Ratchets Within Ratchets

For those interested in political philosophy, or Trump's travel ban, I recommend this discussion on Scott Aaronson's blog, which features a commenter calling himself Boldmug (see also Bannon and Moldbug in the news recently ;-)

Both Scott and Boldmug seem to agree that scientific/technological progress is a positive ratchet caught within a negative ratchet of societal and political decay.

Boldmug Says:
Comment #181 January 27th, 2017 at 5:26 pm

Scott: An interesting term, “ratchet of progress.” Nature is full of ratchets. But ratchets of progress — extropic ratchets — are the exceptional case. Most ratchets are entropic ratchets, ratchets of decay.

You happen to live inside the ratchet of progress that is science and engineering. That ratchet produces beautiful wonders like seedless watermelons. It’s true that Talleyrand said, “no one who remembers the sweetness of life before the Revolution can even imagine it,” but even Louis XIV had to spit the seeds out of his watermelons.

This ratchet is 400 to 2400 years old, depending on how you count. The powers and ideologies that be are very good at taking credit for science and engineering, though it is much older than any of them. It is a powerful ratchet — not even the Soviet system could kill or corrupt science entirely, although it’s always the least political fields, like math and physics, that do the best.

But most ratchets are entropic ratchets of decay. The powers that be don’t teach you to see the ratchets of decay. You have to look for them with your own eyes.

The scientists and engineers who created the Antikythera mechanism lived inside a ratchet of progress. But that ratchet of progress lived inside a ratchet of decay, which is why we didn’t have an industrial revolution in 100BC. Instead we had war, tyranny, stagnation and (a few hundred years later) collapse.

Lucio Russo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucio_Russo) wrote an interesting, if perhaps a little overstated, book, on the Hellenistic (300-150BC, not to be confused with the Hellenic era proper) golden age of science. We really have no way of knowing how close to a scientific revolution the Alexandrians came. But it was political failure, not scientific failure, that destroyed their world. The ratchet of progress was inside a ratchet of decay. ...

It doesn't appear that Scott responded to this dig by Boldmug:

Boldmug Says:
Comment #153 January 27th, 2017 at 11:51 am

... Coincidentally, the latter is the side [THE LEFT] whose Jedi mind tricks are so strong, they almost persuaded someone with a 160 IQ to castrate himself.

And the Enlightenment? You mean the Enlightenment that guillotined Lavoisier? “The Republic has no need of savants.” Add 1789 and even 1641 to that list. Why would a savant pick Praisegod Barebones over Prince Rupert?

You might notice that in our dear modern world, whose quantum cryptography and seedless watermelons are so excellent, “the Republic has no need of savants” is out there still. Know anyone working on human genetics? ...

Don't believe in societal decay? Read this recent tour-de-force paper by DeCode researchers in Iceland, who have established beyond doubt the (long-term) dysgenic nature of modern society:

Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)

Epidemiological and genetic association studies show that genetics play an important role in the attainment of education. Here, we investigate the effect of this genetic component on the reproductive history of 109,120 Icelanders and the consequent impact on the gene pool over time. We show that an educational attainment polygenic score, POLYEDU, constructed from results of a recent study is associated with delayed reproduction (P < 10^(−100)) and fewer children overall. The effect is stronger for women and remains highly significant after adjusting for educational attainment. Based on 129,808 Icelanders born between 1910 and 1990, we find that the average POLYEDU has been declining at a rate of ∼0.010 standard units per decade, which is substantial on an evolutionary timescale. Most importantly, because POLYEDU only captures a fraction of the overall underlying genetic component the latter could be declining at a rate that is two to three times faster.

Note: these "educational attainment" variants are mostly variants which influence cognitive ability.

From the Discussion section of the paper:

... The main message here is that the human race is genetically far from being stagnant with respect to one of its most important traits. It is remarkable to report changes in POLYEDU that are measurable across the several decades covered by this study. In evolutionary time, this is a blink of an eye. However, if this trend persists over many centuries, the impact could be profound.

Neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment

An essay on neoreaction and the dark enlightenment from The Awl.

See also Fukuyama and Zhang on the China Model , Is there a China model? and Power and paranoia in Silicon Valley.

The Darkness Before the Right

A right-wing politics for the coming century is taking shape. And it’s not slowing down.

... Land’s case for democratic dysfunction is simply stated. Democracy is structurally incapable of rational leadership due to perverse incentive structures. It is trapped in short-termism by the electoral cycle, hard decisions become political suicide, and social catastrophe is acceptable as long as it can be blamed on the other team. Moreover, inter-party competition to “buy votes” leads to a ratchet effect of ever-greater state intervention in the economy—and even if this is periodically reversed, in the long-run it only moves in one direction. ... Rather than accept creeping democratic socialism (which leads to “zombie apocalypse”), Land would prefer to simply abolish democracy and appoint a national CEO. This capitalist Leviathan would be, at a bare minimum, capable of rational long-term planning and aligning individual incentive structures with social well-being (CEO-as-Tiger-Mom). Individuals would have no say in government, but would be generally left alone, and free to leave. This right of “exit” is, for Land, the only meaningful right, and it’s opposed to democratic “voice,” where everyone gets a say, but is bound by the decisions of the majority—the fear being that the majority will decide to self-immolate.

Anti-democratic sentiment is uncommon in the West, so Land’s conclusions appear as shocking, deliberate provocations, which they partly are. ... Pointing to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, it argues that economically and socially effective government legitimizes itself, with no need for elections. And this view isn’t limited to the internet right. ...

This brand of authoritarian capitalism has a certain fascist sheen, but in truth it’s closer to a rigidly formalized capitalist technocracy. There’s no mass mobilization, totalitarian social reorganization, or cult of violence here; governing will be done by the governors, and popular sovereignty replaced by the market Mandate of Heaven. There is a strange sort of disillusioned cultural conservatism here as well, albeit one absolutely stripped of moralism. In fact, what’s genuinely creepy about it is the near-sociopathic lack of emotional attachment; it’s a sort of pure incentive-based functionalism, as if from the perspective of a computer or alien. If a person doesn’t produce quantifiable value, they are, objectively, not valuable. Everything else is sentimentality.

...

Capitalism, in this view, is less something we do than something done to us. Contra business-class bromides about the market as the site of creative expression, for Land, as for Marx, capitalism is a fundamentally alien institution in which “the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative.” This means simply that the competitive dynamics of capitalism drive technical progress as an iron law. If one capitalist doesn’t want to build smarter, better machines, he’ll be out-competed by one who does. If Apple doesn’t make you an asshole, Google will. If America doesn’t breed genetically modified super-babies, China will. The market doesn’t run on “greed,” or any intentionality at all. Its beauty—or horror—is its impersonality. Either you adapt, or you die.

Accelerating technological growth, then, is written into capitalism’s DNA. Smart machines make us smarter allowing us to make smarter machines, in a positive feedback loop that quickly begins to approach infinity, better known in this context as “singularity.” ...

Somehow I ended up on this "map of neoreaction" -- without my consent, of course. Who are all these people? ;-)

Power and paranoia in Silicon Valley

Plenty of fear and loathing of the nerd rapture backed by powerful VCs in this Harper's article. Ungated version.

Discussed in depth at LessWrong.

... Be explorers; take advantage of this vast new landscape that’s been opened up to us in this time and this place; and bear the torch of applied rationality like brave explorers. And then, like, keep in touch by email.” The workshop attendees put giant Post-its on the walls expressing the lessons they hoped to take with them. A blue one read RATIONALITY IS SYSTEMATIZED WINNING. Above it, in pink: THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE WHO THINK LIKE ME. I AM NOT ALONE.

... I talked to one of my roommates, a Google scientist who worked on neural nets. The CFAR workshop [[ Center For Applied Rationality ]] was just a whim to him, a tourist weekend. “They’re the nicest people you’d ever meet,” he said, but then he qualified the compliment. “Look around. If they were effective, rational people, would they be here? Something a little weird, no?”

... Were they really going to save the world? From what? “Imagine there is a set of skills,” he said. “There is a myth that they are possessed by the whole population, and there is a cynical myth that they’re possessed by 10% of the population. They’ve actually been wiped out in all but about one person in three thousand.” It is important, Vassar said, that his people, “the fragments of the world,” lead the way during “the fairly predictable, fairly total cultural transition that will predictably take place between 2020 and 2035 or so.” We pulled up outside the Rose Garden Inn. He continued: “You have these weird phenomena like Occupy where people are protesting with no goals, no theory of how the world is, around which they can structure a protest. Basically this incredibly, weirdly, thoroughly disempowered group of people will have to inherit the power of the world anyway, because sooner or later everyone older is going to be too old and too technologically obsolete and too bankrupt. The old institutions may largely break down or they may be handed over, but either way they can’t just freeze. These people are going to be in charge, and it would be helpful if they, as they come into their own, crystallize an identity that contains certain cultural strengths like argument and reason.” I didn’t argue with him, except to press, gently, on his particular form of elitism. His rationalism seemed so limited to me, so incomplete. “It is unfortunate,” he said, “that we are in a situation where our cultural heritage is possessed only by people who are extremely unappealing to most of the population.” That hadn’t been what I’d meant. I had meant rationalism as itself a failure of the imagination. “The current ecosystem is so totally fucked up,” Vassar said. “But if you have conversations here” -- he gestured at the hotel -- “people change their mind and learn and update and change their behaviors in response to the things they say and learn. That never happens anywhere else.” ...

Makes me wish I still lived in the Bay Area :-)  My MIRI interview.

"In the land of autistics, the aspie is king"

I've often thought this to myself, but was amused to hear it attributed to a famous theoretician at Princeton the other day.

On empathy: psychopaths, sociopaths and aspies

Last week a startup CTO, who didn't know my background, characterized all CEOs as "warm sociopaths" :-) He is at least partly right: many business and political leaders are good at reading other people's thoughts and emotions, but lack genuine concern for their well being. On the other hand, many geeks are very bad at mind reading or emotional perception, yet adhere to a strict moral code.

Cambridge cognitive scientist Simon Baron-Cohen (his cousin is the comic Sacha) classifies different low-empathy types below. See this podcast talk and this earlier post about his book on autism and the systematizing / empathizing spectrum. His latest book is specifically about empathy.

I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath (NYTimes): ... For Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are just one population lacking in empathy. ... Baron-Cohen calls these ... groups “Zero-Negative” because there is “nothing positive to recommend them” and they are “unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them.” He provides a thoughtful discussion of the usual sad tangle of bad genes and bad environments that lead to the creation of these Zero-Negative individuals.

People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Such individuals can thereby be moral without empathy, “through brute logic alone.”

David Brooks addresses related themes in his recent book Social Animals. I highly recommend this podcast talk. His opening monologue is actually very funny -- he notes the similarity between politicians and people with the genetic condition Williams Syndrome :-)

Wikipedia: ... Most individuals with Williams syndrome are highly verbal and overly sociable, having what has been described as a "cocktail party" type personality, and exhibit a remarkable blend of cognitive strengths and weaknesses.[3] Individuals with WS hyperfocus on the eyes of others in social engagements.

... While patients with Williams syndrome often have abnormal proficiency in verbal skills, they do not perform better on verbal tasks than average. This syndrome is characterized more by a deficiency in other areas of processing. [Glib, but often mildly retarded.]

I would guess that "neurotypicals" strike aspies the way that Williams sufferers strike the rest of us. Imagine how disturbing it must be to live in a society dominated by and structured around people so different from yourself.

PhD Comics: the movie

PHD Movie Trailer from PHD Comics on Vimeo.

I met Jorge Cham, the cartoonist who draws PhD Comics, a few years ago at Sci Foo. Cham was a roboticist (grad school at Stanford and ME instructor at Caltech) before becoming a full time cartoonist. I notice this movie was made in collaboration with a Caltech theatre company.

Bitter geeks

From Googler Mark Chu-Carroll, a post and ensuing 600+ comments on how horrible high school is for some geeks. Mark writes the blog Good Math, Bad Math and seems fairly well adjusted now, despite the lingering bitterness. My main advice is to get his kid studying MMA/BJJ/Judo/Wrestling rather than Karate ;-)

Original post (with 400+ comments), follow up post (with 200+ comments).

... I graduated from high school in 1984. Which means that this year is my graduating class's 25th year reunion. As a result, a bunch of people from my high school class have been trying to friend me on facebook, sending me email, and trying to convince me to come to the reunion.

I don't feel like replying to them individually, which is why I'm writing here.

As pretty much any reader of this blog who isn't a total idiot must have figured out by now, I'm a geek. I have been since I was a kid. My dad taught me about bell curves and standard deviations when I was in third grade, and I thought it was pretty much the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen. That's the kind of kid I was. I was also very small - 5 foot 1 when I started high school, 5 foot three my junior year. Even when I shot up in height, to nearly 5 foot eleven between junior and senior year, I weighed under 120 pounds. So think small, skinny, hyperactive, geek.

Like most geek kids, I had a rough time in school. I don't think that my experience was particularly unusual. I know a lot of people who had it worse. But I think that it was slightly worse than average, because the administration in the school system that I went to tolerated an extraordinary amount of violent bullying. Almost every geeky kid gets socially ostracized. Almost all get mocked. In fact, almost all face some physical abuse. The main determinant of just how much physical abuse they get subjected to is the school administration. And the administration at my school really didn't care: "Bruises? He must just be uncoordinated and bumps into things. Broken fingers? Hey, it happens. We're sure it must have been an accident. What do you want, an armed guard to follow your kid around?"

In high school, I didn't have a single real friend in my graduating class. I had a very few friends who graduated a year before me; I had a few who graduated one or two years after me. But being absolutely literal, there was not a single person in my graduating class who came close to treating me like a friend. Not one.

Like I said before, the way I was by my classmates in high school was pretty typical for a geek. At best, I was ignored. At worst, I was beaten. In between, I was used as a sort of status enhancer: telling people that you'd seen me doing some supposedly awful or hysterical thing was a common scheme for getting ahead in certain social circles. ...

... Now it's twenty five years since I got out of that miserable fucking hell-hole. And people from my high school class are suddenly getting in touch, sending me email, trying to friend me on Facebook, and trying to convince me to bring my family to the reunion. (It's a picnic reunion, full family invited.) Even some of the people who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis are getting in touch as if we're old friends.

My reaction to them... What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why would you think that I would want to have anything to do with you? How do you have the chutzpah to act as if we're old friends? How dare you? I see the RSVP list that one of you sent me, and I literally feel nauseous just remembering your names.

The only positive thing that ever came out of my time with you people is that my children are studying karate. My son will, most likely, have his black belt by the time he finishes fourth grade. He's a hyperactive little geek, just like me. ...

Luckily for me my high school years were among the best of my life. My 20th reunion was a blast -- it went by way, way too fast!

Beamtimes and Lifetimes

The episode of The Big Bang Theory that I described in my previous post reminded me of Beamtimes and Lifetimes, by anthropologist and historian Sharon Traweek (UCLA).



The book is a detailed portrait of the world of particle physics from a cultural anthropologist's perspective. Traweek did "field work" among the very odd tribe of particle physicists at KEK, SLAC and Fermilab :-) Though imperfect, it paints a very recognizable picture of our community. I found it quite enlightening when I read it as a grad student.

The Big Bang Theory and teleportation

Have a look at the opening segment (video below) of this episode of The Big Bang Theory. I've had exactly the same conversation about teleportation (or transporters on Star Trek) more times than I can count. Sheldon (taller guy, on the left in the picture) is the theorist and Leonard is the experimentalist, both at Caltech.

On teleportation from A to B: let's reverse the time ordering of steps and see if it bothers you. If I were to first produce an exact replica of you at the desired location B, would you then be willing to step into a disintegration chamber at A?

Opening segment (Amazon); full episode - The Jerusalem Duality (avi video)

Another bit of dialog from the episode; Rajnesh is an astrophysicist.

Rajnesh Koothrappali: Do you know what he (Sheldon) did? He watched me work for 10 minutes, and then started to design a simple piece of software that could replace me.
Leonard Hofstadter: Is that even possible?
Rajnesh Koothrappali: As it turns out, yes.

Nerds!

I haven't read this yet, but am looking forward to it. (OK, maybe I just like the title and cover :-)

Here is the author's web page; he's a psychology professor at Bennington.

Q: Do other countries have this problem?

A: The idea that it is unattractive or unappealing to be intelligent is not a universal concept. Not in Asia, certainly not in India. There's no concept in India that being good at math and science and technology has negative social consequences. That's the reason there are so many Indian engineers.

Q: Why did this grow out of American culture?

A: Historically, America is a place for men of action, for men who discover things, make things with their hands, have practical intelligence as opposed to book learning. Book-learning was suspect — the musty old European way, as opposed to practical, snazzy America. I think this tradition has never gone away.

The problem is that now it just doesn't work anymore. You can't do anything unless you pay attention in school. You can't invent things without knowing calculus. If you don't study math, it won't work. Benjamin Franklin was an American genius, a model of the American tinkerer, but the Ben Franklin model is not working anymore.

Q. Wasn't everyone talking about the need for better math and science education back in the days of Sputnik?

A: What's new is the sexualization of it. Kids live in such a sexualized world. ... (If you are called a nerd or a geek, it's) not just creepy or weird, you're labeled as someone who is never going to get laid. There's a lot more at stake because kids are so much more exposed to a culture that's all about being attractive, having sex early.

The nerds and the geek stereotype is that if you're doing well in math and science, you are completely unattractive to the opposite sex.

All the nerd and geek self-tests, what they ask you is: Are you good at science and math? Are you unwashed? Have you never had a date? You don't know anyone's phone number except your mothers?