We are ruled by sociopaths

Turns out that 9/11 and the global war on terror is a good thing, because if we didn't have that we'd probably be starting up a war with China.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support....

"Her name was Lynne Cheney," Hart said. "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today." Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China's back!)

or to put it even more bluntly:

during the 1990s "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" when foreign policy wasn't on the issue agenda.

Hearing stuff like this awakens the dormant anarchist in me. "Why should anyone be surprised at this?", he says. "Violence and conflict is what governments do, and if there's not enough violence and fear of violence to maintain their power, they'll do their best to manufacture some."

A government's ability to drum up violence is inversely proportional to the political intelligence of the populace. And Americans in particular are political idiots. We have the government we deserve.

Convergence

Re my recent departure from Telic Thoughts; I somewhat regret it because there were occasional glimmers of a synthesis emerging from the flames. Stunney (my main interlocuter) viewed God as "transcendent reason". I thought this was an interesting if flawed idea, meaning that while transcendent reason might exist in some way (in the same way mathematical objects have a transcendent, Platonic existence), it didn't have any of the anthropomorphic attributes people hang off of God -- getting angry at people having unconventional sex lives, for instance. Nonetheless I was open to a sort of convergence argument.

Let's say there is a transcendent form of reason. Let's also say that blind, grunting, material evolution somehow drives matter to achieve an imperfect approximation of this perfect rationality. This "somehow" has the nature of a convergent solution, in that while there are is a huge infinity of possible forms, there are relatively few mathematically coherent forms. Seemingly random processes converge on these coherent forms, resulting in all the patterns, life, truth, and beauty we see in the universe.

We see convergence in attempts to generate new systems of mathematics (turns out you can't design a version of the integers with three different signs, and we presume that aliens will understand the Pythagorean theorem), and convergent evolution (eyes were independently "invented" many times). So, maybe evolution converges to rational minds, and maybe the endpoint of convergence has some theological qualities. Maybe.

I wish Telic Thoughts was a good place to explore this quarter-baked conception, but the discourse there inevitably devolves into flaming. I'll give Uncle Aleistair the last word on this:

"It must have a 'natural' cause."
"It must have a 'supernatural' cause."
Let these two asses be set to grind corn.
Frater Perdurabo, O.T.O., "Chinese Music," The Book of Lies

Independence Day

I've just booted myself off the silly Telic Thoughts blog where I was having endless arguments with theists and other crackpots. The trigger that allowed me to break away from what was turning into an alarming addiction was that the list owners started deleting my messages in a thread where I had argued (mildly) for neural determinism over free will. "My neurons made me delete your posts", they childishly claimed. Ha-ha. A good excuse to bow out for me.

This is a standard stupid move in discussions of free will vs. determinism -- "if there's no free will, then your postings are meaningless and so are my actions". Yawn. Obviously, the interesting paradox is that we are apparently completely determined, yet we are capable of asserting meanings and have something that appears to be freedom and independence from the web of causality in which we are embedded.

So I don't believe solely in neural determinism, as does someone like Tom Clark whose version of naturalism attempts to collapse all causation to material causation. Everything we do might be caused by our neurons, but causal explanation is not the same thing as material explanation.

I've also been reading Judea Pearl's book on Causality, which contains some interesting thoughts on the nature of causality and causal explanations. According to Pearl, nobody has yet made a very good mathematics theory of causality, a concept which doesn't fit well into physics or statistics (Pearl claims he has one). I haven't worked through the formal theory, but the informal theory seems to be roughly: while the universe is a seamless web of causal connections, when we make a causal explanation we necessarily sever out a subsystem that we are explaining from its environment, and we create a model that allows us to explore the effects of hypothetical interventions to the system.

If you subscribe to pure materialism, the world is a huge web of interdependency. The problem is, you can't do anything with such a theory. For instance, a car is influenced by the road, the fuel you put in it, the chemical composition o fthe atmosphere, and the gravitational pull of Jupiter. If the car won't start, however, only some of these factors will be invoked as causal explanations. But, why? How do we know that the absense of fuel is likely to be a cause of failure to start, while the position of Jupiter is unlikely? (of course, not everyone agrees!) Because we have a model in our heads and can imagine what would happen if there was no fuel vs what would happen if Jupiter was in a different position.

Such causal models are much more useful than, say, a pure physics model which does not permit us to think about interventions.

Where is this nonsense going? Oh yeah, it's Independence Day! Where we celebrate our severing of certain causal connections between the American colonies and Mother England. A pure fiction of course, since physically Engliand was just as causally connected to North America as before. But a fiction with power, a fiction that could rearrange the causal models of the colonists and thus lead to actual changes in the physical causal connections.

Independence is one of those necessary fictions, like free will. And maybe God is too, although the verdict is still out on that one.

The Aleph and the Knowledge Worker

or, The nature of knowledge in the wired world.

[warning -- formless braindump]

Borges' story The Aleph tells of a point at which a person can view the entire state of the world, everything concentrated and simultaneous. Typically, it's a metaphysical horror story with uncanny resonances in both present reality and the future. The Aleph was published in 1949, four years after Vannevar Bush's seminal article As We May Think, which described the Memex, the postwar technocrat's version of The Aleph as a realizable device. Did Borges read Bush, or just intuit a zeitgeist that was blowing through both of them?

Bush's article is an amazing mix of insightful prophecy and some laughably wrong technical predictions (ie, that storage would involve photographic processes). But mostly he got it right. What is really startling, however, is that despite the fact that we have information systems orders of magnitude more capable than he dreamed of, the problem still remains:

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers' conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

He anticipated the primacy of search:

The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

Selection, in this broad sense, is a stone adze in the hands of a cabinetmaker. Yet, in a narrow sense and in other areas, something has already been done mechanically on selection. The personnel officer of a factory drops a stack of a few thousand employee cards into a selecting machine, sets a code in accordance with an established convention, and produces in a short time a list of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish.

And user interfaces:

One can consider rapid selection of this form, and distant projection for other purposes. To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries... One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

And blogging and search trails and annotation (which the web has still not quite got right):

It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions... The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined..

Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

So. Now we are at a point where we have huge amounts of information at our fingertips, and reasonably good ways to search for it, and crude but effective ways to link it together. The combination of internet standards, high-speed access, Google and open access scientific publications has made a new world. We should be in knowledge paradise!

But that's not how it feels. The basic human problem of how to deal with information hasn't gone away, it's just been raised to the nth power. Finding documents is easy, deciding which are worth reading, and in how much detail, is as difficult as ever. Where should effort be focused, and how can one narrow down a global curiosity into a manageable subset?

Look at the typical modern knowledge worker, trying desperately to keep track of all the things they want to know, or ought to know. Maybe you aren't in this boat, but I am -- comes of too much intellectual curiosity. My RSS reader has 300 feeds! Categorized variously -- I read the politcs blogs mostly for entertainment (in that they don't generally spur me to action), the philosophic ones for ideas, the tech ones mostly out of obligation.

Even within tech, it's a lost cause. There are about five different programming languages I'm involved with right now -- do I want to keep up with current developments in them? And what about all the components and toolkits; what's going on with Prototyup or Scriptaculous? Or Lisp, Ruby, Python? Then there is the entire universe of Java language, components, and tools like Eclipse, which is a whole sub-universe unto itself.

There's no way I can be an expert in all of this stuff. Can I be an expert in finding out just the right piece of knowledge i need? Well, there's where Google comes in handy. I've had pretty good luck, the last six months or so, googling for answers to obscure or not-so-obscure tech questions. A couple of issues though:

It gives a big advantage to tools with a large user community. For instance, I've had occasion both to use Oracle and the very nice Virtuoso OpenLink, an open-source database/semantic web platform/middleware/kitchen sink. THe problem is, hardly anyone is uing Virtuoso so my stupid questions do not have a stupid answer available wit a quick Google. Instead, I need to mail the developers and maybe they get back to me in a day or so, or maybe not.

So where was I? Oh yeah, trying to think about Google and Borges and Memexes and focus and what it means to know everything...got distracted...

The point is it's impossible to know everything, and not even that useful. But what should an informational omnivore know? How to use Google effectively, sure....but there seems to be a deeper idea lurking somewhere in there.

The nature of knowing is going to be different in the future. I was trying to get at this when I coined the term "googlectual" -- as search gets incorporated into our thinking, the knowledge in the digital sphere becomes a part of what we know -- sort of. We lack good metaphors and ways for thinking about the relationship between knowledge-in-the-head and knowledge-in-the-world and the increasingly tight coupling between them.

Alright, I'll stop now.

Worst company names

Licketyship. A guy from there called my cell phone today for something, the connection wasn't so great, so I spent most of the call trying to figure out what sort of business model could involve coprophagy. Then there's the classic expertsexchange.com.

The grain of sand at the core of the wikipedia pearl

Holy shit, Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder and guru) is an objectivist. That is just weird on multiple levels. For one thing, it's another example of a right-libertarian being in the vanguard of what amounts to a left-libertarian vision. When I was at MIT the objectivists used to quite literally worship the $ sign, now we have one whose slogan is "free knowledge for free minds".

For another, the philosophy of wikipedia seems determinedly anti-objectivist, at least superficially. They disdain expertise and seem to expect that truth will bubble up from a crowd-based distributed process. This egalitarian attitude seems very un-Randian to me, although who knows, maybe it is objectivist on a deeper level.

Given that Wikipedia seems to have become the new default authoritative source of knowledge, it's guiding philosophy and structures of governance become exceedingly interesting and important. The fact that it's run by someone under the influence of a nuttily simplistic ideology is a wee bit disturbing. On the other hand, Wales does not seem to have the virulently rabid form of the objectivist meme, and it certainly hasn't interfered with the success of his efforts.

Word and concept of the day: agalmics

Another person tries to make a compact characterization of the economics of open-source and other freely copyable goods: (via Notional Slurry)

agalmics (uh-GAL-miks), n. [Gr. "agalma", "a pleasing gift"]

The study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods.

...

agalmia, n.

The sum of the agalmic activity in a particular region or sphere. Analogous to an "economy" in economic theory.

My own particular interest is in how open source economics interfaces with the "normal" economics of scarcity -- ie, while it's wonderful that software can be given away for free, until potatoes can reproduce themselves as easily it will be problematic for people working on open source to feed themselves. Back in the embryonic days of the FSF I made this argument, but nobody paid me much attention, and as it turns out my objections, while valid, did not stop open source from taking over the world. And many people seem to be able to support themselves while working on free software, one way or another.

I still suspect there is something screwy about the economics, and I'm not the only one. It seems like programmers are collectively undermining their own value in the for-pay economy, to the delight of big service corporations like IBM.

what we're seeing playing out among coders is what I'll term the Programmer's Dilemma. Because skills in open source programming are increasingly necessary to enhance the potential career prospects of individual programmers, individual programmers have strong motivations to join in - and as more programmers join in, the incentive for each individual programmer to participate becomes ever stronger. At the same time, the total amount of money that goes to programmers falls as open source is adopted by more companies. Individual programmers, in other words, have selfish motives to engage in collectively destructive behavior.