Alex Jacobson 3.0

I saw the big amazing basketball fight on TV last night at Godzilla Sushi in SF. If you can’t see a full big screen version, at very least, see the online video. Then read this commentary. Truly Amazing stuff.

Fan discipline is incredibly poor. Emotions running very high. Once a player is in a fight his teammates HAVE to come help (they are team). So the teams both get up off the benches when each one has a member in that initial fight. But the teams know the fight is stupid and calm down and sit down. Artest goes and lies down to calm down at which point BANG a fan throws a bottle at him. Artest gets up goes after him. At this point the frans decide to side with their own and attack Artest. Artests team mates now need to pull him out and it all keeps escalating.

Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying “A pack not a herd“. But this situation illustrates exactly the complexity of his cause.

Herds fail when the allow their members to be preyed upon e.g the Europeans who stand by while allowing a lone gunman to kill people in Sweden, the Germans handing the Jews over to the Nazi authorities, the European states attemtping appeasement of Hitler and Mussolini, and the international community for failing to stop genocides all over the world.

But, in fairness to the pacfists all over the world, World War I and the Cuban Missile Crisis both appear like examples of the risks of the alternative. The death and devastation of World War I was the result of a dynamic very similar to the basketball game. The failing Austro-Hungarian empire needed to assert its authority over the Serbians. A network of alliances then forced the Germans to preemptively attack France and WWI began. The Cuban Missile crisis had a similar quality as the logic of warfare and alliances trumped systemic common sense to put the world at risk of nuclear war.

So we have this apparently conflict between the risks of herding pacifism and the risks of predatory alliances and teams. But this conflict is only apparent and actually a result of failing alliance/team discipline. The solution is for the members of the pack/alliance/team to have enough sense of their systemic health so that they punish members who put them at risk of being drawn in to unhealthy confrontations and conflagurations. The real risk is cultural failure.

If the Piston fan who threw the bottle at Artest really and viscerally understood that the rest of Detroit would hate him for his unsportsmanlike conduct. Then it probably wouldn’t have occured to him to do what he did. If the fans around him also shared that understanding then the man would have been viewed more like a lone gunman who needed to be taken out and less as a representative of the Piston fans whose honor needed protection.

In the case of WWI, the Congress of Vienna balance of power system set up by Metternich after the Napoleonic wars lacked the fluidity to prevent allies from doing stupid things. But more importantly, it lacked any framework for parties rapidly to communicate their power intentions and to communicate with each other what any given anticipated action would force others to do. In short, the Congress of Vienna did not leave its members with a way to understand what system health was and it also lacked a way for parties to simulate before acting. Today we have a United Nations and modern media environment that for all their faults allows parties to play out the results of their actions in theory before they put them into practice. For example, these institutions allowed the US to telegraph its intention to invade Iraq long before it actually did so and gave everyone else the opportunity to articulate how they would handle it if the US went through with the plan. The lack of surprise and the testing of ideas dramatically increased the safety of everyone.

I am flippantly describing the plan by the author of DeanSpace, the software tool that allowed Dean supporters to avoid talking to anyone but themselves. He wants to institutionalize this behavior for a “progressive movement” that, thanks to people like Zack and Michael Moore, has its head so far up its ass that it already resembles a Klein bottle.

Rather than testing their ideas in the market, these foks get together and reassure themselves that they are obviously right. It is emotionally incredibly reaffirming and works well for a Democratic party that markets itself to a population of urban voters that moved to cities because they were unable to cope with justifying their choices in smaller towns where they were more visible and where their behavior was more unique, to “intellectuals” who were losers in high school, and to racial/ethnic minorities in search of critical mass and social support.

Having done so, the Democrats then exhbited the pathologies identified by Clay Shirky in “A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy,” villifying those not in the group as well as (and especially) those seeking to leave the group via greater participation in civic society (e.g. higher taxes on the “rich” with a low threshold for qualifying as “rich”, opposition to school choice, affirmative action, etc…) . The result is a classic Clayton Christiansen style pursuit of purity/quality at the expense of market. The dominance of the liberal media provides some protection for the right from falling into this trap. But projects like DeanSpace/CivicSpace make it worse.

If the Democrats really want to win elections, they need to get out of their pure virtual worlds (see prior post) and engage the real world. Rather than setting up systems to help them talk amongst themselves, Zach should be providing them with more effective systems for arguing with Republicans. Alternative/New media like talk radio and the blogs were built on attacking the liberal mainstream media. The Republicans there practiced dealing with and countering Democratic claims and arguments and distributing those memes quickly. The Democrats in contrast simply denigrated these disreputable non-institutional sources and became shockingly ignorant of and facts and arguments that would put their views into question when presented to an open minded potential voter.

JustOneMinute proposed a survey to test the ignorance of Democrats on substantial issues. I’l excerpt here

suppose we designed a survey loaded with “democratic myths”. My (untested) hunch is that the reality-based community would do pretty badly. [...]

(1) Bush lied in his 2003 State of the Union Address when he said that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”.

(2) Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed Bush’s lie about Niger.

(3) We went to war with Iraq because George Bush said that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US.

(4) It was George Bush who authorized the departure of the Bin Laden family from the US after 9/11.

(5) George Bush plans to re-instate the draft after his election.
[...]
(11) George Bush refused to authorize the release of his Texas Air National Guard records.

(12) John Kerry released all of his military records, with the exception of some items related to his personal medical history.

(13) All of the charges made by the Swift Boat Veterans were shown to be false.

[...]
I would expect an obvious left-right divide amongst respondents. And for most of these, the obvious lefty answer is wrong

I doubt that Zack’s system would fix these sorts of problems. Today I got a link to this “funny” CraigsList post:

Reply to: anon-47785163@craigslist.org
Date: Wed Nov 03 19:11:50 2004

I would like to fight a Bush supporter to vent my anger. If you are one, have a fiery streek, please contact me so we can meet and physically fight. I would like to beat the shit out of you.

As a Republican who lives at the core of blue state society and in the context of all the violence directed at Republican campaign offices both before and after the election, I don’t find it so funny. I find it scary.

At ACC, Peter Thiel, ex-CEO of PayPal, talked about the trend towards virtual value. The content was largely anti-foundational, with him noting that you can view everything in terms of bits or atoms. That the atoms of a human are cycled out every 6 months but we still interpret each other as the same person. He also discussed the possibility for the virtual sphere to escape the control of existing temporal powers (e.g. government). He noted that more than 40% of the worlds wealth is now stored in tax havens like the Switzerland or the Caymen Islands. He was hopeful that the financial system could achieve complete independence and that perhaps other virtual systems would follow, and begged three really important questions:

1. What exactly does virtualization mean?
2. Is it really possible?
3. Do we want it (for some definition of “we”)?

On the definitional front, it is seems really hard to differentiate it from religion. At the extreme, it is really hard to tell the difference between Transhumanist claims that one’s “mind” persists after uploading to some network based virtual reality haven even as the body is left to die. And Christian claims about a soul going to heaven after the body dies.
A Transhumanist might respond by claiming that they can communicate with the uploaded entity and that uploaded entity is responding. Pre-Christian animists used to make these sorts of claims as well.

But, if we were to stipulate nonetheless that the difference really is about some way in which participation in a virtual world actually does have an effect on real world behavior, then the question is simply how vulnerable those participants are to temporal power. For example, if one spends all of one’s time in virtual estate in Second Life, then perhaps one cares little about one’s real (world) estate. If one really enjoys virtual sex, perhaps one has less need to fetishize the physical version. If one spends all of one’s time zoned out on heroin (or lotus eating!)…. And perhaps suicide bombing becomes completely reasonable to those not concerned about death.

But, let us exclude real-world ascetisism as a model for temporal invulnerability for the moment and assume that virtual world participants have real world desires that can be in conflict with those of others… Now we have the premise of traditional economics, unlimited wants and FINITE means.

So, here, virtualization means simply some form of collaboration in order to achieve real world gains. What is appealing here is that no participant is harmed by these gains. An economist would refer to these gains as Pareto improvements. So now it looks like virtualization is simply communication infrastructure for various forms of social arrangements to achieve real world ends!

On the possibility front, there is no question that the world is non-zero-sum so virtualization in that sense is possible, but the original question was whether it is possible to have a financial system that operates outside the grip of temporal power. Let’s talk about desirability and then return to this possibility question…

It is obviously the case that “we” for any definition of “we” want highly efficient communication infrastructure. The open question is whether we want it for “them” when “their” interests are in conflict with ours. For example urban existence is already very virtual. We participate in a virtual world called “money and contracts” to get off the farm and maximize one’s options for physical intercourse. On the other hand, we want to prevent terrorists from using these same networks to destroy this urban existence we hold dear. The result is another virtual world called “government” that interferes in the “money and contracts” world to protect “us” from “them.”

From running PayPal, Peter knows better than most that, as another PayPal founder puts it “Fraud is not a percentage!” Economists may recognize this as a modern restatement of Gresham’s Law: “Bad money drives good money out of circulation.” In the case of PayPal, this means all sorts of fraud protection measures that added substantial friction to PayPal’s ideal virtual economy. Notably these fraud protection measures included resort to the use of real world enforcement mechanisms to protect the interest of PayPal’s virtual customers. But this property is not unique to PayPal. The existence of any virtual world depends on real world institutions to which they will therefore inevitably pay dues/taxes/etc and around which they will need to organize. Note, this fact is a consequence of the finite means issue above it is not particular to any given virtual structure and to use a very different sort of example, it why the terrorists are forced to defend Fallujah (follow this link it is really good on this issue!).

To put it all really simply, a virtual world can be independent of the real world if and only if is a quasi-religion. If it is not a quasi-religion, it will necessarily be subject to real world constraints and be dependent on real world insitiutions for continued operation.

David Brin, author of the Transparent Society and advocate of democratic surveillance, debated Brad Templeton Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the relatie merits of privacy vs transparency. They both seemed to assume that surveillance technologies were inevitably going to win out over privacy protecting technologies. The history of warfare should tell us that it is always an arms race.

What really surprised me here is that neither approached this issue from the perspective of the election we just had (perhaps because they were both in agreement on being rabidly anti-Bush). David Brin is arguing that we should be able to observe every little detail about our neighbors. Brad is arguing that we need privacy or this ability to see our neighbors will be abused by elites. But, neither addressed the question of whether we should have privacy in the voting booth. And, what technologies we can apply to protect voting booth privacy if we even should.

Perhaps Brin would argue that we will just learn “to avert our eyes.” But I find this argument shockingly weak. There is a reason why virtually every democratic society has tried to protect voter privacy. I am sending Brad and David a link to this post. Lets see what they say.

At the conference, Alex Lightman told me about the new politics of Internet standards committees. In the old days, the designer of Internet protocols had to make tradeoffs that were largely technical in nature, they largely designed with the interest of vaguely freedom oriented people’s in mind. Today the parties to these sorts of discussions include people like Chinese Intelligence who are more interested in improving their ability to track users and do damage to the US in case of war, etc. I guess the Internet is all grown up, but this new environment is a little scary.

For example, SMTP, the protocol that governs how email is delivered on the Internet was written in an era when bandwidth was in such short supply but the time it took for a packet to round trip between two internet nodes was relatively short. SMTP is a brilliantly designed protocol for such an environment. However, today the opposite is true. Bandwidth is cheap but round trips are expensive! If John Postel, the author of SMTP, were alive and writing a mail protocol for today’s Internet, I have no doubt he would make different design decisions, but that these decisions would be in the interests of the Internet’s end users.

The problem is that the people in charge of designing the next generation of Internet protocols are NOT optimizing for the needs of end-users. They are optimizing for state control and state interests. It is unclear whether the interests of end-users are adequately represented on the various design committees and this is dangerous. We don’t want IPv6 to make it easy to track the location its users. We don’t want next generation name services to make it easy for a government to shut down operation of a web site it doesn’t like!

I’m not entirely sure what needs to be done here. Alex Lightman is trying to raise awareness, but I think we may need more….

I spent the weekend at the Accelerating Change 2004 conference in Palo Alto. Andreas Olligschlarger gave a presentation on the inadequacy of law enforcement information technology and what they were doing to address it. What was interesting about this challenge is how “fighting the last war” it all was. I have no doubt that we can improve substantially law enforcement’s ability to deal with old fashion crime… to catch criminals after the fact and incarcerate them. Certainly this helps deter crime committed for selfish reasons. But this sort of crime is largely small in scale…. There just isn’t much bonus in killing large numbers of people to steal a wallet or operate an illegal gambling operation.

But, after 9/11, the crime about which we are now increasingly worried is that committed by those willing to die for their cause. These people are willing to die in order to draw attention to the cause they believe in and punish those they think are their enemies. The difficulty we face is that, until the crime is actually committed, the perpetrators of these crimes are not violating any law so they cannot be detained without violation of their civil right, the time from crime in progress to major damage is likely too short to deploy law enforcement officials and catching the crimials is not helpful because they may expect to die in the course of committing their crime. There were very limited reasons to worry about box cutters carried onto airplanes before 9/11. I don’t know how we stop individuals from carrying harmless stuff onto airplanes that can be combined with stuff from others on-board to form a weapon.

We can reduce our risk of this new style crime by:

• A pack not a herd. having an alert and trained citizenry that can act locally and on their own initiative when they suspect a crime in progress. The “Lets Roll” passengers of of the 9/11 flight that fought back against the terrorists are one example. The passenger on another airplace that noticed Richard Reid trying to detonate his shoe is another. If we take this notion seriously we may want to relax subantially restrictions on concealed carry and other forms of gun control. In fact, we may want to actively promote people bringing weapons onto airplanes because it increases terrorist uncertainty further! It also increases the risk of a drunk stupid passenger with a weapon causing more limited damage.
• Preemptive incarceration. We allow law enforcement much more lattitude in arresting and incarcerating people who have not done anything obviously wrong (based on “probably cause”?). The large scale crime described above forces us to re-weigh the costs of false positives and false negatives in law enforcement. The notion that we are going to tolerate a much higher level of false positives makes me really unhappy, but the fault may lie with the new technology for destruction and not with law enforcement itself.
• Memetic warfare. We organize to find people promoting ideologies adherence to which substantially increases the likelihood of violent attack and engage in “the politics of personal destruction.” However the notion of our government actively doing this to private citizens make me more than a little nervous.
• Expandng “Fire in a crowded theater” law. Existing law recognizes that the first ammendment does not permit someone to shout fire in a crowded theater. Perhaps we can find a way to extend this law to cover ideologous the instigate violence against other groups or against the country. Again, we have to think seriously about how to structure such a rule to limit abuse. But, again, we are reweighing the risk of false positives against the risk of false negatives.

But whichever rules you pick, the notion that enhanced and centralized law enforcement technology can, in and of itself protect us from another 9/11 is highly unrealistic.

I was having an email debate with a friend about the differences between Republican and Democrat economic policies. My complaint about his argument was that he was attacking strawmen rather than actual arguments. I think it is useful to reproduce some of the discussion here. The context of this discussion is his endorsement of this screed by Al Gore:

I’m convinced that most of the president’s frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals and then cloaks them with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans … who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world.

Truly, President Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the American people and give as much of it as possible to the already wealthy and privileged.

Here goes my response