NOL‘s “Be Our Guest” feature is as popular as ever this year. Here’s John Lancaster with the latest:
Peer driven rumors, videos of experimentation, forums, news, and entertainment sources provide nigh infinite opportunities for young ones to pick up on vices. The appeal of vaping would’ve caused widespread exposure through said channels anyway. The most marketing does at that point is convince the willing participants to choose a particular brand rather than take on the act itself.
Juul is a company that sells vapes, which are those cigarette replacements that have been so popular lately. Please, read the rest, and shoot us an email if you want your voice heard!
Perhaps the coolest thing I’ve found on the Small Internet so far is the game Nomic. From where I found it:
Nomic was invented in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber. It’s a game that starts with a given set of rules, but the players can change the rules over the course of the game, usually using some form of democratic voting. Some online variants exist, like Agora, which has been running since 1993.
It’s a game that’s about changing the game. Besides offering a tempting recreational opportunity, I think this could be formalized in such a way to make it rival the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) in shedding light on the big social scientific questions.
The PD is a simple game with simple assumptions and a variable-sum outcome that lets it work for understanding coordination, competition, and cooperation. One of my favorite bits of social science is Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation project. It’s basically a contest between different strategies to an iterated PD (you can play a variation of it here). That the “tit for tat” strategy is so successful sheds a lot of light on what makes civilization possible–initial friendliness, willingness to punish transgressions, and willingness to return to friendliness after punishing these transgressions.
A fantastic extension is to create a co-evolutionary simulation of a repeated PD game. Rather than building strategies and pitting them against each other, we can be totally agnostic about strategies (i.e. how people behave) and simply see what strategies can survive each others’ presence.
The evolutionary iterated PD is about as parsimonious a model of conflict/cooperation as we could make. But there is still a lot of structure baked in; what few assumptions remain do a lot of heavy lifting.
But if the structure of the game is up for grabs, then maybe we’ve found a way to generalize the prisoners’ dilemma without assuming on extra layers of complexity.
Of course, the parsimony of the model adds complexity to the implementation. Formalizing Nomic presents a formidable challenge, and getting it to work would surely create a new
But even if it doesn’t lend itself to simulation, it strikes me as the sort of exercise that ought to be happening in classrooms–at least in places where people care about building capacity for self governance (I’ve heard such places exist!).
Let’s play!
A bit of stage setting, then let’s start a game in the comments section. I get the impression that this game is nerdier than Risk, so you’ve been warned (or tempted, as the case may be).
The basic premise is that are mutable rules and immutable rules (like Buchanan’s view of constitutions). Players take turns to propose rule changes (including transmuting rules from a mutable to an immutable state). As part of the process, we will almost surely redefine how the game is won, so the initial rule set starts with a pretty boring definition of winning.
We’ll use Peter Suber’s initial rules with some variations to suit our needs. The rules below will be (initially) immutable.
117. Each round will happen in a new comment thread. A new round cannot start until the rule change proposed in the previous round has been voted on. If technical problems result in having to start a new comment thread, that thread should include the appropriate reference number and it will be understood to be part of the same comment thread.
I will take the first move to demonstrate the format in the comments section.
118. The final vote count will be determined after 24 hours of silence. Players may discuss and cast votes, and change their votes. But after 24 hours of no new comments, the yeas and nays will be tallied and the outcome determined accordingly. In cases requiring unanimity, a single nay vote is enough to allow a player to start a new round without waiting the full 24 hours. The final vote will still occur (for purpose of calculating points) after 24 hours of silence.
Despite being numbered 118, this rule will take priority over rule 105.
119. Anyone who is eligible to comment is eligible to play. If it is possible to start a new round, anyone may start that round. In the event that two people attempt to start a round at the same time (e.g. Brandon and I post a comment within a couple minutes of each other) priority will be given to whichever was posted first and the second comment will be voided.
120. The game will continue until someone wins, or everyone forgets the game, in which case the winner will be the last person to have had their comment replied to.
In my previous post, I discussed the decline of internet freedoms around the world. While writing the post, I realized that I should follow-up on the topic and discuss how we can use cryptography to protect our communication from surveillance by governments and corporations.
This is the first of four posts in which I discuss cryptography. If you read all four posts, you will understand the differences between symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, why the US government were against the spread of modern cryptography, how it has resulted in the first crypto war between code rebels (techno-libertarians) and the US government, and how you can easily protect your privacy using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).
The topics of the four posts are:
What is symmetric cryptography;
What is asymmetric (public key) cryptography;
The first crypto war between code rebels and the government;
How to easily use PGP to protect your e-mail communication.
What is symmetric cryptography
The use of cryptography is more than 4,000 years old. A classic example of symmetric cryptography is the Caesar cipher. It was used by Julius Caesar for his private correspondence with his generals.
The principle of the Caesar cipher is simple. The receiver of the message has to replace each letter with another letter, some number of fixed positions down the alphabet. If a Caesar cipher, for example, makes use of a rotation of three to the left,
A in the encrypted text becomes X
C becomes Z
E becomes B
etc…
Caesar cipher: rotation of three to the left.
A Caesar cipher, compared to modern encryption methods, can be easily deciphered. You can for example make a frequency analysis of letters and see whether the letters in the encrypted text resemble typically Dutch or English writing. Also, each letter in the encrypted text only has 26 possibilities in the decrypted text, including itself. You can also make a table in which you write down the text and let a computer replace each letter with all 26 possibilities.
Up until the 1970s, cryptographers made use of this type of cryptography – also known as symmetric cryptography.
With symmetric cryptography, there is one key (the secret key) that is used for encrypting and decrypting the message. It’s therefore necessary for the sender of the message to share the secret key with the party he would like to correspond with.
The Caesar cipher is considered to be symmetric cryptography, because knowing the exact rotation (secret key) that is used to encrypt the message, you do also know how to decrypt the message.
Symmetric cryptography. One key (the secret key) is used for the encryption and decryption of messages.
Disadvantages of symmetric cryptography
There are several disadvantages to symmetric cryptography.
The first disadvantage is that the secret key has to be shared between the sender and receiver for messages to be exchanged privately. Sending the secret key over an unprotected communication channel is not recommended. In the next post, we will see how asymmetric (public key) cryptography allows us to send the encryption key safely over unprotected communication channels, while keeping the decryption key safely in our own possession.
The second disadvantage is that the secret key is now on two different locations. Thus, there are now two points of attack.
The third disadvantage is that the sender has to trust the receiver that he will not steal or copy the key or give it to someone else. It’s comparable to sharing the keys to your apartment: you also have to trust the other person not to steal your key, or copy your key, or give the key to another person.
The fourth disadvantage is limited scalability. Assuming that we’d like to communicate with a great number of parties, and that we’d like to provide each party with a different secret key for security reasons, we’d need to maintain a database of secret keys. For this setup to be user friendly in an environment like the internet, it would probably require an infrastructure of specialized distribution centers that generate secret keys each time two parties would like to initiate a private conversation. As these distribution centers would hold many secret keys, it would be a honey pot for hackers.
An example of symmetric cryptography is the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was released on the market in 1975. It was developed by IBM, and was primarily meant to protect electronic communication between large financial organizations. Up until DES, cryptography was mainly a field for governments’ secret intelligence agencies to protect state communication. When the DES was released, it was received very well by cryptographers, until people found out that the National Security Agency (NSA) was involved with the development of the encryption key and purposefully influenced IBM to limit the key sizes from 64 bits to 56 bits. With 56 bits, there are 2^56 possible key combinations. This is considerably less than 64 bits keys. It is therefore much easier to break the encryption. Cryptographers believed that it would just be a matter of time before someone would find the right keys through a brute force search – meaning that you are trying all possible key combinations to find the right one.
Symmetric cryptography was the way cryptography was done until 1976 when two young researchers from Stanford University, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, invented asymmetric or public key cryptography.
Both researchers were discontent with DES, and Hellman even addressed a letter to the Secretary of Commerce, Elliot Richardson, saying:
I am writing to you because I am very worried that the National Security Agency has surreptitiously influenced the National Bureau of Standards [NBS] in a way which seriously limit the value of a proposed standard, and which may pose a threat to individual privacy. I refer to the proposed Data Encryption Standard. … I am convinced that NSA in its role of helping NBS design and evaluate possible standards has ensured that the proposed standard is breakable by NSA.
In my next post, I will discuss how public key cryptography works. Eventually, at the end of the post series, you will be able to encrypt your e-mails using public key cryptography.
Deja-Vu! Social Democrats once again bring up the topic of “Democratic Socialism” to cure all of the evils of the world. Once again, the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Finnland, Denmark and Norway) are used as an example of how “a third way Socialism” can work. Although I still would consider myself young, I have already lost all of my stamina to engage in the same debates all over again until they pop up again a few months after.
So, instead of pointing out the fallacy in labelling the Scandinavian countries moderately socialist (Nima Sanandaji, for example, does an excellent job in doing so), I want to look at one aspect in particular: The myth of peak emancipation of woman in the labour market in these countries. So apologies for neglecting Poetry once again for the sake of interesting information. Have a look at the following graphic and the remarks by Sanandaji:
“Some boards in Nordic nations are actively engaged in how the companies they represent are run. Others have a more supervisory nature, meeting a few times a year to oversee the work of the management. The select few individuals who occupy board positions – many of whom reach this position after careers in politics, academia and other non-business sectors – have prestigious jobs. They are, however, not representative of those taking the main decisions in the business sector. The important decisions are instead taken by executives and directors. Typically individuals only reach a high managerial position in the private sector after having worked for a long time in that sector or successfully started or expanded a firm as an entrepreneur. The share of women to reach executive and director positions is the best proxy for women’s success in the business world. Eurostat has gathered data for the share of women among ‘directors and chief executives’ in various European countries between 2008 and 2010. The data show that Nordic nations all have low levels of women at the top of businesses. In Denmark and Sweden, only one out of ten directors and chief executives in the business world are women. Finland and the UK fare slightly better. Those Central and Eastern European countries for which data exist have much higher representation.
[…]
A key explanation lies in the nature of the welfare state. In Scandinavia, female-dominated sectors such as health care and education are mainly run by the public sector. A study from the Nordic Innovation Centre (2007: 12–13) concludes: Nearly 50 per cent of all women employees in Denmark are employed in the public sector. Compared to the male counterpart where just above 15 per cent are employed in the public sector. This difference alone can explain some of the gender gap with respect to entrepreneurship. The same story is prevalent in Sweden. The lack of competition reduces long-term productivity growth and overall levels of pay in the female-dominated public sector. It also combines with union wage-setting to create a situation where individual hard work is not rewarded significantly: wages are flat and wage rises follow seniority, according to labour union contracts, rather than individual achievement. Women in Scandinavia can, of course, become managers within the public sector, but the opportunities for individual career paths, and certainly for entrepreneurship, are typically more limited compared within the private sector.
If you are interested in the whole book, it is completely available online for free.
What’s the state of our internet freedoms around the world? Freedom House (2019) has recently released a report entitled ‘Freedom on the Net 2019‘.
According to the report, more than 3.8 billion people still have no access to the internet, but
71% of those who have access do live in countries where individuals have been arrested and thrown in jail for posting political, social or religious content;
65% live in countries where individuals have been attacked or killed for their online activities;
59% live in countries where authorities use online commentators to manipulate online discussions;
33 out of 65 countries that were assessed have seen their internet freedoms decline over past year.
The greatest declines in internet freedoms happened in Sudan, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. For the fourth consecutive year, China has been the greatest abuser of internet freedoms, and although the United States is still scoring well, they have been on decline for three consecutive years.
The ranking from most to least free is as follows:
The report scores the countries, based on the internet controls that are in place:
Governments hold more technological capabilities than ever before to surveil their citizens. They make use of bots to manipulate social media and big data analyses to surveil citizens. See for example this. In August 2018, Le Dinh Luong has been sentenced to jail for 20 years in Vietnam for addressing and posting about human rights abuses on social media in the country. In March 2019, an Uyghur Muslim was stopped and interrogated for three days, because not HE but someone ELSE on his WeChat contact list had checked in from Mecca.
What was once a liberating technology has now become a conduit for surveillance and electoral manipulation. What can we do to protect our internet liberties?
This month marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most despised and misunderstood Supreme Court cases: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
I love Citizens United. It stands as perhaps the most important First Amendment decision of the last decade. Yet it’s come to symbolize the illicit marriage between money and power, while what actually happened in the case is largely an afterthought. I remember encountering an enraged signature-gatherer outside a Trader Joe’s a few years ago who was engaged in one of the many campaigns to amend the Constitution to put an end to Citizens United. I thought he might have a coronary when I told him that it was one of my favorite Supreme Court decisions. I deeply regret not asking him if he could rehearse for me the facts of the case. Maybe he would’ve surprised me.
So what did Citizens United actually say? The law at issue banned corporations from using general treasury funds for electioneering, with civil and criminal penalties for corporations that spent money to speak on pressing political issues of the day. The Supreme Court said that a small-time political organization (that happened to be incorporated), Citizens United, could not be banned from publishing a film critical of a presidential candidate. It’s hard to find speech of a higher order of significance than that.
Citizens United held that government cannot ban political expenditures just because people choose to speak through the corporate form. This is a classic example of an old rule–government cannot censor speech based on the identity of the speaker.
Much of the fury over Citizens United is premised on a guttural abhorrence for the corporation. But corporations are just groups of people who have chosen to organize through a particular structure. And most don’t realize that the law at issue in Citizens United also banned unions from using general treasury funds for electioneering communications.
Much of the popular criticism of the case that I’ve seen seems to believe that Citizens United was the first case to establish that corporations had First Amendment rights. It wasn’t. In fact, not even the dissenters in the case would’ve held that corporations lack such rights. That was an uncontroversial and settled matter. And it should be obvious as to why. If corporations don’t have First Amendment rights, then the New York Times doesn’t have First Amendment rights, along with many other media organizations. (I’ve heard the excuse that freedom of the press would still protect media organizations independently, which is a misunderstanding of the freedom of the press, which doesn’t offer greater speech protections to media than non-media).
Citizens United gets a bad break, and I wish it a happy anniversary.
Of course there’s no such thing as a Golden Age–some forgotten time in the medium-past where things were unambiguously better. The past is full of backwards savages and hard living. And even so, you can’t go home.
But I’ve got this suspicion that back in my day the Internet was better. It didn’t take itself too seriously, and so was actually worth while. But at some point in the last decade (maybe earlier) things changed for the worse. The Internet, like all the rest of the world, just isn’t what it could be–what it should be!
I’m being at least a little hipstery here–it was cool before it was cool, but now it’s uncool because it’s popular. But the truth is, the crappiness that is Facebook is just a reflection of a large swath of consumers. And I’m allowed to opt out.
Sitting on the Internet at the start of 2020, I feel like I’m sure I would have in 1970. Everything is bullshit and I don’t want anything to do with it. I want to buy a school bus and drive to some part of the country nobody cares about and start a farm. Of course the truth is, I really have no business going back to the land. I’ve taken up gardening as a hobby and learned that it’s hard.
But I do have this imagined past on the Internet I can attempt to go back to. I’m going to make an effort to return to the Internet of the early 2000’s. The Internet that Craigslist (for example) still protects–simple, excellent, and not trying to eat the world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to use the Big Corporate Internet. I’m only imagining my packets being sent via artisinal servers lovingly tended to by ye olde sysadmin.
What made the Small Internet great was the artisinal content. Weird stuff made and shared by weird people. That stuff is still out there. The Big Internet filters still capture it sometimes. But the marketers have gotten to the filters that used to serve us so well. Reddit just isn’t the same as a Conde Nast property.
One move I’ve made is to join MetaFilter, a social media site that goes back to 1999! So far it’s been a delightful place (without sucking me in the way Reddit used to). Hitting the random button brought me Where’s Wallace–an homage to The Wire, which is still worth re-watching. A more recent post introduced me to an excellent advent calendar that brought more new and weird things across my radar.
Why should this experiment matter?
Partly this is an act of civil society. It’s not all markets and government out there. We’ve got this space to share and improve our public spaces. The Internet is one of those spaces and my Small Internet project is sort of like making an effort to walk through my neighborhood instead of just going back and forth from the freeway.
It’s also an exercise in questioning implicit assumptions in how I engage with this part of the world.
I like Stephen Wolfram‘s notion of exploring the computational universe for useful programs. You don’t even need to take a metaphorical leap in applying the idea to media consumption habits. There’s a lot more “content” (facts, opinions, entertainment, editorial judgement, comments sections, provocations, etc.) out there than I can (or want to) deal with. So I have to choose some sort of filter. Once upon a time, Facebook was a great filter, then Reddit, but now I want to try something different.
I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for yet. But I’m going to wander off into the computational universe in search of a better Internet, less encumbered with the interests of behemoths and more closely tied with serendipity, good humor, and those weird human things that made the back-in-my-day-Internet so much better.
The City of Seattle is poised to pass a plainly unconstitutional campaign-finance law later this month. The bill would limit contributions to political action committees that are not controlled by or connected to a candidate to $5000 per election cycle. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which would govern the outcome of any litigation, has already said several times that limiting contributions to independent PACs (meaning independent of a candidate’s campaign) violates the First Amendment.
The rationale is pretty straightforward. Any limit on political spending is a limit on speech, so it must satisfy the First Amendment. In Buckley v. Valeo, the United States Supreme Court said that contribution limits directly to candidates are usually okay because they (arguably) reduce the likelihood of corrupt quid pro quo exchanges between candidates and donors. But Buckley struck down limits on independent expenditures (meaning expenditures that aren’t donated to a candidate but speak independently for or against a candidate). Independent expenditures, unlike direct contributions, are not coordinated or controlled by the candidate, so there is less of a risk that an independent expenditure is actually an illicit quid pro quo. Since limits on independent expenditures restrict speech without actually doing anything to prevent corruption, they violate the First Amendment.
Contributions to PACs that engage in independent expenditures are basically the same as independent expenditures–there isn’t a direct connection to a candidate, so there simply is no genuine risk of corruption. The City of Seattle probably knows this, and they either don’t care or they hope to change the state of the law. I look forward to the forthcoming judicial rebuke.
Really, I find the entire premise behind limits on either contributions or expenditures to be highly dubious. While there are no doubt a few instances where a contribution to a candidate is given in direct exchange for some future favor once the candidate wins office, the vast majority of contributions are not that. They’re donations to support a candidate because his platform reflects the donor’s policy preferences. Most corrupt exchanges of money, when they do occur, almost certainly occur under the table and outside the context of highly regulated campaign contributions. Thus, contribution limits penalize a wide range of legitimate political speech to get at a vanishingly small (and unknowable) number of malefactors.
Defenders of campaign-finance laws tend to emphasize the huge amount of political spending as per se evidence of the need for reform. (When you compare the amount of political spending to other spending in the economy, it becomes quite clear that the amount of money in electoral politics simply isn’t that much). This claim that money in elections is fundamentally bad has always struck me as bizarre. That money is spent by both sides on political speech that informs the public. Why should we assume that this is a bad thing? Of course all political speech has a partisan aim–to convince voters to vote for so-and-so. But the information hardly compels voters to do so. At the end of the day, it seems much better to have a public informed by politically motivated communications than to have less information.
Campaign-finance advocates also like to point out that candidates who receive the most money tend to win. Again, it isn’t obvious why this is a bad thing. It seems rather obvious that popular candidates will attract both dollars and votes, not because they get lots of money, but because they’re popular. This is a classic failure to acknowledge the difference between correlation and causation. To date, no significant evidence has surfaced demonstrating that dollars cause votes.
And what about the concern over undue influence? Of course, politicians may be responsive to high-dollar donors. But again, this is a correlation issue. The NRA gives money to candidates who support the NRA’s policy preferences. When the candidate reaches office and fights gun control, is it because of the NRA’s support, or was the NRA’s support prompted by the candidate’s pre-existing policy platform? Over and over, the deeply felt convictions of campaign-finance advocates seem to rest on a house of cards.
In any case, even if risk of quid pro quo corruption is a valid reason to restrict speech, Seattle’s bill goes well beyond that rationale. PACs engage in core political speech, as do the individuals who donate to them. That speech merits protection.
When people say that we should involve society in discussing the ethics of cryptosystems and blockchain, we should ask ourselves why society is suddenly paying attention to the strides we’re making in the cryptospace. Where does this attention come from?
Back in 2011, society was considering us weird and misinformed. Encryption, digital money, anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero knowledge, reputations, information markets, black markets, collapse of governments were spoken about openly in the cryptospace and no one paid much attention.
6-7 years later, after Bitcoin has shown it’s not just a fad, some groups within society have particularly paid close attention to cryptosystems and are now leading the discourse of what they call “discussions for society’s sake”. Who are they and what are their interests? Banks, central banks and national governments. They’re trying to shape the discourse around cryptosystems, because (a) banks are afraid of becoming obsolete by cryptosystems, (b) central banks are afraid of losing control over monetary policy, and (c) governments are afraid that their national currencies will be outcompeted by cryptocurrencies and their inability to tax and trace crypto payments. When they call for societal discussions about the ethics and consequences of cryptosystems, they thus enter the discussions from a position of fear. Can we then really have substantial discussions with them?
Or will they enter the discussions already motivated to overregulate cryptosystems – spoiling everything beautiful about cryptosystems so that their operations are not threatened?
My main point: be careful of those who say we need more public discussions on cryptosystems. Their calls sound noble, but they may have hidden agendas and don’t enter discussions with an open mind to learn about the beauty of cryptosystems.
Example case of this: Benjamin Lawsky and BitLicense.
I am trying my best to get some routine in blogging by sticking to this series. However, I do not know if I can still pull it off during the upcoming finals. We will see.
This week’s Poetry is less poetic yet very much informative (at least to me). David Motadel in his book “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War” reconstructs the bizarre relationship between Nazi Germany and Islam (and thus sheds light on another Myth of the Nazi Regime). What sounded completely counterintuitive to me, was this short passage on the halal cookery courses organized by the SS:
“In the end, both the Wehrmacht and the SS also took Islamic food regulations into consideration. In his instructions of 1942, Niedermayer ordered to ensure that the dietary requirements of Muslim soldiers, especially the ban on pork, were respected. Similar instructions were issued for Arab Wehrmacht soldiers. The SS went even further here. In July 1943, Himmler personally instructed Berger to find out “what Islam prescribes to its soldiers with regard to food” and added that he wanted to ensure that religious rules were observed. Shortly afterwards, Berger informed Himmler that the soldiers were not allowed to eat pork or drink alcohol. The Reichsführer-SS reacted promptly and ordered: “All Islamic members of the Waffen-SS and the police are granted as an unbreakable special right that, in accordance with their religious rules, they are never given pork as well as sausage containing pork and never alcohol to drink. An equally valuable diet is guaranteed in any case.” The SS even organized halal cookery courses near Graz.”
When I began working in medical research, I was shocked to find that no one in the medical industry has actually collected and compared all of the clinical outcomes data that has been published. With Big Data in Healthcare as such a major initiative, it was incomprehensible to me that the highest-value data–the data that is directly used to clear therapies, recommend them to the medical community, and assess their efficacy–were being managed in the following way:
Physician completes study, and then spends up to a year writing it up and submitting it,
Journal sits on the study for months, then publishes (in some cases), but without ensuring that it matches similar studies in the data it reports.
Oh, by the way, the journal does not make the data available in a structured format!
Then, if you want to see how that one study compares to related studies, you have to either find a recent, comprehensive, on-point meta-analysis (which is a very low chance in my experience), or comb the literature and extract the data by hand.
That’s it.
This strikes me as mismanagement of data that are relevant to lifechanging healthcare decisions. Effectively, no one in the medical field has anything like what the financial industry has had for decades–the Bloomberg terminal, which presents comprehensive information on an updatable basis by pulling data from centralized repositories. If we can do it for stocks, we can do it for medical studies, and in fact that is what I am trying to do. I recently wrote an article on the topic for the Minneapolis-St Paul Business Journal, calling for the medical community to support a centralized, constantly-updated, data-centric platform to enable not only physicians but also insurers, policymakers, and even patients examine the actual scientific consensus, and the data that support it, in a single interface.
One of the bests books I’ve read this year was Serge Audier’s & Jurgen Reinhoudt’s relatively unknown (unfortunately!) translation of the protocols of the Walter-Lippmann-Colloquium. The NOUS-Network organized a wonderful seminar in which we thoroughly discussed the book and the emergence of Neoliberalism. For the preparation of this weekend’s Hayek-Kreis seminar, I reread the book and stood once again in awe of the magnificence of the discussion during the Colloquium.
By the way: If you are an undergraduate, graduate, or PhD scholar, please consider joining the NOUS-Network for Constitutional Economics and Social Philosophy as a Young Affiliate! NOUS is an information platform and a community for interdisciplinary research. The network links all academic fields relevant for thinking about social order and liberty. It spans philosophy, politics, economics and fosters scholarly research, contact and exchange.
In the following excerpt, it becomes clear, that the participant’s opinion on the psychological and sociological causes of the decline of Liberalism differed significantly. Mr Rüstow eloquently captures the standpoints of the two opposing groups (not without bias to be fair) and even cheekily disses Ludwig von Mises.
“Mr Rüstow: ‘All things considered, it is undeniable that here, in our circle, two different points of view are represented. One group does not find anything essential to criticize or to change in traditional liberalism, such as it was and such as it is, apart from, naturally, the adjustments and the current developments that are self-evident.
In their view, the responsibility for all the misfortune falls exclusively on the opposite side, on those who, out of stupidity or out of malice, or through a mixture of both, cannot or do not want to discern and observe the salutary truths of liberalism.
We, on the other hand, we seek the responsibility for the decline of liberalism in liberalism itself; and, therefore, we seek the solution in a fundamental renewal of liberalism. In order to justify in a positive manner this second point of view, I have to refer to what I have said and, especially, to the excellent arguments of Mr Lippmann.
Here, I would only like to draw attention to the fact that if the unwavering representatives of old liberalism were right, the practical prospects [for liberalism] would be almost hopeless. Because it does not really seem that old liberalism has gained in persuasive and in seductive force or that the arguments, no matter how shrewd they may be, of these representatives have the least possibility of bringing about a conversion movement within the realm of Bolshevism, Fascism, or of National Socialism. If they did not listen to Moses and the prophets—Adam Smith and Ricardo—how will they believe Mr. von Mises?'”
I’ve been on a Taleb streak this year (here, here and here). Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that is, the options trader-turned-mathematician-turned public intellectual (and I even managed to get myself on his infamous blocklist after arguing back at him). Many years ago, I read Fooled by Randomness but for some reason it didn’t resonate with me and I wasn’t seeing the brilliance.
Last spring, upon reading former poker champion Annie Duke’s Thinking in Betsand physicist Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk, I plunged into Taleb land again, voraciously consuming Fooled, The Black Swan and Skin in the Game, followed by Antifragile just a few months ago.
Taleb is a strange creature; vastly productive and incredibly successful, everything he touches does not quite become gold, but surely stirs up controversy. What he’s managed to do in his popular writing (collected in the Incerto series) is to tie almost every aspect of human life into his One Big Idea (think Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog): the role of randomness, risk and uncertainty in everyday life.
One theme that comes up again and again is the idea of redundancies: having several different and overlapping systems – back-ups to back-ups – that minimize the chance of fatally bad outcomes. The failures of one of those systems will not result in the extremely bad event you’re trying to avoid.
Focusing primarily on survivability – “absorbing barriers” – through the handed-down wisdom of the Ancients and the Classic, the take-away lesson for Taleb in almost all areas of life is overlapping redundancies. Reality is complicated, and the distribution from which events are drawn is not a well-behaved Gaussian normal distribution, but one of thick tails. How thick nobody knows, but wisdom in the presence of absorbing barriers suggest that taking extreme caution is a prudent long-term strategy.
Of course, in the short run, redundancy amounts to “wasted” resources. In chapter 4 of Fooled, Taleb relates a story from his option trading days where a client angrily calling him up about tail-risk insurance he had sold them. The catastrophic event from which the insurance protected had not taken place, and so the client felt cheated. This behavior, Taleb maintains quite correctly, is idiotic. After all, if an insurance company’s clients consist of only soon-to-be claimants, the company won’t exist for long (or it prices insurance at prohibitively high rates, undermining the business model).
Same thing applies for one of his verbose rants about airline “efficiency,” a rather absurd episode of illustrating “asymmetry” – the idea that downside risks are larger than upside gains. Consider a plane departing JFK for London, a trip scheduled to take 7h trip. Some things can happen to make the trip quicker (speedy departure, weather conditions, landing slot available etc), but only marginally; it would, for instance, not be possible to arrive in London after only an hour. In contrast, the asymmetry arises as there are many things that can delay the trip from mere minutes to infinity – again, weather events, mechanical failures, tech or communication problems.
So, when airlines striving to make their services more efficient by minimizing turnaround time – Southwest’s legendary claim to fame – they hit Taleb’s antifragile asymmetry; getting rid of redundant time on the ground, makes the process of on-loading and off-loading passengers fragile. Any little mistake can cause serious delays, delays that accumulate and domino their way through crowded airport networks.
Embracing redundancies would mean having more time in-between flights, with extra planes and extra mechanics and spare parts available at many airports. Clearly, airlines’ already brittle business model would crumble in a heartbeat.
The flipside efficiency is Taleb’s redundancy. Without optimization, we constantly use more than we need, effectively operating as a tax on all activity. Taleb would of course quibble with that, pointing out that the probability distribution of what “we need” must include Black Swan events that standard optimization arguments overlook.
That’s fine if one places as high a value on risks that Taleb does, and indeed they’re voluntarily paid for. If customers wanted to pay triple the money for airfares in order to avoid this or that delay, there is a market for that – it just seems few people value that price over the damage from (low-probability) delays.
Another example is earthquake-proving buildings that Nate Silver discussed in his The Signal and the Noise regarding the Gutenberg-Ritcher law (the reliably inverse relationship between frequency and magnitude of earthquakes). Constructing buildings that can withstand a high-magnitude earthquake, say a one-in-three-hundred-year event is something rich Californians or Japanese can afford – much-less so a poor country like the Philippines. Yes, Taleb correctly argues, the poor country pays its earthquake expenses in heightened risk of devastating damage.
Large redundancies, back-ups to back-ups, are great if you a) can afford them, and b) are risk-averse enough. Judging by his writing, Taleb is – ironically – far out along the right-tail of risk aversion; for most other people, we have more urgent needs to look after. That means occasionally “blowing up” and suffer hours and hours of airline delays or collapsing buildings after an earthquake.
Taleb rarely considers the trade-offs, and the different subjective value scales (or discount rates!) that differ between people. While Taleb may cherish his redundancies, most of us would rather eliminate them for asymmetrically small gains.
Insurance is a relative assessment of price and risks. Keeping a reserve of redundancies are subjective choices, not an objective necessities.
Over the past four years, my brother and I have grown a business that helps doctors publish data-driven articles from the two of us to over 30 experienced researchers. However, along the way, we noticed that data management in medical publication was decades behind other fields–in fact, the vital clinical outcomes from major trials are generally published as singular PDFs with no structured data, and are analyzed in comparison to existing studies only in nonsystematic, nonupdatable publications. Effectively, medicine has no central method for sharing or comparing patient outcomes across therapies, and I think that it is our responsibility as researchers to present these data to the medical community.
Based on our internal estimates, there are >3 million published clinical outcomes studies (with over 200 million individual datapoints) that need to be abstracted, structured, and compared through a central database. We recognized that this is a monumental task, and we therefore have focused on automating and scaling research processes that have been, through today, entirely manual. Only after a year of intensive work have we found a path toward creating a central database for all published patient outcomes, and we are excited to debut our technology publicly!
Keith recently presented our venture at a Mayo Clinic-hosted event, Walleye Tank (a Shark Tank-style competition of medical ventures), and I think that it is an excellent fast-paced introduction to a complex issue. Thanks also to the Mayo Clinic researchers for their interesting questions! You can see his two-minute presentation and the Q&A here. We would love to get more questions from the economic/data science/medical communities, and will continue putting our ideas out there for feedback!
Without noticing it, I heavily built my reading schedule this year around of what one might call a “post-liberal reading list”. The idea, that the demise of social institutions might be the inevitable consequence of an ongoing individualization of society struck me as initially convincing. I am currently in search of good examinations on the ultimate effect Liberalism has on the development of social institutions. Hopefully, Steven Horwitz’ “Hayek’s Modern Family” will provide me with some compelling arguments to refute the post-liberal agenda.
Not directly being post-liberal, but pointing towards the importance of “homecoming and belonging”, Sebastian Junger’s book “Tribe” has had a lasting influence on me. I found the following observations of a war refugee voluntary reentering Sarajevo during its siege both fascinating and devastating.
“What catastrophes seem to do – sometimes in the span of a few minutes – is to turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. […]
“‘I missed being that close to people. I missed being loved in that way’, she told me. ‘In Bosnia – as it is now – we don’t trust each other anymore; we became really bad people. We didn’t learn the lesson of the war, which is how important it is to share everything you have with humans being close to you. The best way to explain it is that the war makes you an animal. We were animals. It’s insane – but that’s the basic human instinct, to help another human being who is sitting or standing or lying close to you.’
I asked Ahmetašević if people had ultimately been happier during the war. ‘We were the happiest,’ Ahmetašević said. Then she added: “And we laughed more.'”
Notes On Liberty 