Thinkonomics E-Book

Robert A. Johnson

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 213

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

What should we really think about nuclear weapons? Has the music industry gone one step too far? Should we farm free range humans?!

Whilst you can't always answer the big - or small - questions in society, critically examining them allows you to better inform your opinions. Herein lies a plethora of critical thinking exercises to challenge your assumptions on a whole manner of things you almost certainly already have an opinion on.

These beautifully illustrated critical thinking articles will take your thinking so far out of the box, you'll forget there even is one.

Leseprobe

Thinkonomics

Illustrated Critical Thinking Articles

Robert A Johnson

Illustrated by Chuck Harrison

Thinkonomics by Robert A Johnson and Chuck Harrison

Copyright © Robert A Johnson and Chuck Harrison 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission from the publisher.

Published by Ockham Publishing in the United Kingdom in 2018

ISBN 978-1-910780-66-4

Cover by Claire Wood

Cover images by Chuck Harrison

www.ockham-publishing.com

contents

introduction

should music be free?

what will become of the ‘gentleman’s game’?

what is ‘vision’ and why do politicians not have it?

is mass political involvement/passion a good thing?

what effect does ‘media balance’ have?

are nuclear weapons good for the world?

can a refusal to use nuclear weapons ruin the deterrent?

why are we all so easily fooled by placebos?

should we be pro-choice or pro-life?

the moral worry in criminal allegations that we all like to ignore

prejudice or health promotion?

do we ask the wrong questions about public services?

how far should we expand ethics?

are we wrong about transgenderism?

what are men’s rights activists missing?

is sentience a spectrum?

is separating races the best way to attack racism?

how do we ensure a neutral media?

things i believe that are probably false or correlations i have not examined the causation for

do analogies work?

is consciousness mysterious?

can computers become conscious? and should we be worried?

paradoxes probably don’t exist

does the subjective nature of ethics doom rational government and economics?

is your brain entirely reliant on context?

obsession with culture over humankind

should the olympics be modernised?

what are the rules of satire?

why is the absurd funny?

why do we embrace labels, but not evidence?

waste and the back of a sofa analogy

what’s in a word?

why you shouldn’t demonise economic growth

introduction

There’s something innately funny and obvious about human bias. I fail to remember how many comedy sketches I have seen where one person tries in vain to crack a difficult lock, or to cut through a reinforced window, pulling the audience into his immense struggle, whilst his ally looks on – puzzled – right before turning the handle on the unlocked door.

Part of the reason that kind of sketch is so popular is because we relate. We’re a species of smart, rational apes, who regularly miscalculate the level or type of reasoning needed for any given situation. We’re capable of the most immense achievements imaginable, from space flight to ingenious medical techniques, yet reasonably often we’ll set about trying to solve an impossible problem when a simpler way around it was facing us all the time. Likewise, when faced with impossible questions, which should beget uncertainty, we settle for simple, certain answers.

These essays and drawings are a way of celebrating this quirk, but more than that, are an attempt to get you thinking about and questioning all manner of interesting things you may not have realised are even up for debate. From important matters such as politics and economics, or more general topics such as comedy or arts, herein lies a wide variety of critical thinking topics.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this is some sort of guide to revolutionary thinking about society; it isn’t. Whilst I think some of these short pieces sum up unique and often ignored problems that few actually think about, others are putting a genuine debate across: not because I always disagree with how we currently think about the matter, but because I think we should consider things critically and challenge ourselves to defend our ideas. Even if they were right all along.

There is no necessary connection, from start to finish, other than that each article is putting forward an opinion or a debate which is often ignored or indulged shallowly. I did not plan out this collection thinking “I have something on politics, now I must write a relatable one about TV”.

What ties them together is that they all start with a similar situation to that very first comedy sketch I mentioned. As far as I’m concerned, on each of these subjects people are trying desperately to cut through that window – or scale the roof to squeeze down the chimney – when they haven’t even considered trying the door. Sometimes, in fact, they’re using explosives to blow the windows out, and others didn’t even notice the house at all and are setting about a gnome in the garden. All the while, the door was wide open. And occasionally, just occasionally mind you, I’m going to join the other person in banging on the window, because that door was in fact securely locked and chained.

If you take one thing away from this book – whether you agree with all, some or none of the essays in it – let it be thatit never hurts to try the handle.

should music be free?

We seem to be in a regular cycle of debates within the music industry: about whether artists and record labels are paid fairly, about how we should control music piracy, and sometimes about how we should treat those people who ‘steal’ music online.

Strangely, though unsurprisingly, this entire debate is had on the terms set forth by those who profit most from music itself. Rarely do you hear from artists (of which there are many) who make music which they offer for free, or people who actually listen to and live by music. These groups of people far outnumber those who make it.

Once again, this is not surprising. The well-known artists in the music industry are those who make the most money, as they are the ones who appear on commercials, posters and TV shows, flaunted by the record labels who wish to invest in public advertising as a method of increasing their yield from this year’s cash cow. So those with a stronger and more recognisable voice are those most likely to desire the status quo.

We therefore end up in the strange situation of country pop songstress Taylor Swift and ‘perennially famous for the past’ Midge Ure discussing the ethics of music sharing, despite not having any experience other than making money from it. A bit like important debates on euthanasia being held only between ambitious, uncompassionate grandchildren.

Were the debate to be had on the terms of rational ethics, we wouldn’t start by asking how best to compensate record companies or artists, but whether they have a naturally assigned right to make money from music at all. That issue is not as straight forward as everyone thinks.

Suppose I manufacture and sell CDs, onto which I have recorded myself speaking various rhymes to a tune I have played out on my beginner’s bass guitar. In keeping with sensible rules in our society, I am wronged if someone steals those CDs. I made them, they belong to me, and I am willing to part with them for whatever amount of cash I deem necessary. To allow someone to steal them would be doing me a disservice.

Suppose, instead, that I wish not to contribute to society in any normal job, but also wish not to produce CDs as I don’t have the money to produce them, and instead desire to speak my bass-backed verses into a microphone and then sell the audio file for a living. Are we really saying that, if someone is to share that audio file for free, they have wronged me because it is my voice and my fingers making the bass noises, and I have a right to make a living from it? What gives me this natural sole right to every noise I make – such a desperate necessity, in fact, that people should go to prison for sharing it without me profiting?

This is quite a difficult question. The best way of exploring it is not to single out music, but to place it in context alongside visual media (such as movies and shows) and e-books/comics, and then to explore whether or not it is wrong to share anything which has no physical manifestation of production.

The simple argument – the one that is unanimously agreed within all media industries (including by Swift and Ure, who the media pretends to be both sides of the debate) – is that the internet has changed the game. The relatively obvious rules regarding physical manufacture and stealing governed how we developed and sold music before, but the internet allows people to ‘steal’ without physically ‘stealing’. Thus the same rules of ownership should apply to e-products as apply to physical products, to encapsulate this new form of stealing.

Fine… except… look back at that last paragraph. The argument correctly asserts that the internet has changed the game, but then draws the conclusion from that to be that people can now ‘steal’ without physically ‘stealing’. That’s not a logical conclusion, it’s an assumption. People can now share without physically stealing, but we have to be willing to baselessly assume that this sharing simply is stealing, as no material theft is taking place. Sharing does not remove an item which could otherwise be sold and give it free. Instead it duplicates an audio, visual or text-based file for someone else to enjoy, whilst the original remains untouched.

To assume that this sharing is stealing is to assume that a set of companies have a natural right to a certain level of profits, regardless of whether or not technology has naturally made the product they produce less profitable. I realise this flies against the company-orientated logic of modern society, so perhaps an example would help to make my point.

It is not illegal to go home and sew the pips of an apple in your garden to produce more apples. Mr Del Monte will not be sending you cease and desist letters if you grow a banana in a similar way (though some select forms of GM crop reproduction do result in such legal threats, but that is another matter). And, were we able to use new technology to sew Sainsbury’s apple seeds into a daily apple dispenser, which amazingly grew apples daily for us to eat for free, Sainsbury’s would have no ethical or legal right to chase us for ‘stealing’ from their fruit industry. So there is little logical precedent to consider the similar situation – the duplication of e-files – to be a horrendous moral act.

An alternative and more technologically capable model of media, in fact, exists: digital media being widely, freely available, whilst people can still buy physical or legitimate/convenient copies (such as through iTunes), and artists can make money from gigs, concerts, shows, merchandising, screenings, etc. Many artists already embrace and work within this model: check out bandcamp or similar sites for huge swathes of bands that do. Do we really believe that artists are precious flowers who can only create good music if they are picked up by a record label, or surrounded by an entourage – funded by the selling of e-files – or do we believe that some people have talent, and those people can make a name for themselves and succeed based on that talent in a fair market place? If you’re a music fan, you surely agree with the latter, else you have a very pessimistic view of that which you support.

This alternative system is different in one major respect: it leaves little room for record labels to have power or to profit to the levels they currently do. In a world where media is freely digitally available, the surplus millions for these companies drop off, and music is primarily decided upon by the listener or the advocate, rather than the advertising campaigns. Artists are rewarded more fairly and without huge cuts going to companies that control the flow of cash into music.

What’s more, how many of us would want to download Taylor Swift, if it wasn’t for the ad campaigns, glossy magazine covers and hyped up videos? The millions deemed appropriate to spend on these things would suggest that not many of us would if we weren’t persuaded by the daily marketing. So we may well end up being lured into listening, then morally reprimanded for doing so without paying, despite no theft taking place. There’s a serious problem with this reasoning.

It’s no wonder record companies are the ones fighting tooth and nail to keep the old methods, despite the rise of ‘piracy’. A rise, even whilst it is currently discouraged through law. But we should never have been listening to the debate on their terms in the first place; we are all stakeholders with an interest in the diverse and important world of music, and how sounds and noises are governed. Companies that make music should produce it on fair terms or not at all. If that means Taylor Swift has to work in an office during the day at the start of her career, before she makes a name based on talent, so be it.

As horrified as I am that these precious musicians might have to live around the rest of us – shocking, I know – my ethical reasoning can make peace with it.

what will become of the ‘gentleman’s game’?

There are two problems that immediately spring to mind when you see a title like that. Firstly, writing in 2015, what on earth is so special about any game that makes it so gender specific? Surely it isn’t a game related directly to, and accessible only by, genitalia.

Secondly, most people know the “gentleman’s game” is a traditional term that refers to cricket, which is a sport. And those of us that watch or play any sport, occasionally have that awakening of self-realisation, where we suddenly become conscious that we are doing nothing more than trivial and bizarre tasks, performed in an ultra-competitive manner.

Hitting a round lump of cork with a large piece of tree, not allowing it to go behind you and hit the further three wooden sticks that you are desperately striving to protect, is not a sensible thing for any adult to be doing. But then, alas, neither is shoving parts of your body into/on top of someone else’s in an affectionate manner, in order that you might create little genetic replications of yourselves that you will spend the next 18 years trying to mould into something like you. Sport, thus, is hardly more bizarre than even the most lauded of human activities.

My intention in this piece is not so much to point out that games are odd in general or that cricket necessarily is either, but to point to one of its bizarre quirks.

Like many sports, the last few decades have seen cricket increasingly populated by super fit athletes; personalities described best by terms like ‘driven’ or ‘by any means necessary’. Yet it has still maintained a sense of decency, a gentleman-like environment. Cricketers can be banned for swearing or even just disagreeing with an umpire, whilst there are regular pundit-led discussions about ‘the spirit of the game’ like we see in no other sport.

In the past, this ‘spirit of the game’ has been pretty loosely defined, but can essentially be defined as an attitude of honesty among the players. For instance, on decisions regarding catches. For those uninitiated types, a catch is a method of a batsman getting ‘out’ (meaning they are done for this part of the game, and must return to the dressing room, leaving the batting to other team members who have yet to get ‘out’ – everyone on your team gets a go at batting, until there’s only one batsman left). To be ‘caught out’ the ball must hit your bat or your hand and then be caught by an opposition team member before it touches the ground.

Sometimes an umpire can’t be sure if a fielder, who could be 50 metres away, caught the ball before it touched the ground (so isn’t a ‘catch’). Similarly, they may not know if the batsman just hit the ball with a tiny edge of the bat, or didn’t hit it at all. In the past, the ‘spirit of the game’ taught youngsters to just ‘walk’ if you have hit the ball and been caught out, not even waiting for the umpire to rule you as out. It also taught fielders to tell the umpire if they did not catch the ball cleanly before it touched the ground.

This kind of honesty has understandably been challenged by the ultra-competitive, lucrative, sponsorship-fuelled world of modern cricket. Batsmen who clearly hit the ball into a fielder’s hands have been known to turn to look at the umpire to check that they noticed, whilst fielders can be shown to be wrongly appealing for a catch despite the ball rolling along the ground before they touched it. Of course, one can’t be sure that any player is being dishonest, but it seems likely.

It is difficult to back up the claims that the ‘spirit of cricket’ now shines dimmer than it used to, though it is certainly an appealing argument. Similarly, it seems inevitable. When cricket was played by aristocrats who didn’t need the money, or by working-class folks for fun, there wasn’t a desperate desire to cheat or be dishonest.

I’m sure it must have happened even then occasionally, but the honour and honesty of teaching children the ‘spirit’ seems reasonably well matched with its opposition of competitive instinct. A fair battle between your raised desire to be honest and honourable, and your natural desire to compete and win. But when the lucrative salaries and sponsorship of modern sport are involved, the battle suddenly seems skewed in favour of winning rather than playing fairly. Competitive instinct becomes a hulking great monster, overcoming that desire to be fair.

Furthermore, as well as being inevitable, this change may be unimportant. Cricket is just a game of using pieces of wood to arbitrarily protect other pieces of wood. It doesn’t matter. We might get passionate about it, but the intentions involved in defending the piece of wood, or catching the sphere made of cork, are largely irrelevant. It is still just a game, whatever the rules.

Isn’t the important factor about fairness, though? We might reflect on the changing nature of sport – exemplified so obviously by the continuing transformation of cricket – as being detrimental to society. Do we want to be interacting with honest people, or with people who explicitly think about using us in whatever way will best achieve the outcome they want? More to the point, does sport even have this effect, or do people see it as a collection of games that are just fun? Is sport completely removed from how we act in society?

The answer, I would wager, is somewhere in the middle. Of course it’s just a game, and of course cheating sportsmen aren’t a sign that we are all becoming cheating, dishonest people. But the worry is that the effect that sponsorship and money is having, in cricket in particular, is all too symptomatic of the risks it poses to society. The defenders of the current structures will say that this money is necessary, either to ‘keep up’ with other countries or else to create successful teams. But the entire point of sport, or so we like to teach our kids, is that it’s the taking part that counts.

We like to think that learning sport is about learning honour, or teamwork, perhaps even strategy and thus critical thinking; about trying your hardest and testing yourself, whilst learning dedication. When sport evolves to be an ‘anything goes’ pursuit, some of that virtue will remain; the best will still often be those with new and better techniques, or dedication to put the time in. But we do risk losing the respectful, perhaps most honourable parts. The process of learning and playing is partly a goal in itself, and once we lose that in favour of the singular goal of winning, we seem to lose a lot of value.

We need to ask ourselves whether we would rather see our national teams competing at the highest level, or sacrifice a little bit of success for a longer goal: perhaps seeing our batsmen walk before they are ordered ‘out’, which might cost us the odd win, but will teach the new generation that winning isn’t everything. The relatively short-lived pride of victory, playing a conceptually arbitrary game, seems less important than the life lessons that children or adults can learn from the goal of playing sport in itself.

The example of English cricket, in fact, goes even further down this dividing line of success versus wider effect. English cricket experienced its most popular levels for decades in 2005, when they won a popular series versus Australia (called the Ashes) on national free-to-air TV. The media and large audiences were hooked throughout, and the players subsequently each received national honours. Around this height of interest, the ECB (English Cricket Board) had signed a lucrative new contract with pay-to-watch satellite television, meaning following series were watched by far less people, whilst attention to the sport waned.

Free-to-air channels could not compete with the fee that satellite TV could muster, and the ECB said such a deal was necessary; the sport was now popular enough to get them this hugely increased satellite TV money, and as a result more money could be pumped into grass roots cricket. But, of course, as the years went on, fewer youngsters were wanting to play cricket as it was no longer something they were exposed to on accessible television.

Many pundits, to this day, wonder if this was one of the great mistakes of English cricket; whilst the team have had some success, many theorise this success was sown in and before 2005, and that the lack of youngsters involved in the game will actually reduce the success of the national team in the long-term. The argument is persuasive, for obvious reasons. After all, your academy could be expensive and top of the range, but if the next potential legendary batsman never thinks about playing the sport – having never become attached to it – then you won’t be able to train him. The ECB will argue their ‘outreach’ is now better than ever, and that they now involve themselves in more school programs, but the point remains: will youngsters be attracted to cricket by the occasional coaches appearing at school, or to football or pop music on TV?

Sport, it would seem, has a lot of lessons to learn. Is short-term success always, or even often, allied to long-term success? What is the point of sporting success in the first place, if it’s creating a wider society which is less appealing to us? Perhaps the people running these sports nationally should be more culturally accountable; focusing on wider social goals, rather than overarchingly pursuing ‘the win’, which, however you look at it, seems like a ridiculous goal for any popular cultural phenomena in modern society. We know these things affect our kids, and we should be aware that arbitrary sporting victories aren’t as important as the type of world our children will be adults in.

EDIT: since writing this piece, the ECB has agreed a deal to allow terrestrial TV (the BBC) to show ten domestic “Twenty20” matches and two international “Twenty20” matches from the year 2020 (don’t get confused). This is arguably an implicit agreement that mistakes have been made, and a step in the right direction, but the likes of world-class cricket events, such as the World Cup or England vs Australia ‘Ashes’ series are not planned to be shown on free-to-air TV.

what is ‘vision’ and why do politicians not have it?

Martin Luther King Jr had it, so did Gandhi, whilst we all seem to think that our current politicians lack it. But what is vision?

When you consider what it really means to have vision (the inspirational kind, not eyesight) you’ll likely get different answers from different people. Some might see it as an ability to foresee how certain actions now will affect future outcomes, where others might see vision as the ability to see a time when a new truth becomes widely accepted.

The former definition is something akin to mysticism, if you’re spiritually inclined, or economics if you’re not. The latter is actually just a confidence in one’s own beliefs/reasoning: that one has discovered a ‘truth’ which will become accepted once others see it. Within society, we split this latter type of visionary further into two groups: arrogant and stubborn, or courageous and driven (which are often only divided by perception, given that people who are ‘driven’ must also be pretty stubborn, and courage often involves arrogance in one’s own beliefs). Still, the magnificence of the term ‘vision’ means these boring definitions aren’t always enough.

If we were to point out people from history that we deem to have vision, we would almost unanimously be using the second definition. People like King and Gandhi championed causes which had not yet been widely accepted but were rationally justified, rather than foreseeing any amazing catalyst, or making complex predictions. Vision, in this sense, is about courage and certainty as much as accepting a future vision.