The Science of Free Society

Sunday, April 14th, 2013

Political economy is the science of free society, Fitzhugh says — disapprovingly:

Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxim Laissez-faire and “Pas trop gouverner,” are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least. It is not, therefore, wonderful that such a science should not have been believed or inculcated whilst slavery was universal. Roman and Greek masters, feudal lords and Catholic priests, if conscientious, must have deemed such maxims false and heretical, or if unconscientious, would find in their self-interest sufficient reasons to prevent their propagation. Accordingly we find no such maxims current, no such science existing, until slavery and serfdom were extinct and Catholicism maimed and crippled, in the countries that gave them birth. Men belonging to the higher classes of society, and who neither feel nor apprehend the ills of penury or privation, are very apt to think little of those ills, and less of the class who suffer them. Especially is this the ease with unobservant, abstract thinkers and closet scholars, who deal with little of the world and see less of it. Such men judge of mankind, their progress and their happiness, by the few specimens subjected to the narrow range of their experience and observation. After the abolition of feudalism and Catholicism, an immense amount of unfettered talent, genius, industry and capital, was brought into the field of free competition. The immediate result was, that all those who possessed either of those advantages prospered as they had never prospered before, and rose in social position and intelligence. At the same time, and from the same causes, the aggregate wealth of society, and probably its aggregate intelligence, were rapidly increased. Such was no doubt part of the effects of unfettering the limbs, the minds and consciences of men. It was the only part of those effects that scholars and philosophers saw or heeded. Here was something new under the sun, which refuted and rebuked the wisdom of Solomon. Up to this time, one-half of mankind had been little better than chattels belonging to the other half. A central power, with branches radiating throughout the civilized world, had trammeled men’s consciences, dictated their religious faith, and prescribed the forms and modes of worship. All this was done away with, and the new world just started into existence was certainly making rapid progress, and seemed to the ordinary observer to be very happy. About such a world, nothing was to be found in books. Its social, its industrial and its moral phenomena, seemed to be as beautiful as they were novel. They needed, however, description, classification and arrangement. Men’s social relations and moral duties were quite different under a system of universal liberty and equality of rights, from what they had been in a state of subordination and dependence on the one side, and of power, authority and protection on the other. The reciprocal duties and obligations of master and slave, of lord and vassal, of priest and layman, to each other, were altogether unlike those that should be practiced between the free and equal citizens of regenerated society. Men needed a moral guide, a new philosophy of ethics; for neither the sages of the Gentiles, nor the Apostles of Christianity, had foreseen or provided for the great light which was now to burst upon the world. Moses, and Solomon, and Paul, were silent as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, as to this social Millenium, and the moral duties and obligations it would bring in its train.

Until now, industry had been controlled and directed by a few minds. Monopoly in its every form had been rife. Men were suddenly called on to walk alone, to act and work for themselves without guide, advice or control from superior authority. In the past, nothing like it had occurred; hence no assistance could be derived from books. The prophets themselves had overlooked or omitted to tell of the advent of this golden era, and were no better guides than the historians and philosophers. Philosophy that should guide and direct industry was equally needed with a philosophy of morals. The occasion found and made the man. For writing a one-sided philosophy, no man was better fitted than Adam Smith. He possessed extraordinary powers of abstraction, analysis and generalization. He was absent, secluded and unobservant. He saw only that prosperous and progressive portion of society whom liberty or free competition benefitted, and mistook its effects on them for its effects on the world. He had probably never heard the old English adage, “Every man for himself, and Devil take the hindmost.” This saying comprehends the whole philosophy, moral and economical, of the “Wealth of Nations.” But he and the political economists who have succeeded him, seem never to have dreamed that there would have been any “hindmost.” There can never be a wise moral philosopher, or a sound philosophy, till some one arises who sees and comprehends all the “things in heaven and earth.” Philosophers are the most abstracted, secluded, and least observant of men. Their premises are always false, because they seebut few facts; and hence their conclusions must also be false. Plato and Aristotle have to-day as many believers as Smith, Paley or Locke, and between their times a hundred systems have arisen, flourished for a time, and been rejected. There is not a true moral philosophy, and from the nature of things there never can be. Such a philosophy has to discover first causes and ultimate effects, to grasp infinitude, to deal with eternity at both ends. Human presumption will often attempt this, but human intellect can never achieve it. We shall build up no system, attempt to account for nothing, but simply point out what is natural and universal, and humbly try to justify the ways of God to man.

Adam Smith’s philosophy is simple and comprehensive, (teres et rotundus.) Its leading and almost its only doctrine is, that individual well-being and social and national wealth and prosperity will be best promoted by each man’s eagerly pursuing his own selfish welfare unfettered and unrestricted by legal regulations, or governmental prohibitions, farther than such regulations may be necessary to prevent positive crime. That some qualifications of this doctrine will not be found in his book, we shall not deny; but this is his system. It is obvious enough that such a governmental policy as this doctrine would result in, would stimulate energy, excite invention and industry, and bring into livelier action, genius, skill and talent. It had done so before Smith wrote, and it was no doubt the observation of those effects that suggested the theory. His friends and acquaintances were of that class, who, in the war of the wits to which free competition invited, were sure to come off victors. His country, too, England and Scotland, in the arts of trade and in manufacturing skill, was an over-match for the rest of the world. International free trade would benefit his country as much as social free trade would benefit his friends. This was his world, and had it been the only world his philosophy would have been true. But there was another and much larger world, whose misfortunes, under his system, were to make the fortunes of his friends and his country. A part of that world, far more numerous than his friends and acquaintance was at his door, they were the unemployed poor, the weak in mind or body, the simple and unsuspicious, the prodigal, the dissipated, the improvident and the vicious. Laissez-faire and pas trop gouverner suited not them; one portion of them needed support and protection; the other, much and rigorous government. Still they were fine subjects out of which the astute and designing, the provident and avaricious, the cunning, the prudent and the industrious might make fortunes in the field of free competition. Another portion of the world which Smith overlooked, were the countries with which England traded, covering a space many hundred times larger than England herself. She was daily growing richer, more powerful and intellectual, by her trade, and the countries with which she traded poorer, weaker, and more ignorant. Since the vast extension of trade, consequent on the discoveries of Columbus and Vasco de Gama, the civilized countries of Europe which carried on this trade had greatly prospered, but the savages and barbarians with whom they traded had become more savage and barbarous or been exterminated. Trade is a war of the wits, in which the stronger witted are as sure to succeed as the stronger armed in a war with swords. Strength of wit has this great advantage over strength of arm, that it never tires, for it gathers new strength by appropriating to itself the spoils of the vanquished. And thus, whether between nations or individuals, the war of free trade is constantly widening the relative abilities of the weak and the strong. It has been justly observed that under this system the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer. The remark is true as well between nations as between individuals. Free trade, when the American gives a bottle of whiskey to the Indian for valuable furs, or the Englishman exchanges with the African blue-beads for diamonds, gold and slaves, is a fair specimen of all free trade when unequals meet. Free trade between England and Ireland furnishes the latter an excellent market for her beef and potatoes, in exchange for English manufactures. The labor employed in manufacturing pays much better than that engaged in rearing beeves and potatoes. On the average, one hour of English labor pays for two of Irish. Again, manufacturing requires and encourages skill and intelligence; grazing and farming require none. But far the worst evils of this free trade remain to be told. Irish pursuits depressing education and refinement, England becomes a market for the wealth, the intellect, the talent, energy and enterprise of Ireland. All men possessing any of these advantages or qualities retreat to England to spend their incomes, to enter the church, the navy, or the army, to distinguish themselves as authors, to engage in mechanic or manufacturing pursuits. Thus is Ireland robbed of her very life’s blood, and thus do our Northern States rob the Southern.

Under the system of free trade a fertile soil, with good rivers and roads as outlets, becomes the greatest evil with which a country can be afflicted. The richness of soil invites to agriculture, and the roads and rivers carry off the crops, to be exchanged for the manufactures of poorer regions, where are situated the centres of trade, of capital and manufactures. In a few centuries or less time the consumption abroad of the crops impoverishes the soil where they are made. No cities or manufactories arise in the country with this fertile soil, because there is no occasion. No pursuits are carried on requiring intelligence or skill; the population is of necessity sparse, ignorant and illiterate; universal absenteeism prevails; the rich go off for pleasure and education, the enterprising poor for employment. An intelligent friend suggests that, left to nature, the evil will cure itself. So it may when the country is ruined, if the people, like those of Georgia, are of high character, and betake themselves to other pursuits than mere agriculture, and totally repudiate free trade doctrines. Our friends’ objection only proves the truth of our theory. We are very sure that the wit of man can devise no means so effectual to impoverish a country as exclusive agriculture. The ravages of war, pestilence and famine are soon effaced; centuries are required to restore an exhausted soil. The more rapidly money is made in such a country, enjoying free trade, the faster it is impoverished, for the draft on the soil is greater, and those who make good crops spend them abroad; those who make small ones, at home. In the absence of free trade, this rich region must manufacture for itself, build cities, erect schools and colleges, and carry on all the pursuits and provide for all the common wants of civilized man. Thus the money made at home would be spent and invested at home; the crops would be consumed at home, and each town and village would furnish manure to fertilize the soil around it. We believe it is a common theory that, without this domestic consumption, no soil can be kept permanently rich. A dense population would arise, because it would be required; the rich would have no further occasion to leave home for pleasure, nor the poor for employment.

Interesting:

The centralizing effects of free trade alone would be sufficient to condemn it. The decline of civilization under the Roman Empire was owing solely to centralization. If political science has at all advanced since the earliest annals of history, that advance is the discovery that each small section knows best its own interests, and should be endowed with the most of the functions of government. The ancients, in the days of Herodotus, when the country around the Levant and the Islands in the Mediterranean were cut up into hundreds of little highly enlightened independent States, seem to have understood the evils of centralization quite as well a the moderns. At least their practice was wiser than ours, whatever may have been their theory. Political independence is not worth a fig without commercial independence. The tribute which the centres of trade, of capital, and of mechanical and artistic skill, such as England and the North exact from the nations they trade with, is more onerous and more destructive of civilization than that exacted from conquered provinces. Its effects everywhere are too obvious to need the citation of proofs and instances. Social centralization arises from the laissez-faire system just as national centralization. A few individuals possessed of capital and cunning acquire a power to employ the laboring class on such terms as they please, and they seldom fail to use that power. Hence, the numbers and destitution of the poor in free society are daily increasing, the numbers of the middle or independent class diminishing, and the few rich men growing hourly richer.

Posted in Economics, George Fitzhugh, Policy | No Comments »

Secular Cycles

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

Klint Finley of Wired summarizes Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics:

What Turchin and his colleagues have found is a pattern of social instability. It applies to all agrarian states for which records are available, including Ancient Rome, Dynastic China, Medieval England, France, Russia, and, yes, the United States. Basically, the data shows 100 year waves of instability, and superimposed on each wave — which Turchin calls the “Secular Cycle” — there’s typically an additional 50-year cycle of widespread political violence. The 50-year cycles aren’t universal — they don’t appear in China, for instance. But they do appear in the United States.

The 100-year Secular Cycles, Turchin believes, are caused by longer-term demographic trends. They occur when a population grows beyond its capacity to be productive, resulting in falling wages, a disproportionately large number of young people in the population, and increased state spending deficits. But there’s a more important factor, one that better predicts instability than population growth. Turchin calls it “elite overproduction.” This refers to a growing class of elites who are competing for a limited number of elite positions, such as political appointments. These conflicts, Turchin says, can destabilize the state.

Many of these issues persist in industrial societies. Although population growth is no longer likely to result in mass starvation, it can push the supply of labor beyond demand, leading to increased unemployment.

Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are — though there’s one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time.

He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence.

Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops — just like in ecology. “In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks,” he writes. “As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats.”

(Hat tip to the perfidious Buckethead, of Veil War fame.)

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

A Beautiful Example of Communism

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

Fitzhugh provides a beautiful example of communism, writing in 1854:

We find in the days of Sir Matthew Hale, a very singular pamphlet attributed to him. It was an attempt to prove that two healthy laborers, marrying and having in the usual time four children, could not at ordinary labor, and with ordinary wages, support their family. The nursing, washing, cooking and making clothes, would fully occupy the wife. The husband, with the chances of sickness and uncertainty of employment, would have to support four. Such is the usual and normal condition of free laborers. With six children, the oldest say twelve years of age, their condition would be worse. Or should the husband die, the family that remained would be still worse off. There are large numbers of aged and infirm male and female laborers; so that as a class, it is obvious, we think, that under ordinary circumstances, in old countries, they are incapable of procuring a decent and comfortable support. The wages of the poor diminish as their wants and families increase, for the care and labor of attending to the family leaves them fewer hours for profitable work. With negro slaves, their wages invariably increase with their wants. The master increases the provision for the family as the family increases in number and helplessness. It is a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.

Again, the past is a foreign country.  Modern notions of Left and Right don’t quite apply:

A maxim well calculated not only to retard the progress of civilization, but to occasion its retrogression, has grown out of the science of political economy. “The world is too much governed,” has become quite an axiom with many politicians. Now the need of law and government is just in proportion to man’s wealth and enlightenment. Barbarians and savages need and will submit to but few and simple laws, and little of government. The love of personal liberty and freedom from all restraint, are distinguishing traits of wild men and wild beasts. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors loved personal liberty because they were barbarians, but they did not love it half so much as North American Indians or Bengal tigers, because they were not half so savage. As civilization advances, liberty recedes: and it is fortunate for man that he loses his love of liberty just as fast as he becomes more moral and intellectual. The wealthy, virtuous and religious citizens of large towns enjoy less of liberty than any other persons whatever, and yet they are the most useful and rationally happy of all mankind. The best governed countries, and those which have prospered most, have always been distinguished for the number and stringency of their laws. Good men obey superior authority, the laws of God, of morality, and of their country; bad men love liberty and violate them. It would be difficult very often for the most ingenious casuist to distinguish between sin and liberty; for virtue consists in the performance of duty, and the obedience to that law or power that imposes duty, whilst sin is but the violation of duty and disobedience to such law and power. It is remarkable, in this connection, that sin began by the desire for liberty and the attempt to attain it in the person of Satan and his fallen angels. The world wants good government and a plenty of it — not liberty. It is deceptive in us to boast of our Democracy, to assert the capacity of the people for self-government, and then refuse to them its exercise. In New England, and in all our large cities, where the people govern most, they are governed best. If government be not too much centralized, there is little danger of too much government. The danger and evil with us is of too little. Carlyle says of our institutions, that they are “anarchy plus a street constable.” We ought not to be bandaged up too closely in our infancy, it might prevent growth and development; but the time is coming when we shall need more of government, if we would secure the permanency of our institutions.

All men concur in the opinion that some government is necessary. Even the political economist would punish murder, theft, robbery, gross swindling, &c. but they encourage men to compete with and slowly undermine and destroy one another by means quite as effective as those they forbid. We have heard a distinguished member of this school object to negro slavery, because the protection it afforded to an inferior race would perpetuate that race, which, if left free to compete with the whites, must be starved out in a few generations. Members of Congress, of the Young American party, boast that the Anglo-Saxon race is manifestly destined to eat out all other races, as the wire-grass destroys and takes the place of other grasses. Nay, they allege this competitive process is going on throughout all nature; the weak are everywhere devouring the strong; the hardier plants and animals destroying the weaker, and the superior races of man exterminating the inferior. They would challenge our admiration for this war of nature, by which they say Providence is perfecting its own work — getting rid of what is weak and indifferent, and preserving only what is strong and hardy. We see the war, but not the improvement. This competitive, destructive system has been going on from the earliest records of history; and yet the plants, the animals, and the men of to-day are not superior to those of four thousand years ago. To restrict this destructive, competitive propensity, man was endowed with reason, and enabled to pass laws to protect the weak against the strong. To encourage it, is to encourage the strong to oppress the weak, and to violate the primary object of an government. It is strange it should have entered the head of any philosopher to set the weak, who are the majority of mankind, to competing, contending and fighting with the strong, in order to improve their condition.

Hobbes maintains that “a state of nature is a state of war.” This is untrue of a state of nature, because men are naturally associative; but it is true of a civilized state of universal liberty, and free competition, such as Hobbes saw around him, and which no doubt suggested his theory. The wants of man and his history alike prove that slavery has always been part of his social organization. A less degree of subjection is inadequate for the government and protection of great numbers of human beings.

An intelligent English writer, describing society as he saw it, uses this language:

“There is no disguising from the cool eye of philosophy, that all living creatures exist in a state of natural warfare; and that man (in hostility with all) is at enmity also with his own species; man is the natural enemy of man; and society, unable to change his nature, succeeds but in establishing a hollow truce by which fraud is substituted for violence.”

Such is free society, fairly portrayed; such are the infidel doctrines of political economy, when candidly avowed. Slavery and Christianity bring about a lasting peace, not “a hollow truce.” But we mount a step higher. We deny that there is a society in free countries. They who act each for himself, who are hostile, antagonistic and competitive, are not social and do not constitute a society. We use the term free society, for want of a better; but, like the term free government, it is an absurdity: those who are governed are not free — those who are free are not social.

I find it interesting how he casually dismisses the notion that Providence is perfecting its own work a few decades before the publication of Darwin’s theory.

Posted in Economics, George Fitzhugh, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Lions sign “Kickalicious” Havard Rugland

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Havard “Kickalicious” Rugland has in fact been signed by the Detroit Lions — to compete against NFL veteran David Akers to replace retiring kicker Jason Hanson.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The Problem with Bloom’s Two-Sigma Problem

Friday, April 12th, 2013

The problem with Bloom’s Two-Sigma Problem, Kurt van Lehn found, was that Bloom compared classroom mastery learning against one-on-one tutor-based mastery learning, without holding the goal-level of mastery constant:

For 25 years, researchers have been seeking solutions for Bloom’s (1984) “2 sigma problem.” Although one would expect many of the studies of human tutoring to show a 2.0 effect size, only two studies did. This section discusses those two studies, which now seem like outliers.

Bloom (1984) summarized six studies of human tutoring reported in the dissertations of Anania (1981) and Burke (1983). All six studies had effect sizes close to 2.0. Of these studies, only Anania’s Experiment 3 was included in this review because only it involved one-on-one tutoring. The other five experiments summarized by Bloom involved each tutor working daily with a group of three students. However, Anania’s one-on-one experiment did produce an effect size of 1.95, so let us examine it more closely.

A common explanation for the effectiveness of tutors in the studies discussed by Bloom is that they were highly trained, expert tutors. However, the original sources for Bloom’s review say that the tutors were “undergraduate education majors” (Anania, 1981, p. 58) who “met the experimenter each day for one week before the instruction began” (Burke, 1983, p. 85) for training on both tutoring and the task domain: probability. This suggests that the Bloom tutors were not the “super tutors” that they have sometime been thought to be.

Anania’s third experiment (and the other five Bloom experiments as well) included a third condition, which was mastery learning in the classroom. That is, after students had finished classroom instruction on a unit, they took a mastery test. If they scored 80%, then they were considered to have mastered the unit and could go on to the next unit. Students who scored less than 80% had to resume studying the unit and repeat the mastery test. In all six experiments, the mastery learning students scored about 1.0 standard deviations higher on posttests than the ordinary classroom students.

Moreover, the tutoring conditions of all six experiments also involved mastery learning. That is, the tutees took the same mastery tests, restudied, and so on, but they worked with a tutor instead of a classroom teacher. However, the mastery threshold for the tutoring conditions was set at 90% instead of 80% for the classroom implementation of mastery learning (Anania, 1981, pp. 44–45). That is, the tutors were holding their students to a higher standard of mastery than the classroom teachers. This alone could account for the advantage of tutoring (2.0 effect size) over mastery learning (1.0 effect size).

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, and Saint Matthew meet up for coffee

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Anatoly Karlin describes Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War as Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, and Saint Matthew meet up for coffee:

Ranging from Ermak’s subjugation of the Sibir Khanate to the rise of Rome, Turchin makes the case that the rise and fall of empires is reducible to three basic concepts: 1) Asabiya – social cohesiveness and capacity for collective action, 2) Malthusian dynamics – the tendency for population to outgrow the carrying capacity, and 3) the “Matthew Principle” – the tendency for inequality and social stratification to increase over time. The interplay between these three forces produces the historical patterns of imperial rise and fall, of war and peace and war, that were summarized by Thomas Fenne in 1590 thus:

Warre bringeth ruine, ruine bringeth poverty, poverty procureth peace, and peace in time increaseth riches, riches causeth statelinesse, statelinesse increaseth envie, envie in the end procureth deadly malice, mortall malice proclaimeth open warre and bataille, and from warre again as before is rehearsed.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

Slavery is the very best form of socialism

Friday, April 12th, 2013

The past is a foreign country, L. P. Hartley noted: they do things differently there.

This is especially true of, say, the antebellum South, which found itself on the wrong side of history.  Virginia lawyer George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, or The Failure of Free Society (1854) certainly comes from a foreign land.  In it, he argues that slavery is the very best form of socialism:

The phenomena presented by the vassals and villiens of Europe after their liberation, were the opposite of those exhibited by the wealthy and powerful classes. Pauperism and beggary, we are informed by English historians, were unknown till the villiens began to escape from their masters, and attempted to practice a predatory and nomadic liberty. A liberty, we should infer from the descriptions we can get of it, very much like that of domestic animals that have gone wild — the difference in favor of the animals being that nature had made provision for them, but had made none for the villiens. The new freemen were bands of thieves and beggars, infesting the country and disturbing its peace. Their physical condition was worse than when under the rule of the Barons, their masters, and their moral condition worse also, for liberty had made them from necessity thieves and murderers. It was necessary to retain them in slavery, not only to support and sustain them and to prevent general mendicity, but equally necessary in order to govern them and prevent crime.

The advocates of universal liberty concede that the laboring class enjoy more material comfort, are better fed, clothed and housed, as slaves, than as freemen. The statistics of crime demonstrate that the moral superiority of the slave over the free laborer is still greater than his superiority in animal well-being. There never can be among slaves a class so degraded as is found about the wharves and suburbs of cities. The master requires and enforces ordinary morality and industry. We very much fear, if it were possible to indite a faithful comparison of the conduct and comfort of our free negroes with that of the runaway Anglo-Saxon serfs, that it would be found that the negroes have fared better and committed much less crime than the whites. But those days, the 14th and 15th centuries, were the halcyon days of vagabond liberty. The few that had escaped from bondage found a wide field and plenty of subjects for the practice of theft and mendicity. There was no law and no police adequate to restrain them, for until then their masters had kept them in order better than laws ever can.

But those glorious old times have long since passed. A bloody code, a standing army and efficient police keep them quiet enough now. Their numbers have multiplied a hundred fold, but their poverty has increased faster than their numbers. Instead of stealing and begging, and living idly in the open air, they work fourteen hours a day, cooped up in close rooms, with foul air, foul water, and insufficient and filthy food, and often sleep at night crowded in cellars or in garrets, without regard to sex.

Posted in Economics, George Fitzhugh, Policy | 2 Comments »

Laser Shield

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

While the Pentagon is busy developing laser weapons, a small California company claims it has discovered a type of plastic that acts as armor against lasers:

Mr. Harlamor’s company developed the material, now trademarked “Laser Shield,” while searching for a plastic that could be shaped by machine tools yet withstand the stress of aerospace applications.

Researchers first knew they had something unusual when they tried to inscribe the new machinable plastic with an industrial laser-marking system. After 10 passes with this relatively low-power laser, the plastic was unscarred.

“There was no penetration,” confirms Gerhard Marcinkowski, sales manager of A-B Lasers, which carried out the marking test.

Laser Shield’s internal structure apparently acts as if it were made up of many tiny lenses. These internal “lenses” can scatter laser energy in a harmless, diffuse pattern.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

How Social Darwinism Made Modern China

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

Ron Unz explores how social Darwinism made modern China. Here he cites Stoddard:

Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.

Chinese society is notable for its stability and longevity — which, as Gregory Clark pointed out in A Farewell to Alms, is wonderful for those at the top, while ensuring misery for those at the bottom:

From the gradual establishment of the bureaucratic imperial state based on mandarinate rule during the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties down to the Communist Revolution of 1948, a single set of social and economic relations appears to have maintained its grip on the country, evolving only slightly while dynastic successions and military conquests periodically transformed the governmental superstructure.

A central feature of this system was the replacement of the local rule of aristocratic elements by a class of official meritocrats, empowered by the central government and selected by competitive examination. In essence, China eliminated the role of hereditary feudal lords and the social structure they represented over 1,000 years before European countries did the same, substituting a system of legal equality for virtually the entire population beneath the reigning emperor and his family.

The social importance of competitive examinations was enormous, playing the same role in determining membership in the ruling elite that the aristocratic bloodlines of Europe’s nobility did until modern times, and this system embedded itself just as deeply in the popular culture. The great noble houses of France or Germany might trace their lineages back to ancestors elevated under Charlemagne or Barbarossa, with their heirs afterward rising and falling in standing and estates, while in China the proud family traditions would boast generations of top-scoring test-takers, along with the important government positions that they had received as a result. Whereas in Europe there existed fanciful stories of a heroic commoner youth doing some great deed for the king and consequently being elevated to a knighthood or higher, such tales were confined to fiction down to the French Revolution. But in China, even the greatest lineages of academic performers almost invariably had roots in the ordinary peasantry.

Not only was China the first national state to utilize competitive written examinations for selection purposes, but it is quite possible that almost all other instances everywhere in the world ultimately derive from the Chinese example. It has long been established that the Chinese system served as the model for the meritocratic civil services that transformed the efficiency of Britain and other European states during the 18th and 19th centuries. But persuasive historical arguments have also been advanced that the same is even true for university entrance tests and honors examinations, with Cambridge’s famed Math Tripos being the earliest example.11 Modern written tests may actually be as Chinese as chopsticks.

With Chinese civilization having spent most of the past 1,500 years allocating its positions of national power and influence by examination, there has sometimes been speculation that test-taking ability has become embedded in the Chinese people at the biological as well as cultural level. Yet although there might be an element of truth to this, it hardly seems likely to be significant. During the eras in question, China’s total population numbered far into the tens of millions, growing in unsteady fashion from perhaps 60 million before AD 900 to well over 400 million by 1850. But the number of Chinese passing the highest imperial exam and attaining the exalted rank of chin-shih during most of the past six centuries was often less than 100 per year, down from a high of over 200 under the Sung dynasty (960-1279), and even if we include the lesser rank of chu-jen, the national total of such degree-holders was probably just in the low tens of thousands,12 a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the overall population — totally dwarfed by the numbers of Chinese making their living as artisans or merchants, let alone the overwhelming mass of the rural peasantry. The cultural impact of rule by a test-selected elite was enormous, but the direct genetic impact would have been negligible.

This same difficulty of relative proportions frustrates any attempt to apply in China an evolutionary model similar to the one that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have persuasively suggested for the evolution of high intelligence among the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.13 The latter group constituted a small, reproductively isolated population overwhelmingly concentrated in the sorts of business and financial activity that would have strongly favored more intelligent individuals, and one with insignificant gene-flow from the external population not undergoing such selective pressure. By contrast, there is no evidence that successful Chinese merchants or scholars were unwilling to take brides from the general population, and any reasonable rate of such intermarriage each generation would have totally swamped the selective impact of mercantile or scholarly success. If we are hoping to find any rough parallel to the process that Clark hypothesizes for Britain, we must concentrate our attention on the life circumstances of China’s broad rural peasantry — well over 90 percent of the population during all these centuries — just as the aforementioned 19th-century observers generally had done.

In fact, although Western observers tended to focus on China’s horrific poverty above all else, traditional Chinese society actually possessed certain unusual or even unique characteristics that may help account for the shaping of the Chinese people. Perhaps the most important of these was the near total absence of social caste and the extreme fluidity of economic class.

Feudalism had ended in China a thousand years before the French Revolution, and nearly all Chinese stood equal before the law.14 The “gentry” — those who had passed an official examination and received an academic degree — possessed certain privileges and the “mean people” — prostitutes, entertainers, slaves, and various other degraded social elements — suffered under legal discrimination. But both these strata were minute in size, with each usually amounting to less than 1 percent of the general population, while “the common people” — everyone else, including the peasantry — enjoyed complete legal equality.

However, such legal equality was totally divorced from economic equality, and extreme gradations of wealth and poverty were found in every corner of society, down to the smallest and most homogenous village. During most of the 20th century, the traditional Marxian class analysis of Chinese rural life divided the population according to graduated wealth and degree of “exploitative” income: landlords, who obtained most or all of their income from rent or hired labor; rich, middle, and poor peasants, grouped according to decreasing wealth and rental income and increasing tendency to hire out their own labor; and agricultural laborers, who owned negligible land and obtained nearly all their income from hiring themselves out to others.

In hard times, these variations in wealth might easily mean the difference between life and death, but everyone acknowledged that such distinctions were purely economic and subject to change: a landlord who lost his land would become a poor peasant; a poor peasant who came into wealth would be the equal of any landlord. During its political struggle, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that landlords and rich peasants constituted about 10 percent of the population and possessed 70–80 percent of the land, while poor peasants and hired laborers made up the overwhelming majority of the population and owned just 10–15 percent of the land. Neutral observers found these claims somewhat exaggerated for propagandistic purposes, but not all that far from the harsh reality.15

Complete legal equality and extreme economic inequality together fostered one of the most unrestrained free-market systems known to history, not only in China’s cities but much more importantly in its vast countryside, which contained nearly the entire population. Land, the primary form of wealth, was freely bought, sold, traded, rented out, sub-leased, or mortgaged as loan collateral. Money-lending and food-lending were widely practiced, especially during times of famine, with usurious rates of interest being the norm, often in excess of 10 percent per month compounded. In extreme cases, children or even wives might be sold for cash and food. Unless aided by relatives, peasants without land or money routinely starved to death. Meanwhile, the agricultural activity of more prosperous peasants was highly commercialized and entrepreneurial, with complex business arrangements often the norm.16

For centuries, a central fact of daily life in rural China had been the tremendous human density, as the Middle Kingdom’s population expanded from 65 million to 430 million during the five centuries before 1850,17 eventually forcing nearly all land to be cultivated to maximum efficiency. Although Chinese society was almost entirely rural and agricultural, Shandong province in 1750 had well over twice the population density of the Netherlands, the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe, while during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, England’s population density was only one-fifth that of Jiangsu province.18

Chinese agricultural methods had always been exceptionally efficient, but by the 19th century, the continuing growth of the Chinese population had finally caught and surpassed the absolute Malthusian carrying-capacity of the farming system under its existing technical and economic structure.19 Population growth was largely held in check by mortality (including high infant mortality), decreased fertility due to malnutrition, disease, and periodic regional famines that killed an average of 5 percent of the population.20 Even the Chinese language came to incorporate the centrality of food, with the traditional words of greeting being “Have you eaten?” and the common phrase denoting a wedding, funeral, or other important social occasion being “to eat good things.”21

The cultural and ideological constraints of Chinese society posed major obstacles to mitigating this never-ending human calamity. Although impoverished Europeans of this era, male and female alike, often married late or not at all, early marriage and family were central pillars of Chinese life, with the sage Mencius stating that to have no children was the worst of unfilial acts; indeed, marriage and anticipated children were the mark of adulthood. Furthermore, only male heirs could continue the family name and ensure that oneself and one’s ancestors would be paid the proper ritual respect, and multiple sons were required to protect against the vagaries of fate. On a more practical level, married daughters became part of their husband’s household, and only sons could ensure provision for one’s old age.

Nearly all peasant societies sanctify filial loyalty, marriage, family, and children, while elevating sons above daughters, but in traditional China these tendencies seem to have been especially strong, representing a central goal and focus of all daily life beyond bare survival. Given the terrible poverty, cruel choices were often made, and female infanticide, including through neglect, was the primary means of birth control among the poor, leading to a typical shortfall of 10–15 percent among women of marriageable age. Reproductive competition for those remaining women was therefore fierce, with virtually every woman marrying, generally by her late teens. The inevitable result was a large and steady natural increase in the total population, except when constrained by various forms of increased mortality.

Unz came to this idea long before he could share it:

I originally developed my theory of the evolutionary origins of high Chinese ability almost 35 years ago during the late 1970s, prompted by my discovery of the Edward Moise article on massive downward social mobility in traditional rural China. A few years later, I wrote it up as a paper for E.O. Wilson when I studied under him at Harvard in the early 1980s, but never made any effort to publish it, which seemed a hopeless effort given the intellectual climate of the times and the near-total dominance of the Gouldian “Blank Slate” perspective.

Afterward, it languished in my files for over a quarter century, until I happened to mention the idea to someone a couple of years ago, and he persuaded me to dig it out and put it on the Internet, where it drew quite a bit of attention from a couple of science-oriented bloggers. Then last year to my utter astonishment, I discovered that my old unpublished paper had been cited in a major academic journal review article as being among the earliest modern examples of the application of evolutionary analysis to a particular population groups. Since my college paper was totally outdated and was also so totally embarrassing in style and form, I resolved to revise and finally publish it, which I have now done.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 1 Comment »

The Ultimate Strength Exercise

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

In the early 1960s Dr. John Ziegler introduced the ultimate strength exercise, and Bob Hoffman, owner of York Barbell and Strength and Health magazine, promoted it. It was called functional isometric contraction:

While very few sports coaches or athletic directors in high schools and colleges approved of lifting weights, they embraced the isometric system wholeheartedly. What the school administrators and coaches liked about isometric training was it was neat, no plates to store or pick up after, safe, and quick. An entire football team of forty players could go through a workout in a half and hour. Sometimes even less than that.

Power racks sprung up everywhere.

York Barbell sold metal and wood power racks — but Hoffman discontinued the wood version, once he realized people were using them to make copies.

In Strength and Health, Hoffman touted the progress made by 23-year-old Bill March:

Bill weighed 176 and had won the 1960 Middle Atlantic Title with a three-lift  [press, snatch, clean & jerk] total of 745.

Bill was the poster boy for isometric training. His lifts climbed steadily at a pace that few could believe. He blew past an 800 total and kept right on going. He moved up to the 198-lb. class and started winning everything in sight. No one had ever seen anyone make such startling improvement in so short a period of time. At the ’63 Philly Open, Bill pressed 354 to set a world record in the middleheavyweight class. Hoffman couldn’t manufacture power racks fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Fast forward six years. Isometrics and also the combination of isotonics and isometrics had all but disappeared from strength training in sports.

How did isometrics become known as a fraud and a farce? Well, young Bill March’s regimen included some other potent elements that didn’t get as much coverage as his power-rack routine.

It all started back in 1954, when Dr. John Ziegler followed the United States Olympic Weightlifting team to the World Championships in Vienna as their team physician and learned a few secrets from the Russians:

During one of the drinking bouts, well past midnight, the Russians’ tongues began to loosen up and Doc knew the right questions to ask. Ziegler learned that the lifters were experimenting with strength-enhancing drugs and also using a form of exercise that helped make them stronger by exerting maximum pressure against a bar in a fixed position.

Back home in Olney, Ziegler began scanning the research, something he enjoyed. He came across enough pure research to convince him that the concept of isometric training could produce results and put together a program which he used on himself in his well-equipped home gym next to his house and office. He also built the first power rack that would be the prototype for the Super Power Rack that Hoffman would sell later on. He pitched his idea to Hoffman, but Bob wasn’t interested. What Ziegler was proposing was too close to the dynamic tension system that Charles Atlas and George Jowett had made a living on for a good many years. Bob had been speaking out against dynamic tension ever since he had taken over Strength and Health magazine. He saw no way to make money on isometrics at that time.

Meanwhile, Ziegler dug around in yet more research and came up with a formula to make a drug that would help build muscle and attachment tissue. This was to be used to help rehabilitate burn patients or those who had been bed-ridden for a long time. His specialty was physical rehabilitation, and he believed he had a miracle drug in the making. He took his idea to CIBA Pharmaceuticals. They quickly saw the value of such a drug, and in 1960 produced a little pink pill called Dianabol (the color was later changed to blue for some reason I can’t determine).

Again, Ziegler tested the drug on himself and used isometrics at the same time. Within a few months, he knew he was onto something big and once again approached Hoffman. Ziegler wanted to try his new drug and new form of training on a young Olympic lifter

For several years, Hoffman had resisted Ziegler’s overtures about marketing isometrics through S&H. Then, in 1959 a renowned authority in the field of kinesiology and applied anatomy, Dr. C. H. McCloy of Iowa State University, submitted a study for publication. The study showed that non-apparatus exercise done in an isometric fashion led to marked increases in strength. This was the exact same thing that Ziegler had been telling him for several years.

There were two things that motivated Hoffman: greed, and an almost obsessive hatred of Joe Weider. This isometric idea was going to take off, and if he lollygagged any longer Joe was going to jump in and make it his own. And since both Ziegler and McCloy had noted that isometrics were not only useful to athletes in a wide variety of sports, and for competitive weightlifters, they were equally as beneficial to bodybuilders. He let Ziegler know he was ready to sponsor the testing of the isometric program and also the strength-enhancing drug. In the meantime, he set about ordering a shit-load of power racks to be made at his foundry.

[...]

Doc would put March through his workout and give him his daily dose of Dianabol, one tablet for two weeks, two for two weeks, and four for two more weeks. He never gave Bill a prescription for the drug. In fact, I never knew anyone who got a script for any drug from Ziegler. He was extremely conservative about handing out medication and knew that an athlete would always cheat to some degree. Their highly competitive personalities would prompt them to take more and more to achieve the success they were seeking. So Bill went through an isometric workout five times a week and did the three lifts plus squats on Saturday at the York Gym. His progress came fast and often until he was one of the best in the world in a matter of only a few years.

Doc Ziegler improved his isometric routine into a new and improved isotonic-isometric system, but once everyone found out about Dianabol, it didn’t really matter. By the mid-1960s, average lifters were making superhuman gains, regardless of what routine they chose.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Good and Evil, Law and Chaos

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

Michael O. Church believes that people are localistic:

We are altruistic to people we consider near to us in genetic, tribal, cultural, or emotional terms. We’re generally indifferent to those we regard at the periphery, favoring the needs of our tribe. Good and evil don’t escape from this localism; they just handle it differently. Good attempts to transcend this localism and (perhaps cautiously) grow the neighborhood of concern: expanding it to all citizens of a polity, then all humans, then all living beings. Evil, not always being egoistic, turns this localism into militancy. Both involve an outside-the-system comprehension of localism that is somewhat rare, leaving most people in an alignment considered neutral. Morally neutral people are best described as weakly good. Assuming they have a strong sense of what good and evil are, they’d prefer to be good, but this preference is not strong and they do not have a burning desire to seek good at personal or localistic risk.

The civility spectrum, between law and chaos, reflects peoples’ biases toward organizations and those who lead them. While lawful good people will oppose an evil society and chaotic good will support a good one, the truth about most societies and organizations is that they are themselves morally neutral, so a person’s civility (bias in favor or against establishment) will influence her tendency to oppose or support power more than the sign-comparison of her and its moral alignments. Lawful people think organizations tend to be better than the people who comprise them; chaotic people think they tend to be worse than the people who make them up. For my part, I’m chaotic, but just slightly. I think that individual people average a C+ on the moral scale (A being good, F being evil) and organizations tend to average a C-. Chaotic bias makes it natural to see corporations as “evil”; in reality, most of them are indifferent profit maximizers.

Interesting enough, software engineering is intrinsically chaotic. Because software requires exact precision, while human communication is inherently ambiguous, large software teams do not perform well. The per-person productivity of a large development team is substantially lower than that of an individual engineer. A team of 10 might be 2-2.5 times as productive as a single engineer. This leads us, as technologists, toward the (chaotic, possibly faulty) assumption that organizations are inherently less than the sum of their parts, because that is clearly true of software engineering teams.

Management theorists have questioned human nature, generating two opposite sets of assumptions about the typical employee of a corporation.

Theory X (presumed egoism): employees are intrinsically lazy, selfish, and amoral. If they are not watched, they will steal. If they are not prodded, they will slack. They are not to be trusted. The manager’s job is to intimidate people into getting their work done and not doing things that hurt the company.

Theory Y (presumed altruism): employees are intrinsically motivated and inclined to help the organization. If they are given appropriate work, they’ll do well. The manager’s job is to nurture talent and then get out of people’s way, so they can get work done.

Theory X is socially unacceptable, but a better representative than Y of how business executives actually think. Theory Y is how executives and organizations present their mentality, because it’s more socially acceptable. So which is right? Neither entirely. Theory X is ugly, but it has some virtues. First, it can be, perversely, more egalitarian than Theory Y. Theory X distrusts everyone, including the most talented and best positioned. Executives are no better than worker bees; everyone must be monitored and a bit scared. Theory Y, which is focused on talent and development, requires (non-egalitarian) decisions about whom to develop. Second, Theory X is more tolerant of scaling, because large-scale societies run (by necessity) on X-ish assumptions. To keep a Theory-Y organization intact, you cannot hire before you trust. Only in the technological era (where small groups can deliver massive returns) has it been possible for growth-oriented organizations to hire so selectively as to make Theory-Y organizational policies tenable.

My ideology (e.g. open allocation) might be seen as “extreme Theory Y”, but that’s not because I believe Theory Y is inerrant. It’s not. Reality is somewhere between X and Y. I believe that organizations ought to take the Y-ward direction largely (on this spectrum) for the same reason that archers aim slightly above their targets. With the actual leadership of most organizations tending toward egoism and X-ness, an organization that doesn’t set inflexible, constitutional Theory-Y pillars (for some concerns) is going to suffer a severe X-ward bias. X-ism is tolerable for concave industrial work, but in the convex world, organizations need to be somewhat Theory Y. How X (or Y) should an organization be? There’s actually a very simple and absolutely correct answer here: trust employees with their own time and energy, distrust those who want to control others’. It really is that simple — a rarity in human affairs — and to continue with anything else is moronic. Employees who volunteer to use their own energies toward something they believe will benefit the organization should be trusted to do so; those who exhibit a desire for dominance over others should be deeply distrusted.

(Hat tip to Clerestorian.)

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

Sam Harris’s Response to Controversy

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

Sam Harris has found that detractors deliberately misrepresent his views:

It is impossible to effectively defend oneself against unethical critics. If nothing else, the law of entropy is on their side, because it will always be easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It is, for instance, easier to call a person a “racist,” a “bigot,” a “misogynist,” etc. than it is for one’s target to prove that he isn’t any of these things. In fact, the very act of defending himself against such accusations quickly becomes debasing. Whether or not the original charges can be made to stick, the victim immediately seems thin-skinned and overly concerned about his reputation. And, rebutted or not, the original charges will be repeated in blogs and comment threads, and many readers will assume that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Such defamation is made all the easier if one writes and speaks on extremely controversial topics and with a philosopher’s penchant for describing the corner cases—the ticking time bomb, the perfect weapon, the magic wand, the mind-reading machine, etc.—in search of conceptual clarity. It literally becomes child’s play to find quotations that make the author look morally suspect, even depraved.

He starts by describing his views on Islam:

My criticism of faith-based religion focuses on what I consider to be bad ideas, held for bad reasons, leading to bad behavior. Because I am concerned about the logical and behavioral consequences of specific beliefs, I do not treat all religions the same. Not all religious doctrines are mistaken to the same degree, intellectually or ethically, and it would be dishonest and ultimately dangerous to pretend otherwise. People in every tradition can be seen making the same errors, of course—e.g. relying on faith instead of evidence in matters of great personal and public concern—but the doctrines and authorities in which they place their faith run the gamut from the quaint to the psychopathic. For instance, a dogmatic belief in the spiritual and ethical necessity of complete nonviolence lies at the very core of Jainism, whereas an equally dogmatic commitment to using violence to defend one’s faith, both from within and without, is similarly central to the doctrine of Islam. These beliefs, though held for identical reasons (faith) and in varying degrees by individual practitioners of these religions, could not be more different. And this difference has consequences in the real world. (Let that be the first barrier to entry into this conversation: If you will not concede this point, you will not understand anything I say about Islam. Unfortunately, many of my most voluble critics cannot clear this bar—and no amount of quotation from the Koran, the hadith, the ravings of modern Islamists, or from the plaints of their victims, makes a bit of difference.)

You’ll need to read the whole thing.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Navy’s New Laser Cannon

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

In tests aboard the destroyer USS Dewey, the Laser Weapon System successfully shot down surveillance drones and fast boats:

The tubular Laser Weapon System (LaWS) is a solid-state laser that’s been in development for six years, at a cost of $40 million. It’s a directed-energy descendent of the the radar-guided Close In Weapons System (CIWS; it rhymes with “Gee Whiz”) gun already aboard surface ships. In December, following the successful Dewey tests, Greenert ordered the laser “out to the fleet for an operational demonstration,” said Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, the Navy’s chief of research. And so next year, LaWS will have its trial by fire, when the Navy puts it on the deck of its new afloat staging base USS Ponce for its maiden voyage to the Middle East.

It just so happens that the LaWS’ ability to track and kill surveillance drones and swarming fast boats matches with Iran’s development of surveillance drones and swarming fast-boat tactics. And it just so happens that the Ponce will spend most of 2014 deployed in Iran’s backyard.

[...]

The Navy won’t say just how many kilowatts of energy the LaWS’ beam is, but it’s probably under the 100 kilowatts generally considered militarily mature. The fact that LaWS can kill a surveillance drone and a fast-attack boat has more to do with the vulnerabilities of those systems than it its own prowess. It cannot stop an anti-ship missile, and its beam, about the circumference of a dime, will do little more than singe a fighter jet. And there remain significant challenges with cooling a shipboard high-energy laser, a necessary safety feature.

Ponce? Really?

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

David Friedman recently discussed diversity and academic open-mindedness with a fellow academic:

It started with my commenting that I thought support for “diversity” in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context — having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women — in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up — it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.

The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response.

The question I should have asked and didn’t was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment — American academia — as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong — we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis — he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.

An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position — if you don’t know the arguments for it, you probably don’t know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

Annette Funicello Brought Ska to the US

Monday, April 8th, 2013

I had no idea that Annette Funicello brought ska to the US:

One cultural oddity is that ska music, a Jamaican forerunner to reggae and, on its own, a dance music that recurrently becomes a craze in the U.S. every decade or two, was introduced to the American public by Annette Funicello with her 1964 hit “Jamaica Ska.”

It’s not as good as late 1960s ska songs like Desmond Dekker’s “The Israelites” or Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop,” not to mention first revival ska songs like the English Beat’s “Mirror in the Bathroom” or Madness’s “One Step Beyond,” or second revival hits like Rancid’s “Time Bomb,” but “Jamaica Ska” was on AM radio in America in 1964.

Ska is unusual in that it’s a dance music genre that became increasingly monopolized by straight guys.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »