PanCrit.Org

The Restoration Game: Ken MacLeod

2012-01-27T20:58:00.000-08:00

Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game is yet another entry in this year's bounty of books dominated by MMORPGs and set in a near-future real world. I've read at least three and I think I have another three in progress or at the top of my stack. MacLeod's stands out for having some actual science fiction, which (though it has significant implications for the characters' interpretation of reality) doesn't actually effect the story much. Any other Macguffin would have served as well; it is only revealed at the end of the story, and other than searching for it, its exact nature didn't affect the characters' motivations.

The MMORPG in question is being developed by Lucy Stone during the course of events (which is also not unusual in this year's crop of books.) In this case, Lucy is working for a game design company building a more prosaic MMORPG, and they are contracted to build a special purpose variant that will be used to promulgate certain destabilizing ideas among the population of Krassnia, an ex-soviet bloc region that is ripe for a revolution. Lucy's mother was a spy, so Lucy is used to working undercover and making her way unnoticed in the real world. She also has a few friends who seem to be connected to shady and unscrupulous characters.

The action is exciting and the characters' need to travel around Europe and visit the ex-Soviet bloc give MacLeod plenty of opportunities to compare places and the kinds of activities going on there. Krassnia is a dingy place, but the young people there are vibrant and exploring new business ideas and ignoring their elders who have habits developed and honed behind the Iron Curtain. Lucy herself had some scary run-ins with high officials while she was growing up there. That and her mother's book on the history and folk tales of the country give her a leg up when she has to sneak in and look for the MacGuffin.

Restoration Game is, of course, nominated for the Prometheus Award. It's very well written, and has at least a modicum of science fiction (which gives it an edge over Stephenson's Reamde). The libertarian elements are subtle—There's a popular revolution going on in the background, and government agents are trying to stop Lucy's progress. Lucy isn't explicitly libertarian, but libertarians will like her; she's a strong, responsible individual, trying to make her own way. There isn't a prominent struggle with important libertarian themes, though those seem to be generally lacking in this year's nominees. It's definitely worth a read if you haven't overdone the MMORPG-influenced genre yet.

Vernor Vinge: The Children of the Sky

2012-01-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

Vernor Vinge's The Children of the Sky is a sequel to his wonderful A Fire Upon the Deep. In this novel, we visit the home world of the Tines, a dog-like species who only achieve sentience when melded into packs of 3 to about 6. The main human characters are the children of a group of scientists who found a way to engender a widespread Slow Zone, where higher technology and FTL isn't possible, in order to slow the advance of the Blight, a malignant entity bent on a civilization-wide attack. The humans have been revived from cold sleep by various tine factions, and are trying to understand the galactic context that left them abandoned and possibly vulnerable in the Slow Zone. A few of them remember what life was like on a research station, and there is much recrimination and internecine battling among the maturing adolescents. At the same time, the Tines have their own politics and factions, some of whom are ruthless. They also only have second hand knowledge of the higher technology that was lost, and are jealous to be the first to invent useful tools and weapons.

Vinge is a master a depicting truly alien characters, and keeping them true to the characteristics he assigns them. The Tines are individually quite incapable, and don't function well when in close proximity to Tines other than their their own small pack. In this story, we also get to see that the Tropical Choir, which is a super-pack of millions of Tines, somehow manages to operate somewhat cohesively, to the surprise of the northern Tines. Individual packs of Tines have distinct personalities, and can plan and make and keep agreements. When they lose members, it's a lot like aphasic people, with distinct skills and knowledge getting lost. Some Tines and humans explore various approaches to sidestep these problems, but the alternatives have drawbacks that are often worse.

Children of the Sky is a nominee for this year's Prometheus award, and it may be the best written of this year's novels, but the libertarian elements are hard to spot. The Tines don't have an organized government, and no one seems to collect taxes. It's hard to say that they have a well-functioning spontaneous order, since there's little commerce to be seen, even though Tycoon is portrayed as a successful and innovative businessman. (Also, he/they seems to operate sweatshop-style factories, and imprisons and tortures rivals.)

Since the story takes place entirely on one backwoods planet in the slow zone in Vinge's enormous universe, the scope is necessarily narrow, so the implications for galactic civilization that we're used to in Vinge's stories in this universe are missing. The story is still one of adventure, intrigue, invention, progress and loyalty. The way that Tine packs can change attitude, knowledge, and alliance when they gain or lose members gives Vinge unusual opportunities for plot twists. It's definitely a fun read. Whether you like Vinge, or haven't yet seen how he can bring an alien civilization to life, you'll enjoy this.

Daemon and Freedom, Daniel Suarez

2011-12-26T22:28:00.000-08:00

Daniel Suarez's Daemon and Freedom tell a single story about an artificial intelligence, (the "Daemon" of the title) created by a game designer, that becomes extremely powerful in the real economy through violence and by hacking software systems throughout the world. In the end its creator offers to relinquish that power, but by then agents of various governments have shown how ruthless they can be in trying to defeat it, and a representative of the people being protected says it should continue running things. The story is occasionally violent, and includes several explicit misogynistic and sadistic scenes that I had trouble reading. The rest of the story is interesting enough on a couple of levels that I kept going.

It's a fast-paced story involving MMORPGs, augmented reality systems, and an AI created by a wealthy software gaming entrepreneur. The story (and its characters) presumes that the world's economy is controlled by a few powerful, wealthy, and unscrupulous tycoons who pull the strings of the big governments and are getting out of control. The AI makes a preemptive attack and attempts to take over in order to prevent an eventuality which is never really made clear. Instead, we see the US and other governments' secret agencies and militaries attempt to strike back at a system they don't understand, and which is decentralized and has infiltrated most of the world's computer systems. This allows it to watch its opponents and strike back in completely unexpected ways. It also invests heavily in a fleet of autonomous weaponized vehicles that it deploys very effectively.

The depiction of disaffected people from many backgrounds being recruited into a hidden network that deploys them on unexplained tasks that they willingly take on is disquieting. It's clear that many people who join have made thinly justified assumptions that the network's objectives are consistent with their values, but others do it because they're desperate for a job or a sense of belonging, and are willing to ignore their moral qualms about what they're doing--building, testing, delivering obviously dangerous weapons, or worse. It's plausible that many people would go along with an AI that could get this far, and the thing that keeps this from being possible now is that neither AI nor conventional intelligence augmented with modern tools give anyone enough power to pull it off. Who knows how soon that will change, though.

I thought the violence was over the top, and not really necessary to the story. I disagree with the world view that predominates here and says that malevolent actors control signifiant aspects of our economy and will go to extreme lengths to maintain their influence. I found the depictions of technology (other than the killing machines) reasonably plausible, and won't be surprised to see augmented reality, consensual shared overlays, and large-scale real-time cooperation. I expect the cooperation to be much less centrally controlled, and much more either spontaneous, or polycentric. And my strong expectations about AI are that it will arise gradually and in many places. It is very unlikely that one person (much less likely even than one independent group) will make a breakthrough that will enable them to take over. This particular question has been much debated, and there isn't clear agreement on how it will play out, but I firmly agree with Robin Hanson's position that a "hard takeoff" under the control of a single entity isn't a likely scenario. That one person could pull it off with help from at most two colleagues (as in the story) is completely unbelievable.

Sex at Dawn: Ryan and Jethá

2011-11-19T20:54:00.001-08:00

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's Sex at Dawn argues convincingly that monogamy isn't particularly natural for humans. It certainly is one common choice, but many modern people have a lot of trouble sticking to the program despite a lot of exhortation and systemic incentives promoting the practice. Ryan and Jethá marshall evidence from anthropology, evolutionary evidence, comparisons with other primates, and examinations of current practices. Their main argument is that a reasonable definition of "naturally monogamous" would mean that most people pair up with someone from the opposite sex, and aren't tempted to stray. There are a few species that mostly act that way, but looking at the broad range of what humans do, we're not like that. It's an interesting question as to why sociologists, and anthropologists seem to want us to believe that it is natural in the face of all the evidence.

There are several places in the book where the authors don't seem to really understand how evolution works. When talking about male parental investment, they ridicule the notion that maximum reproductive productivity is anyone's goal. It's clear from context that they're misunderstanding a discussion in which individuals are described as acting as if maximizing fecundity is the goal. But the evolutionary reasoning is just that those individuals who produce more offspring end up predominating in subsequent generations, regardless of why they acted that way. But regardless of this, they still make a strong case.

When biologists compare anatomy and mating behavior across species, human genitalia and sexual cycles don't make sense for a species in which couples stick together over the long term and don't cheat on one another. The size of male Genitalia, timing and (lack of) visibility of ovulation, breast prominence, are all unnecessary if the pair bond is unshakeable. They make sense when you assume each individual normally mates with multiple individuals of the opposite sex.

Our close relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos don't restrict themselves to single partners and we look more like humans evolved in an environment where individuals didn't restrict their attention to a single partner. In this kind of environment, evolutionary pressures push toward the large penises (by body weight), external scrotum, long duration of intercourse, and large volume of ejaculate you see in humans. If our ancestors had had reliable access to a partner, they wouldn't have needed these (evolutionarily) expensive features.

Another myth they take on is that of the demure female, uninterested in sex. It certainly occurs, but it's not predominant, either in societies (like ours) that constantly promote the idea or in societies that don't. Ryan and Jethá also make it clear that, evolutionarily speaking, homosexuality is nothing to be ashamed of. Our nearest relatives and many other species engage in the practice, though seldom exclusively. Mainstream society's insistance that each person can be categorized as either heterosexual or homosexual, is just not consistent with our behavior or the evolutionary or anthropological evidence.

Anyway, if you're not sqeamish about these topics, it's a fun, eye-opening read. Not likely to change anyone's behavior, but maybe some people will feel less constrained about their choices. It'll probably also provide grist for some arguments, but that's a fine thing, too.

Migration: James P. Hogan

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

James P. Hogan's Migration is a funny mix of high-tech space traveling futurism and down-home country folks. The bulk of the story takes place on Aurora, an interstellar ship on the first part of its journey, but it starts out on a mostly back-country world. We get to see some local politics and Korshak, a quick-thinking sleight-of-hand magician, who takes advantage of the local ruler's gullibility as far as he can. Korshak has a fan and friend who is on the recruiting team for Aurora, so he manages to escape his pursuers and jump into a world unlike everything he's used to. But he's an adaptable guy, so he learns to be useful in the new environment.

Korshak has to use his wits to rescue Aurora from sabotage by a subversive faction that has recruited Kek, a robot, to help them. We get the standard tour around the society as Korshak chases Kek from place to place. Some of the sub-societies are interesting, including one group trying to live at a subsistence level on this generation star ship. But Hogan makes it completely plausible.

Early on, the recruiters are interviewing a ne'er-do-well the local authorities would like to get rid of. He responds

"If it's military, or some kind of troublemaking to provide an excuse for protective intervention somewhere, the answer's no, but you don't look like a military recruiter. [That] doesn't solve anything. Just causes a lot of hate and reasons for revenge, and makes problems worse. The wrong people get rich."
"Who do you think should get rich?"
"Well, the way I see it is, nobody's born with anything. So whatever they get on top of what they produce themselves must come from other people. And the only way other people are going to give it to them is if they get something worthwhile back in return. So the ones who should end up with a lot to show are the ones who can do things better when it comes to providing what other people need."

But Hogan isn't consistently pro-commerce. The bad guys who have brainwashed Kek call themselves Dollarians and their high officials have titles like Banker. It's a fun story, but though it was nominated for the Prometheus award last year, it wasn't selected as a finalist. The side trip into Kek's attempt to be more human, (which ends up with him getting involved with a cult) is worth the trip.

Deutsch on the Evolution of DNA

2011-11-09T21:34:00.000-08:00

I posted this on Google+ on Monday. I'll repost here for anyone who's not following me there. It's from David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity on the evolutionary origins of DNA as a universal language. I'll post a complete review when I finish the book, but these paragraphs really caught my attention.

Initially, the genetic code and the mechanism that interpreted it were both evolving along with everything else in the organisms. But there came a moment when the code stopped evolving yet the organisms continued to do so. At that moment the system was coding for nothing more complex than primitive, single celled creatures. Yet virtually all subsequent organisms on Earth, to this day, have not only been based on DNA replicators but have used exactly the same alpahabet of bases, grouped into three-base 'words', with only small variations in the meanings of those 'words'.
That means that, considered as a language for specifying organisms, the genetic code has displayed phenomenal reach. It evolved only to specify organisms with no nervous systems, no ability to move or exert forces, no internal organs and no sense organs, whose lifestyle consisted of little more than synthesizing their own structural constituents and then dividing in two. An yet the same language today specifies the hardware and software for countless multicellular behaviours that had no close analogue in those organisms, such as running and flying and breathing and mating and recognizing predators and prey. It also specifies engineering structures such as wings and teeth, and nanotechnology such as immune systems, and even a brain that is capable of explaining quasars, designing other organisms from scratch, and wondering why it exists.

He, She, and It, by Marge Piercy

2011-10-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

Marge Piercy's He, She, and It tells parallel stories about two not-quite-human creatures and their struggles to get along in the world. The main story takes place in a medium-future world devastated by ecological catastrophe. Shira grew up in a small Kibbutz in the desert, and when her husband abducts her child she leaves the corporate enclave they've been working in and returns home, where she developes a relationship with Yod, a cyborg invented to protect the town. The backstory, told by her grandmother in intercalary chapters, is about a rabbi in the Prague ghetto 400 years ago who raises a golem to protect his community. Both of the simulacra learn to be people and to participate more fully in their communities.

There are many interesting facets interwoven quite well in the story. Shira is a high-tech worker, and she and her companions infiltrate the corporate data bases through a three-day experiential interface in which they are attacked and have a narrow escape. The Rabbi and the golem give us a glimpse of oppressed Jews and what they had to do to get enough accomomdation from the local rulers to enable them to survive the occasional pogrom and the annual depredations of the local rabble-rousers. There is politics, intrigue, outright battles, and exploration of the devastated cities where society's cast-offs live.

The relationship between Shira and Yod develops slowly, and is complicated by interactions with old sweethearts, eccentric inventors, and both Shira's mother and grandmother. The women dominate the front story, and are the most fleshed out of the characters, not counting Yod himself. The backstory focuses on the golem and the plight of the Ghetto's populace. Both stories were fast-paced and engaging. All the focal characters were strong positive people and provided a good setting for the surrounding exploration of whether and what kinds of rights the two artificial creatures should have. Very enjoyable.

Diamond Eyes, A. A. Bell

2011-07-17T20:28:00.000-07:00

A. A. Bell's Diamond Eyes starts out with hints of what is to come: Mira, the protagonist, hears her new staff advocate, Ben Chiron, asking

"Why bother blindfolding a blind woman?"
"Why restrain her?", and
"How much trouble could she be?"

She's used to these questions, so we know right away that she's blind, institutionalized, and a handful, but have to wait to find out why she insists on a blindfold (or more permanent measures.) The Serenity Center has a new, more humane director (Matron Sanchez) who has assigned Ben to work with Mira to attempt to bring her out of her shell. Ben promises to protect her from the other staff members who have been treating her roughly, and slowly wins her over.

There's not much action for a while as we get to meet the other characters. It's quite a while before we find out what's special about Mira's eyes, and Bell gives the story a mainstream feel until the revelation.

Mira is blind in the normal visual range, but sees ghostly visual echoes from events of the past. When she's above a building's first floor, she sees only earlier inhabitants of the area on the ground, and can't navigate because the walls and doors disappear. The blindfold keeps her from being distracted by the ghosts; she can't interact with people from the past, so they're clearly different from the flesh-and-blood people who talk to her and keep her tied up much of the time. She's obstreperous because the people who attempt to control her bahavior are only slightly more real to her than the ghosts she can see clearly.

Into this mix, Bell adds Dr. Zhou, who has invented a device that can tell whether someone is telling the truth (or at least believes that they are doing so.) Whle using Mira in a test of the device, the scientists are surprised to discover that she believes what are obviously (to them) hallucinations, they're interested enough that they follow up on her answers and figure out that that she's seeing into the past, then test her abilities by getting her to witness some known and some previously unknown events.

With this situation and characters Bell builds an interesting set of conflicts and an action packed story. I think the military intelligence angle behind Dr. Zhou was unnecessary, and the story would have been better without it. Mira's fight to free herself from the Serenity Center's institutional clutches is a heroic struggle, and the staff of the Serenity Center takes a little too much delight in restraining her physically (though Mira really is uncontrollable.)

Harper Collins sent review copies to the Prometheus Award committee, but none of the committee members thought the libertarian angles were strong enough to warrant a nomination. I agree; I enjoyed the story more for its off-beat sensibility than for the pro-freedom aspects. By the end of the story, Ben and Mira understand her strange ability, and have a strong relationship to build on. They've confounded the military, and Sanchez is on their side. Bell was a bit too even-handed to bring Mira's struggle for reasonable treatment to the forefront. I think it's even a better story for that.

The Ego Tunnel, Thomas Metzinger

2011-07-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel is a provocative look at the nature of consciousness. Metzinger takes an innovative approach to the questions and raises some interesting issues without seeming to have a strong grasp of the subject.

Metzinger's project is to explore the nature of consciousness by examining two neglected states of awareness: out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and lucid dreaming. He argues that studying these phenomena will illuminate the problem of consciousness and make everything clear. I'll agree that the exploration was intriguing, but I don't think we learned anything important over what Dennett made clear in Consciousness Explained. At the end, Metzinger heads out to left field for some completely ungrounded speculations about AI and ethics. In these areas, he's clearly way out of his depth. He doesn't understand what's been done in AI, or what's possible, and his claims about the "obvious" rights of artificial creatures and how it wouldn't be moral to treat them is unconvincing.

When introducing the idea of studying unusual states of consciousness, Metzinger makes the reasonable point that there is enough consistency in the experiences reported during OOBEs and lucid dreaming that it makes sense to take a look at them and see whether the commonalities are instructive. I thought he did a good job of drawing some clear lines around what it feels like to be conscious in comparison to other states in which there is awareness without self-awareness. The title comes from his metaphor of an "Ego Tunnel" as a constrained mental space encompassing the limited set of things that one is aware of at a moment in time. Metzinger points to recent fMRI work and claims that neurophysiologists are finding a neural correlate of consciousness, which they can identify in the brain, and so they can conclusively say that lucid dreaming and OOBEs are conscious states. It's not clear to me that whatever the MRIs are finding really corresponds to the same thing we mean by consciousness, but the argument that these are conscious states is convincing enough without that evidence. He brings up the idea of mirror neurons, and points toward an interesting argument that this feature of our brain is responsible for our being able to model ourselves as an active agent like others we can observe. This argument only occupied a couple of pages, and ended (I thought) inconclusively.

Unfortunately, Metzinger's identification of these mental states as reasonably corresponding to consciousness doesn't enable him to say any more about what consciousness is, what survival-related purpose it serves, or anything coherent about consequences. He tries to talk about AI and ethics, but his justification doesn't get beyond the level of our responsibility for our creations, and the primacy of experience. For him, it's obvious that it would be immoral to turn off anything that has experiences, so in his view, we shouldn't even explore the creation of artificial creatures, since we can't establish a theoretical lower bound for what it would mean to have experiences. This is a much deeper subject than he seems aware of, and he barely brushed the surface of it. With his (apparently) shallow understanding of the issues, his speculations are hard to take very seriously.

I thought the first two thirds of the book were worth reading for their exploration and presentation of how OOBEs and lucid dreaming relate to consciousness. The fMRI and other studies of these states may add significantly to our understanding of how the brain works and eventually to a clearer explanation of what's happening in the neurons during thought and consciousness.

The Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley

2011-06-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist is a very well written ode to the value of trade and how it contributes to a rational confidence that things will continue to improve for humanity as they have since we first appeared in the world.

Ridley's previous books have mostly been on evolution (though that includes the evolution of cooperation and virtue). Here he's focusing on how trade enriches us all, and how far back trading goes. He uncovers new evidence for the richness of trading in antiquity. One example is Oetzi, the mummified ice age hunter revealed by a receding glacier in the alps in 1991:

[He] was carrying as much equipment on him as the hikers who found him. He had tools made of copper, flint, bone and six kinds of wood: ash, viburnum, lime, dogwood, yew and birch. He wore clothes made of woven grass, tree bark, sinew and four kinds of leather: bearskin, deer hide, goat hide and calf skin. He carried two species of fungus, one as medicine, and other as part of a tinder kit that included a dozen plants and pyrite for making sparks.

Ridley's point is that Oetzi couldn't have collected, sewn, tanned, woven, smelted and sharpened everything he carried himself. The only way he could have accumulated so much useful equipment was through trade. I'm used to arguments for the early emergence of trade that show that quantities of obsidian or sea shells was found hundreds or thousands of miles from where it would have been regularly collected, but Ridley goes to great lengths to display evidence that trade was pervasive and that early people everywhere relied on it extensively for many items in their daily repertoire. It wasn't just an occasional trade for a high-value item, it was a part of routine life, and part of what people ate, wore, and used for healing, hunting, and food storage.

Ridley also carefully lays out the case for Ricardo's point that trade makes us all richer. Expanding the extent of trade increases the size of the market; with more people in your trading community, you can draw on the efforts of specialists who multiply the overall productivity you can take advantage of. Ridley argues that the increasing returns from trade taught our ancestors the value of trust and led to to more virtuous interactions, and better ethical instincts among our ancestors.

The underlying point of much of this is that increasing communication, increasing interaction leads to more and better ideas as we recombine the ideas in new ways, and this leads to the production of more wealth. Around the time of Malthus, it was still possible to argue that increasing production of wealth just made it possible for populations to increase, and didn't really make anyone better off. But sometime in the last two hundred years that started to change, and the recent demographic transition has made that position completely untenable. But pessimism is still more widely respected, and Ridley wants us to understand that a reasonable understanding of the sweep of history and of our evolutionary origins makes optimism a much better fit with our circumstances. Things have been getting better for hundreds of years, and while we can imaging things that might change that, none of them seems particularly likely.

More people are moving to cities where they are more productive and have fewer children. They live wealthier lives than before, and insist on and can afford a cleaner environment and healthier lifestyle. Government restrictions could prevent progress, or trap people outside the cities, or make it harder for them to buy the lifestyle and environmental values they will want, but the smart money goes with the trends. Ridley thinks that the pressure for progress will be sufficient to move governments out of the way, and that spontaneous order will enable people to get what they want. Technology will enhance our healthspan, and our ability to travel and communicate will continue to grow. We'll spend less time working and more on other things. China and Brazil will lead the way if politics in the West grows too stifling.

The Long Tomorrow, Michael Rose

2011-06-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

Michael Rose's book The Long Tomorrow discusses aging in the context of evolution. The book has something of the feel of a memoir— Rose writes about how he happened into this field, who helped and encouraged him, who was right and wrong, and what he was working on along the way.

Rose has spent most of his career single-mindedly breeding long-lived fruit flies (Drosophilia Melanogaster). This approach to achieving longevity has important implications for understanding the mechanisms of evolution and how they impact lifespan. Because the mechanism itself (selective culling and breeding) isn't applicable to humans, the implications for human longevity are indirect, even though they may turn out to be very important for us.

Rose begins his tale at a symposium he spoke at for the Templeton Fund, where eminent scientists and ethicists spoke against any attempt to pursue human longevity as respectively impossible and immoral. Christian theologians joined that chorus, but were opposed by a Jewish scholar, and by Rose himself, already pursuing longer-lived flies. This serves as a nice backdrop and introduction to the issues which allows him to refer back to the controversy and the parties later when he talks about his own views.

In the mid-70s, when Rose was trying to get started in biology, Crick & Watson's theories had been accepted, but the implications weren't yet clear. Scientists were starting to investigate the molecular mechanisms for all kinds of biological effects, both to see how they interacted with evolution and to find the cellular mechanisms that made life function. Hayflick's proposal on the impact of cell division problems on lifespan was getting publicity, but there were few posited mechanisms based on evolutionary reasoning. The Hayflick limit was an observed and accepted fact, but so far without much theoretical context. Thirty years earlier, J. B. S. Haldane had suggested that Huntington's disease (which waits until carriers of the causative genetic defect are in their 30's or 40's to attack) was a consequence of selection's pressure: genes that debilitate before the carriers reproduce will be weeded out, but diseases that crop up later can survive more easily in the population. Peter Medowar expanded on these ideas, but got the evolutionary causality wrong. George C. Williams straightened out a few clues and pointed out that processes that are helpful in the young, and therefore reinforced by evolutionary pressures, might be costly for mature animals but they wouldn't necessarily be corrected because reaching maturity is so much more important evolutionarily than surviving it. Finally, in 1966, William Hamilton put the pieces together and provided an argument based on evolutionary principles that explained why aging would arise. Once Rose studied the history, it was clear that there was some evolution-based theory, but no significant experimental results validating the evolutionary basis of aging. He thought he'd be able to make a mark on this new field fairly quickly.

Brian Charlesworth was Rose's mentor and supervisor when he started the research. Charlesworth had worked out the math for how much selective pressures should fall as a creature aged. Since selection pressures are strongest on the young, you'd expect to see less weeding out of deleterious mutations that affect the mature and the aged than of those that affect the young. Charlesworth proposed that Rose look for an experimental demonstration of that difference in drosophilia, by showing that the fall in fecundity of female flies followed his formulas. Rose spent more than a year in the laboratory, and counted more than a million eggs before analyzing his results. The results showed that Charlesworth's predictions were wrong.

But Rose had started a parallel experiment about half-way through the first one, based on a paper by J. M. Wattiaux (published in 1968) which showed that offspring of older parents lived longer than those born to younger parents. Wattiaux had been unable to demonstrate what he expected to be environmental causes of the difference, but when Rose read the paper, he realized that age of reproduction was the crucial variable that evolution could select on. If only eggs produced from older parents were allowed to reproduce, then the selective pressure (acting on potential parents) would be towards flies that stayed healthy long enough to meet the delayed date. A year after sharing the results of the first experiment, Rose showed that the new procedure (delaying breeding) produced flies that were already living about 10% longer than under standard fly care.

From that point, Rose (and later his students) studied the interactions between longevity, stress resistance (starvation and desiccation), diet and diet restriction, and body fat and other energy storage. They established a positive correlation between long life and all kinds of stress resistance, and showed that body fat and other energy stored in the flies' bodies increased stress resistance. Diet restriction seems to work because it encourages retention of more energy reserves. But all of these mechanisms (except diet restriction) work over evolutionary time scales. Rose wanted to find treatments that can lengthen the lives of those already alive. So he started to investigate molecular mechanisms to see if we can tell what's different within the cells of those predisposed to longer life when compared to their counterparts.

A later series of experiments demonstrated that the death rate, which increases with age, only actually increases from the start of reproduction to its cessation. What this means is that the death rate is strongly controlled by evolutionary pressures. For any species, evolution acts to reduce the death rate as much as possible before the onset of sexual maturity. After that point, it allows the death rate (from natural causes, primarily) to increase relatively smoothly. Once sexual reproduction ends (or possibly a bit later if individuals are still contributing significantly to the life success of their offspring) evolution stops being able to apply selective pressure. This means that the rate at which individuals die (in deaths per capita per annum) stops increasing. For most populations the rate is pretty high by this mature age, and the number of individuals reaching each later age is small, so it's hard to see that the rate isn't changing. But separate experiments done by Rose, Charlesworth, and Larry Mueller show that manipulating the age of last reproduction in populations of drosophilia directly effects the death rates of the resulting populations in only a few generations.

In humans, Rose says that 95 is the age at which mortality rates stop increasing. From 15 to 90, there is exponentially increasing mortality, but after 95, the rates stop increasing. This has two interesting implications for humans. First, many more people are going to make it to their 90s in coming decades, just because we're living so much more healthily and robustly than we used to. That means that there will be much larger cohorts which will see their mortality rates stop increasing, so we should see gradually rising maximum ages, even if nothing else changes.

The other implication is that mortality rates don't increase to 100%. There is always a chance of surviving another year if you aren't hit by a bus. And if Aubrey de Grey is right, our first step is just to clean up our constitutions so that we keep the mortality profile of a 40-something, and we'll vastly improve life-spans. As Rose says:

Aging is not an infinitely high wall of mortality, rising faster and faster as we get older, until everybody is dead. It is a ramp that takes us from a phase of low childhood mortality to a much later phase of high, but relatively stable, mortality. Postponing, retarding, or otherwise mitigating aging does not require pushing back a wall of death of infinite height. It requires smoothing out a ramp of mortality, and possibly lowering the height of the top of the ramp.

At this point, Rose seems to get serious about the implications of his research for human longevity. At the prodding of New Scientist, in 1984, he wrote a lead article proposing that a major, government-backed program to produce long-lived "methuselah" mice would be valuable. He pushed the idea with potential funders from government and the private sector, but never found anyone willing to actually underwrite the proposal. Rose never mentions Aubrey de Grey's Methuselah Mouse project, which I've talked about before. de Grey found private funders to endow a prize, rather than attempting to organize a single Manhattan project-style (Rose's own description) effort.

Having failed at his own efforts to start a project to find ways to apply his research to humans, Rose continues to be upbeat at the prospects that someone will succeed. He finishes the book by offering lots of advice and suggestions on which scientific paths are likely and unlikely to bear fruit, and what modes of organization are worth trying, particularly by people with different skills than his.

My own postscript involves pointing out that Rose didn't talk about what happened to his fruit flies in the end. He was a co-founder of the company Genescient, which uses modern gene assay techniques to look for nutraceuticals that can reproduce the cellular effects present in the Methuselah flies. Rose's name doesn't appear on Genescient's site, so there appears to have been some sort of split. Genescient has spun out Life Code, which markets Stem Cell 100, a nutraceutical based on this research. I haven't started taking it yet, but I do continue to investigate.

Darkship Thieves, Sarah A. Hoyt

2011-06-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

Sarah Hoyt's Darkship Thieves is a fun read, with a reasonably freedom-oriented bent. I think it's the strongest of this year's finalists for the Prometheus award. Athena Sinistra is the daughter of a wealthy tycoon who is kidnapped from her father's space yacht, and rescued by Christopher "Kit" Klaavil, an apparent ne'er-do-well from Eden, a colony founded by genetically enhanced humans in hiding from Earth. Eden seems to survive by siphoning off energy from Earth's orbiting power collectors.

Athena's and Kit's adventures together provide an opportunity for a look behind the scenes at how the society on Eden works. Athena can't be returned to Earth without revealing Eden's location, so she has to figure out how to earn a living on her own. The people are receptive and friendly, but insist that everyone find a way to support themselves. Athena has some skills, and finds a way to apply them, even though she's more used to people expecting her to take advantage of her father's wealth and position. It's a peaceful and progressive society and she earns people's respect, but wants to return home to Earth.

When they get back to Earth, Athena learns that the circumstances of her kidnapping weren't what she thought. Kit and Athena end up rescuing one another a few times, and they end up puzzling out some interesting mysteries about both their ancestries.

Hoyt throws in some plot twists involving cloning, brain transplants, and genetic enhancement.

Gawande on Cowboys and Doctors

2011-06-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Atul Gawande gave a commencement address at Harvard last week, and focused on the subjects he covered so well in his book The Checklist Manifesto. Given the setting, he adds a charge to the graduating class to enact the reforms he argued for. The line in his speech that caught my attention and makes me hopeful that the health care system may be moving in the direction he promotes was this:

Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change.

If the next generation of doctors understands and is buying into the idea that we need more systemic approaches to managing health care, there may be a chance that the system will gradually (or we can at least hope, rapidly) reform into something more sustainable, and directed at effective care.

The Last Trumpet Project, Kevin MacArdry

2011-04-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Kevin MacArdry's The Last Trumpet Project covers the consequences of a slightly future world in which realistic virtual realities and uploading of people's consciousnesses into software are becoming commonplace. The government and organized religion are both violently opposed to these developments (for different reasons) and work together to suppress the technology and the people promoting it. Since the technology is the result of decentralized processes, rather than a single company or organization, the efforts to suppress don't do much more than slow the tide.

The story is generally well-told, with plenty of excitement, intrigue, and reasonable character development. The one place where MacArdry comes up short is in his depictions of the bad guys. They are caricatures of venal politicians and religious leaders, and may turn off (politically) mainstream readers. Their explicit drives and goals are for personal power, and they verbally admit that they don't care who gets hurt as long as they don't have to relinquish control.

MacArdry presents a plausible economic story about the development of the technology (the ability to view past events necessary for uploading dead people notwithstanding). As the fidelity of the VR improves, and there are more things to do and places to go there, more people spend more time there. The eventual consequence is that their real world activities and sources of income become harder to trace, which squeezes the tax authorities. This is the root of much of the governmental opposition. The religious opposition is stirred up based on the project to resurrect the dead into the artificial worlds.

As befits a technology that people rely on so heavily (the resurrected can't exist without it), the software has actual security (not described) that enables owners to prevent bad actors from getting access to sensitive locations. Of course the weak spot is physical access to the servers hosting the system, and the enemy forces eventually figure that out, though they have a hard time connecting particular servers to particular virtual locations.

The Last Trumpet Project is a finalist for the Prometheus Award, and it has a reasonable chance. It may not be the best written candidate of this year's finalists, but it's one of the best at presenting a clear conflict between freedom and government repression.

Simple Explanation of Prices

2011-04-10T15:06:00.000-07:00

One of the podcasts I listen to is Russ Roberts' "Econtalk". In a recent podcast on Hayek, he was talking with Bruce Caldwell about the price mechanism and how markets adjust when circumstances change. They referred to Hayek's article "The use of knowledge in Society", a classic article I've heard of many times. This is the place where Hayek conclusively settled the Socialist Calculation Debate, which had raged for a couple of decades to that point. It's remarkably readable.

The podcast also referenced Roberts' own short article "How Markets use Knowledge". This article gives a concrete example of how markets adapt to changing circumstances, using a simple intersection of supply and demand curves. As circumstances change, suppliers and consumers adapt, by changing the amount they produce or consume, and the changing price gives each all the cues they need to choose a new course of action. Roberts shows how their adaptations respond to the context and the information they each have so different economic actors make different choices in differing circumstances. It's simple and elegant.

War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin

2011-04-03T19:38:00.000-07:00

0.3

Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War contains some fascinating details about a period in European history that isn't often covered in order to justify a relatively comprehensive theory about what drives the rise and fall of empires. Since I only have Turchin's view of the events, I don't feel confident in judging the theory, but it does hang together fairly well. Turchin's argument is that societies in which diverse cultures mix and which have frequent contact and conflict with very different groups, usually develop strong asabiya (social capital, Fukuyama's Trust), which leads to a strong culture and government, and historically led to empire (which he defines as a large multiethnic territorial state with a complex power structure.) The mixing which he says is crucial happens most often at the boundaries between empires, so as an empire grows the boundaries grow more distant, and the asabiya is undercut, followed by collapse and the rise of a new empire at the edges of the old.

The heart of the book is a presentation on European history before and after the Roman Empire, focusing on the interactions between the central areas and their Germanic, Frankish, Russian, and Arabian neighbors. There is a lot of detail about the various tribes and societies, and how they interacted, fought, and traded superiority over time. This was quite interesting, but since it was mostly new to me, and presented in support of Turchin's thesis, it was hard to tell how much selective bias there might have been. Turchin covers interactions between Russians and both Tatars and Mongols. The Russians apparently don't have any natural barriers to the east or south, allowing invaders to attack repeatedly. According to the thesis, northern Italy, which had more interaction with divergent neighbors than southern Italy, developed stronger social cohesiveness, which is completely consistent with the argument in Trust.

Turchin is less convincing when he talks about what drives the disintegration of social cohesion. This may be because he relies less on historical evidence and more on colloquial argument. He puts most of the weight of his argument on the "Matthew Principal" ('The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer'.) He argues it's a cyclic process that occurs between and within classes. This sounds like social mobility to me, but he seems to believe that it's more accordian-like, compacting and stretching out the classes, and he argues that social capital eventually dissipates because of the disparities. In his view, the rich have advantages that allow them to amass more and more, so inequality rises, which leads to a decay of asabiya, ending in the fall of another empire. But it's clear from his description that some of the upper classes are rising and others are falling, and the same thing happens to the middle and lower classes at the same time. He even gives examples of some of the wealthy spending their money foolishly and ending up poor, and of the middle and lower classes saving their money and making it into higher strata.

In the final chapter, Turchin acknowledges that the Internet and the spread of the cell phone have changed the dynamics. He suggests a couple of possible directions that things might go, and some ways in which his theory might continue to be useful, but admits that societies don't have much of the stratification or immobiilty that drove the dynamics in prior eras.

Zendegi, Greg Egan

2011-03-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

Greg Egan's Zendegi is another novel nominated for this year's Prometheus Award that features social media being used by an underground movement to topple a government. But this is Greg Egan, so there must be something about silicon consciousness or artificial life involved, right? Well, yes there is, but the political plot works out to be more interesting this time around. Egan's focal characters are Martin Seymour, an ex-pat American journalist living in Iran and Nasim Golestani, an Iranian scientist who worked in the US but has now returned. At the beginning of the story Golestani is working on the Human Connectome project, which gives her a background in mapping the brain to software. Seymour gets involved when cell-phone pictures help topple the Iranian religious dictatorship.

In the second half of the novel, Golestani works on improving the AI for a virtual reality game company that is struggling to keep up with its competition, while Seymour runs a bookstore in Tehran. Golestani starts incorporating data and software from the Connectome project into the NPCs, which raises the ire of fundamentalists. Seymour, meanwhile, has contracted a fatal disease, and wants to find a way to ensure that someone he trusts will continue to provide guidance to his son, and hits on the idea of getting Golestani to build an artificial mind for him.

Egan's depiction in Diaspora of the development of consciousness in artificial minds was ground-breaking, but nothing of similar scope happens here. There are many scenes in virtual reality, but the story-telling emphasis is on Seymour's attention to influencing his son's maturation. The descriptions of the development of the artificial consciousnesses focused on brain mapping rather than awareness. In the end, the characters decide that the simulacrum of Seymour isn't up to the task of mentoring his son, which renders many of the interesting conflicts and questions moot. The protesters against enslaving artificial being can be pacified with a promise to keep them below the level of a simple automaton, and Golestani doesn't have to grapple with her own moral sensibilities about just how conscious they might become. It feels like Egan really side-stepped the issue here. And his solution doesn't do anything to prevent other developers from taking the same step later.

It's especially bad because Egan has previously made it clear that understands these issues. His Diasporah, and Permutation City directly address issues related to artificial consciousness. In the latter work, his characters explore a large variety of different scenarios of partial experience, and directly discuss the issues concerning how real they are as persons, and what rights a partially aware entity should have.

While the story is well-written, topical, and engaging, the liberty-related themes are sparse and limited. The populace revolts against a corrupt dictatorship, but that's more celebration than presentation of issues. Artificial creatures are developed, but never get advanced enough for their rights to be a serious question. It's neither a strong contender for this year's Prometheus, nor as much as I would have expected from Egan.

Directive 51, John Barnes

2011-03-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

John Barnes's Directive 51 is a fast-paced action story that covers a dystopian apocalypse and the struggle over presidential succession in a suddenly low-tech society which suffered huge losses. It's hard to call it libertarian, since the focus is on how the government will help people pull the country together again, but it does realistically show that the struggle for power trumps many other considerations, even when most of the survivors are fighting just to find food and shelter in an emergency.

The situation is that "Daybreak", a leaderless underground movement, has piggybacked on the Internet (there's a lot of that going around in SF this year, isn't there?) to put together a coordinated attack plan to destroy modern civilization. The participants all have different reasons and different objectives, but they agree that "the system" is broken, and we'd all be better off without it. Most of them haven't thought any deeper than that, and don't realize just how much they'd lose. Some of the movement's participants have invented bacteria that eat plastic and "nanoswarm" that gunks up powered machinery. Others have devised plans to ensure that these destructive agents are spread far and wide (worldwide, though the story's focus is on the US) on the appointed day. All this, of course results in the collapse of civilization, 100s of millions of deaths, and nearly everyone else being reduced to fleeing refugees trying to get out of the major metropolitan areas.

All of that serves as background to the story that Barnes really wants to tell. Directive 51 is (truthfully) the latest in a sequence of Presidential Directives laying out the process for maintaining constitutional government in the aftermath of a calamity that removes the bulk of the leadership of the federal government. In this depiction, the consequences are a deadly struggle for power that seems to supersede the attention that should be paid just to getting people back on their feet.

In order to justify one faction's claims that the nation is still under attack, the book has to enable Daybreak to conduct a continuing series of hydrogen bomb attacks after the devastation has occurred. This is both out-of-character with the rest of Daybreak, and hard to believe technically. Nearly everything else has broken down, but the bombs keep falling.

The book has been nominated for the Prometheus Award, and while it's an exciting story, and well-told, and it shows how power can corrupt even in a paramount emergency, I was disappointed that the focus of discussion of the recovery was largely on the government's efforts. It's clear that behind the scenes, individuals are doing most of the work independent of the government, but we're mostly watching federal efforts to ensure that the government continues to function. You might find that outweighed by the fact that people, acting on their own are the primary source of recovered food, the primary hope for growing more, as well as the drivers of a multitude of new inventions that provide some technologies that can continue to function in the face of the proliferating nanoswarm.

For the Win, Cory Doctorow

2011-03-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

Cory Doctorow's For the Win is very much of the moment, covering an Internet-driven global uprising. In Doctorow's case, though it's a union organizing outbreak among Internet workers (gold farmers, mechanical turks, etc.). Not surprisingly, real-world union busting tactics are used to fight back. Doctorow, as usual, has a firm grasp on the zeitgeist, and has written another story just a few months into his own future. Published last year, it must have been written even earlier. The introduction on his webbed version of the story (linked above) talks up the relevance to the recent financial crisis.

There are a couple of fascinating ideas on display in the book: the parallels to current events in the Middle East of course, the discussions of on-line role-playing games and their various denizens, and the story itself and the characters and events that drive it.

The action centers around the Far East: mostly China and Viet Nam, though Cambodia, Indonesia, and India show up, too. Several groups of gold farmers are the focal characters. They're each controlled and abused by a relatively wealthy investor, who underwrites their access to the net, and resells the gold and treasures they earn on-line. In exchange, they're paid enough to keep them alive, and they get to play games all day. Rather than mindlessly wandering the games or doing the obvious quests, their modus operandi is to play the games and look for exploitable weaknesses—monsters that are easy to kill relative to the treasure they give, places that are unusually likely to spawn a good treasure, or actual bugs in the implementation that let players turn straw into gold with less than the usual effort. Since what they do is fun and exciting, and a lot like playing games, there are always plenty more players available, so individuals don't have a lot of leverage with their employers. In this kind of circumstance, it's not surprising that the situation occasionally turns more explicitly abusive, and that's the context that leads some of the characters to approach union organizers. Once they're gotten in contact, the support goes both ways: the on-line workers provide communication and publicity to traditional union workers, and the organizers provide manpower and experience in dealing with violent tactics.

The book was nominated for the Prometheus Award, but it's hard to identify explicitly libertarian aspects of the story. Most of the conflict is between (abusive) owners and workers, with governments not getting very involved. I found the context intriguing, and Doctorow tells a great story, but the closest I can get to a libertarian angle is to try to describe it as a struggle against authority—but it's only a struggle against power, which isn't quite the same thing.

For the Win is a fun read. Doctorow excels at depicting action crossing back and forth between virtual worlds and the real world, and at giving a feel for a future that's only a little advanced over our own. There's a fair amount of violence in this story, even though Doctorow presents it as a young adult novel. In the anti-union violence there's a fair amount of head-bashing, though eventually it's countered with ghandian non-violence. Definitely worth the read.

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande

2011-02-27T16:09:00.000-08:00

Atul Gawande has been writing on medical practice, provocatively and informatively, for the New Yorker for several years. His comments on price differences and what drives disparities between different areas garnered a lot of attention, but that area hasn't been his main focus. His recent book, The Checklist Manifesto, is closer to the main line of his writings. In this short book, Gawande presents his argument that medicine as currently practiced is far from a rigorous, science-driven field. He shows how aviation and construction are at least as complex and time-constrained as medicine, and that both have benefited from the use of checklists to help practitioners get the details right when performing complex operations.

Individual errors and mistakes of coordination are far more common in medicine than in other modern highly-technical fields. If medicine followed the standards of professional practice common in other areas, there would be a dramatic improvement in our overall health. Gawande discusses how checklists are constructed and used in aviation, another field where routine work is occasionally suddenly interrupted by situation requiring split second decision making at a rapid pace in a distracting environment with enormous consequences. Safety experts in aviation have learned how to put together checklists that can be found quickly, and that enable professionals to correctly address situations that arise in one flight in a million.

The safety record in aviation world-wide is amazingly good. I've long ascribed that difference between aviation and medicine to the fact that accidents in aviation are scrutinized thoroughly, and every mistake drives new corrective processes that quickly make it less likely that the same thing will happen again anywhere in the world. Every airframe manufacturer ensures that all of its vehicles are quickly updated with the most up-to-date procedures. In medicine, individual hospitals sometimes conduct reviews, but any knowledge gained is used sporadically and locally. There is also no standard for how to conduct these inquiries, so some investigations are derailed by politics, infighting, or a desire to deflect blame (which is exacerbated by medical malpractice risks.) The inquiries conducted in aviation have been designed to find correctable causes, and not to place blame. Focusing on the checklists that result from these inquiries would be a big improvement on what we have in medicine now. It's even plausible that a coordinated process for producing checklists would drive an improvement in the checklists based on measured effectiveness.

The book is very readable. The main story is about how Gawande led a task force for WHO testing out some simple checklists for a few common surgical procedures with high rates of routine errors. The results were spectacular, leading to a 36 percent reduction in complications and 47 percent drop in deaths from a variety of hospitals in rich and poor communities all over the world. Getting doctors and hospitals to actually adopt this simple improvement is a far harder task than getting a pilot program demonstrating its effectiveness. The side trips Gawande makes into aviation and construction to show how checklists work there and how they're constructed are engaging.

Going Inside, John McCrone

2011-02-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

John McCrone's Going Inside provides a lot of insightful observations about how the brain works, but fails to tie them together into a cohesive picture. McCrone focuses on recent findings from new brain scanning technologies, and is particularly fascinated by timing studies that give details on how long it takes us to process incoming information, the specific times at which decisions are made, and how our subjective experience of when choices happen comport with the underlying brain circuitry. In particular, the studies show that it takes a half second to react to new information, even when we're expecting it, but our subjective experience is that the decision is made instantaneously at the end of that period. The experiments that show this are ingenious: by cutting off or distracting the process at various points, we can compare the reported subjective feel about the decision state that was reached with the brain scanner's details of how far into the process the brain actually got. All this works experimentally, because repeated sessions show that there's a lot of consistency in the information processing, so the scientists can pinpoint when the incoming information started being processed, and how long it would have taken to reach a choice.

The problem with the presentation is that McCrone doesn't provide an overview of the whole picture until the closing chapter, so as a reader, I had no framework onto which to attach all the facts as he presented them so as to build up a cohesive picture. I was left with the feeling that he'd presented good evidence that seemed to bear on the issue he was investigating, but I didn't know how it fit as I encountered it, so each tidbit vanished as I encountered the next one. I'm not sure things would be much improved on a re-reading. With a familiarity with the whole story, I could figure out how most of the pieces buttress the argument, but I'd have to make up my own argument structure for why his is the best explanation for the workings of the entire system.

McCrone also flubs up on the evolutionary explanation. At various points, he attempts to show why evolution would have produced just the structures and relationships that he has revealed, but his descriptions are unconvincing--he sometimes speaks as if evolutionary pressures are pushing toward a known result, rather than explaining why some abilities would have been selectively favored and why random mutations could have produced the effects. I think the correctly formed arguments could have been constructed, but McCrone's failed attempts were distracting.

One of McCrone's goals is to show how quickly brain scanning technologies advanced over the last few decades. The best tools for peering into the deepest details of timing and interaction in the brain have only recently been developed, so the insights that are most crucial to the book's argument aren't presented until a third of the way into the book, when he has set the historical context. Benjamin Libet did a series of experiments on patients (who were getting brain surgery already) that showed that direct electrical stimulation of the brain wasn't noticed unless it continued for a full half-second. If the stimulation was cut off earlier the patient wouldn't notice anything; if it continued for longer, the subject would report that they had been aware of it from the beginning. Later experiments showed that a second stimulus could mask the first one, as much as a third of a second later. This is pretty convincing evidence that processing inputs takes us up to half a second, and our experience of the present is cobbled together after the fact. Explaining "Libet's half-second" and figuring out what it implies about consciousness occupies the bulk of the book.

Libet did other studies later in which subjects were asked to notice the position of a rotating second hand at the moment they made a decision to lift a hand or take a similar action. With these and other similar experiments by other researchers it became clear that there isn't a precise moment at which decisions are made. The state of the brain changes somewhat continuously over a period from a half second to a full second, and subjects report somewhat arbitrary times as "the moment" of decision.

I would have to re-read the whole book (I've re-skimmed about the first half) in order to provide a detailed synopsis of it. I did feel like McCrone brought quite a few fascinating and important insights to light that would clarify an understanding of brain mechanisms, but the organization makes it hard to put them together on first reading. Maybe someone else will (or has) pull the material together in a better order, and that will be a more worthwhile book.

Wired for War, P. W. Singer

2011-01-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

P. W. Singer's Wired for War covers all the ways robots are being prepared for and used in military missions. There's a lot of valuable detail here on what's happening, and what's coming. Singer is a little out of his depth when it comes to the societal implications, though. The robots covered here are used for surveillance, rescue, and actual fighting missions on land, at sea, and in the air. Few of the land-based robots are news, though the pervasiveness and popularity with the troops haven't been widely reported as far as I know. The variety of aerial and marine uses was somewhat of a surprise to me. There has been more progress on small-scale fliers and long-duration flights than I had previously known. The underwater and surface autonomous craft haven't seen as much active use as the others, but rapid development has been happening in these areas in parallel with the better known land and air variety.

The material on consequences for society was much thinner; Singer has thought of several plausible areas where the implications might be interesting, but he was stretching to find things to worry about. The main substantive issue he addressed was whether the operators of remotely-operated robots would be less careful about who they attack because of their distance, and whether autonomous systems are an immoral or inappropriate tool, since there would be no human in the loop. I didn't see any substantive contribution to the issue from Singer: he raised the issue, drew in the outlines of the discussion, and moved on. After that, he talked about issues such as: If the robots are operated by armchair warriors who never approach the theater of operations, how does that affect the military esprit de corps?, should the operators be considered combatants if opposing forces want to target the operators in order to reduce military effectiveness?

Another issue he brought up without any depth is the charge that operators who grew up playing video games are already inured to committing violence on-screen, and so would have a hard time thinking of their targets as actual people. This has been a perennial problem with human soldiers. The military does its best to train soldiers to follow orders and let the officers decide what the strategy and rules of engagement should be. The main limit on the military's tactics is public opinion--the same restraints have to be used with robotic soldiers and their operators. With robots it's likely that we'll have better records of who did what. Additionally, the victims in the modern day will have better tools for recording and publicizing any atrocities that happen, so even if there's a greater ability, and we might expect less hesitation from the soldiers, the same mechanisms are available to restrain their instincts, and better abilities to track and hold them responsible. It only looks like the problem is growing in an unchecked fashion if you don't look at how things used to work holistically. That seems to be common in Wired for War.

I recommend reading the book if you'd like to know more about the impact of robotics on the military, but take what Singer says about the consequences with a grain of salt.

Cambio Bay, Kate Wilhelm

2011-01-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

Kate Wilhelm's Cambio Bay is light fantasy, combining a character study style with an old house that seems to insulate itself and its inhabitants from outside influences and the ravages of time. Cambio Bay is an isolated community on the Santa Barbara coastline of central California, which has somehow escaped the notice of the map makers.

A woman (Iris) and her unspeaking daughter (Bonnie) are on the run because Iris' flaky boyfriend has run afoul of a drug kingpin for whom he did odd jobs. A storm and earthquake shut down the highway and divert Iris and a few other travelers to Cambio Bay and Luisa'a Guest House. Carolyn is a real estate agent with a background in design who quickly realizes that the house's layout doesn't make any sense. She can't be sure that the rooms aren't always in the same places, but she is positive that rooms on opposite sides of the hallway can't both face the beach. She tries several times to sketch out the parts of the floor plan that she has become familiar with (an exercise she commonly performs while touring houses before showing them in her business), and when she can't make consistent picture, she decides the place is too creepy and leaves. Of course the evolving story and the other guests' troubles find ways to lure her back.

In the end, the house turns out to be a force for good, and the good and innocent visitors find ways to outsmart the bad guys. As the story unfolds, we get to know the visitors quite well, and see what drives them. Bonnie's lack of speech is never explained, nor why the drug kingpin is obsessed with capturing her. The house's mystery is traced back to some local Native American legends.

Overall, a pretty fun read, but not very deep. Kate Wilhelm knows how to present interact characters in an interesting story, even when the conflicts remain on a very small scale.

The Price of Everything: Russ Roberts

2010-12-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

Russ Roberts' The Price of Everything is an engaging story written by an economics professor in an attempt to show how prices help us direct our efforts so they will provide the most benefit to others we will never meet. In the story Ruth Lieber, a strikingly insightful Stanford professor leads Ramon Fernandez, a charismatic student athlete, to an appreciation for the unseen consequences of prices after he leads a protest of a local big box store for raising prices after an earthquake.

Ruth sometimes explains, but more often hints so Ramon will investigate for himself, how higher prices or the expectation of a higher return cause suppliers, inventors and others to provide more useful goods and services so they're available when people want them.

The prose is vivid and the characters are interesting. Most of the story is reasonably believable, though there are enough hints at the purpose of the exposition that no one should be surprised at the occasional speech. Roberts does a good job of keeping that to a minimum, but he does have some points to make. Ramon isn't initially interested in economics, but he's smart enough to look into the details when Ruth points out inconsistencies between how he expects people to act and the ways they actually do. Ruth (and Russ) rely on common experiences so Ruth's objections will strike home to readers who are reasonably honest about how events actually turn out, even if their prejudices align more with Ramon's.

I think this would be a reasonable book to give to someone who wants a gentle introduction to the economic way of thinking. It can be read as an interesting story, or for the insights it provides.

That Hideous Strength: C. S. Lewis

2010-12-14T22:08:00.000-08:00

C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength has been a perennial nominee for the Libertarian Futurists Society's Hall of Fame award. Seeking to give it a fair shot, I waited to read it until after reading the first two works in the series: Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandria. Neither of those books impressed me, and this book doesn't significantly rely on the connection to them. Unfortunately, this book didn't impress me either. I think part of it is the style of the writing, which seems vague, foggy, and long-winded to me. I also didn't care much for the characters, didn't find the plot interesting, and had trouble seeing what the conflict was about.

Lewis sets up two clear factions, clearly struggling over something, but we appear to only watching the activities of people who are a few steps removed from those who are aware of the strategy and aims of each side. Instead of watching maneuvering about the great struggle that is going on, we watch the minor characters as they maneuver through office politics, attempting to ensure that they have a seat at the table, while those characters remain ignorant about what the goals of those at the table are whom they wish to join.

Eventually, we see more of the high level action, but the sides are painted so starkly--the bad guys are depraved, manipulating, torturers, while the good guys refrain from acting--that it's hard to imagine how Lewis will turn the struggle into a fair fight. In the end, it was hard to see that it was a fair fight; the bad guys laid waste to the countryside in an attempt to take control over everything, while the good guys recruited a top wizard who eventually makes the bad guys stop.

I couldn't see it as a struggle of ideas, because I couldn't tell what the ideas might have been. One side was full of people who were scrambling for power, and most of their efforts seemed to be the minor squabbles of factional politics. The other side acted in a more genteel fashion, and didn't seem aware that their opponents were preparing a rapacious campaign. In the end, the only part of the struggle that mattered was over who would recruit the master wizard, and this didn't seem to be about who he agreed with as much as who could bridge the language gap with him effectively or who could isolate him better. So the good guys won, but the territory was spoiled in the process, and neither we nor the characters learned much in the process.

Live Free or Die: John Ringo

2010-11-17T09:17:00.000-08:00

John Ringo's Live Free or Die is quite a fun read in the genre of space entrepreneurship. The protagonist, Tyler Vernon, is practically a superman of business, who can create innovative new deals out of thin air with anyone who is amenable to trading. In this case, his objective is to save us all from the Horvath invaders who have set up a warship orbiting the earth and are extracting heavy "protection fees" from all humanity. Other space faring societies are willing to trade, but not in military goods, so Vernon has to figure out what non-military goods he can bend to his purposes without triggering the proscriptions.

For a writer who seems to have a reasonable insight into how business people set up deals so they benefit all parties, it's surprising that Ringo leaves the story as a one-man show. Vernon gains an immense amount of wealth early in the story by figuring out what earth-produced good will be of value to the friendly aliens, and then locking up supplies before anyone else knows that it will be valuable. But the approach he uses to make his discovery should be able to be repeated several times, so it's a surprise that Vernon is the only entrepreneur in contact with the aliens. But in the story, that works out fine, because Vernon is a tireless workaholic who really wants to ensure that we find a way to get the Horvath out of our hair.

There's not much more depth to the story than that, but there are enough twists and turns in the plot that I don't want to describe the story in any more detail. Live Free or Die is a nominee for the Prometheus award, and I'd guess that it will make it as a finalist as well. I'm hoping for something with more depth, but I haven't seen it yet, though it's still early.

Fantastic Voyage: Ray Kurzweil & Terry Grossman

2010-11-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman's Fantastic Voyage is a guide to (as the subtitle says) how to "Live Long enough to Live Forever." The premise is that medical science and technology are on an accelerating growth path like that of digital technologies in general, though it may be a shallower exponential.

In my view, longer lifespans are definitely coming, and it seems likely that we'll be able to extend maximum spans beyond the 120 years or so that are currently possible. In addition, we're coming to an understanding of the causes of aging sufficient to be able to repair or reverse some of the damage. We don't yet know how to apply what we know, but the time isn't far off if current trends continue. The question is how long would you have to live and how healthy will you have to be in order to make use of the technology when it becomes available.

The saddest outcome would be to live to see introduction of technologies for rejuvenation, but be too frail for them to be of much use. This book is Kurzweil and Grossman's summary of what they believe you should do if you agree with them that surviving healthy is of paramount importance now that these technologies appear to be on the near horizon and drawing quickly closer.

Much of their advice is standard current health care wisdom: maintain a good weight, don't eat too much, don't smoke, get a variety of exercise, and so on. They put their advice in perspective a couple of times, pointing out that following the rest of their advice won't matter much if you don't have these basics right.

Given Kurzweil's background, it's not surprising that the book includes an explanation of how the exponential trends and what we can see of the development of the technology provide convincing evidence that we can look forward to enhanced longevity, and some reasonable bounds on how soon and how good.

A lot of the presentation is colored by Kurzweil's family history and past battles with weight control and the concomitant consequences of metabolic syndrome: diabetes and heart disease. When the authors are recommending supplements, it's a chore to distinguish between recommendations that apply to everyone and those that are focused on the majority of Americans who are susceptible to the same problems. Its possible, but you have to concentrate and take careful notes. Some of the discussion of what each supplement is good for is presented separately from the recommendations of what nearly everyone should take, and you have to cross-correlate the two to see what matters if you aren't troubled by this common syndrome.

In the end the recommendations that seem most likely to change my behavior are a few of the nutritional suggestions: eat more soy & tofu, and a further slight movement toward more fruit and vegetable and less meat. I will probably also add more supplements to my regimen. The hard part of evaluating their suggestions is deciding how much time to spend evaluating the suggestions and the science behind them. They recommend supplements for mitochondrial health and to reduce cellular cross-linking. I've read Aubrey de Grey's work on senescence and the role of these factors, and believe his arguments that these are fundamental in aging. The harder question is how anyone is measuring the direct effects in the body, and what evidence there is for actual consequences in the body beyond the theoretical. I may be reduced to accepting that quite a few very sophisticated scientists who are interested in longevity are saying the same things. I attended the recent conference on Personalized Life Extension. The organizer, Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute, and several of the researchers are very well regarded, and they all seemed to be saying the same things about the same supplements.

The authors provide a reasonable amount of justification for all of their advice, and the technical details to convince a moderate skeptic that they know what the biological pathways are and which ones need to be reinforced. I found the presentation reasonably convincing, though it requires further research and correlation with other sophisticated researchers in order for me to have sufficient confidence to take action.

Understanding Institutional Diversity: Elinor Ostrom

2010-10-03T19:59:00.001-07:00

Elinor Ostrom's Understanding Institutional Diversity presents some of the work that led to her Nobel prize last year. Ostrom has developed new frameworks for analyzing the way people organize to manage shared use of common resources. She seems particularly interested in the interaction between spontaneous orders (whether or not relying on markets) and government systems at different scales. The core of the analysis is a robust grammar for describing how an institution is organized and enforces the rules it intends to impose on participants. The grammar lays out 5 elements to be described in relatively standardized language, which results in descriptions that make it possible to compare disparate institutions. Systematically cataloging their relevant features makes it easier to compare institutions to find out what common features lead to their relative levels of success.

Few of the institutions Ostrom studies are government mandated; most have been around longer than the local government. This means the mechanism they use to enforce adherence to traditions, and adjudicate disputes must rely on something other than the rule of law and police power for its effectiveness. Ostrom shows that there are a variety of approaches, and there's a systematic relationship between membership forms and workable enforcement mechanisms.

The grammar Ostrom presents has five elements: the attributes that qualify someone as a participant in the system; whether actions are permitted, required, or forbidden (may, must, must not); the covered actions; the conditions under which the rules apply; and the consequences of not following the rule. These components can be used to describe rules, norms and shared strategies. Rules have all 5 components, norms specify all but the consequences, and shared strategies are statements that only contain the first three components. When using this framework, you have to be aware that most rules can be rephrased between prohibitions and compulsions without changing their sense. When comparing two institutions, a little care is usually enough to penetrate this surface distinction. For example "Actor X is forbidden to take action Y" could be written as "X must perform a non-Y action" or "X does not have the option of doing Y".

Writing descriptions of a variety of institutions using this consistent format has allowed researchers to catalog the kinds of attributes that are used by long surviving non-governmental institutions and contrast those with the kinds of attributes that governments often rely on. The successful private institutions tend to depend on attributes that reinforce a sense of community and mutual obligation (residence in a locality, paying dues or working in a local organization) rather than ones that are easier to administer in a consistent way and have a surface appearance of fairness (paying for a license, passing a test).

The book is organized in three parts. Part I provides background of the context in which Ostrom writes, and introduces vocabulary and some canonical problems. Much of this content is pulled from earlier papers and doesn't flow seamlessly. Other parts are reviews of now well-known examples and experiments and can be skipped or skimmed if the material seems repetitious. Part II explains the grammar's framework, gives some justification, and shows how it has been applied (by Ostrom and others). This is the meat of the book and rewards careful attention. I thought the presentation was clear and the contents quite valuable. In Part III, Ostrom talks about the implications of the theory and the approach for designing and repairing real world institutions.

This was the first place I got a feel for her own attitudes, and I was pleasantly surprised. Since most of her work has been in the context of common pool resources, and she studies communal or voluntary solutions, I expected her to argue that emergent systems somehow "naturally" resolve the issues. Instead she argues that markets have a crucial role, and that it's important that there be multiple institutions at various aggregation levels so rules and meta-rules can be handled through institutions with different incentives and varying feedback systems.

She seems most averse to solutions imposed by central authorities, since they seldom know enough about local conditions to be able to design systems of reciprocity that will fit with the ways that people interact in different locales. In order for a common pool resource institution to succeed over the long term, the participants have to feel ownership of the resource and of the reward and punishment system so that they'll both follow and enforce the rules. If someone else is responsible for enforcement, then the people with the most knowledge of local activities won't be watching one another carefully, and they'll find ways to shirk when times get tough. If they're watching one another, they'll assume they're being watched, and will be much more likely to follow the rules.

I've read other books that talk about how people solve problems in the absence of law and government, but this is the first to present a framework for analyzing existing approaches. The framework doesn't give the answers, but Ostrom's work has allowed her to look at many different approaches that have been taken around the world, and to systematically compare them to see what works and what doesn't. Her conclusions should be studied widely.

What Intelligence Tests Miss, Keith Stanovich

2010-09-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

Keith Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss does a reasonable job of arguing that we have a couple of different things in mind when we talk about how "smart" a person is, and that some of the important aspects are very different from what IQ tests measure. His goal seems to be to convince us that the other parts are important and we would do better if we either found good ways to measure them (though there are caveats there) or reduce the societal importance of IQ tests and their ilk.

Most of the areas that Stanovich is interested in could loosely be called rationality skills. He starts out the book with the example of George Bush, whose apparent IQ (estimated from various of his tests results that are on the record) is about 120, but who is agreed to not have conventional smarts, or be a thorough, consistent, or deep thinker. The main point here is talking about how people are surprised, but shouldn't be, that IQ is separate from what we call smart. The book is mainly a riff on Kahneman and Tversky's work on human decision making, and all the kinds of rationality traps that we fall for.

Apparently, Stanovich's own research is in how the various layers of processing—the Autonomous mind, the Algorithmic mine, and the Reflective mind— interact and override one another in order to determine the kinds of processing we do. We spend most of our time in autonomous mode, with occasional incidents propelling us into slower Algorithmic thinking, and only rarely do we have a reason to actually think about what we're doing reflectively. Stanovich has a detailed model showing the interactions, and pointing to the Reflective mind as the director that gives the signal for when to invoke the Algorithmic level. His argument seems to be that people who don't "act smart" fail to engage their Reflective layer, and so end up on auto-pilot most of the time.

The rest of the book is mainly a rehash of the literature on rationality errors, and a plea for approaches like Thaler and Sunstein's Libertarian Paternalism, which are intended to provide support for people so they can get smarter results without having to reason more clearly.

In the end, I guess I'd say that there are some interesting ideas here, but not enough to make the book worthwhile.

No Justice, No Peace

2010-09-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

Matt Welch's Editor's column in the June issue of Reason includes this paragraph on a budget fight in Montgomery County, Maryland:

The housing bubble, with its tax-generating wealth, was already bursting in 2007. Yet as recently as 2009, Montgomery County, Maryland, decided to make "phantom" cost-of-living increases to the pensions of government workers, linking contributions to salary increases that did not occur. This sweetheart deal, which added more than $7 million to the county's annual budget (according to The Washington Post), tasted rather bitter at a time when the county's revenue was falling short of projections by more than $24 million. Yet after one Montgomery County Council member proposed eliminating this sop to the public-sector unions, four of his colleagues joined a rally on the rooftop of the council's parking garage, leading a crowd of 400 government employees in chants of "We've had enough!" and "No justice, no peace."

I boggled at the audacity of re-using the "No justice, no peace" chant in a context like this. Normally, when the left uses this chant at a rally, it's in support of a group that isn't getting fair treatment on housing or employment rights. The unstated thinking behind the chant is that societies that don't protect people's rights will find that the underprivileged are more restive. But in the mouths of public safety workers threatening to strike because outrageous privileges might be taken away, it sounds more like a threat, which I would paraphrase as "If we don't get what we want, we'll make your life hell!"

A little digging assured me that Montgomery County did rescind the pension increases eventually. Some the county council members are running on their record for having imposed fiscal austerity measures, even though they were in place for the initial largesse as well.

A Different Universe: Robert B. Laughlin

2010-08-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

Robert B. Laughlin's A Different Universe is full of interesting ideas without being a coherent narrative on a single theme. In the preface Laughlin explains that the book is an attempt to address the inherent tensions between reductionism and emergence. In particular, he (not very coherently) tries to argue that it's sometimes more useful to think of physical law as emerging from the interactions of particles rather than causing them. And he constantly interrupts his discussions of physics at various levels in order to tell anecdotes. Sometimes he seems to have chosen the topics in order to be able to either drop names (unusual for a Nobel laureate) or impugn the motives of people he's worked with.

Still, there are several fascinating examples of scientific phenomena that are well established, but for which there aren't good explanations that are integrated into the main texture of our understanding of physical law. I suspect that several good reputations could be made by physics grad students by latching onto one of Laughlin's stray thoughts and developing an explanation that fits the effect into the mainstream. One example is the phonon effect:

Suppose, for example, a sound transducer is attached to a solid and turned on, thus beaming sound into the solid, and then reduced in intensity to make the amount of sound small. A sound receiver on the other side of the solid detects not a faint tone but sharp pulses of energy arriving at random times. This quantized transmission of pulses evolves into the more familiar transmission of tone when the intensity is increased—an everyday example of the emergence of Newtonian reality out of quantum mechanics, But at low intensities this emergence does not occur, and the conclusion becomes inescapable that particles of sound exist, even though they do not exist when the solid is disassembled into atoms.

Laughlin calls this "The closest thing to real magic I know."

His discussion of symmetry (pp 124-5), and why it makes more sense to think of it as caused by the interactions between particles at various scales rather than as a set of rules that enforces their behavior is similarly tantalizing and brief.

He points out ways in which the physics mainstream is sweeping some problems under the rug, but doesn't truly resolve the issue. "If Einstein were alive today, he would be horrified at this state of affairs. He would upbraid the profession for allowing this mess to develop and fly into a blind rage over the transformation of his beautiful creations into ideologies and the resulting proliferation of logical inconsistencies. Einstein was an artist and a scholar but above all a revolutionary."

In chapter 13, "Principles of Life", near the end of the book, Laughlin spends several pages explaining that life is a mass phenomenon, and that collections of large numbers of parts act differently than you'd predict by analyzing the parts themselves. Rigidity, for example, is an important aspect of explaining how molecules get together to build living creatures, and it is only a coherent concept once you get into realms where the behavior of individual particles doesn't matter in detail. Similarly, proteins are enormous structures if you're trying to figure out how the behavior of atoms contribute to their effects, but if you deal with the atoms statistically, and as a mass, you can make more headway. Early in the book he had pointed out that "The only way one can start out from wrong principals and get the right answer is if the property one is calculating is robustly insensitive to details, i.e. is emergent. Thus the lesson from superconductivity is actually not that quantum field theory is a superior computational technology but that quantum fields can themselves emerge."

I'll end with Laughlin's summary of the (wine-fueled) conclusions of an interdisciplinary workshop on emergence:

Emergence means complex organizational structure growing out of simple rules. Emergence mans stable inevitability in the way certain things are. Emergence means unpredictability, in the sense of small events causing great and qualitative changes in larger ones. Emergence means the fundamental impossibility of control.

He manages to tie emergence in with some complex effects but leaves us with nothing more than a recognition that we don't understand what's going on yet.

A Mirror for Observers: Edgar Pangborn

2010-08-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

I recently re-read Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers, and wanted to like it. (It's been nominated for a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award a couple of times.) The story is narrated by Elmis, a visitor from Mars, who has been living among humans for thousands of years as a passive observer. He believes that humans are managing their affairs and their progress quite nicely on their own. His main goal is to prevent Namir, a dissident Martian, from encouraging evil of various sorts from arising among the humans.

The good guy in this story is very good--Elmis values taste and style and life, and wants to ensure that they survive on this planet. But the people he's trying to protect do very little to help their cause. They spend most of their time ignorant of the battle that centers on them, and even spend some of their time collaborating with their apparent enemies. If it weren't for the assistance of the extraterrestrial agent, they wouldn't stand a chance. And in the end, they lose the most important battle, even with his help.

So the underlying message is that the good is worth working for, but it is incapable of defending itself, and even with powerful and intelligent allies on its side, those working to undermine it may come out ahead.

If you read the book, you'll admire the characters, and enjoy their taste and sophistication, but you'll be disappointed in the end by their impotence.

Impro, Keith Johnstone

2010-08-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Keith Johstone's Impro purports to explain how to teach people how to do theatrical improvisation. The author has apparently had a fairly significant effect on the way that actors think about improvisation, but while there's some loose theorizing here, Johnstone presents nothing but personal experience to back it up. It works for him, and that ought to be good enough for you.

Johnstone's main claim is that the appearance of versimilitude that theater needs is mostly a matter of controlling the appearance of status distinctions between characters. He teaches his students via a variety of games and exercises in which they learn to carefully control status both by verbal responses and minor postural tweaks. Part of the trick (he claims) to getting the aspiring thespians to understand what they're trying to achieve is to be able to appear either slightly above or slightly below (on command) another character. Getting the audience to believe that one character is significantly more highly placed than another is easy, but there's no tension in that. In order to get both the appearance of reality, and dynamic intensity, Johnstone wants status distinctions to be slight, and constantly varying.

The last section of the book covers exercises with the actors wearing masks. Johnstone seems to believe that hiding behind a mask has almost mystical properties. This section was very unconvincing to me. The rest was only moderately interesting.

Hiatus

2010-06-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

My two month hiatus probably deserves an explanation, and enough has been going on in my life that it's worth bringing those of you who haven't heard about it up-to-date. For the last several years I've been primarily consulting on Zocalo, my open source prediction market software. In December, my two clients both let me know that their grants had run out, and they couldn't continue to pay me, so I started looking for a job. That occupied a lot of my time for the next few months, though I was able to keep writing reviews.

Then in early April, my father, Richard Tudor Hibbert, passed away. I spent a fair amount of time over the next week preparing to display some of his art that I had started organizing over the last year or so. At the service I ran a continuous loop of more than 100 of his paintings, watercolors, pastels, and sketches. I spoke briefly at the services (as did my brother Mike and my father's brother Robert).

Once I was back in California after the services, I continued interviewing, and got a job offer from Google shortly thereafter. I've been hard at work at Google since the beginning of May (when the hiatus began), and have been setting up a blog RTH-home.net for my father's art, (the name was his personalized license plate for many years, and is a play on his initials and his earth-covered home) and preparing posts for it every other day or so. That's what I've been up to. If you like the art I've posted there so far, I encourage you to keep tracking it, because there's much more coming. I'm hopeful that my time is more in control by now, and that my writing for pancrit.org will return to its normal (irregular) pace.

Microcosmos: Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan

2010-06-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Microcosmosis a recapitulation of the history of evolution of microbes and how it affects us. The work that Margulis & Sagan report on also led to an article at Edge.org that produced a quote I've been using as one of my email signatures.

All sensory cells [in all animals] have in common the presence of ... cilia [with a constant] structure. It provides a strong argument for common ancestry. The common ancestor ... was a spirochete bacterium.

The copyright date is 1986. A lot has been learned about evolution and microbes since then. Even so, this book is a good introduction to the subject; it's very readable and has lots of detail that is still accepted. The story starts with the very beginnings of life on earth, and is always connected to its affect on how our biology works now:

As we examine ourselves as products of symbiosis over billions of yeaaar, the supporting evidence of our multimicrobe ancestry becomes overwhelming. Our bodies contain a veritable history of life on Earth. Our cells maintain an environment that is carbon- and hydrogen-rich, like that of the Earth when life began. They live in a medium of water and salts like the composition of the early seas.

The presentation is ordered chronologically, starting with the formation of stars and planets, proceeding through the cooling of the earth and the formation of the first entities that could reproduce reliably, the invention of sex and the alternative means of exchanging genetic information, and the change in composition of Earth's atmosphere to something that supported oxygen breathers and was toxic to their precursors. That takes us through the first 3.5 Billion years of the history of the earth, and all of the evolution of macroscopic life occupies the most recent 500 Million years. The emergence of cells, multi-cellular life, and then plants and animals follows, but the microbes are still around and still affecting both metabolism and evolution.

Margulis & Sagan provide a very readable introduction to modern microbiology and modern thinking about evolution. There are certainly more recent books that cover the details of the modern understanding in more detail, but this is a good overview and doesn't miss much that's important.

The Prisoner, Carlos J. Cortes

2010-04-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

Carlos J. Cortes's The Prisoner has a very dark mood (partly because a lot of it takes places in sewers and other underground places) but has a freedom-oriented atmosphere. The government has exploited the development of a technology that allows suspended animation to convert prisons to cost-effective body warehouses. Some of the highest officials in the prison bureaucracy have taken advantage of the system to get rid of enemies, or to make money hiding people for the world's crime syndicates.

Someone with inside information and an axe to grind with Odelle Marino, the chief bureaucrat, puts together a team and a plan to spirit out one particular prisoner with the best chance of embarassing Ms. Marino. The plan would be appropriate for a Mission Impossible script, and the sewers that the team escapes through would make great cinema. The novel describes the stench and the slime, while a movie would have to leave the odors to our imagination. This would be an improvement, as the book revels in the ick factor. It also portrays the bad guys (particularly Marino) as caricatures, but since they're not the center of the story, this isn't a huge problem.

The good guys come from all levels of society, from a powerful Senator (willing to abuse his power for the right ends) to homeless vets living in abandoned subway tunnels. They know why they fight against the entrenched bureaucracy, but the novel focuses more on the action and intrigue than on the politics. The climax has a bit too much deus ex machina for my tastes--it wouldn't have been too hard to convincingly portray a General who takes the side of the schemers as anti-establishment, or chafing at some of the abuses, but his motivation remains unstated.

The main weakness of the story, from a libertarian viewpoint, is that the characters are only concerned with obvious abuses of power, and not with the inherent abuse that come with vast centralized power. The government in this future has enormous power over network communication, travel, and employment, and the protagonists spend their time trying to reduce corruption and abuses of that power, without more than annoyance directed at the impositions it provides.

Overall, I'd say this was an fun near future adventure story with a weak message against abusive government. The Prisoner was nominated for the Prometheus award, but wasn't selected as a finalist.

Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen

2010-04-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy argues that Asperger's syndrome and Autism are more common than most people realize, and that part of the reason is that people like Cowen gain more advantages than disadvantages from their condition. The overall point of the book is that we should treat neuro-diversity as an asset, both to society, and (for the neuro-diverse) to themselves.

The advantages that come with aspergers are a greater ability to focus, and to creatively find order in data, while the concomitant weakness is a lower ability to see the big picture. The condition is sometimes referred to as the autism spectrum, because there is such a variety of symptoms, but Cowen points out that both the strengths and weaknesses have a large and largely independent range. One of his repeated refrains is that finding ways to see the strengths has two beneficial effects--it both enables us to take better advantage of our personality quirks once we recognize them, and it encourages others to find the strengths hidden within the ways they see the world and develop them. So overall society benefits from people who think of themselves as differently-enabled rather than differently-disabled, and find ways to contribute and earn, rather than ways to get support and assistance from others.

Makers, Cory Doctorow

2010-04-03T15:56:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed Cory Doctorow's Makers, which is a Prometheus award finalist for this year even though it doesn't reach very far into the science fiction realm. I think many of the other judges, not living in Silicon Valley, don't see the same kind of ongoing inventiveness as I do, and don't see makers as an unrelenting force in the world.

The story follows the activities of a pair of makers (the modern, more popular term for the good kind of hacker), who invent a continuing stream of disruptive technologies, start a couple of movements which grow and crash serially casting fame and angst in all directions though wealth is sparser. The characters are prototypical hackers, with varying social skills, but always with the ability to adapt to new circumstances. From time to time, they each need to take on more managerial or other non-technical roles, which they sometimes do well, and other times pass on to others more suited for the role, and are always pining to get back to being creative.

The characters were completely plausible, and their inventions were eminently reasonable. Many people might blanch at their universal constructors, but everything they build is macro-scale, no nanotech required. Their diet interventions were more fantastic, allowing people to eat unlimited quantities, while burning all the calories wastefully, and therefore losing weight. The drawbacks and work-arounds were also plausible.

The fun part of it is that you get to see hackers spinning out new ideas, and new businesses growing up in all directions. The two primary characters are followed around by a reporter who decides they're the most interesting thing going on, and blogs their activities non-stop. While this means they have few secrets, it's also a source of unending publicity for them. Many of their inventions help other people move up from the bottom rung of the economic ladder, and keep lawyers and business managers continuously busy.

The battles over ownership and control of the technology were priceless, as well as the corporate intrigue and underhanded shenanigans to keep them from destroying other company's (mostly Disney, a perennial bad guy in Doctorow's stories) plans.

As a Prometheus nominee, there must be a libertarian connection, right? Well, open source production, entrepreneurial drive, and undercutting the normal order of things will have to suffice, since the characters pretty much ignore the government except when someone is suing someone else.

BTW, Locus Magazine had a great April Fools announcement that Ayn Rand's estate had picked Doctorow and Charlie Stross (both Prometheus winners, as Locus pointed out) to write a sequel to Atlas Shrugged. Meanwhile, Stross' own site announced that due to the sorry state of the SFF market, he'd be coming out with a line of sparkly unicorn-themed novels aimed at the teen market.

Liberating Atlantis, by Harry Turtledove

2010-03-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

Harry Turtledove's Liberating Atlantis is the final book of the trilogy, which covers the successful rebellion that ends slavery slightly earlier than in our own timeline. The protagonist is Frederick Radcliff, a slave and descendent of Victor Radcliff, himself a major character in both the previous books. Frederick Radcliff is the grandson of a slave woman "lent" to Victor between the battles in United States of Atlantis. Victor suffers a fair amount of angst in that story over the existance of a slave-born son when he has no surviving children with his wife.

Frederick is a smart and competent house slave who trips over a loose floorboard at an inopportune time and is given "5 lashes, well laid on" as direct punishment, and demoted to be a field slave. It doesn't take him long to be fed up with his new circumstances and luck soon feeds him an opportunity which he grabs and takes advantage of. A squad of soldiers are ferrying weapons and ammunition when they are hit with yellow fever; they stop to recover at the plantation where Frederick lives and toils. After the fever takes a few soldiers and their sentries get a little lax, Frederick leads a small band of slaves to grab the munitions and kill the soldiers along with their owners.

From there, the rebellion spreads, and Frederick proves an able leader. They find enough supplies on the nearby plantations and intercept supplies intended for the army that comes to suppress the rebellion. The army underestimates their abilities often enough that they are successful, and eventually negotiate terms with the national government.

Turtledove does a good job of presenting freedom-oriented ideas but in this book, they're in extremely non-controversial areas (everyone has an equal right to be free, governing is hard). His characters are all mixes of good and bad aspects, with even the southerners getting good points in occasionally, and not being any more consistently stupid than their opponents.

One of the ideas Turtledove explored in the series is the workings of the Roman consul system in which the power of the federal executive is checked by electing pairs of chief executives who serve in alternating periods and can veto each others' actions. The system worked alright for Rome for a long time, but as Turtledove portrays it, it falls apart in contentious times. In particular, the system calls for the consuls to serve in times of war as field generals alternating duties daily. The two consuls in this novel eventually figure out how to work together to make some progress, even when they disagree about their aims. It is more entertaining and instructive to see wild ideas demonstrated in fiction to argue that they might work, rather than to show that they don't work any better than we'd expect.

On the whole, a good read. Worthy of being a Prometheus finalist, and the first time, I think, that an author has had two finalists the same year. A few authors, most recently Charles Stross, had two novels nominated the same year.

Hidden Empire by Orson Scott Card

2010-03-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

Orson Scott Card's Hidden Empire picks up where his previous (prometheus nominated) Empire left off.

A new virus has just made the jump from monkeys to humans in Africa and Averell Torrent, the new U.S. President, knows how to take advantage of the situation in order to cement his power and make the world a better place. The story flows more smoothly than in the previous book; the action is intense, and the characters are engaging and sympathetic. There are very affective depictions of loyalty and heroism. Card knows how to propel the story through the characters' actions, and without needing editorial explanations to clarify his point.

But in the end, it's an apology for strong-man politics. The underlying message is if the right (visionary, ruthless) man can get control of the levers of power at the right time, and he has the right motives, he can make everything better. Card is careful (through the characters' actions) to warn us that it's crucial to a free society that the strong man be watched carefully to ensure he isn't pursuing nefarious ends, but in the end, Card says, if he is pure of heart and has the right goals, then he should be allowed to proceed.

If Hidden Empire becomes a finalist for the Prometheus this year, I would read it more as an indication of a weak year for well-written libertarian novels than an endorsement of the political principals displayed here. Of the eleven novels nominated so far (of which I've finished only 7), I can only recommend The Unincorporated Man as both libertarian and well-written. Makers by Cory Doctorow is a wonderful story (review coming shortly) but not libertarian enough to qualify. The United States of Atlantis is nearly as good, but also weak on libertarianism. The Iron Web is stridently libertarian, but with cardboard characters and weak writing.

Daniel Kennefick: Travelling at the Speed of Thought

2010-02-23T16:38:00.000-08:00

Daniel Kennefick's Traveling at the Speed of Thought tries to untangle the current state of science with respect to gravitational waves. The approach is mostly historical, with a focus on what Einstein thought at various times, and how others reacted to his analyses. The book is also fairly recent (2007) and doesn't seem to have been eclipsed by new discoveries yet. (There are active experiments looking for physical evidence of gravity waves. The effect is expected to be minuscule, so proponents are bothered by lack of success so far.)

A lot of the story is driven by a referee's report on a paper Einstein and Rosen submitted to Physical Review in 1936. Einstein was apparently used to European deference to authority on submitted papers, and was so upset that an anonymous referee had been consulted that he sent it to an obscure journal. By the time it was published there, Einstein had changed his mind about the primary conclusions.

The primary question seems to be whether gravitational waves carry energy with them as they propagate. If they do, then their sources (black holes, for instance) ought to lose mass over time. If they don't carry energy, then we don't have a sufficient theory of what could be propagating.

Another question that has to be answered is how fast gravity travels, and what it is that moves. In waves in water, individual water molecules only move locally, while the wave can travel great distances. With electromagnetism, actual photons move from place to place, carrying the influence. Which kind of thing is gravity? In one case, we should try to identify the medium in which the disturbance propagates, in the other, we should be able to find the particles themselves.

I may be over-simplifying, but the skeptical viewpoint seems to be that symmetrical motion or ballistic motion of any isolated mass wouldn't radiate energy, since changes in trajectory are required to produce gravity waves. If the present crop of detectors fails to find anything, this may be the best interpretation. It's hard to reconcile this suggestion with the presence of supernovas and binary star collapses. Those seem like dynamic enough changes that they should result in a change in the gravitational field that would have to propagate at some finite velocity.

Kennefick's book provides a good, general introduction to the area, without getting too technical. If you're interested in the history it would make sense to read it. If you're looking for more details on what is know, how the math works, or how to interpret the results from the detectors, you should probably look elsewhere.

Harry Turtledove: The United States of Atlantis

2010-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

Harry Turtledove's The United States of Atlantis is the second book of his series of a mythical extra continent in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, and how its history progresses parallel to the real North America. The story starts up a decade or two after the close of Opening Atlantis, so the main characters from the end of that book are the focus characters throughout this one. In this book, the British tighten up on taxes and import restrictions until the settlers say enough and start a revolution parallel to the American one. Victor Radcliff, who was pursuing a retirement career as a farmer after the previous novel, is chosen by the rebel Atlantean Assembly as their General. He has to recruit and arm an army, manage his political overseers, and run a campaign against a force that is better armed, better trained, has control of the seas, and is far from home. Of course, Radcliff has all the advantage of knowing the territory, protecting his home, and having the support of (most of) the populace.

The focus follows the military action almost exclusively. The campaigns are reasonably realistic and well told, with each side winning their share, but the eventual outcome is predictable, so it's never a surprise when Radcliff's setbacks are followed by bigger triumphs. The surprising thing to me was there was no attention paid to the events among the Assembly which was attempting to form a government. It seems to me that the possibilities for alternate history in the area of politics are far richer in this time of intellectual and political ferment than for alternate military history. As it was, freedom-related themes are mostly subliminal. We know that the characters are fighting for the independence of their home, and they occasionally talk about their feelings for the British Crown, but they don't talk about liberty, or how to organize or regulate a free society.

Alternate military history, on the other hand, is pretty simple, particularly when the geography and forces aren't constrained to mimic another battle or campaign closely. It's an interesting sequence of fights, and the strategems and tactics employed are interesting, but they don't reflect much on any particular previous war.

This book was nominated for the Prometheus award, and in a weak year it may win. There are hints that the third book in the series (Liberating Atlantis, released in November, so it could be eligible for 2009 or 2010) might be much stronger. Of the nominees that I've read, The Unincorporated Man is the only one that I like more for the Prometheus award.

Steven-Elliot Altman and Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse: The Killswitch Review

2010-02-16T11:35:00.000-08:00

Steven-Elliot Altman and Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse's The Killswitch Review is a heavy-handed diatribe against government control of death and dying. In the year 2156, stem cell therapy and other advances make it technically feasible to extend lifespans indefinitely. But a malthusian economy makes it necessary to restrict the technology to Conscientious Citizens, and to control access to suicide at the same time.

The Killswitch of the title is a technology introduced by the government to allow a painless suicide, and record the context to ensure that nothing nefarious is involved. Jason Haggerty works for the agency that reviews the records. Anyone over thirty can request a Killswitch--access is forbidden to minors. (And as usual, they want access as a sign of their maturity.)

The society is so depressing that people who could live indefinitely do kill themselves, and people with no hope want to do the same. For some reason, the authorities want to prevent the latter, while society suffers from overpopulation and many forms of ecological catastrophe.

The story follows Jason as he and his sidekick android track a public suicide that may not have been what it seemed. They find conspiracies, speakeasy torture parlors, freedom fighters toiling in the wilderness, and of course, the richest man in the world is responsible for the plot.

For me, the story never overcame the premise. A future in which people are a burden, only the well-connected have access to longevity treatments, but they aren't sure they want them, and masses of young people who are unemployed, bored, and forbidden access to anything that might give them a way out. Bleah.

Kwedit: payment for virtual goods

2010-02-05T15:03:00.000-08:00

The most interesting new E-Commerce play that I've heard of in at least 15 years is Kwedit.com. Last fall, a friend was sounding me out about a consulting opportunity, and told me what his company was up to. My reaction was "I'll do it if you pay me at least half in equity." We weren't able to work out terms before they found a different way to solve the problem I might have helped them with, but I haven't been able to talk about the company and what they're doing until now. They're building a payment system based on credit for virtual goods. That combination lets them tell the publishers that there's no need to eliminate fraud--as long as customers have enough incentive to pay that it leads to incremental revenue, you can stop worrying about the customers who don't pay. People who run up their "kwedit" account in a virtual world building up a character aren't going to want to abandon their character, and in order to continue using it, they'll have to settle the bill. The other amazing thing Kwedit has done is to figure out lots of ways to let people pay. By making it straightforward for people without credit cards or checking accounts to pay, they'll be tapping into a vast, under-served market. Their biggest coup to date is that they have 7-11 signed on as a major partner. You can take your outstanding kwedit balance, print out a bar code (or maybe download it to your smart phone) and take that to a 7-11 store, where you'll be able to pay for it, just like it was an item on their shelves. Users can also send cash or a check in a business reply envelope they print themselves or have a friend or parent pay the bill using a credit card. With this payment mechanism, Kwedit doesn't need any strong identity guarantees for their customers. You can create a pseudonymous account, and as long as your kwedit account keeps getting paid off, no one else has to know who you are. They went live on Wednesday, and have had some favorable press. I think they've got a better chance of making this work than anyone else in the payments space. It's a sub-market, but I think it's one that no one else is targeting.

J. Storrs Hall: Beyond AI

2010-02-04T22:25:00.000-08:00

J. Storrs Hall (JoSH)'s Beyond AI provides a good and thorough introduction to the issues surrounding AI. I had expected JoSH to try to explain how to build an AI, and to fail at that, because no one really knows what the necessary breakthroughs will be. I expected that because I've known him long enough to know that he's a smart, ambitious guy who's thoroughly familiar with AI, who doesn't seem to have been drawn into the debates and discussion about "friendly AI". But he surprised me by writing a very readable, very useful book that doesn't say much that is new, but organizes it in a way that lays out the important issues in context and gives a road map for how we can learn to deal with the changes that development of smarter than human AI will bring to our world.

After a brief dip into dreams from antiquity of creating artificial creatures and how they were expected to change the world, JoSH starts the technical history with feedback theory and cybernetics, and shows how those evolved into control theory, information theory, and neural networks. He then shows where his roots are with a section titled "The Golden Age" that talks about work on symbolic AI through the 60s and 70s. This led to what looked like rapid progress and solutions to a number of problems: competence in various microworlds, rudimentary ability to generate understandable language, ability to understand constrained language, and promising representations for abstract knowledge. This is followed by a chapter that shows how the pioneers became disillusioned with their approaches by the end of the 1970s, as they harnessed their tools to solve a wider variety of problems, but discovered that they weren't solving harder problems, or finding any approaches that were leading to general mastery.

Any particular problem area could apparently be analyzed and reduced to a mechanical solution, but that solution didn't seem to help with the next one. JoSH attributes the stumble to the fact that the early approaches relied on programmers explicitly coding specific knowledge about each domain into an architecture organized around a formal model of the domain. This works for a constrained area, but leaves no room for fuzzy boundary cases. People are good at interpreting definitions and instructions loosely and knowing when to do so, but a program that can diagram sentences and summarize a typical daily newspaper would be useless if you wanted to translate the user's manual for a consumer appliance, or generate route instructions for a navigation application.

The next part of the book addresses the nature of mind: what general intelligence is, and what it would take to build something that could understand itself well enough to enhance its own functioning. JoSH draws together evolution (in E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology), with advances in computing and philosophy. Researchers in the 90s were explaining how the mind is made of separate modules that we can analyze in isolation, and whose distinct failures can be seen in identifiable mental disorders. When artificial minds are contemplated from that point of view, the problem of building one to suit appears more tractable, and the idea of recursive self improvement becomes more manageable. In our own brains, it's clear that there are distinct modules with separate responsibilities, that when one part becomes damaged, other brain regions can provide substitutes for the functionality at a reduced efficiency, and that the modules communicate with one another in some flexible way rather than relying on formal, precise interfaces. That makes it easier to believe that an artificial mind, built modularly, could use its understanding to upgrade and improve itself.

One way to resolve the issue that symbolic AI faced, that their representations were only useful in the verbal domain, and not in the physical has been addressed by the modern embodied approach. There has been a lot more focus recently on building robots that interact with the world to build up their model of their environment. This is a start on figuring out how learning works, and one of the discoveries is that agents interacting with the physical world can often get by with much less internal representation that earlier generations expected. The physical world provides a local representation of itself which, if you can interpret it, can answer many of the questions that arise when you need them. This simplifies the learning and doesn't require as much one-on-one training as building a formal model. It also seems to have been particularly robust, where the formal approaches were brittle. These embodied agents have also provided a more situated environment for re-exploring earlier lessons on reasoning and Bayesian inference. If the robot has to be able to adapt to a variety of different locations, then you're better off giving it the ability to become familiar with wherever it ends up than if it can't do anything until someone explains where the doors are and which outlets its supposed to use.

JoSH spends a chapter outlining an approach based on reasoning by analogy with its own history. It reminds me of Jeff Hawkins' description of how the brain works in his book On Intelligence, but he doesn't go into much detail. It's one part of what will be needed, but the situated AI work will provide many more pertinent clues.

The last third of Beyond AI focuses on social consequences. First: what, who, where and, when, then the questions of free will, what morality should apply and whether it will be friendly to us, and finally whether there will be a singularity, and if so, which one. JoSH identifies four approaches that might lead to different WHAT answers: direct synthesis of AI software, emulation of the human brain at the neural or at some higher level, or building a learning machine that grows up to be a full AI. As far as WHO will win the race, JoSH identifies the military, university and industrial labs, and start-ups and the open source community as contenders, without giving any of them an edge. When he addresses WHERE the breakthrough is likely to take place, he tips his hand as to the shape he expects it to take.

Given the international nature of both the scientific community and the Internet, however, [...] The answer is most likely, everywhere.

As to WHEN, his slow projection is for everything except human-level flexibility and creativity by 2025, and 2035 for general human equivalence. With a few key breakthroughs, he thinks that general human equivalence could arrive in the 2020s.

JoSH does an unusually good job of explaining why free will isn't a problem. First of all, I want to point out that he laid the groundwork earlier by talking about how we understand gravity in order to be able to forestall a crucial objection in the middle without requiring a long aside. The whole book seems to have been constructed this way, with explanations early on that help reduce confusions later without seeming out of place when they occur. As he presents it, the problem is that we have a strong intuition that there's some contradiction between the deterministic nature of the universe and our ability to make choices that change the way things will turn out. JoSH points out that in order to make predictions about how our behavior will affect things, we have to have a mental model that includes a deterministic world which we inhabit, but that our model of ourselves has to be one that shows us making choices. We have to think of ourselves as considering alternatives and evaluating them and then making a choice. (When we're sophisticated, the models show that other people are also making choices) Given that the mental model allows us to make decisions, it has to have those two parts. Even if everything is deterministic, the self-model has to consider different possibilities before choosing actions. That part can't feel deterministic if it is to succeed as a model. That's all free will is.

The conclusions reached in Beyond AI about the ultimate shape of the future are remarkable similar to my own. Change will be large, but will arrive gradually, and there won't be any dominating breakthroughs. Many people will develop many different systems that advance the state of the art along a broad front. The groups best able to take advantage of other people's work will be working in the open and sharing their results. In this kind of environment, the best way to exploit your advancement is to bring it into the market place. AIs that emerge in this kind of context will see that cooperation with others and competition to best serve customers and provide value is the best way to get ahead. This kind of morality will serve them, and will lead them to be friendly in the important sense. Just as Adam Smith explained in his Invisible Hand metaphor, they'll help us (their customers) because that's the best way to advance their own interests.

Sandy Pentland: Honest Signals

2010-01-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

Sandy Pentland's Honest Signals talks about subliminal cues we all emit and makes a case that they provide reliable clues about all kinds of social outcomes. It's a quick read (100 pages of text, 50 pages of Social Science appendices, 30 pages of notes, bibliography and index) and makes a reasonably compelling case that our unwitting signals accurately foretell outcomes in many situations. (negotiation, sales, poker and dating were all studied.) The cues themselves are described in the appendices, along with a discussion of the gropus who have learned to read them (salespeople, poker players). Pentland says it will soon be possible to produce portable devices to make the signals evident. Some of the experiments he reports on were done using prototype portable units, others were done in the lab with earlier versions.

Several important questions aren't covered in the book: Why do we signal this way but not notice it consciously?, How could we effectively learn to detect these signals?, Can people learn to change the signals they produce (either to conceal their motivations, or to steer situations to more desirable outcomes)?

Pentland does show that there's reasonable evidence that the signals occur early in a conversation, that they are reliable, and that most participants don't notice the signals, even though they usually realize how things went for them by the end of a meeting. He tries to argue that we can use the predictions made about job satisfaction and organizational stress to optimize the way work groups are managed, but there is little indication that the tools can be used for steering. When the metrics show that information isn't flowing freely across a geographical boundary within a group, there are obvious things to do to change that, but is there an obvious response if they indicate that one person has more influence than others? Maybe making diagnostic information about the form of the interactions visibly shared within a group would make it possible for someone to intervene, but we're a long way away at this point from knowing how to optimally intervene in group politics or communication.

Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin: The Unincorporated Man

2010-01-20T17:46:00.000-08:00

Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin's The Unincorporated Manis a wonderful exploration of an economic idea, in the vein of Barry B. Longyear's Circus World series. Circus World looked at what might happen if a society tried to base all interpersonal actions on buying and selling. The citizens of that society were descended from a crashed circus spaceship, and they paid one another for everything: unsolicited advice, pulling out a chair, telling a story around a campfire. If the benefits weren't obvious, you might have to pay people to listen to your spiel, which is the position of the protagonist in that story. Building a story around the exploration of an outlandish idea is a common approach in science fiction, and this story is a great addition to that genre.

In this novel, the Kollin brothers explore an idea that might have been invented by Robert Shiller: fund education and other personal development by allowing investors to take a share of a person's future income. In the society presented here, everyone is incorporated, and the government, parents, higher education, and others own shares in a person to compensate them for the work they've done raising that individual. Most people start out with a minor stake in their own net worth, and many of their options in life are controlled by the investors. Those who do well can use some of their earnings to buy back shares and try to gain control. Getting to "majority" is a big deal, but it's not enough to be in control of your own destiny. You have to get to 70% or so in order to protect yourself from minor setbacks and lawsuits from investors who can claim that you aren't doing all that you owe for the shareholders' value.

There are obviously lots of potential drawbacks with this kind of system, and the events in the book illustrate them well. But there are also many ways that this could work out, and many people who might be better off if someone else would benefit from ensuring that they got all the training and support that would help them to provide the best value to the economy. Since everyone in the society takes the system for granted, they provide arguments and illustrations for how well it works, and how the system enabled them to reach their present position, even as they struggle to gain control of their destiny.

Into this society (a little more than 300 years in our future) steps a man from our present. Justin Cord was a successful industrialist, a powerful, ethical, individual achiever who built a business empire before having himself cryonically frozen in the face of a cancer diagnosis. Cord didn't trust the standard cryonics providers, guessing that they would be attractive targets in the time between his deanimation and revival. He is proven correct--many others were frozen, but all the known preserved remains were destroyed in the riots after the great collapse. Cord has a contemporary outlook, with a strong pro-freedom bias, and doesn't accept the idea that anyone else should own his shares. This causes numerous problems, which gives the Kollins many opportunities to explore the implications. Cord's struggles to remain free make him the target of the world's dominant company, which has some good reasons and some bad reasons for not wanting any exceptions to the world's economic set-up.

The characters are very well drawn; even the bad guys have a mix of noble and ignoble motives, and are smart enough to be worthy opponents. Cord himself has strengths and weaknesses, so his actions don't have an air of inevitable success (other than his ability to survive amazing attempts on his life.)

The story does a very good job of showing both pluses and minuses for each side of the debate. The story is rich, and the characters constantly interesting. I think this book deserves to be a Prometheus award finalist. It takes a strong position that liberty is important and worth fighting for, and the characters spend their time pushing for different conceptions of what freedom is. I'll have to read a few more of the nominees before I decide whether it's my favorite.

James Case: Competition

2010-01-13T21:35:00.000-08:00

James Case's Competition is a disappointing book. It starts out strong, covering competition in nature and game theory, and moving on to markets. But it's clear that Case doesn't actually like markets, and uses controversies about how trade and monopolies works as opportunities to attack markets and mainstream economics in general. One of his biggest weaknesses in his analysis and policy prescriptions is that he doesn't understand or believe in the possibility of progress. In the chapter on Policy implications, Case suggests that farm problems be solved by fining farmers for overproduction, so the "farm sector could [...] earn more money by producing less, as other oligopolies routinely do. A similar plan worked for many years in the oil industry." This might be beneficial for current farmers, but at the cost of their producing less food for the rest of us at higher prices. If you think of the market as a competition between different producers that should be made both fair and remunerative for them, you end up with a situation where they are taking advantage of their customers rather than serving them. The beauty of the market is that producers compete to satisfy their customers. Each of them has an incentive to undercut the others in order to better serve the customers. This does have the effect of driving the least efficient out of business. Everyone (all consumers, and we're all consumers) gets more over time, but everyone has to remain nimble. The alternative is that some people are comfortable in their inherited position, but then you've undermined not just the incentives for progress and improvement, but also destroyed the mechanism that makes it possible.

Case's review of the literature on competition is quite readable and thorough. He covers the theory of games between 2 players, many players, the effects of incentives in auctions, how game theory was approached historically, and the progress that has been made in the field. His antipathy toward markets may be tied in with his lack of an intuitive grasp of zero sum and non-zero sum games. In the preface, he argues that analysis of non-zero sum games and many player games is nearly intractable.

Whenever many-player games such as Scrabble and Monopoly are contested at the tournament level, the rules are altered to transform them into two-player zero-sum games. Many player and non-zero sum games are simply too confusing for tournament play. With three or more players, there would be no end of complaints from alleged victims of collusion.

For a book published in 2007, it's pretty surprising that he didn't consider tournament poker. People like it because of its complexity and the psychological analysis required for good tournament play. And formal analysis may be intractible, but there are very competitive programs winning real money from serious human players.

Katherine Burdekine: Swastika Night

2010-01-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night is an alternate history published in 1937. It projects a bizarre descendant of naziism 700 years into the future. If the author hadn't been female, I'd have called the book misogynistic; as it is I guess I'll have to say the society she depicts is misogynistic. Men have ruled the world since the death of Hitler, and they have suppressed women to the point that they're barely rational. Men visit women conjugally, but have little other contact with them.

Considering how early in Hitler's reign she wrote, the story show a remarkable prescience about Hitler's influence on the world--Burdekin describes an upper class that has nearly total control over the people toiling under them. Many of her reactions and projections are quite consistent with modern conceptions of Hitler's goals and methods. The women are isolated in camps, and Jews and Gypsies have been eradicated in Europe, and Christians are repressed in Britain. And the Japanese control most of the world outside Europe.

The story follows the interactions among Hermann (a devout Nazi of rather ordinary intelligence), Alfred, whom Hermann had met while doing his military training in England, and the Knight, the powerful local German noble who harbors secrets about the history of the current regime. Burdekin makes a point of showing lots of little ways in which history has been lost and misremembered. The Knight has inherited from his father and his paternal line going back 700 years a document showing something of how men and women lived and interacted in Hitler's times. Since these explicitly contradict the official doctrine of the Nazi church, he must keep it a secret, but for some reason he decides Alfred is worth trusting. Alfred takes the book back to England, where he hopes to use it to foment rebellion, but other than passing it on to his sons, he has little success in the face of the repressive government he faces.

It's hard to recommend this book. The action is slow, and other than Alfred, the characters are caricatures. Burdekin does a good job of showing that this society is dysfunctional and dystopic, but it's too hard to see how Naziism could have led here, and even if it had, the misunderstandings that everyone has of their antecedents softens any consequent blame for Hitler or the Nazis. Given the disparity between Burdekin's nightmare and what the world was actually like 70 years ago, that society could have as easily evolved from any other authoritarian beginnings. Yes, it's an idictment of authoritarianism, but the particulars of Naziism aren't really implicated. The resulting society maintained the style of Hitler's mistakes, but created their own substance.

Malclm Gladwell: Outliers

2009-12-19T17:30:00.000-08:00

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers was an engaging read, but a disappointing argument. Gladwell presents a series of separate incidents, each painted in a fair amount of detail. He doesn't focus on the common threads, and sometimes it's hard to see how the stories are pulling in the same direction, since he fills in the theme with a really light hand.

Gladwell presents a number of success stories and a few stories of failure in order to show that luck and circumstances contribute substantially to both. The preface shows us a small Pennsylvania town whose residents mostly came from a single small Italian town. Both towns show unusual longevity, and Gladwell points to a low-pressure lifestyle with lots of community contact as the reason. The first chapter shows that the top Canadian hockey players (and around the world) all have birthdays that are clustered ~~just after January 1(~~toward the beginning of the year (January 1 is the cutoff date for entry into the youngest organized leagues). This means that each year, this cohort includes the biggest kids, who get the most attention and training, and the investment compounds over the years.

Lewis Terman's gifted kids are presented to show that intelligence isn't a sure precursor for success. There were very few successes out of the class of extremely bright kids that Terman followed for decades.

Gladwell then presents details about various successes who happened to already have the right preparation when their skills came to be valued by the marketplace (Bill Gates and Bill Joy, as well as Jewish lawyers who'd been handling corporate proxy fights when they'd been out of favor by the white shoe firms in New York). Gladwell argues that 10,000 hours of focused practice is necessary to turn someone into the kind of expert how can take advantage of situations like this. He seems to want us to believe that luck determines which of the available experts will ultimately succeed, but he fails to establish that 10,000 hours is an important benchmark. It's certainly plausible that in order to be considered a pioneer, you have to have picked up the expertise before it was obvious that there was a field available to excel in.

Gladwell tries to put the Beatles in the category of people who picked up the 10,000 hours of experience, and then won because the time was right. The evidence he shows makes it look like they worked very hard in Germany for a few summers before they achieved their success, but it doesn't look like 10,000 hours. And it's not obvious what wave of change they rode to gain their success, comparable to the opportunities available to Gates, Joy, and the New York lawyers who were ready for the wave of corporate lawsuits in the 1970's.

Along the way, we also get a few stories of surprising failures, uniformly due to socialization. Some cultures are poorly suited to producing successes in particular fields. He focuses on a particular bad period for Korean Air Lines, which the long term investigations eventually laid at the feet of the extreme deference due to pilots (and high status individuals in general) in Korean society. Gladwell dissects several crashes to show that even when the co-pilot could tell the plane was in trouble, Korean social mores prevented him from saying anything directly to the pilot. Eventually, the international community convinced Korean aviation to change their training to ensure that cockpits were much more egalitarian, so communication didn't have this fatal flaw. There are a couple of other stories of individuals from dysfunctional societies, or of dysfunctional societies themselves.

The book closes with the story of KIPP, a free open-enrollment school that has shown that pretty much all kids can be successful and prepared for college if the social environment is appropriate. It takes a culture that embraces hard work (which Gladwell also emphasized in the previous chapter on Asian farmers), but doesn't require selective admissions.

Gladwell tells a good story, but he didn't spend much time stitching it together. I had to review the whole array of pieces in order to see how they fit together. Before going to that extra effort, I had a different impression of the intended moral. The high-profile success stories (the Beatles, Bill Joy, Bill Gates, and Joe Flom the Jewish lawyer) were the most vivid, so I remembered it as a story of how hard work makes you eligible for success, but requires the addition of fortuitous timing in order to win the brass ring. Once I brought in the pro athletes, Terman's gifted kids, and KIPP, I could see that the point must have had something to do with those who just missed greatness, too. The commonality that Gladwell wants us to find is that success is mostly a matter of luck and circumstance. And he we wants us to know that luck and circumstance can also work against us. (That's how the Korean pilots fit in and southern culture's deleterious effects on socialization.)

So he wants us to believe that community and context matter more than ability. Hard work apparently gives you a chance at success, but the chance is out of your control. All you can do is pick something you care about and work hard at it. If you're lucky things might turn out well for you, but they probably won't.

This is a pretty discouraging story if you stop there. While it may be a reasonable story about which people get to be the big winners, it's misleading as a guide to living a successful life. Success at the level of the characters he describes probably is mostly a matter of luck, but ordinary success and modest achievement is much more attainable, as the KIPP example shows. There aren't many fields like pro hockey or pro baseball in which the winners are picked early, and there's no reasonable chance to catch up if you miss the initial cut-off. But Gladwell doesn't provide any hints about that and he makes this story harder to follow than it needs to be.

Health Care is not like Agriculture

2009-12-18T21:58:00.000-08:00

Atul Gawande is an excellent writer and has a lot to say about the practice of medicine. His columns in the New Yorker have been very educational, and his observations about what some doctors do to make medicine safer and more effective are really incisive. His June article on the difference in costs of providing approximately equivalent services across the country caught a lot of people's attention. He has continued to explore issues related to health care reform, but I'm afraid his most recent article misses the mark.

In December's New Yorker, Dr. Gawande describes how the US Department of Agriculture spread information about the practice of farming by hiring extension agents who convinced local farmers to try out pilot projects to demonstrate the benefits of scientific farming, and where they had successes, recruiting additional farmers by the power of example. Gawande seems to think that most of the improvement in American farm productivity is due to the work of the USDA. He then proposes that this approach is hidden in the draft health care bills, and that it is likely to work as well for health care as it did for agriculture.

I'm very doubtful, and the reason is that everything the USDA did was voluntary. That's why they got volunteers to run pilot projects--they needed to show that the ideas worked, and they couldn't force anyone to go along with it. And voluntarism is one thing you can be sure will be missing from the pilot projects (disguised as targetted programs for particular districts) included in the health care bill. The ideas may well be tried out in one local area at a time, but I'd bet each pilot will be mandatory for some set of doctors, clinics, or insurers. The kinds of approaches that could be made to work if practitioners were allowed to try them are very different from the kinds that might work when practitioners are forced to follow them. The big problem in health care is that there's already way too much regulation. Adding more layers of regulation, and more requirements, won't give any of the participants in this industry any incentive to improve results or lower prices.

A solution would have to include finding ways to make more of medicine look like lasek surgery, or any other competitive industry, but nothing like that is on the table. The Cato institute has been pushing for opening up insterstate competition in various ways, but I don't get the impression that anyone with the ability to influence outcomes is listening to them.

C. J. Cherryh: Forty Thousand in Gehenna

2009-12-11T11:59:00.000-08:00

C. J. Cherryh's Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) is a classic, and shows Cherryh's mastery of the presentation of alien minds. In this case, she makes the non-humans even more alien by having humans become incomprehensible to their own kind in the process of living and working with them.

The story takes place on the border between Alliance and Union space. In a political move, the Union sets up a colony on a remote world, and then fails to resupply it, leaving the colonists on their own. The colonists discover that the planet is inhabited, something the surveys failed to notice. The Caliban (various species of lizard, from smaller than a dog to as large as a brontosaurus) don't seem to be intelligent, though it's hard for the under-supplied colonists to control them and keep them out of the settlement.

The settlers start out as a mix of a few thousand natural-born humans and the titular 40,000 Azi (programmed humans). The plan of the settlement is to remove the programming once the settlement is set up, and allow the Azi to marry, raise families, and farm the land. The first generation of Azi have a hard time adapting to their freedom, and don't have any experience of family, so they don't do a good job with the next generation. At first arrival, the Azi vastly outnumber the free humans, so the resulting culture is a result of the natural forces that arise from the mixing of untutored second generation Azi and caliban than anything the Union planners might have intended.

Two generations later, a resupply expedition arrives, and tries to figure out how to deal with the cultural mix of Humans and Caliban. The expedition's leaders are slow to realize that the caliban represent a separate intelligence from the feral colonists. Eventually, anthropologists learn enough from the divergent societies (the colonists have split into warring factions) to understand that there are two alien groups (diverged humans and the Caliban who have adapted to a human presence) to be integrated into the galactic civilization.

I've read many stories set in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe, and this is probably the only one in which Azis play a prominent role as individual characters. Normally they're present to show how a high-tech society would hold slaves. They're treated relatively well physically, but have their mental lives completely controlled. In this story, they're prepped for the mission with hints and build up that they will be learning to live on their own and that this is a great honor and an important mission. The latter is part of their standard indoctrination, so while they believe it, they don't assign it any particular significance. There's a little bit of hinting that they are excited about the opportunity to be free individuals, but as it turns out, their foreboding about having to manage their own affairs is more to the point. Shortly after the colony is founded, the resupply mission fails to arrive, and the technology that was used to give them reassuranc and training starts to break down. Since additional tools and technical assistance would also have arrived at the same time, the Azi and the other colonists experience their new freedom as part of a package deal with the gradual decay of their technology base. It's too small a colony to be self sufficient in maintaining the technology, though they are capable of feeding themselves as long as everyone works the land. In the end, what could have been an interesting story about discovering how to live a self-directed life is side-steped because the manumission happens in conjunction with a general breakdown in the social order.

It's not surprising that the children of the colonists, growing up in an impoverished settlement, surrounded by nearly incomprehensible but strangely communicative alien beasts grow up estranged from the previous generation. Few of the elders know enough about survival skills in farming or exploration to be of much help, their myths are suited to a much more technological society, and the vast majority of the older generation learned skills as they needed them from the tapes they were fed along with the programming that kept them docile. Given this, it's not surprising that their children charted a new course, but it is interesting to see how Cherryh presents their divergence, and the fumbling steps the envoys from civilization take in their attempts to control and understand them. Cherryh also does a good job of showing how bureaucracy and politics interfere in the task.

I apparently started reading this once before, since I see that Google's cached summary of a 2005 review I wrote has it in my "Currently Reading" list. I'm pretty sure I didn't get very far, because the story was all new to me this time. It's also been on my list for a while, but it took me a while to find a copy. (And then to find another.)

Neal Gershenfeld: Programming Bits and Atoms

2009-11-01T22:16:00.000-08:00

I followed a pointer from the Long Now Blog to The Perimeter Institute's Quantum to Cosmos Festival, and found some interesting talks. I enjoyed listening to Lee Smolin talking to Neal Stephenson and Jaron Lanier about how science informs and learns from fiction. But I had a much stronger reaction to Neil Gershenfeld's talk on what he's been doing at the Center for Bits and Atoms. It involves multi-scale parallel computronium, and fabricators in the hands of kids all over the world who are vaulting past us in understanding what it means to build stuff with embedded intelligence. A fascinating talk.

Alex Tabarrok, Provocative Lecture @SJSU

2009-10-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I found a pointer to the Provocative Lecture series at San Jose State University, which had had several very interesting speakers, whom I was sorry I had missed. I couldn't find a stable place at SJSU where announcements were posted, so I ended up creating a google alert that looks for SJSU and "Provocative Lecture". It has fired periodically over the years, but it has always been a false alarm to date. More often than not it was for a review of a lecture that I had never seen announced.

Well I finally saw an announcement for a talk that hasn't happened yet. Next week, Alex Tabarrok, co-blogger on Marginal Revolution, will talk about wether the FDA is helping or hurting. October 27, 5:15, Morris Daily Auditorium.

And I still haven't seen an announcement from SJSU. The economics department's web page for the series gives details about talks from 2007 and earlier. This announcement came from a meetup.com posting for the Santa Clara County Libertarian Party.

Brian Francis Slattery: Liberation

2009-10-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

Brian Francis Slattery's Liberation (with a 16-word subtitle) seemed to me to be closer to mainstream fiction than to the fantasy it's packaged as or to science fiction. It was still a fun read, but quite bizarre. The prose was quite lyrical and the timing mesmerizing. The story itself was weird, disjointed, and acausal, but it drew me in none-the-less.

The story replays the adventures and reunion of a dispersed band of mythic super-powered robbers and avengers after the apocalyptic collapse of the USA. The country has dissolved into fragments which are each ruled by whatever warlord can hold power (if anyone can). Some sections of the country don't hold together, and there are only local communities. Communication among the parts is slapdash, and it takes luck to get from place to place. One kind of luck is to happen on Dr. San Diego's apparently magic bus, which is drug infused and ferries people to and from unreachable places.

Anyway, the slick six have parted ways, but they'll need to regroup to defeat the forces of evil, slavery, and tyranny. They mostly do, though it requires a bunch of peripatetic adventuring to accomplish, and a few superhuman feats. I'm not sure there's much more that's coherent to say about this, but the language definitely kept my interest, even if the plot summary is mostly superfluous.

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending: The 10,000 Year Explosion

2009-10-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion talks about how humans have evolved over the period since we've been relatively civilized. They explicitly want to challenge the (sometimes vociferously propounded, but seldom cogently defended) notions that humanity hasn't evolved significantly since homo sapiens emerged, and that there's no significant genetic difference among populations in different places. They open Chapter 1 with quotes from Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr to demonstrate that they aren't fighting a straw man.

Mostly, this notion seems to be held in order to defend a liberal notion of equality, as if we could only defend equal treatment if we all have equal abilities, endowments, and if none of our observable differences are innate. If this notion isn't supportable, we'll have to be clearer that equal treatment is right for other reasons, and perhaps we'll have to be articulate about what those other reasons are. But that's an argument that Cochran and Harpending leave for someone else.

Cochran and Harpending's argument here is that there are quite a few differences between different modern populations, and that many are clearly genetic in origin. They first go to some pains to show that genetic changes can easily arise in this kind of time period. Particular examples are dogs, which have evolved all their modern variety since separating from wolves only about 15000 years ago, and domesticated plants which have changed enormously since the end of the last ice age 11,500 years ago. There are particular changes in humans that are also clearly of recent origin including skin color, eye color, lactose tolerance, and resistance to various diseases, all of which can be shown to be related to geography and to react to evolutionary pressures on much shorter time scales.

With that as background they make a couple of (they expect) radical arguments, and explain a few things that seemed puzzling before. Their first radical argument is that modern humans probably interbred with Neanderthals in Europe, and that therefore, the populations that left Africa probably got a significant contribution from them. I thought they did a reasonable job of demonstrating opportunity, plausibility, and some indications from recent genetic studies that some variations were introduced in the right time frame to have come from Neanderthals. This argument was presented as if the authors expected people to be "outraged at the charge", but it seemed sensible and plausible to me.

The radical argument that I expected to have trouble with is the claim that there's something genetically different about the Ashkenazi Jews. One of the members of the reading group I attend has been making this point for years, and I've been passively resisting it for just as long. Well, Cochran and Harpending put an end to that, easily and without much fight. They showed that the time-frame isn't extreme, that there were sufficient environmental pressures to push for particular changes, and that there's a reasonable case that the Ashkenazi were genetically isolated for long enough for the hypothesized changes in intelligence and susceptibility to diseases to have arisen. They add in some evidence that the diseases specific to the Ashkenazi are tied to genetic changes in neuron development to hammer home the point that the changes in brain function and disease susceptibility are probably tied together. The fact that we already knew (even if we didn't admit it in discussions of evolution) that Tay-Sachs is specific to Ashkenazi and is of genetic origin helps cement the case that evolution has continued into the modern era.

If there had been any remaining doubt that there are genetic predispositions to varying intelligence by race, this pretty clearly puts them to bed. I still agree with the sentiments Les Earnest expressed in his 1989 article Can Computers Cope with Human Races? It's not clear that there's anything useful to be done with this fact, and it's pretty clear that many people mis-apply the fact, but it's a fact none-the-less.

Explosion makes a fairly strong case that evolutionary stasis doesn't happen without a static environment. Humanity hasn't been static over the last 100,000 years--there have been many changes in our way of life over that period, and the changes keep accruing faster than evolution has been able to catch up. Our bodies are still adapting to changes in diet since the agricultural revolution and continuing changes in the sources of our food. Our susceptibility to disease has varied dramatically across populations, and the differences haven't settled down yet. There are still vast differences in hygiene between first world and developing nations and many places in the world where populations are sparser and provide fertile ground for new diseases to arise or transfer to human hosts. There is less of a case for sufficient continuing genetic isolation to drive differing evolutionary pressures for intelligence, but there is certainly pressure for differing intellectual capabilities than were selected for 200 or 500 years ago, much less 1000 years ago.

We haven't finished adapting to the civilization that surrounds us, and the form of our civilization continues to change. We shouldn't expect continuing evolution to be visible on a human time scale, but we shouldn't be surprised that many of the differences among people can be explained as the effect of different evolutionary pressures on our ancestors. In some cases, like disease susceptibility, we can take advantage of it if we stop treating it as tainted information. In others, as race, we should in most cases pay more attention to the abilities of individuals, rather than to the predispositions predicted by apparent racial categories.

IntelliJ IDEA open sourced

2009-10-15T12:10:00.000-07:00

JetBrains has just announced that they've released the IntelliJ platform as open source! This is great news, as I've always maintained that IntelliJ IDEA is significantly better than all the other Java IDEs, and their main disadvantage was price, and the second biggest weakness was Eclipse's ability to let users add support for new languages. At one stroke, JetBrains has undercut both of these problems and enabled many more people to make use of the platform.

I only know what I read in the announcement and the FAQ, but it appears that JetBrains has done this for the right reasons, and probably in the right way. Their goal is to increase adoption of the platform, and to encourage third-party developers to work with IntelliJ rather than competitive products. They have kept some of their technology proprietary in order to be able to continue to run a business, and they're focusing on the larger enterprises that they make most of their money from. This is reasonable and proper.

The license they're using is Apache, which is very open and provides no significant restrictions on re-use. I'm very happy about this.

C. J. Cherryh: Cloud's Rider

2009-09-27T11:19:00.000-07:00

C. J. Cherryh's Cloud's Rider is the successor to her Rider at the Gate, which I reviewed last year. This book was far more psychological than the previous, delving deeply into the reactions of all the characters to the dark telepathic sendings of the rogue nighthorse stalking the village.

In Rider, Danny Fisher teams up with Cloud, one of the telepathic Nighthorses on Finisterre, where a small human outpost seems to have been abandoned on a remote hostile planet. The humans who remain cloistered in the villages try to hide from the power of the ambient telepathy of the native fauna, and as a result are unable to exploit the resources of the world. The riders have allied with the nighthorses, which enables them to travel more freely, which makes them a crucial lifeline connecting the remote villages. But there's a lot the humans don't know about the planet.

In Rider, we see that nighthorses can sometimes go rogue (in that case because its rider died in an accident) with disastrous consequences for an entire village. In the end, Danny Fisher agrees to escort the survivors, the three Goss children, Carlos, Randy, and Brionne. Brionne was at the center of the tragedy, having been the focus of the rogue's attention, but at the divide between the two books, she is in a coma.

Cloud's Rider starts out with the quartet struggling up a mountain road in a blinding snowstorm. They end up walking for a couple of days, dragging Brionne behind them on an improvised travois. They had intended to stop halfway up the mountain at a permanent rider's shelter with provisions that ought to be enough to sustain them for quite a while, but the snowstorm causes them to miss the shelter and end up in Evergreen village--not large enough to stand up to the sendings of the rogue that seems to have followed them up the mountain.

The bulk of the story takes place in Evergreen, where the politics is intense among the villagers, the miners, the preacher, and the doctor who adopts Brionne. Some of the villagers quickly recognize that the now abandoned village at the foot of the hill represents a major source of wealth for whoever can claim it when spring brings an end to the unrelenting winter blizzards.

But the focus is on how Danny, Carlos, Randy, and Brionne react to their circumstances and the malevolent presence in the telepathic ambient. As villagers, Carlos and Randy would normally be expected to be oblivious to the rogue's sendings, but they were in Tarmin when everything came crashing down and took a long trek in the presence of Cloud, so they know it's all real. Randy is drawn to the nighthorses and envies the romance of the riders' way of life. Carlos just wants to get back to Tarmin and make use of his blacksmithing skills. Brionne's outlook has been warped by the sendings of the rogue, and her delusions and paranoia are affecting the villagers around her.

Once again, Cherryh has done a masterful job of developing characters whose differences and similarities are highlighted by the juxtaposition with alien thoughts and alien approaches that are perfectly consistent and highly intriguing. I very much enjoyed this story sequence.

John C. Wright: The Golden Age

2009-09-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

John C. Wright's The Golden Age didn't work for me, though it would seem to have a lot of things in its favor. It's a futuristic high-tech story with a focus on personal enhancement and social interaction technology and little in the way of weapons or overt conflict. There is little in the way of visible government and secures cooperation with the society's mores via social pressure. Since everyone has access to largely unlimited resources, anything short of the ultimate form of ostracism leaves a lot of room for many variations in behavior and personal expression. I think the beginning of the story failed to grab me because of the reluctant hero angle. The protagonist, Phaeton, takes a while to admit that there's a problem and he has to take the responsibility to figure out what happened and why he's not getting what he wants even if he doesn't understand how he could have caused the problem.

Eventually Phaeton realizes that his memory may have been altered, and begins to suspect a vast conspiracy to silence him for something he doesn't remember doing or wanting. He bucks a lot of social pressure to investigate his past and figure out what he must have been trying to accomplish and who would have been trying to stop him. I thought the evidence he found seemed flimsy in the context of the story-with even his ostensible friends urging him to accept the world as it seemed to be, his constant bucking of the system seemed more like a habit of being contrarian than a dogged determination to find the truth. Of course, according to Wright's story, Phaeton was correct to trust his instincts, and there really was a vast conspiracy to suppress the evidence he'd discovered, and the entire society was at risk. But like Cassandra, Phaeton is doomed to be doubted, shunned, and ignored. In a society with serious life extension this is a long-lasting problem. The novel ends inconclusively, to be continued in a later volume.

I liked the technology and the way the society was organized. But from Phaeton's viewpoint, it's presented as an instrument of the society's downfall. No one is in charge, so no one is responsible for battling the external existential threat. The lack of centralized monitoring or control enables Phaeton to continue his investigation, and to amass enormous tools and weapons, but his refusal to cooperate with others leaves him ultimately very weak, and unable to recruit allies to his project.

Alistair Reynolds: Pushing Ice

2009-09-08T10:09:00.000-07:00

Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice is a great story, weakened slightly by following the first contact story that justified the initial adventure to a lot of inter-species intrigue. The adventure is a good psychological thriller with lots of interactions among the crew of an asteroid miner that gets unexpectedly diverted to an interstellar chase in the wake of Janus, one of Jupiter's moons that suddenly leaves orbit and heads for the stars. This is a great premise that justifies a good amount of conflict and chaos, as they move from studying Janus, to realizing the implications of effectively being towed at high speed toward distant stars, to finding a way to survive on the surface of a not-quite dormant alien ship.

The crew goes through internal struggles over whether to abandon the chase while there's still some hope of returning to earth, which involves both politics and some violent attempts to overthrow the captain. The hard feelings left behind color all the crew's later attempts to survive long term starting with supplies meant for a much shorter trip. They spend their time studying the star they're heading for and the moribund uncrewed craft they're tethered to.

Eventually they arrive at an immense structure that provides room for ships from several different species. The Fountainheads are highly advanced and provides rejuvenation facilities that restore several of the human crew (including one who had been in cryonic suspension for most of the trip). The humans get conflicting advice from different alien groups about who they can trust and who is dangerous, and not surprisingly, different factions decide to trust different groups. Eventually, Janus itself is the target of several alien species who expect to be able to reap large energy resources from the craft. I thought the interactions with the aliens and the human political machinations occasioned by the aliens to be much less interesting and more poorly motivated than the first half of the story, concerning how the human crew got along and what they had to do to survive the long trip. The first half definitely made the story worth reading, though.

Peter Leeson: The Invisible Hook

2009-08-30T19:03:00.000-07:00

Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook is a fun read with some serious points to make about economics. Leeson is a George Mason economist who has been a fan of pirate literature and lore most of his life. At some point he realized that he knew enough about the real history of pirates, particularly the ones that have been romanticized in our literature, to say something interesting about how economics drove and shaped them. Of course this also gave him an excuse to spend more time exploring pirate mythology and a way to get academic credit for it.

Leeson's most interesting finding is that the pirates often had written constitutions and elected their captains and other officers, and could remove them when the crew pleased. He also investigates the feedback mechanisms and social forces that reinforced this system and kept it stable. Some of it has to do with the fact that Piracy was a cooperative enterprise, and that pirates had no recourse to the law to enforce their rules. This leads to a need for agreement among the crew on how they are to operate, and consensus that breaches can be punished. The modern pirates off Somalia or South East Asia have a different set of contingencies, since it's easier for individual pirates to quit without endangering their own lives or those of their mates.

A lot of what Leeson talks about falls in the area that economists call signalling, by which they mean actions taken by an agent to convince someone of their likely behavior. The fundamental question about signals is what keeps others from copying the signal in order to fool the signal's target. Leeson puts the skull and crossbones and stories about pirate viciousness in this category.

Pirates cultivated an image of being ruthless killers who would never-the-less not physically harm victims who gave up without a fight. Their goal, of course, was to reduce the amount of fighting they had to do. So they did their best to convince honest seafarers that if you fought with pirates they would treat you harshly. The question this raises is why didn't privateers (who had government charters to act like pirates) also fly the jolly roger, and Leeson's answer was that it was too costly for them, since flying the pirate flag led to easy convictions for being pirates, even if you have the government charter. So Pirates competed for a rough reputation, and their competition had to convince their prey to surrender in more costly ways, since their charters proscribed torture and wanton violence.

There's a lot more than this in the book, and just enough asides of "Avast" and "Aargh" to raise an occasional chuckle. If you still retain your youthful enthusiasm for pirates, and are interested in the economic way of analyzing behavior, this is an entertaining approach to the subject that is also educational.

Outrageously Inhumane

2009-08-04T13:43:00.000-07:00

Ken MacLeod has a short post on his recent attendance at a con marking the recent Apollo anniversary. Ken's highlight was a talk by a self-professed techno-utopian, who said, among other things "The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive" and "Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish." Ken has good sense and good tase. That may be why I like his science fiction.

On "Organizational scar tissue"

2009-07-30T22:53:00.001-07:00

John Cook blogged about stupid policies within organizations, in response to a quote he saw:

Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codiﬁed overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations.

John mostly agreed and pointed out that policies sometimes arise for good reasons, though the reasons may be hard to reconstruct later. I want to take the conversation in a different direction: How do you design an organization so that the policies can change if the circumstances have changed?

There are policies designed to handle unlikely events and policies designed to handle everyday events. Both kinds can atrophy over time and no longer be relevant. The ones for unlikely situations are harder to set up time-outs for, but the ones for everyday use are the more costly when they outlive their usefulness.

The hard part of the situation John described is figuring out a different approach that leaves you more flexibility. (If you've built a Maginot line, as in his metaphor, you're pretty much stuck.) So the challenge is designing an organizational culture that can identify outmoded policies and change or discard them.

In a small, agile organization I once worked in, we developed a checklist for use by the project manager (me!) during the release process. The reason was that there were things I occasionally forgot to do that came back to bite me or my boss, the CEO. The rule about the checklist was that it was for me to fill out on my own responsibility. There were items that asked for initials from other people, but I was allowed to ignore them on my own initiative. We updated the checklist often enough that I could remove useless items whenever I noticed that their relevance had disappeared.

For a larger organization, you don't want an individual to make those decisions unless there's a way for them to know the original reason for the policy. So writing up the rationale along with the policy makes it possible for the person on the spot to know whether they should ignore or attempt to change the policy. In a small agile organization you don't want the overhead of having to write up the rationale every time you add a process step, but if the organization grows, you'll need the rationale. It's a dynamic tension that organizations have to learn to adapt to as they grow.

ADDED During the ensuing discussion on The Endeavor, someone pointed to NetFlix' internal presentation on their corporate culture. Very impressive. If I wanted a job, that's the kind of company I want to work in.

Charles Stross: Saturn's Children

2009-06-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

Charles Stross's Saturn's Children depicts a post-humanity future in the solar system; all the characters are various forms of robots, and many have recognizable and sympathetic feelings, goals and aspirations. The humans died out a few hundred years ago but neglected to think about how their posterity would get along in their absence.

Stross has created a very interesting society here. Many of the robots (the focal characters, particularly) were designed to be personal servants to the humans, and their drives are very much shaped around the desires of their absent masters. Others, less constrained, use these drives to control and shape them. The basic conflict is over whether it's possible or desirable to bring back humans. If this could be done and they could be managed, then whoever controlled the humans would have immense power because of the drive to serve the humans that is built in to so many of the robots.

The background is fascinating in that any robot that was expected to work in the presence of humans was designed to have strong strictures to honor and obey them, which leaves them in a strangely constrained state now that the humans aren't around. All the apparatus of government is still in place, and no decisions can be made or changed without humans to vote or make an administrative decision. So the government runs on auto-pilot, and many projects that made sense--terraforming to create new habitable territories--are senseless when the robots can adapt to harsh environments much more easily. And robots that are more able to bend their internal definitions of what the humans wanted are less constrained.

The basic conflict sheds light on thoughts about freedom and free will. Freya, the main character, was designed as a sex-bot, but she was first activated long after the humans had died out, so her drive to serve them is unrequited. Her design gives her some special abilities (cosmetic enhancement gives her an innate talent for disguise and her adjustable high-heeled feet (as Laurie Anderson sang) come in handy in combat and escape. But most of the time, she's a free agent, other than having to serve employers and mentors. Self-ownership is a concrete idea in this society. All the robots originally had owners, but the ultimate owners are now gone from the scene, so each robot is owned by some corporation. Being self-owned means controlling the corporation that owns your body. Unfortunately, some of the robots are rich enough that they can sue others into bankruptcy, and buy their corporations, so there's no safety in owning your corporation. In addition to the slave chips that get used occasionally, ownership conveys control by allowing one being to assert "control level nine" and require absolute obedience of another. Of course, if the subservient one can convince herself of doubts about the authenticity of the ownership, she can escape the fetters.

Overall, this is a fun romp. Stross displays a strong sense of humor, and Freya is a joy to watch. Many of the service machines and tools are aware and interactive, and Stross is quite inventive in giving them interesting drives and quirks. The political implications are interesting, but mostly not the focus of the story. It calls itself "A Space Opera" and it is that, with the addition of interesting personalities and new viewpoints on how our robot progeny will live and think. Saturn's Children is a finalist for the Prometheus Award. The freedom orientation is too subtle to win in what has turned out to be a year with some very strong candidates. It's a lot of fun to read none-the-less.

Dean Keith Simonton: Greatness

2009-06-13T11:24:00.000-07:00

Dean Keith Simonton's Greatness is an attempt to catalog all the influences that allow some people to have a larger effect on the world than their fellows. It takes a more wide-ranging and less data-driven approach to the question than Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. I thought it was less successful, mostly because there were too many sections that were speculative, not well grounded, or inconclusive.

There were, of course, sections that contained important insights, but if one part in three, scattered evenly throughout a 500 page book is unfocused material, the useful portions are harder to identify and lose much of their impact. The most important conclusion I found in the book is that great results are the consequence not just of intelligence, insight, or drive, but that perseverance matters, even for people with huge natural talents. Simonton shows that even for the giants who are widely acknowledged to have remade their fields and outshone everyone else who has worked in the same fields, their masterworks appear in about the same proportion as for others who ended up contributing less overall. Their secret was no secret: they merely worked harder and longer and produced more. Their natural talents sometimes give them a slightly higher batting average, but overall productivity of great works and long-lived impact is a result of starting early and working more hours over more years than their rivals. Great achievers all have mediocre and uninteresting works mixed into their corpus, it's just not so noticeable given their best output. You'll find similar statistics for how long after someone started working that they produced their best work for the great and the near-great. The great simply find more time to be productive, and continue longer. It's possible that early productivity and continuing results enable the greatest producers in any field to continue contributing longer, which adds to their records, but single-mindedness and continuing focus is also crucial.

Simonton covers topics including intelligence, personality, birth order effects, genetics (mostly focusing on the extent to which greatness runs in families), pathology, and what makes some periods more fertile than others. The lack of mathematical models makes most of his speculation hard to trust as he seldom compares the statistics of the successful with those of their surroundings. If you don't know how often familial connections should arise by chance, it's hard to conclude that any particular number of examples demonstrates the existence or lack of any effect. Overall, there were lots of interesting facts and factoids, and the writing is engaging, but it's hard to take many of the conclusions very seriously as anything more than anecdote.

Neal Stephenson: Anathem

2009-06-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

Neal Stephensonhas written another fascinating, grand, opus, Anathem. He's back to writing actual science fiction, and it's pretty impressive. It's somewhat of a surprise that the book wasn't broken up into a few smaller books, since it consists of a sequence of mostly separate adventures by a single hero, each explored in depth. (Actually, now that I look, it breaks easily into three segments of about 300 pages each.) The story starts with Erasmus as a young avout at a sanctuary for intellectuals. The first third of the story takes place as Erasmus is learning the avout way of thinking, and figuring out his place in his world. Stephenson does a good job of introducing in a concrete format several deep philosophical concepts that the reader will want to understand in the final section of the story. The second part of the story takes Erasmus and some of his fellows on a journey around Arbre, their world, after they are expelled from the sanctuary as a result of an emergency in the outside world. I'm not going to talk much about the final section, since it would spoil the story to know what the conflict is about, but lets just say it's a continuation of the journey to further and stranger places.

Erasmus' community is part of a system of monastaries spread around the world that serves to bleed off some of the presure for relentless progress from their society. The outside world still has an irregular cycle of boom and bust, but the mathic communities are isolated and serve to preserve the learning through the tough times. They have a very long view of the changing times--in fact Stephenson developed the ideas while working on some projects for the Long Now Foundation. The communities only have contact with the outside world once a year, and internally, the concents are further divided into subcommunities that only have external contact every decade or century. The more isolated each group, the more deeply they delve into various abstract and theoretical ideas. The less isolated groups treat learning almost as a competitive sport, and their different colleges emphasize different approaches to learning.

Erasmus and his cohort explore the nature of our universe, and some interesting philosophical issues that turn out to be relevant for the finale of the story. The characters explore higher math, philosophical issues such as personal identity, and quantum physics. I found the story very engaging, but I'd expect the depth and detail to turn off many readers. Stephenson is well in his element, exploring many issues in the back story while keeping an interesting story going in the foreground. The foreground story has love and loss, battles and chase scenes, extraterrestrials and high tech, and plenty of fun.

Anathem was nominated for this year's Prometheus award, but isn't a finalist. Libertarians will find it interesting for its exploration of some of the issues of governance of separated societies, and self determination. But it doesn't have the immediate political connection of some of this year's other nominees. I found it to be a fun read, and enjoyed the characters and situations as well as the exporations of philosophy and math.

2009 Hellyer Park Bike Racing

2009-06-07T11:16:00.001-07:00

I know I've mentioned my interest in the bike racing down at Hellyer park before, but it's time (apparently past time) for the annual update. They'll be running the Friday night race series in south San Jose on June 19, July 17, August 14, and September 4 and 18. Racing starts at 7pm and includes a variety of events: sprints, points races, miss & out, and scratch races.

There's also a special event (American Velodrome Challenge) June 26 and 27. The Friday night session (also starting at 7pm) includes Miss & Out, Kierin, Madison, points and scratch races. On Saturday, they'll have two sessions. The morning session lasts from 9:30am to 1pm, and the evening session starts at 6pm. The morning seems to be all sprints, while the evening has sprint finals, keirin, miss & out, scratch and points races.

Michael Flynn: January Dancer

2009-06-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Michael Flynn's The January Dancer is a finalist for this year's Prometheus Award because of Flynn's focus on the corrupting influence of the prospect of absolute power, and some of the characters' attempts to avoid it. Along the way we get a fascinating interstellar romp through a new way of navigating wormholes and get to visit a couple of worlds with some interesting variations on ways of organizing anarchic societies.

The story advances in two parallel streams, which eventually converge. The framework comes from an itinerant storyteller (a seanachy) gathering information about a story she has heard from an old worn-out man who is familiar with a lot of the details. These intercalary chapters alternate with the real action. It starts out with Captain Amos January and his small, but varied crew getting stranded on a small, unpopulated planet off the main trade routes. They know how to forage for the fuel they need without help, but find a treasure room with an inscrutably flowing artifact before they escape the planet.

Their dangerous flight from the planet leaves the ship damaged enough that Captain January must pledge the artifact as collateral to pay for repairs when they reach a civilized port. While they make a cargo run so they can afford to redeem the artifact, rumors start to circulate that the artifact has mysterious powers corresponding to an old legend about an alien mechanism that gives the holder powers of persuasion.

The January Dancer takes us on a tour that includes rebellion, piracy, imperial ambition, quiet guard duty, superhuman secret agents feared and obeyed by everyone, a quiet ungoverned unconquerable planet, and a hero willing to fore-go absolute power because of his concern for what would happen after his custodianship eventually ends: He can see that the artifact will spend more time in the hands of ambitious immoral men than in the care of those with a conscious.

The pacing is good, the characters are strong, and the scenery is varied without being too rushed. We get to spend the most time on New Eireann, a hard-scrabble planet that had hired a commercial firm to

manage their government contract. [The firm] sent in an honest administrator. By all accounts he ran a clean and honest administration though at first the Eireannaughta didn't realize that because they didn't know what one looked like. When they did, they revolted, because an administration that won't take bribes generally won't hand out favors, either.

That firm is replaced with the Interstellar Cargo Company (ICC), which is more amenable to skirting the edges, but seems to do a good job of managing commerce, keeping goods flowing efficiently among all the reachable stars.

The groups Flynn keeps an eye on include January's crew, the government and rebels on New Eireann, and the Hounds' Watch (the previously mentioned small corps of near-supermen responsible for ferreting out momentous plots and keeping the peace). Each has its internal conflicts and clues to add to the developing plot.

<SPOILER>I found it interesting that the ICC is depicted as being accepted by everyone for having cleaned up and regularized commerce while making a reasonable profit. Everyone seems content with this, until someone learns that they've discovered a way of circumventing the wormholes everyone uses, giving them a near instantaneous communications path. For some reason people consider this an unfair advantage, rather than a normal commercial development that benefits all of their customers. In most fiction, the opprobrium would have started with the fact that they were making money without doing anything more than ensuring that goods moved smoothly between planets. The fact that the disapproval didn't start until people found out that they had a secret technology was a little surprising.</SPOILER>

Most of the book is taken up with the adventuring, exploring, and intrigue. We don't find out until fairly late in the story what the artifact is good for, and only one of the characters thinks about any consequences beyond either ensuring the bads guys don't have it or trying to obtain it for themselves. The fact that his concern is expressed after the fact and not telegraphed to the readers or any other characters reduces its impact as a choice. It's a fait accompli by the time we hear about the issue, so there's no time to consider the issue. I thougth this reduced the dramatic impact considerably of what was apparently the core conflict in the story.

Terry Pratchett: Going Postal

2009-03-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

Terry Pratchett's's Going Postal is another in Pratchett's Discworld series. I've only read a handful of these stories, but they've all been fun, lightweight fantasies that explore greater and lesser societal issues in a skew universe.

In this story, Pratchett looks at competition in business and the effect of the competent entrepreneur. Okay, you'd be unlikely to see it that way if you read the book, but those are the themes that I extracted from the story. Lord Vetinari wants to rejuvenate the Ankh-Morpork postal service, and he needs a motivated, creative manager to manage it. He plucks Moist von Lipwig from the scaffold and makes him an offer he can't refuse. Moist turns out to be very creative; his history as a schemer and con artist having prepared him to read people on the spot and make up convincing stories which he can fill in the details of later when he figures out which direction he's going to take the scam.

In this case, Moist is going up against the corrupt monopoly that runs a private semaphore-based messaging system that is closer to a telegraph than a message carrier. The Grand Trunk also has labor relations problems, since their lack of attention to maintenance issues has led to a surfeit of injuries and deaths among the employees. Moist is able to out-compete the Grand Trunk in order to regain the customer base the official post office lost long ago and use an occasional bit of sabotage to reduce the Grand Trunk's ability to stay in the game.

In the end, Moist resurrects the post office by acting as the nimble entrepreneur (with a side of underhandedness) in competition with an entrenched bureaucracy. He has enough obstacles (decades of undelivered mail piled up in the post office, attacks by the competition) and humanity (pursuing a surprising love interest) to be a sympathetic character. Pratchett turns the competitive environment on its head, but I think most readers will see that it's normally government monopolies that are resistant to change, and the story shows that it's the stodginess and resistance to change that lead to poor service. If the competitors have the ability to try new things (normally, not including violence and sabotage), the customers come out ahead, and competition improves all of the enterprises touched by it.

Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival: March 29 and May 2

2009-03-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in math, puzzles, and encouraging middle and high school students to learn more about math, I recommend taking some time to help out at the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival on March 29th in Emeryville. I heard about the festival at a talk last year. I actually helped out as a puzzle mentor for the geeky (adult) audience of this talk, and had a great time talking people through one of the puzzle sets.

The JRMF presents great puzzles--graduated challenges, interesting applications--in a context that encourages kids to work together on solving them. This both encourages the ones who don't get the solution right away and cements the mastery of those who caught on more quickly. Everyone has fun, and many youngsters are exposed to the notion that math is relevant and applies in many everyday situations.

They currently have an event scheduled at Pixar in Emeryville on Sunday March 29, and are planning another for May 2, but don't have a firm location for the latter yet. They're looking for adult volunteers to staff math tables. Here's the announcement I got via email.

General information:
The Julia Robinson Math Festival
The festival, for students in grades 6-12, will consist of morning mathematical activities lunch, an accessible (to middle school and high school students) math talk, and, of course, prizes. Julia Robinson is the Berkeley mathematician who, among other important discoveries, made significant contributions to the solution of Hilbert's Tenth Problem. Here's a bit of biography, and a bit about Hilbert Tenth.
The morning activities will cover a wide variety of mathematical topics, including abstract problem-solving techniques like symmetry and parity as well as content ranging from arithmetic and algebra through combinatorics and topology. Students will have time to visit at least five or six activities during the morning session. For a sample activity, see the Candy Conundrum (and Teacher's Guide). (There are downloadable links at http://msri.org/specials/festival) Each activity table will be staffed by an expert, and upon reaching certain milestones in their understanding of the mathematics behind the puzzle or game or activity, students will be rewarded with raffle tickets for the afternoon's prize drawings. Thanks to our sponsors, the desJardins/Blachman fund and Pixar, we have an impressive array of prizes!
For those who want to staff a math table:We need people who are comfortable with hard math problems, and who can patiently work with kids to guide them toward progress. We are looking for guides who will listen to what kids have worked on, ask some (perhaps leading) questions, and then let the kids continue to progress. If you're interested, contact Joshua Zucker (email: first.last at stanfordalumni dot org), and if you're not sure you're interested, contact him anyway and he can give more detailed information about the expectations of the table leaders.

Harry Turtledove, Opening Atlantis

2009-03-09T13:06:00.000-07:00

Harry Turtledove's Opening Atlantis is a candidate for the Prometheus Award. I suspect it'll be chosen as a finalist since it's well written and interesting and has strong pro-freedom themes. Unfortunately for Turtledove (who was a co-winner last year for The Gladiator), some of my other favorites have more topical themes and are just as fun to read.

Opening Atlantis posits that an extra contintent has been inserted in the middle of the Atlantic, but otherwise history and geography are pretty much unchanged compared to our timeline. Not surprisingly, the new continent is noticed during the Age of Discovery, and since it's located in the Atlantic, it is named for the (realized to be mythological) Atlantis. The geography, flora, and fauna are surprising to the discoverers and eventual settlers. One recurring side note is the characters who recognize that the indigenous species are different in the old world, on Atlantis, and in Terranova (North America). They don't quite point to the possibility of evolution explicitly, but it's the kind of idle wonder that one imagines occurs many times before an explanation is found.

Turtledove's story is presented in three parts from successive eras, which are roughly Settlement and Independence, Battling the Pirates, and Dragged into the European War. Each of the segments has Edward Radcliffe or his descendants as central figures, and the first and last each features a different battle over freedom-related issues. In the first part, Atlantis is discovered and settled by English, French, and Spanish fishermen and their families. Lured by familiar climate, each group settles on a different section of the coast, and builds multiple towns that trade, but maintain separate cultures. The conflict in Part one comes when a nobleman sent away by the British Crown decides that British Atlantis is his new fiefdom. Since the settlers intentionally migrated in order to get away from kings and lords and their incessant war and taxation, it isn't long before they rise up and defeat the invaders. They are helped a lot by their familiarity with local conditions, and their willingness to fight as insurgents.

In the second part, two of Edward's descendants, Red Rodney Radcliffe (a pirate captain) and William Radcliff (a shipping magnate) battle over the fate of a pirate stronghold on the western edge of Atlantis. William allies with other major shipping owners to defeat the pirates and ensure that they'll be able to trade freely. I could say that the freedom-related themes have to do with free trade and cooperation among private enterprises to address a common problem, but truthfully this is just a setup for a series of naval battles. The good guys win.

The third part (my nickname was "Dragged into the European War") covers a period of strife between Britain and France. Early on, there was some discussion of which side Spain would take, and there are hints that other powers are engaged in other theaters, but we only see the battles that take place in Atlantis. Victor Radcliff leads the British-allied settlers, and his French-settler counterpart Roland Kersauzon is descended from the frenchman who first identified the new continent. Early on, the French settlers are reinforced by French troops, but for most of this war, the British navy controls the oceans but isn't concerned about the fate of Atlantis, so the armies on the ground are on their own. Tactics rule the day, and the settlers teach the regular armies several lessons about dealing with insurgents and familiarity with local terrain.

Victor Radcliff is joined by Blaise, an escaped slave who becomes a leader among the British irregulars. A lot of the conflict in this section is about how competent Blaise is and how he is able to win over British settlers who haven't had much previous contact with Blacks. The French and Spanish they run into (and the British regulars) are much less tolerant. Blaise finds several opportunities to point out the parallels between his situation and the freedom that the other settlers are fighting for.

Overall, it's quite a fun read and well up to Turtledove's normal high standards. The characters and their battles and strategic surprises are well-drawn and plausible.

Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey: The Cult of Statistical Significance

2009-03-02T11:54:00.000-08:00

Stephen Ziliak and Deirdre McCloskey's The Cult of Statistical Significance is a poorly argued rant about what appears to be an important topic on the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that many of the statistical sciences have been using the wrong metric to determine whether the results of experiments are interesting and relevant. They report on a few detailed reviews of articles in top journals in economics, psychology, and other fields to show that the problem they describe is real and pervasive. Unfortunately, they are much more interested in casting aspersions on the work and influence of Ronald Fisher and building up his colleague William Gosset, and so they don't actually explain how to apply their preferred approach. In amongst the rant, they do manage to make the defects of Fisher's approach clear, though it's tedious reading.

The basic story is that Fisher argued that the main point of science is establishing what we know, and to that end, the important result of any scientific experiment is a clear statement of whether the results are statistically significant. According to Fisher, that tells you what confidence you should have that the results would be repeated if you ran the experiment again. Ziliak and McCloskey want you to understand that a result can be statistically significant but practically useless. And there are worse cases, where statistical significance and Fisher's approach leads scientists to hide more relevant results, or worse to conclude that a proposal was ineffective when the data show that a large effect might be present, but the experiment failed to show that it was certain. Ziliak and McCloskey want scientists to primarily report the size of the effects they find, and their confidence in the result. To Ziliak and McCloskey, a large effect discovered in noisy data is far more important than a small effect in very clear data. They point out that with a large enough sample, every effect will be statistically significant. (Though they don't explain this point in any detail, nor give any numbers on what "large enough" means. I have an intuitive feeling for why this might be true, but this was just one of many points that wasn't presented clearly.)

They describe a few stories in detail to show the consequences for public policy. Vioxx was approved, they claim, because the tests of statistical significance allowed the scientists to fudge their results sufficiently to hide the deleterious effects. (It's not clear why this should be blamed on statistical significance rather than corruption.) They also present a case that a study of unemployment insurance in Illinois found a large effect ($4.29 in benefit for every dollar spent), but gave the Fisherian conclusion, not just that the result wasn't statistically significant, but that there was no effect. It turned out that a careful review of the data showed that the program had a statistically significant benefit-cost ratio of $7.07 for white women, but the overall benefit-cost ratio was not statistically significant because the $4.29 was only statistically significant at the .12 level, while under .05 or less is required by Fisher's followers.

Ziliak and McCloskey demonstrate that they're on the right side of the epistemological debate by supporting the use of Bayes' Law in describing scientific results, but beyond one example, they don't explain how a scientific paper should use it in presenting results. The use of Fisher's approach gives a clear guide: describe some hypotheses, perform some tests, finally analyze the results to show which relationships are significant. With Bayes, the reasoning, approach and explanation are more complicated; but Ziliak and McCloskey don't tell how to do it. Of the 29 references to Bayesian Theory in the index, 24 of them have descriptions like "Feynman advocates ...", or "Orthodox Fisherians oppose ...". There aren't any examples of how one might write a conclusion to a paper and show Bayesian reasoning, even though they pervasively give examples of analogous Fisherian reasoning that they find unacceptable.

Another significance question that Ziliak and McCloskey argue is important (but that they don't explain adequately) and that statistical significance hides is how much various treatments or alternate policy approaches might cost. Fisher's approach allows authors to publish that some proposal would have a statistically significant effect on a societal problem or the course of a disease and not mention that the cost is exorbitant and the effect small (though likely). Ziliak and McCloskey argue that journal editors should require authors to publish the magnitude of any effects and a comparison of costs and benefits. According to the reviews they've done and others they cite, it's common in top journals to omit this level of detail and to focus on whether experimental results are significantly different from zero.

Another of the authors' pet peeves is "testing for difference from zero". They claim that it's common for papers to report results as "statistically different from zero", when they're barely so. They use the epithet "sign testing" for this case. The lack of attention to the size of an effect that significance testing allows means that papers get published showing that some effects have a positive effect on a problem, even when the effect is barely different from a placebo. And there are enough scientists performing enough experiments today that many treatments with no real effect will reach this level of significance purely by chance.

Overall, the book spends far too much time on personalities and politics. Even when the discussion is substantive, too much effort goes into why the standard approach is mistaken and far too little on how to do science right, or why their preferred approaches would actually lead to better science.

For the layperson trying to follow the progress of science, and occasionally to dip into the literature to make a decision about what treatment to recommend to a family member or what supplements would best enhance longevity or health, the point is that scientific papers have to be read more carefully. Ziliak and McCloskey argue that editors, even of prestigious journals, are using the wrong metrics in choosing what papers to accept, and often pressure authors to present their results in formats that aren't useful for this purpose.

When reading papers, concentrate on the size and the costs of the effects being described. Significance can be relevant, but the fact that a paper appeared in a major publication doesn't mean that the effects being described are important or useful. Don't be surprised if the most-cited papers in some area don't actually present the circumstances in which an intervention would be useful. Don't assume that all "significant" effects are relevant or strong.

Financial Crisis: Regulatory Arbitrage

2009-02-24T11:09:00.000-08:00

I've been following the financial debacle pretty closely. I can explain a fair part of it, describing all the moving parts and how they interacted and why regulators and participants had a hard time seeing that their individual parts in it would lead to a calamity given what everyone else was doing. The main message is that it didn't start and end with the housing bubble and crash. The bubble had causes, (and the legislators behind it aren't backing off; they continue to think that more people should own houses whether they can afford them or not) and so did the crash.

But I've had a hard time summarizing the whole thing and naming a single root cause (other than vague "government interference in the markets") or a suggestion for what should be done differently that would lead to different outcomes next time. The whole thing seems so complex, and everyone in it merely responds to local incentives so it's hard to see what different incentives would lead to a a more stable outcome.

But I recently followed a pointer to an article by a group at NYU who gave a good summary and pointed to one of the parts of my story as the root cause, and I now think they're right. The root cause was regulatory arbitrage at the banks. Regulatory arbitrage describes actions someone takes in order to avoid the affects of some set of regulations that might apply to them if they ran their business differently. Rather than buying some asset in a jurisdiction where it is taxed, you have a subsidiary buy it, or you buy an option, or you buy a company that already owns it. If one kind of institution can't engage in a certain practice that looks like it'll make money, then people will invent a new kind of institution that's subject to different regulators which isn't so prohibited.

Part of my long riff on the crash has been that practically every financial institution that exists now is the result of regulatory arbitrage of some kind. Consumer banks accept deposits, but their activities are tightly regulated in order to qualify for deposit insurance, so commercial banks don't take deposits from consumers. Credit Unions have a different set of restrictions on their activities. Savings and Loans were restricted in the interest they could charge on loans, so when they had to compete on the interest they paid on deposits, they took excessive risks leading to the S&L crisis. Commercial bank investments are regulated and limited, so there are investment banks. Those have their own regulations, so we saw the rise of hedge funds which didn't have to report to anyone except their investors.

The regulatory arbitrage at the root of this crisis was that the consumer banks were restricted in what assets they can hold and what assets they can sell. So the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) they were selling stripped out the lucrative part of the loan repayment income stream and sold that for cash they could use to make more loans, while they ended up keeping the riskiest part on their books. Most of them found tools that appeared to insure against the remaining risks, but those were systemically flawed--all the banks relied on the same few institutions, and their back-up plans would only have worked if problems were isolated. When the crunch came it was general, and so all the back-up plans failed together.

As the NYU group said, "They were in effect equivalent to writing out-of-the-money put options on aggregate crises." In plain English, that means the insurers were selling assets that allowed their counter-parties to demand money from them if certain events took place. Initially, those seemed unlikely. Unfortunately, the events that would trigger the payout were defined so that when enough policies were written, only a general failure would suffice to pull the trigger. What wasn't obvious until later was that the combination of bank loan practices (required by regulators) and hedging strategies made that general failure more likely. An important thing to realize is that neither the regulators nor the banks realized when they introduced the instruments that this would be the outcome. They weren't knowingly making a heads-I-win,-tails-you-lose bet in the beginning. When you've only written the first few policies, the systemic risk is small. The risk grew as an ever-increasing number of institutions bought insurance against the same contingencies from the same counterparty. Normally, insurance companies reinsure to spread the risk to other companies, but AIG held all the credit default swaps itself.

Most of the recommendations from the NYU group make sense. More regulation, better regulation, or smarter regulators wouldn't have made anything better, and won't solve the problem next time either. Part of the dynamic with regulatory arbitrage includes regulatory capture: we have to assume that the regulations and the regulators will eventually be in the pockets of the regulated industry. The experienced people in any industry have the most information and interest in the details, so they're the natural experts to address any problems and to oversee any restrictions. The approach that can work is a set of regulations that requires visibility so that customers, clients, competitors, and counter-parties can see what their exposure is. These are the parties with a stake in the outcome who were stymied in the run-up to the debacle. Another principal is to change the nature of the compensation traders and bankers receive so that their incentives favor the long term stability of their institutions rather than short-term results. This is hard to set up, but possible: one idea is to pay bonuses in a long-term asset that vests slowly.

It's still a complex vexing subject, but understanding how regulatory arbitrage was an underlying cause at least provides a guideline to evaluating proposals to address the problem as we go forward. Bad solutions attempt to forbid certain kinds of actions or investments, since they provide an incentive to find a new kind of institution that can exploit the abandoned opportunity. It's better, when we detect a kind of transaction that is destabilizing in one way or another to find a way to allow it that makes its impact and extent visible and provides incentives to moderate the impact. That's not easy, and it's probably not the direction that regulators and legislators will want to go, but forbidding lucrative practices doesn't prevent them, it drives them underground and out of sight.

Iain Banks: Matter

2009-02-09T10:34:00.000-08:00

Iain Banks' Matter is set in his Culture universe, and it's nearly as interesting as the best of the Culture novels. The high point of Matter is seeing people (and entities) at different technological levels interacting and moving back and forth between societies. The main focus is the Sarl, an industrializing society living on level 8 of Sursamen, an immense shellworld, and their war of conquest with one of their neighbors. The Sarl are getting help from a more advanced species, and being led to believe their own abilities are behind their successes. The royal family has a daughter Djan who was taken away and adopted by Special Circumstances, which gives a reason for them to have someone on the scene, even though Sursamen is outside their sphere of influence.

I think this is the first time we have directly seen that Banks' Culture universe includes competing civilizations at the level of the Culture. Previously we'd been led to believe that the Culture was an over-arching universal civilization that enforced a live-and-let-live stable peace among all species. Now we see that there are others at the level of the Culture, and the Morthenveld are powerful enough that the Culture mostly leaves their sectors and galaxies alone. When a Special Circumstances agent wants to visit a region under Morthenveld control she has to give up most of her powerful built-in weapons, skills, and communications devices.

Amid the local politics, and while following Djan's perigrinations as she attempts to return to Sursamen to find out what happened in the wake of her father's death, we discover that a deeper plot is afoot. Vast forces gather in darkness and secrecy, and Djan has to figure out what their goal is decide whether their plans are aligned with or opposed to those of the Culture before deciding what action to take.

The story has great descriptions of vast stellar constructions, many interacting civilizations, species and people. One of the things I like about the Culture novels is that even though we get to see grand conflicts in the foreground of the stories, it's clear that they are just the front page news of far bigger civilizations with vast abilities and gazillions of citizens, who mostly interact through peaceful commerce. We see a bit of that in a visit to a Morthenveld nestworld, which is huge beyond the scale of the entire Culture civilization.

While the book was nominated for this year's Prometheus award, I don't think it'll be a strong contender. It's perfectly sympathetic to libertarian goals and tastes, but the big conflicts don't directly apply to any hot-button issues. The book is very well written and a lot of fun to read, but this year there are books with a much tighter focus on out-of-control totalitarian governments to contend with, and Banks' Matter doesn't play in that arena.

Scott McCloud at TED

2009-02-02T20:48:00.003-08:00

Scott McCloud, who understands comics better than anyone, gave a recent TED talk in which he explained comics while demonstrating how they work. It's a lot of fun.

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother

2009-01-26T11:14:00.000-08:00

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is a fun, modern, flashy, but stark warning in the vein of Lewis' classic It Can't Happen Here. Like MacLeod's The Execution Channel from last year, it takes place in the current anti-terror climate, but Doctorow focuses more on the consequences and costs of the resulting repression and shows how we (or at least those with a connection to technology and time on their hands, meaning smart high school kids) might fight back.

Doctorow even has an afterword from Bruce Schneier and a bibliography to underline the fact that technologies for privacy are available and urging people to do more to prepare for the resistance now. Since I can attest that all the technology in the book is either available or easily developed, the book has to be placed in the future history category to qualify as science fiction. It has been nominated for this year's Prometheus and I'd have to say it's the best candidate I've read so far.

The story is told from the point of view of a small group of teenagers in San Francisco who are imprisoned by DHS in a general sweep after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge and BART tunnel. Once they are released, they (principally Marcus Yallow, a hacker and LARP player) work to undermine the terrorist state and build tools that their friends can use to communicate privately and organize out of the government's sight. There are enough details about what tools they build and what systems they compromise to serve as an outline for budding hackers who aren't sure how to fight back. These details occasionally intrude into the story in the form of Marcus explaining things to his audience, but I think readers for whom they aren't obvious will take it as necessary background.

The story also shows clearly how torture can come about, and without taking their viewpoint makes the actions and motivations of the guards and torturers believable. Marcus and his friends react to their harsh imprisonment in a variety of ways, just as the people on the outside react to the increasing repression differently. It's not surprising that kids in school (who are used to hiding some of their activities from their parents and teachers) adapt readily to using surreptitious means to hide from DHS as well.

The story doesn't have a young-adult feel; even though the protagonists are mainly teenagers, the story is told with an adult sensibility. Being youngsters, Doctorow has plenty of opportunity to show them growing intellectually and emotionally. The characters are well filled out, and have appropriate conflicts that drive the story. The story is exciting and well motivated. Marcus starts working with a journalist early enough in the story that her role in the denouement isn't a surprise. And compared to the Queen's similar role in Walton's Half a Crown, it seems completely plausible.

I really enjoyed this book. It had some of the flavor of Vinge's Fast Times at Fairmont High, without being as far ahead of the curve, and gave an exciting depiction of the fight against an enveloping tyranny (harking back to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) along with a concrete vision of how and why we'd fight back set in an all-too-plausible near future.

Jo Walton: Half a Crown

2009-01-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

Jo Walton's Half a Crown completes her "Small Change" series with a distinctly different ending. The second novel in the trilogy, Ha'Penny, was a co-winner of last year's Prometheus Award.

Small Change is an alternate history in which Britain made peace with Hitler and itself moved toward fascism. The story follows Peter Carmichael, a police inspector in the first novel, now head of Britain's Secret Police, The Watch. Carmichael is gay, and this fact is being used by his superiors to keep him in line. But they don't seem to know that Carmichael has been secretly operating an underground railroad from inside The Watch. In Half a Crown, Carmichael additionally struggles to deal with the troubles of his protege Elvira Royston, a debutante planning for her presentation to the Queen. Elvira accompanies a friend to a political rally to watch the parades, and is rounded up along with the provocateurs after a riot erupts. The government decides to make an example of the provocateurs and Carmichael has to scramble to extract Elvira from the mess at great cost to himself and his friends.

The books provide a clear depiction of innocent well-meaning people getting caught up in a totalitarian struggle, and having to choose which of the things they value they will work to preserve and at what cost to their other values and to the rest of society. The first two books had downbeat endings, as Carmichael and others gave in on major issues that allowed the totalitarian government to take power in order to preserve a small amount of personal autonomy. This third book has the same feeling most of the way, but in the end Elvira finds a way to turn the tables and expose the machinations that led to the government takeover. I don't know if Britain's government really would work the way Walton portrays it, but as an American, it felt like deus ex machina.

The characterization is interesting. We've come to know Carmichael from the previous books, and his motivations (protecting both his lover Jack and Elvira, furthering the secret projects that allow some people to escape) are clear and well established. Elvira is a newcomer to the story, and Walton demonstrates her thinking and motivations clearly in alternating chapters that Elvira tells in the first person. The others, which mostly follow Carmichael, are given in third person, which allows Walton to follow other characters when necessary.

Half a Crown has been nominated for this year's Prometheus, and it's a strong candidate. The application to libertarianism is clear, but I think there are other books which will do better. Cory Doctorow's Little Brother seems a more powerful cautionary tale along the lines of It Can't Happen Here, though I'm not quite finished with it yet. The book is well written, and my only complaint is that the happy ending seemed forced. I don't think dystopias have to end in a downbeat to be effective, but the total collapse of Britain's fascist government seemed to run against a lot of previous description showing how that the government had co-opted most of the country's leaders and that the institutionalized prejudices were in harmony with those of the populace who were learning to get along with the other consequences of institutionalized repression. The quick turnaround in response to a single speech was a surprise. This is, after all, still an alternate history in which the Germans and the Japanese have taken over two thirds of the globe. Britain will have to figure out how to co-exist with an external world dominated by fascism.

Diane Coyle, The Soulful Science

2009-01-08T13:56:00.002-08:00

Diane Coyle's goal in writing The Soulful Science was to explain why economics is relevant and to convince readers that the bad rap that economics seems to carry is undeserved. She argues that modern economics studies important topics like the causes of growth and of happiness, and thereby provides important clues as to how we can relieve poverty and increase personal well-being. I think the book is a good introduction to the economic way of thinking that might draw a more humanistic audience into the field.

Coyle's approach is non-technical and engaging. The book has only a few graphs and charts, and I don't remember seeing any equations. Coyle tells the story of the people who made the advances that interest her and what their results imply about how we should organize society, what society can and cannot accomplish, and how these advances in knowledge affect our lives.

The first two-thirds of the book contains most of the meat. Part one talks about what economists have learned over the last several decades about what makes economies grow, and by implication, what we can do to reduce poverty where growth is still sparse. She starts out this section with a chapter extolling the virtues of the economic historians who have dug into obscure archives and surprising sources to collect detailed data about how people lived before record keeping was as persistent and consistent as it has become. This work required a fair bit of inference and a lot of perseverance, but in the end, we have a good view of how well people got on in different times and places. This data can tell us a lot about how quickly growth occurred in different circumstances. From this we can deduce a fair bit about when and where progress flowered, which shows some facts that seem to nearly always be true beforehand. (Protection of property rights, respect for education) But the inconsistencies; other societies that seem to have all the prerequisites, but don't enjoy the growth that occurred elsewhere show that it's an incomplete model.

In her chapter on alleviating poverty, Coyle admits that we don't have a formula that works reliably, but argues that we have identified some policies that are worth encouraging and we have learned about some approaches that don't work. If developmental economists and leaders of underdeveloped countries pay attention to these lessons they'll be able to lay some groundwork that will put them in a better position to take action as we continue to learn more. It'll also stop people from hoping for quick results from ideas that we now know don't work (natural resource discovery and exploitation seldom leads to improved living conditions for the populace.)

The second part of the book focuses on people, usually the province of microeconomics. But Coyle focuses instead on recent advance in personal happiness and work on rationality and biases. She does a thorough job of presenting an overview of the implications of recent research for how to live your life, and on what interventions actually make people happier. She also talks about how people behave in markets, and what the economists have figured out about our behavior based on theory and experiment. Theory has filled in the consequences of asymmetrical information: how it affects negotiations and outcomes, and how people gain an advantage in business or politics by controlling access to information. Experimental economics has taught us a lot both about how people actually act in market environments as well as what kinds of institutions and frameworks make markets more effective at allocating goods and how to reduce undesired outcomes like pollution.

The final section addresses larger topics that have been attracting economists' attention recently: how evolutionary and chaos theory can be used to enhance classical economics' approach to the emergence of behavior from collections of interacting agents, and public choice theory's observations about how incentives on bureaucrats as individuals reduce the effectiveness of government as a tool for effecting change. This section is interesting, but doesn't get into a lot of detail.

Overall, The Soulful Science is a well-written non-technical introduction to the most interesting fields in modern economics. Coyle is an insider and quite familiar with the personalities in the field and she presents recent findings well while giving a sense of how economists work together to develop and explore these ideas.

Charles Murray: Human Accomplishment

2008-11-30T22:15:00.000-08:00

Human Accomplishment is Charles Murray's attempt to catalog and explain the highest achievements in the arts and sciences that people have produced. He says his yardstick is the things that humanity would be able to brag about if we were putting together a resume, but he includes scientific discoveries which any advanced species would have made along with the heights of poetry, composition, and painting.

The book quantifies and compares the contributions of individuals, fields of endeavor, countries, and regions, and points out some consistent features of the data like the prominence of men and the paucity of identifiable contributions from Asia. At the end of the book he makes some generalizations about what kinds of environments led to increases and decreases in the amount of great work that was done.

While the book is nearly 700 pages, more than 200 pages of it is contributed by the appendices, notes, index, and front-matter. At least another 75 pages are made up by tables and itemized listings of major contributions by field. In addition, the prose is scattered with frequent tables, graphs and asides (in white text on dark blue so you can't miss the fact that you are welcome to skip them.) So it's not as long a read as it appears, but it's still substantial.

Murray's methodology in identifying the accomplishments that stand out was to survey many encyclopedic works. For the most part, he found in nearly all fields which were covered by a substantial number of such books that there was a lot of overlap and consistency among them. This allowed him to declare that he would only include in his survey achievements that were recognized widely, that he would exclude compendiums that didn't overlap substantially with other works purporting to be in the same field, and that fields that weren't covered by at least a handful of broad overlapping surveys would be omitted from the results.

He ends up with substantial reviews of 8 fields in science and technology; separate inventories for philosophy from China, India, and the West; for the visual arts from China, Japan, and the West, and for Literature from the Arab world in addition to the four regions mentioned previously. The arts are divided regionally because otherwise the contributions from the Arabs or the East would be swamped by those of the West. In each of the regional breakdowns, the West contributed substantially more (4x-10x) than any other region. Murray spends some time showing that this probably isn't due to his lack of familiarity with these regions or the languages in which the histories are written. (Part of the justification is that the disparity holds similarly in the scientific inventory for which there are firmer criteria for inclusion and a general agreement about which accomplishments count, even among those who want to claim minorities are under-represented in the listings.) Murray also spends some time speculating about why there's such a disparity in contributions.

There were few surprises for me in the actual lists. There were only a couple of cases where I didn't recognize one of the top few contributors in a scientific field, even though there were many cases where I wouldn't have been able to name their contribution. There have been a couple of occasions to cross-reference names I've come across in recent reading. For instance, Lope de Vega was a prominent character in Harry Turtledove's Rule Brittania, which I reviewed recently. I didn't realize until I was reading Murray's 1-page summary of the heights of Western literature that de Vega was based on a real author from that period (though not quite significant enough to make the list of Significant Figures in Western literature in Appendix 5.) I also referred to the lists of Chinese notables while reading The Early Chinese Empires.

The most important conclusion to draw from the book is that accomplishment is unevenly spread. Most people who have given even cursory thought to the subject have noticed that there's an exponential distribution of achievements across fields and across time. Practically no matter what criteria you come up with to measure achievement, you'll find there's a high peak and a consistent, rapid drop-off in people's abilities. The best athletes are as much above their competitors as the best scientists and the best writers.

Murray's book gives us the opportunity to savor the best and the brightest.

Allen Steele: Coyote

2008-11-29T18:12:00.000-08:00

Allen Steele's Coyote was nominated for the Prometheus award when it appeared in 2002, but somehow I missed reading it at the time. This year, it was nominated for the Hall of Fame award, which gave me a second chance to read it. Since I had read the follow-up novel Coyote Rising when it came out in 2004, I already knew something about how things turn out, but Coyote Rising takes place long enough afterward that only a couple of characters carry over, and they have a lifetime of hardship between their two appearances. The story appeared as a series of short stories before publication as a novel, but for the most part this isn't very noticeable since the story proceeds reasonably through quite different venues, and the character continuity is unbroken.

In Coyote, the US has become the totalitarian United Republic of America, and a race is on to colonize the planets circling a nearby star. When the URS Alabama is ready for launch, the captain and most of the crew conspire to hijack the ship. They don't change the destination, so the hijacking consists of replacing loyal intended crew-members with families and other folks that the URS regime had considered to be subversives.

The first story covers the theft of the Alabama, and most of the political content appears here in the presentation of the regime's repressive tactics. Most of what we see directly concerns people whose friends or acquaintances have been taken off to the camps, and Steele gives the impression, without saying anything very explicit that minor transgressions against local authority explain most of the incidents rather than anything that would look like true rebellion or protest. The only other time politics comes up is when the crew of the Plymouth (Alabama was renamed upon landing) decides how to arrange their colony. The results are quite pedestrian, and we see the process through the official records of the colony's Secretary. The Ship's captain is elected chair of the Town Council, with a little dissent by people who were hoping for a continuation of military formality.

The rest of the story is pretty standard colonizing-a-new-planet material. The characterization, conflicts, and scenery is reasonably interesting and well-written, but there's nothing of deeper significance to recommend it. The coming of age sub-plots are well-developed, and the conflicts are real; colonists die when they're careless while exploring the new environment. The native flora and fauna have plenty of surprises in store. As I recall, some of them continued to be crucial plot elements in Coyote Rising.

Overall, I'd summarize it as a decent read, but I don't disagree with the decision to not give an award when it first appeared. I can think of several perennial nominees for the Hall of Fame that are more deserving, as well as a few that have recently been nominated for the first time.

Harry Turtledove: Noninterference

2008-10-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

Harry Turtledove's Noninterference explores the consequences of violating the noninterference principal when exploring a world that hasn't achieved contact with other societies. Turtledove takes the best possible example of a minor intervention that goes awry with beneficial consequences that persist through the ages on a developing planet and extrapolates the possibilities. As articulated in Star Trek's Prime Directive, there is something sacrosanct about allowing each civilization to find its own way. In this case, the actual effects on the subject planet appear benign, though extensive. But benevolent consequences are no defense against violations of the Prime Directive. In any case, Turtledove focuses on the effects in the exploring (and interfering) civilization.

The Federacy's Survey Service is responsible for exploring newly discovered planets and making occasional visits to developing worlds. They're in a constant battle with the private Noninterference Foundation, whose Purists argue that it should be disbanded and no contact should be allowed with pre-technological civilizations. In this environment, when news comes back of the effects of the prior interference, the head of the service tries to cover up all the evidence, even stooping to violence when necessary. She convinces herself that it's for the protection of the important work the Survey Service, and therefore justified.

Given all this context, we get to see chase scenes, violence, narrow escapes, bureaucratic bungling, the power of the press, and the importance of independent parties monitoring everything the government does. Turtledove (co-)won the Prometheus award this year for The Gladiator, and his libertarian tendencies show clearly here. He isn't actually very concerned about the Prime Directive—If he were, he could have easily manufactured a simple intervention with disastrous consequences, rather than one with pervasive, long-term, apparently favorable effects. His focus is really on exposing the incentives of bureaucrats to cover up their mistakes, and the unlimited power they draw on because they have access to the public purse.

Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe

2008-09-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe takes place in a high-speed near future of advanced technology. It jumps around in time, with flashes back and forward getting about equal time.

Art Berry is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a granfaloon of people synchronized to Eastern Standard Time, regardless of where they live. Art has been serving EST as a double agent working for the Greenwich 0 Tribe in London, but his erstwhile partner and his paramour have conspired to get him committed to an asylum so they can exploit his latest invention unhindered.

Art feels very similar to Charles Stross' Manfred Macx from Accelerando: a high tech entrepreneur living a life two sigmas faster than those around him, inventing constantly, and caught up in other people's conspiracies. Art is a human factors designer who has a good feel for the zeitgeist, and enough reputation that he has no trouble getting backing to implement outlandish ideas and see whether they'll catch on quickly.

The plot-line associated with the asylum has the paranoid feeling of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". On one hand, Art's friends really were out to get him, but on the other hand, once you're sent to an asylum, there's no way to convince the doctors that you're sane, especially if you try to ask them how to prove you're not crazy. Art's inventiveness serves him in good stead here, as he manages to find a way to cause a ruckus that allows him to contact a sympathetic and influential psychiatrist who believes his story.

The story is well-told, but without depth or broad implications. The most interesting aspects are the world building and Art's struggle to get out of the asylum. The former is well-played; it's a believable fast-paced world with a constant introduction of new toys and tools, but most of the population is unaware of the constant struggle to invent and deliver the things they use. I enjoyed the story, but it's not more than an entertaining diversion.

Nick Humphrey: Seeing Red

2008-09-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

Nick Humphrey's Seeing Red is another attempt to explain consciousness, but from a slightly different angle. Humphrey clearly understands what it would mean to produce an explanation, and makes some progress on the task. Humphrey starts not with what it means to think about something or to be aware of something, but with the more fundamental fact of perception of something outside of ourselves. The focal perception is of a red sensation. There's something in your environment that produces the perception of redness. What just happened to you? What does it mean that it makes you sense the presence of red? Why can you share this experience with others who also perceive the redness or with people who aren't present but still understand what you mean?

Humphrey first concentrates his attention on the internal details: first you perceive, then you become aware that you are perceiving. You may put words to the sensation or you might not, but Humphrey takes pains to point out that the perceiving and awareness are two separate facts. If you then talk to someone else about the perception (which you can do because you're aware of it), then of necessity each of you has some kind of "theory of mind"; a mental model that represents the fact that whatever it means to perceive, you are something that can do it, and other people are capable of the same thing.

Having set these aspects of reality out, Humphrey goes to some trouble to demonstrate that they are separate facets of reality, and all need to be present in an actual explanation. He talks about things like 'blindsight' and optical illusions in order to convince people who aren't keeping up that all these things are distinct facets of reality and need to be distinct in any explanation.

In the second half of this small book, Humphrey explains that consciousness arises out of the neurons in the brain, and that their role is to reflect and represent what's really going on in the world. He wants to present an evolutionary explanation of why they arose, but he only really justifies the fact that they are useful. The mechanism and history that allowed a feedback process between sensing and acting to arise and be passed down as a competitive advantage eludes him. And he doesn't have much to say about how the neural substrate might represent facts about reality in such a way that it could actually be useful to an aware, active agent interacting with the world.

My bottom line is that this book lays out the issues fairly clearly in a way that ought to be interesting and convincing to someone who is just starting to think about how consciousness might work, but the explanations fall short of answering the deeper questions. On the other hand, Humphrey's stated goal in the book is to show that consciousness matters and that it can be productive to think carefully about it. That much he succeeded at.

Kim Stanley Robinson: A Short, Sharp Shock

2008-08-31T11:48:00.000-07:00

Kim Stanley Robinson's A Short, Sharp Shock is a vague, meandering fantasy in which nothing interesting or consequential happens. Someone washes up on a shore and can't remember who he is or where he came from. A woman is also there in the surf, and when they are separated, he spends the rest of the book looking for her and then traveling with or passing time with her. The local terrain is an unending peninsula that apparently circles the world, providing an obvious opportunity for a trek. Thel (the name finally bestowed on the non-hero in the fourth chapter) wanders on his one-dimensional quest, encountering various bizarre groups with indecipherable goals and practices. Some of them chase him, some of them welcome him, some of them let him live peacefully with them. Thel doesn't spend any time trying to figure out who he was, or how he got here, or what his current situation means. Sometimes he's driven by events or pursuers on long sub-quests to find his companion again (who remains unnamed, and is merely "the swimmer" throughout the book). Other times, he spends long interludes in indolence or indulgence either with his swimmer or with someone else.

I've read other books in which nothing happens, but in the good ones someone learns or grows or at least strives. Sometimes the viewpoint character does none of these, but the reader is at least entertained because interesting things happen nearby, and the way these events affect or don't affect the protagonist is compelling. There was none of that in this book. Thel journeys, waits, searches, suffers, encounters, and debauches; all without learning, growing, or caring for anything beyond self-preservation and a drive to be with the person he first noticed next to him. This passage, near the end of the book seemed particularly apt. Thel has found a coin in the surf bearing a profile like the swimmer's.

"Were you ever the queen of an ancient kingdom?"
"Yes," she muttered sleepily. "And I still am."
But this, he supposed, was another of their misunderstandings. Thel had first noticed this phenomenon when he had seen a windhover, hunting over the meadows inland. "Look," he had said, "a kestrel." But the swimmer had thought him crazy for pointing into the sky, for that to her was the name of a kind of fish. And later he found that when he said loyalty she understood it to mean stubbornness, and when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and that when she said melancholy she did not mean that sadness we enjoy feeling, but rather mendacity; and when she said actually she meant currently; and when he said "I love you," she thought he was saying "I will leave you." They had slowly worked up quite a list of these false cognates, Thel could recite scores and scores of them, and he had come to understand that they did not share a language so much as the illusion of a language; they spoke strong idiolects, and lived in worlds of meaning distinct and isolated from the other. So that she no doubt understood queen of an ancient kingdom to mean something like a swimmer in the deep sea; and the mystery of the ancient alloy coin was never explained, and, he realized, never would be. It gave him a shiver of fear, thinking about it—it seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained , and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear. He sat on the beach watching the clouds tumble overhead and letting handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent parts of themselves; which had then been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach; and they would never really have understood anything.

The idiosyncrasy of language between them hadn't been prominent to this point, and isn't raised again. If this is intended as the message of the book, it's a good thing Robinson spelled it out, because Thel and the swimmer don't spend their time searching for meaning or trying to build anything permanent; they don't even focus on enjoying their time together. They do appear isolated from one another when they're together, but not because they can't communicate so much as because they don't try. The passage seems a symptom of the lack of direction of the entire book.

Michael Resnick, New Dreams for Old

2008-08-17T23:36:00.000-07:00

Mike Resnick's New Dreams for Old contains several very good stories. If you haven't been reading (or listening to) recent nominees for the Hugo awards, it's worth picking up. Out of 20 stories, half were nominated for or won a Hugo.

I'm a fan of Resnick, though I can't claim to be a completist. I have his name on my list of authors, so when I'm in a bookstore with time or money to spend, I make sure to look through his books and often find something interesting to read. I think he writes good adventure SF, but this collection also contains some interesting fantasy.

With short stories, the element of surprise seems more important than with longer works, so I'm hesitant to say much about these stories. There are a couple ("Robots Don't Cry", "Travels with My Cats") in which Resnick shows an ability to quickly make us care deeply about a character whether or not they're human. "The Chinese Sandman" is a wonderful evocation of the fairy tale genre, with an oriental flavor.

Some are serious investigations of serious issues; "Hothouse Flowers" and "Down Memory Lane" talk about how important quality of life is to those in their declining years. I think they make important points, even though I expect the state of medicine to improve sufficiently in the next couple of decades to make the issue obsolete.

Obligatory disclaimer: this book was provided to Prometheus, the LFS Newsletter, as a review copy. Since I'm a fan of Resnick, I jumped at the chance to read it. I'm glad I did, even though I was already familiar with the best stories in the collection.

Resnick's stories should resonate well with libertarians, even though there's nothing overtly political in them. "Guardian Angel" and "Keepsakes" take different views of dealing with criminals. In one case, the police aren't called in because the principals include ganglords, in the other, the police have to step gingerly because the "criminals" involved don't seem to have broken any laws. In both cases justice is served, though in one case justice isn't very satisfying. Resnick also has a healthy respect for self-sufficiency, and many of his characters could have come from the pages of a Heinlein story.

Lessig's Change Congress proposal

2008-08-12T22:17:00.000-07:00

Larry Lessig has an article in Metro, a Silicon Valley entertainment weekly. In it Lessig talks about his new campaign to reform national politics. Lessig does a good job of laying out and describing a problem that is worth solving. He ends by providing a vague idea of what he intends to do about it, but doesn't seem to notice that the solution only addresses the surface characteristics of the problem, and won't change the underlying incentives that make the problem so pernicious. His solution might make the problem more visible, but unless they provoke a separate, more fundamental change, it will leave politics as the same mess it currently is.

The problem that has attracted Lessig's attention is the pernicious affect of money on politicians. He has laid out the problem in illuminating detail. The problem isn't just explicit graft and corruption; the unrelenting need to raise money affects even those who manage to keep their values unaffected by the source of the funds that get them elected. Those who provide the money set the terms of the debate and determine which questions will be addressed. Even ideal politicians (if any exist) who retain their values and vote their conscience have to choose among policy prescriptions provided according to the current focus of attention.

As the theory of regulatory capture shows, the decision to regulate an industry is valuable to the companies currently in that industry, regardless of what form the regulation takes initially. Eventually, the industry will leverage its greater interest in the outcomes and its monopoly on experts in the field to ensure that the effective regulations change to its advantage. Once the question of regulation is in the air, people with an interest will weigh in in various ways, including campaign contributions, and eventually there will be a plausible case that congress should discuss what regulations are best. At that point the deck is stacked.

Lessig even provides an example showing that congressfolk completely understand the implications of this. When Al Gore was working on the National Information Infrastructure, one of his proposals was to deregulate the nascent Internet. When Gore's team presented the idea to people in Congress,

the reception was not favorable. "'Hell no,' we were told." The concern? Translated: "How are we going to raise money from those guys if we deregulate them?"
This is, roughly speaking, extortion. And if so, then the Communications Act is a kind of extortion-enabling regulation: regulation whose reach was explained, in part at least, by the opportunity such regulation would give regulators to raise money.
And if so, then how much other regulation is extortion-enabling in just this sense? How many other examples are there of government reaching beyond what it needs to regulate effectively, merely to assure (sic) that members can raise campaign funds more effectively?

So to combat this problem, what does Lessig propose? He's going to use Web 2.0-style media and networking tools to shine a light on congress. They'll connect votes to contributions and show the public what is going on. But given the discussion that has gone before, the only affect of this will be to drive out any explicit graft, and encourage the legislators to take fewer positions that seem affected by donations.

But that won't solve the problem. The problem is that congress can regulate, and does so when constituents demand it. The form of the regulation and its affects on society are extremely hard to see ahead of time, but we can predict that most of the time, the industry will be more in control afterward. And we can be sure that Congress will extract a rent during and after the process, and that the regulation will be structured so that Congress at least has the ability to intervene so there's a reason for affected businesses to keep ~~paying them~~ contributing. Even if we can see the connections between the contributions and the resulting legislation, the contributors will still be able to defend giving money to influential legislators, and legislators will be able to say the effects are all open and visible. There doesn't have to be quid pro quo in order for the influence to be beneficial to both sides.

Giving voters access to better statistics about the situation will make it clearer that interested parties contribute to powerful legislators, but there are legal and respectable ways to do this, and there always will be.

Am I missing something? Does Lessig hope to create an outcry that will change the fundamental incentives? Is there something other than pious hope behind the drive to remove money from politics?

I think the fundamental problem is that congress is allowed and expected to legislate on all subjects. We want citizens (who are also owners of businesses and members of public-interest groups) to be able to speak about their goals and priorities. Being able to spend money expressing support for policies and politicians is an essential way of participating in the debate. Since the laws that come out of congress affect people's goals, people who favor and oppose various outcomes will attempt to influence the decisions that are made.

Money isn't the problem, it's merely one of the more apparent forms of evidence about where influence is flowing. Money and influence aren't going to stop flowing. Maybe Lessig's affect here will just be in making the flow of influence more apparent. I certainly can't foresee any way that he can stop them from flowing.

Arthur De Vany: Hollywood Economics

2008-07-19T00:03:00.000-07:00

Arthur De Vany's Hollywood Economics gives a detailed look at an extreme example of a long-tail industry, the movies. The first half of the book consists of some technical papers that De Vany wrote during his career as an economist. Some of them are quite technical, but they lay the foundation for De Vany's contention that making movies is a highly unpredictable business.

These opening articles demonstrate that there is little predictability in the movie business, and investors, directors, producers, and actors who try to improve their odds by spending more money on special effects, hiring people from the A list, advertising heavily, or whatever else haven't studied the numbers well enough.

The old slogan "nobody knows anything" arises because of the nature of movie releases. Audiences vary from week to week, and they have an always changing menu of movies to choose from. Their reaction may depend on what's in the news, what hits have appeared recently, and whether the blockbuster that came out six weeks ago still has legs. And that's before we try to take account of the intrinsic merit of the story, the acting, how broad the distribution is, etc. Every week is a new tournament with some old and some new players. The audience can't make a judgment about any particular movie until they see it, and they don't make their evaluations from a clean slate.

The statistics deriving from this chaotic process produces the now familiar power law distribution. 70% of movies made are unprofitable, but the business makes money on the whole. most of the 30% that make money barely do better than breaking even; only a few a really successful, and the business of Hollywood is all about trying to make enough movies and give yourself enough chances that you can capture one of the few runaway successes. De Vany talks about how how studios, actors and directors should structure contracts so that the right people have the right incentives, and the right people make money when there is a hit. He then analyzes some actual contracts to show that they follow his rules: star players give up some straight pay for a share of the distant upper tail. The contracts talk about events that are meaningful for less than one movie in a hundred, but that's where all the money is, and one hit in that category can make you rich.

After he's laid the groundwork in the first half of the book, De Vany talks about the breakup of the Hollywood studio system at the end of the 1940's. I had no idea the anti-trust crusaders had even done this. The golden age of the Hollywood studio system was ended by a series of anti-trust cases (culminating in the Supreme Court) that denied the studios the ability to own movie theaters, and restricted the kinds of contracts they could write with independent theater owners. The result was that the studios lost certainty about being able to place the films they made, so they had to be much more careful in deciding what movies to fund, and couldn't plan a season's production coherently. De Vany shows how poorly the courts understood the movie business, and that they didn't achieve any of their objectives in terms of making the business fairer for independent distributors, theaters, or production companies.

I found the book to be fascinating, though quite dense. If the technical analysis in the first half of the book seems daunting, I recommend skimming it; just pay attention to his conclusions, since you'll need them to appreciate the findings in the second half of the book. I suspect there are many lessons that are applicable to other people trying to make money in other long-tail businesses. (Most of the discussion about long-tail is about making money by exploiting the long thin tail, but someone's making money from the tall, rich head of that curve.) The dynamics of other businesses are different, so you'll have to figure out what the drivers are for your uncertainty. De Vany does a great job of explaining the vagaries of the movie business, but not every business is an iterated tournament in which some of the contenders are new each week, while others have advantages or disadvantages due to their recent performance. There's a limit to the number of movies that can be playing in first run theaters every week, so some have to be dropped in order to make room for the constant flow of new releases.

I found this book after reading De Vany's blog for a while in 2005 and 2006. His articles on the movie business were quite interesting, but there's also a bunch of interesting material on evolutionary fitness, health, and sports.

Spending Money

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

~~Robin Hanson~~ (oops) that was Eliezer Yudkowsky takes a quote ("even $10 trillion isn't a huge amount of money") out of context to make an interesting question:

So if you had $10 trillion, what would you do with it?

After reading the first several responses, I quickly dashed off a list of my own:

Fund the top half of The Copenhagen Consensus projects. The idea behind this project was simple: different things that could be done to improve the world have vastly different apparent costs and claimed benefits, and very little policy discussion considers the trade-offs between. The project got leading economists to compare various proposals for big interventions intended to improve welfare across large populations. The recommendations and rationale are very interesting and the process is convincing to me.
Longevity research: Give a billion to Aubrey de Grey.
Push the US government towards more support of liberty. Money on that scale could make a significant start to unwinding the welfare state.
1. The Institute for Justice has a very good program making practical steps. They could productively spend at least 10 times their current budget. Think about whether their methods can be applied in other areas.
2. Try to convince Marshall Fritz to return to the Advocates for Self Government. He pioneered a process of inventing tools to spread liberty, and then measure the results to decide how to spend more money.
3. Start think tanks to flood the political market with arguments and (funded) proposals for moving toward liberty. The Cato Institute does a good job, but in this case, I'd expect to improve things more by providing them with competition than with funding.
Buy OLPCs for the kids in all the "bottom billion" countries.

With a little more time to think about it, it doesn't seem like I'd change my priorities much. I've added some explanation about the Copenhagen Consensus; the others seem to stand on their own. Otherwise, I'll just republish it here with appropriate links added.

Addendum: while looking for the links for this article, I discovered that Marshall Fritz has terminal cancer. I'm tremendously saddened. Marshall is the one person in the libertarian movement I most respect. His pioneering work in promoting and promulgating the freedom philosophy was without peer. Other people continue the fight, but he was the first to approach the problem of spreading the word scientifically and experimentally. He generated ideas himself and welcomed ideas from other people, and would implement them whole-heartedly, and see which ones were the most successful in recruiting new libertarians. Others have continued to run the organization he started (the Advocates for Self Government), but they merely continue to use the successful tools he developed, rather than using his approach to continue to invent and evaluate new techniques.

Mechanicrawl: July 12, 2008, San Francisco

2008-07-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

The Exploratorium, Long Now Foundation, and Musee Mechanique are sponsoring a walking tour of the amazing mechanical marvels spread along San Francisco's North Shore on July 12 from 3 to 8pm. You already know how wonderful the Exploratorium is, right? Well the Musee Mecanique is another must-see; they have an awesome collection of antique and recent arcade machines, mostly in very good working order. I haven't been to visit the Long Now Museum yet, but they have an Orrery, and models demonstrating the planned workings for several parts of their 10,000-Year clock.

They have the world's most complex mechanical computer (targeting system for the USS Pompanito), and one of the world's largest working steam engines (on the USS Jeremiah O'Brien). There are good intro videos at the Mechanicrawl web site.

Members of any of these institutions can get in free to the whole thing, or it's $15 for adults (less for kids and seniors). I'm going; are you?

Harry Turtledove: Ruled Britannia

2008-07-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

Harry Turtledove's Ruled Britannia is an alternate history in which Shakespeare lives in a Britain conquered and ruled by the Spanish. This is the Spanish Inquisition in full force; they are an occupying power, and the pressure of maintaining civil rule and imposing their religious views both push them to ever more forceful measures. Shakespeare is convinced to lend his talents to an underground group attempting to overthrow the Spaniards. Of course, Shakespeare's part is to write a new play that will convince the audience to rise up and overthrow the Spaniards. His task is complicated by the fact that that he has also reluctantly accepted a commission to write a play extolling the virtues of the Spain's King Philip, whose health is quickly failing.

Turtledove does a good job of giving the feel of the era: we see an auto de fé, see how suspicions can be raised about witches, worry about fire consuming the city, travel across the fetid Thames, and attend a bear baiting. The Spanish are constantly recruiting new informants and persecuting suspected Protestants, unbelievers, witches and homosexuals. So, while many have better things to do than spend their time at church, they all have to put on a show of propriety for fear of the inquisitors.

Lope de Vega is an ambitious, womanizing Spaniard, whose talents at writing plays in his native Spanish are sufficient to get him assigned the (joyful for him) task of monitoring Shakespeare's progress and trying to figure out if there is any substance to hints about his unreliability to the Spanish. (The Spanish can always find reasons to be suspicious, though few in this story seem to be based on Shakespeare's actual transgressions.) But the presence of an assumed snoop complicates the project, since both new plays have to be rehearsed. de Vega is kept busy both by having to learn a role in the paean to King Philip, and by his constant chasing after various women.

Turtledove seemed to enjoy writing new passages for Shakespeare, and rewrite familiar passages to reflect the changed circumstances of this world. I enjoyed the story. The conflict was plausible and the characters engaging. The political implications are light and obvious: occupiers are easy to dislike, and those that impose an alien religion and punish disbelief are the easiest to despise.

John Meaney: To Hold Infinity

2008-06-17T11:48:00.001-07:00

John Meaney's To Hold Infinity was a very pleasant surprise. I received it as a review copy, since Anders Monsen, editor of the LFS' Prometheus, doesn't have time to read everything that arrives, so I didn't have any particular expectations. It turns out to be a wonderful book. It reminded me of the wonder of reading Neuromancer for the first time--a vivid depiction of a new way of looking at the world. In this case, Meaney manages to show us enhanced humans (Luculenti) interacting with the unenhanced normals on Fulgor as well as the shadowy Pilots with their access to mu-space, and gives a feel for what the conversation feels like from each viewpoint. It's a wondrous achievement.

The story covers the investigation of Rafael Garcia de la Vega, a Luculentus who has been killing and absorbing the minds and consciousnesses of other Luculenti. We know from the outset that de la Vega did it, but Meaney still manages to make the pursuit riveting. And along the way, we get to see how the enhanced Luculenti entertain one another and get glimpses of how it affects their lives.

Meaney gives an inside view of the thought process of Luculenti in conversation with the unenhanced, while simultaneously giving an impression that the Pilots are as far out of reach. A Luculentus would be having an ordinary real-time conversation, while simultaneously managing web searches on the background of an unexepected guest, negotiating terms of a business deal, and enjoying the nuances of an exquisiste meal. At times, we see Luculenti engaging in multi-layer conversations in which three or four people talk out loud while sharing private jokes with some of those present, accompanying their comments with visual, olfactory, and emotional side-notes to underscore their points. Meaney has to invent a new typography and layout in order to make this all flow smoothly and let you feel it from the inside, but he carries it off very well.

The story follows several different threads, each with its own pace and interacting characters. In the main thread we are treated to a lavish party presented by a top Luculenta for a mixed group of Luculenti and the unenhanced. The entertainment has so many interwoven elements that all the audience members, including the reader, are simultaneously impressed with what they perceive of the whole presentation. In one sub-thread, a recently up-raised Luculentus is in hiding off-the-grid while his new formed talents are trying to emerge without the usual multi-layer interactions to feed their need for stimulation.

A side-note for my security-minded friends looking forward to their own enhancement: the usual rules of story telling require that the enhancing mindware have a crucial security flaw that allows de la Vega to take control of someone else's software. Without this trope, there wouldn't be much of a story, but it's a vivid depiction of why we'd want to design the platform for our thoughts very carefully. Not everyone who uses the system will have the ability or inclination to determine whether the substrate is secure, but they'll all be reliant on its properties.

The book is 500 pages long, but it definitely held my attention. I was up for a couple hours past my usual bedtime for nearly a week while reading it. Oh--even though it was sent to the LFS as a review copy, I didn't find anything particularly of libertarian interest in it. There is a government, but its role is minor without being invisible. The characters assume the government will prosecute crimes, but this one is obscure enough that they do their own investigation.

Tobias Buckell: Ragamuffin

2008-06-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

Tobias Buckell's Ragamuffin is a finalist for the Prometheus award. Buckell describes it as "Caribbean space opera", and it definitely has a Caribbean feel to it. In this story, humans are one of several interstellar-faring species dominated by "the benevolent satrapy", but the only one that we see visibly chafing at the Satrapy's tight control over commerce and technology. Most of the humans we see or hear about numbly accept the domination, but a few among the space traveling people are part of the resistance, and are trying to find a way to fight free.

The story follows Nashara, a genetically enhanced agent, with an implanted computer virus targeted at the Satrapy's systems, and Pepper, an extremely long-lived agent currently trapped on a world at the far end of the worm-hole trail that connects the worlds of the Satrapy. Both have superhuman reflexes, observation powers, and are close to invulnerable, so they're pretty unstoppable—but they still need to find a way to attack their oppressors.

Nashara joins a resistance movement on the planet where she's been marooned long enough to assassinate a local official in exchange for transit off-planet. Once in orbit, she finds a sequence of positions on trading ships that take her closer to where she expects the action to be. Along the way, we encounter various factions and agents who will reappear later.

Pepper's current world is dominated by a faction that in, technology and government, recreates the Aztecs; it's a pretty bloody place to live. But it's a good place to wait for the reappearance of the Teotl, an advanced race that may be willing to help fight the Satrapy, since the broken wormhole they disappeared through years before is still visible in the night sky. Of course, the Teotl do reappear, fleeing their own (even more enhanced) enemy.

The story is engaging, and the characters are interesting, but the main characters' superior powers make the fights' conclusions too obvious. There are interesting subplots on many different worlds and ships, exploring megalomania, mind control, uploading, closed economies, and more.

Fleet of Worlds

2008-06-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner co-wrote Fleet of Worlds, a new novel in Niven's Known Space series. The book is a finalist for the Prometheus Award (voting is going on right now; the award will be presented at the Denver WorldCon in August.) According to Wikipedia, the book follows shortly after the events of the short story "At the Core".

The book's setting and some characters will seem familiar to people who have read most of Niven's earlier Known Space stories. The story line involves humans and Puppeteers. The focal characters are a group of humans descended from travellers on a ship captured long ago by the Puppeteers, and kept isolated from their history and the rest of humanity. Nessus (a character who appears in a few other Known Space stories) is leading a team of humans to explore the future path of the Puppeteers' fleet of worlds and ensure there are no dangers there. Thus, these captive humans end up with an unusual degree of freedom and access to historical information normally hidden from their society. They ferret out the truth about their history, and engineer a rebellion against the Puppeteers.

The libertarian appeal is obvious—rebellion against authority—but it's muted here since the rebellion seems to start and end with the focal characters. Their compatriots who have been left behind during the voyage of exploration don't learn the truth until the explorers have planned out how they will gain their release from the Puppeteers. There are barely hints of any dissatisfaction with their lives; the Puppeteers have done a good job of keeping their history hidden, and isolating them from any knowledge of the location of the rest of humanity. Once they find out, it's obvious that they want to return, and the Puppeteers quickly acquiesce, reasoning that they're better off without troublesome humans around, now that they realize that they're captives and not guests.

The story is reasonably well told, has interesting twists and surprises, and contains many likable characters. In addition, we learn a lot about the Puppeteers (procreation, home world, how General Products Hulls work, government, etc.) It's a reasonably fun story, but without much libertarian interest.