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:
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:
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:
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.
| All others | |||
| Each | Majority for a | Majority for b | Tie (probability → 0) |
| Vote for a | 5 | 105 | 5 |
| Vote for b | 0 | 100 | 100 |
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 candidate offers a policy of appeasement, recognizing the enormous cost in lives and resources that any antagonistic stance might involve. the other candidate stands for national 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 individuals, 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 election 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-preferences” (those expressed when voting) from “m-preferences” (market preferences, or those expressed when the actor is decisive). The authors then discuss “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 analysis of the constitutional implications 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 implications of expressive preferences outside the context of electoral contests, a subject the authors explicitly 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).