Jason Sanford

The Peace Corps in a non-peaceful world

Americans often get rapped by people outside our country as being insular and ignorant of all things not prefaced with a giant, glowing U.S.A.! While there's some truth to this stereotype, it overlooks the strong desire among many Americans to bridge the differences between the United States and other countries.

One of the most famous ways Americans try to do this is with the Peace Corps. Since 1961 over 200,000 American have served in the Peace Corps, including myself and my wife, with both of us serving in Thailand. This service is not without risk. As documented by the Fallen Peace Corps Volunteers Memorial Project, 284 Peace Corps Volunteers gave their lives while pursuing the Peace Corps' mission. Many more have been injured, assaulted, or subjected to violence.

It’s for these last reasons that yesterday the Peace Corps announced it was pulling its Volunteers out of Honduras and will no longer send new Volunteers to El Salvador and Guatemala. This is obviously a controversial decision. According to Jared Metzker, a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala, the decision is also cowardly because PCVs understand the dangers they're signing up for.

As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, I understand and to a degree embrace Metzker's attitude. But I also don't want Peace Corps Volunteers to face a constant risk of serious injury or death. Peace Corps pulled out of Honduras after one Volunteer was shot (and, according to what I've heard from other Volunteers, experienced a number of rapes and near constant assaults on PCVs, which wasn't targeted at the Volunteers but instead resulted from out-of-control violence and political upheaval in that country).

During my time in the Peace Corps I was only physically threatened a single time, and was able to escape with no injury because of my large size and ability to bluff drunken idiots. However, several other Volunteers who served alongside me were raped or assaulted. And that was in the peaceful country of Thailand. A Peace Corps Volunteer who'd transfered to Thailand said that in her previous host country, every Volunteer in her training group had been physically assaulted or raped at one time or another. Every single one.

However, the experience she described was an extreme and, to a large degree, politically motivated. And before you think this violence only occurs overseas, the rate of violence among overseas PCVs is probably lower than they would experience in the U.S. In fact, the vast majority of PCVs experience no violence or threats to their safety.

But as Jared Metzker said, all Peace Corps Volunteers understand that trying to improve this world is not without risk. And when you get down to it, the reason our world needs a Peace Corps is because this world is not at peace.  

While I understand why Peace Corps pulled out of Honduras, this is still a sad occasion. Honduras had one of the largest PC missions in the world and those Volunteers were helping so many people. But I also think the reason I'm grieving this closure is because of the special connection I have to both the country and the PCVs there.

During my senior year in high school I spent a month in rural Honduras working on an aid project. On one of my days off I met three Peace Corps Volunteers, who drove up to the ranch where I stayed. I ended up helping them with their clean water project and, by the end of the day, knew I wanted nothing more than to be a PCV. I no longer remember those Volunteers' names, but they showed me how to make a positive difference in the world. They also taught me that the biggest impact the Peace Corps makes is by building personal relationships between Americans and people around the world.

It's because of those Volunteers that I joined Peace Corps. So I hope in a few years the Peace Corps will return to Honduras.

Doomsday Clock is great propaganda but a poor predictor

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has now adjusted the minute hand on their famous Doomsday Clock. This is significant because the clock, first created in 1947 to "convey how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction," has only been previously adjusted 19 times across six decades.

As a symbol, I have nothing against the Doomsday Clock. In our individual lives it’s always a good thing to remember we’re all mortal—that one day we will die, meaning we’d better live the best life we can in the time we have left. The same sentiment applies to the fate of our species. It’s a goodness to remember that, despite what the human ego may scream at us, our species has only existed on this planet for a short time and could easily go the way of the dinosaurs (those that weren't the ancestors of birds, that is).

However, as an accurate predictor of how close humanity is to destruction the Doomday CLock leaves much to be desired. For example, the above image from Wikipedia shows how close humanity was to destruction during the clock’s 65 year history. The closest we’ve supposedly come to killing ourselves off was in 1953, when we were at “2 minutes to midnight” after the United States tested the first thermonuclear device, followed nine months later by a similar H-bomb test by the Soviet Union.  But while the Doomsday Clock in 1953 warned of our imminent destruction, a study of history shows humanity was actually further away from killing itself than the clock suggested.

Yes, the risk of a nuclear war existed during that time period. But the stockpiles of weapons controlled by the U.S. and Soviet Union in 1953 were not yet sufficient to destroy humanity. That wasn’t, however, the case in 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred. In recent years it has been revealed that this incident came extremely close to triggering a nuclear war at a time when there were indeed enough weapons to destroy the world.

But despite this, the Doomsday Clock in 1962 was relatively far removed from doomsday and was about to climb to the "safest" position it has been at any time except for immediately after the end of the Cold War. What I believe this shows is that it’s not true scientific analysis which drives the Doomsday Clock—it is the political perception of the involved scientists. The explosion of the first H-bomb was a startling event for the human psyche. For the first time, we had the ability to create weapons which could—if produced in sufficient numbers—destroy the world. It didn’t matter that there were not yet enough of these weapons to actually do this deed. All that mattered was perception.

The same thing happened in the late 1980s, when numerous arms control treaties were passed and the Cold War ended. The Doomsday Clock was literally behind the times and had to be continually reset to reflect this new reality.

So while the Doomsday Clock is a great propaganda tool for reminding humanity of the harm we could do to ourselves, as a predictor of the actually risks of an apocalypse the clock is as flawed as any other human artifact.

Why the Stories We Initially Tell Are Never Accurate

So Osama bin Laden is dead, killed with a shot to the head by U.S. Navy Seals. As should be expected with any big story, in the days since his death announcement the details have changed. Initially the government said bin Laden resisted the Seals and was killed. Then came reports that bin Laden died firing a weapon, and that he'd used his wife as a human shield.

Except those last reports are not true. While it still appears he resisted or made threatening moves, he held no weapon. And his wife, instead of being a human shield, evidently ran at the Navy Seals, who shot her in the leg. And that is merely the current story. I fully expect the story to keep adapting as new and more accurate details are released.

However, some people are angry that the details of bin Laden's killing have changed. Glenn Greenwald is outraged that the original narrative of bin Laden's killing – which framed him as "cowardly" and "violent-to-the-end" – will be the narrative people remember, even if it's not true. He compares this to previous stories which were later proven wrong, such as "Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight against Iraqi captors to Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Evil Al Qaeda fighters" and blames this on the media simply accepting "false Government claims." The argument Greenwald makes is seductive; even Andrew Sullivan asks "Why Exaggerate?" in response to Greenwald's post.

However, instead of assuming nefarious motives at work I wish Greenwald and others would simply apply occam's razor and try to see that, when dealing with the release of information around a big story, almost all initial reports are inaccurate. While this can at times result from outright lies and distortion, in most cases the root cause is the imprecise nature of human communications.

Two factors are at work here. First, humans must communicate a vast amount of words in order for specific information to reach another person (for the specifics on this, read the great book The Information by James Gleick). In addition, it doesn't matter if you want to tell someone a basic fact such as "The sky is blue" – the simple truth is those four words are not all you are communicating. Instead, you are also communicating your tone, your inflection, your body language, your power or lack thereof, and many other variables. Secondarily, the person receiving your words doesn't only have to comprehend all of this but also must process the overall message through their own personal filter of how they see the world, which includes everything from their own biases, beliefs, attitudes, and social standing to their relationship and trust with the speaker.

Considering all that, it's a wonder people can communicate with each other at all. This is also one reason why people immediately remember only half of what they are told. It's not that people are pigheaded about actually listening to others – although that can also happen. Instead, it's because people are trying to comprehend much more than simply a few basic words.

This lack of precision then slams against the human need to share stories. Whether you call it gossip or chitchat or conversation, humans have a primal need to continually share information about all aspects of our lives. And when something big and out of the ordinary happens, it's all we can do not to run screaming to the next person we see and tell everything we know.

This primal need to share stories also applies to people in group settings, such as the government. Once bin Laden was killed and the people who knew what happened were cleared to speak, they opened a logorrheic floodgate. Nevermind that many of the details they passed on were wrong – the people passing this information throught what they had to share was correct. At times like this group communications behave like a vast game of telephone, where whispers are passed from person to person until the meaning of the words change beyond all comprehension. Unfortunately, this is often how official information on big stories spreads into our society. There is not one major news event from the last century –  be it Kennedy's assassination, the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and so on – where the initial information released by U.S. government officials was totally accurate.

This doesn't mean these officials were neccesarily lying. Could they have biases in promoting certain information? Certainly. Could they have been eager to release certain information because it confirmed their worldview? That's true of all humans. But the simple truth is initial communications around earth-shaking events are almost always not the final story.

What's funny is that the people who are uncomfortable with the changing storyline around bin Laden's death are also the very people who want more openness from our government. But openness is a double-edged sword and means that when big news events occur information will often be released which is ultimately proven inaccurate. Since the alternative is to wait hours or days until all information is properly vetted and verified, I don't see this changing anytime soon.

Perhaps one day our society will develop to the point where we have accurate information at our fingertips before any of us engages in our global games of gossip and telephone. But I'm not holding my breath.

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The Abattoir of Mediocrity

I don't write or read much horror unless I fall into it sideways while sloshing around in my usual science fiction or fantasy. However, I love the British horror magazine Black Static. The magazine's editors and writers are always slicing their readers into bloody excellence, and the opinion pieces they publish are great beyond measure.

Case in point: Christopher Fowler's essay in Black Static 22 on "Why Mediocrity Rules." As Fowler states, he now actually hates the mainsteam. "Not because of who watches it – people will watch anything put in front of them – or who writes it – writers develop good ideas for years only to have them eviscerated or turned down outright because of passing fashions – but because of who decides what we watch and read."

As Fowler says, there are creativity killers in every profession, people who slink from position to position leaving "trails of destruction in their wakes, like snails." And while Fowler doesn't go into how the new media landscape of YouTube and Twitter and self-published ebooks are changing these trails of destruction, I haven't yet seen a ton of excellence rising to the top. Instead, when the "The Bed Intruder Song" receives 50 million views I'd say mediocrity has found new ways to thrive.

This doesn't mean every artist who whines about their lot in life deserves to be showered with praise. Fowler quotes John Cleese in his Monty Python architect sketch, when he delivers a slaughterhouse instead of a block of apartments and the clients complain. As Cleese says, "That’s the kind of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I expect from you non-creative garbage." Not that Cleese should be allowed to build an abattoir to slaughter apartment dwellers. But the architect who eventually wins is in his own way worse than Cleese's character, and is praised for creating an absolute monstrosity.

I wish I could link to Fowler's essay; instead, I'll simply say you should subscribe to Black Static and that Fowler touches on some of these points in this recent blog post.

As Your Great-Grandparents Saw the World

For the last two weeks I've been thinking about an essay Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote called "Grappling With Genosha," which explores why the pre-Civil War American South—and by extension, the entire United States—supported something as morally wrong as slavery.

Coates finds "almost any explanation that invokes individual evil to be unpersuasive." Instead, he says one must look at how society and self interest makes people rationlize and support things they might personally disagree with. Many people in the pre-Civil War South no doubt realized slavery was wrong but supported it because of the cumulative weight of their culture and self-interest. That's why slavery was accepted. It was far easier to go along with the evils around you than to take a stand which may cause you to lose your social standing, job, family, and much more.

I agree with this analysis. While it is easy to look back at slavery and say we enlightened modern people would never have supported such a horrible system, we're saying that from the comfort of a 150 years distance. Instead of saying how you'd have fought against slavery if you'd been alive back then, find a major societal trend in today's world and see how accepting you are of it.

For example, gasoline powered automobiles create polution and other planet-wide side effects. But how many people are willing to cut themselves off from the benefits of the internal combustible engine? Instead, the best people seem to do is slowly change things. To hope that one day technological advances will result in cleaner engines so we can have the benefits of cars without the bad things. I wonder what our descendents will think about such rationalizations?

And that is at the heart of how to view history—time changes what humans are willing to accept and how we see our world.

Last year I took part in an Authors and Ideas Panel at the World Fantasy Convention. One of the participants—author S.M. Stirling—said something which really resonated with me. To quote:

"If a writer is arguing for a point of view or a belief in their work, that's not what they really strongly believe. The things you believe most strongly, the things you never even think to argue about—your default assumptions about what the world is, what humans beings are, how they operate, that sort of thing—that suffuses what you write. These things vary both between individuals and over time. That's one of the reasons it is valuable to read stuff written a long time ago. You're looking through alien eyes. There is no one more alien than your great-great-great-grandparents. Reading stuff they wrote gives you a valuable corrective on assuming that you are the default condition for human beings. That your basic assumptions are the laws of the universe and will endure forever, or that everything changed up until it came to you and your glorious self and now it will be that way until the end of time."

I love that quote. And Stirling is absolutely correct. No one is more more alien than your great-great-great-grandparents.

But that also brings to mind how our great-great-great-grandchildren will see us. To them we will also be totally alien and they will likely condemn us for the moral choices we made—choices which to us seem totally acceptable but to our descendents will be nothing but evil.

This isn't to say slavery was anything but morally wrong. I hope that if I'd lived back then I'd have taken a stand against this evil institution. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, we don't have that luxury.

Instead, Coates says that to understand how you would have lived in the past "You almost have to forget who you are and start thinking about what you might have been. But if you're going to go there, you have to go there. If this feels safe, comfortable, or affirming, you've done something wrong."

Are We Heading Toward a Faith-Based Science?

After reading two engaging essays in recent days, I'm now wondering if humanity is heading toward a faith-based science. That is, a future where people trust and believe in science in the same way most humans currently trust and believe in religion. Before you say whether this is a good or bad idea, read the following essay excerpts.

First, from the Esquire feature "15 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope" comes Tom Junod's "We Dream in Science" (via Andrew Sullivan):

"We are not going to live forever. We are not going to have our life spans scientifically amplified to biblical lengths. We will not be able to take pills that will give us the musculature of superheroes or allow us to gorge ourselves while enjoying the health benefits of starvation. We will reach our limits, and, with some hard-won variation, those limits will be — they will feel like — the same limits we humans have always had. We will remain human where it counts, in our helpless and inspiring relation to our own mortality.

"Does this sound obvious? It shouldn't. Indeed, what I should have said from the start is that I believe that we are all going to die, in that science increasingly believes otherwise — and science increasingly has become a matter of belief. Its logic, once pointed at the eradication of disease and infection, is now inexorably pointed at aging and death, which is to say the ultimate questions that were once left to religion.

"... It also means that, as loath as scientists are to admit it, science is simply a superior form of storytelling, its testable hypotheses and its quantifiable phenomena still subject to the human need for overarching narrative. The more ambitious and far-reaching its insights, the less likely it is that they will find expression anywhere but in the circumscribed circumstances of the laboratory or in the limitless expanses of the human imagination."

Fascinating.

And as part of the Guardian's "Ten Questions Science Must Answer" article comes Brian Cox's goal for humanity (via Boing Boing):

"Can we make a scientific way of thinking all pervasive? This would be the greatest achievement for science over the coming centuries. I say this because I do not believe that we currently run our world according to evidence-based principles. If we did, we would be investing in an energy Manhattan project to quickly develop and deploy clean energy technologies. We would be investing far larger amounts of our GDP in the eradication of diseases such as malaria, and we would be learning to live and work in space – not as an interesting and extravagant sideline, but as an essential part of our long-term survival strategy."

I'm a ardent believer in the scientific process. I believe this not only because I'm a science fiction writer, but also because one can easily look around our world and see the benefits science has granted humanity. This isn't to say science can't also deliver bad things for humanity—more on this in a moment—but overall I believe science has been a good thing.

Despite this, the idea that people should believe in science in a faith-based manner—which is what both of these essays appear to suggest would either be a good thing or is likely to happen—worries me deeply.

This doesn't mean my worries are driven by a fault with science. Instead, the fault with this approach rests, as always, with human fallibility. Humans simply are not perfect. We'll never be perfect. As a result, no human creation should be given our absolute faith and belief. Not even a noble pursuit like science. 

The November 2010 Atlantic has a great article about how most medical research "is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong." Is the wrongness described in the article the result of a flaw in the scientific method? No. Do these problems result from using evidence-based principles to find solutions to life's problems? Sometimes. After all, it isn't unusual to have contradictory evidence result from similar experiments.

However, the biggest reason for flawed scientific results come from human emotions, needs, and desires intruding into the scientific process. Human are great at twisting science on both subconscious and conscious levels to achieve certain goals. Is this bad science? Of course. But it happens all the time.

This isn't very different from how people twist the stated beliefs of various religions to achieve goals which run against those very religions' core teachings. For example, even though most religions preach against violence, at one time or another believers of every major religion have used their religion to justify horrific violence.

This doesn't mean religion hasn't also had a positive influence on humanity. In the space of a few millennia modern religions have helped turn humanity from an extremely violent species—especially toward people considered to be outside one's "group" or tribe—into a much more peaceful species. Yes, violence still occurs. But compared to levels of violence thousands of years ago, the change toward a more peaceful humanity has been astounding.

Humanity is undergoing a similar change as a result of scientific progress. Since I'm an optimist, I believe this change will one day be as profound and important as the changes in human morality brought about by religion. This doesn't mean science won't also do great harm to us as times. Look at the horrors of World Wars I and II to see what science can do when turned toward violent ends. But overall science is a good thing for humanity.

Unless, I should add, we begin believing in science as if it's a religion. If we have faith that science is as infallible as the Pope. If we put science on a pedestal where one can't question it.

After all, how many of the world's problems result from people having absolute faith that their religion is the ultimate path to truth? And how is that so different from asking for humanity to have a similar absolute faith in science?

The irony is that in many ways we already run our world according to evidence-based principles, just as Brian Cox desires. Unfortunately, these evidence-based principles are usually based around the wrong goals and the wrong evidence. We make decisions based on our emotions and desires, often resulting in only short-term gain for our individual selves. We allow ourselves to think that each of us are among the most important people in the world (which is exactly the evidence our ego-centric minds and senses are programmed to create). We ignore those aspects of life which disagree with our world view—ignore them, that is, until the world forces us in often harsh ways to change our views.

One reason science is such an amazing learning tool is because of skepticism. Ideally scientists don't believe in anecdotes or rumors or any claim lacking empirical evidence. So count me among the skeptics who don't believe having science replace religion as an object of faith would magically result in a paradise on Earth.

I want a world where people both trust in evidence AND are skeptical of that evidence. Where we trust in science but also understand that science can be manipulated by base human desires and needs.

In short, I want a world where we have faith in humanity—even as we acknowledge that sometimes humans absolutely do not deserve such an unquestioning trust.

When is social media a bad thing for authors?

While considering changes to the Million Writers Award, I've been pondering one particular aspect of the award: How it basically encourages authors to promote their stories both online and through social media. Since the public votes for the overall winner, if an author's story is a finalist it's obviously in the author's self-interest to raise awareness about this fact and ask people to vote for him or her.

This has long been the most controversial part of the award. Some people have complained that holding a public vote cheapens the award and that another method for selecting the top story should be utilized, such as using a panel of judges. However, I prefer an open, democratic award process. I also have faith that most people will vote for what they see as the best story--even if an author asks them to vote a different way.

What all this means, though, is that each year authors use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools to promote that their stories are under consideration for the Million Writers Award. And each year people complain about authors doing this.

Which brings me to my main question: If you are an author, are there certain things you shouldn't do to promote your writings using social media?

Please place that question in the proper context. We live in an interconnect world where social media is replacing the old-guard media decision makers. Instead of Walter Cronkite telling us "that's the way it is," a billion people now shout their views on how things really are. This mass opinion constantly ebbs and flows as it filters through our personal interactions and conversations. If several of your friends state on Facebook that a movie is good, you're more likely to see it than if a TV ad proclaims it the best SF epic since "Battlefield Earth." (Sorry, couldn't resist :-) As an author, I'd rather have a million people tweeting about my stories than have my fiction annointed by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review.

The funny thing is that social media works in similar ways to how ideas and beliefs have been promoted throughout much of human history. People once learned from one another what was worth knowing and doing, and the best of these memes worked their way through the population like a unending game of telephone. It was only with the advent of mass communication technology like printing, radio, and TV that a select few became able to easily influence great numbers of people. But with social media those select few are now finding themselves increasingly drowned out. This doesn't mean influential voices won't rise up out of the social media and influence others. But this happens in a much more natural process than having a single news anchor declare "that's the way it is."

So how does this tie in with authors and social media?

It used to be that when an author published a new book, their publisher--a perfect example of an old-guard media decision maker--would arrange publicity and author tours and media exposure. A major goal of every publisher was to land reviews and mentions in high-profile magazines and newspapers, which were influential media decision makers in their own right. If this process resulted in your novel making the cover of The New York Times Book Review, you were usually assured of success. If it didn't, you had a much harder mountain to climb to reach potential readers.

Now the landscape has changed. While landing coverage in the old media is still important--its influence is waning but hasn't totally died off--thanks to social media this is no longer the only way to interact with the reading public. So these days authors should, at a minimum, engage the social media world by having websites, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages.

So which acts of social media self-promotion are valid, and which cross the line?

In terms of authors using social media to promote their works, it is important to understand that the essence of social media is through sharing and interaction with others. With that in mind, authors should not be faulted for doing the following with their social media accounts:

• Asking people to read your stories or novels.
• Talking about your stories and novels.
• Asking people to spread the news about your stories or novels.
• Talking about your life outside of your writing.
• Giving away books and other prizes.
• Mentioning upcoming readings, prizes you've received, new stories you're writing, and so on.
• And most importantly, interacting with your readers by responding to emails, Tweets, messages, and so on.

However, there are also some big social media no-nos, even bigger than throwing your book at the President in hopes that he'll notice and talk you up. In the social media sphere, authors shouldn't:

• Forget that the essense of social media is sharing and interaction. If you're Neil Gaiman, you can play by your own rules and ignore this (not that he does). Everyone else ignores this truth at their own peril. If you don't see social media as a means of actually interacting with people, then why use social media in the first place?
   
  
• Let your ego run amuck through the social media landscape. If every word from your Twitter account proclaims that you're the best writer on the planet, then no one will want to follow you. It is one thing to be confident in your abilities. It is another to be an arrogant SOB. And most people know enough arrogant SOBs in their everyday lives that they have no desire to meet another through social media.
   
  
• Stir up controversy simply to attract attention. The easiest thing to be online is a troll, but who wants to read a troll's memoir about irritating half the world? This doesn't mean you shouldn't state what you feel and think using social media. But if the only reason you use social media is to tick people off, you should rethink what you're doing.
   
  
• Forget that your first job as a writer is to write. While social media can be fun, don't forget that it isn't the first thing you should do with your time. Your writing should always come before using social media.
   
  
• Forget that the social media world isn't the real world. Yes, real people interact using social media. And yes, social media can influence the real world. But if you don't ever leave the cocoon of the social media world, your life will suffer. And if your life suffers, your writing can't be far behind.

At the end of the day, don't forget that the best social media promotion an author can do is to be yourself. If you are a jerk at heart, this will eventually come through in your social media interactions. Likewise, if you are a nice person who cares about your readers, they will also realize that through your social media interactions.