Obama follows my advice; and what is a lie?

Last blog I observed that Obama should come out and articulate three main goals for health care reform. He wisely did just that in his speech last week. Now there is something to debate.
But this blog is about the application of sound reasoning and logic to public discourse. During Obama's speech a member of the audience shouted out "You lie!" when Obama said that the reform bill will not pay for illegal immigrants.
This brings us to the discussion of what is a lie during public discourse.
All politicians, and salesmen, and ceo's and managers and pretty much all public spokespeople put "spin" on whatever they are saying. They try to word things in a way such that concerns are masked and positive attributes accentuated. These are not considered lies. Often such speeches are full of opinions and misleading facts. Often the opinions are summaries from reputable organizations, they are still opinions, although people generally considered experts might agree with them.
Other experts might disagree with those opinions, that doesn't make them lies. Other facts might provide evidence against the conclusions, that doesn't make having those conclusions lies. In the case of healthcare reform not paying for illegal aliens, we need to analyze what aspects of the reform might cause someone to think that it does; what aspect of the bill does the disrespectful member of congress feel contradicts the claim that illegals will not be paid for? What do people mean when they voice concerns about illegal aliens having their health care provided by Americans? What are they worried about?
In private conversations I have classified the health care "issue" as an economic issue, for which I was chastised. I suppose it was considered "insensitive" or too "dispassionate" to consider the issue an economic one. But it has been proven to be truly economic. The controversy is not about finding a cure for AIDS or cancer, streamlining FDA approval for various therapies, or breakthroughs in diet and exercise understanding, the controversy is clearly about who pays for all these things, and how much do we pay. It goes to the heart of what is the proper role of the federal government in society. Many people think of course the federal government, i.e. the American population as a whole, should provide health care for everyone regardless of economic circumstance. Many people think that each person needs to decide for himself what course he follows to provide health care for himself and how far his responsibility goes toward supporting others. This is what the debate is about. At some point a particular opinion will be put into law, but it will still be just an opinion. The only liars are the ones who refuse to admit this.

Application: Health Care Leadership

The health care debate, I suppose I should type "debate", is rife with examples of shoddy reasoning. Part of this is due to something I wish Obama would do: address the American people and describe his vision in clear terms. He is not writing whatever bill is being written, his leadership style is not one of emphasizing details, but articulating goals.
He needs to get up and say "Here are my three goals for healthcare" or two or four, but I believe in the magic of three. Three goals are easy to remember, they can balance each other, they can be measure against, they can be specific and unambiguous enough that action can be taken, but not so detailed that some trivia might derail them.
Ronald Reagan was good at this. He often repeated his goals: reduce taxes to improve the economy, defeat Communism worldwide, and reduce the size of government. When he spoke like this then we had something to argue against. You could argue against his goals, or you could argue against his policies and whether they would achieve his goals, and people did plenty of both. But the debate was understandable.
With healthcare the debate seems stuck on unarguable concepts.
First, do we or do we not have the best health care in the world? Well, what do we mean by "best"? What are the goals of a national health care system? This is what Obama needs to talk to.
Is the goal that everyone has access to health care? Is the goal that we have the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality? Is the goal that we reduce the cost of life-style choice health problems caused by smoking and obesity? Is the goal that everyone gets free checkups every year? Is the goal to reduce the amount of money spent on health care as a nation? Don't assume that the meaning of "best" is understood by everyone.
Let the opponents of reform also state their fears, not fears of death panels and abstract concepts like "government takeover of everything." Don't convolve the skill of our doctors and nurses to take care of us with the system that actually pays for all of it. The reform is not about the FDA and approving drugs and procedures, it is an economic issue.
Health care costs are going up. Why? What are the factors? Do we care? What should the American budget for health care be? We spend tons of money on crap, why shouldn't health care be a bigger portion than it is now? In the current economic downturn we have heard of nurses getting laid off. Does that make sense? Shouldn't we have more nurses? Shouldn't the system should be able to provide at least comfortable living for all health care workers? As we get older as a nation don't we need more doctors and nurses?
Let's get the debate on issues of substance, and let's start with Obama laying out his three goals.

Application: Sonia Sotomayor

Just a quick application of rhetorical logic to the discussion of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination for the supreme court.
Remember, I judge statements not by the the dichotomy of true or false, but by accurate or inaccurate, precise or imprecise, and if an opinion, then reasonable or unreasonable, valid or invalid. This discussion is not about Judge Sotomayor's nomination per se, her skill as a judge, or even her specific views and whether they are right or wrong, but just an academic exercise on how to apply rhetorical logic to the discussion.

Some complain that she is a racist, their evidence is that she made the following comment during a speech at a UC Berkeley lecture on cultural diversity:
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
Is this a racist statement? Does this make her a racist?

Sure, this is a racist statement, but it doesn't make her a racist. But remember, the meanings of words is only opinion. Words like "racist" carry connotations far beyond their dictionary meaning. I use Racism to mean a belief that people of a certain race are superior or inferior, because of their race. Certainly claiming that a Latina would make a better conclusion about certain court cases is racist. But it's also merely an opinion that is reasonable. Not that I would necessarily agree with it, but it is a reasonable conclusion for a contemporary American to make. Reasonable people can understand how living a certain life, with certain experiences, would allow a better understanding of certain situations than not having those experiences. A coach who has played the game before would be a better judge of talent than a coach who hadn' played the game. It is not fair to judge parents as good or bad unless you have been a parent. This idea is behind the concept of having a jury of peers. You want fellow citizens, people who live in your neighborhood and put up with what you put up with to be your judges. Of course there are limits. We don't want serial murderers to be judged only by other serial murderers. But usually, having similar experiences to another person would allow someone to be more fair towards that person, to ascertain what were truly good or bad attributes versus simply circumstantial misfortunes.

In contemporary America, it is reasonable to assume that race correlates with life experiences. This is becoming less and less so, but it still is above randomness. There are some Latina's who have lived a life of privilege, some who would relate to the wealthy corporation more, but in general wouldn't a Latina relate more to the immigrant or early generation life?

A good question I ask myself: If I met Judge Sotomayor at a party, would I come away with the impression of her being a "wise Latina woman" or "an experienced judge." Would I worry more or less if I had to argue a speeding ticket in front of her? Because she is a judge should she be considered "the Man?" Ah, but I digress.

So, her statement seems reasonable, albeit racist. Certainly not out of bounds during a lecture on cultural diversity. I haven't seen her whole speech, but we must also judge statements within context. I can imagine such a statement used to promote the thesis that we should have cultural, ethnic, racial, economic, etc. diversity among judicial appointments would be apropos. Making such a mildly racist statement during a conference on diversity is actually more accurate, one would want such statements to be made, to be considered, to be debated.

Let me analyze a counter point that some people make. They emphasize that she said "hope" and reason that this made the statement a "conditional" (whatever that means) and therefore not a true reflection of her thoughts. This seems specious. The phrase "I would hope that ..." is really a colloquialism about presumption, as in "I would hope a mother loves her child" or "I would hope that the pilot is not high on drugs." It is a statement of opinion so strong that its counter would be startling. I would hate for this to be used to mince her words, I think it is quite clear that she means that "Certainly a Latina woman could use her life experience to understand certain situations more than the typical white male."

So, does making a racist statement make one a racist? We've heard the saying "If you lie then you are a liar." I disagree. Saying racist statements, having some racist opinions, are part of normal life in race-conscious modern America. But we should reserve the word "racist" as applied to a person or a philosophy for those most egregious manifestations of the idea. There are people who are truly "racist", who belief that racial distinctions are necessarily important, who belief that various races should be oppressed or exploited for the benefit of other races. If we want to call her a racist to make the point that even well-educated, successful, ethical people can have racist opinions and need to be careful about their prejudices, then I would perhaps agree and could consider such a statement to be accurate. But if we want to call her a racist in the hope of smearing her reputation, then I would call that same statement inaccurate. When considering a supreme court nomination, we should avoid such ambiguous statements. If one is concerned that her statement is an example of her proclivity to judge not based on law, but based on some internal set of sympathies, then the rhetoric should be tempered toward away from inflammatory language that simply transfers the argument into semantics about what the word "racist" means. Frankly, it lowers the credibility of those making such arguments.

Truth

Let's get philosophical, or maybe just metaphysical.
I don't believe in Truth. Bare with me a while and see if you can follow me. It's not what you might think.
People use the word Truth as a noun, as if it's a thing in itself. It's really an adjective. It describes statements and mental models. As an adjective it is not an absolute. This does not mean I don't believe in reality, or that the true/false is not a useful taxonomy, or that there is not an objective measure of the truth of something. It just means that the word truth is not rigorous enough, not used precisely enough. When deep discussions are engaged in, I prefer terms like "accurate" and "precise" instead of "true."
Let's start with a simple, "true" statement: "The sky is blue." This is true, if you look up you can verify that the sky is blue. The statement is accurate. But it's truth is only as metaphor, it presumes that we know what the sky is, what the color blue is, in context we realize that the word "is" is not used as to define an equivalence, it is used to describe an attribute of something. The statement is true only for people who know what the sky is and know what blue is.
But what if the sky is overcast? Or what if it is nighttime? Then the sky is not blue? Perhaps the sky is grey, maybe there is pollution. The statement is not universally true because it is not precise enough. What about blue? We have divided colors into the primary colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. So we can agree the sky is blue as opposed to red or green. We agree that the color of the sky is closer to the color of bluebells than to roses. But is it exactly the color of bluebells? Is the blue of the sky the same as the blue of the sea?
I suppose we can bring the statement closer to "Truth" by being more precise.
"In the general, during daylight, the sky on earth has a color that is similar to various objects that reflect light of a certain frequency that we categorize as 'blue' , when the weather affords it and pollution is not too severe."
The statement is accurate, within its implied precision. It is certainly not universally true, it does not contain "Truth."
So why would anyone care about what I think about the sky?
Because we can apply this same analysis to other statements.
For example, I am tall. I am six foot five, which is above average for men of the 21st century. For professional basketball players, I am short, below average. If someone tells you "Papa Thor is tall" is he lying? Is he not telling the truth? I prefer to say that he is accurate, but not precise. Often statements can completely contradict each other, yet both are true, they are both accurate within their implied precision. "I am tall" is accurate and "I am not tall" is also accurate, depending on the circumstance. Indeed, if you were talking to a basketball scout you could say "He is tall" and even though most people would ascent to the accuracy of that statement, you might be lying.

Let's apply this to a more recent and more important situation. Please don't infer any political meaning to this example, it is just to illustrate my main point.

The US invaded Iraq with the reasoning being that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and therefore it was urgent for him to be stopped. After the invasion many people focused on whether there really were WMDs to be found. Although none were found I thought this was a red herring. Of course Saddam had WMDs, he had used nerve gas on the Kurds. Of course he thought he was developing WMDs, whether he was fooled by his own scientists or not is irrelevant. People still use that talking point, perhaps if we found WMDs then it would prove Bush was not lying. Other people point to the fact that we haven't found these WMDs as evidence that Bush was lying.
So notice the phrase WMD itself is imprecise. WMD could mean anything from nuclear intercontinental missiles to poison gas. Was Iraq an imminent threat to the safety of the US? Not at all. Was it urgent that we invade Iraq? Not at all. Even though the statement "Saddam Hussein is acquiring WMDs" is "true", it is not precise enough to be used as justification for the invasion. Is it a lie to be imprecise in order to convince people to agree with you?

Let's go to the other side: Is homosexuality a choice?
Both answers are true: Homosexuality is a choice, Homosexuality is not a choice. Should we use the "truth value" of these statements in order to enact public policy? Where is the imprecision?
The word "homosexuality" is too imprecise. Does it mean the inclination, the subconcious desire? Or does it mean the activity? I hope we could agree that we choose whom we have sex with, indeed I would hope we could agree that it was a mutual choice. Not everyone has sex with everyone they are attracted to. Can I control whom I am attracted to? Follow this thought experiment: I might meet a beautiful woman and be attracted to her. But then I discover she is my cousin and I am instantly unattracted, indeed I might be disgusted. Was that a choice? What if I were from a culture where such incest was not proscribed?

What's my point? Instead of claiming people are lying, or that statements they make are not true, apply the criteria of accuracy and precision. Some statements can be dismissed as inaccurate, some are simply imprecise. Realize that people's mental models, their paradigms of the state of things, are voiced in simple statements that are handy as mnemonics for what they really believe. People can say the same thing and be in disagreement, people can say opposite things and be in agreement.

Cussing

I don't cuss. Yes, I am better than all the people who do cuss, but not because I don't, that's just coincidental. I just never got into it. I suppose it's the non-conformist in me. Growing up, kids would start cussing and drinking and smoking, kind of just to show that "hey, I'm all grown up now" and I never was into that. Indeed, I had, and still have, a great aversion to acting all grown up. It bothered me as a kid that somehow I was less a person because I wasn't an adult, so I just internalized that I was all right the way I was and I didn't need to take on any of the accouterments of modern American adulthood. I suppose that is why I am stuck in eternal childishness to this day.
But back to cussing. Even the word just seems embarrassing. It's a version of the word "cursing", as in "I curse you to forever wander the earth with gnats biting you and boils over your whole body" which today has been twiddled down to the simple "Fuck you!"
The whole thing just never made sense to me.
The word "shit" meaning feces, or in verb form, to defecate, makes sense. For example, "you look like shit" although not literal everyone can understand the metaphor. You look like excrement, unappealing to the touch and smell, and to be avoided.
I had a roommate in college who would come home and notice me cooking some delicious goulash and he would peer in the pot and exclaim "what is that shit?" to which I would retort, "it is not shit, it is delicious goulash" and he would respond, nonplussed, "looks good, when do we eat?" So he would be using the word to mean "stuff". A like example would be "we need to move all your shit over here" to which the response would likely be "yeah, I got a lot of shit to move" and no one would be making any value judgment on the particular shit that needed to be moved. Ironically, I use the word "crap" in the same way and somehow manage to offend. "You have a lot of crap in here" is likely to evoke a defensive "It's not crap, these books represent the pinnacle of man's knowledge." Ironic in that if I had called it "shit" no offense would be taken.
"Fuck" is the most nonsensical cuss word ever. We all know what it literally means, but it kind of just means "double-plus" know like in the book "1984".
"1984" is a cautionary tale about totalitarianism. An interesting development in the book is the concept of "newspeak" where the government has decided that having too many words is confusing and starts to pare down the vocabulary, ostensibly to simplify communication, but actually to stifle thought. Removing words with subtle meanings removes the ability to communicate those subtle ideas, eventually removing the ability to even think those ideas.
So, instead of words like good, better, best, bad, worse, worst, the ministry of culture takes the one word "good" and adds "plus" to mean "better", i.e. "plus-good." And so "double-plus-good" replaces "excellent", "fantastic", "radical", "totally groovy, man" etc. "Double-plus-ungood" is used to replace "that stinks to high heaven." See how this restriction of vocabulary limits our freedom of expression? I think of "fuck" in the same way. It means everything, so it means nothing. "That's fucked up" is the same as "that is double-plus-ungood" in that it really conveys no meaning besides "I heartily disapprove." What is that you disapprove of? What aspect can I change to gain your approval? How does it displease in comparison to other non-pleasing things? All that is lost, the critic says "that's fucked up" and everyone laughs and we move on. No thinking, no critical analysis, nothing. It's all evisceral.
At best most profanity is a lie. Using and outrageous, shocking word should be reserved for truly shocking, outrageous things.
For example, the firemen entering the World Trade Centers on 9/11, upon noticing flaming bodies landing around outside, they can honestly exclaim "holy shit!" because it means "there is something so disturbing, so panicking, so beyond the pale of normal observance that I must use the most shocking phrase in my vocabulary: HOLY SHIT!" Seeing a high school kid make a difficult shot in a basketball game does not come close. Seeing a cat chase a much bigger dog around the yard does not come close. Getting a B+ on my sociology final does not come close. Those are all lies, just like the people who are always saying something is the biggest, or best, or longest, or whatever, and you get sick of them always having witnessed the most of whatever the topic is about, I get sick of people using profanity and outrageous, shocking expressions to describe the slightly non-mundane. Pull out your dictionary and get some new words, words that actually mean something.

Up late last night at a little dinner party. It's hard to get up on the day after New Years anyway, but remember I'm laid off? So I have some contract work I'm doing and I need some money so I'll go in.
How many people get their income in this way? I mean, how many people are not on a salary but get paid commission, or only when the job is finished? Which way is "harder"? Getting paid by the job makes sense to me emotionally and psychologically, it seems that follows the core principles of "capitalism", I'm incentivized to do a good job quickly. Big corporations are run like mini-communist states, I suppose some not so mini. So many people are paid not for actually doing anything, but because their boss likes them, and they put up an air of importance, and they can tune into whatever values their boss wants to project to his boss, and so it goes.
But doing contract work for a small business, the owner just wants something produced and he doesn't know how to do it himself, but he has a notion of what a good job is, so he pays me for my skill in getting the job done, not because of how I dress or I can schmooze or I stay late pretending to be "on top off" various "issues." Maybe the real solution to the economy and to force us to be productive is to just put a cap on business size?

Happy New Year

The new year came in watching Kathy Griffin embarrass Anderson Cooper on CNN. Is that what I've come to, watching CNN for the New Year's countdown?
Let's see, this year my Dad died, I was laid up in the hospital for five days with a severe tooth infection, I got laid off, my credit card bills are way too high, I lost a ton of money in my 401K due to stocks going down, might seem like a crappy year, but I know there are people worse off so I guess I can't complain(?)
On the plus side I've lost five pounds, I just got a new job offer, and I love the swirling snow outside the family room window, and Target Optical put a new screw in my glasses for free!