Category Archives: Science & Tech

Science and the Alt-Right

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One of the stranger aspects of some corners of the alt-right is the hostility to science. I don’t want to say it is a rejection of science, but something like an extreme skepticism about it. I was reminded of this reading Vox Day’s 16-point manifesto the other day. The part that jumped out to me is this one:

The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific.

Vox seems to be trying very hard to declare himself the Pope of the alt-right so perhaps he is just getting carried away with himself with these posts, but he has made a big deal about being an anti-evolutionists that regularly kits himself out in the Don Quixote suit and runs around tilting at imaginary concepts. Usually, people opposed to evolution are coming at it from the perspective of self-styled Christians¹. That’s not the case with Vox as you see in this post titled The Crisis in Science.

There is no crisis in science. The soft sciences like psychology and sociology are certainly in trouble, but people have known that for a very long time. It’s not just the bogus studies either. It is the hard sciences, particularly biology, that are collapsing soft sciences like psychology. Once you arrive at a biochemical explanation for mental illness, there’s no need for guys in turtlenecks, smoking pipes and asking about your mother. Genetics is rendering many of the soft sciences meaningless, by exploding blank slatism.

The replication crisis that is bedeviling the soft science is not a problem in chemistry, physics or even biology where speculation is more common. The reason there is a replication crisis is the empirically minded from the hard sciences grew tired of the bullshit coming from the sociology department, showing up in the news as real science. It is science policing itself by enforcing the rules of science on those who seek to appropriate science for their own ends. This is a normal part of the scientific process.

What’s puzzling about the anti-science elements on the alt-right is they are not really motivated by religion, like we see with most Progressives. Rejecting science because it violates your deeply held beliefs is not irrational. It may be wrong, but it is not irrational. The anti-science people in the alt-right seem to be responding to the identity politics of the Left, which often waves the flag of science to justify their crackpot ideas. Since it takes too long to refute the Progressive pseudo-science, some on the alt-right simply reject science, or at least large parts of it.

This is to some degree understandable, as the alt-right is mostly a reaction to the extremism of the social justice movement. The unhinged assault on normalcy is often dressed up in the language of science. A degenerate in a sundress, who wants to watch your daughter pee, is excused as transgender, as if such a thing exists. People with Ph.D’s step forward to tell us how biological sex is a social construct and that there are unlimited number of “non-binary identities.” It perfectly understandable that normal people will get a little skeptical of scientists.

The interesting part of this is that big part of the alt-right is rooted in the growing fields of genetics, evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences. Guys like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire have been intellectual heavy weights of the movement for two decades, largely due to popularizing research in the cognitive sciences that contradict the Progressive faith. More than a few evolution guys have been “Watsoned” for promoting ideas from evolutionary biology.  Frankly, there would not be Vox Day if not for the science guys and their wild tales about evolution.

That’s the other interesting strangeness about the thing the press is now calling the alt-right. There’s a wide diversity of opinion within it and a wide diversity of opinion about what it is. Greg Cochran, I’m guessing, would laugh off the assertions of Vox Day, but guys like Richard Spencer would dismiss people like Razib Khan. Yet, there would be broad agreement among all of them when it comes to critiquing the prevailing orthodoxy. That suggests the anti-science stuff is just a way to make magic fit reality. Self-delusion is powerful stuff and not always a bad thing.

¹I’m sympathetic to creationist because they are harmless and their beliefs tend toward the sort of positive outcomes that make for a healthy Western society. You can be a great engineer and still believe Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, I have no tolerance for intelligent design people. They paganize the Christian concept of God, turning him into a fickle teenager, who alters the laws of nature for no reason. Intelligent design is not just anti-science, it is anti-Christian.

Misinformation Age

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In the olden thymes it was much more difficult to be misinformed than it is today, simply due to the fact that information flowed much more slowly that we see today. That meant stupid ideas and nonsense passed from person to person at the speed of foot, not the speed of light. Festus could truly believe that eating cow dung cured gout, but he was not at a university writing papers on it. Those papers were not being spread around the internet. He was simply boring his family with his crackpot ideas and maybe some neighbors.

The flip side of this, of course, is people were much less informed about the world than today for the same reasons. Literacy rates rocketed up with the advent of cheap printed material, but information still moved slowly. You can pack a lot of information in a book, but it still must be toted from one reader to another. It’s entirely possible that the newly literate of the 18th century were not much more informed about the world than the illiterate of the 15th century. Farmer John in colonial Virginia would know more about the Bible and local politics than Farmer Aethelred in the 15th century, but maybe not that much more.

We don’t think about mass misinformation very much today, but maybe we should think about it. That came to mind what I stumbled upon this posting the other day.

Women are predisposed by their genetics to have affairs as “back-up plans'” if their relationships fail, according to a research paper.

Scientists at the University of Texas say they are challenging the assumption that humans have evolved to have monogamous relationships.

The team’s research has put forward the “mate-switching-hypothesis” which says humans have evolved to keep testing their relationships and looking for better long-term options.

The senior author of the research, Dr David Buss, told the Sunday Times: “Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating patterns of humans.

“Breaking up with one partner and mating with another may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans.”

For our distant ancestors – when disease, poor diet and minimal healthcare meant that few people lived past 30 – looking for a more suitable partner was necessary, researchers assert.

Despite anecdotal claims about cheatng, no study has shown that humans are predisposed to monogamy or non-monogamy.

A study carried out by Rafael Wlodarski and a team of researchers at Oxford University looking into infidelity found a correlation between the length of a individual’s ring finger and the likelihood that they would cheat on a partner.

However, they stressed that they could not find a causal link.

I looked up the lead author and he is not a quack working on TV so this is supposed to be accepted as legitimate science. Just in case the reporter got the facts wrong, which is often the case, I looked up the source paper. The highlighted parts of the quote are the important bits. There have been studies using real science that strongly suggest humans in Europe are predisposed to monogamy. Genetic testing reveals that a tiny percentage of children are the result of adulterous relations and this is data going back centuries.

One could argue, and the paper does leave this open, that women scheme to have a ready replacement in case their husbands get eaten by a saber tooth. That’s not implausible and it would certainly show up in the gene pool as a heritable trait if it were in fact an adaptation.You could also claim that women secretly scheme to have an in-ground pool or a vacation to the beach. This sort of “research” is no longer science and well into idle speculation and propaganda.

This is also the sort of nonsense that is pleasing to the managerial elite because their religion tells them that monogamy and stable families are bad for the peasants. They may live like Victorians, but you people should give up your quaint notions of family, fidelity and morality, cause science!. This ties in with the assertion by feminists that women should have unlimited sex partners. A new movie called Bridget Jones’s Baby, which features a pregnant woman with three potential fathers of her baby, is the sort of idealized woman our betters imagine for your daughter.

That brings us back to where we started. In an age when information was scarce, misinformation was scarce. In an age where information is voluminous and moves at light speed, the same is true of the nonsense, which is much easier to produce in volume. The result is a misinformation age that erodes trust in authority because over time even the most naive grows cynical about what they see in the media. How many junk science stories like the one referenced here get posted before people think science is nonsense?

It’s not just science. The news media has collapsed under an avalanche of nonsense they created. No one believes anything they see reported. Government has approval rates in the teens. We are well into becoming a low-trust society that can only be held together by force. A big cause of that is the daily barrage of nonsense we get through the media. There used to be a time when the responsible made an effort to stem the flow of nonsense, but that’s no more. Instead, we live in a misinformation age.

It’s not going to end well.

Voluntary Obsolescence

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Way back in the olden thymes, I was chatting with an acquaintance, who owned a number of small niche publications. Each had five to ten thousand subscribers, who paid $50 per year for the publication. These were monthly hobbyist type things. Printing, postage and content costs ate up most of his revenue, but he was still able to take an upper middle-class salary from the business. He was never going to get rich from it, but he liked the action and it let him turn hobbies into a nice career.

At the time, he was telling me about his plan to move all of his magazines to the web. This was in the 90’s so it was the new thing. Newspapers and magazines were putting up websites hoping to reach a broader audience. He was very excited about it because he saw the cost savings. Printing and postage were his big line items so going digital meant a potential windfall. I remember asking him how he expected to charge people when he was putting his content on-line free of charge. He responded, “Hits. We’ll get more hits and then we can sell advertising.”

At that point I knew he and many others were about to commit suicide. I’ve been inside many banks and none of them ever accepted hits or site traffic as payment. The people rushing to shovel their content on-line simply had no idea why they were rushing to give their product away, but they were sure it was going to be glorious. The result has been the death of newspapers and many magazines. The New York Times, for example, loses money every quarter and only survives because a Mexican billionaire wants access to the American ruling class.

I get that same feeling when people talk about Uber and self-driving cars. From the perspective of an outsider, I see no reason why cities would sanction Uber or any of the other off-the-book taxi services. There’s nothing in it for the municipality. Similarly, why would any of the car companies sign off on robot cars? There’s no advantage for them to do it. Of course, taxi fleets of self-driving cars is about the nuttiest thing imaginable as it just means the death of a number of industries, namely car makers and car insurance firms.

Think about it. Your car sits unused most of the time. You take it to work where it sits all day. Then you take it home where it sits all night. You have a car for convenience, mostly. Pubic transportation,where available, is not good for running errands, going shopping or other tasks. Cabs are fine for some of it, but hailing a cab in the rain sucks compared to walking into the parking garage to get into your car. There’s a reason why rich people have car services and limos. They get the flexibility of their own vehicle with the convenience of a taxi service.

Now imagine that anywhere you are you can order up a Johnny Cab, having it pick you up and take you where you wish, at a low fee. All you do is pull out the phone and order it up and it comes by to haul you to work or take you to the market. It sounds wonderful, especially for old people and alcoholics. The question is, why own a car when you can get the service of a car, without having to own it, store it and maintain it? Hobbyists would still want a sports car or off-road vehicle, but most people have cars for practical purposes only.

Do a little math and you see that you use maybe ten percent of your car’s useful capacity. The hour commute to work and the hour home means two hours out of a day. Throw in some driving on the weekend and 90% of the time your car is sitting idle. Even assuming inefficiency, one care could serve the needs of five people, which means a world of Johnny Cabs is a world with about 80% fewer cars. That means 80% fewer car sales for the car makers. It also means 80% fewer insurance polices, tax stickers and all the other things that are based on people owning cars.

If you are in the car business, the plan should be simple. Buy enough politicians to kill off Uber and the robot car people. For their part, the pols should require little bribing as it is in their interest to kill the robot cars too. Instead, all of the car makers are announcing plans to produce robot cars aimed at the for-hire business. Uber is doing a test run in Pittsburgh with a fleet of driverless cars. Like those newspaper and magazine guys of the 90’s, the transportation industry is fashioning a noose for themselves out the new technology, so they can destroy themselves. Karl Marx must be laughing in Hell right now.

The Next Frontier

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Genetics, particularly gene therapy is the one area of science that could offer a species altering breakthrough. Flying electric cars would be a great, but they are a long way from reality. In fact, they may never be reality due to issues like battery technology. Most of what science is going to bring mankind over the next couple of generations is better, faster cheaper versions of the stuff we already have now. Think air travel over the last fifty years. The planes are better and faster, but otherwise the same as they were in the 50’s.

That’s not the case with genetic engineering. Here we could very well see some species altering technology. Imagine medicine being able to “fix” certain common genetic defects, thus eliminating the defect from future generations. Imagine the impact of gene therapy that causes the body’s immune system to destroy cancer cells. Cancer kills a lot of people long before old age so “curing” cancer would be an enormous change for humanity. There’s also the application in the area of mental health. Imagine curing forms of mental illness like schizophrenia.

Right now, medicine is the most likely to benefit from genetic technology, but that’s not the end of it. Isolating genes for certain traits like height and eye color is well within reach and well within the realm of things that could be altered in embryos. Designer babies sounds horrible, but imagine your doctor telling you that for a reasonable fee, he can make sure your kid is above average in height. It’s not hard to see how people would do it and science would offer it. No one wants their kid to be a stumpy troll, even if the parents are stumpy trolls.

Once you start tinkering or even think about tinkering, the idea of decanting super-human babies joins the conversation. If you can make sure your kid is six foot or taller, why not go for seven or eight feet? That way, junior can look forward to a career as a basketball player. While you’re at it, give him sprinter’s speed and the eyesight of an eagle. The leap from a small change that eradicates a known defect to changes that create super-babies is not a big one, at least from an ethical point of view.

The problem is we quickly run into another barrier and that’s the complexity. Humans are very complicated machines. In fact, we are so complicated that we really don’t know how much of the human body works. Just look at diet and exercise. We sort of think that diet and exercise habits have an impact on overall health and longevity, but we don’t know. That’s why there are a bazillion opinions on the subject. It’s why every study you can find on the topic of diet, for example, has a contradictory study.

This story the other day about the challenges of virtual reality is a great reminder that we know very little about how the human mind works in even the most basic sense. Humans have been screwing around with virtual reality gadgets for a long time, mostly for gaming and simulations. The theory sounds good. Replicate the inputs of reality and the brain gets tricked into thinking it is in the imaginary world. The trouble is, it really does not get tricked. In fact, the better the simulation the worse the results.

The reason is the brain is a wildly complex and supple bit of biology that processes massive amounts of information in more than three dimensions, faster than anything we can create in the lab. The human mind appears to develop or come equipped with a model of the world, right down to little things like how fast an odor should travel from the source to your nose. It’s how those clever optical illusions you see on-line work. They rely on the brain anticipating, based on known patterns. As inputs come in the brain is a click ahead, anticipating what should be coming next. We think.

Then there is the concept of consciousness, which remains a baffling thing for science. Watch a puppy bark at a mirror and you know that self-awareness is a real thing that not all creatures possess equally, but how that works is unknown. Throw in something like self-deception that theoretically should not exist, but clearly does exist, and we are far away from the shore and into uncharted ocean. Tweaking  a gene to make for a taller person could result in madness as the brain is still wired for a short person, thus busting up the person mental model of the world that includes them as a short person.

Even so, CRISPR technology could be the great breakthrough that alters the human species, but it will be a long slog between making better corn and making super babies. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that the complexity barrier between the most rudimentary tinkering and engineered babies is so thick there’s no way for science to breech it. There’s also a cost-benefit component. Selecting for green eyes has a market, but selecting for super-intelligent giants that are prone to madness probably has no market.

All in all, if you are inclined to think about how humanity destroys itself, the place to start is genetics. If you are a wild-eyed futurist anxious to live forever or meld with robots, that’s never going to happen, but you can dream about it within the realm of genetics. More likely, the result is healthier, more robust people in the not so distant future. Imagine old age without debilitating disease and degenerating tissue.  You still age and die, but it is much more pleasant physiologically. That alone would alter how we think of ourselves as a species.

The Reformation

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This post on Marginal Revolution titled “In which ways is today’s world like the Reformation?” caught my attention.

I can think of a few reasons:

1. Many of the structures in places are perceived as failing, even though in absolute terms they are not obviously doing worse than previous times.

2. There is a rise in nationalist sentiment and a semi-cosmopolitan ethic is starting to lose influence.

3. The chance of violent conflict is rising.

4. Dialogue is becoming more polarized and bigoted, and at some margins stupider.

5. Tales of gruesome torture are being spread by new publishing and communications media.

6. The world may nonetheless end up much better off, but the ride to get there will be rocky iindeed.

I have been reading Carlos M.N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650.  Yes I know it is 893 pp., but it is actually one of the most readable books I have had in my hands all year.

Somewhere in the comments, Steve Sailer brought up the comparison between the printing press and the interwebs, which is the obvious and logical one. The impact of the printing press on the Reformation is often dismissed, as its impact on Western culture is complicated and hard to understand so modern historians focus on the religious angle. That way they can say bad things about Christians, which is still a lot of fun for the people of the New Religion.

Still, the printing press is not the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. The Black Plague is the meteor, but the printing press is one of the first shock waves to emit from it. It’s hard for us, in our age, to imagine a world in which most everyone was illiterate. Even members of the ruling class could make it to adulthood without ever having learned to read. Many members of the clergy were functionally illiterate as they had no reason to read. There was nothing for them to read, even if they had the desire.

The printing press did a few things. The most obvious is it made literacy much more valuable to the commoner. Therefore, more commoners tried to master the basics of reading and writing. Cheap printed material suddenly made literacy a valuable, but attainable thing, so we got more literate people, which vastly expanded the number of people contributing to the wealth of human knowledge. In a short time Sven could learn about the innovations in French plow technology, because he got a scroll on it from the tinker.

That’s where the comparison to the internet falls apart. Getting a billion people on-line is not unlocking a great store of human potential. Mostly it allowed a billion dimwits to fill the available space with inane chatter. Spend five minutes watching cable news and you can’t help but long for the days when men got their news from newspapers and the town meeting. That’s not to dismiss the value of having the Library of Alexandria at our fingertips. It’s just that there was not a lot of untapped intellect sitting around in 1975.

The key comparison, maybe, is the speed that information moves. By the Middle Ages, the state and the Church had evolved systems to control the flow of information. If the lesser nobles were unhappy, they could only conspire with one another, which could only happen within the system. That’s easy to root out with spies and treachery. The printing press allowed one pissed off guy to spread his word quickly and do so well outside the official channels. Cheap printed pamphlets made it easy for a disgruntled minor figure to spill the beans on his superiors, to the wider masses.

The thing is, it’s not the information getting loose or the speed it travels. It is how the current structures can respond to it. The printing press exposed the great weakness of the Church and the state. They were sclerotic when it came to reading and reacting to new information. They evolved in an age of handwritten scrolls and private couriers. They lacked the tools and the awareness to operate in a world in which information moves quickly (relative to the age) and indiscriminately.

None of this was immediate. The printing press was 15th century and the 16th century was a pretty good age for the ruling elite of the West. By the 17th century, however, the wheels came off the cart. By the 18th century the English speaking world was adapted to an age in which information moves around quickly and indiscriminately. The Continent followed in the 18th century so by the 19th the West had a ruling system and a cognitive elite fully evolved to succeed in the age of the written word.

This is where one can find a point of comparison to our own age. The volume of information is obviously way higher today than a few decades ago, but much of it is bad information so we very well may be less informed. The real impact of the technological revolution is the ability of the ruling class to respond. The old ways of hiding things from the public and preventing trouble makers from spilling the beans to the public are not very useful in an age when someone can put the total output of an organization onto a thumb drive.

Defenders of the status quo inevitably have to rely upon size to carry the day. They have the the monopoly of force and the institutions to apply it. The challenger has to rely on speed, agility and cunning. If the big guy is just as fast as the small guy, the big guy always wins. What the technological revolution has done is give challengers to the status quo an edge in speed and agility. Hillary Clinton controls the mass media, yet she struggled to put away Sanders and is struggling to deal with Trump.

This is not a perfect comparison, but if you are looking for a way to link the current age to the Reformation, that’s the place to start.

Grinding To A Halt

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Anyone, who has decided to paint a room of their house, understands the difference between show work and no-show work. Show work is the stuff that has an immediate reward, like rolling on the first coat of paint. A few hours labor and you have something to show for yourself. On the other hand, no-show work is the preparation. It’s moving of furniture, laying down drop clothes, cleaning up trim work and edging the room. You start at dawn and by dusk it looks like you have done nothing but make a mess.

I first experienced this as a teenager working construction. One summer, I was put on a job of renovating an old brick house. My job, along with some other teens, was to first gut the place. In a week we had the place stripped to the bare walls, with a massive pile of rubble inside and one outside. By the following week, the rubble was gone and we were left with a bare building. By the end of the summer, the building looked the same, except for some repointed brick work, and other structural touch-ups.

Spending the bulk of the summer on a million little tasks that never seemed to amount to much was nowhere near as fun as gutting the place, but it was a great lesson. Progress is the million little tasks that accumulate into something big. It is not the big finish where things seem to happen quickly. Put another way, progress is the millions of snowflakes that accumulate on the mountain, not the avalanche that is set off by your yodeling. The no-show part of human progress can take generations, maybe centuries, while the fruits can be consumed in a decade.

The last thirty or so years, from the perspective of most people, has been an age of rapid progress. It is tempting to think that progress will not only continue at this rapid pace, but accelerate. In fact, what defines futurism and always has, is the belief that technological progress is accelerating and will do so into the future. After all, that why we have personal jet packs and flying cars, while our parents were on foot. Since even this rate of change is not enough to have us traversing the stars in a this century, the rate of change must advance quickly.

That is the most basic form of magical thinking. We want our wishes to come true so we imagine how they must come true. One of things you’ll always see with professional futurists is they are wildly optimistic about the future. They don’t imagine a humanity enslaved by sadistic robot overlords. They imagine a world where humans live in forever youth, perhaps mind-melded with artificial intelligence in order to transcend the physical realm. The future, according to futurist, is going to great, which is why they can’t wait to see it.

Given the age in which we live, it is tempting to think these guys are right, but look back through history and you see a different picture. Progress is fits and starts, often with dead ends and rollbacks. It’s not that current humans are smarter than the humans in those eras of technological stagnation. In fact, one of the big questions in evolutionary biology is something called the Sapient Paradox. On the one hand, humans had all the stuff to be modern humans, yet they went a very long time living much like pre-modern humans. Then all of a sudden, they started living like modern humans.

Not only does history tell us that these periods of great technological progress are rare, but science is telling us we may be headed for a stagnation. The technological revolution was built on the revolution in theoretical science that started in the late Middle Ages. Human understanding of the natural world, like astronomy, chemistry, physics, math, is what allowed for the practical application of these fields to give us cell phones and the internet. There’s pretty good evidence that the progress on the theoretical side has come to a halt and may have reached some sort of dead end.

This post by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder makes a good case that we have, at the very minimum, stalled in our quest to understand the universe. There has been no great leap forward for over two generations and not much of any forward progress in a generation, other than confirming some things worked out fifty years ago. When the foundations of technological progress have stalled, it is fair to assume that the showy part is about to run out of steam soon too. Look around and it is clear there’s not a lot of big improvements on the horizon.

The counter here is that genetics is where the action is and that’s certainly true, but progress here is at a snail’s pace as well. DNA was first isolated by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher in 1869. Almost a century later Crick and Watson discovered the double helix and founded what we now call molecular biology. Half a century on what we have to show for it is better corn. To think that we’re on the cusp of genetically enhanced humans assumes a degree of progress never seen in science and in direct contradiction to the deceleration we see in theoretical science.

That’s just the science end of things. Science, particularly theoretical and experimental science, requires abundance. The West got rich and then it got science. The West is old and in the worst financial condition since the fall of Rome. There are a few billion barbarians trying to get into the West in order to go on welfare. Even if that is an unfairly bleak picture, there’s no denying that we lack the will and wherewithal to fund something like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo missions.

The truth is, the future is probably going to be more of the same, or worse.

The Tragedy of the Google

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In 1833 the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd published Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, which introduced an idea we later understood as the Tragedy of the Commons. The example used was of a common grazing area and how the interests of the people using this “free” public land would inevitably work at odds with one another in maintaining the public land. Everyone had an incentive to take as much as they could, as quickly as they could, but no one had an incentive to put back.

Today this is best understood in the management of fisheries. You can’t own parcels of the ocean and even if you can assign areas to particular fishermen, the fish don’t pay attention to these boundaries. The fisherman has no incentive to limit his cod harvest because the fish he does not catch will simply swim over to the next guy, who will catch them. In order to maintain the fishery, the state comes in and puts limits on the overall catch and what each fisherman can catch each season.

This fairly well known example is used by certain ideologues to demand socialization of all private property. Environmentalists will claim that the three-toed elephant slug is a common resource so it must be protected by the state. Therefore, anything that impacts the slug, requires permission from the state. That means if you want to mow your lawn or put up a tool shed, you have to file an environmental impact study and spend a bazillion dollars bribing environmental groups. It’s why we can’t build anything of consequence anymore.

Even though the idea has been abused, it is a useful concept when thinking about something like this story in Breitbart. Musicians are quickly seeing their revenue from music sales disappear. Newspapers all over America are near collapse because their content is distributed free on-line. Those that try to charge a fee just see the news given away by someone else, so their efforts to create property lines on-line always fail. Even the pornography industry is being gutted by a flood of free porn.

Now, the music industry has adapted to the fact Google is essentially an open air contraband market. Big shot musicians have teams of lawyers to police this stuff. The small musicians make their money from live shows and selling their music at their events. But, others don’t have this avenue. Photographers, graphic artists and writers just accept that they no longer have property rights to their work. I often see my work posted on other sites and no one from those sites asks my permission. I always give it when asked, but few bother asking.

The big internet operators and their government ignore all of this because they have grown stupendously rich off this racket. Google is essentially operating an open air contraband market with YouTube. Try running a heroin market on your property and see what happens. But, you’re not a billionaire and you can’t afford to buy a government of your own so the rules apply to you. Even banks find they have to report large movements of cash in order to help the government catch drug dealers. Ross Ulbricht is doing life in prison for being the Google of illicit drugs.

When the robot historians look back at the collapse of the West, they may point to the Internet as an institution analogous to slavery in the Roman Republic. Some argue that the flood of slaves in Rome after the victories over Corinth and Carthage altered the economic balance of Roman society. Large farmers could afford to buy up lots of slaves, thus collapsing the market for labor. This also allowed them to crush their smaller competition. The result was the rise of a landed oligarchy at the expense of the small land owners.

The Internet has brought back something that we thought was dead and that is rentier capitalism. This is the economic practice of monopolizing access to any kind of property, and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society. Cable operators are a good example. In my youth, TV was free. It made it’s money from commercials. Today, you pay the monopolist a fee to get access to TV shows, that still run ads. In fact, they run even more ads than when I was a kid. In the case of kid’s shows, the programs are just ads to sell toys.

The other institution is cost shifting. The paint company that dumps its old paint into the river because it is a cheap way to get rid of the waste is shifting some of its costs to the public. Passing laws to prevent it or taxes on the paint maker to pay for the cleanup, is an effort to end the practice of cost shifting. Even today, the smallest mechanical shop complies with environmental rules because the punishments are draconian. These costs show up in the invoice to the customer. When I get my oil changed, I see an entry for oil disposal on the invoice.

The modern Internet giants shift huge chunks of their business cost to the public via all sorts of schemes. The most obvious being the internet providers. In most of the country, technology and/or the law prevents the internet provider from implementing metered service. Everyone pays the same for their internet regardless of usage. That means the guy with three teenagers that spend all day watching YouTube pays the same as the local feminist, who only goes on-line to post pictures of her cats to Facebook.

If the guy with the three kids had to pay for his usage, his bill would be five times that of the local feminist. He would also sharply limit his usage. Google and the other video providers would see their customer base shrink to the point where it may no longer make sense to exist in some cases. My first broadband bill was $12.95 per month. The cheapest in my area is now $69.95 plus a long list of fees and taxes. The service is marginally better, but not five times better. The additional cost is about me subsidizing my neighbors for the profit of the Internet companies.

Similarly, if the suppliers were charged for use of the public roadways, like we tax motorists and trucking companies, they would have to charge vastly more for their product. Instead, those costs end up in your tax bill, because, the government gives tax breaks to the internet providers. If Facebook had to build out a network to supply you their product, the cost would be prohibitive. Instead those costs end up in your cable bill, even if you have no use for Facebook. The internet economy is all about socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

I’m going long here so let me wrap it up by summarizing a bit. We have created this virtual commons, but we have not come up with a way to manage it like a park or fishery. Further, we have permitted the development of rentiers, who skim from the public good, but contribute very little to it. Worse yet, we have massive cost shifting with the profits going to expand and perpetuate a system that works against the interests of the people. When a firm that made its money from cat videos can dictate terms to the US government, we’re well past the tragedy of the commons and into techno-feudalism.

The End Times

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

–Some Old White Guy

Spend any time around our nation’s ghettos and you quickly become a believer in Smart Fraction Theory. You often hear people say that the problem in the ghetto is a lack of good role models and most people take that literally, but it’s really just a polite way of saying that there are few smart people. Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others. Often, they take up positions of authority so they can prevent the dumb people from doing dumb things. Someone has to affix those stupid warning labels on products.

Another way to think of it is anti-personnel weapons. Ambush weapons are often designed to wound, not kill, enemy soldiers. A wounded soldier requires medical care. He may also require transport out of the area. Even if it does not halt the advance of the unit, care for the wounded will slow the advance and render the unit less effective. Stupid people have the same effect as wounded soldiers. It’s that they are a non-contributor to society. It’s that they are often a net negative, dragging down society, which is why Ayn Rand wanted to exterminate them.

America, like every Western country, has loads of smart, altruistic people, in addition to lots of middling people. Our Smart Fraction is large relative to places like Africa. This means we can carry a large number of low-IQ violent losers. America is the richest country on earth, despite having a population that is 13% African, because we have recruited the best and brightest from Europe over the last two centuries. Now we are skimming off the best Asians for settlement here.

That’s the theory. People in the cognitive sciences, when drunk or outside the wire, will tell you that you need an average IQ of about 94 to run anything resembling a modern economy. Pakistan with an average IQ of 84 is never going to leave the Iron Age because they lack the human capital. They have some very bright people, but not enough of them. Those smart people are overwhelmed by the teeming hordes of low-IQ hyper-violent mouth breathers from the hills, which is why those bright people flee to Europe.

Even if you reject biology as an explanation, travel a little bit and you soon figure out that there is a limit to the number of dysfunctional people a society can carry before it sinks. The debate, if there is one, is whether this can be arrested or whether technology can mitigate it. In the robot future, for example, the stupid will have their own robot custodian to keep them on the straight and narrow. Or, better training will raise up the stupid making them less stupid. Either way, there is some limit to the number of unproductive a society can carry and everyone gets it. People have always known this.

This long wind up is not in support of sterilizing Hillary Clinton voters, even though that would be a good idea. This is a post about the Zika Virus and similar plagues. What if something like Zika gets lose in the West and dramatically increases the number of pinheads? What if the smart, fearing they may birth a pinhead, further reduce their fertility? It would not take but a generation or two to significantly alter the cognitive profile of society. Further, this weakening of the West would reduce the global carry capacity.

When we think of the collapse of civilization, it is always nuclear war, economic collapse or the zombie apocalypse. What if it happens slower? Some new virus increases the number of unproductive, crazy and violent to the point where they begin to drag down society as a whole. The elites will withdraw behind their walls, but that does not change the facts on the ground. The West would eventually reach the point where it could no longer hold back the barbarian tide. This cascading effect would further reduce global carrying capacity.

It is easy to forget that those billion or so sub-Saharan Africans depend on food and medicine from the West. If that flow stops, they are instantly past their Malthusian limit and you get some combination of mass starvation, Hobbesian violence and mass migration out of Africa. The same is true of the Middle East. Even South America, which has made great strides in food production, still depends on a strong West to remain stable. Just look at Brazil if you want to see how fragile these countries are under the skin.

Here’s another thought. When scarcity was real, people, even the poorest, especially the poorest, had little sentimentality toward the weak. They could not afford to have sentimentality. Newborns with defects were euthanized. The old we left to die. The sick were put out of their misery. It’s a ghastly thing for modern, post-scarcity, humans to contemplate, but it was a necessary reality for most of human history. What if some disease like Zika spreads, resulting in a swelling population of pinheads?

I’m not making any predictions on this. Maybe humanity would quickly respond. Maybe we have lost the capacity to survive when facing real scarcity. There is no way to know. It’s hard to imagine a society that celebrates grief and victim-hood quickly shifting to cold-blooded realism, but maybe nature finds a way. Reality is, after all, that thing that never goes away when you stop believing in it. The reality of life is survival trumps everything, even familial love. Still, one has to wonder if the post-scarcity world is a trap of our own design.

Mobile Phones

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I have had a mobile phone since the early 1990’s. I was provided the Motorola bag phone when it came out and I think that was ’90 or ’91, but I may be off a year or two there. Before that I was provided with a model that was the size of a cinder block, when you added in the case, battery and antennae. The funny thing was that the early phones were so unreliable we had a pool of the things. That way when one was broken you could use one of the spares. Before long no one had the number they were assigned.

That was forever ago, of course. By the end of the ninety’s everyone had something small they could put in their pocket. Over the last 25 years I have been through all sorts of phones. I have always been an early adopter so I had the first flip phones and then the first pocket sized models. When Palm released the Treo, I had to have one. According to the stories, Steve Jobs invented the smartphone, but that’s nonsense. Palm created the smartphone. Somewhere in a drawer I probably still have the old Treo to prove it.

Since the Droid hit the streets, I have been an Android user and I stopped being an early adopter. I think by the second iteration of the Droid I decided I had gone as far as I needed to go with the smartphone. Having e-mail and text was great. I will use the GPS when I get lost and I do listen to podcast when traveling. The millions of apps are lost on me. Since something like 90% are never downloaded, I am clearly not alone in that. As a practical matter, the mobile phone topped out for me about six or seven years ago.

Anyway, I had to buy a new phone as the old one was starting to become unreliable. I started with the assumption that I would buy another Android model or maybe try an iPhone. The cost of the things got me thinking that maybe it is time to downsize and go back to a basic phone. Spending $700 for a smart phone that mostly sits idle on my desk strikes me as a waste of money so I went looking at other options. Even with the zero interest financing from the carrier, it seemed like a waste.

I decided to break form entirely and buy a Windows phone. I know one person with one and they love it. I was skeptical, but I saw one on-line for $200 at the Microsoft store so I got less skeptical. You have to try new things and new things that can save you $500 are worth trying. If it were a crappy phone, I figured, it would be a $200 lesson. I have learned much more expensive lessons so the risk seemed small. Plus, the phone was unlocked so I could shop plans.

The hardware is actually a Lumia 650, but it is branded Microsoft and loaded with the Windows 10 OS. It turns out to be a great phone and the OS is vastly better than I expected. The interface is better than Apple and Google. I never would have guess that in a million years, but that tile interface is a great idea. It is stupid on a desktop, but it works really well for a phone. I use mine one handed so using larger tiles for the upper left and small ones at the bottom right means I can reach everything with my thumb.

Since I was going rogue, I figured it was time to walk away from Verizon and try the low cost guys that the local drug dealers use. Mobile phones are a vital part of ghetto life so there are all sorts of low cost carriers catering to the poor. The average hopper is not leaving the five block area of his gang’s turf, so quality of service is not an issue. What is important is that you can get a good deal on a burner and the retailer does not ask too many questions.

So, I went with T-Mobile. I do not know if they serve the black community or it was just the miracle of local demographics, but I was the only honky in the phone store. I suspect I was the only person with a job, other than the clerks. But the lack of an income is no longer a hindrance to participating on the modern consumer economy. I saw two gals who I know have not worked a day in their lives buying new phones on whatever payment plan they offer. Maybe they were signing up for Obama phones before he leaves office.

I have a theory that most of the airtime on wireless networks is used by stupid people talking to other stupid people. Watching the sad sacks at the T-Mobile store I could not help but wonder what they talk about to the people on the other end. If their conversations in the store were representative, millions of minutes are consumed with people saying “yeah” and “you feel me” to one another. It is not like they are coordinating meetings between business trips.

Of course, keeping the people down at the bottom busy is an increasingly important issue in a modern society. The bottom is creeping up as the demand for low-skill labor and low-IQ laborers declines. This is a problem that will only get worse over the next decades. Giving them enough money to buy game consoles and mobile phones means they have plenty of toys to fill their day. Consumer electronics are the Soma of the technological age. The iPhone and Xbox are what gives meaning to their lives.

Low Energy

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The glorious future is always just over the next mountain. The older you get, the taller that next mountain becomes and the further away it seems. It is this realization, this understanding, that young people often mistake for cynicism. They think their elders, poo-pooing their excitement for some new innovation, are just cranky old people unable to appreciate the dawning of the new age and unwilling to adapt to it. In reality those grumpy geezers are tired of sitting through the same film, never getting to the end.

I often feel that way about energy policy. Every decade we have a re-run of the same film, but never get to the end. Instead, everyone gets bored and walks out before the final scene where the utopian dreamer is fed into the woodchipper by a couple snaggletooth rednecks from coal country. Instead, the movie is cut short so it can be retooled for a new audience a decade later with the promise that this time, there is a new and improved ending. That is the catchphrase of every new plan to replace fossil fuels. “This time, things will be different.”

Here is a quote from Jerry Ford’s 1975 State of the Union speech, in which he laid out his energy plan: “I have a very deep belief in America’s capabilities. Within the next 10 years, my program envisions: 200 major nuclear power plants; 250 major new coal mines; 150 major coal-fired power plants; thirty major new [oil] refineries; twenty major new synthetic fuel plants; the drilling of many thousands of new oil wells; the insulation of eighteen million homes; and the manufacturing and the sale of millions of new automobiles, trucks and buses that use much less fuel…”

The only thing he got right was that cars use less fuel per mile, but that had nothing to do with the big dreams of the energy futurists. Fuel economy has steadily improved since the mass marketing of cars back in the stone age. That is due to better engineering. The cars not only get better fuel economy today, but they also ride better, they are of better quality, they use better components. A new car off the lot in the 1950’s suffered from rattles, wind noise, poor fitting components and it needed constant maintenance. In other words, fuel efficiency is mostly just a byproduct of better engineering of cars in general.

The rest of Ford’s agenda never happened. Later, Carter got on the solar bandwagon. In the late 70’s, everyone new that in the future, cars would be electric and be charged by solar panels. Every house would have a rooftop solar generator. Fossil fuels would go away entirely. The fact that none of this happened did not stop the dreamers from dusting off the solar fantasy again in the 2000’s. I am not sure, but I think the last big solar panel plant in the US shut down last year. If I eat right and exercise, I will live to see it re-opened again under another government free energy scheme.

What brought this on is this story in Scientific American last month. You would think that a publication with “science” in its name would be less inclined to fights of fancy, but that’s not how it works. It’s not how anything works these days.

The United States, Mexico and Canada will make a joint pledge tomorrow to draw half the continent’s power from non-emitting sources by 2025.

President Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will announce the ambitious target at the North American Leaders’ Summit in Ottawa, Ontario, which will also address security issues and other concerns to the continent’s three governments.

White House climate adviser Brian Deese described the pact as a sign of the growing bonds between the nations on climate and energy policies. He told reporters yesterday that the trio are cooperating more on those issues now than at any time in recent history.

“We find ourselves now at a moment where the alignment in terms of policy goals and focus on clean energy between our three countries is stronger than it has been in decades,” he said.

None of this will happen. The big non-carbon power generation facilities are nuclear and hydro. We are not building those anymore. The people who swear Gaia is vexed with us because of our cars are the people that killed off nuclear and hydro decades ago. Then as now, the problem is Gaia. She did not like nuclear energy and she did not like us blocking fish from swimming downstream. According to the Gaia worshipers, she is not happy with solar or wind either so the odds of those technologies getting anywhere are close to zero, even before you get to the science problems of both.

That is the irony of the green energy movement. Even if the significant scientific hurdles can be overcome for things like solar and wind, the greens will scuttle the projects anyway. The same people banging their tom-toms over coal and oil are out blocking the so-called green alternatives. Nuclear, which has the most promise in terms of “clean” energy, has been stalled for generations now. Gen-IV reactors are extremely safe and productive. If not for the greens, we could have all our electric from nuclear, but that will never happen.

No one reading this will live to see the day when America is getting the bulk of its electric from nuclear. Your children and grandchildren will not live to see it. The most optimistic estimate puts the window for the change to nuclear well past mid-century. The most optimistic window for wind and solar is somewhere around the time we discover the warp drive. Instead, every decade or so we will have another round of nonsense about how some new green energy will finally ween us off of oil and coal. Billions will be squandered on it; the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.