IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015 - 71

impulse to do things cheaply in the
short run and derive quick benefits.
There is a great deal of simple information about the short run and it is
easy to use that information to derive
quick benefits, yet long-run planning
requires rare high-quality information,
insight, and wisdom [27].
Information about international
politics is mostly about glorifying
our own position, and demonizing
the other. None of that information leads to insight about compromises and solutions. We glorify
the generals who win wars and fill
history books with their exploits,
but we despise the civilian leaders
who compromise as weak. There
are obvious compromises to most
international conflicts and domestic policy disputes, but there is no
glory in advocating those because
that advocacy requires reducing the
information war and asking difficult questions about the interests
of other parties. It is easy to see
that the current problem in Iraq
and Syria is not religious extremism, although that is the low-quality
information that is easy to disseminate and debate, it is the existence
of large oppressed populations in
those countries. ISIS is just a violent face of large angry populations
supporting them. Killing the violent
face will not solve the underlying
problem. The permanent solutions
require solving the resource allocation problems [13].
Domestic policy issues similarly
suffer from large amounts of misinformation. The gun control debate
in the U.S. has obvious solutions,
but one first needs to discard all
the arguments about constitutional
rights, background checks, and gun
safety, and ask more fundamental
questions like why the rural populations are overwhelmingly supportive of unlimited gun rights at
the expense of urban populations
that suffer most of the deadly condecember 2015

sequences of gun violence. The
urban-rural conflicts are common
both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Rural populations have been economically devastated by the industrialization of agriculture, yet the
urban population was never terribly
sympathetic to their plight and just
urged them to accept the economic
consequences of modern technology. Well...here is a technology with
the opposite consequences: guns;
devastating to the urban population,
yet giving an advantage to the rural
folk. Is it any wonder then that the
rural population is unsympathetic to
the gun problem, which has deadly
consequences for the congested
and crime-ridden urban areas, yet
is barely a nuisance for the hunting, fishing, and sparsely populated
rural areas? Improving the economic conditions in rural America would
go a long way to alleviating the rural
hostility towards the urban population, and their unconditional support for gun rights just because it
gives them an advantage over the
urban population [17].
Similarly, there is an obvious
solution to the abortion debate, but
one has to discard the avalanche
of information and debate about
when life starts, when the fetus is
viable, and the morality of destroying fetuses, and focus on a fundamental political question of why
homemakers and their partners
overwhelmingly oppose abortion,
but professional women and their
partners overwhelmingly support it.
One can conclude from that observation that the abortion debate is
a political struggle between professional women who greatly benefit
from controlled pregnancy to focus
on their careers, and homemakers who benefit from childbirth and
child rearing as their economic livelihood, not from abortion. It also
helps to observe that it has become
increasingly difficult to make a liv∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

ing as a homemaker without taking
on extra jobs outside the home,
which fueled the traditional homemakers' hostility towards professional women who made huge
economic gains at their expense.
Then the appropriate solution to
the abortion debate would be to
improve the economic livelihood of
homemakers, such as professionalizing homemaking, rather than
debating morality and the biology
of reproduction [17].
Numbers and statistical reasoning make matters worse by creating
even more low-quality, unreliable,
and misleading information. Numbers oversimplify facts, obscure
complexity, and make hidden
choices, and as such they rarely
illuminate. Consider the statistics
that show that the life expectancy
of humans has been rising steadily
since the invention of agriculture.
Here is a typical misleading story
involving numbers: Two cavemen
are chatting. One tells the other:
"Something isn't right. Our air is
clean; our water is pure; we get
plenty of exercise; everything we
eat is organic and free range - yet
nobody lives past 30." Something
is wrong alright, and that is the statistics. Life expectancy may have
been 30, but that is very misleading, because the life expectancy
at 45 was 23 more years of life,
bringing it 68, closer to current levels. The reason for low life expectancy at birth was high rates of
infant mortality, and also infanticide. Babies were not considered
fully human, and disabled ones
were probably killed. Average life
expectancy across diverse cultures
is not very meaningful, because
the definition of human life varies. If you include the sperm in the
computation, the life expectancy
will go down to seconds; and if
you include the people who can
be kept in a vegetative state for

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2015