Archive for the ‘Introspection’ Category

Think Like an Austrian #1

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

I struggle to hold my own in verbal debates with people who think radically differently to me. It’s easy to be distracted from my point by constantly having to correct misconceptions.

I keep meaning to write dialogues — imaginary debates in which I rehearse my arguments. This is a start, .

The thing about economics is most people think it’s about money supply and inflation and defecits and that there are formulae that relate these things and that the whole thing works like that computer with the pipes. This stuff is impossible to debate. The nice thing about Austrian economics is you can talk about it.

So where to start? Let me try this:

A: The government is cutting jobs in the public sector. This will ruin the economy and cause a double-dip recession.

B: You can’t spend the same money twice.

A: Yes you can, money just goes round and around.

B: What I mean is, *you* can’t spend the same money twice. Let’s say I run a cake shop. I am forced at gunpoint to give you £100. You spend that £100 on buying my cakes. How has this helped the economy?

A: There are more cakes in existence than there otherwise would be. The world is richer.

B: The number of cakes I can make is fixed. I would have sold them to someone else and I would be £100 better off. Or, I would learn that nobody wants my cakes and I would find something to make that people *do* want.

A: But if I don’t get your £100, I will be unemployed and not doing any useful work.

B: The work you do can not be very useful if you can’t get people to pay for it voluntarily.

A: The work I do in the public sector will improve the quality of the transport infrastructure, thereby enabling you to get ingredients for your cakes more cheaply.

B: Yes, but if you were unemployed, I would still have my £100. I might use it to buy a better cake-making machine that will help me make cakes more cheaply. Or I might invest it in a transport infrastructure company.

A: How is that different?

B: Well, apart from the irrelevant (for the purposes of this discussion) fact that there is less violence involved, perhaps I might be better placed to decide how to spend my £100 than you. I might be better able to cut the cost of cake-making because I understand the business of making cakes.

[At this point the discussion veers off into the question of why distributed decision making is better than centralised control. Also, the parenthesis above is why I don't think of myself as a *consequentialist* libertarian. I would be opposed to the violence even if centralised control was more efficient.]

From Harry Potter to Global Warming

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I’d heard about it before, but finally went to read it after Eric Raymond blogged about it. It being:

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

In which Eliezer Yudkowsky “re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works”.

It’s quite a learning experience, especially if you look up the bits you don’t understand. For example, I now know what arbitrage is.

Here’s a snippet from chapter one:

“Then you don’t have to fight over this,” Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. “If it’s true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it’s true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it’s false. That’s what the experimental method is for, so that we don’t have to resolve things just by arguing.”

The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. “Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? When you say that rationality is your favorite thing ever and read so much about it? I thought you’d know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you’re only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”

[...]

“Mum,” Harry said. “If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation – that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um… I can’t think offhand of where to find something about how it’s an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of violence or violent arguments -”

The author uses the pen name Less Wrong, which comes from a “community wiki devoted to refining the art of human rationality” called Less Wrong.

It’s the sort of site within which I imagine I could spend hours following the cross references. I haven’t yet, but one article about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence ends on this paragraph:

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge. The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation. If you don’t notice when your model makes the evidence unlikely, you might as well have no model, and also you might as well have no evidence; no brain and no eyes.

Which immediately made me think of global warmists who seem to always strive to fit the evidence to their hypotheses.

That site also contains lots of arguments about how to change your mind. One of these is titled Politics is the Mindkiller. Perhaps this will be a good site to go to to challenge my beliefs.

Institutional Care?

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

I saw something quite disturbing in the park today.

Care for people with mental disabilities is something I mostly prefer not to think about. I imagine it is done by people with saintly qualities of compassion and patience. Anyone who would take a group of people with Down’s syndrome and similar problems to the park on a sunny day to enjoy ice creams must rank pretty highly in the pillar-of-the-community stakes, one might think.

As I sat reading my book at the cafe in the park, intruding into my consciousness was what at first seemed to be what might be termed “bad parenting”. You know the sort of thing. Barked orders: “Get here now!! If you don’t behave this instant we’re going home!” Looking up, I saw the group of people with Down’s syndrome and similar, all in their 40s and 50s, being supervised by a boy and girl of about twenty years old. I observed them for about twenty minutes.

Never did they display any kindness or compassion. One of their charges must have misbehaved and was getting a lecture about how he had “violated” his “contract”. When he protested, not particularly loudly, he was told not to raise his voice. The whole group was repeatedly threatened with being sent home, in much the same way that bad parents make empty threats, but this clearly upset the rest of the group. One of the women got up and started walking away, and she was shouted at and told to “get here” and “sit down”. When she did sit down on the bench she was repeatedly told to “turn round and face the table” under threat of not getting any ice cream.

The chastisement never seemed to stop. Instead of a kindly, “don’t eat food off the table, dear, it’s dirty” I heard barked retributions of, “that’s disgusting; do you know what’s on this table? Do you? Pigeons poo on this table; do you know what people have been here before you? Do you know what they have done? Do you? Well do you? No? So don’t eat off the table then!”

There were endless ultimatums. “You can do as you’re told or you can go home, it’s your choice.” Every aspect of behaviour was controlled. “Sit there. Stop rubbing your arm. Sit still. Turn around.”

At first I had thought they were volunteers, but then I heard the boy saying, “I’m on shift tomorrow, and I’m going to make sure you can’t join the rest of the group. Why? Because of your behaviour, that’s why. You’ve taken other people’s stuff, and been moaning and groaning.”

At which point I was on the verge of pointing out that I would be moaning and groaning if I’d had to put up with the endless, pointless chastisement and, frankly, bullying all day long. But being out with a pregnant wife changes your priorities somewhat; today was not a day for getting into an altercation with someone I seriously doubted would be open to a reasoned debate on approaches to caring for the mentally handicapped.

I get the distinct impression that the “carers” got a thrill from the power they had over these poor unfortunates. They enjoyed making the threats, being mean, asking what the supposedly delinquent man was going to do tomorrow and then telling him he wouldn’t be able to because he’d been naughty. He probably didn’t understand; they were being mean to punish him. Finally they sent him away. “Go on then, you can go off on your own if you want.”

I feel somewhat weak for not — as the group departed and the “carers” were taunting the old man with jibes of “who are you?”;”you’re not with us any more”;”why are you following us?” — getting up and giving someone a punch.

I have no idea what organisation they were working or volunteering for. As they were so bad at their jobs I can only surmise that this is the kind of state “care” that children are so often subjected to. Presumably it is such an undesirable job that it’s very hard to find people willing to do it well. So it’s predictable, but disturbing nonetheless to see, and here I am writing about it, but not doing anything about it, from my comfortable middle class life.

But there are those who *say* they care about disadvantaged people and that the state is the solution and then condemn these people to such miserable institutions and such indifferent “care”. I strongly suspect that the state muscles out private charity and those who genuinely care — after all, they might not have the right qualifications.

Immigration

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

The coalition government wants to set an “annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants admitted into the UK to live and work”.

Immigration isn’t the problem it’s made out to be. The angle that the government is working is that immigrants will take your job, and the government will protect you from that. It’s the lump of labour fallacy. In the end, the more people there are, the more jobs there are to do. This is self evident: there are millions more people living in the UK than a hundred years ago and they are not all unemployed. The more people there are, the more people go out to restaurants, so the more waiters need to be employed. More fundamentally, a “job” is just a specialisation, something you get someone else to do because they can do it better or more cheaply or more conveniently than you can do it yourself. People will always do things for each other no matter how many people there are.

There are dynamics to the situation. Sudden changes in the make-up of the population can cause problems for some. If you’re a plumber, and lots of plumbers move from Poland and are prepared to do the same work as you for less money, I can see why you’d be worried: you don’t want to lower your prices, increase the quality of your service, or provide a different service. The government talks about limiting immigration because it wants your vote. But doing so doesn’t help people in general. The sudden influx of cheap plumbers is good for me: I get my plumbing done for less. And I have money left to spend on something else, so whoever provides the something else benefits too.

You can’t pretend that limits to immigration are good for “the economy”. No overall good is done by limiting immigration. It helps one group (the incumbent plumbers), but only at the expense of other groups (the would-be immigrants and anyone who wants to hire a plumber).

In the long run, freedom of movement makes everyone richer. You could say that it enables labour, like any other commodity, to move to where it is best able to be used. But there’s more to it than that. Being able to move freely is valuable for its own sake. Left alone, people figure out how to improve their lives. That improvement, whatever form it takes, is an increase in wealth. If a Pole wants to move to the UK and do my plumbing, and I want to pay him to do my plumbing, then left alone we are both richer.

If a third party wants to stop us from making that agreement, they have to initiate force. That’s inherently evil. That’s what goverments do: they’re the go to guys if you want evil done to make sure you can continue to charge high prices for your services.

Rainbows Begin

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Michael Jennings used the term ‘unaugmented‘ to refer to the frightening prospect of leaving the house without an iPhone. I have an Android phone and know what he means. I usually use it to navigate to wherever I’m going.

In the novel Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge describes a near-future world in which people wear contact lenses that can overlay displays onto reality. This virtual-reality world that exists within and is composited onto the real-world is called augmented reality. In Rainbows End, people are in constant communication, receive information from all sorts of sources, and can choose between a variety of overlays on the real world that anyone can create for information or entertainment, including elaborate multiplayer games. Vinge also imagines the economic consequences of the technology. The world is awash with information and careers are built on selecting and filtering it. If you want information fast, money will buy the efforts of anyone and everyone, gathering and sifting anonymously on the network. Meanwhile, entertainment companies vie for the greatest audience shares and compete with school projects that involve creating multimedia augmented reality shared experience extravaganzas. Do you want your local high street themed like Middle-earth or Caprica?

There are a few bits of hardware that would make this sort of technology work particularly well: a wearable input device such as one that detects small finger movements or whispered voice commands for control; a wearable display such as glasses or contact lenses that can either emit an image or transmit light from the real world; and some apparatus for detecting where you are and where you are looking to some considerable accuracy.

But we are already starting to see applications that might be part of this Rainbows End future. Google Maps on a phone with GPS is a good start. Yelp adds the ability to find interesting things nearby, with user reviews and photos. Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite combine location with other social networking features and game aspects like rewards which can businesses can interact with. All of these are ways of gathering and sharing information, and they have open APIs that mean information can be combined in novel ways by third parties creating new applications, sometimes called mashups.

There are pure games, like Pac Manhattan, Zombies Run and ARhrrrr. There is even a real model helicopter that can fly in augmented reality.

Layar is particularly interesting. It overlays 3D graphics onto an image from the phone’s camera. It uses the phone’s GPS to know where you are, and the phone’s gyroscopes and compass to know where you’re looking. Pick from dozens of layers to overlay onto the real-world image. Mostly these are labels providing information about the real world so you can, for example, look through your phone and see nearby places that have Wikipedia articles or user reviews. Some layers put 3D objects into the real world for games, art or information.

A lot of these apps, web sites and services will come and go, but it’s starting to look very much like a large number of people in the tech industry have read Rainbows End and are setting out to make it come true.

Old Fashioned Publishing

Monday, March 1st, 2010

The closest I’ve got to traditional publishing is getting my articles in the company internal newsletter. This happened today.

Being edited is a weird experience. I’m reading my own words, but occasionally I see something I would never write. I haven’t been done any kind of disservice, this time round at least. But for some reason the newsletter is laid out like a paper newsletter even though it’s only distributed as a PDF. Which means space constraints. There may even be some kind of editorial style imposed. Anyway, I am reading my supposed own words, and occasionally exclaim something like, “I’ve *never* used the word ‘tremendous’!”. It’s not necessarily a bad word, it’s just not one I ever say or write. So seeing it under my byline is…weird.

There are word count limits that I know about in advance, so I find myself unable to elaborate, or having elaborated, have to cut out whole swathes of my arguments to get the word count down. And then there is editorial feedback. “Could you remove the bit about eliminating project managers?” Well, I suppose I could tone it down a bit, but I want to be a bit controversial, otherwise what’s the point of saying anything?

Here’s something I could immediately tell I hadn’t written, without being able to put my finger on why:

Raymond argues that the role of project managers as resource allocators becomes obsolete in the bazaar because personal motivation becomes the key instigator in ensuring that the best possible code is produced.

I think “key instigator” is a phrase I would never use. “Best possible code” doesn’t sound like me either. Here’s what I actually wrote:

Raymond argues that project managers are not needed in the bazaar because motivation comes for free and marshalling of resources happens automatically in its free market in reputation.

To be honest, I think the edited version is probably better. I think I am sometimes so concerned about not talking down to my audience that I don’t explain myself properly, and end up using turns of phrase that leave them going, “huh?” But it is also a failure because the “free market” aspect of allowing developers to choose which problems to work on has been lost in the translation. I really need another couple of hundred words to explain it.

So it’s a huge difference from blogging, where I can say what I want, how I want to say it. Presumably real writers for real publications have the same sorts of experience.

Does the editing make the article better? Perhaps it does. Perhaps it makes for a more readable, bite-sized, less rambly article. Perhaps it is good that I was prevented from writing, “we should throw away project management” and alienating all the project managers I work with…

Perhaps all this is also true of the differences between radio, with its producers and scripts, and podcasting.

Tax Codes

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

A tax code is a number that represents how much you can earn before paying income tax, and I think it is often manipulated on an individual basis for various reasons.

Incoming email from the human resources department at work:

Over the past few days it has come to our attention that a number of employees have recently received new tax code notices from HMRC (Inland Revenue) that are incorrect. From BBC reports, this appears to be a widespread problem due to the introduction of a new computer system. I suggest that you carefully check your tax coding notice: In principle it should contain a) a personal allowance, b) the value of benefits in kind (e.g. health insurance) based on your last P11D and c) adjustments because of your personal tax circumstances (e.g. underpaid tax from previous years).

If you think your tax code is wrong, I suggest you phone HMRC on the phone number stated on the notice. If your code is wrong it will mean too much (or too little tax) is deducted.

Please note the Company is obliged to follow the tax coding notice it receives and therefore the onus is on you to contact HMRC to correct any errors that may appear.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Those paragraphs illustrate a whole raft of coercive relationships, broken promises, illusions, lies, twisted assumptions and mental gymnastics that stand between me and my wages. Imagine trying to explain all that to a small child who has just learnt to say “mine”. They’d think you were mad. How many years of “education” does it take before those paragraphs make “sense”? The meta-context on display here is utterly alien.

Do Computers Make Things Cheaper?

Monday, December 14th, 2009

That’s what a colleague asked me today, starting an interesting conversation. I jotted notes thinking it would be a good blog post. But I think I will save time and just post the notes:

Have computers made things cheaper in the last 40 years? How I would put it: have computers made us richer?

What about cars? Yes. CAD/CAM. Are cars cheaper? Yes – no-one had two cars 40 years ago. Your car now is as well specified as a 40-year-old Rolls Royce (if not better (safer (simulation)/more efficient(engine design and management)/more features – air conditioning/sat nav)). Not as pretigious but better.

What about food? Yes. Logistics, globalisation, better agriculture (research done using computers?, better/cheaper farming tools). No-one ate food from as many exotic countries 40 years ago. Food was probably a higher proportion of household budget. People eat out more now. Green revolution: people in poor countries starve less than they would have done otherwise.

What about homes? Everyone has double glazing and central heating now. Less money spent elsewhere makes this possible. Systems are cheaper. Chinese manufacturing made possible by logistics. Materials used in windows- materials research uses computers.

Do people earn more? Wrong question. Impossible to measure. What is the right measure of inflation? Basket of goods is useless when discussion goods that haven’t been invented. Right question is: what do people have now that they didn’t have then?

Increase in technology in general makes us richer. Computers are used for research and developing new technology, and running businesses more efficiently to help pay for research and development. Cheap goods from China rely on cheap Chinese labour = abundant Chinese labour. But this relies on moving stuff around more cheaply. Logistics = containerization; computer programs to load ships; computers to monitor ships’ engines to make them more efficient; computers to design ships; computers to manage inventory and reduce waste; just in time manufacture and delivery. CAD/CAM = new products to market faster and cheaper.

Computers free up time which gets used to do other things, like innovate or relax. BUT – computers make bureacrats more effective. Hmm.

Lifestyle is different now: if born 30 years before you were, would you have cozy office job? Less robots = more (physical) factory jobs. Fewer JCBs = more labouring outside? Working inside instead of out in the weather means longer, healthier life?

You will find computers involved in most things that make you feel rich. And computers are used to improve computers and other technology so the process accelerates. Computers for communication makes doing business in general cheaper (more efficient). Related thought: that measure of progress beloved by the left, inequality, has also decreased over last 40 years. See: central heating, double glazing, two cars with sat-nav and air conditioning, foreign holidays: everyone has these things. All having more money buys you is fancier homes, cars and holidays. A Rolls-Royce and a large house in Westminster and a holiday in a 5 star resort in the Maldives is more expensive than but functionally equivalent to a Ford Mondeo and a flat in Essex and a holiday in a budget resort in Spain. Technology is an equaliser.

Computers in particular and technology in general have played a part in making all those things cheaper.

Climate Betting

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Walking home I was thinking: would it be possible to set up some kind of climate spread-betting market that would encourage people to put their money where their mouths are? You could make a bet and then go around planting trees to make sure it stayed cold. Or develop an accurate climate model and use it to make a fortune. Or a low lying country’s government could make an insurance bet against rising sea levels. It could be a way of getting us climate skeptics to pay for cleaning up the planet.

Live Aid Africa

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I listen to Radio One in the morning. Chris Moyles and a bunch of other celebrities walked up Kilamanjaro to raise money for charity. Now Moyles has just got back from a trip to Uganda to give out malaria nets with the money raised.

He said that two things surprised him about Uganda. It’s very green and lush; and everyone has mobile phones.

I think part of the reason everyone thinks Africa is brown and dry is Live Aid. “Where nothing ever grows; no rain or rivers flow.” Never mind forced relocation. Looking around on loc.alize.us, Uganda is a bit greener than Ethiopia.

Uganda:
Uganda _DSC14771

Ethiopia:
Back home before the storm Ethiopia

Mobile phones, of course, are a triumph of capitalism. On the radio, Aled correctly pointed out that they have been so successful because they don’t require the massive infrastructure of land lines, so that stage was skipped.

A listener asked a good question: if people can afford mobile phones, why can’t they afford malaria nets? Part of the problem is probably education: the charity workers are also having to teach people why and how to use the nets, so perhaps there is currently little demand for them. But if businesses don’t spring up to meet such a demand I’d want to know why.

Another question: would using more insecticides in agriculture reduce malaria?

Update: Michael Jennings commented on this post with a long article about mobile phones in Africa. As for why they might be more common than mosquito nets:

I would suggest that it is because mobile phones are cheaper. Such are the benefits of mass production and massive economies of scale. Also, second hand phones from the rich world end up in the poor countries in huge numbers – no such markets exist in mosquito nets. Also, I suspect that more people actually do have mosquito nets than Chris Moyles thinks – it’s just that nets provided by informal networks do not show up in his sort of statistics.

My suggestion about education originated in Moyles’ comment that many of those receiving the free nets didn’t know what they were for; and that the charity workers were planning to visit everyone and make sure they were using them correctly. I suspect people would figure it out (and are) without charity workers, one way or another.