On the Notion of Free Will

Work is falling on me like a ton of bricks. In lieu of a proper post, I offer you this, and note it for my own reference as well. =)

Edward O. Wilson writes this in his book On Human Nature, p. 72:

Consider the flip of a coin and the extent of the coin's freedom. On first thought nothing could seem less subject to determinism; coin flipping is the classic textbook example of a random process. But suppose that for some reason we decided to bring all the resources of modern science to bear on a single toss. The coin's physical properties are measured to the nearest picogram and micron, the muscle physiology and exact contours of the flipper's thumb are analyzed, the air currents of the room charted, the microtopography and resiliency of the floor surface mapped. At the moment of release, all of this information, plus the instantaneously recorded force and angle of the flip, are fed into a computer. Before the coin has spun through more than a few revolutions, the computer reports the expected full trajectory of the coin and its final resting position at heads or tails. The method is not perfect, and tiny errors in the initial conditions of the flip can be blown up during computation into an error concerning the outcome. Nevertheless a series of computer-aided predictions will probably be more accurate than a series of guesses. To a limited extent, we can know the destiny of the coin.

An interesting exercise, one can reply, but not entirely relevant, because the coin has no mind. This deficiency can be remedied stepwise [...] Let the object propelled into the air be [...] a honeybee. [...] The bee appears to be a free agent to the uninformed human observer, but again if we were to concentrate all we know [...] and if the most advanced computational techniques were again brought to bear, we might predict the flight path of the bee with an accuracy that exceeds pure chance. To the circle of human observers watching the computer read-out, the future of the bee is determined to some extent. But in her own "mind" the bee, who is isolated permanently from such human knowledge, will always have free will.

Pearls Before Breakfast, from the Washington Post

What if beauty is right before your eyes, and you walk past it unseeing?

What would you be, then?

Love

Love. Sometimes known as Charity in other versions of the Christian Bible.

I intend to talk about ministerial pay and social work pay, about just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those, and the nature of public service for both ministers and social workers.

Of course whether this intention has been realized in this article is not for me to judge, at the end. :)

We begin. And begin again and again, on the topic of ministerial pay. Presently the ministers are paid 1.2m a year. According to a pay peg to the salaries of the most highly-paid 8 professionals in 6 fields of the private sector (Yawning Bread), they should be paid 2.2m. Our Prime Minister wishes to "close this gap" (direct quote). Needless to say, the question of perverse incentive to not spend effort on closing the other gap has been raised elsewhere.

It's going to rise no matter what we say. You know it, and I know it. A question to consider is: why is it that we know what we know? My suggested answer is, because there is no clear accountability for performance of the ministers. If they advocate that they deserve to have their pay pegged to the private sector, where are their KPIs, and thus the sword of Damocles that falls when they perform badly?

I hear only a ringing silence on this.

A hypothetical scenario for comparison: If I walked into my boss' office today and asked for a pay raise without justifying the contributions over and above my job's required specifications that I had made, he would not only laugh in my face but possibly fire me for arrogance (except that it would be called lack of team-playing skills or something). But this situation would never arise amongst the citizens and the PAP, because they were voted in without any clear mention of their jobs' required specifications a.k.a. KPIs. Thus the screaming of the cows (Ringisei).

But all this isn't quite about what KPIs they have. The present state of affairs has not even reached that stage of transparency yet. It's about on what basis (KPIs, pure randomness, the 66.6% vote?) they are paying themselves more. Let those criteria be held up for open scrutiny by the citizens, our country's stakeholders - only then will the increase in pay begin to be rationally justified.

Alternatively, the pay peg to the private sector would be acceptable if, like the masses they govern, each and every one of them could do this: Go to a private sector company with absolutely no ties to their original company Singapore (no suggestion of possible corruption or vested interest for our PAP, no), apply for a job, get selected for the interview, pass the interview, get offered a certain salary, and then bring that salary amount back to their original company Singapore as a competing quote. How the ministers are going to put this into effect, well we will just have to rely on their work ethics to find such jobs.

Other comparisons have been offered, from the method of selection of PAP ministers (LuckyTan), to the lack of further increase in Public Assistance (PA) funding, to the recent GST hike to "help the poor" ...

On to social work pay now. Yapdates mentions (found via The Void Deck: Minsta Pay Increase Special!) that people do not want to become social workers because of the low pay.

"I think back on those social organizations where social-workers receive one of the lowest pay in the whole economy, yet people continue to say that the work they do are 'priceless.' Isn't it common to hear positive comments about social workers helping an unemployed widow of many children find a job? Yet how many people will raise their hands to become social workers? Not many, as one of the reasons is that it does not pay adequately). "

Please, this is a pretty inaccurate analogy. From anecdotal evidence, I have heard that the threshold for "being paid adequately" in the social service sector is a question of whether one can support a 1-child family on social worker income. This criterion is one of basic subsistence; it is a far cry from the proposed increase in ministerial pay. So please do not insult the social work profession in this manner, by saying that its inadequate pay is comparable to the ministers' inadequate pay and that its selflessness is comparable to the ministers' selflessness. Notably, on Jan 21 2007, a day after the ST ran their Saturday profile on Social Workers' Day, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan announced in the ST that 11m would be set aside for the social service sector, some of which would go towards an increase in social workers' pay. 11m happens to be more or less the same sum as that required for the salaries of 10 Cabinet ministers to reach their proposed benchmark.

Which leads on to whether ministers are more talented than social workers? Undoubtedly they are. (okay, indubitably, you pedants. :) ) But...

...On just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those. LuckyTan has another interesting piece on this. Less rantily, there will always be a pay differential amongst various occupations, though all are required to keep the society running. This pay differential would ideally be based only on the fruits of one's talent (therefore, the existence of KPIs) as a contribution to society, but this view ignores pre-existing variation in people's talents or backgrounds in contributing to those fruits. Say, if one had enough space at home to store all the books one wanted to read, one would tend to buy those books instead of renting or borrowing them, thus enabling 365/24/7 access to the ideas in those books. This is quite different from borrowing those same books and taking the extra time to summarize them quickly for future reference before returning them, to achieve the same outcome of round-the-clock access. In the former, the cost is in money; the latter's cost is in time. If society places a premium on group availability of the individual's time instead of group availability of the individual's money, then the financially poorer one would be disadvantaged no matter what claims of equal starting points the meritocracy rhetoric has. The word for unequal starting points, in the social work conceptual framework, is 'privilege'.

So there are pre-existing variations in people's talents or backgrounds already. But does it therefore follow that those variations must be reinforced, or worse, solely attributed to one's individual intrinsic 'talent'? Is it really true that the poor deserve to live poorly while the rich deserve to live richly? Well this is up for debate and is a huge topic in itself, but I have taken the step to be a social work student so I clearly do not think so. Neither do the many people who have made their stand clear that the nature of public service is one of selfless generosity.

Ian, especially, talks about how public service can never be bought over by large sums of money, just recompense for the fruits of one's labour aside.

"Finally, I think the people in civil service and government should be people whose morality cannot be affected by money. We shouldn’t give more money to ensure people don’t be corrupt. We should give more money because it is fair to give them that amount of money for the work they do and their contributions to Singapore. To say X amount of money is enough to prevent corruption is to me naive because someone else could always offer X + 1. But if the argument is that there is indeed a threshold where a person would be less susceptible to be corrupt (if not totally not corrupt), then shouldn’t there also be a threshold where enough pay is enough to want to keep the person from jumping ship to the private sector.

And there is indeed such a threshold. It is the benchmark to private sector salaries. But the benchmark will change won’t it. And if such a benchmark changes which means the threshold changes, then by working backwards, doesn’t that mean the people we have are just being bought off now at current market rates so they won’t be corrupt.

And if so, doesn’t that mean they have a price. Which comes back to the first point. If there is a price, there is always an X + 1. "

It was supposed to be about Love and Charity. Are you committed to serve?

[Edit: One more thing I forgot to discuss. Social workers are bound by their national organisations' Codes of Ethics. The comparable document for government ministers would presumably be the Constitution. Your thoughts on this?]