It doesn’t appear to have been covered yet by any US news sources, so I just thought I’d link to this story reporting that, in the 60s, the US military proposed to test nerve gases (Sarin and VX) on Australian troops, who were to be kept in the dark on what was going on. Amazingly, given our generally supine attitude in such matters, the conservative Australian government of the day refused.
From the monthly archives:
July 2008
I’ve had this post in mind for quite a while, and never got in finished to my satisfaction, but it’s been stimulated to a significant extent by reading Clay Shirky, so I thought I’d pop it up now, somewhat half-baked while he’s visiting here at CT.
I’ve updated it a bit, incorporating some comments and responding to others
The biggest single question in political economy is whether and to what extent we can achieve social equality without sacrificing other goods like liberty and prosperity. Neoclassical economics (a project in which I’m a participant) begins with models which imply that, with competitive markets, all factors of production will earn their marginal product. This in turn implies that any intervention that shifts wages or returns to capital away from their marginal product must imply a loss in aggregate income.
There are all sorts of problems with this result, and particularly with simple-minded applications of it, which are legion. For a start, it can only ever be true at the margin – everyone in a modern economy depends for their income on the centuries of effort that have gone into creating that economy. There are also plenty of technical issues which have been debated for a long time, such as the famous capital controversy. I’m particularly interested with questions relating to whether the standard result, derived under the assumption of certainty and perfect information, works under conditions of uncertainty (in my view, much of the activity of the social democratic welfare state can be explained as a form of collective risk management).
Still, in an economy that fits the standard model of lots of competing firms, all operating in a region where constant returns to scale apply, the standard neoclassical analysis has considerable force. But the growing part of the economy centred on the Internet doesn’t fit this model at all. The Internet is a network and the economies of networks are different, in critical ways, from those of the standard neoclassical model.
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I am rushing off to meetings, but this is disturbing news and I figured folks around here would want to know about it/have an interest in discussing it.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation by Kurt Opsahl (posted July 2nd):
Yesterday, in the Viacom v. Google litigation, the federal court for the Southern District of New York ordered Google to produce to Viacom (over Google’s objections):
all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website
The court’s order grants Viacom’s request and erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users. The VPPA passed after a newspaper disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records. As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection.
Various MSM sources are just starting to roll out their own coverage (e.g., BBC).
I guess those – must be many – who watch YouTube without a user ID or without logging in to the service have less to lose, but forget the privacy of the more avid and loyal users.
As to the source code, Google does get to keep that. It’s interesting to see which news item (the user ID issue vs source code) is being covered where.
For a long time, I’ve used the term “delusionist” rather than “sceptic” to describe those who reject mainstream science on global warming. In general, the term “sceptic” is inappropriate for members of this group, since their position is hardly ever based on a willingness to look sceptically at evidence without reliance on a preconceived views. Rather the dominant characteristic is wishful thinking based on perceived political implications. The gullibility with which so many delusionists parrot the latest talking points (“Hockey stick broken!”, “Global warming on Mars”, Warming stopped in 1998″ and so on) is clearly incompatible with any kind of scepticism.
Given the volume of evidence that has accumulated on the issue, only an adherent of some very strong form of scepticism could reasonably remain undecided. Such a sceptic has now appeared in the form of Adam Shand, an Australian program on global warming “it’s only an assumption” that summer is warmer than winter. I imagine he gets great prices on ski holidays, by going in January.*
Of course, once you’ve gone this far in scepticism, why not go the whole hog? Radical scepticism provides the perfect argument for rejecting action to mitigate global warming – if we have no reason to believe in the existence of the external world, then trashing it can’t be a problem, can it?
* Northern hemisphere readers can make the necessary adjustments.
I once said that work on social software formed the experimental wing of political philosophy. I said it to a room full of geeks, not philosophers, by way of exhorting them to consider social ramifications of seemingly technological choices, such as “If you have a point system for good behavior, people will behave to optimize points, not to be good.” (cf. John Quiggans’ post on grades.)
Behind the basic point of this throwaway line, though, is something that has been puzzling me for some time. Like all groups with shared pursuit of shared goals, mediated groups need governance, which is to say rules for losing. It has to be the case that at least some participants in a group are willing to regard not getting their way as both legitimate and acceptable, or the groups would simply fork with every non-unanimous decision, and dividing groups with powers of two in the denominator would atomize even huge collectives after a handful of such decisions.
And so, several years ago, I began reading classics of social contract theory. After the initial excitement of seeing the similarities between Federalist Papers #10 and the Slashdot moderation system, though, I bumped into two key ways in which the arrangement of constitutions didn’t fit with the sort of rules for losing that are essential on the net.
The first is the concern, in recent centuries, about reining in majoritarian tyranny — preventing 50.1% of the polity from simply voting themselves into a permanent advantage over the other 49.9%.
This is something of a concern online, but its also clear that the really novel threat to group action in mediated fora is the tyranny of the individual. Even in systems not constructed around consensus, one or a small group of people determined to upset the proceedings can do enormous damage.
The second is the concern, at the center of the debate since Hobbes, about how leaders are to be legitimated, and under what circumstances, if any, they can be removed and replaced. This concern seems to stem in large part from physical and political facts — to a first approximation, each person is a citizen of one and only one country, and can’t readily switch citizenship should they object to the policies of that country. In the troika of exit, voice and loyalty, much political theory assumes that exiting is off the table for most people.
Online, though, inflexible one-to-one mappings of member to group are rare. One can contribute to Apache _and_ Linux, comment on MeFi _and_ BoingBoing, and so on. Indeed, the two most normal cases of governance on the net are the cabal (there is no cabal) and benevolent dictatorship, as with Linus and Linux or Guido of Python, whose acronymed title, BDFL, stands for “Benevolent Dictator For Life.” What keeps these dictators benevolent is precisely that membership in various groups is non-exclusive, and switching allegiances is under the user’s control, with no analog for rules of state.
So what I want to ask of the collected wisdom of CT readers is this: what one or two works would you pick, from any discipline, that best illuminate the group governance issues we see on the net, as different from political thought about the real world? (Mine would be Exit, Voice and Loyalty, and Logic of Collective Action.)
I believe that Peter Tatchell is planning to run for the Greens in Oxford East against Andrew Smith at the next election. What he ought to be, of course, is a rather dreary backbencher who held a minor position in Blair’s first and second governments, but quietly resigned in the lead up to the Iraq war. At least, that’s what he’d be if the Labour Party hadn’t decided to make him something else. Jonathan Derbyshire has a very fair and accurate account of Labour’s more minor but nevertheless spectacular own goals of the eighties.
John’s post below reminds me that I haven’t yet noted Margaret Drabble’s well-deserved elevation to Dame of the British Empire. I read The Waterfall in my late teens, just because it was on my parents’ bookshelves, and didn’t like it at all, presumably because I didn’t understand a word of it (my parents’ bookshelves provided a lot of my teen reading, including every single on of Shaw’s plays, and the very weighty Auld report on the William Tyndale affair – I was not very discriminating and even read The Concrete Boot which is, if I remember correctly, truly dreadful). I started reading Drabble’s novels as an adult only after hearing her talk about The Witch of Exmoor
I’m organizing a book event for Doug Wolk’s Reading Comics
In other news: I’ve really been enjoying a lot of music by people named Finn. The two albums currently on heavy rotation are The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive (lead singer Craig Finn) and Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning. A couple YouTube links: Liam Finn’s “Second Chance” and The Hold Steady’s “Little Hoodrat Friend” and “The Swish”. But the one you really need to listen to and watch is “Stuck Between Stations”. Bruce Springsteen wishes he was as awesome as vaguely Randy Newmanesque Craig Finn. Who is apparently starved for groupies. I’m not really eligible myself.
This “column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f24b5eda-45eb-11dd-9009-0000779fd2ac.html from Wolfgang Munchau is a keeper. “Challenged”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2008/06/expulsion-from-europe/ by Gideon Rachman last week to reveal the theory under which he believed that the Irish could be kicked out of the EU for having had the impertinence to vote ‘No’ a couple of weeks ago, Munchau obliges:
My own hunch is that they will try to find a way to enforce the Lisbon treaty without the non-ratifiers. As a first step, they will try to offer the No-sayers a quit-and-rejoin deal. It would be the least divisive option of all, but unfortunately, it may also be one of the least realistic. … … In Ireland’s case it may require a referendum to get out and another one to get back in. … If this is not possible, there are several other options involving varying degrees of involuntary separation. For example, everybody would formally remain inside the EU on the basis of the Nice treaty, but the ratifiers would organise their areas of co-operation outside the EU and its institutions – on foreign policy, immigration, economic governance, maybe even on energy and the environment. … There is, of course, the ultimate threat; not a trial separation, but permanent divorce. The Lisbon ratifiers formally leave the EU, and re-group under a new rival organisation. In reality, this is not so much an option, but the thing you do when you have run out of options, the strategic choice of last resort. Like a nuclear bomb, it is a useful device to be used in an emergency, not something you plan for.
I’ve recently had to advise some students who wanted to write papers on the topic of humanitarian intervention. Not for the first time, it brought home to me how strong the disciplinary pressures towards a particular perspective can be. Political philosophy (of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety) isn’t an entirely fact-free zone, but the way we often discuss matters of principle tends to push us towards favouring _policies_ independently of the way things actually are. So we might ask, what should be the foreign policy of a just liberal state and what attitude should such a state have to “outlaw regimes” which are engaged in systematic human rights violations. And, in the light of such thinking, what would the laws of a just international order look like? What rights against interference would states have? When would there be a duty to intervene? And so on.
The distinction between sociology and anthropology, as I learned it, is the distinction between the study of industrial and non-industrial societies. (Obviously false at the margins, but as a rough and ready definition it seems servicable, esp. as so many people offer this answer to the basic question.)
My interest in tagging has led me to assume that any such label is a social construct mainly held in place by its beneficiaries, rather than being something true about the world (and one of my many crank beliefs is that the ability of academic departments to defend the edge cases of such definitions is going to take a hit in a networked society.) However, since I have posting privileges at CT this week, I’d like to run the thought experiment a different way.
Sociologists and anthropologists of living culture have different outlooks and tools. What would change if they were each dispatched to the other’s research sites? If organizational behavior were the primary tool for understanding hunting raids, or if board meetings were viewed through an anthropological lens?
I think we can all construct a world where interesting results would appear (and obviously some of that work is being done already), but would the results be _better_ than what we have today, or just novel? Is one discipline more transportable than the other? Could one simply disappear, or subsume the other, with little loss of intellectual value, or could they merge as equals?
Put another way, if we strip away the historical bias of the kinds of societies being observed, how different are the core values, tools, and intuitions of the two (one and a half?) disciplines?
Via Teresa. I have to say that I was skeptical for the first fifty seconds or so, what with the new-agey soundtrack and the apparently solo globetrotting, but what comes after is just absurdly sweet in a nerd-brings-the-world-together sort of a way. Enjoy.
Consider the following piece in the Daily Telegraph, which may begin making the rounds:
Scientists find ‘law of war’ that predicts attacks: Scientists believe they may have glimpsed a “law of war” that can be used to predict the likelihood of attacks in modern conflicts, from conventional battles to global terrorism. … The European Consortium For Mathematics in Industry was told today that an international team has developed a physics-based theory describing the dynamics of insurgent group formation and attacks, which neatly explains the universal patterns observed in all modern wars and terrorism. The team is advising the United Nations, the Pentagon and Iraq. …
Most remarkable, “or the case of modern insurgent conflicts, our results are in close agreement with observed casualty data.” “What we found was really quite startling,” said Prof Johnson. “Although wars are the antithesis of an ordered system, the datapoints for each war fell neatly on to a straight line.” The line meant they obeyed what scientists call a power law. The “power laws” describe mathematical relationships between the frequency of large and small events.
This finding is remarkable given the different conditions, locations and durations of these separate wars. For example, the Iraq war is being fought in the desert and cities and is fairly recent, while the twenty-year old Colombian war is being fought in mountainous jungle regions against a back-drop of drug-trafficking and Mafia activity. This came as a shock, said the team, since the last thing one would expect to find within the chaos of a warzone are mathematical patterns. …
“We can use the power-law distribution to accurately predict the likelihood of different sized attacks occurring on any given day. This is useful for military planning and allocating resources to hospitals. .. “The fact that the power-law distribution seems to be constant across all long-term modern wars suggests that the insurgencies have evolved to find an ideal solution to the problem of how to fight a stronger force. … “Unless this structure is changed then the cycle of violence in places like Iraq will continue,” said Dr Gourley.” We have used this analysis to advise the Pentagon, the Iraqi government and the United Nations.”
This one has all the ingredients: a few economists, some physicists, a couple of papers on arxiv, power laws, media coverage, and of course the thrilling sense that no-one has noticed anything like this before. Except, of course, they have.
Seen outside a Walgreens. Maybe the owner was getting some antibiotics.
Eric Lawrence, John Sides and I have just finished writing a paper which looks at the first decent dataset that allows us to figure out what blog readers look like. This isn’t a final version (there are comments from Eszter and a couple of other readers that we want to incorporate – further comments and criticisms welcome), but it is just about fit for wider human consumption. The paper is “available at “:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers_LAB.cfm?abstract_id=1151490 SSRN (if you’re signed up with them, we’d love you to download it from there cos it’ll bump up our hit count), and at “http://www.themonkeycage.org/blogpaper.pdf”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/blogpaper.pdf if that’s more convenient. So what do we find?
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