Alex Tabarrok, Provocative Lecture @SJSU

A few years ago, I found a pointer to the Provocative Lecture series at San Jose State University, which had had several very interesting speakers, whom I was sorry I had missed. I couldn't find a stable place at SJSU where announcements were posted, so I ended up creating a google alert that looks for SJSU and "Provocative Lecture". It has fired periodically over the years, but it has always been a false alarm to date. More often than not it was for a review of a lecture that I had never seen announced.

Well I finally saw an announcement for a talk that hasn't happened yet. Next week, Alex Tabarrok, co-blogger on Marginal Revolution, will talk about wether the FDA is helping or hurting. October 27, 5:15, Morris Daily Auditorium.

And I still haven't seen an announcement from SJSU. The economics department's web page for the series gives details about talks from 2007 and earlier. This announcement came from a meetup.com posting for the Santa Clara County Libertarian Party.

Brian Francis Slattery: Liberation

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Chris Hibbert

Brian Francis Slattery's Liberation (with a 16-word subtitle) seemed to me to be closer to mainstream fiction than to the fantasy it's packaged as or to science fiction. It was still a fun read, but quite bizarre. The prose was quite lyrical and the timing mesmerizing. The story itself was weird, disjointed, and acausal, but it drew me in none-the-less.

The story replays the adventures and reunion of a dispersed band of mythic super-powered robbers and avengers after the apocalyptic collapse of the USA. The country has dissolved into fragments which are each ruled by whatever warlord can hold power (if anyone can). Some sections of the country don't hold together, and there are only local communities. Communication among the parts is slapdash, and it takes luck to get from place to place. One kind of luck is to happen on Dr. San Diego's apparently magic bus, which is drug infused and ferries people to and from unreachable places.

Anyway, the slick six have parted ways, but they'll need to regroup to defeat the forces of evil, slavery, and tyranny. They mostly do, though it requires a bunch of peripatetic adventuring to accomplish, and a few superhuman feats. I'm not sure there's much more that's coherent to say about this, but the language definitely kept my interest, even if the plot summary is mostly superfluous.

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending: The 10,000 Year Explosion

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Chris Hibbert

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion talks about how humans have evolved over the period since we've been relatively civilized. They explicitly want to challenge the (sometimes vociferously propounded, but seldom cogently defended) notions that humanity hasn't evolved significantly since homo sapiens emerged, and that there's no significant genetic difference among populations in different places. They open Chapter 1 with quotes from Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr to demonstrate that they aren't fighting a straw man.

Mostly, this notion seems to be held in order to defend a liberal notion of equality, as if we could only defend equal treatment if we all have equal abilities, endowments, and if none of our observable differences are innate. If this notion isn't supportable, we'll have to be clearer that equal treatment is right for other reasons, and perhaps we'll have to be articulate about what those other reasons are. But that's an argument that Cochran and Harpending leave for someone else.

Cochran and Harpending's argument here is that there are quite a few differences between different modern populations, and that many are clearly genetic in origin. They first go to some pains to show that genetic changes can easily arise in this kind of time period. Particular examples are dogs, which have evolved all their modern variety since separating from wolves only about 15000 years ago, and domesticated plants which have changed enormously since the end of the last ice age 11,500 years ago. There are particular changes in humans that are also clearly of recent origin including skin color, eye color, lactose tolerance, and resistance to various diseases, all of which can be shown to be related to geography and to react to evolutionary pressures on much shorter time scales.

With that as background they make a couple of (they expect) radical arguments, and explain a few things that seemed puzzling before. Their first radical argument is that modern humans probably interbred with Neanderthals in Europe, and that therefore, the populations that left Africa probably got a significant contribution from them. I thought they did a reasonable job of demonstrating opportunity, plausibility, and some indications from recent genetic studies that some variations were introduced in the right time frame to have come from Neanderthals. This argument was presented as if the authors expected people to be "outraged at the charge", but it seemed sensible and plausible to me.

The radical argument that I expected to have trouble with is the claim that there's something genetically different about the Ashkenazi Jews. One of the members of the reading group I attend has been making this point for years, and I've been passively resisting it for just as long. Well, Cochran and Harpending put an end to that, easily and without much fight. They showed that the time-frame isn't extreme, that there were sufficient environmental pressures to push for particular changes, and that there's a reasonable case that the Ashkenazi were genetically isolated for long enough for the hypothesized changes in intelligence and susceptibility to diseases to have arisen. They add in some evidence that the diseases specific to the Ashkenazi are tied to genetic changes in neuron development to hammer home the point that the changes in brain function and disease susceptibility are probably tied together. The fact that we already knew (even if we didn't admit it in discussions of evolution) that Tay-Sachs is specific to Ashkenazi and is of genetic origin helps cement the case that evolution has continued into the modern era.

If there had been any remaining doubt that there are genetic predispositions to varying intelligence by race, this pretty clearly puts them to bed. I still agree with the sentiments Les Earnest expressed in his 1989 article Can Computers Cope with Human Races? It's not clear that there's anything useful to be done with this fact, and it's pretty clear that many people mis-apply the fact, but it's a fact none-the-less.

Explosion makes a fairly strong case that evolutionary stasis doesn't happen without a static environment. Humanity hasn't been static over the last 100,000 years--there have been many changes in our way of life over that period, and the changes keep accruing faster than evolution has been able to catch up. Our bodies are still adapting to changes in diet since the agricultural revolution and continuing changes in the sources of our food. Our susceptibility to disease has varied dramatically across populations, and the differences haven't settled down yet. There are still vast differences in hygiene between first world and developing nations and many places in the world where populations are sparser and provide fertile ground for new diseases to arise or transfer to human hosts. There is less of a case for sufficient continuing genetic isolation to drive differing evolutionary pressures for intelligence, but there is certainly pressure for differing intellectual capabilities than were selected for 200 or 500 years ago, much less 1000 years ago.

We haven't finished adapting to the civilization that surrounds us, and the form of our civilization continues to change. We shouldn't expect continuing evolution to be visible on a human time scale, but we shouldn't be surprised that many of the differences among people can be explained as the effect of different evolutionary pressures on our ancestors. In some cases, like disease susceptibility, we can take advantage of it if we stop treating it as tainted information. In others, as race, we should in most cases pay more attention to the abilities of individuals, rather than to the predispositions predicted by apparent racial categories.

IntelliJ IDEA open sourced

JetBrains has just announced that they've released the IntelliJ platform as open source! This is great news, as I've always maintained that IntelliJ IDEA is significantly better than all the other Java IDEs, and their main disadvantage was price, and the second biggest weakness was Eclipse's ability to let users add support for new languages. At one stroke, JetBrains has undercut both of these problems and enabled many more people to make use of the platform.

I only know what I read in the announcement and the FAQ, but it appears that JetBrains has done this for the right reasons, and probably in the right way. Their goal is to increase adoption of the platform, and to encourage third-party developers to work with IntelliJ rather than competitive products. They have kept some of their technology proprietary in order to be able to continue to run a business, and they're focusing on the larger enterprises that they make most of their money from. This is reasonable and proper.

The license they're using is Apache, which is very open and provides no significant restrictions on re-use. I'm very happy about this.

C. J. Cherryh: Cloud's Rider

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Chris Hibbert

C. J. Cherryh's Cloud's Rider is the successor to her Rider at the Gate, which I reviewed last year. This book was far more psychological than the previous, delving deeply into the reactions of all the characters to the dark telepathic sendings of the rogue nighthorse stalking the village.

In Rider, Danny Fisher teams up with Cloud, one of the telepathic Nighthorses on Finisterre, where a small human outpost seems to have been abandoned on a remote hostile planet. The humans who remain cloistered in the villages try to hide from the power of the ambient telepathy of the native fauna, and as a result are unable to exploit the resources of the world. The riders have allied with the nighthorses, which enables them to travel more freely, which makes them a crucial lifeline connecting the remote villages. But there's a lot the humans don't know about the planet.

In Rider, we see that nighthorses can sometimes go rogue (in that case because its rider died in an accident) with disastrous consequences for an entire village. In the end, Danny Fisher agrees to escort the survivors, the three Goss children, Carlos, Randy, and Brionne. Brionne was at the center of the tragedy, having been the focus of the rogue's attention, but at the divide between the two books, she is in a coma.

Cloud's Rider starts out with the quartet struggling up a mountain road in a blinding snowstorm. They end up walking for a couple of days, dragging Brionne behind them on an improvised travois. They had intended to stop halfway up the mountain at a permanent rider's shelter with provisions that ought to be enough to sustain them for quite a while, but the snowstorm causes them to miss the shelter and end up in Evergreen village--not large enough to stand up to the sendings of the rogue that seems to have followed them up the mountain.

The bulk of the story takes place in Evergreen, where the politics is intense among the villagers, the miners, the preacher, and the doctor who adopts Brionne. Some of the villagers quickly recognize that the now abandoned village at the foot of the hill represents a major source of wealth for whoever can claim it when spring brings an end to the unrelenting winter blizzards.

But the focus is on how Danny, Carlos, Randy, and Brionne react to their circumstances and the malevolent presence in the telepathic ambient. As villagers, Carlos and Randy would normally be expected to be oblivious to the rogue's sendings, but they were in Tarmin when everything came crashing down and took a long trek in the presence of Cloud, so they know it's all real. Randy is drawn to the nighthorses and envies the romance of the riders' way of life. Carlos just wants to get back to Tarmin and make use of his blacksmithing skills. Brionne's outlook has been warped by the sendings of the rogue, and her delusions and paranoia are affecting the villagers around her.

Once again, Cherryh has done a masterful job of developing characters whose differences and similarities are highlighted by the juxtaposition with alien thoughts and alien approaches that are perfectly consistent and highly intriguing. I very much enjoyed this story sequence.

John C. Wright: The Golden Age

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Chris Hibbert

John C. Wright's The Golden Age didn't work for me, though it would seem to have a lot of things in its favor. It's a futuristic high-tech story with a focus on personal enhancement and social interaction technology and little in the way of weapons or overt conflict. There is little in the way of visible government and secures cooperation with the society's mores via social pressure. Since everyone has access to largely unlimited resources, anything short of the ultimate form of ostracism leaves a lot of room for many variations in behavior and personal expression. I think the beginning of the story failed to grab me because of the reluctant hero angle. The protagonist, Phaeton, takes a while to admit that there's a problem and he has to take the responsibility to figure out what happened and why he's not getting what he wants even if he doesn't understand how he could have caused the problem.

Eventually Phaeton realizes that his memory may have been altered, and begins to suspect a vast conspiracy to silence him for something he doesn't remember doing or wanting. He bucks a lot of social pressure to investigate his past and figure out what he must have been trying to accomplish and who would have been trying to stop him. I thought the evidence he found seemed flimsy in the context of the story-with even his ostensible friends urging him to accept the world as it seemed to be, his constant bucking of the system seemed more like a habit of being contrarian than a dogged determination to find the truth. Of course, according to Wright's story, Phaeton was correct to trust his instincts, and there really was a vast conspiracy to suppress the evidence he'd discovered, and the entire society was at risk. But like Cassandra, Phaeton is doomed to be doubted, shunned, and ignored. In a society with serious life extension this is a long-lasting problem. The novel ends inconclusively, to be continued in a later volume.

I liked the technology and the way the society was organized. But from Phaeton's viewpoint, it's presented as an instrument of the society's downfall. No one is in charge, so no one is responsible for battling the external existential threat. The lack of centralized monitoring or control enables Phaeton to continue his investigation, and to amass enormous tools and weapons, but his refusal to cooperate with others leaves him ultimately very weak, and unable to recruit allies to his project.

Alistair Reynolds: Pushing Ice

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Chris Hibbert

Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice is a great story, weakened slightly by following the first contact story that justified the initial adventure to a lot of inter-species intrigue. The adventure is a good psychological thriller with lots of interactions among the crew of an asteroid miner that gets unexpectedly diverted to an interstellar chase in the wake of Janus, one of Jupiter's moons that suddenly leaves orbit and heads for the stars. This is a great premise that justifies a good amount of conflict and chaos, as they move from studying Janus, to realizing the implications of effectively being towed at high speed toward distant stars, to finding a way to survive on the surface of a not-quite dormant alien ship.

The crew goes through internal struggles over whether to abandon the chase while there's still some hope of returning to earth, which involves both politics and some violent attempts to overthrow the captain. The hard feelings left behind color all the crew's later attempts to survive long term starting with supplies meant for a much shorter trip. They spend their time studying the star they're heading for and the moribund uncrewed craft they're tethered to.

Eventually they arrive at an immense structure that provides room for ships from several different species. The Fountainheads are highly advanced and provides rejuvenation facilities that restore several of the human crew (including one who had been in cryonic suspension for most of the trip). The humans get conflicting advice from different alien groups about who they can trust and who is dangerous, and not surprisingly, different factions decide to trust different groups. Eventually, Janus itself is the target of several alien species who expect to be able to reap large energy resources from the craft. I thought the interactions with the aliens and the human political machinations occasioned by the aliens to be much less interesting and more poorly motivated than the first half of the story, concerning how the human crew got along and what they had to do to survive the long trip. The first half definitely made the story worth reading, though.

Peter Leeson: The Invisible Hook

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Chris Hibbert

Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook is a fun read with some serious points to make about economics. Leeson is a George Mason economist who has been a fan of pirate literature and lore most of his life. At some point he realized that he knew enough about the real history of pirates, particularly the ones that have been romanticized in our literature, to say something interesting about how economics drove and shaped them. Of course this also gave him an excuse to spend more time exploring pirate mythology and a way to get academic credit for it.

Leeson's most interesting finding is that the pirates often had written constitutions and elected their captains and other officers, and could remove them when the crew pleased. He also investigates the feedback mechanisms and social forces that reinforced this system and kept it stable. Some of it has to do with the fact that Piracy was a cooperative enterprise, and that pirates had no recourse to the law to enforce their rules. This leads to a need for agreement among the crew on how they are to operate, and consensus that breaches can be punished. The modern pirates off Somalia or South East Asia have a different set of contingencies, since it's easier for individual pirates to quit without endangering their own lives or those of their mates.

A lot of what Leeson talks about falls in the area that economists call signalling, by which they mean actions taken by an agent to convince someone of their likely behavior. The fundamental question about signals is what keeps others from copying the signal in order to fool the signal's target. Leeson puts the skull and crossbones and stories about pirate viciousness in this category.

Pirates cultivated an image of being ruthless killers who would never-the-less not physically harm victims who gave up without a fight. Their goal, of course, was to reduce the amount of fighting they had to do. So they did their best to convince honest seafarers that if you fought with pirates they would treat you harshly. The question this raises is why didn't privateers (who had government charters to act like pirates) also fly the jolly roger, and Leeson's answer was that it was too costly for them, since flying the pirate flag led to easy convictions for being pirates, even if you have the government charter. So Pirates competed for a rough reputation, and their competition had to convince their prey to surrender in more costly ways, since their charters proscribed torture and wanton violence.

There's a lot more than this in the book, and just enough asides of "Avast" and "Aargh" to raise an occasional chuckle. If you still retain your youthful enthusiasm for pirates, and are interested in the economic way of analyzing behavior, this is an entertaining approach to the subject that is also educational.

Outrageously Inhumane

Ken MacLeod has a short post on his recent attendance at a con marking the recent Apollo anniversary. Ken's highlight was a talk by a self-professed techno-utopian, who said, among other things "The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive" and "Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish." Ken has good sense and good tase. That may be why I like his science fiction.

On "Organizational scar tissue"

John Cook blogged about stupid policies within organizations, in response to a quote he saw:

Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations.

John mostly agreed and pointed out that policies sometimes arise for good reasons, though the reasons may be hard to reconstruct later. I want to take the conversation in a different direction: How do you design an organization so that the policies can change if the circumstances have changed?

There are policies designed to handle unlikely events and policies designed to handle everyday events. Both kinds can atrophy over time and no longer be relevant. The ones for unlikely situations are harder to set up time-outs for, but the ones for everyday use are the more costly when they outlive their usefulness.

The hard part of the situation John described is figuring out a different approach that leaves you more flexibility. (If you've built a Maginot line, as in his metaphor, you're pretty much stuck.) So the challenge is designing an organizational culture that can identify outmoded policies and change or discard them.

In a small, agile organization I once worked in, we developed a checklist for use by the project manager (me!) during the release process. The reason was that there were things I occasionally forgot to do that came back to bite me or my boss, the CEO. The rule about the checklist was that it was for me to fill out on my own responsibility. There were items that asked for initials from other people, but I was allowed to ignore them on my own initiative. We updated the checklist often enough that I could remove useless items whenever I noticed that their relevance had disappeared.

For a larger organization, you don't want an individual to make those decisions unless there's a way for them to know the original reason for the policy. So writing up the rationale along with the policy makes it possible for the person on the spot to know whether they should ignore or attempt to change the policy. In a small agile organization you don't want the overhead of having to write up the rationale every time you add a process step, but if the organization grows, you'll need the rationale. It's a dynamic tension that organizations have to learn to adapt to as they grow.

ADDED During the ensuing discussion on The Endeavor, someone pointed to NetFlix' internal presentation on their corporate culture. Very impressive. If I wanted a job, that's the kind of company I want to work in.

Charles Stross: Saturn's Children

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Chris Hibbert

Charles Stross's Saturn's Children depicts a post-humanity future in the solar system; all the characters are various forms of robots, and many have recognizable and sympathetic feelings, goals and aspirations. The humans died out a few hundred years ago but neglected to think about how their posterity would get along in their absence.

Stross has created a very interesting society here. Many of the robots (the focal characters, particularly) were designed to be personal servants to the humans, and their drives are very much shaped around the desires of their absent masters. Others, less constrained, use these drives to control and shape them. The basic conflict is over whether it's possible or desirable to bring back humans. If this could be done and they could be managed, then whoever controlled the humans would have immense power because of the drive to serve the humans that is built in to so many of the robots.

The background is fascinating in that any robot that was expected to work in the presence of humans was designed to have strong strictures to honor and obey them, which leaves them in a strangely constrained state now that the humans aren't around. All the apparatus of government is still in place, and no decisions can be made or changed without humans to vote or make an administrative decision. So the government runs on auto-pilot, and many projects that made sense--terraforming to create new habitable territories--are senseless when the robots can adapt to harsh environments much more easily. And robots that are more able to bend their internal definitions of what the humans wanted are less constrained.

The basic conflict sheds light on thoughts about freedom and free will. Freya, the main character, was designed as a sex-bot, but she was first activated long after the humans had died out, so her drive to serve them is unrequited. Her design gives her some special abilities (cosmetic enhancement gives her an innate talent for disguise and her adjustable high-heeled feet (as Laurie Anderson sang) come in handy in combat and escape. But most of the time, she's a free agent, other than having to serve employers and mentors. Self-ownership is a concrete idea in this society. All the robots originally had owners, but the ultimate owners are now gone from the scene, so each robot is owned by some corporation. Being self-owned means controlling the corporation that owns your body. Unfortunately, some of the robots are rich enough that they can sue others into bankruptcy, and buy their corporations, so there's no safety in owning your corporation. In addition to the slave chips that get used occasionally, ownership conveys control by allowing one being to assert "control level nine" and require absolute obedience of another. Of course, if the subservient one can convince herself of doubts about the authenticity of the ownership, she can escape the fetters.

Overall, this is a fun romp. Stross displays a strong sense of humor, and Freya is a joy to watch. Many of the service machines and tools are aware and interactive, and Stross is quite inventive in giving them interesting drives and quirks. The political implications are interesting, but mostly not the focus of the story. It calls itself "A Space Opera" and it is that, with the addition of interesting personalities and new viewpoints on how our robot progeny will live and think. Saturn's Children is a finalist for the Prometheus Award. The freedom orientation is too subtle to win in what has turned out to be a year with some very strong candidates. It's a lot of fun to read none-the-less.

Dean Keith Simonton: Greatness

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Chris Hibbert

Dean Keith Simonton's Greatness is an attempt to catalog all the influences that allow some people to have a larger effect on the world than their fellows. It takes a more wide-ranging and less data-driven approach to the question than Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. I thought it was less successful, mostly because there were too many sections that were speculative, not well grounded, or inconclusive.

There were, of course, sections that contained important insights, but if one part in three, scattered evenly throughout a 500 page book is unfocused material, the useful portions are harder to identify and lose much of their impact. The most important conclusion I found in the book is that great results are the consequence not just of intelligence, insight, or drive, but that perseverance matters, even for people with huge natural talents. Simonton shows that even for the giants who are widely acknowledged to have remade their fields and outshone everyone else who has worked in the same fields, their masterworks appear in about the same proportion as for others who ended up contributing less overall. Their secret was no secret: they merely worked harder and longer and produced more. Their natural talents sometimes give them a slightly higher batting average, but overall productivity of great works and long-lived impact is a result of starting early and working more hours over more years than their rivals. Great achievers all have mediocre and uninteresting works mixed into their corpus, it's just not so noticeable given their best output. You'll find similar statistics for how long after someone started working that they produced their best work for the great and the near-great. The great simply find more time to be productive, and continue longer. It's possible that early productivity and continuing results enable the greatest producers in any field to continue contributing longer, which adds to their records, but single-mindedness and continuing focus is also crucial.

Simonton covers topics including intelligence, personality, birth order effects, genetics (mostly focusing on the extent to which greatness runs in families), pathology, and what makes some periods more fertile than others. The lack of mathematical models makes most of his speculation hard to trust as he seldom compares the statistics of the successful with those of their surroundings. If you don't know how often familial connections should arise by chance, it's hard to conclude that any particular number of examples demonstrates the existence or lack of any effect. Overall, there were lots of interesting facts and factoids, and the writing is engaging, but it's hard to take many of the conclusions very seriously as anything more than anecdote.