My Love-Hate Relationship With Like

I write a lot more comments on other blogs than I do original posts on this blog.  Given my massive following of 2 people who may or may not have pushed the wrong button somewhere along the way, it seems like a better way of getting other people to see my writing.  If I'm working something new out, I'll write it here.  If I'm merely pontificating on one of the topics du jour, I'll often do it somewhere else.

An odd thing has happened:  On Disqus, my "like"-to-comment ratio has been rising recently, going from considerably less than one to 2.6 as of today.  What changed?

What changed is I started commenting on sites that agreed with me.

It's a small but distinct rush to discover that thirty or forty strangers read my comment, thought to themselves, "Damn, that TRM is really on to something there," and took the vast quantity of effort necessary to reach for the mouse and click the little up-arrow, or thumbs-up icon, just for me.  If I write a popular comment, I'll go back and monitor it.  I certainly want to read response comments, but I have to confess, I love the likes.

Now, when I comment on sites where people disagree with me, I don't get the likes.  It's a bummer.  It makes me less likely to comment again.

This is a terrible dynamic.

It is fair to say that I've learned more when I was wrong on an issue, and sharpened my arguments more when I still thought I was right, by getting ripped by smart people on a site where I'm arguing against the consensus, rather than by receiving the little squirt of "like" dopamine.  But dopamine will do what dopamine does; I find myself spending more time reading, and commenting on, sites where people will reward me.

I've written ad nauseam about the dangers of the self-selecting properties of the blogosphere (my, that word's become somewhat quaint, hasn't it?).  That dynamic existed before social media took over the web, and it was dangerous even back then.  But the invention of the "like" paradigm has distilled the problem down to its essence and provided the ultimate binary self-selector.  If people like you, you come back.  If they don't, you stop coming.

We're going to have to come to grips with the fact that our most powerful communication tools are terrible for public discourse.  I'm not a fan of the bland network news.  (Speaking of which:  is there some kind of new standards and practices edict that requires somebody to lose their shit and sob uncontrollably in at least one segment of each of the ABC/CBS/NBC broadcasts?)  But we sure could use a medium that had a natural tendency to form consensus instead of sharpening contrasts.

Snowden-Induced Cognitive Dissonance

I believe both of the following statements:

1. Edward Snowden is a straight-up traitor, who has done irreparable harm to the national security of the US, and has damaged its diplomatic standing in the world.
2. Edward Snowden has done the American people a huge service by revealing to them the extent of the modern surveillance state, and by provoking a long-overdue discussion about the tradeoffs we need to make as we balance freedom and security.

Believing both statements makes my head hurt.  Mr. Snowden asking for the US to stop treating him like a traitor makes my head hurt even more, because the derisive laughter it provokes sends little pressure waves through my skull, exacerbating the pain.

I don't buy that Snowden dumped all of the NSA's secrets out of any civic-spirited impulse for one second.  Snowden is a narcissistic sociopath who wanted to be famous.  If anything else were the case, he would have leaked a minimum amount of information anonymously.  He also would have found more benign host countries than China and Russia.

Still, we have to come to grips with the intersection of Big Data and national security.  Evgeny Morozov had an excellent essay on this topic a couple of weeks ago, where he pointed out that the data collection is only a small part of the problem.  The bigger problem is that the data can be processed in ways that can't be understood, either by the watchers or the watched:

Thanks to smartphones or Google Glass, we can now be pinged whenever we are about to do something stupid, unhealthy, or unsound. We wouldn’t necessarily need to know why the action would be wrong: the system’s algorithms do the moral calculus on their own. Citizens take on the role of information machines that feed the techno-bureaucratic complex with our data. And why wouldn’t we, if we are promised slimmer waistlines, cleaner air, or longer (and safer) lives in return?

This logic of preëmption is not different from that of the NSA in its fight against terror: let’s prevent problems rather than deal with their consequences. Even if we tie the hands of the NSA—by some combination of better oversight, stricter rules on data access, or stronger and friendlier encryption technologies—the data hunger of other state institutions would remain. They will justify it. On issues like obesity or climate change—where the policy makers are quick to add that we are facing a ticking-bomb scenario—they will say a little deficit of democracy can go a long way.

Here’s what that deficit would look like: the new digital infrastructure, thriving as it does on real-time data contributed by citizens, allows the technocrats to take politics, with all its noise, friction, and discontent, out of the political process. It replaces the messy stuff of coalition-building, bargaining, and deliberation with the cleanliness and efficiency of data-powered administration.

This phenomenon has a meme-friendly name: “algorithmic regulation,” as Silicon Valley publisher Tim O’Reilly calls it. In essence, information-rich democracies have reached a point where they want to try to solve public problems without having to explain or justify themselves to citizens. Instead, they can simply appeal to our own self-interest—and they know enough about us to engineer a perfect, highly personalized, irresistible nudge.

Thanks to Snowden, we can have discussions like this.  And perhaps because of this, maybe the US should be merciful and ignore the man.  But if he ever comes in easy range of US law enforcement, he must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Now where's that Advil?

How American Political Parties Dissolve

As I write this, the US government has been shut down for two weeks, and we are 4 days away from the "X date" where the Treasury Department runs out of workarounds on the debt ceiling and has to stop paying somebody.  (Odds are that this will not lead to a default on bonds, per the link above, but things are going to be dicey.)  I can't decide whether to call the set of House and Senate Republicans driving the standoff the "Obamacare defunders" over their (now fading) insistence on defunding ACA, or just the "Tea Party"; the two groups may be congruent.  I think I'll settle on the Tea Party, with the proviso that there may be a few Tea Party folks who haven't completely bought into this level of brinksmanship.

There are a lot of theories for why we've gotten into a situation where there appears to be no ZOPA over such a fundamental set of government functions.  Some of the most popular:

• Republican leadership authority has eroded.
• This kind of brinksmanship is virtually cost-free for Tea Party representatives in safe districts.
• This is merely a principled stand against something that's worth risking a financial and/or constitutional crisis.
• This is an excellent way to demonstrate the irrelevance of the federal government to the average voter, sort of a natural follow-on to the Obama Administration crying wolf over the sequester.
• This is necessary to re-energize the Republican Party.

All of these reasons have some truth in them, but all of these are iffy propositions.  They're all based on extremely dubious judgment calls.  Politicians are notoriously risk-averse and it's hard to believe very many of them are willing to bet their careers on any of them.  What's going on?

The Tea Party has been heedless of the damage they're doing to the Republican brand.  I think that's because they're no longer concerned with that brand in its current form.  The Tea Party has been essentially conducting an ideological purge, drawing a clear demarcation between "us" and "them".  Any person espousing slightest deviation from Tea Party orthodoxy is labelled "them" and is dismissed.  What remains is a clear minority, but it's a minority with a frightening level of unity.

This seems crazy, but there's one situation where it might be astute:  If the Tea Party believes that the moment has come when it can seize control of the Republican Party, then the gamble might be worth it.  The goal of the shutdown and debt ceiling standoff is then to eject Boehner from the speakership and to eliminate the power of the business conservatives and social moderates in the party.  The Tea Party is effectively seceding from the GOP, but it's hoping to carry off enough support to be able to keep the name and the party infrastructure while changing the ideology.

The US has scant experience with the wholesale dissolution of political parties, but what history tells us is instructive:

• In the early 1800's, the Federalist and Democratic Republican (aka the Jeffersonian Republican) parties had grown so close together in their positions that several internal schisms arose.  The "corrupt bargain" election of John Quincy Adams in 1824 and the follow-on election of Andrew Jackson in in 1828 shattered the one-party system, leading to the formation of the Democratic party, which supported Jackson's muscular view of executive power, while the Whigs formed around the idea that, well, they didn't like Jackson.  In this case, the Democrats were reacting to the increasing sophistication of the northern financial and industrial system and wanted it stopped.  In short, they had a strong animating principle.  The Whigs formed in an attempt to preserve the emerging institutions, but their only true animating principle was opposition to the reactionary forces mobilized by the Democrats.  The Democrats won, temporarily; they got to keep half of the party name in the divorce.


• The Whigs finally got an animating principle:  abolition.  By 1840, it was clear that the US was headed for a massive territorial expansion and, absent significant opposition, the new territories were likely to allow slavery.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 shattered the Whigs, with the militant abolitionists forming the Republican Party.  We all know how that ended.

The Tea Party thinks they've found their animating principle:  60% of Americans now believe that the federal government has too much power. They hope to forge a new coalition around the intent to reduce the size and power of the feds.

This is a goal that I support.  Note that it is, despite the negative connotations of the word, a "reactionary" goal:  "Government has gotten too big, and we want the trend reversed."  To that extent, the Tea Party's formation looks much like the formation of the Jacksonian Democrats in the late 1820's.  But there was more than one reactionary thread at work in the 1820's.  When the Democrats formed, the top-line issue was about rolling back financial and industrial power.  But the coalition worked because a strong anti-abolition sentiment flowed through the rural and southern factions.  And that issue ultimately overwhelmed the Democratic Party, leading to 1861.

The Tea Party also has other reactionary threads running through it.  Its members are socially conservative, isolationist, and anti-immigration.  They don't like the current US culture.  The subtext here is more diffuse than was the anti-abolition subtext of the Jacksonian Democrats.  The closest you can come to a one-line description would be, "We don't want to live in a sick, militantly secular culture."  But note that, unlike the 1820's and abolition, nobody's threatening to ban religion in the US.  The cultural forces are more complex than that, and the level of support for and against them has a whole bunch of people staking out positions somewhere in the middle.  (I'm one of them.)

If the Tea Party were truly just a small government party, they might easily attract enough factions from the rump of the Republican Party, independents, and conservative Democrats to form a viable party, and the current Republican Party would wither away, in fact if not name.  But the subtext is problematic for them, and their methods make it even more problematic.  It's unlikely that there are enough people willing to save the village by destroying it for their play to work.

So let's summarize the possible outcomes:

• Tea Party takes over the Republican Party, then attracts enough small-government fellow travelers to make a working near-majority.  (Unlikely, per above.)
• Tea Party fails to wrest control of the GOP, but winds up destroying it.  A new center-right party forms from the rubble.
• The GOP establishment acts to crush the Tea Party in short order, leveraging the shutdown debacle to do so.  The Tea Party members capitulate and accept their role as simply a part of the GOP coalition and work to nominate an electable 2016 candidate.  (Note that if this succeeds, Paul Ryan is going to get the lion's share of the credit, and goes to the head of the class for 2016.)
• Tea Party succeeds in gaining control of the GOP, but dramatically shrinks its influence.  They lose two or three more elections and wither away, then the more moderate elements of the GOP re-establish the status quo ante.

I'm terribly afraid that this last scenario is the most likely, and it's terrible news for the country.  By the time the old conservative coalition recovers from this disruption, we will have had 16 years of a Democratic executive.  Any hope of reining in the government will have gone out the window (if it hasn't already), and we'll be well on our way to the debt crisis that could easily tear the country apart.

A final, cautionary, historical note:  The emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats isn't a definitive event.  Things limp along for 30 years, waiting for the animating oppositional principle (abolition) to become clear.  When it does, the result is the biggest calamity the US has ever faced.  Small government is a fine animating principle, but I have no idea what the principle is that eventually emerges to oppose it.  If history is a guide, we're not going to like the result.

The NSA, Domestic Surveillance, and the Era of Big Data

I've been off the radar all through l'affaire Snowden, but I've been wrestling with how we should think about this.  Conclusions are a bit thin on the ground, and this post is going to ramble a bit as a result.

First, let's acknowledge that Big Data is going to be the most revolutionary scientific and technological advance of the early 21st century.  Giant, mine-able data sets are already changing how we do biology, sociology, epidemiology, economics, and just about any other -ology or -nomics that you care to name.  Big Data makes problems of intractable complexity suddenly tractable.

And this goes for counterterrorism intelligence analysis as well.  By definition, looking for terrorists is about looking for needles in haystacks.  Big data lets you find needles by looking at how they've changed the shape of the haystack in which they've been placed.  Big Data drastically amplifies the effectiveness of traffic analysis.

So, to the extent that you really, really want to stop every last whack job from setting pressure cookers filled with black powder in public places, then you should be really, really happy that the NSA has mountains of data under its control and the computing power to sift through them.  But of course the fly in the ointment is that "mountains of data under its control" bit.  If they can sift through them looking for terrorists, they can sift through them looking for drug kingpins.  Or child pornographers.  Or embezzlers.  Or Republicans.

Seems to me that this boils down to two basic questions:

1. Who owns the data set?
2. What techniques can the owner perform on the data?

We're pretty comfortable these days with businesses owning the data sets that they create during the course of business.  AT&T and Verizon own their call detail records--the ever-popular "metadata" that the Obama Administration has been droning on and on about.  Google owns every search you've ever made and (for a lot of us) every email you've ever sent or received, to say nothing of every four-beer blog post you've made.  And speaking of four beers, Facebook owns every photo of you exercising your constitutional right to join the whoo people from time to time.

We're not exactly happy that these guys own all this stuff, but we're used to it. Why?  Because we trust corporations to mind their business, even when their business is making money off of our semi-public behavior.  Which brings us to the second question:  what limits do we place in the owners of data when they process it?

To answer this question, I like to imagine doing something that I'd be ashamed of (of course this never happens in real life...) and then imagining various people looking at the electronic breadcrumbs.

Do I care if companies provide access to my data for advertising?  If Amazon is trying to sell me a romance novel (hey, my wife and I share an account!), not so much.  But if BDSM-Mart tried to sell me whips and chains, I'd be perturbed.  Is there a difference between these two cases?  Maybe.

First, Amazon tries to sell me things that Amazon sells.  If I didn't do business with Amazon, they wouldn't try to sell me romance novels.  And if Amazon started trying to sell me whips and chains, I'd probably close my account (no doubt causing Amazon's revenues to decline by at least 25%).

On the other hand, BDSM-Mart would have to acquire my data from somebody else.  Maybe they could do this through Google, but Google understands where its bread is buttered and would never give BDSM-Mart direct access to my metadata.  Instead, what they do is allow BDSM-Mart to place advertising with Google, and Google will insert advertising in pages that people whose search and email patterns indicate that they might like bondage paraphernalia.  At no point does Google say, "Hey, BDSM-Mart!  The Radical Moderate looks like he might be a good customer for you!"  If they did, I'd have a big problem with Google.  At the very least, I'd be doing a lot more private browsing, which would hurt Google's revenue.  At the most, I might be complaining to my congressman or filing lawsuits, which, writ large, might put Google out of business.

Next hypothetical:  Imagine two guys at Google's water cooler, swapping stories about those hilarious searches that The Radical Moderate made last week.  Would I be creeped out about this?  The idea doesn't make me happy, but my guess is that if this happens (and maybe Google has a policy about their employees making directed queries and maybe they don't--I'd guess that developers have to make directed queries in the course debugging stuff all the time), they don't talk about me, they talk about me as "some guy".  Do I care now?  Ennh.

Now, let's imagine that somebody in Google takes my data and posts my searches on a public website, with the express purpose of shaming or humiliating me.  That's lawsuit territory, and I'm suing Google, not their employee.  Google has a vested interest in making sure that this doesn't happen, the same way that they're not going to let BDSM-Mart see my data.

Bottom line:  I trust private companies with this sort of data because they value it properly, or they don't remain in business.

But now let's suppose that Google's "customer" is the government.  What kinds of questions can they ask?

Well, some of them might be close to innocuous.  They might want to know the correlation between the number of accounts that search for BDSM stuff and certain types of pornography, for purposes of formulating law enforcement policy.  If all of those correlations are anonymous, no harm done.  But the logical next step isn't so wonderful.  If the feds manage to convince some judge that a certain pattern of BDSM searches indicates that there's a high likelihood that the account will also contain searches for kiddie porn, that would be not so harmless.  I can't imagine a judge issuing a warrant under those circumstances, but you never know--and the way the FISA courts are set up, you never will know.

But notice what had to happen for me to be at risk from the government:  Google had to turn over account-specific information.  So, not only did Google no longer control the data, but they gave it over to somebody who would process it in ways that Google would never dream of.  Here's where the ownership of the data becomes crucial.  Without the data sitting in some server farm controlled by the feds, they can't control the post-processing and queries, and they can't overstep any bounds.

So maybe that's the first step toward a sensible data-mining policy:  the government shouldn't be able to control data.  Or, at the very least, it can't control data with identifiable account info.  The NSA seems to have paid lip-service to anonymizing account info, but it's also pretty clear that the names and addresses were just a protected table, with lots of people able to gain access.  If that information remains safely back with the company that owns it, retrievable only with a warrant, things are somewhat more private.  But we haven't solved the problem of how to keep the feds from mining the anonymous data for whatever they want.

Another possibility is to require warrants for the actual post-processing and search queries.  This is something that would obviously require a pretty sophisticated court (I don't see many judges being able to conduct a code review), but it has the advantage that all data now stays with a private owner.  The feds can donate a firewalled, sterilized server farm to the company for doing the processing, and they can get the anonymous results back.  But the government can't be allowed to own the data, or it will find some way to abuse it.

Does this impede the NSA in its quest to identify real security threats?  It certainly makes the process more ponderous.  If you've got a real-time threat, your engineers aren't going to be able to poke at the data willy-nilly until some interesting answer pops out.  But that's an unlikely way for these guys to work; they're much more likely to come up with specific data-mining programs that they'd like to run on well-established data sets, over a long period of time.  Adding one more hoop to jump through before they conduct this sort of surveillance doesn't seem like a big price to pay.

The much more troubling form of data collection are the taps that the NSA is alleged to have placed to collect raw internet traffic.  There's no way to firewall that sort of collection with a private company.  On the other hand, the only "account" associated with such data is an IP address.  Keeping that information firewalled from the feds without a warrant should allow them to do bulk analysis on the traffic without compromising privacy.  And if they find something alarming, they can get a warrant.

So we can reduce the problem, through fairly simple means, to a question of how much we trust the courts.  Per reports on how FISA courts run currently, the answer to that question is, "not very much".  Fixing the operation of these courts is difficult, but paramount.  At the very least, application for warrants needs to be an adversarial process.  Currently, outside groups can file friend-of-the-court briefs, but it's pretty hard to quash a warrant when you don't know what it's for.  Appointing and providing security clearances for a pool of outside parties with aggressive anti-surveillance agenda would go a long way toward leveling the playing field.  I'd feel a lot better if an EFF lawyer were opposing every warrant application.  I'd gladly contribute to a fund for the billable hours.  (I'd rather not have the feds footing the bill...)

Ultimately, though, we're going to have to live with the fact that applying Big Data techniques to the detritus of daily life potentially gives the government huge power over us.  The only way to prevent that power from being abused will be the exercise of constant vigilance and aggressively proscribing the activities of the security agencies.  I'm not sure I approve of how Snowden outed the whole system, but it's hard to deny that his actions have opened up a very useful conversation.  I just hope that we put some real reforms in place before we all go back to sleep.

Mitt Romney Lost Because of Abortion

The despondency, fear, and loathing in the GOP has begun, with a wide range of explanations for Romney's loss in what should have been a slam-dunk year against Obama.  So far, I've seen:

• The GOP will never win until they have the courage to nominate a conservative.
• The GOP will never win until they nominate a competent moderate and don't drag him down in the primaries.
• The GOP will never win until it fixes its core values to appeal to hispanics and women.
• The Obama campaign had an amazing secret sauce to get out the vote, and the GOP will be fine next time because they'll have the same secret sauce.
• We're no longer a center-right country, and conservatives need to concentrate on seizing the cultural levers of power.
• We're no longer a center-right country, so conservatives need to build themselves a parallel society next to the one that's ultimately going to fail.  (If you've got an hour and half to burn, listening to Bill Whittle grope his way toward something coherent on this topic is kind interesting.  I suspect that when he's done with this it won't sound quite as looney as it did in spots.)
• We're no longer a center-right country, and we're all gonna die.

Some of these are laughable.  Some of them are pretty close to the truth.  Some are... worth deeper consideration.  But I think the most plausible is that the Obama campaign not only had a secret sauce for getting out the vote, but they had a real issue on which to ladle the secret sauce.

The Obama campaign, with a little bit of mind-boggling stupidity from the Republicans, managed to scare women out of their minds, convincing them that Romney was unacceptable.  And they did it over abortion.

I have a wife, two daughters, and a son.  One of my daughters and my son are apolitical--they are, in effect, the dreaded low-information voters, but they don't vote.

My wife also didn't vote, but she's far from a low-information voter.  She's just decided that voting only encourages the bastards, and they're all equally bad.  Plus, we live in Texas.  Why bother, when you know what the result is?

My oldest daughter (she's 31) is well-informed and a regular voter.  She has the handicap of having a BFA from a California art college, so she's been exposed to the absolute worst that liberal academia could possibly throw at her.  However, she's also my daughter, so she's emerged as a relatively centrist, probably slightly left-of-center, voter.

She considered voting for Romney and liked a lot of his economic ideas.  But she ultimately decided that she couldn't vote for him because she was sure that he was going to destroy the reproductive rights infrastructure in the US.  All arguments to the contrary were lost on her.  Romney and the Republicans were just too dangerous even to consider voting for them.  According to her, all of her friends thought the same way.  My wife thought the same way; if she'd voted, she would have voted against Romney for this sole issue.

Now, this is admittedly the smallest sample possible.  And my daughter admittedly is part of the Austin artsy-musician-y community, which is pretty liberal.  But I have a hunch that Obama won the election because of people like her.

The abortion issue poisons all attempts the GOP will make to regain a working electoral majority.  Unmarried women won't vote for them.  Married women who remember the 60's won't vote for them.  Only married women who are happily building families will vote for them.  Since this is a shrinking demographic, the anti-abortion activists in the GOP will manage to lose election after election for their candidates.

I am pro-abortion.  I hate the term "pro-choice" because using it prevents a frank confrontation with the ugly truth about abortion:  It's a way to kill something that would otherwise turn into a human being.  When it comes to things like this, the individual has no "choice"; society gets to make laws that bind its citizens to certain courses of action.  I don't support a burglar's right to choose whether to rip me off; I'm anti-burglary.  I don't support a violent felon's right to choose whether to beat the crap out of me;  I'm anti-battery.  But I'm pro-abortion.

Why?

Before I can explain why, I have to make things worse.  See, I actually believe that a fertilized egg is alive and for all intents and purposes human.  Will all such fertilized eggs implant and start pregnancies?  No.  But hormonal contraception will guarantee that pretty close to 100% of any zygotes that would implant, don't, and die.  Will all pregnancies result in a live birth?  No; about one third of all pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage.  But abortion again guarantees that almost 100% of all viable pregnancies against which it is performed will end without a live birth.  (And the small fraction that don't--well, we'll get to that.)

A common "pro-choice" argument is that a blastula, or an embryo, or an early-to-mid-term fetus isn't human because it's not viable ex vivo.  That's certainly true, but a baby isn't viable ex vivo either, without its mother's care.  Yet (almost) all cultures consider babies to be human.  Another argument is that a fetus is something less than human because it lacks many uniquely human features and faculties.  But a baby lacks many of those faculties as well.  And a baby resembles an adult human about as much as a blastula resembles a baby.  Don't think so?  Try touching a baby's arms together above its head.  Babies are born as partially-grown heads with a minimum life-support system.  They don't look or act much like people.  We're awfully fond of them, for powerful evolutionary reasons, but the only thing they have in common with adult humans is a genotype.

So, given all of the above, how can I possibly be pro-abortion?

I'm pro-abortion because we as a society get to decide when the taking of human life is justifiable and when it's murder.  We can kill people in wars and celebrate the people who do so.  We can kill people in defense of ourselves or our families and society holds us blameless.  We execute humans that have done things so heinous that we as a society consider ourselves better off without their continued existence.  We almost always regret the taking of human life, even when justified, but we do it anyway, in some circumstances.

I consider early-term abortion to be justifiable homicide.

Sounds really bad, doesn't it?  And yet, I think I can support my argument, and further show that it's merely an attempt to put something that about half the people in the country support onto a semi-ethical foundation.

For fifty years now, ever since the technology became available, women have been able to control their fertility.  The ability to do this might not have resulted in breaking down the gender-specific roles we had in our culture.  We might, as a society, have decided that women should have remained homemakers in single-income families, even if those families had control over the number of children they had, including the ability to have none at all.  Indeed, there were plenty of arguments in the 70's and 80's to that very effect.  But those arguments failed.  We provided women largely equal opportunity in almost all aspects of modern life.  It dramatically improved our economic output, but it also made the two-earner family a requirement, because the economy adapted to the new economic power afforded to women.  We can't go back to a gender-segregated set of societal roles.  If we did, our economy would collapse.

An unwanted child is therefore now an economic disaster.  Not only does it affect the woman, who can't work effectively for a long period, it also affects her entire family.  A family living hand-to-mouth on two incomes can cease to be viable as the result of an extra child.  Loss of viability could mean dissolution of the family, inability to raise the existing children properly, homelessness, hopelessness, and who knows what other misery.


So the equality of women has led, irreversibly, to families with a lot less slack in their finances, and that in turn has led to the requirement that women be able to control their fertility.  That's largely achieved through contraception but when that fails, early-term abortion is a necessity.

Of course, women could just stop having sex, both in an out of wedlock, until they wanted children.  But again, we've crossed that bridge as a society and burned it behind us.  And let's be honest:  that was never really an option, was it?  Even before contraception, women had sex, sometimes with disastrous consequences.  But it's what human beings do.  Depriving half of the country to engage in an activity that makes almost everybody happier is a horrible idea.

But what of the unwanted child itself?  The "pro-life" (a term as deceptive as its opposite) argument is that the child's right to life trumps any amount of economic hardship for the family into which it is born.  That's a valid topic for debate, but I suggest that everybody who espouses that belief should spend some time with the chronically poor.  And there's nothing that will make a family chronically poor faster than having unwanted, unaffordable children.

Economically non-viable families produce socially non-viable children at an alarming rate.  Sure, lots of kids escape chronic poverty, but lots don't.  And those unlucky kids don't just grow up poor.  They grow up... stunted.  Stifled.  Hopeless.  And we're not just talking about the unwanted child here; that child's siblings suffer the same hardships, even though they're completely innocent of the action that dropped their family below the line.

Almost everybody, even the most ardently pro-life, believe that abortion is justifiable to save the life of the mother.  This makes sense:  if the mother dies, the fetus dies with her.  Better to sacrifice one life than two.  But why doesn't that argument apply to the family as a whole?  Where's the moral distinction?

More than anything else, that's why I believe that early-term abortion is justifiable homicide.  But let's not kid ourselves:  this is a bad thing, even if it's sometimes a necessary thing.

I don't think I'm going to change any minds among the pro-life faction here.  But let's return to the political now.  If for no other reason than that economy can't manage without it, abortion is going to continue.  The pro-life faction needs to understand this.  They're not going to win.

Even worse, though, the pro-lifers recently came close enough to succeeding that the other side, the political side that can't live without the cover of their "pro-choice" half-truth, had to consider the possibility that they might win.  This inevitably forces the pro-choicers to fight for every last inch of political ground.  No issue that even whiffs of "reproductive rights" can be ceded.  They'll mobilize every last resource to fight for the most repellent of practices, because they know that every time they lose a battle, the owners of the "pro-life" half-truth will advance, ready to conquer the next issue.  Neither side can back down.

And yet, I'll bet that an overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with the following:

• Partial-birth abortions are an obscenity.  Unless the life of the mother is threatened, there should never be an excuse for this practice.  
• If the baby from a medically necessary abortion is born alive, it needs to be treated as a baby.  That may mean that the mother has the right to make the agonizing choice to withhold medical care and watch her child struggle and die, or it may mean that we as a society are on the hook for endless care of a premature baby, if that's the mother's choice.  But we can't cross that line; if the child is born alive, it's born alive.
• Short of medical necessity, there is no excuse for an abortion later than the end of the first trimester.  If the mother is an idiot and doesn't know she's pregnant, too bad.  She can put the baby up for adoption after she's carried it to term.  If we're going to tolerate abortion at all, we have to treat it as acceptable only as a failure of contraception, and that demands that the mother take some responsibility for understanding what's going on with her body and making a prompt decision.
• Pregnant minor children are their parents' responsibility.  The parent decides what happens, just like with any other medical procedure.  If the parents decide that their daughter should carry a pregnancy to term, so be it.  After all, the baby will be their responsibility.  Withholding notification from parents is insane.

This looks like the best--possibly the only--compromise that's possible on this issue.  It's an important issue, even if it poisons every piece of political discourse that it touches.  Fundamentally, this is about what acts a society considers to be murder, and I can't think of a more important public policy topic.

But the social conservatives need to understand that abortion isn't going away.  The social and economic pressures to continue it are overwhelming.  Societies have the morals that they can afford, and our society can't afford the cost, both in economic and human terms, of unwanted children.  Until they understand this, and work out a firewall compromise like the one I've outlined above, they're going to continue to lose elections.  They got too close to succeeding in rolling back a set of laws whose existence most women depend upon, and they're never going to be given another chance to do so.

If they hold on to this, they will be politically annihilated, over and over again, until they stop.  And the net result will be a continued fraying of economic prosperity, liberty, and consensus culture.

What Do Social Conservatives Want?

Apparently the Republicans don't quite understand that when they make inflammatory comments about things like abortion and its legality in cases of rape or incest, they're constructing shiny objects with which their opponents can take them off message for days at a time.  This is so stupid on its face that I'm tempted to think that I'm missing something.  But I have a better question:  Why do social conservatives care about this stuff?

Full disclosure:  I'm not a social conservative.  I'm pro-abortion.  (The term "pro-choice" seems horribly dishonest to me.)  I think that children ought to learn about evolution and earth science and cosmology.  I think that teaching kids how to stay unpregnant and disease-free during sex is a reasonable function for public schools, although I have no problem with parents opting their kids out of such classes.  I don't have a problem with sex and violence on TV or pornography or the general coarsening of our discourse.  If gay people want to get married, I don't care.  And I certainly think that gay couples need to have the same legal rights as straight couples, even if they aren't married.  I'm perfectly happy if immigrants import strange customs and funny ideas.  (I'd like them to import them--and themselves--legally, but I'm disinclined to support the ugliness and suffering that would be involved in rounding up everybody who's here illegally.)

On the other hand, I do understand that social coherency is important to national strength and economic robustness, and that the easiest way of maintaining social coherency is to maintain traditional values.  And none of the things I've listed above (with the exception of indoctrinating children with incorrect science) is conducive to the maintenance of said values.

So the answer to my title question is, at the most obvious level, pretty simple:  Social conservatives want to maintain traditional values. But the problem we're going to face is that maintenance of a value system implies a certain level of disgust and intolerance when that value system is violated.  Disgust has grown terribly unfashionable, and intolerance is now, for all intents and purposes, illegal. 

So let's peel back the next layer of the onion and look at the factors that mitigate disgust and intolerance, and therefore erode traditional values.  These are all going to boil down to two factors:  media and government coercion.

Of these, media is by far the biggest problem.  TV and internet show kids behaviors that aren't part of the traditional culture, and in so showing them inoculate the kids to the strangeness.  When behaviors aren't strange, they don't generate disgust.  With no disgust, the probability of kids adopting some of the behaviors goes way up.

Even worse, special interest groups have learned how to indoctrinate via the media.  Parents are helpless to prevent this kind of indoctrination, short of turning off the the TV and the internet (which is what they should do...).

Protection of civil rights is the camel's nose under the tent  that lets the government begin coercing behaviors.  The government can't do much about disgust, but they can force tolerance.  There's a fine line to be trod here, and the government tends not to be very subtle.  Here also, special interest groups know just how to tweak the government to get their hunks of cultural agenda institutionalized and codified, making them part of the culture willy-nilly.

Social conservatives quite correct view both the media and the government as huge threats to what they view as traditional culture.  They feel that they're getting stuff force-fed to their children, and they have no defense against it.  So the real answer to the question, "What do social conservatives want?" is that they want to be left alone.

But the "culture war" is inherently asymmetrical, with one side proactively trying to change a variety of stuff and the other side merely resisting that change.  The problem is that the social conservatives believe that playing defense isn't working.  So they've found a way to play offense, a way that's, well, offensive.

When you don't have a legal framework for resisting assaults on your values, your next best weapon is to attempt to discredit the people doing the assaulting.  This is why the Right is obsessed with the "liberal media" and with "big government".  It's why the Right spends so much time resisting abortion and gay rights.  It's why they work so hard to discredit multiculturalism.  They think that this is the only way to hold back the tide.  And it doesn't really matter how valid their arguments are; muddying the waters is a somewhat effective way to ensure that they things they're resisting remain excluded from mainstream thought.

The second tactic is to become reactionary.  Social conservatives maintain a benchmark for culture that would require eliminating existing rights and  cultural conventions.  It'll never happen, but it forces their opponents to play more defense and less offense.

But in the long run this is going to be an abysmal failure.  The culture is what the culture is, and trying to roll it back is guaranteed to alienate moderate voters who by-and-large don't care that much but who think that denial of reality as a negotiating strategy is just plain stupid.    Social conservatives lose power with the center, and the best that they can hope to do is to maintain the status quo.  And each time that they alienate too much of the center, they lose a little more cultural ground.

I think that there's a way to win, and it will be massively less disruptive to political discourse.  Here it is:

Accept the status quo, and turn off your TV sets.

Think how much more powerful Romney's and Ryan's message would be if they merely said, "You all know where we stand on these issues, but we're willing to take them off the table, as long as our opponents don't push past the status quo."  Would the Far Right be angry about this?  Probably.  But there's an answer for them, too. "These aren't national issues, but they're terrific local ones.  Work with your neighbors to live the way you think is is right, and we'll keep the government off your back.  Then the only thing that can hurt you is the media, and they can only hurt you if you listen to them.  So keep your kids away from the TV and massively restrict their internet access."

We're not going back to a 1950's society, short of a massive technological collapse.  But social conservatives can get what they want, as long as they can limit government coercion to current levels.  Ironically, the best way to do that is to stop fighting and focus on the economy.  Pro-business fiscal conservatives will win every time with the independents as long as they don't freak them out with fantasy.  And, once power is won, it can be maintained as long as the basic bargain is kept:  Any additional changes will be resisted, but nobody will try to roll back the changes already made.

The Tyrrany of Affirmative Duty

Here's a bit of a bleg:  Does anybody have any data on the ratio of laws and regulations that prohibit a particular activity vs. those that require some sort of affirmative duty?

Let's start small.  How 'bout the Ten Commandments:  By my count, there are 8 things that you're not allowed to do (no other gods allowed, no taking the Lord's name in vain, no killing, adultery, or stealing, no bearing false witness, and no coveting, wifely or otherwise) , and 2 that you're required to do (keep the sabbath and honor your parents).  80% prohibition, 20% affirmative duty.

I like laws that tell me what I can't do.  If I have an idea, I can rapidly scan against all the things that I'm not allowed to do and decide whether or not to act on the idea.  But affirmative laws are much harder to deal with.  Now I have to ask myself, if I act on my idea, does it require me to do something that I haven't thought of?  Will I wind up taking on too much work just because I wanted to do this one simple thing?  This is a much harder search question, because it potentially requires me to generate all of the consequences of my idea and search each one for follow-on duties that I have to perform, before I can even think about doing that thing that I wanted to do.

You can argue that that's a good thing, because it prevents me from doing something that might ultimately be stupid.  But it's also a huge drag on my ability to try stuff out and learn from my mistakes.  If the motto for a vibrant society is "try small, fail small, win big," then affirmative duties aren't so good;  they force you to "try bigger", because trying small stuff requires so much investment in figuring out all the things that you need to do before you can actually try out the idea.

My impression is that the number of affirmative duties in our society is skyrocketing.  To hire somebody, you have to register all of his info for withholding, FICA, medicare, disability, unemployment insurance.  You have to verify that he's not illegal.  You have to look at your workforce to ensure that hiring is fairly apportioned among the various groups that we feel guilty about.

If want to build or manufacture something, it's not adequate that I not pollute; I need to file environmental impact statements and a whole bunch of paperwork that shows that I'm not only not polluting, but that I'm measuring that I'm not polluting, so I can do the enforcement official's job for him and he can supervise more firms at the same time.

But the worst thing about affirmative duty is the implicit message from the State.  "We can make you do what we want."  That's a much different message than, "You're not allowed to do that," which, while sometimes annoying, is mostly accepted because the thing you're not allowed to do will likely hurt somebody else.  Affirmative duty is how the State reminds you that you're its creature.

Government By the Poor and Those Who Don't Mind Supporting Them

This WSJ article based on an interview with Joel Kotkin got my attention, because it points out an obvious truth that had completely escaped me.  The interview deals with California demographics and how they relate to the progressive politics in the state.

It's no secret that people are fleeing California in droves.  But I'd always assumed that both the rich and middle-income earners were the ones doing the fleeing.  Not so:

Part of California's dysfunction, [Kotkin] says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.

"Basically, if you don't own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven't robbed a bank and don't have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak," says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don't have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there's no income tax.

So the rich are willing to put up with the red tape, taxation, and high housing prices because they've already got theirs, and the added taxation is a tolerable cost of living in a really, really nice place.  But the middle class can't hope to claw their way into the desirable enclaves in California, so they leave for places where the weather isn't perfect and the scenery isn't so pretty but where they actually have a future.

Meanwhile, the other group that's perfectly happy with California is the poor:

According to Mr. Kotkin, these upwardly mobile families are fleeing in droves. As a result, California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are the "entrenched incumbents" who inherited their wealth or came to California early and made their money. Then there's a shrunken middle class of public employees and, miles below, a permanent welfare class. As it stands today, about 40% of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on Medicaid.

It's "a very scary political dynamic," he says. "One day somebody's going to put on the ballot, let's take every penny over $100,000 a year, and you'll get it through because there's no real restraint. What you've done by exempting people from paying taxes is that they feel no responsibility. That's certainly a big part of it.

And the welfare recipients, he emphasizes, "aren't leaving. Why would they? They get much better benefits in California or New York than if they go to Texas. In Texas the expectation is that people work."

You can see what's at the end of this process:  You have the very rich, whose capital gets put to work outside of California and provides them the income to live in the style to which they've become accustomed, and the very poor, who live at the sufferance of the very rich and provide a pool of labor for their convenience, financed largely by their contributions to a common pool of tax dollars.

There's a name for this type of society:  It's called an aristocracy.

The real question is whether this aristocracy is stable or not.  I've always assumed that California's finances would eventually collapse as its financiers chose to realize their income elsewhere.  Now I'm not so sure.  At the very least, maybe the collapse is delayed merely because the very rich like where they live.

California has always been an interesting lab experiment for the rest of the country, and its recent problems have certainly been instructive.  But a Californian aristocracy can only survive when the middle class that it drove away is off being productive somewhere else in the US.  If the whole US adopts the same aristocratic model, the middle class has nowhere to go, and the aristocracy may grow impatient with the amount of money it's forced to lavish on the serfs.  That's not a country you want to live in.

Disruption. Adaptation. Evolution.

I recently ran across Charles Stross's post on how to build a near-future science fictional world.  Stross thinks that the future is merely new layers on top of old stuff.  The only way an old layer of stuff gets discarded is if the new layer of technology/culture/whathaveyou can completely replace the old one, and even then you have to wait for the old stuff to decay.

That's close, but it's not quite right.  Having recently read Tim Harford's Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, I've been thinking a lot about disruptive events as a framework for looking at how cultures change.

First, a few words on disruptions.  We tend to think of a disruptive innovation as one that suddenly invalidates an existing market, but that's not really what happens.  Most disruptions start out as an innovation in a market that's adjacent to, but not congruent with, the market that's eventually going to get killed.  The innovation is usually crudely featured and not even close to competitive with the state of the art of the disruptee, but it offers a specific capability that a small segment of users desperately need.  Harford's example of this was web-based mail, particularly gmail.  Web mail started out life with bad distribution list management, poor threading, no calendaring, trivial formatting capabilities.  In short, it was utterly unsuited for the enterprise market, which was dominated by Outlook.  But web mail offered one feature that was vital to a certain class of user:  the ability to log on from any browser, anywhere, and interact with mail.  For the user that roamed from computer to computer, device to device, and couldn't afford to install Outlook everywhere he went, the advantage of location-independence offset the crudity of web mail system.

Of course, Microsoft was an early entrant into web mail with Hotmail.  But it never made sense for MS to invest in Hotmail, because they always got a better return investing in knocking out the next 150 features in Outlook to satisfy the Fortune 1000 customers than it did to divert resources to Hotmail.  Google, on the other hand, didn't have a cash cow to protect, so they slowly enriched the Gmail feature set until it's now on the cusp of being able to "suddenly" disrupt the enterprise email market.  I'm confident that 5 years from now, Outlook sales will be down sharply.  10 years from now, Outlook will be quaint.  15 years from now, it will have vanished.  So disruption always sneaks up on you.

The email example is instructive, but it's a fairly modest disruption when we're dealing with the difference between web mail and client-server mail.  But disruptions can impact the culture in huge, unanticipated ways when use of the new, disruptive innovation changes one of our core cultural processes.

Human beings are a lot simpler than you might imagine.  We like to think of our lives as complex, ever-changing tapestries of experiences and interactions with our environment.  But the brain's great talent is to categorize varied experiences into as small a set of conditions as possible, then react to those conditions using as small a set of behaviors as possible.  Yes, those behaviors are executed with minor variations for the unique portions of each condition, but that's the brain's other great talent:  it can adjust a learned behavior in real-time without having to invent a completely new behavior.

This set of learned behaviors is actually pretty small.  You can create a complex culture with a small number of learned behaviors:  Driving a car.  Eating at a table.  Meeting a new person.  Using a toilet.  Taking a shower.  Tucking your kids into bed at night.  Playing catch.  Going on a date.  Buying something.  Engaging in ritual.  Believing--or not believing--in God.  Reading.  Making an argument.  Solving a problem.  Dealing with your emotions.

This is obviously only a fraction of the things that people do, but I'm willing to bet that it's closer to 1% or 2% of the total list of behaviors than it is to .001% or .002%.  Of course, these learned behaviors are assisted by a few doozies that are instinctive or semi-instinctive, including such things as language, sex, locomotion, eating, etc.  But, even though those behaviors are incredibly complicated, they're still fairly finite, and they act as primitives upon which the culturally instilled behaviors rely.

Right about now you'll be asking, "What the hell does this have to do with disruption?"  The answer is that the goods and services we consume have deeply-ingrained cultural behaviors underlying them.  There are tens of thousands of products that dovetail perfectly with how we've learned to prepare and communally eat food.  Other tens of thousands play to the ways we were taught to socialize and attract mates.  Still other products assist our ability to identify and solve complex problems.

In general, products that don't dovetail well with our set of cultural behaviors don't do very well in the market.  But the same processes that cause disruptive products to succeed as they evolve adjacent to more established products can sometimes cause a new, disruptive behavior to be learned adjacent to an established, culturally pervasive behavior.  Cultural disruptions are much rarer than market disruptions.  Returning to the web mail example, the cultural behaviors of using written language to express yourself to another isn't much different between snail mail or client-based email or web mail.  But when you marry the convenience of communicating in text from mobile devices, even though the modes of written expression that you can engage in are vastly more limited than in a letter or email, you begin to see the beginnings of a major cultural disruption, radiating out along several different behaviors.  People who wouldn't dream of composing a letter or email in public are now perfectly content to spend 30 seconds texting someone, with all the attendant rudeness associated with it.  Formal written language gets mutilated because texting is so awkward that linguistic shorthand has to be developed.  And, possibly most significantly, linguistic-based reasoning itself gets changed from an expository form, where large thoughts are formed, expressed, and responded to, to a more interactive form, where simple thoughts bounce back and forth between two or more people to form a sort of gestalt or groupthink.

Just as with product disruptions, the insertion of a cultural disruption doesn't immediately destroy the old forms of behavior, because the old forms are better suited for the majority of the culture that's still oriented around the old environment.  But, even while letters and books and email still make up the majority of the words being written, and while the state of the art of these behaviors becomes increasingly refined, the texters and tweeters and, to a lesser extent, the bloggers and even the PowerPointers are rapidly evolving a new, rich set of cultural behaviors that will ultimately become superior to expository prose and will therefore sweep it away.  We sure as hell aren't there yet, but it'll happen.

So Stross is right about the layers of new stuff, but only up to a point.  Disruptive layers ultimately digest the old layers next to which they evolved.

It's worth looking a little more at today's culture through the lens of cultural disruptions.  They're harder than you might think to spot, because all disruptions appear to be innocuous at first, and the amount of time required for them to affect the culture significantly can be tens or even hundreds of years.  At some point, I'd like to make a list of all of these, but for now, I'd like to concentrate of the most serious cultural disruption of the last thousand years:  the rise of electronic media.

We're used to media now.  It pervades our culture.  But it's important to realize that media has not only disrupted the culture by increasing the flow of information to the individual by at least four orders of magnitude; it's also changed our habits of thought.

Human beings are evolved to process information in real time.  See the sabertooth tiger, run away.  Spot the tasty berry, eat it.  Find your offspring, protect it.  None of these things require complicated reasoning or abstract thought.  And yet abstract thought conferred such a survival advantage that it became highly conserved.  From the rise of language, to the neolithic revolution, up through the civilizations of the ancient and classical world, and even through the rise of the printing press, the renaissance, and the early industrial revolution, the culture conferred greater and greater rewards on those who could think abstractly and use language and writing to communicate those thoughts to others so that they could be acted upon.

So we've got 3 or 4 million years of evolution that has tailored human beings to use an "immediate paradigm":  see, hear, act, repeat.  And that was significantly disrupted by a new, culturally agile "expository paradigm":  talk, listen, read, imagine, think, communicate, act.  The vast majority of cultural progress is based on the expository paradigm.  Effectively, cultural progress was based on words.  And not just any words:  it's based on exposition and reasoned arguments.

This brings us up to 1909 and the first mass radio broadcast by Charles Herrold.

Suddenly, mass culture could be impacted not just by exposition but by conversation.  Drama, which previously had been available only to small audiences, became available to a mass audience.  Movies and television soon followed, with visual depictions of stories and the conversations that went along with them.

Note that we're still firmly rooted in Stross's "new things are layered on old things" paradigm at this point.  But the seeds of the disruption are now sown:  for the first time since the neolithic revolution, there are now cultural constructs that can appeal to humanity's evolved, immediate see/hear/act paradigm.  They're crude constructs.  They're one-way.  And the expository, carefully reasoned forms of communication aren't in much danger of being supplanted.  But a new paradigm, a "media paradigm", much more closely aligned with the evolved immediate paradigm, is in place.

Fast-forward to today.  The expository paradigm is holding on by its fingernails.  Give children a choice between a book and a video game and a majority will choose the latter.  The video game fits the more natural media paradigm, and is therefore much more easily assimilated by a child than the expository paradigm used by the book.  And it's not that the video game isn't educating and developing the child, both cognitively and culturally.  But it isn't training the child to function in the expository world.  We are, in essence, about at the same point in media's cultural disruption that web mail is in its market disruption.  The old paradigm is still dominant for getting real work done, but the smart money is already trying to figure out how to get the same work done in the new paradigm, because it's seen to be inevitable.

Unfortunately, in the case of media, figuring out how to get the same work done with media that is currently being done with exposition isn't obvious.  The world still runs on advances in science, technology, philosophy, ethics.  But the media paradigm doesn't have good replacements for most of the thought that goes on it these disciplines, the majority of whose advances are still firmly rooted in exposition.  The net result is likely to be a temporary slowdown in innovation as the culture develops the tools to accomplish the tasks that only the expository paradigm can still do, in the new media paradigm.

There are glints of light at the end of the tunnel.  Real science can now be accomplished through simulation, which is fundamentally a media tool, albeit one grounded on a simpler, more immediate kind of expository reasoning.  The aforementioned revolution in texting and social media is slowly evolving a new way to interact with complex problems.  Web resources like Khan Academy on other computer learning systems are slowly enriching children's training in the expository paradigm by driving it through media channels.

But the gap is still huge and, unlike Stross's new-layered-on-old hypothesis, there are likely to be real deficits in education for the foreseeable future.  In education, in effect, the new is cannibalizing the old, because we don't know how to develop a child's cognition in both paradigms simultaneously.  Until we figure that out, the disruption will continue.

A Couple of Comments on the New Malthusian Limit

I've been thinking a bit more about whether productivity growth rates can permanently outstrip economic growth rates, and what that means if it happens. Comments from me here and here.

I'm starting to wonder if we're not about to bump up against a new kind of Malthusian limit. The old one had increased output leading to birth rates that exceeded food supply, which caused collapse. Is the new version of this improved technology leading to productivity rates that exceed growth rates, causing the number of available jobs to collapse? And does the collapse of jobs presage the collapse of population? Of civilization?

I'm also wondering: what other Malthusian-ish transitions might we have gone through? Clearly there was a point near the Neolithic revolution where we stopped being one of the variables in a predator-prey equation, which seems like a pretty big transition. Are there others? Can we foresee others in the future?

Why Are We So Risk Averse?

From Neal Stephenson:

In his recent book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” vs. the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.

The counterpart to Galapagan isolation is the struggle for survival on a large continent, where firmly established ecosystems tend to blur and swamp new adaptations. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author of the recent book You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, has some insights about the unintended consequences of the Internet—the informational equivalent of a large continent—on our ability to take risks. In the pre-net era, managers were forced to make decisions based on what they knew to be limited information. Today, by contrast, data flows to managers in real time from countless sources that could not even be imagined a couple of generations ago, and powerful computers process, organize, and display the data in ways that are as far beyond the hand-drawn graph-paper plots of my youth as modern video games are to tic-tac-toe. In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past.

The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision-making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run. There is no such thing as “long run” in industries driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovation making money is just that—a mere possibility that will not have time to materialize before the subpoenas from minority shareholder lawsuits begin to roll in.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

I have long thought that a too-perfect flow of information might be socially (if not economically) deleterious. Exhibit A for this is the self-selection that occurs in the blogosphere, where the difference between what the community will tolerate and honest disagreement and what it considers trolldom is vanishingly small. Ditto for political discourse, where the cycle required to attack an opponent's statements, which used to be weeks, has shrunk to minutes. But I have to admit that I hadn't really thought about the internet as a huge idea buzzkill.

On the other hand, the near-pefect flow of information files the rough edges off of genuinely good ideas, so that they're brought to market more efficiently. But any idea with too many rough edges--which is pretty much any large project--is likely to be milled down to nothing.

In Which the Blindingly Obvious Becomes, Oddly Enough, Blindingly Obvious

Michael Lewis has a piece in Vanity Fair that kinda rocked me back on my heels.  It's nominally about debt in California--at all levels of government, but the interesting part comes from an interview with neuronscientist Peter Whybrow:

“Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.” Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

The succession of financial bubbles, and the amassing of personal and public debt, Whybrow views as simply an expression of the lizard-brained way of life. A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control’s color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern. The boom in trading activity in individual stock portfolios; the spread of legalized gambling; the rise of drug and alcohol addiction—it is all of a piece. Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for short-term rewards.

What happens when a society loses its ability to self-regulate, and insists on sacrificing its long-term interest for short-term rewards? How does the story end? “We could regulate ourselves if we chose to think about it,” Whybrow says. “But it does not appear that is what we are going to do.” Apart from that remote possibility, Whybrow imagines two outcomes. The first he illustrates with a true story, which might be called the parable of the pheasant. Last spring, on sabbatical from the University of Oxford, he was surprised to discover that he was able to rent an apartment inside Blenheim Palace, the Churchill family home. The previous winter at Blenheim had been harsh, and the pheasant hunters had been efficient; as a result, just a single pheasant had survived in the palace gardens. This bird had gained total control of a newly seeded field. Its intake of food, normally regulated by its environment, was now entirely unregulated: it could eat all it wanted, and it did. The pheasant grew so large that, when other birds challenged it for seed, it would simply frighten them away. The fat pheasant became a tourist attraction and even acquired a name: Henry. “Henry was the biggest pheasant anyone had ever seen,” says Whybrow. “Even after he got fat, he just ate and ate.” It didn’t take long before Henry was obese. He could still eat as much as he wanted, but he could no longer fly. Then one day he was gone: a fox ate him.

The other possible outcome was only slightly more hopeful: to hit bottom. To realize what has happened to us—because we have no other choice. “If we refuse to regulate ourselves, the only regulators are our environment,” says Whybrow, “and the way that environment deprives us.” For meaningful change to occur, in other words, we need the environment to administer the necessary level of pain.

Did our value system only work because it was designed for scarcity?  Or would the old-timey Christian values of hard work, community, cooperation, and charity still function, if only they hadn't been eroded by abundance?  Is there any market-based solution that will encourage long-term thinking?  Are we approaching another Malthusian limit where the wealth of our society no longer causes a self-limiting population explosion, but instead fuels a self-limiting explosion in consumption?  Or is this all nonsense, and all we need is the ability for everybody in the society to understand compound interest?

If this thesis is correct, it has vast implications for the future success not only of government in the developed world, but of market-driven economies in general

On Dirty Jobs

Just wanted to save this, because it kinda rocked me back on my heels:


"Follow your passion--what could be wrong with that? Probably the worst advice I ever got." (11:20 into the clip)

Huh.

I'm a middle aged software engineer. Back when I started out, I was just a computer programmer. These days, I almost exclusively draw boxes on whiteboards and evangelize ideas and products to folks inside my company. I'm pretty good at it, and I make an excellent living doing it, and I like it a lot.

I can't say I like it more than just the simple art of writing a bunch of code and making it work. My job is so abstract that I can't even really describe it to ordinary, non-technical folks, and when I do, they often don't believe that you can get paid for doing that. A lot of the time, I can't believe it either. Part of the price of success is becoming more abstract, more political, more removed from the simply joy of doing your job at its most basic level. That price may be worth paying, but we ought to be aware that we're paying it.

I've been incredibly lucky to be able to do something that I used to love, and still like pretty well. My kids aren't so fortunate. They were encouraged to "follow their passions" and the result is that they've spent a lot of time doing things that were ultimately unrewarding. My son finally went to trade school and got certified as an HVAC technician 18 months ago. A few months ago, I asked him how he liked his job. He replied, "Nobody wants to grow up to be an HVAC tech when they're a kid." And yet, he has more security than my two girls, who are still following their passions, and who aren't very happy with the result.

Watch the video; seems to me that it cuts through a lot of nonsense that somehow we've started to assume was true.

Is There Anything Left to Conserve of Western Civilization?

Stephen Davies says not, because we're not living in Western Civilization. He says a lot of other things, too. A completely fascinating lecture.