We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Even I had believed the oft repeated mantra that integrated circuits were a result of a spinoff of the Moon Race. According to George Guilder, at the end of Chapter 5 of “Microcosm”:
Like TI before it, Fairchild achieved its breakthroughs with virtually no government assistance while its largest competitors — chiefly the vacuum tube companies — were receiving collectively hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But when the government needed a way to miniaturize the circuitry for its Minuteman missiles and its space flights, it did not use micromodules or any of the other exotic technologies it had subsidized. It turned first to Fairchild rather than to its early favorites and beneficiaries. Fairchild’s lack of military entanglement in the late fifties finally allowed the company to get the bulk of military and aerospace contracts in the early 1960s.
I begin to wonder if the government is actually responsible for the introduction of anything whatever. About the only thing left are a few DARPA projects and on most of those, other than the Internet itself, it is too early to tell.
This (which I just had trouble getting back to – it was linked to from here today, top left) is very strange:
The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.
Very strange because it seems to me that with about five seconds thought one can easily arrive at an evolutionary advantage associated with a belief in eternal life, and accordingly an evolutionary explanation of it.
Tribes of ancient humans often battled each other to death – literally to death, the losers being completely wiped out – and in these battles, a willingness to die might be the difference between victory and defeat, between your gene pool spreading, and your gene pool being wiped out.
Tons of stuff has been written about the prisoner’s dilemma associated with infantry battles. If you all stand together and fight, your side has its best chance of winning. Anyone breaking and running exposes all others to annihilation. Etcetera. Military cultures ancient and modern were and are suffused with ideas of honour and courage and self-sacrifice, all of which resulted and result in everyone in your army standing firm and holding the line.
In such a world, a belief in some kind of Valhalla of dead heroes is pretty much a certainty. Even now, effective military units do everything they can to ensure that their heroic dead-in-battle are treated with tremendous solemnity and never forgotten, giving them eternal life of a limited kind, and pour encourager les autres. Such notions have even greater force if eternal life is literally what everyone in the front line of battle believes in. I am amazed, absolutely amazed, that any academic could be unaware of such notions, or if aware, then unpersuaded.
It’s as if this guy Scott Atran has never seen a war memorial, and never even read The Selfish Gene, which is all about how our selfish genes cause us, in certain circumstances, to become raging altruists, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of society.
You do not have to have to have any particular view of the truth of religion in order to see the force of this explanation. As an atheist, I am obviously on the look out for evolutionary explanations of the phenomenon of religious belief, given that I don’t think such beliefs are correct – so why do people persist in believing them or in their absence, invent them? But religious people often use such genetically-enhanced-altruism notions to argue for religion, on consequentialist grounds. In a similar spirit they also argue, perhaps rightly, that religious people are more inclined to have children, and hence to outbreed us atheists, childbirth being, for a woman, not unlike taking part in a battle, especially in earlier centuries. Religion makes your society stronger, because it make you more willing to sacrifice yourself for the collective!
Notice that if you didn’t care at all about the collective in the first place, the argument in the previous sentence would have no force for you.
It’s somewhat off topic, but this is one of the many reasons why I am, although an admirer of her in many ways, not a devotee of Ayn Rand. Her stated plan of saving the world by abolishing altruism flies in the face of the known facts of human nature. The trick is to do altruism well, not to try to abolish it. Which is easier said than done, as our current economic troubles illustrate well, and which is actually, I would argue, what most of Ayn Rand’s stories and heroic characters were really all about, despite what she and they insisted on telling us.
It is tempting to imagine that a cause is so important to Mankind, so essential, that only a total idiot could object to coercing one’s fellows into paying for said cause. And when it comes to science funding, even the most seemingly rational people fall prey to the notion that only wicked, selfish people, or religious nutters, could object to this funding. Take a recent article by Steven Mirsky, who writes for Scientific American:
“You’re not supposed to kick a guy when he’s down. Of course, in reality, when he’s down is the perfect time to kick him. He’s closer to your feet, for one thing. But the particular kicking I have in mind should be thought of as tough love. These kicks at the freshly defeated McCain-Palin ticket, as I write in early November, are an attempt to knock some sense back into the group of my fellow Americans who seem determined to ignore or even denigrate valuable scientific research because it’s something outside the realm of Joe the Plumber’s daily activities.”
Ah yes, Joe the Plumber, the man who achieved prominence by asking The Community Organiser about the latter’s plans to seize wealth from productive folk and “spread it around”. What Mr Mirsky goes on to do is mock the comments of the McCain/Palin team who had mocked examples of high tax funding of various projects they think were silly or wasteful. Mr Mirsky gets very shirty about this, regarding the projects as obviously beneficial, and only an old fart like McCain and his crazy VP running mate could disagree.
The rest of the article lays out examples of how certain projects that Mr Mirsky thinks are useful were mocked by the GOP, and by extension, other know-nothings more concerned about protecting their wallets. But Mr Mirsky misses a rather large point. Which is that even if a science project is valuable, the question of value is meaningless unless one asks: of value to whom and in the eyes of whom? What Mr Mirsky want to do is to sustitute his judgement of what is right to spend money on for that of others spending their own money. No doubt he fears that without tax funding, financial support for science will dry up – a very dubious assumption, to put it mildly.
Timothy Sandefur – who is on a roll at the moment – has a collection of essays taking on the argument that science funding has to be, or should be, done at the expense of taxpayers. I urge regulars here who are interested to read all of Tim’s pieces. They are the most comprehensive demolition job on such arguments that I have read for some time.
The trouble with people who do not think much in terms of principles, but who just take a sort of techno-managerialist view of public affairs, is that they cannot see why the great unwashed should object to paying for biotech research, or space flight, etc. And as I mentioned the other day, with the world of the arts, it is the same. It is just assumed by some folk that because a painting by Titian or Andy Warhol is marvellous, that the taxpayer should consider his duty to pay for it. The danger in such cases is when the expenditures are relatively small compared to the total size of public spending: the temptation is to shrug one’s shoulders and wonder why making a fuss is necessary. Well, if we cannot take an axe to the supposedly more “benign” aspects of public spending, it will never be possible to make the broader philosophical case for reducing the state significantly.
As a side observation, the sneering, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone of Mr Mirsky puts me in mind of Thomas Sowell’s recent superb attack on that sort of mindset, in his book, The Vision of The Anointed.
I have just been reading an article in this month’s Scientific American that has me smiling from ear to ear. One of the difficult problems for ‘strong nanotechnology’ has been cracked: how do you handle C3I with millions or billions of nanoassemblers? How do you program them? How do you tell them when to start and stop or do something different? How do they report problems, lack of raw materials, whatever?
University of California Berkeley physicist Dr. Alex Zettl and colleagues have built nanoscale radio receivers and transmitters using a single buckeytube each. One tube performs all the actions of an AM radio. Antenna. Tuner. Amplifier. Demodulator. Best of all this is not just theory. It already works well enough to communicate to and from the human scale at this primitive stage of development.
I might add that if you can turn radio waves into mechanical energy at the nanoscale, then you also have another tool in the nanoparts box for feeding energy to nanosystems.
This is big.
Yesterday, while I was cleaning my flat (you asking for a medal, Ed?), I had the TV on in the background and it was running a series of programmes via the Horizon team at the BBC about various natural disasters, such as earthquakes, killer giant waves and tsunamis. In the latter case, the programme speculated that if there was a volcanic eruption in one of the islands in the group known as the Canaries, off the African coast, that it would trigger a huge slide of rock into the ocean, therby causing a massive wave, which would then run left across to the Eastern seaboard of North America, probably parts of the Caribbean also, annihilating all in its path. New York, Balimore, Miami, etc would be obliterated.
This guy is not terribly convinced by the thesis. But suppose for a second that the direst predictions are accurate. Part of the theory is that the eruption will be so violent because of the enormous pressure that is building up inside the active volcano. So a question that occured to me was why doesn’t a team of geologists and engineers try to bore several large holes in the side of the volcano and let some of the pent-up magma come out, in a fairly controlled way?
I am not a scientist so feel free to mock this idea, but it occurs to me that given all the facts presented, this sort of idea might be a goer. I’d be interested to know what people think. There might be other techical “fixes” that spring to mind.
Some time ago, I asked here, non-rhetorically: What use is handwriting?, and I got a lot of very useful answers, such as that techies can communicate very well if they can hand-write, in ways that just wouldn’t work with any gadget more complicated than a pencil or felt-tip pen. By attaching labels to hastily sketched diagrams or graphs, for instance.
Now, for similarly pedagogical reasons I ask: What use is algebra? I refer to the most primitive sort of algebra, where you merely tiptoe into the swamp of abstraction and say things like: if a is 2 and b is 4, then what is a plus 2b? What is the specific value of writing out algebraic equations with small letters in them, and then either substituting particular values for those letters, or else deducing some of those values? Why go into letters, if all you then do is get out of them again, which seems to be the rule when you first start out at algebra.
I’m guessing – guessing because it is decades since I myself did any of this – that there is value to an equation, as a generalisation, quite lacking in the mere specifics of what happens in the particular case when a is 2 and b is 4. An equation specifies a general relationship, and one that is often worth understanding, and impossible to understand without this on-the-face-of-it peculiar and regressive diversion out of arithmetic and back into mere letters. But can the commentariat rephrase, correct, expand on that?
Ideally, they would do this in a way that might convince a twelve-year-old whose ambition is to get rich – perhaps by being a Something in The City (assuming there still is a City for him to be a Something in when he reaches his twenties) – and who now gets up before 6am every morning to do a paper round. By the time I get around to teaching him things like algebra, he is tired. What’s the point of this?, he asks. I would like to be able to give him some better answers than I have managed so far. I both like and admire this boy, and would really like him to do well.
We meet every Tuesday night, so my next chance to pass on such things will be tomorrow evening.
UPDATE Tuesday lunchtime: Many thanks for all the comments, most useful. Lots to pass on and to think about, and not just this evening.
I just watched this BBC Horizon programme, about cannabis.
Many who favour the legalisation of cannabis base their case on the claim that cannabis is less harmful than is widely assumed. It is less bad than you think, they say, in fact very good. For me, the case for legalisation does not depend on any claim about riskiness or lack of it, but rather on the idea that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves about the risks they take, and about how pleasurable the pleasures are that they take these risks to enjoy. Not myself having any plans to take cannabis, I have tended to remain rather ignorant of the details of the riskiness argument, because I just do not think that this is what matters, any more than I favour denationalised washing machine businesses (which I do), because of and following long years spent studying the internal workings of washing machines.
But being a libertarian, I inevitably come across screeds about cannabis, of which this splendid rant (linked to from here yesterday by Johnathan Pearce) is a fine example. Spurred on by this rant, I watch the BBC show. I dozzed off during some of it, but still learned quite a lot. → Continue reading: Late night thoughts about cannabis
I have never felt the urge to buy an iPod as I am really not that interested in music-on-the-move, but maybe it is time for me to reconsider… I feel another overdue hunting trip to Central Europe coming on.
Life is always better when I have a book on the go which I can hardly wait to get back to. The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins is not quite going to be that for me. Too complicated. Not central enough to the things I happen now to be interested in, probably because I already agree with it far too completely for it to grab me by the throat. But, I have recently been dipping into this book, having finally got hold of a cheap second-hand copy of it, and yesterday I came across an argument in it which I found familiar, but in another context.
Dawkins criticises Bishop Hugh Montefiore (on page 38 of my 1991 Penguin paperback edition) for again and again resorting to the argument that he just cannot believe that this or that complex organ or organism could possibly have evolved. → Continue reading: Arguments from incredulity
Excellent, a new skycar prototype will be travelling from London to Timbuctoo, via ground and air. There is a nostalgic coolness about skycars as they reflect a legacy future where 1940s starlets are rescued by a world of modern skyscrapers and heroes in jetpacks. In reality, the car will be driven by the SAS and the Foreign Office provides its doleful advice that adventures are ‘dangerous’. Couldn’t they go to Cleethorpes instead and why can’t we force them to, thinks the man from the FO?
As well as natural barriers, the team has been warned about the threat of kidnap in volatile parts of Africa and the car will have to negotiate a minefield in Mauretania – “I might fly that one,” said 45-year-old expedition leader Neil Laughton.
When the need for flight arises – estimated to be for 40% of the journey – a ParaWing, a parachute of the type used by paragliders, will be dragged behind the modified off-road buggy and the propeller on the back of the vehicle will boost the Skycar down whatever happens to be serving as an improvised runway. When it reaches 45mph, enough lift should be generated to get the car airborne, its weight supported only by “a silk handkerchief, a large one at that”, said Laughton.
The adventure is referred to as an element of “mad Brits“, another phrase redolent of passing qualities. More details on the car can be found here, though one must accept that not all prototypes will be stylish Italian jobs. This one looks more like a souped up Dune buggy.
Following on from my post earlier about what sort of things might be regarded as wrong or intolerable by future generations that are widely done now, this book by David Friedman (son of Milton F), which looks at potential future legal, scientific and ethical controversies, looks interesting. For instance, Friedman asks what might happen to inheritance wrangles where the “deceased” is in fact held in cryonic suspension and hence not technically dead, as might be defined in a specific legal code. Some of this stuff might appear pure science fiction, but SF has a way of sometimes becoming reality. After all, the very fact that many people can afford to not use animal products such as leather has been made possible by synthetic fibres and materials such as plastic, something that did not exist about 100 years ago. Other developments could also make certain moral controversies either irrelevant or shift the boundaries markedly, or raise controversies that no-one has to contend with now.
On the dystopian side, the developments going on in IT might raise such worries about how the state might try to do things like implant computer chips into people’s bodies as a sort of ID system. Only the innocent have anything to fear…
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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