Keep almost touching on this idea in my posts, so thought this could use a little exposition.  In my view, there are three major ideological factions in American politics:

Conservatives: The loyal opposition.  Tradition is good, don’t change what works.  Major weakness: Can’t decide when, exactly, they want to preserve; agree with Progressives of not that long ago, so Progressives of today assume they can just wait them out.  Very weakly right-wing.

Progressives: “Liberals”, Moldbug’s “Universalists”.  Moldbug enumerates the core beliefs of this faction as fraternalism, pacifism, social justice, and communitarianism, that’s a reasonable summary.  Major weaknesses: Sometimes confuse ideals for reality, ideological blindness leads to self-defeating compromise.  Left-wing.  I more-or-less agree with these guys.

Big Business: “Neoconservatives”, “neoliberals”, “free market proponents” (though not actually in favor of a free market, their policy is more like “Keynes at home, Friedman abroad” or “privatized profits, socialized losses”).  Major weaknesses: Sometimes confuse ideals for reality, ideological blindness (or worse!) leads to global economic collapse.  Left-wing in right-wing sauce.

(I’m still not quite satisfied with that name for the last, but can’t come up with any better.)

Both political parties have been rather significantly captured by the Big Business faction (Republicans thoroughly, Democrats to a very large extent post-Reagan).  The Republicans pay lip service to Conservatives (and some Republican politicians are actually Conservatives), but policy-wise deliver almost nothing to that faction.  The Democrats pay lip service to Progressives (and many Democratic politicians are actually Progressives), but policy-wise deliver little to that faction.

The Progressive and the Big Business faction are both left-wing, but they are two distinct, mutually incompatible ideologies.  Compromises between the two tends to produce perverse results:

1. Minimum wage and workplace safety standards plus an opposition to “trade barriers”.
2. Food safety standards plus an insistence that regulation must apply to small, transparent family farms as well as big, secretive factory food-processing operations.
3. FDIC plus bank deregulation.

None of these ideological factions are centrally organized, so nothing prevents people from trying to set up their tent at both camps and nothing prevents Big Business from appealing to Progressives on Progressive grounds.  Which they have done fairly effectively:  Promoting “free trade” on the basis of brotherhood (framing protectionism as xenophobia) and social justice (“economic development”).  Promoting context-blind regulation as an appeal to fairness.  Selling consumer protections that mostly benefit corporations on the basis of the former aspect (even when it’s the sort of disaster mitigation that makes disaster more likely).

My guesses for why such compromises are so tempting:

1. Progressives think they are still compromising with Conservatives, though present-day Republicans are anything but.  Progressive/Conservative compromises tend to not be so perverse.  And they tend to be a long-term win for Progressives.
2. People don’t get the concept of a compromise with perverse results.
3. “Doing something” is more politically advantageous than “doing nothing”, even if it’s actually worse, in large part because of the previous point.
4. Progressives believe that talking things out and arriving at a compromise is in general a good way of solving problems and thus are reluctant to notice that this doesn’t work so well in a broad class of situations.

During my long public school career, I didn’t think much about the structure of public school.  The reasons for this are not exactly flattering for me.  I viewed school as the “one thing” I was good at (though that was not actually true), and I used my focus on academics to avoid paying attention to many of my problems.  If I wanted to do one thing dramatically different with my academic career, that would have been skipping grades, but I didn’t pursue that with any sort of determination, since I was happy to take the path of least resistance.

It wasn’t until college that I began to think about the issue seriously.  I came at it initially from the subject of grades.  I was obsessed with grades during my primary school career (obsessed with getting grades that were just barely good enough to be called “perfect” by some carefully chosen definition (e.g. 90%, “an A”); I told you this wasn’t flattering for me), and that got worse and worse until high school.  When I entered college, I resolved to not look at my grades for any class.

The college I went to was new and we took pride in being “innovative”.  But Olin’s grading system was strikingly conventional.  Evidently, the issue of grading came up during the school’s design process.  A substantial discussion led to a rough consensus favoring a very minimal “Pass/Fail/Excellence” grading system.  But the result was a temporary compromise on letter grades without +/- gradations, followed by a wholesale adoption of the conventional grading system.

The thing is, in my view, the conventional grading system is glaringly flawed.  There’s ample psychological research showing that rewards produce a lasting decrease in intrinsic motivation, long-term recall of information, and lateral thinking, and that to the extent that “good grades” are perceived as desirable, they produce the same effect.  Grades are also only minimally useful as feedback.  They’re not very useful in comparing students from different classes, much less different institutions.  (Concerns about “grade inflation” get some of that, but talk about focusing on the mote and missing the beam!)  To some extent, grades measure how well students conform to the idiosyncratic preferences of individual professors.

In other words, pretty much anything that puts grades less in the spotlight is a win in terms of the nominal goals of academia.

(Another point that would be particularly worrying for Moldbug:  To the extent that people change their behavior for the sake of grades while not believing that “good grades” are inherently worthwhile, that could serve as the insufficient justification that would make any ideological content contained in the lessons far more persuasive than it would otherwise be.  Also worth keeping that effect in mind when people emphasize how useful grades are to graduate schools and employers.)

So grades are interesting for a few reasons:

1. It’s an example of academia pursuing a policy that doesn’t fit well the the nominal goals of academia.
2. It’s a policy that promotes things that are very much not the overt goal of academic idealists (rote memorization, obedience, tolerance of pointless tasks, ideological conformity).
3. It’s an example of academia conforming to an (in my opinion) obviously broken status quo because no one wants to take the cost of defecting first.

And as it turns out, there’s a movement that would apply those three points to many (if not all) of the structural features of the entire “education system”.

The Unschooling movement is heavily influenced by the teacher and educational philosopher John Taylor Gatto.  A good introduction to his view is the essay Against Schooling, originally published in Harper’s Magazine in September 2003.  This one is hard to excerpt, read the whole thing.  But here’s my attempt at extracting the kernel of it:

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. […]

In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley – who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard – had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration:   “Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned …. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,” even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

One frequent observation of mine is this:

Idea #5: A naive compromise between ideologies can produce worse results than a coherent implementation of either’s favored policy.

But naive compromises are often politically expedient, so they happen anyways.

To put it more cynically, liberals (especially) love half-measures.  (I’m not immune to this, myself.)

Gatto essentially agrees with Moldbug about the purpose of the schools, but Gatto’s description of the present state of affairs misses something crucial when he overstates his case:

The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. [emphasis mine]

But I’d say that view of the goals of the education system is in fact not totally wrong, which is what makes it pernicious.  Public schools do teach some about critical thinking, analyzing primary sources, the scientific method, distinguishing fact from opinion and so on.  To the extent that schooling is “education” (to some extent it is) and a diploma is (economically) valuable, schools convince people that education is valuable.  “Good people” believe that education is valuable.  Actually, I do believe that statement if taken at face value: Good people do (correctly) believe that education is valuable.  Convincing someone to agree with a true statement on a technicality, however, does not make them better people in any meaningful sense.

A strategy of “make education a good investment and people will realize it’s intrinsically valuable on its own” also starts having some serious problems when there’s a mismatch between the educational system and the economy.  I’ve read a lot of talk recently about a “higher education bubble” and of a mismatch between the education system and the “21st century economy”.  The former has some talk of unschoolers (it uses the term “edupunks”).  Unfortunately for unschoolers (and for reactionaries like Moldbug), the dominant force among education reformers seems to be the neoconservative/neoliberal/”free market” types (need a better name for that faction, and that probably deserves another post).  Their favored solution, charter schools, is the usual mix of privatized profits and socialized costs.  Charter schools may be more willing to be “innovative”, but I wouldn’t expect them to solve the problems above or defect from educational norms, no matter how counter-productive, when defecting first is costly.

(I wish I had a better way to wrap things up here.  I still need to read more Gatto and Holt and Illich and Llewellyn.  I want to know more about how compulsory education (in particular, as opposed to public education in general) took off—not just what interests that might work well for, but how it was argued and implemented politically.  I read and would recommend Llewellyn’s Teenage Liberation Handbook to parents, adolescents, and those interested in unschooling.)

I’ve still got a post in the hopper on education and the school system, but I’d like to take the time for a bit of a digression on the 2010 elections.  Mostly because of this interesting comment by Robert Reich:

Some people are going to tell President Obama that Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996 because he moved to the center, and Obama should, too. But Clinton was really reelected because by 1996, the economy had come roaring back to life.

[…]

The relevant political lesson isn’t Bill Clinton in 1996. It’s Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. By 1936, the Great Depression was entering its eighth year. Roosevelt had already been president for four of them. Yet he won the biggest electoral victory since the start of the two-party system in the 1850s.

How? He shifted the debate from his failure to get the economy moving to the irresponsibility of his opponents. Republicans, he said, stood for “business and financial monopoly, speculation, and reckless banking.” And Roosevelt made clear his opponents wanted to stop him from helping ordinary Americans. “Never before have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he thundered. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

The lead of that piece quotes Clinton in contrast to the FDR strategy:

 I want us to forge a partnership to produce results for the American people.

Compare that to Obama’s remarks in the aftermath of the election:

I’m not so naïve as to think that everybody will put politics aside until then, but I do hope to make progress on the very serious problems facing us right now. And that’s going to require all of us, including me, to work harder at building consensus.

In part, I agree with Reich.  I don’t think the “double down on consensus building” approach in 2010-2012 will work any better than the same approach 2008-2010.  However, the Roosevelt comparison is equally poor.  Let me count the ways:

The Democrats gained seats in ‘32 and ‘34 (and were on their way to doing well in ‘36).  They had a strong majority in both houses by ‘32.  Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs started in ‘33.  So ‘36 Roosevelt was winning in a way that Obama is currently not.  Easy to take a haters gonna hate line when you’re on top.  You might be able to do it if you were selling yourself as a scrappy (but right) underdog.  But Obama hasn’t been selling himself as a scrappy underdog since the election, and even then he was using “we’re all in this together” rhetoric.

A better comparison would be Roosevelt ‘40.  After all, the Democrats took a big hit in ‘38 because the economy was still weak.  Sounds familiar.  Even more familiar (PDF, via Wikipedia):

When the Gallup poll in 1939 asked, ‘Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt administration toward business is delaying business recovery?’ the American people responded ‘yes’ by a margin of more than two-to-one. The business community felt even more strongly so.

But even then, Roosevelt had quite a few things  going for him that Obama does not:

1. He had far better access to the media than his opponent.
2. The Democrats still had control of both houses, whereas Democrats in 2010 don’t have control of the House and only have enough control of the Senate to not do things.
3. War was looming, when it came to having an external enemy to convince the American people that changing course on domestic policy is not the relevant issue, you couldn’t do better.  (Heck, the guy is still a favorite political distraction.)
4. People had a negative sentiment for “big business” that they don’t today.  (They felt that Roosevelt ‘40 was “delaying business recovery”, but that didn’t mean a lot of public sentiment behind deregulation or repealing New Deal programs.)  Today, a lot of the same anger is directed into anti-government sentiment.  Among other fears.
5. The Democrats of today aren’t credible as an anti-Wall-Street party.  Sure, they’re a bit better in supporting higher taxes on the top income bracket, which would discourage some of the reckless compensation schemes featured prominently in the current crisis.  The Republicans were all over deregulation.  But Clinton passed NAFTA and Gramm–Leach–Bliley and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and reappointed Greenspan, while Obama is all Summers Geithner Bernanke and the best he can get in terms of big liberal reforms is basically the health care plan proposed by Republicans in 1994 and a bit more consumer protection for credit cards.

So Clinton ‘94-96 isn’t the right lesson.  But FDR ‘34-36 (or even ‘38-40) isn’t the right answer either.  And that’s obvious enough that I don’t know why Robert Reich would think so either, except for wishful thinking that Obama will change his strategy completely and start acting like FDR.  Wishful thinking more powered by a positive sentiment about FDR than a reasonable belief that such a strategy would work in this situation.

As for the Republicans, I’ll quote Senator Mitch McConnell:

Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office.  But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things.

Sadly, I think Obama’s 2010-2012 strategy will likely be similar to his 2008-2010 strategy, with even more modest results.  And if the 2012 election is a straight-up Obama versus centrist Republican contest, I predict Obama will lose (and that the Republicans will subsequently forget all about ending the bailouts, cutting spending, and shrinking the size and scope of government).  Whether healthcare reform is repealed will depend on how much popularity it has gained by 2012, which I can’t accurately predict.  (If repealed, it will probably not be replaced at all.  If replaced, it will likely be replaced by something rather similar.)

Of course, it’s not at all guaranteed that the 2012 presidential election will be straight-up anything.

While perusing Moldbug’s blog, I came across an essay titled How Dawkins Got Pwned (links to all parts of that in this index).  The essay is a response to the book The God Delusion, in which Richard Dawkins argues that religion is a parasitic meme complex centering on one central flaw, an irrational belief in the existence of a god (or gods) and the further belief that one can know god’s will.  In the book, Dawkins claims to believe in “Einsteinian [or Spinozan] religion”, which is non-theistic (or trivially pantheistic).  As Dawkins describes:

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

Moldbug argues that Dawkins is mistaken in thinking that ditching “the God delusion” brings him into the realm of pure rationality.  Rather, Dawkins is a follower of the progressive tradition, which in Moldbug’s view is basically a liberal sect of Christianity that has jettisoned a few bits of theological baggage:

So: Professor Dawkins is an atheist. But – as his writing makes plain – atheism is not the only theme in his personal kernel. Professor Dawkins believes in many other things. He labels the tradition to which he subscribes as Einsteinian religion. Since no one else has used this label, he is entitled to define Einsteinian religion – perhaps we can just call it Einsteinism – as whatever he wants. And he has.

My observation is that Einsteinism exhibits many synapomorphies with Christianity. For example, it appears that Professor Dawkins believes in the fair distribution of goods, the futility of violence, the universal brotherhood of man, and the reification of community. These might be labeled as the themes of Rawlsianism, pacifism, fraternism and communalism.  [ed: Taking for granted for now that Moldbug’s assertion that Dawkins holds these specific beliefs is correct.  It certainly seems that he believes something along those lines.]

[…]

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.

Moldbug, throughout his blog, often refers to this liberal-Christian progressive tradition as “Universalism”, due to, among other things, its relation to Unitarian Universalism.

Now, as it happens, one of my major influences is a sermon by a Unitarian Universalist.  About Richard Dawkins.  The sermon is in response to an essay Dawkins wrote entitled Is Science a Religion?  (For the sake of chronology, note that these was published in 1997, The God Delusion in 2006.)  In that essay, Dawkins argues that science has “many of religion’s virtues, […] none of its vices”.  He asserts: “Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.”  Before reading the sermon, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with Dawkins, and insisted that I was by no means religious.  After reading the sermon, I still thought that Dawkins was technically correct on whether science is a religion per se, but missing a more significant point.  And I would have hardly quibbled with the assertion that I was a Universalist (even though that long predates my awareness of Moldbug’s use of the term).

The sermon, which I found via a search for the titular question, argues:

Dawkins complains that religion bears no relationship to this way of approaching human knowledge and understanding. The line with which he opens the second paragraph of his article is: Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of religion.

Is that, in fact, what faith is? Oh, I agree with him that this notion of faith is a major feature of bad religion. However, in science, would we let the common understanding of science of the populace at large define what the enterprise of science shall be? Of course not. Yet we have done precisely this with religion and Dawkins buys into it hook, line and sinker. […]

[…]

For Dawkins, the notion that science is a religion is unacceptable because he has bought the narrow and wrong popular notion of what religion is about. […]

In other words, if Dawkins was aware of (Unitarian) Universalism, he’d understand the religious nature of his belief system!

Let’s bring this back to Moldbug.  First Rev. Young:

Dawkins goes on in the article to rehearse, among other things, what it would be like if all religious education were done from the point of view of science. It’s an interesting section of the article because what he is essentially doing is rehearsing the Unitarian Universalist religious education curriculum, as if somehow this never had occurred to anybody before. […]

Dawkins:

Looking now at the various things that religious education might be expected to accomplish, one of its aims could be to encourage children to reflect upon the deep questions of existence, to invite them to rise above the humdrum preoccupations of ordinary life and think sub specie aeternitatis.

Science can offer a vision of life and the universe which, as I’ve already remarked, for humbling poetic inspiration far outclasses any of the mutually contradictory faiths and disappointingly recent traditions of the world’s religions.

[…]

When the religious education class turns to ethics, I don’t think science actually has a lot to say, and I would replace it with rational moral philosophy.

In fact, Moldbug argues, just this sort of “religious education” is a big part of how Universalism thrives (we’re back to that first link again):

Fundamentalist Christianity – I prefer the term “salvationism,” because the belief that only those who are born again in Christ will be saved is essential to almost all “fundamentalist” sects – certainly matches some of the above descriptions. […]

In the contagion department, however, salvationism is curiously lacking. Compared to other successful memetic parasites of the past – for example, Catholicism before the Reformation – its presence in educational institutions is negligible. In fact, under present law, salvationism is entirely barred from the entire mainstream educational system. […]  [emphasis mine]

Given that America enforces a separation of church and state that excludes explicitly theological ideas from the public educational system, a meme complex that includes most of the religious beliefs of many teachers minus any religious beliefs that are explicitly theological has a huge advantage in transmission.  Liberal religious sects are far more likely to generate that sort of meme complex for several reasons:

1. Liberals are willing to revise philosophical frameworks piece-wise.  Hence liberal religions are more likely to be coherent piece-wise as opposed to all-or-nothing, so they’re easier to revise further.
2. Actually revising a religious meme complex is the sort of thing that’s more likely to occur in the mind of a liberal.  The whole point of being a conservative is not to revise your traditional beliefs.
3. Conservative emphasis on liturgical traditions makes it harder to separate theology from anything else.

So while I’m not so quick to buy that liberalism (up to and including the basic concepts of democracy) is a bad idea that leads to complete bureaucratic stagnation, anarcho-tyranny, or worse, I can see Moldbug’s point on the transmission aspect.  It’s extremely plausible that many of the religious ideas from mainstream American Protestantism are transmitted frequently and effectively by the public school system.

Of course, my initial reaction to that agreement was, “so what?”  But I would think that, wouldn’t I.

After all, the process that Moldbug argues happened to Dawkins certainly happened to me.  I had little trouble (though the process took some time) discarding the liturgical elements of Judaism, a process undoubtedly made easier by that fact that my parents, despite their membership in a Conservative synagogue, had beliefs which more closely matched with the Reform movement (which Moldbug would describe as “Protestant Judaism”, mere theological window-dressing away from secular “Universalism”, and I myself described as “the Unitarian Universalists of Judaism”, years before I’d heard of Moldbug).  But the same anti-religious-bias intellectual defenses, quite easily inflamed by Christian “salvationism” or Jewish fundamentalism, were (as far as I can tell) barely activated at all when learning about the causes of the American Revolution.  Or singing “Simple Gifts” in music class.

As Moldbug puts it in part of his Open Letter, imagining an optical device that makes the theological atheological and vice-versa:

[…] More to the point, it [the First Amendment] does not say “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, until that religion manages to sneak God under the carpet, at which point go ahead, dudes.” Rather, the obvious spirit of the law is that Congress shall be neutral with respect to the theological disputes of its citizens, such as that described by Professor Hayes. Um, has it been?

[…]

In the Fundamentalens, Harvard and Stanford and Yale are fundamentalist seminaries. It may not be official, but there is no doubt about it at all. They emit Jesus-freak codewords, secret Mormon handshakes, and miscellaneous Bible baloney the way a baby emits fermented milk. Meanwhile, Bob Jones and Oral Roberts and Patrick Henry are diverse, progressive, socially and environmentally conscious centers of learning – their entire freshman class lines up to sing “Imagine” every morning.

Would it creep you out, dear open-minded progressive, to live in this country?

Imagine a Harvard that, as the Harvard of old, primarily emitted Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers.  Imagine that these graduates, as graduates of the Harvard of today, went by the scores into government and NGOs and the educational system.  (And what applies to Harvard generalizes pretty well to Princeton, Yale…)  Such ministers are scrupulously careful about leaving out the god-talk when performing their secular jobs, of course.

Now, modern Harvard is not (for the most part) training ministers, and I assure you the world in that imagining is nothing like the real one.  But what an odd afterimage the Fundamentalens leaves on the back of your retina!  Especially when you look at the public schools.

(This post is reaching Moldbuggian length (note: actually not even close), so I’ll leave it there for now and pick up this thread at a later time.  And hopefully move this blog back away from being the All Moldbug All the Time channel.  But anything that’s taking up far too much of my mental time is an excellent candidate for discussion here.)

For those of you who followed my links on that last post, I should point you to this index, and note that the “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” is probably a better place to start reading than the Brief (lies!) Introduction.

Of particular interest is Part 6, where Moldbug actually details his plan for his favored new form of government (neocameralism, the “sovereign corporation” as joint-stock company).  It’s rather similar to some of the ideas in crypto-anarchism1, it proposes solving the Roman Dictator Problem2 by using strong cryptography.  Significant aspects of the plan strike me as totally unworkable.  For one thing, all the problems that plague DRM schemes would also apply to cryptographically-locked guns.  But it’s still a novel idea.  (As far as I know.)

1. I might call it crypto-fascism, but that phrase already has a different meaning.

2. How do you give someone total sovereign authority but still make that authority temporary or revocable?

Haven’t posted in a while, but my intellectual fare from the past few weeks has been quite hard to digest.  I’ve been pulled into a fascinating blog written by one Mencius Moldbug.  (Edit: Not “Moldburg”.  Why the misreading?  Must have struck me as more Continental.)

There’s probably no brief way to describe Moldbug’s political views.  Short of a ten-thousand word essay, I could say that he’s a royalist or a formalist or a follower of Thomas Carlyle who sympathizes with Robert Filmer (who is, to quote Moldbug himself, “so right-wing, you need special equipment just to observe him”) and considers Hobbes to be relatively left-wing.

Moldbug distinguishes himself from the typical libertarian fare in a few key ways:

1. He seems to recognize the obvious problems with libertarianism.
2. His hypothesis has more to do with decentralized coordination within an extended political structure (including organizations outside of government proper) as opposed to the actions of a monolithic political class
3. He takes more of a “come to the dark side, we have cookies” approach, as opposed to painting himself as holier-than-thou.
4. He cites his sources and is damned interesting.
5. He skips the “wouldn’t anarchist capitalism effectively outsource all the tyrannical aspects of government to businesses?” criticism by suggesting that the government should be turned into a corporation outright.
6. His endorsement of “passivism” is far more soundly argued than Molyneux’s “just don’t vote” argument, which I criticized earlier.  He doesn’t think that enough people “walking away” will create political change.  Rather, he suggests creating an institution to understand the existing structure of government and create an alternate structure (essentially a shadow government) that is so obviously superior that handing control to the new structure becomes a popular option.  This proposal has two advantages:  It would be extraordinarily interesting to see such a thing attempted, and while I still doubt it’s practicality, I’m not sure I could see myself opposing it in any situation so dire that it actually had a chance of success.
7. He has a sense of humor.

In short, Moldbug has excellent rhetoric and is an (artillery shell sized1) bullet biter extraordinaire.  Not to say that I’m persuaded, I’m sure he’d still place me firmly among the supporters of Chaos.  But if you like interesting political writing, you’ll find plenty2 to be fascinated, challenged, and quite probably shocked and appalled by.  Start here, probably.

1. Fired with confidence, presumably, by a Carlylean Artillerist.

2. This post probably exceeds my previous “number of words in posts linked to” count by orders of magnitude.

In 2007, the Daily Mail did a human-interest piece looking at one UK family titled  “How children lost the right to roam in four generations”.  At age eight, their child is allowed no further than the end of the block.  At the same age, his great-grandfather was allowed to wander across the town, including walking to a fishing-hole six miles away.

In 2008, Lenore Skenazy, a New York mom, wrote an editorial titled “Why I Let My 9-Year Old Ride the Subway Alone”.  She quickly acquired celebrity status as “America’s Worst Mom”, and has been fighting to defend her views ever since.

In 2010, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote the following:

At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was.  The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with a physical attack.

I didn’t get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: “My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios.”

[…]

Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it’s only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.

The parental is political, too.

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  – Yogi Berra

As a sort of follow-up to my last post, I’ll say that being aware of one’s cognitive biases is a necessary but not sufficient condition for counter-acting them.  Because even if you’re aware of your biases, those biases still apply, both in how you perceive your own bias and how you judge your own counter-action.  To put it another way:

Idea #4: Predicting the future is harder than you think, even if you know why predicting the future is harder than you think.

(With thanks to Douglas Hofstadter.)

Predicting significant social or technological changes would be hard enough even for a rational actor.  After all, any individual has limited (and inaccurate) information about the current state of affairs, many of the systems involved appear chaotic, and the time-scales involved can be very short indeed.  For humans, it’s even harder.

So when a Reddit post on this comic led me to this article, I was intrigued.

The relevant bit of the article:

Pattie Maes, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab noticed something odd about her colleagues. A subset of them were very interested in downloading their brains into silicon machines. Should they be able to do this, they believed, they would achieve a kind of existential immortality. […]

[…] her colleagues really, seriously expected this bridge to immortality to appear soon. How soon? Well, curiously, the dates they predicted for the Singularity seem to cluster right before the years they were expected to die.  […]

Joel Garreau, a journalist who reported on the cultural and almost religious beliefs surrounding the Singularity in his book Radical Evolution, noticed the same hope that Maes did. But Garreau widen the reach of this desire to other technologies. He suggested that when people start to imagine technologies which seem plausibly achievable, they tend to place them in the near future – within reach of their own lifespan.

The author of the article, Kevin Kelly, refers to this observation as the “Maes-Garreau Law”.

The most obvious explanation for that observation is probably wishful thinking, especially (but not always), if the change in question seems positive.  Or perhaps the desire for personal significance that comes with messianic or apocalyptic thinking.  Kelly comes up with a slightly different explanation, though:

Singularity or not, it has become very hard to imagine what life will be like after we are dead.  The rate of change appears to accelerate, and so the next lifetime promises to be unlike our time, maybe even unimaginable. Naturally, then, when we forecast the future, we will picture something we can personally imagine, and that will thus tend to cast it within range of our own lives.

If I had to guess, I would say that this is not bound by observations about the rate of change.  Rather, since consciousness is centered around narrative, we expect our lives to have narrative continuity.  Thus, predictions about the future that seem hopelessly alien are more likely placed after the imaginer is dead, and predictions about the future that seem like they could fit into the stories of our lives seem like they could also plausibly happen within our lifetimes.

An interesting logical inference:  If the above is true, than one would expect predictions of the timing of the singularity to differ wildly depending on which side of the singularity one is trying to imagine, and how good a job one does of imagining the alien-ness of a post-singularity world.

Google Wave is being discontinued as a standalone product.  I’m not sure whether to be surprised.  On the one hand, it seemed like if anyone could solve some of the flaws of email and get people to actually adopt it, it would be Google.  On the other hand, I was tremendously excited about Wave… but I never used it.

It seems that with networks as big as email, there are no good ways to push out a new protocol.  If you let everyone in right away, it doesn’t scale.  If you slowly add users, people’s friends are not on it when it’s fresh in their minds.  If you make it a separate product, it’s an inconvenience.  If you make it part of an existing product, users object to having it foisted upon them.

Still, Wave contained some fundamentally good ideas.  It makes sense to have an email client that can handle scheduling or collaborative document editing or shared to-do lists or threaded discussions; that is, instead of sending an email with a link to a web-app, why not send an email with a webapp in it?  It also makes sense to create open protocols instead of closed systems, especially if you want to build off of something as widely adopted as email.  (Not that open protocols are guaranteed winners.  Many open-source proponents would like to paint the history of the internet as a steady progression away from “walled gardens”, but that’s not necessarily the case.)

Google Wave isn’t dead yet.  It’s already used by at least two sets of enterprise collaboration software.  Hopefully, some of Wave’s features will find their way into GMail and other mail clients.

What do you think?  Will Wave rise again, or sink into obscurity?  Will the email client of some decades hence look much like one today, or will email’s role be filled by something different?  Will it be in FULL 3D?  It’s the future, after all.