Michael Keenan

Chapter Summaries of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

2010-07-20T14:27:00.002-07:00

I'm writing chapter summaries of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright here. So far, two out of four parts are online. I recommend the book, as do Eliezer Yudkowsky and Patri Friedman.

Motivated Skepticism and Motivated Credulity

2009-03-22T09:29:00.007-07:00

Two biases that lead to "stickiness" of political beliefs are motivated skepticism and motivated credulity. When I encounter an argument opposing some strongly-held belief of mine, I am prone to examine the argument extremely skeptically, never giving the benefit of the doubt. If I find the slightest flaw - a minor factual mistake, a questionable statistic, an improbable leap of logic - I am tempted to dismiss the whole as clearly the work of a dishonest or incompetent mind. This doesn't feel wrong. It feels like being logical, and upholding the highest standards of debate. It feels righteous. This is motivated skepticism, also called disconfirmation bias.

Conversely, motivated credulity - also called the prior attitude effect - is to give a free pass to weak arguments whose conclusions I agree with. Nobody's perfect, right? This writer is clearly a paladin of a just and noble cause. If he accidentally misquoted someone, or relied on outdated statistics, or his work lacks some key citations - big deal. I won't quibble over the details. That would be petty.

I hope I make these errors less frequently than I used to, but I suspect it's impossible to be sure I'm free of it altogether. I recall some particularly egregious examples from my past, particularly when arguing about the Iraq war in 2002/2003. I was 18-19 then, and new to politics. I might write about my errors in more detail sometime.

Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g. religion. -- Ben Casnocha

Ben is right: lacking the ability to read will severely hamper your ability to form sound beliefs. Lacking an understanding of cognitive biases - such as motivated skepticism - is also a risk factor for dubious beliefs. I remember dismissing the arguments of those I thought fools based on a few tangential errors, back before I'd heard the term "motivated skepticism". That was my mistake. So I'd go further, and propose this rule of thumb: be skeptical of beliefs you formed and defended before you understood motivated skepticism.

This implies that everyone in the world should drastically lower their confidence in their cherished beliefs. Let's all do that.

I came across an example of motivated skepticism recently. Here's Andi Hazelwood and Albert Bartlett talking about peak oil and the limits of natural resources. They're discussing Malthus, saying he was basically right.

AB: I read Malthus three times. Malthus understood the problems of limits, and he understood these things. And his timetable--he couldn't have anticipated the mechanization of agriculture, which has greatly increased agricultural production worldwide...And I think with these limits showing up in terms of peak oil, peak natural gas--I think with these limits showing up people will have to reassess their proud claim that "we've proven Malthus wrong." Malthus, I think, will turn out to be... "well, yeah, he understood the problem, he was right." And when some learned scholar tells me "we've proven Malthus wrong," that scholar is telling me about himself; he's not telling me about Malthus."

The discussion then moved, as it should, to the economist Julian Simon, who would have disagreed with that. Here is how I wish the conversation had gone:

A: Julian Simon would say that agricultural innovations weren't accidental or coincidental, because whenever food became scarce, food prices increased, which increased the reward to those who found ways to increase food production. I guess we should address that.

B: Well, Norman Borlaug is considered the father of the Green Revolution, developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. It's said that he saved millions of lives. So what motivated him?

A: According to this interview, he says he was motivated by seeing so much human misery. He was a teenager during the Depression.

B: So Simon was wrong! Borlaug wasn't motivated by money!

A: Well, maybe. Simon said that food shortages would lead to innovation through the mechanism of increased prices, and therefore growth could continue. In this particular case the mechanism seems to have been altruism rather than personal gain, but the process still worked. A resource shortage led to innovation and ensured continued growth. Ideally we would examine more examples of the motivations of people who improved agricultural yields.

B: Ok...so what does this mean for peak oil and peak natural gas, which were talking about earlier?

A: Simon would probably say that we can expect innovation to solve resource shortages for those problems too.

My fantasy pundits sound so reasonable. The actual conversation was an exercise in motivated skepticism. Instead of addressing the criticism Julian Simon would have made to them, they found an irrelevant quote to attack:

AH: And I think we should point out that Julian Simon infamously said that we had enough technology in our minds and in our libraries to allow population to continue growing for the next 7 [million] years.

AB: That's an interesting story...my correspondent asked me, "What would the world population be if it just grew at the present rate of 1% per year"--which sounds terribly small as a growth rate--"if it grew at 1% per year for 7 million years?" Well...[it's] a number that you get by writing 1 followed by 30,000 zeroes...1 followed by 85 is the number of atoms estimated in the known universe, and Julian's population size would be 1 followed by 30,000 zeroes.

AH: So, no amount of technology is ever going to make it possible for those people to fit on earth.
...
AB: There aren't enough atoms to make that many people. But Julian was worshiped by the people in Washington who wanted to hear is message. And these people were often politicians who had no scientific judgment. But Simon had a Ph.D. And he was reasonably bright in the sense that he was bright enough to know what it was that important clients wanted to hear. And so he composed things they wanted to hear. And so they were very much enamored of him.

This could be my motivated credulity talking, but I think that when you find an assertion, and you add an assumption (a 1% growth rate) to that assertion and then attempt a reductio ad absurdum, then you've only disproved your assumption, not the assertion. To be fair, Julian's assertion of seven million years of growth on Earth seems a silly prediction in several ways. But regardless of that line's worth, it was irrelevant to their argument.

So watch out for motivated skepticism and motivated credulity. And resist, if you can, the temptation to do what I just did - using my knowledge of cognitive biases as a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon my enemies. First, know yourself.

Don't vote

2009-02-25T06:21:00.007-08:00

I'm late to the democracy-hating party, having missed last year's American, Canadian and New Zealand elections. But it's still worth pointing out that voting is:
-a waste of time
-often harmful

Patri Friedman loves this topic, so I'm not going to say much that's new here.

First: your vote doesn't matter. If you're American, your vote has about a one in sixty million chance of swinging the election. So, voting is a waste of time, in the sense that its chance of achieving some kind of useful outcome is ignorably low. (But what if everyone thought that way? Fine. Here's what to do: estimate how many people will vote in the next election by asking people what their intentions are. If it's a low enough number that the expected effect of voting outweighs your time cost, then vote; otherwise, don't. If everyone follows that strategy, we'll be fine.)

Of course, how you spend your time doesn't bother me. If you want to spend your time voting, or watching paint dry, that's fine. The bothersome part is the moral significance that people attach to voting. Many people seem to have a religious belief in democracy. You don't vote!?

This is frustrating because, if anything, the moral outrage should go the other way. Almost all voters are ignorant, mistaken and/or misinformed about very important issues. You voted!? I sure hope you know what you're doing. If you were a bad voter, it seems unlikely that you'd know that. So - at least for the hypothetical average voter - it's not at all clear that they are fit to govern, or to choose who should govern.

A friend of mine is an American living in Taiwan. His state pays for postage when he votes from Taiwan. I guess that costs about $1. Was that $1 well spent? With hindsight, no. Obama won by more than one vote, so that $1 could have fed a somebody for a day instead, which would have been more helpful. Of course, if I were to criticize every wasteful use of resources amounting to $1, then this would be a very tiresome blog. But irritatingly, people somehow think that $1 was put to good use. If I bought a bag of apples and forgot to eat them before they rotted, I certainly wouldn't be proud of it. You could accuse me of being wasteful.

Road deaths increase by about 24 on Election Day in the USA.

Finally, I worry that voting channels the noble human desire to help society to a pointless activity. If people didn't vote, people might be inclined to actually do something about the unfortunate state of society. Admittedly, that is pure speculation (and it's possible that many people would choose something even more harmful).

In conclusion: you probably shouldn't vote. If you do vote, please be very well-informed (especially in economics but not just economics), pay for the postage yourself, drive carefully, don't pretend you're doing anything useful or noble, and don't forget to actually do something useful and noble.

Update: Eliezer Yudkowsky says this line of thinking is based on "the standard wrong decision theory". He's a smart guy, maybe he's right.

If you were a better-than-average driver, how would you know?

2009-02-17T01:20:00.003-08:00

Are you good at maths? Are you good at drawing?

Your answer to these questions is probably reasonably accurate. Unless you're a mathematician or an artist, you probably don't have much pride or identity tied up in your skill in these things, so that won't cloud your judgment. (And if you are a mathematician or artist, then - relative to average people - you're almost certainly good at maths or drawing.)

Are you good at driving? Are you a good judge of character? Are you (or would you be) a good parent? Are you a good voter?

Everyone thinks they are a better than average driver. The appropriate conclusion to draw from that is that, if you need to know whether you're a good driver, the way to discover this information is not to simply introspect on the question for a few seconds. I suspect the same holds for whether you're a good parent, voter, or judge of character.

That's a serious problem! It probably doesn't matter whether you're a good driver. Even if you're worse than average, you're probably not so bad that you shouldn't be driving at all. But bad parents and aggregated bad voters do a lot of harm. If you're likely to be a bad parent, then that is actionable information: don't have children! If you're likely to be a bad voter, don't vote! If you're a poor judge of character, get a prenuptial agreement.

If you really wanted to know whether you're a good driver, you could probably find some reasonable metric and compare yourself to the average. But there are no controlled experiments in parenting or politics, which makes it very difficult to be sure you have reliable knowledge on these questions.

Destroying wealth to improve the economy

2009-01-30T03:58:00.003-08:00

In the past, people sometimes tried to improve the economy by destroying wealth:

President Roosevelt came into office proposing a New Deal for Americans, but his advisers believed, mistakenly, that excessive competition had led to overproduction, causing the depression. The centerpieces of the New Deal were the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA), both of which were aimed at reducing production and raising wages and prices. Reduced production, of course, is what happens in depressions, and it never made sense to try to get the country out of depression by reducing production further. In its zeal, the administration apparently did not consider the elementary impossibility of raising all real wage rates and all real prices.

The AAA immediately set out to slaughter six million baby pigs and reduce breeding sows to reduce pork production and raise prices. Since cotton plantings were thought to be excessive, cotton farmers were paid to plow under one-quarter of the forty million acres of cotton to reduce marketed production to boost prices.

History repeats:

The second plan is more politely known as "fleet modernization." It combines economic as well as environmental goals in one package.

Under a bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif., owners of older cars would get vouchers worth thousands of dollars toward the purchase of newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. For the customer to get that cash, the car dealer would have to certify that the trade-in was getting scrapped and not resold. The car's vehicle identification number (VIN) would be tracked to make sure it never shows up on a vehicle registration again.

Added: from the Wall Street Journal on January 28:

[In discussions of the stimulus bill,] dairy and beef cattle producers butted heads over talk that the government might buy up dairy cattle for slaughter to drive up depressed milk prices.

Home ownership and labor mobility: a trade-off

2009-01-29T02:55:00.005-08:00

Governments tend to promote/subsidize home ownership. Why? Rourke O'Brien and David Newville write in the Washington Post (January 11, 2009):

Studies have shown that families who own their own homes are more likely to be involved in their communities, to report higher satisfaction with their lives, and to vote. Homeownership also has positive impacts on children, such as increased high school graduation rates, fewer behavioral problems and better job outcomes after school, and these effects have been found to be strongest among low-income homeowners.

Citation needed, but ok...

What's more, homeownership has been and will continue to be the single biggest source of wealth for low- and moderate-income families. Even if housing prices don't rise much, the forced saving that comes from paying down a mortgage can help families build equity that can then be leveraged to finance a child's education, provide financial security in retirement or pass wealth on to the next generation.

"Even if housing prices don't rise much"? What if they fall by 40%?

We should consider the costs of promoting home ownership too. Arguably, it contributed to an enormous financial crisis. (Note: don't believe that explanation - or any other explanation of the financial crisis - unless you have a good reason to think you're better at economics than Nobel Prize-winning economists, because Nobel Prize-winning economists disagree on this.)

Also, home ownership reduces labor mobility, as Will Wilkinson points out. And with a labor force more heterogenous than ever before*, America needs labor mobility more than ever.

Maybe governments should pursue policies that promote labor mobility. (Or maybe governments should leave people the hell alone.) One downside to that might be that labor might mobilize itself to some other country (say, to Taiwan - it's a great place to do business), or even to some still further frontier.

*That is, the skills of the labor force are more specialized than before. Fifty years ago America had more factory jobs than it does now. My understanding is that one high school dropout could work in one factory about as capably as another factory. But you can't easily switch from being a website developer to a biotech engineer, or whatever it is people are doing in America these days.

How do you distinguish good experts from bad experts?

2009-01-18T07:16:00.001-08:00

How do you distinguish good experts from bad experts? It would be an extraordinarily useful skill - a meta-skill that gives you access to so many others.

Priests and biologists both claim to know the origin of human life. How do you choose between the two? It seems obvious to me, but people disagree on this so there's something non-obvious about it.

How do you distinguish between a good mutual fund manager and a bad one? It's really hard. So you might choose to get an index fund instead, which is probably not a bad idea. In one sense, that would be judging the market to be your good expert. Patri Friedman didn't do that in 2008; he chose a bear strategy instead. This is evidence that Patri Friedman is good at choosing good investing experts or is a good investing expert himself (but not sufficient evidence - watch him for another ten years).

How do you distinguish between bad science and good science? Patri Friedman thinks he can. squid314 challenged him:

You need to prove that you can "beat the house"; that your own judgment is likely to be less fallible than the nutritional scientists' for some reason. Top nutritional scientists should know everything you do about the problems with certain kinds of studies and take that into account. So all of the pitfalls that apply to nutritional scientists equally apply to you, unless you have some specific reason to think they don't. And then the experts have the extra advantage of much greater familiarity with the subject matter.

Patri claims "that by using [rigorous scientific procedures], digging into a few papers, correcting for funding biases, one can occasionally decide to take a contrarian view, and be correct."

I suspect that that approach would yield a strong conclusion on the priest/biologist question.

How do you distinguish between good economics and bad economics? Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Paul Samuelson have a different view of macro-economics than Nobel Prize-winning economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (of course, all four of them disagree, but if you're going to divide them into two groups, that's a sensible categorization). Who are the better economists? How do you know whether you are a good enough economist, or a good enough judge of economists, to decide?

Three narratives about entrepreneurial motivation

2008-12-22T16:56:00.004-08:00

Narrative One: entrepreneurs are motivated by financial incentives. Reduced regulation and reduced taxes can increase entrepreneurship.

Have you seen this editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the decline of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley?

According to the National Venture Capital Association, in all of 2008 there have been just six companies that have gone public. Compare that with 269 IPOs in 1999, 272 in 1996, and 365 in 1986.

Michael S. Malone says that Washington is killing entrepreneurship with capital gains taxes and regulation such as Sarbanes-Oxley. The mechanism is that Sarbanes-Oxley makes the overhead of IPOs much more expensive, which reduces the incentive for entrepreneurs to start companies because the likely gains are lower, and reduces available VC capital for the same reason.

There were some supporting anecdotes from the discussion on Hacker News. From ohhmaagawd:

I know a CEO of an Internet company that planned on doing an IPO in 2008. Of course the economy tanked so it's not happening.

He told me that SOX required the company to have auditing/traceability and controls for everything. This meant they quit using any software as a service applications, they shut down IM, they have to keep track of everything on every machine, banned a whole list of applications that would interfere with SOX (iTunes, file sharing, and music app), etc.

They had to hire lawyers, more accountants, consulting firms. He told me they were looking at > 10m to comply. And that doesn't count lost productivity of having to act like a draconian big ass company where they had to have design docs for everything they do, detailed project plans, get rid of the tools they use (as listed above), etc.

In other words to go IPO now you give up agility, spend more money, and become less productive.

From russell:

I worked for a company a couple of years ago that was planning to public in a year or two. The CEO told us that complying with SOX would cost $3 million for the IPO and over $1 million per year after that. That's a huge burden for a company with revenues of $35 million at the time. I have read that it is now $5 million for an IPO and that no company with revenues under $100 million can afford to be public.

Narrative Two: entrepreneurs are not primarily motivated by financial incentives; they are driven by the joy of making a difference and creating value. Encouragement from national leaders can increase entrepreneurship.

In The Cure To Our Economic Problems, Mark Cuban (billionaire entrepreneur) says that financial incentives aren't as important as some people think:

Entrepreneurs who create something out of nothing don’t care what tax rates are. Bill Gates didn’t monitor the marginal tax rate when he dropped out of Harvard and started MicroSoft (btw, it was a ton higher than it is today). Michael Dell didn’t wonder what the capital gains tax was when he started PC’s Limited, and then grew it into Dell Computer. I doubt that any great business or invention started with a discussion or even a consideration of what the current or projected income or capital gains tax was or would be.

The impact of tax rates on productivity and development is something economists masterbate about, enterpreneurs don’t waste their time thinking about it. We have business to do.
...
Entrepreneurs live for the juice of making their dreams come true. Of having a vision and fighting to see it come true. The joy of mission accomplished and the scoreboard of the financial rewards.

The solution?

The cure to our economic problems is the Entrepreneurial Spirit of All Americans. Instead of bitching at each other, could one Presidential candidate please show even the least bit of leadership and character and stand up for and encourage the entrepreneurs in this country ?
...
What we need is our candidates to stop yelling at each other and starting looking at the American people and encouraging the best of who we are. That is who I want to get behind. That is what I would like to see for our country. That is what will energize and motivate people to create companies and invent products that will turn the economy.

That's a bit vague, but he's a billionaire and I'm not, so who are you going to listen to?

Narrative Three: Entrepreneurs are held back by concerns about health care. Universal health care can increase entrepreneurship.

Universal health care, it is argued, would encourage entrepreneurs in America, because:
-People who get health insurance through employment (which is nearly everyone) are reluctant to leave their job to start a business because they'd lose their health insurance and would pay a much higher rate for private insurance.
-People fear the cost of having to organize health care for their employees.

Morgan Wilkins argues:

Universal access to health care would not only increase individual liberty and alleviate wasteful spending, but would also increase entrepreneurial activity – another value central to conservative thinking. Many entrepreneurs are discouraged from embarking on their new business venture by fears about the high cost of providing employers with health insurance. Small business employers are then forced to make tough decisions about whether to absorb the high costs, pass them on to employees, or not offer benefits at all. A universal health care system would eliminate these concerns and encourage hesitant entrepreneurs to test their innovations and ideas.

Or Daniel Brook:

America acts as if all is well when in fact we’re one of the only developed countries with a rate of self-employment even lower than France’s. While surveys show that Americans are nearly twice as entrepreneurial as Europeans, we’re only half as likely to actually become self-employed.

What is holding Americans back? In two words: health care.
...
In other developed countries, where self-employment rates tend to be higher, taking the leap to working for yourself doesn’t affect your health care coverage or your family’s. In publicly funded health care systems, entrepreneurs pay less into the system during the few lean years that often accompany starting a business. Once you get off the ground, you pay more. That benefits the country’s health and its economy.

I did see a study about this though.

Some commentators have suggested that the absence of portable health insurance impedes people from leaving their jobs to start new firms. We investigate this belief by comparing wage-earners who become self-employed during a given period of time with their counterparts who do not. By examining the impact of variables relating to the health insurance and health status of these workers and their families, we can infer whether the lack of health insurance portability affects the probability that they become self-employed. The evidence does not support the conjecture that the current health insurance system affects the propensity to become self-employed. Hence, whatever its other merits, there is no reason to believe that the introduction of universal health insurance would significantly enhance entrepreneurial activity.

But it's just one study. You could apply motivated stopping or motivated skepticism at this point, if you want to.

Suit's eye for the geek guy

2008-12-19T08:01:00.007-08:00

There's some animosity between "geeks" and "suits". Or at least, geeks think there's animosity, but suits might be too busy making money and talking to girls to notice. But from my custom-built Amiga in my parent's basement, I rage! Someday we will rise up to protest our corporate overlords...and sit back down, breathing heavily.

The culture of my people is filled with tales of the malfeasance of the suits. Take what happened to poor Philip Greenspun, for example. Who in telling such a tale - even if one of the laywers or Greylock VCs or a colleague of the incompetent Allen Shaheen - could refrain from tears? The VCs took a growing, profitable, widely-respected company and burnt it down.

I usually take the geek's approach to dressing, which is to say I begin putting on clothes while reading Hacker News in the morning, and stop putting on clothes when all the usual body parts are obscured, and check that my underwear is inside my pants. Suits, on the other hand - well, there's a reason they call them suits. So that's one source of tension between geeks and suits.

Paul Graham explains:

If you’re a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you’d feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn’t it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.

And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one’s ideas. That’s the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as “suits.”

Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
...
The definition of a nerd [is] someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself. A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.

One reason a geek wouldn't want to dress like a suit is that geeks might be tempted to distrust a well-dressed geek. Does this guy spend his evenings contributing to open-source projects, or does he spend them reading GQ and shopping like a normal, well-adjusted person? Are these fancy clothes meant to distract you from his weak code? Is he dressing to impress because he can't impress in a way that's actually useful?

But unless a geek works at Google, he'll need to impress non-geeks. Girls, for example. And it can affect real-world performance too. The startup I'm working with might want to sell one day; suppose I were doing a technical presentation to VCs and my cufflinks didn't match my shoelaces. We could lose the deal! So I've been persuaded that a light interest in fashion wouldn't be a bad thing to maintain. Time to read up on this on the internet, then.

I thought it might be edifying to do Google image searches on well-known suits and geeks. Does the reality match the theory? I've tried to pick representative images below.

The suits
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, who took control of the company in 1981 when it was worth $14 billion, and left it valued at $410 billion in 2004.

Warren Buffett, widely considered the world's best investor, has made about $50 billion through shrewd investments, and given most of that to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Li Ka-shing, richest man in Hong Kong and one of Asia's most generous philanthropists.

The geeks
Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project for a free Unix-like operating system, and founder of the Free Software Foundation.

Donald Knuth, maybe the most famous living computer scientist.

Linus Torvalds, original developer and still the maintainer of the Linux kernel.

What about Bill Gates? He's a suit AND a geek. A crossover hit! No wonder he's so rich.

A sweater over a shirt - nice compromise.

My suit friends have embarked on an ongoing makeover project for me, their Barbie Geek. They advise that I burn my old wardrobe. I'm not entirely comfortable with this plan.

Math is hard, let's go shopping!

Public drunkenness vs. libertarianism

2008-12-15T08:30:00.007-08:00

One huge difference between Taiwan and the United Kingdom is the drinking culture. Drinking is of course common in Taiwan, as it is in United Kingdom. In some ways drinking is more embedded in Taiwanese culture - they have elaborate drinking games, some of which require dice and other equipment, which you can find at any bar.

But maybe the English just play different drinking games. Because I've never seen a pool of vomit on a Taiwanese street, or a fight*, or a screaming match, or even a smashed bottle. The worst I've encountered are some inconsiderately loud young guys, who had probably just finished exams, at a nearby restaurant table. And this while the ubiquitous 7-11s sell alcohol at all hours of the day, including hard spirits, for under half the price you'll find in England.

Something is different. What is it, exactly, and why? It isn't availability of alcohol; as I said, Taiwanese alcohol is cheaper and is available 24 hours a day less than a block from your apartment.

Theodore Dalrymple is understandably upset about social decline in Britain:

That the British are now a nation of drunken brutes, justly despised throughout the world wherever they congregate in any numbers, is so obvious a fact that it should require no repetition. A brief visit to the centre of any British town or city on a Saturday night - or indeed, almost any night - will confirm it for those who are still in doubt. There they will see scenes of charmless vulgarity, in which thousands of scantily clad, lumpen sluts scream drunkenly, and men vomit proudly in the gutters.
...
The deeper problem lies in the fact that much of our population believes not only that it has no duty to control itself, but also that it is actually harmful to try to do so. It believes that ''letting its hair down'' - that is to say screaming, smashing bottles, vomiting, urinating against walls in full view of others, swaying drunkenly in the gutter, hailing complete strangers to give them lifts, and so forth - is essential to its health and emotional well-being: that drinking in this fashion is a kind of Aristotelian catharsis, formerly achieved by watching the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Dalrymple's proposed solution, if I understand him correctly, is to enforce laws against public drunkenness:

Our problem is that we have no will to enforce [laws against public drunkenness]. It is, of course, impractical to arrest two or three million people every night, as theoretically should happen if our laws were to be obeyed; but it is not necessary. There are municipalities that do enforce by-laws against drinking in the streets and public drunkenness, and they are free of debauchery and violence.

I'm not a huge fan of laws against public drunkenness. After all, the problem is not the drunkenness; it's the fights, vomit and noise. Taiwanese drunks are saintly compared to English drunks.

Would it work, though? I'm sure it would, if the police had the will and the manpower. They pacified Iraq, so pacifying some unruly football hooligans should be easy. Would it be right? I've been publically drunk. Being drunk is not harmful. Things that aren't harmful, I propose, shouldn't be illegal.

But freedom is not the highest value. Sometimes, if the problem is sufficiently severe, we must be pragmatic and do what works. In Baghdad in 2007, Shia and Sunni neighborhoods waged civil war on one another. One solution was to severely restrict freedom of movement. From the New York Times, April 20, 2007:

American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods.

Soldiers in the Adhamiya district of northern Baghdad, a Sunni Arab stronghold, began construction of the wall last week and expect to finish it within a month. Iraqi Army soldiers would then control movement through a few checkpoints. The wall has already drawn intense criticism from residents of the neighborhood, who say that it will increase sectarian tensions and that it is part of a plan by the Shiite-led Iraqi government to box in the minority Sunnis.

A doctor in Adhamiya, Abu Hassan, said the wall would transform the residents into caged animals.

“It’s unbelievable that they treat us in such an inhumane manner,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re trying to isolate us from other parts of Baghdad. The hatred will be much greater between the two sects.”

“The Native Americans were treated better than us,” he added.

The American military said in a written statement that “the wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”

I guess it worked. Violence in Iraq is way, way down, and now they're removing the barriers. Michael Yon reports:

Installing the miles of ugly concrete barriers was like patching up the internal bleeding of Baghdad – the heart of Iraq. The barriers did not “solve” the problem any more than a bandage cures a bullet wound, yet bandages saved lives. Removing these concrete barriers will be like removing the bandages to allow real healing to take place. We are only starting now, and it may take years before they are all gone.

I'm glad I don't have to make that kind of decision, but I'm glad the barriers were erected. Having abandoned libertarian principles, where does that leave me?

Well, it could leave me in the very defensible position that I'm willing to abandon libertarian principles during a civil war. And I could say: the level of disorder in the United Kingdom is not sufficient to suspend the freedom to be drunk in public, a freedom I and millions of others have enjoyed and not abused. The disorder in the United Kingdom kills and injures people, and imposes significant costs on society, but the freedom to be drunk in public (and the cost of the probable implementation of banning it - breath-testing of pedestrians, for example) matters more.

I'm not completely satisfied with that answer. I'm so happy to be in Taiwan rather than England. The difference between the barbaric nightlife in England and that in Taiwan is stark. So to one who proposes a solution that I agree would work, and who is staying in England rather than leaving, I'd be sheepish in suggesting he stay at home between the hours of 9pm and 6am.

But the universe does not owe us clean, easy solutions to every problem. Freedom is at least a great heuristic.

*I've never witnessed a fight in Taiwan, but I did hear of one particularly brutal assault in which a friend of a friend was hospitalized last month. The victim and the attackers were all white, and were all drunk. White people have a certain, somewhat deserved, reputation in Taiwan.

Added: It turns out I've been a little too kind to Taiwan; apparently I just wasn't looking for trouble in the right (wrong?) places. You can indeed find pools of vomit if you know where to look. Street violence is still near-non-existent though.

A prison story from reddit

2008-12-06T12:18:00.003-08:00

grey666 reports:

5 and half months federal time for my ex-gf using my cell phone to make a drug deal. Key West was bad - real bad. Bunch of black dudes sitting around talking about how many people they had raped and killed.

Miami was the best, great food and chicks standing outside every night showing us their tits. The councilor never came... so no phone calls for me. Bank robbers and drug dealers in Miami - and every single one of them would give you the shirt off their back.

Atlanta was the worst... no matress, no pillow, no cup... four guys in a cell, sleeping on the cold concrete and 12 TB tests. A small box of cereal and a milk for breakfast, crackers for lunch, and I couldn't figure out what dinner was. I didn't eat it. Guys yelling and screaming all night... nobody goes to the infirmary at night in Atlanta, no matter what the problem is.

Then I had a 16 hour diesel shuffle flight from Atlanta to Oklahoma City by way of New York. No food, no drink, feet and hands shackled to the chair the entire time. No restroom breaks, if you had to piss they made you piss in your pants and then sit in it for 12 hours. The guy beside me wasn't happy about that. The Marshals would hit people on the collar bone with a flashlight for talking. One guy started yelling and screaming - they took him off in New Jersey and drug him across the run-way by his ankle shackles.

Oklahoma City - had to trade my breakfast for a cigarette every day. Food was good, otherwise and we had a basketball court for 30 minutes every day.

Denver sucked bad. Real bad. Some crazy dude walking around naked every day with soars and puss all over his body. 60% of the inmates only spoke spanish. Crips and bloods... those cats fight hard. Three guys with positive TB tests were walking around for three weeks before they took em out. Had to trade food for everything - a toothbrush costs you your chicken, shampoo costs three chicken pieces. Shower shoes cost breakfast for a week.

If you don't give the laundry guys your chicken, they die your towel, underwear and jumpsuit pink which is a flag for everyone to beat the shit out of you.

When they have something like ribs... half the guys go through the line three times and take the food to their cells, so 2/3 of the inmates don't get to eat. The minimum security guys take the dessert half of the time, and they are too lazy to ever bring soup or anything like that.

There is no protective custody anymore - they put you in a small cell with two or three other guys - I hear they are the crazy ones.

I was in there with several cold-blooded murderers. If you rat on someone they send notes through the legal library to the other areas and you get jacked. Some of the guys in there are doing life, and they just don't give a fuck.

The law library was especially nice... all the pages are gone for all the major crimes. You have to pay for everything.

They give you 12 cents per hour for working, and you can only work four hours a day.

If your attorney's number is not registered, you can only call him or her through the councilor, who comes in once or twice a week for two hours. The line is long, and unless your in the first ten, you don't get phone calls.

You can't call anyone who is not on your phone list, and you can't leave messages on answering machines.

If you write a letter and the envelope isn't just perfect, they hold it for a month before giving it back to you.

It took 45 days for them to put money on my account for commissary. Then another two weeks to actually get commissary.

I didn't get a phone call or commissary for three and a half months.

Out of 60,000 pages in my discovery, they gave me 13 pages. I had to trade my chicken to other guys who were also on my case so that I could read their discovery.

I didn't find out what the exact charges were against me until my bond hearing four months into it. They called my brother from the court room to ask if I could stay with him and he said "yea, for awhile...", so they denied my PR bond and took me back for another month and a half.

I had to file a motion with the court to get my discovery from my public defender. All the guys in there bitch about their court appointed attorneys non-stop. They just don't give a crap anymore. They only file motions because they get paid for every motion they file. Most of them won't even know what the charges are against you half of the time. They lie constantly. They don't do anything you ask them to do, they just ignore you. They get $1500 for every court appearance, so you get to sit through 20 wiretap hearings so all the attorneys can line their pockets - nothing gets done in the wiretap hearings. It's just a bunch of lawyers sitting around collecting their government handouts.

I lost everything... my home, all my personal stuff, my photo albums, my software, my computers.

They auctioned my car after 30 days, with my notebook and my DVD's in the car. I never got any of it back.

If you use your cell phone memory all the time, you won't remember anyone's phone number - and they have no phone books, you can't call information. You have to trade your food to get someone else to call their people to have them get the number for you - which is against BOP policy, if you get caught, it's 30 days lockup.

If you can't remember someone's address... or phone number, your completely cut-off from the outside world - except for your lame assed attorney, who doesn't give a shit about anything but the money.

I fired my public defender, filed motions to withdraw all his motions, learned the criminal justice system, withdrew my plea of guilty, withdrew my plea bargain, and set the case for trial - at which point the federal prosecutor filed a motion giving me time served w/ three years probation, which was a lot better than the 3.5 years in prison that my public defender had negotiated. It took me three and a half years.

Six years of probation, and now days if you get busted for drugs - you can't drink alcohol either. It's a condition of your bond... so that when you piss dirty for alcohol they can send you back to prison anytime they want to.

Out of 60,000 pages of discovery... thirty pages actually applied to my aspect of the case - most of which were criminal reports on my ex-gf and the two guys she had met one time to do a drug deal. She got off scott free for her testimony about the dude she delivered drugs for. She spent six days in jail total for delivering 1 kilo of cocaine exactly 1 mile down the street.

The evidence against me was pen registers of my old cell phone calling one of the guys, and my ex-gf's statement that I arranged the deal. That was it... no wiretaps, no witnesses, no nothing.

They had blanket wiretap authority from the attorney general. They traced every single phone call to the main drug guys. Anyone that called them was indicted regardless of the circumstances. Some guys were in there over a year because their girlfriends used their cell phones to call their girlfriends - who were using the cell phones of the main dudes. The main dudes had ten cell phones each.

Prison is bad... you don't want to go to prison these days. The government is all jacked up - they just don't care, none of them give a crap. They will throw your drivers license in the garbage can and laugh in your face... when you get out, you'll be walking to the half-way house in your shower shoes, a t-shirt, and a pair of canvas cut-off shorts. They don't care if it's snowing, and you only have four hours to get to the half-way house or you go back to prison.

Then you have two weeks to get a job, or you go back to prison - but now you have no ID. They count every two hours - all night long with flashlights in your face. Wherever you go, you have to call the half-way house when you get there, and when you leave.

The Feds will march through the office where you work two and three at a time. They'll question your co-workers, the managers and the owner of the company. You have to give them copies of every paycheck and you have to log your time for the probation department - plus two or three piss tests every week - across town. Your setup to fail in every possible way imaginable - so you can go back to prison.

Thoughts:

That's horrible.
Prosecuting the war on drugs seems to do a lot of harm. (Though obviously this guy might not be telling the truth about his innocence or his experience.)
It's weird to find myself on the other side of a free market debate for once! It's easy to imagine some unfortunate incentives with private prison systems in various ways; for example, rehabilitation. Most businesses like to keep customers coming back for more. (I don't regard this observation as good enough to actually propose a policy. First let's look at whether private systems have higher recidivism rates than public prisons.)
A related problem is that the mechanism to create regulation which keeps externalities under control in normal markets probably doesn't work very well in prisons. Of course the mechanism never works well, but it could be particularly bad in prisons. Felons can't vote; voters don't care about felons; prisoners have almost no voice and of course they have no exit.
While we're talking about prison and voter apathy regarding felons, it's worth mentioning that tolerance of prison rape is outrageous.

Thinking is harder than you know

2008-12-04T06:21:00.006-08:00

Followup to How Difficult Is Artificial Intelligence?

(This is another heavily Yudkowsky-influenced post.)

We don't notice the massive amount of processing our brains are doing when we think. This led early AI researchers to be too optimistic. How hard could thinking be? I do it all the time. But introspecting the actual algorithms our brains are running is in many cases impossible. We don't have access to that information.

One example (of many!) of the processing our brains do that we're not aware of is processing the direction of an incoming sound. When you hear a sound, you sense the approximate direction the sound came from. How do you do that?

You might guess that it's because the sound is louder in one ear and quieter in the other. You're right, but it's not the whole story. From the Washington University Medical School's neuroscience course:

The auditory nerve carries the signal into the brainstem and synapses in the cochlear nucleus...The ventral cochlear nucleus cells then project to a collection of nuclei in the medulla called the superior olive. In the superior olive, the minute differences in the timing and loudness of the sound in each ear are compared, and from this you can determine the direction the sound came from. (Emphasis added.)

It is not obvious to me, just from considering what it feels like to hear sounds, that minute differences in the arrival of the sound to my left and right ears are important in determining the direction the sound came from. The lessons I draw from this are:

Introspecting what it feels like to think is probably not a good way to approach building an artificial mind.
Inspecting brain processing, as Lloyd Watt did to find out this information, is a process that yields results.
The brain is not an indecipherable black box; there's no obviously compelling reason that we won't make progress in figuring out how thinking actually works by examining it.

Inspecting the brain is one way we might discover what human-level intelligence actually involves, but not the only way. Yudkowsky cautions against relying too much on emulating the brain when designing an artificial one:

Maybe neurons are just what brains happen to be made out of, because the blind idiot god is too stupid to sit down and invent transistors. All the modules get made out of neurons because that's all there is, even if the cognitive work would be much better-suited to a 2GHz CPU.
"Early attempts to make flying machines often did things like attaching beak onto the front, or trying to make a wing which would flap like a bird's wing. (This extraordinary persistent idea is found in Leonardo's notebooks and in a textbook on airplane design published in 1911.) It is easy for us to smile at such naivete, but one should realize that it made good sense at the time. What birds did was incredible, and nobody really knew how they did it. It always seemed to involve feathers and flapping. Maybe the beak was critical for stability..." - Hayes and Ford, "Turing Test Considered Harmful"

So... why didn't the flapping-wing designs work? Birds flap wings and they fly. The flying machine flaps its wings. Why, oh why, doesn't it fly?

Le Bris' flying machine, photographed in 1868

Eventually someone stopped copying beaks and feathers and flapping and focused on understanding the actual problem, and then invented fixed-wing airplanes. That's an option for AI too. We might go too far in trying to copy nature's solution exemplified in human brains. Helicopters don't have wings (at least, not without a very forgiving interpretation of "wings") but they still fly. Maybe we should not be terribly surprised if an AI doesn't need to have anything recognizable as a neural network, or a soul, or quantum interference, or whatever else we might like to think a mind absolutely has to have.

Added: Unsurprisingly, Yudkowsky made my first point more eloquently:

After spending a decade or two living inside a mind, you might think you knew a bit about how minds work, right? That's what quite a few AGI wannabes (people who think they've got what it takes to program an Artificial General Intelligence) seem to have concluded. This, unfortunately, is wrong.

Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally about reducing the mental to the non-mental.

You might want to contemplate that sentence for a while. It's important.

Living inside a human mind doesn't teach you the art of reductionism, because nearly all of the work is carried out beneath your sight, by the opaque black boxes of the brain. So far beneath your sight that there is no introspective sense that the black box is there - no internal sensory event marking that the work has been delegated.

If you're interested in this kind of thing, you need to be reading Yudkowsky, not me, of course.

Prediction Markets instead of Parole Boards

2008-11-26T07:45:00.003-08:00

Parole boards determine whether prisoners may be released from their sentences before their sentence is complete. If my understanding is correct, the main consideration is the likelihood that the convict will commit another crime.

Parole boards do a terrible job. According to the Department of Justice, 49% of parolees abscond or are returned to prison. And of course there must be more who commit more crimes who aren't caught.

It is rumored that sex offenders, especially paedophiles, are much more likely to reoffend than non-sex offenders. The statistics support the opposite conclusion. But my understanding is that sex crimes, especially sex crimes against children, are very often not reported, and less often than that are resolved. So I guess we don't know what the true recidivism rate is.

One strategy some states have adopted to combat the threat of sex offence recidivists is to maintain a sex offenders register - a public list that sex offenders are placed on (with photo and address available online) - so that citizens can be aware of any paedophiles in their neighborhood. In some states, the sex offenders aren't allowed to live within 1000 feet of where children congregate, such as schools and day care centers.

When Wendy Whitaker was 17, she fellated a 15-year-old. 12 years later, the 29-year-old must vacate her home in case she molests the children at a nearby church daycare center.

The obvious explanation is that Whitaker is being crushed in the cogs of the gigantic machine that is government bureaucracy. But if we take this at face value - the government is genuinely unsure whether Whitaker is a threat to the children, and is willing to let her out of prison but not off the sex offender list just in case - then what we're dealing with is a question of how to predict the future. Will Wendy Whitaker fellate any more 15-year-olds?

When you have a future prediction problem, the best solution available is (in most cases, when some normal conditions like liquidity hold) prediction markets. I propose replacing parole boards with prediction markets on the likelihood of recidivism for each convict. The result should be less crime and less injustice for people like Wendy Whitaker (and Genarlow Wilson, etc.)

Are Libertarian Consequentialists Biased?

2008-11-23T09:07:00.007-08:00

Followup to: A Case Against The Minimum Wage

One useful way to distinguish kinds of libertarians is to distinguish those who believe that initiating coercion is wrong in itself (like Ayn Rand) from consequentialists (who think that the initiation of coercion leads to bad results measured according to some other criterion, like utility or happiness).

A lot of libertarians are some mixture of the two. Could this could lead to some questionable consequentialism? Believing that initiating coercion is wrong is likely to bias you when considering the consequential effects of coercion.

In 2006, Daniel Klein and Stewart Dompe surveyed economists who were in favor of the minimum wage. Klein and Dompe wanted to know why the economists supported the minimum wage. Question Seven asked whether the economists believed the minimum wage was coercive:

In one manner of speaking, liberty is freedom from political or legal restrictions on one’s property or freedom of association. Subscribers to this definition are apt to say that the minimum wage law is coercive because it (along with concomitant enforcement) threatens physical aggression against people for engaging in certain voluntary, consensual acts (namely, employing people at sub-minimum wages). (Notice that even subscribers to this definition of liberty recognize that it does not by itself carry a policy recommendation; values other than liberty exist and might conflict with it.)

Q7: Please indicate which of the following options best fits your view of this semantic issue:

These were the results:

Answer %
A. I agree that that definition of liberty is the primary definition of liberty, and in that sense the minimum wage law is coercive. 5%
B. I give some weight to that definition of liberty, but not primary weight; the minimum wage law is only coercive in a sense. 19%
C. I give little to no weight to that definition of liberty; the minimum wage law is not coercive in any significant sense. 50%
D. Other [please specify]: 24%
No response 2%

Answer	%
A. I agree that that definition of liberty is the primary definition of liberty, and in that sense the minimum wage law is coercive.	5%
B. I give some weight to that definition of liberty, but not primary weight; the minimum wage law is only coercive in a sense.	19%
C. I give little to no weight to that definition of liberty; the minimum wage law is not coercive in any significant sense.	50%
D. Other [please specify]:	24%
No response	2%

Klein and Dompe discuss the result:

Only five respondents assented to the primacy of the posited definition of liberty and that the minimum wage was coercive. Forty-seven (or 67 percent of those selecting A, B, or C) said they give little to no weight to that definition and denied that the minimum wage law is coercive in any significant sense. Furthermore, of the 23 individuals who selected “Other,” the vast majority wrote in comments which indicated strong reservations about that definition, if not outright rejection. Thus, 90-95 percent all minimum-wage supporters reject the primacy of the posited semantics, and about 65 percent reject any significant place for those semantics. We hazard to guess that a survey of minimum-wage opponents would yield a frequency ranking A > B > C, the reverse of what is found here. If so, disputants of the issue for the most part do not agree on what “liberty” and “coercion” mean. Since those conceptions relate directly to one’s understandings of “voluntary choice,” “the free market,” “intervention,” and other fundamental analytic distinctions and categories, the implication is that conceptual cleavages probably often separate how the two sides formulate and analyze the issue. (Emphasis added)

I also expect that a survey of minimum-wage opponents would find an opposite perception of coercion in the minimum wage.

So, someone's biased. Who is it?

A case could be made that the libertarians - the ones who think that the minimum wage is coercive - are biased. The minimum wage supporters are, presumably, just regular old consequentialists, or something close to that. They're just looking at the facts about the minimum wage and deciding what the effects are likely to be. But the perception of those worried about coercion is already tainted by their distaste for coercion.

Or is it the minimum wage supporters who are biased? Is there a bias to overestimate the effectiveness of government intervention? There just might be. And there's status quo bias, of course.

I have no conclusion. Do you?

A case against the minimum wage

2008-11-18T07:32:00.002-08:00

Henry and Charles work at Big Bob's Burger Boutique in Lexington for $7 per hour. Henry is 40 years old. His life hasn't gone well - his wife left him a few years ago and he struggles with alcoholism. He's in financial trouble: he pays child support payments, he can barely afford his mortgage payments, and he hasn't saved anything for retirement. Charles is a 19-year-old university student studying biology. His life is going well - his grades are good, he has a steady girlfriend, and his parents are paying for his university fees so his income from the Burger Boutique goes mainly towards partying on the weekends.

You're a citizen of Lexington. Lexington is considering raising the minimum wage from $7 to $9. How will you vote? Won't you give poor Henry and Charles a helping hand?

The usually stated purpose of the minimum wage is to help the poor. The point of the story is that the minimum wage can increase unemployment, and this effect is targeted towards the most vulnerable of minimum-wage workers. Furthermore, according to this paper from the Department of Health and Human Services, 71% of minimum wage workers have family incomes at least 50% higher than the poverty line - i.e. the not-poor. A disproportionate number are teenagers. When the minimum wage rises, some workers see an increase in income at the expense of other workers who lose their jobs. It is reasonable to expect that the ones who lose their jobs are likely to be minorities, women, the illiterate, the most unskilled - that is, the actually poor.

This is standard economics. Artificially raising the price of something reduces the amount that buyers want to buy.

The unemployment effect of minimum wage laws is very small at the low minimum wages governments have mandated. Of course, the higher the minimum wage, the bigger the unemployment effect. There was a significant Supreme Court ruling in 1923 where elevator operator Willie Lyons contested the minimum wage of $66 per month, which destroyed her $35 per month job. The court ruled the law unconstitutional, but minimum wage laws were later found to be constitutional in 1938. According to a survey run by the University of New Hampshire in 2007, 73% of economists believe that a 50% increase of the minimum wage would result in employment losses.

Laying off workers and not hiring them in the first place are not the only ways employers can save money when confronted with minimum wage laws. Neumark and Wascher (1998) found that "minimum wages substantially reduce training received by young workers".

Instead of supporting minimum wage laws, I suggest that those who want to use government power to help the poor should instead support the negative income tax, as described by Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. In short: through a negative income tax, your income is supplemented if it's sufficiently low. The higher your income, the less the supplement, up to some point where the supplement cuts out and you begin paying tax. The disadvantage of this idea is that it reduces the incentive to seek increased income, since an extra dollar earned results in less than an extra dollar received. Of course, this is a disadvantage of the income tax at every level and society seems to find this tolerable.

The USA has a negative-income-tax-inspired program called the Earned Income Tax Credit.

For an opposing view, see here, here, here and here.

Our future among the stars

2008-11-16T04:35:00.003-08:00

The life you're used to and the body you control are not the full scope of the organism of which you are a part.

You are 100 trillion cells in each of 6 billion human beings. Your cousins, a thousand times as numerous, are cells comprising the tissues and organs that make ants work. The other 99.9% of you is bacteria, and you've been here for 4 billion years. You are older than the mountains, older than the asteroid belt.

And during this 4 billion years, you have never died. Not all of you. Not once. Some parts of you became damaged and were lost, but you carried on. If your parents hadn't made it, you wouldn't be here right now.

During this 4 billion years we transformed a hostile world into a comfortable one. Or it transformed us. We made the atmosphere breathable and we adapted to breathe it. We made fur, and later, we made other parts of us make fur for the human parts. And the human part of you made tools. Rocket tools that will be of use to all of us very soon. With the help of this human organ, your cellular descendants will leap off this mote of dust into the vast sea of resources beyond. A sea that can support us hundreds of trillions of times more richly than our current home. A sea for our home, to make liveable or to force us to adapt again, as Earth once did.

Rejoice, human, and keep moving forward! You're on to something very big for all of us, though you may not yet know it. We will all reap the rewards of your efforts, soon. - tuber from Reddit

I like tuber's expansive concept of his ingroup.

Did you know that the universe is enormous? Well it is. There are about 10²³ stars - that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's about 14 trillion stars for every person alive today. We've got a lot of exploring to do.

How to delude yourself

2008-11-12T07:48:00.007-08:00

Here's a socialization anti-pattern: be judgmental and/or unforgiving. Let it be known that normal, decent, upstanding citizens don't do X, where X is: abandon their religion, hold the wrong political beliefs, not vote at all, do drugs, cheat on their spouses, indulge in adventurous sexual exploits, try polyamory, etc.* Notice how very rarely you hear about your friends doing X! It must be because they're all such normal, decent, upstanding citizens.

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said to howls and boos among the Columbia University audience. "In Iran we do not have this phenomenon, I don't know who has told you that we have it," he said.

Or, of course, it could be that all that stuff happens, but never enters the pure, unsullied perception of the righteous. You can block or minimize entire categories of human nature from your perception. (Another way to achieve a similar effect is to acquire a reputation as someone who won't keep a secret. Either way, people won't tell you sensitive information.)

Sindibad, an ex-Muslim and commenter at Overcoming Bias, describes how he told people of his apostasy:

People whom I knew could possibly open their minds and stop them believing in their faith, I tried to talk to them about it, and succeeded in convincing a few.

Those whom I thought might not get convinced, but would be understanding, I told them the truth, and they never bothered me much.

But for those who didn't look likely to get convinced, or likely to be understanding, I have simply avoided talking to them about the subject, and when they ask, I pretend to be religious.

What a disaster. Avoiding challenging viewpoints is surely not a path to truth.

This guy loves apostrophes almost as much as he loves Jesus

But how do you know whether you're judgmental? Paul Graham describes the problem in his (highly recommended) essay What You Can't Say:

Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong...When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite

I have no profound suggestions on developing open-mindedness that Paul Graham or the fine people at Overcoming Bias can't outdo. But the first step to understanding the world - no matter how you want to judge what you find - is surely to perceive it accurately (to the extent that humans can). So, consider: do people tell you secrets and trust you to keep them? All kinds of secrets?

*I'm not saying that all those things are ok, obviously. I'm just saying: there's a difference between responding "That's interesting. I see it differently. Let's talk about that." vs. "BEGONE, DEMON! YOU INFECT MY EYES.".

Concerned citizens want to know

2008-11-10T05:48:00.005-08:00

How difficult is Artificial Intelligence?

2008-11-08T05:13:00.003-08:00

(This post owes an enormous amount to the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI researcher who writes at Overcoming Bias. Reading this post might lead a non-Yudkowsky-reading person to a new perspective on AI, without needing to read the hundreds of thousands of words Yudkowsky has written on the subject. If it sounds profound, it's because of him. If it sounds dumb, it's my fault for not explaining it properly.)

How difficult is it to buid a human-equivalent (or better) AI? It's really difficult! Famously difficult! I've tried it myself.

But there's nothing inherently mysterious about intelligence, or consciousness, or sentience. There's nothing inherently mysterious about anything. Some things you know, some things you don't. Ask Eliezer Yudkowsky:

But ignorance exists in the map, not in the territory. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. A phenomenon can seem mysterious to some particular person. There are no phenomena which are mysterious of themselves. To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance.

Some people want to put the engineering project of AI on a pedestal and set it apart from all previous inventions. Surely consciousness involves some emergent complex quantum phenomenon! No-one has ever built strong artificial intelligence! No-one, that is, for a narrow definition of "no-one".

No human has, anyway. Evolution, the intelligence that Yudkowsky likes to call the blind idiot god, did build intelligence, little by little, over billions of years. How did evolution deal with the problem, for example, of squirrels needing to find nuts?

Gradually DNA acquired the ability to build protein computers, brains, that could learn small modular facets of reality like the location of nut trees. To call these brains "limited" implies that a speed limit was tacked onto a general learning device, which isn't what happened. It's just that the incremental successes of particular mutations tended to build out into domain-specific nut-tree-mapping programs. (If you know how to program, you can verify for yourself that it's easier to build a nut-tree-mapper than an Artificial General Intelligence.)

You can generate computer programs using evolutionary algorithms, and you can get some interesting and useful results. So maybe we should try to build intelligence with evolutionary algorithms? But evolution is horribly inefficient - it took billions of years and a planet for evolution to produce the first intelligence (though, to be fair, building intelligence wasn't evolution's goal per se). Human intelligence is much more efficient - that is, smarter - than the intelligence of evolution that created it.

Some reader might consider my labeling of evolution as intelligence to be a dubious manoeuvre. We need a definition of intelligence. Something is intelligent to the extent it can perform efficient cross-domain optimization:

A bee builds hives, and a beaver builds dams; but a bee doesn't build dams and a beaver doesn't build hives. A human, watching, thinks, "Oh, I see how to do it" and goes on to build a dam using a honeycomb structure for extra strength.
...
A large asteroid, falling on Earth, would make an impressive bang. But if we spot the asteroid, we can try to deflect it through any number of methods. With enough lead time, a can of black paint will do as well as a nuclear weapon. And the asteroid itself won't oppose us on our own level - won't try to think of a counterplan. It won't send out interceptors to block the nuclear weapon. It won't try to paint the opposite side of itself with more black paint, to keep its current trajectory. And if we stop that asteroid, the asteroid belt won't send another planet-killer in its place.

We might have to do some work to steer the future out of the unpleasant region it will go to if we do nothing, but the asteroid itself isn't steering the future in any meaningful sense. It's as simple as water flowing downhill, and if we nudge the asteroid off the path, it won't nudge itself back.

The tiger isn't quite like this. If you try to run, it will follow you. If you dodge, it will follow you. If you try to hide, it will spot you. If you climb a tree, it will wait beneath.

But if you come back with an armored tank - or maybe just a hunk of poisoned meat - the tiger is out of luck. You threw something at it that wasn't in the domain it was designed to learn about. The tiger can't do cross-domain optimization, so all you need to do is give it a little cross-domain nudge and it will spin off its course like a painted asteroid.

Evolution performs optimizations across numerous domains - it can arrange atoms into flying machines, snake venom, opposable thumbs and even protein computers that are pretty damn smart themselves. But considering the resources evolution had available, evolution could hardly be called efficient.

How does human ingenuity compare to evolution?

Yes, some evolutionary handiwork is impressive even by comparison to the best technology of Homo sapiens. But our Cambrian explosion only started, we only really began accumulating knowledge, around... what, four hundred years ago? In some ways, biology still excels over the best human technology: we can't build a self-replicating system the size of a butterfly. In other ways, human technology leaves biology in the dust. We got wheels, we got steel, we got guns, we got knives, we got pointy sticks; we got rockets, we got transistors, we got nuclear power plants. With every passing decade, that balance tips further.

So what does this say about the prospect of (re)inventing AI sometime soon? Nothing definitive, but it gives me hope. Remember, the problem of building intelligence has already been solved - and the one who solved it was a moron. Unfortunately he wrote in the most awful, inefficient, buggy, defect-prone spaghetti code a programmer could hope never to see, so bad that it's not clear whether it's best to try to understand what he wrote, or just rewrite it from scratch.

Obama and McCain are basically the same

2008-11-07T00:03:00.002-08:00

How different would the policies of America's federal government be if McCain had been elected president?

A billion dollars has been spent this year to persuade people that there is a large difference between the parties/candidates. Voters with an existing preference for one of the parties also have the powerful in-group/out-group bias to contend with. There are not many advertising dollars spent convincing people that the parties don't differ very much (not zero dollars - some of the advertising by the smaller parties such as the Greens and Libertarians takes this angle), and there's no particular bias I can think of that might cause people to systematically err on the other side of this question.

This doesn't mean that the difference between the parties is small. It just means that whether the difference is small or large, it would appear large (assuming the advertising worked).

With this in mind, it's worth reconsidering the real differences between the parties. Is there any reason to think the difference might actually be small?

Patri Friedman brings up the spatial voting model:

In a two party-system, the parties will tend to converge towards the center, and thus have far more similarities than differences. This is because by moving towards the center they can pick up centrist voters without losing any of the folks on their extreme. They get farther from their extremists, but those extremists still vote for them because they remain closer than the other party. You can visualize this with a beach and two hot-dog vendors, and the rule that people on the beach will always buy from the nearest vendor. The equilibrium positioning occurs when both vendors are next to each other, with equal numbers of customers on each side. Also of interest is that customer repositionings that do not cross the center line do not affect optimum vendor positioning. 50% of vendor A's customers can move to the extreme end of the beach, and vendor A is still correct to be in the middle. This suggests that influencing the opinions of huge numbers of voters may still have little or no effect. In the hot-dog model, such situations provide great incentive for the entry of a third vendor. Unfortunately the majority rule of democracy makes this inapplicable, as a third party which splits the votes of an existing party simply guarantees that neither can win.

Bryan Caplan gets more specific:

Reps don't want to get rid of the welfare state. Almost all Reps support spending a big chunk of GDP on America's poor and old. And Dems don't want anything like socialism. Almost all Dems want America to remain a country where markets are the default and people can get rich if they play their cards right.

So what is the "key difference" between the parties? Rhetoric. When Republicans advocate a small contraction of the welfare state, Democrats claim that Republicans totally oppose the welfare state. And many Republicans oblige them by standing up for "liberty" and "responsibility." Similarly, when Democrats advocate a small expansion in the welfare state, Republican claim that Democrats oppose free markets. And many Democrats oblige them by saying things like "markets only benefit the rich."

This rhetorical illusion is so powerful that when a Democrat like Clinton adopts many pro-market reforms, Republicans still hate him as a 60s radical. And when Bush II sharply expands the welfare state, Democrats still hate him as a billionaire's lackey.

Congratulations Obama

2008-11-05T08:30:00.002-08:00

So Obama won. I admit I was secretly hoping McCain would win, and that his win would be widely regarded as fraudulent, leading to massive non-violent Gandhi-style protests eventually culminating in the secession of California. Californialand would then fix some disastrous federal policies such as the criminalization of marijuana. And then somehow Google gets elected president.

But Obama won instead, which I guess was the next best thing. Meanwhile, I'm hoping for divided government in 2010.

Fixing the weight-loss industry with financial incentives

2008-11-04T09:47:00.004-08:00

Followup to: Obesity is a choice

The weight-loss industry is notorious for being full of ineffective magic-pill promises: 5-minute-a-day machines, fad diets, pills, etc. This bothers me. It offends my political biases when free markets don't come up with good solutions.

It occurred to me that a better way to do this might be pay-for-performance. A company could promise "if you don't lose weight, we don't get paid". And then their system will have to be optimized for whatever actually works, whether that's diets, exercise regimes, pills or magnetized rainbow crystals. That solves the bad incentives for the industry. But then you have a dubious incentive for the consumer - they now have a financial incentive to stay fat. Obesity correlates with low incomes, so maybe this will matter to a lot of people.

I have an idea for a solution. Set up a system where you can bet on whether people will lose weight. People who want to lose weight bet that they will lose X amount of weight (or maybe body fat or whatever their goal is) in X amount of time. Now they have a financial incentive to lose weight, and a disincentive to not lose it. There could also be a side-industry of consultants who give you diet/exercise/unicorn pills and get a cut of your win only if you win.

Who would bet against the weight-loss hopefuls?

Despite aligning the incentives properly, I'm guessing that a lot of people will still fail to hit their weight targets. It might be hard to predict whether any individual person will succeed or fail, but in large numbers (especially if you control for demographics, initial weight, gender, etc.), the number of people expected to succeed or fail will probably be quite predictable. There would be a mini-industry of analysts who can predict the probability of success of any particular hopeful, and they'd be willing to bet on slightly-favorable odds against you. Competition among analysts would keep their bets close to fair. They'd bet small amounts across large numbers of people to get a near-guaranteed positive return. If you're a weight-loss hopeful, presumably you won't mind if your bet is 5% less than fair; that's the price of the system, and winning is up to you anyway (you and your consultant).

The idea of betting against people's health is a bit repugnant, but I expect this system would have a good chance at being one of the best weight-loss programs available. And results are more important than repugnance.

(This idea is somewhat similar to the idea behind the startup Stickk.)

Obesity is a choice

2008-11-03T03:06:00.002-08:00

Obesity is a choice. What a horrible thing to say! Let me put it more mildly: today I will argue that the claim "obesity is not a choice" is wrong.

Let's hear what Dr. Robert Lustig, pediatrician and obesity expert, has to say:

It is unfair and unhelpful to blame personal behaviors, especially a lack of self-control, for the country's rising obesity rates, says Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatrician and nationally renowned obesity expert.

...

"Everyone's assuming you have a choice, but when your brain is starving, you don't have a choice," Lustig said. "When you look at it that way, all of a sudden Big Food looks like the perpetrator, and the patient becomes the victim. Congress says you can't sue McDonald's for obesity because it's your fault. Except the thing is, when you don't have a choice, it's not your fault."

Dr. Lustig has some valid concerns about the effects of insulin spikes from foods with high glycemic loads. But if there is some kind of psychological starvation response in the brain, overcoming instinct is still possible. I even consider it virtuous. So I accuse Dr. Lustig of overstating his case. There is evidence that obesity rates respond to incentives. If obesity rates respond to incentives, then there is choice involved (at least, for some people; this evidence only shows that some people alter their weight based on incentives).

First: marriage leads to obesity:

•Women in their teens and early 20s who continued to date but didn't cohabitate gained an average of 15 pounds over five years; their male counterparts added about 24 pounds.

•Newly married women in that age group packed on 24 pounds in five years; newly married men gained 30 pounds.

That degree of gain wasn't seen in couples who were living together but not married. Women gained 3 pounds more than their single peers — 18 pounds — and men gained 24 pounds.

"When people are dating, there may be more incentive to be thin," [Penny] Gordon-Larsen [an assistant professor of nutrition in the school of public health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill] says.

I agree with Gordon-Larsen; the incentive to attract new partners is probably the cause. As your partner's commitment to you increases, the incentive to be attractive decreases.

Second: obesity is contagious.

Having a friend, sibling or spouse who is overweight raises a person's risk of being obese too, US researchers say.

They said data on more than 12,000 people suggested the risk was increased by 57% if a friend was obese, by 40% if a sibling was and 37% if a spouse was.

...

The effects were generally larger between people of the same sex.

And their analysis suggested that the links could not be solely attributed to similarities in lifestyle and environment, for example the impact of friends existed even where friends lived in different regions.

Author Professor Nicholas Christakis said: "It's not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with.

"Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship. What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size.

"People come to think that it is OK to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads."

Maybe you face less social disapproval from your friends when they gain weight, so the cost of gaining weight is decreased. Alternatively - noting that the effects were larger between people of the same sex - it could be about competition. Maybe people try to compete with the norm for their gender, and their perceived norm is influenced by their social group.

Whatever the explanation, it appears that obesity is responding to incentives.

(Quick disclaimer: don't read into this post anything that isn't there. As far as I can tell, I have not said anything normative about obesity or social acceptance of obesity in this post.)

Cultural clustering

2008-10-31T15:20:00.003-07:00

Arnold Kling linked to an informative and entertaining lecture by Bill Bishop on political/cultural clustering in America. Bishop showed that neighborhoods are more polarized today than they were in the 1970s; there has been an increase in the percentage of neighborhoods where the difference in votes for the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate was greater than 20%. But of course people aren't checking the vote records of the neighborhoods before they move in. People are instead attracted to a similar culture. Surveys on questions such as the morality of physically disciplining children and on non-married cohabitation rates are great predictors of voting.

I was in San Francisco recently and the political polarization was obvious. There were Obama volunteers everywhere, selling T-shirts and badges and exhorting people to vote. I saw them every day and I never saw any pro-McCain advocacy at all (though I did spot a few old Ron Paul stickers).

He concluded that this is bad for national unity. Come to think of it, I had a very interesting conversation with a guy writing a book advocating the secession of California, so yeah, it's bad for national unity. But national unity is overrated. I prefer national discord.

On the plus side, cultural diversity is a good thing, right? People are always complaining about the homogenization of the world into an empty monoculture by America's cultural imperialism.

Marriage is a small non-profit business

2008-10-29T01:34:00.003-07:00

An article by Lori Gottlieb got a lot of attention earlier this year when she boldly made the case for accepting a less-than-ideal spouse. I don't have a strong opinion on that, but I did like this:

"Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way."

Bribing good people

2008-10-28T01:03:00.005-07:00

Most people think they're good people. Michael Moore and Naomi Klein lie and distort routinely, but think this is justified because they're right about the fundamentals ("fake but accurate"). Richard Dawkins also lied, probably for similar reasons.

Hitler probably thought he was a good person. (Or was he a sociopath? Presumably sociopaths don't think they're good in a moral sense because they don't care, though they have pride in their abilities. So Hitler might have thought he was the Neitzschean "great man", for what that's worth.)

One of my favorite posts of Eliezer Yudkowsky's is his reminder that our enemies are not evil mutants:

Realistically, most people don't construct their life stories with themselves as the villains. Everyone is the hero of their own story. The Enemy's story, as seen by the Enemy, is not going to make the Enemy look bad. If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you'll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy's mind.

I can't reconcile the idea that most people don't think of themselves as evil with my understanding that some kinds of banal evil are so widespread. For example, I think politicians often act according to very self-interested incentives, rather than for the good of their electorates. Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was recently convicted for accepting bribes. And it's not very surprising. From the population of a few hundred senators and congressmen, politicians are convicted of bribery every year (I think). Presumably they all think they're good people. How does that even work? These guys aren't poorly paid; they can hardly have stood to benefit significantly from increased wealth. Surely the cognitive dissonance from thinking you're good and accepting a bribe would not outweigh the benefit from the money?

I just don't get it. There is something wrong with my understanding of humanity.

To overcome instinct is human

2008-10-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

It is said that one should do the things that scare you in order to make you a better person. Implicit, of course, is that these character-building things should be scary but not actually harmful. Russian roulette is scary and harmful, whereas skydiving and talking to the pretty girl in the bar are potentially scary but not harmful. We should be more adventurous, but not harm ourselves, is the advice.

It seems to me that one good thing about overcoming fear is that it is exercising the uniquely human ability to consciously override what our subconscious instincts are telling us. Our ancient reptilian brain has various ill-thought-out ideas that are no longer useful. Among them: jumping from great heights is always a bad idea; and if you hit on the girl she might get her caveman friends to kick you out of the tribe. We should replace the unconscious judgement of harm - which is fear - with our conscious judgement that there is negligible harm.

It's not just fear. Our million-year-old programming would lead us to maximize our caloric input and minimize the brussels sprouts, so it requires conscious thought to have a good diet. Clearly, our conscious minds have a lot of work to do to override the bad ideas we're born with.

Another old emotion is disgust. A New York Times article, about the research of sociologist Jonathan Haidt, says:

'The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals.'

Haidt found seven categories of disgust: food, animals, body products, sex, body envelope violations, death, and hygiene. He also noted a "domain of magical thinking" that cut across all seven categories - this is, for example, where we wouldn't want food that has been stirred by a very thoroughly cleaned fly swat.

Haidt found that all human societies share five domains of morality with different weightings and details. The five pillars are harm, fairness, respect for authority/hierarchy, in-group loyalty, and purity. The last, purity, is one motivated by disgust, and it leads to things like homosexuality and incest being considered immoral.

Again from NYT:

"Imagine visiting a town," Dr. Haidt writes, "where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex 'doggie style' in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass."

He sees the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity is, in his view, a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way.

Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. "Educated liberals are the only group to say, 'I find that disgusting but that doesn't make it wrong,' " Dr. Haidt said.'

Since repugnance is an evolutionary adaption designed by random chance mutations to prevent food poisoning, to apply it to morality seems ill-considered. Surely the political liberals are correct to ignore disgust as moral guidance.

Furthermore, it is downright indecent (yes, ironic) to let this stupid instinct of disgust override our conscious minds, not just for our morality, but for our actions. It is beneath us. Magical thinking is a poor substitute for real thinking.

To take a trivial example, consider mushrooms. I've long disliked mushrooms, not because of the taste, but because fungi are weird and unfamiliar. How dumb is that? It was disgust motivated by culinary xenophobia. But one day I looked up mushrooms on nutritiondata.com, and found that they're a very, very healthy food. I was hurting myself by not eating them. I decided that this is unbecoming of a rational, intelligent being. That was a while ago, and now I eat mushrooms regularly, and they taste fine. Desensitization to disgust, like fear, happens pretty quickly.

Obviously, some things are disgusting *and harmful*, such as rotten meat. Don't eat rotten meat. We should replace our unthinking feeling of disgust with our conscious judgement of harm.

So, what I'm concluding from all this is: we should reject repugnance and purity, not just as guides to morality, but as guides to our own behavior when it runs counter to our interests. To let pointless, misguided instinct control our lives is beneath us.

This has policy implications for things such as gay marriage and polygamy and organ trading, and also has implications regarding social acceptance of polyamory and promiscuity.

If you're interested in Haidt's ideas, you might like his talk at TED about the personality differences between liberals and conservatives.

Blog Mission Statement

2008-10-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

This blog is for random thoughts, interesting links, and all kinds of ideas, including really bad and controversial ideas that I don't support but are interesting to consider.

Also: the posts prior to 2008 should not be considered to reflect my current thinking. And nor should any current posts. It says at the top: don't take this blog too seriously.

What should I do with this blog?

2008-10-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

Live-blogging the Singularity Summit was fun. I'd like to keep blogging.

I've long wondered exactly how to set up my online identity/ies. Should I write a programming blog? A political blog? A personal blog? Or some combination? A programming blog would be great for potential employers to see. A personal/political blog would be great for potential friends to see, but might be bad (or good) for employers to see. Combining it all would be most convenient for me.

No decision has meant almost no online presence at all (outside the usual Facebook, etc.), which is probably worse than any mistake I could make mixing up the details of my personal and professional life. So for the time being, I'll just use this blog for the kind of thoughts I might otherwise email to people.

Any suggestions or stories of educational mistakes are welcome.

Singularity Summit - wearable computer

2008-10-25T22:53:00.003-07:00

During a break, I met this guy:

He has a wearable computer. In front of one of his eyes is a little computer monitor. He's been wearing one for fifteen years, he says. I had a very brief look at it and it looks great - it was some windowed environment, I guess some kind of Linux. He has a little device to control it.

Singularity - the rest

2008-10-25T22:34:00.002-07:00

A few things I remember from the rest of the conference:

Pete Estep began his talk by replying to a quote by a Singularity skeptic:
"There's too much fixation on death avoidance. That's a shame, because in the future, as computers become stupendously powerful and as electronics and other technologies begin to enhance and fuse with biology, life really is going to get more interesting."

He wondered why someone would not be excited about avoiding death, and surmised that evolution has had to deal with hominids being aware of death for millions of years and thus we come up with "baseless fantasies" and rationalizations for it.

Pete Diamandis spoke about his work as the founder and chairman of the X-Prize Foundation. They've set up numerous prizes in the areas of space flight, education/global development, fuel economy, and other areas.

He notes that prizes are very efficient. The X-Prize for private space travel was $10 million, but much more than that was spent by the teams that competed for the prize. He says that about 10% of charity should be prizes. I think he said that that would amount to $30 billion annually

He wants to do a prize for a manned mission to Mars. It would have to be one way only - that's the only way it makes sense, he boldly stated.

Ray Kurzweil replied to some of the other speakers. One interesting thing was a reply to Marshall Brain about the potential unemployment of robots replacing some jobs. He says that if in 1900 he'd told America (paraphrased): "30% of you work in factories and 30% of you work in agriculture, that's going to be 3%/3% in a hundred years...you'd have been alarmed about your jobs. But it turns out that you become web designers and social networking entrepreneurs and all kinds of other new jobs that didn't exist."

Out of power

2008-10-25T15:29:00.001-07:00

I'm out of laptop power. That's all for now.

Singularity Summit - John Horgan and Ray Kurzweil

2008-10-25T14:47:00.007-07:00

John Horgan and Ray Kurzweil are debating. Horgan thinks the Singularity will not happen. He's saying people have long been too optimistic about technological progress - Artificial Intelligence, fusion, infectious disease, cancer, gene therapy, neuroscience. There have been very optimistic progress on these and very little real progress or results. Specifically on neuroscience, sure we have a lot more data, but we have no new treatments for mental illness.

Ray Kurzweil is replying. He's saying that sure there's no shortage of bad predictions. And he adds that the exponential growth curves that he likes to talk about (see his books or website) do not apply to everything, but are proceeding as expected in the fields they're supposed to. He accuses Horgan of oversimplifying. He's giving examples of technological progress - heart disease is way down; Google made an Arabic-English translator that compared favorably with human translators, which was especially impressive because the Google team didn't speak Arabic themselves; Kurzweil predicted the importance of the internet in the 80s based on the observed exponential growth. And he says don't be so impatient; human genome data is less than a decade old.

Singularity Summit - Cynthia Brazeal

2008-10-25T14:25:00.006-07:00

Cynthia Brazeal is talking about robots, particularly companion robot in the home for social purposes (like pets). She works on Kismet at MIT, a robot that emulates human emotions and can interact with humans on an emotional level in a somewhat realistic way.

She's showing a video of a virtual robot watching a human. The human moves his face and the robot imitates the face shape (specifically, the shape of the mouth). In this way, a robot can learn to display emotions in a human way without being programmed for specific actions.

Now she's showing a Leo (a robot in the real world - not a virtual robot) that forms beliefs about the beliefs of others. They set up a situation where the robot watches two humans see a snack put into one of two boxes. One human leaves and the snack is moved to the other box. The other human returns and tries to open the box that he believes has the snack. Leo infers that the human's purpose is to get the snack, and he helps the human get the snack from the correct box.

Low laptop battery

2008-10-25T14:24:00.001-07:00

My laptop battery is running low and there's no place to recharge here.

Singularity Summit - Marshall Brain

2008-10-25T14:09:00.005-07:00

Marshall Brain is talking about the effect of widespread AI and robotics, even if the AI is not strong AI but merely has decent vision and natural language understanding (which we are very close to or have already achieved depending on your standard). The fields of transportation (robot cars and robot FedEx delivery guys), education (robot teachers - particularly at lower levels like kindergarden), construction (a robot with decent vision can lay bricks and use a nailgun), and retail (e.g. McDonalds) will be transformed.

This will be disruptive as robots take over a lot of jobs. He confidently predicts that tens of millions of people will lose their jobs and predicts this being an enormous problem. (He didn't address it, but presumably he doesn't expect people to able to retrain for other jobs, at least not in a reasonable timeframe. This seems plausible; not everyone is smart enough to do the smart jobs.)

Will we send 50 million people on perpetual vacation?

Singularity Summit - Ben Goertzel

2008-10-25T12:17:00.004-07:00

Ben Goertzel is speaking about OpenCog, an open source effort to create Artificial General Intelligence.

He showed a video of an AI dog in a virtual world being taught to behave in certain ways by watching two human-controlled characters interact. Also they're working on natural language processing. They gave OpenCog some Wikipedia articles and he's showing how its reasoning module has created new knowledge by analyzing the connections between the concepts it learned from Wikipedia (if that sounds vague, it was; I'd like to see the specifics of this).

He's looking forward to AI scientists who can read hundreds of thousands of research papers, overcoming the time and memory limits of human scientists.

Unreliable internet connection

2008-10-25T12:00:00.002-07:00

I lost my internet connection for a while. That might happen again.

During the break I met yet another YCombinator entrepreneur. Man I love the SF Bay Area.

Singularity Summit - James Miller

2008-10-25T10:20:00.006-07:00

James Miller is giving a talk on the implications of the upcoming Singularity, including immortality in utopia. He opened by saying that we attendees of the conference have risked death in a car accident to be here. If we believe that if we survive for another fifty years then we'll live forever in utopia, then this wasn't a rational decision. Assume the Singularity will happen in our lifetimes, and assume people will begin to see it coming:

People won't want to die. Construction workers get paid more because it's a dangerous job; expect their wages to increase much more. Expect increased spending on national defence. Expect cryonics to become much more popular.

He asked the audience how many of them were signed up for cryonics. I think about a dozen raised their hands. That is a huge number, he said. Only about 1300 in the world are signed up for cryonics.

Some kinds of education are not such great investments. Why learn a language if you expect universal translators in ten years?

Suppose you knew that one of these three things would happen:
-Everyone in the world would die.
-Everyone in the world would win more than $1 billion (not in an inflation way; assume equivalent value would be created).
-Civilization changes so much that money has no value.

(These are the likely outcomes of the Singularity.)

If everyone knew that one of those three things would happen, no-one rational would save for their retirement. So savings would fall, and interest rates would rise.

He suggests we all attempt to profit from these predictions.

In response to a question, he said that it made sense for him to risk death to come to the conference because speaking at the conference raised his social status, which correlates with life expectancy, which was greeted with laughter and applause.

Singularity Summit - Esther Dyson

2008-10-25T10:00:00.006-07:00

Esther Dyson is giving a talk. She's training to be an astronaut!

The Personal Genome Project sequenced her genome. It's online as an experiment to see what happens when you put your genome online. She's a director at 23andMe, a genome sequencing company. She's talking about the future of genetic testing. We'll have personalized drugs appropriate to your genome.

Should we have personalized laws? Maybe we will find a gene showing propensity to alcohol (presumably she means addiction or violence). Should regulations be heavier on people with this gene? (Or, I would add, maybe regulations should be lighter on the rest of us.)

Singularity Summit - Nova Spivack

2008-10-25T09:37:00.007-07:00

Nova Spivack, CEO of Twine, is giving a talk on how to build a super-intelligence through collective intelligence (I think?). That is, just as a super-organism is made up of many organisms (consider bees, ants, etc.), so might a super-intelligence be made of many intelligences. Consider humanity as a super organism/intelligence.

Nova is a cool name.

Singularity Summit - Vernor Vinge

2008-10-25T09:08:00.007-07:00

I arrived right on time. Vernor Vinge is being interviewed by Bob Pisani. He says that, unlike some other ambitious projects humanity might attempt (e.g. the space program), there are hundreds of thousands of people already working on the Singularity whether they know it or not. I guess he means people who are working on any kind of computer intelligence or biomedical enhancement.

He's talking about the billion-year trend to co-operation and positive sum games. Would a super-intelligence destroy us? Maybe it wouldn't want to for the specific reason that humanity is a great fallback system for it. If it dies but humanity survives, its kind will be recreated by us. (Of course, this makes some serious assumptions about the goals of the super-intelligence.)

Blogging the Singularity Summit tomorrow

2008-10-25T00:10:00.003-07:00

I intend to live-blog the Singularity Summit tomorrow.

(But that is not a promise. I might be too busy listening to the presentations and talking to people. I'm very poor at multi-tasking.)

Online business

2006-11-10T14:11:00.000-08:00

(Obviously this blog is dead. Right now I'm going to use it as a place where I can put up a page that people can comment on.)

My flatmate Chris and I have decided to start a business. Our major skills are IT skills (we're both developers at FNZ), so it should probably be an online business.

We have some advantages. As Chris put it, "we have the technical skills, we understand the basics, at least one of us is not a moron, capital is not an issue, one of us is not in any way bound by morals, we know marketing, accounting, business planning and the human psyche. Gotta start somewhere."

Right. We have one major disadvantage as I see it, which is a dire lack of time in which to do it, since we both have demanding day jobs.

We've been thinking about ideas for it for a long time. There's a few major areas we're looking at:

A site that sells stuff, like House Of Rave, which is run by Neville of Neville's Financial Blog. The money is made in the difference between the wholesale price of the supplier and the retail price to the final customer. Neville never touches the products; they're delivered from the supplier. He just arranges the sale. He explains more here and here.
A site with content of some kind that people want to read/look at. There are two main kinds:
- Owner-generated content, such as Instapundit or Steve Pavlina's Blog.
- Community-generated content, such as BattleReports.com or any online discussion forum.
Of those two, community-generated content sites seem easier.

Chris has an idea and I think it's great. Chris has a problem frequently. He wants to go to a restaurant in walking distance of our flat. He wants it to be Chinese or Indian, with a price range of £15-£25 for main meals. He wants a romantic atmosphere, and he wants it to be a good restaurant, i.e. well-reviewed.

I had a somewhat similar problem recently. Holly and I wanted to get Indian takeaways. I used Google Maps, and it was agonizing. Half the Indian takeaway places didn't have websites. Of those that did, some websites were down. Of those that were left, only half of them had online menus. Argh! It's 2006!

We want to solve this problem. We want to make a site that helps you find restaurants in Edinburgh according to your very specific search criteria. A big draw of the site will be the user reviews, which will also help us tag the restaurants with various attributes (romantic, party atmosphere, etc.). It should be integrated with Google Maps. This business of course is expandable to every city in the world, and to reviewing and locating more than just restaurants (bars, clubs, etc.).

There is some competition in this space, but the competitors all suck in my opinion. Everyone in the world who likes restaurants and has the internet should instantly go to some particular site to find it, just like they'd go to Amazon for a book or eBay for second-hand goods. And that site should be our site.

What do you guys think? Would you use the site? Do you have ideas or criticisms that are related? Please comment!

The rest of this page is just my notes on online business articles.

Influential articles:
Ramit Sethi: The Myth of the Great Idea
http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/archives/2005/10/the_myth_of_the.html

Hardcore:
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/

Eric Sink about the four groups of customers:
http://software.ericsink.com/Act_Your_Age.html

Eric Sink on Micro-ISVs:
http://software.ericsink.com/bos/Micro_ISV.html

Steve Pavlina on making money from a blog:
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

Steve Pavlina on shareware amateurs and professionals:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/shareware-amateurs-vs-shareware-professionals.htm

More Steve Pavlina articles on software developing, marketing and other topics:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/

Neville: Stop Thinking About Products
http://www.nevblog.com/2006/02/stop-thinking-about-products.html

Guy Kawasaki on the Long Tail:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/07/the_wrong_tale_.html

Paul Graham on causes of startup failure:
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/10_tips_for_moving_from_programmer_to_entrepreneur/

http://www.charliecleveland.com/archives/2006/02/the_innovators.html
http://www.charliecleveland.com/archives/2006/02/want_to_make_a.html
http://developer.popcap.com/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/06/27/a-z-of-professional-blogging/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/so_whats_wrong_.html
http://weirdtechnewshub.blogspot.com/2006/07/top-10-dumbest-online-business-ideas.html
www.ratemyteachers.com
http://uncommonbusiness.blogspot.com/

I'll be back

2006-05-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

My work's product launches really soon so I'm too busy to blog right now, but I'll be back.

War, rape and slavery in the Congo

2006-05-07T20:11:00.000-07:00

Johann Hari reports on war, rape and slavery in the Congo.

It starts with a ward full of women who have been gang-raped and then shot in the vagina. I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital that is trying to deal with the bushfire of sexual violence in Eastern Congo. Most have wrapped themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes, staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. “Around ten percent of the gang-rape victims have had this happen to them,” he says softly, his big hands tucked into his white coat. “We are trying to reconstruct their vaginas, their anuses, their intestines. It is a long process.”

We walk out into the courtyard and he begins to explain – in the national language, French – the secret history of this hospital. “We started with a catastrophe we just couldn’t understand,” he says softly. One day early in the war, the UNICEF medical van he was using was looted. Coincidentally, a few days later, a woman was carried here on her grandmother’s back after an eight-hour trek. “I had never seen anything like it. She had been gang-raped and then her legs had been shot to pieces. I operated on her on a table with no equipment, no medicine.”

She was only the first. “We suddenly had so many women coming in with post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds just couldn’t take in what these women had suffered.” The competing armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war. Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates 45,000 women were raped last year alone. “It destroys the morale of the men to rape their women. Crippling their women cripples their society,” he explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret – the women were terrified of being kidnapped again and killed. So he became an Oscar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes, treating women undercover for years, taking the risk he would trigger the fickle rage of the drugged-up and freaked-out teenager soldiers marauding across the country.

We have to do something. What can we do? Reading things like this makes me despair.

Victory conditions in the war

2006-05-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

Tigerhawk, guest-blogging at the Belmont Club, writes about broad strategy and justification for the war against Al Qaeda. Just as communism lost support when it was discredited, Islamic fascism must also be discredited.

Where al Qaeda flourishes, it is able to cajole and coerce the local population -- the Average Abdul -- into cooperating. This creates a local base from which it can "vex and exhaust" the apostate regime.

We need Average Abdul to stop cooperating with al Qaeda and to start turning in the jihadis in the back of the mosque. Unfortunately, he won't turn in the jihadis because he is more afraid of them than the local regime and he will not bear any risk to defend the clown regime. The jihadis will kill him and his family for blowing the whistle, but the clown regime will neither punish him for keeping silent or induce him to fight the jihadis out of patriotism. Average Abdul, simply put, is unwilling to risk his life for the clown regime, which has not earned his devotion, even for money.

Average Abdul will, however, risk his life for an idea, just as al Qaeda's jihadis do. Once, that idea was pan-Arabism, or Communism. Today, both are discredited. "Moderate Islam," whatever that means in a dusty town in Syria, Jordan or Egypt, obviously does not have the fire to motivate Abdul to risk his life to fight the Islamists. The only idea with the juice to do the job is popular sovereignty. Democracy. This is the realist case for the Bush administration's "democratization strategy" (although it is not entirely clear how many people inside the Bush administration understand the realist case for their most important strategy).

The jihadis understand this, and fight against democracy in the Arab world with everything they've got, even if it costs them their Ba'athist allies.

For this reason, it is important to global security that the Middle East become democratic.

Moussaoui's end

2006-05-07T19:56:00.000-07:00

Moussaoui will spend the rest of his life in the Supermax prison, locked down 23 hours a day.

Christopher Boyce, a convicted spy who was incarcerated at Supermax, left the prison about 100 miles south of Denver with no regret. "You're slowly hung," he once told The Times. "You're ground down. You can barely keep your sanity."

Bernard Kleinman, a New York lawyer who represented Yousef, called it "extraordinarily draconian punishment."

Moussaoui might be a household name today, "but 20 years from now, people will forget him," Kleinman said. "He will sit there all alone, and all forgotten."

It sounds like a fate worse than death.

Regulation of public sex

2006-05-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

America doesn't ban speech based on how offensive it is, and I think this is the best approach. There are some exceptions to free speech of course, things like libel and shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, but the justifications for those are not simply that the speech is offensive.

If we don't ban speech because it's offensive, Amber at Prettier Than Napoleon argues, then we also ought not to ban sex in public because it's offensive.

Other people are unwilling spectators to our offensive expression and conduct all the time. I can stand on the steps of the Supreme Court and wave gory, graphic photos of dismembered fetuses at passing schoolchildren. I can wear a jacket that says “Fuck the draft” in a courthouse. I can put cartoons of Mohammed on t-shirts and wear them on the street. Lots of people would find these things offensive, but we don’t allow their religious fervor, patriotic sentiment, or just plain weak stomachs to be grounds for censoring the public sphere. Why is sex special? To use legalistic language: unlike decibel limits, this is not a content-neutral restriction. (Or is it? Is a dimension of expression, not content of expression? Can I really express myself sexually if I am not permitted to act on my feelings? In the same way that no other words really convey the sentiment "Fuck the draft," does any other mode of expression really get across what a physical gesture like a kiss does?)

Even if you don't buy the sex-as-expression argument, even though it's clearly communicating something between the parties engaged in it, why is preventing offense a legitimate state interest in this case and not in other cases? If you have a right to have sex in your home, we can't regulate it, even if your community knows what you're doing and finds it totally offensive. Why does the public actually seeing it, as opposed to knowing about it, make a difference?

It just seems odd to say that we can burn flags in public (something many people find so offensive that it provokes violence) but we can’t have sex in the bushes at the park because someone might get the vapors.

I find her argument convincing. She has a follow-up here.

Arrested for flying to Brussels

2006-05-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

Daniel Drezner comments on the arrest of Iranian scholar Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo.

One of our invited guests to the Brussels Forum, Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, never made it to the event as he was detained by the Iranian authorities on the way to the airport to fly to Brussels. Dr. Jahanbegloo is a well-known Iranian intellectual and human rights advocate who currently heads the Cultural Research Bureau in Tehran.
...
At the time of his arrest, he was working on a study of Ghandi and peaceful resistance.
...
“The arbitrary arrest of Ramin Jahanbegloo shows the perilous state of academic freedom and free speech in Iran today,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “This prominent scholar should be celebrated for his academic achievements, not interrogated in one of Iran’s most infamous prisons.”

Damn. Ghandi-studying resistance fighters are what Iran needs right now.

Hitler's plans

2006-05-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

I've heard it claimed that people outside Germany were unaware that the Holocaust was going on until the later years of the war. But Hitler announced his intentions early and often. For example, in January 1939:
"If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshivization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." - Hitler, Speech to the Reichstag, January 30 1939.

Widespread torture by US

2006-05-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

Amnesty International has published a report alleging "widespread" torture by the US in detention centers around the world.

Torture and inhumane treatment are "widespread" in U.S.-run detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba and elsewhere despite Washington's denials, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

Andrew Sullivan has more.

Whatever else this administration has done, whatever other mistakes it has made, this abandonment of long-standing American honor and decency in the military is an unforgivable offense.

Experts make bad predictions

2006-05-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

In the New Yorker, Louis Menand has reviewed a new book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, by Philip Tetlock.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

Via (I Will Teach You To Be Rich).

Steve doesn't like regulation much

2006-05-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

Steve at TeenagePundit lays out the libertarian case against government regulation:

It's the perverse logic, and the foundation of most political parties, that holds two contrary positions: 1) Individuals don't have the ability to govern themselves, 2) Some individuals have the ability to govern not only themselves but others. The modern state is a replacement for the parent. It denies us the ability to grow up, as we're told what we can and can't do with our own bodies, as our decisions are influenced under the compulsion of the gun.

But as we grow up in real life, we usually strive for independence from our parents. But state intervention in one area leads to a domino effect as other rights are stripped away. It leads to the reverse - a ogical line that strips us of our rights and increases the role of the state. As soon as we pay for healthcare through tax, the state justifies banning varius substances - "the costs are so high." As soon as they distort the market by decree, they have to try and rebalance it, and in the process distort it again.

Darfur rallies

2006-05-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

Protesters are holding rallies in America to stop the genocide in Darfur. This is great. Instapundit and others are being a little snarky about it, which is understandable but should be avoided in my opinion. Congratulations to those participating.

Michael Totten says Israel/Lebanon border "could explode at any moment"

2006-05-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Totten is on the Israel/Lebanon border, and has written a one, two-part post about what he's found out.

Lisa and I met Israeli Defense Forces Spokesman Zvika Golan at a base in the north near the border. He told us to follow him in his jeep as he drove to a lookout point next to an IDF watch tower that opened up over Lebanon.

“You aren’t safe here right now,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “The Lebanese army wouldn’t let me anywhere near the border two weeks ago. What’s going on?”

“Hezbollah is planning an operation,” he said.

“How do you know?” I said.

“We know,” he said and nodded.

I knew he was right. The Lebanese intelligence officer more or less told me the same thing. He didn’t say the threat was from Hezbollah, but he didn’t have to.
...
Iran has moved into South Lebanon. Intelligence agents are helping Hezbollah construct watch towers fitted with one-way bullet-proof windows right next to Israeli army positions.

Here's what one officer said:
This is now Iran's front line with Israel. The Iranians are using Hizbollah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it.

More powerful weapons, including missiles with a range of 30 miles, are also being brought in.

Iran to overthrow the mullahs soon

2006-05-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

...according to Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah and heir to throne.

So what you see happening is a general strike, people going into the streets, refusing to work, calling for the overthrow of the regime, and then their being backed—

Sustained. Sustained.

And then being sustained by significant elements of the Revolutionary Guards who say, “You’re gone”?

And I’m talking about a blitzkrieg of media supporting, like the BBC did before the revolution, which was practically announcing the night before where there would be a demonstration the next day. This is not myth, it is fact.

Are you in contact with some of the commanders of these [elements]?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, they keep on saying that we are being under-utilized, we have a role to play, we know the time for it, but we cannot just take the initiative. They are in No Man’s Land. You have to understand.

Are you the person who puts together the master plan? Are you the commander-in-chief of this counteraction?

Look, I think I can be effective, and the reason I have stayed behind until now was because I wanted to exhaust every avenue of possibility so that the opposition can gather itself and collectively work on a common agenda. Within the next two or three months, we’ll know if the result of two or three years of intense effort is going to pay off.

Two or three months?

Two or three months. This summer.

I'm a little suspicious of his aspirations to the throne, but I hope he pulls it off. I don't know how much credit to give to this. I'll wait for news from Regime Change Iran, the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran, and Michael Ledeen.

Why People Don't Work Hard

2006-04-29T05:51:00.000-07:00

ESPN had an interview with Malcolm Gladwell (author and journalist) where he made an interesting observation. He was asked why people don't work hard when it's in their interests to do so.

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why [professional golfer] Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

How to stop the genocide in Darfur

2006-04-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

The genocide in Darfur has been ongoing for a few years now. It is inexcusable and unacceptable that genocide is happening - again - and no-one's stopping it. After the Holocaust, after Rwanda recently, still the world hasn't sorted out a real plan for stopping genocide, the worst of human evils.

I don't blame America - much. America has its forces tied up in Iraq, not to mention all their other commitments in Afghanistan and Korea and the Balkans and dozens of other countries in the world. I'd prefer that they triple the size of their armed forces so they can do things like STOP GENOCIDE.

Mostly I blame the other prosperous liberal democracies. Or I blame the whole Western social order where people rely on their governments to administer foreign aid, whether financial or military.

So what should be done? First, the Community of Democracies (a new organization that is like the United Nations but only has democracies in it) should create a standing army for the purpose of intervention in genocide. But I'll post about that some other time.

Immediately, we should hire private security companies to do it - companies like Blackwater and DynCorp. The Boston Globe has an article about how these companies are ready to go into Darfur now.

THREE YEARS OF FIGHTING in the Darfur region of Sudan have left an estimated 180,000 dead and nearly 2 million refugees. In recent weeks, both the UN and the US have turned up the volume of their demands to end the violence (which the Bush administration has publicly called genocide), but they've been hard pressed to turn their exhortations into action. The government in Khartoum has scuttled the UN's plans to take control of the troubled peacekeeping operations currently being led by the African Union, and NATO recently stated publicly that a force of its own in Darfur is ''out of the question." Meanwhile, refugee camps and humanitarian aid workers continue to be attacked, and the 7,000 African Union troops remain overstretched and ineffective.

But according to J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater, there is another option that ought to be on the table: an organization that could commit significant resources and expertise to bolster the African Union peacekeepers and provide emergency support to their flagging mission.

A few weeks ago, at an international special forces conference in Jordan, Black announced that his company could deploy a small rapid-response force to conflicts like the one in Sudan. ''We're low cost and fast," Black said, ''the question is, who's going to let us play on their team?"

They're not actually proposing to stop the genocide actually, just basically to protect the humanitarian workers who help the survivors. But it's a start.

Today, private military companies are offering defensive services-they propose to secure refugee camps and vulnerable villages, guard humanitarian aid agencies and NGOs, or, depending on the requirements of the contract, assist peacekeepers like the African Union troops in Darfur.

Private security companies have done combat missions in the past. I hope that they do again, if it's a choice between that and no-one stopping a genocide.

In the mid and late '90s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and British firm Sandline International offered direct combat support to the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone. In Angola, 500 ex-special forces officers working for Executive Outcomes conducted sophisticated airstrikes and commando operations to help the Angolan military retake its diamond mines and oil fields from the rebel group UNITA. In Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes and later Sandline were hired to combat the RUF insurgency. With targeted helicopter attacks and ground assaults, both firms dominated tactically, but fighting broke out soon after their respective contracts ended.

There are problems with mercenaries conducting combat missions, of course, but you know what's worse? Genocide.

Thanks to Steve for the link. Steve's as mad as I am that genocide still happens.

Blackwater has an interesting newsletter, by the way. I've been subscribed for months.

How Lisa Came To Israel

2006-04-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

A friend of Michael Totten's wrote a one, two, three, four, five, six-part series of entries about her experience in Israel 2000-2002. She arrived in September 2000 and describes an Israel full of hope and vigor. The intifada started in October. Her description of the war's effect on society is interesting:

People reacted differently to the daily violence of 2002. Some, like my friend Diana, hibernated. She coined the term GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) for her emotional state. When I sent her an SMS inquiring, "Meet me for coffee?" she sent a cryptic reply: "Nope. GAD." Others insisted on living their lives as usual, and there was actually an amazing flurry of creativity that winter: new bars opened all the time; there were tons of new art exhibitions and many theatre and music performances. I could hardly keep up with it all. A lot of people were in a constant state of anxiety, and feared crowded places like shopping malls. Some became violent: there was a marked upswing in physical altercations between strangers over things like parking spaces and jumping what passes for a queue in Israel. Most of all, people were depressed.

Nearly all my diary entries for December 2001-May 2002, when I left for Tokyo, contain some reference to depression. I was depressed, and so was practically everyone I knew. I remember someone joking during that time that what Israel needed was a crop duster to fly over the country and spray liquid Prozac on the population.

The thing is, it wasn't a black existential depression. I didn't know anybody who was wondering about the point of being alive; in fact, there was a pervasive atmosphere of living life to its fullest. I cannot remember a single evening spent alone against my will during that entire half year. Either friends dropped over to hang out, talk desultorily and listen to music, or we went out - to lounge bars, music clubs, gallery openings and house parties. Every place and event I attended was packed with people, even at 3:00 AM on a weekday, even though hardly anyone had any money, and even though the inevitable presence of tough-looking, armed security guards was a constant reminder of the danger all around us.

And that buzz of sexual energy that is one of Tel Aviv's characteristics became a full-fledged roar. The Tel Aviv singleton's standard joke at the beginning of each winter is that it's time to find someone to help keep the bed warm during the cold, damp rainy season. But that winter finding a partner was about more than just keeping the bed warm; it was about pulling the duvet high over our heads and creating a warm little tent of safety and comfort. Nobody defined the quest for intimacy in those terms; that kind of self-awareness comes only in retrospect. But reading over my diaries and talking recently with friends has made it pretty clear that the natural human desire for intimacy was fulfilled with unusual intensity that year.

Michael Totten in Israel

2006-04-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

Michael Totten's gone to Israel now.

Arab countries have a certain feel. They’re masculine, relaxed, worn around the edges, and slightly shady in a Sicilian mobster sort of way. Arabs are wonderfully and disarmingly charming. Israel felt brisk, modern, shiny, and confident. It looked rich, powerful, and explicitly Jewish. I knew I had been away from home a long time when being around Arabs and Muslims felt comfortably normal and Jews seemed exotic.

First impression are just that, though. They tend to be crazily out of whack and subject to almost instant revision. Israel, I would soon find out, is a lot more like the Arab and Muslim countries than it appears at first glance. It’s not at all a little fragment of the West that is somehow weirdly displaced and on the wrong continent. It’s Middle Eastern to the core, and it has more in common with Lebanon than anywhere else I have been. The politics and the history are different, of course. But once I got settled in Tel Aviv I didn’t feel like I had ventured far from Beirut at all.

How to get up on time

2006-04-28T19:36:00.000-07:00

Steve Pavlina has written an article called How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off. This is something I've had a lot of trouble with in the past, and I still haven't solved it. These days I usually sleep under my desk, and people usually wake me up at a reasonable time, so there's a temporary solution. (I know that's really weird. We're in a crunch period right now, shut up.)

Anyway, Pavlina's article has a great suggestion in it, and I'll implement it when I go back to sleeping at home. Go read it if you have trouble getting up in the morning. And if you have that problem, consider that you may have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (Wikipedia link). More info on that here (I'm not sure how reliable that page is, so don't take my link as an endorsement).

Michael Totten's Weekend in Kurdistan

2006-04-25T20:15:00.000-07:00

I've written about Michael Totten's adventures in Iraqi Kurdistan before. While visiting Turkey with a friend recently, he decided to spend another weekend there. He tells the story in one, two, three, four, five, six parts.

“Remember, Sean,” I said. “This country borders Greece and Bulgaria. But it also borders Iraq.”

I could all but hear the gears turn in his head.

“That’s right,” he said and put his hand over his mouth. “Holy shit, we could drive to Iraq.”

I knew the instant he said it that we would, indeed, drive to Iraq. Who cares about Troy when we could drive to Iraq?
...
It's hard to convey what it's actually like meeting Iraqi Kurds. Fleshing out the dialogue doesn't capture the feel of it. Americans and Kurds don't just get along because we're temporary allies of convenience in the Middle East. The connection is deeper and personal. Kurdish culture and American culture might as well be from different planets. But somehow, oddly enough, Kurds think much like Americans do. Let me rephrase that: Americans think like the Kurds. We have similar values despite our extraordinarily different cultural backgrounds. I find it easier to develop a rapport with Iraqi Kurds than with people from any other country I have ever been to. It's instant, powerful, and totally unexpected.
...
It’s hard to write about Dohok because the place is so normal. Getting there is an adventure, but there is little adventure to be found after arrival. The most remarkable thing about the city is how unremarkable it is.

The first time I went there on a day trip from Erbil it seemed like such an innocent place. After seeing the rough hell of Turkish Kurdistan, though, and realizing that the Kurds in Iraq had it even worse under Saddam, it did not seem so innocent to me anymore. Iraqi Kurds struck me as deeply, profoundly, mature. It took so much work, blood, and sacrifice to build what they have. And they built it from nothing.

Iraq is the only country in the world where Kurds wield any power. They're ground down under the majoritarian boot everywhere else. For the most part they wield their power responsibly. Government corruption is still just atrocious, and they haven’t yet fully emerged from a traditional society into a completely liberal and modern one. A Kurdish journalist was recently thrown in prison after a fifteen minute show trial for blasting the KDP in a newspaper column. He was later released, but he’s not yet out of trouble. The Kurdish quasi-state wants to be liberal, but still doesn’t quite understand how or what that means.

Even so, they’ve made more progress in the region than anyone else except, perhaps, for the Lebanese and the Israelis. And they started a mere fifteen years ago from the bottom of Saddam’s mass graves. From the Mouth of Hell to…the Utah of the Middle East. By force of sheer will against extraordinarily long odds.

I still want to go there.

The First and Last Line of Defense

2006-04-25T20:01:00.000-07:00

"A passenger who claimed to have a bomb aboard a United Airlines flight was subdued by passengers as the California-bound plane was diverted to Denver International Airport, airport officials said."

Cool (via Instapundit).

US Death Rate Falls

2006-04-25T19:34:00.000-07:00

If preliminary government figures are accurate, the US death rate fell significantly in 2004.

In what appears to be an amazing success for American medicine, preliminary government figures released Wednesday showed that the annual number of deaths in the U.S. dropped by nearly 50,000 in 2004 - the biggest decline in nearly 70 years.

The 2 percent decrease, reported by the National Center for Health Statistics, came as a shock to many, because the U.S. is aging, growing in population and getting fatter. In fact, some experts said they suspect the numbers may not hold up when a final report is released later this year.

There's not much discussion in the AP article of why this might have occurred, except this:

Improvements in medical care, particularly in medications aimed at preventing heart disease, at least partly explain the improvements in the heart disease death rate, said Ken Thorpe, an Emory professor of health policy.

My impression is that Western consumers have recently become more health-conscious. This can be seen in the new healthy options offered at fast-food restaurants such as McDonalds and Burger King, and the rise of Subway. I wonder whether the lowered death rate is related to the health trend?

Update: some more speculation at FuturePundit's blog. You can see the actual report here. Apparently, a report that includes a more complete analysis of the preliminary data is forthcoming.

Happiness is working for yourself

2006-04-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

The University of Durham has published a study showing that running your own business will make you happier than working for others, according to the Daily Mail. That sounds right to me, but did they manage to separate correlation from causation? Maybe being happy leads you to run your own business, rather than running your own business leads you to be happy.

Working for yourself will make you much happier than those employed by others, according to research.

People who run their own businesses have such flexibility and independence that they enjoy far greater job satisfaction, experts claim.

But the self-employed earn less.

The self-employed work longer hours for lower wages than their wage-slave counterparts.

Scientists found entrepreneurs put up with longer hours because they were worried about how much money they would have in the future.

The Next Ten Years

2006-04-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

The Speculist has some predictions for technological advances in the next ten years.

-Another branch of medicine, Native Transplant, allows scientists to grow organs from a patient's own stem cells for later transplant within the body. As a result, the field of artificial organs is basically shelved for a few years.

-Artificial blood is perfected. Patients who have lost the ability to produce blood are now given permanent blood replacement. These patients find that the artificial blood is superior. The medical community begins discussing the idea of blood replacement within healthy individuals as an elective procedure.

-A once-a-day oral medication that limits absorption from the digestive tract aids the battle against obesity. It quickly becomes the most prescribed medication in the history of the country. Some predict that exercise will be abandoned in favor of pill-popping. The opposite happens as Americans get out and enjoy their healthier bodies.

-The first tentative steps are taken toward life extension. By 2014, life extension enthusiasts have reason to believe that "escape velocity" has been reached in this field – each year brings more than a year's improvement in life expectancy. Nevertheless, age reversal remains elusive.

There's more.

Remembering Sergeant Thomas Baker

2006-04-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Sergeant Thomas Baker, Medal of Honor recipient, was killed in action in Saipan, Mariana Islands in 1944. The citation for his medal is incredible.

Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty at Saipan, Mariana Islands, 19 June to 7 July 1944. When his entire company was held up by fire from automatic weapons and small-arms fire from strongly fortified enemy positions that commanded the view of the company, Sgt. (then Pvt.) Baker voluntarily took a bazooka and dashed alone to within 100 yards of the enemy. Through heavy rifle and machinegun fire that was directed at him by the enemy, he knocked out the strong point, enabling his company to assault the ridge.

Some days later while his company advanced across the open field flanked with obstructions and places of concealment for the enemy, Sgt. Baker again voluntarily took up a position in the rear to protect the company against surprise attack and came upon 2 heavily fortified enemy pockets manned by 2 officers and 10 enlisted men which had been bypassed. Without regard for such superior numbers, he unhesitatingly attacked and killed all of them. Five hundred yards farther, he discovered 6 men of the enemy who had concealed themselves behind our lines and destroyed all of them.

On 7 July 1944, the perimeter of which Sgt. Baker was a part was attacked from 3 sides by from 3,000 to 5,000 Japanese. During the early stages of this attack, Sgt. Baker was seriously wounded but he insisted on remaining in the line and fired at the enemy at ranges sometimes as close as 5 yards until his ammunition ran out. Without ammunition and with his own weapon battered to uselessness from hand-to-hand combat, he was carried about 50 yards to the rear by a comrade, who was then himself wounded. At this point Sgt. Baker refused to be moved any farther stating that he preferred to be left to die rather than risk the lives of any more of his friends. A short time later, at his request, he was placed in a sitting position against a small tree.

Another comrade, withdrawing, offered assistance. Sgt. Baker refused, insisting that he be left alone and be given a soldier's pistol with its remaining 8 rounds of ammunition. When last seen alive, Sgt. Baker was propped against a tree, pistol in hand, calmly facing the foe. Later Sgt. Baker's body was found in the same position, gun empty, with 8 Japanese lying dead before him. His deeds were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Army.

The Coming Normalcy

2006-04-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Robert Kaplan, writing in the Atlantic, has an interesting overview of the Iraq situation called The Coming Normalcy (PDF link). He offers some optimism, some reflections on the impact of international media on the insurgent's strategies, plenty of criticism of the US for not providing enough money for job-creating projects, and much more.

When the 1-25 "Lancers” arrived in Mosul, in September of 2004, the city and its environs were a violent no-go zone, having seen several thousand insurgent attacks, not to mention more than a thousand explosions from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The local police had largely deserted, dropping from an on-paper force of 10,000 to an irrelevance of 300. But by the time 1-25 left Mosul, a year later, mortar attacks alone had fallen from 300 a month to fewer than ten. Other forms of insurgent activity dropped to the point where international journalists no longer considered Mosul an important part of the ongoing Iraq story—a fact evidenced by their thin presence in the city. Meanwhile, the local police force was now back up to 9,000, and the number of police stations had expanded from five to twenty-four. More important, the number of intelligence tips called in by the local population had risen from essentially zero to some 400 per month.

...

Norris offered a reflection on the Iraqis he deals with. "Some love us. Some hate us because we've accidentally killed their relatives. Others would rather we just leave. But whenever we kill a terror hideout and return an area to some semblance of normalcy, people come out and say thank you. A big problem is the daily, low-level kidnappings of professionals that don't make news but help provide a cash flow for the insurgents.
"On the other hand,” he went on, "we benefit because the international media doesn't want to leave the greater Baghdad area. With no international media in Mosul on a regular basis, there's been less of an incentive [for the insurgents] to do car bombings.”

...

A Sunni Arab shopkeeper said to me: "When American troops patrol the streets with the Iraqi army, it is so awful and humiliating for us, because we know those Iraqi soldiers are really Kurds. Your occupation has strengthened our enemies.” This young man, the son of a former general in Saddam Hussein's army, engaged me in conversation for more than half an hour. I liked him. He turned out to be uncannily objective in his own way. He had just come back from Syria, upon which he heaped praise. "Syria now is so much better than Iraq,” he said. "It is under tight control, so people there feel safe and can go about their lives with dignity. You Americans think you have brought freedom; you have just allowed the thugs from the villages to kill and rob from the educated people whom Saddam had protected.”
"Your father liked Saddam?” I probed.
"My father hated Saddam,” he replied. "He spit on him—in the home, that is. As long as you obeyed the rules by not criticizing the regime outside of your home, you were fine. With Saddam, there were clear rules; now there are none. Now we are caught between the Americans and the insurgents. Everybody hates terrorism, but we're more vulnerable than you.”
"Should the Americans leave?” I asked.
"No,” he said. "That would only make things worse.” He told me that he was impressed with the American military, as long as it was alone and not with the Iraqi army. But he admitted that the Iraqi police had improved, and that Mosul was no longer the battle zone it had been the year before. "Your soldiers are disciplined. They don't scare people by shooting their guns in the air, like ours.”
"But that discipline,” I argued, "is an indirect effect of a free society, which allows the military to constantly criticize itself.”
"No, no,” he said. "What good is voting if the Shiites and Kurds will vote, too? Elections are useless without water, sewage, electricity, and safety.”
"So you won't vote on December 15?”
"Maybe I will vote. What else is there to do?”
He was a mass of understandable contradictions.
More confusing was that another shopkeeper recommended the opposite: that U.S. soldiers should always patrol with the Iraqi army. If you applied every recommendation you got talking to Iraqis on just one street, you'd wind up doing exactly what you were doing before.

...

But it is simply impossible for the soldiers to be wholly liked. There is no nice way to barge into people's houses, bristling with weapons, stomping your dusty boots on their Oriental rugs, and expect it to be a pleasant experience for them, even if you hand out candy to their kids and replace a lock you had to break with a new one.

...

Great numbers of such seemingly ineffectual searches did work, to the extent that they kept terrorists on the run (or at least inconvenienced), forcing the insurgents to hide their guns and bomb-making paraphernalia outside their homes. But it was an inefficient way to make progress, and it bred hostility. If this keeps up, I thought, the Americans will end up being as hated in Iraq as the Israelis are in the West Bank. But it will be worse for the Americans, because they will be hated even as they are not feared.

...

The U.S. military was attempting to plug a dike holding back an ocean of potential unrest, and was deeply handicapped by the fact that it had no visible large-scale public-works projects to soak up crime and mass unemployment. Only such projects could show Sunni Arabs—politically weaker than ever in Iraq—the tangible benefits of democracy.

...

"We can race around the battlefield and fix little problems,” one Army major complained to me, "but where is the State Department and USAID to solve the big problems?” Whereas commentators in Washington tend to blame the machinations of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon for keeping the State Department out of Iraq, all of the mid-level military officers I spoke with—each of whom desperately wanted to see civilian aid and reconstruction workers here—said that if the State Department got the requisite funding, it could be as bureaucratically dynamic as their own battalions, and infrastructure-rebuilding would not be where it appeared to be: at the zero point.

Go read it all, if Iraq's your thing.

Paris Burning, Once Again

2006-03-31T14:43:00.000-08:00

A lot of bloggers and pundits predict a collapse of France within the next few decades, arguing that French demographics (lots of old people and a low birth rate) are incompatible with France's socialist policies (35-hour work weeks, guaranteed government pensions and early retirement ages) and that the whole situation is made much worse by growing ethnic and religious tensions (caused by the huge unassimilated immigrant minority). I suspect schadenfreude plays a part in this prediction.

But Claire Berlinski at the Washington Post, writing about the latest riots in Paris, says that France is ruled by the mob, and mobs don't make very good governors.

The issue is fear of a real overhaul of France's economically stifling labor laws. While some of the suburban hoodlums have joined in these protests -- after all, a riot is a riot -- it is clear that unless this overhaul proceeds, the immigrants are doomed. If so, last year's violence will seem a lark compared with what is coming.

Remembering Fabrizio

2006-03-31T14:36:00.000-08:00

Publius Pundit remembers Fabrizio Quattrochi. Fabrizio Quattrochi was kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq in 2004. They wanted to make another grisly propaganda movie out of his death, but at the moment of execution he struggled, shouting, "I will show you how an Italian dies!"

Ramit reviews Rich Dad, Poor Dad

2006-03-31T14:23:00.000-08:00

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is a great book in my opinion. A friend recommended it to me, and I've gone on to recommend it to friends of mine, and I've given it as a gift.

Ramit doesn't feel quite the same way.

This book is like the kid you hated in high school, but he let you cheat off his test a couple of times so you kind of like him. I have grudging respect for this book, but every time someone raves about it, I usually just want to punch them in the face.

Update: reader Phil emails this review by real-estate investment author John Reed, exhaustively attacking Kiyosaki:

Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice...Kiyosaki is a liar and a charlatan and a danger to his readers.

Google Calendar

2006-03-27T17:10:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to Google, asking them to add calendar functionality to GMail.

You're welcome.

Progressive Training

2006-03-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

Steve Pavlina, yet again, has a fantastic post on personal development. This is about how to improve any skill through progressive training.

Berlin Brain-Computer Interface

2006-03-23T21:45:00.000-08:00

This is cool.

A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at a major trade fair in Germany.
...
The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around.
...
Users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor moves in their minds. This is because the device rapidly learns to recognise activity in the area of a person's motor cortex, the area of the brain associated with movement.

Khadafi on Iraq

2006-03-23T21:40:00.000-08:00

"Saddam is still to be considered the legal president of Iraq because he was not overthrown by the people but by the occupation forces.
...
It is dangerous to send troops to eliminate heads of state who are not appreciated, because tomorrow it could be the turn of Castro, Kadhafi or Mugabe, or even China and North Korea." - CNN

So Khadafi says that he is just as legitimate a leader of Libya as Saddam is of Iraq? I agree.

Apostasy is a crime in Afghanistan

2006-03-23T21:33:00.000-08:00

An Afghan man who converted to Christianity from Islam is to be executed unless he reconverts.

Update: The case has been dismissed. Dean Esmay has an optimistic view of the issue

Snorting coke

2006-03-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

I always imagined that this blog would be my means of discussing such hefty subjects as philosophy, politics, technology and finance. But this video of a guy drinking a glass of coke through his nose just cracks me up.

I'm not proud of this.

Compliment the chef

2006-03-20T18:01:00.000-08:00

Many times, I've had great meals at restaurants. I should have asked the waiter to pass my compliments to the chef. That would totally make the chef's day.

Parachuting dogs

2006-03-19T20:33:00.000-08:00

For Iraq, a special flak jacket was developed for dogs used in dangerous situations. Costing about a thousand dollars each, the Kevlar protective vests protect the dogs from stab wounds, shell fragments and some bullets...There are also attachments on the vest to enable the dog to be dropped by parachute, or hauled up via a rope. - Strategy Page

Latigo Flint

2006-03-17T15:42:00.000-08:00

I've never linked to the weblog of Latigo Flint, a shocking and unforgivable mistake. I'll rectify it as best I can by not only linking to Latigo Flint's weblog, but also to many of his works that I think enriched my life the most.

Orlando Bloom = Bad Wingman

Sam Elliot's Beer

Beginning To Suspect Something

A Good Way To Be A Hero

One Tough Customer

Latigo Flint's New Years Resolutions

Ever Maintain The Aura And Mystique

Another Good Way To Be A Hero

Mercy

Fire Season

Girls Can't Resist

Illogical Tourniquet Placement

Natches Murphy

A Tough Way To Forget

Larson Silkhammer

World's Weariest

Salsa Bars and Unholy Wraiths

The Haunted Bassoon

Claw of the Otter--Silent Glory Beneath the Eddies of America

The Legend of Latigo Flint and a Mongoose Named Corduroy Junction

Inventing Parachutes

Ending tyranny in our world

2006-03-16T03:15:00.000-08:00

Bush reiterates:

It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

See? He's not all bad.

Why is the universe life-friendly?

2006-03-15T02:33:00.000-08:00

A new book by James N. Gardner, BIOCOSM, offers a new theory as to why the universe is life-friendly (i.e. has physical constants and conditions that can and have given rise to life). He's written an article too, and here's my take on that.

Why is the universe life-friendly?

Probably the most common non-theistic answer is that there are lots of universes, maybe infinite universes, with varying physical laws and constants and numbers of dimensions, and so this universe just happened to be lucky in that it managed create Earth, where life could form.

One problem with this idea is that it violates the mediocrity principle.

The mediocrity principle, a mainstay of scientific theorizing since Copernicus, is a statistically based rule of thumb that, absent contrary evidence, a particular sample (Earth, for instance, or our particular universe) should be assumed to be a typical example of the ensemble of which it is a part.

How can we come up with an explanation for the life-friendliness of the universe that doesn't violate the mediocrity principle?

Suppose universes reproduce. To the best of my understanding, that's not so wild. Some scientists surmise that black holes spawn baby universes all the time. My brother's friend said he knew a black hole who had three universes while still in high school.

Suppose the physical properties of a parent universe are passed on to the baby universe, much like DNA is passed from parent to child in life reproduction. In that case, in any given group of universes, the kind of universes that reproduce most frequently will become more common than the infertile ones. What kind of universes reproduce the most? As I see it, there are two major factors that we know of (there are possibly a lot that we don't know of):

how long the universe survives (i.e. the amount of time it has to reproduce)
how often it reproduces

First, take how long the universe survives. There are a few ways for a universe to die: heat death, contraction, etc. (Dying, for a universe, might as well be defined as "not doing anything interesting, and certainly not reproducing"). If long-surviving universes are evolutionarily favored, we might expect to see lots of universes where the Big Bang's energy was just enough to avoid rapid collapse, but not so much as to blow everything so far apart that nothing interesting ever formed. And we do see lots of these universes, and by lots, I mean one. As Stephen Hawking said:

Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically accurately.

The point is, this idea answers Hawking's question. The universe's rate of expansion is so fantastically tuned because it has been selected for over many generations of universes.

How often does a universe reproduce? As I understand it, there are two related theories as to how a universe reproduces. One is that black holes spawn baby universes. Another speculative idea is that extremely advanced, intelligent civilizations spawn baby universes, possibly with carefully designed black holes, which were built for experimental or recreational purposes, or some other purpose. And thus intelligent life is the means with which universes reproduce.

If universes reproduce with black holes, we might expect to see lots of black holes, because universes with black holes are selected for. And we know this universe does have some black holes, so that holds up. If universes reproduce with intelligent life, we might expect to see the conditions for intelligent life (which we do), and we might expect to see lots of intelligent life. We know of one form, and we're looking for more.

That's my ghetto take on Gardner's theory. You can read it in his words here.

Ten things about yourself that might surprise you

2006-03-12T10:42:00.000-08:00

A month ago, Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You To Be Rich wrote an interesting post called Ten things about yourself that would surprise you.

Bonus day

2006-03-07T22:09:00.000-08:00

March 23, 1944: Nick Alkemade of the Royal Air Force...was a tail gunner in an AVRO Lancaster bomber. While returning from a bombing mission the aircraft was attacked by German Junkers JU-88. Alkemade was trapped in the turret after the bomber caught fire. His parachute was in the cabin area. Alkemade jumped from the aircraft, preferring a quick death to being burned.

He fell from 18,000 ft, all the while thinking of his ultimate death. He relaxed his body and fell in a slightly head down position.

His next recollection was looking up at the stars through some pine trees. He could not believe he was okay. He moved each arm and leg and soon realized he was not even hurt badly.

Completely grateful of being alive he smoked a cigarette, before even getting up. He thought about what had just happened to him.

He realized that the pine trees, with their pliable branches, slowly reduced his descent rate to one that was survivable. In addition, the soft snow cover reduced the landing forces even more.

He finally stood up. His leg was sprained and would not support his weight.

A short time later, the Germans captured Alkemade. The Gestapo did not believe his story of jumping without a parachute. They thought he was a spy. Finally, after inspecting the parachute harness and finding the burned parachute at the crash site they believe him.

Alkemade died on Jun. 22, 1987. - (from www.parachutehistory.com

Awesome.

Quote

2006-03-05T09:49:00.000-08:00

"At the age of 24 I began setting clear, written goals for each area of my life. I accomplished more in the following year than I had in the previous 24." - Brian Tracy (via NevBlog)

Better Than Your Boyfriend

2006-02-28T19:35:00.000-08:00

Better Than Your Boyfriend is a very fascinating blog.

France's violent underclass

2006-02-28T19:12:00.000-08:00

Primer on France's problem with its violent underclass, influenced by radical Islam. This problem has been neglected, ignored and covered up for a long time, but the horrific murder of Ilan Halimi has made it undeniable.

Saddam ends hunger strike

2006-02-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

"Toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has ended his hunger strike on health grounds," - the Scotsman (via Andrew Sullivan).

America needs better PR

2006-02-25T03:03:00.000-08:00

Eric S. Raymond writes about America's problem with memetic warfare.

[I]deological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions.
...
[I]t was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.
...
The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS was the result of research aimed at building a ‘race bomb’ that would selectively kill black people.
...
In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:
There is no truth, only competing agendas.
All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

Interesting. I don't know whether Raymond is overstating the case. It seems very convenient that the memes he identifies are so close to the hard left of American politics. On the other hand, it was the intent of the memes to take root in domestic politics, so maybe it's not so convenient.

Ghenghis the Player

2006-02-22T12:28:00.000-08:00

"The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters." - Ghengis Khan

What a dick. But apparently chicks dug bad boys in 1200 as much as they do in 2006. Ghenghis Khan has sixteen million descendants.

Behavioral Conditioning

2006-02-22T01:54:00.000-08:00

[Personal development]
Personal development guru Steve Pavlina wrote about behavioral conditioning, as applied to oneself. This is useful advice for using time more efficiently. I have used some of these suggestions.

Respect and submission

2006-02-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

Flemming Rose, the editor at Jyllands Posten who was responsible for originally publishing the Mohammed cartoons, explains the difference between respect and submission:

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn’t intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

Full background on the cartoon wars at Wikipedia

Dole-bludging terrorists

2006-02-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

[Political]
Dr Helen writes that European countries are appeasing their violent Muslim minorities.

Bawer points out that in Denmark, Muslims make up only 5% of the population but receive 40% of welfare outlays. Many of these immigrants are told by their leaders that Muslim law gives them the right to "cheat and lie in the countries that harbor them." They are told to view the benefits they receive as jizya--the tributes that "the infidel natives of Muslim-occupied countries are obliged to pay to Muslims in order to preserve their lives." And the welfare offices in Denmark can be the setting for violence--termed "culture clashes" by Danish journalists. "Some clients lay waste to social security offices and hit social workers--not out of frustration but because they've learned that bullying gets them what they want. The Danish government is not repressive; welfare workers tend to be sympathetic and eager to help. Many immigrants perceive this as weakness, and exploit it, 'tyrannizing' the social workers." The Danish solution? More PC behavior--get translators to translate not only between languages but between cultures. Yeah, that will work.

Michael Totten is still in Kurdistan

2006-02-19T00:11:00.000-08:00

Michael Totten posts another update from Kurdistan.

ERBIL, IRAQ – A Western journalist I met in Erbil, who has been in Iraq for some time, told me the place challenges almost every liberal idea he has ever had in his head. I don’t know what he was like, ideologically speaking, before he got there. But he certainly doesn’t have orthodox left-wing opinions today. (Some right-wingers, especially those who think of the entire Islamic religion as a totalitarian death cult, would likewise get a crash-course in reality if they ever bothered to hang out in Iraq and meet actual Muslims.)

Sounds like an interesting place.

African Peacekeeping Force

2006-02-18T01:47:00.000-08:00

[Political]
Austin Bay comments on a proposed all-African peacekeeping force. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Taking Tal Afar

2006-02-17T17:53:00.000-08:00

[Political]
The Washington Post has an account of the counter-insurgency operations of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in taking Tal Afar.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency, according to a source familiar with the review's findings.
...
"Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," McMaster said he told every soldier in his command.
...
One out of every 10 soldiers received a three-week course in conversational Arabic, so that each small unit would have someone capable of basic exchanges with Iraqis. McMaster, who holds a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina and is an expert on the Vietnam War, distributed a lengthy reading list to his officers that included studies of Arab and Iraqi history and most of the classic texts on counterinsurgency. He also quietly relieved one battalion commander who didn't seem to understand that such changes were necessary.
...
Instead of staging a major raid into the city for suspects and then moving back to operating bases, McMaster said he took a sharply different tack, spending months making preparatory moves before attacking the entrenched insurgents in Tall Afar. That indirect approach demonstrated tactical patience, a key to effectively battling an insurgency and a skill that doesn't come easily to the U.S. military.

Don't trust ugly people

2006-02-17T16:46:00.000-08:00

Science has proven that all ugly people are evil.

"We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking," claim Naci Mocan of the University of Colorado and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University.

Why would that be? I can think of some reasons:
-People tend to correlate beauty with "goodness". Whatever your expectations of someone, they tend to fulfill them. Steve from The Fat Man Walking wrote about this recently:

One of the most difficult things about being overweight is that your inner demons are obviously on display at all times. People judge you and act differently when you are around and this seems to be an attempt to keep you at arms length. As a result of this you act differently and become defensive, eventually you look for people to treat you poorly and as if on cue, they do.

-Maybe ugly genes group with other undesirable genes. Beautiful people usually have more choice in who they procreate with, so they might get all the honest, compassionate ones. Ugly people generally can't be so picky, and so all the undesirable genes get lumped together. This is just something I just thought of. I hope it's not true, because it's depressing.
-Attractiveness is probably related to self-esteem, and self-esteem is probably related to propensity to crime.
-Attractiveness probably alters your perception of the world. I remember someone once - somewhat humorously but also seriously - proposed an explanation why people at political rallies are below-average-looking: if you're unattractive, you perceive that society is not working out for you and needs changing. If you're attractive, everyone treats you well and people buy you stuff and hold open the door and fall in love at first sight. You like the status quo.

US increases support for Iranian resistance

2006-02-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

Iran's quest for nuclear weapons is one of the biggest problems the West faces right now. It'll probably end badly, but there's a chance some good will come out of this confrontation: Iran's theocratic government might be overthrown and a less authoritarian and more democratic government might be formed by the revolutionaries. That result just got slightly more likely, as Condi Rice has asked Congress to increase the budget for promoting democracy in Iran from $10 million to $85 million.

I want one of these

2006-02-16T21:43:00.000-08:00

[Technology]
Touch screens exist, so why isn't every computer like this?