The Wall Street Journal offers up A Viewer’s Guide to Judo — which isn’t particularly instructive:
The real news is simply that the Wall Street Journal is talking about judo.
A Viewer’s Guide to Judo
Monday, March 24th, 2008Hard-wired for the ups and downs
Monday, March 24th, 2008Denis Dutton notes that we’re Hard-wired for the ups and downs of living in hierarchies:
Some general sense of fairness is intrinsic to hunter-gatherer hierarchies. Pure self-interest or the interest of your family is not all that counts. There is also fairness in, say, food distribution: the obligation of individuals to divide, rather than keep for themselves or their family, the kill from some successful hunting expedition. As far as status and opportunity are concerned, I think we’d learn a lot by looking at how hierarchies tend to be found in typical Pleistocene hunting bands.These bands seem to be adjusted to create maximal success in terms of mobility, flexibility, skill specialisation and stealth. They required co-operation. They were male units. Bands of brothers is perhaps going too far, but the standard hunter-gatherer societies were anywhere from 25 to 150 people in size and certainly included a lot of cousins and brothers. It’s interesting to note that the size of the hunter-gatherer hunting band drawn from these societies was about 10 to 12 men, which happens to be the size of the basic platoon in the British army, the squad in the US army and the basic unit in almost every army since the Romans.
It is also close to the default size — nine to 12 or so — of teams in many sports and boards of directors of corporations.
[...]
These bands, as well as the larger hunter-gatherer groups that they fed and protected, were involved not only in hunting but in running raiding parties and defences against other human raiding parties.They were governed by what are called reverse dominance hierarchies. A pure dominance hierarchy is one in which the individual at the top of the heap dominates all those underneath him: likely a him, by the way, rather than a her. Such arrangements became practical on a large scale only in the modern age; that is to say, during the past 10,000 years, with the invention of agriculture and cities, which allow food to be stored and police forces and armies to be fed.
We do have pure dominance hierarchies in the modern world, and we have had them for the past 10,000 years. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was a pretty good example of a modern pure dominance hierarchy, from the boss on down. It makes me think of wolf hierarchies. I once observed a wolf hierarchy in a zoo and it was unbelievably brutal if you looked at the one or two animals at the very bottom of the pecking order. The final wolf, who’s the weakest of the group, is tormented night and day, attacked, howling, constantly in pain and terror. Dominance hierarchies are brutal.
Of course, I say that because I evolved as a member of a reverse dominance hierarchy.
[...]
Attempts at dictatorial domination were likely to be responded to in the Pleistocene with exile, homicide, non-cooperation and, interestingly, ridicule. Ridicule is a standard way for all human societies to deal with people at the top.
[...]
Well-structured societies today, including modern mass democracies, provide adequate outlets for our hunter-gatherer preferences to fit into hierarchies, to achieve relative dominance in them and to possess personal autonomy, all at the same time. The variety of independent spheres of life today opens greater possibilities than the Pleistocene did for individuals to fit in, to lead and to follow in organised groups.As for hierarchies and elitism, our intrinsic resentment of leaders, our Pleistocene anti-elitism, may partly be explained by the fact that small-scale tribal societies were zero-sum economies. Everything that was owned by one person was something that someone else could not enjoy. Some psychologists argue that the zero-sum nature of the Pleistocene gives us a psychology that has a lot of trouble grasping concepts of borrowing, interest and economic growth.
As Easy As A.B.C.
Monday, March 24th, 2008
A couple months ago, when I watched H.G. Wells’ Things to Come, it led me to pick up a used copy of The Science Fiction Stories of Rudyard Kipling, which includes two stories about a future world “ruled” by the Aerial Board of Control: With the night mail and As Easy As A.B.C.
Kipling’s A.B.C. doesn’t really rule the planet the way Wells’ league of super-scientists, Wings Over the World, does though. The A.B.C. is more like the laissez-faire British Empire, keeping its hands off of things until someone threatens the free flow of (aerial) trade.
The story involves civil unrest in the Chicago of the future, and our heroes come to the rescue — that is, they rescue Chicago from democracy:
Suddenly a man among them began to talk. The Mayor had not in the least exaggerated. It appeared that our Planet lay sunk in slavery beneath the heel of the Aerial Board of Control. The orator urged us to arise in our might, burst our prison doors and break our fetters (all his metaphors, by the way, were of the most medieval). Next he demanded that every matter of daily life, including most of the physical functions, should be submitted for decision at any time of the week, month, or year to, I gathered, anybody who happened to be passing by or residing within a certain radius, and that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns to settle the matter, first by crowd-making, next by talking to the crowds made, and lastly by describing crosses on pieces of paper, which rubbish should later be counted with certain mystic ceremonies and oaths. Out of this amazing play, he assured us, would automatically arise a higher, nobler, and kinder world, based — he demonstrated this with the awful lucidity of the insane — based on the sanctity of the Crowd and the villainy of the single person. In conclusion, he called loudly upon God to testify to his personal merits and integrity. When the flow ceased, I turned bewildered to Takahira, who was nodding solemnly.
This is a future that has lived through populist democracy and mob rule. Kipling appends something called MacDonough’s Song, apparently from the not-so-distant past of this lawful, non-democratic future:
Whether the State can loose and bind
In Heaven as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill mankind
Before or after the birth —
These are matters of high concern
Where State-kept school men are;
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
Endeth in Holy War.Whether The People be led by the Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by vote —
These are the things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Holy People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King —
Or Holy People’s Will —
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!Saying — after — me: —
Once there was The People — Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once There was The People — it shall never be again!
“We own ourselves,” the non-democrats say.
Anyway, I was shocked to come across such a clearly non-Progressive story. It reminded me of Mencius Moldbug and of Bryan’s Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter.
The Bare Necessities
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008In The Bare Necessities, Stephen Moore tries to explain our amazing progress to a pessimistic generation that cannot “imagine life without iPods”:
Times are tough in many old industrial areas of the country. And middle-class anxiety about the costs of health care and higher education is real. But new data from the Census Bureau reveal that Americans of all income groups have made enormous gains in their standard of living in recent decades. As late as 1970, air conditioning, color TVs, washing machines, dryers and microwaves were considered luxuries. Today the vast majority of even poor families have these things in their homes. Almost one in three “poor” families has not one but at least two cars.Consumption in real per-capita terms has nearly doubled since 1970. The single largest increase in expenditures for low-income households over the past 20 years was for audio and visual entertainment systems — up 119%. In 2007 Americans spent an estimated $1 billion to change the tune of the ringer on their cellphones. Eating in restaurants used to be something the rich did regularly and the middle class did on special occasions. The average family now spends $2,700 a year dining out.
There’s a wonderful new video on Reason.tv called “Living Large.” In it, comedian Drew Carey goes to a lake in California where people are relaxing on $80,000 27-foot boats and goofing around on $25,000 jet skis that they have hitched to their $40,000 SUVs. Mr. Carey asks these boat owners what they do for a living. As it turns out, they aren’t hedge-fund managers. One is a gardener, another a truck driver, another an auto mechanic and another a cop.
When I was young my parents used to drill in me the moral imperative of eating everything on my plate, and they recited the (tall?) tale of how they even ate what would now be considered dog food during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The American Pet Products Manufacturers Association reports that Americans now spend $36 billion a year on their dogs, cats, turtles and so on, and one of the hottest-selling consumer items is “diet pet food.” We have become a nation of fat cats — literally. I have a friend whose daughter insisted that he spend $200 on eye surgery for their hamster. (I want to see that hamster read the eye chart!)
After my lecture, one young woman walked up to me on her way out and huffed: “What I favor is a radical redistribution of wealth in America.” I tried to tell her that America’s greatness is a result of our focus on creating wealth, not redistributing it. But it was too late — she was already tuning in to her iPod.
Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
The Flip Ultra Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot — which, in classic disruptive innovation style, has led it to capture 13 percent of the camcorder market:
It’s the Flip: a tiny, stripped-down video recorder the size of a digital camera (but you hold it vertically). And in the year since its invention, it has taken 13 percent of the camcorder market, according to its maker, Pure Digital. The latest model, called the Flip Ultra, had its debut six months ago with slightly improved video quality, greater capacity, a tripod mount and better looks (available in white, black, orange, pink and green). It’s been the best-selling camcorder on Amazon.com since the day of its debut.Now, understanding the appeal of this machine will require you not just to open your mind, but to practically empty it. Because on paper, the Flip looks like a cheesy toy that no self-respecting geek would fool with, let alone a technology columnist.
The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.
Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.
There it is: the entire user’s manual.
Storming the Campuses
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
The New York Times explains how students are Storming the Campuses — in a game that mixes Risk and real-life maps of schools and dorms:
Eleven thousand Ivy League students and alumni have played out these scenarios as part of an online computer game called GoCrossCampus, or GXC. The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.GXC more closely resembles an intramural or interscholastic sport than the typical online video game, where individuals or small groups are pitted against each other. GXC teams, made up of hundreds and sometimes thousands of players, play on behalf of real-world dorms or schools — even presidential candidates — by jostling for hegemony on maps of their campus or locale and conducting their campaigns as much in the real world as online.
It turns out though that GXC isn’t the only game in the new sub-genre. Two Startups Battle Over Who Invented Risk-Like War Game First:
What started off as a for-fun experiment by Yale student Gabe Smedresman in January 2007 resulted in a game that went on for over a month and involved over 3,300 Yale students (more than 25% of the student body).But now that original game of Turf has spawned two separate and funded startups to push the game as a business. Smedresman joined with Harvard students Andrew Fong, Matt O’Brien, and Hugo Van Vuuren to found Kirkland North, a Y Combinator backed startup (screen shot of their game is above). Meanwhile, a rival company has launched that was founded by some of the players of Smedresman’s original game, called GoCrossCampus.
A New York Times article today written by Brad Stone profiles GoCrossCampus and suggested the founders invented the game and said “The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.” There was no mention of Kirkland North or Smedresman’s original work in that article.
GM: We’ll Lose Our Shirts on the Volt, But That’s OK
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008GM says, We’ll Lose Our Shirts on the Volt, But That’s OK:
The Chevrolet Volt might just prove to be the game-changing car its supporters say it is, but General Motors expects to lose money on the car “for years,” said Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.Maximum Bob‘s frank admission isn’t terribly surprising given the resources GM is pouring into the Volt and the expense of the technology behind the range-extended EV, but you’ve got to admire his honesty.
“We won’t make a dime on this car for years, and the board is OK with that,” he told a group of Volt enthusiasts at the New York International Auto Show, according to the Detroit News.
They’re Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008They’re Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side:
While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.“It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering Northern California, who rents a desk for $175 a month at one of Mr. Neuberg’s original sites, the Hat Factory. “And if you’re not nourished, how can you be creative?”
Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States. While some have grown-up-sounding names, most seem connected somewhere between the communalism of the 1960s and the whimsy of the dot-com days of the ’90s, like the Hive Cooperative in Denver, Office Nomads in Seattle, Nutopia Workspace in Lower Manhattan and Independents Hall in Philadelphia.
The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space.
Most coworkers say they were drawn to the spaces for the same reasons that inspired Mr. Neuberg: they like working independently, but they are less effective when sitting home alone.
“Even people who are antisocial feel a need to be around other people for at least part of the day while they’re working,” said Laura Forlano, a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who has studied people working in communal offices and cafes.
The Trouble with Commercialization Funds
Friday, March 21st, 2008Paul Kedrosky goes on a “VC Mini-Rant” about The Trouble with Commercialization Funds — that is, funds to commercialize university technologies:
Granted, I see the superficial attraction:
- There is lots of technology in universities.
- We all love the cheery stories about university-based technologies that made it big, i.e., Google
- Universities do a crummy job of turning technology into commercial companies.
- It doesn’t seemingly require a large fund, so you could get by with a seed-ish fund, which is easier to raise from friends and acquaintances and individuals.
The trouble is, it’s a sucker trap. Here’s why:
- University technologies are more nascent than naive investors think, so there is immense scientific risk.
- Technology is 5% of the story. Managers are 95%. And most sane managers won’t touch university startups with a pole-vaulting pole. Further, most qualified candidates don’t live anywhere near East Wherever University, Iowa, let alone in Peru, etc.
- Far more money is typically required than uninformed investors think, making a seed fund inappropriately-sized.
- There is a lot more technology available to be commercialized in any given area than you think, and most of it sucks.
A global tribe waging segmental warfare
Friday, March 21st, 2008David Ronfeldt sees Al Qaeda and its affiliates as a global tribe waging segmental warfare:
- Continuing to view Al Qaeda mainly as a cutting-edge, post-modern phenomenon of the information age misses a crucial point: Al Qaeda is using the information age to revitalize and project ancient patterns of tribalism on a global scale.
- Tribes behave more like balance-of-honor than balance-of-power systems.
- Al Qaeda’s design looks backward more than it looks forward; it reiterates as much as it innovates — and that’s because of its enduring tribalness.
- Jihadis are using the Internet and the Web to inspire the creation of a virtual global tribe of Islamic radicals — an online umma with kinship segments around the world.
Counterinsurgency Reading List
Thursday, March 20th, 2008The folks at Abu Muqawama offer up an extensive counterinsurgency reading list — but their bare bones essentials list comprises just three items:
- David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
- David Kilcullen, “28 Articles“, Military Review, May–June 2006
- Kalev Sepp, “Best and Worst Practices in COIN“, Military Review, May–June 2005
Galula’s Counterinsurgency Warfare is based on an earlier study he did for RAND, Pacification in Algeria: 1956–1958, which opens with this short history of his military career:
I left Hong Kong in February 1956 after a five-year assignment as military attaché. I had been away from troop duty for eleven years, having specialized in Chinese affairs since the end of World War II. I was saturated with intelligence work, I had missed the war in Indochina, I felt I had learned enough about insurgencies, and I wanted to test certain theories I had formed on counterinsurgency warfare. For all these reasons I volunteered for duty in Algeria as soon as I reached France. When my four-month leave was over, I was assigned to the 45th B.I.C. (Colonial Infantry Battalion) to which I reported on August 1, 1956. I was to spend two years in Algeria, first as a company commander until April 1, 1958, then as a deputy battalion commander until August 1, 1958.
Kilcullen’s “Twenty-Eight Articles” offers these bits of advice:
- Know your turf.
- Diagnose the problem.
- Organize for intell
- Organize for interagency operations.
- Travel light and harden your combat service support (CSS).
- Find a political/cultural adviser.
- Train the squad leaders — then trust them.
- Rank is nothing; talent is everything.
- Have a game plan.
- Be there.
- Avoid knee-jerk responses to first impressions.
- Prepare for handover from day one.
- Build trusted networks.
- Start easy.
- Seek early victories.
- Practice deterrent patrolling.
- Be prepared for setbacks.
- Remember the global audience.
- Engage the women, beware of the children.
- Take stock regularly.
- Exploit a “single narrative.”
- Local forces should mirror the enemy, not the Americans.
- Practice armed civil affairs.
- Small is beautiful.
- Fight the enemy’s strategy, not his forces.
- Build your own solution — only attack the enemy when he gets in the way.
- Keep your extraction plan secret.
- Whatever else you do, keep the initiative.
In Best Practices in Counterinsurgency, Kalev I. Sepp, Ph.D. provides a list of Successful and Unsuccessful Counterinsurgency Practices:
Successful
- Emphasis on intelligence.
- Focus on population, their needs, and security.
- Secure areas established, expanded.
- Insurgents isolated from population (population
control).- Single authority (charismatic/dynamic leader).
- Effective, pervasive psychological operations
(PSYOP) campaigns.- Amnesty and rehabilitation for insurgents.
- Police in lead; military supporting.
- Police force expanded, diversified.
- Conventional military forces reoriented for
counterinsurgency.- Special Forces, advisers embedded with
indigenous forces.- Insurgent sanctuaries denied.
Unsuccessful
- Primacy of military direction of counterinsurgency.
- Priority to “kill-capture” enemy, not on engaging
population.- Battalion-size operations as the norm.
- Military units concentrated on large bases for protection.
- Special Forces focused on raiding.
- Adviser effort a low priority in personnel assignment.
- Building, training indigenous army in image of U.S. Army.
- Peacetime government processes.
- Open borders, airspace, coastlines.
A Solar Grand Plan
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Scientific American offers up A Solar Grand Plan:
- A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
- A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
- Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
- A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
Oh, but there’s this caveat:
- But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.
D’oh! If it requires $420 billion in subsidies to be cost-competitive, it’s not cost-competitive.
Everywhere and nowhere
Thursday, March 20th, 2008The Economist expects online social networks to end up everywhere and yet nowhere:
So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.
The problem with today’s social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks’ lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users’ information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.
Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as “walled gardens” before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook’s messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a “data portability workgroup” to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.
Burglaries on the Decline in the United States
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Burglaries are on the decline in the United States — because “everybody has everything now”:
For almost 20 years, Mathis burglarized homes to support a drug habit. He only got caught a few times. Mathis says he stopped breaking into homes because there’s just no money in it anymore.“If you’re going to do a burglary, you need to have some buyers,” Mathis says. “Everybody has everything now.”
Mathis says there’s just too much on the street already. Everyone he knows already has a digital camera, iPod knockoffs and pirated DVDs shipped in from China.
“And if it’s not new, a lot of people don’t even want to fool with it,” Mathis says.
Forget about last year’s video games and old laptops, Mathis says. And don’t even bring a VCR or boxy TV to the street.
“You can get a TV for nothing almost,” he says. “People are giving them away now.”
Peace and Poison Arrows in Kenya
Thursday, March 20th, 2008John Robb notes that the resurgence of tribal warfare can come suddenly, as in Kenya, where democratic elections led to an oddly civilized form of traditional warfare: daytime battles between large groups of archers. Time looks at Peace and Poison Arrows in Kenya:
December’s election saw incumbent President Mwai Kibaki, who belongs to the Kikuyu tribe, defeat opposition leader Raila Odinga, a Luo, in a contest that opposition supporters said was rigged. Kenyans, who often vote along tribal lines, then found themselves caught in ethnic clashes marked by swinging machetes, soaring stones and flying arrows that have left hundreds dead. Hospitals and morgues saw instance after instance of victims with arrows lodged in their heads and chests. A peace deal was struck Thursday between Kibaki and Odinga, establishing a coalition government. But some Kenyans fear the violence is not yet over, blaming century-old land disputes. “We have been making arrows since we were attacked a month ago,” Sylvester says, amid the sound of hammers clanging against steel nails. “It’s for our own self-defense.” “We cannot know the time of day when they [the Kalenjin, another rival tribe] will come. If they catch you off guard, you’re dead,” says Samuel, 25, holding a bundle of ready arrows.
The associated slide show is eye-opening: