Three-Toed Sloth

2003-04-19T04:36:00.000-04:00

Migration

Getting Movable Type set up is actually surprisingly easy. This blog will now live at http://bactra.org/weblog/; I'll leave old entries up here, on the off-chance that somebody got permalinks to work.

2003-04-18T12:46:00.000-04:00

Life Considered as a Series of Multiple-Choice Questions

So, while waiting for a simulation to finish running, I've just taken the "Essential Differences" quiz at the Guardian. According to my (unfeigned) answers, I'm an emotionally normal woman (which my wife finds laughable) and an autistic man. How I managed the latter while admitting a complete lack of interest in car engines, stereos, household wiring, freeways and sports statistics, I dunno. (The Jungian explanation, perhaps, is that my anima has Asperger's syndrome.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Maria Farrell [permalink bloggered], Kieran Healy and Matt Yglesias are all saying the right, intelligent things about how appalling it is that something like this is being presented as evidence of hard-wired gender differences. What I want to know, though, is what happened to Simon Baron-Cohen, who wrote the book occasioning this quiz: he used to be a pretty good cognitive scientist.

2003-04-17T15:07:00.000-04:00

AAARGH!

I have just discovered a Turkish creationist (and anti-Masonic conspiracy theorist) linking to my notebook on Ilya Prigogine, mining what I say there and my accompanying citations to try to make it sound like self-organization is a myth, and evolution is thermodynamically impossible. I guess this means I have to go on record as saying that I have no connection with this "Harun Yahya", that his arguments about evolution and thermodynamics are century-old fallacies, and that self-organization can be demonstrated, in nature, in the lab, even in bloody cocktails, to anyone with eyes to see. It's true Prigogine's theories fail to account for these phenomena, but to go from that to saying the phenomena don't exist is mere bullshit. How someone can in one breath say they expect to stand soon before the Throne of Judgment to account for their words and deeds, and in the next breath be so blatantly dishonest, I will never understand.

2003-04-16T22:44:00.000-04:00

Bloggered

Archives seem to be screwed up, everything gets posted twice, and I can't change my sidebar to save my life. I'm preparing to switch over to Movable Type at my main site.

2003-04-16T16:04:00.001-04:00

Aground on Scholes of Finance

I am generally receptive to (legal) propositions which involve my receiving sums on the order of my paycheck in exchange for a few days of work. The latest of these came from an editor at Quantitative Finance, and led to my conducting a telephone interview with Myron Scholes and writing a profile of him for QF. (If you don't know who Scholes is, well, read my piece!) Here then a few reflections which it wouldn't have been appropriate to work in to the profile.

1. Scholes is the fifth Nobel laureate I've had a chance to talk to at some length. He's pretty clearly the second most arrogant of the five, though also pretty clearly not the smartest, or even the second smartest. He was understandably completely bored by the idea of discussing the origins of the Black-Scholes formula yet again; other topics interested him more.

2. I did not have the gumption to ask what it felt like to lose several billion dollars over a summer, or if it was true that when LTCM was raising capital, he'd respond to skeptics by saying they'd make money "because of fools like you".

3. Black-Scholes portfolios, combining stock and options in just the right proportions, are supposed to be riskless. This is obviously false. Back in the day, one of my in-laws bough stock in WebVan.com, and has made a return to date of -100%; they're so belly-up I can't give you a link. Could she have hedged away the risks of that stock by suplementing it with the right number of WebVan options? The question answers itself; stuffing the money under her mattress would've had better risk/return properties. Obviously, the problem is that the Black/Scholes/Merton argument assumes the company you're buying stock in will persist indefinitely into the future. Presumably somebody has modified it to include a finite risk of default (though estimating that risk would be tricky at best; see below). But when you make a list of all the over-simplifications that go into deriving the formula, you have to ask whether it relying on it is ever a good idea.

4. When Scholes started talking about how finance needed to embrace non-stationary processes, it was all I could do to not quote D-Squared at him:

"Sir, you can't work out the answer to that question in any statistically reliable manner, sir, because economic processes are nonergodic, sir, because the economy is subject to positive destabilising feedback sir!"

Very well done that pupil. The rest of you, go back to the books and revise.

(For extra credit, reconcile this observation with the fact that chaotic systems are generally ergodic, though "subject to positive destabilising feedback".)

5. Finally, something I was able to hint at in the profile. Scholes seems to seriously think that the growth of finance & financial engineering is supposed to make life in general, and economic decision-making in particular, simpler for non-financiers. If that's the case, well, they're not doing such a good job of it, are they? I can now go to an ATM in Belgium with my American bank card and get euros (his example), which does depend on a very liquid foreign exchange market. Without certain kinds of derivatives on foreign exchange, it would be slightly more expensive for the banks to offer that service, but the magnitude of the expense isn't at all commensurate with the size of the foreign exchange derivative market.

Financial markets (say Scholes, along with the Chicago School which trained him) are the mechanism by which capitalist societies allocate productive resources. It follows that financial markets are economically efficient to the extent that they make better, more productive, allocations than other potentially available mechanisms. (So far so good, says my inner market socialist.) The total profits of the financial sector, in competitive equilibrium, should thus be approximately equal to the waste which would be entailed by using our second-best allocation mechanism. (Larger profits, and it wouldn't pay to use the market; smaller, and they could charge more and get it.) What makes this unbelievable is that the profits of the financial sectors of developed economies have grown dramatically since the 1970s, i.e., at exactly the same time as the great productivity and growth slow-down of those same economies. So assuming the financial sector is fulfilling its role efficiently requires us to believe that the growth slow-down would've been immensely worse without its services. It's hard to tell a plausible story why this should be so, much less back it up with non-tautological evidence. I'm tempted by the idea that around 1975 the financial sector found a new way of extracting rents (perhaps through exploiting some kind of lock-in or switching cost?), but also can't come up with a decent story for that.

2003-04-15T20:36:00.000-04:00

Gilles Kepel

Since it seems staggeringly unlikely I'm ever going to write my review of Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (it's been hanging fire for nine months now), I'll just blog his dialogue with Joan Smith, and his precis of Jihad that lead me to buy the book. (Via the valuable openDemocracy.net.) The dialogue was occasioned by a new book, Bad Moon Rising, but I can't find any indication it's going to be published in the US, which seems odd.

2003-04-15T13:46:00.000-04:00

Civis Americanus Sum

For years I've been fond of the idea that American citizenship should be extended to all nationals of our allied countries, but I've never gotten around to writing it out. (The fact that I'm especially fond of the idea after a few drinks has perhaps something to do with this.) Imagine, then, my disappointment at seeing it appear, bylined by Régis Debray no less, complete with my extended Roman analogy, in the New Left Review. Of course, appearing in that venue, it can't help but contain certain flaws I like to think I would have avoided*. This does not make it any more likely I'm going to write my version, though.

* E.g.: (1) In what sense could Europeans possibly be "descendants" of the Pilgrims? (Perhaps this is a translation error.) (2) Debray makes one of the selling points of the idea, on American side, that of making the US population more white. I'd be the last to deny that there are still plenty of racist yahoos in this country, or that the GOP is their party, but this is simply not something that would be acceptable in American politics; it feels like a projection on the part of a European. Bush, for all he's an awful president and apparently a bit of a moral idiot, has a black national security adviser, a Jamaican secretary of state, a Hispanic immigrant sister-in-law, etc. (3) Nature is a British journal, not an American one.

2003-04-15T13:25:00.001-04:00

"I'm afraid I've committed an egregious foucault"

John Holbo is a professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and (like everyone else) has a blog. He's also tried his hand at a Socratic dialogue, The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory for Life, with excellent results. Holbo (or rather, Socrates and Phil) demolishes the following bit of received wisdom: that it is impossible to engage in criticism without some theory or another; "those who resist theory commit it by other means". As he says, this rests on an equivocation about "theory". On the one hand, there is little theory, which are the ordinary reasonably-coherent ideas one does indeed use to get through the day, or the book review. On the other hand, there is big theory, which is something like Freud, or Althusser, or (pace my friend J. J.) whatever the hell it is Deleuze tried to say. The cliche only has any bite if one believes that little theory is always some kind of disguised form of big theory, which is, to say the least, not obvious. Indeed, Holbo can't think of any sense in which this might be.

Here I wish to record a small quibble. A defender of the cliche might argue as follows. Consider (they would say) someone who seems to only be employing little theory in their reasoning. On closer examination, however, it turns out that the explicit part of their reasoning is full of formally invalid inferences, which are not positively fallacious but simply lacking major premises --- in a word, enthymemes. If one were to collect those suppressed major premises, which might be tacit and not consciously available to the reasoner, might they not constitute a system of generalizations as grandiose as any big theory? Thus "those who resist theory commit it by other means".

As usual, a lot rests on "might". There are usually lots of ways of fixing a formally defective argument, and the missing premises could be more or less grandiose. Why should we believe that the hidden premises are generally very ambitious? The partisan of theory-by-other-means might point to their friends who study particular cases of implicit theory and conclude that ambitious implicit premises are themselves good theories, since they parsimoniously account for large numbers of enthymemes. But this would only be good evidence if these analysts had severely tested alternatives involving quotidian, reasonable hidden premises. So the partisan of theory still loses, though they can put up more of a fight than Holbo allows.

(This takes it as a given that tacit premises are the right way to explain enthymemes and their kin. But I'll save the problems with that for a book reivew.)

2003-04-14T20:32:00.000-04:00

When Did They Get a Blog? Dept.

Ken MacLeod, one of my favorite novelists, writes The Early Days of a Better Nation.

Juan Cole, a professor here in Ann Arbor, offers Informed Comment. Only recommended if you want to learn about Islam and Middle-Eastern politics from somebody who, you know, studies them very well for a living. It's not like their judgments might be a bit better grounded than, let us say, Andrew Sullivan's.

2003-04-14T20:25:00.000-04:00

How to Not Blog for a Month

1. Agree to present a paper at a conference ten months in the future, because you are, after all, on the program committee and getting other people to attend.

2. Further agree to present new work.

3. Completely forget about this, until you get an email from the relevant society a week before the deadline for final manuscripts.

4. Spend every fungible moment working on said paper. If you are on eastern time, and the society is on Pacific time, your absolutely final, last-chance deadline is 3am, not midnight.

5. Remember that your code will contain at least two irritating numerical bugs.

6. Remember that LaTeX style files have only a conjectural relationship to the actual format demanded by the proceedings.

Actually, I'm pretty happy with the resulting paper; it'll be fun to see what kind of reaction it gets.

2003-03-04T14:10:00.000-05:00

Malawi Revisited

Some time back, there was a bit of a stir among the blogs regarding vampire rumors in Malawi. Now here's some context: the country is dying of AIDS. Society is collapsing from disease, and they're looking for scapegoats: well duh.

2003-02-25T17:12:00.000-05:00

Dumb Survey Tricks, or, Time to Restock the Adaptive Toolbox

A few weeks back, parts of the blogosphere were much aghast at reports of a poll where a huge fraction of Americans surveyed said some or most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, when of course none of them were. (Steven Johnson: "People! Can we please just try to pay the slightest bit of attention?") Examining the news reports of the survey (like this one in Salon), things really don't seem that bad. The phrasing of the survey question seems to have been something like "How many of the 9/11 terrorists were from Iraq? (a) All; (b) More than half; (c) Less than half; (d) None; (e) Don't know". (None of the news reports actually bothers to quote the question, so I'm forced to reconstruct.) Now imagine you get called up out of the blue and asked to answer this. You don't remember hearing anything about Iraqi hijackers, but, well, it was more than a year ago, and you know you don't pay as much attention to the news as you should. Presumably the pollster isn't trying to ask you a trick question, and what would be the point of the question if the answer was (e) and everyone knew that? (There were no survey questions about how many hijackers were Croats or Nigerians.) So you may say you don't know, which is actually what a third of those polled did. Or you assume the question has some kind of relevance, and guess, but you're unlikely to guess "all" or "none", since that's the kind of answer you'd think everyone would remember, and so no one would bother to ask. (People don't like giving extreme answers, generally speaking.) Result: the people surveyed end up looking like idiots, though they're just following what's normally a very adaptive strategy, namely assuming that the person talking to you isn't trying to mislead.

2003-02-25T16:18:00.000-05:00

A Fish, a Barrel, and ...

Ana Marie Cox, formerly of the never-to-be-too-much-lamented Suck, has a blog. I'd almost forgotten how much fun it was to read 198-proof brilliant vicious snarkiness.

2003-02-19T14:35:00.000-05:00

Letter to a Friend in Boston, or, Why Are We Ruled By These Idiots, Part 437?

A huge letter I wrote over the weekend to a friend in Boston, who had dissented from my wife's proposition that Bush is the Antichrist, on the grounds that (a) he was serious about the security of the U.S., (b) the Democrats were being pathetic, and (c) unlike Clinton, who practiced "appeasement", he was promoting American values and goals.

Summary: These people don't give a damn about anything I'd want to call American values, and are either idiots or don't care about our safety at all.

Dear R.,

I hope you don't think that disliking Bush means approving of the Democrats. Yes, their response to Bush's proposals and policies has been pathetic. And, yes the government's first priority must be the security of the populace; that's it's most basic function. If I thought that Bush was making us safer, I'd back him. I thought the war in Afghanistan would make us safer, and so I backed it, and still back it.

Bush hasn't convinced me that attacking Iraq will make us safer. The obvious guess is that it will endanger us, because it removes any incentive Hussein has to not use his weapons, it drives him into alliance with al-Qaida et al., normally our mutual enemies, and it recruits people for those movements. The best reason to attack Iraq now is that otherwise it's only a matter of time before it gets nukes, which we, and the rest of the industrialized world, can't live with. This is a strong argument, but it means that disarming Iraq is part of our general strategy, not part of our conflict with al-Qaida. There is the additional argument that, at this point, we are so committed to invading Iraq that our credibility and prestige will massively suffer if we do not. There's force to that, too, but in a free republic, we'd then impeach the president for arrogating to himself the power to declare war.

As to domestic security, there's really no evidence that Bush & c. are serious about it. They spent most of a year opposing creating a federal department to oversee it. (Incidentally: wouldn't it be nice if we called Homeland Security "defense" and Defense "war"? "War" worked quite nicely for us for more than 150 years.) They're not funding police, firefighters, hospitals, public health agencies, or other "first responders" (despite promising to). They're not seriously seeing how known, wanted terrorists could manage to e.g. live openly in San Diego with their real names on credit cards. There's been no investigation, never mind reform, of the intelligence agencies which let it happen. The threat level announcements seem to go up every time Bush's poll numbers drop --- I haven't done a regression on that, so I'm willing to believe that's the bias of my memory. But it's a supremely useless system, and it doesn't even give useful advice (see e.g. Gregg Easterbrook in the Times the other day).

Behind ensuring our safety, comes promoting "our values and our goals". And here, again, I don't see that Bush is doing a very effective job. Under him, we've guaranteed the safety and stability of dictatorships in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Egypt, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia (the home of most of our enemies, who've received funding from the royal family). In Venezuela, we gave official approval to a military coup against a president constitutionally elected by majority vote. (Chavez's policies are idiotic, but so what?) In Argentina, we let a country which had made a point of following all our policy suggestions to the letter collapse economically, which has not gone unnoticed in the rest of the world. Bush made not one but two apologies to China in the spring of 2001 over our crashed airplane. The State Department has officially classified as terrorists non-violent political movements in the mostly-Muslim, mostly-non-Han province of Xinjiang, to please the Communist Party. In Russia, we are not protesting at all as Putin clamps down not merely on dissent but sheerly independent media outlets, and we're now backing his incredibly brutal war in Chechenya, which under Clinton we at least rhetorically opposed. (The fact that many on the Chechen side are brutal, drug-running gangsters does not make what the Russian army does any better.) In Afghanistan, Bush has proposed a budget which contains, literally, not one dollar for economic development or reconstruction there, which is both stupid and contrary to our promises. Because of a speechwriter's conceit, we lump Iran together with its mortal enemy Iraq, thereby handing the mullahs a perfect club with which to beat the secularizing, democratizing opposition we should be doing everything we can to encourage.

Finally, our real allies --- not places like Saudi Arabia, but the network of democratic, market-economy countries we have created since WWII. We need them: we're stronger than any other country in the world, but we can't run the world in opposition to everybody. And it would be nice to have the costs of running the world spread over them, too, since they're going to benefit. (And by "costs" I include "murderous hostility of Islamists".) There have been many powerful empires in history, but I think we've been the first in actually running a part of one on the basis of positive ties and moral authority. We could have installed biddable satraps across Europe after WWII, but we created or reinforced democracies. (Asia, well... we did right by Japan.) We cemented our leadership not just by our overwhelming power, but by creating organizations and institutions which bound us as well, everything from the UN and NATO through little things like the laws of the sea treaties. (I'd say that this expressed our values very well: our response to seeing a need or a problem is to organize, and we tame power through checks and balances, through countervailing power.) One can argue about whether this is morally right, but it has a very practical benefit: in a crisis, people are more likely to stick with a leader exercising what they see as legitimate authority than one who rules by mere strength. There must be a political idea to get us through crises, and for more than half a century that idea has been "the USA is looking out for the free world, not just itself". I think this is the right idea, and in any case one should be leery of changing something that's worked for, what, a quarter of our nation's history --- a full 1% of the recorded history of mankind!

We haven't done that. We want collective action with our allies, which means convincing enough of them that we're right about Iraq; we haven't done that anyplace, even Britain. (Say what you will about Tony Blair, he has political courage.) There are an immense number of ways in which we've managed to convey that we don't really care about the rest of the free world. The one which most appalls me is trade. For a long time we've been saying, correctly, that free trade enriches all countries, that it is one of the best routes to development, and that it ties the world together peacefully. We have led by example in opening ourselves to trade, and been very forceful in persuading other countries to agree to it. Under Bush, we not only reintroduced steel tariffs, for nakedly political purposes, but we've openly reneged on commitments to reduce agricultural subsidies, which everybody knows are protectionist, and textile tariffs, ditto. (Need I point out that there are several countries --- Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia --- with very competitive textile industries, where massive poverty creates fertile recruiting grounds for al-Qaeda and its clones?) On top of all this, we have senior Pentagon officials calling on elected representatives of allied countries to resign for siding with their voters rather than us, and saying that France should no longer be considered an ally. Should we not do things for our own safety because of public opinion in our allies? No, of course not. Should we not do things which are morally right because we can't persuade our allies? Again, no, of course not. But policy which does not realize the value of our alliances, and the need to maintain them, and act accordingly, is incompetent, and not serious about our safety or our values.

As for Clinton --- he's a lying, smug, self-pitying horndog, who'd make a perfectly awful high school principal. You'll recall that wasn't his position. He made a pretty good president, and I really don't think his foreign policy was less serious about protecting American security, or promoting American values, than Bush's has been. He maintained Kurdish autonomy in Iraq (which it now seems we're going to abandon after we invade, turning everything back over to the same old thugs from Baghdad); he bombed Iraq repeatedly for non-compliance with the resolutions about disarmament. He retaliated against al-Qaeda for the embassy bombings, and directed the intelligence agencies to produce a plan for rolling them back, which was presented to the Bush team at the beginning of 2001, who promptly shelved it. Under him, we intervened, militarily, on the right side in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and (to intense opposition from the GOP) Kosovo, and diplomatically in more places than I can readily count. (Not all of these interventions were successful, of course.) In North Korea, our policy was to provide humanitarian assistance in exchange for careful supervision of facilities, making sure there was no weapons development. It's hard to see what could be done better, short of a war which we would win, but would have tens of thousands of American casualties, not to speak of the obliteration of Seoul. Arguably this was "appeasement". Bush canceled that deal and announced a policy of not giving North Korea anything, so the regime resorted to nuclear blackmail. Result: after weeks of crying that we weren't going to negotiate, we started negotiating. Are we more at risk? Yes; North Korea is now producing nukes, and has missiles which can deliver them to our west coast. Has our strategic position improved? Not at all. Has our credibility increased, or our moral authority? Not likely.

The real moral failures of American foreign policy under Clinton was, it seems to me, our reluctance to intervene against genocide --- at all, in the case of Rwanda, or until quite late, in the case of Bosnia. But dear God, better inaction than active complicity in genocide, which is what we had under Reagan and Bush I, in Iraq and Guatemala. (For the record, the fact that we gave Hussein some of the tools for his slaughter of the Kurds means we have a special obligation to make things better, which is not served by isolationist self-flagellation.) Now, there doubtless were other issues where the Clinton administration did not do as much as it could've for our security and values, but compared to our recent history, certainly our history under Bush II, I think he did pretty well.

OK, so I don't like what Bush is doing. Do I have any better ideas? Frankly, yes. Fortunately for me somebody else has taken the trouble to write them up: Robert Wright did it in Slate, as a nine-part series which starts at here. Needless to say, the Democrats aren't pushing that line, or anything much like it. But I'd feel a lot safer if somebody was.

2003-02-19T14:16:00.000-05:00

Kurdish Betrayals; a Fifth International?

Kanan Makiya despairs that Foggy Bottom wants to keep the Baathist thugs in charge in Iraq. Nick Cohen berates the European left for its lack of solidarity with its democratic comrades in Iraq and Kurdistan. Harry Steele helpfully blogs both of them, and is moved to ask can we still belong to the left?. He answers yes, but says what I have been feeling for some time, that there are now two lefts, one still stuck in the Cold War, and one which has learned something since 1989. Steele puts the definitive split at 9/11; Chris Bertram agrees about the split, but claims, correctly I think, that the parting of the ways was over the wars in Yugoslavia.

2003-02-13T15:40:00.000-05:00

It was a free country, wasn't it?

The only point Jack Balkin misses in his commentary on the "Patriot Act II" is that there doesn't seem to be anything in the proposed law to check the Attorney General's finding that any group is a terrorist organization, and then stripping all its members of citizenship. I could be wrong about this, but so far as I can see, if this became law, Bush could proscribe the entire Democratic Party.

So long as we're thinking along those somewhat paranoid lines: Suppose you are one of the leaders of a party which forms a government even though it received only a minority of the vote at the last election, after being out of office for most of a decade. Suppose, furthermore, that the party has a quite radical ideological agenda which most of the country consistently rejects (so much so that an important and explicit part of your propaganda is to lie about your own positions). Exactly what incentive do you have to not create a police state?

2003-02-11T01:29:00.000-05:00

Pattern Formation in Cocktails

If this isn't the official drink of self-organization, it's only because nobody knows about it yet. The only thing which could displace it would be a drinkable chemical oscillator, which didn't exist, at least when I looked for one in graduate school. (From the Viridian mailing list.)

2003-02-10T23:58:00.000-05:00

Temujin Displays His Adaptation

UPI (via Ideofact) reports on a population genetics study of Asia which concludes that some Mongol or another, living about a thousand years ago, has over 16 million living descendants in the direct male line, meaning that his reproductive fitness was about 800,000 times higher than average. (The calculation described in the UPI piece seems, if anything, to underestimate his relative fitness.) The most likely candidate is of course Genghis Khan. Brad DeLong, who would know, asserts that he was also probably the first man responsible for over ten million human deaths. Evidently he was making room for his descendants (who almost certainly include me). The UPI writer fairly swiftly descends into silliness about lost treasure and cloning, but the original paper sounds worth a look.

2003-02-10T23:45:00.000-05:00

"Every biological invention is a perversion"

Melvin Konner on treatment versus enhancement in The American Prospect in 1999. Though Konner doesn't say it in so many words, this distinction --- between repairing defects that keep people from being normal, and enhancing normal people --- is a relic from when we couldn't do much of either, but it was more obvious we couldn't do much if you if you weren't broken. Of course, people would always like to be better adapted than they are, so there were always people (yogis, alchemists, Plato, etc.) claiming to be able to do it, but they were all bullshiting. We have no mores about human enhancement because we've never needed them. Almost.

I have to wear glasses to see even as far as this screen. I'm fat, weak, forgetful, gullible, easily distracted, clumsy, unperceptive and immensely ignorant. One on one, a teenage child from almost any foraging band could make mincemeat of me. Fortunately, I confront such people only as part of my society, which is a cunning, attentive, scheming, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-devouring death-machine. In fact, I'm helping this terrifying beast implacably consume the remaining foraging societies right now, as part of my job, in ways I barely even realize, and could easily ignore for the rest of my life. Collectively, we're all about being better adapted than primates have any right to be. I can't think of a single civilization which has persistently held that enhancing social power is bad. (This is not to say that people haven't rejected innovations which would've enhanced overall social power, because they wouldn't have gotten to wield it.)

Now that we actually have the start of a clue how our bodies and minds work, we can see how to improve them. This ability will grow as we get more clueful, and we'll become both more effective and more efficient. (Athletes are fairly effective at making their bodies do admirable, unnatural things, but they have to spend their whole life working at reshaping their muscles and cerebellum.) There are lots of reasons for not wanting people to use efficient, biochemical means of adaptation, but most of the common ones are pretty bad. "Going against nature" is absurd coming from any member of an industrial society (see above). The argument that it would set off an arms race, where previously normal people get pushed to the bottom of the heap, has more merit. But consider the counter-scenario (implicit in Konner's article). Someone develops a pill to make people taller, or faster studies, or improve their muscle tone, or expand their chests, or keep their hair, or whatever. The anti-arms-race position is that hose who are currently short (slow-witted, flabby, flat, balding, etc.) should continue to suffer, lest those who are now normal lose their superior relative position!

2003-02-10T22:30:00.000-05:00

Cthulhu, Ancient Astronaut

The Argus-eyed Mitchell Porter points me to Jason Colavito's argument, in From Cthulhu to Cloning, that Lovecraft was a decisive influence on the ancient-astronaut wing of crank archaeology, and so on such modern movements as the Raelians. Which is obvious, in retrospect: Lovecraft has lots of bogums which came to Earth from Someplace Else, and were worshipped by human beings --- some of them are hinted to have made human beings, more or less as a joke. And this was not a common theme before him; it would be surprising if the ancient-astronauters hadn't gotten the idea from Lovecraft. But Colavito lays out positive reasons to think this happened, including amusing textual evidence.

Colavito doesn't seem to remark on it, but it's interesting to note how the myth has changed as it moved from person to person, and especially how it's become more comforting and conformable to mainstream religion. In Lovecraft, the Old Ones aren't even malign --- they are so alien that our moral terms no more apply to them than to hurricanes or solar flares. In the first generation of ancient astronaut writers, say von Daniken, the motives of the aliens are ambiguous, or are mixed, but they have motives. When one descends to the generation of Rael, not only are the aliens basically benevolent, they're wrapped up in the Christ story. (One of the first things I wrote for the Internet argued that Cthulhu was in part a satire of Christ. I still buy that, though I hope I don't write like that any more.) That is, the story been transformed by passing through minds brought up on Christianity. I'm sure there are more Lovecraftian variants circulating, but they're obvious vastly less fit, i.e., less popular.

Of course, just because something is a fantasy out of Lovecraft doesn't mean it can't happen. Insane cults performing weird yet pointless experiments on human beings deserves to be on the
Dystopian Millenial Checklist, but it happens every few years now. Maybe the Old Ones are coming.

2003-02-10T15:21:00.000-05:00

Rootless Cosmopolites of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but the Idiocy of Rural Life!

I read Tyler Cowen's Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures over the weekend --- it's a small book with big margins --- and came away half-convinced. Cowan frames matters as an argument about what "globalization" --- never precisely defined --- does to cultural diversity, also never defined. He concludes that it reduces the difference between cultures, but increases the diversity within any one culture. Therefore the effective cultural diversity available to most people will actually increase. This is an attractive argument, but pending those definitions, I'm not altogether convinced --- it's not even clear that diversity across cultures is comparable to that within a given culture. This probably deserves a full review...

Chris Mooney had a good profile of Cowen in the Boston Globe, but that's retreated into the pay section of the paper's archive.

While we're on the subject of "creative destruction" (am I alone in thinking it should be retired for a few years?), does anyone know what made the idea so attractive to people in Vienna between the wars? Schumpeter coined that phrase, but Popper uses nearly identical ones when expounding the idea that knowledge grows through conjectures and refutations, and I'm sure I've seen similar things in Hayek. Was there some intellectual reason they would all have been attracted to this notion simultaneously? Or was it some kind of emotional reaction to the all-hell-breaking-loose atmosphere of the place and time?

2003-01-29T02:01:00.000-05:00

Procrastinating? Me?

Since all the cool kids were doing it, I felt like I had to have a blog too... Actually, for the last few months I've been finding myself more and more drawn to reading blogs, and feeling like one'd be a useful way to write about things which don't lend themselves to being (self-promotion follows) book reviews, scientific papers or even notebook entries. A few weeks ago I started writing some entries, and thought about just making them a simple HTML page on my site, but it was too much of a pain to implement all the features I wanted; hence using blogspot, and the sudden rush of entries tonight.

2003-01-29T01:44:00.000-05:00

What's Right with That Picture?

Computing analogies between images. Clever idea: one wants to complete analogies of the form A:A'::B:B', where those are all pictures. The solution is to find a filter, such that both A' and B' are filtered versions of A and B. The even neater application is to be able to fill in the blanks: learn the filter from A and A', then find what the analog for B is. (For instance, landscapes in the style of Lucian Freud!) Especially look at the textures-by-numbers examples.

There are vast possibilities for fraud here; also for jokes. Presumably the same approach would work for movies. In fact, you could build an analogical predictor, not just a filter, in this way: train it on pairs of successive frames from a movie, and then apply it to the last frame, to see how the movie continues! (Memo to self: see if you can't work in a reference to this in the new paper on predicting spatiotemporal systems.)

2003-01-29T01:10:00.000-05:00

Abusive Everywhere, Always and Towards All?

Just when you thought there was nothing more to be exposed about the Catholic Church, something like this ---something that might've been ripped from The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk or other anti-Papist propaganda --- always comes along: tens of thousands of Irish women enslaved in laundries by nuns over more than a century. ``Girls who had become pregnant, even from rape, girls who were illegitimate, or orphaned, or just plain simple-minded, girls who were too pretty and therefore in `moral danger' all ran the risk of being locked up and put to work, without pay, in profit-making, convent laundries, to `wash away their sins.' '' Of course, they would be for-profit. Of course, it would be the Magdalen Sisters who would torment women taken in adultery. Of course, the Church would refuse to apologize, and bishops would say that really they were only trying to help

2003-01-29T00:45:00.000-05:00

Better Willing Through Chemistry, or, More Reasons the Staff of the National Review Should Be Squirming in Front of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission Right Now

Back when I subscribed to magazines like Mother Jones and The Nation, it seemed that every few issues they'd run a piece saying psychiatric drugs were overproscribed so that pharmaceutical companies, aided and abetted by soulless allopathic conventional Western medicine, could profit from turning the common problems of life into treatable disorders. As you can tell, this irritated, for a number of reasons. The most important were matters of temperament and prejudice. Because I would like materialism and mechanism to be true, I like the idea that, even if some of these conditions have up to now been ordinary ills that flesh is heir to, they could be dealt with by fairly simple chemical means --- and dealt with better by more subtle chemical interventions. Even more, I am generally inclined to think that soulless allopathic etc. medicine is a Good Thing, and that conditions which respond to physical treatment are real. And the articles themselves always seemed to employ two incompatible reactionary tropes, those of futility (``you can't medicate away unhappiness'') and jeopardy (``medicating away human spontaneity''). And an awful lot of them seemed to be written by talking-cure shrinks...

In those pieces, Ritalin was always a particular object of scorn, as something used to keep prole-spawn in line. Now, I was (and am) willing to believe that many teachers, school administrators, etc. would like nothing better than to have zombies for students. But saying ADD/ADHD doesn't exist, or that Ritalin doesn't help it, or that it turns boys into something from The Night of the Living Dead, is just absurd, and flies in the face of extensive scientific evidence.

Imagine my surprise to learn, from professional conservative Michael Fumento writing in The New Republic, that most professional conservatives are saying that ADD is yet another liberal P.C. myth, and make lots of the same charges the people on the other side do. The exceptions are those movement conservatives who have ADD kids, or who have actually bothered to learn anything about the subject. Nonetheless, a little digging now turns up a steady stream of right-wing pundits saying ADD is a hoax and Ritalin is ``kiddie cocaine''.

An anecdote might make vivid what acting on those ideas would mean. One of my best friends is an excellent mathematician who is, in writing, incredibly inarticulate --- we joke that he proves the theorems, and then his co-authors translate his papers into English. But by all odds he shouldn't be writing papers at all, since he's dyslexic and as a boy he had severe attention-deficit disorder --- he really could not concentrate at all. Fortunately, he was treated with Ritalin for years on end, which kept the ADD ``down'' enough that he could learn to control his own attention. (In fact, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his typically-excellent New Yorker piece on Ritalin, this process of medication making it easier to acquire normal self-control is a fairly common outcome. [Someone should look into how this connects to Vygotsky and Luria's ideas about the social development of self-control.] But it wouldn't be Gladwell without at least one weird speculation, viz., that more teenagers have ADD because fewer of them smoke.) Were it not for the fact that his condition was admitted to exist, looked for, recognized and treated, he'd most likely be a dropout, or in jail. Instead he's a productive member of society, or at least as productive as any expert on high-dimensional dynamical systems theory can be.

One of the sound tenets of conservativism is that one should be most leery of harming actual, concrete human beings in the name of abstractions. But this is precisely what the conservative claim that ADD is a myth would do: ruin the lives of people like my friend, for the sake of abstract principles about ``opposing political correctness''. In the name of enforcing personal responsibility, it would deny those people the modest tools they need to become responsible.

Is it puzzling that people who frequently fuss about threats to the heritage of Western science would make up whatever sounds convenient and echo each others fabrications, rather than actually consult experimental findings? Not at all; while there are individual conservative activists who are genuinely dedicate to science and reason, the movement as a whole has no use for those ideals, other than claiming to defend them. Making-stuff-up is the charitable description of professional conservativism's mode of argument; often it can only be described as blatant, self-serving lies about crucial subjects. While people who write for, and read, Mother Jones can irritate me, people who write for The American Spectator, and their paymasters, can deny people like my friend the things they need to grow up decently, and can choke us all in sooty filth. Much of the left has, sadly, faded into crankishness; the right is a well-organized band of cruel, dangerous, selfish liars. It's not a hard choice.

2003-01-29T00:35:00.000-05:00

Civilization Fell While I Wasn't Looking

When I was a boy, I read novels (and even, have mercy, play role-playing games) set in post-apocalyptic worlds where an advanced civilization had collapsed, leaving behind fabulously dangerous technological artifacts in the remoter reaches of blasted landscapes. When I grew up a little, I thought those books were silly and juvenile. Now the world has places like this ruined Soviet biowarfare lab, on an island in what used to be the Aral Sea, regularly visited by scavangers on ``two small boats, the last to ply the waters''.

2003-01-29T00:34:00.000-05:00

Try It, and Let's See What Happens, or, Great Minds

Predictive state representations are a way of predicting how a dynamical system will respond to outside inputs, by grouping together input histories which lead to the same distribution of future outputs. This is so damn close to chapter 7 of my dissertation it's not even funny, especially since they can actually get them to work. Clearly worth the trek over to North Campus to talk to this guy. (Found by Kris.)

2003-01-29T00:29:00.000-05:00

Great Moments in Afghan Buddhism

Buddhist manuscripts on 2000 year old strips of birch-bark from Gandhara by way of the British Museum and Seattle. There's a story there, almost all of which nobody will ever know. (Presumably the Brits could say why they picked them up in 1994.)

2003-01-29T00:14:00.000-05:00

Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal

Capitalism is a one of the great utopian systems, based on difficult moral commands: free exchange, with no coercion, and respct for individual rights and individual property. Consider what it says should happen when one needs to hire people to do a a difficult, dangerous job, such as working a sixteen-hour shift in a factory casting iron pipes from molten metal. The capitalist employer would offer a contract which completely compensated the employee for the disutility of taking such a job. Suppose, for instance, that there is some substantial chance that the employee would get sucked into a piece of machinery and spend three hours screaming for help before anyone could hear him over the cacophony, while the machine sanded off his arm. The employer then offer a benefit so valuable that the employee is indifferent between keeping his arm and getting the benefit. There are many ways to design such a contract, depending on the desires of the parties, but under capitalism every single one of them is right, provided they both agree to it, and under every single one, employees wouldn't mind getting their arm sanded off in order to have that benefit, even after the fact. From the other side, employers could reduce the amputation benefits they must offer by making their factories safer, and so lowering the probability of amputations. They would spend money on workplace safety, until each extra dollar for safety reduced the benefits they had to offer by just a dollar. Nobody could squeeze out more profits by neglecting the safety of their workers.

In real life, of course, we have companies which make a few billion dollars a year by killing the people who work in their pipe factories (1, 2, 3).

The really appalling thing is that other companies in the same industry are just as profitable, and immensely more decent. McWane isn't being driven to kill people by implacable market forces: they're just too vicious and stupid to make money any other way. Human beings may not be good enough for socialism, but we're not smart enough for capitalism, either.