Sound of the Mushroom

Starlings and Boids

2009-08-24T18:14:00.003-04:00

Here's word on a new simulation of bird flight. I loved the Boids simulation published some time ago. I'm hoping for a youtube video soon. Thank Mandelbrot for cracking this door open.

Anthropic Principle Explained

2009-07-21T22:58:00.004-04:00

Instapundit posts on the unobserved impact of a comet or asteroid with the planet Jupiter.

UPDATE: Reader Dale Osborn writes: “So, Jupiter’s role in the solar system is to be the Big Hoover, vacuuming up most of the big rocks that could head Earth’s way. It’s like Someone designed the solar system that way.” Well, but sometimes it slingshots ‘em our way, too . . . .

This is an indirect appeal to the fine-tuned Universe argument, and it's really unnecessary for Dale Osborn to get so excited. Let us begin with the question as a question. Why are we here? We've learned enough hard lessons on this planet and seen enough things in the galaxy to know that it needn't be the case. Things could have gone otherwise, couldn't they? Actually, that's precisely the wrong answer. Things couldn't have gone otherwise, because they didn't. The anthropic principle says that the fact that we are asking the question is it's own answer. The fact that Jupiter is Hoovering up all the planet-killers is one reason, probably one among many reasons, that we are able to ask the question. Fred Bltziflc on planet number 4 and one half is not able to ask why he is there because planet number 4 and one half was reduced to rubble long ago and Fred never evolved from the slime mold. Maybe he wouldn't have evolved anyway, but it has nothing to do with the benevolence of Jupiter or even the intervention of any higher power than that. It is just that we are here because all these sensitive parameters and peculiar circumstances were lined up appropriately, and Fred isn't because they weren't. Hence, we ask why and Fred doesn't. If we are to invoke God's watchful protection, we need to have a little more respect for the subtlety of his Works.

The fact that we are here now also doesn't say too much about our future chances, so it seems like we ought to start paying better attention to the neighborhood.

Dysfunctional Hierarchies

2009-06-27T13:55:00.005-04:00

I just read a blog posted by an Army Sgt. about, among other things, the unseriousness of soldiers receiving promotions. I believe that good organizations have a natural tendency to degenerate over time, and this tendency must be resisted strenuously. Good organizations come about through a confluence of good luck and exceptional individuals with strong motivation. Neither will last very long. For that reason, the most important function of an ongoing organization is the recruitment and promotion of those people who will best preserve and extend the aspects of the organization that make it "good". Personnel evaluation is the most difficult and most easily corrupted aspect of that function. Disinformation and performance theater will gradually overcome integrity and actual performance. And once inappropriate assignments are made, the next cycle will be even more vulnerable to suboptimal choices.

The cure for this process involves a dedication to two principles. 1) Trust but verify. 2) Cultivate diversity.

Reality checking is neglected for many reasons, but mostly for its labor saving aspects. You need to budget a certain percentage of your effort to proving yourself wrong, to testing the obvious. Every man a scientist! Most importantly, you should test whatever you are most emotionally invested in. I have talked about the need for red-teaming before, and it applies in this context.

So what do I mean by diversity? I'm talking about different points of view, different methods of processing information. People who agree with you should make you uncomfortable. They are encouraging your natural tendency toward assuming too much, and not adding anything valuable. Sometimes diversity of thought follows diversity of background and demographic classification. Not necessarily though. And no matter what the organizational taboos are against it, you have to find out what people think depending on their hierarchical position. When it comes to personnel evaluation, that means you have to determine what the peers and subordinates of the individual have to say on the subject.

In politics, this natural degeneration of organizations tends toward the extreme. Personnel evaluation in the political world is dysfunctional, almost counter-productive. I've often thought that we would have a better Congress if our representatives were chosen at random from a telephone directory. Is that too harsh? Yes, it is. There are many well meaning individuals who have been honestly elected, but they are essentially helpless to accomplish anything. The sea of influence, horse-trading and gamesmanship that they swim in controls their every motion. It's a problem. But it's a problem we must solve if we expect to prosper.

Shortfall

2009-05-11T23:58:00.004-04:00

The economy shows, according to various ostensibly independent news reports, some signs of recovery. New unemployment claims are down. That doesn't mean that anyone has got a new job yet; it just means that though the disaster is larger each week, the rate of increase of the disaster has subsided somewhat. One note that is usually struck -- we no longer seem to be in free-fall. I'm inclined to agree. We are a little more knowledgeable than we were in FDR's day, but we aren't doing much better on the political score.

The fiscal conservatives, among whom I usually reside, have started to claim that this recovery is proof that we didn't need to spend so much money. On the contrary, my sensible friends, think about it this way. The economy is underperforming by about $1T per annum. We are spending about $0.4T this year and next year to purchase this reserve capacity. The difference of $0.6T is the part that will be translated into joblessness and various other forms of human suffering.

In February, Media Matters identified a few economists who agreed that the stimulus was too small -- too small by far. I have followed up to see whether they still seem to feel that way. Yes they seem to. Here are some links for those listed.

Eileen Appelbaum - visiting professor at Rutgers, New Brunswick
Dean Baker - Center for Economic and Policy Research
J. Bradford DeLong - professor at UC Berkeley, visiting scholar SF Federal Reserve
James K. Galbraith - Levi Institute, Bard College
Paul Krugman - Princeton and NYTimes (China speech here)
Joseph Stiglitz - Nobel Laureate
Mark Zandi - Moody's ( here, and here as well)

Lords of the Lemmings

2009-05-07T01:45:00.006-04:00

Why the Green Program is Hypocritical and Doomed to Frustration

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have a new article in The New Republic called The Green Bubble comparing the waxing and collapsing of environmental sentiment, not coincidentally, to the labored breathing of the ailing business cycle. They point out than in actuality we have done nothing of significance to address the Global Warming problem, and that we are not likely to. All of our actions for the environment are symbolic, more addressed to guilt management than anything else. Several times since Earth Day was started, the American people have gotten all worked up about the issue, only to change their minds when the economy shifted.

The authors point out the hypocrisy of green-strutting (my word), posing their green poses like prairie partridges on the lek, as if their actions were significant. CFLs and Priuses are not going to do the job. Not when the systems that drive our daily lives burn on unchanged. Nobody is going to make significant sacrifices. Understand that. Nobody is really prepared to return to the idyllic pre-industrial life, where life was so noble ... as well as nasty, brutish and short.

Green philosophy would have the aspirations of the world's impoverished billions redirected into a Utopian myth. These people are not that dumb. Chinese people want to drive cars. Indonesians want air conditioners. Nobody really wants to work the fields by hand. They want what we have, and now we're telling them that they can't have it ... just when hope finally begins to seem justified. Good luck with that.

Cap and trade appears to be off the table. All suggestions of a carbon tax generate massive resistance from Americans of both parties, even when it is suggested that other taxes can be reduced. Americans get angry at HOV lanes for God's sake. No Daddy is big enough to make us take our medicine. The Kyoto treaty itself has not been successful at creating CO2 reductions. Don't expect that to happen any time soon either. IMO, only the nuclear treaty that Bush negotiated with India is of sufficient scale to matter. Nothing else presently under consideration addresses the concerns of the developing nations and provides any hope of addressing environmental concerns.

Americans, in spite of the example of French success, are unwilling to encourage nuclear energy as a clean alternative. Obama is afraid to bring it up. In fact, our irrational preference for solar and wind power, both expensive and unsuitable for base energy needs, has reduced the likelihood that new nuclear will be affordable. Nuclear is a suitable base, actually more reliable than coal, since it doesn't rely on frequent deliveries. Coal untaxed is, however, the cheapest form of energy. Any preferences applied to solar and wind will come at the expense of nuclear rather than coal.

It appears, when everything is weighed up, that what we must do, we cannot do. Environmentalists lack the necessary knowledge, vision and clout, and Americans in general lack the conviction and willingness to sacrifice. Under the current civic regime, it's not going to change.

I say that when you finally see that a problem cannot be solved, you are free to solve it. You do it by backing up a few steps and including the problem within the context of a larger system. The system that we must change is our collective method for generating decisions. Democracy is effective only in a contributory context, where the best of our thinking is collected and distributed. We are, today, being tyrannized by the Least Common Denominator.

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Links:

http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-10/mf_burning

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6cd5578a-85ab-4627-b793-680ea8d44c7f

http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2007/05/al_gores_soluti.html?cid=69025842#comment-69025842

http://soundofthemushroom.blogspot.com/2009/03/stardrive.html

http://current.com/items/89963405_bushs-india-triumph.htm

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Chronology-of-the-Indo-US-nuclear-deal/articleshow/3575350.cms

http://www.hindu.com/2009/05/07/stories/2009050755551000.htm

http://soundofthemushroom.blogspot.com/2006/07/skeptics-discuss-wind-and-nuclear.html

Beyond the Labor Arms Race

2009-05-04T02:06:00.004-04:00

So how is my idea different? What does it contribute? It looks just like a regular employees' union, don't you think? Who needs more unions?

Now, that in itself is going to turn off about half of you. People who know business owners tend to sympathize. I guess that's where my sympathies are as well. I worked in a union shop long ago, run by the Teamsters. I ran afoul of them for various reasons, and their first impulse was to threaten me. They also took far more of my monthly paycheck than could be justified by any reasonable person. What could they be doing with all that money? Not only that, they kept my wages low. I knew that people were getting literally three times what I was earning across the river for the same exact job. (If I'd had any brains at the time, I would have taken one of those jobs and bought a car with the extra money.) Are you getting the picture yet? The union was in bed with management. Somebody was getting paid to run a charade union, and shop stewards were being paid to keep people in line. Did I know this at the time? I knew that Rock and Roll is Here to Stay ... and not much else.

How can we characterize such an organization? It was top-down, recruitment driven, parasitic, authoritarian, and probably counter-productive. The company went out of business a few years later. I sometimes wonder what happened to those shop stewards. Companies that specialize in recruiting stupid people and keeping them stupid are not exactly in touch with their Model Modern Business Practices.

I am also opposed to card-check, but not without reservations. We've all heard stories of companies that have been raked over by unions, and we've all heard of workers that have been raked over by management. Privately owned companies will do just about anything to stop a union from forming. They own the business. They don't want outsiders to tell them what to do. It's understandable. I've heard of cases where the owners closed down the company, fired everyone, sold the inventory at a loss and left the state – all rather than accept union representation. People can be very bull-headed – or very principled, depending on your point of view.

Unfortunately, good owners and nasty, rotten no-good owners that really need union supervision all have the same response. I've had managers that qualified for sainthood and others that smelled of brimstone. I was reasonably suspicious that one VP, on that Teamsters job, was actually a Nazi, and not just because of the accent. None of them, the good, bad or ugly, would tolerate real unions.

The tactics that Management uses to discourage unionization are famously deceitful and cruel. So union people – honest union people that is – often come to the conclusion that you have to fight fire with fire. And they are often fired up with righteous wrath, justifiably if you ask me. In those days I knew a real Red communist. He had the zeal, the rage and the knowledge, and remarkable courage. He couldn't get very far with that crowd of workers, or with me either, but he had our respect. He didn't need no stinkin' card-check, though. What he needed was a cultural shift that wasn't going to happen.

In today's business environment, people just accept union and management because they have to. Nobody really likes either. Yet, here I am trying to sell you on my voters' union approach to the world. So what's the difference? What makes me think that it won't turn into some top-down, parasitic something or other?

The organization I'm proposing is home-grown. Recruitment is anathema. You click with your friends. You inspect them for the trust that you share. The only objective is to grow an information entity, starting with a tendril of reliability spread outward into the unknown soil of modern life. It is a worthy effort in itself. Representation is organic, not functional or confrontational. We are simply trying to get things straight here. Anonymity is helpful to keep out the control freaks and the spies and the zealots. We don't need to be manipulated and tricked into our choices. We will make up our minds according to the channels of trust that we construct. It's more of a defense against disinformation and arm-twisting than some power-seeking entity. I want it to become part of life, not part of the job, and I want it to be fun.

Membership is not exclusive to specified groups. Everyone is invited in, union and management if you honestly trust one another, but invited not as agents, only as friends. The idea is to start with trust and build on it, testing and strengthening it. In time we will grow a tree of trust. Things of importance can flow though the body of that tree without arousing animosity or suspicion, without causing polarization.

I'm not pushing mysticism. I'm proposing a calculated methodology conjoined with a shared philosophy, a social algorithm for calibrated connection.

Unions are like the Blob, growing constantly larger by spreading out and moving into new territories, engulfing and absorbing whatever organized relationships already exist. Only the Blob chooses. Well the Blob hasn't been very successful lately because the victims know how to defend themselves. And the Blob is not very happy about it. Voter's unions – I don't really know what to call them yet – are more like Tinker Toy sets, where the toys construct themselves and piece themselves into progressively larger groups, according to fixed rules of node and branch.

Well, OK. But what makes me think it will not degenerate into the Teamsters, or the Pinkertons for that matter? Americans have had nightmares about cabals and secret societies. We don't like to be told what to do. We don't like to defer to others. So how can I square the organization I've described with the individualism of America. I don't know yet, but I've been trying to convey my vision in a convincing way for a couple of years now, a vision still under development, I'm afraid. If you have any suggestions, I'll be glad to entertain them.

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The glimpse of an unintended motion,
The shake of a head, an unexpected shift of the eyes,
Teaches more in a flash than you'll learn
From eight patient hours of listening to lies.

Optimal Mesh

2009-05-03T02:14:00.004-04:00

The Swine Flu is spreading very efficiently. It seems like modern society has the ideal configuration for spreading it. So, just as a thought experiment, what would be the ideal organization for spreading the flu? It would not be, I think, like our goods distribution system.

Let's say the flu began with a little rubber duck made in Shanghai. After getting punched out of the mold, it would tumble along the conveyor belt infecting other rubber ducks along the way and get dumped in a box, mostly with those other rubber ducks already infected. Who knows, maybe someone, a Chinese woman, would do some inspection and touch-up. Would she be wearing gloves? Maybe she'll paint on cute little eyes and eyelashes and lick the tip of the brush. I've seen people do that. But our little duck and its friends would end up in a box pretty quickly. The box would be sealed, placed in a pallet with other boxes of rubber ducks, containerized, stacked for weeks in some ship and then in higher stacks at the port in Seattle, then finally shipped to Toys-R-Us in Peoria, IL. From the truck to the shelf is a pretty efficient process these days, but someone in Peoria would have to handle these ducks. Children might play with the ducks. The customer would pick one up and place it in a cart. The cashier would scan it and bag it. And it would find a nice home. Direct customer shipments might be neater, but somebody will still be exposed.

So basically, there would be two growing nodes of infection due to transportation of goods, the one in Peoria and at the origin in Shanghai. Our global system for the distribution of goods is designed to minimize handling and reduce unnecessary dispersion. The rubber duck would have very few opportunities to infect anyone. More importantly, the rubber duck would never move very far again.

Transportation of people is an entirely different thing. Everybody drives to work to be with others where they shake hands, kiss cheeks, pick up the wrong cup, cough on the bathroom fixtures. Then they come home -- where they lick their fingers to wipe bits of jelly and chocolate off of smiling faces. The kids get shipped to school where they have even more interesting ways of uploading their microbial history. The teachers collect assorted papers and projects that have little smudges and sticky spots. Then they take the subway home, and drive to conferences or night school in the next town over. The professors mingle with their students after class, responding to questions by laughing, scratching their heads in thought, borrowing pens perhaps to sign papers. Then they fly to San Diego for their conferences.

I've heard it said that every drop of water we drink has been excreted by a thousand dinosaurs. I think about that whenever I'm breathing the air on an airplane, and possibly sitting next to a large individual. Sometimes when I come up the ramp and pass through the waiting area, there's a new crowd waiting to get on the same plane. Sometimes they crowd around, making it difficult to exit the area. There's a lot of jostling. They seem eager to be on their way. Maybe they're going to Shanghai. Maybe they'll bring some toys home for their kids.

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So how would I maximize the spread of the flu? For a specific pathogen, I think it depends on the mode of transmission. For a virus that requires contact, I think the best environment is the happy suburban shuffle, where kids are carpooled to preschool in the morning, playdates and playgrounds in the afternoon, and then maybe group Suzuki lessons, with swimming on the weekends. Maybe the perfect group size is five or ten.

But for flu, it seems like jumbo jets and stadiums can't be beat. If the guy selling hotdogs is coughing on his customers, things can spread pretty quickly. Bowl games bring people from all over and drunks don't cover their coughs either. The Olympics seems like a potential Perfect Storm of infection. Thousands of sports fans, young and friendly people for the most part, will be meeting and mixing with others from every three-letter national entity that can carry a flag around an oval track. These folks will all go home on airplanes and share their experiences, visiting perhaps, all the schools and churches and arenas in a thousand scattered Peorias.

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Two related questions occur to me: If we organize our networks to optimize the speed of an epidemic, does that have any bearing on the likely severity of the cases? And second, does the pyramidal structure of my proposed league of voter unions strike you as being in itself a pretty good vehicle for disease transmission?

No Immunity for This Disease

2009-04-28T00:12:00.007-04:00

The Swine Flu is probably not something to panic over, but here's my problem. There is an asteroid out there with our name on it. There is a supervolcano ready to blow. And there is a potential pandemic that could destroy Civilization. So what are we doing about it? Do we even care?

If humanity were able to speak for itself, if we were able to produce a coordinated response to challenges, to take an enforceable decision and to actually protect ourselves, what would we be doing now?

Oh, I know this is crazy, but here's my take. One long term policy: We should not allow the people of the planet to integrate into a single unified global continuity. We can't afford, IMO, to be aligned into a single vulnerable monoculture. You can see what happened to our unified financial community. The "global meltdown" is, however, a risk we are going to be facing continuously from now on. In the past, economic problems in one place could be partially ameliorated by success in other places. Not so any more. In a sensible world, this would at least be a topic of serious conversation. The key phrase would be: "What are we going to do about it?" And the implication would be that a solution was naturally forthcoming.

One theory about the success of European society, my reading of Jared Diamond actually, is that there were multitudes of semi-independent societies. The geography of Europe protected them from each other for a while and allowed them to develop in isolation. These societies were able to evolve, make mistakes, make discoveries, lose or win. Oh, they copied each other, no doubt about it. Everybody had to have a cathedral and a clock tower, but they were also different from one another. They had variation and, as a consequence, there was natural selection going on. Some groups were subsumed by others, and then promptly separated again. People didn't move more than a few miles in their lifetimes, but their societies ebbed and flowed. And their little societies lived or died based on the hereditary benefits of their meme system. OK, they started from a very low place, but they developed systems that were robust, resilient and effective. Unlike China, Europe was memetically unfragile. Unlike America, Europe was epidemiologically unfragile. (But that was another story, one that we shouldn't like to repeat.)

Right now, the US has a version of the Swine Flu that is relatively mild. If it turns out to be something more than a statistical fluke, Mexico may well have a dangerous strain. So what should we do about it. I'm reading a lot of nonsense that it's "too late" to close the borders. I don't think so at all. If I were in charge ... I know this is even crazier ... I would be doing my best to be sure that everyone were exposed to the American strain of the virus as soon as possible ... before the Mexican strain gets here and before the American strain mutates into something more virulent and destructive. There's no vaccine in the works, but there is the next best thing -- a mild version of the disease.

This is the kind of counter-intuitive decision that we are incapable of thinking about now. That's why we need to apply conscious changes to our own society. We need to be capable of marshaling our thoughts. We need to recognize that we are a product of evolution, understand the mechanics of evolution on all its levels, and apply its deepest lessons. Once again, that is where I see my double pyramid system fitting in.

I'm not saying that my rather radical approach to the Swine Flu is the best one, or even a good one. I don't really know. Better minds than mine should be thinking about it. All I'm saying is that we are presently incapable of processing the idea. If, however, we could determine that it was the most beneficial course of action, would we be able to grab it close, to own it, and make it happen? I don't think so. I think, as we are now, we would rather accept our death with "dignity", meaning without too much thought.

Iraqi Civilian Mortality

2009-04-24T12:43:00.004-04:00

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an analysis of mortality among Iraqi civilians during the 5 year period from the inception of the war until March, 2008. It's fascinating. It's not quite a refutation of the Lancet/Hopkins study that talked about 600,000 "excess" deaths, but it is certainly an example of a non-hysterical approach to the subject.

The detailed data table give a breakdown of deaths by cause as well as children vs. adults, male vs. female. The most telling number is the high percentage of "executions" (33) and "executions with torture" (10). Various other nastiness from AIF (anti-Iraqi forces) accounts for an additional third, leaving at most a third of the 60,000 total civilian deaths at the doorstep of coalition forces.

I have argued against the inflated estimates of the Hopkins study. These estimates are much more convincing, but just to be clear, they represent a low-end figure.

Intractable Financial Foolishness

2009-04-23T23:42:00.001-04:00

Seymour Friedel asks why we are able to solve engineering problems once and for all. Every generation adds fixes to the nasty problems of the last generation. He cites problems with constantly crashing RAM, and automobiles that once needed continual "tune-ups". The fortitude of cars and computers today is astonishing to people who grew up with the older versions, but the same people stand stunned before the finance headlines of today. How can these things be happening again? Didn't everyone get the memo?

Friedel suggests that despite the availability of a written record, we are congenitally unable to learn from the past because nobody reads. Engineers, however, take the decision out of our hands by integrating the fixes into the product. "Strict revision control" is how he puts it, and that is certainly a term familiar to software developers. The implication is that finance needs to be engineered somehow, modularized, packaged with safeguards that incorporate protection even from the damned fools that everyone knows will follow.

I am a uncomfortable with some of Friedel's economic assumptions, but I agree with the thrust of his argument. In fact, engineering fixes have been attempted in the past, as he points out, but keep getting repealed. And the reason for that is ... are you ready ... *Human Nature*. The "mistakes" in finance are not really mistakes. They are predictable outcomes induced by social pressures, unquenchable cleverness and great gobs of greed.

How can this cyclic return to stupidity be stopped once and for all? The main requirement, as I see it, is to give humanity a genuine memory. We need a self-sustaining networking protocol that preserves and refreshes (more reliably than with DRAM we hope) the latent wisdom of all the mopes among us who, despite being ordinary humans, have certain modules of profound understanding created by the idiosyncratic circumstances of their lives. We need an institution of choreographed meme-meshing, designed to concentrate and preserve the collective social wisdom according to a deliberate and self-conscious algorithm of sharing. I believe my method, described previously, will do the job. There are assuredly bugs in the model, and certainly incompletenesses, but we need to start somewhere, and we need to start doing something more sensible than the present arrangement.

I see the growing pressure of population and untracked externalities as problems. Our safe paths are narrowing and some future collapse, the demographic equivalent of our current financial crisis, becomes relentlessly more likely. (See Jared Diamond, et al.) The engineering fix is no longer easily available from our wonderfully clever technical insights. That blossom has been picked, or, at least, will eventually stop producing new petals. We need to focus now on social engineering -- social engineering that pays heed to all our dearest values and deepest fears, while allowing us to address reality in ways that cure the obsessive repetition characteristic of our current insanity.

China's Sticky Fingers

2009-04-23T02:10:00.003-04:00

Wretchard discusses a WSJ article about Chinese cyberwar. Computer spies, it seems, have drained the digital assets of some of our most important weapon systems. The usual denials and uncertainties apply, but it walks like a duck.

The influential members of the Chinese government see their national interests in very stark military terms. Taiwan is still on their plate among other territorial “reclamations”, and any realistic analysis must assume that they have explicitly developed plans to meet their goals. And they see no reason why they can't build a military force capable of getting what they want.

The Chinese have certain asymmetric advantages. The central government has strong support of the people along with almost unlimited central power to chose and enforce policy. No other country in the world could even dream of controlling their birth rate with such rational firmness. The US has neither rational nor strong government. We do have superb technological expertise and capital. We are rich in knowledge and we are still far more wealthy than China. But what that means is that we have a lot to offer them in terms of targets for trade, emulation and theft. They are asymmetrically well positioned to extract the fruit of those targets because of the openness of our society.

There are around two million Chinese speakers in the US. There are thousands who have ongoing contacts with Taiwan and the PRC. There are first and second generation Chinese distributed throughout the country, involved in the most interesting research at our best universities, and just as many holding responsible positions in every agency, department and office of the federal government. What percentage do American citizens represent in the Chinese civil or military services? And if we did have the humint capacity, what do you imagine we could do with it? We could find out their intentions I suppose, but we already have that knowledge as a byproduct of our expertise in game theory. All in all, though, they don't have anything we would want to steal, and they don't have anything that would improve our capabilities.

I don't know. To me the long-term strategic situation is worrisome. I'm no expert. Maybe Wretchard is, but I can guarantee you that there are not a lot of members of Congress who even think about this issue. I suspect, though, that someone is advising them on other military issues. The advisors have names like, oh, Boeing, General Dynamics, Halliburton. I would rather that Congress had advisors that came from a citizens' committee of strategic experts. Ask me how to make that happen.

Estuary Lament

2009-04-21T21:21:00.003-04:00

Hedrick Smith, one of the best reporters on the planet, is on Frontline right now talking about the invisible pollution that is killing the Chesapeake. Why is this happening? It's not so much a technical problem as it is an economic/political problem.

No real government could allow the collapse of such an important and productive part of American life. Therefore, we do not yet have a real government. We are ungoverned. We are at the mercy of the great Process. Perhaps we have done as well as we have simply on the basis of good luck. The Constitution is referred to as the "Miracle in Philadelphia". Maybe we should generalize that assessment to cover everything that has happened to make this a great country.

I heard HS being interviewed on NPR earlier this week. His efforts remind me of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. They will be successfully submerged under the tide of commercial "necessity".

One of the big culprits in this thing is chicken farming in Delaware. Purdue and the other members of the chicken cabal have managed to rig the system so that nobody is accountable for the mountains of manure. IMO, if there were a carbon tax, this industry would have to restructure itself and maybe the manure would become a product rather than a waste.

Update: Here's a Washington Post review of "Poisoned Water".

Military Democracy

2009-04-21T21:09:00.003-04:00

StrategyPage describes the tensions related to body armor. Soldiers want protection of course, but for reasons of comfort, expediency and local presentation, would sometimes prefer to do without the inconvenient body armor. More convenient models have been designed and promised, but are not currently being supplied. Officers have a tendency to feel that soldiers cannot be trusted with the decision, so the officers make blanket orders. But here's the annoying thing to me. Higher officers don't even want the local officers to make the call. The reason? It would be too embarrassing to them if someone got killed while not wearing body armor. Reporters would wonder whether armor was being provided in sufficient quantities and whether the officers even cared about the welfare of the troops. Well, such publicly aired speculation would not be particularly welcome when the officer was up for promotion.

Many of the troops are willing to take the risk, because they believe, for example, that taking down a sniper when you have the chance, is worth it. If you don't catch the guy, he will be back in action the next day, kill[ing] American troops. All this is another example of the fact that "victory" is defined differently, depending on what your rank is.

My father and his fellow draftees of WWII hated the lifers who filled the peacetime ranks. Those people were rigid, unambitious, ineffective, turf-protecting, self-interested, unsympathetic, actually unpatriotic – simply obstructing what the draftees wanted to do: win the war and go home. I imagine he was exaggerating, but I recognize that there had to be some truth to it. The differential selection processes of the two groups guaranteed different priorities. Unfortunately, that is also true of the filters that always separate good officers from those who move up the ladder. The priorities being fed down are not compatible with those that are rising up from the ranks.

For that reason, I have always been an advocate of more democracy in bureaucracies. It's hard to see how that can happen, but another of my father's stories appealed to me in this regard. Officer trainees were required as part of their training to nominate officers from within their own group. The trainees were then evaluated for their choices. If a large number of trainees chose the same person, that person would be, in most cases, promoted. If a trainee nominated someone that no one else nominated, there could be two outcomes. Were the instructors to agree with the assessment, both the nominee and the nominator could be promoted. If they disagreed, then the nominee would be suspected of having poor judgment and treated appropriately. Good judgment was considered a very important attribute. I'm not sure that is always the case today.

So, in light of my double pyramid model, I propose that soldiers (and worker bees in other organizations) should select some representatives from among their numbers, who would meet and select higher levels of representatives, who could then make personnel decisions regarding the lower level officers. They might not involve themselves in operational decisions, but they would act to clarify goals both up and down and to reduce the likelihood of bad officers moving up. Higher level officers would then do the same thing to influence the selection of their own superiors.

Elijah Missed Another Good Meal

2009-04-14T01:09:00.002-04:00

4/9/2009

I was told last night, under a full moon identical to that which shone twenty-eight years ago and fifty-six centuries ago (and on the first day), that the term Israelite means “God-wrestler” and that the face of the angel that Jacob clutched was shockingly his own. The first I think is profound, the second an easy piece of theater, a scoop of tasty symbolism, posing as something important, like the clever answers of the “wise child” who played a brief role in the evening readings.

The door is opened for symbolic invitation. The cup, or cups for some, is placed meaningfully. The careful sequence of mnemonic rituals is thoughtfully played out. The questions and the readings are executed with diligent patience. ... This melange of wisdom and carnival – the product of memetic millennia – provides a degree of satisfied completeness for many of those who do wrestle with the harsh philosophical exigencies of sentient chemistry.

Most, I think, no longer wrestle. They have their pat answers, or they avoid the questions. The suffering, however, continues unabated, sometimes because of those responses, but mostly because that is what Life has to offer.

For myself, I accept neither the pat answers nor the life-affirming stoicism expressed in the words of the evening. The idea that suffering is God's medicine is repugnant to me, for though I recognize its allure, I seek a real cure.

We are not doing well on this planet, not because we are incapable of doing better, but because we will not agree on how to proceed. We are still at the mercy of the current – the thoughtless and heartless process of mechanical social consequences – because we have not yet clasped each others hands to pull ourselves toward firmer land. We have not yet addressed those social processes with a mechanic's paternal detachment. Fix the problem! Don't try to convince yourself it's an illusion.

4/10/2009

The Jeremiahs want us to believe that the ravages of history have been punishments for sinfulness and unbelief. Would a good God do such things, we wonder? If not, he allowed them to happen, and that is most of the reason that people cannot restrain themselves from wrestling with God. But this is not right. Blaming God, if God there be, is counterproductive. I think we need to recognize that most of our suffering is purely self-induced, if not self-inflicted. The things we suffer are neither intentional nor merited, but they come, for the most part, as consequences of our incompleteness and our ignorance. Disasters afflict us because we do not directly address the underlying problems and we do not take the necessary steps to fix the machine.

Why do the armies of Babylon descend upon us, burning the storehouses and breaking the grindstones. They do this because we have not become Babylon and Babylon has not become us. There are no hands linked across that river. In fact, the Israelites could not reliably recognize even themselves as one people, could not participate in their own consensual decision-making without the harsh whip of a ruler to drive them to an imposed unity. Only in exile could they maintain that unity -- by the process of natural selection as much as anything else.

4/12/2009

To be clear, I am not advocating a One World solution on the order of the UN. Wishful thinking is no part of my prescription. I am saying that expecting sovereign nations to solve problems of significant magnitude is just as silly. The model doesn't work. Our failure is a little less depressing than some others, but it is clearly not up to the imminent crises.

We are today little different from the Israelites. We have a Constitution, but we have no trust in each other. The country that represents the best of our hopes is only fifty percent legitimate. People have quarreled with my definition of legitimacy here, considering it to be rather something conferred by outside observers, like a good reputation, but I must persist in stretching it a little to cover a broader frame. The legitimacy of government, I say, is not a legalistic toggle, a decisive status anointed from without. It is rather a continuum of social virtue, measured by the degree of satisfaction, even joy, that members feel in contributing to the whole. Yes, they trusted in David as they would in their kin. And in Solomon. But the power and wealth which always corrupt eventually drove the upper folks away from the lowers. When democracy departs, Fear eventually becomes the ruler. And when the ruled must prove themselves worthy ... yes I am loyal, and I honor the king above all ... then the legitimacy of a government, as I am now defining it, is weak. It is a ruler who should prove loyalty to the people, not the other way around.

Even within a democracy, however, that ideal is only nominally adhered to. Candidates only have to be trustworthy compared to their opponents. It's like the old joke where a man puts on his sneakers to run from lions. “Why,” his friend says, “you can never outrun a lion.” “No,” he replies, “but I only need to run faster than you.”

In a nation such as the US, the political distance between the leaders and the citizens is so great that there is no way to pass truth back and forth. The US was a lot smaller and a lot simpler in the beginning, but I'm not sure the fundamental problem of accurate leadership was ever any easier. The President often tries to “break out of the bubble” to interact with “real” people. It can't be done though. It's like the Truman Show. The lives of leaders in America are completely controlled by the commercial opportunity they represent. If we want to cut through that clutter, we obviously have to install some intermediate steps. Somebody has to collect the honest messages of the people and present them for the rest of us. How can someone be in a place where they understand both the message and the President? The answer is that we have to create those positions, a sort of collective ombudsery. (Maybe I'm advocating an ombudsocracy). Well then, how will that person or persons avoid the same kind of pressure and scrutiny that apply to everyone at such rarefied political levels?

Here's the trick. Let them retain their anonymity. Think of such people as representatives from the Ministry of Magic to the Prime Minister himself. Some sort of shibboleth allowing contact to be made will be necessary. I don't know how Blackberries work, but I'll bet something could be worked out involving public/private code exchanges.

Obama's Bowling Score Aside

2009-03-22T13:30:00.006-04:00

Legitimacy

President Obama has been traveling a lot lately. Even though he has a lot of important projects to attend to in Washington, he is spending the precious coin of presidential time on propping up his favorability numbers. I mean, who cares? Do we really think that the most powerful person in the world should waste time on Peoria? As we all know, the answer is sadly, yes.

If you read economists and business types on the web, you will eventually come to the conclusion that there are more important things than recouping the AIG bonus money. There is no doubt that it is the biggest political sore point, but it is a storm in a teacup. In fact, it may even be counter-productive to pursue a claw-back. It may actually be bad for everybody involved, the nation included. The conservative point of view is that it may also be unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the President has to act as if he's pursuing every last dollar.

The problem here is legitimacy. The President can be elected by a landslide. Every public figure can tell us that they're behind him. He can be praised from the pulpit and the street corner until youtube is overflowing with his praises. And he still won't have the authority to do his job.

We are a very suspicious people, and rightly so. The understanding of the insidious nature of power has been with us since long before George III tried to recapture the divine rights of monarchs. We always think that someone is stabbing us in the back, and then we force them to do it. Obama doesn't want to fool us, but he has to. We won't have it otherwise.

Unfortunately the problems facing him are so challenging that he can't solve them without our complete cooperation, and there are very few tendencies in American life that foster that sort of cooperation. It is for these reasons that we absolutely require an improved version of government. The trust network I have outlined would be able to provide people with the kind of assurances that we require. We would not have to go to the streets for satisfaction. We could go to our designated neighborhood liaison who has already spoken to others. We could ask and understand why things were being done as they are. And we could get suggestions for how to help.

Here is an interesting article, somewhat tangentially related, on the propagation of trust through networks. Do you think we could set up a sort of eBay grading system for politicians and platform planks?

Here's a youtube video that shows how easy it is to fool us. It's also a very good explanation for the housing bubble.

Stardrive

2009-03-09T00:38:00.004-04:00

I have talked about 1) the problem of political distance, 2) the customary and inevitable failures of government as structured today, 3) the nature and nourishment of altruism, and 4) the need for re-engineering our human networks. I have also proposed a plan for improving our system of governance, which I'll elaborate on here.

Here are the basics of my argument:

1) Democracy is a great system but it has some failings. It does not always, or even often, generate the best decisions that the people are capable of. It's certainly better than the various forms of tyranny, but it encourages dishonesty and deception in the political class. It tends to represent dollars rather than people. The political distance between our leaders and our citizens is vast and the channels of communication are too narrow, as well as being entirely too public, too impersonal. Progress on important social goals is constantly impeded by political insurgents of numerous types. Distraction and corruption in high places are common. Concentrated power is a constant danger.

What's good about it? Well, it's competitive like capitalism. The best product generally succeeds. The electoral process tends to filter for self-confident, realistic, sociable, energetic, articulate deal-makers, people who can get things done. If you want to be President, you have to fight your way through a grueling, discouraging, seemingly interminable gauntlet. You have to know how to get people to do what you want. You have to be conversant with the practical world and the possibilities of power. There are, of course, other personal characteristics that allow politicians to succeed, but, in general, we end up with the people who have the ambition and skills to do the job. We get good people, but then the system tries to corrupt them, and certainly corrupts the results of their efforts.

2) Modern society is extremely interconnected, but not all connections are equal. There are strong antidemocratic, anti-egalitarian forces endemic to the Matrix. There are enough ideologues, fanatics, control freaks, selfish people, parasites, con artists, crooks, thugs and liars to keep us all busy dealing with unnecessary suffering, inefficiency and unhappiness. Such disfunctional people degrade the network. They are empowered by our credulity, our ignorance, our isolation and our weakness. Our democratic system addresses the problems, but not adequately. Personal development and maturation reduce the impact for an individual and close associates, but the effects are not widely shared. Police discourage murder, but don't prevent it. Food poisoning and embezzlement still occur. Absurd political decisions persist for decades. Networks ameliorate the impact, but they could do better.

3) The major problems that we face are gridlocked by controversy, but are of such severity and complexity that we cannot continue with the ineffective governance that we have engineered to date. No progress can be made in the current social environment. In particular, I would cite Global Warming and population control. Every direction of approach to these problems is suffused with contentious disputation and hostility. If you don't see this issues as problematic, then I could provide many others, and I imagine you could provide many of your own. How about coordination of responses to the global business environment, or to the spread of religious fanaticism? How about the inability of third world countries to shake off endemic corruption and make economic progress? From my own perspective I would include the repressive and irrational approach to Prohibition, the inadequate control of contagious diseases, the ineffective programs of education for the poor (and everyone else for that matter), the unbalanced distribution of wealth and evolutionary indecision.

4) It is possible to design theoretical improvements to our current methods of governance. Whether such improvements can be implemented, I'm not certain, but I do believe that it is our only hope in the face of otherwise unsolvable existential threats to our civilization. The design improvement that I am espousing is this: Institute a fourth branch of government which is essentially a network of voters' unions, linked together as a bi-directional pyramid structure.

Here are the principle characteristics of the proposed structure:

1)Organization is bottom-up. That is, it evolves from the grassroots as a self-assembled entity. Recruitment creates peers, not subordinates.

2)The units are, with certain specified exceptions, intended to be of equivalent size.

3)The goal of each unit is to achieve consensus, shared understanding and a penchant for unified action. The hope is that multiple units will be able to join through representatives, and achieve a similarly high degree of consensus and mutual understanding.

4)Each unit will have multiple representatives, a specified number, selected by a shared decision of the unit. Every member should be comfortable with every representative. For that matter, every member should be comfortable with every other member.

5)It is the assignment of each representative to adhere to another unit, a group of similar representatives at the next hierarchical level. The goal is to share information, ideas, opinions, plans and decisions among the other representatives and all their associated units, and to coordinate such with the representative's own unit.

6)Each unit should send its representatives to different, ideally dispersed, higher order units, if such are available. And each hierarchical unit should elect representatives to perform in the same manner creating still higher level units until the candidate population is exhausted. By this method, any member of the society could, in theory, have exactly the same upward pyramid of representation. Obviously, at the highest levels, the pyramid closes in on itself, but there will be multiple paths of representation from the top to the bottom.

7)In theory, a representative could be a member at every level in the hierarchy – as a result of being elected to each successive level. I'm not sure how to deal with that problem pragmatically.

8)In practice there will be levels at which members of a unit have irreconcilable disputes, Republicans vs. Democrats, Sunni vs. Shia, Blues vs. Greens. I have several suggestions for addressing that problem. First, encourage members to integrate their ranks at the lowest feasible level. Second, provide more encouragement in the form of bonus representation. If a balanced unit can subsume their differences enough to agree on a slate, then we can assume they are contributing something of particular value. Award them with more influence, an extra representative, whatever it takes. The idea is to promote peacemakers and moderates while focusing on disputes at the retail level. Third, develop methods of trading members, particularly more contentious members, with more appropriate home units.

9)In practice, it may be difficult to attain a quorum. In order to encourage units to form as soon as they are ready, smaller groups should be allowed to form with reduced representation, but per capita representation for substandard group sizes should be lower than for complete units.

10)In practice, it will be a challenge to prevent groups and individuals from misrepresenting themselves. Therefore, a supervising organization should be created to provide passcodes and certifications that allow representatives to prove that they are following the rules. This information should be kept as anonymous and untraceable as encryption technology will allow. Management of the supervising organization is clearly an important and sensitive role, particularly in environments that discourage the freedoms of speech and representation.

11)Initially there will be some difficulty in identifying peers in order to form new units at the higher levels. The supervising organization could be helpful in this regard as well, providing suggested contacts. After a substantial network has been established, such intervention may be less important, as connections can be maintained by inter-personal communication, hopefully improving the level of anonymity.

The purpose of this new branch of government would not be to accumulate or exercise power. As I see it there would be multiple purposes: among them the propagation of 1) information, 2) transparency, 3) trust, 4) and wisdom. Furthermore it would provide omnipresent citizen oversight and the ability to exercise unified power when necessary.. The government would still be the government, but the government would be operating in a new environment. We would understand its actions, and good politicians would be able to reliably explain themselves to the people without undue risk of political sabotage.

Non-Caveat

Is this just another form of Utopianism? I really don't think so. It is actually just the opposite. It starts with the idea that humans are fallible, one of the cornerstone tenets of our democracy, but also that most of us are capable of contributing some small vector of wisdom to the collective thrust of our society. The leadership of these network units would be quintessentially democratic. Their duty would involve only the responsibility to pursue truth and represent it to their best judgment. It doesn't sound very dramatic or romantic, but I believe it would gradually lead to profound and beneficial changes.

The spirit of constructive criticism is not always happy. When they met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, Raine told McEwan: "Listen, love. It's complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it." McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.

The author relates to Zalewski how he came to settle on climate change as the background to his novel in progress. He'd gone walking on a frozen fjord in the Arctic, purely, he insists, for the hiking. He was initially sceptical that global warming was the stuff of novels. Then he saw well-meaning people in his group squabbling over their possessions in the confined space of the boat.

"People were losing stuff, stealing things. Meanwhile, we'd be ... talking about how we were going to save the world. I thought, Ah. The interesting thing here is human nature. Global warming suddenly wasn't an abstract issue, because humans had to solve it - untrustworthy, venal, sweet, lovely humans."
from the Guardian

The Binary Decomposition of Political Distance

2009-03-05T00:09:00.003-05:00

Political Networking Proposals

In the old days, everything was done by means of introductions. If you wanted to talk with a particular person, you needed to play a game of six degrees of separation. Obviously things aren’t so formal these days and the system had its faults. The process of conferring trust from one person to the next left many people out of the social loop and also failed to fulfill its primary objective, which was to promote social interaction and filter out the salespeople and con artists.

A process that evolved among the lower classes for similar purposes grew up in the urban America political machines. You trusted your committeeman and did what he told you to do. If you had a problem, he would deal with it through his network connections. There were obviously numerous problems with that process as well, notably massive corruption at the retail level. That’s what we remember, the elitism of the one and the corruption of the other. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a need for something similar.

What we have today is the converse of those rough political systems. The social networks joining us to our political leaders have become very sparse and unreliable. The unreliability has been induced by competing powers trying to usurp the networks with their partisan messages. The sparseness is a side effect of the success of American culture. Most of us don’t need to interface with political parties any more. We are too busy making our fortunes and dealing directly with our own problems. The economic system protects us from the worst of the political system. The nuclear family is paramount, the political world an afterthought, the concerned citizen a rarity, but we know that neglecting the political system can be risky.

Many people don’t participate in the political process because they don’t understand it. They don’t vote because they don’t know anything about the candidates. A lot of voters take the list of recommendations from the local paper, or the union, or the party regulars. Personally, aside from Bush vs. Kerry, I never have had any problem deciding. Unless I have strong opinions, I always vote against the incumbent or the expected winner, just to make it a little closer. My theory is that there is somebody out there who knows the score. If there is a closer balance, then those knowledgeable people will have more of a chance to make a difference.

But wouldn’t it be better if I could find those people who know the score, and just ask them how to vote. There are two ways I can do this, top down or bottom up. The top down method might involve reading columnists or blogs to find someone I tend to agree with. If I find someone I like, I’ll just take their recommendations. Well it turns out that some of these people might be getting paid to present a certain viewpoint, or they might be disguising their true position for personal or strategic reasons, or they might not know the particulars of my region.

Here’s my proposal for cultivating appropriate political recon specialists. Set it up like a dating service. Let some non-partisan group, like the League of Women Voters, solicit a corps of volunteer political mavens from, say, every congressional district in the USA (they could be bloggers even). Screen them for sanity, and the usual issues, then let them fill out a questionnaire concerning their goals, interests, political aspirations, worldview, etc. (Note that questionnaires can be designed to evaluate responses for honesty.) Members of the public can then respond to a matchmaker questionnaire online in order to decide which of these mavens would be best for them to emulate. The mavens could keep in touch with their fans by means of newsletters or email. The LWV might take it upon themselves to provide additional resources to facilitate interaction and communication.

I’ll talk about more top down ideas and some bottom up approaches in a later post.

6/5/2005 11:51 PM

Effective Human Network

2009-02-11T01:48:00.006-05:00

Now, this guy from NYSE, the one with the Ponzi scheme, he never asked me to invest with him. Did he ask you? No one ever told me about his “system”, if he had one. Nobody tried to sell me. In fact, I suspect that none of his investors even know me. I suspect that none of them even know my name. I'm hurt. Oh, well, I guess I'm better off. ... Besides, I never knew who he was either.

But here's my question. What happened to the Kevin Bacon idea? I know who KB is. I don't think he knows who I am – even though I would be a whole lot more likely to invest with him than with the other guy. But the point is, according to common wisdom, we're connected. And still, he's not soliciting anything from me. He doesn't know me, he doesn't want to know me. He's not interested in my ideas, and sour grapes aside, the feeling is more or less mutual.

Lots of people know who KB is, and some even know every piece of public information that can be found about Kevin Bacon. He's a celebrity, above the crowd, but I have it on good faith that there are six (or maybe seven) degrees of separation, at most, between him and every other Hollywood actor, no matter how ordinary. We could broaden the terms of the connection game and make it between him and everyone else. Do we have to make it eight degrees to get everyone in? The game depends on the fact that connections between Hollywood people are part of the public domain, but for every publicly known connection, there may be thousands of anonymous connections.

Now, if he has kids, maybe they played soccer. My kids played soccer. Their coaches knew a bunch of grown-up soccer players and the league officials (and a bunch of sales reps I bet). Those guys probably know some state officials, who probably know some national officials, who probably know some officials in California, and so on. I'll bet there exists a four-link connection somewhere between my kids and KB's kids. Besides, I know the coaches myself, and I'll bet he does, too. That makes us almost buds. (Coincidence: I saw one of the coaches just this week crossing the street. I also learned a lot about him by seeing where he was. If I pass on that information, he will have no idea where it came from.)

Does Kevin Bacon go to church? Does he travel on commercial airlines? Does he know his congressman? I know a congressman. Hey, I'm not a particularly social person, but I'll bet there are lots of ways, pretty short connections, between me and Kevin Bacon. So, what's the deal? How come he's not hooking me up with a bunch of these Hollywood people?

There are probably short link-chains between just about everyone and everyone else. The world is pretty tightly connected, as the annual wave of flu epidemics should tell you. The flu bug, however, can take advantage of these connections in ways that you or I cannot. Jokes maybe, jokes and flu, that's all we share. The problem is that these networks have rules and filters that prevent and control the traffic. The reason for that is that many people are, like the flu bug, willing to abuse these networks for less than altruistic motives. Memes and viruses can have sharp teeth, and lots of people want to enlist you into their personal Ponzi schemes. If you have anything, or care about anything, then you have to protect yourself, ensconce yourself. So the tribal impulse constantly reasserts itself, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Nevertheless, if you want to solve big problems, the barriers are counterproductive.

Fred Smith, who delivers groceries to old ladies three days a week, has some interesting ideas that, believe it or not, would be useful to several congressmen, a certain epidemiologist, and even Bono. Fred has a creative mind but sort of puts people off with some of his outlandish malarkey. In fact, no one but the old ladies will listen to him any more, and they don't really understand him despite their best efforts. The problem is that the filters placed on Fred are pretty suffocating, unforgiving, and judgmental. Since Fred doesn't know how to explain himself, and no one who could explain him is taking the trouble, then those ideas are just going to have to wait until someone more respectable manages to think of them. I know -- innovation is 99 percent perspiration -- but it is also 90 percent luck and it appears in the oddest places. ... Maybe I could get Kevin to introduce him to Bono.

Fred is not the only one who gets marginalized. My daughter tells me about a young lady who invented and patented the windshield wiper. Her invention was never used, as such, and the implication seems to be that automobile makers could not believe or accept that a woman, much less a young woman, was capable of making such a contribution. Or maybe they just didn't like the idea of sending royalty checks to a woman. She wasn't inside their meme-walls. At any rate, we know what they should have done. They should have pursued the concept and the person. It was a good idea, and more importantly, an original mind is not usually limited to a single idea.

So here's my idea. We want networks that help us build collective intelligence and collective wisdom, that allow us to aggregate the strengths and knowledge of all, but that's not what we have now. Our networks are effective as peer-links. They are capable of passing certain types of information, especially among peers, but they are very poor at distributing trust. They are poor at concentrating veracity and intelligence; they are poor at recognizing the potential of specific pairings, and they are poor at producing enforceable collective decisions.

So I suggest that we redesign our networks to remediate those failings.

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There are many organizations that are effective at concentrating power, which is both a strength and a failing. The caucus is one such organization. Despite great pains taken to prevent what they considered the evil of factionalism, the Framers of the Constitution were unable to prevent the development of groups in Congress from caucusing together. What happens is that members agree to hash out their differences and then vote as a bloc. The normal mode of independent voting would dilute their power by allowing minor differences to erode the collective impact. By committing to unanimous voting within the caucus, the members are insuring that their influence, and the influence of like-minded individuals, becomes predictable and potent.

To understand why the members of a caucus are willing to sacrifice their independence and even vote against their own interests, you have to understand that they are participating in a form of iterated prisoner's dilemma. There is a payoff for cooperating: I am with you guys because I trust you, and because my influence is stronger with you than on my own. I trust your judgment and I believe that, though I must sacrifice on occasion to vote with you, sometimes you will sacrifice to vote with me. If you deviate significantly from that covenant, though, I will punish you by removing myself, and though I might lose influence thereby, you will feel some pain yourselves, especially if I ally myself with your enemies. The pain you feel, or the threat of it, might well cause you to consider my positions and my situation more carefully.

I have written in the past about voters' unions. Somewhat like investment clubs, such groups ask each member to contribute research and opinions toward the collective goal of choosing a candidate. They caucus together. Once a decision has been made, the group acts as a unit, casting a unanimous vote.

Each state in the United States is actually a voters' union within the Electoral College. If a candidate wins by one vote within the state, it will be as if the entire state voted for a single candidate. It enhances the power of a state to influence the national election. But the idea can be generalized upward to groups of multiple states, or downward to groups of voters. States today do not cooperate in this fashion. And, except for special interest groups, neither do voters, but they could.

Some couples I know have a sort of voters' union. They argue together about the candidates. If they can agree, they both vote. If they can't agree, then neither of them votes, essentially saving them the trouble of getting to the polls. A group of three [I'm not supporting Big Love here] could settle things more efficaciously, but more coercively by resorting to majority rule rather than consensus. Since they pool their wisdom as well as their power, I would argue that such groups of three, or a hundred and three, are more likely to make the right decisions than a standalone voter, and more likely to influence others.

The catch is that official balloting is secret -- a very good thing in my estimation -- and that there is no way to ensure that the dissenters are cooperating. The conundrum is that small groups could benefit, in terms of power concentration, by committing themselves to a coercive voting protocol, but there seems no way to implement that regimen in the larger arena.

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The Shiite and Sunni religious parties are feeling cheated over the January election results, not yet finalized. It was bound to happen. They have a perception of their popularity based on fear-elicited responses. Basically, sing our praises or we shoot you, or at least punish you. This is also why many managers are convinced that their employees love them. They hold power. The secret ballot removes the kind of leverage that such social power generates.

The first response of these parties, shocked by their loss of stature, will be to take control of the polling stations and consciously reinsert their influence. I expect they will be thwarted this time. Their second response will be to start lying about their motives and intentions. Their third response will be to concentrate on constituent services, at which point they will have raised themselves up to the level of Tammany Hall or Hezbollah in Lebanon, though perhaps not as influential. Getting beyond that is not easy. We tend to underestimate our own accomplishments in this regard.

The secret ballot is a boon to liberty but is insufficient for promoting trust. It allows you to vote for whomever your wish, but it doesn't protect you from making a bad choice. For one thing, there is still partisan gamesmanship, slate management, demagoguery and outright deception. The long and narrow conduit between the constituents and the leaders is a tempting target to everyone who seeks more influence than a rightful allocation would indicate. Here's the problem: you still do not know the people you are voting for. You do not know what they really intend because they are motivated to lie to you. Beyond that, they are motivated to avoid saying anything that might lose votes. We are consequently misinformed, disinformed and uninformed, which is why we always seem to be voting for the lesser of evils. We cannot distinguish the aberrant intentions of the power-hungry scoundrels from the rational political responses of the earnest public servant. Politicians routinely and necessarily cater to our ignorance and pander to our mistaken views. Since there is no trust and no truth, nothing gets fixed.

In order to increase trust in our elected officials, we need them to tell us things that we don't want to hear. We need them to not care about our vote. But we can only receive such messages from those we already trust implicitly, close associates, family and friends. Politicians can't, in general, have such a relationship with us, but we could in theory establish a personal connection chain from the retail voter to the power agent, in which each pairwise link is imbued with the assurance of personal trust. I might not trust the politician himself, but I trust someone who trusts someone who does. At the same time, I believe that such a chain could and should be sufficiently anonymous that no exterior force can be applied to the effect of distorting the information flow. A bucket brigade of trust and appropriate political deference could serve to solve problems that have been beyond us in the past.

So how can that be arranged? How can a forest of such trees be encouraged to grow? First, political distance can be minimized by using a pyramid scheme. Second, factual variance can be minimized by means of redundancy.

Pyramid schemes have a bad reputation because they have been typically used to distribute false hopes and illusion for the purpose of making money. That's because the pyramid recruits the soldiers rather than vice versa.

Consider the so-called Barack Obama 2.0. This program has a lot of cachet, but I don't believe it is any different from your standard corporate or military reporting structure. It's a pyramid, if not a scheme. Top down, tight span of control, one way flow of information, central command, leadership of each level selected by the higher levels. The lowest level members have virtually no influence, no information processing capacity, no caucus benefits. There is some redundancy, however, because the Internet allows for a lot of crosstalk. Nevertheless, it really should be called Barry's Battalion.

America 2.o

I maintain that information can flow both ways, authority can be delegated upward in a democratic and metered fashion, and trust can be nurtured as a rational outcome of a process rather than an emotional response to charismatic leadership. The secret is to have an upward pyramid. There are three requirements: 1) self-assembling units with regulated size and voting power, 2) multiple leaders elected at each level with instructions to represent the group at separate higher-level units. 3) the willingness of members to assimilate discrepant reports from the multiple representatives and coordinate a unified response.

What I'm proposing is essentially a fourth branch of government, a trust distribution network. In my vision, it works like this: People gather together in groups of choice, say twenty (20) people in each group. These would be friends, or members of a club or congregation -- any collection of folks who know each other and can evaluate each other's strengths and weaknesses. In the course of whatever activity they are engaged in, they also take time to select two (2) representatives on the basis of trustworthiness, reliability, honesty and whatever leadership qualities might be interesting. I think people can do this job pretty well. They know their friends. They might have sent Blogojevich to the State House, but he wouldn't stay on their bowling team for very long. Yes, there are exceptions, but for the most part, the groups will serve as a national filter to concentrate trustworthiness.

The next step is that the representatives should seek out other representatives of the same rank to form new groups at the next level up. Imagine growing neurons, dense and overlapping, each reaching its synapses out in hopes of synaptic intimacy.

One important rule is that two representatives from the same level one group should not be together in the same level two group. That's where the redundancy comes in. If there are enough groups, more and more levels can be built up until the whole country is part of the pyramid. Using the twenty-to-two ratio, each level is 10 percent the size of the previous level. We have, what ... eight degrees of separation between me and the top of the pyramid. Yes? But there is an important point to the rule of two. The length of the link-chain is a problem, but there are multiple link-chains that lead to the top, and each link pair represents a bond of trust, a relationship between two people who understand one another, who have a wideband communication interface. I think that could make all the difference.

There's a lot more that can be said about this pyramid scheme, but I'll let the reader digest what I've said here.

Game theory applied to Obama's Iran policy.

It turns out that Kevin Bacon was inside Bernie Madoff's meme-wall.

.-.-.-.-.-..-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

How to Improve Ourselves

2009-01-03T20:14:00.002-05:00

Many thinking people have come to believe that the solution of long-term social problems is hopeless. Trends, other than technological, are mostly grim. The crux of the failure is apparently that society is composed of all-too-human components. Systems, whether designed or emergent, to coordinate the activities of humans for the community welfare are flawed, full of loopholes that allow or even encourage individuals to undermine the group effort. The Tragedy of the Commons is a summary description of that discouraging viewpoint. The tragedy is that there's a little bit of free-rider in every one of us, the most well-meaning of us, each chiseling out a little more from the shared wealth than we ought to. Eventually the commons deteriorates into uselessness. The Invisible Hand, much admired though it be, appears to be, ultimately, a pickpocket.

More often than not, we watch impotently while public goods projects are starved and parasitized. Everyone laments these losses and rancorously blames the most blatant abusers, but we all partake of the looting, if only indirectly. Bridges fall, hospitals close, truants and old veterans roam the streets, not because we don't care, but because we don't feel compelled to pay our dues in full -- at least, not until Tuesday.

So, if no one, or at least too few, will do those things which are obviously needed, how can we ever solve collective problems? The problems themselves are much discussed and daunting … War, Warming, Want and Waste among them. The cures all require that everyone contribute and sacrifice, which, as we know, runs counter to human tendencies. There is always a Hitler to occupy the Rhineland, and always a Chamberlain to wring his hands over it. There is always a Patient Zero who heeds not the consequences. And always, the Band Plays On. We don't want to be in the Band, but somehow we are.

In fact, many problems are actually solved, which serves as a kind of evolutionary filter. When we actually solve a problem, the problems that remain are necessarily harder to deal with. The character of the remaining problem set is, by natural selection, more perfectly designed to remain just beyond our grasp and just beyond our understanding. As the pressure of population growth expands the importance of our remaining problems, the tools in our social toolkit begin to reach their point of diminishing returns. Capitalism, for instance has shown its power and flexibility far beyond what we could have expected a century ago, but its faults are intruding themselves more and more objectionably into thwarting our naïve attempts at staightforward progress. Ditto democracy. Alternatives, such as bureaucracy, co-ops and emergency rule, have been helpful within narrow domains and circumstances, but suffer from the same loss of sharpness due to overuse and misapplication. The changes we need have to be more global and flexible ... and transcendent as well.

God forbid that we focus on any more Utopian approaches, but there is no doubt that collective action is required, sacrifice is required, altruism is required. Unfortunately, everything we see and everything we have learned -- about economics and the natural world -- tells us that systems of cooperation must function on the basis of mutually beneficial payoffs. The inadequacies of such systems, the apparently irreducible negative externalities, have led us to question the possibility for any sizable mass of individuals to act outside of the short-term personal interests of each member. The collective problems are severe, apparently insurmountable, and the required modifications to the Mechanism do not seem to possible ... Despair hangs heavy on the land.

Yet, there are situations where we do see good things happening. Sacrifices do occur. Common purpose does motivate. ... We see people giving their kidneys to perfect strangers. Masses of volunteers spontaneously come to the aid of catastrophe victims. People help others on occasion for no rational reason. People even forgive their enemies from time to time. There are times when we can be proud of ourselves and even entertain hope.

Remarkably, it is known that even animals help each other. Cooperation in nature appears everywhere. Animals have been known to help members of other species. Pilot whales lead ships into harbor. Dolphins hold sailors up in the water. Individual dogs, certainly, have sacrificed their lives for humans without hesitation.

The unexpectedness of such generosity gives rise to what is known as the "Problem of Altruism", a designation that indicates the difficulty scientists have in explaining it. It cannot be denied. People obviously do good deeds. They sometimes do good deeds when no one is watching. And societies can actually reform and infrastructure can be maintained. Sometimes good things come out of bad. The fact that people do bad things to further their selfish goals does not negate the surprising prevalence of beneficence.

So, given what we think evolution is about, why has such folly not been eliminated by natural selection? The Problem of Altruism has been one of the most intractable conundrums in science ever since Darwin. If we start from the hypothesis that successful reproduction is the only metric that matters, then how can we explain what actually happens? Nature Red in Tooth and Claw is there, but not everywhere.

Theorists have, however, managed to explain some of these anomalies in the natural world. Sometimes there is a payoff that we can't see. The honeyguide leads people to the beehives not for human benefit, but to harvest the larvae and beeswax after the humans leave with the honey.

Sometimes the payoff is in plain sight, but you have to look at the genetic point of view. A male spider or Praying Mantis may sacrifice its body for the benefit of the female. The important recipient of that gift, however, is the next generation. These males are helping to feed their genetic offspring. Genes that induce this behavior might therefore propagate more quickly than those that don't. It depends, it seems, on the likely subsequent reproductive success of the prospective fathers. If they can expect to mate again, they will not be likely to engineer such a sacrifice, although the female might still find it attractive.

Honeybees, even more strangely, will not only sacrifice themselves for the defense of the hive, but also sacrifice their ability to reproduce. Although many cells do the same thing within our bodies, it is puzzling to us that an independent organism could evolve such a sacrifice. Once again, it turns out that the Selfish Gene explains the quirk. Just as we do whatever we can to help our children, honeybees do whatever they can to help the queen. They help the queen reproduce because they are closely related to the queen. Any specific gene of the worker, shared by the queen, is more likely to propagate itself through the collective effort than through independent individual effort. Any gene, therefore, that enhances the collective effort, whether at the expense of the individual or not, will reproduce more quickly and saturate the population of hives. That's the gist of it, anyway. The real situation is apparently a little more complex, but the logic applies broadly.

Among humans, the degree of relatedness is used to explain the extent of altruism. I'm not sure how well it works, though. Once again we are stymied by the fact that humans will help their brothers, but they will also help their cousins, their friends, and a wino down the street who will never, can never, return the favor.

Birds will do the same for each other. One of the favorite pastimes of small birds is to chase large birds. I have myself seen a group of arctic terns actually pecking the flesh of a large eagle while in flight. I have seen tiny birds attack a group of crows. Perhaps this is not as dangerous as it looks, but it certainly represents an opportunity cost. Wouldn't it be more profitable for a given bird to spend its time searching for food and letting the other guy do the community service? Mobbing, as this is called, was often explained in the past as providing a collective benefit. Somehow, the group gets rid of a predator and the group receives the benefit. Unfortunately, the concept of group evolution, in the sense that a group reproduces more quickly if members contribute to a shared benefit, has always attracted skepticism. How could shirker genes be excluded? Game theory would seem to vitiate such an explanation.

A more credible idea suggests that there is a "dilution" effect regarding the group action.
Schooling fish supposedly produce synchrony behavior in order to dilute the risk to any particular individual. A shark will be confused and will not be able to track a single individual if the individual does not break ranks. Bison males can keep the wolves at bay by presenting a united rank of horned heads, like a phalanx of Greek Hoplites. The more individuals who participate, the lower the risk to any of them. Individuals could be seen then as engaging in group activity only to lower their own risk.

Mobbing behavior, however, seems to refute that analysis. Why not hang back? Why no synchrony? I have even seen a lone bird "mobbing" a larger bird. There is no apparent benefit for a bird to count coup against the raptor enemy. Then why do they do it? Why do humans do it for that matter? Well, we do it for glory, for prestige, for the self-satisfaction, I suppose … for the political advantage, we might say. And such advantages pay off, among humans, whether we care to admit it or not, by increased wealth and, more importantly, access to superior breeding opportunities.

The Handicap Principle suggests that animals advertise their fitness to prospective mates through signals that are resistant to counterfeit. Size of a male, perhaps might indicate health. Bright colors, of a particular sort, might be proof of a strong metabolic system, capable of producing a large yield of expensive coloring agent, and it might also indicate the absence of negative factors such as parasites. Certain male baboons in colder climates have a bright patch of exposed skin on their chests. Blood circulation makes it bright. The larger and brighter the patch is, the more evidence it provides that the animal is resistant to cold weather. If he is strong, he can afford to waste massive amounts of thermal energy. Likewise, the female evolves to look for those certificates because her reproductive success depends ultimately on the fitness of, not just herself, but also her mate.

Inconveniently long tails or extravagant plumage indicate that a male bird is strong enough to grow it and carry it, and quick enough to evade predators despite the handicap. Mobbing, in this view, is pursued most fiercely by those who are most capable -- for the explicit purpose of showing off. It is an opportunity for demonstrating fitness. And by the way … it achieves a public good.

Perhaps it is this Handicap Principle that has driven people toward altruism. We show our fitness by sharing our surplus with others. By promoting those around us, we are probably promoting some of our own genes as well.

The Potlatch tradition among the Kwakiutl (the formal designations have apparently changed since my undergraduate days) Indians of the Pacific Northwest is one of the more extreme manifestations of this process. A family calls many guests together for a feast. Among the various celebrations associated with this tradition is a profligacy of gifting. The family, at least in the past, would spend itself into bankruptcy. (I've seen something close to this on the Main Line, but it involves more alcohol.) It seemed so wasteful to European eyes, that the custom was outlawed in Canada for many years. So why do they do this? The required answer from the standpoint of natural selection is this: they gain something of equivalent or greater worth than that which they give up.

So let's forgo the usual piety about harmony and spiritual blessings. A good family can give a righteous potlatch repeatedly. They know how to throw a good party and they know how to accumulate the necessary wealth. It’s an unfakeable signal of fitness. The fact is that, besides aiding the poor, the family with the best potlatch gets the most prestige. Prestige translates to numerous survival perks, but it also leads to, for the members of the honored families, superior mating opportunities.

But just how far will they push it? Well, logically there is a payoff matrix which characterizes the process. If they don't push it far enough, they lose prestige and are excluded from some of the better mating opportunities. If they push it too far, they have exhausted themselves for an inadequate genetic payoff. Natural selection will tend toward the optimal payoff, the point where their errors will fall symmetrically around the peak payoff point. That is, the people will be genetically and socially programmed to push their extravagance just far enough. But it's a competitive sport, of course. Each generation will have to push just a little farther in order to outshine their genetic competitors. (If you are offended by the notion of human genetic differences, please feel vindicated by the fact that interbreeding is quick to dilute such effects, and furthermore, culture is part of a person's selectable inheritance.)

[My personal genetic strategic avatar would be Freeloader. Get fat and happy and learn to attract mates through stealthier methods.]

Game theory has become a very interesting experimental science in recent years. I say, "experimental", because ideas can now be tested, much in the manner of climate modeling, by simulating well-defined strategies in a software environment of stripped-down logic. A recent article in Nature, a very important article in my relatively unschooled estimation, published under Letters on July 10 of this year, exemplifies the game theory simulation approach, dramatically explaining the evolution of cooperation within a spectrum of environmental parameters. I don't know whether the authors, Santos, Santos and Pacheco, are far out in front of this field, but they address the problem of altruism from the viewpoint of social networks in some very interesting ways.

They are looking at a version of the iterated N-person Prisoner's Dilemma called the Public Goods Game (PGG). Will people contribute to the general welfare when they can obtain the benefit anyway, and when they know that others might well pay for it? ... Apparently they will. If individuals fail to cooperate, they stand a risk of being "punished" by losing, first of all, their portion of the collective benefits associated with a given Public Good (and by foregoing the opportunity to reproduce within the structure of the simulation). The crucial insight in this study is this: When there are overlapping networks of such game-based interactions, where the networks have various realistic attributes of diversity and the individuals have diverse resources, in those cases, the evolution toward cooperative strategies is dramatically accelerated by the simple expedient of recognizing "good will". That is, by using a programmed punishment/reward strategy which evaluates any contribution of a competing individual as "cooperation", a community will evolve, within the model, to become more successful and will quickly exile defectors to the margins.

The implications for the study of altruism are extremely important. For one thing, it becomes apparent that a reasonably accurate depiction of social networks can lead to entrenched patterns of good behavior without any explanation based on the Handicap Principle or any clear genetic advantage. This idea is, at last, a believable explanation here for those “better angels” that we have always seen in our natures.

But we also have here a prescription for the cultivation of altruism. What do these experiments imply about public policy? If we need collective altruism to solve collective problems, how can we promote the desired behavior?

First, I think, we must fight local anonymity. We must encourage the development of richly joined overlapping social networks where people are known to one another and are generally expected to contribute, not necessarily a lot, but whatever they can reasonably afford. We need to encourage social structures where people have an identity, a reputation and a collective interest.

Does this prescription necessarily follow from the putative social richness of the model? I think so. It conforms to what I have always thought anyway, and it's easy for me to read confirmatory evidence into tangentially related material. I'm hoping for more research to support my agenda, of course. Meanwhile, Nature also has an article on group selection in the Darwin issue from November 20, 2008.

Interview with Amotz Zahavi

Honest Signaling Theory

Discussion of Tragedy of the Commons

Fairness among primates

NoBama

2008-07-01T00:01:00.003-04:00

As a supporter of Hillary, I have found Obama people to be particularly nasty. The zealotry and self-certain smugness of some of these people verges on frightening. The New York Times is reporting that many Clinton supporters have had their Blogger blogs shut down with a message about spam violations. Nixonian dirty tricks. And that's all I have to say about that.

Obama's Appeasement Strategy

2008-05-22T19:00:00.002-04:00

Barack Obama's indirect acknowledgement that he believes in appeasement has earned him some negative attention in the right blogosphere, but he is not necessarily wrong in his insistence that his approach deserves more respect than it is usually accorded. Appeasement got its bad name from Churchill and his allies who were upset about Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938. The agreement was that England would acquiesce to Hitler's lebensraum requirements in Czechoslovakia, allowing him to annex the Sudetenland, or German-speaking portions of that county, in exchange for only a promise. Churchill said it was akin to feeding a crocodile in the hopes that it will eat you last.

Churchill's implicit assessment here is that Hitler was an unreliable partner for any agreement and that his behavior could not be changed in a useful direction by any compromise that was offered. But how did he know that? I'm with Churchill here, but not everyone is. Apparently it has now become fashionable to speculate that World War II was unnecessary, or at least inferior to some possible alternatives. I don't know whether Chamberlain shared this assumption, but there could have been any number of reasons why he adopted the appeasement strategy. The kindest take is that Chamberlain hoped that Hitler was honorable but knew that the British were unprepared to fight. The right strategy in that case would be for Chamberlain to pretend to believe, hiding his fear and guile. Perhaps, Time would be more his friend than Hitler's. Hitler would, for a while at least, be mollified and turn his attentions elsewhere. Unfortunately, Chamberlain squandered the extra time by sticking with cronies and excluding Churchill from power. And in all likelihood, Chamberlain was not faking. He was, at least in my opinion, simply self-deluded, thinking that the best hope for avoiding war was to avoid any appearances of preparing for war. Understanding Hitler as we do at this remove of time, it is hard to forgive Chamberlain. Revisionism aside, it was a mistake … but others havemade the same mistake – with Stalin, with Castro, with Putin, with Arafat. Arguing to the contrary, however, there have been cases where it wasn't a mistake – with Sadat, with Gorbachev … who else? It can happen.

My real concern here is the nature of appeasement, and that brings me to Game Theory. International relationships often correlate well with a peculiar game called the Prisoner's Dilemma. In this game, modeled after the situation of captured criminals, A is paired with a B, a partner in crime. A does not trust B, but depends on B's cooperation. For a given iteration of the game, A is confronted with a single choice. Not knowing what B will do, A can take either a take cooperative or a hostile position with respect to B. The payoffs are these: If both cooperate, both do tolerably well. If they are equally hostile, both do poorly. If the responses are asymmetrical, i.e. under the condition of betrayal, then one prospers and the other does poorly indeed.

A typical strategy of responses can either be blind or triggered. Hitler's strategy was blind. He just took what he wanted. His strategy was blind to the benefits of cooperation. An alternative blind strategy might be randomized choices, where cooperation and hostility are played without regard to the partner's actions. Another blind strategy is to always cooperate. It works quite well in a cooperative world. But in a mixed or hostile world, it could be called by another name – "surrender". Ask yourself this, can an eloquent speech in the House of Commons turn a hostile world into a cooperative world?

The other large class of response strategies is "triggered". That is, you respond to your partner's actions. The actions of your partner, determine your next choice. This strategy could contain a random element, and it could certainly be ineffective or counter-productive. It could be wimpy or punitive. To be effective, your strategy, most likely, will involve some sort of punishment for the partner's previous betrayal. The Grim Trigger strategy, for instance, switches from cooperative to hostile forever once hostility is detected. A modified form would revert to cooperation once the partner had "paid" for the first betrayal by losing every advantage that had been gained. Further modifications involve the number of betrayals before punishment is invoked and the number of gestures of good faith which are needed to get out of the doghouse.

According to game theorists, the optimal strategy, over a wide domain of assumptions and reward schedules, is a triggered strategy called "Tit-for-Tat". This means that you respond to every hostile play with a subsequent hostile response, and every cooperative play with a subsequent cooperative response. This is the method most widely practiced by governments and their tedious diplomats. If you put missiles in Turkey, I'll put missiles in Cuba. If you arrest a spy, I'll arrest a diplomat and call him a spy. The benefit of this system is that two partners playing this strategy will benefit consistently. The trouble with this system is that it can lead to a negative spiral. People can forget who started it and get locked into reciprocal hostility. You have a Hatfields-and-McCoys situation where people have forgotten the original crime and maintain a regimen of hostility for no reason beyond tradition.

This is where appeasement comes in. If sometimes you vary from the algorithm by offering an olive branch, you might be able to break out of the cycle. Turn the other cheek. Give peace a chance. Forgive and forget. … Appeasement strategies might involve ignoring the first hostile move, or even more than one – Tit-for-Two-Tats, perhaps. Jesus suggested that seven times was not enough. It depends on relative costs. It depends on specific situations. And it depends on seeing through the clinical world of game theory for the emotional aspect of the situation, if such a thing can truly be. Can't we be friends, we might ask. These slack, forgiving strategies, in the real world, are probably more effective that Tit-for-Tat, simply because a lot of perceived hostility is simply miscommunication. Good judgment allows us to be more forgiving. And some hostility, for that matter, is mere posturing for the home audience.

So,any strategy more responsive than "surrender", but less rigorous than Tit-for-Tat, can be considered a form of appeasement. That covers a lot of area, and requires a lot of careful calculation based on some true insight.

And that's where Obama comes in. He does not share the widespread assumption that Iran is uniformly and unrepentantly hostile. He might be right. Now, if Iran is actually on some sort of reasonable trigger protocol, how do we convince them to slack off? Do we punish them or placate? Since we don't talk with them, do we even know what they want? It depends on whether you've been watching.

I'm of the opinion that the powers-that-be in Iran are incapable of responding to any peace overtures. Even monumental demonstrations of good-will, such as Israel displayed by ceding Sinai to the Egyptians and Gaza to the Palestinians, will be ineffective with Iran, just as they were with Hamas, just as they were with Hitler. But, I could be wrong. Obama could be right. Unless Hillary can pull a rabbit out of a hat, I think we're going to find out. Let's hope for the best.

Tags: Appeasement, Obama, Hitler, game theory, tit-for-tat

Iraq and Recession

2008-01-31T15:03:00.000-05:00

"The Iraq war is a sucking chest wound on the American economy."

Kiko's House has a post essentially blaming the recession on Iraq. My response tries to put things into perspective.

Your thoughts mesh nicely with those of Paul Kennedy who points out that serious wars are generally won by the side with the biggest GDP. IMO, the big problem in Iraq is the dollar kill-ratio.

If we fought with the Soviet Union, it was pretty much straight up -- dollar for dollar. Whatever we spent, they had to match. At least, that's the CW on Reagan's success against them. The USSR ran out of money before we did.

In the case of asymmetric warfare, the money is the most asymmetric part of it. Force projection is very expensive. Any action on the other side of the planet is going to drain us. But this is worse because each dollar the enemy spends must be matched by some large number of dollars on our part. My swag is that the battlefield kill-ratio is at least 20 to 1 for sunni types. I heard much higher in anti-Sadr actions early on. Maintaining that ratio is expensive, but, I think you would agree, worthwhile.

My guess for the dollar kill-ratio, however, is that it is much higher. Let's just venture that it's $1 to $10,000. So every time we drop a meg worth of bombs, the enemy can match it with equal effectiveness using a hundred dollars worth of IED. The problem is that they are getting it. We have been giving it to them! We are paying for both sides in this war. It is extremely hard to keep the huge flow of petro-dollars from dripping a little bit into their hands. The Islamic "charities" are not helping either.

Our strategy, as far as I can tell, is now to emphasize the CLCs, who operate on a dollar-dollar basis against the AQ forces. Every dollar we give them that gets used against AQ saves us 10,000. Penetration is what matters here. How many of the dollars are directed correctly?

Now, to the question of whether we can afford it, remember that the war represents a fraction of our national debt. At two trillion, the per capita cost of the war is about $6,000 spread over, let us say, ten years. How much do you suppose we spend on SUV's? In other words, this is not the cause of our economic problems. Note also that much of the war money churns back into our own economy, upgrading, to a degree, generalizable skills and facilities, and keeping people employed.

IMO, our economy has been stung, not by the war, but by corrupt financial activity extending over a decade, causing extensive and pervasive misallocation of housing resources. This folly was also funded, or at least encouraged, by our own government. Please tell me, which party is the anti-bubble party?

Tags: Iraq War, Recession, Kiko's House, Economic Bubble

Fred Reed's Fulminations

2008-01-02T15:35:00.000-05:00

Here is a delightful rebuttal (click on article #380) to my previous post. Fred Reed has written an article that attacks Ralph Peters' pieties about war. This is the first time I've seen anything by Fred Reed. He reminds me of a comedian, George Carlin or Lenny Bruce or even Mark Twain. He's not a happy camper and he's absolutely right about the world and how it works.

Ralph of course speaks of the sacrifices our boys are making. They aren’t making sacrifices. They are being sacrificed. Sacrifices are voluntary, but if the troops decline to fight, they go to jail. The mechanics go this way: Having an all-volunteer army minimizes objections to the war since no one of any influence has to go; if a lot of high-school grads from Tennessee are getting killed, well, it’s not a good thing of course, but who really cares? This facilitates hobbyist wars. A voluntary army is a small army, so you have to send the same troops for tour after tour until they are half-mad and their families wrecked. Who cares? They are just rednecks anyway—not our sort of people, nobody a general would let his daughter date.

He is absolutely right about the disgraceful behavior and general stupidity of our leaders, and, in particular, our way of staffing the military, the whole national chickenhawk movement. What he is wrong about, however, is fundamental. Our governance is in fact superior to most other places. Whatever our faults and moral failings, the US is up against other forces which are even more reprehensible. You only have to look at the deteriorization of Iran and the once productive Southern Rhodesia, for example, to realize that unseating the evildoers is insufficient to bring about a happy outcome. You can't walk away from these things just because you know that your own motives aren't pure. The vacuum will be filled. And the place from which the vacuum is filled is far worse that we are, far worse perhaps than you can imagine. Let's take Pakistan as our recent example on that.

We owe it to ourselves to listen to and internalize the message that Fred Reed is sending, but I believe Ralph Peters is wiser and closer to the proper policy perspective. If you can read only one, go for Ralph.

Tags: Iraq, Ralph Peters, war myths, Fred Reed, moral high ground, chickenhawk

Words I Wish to Hear from Bush

2007-12-13T02:36:00.000-05:00

The South of Iraq has suffered from a triple car-bomb attack, killing many. In all likelihood we will soon have evidence that the perpetrator is Iran. Bill Roggio at the LongWar Journal thinks so. Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club agrees.

If we find the smoking gun, there will still be nothing we can do, but there are many things we can say. I have given up hoping for George Bush to become a Great Communicator, but if I could put words in his mouth, here is what I would have him say when the time comes.

Bush Address I Hope to Hear -- to the Nation Concerning Iraq and Iran

Fellow citizens, I'm addressing the nation today in order to share with you some of my concerns, concerns that will naturally be inherited by the next administration. I have spoken before about the need to defend ourselves, not when the danger is before us, but well before a threat becomes imminent. That remains the policy of this administration. It is, unfortunately, not an easy task to understand such threats, and it is not always clear what we should do about such threats when they become known. Uncertainty bedevils us. The various intelligence groups that struggle every day with the need to interpret clues and information gathered throughout the world often disagree with one another and advocate contrary course of action. I, as President, must sometimes make hard decisions, as I, and Harry Truman before me, have told you before. The buck stops here.

But that is not the subject that I want to bring before you today. We have a case before us where the facts are clear, the data is certain, the perpetrator identified. No substantial questions arise in the minds of my advisors. A foreign entity has deliberately attacked, killing and wounding scores of men women and children. We were confused at first, but now we know who did it. But the reason I am discussing this issue today is that the people attacked were not US citizens. They were not Americans. They were not members of our armed services. The people that were killed and wounded were citizens of an ally of ours, the democratic state of Iraq. Forty lives were snuffed out in the the southern city of Amarah on December 13, at the marketplace – because of nothing they did – purposely, and without justification. We imagine, though we don't know for sure, that the intended purpose was to manipulate Iraqis into blaming someone other than those who are truly responsible. It's a common tactic in war and on the playground. The bully strikes someone from behind and then blames it on an innocent individual who has somehow fallen short in the eyes of the bully. It's a tactic that often works, but not in this case, because we know who did it.

The foreign aggressor responsible for this heinous act is, you might have guessed by now, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or rather its leaders, the Mullahs and President Ahmoud Amahdinejad. If this attack were made against the people of the United States of America, I would not be standing before you, asking that you understand my concerns. Knowing what we now know, I would be in the Situation Room, and we would be at war.

It was not against us. No Americans or American service members were killed or wounded. And I am not suggesting, certainly not hoping, that this will lead to war with Iran. The Iraqis do not have the luxury, at this point, of retaliation. And we will not do it for them -- at least not yet and not now. What I am doing is presenting the facts to you and asking you to think about them in the context of our ongoing struggle, our struggle against the evil practices of Terror. Consider what it is that we should be doing. Let us reflect. Let us reflect together about the weight and import of our actions since 9/11. Let us consider the evil that we face, the evil practice of unmitigated terror that we have seen emanating from certain fanatic groups in the Middle East.

In this particular case it is not some shadowy group hiding among the people, lurking in the dark. It is not a loose network of deranged extremists, citizens of nowhere, welcome nowhere. It is an identifiable nation, a coherent and powerful entity with all the resources that a state can muster. We have seen the hand revealed – that of a nation that is using terroristic violence as an extension of its foreign policy.

There are those who claim that we are no different. They point to incidents of misbehavior or mistaken behavior and claim that the US is the evil one. … At the beginning of my presidency I identified three nations as belonging to an Axis of Evil. … Do you believe I was wrong? Do the American people believe that America is truly the evil one? … There are many doubts in this world, because the world is a confusing place, but Americans know, deep down, that the central animating spirit of America is suffused with goodness.

I can't begin to tell you how many actions of goodness and valor have come to my attention since I have taken on the burden of this office. I know, and I believe you know too, that we are indeed an exceptional people, trying to do the right thing as best we can. We have many allies that support us in this effort in their various capacities, for which we are very grateful. Someday soon, sooner than you might imagine, Iraq will be among those who support the cause of justice and peace in this world, and it will be strong in the Spirit of Truth and Decency.

That transformation would not have been possible if we had not taken the necessary actions. And sadly, there are always necessary actions to contemplate. The consequences of our actions are these: The sorry state of Saddam has passed from this world, never to return. It has been replaced by a nation directed by honest freedom-loving people who are willing to fight for their freedom. I pledge, today, that we will continue to help the Iraqi people in whatever way we can, and in whatever way that we believe can serve the cause of Justice.

We have already done too much, some of you might say. The evil is too entrenched, the confusion too widespread. To you I say, we have done a good deed here – a hard one, to be sure – but a good deed nonetheless. And we will stand with the Iraqis as long as necessary, against all the cruel and devious forces of evil that confront them. Until one day, all of America can truly come home and stand under a banner that says, "Mission Accomplished!"

May God bless the United States of America and may God bless you all, and may God bless and defend the democratic nation of Iraq.

Tags: Amarah, Qods, Axis of Evil, carbombs, mission accomplished

Anthropomorophic Thoughts on Social Engineering

2007-08-07T00:32:00.000-04:00

While biking one day this summer, I saw two deer crossing the road in front of me … gracefully, quietly, carefully. Around here deer are considered pests, but I still feel honored to see them. As the lead deer cleared the fence on the far side of the road, it turned its head back and seemed to signal the second, who then crossed quickly. I thought they were friends, maybe, looking out for one another. Wait, I said to myself, I’m reading too much Harry Potter lately. These are not people. Don’t anthropomorphize.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I got into my car and turned the radio on, there was that word again. NPR was talking about baboons. “We try not to anthropomorphize,” said the primate scientist. He thought it was all right to do so for generating hypotheses, but such thoughts have to be tested experimentally. As he described his somewhat fiendish experiments with baboon psychology and the nature of baboon culture, I was anthropomorphizing like crazy and it wasn’t making me happy.

Baboons live in large groups with ferocious pecking orders. The female pecking order is rigidly hierarchical based on status at birth. It is enforced by all the relatives of the high-ranking females. None can successfully avoid or challenge it. Males, however, leave the tribes after maturity to find a new tribe where they will have to fight for their positions in a dynamic pecking order. Aggression is the coin of that realm, and it doesn’t sound like much fun either.

I thought to myself, being an anthropomorphizing fool, “Why the hell don’t they just leave?” I mean, I couldn’t stand it. If you find yourself being picked on – and everyone gets picked on by the next one up – why don’t you just get with a few low ranking pals, grab a few low-ranking females of the foxy baboon persuasion, and make for parts unknown? I remember reading about the fossilized hominid footprints, a single male and female, possibly with a child, walking through the outskirts of recently fallen volcanic dust. I found that very appealing. Why wouldn’t it be appealing to baboons?

The answer of course is that baboons have their own priorities. Maybe they don’t mind being part of a hierarchy. Maybe they enjoy it like we enjoy football. Plus, I imagine the large groups enhance survival when there are leopards and who-knows-what all about. Not that I’d like to face off a lion with a baseball bat or anything, but I imagine it’s a little harder when stick technology hasn’t appeared yet. Baboons defend the tribe from predators by massing phalanxes of males, armed formidably with fangs and claws and numbers. Since baboons are not all that large, compared to the potential predators, smaller numbers might be insufficient.

Pecking orders appear among all types of animals, including the human variety. The typical explanation is that it is a mechanism to cut down on fighting. Since we already know the outcome, why should we take a chance of getting injured? So the pecking order is good for the individual and good for the group. The downside, however, is that reproductive success probably correlates with the position in the pecking order. I have heard that high-ranking females sometimes kill the offspring of low-ranking females among Chimpanzees. I suspect it’s the same with baboons.

It seems to me more likely that hierarchies persist for simple self-perpetuating reasons – because they can. Any gene that increases the tendency to protect the rank of family members will thereby further its reproductive success. From a gene’s point of view, allowing the low-ranking females to propagate uses up resources that could be used for propagating high-ranking genes. So why don’t they just drive the low-ranking females away? Well, aside from the real risk involved in such a confrontation, it may be very hard to do. The outcasts would hang on for dear life and could not be strategically severed completely. They would take measures to ingratiate themselves or they might try to detach some of the males. Therein lies the real reason that the elites don’t drive the low-rankers away. They need a large troop of females to attract the males, and they need the males for defense as well as reproduction.

Now, why would the males want to leave? As Americans we probably relate better to that aspect of baboon culture. The stultifying hierarchy of the females seems unfair and depressing. The freewheeling one-on-one competition of the males is, at least, more fair. I can see why they would want to leave. But why do they leave? Well, they need to maintain genetic diversity, avoid inbreeding. Seems sensible, but why do they leave? Well, like maple seeds the opportunities for long-term survival of their genes improves by rapid dispersion. OK, but that applies to all genes. Why do they leave? Why not the females as well?

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The answers you get can be centered on the individual, the group/tribe or the gene, but there is another way of looking at it. There is an information processing perspective as well. The hierarchies accomplish something. The female hierarchy preserves the historical story of the baboon environment. The male hierarchy processes new messages, carrying new and more accurate information up the priority queue. In this view of the world, the species represents an increasingly accurate map of the environment.

So the obvious question: if it’s a map, could we read it? Could we ever get to the point where we could look at a code, transcribe it to a computer perhaps, and ascertain the many aspects of baboon life from a purely analytic approach? I don’t think so, for the following reason: natural selection is more holographic than graphic. It works on every aspect of the creature at once, distinguishes every kind of genetic, epigenetic, and autocatalytic capacity that the creature has access to – genes, germs, memes and worms – including many dimensions, I suspect, that we have not yet discovered and some that we may not be able to discover. The gene, itself, as well as other replicators, is really only a symbiont. And, in essence, the only way to transcribe its code is with another baboon, bred and raised within a historically uninterrupted society of baboons. Likewise the information processing structure of a troop of baboons can be transcribed only in context. And this is what we mean by organic.

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So what good is it to speculate that the social arrangements of baboons serve as an information processing structure with the honed evolutionary purpose of optimizing the environmental tracking? Since we have no real way of reading the structure, what can we gain? The answer is that we can simulate it in stripped down computational terms. Similar approaches, using chaos theory for example, have allowed us to simulate the mass performance of a flock of birds. Without being able to predict the movement of a single bird, or any given flock, we can produce a computer generated group performance using very simple mathematical rules. And the result is a flowing, swooping burst of lifelike beauty. It doesn't predict anything at all, but it captures our instinct of the movement. It looks right.

In addition to simulation there is also emulation. We recognize that the baboon system is self-sustaining and powerful in the baboon context. We also know, however, that the human system is not self-sustaining and not particularly effective at solving human problems. So, taking the concept of organic information processing to heart, let us design a system which will work to organize the memetic turmoil of our own species into a functioning optimizer that is capable of subsuming the sum total of the human environment into manageable data flows. If we keep clear in our minds the characteristics of these kinds of structures, perhaps we can piece together some non-contradictory components that will actually work.

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What, then, might be a human analog for these parallel hierarchies? I think first of Jared Diamond’s assessment of Medieval Europe as a set of separated fiefdoms lots of little contentious tribelike, each copying one another and trying to outdo one another. Due to geography there was enough cross-pollination to keep things growing and enough separation to allow independent development. Innovations could develop, be tested and spread themselves to the next valley. If one tribe fell far enough behind, the others replaced them, consumed and removed them. Learn quick or disappear. Europe was tracking its environment through experiment, change and natural selection. The end result was Science, Enlightenment, Democracy and the US Constitution.

China at the same time was a vast hierarchy, a simple tree structure dependent on a single root. It was awesomely equipped to execute the will of a single individual dedicated to a single way of life. When that individual directed China to explore the world, then China amassed a great fleet of discovery, a treasure fleet such as had never been seen before. And when that individual decided to turn China in on itself, progress ended. Change ended, and China slowly deteriorated. People merely had to conform to the wishes of those above them in the pecking order. Innovation had no mechanism by which it could move up the ladder. The only natural selection was akin to that of the female baboons. When the ideas of China went like little boy baboons to Europe, then they could make a difference, which eventually reached China again after 500 years.

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The US government, however, was designed specifically to embody both approaches. Lots of little states are trying their own solutions within circumscribed arenas. At the same time, a central government maintains a firm top-down grip within its own arena of control, also limited. The two houses of Congress, while not explicitly inspired by baboons, were intended to emulate the basic idea. The Senate was originally intended to represent the aristocratic top down character of the strongest countries in Europe. The Founders expected Senators to come from the leading families, appointed by the Governor or some elite commission as determined with each separate state or commonwealth. The House was closer in concept to the contentious workings of the British House of Commons or the democracy of ancient Greece. Commoners would vote!

To me, the wisdom of the Founders seems astonishing. Knowing what I do of today's political climate, it's very difficult for me to understand how they were able to transcend the bickering and the self-interest to accomplish what they did. Think about this: no one knew whether it would work at all.

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Now, getting down to brass tacks, what is it about the our system that allows it to track our needs, our hopes and desires, so much better than other places we could name?

Here's how I answer:

Multiple paths of access to power and influence.
Wide social dispersion of power centers and government functions.
Limitation of power centers to focused areas of responsibility, subject to effective overview by others.
Aggregation of compromise beginning at low levels.
A dedication to visible processes.
Filtered but effective information flow.
Widespread adherence to critical processes and reliable expectations based on codification, history and tradition.
Frequent government personnel review and adjustment driven by the true desires of an ultimately sovereign populace.
Appropriate protection of individuals and their personal choices.
The capacity to decisively focus power when necessary to address real and substantial problems and the ability to make wise choices.

These points are widely understood in the US. I just say them differently. (Maybe number 4 is a little more different.) The way I describe them is designed to generalize and emphasize the algorithmic nature of our system, and also to delineate the separate components in such a manner that we can recognize that each factor lies on a continuum. Theoretically we would like to extend and intensify each item without compromising the others. Unfortunately, all of them seem to militate against the last, and economic considerations constrain them all.

I think that the formal protocols (7) and the deliberate diffusion of power (1, 2, 3, 8) are key to the Constitution. Human rights (9) are a result. The factors that we need to emphasize much more are the information processing aspects (1, 4, 5, 6) and the survival aspects (4, 10). And I believe we should do it with a codified algorithmic adjustment to the current system.

The Usual List:

Popular Sovereignty

Rule of Law

Separation of Powers and a System of Checks and Balances

Judicial Review

Individual Rights

Word Fossils -- A Statistical Fantasy

2007-07-16T00:20:00.000-04:00

We started getting cable television at our home just a few months ago. I never got much opportunity to watch any of the cable shows in the past, so I’ve watched it pretty intently for a while now. One series that fascinates me is Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel. These people are real scientists! They are amazingly resourceful, appropriately skeptical, knowledgeable and very funny. I particularly liked the show where they tried to read recorded sound off of a ceramic pot. The spectacle of the crew shouting through a phonograph horn into a lump of clay was so much better than anything on the Comedy Channel. The story behind the scene was even more intriguing.

The suggestion had been made that sound recordings would be naturally embedded by a potter applying tools to the surface of the wet clay as it rotates on the potter’s wheel, analogous in principle to an Edison phonograph, I suppose. The tool would vibrate and the vibration would leave a mark. The mark could theoretically be interpreted to reconstruct the original sound. Old pots could be made to give up the words of the dead. Even the audio track of the life of Jesus might be recovered if a potter had been nearby, in Jerusalem perhaps, inadvertently pressing His words into the stoneware.

Now, by my way of thinking, the physics of the situation is undeniable. Everything in the environment is going to effect that wet clay. We should be able to pick up that sound. Based on the historical analysis of potsherds, pebbles and ash we have reconstructed entire civilizations and chronicled the oft repeated Fall of Troy. The wet clay should record the nature of the tools, the chemistry of glaze, the location, the temperature, the humidity, the firing fuel, the fact that the potter was a big left-handed galoot with a sore tooth and even note the presence of a nearby supernova in a northern constellation. Of course vibrations in the air will effect the clay! So why couldn’t the Mythbusters team retrieve the sound?

Well, maybe they weren’t trying hard enough. But the fact is that, assuming it’s possible, it’s not going to be easy. Edison himself was famous for his persistence, and he only succeeded because he was controlling all the variables. We forget how hard it is to do something for the first time.

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If I were going to attempt it, how would I approach the problem of interpreting a pot? First I would forget about all the mechanical nonsense and treat it as a data source. Laser scan the whole thing, CAT scan it, whatever, to get a data-rich digital map of the surface, and maybe the interior as well. I’m imagining that these scans come in as bit maps where each digital point is a 3D address with sensor measurements associated with that point. I imagine also that the preprocessing provided by the scanning equipment retains only the significant points, employing massive computing power to whittle down the 3D space into a 3D form. Nevertheless, from the resolution that these images have, I’m guessing that there would be a tremendous amount of data. I don’t think I’d manage it on my PC, so I’d have to have access to some specialized computing power. (Maybe I’m underestimating today’s PCs.) Then, being of a statistical bent, I would take a random sample of the surface points, something large but reasonable.

The first objective IMO would be to identify simplifying physical parameters – in particular, the axis of rotation. This seems very straightforward, but in fact it is not. The pot will have been cut from the wedge unevenly. The bottom will have been trimmed, probably, but not necessarily square with the pot. Furthermore, the shape will have warped in the kiln to a degree depending on imperfections, unevenness and non-symmetrical heating. Sore Tooth may have thumbed it a little hard in places. I’m guessing, though, that we could easily fit some fairly simple 3D curve as the axis using a least-squares process. Then I would do it again with another, completely independent, sample of the same data. … The results of the two tests will not be the same, I promise you.

At that point, we have to make a decision. Do we try to straighten out the surface, or the axis? I’m betting we go for the surface first to remove major anomalies. NASA has some algorithms that I’m aware of (I’m talking 25 years ago) that are used for stretching maps and images to correct for the angle of viewing and atmospheric distortions. They do it by marking known positions and then spreading the distortions evenly in order to maintain neighborhood consistency. It’s as if they took a rubber sheet and pinned some of the points to an earthlike, rounded surface. The points in between would adjust themselves over the theoretical frame. In this case we would we would search for large explainable anomalies and try to remove them statistically. In the case of thumbjabs or other dents, we might look for and catalog local distortions that have an inverse curve and try to reverse the curve, preserving the local terrain, but not the original altitude.

In order to make this surface correction, we might have to develop a whole science of thumbjabs and the propagation of their impact on the remainder of the vessel. Learning how to correct these simple anomalies (akin to Oklahoma City in the previous post) would require us to experiment with real clay, pushing and prodding otherwise perfect pots to see what happens. Maybe we could exclude the anomalous data, but then we would lose the detail. Remember, we’re ultimately interested in identifying the sound vibrations. These are just steps we would need to trace before getting there.

Eventually, having removed as many dents and bulges from the virtual shape as seems appropriate, we will refit the axis to see if we can get more consistency. Finally we may decide on an axis that represents the statistical combination of numerous attempts. We may look at all sorts of possible axes including expanding helices. The variation among our calculations will give us clues and the closeness of the fit will be our interim measure of success.

We don’t really expect a close fit at this point, because we don’t really have a circular pot. Sore Tooth pulled the pot off the wedge a little too vigorously and apparently stored the greenware overnight, laying the pot on its side and thus warping the circular pattern that one would hope for. That pattern, described with mental reference to integral calculus, perhaps, as a stack of many stubby cylinders of varying diameter, is a mere dream, one of Plato’s Forms. In fact, the slight torque exerted in the process of throwing the pot would have produced elliptical shapes at best and probably something more complicated. All this could be corrected. It takes work, but it can be corrected. The helical axis could be unwound; the out-of-round could be identified, measured and removed. (These parameters might also help us discover that Sore Tooth was left-handed.)

The overall concept here is that we are extracting significant variables that help us generate an idealized formulation of the pot by means of statistical corrections and, at thesame time, tell us stories about its making. The main measure of success will be the R-squared of the model. This is a statistical measure of the goodness-of-fit that is very widely used in scientific research. It is regarded as providing an intuitively helpful measure of the percentage of variance explained by the variables that have been incorporated in the model. The closer to 100 percent you can get, the better you understand the data. In the physical sciences, as opposed to the social sciences, we can sometimes get very high values for R-squared, and that is good. The whole purpose of this exercise is to find out what the surface should be, and subtract that value leaving us with the so-called residual, or remaining unexplained variation, where we hope to find the magic vibrations.

At this point, the form has effectively been removed and we are left with a giant tube-sock of data in the form of standard deviations from the mean. And what is the mean? The mean is the form, the surface in question, which is now zeroed out, and we are looking instead at small deviations away from that form. The purpose of removing the form is to allow us to find the sound track. If it were an LP disk, we would be looking at a single long track of numbers with a mean of zero, and we would be trying to avoid track repeats and track skipping. This case is a lot more complicated because the track might wander. Even if the pot were perfect, the presumed recording "head" would have produced a moving target.

Now that we have the relatively pure signal, we are going to mathematically scan across, trying to find a track, slightly up, slightly down, anything we can think of – looking for what? Sine waves! If our data density is good enough, we should be able to find horizontally connected amplitude signals that correspond to the classic curves. We don’t expect good sine waves, of course. We expect cluttered overlapping sine waves that we can break down with Fourier Analysis. We are looking for sound as opposed to noise. In order to find it, we have to make a guess at how fast each track was moving and maybe we have to know what kind of noises to expect in an ancient potter’s workshop. And then we have to get lucky.

In all likelihood we will not be able to find anything. So then we give up, right? Not even close. First we look for combinations of adjacent tracks that might have more statistical power. Then we’re going to repeat the whole process looking at variations on the inner wall, or in the thickness of the walls, or linearity of the mineral crystals, or variable chemical states caused by changing pressure. Who knows what would actually work. And we could study the various interactions of all these measures until the Second Coming. In the end, lines of inquiry are only dropped because people run out of money or get tired of it all. If the research is important, people never give up. They just keep looking for new approaches.

The statistical mindset is just one of these approaches. The mindset of engineering would handle it like the Mythbusters team did. The first thing you try to do is record sound using the same medium under perfect conditions and see if you can learn from that. But I wouldn’t do it that way because it doesn’t suit my personality. For one thing, statistical analysis will find a lot of other things as well, which I like.

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The question returns to just how important this research might be. Think of it! To recover dead languages, to literally hear the words of Jesus, of Pericles, of Caesar, the roar of the crowd in the Colosseum. More likely, I suppose it is, to hear the yelps of children chasing around the workshop or the cackle of hens. Maybe there are better ways to spend our time – providing electricity for third world countries or preventing malaria might seem to be better goals. Part of it always comes back to faith. Do you really believe that the research can pay off? And do you believe it’s worth the effort?

In the end, I have my doubts about the song in the pot. The real problem is that a medium can only hold just so many dimensions of information before the residue becomes random noise. There are just too many tiny factors effecting the outcome in small ways, and it doesn’t help that the signal is analog, as is everything else in the Universe. As a matter of fact, I think I’ve changed my mind. The Mythbusters approach may actually be better. We just have to build the perfect reading head for the given medium.

The many little things get washed out by a background of big factors. Theoretically, you could use the same approach to look at the stars in the daytime. Just subtract the statistical effects of the sun and sky. In practice, though, you just can’t know it well enough to subtract it. And this is what you need to understand about the previous post concerning the impact of the death penalty on the homicide rate. There are some pretty strong factors that motivate the likelihood of murder and the decision to murder. Although you know it has to have some sort of effect in some cases, it’s really hard to identify and measure that effect. And when combined with other factors, the result might not be what you expect. For instance, if you correct for poverty, then the impact of the death penalty might be to increase the likelihood of murder rather than decrease it. The reason for this is that the deterrence effect will have differing impacts on different groups, an effect which is correlated with the direct effect, but stronger. This is one of many problems involved with extracting second and third order factors by means of statistical correction.

IMO, you can’t squeeze sound from stoneware, and tiny incentives have indiscernible effects.

Deterrence of Homicide

2007-06-19T23:05:00.000-04:00

Frank Warner has posted on an article that purports to demonstrate the effectiveness of the death penalty at reducing the murder rate. He doubts it. He is worried that the source study is "rigged". I have, in response, tried to trace the underlying analysis back to a specific study. The general impression I get from the article, though, is that there is an accumulation of results, mostly coming out of a certain school of thought, a school which advocates an economic approach to such issues. I was able to identify a specific study, Mocan and Gittings (2001), which I thought was an appropriate exemplar. It estimates that 5 to 6 murders are prevented for every execution and that 1.5 murders are encouraged by each pardon. The study, available in Adobe format through SSRN, can be requested for delivery to an e-mail address.

I’m not willing to say that the study was rigged, but I will go so far as to say that I have my doubts about the specific result and much greater doubts about the moral issues involved. Let me preface this discussion by saying that I am unsure of my own position on the issue of capital punishment. With some people, such as Saddam, I believe we have no choice, but it is generally not such a forced decision. The process is expensive and distasteful. It’s morally questionable. If we acknowledge that murder is forbidden to individuals, then how can we allow it to the state?

I can’t decide whether capital punishment is desirable in principle, but I do think our bias ought to be against it. The question is, can it be justified on a rational utilitarian basis?

Abstract

This paper uses a data set that consists of the entire history of 6,143 death sentences between 1977 and 1997 in the United States to investigate the impact of capital punishment on homicide. This data set is merged with state panels that include crime and deterrence measures as well as state characteristics to analyze the impact of executions and governors' pardons on criminal activity. Because the exact month and year of each execution and pardon can be identified, they are matched with criminal activity in the relevant time frame. Controlling for a variety of state characteristics, the paper investigates the impact of the execution rate, pardon rate, homicide arrest rate, the imprisonment rate and the prison death rate on the rate of homicide. The models are estimated in a number of different forms, controlling for state fixed effects, common time trends, and state-specific time trends. Each additional execution decreases homicides by 5 to 6, while three additional pardons generate one to 1.5 additional homicides. These results are robust to model specifications and measurement of the variables.

… So you have here a study that suggests -- suggests, mind you -- that multiple lives will be saved across a dispersed population in exchange for the lives of a certain number of convicted murderers. The number of lives to be saved is a statistical estimate presumably based on the analysis of reliable social and criminal datasets along with various supporting variables that have been determined by researchers to be relevant. The presumed mechanism for this process is the dissemination of information concerning actual punishment of one or more actual murderers. Potential murderers will, upon leaning of someone recently executed for murder, will be at least somewhat less likely to consummate the act. Since the author describes the study as an "economic" analysis, the result is to be interpreted as the marginal rate of return for each additional execution. How many lives are saved per execution? The effect of executions is touted in this study as having a statistically significant suppressive effect on the number of murders.

The moral issues involved include the following:

Uncertain Models and Consequentialism – How certain are we that the statistical estimate is actually non-zero? In fact there is some probability that it could be negative. What if it turned out that it actually cost extra lives to execute a prisoner? Would we stop immediately?

Consequentialism and Consistency – If capital punishment did not exist today, would we use this evidence to institute it?

Opportunity Cost – How much additional cost, in terms of dollars, would we be willing to tolerate in order to accomplish these executions? We know it costs much more to impose the death penalty than it costs to maintain a prisoner for life. Money, believe it or not, is convertible into lives. The difference in cost could be used to build hospitals, buy body armor for soldiers and police, or pay for more police salaries, or even pay for more of this university research into effects of the death penalty. Think about that! These investments might actually save more lives for the same money.

Untried Strategies – Are there any other ways to accomplish the same putative benefit? Could we cut down on murders, as Mayor Giuliani did, by picking up the trash and addressing petty crime more vigorously? How about enforcing court orders concerning wife-beaters? Can we honestly say that we have picked all the low-hanging fruit in this effort to reduce murders?

Unacknowledged Benefits – Is there a hidden "real" reason why people might approve of capital punishment? For instance, they might approve of capital punishment for reasons of biblical interpretation. It might just be tradition or retribution or even sadistic satisfaction. Can any of these or other reasons be justified on their own, rendering the study results irrelevant? What is the cost/benefit value of these alternative reasons?

Overlooked Costs – Likewise, have we measured the cost of vicarious suffering? Are there reasons to eliminate capital punishment based on the impact that it has on non-murderers? Perhaps sensitive people suffer a psychological impact. Perhaps it perpetuates elements of our culture that are vengeance oriented and discourages forgiveness. Perhaps it prevents us all from attaining satori.

Hidden Agendas – Might some people be using the study results for polemical reasons only, disguising their true motivations? Would that matter?

Missed Opportunities – If we are using these deterrence numbers to justify capital punishment, are we sure that we are getting the maximum effect? Are there means to magnify and target the impact? For instance, we could distribute pictures of the process in the dead convict’s former neighborhood. Or post it on a special 3-D web-site. We could send 3-D glasses to anyone who requests them. (Keep the names and addresses.)

Unexplored Alternatives – Do we really need to use real people? Maybe we could disseminate disinformation explaining how capital prisoners are sometimes renditioned to Saudi Arabia. Perhaps an annual caning would be more effective. Convicts can be given the choice annually. You don’t even have to pursue the sentencing phase as long as they accept the caning. Videos available upon request. (Keep the names and addresses.)

Reliability of the Conclusions – Once again, how much are we willing to base important public policy on numbers which are currently disputable. Sometimes there is no choice but to go with what you’ve got, but in this case we seem to have a choice.

Minority Discrimination – There is still, in spite of major social and judicial efforts, evidence that arrests and convictions are influenced by stereotypes and racial prejudice.

Reliability of the Convictions – And most importantly, IMO, how sure are we, in specific cases, that the conviction was fair and accurate? There have been at least 200 exonerations in the US based on new DNA analysis of old evidence. There have been many further exonerations based on other evidential weaknesses as well. Authorities have not been notably willing to have their judgment questioned, and the process of correcting these decisions has been hampered, as well, by a number of unavoidable evidence losses over time. But these reversals have damaged the credibility of the legal process and of important techniques that had previously been relied on, such as witness identification. Justice, it turns out, is not just blind, but prone to hallucination and obsessive false certainty. Yes, we usually get it right, but we’re not doing nearly as well as we used to think.

I have looked specifically at the 2001 paper by H. Naci Mocan and R. Kaj Gittings, both of the University of Colorado at Denver. It looks pretty professional and (unlike the Iraq Mortality Study for instance) exhibits signs that a tremendous amount of effort was expended – perhaps too much effort. Some of the scientific and statistical aspects that I see as problematic are:

Researcher Bias – Steve Levitt is acknowledged for his input. Levitt is a highly regarded economist and author of Freakonomics, a very discussed book, a thought-provoking and controversial popularization of Levitt’s economic ideas. I admire him, myself, but there is a problem. He is the proponent of a number of unorthodox and even extravagant theories. The relevant one here is his bias that even very small incentives have measurable effects on behavior in the aggregate. The authors of the study may well share this bias, and may even have a very small incentive to identify a measurable effect where there is none. As Levitt himself might say, the incentive is there, and, while not determinative in any specific case, incentives have effects.

Overspecification – Modern statistical packages provide the opportunity to explore any data set to the point of exhaustion, applying multiple statistical measures to all the possible combinations of large numbers of candidate variables. Some combinations are going to produce effects merely due to the law of large numbers. The study also complicates the issue with a number of subtle variations on the model, some of which IMO, include excessive numbers of interaction variables. Some variables will be identified as important by accident.

Possible Filtering of Cases – I’m not clear on how the observations were allocated and why the dataset has apparently been reduced from 6,143 to less than 1,000. Researchers can sample or eliminate cases for all sorts of justifiable reasons, some of which may be influenced by subconscious expectations. It might be that the researchers have appropriately divvied up the cases for separately testing the distinctively different species of models. That would be a very admirable practice, but it opens the possibility that the appearance of certainty is amplified by separate reporting of similar models. Possibly cases were lost in the process of matching multiple datasets. In that event, there is more than a little chance that the matched cases were different from the unmatched cases.

Auto-correlation – There are too many variables. I can’t tell if they’re all being used or if final conclusions are based only on the significant variables. I would be inclined to do a preliminary factor analysis to help eliminate redundant variables and to explore the underlying structure of the data. It is silly to imagine that there are more than, say, seven important sources of variance. And if there are that many, it is bold indeed to assume that the effect of one of the residual variables can be measured with any reasonable degree of precision. There would be too much play and inaccuracy in the major sources. I’m guessing that the authors don’t believe that the death penalty has a major impact on the murder rate, and non-major effects will be lost in the noise.

Sources of Variance – Judging from the first line in the tables, three things, location, time and trend effects, explain a huge proportion of the variance in homicide rates. I’m willing to bet that better granularity of these measures would be more important than any of the variables that the authors are trying to isolate. I’m suggesting that they look at specific cities, at neighborhoods within cities, and at seasonal effects. (One idiosyncratic effect that they did remove was the 1995 terrorist attack in Oklahoma City.) Removing all these effects, they could first study the residual for non-randomness before they proceed to more subtle analyses.

Unnecessary Time-series Assumptions – A component of the model is time-series analysis. This implies a certain pattern that relates deterrence effects over time with composite deterrence. As well as adding a lot of new lagged variables and further complexity, it ignores the most likely nature of the relationship between the fact of execution and the potential perpetrator (pp). That impact is zero/one: does capital punishment exist, and does it actually occur in the pp’s domain? Time series analysis assumes that an exponentially diminishing effect persists from previous time periods. I’m inclined to think that the opposite is true. What matters is: when did the pp learn of this punishment. The imprinting of this social message would have occurred much earlier – probably around the age of eight.

Insufficient Significance – The reported level of significance for the execution rate is worse than the ninety-five percent usually expected. The primary model identifies it as better than ninety percent, but less than ninety-five. The impact of the pardon rate is apparently much smaller, but much more significant. Why should that be? Could it be that the pardon rate reflects the frequency of errors committed by the legal system in the past? Could a generally incompetent legal system be a contributor to the murder rate?

I know this analysis seems very critical. I’m doing my best on that score, because this kind of attitude is the method of science. I disagree with the methods and the results of the study, but I actually approve of the authors’ efforts to a great extent. The authors are not claiming certainty, nor are they suggesting that their result trumps any other analysis that might determine social policy. They are merely asking us to consider the possibility that such an effect might exist, implying that the effect is relevant, and they are giving an initial estimate of that effect. It needs to be confirmed, I think, and I’m not at all sure it can be. I personally believe that decisions on the death penalty will remain controversial and cannot be resolved in the realm of social science research.

Tags: death penalty, pardons, exonerations, Naci Mocan, University of Colorado, Steven Levitt, statistical critique

The Remnant is Nice

2007-05-25T17:31:00.000-04:00

A new post by "Proteus", which is undoubtedly Bill Whittle, talks about the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Remnant. He mulls over the difference between short term and long term social strategies and the differences among those who chose their actions. The game theory described in this post is very timely because a very similar issue, the Traveller's Dilemma, is being discussed in the new Scientific American. El Blogador has a discussion as well. I hope he follows up on the Whittle article.

Everything that Whittle writes is essential reading, but this is key. The basic idea is that society is held together by people who make irrational altruistic choices when they can. Not all the time, mind you. We're not talking about punching bags here. This is about the tit-for-tat strategy.

The Traveller's dilemma, as described in the SciAm article, gives people a somewhat sleezy choice of how much reimbursement to ask for from the airline for their broken pot. The catch is that another person has the exact same problem with an identical pot. The airline will only pay the lowest estimate, within a reasonable range, from the two people (combatants). They will pay it to both parties, but there is another catch. The person who asks the most will be penalized a modest amount and the other person will be rewarded. In practice, both people will ask for the maximum amount, but it can be shown that in the specific circumstance discussed, it is not the rational choice. The problem reduces to a version of the famous prisoner's dilemma. The question is, why are people usually altruistic in this case?

The obvious answer to me and Bill is that good people are also willing to take retribution. If you don't go along with the shared benefit, then we find a way to get even. Tit-for-tat is the most effective and generous long term policy. Nice people win in the long run. Civilization depends on it.

Now, a counter-example I have puzzled over, is the recent trend, at least in my city, to follow a "no-snitch" policy. People in the problem neighborhoods have begun advocating a cultural norm of silence in the face of criminality. This may seem counter to the need for social retribution, but it is easily understandable on this basis. The social contract has failed these people. The failure corresponds, IMO, completely to the War on Drugs, which is a racist, liberty destroying pantomime of justice. Great numbers of civilized people are going to jail over this insanity.

The understanding of the nature of justice must be widely shared to make the fragile contract work. The Remant awaits your enlightenment. If you get it, they will come.

Tags: Traveller's dilemma, game theory, The Remnant, Bill Whittle, Belmont Club, altruism, the War on Drugs

TigerHawk Speaks with Energy

2007-04-28T17:23:00.000-04:00

I found a worthy comment by Tigerhawk, a pearl buried deep in one of his own less lustrous posts. It is a well-written summary of what I would consider an eminently sensible energy stance. I wish I had written it, but the least I can do is revive it.

As I’m sure you are aware, many conservatives, President Bush excepted, spend a lot of time ranting against the Global Warming Conspiracy. They claim variously that no such effect exists, that its potential destructiveness is exaggerated to the point of alarmism, and that, if it does exist, it is the product of a natural cycle and has no policy implications. Their major objection, IMO, is that the intellectual thrust for a response to Global Warming comes from the Left -- from the UN, from the environmentalist organizations and from Al Gore, whose mere voice annoys them.

I salute Tigerhawk for being able to distinguish the source from the content of an argument. As President Bush has done, he acknowledges the likely existence and anthropogenic origin of Global Warming. He implies that something should be done and argues convincingly that it should consist of a Carbon Tax (!) and strong support for nuclear energy. A truly enlightened viewpoint! I can’t help but wonder why he didn’t put it on page one, above the fold. Perhaps he feels that his peer support may be tepid.

Since there has been a lot of speculation on the subject, my views on climate change are these:

1. In all likelihood, the world's climate is changing rapidly.

2. The cause may or may not be anthropogenic, and it may or may not be due to carbon in the atmosphere. It is, however, more likely than not due to both.

3. If we can reduce the incremental carbon dumped into the atmosphere while setting all other considerations equal, it would be a good thing.

4. Notwithstanding #3, a rapidly changing climate will require humans to generate more inanimate energy, not less. We will need more energy to deflect the impact of the climate, grow crops under arduous conditions, move people around, and so forth. Any plan to cut carbon, therefore, should also incorporate increased, rather than decreased, energy requirements.

5. Some of that energy can certainly come from conservation.

6. Some of the carbon reduction can certainly come from conservation.

7. By far the most efficient mechanism to achieve both is taxation. I have long advocated a carbon tax.

8. The "hair shirt" environmentalists will not persuade Americans, Chinese, Indians, or anybody else to destroy their lives in defense of the planet's climate. At least not until it is demonstrably too late. They are especially unlikely to make their case if they themselves claim exemption from the sacrifice.

9. The biggest problem, by far, is the reliance of the United States and China on coal to produce electricity. The only way to produce the power generated by the hundreds of coal-fired plants in the U.S. and China is to replace it with nuclear power. The problem, of course, is that virtually all mainstream environmentalists oppose nuclear power as well -- their activists cut their teeth fighting nukes -- so their only recourse is to "hair shirt" sacrifice.

10. Hence, the political stalemate.

By TigerHawk, at Mon Apr 23, 09:01:00 PM

Fossil Fees and Nukes. The only thing I would add is that the Carbon Tax should be administered by the Federal Reserve with an explicit mission to suppress greenhouse gases and promote the new economy.

I myself am not opposed to "hair shirt" environmentalism. I try to practice it. I believe we should be provident, generous and self-disciplined. Unfortunately, we’re not. So we have to find policies that work in the Real World. Eh? So obvious even a troglodyte can apprehend it.

The following are some of my posts on related issues:

Carbon Capture
Dregs
Conspiracy Theories
New Oil
Wind vs Nuclear
Lung Operation (with links to other posts)
Plug In
Bush Concedes to Science
Slate on Gas
The Anxiety of Complexity
Weak Hand
Bush War on CO2
Stewart Breaks the Mold
Never Put off for Tomorrow
Jerking Us Around with Oil

Schrödingers Whirlpool

2007-02-13T00:15:00.000-05:00

Erwin Schrödinger introduced the idea of negative entropy to characterize Life. It’s a mystical concept, as I’m sure he well knew. For Life bathes in a colossal gusher of local energy from Sol. That astonishing light and unimaginable heat vanish surely and almost completely into the Universe, leaving nothing but agitated motion among the sparse molecules spread across the lightyears. Life thrives in the flow, but it is not energy, nor does it violate the laws of energy.

Energy spreads out until it is useless. This loss, we feel it as a loss for some reason, is remorseless, like the flowing of the water remorselessly through a billion channels from the highest clouds to the level of the Sea. But what are we in such a scheme? A physicist sees Life as somewhat counterintuitive, comparing it perhaps to a capacitor, some curious electro-chemical mousetrap that holds back some of that energy flow for later use, where the word "use" itself implies an unscientific refutation of entropy.

It is a mystical concept, I repeat. It has confused generations of creationists. Living things are not immune to entropy and pose no challenges to it. The apparent complexity and organization of life is a product of the flowing energy, slowing it down but an instant, similar perhaps to an eddy in the flowing river. The eddy is not made of water, and causes the water to tarry only a short time. The eddy is not the water, yet the eddy is a complex form that holds together in itself, an apparent spirit of the water, retaining its form and dancing in the water for the span of its moments or days. It seems alive. By Schrödinger’s light, it is alive, and its path cannot be predicted. Nor can ours. But the energy goes its way.

-------------------

People who apply mystical concepts to the workings of the human universe are almost always misled by those concepts. People who get mystical gratification from understanding those workings, however, can have the profoundest impact on the rest of us. Schrödinger was from that second group, as were Adam Smith, Einstein and Darwin, who found that there was grandeur in his view of Life. Carl Sagan tried to express this in his series, Cosmos, which I recommend as still inspiring after two decades. Wonder and awe and even mystical experiences are common to those who explore the world with the cold scalpel of reason. Why that is so, I can only guess, and my guess is this: it is because the real world is worthy of such emotions, and the mystical world is worthy of such a scalpel.

While Darwin had the pleasure of his discovery, that marvelous engine of Beauty, I suspect that Thomas Malthus, who has also given us a great truth, had trouble getting out of bed. I imagine that he found it hard to breathe from time to time, as I do when I think about his offering to us. It is the straitjacket of reproductive life. The Malthusian Denialists are rampant among us. It’s hard to blame them. Bartletts’s Law suggests that this simple idea is indigestible, that humans cannot, by their nature, understand it . Perhaps, as has been suggested, Bartletts’s Law is an inevitable outcome of natural selection when the human mind meets Malthus. Can anyone who comes to understand him reproduce as productively as before? Darwin certainly could, but he was an unusual creature.

These thoughts are occurring to me as I try to put the work of Joseph Tainter in perspective. I am pondering the subject at Steve Sturgill’s behest. Steve has, I think he would agree, been driven to pessimism at least in part by the school of thought currently thrashing in those waters that Tainter described so cogently.

Tainter, in my abrupt summary, has identified energy and complexity as the limiting factors, the controlling inputs, of modern civilization. Even research and development, he would say, requires increased complexity and energy inputs that are reaching a saturation point. The Law of Diminishing Returns would indicate that increasing inputs into the business of solving problems rewards us with smaller and smaller payoffs.

I would like to generalize his viewpoint and make a statement I can agree with. Every society, every growing system, requires one thing that it does not have. The limiting factor could be energy, labor, land, knowledge or just plain resolve. If the society gets more of that one thing, then it will be short of something else. Each solution requires effort, concerted action, and probably some physical inputs, such as energy or nitrates or water. The odds are that sooner or later the society will, solving many problems as it grows, finally stumble upon a required input that the society is congenitally unable to provide. The suggestion was that the Roman Empire lacked energy resources, provided in those days by slaves, and resolved the issue in a dysfunctional way, by adapting a strategy of conquest, which could not be sustained. It is obvious that the problem is growth itself, to which there are indeed limits.

We know, however, that we have not reached those limits yet, for the growth of GDP still outpaces population growth. We are, however, borrowing against a future that will come to its limit more abruptly because of our profligacy. Abrupt limits lead to collapse. Do we have a choice? I certainly think so, but not as we are.

One of the limiting factors in our society is decision unification. The democratic structure does not allow for rational choices pursued patiently. And autarchy, plutocracy, and kleptocracy are much worse in every way except single-mindedness. We see this amply demonstrated in the ecological crimes of the USSR, the PRC, the states of the Warsaw Pact and Saddam’s Iraq.

Part of Tainter’s thesis is that complexity increases continually. Most of what he sees as complexity is Division of Labor as delimned by Adam Smith in 1776. We become more productive by breaking difficult jobs into many parts and allowing people to specialize in each part. It applies to manufacturing, regulation, research and general scholarship alike. But it is only one of the ways that we improve productivity. When I was a child, my father had several mechanics who worked on his car. One of them was a specialist in carburetors. He had studied them for decades and could take one apart and put it back together in the dark. Today, he would be out of a job. There are no carburetors, so no repairmen. Things have been simplified, not complicated. There are also no computer repairmen or vacuum clearner repairmen because we have become so productive at producing them that it’s cheaper to replace than fix. Maybe they still have carburetor mechanics and vacuum cleaner repairmen in Cuba, but that speaks to other problems.

I used to be a computer programmer, but now most of these jobs are gone. Why is that? Software has added to our productivity so effectively that upgrades have become nuisances rather than eagerly awaited benefits. People can do a lot of their own programming now because it’s so packaged and programming languages have improved. Outsourcing is routine. Simpler in some ways, harder in other ways. People can’t program their VCRs, so we now have the Geek Squad. That complicates things a little for now, but in ten years your electronic devices will interface with humans much more conveniently. Part of our complexity input is being reaped in the form of simplicity output. So Tainter is not necessarily correct. At least not yet. And maybe we can change in more fundamental ways as well. Maybe we can learn to observe ourselves, rule ourselves and regulate our growth.

2/13/2007 1:28 AM

Tags: negative entropy, Joseph Tainter, Sustainable Societies, Life, Mysticism, Complexity, Division of Labor

Gomboc

2007-02-13T00:14:00.000-05:00

I am a sucker for new words. GOMBOC is a mathematical word related to turtles in some obscure way. Turtles are pretty cool in themselves. I remember that my father used to bring home box turtles when I was young. I think he let them go after we lost interest in them. I miss turtles. It's hard to find them anymore. I don’t think it’s the fault of Global Warming, but I do suspect that we’re somehow to blame.

I also miss pheasants, but people tell me that’s a good thing. They weren’t native anyway. I’ve had enough of crows and starlings and deer, too, for that matter. OK, I lied. I still like seeing the deer.

2/12/2007 11:59 PM

The Calculus of Confrontation

2007-02-11T03:03:00.000-05:00

Peace is very nice, but it doesn’t exist until everyone subscribes. Where ever in the world there are tyrants who rose to power using violence, or something close to violence, there are people who know the effectiveness of violence, and will resort to it with increasing frequency as it becomes increasingly effective.

Our enemies recognize that, for the most part, we do not come from the same school as they do. We can be intimidated by accusations that we bully others, usually by bullies themselves, and we can be intimidated by threats of violence. Americans see the rest of the world as a hornets’ nest. I mean, sure, we’re more powerful and everything, and sure, we could just destroy them completely, but my gosh, why should we go meddling? What’s to gain? Live and let live. People are different. Respect their differences. Culture is relative, and everyone thinks their culture is the best. Isn’t that right?

Well of course it’s right. But seriously, these annoying other places are annoying because they don’t share any of those dicta of tolerance. They would like to grab that ring in our collective nose and lead us around like a prize bull. If you think they would have any qualms about embarrassing us, or hurting us, you’re crazy. The use of power by power-loving people becomes when unmet, effective and exponentially cumulative. Prussia nearly conquered the world. Do yourself a favor and look at the historical maps of the Roman Empire.

We, and the rest of the free world, represent something new. We are a people who truly believes that we can coexist and actually wants to coexist with the rest of the world. Before the US came into being, nations addressed each other with avarice, animosity or indifference. We are different. You don’t have to be part of the US to be our natural allies. You can be as different as you want, and everything is cool. We love everybody, but we must not allow ourselves to forget that some nations, the lands of the powerful men, return the favor by viewing us with avarice, animosity or indifference – and they make their plans.

Ralph Peters discusses some of these axioms in an article in Front Page Magazine. He notes that our enemies, unchecked, unconfronted, have meddled, and will not hesitate to meddle more in whatever efforts we take in the world. As long as the parental eye of the voting American public doesn’t see the devious action under the table, there is no price to be paid by the troublemakers.

Within two weeks, four choppers go down in Iraq. Shot down. By enemies who previously couldn't hit the Goodyear Blimp.

Attack helicopters and transport birds, military and contractor aircraft went down. Crews KIA (in one case, executed). Did the bad guys just get lucky?

No. They have new weapons. And new training. And a new strategy.

…

Unless these shoot-downs were a weird blip, foreign powers are involved, providing the missiles and training - probably outside of Iraq. Our intel services either already know who's lurking behind our enemies' new capabilities or will confirm it soon enough.

And who might those third parties be?

…

[T]he foes of freedom beyond Iraq's borders raised the stakes significantly by providing deadly new weapons and training to the insurgents and terrorists. They're confident that they hold the winning cards. It's time we taught them how to play for keeps

To your Average Anti-War Thinker, this sounds like new excuses to pursue a tired strategy. But why do we do it? What profit is gained for the Administration by hysterically barking at every rabbit in the woods?

The fact is that there are reasons rooted in the real world, reasons that cannot be believably explained to a cynical public in the midst of a propaganda war. So the President does not try. The AAWT, on the other hand, fleshes out that unexplainable something with the magic sinews of imputed motive. I’m sure you’ve heard some of these accusations. They are ludicrous, but they are believed. The over-the-top conspiracy theorizing on the Left tells you that they are outraged at the uncivilized behavior of the White House. And it should also tell you that they just cannot compute what the real reasons might be.

2/11/2007 2:46 AM

Tags: Vladimir Putin, Russia, Ralph Peters, military power, confrontation

Hafnium Extends Law for Moore

2007-02-07T23:47:00.000-05:00

The Age has a description of the next technology in computer chips, as announced by Intel and IBM, amid some interesting commentary on Moore’s Law. This breakthrough uses the unusual metal hafnium rather than silicon. Hafnium has good electrical characteristics and is denser and more accurately etched into narrow bands. It will make it possible for new components to double the number of transistor elements just in time to keep Mr. Moore honest.

I’m gratified to see the suggestion in writing that Gordon’s Guesstimate has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have thought so myself. Some think it's just a mirage caused by shifting goalposts. This is interesting, but ignores the incontrovertible fact that computing technology has advanced beyond our wildest dreams -- every two years or so, I would say. The spotlight that Moore's Law has put on this is also undeniable. One could hope that the same kind of focus ensued from, for example, Bush’s Mars Mission. But I’m afraid nobody believes him. Without the belief, the schedule is fantasy.

The prediction of a “singularity” in human/technology development by 2040 is not as powerful either. It is more like religious millenialism. There is no way to know whether it’s right until we get there. And when we don’t get there on the projected date, they just say, our calculations were off. We really meant to say 2050.

The real power of Moore’s Law is as a quantitative measure of progress in a designated domain. He predicts … we observe … we believe. It is up to specialists in connected fields to understand what those predictions mean to them and to do their part in making the magic happen.

2/7/2007 11:38 PM

http://www.theage.com.au/news/perspectives/moores-law-at-the-double/2007/02/05/1170524024935.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium
http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/Hf/key.html

Chemical & Engineering News on new chip technology
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/85/i06/8506notw4.html

45 nm competition w gratuitis ref to Milton Friedman
https://www.wesrch.com/Documents/view_editorial.php?flag=3&editorial_id=43

Moore’s Law thread on mushroom
http://journals.aol.com/jjmollo/SoundoftheMushroom/entries/286

Deep historical analysis of Moore’s Law
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/

Searching the Vasty Deep

2007-02-06T02:16:00.000-05:00

The Internet is now being used as a tool for seeking lost individuals and ships lost at sea. Satellite and aerial mapping data, in the case below, is being shared out to numerous volunteers. Page codes are returned to a central web site with recommendations – "nothing found", or "please review".

James Gray, 63, a Microsoft researcher and winner of the prestigious Turing Award, failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday, January 28.

He left from San Francisco Bay aboard a 40-foot sailing boat, and had intended to scatter his mother's ashes at the nearby Farallon Islands.

Several days of intensive searching by the US Coast Guard and private planes revealed no sign of Dr Gray or his boat, so desperate friends and colleagues turned to the internet for help.
On Friday, engineers from NASA, online retailer Amazon and technology companies such as Google and Microsoft organised a satellite and high-altitude aircraft to photograph the area where he was believed to be located.
The photographs were then split into smaller tiles and uploaded to Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, allowing virtually anyone to take part in the search effort.

If you want to help, click here. This methodology is essentially distributed computing, similar to that used in the SETI project, except that the parallel component consists of human visual analysis units. I wonder whether this open community approach might have helped with the Beagle 2, an ESA lander lost on Mars, Christmas Day, 2003.

Remote sensing and satellite imagery are finding more uses every year. It’s really remarkable. Search theory and methodology have also matured dramatically within my lifetime. I remember Grace Hopper mentioning the search problem in a speech at my school. As a naval officer, she couldn’t help but be exposed to the problem. A recent episode of Numb3rs went into some detail on how to find a sunken ship.

We may think the world seems small today – with international communications and online mapping, but things can still be lost on a single plot of land, and the Pacific is a whole other thing. I’m sure Hopper would be gratified, but not surprised, at how computers have facilitated this work.

It is ironic that once imaging becomes sufficiently detailed and available to do this kind of work online, countervailing forces act to politically impose reduced availability and resolution. If India can change an international Google standard, I can imagine what China has requested.

2/6/2007 1:56 AM

Tags: search theory, James Gray, distributed computing

Still Waters

2007-02-04T17:29:00.000-05:00

I have a friend who worked with me for many years. This gentleman is active in his church and a doting father and husband. He is a productive worker in his company and a community volunteer who often finds himself in positions of responsibility. It’s not clear why this happens. He’s very quiet; he has a policy of not volunteering. He always says he’s too busy. He never promotes himself. Yet he seems to know everyone and everyone knows him. He is never thought of when people discuss technical talent, yet he is always learning and always one step ahead of where I think I ought to be going. He never loses his cool, but he often seems to be frustrated, which he indicates with a very dry humor. And he always ends up in charge of something.

He and I worked in some difficult situations for some bad bosses. In those situations he served as a sounding board for disaffected individuals, and I believe he managed to rectify some situations with some under-the-table tactics that I never fully understood. After a few years of working with him, I compared, in my mind, the current management to his example -- and found the current management wanting. I began to encourage him to seek a promotion. I began quietly campaigning for the idea with some people I knew, but it never happened because my friend didn’t want it to happen. He didn’t want the limelight. He didn’t need the glory. He didn’t want to rock the boat.

Now, we all know people like this. Supremely competent, level-headed, socially adept and unambitious. Compare them to the people who actually get into high offices. I have often said that our government would improve if we were to select our officials randomly from a phone book. The people that do get elected are lackluster, hypocritical dimwits, with many exceptions of course. The problem is that people like my friend really could never get very far in a political situation. They are insufficiently nasty and selfish.

When they move up, you usually find people like my friend in positions like assistant director, liaison to the president, treasurer, vice chair, head of the decorations committee. They understand everything that is going on. They know what needs to be fixed, but they refuse to impose their personality on the process. Successful politicians are not like that, but they work with people like that.

The problem with our democracy, as I see it, is that far too many wise and competent individuals are languishing in the backwaters, which is precisely what they want, of course, but it is not what we want. We want the right people to move up and the wrong people to stay out of power. The algorithm of government today does not work that way. How do we change the algorithm? If every such individual were to move up one level in the social/governmental/military hierarchy, I believe there would be revolution of competence with far-reaching effects.

A management consultant once told me that the secret of success is to steadily expand your sphere of influence. It’s a very simple formulation. I don’t think it has helped me a whole lot over the years, but I have come to see how it applies. My friend doesn’t care about his sphere of influence. He only cares about his circle of friends. As a strategic approach to enhancing American democracy, I believe we should look at mechanisms that leverage the social talents of these backwater sages. I have a few ideas in mind.

2/4/2007 5:14 PM

Point Well Taken

2007-01-30T03:11:00.000-05:00

Jason Rosenhouse, a Darwinian crusader, deals with what he thinks is a creationist in his post on EvolutionBlog. The target – biologist J. Scott Turner – is an expert on termites who has come to the conclusion that Darwinism is inadequate to explain the marvelous adaptations of his sociable subjects. He argues in his book, The Tinkerer’s Accomplice, that there exists a physically present and continuous tendency that exerts itself along with DNA – a self-emergent design force, that shapes the organism to its environment in a way that improves on natural selection. Reading the editor’s notes and the single reader review that now appears on Amazon, I am inclined to label this book as semi-mystical musings that toy with the ideas of Intelligent Design without trying to finesse the science. Relatively harmless, don’t you think?

Rosenhouse, however, feels that there is justification for alarm. Turner has in later writings analyzed and pooh-poohed the alarm that the establishment scientists seem to feel toward his musings. After all, it doesn’t hurt to talk about an idea. Rosenhouse sees this as simply more evidence for a hidden agenda. He is used to dealing with underhanded tactics and leading wedge subterfuges from the Creationist bloc (example). He’s been at it for years. Maybe, I’m thinking, he’s just hyper-sensitized. Let’s just talk about it, hmm?

I think I can justify the idea of Intelligent Design on a scientific basis. As long as the IDer doesn’t have to be an all-powerful, all-knowing kind of entity, then I could just point to Arthur C. Clark’s 2001 concept. Highly intelligent alien societies have an interest in promoting intelligent life. If the society of aliens is sufficiently future-oriented, it could seed suitable planets with previously successful forms, subject the planets to evolutionary accelerants and directly interfere at critical junctures during the unfolding process.

Fred Hoyle presented this idea as panspermia even earlier than Clark. Life evolved, but not just here. The seeds have wafted on aether breezes from planet to planet, perhaps in a sentient Black Cloud of living space dust. (Rebuttal.) In Hoyle’s conception of the Universe has no beginning nor ending – there is enough time and space for Irreducible Complexity to be trumped by random molecular movement.

Another example was presented by Carl Sagan in his book and film, Contact. Sagan postulates that there must be other Life, and if it is still out there, it must be smarter than we are. Sagan goes so far as to imply that the Universe itself might have been created deliberately by an Intelligence of some sort. There are few who would accuse Sagan of being a Creationist. The distinction is that he believes in a rule-based universe and rational explanations.

So why is Rosenhouse so defensive? … so unreasonable?

I, myself, have chosen to reason with people, to argue for my ideas directly with people who have conflicting ideas. I don’t get angry with people who try to convert me, as long as they confine themselves to reason. I know that many people have little patience with door-to-door missionaries, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I have heard people bragging about how they abuse these poor people. I don’t do that. I open the door and talk, sometimes for extended periods of time, I present my points of view and politely counter the ideas that they present to me. My wife gets annoyed with me, but I am trying to be fair and decent. All in all, I have an open mind.

A month or so ago, the doorbell rang while I was working upstairs. I wondered who it was. Maybe my wife’s sister had come over for a walk. My daughter went to answer the door. I heard some murmured conversation; it went on for a while. I noted that the afternoon was very pleasant, unseasonably warm. It was Sunday. … I had a sudden moment of panic. I ran downstairs as fast as I could. I confronted the well-dressed, reasonable-looking man at the door, and I shouted at him. "Don’t ever," I said, "speak to my daughter when I’m not here!"

1/30/2007 1:54 AM

Further Polemics and Speculations on Evolution

Harvest of Randomness

Darwin's Malcontents

Darwin's Mouthpiece

Holy DNA

Cane-Tucky

Life the Universe and Everything

Evolution and Iraq

Tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Darwinism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jason Rosenhouse, panspermia, Fred Hoyle, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clark

Ten Myths

2007-01-28T23:11:00.000-05:00

Instapundit has lined to a Strategypage post listing ten myths about Iraq. Very concise, reasonable and persuasive to those already persuaded. It makes me wonder how people actually do get persuaded. I think it has more to do with wanting to be with the in crowd than wanting to be right.

The Wages of Forebearance

2007-01-27T02:57:00.000-05:00

Wretchard has posted a description of our policy failure in the way we have confronted Iran's meddling in Iraq. He thinks that the policy has changed at last. I'm wondering what the situation in the Middle East would be like today if we had responded to the hostage crisis more vigorously in 1979. I left a comment detailing my outrageous proposal on how we should have handled it. It just makes me MAD to think about it.

An Empty Seat on the Bus

2007-01-25T00:04:00.000-05:00

My friend has died of breast cancer after all these years. She always gave Life her best. I talked to her on the phone the last week, and I’m glad I did. I could tell it was getting close. She was full of emotional intensity. She was telling me what to do with my life and she wasn’t making a lot of sense. Her liver function was at 1 on a scale of 1 to 10.

She died early in the morning just a couple of days later. She didn’t want to die in the hospital, but she had somehow turned it into her home. She had photographs of family and friends on poster boards all over the room. The nursing staff had become part of her extended family. They were constantly in her room. The oncologist was reviewing his drug list and had come up with a chemo-drug that she had received only a few times. He was unwilling to let her go, and so was she, but the body can only take so much. She taught me that it can take a lot.

For people with breast cancer, I am linking to her monograph on xeloda that I posted last year and re-posted in September. She was very practical and very determined to live and live well. You could do worse than to read her advice. I wouldn’t mind hearing a little more of it now, myself.

1/24/2007 11:58 PM

Tags: xeloda, cancer, chemotherapy, drug management

The Harvest of Randomness

2007-01-22T02:41:00.000-05:00

Several days ago I described four types of Darwin skeptics. "Physicists" were described as people who love the mathematical structure of the Universe and believe this math is all encompassing. Perhaps a better designation would be "determinists". They are, I suggested, resistant to three pillars of my own faith in the statistical nature of the Universe. I mentioned Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorems, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Chaos Theory.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle implies that there is a limit to the precision with which you can know about a single atom/particle. You can know where it is or how it’s moving, but not both. I believe that this uncertainty is intrinsic, not just mathematical, and the effect of a given object on its neighbor is also subject to a stochastic response. Even identical twins don’t react to each other with perfect accuracy or predictability.

Chaos Theory basically says that a relatively complex system may well be so sensitive to precise original conditions that the future of the system is not predictable through deterministic equations. Although a system might be technically deterministic, original conditions can never be measured with sufficient accuracy to emulate reality. The butterfly in Beijing flaps its wings thrice instead of twice, and two weeks later an unpredicted hurricane threatens the Caribbean. Weather, though possibly not climate, is one of those systems so complex that physics-based models predict radically different results when a single bit is changed in the data. It may be that the required quality of the input exceeds the measurability limits specified by Heisenberg, which is to say that the Universe is neither predictable nor repeatable.

What Kurt Gödel proved is that even the mathematics of a sufficiently complex system is immune to prediction or complete understanding. There will be true things within the system that cannot be proved within the system, and false things that cannot be disproved. Even if a precise mathematical model of Life the Universe and Everything were developed, it could not be counted on to explain everything.

These three ideas shook the foundations of physical science in the twentieth century. Statistical analysis became not just a way to approximate the Truth, but an essential component of the Truth. Things are stochastic. There is an irreducible element of randomness, and Life flourishes, free of determinacy, because of it.

1/22/2007 2:05 AM

Pipes Inspects the Leaks

2007-01-20T01:34:00.000-05:00

Daniel Pipes has been trying to explain the Islamist threat for a long time. He works too hard, but I guess he thinks the subject is important. His latest attempt, before shipping off for a working vacation in Malibu is another in his series of speaking-slowly-so-we-will-understand wake-up calls. He wants us to know that radical Islamism is not the passing fancy of a couple of guys sitting around a hookah. We should not judge the threat with referrence to our obvious military superiority. We should not underestimate the enemy.

He points out that there are a few critical weaknesses in Western Culture that could give them the leverage to defeat us, to our belated surprise. The three weakness that he chooses to name are 1) pacifism, 2) self-hatred, and 3) complacency. Let me name some more: 4) isolationism, 5) compassion, 6) tolerance, and 7) self-involvement.

We children of the Enlightenment do not honor that which we have. We do not realize our virtues and we do not recognize their absense. We are fish swimming in the gifts of Western thought, so oblivious that we don't even take these blessings for granted. We just don't know they're there.

Those who do not share these gifts are envious, but they would rather die than emulate us. And yet we are constantly trying to find ways to reason with them, fully expecting sense to prevail, like Theo van Gogh, perhaps, who reportedly went down asking, "Can't we talk about this?"

1/20/2007 1:18 AM

LEAP for Sanity

2007-01-19T08:49:00.000-05:00

Steve at Skepticals has posted a piece on LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a name that harkens back to a time in our history when we should have learned how to fight a Drug War. He quotes an extensive article from Radley Balko in the comments, which is also worth reading.

OK, let’s assume (which I do not) that the elimination of certain drugs is a legitimate goal for society. How should you go about making it happen in these modern times? Take the question seriously. Your suggestions are welcome. But I think we can safely say that whatever it is we are doing now has the opposite effect from the one desired. The system, as my father explained to me and any competent police officer can tell you, is so full of holes and counterproductive procedures, that it is not just as bad as doing nothing at all, but actually much, much worse. The current system promotes smuggling, international instability, gang violence throughout the world, corruption of border guards, corruption of police and officials from the lowest to the highest, cabals of local officials, mal-distribution of income, inefficiency in economics, environmental destruction, terrorism, proliferation of lawyers, protectionism, dangerous formulation practices on the part of the providers and destructive behaviors among the users. It also encourages people to use these drugs. Repeat. The current system encourages increased use of the drugs that it is trying to eliminate.

OK, so what’s my plan? I imagine that nine out of ten people can’t begin to accept what I’ve said here, and I’m not really going to take the time to explain. Instead I’ll just give you my plan and see if you can wrap your mind around it.

The three most important steps are these: 1) take away the profit motive, 2) take away the profit motive and 3) take away the profit motive. OK, do I have you so far? Of course, everyone understands basic finance. If there’s no money in it, people aren’t going to be so determined to trade in it.

But, you may think, that would be impossible. There’s no way to take the money out of it. Well, you would be wrong! It’s very easy. You just continue with the present enforcement structure while allowing the US government to sell the same drugs, in their purest, most hygienic, and powerful form. And cheap. Don’t play around. Make it cheaper than aspirin.

But, you may say, that would be immoral! Yes, I know. But by the same standards, it would also be immoral to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Look at it this way, you have just eliminated the incomes of every petty criminal and anti-social monster in the country who wants to make money by selling those drugs. You have also completely dried up the pool of money that flows into the pockets of crooked cops. Not only that, you are making money for the government without raising taxes!

But what about the poor drug users? What about them? Think about all the people who wouldn’t use it before because it was illegal and dangerous? Now there will be nothing to stop them from destroying their lives. (Not very bright I guess.)

Well, let’s try a little thought experiment. Right now, the most addictive drug, and one of the most dangerous drugs, is being distributed and sold right under your eyes. Every convenience store outside of Utah is selling this stuff (I don’t know about Utah). You know where I’m going, right? Cigarettes!

Now suppose that the franchise on cigarettes were revoked. Only the government could sell cigarettes. What do you suppose that product would be like? I can promise you that it would be clean, standardized, mass-produced and boring. There will be a picture of an eagle on the front and a grim warning on the back with, perhaps, a depiction of cancerous lung tissue. No government official would ever take a chance of generating buzz or effectively promoting this product. Sales procedures would be anything but smooth, and sales revenues would surely and steadily fall. A smoker would be given no fantasy to connect to, no courtesy, no comradery and certainly no respect. The advertising budget would be for laughs only.

The bottom line is that drug use would actually decline once the profit motive was gone. OK, I can accept that you might not agree. Let’s assume therefore, that drug usage is still increasing. What’s my next step? 4) Start raising the prices. Keep raising them until the drug dealers and corrupt cops go back into business, and they will, then back off a little. Now you are at a situation where your product is almost as expensive as the natural market. The price is high, but there is no one out there encouraging the user to buy. Plus, you are making a lot of money, which you can use to enforce the government monopoly.

Now to commence eliminating all drug use: 5) Stop selling to new buyers. Require proof that a user is already addicted before selling to them. The side effect of this, sadly, is to create a secondary market where drug users will sell to non-users for a small profit. 6) Control the secondary market by chemically tagging each and every unit with a complex chemical cipher, a UPC of inactive chemicals. Every new user will be blood-tested and the origin of the contraband can be easily determined. Start the new user and arrest the source. Since you are the only game in town you can count on a return visit.

Am I right? Would it work? Can you poke any holes in this plan?

Actually, I do think it would work, but I don’t think I approve entirely. I think these drugs are a wonderful thing. A gift from God. In this world, believe it or not, people suffer. And I believe they suffer needlessly. People with cancer, people with arthritis or any of a hundred debilitating illnesses, including old age, should be allowed to control their discomfort and distress with any drug that suits them. Since every user is registered, there can be no unpunished violence. Since every dose is clean, there will be no ancillary disease issues. Since every drug is available, there will be no tragic regimen of under-treatment, no throwing doctors in jail for honest care.

If you are interested in more of the rationalist argument against the War on Drugs, you should be reading M. Simon’s blog, Power and Control.

1/19/2007 1:21 AM

Tags: Drugs, War on Drugs, Addiction, Criminality, LEAP, Enforcement, Skepticals, M. Simon

House He Bite'em ad Infinitum

2007-01-17T23:37:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite series is Fox's House. John Hawks does a diagnosis of the show's success:

But unlike most fictional detectives, House and his team average around seven wrong diagnoses per episode before they finally arrive at the right one. That adds to the drama, but it also adds a bit of transparency to what is really going on. House is reading signs.

All medical diagnosis is essentially semiotic: the physician examines the patient, looking for signs. Sometimes these are physical or physiological signs -- a swelling on the knee, vomiting, blood. Sometimes the signs can't be directly observed, but are communicated by the patient: nausea, chills, pain in the chest. The doctor has a script intended to discover these patient-reported signs: "Are you feeling light-headed? Any pain? How often do you have these spells?"

When a physician makes a diagnosis, she has found a set of these signs that point to an underlying disease or condition with some fidelity. Sometimes it helps to know how a disease progresses, but this is not strictly necessary. It almost never requires knowing why the disease exists. The evolutionary origins of many human diseases are mostly or entirely unknown, and physicians do quite well recognizing and treating them without any such knowledge. Together, these facts imply that the mechanism by which a disease causes a symptom is not necessarily of importance to the physician; the symptoms are quite sufficient in themselves as signs.

Tags: Fox TV, House, John Hawks, medical diagnosis

Darwin's Malcontents

2007-01-17T23:05:00.000-05:00

Darwin's Malcontents

This is the second part of my review of Michael Ruse’s Darwinism and Its Discontents. The first part is here.

The lead paragraph of Ruse’s Introduction is a quote by Daniel Dennett, whom Ruse characterizes as a philosopher. This in itself is very revealing, because Dennett is possibly the most extreme believer in the power of natural selection in print today. Dennett explains natural selection in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea so forcefully and extravagantly that one thinks of Poe as much as Darwin. Ruse likes the way that Dennett shows his respect for Darwin, and so do I. Ruse, though more restrained in his writing, is probably on board with Dennett’s radical interpretations, as am I.

Poe may well be the correct model for what Darwin has to say by implication. Ruse and Dennett are firm in asserting the deep truth of Darwin’s ideas, but they are both negligent in describing the unrelenting suffering, the world of evil implied. Since they don’t say it, let me. Evolution by Natural Selection is a beautiful truth of great explanatory power, but it is not our friend. It has produced the breathtaking scope of life today, left ages of astonishing forms in its wake, but it has been the author of incalculable cruelty. And it has not come to a halt for our benefit. In fact, the best and worst of our nature were extorted from Evolution by blessed Chance and by the power of memes, which is the next of Darwin’s children. And Evolution shows great potential for balancing our success with even more suffering. The unintended consequences of our intelligence represent a grim threat to our future. This, to my mind, is the most important reason for understanding Darwin. If we are to have any hope in this world, we must work together to resist the wretched excesses of Evolution’s iron hand, and we can’t do it if we continue to indulge in self-deception.

In this vein, Ruse describes four types of resisters in the Introduction. They are, in my terminology, 1) creationists, 2) relativists, 3) physicists, and 4) utopianists. I will elaborate extravagantly below, expanding Ruse’s terse descriptions into individual rants. Enjoy:

Creationists are those who cannot give up the idea of the centrality of Humankind. We have a contract with God. The nature of the contract varies. There are Creationists in Islam, for instance. But the feeling ofdivine connection to the engine of the Universe, the power of it, satisfies so many insecurities, inspires such strong esthetic responses, that many cannot relinquish it. It is a divine narcotic. The addiction cannot be treated by methods of access to the Truth, because the attachment occurs, deliberately, at levels below the conscious.

Intelligent Design, while plausible as a theoretical approach, is in actuality not really supported by the intellectual drive of anyone alive today. It is an unnecessary complication, a dead issue, a stalking horse for religious ideology. I say with some regret that it is merely an aspect of Creationism.

Relativists reject Darwinism for another emotional reason. These are scholarly people, philosophers, social scientists, literary thinkers, who eschew the theoretical study of the subject, but observe its functioning in society, its misuse in discredited schools of thought, and its negative imagery. Red in tooth and claw. The eugenics of fascist elites. Racism, sexism and laissez faire capitalism. All speak to them of Darwinian rationalization for wretched behavior.

Inadequate inculcation of a gut understanding of Science is responsible for this group. They hear the poetry but not the prose. Logic is used, but strangely. The missing distinction is between representation of objective reality versus the advocacy of public policy. Since the social result is "wrong", the describers must be to blame.

Some relativists hold the opinion that Science itself is primarily a social activity, that one theory is as good as the next. The study of Science is just an operation in group dynamics. Everything you need to know is embodied by who is shouting at whom, not by what they are shouting about. Objective reality is beyond us. If Plato were alive, they would tell him that there is no way for the shadow watchers to be unchained, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Each level of so-called enlightenment leads merely to another type of ignorance. So watch the shadows and enjoy the show.

Physicists, as I shall call them, are usually scientists, hard scientists with a command of mathematics. They are so in love with the universe of possibility expressed in the mathematical world that they imagine Life to be part of an equation. The cell wall, for instance, is said to have spontaneously generated because of the particular tendencies of certain chemical combinations. Presumably, the protoplasm then simply moved in like a Hermit Crab moves into a handy snail shell. These people have heard of Heisenberg, of Chaos Theory and Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem, but in their hearts they cannot accept the view that randomness can be harvested. Perhaps Einstein’s rejection of God’s dicing provides the paradigm of their search for order.

Utopianists, the final group, are basically Marxists. These are people who live and breathe such highly structured, intricately detailed prescriptions for social correction, that they have no room to incorporate a mere scientific concept. It reminds me of the famous map of the US as viewed from a New Yorker’s perspective. On this small island we have forty varieties of Trotskyite revanchism, modulated anarchism and Leninist political correctness. Over there we have New Jersey and then all that Science stuff. It’s not that they would disagree with Darwin, but rather that his stereotyped elitist motivations and his privileged extortionistic position in life would be so riddled with obvious counter-revolutionary treachery, that the actual words would be irrelevant.

1/17/2007 10:52 PM

Tags: Darwin, Michael Ruse, evolution, Darwinism, evolution skeptics, Daniel Dennett, Intelligent Design

Zombiecology

2007-01-16T01:10:00.000-05:00

Evolgen reviews the population dynamics of zombies. The critical zombie behaviors are brain-eating vs. zombie creation (by means of a bite). I don't know what the assumptions are, related to length of life and calorie requirements for instance, but it looks to me that the low levels of human population predicted are not going to be self-sustaining and may be subject to chaotic variation. One commenter was concerned about the possible introduction of werewolves into this mix.

Right But for the Wrong Reasons

2007-01-15T22:25:00.000-05:00

Instapundit points out this post by Jane Galt. She is basically saying that the anti-war types have no claim to better judgment than the pro-war people because none of them predicted the reasons for our failure in Iraq. You might remember that the most rabid anti-war people were predicting that ten thousand Americans would die during the invasion and that WMD would be unleashed on our advancing troops. Jane says a mea culpa for not recognizing that the Iraqis wouldn't want to be liberated.

To that, you may guess, I say nonsense! It has not been a failure. Some objectives have been met. The Iraqi dead have been grossly over-estimated. We are damping down a potential bloodbath and standing between two religious antagonists who would love nothing better than direct military confrontation.

Despite the assertions of James Baker, we have very little chance of losing the thing militarily, even with Iran stirring up the pot. We have nothing to be ashamed of, other than Abu Ghraib and a few incidents of excess. We have a great deal IMO to be proud of. The only place we can lose this thing is in the hearts of the American people. Is the public willing to make the necessary sacrifices and take the required bloody-minded choices. Maybe not, and that's what we should be ashamed of. On September 11, 2001, we were willing to make great sacrifices and strike out at the enemy. Today we get teary-eyed at the thought of a mass-murderer losing his pop-top.

Darwin's Mouthpiece

2007-01-15T10:45:00.000-05:00

Michael Ruse, Professor Michael Ruse of the Florida State University, has been in the business of trying to understand Science and its place in our minds for over 40 years. He is the director of the History & Philosophy of Science program, whatever that implies, and has published a long list of books, perhaps three dozen scholarly books accessible to public consumption. Click on his C.V. to see them. I found some of the titles familiar, and certainly interesting. His degrees are in Philosophy, and his focus is Science, more narrowly Biology, and more narrowly still – Darwinism, a word which appears in the title of several of his books. In addition to his original degrees, he has a long list of honors, and I am going to undertake in this blog, having read just one of his books, to criticize him at length. Let me assure you that I myself have not spent my life being showered with praise, apart from that of my wife of course. I take up this task for two reasons. Number one, I want to show everyone how tough I am, and number two, I appreciate what he has written and wish to explore it by challenging it.

The book in question is Darwinism and Its Discontents. I found something in the Acknowledgments that impressed me more than all his honors. He is apparently on close terms with Edward O. Wilson, the founding father of Sociobiology. He also has an indirect connection to the discovery and analysis of Homo floresiensis, the contemplation of which I have been much enamored.

Here is a brief interview, contrasting Ruse’s views with those of a creationist who is pushing Intelligent Design. The question: Why do they call ID a science?

Ruse: I think there are two questions here. One is … to say it couldn't be science, because it appeals to miracles, and miracles in this day and age are not part of science. But I think you need to dig a little bit more deeply. Why is a miracle excluded from science in this day and age? And the answer is because science has been very successful by assuming what's often called methodological atheism; namely, don't allow any miracles whatsoever and see how far you go.

Starting just here, I have two problems. First, Intelligent Design can be a scientific theory simply by avoiding the temptation to attribute the hypothesized intelligence to God. The same idea can be found in a police story. Let’s say a man is killed by a rock as he drives in his car. The possibilities are that, 1) it is a freak accident, 2) someone induced the rock to kill the driver, or 3) Joe Smith killed the driver. Distinguishing between numbers one and two is science. Including item three is an accusation that is far ahead of the question at hand, and thus not yet and maybe never a matter of scientific discourse. The legitimacy of intelligent design comes from pursuing the legitimate question, is there any evidence that the course of Evolution is marked by events that cannot be explained by Darwinian analysis?

Unfortunately for the ID proponents, this question has already been studied. Many proposals have been made over the last century and a half about phenomena that cannot be easily explained. Altruism, for instance. Subsequently, most, but not all, have been explained, and there is every reason to believe that more explanations, and more convincing explanations are forthcoming. I know of at least four different, plausible explanations for how upright stature in humans can be adaptive*. None are definitive, but the plausibility of any is sufficient to refute the assertion of intelligent interference with regard to that attribute. Show me the meddling!

Nevertheless, ID could be a science, but it is presently a very unconvincing science, and as Judge Jones pointed out in the Dover case, the proponents do themselves no favor when they are so easily exposed as creationists who don’t even know their own theory. Since the people backing the theory are so transparently motivated by religious considerations, the current incarnation of ID, but only the current incarnation, has been rejected by the judiciary. That’s fine by me, but it’s also fine if they continue to develop their thoughts from choices one and two, avoiding three. In fact, ID is not a new theory. Some, including Fred Hoyle, the famous astrophysicist (and Science Fiction writer), touted the panspermia hypothesis for the origin of life, with the mechanism of dispersion in serious question. Was there an intelligent Johnny Appleseed in our early history? I have argued previously that auto-catalysis makes such a mechanism unnecessary, but not necessarily impossible. Once again, show me the meddling!

The second objection I have to Ruse’s answer is that the juxtaposition of miracles against naturalism is a false dichotomy. Many things we see in the streets today would be considered miracles in olden days. Perception is complex. If you see something you don’t understand, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a miracle. Alternatively, there is no way to certify that any given event has not been instigated by a miraculous cause, even if the event "seems" perfectly normal. Gravity may be a miracle. There is, furthermore, a continuum between miracle and process. Like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, repetitive normal activities blend seamlessly, undiscernably, into something that seems impossible. The miraculous is philosophically inseparable from normalcy because the world is all the same stuff to us.

My point is that even if there were miracles dancing like elves between every quantum of time and space, even if we knew there were miracles or that there was nothing else, we would still want to treat the world with law-based science as a way to predict, approximate and model this world in the breach of miracles, or as the tamer of miracles. Even miracles have structure.

One thing I disliked about this interview was Ruse’s gratuitous swipe at the intelligence of the American people, but I did like the associated hypothesis that apocalyptic religion thrived because of the Nuclear Jitters of the Cold War. Being close to the phenomenon, I’m not sure I agree, but it does make me think.

OW: The American public – a large plurality believes in the Genesis story. Why isn't evolution more popular?

Ruse: Well, you tell me. The American public also believed that Saddam Hussein was linked with al-Qaida, didn't they? So I think you've got to be very careful when you make appeals like that to the American public. More seriously, I mean, the answer is America is a very religious country and certainly, Protestant religion has been very, very influential in America. Particularly after the Civil War, in the South this fundamentalist religion provided a security blanket for people who would read the Bible and read all about how God would afflict his most beloved more than anybody else and things like that.

I think that what we're living with is very much is a function of American history, rather than something which is new today. Certainly the 20th century with the wars and the Cold War and the bomb … led a great many Americans into apocalyptic sort of thinking. We're now living in a time where people are really tense, really tense indeed, about the threat from outside and issues like this.

*Plausible Adaptive Advantages of Upright Bipedal Locomotion

Water-wading for retrieving desirable plants and/or gathering shellfish at the oceanside.
Squatting for harvesting multitudinous, but small, items at ground level or below, changes the shape of the hips, pre-evolving the capacity for long term standing.
Prairie-dogging to see threats and treats over the long grass.
Improved efficiency of long-distance bipedal locomotion when feeding ranges had to be extended on the dry side of Africa, where climate change had eliminated the forests.
Shielding infants from the sun required that they be slung below the mother's torso rather than carrying them on the back. Arm support would be helpful.
Dragging or carrying meat for long distances would require free use of the hands.

1/14/2007 11:05 PM

Tags: Darwinism, creationism, Intelligent Design, panspermia, Michael Ruse, autocatalysis, auto-catalysis

Counter-Threat

2007-01-12T01:47:00.000-05:00

Counter-Threat

Some analysts say that an Israeli government leak, suggesting that Israel was ready to bomb Iran in order to delay its nuclear program, was really a message from the US to Iran. War being what it is, sometimes you don't get the response you expect.

Desert Rat, who posts on the Belmont Club site has made the suggestion that a certain highly public gas leak in NYC was really a message from Iran, stating basically that if you try anything, we can get you back.

Guess you fellows were not in NYC when the "Swamp Gas" filtered through the high rise buildings.

Trouble is it was, most likely, not "swamp gas". Just as likely it was a practice run to send a message of restraint? Well at least to Mr Cheney's 1% Standard of Probability.

Only a few hundred thousand dead in NYC, in response to starting a war against Iran. If that stench had been a aerosoled nerve agent.

An event that dropped into the MSM memory hole, in just under an hour. Just a NJ swamp belching.

Why worry about nuclear devices that may or may not exist, when Japanese religous cults can manufacture basic nerve agents, without State support.

If so, it's a wake up call. The US is the biggest safe haven for terrorist sleepers. As long as they don't do anything, they remain unmolested. It's the Middle Eastern version of MAD. We have been at war since 1979 but have been in serious denial. Let at least that part change! The President could do worse than to announce that the smell was really a threat from Iran, whether or not he knows for sure. IMO, it probably was not a real threat, but that doesn't mean that there is no threat. Wake up and smell the gas!

Tags: poison gas, belmont club, desert rat, MAD, Iran, WMD, game theory

Just War Thoughts

2007-01-09T04:34:00.000-05:00

According to the current incarnation on Wikipedia, the Just War Tradition "is a view that combines a moral abhorrence towards war and a readiness to accept that sometimes war is the lesser evil." The concession, that sometimes war is necessary, is usually overlooked by those who invoke the concept of just war, but that is of course, just the first hurdle. The second is ascertaining that this war is necessary, and establishing a stable consensus on such a predicate. That being stipulated, the definition implies a continuum on the cost-benefit scale depending entirely on how much you value the innocent components of the target entity. What are your "responsibilities" and how much compliance can you expect from yourself? How do you define "valued", "innocent" and "target"?

For instance, there are certain individuals (type A) who will fight you until they die. They may be identifiable or not. They may be embedded or otherwise protected. It may be possible to identify valued aspects of even these individuals. Unfortunately, they may be unwilling to adhere to any concept of just war on their own, and consequently are interested only in optimizing destructive antagonism. These individuals must be neutralized under any understanding of war. If the entire population, or a sufficiently large portion, of our enemies falls in this category, then we must parse our understanding of the word "neutralize". What must we be willing to sacrifice in order to convert them? Can we afford to imprison them? Should we cut off the left foot and right arm of each? Do we have any choices short of killing them? Which would they prefer? Will their numbers grow or diminish as we hold them at bay? Is there any justice to be extracted with such as these?

There are also many who will fight only until their cause is clearly lost (type B). If we value their lives at all, we must give them the opportunity to surrender, to cease fighting. Maybe we feel that we can’t distinguish the first group from the second group. Then we have to decide what probabilities and costs are associated with a Type I vs. a Type II error and whether they can be managed. In the Pacific Theater during WWII, we felt, at least the soldiers did, that there was no way to distinguish, and that the costs were too high. As a result, no prisoners were taken, no surrenders accepted. How do we tell the soldiers how high the costs are permitted to go? Are we willing to punish them for their more merciless evaluation? In fact, we treated the entire country of Japan under the same rule. Only complete and unconditional surrender of the entire nation of Japan would be accepted, which actually led, IMO, to a relatively just result overall. Maybe we were just lucky.

In the ETO we took prisoners by the thousands. My father was involved in that operation and had nothing but praise for the conduct of his German charges. Americans are often accused of racism for treating these people so differently. But think about this, the British soldiers, more so than the Americans, hated the Germans passionately. Some still do, and yet the British also took German prisoners. Do we praise them for that? Or condemn them for their racist attitudes? My point is that the different rules of treating the European enemy vs. the Japanese were dictated, not by the behavior of the Allied soldiers, but by the behavior of the enemy. Given the relative costs of taking prisoners, there was little choice involved.

One of the salient characteristics of the war in Iraq has been the very high effectiveness of our munitions with respect to collateral damage. A target is bombed. It is almost always the right target. It is almost always the only thing destroyed. Maybe, you say, this is merely the way we want it to look. Well, then you have to ask yourself, why do we want it to look that way? Clearly our values dictate that the effectiveness ratio should be as high as possible.

Our failures in targeting are based on judgment calls, not policy. When the type A targets are mixed in with type B, or with total innocents, someone must decide how many unnecessary casualties are acceptable. Furthermore, someone has to decide how reliable the intelligence is. What probability of error is acceptable? This god-like power of life and death invokes suspicion and disdain among some civilian opponents of the war, but think for a second. Do you realize what a luxury this situation is? And do you think any country other than the US and our natural allies would avail themselves of these choices?

Street fighting is another theater in the Just War. Type A targets do not follow the rules of war, so they treat every reservation we adhere to as a wall to hide behind. For instance, the enemy bases itself in areas with high concentrations of civilians, fires from within sanctuary zones, such as mosques,hospitals and schools. There have been reports of grown men firing from behind the backs of exposed children, recruited specifically for that purpose. I have been told that American snipers have the skills and equipment to neutralize such tactics, but still, contemplate the luxury that we have in making that choice. How much is expected of us?

That is precisely the question. How much is expected of us? The answer is that the US military is constantly raising the bar on its own achievements. It expects a lot of itself. Technical sophistication improves constantly. Individual soldiers will, today, be investigated for questionable choices and prosecuted under US law for mistaken decisions. I imagine the citizens of Grozny would find that darkly humorous.

Almost all of the nasty stuff that is going on in Iraq involves Iraqi on Iraqi violence. Criminal gangs, religious fanatics, sectarian extremists and psychopaths are making Iraq unlivable. Most of the rest is caused by Iranian, Syrian, and Saudi support of various factions. The MNF has nothing but a positive influence. Nevertheless, the Iraqis with leadership capacity and anything else to contribute are leaving. Their numbers reach the millions. So, does that mean our involvement in this war has been unjust because of their suffering? Are we culpable for bullets shot by lunatics who want Saddam back? Can we be blamed for not foreseeing the consequences of our invasion?

The US Senate decided with near unanimity, no matter how they characterize their decision today, to allow and support a war to remove Saddam. They thought it was necessary. Once that was done, they supported with very little question, the continuing effort to promote democracy and suppress chaos in Iraq. The Senate is empowered to speak for America on these issues, and you can bet that the senators checked with their constituents. So it’s fair to say that America thought the war and subsequent cleanup efforts were necessary. There have been opponents all along. And today, there are those among them who would say, abandon Iraq no matter what the cost. This faction seems to have the ear of Congress now, and there is more than a little danger that their wishes will be implemented. So what does that imply with regard to Just War Theory?

Are these opponents motivated by the monetary cost of the war or the loss of American life? Let us say that we can save the loss of another 3,000 American lives and maybe a trillion dollars by leaving today. How many Iraqis would that be worth? Seriously. If we knew for sure, which we don’t, that 300,000 extra Iraqis would be killed, would they still want us to come home now? How about one million? Five million?

Of course, they might say that the killing would probably stop as soon as we leave. Then we would have the best of all possible worlds. My question: Do they really believe that, or do they simply believe that the entire population of Iraq is not worth a single American soldier? That’s a pretty steep cost-benefit curve. Let me just suggest that people who feel this way do not have the right to talk about Just War Theory.

1/9/2007 3:17 AM

Tags: Just War

Escape from the Quagmire of Success

2007-01-08T00:58:00.000-05:00

I sometimes wonder if there were people in the Roman Empire who could see the causes of its demise, who recognized and tried to cure the diseases that ended its power and beauty and legacy of knowledge. Frank Warner thinks that our reluctance to win in Iraq might lead to a modern era of darkness. He wants us to read this piece by Jules Crittenden. It seems that the phony analogy to Vietnam now has the prospect of becoming real. The failure to fund the war will turn it into a rout of one kind or another. The Fall of Saigon is not far away, and the Killing Fields of Iraq will be coming up next.

Is this alarmism? In fact, according to the talk shows this morning, a decisive majority of Republican senators is uninterested in a troop surge and wants us to pull out with all deliberate speed. Everybody is claiming, of course, that the Democratic base is all for surrender and that the "meaning" of the last election was John Murtha's precipitous dive to the bottom of the political convenience bomb shelter.

How many of these people were once saying that we really had no choice but to prevail in this war? There is too much at stake. They were certainly right. And I think that we will find that allowing a direct confrontation between Iran and the Sunni powers is not a great idea.

Bush is no Lincoln. But I'm hoping he's a lot tougher than old Gerald Ford, much celebrated for leading us through a time of national crisis. We were just lucky to recover from that leadership. This time it might not be so easy.

Just so you know, the beginning of American power, with the thirteen colonies standing together, was exactly thirteen centuries after the end of Roman power in the year 476AD. Roman culture before that, in one form or another had lasted almost as long. Will we?

1/8/2007 12:43 AM

Tags: Jules Crittenden, End of American Power, Fall of Saigon

T Minus 16 Months

2007-01-07T02:04:00.000-05:00

We’re looking at colleges. Some people, who will remain nameless, think that we don’t have to do this, because we already know where we want to go. My response is this:

The college experience is the real beginning of your intellectual life. The people you meet, the mentors, the teachers, the friends, will be critical in helping you become yourself. It’s easy to underestimate the importance of actively making that experience work for you. It’s easy to take less than the best. This effort should not be a random grab at a convenient degree mill. You have to absorb an understanding and a feeling for various places. In order to get a feel for what might help you, you have to get a feel for place and pace and local color. What kinds of places are out there? What are the boundaries of this educational universe? How do the people seem? This is largely a subconscious process requiring exposure. After seeing a place, conversations and reading about that place will have a hook in your brain, a folder where they can easily fit. I suppose it’s easy to make mistaken assumptions based on limited data, and it’s impossible to see every place you might be interested in. Nevertheless, you come to know, for instance, the difference between a state university and a liberal arts college. It’s no longer just a line item in the US News and World Report.

After our first visit, we managed to elicit the following comment. "Well, when you see an interesting campus like this, it makes you think. Maybe city schools are not necessarily the best."

Tags: College Search

Vibrations in My Ear

2007-01-05T23:58:00.000-05:00

We try to rescue ourselves with knowledge … at least, I do. I have … I thought I had. When I was … sometime ago, I understood my weakness and resolved, as many have, to keep my distance, to be alone. But fronted with the question, the words … they unreserved came … I do; I will; We are.

Plato tried it too. These images … these shades … are merely light upon the wall, he said. The players strut their remarkable deceptions, parading, knowing what they do. Rise above it friend. If you can see it all, you choose how you respond.

I know, and I have read that consciousness … it skips a beat. Cascading down our sloping thoughts after the echo of the shot is fading. Mere software meant to stitch the tattered image back together.

And yet how real it seems, just when I would have it otherwise.

1/5/2007 11:43 PM
Tags: Acknowledgement

Why Not the Men?

2007-01-04T10:09:00.000-05:00

I believe I have a completely different point of view on this. I have been noticing commercials on TV lately urging women to get vaccinated against HPV. Frankly, I am appalled!

It is true that women are susceptible to cervical cancer because of HPV. It is true that this vaccine will improve their chances. But let’s look at how this is being done. Women are being encouraged on commercial television to take personal action as a self-help step. This approach could equally suit a campaign endorsing allergy medicine or Pilates. This is a matter of public health policy, not selecting a brand of toothpaste!

Think about how the polio epidemic was handled. Think about smallpox and German measles. Cervical cancer is one of the more wretched ways to die, and it is not a rare disease. The Surgeon General, if we have one, should be giving public service announcements to tell people where and when to get their shots. The President, if we have one, should be appearing on news broadcasts praising the inventors and encouraging people to cooperate. Churches should be announcing special programs for those who cannot afford the treatment.

And let me ask you this. If we have a deadly disease in circulation, why are we passively accepting the easy public exposure to a hundred million Typhoid Marys?

1/4/2007 9:57 AM

Tags: Gardasil, Merck, HPV, cancer, cervical cancer, public health policy, epidemics

Meme Test

2007-01-03T11:54:00.000-05:00

The professors asked me what good this theory of memes was. Did it have any predictive value? Do we have any evidence that a meme can actually influence behavior? That is, do the "infected" individuals show any measurable differences from the rest of the population? Can we say that there is something analogous to population genetics or ecology in memetics? Make a prediction that can be tested.

OK. I was on the spot. Here’s what I came up with:

There is a memeplex associated with the handling of the US flag. People within a certain sub-culture in the US learn the "proper" treatment of the flag and take it to heart. A single element of this plex is the meme dictating that "the Flag must not touch the ground." I, myself, have emotions associated with the Flag, and, although not steeped in these particular doctrines, would not willingly allow a US flag to touch the ground. I am a Democrat, but I will predict that Republicans are more susceptible to this meme than are Democrats. What about Republicans who become Democrats or Democrats who turn Republican? I don’t know for sure, but I have a hunch and I’m proposing the following test. If we were to observe successive randomly selected Fourth of July parades for several decades and count the number of times that flags were permitted to touch the ground, that number would be higher in years when the Democrats had done well in elections. I am postulating that the self-identification of "Republican" provides a more hospitable environment for this particular meme.

There are two side issues here. First, it may be more convenient to measure this phenomenon using survey methods. I agree, but the challenge here is to identify an actual behavior that is effected by the meme. Second, if the knowledge of the test were to become widespread, it would have unpredictable effects on the outcome.

I’m pretty sure that we can come up with more such tests, and easier ones, if we put I minds to it. I suspect that some folks have already done so. I believe that this is the kind of thing that has to be done to prove that the meme concept provides a productive viewpoint for social scientists.

1/3/2007 11:24 AM

Tags: memes, memetics, meme ecology, evolution, meme test

The Descent of Theory

2007-01-02T15:54:00.000-05:00

Two of my in-laws are social science professors at a major university. As near as I can tell, they have made significant contributions to their fields and are delightful human beings as well as learned and intelligent. I love being with them at family events, but unfortunately for me, they usually are looking for a break from their work. I am always hungry for intelligent conversation, but they would rather talk about something else – anything else, with the possible exception of football. (I found out a few years ago that they did not know the name of their own football team.)

I decided on Thanksgiving vacation to sneak up on them with a tangentially related subject: memes. "So, is anyone in your field using meme-related approaches to any of their problems?" Well, the answer was not just, "No." It was, "No, of course not!" Needless to say, I was stunned. I know they went to school before memes were hypothesized, but seriously, Darwin had already published! The ensuing conversation was pointed and extremely satisfying to me, because one seldom gets seriously challenged, point by point, on things that one believes to be true. The nice part was that I was able to meet each challenge with an explanation and/or example. They were certainly asking the right questions. Even so, it took a good half-hour before one of them summarized that the defining characteristic of a meme was that it "reproduced" by means of imitation.

Apparently, they had not previously understood the concept, which implies that they did not really understand what Darwin had to say, other than the fact that the biological world was an end product of Deep Time and small changes. In fact, they didn’t really care about Evolution. In their minds, they were dealing with a static situation. How do people function under certain circumstances? What are people like? What can they do? How do they do it? What are the important explanatory variables involved in these behaviors? How do people perceive and understand their own behaviors?

In the same position I would be asking, do permanent behavioral changes invade a population? Is there homeostasis in alternative behavioral options? Do suites of behavioral attributes coalesce into clusters of mutually supportive elements? How do behaviors change? What environmental variables influence the direction and nature of those changes?

The model for their questions is the mechanical. How does it work? The model for my questions is ecological. Where is the balance? Why does it change?

I talked to one of the professors the other day. When I asked about progress on the meme front, laughter was my only response. These things take time.

-------------------------------------------

I had a beloved professor of geology who taught courses on statistical concepts. It was his belief that professors did not change their opinions or approaches to Science. Their courses were set, their notes were written, their efforts were focused. Paradigm shift occurred only because these "dinosaurs" died off. His example was the Theory of Continental Drift, proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, but not accepted until the 60’s. Everybody knew that this theory couldn’t be right. The Earth did not move for them. Wegener insisted and came up with a different explanatory mechanism every three weeks, one of which was correct. The professors got tired of shooting down these proposals and just stopped listening to him. The young students, however, listened and couldn’t help but look for confirmatory examples. They couldn’t talk about it, but they could think about it.

Maybe this is how memes will work their way into the social sciences. Old Heads will die off.

Maybe my geology professor was right. Individual professors choose a path that can be productive, or they can waste their careers following dead ends and digging dry holes. Students will more often follow the ones who are, by sheer chance, productive. Successive generations of students can acquire significant changes over Deep Time. Ideas thus shift slowly in the direction of productivity.

I prefer to think that scientists can change in real time, can accept new visions of the world. It’s just that they often build walls to cut off change in a given direction. These self-imposed constraints are complicated, often due to personal interactions as much as anything else. Some self-limitations are installed for good reason. For instance, resistance to the O.T. story of Noah made the old geologists reject Catastrophism, to the point that they could not see the story of an actual catastrophe in the stones. Professors are also often bound to the mast. The inertia of their particular academic trajectories drags them along for the ride.

Follow-through is necessary, and obsessiveness is a required trait for the profession. Notwithstanding these limitations, scientists do change. My geology professor was a good example of that. Having made his career as a petrologist, he became so enamored of statistical methods that he retired to teach it. He encouraged random sampling to such an extent, pushing a program for grid-drilling the entire continent, that he became known as the geologist with ten thousand holes in his head. He was proud of that.

1/2/2007 2:21 PM

Tags: memes, paradigm shift, evolution

One by One

2007-01-01T23:48:00.000-05:00

I’ve decided as one of my New Year’s resolutions that I should post at least five times a week.

The reason that I haven’t is not really a lack of desire, or lack of time, or a lack of ideas. Quite the contrary, I suffer from an excess of interests and topics that I would like to discuss. Call it process lock, or mental page-thrashing. I read once that some people have difficulty with decisions and that the cure is to set a priority scheme. E.g., first, you choose as you read. Left first, top first, age before beauty, alphabetically, then flip a coin. If nothing else works, ask a friend to pick.

Maybe that could work for some things, but my problem isn’t a shortage of decisions, but an excess. I decide to write about each thing I come across, and each item pushes the stack one deeper. To know me, you wouldn’t believe it, but I have entirely too much enthusiasm about every thought that crosses my mind.

So what’s the cure? I’m open to suggestions, but here’s my plan for now: I’m going to write about the books I’m reading, one chapter at a time. If I get a post done, then maybe I’ll work on something else.

1/1/2007 11:14 PM

Tags: New Year's Resolution

Book List – The Saga

2006-12-21T14:19:00.000-05:00

My life is way out of control. Just to give you a little insight, the following books appear on the back of my bed:

1,000 Ways to Checkmate

Chess Rules of Thumb

The Game

Economics

The Complete Art of War

I am currently reading none of them, though I have read chunks of all and may do so again.

On my chair by the bed are the following books and other items:

Darwinism and Its Discontents

The Language Instinct

Global Brain

The Lucifer Principle

A+ Certification

The Forgotten

The New Testament and Psalms

S is for Silence

Biking shorts
An issue of Science News
A combination lock that glows when you spin it
Various unfinished newspaper puzzles
Various bills and receipts
A cost list for shelving
A bank statement
The envelope for a Starbucks giftcard
A grocery list from last month

I am currently reading or using all of them in some fashion except The Lucifer Principle, which I have finished and intend to read again.

On the window sill I have stacked 8 piles of books, approximately 3 feet high. I have been on Amazon three times this week.

Eventually we will have a party or something, then I will carry everything up to my office and leave it there until I think of it again. By the way, I don’t use my office for anything except storage. I have been wondering whether to call a structural engineer.

12/21/2006 2:10 PM

2006-12-20T22:21:00.000-05:00

Comics Curmudgeon has posted a new version of The Night Before Chistmas for the ultimate funnies fanatic.

Viva the Zap

2006-12-19T12:58:00.001-05:00

The Voloch Conspiracy is quoting the WSJ’s editorial on food irradiation. This is Very Interesting stuff.

The Centers for Disease Control concluded its investigation by noting: "An overwhelming body of scientific evidence demonstrates that irradiation does not harm the nutritional value of food, nor does it make the food unsafe to eat." According to Paisan Loaharanu, a former director at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, "The safety of irradiated foods is well established through many toxicological studies. . . . No other food technology has gone through more safety tests than food irradiation."

Jonathan Adler of Voloch says:

If the use of food irradiation would help protect public health, why isn't it used? Anti-technology activists, including many self-appointed "consumer" groups, have given it a bad name (largely due to its tangential association to nuclear power), and spread anti-irradiation misinformation.

Irradiation would not eliminate all food borne illness, to be sure, but there's no reason not to encourage its use where appropriate.

Some cherry-picked comments follow. Apparently people have strong feelings about the subject.

Maybe some mystical nutrients could be killed. The ones that are known and measurable aren't affected significantly.

…

I delight in pointing out to my colleagues at our biotech company that they are better off licking the toilet seats in the men's or women's room, than touching the handles of the microwaves in the lunch room. That's where the real crap is....this because most of you disgusting, nose-picking, eye-rubbing, mouth-wiping, toilet non-washing, body-fluid smearing slobs don't wash your hands. Buying overpriced "sanitizers" is a very poor substitute for personal cleanliness. As for avoiding food born illness, you can beat a lot of the food issues by preparing food for yourselves, not coping out to cheap fast food (although the fast food joints are a lot better at clean living than most of you). Just remember to eat only foods that will spoil but eat them before they do.

Still, you can get nailed by the diseased, unexamined people flooding into the US, whoamong other things, shit in the irrigation water flooding the fields of sunny Kalifornia. Their "deposits" show up in your bags of pre-cut salads. Bank on it.

…

Speaking of unsanitary, my brother-in-law is a preacher. After every service, he goes through the usual routine of greeting the congregation as they leave the church. Then he goes and thoroughly washes his hands. Hand shaking is very unsanitary.

…

Irradiation is simply uncouth. Food should be more expensive. Cheap food just lets more poor people live, and live badly if you know what I mean. So fat and such bad taste.

They should get a few hundred grams of organic food a day. And wash my car.

I have some misgivings. My own feeling is that the food market is distorted by exceedingly low transportation costs in the US. I suspect we would have a lot fewer food-borne ailments if food were obtained locally. So, once again, I argue for a substantial carbon tax.

On the other hand, there would be substantial energy savings due to unrefrigerated transport and storage. We keep a gallon of Parmalat skim milk on hand, which is steam-processed. We can’t afford the culinary tragedy of running out of milk for morning cereal. We store it on the pantry shelf and it keeps well. We have found that it does separate and settle after a couple of months, but it still tastes fine. I wouldn’t keep it past the shelf date, though.

I also worry that the radiation process would get the food processors off the hook. They would become more lax than they are today. I don’t think we should be relying on a single methodology. One thing we should expect from our government is to inspect and assure the quality of our food.

Third, I worry that it would let our bodies off the hook, as well. Think about what happens when Americans go to third world countries. They invariably come down with Montezuma’s revenge no matter how careful they are. If you’re not fit, this can kill you. It’s usually the old and infirm or very young who die from contaminated food. Perhaps we need more exposure to nasty germs, not less, to activate our natural immunities. (I’ve often thought that there would be market for third world water, so that you could develop resistance before going to the country, suffering only in the comfort of your own bathroom.)

I had another issue, which was laid to rest by one of the commenters – smart group over there. What about the security issue of loose radioactive materials? Companies could not be trusted to keep track of this stuff. It turns out, however, that the food is radiated by mechanical rather than nuclear means. Electrons are magnetically accelerated to bombard the food within a closed chamber and there is no actual radioactive material.

On the whole, my assessment is that it is a good idea. We should be doing it under the control of rigorous government inspection and evaluation, just as we should be fostering GM foods that can help address world-wide hunger and health issues. We have the capacity, if we put our minds to it, to handle these things responsibly. Let’s prove it by policing the food industry a little better in general.

http://volokh.com/posts/1166493092.shtml

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116639577040052892.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_processing

Tags: radiation, food safety, Parmalat, germs

Statistical critique of Hopkins Iraq mortality study (100,000)

2006-12-16T23:20:00.000-05:00

It seems like every conversation about Iraq nowadays begins with, "Everybody knows we’re going to lose this war, it’s just a matter of when we choose to leave." Maybe, they think the whole thing is a matter of silly juvenile behavior. The reason for this defeatist attitude is that people have some absurd preconceptions about the nature and extent of the violence. They don’t understand what we are fighting. They don’t understand what we are accomplishing. They don’t know how bad things can really get, and they have an exaggerated picture of the current violence. Things are bad, I recognize this. We are not "winning" yet. That’s true. However, it is far from a hopeless situation, and it’s far from clear that things are worse than they were before the war. (Did you know, for instance, that oil production in Iraq has steadily increased?)

Mostly the defeatist attitude is a matter of self-deception and lack of perspective. I know. I, myself, feel guilty when I have offended someone. That’s not an unusual attitude in this country. Americans want to be "nice" to everyone. Even if we invade your country, we have to see ourselves as merely, ah …, helping out. War does not abide that attitude. You can’t just re-sheathe your sword when the work becomes tiresome.

Once upon a time, there weren’t so many simple-minded people here. When America was looking toward half a million casualties, or more, to invade the main islands of Japan, there was little trepidation and shirking. The members of the invasion force saw themselves as marked for death. Only MacArthur looked forward eagerly, but everyone looked forward. Thank God for the Enola Gay and its life-saving cargo. How many of us owe our existence to Harry Truman?

One of the major contributing factors to our lack of perspective, however, has been the "academic" contribution of some researchers at Johns Hopkins. The absurd body counts that these people have touted have been swallowed whole by a good number of Americans. Let me just say this. The authors of this study would not flinch from the assertion that a million Iraqis have died as a result of this war. OK. That’s one thousand, on average, each and every day for a thousand days. Can we picture that?

Pearl Harbor – 2400

Valley Forge – 2000 (six months about 10 a day)

Gettysburg – 8000 (3 days, about 2666 per day)

Normandy – 245,000 (81 days, about 3000 per day)

Battle of the Bulge – 35,000 (41 days, about 900 per day)

These were awesome events, storied in history. Let it be known that civilians died as well, but the fact is that it is hard to kill people. They take effective steps to prevent that outcome, especially civilians. And the dead tend to be counted pretty accurately. People come hunting for them.

I’m going to explain to you why the Hopkins/Lancet study is flawed. I realize this is old news, but I get tired of reading that nobody has challenged the Hopkins study on a statistical basis. There are a number of statisticians who have done so. I have seen some critiques that were telling and concise, but the anti-war people blew them off, just as they accuse others of doing. I suspect that many statisticians didn’t bother – after all, it is a lot of work – because they deemed the study too tentative and troubled to be worth the effort. Some people reject the whole field of statistical epidemiology as naturally prone to hyperbole. I think that goes too far. Good science is possible. Statistics can tell the truth, but such ideals have not been honored by this study.

I recognized at the time that a lot of the people were impressed by the scientific trappings and daunted by the difficult reading. I felt I could contribute in this area, so I wrote up a detailed analysis. Since interest had faded, I didn’t anticipate that a follow-up study would be done based on the same flawed process. I have not, and don’t really plan to look at the new study, but I think my complaints about the original study are still pertinent. I have rewritten them extensively for the sake of clarity.

Description of the Study

The Bloomburg School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University sponsored research into the effects of the US invasion of Iraq in 2002, treating it as a public health issue for the people of Iraq. How many deaths resulted, directly or indirectly, from the invasion? The study was designed as a retrospective survey of households across Iraq to measure "excess" deaths of the post-invasion over the pre-invasion period. Theoretically, this would mean every death, whether it be from malaria, whooping cough or self-immolation. In practice, this seemed to come down to measuring war fatalities. Respondents were asked to provide names and death certificates for everyone who died and, most importantly, the date of that death. In which period did they die, before or after the invasion.

The term "excess" implies a hypothesis that a specified event induced an increase in the number of deaths beyond a "normal" level. This is the epidemiological bias. How many extra people died after Chernobyl, when considering all conceivable effects? In actuality, though, the "event" is a lot more complicated than the authors let on. Many, many changes and events occurred at roughly the same time, and the conclusions are naturally muddied by that mix. The other obvious concern is that the time preceding the invasion was not normal either.

Specific critiques follow in roughly the order they occur in the Lancet paper:

Sample Construction and Questionnaire

Cluster Dilution – Variance of the sample is artificially reduced by pairing some provinces to avoid sampling both. Even though there are the same number of clusters, some clusters, coming from the same province, are now more alike than they would have been, and the significance of the result is thus exaggerated.
Non-Response – Interviewers skipped a lot of houses where no one answered. There is every reason to believe that the households skipped are different than the ones who answered. No attempt was made to characterize the non-responders.
Subject Bias – Households who answered the door were almost uniformly responders. This implies that they knew what the study was about ahead of time and had already assented when they opened the door. Therefore we have to assume that this was essentially a self-selected sample. It’s no better than walking through a mall interviewing only people who ask to be interviewed.
Frame Definition –The demographics of the households changed between the two periods more than should be expected. Also, do the interviewers and subjects have the same definition of household? I was listed as living with my parents during the years that I was away at college. Where was my household? Iraq upheavals may have effected the inclusion of young males in particular as members of a household.
Unbalanced Ignorance – No information on disappearances – only on known deaths. Do we know when the death occurred, or only when the body was found? If only a few were switched from pre-invasion to post, it would seriously distort the results.
Sample Manipulation – The selection of Fallujah makes me suspicious that the sampling was not purely random. Surely there was no more notorious town in all of Iraq. The dropping of Fallujah makes me even more suspicious. I’m questioning their stated motives on dropping it. I believe that the effect of Fallujah on the analysis was probably to expand variance so greatly that the confidence interval included zero, rendering the result statistically insignificant. Prove me wrong. I have some experience with researchers. The most dangerous tendency in Academia is the drive to attain positive results in order to publish. Combine that with the natural human tendency to hide weaknesses in an argument, and you have a license to argue any point of view whatsoever.
Omitted Controls – The interviewers wanted to avoid certain areas. That implies that there is a known variable not considered. Relevant distinctions should always be measured. This variable should have been quantified and used as a control variable in the study. Let’s call it "war zone status", which would serve as a useful indicator variable. Areas in war zones should have been oversampled to reduce variance, not undersampled. Maybe violence is only a big issue in violent places. Yes? Non-violent places cannot be expected to contribute significantly to excess deaths. The sampling frame is not uniform! Think about Kurdistan and the parts of southern Iraq that are relatively peaceful. Making the assumption that they will follow the same distribution inflates the projected total.
Uneven Field – Means and variances can be expected to change from cluster to cluster dramatically, and the model does not control for that except by governorate.
Source Clumping – The study conflates multiple sources of excess deaths that have different statistical properties. These sources, such as economic/public health vs. military, should be evaluated separately. On one extreme we have a fields of grain analogy. On the other we have a minefield analogy.
Dark Matter – Did Saddam kill anyone? How many? Why don’t we see a number for that in the results? Was such a question posed in the interview? Do the investigators think that would be a legitimate question to ask? Do they have any way of knowing the answer?
Conduct of the Interview
Tare – If I assert that the introduction by the interviewer was biasing the results, do the investigators have any way to refute my assertion? In other words, were there any efforts to disguise the perceived purpose or political import of the study? Was there any effort to measure the impact of alternative introduction scripts or question sequencing?
Differential Time Bias – Interviewers would naturally be afraid to probe if the death were recent. Any such behavioral change that depends on the lapse of time since the death would cause bias.
Differential Cause Bias – It is also possible that subjects would be more reluctant to report certain types of deaths than other types. Since the types of deaths may have changed between the two periods, the interviewers need to know that they are getting the whole truth. Were measures taken to do so?
Intimidation Distortions – Were some clusters in areas controlled by AIF at the time of the interview? Would interviewers change the wording depending on who they thought was listening?
Statistical Methodology
Hyper-Processing – Modern statistical software allows, even encourages, a great variety of data snooping and something analogous to venue shopping. I read nothing to indicate what the investigators were doing to minimize such dangers. It is not sufficient to wear a cloak of professionalism if you’re not going to share with the readers.
Post Facto Definitions – Background deaths went up. The investigators clumped them in with the total. This increase should have been tested for statistical significance before doing so. If background deaths had gone down would they still have combined them? I’m suspicious that they wouldn’t have.
Post Facto Scale Conversion – A log-linear scale conversion was imposed on the numbers. This wouldn’t work if any of the results had been decreases. You would have to kluge the conversion to handle negative inputs. So the conversion obviously wasn’t planned for from the beginning.
Demographic Weighting – Was ethnicity, religion, age and sex of household members recorded? Was this information compared to national statistics? Projections to national population should be weighted to match national demographics, and conversion ratios should be reported.
Emotional Class Reporting – According to the study, the majority of violent deaths were among women and children. There are several problems with this assertion. 1) The estimate is not separately tested for significance. 2) The number of women killed was very small. Why even mention them? It would make much more sense to combine children and men as classes, since the majority of the sample fell in those two categories. 3) The rate is wrong. The Iraqi Health Ministry estimated a much lower proportion of women and children, less than 10%. You can argue with the Ministry’s absolute numbers, but this peculiar anomaly is most likely due to a small sample size. 4) The definition of "children" does not necessarily preclude its members from combat operations. 5) Children are not categorized by sex. Why not? I suspect it makes a difference. 6) Combining women and children together seems calculated to allow emotional political statements. This misstep, in and of itself, points to motive and brings the whole study into question.
Mathematical Mistakes – Although it may seem intuitively acceptable, it is nevertheless inappropriate to perform arithmetic on Confidence Intervals in the same fashion that you might use for other numbers. I am sure that the investigators derived some CIs based on the raw numbers, and then converted the result to a ratio of post-invasion to pre-invasion deaths. Even if a confidence statement about increased mortality is correct, the corresponding statement about the ratio increase could easily be incorrect.
Division by Zero – In particular, many clusters had ZERO deaths by violence in the pre-invasion period. There was only one death by violence during that time for the WHOLE study. (I find it confusing that both Fallujah and the other clusters show this as a missing value on Table 2.) A ratio with zero on the bottom is hard to estimate. The increase would be interpreted as infinite. This study certainly does not measure the ratio for more than one cluster. I’m suspicious, forgive me, that the investigators imputed a single violent death for the earlier period in order to have a calculable ratio, which they may have seen as a conservative procedure. Also, a normally distributed variate divided by another normal distribution theoretically produces a Cauchy distribution. An interesting feature of the Cauchy distribution is that it has infinite variance. Since there was only one cluster, at best, for which a ratio was measurable beforehand, I am certain that the distribution of ratios was not directly determined for violent deaths. The numbers should therefore be reported in raw form and not represented as ratios.
Public Presentation
Why did theauthors feel it necessary to point out that the sponsors had no impact on the design of the study? Is this customary? The design of a study is a technical issue that can benefit from all viewpoints.
Johns Hopkins is a highly respected institution around the world, and the Lancet a respected journal. May I point out, however, that JH has witnessed some anti-war activism supported by faculty, and that several of the authors have shown bias in public statements and blog-published correspondence. They commit themselves to claims that exceed even the conclusions of their report. They now argue essentially that the "real" numbers must be even higher because of all the violent places they "missed". Well? Did the study measure those numbers or not?
There is considerable doublespeak about the meaning of the numbers. We are talking in the report about excess deaths, but that does not necessarily mean civilian deaths. Someone who takes up arms is not a civilian. The authors, in their public statements, seem to want to have it both ways.
As discussed above, a log-normal conversion was used for some of the data, yet Richard Garfield now seems to be sure that the distribution is normal. The distinction is important because of the implied asymmetry. In a log-normal distribution the mean or expected value is closer to the left, or lower end of a confidence interval. Statements that the bulk of the probability will tend toward the center are therefore incorrect.
The timing these reports, both the original and updated versions, is indicative of political motivation.

The war in Iraq is a very sad affair. People are dying. War is Hell. Though I disagree with their politics, I have respect for people like Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham, etc., who have a lot of heart and are trying desperately to do something about these problems. I envy their talents and energy, and I admire their compassion. I myself am doing very little.

That being said, I believe their efforts are counterproductive. For one thing they do a disservice to Science by abusing it for political reasons. I think that I have made a good argument here that the results are tainted by all sorts of goal-directed biases. Scientists are supposed to bend over backwards to assure the validity of their work. If you abuse the tool, it won’t be as useful when you need it again. And I think – and this is my political angle – that they are also doing a disservice to public health in the long run by undermining the strategic goals of the war in Iraq. The world needs peace, but we are never going to get it until Saddam and his ilk are impossible.

My original more extensive discussion can be found here.

http://journals.aol.com/jjmollo/SoundoftheMushroom/entries/2005/04/30/iraq-mortality-study-100000/342

New study?

http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf

Cluster Sampling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_sampling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution

Lancet/hopkins justification

http://www.stats.org/stories/the_science_ct_dead_oct17_06.htm

Original Study

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604174412/fulltext

A Funnies Kind of World

2006-12-03T23:36:00.000-05:00

A Funnies Kind of World

I know I've been negligent. I am a serial obsessive and my obsessions have been elsewhere. One thing I had to stop obsessing about was Iraq. It was driving me crazy and there's never been anything I could do about it. But, it turns out that the Democrats were really just blowing smoke. When push came to shove, they were unable to unleash the Murthas of the world. It's true that they are congenitally unable to recognize an enemy. Every situation is seen as a simple misunderstanding among reasonable people. But, they are susceptible to persuasion when in a position to make decisions. The Left has been unable to set the agenda.

One thing I have never neglected, however, are the funnies. I read them every day. I can't get enough of them. Sadly, one of my favorites has bit the dust. The Boondocks has been replaced by something dreadful. I don't think I would like most of the people who like The Boondocks, and I suspect I wouldn't get along too well with Aaron McGruder, the creator of this radical strip. But the cartoon itself is (or was) awesome. It's about a truncated family of 10-year old Huey, a budding black radical, his younger brother Riley, a self-styled gangsta, and their beleaguered grandfather, who have moved from the city to the suburbs. The representation of the ensuing culture clash has been perceptive, blunt, honest and constructive, with enough forgiveness and humanity to make it bearable. I think McGruder has done a lot of good with this medicine, and I will miss my daily dose.

Today's funnies had some small consolation in Opus, an oh-so-delicate jab at religious sensitivities, including a pinch on the cheek of Islamic cartoon-o-phobes. (It's not online yet. You gotta buy the paper.) I won't mention the cartoonist's name, since he and Opus may be in the soup. Can't have that.

12/3/2006 11:33 PM

Peters Out and Dies

2006-11-04T01:30:00.000-05:00

Ralph Peters has given up on the war in Iraq. He had been a war proponent, but not too long ago he started talking about how the "natural" map of the Middle East has been abused by history. He aroused a great deal of discontent among friends and enemies alike by publishing, in the Armed Forces Journal no less, his preferred map, which divides everything along cultural, ethnic and religious lines. By this defeatist insight, he may have actually made himself the person most responsible for pushing us past the tipping point in Iraq, and now he wants out.

The promotion of a sanctity concept regarding national borders has made the enforcement of non-aggression possible since the end of World War II. Certainly, it allowed us to intervene in Kuwait when Saddam tried to gobble it up, but most of the time it served by establishing the rules of the game. In Iraq that rule was serving us well to keep the neighbors at bay, protecting Kurdistan in particular. Peters' proposal was taken as a message from the Bush administration most importantly in Turkey and Iran, and it may have put our only current success at risk. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go.

Peters' new idea is to put all of our efforts into supporting the Iraqi Army, which has been a relative success, rather than the IP, which has been a disaster. Then ... we sit back and hope for a military coup. I agree, with only the first part of course, on the principle that you should always feed your successes. I would go further and encourage the Kurds to expand their influence southward, bringing their liberal disposition along with them, and to bring in Kurdish population from Turkey and Iran where they are discriminated against, to help challenge the growing Shia hegemony. Maybe then the Sunni and Shia Arabs will be persuaded to realize how much they have to lose. We want these people to work together, and it is more than possible for that to happen (see Frank Warner discussion on diversity). We just have to take the necessary steps. Who would have predicted twenty years ago that there could ever be peace in Northern Ireland? The Iraqis are no more addicted to violence than the IRA was.

It seems, however, that many Americans, in addition to Ralph Peters, have given up in Iraq. There is an air of defeatism and a dramatic Democratic victory will be taken as confirmation that we are going to throw in the towel. (Which aggravates me greatly, since I am a Democrat.)

First of all, when you read that someone who used to support the war has had a change of heart, remember than anyone can make such a claim. Check the source, and look up the word "shill" in your dictionary. Not that Peters is in that category, but I have seen some interesting see-the-light posts. Second, remember that the true reasons for invading Iraq were strategic. Third, ask yourself what we will do when we pull out. If we throw in the towel, where exactly are we going to throw it in to?

What becomes of Lebanon? For that matter, what will become of Israel? How will we keep the Soviets ... oops ... the Russians and the Chinese from asserting their influence over the area. People think it doesn't matter much, but what to you think Russia and China will do with their newfound power and influence? Putin certainly didn't seem concerned last year whether the people of Europe had heat for the winter. He wanted to send a message to the wayward people of the Orange Revolution by cutting off gas supplies. I hope the message was received somewhat beyond that target.

Whether we have been in Iraq to grab the oil or not, it is hard to believe that our competitors would be any less acquisitive. Most likely a power vacuum will lead to a whole series of disasters -- starting with a bloodbath in Baghdad, ending perhaps with another genocide, much as our absence from Indochina allowed the genocide in Cambodia to proceed. Our leverage on Iran will evaporate. Our ability to defend the Straits of Hormuz will deteriorate, to say nothing of the plight of women in that part of the world. And Africa. Think what will happen when the unimpeded children of the Prophet (subset Wahabi) sweep across that continent, flush with oil money and full of religious wrath. Is it paranoid to think that Darfur is but a warm-up? Chad is already under attack by the Janjaweed militia. Will the African Union stand against them? Perhaps a contingent from Europe could be persuaded?

Force and fear is a necessary part of world politics, and will be until the world resembles the West. It's not that we would lack the power to deal with a deteriorating situation, but the crux of the problem is that retreat can become habitual.

11/4/2006 1:13 AM

Frank Warner has a different interpretation of Peters' approach.

Glossolalia

2006-10-19T23:05:00.000-04:00

I was paging through the TigerHawk site the other day when I stumbled upon a very interesting post talking about the Global War on Terror in a way that made me feel that the author truly understood the issues. There was no mention of Vietnam, so it couldn't be a Democrat, and no weasel words about the President's mistakes, so obviously it couldn't be a Republican running for office:

... Why is it so hard to see the nature of this war?

It should not be difficult to see clearly who our enemies are. Every major Islamic fascist leader has openly identified the United States as their prime target, and repeatedly promises the creation of a new, global, "caliphate" where Islamic fascism will rule mankind. This language comes from both Sunni and Shi'ite fanatics, whether Arab, Persian, Indonesian, American, or British.

We are fighting Islamic fascists in two forms: states like Iran and Syria, and organizations like al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

And yet we are foolishly reluctant to come to terms with this terrible reality. It's an old, sad story isn't it? Over and over again, our enemies announce their intention to attack us, and we refuse to believe them. Hardly anyone took Mein Kampf seriously, and when Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the table at the U.N., announcing, "We will bury you," it was widely treated as a moment of comic relief. ...

... Paradoxically, when we refuse to criticize anybody, we end up patronizing everyone, which is offensive to everyone and self-defeating. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech, and traps us in the discredited nonsense of moral equivalence. This war is not between two morally equivalent sides; it's a war between brutal totalitarian fascism and freedom. Our freedom, not just freedom for Iraqis and Afghans. We are the fascists’ prime target, and they intend to impose a brutal tyranny on those of us who survive their onslaught.

Islamic fascism is the great test of this generation. When we fail to fully grasp the nature of our enemy and the urgency of our victory, our own people become confused and divided, and the fascists are encouraged to believe that we’re afraid of them. ...

Imagine my chagrin to discover that the author of this sincere, intelligent sounding speech was none other than Rick Santorum. He has, unfortunately, earnedmy reluctant respect, in this regard at least.

Why is it that the people I have so little in common with can be so right on this issue, whereas the people who speak my language in every other way are so pathetically obtuse? I really don't know what I'm going to do here. I simply can't bring myself to vote for this narrow-minded, elitist, moralistic, fundamentalist, anti-scientific, corporate-stroking, monopolist-enabling retrograde. He must be channeling someone.

10/19/2006 10:47 PM

Folishness in High Places

2006-10-17T17:04:00.000-04:00

One thing people need to understand about Rep. Foley is that he was not really elected. He was "promoted" progressively by a political infrastructure that indirectly rewards sin and corruption. Honestly, I say this without knowing a single thing about Rep. Foley.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say I’m Senator Warbucks, a good Republican from the state of Disrepair, and two Republican candidates are being proposed to run for the House in District 666. People in the party want my opinion, and I probably want to give it to them whether they want it or not. Candidate A is a good all-around guy, not too flashy, but nothing nasty in his background. Believe me, I would know. I know where all the bodies are buried. Now Candidate B is more charismatic, probably able to move the Party forward, has lots of influential friends and seems pretty smart. Unfortunately, he’s got like a whole ream of dirt. You’d have to know where to look, but it’s definitely there. Now, if not for the dirt, I’d have to go for Candidate A, but as it is, Candidate B is a no-brainer.

That’s crazy isn’t it? No, B is the clear choice because 1) he’s good for the Party, 2) he can’t run against me, and 3) I can get rid of him whenever I want. You decide which of these reasons is most important. Essentially, I will have a workable slot where I have complete control.

Now imagine that there are a couple thousand people like Sen. Warbucks running loose in Washington. Most of them are decent people who want to do the right thing for the country, but they have friends to stroke and status to maintain. Situations arise faster than they can work the agenda, and hard choices have to be made all the time, and we need to raise lots of money. God is this fun! You sort of lose track of the time. When it’s time to depart from the stage, no one goes willingly. A lot of damage can be done and the welfare of the country becomes a secondary concern. Oh, well. At least I got a building named after me.

--------------------------------

There are several theories about the problems of democratic governments. It is necessary to explain how the people in charge seem to be consistently worse than the populations they represent. The Slick Willy theory is that people without conscience have an advantage in the contest. The Tammany Hall theory is that everything is rigged. Mr. Smith will just have to do what we say. The Don’t Delay theory is that motivated and innocent folk start at the bottom, move upward by luck and charisma, but somehow get corrupted by the exposure to temptation, by the mechanics of government, by requirements of compromise and the very social qualities that attracted the voters in the first place.

Actually, I believe it is a combination of all three. There is an algorithm in place that is not producing the quality of leaders that we wish for, not even the quality of leaders that we deserve. It filters out the good ones by scaring them off or undermining them, it corrupts the successful, and it handcuffs the effective. Given the countervailing forces, it is a testament to the basic decency of human nature that our reps are as sincere and hopeful as they are.

I’m really not being cynical here. I’m just trying to understand why things work out the way they do. It is my considered opinion that we need to change the algorithm, and I believe we can. That’s not cynical is it?

10/17/2006 1:39 PM

The Quiet

2006-10-14T01:39:00.000-04:00

Salman Rushdie, once famously targeted for assassination by the Ayatollah Khomeini, has given an interview to the Belfast Telegraph.

... It horrifies Rushdie that so many people in his natural political home - the left - don't get it. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. ...

... III: The quiet American, and the art of slitting our own throats

Rushdie has looked down the barrel of Islamism, smelt its cordite, and survived. So he is perpetually being asked - how do we lift the collective fatwa on our transport systems, our nightclubs, our cities? How do we scrape meaning from his misery? "When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say - the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable - satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary - why the hell not?

"But you see it every day, this surrender," he says. He runs through a list of the theatres and galleries that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests. He mentions that the entire British media - from the BBC down - placed itself in purdah during the Mohammed cartoons episode. "What I fear most is that, when we look back in 25 years' time at this moment, what we will have seen is the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They'll say that in the name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own throats.

10/14/2006 1:29 AM

Hopkins Hogwash

2006-10-11T22:47:00.000-04:00

The Washington post is aiding and abetting a crime against the truth by paying any attention whatsoever to the Johns Hopkins study and its magic 100,000 number which has now become 655,000. This was originally a rough attempt to find a rough number. There were so many flaws in the original work, published in The Lancet, that the estimate had to be characterized as a SWAG. The effort, however, was forgivable in that everyone knew that the circumstances were difficult. Don’t forget that the original estimate was not 100,000 but rather a spread, a confidence interval, from 8,000 to god-knows-what. There was considerable nudging, if not fudging, to get that bottom number over zero, into the realm of dubious significance. Use of a point estimate of 98,000, quickly rounded off to 100,000 in the public’s mind, was statistically unjustified and politically inflammatory. Why do it?

Forgiveness is no longer an issue because sanity is. There are, they say, or at least as Gilbert Burnham says, shall we round off again, two-thirds of a million dead people in Iraq who would not have died if the US had stayed at home. Yeah, we been busy. My question is, compared to what? The concept of excess deaths implies that we know what would have happened. We had an unstable situation that could have gone any direction. Who knows what Saddam would have done and who knows what someone else might have done to Iraq if we hadn’t acted?

My second question is, who’s to blame? We went into Iraq as a strategic move to change trajectory of Islamic radicalism. We went in as a preemptive move to forestall progressive deterioration in the political environment of the Middle East. We went in, among the many other reasons, for the charitable purpose of restoring a semblance of civilized life to a beleaguered people. Despite our motives, people have died and suffered. I don’t know the numbers, and neither does Gilbert Burnham, no matter how he might posture.

Many people have died at American hands because they have taken arms against us. Is that our fault? Yes, you might say, because they are defending their country. I’ll give you this, some of them were motivated by patriotism and were killed by our soldiers. Some of them were Baathists with blood on their hands. Can I subtract those? Some of them were Sunni ethnic supremacists who took joy in slaughtering Shiite police recruits. Do we need to take the blame for those deaths? Both sides? Many Iraqis were killed by simple criminals, released by Saddam for the explicit purpose of inducing chaos in a post-Saddam Iraq. If a man threatens to kill his family rather than face charges, what should the police do about it? Are they culpable if the man carries out his threat?

Some of these postulated "excess" deaths are attributed to public health issues. How do the researchers know what the health status of Iraq would be after four and a half years? What would be, for instance, the health status of the Marsh Arabs as Saddam continued for four years to drain and poison the swamps? People are dying for lack of electricity, for lack of drugs, for lack of gasoline. Americans have tried to bring these things to the Iraqi people but have been repeatedly thwarted by violent fanatics who wish the people to have nothing that Americans provide. Should we accept the blame for such deaths?

What does Gilbert Burnham counsel us to do? What does he think will happen in Iraq if we leave? Will he count the bloodbath that follows against us as well?

I agree with Burnham that we are culpable. We have caused many of these deaths. The fault is ours. Inaction was our sin. We are to blame for not acting much, much sooner. It would have been a lot easier to suppress all these evils if we had done it in 1992 instead of 2002.

I have talked about the Hopkins study in earlier posts, here, here, here, here and especially here for example, and other people have done better studies.

10/11/2006 9:58 PM

The War Against Lucifer

2006-10-07T16:35:00.000-04:00

Bio-hackers. Wrap your mind around that concept. Unlike nuclear weapons technology, biotechnology is relatively cheap and hard to monitor – a lot like the underground culture of Web crackers. I don’t believe the "Singularity" is near, but I do believe that changes in the next decade or two will be coming fast and piling on. This article points out the arms control problems when you have Al Qaeda with Bugs.

People do not give enough credit for the determination and wisdom, care and caution, dare and gumption, that went into winning WW III, the "Cold" War. An incomprehensible mesh of lifetime efforts mixed with angst-ridden decisions will never be completely understood. Make no mistake, no one lost this war except the taxpayers, and they got good value for their money. The states of the former Soviet Empire will all, eventually, be better off than they were, and the abatement of risk bodes well for Humanity’s long-term survival. It also bodes well that we can solve such enormous problems, because future problems will be of comparable severity.

… Other technologies have appeared almost out of nowhere, moving rapidly from fundamental research to applications. These include RNA interference, which allows researchers to turn off certain genes in humans or other organisms, and synthetic biology, a fledgling field recognized only since about 2002, intended to allow engineers to fabricate small "biological devices" and ultimately new types of microbes.

Between 1990 and 2000, the speed of DNA synthesis increased more than 500 times. …

The nature of future problems is such that we currently do not have the social structure to deal with them. The aggregation of 50 states in relatively uncontested lands took two hundred years of monumental efforts, combined with immense happy accidents. We have faults. We are what we are, but we are on the whole, a very good thing. Unified effort, however, a prerequisite to solving world problems, remains such a difficult thing that despair is a justifiable temptation. Canada and the US, sister states with a great deal in common and extremely little friction for the present, are unmotivated toward, and incapable of, designing a sensible political conjunction. The European Union is motivated, but even less capable. The Puerto Rican independence movement remains alive and strong after a century despite the advantages Puerto Rico has found as part of the US. Most of its citizens are as comfortable on the mainland as they are on the island, but nothing happens. How many proponents will it take to make Puerto Rico a state?

I was reading about Simon Bolivar the other day. He endeavored to unite Spanish speaking South America. He was widely admired, just as Vacslav Havel was in Chechoslovakia, but accommodation could not be made. He gave up in despair and went home, or rather away, to Spain. There were subsequently wars among the states of Peru, Chile and Bolivia, which despite its landlocked status, defiantly retains a navy that will return to the sea one day, one day when Arthur returns perhaps. Despite all the shared history, they could not find a way to unite.

That is the nub of things. How do we meld our separate superorganisms into a united network? Frightening as all this new biotechnology is, social science is where the real action is going to take place -- at least if we plan to survive.

10/7/2006 1:05 PM

Founder's Lookahead Problem

2006-10-07T01:31:00.000-04:00

There is a good post at Belmont Club, most of the posts at Belmont Club are good, but this one has more interesting comments than many. This subthread on the Constitution, initiated by Cedarford (they call him C-4 after the explosive, I think), was too interesting to moulder in comment limbo. He points out (as he has in the past) the undeniable fact that the US is almost unworkable, that the government has insufficient authority and flexibility to do its job. The Constitution, he says, is obsolete and politically unfixable. The consequent sanity gap is being plugged by activist judges (which is fine by me) and a tacit collective agreement to look the other way when real work needs to be done.

Cedarford said...
Red River - We need a constitutional amendment for Voter ID.
We know that the Constitutional Amending process is broken - impossible to do unless there is near-unanimous bipartisan support for doing so.
So errors, obsolete portions, and archaic terms continue to accumulate. Major flaws in the Constitution like no continuity of government in a nuclear attack, lack of a line item veto, confusing war power provisions, lifetime appointment of a badly flawed Federal judge, encroachment of the Feds onto State Rights are deemed "unfixable" - or worse, at the sole discretion of an unelected judiciary to hold their own little mini-Constitutional rewriting to divine "what the Constitution really meant" through "analysis" of unwritten emenations and penumbras..
Most nations recognize, most organizations recognize that constitutions, charters, code must be subject to revision and correction every 50 years or so to remain vital and relevant.
The Constitution of 210 years ago was a great old thing...wonderful, other than the Civil War...for getting much of what America became - right for so long. But it is long, long overdue for a real cleanup and correction of some bad provision or provisions the Fed Courts have perverted into different meaning.
The time is coming...unfortunately...it will be when we, The People - not the Courts - are empowered by necessity of a growingly dysfunctional, ossified, uncompetitive America incapable of waging war or peace effectively --to sit down With lawyers and fix the obsolete, archaic, or just flat wrong elements of the Old Paper...
10/05/2006 09:28:39 PM
2164th said...
C-4, you are off your game when you say:
... "The Constitution of 210 years ago was a great old thing...wonderful, other than the Civil War...for getting much of what America became - right for so long. But it is long, long overdue for a real cleanup and correction of some bad provision or provisions the Fed Courts have perverted into different meaning."
Do you really believe this current generation of ill-informed, poll driven, media-manipulated Americans is the right one to change and rearrange the US Constitution?
Repeat after me: "Hanging Chad".
10/06/2006 01:54:25 AM
10/06/2006 06:43:20 AM
Teresita said...
Do you really believe this current generation of ill-informed, poll driven, media-manipulated Americans is the right one to change and rearrange the US Constitution?
Yeah, how would you like Rosie O'Donnell to fix the 2nd Amendment, Bush to fix the 4th Amendment, and Alberto Gonzales to fix the 8th Amendment? Besides, you can't just sit down and change it, because the Constitution itself calls out a different procedure that involves the legislatures of 3/4ths of the States. Cedarford's only hassle is with the current interpretation of the document. I know it's a slow process (by design) but Cedarford should vote for Presidents and Senators who will install SCOTUS judges who see things your way.
10/06/2006 06:44:35 AM

Well, I’m no Constitutional scholar, but I have often thought that we treat the Constitution like the Torah. No one would have the courage to correct it for fear that others might make incorrect changes, not to mention that God would strike us dead. The actual accumulation of precedents and legal theory is more like the Talmud. Crazy old judges have pushed analogies and intimations of intent so far that the result defies common sense. The TV remote is comparable to a wagon wheel. You can pick it up to retrieve something underneath it, such as a book or a child’s leg, but you can’t move it to carry a load unless its already moving of its own, as down a hill. So beginning at sundown, as opposed to sunset, of Shabat, we can watch only that station which is already playing, unless it is showing the cooking of an animal in the milk of its mother, in which case we can drop the remote hoping that the impact will change the channel, just as we could stop the rolling wagon wheel by putting a rock ahead of it. [ed: not a real example]

I believe that the Constitution is fixable, but we have to get a whole lot better at talking things over, a whole lot better at merging the collective wisdom, before we take the chance. A leadership of alternating ideologues, which seems to be our pattern, will never be trusted enough to allow such delicate surgery.

10/7/2006 1:23 AM

Sen Inhofe Denounces Alarmism

2006-09-26T23:21:00.001-04:00

The Huff has a discussion of Sen. James Inhofe's passionate campaign to protect us from the Global Warming myth.

Xeloda and Tenacity

2006-09-26T22:23:00.000-04:00

I am reposting this message for Xeloda users which I first posted 15 months ago. I just traveled to visit my friend yesterday and earlier today. She has been up and down over these 15 months, but mostly up. She has continued to take Xeloda off and on and has made a point of enjoying life. She has also held down a job until just 3 weeks ago, helped to take care of her elderly mother, and lived to celebrate her own 60th birthday. Since her birthday she has developed severe edema. Her doctor has managed to get it under control using albumin, which has been another story in her well-storied life. When I saw her yesterday she had lost forty pounds of water weight in two weeks and she was "holding court" with an audience of family and friends. Once again, each day is a gift. After being unable to take it for a while, she has recommenced her Xeloda regimin as of today.

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Posted 6/28/2005
My family and I spent a few days with my friend who has breast cancer. She is not doing too well now, but she has been up and down for many years, fifteen years I think. I know it sounds strange, but I am somewhat envious of her. She loves life and gets excitement and enjoyment out of every bit of it. It's not that she has changed because of the cancer. She has always loved life, and she's been doing her best to hold onto it. Sometimes she gets her dark moods, but never weak moods.

I think she's been to every doctor in the Western Hemisphere and a few in the Eastern. She is constantly doing research and making lists of questions. Sometimes she tells the doctors things they didn't know.

Her pet peeve is the ignorance doctors seem to have regarding the daily struggles that patients face. She has, according to her own story, and I believe it, lasted longer on Xeloda, a particular chemotherapy, than anyone else. The side effects are nasty and she has learned to manage them. Since, she feels, the doctors are not doing a good job of helping patients with these problems, she would like to share her insights. She has written a document that she has been xeroxing and handing out to likely candidates, or leaving in doctor's offices, and mailing to any who ask.

It has become more difficult for her to keep up with this process, and she is currently on a triple cocktail of new chemo drugs, so I offered to post it on my blog for her. I will post it below until I find a better home for it. I will be glad to forward messages and or questions if I find them appropriate.

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Posted Document by M.:

As a breast cancer patient who has survived nearly 8 years of chemotherapy since the metastatic spread of my disease, I have a complaint to make about cancer treatment: often patients are not adequately informed about the process of taking a specific drug. Doctors (or their physician assistants) in some instances for certain drugs need to be very detailed and almost create a recipe for successful taking of the drug. While sitting in waiting rooms, I have chatted with people in all phases of treatment. Many complain and insist "I can not take this drug. . . the side effects are too bad". We humans are all different and our bodies certainly respond differently to drugs, but I would think a few guidelines are needed. The purpose of this paper is to provide step-by-step instructions for the successful administration of the drug Xeloda or Capecitabine.

The cancer patient unfamiliar with Xeloda might imagine that taking chemotherapy by pill would be considerably more convenient than taking weekly injections . There would be need for one less needle puncture! However,the initial adjustment to the drug Xeloda is not like swallowing an aspirin and letting it do its thing.
As with many of the chemo drugs, establishing the effective and tolerable dose for a specific patient is not an exact equation and sometimes various dosages must be tried. Doctors establish an initial dosage by using your body weight. Often this initial dosage must be adjusted. Do not give up if your first dosage sends your body into physical despair. My body actually developed Parkinsons-like symptoms when I took the initial dose. I mean by this that all my muscles got very weak…most especially and noticeably my tongue—I could not speak, I could not swallow so I dribbled, my eyes teared and could hardly be made to focus. I scribbled in nigh illegible handwriting "I think I have had a stroke." Even though my mind was functioning and I knew everything that was happening, I felt like a viewer of my own strange condition. My family checked me into the emergency room expecting them to arrest my stroke. In short order, the ER folks assured me that this was not the case. I lay on their gurney for 5 hours being monitored and then they sent me home. The ER doctor said" Do not take any more of that drug until you speak to your medical oncologist who prescribed it." When I visited my regular oncologist his first response was "Discontinue the drug." I insisted that I did not want to give up taking this drug. I knew that it might be my last possibility for survival. Finally he said "Okay, one more attempt. Reduce the dosage by half and then work your dosage back up." At 1300 mg., the same horrible set of symptoms returned. I reduced the dose back one small 150 mg pill to 1100 and that is the dosage I took for two years. Very few people get this side effect—only 2%.

I knew that with my advancing breast cancer I had to be able to take this drug. I was not only tremendously determined, but also afraid of this drug that had the potential to extend my life. I experimented with methods and times to take it. The brochure that my doctor gave me informed me that this medication should always be taken with food twice a day. Even a simple stipulation like this required more attention than I initially imagined.

For example, when I first began the medication I was taking it twice a day with several swallows of food. One vomitous experience made me want to discontinue this drug. I had to try again. From then on I took the medicine with a pretty substantial meal. No more few swallows of whatever. I had a meal. Two staples that I included in my diet were cheese and kefir. The latter is a yogurty-like beverage that is high in protein. Our bodies need much protein to rebuild cells that the chemo destroys. Cheese helps me to avoid chemo-induced diarrhea.
Eating was one thing, drinking was another. Xeloda is a heavy duty medicine and I figured it had to be hard on the kidneys. I always chased my pills with two 8 ounce glasses of plain water.

I forced water the rest of the day. I got myself a big water bottle and it became my constant companion. Obviously, this necessitates frequent urination and that takes some planning. Coffee and soda and most juices were eliminated from my fluid diet.

The timing for administering the drug was also crucial. If I took Xeloda with a late breakfast and an early supper, an 8-10 hour spread , I was in trouble. Too little space between doses and I was overdosing and feeling as though my stomach could not hold itself together. I rearranged my schedule. A twelve hour spread was the allotment which allowed me to feel the best. I took my pills at breakfast at 6:30am and again at supper at 6:30pm. I carried spare pills and food and water with me. If it was 6:30 and I was on the subway, I whipped out my apple and cheese or banana and nuts. You must carry enough to cover for unscheduled interruptions in your meal plan. This medicine worked for me if I worked it that way.

Xeloda causes a very aggravating side effect called " hand-and-foot syndrome" (technically known as Palmar-Plantar Erythrodysesthesia).
My doctor described it as "inflamed capillaries." No one in the medical establishment seems to know how to prevent this burning hand and foot condition. I found an article written by a nurse. I raced through it looking for specific instructions about how to eliminate or reduce this symptom. To my dismay there were none. I called her on the phone and asked "Well what can we do?" "Nothing" she responds "Just stay off your feet and don’t use your hands." Great! What a life I thought. My extremities felt hot and burning. I told my doctor maybe if I put them on ice that would cool them off. "No, no" he emphatically proclaimed, "that will make it worse. Use Bag Balm cream like farmers use on the udders of cows. " That was too greasy and it did not take away the burn. Big half dollar sized pieces of skin would peel off my feet if I used nothing. I asked my doctor again. He went to a dermatologist and came back with a prescription for LAC-lotion (ammonium lactate). I now smear this magic lotion on my hands and feet 5-6 times a day. It absorbs very thoroughly and fast. I usually wear white socks under colored ones. The dyes on colored socks , I figured, could cause trouble in the open cracks in my skin . Removing socks and juicing up makes life effortful and somewhat ridiculous, but you must do it if you want to take this medicine. LAC-lotion only prevents the pain caused by shrinking skin. It does not take away the burn. Its use allows the skin to retain its elasticity and not peel off. This prevents the danger of infection. It also feels much better if it is flexible skin rather than a tight shrinking glove. I walk on my feet a reasonable amount in an effort to prevent the body from losing all its muscle tone. In a museum, I try to use common sense and have occasionally allowed myself to be driven around on a wheelchair.

I continue to do things with my hands. Certain tasks require special precautions. For example, I wear cement layer’s gloves purchased at the hardware store when I scrub the floor. I have another pair to do dishes. In the garden I use a heavy pair of mud gloves. I try never to get in prickly plants that could plant a thorn in me.

B-6 is a vitamin to remember if you take Xeloda. Xeloda seriously depletes your body of this vitamin. I have bottles of vitamin B-6 stashed in the car, in the upstairs bathroom, at the dinner table and in my purse. I buy 50 mg tablets, bite them in half and swallow a lot of water. I do this 4-5 times a day. If I don’t, my energy slips away and my thinking gets foggy. The hand-foot syndrome worsens without it also.

The protocol for Xeloda requires taking the pills twice a day for 2 weeks and taking none for one week. Then you start back up again. This is a serious chemotherapy drug and, like all, you must be vigilant. Many patients can not make it through the whole two week period. That is no reason to despair. If you are only able to manage 9 days, stop. The pain in the stomach (probably from too little food) is the major reason to stop. Doctors are, I think, too quick to permit you to stop if your feet look red. As long as they are not cracking open (because you are using your cream) try to ignore the pain. Do not , as so many I have known , dwell on this condition. Remember: your very life may depend on your being able to take this medicine.

After taking Xeloda for 4 or 5 rounds, you may discover that the hand-foot-syndrome may actually worsen during the weeks off the drug. My stomach seems to knot up the first day off the drug, too. I have grown accustomed to that feeling now and have learned to say "Oh, yeah today is the first day off the Xeloda."

One of the most irksome attributes of Xeloda therapy, is the bottomless sense of tired that results from the least exertion. Walking seems to use up your total energy. It almost makes you breathless—especially the two weeks when you are actually consuming the pills. Ask a friend to help you get a disability parking sticker. Go to the customer service center at the front of your grocery store and request that they send someone to the back of the store for that item you want.

You must modify your style if you are taking Xeloda.
Many of us race around in the morning trying to get out the door to work. Well, that racing is impossible on Xeloda. You must plan ahead. Arrange your clothes and prepare your lunch the nite before. Ask your spouse or friend to gas up your car. Allow others to do for you. Friends and family want to feel useful instead of helpless.

Sometimes you have to give up activities. For example, I regrettably gave up making porcelain pottery on the potter’s wheel. My hands were prone to cracking now and I figured it would be asking for trouble if I left bacteria from the clay seep into my hands. I took up beading instead. When I had not only physical energy but also creative energy, I assembled necklaces and bracelets as thank you presents for my helpful friends.
Just like selecting the battles we want to fight in life, the Xeloda patient must select his/her activities and energy-expending actions carefully. Some people absolutely must have a perfect physical environment. Objects and newspapers must be in their assigned locations. Okay you can give up your gardening time and keep the house perfect. If gardening feeds your soul and tidying doesn’t you may choose to sacrifice tidying and/or reduce your standards. You may have to choose between washing the windows or spending those sacred two hours with a gang of friends sharing a movie and conversation. A cancer diagnosis makes one cherish every moment. Xeloda forces one to seriously evaluate his/her use of time and energy.

One must carefully gauge one’s need for rest when on Xeloda. I have an inflatable mattress at work. I change my plans according to how tired I am. I gave away my precious ticket to the Neil Diamond concert. I knew it would take more energy than I had that day. Furthermore, my white blood cell count was low and I did not want exposure to all those germs from the university students who had just returned from venues all over this germ filled world. I started to go to less congested and free student concerts –when my energy was up.

Capecitabine, the scientific name for Xeloda, works havoc on rapidly reproducing membranes. For my dried out nose I buy cheap saline nasal spray. For my cracking lips I resort to lip moisturizing therapy. Because of lack of energy I confess I do not brush my teeth as often as I once did. I do try to keep my mouth clean by swishing water from one cheek to the other when I can’t brush. Mouth sores are a very common chemotherapy problem. Do not let them get to be problematic. Be vigilant and tell your doctor’s office as soon as you sense one coming.

Everybody’s body chemistry is different, so one never knows exactly what to expect. Some of us are allergic to dog hair and some to cat hair. I have included here the lessons that I have learned from my body over the 2-3 years I have been taking Xeloda. My hope is that some of my tips will help you. If not, be inventive

The Ick Factor

2006-09-22T17:42:00.000-04:00

Many people have feelings toward objects. When I see beer cans, crack vials and used condoms in a playground, as has happened, I have a strong visceral response. It lowers my opinion of the neighborhood to say the least. This reaction, I don't think is unreasonable. It is relying on objects as the traces of likely events, sort of a poor man's CSI. Broken glass is an indicator that you should park your car somewhere else.

When I see a collection of old weapons, or Nazi paraphenalia, it doesn't disturb me. Some of it might interest me, but certain other folks might find it frightening. They won't want to touch it. I wonder, what does it represent to them? Do they consciously believe that the presense of such historical material indicates the imminence of danger? Are flags of the CSA indicators that whips and bloodhounds are close by? I have already mentioned my reaction to a modern, automatic weapon that my friend showed to me. Was my revulsion rational?

Looking at the positive side, I remember that my brother had a favorite Teddy bear when he was a toddler. I don't think I did, although I was quite fond of him. I also remember being surprised once when he tripped over a stone ... and then came back and kicked the stone as if to exact some sort of revenge! Which of us is normal? My children show the same differences.

Professor Bruce Hood has been poking at the boundaries of superstition. He thinks that there are very few rationalists in this world. To prove it he offers to his students a chance to wear a sweater, washed and folded, formerly worn by someone else. He'll even give them 10 quid to do it. There are lots of volunteers until he tells them who the former owner was. For me, it made no difference, but then again I didn't know the name. I probably wouldn't wear the shirt at that price because I'd consider it beneath my dignity [ed: cantankerousness maybe], but I would have nothing against it in principle. I've been trying to think what criminal, or other person, might make me reluctant to wear a thoroughly laundered garment.

9/22/2006 5:25 PM

George Will Likes W**-Mart

2006-09-18T18:46:00.000-04:00

OK, I admit it. I have hated Wal-Mart for years. I shop there from time to time when it's convenient, but only because the relevant retail stores in my own neighborhood have gone out of business. However, I am conceding here that George Will is a pretty persuasive guy. His paean to the Big W is annoying because it is mostly correct. I was also impressed, as I noted in an earlier post, with Wal-Mart's massive philanthropic efforts to assist people after Katrina and with Wal-Mart's recent green initiatives.

George Will has pointed out that the store creates 100 new, more productive, jobs for every 50 jobs that it erases among the competition. I am certainly in favor of this. Unions are against it, but I am ambivalent about unions as they exist today. I believe that the small and repeated sacrifices that we make in the US, as an economic entity, are our insurance against obsolescence. It might not seem like a small sacrifice to the person who gets laid off, but it would be a lot worse if we delayed such dislocations until a crisis took place. Just look at the old Soviet Union.

Having second thoughts is a good thing, yes? Nevertheless, in the final analysis, I still have big problems with Wal-Mart for two overriding reasons. First, Wal-Mart is too big. It creates havoc regionally, sucking the local money out of every small shop and drug store and bakery and deli and corner grocery for miles around. The jobs it creates are cookie cutter, assembly-like jobs. The dislocation caused destroys local culture, and the jobs it replaces are those of middle-class, neighborhood-oriented people who, in turn, would spend their money locally. I'm sure George Will used reliable calculations, but I'm not sure he accounted for the cultural multiplier of having local people with honored positions.

The competition that Wal-Mart faces, aside from the fast-fading local businesses, is what? Target and Home Depot, maybe? As long as these remain viable I suppose Wal-Mart won't become a monopoly. That's some comfort, I suppose. However, I don't really trust a Republican administration to watch for the price-fixing shenanigans that will begin to occur when economic power becomes too concentrated.

The second objection that remains is that Wal-Mart is unnatural. Plainly it depends on the suburban automobile culture. The physical footprint is huge and environmentally disastrous, but the bigger problem is that the dependence on cheap oil makes us much more vulnerable to oil shocks. Congested traffic and global warming are part of the externalities generated. Wal-Mart also gains its productivity by putting all its customers to work. What work is that? -- The untold hours spent behind the wheel.

I am in favor of any tax structure that puts a penalty on unsustainable trends, particularly unnecessary transportation. I don't think we should ban such things, but I do think we should have a forward-looking national policy that discourages sprawl, dependence on individual travel and the use of fossil fuels. The amount of discouragement should be determined with an eye toward facilitating the development of sensible economic alternatives. If we had a high fuel tax and Wal-Mart were still able to prosper, then I would be willing to agree that its productivity advantages were real.

Thanks to Jane Galt for the George Will reference. I'm sorry that I must continue to disagree with such a distinguished triumvirate.

9/18/2006 6:07 PM