Really? Gay wedding photography heading towards the Supreme Court?

When I talk to people who are against gay marriage because "it isn't right," in a withering response I say to them, "you do realize that allowing gay people to marry does not require you to participate."  This has always been the linchpin of my socially progressivism.  I do my thing, you do your thing, and I am HAPPY to have you not like it, just keep your stupid nose out of my stupid business.

So along come the rest of the progressives, the kinds of people who give progressives a bad name.  The kind of people who give life to the slippery slope arguments that the gays will insert themselves in everything if not banned by law from most public institutions.

A woman in New Mexico asked a wedding photographer to photograph her gay wedding.  The wedding photographer said that she only photographs "traditional" weddings.

So before we go down the rabbit hole, how is that not the end of it?  Why would you ever even consider hiring a wedding photographer who didn't want to photograph your wedding?  Is there a shortage of gay-friendly photographers?  Is there even a shortage of gay photographers?

Do you really think you would like the job that a photographer who did not want to photograph your gay wedding would do?  Are you going to sue them for violating your civil rights if some of the pictures are blurry and they don't get a shot of you dancing with Aunt Mildred who is 101 years old and came all the way from Poughkeepsie to see the wedding?

But no.  Here I am a totally died in the wacky wool social progressive. And I look over at the other wacky social progressives, and for some of them, not being stopped from having everything they want is not enough!  They need the people who they beat in legislation, the people they beat in courts, to bow down before the great fascist power of their self-righteous sodomy!

Upon verifying with the photographer that she did not photograph gay weddings, our blushing bride filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission for discriminating against her based on her sexual orientation in violation of the NMHRA And on it has gone from there in a clown-car journey from court to court.

I can't imagine paying a photographer who didn't want to photograph my wedding to do it.  I would expect crap from them.

I can't imagine there aren't wedding photographers all over the place who would be happy to photograph a gay wedding.

I can't believe there is no American court that can moot the case by pointing out that "you'd have to be a f***ing idiot to hire a photographer who did not want to photograph your wedding.

I can't believe I am not seeing other commentary pointing out the pure basic nastiness, stupidity, and fascism of bringing legal action against a photographer who did you a favor when she said she didn't want the job.

Why do we need to interfere with every person out there and get them to kowtow under the law to a particular set of social choices?

Honestly, how do I argue with people who want to ban gay civil rights because they don't want gays inserting their influence into their families' lives by pointing out that "allowing gays to marry does not obligate you to participate."  Because apparently it does.

What about NSA spying?

In briefest summary, we have learned that the NSA is collecting and saving information about every phone call in the US.  One assumes they are analyzing this as well, that they are creating graphs of who talks with whom and how much.  Presumably on demand they can go back and see who you were talking to at a certain time, and find accomplices to various activities they discover by doing so.

Yes I actually do have the same INITIAL reaction as everyone else, well almost anyway.  Pretty much, WTF?  But then my internal reverse engineer takes over and I ask myself questions like: 1) does this really matter?  2) Is this sort of thing inevitable with current technology (and therefore less worth tilting against)?  3) Is it really so bad, or is there something very much like what is going on that would not be really so bad?

SO here is a thought I just had that prompted me to write this post now.  Suppose there was a telephone system which was programmed so that it only worked for "good" calls, but simply did not work for calls that involved plotting or planning illegal violence.  And it did this automatically, no human intervention.  When you called your girlfriend to talk about her shopping trip it worked, when you called her to threaten her because you think she was paying too much attention to your brother it would not work.  When you called Walmart to get a price on a gun for self-protection it would work, but when you called them to ask about the price of a gun you wanted to commit armed robbery, it would not work.  When you called about flight school because you wanted to be a pilot, it would work, but when you called to learn how to take off, but did not need to learn to land, it would not work.

OK, such a system might be difficult to implement, but SOME of you are  already thinking of ideas about how you would approach this.  But this post is not about a new technology, it is about what we think of this feature set, good idea or bad idea?

As I have described it, it seems like a GREAT feature set to me.  A tool that can only be used for good.  No other human issues.

7 Minutes of Great Sci-Fi

They're Made Out Of Meat  A 7 minute sci-fi movie that resolves the Fermi Paradox.

Why the machines let us live

OK so I'm reading this nerdy lesswrong.com sequence that has somehow incorporated a lot references to the matrix in it.  And the nerds (some of them) arguing over whether the matrix had flawed explanations in it (!)!.

And I came across this comment from Gwern which for reasons I won't go in to now (you're welcome) I just loved to pieces and wanted to upvote 1000 times.

The part that I loved:

...MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

Me on vacation.

Recreating?  Re-creating?

I don't think of myself as a vacation person.  But my family loves them some vacations and particularly loves Kauai.  Julia thinks of The Point at Poipu as one of her houses.  She has been visiting there since she was born.

So here I am one week into a two week vacation in Hawaii.  I brought my laptop with me, and not just so I could book ATV tours.  I read my work email.  I answer some.  Is this a vacation?  Is this the break from work that I read you "need" so you come back re-charged?  Re-vivified?  De-zombieized?

You know what?  I think it is.  What I am NOT doing is anything I don't feel like doing.  Yes, I'd like to send my app to the VP at work who asked for it.  But reading his email, it seems pretty clear he thinks it is something else (something I CAN create).  So I am somewhat paralyzed, do I do what he asked, send him the app I wrote about, regardless of my concern that he thinks it is something else?  Do I write the new app, knowing full well that "it is a few days work" is B.S., for me anyway it is a minimum of 2 weeks work?

I'm on vacation.  What I do is read randomly through the web.  I have been wonderful places on the web in the last few days.  A wonderful blog by a VC in New York City.  (Ignore his vacation stuff, its too vacationy.)  He leads me to Seth Grodin, eh.  But he leads me to kickstarter where I get a much better/different idea about the relative importances of smartphones, android, iphone, and... Sensors!  Sensors!  (I had to say that twice because there were two links I wanted to share.  Try them both! (new start-up idea... hyperlinks that bring you to two web pages instead of just one.)).

And how did I find that VC?  Oh yeah, one of the best essayists in the universe, Paul Graham wrote about him.  And Paul was giving me leads on how to approach my work more effectively.  And Seth was warning against pandering.  So I don't have to be too responsive to a VP's request, I should at least consider doing something he might really be interested in, on my schedule not his.

And I can follow Paul's advice to put these at the top of my To Do list:

• Don't ignore your dreams; 
• don't work too much; 
• say what you think; 
• cultivate friendships; be happy.

That looks like re-creation worty of a vacation to me.  

Wireheading?

I just read a nice mini-scholarly presentation on "wireheading."  Wireheading is basically addiction distilled down to direct stimulation of the parts of the brain that are (probably) the essence of what makes something addictive.  The article is intriguingly entitled: "Are wireheads happy?"  A great question.  I have been addicted, I think, to alcohol and little cigars at times.  I suspect I am addicted to food even now.  I think I work compulsively (although not all that much) and do the things I do on the internet in a sort of compulsive-addicted way.  Who knows for sure where the line is or even if there is a line.

I smoked small cigars, about 3 a day, for about 2 years.  This is 20 years ago by now.  I was quite content every time I smoked one, they pleased me in many ways.  I didn't stop because they stopped pleasing me, but rather because I realized after 2 years that I was de facto addicted and was concerned about the cost of smoking them (primarily health and disgustingness).  Since then, I have smoked cigarettes (my preference) or cigars at parties when drinking.  Probably never more than about once every 3 months, and now less than once a year.  But my feeling whenever I smoke them is pleasure and satisfaction.  I am happy to smoke them and look forward with pleasure to smoking again, even as I forego opportunity after opportunity to smoke.

When I diet food is extremely satisfying.  It would be hard to say I am not happy when I am eating.  When I am not dieting, I am not as happy at all when I am eating, but I still have the desire to eat.  I am obese and consider that my eating patterns have a lot in common with chemical addiction.

When I have allowed myself the pleasure of various video games I have taken pleasure from them for days at a time, but still felt the compulsion to keep playing them even when the amount of pleasure or happiness was way down from its starting value.  As with cigars and alcohol, it is much easier to not play them when I am not playing them at all then when I am trying to play them in moderation.  Even so, when I am not playing them I am fully aware of how much I will enjoy playing them if and when I take them out of the penalty box.

Decades ago, I saw before me two paths, one using drugs regularly to seek pleasure, another being engaged in real life with other people.  I felt the drug path would do a much more complete job of wiping out the real life path as a viable choice, whereas it would always be easy to switch to the drug path later.  More than 35 years after making the temporary choice against drugs, I am less attracted to the drug choice than ever.  Even so, I still miss drugs, if not every day probably a few times a month.

I don't know what the point of this blog entry is, which is I suppose why I don't add much to the self-help literature.  Its just a part of my story.

When no correlation tells you about a strong correlation...

Robert Wiblin summarizes a blog post at The Atlantic.  If you'll read only one but have a little more time, read the Atlantic one, it has figures and more examples of the phenomenon.

So the phenomenon is that for some kinds of observables, correlations with other observables give some interesting results.  The one that drew me in: among Republicans, favoring marijuana legalization has absolutely no correlation with favoring wealth redistribution (and there are significant numbers of Republicans on either side of these issues).  Does this mean that these two policy issues are decided in completely unrelated ways in a Republican's mind?  That would be the vanilla explanation.

But there are two things that break that explanation.  One: favoring wealth redistribution and favoring marijuana legalization are highly correlated among the population as a whole.  So does this mean the Republican party somehow attracts people for whom these issues are unrelated?  No.

Consider 4 classifications.  Let me nerd out a bit to save some typing, G means you favor grass (marijuana) legalization, R means you favor wealth redistribution.  Then ~G and ~R mean you are against these things.  Then there are 4 possibilities: you are one of (G,R), (G,~R), (~G,R), or (~G,~R).  From what we know of republicans, one might expect it to attract social conservatives who might include (~G,R) and (~G,~R) people.  One might expect it to attract economic conservatives who might include (G,~R) and (~G,~R).  Heck, there might even be a few libertarians who are probably (~G,~R).  But what of (G,R)?

The punchline is that (G,R), people who favor both marijuana legalization and wealth redistribution probably belong to a different party than the Republicans.

So there probably are plenty of connections between how people think of marijuana legalization and wealth redistribution.  And in general, these things are correlated positively.  But then when you confound (or collide) that with a third thing, identify self as Republican, you get the interesting result that G and R are uncorrelated (a mathematical result) which might lead you to conclude incorrectly that Republican's think of G and R as unrelated while non-Republicans think they are related.  In fact, each Republican probably thinks they are related, but the fact of Republicaness biases away from (G,R) strongly enough to counterbalance the expected correlation of (~G,~R).

Other fun conclusions these blogs:  1) if you want good food in a restaurant go to older restaurants that are unfashionable and otherwise unpleasant: if food and atmosphere cause a restaurant to survive than surviving restaurants with better atmosphere probably have worse food.  2) If you want to choose a good actor from among the unemployed actors, pick a not-particuarly-good-looking one, because employed actors are probably good-looking and/or attractive, leaving behind few good-looking good-actors.

If you can think of any other counter-intuitive anti-correlations, please post them here in a comment.  ESPECIALLY if exploiting the anti-correlation might make me money. :)