The art of tea and the false analogy

I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.         Adlai Stevenson

from Scoop.com

Analogous thinking is one of our most useful cognitive tools as it can help clarify difficult or unfamiliar concepts – or it can be used fallaciously to mislead and misrepresent a situation. Analogies don't directly prove anything, they allow us to infer based on the principle that if two items have similar known properties, and one has a further known property then the other item probably also has that property. The more similar the situations, the higher the probability.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the pre-election tea tape saga. To recap: On 11 November 2011 Prime Minister and National party leader John Key met with Act party Epsom candidate John Banks for a cup of tea in a Newmarket cafe. This was a staged election campaign event to which the media where invited. At some point the media where moved back by the politicians minders and told to remove recording devices, but were allowed to continue to film the conversation. A cameraman left his microphone on the table - he claimed he had been unable to retrieve it – and subsequently passed his recording to the New Zealand Herald. The Prime Minister then laid a complaint with the Police under section 216B of the Crimes Act 1961, which relates to anyone who “intentionally intercepts any private communication by means of an interception device.”

Rather than the event, my interest lies in the subsequent comparison made by the Prime Minister; "What happens if a couple of high profile New Zealander's have a conversation about their son or their daughter being suicidal - a Sunday paper reports that and that child takes their own life. We're at the start of a slippery slope here and I for one am going to stand up and ask the police to investigate it."

The Prime Ministers argument is that the two situations are so analogous that to allow publication in one situation would inevitably lead to publication in the other (the inferred shared characteristic).  There are several properties of the analogy we can examine to determine if it is accurate or if it's false. These include the relevance of the known characteristics to the assumed characteristic, and the number of shared characteristics.

On initial look it doesn't seem like there are many shared properties;

Tea Tape                                                                           Hypothetical suicide discussion

High profile individuals                                                          High profile individuals

During staged event                                                              Private event

Discussion relevant to national elections                                Discussion relevant to family only

There are, however, further characteristics related to the Act; which holds that it hasn't been breached if either the individual making the recording is a party to the discussion, and that it must be intentional;

Tea Tape                                                                           Hypothetical suicide discussion

Not party to discussion                                                        Not party to discussion

Intentional?                                                                          Intentional

Also relevant is how the Act defines “Private Communication”;

• (a) means a communication (whether in oral or written form or otherwise) made under circumstances that may reasonably be taken to indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties to the communication; but
• (b) does not include such a communication occurring in circumstances in which any party ought reasonably to expect that the communication may be intercepted by some other person not having the express or implied consent of any party to do so.

The microphone is in the bag on the table. From www.stuff.co.nz

During the tea tape discussion the politicians minders requested audio recording devices should be removed, and with the hypothetical situation we can expect that the parties desire to confine the contents of their discussion to themselves – both meeting the requirements of section a. It's also pretty clear that the hypothetical situation meets section b. Less clear is whether the tea tape also meets this requirement;

• It was an event that the media were invited to
• The recording device was visible to the parties
• The media and cafe customers were so close the conversation could be overheard
• Other types of recording were allowed (and possibly encouraged)

from www.listener.co.nz

There is a final consideration we need to give about the relevance of the characteristics of the situations in the analogy, and that's the public interest argument.

As well as the suicide analogy Mr Key also used a News of the World phone hacking analogy in relation to the tea tape saga, and in response Milly Dowler's lawyer Mark Lewis instead compared it to Gordon Brown's not realising his microphone was on when complaining about a “bigoted woman". This is relevant because the National party ran a campaign largely around the persona of John Key, who maintained the tea tape conversation was bland in nature, and of course the symbolic cup of tea was in itself an attempt to influence voter behaviour. In her column in the Herald Mai Chen references Drew Westen's book, The Political Brain, who's thesis is that voters are influenced by their emotions and feelings, rather than policies. What Mr Key and Mr Banks said - and whether they subsequently lied about the contents of their conversation - may be relevant to how we might choose to vote. It is therefore in the public interest to know.

What makes this different from the hypothetical suicide scenario for the child of the high profile individuals? Surely the public are interested? What makes “what the public are interested in” different from something “in the public interest”?

One way of quantifying this is based on the concept that disclosure would lead to some people gaining and some people loosing. It is “in the public interest” if the gainers gain more than the losers loose. If the politicians have said something inappropriate or subsequently lied and it is disclosed, they may loose some support, but voters will have learned something to help them make a more informed decision. In the suicide scenario, the recipients of the disclosure will have gained little useful information, but the consequences for the losers is catastrophic. Clearly not in the public interest.

The point here isn't to decide whether the recording breached the Act, merely whether the analogy cited as the reason for laying the complaint is valid. Since it appears that neither the number of shared characteristics or their relevance makes this a particularly compelling analogy I think we can conclude it is false, and since this analogy was by his own admission Mr Key's rationale for laying a complaint with the police, we can also conclude that making the complaint was based on poor reasoning. As Ms Chen points out in her column, even if you have a valid legal complaint, it doesn't necessarily mean you should make one.

From Liberation.typepad.com

Pair-bonds, happiness and casual sex

I never could be good when I was not happy.  Julia Ward Howe

There was a theory recently proposed that the main reason Neanderthals’ died out was that females took an active role in high risk hunting activities, whereas Homo Sapiens’ specialised along gender lines with females gathering and males hunting.  There is asymmetry between the consequences of a loss of a male and the loss of a female - as a single male with access to sufficient females can generate progeny much, much more quickly than the reverse.  Genghis Khan is a good example; living in the 14^th century, by the 21^st his male descendants are estimated as 16 million.

A consequence of this specialisation and consequent physical dimorphism can be seen within many cultures where males treat females as a resource e.g. St. Augustine of Hippo’s statement “I fail to see what use women can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children".  There is also a significant cost to both parents in raising children to independence, and uncertainty for males as to whether that expenditure is going towards their own offspring.  With that background it isn’t surprising that some cultures have codified as religious commandments a set of beliefs and behavioural expectations regarding female sexuality.

It was unfortunate that Timaru based gynaecologist Dr Makary chose to express his concerns regarding the behaviour of women he sees at his practice in those terms.  He highlighted unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections in the context of high numbers of sexual partners and casual sex while intoxicated, and the inability to remember even who the sexual partner was.   It isn’t perhaps surprising considering his background that he chose to frame the problem and his suggested solution within a model he felt comfortable with i.e. that women need to return to the behaviour of their grandmothers; but the response it provoked in many cases ignored the problem he was highlighting.

Anyone who has lived on a farm would recognise his "paddock mating" analogy as being poor; mating season only is a short period during the year, the intercourse isn't really that frequent during it, and most importantly it's aimed at procreation, not fun, which may be why it's of short duration: even other apes only average 8 seconds.  Pretty much everything Dr Makary wasn't trying to convey.

Dr Farvid from Auckland University pointed out that women should be able to have safe casual sexual encounters because they gain pleasure from them, and that Dr Makary, by focusing on women exclusively and framing it in terms of morality was promoting a double standard.  Considering the number of men Dr Makary would see professionally though, it's hard to fault him for focusing on the subject of his clinical expertise.

The issue that Dr Makary and sex therapist Mary Hodson were drawing attention to, however, is that women weren’t engaged in safe sexual practices, and were in fact not even behaving safely full stop.  Whereas Dr Makary believes the issue can be resolved by turning back the clock, Dr Farvid says that “"pathologising" others' sexual choices undermined today's liberalised cultural environment that her study concluded had firmly entrenched casual encounters on the sexual menu.”

A preconceived philosophical background has informed each of their points of view, and also means they are, I believe, missing the main point.  High levels of suicide, drug and alcohol misuse and unsafe sex may all be symptoms of a single problem – our focus on becoming a pleasure seeking society because of our failure to distinguish between pleasure and happiness.

Although they are sometimes used as synonyms, they are slightly different.  Pleasure is in response to an outside stimulus – and effectively doesn’t last much beyond the duration of the stimulus.  Happiness on the other hand is an underlying state of being which isn’t entirely dependant on outside influences.  Positive psychologists have suggested it has a number of components, including; pleasure, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments.

In “The Naked Ape” the zoologist Desmond Morris popularised the observation that human female sexuality is different from other apes, and hypothesised that it was an evolutionary response to the prolonged parental burden: to enhance the pair bond and ensure long term relationships that would support both parenting and grand-parenting. Within Dr Morris’s model lies all the components of happiness - something both models advocated above lack.  This give it a purpose - helping maintain the pair bond, which means it can become central to a variety of monogamous or relatively monogamous relationships, and not just for procreation or parenting.

Having said that, not everybody is seeking a relationship, and the human sex drive is very powerful.  While it might be enhanced by intellectual and emotional engagement, whether that’s for a period of six days, six months, six years or six decades; it can still be pleasurable without it.  The main issue is the prevention of high risk behaviours, of using pleasure as a simulacrum for happiness - and the answer to that isn’t sex education and it isn’t our grandparents morality; it’s in ensuring people have the opportunities to establish the factors that lead to happiness in their lives.