TJ's Place

Notification of Death

2011-12-04T16:55:00.001-08:00

Well this blog is clearly dead.

I have every intention of setting up a new blog at some indeterminate point in the future.

In the meantime I'm @TACJ on Twitter.

Wow

2011-07-15T06:05:00.001-07:00

These three swashers

2011-06-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

There are three types of economics:

1) The philosophical study of what kind of economy it is morally right to have. For lack of a better term, this is usually called "political economy."

2) The science of economics. This includes a broad spectrum of topics: with the study of mathematical optimisation at one end, and the sociology of market microstructure at the other. It is concerned with the objective (insofar as it is possible) study of the economy as it is (or of abstractions of same).

3) The practical discipline of applying the lessons learned in the science of economics (2) in the pursuit of the ends identified in the philosophy of political economy (1).

Too many "economists" do themselves a disservice by doing (3) without having the honesty to admit they do (1), or that doing (1) is even necessary or possible. This means that they do (1) badly and (2) even more so.

The Torygraph jumps the shark

2011-05-07T13:12:00.001-07:00

Here.

AV Maria

2011-04-04T03:09:00.001-07:00

Briefly. I'll be voting no on AV. Here's why:

AV is not PR.

PR is not good.

AV is not good.

Nick Clegg is not good.

Here's why PR is not good:

Britain, like most developed democracies, is basically a kind of elected dictatorship. The state is controlled by a self-selecting group of elites. Factions within these elites vie for direct control over the state. One of the cool things about the constitutional arrangement and/or culture of Britain (as opposed to most polities in history)(and in common with other successful democratic polities) is that there are lots of feedback mechanisms in place to prevent extremes of bad behaviour on the part of whichever faction of elites is in power at any given time.

Examples of these include free press, rule of law, independent judiciary. Stuff like that.

One of these feedback mechanisms is the election. Elections are held every so often and basically acts as a pointy stick with which to prod the various elite factions into behaving in a fashion that people are willing to put up with (where here "put up with" means that the vast bulk of the population are not driven to engage in the violent overthrow of the state, like these guys). The sanction is fairly straightfoward: the faction in power loses power if the voters are pissed off with them.

Obviously "democracy" in this conception has very little to do with the idea that the desires of "the people" have some influence on policy. Maybe they do. But there's always going to be at least 20% of people who are pissed off about *any* given policy. You can't please everyone. Really.

OK. So what does all this have to do with PR and FPTP?

Well FPTP is superior to PR because of the following:

i) It makes it easier to throw a government out of office. It means particular parties know their power is based on the general consent of the public and not on what they can wrangle with the other parties after the election. It means when a specific group of elites with a specific ideological platform start pissing people off then they and their specific ideological platform get booted out of office and get to cool their heels for a bit.

ii) It means there is a clearly defined "opposition" to hold the current government to account. Under PR there will presumably be a greater number of parties. It also means that any governments that do emerge will probably be coalitions. This multitude of factions combined with the possibility that any particular party not-currently-in-government might be able to get in government in order to prop up the governing coalition, means that there is insufficient oversight of government.

iii) It avoids the problem of parties with small portions of the vote remaining in government over long periods due to their always being required to make up a coalition. This means that whoever makes up this faction of floaters will not be subject to the same electoral discipline as parties under FPTP and they can basically do what the fuck they like regardless of the consequences.

iv) It leaves clear ideological space between parties. Parties will not succumb to the "chilling" effect of knowing they may one day have to form a coalition with one or more of their opponent parties. People also have a reasonable expectation that under FPTP they will be able to give "the other lot" a chance to rule for a bit.

v) Good old-fashioned Lor' o' the Shires, si non confectus non reficiat, big B, small c, Burkean conservatism. About time someone actually gave this a try if you ask me.

Now FPTP isn't perfect in this regard, or even at all. But it isn't obvious to me how PR or AV is better.

Now so far I've been arguing specifically against proportional representation (STV is the one I had in mind, YMMV), which AV ain't.

So if AV isn't FPTP, and it isn't PR (which sucks anyway) then why the hell are we being offered it?

The answer is that Nick Clegg needs to deliver some kind of electoral reform in order to maintain credibility (or whatever) as leader of the Lib Dems. And this brings us to the single biggest reason why it's worthwhile to vote no on AV:

*It might destabilise the Coalition*

If Clegg can't deliver the big constitutional whatsit all the Lib Dems want then the Lib Dem cost-benefit analysis of remaining in the Coalition starts a-tilting towards a cut and run.

Now I'm not sure this'll happen. Too many Libs have been bought off with gimcrack Ministerships and the prospect of red leather. But it's worth a shot, and it's not like AV is worth that much anyway.

Anything that helps destabilise and potentially break the Coalition is good because they are currently pursuing a failing and harmful economic policy, and using the ongoing economic crisis to further a pernicious small-state neoliberal agenda that seeks to further undermine our remaining social democratic institutions and further the interests of a handful of wealthy bastards at the direct expense of poor people. Basically.

Now so far I've been going on about PR and why we need to give Clegg a slap. Here's why AV is no good even when considered on its own terms:

1) It isn't proportional (not that this matters, see above).

2) It basically strengthens the third party at the expense of everyone else. Many of the objections to PR expressed above apply to this, but also: the lib dems suck.

3) The bit about "majority support" within constituencies is a reasonable point. But this doesn't cut much mustard when viewed against from the perspective of the vague description of how democracy actually works I gave above.

And frankly I owe Clegg a poke in the eye for enabling this shower of idiot Tories.

Addendum:

I am not against constitutional tinkering per se. Even if I am broadly sceptical of PR. My hypertrophied sense of order would like to see the King in Parliament turned into an actual directly elected president and full separation of powers. And parliament somewhat beefed up in terms of its relative political power to the executive. Of course I'm sure this is a ridiculous idea that no one in their right minds would actually implement. Heigh ho.

Added Addendum:

Also this.

Moore's Law and Structural Deepening

2011-02-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

Apropos Tyler Cowen's book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.

Matthew Yglesias points to Kevin Drum pointing out that:

World-changing inventions just don’t come around all that often, and when they do it takes a long and variable time for them to become integrated enough and advanced enough to have an explosive economic effect. Steam took the better part of a century, electrification took about half that, and computers — well, we don’t really know yet. So far it’s been about 60 years and obviously computers have had a huge impact on the world. But I suspect that even if you put the potential of AI to one side, we’re barely halfway into the computer revolution yet. To a surprisingly large extent, we’re still using computers to automate stuff we’ve always done instead of actually building the world around what computers can do.

This reminds me of W. Brian Arthur's book The Nature of Technology and Arthur's idea of structural deepening (as described here).

Yglesias has his own theory that advances in computer technology have in fact been "un-optimally" rapid. We have come to expect that new and improved computer technologies will arrive so soon that it isn't really worth refining an existing paradigm. Therefore structural deepening hasn't really happened in Arthur's sense of the term. There has instead simply been a succession of straightforwardly better technologies.

Tuition Fees: For and Against

2010-12-14T08:03:00.000-08:00

For:

OK, so 20 years ago we had a situation where a tiny group of people had their entire higher education costs paid for by the state. These people, ceteris paribus, went on to earn vastly more than people who did not go to university. It was the latter group whose income tax went to pay for the education of the former. It was a massively regressive situation. You had poor people paying rich people so that the rich could get richer.

Over time we have shifted towards a system where more of the costs are paid by the individual who gains most from going to university, both in terms of their future income and in terms of the experience.

Now one could argue that even the poor receive indirect benefits from having a bunch of highly educated people in society, but this objection falls for two reasons: 1) There is no reason to imagine that charging high fees will mean people *won't* go to university, there might be fewer, but the externalities will still be there and 2) The person who benefits most directly, concretely, and straightforwardly is the person receiving the education, so it is only fair that they pay the bulk of the costs.

Now there are a bunch of arguments about community and reciprocity and all that jazz which I am sympathetic to but still don't find terribly persuasive, probably because I have been conditioned within an atomistic liberal individualistic society to believe all the stuff I just wrote outweighs that hippy BS.

Peace out.

Against:

1) Although poor people's taxes paying for wealthier people to have free university education is regressive, it is not the only thing the state does. If you look at the welfare state in aggregate is generally redistributive and progressive in that poor people get out more than they pay in and rich people get out less than they pay in. However it is important that rich people get *something* for two reasons:
a) If it is only poor people who gain from something it will become stigmatised, so being a beneficiary of the welfare state will become something to be ashamed of.
b) If rich people perceive the state to be constantly taking away from them and giving nothing in return they will be begin to resent the welfare state. As rich people are generally more politically influential than poor people (because they can fund political parties and are more likely to vote and more often live in marginal constituencies) then this will result in rich people agitating for a smaller welfare state, which will have long term negative effects for poor people, if they succeed (and as rich people are generally better at being organised and have more resources they are quite likely to succeed).

On the other hand if the rich perceive the welfare state to be a community enterprise, with everyone paying in and everyone receiving some kind of benefit, then it will not be considered a "bad thing" to be the recipient of welfare because everyone receives it, and the rich will not resent the welfare state, so the poor won't end up being on the losing side of a class war.

So by subsidising the higher education of the children of the rich you are tying the rich into the system of mutual obligation and support that underpins our political community.

2) Externalities: we want as many people as possible to go to university because it's good in and of itself and because it is good for the economy. More educated people are more skilled, more skilled people earn more money and in so doing create more wealth, which is better for society as a whole, including poor people. Also more better-off skilled workers pay more tax which means more support for poor people through the welfare state and redistributive taxation. More people will go to university if going to university is cheaper. Therefore it should be subsidised. Moreover if more people go to university then it makes more and more sense to pay for it out of general taxation anyway, because the state can more easily bear the burden of cost than the individual.

Why Deborah Orr is Wrong

2010-12-03T01:50:00.000-08:00

Making some cuts in national spending is necessary at present because the bond markets, which lend money to countries, tend to see nations unwilling to stop piling up ever larger structural deficits as larger credit risks (because they are), and hike interest rates on their lending accordingly. This is what is actually happening. It is the situation we are in, like it or not. No metaphors are needed to explain it.

Except it isn't the situation we are in, and hasn't been for years. The interest rate the British government has had to pay on its debt has been at record low levels[1] since the financial crisis. This is because investors are more concerned about lacklustre economic growth than they are about the solvency of the British government, which is why they are keen to purchase government debt.

Fiscal discipline really is necessary, unless a nation chooses to default

Putting aside how ridiculous this sounds (having defaulted, a country would presumably find 'fiscal discipline' forced upon them, because nobody would lend to them), it is a perfect example of the tendency Chris Dillow identifies in right-wing polemic: tell a small truth and use that truth to obscure a bigger, and different, truth.

Here the small truth is that fiscal discipline is indeed necessary. But the larger truth is that the options aren't the binary 1) cuts or 2) default. There is spectrum between these and it may be the Coalition government is too close to the 'cuts' end of the spectrum. Perhaps by cutting government spending so aggressively the Coalition is reducing economic growth.

We'll never know, of course. But it is critical to recognise that 'the cuts' are a political choice, not a necessity.

[1]: This was the case even before the Coalition government came to power, and was the case even when the 'spendthrift' Labour government was in power.

A State Bank

2010-10-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

Chris Dillow has been arguing in favour of a state bank. Recently I finished reading "The Truth About Markets" by John Kay, in which Kay describes the fiasco of the development of British Advanced Gas Cooled nuclear reactors.

These reactors were announced in 1965 by the Labour Minister of Power Fred Lee, who promised that we would "hit the jackpot" in exports of AGRs.

The AGRs were sold for £1.9 billion when British Energy was privatised in 1996, along with a promise by the government to underwrite any future clean-up costs. The total cost of developing the AGRs was around £50 billion at 1996 prices.

On the face of it this sort of thing makes it look like it is a bad idea to put the state in charge of allocating investment. Kay's point is more subtle though, he explains that what markets possess and the state does not, and what makes markets such effective wealth creation systems, is the disciplined pluralism of the market.

In the market new ideas are implemented all the time. Most fail. Companies either ditch the bad ideas or go bankrupt. The problem with the AGRs was that the government wanted the electricity industry to speak with "one voice", and the civil servants who made such bad decisions were never properly held to account. There was no plurality of ideas and no discipline when things didn't work.

The problem then is not that necessarily with the state funding things, but rather with the state funding things without its decisions being subject to any kind of disciplined pluralism.

Back to Dillow's point: can it really be so hard for the government to create an independent state bank? It could be run in a similar fashion to the BBC, with an independent income guaranteed from some kind of levy.

As Dillow points out, the future is inherently unknowable. Professional VCs expect only around 1 in 8 of their investments to work out. Small loans made in sufficiently large quantities may generate enough benefits to outweigh the losses.

A public service person

2010-08-31T17:41:00.001-07:00

It occurs that I probably will never meet Tony Blair in person. I have never seen him. I have never shaken his hand. I have never spoken to him and probably never will.

For all I know Tony Blair could just be a fictional celebrity conjured up out of nothing. All I have to show for him is the few hundred pounds of EMA I received and the few thousand of working family tax credits my family received.

Oh well.

Update 23/09/2010: It occurs this could be read as being sympathetic towards Mister Blair. It isn't intended as such. I believe Mister Blair is a bit of a tit.

Sunglasses and the Burqa

2010-08-30T05:32:00.000-07:00

Apropos this, and this, am I the only one who perceives a parallel between burqas and sunglasses?

Probably.

Both have a "distancing" effect and both are vaguely poserish and both (arguably) have some practical purpose (I agree with Jamie Kenny that there is someting viscerally appealing about being anonymous in public).

Of course sunglasses are only considered religious wear in some Dudeic sects.

I know not how it tastes; though it be dish'd

2010-08-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

I left the following comment on this post by Shuggy:

Not sure I agree with this.

1) As you admit, conspiracies occur. We know this because some conspiracies in the past have failed and been revealed. Some have succeeded and been revealed (Iran Contra, for example, was successful, in that some of the goals the conspirators sought to achieve were achieved and everyone involved basically got away with it). Note that 'revelation' is not the only possible failure mode for a conspiracy.

2) I observe that to a large extent society is heavily influenced by a large number of quite powerful organisations composed of individuals of various levels of public profile and accountability. This observation is consistent both with a good-faith interpretation of what the saner wing of the para-political community claim and with any number of entirely rational theories about how the world works.

3) Pace Popper, of course some things 'just happen,' but sometimes things happen because small groups of people secretly and illegally and unethically cause them to happen.

4) One doesn't have to believe the 'conspiracy theory of society' to have entirely legitimate concerns about the role and behaviour of the secret state.

Shorter: to claim that a conspiracy theory is automatically nonsense by virtue of someone describing it as a conspiracy theory is unwise.

More economics, and similar

2010-08-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

I left the following comment at this post on Falkenblog, which was itself in response to this post by Paul Krugman:

Krugman contemptuously ridicules Paul Ryan's proposed budget because it freezes discretionary spending in the future, as if this modest fiscal restraint is insane. How is this sustainable?

Government can choose one of two options:

1) The government can reduce spending at the same time as households and businesses (which is what Ryan's plan amounts to), resulting in a fall in aggregate demand and concomitant rise in spending due to increased welfare provision and falls in tax revenue due to falls in GDP.

or

2) The government can borrow to increase spending, thus stimulating demand and increasing GDP, thus increasing tax revenues, allowing the government to service the debt it has incurred.

"In a private company, if you are losing money you cut until revenues meet expenses"

Clearly you have never worked in a high-tech startup.

Many businesses "lose" money for years before they start making profits. They borrow money to invest in future growth, much as the US government can borrow to invest in future growth.

Economics, and similar

2010-07-27T14:49:00.001-07:00

I left the following two comments on this post my Mario Rizzo, which was commenting on this post by Brad DeLong:

Brad DeLong is ot making an epistemological point, he is simply saying that there are two kinds of people who call themselves economists:

1) Hacks
2) People who study the economy

He does not claim that economists in sense 2) do not create theories to explain economic behaviour, he is simply claiming that there are are a large number of economists in sense 1) who create models containing assumptions that lead to those models leading to conclusions that are conducive to the desires of powerful individuals.

and

“ot” should be “not”, of course.

And can I confirm, Mario Rienzo, that you think that people who sincerely try to understand things about the world are “pathetic” and of the same order of moral depravity as people who deliberately try to undermine the free and fair discussion of ideas by pushing ideas that favour their own interests whilst knowing these ideas to be wrong?

Go read both posts and tell me what you think.

When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?

2010-06-25T12:16:00.001-07:00

What follows is some comment on an article by Simon Jenkins.

The content of said article is the usual hackworthy guff about how “science” is the new Stalinist religion and how “science” has eaten up so much of the curriculum for itself and how “science” needs to justify the huge amounts of money spent on “science” and why "science" needs to explain why that money should be spent on “science” rather than on the arts or anything else and how scientists only care about money.

Maybe if I was at a dinner party with someone making the various points Jenkins expurgates in his article it would be worth my time laying out exactly why he is wrong. Given that I'm not and I suspect anyone reading this will be smart enough to join the dots themselves I will restrict myself to a general commentary. So here are a few points I think relevant, but I honestly don’t have the energy or inclination to elaborate further:

Education in the disciplines of engineering, physics, chemistry, and biology cost more ceteris paribus than education in the disciplines of English literature, media studies, philosophy, maths, history, and art. This is because in order to learn the scientific subjects properly you need to spend a certain amount of time at a lab bench studying how the universe actually fits together. The bits of the universe you study generally have to be prepared by paid lab technicians and – as well as possibly being costly in and of themselves – often require the interplacement of similarly costly apparatuses to observe and analyse said components of the universe at a finitude of observation greater than that of the human eye.

As it isn’t obvious that education in scientific subjects is in fact less valuable than that in other disciplines – both in terms of the return to society and to the individual to be educated – I see no reason why university physics departments, for example, should be required to justify their greater expense when it is clear that this is a product of the nature of their discipline.

If it were the case that physics was obviously of equal societal and individual utility to (say) English literature then we might be in a position to suggest that maybe fewer people should study physics, as it costs more to no greater reward. The fact that there is a strong argument that physics does in fact have greater societal utility than English literature suggests that maybe the directors of university finances indulge the greater monetary demands of the physics department. [The argument goes like this: economic growth is good for everyone, education is also good for society, but education that leads to economic growth is better, you don’t need to have an English degree to write a bestselling novel (which generates economic growth) but you do need an engineering degree to build a better method for manufacturing microchips (which also generates economic growth].

Then there is Jenkins’ weird obsession with the idea of “science” vs. “arts” or “science is the new religion”. I honestly don’t know how to respond to this nonsense because I don’t perceive “science” to be in competition with “arts”. They are both avenues for expressing what it is to be human, whether that expression is the search for truth without or within a particular human being. It just so happens that the positive economic externalities of science are greater and could not be tapped without a certain level of direct support.

Finally, the reason we fund “blue sky” research in physics, biology, and chemistry, is that we don’t know what may have value until we find it. In studying the universe in all the ways available to us we gain a deeper understanding. And when it comes to science, in terms of Michael MacIntyre’s distinction, we can persue both the goods of excellence and the goods of effectiveness. A deeper understanding of the universe has intrinsic value in and of itself, as well as instrumental value.

Goodbye, apathy

2010-03-29T15:29:00.000-07:00

Why exactly should I vote?

I've been turning this question over in my mind over the last few weeks and have come to realise that there is absolutely no reason to do so.

I'll just briefly address each of the usual answers offered as to why I *should* vote.

1) It is in my interests to vote.

Sorry, but this dog just won't hunt. Even if I lived in a marginal constituency (I don't) and even if my vote was "the decider" (and it wouldn't be) and even if my constituency MP was the difference between one or the other of the control parties having a working majority and not having a working majority (unlikely) then the chances that my action would result in a government that is more likely to behave in a fashion conducive to my wellbeing would still be so remote I would more profitably spend the day playing videogames or, you know, *working*.

Furthermore just where does my putative inquisitor get off assuming I'm some kind of greedy dastard who only wants what's in my interests? Perhaps I feel I have a duty to vote for the party I feel best represents the national interest?

2) I have a duty as a citizen to vote.

This is just plain wrong. The only duty I have as a citizen is to obey the law. If voting were to become compulsory I would, of course, vote, because to do otherwise would be breaking the law.

If I feel I have further duties as a *person* then I shall do my best to fulfil them, but I certainly do not believe that choosing not to vote makes me a bad person. Particularly if it is on a point of principle.

But if I am to be morally culpable for something that is considered "bad" then surely *I* must be responsible for my decision? But if the cause is apathy (and in my case, it isn't, but supposing it were) then surely that is the responsibility of politicians for not inculcating in me a desire to engage with the political process by actually voting?

3) I owe it to the shades of all those who fought for the rights of people like me to vote.

This is probably the most interesting, and also the most frequently cited reason for voting. It also raises all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of inter-generational obligations, harms to the dead, and so forth.

I would say that what the various democratic heroes of the past did was to give me the *right* to vote, but not the obligation to do so. Or maybe they didn't think about it like that. Maybe if they knew about me they'd despise me, but that says more about them than it says about me.

So what's to be done?

Now I don't want this post to turn into one of those whiny disquisitions on how politicians aren't "engaging with the youth" - I basically disagree with Sian Anderson's view that politics is presented as too complicated or boring, and that this is what is dissuading young people from voting (and why should this dissuade only *young people* from voting? There are plenty of older folks with low attention-spans and better things to do with their lives).

It is not the case that I'm not interested in politics. I read as many newspapers as I can and generally try to keep up to date on what is happening. And I do occasionally badger my MP about legislation when the mood takes me.

So, given I'm actually fairly turned on to politics, why do I still feel it isn't worth my while voting?

Basically because of each of the following:

1) Government has a lot less ability to affect change than people generally credit them with. Therefore even if my vote *did* have an effect on the makeup of the government it wouldn't make a lot of difference quickly.

2) The two control parties have hit upon a basic raft of positions and policies that are designed to appeal to a narrow, non-ideologically-aligned, section of the electorate who live in marginal constituencies. The "floating voters" or "scorekeepers." As I mentioned above, I'm not one of these, so the government genuinely *doesn't* have any reason to give a damn about me.

3) The areas where I feel government *could* make substantive improvements are in areas like prohibition, immigration, housing, and tax policy. These areas are essentially precluded from discussion by the necessity of pandering to the perceived self-interest of the aforementioned "floaters." I disagree with *both* of the control parties on a number of issues that they just don't have the guts to act reasonably on (viz mephedrone).

And this is what it comes down to. It's not that I don't care. It's that I do care and I care enough to know I'm being ill-served by the current offering.

I appreciate that the Tories are much more vociferous class warriors than Labour and are likely to arrange matters to suit the super-rich, rich, and extremely well-off at the expense of the poor but maybe a bit of Sideshow Bob right wingery is what the public needs right now. And who knows, a few years of a Conservative government may be character forming.

So in conclusion: I might vote, or I might not. But it doesn't matter if I do or don't. And I say this as a fairly politically-engaged yoof. If I really want to make a difference there are plenty of other avenues to do so, and if I really can't be bothered I might as well comp my punt to these guys [via Penny Red], who actually might give a damn.

Addendum:

(A) Incidentally, I have personally done rather well out of the Labour government. Contrary to popular belief they have managed a fairly solid redistribution from rich to poor, especially considering the structural factors (globalisation) they've been fighting against. If it weren't for the bloody stupid wars, stupid policies, and nasty authoritarianism I probably would vote for them.

(B) And, as with every bloody thing, I discover Daniel Davies said it first, said it briefer, and said it better.

(C) As has Alix Mortimer.

The grey technocrat

2010-02-10T08:46:00.000-08:00

A good name for a blog?

Tell me that somebody stopped the war

2010-02-01T04:29:00.000-08:00

An interesting point of clash between Daniel "dsquared" Davies and Chris "Stumbling & Mumbling" Dillow lies in their attitude to Tony Blair and the Iraq War, Chris says:

Those protestors outside the Chilcot enquiry on Friday [...] accuse Blair of lying, as if this is a bad thing. Surely, what matters is the allegation that the war was a bad idea badly executed. This stands or falls independently of the question of Blair’s honesty.
Instead, there seems to be a huge premium upon sincerity; Blair himself exploited this when he famously claimed that he was “a pretty straight kind of guy.”

Daniel Davies, in his classic "One Minute MBA" argues that when a project needs to be lied about in order to get it implemented, that is a fairly strong indicator that the project is a bad one:

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.

So I'm not sure Chris' point about the overvaluation of sincerity stands. Sincerity is generally valuable in political leaders (perhaps because it is so rare?). So those protesters were accusing Blair of lying, because lying by politicians is a bad thing, and (as Iraq shows) a potentially very destructive thing.

But this raises an interesting question: are there circumstances under which it is *necessary and advisable* for political leaders to tell lies?

I would be inclined to say that there never are. Things can justifiably be kept *secret* because the state is often privy to information that could, if broadcast, breach the individual privacy[1] of private citizens, or cause negative effects like mass panic, or even undermine the efficacy of policy (e.g. interest rate changes), but when it comes to actually broadcasting data that governments know to be false, I can't see any justification that isn't based around the interests of the individuals that make up states and governments, rather than the interests of society as a whole.

So pointing out that Blair lied[2] is in fact very relevant to the allegation that the war was a bad idea badly executed.

[1]: I would say the state as an entity should have no right to privacy, as it is not a person.

[2]: On which subject, Davies notes that:

"the difference between "making a definite single false claim with provable intent to deceive" and "creating a very false impression and allowing it to remain without correcting it" is not one that you should rely upon to keep you out of jail."

If I were PM...

2010-01-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

...I would cease all government activity for the entirety of my first term. No legislation should be produced, and MPs should return to their constituencies and concentrate on casework.

The results of this would be that any major issues in the way the state operates would be highlighted and after five years of non-interference from central government it would be possible to clearly identify what the *actual* problems are as opposed to the problems caused as an inevitable side-effect of managerialist power politics.

It would also mean the media would suddenly have nothing to talk about. This could have two positive effects on different areas of the media:

a. Tabloids could do away with all the boring bits and shift their *entire* output to celebrity gossip.

b. Broadsheets might be persuaded to concentrate on more important questions than who is up or down in the Westminster bubble. The self-consciously serious could spend the entire five years in argument about what is really important to do at the end of the five years.

Further if there are any major economic crises during this period the absence of a centralised government to coordinate a response would serve as a demonstration to vulgar libertarians that having a government is sometimes quite a good idea.

Low-rent shitheads

2010-01-01T14:15:00.000-08:00

There's no other way to say it: Barack Obama, a once-in-a-generation political talent whose graceful conquest of America's racial dragons en route to the White House inspired the entire world, has for some reason allowed his presidency to be hijacked by sniveling, low-rent shitheads.

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Obligatory new year post

2009-12-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

2009 has been a pretty good year. I got back into university, and it is going rather well this time.

All in all I don't care much for the naughties.

Here's hoping the teens will be better.

[Note to self: fill this out with some more stuff as and when it occurs.]

George Monbiot: worra facking liability

2009-12-22T08:53:00.000-08:00

So George Monbiot is pissed off with readers of the Guardian for not doing their bit to combat climate change:

So what happens now? That depends on the other non-player at Copenhagen: you. For the past few years good, liberal, compassionate people – the kind who read the Guardian – have shaken their heads and tutted and wondered why someone doesn't do something. Yet the number taking action has been pathetic. Demonstrations which should have brought millions on to the streets have struggled to mobilise a few thousand. As a result the political cost of the failure at Copenhagen is zero. Where are you.

The problem with Monbiot's attitude here is that he is taking discussion of the serious problem of anthropogenic climate change and turning it into a discussion of the morality and lifestyle choices of Guardian readers.

Not only is this pointless, it is also actively dangerous. It is pointless because even if every single one of the 1,205,000 Guardian readers had moved to Copenhagen for the weekend it wouldn't have made any difference to the 46% of Britons who either don't believe that global warming is happening or don't believe that global warming is caused by mankind.

The fact that such a large proportion of the British public believe a scientific theory to be false is of course irrelevant to the actual state of the universe, but it does raise the question of *why* so many people believe that GW or AGW are false.

Part of the problem must be that thus far well-meaning environmentalists like George Monbiot have made out that global warming is something that requires us to adopt a particular set of moral standards, and have let it be known that anyone who falls short of those standards is a sinner.

And this is why Monbiot's stance is actively dangerous, as it turns what ought to be a sober, rational, quantitative (and probably rather boring) debate about a known fault in our industrial infrastructure into a passion-infused row about ideology and lifestyle-choices.

So here, in a nutshell, we have everything that is wrong with the modern, Monbiot-ist environmental movement. We have:

1) The idea that political change could be affected, if only we have enough people show up to protest.

2) The idea that, in the context of the environment, individual choices of ordinary people matter more than the collective actions of powerful elites.

3) The idea that you can get people to agree with you by repeatedly telling them that they are bastards and should be jolly ashamed of themselves.

If the international public response to the Iraq War teaches us anything it is that the number of protesters against a particular action is irrelevant. What matters are the decisions of elites. The idea that you can change the world by protesting in the streets is one that I just don't agree with, and it would seem the majority of Guardian readers agree with me and disagree with Monbiot on this one.

In the context of the environment small, individual actions really don't matter. If everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little. I don't buy into the narrative of climate change that implies everything would be OK if only we all suddenly decided to change our behaviour 'cos George Monbiot says we ought to. People respond to incentives. Large groups of people will only make major changes in their lifestyle if they have a big incentive to do so. So, again, slagging off Guardian readers for having the good sense to avoid wasting their time is pointless and counterproductive.

Monbiot has misunderstood his relationship with his audience. Guardian readers are either 1) people he is trying to influence, and win round to his way of looking at the world[1] or 2) people who already basically agree with his political programme. So why is he slagging them off? When trying to influence people it is better not to criticize, condemn or complain. It makes Guardian readers ever so slightly less likely to give a toss what George, and by extension every other environmentalist, has to say about anything.

I, of course, have no positive suggestions (for most of the reasons described here) as to what to do about global warming or what an appropriate response to climate change might look like. All I know is that George Monbiot is making things worse, because my immediate thought on reading his article was not "I'd better do something about climate change" but rather "the fuck did I do?". If I, a typical sort of middle-of-the-road chap, respond as such then imagine how someone who is more generally sceptical of global warming might respond.

So, practically speaking, Monbiot and his brand of hair-shirted eco-puritanism are a liability to the environmental movement.

{Incidentally: This is all described rather more articulately by Charles Stross here}

[1] It could be argued that Monbiot agrees with the observation that people do not read newspapers to be informed, but rather to have their existing predjudices confirmed. But in being so unjustifiably critical of Guardian readers he is undermining both of the potential uses of newspapers.

Kettle (again)

2009-12-11T07:07:00.000-08:00

This latest article by Martin Kettle pretty much summarises the problem with his entire political outlook:

My argument with other liberals does not depend on the view that Obama is right to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan, that Rowan Williams is sensible to try to keep the church together, that the Blair government was actually rather a good one, that limited agreements at Copenhagen are better than none at all, or that the Iraq inquiry is doing a pretty useful job in spite of some of the Vicars of Bray who have turned up to give evidence at it – although as it happens I believe all these things.

The problem is that Kettle confuses being self-consciously "mature" and "grown up" with accepting second best. F'sure be willing to accept that in the Real World things won't turn out exactly as we would want them to, but don't pretend that an appropriate response to this is acceptance.

What those immature "liberals"[1] that Kettle is decrying are doing is massively more helpful than what Kettle is doing. The liberals attack politicians for falling short. Kettle praises politicians for being mediocre. If we want a general improvement in the standards of our political culture then it is important and necessary that politicians are attacked for falling short. Politicians are powerful people, by and large, and as such need to be reminded as frequently as possible that when they behave badly they have behaved badly and when they have failed they have failed.

Suppose Kettle were to get his wish, and for everyone who has criticised Blair over the Iraq War or Obama over remaining in Afghanistan to recant and state that it is entirely understandable that these things should happen, and that you can't make a pancake without breaking eggs etc. Then what would happen? Politicians would suddenly discover that they can get away with anything. All thanks to the strength of Kettle's arguments.

So what is Kettle good for? If he is wrong, then he is wrong and not particularly interesting with it. And if he is right, then politicians should be allowed to be venal and corrupt, which would be pretty crap.

To reiterate: *I* understand that politics is a messy business, but then so is caring for the elderly, but you don't get journalists advocating lower standards of care-home cleanliness just *because* caring for the elderly is a messy business. Quite the opposite, in fact.

So yeah.

Where does Kettle get off saying things that are quite clearly bad and stupid?

Politicians are neither bad nor stupid. They are wrestling with difficulties.

Everyone is wrestling with difficulties. I'm wrestling with difficulties. Kettle, Lord help him, is probably wrestling with difficulties. That's the human condition! *Some* politicians are undeniably bad *and* stupid. That this may be true of a minority is beside the point. Politicians are sufficiently powerful that it is good SOP to give them a kicking when there is even the whiff of wrongdoing.

PS: Howard Jacobson does the same thing in The Independent, in the middle of an article slagging off the Coen brothers:

You don't have to like anybody. Men/ women, straights/gays, God/the devil – in art you can hate the lot. But there is something retarded at the heart of not liking when it targets the obvious. Living in this country at the height of Blair-baiting was like living in one giant fourth form. Listening to atheists is the same. It isn't that they're wrong, it's that they haven't moved on from the disillusionments of adolescence. Politicians lie, God isn't very nice. Get away!

The problem here is the same: the accusations of immaturity against those doing the right and necessary thing and having a go at powerful bastards. It's not as if Kettle or Jacobson advocate a more pro-active approach over just having a go. They actually seem to be saying that doing the political equivalent of growing a goatee and hanging out in dimly lit bars (i.e. playing the Kettle "too mature for manure" card) is preferable to the political equivalent of getting a job and just getting on with life (i.e. treating politicians as a class with contempt and occasionally having a go at powerful bastards).

In summary: Kettle thinks giving politicians the benefit of the doubt because they are powerful is a good idea. I disagree. Politicians should not be given the benefit of the doubt precisely *because* they are powerful.

[1]: I have a vague sense of who Kettle is referring to when he talks about "liberals" in this context, but I would prefer it if Kettle made it clear.

A monument higher than all the pyramids would rise

2009-10-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

What's to say about Africa and Aids? Except that if the pope were as omnipotent as people make out, he'd be able to make individuals subscribe to the whole package of Catholic teaching on sexuality, on fidelity within marriage and chastity, not just condoms. I've never quite been able to believe in Catholics – Africans or otherwise – who are so scrupulous that they couldn't possibly use condoms, but will resort to prostitutes.

What's to say about Africa and Aids? What indeed?

You could begin by pointing out that chastity has a very poor record as a public health policy, and is generally only proferred by simpering, sanctimonious prigs that care more about their own superstitions than the lives of actual, real, people.

According to the BBC "Aid agencies can find that their biggest challenge is trying to overcome cultural objections to using condoms."

Presumably some portion of this cultural objection is down to Catholicism, and of those Catholics who hold this view, some would change their view in response to a papal bull endorsing the use of prophylactics.

You could go on to point out that his Holiness' advocacy of such traditional Catholic alternatives to the use of condoms has failed to halt the the continued spread of HIV and Aids across the world.

His Holiness is not omnipotent, but has at his disposal the means to end a great deal of human suffering, and yet chooses not to do so.

That is what you can say about Africa and Aids.

From the pillar of fire and cloud

2009-09-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

Moving from four to three submarines is bad for our defence – it leaves no margin for error, and makes it harder to maintain our present continuous undersea watch – but the move would not affect nuclear capability or be part of global negotiations. What President Obama wants cut are warheads. Britain has 160. This is already very low. France has 400, and the US and Russia have 2,700 each. Mr Brown (rightly) did not offer any cuts in warheads.

Occasionally you are presented with a mentality so different from your own that it is quite difficult to understand what the hell they are talking about.

In this case I do not think Charles Moore, who asserts that Trident "will give this country 50 years of security" (but not from global warming, climate change, asteroid strike, bird flu, terrorism, John Redwood, or any of the other realistic threats to the security of our nation) is as out-of-the-park meshugge as, say, the unresistingly imbecilic Melanie Phillips, but he is as close to that state of being as you can be whilst still being minimally coherent.

That nuclear weapons are expensive and unconscionable is by-the-by. What always surprises me about the likes of Moore and other cheerleaders of WMDs is that they choose to focus only on the nukes. Surely there are alternatives?

There must, surely, be cheaper ways of commiting retaliatory genocide than nuclear weapons? One possibility is for the British government to covertly secrete a sealed vial of anthrax, replete with satellite-bounced remote-control detonators, in the centre of every foreign city in the world. This would be cheaper than submarines and nuclear tipped ICBMs but still guarantee the possibility of the desired level of monstrous carnage.

Will decide, but he won't debate

2009-09-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

Listening to Iconoclast and reading Sunny Hundal's views on whether the BBC should allow BNP MEP Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time (preview: Sunny's agin' it) it occurs to me that most TV/radio debates are fundamentally flawed. On Iconoclast there were four guests and one chairman. IIRC Question Time has five guests + one Dimbleby brother + a studio audience.

Partly as a result of this Sunny Hundal describes Question Time as:

...basically a populist shouting match where facts and figures don't have time to get checked. Someone such as Dan Hannan MEP can claim 84% of our laws are made in Europe and no one calls him out on his rubbish. Nick Griffin could similarly claim he's not racist and repeat lies that go unchallenged live on air. BNP pamphlets have repeatedly featured lies in the past. Who will have the research on hand to challenge that? His fellow QT panellists won't.

My preference would be to limit the number of debaters to two, and have only a few distinct issues discussed for a reasonable period of time, say 20 minutes each for three issues in an hour-long show.

Assertions made by debaters would have to be based on robust, ideally peer-reviewed, evidence that is cited by the debaters before they go on the show. These citations would be made available to all some time before the programme is broadcast so that they can be analysed by a panel of experts appointed by the programme and those that are found wanting can be made inadmissable.

In other words more like a court or parliament.

This view may seem elitist, but it isn't really elitist to claim that the views of ordinary people aren't as valid as the evidence-based views of experts. We demand a high standard of evidence in medicine, so why not demand a high standard of evidence in political debate?

Deliberative democracy is not best served by treating the truth as something relative or subject to an individual opinion.

It annoys me when people conflate respect for democracy with the idea that everyone's opinions are valid and useful. Most people don't know enough about enough to be able to make meaningful contributions.

For my own part I know my ignorance of most matters is such that I should avoid commenting, but that does not mean I cannot take down the ideas of others I know to be false.

Call it the Statler and Waldorf school of political debate: ideas are cheap, but the truth is expensive.

As such it is the democratic duty of we bloggers to attack bad ideas and incorrect assertions. Negativity is a powerful creative force. Our society will only begin to evolve when bad ideas are allowed to be called bad ideas and dismissed as such.

Update:

As per badconscience's point in the comments "Question Time" is teh suck and I need to crank up the Mills and dial down the Plato.

Both philosophers are hovering somewhere in the middle of my prodigious to-read pile (Mills is definitely a serious contender for my next big Amazon raid [i.e. this has moved from "wish list" to "shopping basket"]).

For my part elitism does piss me off, but not nearly to the same extent as ignorance and crass populism.

Update update: actually reading badconscience's blog post over on Liberal Conspiracy he makes the same point but somewhat better.

For the frightened baby on some foreign beach

2009-09-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

I'm currently listening to a recorded version of BBC 4's Iconoclasts.

In this episode economist and writer Philippe Legrain argues that Britain should abolish all immigration controls and institute a policy of "open borders".

He makes an admirable and coherent argument in favour of this position. Amongst the points he makes are:

1) Freedom: it is right that people should have the freedom to live and to move wherever they want. People should not be favoured or discriminated against simply because they happen to have been born in a particular country.

2) Economics: companies like Google and Yahoo! in the US were co-founded by immigrants. These people went to America and created extraordinary wealth and innovation in their adopted countries.

3) Public services: if public services are placed under strain because of an increase in population then those public services must be improved, made more robust, and more flexible.

4) Overcrowding: the idea that Britain is "full up" is nonsensical. London is the most crowded city in the UK, but no one advocates immigration controls around the M25 to prevent people in other parts of the country from going to live there.

5) Population control: inasmuch as population is a problem, it is not one that can be solved by arguing over where people are located on the surface of the globe. Population is a global problem. No one would advocate instituting a version of the Chinese one child policy in the UK to limit population, so why seek to limit the local UK population by reducing immigration?

Listening to the programme I became increasingly infuriated by the assumption, apparently shared by the chair Edward Stourton, that the idea of freedom of movement is some kind of wild and crazy idea.

As Chris Dillow points out, it is a mainstream and highly respectable idea.

The chap from Migrationwatch, Andrew Green, attempts to refute the point that immigrants bring economic benefits, but is allowed to get away with not actually producing any evidence that there are economic dangers to immigration. The burden of proof comes back to Legraine to support his point that immigration is good for the economy, which he does very ably, but why should Green get away with not explaining what the economic downsides of immigration are?

Then the MP, Ann Cryer, claims that immigrants might not be able to speak English, and might lack skills to work. Legrain makes the point that there is huge demand in this country for low-skilled labour. The notion that people lacking in "skills" are economically useless is absurd.

Then Green brings the argument back to numbers. He says "we cannot absorb this number of people" of the 7 million new immigrants that will arrive in Britain over the next 20 years. Fair enough. The question to ask is "why not?"

Green makes the good point that the government isn't building enough social housing or scaling up services to cope with the increase in numbers. I suspect part of the reason for this is that the government is terrified of being seen to do any of the following:

1) Reduce prices in the housing market by increasing supply, thus incurring the wrath of the Daily Mail readers and damaging the fundamental driver of the British economy, as detailed by Ross McKibbin.

2) Be seen to be soft on immigrants, which is stupid, if you think about it.

3) Increase public spending, thus incurring debt, which as Will Hutton explains isn't all that bad.

These are failings of government policy.

The debate moves on to the question of whether immigrants will come here to work or stay forever. Legraine highlights the point he makes in his book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, that when the USA had an open border with Mexico in the 1960s Mexicans would migrate back and forth over the open border, but once the border controls were tightened the migrants moved one-way, for fear they wouldn't get an opportunity to get back into the States if they moved back to their home countries.

Legraine makes the point that many immigrants want to be able to go home and live in their home countries after they have made money in Britain.

Andrew Green responded to this point by repeatedly asserting that he "couldn't imagine" that people from Sub-Saharan Africa would move back to their home countries after having lived in Britain. He had the gall to claim that "the facts are against" Legraine. The problem is Green has no facts to support his side of the argument. He goes unchallenged on this point.

Stourton also said a rather extraordinary thing: he claimed that this issue "does not easily lend itself to fact and figure." In fact it does. There are facts and figures surrounding immigration. This is the ballpark. Opinion, hearsay, and prejudice should have no place in this debate.

This is the most frustrating thing about so much political debate. Ultimately it should all come down to empirical data and observed facts. Opinions are irrelevant. And yet for some reason the misinformed opinion of the general public is seen as somehow valid and useful, when it isn't. This isn't a counter-democratic point, it's a pro-evidence point. Everyone is equal under the law, comment is free, but facts are sacred.

The programme ends with Green threatening to sue Legrain if Legrain doesn't retract an accusation of racism made against him.

The accusation was made by Legrain after Green's use of the term "there are limits to what the indigenous community will stand for".

Legraine immediately demanded an explanation of this term and accused Green of "ducking the race issue" and of being a racist. He asked Green if he felt that people who have "arrived in Britain in the last fifty years were British, yes or no?"

Green demanded a retraction of the accusation of racism and answered that he did feel that people who have moved to Britain in the last 50 years are British.

Legrain eventually retracted the accusation under threat of legal action

I have no opinion on Legrain's contention that the term "indigenous community" is inherently racist.

I will say that Legrain made a tactical error in falling into the trap of accusing Green of racism. He should not have lost his temper, as in doing so he gave Green the opportunity to threaten legal action, forcing Legrain to subsequently retract his point.

This highlights one of the problems with talking about immigration. The use of threats, slurs, and race-baiting tactics seems endemic to the discussion. This makes the debate far more emotionally charged than it should be.

Bonuses for MPs

2009-09-13T08:09:00.000-07:00

But how do we attract abler MPs? Pay them less and reduce their perks is Cameron's answer – I can't wait until he gets his hands on Afghanistan. Steve Punt did a bit of salary research for Radio 4's The Now Show and takes a different view: "Another way of looking at it is that they do a rather thankless and time-consuming job under relentless public criticism and yet they're paid less than the head of estate capacity procurement at the Ministry of Justice or the head of consumer services at Calderdale Council."

The problem, as David Mitchell points out, is not that MPs are exceptionally greedy, or even exceptionally stupid, it is that they are incentivised to appear frugal when they have no desire (and who would?) to engage in frugality.

So: a solution? Performance-linked bonuses. This would mean that how much an MP is paid is reflected in how well that MP is seen to do their job by their constituents.

So: pay MPs a base salary of something somewhat less than they are paid now (say: £50 000/year) then pay them a bonus on top of that.

The bonus is determined by the electorate. So if a voter thinks an MP has done a good job then they can tick the box saying "I wish to contribute £20 to the incumbent's bonus."

If the MP had done a really good job and 15000 of their constituents ticked the box then they'd get a payout of £300 000 on top of their £50 000 salary. This would work out to a salary of around £110 000/year.

One of the good things about this system is it would allow people like me to express personal support for our MP, despite the fact I would never consider voting for his party. It also means that MPs wouldn't have to be childless millionaires in order to get by.

This brilliant idea of performance-linked bonuses for MPs brilliant idea (c) the inestimable Daniel Davies

Update: thanks to @PaulGrahamRaven for this video of Dan Pink talking at TED on why financial incentivisation might actually harm and disrupt creative faculties.

In the speech Pink argues that the kind of non-mechanistic, creative industries of the 21st century will actually suffer under a traditional Taylorist regime of incentivisation. Pink highlights results of the candle-problem as evidence that the prospects of true creativity and innovation are damaged by gross financial incentive.

People, Pink argues, respond better when they are given autonomy: freedom to persue our own projects in our own time and in our own way.

It's a good point.

The question to ask then is: what kind of work are MPs supposed to be doing? Are they performing the (relatively) mechanistic tasks that a good constituency MP is supposed to be doing, like sorting out parking tickets, solving planning issues, and trying to help their constituents with their problems?

Or are MPs supposed to be doing the more abstract, creative job of crafting excellent pieces of legislation?

Considering how royally (no pun intended) screwed-up our political system is the effect (either positive or negative) of any kind of incentive structure would not show up against the huge systemic institutional failure of the safe-seats/marginal-constituency problem.

Dan Pink identifies what is wrong with managerialism in much the same way as Dillow does, with recourse to scientific fact, and offers much the same solutions: more freedom, less hierarchy, no meaningless targets and greater worker power.

Managerialists believe in hierarchy and manipulating symbols, they believe that people must be coralled and controlled and inventivised to work well and be productive.

The truth, as Dan Pink describes, is that people work better when they are simply given a task that they believe is important, and are given as much freedom to persue it as possible.

MPs obviously know what they do is important, so this is an argument for greater independence amongst MPs from the party machine, a weakening of the parliamentary whips, and a rebalancing of power away from the Crown towards parliament, and more independently-minded MPs in general.

The PC brigade - what you know and what you do not know

2009-09-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

People ask us if We know the PC brigade.

There is a small vanguard of the population of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that seeks to destroy British values, flood the country with immigrants, ban all petrol-powered cars, legalise all currently illegal drugs, introduce a compulsory universal 50 km/h speed limit, replace Elizabeth Windsor with the Speaker of the House of Commons as Head of State, disinherit the Monarchy, replace all Imperial-fascist measurements with metric-ISO measurements, require that exactly half of all senior figures in business, government and the media be female, build wind turbines on every square metre of open countryside, break all diplomatic ties with the USA, increase taxes on the middle classes, impose multiculturalism on all, ban the display of all Christian artefacts in any public place, and replace Christmas with a non-denominational all-faiths and atheistic celebration called "Winterval."

Once these objectives have been accomplished this elite vanguard will cede all legislative authority to the European Union.

We know this because the PC brigade knows this.

And We are growing stronger.

It may surprise you to know this: after all our existence and Our aims are an open secret, you would imagine that those in Authority might do something about such an open group of subversives.

What you so not realise is that we have successfully entered the corridors of power. Every senior civil servant and government minister is part of the PCB. We have a stranglehold on the BBC, and every major national newspaper. Members of Our Loyal Opposition are mere placemen, already inculcated in Our ways and ready to do Our bidding.

Even those press organs, such as the Sun and the Daily Mail, which appear to decry us, only do so on our explicit instructions. By allowing the lumpencommentariat such outlets for their helpless rage we have discovered that they can be kept in a state of torpid docility until such a time as we see fit to place them in one the Re-Education Camps.

I write this not to warn you, but rather to gloat at your hopelessness, and revel in the fact that Our power is of such an extent that we can talk of Our conspiracy against the British middle class openly and without fear of sanction.

We are, as ever, your imminent overpeople

The PC Brigade

Jenkins on prohibition

2009-09-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

I've dissed Simon Jenkins in the past, but I really can't fault his latest article on the prohibition of drugs for total brilliance:

Push has finally come to shove. Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was "unconstitutional" to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use. It asserted in ringing terms that "adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state". This classic statement of civil liberty comes not from some liberal British home secretary or Tory ideologue. They would not dare. The doctrine is adumbrated by a regime only 25 years from dictatorship.

Why the free market is not meritocratic

2009-08-28T11:38:00.002-07:00

The price system does not reward ability. If you want people’s earnings to reflect their ability, therefore, you can’t have a free market.

This simple point is both obvious and universally ignored. Consider:

Bonuses for executives and traders have increased over the past 30 years - can anyone really claim that traders and executives now are actually “better” than traders and executives from 30 years ago?

(Traders and execs now have access to better tools, but surely this is an argument for paying the providers of said tools more rather than the people who use them?)

The point about the free market is that it signals demand. It does not reward past performance, but indicates what people *should* do in the future.

As the free market does not reward past performance (90 year old retired executives can’t go back to their former employers and demand more money from them now because they weren’t paid as much 30 years ago as their replacements are now) the free market cannot be a meritocracy.

The best thing about the free market is the way it matches supply to demand. It is this very thing that means it is not meritocratic.

The best social worker in the country probably earns no more than the average taxi driver.

Of investment bankers, entrepreneurs, VCs, and life

2009-08-14T17:56:00.001-07:00

One of the tragedies of investment banking as a profession is that although bankers are paid stratospheric amounts by the standards of most people they spend their entire careers working for the fraction of individuals who end up becoming (much) richer than they are.

Consider: a very successful fortysomething investment banker who has amassed some £5 million in net wealth is assisting in the public flotation of a company.

This company was started seven years ago by a 30 year old. This 30 year old managed to raise £2 million in capital from a VC in exchange for a 60% stake in the company after two years of trading.

Now 37 the entrepreneur is taking her company public, floating at a market cap of £500 million. The entrepreneur will sell half of her 40% stake (i.e. £100 million) to the market, and immediately reinvest half that amount (£50 million) in the business.

Her VC partners are similarly selling half their 60% stake (£150 million) to the markets, and reinvesting half this amount (£75 million) in the business.

The company will raise £125 million to invest in new plant and expand worldwide. If things go as expected the stake held by the entrepreneur will double within three years to £200 million.

Out of all this the bank takes a 1% fee for buying the shares initially. 1% of £225 million or £2.25 million. The banker expects to receive 10% of this in his bonus, or £225, 000. He has already advised on three similar transactions so far this year, and the year is nearly over, so he *expects* his bonus to be around £900, 000, on top of his salary of £200, 000.

Around half of this will be taken in income taxes (compared with 18% capital gains tax or £9 million in the case of the entrepreneur) leaving the banker with take-home pay of £550, 000. After the flotation the entrepreneur has £41 million in cash and a 20% stake in a company that is expected to be worth £1 billion in three years.

The banker end that year with net wealth of £5.55 million. The entrepreneur ends that year with net wealth of £141 million plus whatever is left over from dividends and what she paid herself over the previous 7 years.

This is the heart of the tragedy of capitalism. As the man said, you gotta serve somebody. The banker serves the enrepreneur who probably feels hard done-by that she didn’t keep a larger stake in her firm. The VCs will be happy, but they are accountable to their own shareholders who are themselves accountable to equity and pension funds, who are in turn accountable to clients who really just want to live a quiet life/retirement.

Overall, on average, society wins, but at the cost of everyone being just the tiniest bit pissed off at the place they ended up in the pyramid. So they’ll keep pounding away on the hedonic treadmill in the hope that something will come up.

Sir Simon Jenkins fails again

2009-07-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

Simon Jenkins' most recent opinion piece continues his long, glorious tradition of making an utter fool of himself.

In it he lays into Michael Fish and the Met Office for the incorrect forecasts of "barbecue summer" that the press had been bleating about over previous weeks.

One of the many points Fish makes here in defense of the Met Office is that "A lot of blame has to lie with the media who misinterpret the forecasts."

The Met Office, being composed of scientifically trained professionals, in fact said: "there is a 65% chance of above-average temperatures."

Jenkins, however, goes off on one about how the Met Office shouldn't be paid for by the taxpayers if it can't even guarantee "barbecue summer."

Ignoring basic probability theory (that if there is a 65% chance of something happening then there is a 35% chance of it not happening) Jenkins essentially blames the Met Office for the failure of the media to report what the Met Office actually said.

The money quote is where Jenkins says:

We listen uncomplaining to this drivel from one day to the next. We are British. Weather forecasting is like abstract art, any fool can do it once he has got the job.

Ironically, his description of weather forecasting perfectly encapsulates his own "profession" of overindulged, pompous columnist.

Jenkins' piece really is a classic of a certain kind of opinion journalism, based entirely on prejudice and bumptious "common sense" with no reference to actual evidence, statistical theory, or human psychology, and with an hilarious lack of awareness of how much of an innumerate prat he comes across as.

A History of Economics

2009-06-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention I read this book a few weeks ago. Galbraith is an excellent and entertaining writer.

An underlying theme is Galbraith's emphasis on how the economic ideology of different historical periods seems to flatter those who hold power. Hence you have physiocrats in France during the 18th century, mercantilists during the 17th century, and neoliberalism during much of the 20th century, with a dash of Keynesianism for those who like that sort of thing.

I was reminded of this book whilst reading this lengthy thread at Crooked Timber in which Daniel "dsquared" Davis argues that economics should really be split into two disciplines: industrial cybernetics and political economy, with one being based on the development of practical applications of empirical research (like engineering) and the other being based on a discussion of the ethics, morality, and political consequences of different policies (basically a branch of political philosophy).

IIRC Galbraith endorsed this point: the idea that you can separate ideology from reality in political discussions is naive in the extreme (as Daniel argues here). Also Galbraith coined the term "the conventional wisdom" to describe beliefs that are widely assumed to be true for the sake of ideological convenience (think EMH, rational agents, drugs are evil etc)

I was going to write up a lot of quotations but frankly I can't be bothered: I advise you to buy and read a copy of this excellent history of this peculiar science.

[image from here]

The Steep Approach to Garbadale: incest and interest

2009-06-21T11:36:00.000-07:00

A good book, all told.

Reading Bank's mainstream fiction is kinda weird. I keep expecting to discover that someone is a Special Circumstances agent in disguise.

Also the shoe-horning in of circa 2005 TWAT lefty politics is interesting. Although nothing has changed in an objective sense it does seem that the world is a better place.

There is just a shimmer of Banks' patented gratuitous-unpleasantness towards the end, otherwise this is a superb novel about family, forbidden love, and beautiful mathematicians.

[image from here]

Enemas of reason

2009-06-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

I have established to my own satisfaction the prime source of everything that is wrong with British politics.

Surprisingly, it is not the Daily Mail (at least directly).

The problem is our first-past-the-post system of voting for MPs. This allows parties to gain power despite not having a majority of voters actually vote for them.

Further it means that politicians are not interested in garnering a wide base of support, they are only interested in attracting the votes of "scorekeepers" in marginal constituencies.

Scorekeepers, as detailed in this article by Danny Finkelstein, are people with no particular ideological commitments but who vote for the party (or more accurately, the individual at the head of the party) who they believe to be the most effective manager of the government:

The Scorekeepers “are non-ideological pragmatists who trust or distrust each side equally. They tend to see politics not as a contest of world views, but merely as alternate teams of possible managers of government, each contending that they can do a better job. The Scorekeepers are not choosing directions in their votes, they are hiring managers.”

The problem is that these scorekeepers are engaging in the same folly as managerialists or progressives. The notion that all our problems could be solved if only we all followed this or that political programme, or this or that heroic manager.

If the history of the 21st century teaches us anything it is that grand schemes for the improvement of the masses rarely work, and often have strongly negative outcomes for everyone. And all those scorekeepers are bound to be disappointed, so their support gradually wanders over to the other control party after a few elections.

Polly Toynbee highlights this here:

Our electoral system is the reason why each campaign seems more reductionist and vacuous than the last. The parties are competing for an ever more cleverly identified few thousand wavering voters in marginal constituencies. Pollsters find these few vague voters hardly think about politics at all. They are difficult to engage even for a fleeting moment, don't read papers but may vote if taken by some slogan that catches their eye. Most people are not like that: even if party tribalism has weakened, these target voters tend to be exceptionally uninterested in politics. Yet everything depends on them.

What matters most in politics is the constant churn of debate and argument and conversation and trial and error. I don't believe there is or can ever be one ultimate solution to political problems, rather there must be (controlled) conflict between parties against a backdrop of individual freedom, democracy, and an open society.

This outcome is best served in this country by the replacement of the current FPTP parliamentary system with an STV proportional representation system, a written constitution, separation of powers, and a reduction in the power of the executive relative to the legislature.

Vox stopped

2009-06-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

I do not hate. I am not a hater.

However there are a handful of things I loathe.

I have a visceral dislike of those vox pops you get on the TV News where the journos go out into the streets and ask passers by for their opinion on whatever the current Issue of Note is.

My objection to these bits is threefold:

1) They are meaningless. If the intention is to gain an understanding of the public's views on a particular topic then a far more rigorous method is to use polling.

2) They are embarassing. It is painful listening to my fellow citizens embarass themselves with comments that they have not had the time to prepare beforehand. It is clearly patently unfair of the journos to pounce on someone in the street with a question concerning what may be a very complex issue and expect them to contribute a well-thought-out answer.

3) They are fake. There is a script to these things. Journos only ever seem to ask questions that have one obvious answer viz "Are you in favour of MPs swindling the taxpayer?" A: "It is distgusting. They are all the same etc"

The clear and obvious solution to my problem is to stop watching the news. Unfortunately, as I've already discussed, this is not really an option.

Proportional representin'

2009-06-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

According to this 'ere news post by the Beeb Gordon Brown is proposing an alternative vote semi-proportional representation system and a fully-elected House of Lords.

This could be big.

A strange love: or how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy politics

2009-06-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

I am interested in politics.

This is a matter of some concern.

The reason is simple: what goes on in Westminster is largely irrelevant to me and my life. I live in an advanced, socially stable, pluralistic liberal democracy. I have easy access to clean water, good housing, good food, healthcare, education, information, the company of others, culture, and the opportunity to pursue whatever idle desires may remain now that the problem of my personal comfort has largely been solved.

Politics, however, is a source of depression and irritation. There is so much wrong with how our political system works that observing it is like watching a man sweeping a dusty hall with the brush extension of a fully functional industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

The costs of any possible, and hence marginal, improvements in my personal condition are so high that they outweigh the gains.

Spending more than £10.6 billion on an ID card system that might fractionally reduce the already miniscule probability of me dying in a terrorist attack is an act of such revolting waste and intellectual squalor that I am sick at the thought of it.

The act of vetoing the publication of the minutes of the meetings in which our government decided to embark on an illegal and murderous war (not to mention going to war in the first place) is one of cowardice, both political and primal.

There are better political systems out there. Ones that are more representative and more democratic. And yet we're stuck here with an absurd system of elected kingship.

Given the failure inherent in the Westminster of politics the rational response is to simply ignore the newspapers and blogs that discuss these remote phenomena and concentrate on things of genuine local importance, whatever they may be.

But I am, of course, not rational.

Given I cannot ignore this irrational interest in politics I can only ask the question:

Why am I interested in politics?

The stock answer is that I consider myself a responsible citizen and therefore ought to be aware of and engage in the democratic process. This is of course nonsense. The only duty of a citizen is to obey the law.

I suspect that the source of this political disease is similar to that of the unfathomable interest that some of my friends have in the game of association football. They, like me, lack the power to make any substantive changes to the rules of the game and who gets which job for which team, and frequently decry what they see as poor decisions on the part of those appointed, but ultimately it is the same impulse that leads them to read the sports pages just as I read the politics and business pages.

Chris Dillow comments on this idea of rational inattention of politics:

So, what would be wrong with someone who avoids, as far as possible, all political knowledge - they don’t buy a newspaper, ignore political websites, don’t watch TV news, turn off the radio when the news comes on, and so on?
The obvious answer is that paying attention to politics isn’t a matter of narrow utility maximizing. We should do so because virtue requires it. Being a good citizen requires us to follow politics.

But does it? There’s a long tradition of people shunning public life: monks, hermits, Voltaire advising us to cultivate our gardens, MacIntyre urging us to retreat into local communities. And what’s virtuous about wishing to impose one’s own ego and limited knowledge onto the rest of society?

Nor is it the case that ignorance about politics need, in principle, be associated with general ignorance or incuriosity. It’s perfectly possible in principle to be very informed and cultured on all sorts of matters whilst paying no attention to politics - just as one can be clever and cultivated whilst being ignorant about, say, fruit flies or medieval plainchant

Further: as Nassim Taleb argues in Fooled by Randomness politics is one of those areas of human endeavour where success has more to do with random luck than any exceptional, empirically measurable, skill. What Taleb says about corporate CEOs can be paraphrased for politicians:

Politicians are not administrators. [...] they are often "empty suits" [...] persons who are good at looking the part but nothing more. [...] what they have is skill in getting promoted within a political party rather than pure skills in making optimal decisions - we call that "political skill."

So not only do I lack the power to change things substantively, neither do most of the participants.

Another problem with politics is that most of it is filtered through what is written by journalists.

Taleb argues against listening to journalists' opinions on anything, as the skills required of a successful journalist are not those required of a good political scientist[1]:

A journalist is trained in methods to express himself rather that to plumb the depths of things - the selection process favors the most communicative, not necessarily the most knowledgeable.

To conclude. Politics is my idle entertainment. Just as some watch soap operas and others watch association football games, I watch Newsnight and read political blogs. It isn't all I do, of course, but at least it is explicable.

[1]: Taleb is also highly critical of the whole notion of "political science", but is even more critical of journalists, so I'll let that slide for a moment.

House of Suns: definitely not a review

2009-06-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

Just finished this 'ere book by Al Reynolds.

Thoughts:

1) An alright 500 page book with a good 250 page book struggling to get out.

2) There is a lot of boring, pompous, non-political politics goes on in "the Line". I feel the concept of someone creating thousands of clones of themselves and sending them out to explore the galaxy is good, but Reynolds kind of let it go without thinking through how it would operate IRL.

3) I don't know if it's a style thing (Stephen Baxter does it as well) but none of the characters talk as people talk. Ken MacLeod is much better at this sort of thing.

4) The most interesting characters (the Doctor and the Spirit of the Wind) don't get nearly enough of the airtime that is instead given over to the unconvincing political pomposity.

That said I really enjoyed this book. It's not as good as Century Rain or Pushing Ice, but is considerably better than Prefect.

Will Hutton, constitutional glutton

2009-06-07T04:01:00.000-07:00

Will Hutton summarises what is wrong with British politics rather well:

Departments of state and, with them, great swaths of public spending, are treated as political spoils. With Geoff Hoon's resignation as transport secretary, this department alone will have had four secretaries of state in three years. It's a similar story in defence, with environment and energy only marginally less hard hit; these are all departments with long-term planning horizons, but whose political leaders are birds of passage. What chance is there of difficult decisions being taken? Systematic policy developed? Of careful attention invested in how effectively and efficiently cash is spent?

Damn straight. The problem is that, as Charlotte Gore points out when discussing proportional representation, a new constitutional structure is a procedural story and as such something no one has the slightest bit of interest in. Except me and other political geeks.

But all the moralising nonsense spoken about MPs and Parliament over the last few weeks ultimately comes back to problems inherent in the system. The press commit the fundamental attribution error and assert that the problem is with the character of individual MPs, rather than a problem endemic to the way the system works.

My own thoughts on parliamentary reform are with those of Thomas Paine, and I describe them over on Charlotte Gore's discussion of an elected Lords.

They are as follows:

Why not have the Lords elected for terms of (say) 12 years, and also have a term limit of one term per person?

Have 300 lords with 1/3 elected every four years.

Also set a time-limit of say, 12 years, until people who have served in the Commons can subsequently run for office in the Lords.

Combine this with an upper age limit of 35 for lords and you have a chamber that consists of older (and hence more experienced) non-career politicians that are not required to respond to every tabloid-editor’s whim or whip’s demand and can use their own moral and intellectual judgement on whether to accept or reject legislation.

Also you need to have separation of the legislature and executive, have independence of tenure of the legislature (i.e. elections every four years), and use the STV PR system to select MPs in the Commons.

And I still want my pony.

And otherwise I basically agree with this Martyn Richard Jones guy[1]. Lashings of democracy.

[1]: The only slight note of disagreement with Richard Jones is with his point 11 - "Elections for all Public offices - no appointments on the nod" - I assume he doesn't mean to elect every clerk and mid-ranking bureaucrat by popular vote. But apart from this he seems bang on the money.

Stuart Rose on feminism

2009-05-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

Guardianistas seem split over the question:

I'd be interested to see how that splits on gender lines.

A (very) short story

2009-05-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

There are many of these now. Hollow spheres and cylinders, mostly. Some cylinders. A few rods. The occasional torus. An endless fecundity of green worlds.

In the old days before fittle they thought the only way to colonise the universe was by throwing gunk out into space forever. Fapping out an endless stream of phlegm into the face of God in the hope that at some then-unimaginably distant point in the future and at some absurdly remote location the biomatter might just evolve into something you could play poker with.

At least I think that is what they believed. Corruption and degradation are a constant in this entropic universe. So it is said.

Lost in the strata of history we might find the truth of it, there are billions of dead worlds down there. Trillions of corpses that lived full and happy lives and some more that did not. Perhaps with them lies the truth of it. Where we came from.

They might have been Giants, of course, as the legends say. They might have been Gods. Or giant robots. Or intelligent waves of probability and potential. We might even have developed through a process of blind native favouritism.

All we know is what is remembered. And what we remember most of all is the name that was given. Our name.

We are the diatoms.

Sanctimony in the UK

2009-05-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to determine exactly why I feel so uncomfortable with the condemnation of MPs over their expenses claims.

The answer is I have been revolted by the sanctimonious priggishness of the newspapers. Sanctimonious priggishness is only fun when it is me directing it at others: even seeing someone else direct it at a third party is unpleasant, possibly because of rays of sanctimonious priggishness being reflected in my direction.

Daniel Davis calls it right: the MP who said that he deserved his taxpayer-funded duck house is exactly the kind of guy I'd vote for. Honest, to-the-point, pro-duck. Too bad he was a Tory.

Anyhoo.

During my working day I am exposed to a lot of newspapers.

As such I end up reading a lot of front pages. I'd rather not, but it is an occupational hazard, just like putting up with idiots buying shitloads of crap they don't need and then objecting to paying one penny for a bag "on principle".

Newspaper headlines are full of bile and self-rightous indignation at the best of times, but the tabs, and The Telegraph, have outdone themselves with their inane rantings on the issue of MPs expenses.

My objection is not to the reporting of the facts of MPs expenses (they should of course be public knowledge as a matter of course), rather it is to the attitude of the reaction to the reporting.

There is my visceral dislike of the vox-pop faux-outrage of TGBP as they rant away at their elected representatives whilst ignoring the various ways they're being fucked over by businesses, the media, their bosses, popular culture, and 21st century life in general.

But there is more to my dislike of this story.

Let's step back a moment.

In a society there are a few problems that need to be solved. One is the problem of how you identify error in a complex society. Another is how that error is broadcast, such that a solution may be found.

In a civilized society (or, in the absence of a civilized society, a pluralistic liberal democracy such as wot we 'ave 'ere) if you identify a problem you broadcast it, it is debated, critically analysed, and many solutions are proferred.

A solution or group of solutions will be selected after various deliberations and debate and compromise, then you move on. At some indeterminate time in the future the solution is tested or re-evaluated.

The way our system of liberal democracy has developed has lead to an important part of this process (primarily the identification and broadcast components, or as I shall call it "I/B") being carried out as a worthwhile byproduct of the profit-seeking activities of a collection of businesses called newspapers.

Newspapers are run by humans, so as I/B systems newspapers are subject to all the usual cognitive biases, and are therefore prone to horrible failure modes.

I suspect in the phase space of all possible ways of solving the I/B problem newspapers occupy a local maxima. There may well be better ways of dealing with I/B (some kind of universal Panopticon and a million bored apes?).

But here the press has failed in that is has chosen to concentrate on a minor side-effect of the wider problem:

MPs were writing the rules for their own expenses. To whom are they accountable?

Half our legislature is unelected. This is a bad joke.

Our executive is more powerful than our legislature. This is a bad idea.

If there is a problem here it is bigger than the problem of MPs expenses, it is a problem with the way our legislature is set up and our government is elected.

So why are the newspapers focussing on the sneering, snide, grumpy, petty, priggish, holier-than-thou, expenses-obsession rather than the actual issues.

The British are possessed of the same peasant mentality as the Americans. Easily distracted by the threat of external foes but fundamentally incapable of addressing the real problems.

I agree with what Joan Smith writes in The Guardian

The British public – not all of them, but the smug guardians of morality who are enjoying this crisis so much – say they are disgusted by the behaviour of our elected representatives. Let me say that it works both ways: for the first time in my life, I am sick of my country. I am sick of the daily undermining of democracy, and sick of the sadistic pleasure people take in humiliating decent public servants. Even so, I will go on urging my friend not to give up her seat. She is a brilliant constituency MP, and I don't believe anyone should give in to bullies.

Indeed.

The Accidental Pornographer: not actually a review

2009-05-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

A brief summary of lessons learned from The Accidental Pornographer:

Do not fall in love with the concept before you have scoped out opportunities for expansion. Griffiths discovers that the potential market for his product is smaller than he assumed only after he is well into it.
Do not get hypnotised by the prestige of others. Griffiths uses M&C Saatchi for marketing, despite their high-cost.
In planning your cash-flow always bear in mind the worst case scenario.

I've actually met the author, Gavin Griffiths, though I didn't know who he was at the time. I was working in our local branch of WH Smith and he came in to ask if we had this book in stock, as he had written it and wanted to know if it had hit the shelves yet.

My fleeting impression of him was of an earnest and unobjectionable individual. This is reinforced by his book and his blog.

The book is recommended for much the same reasons as Paul Carr's book Bringing Nothing to the Party. It is story of business failure, though neither Carr or Griffiths fail completely.

And you learn more from failure than you learn from success. Karl Popper teaches us this.

MPs expenses

2009-05-13T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to articulate exactly why I don't care about the MPs expenses row. It could be because of the dry pointlessness of it all (as discussed here by Alex), it could be because of the po-faced hypocrisy (as identified here by Stephen Fry) of the public and media, or it could be that after having written to my MP about this I feel I've already done my civic duty and therefore have no need to be outraged.

But it mainly comes down to my belief that the purpose of a free press is to highlight error in as efficient manner as possible. Going on and on about this dishonorable behaviour on the part of some MPs distracts from more serious dishonour and dishonesty: when Jack Straw used executive privilegeto veto the publication of the Iraq war minutes, where were the days of outraged front-pages?

Parliamentary expenses should be public knowledge as a matter of course. And political error should be highlighted as a matter of course.

My problem with the "MPs expenses row" is that:

1) The media has taken years to respond to this issue.

2) The media does not respond as strongly to undisputably more serious problems.

Update 15/05/2009:

On second thoughts, I agree with Shuggy.

Laughter as an error-correction mechanism

2009-05-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

Some bloke called Carlo Strenger has written a superior article on enlightenment values:

...the Enlightenment has created an idea of immense importance: no human belief is above criticism, and no authority is infallible; no worldview can claim ultimate validity. Hence unbridled fanaticism is the ultimate human vice, responsible for more suffering than any other.
...
it applies to the ideas of the Enlightenment, too. They should not be above criticism, either. History shows that Enlightenment values can indeed be perverted into fanatical belief systems. Just think of the Dr Strangeloves of past US administrations who were willing to wipe humanity off the face of the earth in the name of freedom, and the – less dramatic but no less dismaying – tendency of the Cheneys and Rumsfelds of the GW Bush administration to trample human rights in the name of democracy.

As one of the commenters points out, the profound principle that both 20th century secular ideologues and religious authorities throughout history have ignored, is that of always bearing in mind the possibility you might be dead wrong.

The healthy human response to harmless error or misunderstanding is to have a laugh. Thus error is highlighted for all to see and forgiven by all parties.

A further mistake on the part of humorless fanatics everywhere is to assume that there can ever be one, insoluble, and eternal truth. It may be that such a thing exists, but it is likely to be beyond our capacity to discern its true form from the vague shadows on the walls of our epochal cave.

And so human beings are prone to error. There's no problem with this, as failure teaches us more than success.

This idea was only properly articulated by Karl Popper in the 20th century: it is the idea you can never conclusively prove that an idea is correct, but rather disprove false ideas.

And so human knowledge grows and the enterprise of civilization advances, one laughter-inducing blooper at a time.

John Sutherland: fool?

2009-05-10T04:39:00.001-07:00

Just read this weird nonsense about Sir Jim Rose's report on primary school education by columnist John Sutherland.

I'll just highlight a few of the more ridiculous pronouncements:

In a library, you choose the book. Put another way, you control the book. I can't get over the feeling that, somehow, the computer controls the kid - he or she becomes nothing more than an information servo- mechanism. Or an empty file in which knowledge is not being discovered but (hateful word) downloaded. And computers, it seems to me, work best with what George Orwell called “Newspeak” - language stripped down to skeletal simplicity. Language, in fact, that is not language at all but code. Many skills have been enhanced by the computer but vocabulary, I suspect, has been shrunk, rigidified and deadened.

Deary me. Where to begin?

1) "You control the book" - no. As far as a child is concerned, the book is written, published, and printed by adults they have never met. The books they have access to are chosen by their school.

2) "the computer controls the kid" - no. With a computer connected to the Internet the child has the option of creating their own blog, editing Wikipedia, or interacting with their friends over social networking websites. If the child is particulary precocious they may even by able to write their own code, thereby truly taking control of the computer.

3) "computers, it seems to me, work best with what George Orwell called “Newspeak” - no. I don't see how anyone can make this claim without fundamentally misunderstanding what newspeak is. But wait...

4) "language stripped down to skeletal simplicity. Language, in fact, that is not language at all but code." - no. Although newspeak is "simplified English" the objective of the totalitarian governments of 1984 is to remove the capacity of the language to describe rebellion in terms anything other than negative. Newspeak is about control, not simplicity. It is about replacing ambiguity with certainty, and leaving no room for doubt.

Anyone who has read Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language will know that Orwell decried the lazy use of metaphor, as it substituted rational thought with mindless sloganeering.

Precisely the kind of mindless sloganeering that Sutherland uses when he talks of language "that is not language at all but code." It is not clear if Sutherland is referring to actual computer code or to leet speak or to the asanine babbling of most high-profile blogs. And that is part of the point.

Sutherland is unconsciously shutting down debate by making unfounded cliched statements that he has heard others utter about computers.

Sutherland's basic point is that he agrees with the general conclusions of Jim Rose's report: that "play" is a necessary and valuable part of a child's education. This can be filed in the "no shit, Sherlock" cabinet.

On a more cheerful note this discussion allows me to reference the Monkey Dust sketch that summarises the problems of education in the UK far more succinctly than Prof. Sutherland manages.

The Night Sessions: a few thoughts

2009-05-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

I read this book over the weekend. A few thoughts:

1) Very good treatment of religion. Harsh criticism of faith-based brutality mediated by a genuine understanding of the nature of faith. There is a part near the end that captures the essence of what losing a strong religious faith is like perfectly:

He knew exactly what he now believed, because it was exactly what he had rejected until now. He'd stepped out of shattered armour not naked and shivering, but fully clothed. It was as if his new world-view had all along been inside the armour and being kept in, rather than outside and being kept out.

2) Very plausible treatment of sentient robots. Probably the best treatment I've seen in a while. The key point that MacLeod makes is that yer typical sentient robot is likely to have a superior theory of mind to yer typical sentient animal. Therefore robots are likely to be kinder, gentler, and more empathetic than humans.

The book is strongly recommended, being well-written, and the characters spend a lot of time talking in pubs. There is little and life that could not be improved by spending more time talking in pubs. Certainly Stephen Baxter's work would gain a lot.

[pic borrowed from here]

A mixed bag of economics

2009-04-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

I took this test Are You an Austrian? The actual number of ticks for each economic tradition I got are as follows:

Keynesian/Neoclassical: 10
Chicago: 8
Austrian: 5
Socialism: 1
Keynesian: 1

My score was 47/100. So I am nearly half Austrian. Who knew?

Ranting about nothing very much

2009-04-22T05:31:00.000-07:00

This Are You an Austrian? [1] quiz has some fail in it. Take question 4:

What is the economic impact of saving?

The first two of four multiple choice answers to this question are:

In normal times, saving is not economically harmful but in a recessionary environment it can cause the economy to spiral downward.

Saving reduces consumer spending and may not be translated into investment spending because of investor pessimism. This will reduce total demand in the economy and lead to unemployment.

One way of correcting this is to expand the money supply to keep interest rates low. This will support private investment and stimulate total spending in the economy.

Fiscal and monetary managers need to implement policies that discourage hoarding and encourage current expenditure. As for saving over the life cycle of individuals, we need a social safety net that will provide for people in their older years.

and

The vast accumulation of wealth within select classes and families creates an economic oligarchy that shuts out those who cannot gain a foothold within the economic system.

Inheritance taxes, and taxes on dividends, are essential to a society that values equality. After all, the yield from vast bank accounts really amounts to unearned income. No society can tolerate some people living off interest while others live paycheck-to-paycheck off the meager sums offered by minimum wages.

The first answer is basically right, but the second seems like a non sequitur straw man version of a raging Marxist. What does inheritance tax have to do with the question of whether saving is good or not?

[1]: Economist, that is.

What people are actually interested in

2009-04-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

In lieu of actual content I've decided to post this image of the most read articles on The Daily Telegraph webwotzit, seen whilst reading about some sort of Westminster argy bargy by Boris:

Dunno why, but it tickled me.

Links here, here, here, here, and here because I don't want posterity to bother me about this.

LMFAO!

2009-04-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

From these guys.

Ideology and the state vs. markets paradigm

2009-04-07T13:50:00.001-07:00

Charlotte Gore, libertarian liberal democrat, has been responding at length to a comment I made on this post on her blog.

Chris Dillow has commented on the G20 protests, and of course manages to be far more coherent than I've been, what with my constantly changing opinion on the matter:

Most of the Left is more interested in smug self-righteousness than in economics.

The debate about what to do now is conventionally framed in terms of the state versus (actually existing) markets - that is, as one set of bosses versus another. The possibility that people can organize themselves - through either genuinely free markets and/or through democratic co-operation - doesn’t arise. But it’s this spontaneous free organization that is the Marxist ideal.

This is what I find most interesting about Dillow: he highlights the absurdity of exhorting people to support one set of rulers (state bosses) against another set of rulers (corporate bosses). All left/right distinctions kind of fall away when you frame the political debate in these terms.

T'be honest when it comes to political ideology I don't give a flying fig: they're interesting things to study in their own right, just as science, technology, business, political economy, and the history of all of these things are interesting.

But do I care to ascribe to any particular ideology? No. Not really. I am somewhat peeved that despite the fact that humanity possesses the technological and economic capacity to make the world a decent place to live for everyone we still haven't done so.

I am mildly annoyed that not every one of my fellow human beings is living the Good Life they deserve to.

But as to means to achieve these ends? I don't know. I strongly suspect we haven't even started to properly explore the phase space of all possible ways of running our civilization, and there may well be ways that are qualitatively better than the current statist/capitalist model of global political economy, but I am strongly sceptical that any particular Vanguard know What Needs to Be Done and have the ability to do it.

As long as our Leaders avoid doing anything really stupid then things will probably turn out OK.

Progress will happen, as progress always does, with many incremental steps and the occasional jarring revolution.

Civilization will continue to evolve.

Put people first

2009-04-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

Yeah. So I've changed my mind about the G20 protesters. It is a shame that one was killed, but really they were just protesting for the sake of smashing things up and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

Edit 07/04/2009:

Nope. I've changed my mind again. I don't know exactly where I stand vis a vis the Put People First agenda, and the conduct of the police was depraved and disgusting.

Harnessing the body politic

2009-04-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

Reading Hopi Sen's excellent analysis of Peter Oborne's less than excellent analysis on Charlie Brooker's excellent program Newswipe I was struck by an important point, from Oborne:

"You go back a generation or two, the people who came into the commons, whether from the left of the right, the primary objective was to serve the country or serve their voters, not to make money for themselves.

What is new is that the majority of people now coming into Parliament have sought politics as a career since coming out of university… so what we see is the use of politics as a way of making huge sums of money".

The first assertion is bogus: what people, and politicians especially, really want is power. But there's nothing wrong with this, it's just how we're evolutionary wired.

The trick is to create a system of government that harnesses the inherent desire for power and competitive instincts of homo sapiens sapiens to constructive ends.

Democracy works because when it works properly it enables politicians to achieve power by giving the public what they think the public wants.

That this is an absurd impossibility is without doubt: but at least they're trying and at least they're accountable and at least they're so keen to stab each other in the back that they can very effectively police themselves.

G20: what was that about?

2009-04-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

Since I read The End of Politics by the august Chris Dillow I have become even more sceptical of the capacity of politicians to identify and accomplish worthwhile goals.

So news that the 20 most powerful politicians on this fair globe of ours have got together and have decided that something must be done is not especially comforting, especially as much of what they suggest seems tangential to the main problem of anthropogenic climate change.

This is unsurprising given the other great lesson of The End of Politics is that there is no such thing as a clearly defined national interest or even (within fairly wide parameters) such a thing as a single global interest. Any government policy will result in winners and losers. There will always be tradeoffs between different interests. TANSTAAFL.

And yet rather than focus on the big problem of a powerful, complex, open, and unpredictable system that we also all happen to live inside these 20 individuals chose to focus on a powerful, complex, open, and unpredictable system that we all happen to rely on for ongoing wealth and economic development (I betcha can't tell which one is which!).

Mmm. Tradeoffs at work.

I have not opinion on the credit crunch. I imagine things will be back up and running soon enough. As to the climate it is best to try to tread as lightly as possible and stop pushing the button. We've got a good thing going on here: it would be a damn shame if we continue pissing it up the wall.

And it is not managerialist to desire that governments do something about climate change. Given the potentially huge negative consequences of continuing to vent gas this can be thought of as a case of stopping a crime: one of the few things that it is generally agreed states are ~~pretty good~~ not bad at.

But I repeat: there are always going to be winners and losers.

Which is why it is important that everyone is consulted, everyone's point of view is heard, and the losers are given respect and sympathy for their plight.

That is why the death of one of the protestors at the summit was particularly sad.

The Put People First campaign achieved a couple of it's goals: tougher action on tax havens, and closer regulation of all financial instruments. But there didn't seem to be any particular emphasis on the environment or climate change, undoubtedy the areas where most medium and long-term good can be accomplished.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who can read and has access to a history book. Financial panics and recessions happen every few years.

But if there is one good thing politicians can do it is to try to find some way of averting the negative consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

A global $100/barrel all-border tariff on crude oil would be a good start: such a tax would avoid the colossally complicated, inevitably inefficient, bureaucratic corruptofest that any kind of "embedded CO2" tax system would entail whilst encouraging investment in innovative alternatives to our current oil-based infrastructure.

Combine it with a cap 'n' trade system for CO2 emissions and we're well on our way to dodging the climate change bullet.

Sharpening the memetic razors

2009-03-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing slightly more annoying than blog posts the existences of which are due entirely to some minor irritation on the part of their creator it is post subtitles on CiF [1] that are laid out in the manner:

"We need a [insert your choice of damnfool idea here]"

The first thing that annoys me about this habit is the presumption of any journalist or blogger deciding that "we" need something. The audacity.

The second thing that annoys me about this habit is the wholly unintentional Royal Pronounity of the form. Like the author thinks they're the Queen. Damn their eyes etc.

Despite this Robert Sharp is excused, not so much because he didn't annoy me, but because he actually talks sense [2]:

Despite the robust nature of much of the debate online, I do perceive a sort of online Omerta, a Way of the Blogs. This states that if you have been offended or disrespected online, you can always fight your corner by setting up a counter-blog somewhere else. The idea is that you do not attempt to suppress the offensive material, legally or otherwise, but instead use the same medium to counter and debunk it.

More diverse memes and more aggressive selection pressure ensures that only optimal ideas are amplified and replicated.

And such is the power of liberal pluralism. If you can't stone them to death then join them.

[1] I know I promised to stop reading CiF after NNT advised that newspapers were full of tosh, but as CiF is theoretically a blog aggregate and as such a Public Forum I am entirely justified in finally dropping my ill-thought-out New Years Resolution.

[2] And in any case he is actually identifying a blogging phenomena rather than actually advocating one. I blame the copy editors for the silly (and blood-pressure-increasing) subtitle.

How much should MPs be paid?

2009-03-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

After much consideration I've come to the conclusion that the answer to this question is either:

A lot (or more than they're paid at the moment)
Nothing at all

The rationale behind the first is that MPs need to be effectively unbribable by outside interests, either via the traditional envelope of used fivers or sinecures and stipends as "non-executive directors" after they leave office.

The rationale behind the second is that MPs must do what they do out of a sense of duty to their country, rather than the mere taste of silver.

There is an inherent conflict between these two extremes. Both purport to ensure that only people of integrity are elected to (or allowed to remain in) high office: but this objective is not served by the current mess of low salaries (and yes, for the job they do they are low) supplemented by perks and expenses.

My preference is for a situation where MPs are paid nothing, but must create some kind of external income to enable them to carry out their political duties.

This would ensure that MPs are canny, experienced, and entrepreneurial enough not be total dishrags in office, and (assuming that everything is declared in as open and honest way as possible) it would also allow us (the electorate) to see who works for who in as straightforward a fashion as possible.

Full price for porn? That dog won't hunt

2009-03-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

What surprises me most about this recent snafu regarding Jacqui Smith's Other Half's wanking habits was that the silly old duffer actually paid for pornography.

What the heck is the point of spending thirty quid a week on a broadband connection if in addition you're going to spend money on pay-per-view?

In any case I have no particular moral objection to MPs expenses going on skin-vids. Contrasted with eminently stupid policies like continuing prohibition and national ID card registers it is small tuberous angiosperms (appropriately served, of course).

I also agree with Iain Dale: politicians in this country aren't generally corrupt and to assume so is a bit silly.

The End of Politics: a review

2009-03-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across Chris Dillow's blog (entitled Stumbling and Mumbling) after reading repeated references to managerialism in The Yorkshire Ranter and DSquared Digest.

A brief read of Dillow's blog suggests he is clearly too clever by half and, which is more, he knows that intelligence is irrelevant if you don't pay attention to empirical observations, or further are incapable of making accurate empirical observations.

Which leads into The End of Politics - Dillow's book.

Dillow's thesis is that, contrary to the standard caricature of being "all spin and no substance", New Labour does have a distinctive ideology.

This ideology holds that it should be possible to combine equality and economic efficiency, and that there is no trade-off between these two goals. Any problems that emerge can be dealt with through effective management.

Dillow calls this ideology managerialism. Managerialists believe that the job of government is to behave like managers of a company. Managerialists do not perceive the inherent trade-offs and conflicts of interest that are endemic to politics, and are indeed the reason for the existence of politics. Managerialists believe conflicts of interest can be resolved with good leadership and appeals to a well-defined national interest.

Managerialism is distinct from the scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor, which was concerned with organising resources effectively. Rather managerialism is the belief that there exists an abstract concept of "good management" that can be applied to every situation, regardless of the underlying organisational substrate.

Managerialists are obsessed with the idea that the world is new and constantly changing, thus simultaneously justifying managerialist action and ensuring that it is impossible to objectively test the efficacy of a managerialist policy because by the time it is implemented things will have changed.

Dillow also draws a link between Old and New Labour, describing how they are defined by their desire to achieve equality and economics efficiency simultaneously.

Dillow argues that there are trade-offs in politics that can't be managed away.

Further he argues that notions of "economic efficiency" or "equality" or even "rationality" are ambiguous and incoherent in and of themselves. He cites Newcomb's Problem to identify areas where traditional conceptions of rationality are limited.

Dillow shows that the arguments that globalisation have changed everything are false, and that concern over globalised capital and labour is as old as Adam Smith.

Instead, globalisation is used to justify New Labour's managerialist schemes.

Globalisation isn't necessarily irreversible, as the existence or non-existence of tariffs or immigration controls are at the whim of politicians.

Dillow shows that the evidence as to whether the national minimum wage destroys jobs is inconclusive, but taken as a whole, the research generally seems to indicate that the national minimum wage does destroy jobs but this is difficult to detect in aggregate economic data.

The attempts by the Beveridge-report inspired postwar settlement to achieve full employment lead to worker militancy and increased inflation, as workers campaigned successfully for higher and higher price rises in response to increased inflationary pressures that were in fact being caused by inflationary pay rises.

Dillow's arguments are a recurrent theme in what I've been reading. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker and now The End of Politics all have in common an empirically-supported belief that the powers of human rationality are more limited than we tend to assume. That centrally-planned projects often fail and that extensive government oversight of the economy is generally a bad thing.

So if the capacity of political leaders to manage things is inherently limited in all sorts of ways what is to be done?

The title The End of Politics is appropriate: Dillow pours flammable liquid over all the most cherished ideals of all politicians and sets everything alight.

Given the robust and thoroughly empirical nature of this book I am entirely persuaded by Dillow's arguments that most political projects are stillborn. There is never enough information for politicians to make good decisions, even if they were capable of doing so, or even had a clear idea about what qualifies as a "good" decision.

As an alternative to top-down managerialist politics Dillow argues in favour of the open society: that decision making should be as democratic as possible, simply because no centralised authority can possess all the necessary information to make good decisions.

Dillow believes hospitals should be run by doctors and nurses, and schools run by teachers, because no centralised manager in Whitehall can possibly predict "the facts on the ground."

He also suggests the intriguing idea of a citizens basic income as a way of partially solving the problem of welfare vs. working tax credits. It's an interesting idea, and one that appeals to the dilettante in me.

The basic lesson of The End of Politics is that in the complex world in which we live political and business leaders need to be more humble in the face of the inherent limitations of centrally directed institutions.

The best way to get anything done is to create the circumstances by which effective solutions can be evolved from the interactions and daily business of all the millions of people and machines in the world.

Nowadays, as professions become more and more specialised, it is important to hand control back to the professionals. Just as David Allen's Getting Things Done system was defined by Wired magazine as "Taylorism for the modern knowledge worker."

Just as the study of productivity has shifted emphasis from centrally-directed institutions to professional individuals Dillow argues that the response to increasing complexity in the world is to decentralise politics and business.

Both The End of Politics and The Origin of Wealth convey the message that economists and policy makers need to be more humble about the extent to which the economy can be controlled and that the best laid plans gang aft aglay.

Dillow advocates an open society and more genuinely democratic debate in which heterodox views and those who stand to lose out from policies are given a fair hearing. Political debate is likely to be fairer if things are done in the open.

My response to this book was initially fatalistic: if the world is so complex that we can never hope to control it, why bother attempting anything?

Dillow's answer is that government has a role in creating the circumstances in which innovation can take place. But it is not the role of government to attempt to change people or manipulate the economy, because it is incapable of doing so effectively.

In a broader context it is clear that our conception of human nature is changing and altering. We are coming to realise that we are not wholly rational, and even that rationalism itself is a canard.

Dillow has an excellent blog: Stumbling and Mumbling.

Against a Dark Background: not a review

2009-03-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

I've finished reading Iain M. Banks' Against a Dark Background. Here are a few thoughts, bullet pointed, as this isn't a review:

This is a wonderfully indulgent piece of science fiction. The scope of imagination is huge and the cinematic expanse of Banks' imagination lends a sense of wonder to the story.
This is a profoundly humanist novel. The notion that people are truly alone and this life is all is explored through a variety of mechanisms and tropes. The Solipsists insistence that they are alone in their own universe, the finality of death and the transient nature of being are persistent themes. Also the nature of the System in which it the story is set.
This is a dark novel. Lots of death and failure and despair and general unpleasantness.
That being said Banks doesn't Pull the Nasty in the same way as he has done in The Algebraist and Consider Phlebas.

Well worth a read.

Fiskal policy

2009-03-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

It's not often you get the chance to say you're smarter than the shadow Cabinet Office Minister, from the BBC, we find Gordon Brown has cancelled his email account.

Francis Maude objects:

Mr Maude said: "Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers' money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can't be bothered to give out a simple email address.

"The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.

"In the depths of a recession, it is a waste of taxpayers' cash to be hiring a £160,000 a year head of digital engagement and setting up an office in the virtual world of Second Life."

Now even I know that recessions are caused by falls in aggregate demand. Far and away the worst thing the government can do in a recession is to cut spending on anything.

And as for email I doubt very much it was of any use. I'm with Donald Knuth on this one.

The bill for freedom is eternal vigilance

2009-03-22T04:41:00.000-07:00

I've signed the petition to support this here freedom bill.

I'm always a bit lairy of putting my name on political petitions, partly because that's how they getcha and partly because I don't want to end up being responsible for a pyramid of skulls.

But this bill seems entirely sensible. In fact I'm rather surprised the whole lot isn't already in law:

# Scrap ID cards for everyone, including foreign nationals.
# Ensure that there are no restrictions in the right to trial by jury for serious offences including fraud.
# Restore the right to protest in Parliament Square, at the heart of our democracy.
# Abolish the flawed control orders regime.
# Renegotiate the unfair extradition treaty with the United States.
# Restore the right to public assembly for more than two people.
# Scrap the ContactPoint database of all children in Britain.
# Strengthen freedom of information by giving greater powers to the Information Commissioner and reducing exemptions.
# Stop criminalising trespass.
# Restore the public interest defence for whistleblowers.
# Prevent allegations of ‘bad character’ from being used in court.
# Restore the right to silence when accused in court.
# Prevent bailiffs from using force.
# Restrict the use of surveillance powers to the investigation of serious crimes and stop councils snooping.
# Restore the principle of double jeopardy in UK law.
# Remove innocent people from the DNA database.
# Reduce the maximum period of pre-charge detention to 14 days.
# Scrap the ministerial veto which allowed the Government to block the release of Cabinet minutes relating to the Iraq war.
# Require explicit parental consent for biometric information to be taken from children.
# Regulate CCTV following a Royal Commission on cameras.

Brought to this place by the inestimable People's Republic of Mortimer.

Build Your Own... political ideology

2009-03-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

Your friendly guide to building your own political ideology.

First step: if you want to build your own political ideology you need to look hard at the Way Things Are and try and work out why they are the Way They Are.

Second step: carefully record your findings and then make careful ethical judgements about the Reasons for the Way Things Are that you have discovered. If you find there are some Reasons that are ethically questionable then make a note of these.

Third step: write a tract or essay describing the bad Reasons for the Way Things Are and your personal ideas for how we might go about Improving Matters.

Fourth, final, and most important step: toss the whole lot in the bin and walk away and do something useful and worthwhile. The world has enough ideologies and enough ideologues to be getting on with. :)

Why I am not a minarchist libertarian

2009-03-21T17:07:00.001-07:00

I've been reading Charlotte Gore's wonderful weblog, having being directed there by the sublime People's Republic of Mortimer.

Gore describes herself as a "libertarian liberal democrat." This is fair enough, but she is also a minarchist (and especially here):

I used to think - that the alternative to what we had was Afghanistan or some African style government.

I've changed my tune on that. The most important part of any Government is the rule of law - the ability to enforce contracts, maintain a monopoly on force and be subject to the rule of law themselves.

...

I'm not an anarchist. I want a state - I just want one that acts as nothing more than a framework to make free and honest trade possible and otherwise keeps out of people's lives. Upholding the rule of law is more important than anything - consider Iraq with democracy but without rule of law, for example.

I want this because free trade is the key to creating wealth, which improves the quality of our lives, advances technology and makes things cleaner and more efficient.

Free trade, you see, makes everyone richer because when two people trade in their mutual self interest both are made wealthier as a result.

It is this the implicit assertion that the actions of the state (in addition the maintaining the rule of law) cannot add to the wealth¹ of everyone that I intend to refute.

Consider the following two scenarios:

1. A person living in a minarchist, night-watchman state has a business idea. They know that if their business works they could change the world for the better; create hundreds of rewarding jobs; initiate a whole new industry; and make them famous and wealthy and respected for their inventiveness and brilliance.

But they're smart enough to realise that there is a risk their business could fail. They have a good job at the moment. They have a family to support. One of their children has a disease that, although manageable at the moment, could degenerate at any time into a much more serious condition that will require intensive, and expensive, medical care.

The prospective entrepreneur knows if they succeed they will get 95% of all the profits from their venture to keep for themselves, paying a small 5% tax on the gains to the night-watchman state.

2. A person living in a social democracy has a business idea. They know that if their business works they could change the world for the better; create hundreds of rewarding jobs; initiate a whole new industry; and make them famous and wealthy and respected for their inventiveness and brilliance.

But they're smart enough to realise that there is a risk their business could fail. They have a good job at the moment. They have a family to support. One of their children has a disease that, although manageable at the moment, could degenerate at any time into a much more serious condition that will require intensive, and expensive, medical care.

Taxation in this social democracy is high, to provide for the generous welfare payouts, state-funded R&D, high standards of education, and superbly generous national health service. The prospective entrepreneur knows he will have to pay at least 60% of all the profits he makes from his business to the state.

Now which of these two wannabe entrepreneurs d'you think is most likely to follow their dreams and set up their potentially wealth-creating business?

If you made your answer purely on the basis of their cost-benefit calculation then you probably agree with me that it would be the denizen of the social democratic state, but probably not for the same reason as I.

Do you think Steve Jobs is as rich as he is because he wanted to be a billionaire or because he loved making computers? Do you think Thomas Edison founded General Electric because he wanted some guy to take it over after he was dead and build the world's second largest company?

No! These geeks and misfits and entrepreneurs and Johnny Appleseeds did it for the love and adventure and sensawunda and because they couldn't help themselves.

Do you think Felix Dennis created Maxim magazine because he wanted a better skinmag for the sarky masses and also to make shedloads of moolah? Well yes, he probably did. But 60% of $240 million is $144 million more than 100% of nothing and a notebook full of good poetry.

A minarchist libertarian disputant would claim that I clearly know nothing of business: the individual entrepreneur may be doing it because they love it, but they need to get capital from somewhere. This will need to come from investors who want large returns to make up for the risky nature of business.

My answer to this is to be point out that in our hypothetical minarchist state where there is less propensity to start businesses there is less propensity to invest in the same. Why not stick it in a vault or buy land? Land isn't risky. Banks vaults are (no deposit insurance), but they're a damn sight less risky than investing in some nobody's idea for a business.

Further these libertarians might point out the bureaucratic monstrosity that social democracies inevitably end up as. The problem is that bureaucracy is not and has never been endemic to the public sector. Large corporations are as liable to it as anyone else.

At this point my hypothetical libertarian opponent might say that the only reason large companies are bureaucratic is because of state regulation. They might also throw in the point that bureaucratic companies will fail in the marketplace, as the costs of maintaining the bureaucracy lead to a lack of profitability.

To the first I say so be it. If bureaucracy is the price you pay for clean water and functioning aircraft then I'm fine with that. To the second I point out that if a company has to deal with particular regulations then so will all it's competitors.

At this point my assumptive adversary will presumably posit that the state is not accountable. Well, this is certainly true. But governments are (that's why they're called social democracies) and governments are nominally in control of the state. If bureaucracy really starts to irritate the people then they will elect a government that aims to put an end to it.

I'm all in favour of markets. They create wealth and foster innovation. And I'm all in favour of making markets as free as possible. But the notion that the state is always inimical to the creation and maintenance of free markets and innovative industry is nonsense. In many cases the state is necessary to foster industry in ways far beyond simply providing for the rule of law.

Look at South Korea in the last century. Look at industrial development in Britain during the Elizabethan period.

In both cases the state stepped in with tariffs and subsidy to protect industry at home².

Look at what came of ARPANET and the World Wide Web. Look at what came of Global Positioning System and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

The idea that the state is somehow "getting in the way" of economic growth is absurd.

The state needs to support economic growth through the provision of extensive civil amenities just as a poorly-educated, under-insured, and uncertain entrepreneur is likely to fail whereas a well-educated, healthy, well-informed entrepreneur is likely to succeed.

1: I get the free market, I do. My argument is not that the free market is a bad idea, just that it is wrong to think that there is more to the creation of human happiness than the creation of wealth and more to the creation of wealth than free markets.

2: I also get globalisation and maximum advantage. I won't go into that now as it would be a long and involved conversation that is orthogonal to my main point: a minarchist state is not a state that enhances economic growth OR human happiness.

Trivium and the MBA

2009-03-21T10:36:00.001-07:00

It occurs to me that in a couple of centuries historians will look at the MBA in the same way contemporary historians look at the trivium - as something someone has to possess to be considered educated.

Insert obligatory Talebesque derision of MBAs here

Trolling my former self

2009-03-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

Nearly three years ago I wrote a post entitled Things We Need to Do describing various bits of technological wotzitry I felt humanity needed to create:

Mature nanotechnology: as demonstrated by the RepRap, it is becoming clear that nanotechnology (coupled with another technology, see below) will sort out quite a few of our problems). Once material wealth can be “made” by a machine that itself only requires energy and raw mass (the most advanced post-nanotech replicators will presumably need only energy) then a significant proportion of the iniquities in life will be resolved and done away with.

Well first I really should point out that every machine ever made only needs "energy and mass" of one sort or another. And as for my earlier comment:

Fusion: in order to supply a crowded planet with sufficient energy whilst maintaining the integrity of the biosphere for future generations (and for ourselves, see below) it is necessary to create an elegant fusion reactor that produces significantly more energy than it consumes. This will remove any further material iniquity. We will have energy “too cheap to meter”, and the means of production will be owned by anyone and everyone. I suspect this will result in a sort of libertarianism.

Yowza. What was my younger self smoking? Bit of a cognitive leap from realisable fusion to communal ownership to libertarianism.

How much have I changed in the intervening years? Sadly not enough. I am prone to making vague statements and leaping from topic to topic without any clear rationale.

Further I still haven't made my mind up on all those ideological questions of capitalism vs. public ownership or free markets vs. command and control. The world is far more complicated than ideologues and ranters on both sides make out and neither side is as fully rational and empirical as they should aspire to be.

In praise of apathetic youth

2009-03-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

Commenting on the undoubtedly cringe-inducing¹ video interviewing Future Leaders of the Labour Party (produced by The Guardian) Alix from The People's Republic of Mortimer makes a rather interesting comment:

Actually, I always feel slightly sorry for youngish politicians when journalists ask them - as they invariably will - about political apathy amongst the young, because their responses are so hopelessly inadequate. And no wonder, because they (charmingly uncognisant of this as they may be) are the weirdos who did get interested. You might as well ask a zebra why it thinks more of the horse family don’t have stripes.

As I've commented before I think there are three rather distinct uses of the word "politics" in common usage. Two of these, one concerning political traditions, and the other concerning how things actually work I am fascinated by.

But the tedious, tribalistic, mudslinging nonsense that might well be fun if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing-but-I-don't that is reported on the news on a daily basis is not something I or any other non-nerd would ever be remotely interested in.

The problem is that whenever da yoof are exhorted to "engage in politics" it is this tedious bottom layer we are expected to "engage" with. No discussion of Adam Smith or Plato or Marx. No discussion of the global balance of power or how computer chips are made.

And not even anything useful, like giving everyone under 25 a free bus pass.

Just tedious distracting talking shops like the Youth Parliament².

Y'see I'd say the reason otherwise quite engaged and well-informed young people such as myself (no really) aren't interested in this kind of politics is because it is boring. And also has very little relevance to how many of us live our lives.

Take, for example, the "90 day without charge" Terrorism Act later rehashed as the "42 days without charge" Counter-Terrorism Act. From an ideological standpoint it was an obvious attack on some fairly solid principles of freedom: namely you should not be imprisoned by the state without being told why you've been imprisoned ASAP and then given the opportunity to defend yourself.

But what did it actually accomplish? Sweet Fanny Adams is what. The chances of me dying in a terrorist attack are ridiculously minute in any case, but they haven't grown substantially smaller because the police can now hold suspects for a whole two weeks longer.

And even if that weren't the case what the hell is the point of being a liberal democracy if you let the bastards win by caving in to their terror tactics like this?

I keep an eye on what goes on in parliament. And if I see some way of making the world a better place by taking political action I will certainly do so. But I do not want to engage with this bunch of egotistical navel-gazing pishers³.

Political apathy amongst the young is probably a good thing as it will keep those with genuine talent out of career politics and place them in the real world where they might be able to do something useful.

1: Of course I haven't watched it and I have no intention of doing so. Partly for the reasons described above and partly because Alix does a wonderful job of summarising the Horror.

2: I suspect the Youth Parliament is a clever way of distracting and then proceeding to grind down anyone with even the remotest genuine interest in helping their fellow man. That or ensuring all the trouble-makers are kept in one place for easier observation /paranoia.

3: I can get enough of that online and in a more entertaining package.

What to do, what to do?

2009-03-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

My basic problem is that although I have every confidence that if I put my mind to it I can accomplish a great deal I'm not sure at this stage exactly what I want to do.

Although there are numerous avenues that may lead to remarkable achievements and Good Times I'm never sure if I want to dedicate the time and effort necessary to achieve and enjoy.

I worry that the time I spend not really doing anything is detracting from my enjoyment of life and from the time I could spend doing something useful. If I had some clear goal perhaps it would be different but I really don't.

I'm fairly happy with how things are at the moment but there is always going to be room for improvement.

A woman

2009-03-18T16:39:00.000-07:00

A perfectionist trapped in an indolent's body

2009-03-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

~In which a deep conflict of personality within our hero is discussed~

I am a perfectionist.

Given the choice I would love to do pursue this blogging lark properly. I would love to lovingly craft a lovely blog in WordPress or MoveableType or some such. I would love to lavish countless hours on CSS templates and plugins. I want to worry and obsess over tiny details of compatibility and stick little "certified CSS" or "XML validated" stickers all over my prospective palace of a personal portal.

Unfortunately I don't have the time. Amazingly I have other things to do.

Now this presents something of a quandary.

I am an indolent¹.

I believe that life is for living. I believe that civilization progresses by reducing the number of conscious operations required to accomplish a particular task. Laziness is a virtue that has catapulted a rather peculiar hairless ape into a position that is apparently unprecedented in the history of the known universe.

So on the one hand I have an obsessive desire to realise a given project, because craft is it's own reward.

And on the other hand I lack the inclination to dedicate my time and energy to something that doesn't appear to produce any clear reward beyond craft.

Therefore I am slowly coming to the conclusion that I need to shape up and show off. I need to become more actively self promotional and invest more time and energy in the content and quality of my blog postings.

Hopefully this will lead to a feedback loop in which feedback (hopefully constructive) leads to a greater desire on my part to invest time and energy in the enterprise of blogging.

~To be continued~

1: I'm aware this is an adjective but I am hereby coining it as a noun that refers to one who prefers efficient accomplishment over unproductive activity.

My reading list

2009-03-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Rationale: I wasn't paying very close attention to Our Glorious Ally's Recent Imperial Adventures whilst it was happening. Partly this was because this sort of thing is difficult to piece together when you're reading it on a daily basis in the newspapers and partly because I was busy being a truculent teenager.

Anyway this seems to be the standard text on the subject and will hopefully give me a good grounding in What the Hell Happened.

The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin

Rationale: I enjoyed the discussion of theoretical physics in The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, which was published in the early nineties, and I also enjoyed The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. I really want to find out what's happened since, and what the current state of play is as regards Big Science.

This book was recommended to me by one of my physics teachers a few years ago, and at the time was being serialised in The Times. I skimmed through it a while back in a bookshop and was impressed by the tone and content.

Introduction to Materials Science for Engineers by James F. Shackelford

Rationale: this is one of the set textbooks for the course I am (if everything works out) starting in September (there will be a few of these to come).

Manufacturing Engineering and Technology by Serope Kalpakjian and Steven Schmid

Rationale: Again another set text. I want to have a vague familiarity with the course materials well before the course actually starts. The reason for this is that I learn best when presented with a fairly long runway. I also like the opportunity to become comfortable with a particular textbook layout before using it in earnest.

The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism by Chris Dillow

Rationale: This book is much discussed by the likes of Alex Harrowell and Daniel Davis and Dillow's blog is quite superb. If his book is even half as interesting and engaging as his blog then this will be a worthwhile read.

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

Rationale: I enjoyed the previous book in this series and since I finished it the sequence has been praised and commented on by Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman. Definitely not one to miss out on.

Foundations of Engineering by Mark T. Holtzapple

Rationale: Another set text!

Mathematics for Engineers: A Modern Interactive Approach by Anthony Croft

Rationale: And again.

Management for Engineers, Scientists and Technologists by John V. Chelsom

Rationale: Same again - nothing to see here.

Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

Rationale: I've read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books,The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, and enjoyed them immensely. However I would like a more in-depth and technical look at all the derivatives, investments, quantitative finance, mortgage-backed securities and other paraphernalia of the ongoing economic troubles.

This book seems to get high reviews and from the brief excerpt on Amazon seem to capture this particular facet of the Zeitgeist rather well.

The Accidental Pornographer: A Story About Having a Go - And Succeeding... in Failing by Gavin Griffiths

Rationale: After reading Paul Carr's enjoyable account of trying and sort of not-quite failing,Bringing Nothing To The Party , I sought out similarly themed books. This looks to be one such in which the eponymous pornographer protagonist tries and fails.

And as an additional bonus he apparently meets none other than my favourite business antihero Felix Dennis!

Against a Dark Background by Iain M Banks

Rationale: Well, I'm reading this at the moment so I've rather jumped the gun as far as rationale goes. It is a spectacularly florid book with titanic set pieces and more Big Dumb Objects than you can shake a space elevator at. Truth be told it could easily gain from content-trimming if you prefer tighter reads, but I've always enjoyed Banks' Banksishness so it's all puppy for the fat as far as I'm concerned.

Self

2009-03-17T18:40:00.001-07:00

My contribution

2009-03-17T07:16:00.001-07:00

Opinions, in the wise words of Chris Dillow, are mere arseholes. Everyone has one but I don't want to hear them.

Now being as I have access to little special knowledge or empirical data not available to everyone else, and being as my thoughts are largely the opinions of other people this leaves me in something of a quandary.

What do I blog about? There are so many topics I need to learn more about before I am qualified to analyse the relevant data: what can I contribute?

The obvious answer is that I can simply ask questions.

Surprisingly few blogs concentrate on defining the terms of their own ignorance as opposed to ranting on about their opinions.

Therefore from now on I will concentrate on asking questions and attempting to come to conclusions.

Free flowing writing experiment #2

2009-03-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

This is an experiment.

This is the second of what may eventually become a whole series of essays on the subject of writing, and specifically the writing process as perceived by one who writes.

I say "one who writes" as I am not ready to call myself a full writer, any more than I am ready to call myself a full blogger. Most of what I write down here is in the form of questions and idle wonderings. It is not opinion or comment or theorising. Inasmuch as it is an attempt to make sense of the world it is preliminary to all these.

I suspect the key part of the writing process I have yet to fully acquire is the process of refinement. I intend this series to be both an exploration and a trial, to see how I might develop this skill.

What do I mean by refinement?

Picture the raw input of any process. It could be labour or energy or earth or wood or clay. Now picture the process by which these commodities are converted into something more valuable.

In writing the valuable output is a well written piece. In writing the raw input is largely other writing, thoughts, ideas, experiences, other people, yourself, your beliefs and ponderings and habits and the minutiae of your daily life.

Inbetween the raw input and the valuable output there are several processes of refinement. I generally lack the patience or obsessive compulsion required to persue a writing project beyond a single iteration. This is a problem I am working on remedying.

This industrial process whereby the raw and unrefined output of my mind is distilled onto a page or screen is itself subdivided between drafts and even between the moment the words are instantiated in the real world and I travel back to the end of the sentance to remove them.

Someone, I think it was Terry Pratchett, said writing went something like that. You fill your mind with stuff and wait until it all bubbles over and you start writing. He then qualified it by pointing out that this didn't necessarily imply any kind of verbal diarrhea¹ and that the process of refinement was equally important.

If this is correct then blogging might not be such a good idea: you venting valuable material and not bothering to refine it.

Or perhaps it is good practice.

In any case I need to stem and control the flood of half formed ideas, plucking the nuggets prose out of the flow of verbiage.

The intention here is to explore how my writing process works.

1:Impossible to spell first time correctly. Also a good name for a blog. Verbal Diarrhea. Doubly annoying as the spell checker doesn't immediately identify my mangled attempt at spelling it correctly. Wouldn't it be good to have a blog that was called something like Verbal Diarrhea but was purposefully spelt incorrectly.

Perhaps I should write a list of good qualities to have in a blog title, but that would be time consuming and frankly rather beside the point. I'm sure it's already been done and better elsewhere.

Free flowing writing experiment

2009-03-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

OK. I'll attempt to direct some thought into something coherent.

Perhaps writing is like a process of refinement. Like panning for gold. You read lots and lots of stuff and let it incubate and digest and assimilate and then you attempt to construct something legible and interesting out of the result.

Someone, I think it was Terry Pratchett, said writing went something like that. You fill your mind with stuff and wait until it all bubbles over and you start writing. He then qualified it by pointing out that this didn't necessarily imply any kind of verbal diarrhea 1 and that the process of refinement was equally important.

So perhaps having a blog is a mistake. Sure it builds up writing ability, but in fact it's blurting out valuable writing ore whilst at the same time not providing for the essential process of refinement.

I mean when it comes to writing an essay or a computer program or something where meaning is important and purpose both necessary and good you need to plan everything out beforehand.

I've always had difficulty with this mode of writing. I can write essays and whatnot but I always need some central scaffold on which to assemble the main core of meaning of the text. What I'm doing now is attempting to give some kind of suggestion as to the unmediated flow of thoughts and sentences that comes out of my mind as I think about something.

I need to stem and control the flood, plucking the nuggets of metaphor out of the flow of simile. Y'see that last bit made no sense as an analogy but I'd need to work at it. Also I'm writing as you speak in long clauses without any meaningful sentence structure. I could go back over this and build it into some kind of structured essay but what would be the point?

The intention here is to explore how my writing process works. This isn't even the first draft. I'm not trying to write anything here. I'm doing that thing the kid does from that film where he sees dead people.

This isn't intentionally post modern. There is meaning in the medium or whatever but it's meaningful in the way the noises animals make is meaningul. This is also lazy. What am I doing here? Constructing fine words in a pleasing manner? Hardly. This keyboard is really appalling. So buy a new one.

1:Impossible to spell first time correctly. Also a good name for a blog. Verbal Diarrhea. Doubly annoying as the spell checker doesn't immediately identify my mangled attempt at spelling it correctly. Wouldn't it be good to have a blog that was called something like Verbal Diarrhea but was purposefully spelt incorrectly.

Perhaps I should write a list of good qualities to have in a blog title, but that would be time consuming and frankly rather beside the point. I'm sure it's already been done and better elsewhere.

Three kinds of politics

2009-03-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

There are three layers of politics, from the top:

Theoretical political philosophy: the teachings of Plato, Locke, Mill, Hayek, Smith, Berlin, Marx, and the rest occupy this topmost and most ideological stratum of political discourse.
Administrative political reality: this layer contains politics as it is instantiated in the real world, and is often at odds with the ivory-tower teachings of the upper layer. It is studied by sociologists and political scientists.
The office politics of the powerful: this is the layer most often discussed by journalists who are too close to the game to realise that inasmuch as the personalities involved are of any relevance to what actually goes on (see above) it is almost impossible to predict what effect they will have. Nick Robinson is particularly guilty of believing that this is the only layer of politics that matters.

Potentially lengthy blogging interregnum

2009-03-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Some guy called Daniel Davis has written a much better blog than I. This is dispiriting but also reassuring. It means I won't be the guy who says good things but I have less responsibility if those good things result in a pyramid of skulls.

In the meantime I got into Warwick University to study systems engineering. This is a pretty awesome fact.

Nationalising religion

2009-03-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

There's a brilliant post over on Overcoming Bias on the possibility that lower levels of religiosity in Europe relative to the USA is are due to the state-sanctioned nature of organised religion in much of Europe.

Hume, an agnostic if not an atheist, takes the position that religion is not a public good but its opposite — a public bad — and that government intervention will avert the pervasive negative externality of religious controversy, which clergy create and that threatens public safety.
...
The strongest argument for socialized medicine is the strongest argument for socialized religion, that government provision seems to reduce enthusiasm for and consumption of such things. Western Europe seems to have hit on the clever solution of loving both religion and medicine to death. Should we consider loving other cranks to death?
Imagine bureaus of palm reading, UFOS, conspiracy theories, etc. In a few decades they might be run by out-of-date boring bureaucrats following stacks of official protocols. If the best devotees were distracted seeking promotions in the ossified agency, they might inspire less public enthusiasm.

From an evolutionary standpoint an increase in diversity and competition caused by freedom of religion inevitably leads to selection of ever more compelling and virulent memesets (7th Day Adventists, Scientology etc). But by creating a benevolent state monopoly of the C of E the state has repressed diversity and hence the fitness of religion.

Certainly government endorsement immediately makes everything much more boring and unattractive (apparently use of cannabis actually decreased when it was relegated to a class C drug).

Thoughts on Feersum Endjinn and writing

2009-03-04T11:52:00.000-08:00

This book has an immense span of imagination. Banks has an ability to create ideas that are just over the boundary of the absurd and yet implements them so that they seem almost homely and reasonable.

There is, in my limited experience of writing, a sort of mental crash-barrier between the familiar and comfortable and the strange and disturbing.

Great SF writers possess a kind of intellectual bravery in vaulting the barrier and hauling the strange into the familiar.

When writing I will pursue an idea as far as I can but there is always a part of me too willing to reject a plot or character or situation as too ridiculous for further exploration.

Feersum Endjinn starts superbly: with typical Banksian whimsy gradually revealing an immense canvas that (had I ever thought it) I would have immediately rejected.

There is a tendency towards dues ex machina in the plot: and the Bad Guys aren't as unpleasant as most Banks villains. However the story is compelling enough and the Good Guys interesting enough to follow through.

An excellent read.

These things I could believe

2009-03-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

I don't subscribe fully to any coherent political ideology (if indeed any political ideology can be truly coherent), but following is a brief list of things I'm beginning to suspect are true:

The free market is a powerful evolutionary system for generating Good Ideas.

Important policy decisions should be made on the basis of empirical study and rational thought

The rule of law applied equally to all is a Good Thing

Freedom of speech for everyone is a Good Thing

Political representation is a Good Thing

Individual negative freedom is a Good Thing

Agonistic pluralism is a Good Thing

Democratic nation states are a reasonably effective way of getting certain necessary jobs done

What consenting adults do with their time is not the business of anyone else

Privacy is important

All healthy human beings are fairly smart but not infallible or perfectly rational

Wars are complicated and always morally ambiguous

A large majority of healthy human beings possess a basic sense of fairness and morality

There can probably be no such thing as a genuine meritocracy

Equality is a Good Thing

Education is a Good Thing

Equality in education is an especially Good Thing

I might go through each of these and explain exactly why I think each of them.

In praise of failure

2009-03-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

I disagree with the following part of In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell:

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail.

That means that a large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone.

The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger.

But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure to no one.

Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

What Bertie is missing is the value of the deductive tinkering in any new business endeavour.

What reading The Origin of Wealth has taught me is that the value of free markets lies in their ability to generate many new and interesting ideas, then apply a selection process to them, and then amplify the successful ideas.

Innovation does not just emerge from one Big Man with a Plan but rather from the collective efforts of thousands of competing enterprises, businesses, startups, and university faculties, all deductively tinkering their way around idea space.

Laying out surface car tracks, as in Russell's example, may not end up being economically useful, but if the business were (for example) to develop a slightly more efficient way of laying down track then there would be a positive outcome for humanity, if not for the erstwhile entrepreneur ¹.

The core lesson of The Origin of Wealth is that knowledge is value, and finding things out by trying and failing is a worthwhile activity, if not in the narrow rationally self-interested sense.

Update 02/03/2009:

Chris Dillow has a post up that has relevance to this point:

Labour is not just a cost, to minimized. It is - or can be - a form of satisfaction in itself - a way of asserting who we are.
It is on this point, of course, that Marxism starkly confronts neoclassical economics. Marx’s gripe with capitalism was that it transformed work from a means of expressing one’s nature into a force for oppressing and demeaning people. So great has been capitalism’s triumph that many of us don’t even appreciate the possibility that Marx could have been right. It’s just taken for granted that work must be alienated drudgery.

So not only is Russell missing the value of failure in business he also misses the fact that certain kinds of labour are enjoyable and that it is extremely difficult to determine beforehand what will make us happier and what will make us richer (in all senses of the word).

Hence trying and failing is good. Trying is good. And some kinds of work are good.

1. Unless he had the forsight to patent his improved track-laying process, then he could licence the method for profit. Humanity as a whole would still benefit from increased speed of track-laying and the innovation would become widely available after the patent expires.

On The Origin of Wealth

2009-02-24T15:40:00.000-08:00

After a brief hiatus I have started reading this book again. Everything Taleb has written, sans the epistemic philosophy and general snark, can be seen as a subset of this book.

As I read Beinhocker is discussing how the observation that businesses evolve in the marketplace can be applied to practical strategy. He makes the point that for the most part conventional strategy and long-term planning is futile in the face of the complex non-linearities of the marketplace.

Beinhocker grounds his descriptions of economic activity in modern physics itself, rather than attempting to ape physics as many early economists (like Jevons and Walras) did.

Beinhocker defines wealth as useful order. And order is information, and useful information is knowledge. So knowledge is wealth.

Beinhocker says that value is created by:

• Irreversible actions
• Local reductions of entropy and
• Fitness

Fitness is determined by an evolutionary process, the free market, which can be thought of as a knowledge-generating machine.

Beinhocker advocates ideas similar to Alex Harrowell of the Yorkshire Ranter (who I suspect is familiar with the book), stating that we need to build institutions that evolve more effectively.

This sentiment runs counter to many traditional conceptions of Big Man, top down, authoritarianism. Politicians are praised for ignoring evidence and not adapting to circumstances.

The scientific method and free markets work so well because they lead to the creation of a large number of ideas and then subject each idea to testing, selecting the most successful ones, replicating and recombining these successful ideas, then repeating the whole process continuously.

The outcome is a an increase in knowledge, and hence wealth.

Bildungsphilister

2009-02-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

In The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a bildungspilister as a philistine possessed of a fake, cosmetic culture.

Taleb borrows the term from Nietzsche, who used it thus:

A bildungsphilister is someone who reads newspapers and reviews and imagines themselves to be cultured and educated but lacks genuine, introspective erudition.

Bildungsphilisters are prone to dogmatic, cliched, and unsubtle responses to events and things.

Taleb extends it to refer to anyone who has a high degree of education in one particular non-empirical field, who is prone to using buzzwords and ignores conflicts between the ideas they promote and the nature of reality.

Timewasting

2009-02-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

Since I made a conscious decision to stop reading newspapers a la Taleb I've found that I spend more time reading blogs, most especially the Yorkshire Ranter, Stumbling and Mumbling, and DSquared.

In fact the amount of time I've freed up by reading fewer newspapers has been entirely consumed by additional blog reading.

My attention span seems to be subject to its own version of Jevon's Paradox. Increases in the efficiency and quality of my text consumption are immediately swallowed up by an overall increase in the amount of text consumed.

I would prefer to spend my time reading substantive literature, both novels and textbooks, rather than blogs. However because I spend so much of my time sitting in front of an Internet connected screen I inevitably end up getting distracted by them.

Explaining intelligence: complex adaptive systems

2009-02-18T09:05:00.000-08:00

I've been trying all day to write a coherent response to Michael Anissimov's recent posts Friendly AI - May I Check Your Ideological Baggage and The Three Singularity Schools, Kurzweil, and Superintelligence.

I finally succeeded in this comment on Ken MacLeod's recent discussion on evolution and AI.

Following is a slightly cleaner version:

My problem with Anissimov's implicit argument stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of technological progtess. Anissimov's belief that "once we create a superhuman intelligence all our scientific problems will be ~~sold~~ solved¹" is based on the assumption that intelligence is the only contributory factor to innovation. Anissimov says:

To me, the relevance of a given technology to humanity’s future is largely determined by whether it contributes to the creation of superintelligence or not, and if so, whether it contributes to the creation of friendly or unfriendly superintelligence. The rest is just decoration.

"The rest" being every technological development that will occur between now and birth of our putative god-in-box AI.

Now I'm willing to bet microchips to nanobots that there will be a few interesting innovations, inventions, and scientific breakthroughs over the next few years that aren't directly linked to AI research but still have a large impact on people's lives.

Developing a cure for AIDS, for example.

Anissimov makes these claims concerning the importance of AI research in support of the intelligence explosion school of the technological singularity the school which can briefly be expressed as:

Intelligence has always been the source of technology. If technology can significantly improve on human intelligence – create minds smarter than the smartest existing humans – then this closes the loop and creates a positive feedback cycle. What would humans with brain-computer interfaces do with their augmented intelligence? One good bet is that they’d design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces. Intelligence enhancement is a classic tipping point; the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.

The problem with this view of the singularity is that intelligence is not the main driver of innovation.

We know this because the single most dynamic, creative, and successful innovation generator on the surface of this planet famously does not possess intelligence.

Natural selection lacks intelligence and it has produced an extraordinary fecundity of design and invention, not to mention the only version of intelligence currently available to us.

Some transhumanists imagine that simply creating a sufficiently powerful intelligence will solve our problems. We probably could evolve an intelligent being, using the process described in Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction just by creating billions of lines of random code (a trillion script-kiddies at a trillion keyboards) and applying an evolutionary de-stupidifying process to it, then rinse, cycle, and repeat until we get something that smokes a pipe, does The Times crossword, and publishes the occasional enlightening monograph.

Or we could even do a brute-force molecular-level simulation of a human being, assuming that the various exponentials associated with computing hardware continue ticking over for a few more decades.

But in the meantime why not cut out the AI and go straight to innovation by evolution? Why don't we find some way of generating vast numbers of products and items and testing them under competitive conditions, then recombine and incrementally adjust and improve them until we have an optimal outcome?

And in fact we already do this - free markets create a huge pool of possible companies and products and the really bad ones are filtered out. Effective companies increase the extent of their control of a finite set of resources at the expense of less effective companies.

Companies don't breed, of course, rather new designs for companies are created by human beings. Most fail. But if one is superior to another it will survive and grow, taking wealth, influence and market share from its competitors.

It also applies to products: the idea that products like the iPhone come about as a result of a flash of genius insight from someone like Steve Jobs is incorrect. The iPhone is the result of a long series of tiny, incremental, trial-and-error developments across many scientific and technical fields.

My conclusion: if the singularity means anything then it means that technological change will continue to accelerate in certain areas. And this trend has already been happening for almost two centuries.

The physicist and complexity theorist Murray Gell-Mann would say that human civilization is a complex adaptive system in the same way that the biological evolutionary process and individual human minds are.

Knowledge, science, learning and culture have created an evolutionary process working outside of human minds and outside of biology that results in an ongoing rise in the rate of change of technical progress.

1: Presumably these superhuman entities would be willing to pay us to solve our problems, what with their being superhumanly bored with life having already simulated and experienced the totality of all possible existences while the lab guys were getting the celebratory muffins.

Realisable fusion power

2009-02-17T06:11:00.000-08:00

I commented on this fusion-fission hydrid reactor design on Futurismic a while ago.

Researchers at the university of Texas are developing a means to process spent nuclear fuel using fusion:

The scientists propose destroying the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, the centerpiece of which is a high power Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS) made possible by a crucial invention.

The CFNS would provide abundant neutrons through fusion to a surrounding fission blanket that uses transuranic waste as nuclear fuel. The fusion-produced neutrons augment the fission reaction, imparting efficiency and stability to the waste incineration process.

The reason this is exciting is that it raises the possibility of a way of developing fusion technologies incrementally and economically. Instead of going all-out to build a nuclear fusion reactor in one step, putative nuclear fusion companies could market their wares as a means of processing the nasty transuranic waste output of conventional fission reactors.

This would provide fusion companies with a source of revenue to develop more advanced magnetic containment methods, and many of the other technical requirements of fusion electricity production.

The problem with fusion technology in the form of the ITER project is it's a massive, expensive, centralised, all-or-nothing endeavour.

I entirely support ITER: but it I'd love to see some this fission-fusion hybrid fuel cycle implemented in practice.

Charles Stross makes this point about incremental development but concerning the LiftPort group, a consortium that have made the mistake (as Stross sees it) of focusing on the development of an elevator system under the assumption that the revenue-generating fullerene cable technology would appear from somewhere else.

I see their knavery; this is to make an ass of them

2009-02-16T14:04:00.000-08:00

I've been doing the rounds of the UK anti-tabloid blogs over the last few days: including the The Sun Lies, Enemies of Reason and Alone in the Dark.

The creators of these blogs see it as their duty as good citizens to refute and rejoin every last lie, exaggeration, misrepresentation, canard, fib, falsehood, and untruth that pours from the pages of those grotesques of British public life: The Daily Mail, The Sun, and The News of the World.

This is an entirely necessary task, as the tagline on Mail Watch says:

We are not here to hate the readers of the Daily Mail.

We are here to show them that they are being lied to.

We ask our readers and contributors to keep this is mind.

Indeed: but Daily Mail readers aren't stupid (or at least not as borderline-disabled as you'd have to be to believe what is written in The Mail) so why do they continue to buy a newspaper that is lying to them?

I'm not being naive here: why do people read The Mail? Is there a particularly good crossword? Are the horoscopes particularly accurate? Is the sports coverage terse and reliable?

If the quality of every part of the newspaper is similar to the quality of the headline, news, and editorials then it can't be particularly good.

I have no way of knowing if the editorial line of these newspapers accurately reflects the pre-existing views of the readership or not. If I were to take over any of these newspapers and replace the editorial staff with people with extensive technocratic competence as well as journalistic and writing skills, would the readers be any better off?

I don't know.

But there comes a point when the nastiness and unpleasantness reaches a level where it generates a genuine public hazard. Check out the latest of the baby P case, an open letter sent by the social services blog Community Care to the editor of The Sun Rebekah Wade.

Social workers do an incredibly necessary and unpleasant job. And when the tabloids aren't complaining that they're not doing their jobs properly they're complaining when they decide to take a child into care.

You can imagine an alternate universe where baby P was taken into care before he died and became the subject of tabloid ire because the child snatching social services were taking kids away from their parents.

As the letter says:

Informed public opinion is undoubtedly important. Unfortunately, your coverage misinformed your readers. And in considering their views ahead of the facts and the informed opinions of the social workers who struggle with the realities at the frontline everyday, you have risked more children's safety and maybe their lives.

So at what point will something be done? And is it even practical to do anything? Is the generation that reads this trash dying out?

How would you go about altering the sensational and dangerous reporting of British tabloids?

Said with confidence

2009-02-16T09:16:00.000-08:00

A more hostile memetic environment

2009-02-13T03:30:00.000-08:00

I didn't know who this "right wing Dutch politician" was until all the kerfuffle yesterday.

Foamingly right-wing racists feed off the oxygen of public attention: if HMG genuinely wanted to damage Mr Wotsits' credibility they should simply have ignored him.

This is the problem with not wholeheartedly embracing free-speech. Supposed anti-hate laws give a megaphone to idiots by turning them into martyrs.

More open debate and ~~more~~ freedom of speech is a necessary part of what Alex calls a more hostile memetic environment: the more society is exposed to stupid ideas the stronger it's immune response to them will be.

What is the best way to write blog posts?

2009-02-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

The best way to write blog posts is to have a clear and specific point to make, and only to make one point per blog post.

If you want to make multiple points, or write a multifaceted argument on a particular subject what you are writing become what Stephen Fry calls a blessay.

From now on I will try to keep my posts short and interesting, rather than long and rambling.

Problems of specificity

2009-02-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

Eleizer Yudkowsky on the virtues of specificity:

When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless. The remedy is specific knowledge and in-depth study. When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph.

This is a problem that is ever-present online. Very rarely are online debates actual arguments, they are bickering contests between people who have completely different ideas about the actual definition of words and the scope of the debate.

I was impressed by Yudkowsky's thoughts on the three schools of the singularity because it addresses directly the oft-ignored problem of what exactly someone means when they talk about the singularity.

This was the problem with PZ Myers' objections to the singularity - he argued against a few elements of Kurzweil's thesis and used these inconsistencies to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

I agree there are problems with various aspects of Kurzweilian singularitarianism but they need to be adressed clearly and specifically.

Delicious specificity

In a similar vein I've been trying to work out what the best way of organising my Delicious tags is.

There are some tags, like "technology", "economics", "politics", "science", and "toread" which are so wide-ranging they lose all meaning.

However if my intention is to be able to refer back to a specific article when I need a reference too much specificity can hinder my search.

Tag bundles help solve the first problem of overarching vagueness by promoting "technology", "economics", "science", and "politics" to a well-earned retirement on the board of directors {?}.

Could it be possible to build a system into Delicious whereby it is possible to say that something vaguely reminds me of something else?

I don't mean a tag like "remindsmeofStephenFry". I mean a way of tagging a document that doesn't explicitly reference Stephen Fry in any way but still reminds me of him. Something like remindsmeof:"StephenFry".

In this context remindsmeof would be a command recognised by the Delicious API to note that the article isn't explicitly about Stephen Fry but nevertheless puts me in mind of him.

I suspect that this sort of thing is less useful in practice than I imagine, particularly as much of the utility of Delicious comes from its simplicity and intuitiveness.

And as to Yudkowsky: obviously this respect for the specific can be taken too far: a general knowledge encompassing many fields can also be very valuable.

It's best to learn a lot about a little and little about a lot.

What I think of the three kinds of technological singularity

2009-02-11T03:08:00.000-08:00

Michael Anissimov has a post up on the three kinds of singularity. This is based on this post on the three schools of singularity thought by Eliezer Yudkowsky. This is relevant to many criticisms of the idea of a technological singularity as criticisms frequently focus on minor or ancillary effects of the singularity.

As I said before, I don't "believe" in the singularity. I think it's either irrelevant or a fairly trivial observation of technological growth trends. But within the context of the three schools I think I can express my thoughts more coherently.

Here are the three kinds of singularity Anissimov and Yudkowsky describe:

Accelerating change: advances in computer science, AI research, genetics, human augmentation, and biotechnology create a positive feedback of rapid technological growth. As the abilities of our tools improve and our own abilities improve through augmentation (both external in the form of personal AIs and internal in the form of intelligence-enhacements and nootropics) technological change accelerates exponentially.

Event horizon: advances in computer science, AI research, genetics, human augmentation, and biotechnology lead to the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence. It is impossible for a less intelligent mind to predict the actions of a more intelligent mind so it is truly impossible to make any definitive statements about what will happen after a superintelligence (whether pure AI or strongly augmented human).

Intelligence explosion: advances in computer science, AI research, genetics, human augmentation, biotechnology and neurobiology allow intelligent beings (either human or AI) to alter their own brains so as to improve their own intelligence. As intelligence is the source of all technological development this process will feed back on itself, as the slightly more intelligent beings develop slightly better ways of improving their intelligence, all the while creating amazing spinoff technologies.

Here's what I think of them:

The accelerating change school of the singularity is the one I find most compelling. This is because it is both logically plausible and reflects the experience humans have had of changing technologies in the past. Technologies like electronics combine with digital computer theories to develop fast computers that go on to have a major effect on other areas of development. I think the accelerating change argument is the most coherent and reasonable depiction of a technological singularity

The event horizon school is flakier. First, I have issues with the idea that greater-than-human intelligences are necessarily unpredictable, second, I don't believe that raw intellectual or cognitive ability is the primary driver for technological progress, and thirdly we have seen that it is already impossible to accurately predict all the outcomes of any technological development, let alone strong AI/posthuman superintelligence.

The intelligence explosion school is flakier still. It is based on the assumption that a sufficiently powerful general intelligence would necessarily be able to comprehend how it's own mind works and know how to improve it. I do believe that as knowledge of the workings of the brain increases it will lead to real gains in various intellectual capacities, through nootropics, brain augmentation, or through brain simulation on faster substrates. Gaining additional knowledge about the brain doesn't require us to be "smarter."

With reference to the last point: the knowledge of how the brain works will be gained through trial-and-error scientific experimentation and ongoing technological development of brain-scanning technology (itself developed by trial-and-error technological tinkering), surgery (again also developed through the inductive tinkering of the barber surgeons), and neural interface technology (which is being tinkered with as I write).

Anissimov believes that all technological progress must be judged on the basis of how much closer it brings us to the existence of a superintelligent AI, because then the superintelligent AI will take over the business of technological development and create an intelligence explosion.

Anissimov describes himself as a technological determinist, as such he presumably believes social change is caused primarily by technological development. I agree with technological determinism in general but I feel Anissimov's perspective is closer to cognitive derminism: he believes technological (and hence social) change in the future will happen purely as a result of the cognition of AI.

This is at odds with our experience because the component of scientific and technological development that relies entirely on pure cognition (e.g. Einstein's development of the theory of relativity or Newton's laws of motion) is quite small compared with those which required a substantial amount empirical study (Darwin's theory of evolution) or mechanical tinkering (Faraday's law of induction).

This is a similar criticism to Kevin Kelly's idea of thinkism, where Kelly highlights the fallacy of believing you can study the universe by simulating it, without recourse to experiment to attempt to falsify your belief.

To summarise: although the development of a smarter-than-human AI will be a huge aid to our understanding of the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and the human mind there is no reason to assume the effects (though unpredictable) will include an intelligence explosion - I agree that it may help lead to an acceleration in technological development - but it will only be one part of the general acceleration.

Current areas of interest

2009-02-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

Here's what I'm up to at the moment:

Doing Open University Tutor Marked Assignments in "Data, Computing, and Information" and "Engineering the Future" courses.
Learning how to program Python using Diving into Python and Thinking Like a Computer Scientist.
Applying to go to university.
Looking for a job.
Creating a lengthy webcomic narrative.
Blogging extensively.
Reading The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker.
Reading Four Laws that Drive the Universe by Peter Atkins.
Reading Feersum Endjinn's by Iain M Banks.

Singularity and transhumanism

2009-02-10T16:57:00.000-08:00

PZ Myers has written an interesting critique of Ray Kurzweil's thoughts on a possible technological singularity:

...not only is the chart an artificial and perhaps even conscious attempt to fit the data to a predetermined conclusion, but what it actually represents is the proximity of the familiar.

We are much more aware of innovations in our current time and environment, and the farther back we look, the blurrier the distinctions get. We may think it's a grand step forward to have these fancy cell phones that don't tie you to a cord coming from the wall, but there was also a time when people thought it was radical to be using this new bow & arrow thingie, instead of the good ol' atlatl.

We just lump that prior event into a "flinging pointy things" category and don't think much of it. When Kurzweil reifies biases that way, he gets garbage, like this graph, out.
Now I do think that human culture has allowed and encouraged greater rates of change than are possible without active, intelligent engagement—but this techno-mystical crap is just kookery, plain and simple, and the rationale is disgracefully bad. One thing I will say for Kurzweil, though, is that he seems to be a first-rate bullshit artist.
...

Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it's OK, when he's actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time.

In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it's absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil's popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

Calling Kurzweil a bullshit artist is unfair: Kurzweil is a genuinely talented inventor and engineer. His beliefs might be a little kooky to some, but I've always found his writing compelling.

Kurzweil is a spiritualist: there's nothing wrong with that. A belief in the power of some imminent superhuman AI to solve all our problems is slightly less absurd than most religious beliefs, and Kurzweil doesn't come across as the type to build a pyramid of skulls in the meantime.

But really: who honestly cares about the singularity?

Building artificial human minds may be possible within my lifetime, or it may not.

There will still be substantial technological change, even if the prime mover remains good old-fashioned human grey matter.

What I find compelling is the suggestion of where ongoing developments in biology, computing, genetics, and human augmentation may take us over the next few decades.

Among these developments are new ways of combining human intelligence with machine intelligence that result in a substantial increase along all dimensions of intellectual development (what Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns.)

So although the idea of the singularity has become less compelling what continues to excite me about Kurzweil's writings are his descriptions of posthumans. Partly for the good ol' SFnal sensawunda, and partly because maybe it could happen to me. Maybe I could become a posthuman.

I think the idea and potential reality of self-guided human evolution is a great idea in itself. I can take or leave the singularity.

Prof Myers also comments separately on the recent pronouncements on the future of humanity Juan Enriquez at the TED conference:

Every species also takes control over its own evolution, in a sense; individuals make choices of all sorts that influence what will happen in the next generation. You could rightly argue that they don't do it with planning and intent, but I have seen nothing that suggests that our attempts to modify our species, low tech and high tech together, are any wiser or better informed about the long-term consequences than those of any rat fighting for an opportunity to mate. We do what we do; don't pretend it's part of a long term plan that is actually prepared for all of the unexpected eventualities.

I agree with Myers up to a point: he's basically saying that developments in biotechnology and the progress of transhumanism won't happen in some big, top-down, organised way, but will rather develop as a series of steps through stochastic tinkering in the lab and (eventually) the marketplace.

The beauty of human progress is it doesn't have any long term plan: we do what we do and we tinker and experiment and find things out.

Juan Enriquez can make all the grand pronouncements about the future of humanity he likes but what he is actually trying to do is raise investment capital for his company Biotechonomy.

And Biotechonomy will pay scientists to tinker and experiment and find things out.

Such is the nature of technological advancement.

Prof Myers ends on a positive note:

Maybe this information age will have as dramatic and as important an effect on humanity as the invention of writing, but even if it does, don't expect a nerd rapture to come of it. Just more cool stuff, and a bigger, shinier, fancier playground for humanity to gambol about in.

Well I certainly agree with that.

The eye of the apple

2009-02-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

This development is... interesting.

That Apple's next update to the OSX line of operating systems is to incorporate a geolocation facility is both compelling and worrying.

Obviously having fully networked, location-aware computers is a Good Thing, but the potential is also there for additional harmful tracking and monitoring of individual computers.

Where Apple leads Microsoft and everyone else is sure to follow. Yet another component for realisable spimes is imminent.

Interesting times.

power to the commentariat: The Inauspicious Er...

2009-02-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

power to the commentariat: The Inauspicious Er...

I'd go with "lolwut?". Carries impact and genuine scorn, as if you don't really give a damn. "Ahem" is also nice of course. Both are either end of the scorn - condescension axis.

Or you could always try sincerity...

Productivity in shops

2009-02-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with working in a second hand bookshop is that although you spend a large portion of your time sitting in front of a PC on your own you're productivity drops to nearly zero.

Every time someone asks you a question or buys a book it breaks your concentration, then there's all the usual stuff - Twittering, blogging, surfing, and general procrastination.

I'm not complaining - I'm just saying that this is the reason I've managed to get so little work done.

And in a way I am being productive, or at least as productive as misanthropic booksellers ever are...

/Bernard Black

The fifth element

2009-02-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

In the Western classical tradition there were believed to be four elements from which everything in the human world was made. They were earth, air, fire, and water.

Every object in the human world was believed to consist of different proportions of these four elements.

Of course in order to combine these elements together into objects there needed to be a fifth element, which Terry Pratchett calls the element of surprise.¹

Surprise is a funny thing: an emotional response in a rational context. You think one thing, something changes, and then you think another thing. They've forgotten my birthday, every jumps out at you, they haven't forgotten your birthday!

Why do we feel surprise? Is it an evolutionary adaptation to finding out that things are other than they are? Does it act as a kind of exclamation mark for the mind to highlight the importance of a change in the universe or is it simply a high-order emergent property of consciousness that serves no really useful purpose?

Do animals feel surprise in the same way as humans? Are there qualitative difference amongst surprises?

Intellectual surprises are the most fun, over at Overcoming Bias Robin Hanson asks what would have surprised our hunter-gatherer ancestors about how we view the world today?

The answers boil down to a couple of basic points:

The universe is far bigger and older than expected.
Everything in the universe is actually composed of a surprisingly small set of items operating on the basis of a surprisingly simple set of rules. Complex things emerge from these simple rules.

The loss of determinism to quantum physics was also suggested.

As an SF fan I'd love to fast forward a few thousand years to see what things we will discover in the future that will surprise me.

There is a strong temptation to fall into the trap if thinking "we've got this science thing basically nailed down except for a few small details."

One of the most compelling things about life is surprise: the act of discovering something is other than you expected and that things are not as they initially seem.

{Incidentally if this post seems a little off it's because I've had difficulty sleeping recently and I'm currently very tired... ;)}

1: Actually the original fifth element was quintessence, which accounts for all the stuff in the "heavenly realm" of the sky that didn't obviously consist of any of the other four.