It gave me the idea that you could question anything, that it was possible to question anything at all. You could question religion, you could question your own culture’s most basic assumptions. That was just unheard of—where else could I have gotten it? You know, to be thirteen years old and get your brain plugged directly into Philip K. Dick’s brain!

That wasn’t the way science fiction advertised itself, of course. The self-advertisement was: Technology! The world of the future! Educational! Learn about science! It didn’t tell you that it would jack your kid into this weird malcontent urban literary universe and serve as the gateway drug to J. G. Ballard.

And nobody knew. The people at the high school didn’t know, your parents didn’t know. Nobody knew that I had discovered this window into all kinds of alien ways of thinking that wouldn’t have been at all acceptable to the people who ran that little world I lived in.

I love the idea that SF is so subversive. I experienced it too, around the same age, but I didn’t realise at the time what was happening, and I don’t think I realised it since until Gibson pointed it out to me. There does seem to be a correlation between SF fans and, say, libertarians, who are certainly in the habit of asking more questions about the world than most people. But I don’t think it occurred to me that SF was the *cause*. Perhaps, to an extent, it is.

GDP is all well and good as a measure of productivity if it adds up all the values of the voluntary transactions. This is because any voluntary transaction must increase the wealth of both participants, otherwise they would not have volunteered for it.

But GDP also includes involuntary transactions, and these do not increase wealth. If they did, people would volunteer for them.

So let’s sort out the semantics: Let vGDP stand for the value of all voluntary transactions. Let GIT stand for “gross involuntary transactions”. Let GDT stand for the value of all transactions. This is what is popularly called GDP. Then:

GDT = vGDP + GIT

Rearranging:

vGDP = GDT – GIT

If the government increases taxes, all other things being equal, productivity is reduced.

It might be useful to measure vGDP.

Of course, when politicians fixate on something they can measure and try to improve it, they lose sight of what it is the measure means. So school targets result in a tendency for students being taught only to pass exams; crime targets result in police tending to investigate only the easiest to solve crimes.

And GDP targets result in money printing to boost GDP figures. But:

It will lift GDP statistics temporarily, never lastingly. It will not lead to a better use of resources, to better human cooperation in markets. It will not lead to innovation, creativity, or more entrepreneurship. It is a trick that the money producer plays on the economy for short-term effect, and it cannot increase the efficiency and productivity of the economy.

So says Detlev Schlicter in part two of his book Paper Money Collapse.

That’s because when new money is created its recipients spend it on goods and services, which increases the number of transactions and therefore GDP. But there aren’t really any more goods and services being produced. The economy hasn’t really grown. The recipients of the new money spend it, and the people they give it to spend it, and so on until prices start to rise, as they must because there is demand but no more supply, which causes the demand for money (as opposed to goods and services) to rise, so that the holders of the new money start to hold onto it, instead of spending it. Everyone whom the money has not yet reached is faced with rising prices but no new money.

The other way governments seek to increase GDP is by government spending, or to put it another way: involuntary transactions. These don’t create wealth in the way voluntary transactions do, because if someone takes your money by force, then buys you something they think you would like, it’s not likely to be something you really want. It *might* be, by pure chance, but it’s unlikely, so on average involuntary transactions don’t create wealth.

Paying one man to dig a hole, and another man to fill it in again increases GDP but doesn’t create wealth (and no-one would do this voluntarily, though it might make a nice government make-work scheme). Paying men to build a bridge might create some wealth by improving the transport infrastructure (which is seen), but if you’ve taken money by force to pay for it, then you’ve taken money that people would have preferred to have spent on something else (unseen). Something that would have created even more wealth than the bridge.

So if people say the government should not fixate on GDP, they are right, if probably for the wrong reasons. Growth as measured by GDP is only growth if it was caused by voluntary transactions. The only real growth is a growth in voluntary transactions. The best way a government can increase real growth is to increase the number of voluntary transactions which it can do by decreasing the number of involuntary ones, by cutting government spending.

This was met with much derision at the time, but I thought I’d attempt a serious answer.

If A is better than B, that means someone prefers A to B. So someone has to do the preferring. In game theory is the concept of revealed preference. You can tell what people prefer by the way they behave.

So it is better to be alive than dead because people behave as if they would rather be alive than dead.

The context of the question was a discussion that started after someone suggested that it would be good if everyone in the world could become middle class. People don’t want to live in mud huts; subsistence farming. They want long and comfortable lives without threat of starvation.

So if you want to know why it is better to be middle class than to live in a mud hut, the answer is that it enables you to act on all your other preferences, including the one about not dying of starvation. To deny that this is better is to deny that people have preferences.

Or a series of mutations that led to a skull optimised for brain size but with some serious but non-fatal flaws?

The coffee market has also long been a reactive market; when prices are high, every piece of available land has a coffee plant on it, but when prices are low farms disappear along with the coffee, this in turn raises prices as beans become scarce, resulting in re-planting (you get the picture). For a coffee plant to be suitable for harvesting requires around 4 years from seedling to mature plant. So it’s easy to see why the market fluctuates so much, as there is a four year gap before changes are fully appreciated. The coffee-growing countries have tried and failed to work together, holding back crops to raise prices, but when harvests eventually hit the market a downturn in price always occurs. This leads to the whole boom and bust cycle that has been such a feature of the coffee market for many years.

I’m an engineer, and this kind of oscillation seems all too plausible to me. There is a negative feedback and a delay. It seems inevitable.

But I have questions: in a truly free market, is this inevitable? Can’t speculation such as futures markets damp this effect? If so, why do we still see the oscillation?

More importantly: is there any kind of outsider meddling that can solve the problem of oscillation without introducing even worse problems? (I have a tiny suspicion that the price oscillation may turn out to be a feature, not a bug, but it’s not immediately obvious how.)

But something bothered me about why he thought nuclear power was okay. It’s as if he is right for the wrong reasons. In his correspondence with the anti-nuclear campaigner:

I’m struck by the fact that none of the attachments you’ve sent me is a peer-reviewed article. [...] I’m looking for peer-reviewed papers or high-level reports

In the analysis of her evidence:

As my article explains, the Yablukov book has little scientific standing and has not been peer-reviewed

From the article itself:

Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether the Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: “In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer-reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.”

I can see why a journalist wants to be able to point to proper papers in proper scientific journals, but it’s all argument from authority. There’s very little engagement with the details of the argument. What are the scientists saying? What are the environmentalists saying? Why is the group that is right, right? Why is the group that is wrong, wrong?

And then this, at which I went from thinking, “maybe Monbiot is not so bad after all” to “oh, yes he is”:

Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don’t suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

Those who refute the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, (deniers, if you like), are not correct because they have more peer reviewed papers published in respected scientific journals. They are correct because they have analysed the data and methods of climate scientists and found flaws in the work. You can tell they are correct by understanding the arguments. For example, you can learn what principal component analysis is and how it works and see why its incorrect use in producing the hockey stick graph gave the results that it did. And it’s quite possible to explain this to a general audience.

This is exactly what Monbiot’s “climate change deniers” have done. They have not failed to provide sources (in fact they are more open than the climate scientists, and in many cases their original work is their source, whether it is peer-reviewed or not), they do not rely on anecdote, they do scorn the scientific consensus (consensus is meaningless) and they don’t invoke “cover-ups”.

Peer-review is not the be-all-and-end-all. It’s perfectly possible for groupthink to set in. Scientists often get attached to their theories and defend them too much. The consensus is often overturned. Without understanding the details, the UN’s report into Chernobyl might be just as flawed as its report into climate change.

If Monbiot dropped all the argument from authority and wrote about, for example, why the UN report on Chernobyl is more correct than the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences book, then he would have a better case.

He actually does this occasionally:

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

That’s the kind of analysis which can get to the truth. If Monbiot could do this consistently, and apply the same kind of thinking to the global warming debate, he might come up with the right answer there, as well.

The readers fall into three general categories the gullible, the knowledgeable, and the sceptical/synical.

The gullible themselves fall into two sub-classes, those who are predisposed to believe the reports because they support some life view of their own. And those who don’t have any life view and believe that politicians/civil servants/’academics etc. are beyond reproach.

The knowledgeable are those who have experience/pre-knowledge of the contents of the press reports, they are in most cases astounded at how little truth there are in these reports. This is on almost any topic, journalists aren’t scientists, engineers, doctors or of any other profession, they don’t have, or want, a deeper understanding of the issues other than one that can side with the political/social position of their newspapers. The knowledgeable are the most like to splutter toast crumbs across the breakfast table.

The sceptics themselves fall into two categories. Those who have thought the problem through and investigated the issues with which they find fault, on all topics they are generally amazed at press bias. The second group is my favourite, it’s the great unwashed, who despite being fed media propoganda on all topics read the articles and say,”Pull the other one”, and move on. Theirs is a voice seldom heard because they keep their opinions to themselves, but they are the people we trust on juries, an institution that has stood the test of time, and which while not infallible, continues to treat the evidence they’re presented with and make reasonable judgements on it.

These latter are the natural enemies of the metro-elite. They are almost beneath contempt for the Guardian reading lifestyle clique because they eschew pseudo education for their own knowledge and experience of the world. They thumb their noses at their betters in the metro elite, and are now defecting in droves into the sceptic side of the climate debate. Where they go Murdoch will follow, as will the politicians. They may save us from these awful eco-jihadists yet.

This last group is very interesting. Most of my older relatives fall into it: they’re not intellectual, but they’re not stupid either. This group probably also forms quite a large voting block. The UK Libertarian Party might do well to engage with them. All this highfalutin philosophy stuff is necessary, but can it win votes?

In this regard, the Taxpayers Alliance seem to be on the right track. Taxing ordinary families to pay for daft quangos is a narrative that should be easy to sell. But can the rest of libertarianism be re-worded as so-obvious-it-must-be-true common sense? I think so. Has anyone tried? We need a libertarian version of the Sun, or something. Hayek on the front page; tits on the next page; Micklethwait and Jennings doing sport on the back page…

To win the thread, George Lee Stowell replied:

It’s where I keep my stuff…So yes

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.]

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.

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 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.

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.

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.