Ok, anyone reading the comments knows what this is a allegory for. Before reading on, remember your current stance on this issue.
I’m now going to interpret this as being about education in general.
Green Martians == uneducated
Blue Martians == educated
humans == society, and especially taxpayers
nice tickling == the social benefits of having highly educated professionals
painful tickling == the financial costs of maintaining an education system
Suddenly the anti-creep feminists are libertarians, arguing that tax is theft, even if used to educate children.
Others argue against this, saying that everyone has a right to an education, which is a social good that trumps individual property rights.
Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist.
Is it unethical for a Green Martian to attempt to metamorphose? Does this depend on whether they believe themselves to be fast or slow learners?
Clearly, some Green Martians must attempt to metamorphose in order to maintain a technologically advanced society. The current social norm is that all Green Martians, no matter how stupid, must attempt to metamorphose at least to the age of 16.
Indeed, in many places the slower-learning Greens are given extra tickling time, more than the fast learners.
Some people believe that some Martians are inherently better at tickling, and that those who struggle to metamorphose are in some way inferior. Some even say that for the slowest-learning Martians it is immoral to try and better themselves by being educated, rather then accepting their lowly place in society.
These people are often accused of being ableist, classist and elitist.
Some people even believe that the slowest-learning Martians should not reproduce, saving the next generation the pain of their stinging tentacles.
These people are generally regarded as crypto-Nazis.
So, now that everyone is thoroughly mindkilled due to the mention of both PUA and Nazis, did your stance change? If so, does this reveal underlying biases, or is it more a matter that allegories are inherently imperfect representations of the actual issue being discussed?
I wonder how much potential this technique could have. I mean, inventing a metaphor that applies to two situation, letting two groups of people debate the metaphor, telling each of them only one of the meanings… and then collect their answers and try applying them to the other situation. Maybe we could find some creative solutions here.
I’ll try… okay, sometimes the analogy will be stretched a lot, but that’s because the goal is not to be perfect in translating, but to generate ideas.
(polymathwannabe): Recruit the subset of rare humans who enjoy green tickling and employ them as tickling punchbags for green Martians to practice on.
Find people willing to donate a lot of money to education of the least educated people.
Make green Martians wear soft clothes that do not dampen their tentacles’ sensitivity too much.
Make education less expensive.
Use some medium (animals, dolls, androids) where green Martians can practice their tickling skills without harming anyone.
Use Khan Academy for teaching.
Find a way to chemically induce metamorphosis in green Martians.
Uhm? Invent a sci-fi technology that will inject knowledge and skills into humans.
Use plastic surgery, medications, or artificial selection to make green Martians’ tentacles less stingy.
Give schoolkids Ritalin.
For parents and/or cell donors who are willing, find a way to engineer blue-born Martians.
Sperm donors should provide information about their educational achievement.
Perform non-interventional, follow-up studies on elderly green Martians to assess the worth of a non-tickling life.
Let stupid people live without education, and make a scientific study about their lives. Maybe they are not that much worse than the rest of the population.
(Manfred): A thin layer behind the ears that prevents pain/euphoria from tickling.
Lower the tax, give less education to both stupid and smart people.
Community college classes on tickling.
Classes on “efficient learning” before learning specific subjects.
Economic transactions.
Contracts between private people, like: “I will pay for your education, and in return you will give me 10% of your income during the next 20 years.”
Drugs that satisfy Martians and reduce the desire for tickling.
Give stupid people free TV.
Drugs for humans that make them not experience pain from tickling.
Create better propaganda for taxpayers.
(Adele_L): It might be good to have designated spaces where Green Martians can practice tickling participating humans. As more and more of these spaces become available, it becomes more and more socially unacceptable for Green Martians to tickle humans elsewhere. Obviously, for this to work, there would need to be a sufficiently high number of humans willing to participate.
Create more privately sponsored educational institutions. Demanding public education should become socially unacceptable. Obviously, this needs a lot of private sponsors.
For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.
Have some limit on taxes, so that people don’t have to worry that more education will mean more taxes.
Now imagining myself as a Green Martian, I feel like I would naturally feel bad about stinging humans, and try to avoid it for the most part. This anxiety would be significantly worse if the humans visibly disliked me for stinging them. But I would be desperate for someone who could help me become a Blue Martian. Learning the Blue Martian’s techniques would be very tempting… Something that might be a good alternative would be if there were humans working with the Blue Martians, finding ways to make the techniques more robust.
Make a reasearch about habits of highly successful students, and use it to improve education.
The biggest problem with the education analogy is that humans are plural, but society is singular. If you want the Martian analogy to work for education, you’d have to have all Martians trying to tickle the same human, of which there is only one.
If there’s only one human and an unlimited number of martians can tickle him, things work very differently than if there are many humans:
The human solves the problem by preemptively consenting to green tickling in exchange for benefits to himself later on from the increase in blue tickling. If there are many humans, the humans face a collective action problem; agreeing to be green-tickled increases the total rate of blue tickling by a negligible amount unless all humans agree on it at once (or unless Martians and humans behave in ways that don’t match the analogy).
If there is only one human, the humans don’t compete against each other for the limited supply of blue Martians.
If an unlimited number of Martians can tickle the same human, the Martians don’t have to compete against each other for the limited supply of humans, either.
You can try to fix the analogy up by saying that “human” stands for an individual member of society rather than the whole society, but then the analogy fails because while there are lots of humans, a Martian doesn’t pick an individual human but extends its tentacles over all the humans at once.
Furthermore, some of your uses of the analogy fail for other reasons. For instance, “Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist. ” But in the analogy, this should be “pay to have the right to tickle someone else”, not “pay to be tickled”, and even that’s a bad comparison because tickling is defined as the cost of education, so “paying to tickle” means “pay in order to be able to pay the cost of education”, which is tautological.
Furthermore, some of your uses of the analogy fail for other reasons. For instance, “Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist. ” But in the analogy, this should be “pay to have the right to tickle someone else”, not “pay to be tickled”
Yes, I meant “pay to have the right to tickle someone else” although I probably could have phrased it less ambiguously.
and even that’s a bad comparison because tickling is defined as the cost of education, so “paying to tickle” means “pay in order to be able to pay the cost of education”, which is tautological.
The pain of tickling is the cost to taxpayers of education. “paying to tickle” simply means privately paying for education.
The pain of tickling is the cost to taxpayers of education. “paying to tickle” simply means privately paying for education.
“Paying to tickle” means “paying for the right to tickle someone else”, and more specifically, “paying for the right to green-tickle someone else, despite the pain it causes him”. That would amount to “paying the cost of education so that you have the right to charge taxpayers for education”, which is still meaningless.
Ok, maybe a better analogy would be something along the lines of:
Some martians are able to afford expensive tentacle cream which stops the tentacles stinging, meaning that they can find more willing humans and become a deeper shade of blue then less well-off martians.
Also, there’s a country where most martians borrow so much money to buy cream that they have to work like 80 hours to hope to ever pay back the debt, as most humans only let indigo martians tickle them.
For the analogy to make sense, blue tickling has to be done to the same humans as green tickling. If blue tickling means “the employer (as an individual) hires an educated person and benefits”, green tickling would be “the employer (as an individual) pays for an uneducated person to be educated”. Pretty much nobody thinks that employers should be obligated to pay for people’s education.
You guys have been making valiant efforts to apply the tickling analogy to education, but I really don’t think it works.
Nowhere in the story is it implied that the humans a martian will pleasantly tickle once blue must be the same ones he unpleasantly tickled when green in order to become blue.
The analogy doesn’t require that the same individual human who is green-tickled is the one who’s blue-tickled, but the analogy does require that the humans and Martians who green-tickle them are an analogy for the same kind of thing as the humans and the Martians who blue-tickle them. So if “humans blue-tickled by Martians” means “employers hiring educated people on an individual basis”, then “humans green-tickled by Martians” means “employers paying to educate people on an individual basis”. Employers don’t do that—the analogy fails.
You can’t just say that blue-tickling means hiring and green-tickling means paying for education, without considering who is hiring whom, and who is paying to educate whom.
You can try to fix the analogy up by saying that “human” stands for an individual member of society rather than the whole society, but then the analogy fails because while there are lots of humans, a Martian doesn’t pick an individual human but extends its tentacles over all the humans at once.
Ok, anyone reading the comments knows what this is a allegory for. Before reading on, remember your current stance on this issue.
I’m now going to interpret this as being about education in general.
Green Martians == uneducated
Blue Martians == educated
humans == society, and especially taxpayers
nice tickling == the social benefits of having highly educated professionals
painful tickling == the financial costs of maintaining an education system
Suddenly the anti-creep feminists are libertarians, arguing that tax is theft, even if used to educate children. Others argue against this, saying that everyone has a right to an education, which is a social good that trumps individual property rights.
Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist.
Clearly, some Green Martians must attempt to metamorphose in order to maintain a technologically advanced society. The current social norm is that all Green Martians, no matter how stupid, must attempt to metamorphose at least to the age of 16. Indeed, in many places the slower-learning Greens are given extra tickling time, more than the fast learners.
Some people believe that some Martians are inherently better at tickling, and that those who struggle to metamorphose are in some way inferior. Some even say that for the slowest-learning Martians it is immoral to try and better themselves by being educated, rather then accepting their lowly place in society.
These people are often accused of being ableist, classist and elitist.
Some people even believe that the slowest-learning Martians should not reproduce, saving the next generation the pain of their stinging tentacles.
These people are generally regarded as crypto-Nazis.
So, now that everyone is thoroughly mindkilled due to the mention of both PUA and Nazis, did your stance change? If so, does this reveal underlying biases, or is it more a matter that allegories are inherently imperfect representations of the actual issue being discussed?
I wonder how much potential this technique could have. I mean, inventing a metaphor that applies to two situation, letting two groups of people debate the metaphor, telling each of them only one of the meanings… and then collect their answers and try applying them to the other situation. Maybe we could find some creative solutions here.
I’ll try… okay, sometimes the analogy will be stretched a lot, but that’s because the goal is not to be perfect in translating, but to generate ideas.
Find people willing to donate a lot of money to education of the least educated people.
Make education less expensive.
Use Khan Academy for teaching.
Uhm? Invent a sci-fi technology that will inject knowledge and skills into humans.
Give schoolkids Ritalin.
Sperm donors should provide information about their educational achievement.
Let stupid people live without education, and make a scientific study about their lives. Maybe they are not that much worse than the rest of the population.
Lower the tax, give less education to both stupid and smart people.
Classes on “efficient learning” before learning specific subjects.
Contracts between private people, like: “I will pay for your education, and in return you will give me 10% of your income during the next 20 years.”
Give stupid people free TV.
Create better propaganda for taxpayers.
Create more privately sponsored educational institutions. Demanding public education should become socially unacceptable. Obviously, this needs a lot of private sponsors.
Have some limit on taxes, so that people don’t have to worry that more education will mean more taxes.
Make a reasearch about habits of highly successful students, and use it to improve education.
This comment is awesome.
The biggest problem with the education analogy is that humans are plural, but society is singular. If you want the Martian analogy to work for education, you’d have to have all Martians trying to tickle the same human, of which there is only one.
If there’s only one human and an unlimited number of martians can tickle him, things work very differently than if there are many humans:
The human solves the problem by preemptively consenting to green tickling in exchange for benefits to himself later on from the increase in blue tickling. If there are many humans, the humans face a collective action problem; agreeing to be green-tickled increases the total rate of blue tickling by a negligible amount unless all humans agree on it at once (or unless Martians and humans behave in ways that don’t match the analogy).
If there is only one human, the humans don’t compete against each other for the limited supply of blue Martians.
If an unlimited number of Martians can tickle the same human, the Martians don’t have to compete against each other for the limited supply of humans, either.
You can try to fix the analogy up by saying that “human” stands for an individual member of society rather than the whole society, but then the analogy fails because while there are lots of humans, a Martian doesn’t pick an individual human but extends its tentacles over all the humans at once.
Furthermore, some of your uses of the analogy fail for other reasons. For instance, “Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist. ” But in the analogy, this should be “pay to have the right to tickle someone else”, not “pay to be tickled”, and even that’s a bad comparison because tickling is defined as the cost of education, so “paying to tickle” means “pay in order to be able to pay the cost of education”, which is tautological.
Yes, I meant “pay to have the right to tickle someone else” although I probably could have phrased it less ambiguously.
The pain of tickling is the cost to taxpayers of education. “paying to tickle” simply means privately paying for education.
“Paying to tickle” means “paying for the right to tickle someone else”, and more specifically, “paying for the right to green-tickle someone else, despite the pain it causes him”. That would amount to “paying the cost of education so that you have the right to charge taxpayers for education”, which is still meaningless.
Ok, maybe a better analogy would be something along the lines of:
Some martians are able to afford expensive tentacle cream which stops the tentacles stinging, meaning that they can find more willing humans and become a deeper shade of blue then less well-off martians.
Certainly true :-D
The idea is that the green and blue Martian analogy can be used, as is, as an argument about education. I don’t buy that.
Of course you can use it as an argument about education if you replace it with a better analogy.
Also, there’s a country where most martians borrow so much money to buy cream that they have to work like 80 hours to hope to ever pay back the debt, as most humans only let indigo martians tickle them.
For the analogy to make sense, blue tickling has to be done to the same humans as green tickling. If blue tickling means “the employer (as an individual) hires an educated person and benefits”, green tickling would be “the employer (as an individual) pays for an uneducated person to be educated”. Pretty much nobody thinks that employers should be obligated to pay for people’s education.
You guys have been making valiant efforts to apply the tickling analogy to education, but I really don’t think it works.
Nowhere in the story is it implied that the humans a martian will pleasantly tickle once blue must be the same ones he unpleasantly tickled when green in order to become blue.
The analogy doesn’t require that the same individual human who is green-tickled is the one who’s blue-tickled, but the analogy does require that the humans and Martians who green-tickle them are an analogy for the same kind of thing as the humans and the Martians who blue-tickle them. So if “humans blue-tickled by Martians” means “employers hiring educated people on an individual basis”, then “humans green-tickled by Martians” means “employers paying to educate people on an individual basis”. Employers don’t do that—the analogy fails.
You can’t just say that blue-tickling means hiring and green-tickling means paying for education, without considering who is hiring whom, and who is paying to educate whom.
Is it?
Taxpayers are plural. Some of them pay more taxes than others. Some of them would donate to a charity related to education, others wouldn’t.
I covered that: