It's been fun writing here over the past few months. I think I've learned a thing or two about blogging, and hopefully you've had fun reading some of my offbeat ideas. However, as time has gone on I've found that writing on Blogger has its limits, functionally and otherwise.
So Quantum Sense is moving over to Wordpress. The new blog has some handy dandy features - including a "tag cloud" (Ooooo) - and I look forward to developing it further.
Be sure to drop by!
Dave Higgins
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Of Moles and Squeegee Men
Now that January 20th has come and gone, the Bush League has departed from DC like unruly guests who cleaned out the liquor cabinet and the wine cellar and generally trashed the place. As we start to pick up the pieces and straighten the furniture, a question persists: should we call the cops or should we just pretend it never happened?
Many of the DC regulars want to make pretend and "just get on with things." As Glenn Greenwald noted:
The reasoning for this "let bygones be bygones" comes in a variety of flavors. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen argued that the Devil (aka Osama bin Laden) made us forget ourselves and our constitution and begin jailing people without charges and then torturing them:
Cohen's Post colleauge Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, strikes a pragmatic pose:
Mr. Greenwald is outraged by this attitude because the Justice Department continues to hound the lawyer-mole who first told a New York Times reporter about Bush's illegal NSA spying program. It certainly seems unfair to persecute an individual for revealing criminal and unconstitutional behavior at the same time pundits and politicians want to give the "evil doers" a free pass.
The New York Times' Frank Rich also supports investigation and possible prosecution, to regain our country's honor:
Beyond the whole matter of being a nation of laws and all, Mr. Rich argues we need to address the problems of the past to gain guidance for the future:
Greenwald and Rich make strong points in favor of actually investigating what happened over the past eight years, and prosecuting those who broke the law. But their points are not the only - or even most - important reasons for investigation and prosecution. To understand what's at stake here, we need to remember the squeegee men.
Back in March of 1982, The Atlantic magazine featured an article by George Kelling and James Wilson, titled "Broken Windows." Kelling and Wilson argued that the perception of a social breakdown will lead to the reality of that breakdown:
Kelling and Wilson wrote about experiments reported on by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who arranged to have apparently abandoned vehicles parked on streets in the Bronx, NY and Palo Alto, CA. While the time frames differed, the result was the same: both cars wound up being vandalized and destroyed. Kelling and Wilson wrote:
This article eventually led to a then-new approach to community policing in which minor offenses were dealt with thoroughly, with the idea that by discouraging disorderly behavior there would be an increase in social order. The most famous - or notorious, depending on your point of view - case of this was in New York City, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani gained fame for such tactics as cracking down on squeegee men. This approach was eventually credited with a significant decline in the general crime rate in New York City.
It's common to believe that illegal or anti-social behavior is rooted in individual morality: good people behave in good ways, while bad people behave badly. But that's not necessarily so. As Kelling and Wilson (and others) have found, individual behavior is often influenced by how that individual sees others behave. If boundaries are pushed and nothing happens to the wrong-doers, then the threshold for anti-social or illegal behavior shifts. If someone vandalizes a car and nothing happens, soon others will follow suit. If one Wall Street firm games the system and nothing happens, you know it's only a matter of time before others start behaving the same way.
This is really nothing new. Who hasn't, as a child, tried to do something because "everyone else is doing it"? And who hasn't had their mother or father reply something to the effect: "If everyone else jumps off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?" While we may tell ourselves that adults act differently, history (and the fashion industry) proves that our behavior frequently reflects that of those around us.
While it might be politically convenient to disregard any possible criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration, "letting bygone be bygones" will send a terrible message to the rest of our citizens - as well as the world. It will be saying "we don't care" about violations of our constitution, international law, and the fundamental idea of human decency.
Ruth Marcus may wish to disregard the particulars and just ensure "that these mistakes are not repeated." But by blithely ignoring them, we're likely to guarantee such behavior will someday return.
Many of the DC regulars want to make pretend and "just get on with things." As Glenn Greenwald noted:
There are few viewpoints, if there are any, which trigger more fervent agreement across the political and media establishment than the view that George Bush, Dick Cheney and other top officials should not be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, for the various laws they have broken over the last eight years.
The reasoning for this "let bygones be bygones" comes in a variety of flavors. The Washington Post's Richard Cohen argued that the Devil (aka Osama bin Laden) made us forget ourselves and our constitution and begin jailing people without charges and then torturing them:
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." So goes an aphorism that needs to be applied to the current debate over whether those who authorized and used torture should be prosecuted. In the very different country called Sept. 11, 2001, the answer would be a resounding no.
Cohen's Post colleauge Ruth Marcus, on the other hand, strikes a pragmatic pose:
I'm coming to the conclusion that what's most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.
Mr. Greenwald is outraged by this attitude because the Justice Department continues to hound the lawyer-mole who first told a New York Times reporter about Bush's illegal NSA spying program. It certainly seems unfair to persecute an individual for revealing criminal and unconstitutional behavior at the same time pundits and politicians want to give the "evil doers" a free pass.
The New York Times' Frank Rich also supports investigation and possible prosecution, to regain our country's honor:
While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed.
Beyond the whole matter of being a nation of laws and all, Mr. Rich argues we need to address the problems of the past to gain guidance for the future:
But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.
Greenwald and Rich make strong points in favor of actually investigating what happened over the past eight years, and prosecuting those who broke the law. But their points are not the only - or even most - important reasons for investigation and prosecution. To understand what's at stake here, we need to remember the squeegee men.
...at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
Kelling and Wilson wrote about experiments reported on by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who arranged to have apparently abandoned vehicles parked on streets in the Bronx, NY and Palo Alto, CA. While the time frames differed, the result was the same: both cars wound up being vandalized and destroyed. Kelling and Wilson wrote:
...vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."
This article eventually led to a then-new approach to community policing in which minor offenses were dealt with thoroughly, with the idea that by discouraging disorderly behavior there would be an increase in social order. The most famous - or notorious, depending on your point of view - case of this was in New York City, where Mayor Rudy Giuliani gained fame for such tactics as cracking down on squeegee men. This approach was eventually credited with a significant decline in the general crime rate in New York City.
It's common to believe that illegal or anti-social behavior is rooted in individual morality: good people behave in good ways, while bad people behave badly. But that's not necessarily so. As Kelling and Wilson (and others) have found, individual behavior is often influenced by how that individual sees others behave. If boundaries are pushed and nothing happens to the wrong-doers, then the threshold for anti-social or illegal behavior shifts. If someone vandalizes a car and nothing happens, soon others will follow suit. If one Wall Street firm games the system and nothing happens, you know it's only a matter of time before others start behaving the same way.
This is really nothing new. Who hasn't, as a child, tried to do something because "everyone else is doing it"? And who hasn't had their mother or father reply something to the effect: "If everyone else jumps off a cliff, are you going to jump off a cliff?" While we may tell ourselves that adults act differently, history (and the fashion industry) proves that our behavior frequently reflects that of those around us.
While it might be politically convenient to disregard any possible criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration, "letting bygone be bygones" will send a terrible message to the rest of our citizens - as well as the world. It will be saying "we don't care" about violations of our constitution, international law, and the fundamental idea of human decency.
Ruth Marcus may wish to disregard the particulars and just ensure "that these mistakes are not repeated." But by blithely ignoring them, we're likely to guarantee such behavior will someday return.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
What Do Libertarian Farmers Grow?
Washington Post writer and blogger Joel Achenbach recently wrote a piece called "Inventing the Future" for his alumni publication. It's about a brainy fellow Princeton alum named Nathan Myhrvold, who according to Achenbach is brilliant in many areas - physics, software design, cooking, photography, etc. In his article, one quote by Myhrvold caught my attention:
A taste of that libertarian streak comes out a couple paragraphs later:
OK...first of all, I'd love to see a debate between Mr. Myhrvold (aka Mr. T - as in Technology) and James Kunstler (aka Mr. Doomed - as in "we all are..."). They both sound bright and opinionated, and they share an interest in predicting the future. But one expresses great optimism about technolgy and the future, while the other is generally very pessimistic. It would be a fun debate - in an intellectual "fight club" kind of way.
Beyond that, up to a point I agree with Mr. Myhrvold about society being emergent: the way a society is and the way people behave in it develops from the bottom up. However, I believe this is only a part of the picture.
I suspect Myhrvold's sense of emergence is at the heart of a lot of libertarian thought: "just get out of the way and let things emerge!" Libertarians apparently assume things exist in some vaguely positive state - sort of a social petri dish filled with a fertile growth medium. Given that neutral state, things will always work out for the best eventually. If and when they don't - like the current financial crisis - libertarians just write it off as "creative destruction."
There are indeed cases in which The Old must collapse in order for The New to come to fruition. (After all, that's one of the main ideas behind this blog and my website,) But as we've seen too often recently, destruction can often be a product of stupidity or greed rather than creativity.
What Myhrvold and other libertarians fail to recognize is the other side of the bottom-up nature of emergence. Things don't just emerge willy nilly out of nothing; they emerge in a context. The environment in which they exist will usually play a huge role in their outcome.
Take farming, for example. What a farmer grows and how successful he or she is in growing it will largely be determined by the context of his or her farm: the climate, the soil, water availability, general nature of the land, etc. Any farmer who tries to grow corn in the mountains of Colombia is likely to have as little success as one trying to grow coffee in Iowa.
Crops are an emergent phenomena; a farmer may plant the seeds, but then nature takes over. However, the farmer's success depends on him or her being mindful of the context of the farm and the crops that are most likely to thrive in it for a sustainable period of time. In addition, to get the most productive crop the farmer must keep in mind the specific needs - water, nutrition, etc. - of the crop over the course of the growing season. Otherwise, under/over-fertilization or a drought can have a serious effect on the yield of the crop.
In the same way, individuals and businesses exist within the context of human society. That society, in turn, exists within the larger context of the local and global physical environment. We are each a part of the world, not apart from it.
This may be easier to understand if we borrow an idea from modern science. Physics has found that at its most elementary level, matter is simultaneously an individual particle and part of a collective wave. It's dual-natured.
The same is true of people and businesses: we are not just a solitary individual or a part of the group. We are always both at the same time. It's just a matter of perception, like watching a crowd doing a "wave" in a packed stadium. You can watch the wave of humanity roll around the stadium or you can watch a person participate by standing up and then sitting down with those around them. But you can never see both at the same time.
The problem with libertarianism is that by always being focused on the individual it is blind to context. It's all particle and no wave. At that stadium, it would see a person getting up and sitting down; it wouldn't see the wave that individual was a part of. On Wall Street the focus was only on the success of individuals; there was no thought of the way the behavior of those individuals was damaging the financial system as a whole. No wonder so many "experts" were caught off guard by the inevitable collapse. They literally never saw it coming.
If a person tried to farm with a libertarian's blindness to context, they'd most likely lose the farm in short order. They would plant whatever they thought would be most profitable, regardless of its suitability for local climate and soil. Once planted, the crop would be at the mercy of the "invisible hand" of nature. Maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn't; being averse to "regulatory meddling," it would be against libertarian ideology to alter the natural course of things by watering.
With a blindness to context and an aversion to "meddling," there's only one crop a libertarian would be likely to have by the end of a growing season: weeds.
“Broadly, overall, the way society works is emergent, and it is built on progress — it generally runs downhill toward something better,” Myhrvold says as we get deep into the philosophical weeds on all this stuff. The world is a better place now than it was 500 years ago, he declares. Driving that improvement is, he believes, technology. He’s an unabashed technophile. And he seems to have a strong libertarian streak.
A taste of that libertarian streak comes out a couple paragraphs later:
Many of the visionaries today talk of building a “sustainable” society, a word that seems to rile Myhrvold. “The most sustainable thing about human society is that we innovate,” he says. Later, he elaborates in an e-mail: “The answer is not to pine for a past golden age when things were better (there was no such place or time), but rather to ask how we can use more technology and innovation.” Change, he thinks, is intrinsic to our nature. The future will be different. Survival will not involve preservation of things as they existed before: It will require their creative destruction and replacement.
OK...first of all, I'd love to see a debate between Mr. Myhrvold (aka Mr. T - as in Technology) and James Kunstler (aka Mr. Doomed - as in "we all are..."). They both sound bright and opinionated, and they share an interest in predicting the future. But one expresses great optimism about technolgy and the future, while the other is generally very pessimistic. It would be a fun debate - in an intellectual "fight club" kind of way.
Beyond that, up to a point I agree with Mr. Myhrvold about society being emergent: the way a society is and the way people behave in it develops from the bottom up. However, I believe this is only a part of the picture.
I suspect Myhrvold's sense of emergence is at the heart of a lot of libertarian thought: "just get out of the way and let things emerge!" Libertarians apparently assume things exist in some vaguely positive state - sort of a social petri dish filled with a fertile growth medium. Given that neutral state, things will always work out for the best eventually. If and when they don't - like the current financial crisis - libertarians just write it off as "creative destruction."
There are indeed cases in which The Old must collapse in order for The New to come to fruition. (After all, that's one of the main ideas behind this blog and my website,) But as we've seen too often recently, destruction can often be a product of stupidity or greed rather than creativity.
What Myhrvold and other libertarians fail to recognize is the other side of the bottom-up nature of emergence. Things don't just emerge willy nilly out of nothing; they emerge in a context. The environment in which they exist will usually play a huge role in their outcome.
Take farming, for example. What a farmer grows and how successful he or she is in growing it will largely be determined by the context of his or her farm: the climate, the soil, water availability, general nature of the land, etc. Any farmer who tries to grow corn in the mountains of Colombia is likely to have as little success as one trying to grow coffee in Iowa.
Crops are an emergent phenomena; a farmer may plant the seeds, but then nature takes over. However, the farmer's success depends on him or her being mindful of the context of the farm and the crops that are most likely to thrive in it for a sustainable period of time. In addition, to get the most productive crop the farmer must keep in mind the specific needs - water, nutrition, etc. - of the crop over the course of the growing season. Otherwise, under/over-fertilization or a drought can have a serious effect on the yield of the crop.
In the same way, individuals and businesses exist within the context of human society. That society, in turn, exists within the larger context of the local and global physical environment. We are each a part of the world, not apart from it.
This may be easier to understand if we borrow an idea from modern science. Physics has found that at its most elementary level, matter is simultaneously an individual particle and part of a collective wave. It's dual-natured.
The same is true of people and businesses: we are not just a solitary individual or a part of the group. We are always both at the same time. It's just a matter of perception, like watching a crowd doing a "wave" in a packed stadium. You can watch the wave of humanity roll around the stadium or you can watch a person participate by standing up and then sitting down with those around them. But you can never see both at the same time.
The problem with libertarianism is that by always being focused on the individual it is blind to context. It's all particle and no wave. At that stadium, it would see a person getting up and sitting down; it wouldn't see the wave that individual was a part of. On Wall Street the focus was only on the success of individuals; there was no thought of the way the behavior of those individuals was damaging the financial system as a whole. No wonder so many "experts" were caught off guard by the inevitable collapse. They literally never saw it coming.
If a person tried to farm with a libertarian's blindness to context, they'd most likely lose the farm in short order. They would plant whatever they thought would be most profitable, regardless of its suitability for local climate and soil. Once planted, the crop would be at the mercy of the "invisible hand" of nature. Maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn't; being averse to "regulatory meddling," it would be against libertarian ideology to alter the natural course of things by watering.
With a blindness to context and an aversion to "meddling," there's only one crop a libertarian would be likely to have by the end of a growing season: weeds.
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