Drone Army

The argument for drones is pretty much the same argument as for any of the new smart weapon systems. Less people killed, the right people killed. Not pretty, but makes perfect sense; better to snipe, than to blindly shotgun everything with your fingers crossed. Very surgical, like Dr. House with a kalashnikov, shooting cancer, unconventional - but great TV. Or "Wall-e goes to Iraq" maybe. Oh, hang on, Wall-e has already gone to Iraq.


Well, that saved me half-an-hour on photoshop. Thank you internet.

On the small-scale, perfect-world end - clear legitimate target, perfect deployment - would seem as ethical as hell. Press-button, destroy evil-doer - easy as a credit-card swipe at the mall, except you don't take home new shoes.

But on the big scale, with a quick squint around the corner of the future, drone-armies are bad news.

But first.

Imagine there is a fat kid. I mean fucking huge. Blimplike in dimension. Put a gondola on that mother and fly him to Europe. But fat kid's trying, he's watching what he eats, trying to reduce the titanic arsenal of food he's got stashed in the fridge, by erm, not buying it rather than eating it. Get slim, save money. Future's rosey. Throw the gondola away, all transatlantic flights cancelled.

I come along. Give him a big smile. Bring in a big ole box. It's the Cheapsnax 3000™ food-dispener unit. Sits comfortably by the fridge - hell the deluxé version follows you around the house - don't even have to get off the sofa - primo smart-snax technology. Your ideal hunger solution - auto-clean function to tidy up collateral-crumb spillage. Assorted pastel colours, interior-decorator approved. Comes with auto-stock support function - you need never actually buy your own food again, no more painful waddles to the mall, consume endlessly from the comfort of your own home.

Unethical..? I mean, I haven't put a gun to his head or anything. He doesn't have to abuse it. I mean, if used wisely, it could save him time and money. If he explodes all over his appartment 6 months later it ain't nothing to do with me.

I was talking this over with a mate at work, first thing he said was "Whoo, cool, but expensive." But - Let's look at some figures.



Not expensive. Roughly half as cheap to make at first glance. But look deeper, and the advantages of drone-soldiers to flesh soldiers are endless. Humans are badly suited to war. Don't need to grow a drone over a 20 year period. Turn 'em out by the 1000, week in, week out. Don't need to send them to boot camp. Downloading in progress. Don't get post traumatic stress disorder. Don't need paying, nor a pension.

Make them modular. If one gets immobilized, it doesn't sit there crying for its lost legs and bleeding all over the place. It becomes a sentry, patiently pot-shotting targets till it runs out of ammo. Then it becomes a stationary mine. Blows up if you come too close. Gps locator chips means it can be found even if rendered completely inoperable. Use the modules left to rebuild other drones. Plug and play. Kill a flesh soldier and he's 100% dead. Wound one and he's a burden on his comrades, even better. RPG a drone and maybe you'll kill it only 20% dead. And it goes right on trucking.

And ammo. Humans are shit at killing other humans. Let's ask statisticians.

In Vietnam, 50,000 rounds were used for each kill, a three-fold increase over WWII levels.

There is an amazing (and startling) statistic out of Iraq and Afghanistan: the United States has fired an estimated 250,000 bullets for every insurgent killed. [source: reddit]

Wow. Just Wow. 5.56mm bullet manufacture and cleanup costs http://ecomass.com/pdf/bullet.pdf. Green bullets, who knew..?

Drone-soldier however, could do better. Maybe not one shot one kill, not initially anyway. But it's a software/hardware problem, and problems get solved. The two big advantages here are:

(1) Scalability. With humans, you have to train each individually. Like making chairs for a living. You make a chair, you sell it. You make another chair, you sell it. You make one more, you sell it too. Write a drone trainer computer program however... Write it once, upload it a bazillion times while you sit back and throw cigar-butts at the chair-maker.

(2) Lack of conflict between orders and instinct. There's a joke. The bare bones are - General sends soldier into room with gun. Tells soldier to kill occupant as test of loyalty. [Gun fires blanks btw. it's only a psych test]. First two refuse. Last one comes out [he's usually of comical ethnic descent - Irish or something] breathing heavily. General says "Wtf..?" Last guy says "Well sir, the gun shot blanks so I had to kill them with a chair..."

Hilarity ensues.

Why's it funny though..? Someone died afterall. Died by chair even, one of the most horrible deaths of all. It's funny because humans have a natural aversion to killing other humans. Look at the propagandic lengths that are needed before killing strangers X,Y & Z begins to seem like a good idea, and the still further lengths required before the job gets done. There is always a war of public relations before the shooting version starts.

But drone boy..? Nah. Just upload new targetting details, insert ammo into hopper A.



I could do this all day. But boiled down, drones, once out of their rather comical infancy, will become an automated war-package. Press button recieve bacon, erm, victory. The Cheapbang 3000™ Death-dispenser.

Is it unethical in itself..? On the scale of individual units and individual missions..? No, no more than an axe chopping trees. Is it unethical on a wider scale, given humanity's frailities in the face of temptation..? Hell yes. No more trees and squirrels crying on treestumps.



Why are wars, big or small, hard to start..? - Unless they are brought to your doorstep and you have zero choice..? Simple answer, soldiers have Mums. And Dads, and girlfriends and wives and children and brothers and sisters and second cousins twice removed. To send a son or daughter off to fight, and maybe die for the cause of country - Dulcé et decorum est, pro patria mori [thanks Seigfried] - that soldier's family has to be damn well convinced that the cause of country in question is beyond doubt. Communism has to be smelled, weapons of mass destruction located, oil supply has to be threatened. Oops, sorry, scratch the last one, never happen. [?Hmm-scratchbeard?]

But if all that's gonna be sent overseas is a bunch of metal and wires, and comparatively cheap bunches of metal and wires to boot, then erm, who cares..? That initial social resistance to deployment, to the commitment of forces, will be reduced to a small murmur of "Well, try not to spend too much cash guys okay..?" Military interventions will barely ripple the social surface tension. What's news-worthy about Maul-e™ unit two-six-six taking a tracer in the chest-plate and getting his paint-job scratched..?

Poeple would just get used to seeing the results of such actions, with near-zero human costs.

ie. casualties for any single skirmish may be lower with drones... More 'ethical'... But the total number of skirmishes would increase. And given our rates of energy consumption... Increase probably exponentially.

Next question of course, the other end of the equation, what stops wars..?

Well, economic-wise - attrition. Lack of matériel, lack of ammunition and other supplies, lack of soldiers to use them. But more often than not, in our modern age of limited warfare, it never comes down to the economic wire - long before that the public becomes increasingly outraged by the loss of life. Erm, the lives of their own soldiers anyway - fuck those other guys. Why else do the armed forces try to minimise casualties..? Leave no-man behind..? Because they care deeply about the welfare of their men..? Yes, that must be it. Nothing to do with trying frantically to eke out their dwindling supply of public support until they achieve their objectives. No, that would be deeply cynical and completely unlike me.

No one will mourn the loss of a drone in combat. It would be like mourning a toaster.

So then, once begun, why stop a drone-war..? Even if an objective is reached, a country subjugated. Why bring them home at all.? It costs big to occupy a country with conventional troops, but you could just park your drones around the map in armored bunkers, put them in sleep mode, and hang out the solar-panels - indefinitely. There's your veto-power right there and ready to go.

So - in short, wars, of the smaller Military/Industrial Complex type, driven by scarcity perhaps, will become waaaaay more common/acceptable to public opinion, and last a lot longer - grinding up more human lives in the process and manufacturing enemies as they go.

Democracy's Bugbears:

Been reading a lot about failed and failing states in Africa and around the world, and political history in general. Gives you a feel for the common themes between states. On paper, a democracy is the best system of government we've come up with so far: a politically involved and aware populace elects some of its peers to act in their intrests to develop the state for the good of all. However, in practice this is almost always not the case, and the populace no more rule themselves than they did under a kings or dictator. Why..? Where does democracy go wrong..?

To me, the biggest threat to a state's balance between an oppressed or ignored electorate to an empowered and involved electorate, are the self-interested elites. Some definitions:

By elites I'm referring to groups of people who can guarrentee the support/votes of a large number of the population to whomever they may designate. These groups are self-serving, and will ally themselves with the state for their own ends, be they money, power or whatever other reward they may seek.

By the term weak state I'm not referring to a state's GNP, or military stature. A weak state is formed when political parties cannot attract enough support/votes from their populace directly to obtain or stay in power, and as such, are forced into alliances with elite groups to maintain/extend their control.

I hesitate to include this elite, as it is more of a background hum pervading the political scene all throughout history, rather than part of a progression. The state is always bound to pay at least lip-service to the prevailing religion, except in the case of Communism perhaps.

I think Soviet Russia was the first state to ever try to expunge religion totally and replace it with atheism, but you could argue that they had no choice but to do so - as religious faith and a faith in Communism both probably compete for the same socio-psychologic niche in the mass psyche - and as such are bound to come to blows. In truth though all they did was drive religion underground. This also turns it into a seam of buried political gold which will become increasingly attractive to future political parties - the first party to cave in and appeal to religion will possibly recieve a landslide of support - as is seen in modern Turkey for example and the success of the first openly pro-Islamist party after 80 years of strictly secular politics.

Origins: For a quick summary of why religions naturally arise and spread see: Here, and here.

Effects: A political candidate or party only has to appear pious and adopt the vocabulary of whatever the majority religion may be to get the religious vote, all other policies being equal. Tax breaks, donations and other favourable economic sanctions for religious bodies don't hurt either. Build a mosque or two. The downside of trying to secure the religious vote is the backward mind-set behind it, that parties end up having to support, however obliquely. Creationism taught in schools as 'fact' and a general distrust of mainstream science - and the state-wide brain-drain this sponsors, varying degrees of intolerance for other religious and ethnic minorities - intolerance of sexual diversity, abortionist issues, birth-control issues. On the judicial side, the interference between, for example, Sharia/biblical codes with more abstract state law.

But then, how much of this would occur anyway, even without active state support, is debatable, as is the plus side of a religious enviroment - increased moral restraint, not to mention a possibilty of alliance with other states of similar beliefs - the crusade effect/Muslim brotherhood of nations etc. - though such polarization of foreign policy along religious, rather than practical, lines is also a minefield.

Removal: In the sixteenth century Henry the Eighth dissolved the Catholic monastries and appointed himself the head of the new "Church of England" basically for a divource and a whole shit-load of gold collection plates. ie. The grip of a religious elite external to the state can be broken, though usually only by its replacement with another form of religion - or ideology as with communism. However, a democracy does not usually have the brute-power of a king/or totalitarian regime, so the direct "burn the churches" route is closed to them. A quiet emphasis of religion-related atrocity - whether it be fiddling with choirboys, Waco and Jonestown, or historical blooper-reels - in the media will undermine the stature of religion in the group mind; the materialist usurption of religious festivals - Father Christmas and the Easter bunny on every corner; entertaining alternatives to piety, cheap booze, porn and reality tv, all under the pinkly beneficent cloud of "freedom of expression" and "freedom of choice".

Ideally, a nominally religious country, with a very lazy collective congregation and a secular state is the best that can be hoped for.



Pretty much the common theme running through the political development of all countries I've read about is the constant battle between the state and the extended family. These kinship circles can vary in size from a single family to a whole ethnic minority. Ideally in a 'perfect' democracy, voting is absolutely anonymous and peoples' choices are individual and inviolate, in practice however, this is seldom the case. And this is the problem. The situation is compounded once a state ratifies and protects the ownership of land, (usually making it safe from its own arbitrary sequestration, at least without fair compensation).

Origins: With land, as with any economic resource, the ancient rule of "to those that have will be given, to those who have not even that will be taken" means that in practical terms the majority of that land will end up in the hands of the powerful few over time. Basically, inheritance of all assets by the first-born son and judicious marriages between land-owning families will tend to create a rural elite, with large extended families dependent upon them and a number of other tenant farmer families effectively under their control. The landowner-patriarch eventually gaining enough clout to control enough votes in an area to guarrentee the election of whomever he chooses.

Effects: This elite is the most damaging to a country. A corrupt politician has many things to offer:

Jobs: - Members of the rural elite will end up sitting on the boards of state-owned buisness, banks, utilities, institutions as well as in cabinet positions - either doing nothing but drawing (very large) salaries, or worse still, attempting to run ventures they have no idea about running. Much of the infra-structure of South Africa under Mbeki was ruined by completely corrupt and under-educated management recruited from his supporters after the end of apartheid for example.

Government Contracts and loans: - For goods and services either shoddy or non-existant in nature, produced (or supposedly produced) by businesses and factories owned by rural elite families. The loans of course are large, and never repaid.

Immunity: - Are the police hassling you..? Not any more they aren't.

The list is endless. Rural elites are the locusts of politics and the chief cause of failed states.

Removal: - Throughout history, land-reforms - the widespread seiziure and re-distribution or leasing of land - pretty much instantly destroys the powerbases of rural elites. However it takes a strong-state or a military junta to put into effect. Industrialization; urbanization - the movement of the rural populace to cities - also gradually leaches the power of rural elites as families disperse and scatter geographically, and become less reliant upon each other for employment as increased opportunities for education leads eventually to more diverse career choices; the emancipation of women and state control of inheritance laws tends to break up the wealth of any particular extended family over time.

When a state gets into bed with the rural elite it becomes a race against time as to whether uncorrupt sections of the government can finesse a reduction of their power before the entire state collapses.



I'm guessing, but I think in the interim between the fall of the rural elite, and the rise of the workers' elite there is a window for a short golden age of democratic politics where there is no short-cut for corrupt politicians to get easy votes - no elites to appeal to and no-one to force the voting choices of the electorate. So then, in this period, elected politicians are almost by default, of the people and for the people.

After America won its independence I think there was such a period, because the colonists, though rural, were such a heterogeneous bunch - hailing from all ends of Europe - there were no large land-owning extended famillies, able to exert pressure on their members and dependents, for a corrupt politician or party to exploit. So then, the notable politicians of the time were true giants, elected for their own merits, policies and personal charisma. You know the ones - they've got their heads on that mountain that Cary Grant climbed in North by Northwest.

But then of course, these things never seem to last...



Trade Unions are necessary. That said, when they get out of hand, things get economically ugly. If a country was completely self-contained - a closed loop of resource/production/consumption - and global competition not an issue, then screw it, let trade unions take over, but in the real world...

Origins: When a state goes through a period of industrialization - factories popping up like mushrooms everywhere, dark satanic mills etc., it gives a government a huge infrastructure headache. To facillitate industry you need large amounts of electricity, steel, coal/oil, water, transport systems - shipping, trains, canals - and only the government has the kind of money to engineer them en-masse. Giant state owned industries and utilities appear. And whenever you get giant state-owned industries, you usually get unions. Big ones. Big ones which, through union contributions, have big war-chests to support strikes and full-time coordinators. Alone, this wouldn't be so bad, but when they form alliances, and come out in sympathy strikes to support each other, countries grind to a halt. I grew up in 70's England - I remember frequent water-cuts, electricity black-outs and coal-shortages, which meant my family, with coal-fired central-heating, got a bit chilly in Winter.

Unions that big, start dictating government policy, and telling their huge memberships, and their families, who to vote for. A new workers elite for the politicians to get into bed with. Which is bad.

Effects: Out of control wage rises and benefits for workers means more expensive production, which means higher-price goods. Okay if you've no foreign competition, not okay if you do. Exports fall, cheap imports rise and your expensive goods stay on the shelves and in the warehouses and all your money leaves the country. Extravagant pension schemes and golden handshakes are great so long as the average age of the population is low, and the death-rate high, but terrible if everyone's pushing 60+ and fit as a fiddle. Closed shops set everything in cement and rule out competition for jobs, ham-stringing employer recruitment policies. Even if wages stay reasonable, "work to rule" ethics and go-slow policies again make production inefficient. Worked-out, inefficient mines and production facillities that are no longer profitable get kept open, and get subsidized.

Because of the above, a number of things gradually happen.

• People stop building new factories in your country. They outsource as much of everything as they can to cheap-ass sweatshop human-trafficker countries out in the boonies. Good managers and entrepreneurs quietly quit and leave the country. Governments have to start "Buy British/American/[insert country here] campaigns" and impose import tarrifs on goods from other countries which pisses those countries off and provokes tit-for-tat sanctions on your own goods, which screws your exports even worse. Effectively forcing everyone to buy expensive home-grown goods drives up the cost of living, even with the wage rises, and makes everyone poorer. A vicious circle. 
• Investors stop putting their money into things which involve having to give people jobs. Automation in factories increases, because robots don't have unions. Unemployment rises. But then so does the cost to the state for unemployment benefits and subsidized housing. A double-whammy. And of course there are also a lot of poor people with nothing on their hands but time. Which means you need to spend more on police. Triple whammy. Bored people screw more, so either populations rise, or abortion rates do. Condom sales improve perhaps, unless you're a catholic country. This fall-off in the job market and the rising cost of living makes unions even more frenzied. Round and round.
• More kids stay in school by default. Even the thick ones who should really leave and learn a trade, if there were any jobs, which there aren't. These thick kids beat up the smart kids and disrupt the classroom, which means the pace of learning gets slower - which is bad because knowledge in every field keeps on increasing regardless. Teachers get stressed. Thick Mums and Dads get all sad about how their thick children fail their exams and look stupid, so education gets dumbed down by sensitive sociology graduates in the government's education department. University entrance exams also get quietly easier, to lessen the impact of school-leavers on the unemployment figures. University stops being free, and grants turn into loans, which prohibits very-clever people from poor famillies who might have had a chance of flying high from doing so. University diplomas, now more common, and from universities of dubious quality, lose their value as levers into employment anyway, not to mention the 3-4 "I could have been working maybe" years lost to their owners.
• If employment laws allow it, smart employers recruit immigrants who can be threatened into not forming unions, and accepting lower pay. This boosts racial hatred in the host populace. "Those Pakis/Wogs/Chinks stole our jobs".
• I suspect that quietly Stock-market investment starts to balloon, because money also doesn't have a union. I also suspect this quickens the cycle of boom-bust economics as too much money sloshes around the system. Global economic links increase and diversify because the people with the money want to invest it in ventures outside the country.

In short, while an unchecked Worker's Elite doesn't ruin a country as badly as the Rural elite, it does end up hobbling it on the world stage, economy-wise.

Removal: Two words. Margret Thatcher. Less specifically, reforms to employment and picketing laws along with the massive privatisation of state-run assets and industries. This means the state suddenly has a lot more money than it had before - hopefully to do good, wholesome things with - and that the buyers' money is tied to the country. Privatisation has the effect of divide and conquer - instead of large homogenous unions, you get lots and lots of little ones, which you can do deals with and set against each other. Then you hold your breath for 20 years and hope everything gets back to normal.

A final interlude, though not so pink and fluffy this time.

So, the state has dismantled the extended family, has most of its population safely settled in big sprawling cities watching TV and sucking back big-macs. The trade unions have been smashed and the headaches of running much of the infrastructure of the country have been off-loaded onto private companies. The middlemen between the state and the populace it serves have been to a great extent removed. In the meantime technology's given everyone new toys and distractions; public health has improved, populations are booming; nukes have made world-wars extinct and have also failed to turn everyone into radioactive slag. Everything should be hunky-dory.

But it isn't. This is because the price to pay for isolating people from each other, reliquishing control over large sectors of employment into private hands and dumbing down the education system is the loss of means with which to easily appeal to the voting public.

The state can't appeal to family values the way it once could, because families ain't what they used to be. Neither can it simply give people jobs, because it hasn't got as many as it used to have to give away. Neither can it use compelling rhetoric, stirring the masses with speeches like, I dunno, the Gettysburg Address or something, because on average people aren't - pan-demographic-wise - as smart/impressed by fancy words as they used to be either.

Religion, or what's left of it, cancels out like it always has - and cannot be used to stand out from the crowd, unless you're a total raving fanatic or a complete atheist. You might manage to swing a nationalist vote - appealing to the heightened racial tension over employment depending on the ethnic mix in your country, but that would be a wee-bit evil and you'd have trouble booting out all the "foreigners" who were actually born on your soil, have passports and are possibly married to one of everyone's cousins.

And finally, you can't go round and press the flesh in person like you used to either, because there are just too many damn people.

What to do..?

Here we run out of history and begin to speculate a little. Before we start, let's examine the qualities of the naked politician.

 Physical Appearance: Even now, with cosmetic surgery techniques developing every year, your average Joe politician is pretty much stuck with whatever his or her genes gave them. However, as long as they correspond to enough of the concurrent "leader" tropes rattling round the collective psyche, the rest can be taken in hand by careful wardrobing, and maybe a touch of stage make-up and careful studio lighting upon occaison.

Don't underestimate appearance. eg. The Warren Harding Error.

          Warren Harding was – most historians agree – one of the worst presidents in American history. He served for 2 years before dying unexpectedly of a stroke. But how he came to become a presidential candidate holds some crucial lessons and warnings for us: “Why do we fall for tall, dark, handsome men?”
          When Harry Daugherty first met Harding – as they both had their shoes shined one morning in 1899 – Daugherty sized him up and thought: “Wouldn’t that man make a great President?” Or a great-looking President. At the time Daugherty was the Machiavelli of Ohio politics, the classic behind-the-scenes fixer, and shrewd judge of character, or at least political opportunity.
          Harding was worth looking at. At about 35 years old, his features, size and proportion attracted attention. The term ‘Roman’ was occasionally used in descriptions of him. He was classically tall, dark and handsome and appeared courteous, virile, generous, genuine and good-natured. However, Harding wasn’t a particularly intelligent man.
          He liked to drink, play poker and golf, and – most of all – chase women. He was vague and ambivalent on matters of policy. His speeches were once described as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea”. In 1914 he was absent for the debates on the biggest political issues of his time – women’s suffrage and prohibition.

          How did this man become President? He looked the part.

Of these four basic attributes, appearance is the most innocent - a makeup artist, hair-stylist or wardrobe assistant would find it hard to get much leverage on the politician they were tending to, much less dictate policy.

  Oration: Voice, body-language, speeches. Here a lot of tweaking can be done. Voice coaching, acting lessons, and a good speech-writer have been the politician's friends for a very long time. (Though a certain base-level skill in communication for all those times when spontaneity is called for sorts the wannabes from the actually will-bees). A politician's speech-writer does put words into a candidate's mouth, but unless the politician is dumb to the point of being illiterate, he still has control over events.

 

  Life History: Okay, so ideally a politician will be a paragon of the times with zero blooper reel content. In real life, there are usually skeletons ranging, from slightly embarrasing to career-ending, lurking in the closet. Here tweaking in the form of spin, concealment and outright fabrication can be applied. Jeffrey Archer's academic credentials spring to mind. This is a minefield, because - if the politician does need something big hiding - it automatically makes him or her the puppet of the ones doing the spinning, or the burying. His or her only hope is to become powerful and popular enough to expose past faux-pas and laugh them off without too much damage being done. There's obviously a limit - reasonably harmless sexual indiscretions, a bit of drunken college tom-foolery are okay but anything bigger...

Wesley Higgins (33) attempted to extort €5,000 from Liam Kelly [Irish Republican party] by threatening to give the pictures to a newspaper. [...] The message continued that Higgins was acting as a "middleman" and the woman wanted €5,000 for the photos. Higgins added that he needed to be "looked after" as well. A later message stated that Higgins was having difficulty stopping the woman going to the newspapers with the photographs. A final message added that the pictures showed the councillor snorting cocaine.  Full story

...and you are going to have big problems.

Personal Wealth:  Ideally - of the people, for the people - anyone should be able to stand for election. However, it's an expensive business. Off the top of my head:

• Support: Can't easily work and campaign, unless you live in a really small place. So you need to support yourself without working for a while.
• Media: At the very least some nice flyers and campaign buttons, maybe a web-page. At the top, national TV slots, polls and market research, and huge rallies/fundraisers.
• Legal: At some point, someone's going to think about saying something nasty about you in public, hopefully false. To deter them, they have to know you've got the money to take them to court, with some serious lawyers behind you, not cheap ones.

For a more detailed example, click here for an expenditure breakdown for Barack Obama 2008. To cut to the chase, a little over 650 million Dollars on media, and about 203 million on campaign expenses.

Of this list of attributes the first three are fairly doable by average Joe/Jane Independent. As long as they are reasonably presentable, don't talk like Donald Duck and have led reasonably decent lives, sans prostitutes and cocaine belly-buttons, they are in with a chance. The real bottleneck these days is how to get yourself noticed by the public. The realy huge, and mainly ambivalent public. ie. The money.

So, assuming average Joe Politician and his party aren't stupidly rich, where does all the money come from..?

Well, donations for a start, which are usually required to be declared - for example:

Note: for the big candidates - donations from large donors, ie. the super-rich - approach 50% plus.

But also the slightly shadier world of loans - which may or may not be declared. How's your credit-rating Joe..?

An article in the Guardian on 21 April 2005 reported:
The Electoral Commission is to investigate political parties receiving secret monies in the form of private loans rather than donations, evading the need to declare them publicly. The Times newspaper today revealed that the Conservatives [England] had received "a number" of £1m loans from wealthy supporters, which were not disclosed as donations. Electoral law states that all donations over £5,000 have to be made public. But the situation with loans is more opaque.

As you may have guessed by now, the identity of the Third Elite is the moneymen - the super-rich - the banks - the media-moguls.

Origins: I think I've covered the creation of the rich in another blog-post - here - so here's some news clippings which testify to their global presence:

in the political process in the UK, according to one watchdog organization.

“When donors are making contributions exceeding £20,000 ($31,000) -- and some are making donations well over £250,000 ($390,000) -- it's perfectly understandable you don't give away that kind of money without expecting something in return,” Chandu Krishnan, executive director of TI UK. In November 2011, a UK advisory body recommended increased public funding as one way to avoid future scandals and limit the influence of big donors in elections, but the three main political parties rejected the proposal.

The Center for Responsive Politics estimates $6 billion will be spent in the U.S. elections by campaigns, political parties and corporations hoping to propel their candidates into the White House. The projected price tag of the 2012 US election dwarfs that of other nations, but corruption monitors from Transparency International (TI) say it's not just how much will be spent but where the money is coming from that threatens the integrity of politics around the world.

For the full article, listing other countries, see here:

Effects: Here, I run out of imagnation, or at least any form of reliable evidence. Off the top of my head, and purely personal opinion:

• Bipolar states, with only two giant parties - the minimum to preserve the illusion of democracy. The money is backing both of them anyway, so to an extent some of the money wins either way.
• De-radicalization of politics, producing parties which are largely homogenous in policy, harder to choose between, which in turn will only increase the amount of media dog-and-pony show required during campaign periods to influence the electorate either way, whihc in turn again will increase the amount of money required to campaign, thus increasing the hold the money will have over the participating candidates and parties. Round and round.
• Supression of paradigm shift technology - electric cars for example and alternative fuels. Money is notoriously conservative with respect to real change - because it costs a lot to switch, and the forerunners, who shoulder most of the R&D costs, make it strategic for others to sit on their hands wringing out the last petro-dollars before eventually adopting a finished product which they won't have to pay to develop, only tweak enough to apply for basic patents.
• Short-term show-off politics. Who remembers the guy who made it a law to have seat-belts in cars..? Even though that single act has saved more lives traffic-wise than any other. But I'll bet everyone knows the guy who pulled them out of the burning wreck of their car, and the doc. who put their face back together. Shock and awe baby.
• Increased surveillence of the electorate, for market research and other purposes - more penetrative advertizing/media probably individually biased by Amazon-like recommendation programs.
• Even greater emphasis on the 'sustained growth' economic paradigm, rather than the simply sustainable.
• Money has no country, I'd expect countries backed by the global Third Elites to act increasingly in unison in the future. New economic crusades, back by state of the art weaponry.

Please feel free to add your own ideas, and you've probably noticed that all of these trends are already happening.

Removal: A toughie. Beyond a Fight-Club-esque destruction of everyone's credit records, a Zeitgeistian collapse of the monetary system, or just general mass-mayhem - The Third Elite are here to stay. I do hava a rather wacky back-door idea though.

If you remember that after the reduction of the older elites - the rural, the worker - the destruction of the extended families and the unions, that the politic parties are faced with the problem of reaching a large and sometimes disinterested public, and that it is the size of the population they need to influence that involves enormous amounts of money. Money which forces them into the arms of the Thrid Elite if they are to have any real chance of running the state.

Well, what if we reduced that population..?  Rendering the money question null-and-void..?   

Okay, before you call me a monster, I'm not talking about killing 90% of the population - though that would sure ease the the whole climate-change-death-and-destruction situation - no, I mean simply how about reducing the number of people eligible to vote in any given election..? If, instead of trying to convince the entire populations of democratic countries:

Why not pre-select a representative few..? And give them the power to elect the next state..?

First selection: Drawn from the last census. Everyone not in jail and/or involved in politics or mentally ill is eligible. A completely random lottery - run by a publicly funded and oversighted institution - chooses (on national TV) 10,000 people. Participation is compulsary. No whining. Each of these people is seriously background-checked for any signs of having been influenced/paid-off/threatened or whatever. Those that fail are kicked off under transparent criteria.

Second selection. For the country concerned an ethnic, economic, religious, and age distribution table is constructed, and a final thousand - randomly chosen from the remaining pool of participants - selected to represent the concerns of each demographic.

These thousand are guarrenteed a continuation of their current income plus whatever benefits they receive, and guarrenteed their current job will be held open for them in the interim they are away. Compensation will be paid to their dependents/family for their relative's temporary absence. The final thousand are taken together into media isolation, though the process itself - reality-TV style - will be comprehensively monitored and televised 24/7.  For X amount of time, the political figures and parties of the time will campaign to this small select few.

And at the end of that time, that thousand will vote, finally and in complete anonymity, and the votes tallied, in front of the nation.

This way, this very cheap way, would cut out the money's influence on politics, opening up politics to all those who are of the people and for the people. And possibly, depending on the reality-TV show's success, maybe educate people about real politics, rather than just the flim-flam.

Thanks for reading.

A Tale of Two Incomes

One of my favourite rants is about working women, not from a "Hah - Women..? Work..? Ridiculous !!!" Bullshit POV, but from an economic one. It doesn't matter which sex worked directly for money first, and which second, because it wouldn't ever have mattered anyway, the result is always the same: everyone gets fucked over.


Let me 'splain. Very simply, beacause I only do simple:

Let's say there is a society of psychotics. They get paid in happy pills. Each psychotic needs a minimum dose of ten pills a month in order to stay calm, and not go on a rampage of machine breaking, boss beating and general assorted mayhem. They are employed by people who give them benzodiazepines in return for work. Happy pills are expensive however, so they really want to pay the psychotics the minimum possible.


However, the psychotics usually live in clusters averaging three members. The tradition of this particular society is that only one psychotic in any particular cluster works for happy pills. Therefore the minimum monthly dosage doled out by the employers to any particular worker-psycho is necessarily not less than 30 pills.


However, over in another valley, each cluster, still averaging three members, is accustomed to having two worker-psychos out earning pills. Everything else is the same, each Psychotic still needs a minimum 10 pills a month to keep them on an even and productive keel.


Initially, when the first two income clusters appeared, they were better off, - earning twice the basic wage, 60 a month - happy as Larry with a few extra pills stuffed under the futon for a rainy day. Then the employers twigged they were paying too much, that the psychotics could put up with less income per capita, and still not go on the rampage, at least not en-masse. So the wages of a single psycho-worker gradually, over a period of years, fell, until it approached roughly 15 pills, totalling 30 per two-income cluster per month, just enough to keep them all sane.


One day, a psychotic from the one-income valley crossed the ridge and strolled through the two-income valley. When they got to talking shop with some of the people there, the one-incomer laughed. When the indignant indigenous psychotics asked why, the stranger said "One of you is working for nothing."


Then of course they killed him and ate his liver.

I don't care who the first income earner, or the second income earner, actually is, genitalia-wise, but I am really pissed off about the 'working for nothing' bit.

And although yes, it is a good thing that more potential earners can now pursue their particular dreams, and true that they can sometimes become doctors and professors and rocket scientists, and be happy and fulfilled (and not to mention rich) in those positions - moreso than they would perhaps have been should conditions have been different - it is also true that the greater majority fail in those dreams and aspirations, and find themselves paying heavily for the opportunities that, with hindsight, most of them were never destined to realise anyway.

This has been an exercise in restricted personal pronoun usage.

Government for the Many, Anarchy for the Few.

I was talking to some guy in a bar the other day. A self-proclaimed Anarchist. I was drunk, so we had an argument. He told me that no such creature as government actually exists, and what we have in reality are scaled-up versions of the 'friendly' skills and commodity bartering systems of old - hierarchies arising spontaneously and organically within anarchic states, without the need for the artificial contrivances and paraphernalia of elections and politic structure.

In short, he said that governence is an illusion, unattainable in any perfect form, and as such only pursued by fools, and that an acceptance of our true 'anarchic' statehood is a more practical, realistic POV.

There are a few things wrong about assuming a social system can be scaled up without distortion - a system which works well in a community of a few hundred people may not work so well when applied to a society of a few million. There are reasons for this. Reasons perhaps most succinctly outlined by game theory.

You may be familliar with game theory in its most well known form of prisoner's dilemma - two suspects, held incommunicado in separate interrogation rooms, deciding whether or not to implicate the other - mutual co-operation (enabled by a faith in the good faith of the other) leading to freedom for both.

This is however, only the tip of the iceberg.

When applied to larger groupings of people, game theory - an attempt to outline the variables affecting co-operation, betrayal and recidivism; punishment and forgiveness and analysing the stability of different individual social strategies within a non-homogenous behavioural community - shows that unfortunately OG's assertion of a scalable 'gentlemen's agreement' system becoming a 'natural/anarchic' government, to be unrealistic.

There is a numerical limit, beyond which a group begins to factionate and schism. For humans, this number would seem to be around 150-200 people. This is extrapolated from brain capacity - of the neocortex, in comparison with average group/brain-size ratios in our fellow primates (Dunbar).

I do not claim it to be especially accurate purely from scientific grounds - rather I draw more confidence from historical observations of military units - the Roman century for example - why hundreds not thousands..? And more modern army units - the largest grouping being (before the command structure splinters into a complex hierarchy) the 'company' - consisting of a max. 250 men, composed from platoons. Also the observance of primitive communities - for example the Australian Walbiri and the Ammassalik of Greenland - all possessing an average of 148.4 people in their villages. (Maybe the 0.4 had a boating accident or something). Also observe the more modern 'primitives' - such as the Amish and the Hutterites. Their leaders observe that "keeping communities below 150 keeps management efficient - beyond that people become strangers to one another". ("The tipping point" - pg. 178)

ie: An anarchic government of gentlemen/gentlewomen does not scale up.

The basis of any co-operation is trust. And trust is not based on friendship so much as predictability. A predictable enemy - the devil you know - is easier to live with than a complete unknown. Anyone that went around trusting everyone on sight willy-nilly, would soon get burned.

And this is where an archy, with a convoluted judiciary system, wins out in the "large population co-operation between strangers" front. By routinely limiting the extremes of behaviour - rape, theft and murder for example - ritualising interactions between people and most importantly being seen to punish prohibitively those who trespass, they provide a proxy for prediction between erstwhile strangers and hence a basis for trust between those interacting with each other for the first time.

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of that society faces of ever becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful', archic society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit are no longer outweighed by a reduction in the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within an anarchic society without such an externalized system.

In short, Some kind of X+archy fosters co-operation in ways anarchies cannot. It also frees us all from having to become Jean Claude Van Damme in our spare time.

More free time coupled with less violent disruption = more work. Well, more something anyway.

On another tack - that of 'alpha personas' - anarchists are right to emphasize the natural arisal of leaders, but they are forgetting duration. With an anarchy leadership is faddish - a leader lasts only for as long as there is no other serious contender, or he retains the imagination of his group (think literally highschool popularity contests and playground bullies) the anarchist leader may be king for a day or king for a year - he has no way of knowing - producing 'slash and burn' crowd-pleaser strategies which though may ensure the alpha's continued leadership, will not necessarily benefit the group long term.

Even if the anarchic equivalent of a totalitarian despot arises and rules for his or her entire lifespan - that is still a very finite spell - not even the three-score and ten is guarrenteed - which though may be a long time in politics is a short time for anything else. The cathedral in my home town for example, took 400 years to complete back in the day. Anything is possible I suppose but I would bet most of this month's salary that the social attention-span of an anarchic body-politic would veto such an endevor.

However, with an 'archy', a leader - once come to power - usually has a certain period of power guarrenteed by an established social dictate - be it a lifetime or a four to eight year span, perhaps even a multi-generational lineage or at least an itterated political-party presence - which allows him or her to put, realistically, into effect plans which though not paying off in the short term, pay off big in the future.

ie. Anarchic leadership is short-sighted, and any autopoietic hierarchies thrown up, are mayfly in lifespan, subject to whim.

All of which puts me in the position of performing my own version of OG's 180° tyre swing in saying that rather than being 'unrealistic and ivory-towered', the pursuit of government, of archy, however flawed and cruel it may be or become, is the only realistic reaction to a species that cannot keep its collective legs together and the burgeoning populace this inevitably produces.

Let me repeat, a romantic adherence to the vice of anarchy, however soft or hard, applied now, to a population as big as the one present would only condemn humankind to the old cycles of growth and mutual culling at a hugely accelerated rate.

But then, romance has ever been cowled in blood.

See also: http://writeitorbust.blogspot.com/2008/11/why-archy-beats-anarchy.html

NoFun™ Money

I recently had a conversation in which someone was basically saying that people who handed out small change to beggers on the street were doing society a diservice:

"Take as a simple example the act of giving a panhandler spare change. While this charitable act may seem noble oir compassionate, from a broader perspective it probably hurts society. By giving a panhandler change, s/he is incentivized to remain unproductive. Furthermore, others are disincentivized: the hourly wage of panhandling approaches the hourly wage of menial work, which is often more unpleasant. Since panhandling produces no value, the reward for the production of value falls off at the low end."

They said.

A couple of points with this.

1) "Since panhandling produces no value"

Panhandling does produce value. Your average begger lives right on the line of survival. He or she is not panhandling for kicks and giggles but simply to get through another day. Beggers, upon hearing that charity has been made illegal aren't just gonna curl up and say "Gee, okay, I'll jus' go chuck myself under a bus." Take away petty charity and what's left..? Petty crime. And petty crime is a pain in the arse. Policemen cost money, so do courts. So does social disruption to local business and residents in areas where once beggers/now malingerers frequent.

Basically, everyday charity is a distrbuted and voluntary tax which prevents a certain demographic of any city from turning into petty criminals.

They also serve as negative examples - bogeymen for the modern times. "Hey lil' Johnny, you do your homework now, or you might end up sitting on the kerb with no front teeth and shit in your pants." A useful social function.

2) "Furthermore, others are disincentivized: the hourly wage of panhandling approaches the hourly wage of menial work, which is often more unpleasant."

I dunno, standing around all day in bad shoes, with everyone wishing you would just fuck off and die, in the rain maybe, or in the cold, with screw all to look forward to, zero prospects and probably no girlfriend, a grumbling belly and bad teeth sounds pretty unpleasent to me. Work, however grindingly tedious and meaninglessly repetitive, does carry an ounce or two of honour and social acceptence along with it. Also the comfort of predictable routines, something to plan around. Externalities. It's not all about money.

Maybe you mean that fabled begger who actually has money bursting out of the seams of his or her matress, a nice house in the burbs and two peachy-faced kids going to college..? There's one in every city or so I've heard. The one near us has a mercedes he keeps in a garage for special days, and pearly porcelain teeth he keeps carefully stained during the week, just for appearances.

I don't think it's the money that people get hung up on but the alleged fact that a begger, by sitting on his butt, can earn enough to have a lifestyle pretty much indistinguishable from that of a menial worker in a more reputable profession.

Which I agree, is not a good thing.

So. A fun idea I had. Rather than abolish or otherwise obstruct everyday charity, perhaps we should change the lifestyle a begger can buy with the income he or she derives from begging.

Ta-da:No-Fun Money™

Let's say that employers are required to pay all their employees at least, I dunno, a very low basic amount - five dollars worth perhaps - of No-Fun™ currency as part of thier monthly salary. An employee can ask to be paid a greater percentage if they should so wish.

Begging is not made illegal, nor is giving - but a begger found to be accepting, or carrying/possessing 'normal' currency is liable to have it confiscated arbitrarily, and one giving it perhaps liable to a misdemeanor charge and a fine.

No-Fun money™ buys stuff just like normal money, however, there are things it cannot buy:

• Tobacco products or paraphenalia.
• Alcohol in any form.
• Weapons and ammunition.
• 'Luxury' food items - Confectionary/fizzy pop/crisps/take away pizza etc..
• TV's, computers, playstations etc.
• Entertainment media - DVDs/TV cable connections/internet connections etc.
• Cinema tickets/theatre tickets/concert tickets/restaurant bills
• Petrol.
• Imported goods. (Ensure the hand-out dollar benefits the host economy).

It cannot buy anything fun. Just the basic "I need this or I will die" kinda stuff, or the educational stuff - books on philosophy etc.

You'd also have to bullet-proof the system by legislating against businesses (off-licences most probably) from running currency exchange schemes on the quiet. A basic cap on how much not-funny money could be exchanged in a single transaction, or by a single individual within a certain timeframe - whatever - it wouldn't stop all of it, but perhaps push the profitibility of the process down to the level of barely being worth anyone's risking it.

Another benefit - as I mentioned before about wage-earners being able to request more of it - it would be a good way for people in debt to combat their bad spending habits, it could also be imposed upon people by debt-collection agencies etc.

In this way, a begger might make an ammount comparable to someone involved in more socially acceptable and productive work, but would never be able to achieve a similar life-style.

Hell, perhaps all state well-fare handouts should be paid in No-Fun™ Money, that would shake things up. Might even improve the quality of TV programming...

...Continued...

Why Archy beats Anarchy

The function of a law, a rule or a moral is not to erradicate totally the behaviour against which it proscribes but rather to reduce the probability that the majority of society faces of becoming a victim of that particular behaviour to such a low degree that it becomes more reasonable, from a cost/benefit basis, on the part of any given individual member of that society to forgo taking prohibitive precautions against such an occurence in their day to day lives.

Boy, that was a long sentence.

What I want to express, but perhaps have not done so well enough is to highlight that as a member of a 'lawful' society I do not need to become expert in say some defensive/offensive discipline - such as fencing or shooting or a martial art - because the penalties I will incur in terms of the time invested and risk of injury involved in their pursuit is no longer outweighed by a reducement of the risk of injury and death from - I don't know - a duel for example, or a mugging.

In being a member of a society where such an option exists - ie. paying through taxation for a judiciary system and accepting the governmental veto on my expressing dissatisfaction through direct violence against another person or persons - I incur less penalty than would be entailed by having to aquire the skills and equipment necessary to maintain a reasonable degree of protection within a society without such an externalized system.

However, in realising that no level of judical control - at least a level that would be acceptable in a 'free' society - will ever totally erradicate the threat of violence, loss or injury, and by refusing to take direct responsibility for either their own [absolute] protection or that of others, any individual member of that society must accept their complicity in the effective sponsoring of 'sacrificial offerings' in the form of the people who actually do roll snake-eyes and become the latest statistic on the evening news, if that sacrifice could have been prevented by the acceptance of stricter curtailments on individual freedom by the members of that body politic or a society-wide [and equally shouldered] investment in self-defence.

Those statistics on the news, the lost boys, the chalk outlines on the street, the wounded hookers - they are the price of conscience we [willingly or unwittingly] pay to maintain a both balance of personal freedom from governmental scrutiny and intervention in our private and public lives, and the luxury of non-acceptance for our own welfare.

We forget this at the peril of totalitarianism.

Laws and moral-codes can also be seen to operate as markers dilineating the topography of benefits incurred either by the individual(s) at the expense of a wider group loss, or benefit to the group en toto - embodied within its given form of governence - at the expense of the individual(s) subject to it.

It doesn't have to be a zero sum game - ideally, a good law should aim to keep the expression of a particular human behaviour set within a range such that it benefits both the individual and the social system playing host to that individual.

If that is impossible it should aim at least attempt to curtail the extremity of its expression to a limit where the expense incurred either to the social system or individuals effected by such behaviour (but not benefitting from it), is tolerable, preferably negligible.

For example "the holding, expression, and discussion of different beliefs and ideas amongst individuals."

This carries an attendant behavioural range: One end of this range being freedom of speech, and debate, at the other is repression, violence, murder, vendetta and war.

The laws affixed to this range should aim to keep a given society tolerant enough to stimulate productivity both technologic and spiritual - whilst acting as a buffer against the social-cohesion destroying consequences of fanatacism.

...Continued...

Black swan

Notes on the Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb:

Pg.36. Non-scalable and Scalable situations. ie: Mediocristan/guassian vs. Extremistan/Mandelbrot

Comparing situations in which the average value is largely unaffected by the addition of a new individual value (physically contrained sets like height or weight, or systems where something is constructed from scratch in each transaction) with situations that are unconstrained - such as personal wealth, or booksales - where there tend to be either absolute losers with zero sales or insignificant property, and true giants like Harry Potter or Bill gates - where the addition of a single extra individual (a black swan) can totally upset the previous average value.

Pg 40: The Turkey lesson about corroborative past - 1000 days of feeding, and on the 1001st day, a twisted neck.

Pg 54: The error of confirmation: "No evidence of X" is not the same as "Evidence of no X"

Pg 59: Switching things round:
"There are no black swans." -->
"All swans are white" ==>
"Anything not white cannot be a swan"

According to (faulty) confirmative logic, that which confirms the second - the sighting of a red mini for example, also confirms the former, that all swans are white.

Pg 68: Cost benefit + information:

*Information is costly to obtain, costly to store and costly to manipulate and retrieve.

To reduce these costs we use patterns and rules to compress/reduce the amount of information needed to re-create the object/event/uncompressed information

However - in so summarizing - we also add more 'order' to the world as we percieve it than there really is - and hence are prone to underestimating the degree of randominity extant in the real world.

Pg. 71 - this error of derived rules - the narrative falacy (drawing of 'story'-like conections between things perhaps not truly connected) and the ludic falacy (using a simulation or 'game'like abstract representation of a real-life situation to draw conclusions, predictions and rules concerning that real life situation - and placing too much faith in them) also effects memory - creating a palimpsest - as you remember not the actual event first recorded, but your memory of remembering of that event, and then the memory of the memory of remembering that event. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, sometimes the details get fuzzy, and sometimes parts of that attendent fuzz get interpreted as something else entirely.

Pg. 76: Narrative fallacy:

"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife."
"Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritence."

The second intuitively seems more likely, though it is in fact not.

Pg. 80: The power of emotional connection - "One death is a tragedy - a million is a statistic." Stalin. That which cannot be easily and vividly imagined, effects us but slightly.

Pg 100: The problem of silent evidence, and the self-sampling assumption. ie: of course all gamblers have beginner's luck - otherwise they wouldn't have become gamblers. Those that prayed but drowned anyway, did not survive to tell the story of how their praying saved their lives.

Pg.107: That which does not kill you makes you weaker. The idea that people are somehow hardened through sub-lethal physical hardship and adversity - which 'weeds out' the weak from the strong - is fallicious because it neglects to state that the surviving 'strong' are also weakened by their trial. The progeny of those so selected perhaps, but again how much strength is derived from nurture, and how much from nurture. How much genetic, how much epigenetic..?

Pg 112: Visable effect. "Look at what I did for you." is more easily marketed than "Look at what I avoided for you." ie: A catastrophe visibly combatted is much more media-friendly than a catastrophe so well prevented that even its threat never broke the surface tension of public perception. (eg. the politician who has saved the most lives is actually the man who exposed the safety records of car manufacturers and made seatbelts maditory, but who even knows his name..?)

Pg. 139: People's evaluations of [the certainty of] their own knowledge is frequently exaggerated. Usually by a factor of twenty. A 2% estimate of error in some area of knowledge is in reality around 40 - 45%. A better education usually increases the error margin, rather than closes it. ie: a graduate is only slightly more knowledgable than X, but is many times more confident in that knowledge.

Pg. 146: Experts and and empty suits: Techné = craft. [know-how] Epistémé = knowledge. [know-what] Imagine you will have an operation - do you want 'know-how' in the form of a surgeon..? Or 'Know-what' in the form of a popular science writer..?

Expert professions: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, chess masters, physicists, accountants, pure mathematicians, insurance analysts (as long as dealing with constrained "mediocristan" subjects). The subject matter does not 'move' - chess is chess today, and chess tomorrow, the mechanics of flying does not radically change from day to day, today's cow is tomorrow's cow. ie: the black swan liability is low.

Non-Experts 'professions': stockbrokers, pyschiatrists, psychologists, court judges, councilors, intelligence analysts, financial advisors. High variability linked with overconfident evaluations and high margins of error... Empty suits and empty words, however convincing they may be.

Pg. 151 & 153: Accuracy of prediction. Study reveals that a PHD makes no difference in accuracy. However - a big reputation makes people worse at prediction than those who have none. Famous people also make bad predictors.

Pg. 159: Points of reference: A subconscious tendency to use (random) numbers as seed crystals around which to build belief. A study showed that people shown a (random) number were influenced by it in later tasks involved in estimation - a high number produced higher estimations than a lower number for example.

People find it almost impossible to evaluate something in isolation without some [arbitrary] point to work from.

cf: James No2's lack of absolute originality - everything is related to past matters. What goes before sets the stage for what comes after.

Pg. 171/2/3: Limitations on forecasting essentially historical events - Soft historical studies/social science - are too based in the narrative fallacy to be dependable as anything but fiction. Popper.

"Fundamentally unpredictable" to know the future is to make the future into the present. To correctly predict the future you must also predict accurately the technology of the future. If you can do that, then simply by idea difusion, you will probably be able to create the technology of the future today.

The law of iterated expectations - "If I expect to expect something at a later date, then I already expect that something in the present."

Predictions of the future are really merely re-runs of today and yesterday, perhaps with a few extra bells and whistles. ie: predict tomorrow with reasonable certainty, but not next week.

Pg. 178: problems with prediction from incomplete information. Billiard balls.

Two balls colliding - easy. Three, possible with precise knowledge of initial states... Nine - you need to take into account the gravitational effects of anyone near the table... Fifty-six impacts - you need to exactly know the states of every single elementary particle in the universe.

Billiard balls are easy - they have no personal needs, drivers or desires. predicting collisions between people however...

... And yet that is what social scientists and economists believe they can [reliably/accurately] do. To give themselves a leg to stand on they assume that everyone acts "rationally" (acting toward their best interests in all futures) and "coherrently" (adherring faithfully to habits and predilictions).

The chief fallacy of this is two-fold - it assumes everyone within a given sample has equal knowledge and the ability to put it into practice, and that all habits/predilictions are strongly held.

Given that people frequently make irrational and inconsistant choices - the general theories of economic optimization fail. There can be no "general theory" from which to make [long-range] predictions concerning any topic in which people are a variable - the branching error margins for their decisions/actions become exponential.

Pg. 195: Prediction errors and motivation [aka anticipated utility/affective forecasting]. It is thought a certain degree of prediction bias is innate and serves as a cue toward [beneficial/aversive] action. We overestimate, sometimes drastically, the impact of future events, both good and bad, on our lives. That new car becomes less a vehicle than a key to heaven; that impending redundancy becomes not so much a hiccup but an all consuming tidal wave.

Without such a fanfare and hullabaloo however - would we ever get up off the sofa..?

Pg. 196: Forward is easy, backward is hard. An ice cube is melting. Predicting the shape of the puddle it will make is difficult, but not entirely impossible, if you measure sufficiently well the starting conditions. But now, given a random puddle of water, try to reconstruct exactly what made it...

Helenus, of the iliad (son of priam and hecuba captured and made to tell the acheans how to capture troy) was a seer who predicted backward - seeing the past from its barest remnants.

Pg. 198: The death of determinism. Is everything determined..? Is randomness truly random or deterministic chaos...?

Random has no predictable properties, not even a predictable unpredictability. Chaos however, conceals a predictable order beneath a superficial surface of fake 'random'. It has predictable elements - but they are [very very] hard to know.

It doesn't matter. For any practical purpose, both are the same. Randomness is incomplete information. Opacity. And induction the fallacy of believing facet of life X. is non-random from insufficient observation.

Pg. 205: Barbell strategy in investment - hyper-conservatism and hyper-aggression. Because risk assessments are always error-prone the best way to invest is in the same way as you would gamble so as to invite good fortune and minimize losses. ie, bet big on sure things, but also bet a little at huge odds just on the off-chance. "Medium sized" bets are the worst - they are lauded as 'safe' but for relatively little return in reality risk huge losses should you invest heavily.

ie: two horses: Mr. Racecourse-Rocket and Mr. No-Hoper. MRR always always places in every race he ever enters. Lousy odds, but a big enough bet each way will always pay for your dinner, if maybe not dessert. MNH however wins a race maybe once in a blue moon, (if there's always an eclipse at the same time) at truly stupendous odds (he's the google of racehorses) - put a fiver on him every week, okay, you'll bleed out slow, but if he ever comes in, you can retire.

ie: invest at both ends of the spectrum, at something like 85% / 15% split - but never in the middle.

(This btw. is also why casinos limit single bets to sizes that won't ever bankrupt them - because the combined losses of the many always more than cover the lucky high-rolling few on any given day).

Pg. 216: Sherwin Rosen - the economics of superstars. The differential in earnings between X and Y in extremistan professions - TV celebrity, sports and films etc is increasing. But this does not mean that X is hugely better than Y at their profession, only that these professions instigate a 'tournament' effect - the winner only has to win by even the merest of margins to scoop the whole pot.

Of course, they can also win by pure luck. And once the initial event has occurred, social coherence/adherence effects re-inforce the outcome as people gravitate toward the winner - heaping upon him or her the adulation and material prizes which may indeed make that person win yet again.

ie: two books in the same catagory - horror say - one's a Stephen King, one's a Mr. Nobody. All other things being equal enough people would instinctively buy the former over the latter to make sure that Mr. Nobody stayed Mr. Nobody, however good Mr. Nobody might really be.

Pg. 218/219 Merton's ideas of "preferential attachment" (herding in choices / preferences) and cumulative advantage (the first million is the hardest - success attracts greater successes etc.) leads to Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noting the link between the globalization of culture and the increased concentration of success. ie - the tournament effect above doesn't really depend on the actual number of players, it still tends to funnel success toward an ever smaller proportion of the population - given that that population is sufficiently well linked together both in comms hardware/software and through shared cultural reference points. MTV say, or concepts of female beauty - Whatever the credo, a punter is still a punter.

In general - the big get bigger, and the small either get smaller or stay the same. ie: We feel - like female birds at a lek - more comfortable with choices that already have been agreed with. (Which also explains the sudden attractiveness you gain from having a girlfriend :) ).

Zipf's law. Linguistics - the idea that the more you use a word, the less effortful it will be to use again. ie: we tend to fish out words from our private lexus with an ease and regularity dependent upon the frequency of their past use. (on the part of the individual and within his/her linguistic enviroment - leading to local dialects appearing quickly if isolated sufficiently)

eg - in English there are roughly 60,000 main words, of which only a few hundred constitute the bulk of written English and even fewer in casual conversation.

Pg. 227: Michael Marmot - Whitehall studies - shows, even adjusting for disease, a higher social status positively effects longevity. eg: an Oscar is worth an extra five years of life to an actor.

People who live in societies with relatively flat social gradients live longer en toto than the populaces of steeply-graded societies. Being a loser kills.

Pg. 233. The Guassian lie: The precipitous fall off slopes of the bell curve - as you move away from the 'norm' - produce probabilities so unfeasibly low that black swans seem completely out of the picture in any sane world. Trouble is, it is massively sensitive to errors in the measurement of sigma (standard deviation) to the point where a very small miscalculation can result in gross (a factor of a trillion for example at 20-21 sigma) underestimation of risks - if a guassian curve is applied to a scaleable situation - such as the stock-market - and used as a reliable predictor of risk... everyone, sooner or later, is totally fucked.

A Mediocristan (guassian) plot has an inconstant (exponential for example) decline as you move away from the centre in either direction, and an extremistan (Mandelbrotian) plot - follows a constant decrease as you move away. Anticipating risks with much greater levels of probability.

The key is to correctly apply the right curve to the right situation, rather than a one-size fits all approach.

Pg. 244: How do you tell where you are..? If you are dealing with yes/no questions, in which magnitudes do not matter or are non-existant (dead/not dead - pregnant/not pregnant - have a something/Don't have a something) then you are in mediocristan. If the magnitude does matter (how much money - how many hits) then you're in extremistan.

Pg. 250: Guassian Assumptions:

One: coin flips have no memory. They are isolate in time and space. You never 'get better' at flipping coins, a head today does not influence the likelihood of another tomorrow.

See - "preferential attachment" and "cumulative advantage" both mean real-world events do not obey Gaussian assumption. Suddenly forty heads in a row becomes more likely than a completely random mix.

Two: Random walks without wild leaps. A Guassian world view has steps of equal (value one) length. The real world has indeterminite step lengths (usually value one) and contains the possibility of a wild leap in times of acute stress.

Pg. 290: Popper. [paraphrase] "Philosophy collapses into empty sophistry without being based around problems that lie outside the strict philosophical domain."

...Continued...