Abstract Minutiae

The Information Entropic Proof of God

My Mormon friend informs me scholars at BYU have a pet theory that Kierkegaard was directly influenced by Mormonism. Kierkegaard’s one reference to the nascent faith (quoted in the footnote below from this book) makes this doubtful. Still, I am intrigued by the suggestion that Mormon theology was influenced by the invention of the train and telegraph. In what ways have modern understandings of God and divinity been influenced by contemporary technological advances?

Scientology was obviously influenced by 20th century debates in psychiatry, the space race, and the Douglas DC-8 jet airliner, but otherwise I think Kierkegaard’s prediction that technological progress would fuel retrograde and mechanistic metaphors for God had it backwards. Technology and basic science have pushed in favor of more and more abstract conceptions of God, as more and more of the workings of the universe come under human control and are found to obey naturalistic laws. In that sense, the idealists, rationalists and pantheists like Hegel, Schelling and Spinoza used metaphors for God that were way ahead of their time.

Computer science, in particular, has led (or will lead) to more computation or cybernetic metaphors of God. “God is information.” Or perhaps, “God / spirit is the intentionality underwriting otherwise hollow and derivative computational processes.“ Or something like that.

It reminds me of an argument I concocted on the spot in a philosophy of religion elective I took several years back. We read Aquinas’ ”Quinque viae“ aka his five proofs of God’s existence. The professor, a militant atheist and functionalist, lectured for awhile about internal contradictions and tautology. And while I was and still am a strong atheist, I found his arguments ungenerous, and worse, boorish. So I raised my hand.

Professor, I said, You should note that Aquinas begins with the Argument from Motion:“Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another,” and “Motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality.” This establishes God’s fundamental connection to entropy.

Then, in his Argument from Degree: “As fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.”

The idea of maximum heat is literally a thermodynamic metaphor. God is like absolute zero, the baseline which makes heat measurement possible. In terms of entropy, this implies God is a zero entropy state: a state or pure and total order and useful potentiality.

Consider what we know from physics: The universe began in a singularity and entropy, which is to say disorder, has been increasing ever since. Is it a stretch to relate this inextricable progression from order to disorder with the Christian metaphor of being fallen and separated from God? Is the punishment for original sin not that mortal beings must eventually age and die, that is, to be subject to the whims of entropy? And is the “heat death” of the universe not well captured in the metaphor of hell as state of uniform disorder and chaos?

Consider next how information theory has updated our understanding of these physical truths. Entropy, through the lens of statistical mechanics, refers to uncertainty about the state of a given system. A low entropy system requires less information to be fully describe with certainty. A single particle, for example, can be described by its position and velocity with certainty in a way that chaotic system cannot

Let’s go back to the initial state of the universe, which began in a singularity of infinitesimal size, contained in an equally infinitesimal amount of space and time. This is not directly observed. Rather, it’s postulated by extrapolating backwards along the arrow of time until the universe’s entropy is asymptotically nil. That is, where the information required to describe the state of the entire universe and everything in it approaches zero, with the degree of certainty approaching one.

This asymptotic, zero entropy state is in dimensionless space, and, in informational terms, contains literally all the “knowledge” of how the universe will subsequently unfold. In other words, it is omniscient and omnipresent. And moreover, since it contains infinite potentiality, it is a state capable of creating its own momentum, to be the unmoved mover.

I lowered my hand, and returned the floor to the incredulous professor, who scoffed.

“Ridiculous.”

Of course, I agree. But isn’t their more virtue in creatively exploring positions you don’t actually hold, rather than contorting obviously bad arguments into an even worse light?

Either way, the information entropic "proof” of God (i.e. the sixth proof) seems to me to be also asymptotic in its degree of abstraction. Is a more abstract metaphor for God possible? If not, then maybe it does have an ontological reality. I have no doubt Aquinas would agree. And perhaps Kierkegaard would agree, too, given his faith in God despite the undeniable disorder of things.

The Future of Capital Mobility

I have new post up on Read Plain Text called The Future of Capital Mobility. Check it out. Here’s an excerpt: 

Buildings are concrete and rebar. Labor is people. In contrast, physical and human capital are abstractions, metaphors really, that let us talk about “stocks” of knowledge in an individual or population in the same way, and with analogous economic models, as when we talk about any other capital input. Only instead of bricks, it’s years of education, wages instead of interest rates, and cognitive decline instead of depreciation.

In fact, anything that generates a rate of return and is accumulated in a production process (as opposed to being the final product for consumption) can be thought of as a type of capital. So it’s easy to see how more and more things can come to possess the properties of capital as information technology progresses: “Capital” at root represents an abstraction, and the internet and software at root represent making useful, electronic, globally mobile incarnations of abstractions.

The low mobility of labor (thanks to barriers to high skill immigration) hurts the mobility of human capital indirectly, abstractions be damned. Yet it doesn’t have to. As online tools for outsourcing knowledge intensive work improve, human capital mobility will increase despite the meat-space barriers to labor, just as communication technology and electronic banking let firms abstract their “capital” from the physical gold or banknotes in a vault. Today moving financial capital from a bank in London to a financial services company in the Cayman Islands is as easy as asking each to reconcile some 1s and 0s. Why can’t it be the same for human capital and more? And if it were the case, might we not then see similar jurisdictional competition over payroll and personal income taxes, say, rather than merely over the tax on capital gains?

Consistent with the premature futurism thesis, smart writers have been predicting large and looming social implications from telecommuting and remote work for decades, only to have their visions stymied by some unforeseen technical or psychological barrier. While hiring international freelancers has gotten a lot easier, for many jobs people just prefer face to face contact. Yet we seem to be finally reaching a critical point where video streaming, virtual reality, and collaboration tools are converging to make even the most complex team production viable across borders.

Importing embedded human capital this way can’t be stopped by regulation without significant collateral damage. That’s because the same tools that will soon let us have immersive collaborative experiences with creative workers in India are fundamentally the same tools you’ll use to connect with your Aunt in Peru.

The upshot? As software eats the world, all regulations become capital controls. And capital controls are notoriously hard to enforce.

Autonomy or Autarky?

There’s a tension in liberalism when it comes to autonomy.

On the one hand, liberalism represents the thin set of rules that constitute the overlapping consensus, the implicit social contract between warring conceptions of the good made to share control of a political order. We accept liberal institutions, if only begrudgingly, because a) we recognize disputes over irreconcilable conceptions of the good are pointless, and b) we all stand to benefit from an expanded aperture of social cooperation.

This is the context in which Kant defined the concept of equal dignity. Though we may disagree with our neighbor’s way of life, dress or worship, we all have equal dignity through a common commitment to respect each other’s autonomy. Autonomy means moral self-constitution, or self-authorship: the freedom to chart one’s own course in life. To be treated as an end, and not as a means to an end, is to be left the constructor of one’s own ends, to conceive of whatever the good and just life means to you and to be left to pursue it.

Autonomy is neither hedonistic, nor atomistic. Autonomy is the subject and object of human reason, and acting in alignment with reason requires self-legislation, self-control, and obedience to the moral norms required of a civil and cooperative society. When whole societies of people are granted autonomy, an amazing thing happens: It creates the Kingdom of Ends, exemplified by the free market, where equal dignity is manifest in each and every commercial exchange.

But as time has worn on, an interesting thing has happened. The terms of the social contract seem to have become internalized as a conception of the good in their own right. That is, the political order, which emerged through conflict and error to sustain rivalrous conceptions of the good, has become mirrored in our sensory order. Liberal neutrality, rather than being a property of corporate institutions, percolates into an individual’s own faculty of judgment. Autonomy, rather than being an allusion to sectarian ceasefire, is reconstrued as a kind of end in itself.

There is no such thing as autonomy for autonomy’s sake. Autonomy gets its footing precisely through the way it enables, empowers and amplifies genuine, substantive conceptions of the good, irreconcilable though they may be. Autonomy for autonomy’s sake, in contrast, is without substance. It’s a purposive void.

More dangerously, this way of conceptualizing autonomy quickly becomes identified with lacking dependencies: romantic, familial, moral, and organizational dependencies. Yet being dependent on someone is not at all contrary to living an autonomous life. Mutual advantage presupposes interdependence. As do market exchange, specialization and the division of labor.

Fundamentally, this confuses autonomy for autarky. Autarky in economics is the refusal to trade. Translated to human psychology, autarky is the refusal to be vulnerable; to open one’s self to emotional and intellectual trade winds.

Self-reliance, it has been said, is just another word for poverty. So what will come of our psychic Juche? Will we move from a pluralistic Kingdom of Ends to a monastic Kingdom of Hermits? And what does the capacity to self-legislate look like when, morally speaking, we’re living out a hung jury?

This essay originally appeared on Sweet Talk.

Techniques of Neutralization

Ryan and Adam have been discussing the role of situation in morality. Do read both in full.

Ryan’s is a convincing defense of the banality of evil. Rape is an inevitability of war, for example, not because the participants of war are particularly bad human beings, but because the situation of being at war drives otherwise normal human beings to do heinous things. As he writes,

Situational psychology does not excuse evil, it democratizes it. It’s easy to believe that a U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Central African Republic, or a torture chamber in Cuba, or an insane-asylum-cum-torture-chamber in Iraq, or the total eradication of life as we know it in Syria, has nothing to do with us.

Both he and Adam point to self-delusion as the culprit. Writing from the experience of having once rationalized the immoral actions of a close friend, Adam says he

received that wake-up call about my own capacity for self-deception over a decade ago. The bigger shock was not that I was able to be so willfully blind, but that so many of my friends continued to be in light of what the investigation uncovered. In fact, they doubled down, entrenching themselves in a persecution narrative which provided a useful framework for rationalizing away any hint of their own guilt.

I don’t have much to add so far that senpai hasn’t (as usual) said earlier and much better. From his discussion of the shortcomings of virtue ethics in Morality Competition, and the Firm, Joseph Heath brings up the criminology literature on violent subcultures:

In the 1950s David Matza and Gresham Sykes suggested that the reason deviant subcultures (such as youth gangs) are criminogenic is not that they encourage primary deviance with respect to the moral norms and values of society, but that they facilitate secondary deviance with respect to cognitive and epistemic norms governing the way situations are construed. … Instead of maintaining that violence itself is good, members of the group may instead convince themselves that they had no choice to act as they did, or that the victim had done something to deserve it … What distinguishes the criminal, according to this view, is not a motivational defect or an improper set of values, but rather a willingness to make self-serving use of excuses, in a way that neutralizes the force of conventional values.

One implication of these “techniques of neutralization,” as they’re known, is that proper behavior, for the most part, is not hidden knowledge that the deviant is ignorant of. In fact, social deviants usually “know” the right thing to do, but explain it away with reference to exceptional circumstances, or by construing the situation differently. Paraphrasing an example Heath often gives, when someone says they have “borrowed” an item they in fact stole, they are in essence substituting one normative violation (“do not steal”) with a different, less badcognitive violation (the generally accepted meaning of the word “borrowed”). He discusses other techniques of neutralization here. They include:

• Denial of responsibility
• Denial of injury
• Denial of the victim
• Condemnation of the condemner
• Appeal to higher loyalties
• “Everyone else is doing it”
• Entitlement

Reading Ryan’s post, I was left with the sense that he sees a situation’s influence over moral decision as inevitable, possibly even deterministic. He thus suggests abandoning the even greater delusion that we can avoid self-delusion, and instead focus on reforming the broader system that generates the situations that leave us most compromised.

The problem with this argument comes back to the eternal question asked by criminologists: Why isn’t there more crime than there actually is? Given the state’s limited enforcement capacity, society depends on most people, most of the time behaving morally, i.e. of following the rules. If self-delusion were truly the rule, rather than the exception, civilization would collapse under a crisis of endemic shirking.

Ironically, blaming the system is one of the most pernicious techniques of neutralization criminologists have identified. Indeed, saying “it’s systemic” is one of the easiest ways to deny responsibility for one’s action, and in turn make the problematic behavioral pattern all the more common and entrenched.

This is true not just with respect to crime stemming from war or systemic poverty, but applies equally well to white collar crime, too. When bankers engage in shady lending or regulatory arbitrage, for example, they often neutralize their bad behavior by blaming the systemic forces of market competition (“Everyone else is doing it”), or the duty to maximize shareholder value within the letter of the law (Appeal to higher loyalty). Over time this leads to juridification, the thickening of law books, as behaviors that were once enforced by unwritten social norms and voluntary self-restraint must be replaced by codified laws with explicit sanctions.

The upshot is that we shouldn’t stop holding people accountable for their actions just because the situation they somehow found themselves in made shirking their moral duties the path of least resistance. Indeed, just the opposite. Employing techniques of neutralization, as a self-serving behavior, should itself be an object of social sanction.

Moreover, it means there’s a chance we can preempt our techniques of neutralization by being aware of them, and by training ourselves in strategies that undercut self-delusion. That’s essentially what Joseph Heath argues business ethics courses should look like, rather than tired lessons in the history of moral philosophy. But in general it’s probably the sort of moral education we should all be subject to, starting as children.

This post originally appeared on Sweet Talk.

Immigrants for Trump?

My most recent piece in The Federalist argues that, just like “only Nixon could go to China,” maybe only Trump can reform immigration. Read the whole thing. Some excerpts: 

If you oppose Donald Trump for president, there’s a good chance it’s because of his extreme pronouncements against illegal immigration. But what if, in practice if not in sentiment, Trump is the only candidate in the running with a chance of passing comprehensive immigration reform? 

After all, we’ve lived through decades of presidents who nominally support immigration reform with little to show for it. … 

Most elections, people ask themselves the same thing: Which candidate comes closest to sharing my values and believing what I believe? How someone answers almost always indicates who that person will vote for, whether it’s over a single issue like immigration or a more broad set of commitments.

This is called expressive voting. The theory says casting your ballot has more in common with engaging in applause, communicating approval or affiliation, than a careful appraisal of whose election is most likely to advance your preferred policies….

In practice, a vote is not necessarily an endorsement of a particular person’s character or the moral values listed in a brochure. It’s not even an endorsement of the contents of a policy platform. A vote is simply a miniscule contribution toward determining who holds office, with all the internal constraints and second-order effects that implies.

As we’ve seen with Obama, expressive support for a policy is a weak indicator of whether that policy will pass. More paradoxically, however, why did he do something close to the opposite?

One theory says that Obama eyed immigration reform as the object of his second term and thus doubled down on deporting illegal immigrants, particularly convicted felons, in order to (a) set the stage for a path to citizenship, and (b) purchase credibility with nativist forces in Congress. George W. Bush likewise supported immigration reform his whole presidency, but was relentlessly stymied by these same factions. Although the border hawks in Congress also desire to see reform, they seem unable to trust anyone they perceive as sympathetic to amnesty, even a member of their own party.

Economists Tyler Cowen and Daniel Sutter formalized this dynamic in their 1998 paper, “Why Only Nixon Could Go to China.” As they point out, Nixon held close ties to the anti-China lobby and had built a tough, anti-communist reputation. But once in office, “Nixon shocked the public by opening diplomatic relations with China and traveling to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao.”

There are dozens of historical examples of right-wing politicians enacting left-wing policies, and vice versa. The reason, Cowen and Sutter argue, is that when a politician acts against his ideological commitments he credibly signals the desirability of a course of action to his end of the spectrum, and therefore wins bipartisan support.

The Nixon paradox tends to be more the exception than the rule, but perhaps it’s the case when it comes to immigration reform. As a foreign national myself, I have a personal interest in seeing visa applications expanded and processes streamlined, and for it to become easier to obtain a green card.

So while I abhor the halo of xenophobia that surrounds Trump and his zealous supporters, it’s not obvious to me that his presidency would be the worst outcome for advocates of more open borders. It is often forgotten, but Eisenhower’s two terms as president also saw the largest expansion of the Bracero guest worker program in its history, for which thousands of Mexican-Americans owe their naturalization.

The more general lesson is that politics is counter-intuitive. Instead of throwing support behind the candidate you most identify with in the abstract, a more rigorous approach considers the total effect the winning candidate is likely to have on future states of the world, intended or not.

So when it comes to immigration reform, I can’t help but be reminded of what Nixon said to Mao upon their first meeting: “The most important thing to note is that in America, at least this time, those on the Right can do what those on the Left can only talk about.”

Universal acceptance is theocratic

Modern proponents of universal acceptance have a natural affinity with traditional theocrats. Both prove themselves by their piety to an immutable creed, conveyed through zealous displays of righteousness. And both endeavor to inquisition any who depart from the flock.

The culture war demonstrates how much the ink on our Paretian contract has faded. But if traditional theocrats continue in their attempts to regulate virtue they cannot justly complain when proponents of universal acceptance force them to acquiesce in other settings, and vice versa. Defection from liberal neutrality opens a perfectionist Pandora’s Box that cuts in both directions.

There is no way around it. The essential heresy of freedom means we either live with imperfection or all burn at the stake.

- From The Essential Heresy of Freedom

Theocracy is perfectionism

In the history of human civilization, no large society has ever come close to achieving consensus, be it on values, life styles, or standards of taste. Yet there have been many that have tried. Today, they are known as theocracies.

By theocracy I do not mean a strict religious society, at least not in the usual sense of religious. Rather, I define theocracy as any society with a strong commitment to moral and political perfectionism. Perfectionism is a term that refers to any attempt to prescribe a theory of what constitutes “the good life,” as it was known by Aristotle. Perfectionism comes in many shapes and sizes, from suppression of so-called sexual deviants, to the soft paternalism of Michael Bloomberg.

Classical liberalism is in essence the repudiation of perfectionism. That’s why advocates of “libertarian paternalism” are still properly understood as illiberal even though they abstain from direct coercion. When policy has the aim of shaping our lives based on a bystander’s substantive theory of how one ought to live, be it who to love or how much soda to drink, it runs the principle of liberal neutrality through the shredder.

Read the rest of “The Essential Heresy of Freedom” at Sweet Talk.

My Framework

Cameron Harwick has a great write up of his macroscopic framework for thinking about the world. Not only is it insightful and well written, I agree with 90% of it.

Still, that 10% contains some major caveats. I’ll elaborate on our points of disagreement below. But please read his post first. 

10. Social norms are generally not rationally justifiable

I disagree.

I think of norms as valid types of reasons that we give to or ask from interlocutors to justify behavior. That makes them inherently rational. When this point is missed, the tendency is to demand for there to be a “why” behind the norm, when the role of norms is to be the “why” behind the action. 

Maybe this is what Cameron means when he writes that norms “must be accepted either tout court or on the basis of a mythology.” But you can see why, if norms are rational at their core, this phrasing is misleading. 

I have written on this point in a post called Sacred and Profane Reasons. In short, I think the notion that desires, preferences, values, and norms are non-rational or even irrational is not only mistaken, but has perverse consequences. Namely, it makes us instrumentalize imperatives, leading to pareto-inferior social orders. 

Nonetheless, I was disposed to this view for most of my thinking life, but after reading the exception book Following the Rules by Joseph Heath I now see that view as untenable. I’ve blogged many excerpts from that book, but a key one on this topic is available here.

I believe coming around to the rationality of norms has made my framework more coherent. To illustrate, consider Cameron’s three opening points:

1. The universe is intelligible.
   
2. The language faculty is the decisive difference between human and animal consciousness.
   
3. The fact-value distinction is irreducible. 

I fully agree with all of this. But moreover, I think these points, taken together, imply the rationality of norms—especially once norms are conceptualized as [cognitive] moves in a language game. As Cameron writes below point 3:

Perception is filtered and structured by pre-conscious judgements about the significance of various aspects. This judgement (“theory”) is not essentially different from value judgements which operate on the conscious level.

Thus if Cameron really views value judgments as non-rational, then he’s committed to all judgments being non-rational, which contradicts the intelligibility of the universe.

I have also written that calling an imperative or norm a “myth” (as Cameron does for liberal norms and natural rights) amounts to a category error. Assertions and imperatives stake very different types of validity claims. For example, I can assert the non-existence of God while still holding on to the imperative of ritual. Imperatives don’t carry an intrinsic epistemic burden. 

The confusion arises because ethical vocabularies using words like “ought to” and “rights” transform imperatives into assertions. But this doesn’t change the fact that the concept of “rights” is at core about expressing certain imperatives. It simply lets us express imperatives in a more flexible, natural way, 

In Theory and Practice Reconciled I went so far as to define progress as any process whereby our theoretical assertions come into alignment with our practical imperatives. In other words, progress equals cooperation without the assistance of pious fictions.

This brings us to point 4:

Variation and selection are necessary and sufficient to explain complex order.

Necessary, yes, but not sufficient. This one goes to the importance of language, and its role in normative / cultural reproduction. As communicative animals our societies are subject to much more directionality than can be explained by purely Darwinian types of selection. I came to this view from reading Joseph Heath, as well: The second and final chapters in Following the Rules; and his synopsis / defense of Habermas’ theory of discourse ethics.

Combining Cameron’s points 1 through 3, and amending points 10 and 4, we have basically arrived at the precepts of Hegel’s German Idealism. Or, as Robert Brandom prefers to call it, American Pragmatism.

Which brings me full circle to Cameron’s first point: The universe is intelligible. And yes, “on its face, this is a statement about the mind, not about the universe.“

In Defense of Status Competitions

As SpaceX successfully landed their 23 story tall Falcon-9 rocket in upright position, Jeff Bezos, the CEO Blue Origin (a rocket company which performed a superficially similar, but technically much less impressive feat days before), tweeted the following:

Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 22, 2015

Ouch! Within an instance, Bezos became the target of scorn for hundreds of fawning SpaceX and Elon Musk fans who derided Bezos’ “welcome to the club” comment as classless and back handed. Yet as my colleague Andrew noted at the time, “given that space exploration is mostly a billionaire dick measuring contest, petty squabbling is probably the best motivator we could ask for.”

I think this is exactly right, but I will go a big step further. “Dick measuring contests,” more generally known as status competitions, are often called “wasteful,” “zero-sum,” and “inefficient.” Yet even when those labels are technically accurate (and they often aren't—the private sector space race, for example, is clearly socially useful), another important truth can be simultaneously true: Status competitions are our main, if not only, source of meaning in the universe.

The Anxieties of Affluence

For all the wealth controlled by the three comma club, they turn out to be relatively poor when it comes to status goods. The reason relates to the inherent positionality of status. As in a game of King of the hill, moving up a rank necessarily means someone else must move down one, with the top-most players having the least to grab on to. Climbing from second-from-the-top to “King” is thus exponentially harder than moving from third to second, forth to third, and so on. And for whomever is King, with no one above to latch on to, the only way to truly secure one’s position against the penultimate scourge would be to invent a (proverbial) sky hook.

If not for this zero sum (at the psychosocial level) drama, what would drive Musk or Bezos to invest so heavily in their own (quite literal) sky hooks? Bezos tweet is at least evidence that Musk’s aeronautical successes have gotten under his skin—ahh, the anxieties of affluence. But all that means is one of the world’s most socially productive people has all the more reason to wake up in the morning.

In contrast, for a middle class and median IQ American to broadcast their status relative to their peers they can always buy a bigger house, drive a faster car, learn a new talent, travel to more exotic places, or give more to charity. That is, the space to broadcast ever greater social distinction is seemingly unbounded from the top. This was the nouveau riche mindset of Elon Musk circa 1999, when he bought (and later crashed) a million dollar McLaren F1. But today, as an ennuyé riche multi-billionaire, simply owning an awesome car is old-hat, cheap-talk, something any rich CEO can do. So now he builds and designs even better cars from first principles, incidentally spurring innovation as he literally pushes against the physical and technological boundaries of keepin’ up with the Bezos.

As the McClaren incident shows, for all his self-effacing talk about saving humanity from extinction even Musk is human, and in that humanity ultimately motivated by subterranean vanity. Bezos’ only sin was to let his vanity see the light. At least he punches up.

Darwin’s Wedge

Critics of the free market point to these sorts of positional arms races as the downfall of the neoclassical economists’ conception of efficiency. On the one (invisible) hand, competition and exchange can guide the butcher and baker to produce meat and bread for the common good. On the other hand, identical competitive forces can lead nations to the brink of nuclear war, marketing and political campaign budgets to balloon, and large SUVs to pollute the roads due to safety in relative size. That is, individual incentives need not be aligned to the collective good. (As I’ve argued before, classical liberals like Adam Smith understood this full well).

Richard Thaler influentially explained markets where individual and collective goals diverge in terms of what he calls Darwin’s Wedge (or what writer Jag Bhalla variously calls “dumb competition” and “spontaneous disorder”). The term comes from evolutionary biology, where wasteful arms races are ubiquitous. In the classic example, deer evolved large, cumbersome antlers because whenever a mutation made a buck’s rack marginally larger he was able to beat out and reproduce more than his sexual competitors, passing on the trait. But since what really matters is not the absolute size of the antlers, but their size relative to the local average, competition over the trait lead sexual selection to favor ever larger antlers up to the point where the marginal benefit of a bit larger antler equaled its marginal cost (i.e. until it was evolutionarily stable).

In economics MB=MC is the mark of optimality, but here it’s clear competition in some sense failed. Male deer must now go through life with awkward bone-branches extruding above their eyes, getting them caught on trees, and generally using caloric resources that might be better spent procreating. Had the ancestors of deer somehow colluded genetically to cap the size of antlers, or else to compete along some other, less handicapping marker of genetic fitness, the entire deer species would in some sense be made “better off” through greater numbers.

Optimally Boring

But alas, genes are selfish. As the famed selfish gene raconteur Richard Dawkins himself once wrote:

In a typical mature forest, the canopy can be thought of as an aerial meadow, just like a rolling grassland prairie, but raised on stilts. The canopy is gathering solar energy at much the same rate as a grassland prairie would. But a substantial proportion of the energy is ‘wasted’ by being fed straight into the stilts, which do nothing more useful than loft the ‘meadow’ high in the air, where it picks up exactly the same harvest of photons as it would – at far lower cost – if it were laid flat on the ground.

And this brings us face to face with the difference between a designed economy and an evolutionary economy. In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition – futile if we think in terms of a planned economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.

And how lucky we are that this is the case! I am grateful for hemlock forests, flamboyant peacock tails, and even moose, the silly looking cousin to deer. Were it not for the playing out of these so-called wasteful competitions, instead of a world of immense biodiversity and wonder, life on Earth would consist in a hyper-efficient photosynthesizing slime spread thinly across the globe.

Indeed, the self-defeating hunt for relative fitness, including social (and sexual) distinction, is responsible for bootstrapping literally every one of our perceptual and cognitive faculties, including our ability to appreciate aesthetics. If not for positional arms races around sexual selection, for instance, it is unfathomable that beauty would exist at all. All creativity, when not strictly for survival, is rooted (in the sense of ultimate causation) in status games. Even the fact that I’m writing this right now.

Beyond biology, the same story explains the artistic and cultural diversity created by market societies. While there are no doubt those who think the classical era represented a pinnacle of cultural achievement, a stationary point at which we should have made every effort to hold in perpetuity, this is nothing more than the golden age fallacy. Instead, the greatest classical musicians were only great because they superseded their predecessors and contemporaries by chasing the same ephemeral distinction as Elon Musk and the white-tailed deer, and as such were contributing to a self-defeating cultural churn that baked-in its own impermanence. This holds true today, as dozens of musical and artistic genres have been invented, grown steadily popular, and then “mainstream” and stale as their social cachet dries up.

Ironically, it is often those who are most critical of neoclassical economics that still seem wedded to its narrow and lifeless conception of optimality. Rather than moving beyond the Samuelsonian allocation paradigm to one based in creation, innovation and discovery, they thus double down on the dangerous illusion that positional status competitions can be easily muted or improved on by a central planner (the “design economy” referred to by Dawkins). While there’s obvious merit in blocking literal arms races, tweaking the tax deductibility of marketing expenses, and so on, I always worry whenever I read calls for a general luxury tax, or other excoriations of variability in the type and quality of consumables.

In the extreme, this thinking is what underlied the Marxist-Leninist ideology that transformed Mao’s China into a literal “Nation in Uniform.” A bit earlier in history it also motivated the Soviet government’s attempt and failure to make the luxury goods used by the petite bourgeoisie available to one and all. Rather than try to “eliminate” bourgeois values, in contrast, a capitalist society is healthy precisely because it enables a nation of rebels and the inequality that implies.

Resistance is Futile

One thing neoclassical economics did get right is non-satiation. Humans can never be fully satisfied: not with our mates, not with our station in life, nor with this final draft. However, this is not because we have neat, monotone preferences, but rather it’s because relative status has shaped every corner our psyche.

Buddhism rightly teaches that this dissatisfaction, called dukkha, pervades all of existence. As Buddha supposedly once said, “I have taught one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha.” But why? If resistance is futile, why not embrace it. Satisfaction is over-rated anyway. What person has ever achieved any kind of success or excellence without being tortured by anxiety, stress, or self-consciousness?

Of course Buddhists, like Stoics, would presumably question my definition of success. Maybe if we all meditated daily and simply learned to lower our expectations we’d learn to be satisfied with poverty. Yet we ran that experiment and we self-evidently were not.

Rather than be zen about our lack of zen, even Buddhist practices have ironically become (or was it not always?) their own dimension for pursuing social distinction. Don’t forget, Veblen’s magnum opus on status goods was called “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” and what could be a greater advertisement of belonging to the leisure class than the ability to sit absolutely idle for hours out of every day.

I don’t deny that meditation can be incredibly useful for reducing and controlling the stresses and anxieties of civilization. But if you’re a fan of meditation you should also not deny nor feel shame in the bourgeois half of your BoBo paradise. You are not above consumerism or hedonic treadmills. On the contrary, you are a leading light, an early adopter, an innovator in waste.

Otherwise, a monomaniacal focus on achieving nirvana (the state when all attachments and dukkha have melted away) simply becomes an agent-centric example of the social planner’s protoplasmic conception of optimality. At the same time, I recognize the futility in my own attempt to disillusion you, dear reader. As Mises wrote, human action is predicated on “the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate felt uneasiness.” It just turns out that that expectation is as mistaken as it is incorrigible.

So meditate if you have to, but don’t be afraid to day dream a little, too. It may fill you with anxiety, and it definitely won’t make you happy, but later in life you just might find yourself building a spaceship to Mars.

This essay originally appeared on Sweet Talk

The New Drone Registry Targets Consumers

The Department of Transportation just announced the creation of a national registry for drones. The rationale, according to public statements, is to aid in identifying owners and operators of errant drones, and close a “gap” in rule enforcement.

Left unmentioned was the fact that a drone registry already exists for commercial drones. While the FAA effectively prohibits commercial drone operations without specific approval, an exemption can be granted by petitioning through Section 333 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (FMRA). To complete the petition, an operator is required by law toregister the drone as a “small unmanned aircraft,” send in the original Bill of Sale from the manufacturer, and complete an affidavit of ownership (among other things).

Since commercial drones are already required to register with a national database, the new registry is therefore aimed squarely at consumers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts — the group of drone users who, up until now, had enjoyed relative freedom from the DoT and FAA’s regulatory indiscretions.

That freedom has been no accident. The FMRA, the current law of the land, explicitly restricts the FAA’s ability to “promulgate any rule and regulation” over recreational drones. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has thus had to cite the DoT’s broadly-defined “safety authority” when pressed on the registry’s legality.

Regulatory creep

Nevertheless, as Marc Scribner points out, the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) requires any new rule to solicit comments from the public and take them into consideration. This process often takes years, but even if a new rule were finalized tomorrow the act would still allow 60 days for affected parties to come into compliance. This is problematic for the DoT, which is scrambling to get the details of the registry in place by November 20th. The timing is crucial, since up to a million drones are expected to be sold in the US this holiday season alone.

The broadness of the DoT’s safety authority is clearly a recipe for serious regulatory creep, which is why these procedures are essential for providing at least a modicum of accountability. Otherwise, infinitely contorted interpretations of their mandate let the DoT become a de facto law maker, only minus all the messy business of democratic oversight.

But since the DoT and FAA are proceeding as if the time constraints don’t exist, it suggests they may be planning to evoke a “good cause” exemption to these important APA rules. As drone lawyer Jonathan Rupprecht explains:

[T]he APA allows the FAA to issue a direct final rule without any notice when the FAA has good cause. Good cause is when the rulemaking process is “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.” … “This exception can be used when an urgent and unsafe condition exists that must be addressed quickly, and there is not enough time to carry out Notice and Comment procedures without compromising safety.”

The idea that unregistered recreational drones are an imminent threat to public safety is, in a word, laughable. Yet more importantly, it runs contrary to the DoT and FAA’s own behavior, as they have allowed recreational drones to fly unregistered for years without exercising safety authority, and therefore materially contributed to their own deadline pressure.

These legal questions are just the tip of the iceberg. Suppose the FAA somehow finds the legal authority for a drone registry in time for Black Friday. That still does not make the registry itself anymore feasible on a practical level.  … 

Read the rest at ReadPlainText.com

Smart Device Paranoia

The following was originally written for TechLiberation.com:

The idea that the world needs further dumbing down was really the last thing on my mind. Yet this is exactly what Jay Stanley argues for in a recent post on Free Future, the ACLU tech blog.

Specifically, Stanley is concerned by the proliferation of “smart devices,” from smart homes to smart watches, and the enigmatic algorithms that power them. Exhibit A: The Volkswagen “smart control devices” designed to deliberately mis-measure diesel emissions. Far from an isolated case, Stanley extrapolates the Volkswagen scandal into a parable about the dangers of smart devices more generally, and calls for the recognition of “the virtue of dumbness”:

When we flip a coin, its dumbness is crucial. It doesn’t know that the visiting team is the massive underdog, that the captain’s sister just died of cancer, and that the coach is at risk of losing his job. It’s the coin’s very dumbness that makes everyone turn to it as a decider. … But imagine the referee has replaced it with a computer programmed to perform a virtual coin flip. There’s a reason we recoil at that idea. If we were ever to trust a computer with such a task, it would only be after a thorough examination of the computer’s code, mainly to find out whether the computer’s decision is based on “knowledge” of some kind, or whether it is blind as it should be.

While recoiling is a bit melodramatic, it’s clear from this that “dumbness” is not even the key issue at stake. What Stanley is really concerned about is biasedness or partiality (what he dubs “neutrality anxiety”), which is not unique to “dumb” devices like coins, nor is the opacity. A physical coin can be biased, a programmed coin can be fair, and at first glance the fairness of a physical coin is not really anymore obvious.

Yet this is the argument Stanley uses to justify his proposed requirement that all smart device code be open to the public for scrutiny going forward. Based on a knee-jerk commitment to transparency, he gives zero weight to the social benefit of allowing software creators a level of trade secrecy, especially as a potential substitute to patent and copyright protections. This is all the more ironic, given that Volkswagen used existing copyright law to hide its own malfeasance.

More importantly, the idea that the only way to check a virtual coin is to look at the source code is a serious non-sequitur. After all, in-use testing was how Volkswagen was actually caught in the end. What matters, in other words, is how the coin behaves in large and varied samples. In either the virtual or physical case, the best and least intrusive way to check a coin is to simply do thousands of flips. But what takes hours with a dumb coin takes a fraction of a second with a virtual coin. So I know which I prefer.

An hour versus a second may seem like a trivial advantage, but as an object or problem becomes more complex the opacity and limitations of “dumb” things only grow. Tom Brady’s “dumb” football is a case in point. After deflategate, I have much more confidence in the unbiasedness of the virtual ball in Madden. And to eliminate any doubt, I can once again run simulations – a standard practice among video game designers. This is what allows balance to be achieved in complex, asymmetrical video game maps, for example, while American football is stuck with a rectangle and switching ends at half-time.

In other words, despite Stanley’s repeated assertion that smart devices inevitably sacrifice equity for ruthless efficiency (like a hypothetical traffic light that turns green when it detects surgeons and corporate VPs), embedding algorithms is a demonstrably useful tool for achieving equity in the face of complexity that mirrors the real world. Think, for instance, of the algorithms that draw congressional districts to eliminate gerrymandering.

Yet even if smart devices and algorithms can improve both efficiency and equity, nonetheless they require a dose of human intention and therein lies the danger. Or does it?

Imagine a person, running late for something crucial, sitting at a seemingly interminable red light getting tense and angry. Today he may rail at his bad luck and at the universe, but in the future he will feel he’s the victim of a mind—and of whatever political entities are responsible for the shape of that signal’s logic.

In this future world of omnipresent agency, Stanley essentially imagines a pandemic of paranoid schizophrenia, where conspiracies lurk in every corner, and strings of bad luck are interpreted as punishment by the puppet masters. But this seems to get things exactly backwards. Smart devices are useful precisely because they remove agency, both in terms our personal cognitive effort (like when the lights turn on as you enter a room), and in terms of discretionary influence over our lives.

In this respect, one of Stanley’s own examples directly contradicts his thesis. He points to

an award-winning image of a Gaza City funeral procession, which was challenged due to manual adjustments the photographer made to its tone. I suspect that if the adjustments had been made automatically by his camera (being today little more than a specialized computer), the photo would not have been questioned.

Exactly! The smart focus and light balance of a modern point and click camera not only makes us all better photographers, but it removes worry of unfair and manipulative human input. Afterall, before normal traffic lights was the traffic guard, who let drivers through at his or her discretion. The move to automated lights condensed that human agency to the point of initial creation, thus dramatically reducing the potential for abuse. If smart devices mean we can automatically detect an ambulance or adjust camera aperture, it’s precisely the same sort of improvement.

The fact is that a benign rationality is already replete in the world around us, embedded not just in our technology, but also in our laws and institutions. Externalizing intelligence into rules and structures is the stuff of civilization – what’s called “extended cognition”. In the words of philosopher Andy Clark:

Advanced cognition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex social structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political and institutional constraints.

And yet we go through life without constantly looking over our shoulders. This is because we have adapted to the point where we are happily ignorant of the intelligence surrounding us. The hiddenness is a feature, not a bug, as it allows our attention to move on to more pressing things.

Critics of new technology always fail to appreciate this adaptability of human beings, implicitly answering 21st century thought experiments with 20th century prejudices. The enduring lesson of extended cognition is that smart devices promise to make – not just our stuff – but us, as living creatures, in a very real way more intelligent, expanding our own capabilities rather than subordinating us to the whim of invisible others.

To that end, I can’t help be reminded of the tagline at TechLiberation.com: “The problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.”

The Fall of Semiotics

This is the title of my favourite chapter in Joseph Heath’s, Following the Rules. It’s about so much more than the problems with semiotics. It’s the clearest articulation I’ve ever read of the problems with meaning as reference, and how combining pragmatism with a linguistic twist offers a strong alternative explanation of intentionality, normativity and meaning in general. Anyone interested in philosophy should read it. The excerpt is at the link above – the whole book is available here as a pdf.