Mike Linksvayer

April 23 I saw Gene Healy speak in San Francisco on his book The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Presidential Power. I’d noticed recently that Tim Lee thinks Healy is great, I’m extremely sympathetic to the idea that the temporary dictatorship is a problem, and the event was held on the top floor of (sadly) San Francisco’s second tallest building, with great views.

I found the talk pretty uninteresting, consisting of too many quotes indicating people expect the U.S. president to be a parental figure and warlord at the same time and a standard libertarian critique that simply says presidents who do a lot are by definition bad — Healy likes Harding and Coolidge. I tend to agree (though I favor Cleveland), but none of this is remotely news. Healy used a cute name for partisan interpretation of rules — “situational constitutionalism” — but didn’t bother to spell out why he thinks partisanship leads to the expansion of executive power rather than (or at least more than) a check on it.

Overall I got the impression Healy knew a whole lot of facts about the U.S. presidency and its baneful impact on the polity and culture, but not much more. His responses to questions from the audience indicated he hadn’t really thought about excessive executive power relative to judicial and legislative abuses, executive power in other jurisdictions, nor any approach to limiting executive power, each of which is many times more interesting than any particular collection of facts about any U.S. president or the presidency. To me.

I hope the book does very well and is read by many people who either don’t think the U.S. presidency is too powerful or is only too powerful when their preferred party is not in power.

Jim Lippard blogged about Healy speaking in Phoenix and had a more favorable impression.

View from 52nd floor of 555 California, looking southeast.

Gene Healy speaks.

Robert Pape collected data for every documented case of suicide terrorism from 1983-2003. In Dying to Win he makes a strong case that suicide terrorism is almost exclusively used to combat occupation where there is a religious difference between the occupiers and occupied (together these present an existential threat to the occupied community) and the occupier jurisdiction is a democracy (and therefore less likely to reply ruthlessly and more likely to grant concessions). Furthermore, suicide terrorism seems to be relatively effective under these conditions.

Pape also dismisses two sucicide terrorism myths. First, that it is an Islam-only phenomenon (the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers account for the most cases). Second, that suicide terrorists are primarily poor, uneducated and fundamentalist (they tend to have above average education and opportunities for their communities and often show now fundamentalist commitment before volunteering — an act of extreme commitment to their community by well integrated members of the same).

Although Pape has amassed significant data in support of his analysis, suicide terrorism (largely suicide bombing) has effectively only existed for a little over two decades (though suicide attacks have occasionally been used for millennia, briefly covered in this book). Will suicide terrorism change, or continue in the same pattern? There are two obvious questions, neither of which Pape bothers to pose (though I read the book a few months ago, I could’ve missed or forgotten):

• Will suicide terrorism continue to be effective? In other words, will democracies continue to respond with a combination of concession, coercion, and grandstanding? Alternatives include apolitical response (e.g., criminal investigation and prosecution) and ruthless response (i.e., annihilation of the terrorist’s community).
• Given that suicide terrorism is effective, will it be taken up by other groups that perceive an existential threat, e.g., radical environmentalists?

It seems that suicide bombings in Iraq, only the first several of which are included in Pape’s data, fit the pattern Pape has described. Even when not directed against the occupiers, religious difference (Shia vs. Sunni) is involved, as is the potential for influencing the democratic occupiers.

Apart from advising democracies to not occupy jurisdictions with a different predominant religion, which flows obviously from his analysis, Pape’s recommendations are irrelevant at best (e.g., lock down U.S. jurisdiction borders), as Peter McCluskey observes in his review. Nick Szabo and Chris Hibbert have also recently reviewed the book.

Seth Godin and those who worry about republishing of (freely licensed) bloggy material, please watch this video by Lucas Gonze.

Republishers, if they add only noise or worse (in the case of sploggers) are primarily a problem for aggregators (Amazon can be thought of one, as can search engines), not creators.

That said, if Godin really hates the idea of a republisher using the license granted by Godin, that license does allow the licensor to request the removal of attribution from derivative or collective works. If this was requested eventually one couldn’t find the commercial outrage version of Godin’s book by searching for Godin’s name on Amazon. (But I have no idea if that provision could apply in this case, am not a lawyer, generally don’t know what I’m talking about, etc.).

On a recent road trip I listened to four audiobooks. One is overrated, another poorly written and ignorant (conflation of mathematical proof and statistical confidence was most galling to me, but there’s plenty to go around), another well written and wrongheaded. The fourth isn’t exactly any of those things (apart from overrated), but then it didn’t feel much like a book. More like a book adaptation of an infomercial, read aloud.

That would be Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a garrulous stream of self-help cliches, financial pep talks, tall tales, and pitches for other books and products. (I may have listened to another book in the series–I gather they’re all pretty similar, and I heard tiresome stories of “Rich Dad” in any case.) Author Robert Kiyosaki has the annoying habit of presenting the obvious as deep wisdom (e.g., “everything has a price”, now that was new to me) along with obvious lies (I completely lost respect for the enterprise when Kiyosaki quoted “Rich Dad” as saying that one can consistently obtain 20% to 50% returns at low risk).

It turns out that “Rich Dad” is probably made up. Apparently the most specific answer (and telling) answer Kiyosaki has given regarding the identity of Rich Dad is “Is Harry Potter real? Why don’t you let Rich Dad be a myth, like Harry Potter?”

So that covers myth, what about pyramid? Apparently Kiyosaki got his start with pyramid organization Amway. He seems to have learned well, for Kiyosaki’s franchise of selling products that offer little more than selling Kiyosaki and his products would (do?) make perfect fodder for network sales.

It is possible a liar and network marketer could have valuable and unique insights, but Kiyosaki doesn’t seem to present any. I don’t hold being an excellent salesperson against him, indeed I think selling is undersold, but then he doesn’t advise people to learn or earn by selling, as far as I can tell.

I wasn’t going to write about Kiyosaki, but was inspired to by reading links posted by Jim Lippard on Kiyosaki today (I did not previously know that “Rich Dad” is a fabrication).

My theory is that Kiyosaki is an excellent salesperson and many who read his books and perhaps have never thought about money before or have, and are dense or frustrated, take his cliches as amazing insight. Take this from a commenter on one of the posts Lippard links to:

As mentioned, defining wealth as how long you can live without working was a new way of thinking of things for me. In 10 years of Money Magazine subscriptions, I’ve read a billion different mutual funds articles, but nothing about generating or even measuring passive income.

Think of things in terms of assets vs. liabilities was a new concept to me.

Helloooo!

I don’t have a theory explaining why anyone smarter than me would find anything valuable in Kiyosaki.

I wrote a distantly related post on real restate returns in September, 2005.

The January 13-19 Economist has a review of (and my first encounter with) Philippe Legrain’s book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. The title and the review make the book sound a bit wishy-washy, but a review in the Guardian, reprinted on Legrain’s site makes it sound much better.

The central thrust is that immigration is economically beneficial. Fluid migration is as dynamic as every other form of free trade. “If you believe that the world is an unequal place and that the rich should do more to help the poor,” he writes, “then freer international migration should be the next front in the battle for global economic justice.”

Ironically, the book appears to not yet be available in the U.S. Amazon Canada will have it January 30.

What better way to celebrate thanksgiving than to ponder envy? Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (1969, German original 1966) makes the case that envy and envy avoidance are important determinants of human social behavior and that envy is greater when similarity is greater.

The envy Schoeck writes of is destructive. If I am jealous, I want to take what the other has. If I am envious, I want to destroy what the other has — the envied should be brought down to the envier’s level, at least. This desire for destruction is not bizarre if you adopt the mindset of a magic-filled and zero-sum world, apparently the norm for most of history and pre-history, and perhaps for most people in the world, still.

In such a world a good harvest or successful hunt may only be obtained through black magic which ensures others will not succeed. Apparently the evil eye and analogues intended to ward off the effects of envy are ubiquituous in pre-inudstrial human cultures, as are condemnation of envy and envy avoidance strategies.

If we accept that envy is important and detrimental, what to do about it? Schoeck argues that removing the apparent causes of envy by making everyone (more) equal will not help. A high school teacher is more likely than a manual laborer to envy a university professor, as the teacher can see himself in the professor’s shoes. Envy, or at least envy avoidance in the form of leadership position avoidance, was apparently rampant in kibbutzim, the largest and most sustained effort to build societies based on everyone-is-absolutely-equal principles, according to Schoeck (forty years later, the current Wikipedia article says “While the kibbutzim lasted for several generations as utopian communities, most of today’s kibbutzim are scarcely different from the capitalist enterprises and regular towns to which the kibbutzim were originally supposed to be alternatives.”) Perhaps the furthest claim made against absolute material equality by Schoeck is this (p. 342):

[Complete levelling] overlooks the important function of material inequalities. The envious man is able to endure his neighbour’s superiority as regards looks, youthfulness, children, married happiness, only by envying the other’s income, house, car and travels. Material factors form a socially necessary barrier against envy, protecting the person from physical attack.

Some of the ways mentioned by Schoeck that societies have mitigated envy (apart from condemning it) include belief in fate or luck (which can account for different outcomes in place of invidious magic), belief in non-envious gods, religious endorsement of individual achievement (i.e., some forms of protestantism), and commercial intermediaries. Regarding the last, Schoeck says a buyer will always be envied by a seller in pre-industrial society. Mass production and intermediaries perform envy arbitrage (my made up term) and thus remove a dangerous element hindering the division of labor.

While Schoeck surveys lots of historical, anthropological, personal, and literary anecdotes in support of his claims, it all seems rather hodge-podge. Most egregiously missing is any kind of evolutionary perspective. Animal (pp. 91-97) and psychology (pp. 98-105) experiments are mentioned, but all address envy indirectly at best. I suspect some of the anthropology Schoeck cites will have been discredited in the intervening forty years as well. One example I consider suspect (I mainly include it for your entertainment; I found it hilariously over the top) is Schoeck’s description of Maori muru raids (p. 391):

A man with property worth looting by the community could be certain of muru, even if the rea culprit was one of his most distant relatives. (The same kind of thing was observable during European witch trials.) If a Maori had an accident by which he was temporarily incapacitated, he suffered muru. Basically, any deviation from the daily norm, any expression of individuality, even through an accident, was sufficient occasion for the community to set upon an individual and his personal property.

The man whose wife committed adultery, the friends of a man who died, the father of a child that injured itself, the man who accidentally started a grass fire in a burial ground (even though no on had been buried there for a hundred years) are all examples–among innumerable others–of reasons on account of which an individual might lose his property, including his crops and his stores of food.

Did Dr. Seuss write this? A bit more:

In practice the institution of muru meant that no one could ever count on keeping any movable property, so that there could be no incentive to work for anything. No resistance was ever offered in case of a muru attack. This would not only have involved physical injury but, even worse, would have meant exclusion from taking part in any future muru attack. So it was better to submit to robbery by the community, in the hope of participating oneself in the next attack. The final result was that most movable property–a boat, for example–would circulate from one man to the next, and ultimately become public property.

So who was stupid enough to build the boat? Schoeck cites p. 87 of Eldon Best’s 1924 book The Maori, which is online, but doesn’t seem to say much more about muru than what Schoeck repeats above. A modern interpretation of muru seems to be here. A student paper on the Maori legal system largely citing this link is here, from the same Legal Systems Very Different From Ours class that produced an informative paper on the Aztec legal system I mentioned previously. I highly recommend checking out the site for that class or similar before assuming another culture’s institutions are so bizarre they could not serve a productive purpose.

Schoeck also claims in various places (e.g., p. 304) that society could not function without a modicum of envy, without which social controls would be impossible. On this topic he never moves beyond mere assertion and is not convincing. Innovation is another possible good outcome of envy, though Schoeck’s example is support of this seems rather lame (p. 403):

[T]he man in question may be a discontented, disregarded member of a primitive tribe who makes a show of being the first to be inoculated or treated by a Western doctor, in order to put his own medicine man’s nose out of joint. But his ‘courage,’ and the success of the treatment, induce other members of the tribe to follow his example, so that by degrees scientific medical care can be introduced. Thus, in this particular case (and disregarding certain side-effects), the envious man ‘who always sought to do harm’ had achieved something beneficial for his group.

A modern example may be one who works on free software in part to bring Bill Gates down; the former’s destructive urge is channeled into production.

…

I enjoyed reading Envy, and much of the enjoyment came not directly from the subject at hand, but from seeing the world through the eyes of a slightly different time period and culture. Some items I found interesting follow.

(p. 258) The Soviet Union had a seemingly low income tax (13 per cent) and high social stratification. Why bother with an income tax … presumably the state pays everyone? I know almost nothing about how communist economies actually functioned.

(p. 289)

[T]he young man who has hung around graduate school until he is twenty-six or twenty-eight to acquire his doctorate or M.A. in the (correct) belief that his college diploma was no longer of much significance is not really content to be a trainee in a bank of a business firm.

If there’s a trend at all, it’s older than I thought.

(pp. 330-332) The first Labour government in the UK produced a crisis of conscience in some of the new members of that government. They were dedicated to equality, but would be drawing high salaries in government. They got over it quickly.

(pp. 373)

In 1959, when the Soviet Union had already set its course unequivocally in the direction of private property and a consumer society

Was Schoeck amazingly prescient or engaging in wishful thinking? Was this conventional wisdom among sovietologists in the early 1960s, or would Schoeck have been considered crazy for this statement?

A biographical page included in the front of Envy contains this amazing sentence:

He was a student of medicine and psychology at the University of Munich from 1941 to 1945.

This sounds completely normal, until you consider the location and years. Schoeck would have been 19 in 1941. How did he escape the army? He looks able-bodied in a photograph. Someone I mentioned this to joked that perhaps Shoeck was so envied during this period for having avoided the Wehrmacht that he became obsessed with envy. What is the real story?

…

I found Envy interesting and Schoeck’s claims about the importance and nature of envy somewhat plausible, but the subject cries out for treatment by a modern social scientist with far more data, tools for data analysis, and evolutionary theory at hand. Perhaps Bryan Caplan will write such a book. I learned of Envy via one of Caplan’s posts.

The only good to come of 2001-09-11 is that many learned the meaning of Islam: submission to the god. And they don’t like it.

Not many have learned how submission to (another) the god gives succor to the jihadists.

Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is an ideal 9-11 reading and commemorative gift.

The story of The Pig and the Box touches on many near and dear themes:

• The children’s fable is about DRM and digital copying, without mentioning either.
• The author is raising money through Fundable, pledging to release the work under a more liberal license if $2000 is raised.
• The author was dissuaded from using the sampling licnese (a very narrow peeve of mine, please ignore).
• I don’t know if the author intended, but anyone inclined to science fiction or nanotech will see a cartoon assembler.
• The last page of the story is Hansonian.

Read it.

This was dugg and Boing Boing’d though I’m slow and only noticed on Crosbie Fitch’s low-volume blog. None of the many commentators noted the sf/nano/upload angle as far as I can tell.

There were a surprising number of panels more or less concerning entrepreneurship. I only attended one of these, Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions. It was very mildly amusing but as far as I could tell the only important decision discussed was whether to look for outside funding or not, a well-trod topic if there ever was one. There was even one panel on Selling (Big Ideas to Big Clients).

I understand that Creative Commons was mentioned in passing on many panels. Attendees coming to our booth were much better informed than in years past, part of a greater trend.

The Digital Preservation and Blogs panel I was on was interesting for the self-selection of the audience — I imagine every librarian and historian attending SXSW were present. A writeup, photo, and my narrow take.

Both accepted panels I helped conceive went very well, especially Open Science. Though an outlier for SXSW the audience Q&A as high quality. Moderator John Wilbanks did a great job of keeping a diverse panel (open access journal editor, synthetic biologist, IT standards person, and VC) on point.

Commons-Based Business Models included Ian Clarke of Revver, which encourages sharing of short videos with an unobtrusive advertisement at the end under a CC license that does not permit derivative works. This licensing choice was made so that stripping out the advertisement is not permitted. Jimmy Wales challenged Clarke to think about opening up some content on an experimental basis. Sounds like a good idea to me. I suggested from the audience that attribution can require a link back to Revver, so even modified videos are valuable. Clarke responded that advertising at a link away is far less valuable. True, but the question is whether derivative works that could not otherwise exist become popular enough to outweigh those that merely remove advertising. I suspect many derivatives would be uploaded directly to Revver, allowing the company and original creators to take full advantage of additional revenue and to become the leading site for explicit remixing of video, a la ccMixter for audio. Seems worth an experiment — Revver is in no danger of becoming the leading video site at the current rate.

I also asked Clarke about interest in his FairShare patronage system. He said Revver is aimed at the same problem (funding creators) but was easier to implement. In the same vein I met John Pratt of Fundable, which is based in Austin. I got the impression he didn’t think the service could be viral (I disagree). I’ve written about FairShare, Fundable and related ideas several times in the past, mostly linked to in my Public Goods Group Shopping post and its comments. The field is ripe for a really good service.

The EFF/CC party was very well attended, even not considering its obscure location (an Elks club). In the middle of the facility was a room of Elks members, playing cards and other games, oblivious to the SXSW crowd that outnumbered Elks even in that room. I gave a very brief thank-you speech for CC, which I closed with a prayer (because we were in Texas) to J.R. “Bob” Dobbs (because we were in Austin).

At the end of the trade show Rob Kaye alerted me to the giveaway of every book at a well-respected computer publisher’s booth to “cool geeks” or similar. 5-10 years ago this would’ve really excited me, but this time I was mostly concerned about bulk and weight. I took a few. I suspect they’ll be among the last computer books I obtain, free or otherwise.

James Surowiecki gave a presentation which I did not attend but I hear focused on prediction markets. I should’ve made the time to attend simply to see the crowd reaction. Several of the latest sites cropping up in that field certainly look like they were designed by potential SXSW attendees — circa 2004/5 generically attractive web applications. I should have some posts on that topic soon, starting with Chris F. Masse’s 2005 Awards.

Tyler Cowen cites Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, which claims that “On average [in the U.S.] a new parking space has cost 17 percent more than a new car.” If I were lured by the temptation of urban policy I would certainly read this book.

I gather Shoup’s argument is that if zoning did not require minimum numbers of spaces and if market rates were charged for parking there would not be wasteful spaces built in uncongested areas and it would be possible to find parking in congested areas.

Shoup probably covers this, but one of the baneful effects of free or underpriced (e.g, cheap area parking permits in San Francisco) is opposition to dense development. Additional residents mean more competition for spaces, giving residents all the reason they need to go into NIMBY mode, leaving San Francisco a stunted cross between Monterey (vile place) and the wonderful Sanhattan it could be. (Of course there’s much more to story. I’d point to some Matt Smith columns and a feature published on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations in San Francsico in the SF Weekly if its archive search weren’t so broken.)

Certain control freaks now want to swing from requiring a certain number of parking spaces to prohibiting more than a certain number of spaces. How about letting people build or not build however many spaces as they see fit? The problem is not under- or over-provision of private spaces, it is the underpricing of public spaces.

How about auctioning area parking permits — what politician doesn’t love a windfall? Existing permit holders could share in the windfall as power dictates. New residents would pay market prices. I’m sure Shoup has many more and better thought out proposals.

A related urban transport micro-rant: Light rail is an atrocity. No faster than buses and far more expensive, dangerous, space-wasting and inflexible, light rail serves only monument-building fantasies. If a real subway or elevated line is infeasible just add or upgrade buses.

Addenda:

• A complement or partial alternative to market prices for parking is to charge for road use as in central London.
• Anti-light rail articles.
• Politically-controlled underpricing of water (especially for agricultural use, e.g., in California) and energy (primarily in oil exporting jurisdictions) doubtless cause far greater problems worldwide than underpriced parking.

I saw author Wil McCarthy give a talk at Etech nearly two years ago and read the book shortly after. Now (via Boing Boing) Hacking Matter is available as a free download (under the most restrictive Creative Commons license), so I guess it’s time to post a mini-review.

Programmable matter is any bulk substance that can have its physical properties altered on demand. McCarthy’s focus is on quantum dots woven into bulk matter and controlled by electricity.

The quantum dots can form arbitrarily sized artificial atoms on demand, radically changing the bulk matter’s properties. Examples (from p. 119 of the PDF):

Not all of these could be changed arbitrarily and simultaneously, as many are correlated, but the point is “doped” matter becomes practically magic. Apart from obvious many billion dollar applications in fashion, personal and household goods and industrial processes, cheap bulk programmable matter would enable the conservation bomb to go nuclear (figuratively speaking), producing super efficient heating, cooling, and solar engergy collection. Beyond that, the possibilities quickly go into the realm heretofore of science fiction and magic.

There is a problem of course–making quantum dots in bulk cheaply. Apparently progress is being made, but there’s a long way to go to anything that could be called cheap. As far as I can tell a hot application now is “nanosensing” which isn’t really bulk.

Molecular nanotechnology could presumably produce programmable matter with abandon, but MNT may be some ways off. From about as far away from any related field as possible, quantum dots lack the hype and controversy surrounding “nanotechnology” and MNT, though research and small scale applications are well underway. As solid state, programmable matter also shouldn’t scare some people has MNT has–no self replication.

Hacking Matter is a popular science book and tries to balance between describing the personalities doing the research, technical information, and wild speculation. I could’ve done without the anecdotes. I’m sorry to admit that the technical parts were at about the right level for me, having a very weak science background, which also leaves me largely unable to pass judgement on the speculative parts. There definitely needs to be a more rigorous but still somewhat accessible treatment.

I was convinced that programmable matter will be an important technology in the not too distant future, though not inspired a la Engines of Creation, though that comparison is probably unfair.

I recommend skimming Hacking Matter if you’re interested, and skimming the brief programmable matter FAQ even if you aren’t particularly interested, just for the purpose of being informed.

At Etech I asked McCarthy if he had any easily judged predictions about the development of programmable matter technology (for use as prediction market claims of course). He didn’t have anything concrete on the spot–something about “bulk material should be available” if I recall. The Cheaper Dots story cited above mentions “$2,000 a gram”. Are cost per gram or grams produced good general metrics?

I expected to enjoy Accelerando by Charles Stross and have a really hard time finishing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. The former includes cool stuff like mind uploading, space colonization, and singularity. The latter is set in an incredibly challenging environment (in terms of holding my interest)–a theme park. I experienced the reverse.

Manfred Macx, an open source entrepreneur of the future (very approximately), has a kid with his IRS agent luddite wife. They and their descendents carry their family squabbles across the universe and singularity. As this incredibly non-interesting story unfolds, Accelerando takes every opportunity to reference dot com bubble, transhumanist, and obscure political cliches and inside jokes, without any real depth.

Accelerando was originally written as ten stories, many of which won awards, and several of which I can imagine being enjoyable as shorts. The book is way too long.

If you can put up with lots of crapenjoy science fiction, you’ll probably like Accelerando. Everyone else, skim the Accelerando Technical Companion to pick up any missing memes. Peter McCluskey has a better Accelerando review.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is short and concerns the fate of a theme park ride rather than the fate of the universe. Theme park rides are run by adhocracies. The only way for an ad hoc to take over a ride is to have such an obviously better plan for it that nobody resists–but not everyone wants to play by the rules.

Much is left unexplained (e.g, how does cleaning bathrooms immediately boost one’s whuffie–mass surveillance?), but the core ideas Doctorow explores infect every page, making the book the most thought provoking treatise on Disney theme park rides ever.

What would an economy driven by open source concepts and reputation (post-capitalist but not necessarily post-market?) look like? This is a concern of both books. Neither has concrete answers, but Down and Out does a fair job of toying with the question, cat-like, in its limited domain.

Both authors are trying primitive versions of these ideas in the real world, having released Accelerando and Down and Out under Creative Commons licenses. You can download the books here and here. I commend both authors for this and for even attempting to write human stories about such abstract and interesting topics.

Charles Mann’s essay 1491 in the March 2002 Atlantic was one of the most fascinating magazine articles I’ve read. It posited a human an natural world in the Americas prior to 1492 very unlike the one taught in history classes–large, organized human populations that thoroughly shaped their environments–and it seemed the scant evidence pointed to this world.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus expands on the essay and is a good read, apart from a few personal anecdotes and one painfully silly page on Inca economics. Some of the major points:

• Humans probably migrated to the Americas 30,000 years ago, not 12,000 years ago.
• The first complex culture in the Americas, Norte Chico in present-day Peru, was contemporary with ancient civilizations in the old world (beginning 3000BC).
• Pre-1492 ecologies, including the Amazon rainforest, were engineered by humans, mostly through fire, irrigation, and planting of fruit and nut bearing trees.
• Pre-1492 human populations were large and well organized, and not just in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Amazonia and fertile parts of the present day U.S. were heavily populated and organized. The earliest accounts by Europeans agree with this.
• Perhaps 80 percent of the new world population died of old world diseases in the century after 1492, almost entirely without direct contact with old world humans. World population may have declined by 20 percent in the first 200 years.
• New world populations were vulnerable to old world diseases and not vice versa because there weren’t many new world species suitable for domesticaion (and thus the passing of disease between humans and animals) and very little diversity in genes impacting the immune system.
• The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires would have been impossible had both not been ravaged by smallpox immediately before conquest.
• The pilgrims survived with food taken from villages emptied by disease shortly before.
• The overgrown forests, massive bison herds and pigeon flocks and similar encountered by later arriving old world descendants did not exist prior to the die off of native human populations and resulting disintegration of their socities. Passenger pigeons in particular seem to have been rare pre-contact (their bones are rare in refuse that contains bones of many types of birds eaten). The flocks of billions were an outbreak population enabled by human death or other ecological disruption resulting from contact.
• Slash and burn farming did not exist pre-contact–it only becomes practical with steel axes. Clearing with stone axes would take many months, for land that can only be cultivated a few years. With steel axes, clearing can be accomplished in a week. Farmers in Amazonia instead created terra preta that could be farmed continuously through a “slash-and-char” process.
• Present day primitive state of peoples such as the Yanomami may not be ancient at all. The tree-based agriculture of Amazonia would have enabled them to abandon their farms for a short time at no permanent loss–and they would have had plenty of reason to flee from disease and Spanish slaving–but after a generation or so, especially with high mortality, their agricultural knowledge would have been lost.

Apart from Norte Chico, which appears to have only been recognized in the last decade, none of these revelations are truly new. They have been hotly debated by archeologists for many decades, with the consensus slowly coming around to support the scenario above, at least that’s what I get from reading Mann’s description of the debates.

I have changed my mind about one thing, mostly as a result of reading this book and some further reading on the topic. I used to think the Aztecs and Incas basically “had it coming” as they were super-seriously, super-outrageously, and super-bizarrely deranged by bloodthirsty religions (as opposed to the merely serious, outrangeous, and bizarre derangement of the bloodthirsty subjects of the Catholic Inquisition) that left them unable to cope with anomalous events. The pre-conquest civiliations may not have been more bloody than their contemporaries in Europe in terms of numbers killed. The appearance of pale skinned men on horses with guns is no anomaly compared to smallpox. I suspect old world civilization would have convulsed had disease worked the other way–the impact was greater than that of the Black Death.

An interesting and demystifying paper on the Aztec legal system.

I am both amazed that essentially a whole separate set of cultures and line of history existed and saddened that it is almost completely lost.

That famous passage from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759):

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

Smith’s hypothetical was merely off by an ocean.

I first heard of the Silicon Valley Patterns meetings from Alex Chafee a few years ago while participating in his “bootstrap” Extreme Programming practice group. SVP sounded like fun, but I only got around to attending a meeting this spring, a one-off on digital identify led by Johannes Ernst (notes). I was going to write something about that meeting, but just can’t get worked up about digital identity.

SVP’s next extended track was on machine learning, a topic I have some interest in and very cursory knowledge of from reading popular books on AI. The track lasted from May through October. Mostly our study was guided by Andrew Moore’s statistical data mining tutorials, with occasional reference to Russell & Norvig.

I don’t think any of the regular attendees were machine learning experts, but with occasional contributions from everyone, I think everyone was able to increase their knowledge of the material. Overall a gratifying method of learning, though not a perfect substitute for lecture.

My secondary take way from the track was that I need a serious brush up on calculus and statistics, neither of which I’ve studied, and barely used, in fifteen years. I’m working on that.

The current SVP track should be very different–hands on Ruby on Rails practice. I’m attempting to justify putting in the time…

Democracy and Decision, a 1993 book by economist/philosopher Geoffrey Brennan and political philosopher Loren Lomasky, undermines a relatively little known (to me) side of public choice theory–the assumption that voters vote in accordance with their (instrumental) interests.

The authors make a convincing case that because an individual voter is essentially never decisive, the rational voter will vote expressively, even if the vote that gains the voter the highest expressive value would be against the voter’s instrumental interests, if the voter were decisive. The authors summarize their proposition as “Rational action ⇏ psuedorational voting.”

The following rendition of Table 2.2. Electoral choice as a quasi-prisoners’ dilemma (p. 28) illustrates a simple case where voters will vote according to their expressive values and against their instrumental values, as their probability of casting a decisive vote approaches nil.

The authors make a reasonable case that voters’ instrumental and expressive values often are divergent. War seems to be a particularly strong case (p. 50):

How is it, then, that such mammoth exercises in irrationality seem to have been pursued so vigorously and with such popular enthusiasm in this most democratic of ages? The voters’ dilemma provides a possible explanation. Consider the individual voter contemplating a vote between competing political candidates in a setting where international relations are tense. One cadidate offers a policy of appeasement, recognizing the enormous cost in lives and resources that any antagonistic stance might involve. the other candidate stands for natinal integrity — “By God, we are not going to be pushed around by these bastards.” We might well presume that few voters, making a careful calculation of the costs and benefits to themselves and those they care about, would actually opt for war. Just as invididuals, in situations of interpersonal strain, will often swallow their pride, shrug their shoulders, and stroll off rather than commit themselves to an all-out fight (particularly one that might imply someone’s death), so the interest of most voters would be better served by drawing back from the belligerent course. Yet a careful reflective computation of the costs and benefits of the alternative outcomes to herself (and those others relevant to her concerns) is precisely what the voter does not entertain: Any such computation is essentially irrelevant. What is relevant, we might suppose, is the opportunity to show one’s patriotism, one’s antipathy to servility, one’s strength of national purpose.

Of course expressive preferences may be for peace instead. In either case, and for any issue, the main point is that “it will be the symbolic power of the policy rather than the costs and benefits the policy scatters on particular voters that will be most relevant.” (p. 51, emphasis in original)

A chapter is devoted to the probability that a vote is decisive–roughly speaking, the probability an election is decided by one vote, given an odd number of votes. It turns out the calculation of this probability is not straightforward, but any reasonable attempt seems to result in an infinitesimal value.

Strategic voting and widespread belief in the wasted vote argument against voting for minor party candidates would seem to indicate that voters do not vote expressively (surely the proportion of voters who could increase their expressive returns by voting for a “third party” candidate is higher than the roughly one percent who actually do so in U.S. presidential elections). However, at least four non-instrumental factors explain strategic voting: established parties have economies of scale in advertising, rationally habitual voting, voting for a candidate’s top competitor may give the highest expressive returns if a voter’s primary expresive desire is to “boo” the candidate, and being seen as voting “responsibly” is itself an expressive return.

One possibility I believe the authors do not address is that voters may irrationally believe there is a significant probability that their votes may be decisive. After all, the probability calculation is not obvious, and people presumably have terrible intuitions about very large (or small) numbers. The only two small hints of voter irrationality I noticed were on page 121–some voters may be irrationally instrumental–and the following odd quote from page 171:

One who intends through his vote to bring about the elctiction of candidate X is on all fours with someone who steps on a crack with the intention of thereby breaking his grandmother’s back. Irrespective of what they may believe they are doing, they are in fact not acting intentionally to secure favored outcomes.

The fundamental lesson of the domination of voters’ instrumental preferences by expressive preferences is that homo economicus is a poor model for voter behavior.

Another way to put this is to distinguish “p-prefernces” (those expressed when voting) from “m-preferences” (market preferences, or those expressed when the actor is decisive). The authors then disuss “r-preferences” (outcomes an actor may prefer upon reflection, but finds himself unwilling to act upon, e.g., a glutton may reflectively prefer to refuse a third serving of cake, but not actually do so) and the related concept of merit goods, items underconsumed even in ideal markets.

Voting dominated by expressive preferences could lead to the political provision of merit goods. However, demerit goods could also be provided.

The authors close with an analaysis of the constitutional implcations of expressive voting, e.g., what does it mean for federalism, the secret ballot, or representative democracy? Nothing is said in this chapter that hasn’t been said countless times without the benefit of a theory of expressive voting.

At the top of this post I said that the assumption the assumption of instrumental voting by public choice theory is relatively unknown to me. My very uneducated summary of the insight of public choice can be summed up as “concentrated interests trump diffuse interests.” The reason I considered theories of voting unimportant in this context is that voters are obviously diffuse. In my mind, the concentrated interests are not voter blocs, but organizations that manage to overcome the obstacles to collective (political) action (e.g., individual corporations, trade groups, and unions) and politicians themselves. I’m not sure what, if any, impact expressive voting has on this side of public choice theory. One impact may be that expressive voting within organizations lowers the bar for collective action.

There’s more to be said about the book, particularly on merit goods and related subjects (but it’s been a few months since I read Democracy and Decision, and my grasp on the subtleties is fading fast) and much more on the implcations of expressive preferences outside the context of electoral contests, a subject the authors explicity do not cover.

A review of Lucene in Action posted on Slashdot yesterday reminded me to make this post. I read the book in March shortly before giving a related talk at Etech in order to avoid sounding too stupid.

Lucene in Action is very well written. I liked the presentation of code samples as tests and found almost no fluff. If you don’t have a background in information retrieval (I don’t) I think you’ll enjoy this book for the background information on IR that is thoroughly integrated with the text even if you have no plans to use Lucene (though you’ll obtain an itch to use Lucene, it’s so simple and powerful).

One non-technical comment I made about Lucene in the Etech talk is that it may be another open source category killer. As Apache eliminated much of the opportunity to sell HTTP servers, I suspect Lucene will eliminate much of the opportunity to sell embedded search libraries (which seems somewhat significant judging by the quantity of ads for same in programming magazines).

Notes on Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, an apparent classic first published in 1965, which I read in September:

The basic argument is set forth on page 2 (emphasis in orginal):

Unless the number of individuals in a group is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in their common interest, rational self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.

Olson writes on page 64 that self interest is not a requirement for this outcome. Even rational altruistic individuals will not act to further group interests if they realize that their efforts, as one of many, will have no perceptible effect on the outcome.

Olson says several times that groups by definition act in the interests of members, though he admits to potential in-fighting and capture by leaders in footnotes. However, if coercion must be involved (the success of other special devices such as exclusive contributor services is downplayed), what is to prevent a rather permanent state of affairs in which members are forced to act against their own interests? I use the word state in the preceding sentence advisedly.

A very long and curious note on page 48 (note 68 of chapter I “A Theory of Groups and Organizations”) begins and ends with (middle elided):

There is one logically conceivable, but surely empirically trivial, case in which a large group could be provided with a very small amount of a collective good without coercion or outside incentives.
[...]
total costs of the collective good wanted by large groups are large enough to exceed the value of the small fraction of tht total benefit that an individual in a large group would get, so that he will not provide the good. There may be exceptions to this, as to any other empirical statement, and thus there may be instances in which large groups could provide themselves with (at most minute amounts of) collective goods through the voluntary and rational action of one of their members.

This quote is typical of Olson’s insistence that public goods just don’t get produced without coercion or individually excludable inducements, which he notes shift the individual’s indifference curve to the left or right respectively.

In 2004 the above quote cries out for a response of “professor, what about open source?” However, I suspect that Olson thoroughly underestimates in general the extent to which private efforts motivated by private returns produce positive externalities, thus reducing the need for coercion. As I previously mentioned in an aside, the extent of private and public good co-production(?) is a crucial if unstated aspect of nearly any policy debate.

When applied more narrowly to private associations Olson’s argument is fairly compelling, though not novel, as perhaps it seemed in 1965.

Olson seems somewhat congruent with public choice economics. While I like to summarize a key insight of the latter as “concentrated interests trump diffuse interests”, Olson emphasizes the great difficulties groups face when pursuing a common goal, e.g., attempting to trump diffuse interests via “special interest” lobbying. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing that groups have a difficult time acting to achieve group interests, that is when group interests may be furthered by stealing rather than production.