SOPA

I never blogged on the SOPA kerfuffle; it happened while my creative(?) energies were elsewhere.

Looking back, a few minor points emerge:

Some commentators got all excited: “look what we did! What shall we do next?!” “We” meaning right-thinking internet-type people. The answer, obviously, is nothing: this, “we” agreed about, most things, we don’t. I think Wikipedia’s claim: “Although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, it’s existence is not” was basically justified.

Libertarian commentators had a lot of fun jeering at leftist techies who wanted every aspect of the economy to be regulated by the government except the internet. The criticism is only justified against those who demand that government regulate things but don’t specify exactly how they should regulate them (others can say they’re in favour of regulation, but just want it to be better). But that’s most people. So yeah.

In some ways, it’s a disappointment that SOPA didn’t go through; the circumvention techniques that would have been developed if it had would have been interesting and useful. At the end of the day, the biggest threat to free computing isn’t legislation, it’s that in a stable market, locked-down “appliance” devices are more useful to the non-tinkering user than general-purpose, hackable devices. So far, we tinkerers still have the GP devices, because the locked-down ones go obsolete too quickly even for lay users. I’m not sure whether that situation will persist for the long term: I’ve looked at the question before.

But if the government makes stupid laws that can easily be circumvented using general-purpose devices, the demand for those devices will be helpfully supported.

Note when I talk about circumvention, I’m not talking about copyright infringement. That was not what the argument was about. While I lean toward the view that copyright is necessarily harmful, I’m not certain and it’s not that big a deal. The important argument is all about enforcement costs: given that copyright exists, whose responsibility is it to enforce it. The problem with SOPA was that it would have put crippling copyright enforcement costs on any facilitator of internet communication.

Currently, internet discussion is structured mostly around large service providers — in the case of this blog Google — providing platforms for user content. If those service providers become legally liable for infringing user content, the current structure collapses. The platforms would either have to go offshore, with users relying on the many easy ways of circumventing the SOPA provisions attempting to limit access to offshore infringers, or else evade the enforcers by going distributed, redundant and mobile. What will be to Blogger as Kazaa and then BitTorrent were to Napster?  It would have been interesting to find out, and possibly beneficial. There is a lot of marginal censorship that can be applied to easy-target platforms like Blogger or Wikipedia that will not induce sufficient users to create alternatives, as the sheer idiot clumsiness of SOPA would probably have done.

(Note Wikipedia might have been spared, but it would have suffered, because if existing less respectable platforms were removed, their content would migrate to the likes of Wikipedia. If 4chan did not exist, Wikipedia would become 4chan.)

Actually, it’s interesting to think about how to blog over a pure P2P framework. Without comments, you’re publishing a linear collection of documents. (I don’t think you can handle comments — we’d need something more like trackbacks). Posts would need to be cryptographically signed and have unique ids. Serial numbers would be useful so readers would know if they’d missed anything. I wonder if anyone’s worked on it. A sort of bittorrent-meets-git hybrid would be really interesting — search this list of hosts for any git commits signed by any of these keys…

The dance of censorship and evasion is very difficult to predict in detail. I found some time ago that the way to find the text of an in-copyright book is to take a short phrase from it (that isn’t a well known quotation or the title) and google it. That used to work. I wanted some text from Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall the other day, so I did the usual, and got pages and pages of forum posts, containing chunks of the book interspersed with links to pages selling MMO currency and fake LVMH crap. My access to illicit literature was being messed up by someone else’s illicit SEO.

Law, Order and Prisons

This is a truly bizarre article.

The author, Christopher Glazek, makes a lot of good points about the American prison system, in which prisons are run by the inmates. He points out that according to some statistics, the majority of all rapes committed in the US occur in prisions. We have heard elsewhere recently that more black Americans are in prison today than were in slavery in 1860, and that more people are in American prisons than were in the Gulag Archipelago (although, to be fair, that is partly because the latter tended to die).

The solution proposed by Glazek is: to let the prisoners out to commit more crimes. There is no mincing of words; the title of the article is “Raise the Crime Rate”. Not for Glazek any wishful-thinking “prison doesn’t work” rhetoric, his thesis is clearly that it does work, but the price is too high.

Part of the weirdness is that he seems to regard a reduction in crime partly as a bad thing in itself:

Certain breeds of urban dwellers benefit, too. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent areas.

Er, yes. Reducing crime makes neighbourhoods nicer and encourages people to live in them. That’s more or less the point.

What Glazek never addresses is the question of why the US is unable to keep order inside its own prisons. From an international point of view, this is the obvious question. The UK, as he observes, imprisons fewer of its criminals, but here there is no assumption that prisons are run by the inmates. There is a possibility that here we are just misled, but I don’t think so. There was for a time one exception to the rule, the Maze prison, where Northern Ireland’s terrorists were held, but the management of that prison, with opposing factions kept in separate wings run by their own paramilitary hierarchies, was a major controversy. The terrorists were de facto prisoners of war, though de jure that status was always denied them, and the contrast demonstrates that the situation in the mainland prisons really is different. Compare to this astonishing paper on the Mexican Mafia, which demonstrates that gang prisoners in California have essentially the same status as the paramilitary POWs of the Maze H-Blocks.

There are statistics in the article: the US spends 200bn a year on a system which employs 500,000 correctional officers to supervise 2.3 million prisoners. Is it really not possible to control crime inside the prisons with a ratio of more than one officer to five prisoners?. The abandonment of law and order inside American prisons is a choice, one probably inherited from the country’s frontier days, and one which simply cannot be justified. If violent criminals continue to commit — and suffer — violent crime inside prison, the answer is surely not to move them out to prey on the law-abiding, but to actually enforce order in the one place where it ought to be easiest of all to do. Don’t, as Glazek recommends, put TV cameras all over the country: put TV cameras all over the prison. (That was a progressive idea in 1791). And finally, if you’re going to release prisoners because there are too many, release the ones that don’t commit crimes inside.

Meritocracy versus Loyalty

This has been sitting in my drafts directory for three months, since I read this Ross Douthat column on Corazine. But it goes with some of what I was writing yesterday, so I’ve dusted it off.

Douthat points out, I think rightly, that the defining features of our modern elite are its arrogance and its recklessness.

Arrogance is perhaps an inevitable weakness of any elite, but I think he is right to identify the recklessness as something new since the days of a hereditary upper class.

For one thing, someone who has been elevated from a humble background wholly or mostly by their own efforts and ability is likely to have a very high opinion of that ability. that again seems almost an inevitable side-effect of having the most able people in positions of power.

I think it’s more significant that a large number of people in positions of serious power have absolutely no-one above them.  If you are Governor of a state, or CEO of a company, you are theoretically responsible to voters or shareholders, but they do not play the role of a superior in a social or psychological sense, they are more the material a politician or manager works with than the patron he works for.

If the most significant person you know of is yourself, then the brutal one-sided logic of excessive risk-taking kicks in. You’re already successful, you’ve got a well-upholstered safety net, so when you take a big gamble, if it comes off you’re a hero and move up to the next level of achievement, and if it doesn’t you take a break for a bit to play golf and then try something new.

That unbalanced incentive is widely recognised now, but in itself it is not what’s new. Limited Liability has been around a good while, as have the country houses of disastrous politicians. What is new is the end of loyalty. In the past, the bulk of those wielding power were tied not just by their rolling contacts but by bonds of loyalty to superiors. A failed gamble would impact not merely a crowd of insignficiant peasants, voters or shareholders, but would hit the status and reputation of those whose approval or disapproval actually matters.

Obviously there were always a few who were beyond any such limitations, but think about how many there are now who have no practical superiors. It would have been hard to have made a list that would have included “CEO of MF Global”.

Nor is the concept limited to business. To whom does Hillary Clinton, or the head of an agency, look up as a superior? To the President who appointed them? I don’t think so. He’s just another punter. What about Paul Krugman, or some pressure-group head?

The distinction I’m getting at, between a technical superior and a psychological superior, is whether the superior’s opinion matters beyond the immediate game being played. If you’re a department head in a company or a government agency, your boss can fire you. But that’s all he can do, and that’s the only risk you’re taking. Once he’s done that, he’s not your boss any more. On the other hand, if your boss is your lifelong mentor, then he’s a psychological superior. Even if he fires you, he doesn’t stop being your superior; you still need his approval at some level. I think such relationships were once the norm, and have been becoming steadily less common for a few hundred years.

A response has been to try to build up abstracts to which powerful people feel loyalty. Many companies try hard to impress on their people the idea of being part of something bigger than themselves, but that’s a tall order for an institution which itself is required to operate by cold logic.

The replacement of mentor-protégé relationships by meritocracy has had two drivers: first, modern communications, record-keeping, and the broadening of trust up to recent times have meant that positions are being filled from much wider pools of candidates than before, while at the same time, as I described yesterday, the concepts of personal loyalty and rewards for loyalty have become seen as suspect, even corrupt.

I therefore propose a two-pronged response to the problem of meritocratic recklessness: First, personal loyalty to a mentor should be recognised as something moral and admirable, and secondly, the most senior positions should be held by individuals on a longer-term schedule, to encourage the maintenance of such relationships.

Basic Power and Political Power

I ran into a terminological problem in the previous posts. I was making the argument that it is more acceptable for non-sovereigns to demand a share in the spoils of government than to demand a share in the actual decision-making of government.

To do that I had to classify those people who have power₁ to make demands on government, but who don’t use that power₁ to actually share in power₂ by influencing government policy. I need a different word to distinguish the capability to influence policy from the exercise of that capability. I would like to call the first “potential power”, except that Etymology Man would come crashing through the window, and it’s too cold in here as it is.

The best I’ve come up with is “Basic power” versus “Political power”. So I can say that those with basic power owe loyalty to the sovereign, but can expect to be rewarded for that loyalty. Any attempt to gain political power, rather than wealth and status, is disloyalty, and should be opposed by all right-thinking people.

The terms aren’t really obvious though, and I’m hoping to find better ones.

Honour Given and Taken

Not long ago, Fred Goodwin was a Knight, his successor Stephen Hester was in line for a £900K bonus, and Chris Huhne was a cabinet minister.

It would be neat in a literary way to show that these three withdrawn honours are part of the same thing, but it’s more interesting, and more true, to see how they’re all different.

Going in reverse chronogical order, Huhne is in some ways the most straightforward. He was in a position of trust, and he is accused of criminal dishonesty.

On more detailed reflection, oddities emerge. For one thing, while it would be nice to think that laws and policies are being made by people who are honest and trustworthy, the idea that any of his rivals or colleagues are honest enough to admit their mistakes or crimes is laughable.

For another thing, why is it the decision of the police to prosecute that triggers his resignation? The facts are not really any better known than they were before.

I suspect that what forced him out was the media deciding to claim that he must be forced out. That doesn’t necessarily indicate any particular animus to him on behalf of the media; a cabinet resignation is worth pushing for just for story value. It might be that earlier, there were reasons for the press not to try to do him in, but those are now gone.

I could suggest a couple of possible reasons: one is that the media seemed somewhat invested in the coalition, but is now more soured on it. (The 2010 story of David Laws tells against that theory somewhat, but he might have been more specifically unpopular to the media). Another theory might be that Huhne’s activity on climate change protected him, but that has mysteriously become less of a concern.

Ultimately, I don’t think we can know what’s really going on, and that’s why day-to-day party politics isn’t worth paying attention to.

On to Goodwin then. On the one hand, if Goodwin was rewarded for benefiting British Banking, it is fair to say that the any benefit he bestowed was more than undone. On the other, the whole process did not seem to have much to do with either justice or wise decision-making; rather it had all the appearance of a stampede.

Whatever knighthoods are for these days, it can’t be what they were originally for. It’s a bit murky. Interestingly, knighthoods would fit well into a formalist system, as a treatment of the coalition problems I just wrote about. It could serve as a formalisation of informal power: a recognition that the recipient has some power, is loyal to the sovereign, and is being rewarded for that loyalty. If that were the basis of honours, they would not be withdrawn for incompetence, or even for criminality, but only for disloyalty. It would mean that that person ought not be permitted to obtain any power again.

Finally Hester. Hester is CEO of a bank which is making modest profits in a difficult market. As such, he would normally expect a substantial bonus. The same stampede which took away his predecessor’s knighthood took that as well.

There are legitimate questions about the amount of money made by banks and their employees, which I am not going to address — anyone worth reading on the issue would be either more knowledgable or less personally interested than me.

The question of bonuses per se is a separate one, though. What it amounts to is that companies that award large bonuses (relative to salary) are run in a more formalist manner than most other corporations. In many organisations, valuable employees are rewarded with more responsibilities, or better job security. Arnold Kling recently raised the point that this can produce bad outcomes. These companies avoid that, giving responsibilies as tasks rather than rewards, and rewarding valuable employees more directly with cash. This is the appropriate response to the sort of issue that Arnold Kling raised, and which Aretae picked up on as a widely applicable example of bad governance.

The fact that this formalist measure to improve governance arouses such opposition (again, independently of the actual sums involved; Hester’s salary for 2011 was over a million pounds, and attracted little attention), says a lot about what is wrong with modern political culture.

So, three very different honours: a minor position in our corrupted and ineffective system of government, an anachronism that might once have been a formalist recoginition of power and reward for loyalty, and a straightforward, honest payment for value. All removed, for better or worse, in the same way, by an unthinking popular stampede, triggered by a media driven not primarily by ideology but by a need for drama.

Formalism and Coalition

Aretae insists that all government is coalitional.

Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to widen the coalition further, and spread power about randomly.

The point of formalism is that power should be aligned with some form of responsibility, so that the powerful not benefit from destructive behaviour, and that attempting to obtain more power should be illegitimate, so that energies not be directed to destructive competition for power.

Formalists tend to believe that stable, effective and responsible government would follow a largely libertarian policy, choosing to limit government action to maintaining order and protecting private property, and taking its own loot in the form of predictably and efficiently levied taxation rather than by making arbitrary demands of random subjects. Such a policy would maximise the long-term revenue stream from the state.

Given a policy which sets limits on government, it becomes reasonably straightforward to deal with those centres of power which are not sovereign but which cannot be eliminated. They get subsidies, but not power over policy. Given that the sovereign chooses, for reasons of efficiency, to take taxes and buy food with them rather than to take food directly from whereever he fancies, there is no problem in giving pensions or subsidies to those whose support is needed.

The key formalist idea is that if those with informal power go beyond what they are entitled to but seek to influence general government policy, then they are doing something anti-social and immoral. All those who have an interest in the continuation of stable, effective and responsible government will see such an attempt as a threat. Fnargl does not have a ring, and I do not much fancy engineering weapon locks implementing a bitcoin-like voting protocol, so a combination of popular will and, in due course, force of tradition is all we have to fill the gap. In as much as there is a general interest in anything, there is a general interest in good government, and I do not think it is all that far-fetched to to see sovereign authority as something that people will reflexively stand to defend, were it not that that they have been taught for 250 years to do the opposite.

What’s striking is that our current political morality holds the opposite view: that attempting to influence policy is everyone’s right, but to receive direct payoffs is unjust. The powerful are therefore rewarded indirectly via policies with enormously distorting effects on the economy or on the administration of government, whose general costs greatly outweigh the gains obtained by the beneficiaries. Further, it is easier for them to seek to protect and increase their power, than to seek reward for giving it up, even if the general interest would benefit from the latter.

I could do with an example to illustrate this — if a person has necessary power, such as a military officer, then he should keep his power and be rewarded for it. If alternatively his arm of the military is no longer needed, but he still has power because he could potentially use the arm against the sovereign, then it is preferable to pay him extra to cooperate in disbanding the arm, rather than to maintain it just to keep him loyal. The same logic might apply in the organisation of key industries, or sections of the bureaucracy.

It would not necessarily be easy to resolve these things perfectly, but it would be made easier by recognising that concentrating power over general policy — sovereignty — is a good thing, as far as it is possible, and that the sovereign who has control over policy has the right to use it in whichever way he sees fit: to hand out cash presents as much as to award monopolies.

The exercise of democracy makes things very much worse, by adding to the number of those with necessary power anybody who can sway a bloc of voters, and enabling them to make demands for more inefficient indirect sharing of the loot.

A Case for Ispettore Zen

I’ve probably mentioned before that I read a lot of crime novels. My favourites of the modern era are probably the Aurelio Zen series by Michael Dibdin. Zen, a detective of the Polizia di Stato, solves his cases with a blend of staggering luck and an involuntary bloody-mindedness which distracts him from his more important tasks of attempting to understand and navigate the women in his life and the political machinations of the Italian bureaucracy.

I have no idea how realistic Dibdin’s grotesque presentation of the corruption and hidden motivations of Italian life really is, but I have not been able to see the Costa Concordia story in any other context than as an Aurelio Zen mystery. The captain who accidentally fell into a lifeboat and then argued with the coastguard on the phone, the mysterious blonde on the bridge, the cruise line that was blaming their own captain for everything even while the passengers were still being rescued:  all we can be sure of is that nothing is what it seems to be, and nobody is telling the truth. Only Zen can actually get to the truth of it, and even if he does, we probably won’t know, because the official story might be completely different…

Monarchism and Stability in the Middle East / North Africa

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution posts a link to a paper by Victor Menaldo, The Middle East and North Africa’s Resilient Monarchs.

It’s well worth a read; it’s not long, though frankly I’ll need to spend more time with it than I have this evening.

First and foremost, it’s a challenge to the Bueno de Mesquita theory that all that matters is the size of the ruling coalition and the selectorate — a theory that I found valuable but simplistic. Menaldo addresses political culture, observing that the political culture serves to distinguish regime insiders from outsiders. He finds that monarchical governments have less conflict and better economic development.

Particularly interesting to me is the account of elites within the monarchical society. These kingdoms are not the absolute autocracies of my “degenerate formalism”, but actually existing monarchies, in which the extended royal family and other important groups hold significant power. Menaldo’s argument is that the fact that the political culture defines who shares in power, the struggles between in-groups are limited. Unlike a faction in a revolutionary republic, you can lose a power struggle and still be an insider with some power.

In my view, this is also the strength of our somewhat corrupted democracies: if you’re an insider but you’re losing, it’s still not worth being extremely destructive. Better to admit defeat and preserve the system that keeps you an insider even as a loser.

Because of that, this paper doesn’t really make my argument: it shows that monarchy is better than a revolutionary republic, but not that it is better than a western democracy. Still, it’s useful that it’s showing some of the strengths that monarchy has.

It’s not without weaknesses, either. As with other work of this kind, I don’t really take the mathematics seriously. Checking that a statistical analysis bears out the impression you get from drawing a couple of graphs and watching CNN is not what I call verifying a testable hypothesis. And a relatively small data set of somewhat subjective categorisations of events seems inadequate for the amount of analysis being done on it.

Also, the paper, as far as I have seen, does not explore the possibility that foreign influence is the explanation for the difference in violence. Bahrain faced nothing like the outside pressure that Libya or Syria did. I don’t think foreign action is affected directly by whether the regime is monarchical or republican, but there might be an indirect link with foreign policy stance.

Diane Abbot

@bimadew White people love playing “divide & rule” We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

Offensive? Of course not. How can that possibly be offensive? Just because it implies that it is possible to generalise about what “white people” like? You mean like this? What rubbish.

Well, is it wrong, then? I think so, but so what? She’s a Labour MP — saying things that are wrong is her job. Further, it’s worth arguing about.

Speaking on behalf of white people, we do not love playing “divide & rule”. It’s strictly a last resort — keeping track of different groups of black people gives us a headache. Which ones are the Tutsis again? We much prefer to have “community leaders” deal with all that stuff for us¹.

I would not have been able to say that had Diane Abbot not raised the issue. She was right to raise the issue, despite being wrong: like I said, that’s her job. She should not have been shut up or made to apologise.

The reflex to hang her out to dry is understandable: we are frustrated at not being allowed to say things about race, and when one of “them” does it, we take revenge. But I think that is a bad mistake — ironically, this is one time where we have to risk that headache and play “divide & rule”. Abbott is not one of “them” that want us to shut up about race. Rod Liddle says that she has used the same tactics in the past, but when he talked about black crime, she at least disagreed with him on the merits. Probably wrongly, mind, but, Labour MP, etc. Yes, she used the R-word as well, but if everyone complaining had also engaged the argument like her, they wouldn’t have been able to shout it down. It is the likes of Alex Massie and Bonnie Greer weighing in that make it near impossible to have such a discussion.

Non-white politicians are generally willing to talk about race. (Sometimes at enormous length). Being offended is Stuff White People Like. And that’s not something I’m going to apologise for saying.

¹ If it turns out that the “community leaders” are all from one group, and are using the power we give them to exterminate another, we would rather not know about it, thank you very much.

AI, Human Capital, Betterness

Let me just restate the thought experiment I embarked on this week. I am hypothesising that:

  • “Human-like” artificial intelligence is bounded in capability 
  • The bound is close to the level of current human intelligence  
  • Feedback is necessary to achieving anything useful with human-like intelligence 
  • Allowing human-like intelligence to act on a system always carries risk to that system

Now remember, when I set out I did admit that AI wasn’t a subject I was up to date on or paid much attention to.

On the other hand, I did mention Robin Hanson in my last post. The thing is, I don’t actually read Hanson regularly: I am aware of his attention to systematic errors in human thinking; I quite often read discussions that refer to his articles on the subject, and sometimes follow links and read them. But I was quite unaware of the amount he has written over the last three years on the subject of AI, specifically “whole brain emulations” or Ems.

More importantly, I did actually read, but had forgotten, “The Betterness Explosion“, a piece of Hanson’s, which is very much in line with with my thinking here, as it emphasises that we don’t really know what it means to suggest we should achieve super-human intelligence. I now recall agreeing with this at the time, and although I had forgotten it I suspect it at the very least encouraged my gut-level scepticism towards superhuman AI and the singularity.

In the main, Hanson’s writing on Ems seems to avoid the questions of motivation and integration that I emphasised in part 2. Because the Em’s are actual duplicates of human minds, there is no assumption that they will be tools under our control; from the beginning they will be people with which we will need to negotiate — there is discussion of the viability and morality of their market wages being pushed down to subsistence level.

There is an interesting piece “Ems Freshly Trained” which looks at the duplication question, which might well be a way round the integration issue (as I wrote in part 1, “it might be as hard to produce and identify an artificial genius as a natural one, but then perhaps we could duplicate it”, and the same might go for an AI which is well-integrated into a particular role).

There is also discussion of cities which consist mainly of computer hardware hosting brains. I have my doubts about that: because of the “feedback” assumption at the top, I don’t think any purpose can be served by intelligences that are entirely isolated from the physical world. Not that they have to be directly acting on the physical world — I do precious little of that myself — but they have to be part of a real-world system and receive feedback from that system. That doesn’t rule out billion-mind data centre cities, but the obstacles to integrating that many minds into a system are severe. As per part 2, I do not think the rate of growth of our systems is limited by the availability of intelligences to integrate into them, since there are so many going spare.

Apart from the Hanson posts, I should also have referred to an post I had read by Half Sigma, on Human Capital. I think that post, and the older one linked from it, make the point well that the most valuable (and most renumerated) humans are those who have been succesfully (and expensively) integrated into important systems.