Aretae describes a political-economic feedback loop:
Conservativism leads to good social norms that lead towards economic growth. Economic growth leads to experimentation which leads to the (partial?) disintigration of those social norms. I think that economic growth causes progressivism. I think that libertarian rules, and conservative norms cause growth. Progressivism defeats itself, as growth fails, just as conservativism does.
In 1929, superintendent L.P. Benezet decided to omit arithmetic from the elementary school curriculum, because he found it to dull and almost chloroform the child’s reasoning faculties:
There was a certain problem which I tried out, not once but a hundred times, in grades six, seven, and eight. Here is the problem: “If I can walk a hundred yards in a minute [and I can], how many miles can I walk in an hour, keeping up the same rate of speed?”
In nineteen cases out of twenty the answer given me would be six thousand, and if I beamed approval and smiled, the class settled back, well satisfied. But if I should happen to say, “I see. That means that I could walk from here to San Francisco and back in an hour” there would invariably be a laugh and the children would look foolish.
I, therefore, told the teachers of these experimental rooms that I would expect them to give the children much practise in estimating heights, lengths, areas, distances, and the like. At the end of a year of this kind of work, I visited the experimental room which had had a combination of third- and fourth-grade children, who now were fourth and fifth graders.
I drew on the board a rough map of the western end of Lake Ontario, the eastern end of Lake Erie, and the Niagara River. I asked them to guess what it was, and was not surprised when they identified the location. I then labeled three spots along the river with the letters “Q,” “NF,” and “B.” They identified Niagara Falls and Buffalo without any difficulty, but were puzzled by the “Q.” Some thought it was Quebec but others knew it was not. I finally told them that it was Queenstown.
I then drew a cross section of the falls, showing the hard layer of rock above and the soft layer eating out underneath, and they told me what it was and why it was that the stone was falling, little by little, from the edge. They told me how this process was going on. I then made the statement that in 1680, when white men had first seen the falls, the falls were 2500 feet lower down than they are at present. I then asked them at what rate the falls were retreating upstream. These children, who had had no formal arithmetic for a year but who had been given practise in thinking, told me that it was 250 years since white men had first seen the falls and that, therefore, the falls were retreating upstream at the rate of ten feet a year. I then remarked that science had decided that the falls had originally started at Queenstown, and, indicating that Queenstown was now ten miles down the river, I asked them how many years the falls had been retreating. They told me that if it had taken the falls 250 years to retreat about a half mile, it would be at the rate of 500 years to the mile, or 5000 years for the retreat from Queenstown.
The map had been drawn so as to show the distance from Niagara Falls to Buffalo as approximately twice the distance from Queenstown to Niagara Falls. Then I asked these children whether they had any idea how long it would be before the falls would retreat to Buffalo and drain the lake. They told me that it would not happen for another ten thousand years. I asked them how they got that and they told me that the map indicated that it was twenty miles from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, or thereabouts, and that this was twice the distance from Queenstown to Niagara Falls!
It so happened that a few days after this incident I was visiting a large New England city with five of my brother superintendents. Our host was interested in my description of this incident and suggested that I try the same problem on a fifth grade in one of his schools. With the other superintendents as audience, I stood before an advanced fifth grade in what was known as the Demonstration School, the school used for practise teaching and to which visitors were always sent.
The home superintendent: Boys and girls, would you like to have Superintendent Benezet of Manchester, New Hampshire, ask you some questions about Niagara Falls?
The children express pleasure at the idea.
Mr. Benezet: [Drawing a map on the board] Children, what is this that I have drawn on the blackboard?
Children: The Great Lakes.
Mr. B.: Good. What lakes?
A child: Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
Mr. B.: Good. What is the river?
Child: The St. Lawrence River.
Mr. B.: That is really correct. It is the St. Lawrence River. But they call it by a different name here. They call it the Niagara River. What have you heard in connection with the Niagara River?
Another child: Niagara Falls are there.
Another child: Niagara Falls are connected with Niagara River.
Mr. B.: Oh! How are they connected?
Child: The water trickles down the Falls and goes into the Niagara River.
Mr. B.: I should call that quite a trickle. Have any of you children seen Niagara Falls?
Three raise their hands.
Mr. B.: How high are the falls? Have you any idea? Are they higher than this room?
Children: Yes [dubiously].
Mr. B.: Well, how high is this room?
Its height is guessed anywhere from 11 feet to 40 feet. The room is actually about 16 feet high. The question of the height of the falls is finally dropped.
Mr. B.: Well, never mind how high the falls are. On this map here I have indicated one spot and marked it “NF,” and another spot and marked it “B.” What does “NF” mean?
Children: Niagara Falls.
Mr. B.: What does “B” stand for?
Another child: Bay.
Mr. B.: No. Remember that Niagara Falls is not only the name of the Falls, but the name of a city.
Child: Baltimore.
After considerable pause, the home superintendent, in the back of the room, tells the class that the name of the city is also the name of an animal.
Child: Buffalo.
Mr. B.: Yes. Now there is another town here that I am going to mark “Q.” It is not Quebec; it is Queenstown. People who have studied this carefully tell us that once upon a time the falls were at Queenstown. Tell me now. What does it mean if I say that I show you the cross section of an apple?
Class is uncertain.
Mr. B.: Suppose that you cut an apple in half with a knife. What do I show you if I hold up one-half?
Child: Half the apple.
Another child: The core of the apple.
Third child: The inside of an apple.
Mr. B.: Tell me. Is the word “section” a new word to the majority of you?
Enthusiastic chorus of “No.”
Mr. B.: Well, a cross-section of an apple means a cut right thru an apple. Why have I said this to you?
Meantime he has drawn on the board a cross-section of Niagara Falls.
Child: Because that is a cross-section of the falls.
Mr. Benezet now explains the two kinds of rock and asks which is the harder. They finally decide that the rock above is the harder. He then shows how the underneath rock rotted away, and that finally there was a shelf of hard rock overhanging. This became too heavy and fell off; and the falls have thereby moved back some ten feet.
Mr. B.: Now, when white men first saw the falls in 1680 [placing this date on the board], the falls were further down the river than they are now, and it is estimated that since that time they have moved back upstream about 2500 feet. Now how long ago was it that white men first saw the falls?
Child: Four hundred years.
Another child: Two hundred years.
Third child: Three hundred years.
Guesses range anywhere between 110 years and 450 years. One boy says it was about the time that Columbus sailed to America; another says that it was about the time of the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
Mr. B.: Well, how are we going to find out?
General bewilderment for a while. Finally:
Child: Take 1930 and subtract it from 1680.
Mr. B.: Fine.
He writes on the blackboard:
1680 1930 ––––Mr. B.: Now take a look and tell me how many years that was. See if you can tell me before we subtract it, figure by figure.
It is to be noted that not one child called attention to the wrong position of the two sets of figures. They guess 350 years, 200 years, 400 years.
Mr. B.: Well, let’s subtract it figure by figure.
Child: Zero from 0 equals 0. Three from 8 equals 5. Nine from 6 equals 3. Three hundred fifty years is the answer.
Mr. B.: How many think that 350 years is right?
About two-thirds of the hands go up. Finally two or three think that it is wrong.
Mr. B.: All right, correct it.
Child: It should have been 9 from 16 equals 7.
Mr. Benezet thereupon puts down 750 for the answer. When he asks how many in the room agree that this is right, practically every hand is raised. By this time the local superintendent was pacing the door at the rear of the room and throwing up his hands in dismay at this showing on the part of his prize pupils. After a time, as Mr. Benezet looks a little puzzled, the children gradually become a little puzzled also. One little girl, Elsie Miller, finally comes to the board, reverses the figures, subtracts, and says the answer is 250 years.
Mr. B.: All right. If the falls have retreated 2500 feet in 250 years, how many feet a year have the falls moved upstream?
Child: Two feet.Mr. Benezet registers complete satisfaction and asks how many in the class agree. Practically the whole class put hands up again.
Mr. B.: Well, has anyone a different answer?
Child: Eight feet.
Another child: Twenty feet.
Finally Elsie Miller again gets up, and says the answer is ten feet.
Mr. B.: What? Ten feet? (Registering great surprise)
The class, at this, bursts into a roar of laughter. Elsie Miller sticks to her answer, and is invited by Mr. Benezet to come up and prove it. He says that it seems queer that Elsie is so obstinate when everyone is against her. She finally proves her point, and Mr. Benezet admits to the class that all the rest were wrong.
Mr. B.: Now, what fraction of a mile is it that the falls have retreated during the last 250 years?
Children guess 3/2, 3/4, 2/3, 1/20, 7/8 – everything except 1/2. The bell for dismissal rings and the session is over.
It will be noted that the local superintendent gave them a little hint at the outset, that was not given to the Manchester children, when he said, “Niagara Falls.” They were prepared to identify my map. Also, the Manchester children who had not learned tables but had talked a great deal about distances and dimensions, recognized the fact that 2500 feet was about a half a mile, while the children in the larger city who were fresh from their tables, had little conception of the distance.
I was so delighted with the success of the experiment so far that in the fall of 1930 we started six or seven other rooms along the same line. The formal arithmetic was dropped and emphasis was placed on English expression, on reasoning, and estimating of distances.
Summertime is the fighting season in Afghanistan:
Late spring advents a resurgence in Taliban activity, possibly an effect of the surplus labour capacity made available after sowing, this would reconcile the reduction in activity from October onwards, coinciding with the harvest.
During the winter, climatic conditions most likely tempers insurgent activities and thus also lowers NATO casualty rates.
HBO’s The Pacific reminded me of an old post of mine that answers the question, How many able-bodied U.S. Marines does it take to hold a hill against 2,000 desperate and motivated attackers?
They’re a bit like Texas Rangers, I suppose.
I don’t read Lawrence Auster’s View from the Right, but he recently posted an exchange with Mencius Moldbug, whom he characterizes as friendly, witty, and engaging — and a bit more:
But the fact is that he is an extreme paleocon nihilist who, in the midst of a leftist revolution aimed at destroying our Constitution and reducing us to slavery, would, from the vantage point of his supposedly superior knowledge of history, undermine any effort on our part to stop it.
Mencius Moldbug writes:
It is not necessary for Americans to transform their civilization, only their government! If that civilization has decayed, it has decayed under long and continuous pressure from a corrosive form of government inimical to it.
Government can heal a society as well as corrode it; but without the infection, it will also heal itself. Government has broken society. Your parody of my remedy is: to repair government, first heal society. My remedy is: to heal society, first repair government.
The natural order of government is not a secret. Aristotle knew it. It is natural for children to respect and obey their parents. It is natural for parents to guide and support their children. It is natural for the poor, weak, and ignorant to respect and obey the wealthy, strong and powerful. It is natural for the wealthy, strong and powerful to guide and support the poor, weak and ignorant.
Why do ghetto blacks vote for Kennedys? Why do Kennedys repay them for these votes with government welfare? Because they are recapitulating this natural feudal structure, albeit through a broken political system that perverts its every good to evil.
Why did “healthcare reform” experience a burst of support when it prevailed? Because, pace Osama, people like a strong horse. This too is natural. They flock to winners, however perverse, and abandon losers, however noble.
Because your conservative vision of the defeat of liberalism is in fact modeled on historical events in which liberalism prevailed over conservatism, it is a fantasy that can never succeed. Decay is an entropic, progressive process that feeds on itself. A little decay leads to a lot of decay. A little fire leads to a lot of fire.
Restoration is an anti-entropic process. A little restoration does not lead to a lot of restoration. It is an intrinsically futile act — a candle that soon goes out. Rather, if order is to be restored, it must be restored entirely in one step. A house can be ruined incrementally. It cannot be renovated incrementally.
Is this one step more difficult than the little, incremental steps you encourage? Yet to other conservatives, your little, incremental steps (ending Muslim immigration! Repatriating Muslims!) seem grandiose, incredible, impossible.
And they are. Not, though, because they are too big; because they are too small. In the ruined house (picture America as an old mansion in Detroit), Powerline wants to start by cleaning and sanding one floorboard. This inspiring act will spread to the next floorboard, and so on, and eventually the house will be clean and new. Destruction works in this way. Renovation does not.
You would like to remodel the kitchen. The whole kitchen! And the result will be — a ruined house in the slums. With a state-of-the-art kitchen.
Who would sign up for this task? Who would volunteer? No one, because the task is obviously futile. For one thing, the rest of the house is still full of the same old squatters. They can ruin your lovely kitchen in a week. Sooner or later, they will.
It is this futility, both of your approach and of Powerline’s, that creates the deep apathy of the discontented American population — the people who give Congress a 14% approval rating. The 86% could sweep away this body with a tap of its finger — if only they could agree on an alternative to replace it with. They have no such alternative. So it rules, forever.
There’s much more to the exchange. Read the whole thing.
If you haven’t yet seen this video of an American Apache helicopter crew shooting at suspected insurgents, I recommend you skip past the intro to 2:45 in, when the gun-cam footage starts. Try to ignore any helpful captions, so you can see it with your own eyes.
You can stop watching after a few minutes.
Now, viewed without the intro and the captions, the video seems straightforward. An Apache was dispatched to the area for some reason, spots some insurgents armed with AK-47s and RPG-7s, shoots them, spots more insurgents coming to their aid, and then shoots them, too. Simple.
Only, we’re told, those weren’t insurgents armed with AK-47s and RPG-7s, but locals and a reporter with a professional video camera. So the whole thing is tragic — but apparently many, many people on the Net see it as downright sinister.
I think Foseti has it right:
I submit that anyone with a historical perspective will find this video to be 0% shocking. In wars, this stuff happens. If modern warfare is remarkable for anything, it’s for how far some militaries go to avoid these incidents. Nevertheless, it is shocking and sickening and harsh — it is war and it can’t be otherwise.
What I find most interesting, is that no one talks of the most interesting part — namely, the fact that Wikileaks exists. It’s a site that coordinates an illegal activity — one whose only purpose is to facilitate government employees illegally undermining their government agency.
I understand that our system of government (the unwritten American Constitution) depends on leaks from official government (agencies) to unofficial government (press). But I still find it astounding.
If your theory of the way the US government works cannot explain why Wikileaks exists, then your theory sucks. If your plans to reform government do not deal with the Wikileaks phenomenon, then your plans for reform suck. As far as I know, Mencius Moldbug is the only person who has come up with a convincing explanation of why Wikileaks is allowed to exists.
Addendum: It looks like they were carrying weapons — at least by some accounts:
The footage is grainy, but, in fact, it is very clear that some of the men were carrying weapons. See this photo at the Jawa report. Clearly one man is carrying a gun and, it seems to me, the other is carrying an RPG. According to the military, troops on the ground had taken fire and called in for air support. As Bill Roggio wrote yesterday, “note how empty the streets are in the video. The only people visible on the streets are the armed men and the accompanying Reuters cameramen. This is a very good indicator that there was a battle going on in the vicinity. Civilians smartly clear the streets during a gunfight.”
Apparently the official report was that they found RPG rounds at the site:
We remained above the engagement site while Bushmaster sent ground forces to the site. Bushmaster arrived and reported 11 x AIF KIA and found RPGs and RPG rounds at the site. We also witnessed a loaded RPG lying 2-3 blocks south of the engagement site.
Aretae would reframe my recent post about complex systems as being all about how feedback systems fail to work in bureaucratic systems. I think we can go one step further:
I suppose the more subtle point, as Coase pointed out, is that there’s a trade-off between small, atomic, market actors and large, conglomerated, bureaucratic firms.As long as the greater context is a competitive market, firms will face pressure to seek the right size — but government agencies certainly won’t, and big firms are awfully good at wielding political power to grant themselves market power.
Aretae responds that left-libertarians find corporations almost as problematic as governments, because corporations are the primary actors that move government to mess up the economy, and that governments mess up the economy by increasing transaction costs — but I don’t quite agree:
I think it’s left-libertarian to see corporations as intrinsically problematic — because they’re big, bureaucratic, hierarchical, full of suits, etc.
I think it’s right-libertarian to see corporations as problematic in the presence of government — because they use government to their own ends, under the guise of doing what’s best for the economy.
I suppose these things are always a bit fuzzy though. Rand, for instance, combines Romantic “fight the power” yearning with pro-capitalist reasoning in favor of producers over moochers and looters.
Now, is the chief problem of government that it increases transaction costs? I’ll have to think about that. Certainly regulatory “red tape” increases the cost of doing business. So do outright taxes, of course, which tend to increase marginal costs — not good for economic activity either.
Interestingly, when the State was really just a bunch of landlords, taxes were fairly efficient — charging rent for land is easy to do and doesn’t reduce the supply of land much.
So, the rank-and-file Taliban can’t shoot straight, but why is that? Their great-grandfathers were known to shoot each other, and Brits, from a mile away. Well, the kids these days, they never learned to shoot with a good old-fashioned bolt-action rifle. No, they’ve only ever shot full-auto Kalashnikovs:
Few sounds are as distinctive as those made by Kalashnikov rounds passing high overhead. The previous sentence is written that way — rounds and overhead — for a reason, because this is a common way that incoming Kalashnikov fire is heard in Afghanistan: in bursts, and high. Over and over again in ambushes and firefights, the Taliban’s gunmen fire their AK-47 knockoffs on automatic mode. The Kalashnikov series already suffers from inherent range and accuracy limitations related to its medium-power cartridges, its relatively short barrel, the short space between its rear and front sights, and the heavy mass and deliberately loose fit of the integrated bolt carrier and gas piston traveling within the receiver.
For many shooters, the limitations resulting from these design characteristics are manageable at shorter ranges and with disciplined shooting. In certain environments and conditions, including in dense vegetation where typical skirmish distances shrink, the limitations are easily overcome. Add distance between a shooter and a target, and fire a Kalashnikov on automatic, and the rifle’s weaknesses can emerge starkly. There are reasons for this. One is perceptible to people who are shot at but not struck. When fired on automatic, the weapon’s muzzle rises. Bullets start to climb. At very short ranges, a round from a climbing muzzle might still hit a man. At longer ranges, which are common in arid Afghanistan, the chances of a hit decline sharply. Rounds travel over heads.
For decades, those who have trained Afghan fighters have cajoled, preached and drilled the importance of firing on semiautomatic mode (read: one shot for each trigger pull) for most situations. A Marine lieutenant colonel I served with in the 1980s and 1990s had been previously assigned to Pakistan to train anti-Soviet mujahedeen. His accounts of Afghan and foreign fighters who were impervious to instruction on the importance of single-shot fire would seem to describe many insurgents in the field in Afghanistan today.
A commenter named Ben makes this same point:
Having recovered many many caches of weapons while in country we always found stores of Mausers and Enfield rifles in the caches but failed to find many AK 47/74 type weapons. This is due to the status symbol the AK brings to the soldier. Because of this the younger soldiers were never taught to really shoot or even maintain their weapons. The old spray and pray marksmanship now comes to play. Many of todays Taliban were born during the Russian or Post-Russian era in Afghanistan.
The older veterans are tired of fighting. On one such occasion we had taken some of the Mausers and ammunition to the range. One of our hired workers who was approximately 50 years old came along to clean up the area and help. He may have also been curious! During the event we were practicing marksmanship with captured weapons and ammunition. The American soldiers were really impressed with the accuracy of the bolt-action rifles and their range.
I had noticed our Afghan worker had started coaching some of our troops and offered him the chance to shoot. He accepted and proceeded to school the American soldiers on marksmanship. I later found he had been Mujahedeen fighting the Russians. After offering him a position with our militia he proceeded to turn us down. He said he was tired of fighting and just wanted to keep his position supervising the kids we hired for general labor and trash collectors on our base.
The older Afghans who learned to shoot with old single-shot and bolt-action rifles still know how to shoot and shoot well. Fortunately for us, they are tired of fighting and not interested in choosing any side in this conflict. Our worst nightmare would be a couple hundred older soldiers with the old Mausers and the knowledge to use them. Our problems would greatly multiply fast as would our casualty rates.
Venture capitalists avoid innovation whenever possible, Andy Singleton says:
They claim to be in the business of innovation, but they also talk constantly, often in the same paragraph, about how much they want to avoid innovation.In this latest conversation, the VC said “We look for companies with a product and a proven business model.” This should should sound familiar to you. I wish I could run a video montage of the pictures in my head of VC’s saying how much they want to avoid innovation. Surely you would laugh. If you ask VC’s what they look for, they use words like “traction”, “proven business model”, “reference customers”, and “invest in marketing” or “sales and marketing”. This in itself is a big step forward from “We invest in teams that have done it before” (Greylock partner, 90′s), or “We look for the second time around” (Sigma partner, 90′s). It doesn’t take a genius to understand what they are saying. As much as possible, they want to avoid all innovation (stuff that’s not proven). It’s risky and unprofitable.
VC behavior subsequent to making an investment is also revealing. After looking at hundreds of deals, and falling in love with one particular business plan, and persuading other investors and partners that it’s great, VC’s generally don’t support subsequent changes to the business plan. A self-funded entrepreneur is constantly making major course corrections, to the point of driving his colleagues crazy. VC’s will deny this, but a VC investment is basically a ballistic missile launch, without course corrections. They are likely to just shut down the funding, or even to continue investing a lot of money in a concept that is clearly not creating the forecast level of excitement.
Cracked presents a list of six ridiculous history myths that you probably think are true — if you don’t regularly read up on historical myths:
Gun Fights in the Violent Wild West
How many murders do you suppose these old western towns saw a year? Let’s say the bloodiest, gun-slingingest of the famous cattle towns with the cowboys doing quick-draws at high noon every other day. A hundred? More?How about five? That was the most murders any old-west town saw in any one year. Ever. Most towns averaged about 1.5 murders a year, and not all of those were shooting. You were way more likely to be murdered in Baltimore in 2008 than you were in Tombstone in 1881, the year of the famous gunfight at the OK Corral (body count: three) and the town’s most violent year ever.Stock Brokers Jumping Out of Windows When The Market Crashes
A popular comedian at the time made a quip about speculators needing to “stand in line to get a window to jump out of.” The myth grew from there, until the “suddenly bankrupt stockbroker leaping from a window” became a stereotype.In reality, only two suicides by jumping occurred on Wall Street between the crash and the end of 1929, and one of those was that of an elderly female clerk named Hulda Borowski — not really the image that comes to mind when you hear “corporate fat-cat.”Feminist Bra Burnings
This one literally never happened as far as anyone can tell. Women protesting against the 1968 Miss America contest in New York did toss several items into a trash can, including bras, girdles, high heeled shoes and women’s magazines, labeling them “instruments of torture.” But no fire was involved, except for the fire of burning feminine rage. Neither did the women actually remove their bras at the protest, inexplicably opting to gather the bras beforehand, and remain fully clothed.It wasn’t long after the era of Vietnam protesters burning their draft cards, and a journalist or two presumably conflated one of the concepts with the other. After all, they’re all hippies, right?America Goes Crazy Over War of the Worlds
There’s no doubt that some people thought the broadcast was real. Radio was still new and a fake news broadcast had literally never been done before. But virtually all of them reacted in exactly the way you would have: flipped to another station, or called somebody to ask what was going on.Reports of people immediately flying into a panic — attempting suicide, hallucinating alien death rays or fleeing to the countryside with guns in hand — were almost all anecdotal stories told second hand with no names attached. And although the phone lines to the studio were unusually busy that night, mixed in with the people asking for information, were people praising or complaining about a show that seemed like it was clearly designed to create a mass panic.
No Irish Need Apply
There is no record of even one of the so-called “NINA” window signs ever existing in America. No photographs have ever been found, and any evidence for them is entirely anecdotal.Even in print notices for jobs, records from the New York Times at the height of anti-Irish discrimination (from the 1850s to the 1920s), show exactly two jobs using the phrase in a 70-year period. That’s probably less than the number of jobs that specified that the applicant must bring his own trained monkey.
The myth of the window signs became widespread when a song, aptly named “No Irish Need Apply,” was imported to the U.S. from the UK in the 1860′s. The lyrics told the tale of a young Irish woman looking for domestic work and being discouraged by the “No Irish Need Apply” warnings in print ads, even though, she says, the Irish would gladly “given their last potato” to a person in need.
Elaborate Medieval Torture Devices
Despite being one of the most famous torture devices ever (and having a heavy metal band named after them), Iron Maidens didn’t exist back then, and there’s no record they were ever used on anyone. If you’re saying, “But I’ve seen them in museums!” well, that’s why they exist. These kind of “horrors of the medieval times” exhibits were hugely popular in the 19th century and it appears the Iron Maidens they showed off were cobbled together for the exhibit.That terrible pear thing that they used to punish sodomy and adultery by ripping the offending organs to shreds from the inside? Also a myth. Nobody can find any reference to the device before the 17th century, and no record at all of it being used to destroy somebody’s asshole.What about the spiked chair? It’s supposedly a device of the Spanish Inquisition, but once again there’s no record of them using it, or anybody else.
(Hat tip to Fbardamu.)
Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is one of those influential books I haven’t read yet, but I’ve read a lot about. Clay Shirky summarizes it — in a slightly unusual context we’ll get to in a moment:
The answer [Tainter] arrived at was that [the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon, etc.] hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex — agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.
Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive — each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output — but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.
Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
Shirky’s not comparing us to the Romans; he’s discussing big media companies that choose not to see disruptive innovation:
One of the interesting questions about Tainter’s thesis is whether markets and democracy, the core mechanisms of the modern world, will let us avoid complexity-driven collapse, by keeping any one group of elites from seizing unbroken control. This is, as Tainter notes in his book, an open question. There is, however, one element of complex society into which neither markets nor democracy reach — bureaucracy.
Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
In spring of 2007, the web video comedy In the Motherhood made the move to TV. In the Motherhood started online as a series of short videos, with viewers contributing funny stories from their own lives and voting on their favorites. This tactic generated good ideas at low cost as well as endearing the show to its viewers; the show’s tag line was “By Moms, For Moms, About Moms.”
The move to TV was an affirmation of this technique; when ABC launched the public forum for the new TV version, they told users their input “might just become inspiration for a story by the writers.”
Or it might not. Once the show moved to television, the Writers Guild of America got involved. They were OK with For and About Moms, but By Moms violated Guild rules. The producers tried to negotiate, to no avail, so the idea of audience engagement was canned (as was In the Motherhood itself some months later, after failing to engage viewers as the web version had).
The critical fact about this negotiation wasn’t about the mothers, or their stories, or how those stories might be used. The critical fact was that the negotiation took place in the grid of the television industry, between entities incorporated around a 20th century business logic, and entirely within invented constraints. At no point did the negotiation about audience involvement hinge on the question “Would this be an interesting thing to try?”
When, TV execs asked Shirky, would online video generate enough money to cover their current [high] costs?
In the future, at least some methods of producing video for the web will become as complex, with as many details to attend to, as television has today, and people will doubtless make pots of money on those forms of production. It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That’s not how it works, however.
The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!) That minute has been watched by more people than the viewership of American Idol, Dancing With The Stars, and the Superbowl combined. (174 million views and counting.)
Some video still has to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old media ecosystem, where video had to be complex simply to be video, is broken. Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete with cheap bits made in simple ways. “Charlie Bit My Finger” was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.
Read the whole thing.
Anomaly UK finds it horribly persuasive and adds his libertarian-software guy perspective:
If there’s one reason why libertarians tend to be in software, it’s that software is more complex than other things humans design (since it doesn’t have to be actually built), and that programmers are therefore more aware that complexity is a cost. The biggest cost of adding a feature to a piece of software is not the time you spend making it, it’s the fact that your software is now more complex, and everything else you do with it in future is made more difficult by that complexity. Similarly, the biggest cost of adding a government program is not what you immediately spend on hiring people to do it, it is that you have made government bigger, in a way that is almost impossible to reverse when changes in the world or changes in what you want to do demand it.
Of course, saying that government cannot be simplified at the margin is just another way of saying that libertarian politics cannot be successful. The only people with any approach that can succeed in the face of Tainter’s theory are these guys.
Kevin Kelly also cites Shirky and names a principle after him:
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
— Clay Shirky
I don’t know if that’s a terribly novel principle though. David Levinson notes that it evokes Upton Sinclair’s Law:
If a man’s paycheck depends on his not understanding something, you can rely upon his not understanding it.
I’m reminded of Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics, Parkinson’s Law, and Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
Forget the fables about Afghan marksmen, C.J. Chivers says, after spending a month and a half in Helmand Province with the Marines. The Taliban insurgents may be resourceful, organized, clever, and even brave, but they can’t shoot:
They knew the network of irrigation canals and used them as trench lines. They littered the fields and small terrain features with hidden bombs rigged to pressure plates. They deployed spotters with radios on motorcycle patrols, which tried to find the Marines and relay word of their movements and activities. They also chose when to fight, and often opened fire on the Marines in the late afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky. Why? Because Marine patrols originated to the Taliban’s east, and as the Marines walked generally westward across the flat steppe toward the area where the Taliban hid, the Marines were walking into the angled sunlight, which illuminated them perfectly for the Taliban, but forced the Marines to look into hard light, and squint. This was an environment in which small-arms clashes were almost inevitable, and in which the Taliban would often get to fire the opening shots. It should have been a place where the Taliban might succeed. What did the numbers show? By early February, when Marine units began massing for the push on Marja, Capt. Thomas Grace, Bravo Company’s commander, estimated that his platoons had been in at least two dozen firefights, often in open terrain. Some of the fights lasted several hours. At least one lasted a full day and into the night. How many of the company’s Marines and the Afghan soldiers who accompanied them had been shot? Zero.Farther west along Route Olympia is an intersection known as Five Points, so named because several dirt roads meet there. The juncture provides access to northern Marja. Marine Expeditionary Brigade-Afghanistan, the command that planned the attack on Marja, deemed this essential terrain for securing the region. In January, another unit — Charlie Company, First Battalion, Third Marines — was assigned to fly in by helicopter and seize and hold the intersection. This happened in February, a few days before the larger assault began. It prompted a determined Taliban response.
Once the Taliban realized the Marines had leapt by air over their outer defenses, they clustered near Five Points and fought Charlie Company intensely, especially in the first few days. During this time, according to the company commander, Capt. Stephan P. Karabin II, his Marines were in about 15 firefights. Again the Taliban had certain advantages. They knew the ground well enough that their fighters stashed small motorcycles in canals that had been drained. After ambushing the Marines, they sometimes dropped into a dry canal, ran through the maze, jumped on their bikes, started the engines and blasted away at speeds that no one pursuing on foot could hope to match. Smart tactics. But the Taliban did not always run. They often held their ground and fought, perhaps feeling protected by the canals that did contain water, which typically separated them from the Marine patrols they chose to fire upon.
To change the character of the fighting, Captain Karabin ordered his Marines to patrol on foot with their .50-caliber machine guns. These would be lugged along in pieces, and when a firefight began, the Marines assigned to them would put them together, mount the weapons on their tripods, load belts of ammunition and open fire. (A M2 Browning machine gun and tripod weighs nearly 130 pounds; this does not include the weight of the ammunition.) The heavy guns tilted the fighting more fully in the Marines’ favor. But the fact that M2s were used this way said something about how the Taliban fought; some of this fighting was pitched. How many of Charlie Company’s Marines were struck by Taliban bullets in these engagements? Once again, none.
Neither of these companies was spared casualties. Four separate bomb blasts killed two Marines from Bravo Company and wounded nine Marines from Charlie Company. But the Taliban’s rifles were another story. Together the two companies were in about 40 firefights against the main guerrilla force in a nation that is considered, by the conventional wisdom, to be a land of born marksmen. And not a single bullet fired by the Taliban found its mark.
Kilo Company, a fairly large unit (~300 men) suffered some casualties (8 shot, 2 fatally) from 10 days of heavy fighting:
On many days, Kilo Company’s patrols would be ambushed while crossing flat, open ground, with no vegetation concealing the Marines’ movements and no place to take cover without running a couple of hundred yards or more. Often many Taliban gunmen would open fire simultaneously, and a large number of rounds would fly into the area where the patrol walked. Rounds would snap and buzz past helmets. Rounds would thump all around in the dirt. But usually no one would be struck. It happened again and again. When Marines did get hit, it often appeared that the fire came from PK machine guns or the local contingent of snipers — not the riflemen who make the Taliban’s rank-and-file. One day, after a few hours of fighting in which the Taliban had not yet hit any Marines, a corporal from Second Platoon stood upright, exposing himself above the waist and looking over a wall as bullets flew high overhead. He didn’t flinch. “What’s everybody ducking for?” he said. He cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted an expletive-laden taunt at the Taliban gunmen shooting from concealment on the opposite side of a field. The editors would never allow the corporal’s words to be printed here. But they amounted to this: You guys can’t shoot.
Yes, some of this was probably adrenaline and undiluted cockiness, the kind of behavior that Marines can thrive on. But this cockiness was not just attitude. It reflected a discernible truth. Much of the incoming fire was not coming close.
It’s no longer 1897, and the average Afghan is no longer a warrior, a politician, and a theologian.
Eric Falkenstein reiterates his key idea, that envy dominates greed when it comes to explaining human behavior:
The idea that ‘incentives matter’, and that people generally act in their material self interest, is a powerful assumption. Alternative conceptions of human action, such as that people care mainly about their community, country, or God, are considerably more convoluted in explaining, say, why stock prices are uncorrelated from one day to the next.
However, there are many anomalies to this assumption, and my big idea in this article is the standard conception of self interest is not cynical enough: envy can explain most of what greed can, plus more. For example, a non obvious implication of a standard formulation of self interest–that our happiness increases in wealth, but at a decreasing rate–is a necessary and sufficient condition that a ‘risk premium’ must accompany risky assets. This was developed in the 1950s and 1960s into Modern Portfolio Theory, and is a mainstay of business school curricula. Yet the data supporting this seemingly intuitive theory (‘higher risk–correctly defined–implies higher expected return’), is lacking for every asset class you can imagine (stocks, bonds, lotteries, currencies, futures), with only a few conspicuous consistent anecdotes (ie, short-term US Treasuries and AAA bonds have low risk and low returns).
Why might this be? I wrote a book arguing this is because if everyone is benchmarking against everyone else, not maximizing wealth but rather relative wealth, it turns out the mathematical implication is that the risk premium goes to zero. It’s a rather straightforward implication, and it does involve a little math, but the bottom line is, different assumption, different reality.
[...]
Most work finance today involves teasing out the nuance of risk that explains this null result. Like a wine expert finding they can’t discern a Chateau Lafite Rothschild from Two-Buck Chuck, experts are very good at rationalizing, especially using ‘powerful econometric techniques’ that hide the embarrassment in obscure metrics.
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Of course, people are still risk averse, in that they will pay to avoid having risk thrust upon them, and so buy insurance. Yet, systematic risk, the risk that presumably yields a prisk premium, is distinct from that. Note that if ‘risk-free’ is buying the market or consensus portfolio, you have the potential for bubbles. As a sector like internet companies, or housing, becomes larger, one allocates more to it without much notice, because it isn’t risky if everyone is doing it. My experience working in finance is that it is much easier to sell a new strategy if several of your competitors are already doing it, indeed, one should probably anticipate your superiors asking for good reasons why one is not doing what competitors are doing. An investment that starts off solid and gains conspicuous support can cross over into a bubble because at some point investment demand can create a positive feedback loop as more people try to emulate their peers, who then generate more benchmarks that generate more emulation.
[...]
Humans are inherently social creatures, and so our greatest rewards and problems come from other people, as opposed to ‘stuff’. For economists to focus on wealth as consumption, independent of others, ignores all this and so and so has to massively nuance theory to get things to explain much of what we do.
[...]
Economists strongly prefer the idea that people are merely wealth maximizing agents because this generates tractable models, and economists are primarily modelers. Envy would invalidate many models, if not entire subdisciplines, because in that case one cannot aggregate preferences into one person, as it makes no sense to talk about the aggregate happiness of people, when their happiness depends mainly on their relative positions. Economists like to add these curiosities outside models, but clearly the objective function to maximize GDP is misleading if envy is very important. As the old can opener joke goes, economists like the assumption because it generates nice answers.
You should probably read the whole thing — if not because I say so, then because Aretae says so.
And the Lord said unto the Rabbit, goeth and hideth eggs, and so didst the Rabbit.
— Lepus 3:16
All the fun things about Easter are pagan, Heather McDougall says:
Bunnies are a leftover from the pagan festival of Eostre, a great northern goddess whose symbol was a rabbit or hare. Exchange of eggs is an ancient custom, celebrated by many cultures. Hot cross buns are very ancient too. In the Old Testament we see the Israelites baking sweet buns for an idol, and religious leaders trying to put a stop to it. The early church clergy also tried to put a stop to sacred cakes being baked at Easter. In the end, in the face of defiant cake-baking pagan women, they gave up and blessed the cake instead.Easter is essentially a pagan festival which is celebrated with cards, gifts and novelty Easter products, because it’s fun and the ancient symbolism still works.
Early Christianity made a pragmatic acceptance of ancient pagan practices:
The general symbolic story of the death of the son (sun) on a cross (the constellation of the Southern Cross) and his rebirth, overcoming the powers of darkness, was a well worn story in the ancient world. There were plenty of parallel, rival resurrected saviours too.The Sumerian goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, was hung naked on a stake, and was subsequently resurrected and ascended from the underworld. One of the oldest resurrection myths is Egyptian Horus. Born on 25 December, Horus and his damaged eye became symbols of life and rebirth. Mithras was born on what we now call Christmas day, and his followers celebrated the spring equinox. Even as late as the 4th century AD, the sol invictus, associated with Mithras, was the last great pagan cult the church had to overcome. Dionysus was a divine child, resurrected by his grandmother. Dionysus also brought his mum, Semele, back to life.
In an ironic twist, the Cybele cult flourished on today’s Vatican Hill. Cybele’s lover Attis, was born of a virgin, died and was reborn annually. This spring festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday, rising to a crescendo after three days, in rejoicing over the resurrection. There was violent conflict on Vatican Hill in the early days of Christianity between the Jesus worshippers and pagans who quarrelled over whose God was the true, and whose the imitation. What is interesting to note here is that in the ancient world, wherever you had popular resurrected god myths, Christianity found lots of converts. So, eventually Christianity came to an accommodation with the pagan Spring festival. Although we see no celebration of Easter in the New Testament, early church fathers celebrated it, and today many churches are offering “sunrise services” at Easter — an obvious pagan solar celebration. The date of Easter is not fixed, but instead is governed by the phases of the moon — how pagan is that
Big Mean Carl is a Muppet who made his name on Muppets Tonight, the short-lived, post-Jim Henson show that came well after my prime Muppet-viewing years.
As an Easter treat, here he is, singing Stand By Me: