. Family members help each other all the time.

But it can be any other reason. Even if you derive no material benefit from helping, you might still do it because you like this person and it matters to you that they get help (self interest), or because you expect them to reciprocate when the time comes (self interest), because you don't like to see people suffer (compassion, which is a personal need you have to help, again self interest), because you believe in a certain cause (which could be plain self interest, eg. global warming), because you care about society (again, self interest, what kind of society do I want to live in?), or for the rather more vague reason that it makes you feel good (self interest). Obviously, several factors can be present at once, which complicates the calculation.

Wikipedia has this sober debunker:

According to psychological egoism, while people can exhibit altruistic behavior, they cannot have altruistic motivations. Psychological egoists would say that while they might very well spend their lives benefitting others with no material benefit (or a material net loss) to themselves, their most basic motive for doing so is always to further their own interests. For example, it would be alleged that the foundational motive behind a person acting this way is to advance their own psychological well-being ("good feelings").

Not surprisingly, people are more eager to act when the equation is tilted heavily to the right. If you can give someone 10 bucks that will cause a benefit of 100 bucks (because you have 10x the buying power), that seems like a great deal. And while we don't get something for nothing, we like great deals like this. But again, if we had the opportunity to give out 10 bucks to benefit someone 100, and there was no self interest involved, nothing would stop us from going broke doing this.

A more meaningful definition altruism

People like to throw around slogans and one popular one that gets around is this one.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson

That's pretty much the canonical explanation of altruism the way we commonly use the term. Or is it? Well, according to Hamilton, in order to have altruism it has to be an act that costs something. And "how he treats someone" does not imply that. I can treat someone well without incurring cost by any measure of cost that I can come up with. How much does it cost to smile at someone as opposed to not doing it?

Of course, we can take this further and assume that Johnson was talking about acts of altruism. First question: how do we define cost? Is someone who is more reluctant to do it incurring more costs (in terms of overcoming their own skepticism) than someone who's naturally inclined to help people? For that matter, cost may be expressed in terms of risk. Conservative people would determine the cost higher ("this will probably cost more than we think") than people who are willing to take risks ("I'm sure it's nothing to worry about").

Does greater cost deserve more credit? What about cost-to-benefit ratio, should I get more credit for doing something if I'm not getting that great deal? What if I actually incur greater cost than the benefit is, am I good or bad? If I accomplish something small at great cost, that's a big waste, because I could have potentially helped someone else to greater benefit. It seems obvious, at least, that benefit-to-self-benefit is a clear case, if I'm doing something to help myself and only incidentally helping someone else, I won't get much credit.

All of these questions certainly come up when we assign credit for acts of altruism. But the pressing question is: is there some definition of altruism that agrees with our intuitive one? In other words, are there some acts that are "sufficiently selfless" to qualify as altruistic, to not be tainted by self interest? If we did that, we would move away from this misconception of selflessness and derive altruism as a personality characteristic of a person who appreciates certain values we like: personal freedom, free choice, compassion etc. And I think that is exactly what Johnson meant, and what we mean.