Virtual Worlds

Lord Puttnam says that we may be damaging children by allowing them to grow up in virtual worlds.

I agree entirely. Childhood is where children learn to be adults. Putting them in a fake environment away from real adult humans denies them the chance to adapt to the real world.

However, Puttnam seems to be hung up on something to do with computer games. I’m much more concerned about schools.

Rather than inflict my own clumsy prose on you all, here’s Paul Graham:

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.

Read the whole thing. I want to rant on about this, but there isn’t a single thing I can say that Graham doesn’t say better.

See also Robert Epstein’s book, which I haven’t read, but I listened to this podcast with Epstein from the Glenn & Helen show.

Corporations and Governments

Lawrence Lessig praises a book “Supercapitalism” by Robert Reich:
Reich and Lessig count it a mistake that We push for “corporate social responsibility” and praise corporations who agree to do the “good” thing, imagining that this means something other than the “money making” thing. We know a song about that, don’t we children?… government is pretty good at forcing internalization when it benefits strong special interests (again, copyright), and not when it harms strong special interests (again, carbon). Here, and in a million contexts, the government is coopted by the powerful influence of powerful interests.Phase 2 of Lessig’s journey will be when he realises that, just as a corporation exists to create profits, and cannot reasonably or usefully do anything else, a government exists to serve powerful interests, and cannot reasonably or usefully do anything else.Lessig’s article is fascinating, and I’m not doing it justice, because of the completely alien worldview it exhibits.
We’ve now … Reich says, entered a period of Supercapitalism — a time when competition has grown dramatically, and when half of us (meaning half of each of us, or at least half) more effectively demand lower prices in the product and service market place and higher returns in the investment market place.The problem, from Reich’s (and my) perspective, is that the other half of us – the part that thinks not as an actor in a market, but as a citizen – has atrophied. That is, the half of us (again, of each of us – Reich’s point is that each of us has these two parts) that demands that government set sensible and efficient limits on private action has atrophied.That division – between “market actor” and “citizen”, is not one that it would have occured to me in a hundred years. “citizenship” in the sense he talks about means nothing to me but busybodying: interfering with people who have nothing to do with me. Does that mean I am half a person – a “market actor” only? I don’t think so. If I help someone up the steps at the station, (or for that matter kick them down those steps for fun), I am not a “market actor”, but neither am I being a citizen in the political sense that Lessig seems to mean. I am interacting with those around me. I do not draw a sharp distinction between those I work with (or “interact in the labour market with”), and my other circles of neighbours and friends.

There is a danger of treating libertarianism (in the broad sense) as being entirely about markets. This mistake can be made by supporters as well as opponents. Markets are not the point; freedom (and particularly free association) is the point. People should be free to associate and co-operate in whatever manner they wish. Often that co-operation have the structure of a market, but frequently we can do better than the market (particularly at small scales). The significance of the market is that if we are free to market, then we might do better than we would by market, but we need not do worse. If we are prevented from using a market, then there is no limit to how ineffective our co-operation can be.

At one point there I had to use “market” as a verb. Trading or “marketing” is something that people do, and markets are an emergent property of that action. Without wanting to get too hung up on parts of speech, it’s a bit awkward to have to talk as if the market is primary, and people acting in a market secondary, when the opposite is the case.

In essence, then, we have three categories of interaction. There is market interaction. There is other voluntary interaction outside of markets, which I might call “citizenship” but which Lessig apparently doesn’t, and there is politics, or achieving goals through government action, which Lessig considers “citizenship”, and which I consider almost entirely harmful.

(As an aside, I have written previously on why we choose to clearly separate market interaction and other voluntary interaction).

The history is what I find interesting here. Lessig has long been arguing that we need government to control the excessive power of corporations. That is a reasonable argument in vacuuo, but suffers from the observation that in the real world government almost always intervenes on the side of the corporations. Having noticed this, Lessig now turns his attention to it. I am being serious when I suggest he may reach the stage where he recognises that the problems of corrupt government are not fundamentally fixable, only containable (by restricting government).

Richard Brunstom

Is the North Wales Chief Constable calling for the legalisation of drugs.

While I agree with him, I have my worries about government bodies, such as police forces, campaigning for policy. The idea is that the people campaign, and the government responds. I find it idiotic when government-funded “charities” spend their money on campaigns aimed back at the government which funded them, and it is not really any less idiotic just because I agree with the campaign.

Of course, the question of whether Brunstom should express is personal views is a different one. That’s really between him and his employers — if they attempt to be too restrictive they may find it hard to get good people. It is probably best that he is allowed to speak out.

The Police Authority, indeed, is his employer. It consists of 9 councillors, 3 magistrates and 5 appointed members. The councillors have other venues in which to put forward their political views. Rather than calling for change in the law, they would be better making decisions genuinely within their province as to the North Wales Police. I imagine it is beyond the scope of their discretion to decide not to enforce laws they disagree with, but priorities to a certain extent must be down to them. Let them combine their wisdom with their responsibility.

Fixed Term Parliaments

What do I think about fixed term parliaments? Since I’ve been recently considering whether I would prefer to continue with democracy at all, this is a slightly odd question. I think it relates to my previous examination of the length of the term between elections. The advantage to the incumbent of choosing the date is not necessarily a problem, if a balance is needed between stability which increases the time horizon of the government, and the opportunity for change which discourages insurrection. Effectively shortening the campaign is an advantage. If we know now that election will be on particular date in 2008, everyone — government and opposition — will be organising around that date. We’ll have 3-year election campaigns. And I’m coming to the conclusion that politics is bad for government.It could be argued that the mere possibility of an early election caused extra politics in the recent past, but that’s a rare occurence, and likely to become even rarer in future as a result of the points Brown lost over the whole thing.
Also, unlike, for instance, the US federal system, we have a system where the executive requires the support of the legislature. If it no longer has that support, and no other government can get support, we need to have an election. Currently, it is up to the government to resign and call an election when it no longer has support. With fixed term, it would require a formal no confidence vote, and you can get some weird games, such as a government actively seeking passage of a vote of no confidence. Something of the sort happened in Germany a year or two ago if I recall correctly. So, I’m against fixed term parliaments (at least as a single reform in the context of the current UK system).

Tax and Democracy

chris dillow is ready to give up on democracy, based on observations that cutting inheritance tax, paid only by the rich, is more popular electorally than cutting income tax, which is paid by the poor.

I’m not here to cheer for democracy, but his explanation, that the low expectations of the poor lead them to accept being victimised by the tax system, does not seem to me the most likely one.

For me, the key fact is that PAYE income tax is the ultimate stealth tax. If someone pays £100,000 in tax on inheriting a £500,000 house, that is seen as a huge blow, but I have never heard anyone ask what difference it would make to someone on £20,000 a year if they weren’t paying £3,500 of it in income tax (and, while we’re at it, another £1,500 or so in VAT).

Evidence for this is articles like the one I picked on in 2005 , which claimed that transport was the average household’s biggest expense, ignoring the fact that taxation added up to as much as transport, food and housing put together.

Further, it is still widely believed that higher taxes help the poor. Helping the poor by cutting income taxes would generally be looked at as an absurdity. The same goes for inheritance tax, of course, but that is more likely to be seen, probably correctly, as a fringe issue. Therefore cutting inheritance tax wins votes of those who pay it, but does not lose many from the rest.

The fact is that when government took 10-20% of the economy, it could be funded mainly by taxing the rich. As the figure has grown to 40%, the tax burden has fallen far more heavily on the poor, despite the widening of the franchise. To me, the obvious explanation is that government has for a long time been extracting as much or nearly as much from the rich as it practically can. If that is correct, then the only way to achieve genuinely redistributive taxation is to drastically shrink the state.

If I’m right (and I admit I’m asserting a few controversial things here without much in the way of evidence), then the problem isn’t any fundamental conflict between democracy and equality as chris fears, but a single mistaken view which might possibly be reversed.

Help the poor – cut taxes.

"The computer did it"

In The Register, the story of a man who got 7 days because when he signed up for facebook, it sent an invitation to “be his friend” to every facebook member whose email address was in his address book — including his ex-wife, whom he was under a court order not to attempt to contact.

He might of course have been lying, but if not he has been punished for what his computer, and facebook’s computers, did on his behalf.

The point is that the law has to decide how much responsibility a person has for what their computer decides to do.
Up till now, the assumption has been that whatever your computer does, is done at your request, and you are wholly responsible. This despite the fact that that has never been true, and is getting further from the truth every year.
There is no legal tradition to apply here. The nearest analogy to the relationship between a person and his computer is the relationship between a man and his dog.
People have kept dogs for thousands — most likely tens of thousands — of years, so everyone has a rough idea what the deal is. The general legal view is that you have a duty to keep your dog from causing harm under foreseeable circumstances, but there is a distinction between what your dog does and what you do. If your dog attacks a child, you are not guilty of Grievous Bodily Harm, but you might be guilty of keeping a dangerous dog. If your dog craps on the street, that is different than if you crap on the street, but you might still be fined.
If you are found guilty of not properly controlling a dog, you can be banned from keeping one. If your dog causes harm and is considered not to be controllable, the court can order it to be destroyed.
(If you deliberately cause your dog to kill someone, that is still murder of course, but your intention is crucial)
This is the only rational legal framework for crimes committed by a computer without the intention of its owner.

Crime: responsibility of victims

In an insightful piece, “David Copperfield” discusses how much responsibility the victim of a crime has for the crime, in a number of different situations, and to what extent, if any, such responsibility should affect his actions as a police officer.

I discussed this question a couple of years ago:

There is a notion that responsibility can be “shared”, which I think is fundamentally misleading. We each make our decisions in an environment that has been made mainly by other people, but to judge any decision, legally or morally, we have to take that environment as given. Many people might have responsibility for any bad outcome, but they have it separately, they do not share it. We might put ourselves at risk of all sorts of dangers, from other people or from other elements of our environment, and if we are wise we will consider our own responsibility as we do so, but if we are the victim of a criminal, his responsibility is not lessened by our risky behaviour.

In the examples Copperfield gives, there are two general categories of responsibility that some victims have: Either they can fail to take ordinary precautions to avoid or prevent crime (failing to lock doors, leaving property unattended in a public place), or else they can deliberately involve themselves in illegal activity (buying goods that are probably stolen, dealing drugs, responding to 419 communications which are generally invitations to share in a theft or fraud).

My answer to his question is that the responsibility, if any, of the victim should not be a primary consideration for him. The reason is that he is not working on behalf of the victim. He is working on behalf of us all, as we all benefit from the rule of law. His job is not to undo the effects of the crime, which in most cases is impossible, but to bring offenders to justice in order to uphold the rule of law.

So what should be important for him is not the status of the victim, but the status of the offender. It might be the case that a thief who grabs a handbag from a pub table is a lesser offender, and a lower priority, than a thief who breaks into a car. I do not think that a mugger who hangs around in a “bad part of town” is a lower priority than one on the high street. Is a drug dealer who shoots other drug dealers a lower priority than a drug dealer who shoots passers-by? Possibly, but it is very marginal.

Phone Mast information

The people who worry about health effects of RF radiation from mobile telephone masts are superstitious, ignorant luddites. It is vastly implausible that there could be any effects, on top of which repeated studies have failed to find any.

The idea that they are dangerous is stupid, but there are even more stupid ideas around. Among them is the claim by the mobile phone companies and Ofcom that the existence of a tall metal mast, bearing a distinctive antenna and broadcasting a distinctive radio signal, is a trade secret. That claim takes us way beyond tinfoil hat territory and into serious alternate reality.

It is entirely reasonable for Ian Henton and his fellow tinfoil-clad loonies to demand that the location of masts be made a publicly accessible record. “Commercial sensitivity” is frequently used as a cover for political sensitivity, and this is another example.

About this blog

Pressures of work mean that I’m only likely to add pieces at weekends. I’ve always gone more for analysis than instant response, so that shouldn’t matter much.

I rarely actually look at the blog from outside. I just did, and I’ve noticed that blogger has eaten all my paragraphs. I tend to write in the “Edit Html” tab, becaues the WYSIWYG mode used to be rubbish, and I would use the preview view before posting. I’m sure blogger used to put actual paragraph breaks in when you used blank lines in “Edit Html”, and the preview view still shows them, but blogger itself doesn’t. So I’m going to be going back through adding paragraph breaks to older articles. Expect the feed to go haywire.

Note to Google. If the Preview link doesn’t show what the piece is going to look like, it’s useless. Get rid of it.

It’s worse than that! I just wrote this in the “Compose” tab, and it’s still eaten all my paragraph breaks. How am I supposed to write paragraphs?? I’m actually going to go in and add paragraphs manually to the HTML. How crap is that?

I’ve found a setting (under “formatting” on the settings page) which puts the paragraph breaks back. Nevertheless, I consider it broken, because (a) what is the point of having a setting which means the only way of writing paragraphs is to edit the HTML, and (b) why does the setting affect the real blog pages but not the previews in the editor?

Adams on Lomberg

Scott Adams has a very interesting piece on his blog, describing Bjorn Lomberg’s appearance on Bill Maher’s TV show.

The Danish economist’s argument doesn’t fall into the established views about global warming. He wasn’t denying it is happening, or denying humans are a major cause. But he also wasn’t saying we should drive hybrid cars, since he thinks it won’t be enough to help. He thinks we need to make solar (or other alternatives) more economical. That’s the magic bullet. His views don’t map to either popular camp on this issue, and it created a fascinating cognitive dissonance in Bill Maher (a fan of hybrid cars) and his panelists.

Adams went on:

“It looks to me like a classic case of cognitive dissonance . They literally couldn’t recognize that the economist was on their side because he suggested considering both the positive and negative effects of global warming.”

But the economist certainly was not on their side. For Maher and the others, the important thing is that a policy of austerity be introduced, because they consider it morally right. Global Warming is just the excuse. Global Warming is true because it justifies austerity. If Lomberg or anyone disagrees with austerity he is not on their side, whatever he says about the climate. By arguing against austerity, he is removing the reason for Global Warming to be considered true, and therefore he is anti-Global-Warming. Denier! Burn Him!

Adams is imagining a world where observations lead to judgments about facts, which lead to conclusions about policy. That is alien to politicians, and to Maher. For them, policies lead to search for observations which can be connected to possible facts that justify the policy.

I would like to describe myself as in the Adams camp, but in honesty, as I’ve admitted previously, I can’t. The political vision of Gore, Maher and the others is so terrifying to me that it is surely colouring my assessment of the facts concerning climate. All I can do is put up the arguments as I see them, admit my bias, and make sure I don’t hide from evidence that contradicts my position. I’ve yet to see any evidence that I’ve felt I need to hide from.

This is my most detailed piece on climate. This is all of them.