I am not making this up

Posted on 2012-01-11 by TJ

It has been ten years since the United States started openly violating its own constitution by holding innocent people in indefinite custody without trial.

One of those people is Canadian child solider Omar Khadr, who has been held there illegally–against international treaty and Canadian law, including a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada–for the majority of Guantanamo’s sorry history.

I really don’t know what more to say about this. The facts are clear, but the people with power in this matter have chosen to ignore the facts. I could speculate as to why that might be so but I’m not sure that’s relevant: it remains true, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot I can do about it, which annoys me more than a little.

To see just how far off the real axis the people with power in this matter have gone, consider this story from 2006, when Guantanamo was only half a decade old:

The camp commander said the two Saudis and a Yemeni were “committed” and had killed themselves in “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us”.

Lawyers said the men who hanged themselves had been driven by despair.

A military investigation into the deaths is now under way, amid growing calls for the detention centre to be moved or closed.

I am not making this up: The camp commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris said, “They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

What can you say in argument against a person like that? Someone who is a senior member of the American mass organized killing system, who has enormous power–literally the power of life and death–over the illegally held prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. He had dedicated his life to the business of mass organized killing, and ended up in a state of mind where the only thing he can see is mass organized killing, even in the suicides of men who are being held in his own prison, completely under his power.

There’s a word for a man like that, who sees the power of his enemy in every act, even when that enemy is helpless, alone and imprisoned half a world away from home. The word is coward.

And that is what keeps Guantanamo Bay open: cowardice. The fear of American lawmakers and American mass organized killers that a few abject prisoners and child soldiers have the power to overthrow the American Empire.

I’ve written my MP and the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice in the past regarding Omar Khadr. Perhaps it’s time to do so again. It may not make a difference, but it can’t do any harm, and at the end of the day I want to be able to look back and say that I did what I could in a cause I knew to be right, in defense of the rule of law.

Posted in history, life, politics, psychology, war | Leave a comment

Other People’s Lives

Posted on 2011-12-31 by TJ

I looked back at my own life a bit in the previous post. But how are the other 7 billion humans on and off this planet doing?

The ones on the space station are doing pretty well, I guess. This has been a good year for space exploration generally, particularly with the launch of Curiosity toward Mars and various other flyby missions. Vesta was imaged up-close (there’s a joke in there about virgins but it’s probably in bad taste) and a fourth moon of Pluto was discovered. A Russian probe to Mars was lost in space, but that kind of thing happens: if you don’t have a few failures you aren’t trying hard enough.

On Earth the year opened with an major earthquake and nuclear scare in Japan. The Earthquake killed thousands of people. The destroyed nuclear plant a few dozen, making it by far the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

The fact that being hit by a tsunami immediately after being shaken by an earthquake can result in nuclear reactors behaving badly took some people by surprise, and may have affected policy in Germany where it was announced that nuclear power would be phased out by the early 2020′s.

This is an interesting time in the world of energy. We are using less of it for many things–notably lighting, which accounts for 10% of energy use and is slated to go to less than 1% in the next decade or so as LED lights replace incandescents and compact fluorescents. Ontario runs at about 25 GW and a large power plant is about 2.5 GW, so changing lighting technology could be equivalent to building another Bruce or Pickering. And much cheaper, and with lower environmental impact.

Politically, the ETA in Spain renounced violence, and as a direct consequence of that the chances of a Basque Homeland being created in my lifetime took a huge leap upward. Egypt and Tunisia saw peaceful revolutions, as did Syria, where protests are ongoing. Libyans decided to do what is known not to work, and various countries–including Canada–sent people to engage in mass organized killing there, unfortunately.

My prediction for the Arab world: over the next five years Egypt, Syria and Tunisia will all end up with some kind of moderately-to-severely repressive Islamic democracy (comparable to what Canada was like in 1900, say, but avoiding the supreme Islamic council that makes a mockery of Iran’s democratic institutions) and Libya will end up as a war-torn dictatorship.

The world economy continued to struggle with clearing the debts of the past decades, and saw Standard and Poor’s downgrade the sovereign credit of the United States. The same people who were outraged when S&P didn’t downgrade investment banks before the crisis in 2008 were outraged that S&P did downgrade the US before the crisis of… well, maybe 2012, maybe 2013, maybe 2015… all we know is that the gods of the copybook headings will eventually have their way.

While political brinksmanship made it clear to the entire world that the American government is fundamentally broken, indebted European nations saw an unraveling of various pasteboard houses. First Greece, then Italy, saw governments turned over at the behest of bankers, which is more than a little disturbing.

In the modern economy banks create money by reducing their reserve ratio as they make loans for interest. For there to be even a mathematical possibility of those loans being paid back the money supply (i.e. indebtedness) must grow by an amount equal to the outstanding interest on those loans over the term of the loans. If people stop borrowing, or worse yet become net savers, it becomes mathematically impossible for all outstanding loans with interest to be repaid. There simply isn’t enough money in circulation to do it.

In the past forty years the world has gone on a borrowing spree, and today no one except the recently downgraded US government is interested in borrowing more. That means banks have no way to inject new cash into the economy and universal insolvency looms. It’s an interesting situation: the world economy may very well be dependent upon the prolificacy and incontinence of the US government. Fortunately, those are extremely reliable characteristics.

But I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to end all that well for a lot of people. Europe may have its problems under control for the next few years, but clearing existing debt will take decades, not years. The last time something like this happened, in the 1930′s, debts ended up being cleared by violence, which is really not at all the best solution. Erasing a blackboard by bombing a classroom is neither very efficient nor very effective.

Perhaps this time we’ll do better.

Posted in economics, history, politics, prediction | Leave a comment

Anno Post Mortem

Posted on 2011-12-23 by TJ

The postmortem phase of a project is when you look back over it and figure out what went right, what went wrong, and what went crazy.

I generally do yearly postmortems to see if I’m getting anywhere. Sometimes the answer is “No”, or “Much progress in wrong directions”, but I’ve hardly ever met a truth I didn’t like, and if we can figure out what’s going right, wrong and crazy we have a chance to adjust our behaviour to compensate.

Things that went well:

  • FIRST Robotics team FRC 2809, which I help mentor, went to the World Championship in St Louis, which was a pretty awesome experience for all involved.
  • Carrie and I had wonderful times together in spring, summer and fall after a long winter apart
  • My novel “Metastory” is out to publishers
  • I bought a Laser-M and sailed in both it and the Sharks
  • I lost 20 lbs and kept to a solidly regular gym schedule
  • Hilary and I launched Songs of Albion
  • I’ve improved my literary French a lot and continue to do so
  • I wrote quite a lot of poetry, some of which I don’t actually hate.

Things that didn’t go so well:

  • My work-life-balance was tilted a little too heavily toward “life”
  • “Metastory” was rejected by one publisher and is currently languishing in the slush-pile of another
  • “Songs of Albion” is not getting the readership we’d like
  • I spent most of the Fall sick with some mild but persistent systemic infection that only now seems to be taking its last bows.

Overall a pretty good year. If I’m going to err in the work/life balance thing I’d rather it be on the side of life; getting rejected is all part of growing up and being a writer; and Albion has been a great experience that has a world-wide readership (seriously, Russian, the Middle East, South America…) albeit smaller than I’d like. And while I’ve been sick, I aen’t deid, as Granny Weatherwax might say.

We tend to want to emphasize the positive in our lives but we can learn the most from the negatives. As every engineer knows the study of failure is one of the most rewarding, and my life has given me no end of subject matter. Fortunately my really spectacular failures are mostly behind me now, although I’m sure I’ll be able to work up a couple more before the day is done.

The next few years are shaping up to be exciting, as my more-or-less adult children go off to university and I start executing my nefarious plans to take over the world. Somewhere in there I’ll move back to the West Coast after an absence of 30 years, and my next novel is starting to take shape in my head.

In the meantime there are robots to build, boats to sail and Songs to write, and that’s no bad thing at all.

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Some Notes on the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Posted on 2011-12-23 by TJ

It goes like this: A and X are caught by the cops and accused of a crime. They are both told if they alone confess then they will get five years and their compatriot will go to jail for ten years. If their compatriot confesses as well they will both go to jail for five years. And of course, if they don’t confess and their compatriot does they will go to jail for ten years while their compatriot goes free. But if neither one confesses they will both walk.

Traditionally one then asks: what is a rational being to do?

Unfortunately, this is a completely meaningless question. “Rational” is one of those words like “common sense” that are just empty sounds. A parrot could use them as meaningfully as a human. “POLLY WANT A SYLOGISM!”. Anyone who calls themselves “rational”–like a food that is labeled “food”–is certainly not rational. Bayesians are as rational as possible. No one else is.

So let’s ask instead: what is a Bayesian to do?

Let’s suppose that the ONLY thing A knows about X or X knows about A is that they are a human being. That’s it. No other information.

I’m an individualist, but the fact is that we deal every day with people in situations where the only thing we know is: they are human beings.

What can we conclude from this information?

[Edit: most of the following discussion is really inadequate, and one day I'll come back to this and do the full analysis properly. As it stands it does a poor job of making the point, but I'm leaving it up because this is a blog, not the Journal of the Society for the Otherwise Unemployable.]

The types we impose on the world are based on shared behaviours. Massive things fall down. If something does not fall down, we tend not to think of it as massive. And if something is massive, we rightly believe that all else being equal it will fall down.

Bayes’ Theorem tells us:

P(S|E) = P(E|S)*P(S)/P(E)

In this case (if we are, say, X): S=”A will clam up”, E=”I will clam up”. Or conversely, S=”A will confess”, E=”I will confess”.

Remember, X and A are of the same kind. So no matter what their specific values, P(S) and P(E) must be pretty much equal, “all else being equal”. Whatever X will do, A is also likely to do. If A will clam up, so will X. They are, after all, of the same kind. Believing two individuals of the same kind will behave completely differently would be pretty weird, like believing one rock will fall up and another down.

So P(S|E) ~ P(E|S), which means that far from there being four possible situations, there are actually only two worth considering (to a Bayesian): both confess, or both clam up. No matter what the ab initio probabilities of E or S, the posterior probabilities are the same. To consider the alternatives, in which two entities of the same kind act in completely different ways would be… irrational. Like believing one stone would fall up, the other down. Remember, we’re talking about “rational” entities here, or so the economists tell us.

And in this two-choice universe, there is one choice that is clearly superior: to clam up. Ergo, both X and A will clam up. No Bayesian could come to any other conclusion, and no one but a Bayesian has any claim to rationality.

Ergo: Kant was a Bayesian. This argument is nothing but Kant’s categorical imperative: make your behaviour the rule. Because all humans are members of the same category: we are all individuals of the same kind.

Posted in economics, probability | Leave a comment

A Peak Behind the Curtain

Posted on 2011-12-21 by TJ

Hilary sometimes complains that I write too fast (OK, it isn’t exactly a complaint…) so these pages from my notebook kind of amused me. The process sometimes is smooth and easy, but this particular poem for Hilary’s lovely winter scene was anything but:

Posted in poetry, writing | Leave a comment

Some Notes on Statisitical Paradoxes and Conditional Probabilities

Posted on 2011-12-19 by TJ

Paradoxes are like the magic tricks of the mind: they require a careful setup that involves a healthy dose of misdirection, and any deviation from the carefully contrived script will make the apparent contradiction go away. It’s been my experience that most people who are engaged by paradoxes don’t want to understand them, but insist in repeating the same illusion over and over again and can get quite upset when anyone bothers to reveal the man behind the curtain.

The Monty Hall Problem is a nice example of this. You’ll find that most presentations follow an identical script that misdirects the mind in a very important way: it fools us (not that this takes a lot of doing) into thinking that a conditional probability is a total probability.

A conditional probability is what you get under some particular condition or circumstances. For example, the conditional probability of the temperature being below zero in winter is much higher than the total probability of the temperature being below zero.

Humans are “probability blind” or perhaps “probability deaf” (like colour-bindness or tone-deafness): we have no direct sensory grasp of probabilities and as such we have to learn about them the way a colour blind person might learn that roses and cherry lollypops are the same colour: by a series of experiments and inferences. Most people never have much opportunity to do this, and so the casino gambling industry and state lotteries exist.

Remember in what follows we assume a series of trials, repeated over and over again, to work out the probabilities. Imagine you’re a repeat contestant on the show or that we’re talking about the aggregate choices of all contestants over a season.

In the case of the Monty Hall problem, it works like this: you are a contestant on some game show (Let’s Make A Deal, according to the Great Wiki) where the host (Monty Hall) has you pick one of three doors. You know that behind one door is a prize, behind the other two are goats. You pick a door.

Let’s stop here for a second so we don’t miss what the promulgators of paradox would like us to: how often do we pick the one-and-only door with the prize behind it?

Since we’re picking randomly and there are three doors, it must be one third of the time.

And since there are two goats, then two thirds of the time we can expect to pick a goat.

So at the outset of this problem there are two different conditions: one where we picked the prize, and one where we picked a goat.

The whole trick is to somehow avoid noticing this, and then treat these two quite different situations as if they were the same situation. If you miss this, you miss everything.

The next step of the “paradox” involves the host opening a door and showing us there is a goat behind it, but since we have two conditions we have to analyze them separately. Otherwise we’d be mixing disjoint, incompatible states of the world. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that the “paradox” requires Monty to open a door every single time a contestant is in this situation, or at least in a fair random sampling of such situations. If Monty only opens a door when we’ve chosen the right one, for example, then the whole argument falls apart. More on this later.

Under the first condition, we chose the door with the prize. Under this condition Monty can open either of the other doors and show us a goat. As pointed out above, Monty doesn’t open a door at random… he by hypothesis must open a door, and there must be a goat behind it. Under the first condition and only under the first condition can he pick freely between the two doors we did not choose because…

…under the second condition we have chosen a door that has a goat behind it (and remember, this happens 2/3 of the time!) In this case Monty–who must open a door, which must have a goat behind it–has no choice about what door he opens: he has to open a door we did not chose, and exactly one of those has a goat behind it. He must open that door. He has no choice at all.

Finally, he offers you the chance to change your mind about what door you want to pick.

Remember, 2/3 of the time you’ve picked a door that has a goat behind it, giving him no choice about which door to open, and if you change your choice under that condition you will certainly win the prize. The other 1/3 of the time you have already chosen the right door, and if you change under that condition you will certainly lose the prize.

So if you change your choice you will win the prize 2/3 of the time and lose it 1/3 of the time, and the outcome was determined when you made your original choice of door, which is the point when the universe resolved itself into one of the two possible conditions. Monty has provided you some useful information by showing which of the other two doors definitely has a goat behind it, giving you only once alternative to the door you originally picked. But the conditional decomposition of the universe happened when you made your original choice.

Monty is just letting you take advantage of the knowledge that 2/3 of the time you picked a wrong door first off, and that’s only possible because he has by hypothesis no choice about opening another door and showing you a goat. If he had a choice–as he would in the real world–all he would have to do is open another door every time a contestant chose the right one initially, and half the time when they chose a wrong one. Monty would only open a door and reveal a goat 2/3 of the time, and half of those times it would be right to change, and half wrong. This hidden assumption that Monty has no choice about opening a door and showing the contestant a goat is one of the things that makes the usual description of this problem counter-intuitive.

Another, possibly related, story is the “Surprise Exam Paradox”, which goes like this: a teacher tells the class that there will be a surprise exam one day the following week. The students reason as follows: the exam can’t be Friday (missing conditional alert!) because it wouldn’t be a surprise. But since it can’t be Friday, Thursday becomes the new Friday, so it can’t be on Thursday either (Friday having already been eliminated). But since it can’t be Thursday… and so on to prove that it can’t be on any day of the week. The students conclude there can be no such exam, and all fail when the teacher pops it on them the following Tuesday, much to their surprise.

What is going on here? More about that later.

Posted in epistemology, probability, psychology | Leave a comment

Mass Organized Killing, What’s It Really Good For?

Posted on 2011-12-17 by TJ

The New York Times has a brief account of a cache of secret American government documents found in an Iraqi junkyard that sheds some more light on the 2005 killing by American Marines of 24 human beings in the town of Haditha. The humans who were killed ranged in age from 3 to 76 and included a mix of males and females. There is no evidence–other than being Iraqi–that any of them were involved in killing Marines.

There are a whole bunch of things about this story that bother me.

First, some quotes:

Haditha became a defining moment of the war, helping cement an enduring Iraqi distrust of the United States and a resentment that not one Marine has been convicted.
…
In their own words, the report documents the dehumanizing nature of this war, where Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not “remarkable,” but as routine.
…
The bodies piled up at a time when the war had gone horribly wrong.
…
“It is one thing to kill an insurgent in a head-on fight,” Sergeant Major Sax testified. “It is a whole different thing — and I hate to say it, the way we are raised in America — to injure a female or injure a child or in the worse case, kill a female or kill a child.”

The immediate trigger for the mass killing of humans in Haditha was the killing by humans in Haditha of four humans who were part of the Blackwater mercenary army. These four humans were killed, their bodies burned and hung from a bridge. The logic of the Marine’s response seems to have been:

1) We invaded their country and killed many people
2) In response to this they have killed some of our people
3) In response to that we will do exactly what they did in response to us: kill some of their people
4) It is our expectation that in response to this they will behave like magic unicorns

I’m not totally sure about that last part, although it is abundantly clear that the Marines were expecting something other than what actually happened, which was further escalation of violence and distrust, ultimately leading to where we are today with the United States ignominiously withdrawing from a failed-state-in-the-making.

But focusing on the immediate trigger is to miss the important thing, which is the inevitability of this random event. In “War and Peace” Tolstoy makes the point that while Napoleon didn’t explicitly plan to burn Moscow, Moscow burning was the inevitable consequence of the way Napoleon let his troops run loose though the city. The individual who happened to light the particular fire that got out of control is not responsible for the resulting conflagration, any more than the single neutron that triggers a chain reaction that causes a nuclear bomb to explode is the primary cause of the explosion. In the latter case, it is the person who assembled the critical mass of uranium or plutonium, creating the conditions under which some random neutron would inevitably produce the fatal chain reaction, who is responsible. In the former case it is the the general who ordered his troops to occupy a wooden city without any attempt to properly police their behaviour.

This “defining moment” was random, but inevitable. As soon as the American invasion became an occupation this was going to happen, and in the future America’s enemies will celebrate George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz as heroes of the anti-American cause for having ensured such broad hatred for America amongst the sometimes intersecting groups of Iraqis, Arabs and Muslims.

There is a depressingly Strangelovian aspect to the belief that “bodies were piling up” when the mass organized killing in Iraq had “gone horribly wrong”. Generally one expects a large number of dead humans when mass organized killing is going right, right?

It is also remarkable that–three generations after London, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki–anyone can maintain the belief that only this mass organized killing is “dehumanizing”. As opposed to say the nice clean mass organized killing in Afghanistan and more recently Pakistan, as armed remotely operated aircraft cruise the skies while their drivers sit comfortably on the far side of the world, scanning their monitors for their next victim.

Mass organized killing is dehumanizing as such. It is not beautiful. It is not glorious. It is not efficient. It is rarely effective. It is always dehumanizing.

Dehumanization is both an enabler and a result of war, and it always starts with the same people: men. Men are subject to a relentless stream of propaganda telling them their lives are without value, that it is the essence of being a man to be used as a mere means to kill or get killed during a mass organized killing.

In my experience people tend to a significant degree to treat others they way they themselves are treated. In a society where killing women and children is considered horrible but where dead men are just taken for granted, in a society where “Men last!” is considered a noble sentiment, in a society that systematically dehumanizes men by telling them that being stripped of their individuality, stuffed them into uniform clothing and forced to walk synchronously and kill other men, it is not entirely surprising that the men who have been victimized in this way should themselves become victimizers.

Men are not the only victims of war, but they are the first, victimized by a society that dehumanizes and devalues them long before the first shot is fired.

Nor are women and children the last victims of war. There is a final casualty, one that takes a long, long time to kill but which will eventually succumb to the continued onslaught: the rule of law, injured in this case by the complete impunity with which the Marines killed the humans of Haditha:

That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.

Mass organized killing is the lifeblood of empire, although we should seriously consider the advice of an imperialist poet from long ago:

Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!

Kipling was writing about the power of the mob, but every mass organized killing is an attempt by some humans to gain power above or beyond the law. Attacking the humans just perpetuates the problem. Viewing mass organized killings as entities in their own right–a variety of what I call “fabella” in my as-yet unpublished novel–allows us to pose the problem in different, and perhaps ultimately more tractable terms, about which more at a later time.

Posted in history, politics, war | Leave a comment

Two Higgs or Not Two Higgs, That is the Question

Posted on 2011-12-13 by TJ

There’s been a lot of buzz this week about results from CERN that are consistent with a Standard Model Higgs mass of about 125 GeV.

I have to admit that my first reaction was a huge sigh of relief. Despite theorists cavils I kind of like the Standard Model. I know of no particular reason why there should be One Law To Rule Them All, and a messy, somewhat irregular description of a messy, somewhat irregular universe seems to me entirely appropriate.

One and zero are just numbers. There’s nothing particularly special about them. Newton had three laws, while Leibniz was spinning speculative gibberish about monads. It would be cool if there was one grand unified thingy, but on the other hand it would be cool if there were two or three somewhat less grand unified thingies, too.

After feeling relieved for a minute I poked around a little and found this gem of a discussion of what a 125 GeV Higgs might mean.

We’ve known for nearly a century that “empty” space (also know as “the vacuum”) can be viewed as a sea of negative-energy Dirac electrons and a seething foam of virtual particles. There is cosmological evidence that once upon a time the vacuum was in a higher energy state than it is today, and when it decayed the (very) early universe underwent an inflationary era in which it rate of expansion increased enormously, leaving us with the very flat universe we see today.

The universe we find ourselves in today is very cold in comparison: the events described in the paragraph above involved temperatures in the 1020-1030 K range, as opposed to the 4.2 K value of the cosmic background radiation today. But even though we are cold, are we frozen? That is, could it be there is another vacuum phase transition waiting to happen? This would be unfortunate, as it would destroy the universe as we know it, and it is also demonstrably very unlikely because it hasn’t happened in the 13 billion years since the Big Bang.

The curious thing about a Higgs mass of 125 GeV is that it puts us pretty close to the boundary between a stable and metastable vacuum, which in my mind raises the question: “Could there be some physics that drove the early universe into that state?” The answer may well be, “Nope,” but the question is still worth asking, as it would tie the scales of Standard Model physics to those of Big Bang Cosmology in a potentially new way, or perhaps reveal something interesting about the other ways the two are connected.

In any case, it’s an exciting time, and a year from now we’ll know if the Standard Model Higgs exists. If it doesn’t there are still plenty of non-standard Higgs possibilities, the simplest ones involving two Higgs fields (thus the what passes for a joke in the title of this post.)

In 1911 we had no generally invariant theory of gravity, the universe was seen to be eternal and static, and it looked like there might be things called “electrons” that might be the same as “cathode rays”, as well as something else called “x-rays” and some positive particle that contributed to the mass of atoms.

A mere century later we have a generally invariant theory of gravity that is one of the best-tested areas of physics, we know the universe is probably ephemeral and certainly dynamic and we understand those dynamics in some detail, and we are homing in on the last missing piece of a model that contains almost all the basic building blocks of reality as we know it. There will always be more to discover, but this century is going to be remembered for a long time as one of the intellectual triumphs of the human race, in which we passed from belief to knowledge, certainty to doubt, dogma to fact.

Posted in epistemology, physics, quantum, science | Leave a comment

Evolved Behaviour

Posted on 2011-12-10 by TJ

There were two interesting stories of animal behaviour in the news this week: an experiment suggesting helping behaviour in rats is emotionally motivated and an observation on behavioural regulation in swarms of bees.

Understanding animal behaviours puts human behaviours in context, and these studies juxtapose two very different aspects of evolved behaviour. It’s a little weird to say “evolved behaviour”,of course, since all behaviour is evolved, although the way that evolution elaborates itself in the context of an individual’s development is subject to lots of other influences.

In the rat study the researchers were specifically looking for evidence that something akin to emotions regulate helping behaviour. Emotions are a powerful behavioural regulator, and they appear to have no other evolutionary underpinning. We tend to forget that the only reason evolution produced a being with our emotional complexity and capacity was because our more emotionally capable and complex ancestors had more offspring than their more cool-headed brothers and sisters.

Humans are uniquely rational, but we are also uniquely emotional: our emotional lives appear to be much richer than those of our closest cousins. So it is interesting–and difficult–to investigate how much of our basic emotional machinery is shared by other mammals.

Kin selection is the only known evolutionary reason for helping behaviour, and even that is not necessarily enough. Plenty of species manage to get along with one or both parents abandoning their offspring very early on. In the case of rats, they are somewhat social creatures who live at fairly high densities, so from a rat’s perspective the rat you rescue is more than likely carrying similar genes to your own. Ergo, rats with genes that promote rescuing of rats in distress are more likely to have genes that get passed on, either by themselves or the rats they rescue. Evolution happens regardless of which individual actually out-procreates the competition.

Rats, like humans, feel empathy because our ancestors who felt empathy were more likely to have genes that got passed on than the ones who didn’t. This differs from the usual (non kin-selection) case because in that case it would be “rats that have genes for X are more likely to pass them on.” The effect for kin selection is second-order.

The bee study–which demonstrated swarms reach consensus regarding their new home by communicating between individual bees via head-butts–is interesting for a different reason: most commentaries have been written as if the bees were somehow engaged in the kind of dominance and submission behaviours that humans engage in. This again treats human emotions as primary, rather than evolved.

Humans are a hierarchical, mildly polygamous, social primate. That we are hierarchical and social hardly needs argument. The mild polygamy is easily demonstrated by looking at the degree of sexual dimorphism we exhibit: men are significantly bigger than women, and the only reason for this is that men compete for mating opportunities.

Tell any biologist just one fact about a species (that the males are on average 20% larger than the females) and they will tell you the species is somewhat polygamous and mate competition is an important aspect of their lives. If you then tell the biologist you’re talking about humans they may want to backtrack based on a mistaken belief that this undoubted biological fact has moral implications, but they would be wrong on both counts.

Mate competition and hierarchy means humans are always jockeying for position, and like rats much of our behaviour is emotionally mediated. Curiously, organizations populated by the least reflective, most emotionally driven humans are the most hierarchical (and exist for the least rational purpose: war.)

The individual bees in a swarm, on the other hand, all have identical genetic interests. There is absolutely no differential reproductive benefit to any particular bee if it “convinces” the swarm to go to one destination as opposed to another. Worker bees are all sterile and equally interested in finding a viable home, with no individual being more invested in one particular outcome over the others.

That people have a really, really hard time understanding this is a measure of just how big a deal mate competition is for us, to the point where most people can’t really conceive of what it would be like to be a member of a species where mate competition wasn’t the dominant force in evolved behaviour.

Amongst humans–and rats–we help each other out because we have evolved emotional responses to the distress of members of the same species because there was once (and may still be) a reproductive advantage for the genes of individuals who had such responses. Amongst bees, workers in the same hive cannot and do not compete for reproductive advantage. It’s impossible, and that impossibility means that bees behave very differently from humans, so our tendency to impose anthropomorphic interpretations on the swarm regulation process actually masks a great deal of what the science is telling us about these fascinating insects.

Posted in epistemology, evolution, probability, psychology | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Future of Reading

Posted on 2011-12-10 by TJ

Some of the things I describe here may actually be illegal where you live. Just so you know.

My longer-term life plan involves living aboard a sailboat on the West Coast of Canada. If money were no object it might be a Cooper Seabird 37 or a Cooper 353, but realities being what they are a Gulf 32, or even 29, is a significant possibility.

I’ve always been comfortable in smaller habitations, but a sailboat is a few hundred square feet at best. And I own a lot of books. I get rid of bunches of them whenever I move, but some will come with me, even if they just go into dry storage ashore. In the meantime, I need books in my life.

Ergo: e-readers. After much digging around over the past year or so I settled on the Sony PRS-T1. It’s lightweight, has excellent battery life, and reads most open e-book formats, including ePub, which is by far the most popular outside of the Amazon ecosystem.

The problem is that Amazon is the 400 kg gorilla of e-publishing right now, and they use some bizzaro DRMed proprietary version of the MOBI format.

Now, despite what my friends might tell you, I’m not an idiot: if I’m going to spend money on content I’m not about to let the person I buy it from retain control, and that’s what DRM does. As anyone who has bought DRMed music in the past decade knows, technological changes, business changes, and what software developers know as “bitrot” will with something close to certainty result in inaccessible content in a few years.

Let’s consider a really common, obvious, scenario: I buy a DRMed copy of “Autobiography of a Flea” from Amazon and read it on a Kindle, or use the Kindle application for Windows to read it. Time passes. I’m running WinXP, and when that gets too painful for words I plan to upgrade this machine (an ASUS Eee, highly recommended) to Linux.

I have no idea if there’s a Kindle application port to Linux today, and I really have no idea if there will be one two or three or five years from now when I’m in the midst of switching OSes. Nor do I know if there will be such an application ten or fifteen years after that when I’m wanting to re-read that old bit of Victorian pornography on a machine running Microsoft WindowsSCHRODINGER for the new quantum computers.

The thing I do know is that nothing that was Win3.1 compatible runs very well any more, and DRM-related applications have, empirically, a much shorter lifetime than anything else.

I have books I bought when I was a teenager, 30-odd years ago. I have books my father bought when he was a teenager, back in the 1930′s. I have a lot of books. And I want to be able to keep on reading them for the rest of my life.

Ergo, I say again: no DRM, because no one at Amazon can give me anything like the same assurance I’ll be able to read the DRMed e-books I buy today 30 years from now that I get with paper. Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant or lying. As hardware platforms change, bits become obsolete and DRMed bits become unreadable. This is a certain as night following day.

Fortunately, there are several other important truths that come to the rescue, the most important one being: if you give a person the plaintext, the ciphertext and the encryption key they will be able to decode the ciphertext at will. People who sell DRM systems really hope their customers never find this out, so let’s keep it between us, eh?

So this is what I did, after some flailing around with Google:

  1. Downloaded the Kindle application for Windows from Amazon
  2. Purchased a cheap collection of short stories (“Blood on My Jets and Others” by Algis Budrys, whose work I have a weak spot for) from Amazon. This downloaded a file to C:\My Documents\My Kindle Content” in .azw format, the Amazon proprietary format.

  3. Downloaded Calibre and related plugins
  4. Converted the book I’d just bought to ePub, stripping the DRM.

As I said, some of this might be illegal where you live, and let me be clear about this: if I were to then go on and post that ePub online my actions bloody well should be illegal. But as it stands I just want ownership of the content that I have paid for. I’m only doing this so I can give Amazon money.

In Canada, mind, this kind of format-shifting is not (in my understanding) illegal. But I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I do know the demented leadership of the empire to our south is lobbying our compliant and ideology-addled big-government/high-deficit ruling party to make this kind of thing illegal, but they are thus far too busy stamping their boot on the face of unreported crime to pay much attention.

Having done all that, I went out and bought a Sony PRS-T1 from Future Shop (the cheapest local retailer) and then blew most of the discount I was getting on a cover (this appears to be the Sony business model: sell $150 worth of electronics for $130 and then ding the customer $40 for a nice cover…)

Given what I’ll save on books in the next year alone it’s a good buy for me, particularly given I’ll have access to the Amazon ecosystem as well as everything Sony carries, plus Baen, plus anyone else I can find. The world needs a better e-book outlet aggregator.

I’ve pushed the Budrys collection to the device and it seems to work OK. Setting up the WiFi was tricky because my router password has very high entropy, but it eventually worked. It has a pretty full-featured Web browser so technically I could be using it as an e-mail client and god knows what else. I don’t think I’ll be abandoning my netbook any time soon, but this device not only gives me e-reading capability it gives me an MP3 player, a Web client and (therefore) an e-mail client. That’s a pretty powerful combination for $192 (including cover and taxes).

Addendum: after reading the terms of service I would never under any circumstances install the Sony Reader Application on my computer. It requires to you agree to Sony or any third party monitoring and controlling your computer. No thank you! If I buy books from Sony it’ll be through the PRS-T1, NOT my PC. Even Amazon’s terms are not nearly so draconian, at least on my reading of them.

Posted in life, technology | 2 Comments