What if they taught noblesse oblige in school?

I first learned about the concept of noblesse oblige in sociolinguistics class, when we were studying U and Non-U. To give us some context, the prof talked to us about the British conceptualization of old money (generally title nobility) vs. nouveau riche. The most memorable example she gave was that titled nobility would wear an extremely good quality cashmere sweater that they bought 20 years ago, while nouveau riche would ostentatiously buy the trendiest new clothes every year. I found the noblesse oblige concept appealing, and try to work it into my own life on the few occasions when I can find an opportunity to do so.

A number of things recently have made me wonder "Haven't they ever heard of noblesse oblige?" Some of this comes from politics, some of it comes from my recent readings on bullying theory. Most recent was from this article:

At one Southern school, some popular kids keep the price tags on their clothing so that classmates can see that they paid full price at a nondiscount store.

WTF? Haven't they ever heard of noblesse oblige?

Actually, they probably haven't. I first met the concept in an upper-year university sociolinguistics course, so why on earth would I think schoolkids should have heard of it?

But wouldn't it be useful if it were a more widely-known concept? What if they taught it in school?

Obviously they can't teach it as a thou shalt - that would come across as lecturey and sanctimonious and would never work. It would have to be closer to how I was introduced to it, simply "This is a thing that exists. Nobility does it."

So how would you do that? First thing that comes to mind is in a novel. For one or more of the books everyone reads in English class, pick something where noblesse oblige is a plot or character point. Appealing protagonist characters demonstrate noblesse oblige, and unappealing antagonist characters fail to do so. It wouldn't be the whole moral of the novel, just an underlying thread, like how entails are an underlying thread of Jane Austen novels but the books are far more than just a lecture on the follies of entails. That would introduce people to the concept of noblesse oblige in a non-lecturey way, and maybe the idea would stick with some people and help make the world a better place in the long run.

Questioning the illegality of assassination

I was surprised when reading Noam Chomsky's reaction to Bin Laden's death to learn that assassination is illegal under international law. This surprised me, because all-out war can be perfectly legal under international law, and war is far messier and hurts far more people than assassination. I googled around and it seems to be true, and I also have a vague memory of in 2001 when Canada was first going to occupy Afghanistan, asking why we couldn't just assassinate Bin Laden instead and being told that that's illegal.

I think we need to rethink this. It just doesn't seem right that it would be illegal to, say, send in a small team of spooks to neatly assassinate Gaddafi, but World War I was perfectly legal. Why should it be legal to kill thousands, even millions, of soldiers and civilians and destroy infrastructure and livelihoods, but illegal to sneak into some despot's compound and off him in his sleep?

I'm certainly not saying that people or countries should be allowed to kill people and then get a get out of jail free card by calling it assassination, or that assassination is even objectively a good thing, at all, ever. I'm just thinking it might be a less unpalatable shade of grey than full-out military action.

In his article, Mr. Chomsky says:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

And his point, that the American people would not be best pleased with that development, is, of course, correct and valid. But I suspect the American people would be even less pleased if war were declared on the whole country and millions of innocent civilians found themselves bombed out and under military occupation when the occupying force really just wanted that one guy.

Perhaps it would be useful for international law to create a framework inside which assassination can be legal. Perhaps countries who want to assassinate someone could go before an international court and get an assassination warrant. (Q: But then wouldn't the target know they're about to be assassinated? A: Are there any plausible targets for assassination who aren't already assuming someone wants to assassinate them?) As a starting point, I propose that, in any situations where war or other military occupation would be legal, targeted assassination should also be legal (and military action should not be a prerequisite to targeted assassination.) Perhaps, before military action could be considered legal, the initiator should have to justify why targeted assassination isn't an option.

I'm certainly not under the impression that military actions normally stick to the letter of international law in the first place, but nevertheless, even if just for form's sake, the action with the less harmful outcome should be just as legal as the action with the more harmful outcome.

How to make me conservative

I've been watching Johnathan Haidt's TED talk on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives, and I realized that I actually have quite a lot in common with conservatives. I don't have a high level of openness to new experiences. I like things that are familiar, safe, and dependable. Mr. Haidt says that liberals "want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos" and conservatives "want order, even at cost to those at the bottom." I don't necessarily want change, except when it's necessary for justice or to improve things. I wouldn't say "at the risk of chaos", the strongest I'd go is "at the risk of reasonable sacrifice." I rather like order as well (although not when it's code for authoritarianism), just not at the cost of anyone - especially not those at the bottom! Overall, I like the rut I'm in and would very much like to stay here. My politics come from my personal desire not have my comfy rut taken away, and my socialist value that anyone who would like to do so should be able to enjoy the same benefits from the status quo that I do.

The more conservative people around me seem to think that I should be more conservative, and based on Mr. Haidt's theories it seems like the potential is in me. So why am I not there?

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think it comes down to two things: the status quo is not satisfactory, and there is sufficient will among people who identify as conservative to change the aspects of the status quo that I find positive to make me nervous. I am naturally inclined to unquestioningly accept the status quo, and to fiercely cling to the aspects of it that I see as positive. Elimination of threats to positive aspects of the status quo is the most likely way to make me conservative.

So what does that mean in specific terms?

1. Good jobs for all Employment gives me money which buys me my comfy rut. If I could be confident that my earning potential (along with that of people I care about, people I identify with, and people I look at and think "there but for the grace of god go I") is not going to vanish due to circumstances beyond my control, I could feel safe and secure enough to be conservative. However, as long as the status quo is moving towards contract hell for all, I will be disinclined to protect the status quo.

2. Maintain our rights Everything else that I value about the status quo can fall under the broad category of retaining our existing rights, and everything that I want to change can be defined as either expanding existing rights to everyone, or restoring rights that were eliminated in living memory. I feel secure because I have access to all the tools I need to remain childfree, and I want that available to everyone. I feel terrified that the police could just round up everyone who happened to be in a particular area of a public street during the G20, and I want to go back to a world where that couldn't happen. If I could be confident that my rights (along with those of people I care about, people I identify with, and people I look at and think "there but for the grace of god go I") are not going to vanish due to circumstances beyond my control, I could feel safe and secure enough to be conservative. However, as long as the status quo includes people very loudly trying to take them away, I will be disinclined to protect the status quo.

What if schools were evaluated on long-term results?

I was reading this article on the problems with standardized tests, and it got me thinking about more effective ways to evaluate education. And it occurred to me that the true measure of education is long-term results.

For example, my high school was rather proud of the fact that 80% of its graduates went on to university. But what percentage made it past first-year university? We don't know. If, hypothetically, only half of us made it past first-year university, there's probably something wrong with the high school. And a high school where only 60% go to university but they all graduate is probably doing better.

Obviously, there are many problems with using long-term results. You'll lose track of some people, and you're more likely to lose track of students who have slipped through the cracks. It doesn't signal problems until it's far too late to do anything about them. It introduces the likelihood that outcomes will be affected by variables beyond the school's control.

But still, it seems relevant. It would be so useful if they could figure out a way to incorporate long-term outcomes as part of the evaluation.

Theory: insecurity in one's own philosophy is the root of all evil

I blogged recently about how various patriarchal cultures are operating suboptimally essentially as a result of the patriarchs' insecurity in their own philosophy.

It occurs to me that many of the evils of the world are the result of powerful regimes being insecure in their own philosophies.

I was recently in a conversation with someone who felt the need to expound at length upon why communism is bad. But none of the examples they gave had anything to do with the actual social/political/economic practises that constitute actual communism. Instead they were on about stasi and gulags and propaganda - things that communist countries did because they were insecure in their philosophy. If they had trusted their philosophy, they wouldn't have needed all this stuff that they used to hurt people and ruin people's lives. And if they weren't pouring so many resources into assuaging their insecurity, they'd have had more to put into making their actual social and economic model work.

The evils that result from religion are similar. The problems happen when religions try to force themselves on people who aren't interested, start wars with other religion, and try to colonize countries and impose their values upon legislation. If they truly were secure in their dogma, they could just quietly go about life, letting the benefits of their religion speak for themselves. And if religions didn't go around trying to force themselves on others, there fewer people would perceive other religions as threats. Even I, as a recovering catholic, think I could appreciate the beauty and history of my former religion if it would stop trying to infringe upon my life as a private citizen.

My theory, which is mine

I always advise fellow translators to use a more specific preposition than "regarding" (or synonyms thereof). I feel that "regarding" forces the reader to make some effort to figure out how the two elements are related to each other, and if you can use a more specific preposition, then the reader doesn't have to make this effort.

However, I have also begun to think that using no prepositions whatsoever, by piling the elements together as a noun phrase or something similar, might make it even more effortless for the reader. This obviously wouldn't work for non-Anglophones (at least not non-Anglophones coming from Romance languages), but I really do suspect noun phrases scan more effortlessly for Anglophones. Perhaps it's because it implies to the reader that they're closely familiar with the subject matter, giving them a sort of false reassurance.

Specific (fake) example:

"The problem regarding the umbrellas"
takes more effort to read than
"The problem with the umbrellas"
takes more effort to read than
"The umbrella problem"

Strictly speaking, they all provide the same amount of information. If someone is completely unfamiliar with whatever the problem with the umbrellas is, calling it "the umbrella problem" isn't going to help them. But if they already have the information they need to understand "the problem regarding the umbrellas", then "the problem with the umbrellas" or "the umbrella problem" will be more effortless to read and understand.

Is this consistent with your experience with the English language?

(Anonymous comments welcome, non-Anglophone comments welcome, but if English is not your first/primary language please tell me what is.)

How to buy better school performance with one simple tweak

I've read in a number of places that one approach to improving school performance is to offer money to schools who improve, or offer the most money to the schools who improve the most.

I'm not sure whether or not that approach would work, but here's a simple tweak to maximize its effectiveness: give some of that money to the students.

All students get some money. Students who pass get more money than students who fail. The highest-performing students get more money, but the most improved students also get more money. The highest-performing student in the school and the most-improved student in the school get exactly the same amount of money. Maybe the money baseline could increase with each grade, so that you'll never that less money than last year for getting exactly the same marks (i.e. if a D student pulls their average up to B in grade 10 and gets a shitload of money for improvement, we don't want them to get less money for maintaining a B in Grade 11.)

A school can only be successful if it elicits the desired behaviour in its students. School administrators and teachers already want the students to show the desired behaviour, if only because it makes life easier. If financial incentives are effective and appropriate (and I'm not sure whether or not they are), why not give at least part of them to the group that actually front-line produces the results being evaluated?

What if non-specialist teachers taught all mandatory courses?

My high school history teacher passed away recently. I think he was a good teacher, so while trying to think of something to write in his obit's guestbook I was trying to think of why I think he's a good teacher. And what I came up with is he got the material into my head. History was neither my favourite nor my least favourite subject. I don't have any particular passion for it, and I only took the required course. But this teacher easily and painlessly got me to a mindset where, even 15 years later, the material that is relevant to whatever I'm doing or thinking about is there in my head. When we were talking about a coalition government last year, I could name-check King-Byng and modify a well-known historical quote to come up with coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition. I knew enough about the Upper Canada Revolution that I groked and could banter with @RebelMayor. I know what the Boer War was and how Canada got caught up in it. I know why we have Catholic schools, and I know why so many of my co-workers are ex-Catholic. I can name-check all the major characters and plot points from both world wars. I know what a Bennett buggy is and what the On-to-Ottawa Trek was. I don't know everything about everything, but I have a solid grounding and know where I need to do more research. While this teacher must have had a passion for history, it didn't permeate his work - which was a good thing! In his classroom, we could simply learn the material without being expected to pour our whole heart and soul into it, and it stuck.

In comparison, my Grade 12 English teacher had a passion for literature, and that made me detest the subject matter. He loved comparing and analyzing and dissecting, and I simply don't care that much any more once the story is over. Even the few glimmers of interest that arose naturally were promptly extinguished, smothered by his constant demand. I found a Shakespearian sonnet that spoke to me, and got marked down in my analysis of it for not drawing religious parallels. I memorized and understood Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and lost marks for not being able to write it out with the exact same punctuation. I thought Newspeak was kind of cool and was in a headspace where I could have made a rudimentary attempt at drawing parallels with the language choices of current politicians, but we had to have a fricking debate about it in front of the whole class! Overall, we studied about half a dozen major works from generally-accepted Western literary cannon (plus poetry and ISU), learned the whole hubris-hamartia-downfall thing, and I found a few things that piqued my interest. That should have been enough for a required course, but this teacher put me right off with assignments that simply didn't work out unless you had the level of passion for the subject matter that he had and I didn't.

I've had this happen in other subject areas too. Teachers who are passionate about subjects I'm indifferent about smother any sparks of interest I might have developed, whereas teachers who are more blasé make subjects I wouldn't normally care about seem more approachable without hindering any existing interest.

So, to address this, what if all required courses in school were taught by non-specialist teachers? They didn't study the subjects in university, they don't have any particular passion for them, but they learned them in high school just like everyone else and now have to refamiliarize themselves in order to teach them. So they understand what it's like to struggle with the subject matter or to have to figure it out despite a lack of enthusiasm, and can get the basics into everyone's brains. Students who then find the subject particularly interesting can go on to study it in elective courses taught by specialist teachers who also have a passion for the subject matter, while students who don't particularly care can absorb the basics without having the subject ruined by a teacher's enthusiasm for fussy and finicky aspects of the subject matter.

Refining Scott Adams' tax model

Scott Adams proposed a tax model where the rich support the poor. I've thought of a modification whereby businesses support the unemployed and underemployed.

We begin by identifying what I will define as the "corporate tax pool". The corporate tax pool is a dollar amount equal to a fair, reasonable, and comfortable living (for mathematical simplicity, we'll say $50,000) multiplied by the number of people in Canada.

In lieu of whatever the current method for calculating corporate tax is, every company's taxes owing is equal to their share of the corporate tax pool. A company's fair share of the corporate tax pool is determined by calculating their business revenues as a percentage of Canada's total business revenues. If, for example, a large corporation's revenues are equal to 1% of all of the business revenue generated in Canada, then that corporation is responsible for paying 1% of the entire corporate tax pool.

However, from this tax payable is deducted the total salary and benefits the corporation pays to its employees. So if the corporation's payroll is equal to or greater than its share of the corporate tax pool, it doesn't pay any taxes. If its payroll is less than its share of the corporate tax pool, it pays taxes. The taxes collected through the corporate tax pool pay for social assistance for people who are unemployed or underemployed.

Ultimately, all businesses collectively have to pay for all people collectively. They can do so by hiring people, paying them salary, and getting productive and/or revenue-generating work out of them, or by paying taxes that are used to fund social assistance. I know that in my current job, the revenue I generate for my employer is between two and three times my salary, so if it's a choice between paying taxes to support me or hiring me as a worker, hiring me wins by far.

Things I haven't figured out yet: Might this somehow create an incentive for employers to pay employees no more than $50,000? Conversely, if there's high unemployment but very high salaries for the jobs that do exist, could that leave the unemployed high and dry? Is it fairer to use revenue or profit to calculate each company's fair share of the corporate tax pool? (I chose revenue because my understanding is that a company can use accounting tricks to appear to have very low profit on paper, but it's possible I'm missing something.)

Edited to add: Another thing I haven't figured out is the impact of public sector, not-for-profit, and other employers that wouldn't pay taxes. I know that there are an awful lot of public sector jobs (the number half a million comes to mind but I'm not sure if that's right), but they'd be operating outside this whole system. I'm not sure how this would affect it. The easiest workaround I can think of at this precise moment is to subtract the number of employees of non-tax-paying employers from the calculation of the corporate tax pool, but there would still be other impacts I can't see.

Cars and yelling

This post is further to this braindump.

I've noticed a correlation between driving and yelly/angry behaviour.

A friend of mine once worked for the City of Toronto in a number of different offices, and she said that by far the most anger she ever faced was in the parking office. People get way more disproportionately angry about parking tickets or not being allowed to park where they want or not being able to find a parking spot than anything else. That is consistent with my own observations of life in general.

For the purposes of constructing a sensible sentence, I'm going to deem the set of all the people who have ever been the driver of a car in which I was a passenger "my drivers". I'd say a good 80% of the anger I have witnessed from my drivers has occurred while they were driving, even though the vast majority of the time I have spent with these people has been outside of the car.

My yelly fast-food customers were nearly all drivers, and actually most of the yelly behaviour came through the drive-thru.

Rob Ford's angry demographic skews towards drivers. And again, I'm supporting and they're opposing policies that would make driving less necessary.

Is driving scary? I think so, but not everyone does. Is driving stressful? I think so, but not everyone does. Is driving disempowering? No. Driving increases empowerment and agency and resilience.

So why does it correlate with an increase in anger and yelling?

Hate speech braindump (part 1 of ???)

I support hate speech laws, and I'm the only person I know who does. Unfortunately, I've never been able to articulate usefully why exactly I do support hate speech laws. However, the more I think and learn about it, and the more I'm exposed to the efforts of everyone I know to convince me otherwise, the more I become convinced that hate speech laws are a good idea. But I still can't articulate why. So I'm going to braindump around the concept and see what I can come up with. You can try to debate me if you want, but you're totally going to win right now because my thoughts aren't words yet.

1. There's a parenting technique whereby siblings are to be left to sort out their interpersonal problems among themselves I've blogged about my experience with it here. The problem for me is that what I wanted was to be left alone. It didn't hurt anyone, it didn't demand anything of anyone. But what my sister wanted was apparently to bother me, to stop me from having privacy, to make sure that I didn't get what I wanted. The same thing with my bullies. Leave me alone, either work civilly with me or ignore me in class, let me read my book. But what they wanted apparently was to bother me. What I wanted had no impact on anyone else; what they wanted was specifically to bother me. But this technique of letting kids sort out their own interpersonal problems treated them both as equally valid. It didn't give any credit to the fact that I wasn't hurting anyone, I wasn't bothering anyone. Because they did want to hurt and bother, they were good at it; because I didn't want to hurt and bother, I was bad at it. Therefore, they always won, and the net result was that someone was hurt and bothered. Which is, objectively, a negative outcome, whereas if I had been left alone the outcome would have been neutral or perhaps even positive.

My child-self didn't have these negative skills of hurt and bothering, but she did have the positive skills of amusing herself quietly without hurting or bothering. In a society, these are excellent, helpful, even productive skills to have, and if our child society had been mediated by adults, my child-self would have been left alone to be productive and our little corner of society would have been better for it. But when kids are left to their unmediated anarchy, these positive skills are worthless and the negative outcomes prevail, to the detriment of all but the lowest common denominator.

There needs to be…something, some way of mediating discourse to prevent the people with the best bullying skills from winning just because they have the best bullying skills. There needs to be some way of giving more credit or weight to positions that are productive as opposed to positions that are harmful. There needs to be some way of creating a public environment in which people can't bully their way to credibility. Without this, we may as well be back on the playground.

2. Go read Death or Cake and them come back here (this is an archive.org page and the formatting is messed, so you have to scroll down about halfway before the content starts). In this particular article they're talking about US political parties, but let's take it as broader interpretation: the contingent calling for Cake is being opposed by a contingent calling for Death. This reminded me of something I wrote during the last municipal strike. It uses up a lot of time and energy and bandwidth and column space and airtime to have to constantly counter shouts of "Death! Death!" It's draining, and it's preventing us from being productive. Maybe Cake isn't the optimal solution, but all the energy we're putting into countering calls for Death is preventing us from being able to to build a better cake, or maybe a pie instead.

We need…something, some way of taking Death off the table, so we can examine Cake objectively. How do we make it work for vegans and diabetics? I have a great recipe for gluten-free cookies! What if there was a nice salad? We can't do this when we're frantically trying to negotiate down to a maiming.

3. A while back, I read this article by a US columnist on Canadian hate speech laws, and I got the impression that he isn't seeing something that's apparent to me. I'm still not able to fully articulate my reaction (although I can point to the exact part of my brain where it occurs), but I think at least part of it is that the concept of hate speech is far more closely circumscribed than this columnist - or, I think, people who are opposed to hate speech in general - realize. You can't just point at someone saying something you don't like and scream "Hate speech!" and get them in trouble. And any idea with some actual non-hate substance to it can totally be expressed in a way that doesn't constitute hate speech.

I don't have on hand any real examples of hate speech with substance beneath, so I'll try to explain this using the Death or Cake example. Suppose that, rather than simply shouting "Death! Death!", the Death contingent was saying "You know, we have a bit of an overpopulation problem here…" We could work with that. We could start talking about improving access to family planning or introducing voluntary euthanasia options. It would not only save a whole lot of time and energy and yelling, but also keep anyone from being maimed in the name of "reasonable" compromise.

That is part (not all) of the nuance of what constitutes hate speech. "Death! Death! Death to Those People!" is hate speech. "We have an overpopulation problem. " is not. That's part of why the more I think about it, the more I support the existence of hate speech laws. It's a little step in the general direction of giving a bit more weight to productive positions. It's a little step towards taking Death off the table so we can focus on the real issue of controlling overpopulation while keeping the existing population from starving. It stops people from being able to go around doing harm just because they're bigger and louder like the bullies. And maybe if my bullies had been forced to say what it was they wanted from me, why exactly they wouldn't just leave me alone and what exactly they hoped to accomplish, maybe we could have had a situation where everyone was happier and no one was bothered.

4. When I say that any idea with non-hate substance can be expressed in a way that doesn't constitute hate speech, some of you are probably thinking "But not everyone is as good with words as you are! How can you say - and this in a blog post full of 'I can't quite articulate' - that people should get in trouble just because they can't express the precise connotation they need?" But that's how the rest of the world works. If I want to compliment a subordinate on her outfit, it's incumbent upon me to do so in a way that cannot be interpreted as sexual harassment. If I joke to the woman waiting in front of me in line that we should shoplift our purchases and then it turns out she's a police officer, it's incumbent upon me to do so in a way that makes it clear I'm not actually planning to shoplift. If I want to tease you about something, it's incumbent upon me to do so in a way that isn't cruel. So why should the people making the most hateful statements in our collective discourse get a bye?

5. Hate speech laws are to free speech as libel/slander laws are to freedom of the press.

6. As I've written about before somewhere, I do well in a society, but wouldn't do well in anarchy or a survivalist situation. I've found something I'm good at, and someone pays me money to do that, and then I can trade that money for things I need. In exchange for contributing what I can and keeping out of everyone else's way the rest of the time, I have enough food and shelter that keeps the bugs away and time and space to learn and think and grow. And a lot of the reason why this works is because of laws. Because we have laws, my employer pays me what's due to me, my landlord doesn't kick me out or raise my rent every month, the grocery store sells me food at the posted price and the food isn't poisonous, etc. This allows people like me who aren't good at fighting for their very survival to participate and even thrive, and it also allows our society as a whole to ascend Maslow's pyramid. I think hate speech laws do the same thing for discourse. It takes death off the table so we can work on building a better cake while also solving the overpopulation problem, all without anyone getting maimed along the way.

That's all the words I have at the moment, and it feels like somewhere around 20-30% of what's in my brain. More later.

Powerlessness and yelling and rudeness and job security and Toronto politics: messiest braindump ever

Last August, I read this Miss Conduct post about how rudeness comes from a lack of power.

My first thought was "This is HUGE! I must blog about it!" And I've had writer's block ever since. I know what I want to say but I can't make it into a blog post, so I'm just brute force braindumping. Each of these points should be developed into a couple hundred words, but I'll just spew now and maybe clean it up later. There's something in here, and I'm not going to get at it unless I braindump.

1. My first thought was about childhood. When you're a kid - or at least when I was a kid and based on my experience with other kids - you yell more. That's because you're powerless. You're completely at the mercy of the grownups and their rules. I've blogged about this many times before. As I became a proper grownup and especially because I started living alone, I found myself yelling much less. It's not that I became more polite, it's that I became better able to be polite. I had the [insert word that's halfway between "empowerment" and "agency"] to be polite, because I had the option of walking away.

2. This became even more pronounced when I got my first proper grownup Good Job. It was easier to be polite, and it was easier not to yell, because I was suddenly in a position that is, by general social standards, respectable. On one hand the world treated me with more respect, and on the other hand I had the security and the confidence, and, frankly, the trump card of paying my own way. More "power" (insofar as this can be considered power - it's more privilege but emotionally it fits the originally analogy) meant fewer people were aggravating me, fewer stresses were aggravating me, and it was way hella easier to be polite and not yell.

3. My second thought was about working in fast food when I was a teen. The restaurant was located in a poshish suburb, where people had big houses and fancy cars. And they yelled. Looking at it with adult retrospect, I can't see where they were coming from. Why would you yell at a fast food cashier? So you have to wait two minutes for fries, or you have to pull around away from the pay window, or someone accidentally drops your change. Why is that even on your radar? As an adult with a proper grownup job - albeit one that's nowhere near posh enough to buy big houses and cars - I can't even imagine caring. So why didn't money/power/privilege buy them the calm that it bought me?

4. At this point, I realized that I'd drifted away from rudeness vs. power and into yelling and anger vs. privilege and respect. But I know in my gut it's the same thing or closely related. So that's why this blog post got paralyzed way back in August.

5. And then Rob Ford got elected mayor of Toronto.

6. Rob Ford yells. People who are inclined to vote for Rob Ford think he's down-to-earth. In my corner of adulthood, down-to-earth people don't yell - that's what makes them down-to-earth. What are these people's lives like that their definition of down-to-earth includes yelling?

7. Rob Ford's target audience is skewed towards houses and cars, which, in Toronto, are hella expensive. They must, necessarily, have several times more money than I ever will. But they're angry. Why are they angry?

8. The non-selfish aspect of my personal politics is focused on Good Jobs. (The selfish aspect doesn't contradict this, it's just focused on very specific things that affect me personally.) I know, from my personal experience and those of my family and friends and everyone I know who's ever had a Good Job, that a Good Job is transformative. And, in my own experience, it's what makes the angry go away. And this might even be multi-generational. If I have a Good Job, and I'm not angry, then my kid not only has a secure environment to grow up in, but doesn't have to face generalized anger at the dinner table every evening, thus making them feel even more secure and less prone to anger themselves.

9. But the Rob Ford people, the people who are angry, are working against this politically. Why? Do they not know that Good Jobs make the angry go away? Do they already have Good Jobs (since they have all houses and cars and expensive things like that) that didn't make the angry go away? Do they not have Good Jobs but have somehow managed to acquire houses and cars that they now have to pay for and they're scared? But, if so, why are they trying to get rid of what few Good Jobs exist?

10. Then I read an article in the Globe and Mail on stress as a serious social-medical problem, and was struck by this quote:

Combatting these feelings is not easy and begins with resilience. Just knowing you have a Plan B for any problem can often reduce the brain’s physical response to stress.

That's what a Good Job does - resilience. It creates opportunities for a Plan B. If my glasses break, I can drop everything and get them fixed without running out of money or losing my job. If I get cancer, all I have to worry about is nausea and hair loss - I'm not going to lose my home or my job. It's less scary, less stressful, and ultimately means that there's less yelling in your life. And, politically, I want that for everyone. I've had a glimpse of it, and I want to share it. But my city seems to be run by people who are angry and yelly and stressed and scared, and yet want the opposite of this situation that creates resilience. I don't understand it. It doesn't make sense.

11. I realize I have no right, authority, or credibility to go swooping in and saying "You voted wrong! I know better than you!" But what I'm saying here is my truth as I have lived and experienced it, as I have observed in those around me and those I admire from afar. Rudeness and anger and fear and yelling decrease as empowerment and agency and respect and social credibility and resilience increase, and all these things increase with good employment conditions.

12. Growing up, I'd probably yell at someone every other day. Now, I can't even think of the last time I yelled at anyone. I like this, and I want everyone else to have it too. But the people who look to me like they need it the most don't want anyone to have it.

I don't know what to do with this.

Half-formed idea: algorithmic approach to TTC expansion

This post arises from a combination of ideas.

1. A number of very loud political candidates want to wreck Transit City because they want subways. They seem to think LRTs now preclude subways later.

2. There is a sysadmin approach whereby hardware upgrades are algorithmic. They make a rule (presumably based on some calculations or intelligence or standard procedure) that if the system reaches X% capacity Y% of the time, they upgrade capacity.

3. It is possible to do vast 20-year economic projections of population growth, service use, and revenue generation, and to project how all of these will be affected by certain factors. They can then use these things to work out random crazy things like "If mortgage rates jump sharply today, how will that affect passenger loads at Pearson a year from now? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years?"

So we combine all three of these things, and we get an algorithmic approach to TTC expansion. They determine that if a bus hits a certain capacity, it gets upgraded into an LRT, and if an LRT hits a certain capacity, it gets upgraded into a subway.

We know that better transit service will eventually lead to intensification, which will lead to a broader tax base and more transit users. This is the sort of thing economic forecasting can quantify, which can be used to cost out the upgrades, determine which will be most profitable most quickly, and ultimately work out an algorithm for prioritizing them.

So they get a bunch of smart people to figure all this out in specific terms and make a massive plan specifying conditions under which transit lines are upgraded and a method for determining which lines will be upgraded first. They make a plan to grow using internally generated revenue, and another plan for outside funding from other levels of government, so transit improvement isn't paralyzed by withdrawl of outside funding. Maybe internal funding is used to target the areas most in need, and external funding is used to target areas with most revenue-generation potential, so it can be presented more as an investment on funding applications. The plan could of course be tweakable as new factors come into play, but in general it should come down to "Once a route reaches X capacity, it gets upgraded."

Then this approach, and the algorithms and economic forecasting used to work it out, are all made publicly available, so people can see what exactly is driving specific expansion decisions, and can see that, yes, they will get a subway eventually. Hopefully this will protect our transit system from politicos who want to dismantle existing plans and remake it in their own image every election cycle (or at least make their plans look foolish) and encourage more long-term thinking.

Now, it's quite possible that the TTC already does this. I'd be very surprised if they didn't already have an economic forecast. If so, they should publicize this information - post it on their website and make people aware of its existence, to give more credibility to their plans and make "NO! Kill it and build a subway to my house!" politically unviable.

Why are people absolving the black bloc of basic personal responsibility?

This post builds on ideas from my G20 braindump and occurred to me while reading this post from James Bow, but can be read without prerequisites.

A lot of people have been asking lately "Why didn't the legitimate demonstrators do anything to stop the black bloc?" (And, indeed, that has been used as justification for Queen & Spadina.) Some have asked in return why the police didn't do anything to stop the black bloc. Some have pointed out that that people did try (both successfully and unsuccessfully). Some have pointed out that the black bloc people were taking a different route than the main march, so the leaders among the legitimate demonstrators wouldn't have been in the areas. Some have pointed out that the black bloc were simply vandalizing property, not putting anyone's life and safety at risk, and if you call 911 to report a property crime in progress the operator will tell you to stay out of the way and keep yourself safe.

My first thought, as I mentioned in #9 of my braindump, was that not everyone can make people listen to them. People tend not to listen to me, so I normally couldn't stop them no matter how hard I tried.

But then, while reading James Bow, it occurred to me that in real life, in the regular adult world, there is no "Why didn't you stop him?" We are held responsible for our own actions; the people next to us aren't held responsible (directly or indirectly) for our actions. I can best explain with a couple of real-life examples.

Example 1: when we met Eddie Izzard, I went babbly stupid and made a complete ass of myself. Everyone else in our group was cool, but my idiocy reflected poorly on our entire group, thus depriving everyone of whatever awesomeness happens when a celebrity thinks you're cool. If Poodle's cool friends weren't far too polite to say anything, they might have said to me "WTF are you being such an idiot for?" However, they wouldn't have said to, say, TravelMaus (who was adjacent to but unaffiliated with our group) "WTF are you letting her be such an idiot for?" They wouldn't even have said that to Poodle, who was the one who brought me to the stage door in the first place. They might have asked him in a private moment "So what's her deal? Is she completely socially inept?" But it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to hold someone else responsible for not stopping me from being an idiot. My idiocy is on me, even when it ruins things for everyone.

Example 2: once one of my co-workers tried to bring his new dog into the office to show it off. The building security guards stopped him and told him dogs aren't allowed in the building. I repeat: they stopped him, the man with the dog. They didn't stop the people walking into the building next to him and tell them not to let him bring the dog in. So then he hung out with the dog outside the building, and some of us came outside to meet the dog. We walked right out the front door and then petted and played with the dog in full view of the security guards. We were quite clearly pro-dog and anyone with half a brain could see that we had probably encouraged the dog infiltration. But they didn't do anything because playing with a dog outside the building is totally allowed. They didn't scold us for wanting the dog in the building, they scolded the person who actually brought the dog into the building. Because that's how the world works. If you do something that's not allowed, you aren't absolved of your responsibility just because there are people doing nothing to stop you, and perhaps even watching with interest.

So why should the bad guys get a bye?

Conspiracy theory of the moment

Bicycles are considered equal to cars (or any other motor vehicle). They should be on the road, not the sidewalk. They are entitled to take up an entire lane on the street.

On the surface, that sounds good and positive and validating towards cyclists. But what if it's really a conspiracy to keep cycling from being a viable and commonly-used mode of transportation?

Biking in the road is difficult and scary for the cyclist, and is also kind of scary for the driver. If you hit another car, you hurt the car. If you hit a cyclist, you probably kill a whole human being. There's huge outcry about how cyclists should be on the road so they don't interfere with pedestrians, but I personally feel safer walking among cyclists than driving among cyclists, and I feel better able to dodge pedestrians while biking than to dodge cyclists while driving. (I freely concede this might be because I'm a bad driver, and good drivers might feel differently.)

People who aren't hardcore and brave simply aren't going to bike as a primary mode of transportation if it means they have to share a busy street with cars. I'd say the majority of people simply don't want that kind of risk with their morning commute.

Has anyone ever looked into the origin of the law that puts cyclists on the road? Why is it there in the first place? Who thought it was a good idea, and why?

What if TTC workers stopped enforcing fare collection?

I've only had two outright negative TTC experiences, and in both cases it was getting very loudly and publicly yelled at by a TTC worker trying to enforce fare collection when I had just made an honest mistake. In one case, I boarded a bus on the first day of the month, confidently waving my previous month's Metropass (i.e. the same one I used just the day before) at the driver. I did have the right one in my purse, I just grabbed the wrong one of the two. In the other case, just a few days after moving to Toronto and my first time ever in Eglinton station, I misunderstood how the choreography of how the (now defunct) bus bays worked and walked somewhere I wasn't supposed to. In both cases, the bus drivers yelled at me, in public, in front of people, without even taking a moment to calmly explain to me what I had done wrong, so I had literally no idea why I was being yelled at. In both cases, it made me cry (in public, to the extent that I couldn't see well enough to walk around) and broke me for the day.

In my time working customer service, every time I provided suboptimal customer service, it was because I was trying to meet corporate goals. For example, when I worked fast food, we had a timer measuring how long cars were in our drive-thru window. The average time at the window was supposed to be under a minute. The problem was that many customers didn't want to be out of there in under one minute. They wanted to find exact change to pay me with. They wanted to get themselves settled, put a straw in their drink and ketchup on their fries. This generally took over a minute, and then I'd get in trouble for not meeting service time goals. I once even snapped at a customer who had a habit of order food that needed to be cooked to order and then waiting at the window for it to be done (instead of pulling forward to the waiting space). His refusal to pull forward when I asked him to had him at the window for three minutes, which made it absolutely impossible for us to meet or even approach our service time goals for the rest of the day, and got me in trouble. I wasn't even able to start thinking of it in terms of his convenience, because I was going to get in trouble for the number on the clock. The things I got yelled at and nagged about and evaluated on by management were service time goals and upselling, with no thought to customer experience unless a customer complained. When I started that job I didn't upsell because as a customer I didn't appreciate it, but my manager marked me down for it in my performance review, specifically telling me to do it even though I didn't think it was good customer service, because it was corporate policy. How can you provide good customer service in that context?

Another bad TTC experience happened when boarding a Spadina streetcar at Spadina station. The driver started telling people over the PA to get off the stairs so he could close the doors, getting more and more frustrated that people were on the stairs. When he finally pulled out of the station, he said all snarky "Thanks for making me late!" But you know why the people were on the stairs? Because they were in the process of boarding the streetcar! More and more people kept coming from the subway to the streetcar and boarding the streetcar (standing on the stairs in the process) because that's what happens at Spadina station.

Obviously the Spadina streetcar driver had been handed down word from on high that he'd damn well better stay on schedule. And obviously the drivers who yelled at me for accidentally showing the wrong metropass and for entering the bus bay wrong had been instructed to prioritize fare enforcement. And obviously they were getting static from management when these things didn't work out, even when it wasn't entirely the driver's fault. But the result is bad customer service. People get yelled at by a streetcar driver for boarding a streetcar. A passenger gets treated like a criminal for grabbing the previous day's pass out of her purse. A newly-arrived teenage girl just learning to navigate the city gets publicly humiliated for not being fluent in the choreography of a subway station she's at for the first time in her life.

In my food service days, my performance was measured almost entirely quantitatively, by service times and by average price per order on my receipts. Despite all the pretty words in our policies about customer service, actual customer service only came into play if there was a complaint. Otherwise, it was all about the numbers.

With the TTC's new focus on customer service, they need to make sure they aren't creating a similar situation. Don't manage things in a way that gives drivers more motivation to prioritize things other than customer service. Tell them "Your primary mission is to get people where they need to go, and help people who need help. You are empowered to do that." Yes, your route should be on time, but not at the expense of pulling away from someone running for the bus. Yes, you should enforce fares, but not at the expense of holding up the whole bus for someone who boarded with yesterday's metropass. Make sure they aren't creating a culture that favours performance indicators over actual customer needs, and just focus on customer needs for a while.

Building a better protest rally

The problem with protest rallies is ultimately they are boring and not particularly productive. You're standing there in a crowd while the people on stage tell you stuff you already know, then you walk around a bit and make noise so people notice you. Not especially fun or interesting, and doesn't achieve anything other than visibility.

I do get that visibility is the point. A big loud crowd of people gets attention and makes it clear that a lot of people feel strongly about the cause. Critics are likely to dismiss petitions, email campaigns, facebook groups etc. far more readily than an actual crowd of people. But instead of just showing up and making noise and shouting at each other stuff we already know, we should do something, make something, create something, help something. Surely we can make better use of thousands of intelligent, engaged Canadians than just being extras in a crowd scene!

So here's what our Something has to be:

1. Tangible: The value of the crowd is its tangibility, and we need to retain that. If everyone showed up in Yonge Dundas Square and left their mittens behind, that would show how many people were there (problem: then we'd all have to buy new mittens).

2. Visually impressive: Close to 10,000 people is a lot of people. It's "Holy shit, look at all those people." The Something has to be similarly visually impressive. For example, if everyone put their business card in a jar (problems: not everyone has a business card, and not everyone is free to take political action in their employer's name) that wouldn't be visually impressive - 10,000 business cards isn't really a lot. If everyone left their mittens behind or brought a can of food, that wouldn't be particularly visually impressive either - it would look like a lot, but it wouldn't be "Holy shit!" But if everyone brought a live squirrel and released it in Yonge Dundas Square (obvious problems: how do you catch and transport a live squirrel? Plus it's cruel to squirrels), the reaction would be "Holy shit, look at all those squirrels!"

3. Practical and feasible: So suppose everyone showed up at Yonge Dundas Square, stood there and knitted a scarf, and then we left all the scarves on the ground, carpeting the entire square. Tangible and visually impressive, but the problem is not everyone knows how to knit. If everyone got in a car and drove around really slowly with a sign on their roof tying up traffic, that would be tangible and visually impressive, but would severely reduce the numbers because you can't assume everyone has a car. But if we all showed up and drew chalk outlines of our bodies (problems: symbolically inappropriate for this protest, dependent on the media being willing to go to the trouble of photographing it from above) that would be extremely feasible. Leaving your mittens behind might be impractical enough to deter people, but bringing a can of food is generally doable (the problem being that 10,000 cans of food aren't that visually impressive.)

4. Productive and helpful: The ideal would be for the protest to have some lasting positive impact, beyond political awareness. That would give us more of the moral high ground and be good PR vis-a-vis people who are wary of protests in general. The squirrels and the slow-driving cars would just annoy people (and squirrels) so we wouldn't want to do that. The scarves, the mittens, and the cans of food could all be donated somewhere where they'd do some good. It would be even better if the Something could be permanent, like building Habitat for Humanity houses (problem: even if a tract of Habitat for Humanity houses springs up overnight, it isn't obvious to the non-expert how many people were involved).

While writing this I came up with the idea of everyone coming to the protest site and building a small (like 1 or 2 feet high) inukshuk. But that's not super-feasible and not particularly productive. (Where would we get rocks from? How would we make it visually apparent what the inukshuks represent? Plus critics would say that maybe just a few people showed up and built many inukshuks each, and it would annoy people if we cluttered up Yonge Dundas Square with inukshuks.) Plus I don't know whether 10,000 small inukshuks in Yonge Dundas Square would be visually impressive or not.

Then I had the idea of building inukshuks out of nonperishable food, and after the protest is over donating all the food to a food bank. Questions: is it architecturally feasible to build an inukshuk out of nonperishable food, and would the amount of food required be generally affordable? How much trouble/annoyance would it be? What would we do about critics' inevitable allegations that maybe it was just a small number of people building a large number of inukshuks? And would it be visually impressive?

Any other ideas?

Wherein a foreigner who knows nothing about privatized health insurance tries to fix the US health insurance system

What if US health insurance companies weren't taxed on their earnings, and were instead taxed on the value of the claims they decline? If they pay in full every claim submitted to them, they won't pay any taxes. If they pay none of the claims submitted to them, they have to pay taxes on the full amounts of all the claims submitted to them.

Other problems I've heard of are a) insurance premiums being too expensive, and b) patients being refused insurance coverage at all because they are or have been sick. So in addition to taxing the amounts of any claims that are refused, they should also tax the amounts of any insurance premiums above a certain percentage of the client's income, and there should be a penalty for every applicant they refuse to cover, equal to either the cost of their average client or the cost of their most expensive client (I can make arguments for both).

Now the obvious flaw here is that taxes are never 100%, so the insurance companies would still be saving money by doing whatever they want. It's possible that anti-tax sentiment would provide sufficient motivation, but you can't make policy on the assumption that people are that stupid. So the next step is to use any money collected through this coverage denial tax to create an insurance fund for people who can't get or afford coverage elsewhere. So basically the insurance companies are paying the insurance premiums of people they refuse to cover.

I think they either did or were talking about making a rule in the states where every citizen has to buy health insurance, so it would be perfectly logical to tweak legislation at this point to make that more feasible. And if the insurance companies don't want to pay any denied-claim tax and just want to revel in unbridled capitalism, all they have to do is provide their services to anyone who asks at a fair price.

What if the solution to ignorance isn't found in formal education?

You often see people interpret any ignorance they observe as a failure in education. "They should teach this in school," they say, "they should make it a required course."

I wonder if this might be doing us all a disservice?

As I've blogged about before, I didn't learn everything I needed to know about anything in high school, but rather got a starting point for learning things myself as the need arises. I'm wondering if, by treating ignorance as a failure of education, we're collectively absolving ourselves of our own responsibility to keep learning? If people don't know what prorogation means, even if they should have learned it in school and didn't, their job now as adults and functional members of society is to recognize that they should know what it means, and find out what it means. Not having learned it in school isn't nearly as bad as sitting there going "Waah, I don't know what prorogation means because I never learned it in school!" instead of spending 30 seconds googling.

I also wonder if, by deeming it a job for formal education, we're inadvertently giving it a mystique, framing it as something that needs to be taught instead of something that you can figure out yourself. And I'm worried that this will, in turn, alienate people who aren't so very into formal education. I read in Big Sort (and have observed hints in real life) that sometimes people who have not gone through formal education tend to perceive formal education as Other (and sometimes as a bit suspicious). If we view ignorance as a problem to be solved with formal education, would we be marking it as Other for people who don't have formal education, giving the tacit impression that understanding these things isn't for them, and/or that learning them is only for people who have formal education.

I'm not opposed to adapting our formal education system to meet our ever-evolving needs, but I am worried about giving the impression that formal education is the only way out of ignorance, rather than that people should be bringing themselves out of their own ignorance.

Half-formed theory: men can smell rapists

When I was 9 years old, I was allowed to go trickertreating without parental accompaniment for the first time in my life. After many many lectures on safety, I went around the neighbourhood with another neighbourhood girl, collecting candy, feeling very cool walking around in the scary dark without a grownup. Then we got to this one house where there were two great big scary teenage boys in the driveway playing a very violent-looking game of basketball. We quickly consulted with each other. What should we do? They're Big And Scary! Look at how they're body-checking each other to get at the basketball - they totally look like the kind of people who would beat someone up! (At the time, beating someone up was the worst thing we could imagine.) And we'd totally have to walk right past them to ring the doorbell! So we decided to skip that house, and hurried along to the next house. But the big scary teenage boys saw us skip their house, and shouted at us "SNOBS!" OMG! They saw us! They're shouting something at us! What do we do? So we went straight home to my house (because it was closer) and told my parents what happened. My parents were like "What's the big deal? They were just playing basketball to pass the time between giving out candy."

Thinking back on it as an adult, they were totally just playing basketball to pass the time between giving out candy. But my 9-year-old self couldn't tell that. She saw large intimidating man-sized boys behaving in a way that was unusual and unpredictable, outside of the norm for the context, and seemed unnecessarily violent. She was scared, so she decided to remove herself from the situation. She also saw that when she went to remove herself from this situation that she found scary, the large intimidating guys tried to shame her into coming back. So while she did completely misread the situation, isn't that what you'd want a 9-year-old to do with the information she had on hand at the time?

Now, as a mental exercise, I want you to think about how you would explain to my 9-year-old self, in terms she can understand, why exactly those boys were safe. Give her clear specifics without any adult "Because I said so!" involved. You want to empower her to autonomously make more accurate decisions in the future without putting her at risk. Remember, Paul Bernardo is going to turn up in just a couple of years. So give her the information she needs to reduce false positives without introducing false negatives.

That's a tall order, isn't it? I was there, I saw the boys through my nine-year-old self's eyes, I can see them now through adult eyes, I see exactly why my child-self saw them as dangerous, and I can see them now as harmless. But I can't articulate in a way that my child-self would grok why exactly they're harmless. "They're just playing basketball!" But playing basketball wouldn't make a person harmless. "They're just teenagers!" But teenagers aren't automatically harmless, especially not to a preteen child. "They were just being violent with each other as part of the basketball game. They wouldn't hurt kids trickertreating." Yes, that's my read on the situation as an adult, but how exactly do you tell? I've been thinking about this for some time, and I still can't articulate it clearly. It might have something to do with the fact that on Halloween there are all kinds of adult eyes on the street, so if those guys had been up to no good they would have been more stealthy about it or waited until later at night, but I still wouldn't quite be comfortable telling a 9-year-old that without further precisions.

That Halloween night was the first of several false positives I've gotten when attempting to assess whether a particular strange man is a threat to me. There have been maybe 5-10 false positives over the years, but no false negatives. A man behaves unusually, or invades my personal space, or just gives off a wrong vibe, so I raise my shields and take evasive manoeuvres. Then I either find out that there was a perfectly good explanation for his strange behaviour, or I remove myself from the situation without him actively attempting to hurt me. None of that is noteworthy, that's just everyday life. What is noteworthy is that I often have other men - men who were completely uninvolved in and have no particular investment in the original situation - scold me for behaving so rudely to the strange man who pinged my creepdar. They really seem rather disproportionately offended that I'd take evasive manoeuvres against a man who wasn't a rapist. That was always really WTF to me. Can't they tell that I have no way of knowing who is and isn't a rapist, and only have my gut instinct to work with? (c.f. Schrödinger's Rapist.)

This all came to mind with a recent internet meme, Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed To Work. Again, the reaction from some men (not all men, but I only ever saw this reaction from men) was the same as the reaction some men have to my false positives - rather disproportionately offended, as if to say "How dare you show this to men who aren't rapists!" This reaction really seemed bizarrely disproportionate, as though there was something else going on that I couldn't see. So I've been thinking about this a really long time, and come up with the following theory:

Men can smell rapists.

Specifically, there are some men who can just tell by gut instinct, far better than I can, whether another man is a rapist, just like we as adults can tell better than my 9-year-old self could that the teenage boys playing basketball were harmless. Extrapolating to a general theory, men have better creepdar than women, at least in terms of avoiding false positives. (I have no data for false negatives.) So these men with the more effective creepdar think our creepdar works the same as theirs, thereby assuming that we can tell that dude isn't a rapist just as easily as they can, and therefore are taking evasive manoeuvres against some dude who clearly isn't a rapist due to some technical violation or perceived slight. Meanwhile, we're assuming that men's creepdar works the same as ours, so what we're hearing from them is that we should ignore our gut and take greater risks with our instincts so as not to inadvertently offend someone.

So what do we do with this? It sounds like I'm teeing up to saying that women should just listen to men's judgment on whether other men are safe or not. That's not workable. As we all know, some men are rapists, some men have different concept of what does and does not constitute rape, and it's certainly not unprecedented for a guy to vouch for his buddy to help him get laid. On the other side of things, some men are overprotective of women they care about, and might be reading false positives themselves. (Oddly, I've never seen a man get similarly disproportionately offended at another man's false positive on behalf of a woman he cares about.) There's also the problem that the vast majority of hitting-on happens when the woman is unaccompanied by a man, so the disproportionate offence/retroactive creepdar reading happens after the fact.)

So I think what we do need to do is just be aware of this difference in creepdar effectiveness, and communicate. If you're a man and you see a woman taking evasive manoeuvres with another man who clearly isn't a rapist, start thinking about how to articulate precisely why you can tell he isn't a rapist - to the same degree of specificness and with the same care to avoiding false negatives as you'd use in explaining why the basketball boys were safe to my 9-year-old self. Not why he "might not" be a rapist, not hypothetical explanations for his questionable behaviour; you need to describe the actual tangible ways you can tell for certain. You might not be able to articulate this right away, but just think about it. Try to figure it out so you can articulate it next time. Conversely, if you're a woman and a man scolds you or otherwise seems pissed off that you took evasive manoeuvres on what ended up being a false positive, ask him for specifics about how he knows the guy in question was safe. He might not be able to articulate it right away, but have him think about it.

And if you're a man and women seem to be getting false positive readings from you, think about why they should be able to tell that you're safe, and work on highlighting those aspects. (Schrödinger's Rapist can also help you avoid inadvertently giving off false positives.)