Universities are also supposed to be pure meritocracies, rewarding students and faculty primarily on their academic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the structure of modern universities and their surrounding educational-industrial complex includes myriad insidious elements that exacerbate the disadvantages faced by less financially secure students. Here are some of the worst offenders.

1. Student loans instead of grants

Student loans are supposed to provide funds for full time students to live on during their studies. Student loans systems generally suffer from two serious problems. First, the amount of money a student receives depends on their parents’ income, regardless of whether those parents are willing or able to contribute to their childrens’ education. Second, in the U.S., Canada and many other countries, you have to pay them back. A $120 000 loan to go to medical school is much more daunting to the child of a medical secretary than to the child of a neurosurgeon. (In some countries, like the U.K., you only pay back a portion of your student loan depending on how much money you make after your education.)

2. Busy work

Universities in general (and business schools in particular) inundate their students with repetitive, unchallenging assignments – busy work. Busy work serves no pedagogical purpose (by definition). You learn nothing from it, and it does not separate good students from bad students. It is primarily used in subjects like business where the material is straightforward. Since faculty cannot or will not provide challenging problems, they make getting through the endless barrage of menial tasks the challenge. This discriminates against students who have to work part time (or even full time) to fund their studies.

3. Lack of evening and distance classes

Again, as many poor students have to work to fund their education, offering classes only during conventional business hours forces students to choose between attending the class or making the money to pay for the classes.

4. Participation marks and punishing absenteeism

When a student has to choose between a work shift and a class, between next month’s rent money and this term’s participation marks, poor students’ marks suffer one way or another. Punishing absenteeism also facilitates pandemics, but that’s an issue for another post.

5. Market-priced student housing

The purpose of a University is not to educate the populace and produce high-quality research, not to turn a profit. When universities are located in areas with high real estate prices, they can accommodate financially challenged students by providing housing at cost. However, where “at cost” means $400/month, and similar apartments in the area go for $800/month, universities smell the opportunity to extract more money from students and provide “market-priced student housing”.

6. Pressuring or forcing students into volunteer work

When I was an undergrad, many professional programs pressured students to engage in “resume-building” volunteer work or unpaid internships. Volunteer work is all well and good when you’re on a full scholarship and daddy pays for your Benz. When you’re already pulling 20 hours/week cleaning a movie theatre to pay your tuition, volunteer work is money out of pocket, plain and simple.

7. Pathetic pay rates for research and teaching assistants

Many faculty view students as cheap (if not free) labour. I got paid less per hour as a research assistant in undergrad than most gas station attendants. Worse, foreign students’ visas often stipulate that they can only work within the university, so they take these jobs regardless of the pay, removing the pressure to increase salaries for lack of willing workforce. Poor students have to turn down more educationally beneficial research jobs in favor of better paying menial labour jobs. In the words of Chris Rock, that is fucked up.

8. The tuition-economy link

Recently the UK elected a conservative government, which drastically cut university funding. In response, universities are tripling their tuition fees, in the middle of a recession. Where tuition fees are directly linked to the economy, they are highest when people have the least money. This flies in the face of basic Keynesian principles … but then, since when have conservatives ever understood Keynes?

Conclusion

One could argue that there are good reasons for all of the practices criticized above. I would simply counter that improving social mobility in society and reducing class discrimination is more important.

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1) Learn to shave with a straight razor

While shaving isn’t uniquely male, it is something most men do, and a close shave is something to be proud of. Both men and women will notice a truly close shave. Unfortunately, no two, three, four, five or 16 blade razor can do the job. These fisher-price razors yank and chop your facial hair. The only way to get a perfect shave is with a literally razor-sharp blade placed directly against the skin. Yes, while learning to use a straight razor you will cut yourself and get razor burn. But if anyone notices, you get to say, “oh, yeah, I’m learning to shave with a straight razor.” And when they reply, “why on earth would you do that?” you get to say, “because it’s manly!”

2) Play a team sport

Team sports like football, basketball and hockey are essentially popular war games. Yes, they’re good exercise, fun and improve sexual performance. But aside from that, they allow a man to exercise primitive battle instincts in a constructive environment. And you don’t have to be skilled to have a good time.

3) Cook over an open fire

Ancient man cooked meat over an open fire, and there’s still something deeply satisfying about the sight, sound and smell of roasting meat. Sorry, veggie burgers don’t cut it.

4) Join a martial arts club

We all know guys who sit around drinking beer and watching MMA. This is not manly. Getting intoxicated and gaining weight while arguing about the finer points of movements you have never tried is false manliness. MMA isn’t even manly. When a real martial artist hits you, you go down. Often in pieces. To get in touch with your inner power, try a traditional martial art. The precise art is not as important as finding a teacher who inspires you and club where you can train safely.

5) Play paintball

Like team sports, paintball is just an elaborate, stylized outlet for your battle instincts. With a paintball gun you can live out all your John Wayne fantasies without actually killing anyone, or more likely, getting shot, shooting the wrong guy, or ending up in prison.

6) Go camping (not glamping)

Ancient man covered miles of wilderness hunting game, traveling between villages, or just getting some peace and quiet. Hiking and camping is an excellent way to reconnect with your ancestral heritage. Note: camping is not the same as glamping. When you drive to your campsite, set up on a pre-made platform, sit in the nearby hot tub for an hour, party all night, pass out drunk on the picnic table, wake up and hit Starbucks on the way home, that’s glamping. Camping is when you put your gear in a pack, hike to your campsite, cook half a mile away so as not to attract bears, and go to bed early because you’re exhausted from hiking all day with a heavy pack. Glamping is false manliness. Camping makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

7) Watch a Manly Movie

And when all else fails, just have the boys over and watch a manly movie.

See also

Macho Men vs. Real Men: Top 15 Differences

Five Things that Make Gyms a Plague Upon Fitness

1. Find a Reasonable Supervisor

The single most important part of a PhD is finding the right supervisor. Most people will tell you to try to work with someone who is 1) a (famous) prolific researcher, 2) brilliant, 3) similar in research interests. Bullshit. The most important quality in a supervisor is reasonableness. Your supervisor can indefinitely forestall your graduation and make your life so miserable you’ll quit. If you get an unreasonable supervisor, you’re hosed.

Many academics become prolific by cracking the whip over an army of grad students and then taking credit for their hard work. Worse, truly important research is often time-consuming, so those who do the most important stuff rarely publish the most articles. Brilliance is nice, but not necessary for the same reason as overlapping research interests: your PhD should be your own. Never mind your supervisor’s agenda, or your department’s, or your school’s. You need to pursue your interests, your project, your way – otherwise your job talk will be uninspiring and you won’t get a good position.

2) When Choosing a Program, Focus on Past Graduates

Most people compare programs based on two factors: the overall reputation of the school and the research reputation of the faculty in your department of interest. This strategy suffers from two problems: 1) famous universities aren’t necessarily strong in your particular field; 2) having a bunch of prolific researchers does not imply that the school’s PhD program is pedagogically sound.

To choose a program, ask consider two questions. First, where did previous students from this program get jobs? Second, how long did they really (not officially) spend in the program? If students like you went to this program, and got the kind of job you want after a reasonable time, then it’s your kind of program. Of course, you also have to watch out for changes in the program or faculty.

3. It Usually Takes Longer than you Expect

Longer than they tell you. Prospective students are commonly told fairlytales about three- to four-year programs. In some countries, like the UK, this is still accurate because university funding is sometimes tied to program duration, but this is unusual. Find out how long previous students took, and don’t take their word for it. PhD’s have ambiguous end-dates: there’s the date you finished writing your thesis, the date of your defense, the date you submit your corrected thesis, the date you accept a position, the date you begin your position, and the date you get your diploma. You want the last one. When did you start, and when did you receive your diploma? Seven or more years is terrible. Six is bad. Five is realistic. Four is fantastic. Three is a myth. But it varies by field.

4) Be Damn Sure you Want to do This

As far as I can tell, PhD students fall into one or more of three categories: aspiring academics, egomaniacs, and people just aren’t sure what else to do with their lives. If you’re not an aspiring academic, think long and hard about whether you really want to go through five to eight years of hell, followed by an anticlimactic post-doc position. Then read every strip at PhD Comics, and think about it again.

5) Difficulty comes from Politics, not Research

PhD’s are supposed to be difficult, and they are. However, they’re not difficult for the reasons you would expect. A PhD is supposed to be difficult because doing good research is wickedly complicated. A PhD is actually difficult because of all the political wrangling, endless debates about inconsequential minutia and general academic assholery.

6) Go Big or Go Home

Doing good research is easy. Pick a real group of people who are in trouble, and use all that expert knowledge you’ve accumulated to improve their lot in life. It doesn’t matter if you’re in physics, medicine, anthropology, or English, helping real people is a powerful thing. The trouble is, all the while you’re trying to do something real, people around you will bitch and moan about how it’s risky, too novel, methodologically questionable, and doesn’t make a clear academic contribution. During my proposal defense, I desperately wanted to say “If you’re not going to help, get the fuck out.” In hindsight, I wish I had.

7)Most Academics are Simultaneously Geniuses and Morons

At the end of middle school, someone always gives a motivational speech about how “when you get to high school, you won’t be spoon-fed anymore – you’ll really have to work hard.” And then you get to high school and the spoon-feeding continues. And then you get the same speech at the end of high school, and you get to university, and the spoon-feeding continues. And then at the end of undergrad, you get a similar speech, but with the “now when you get to grad school you’ll meet some of the smartest people in the world and they’ll knock your socks off” twist. Yeah? Where?

Academics are almost all intelligent, because many of the tests you have to pass to get in (LSAT, MCAT, GRE, GMAT, SAT, etc.) are glorified IQ tests. The trouble is, intelligence isn’t the only thing you need to become a great intellectual. You also need rationality, creativity, and persistence. And the other trouble is, none of these are highly correlated with the kind of IQ. The result of this misalignment between entrance criteria and required characteristics is an academic system populated by intelligent yet irrational people. This leads to all sorts of hilariously demotivational exchanges:

“I never authorized you to buy that!”
“Yes you did. You said right here in this email, ‘go ahead and buy it.’”
“Yes but you were supposed to confirm first.”

“You should have used grounded theory”
“Yes, and I would have, if you hadn’t told me not to when I proposed it three years ago.”

“I don’t think you should rely on this reference.”
“Then why did you send it to me?”

“You’re supervisor didn’t actually read your proposal, did he?”
“Considering that the answer to his question was in the abstract, I suspect not.”

“Just pick the survey questions that will give you the answers you want.”

Conclusion

In summary, don’t do a PhD unless you’re absolutely certain you want to be an academic or you have some other extremely compelling reason. If you decide to do one anyway, choose a school that graduates students quickly and gets them reasonable positions. Then find the most reasonable, easy-going supervisor you can. Choose an ambitious topic that matters, and go make someone’s life better. Then do your best to ignore all the negative bullshit around you, and keep putting one foot in front of the other until you can stand up at a conference and identify by name real, living, breathing people whose lives are better today than they were yesterday because of you.

I have personally met computer science professors who believe each of the following things. I make no claims as to how widespread these beliefs are; you can judge that for yourself.

1. Java is a good first teaching language

I don’t know how many computer science programs start teaching programming using Java, but there are more than a few, and that’s too many. When you’re going over variables, loops and conditionals, the object-oriented overhead of a language like java is unnecessary and confusing. Inquisitive students can’t just memorize things (i.e. public static void main (String args[])) without demanding to know what it means and why it’s there.

2. Machine language is “basic”

Comp Sci people seem to be terribly confused about what ‘basic’ means. When one learns to drive a car, starting the car, making a right turn, a left turn, parking, etc. is basic. Building a parallel gas-electric hybrid engine is not basic. Driving a car is more basic than building one because the latter requires significantly more expert knowledge than the former. In the same way, using a simple scripting language requires less depth of understanding that writing in machine language; therefore, computer science education should start with higher level languages and proceed to lower level ones, not vice versa.

3. You should write code on paper before you write it on a computer

Writing code by hand is stupid. It is entirely inconsistent with the interactive and iterative design process that comes naturally to hackers and painters alike. Professional software developers make extensive use of API documentation, reference guides, forum discussions, etc. to make troubleshoot problems and make their code more efficient and effective. Writing code by hand tests your ability to write trivially simple software without making errors. Real programmers must be capable of making complex software and detecting their errors with a variety of automated tools. Teaching or testing coding using pencil and paper is inconsistent with both the natural mode of human action and the practical realities of software development.

4. Lectures are an effective method of teaching programming

Programming is like algebra. You can’t learn how to write code by watching someone write code on a blackboard or listening to elaborate explanations from professors. You can’t learn math from watching someone do math. You learn to do things by doing them.

5. Algorithm design is learned by reading existing algorithms

Designing algorithms is about finding innovative solutions to difficult problems. Algorithm design courses are about studying existing solutions to rather simple problems. Learning how a particular problem can be solves provides approximately zero insight into how to solve problems you’ve never encountered before.

6. You can just ‘pick up’ prolog in a week for a course

There’s this crazy belief among Comp Sci. faculty that all languages are basically the same, so after learning the principles behind languages you can use whatever. This is bullshit. This is like claiming that since someone studied Spannish grammar in grade school, they can speak Spanish fluently, in any of Spanish, Mexican or Columbian accents. The leap between structured and object-oriented programming is huge, and it pales in comparison to the leap between object-oriented languages and declarative languages.

7. Exams measure understanding of programming

Teams of professional programmers spends months and years building intricate software systems in response to poorly-understood, ill-defined and changing problems. To accomplish this, they employ API documentation, online tutorials and forum discussions, team problem-solving sessions, reference books and an infinite number of phone-a-friend lifelines. Exams test your ability to write simple code to solve a trivial, well-defined static problems, without consulting and references. One is about resourcefulness, the other about memory. Exams test the wrong thing.

8. GUI’s are not an important aspect of learning to code

At the university where I did my undergrad, it was easy to finish a B.Sc. in computer science without ever building a graphical interface. While I agree that many software projects do not have graphical components (e.g., developer APIs), to marginalize GUIs as some kind of specialty endeavor is short-bus crazy!

9. Programming Requires Calculus

I have been told that development involving sophisticated work with graphics and animation involves calculus. Outside of this particular subfield, however, I haven’t seen much calculus in software development. Certainly I’ve seen a lot more GUI development than graphics.

10. Linux will rapidly overtake Windows among consumers

Comp. Sci. profs have been saying this for years. Hasn’t happened. And it’s not going to happen until Ubuntu and company take the dicking around out of computing the way Apple has.

11. LaTeX will overtake WYSIWYG text editors because LaTeX gives you more control

Yes, believe it or not, a computer science prof said this during one of my classes in undergrad. It goes directly to a deeper misunderstanding among Comp. Sci. academics that power and control are the primary factors driving adoption. They’re not. Simplicity and ease of use are far more important.

12. You can buy gates at RadioShack

The same idiot who thought LaTeX was the future also told his class to go buy gates (the things transistors are made of) at RadioShack and play with them to see how they work. Again, this evidences how completely out of touch some of these people are. Gates are microscopic. You can’t go buy them at an electronics store.

Update (25MAR2011): As so many helpful readers have pointed out, 1) gates are made of transistors, not the other way around, and you can now buy gates at Radio Shack online. However, the prof in question told me to go buy gates at a physical Radio Shack store in 2001, and they had no such thing. I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote “the things transistors are made of.”

Conclusion

I have long argued that society needs a professional certification for software developers and that universities need undergraduate programs dedicated to training people for these certifications. It’s worked for accounting, engineering and medicine. There’s no reason it can’t work for software development. One of the primary barriers to this sort of progress is the raging incompetence of academics in computer science, computer engineering, management information systems and related disciplines.

Have one or a few to add? Comment away.

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1. No Pain, No Gain

The Problem

The modern gym is like a football video game – it allows the novice trainee to experience the feeling of accomplishing something without leaving the couch. These sorry excuses for strength training facilities are full of so-called “circuits” of machines that loosely mimic real exercises while taking away any remote possibility of discomfort.

Why it Sucks

Unfortunately, the discomfort you feel when pushing through a heavy bench press or squat is the primary indication that you’re working hard enough to signal the body to grow stronger. Worse, these machines necessarily make assumptions about height, limb length and other biomechanical sizes, angles and leverages, which makes the machines inappropriate for many trainees.

How to Fix it

The fix is simple. First, reorganize the gym to emphasize free weights and cardio. Second, give people fitness programs that are predominantly composed of compound exercises performed with free weights. Third, teach people how to perform those exercises … but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll return to this in a moment.

2. Beauty Parlours on Steroids

The Problem

Strength is approaching passe in the modern gym. Filled with mirrors, spandex-clad gym-queens, teams of personal trainers resembling boy bands, gyms elevate form over function. Any gym sporting tanning beds has disembarked the Good Ship Fitness for the Shores of Narcissism. The Lulu Lemon-clad yoga hordes are taking over, and while there’s nothing wrong with yoga, they better keep their manicured and moisturized hands the hell off my bars, plates, benches and four-post power racks.

Why it Sucks

Strength is underrated. If you want to get a manly physique without taking steroids, you need to lift heavy weights. There’s no getting around it. Broad shoulders, tapered backs, Herculean pecs, powerful legs and arms like cannons don’t come easy. You’ll just never develop a powerful body if you’re preoccupied with looking good at the gym. Gyms are for sweating, grunting, rubbing chalk on your hands and occasionally screaming at weights if that’s what it takes. If you’re still pretty at the end of your workout, you’re not doing it right.

How to Fix it

Again, the organization of a gym is important. Prime space must always be given to four-post power racks, olympic lifting platforms, benches, bars and plates. Stretching mats go in a corner somewhere. Tanning beds go nowhere near a gym unless or until they invent some that don’t give you skin cancer. Moreover, people need to be encouraged to try harder, to train to failure, to sweat, to get their hair messed up, and to stop worrying about looking good. Ever seen a woman clean and jerk more than she weighs? It’s equal parts intimidating and sexy, and no one with half a brain gives a damn that she’s not wearing makeup.

3. Backstreet Trainers

The Problem

You’ve seen these expensive, bleach-blond, overly-tanned personal trainers who look more like boy band wannabes than fitness experts. They’ve got damaged nerve clusters in their backs from the thousands of crunches it took to get those washboard abs. They’ve got water-filled muscles from all the creatine they’ve mixed into their protein shakes. Perhaps more damning, most of them are devoid of any real power because they do too many sets and reps of too many exercises in their relentless pursuit of their toned look. In principle, these douchebags are problematic because normal people would benefit more from modestly-priced weight training classes than overpriced personal training sessions. In practice, these K-Fed lookalikes are problematic because they don’t really know sweet fuck all about weight training. Have you seen the certification exams for personal trainers? They’re a joke. These are the jerk-offs whole tell you that wide grip curls work your inner biceps while close grip curls work your outer biceps or somesuchnonsense while completely missing the fact that lifting weights with your elbows at extreme angles greatly increases your chances of soft tissue injuries.

Why it Sucks

I remember one day I was working out with a couple of olympic weightlifters in a gym near my parent’s home when the local M.Sc.-in-kinesiology-certified-personal-trainer pretty boy started trying to teach a novice trainee to do power cleans. We stared in disbelief. His form was terrible and his advice was worse. One of the guys had to take the poor beginner aside and tell him to get a new trainer, quick, before this jackass got him injured. You may believe that cases like this are rare, but that’s only because most gyms don’t have the benefit of a cohort of expert trainees to point and laugh at these pretty-boy dipshits.

How to Fix it

Fire them. Then demand that the certification courses and exams for personal trainers be improved, and standards raised.

4. Bogus Nutrition Programs

The Problem

Many gyms now offer free diet consultations with the purchase of a membership. You know what they say – you get what you pay for. Here are the two basic principles of nutrition:
1) if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. This is physics. There’s no way around it.
2) Most of the modern industrial diet is composed of synthetic substances that resemble, but are not actually, food (link to real foods post). Eating healthy means eating a diet primarily composes of real food, not artificial non-foods.

This is not what they tell you at gyms. Truth doesn’t sell. Easy sells. So they tell you what you want to hear: ‘just go on eating the sorts of things you’re eating, but try to eat a little less with each meal and cut back on the baconaise (link to disgusting foods post).

Why it Sucks

This isn’t nutrition advice. This is like giving a Band-Aid to a terminal cancer patient. It’s like fighting zombies with brain-scented snausages. Real nutrition advice advice sounds like this: McDonald’s, KFC, chips, candy bars, soda, white bread and white rice are not food. Stop eating these synthetic, poisonous substances altogether. Oh, and while you’re at it, cut your calorie intake by 600 – 1000 kcal/day from now until you’ve lost that extra thirty pounds you’re hauling around. No you do not get cheat days, cheat meals, or cheat anything. And if you overeat today, you can fast tomorrow.

How to Fix it

This is easy. Tell the truth. Some people need encouragement, some need to be yelled at, but telling people that they can go on living like they’re living and expect their bodies to magically firm up is unethical.

5. Injury Causing Machines

The Problem

Finally, there’s the machines themselves. I’ve never found a well-equipped gym that didn’t include a plethora of exercise machines that seemed purposefully designed to injure as many trainees as possible.

Why it Sucks

You are probably not an expert in biomechanics, so how the hell are you supposed to know that the leg extension machine is slowly damaging your kneecap by preventing your tibia from rotating at the top of the lift? Most people don’t receive dramatic injuries, like broken bones, from badly designed weight machines – any machine that snapped wrists would be quickly uncovered as garbage. No… these machines are far more insidious. They wear down your joints slowly from forcing you to push at the wrong angle, or along the wrong path. They corrupt your natural motion, giving you the illusion of safety while your bones quietly grind their way to chronic knee, shoulder and elbow injuries.

How to Fix it

Gym should be certified the same way personal trainers are. Certification should consist of a review by a three person panel composed of an expert in biomechanics, a chiropractor and a physiotherapist. The panelists should review the gym one piece of equipment at a time, and make a set of recommendations regarding machines that must be removed and any warning signs that should be added to those that remain. While we’re at it, any nutritional programs should be reviewed by a qualified nutritionist. At this point, gyms will not comply with reasonable sets of recommendations without some kind of government intervention, because they’ll balk at tossing thousands of dollars of equipment. And lest you have any compassion for these amoral businesses, remember that they never should have bought this stuff in the first place, and their lucky it’s thousands in machinery instead of millions in class action law suits.

Conclusion

Gyms are like cable news. Cable news should report stories that are important, but, under pressure for higher ratings and greater profitability, they show what is entertaining instead. Similarly, gyms should contain the most safe and effective exercising equipment available, and offer honest instruction in using this equipment. However, effective exercises are also difficult. So gyms promote ineffective, “fun” exercises instead.

1. Most Moral Reasoning is Arbitrary

Most people seem to think of morality as simply whatever feels intuitively right to them in a given situation. These individual, contextualized, intuitive impulses toward right and wrong comprise “ad hoc morality”. Since everyone has a different personality, set of experiences and personal historical context, two sane, reasonable people can reach contradictory moral conclusions in a single situation. “Ad hoc morality” is nothing like honest, thoughtful moral reasoning.

Morality has at least three meanings (wikipedia). I think of the three meanings as follows.
1) An Ethical Framework: An arbitrary code of conduct regarding right and wrong (e.g., The Ten Commandments, the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics).
2) Descriptive Morality: An ideal or universal code of conduct regarding right and wrong; i.e., one that a typical person would agree with, if he thought about it.
3) Ethics: the philosophical and empirical study of morals.

No universal code of morality has been discovered – at least as far as I, or the editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, are aware. Since we have no universal code, we create ethical frameworks to assist in our moral reasoning. The development, analysis and use of these frameworks is the subject of ethics.

An action is “moral” if it is acceptable according to said (unknown) universal code of morality. Thus, the morality of an action is a property of the action, which may be difficult or even impossible to ascertain. In contrast, the ethicality of an action is a relationship between the action and a particular ethical framework. Hence, an action is always either moral or amoral, but an action can be ethical in one framework and unethical in another.

In summary, disagreements regarding morality often arise because people rely on arbitrary (ad hoc) moral intuitions.

Ad hoc moral reasoning is sort of like illogical logic. It has no framework. No system. No rules. No way to reject nonsense. No way to resolve disputes other than to agree to disagree.

2. Unsophisticated Approaches to Morality are Obviously Flawed

Then next problem is that, of those who bother to argue from a particular ethical framework, almost everyone chooses an unsophisticated approach. I have previously outlined the problems with the two most common Christian approaches: The 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule.

Here I’d like to take this one step further. Religious people often claim (or act as though) they have access to “moral authority” (a universally correct moral code) through the teachings of their religion. This is utter hogwash because even the most fundamentalist believer constructs his or her values by cherry-picking the religious teachings they agree with… or worse, the teachings that support their present arguments. When evangelical Christians, for instance, decide to oppose gay marriage, they pull from the bible those verses that support their argument (the Sodom and Gomorra stuff). They conveniently ignore all the turning the other cheek / be kind to everyone stuff.

Let me say this as simply as possible: if someone says ‘X is immoral because God said so in the bible,’ then demand that they also accept that slavery, rape and murdering gays, fortunetellers, adulterers, atheists, and WITCHES are virtuous, but eating shellfish is forbidden. If they do not, they are full of shit. If they do, they’re just evil motherfuckers. Same goes for the Koran and the Torah.

It is a logical fallacy to claim that X is true because it’s in the Bible, but those other parts of the Bible we don’t agree with are just metaphors. Who the hell are you to decide which parts are literal and which aren’t? Same goes for any religious text. Even if you ignore the rampant contradictions in various religious texts, practically everyone agrees that some of the statements in said texts are downright mental.

That means that values drawn from holy books are just another ad hoc approach to morality.

3. Sophisticated Approaches are also Problematic

To summarize the above, most people use an ad hoc approach to morality, which is useless because it’s impossible to reason from an arbitrary foundation, i.e., debates will just endlessly circle among baseless arguments because the debaters are pulling everything out of thin air. Most people who bother to ground their moral rhetoric in a particular framework use childishly unsophisticated frameworks like the Golden Rule.

In contrast, philosophers, ethicists, academics, advocates of social justice and the leftwing parts of the media tend to adopt more sophisticated approaches to ethics. These come in two flavors: absolutism and consequentialism. Both of these approaches to ethics have incontrovertible problems.

Absolutism is the belief that certain actions are inherently good or bad, usually as set out in a guiding document. Prominent examples include the Christian Ten Commandments, Islamic sharia law, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Absolutism is plagued by a plethora of gob-smacking stupidities. Here, I will content myself with the most obvious: the rules conflict with each other. It doesn’t matter which set of rules, or how many rules, or what exactly the rules are. They always contradict each other. As I’ve argued before, practically every right in the UDHR conflicts with every other right – freedom of religion even conflicts with itself!

Consequentialism is the belief that the ethicality of an action is determined by its consequences. The best known example outside of philosophical circles is utilitarianism. Consequentialism also suffers from several migraine-inducing contradictions. Again, sticking to the most obvious: humans suck at foresight. We don’t know what the consequences of our actions will be. What’s worse, we can’t even agree on causes of actions after the fact. Just look at the disagreement over the causes of global warming or the continuing financial crisis. Saying that something is moral if it causes more good than harm is meaningless if you can’t foresee consequence or agree on causation.

In summary, the two main flavours of sophisticated ethical frameworks are based on assumptions that can’t possibly be true.

4. Sophisticated Approaches Contradict Each Other

Aside from the problems within these more-sophisticated frameworks, their use is further confounded by inter-framework contradictions. For instance, when Dick Cheney defends torturing prisoners ‘because it worked,’ his argument is consequentialist. When his detractors argue that effectiveness is irrelevant because ‘torture is wrong’ and ‘people have a right to freedom from torture,’ their argument is absolutist.

As a second example, consider a person who uses rhetoric to incite a revolution. Under an absolutist framework that guarantees free speech, such as the UDHR, or Canadian Charter, the ethical response is to leave this person alone – he is simply exercising his right to free speech. In contrast, under a consequentialist framework, the consequences of not intervening may be much worse than the consequences of arresting the revolutionary; thus, arresting him would be the ethical response.

What’s worse, the same person will readily contend that torture is wrong using an absolutist argument, while abortion is not, using a consequentialist argument, or vice versa.

The contradictory conclusions reached through different types of sophisticated ethical frameworks explains why reasonable people so often talk past, rather than to, each other in ethical debates.

5. Ethical Frameworks Based on Cracked Foundation

More generally, every code of moral conduct, be it religious, national, criminal or organizational is some combination of absolutist and consequentialist principles. Since both absolutism and consequentialism are deeply flawed, so are the moral codes based on them.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Bullshit.
Criminal Code of Canada? Bullshit.
English common law? Bullshit.
Constitutions of the E.U., U.S., Canada, U.K., Japan? Bullshit.
Ten Commandments? Golden Rule? Sharia Law? Precepts of Buddhism?

Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

It’s not that these codes are imperfect, it’s that they are fundamentally invalid. Human beings cannot anticipate or agree on consequences. Systems of absolutist rules are forever filled with contradictions. It’s like building free market economics on assumptions like “people act rationally” and “no companies are big enough to affect prices on their own”. It’s not even ‘in question,’ it’s absurd!

These ethical frameworks make assumptions that are manifestly, obviously, observably, demonstrably false! This is what happens when people simply ignore reality.

6. Differing Moral Foundations

To add a further complication, Jonathan Haidt, a Professor of Social Psychology, has empirically identified five foundations of human morality. The “five pillars” are:

1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

These pillars are evident in nearly everyone, regardless of ethnicity, cultural, religion or philosophy. Although two reasonable people may disagree regarding what constitutes harm, fairness, etc., in a particular instance, practically everyone understands the concepts of harm, fairness, etc., and agrees that they are important components of morality. Every language has words for these concepts. Every culture observes them.

Unfortunately, just like the rules of absolutist ethical systems, it doesn’t require much imagination to conceive of situations in which two or more moral pillars are in conflict. The issue of gay marriage, for instance, pits fairness (“We should be able to marry, too”) against purity (“We don’t want to change the definition of marriage”). War crimes pit harm (“He ordered people tortured”) against loyalty (“But they were bad people and he’s one of us”). Whenever an innocent person refuses to cooperate with a police officer, authority (the police) is pit against fairness (“why should I move? I’ve done nothing wrong!”).

Therefore, the moral principles that are genetically preprogrammed in human thought conflict with each other.

Conclusion: All Prominent Ethical Systems are Garbage

To summarize, the public discourse on ethics is so confused because: most people apply moral reasoning in an ad hoc or arbitrary way, or (at best) apply some bogus ethical principle like the golden rule; moreover, even if we try to apply sophisticated ethical frameworks, these too are fundamentally flawed and yield contradictory results; meanwhile, our genetics are working against us by way of pre-programmed yet contradictory moral foundations. I haven’t covered all of the problems with the above principles (e.g., absolutism seems at odds with our empirical moral foundations), or all existing ethical principles (e.g., rational self-interest, moral relativity, nihilism); however, I have tried to discuss enough of the mainstream thought on ethics to demonstrate my overall point: the way we think about ethics is broken.

In my next post in this series, I’ll describe a new foundation for ethics – one that solves many of the problems identified here.

Related Posts

8 Reasons Why Freedom of Religion is Impossible
Golden Rule FAIL – Top 6 Examples Where Reciprocity Does Not Apply
United Nations Hijacked by Religious Whackjobs… jumps shark
Discrediting the Christian Core: The Ten Commandments as a Pathetic Basis for Morality

1. Smith Machine

A smith machine is just a bar built into an apparatus that restricts the bar to a vertical path, and sometimes prevents it from tipping sideways. Smith machines are dangerous because they lock the lifter into a vertical or near-vertical straight-line bar path. The smith machine can be safely used for short range-of-motion exercises such as shrugs and calf raises, where the natural bar path is close to vertical. However, for any compound lift such as a bench press, overhead press, squat or deadlift, the natural bar path is not a straight line. By interfering with your natural (and optimal!) movement, the smith machine increases the stress on your joints and stabilizer muscles. I tore ligaments in both my shoulders using a smith machine for overhead presses.

2. Leg Extension

As you extend your leg into the locked-knee position, your shin bone rotates slightly. Leg extension machines interfere with this rotation. This puts unnecessary stress on the knee joint and can cause the knee cap to grind against the femur. Moreover, the quadriceps evolved to assist in running and jumping movements, not to provide torque against a rotating force.

3. Bent-arm Laterals Machine

Doing dumbbell laterals with your arms straight (but not locked) is reasonably safe and beneficial exercise. However, bending your arms, as this machine forces you to do, dramatically increases the stress on your rotator cuff and can lead to tears. The small muscles and tendons comprising the rotator cuff heal slowly and are difficult to rehabilitate.

4. Cable Row

Rows are a great exercise; however, rowing machines almost always suffer from the same problem. At the beginning of the exercise, you have to reach so far forward to grasp the handles that you inevitably overextend your lower back. This can damage your spine, the nerve cluster in your lower back, and your spinal erectors (the small muscles that hold your lower back straight. These are the sorts of injuries that don’t get better.

Suggestion: use a piece of chain and carabiners to bring the handles closer to you, or get someone to pull down on the cable so you can get into position safely.

5. “Ergonomic” Benches

The thing about ergonomics is that it has to be personalized to your body. These so-called ergonomic benches make assumptions about your height, weight, proportions, limb length, etc. Unless your body happens to fit these (often restrictive) assumptions, you’re out of luck. I can feel the benches in the above picture interfering with my shoulder movement. They also encourage taller people to move too close to the uprights (thus press to linearly) and encourage shorter people to move too far away from the uprights (thus endangering the shoulder in the initial lift). All of this serves to corrupt one’s pressing motion and endanger the shoulders, elbows and wrists.

6. The Pec Deck

This sort of pec deck puts your shoulders in the inner dislocation position and can tear the shoulder ligaments or the rotator cuff.

7. Ab Twisters

The spine is not meant to twist. Twisting the spine can damage the disks between your vertebrae. The kind of spinal twists they do in Yoga (slow, controlled stretches) are probably ok, but twisting against resistance encourages a faster and more violent movement that’s significantly more dangerous.

8. Ab Crunch Machines

Crunches do stimulate growth in the rectus abdominis (the six-pack); however, the full crunching your abs also full flexes your spinal erectors, putting maximum pressure on your lower back. Over time, this damages the disks in your back. Besides, most people’s abs are invisible not because they’re ill-developed but because their percentage body fat is too high. If you want your abs to show, hit the treadmill, not the crunch machine.

Suggestion: Composite exercises such as squats and pushups work your abs the way they were intended to work – as stabilizers. If you must do an ab-specific exercise, try the plank position.

9. Standing Calf Raise

The calf is a very strong muscle. Working both calves at the same time on a standing calf raise can involve hundreds of pounds in a normal person, and over 1000 lbs. in a very strong person. This kind of weight compresses the spine, breaks blood vessels in the shoulders, and generally puts a lot of strain on joints. Standing calf raise machines often encourage this sort of practice because they often come with signs showing a two-leg movement.

Suggestion: Do calf raises one leg at a time. Hold a dumbbell in one hand and a post to keep you steady in the other.

10. The Decline Bench

The decline bench is a shoulder-wrecker if there ever was one. Pressing on a decline bench puts extreme pressure on the shoulder joint and surrounding stabilizer muscles, meanwhile making it nearly impossible to press the weight in the natural back-toward-your-head arc. The slant of the board encourages the lifter to push from the shoulder instead of the chest, and to let the shoulders ride “up” (toward the head) when they should be rotating “down” and back (toward the feet). The decline bench is just an exercise clusterfuck. It’s biomechanical voodoo. Don’t use it.

Suggestion: If you must work specifically on your lower pecs, try a parallel bar dip. However, avoid an extreme range of motion (dropping past the point where your upper arms are parallel to the ground) or this too will put exaggerated stresses on the shoulder. (Note: never do dips behind your back – these endanger the rotator cuff.)

Conclusion

If you’ve used one of the machines profiled above for years without injury, consider yourself lucky it hasn’t hurt you yet and quit now! Yes, smoking hasn’t killed you yet either, but that doesn’t mean you should keep doing it. I am not a doctor; check with yours before starting a new workout program. Don’t just switch to free weights if you have no idea what you’re doing. Find a good book on weight training (The Insider’s Tell-All Handbook on Weight Training Technique, for example) and read it before you beat yourself up.

Related Posts

BS Forms of Exercise and their Athletic Alternatives
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6. Crime

Suppose one day I lost my shit and murdered someone. If, shortly after, I realized that this was a terrible mistake and was sorry, I would like to be forgiven, given a warm hug and let go. I suspect most criminals would appreciate the same treatment. You may think that you would want to be thrown in prison if you broke the law, but if you do, I suspect that you’ve never seen the inside of a federal prison. In North Korea. Empathy is crucial to our justice system, but basing the prosecution of criminals entirely on the Golden Rule would be disastrous.

5. Euthanasia

Some people want to hang on to every last moment of life, no matter what the cost. Other people are terrified of becoming a vegetable, losing their independence in old age, the pain of dying slowly, or the indignity of losing their minds. Asking the family of a suffering person ‘what should be done?’ is ripe for golden-rule-failure. It’s not about what the family wants. It’s about the individual. If every day hurts, you should have the option to end those days, if you so choose.

4. Good Sportsmanship

On a different note, remember the guys in high school who always wanted to play rough? And did so, regardless of who else was on the field/court/etc.? Were you one of those guys? I believe their logic (if you could call it that) went something like ‘Sports are SUPPOSED to be rough, so that’s how I’ll play.’ Except not everyone likes to play rough. Forcing your style on unwilling partners is just as bad as facing your bullshit beliefs on unwilling atheists (more on this below).

3. Homosexuality

Well-meaning (albeit ignorant) parents of out or suspected gay and lesbian children sometimes want to “cure” them because they think of homosexuality as a disease. I’ve never met a gay person who wanted to be so cured. Sending potentially gay youths, or anyone else for that matter, to Jesus Camp for rehab is more likely to instil mental disease than change sexual orientation. Going to one of these anti-gay camps would be an zealous assault on a person’s mentally and emotionally stability. But if you’re an ignorant, amoral, evangelical whackjob, you think the ends justify the means. Golden Rule FAIL.

2. Differences between men and women

At the risk of overgeneralizing, men and women expect and desire to be treated differently. If an attractive young woman walks up to a man in a bar, takes a firm hold of his ass and tells him she wants to take him home for the night, some guys will immediately escort her home, some will politely refuse, but practically none will slap her across the face and charge her with sexual harassment. In contrast, if a man squeezes a strange woman’s butt in a bar and propositions her, most women will not take it well, no matter how much of a pretty boy he is. Put more simply, imagine someone actually using this logic: “I would love it if she pinned me down and had sex with me, so I’ll pin her down and have sex with her.” Golden Rule FAIL!

1. Religions

These unrepentant simpletons who call themselves evangelicals actually think something like ‘If I stopped believing in God, I would want religious people to try to save me from myself, so I better try to save this atheist.’ I never met an atheist who enjoyed listening to the nonsensical ramblings of a believer trying to bring him or her “back into the fold.” Consider the opposite logic: “I’m much happier now that I’ve rejected all this supernatural, talking-snake, wrath-of-god, pro-slavery, rape-condoning theist nonsense, so I should spend my days undermining the belief systems of happy (but ignorant) believers.” Foisting your ideology onto others because YOU think they need to hear it only serves to prove that you are as dumb as a sack of headless turkeys. Golden Rule FAIL!

Conclusion

Treating people as you would like to be treated is like ethics for toddlers – you wouldn’t like it if Jimmy bit you, so don’t bite him! It is a rudimentary understanding of empathy. It’s ethics for SPED class. Not everyone wants to be treated the same way. (Tangent: Some people might argue for restating the Golden Rule as “treat people as they wish to be treated,” but this is equally unsophisticated. Sometimes what’s best for someone (or for society) is not what he wants, as in the Crime example above.) The so-called Golden Rule is a nonsensical basis for ethical action. It’s moral fool’s gold.

Related Posts

Discrediting the Christian Core: The Ten Commandments as a Pathetic Basis for Morality

5. Walking

Unless we’re talking about hiking 40 km with a 20kg backpack over rough terrain, ‘going for a walk’ is not exercise. Walking, not sitting, is the natural state of the human body. You will never get anywhere even approaching ‘good shape’ by just walking. Perhaps, if you are a sedentary, obese, pathological eater, walking to and from work every day may help you lose weight. However, it is important to understand that that does not make walking a serious form of exercise. Everybody should walk several kilometers each day simply as a matter of living.

What you should be doing instead

Running, of course! Running is one of the best exercises available: it’s practically free in most climates; you don’t need any special equipment; it will raise even the most fit athlete’s heart rate; and it works all the muscles in the lower body.

4. Gardening

With the possible exception of muffin-baking, Freedent-toting, cheek-pinching, Becel-loving octogenarians, nobody should consider gardening a form of exercise. This is not to say that gardening (and moreso farming) are not hard work, but hard work is different from exercise. You can work hard your whole life and still not be able to run a kilometer if a pack of rabid paparazzi reporters were hot on your tail. Don’t confuse things that make you tired with things that provide good exercise.

What you should be doing instead

Between the ages of 16 and 60, most people will benefit from moderate resistance training (i.e., weightlifting). Twice a week is plenty, and I have had good results from once-a-week training when that’s all my schedule allowed. But stay away from “circuit training” and any workout that makes extensive use of machines or yoga balls. Take the time to learn how to train with weights effectively. It takes years to master the form of the squat, deadlift, bench press, press, row, chin-up, and so on, but the health benefits of resistance training with correct form are phenomenal – not to mention you look better naked. I once considered writing a book called the “No B.S. Guide to Weight Training” but Stuart McRobert beat me to it.

3. Dance

Professional hip hop, ballet, swing and break dancers sweat buckets because they execute highly athletic movements at extreme speed. Most everyone else sweats when they dance because it’s hot and they’re out of shape. Any activity that’s primarily undertaken while half in the bag is not good exercise.

What you should be doing instead

Gymnastics. As long as you don’t go overboard, gymnastics is one of the best forms of exercise. It develops balance, strength, endurance and cardio. It encompasses a wide variety of activities. The only downside is, you’ll need hands-on training. Of course, if you wanted to get good at dancing, you’d need hands-on training for that too.

2. Thinking

While it is true that sitting and thinking burns more calories than sitting and resting, thinking also makes people hungrier than resting, so they tend to eat more afterwards. Based on this study from Laval University, it’s pretty safe to say that the increase in appetite more than makes up for the increased calorie burn.

What you should be doing instead

Martial arts such as Aikido, Iaito, and Tai Chi require intense focus and concentration to produce exactness of form, while simultaneously developing strength, flexibility, balance, speed and timing.

1. Aerobics

I know I’m going to take heat for this, but it has to be said. Aerobics is bullshit. I know far too many people who have spent years doing step aerobics, dance aerobics, cardio kickboxing, boot-camp aerobics, etc., ad nauseam, and still can’t run a few miles or lift their own body weight. In contrast, good luck finding a marathon runner who can’t survive an hour of aerobics. The sheer number of people who are in terrible shape despite excelling at aerobics proves that aerobics is an ineffective exercise.

What you should be doing instead

I cannot overstate the benefits of swimming. It may be the best possible exercise. Swimming builds muscle across the whole body, provides excellent cardio, can save your life, is available all year in ubiquitous indoor pools, and has virtually no impact on your joints. And when you’re done burning 1000 calories in a one-hour workout, you can point and laugh at those featherbrained peacocks spasming in their aerobics class.

Conclusion

I am not a doctor. Check with yours before you start any kind of fitness program, especially if you’re seriously out of shape. Not all forms of exercise are appropriate for all people, but some form of exercise is appropriate for you.

Want evidence do I have? Well, here are 10 ideas that were once considered radical. I think it’s pretty clear that these don’t seem very radical anymore.

10. Children should be required to attend school.

9. Ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress.

8. The world is round.

7. Doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies.

6. Governments should be elected by the people they govern.

5. The earth revolves around the sun.

4. AC electricity.

3. People should not be killed for changing their religion.

2. Blacks are people.

1. Women are people.

A vast number of ideas that were once radical are now commonplace. Therefore, it seems likely that many ideas that will seem commonplace in the future, are currently considered radical.

So yes, I’m a radical.