Republican epistemology

Republicans are convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that Obamacare is wreaking untold havoc on the American public.  Premiums are skyrocketing, businesses are not hiring, full-time workers are getting their hours cut, and doctors are no longer accepting insurance.  It is an unmitigated disaster.

There is no need for a study to show this.  They just know it. How?  It's obvious.  If you ran a business with 50 employees, wouldn't you cut a few to avoid giving them all healthcare?

Given this undeniable fact, they can't understand why anyone would be in favor of it.  Supporters of Obamacare, including the president, must want to destroy America.  That's the only explanation.  They are drunk with power.

Republicans know that illegal immigrants are dangerous to America. According to Steve King, for every child of illegal immigrants “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

How does he know that?  Again, no study is needed.  It's obvious.

What else do they know?  That our $17 trillion debt is crippling us, social security is going bankrupt, being gay is a choice, global warming is a hoax, evolution is just a theory, and gun control has no effect on gun violence. Also, American has the best healthcare system in the world.

It's becoming clear that the core problem with the extreme right is one of epistemology.  How do you know what you think you know?  What counts as evidence?  Do a few anecdotal stories confirm or invalidate a theory?  Does personal experience count more than statistics over a large population?

The left doubts itself, pays attention to studies, listens to the poles.  It has biases of its own, but understands that it should argue from facts to theories.  Rachel Maddow is exhausting as she lines up facts to support her claims.  The right skips all that hard work.  It reasons directly from a strong theory about human nature to policy.  Humans are entirely motivated by self-interest, for money or power, and individual self-interest is the best basis for policy.  With such a powerful theory, there is no need for facts.    

A beautiful illustration of this point, from the Daily Show:

Aasif Mandvi: "What about all the reports that say illegals benefit the economy?"

Denis Lynch: "I don't like to read the reports, I'm not a reports guy."

- Reports be damned!

- Illegal immigration costs a great deal of money.

- It's that simple!

- It's that simple.

- You'd think it would be more complicated.  With millions of people interacting with the economy in untracked ways.  You know.  You'd think you would want to sit down with a calculator, really figure this out.

- You don't need a calculator.

- No?

- No, I've done my research.  I go down to the border, I hide in places such as bushes, I see what's coming over, how many are coming over, and the numbers are breathtakingly scary.

Similar examples are rampant inside the bubble.  Think of Michele Bachman repeating the story of a woman she just met, proving that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation.  Global warming is a hoax, exposed by the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.  Mitt Romney will win the 2012 election by a landslide.

Republicans just know things.  

Total Recall by Google Glass

Google Glass records video effortlessly and unobtrusively.  No need to take out a device and point it at people.  It's enough to turn your head in the right direction.

This is a post about what will happen many years from now if they become a commercial success.  I'm mainly interested in Glass's ability to record video and audio.  The heads-up display presents tough problems, including the nerd image that will follow it around after Fred Armisen's review on SNL.  It might go the way of the Segway.  So drop the heads-up, and make it just a recording device. 

When would you want to put them on?  Maybe not every day, but it would be a great replacement for a handheld cellphone or camera at special occasions, weddings, graduations, and parties.  

Rent a pair for a party and watch as your use evolves.  At first, you warn people before you record, as if you have a normal camera stuck onto your face.  But you forget to turn them off one time and you realize, why bother turning them off and on all the time?  Just keep them on and set to record.  So what if a lot of it is dull, you can edit out the boring parts later.

Cameras capture the future.  You hold up your camera and ask people to say cheese.  If they blink, take another picture.  If something interesting happens, you may ask people to stage it again for the camera.  You decide to take a picture, then you take it.

This is a camera to capture the past.  It records everything in case something interesting happens.  When it does, just go back in your video stream and grab it.   The past has a much better user interface than the future. Taking a picture becomes the action of selecting frames from existing video. There are no split-second decisions to make.  No need to be on alert for the decisive moment. You have every moment.

To save space, the device keeps a window of a few hours.  If something happens you want to save, do it before it gets deleted.

After the party, you pick a few interesting images and post them.  Digital cameras, with near zero cost per picture, have already made it free to"shoot many, save few".  Continuous video fills in the gaps.  Everything you see is recorded, so nothing can be missed. 

You can concentrate more fully on the here and now.  You never have to decide to take a picture . . . now.  Put on the glasses and forget about them.

If this works, and people find it compelling, we are on the road to some revolutionary changes.  

First, you will not be the only one to rent a pair of Google Glasses for a party.  What happens when everyone at the party is wearing them, recording everything?  Now sharing and privacy become complicated.  There are lots of private conversations at a party, so each person has to decide which parts of their video streams will be made public, to which part of the public.  To tell a secret from everyone else, both people have to turn off their glasses for a moment, or tag the moment as private so neither person can share it.

After the party, you can go online and see what happened from various points of view.  Imagine an interface that shows several streams at the same time.  Or software that can stitch the multiple streams together into a 3D animated model of the party over time, and you will be able to watch it from any point of view.  You become a fly on the wall, floating from one conversation to the next.   The quality of the model at any location depends on the number of recordings from different angles of the same thing. 

In a few more steps, it's a new world.

People start wearing them not just for parties and special events, but for everyday life.  Walking down the street.  Going to school.  The day at work.  A day of shopping.  Who knows when something interesting might happen?  

Use grows widespread as more and more people see the benefit of continuous recording.  A pair of glasses is included with every cellphone.

People starting leaving them on all the time.  Why turn them off?  Eventually, you forget where to find the off button.  You keep them on your nightstand, still recording in the dark while you sleep.  Black motionless silence compresses well.  

Finally, as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, the motivation to delete old video fades.  Why bother?  Let it all accumulate, up there in the cloud.

In the end, everyone will have a complete video record of everything that happened to them in their life.  Most of it is boring and will never be viewed by anyone.  But there are moments that occur, the good times here and there, that you will return to over and over.  In retirement homes, reviewing your life will be an alternative to endless television. You can also watch the publicly available parts of other lives, of people close to you or not.  

There will be software that takes the raw material video of your life, extracts the interesting parts, and creates the movie of your life.  Or of your college years.  Or of yesterday.  Massively Open Online Reality TV (MOORTV).

You can always decide to shut off the glasses, or go dark for awhile. Meeting someone the first time, you'll know how often they go dark.  There is a general expectation that you will make much of your life available to other people.  You want some people to know a lot about what's going on in your life.  A student can make part of her stream available to her parents all the time, so they can watch any part they like.

But some people will want to share with no one.  Be very careful around them.  Will percent of time spent dark be a public measure of moral rectitude?  Will hiding nothing be not only a sign of exhibitionism but sometimes a sign of saintliness?

The combined video streams from all over the world can be integrated into an animated 3D model that constitutes a new kind of world history.  A model of the world over time.  Zoom down to any location and time, and watch what happened then.

But one thing could derail the whole train of events.  You look like a dork wearing Glass.  What is it that looks bad?  The heads-up display.  Nothing here requires a heads-up display.  You need a high-def camera, or two for 3D, and two microphones, that can wirelessly stream to the phone in your pocket and eventually the cloud.  And not look stupid. Some day it will be possible to pack all that into a frame that looks like normal glasses.