Today I Learned...

Warning: possible overgeneralization from my own experiences.

Background: from ages 12-21, I wanted to be a scientist. I left because it turns out science is a spectacularly crappy career, but I still feel some kinship with it.

Opening anecdote: One day in my sociobiology class, our lecturer described a particular experiment demonstrating that people are more friendly towards those who share their name, more so with last than with first, more so still if it's a rare name. The experiment was elegant, required a minimum of effort, and got the undergraduate experimenter published in Nature. For those who don't follow these things: that's roughly equivalent to throwing the winning pitch at the World Series at 17. My friend and I turned to each other and, in unison, mouthed the words "that bitch."

My point is, scientists are competitive. They care about truth and knowledge and expanding human horizons... but they also care that they're the one to do it. It's almost tautological, because while I'm sure there are many excellent scientists who don't care that much, they tend to get scooped. What's worse, there tends to be a particular moment for a particular discovery, and while 99.99999% of human beings are still incapable of finding it, there are still three or four other people with the knowledge, inclination, and equipment, and if any one of them beats you, you might as well be one of the 99.99999%. That was some of the lesson of Quicksilver*: you have all these brilliant minds coming at once and then they waste their time competing with each other and hiding results so the others can't steal them.

This feels like a pretty lonely limb, but I think that's why scientists are so quick to beat down Henrietta Lacks (the woman whose cancer cells went on to be the first and most productive line of cultured human cells). These men* gave their entire lives to something that has minimal financial reward (relative to what else someone with that level of intelligence could do) and is really only prestigious within a small subculture. They did it because they wanted to discover things, wanted to contribute, and wanted the respect of that subculture. They did at the expense of years and years of their lives. Then this woman comes along and contributes about as much to medical science as a nobel prize winner, and she didn't have to sacrifice a damn thing.***

I think researchers try to anonymize and deemphasize the source of their data- the human beings- because they don't want to share the credit. Human instinct is to give the biggest rewards to the person who made the most sacrifice, and giving part of their body feels like a bigger contribution than collating some data, even if the scientist provided the spark of insight and any old human could have donated blood. Knowing this, the scientists dehumanize the donors in an attempt to bring prestige/credit/ownership to themselves.

I'm basing this in part on my own feelings. While listening to the book there's a thread in me saying "why are we paying attention to her? She didn't do anything, she didn't choose anything, she was just in the right place at the right time to have something happen to her?" She has an interesting story, and it's pretty illustrative of a lot of things that were wrong with America at the time and are not as fixed as we like to think, but why is her story more interesting than any of the thousands of other poor black women who went to that same medical clinic? Why should she get remembered and they don't?

And the answer is... because. Because even without bringing metaphysics into it, it is good to cultivate an attitude of respect for people who contribute to things. It's good for the soul to know the web of connections you're living in, and bad to disregard people who made substantive contributions to it. Overruling that voice saying "but she contributed the actual living cells" comes at a real psychic cost.

Okay, that got dramatically less articulate at the end but I've still got a good 2/3 of the book left so maybe I'll figure out some more later.


*This is one reason I don't manage to keep my reading on theme. It's more fun coming up with connections between whichever books arrive at the library together

**The women scientists are likely to be even less happy with her, since they faced many more obstacles than the men.

***I mean, she did die at 30. But it wasn't intentional so it doesn't count.

So you're allowed to steal bread to feed your starving children. And you're probably even allowed to steal bread to feed yourself. But rarely are "steal bread" and "children starve" your only options. For example, I think we can all agree that if the choices are "steal bread", "children starve" and "spend eight hours in a cubicle for a reasonable wage while your children are well cared for", you're morally obligated to pick door number three. The same would not be be true of "steal bread", "children starve", and "cut off foot in exchange for one loaf of bread". But there's a whole range of intermediate options that aren't so clear cut. What if the only day care available is neglectful? Abusive? What if you need to work 16 hour days to buy everything you need- can you stop after 10 and steal the rest? What if you need 23 hours? What if there's only a 1% chance you'll lose your foot in the work? 10%? Are you obligated to prostitute yourself? If there are two breads of equal nutritional value and your kids prefer the more expensive one, are you allowed to steal that, or must you go for the cheapest possible bread?* Take out a loan? How high must the interest rate be before you're allowed to steal? And that's before we include uncertainty in the model.

Obviously there's a really easy analogy to welfare here, but that's not actually the motivating example. I can't share it for several reasons, but I like to solve the general form of equations anyway. So this is an open call for suggested rules (or rules you think definitely don't apply), and why you think they're good (or bad) rules. Please include as much explanation of your thought process as possible.


To start us off, here are my ideas: you're not obligated to give up capital to get consumable goods (so no cutting off your foot)**, you are obligated to take any choice that's better than the best option of the person you're stealing from, and you are obligated to keep damage to a minimum- so you can steal bread, but you can't break a window to do it unless your kids are actually-that-second-starving, because that's a huge amount of destruction for a small benefit. They're not perfect rules- all jobs have some risk (albeit sometimes really 1st world risks), we as a society have decided to compensate for riskier jobs with more money, and that's not going away. Enough people work as coal miners that I'm prepared to say it's an option you must choose before stealing, but I don't feel good about it. I also have some problems with the way the second rule will tend to punish the better off bakers, which could be damaging in the aggregate, and I consider it necessary rather than sufficient- even if all bakers are fantastically wealthy, if you have the option of a decent job, you're not allowed to steal.

*Technically, bread is nutritionally void and you should really steal an apple, but I went with the classic phrasing.

**I went back and forth on "stealing bread" versus "stealing medicine" as an example. It makes a difference, because bread is a consumable and medicine, arguably, is building capital, which means that forcing someone to cut off a finger to buy medicine is more okay than forcing them to cut off a finger to buy bread, although not necessarily okay enough. There is an additional complicating issue in that bread is sold on a pretty narrow profit margin, while most of the cost of expensive drugs is the intellectual property***, and thus the actual cost inflicted on the drug company is pretty minimal, compared to the benefit you receive.

***Don't have space to get into here, but long story short: I'm fine with drugs having a limited run of being very expensive, in order to incentivize the creation of new drugs.