Penguins are Birds...

...and social democracy is capitalism

"Penguins not being able to fly is only sad because we call them birds. If we think of their wings as flippers and call them fish it's a miracle they can walk on land."

Someone actually said this, and others found it worth repeating. So here I am talking about it, because despite being a joke it nicely illustrates a thing people do, which is reason about concepts, and cling to concepts despite new information, rather than use concepts to reason about reality. This is a bit like a carpenter who thinks their job description is "hammering" rather than "building". Making the tool the focus leads to all kinds of errors, from hitting things that shouldn't be hit to going out of business when nail guns are invented.

Penguins are birds, and many people have a concept of "bird" that makes "flight" part of the definition--I certainly do--so much so that "flightless" is considered a useful and important modifier, naming a different category or kind. A "flightless" bird is lacking something, which one might suppose to be sad... if the concept is mistaken for the reality.

What we call things is irrelevant to the way things are. It is barely relevant to the way we think about them. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which "holds that our thoughts are shaped by our native language, and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways" is false, and has been known to be false for a long time. There are small effects that are barely measureable and imperfectly reproducible in specific tasks like fine colour discrimination when the colours have been carefully selected to lie on boundaries recognized by some languages and not others, while every single language has exactly the same basic colours: red, black, and white.

So if you ignore the huge effect of basic colour names and focus your limited attention on the statistically significant but practically irrelevant barely measureable effect, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looks interesting. Otherwise... not so much.

Once we move away from perception to more abstract issues, how we conceptualize things does make a difference... but only in cases where our existing concepts are either inadequate to describe something or are misaligned with the reality they are supposed to describe.

In those cases, which happen fairly often, we have two basic moves available. One--illustrated by this joke about penguins--is to insist that the failure of our concepts to capture reality is the fault of... reality. The other is to update our concepts, which we do all the time, to the extent that I would say the ability to form new concepts is fundamental to the process of thought and language.

"I downloaded an app to my smartphone but it won't interface with my laser-printer," uses at least five concepts that have only appeared in the past few decades, some in the past few years.

We also repurpose words--and shift the core meaning of concepts--with incredible speed: no one says "smartphone" anymore because "phone" now means "smartphone", a concept that barely existed twenty years ago.

When we cling to outmoded meanings it's always for non-cognitive reasons: politics, status, power, and so on. Humour in the case of the joke I started this piece with.

Explicitly political concepts are where this it the most obvious: "socialism" on the right has come to mean any legal impediment to rich people doing anything whatsoever, and on the left it has come to mean social democracy, which is confusing because reality remains what it is, and social democracy is still a form of capitalism, the same as it always has been. It's just a form of capitalism where anyone can be rich, and no one can be poor.

We should be very wary of shifting definitions of old terms rather than inventing new terms. Smartphones were called "smartphones" originally specifically because they were different in important ways from the things people had used "phone" to refer to for the past century. Only when reality reached the point where every phone was a smartphone did the meaning of the word change.

Likewise "democracy" in the West generally means "representative democracy" and to decry our representative systems as "undemocratic" because they are not "direct democracy" depends on the same kind of implicit insistence on an overly narrow meaning that this silly joke depends on.

In all these cases the cure is a bit more specificity, which is cumbersome and inconvenient: "social democratic capitalism", "flighted birds", and so on. The cure is never to argue about what "real" democracy or "real" socialism or "real" capitalism is, because everything is real. The only argument is about how we paste labels on stuff in ways that reflect the relevant bits of reality in a consistent way.

Arguing that a particular label is better suited to one kind of thing rather than another is unfruitful: back when I still argued with philosophers, this kind of question would come up with surprising frequency, and I’d do my best to short-circuit and otherwise pointless exchange by saying, “We both agree there are two categories here, X and Y. I’m calling X by the name P. You say that name better applies to Y. Fine. Call Y whatever you like… but I am still only concerned about X, which we both agree exists no matter what it’s called.” This resulted in a lot of truncated exchanges: it turns out the best way to shut up a philosopher trained in the analytic tradition is to tell them you don’t care about what categories happen to be called.

In the case of penguins, they are flightless birds that are incredibly well-adapted to their environment, and only thing sad is that someone in the grip of this kind of error in categorical thinking might come along and declare that "all birds must fly," which takes a pretty enormous ego: "Reality doesn't conform to my categories and that's sad, bad, or an outrage."

To go on and declare that we should recategorize reality--a bird is a fish, capitalism is socialism--so that our emotional preferences or politics are satisfied takes an even bigger ego than that.

Why not go back to the beginning, and when we encounter something that is as obviously joyous as a penguin swooping through the ocean depths, say, "Huh, I thought all birds could fly! Guess I was wrong about that. What a wonderful bird!" All we have to do is change our mind in the face of new data… data like "Nordic-style social democracy beats literally every other system we've tried on virtually every measure... I guess capitalism isn't necessarily bad after all.”

So while the thing about penguins is a joke, what it illustrates is very real: our propensity to say things like, "I think capitalism is bad, and the data say social democracy is good, therefore social democracy must not be capitalism."

I sometimes say being a Bayesian requires a great deal of humility, and this joke is the distilled essence of why that is so: not only does it insist that reality fit neatly into the concepts we've got, with zero updating, it insists that this not make us feel bad in the process, and says we should be willing to insist on a dramatic and ridiculous reclassification of reality based on nothing but our desire to avoid feeling sad, which is only happening because we're unable to change our understanding in the face of new data.

The whole thing is kind of wonderful because it illustrates so many errors in such a few words!