Tag: highlight

This has rumbled on for a long time.

I fall more in the pro than the anti camp, but with reservations.

I am not convinced by claims that Wikipedia is as accurate as Britannica, and it would be very surprising if they were true. The “latest snapshot” of Wikipedia cannot be authoritative in the way a managed encyclopedia or a textbook can be, and I am disturbed to see Wikipedia cited in scholarly articles or legal opinions.

However, to me those aren’t the main point. Wikipedia is not really in competition with premium encyclopedias or university-level textbooks – its easy availability and massive scope put it into a different category. It makes more sense to compare it with other casual ways of gathering information – conversations in the pub, the popular press, TV programmes, memories of junior school lessons.

In my opinion, we get most of our information about most subjects from sources considerably less reliable than Wikipedia. Take the question of of early-20th century history I mentioned last week. My first source of information was a historical novel – low reliability. Next was Wikipedia – surely more reliable than a work of fiction. Thirdly I discussed it with my wife – not in general a high-reliability source, but since I happen to be married to a history teacher, the source has a certain authoratitiveness. Less detailed, accurate, information, in fact, than Wikipedia, but, while it is possible that Wikipedia might be seriously misleading or incomplete, it is less likely that a history graduate, even one rusty in the particular subject, would be so.

But authority is a niche market, though an important one. When you need an authoritative answer, nothing else will do. Most of the time, you don’t. Unless you have a good reason to find an authoritative answer, you’re not likely to find one – they don’t grow on trees.

The other question is how much better Wikipedia will get. I think the answer is not much – it has grown rapidly to the limits that its structure puts on it. The organisers will continue to tweak the rules to balance new contribution, vandalism and editing, and it will continue to expand in scope, but the basic level of quality is probably about where it will remain. As I’ve said, that quality is very high for most purposes, but not high enough to displace truly authoritative sources of information.

A couple of asides on possible derivatives of Wikipedia: It might be possible to take a snapshot of Wikipedia as a starting point for producing a truly authoritative encyclopedia – it would probably be easier to check the articles there than produce authorititave ones from scratch. Such a product would compete with “real” encyclopedias, but would not compete so much with “live” Wikipedia, which gets much of its value from its currency.

Also, I’m not up to speed with current work on A.I., but I’ve tended to the view that a missing element is the very large amount of stuff you need to know to have any kind of ordinary conversation with a human being. I can’t help wondering whether the enormous database of “general knowledge” that is wikipedia might at some stage form a key part of the first natural-language speaking A.I.

Update: Tim Bray makes the point that Wikipedia’s popularity as a reference is partly due to the fact that those who could provide authoritative information in the public domain aren’t doing so in a sufficiently organised way.

From my comment on Tim Lee’s question about Blair:

Blair’s “third way” is the traditional socialist belief that the economy, the country and the world can be managed and moulded to greater effectiveness, but with the old socialist economics modified by a magic sprinkling of private-sector fairy dust that would prevent repetition of the failures of the old state-run industries.

There is a perfect consistency between the belief that every public service and every industry can be improved by expert target-setting and regulation, and the belief that the Middle East can be made better by expert regime change.

The fairy dust is worth elaborating on. What I am talking about, of course, is PFI – the Private Finance Initiative, the idea that private-sector efficiency can be achieved in public functions by means of contracting with private suppliers to fulfil the functions.

The idea is not totally false. If there genuinely is an already-existing market for a particular service – say rubbish collection – then there is a good chance that the government can do better by entering that market than by organising and employing its own collectors. But it is usually the case that if there is a working market for something, the government should not be doing it at all in the first place, either directly or indirectly. PFI has most often been employed in areas which are in practice pretty much government monopolies. There is no competitive market in running prisons, and not much of one in building hospitals.

The reason I refer to PFI as “fairy dust” is because it is employed without any understanding of what makes the private sector different. The point is not the manner of organisation, but the pattern of incentives. The sales manager of a business unit which sells services to the government under PFI is as much a part of the public sector as any civil servant. His personal success depends on satisfying his government superiors/clients, accounting to them for the services he delivers and the resources he expends. If he satisfies them, he will win more contracts. He is in competition only with his peers – those who are selling the same class of services to government.

Von Mises produced an incredibly precise critique of PFI decades before its introduction to the UK, in his 1944 book Bureaucracy

It is a widespread illusion that the efficiency of government bureaus could be improved by management engineers and their methods of scientific management. However, such plans stem from a radical misconstruction of the objectives of civil government.

Like any kind of engineering, management engineering too is conditioned by the availability of a method of calculation. Such a method exists in profit-seeking business. Here the profit-and-loss statement is supreme. The problem of bureaucratic management is precisely the absence of such a method of calculation.

By coincidence, just after posting my prevous piece on the importance of considering political survival as a constraint on any government, the EconTalk podcast on The Logic of Political Survival came out. Like others, I found this fascinating, and not satisfied with the 88 minutes of interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, I bought the book, which arrived on Friday.

The book in many ways lives up to its promise, but there are a few annoyances with it. The errors in the English are quite distracting: the first chapter is titled “Reigning in the Prince”. It’s just conceivable that this is some kind of clever pun, but if so it doesn’t quite work – it looks much more like ignorance of what reining in is. The title is taken from the sentence on page 4, “On the basis of our analysis, we propose ways of reigning in not ony Hobbes’s Leviathan, but Machiavelli’s well-advised Prince as well”. That makes perfect sense if it means “reining”, but has a quite different meaning if “reigning” were really intended, as well as sloppy grammar. (That is, it could refer to ways of reigning in the context of Leviathan or The Prince. I think it doesn’t).

The other problem is more general, not specific to this book. As you can see, the book compares the authors’ theories with those of other political scientists, from Hobbes and Machiavelli to the present day. There is a glaring ommission, though: an influential political thinker who produced a large body of work looking at the same questions. I shudder to think of the sarcasm that will come my way when I tell a Marxist about a new theory that governments are necessarily constrained for their survival to act in the interests of a definable powerful subset of the population.

This is not a problem with the theory – while the “Selectorate” is in many instances identical to what some call “The Ruling Class”, in other cases it isn’t, and the reasons for both the similarities and the differences between the two concepts are illuminating. But because of that, I think the comparison would have been worth making by the authors. If the Selectorate is identifiable as a class in the Marxist sense of sharing the same relationship to the means of production, that makes it easy for the leader to produce semi-public goods that benefit the Selectorate at the expense of the rest of the population, and harder to produce goods that benefit the “Winning Coalition” at the expense of the rest of the Selectorate. Conversely, if the Selectorate cuts across classes, then many policy choices would be available to favour one class within the Selectorate at the expense of others. This will have interesting implications on the behaviour of the government within the context of the theory, which in the part I’ve so far read and in the parts I’ve skimmed, don’t seem to be studied.

Of course, there are many avenues for further development opened by the theory, and that is just one, but it is an obvious one that occurs to anyone who has, like me, a passing even if hostile aquaintance with Marxism.

I have a bit of an interest in Catholic theology, on the basis that since this is what the brightest minds half the world could produce spent about a thousand years on, it is likely to have some value, even if it is fundamentally flawed. In the same way, a large proportion of political science in the twentieth century was carried out in a Marxist framework, and while it is no doubt the worse for it, it is a stretch to dismiss it as worthless, less worthy as a point of comparison than Hobbes or Machiavelli, or to examine Lenin and Mao as political practitioners without giving any attention to the theories they expounded before coming to power.

Even if I am wrong about there being useful insights in Marxist theory that are worth looking for, it is also the case that the world today contains a large number of ex-Marxists, ex-Marxist political parties, and even ex-Marxist countries. Is it really the case that they need to forget everything they ever learned about politics? So long as the dogmatic approach is rejected, it would seem more productive to show that modern free political scientists are looking at the same questions as the Marxists in much the same way, and drawing conclusions that in some cases agree and in others disagree with aspects of Marxist political theory.

The biggest cost (in the widest sense) of any political system is that which it expends in preventing its overthrow.

Attempting to “design” a political system without paying attention to how it will protect itself is like designing a building without paying attention to how it will stay up – architecture without gravity, castles in the air.

To our current system – the family of political structures labelled “Western Democracy”, the cost is high. It saves costs, compared to traditional autocracy, on direct counter-subversion, but spends instead on bribery and waste to pacify potential opponents. The total cost of government is comparable to, but probably lower than, that of an outright dictatorship.

This is why I am not a revolutionary. I can draw up a political system enormously superior to any currently existing – minimising waste and maximising progress and prosperity for all – but my plans do not include mechanisms for maintaining the system itself. Such mechanisms would have to be improvised – and would in all probability be improvised much as Lenin’s were.

My ideal government being smaller and lighter than Lenin’s, the ad-hoc instruments of “state security” would have an even easier job of coming to dominate the whole.

So here I sit, in the midst of waste and ignorance, attempting to chip away here and there at the very worst of what Western Democracy is producing. It is a depressing vision, as the more succesful our society is, the more waste it can afford, so the cost of politics trends ever upwards. But our lives are improving, and will continue to do so. The brakes on progress are enormously frustrating, but the best we can do is spread the ideas – the key idea that goverment is mainly waste and the less of it the better – to reduce the cost of maintaining the political system.

Yesterday the House of Commons unexpectedly upheld freedom of speech by voting to accept the amendments made by the House of Lords to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Very good news. We will continue to be able legally to be rude about religions, as long as we are not threatening (in which case there is plenty existing law, anyway). And three boos for my MP Margaret Moron, who has a 100% record of voting for oppression.

Of course, while it is good to see our elected representatives voting for freedom, it must be remembered that the Commons previously approved the bill in all its horrible glory, and only after the rejection by the unelected house of Lords did it agree to gut it. What conclusions can we draw from that?

Well, one is that the Commons’ view when there is time for both a public and an internal debate is not the same as its view in normal circumstances. This is because legislative productivity is too high: laws are being passed without getting adequate consideration.

Why did the Lords get it right when the Commons initially got it wrong? Possibly, the Lords, while unrepresentative of the population just happens to be more representative of me. That doesn’t lead anywhere useful. Alternatively, I have often thought that the Lords show a greater sense of responsibility, brought on by the knowledge that their powers are illegitimate. An MP says to himself “I have gone through a long struggle of politicking and elections to obtain the power to vote on these matters – I shall now vote according to whatever suits my purpose at this moment”. A Lord says “I have undeservedly been given power to change the law of my country – I must take care not to use that power in a harmful way”. This explanation seems weaker now that most voting Lords are appointed ex-MPs – it seems unlikely that they would suddenly aquire an unfamiliar humility along with their silly robes.

I cannot justify the existence of the House of Lords, and I have in the past argued for unicameralism, but there is a pressing need to reduce legislative productivity, and the brake that is the Lords, eccentric as it is, cannot be discarded at this stage.

A claim by Charles Clarke was that the defeat was “a purely political act”. A bizarre statement for a politician to make, but I suppose he meant that those opposing the bill were not really opposed to it, they just wanted to see the government defeated on something. (Of course it is unheard of for a Labour MP to vote for a bill he does not really support, just because he wants the government to win a vote). That may be true of some Tories, but I am sure that those who voted against their own party were sincere in their opposition.

A prominent feature of the debate was its dishonesty. The original text of the bill said things like “an offense is committed if someone says things that stir up racial or religious hatred”. In response to criticism, the government proposed amendments along the lines: “you may express criticism of religion (provided you don’t stir up hatred)”. Such amendments obviously have no effect whatever on the meaning of the bill: see here

I am impressed by the Hansard web site. Full text of yesterday’s debate and votes is available this morning for examination. Obviously, this is how it should be, but it is slightly surprising nonetheless.

I’m trying to make sense of this piece by Ed Felten, on what he calls a “weapon of mass virtual destruction” in an online game. (You will probably have to read it first to understand the rest of this.)
The problem isn’t that I think he’s wrong – I’m pretty sure he’s right. The problem is I’m not sure why he’s right.
He says:

Should the FBI get involved in this mess?
It seems to me that they should. A WMVD of this sort is just a fancy denial of service attack, and a deliberate denial of service attack against a large network service looks to me like a crime. It’s possible that the first attack wasn’t meant to crash Second Life — though even if not deliberate it was certainly reckless — but subsequent attacks could only have been intended to cause a crash.

That sounds very promising to start with. A crashing server is a “real world” event, not a “virtual world” event, and since a real human has deliberately caused a real-world harm, we are in the domain of real-world law enforcement.

On reflection, though, the issues start to blur. The jargon term “crash” can be used to describe a large range of computer behaviours. The assumption in this case is that the game server software stopped working, and either terminated itself or had to be terminated by an operator. There are other possibilities, though. For instance, it might have continued to function “correctly”, but, since the majority of the “virtual objects” being maintained were by now copies of the “gray goo”, the actual progress of everything else might have been slowed down, possibly by 1000 or 10000 times. It’s not actually particularly likely, but it’s quite plausible, and it would actually be difficult to tell whether this was the case or not. Even the most casual computer user has been faced with the question “is it working, is it going slow, or is it dead?”

So what? If it doesn’t make any difference to any actual user, then it’s no different, right? But it’s less clear in this case that we’re talking about a “real world” event. A server rebooting is a real world event, but a program processing objects of type A not objects of type B? Not really.

And that, I think, negates Felten’s argument. He calls it a “denial of service” but it is more of a matter of opinion – if the server is servicing the allegedly malicious user rather than other users, that could be seen as a legitimate “aim” of the game. After all, if you kill the character of another player in a game (which in many games is more or less the main point), you are “denying service” to that player, but you are no more guilty of “denial of service” than you are of murder So the fact that you’re deliberately impairing the experience of other players does not make you actions illegal, any more than if you killed them with a sword in one of the more combat-oriented games.

The obvious difference is in the intention of the game, or its organisers. You’re supposed to decapitate people in Everquest, you’re not supposed to destroy the world in Second Life. But that’s weak too – the attraction of Second Life, from what I can see, is it’s open-endedness, the fact that you can do things in it that nobody else thought of doing.

In conclusion, I think that it is reasonable that this “WMVD” could be considered to be against real-world law, but it’s a matter of judgement, and of degree. Effectively, an arbitrary line would have to be drawn – how much are you imparing the service of other users, how far from the intention of the owner of the service are your actions. Many other things are like that, of course.

Two related issues, for comparison:

In sport, there are rules that you can break with purely in-game consequences, and rules that you can’t. For instance in soccer, if you are behind the last defender when the ball is played to you, you are offside, and if the match officials judge it correctly, the other side gets the ball. There is nothing immoral in being offside, even deliberately (in the hope of getting away with it). On the other hand, if you deliberately trip up another player, that also results in the ball being given to the other side, but in addition it is considered to be misbehaviour. If the foul is considered to be deliberate or reckless, you can receive extra in-game penalties, and also penalties that are within the game-system but external to the actual game being played – for example, being disqualified for another game, or being fined by the game’s governing body or your club. In extreme cases, you can be subject to out-of-game penalties, such as being charged with assault or sued. This has happened a few times. The same three levels can apply in online computer games. You can be pursued by some kind of in-game policeman – this is part of the game, like a free kick for offside. You can be excluded or restricted by the game’s organisers – this is like being suspended. Or you can be pursued through the law. The distinctions aren’t always clear. (Was a criminal fraud committed on 22 June 1986?)

Second, similar questions of proper and improper uses exist with other network services. An SMTP server can receive email messages. Some servers are configured to receive only from certain users, but to forward mail to anywhere. Some servers are configured to receive from anywhere, but deliver only to certain addresses. Servers can be, but rarely are, configured to accept mail from anyone and forward it to anywhere. Some servers are not correctly configured to enforce the restrictions intended by their owners. What uses of these servers are proper? Is it a crime to take advantage of a misconfiguration? of a software bug? Over the past 5 years or so, some arbitrary lines have been drawn.

‘ve been struck by this question a few times, lately.

First there was this article, which I already praised, insisting that the internet is not a separate place, and that activities carried on using the internet are still subject to (in this instance) the tax laws of an actual geographical place.

Then there was this piece from Eric Raymond, insisting that the internet is a place.

Now there is this article by Doc Searls, “How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net down the Tubes”. He points out:

To the carriers and their regulators, the Net isn’t a world, a frontier, a marketplace or a commons. To them, the Net is a collection of pipes.

(in fact, these two are backwards: The esr piece is a reply to the Searls piece. I read them in reverse order).

In the background, there is Lawrence Lessig’s deep and subtle reasoning about the relationships between “cyberspace” and the real world, which I have referred to before.

Read the rest of this article…