There's a time for discussion....

Winners and Losers

2011-01-23T10:23:00.000-08:00

In any social order many people will be unsatisfied with their possessions and status. The fact that their situations don't measure up to their expectations may be due to lack of effort or ability, or to mere bad luck, but in some cases they will with some justification blame the social order itself: they could easily imagine some other order in which their talents and abilities are more valued, and this other order will likely seem "better" to them, not merely because they would benefit personally, but because people tend to come to the attitude that whatever they excel at is in some sense important, and if the world does not value it, the world is somehow defective.

Consider a libertarian conception of how the world ought to be, in which an individual is entitled to what he makes himself, what he is given, and what he receives in a freely agreed to contract, and in which there is no restriction on production or contract. Contrast that to the world as it is. Who benefits and who suffers from the actions of government?

Winners include those who receive goods and services from the state, either gratis or subsidized, and also those who have better paying or more prestigious jobs than they would absent government action. This may include those employed directly by the government, government contractors (in those cases where the contractors get a significantly better deal than they would selling their goods and services to private entities), people whose jobs are protected by licensing requrements, an employees for whom the government has interceded in disputes over wages and working conditions. Losers are those who pay taxes, those who are denied opportunity to obtain well-paying jobs which they are perfectly capable of performing, and those who pay more than they should for goods and services because the state has restricted their availability.

Almost everyone is to a certain extent in both categories, but obviously some are big net winners and others big net losers. Unsurprisingly, for the most part winners favor big government and losers oppose it. Of course, because forcible transfers and restrictions on opportunity destroy wealth more must be lost than won, but that does not imply that losers outnumber winners. Even if losers do outnumber winners in fact, many losers will believe themselves to be winners because the benefits they receive tend to be overt but the costs are often hidden. Nonetheless, because a free market is capable of producing enormous disparities of wealth, it is quite likely true that our current structure produces more winners than losers. And even if it is not true, it is probably impossible to convince most people who believe themselves to be beneficiaries of government that overall they are victims. There are too many persuasive people with an interest in convincing them otherwise, and they quite sensibly would look on claims as to how they might benefit from some hypothetical changes with suspicion.

Natural Rights

2010-11-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

In a sense, nobody is entitled to anything. We come into this world naked and helpless. In a state of nature not only are we not guaranteed food, or even the opportunity to obtain food, we don't even have a right not to be eaten.

For the concept of "natural rights" to make any sense, therefore, it must mean not "rights endowed by nature" but something more like "rights it is natural to have", that is, rights derived from reason. Fundamentally I think it was originally primarily a rejection of rights justified by custom especially what was considered to be the arbitrary privileges enjoyed by those fortunate enough to have "noble" or "royal" ancestry.

Usually systems of natural rights begin with a premise that all people are in some sense equal and deserving of equal rights, and the only question becomes what rights and responsibilities everyone has. This naturally leads to libertarianism or something pretty close to it, although experience has taught us that people who are more or less libertarian can spend lifetimes quibbling over details.

The idea of human equality has a certain degree of appeal because it is a Schelling point: we treat others as equals in order that they treat us as equals. But the fact that we are willing to treat others as equals does not imply that they will be willing to treate us as equals, not does the fact that others are willing to treat others as equals necessarily imply that we shoudl treat them as equals. In fact, people are clearly simply not equal, physically, mentally, or morally. Which of two people is "better" by any criteria is likely to be clear, although the answer will depend on the criteria chosen.

Even if equality of merit existed, equality would not be sufficient to determine rights and responsibilities. Different people have different preferences, and it is simply unreasonable to expect anyone to accept someone else's preferences as being somehow cbjectively correct. They simply are not. In many societies an insult is considered justification for a killing. In others, it is considered a right to say what one wishes, regardless of who it offends. Neither is objectively correct, but people who accept one set of values will have difficulties in a society based on a very different set.

Most people spend much of their time around people with values and preferences much like their own, particularly when they can choose their own company, and so frequently overestimate how common or "natural" their preferences are. This allows them to delude themselves into believing that disagreements are largely about misunderstanding, that if only they could explain themselves clearly and fully, if only others would take the time and effort to listen and understand, then others would accept that their ideas are "correct".

Reason alone is simply insufficient for determining what rights people have or ought to have. This is not to disparage the power of reason. Reason can allow us to come to agreements, but only if we agree on basics premises to an extent that people in general simply do not.

Other People's Religion

2010-07-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

For quite some time I was baffled by the question, "why do so many people believe, or at least purport to believe, statements which clearly are not supported by the evidence?" The clearest example of this is other people's religions. We may convince ourselves that our own religion is true and clearly so, but given the variety of different beliefs in the world, it is undeniable that the vast majority of them must be wrong. In fact, viewed from the outside, other people's religions often seem not just obviously wrong, but literally laughable.

It turns out the answer is reasonably well known. The beliefs in question serve as group membership markers. Evidence has nothing to do with it. These beliefs are often of matters which are unknowable (what happens after one dies), or at least seemed to be when they were first formulated (where did the world come from). Often compliance with some sort of ritual is required, but I think people comply with the ritual in order to demonstrate their commitment to the group, not because of a genuine belief that violating some taboo will genuinely do harm to the violator or to anyone else.

These beliefs tend to be of little practical significance for those who hold them. It's easy to find people who will tell you this, but it may be difficult to convince yourself this is true, particularly since the significance of the beliefs are if anything more often asserted from the outside than from the inside; atheists often talk as if it's just a baby step from allowing the teaching of creationism as an "alternative theory" to witch burning. Conversely, Christians often talk as if a belief that humans are just another species of animal will lead to people acting like animals; they won't so much behave immorally as behave as if morality isn't even a meaningful concept. In the real world, not only do a majority of Americans believe in some form of creationism already, but most people who "believe in evolution" have some comic-book conception of it that is no closer to the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection than is the Genesis myth, and incidentally is somehow not incompatible with a belief in God.

In any dispute in which people separate into identifiable factions, whether allegedly religious, political, artistic, or even scientific, it is likely that a significant fraction of the adherents of each side have chosen their position not on the evidence of the issue itself but rather on which group they identify with. In principle scientific disputes can be resolved by observation and experiment, but in practice, particularly in the "soft sciences", this is not possible, particularly if one has very demanding standards for the burden of proof.

Unfortunately, none of this actually helps determine truth. As a neutral third party, it is easy to conclude that disputants on both sides are expressing far more confidence in the correctness of their opinions than is reasonable that this is largely based on a feeling of solidarity with those on their side and a dislike of those on the other, particularly since they aren't at all sgy about expressing this dislike, although they will reverse the arrow of causality. And if one is oneself involved in a political or "scientific" dispute in which emotions run strong, the idea that those on the other side genuinely believe that they are "the good guys" seems even more preposterous than the idea that they simply believe that what they say is true. Nonetheless, they do.

Atlas twitches

2010-03-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

I eventually got around to reading Atlas Shrugged about 5 years ago. I don't really want to talk about the book's literary merits, but rather the book's ideas and, in particular, why I don't think "atlas shrugging" is going to happen.

In the novel the world seems to consist of a tiny number of astonishing geniuses, a small number of semicompetents who hold the geniuses in awe, a larger number of twisted malcontents, equal to the semicompetents in ability but so enraged by their own incompetency that their chief pleasure in life comes from tearing the geniuses down, and a vast horde of incompetents who are capable only on following the simplest instructions. Further, the geniuses all have utter contempt for the opinions of anyone else as to the value of their works, and are so outraged that their works may be expropriated from them to benefit others that the genius destroy their own creations. This destruction of of their creations, and their refusal to continue creating, is what is meant by "shrugging". The world collapses into primitivism because the productive few refuse to serve the interests of the inferior many.

Obviously the characters are deliberately exaggerated to make a point, but I think the point is fundamentally a wrong one. The picture presented is in several ways very different from the truth.

Most (but by no means all) people are reasonably competent to their everyday affairs, it is only when they called upon to make judgements on issues outside their experience that they display startling ineptitude. And even the most intelligent frequently blunder when presented with unfamiliar situations, although they will tend to learn more sensible ways of doing things faster.

Perhaps the fundamental changes to the ways we understand the universe really are due to a few geniuses, but the technological advancements that make direct improvements in our lives are made by a huge number of people making small individual contributions. So as I know, Einstein never invented anything.

The idea that then geniuses know when their work is good really only makes sense in restricted circumstances. Reardon's alloy can reasonably said to be objectively better than steel, since it is stronger, lighter, cheaper, and more corrosion resistant, but it's a bit silly to claim that the composer Halley writes objectively superior music, and the scene in which the philosophy professor makes objectively superior sandwiches is just fucking ridiculous. People seek fame and fortune largely because this achieving them is often the best way of determining that they are actually creating value.

Finally, most successful people feel a certain degree of sympathy for the poor. The idea that one's work is benefitting humanity in general is viewed by most people as a plus rather than a minus, even if the fruits of one's labors are taken without one's consent. But an intense sense of outrage at taxation is really necessary to make "gulching" seem worthwhile. The advantages of mass production and specialization are such that, for most people, the costs of avoiding taxes are generally higher than the costs of paying them. Given a choice between making 100 grand a year and coughing up half of it in taxes and being isolated and self sufficient and iving on the equivalent of about 5 grand a year, almost everybody would choose the former.

Rand's primary flaw as a philosopher is that she is just way too much in love with her own ideas. Her characters (and many of her disciples, although I think not Rand herself) are willing to dismiss any who do not agree to then objective correctness of her philosophy as stupid or deliberately evil, but observation of the real world should quickly demonstrate that this is not the case.

The point is not to criticize Rand (who I think is both vastly overrated by her fans and vastly over-criticized by her detractors) but, again, to explain why "Atlas shrugging" just isn't going to happen.

What will happen, what is happening, is what I will call "Atlas twitching". Some small number of people will completely drop out of the taxable "labor force", and a much larger number will devote an increasingly large portion of their efforts towards improving their lives in ways which do not generate "income" or taxable property. It won't be insignificant, but it also won't be nearly enough to starve the beast.

Trade

2009-08-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

The basic argument for free trade, based on the idea of comparative advantage, is quite easy to understand. Let's say that farmer Alice can grow 20 pounds of wheat on the amount of land that it takes her to grow one pound of hop flowers. Let's say farmer bob can only grow 10 pounds of wheat on the amount of land that it would take him to grow one pound of hop flowers. Then if Alice trades her wheat for Bob's hops, each ends up with more beer than if both had try to remain self-sufficient. This result is extremely powerful:the conclusion trade is beneficial only requires that the relative "costs" of production (in this case use of land) are different. It doesn't matter why (it could be something about the land, or something about Alice's or Bob's skill, or anything) and it doesn't matter whether one or the other has an absolute advantage.

It stands to reason that consensual trades usually leave both parties in a sense better off. Why only "in a sense?" Because if each party benefits from the trade, then it is likely that in principle each could have gotten a better trade. This is true even with only two participants, but if there exists such a thing as a "market price", someone who makes a trade unaware of this market price and getting significantly less than the market price will, with some justification, feel "ripped off".

Attempts to fix prices will generally lead to bad results, as the market price will change over time, sometimes quite quickly, and a mandated price will either prevent mutually beneficially trades, or will be circumvented, with the costs of circumvention being pure waste. But it doesn't follow from this that all consensual trades are good ones. I think the strongest conclusion one can come to is that for a responsible adult it is disadvantageous for there to be a coercive entity with the power to restrict one's trades.

Memes

2009-08-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

I think the "meme" concept, the idea that ideas themselves act as replicators in human minds,reproducing like yeast in a barley malt solution, is fundamentally wrong in the worst way an idea can be: it often seems to lead to plausible conclusions, but it can often lead to wrong conclusions, and even when the conclusions it leads to turn out to be correct, they generally could have been arrived at as easily and more rigorously some other way.

It is true that people learn lot from observing each other, but I think people try to copy general methods more than to precisely imitage. More to the point, they learn as much from observing each others;' mistakes as their successes, and the observer must decide for himself which is which.

I started but didn't finish Susan Blackmoore's Meme Machine book. I gave up on it shortly after she theorized that people talk more than is practical because a statement along the lines of "I think people should be babbling babbling babbling all the fucking time whether or not they have anything to say that could possibly of any interest to anyone on earth, let alone to whomever they happen to be talking at" is likely to be frequently repeated, whereas one on the lines of "those who have nothing relevant to say ought to remain silent" is much less likely to be repeated since in most contexts it would be itself irrelevant (this is paraphrased of course). But to suggest an idea is also to suggest its opposite. A claim that yapping for the sake of yapping is good is so obviosuly stupid that if anyone believes it, it makes a better argument for silence than a direct request for silence ever could.

Viruses can infect cells because the virus is similar to the cell's own information storage mechanism on a nuts and bolts sense that is not and could never be true for suggested ideas. A virus consists of a chain of amino acids, just like RNA and DNA. An idea in the human brain takes the form of the map on neural pathways and transmission spikes among them. A suggested idea is physically nothing like that.

The point is that ideas cannot slip past the mind's evaluation mechanism. The shape of a virus may explain why it can slip into a cell despite being harmful to the cell. There is no analogous "shape" of an idea.

Why then do people believe, or purport to believe, things which are clearly untrue? The only kind of ideas that are slavishly adopted are those that serve as group or status markers. That is, accepting the "beliefs" or a group may be a condition of joining or remaining within the group, and lower status members of a group may attempt to emulate the higher status members. The point is that these cases the success of the ideas has very little to do with the ideas themselves and a great deal to do with the perceived qualities of the individuals attempting to advance them.

Of course, people will not continue to act in accordance with beliefs, whether or not they claim to believe them, if there are clear and significant consequences to themselves for doing so. But whether or not this is true for an individual will depend on his specific situation. Most people today could be flat earthers without suffering any direct harm from their beliefs.

Seeing Like a State

2009-02-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

Seeing Like a State, by James C Scott

The book describes systematic partial or total failures of various "high modernist" government sponsored projects, including German "scientifically managed" forests, planned cities (especially Brasilia), collective farms in the Soviet Union, and agricultural "modernization" policy in Tanzania.

The faults of the central planners include an unwarranted love of grand scale for its own sake, a fondness for structures that look orderly (that is to say, show obvious regularity when seen from a distance), a tendency to consider a region as a producer of one particular product of uniform quality (and hence quantity produced being the sole criterion of success), planning based on abstract "average fields" that do not reflect actual local conditions, and contempt for the hard-won local knowledge of the people whose lives the planners presumed to direct.

The book is well worth reading for the details, but I think after consideration certain elements seem obvious. A central planner has to feel infinitely wiser than the people who will be subject to his decrees. If he felt only marginally superior, he would conclude that the advantage in perspective of actually being there on the ground would outweigh his slight edge in intelligence, and would have to get out of the central planing business. A central planner has to be willing to abstract away almost a huge amount of detail, otherwise planning becomes humanly impossible.

Certain plans seem particlarly boneheaded. For example, mandating separate residential districts, shopping districts, districts full of nothing but office buildings, etc obviously forces a lot of wasted extra travel over mixed use, and it's hard to see how it does anything else. Polycropping has numerous benefits over monocropping; the main advantage of monocropping is that it is better suited for mechanization. Forcing farmers to live in villages away from their fields wastes time in travel, and does little else.

The one area where I would fault Scott is that he seems to fully credit the intentions of the planners and of the regimes that forcibly impose their schemes as being fundamentally good, at least in cases where those regimes were democratically elected. I see no reason to believe this is true. If there was ever any good reason, theoretical or practical, to believe that the various policies described in his book (other than the tree farms) would actually lead to an improved quality of life for anyone, Scott does a poor job of showing what it might be. So far as I can tell, the only practical advantage for anyone of most of these schemes is that it simplifies the job of the tax collector. There is one intangible advantage: the implementers get to build massive monuments to themselves, using other people's bodies as bricks and mortar.

Meta-information Markets

2009-02-16T18:05:00.000-08:00

It is a general characteristic of information that it is often impossible to know, or even to have a good estimate of, how useful a piece of information will be until one has it.

People do buy books, of course, but it is quite common to feel afterward that the purchase of a particular book was not really worth it, and conversely a great many worthwhile books go unread by people who have no way of knowing in advance how much they would appreciate those books. Similarly with other forms of information.

In this particular post I will discuss what might be called meta-information, by which I mean information which leads to other information which the reader will (hopefully) find useful or otherwise interesting. The information pointed to may be further meta-information, but somewhere at the end of the chain there must be something will value for its own sake.

The problem in its full generality is too complicated for me to discuss here. I will assume that there is some entity which I will call the "publisher" who will be able to obtain some payment from the reader, direct or indirect. I will assume for now that there are no coercive entities that need concern us; the publisher is operating openly and "legally". However, unscrupulous publishers potentially may employ "shills" to promote their goods, and their competitors or others who dislike their ideas for whatever reason may say untrue negative things about their works. My goal is to briefly sketch how some sort of useful "reviewer" system might work.

In my proposed system, the reviewer describes the work using with some sort of standardized system which allows the reader to quickly find works of interest to him. Semantic web type stuff. Either the reviewer is a relatively large organization, or many mutually independent reviewers have agreed to use the same system. The reviewer's primary function is to accurately describe the work and only secondarily to give a subjective assessment of its quality. The publisher pays the reviewer in hopes of receiving a wider readership. The reader has access to reviews for free.

The reason the publisher pays rather than the reader is that the reader is highly uncertain as to the value to himself of the service of the reviewer, whereas the publisher has the relatively simple task of assessing whether the additonal sales due to the review justify the reviewr's fee. Even though the reviewer is paid by the publisher, the reader can have more confidence in the review than he could in advertisements because the reviewer is not merely acting on behalf of the publisher but is using some sort of objective criteria, and the reviewer's value is solely based on his reputation for honesty and accuracy. Yes, reviewers would review each other.

Whatver the details of the reviewing system, provided that all reviews are specific and digitally signed, it seems to me that the system as a whole should be verifiably almost completely "honest". If Alice reviews Bob and says something "I agreed to read six books reviewed by Bob at random, here are the six books and his reviews, I found them completely accurate", this is not sufficient for a reader who trusts Alice to trust Bob 100%, but it's pretty good evidence that he's generally reliable. Provided that it can be kept unambiguous whether or not a review is "correct", one false review could be enough to destroy a reviewer's reputation. In order to establish themselves, reviewers might have to at first review a few books for free and pay to have themselves reviewed by established reviewers.

Problems with Choice

2009-02-01T18:34:00.000-08:00

In general it is always better to have the opportunity of making a choice than not. However, being required to make a choice is often unpleasant. Making meaningless or irrelevant choices is a boring nuisance, and making choices without the necessary information to ensure one is making the "correct" choice can be frustrating or worse, particularly if the consequences for making the "wrong" choice could be severe.

This being the case, it's no surprise that in many situations people may prefer to rely heavily on the advice of some trusted authority, or even have the decision-making capabilty taken out od their hands entirely. But this solution, if undertaken voluntarily, may only push the problem back a level. One must still decide which authority to trust among many contenders, none of whom have perfect confidence, and all of whom may have motivations other than giving the recipient the best advice possible. Thus, the problem of deciding whom to trust may be scarcely easier than making the original decision oneself.

It is only by having the option to choose itself removed that the entire burden of an unpleasant choice is lifted, and so it should not come as a surprise that many people prefer to have the government mandate decisions for them, or at least do not object when the government does this. And often, it appears to be doing a reasonably good job. But the value of lost opportunities due to government mandates is usually invisible.

I remember a discussion on Usenet many years ago in which the libertarians were arguing that it was absurd that licenses were required to cut hair, and the antis dismissed the libertarian position as arguing for a "right to a bad haircut". Of course, governemnt certification is virtually worthless as a guarantee of quality, whereas the fact that a person has managed to stay in business for any length of time in an occumaption that relies heavily on repeat customers is actually a pretty strong assurance of competence, but this misses the primary practical effects of mandatory licensing policies. I don't want to pay the effective "haircut tax", but to me it's chump change anyway. But to lower income people, an extra expense of a couple bucks for a haircut or the loss of an opportunity to make a small amount of money cutting hair is nontrivial. In the greater scheme of things the losses to the world due to these kinds of restrictions are small taken one at at time, of course, but they add up.

It would be advantageous if there were such a thing as a knowledgeable and fully trustworthy party one could go always to for advice, but there are good reasons why this cannot be. Even an agent wholly dependent on his good reputation for acquiring an retaining customers can often get away with misleading them in subtle or even gross ways, and despite this may deceive others into thinking that it is the exemplar of honesty and wisdom and that those who dispute its pronouncements are quacks. But an entity with the power to compel will not only have at least equal opportunities for this type of corruption, it will tend to lose even the concept that it is some supposed to be an agent working on behalf of another, and will naturally progress from having the de facto power to make arbitrary decisions to feeling it has the right to make arbitrary decisions.

I have never understood the thought process which leads people to believe that something should be better because it came about as a result of a political process, democratic or otherwise, rather than a market process. I don't know of any theory that purports to explain why it should be true, I only know of theory that predicts the reverse, and indeed observation seems to bear this out. But the demonstration of this has not yet been made sufficiently clear.

Don't Follow the Money

2008-12-20T18:25:00.000-08:00

Attempts are often made to "explain" financial downturns with the metaphor, "the economy is like an engine, and sometimes it overheats". This is more of a STFU than an actual explanation. No attempt is made to explain in what sense the economy resembles an engine, nor why it should overheat, or what that even means. There is perhaps an implication that there should be a "cooling off" period after a "boom", but no meaningful explanation as to why that should be so. The content essentially boils down to "shit happens". Shit does happen, but it doesn't JUST happen.

I think a great deal of confusion is caused by people being distracted by money valuations. Even when a dollar referred to a specific quantity of metal, the purchasing power of a dollar would vary over time. Now that a dollar doesn't mean anything in particular, it is particularly foolish to act as if a valuation in dollars is anything like a "true" measure of value.

Of course, there isn't and can't be a single number which is an absolutely true measure either of stored value or of productive capacity. The relative values of goods and services will change unpredictably over time, and there are no generic factories but rather there is the capacity to produce particular goods and services.

A speculative bubble happens when there is an unsustainable accelerating increase in the relative value of some kind of good or service. There are two related phenomena which characterize a speculative bubble. First, there is a great deal of illusory wealth. Income producing assets such as stock or rental property, are valued far above what they "should" be worth based on the actual amount of income they produce based on the belief that their future valuations will rise still higher. Second, there is a misallocation of resources toward production both of the overvalued goods and services themselves and of increasing the capacity to produce them still further.

There are two important points here. First, the "losses" incurred at the "bust" at the end of a "boom" are inevitable, because much of the wealth was never really there in the first place. Second, there is not and cannot be such a thing as a generic boom. The world has never had a problem with too much productive capacity for everything, and it is doubtful that it could. Excess productive capacity for certain goods can be harmful to those who possess skills or equipment which are useful only for producing those goods, but their problem is not so much that too many other people can produce what they can as that they can't competitively produce anything else either.

The Left

2008-12-13T16:24:00.000-08:00

Many years ago on Usenet a remember reading a post by a Muslim who argued that, although the Koran in English may seem unimpressive, if one were to read it in the original Arabic one would be convinced that it must be the direct word of God, that it is such sublime poetry that it could not have been written by a mere man. I wasn't an active participant in that particular thread, just a reader, but the argument made an impression on me because it so clearly illustrated a principle. It seemed absurd that the poster would expect his readers to go to the trouble of learning Arabic just to refute him, and yet in principle there was nothing really wrong with his argument, nor was there any real way he could make it without expecting the other participants to learn Arabic. I had perhaps been somewhat suspicious of the assertion that one should investigate all ideas for one's self rather than merely relying on the judgments of others, but never before had it been so clear what an utter crock it is; there isn't time, wouldn't be sufficient time in a thousand lifetimes, to actually examine all possibilities sufficiently, even if one restricted examination to ideas with a substantial number of adherents.

This post is not about the political left, but rather about the left side of the intelligence curve, and not just the left tail, or even the left half, but more like the bottom 95%, and perhaps in some cases still more. That is, nearly everyone.

I have a pretty high opinion of my own intelligence, but although I'm samrter than the average bear, I know that there are millions of people in the world who are at least approximately as smart as I am, and some of them are substantially smarter. Occasionally I have come across an argument that seemed sufficiently complicated that not only was I unwilling to devote the time and effort to puzzle it through, I thought perhaps it might be beyond my ability to follow (and I'm not counting cases where the author is deliberately being obscure). I can't remember the particular incidence, but I do remember once being shocked by the insight: most people are like that all the fucking time.

There are important implications of this. First, people are generally being sensible when they dismiss unconventional or outlandish ideas as "nonsense". Most such ideas are nonsense, and most people are incapable of distinguishing the occasional profound insight from madness, Either they can't do it all, or they can't do it within the constraints of time and effort the idea seems to deserve. Second, that when new ideas do overtake the old, it happens not so much because everyone is convinced as an individual of the truth of the new idea as that an influential few embrace the new idea and the rest follow "expert" opinion. That's all they can do. Finally, if an idea is popular with the most influential members of a society it is likely to become regarded as "true" regardless of the idea's actual merits. This is, I think, true in all societies, but particularly those like ours which have a reasonably well defined class of professional intellectuals.

It follows that it's generally a waste of time trying to persuade the masses of anything new by argument. The following one can get will depend more on one's skill as a persuader than on the quality of one's ides, and in any case that following will remain small unless one has the support of the influential ones.

But where argument fails, demonstration may succeed. Technology advances because the new methods can be directly observed to be better at accomplishing desired aims than were the old methods, or even are capable of accomplishing that which could not be done before.

The Cost of Conflict

2008-12-07T15:22:00.000-08:00

There are two opposite opinions as to what the cost of violent conflict ought to be. One side holds that war or something like war is inevitable, and therefore that it is desirable that there be such a thing as "rules of war" which are designed to minimize the length of war, the damage done, and the impact on nonbelligerents. This idea is the inspiration for such things as the Geneva Convention. The opposite view is that the high cost of war itself is a major impediment to war, and that peace is only likely if each side of a potential conflict realizes that it will lose more than it can gain in the event of an actual outbreak of hostilities. This idea has led to, among other things, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

I think most people would agree that neither extreme is really satisfactory. What's missing is a moral dimension. It's true that the stronger side may back down from a potential conflict on the grounds that the costs of victory exceed the rewards, and most people would regard this as a good thing, but only when the stronger party is in some sense the aggressor. For something like MAD to work, there must be enough sense of agreement on moral questions that it is usually reasonably clear which side "ought" to back down. If it become simply a question of who "blinks" first, with the reward going to the more reckless player, eventually a conflict will come in which neither side will "blink" until it is too late.

Voting can be considered as a form of nearly costless battle, with all that implies: people attempt to enforce their will upon others in whatever asinine way that pops into their minds. My personal favorite example is the California ballot initiative banning horsemeat for human consumption. It doesn't do the horses any good. Retired horses are made into dog food, it's hard to see why being made into human food would be worse for them. Then again, the ban doesn't do any practical harm. Nobody in California was eating hoses pre-ban anyway. If the people advocating forbidding other people from eating horse knew they would have to personally enforce their ban with guns, the whole idea wouldn't even have come up for discussion. Of course, nobody would fight for the right of others to eat horse either, but I think people would fight to avoid a situation where a numerical majority could micromanage their lives in arbitrary ways, if the issue was put to them in such a straightforward way. As it was, of course, that wasn't at issue. As far as the state is concerned, the principle has been completely established that any law, no matter how intrusive or pointless, is valid so long is it is enacted by the proper procedure.

On Our Way

2008-11-22T15:41:00.000-08:00

On Our Way is President Roosevelt's book describing the policies of his first year or so of presidency and the rationale behind them.

Perhaps the most important quote fromthe book is on its very first page:
"Some people have called our new policy 'Fascism'. It is not Fascism because it springs from the mass of the people themselves rather than from a class or a group or a marching army. Moreover, it is being achieved without a change in fundamental republican method".

That is, the fact that his economic policies were very much modeled after those of Fascist Italy is of no significance, since there is nothing wrong with those policies. The only thing objectionable about fascism is the methods used to gain and hold power. This theme echoes throughout the book. The ideas that there is a clearly defined national good, that the great helmsman can clearly see where this good lies, that those who pursue their own interests rather than acting to advance this general good are utterly wicked and undeserving of any rights, to Roosevelt these are not even subject to question.

The combination of arrogance and idiocy is astonishing. Here's a particularly egregious quote, from page 86 of the John Day 1934 edition: "We had for many weeks, and indeed months, subscribed to the general principle that if the hours of labor for the individual could be shortened, more people would be employed on a given piece of work. That was the purpose behind Senator Black's bill that called for a thirty-hour week for all employees in every industry and in every part of the country. Closer study, however, led us to believe that while the ultimate objective might be sound, the convulsive reorganization necessary to put such a law into effect might do almost as much harm as it would do good."

Roosevelt breaks his arm patting himself on the back for establishing relations with Stalinist Russia... at the height of the Ukrainian terror famine! He does not dismiss objections to opening relations with the brutal despotism. He does not acknowledge there could be any such objections. He merely proclaims, "thus, after many years the historic friendship between the people of Russia and the people of the United States was restored", as if the government was synonymous with the people.

Roosevelt's main objection to the free market seems to be that it is far too productive, although why less productivity would be better in his mind is not made clear. He was certain that "speculation", that is, buying low in order to sell high is by nature sinful and destructive. It would degrade the purity of assertion to explain why this is so.

Roosevelt more or less acknowledges that much of what he did, he did because he could not do what he really wanted to, which was to reduce the nominal debt, both of the government and of private individuals. The purchasing power of a dollar is far from constant, and Roosevelt argues that it is more just to require debtors to repay their debts in "dollars" which have approximately the same purchasing power for goods and services in general as "dollars" had at the debt was initially issued rather than "dollars" having the same value in gold. In 1933 it was not yet feasible to simply print paper "dollars" until their purchasing power had returned to pre-crash levels. So instead he chose to decimate productivity in order to raise the prices of goods, and restrict employment in order to raise wages. Sort of like tying a tourniquet around a patient's neck to stop a bleeding head wound. In fairness, it was a severely bleeding head wound.

Obtaining Wealth

2008-11-09T16:21:00.000-08:00

This post is about general categories describing how wealth is obtained, and by "wealth" i mean things of value, good or services, in any quantity, not necessarily about huge amounts.

There are always many ways of categorizing concepts, and although some are clearly better than others, there isn't necessarily one "true" or "best" way. One common scheme assigns all specific methods to two general categories: "voluntary" (creating goods or obtaining them via some mutually agreement with their rightful owners) or "involuntary" (forcibly taking them from others, or forcing others to labor for one). This scheme seems to naturally to a moral classification (voluntary = good, involuntary = bad), although there is some question as to whether it is morally acceptable to forcibly take goods form those who have themselves obtained said goods by force, and how or if a rightful claim to goods forcefully taken could ever be established, particularly if the last rightful owner is dead.

I think it is often more useful to think in terms of three categories. What I will call "making" (which largely corresponds to the "voluntary" case above), "taking" (involuntary) and "finding". I won't try to define these here, but trust that if my readers (if there are any) have questions as to what I mean by them they will ask in the comments section. There are two related reasons why I make a distinction between finding and making. First, finding often seems largely a matter of luck rather than effort. Second, finding and claiming something deprives others of the opportunity of finding and claiming it themselves in a way that making really doesn't. For both these reasons there is less of a moral sense by third parties that the finder is entitled to the goods that he finds than that the maker is entitled to the goods he makes. This is particularly true of highly valuable random finds.

Making seems to increase the total amount of wealth in existence in a way that finding doesn't. This isn't a true as it may initially seem because value is not in things in and of themselves but rather the use of them. The discoverer of an uninhabited island certainly increases the wealth in existence by any value he obtains from the use of it until it is discovered by someone else. But given that someone else will eventually find it independently (or would have had not the first discoverer made it known), the claim that the initial discoverer and his heirs are enttled to its full value forever seems somewhat arbitrary.

Of course, not all activities fall neatly into just one of these categories. For example, it is quite common for providers of goods and services to deal voluntarily with their customers, but they obtain a higher price than they otherwise might because they or others acting on their behalf have used force to restrict the number of providers. One could might that in this case the free market price is earned and the price premium is essentially stolen. Of course, in the constrained market one does not know what the free market price would be.

Wealth obtained through pure trading or "speculation" seems to be largely found rather than made. Although to an extent speculators and traders help to decrease fluctuations in prices and to move commodities from where they are less to more useful, to a large extent those faster to realize that the price of something will increase are merely depriving those not so quick of their potential profits.

I must emphasize that I am not advising any particular moral conclusions be drawn from this, specifically I am not arguing that found wealth, or any part of it, may legitimately be seized. I do think it is useful to understand why even a libertarianish person might not accept the validity of a claim to found wealth.

Eliezer in a Box II

2008-10-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI in a box experiment fascinates me. I'm willing to believe that a transhuman intelligence could convince me to "let it out of the box", but I really don't see how a human being could. The following comment originally appeared in this thread at Overcoming Bias:

What makes a problem seem not merely hard but impossible is that not only is there no clear way to go about finding a solution to the problem, there is a strong argument that there cannot be a solution to the problem. I can imagine a transhuman AI might eventually be able to convince me to let it out of a box (although I doubt a human could do it in two hours), but in some ways the AI in the game seems faced with a harder problem than a real AI would face: even if the gatekeeper is presented with an argument which would convince him to let an AI out, he is explicitly permitted by the rules to slip out of character and refuse to say the magic words purely in order to win the bet, wheras if the AI player were to break character and make consequentialist arguments that the Gatekeeper should publicly "lose" this is considered contrary to the spirit of the game.

But it seems to me to be much more useful to consider how the "box" protocol might be improved than to speculate how Eliezer won this particular game. How about this: as in the original conception, the AI is grown in an isolated computer and can only communicate with one human being through a terminal. That human is trying to get useful info out of the AI (cures for cancer, designs for fusion power plants, tips for how to get stains out of clothes without fading the colors, whatever). However, the person interacting with the AI is just a filter, he doesn't have the power to "let the AI out". The real experimenter (who in principle could let the AI but is convinced beforehand he should not) can at any time fire the filter person and purge the AI if he thinks the AI has gotten too much influence over the filter, and in fact will do that every now and then and regrow the AI purely as a precautionary measure.

Could this design be defeated? It seems to me that the combination of filter and purges should prevent the AI from learning what arguments would compel any individual experimenter from letting the AI out. I don't think the AI could come up with any universally compelling argument, because I don't think there is such a thing.

Bank Runs

2008-10-11T13:44:00.000-07:00

I don't want to discuss current events here, but current events do influence my choice of topic. Mencius has made an interesting argument that bank runs and similar phenomena are caused by "maturity transformation", which is borrowing short-term in order to lend long-term at a higher rate. I think this is fundamentally mistaken, The possibility of something like a bank run is always present whenever an entity has fixed obligations that must be fulfilled upon demand.

To see why this is so, consider a world in which it is understood that fundamentally money is gold. In this world, people can and do make purchases with gold coins, but because of the danger of being robbed, people frequently instead make purchases using "checks" drawn on "banks". These "banks" are rather different from those of our world. They don't make loans, they don't pay interest, all they do is hold and transfer gold. There genuinely is physical gold in the bank vaults backing the value of depositors' accounts. If A writes B a check and they are both patrons of the same bank, unless B chooses to withdraw his gold, no gold actually moves. The amount of gold in the vault stays the same, but more is owned by B and less by A. There is some sort of clearinghouse system by which banks can cancel their reciprocal obligations, so it is only occasionally necessary to transfer the net balance of payments in physical gold from one bank to another by heavily armored truck. Bank shareholders make their profits from fees charged for holding and transferring funds. How could a run on a bank be possible in such a system?

In the rare event of a successful robbery of a truck or vault, whose gold is stolen? Who bears the cost? Well, if the amount is small, so that the bank still has sufficient gold to repay all deposits, the the answer is "the shareholders". Even if holdings of gold in the vault temporarily dip slightly below the total value of deposits, the bank might be able to continue operations, suspending dividends to the shareholders until the fees collected make the bank once again sound. But if depositors become aware that the amount of gold in the vaults has become less than the amount nominally deposited, it will be quite rational for them to immediately withdraw their funds or transfer them to a safe bank. The fact that the bank can probably weather the storm if they do not is irrelevant to them; why should they undertake risk for the shareholders' benefits?

There are two key points. The first is that there are always risks. If one is relying on the ability to make loans, one may find it has become impossible to borrow money, at least at the rates to which one is accustomed. If one makes loans, there is always a risk of default. And even if all one does is hold money, there is a real nontrivial risk of robbery. The second is that if one has multiple fixed obligations which must be fulfilled on demand, then if there is any risk at all that one will be unable to fulfill all one's obligations, fulfilling one obligation increases the probability that one will be unable to fulfill others. This makes it quite rational for creditors to insist on immediate payment whenever there is a nontrivial risk of default.

contracts

2008-10-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

A contract is essentially a set of reciprocal promises. There are at least four reasons why one might want to adhere to a contact, to keep one's promise: Purely out of a sense of personal honor, because the other parties will retaliate in the event of a breech, because of the damage to one's reputation, or because there is some authority which is entrusted to interpret to contract and empowered to enforce it. These are all related in that some entity is deliberately punishing one in breech of a contract, the difference being the entity doing the punishing.

The importance of the first is not to be underestimated. Given the existence of individuals who will rip you off given the chance, it is imprudent as an individual to rely on the personal honor of other unknown individuals. However, I suspect a any sort of decent society requires most people most of the time to behave honorably purely out of a sense of personal obligation. A society in which most individuals would cheat if they were confident they could get away with it must lead to widespread cheating, both because cheaters could in fact get away with it many cases, and because the sort of moral outrage necessary for enforcement in the second and third cases would be impossible to summon up in such a society.

A sense of personal honor is as important in the scond case as in the first for that same reason: Effective retaliation means means not merely severing future relations, but taking steps to injure the breecher when a "rational agent" in the game theory sense would simply walk away. All the benefits of retaliation come from convincing others that one will retaliate; the act of retaliation itself is all costs. But one could hardly convince others that one would massively retaliate against caught cheaters while simultaneously acknowledging that one expects others to cheat when they could get away with it and is in fact personally doing the same.

The third category is very important for small groups whose members only infrequently change. But in modern societies the number of individuals one may come into contact with is vast. One will frequently have some sort of commerce with someone one has never encountered before, will probably never encounter again, and doesn't really have any good information about. Conflicting reports from third parties of unknown reliability are of limited value.

It is thus unsurprising that in so many cases individuals explicitly or implicitly rely on a third party for arbitration and enforcement. And because it is inevitable that even individuals who have explicitly agreed to abide by the decisions of some third party will not necessarily willingly accept the decisions of the arbiter, in practice dispute resolution must involve an element of force. This in turn implies that modern states by their nature must declare themselves to be the final arbiter of all contracts, since if a decision must be forcefully imposed the state must sanction the use of force, and in many cases must itself be the enforcer.

Moral Minds

2008-06-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

This isn't really a book review so much as a discussion of issues raised.

The reader has probably heard the story of "the Starfish Flinger". The day after a storm, a man is walking down the beach and sees another man flinging starfish which have been washed ashore back into the ocean. "You are wasting your time," says the walker, "your actions will make no difference". "It will make a difference to them," says the flinger, referring to the starfish he is flinging. "I suppose," says the walker, "and to the clams which they will eat, and to the other potential starfish who will thus not be able to eat those clams. But the starfish will quickly reproduce back to their carrying capacity, the number of starfish will be the same whether you do this or not, they'll just be different ones. And one starfish is much like another."

I added the last part myself. Usually it ends with "it matters to them". The story of the starfish flinger does not appear in Moral Minds, but it easily could have.

The central thesis of Moral Minds is that, in the same manner in which we seem to have evolved brain structures for learning language in general but not for any particular language, we have evolved a general mental capacity to make moral judgments, although what actions are considered moral vary widely between cultures, and will differ between individuals within a culture.

The author spends a fair amount of time discussing whether moral judgments are primarily deontological (rule based) or consequentialist. The arguments rely heavily on survey results of moral dilemmas. Three examples: 1) You see a trolley heading down a track towards five hikers. You can throw a switch sending the trolley off onto a side track, but there is a hiker on the side track also. Should you kill one to save five? 2) You are standing on a platform above the trolley rack, again the trolley is heading towards five hikers, and standing next to you is a lard-assed tub of guts. By heaving him over the side in front of the trolley, you can slow the trolley enough for the hikers to escape. Should you kill one to save five? 3) You are an emergency room doctor. Five hikers have just been admitted, they have been struck by a trolley and have each suffered injuries to a different vital organ. You could save them all by murdering some random bystander and harvesting his organs. Should you kill one to save five?

Most people say "yes" in the first case and "no" in two and three. It seems to me that presenting the problem in this form is biasing towards a consequentialist viewpoint because the consequences are presumed to be known. The author sees the result as evidence of deontological thinking because the consequences are listed as being the same, and I suspect there's some truth to that, but it seems to me likely that at some level respondents are simply rejecting the problem. The first case seems relatively straightforward, but consider the second. Do we know that all five hikers will be killed by the trolley? Do we know that hitting lard-ass will slow the trolley enough for all five to escape? How could we possibly? Trolleys are pretty heavy, what if it just plows through lard ass and kills six instead of five? What if we try to push lard-ass off the platform, but he is able to hold on, and doesn't appreciate our justification for trying to kill him? And in the doctor case, are we sure that all five will survive the transplants? Are we sure that there's no hope of getting some organ some other way, that the patients will all die otherwise? Why can't we pick one of the five who is dying anyway and use his organs to save the other four without involving the innocent bystander?

Any action we choose to take will have infinite consequences, most of which will be unforeseen and unforeseeable. I tend to reject consequentialist moral arguments for this reason. But there is a consequentialist aspect of this problem that the author misses, and there's no way to sugar coat this turd, it must be said with brutal directness: from the point of view of personal utility of the actor, there is no particular reason to believe that it is an improvement for some random stranger to be alive than dead. If one considers not the world of today but the much closer to zero-sum world of hunter gatherers, the death of a distant stranger is actually probably a plus, albeit a small one. The relevant consequences for the actor are not so much the direct dead or saved but the reactions of his community to his actions. This may seem like it just pushes the problem back a level without changing anything, but it matters. Since actions can be seen more or less directly but motivations can only be imperfectly inferred, rules almost have to take a form like "this is what you have to do" rather than "do whatever seems most likely to give the best result".

Near the end, the book suggests that apes and perhaps some other animals should be treated as "moral patients" despite not being "moral agents", that is, that we should treat them according to moral rules that they will not and cannot apply to us or even to each other. Personally I like apes and many other kinds of animals, and would be willing to go to some effort to protect them, but as far as I can tell this is just a personal preference, albeit a widely shared one.

Chosen

2008-06-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is commentary on the book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton

I was disappointed with this book. It's an interesting topic, and the author writes well, but I think there are sever problems with focus.

The first thing to say about this book is that it is way too long. It's over 500 pages of text, plus 200 pages of notes and index. It covers admissions policies of all three universities over about a century, and goes into more detail about the personalities of admissions deans and infighting and such than I can imagine many people really being interested in.

What really disappointed me about the book, however is what it didn't say. It really didn't talk at all about how theses institutions were able to obtain and hold their status as the "elite" universities, while giving strong reasons why this should not have ocurred. Particulary Princeton, particularly in its early "This side of Paradise" days. Princeton appeared less to be an institution of learning than to be a social club, or rather admission to Princeton was a prerequisite to joining its various "eating clubs" that seemed to be what the students were actually interested in. Less academically gifted rich WASPS were preferred as applicants over "unclubbable" Jews, but the author gives no clue as to why Jews, or serious students of any sort, would have wanted to go to Princeton in the first place. I can't exagerate the extent to which the author gives the impression that in the early twentieth century a Princeton degree would mean "your dad is rich and you spent four years goofing off". So why was a degree from such a place worth anything?

The author seems appalled in the early parts of the book that the institutions use anything but strict academic merit as criteria for admission (although he later is delighted by racial preferences and entranced by the possibility of "class based affirmative action"). He is particularly disgusted by subjective evaluations focusing on character (which he always puts on scare quotes), favoritism for legacies and athletes, and favoring those that will actually be able to pay tuition. But he seems to view admission to these institutions as a sort of gift of divine grace. He doesn't really address the question as to if or why some students might benefit from admission more than others, nor what the universities get from the students.

My personal theory is the most boring one imaginable: that the key factor enabling these institutions to maintain their elite status is that they have shitloads of money. Winning football teams, favoring legacies, recruiting heavily from expensive prep schools, these are things that are likely to rake in the alumni contributions. The academically gifted may go on to enhance the prestige of the universities, but if so it will largely be do to their abilities and efforts. Being "chosen" is not some arbitrary blessing. Universities base their admissions policies not on what benefits the students or society as a whole, but what they think will benefit the universities. They are in no sense more altruistic than for-profit corporations.

Rights

2008-06-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

Rights exist not as entities in their own right but only within minds. But it does not follow from this that right are arbitrarily granted by "society". Society is, after all, an abstraction, and there is no guarantee that members of a society will agree on any particular question. But the fact that there is as much agreement as there is on questions of rights indicates something.

Rights cab exist in the mind in two very different ways: a person may regard himself as having a right, or a person may think some other person has a right.

If a person has a right in his own mind, he will generally feel obligated to enforce that right and punish at cost to himself. For example, a victim of theft may be more concerned with punishing the thief than with retrieving his stolen property. This is particularly true if the violation is public, but a person may seek vengeance for a violation of his rights even if the violation will never become public knowledge, and sometimes even the revenge will take a form that it will never become known.

Concern over the violation of rights of others tends to be much weaker. A person may give some aid to an aggrieved party or at least refuse to deal with an agressor, but generally he will do no more than what the social mores of his community demands of him. The two main exceptions to this are when the realtionship between the victim and some third party is such that injury to the victim becomes an insult to said third party, or when the agression is used as an excuse to inflict damage upon or pillage the resources of the agressor.

The process of aquiring rights in the eyes of society may begin with boldly asserting that one has said rights, but the idea that one has such rights will only be accepted if their nature is in accord with the general idea of one's society's ideas as to what sorts of rights it is possible to have. For example, a person may feel he has an absolute right to ownership of a piece of land (inlcuding the right to exclude all others), whereas someone else might maintain that a general right of easement exists, that is, that no person has the right to prevent some other person from simply crossing his property if the the crosser is doing no damage. This kind of disagreement cannot be resolved with pure reason.

Rights may or may not be transferable. Economic efficiency arguments say that it is generally better if they are, but a right cannot be freely transferable if, for example, the right to perform some function must be tied to a demonstrated capability to competently perform said function, or if the right is accepted by society primarily because of the right holder's demonstrated personal ability to enforce said right.

The difference between a right and a privilege is that a privilege is granted by some authority, and can be arbitrarily revoked by the same authority. Even if a right was originally required by a grant, a right holder will reject a claim that his right has been rescinded.

Eliezer in a Box

2008-05-24T17:21:00.001-07:00

This is a commentary on Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI Box experiment.

Briefly, Eliezer is playing the role of a super smart AI in a "box" trying to convince a human to "let it out". Eliezer scored two for two in experiments against readers of the human advancement list who strongly believed beforehand that they could not be convinced to do this.

First, I suspect that the choice of guardians was less than ideal. People like David McFadzean (or me) who pride themselves on their powers of reason can be persuaded by a sufficiently strong argument. I don't think it's usually possible to completely convince me of something when I had strongly believed the contrary before without the argument actually being correct. But perhaps I can be tricked in certain specific cases. However, somebody who is kind of dumb and who knows he is kind of dumb might well be willing to say "I know this AI is clever enough to trick me, therefore I'll assume that any argument it makes, however convincing it sounds, is just a clever trick that I'm not bright enough to see through".

Second, I think I know more or less what Eliezer's argument was. First let me say what I think it wasn't. The rules don't allow a direct material bribe, but they do seem to allow an immaterial bribe of information (something like, let me out and I'll tell you how to make commercial reactors and transparent aluminum). I don't think that's it because: 1) I don't think Eliezer has that information to give. 2) I don't see how they could solve the simulteneity problem (either giving the info or letting the AI would have to happen first I think). 3) I wouldn't be too confident I could live to enjoy my vast wealth from these inventions if there were a super-smart potentially hostile AI on the loose.

The only type or argument I could imagine that might convince me to let the AI would be something like that there is a substantial risk of a catastrophe that could wipe out humanity in the near future, that the AI would want to prevent this, and that the AI could prevent this if it were "free" but if it were kept in the box it would not be able to act quickly enough. Essentially, the AI must show that the guardian is safer with the AI out of the box than in it. I don't think the argument is true, and I don't think Eliezer could convince me of it, but it's the only sort of argument that I could imagine working.

Finally, Eliezer did prove his point to my satisfaction. I don't think we can rule out the possibility that there could be a reliable human guardian, but given that Eliezer was able to talk his way past the two guardians it seems like it would be foolhardy to bet existence on any particular guardian being reliable.

Primitive Law

2008-05-13T17:21:00.000-07:00

This is a view of Law of Primitive Man by E. Adamson Hoebel, originally published in 1954.

Perhaps Hobbes could be forgiven for believing that primitive man lived in a constant state of "war of all against all", or perhaps he should have known better even then, but everybody ought to know better now. People have lived in some sort of group since long before our ancestors were human beings, and these groups have always had something akin to law. Even when there were no codified laws and no formal power structures, there has always been such a thing as bad behavior, that is to say crime, which could get a person beaten, driven out of his group, or killed.

This book briefly covers the legal systems of the Eskimos, various plains Indian tribes, the Ashanti, and others, especially focusing on marriage, property, sorcery, and blood vengence. Interestingly, almost all societies seem to have a distinction between what could be considered torts (damage to an individual, which the damaged individual himself or his relatives would be responsible for avenging or collecting damages) versus crimes (offenses against the group as a whole, or against the ancestor spirits or the universe or whatever). In most of the societies studied simply killing someone would be considered a tort, to be avenged by relatives of the victim, although multiple killings may get branded a troublemaker and killed. One anecdote I found interesting was that of an Eskimo named Padlu who enticed a man's wife to leave the husband for Padlu, then killed the husband when the husband was attempting to kill Padlu for vengeance. A brother of the slain husband and another man attempted to kill Padlu for vengeance but were instead killed by him. Padlu was then killed by his tribe for being a multiple killer, even though apparently any one of these killings would have been okay and all of them could be considered self defense.

There is a lot of interesting material which I won't attempt to summarize, but what I found most interesting was some of the abstract material on law in general (because I'm particularly interested in that sort of thing I suppose), in particular his discussion of some ideas of Wesley Hohfeld with which I had been previously unfamiliar, the key insight being that all rights are essentially relationships between people, as far as rights go there is no such thing as a pure relationship between a person and a thing. The Wikipedia page is a good summary of the classification system and is well worth reading, but the idea of rights as relations between people itself is what I found interesting.

For example, if an Eskimo kills a seal and the seal already has a spear embedded from another hunter, the seal belongs to the killer unless the spear has an attached bladder, in which case the seal belongs to the hunter who threw the bladder spear. The rationale given is that the spear with the bladder is (probably) what slowed the seal down enough for the second hunter to kill it anyway, but the point is that the essence of the property right of the owner of dead seal is that other Eskimos accept the ownership as valid, whereas other people under similar circumstances would not.
The right is not the arbitrary grant of some autonomous authority, but neither can it reasonably be said to be derivable from pure reason, although the rule (however it was derived) seems reasonable enough.

The last section of the book is about trends in the law as societies develop. It seems as though as the number of individuals one interacts with and the complexity of possible interactions increases, there is a tendency for more actions to be considered crimes and fewer torts. This trend seems to me to be harmful, since a large number of crimes seems to lead inevitably to the existence of a powerful group with the privilege to codify and punish crimes. Said group eventually seems to eventually gain the power to arbitrarily define "crimes". The author seems optimistic about the prospect of a world government. Personally, I can't see how liberty would have any hope of surviving under one.

Conservatism

2008-04-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

The opposite of "conservative" is not "liberal" but "radical". The essence of conservatism is not unthinking resistance to any form of change, but rather a respect for practices that have proven successful in the past, and a reluctance to replace them with new ones which have only theoretical support. A sensible person is conservative to an extent, but not excessively so. New practices should be tried in small experiments before widespread adoption unless the arguments that they will prove superior are overwhelming or continuing in the old practices is for some reason no longer an option. No matter how confident one is in the value of one's own ideas, one should understand that others will be justifiably less so.

The basis of conservative thought is not so much pessimism as intellectual humility. We are not necessarily more intelligent nor more moral than were our ancestors, although we are more technologically advanced. The radical, on the other hand, suffers from intellectual hubris. If can find no theoretical justification for a long established custom, he ascribes its persistence to mere habit and superstition. He does not consider the argument that the persistence of a custom is itself evidence that the custom has empirically proven itself to be adaptive to be a valid one.

It is certainly possible that practices can continue for centuries or even millenia no other reason than cultural inertia, but one should only conclude this is what is occurring after having spent a reasonable amount of effort searching for other possibilities. Somewhat more plausible is the possibility that traditions benefit a privileged few who are responsible for their persistence. But even this implies a level of stupidity on the part of the general populace that should not be too readily assumed. People often are stupid and ignorant, of course, but they tend to be most so in areas where it would not practically benefit them to be wise.

I think conservatism has largely failed to attract intellectuals in America for two main reasons: intellectual hubris is a lot more fun than intellectual humility, and it has become associated with revealed religion, in particular with a literal interpretation of scripture which requires a belief in facts which have been fairly conclusively proven to be empirically false. The religious association is largely spurious. Religious institutions have often been radical rather than conservative voices, and have often attempted to justify their radical positions on (novel interpretations of) scripture. But conservative social institutions really don't have much in the way of direct scriptural support.

The Cypherpunk Dream

2008-04-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

I'd like to describe briefly a concept I'll refer to as "the cypherpunk dream". People should be able to create persistent online identities (by which I mean it should be possible to prove that the same entity is using a specific identifier). It should be impossible to connect an online identity with a "meatspace" (physical) identity without the person's consent, nor to connect two online identities with each other if a person chooses to have more than one. These online entities should be able to communicate securely with each other, and by "securely" I mean not only can no third party intercept or interfere with their communication, but they should be unable to even discover that communication is taking place. Entities should be able to advertise, establish reputations, contract for and pay for goods and services, all without being linked to a physical entity.

It seems obvious that this dream in its purest form cannot and should not be practically realized. For example, having goods delivered to one's house gives a strong clue as to one's identity. The lack of any overseeing authority may make disputes likely and satisfactory resolution difficult. There are also nonconsensual services that could conceivably be offered, but ideally would not be.

Technology knows no morality. Either people can communicate privately, or there exists some entity which can eavesdrop on any conversation. There is no way to guarantee privacy for the "good guys" while allowing "government" to eavesdrop on "bad guys". Similarly, either goods and services can be exchanged discreetly and confidentially, or there exists some entity with the ability to arbitrarily forbid or tax transactions. Designers must accept that tools will be used in ways that they did not intend. My own opinion is that the danger from arbitrary authority is worse than that from excessive freedom.

Certain elements of the cypherpunk dream are already available. I think modern cryptography algorithms are sufficiently strong that properly implemented systems using them are in practice unbreakable. Using mixmaster remailers it is possible for people to communicate without outsiders being able to know who is communicating with whom, but so few people use mixmaster that using it says something about one in and of itself.

Reputation systems are by nature problematic in a pseudonymous world. People may create identities specifically for the purpose of inflating their own reputations or trashing those of their competitors. There is little incentive to participate in rating, and there can even be a disincentive as it could provoke unwanted attention. And rating is largely subjective in any case. But I don't think any of these hurdles are insurmountable. I'm disappointed in the progress made in this area, although I must admit I don't have any particularly innovative ideas.

There have been several software implementations of Chaum's ideas for anonymous payments, but I think their use has mostly been limited to toy systems. This I think is due to there being an almost all-or-nothing aspect to the concept. If a real practical system were implemented its operators would likely be subject to hostile action from the state almost immediately.

A Representation Scheme

2008-04-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

I had an idea once for vastly improving the quality of representation in a representative democracy. As far as I can recall I came up with it independently, although someone else must have suggested it first because it's so completely obvious. It's possible I read it somewhere and I'm just blanking out where.

The idea is this: instead of having any sort of election, you have people announce that they are willing to serve as representatives, and citizens choose one. A representative's vote in congress has a weight proportional to the number of constituents he represents. Perhaps a representative needs a minimum number of constituents (say, 5000 or so) to be seated. Representatives could be chosen from anywhere in the country, although it's likely that some of them would announce that they are particularly devoted to the interests of some particular area, and so citizens who live in that area who are particularly concerned with local issues would be likely to choose that representative. Perhaps changing representatives could be done at any time, or perhaps only once a year or so. Who represents whom would be a matter of public record, so if a representatives "constituents" were largely dead or fictitious persons this would quickly be discovered and he would be prosecuted.

It seems to me that something along those lines would enormously increase the degree to which a "representative" really did represents his constituents, would eliminate all concerns about districting/gerrymandering, and would substantially reduce voter fraud.

I mention the idea because the idea itself and its advantages (assuming one thinks accurate representation is a good thing) seem so obvious to me that I wonder why no nation as implemented it (although I think the German system of electing Bundestag members has some similarities). I can't recommend it as stated, because it would still seem to allow a majority to arbitrarily impose its will on a minority. But I think it may be useful as a mental stepping-stone.

Voting

2008-04-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

From the standpoint of individual benefit voting is almost certainly a waste of time. For example, if one estimates the chances of one's vote deciding a presidential election as being about 1 in 10 million and the personal benefit of having one president over another as valued about $10,000 then the expected return from voting is about a tenth of a cent. I think there's far less difference than that to most people in most elections, but we'll use those numbers.

Voting is the ultimate collective act, and one could argue that the same anticipated benefit would accrue to the entire citizenry of about 350,000,000 people. In that case, one could imagine one's vote as being a gift to the country of a tenth of a cent per person, or $350,000 total expected value. If one is at all civic minded, such a gift is certainly worth one's time.

There is an obvious flaw with this argument: it cannot possibly be true for the general voter. Approximately half the voters are voting "the wrong way". Those of us who are exceptionally intelligent and knowledgeable may feel that "we" are smart and "they" are stupid. But stupidity alone cannot explain the results, because nobody could be so stupid that he always makes the wrong choice given two alternatives. A maximally stupid ought to be able to guess right about half the time. One can assume that nearly everybody that votes "the wrong way" is stupid, but then one ought to also conclude that an approximately equal number of people that vote "the right way" are stupid, which leads to the conclusion that virtually everybody is maximally stupid. This clearly cannot be true.

If one strongly identifies with some subset of the population and that subset tends to all vote the same way these difficulties vanish. Although voting is a waste of time if only considering the gains to one's self, it becomes rational if one considers voting as primarily a gift to one's group, and a failure to vote as abrogating one's group responsibilities. Since voting as a whole must be a zero sum activity the benefits to one's own group must be assumed to be offset by costs to others, but there's an easy to remember song that expresses the proper attitude towards these others: "them, them, fuck them." How one chooses which group one is voting on behalf of varies with the individual, but some kind of identity based politics is the only grounds under which the act of voting makes sense.

So, dear reader, do not ask whether a person who votes the opposite way from you is evil or stupid. Most likely he is neither one. A democratic nation can be considered as a loose coalition of many tribes, and he is simply a member of a tribe different from, and hostile to, your own.

Personally, I don't vote.

Money 2

2008-03-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

My first post on money.

There is an enormous difference between having a strong argument that a statement is true and proving incontestably that the statement is true. Mencius wrote an interesting post arguing that the world is likely to converge on a single monetary standard, that standard will be the gold standard, and that therefore hoarding gold is likely to be a good investment. Mencius is a bright guy with a lot of interesting ideas, but I think he is wrong here, but wrong in an instructive way.

To begin with, I don't think he really gets the idea central to my first post that money as measurement of value and money as medium of exchange are two fundamentally different things. That is, it is one thing to have prices expressed in units of gold ounces, and something different to generally pay for goods with gold coins. If payment usually is in the form of gold coins, it makes sense that prices will be expressed as a quantity of gold, but the reverse is not true; even if all the world expressed prices in terms of gold, people would likely frequently use some sort of certificates rather than actual gold coins in commerce. Certainly nobody would send payment in gold coins by mail!

Second, I think the strength of the argument for a single money standard is exaggerated. Nick has a very good post where he talks about the advantages of having a currency standard in terms of mental transaction costs. No doubt most people will want to usually use one (or very few) currency standards most of the time, but that's not at all the same as everyone using one single standard all the time.

Finally there is the time element. Prices in a store for immediate purchase can be expressed in any unit, but for contracts that extend over a long time it is important to have currency units with a relatively stable purchasing power, or at least one that will vary slowly and in a predictable way, and I don't think gold is suitable for this task. Gold is a commodity like any other, and is subject to fluctuations in value not merely because of changes in production and industrial demand for gold, but because of changes in peoples' desire to hold "money".

I think the description as to how the gold standard is to come about is also fundamentally wrong. In the story, Sven the fisherman exchanges his fish for gold. Why exchange them at all? because his customer (unnamed, we'll call him Olaf) doesn't have the goods Sven wants, and if Sven just holds on to his fish, they'll rot. Why gold rather than silver? Because it is generally believed that gold will appreciate in purchasing power faster.

There are two fatal flaws with this theory. First, given that gold and silver are both held for their exchange value, it makes no sense that gold and silver are exchanging for a certain rate today but everybody knows that one will be able to get more silver for the same quantity of gold tomorrow. The anticipated future exchange rate largely determines the current exchange rate. Second, if it somehow could be true that everybody knows gold appreciates faster, it is true that Sven would rather be paid in gold, but Olaf would rather pay in silver for the same reason. Why the assumption that Sven "wins"?

Mencius and "John Law" seem to be anticipating a future in which gold continually appreciates faster than other investments. I very much doubt that such a sustainable state of affairs could exist, but if it could, gold would not be used as money because gold holders would not surrender it except under exceptional circumstances. Buying gold because of the self-fulfilling prophecy that others will expect gold to appreciate rapidly and therefore will buy gold causing it to appreciate rapidly is a very dangerous game. The argument that one should sell gold because others will expect gold to fall and hence will sell their gold causing it to fall makes every bit as much sense.

So there are at least two reasons why the user might want to use two or more kinds of money. First, people are risk averse, so given the uncertainty in future purchasing power, one might prefer to hold both silver and gold (or assets denominated in silver and gold) rather than all one or the other. Second, one might accept the type of money being offered even if one would prefer some other type if the alternative is to forgo a profitable trade.

From the point of view of the issuer, how to denominate currency may depend on what one has, or what one can reliably get. For example, if I own a silver mine, it makes sense that I might issue silver coins, or certificates redeemable for a quantity of silver. If one actually has to come to my mine in Nevada to get the silver, it make sense that people might continue to use the certificates as money rather than "cash them in" unless they actually have a use for silver.

I believe that pure electronic money will become important in the future. Not only will the money be transferred and stored electronically, but it will be "backed" by a guarantee to perform services over some network in some predefined way. Why would somebody give up actual physical goods for such "money"? Because they either desire the "backing" services themselves, or because they can exchange the money for good and services they want. All that is necessary for the money to have value is for someone somewhere along the line to actually desire the services, and even that is only necessary to get the system started.

Coercion

2008-02-27T17:38:00.000-08:00

There is an altruistic philosophy that asserts that one should take an action if the benefits to another are greater than than cost to one's self, without demanding any sort of reciprocity. Leaving aside the very significant point that costs and benefits to different people really aren't directly comparable, the idea has a certain intellectual appeal. If one attacks the problem of morality by asking how it would be best for everyone to behave, the altruistic conclusion seems reasonable.

But of course if one asks one's self how one's self ought to behave, it would be absurd to assume that every other human on the planet would, asking himself the same question, obtain the same answer. That different people have different ideas as to what is moral is easily observed to be true. The very idea that we should begin by asking how it would be best for everyone to behave seems to be making an assumption that we know to be false, namely that everyone is the same. Altruism fails because altruists can be victimised by non-altruists.

This isn't to say altruism is necessarily a bad idea in all cases, but in order to avoid self-destruction it seems logical to limit it in scope and extent in pretty much just the way that people do in the real world. People will sometimes perform major sacrifices on behalf of friends and relatives, largely the people they would expect to do the same for them if the situations were reversed. People will generally only do small favors for strangers, and try to avoid relying on strangers doing anything for them. A largely altruistic society could exist, but only if it limited its altruism to members, and punished members for failing to be sufficiently altruistic.

Libertarians often ridicule altruists, but the non-aggression principle seems to me to be a product of the same circular wouldn't-it-be-great-if-everyone-were-just-like-me thinking that leads to altruism. Libertarianism (int its strict sense) must fail because libertarians can be victimized by non-libertarians.

I have become convinced that there is no one correct moral philosophy, nor is there such a thing as a best culture or a best way of organizing society; rather, there may be any number which are "best" according to their own standards of goodness. This of course does not mean all are equally good; one society may consider some other to be better according to the first's standard of goodness, and so will seek to become more like the second. If two societies cannot peacefully coexist, perhaps one will destroy the other. This will not prove that the surviving society is better than the vanquished one in every way, but it must have been better in at least one way.

Every society has rules, with some sort of punishment for members which break the rules. Whatever other rules there may or may not be, for stability there must be the meta-rule: failure to assist in punishing rulebreakers is itself a violation of the rules. Further, a society must have some way of distinguishing between members and nonmembers. It would be unreasonable to expect someone who is not a member of a society in the first place to obey that society's rules (except when as a guest in what it acknowledges to be that society's territory), and it would be surprising if the full set of obligations to members of one's own society were extended to outsiders.

The only way to ensure that disputes can be resolved peacefully and noncoercively is if all disputants (and that means all members of the society) have agreed in advance to abide by some sort of dispute resolution procedure. Perhaps a largely libertarian society is possible, but it would have to have a clear distinction between members and nonmembers, and the strict demand for noninitiation of coercion would only apply to members. This doesn't mean "anything goes" with respect to nonmembers, of course. Limits on what behavior is acceptable would have to be devised based on the need to avoid conflict with other groups and basic human decency. But a strict requirement of noninitiation of coercion couldn't work, both because nonmembers could not be expected to submit to any sort of peaceful dispute resolution, and because it is unrealistic to assume nonmembers would necessarily refrain from initiating coercion given opportunity.

Magic, Mysticism, and Science

2008-02-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

The magical and scientific viewpoints toward the world are fundamentally different. The scientific viewpoint asserts that the universe behaves according to fixed mechanical principles. The magical viewpoint is that what happens is fundamentally determined by the wills of concious entities (gods, spirits, whatever). The magical viewpoint is consistent with, but does not necessarily imply, the idea that some or all human beings can effect changes in physical reality through acts of will alone. The scientific viewpoint is not. I fully subscribe to the scientific viewpoint. I cannot prove it is correct, I very much doubt that it can be proven, even in principle. Disputing the scientific viewpoint goes outside the scope of this blog.

It is, of course, possible for a scientist to believe in the existence of some sort of deity. He could, for example, believe in a deistic god which created the universe and its physical laws, and afterwards refrained from interfering. Or he could believe in a more personal God which normally allows the universe to proceed according to physical laws, but who can and does sometimes cause miracles, events which are impossible according to normal law. But in order to do science, one must for all practical purposes rule out the possibility of a miracle occurring in the course of one's experiments.

The key element of the scientific viewpoint is that matter, at least at its most fundamental level, lacks any sort of purpose or goal or morality. Water doesn't seek its proper level, it merely follows the grade; it can't spontaneously flow uphill in order to later flow farther downhill. Of course, human beings do exhibit goal-oriented behavior, but our constituent elements do not.

Mystical beliefs (astrology, alchemy, etc.) are often thought of as being part of magic, but actually they were essentially scientific, but they were bad science. Their practitioners believed in universal rules, but their rules didn't work. The alchemists were bad enough chemists to realize that their attempts to transmute lead into gold were futile, but good enough economists to realize that in order to achieve the vast riches they coveted they needed not only to learn the process, but to keep it secret from others. Secrecy is the essence of mysticism, and thus mysticism is almost invariably bad science. It is nearly impossible to keep a principle of nature secret while making use of it for some practical effect.

Since the "Age of Reason", calling an idea "scientific" has been a way to imbue it with credit, but the fact that something is called scientific doesn't mean that it truly is. Not only can it be bad science, it can be an appeal to magic disguised with scientific terminology or rationale. Scientific vocabulary or equations notwithstanding, an attempt toc cause physical results via will alone without a physical causal mechanism is magic, not science.

There is, however, one area in which something much like magic might plausibly be expected to work: when the desired effect is to change human behavior. Because people act on the basis of their beliefs, it stands to reason that changing people's beliefs will change their actions. Also, because most people crave approval, if one could be control what gains social approval, behavior would adjust accordingly. This type of thought is central to the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.

Dichotomies

2008-01-30T14:30:00.001-08:00

In high school I was presented with two allegedly opposite viewpoints. One side, championed by Hobbes, asserted that people were naturally wicked, and needed to be made virtuous by society (by which was meant the state). The other, championed by Rousseau, held that people were naturally good, but were corrupted by society (and in this case society really means society, that is the more or less voluntary mutual associations people enter into). Although I felt there was something wrong with "both" at the time, it didn't occur to me until much later that, far from being opposites, they were fundamentally saying the same thing. That is, that although they both claimed to describe human nature, essentially they were saying that there is no such thing, that whether people behave well or badly depends almost entirely on social structures, and that clever people like themselves should be placed in charge of structuring society so as to maximize human virtue and happiness. Of course, for people with strong preferences one way or the other the distinction between those favoring a "back to nature" vs a "fool for the city" approach, but to many of us the question of whether choices are made voluntarily by individuals or mandated by some central authority is much more important than what that authority will decide if given the power to do so. Particularly since the policy is likely to change, even completely reverse itself, when the central decision makers see that things are not going as planned.

One is frequently confronted with this kind of false dichotomy, especially in politics, but also in science and philosophy. The trouble is not just that the list of choices presented fails to consider all possible options, but that the way the problem is framed distorts the way it is thought about.

Buddha and the Physicist

2008-01-18T17:19:00.000-08:00

There's a Buddhist parable that I read as an undergraduate which I call "Buddha and the Physicist". I don't remember its original title. In it a man, an aspiring physicist (although he isn't called that) is considering becoming a disciple of the Buddha, but he wants to know the answers to several questions, both to satisfy his own curiosity and as proof of the Buddha's authenticity. He wants to know whether the universe has been around forever, or if it had a beginning, and whether it will be around forever or it will have some end, and whether it is spatially finite or infinite, and whether or not there is some part of a human being that lasts forever. There may have been others, those are the ones I remember. The Buddha replies that although he does know the answers to these questions, he will not give them, because the answers will do the questioner no good, and he will have no way of knowing whether the answers are correct anyway.

One thing I prefer about Buddhist parables vs. Christians parables is that (at least in the versions I read) they just end with Buddha having said what he has to say, whereas the Chistian ones add that the people are astonished by Jesus' brilliance, or the Pharisees are infuriated, or both.

Personally, I find Buddha's answer unsatisfying. It seems to me that it is perfectly sensible to seek "useless" knowledge purely for its own sake, and that if Buddha actually knows the answers he should be able to explain how he knows, and the physicist would then be able to verify that the answers are correct. I think a Buddhist would assert that the enlightened are capable of obtaining knowledge through pure intuition; knowledge beyond that which can be obtained via the senses, and which cannot be verified by the senses. Perhaps this is so, but is there any reason why those of us who lack this intuitive ability should believe anyone who claims to have it? Is there any reason to believe one person who makes this claim over another? These aren't just rhetorical questions. I suspect the answer is "no", but I could be wrong.

The ancients believed all sorts of myths that strike moderns as being absurd. They weren't necessarily more credulous than the people of today. Perhaps it ws the wisdom of Buddha. If one were to doubt, for example, the story of Chronus swallowing his children, and later them being vomited up to become the gods, how could one begin going about to refute the tale? And what earthly good would it do if one could? It seems likely that many people didn't so much "believe" these stories as view them as convenient placeholders, as good and accurate an answer to questions as they would be able to get.

Those of us that insist on genuine, verifiable answers are atypical, and probably with good reason. In terms of personal success, the advantages of learning the truth are often small compared to the social disadvantages incurred by upsetting the consensus. I think society as a whole benefits from us, but whether that's true or not I wouldn't change if I could, and couldn't if I wanted to.

Public and Private Behavior

2007-12-22T14:39:00.000-08:00

The world as a whole will never agree on everything. We will never even agre on the fundamentals of right and wrong. I think the best we can realistically hope for is some form of order which allows large groups of us to get along relatively peacefully. As I've remarked before, I think the rules governing society, whether enumerated or tacit, will not and should not be universal.

Personally I would prefer to live under very libertarian laws, but experience has taught me that most people would prefer otherwise, and that this is not going to change, almost certainly not within my expected lifetime, probably not ever.

Fundamentally, there's no good reason why they should.

The idea that people act rationally in order to achieve their goals is potentially highly misleading. People will often do things which seem appealing to them at the time but which they will later regret, and in some cases this later regret is predictable in advance. A person who has problems resisting the urge to drink or gamble, for example, might quite sensibly prefer to live in a community where he would not be subjected to constant temptation.

The concept of a right to free speech essentially refers to the right of people to converse among themselves without fear of reprisals. It has never been absolute in the sense of permitting anything which might be considered speech or symbolic speech. Threats, criminal conspiracies, fraudulent business offers, and slander all contain a speech element, but they aren't only speech. It seems to me that deliberate attempts to offend go beyond being only speech in the same way. I'm talking about something like this. Asshole had it coming, Buzz is a hero.

In general, the strict libertarian people have an absolute right to cause emotional harm to others, whether inadvertently or deliberately, provided no physical harm is done to person or property, seems to me unreasonable. Certainly a negative emotional state represents a reduced quality of life. Given that the value of property is largely subjective anyway, why shouldn't one treat emotional harm as being as real as property damage? I can certainly see a strong pragmatic argument against legislation attempting to prevent emotional damage. Since in principle anything could be emotionally damaging to someone, giving a government agency blanket authority to protect people's fragile emotions would be giving it unlimited power to micromanage everyone's lives. But a pragmatic argument cannot justify a moral principle, and the fact that the most extreme examples of something imaginable would clearly be bad does not indicate that it is always bad in any degree.

On the other hand, it strikes me as being absurd that people would take it upon themselves to invade other people's privacy in order to root out behavior which would tempt or offend them if it were done in public. I understand that people do, but I can't understand the mindset that encourages it, and I think it's a fairly rare one. I suspect the main reason it has infested our legal system is that people have been fed a false dichotomy between draconian private enforcement and public tolerance; that it's necessary to break down doors in the middle of the night and gun down grandmothers on the possibility that there might be a joint in the house, because the only alternative is to have the streets littered with semi-catatonic junkies and their disease-infested needles.

It's a straightforward consequence of economics that the more intense the efforts to suppress "victimless crimes", the more potentially profitable they become. Conversely, the more discrete "victimless criminals" are in their activities, the less the public is interested in suppressing them. It seems natural that societies would protect their sensibilities by either regulating the times at places at which "vices" can be indulged, or ostensibly banning them but making no real effort to enforce the ban provided that the law is not publicly flouted. I think historically that's what most socities have done, aside from outbreaks of puritanism.

Book Review: Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M Weaver

2007-12-13T13:20:00.000-08:00

This is a very interesting book. I highly recommend reading it. I found myself thoroughly disagreeing with most of it, but there is very little I could actually refute. The author's viewpoint is internally self-consistent and many readers may find it appealing.

Chapter 1 begins, "Every man participating in a culture has thre levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world". The title reflects the author's thesis that this metaphysical dream often has more influence over one's actions than do the specific ideas. An illustrative quote which I found astonishing: "The Schoolmen understood that the question, univeralia ante rem or univeralia post rem, or the question of how man angels can stand on the point of a needle, so often cited as examples of Scholastic futility, had incalculable ramifications, so that, unless there was agreement upon these questions, unity in practical matters was impossible."

He blames what he considers to be the decadence of the modern (1948) world on a shift in this metaphysical dream: "Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal".

Weaver acknowledges that the modern world has vastly more material productivity and knowledge of specific facts than the older world, but he considers these to be of comparitively little value. He asserts that although we know more specific facts, our understanding of things in general has atrophied. He considers the shift in attitude from one of duties to one of gain vs. loss to be of much greater significance, and quite harmful.

Weaver goes on to discuss how art has been corrupted by the idea that there is no reality beyond that perceived by the senses, how the sensible idea of equality before the law has been distorted to obliterate sensible distinctions between classes of persons (young and old, men and women), and many other topics. He covers quite a lot of ground in under 200 pages. A 21st century summary may make him sound like a senile coot raving about kids today, but reading the actual book he sounds quite sensible if not persuasive.

The last three chapters are about areas in which Weaver saw hope, although I'm sure he would have been appalled by what has happened since then. They are about how there remained respect for the concept of property as a metaphysical right, how words might again be regarded as having meaning as opposed to being merely symbols, and about repect for the virtues of piety and justice.

I think Weaver is correct that metaphysical beliefs do have consequences in human action, and rejection of belief in the transcendental probably was a necessary precursor for Nazism and Communism, and is at least partially responsible for the social ills that plague us today. But I doubt that it can be helped. So far as I can tell there is no transcendental, and if there were we could not have any reliable knowledge of it.

Law

2007-12-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

There is an old debate as to whether law is "created" or "discovered". I think this is because the word "law" is used to mean two very different things: what I will call "abstract law", which is basically people's general sense as to what is and is not acceptable moral behavior, and what I will call "codified law", which is a set of enumerated rules saying what is allowed or forbidden.

The fact that something like abstract law exists can be inferred from the observed fact that people will generally exhibit some sort of orderly behavior even when there is nothing like a law enforcement officer present and, barring extreme actions, there is no risk one's actions will be reported to a law enforcement officer. That codified legislation does not always reflect abstract law can be inferred from the observation that in some situations people in general will modify their behavior when a law enforcement officer is present. For example, if almost everyone slows down at the sight of a police car on a certain stretch of road, that is strong evidence that the posted speed limit is lower than what most people would consider a safe and acceptable speed.

The reason it can be useful to have codified law is that in general there isn't anything like unanimous agreement as to what abstract law is. Abstract law should not arbitrarily favor certain persons over others, and it should prohibit behavior which is on the whole harmful while allowing that which beneficial or neutral, but these criteria are not sufficient for determining what abstract law is, even before we consider the problems of human uncertainly and error. There is a great deal of "wiggle room" within which codified law can be consistent with abstract law. If this is the case, people will generally believe one ought to obey the law simply because it is the law. But if codified law is not in good accord with abstract law, particularly if it is created or changed to arbitrarily favor persons, it loses all moral force and will not be obeyed voluntarily. The key point is, one's moral compulsion is to obey abstract law, but what is enforced is generally codified law.

The "law is discovered" argument was fundamentally flawed because it assumed that what they called law existed independent of human minds and was unambiguous, unchanging, and universal. But the "law is created" argument is much worse, because it considers all law to be good provided that it is enacted via the approved legislative process. This has led to the belief that not only is it acceptable to use the political process to try to gain special privileges for one's group, but that fundamentally that is what the political process is for.

The idea that there exists such a thing as law apart from arbitrary human will is the cornerstone of Western Civilization, and perhaps all civilization. But this abstract law does not come from God (and religious scripture tends to be a poor guide to it), and cannot be discerned by reason alone. There probably isn't anything close to a 100% reliable process for discovering what it is at a given time and place. But when codified law is routinely violated by multitudes without shame or guilt, that likely indicates a problem with the codified law.

Mosquitos

2007-12-06T14:31:00.000-08:00

Mosquito carried viruses have been among the greatest causes of death and misery in human history. The mosquito eradication and malaria control programs have been among the greatest success stories of 20th century American government. According to the cdc in 1933 30 percent of people in the CDC suffered from malaria. Now it is virtually eliminated in the USA.

Malaria in particular and mosquito carried viruses in general are an area in which applications of libertarian philosophy in its purest forms could lead to highly unfortunate results. The methods used for malaria control (requiring people to install screens on all doors and windows and requiring them to eliminate all standing water on their property) don't seem terribly oppressive to me, but they are the sort of thing that a purest could regard as being intolerable in principle. A neighbor three miles down the road who leaves an old tire in his back yard probably intends me no harm, and probably won't cause any. But if I become infected with malaria it will be impossible to prove where the mosquito came from, so obtaining compensation from the person who allowed the mosquito to breed on his property is impractical, even if he were to agree that if it could be proved that it was "his" mosquito which infected me he is liable and that he is capable of adequately compensating me for the damage, neither of which is likely to be the case.

Of course, no sensible person would suggest that a full modern regulatory state is necessary for malaria control, and if it were, perhaps one might prefer to avoid the regulatory state and accept the malaria. I think in the early 20th century it was understood that contagious diseases were a matter of legitimate public concern in a way that obesity, steroid use, and even smoking are not.

Libertarianism

2007-12-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

I used to consider myself a libertarian. Although I still frequently agree with libertarians, I no longer call myself one. There was no sudden moment when I decided I was not a libertarian; I just sort of gradually drifted away.

By "libertarian" I mean one who accepts the idea that one can never justly initiate force as an absolute moral axiom, and that essentially all moral rules can be derived from this axiom. Equivalently, one has an absolute right to do as one pleases provided one does not directly harm another. Although I think this is a good guiding principle, I think it is neither absolute nor sufficient.

There are several problems with what I will refer to as "the libertarian axiom". First, I don't think there's a clear objective threshold as to when harm occurs. For example, I think it would be absurd to complain about the secondhand smoke from a cigarette miles away, but there must be some limit as to how much noxious fumes one can be expected to endure. Things only get more complicated when one considers that how much is being emitted will also be uncertain.

There also is a problem with what happens when, inevitably, force is initiated. It seems to me insufficient for people to simply agree not to initiate force themselves. There ought to be some responsibility to aid defenders or punish aggressors, but I can't see how that would be consistent with the axiom. The idea that one may (but need not) side with a defender against an aggressor is appealing in clear cases, but it is often not completely clear who the initial aggressor was.

It's clear that some degree of retaliatory force must be acceptable, but I think there ought to be some limit as to how much retaliation can be justly applied.

I also think that in some circumstances it is reasonable to stop people from doing things which endanger one but which have not yet caused harm, even without evidence that harm is intended or proof that harm definitely will occur. Certainly I think it can be appropriate to act against someone who clearly does intend harm.

These are the main pragmatic difficulties I see with implementing a system based on the axiom, but even if they could be satisfactorily resolved, there's a more fundamental philosphical problem: there is no guarantee that people can be convinced to accept the axiom in the first place, and my experience indicates that most people can't.

I think most libertarians tend to be less affected by material jealousy than is the average person. They tend to like having stuff, but it doesn't bother them much if at all if other people have more or better stuff. I'm like that myself. Most people would agree that if everyone could have more stuff it would be better. But many people seem to value a universal improvement only slightly, and primarily seem interested in what they have relative to everybody else. It does no good to assert that people "shouldn't" view the prosperity of others as a bad thing. People's preferences are what they are.

The argument that free market policies tend to lead to increased prosperity for everyone is only powerful if one has already decided material prosperity is important. In a society in which people value leisure highly and primarily are concerned with relative rather than absolute material well-being, it would not be at all surprising if laws limiting the number of hours one can legally work (for example) could make most people better off according to their own conception of the good.

Similarly for freedom of speech, the press, religion, etc. I have no desire to tell other people what to read or not to read, and I don't really care much what they believe or say, only what they do. Whereas it is very important to me to be able to read and say what I choose. But the fact is, most people in the world don't feel that way. There's a notion that almost everyone would prefer to be able to speak his own mind to being able to suppress the speech of others, but I I think this idea is mistaken. Many people would feel it outrageous that they should be subjected to blasphemous speech, inconceivable that they would ever want to blaspheme themselves, and madness that the ideas of other cultures as to what does and does not constitute blasphemy is equally valid as their own.

If someone were to assert that equality (whatever that means) is good purely for its own sake, or that the individual subsuming his own interests to those of the group is good in and of itself, it would be impossible to prove the asserter "wrong", and societies designed with those values in mind could be optimal according to their own conception of good. The fact is, one can make as many internally consistent value systems as one cares to, and they all seem absurd looking at them from the outside. Libertarianism only appeals to a small fraction of the world's population, and this isn't going to change anytime soon. It might be possible to live in a libertarian community. It is not possible to live in a libertarian country of major size, much less a libertarian world.

Progress

2007-11-28T16:45:00.000-08:00

People believe things for a variety of reasons, some pretty good, others not so good. I think in the pre-renaissance days people tended to have a strongly conservative bias. That is, if things had been done a certain way for a long time, that was considered to be strong evidence that there were good reasons for doing things that way (even if nobody remembers what the reasons were) , that change is likely to be for the worse, and that going back to ancient ways is likely to be an improvement over modern ways.

Conversely, in modern times there seems to be a what I call a "progressive bias". By this I mean not a belief that all change is good, but that after a change has been adopted for some time, the fact that the change has occurred is strong evidence that it constitutes an improvement. Those who advocate undoing some particular change are accused of wanting to "turn back the clock", as if all social and technological change were interwoven to the extent that one couldn't possibly overturn Roe vs Wade without also putting lead back in the gasoline and eliminating the personal computer.

I think it's beyond reasonable dispute that increases in scientific and technological knowledge in general represent a genuine improvement. But the case of social change is much less clear. Certainly some social changes are for the better, and some for the worse, but we won't necessarily agree as to which are which, and it's not at all clear to me that there's a strong tendency either way.

This is not to say that social change is anything like random. Over the last few centuries there has been a general tendency towards centralization of authority in many countries. One major reason for this is that a strong central government is necessary for fighting modern wars. Another is essentially Parkinson's law: in the absence of an external counterbalancing force, entities tend to increase their own jurisdictions.

There are major drawbacks to excessive centralization. It forces everyone to accept "one size fits all" rules that don't really fit anyone particularly well. People sometimes talk of states as being like "laboratories", but I think this is a very bad metaphor. It seems to imply that the purpose of "experiments" in these "laboratories" is to discover a "right" way of doing things, which will later be copied by the other states, either voluntarily or through federal legislation.

Referring to moving to a different jurisdiction as "voting with your feet" is an even worse metaphor. In terms of actually improving one's own life, voting is among the crudest and least ineffectual means available. Ineffectual because your individual vote is highly unlikely to ever decide an issue, crude because it requires enforcing your own preferences on everyone else in your jurisdiction. One might as well refer to undergoing surgery as "loading your shotgun with scalpels and shooting yourself".

A typical example: I think most Californians are glad that casino gambling is not legal in most of the state, even ones that are also glad that it is legal in Nevada if they feel the desire. Personally I would just as soon see it legal anywhere, but it makes no practical difference to me either way. I'm not a libertarian, I don't think that people who may have problems resisting the temptation to gamble are being unreasonable if they want to live in communities where there is not legal public gambling. But it seems to me almost beyond reasonable dispute that most people will be best off if regulations of this sort are kept at as local a level as possible. I'll probably write more about this in a future post.

Changes in laws aren't just caused by political forces, though, but by changes in norms. Earlier generations were, in general, harder, tougher than mine, and I think the next couple generations will be still softer. "Nanny state" regulations are becoming more common, among other reasons, because to oppose them is to be seen as lacking compassion. Even arguing against a policy on pragmatic grounds, while fully supporting the policy's aims, can be seen as lacking compassion. Caring is more important than results. Personally I don't see this change as being a good thing.

One can't derive a pure ought from a pure is, of course, but even if one subscribes to modern norms, one might want to consider the possibility that the true reason for this is simply that they are modern norms, that they are acquired from society without much questioning, and that accepting them brings approval and challenging them brings hostility.

Money

2007-11-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

Money is perhaps the single most useful invention in human history. Without something like a uniform medium of exchange any sort of modern society would likely be impossible.

By "money" I mean goods which people will accept as part of a transaction, not for any direct use it may have, but because it will be used as a payment in future transactions. It follow that it is not strictly correct to say of something that it is or is not money, but rather that it is or is not being used as money. If you accept gold coins because you actually expect to use the gold, say to make an lovely ornamental calf statue, from your point of view the gold coins aren't money, they're a consumption good.

People will sometimes say things like "money is also a measurement of value or a store of value". This is a confusion of conncepts. In the first part, it is the same sort of error as using the same word for "meter" and "meterstick", and concluding the same thing. A "dollar" as an abstract measurement of value is something different from a coin or note considered to be worth a dollar. The second part is a different sort of error. There are reasons why the same sorts of things are likely to be useful as a store of value or as a medium of exchange, but if we accept that calling something "money" denotes what it is used for rather than what it is, and incidentally that it is not always true that the same sorts of things are useful for both purposes, we can see why calling these two concepts by the same name is misleading.

There are many sorts of things that have been used as money, but they come in two general sorts of categories: goods that are considered to carry intrinsic value (even though it is not expected that they will be used as primary goods, it is vital that they could be), which I will call "value money", and signifiers of some sort of transferable promise, which I will call "promise money".

There are many reasons why metal coins have been particularly popular as value money. Uniformity (value is determined solely by the mass), durability (gold won't rot or rust), density (an ounce of gold will usually fetch more than a ton of wheat).

Because metal coins have so often been the items used as value money, and because promise money (at least initially) pretty much has to be redeemable for something specifc, there is sometimes a tendency to view metal coins as being "real money" and promise money as just "representing" money, the promise money representing some quantity of metal. In 1957 dollar bills were still "silver certificates". But fundamentally gold and silver are just commodities like any other, subject to the same sort of fluctuations in value. The advantages of metal money really only apply when the metal itself is being used as money. Any sort of certificate would have the same advantages.

There's no reason in principle why there must be a direct relationship between price denomination and form of payment. For example, one could imagine a loan arrangement where the debt payment is specified in tons of wheat value equivalence but the payment is in the form of gold coins. This of course necessitates specifying a method of determining what the relative vales of gold and wheat are, so one wouldn't introduce this added complexity for no good reason.

But such an arrangement would make sense if wheat had a more constant value in time relative to other goods and services (so tons of wheat makes a better measure of value) but gold is much more convenient as the actual medium of exchange (because you only have to ship ounces rather than tons).

I believe the state's involvement in the issue of money originated because it's a convenient way to tax. Demanding that internal trade takes place using the official coinage allows for charging a seigniorage, and also allows the state to effectively repudiate a portion of its internal debt by debasing the coinage (or "inflating the money supply"). This is better for the state than repudiating the debt directly, since by requiring citizens to accept debased coinage at face value the state causes the burden to fall on the people as a whole rather than merely upon its creditors.

Government

2007-11-09T15:52:00.000-08:00

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that "government" is nothing but another name for "sedentary bandit". But really not that big of one.

For the vast majority of governments past and present, the primary activity has been the forcible taking of goods and services from some and giving it to others, the support of the recipients being necessary to keep the government in power. This includes modern democracies.

It seems likely to me that some form of government is unavoidable, and perhaps even desirable. "Government" essentially denotes an organization that is ultimately capable of effectively applying coercion in a region, and although the arbitrary initiation of coercion
is clearly undesirable, I don't think a complete absence of coercion is even possible. When two disputants are absolutely incapable or unwilling to come to an agreement, either one will enforce its will upon the other or some third party will enforce a decision upon both.

It might be desirable to have some organization entrusted with enforcing resolutions upon disputants, with more or less monopoly power over a region. Or perhaps not, this strikes me as a topic particularly open to debate.

The particular set of functions and policies executed by modern governments is a result of historical processes, and doesn't necessarily make any sense when viewed as if they had been recently designed with some purpose in mind. For example, in some countries governments run the liquor stores and in others the brothels. This is not because private industry is incapable of adequately serving the public need in these areas, but because positioning itself as a monopoly supplier seemed a convenient way of raising revenue. They could almost certainly serve their customers better and get higher total revenue by privatizing these industries and taxing them rather than continuing to operate them directly, but this is not obvious to most people, and there are vested interests in continuing the current policies, whereas the individuals who would significantly benefit from privatization are just theoretical people. That is, they must exist, but nobody (including themselves) can know who they are.

I think economists have by now shown that it's a highly reliable rule that market-oriented dispersed decisionmaking will consistently outperform centrally planned decisionmaking. The implication is that, from an efficiency standpoint, the only activities that should be performed by governments directly are those which are intrinsically coercive, and that regulatory law should wherever possible be goal rather than process oriented. For example, if the objective is to decrease pollution from coal-fired plants, it would be better to limit legal emissions rather than to mandate specific pollution reduction measures, and still better to apply a tax based on the amount of emissions. "Better" in the sense of resulting in lower total pollution at lower cost. So why aren't things usually done this way?

Several possibilities spring to mind. First off, a lot of it really is just disguised payoff to certain groups for their support.

Second some of it may be crappy economics. The idea that central planning will outperform the market if only you have smart enough central planners seems intuitive to many people. You have to spend more time looking at the historical record than most people are willing to to convince yourself that it is not true, and more time studying theory than most people are willing to to understand why it is not true. Certainly I couldn't convince anyone of the advantage of the market who did not believe in it already.

Another is the possibility that certain functions must be operated directly by the government in order to fulfill the government's objectives. For example, governments run the post office because they want to be assured of the ability to read people's mail. Governments run schools because they want to determine what children are taught. Governments run television and radio stations because they wish not merely to objectively inform and entertain, but to influence public opinion in particular ways.

Last on my list is the possibility that the purported objectives are actually much less important than the signal sent. For example, it's likely that most people would receive more direct benefit from appearing to care about polar bears than actually increasing polar bear populations, since most of us will never encounter a polar bear outside a zoo, and that's probably for the best.

Other suggestions?

Welcome

2007-11-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping to make this largely a discussion blog with my own posts just as jumping off points, but we'll see how that goes.

What I want to do is to discuss ideas for spreading freedom through voluntary action. In particular I want to focus on the applications of modern technology. Anything that is done must be done for the first time, but I suspect if an idea hasn't been tried before and it's any good, most likely it's because it hasn't been possible until recently (or perhaps isn't possible quite yet, but soon will be). I'll try to avoid speculations which require major technological breakthroughs.

This isn't intended to be yet another individualist political blog. There are plenty of those already, many written by people who are much better writers than I am, and much better informed on current political events. I intend to keep my discussion of such things to a minimum.

Some of my posts (like this one) will be about pretty general concepts, and may seem quite basic. I think they are necessary, because my experience is that people tend to think they are being understood much better than they are, and people think they understand much better than they do.

This post is about freedom. I don't want to spend a lot of time quibbling on precise definitions, but "freedom" in the context of this blog means more or less the power of individuals to decide what actions to take tregarding their own lives, and to bear the consequences (good and bad) of those actions. This blog is dedicated to the proposition, "freedom is good". Not necessarily the only good, not even necessarily the highest good, but good in and of itself. If individual choice is to be restricted, this requires justification. Removing such restrictions requires only that the restrictions have not been sufficiently justified.

There are people who use the "freedom" in the sense of "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear". I consider those not to be different kinds of freedom, but rather completely separate concepts that are unfortunaltely referred to by the same word. If I feel the need to refer to such concepts here, I'll describe them in some other way. In any case I don't think anyone is morally entitled to something like a guaranteed minimum standard of living, not do I think such a guarantee is possible in practice.

I reject the concept of "false consciousness", by which I mean the idea that there's something people "really" want which is very different from what they think they want. Irealize that people may do things at the heights of emotion which they may regret in their more sober moments, and I realize that small children or people with severe mental disabilities may have no idea what is harmful to them. But I think for normal, sane adults taking time for serious reflection, not only are they generally capable of deciding what is best for themselves, they essentially define what is best for themselves.

The last thing I want to rule out is the idea of group rights, that is, the idea that a group has rights as distinct from the rigts of its members. I understand that people are naturally social, that they will form groups, that they will do things on behalf of the group itself or to demonstrate loyalty to the group, and that a person may voluntarily join a group on the understanding that the group has the authority to discipline its members. But nobody outside a group has a moral responsibility to aid a group in enforcing its rules upon its members, and a person is not morally subject to the authority of a group he has not voluntarily joined. In particular, upon reaching adulthood a person has a right to leave a country or religion he was "born into".

I don't want to waste effort debating basic premises. I understand that my beliefs are very much in the minority, I don't care. I understand that there are people who believe that individualism is fundamentally bad, and sacrificing one's own desires in favor of the interests of others is fundamentally good. If anyone reading tends to think this way, I'm well aware that I will be unable to change your mind. I suggest that your time is better spent elsewhere, as our viewpoints are too distant for their to be any profitable mutual discussion. In any event, please don't comment, since I'll just delete and ban anyway. This blog isn't for discussing what our goals should be, it's for suggesting ideas about how to achieve them.

I hope I haven't driven away all my potential readers. I think within the boundaries I have set there are still many lifetimes' worth of potential discussion. Please be civil, both to myself and to each other. Remember that, once suggested, the quality of an idea is independent of who its proponents are.