Brian D. Buckley

Today’s Ask Me Anything question arrives courtesy of longtime reader Jo Eberhardt:

What is the one question you wouldn’t answer honestly, no matter what?

This question is especially interesting to me, because as it happens, I’m a very honest person. Maybe it’s just my upbringing, but for whatever reason, I’ve been honest nearly to a fault ever since I was a little kid. This, in turn, has made me think a lot about the ethical foundations of honesty, and when lying really is acceptable.

I can think of two major reasons for telling the truth.

First, there’s trust: the more honest people are, the more they can trust each other. And trust has a wide array of benefits, from personal relationships (like marriage) all the way up to international diplomacy. Without trust, society falls apart.

My second reason is more nebulous, and would be harder to defend in a pinch, but here it is: I believe there is something inherently beautiful, or noble, about the truth. I feel that one of the great purposes in life is to understand the universe, and to that end, truth is a step forward and lies are a step backward.

With that in mind, I would say that lies are justified when the ethical good they can do (or the harm that the truth could cause) outweighs the benefits above. The classic example (at the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law) is if you’re hiding some innocent person in Nazi Germany, and the Nazis come banging on your door, asking if you’re hiding anyone. Of course you lie, because the need to save a human life is vastly more important than anything else in that situation.

That’s an extreme example, but it can act as a guide for thinking about ethics.

(To be clear, I’m not nearly as saintly as all this makes me sound. I certainly have lied for no other reason than to cover my own ass. Not too often, and I’m not necessarily proud of it, but it does happen.)

So. That was a long-winded philosophical monologue in reply to a simple question that I haven’t even answered yet: “What is the one question you wouldn’t answer honestly, no matter what?”

The short answer is that I can’t think of a single specific question I would never answer honestly. Rather, it’s a whole class of questions that I would lie about, according to the guidelines above. So much depends on context, and especially on who’s asking.There are very, very few things I would lie to my wife about; there are many more things I would lie to a stranger about, though still relatively few.

Not sure if that was a satisfying answer, but I’m afraid it’s the only one I have. Thanks for the question, Jo!

Tomorrow is the last “Brian Answers” post. I’ll respond to questions from Shaila and Adam about immortality (w00t!).

The next Ask Me Anything question comes from Zeev:

Let’s give you an all encompassing question.

“Where do you see the United States in 20 years?”

Will it still be a world superpower? Or more like the British empire past its prime with waning power over the rest of the world?

Where do you see the US citizens? Happy? Prosperous? are we a Plutocracy? an Oligarchy? how’s the wage gap? how’s our civil rights record looking?

Feel free to include any an all ideas that you have on the future, the previous were just suggestions and not mandates.

The year is 2032, I’m forty-seven years old, Sony’s just released the Playstation 9, and we’ve discovered we’re all living in a computer simulation. What else is new? Of course, nobody knows, but these are my (somewhat) educated guesses.

On the world stage, I think we’ll continue to be a superpower. As I’ve mentioned before, the U.S. spends as much on its military as the next nineteen countries combined, and has more aircraft carriers than the rest of the planet put together. I don’t see that changing drastically anytime soon. The biggest danger I see militarily is that we’ll spread ourselves too thin. However, the quagmires of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the far more successful and cheaper (in blood and money) action in Libya, have hopefully imprinted a distaste for entanglement on our collective psyche – at least for a while.

It does seem likely that our military dominance will become less overwhelming, due to the rise of countries like China, India, and Brazil. We worry a lot about China, and rightly so, but its leaders seem to crave stability more than anything. I don’t see them launching World War III, recent saber-rattling with Japan notwithstanding.

And there are other reasons for hope. In general, the world is slowly, slowly getting more democratic: witness the Arab Spring, the reforms in Burma, and last decade the revolutions in eastern Europe. Democracies tend not to fight each other, so this, too, is a sign of stability. Meanwhile al-Qaeda is weaker than ever – not that it was ever, statistically speaking, much of a threat. Americans on their home turf have always been more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a terrorist attack.

Enough about geopolitics. What about at home?

For starters, the Republican Party is facing a pair of crises, and they know it. The first is a growing split between the moderates and the Tea Party; the second is demographics. Republicans are overwhelmingly losing the black and Latino vote, which is an ever-growing share of the electorate. I think they’ll find a way to adapt, but that will mean some significant changes to their platform over the next 20 years.

In terms of civil rights, marriage equality is perhaps the major battle of our time, and on that front, we’re making enormous progress. I’ve written about that recently, so I won’t belabor the point here. But I think same-sex marriage will be far less controversial twenty years from now, and thank goodness for that.

I’m painting a rosy picture so far, but of course we do face enormous challenges. Debt continues its long, slow spiral out of control, and despite all the talk recently about reining it in, I haven’t seen much hope that it’s going to happen. Our K-12 schools are failing even as our universities get more expensive. The threat of nuclear war, which has faded since the fall of the Soviet Union, never disappeared – and our drone strikes are winning us few friends in nuclear-armed Pakistan. (Although India is probably a more likely Pakistani target, if it comes to that.) And, of course, we’re still in the midst of a global economic crisis, and humanitarian crises in Syria and elsewhere.

Overall, though, I tend to be broadly optimistic. We’ve survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War. As problems emerge, we adapt. One way or another, we’ll figure it out. (See, I’m reciting platitudes – take that, dictatorships!)

I’ve written a lot, but of course I’ve necessarily left out a lot. I haven’t even mentioned privacy concerns or the exponential growth of technology. But my time and your attention are limited, so I’ll cut it short.

What do you think about the question or my answer? Leave me a comment!

Tomorrow I’ll answer Jo Eberhardt‘s question: “What is the one question you wouldn’t answer honestly, no matter what?”

A little while ago, I put out the welcome mat to ask me anything and be guaranteed an answer. And you responded. What’s more, your questions were so intense, so thought-provoking, that I decided that cramming all the answers into one forty-minute post would be a crime (or at least a misdemeanor).

With questions this good, each one deserves its own post in answer. So all this week, I’ll be answering questions.

Here’s the first, from my good friend Ben Trube:

Okay Brian, I know you’re the right person to ask this question:

“Are we living in a computer simulation?”

Some potential source material and my inspiration for the question: NPR article

This is a great question, and as the article points out, people have been asking it long before The Matrix came out – indeed, long before computers were even invented. The puzzle of whether reality is “real” has kept philosophers busy for about as long philosophy has existed.

And the answer is simple: it’s utterly impossible to know. We can’t even speak meaningfully about how likely it is that we’re in a computer simulation.

Here’s why.

There are certain properties we would expect a computer simulation to have: finite computing resources, logic errors, and so on. Conceivably, you might design experiments that could test for these properties. So why do I say it’s impossible to know?

Simple. Because all of our ideas about how computers work are based on computers in this reality, which – if we’re a simulation – might be nothing like how computers operate in the “real” reality.

Our parent reality might have totally different laws of physics. It might even have different laws of logic. Two and two might not equal four. Since our entire lives have passed inside this reality, we have to concede that we have absolutely no basis for even speculating about any other reality.

So if our experiments didn’t find evidence of a computer simulation, that could just mean that we have no idea what “real” computers are like. Conversely, if we did find evidence, it could just mean that our reality happens to have properties of what we think of as a computer simulation; it says nothing about whether our reality matches the properties of a “real” computer simulation, which is unimaginable to us.

The NPR article you referenced quotes philosopher Nick Bostrom as saying that we’re “almost certainly” living in a computer simulation. But he makes the same logical error I just described: all his reasoning presupposes a “real” reality with the same properties as our own. There’s just no basis for such an assumption.

Okay, so we have no idea whether we’re made of baryons or bytes. A follow-up question might be: does it matter? Occam’s Razor says that if a hypothesis makes no observable predictions (that is, if “real” reality and simulated reality are subjectively identical) then it’s not worth worrying about.

But that’s a pretty big if. It could be, as in The Matrix, that waking up from the simulation has profound implications. It’s a question worth asking.

And a question that’s impossible to answer – just as Neo can never know that Zion is the real world, and not just another Matrix.

What do you think? Am I right, or did I miss something? Let me know in the comments!

Tomorrow, I’ll answer Zeev’s question: “Where do you see the United States in 20 years?”