Collapse and Complexity May 13, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Technology.Tags: Jared Diamond, Jon Taplin, stock market collapse
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Last week, the stock market plunged nearly 1000 points in a matter of minutes, although the market clawed its way back a bit before it closed. We still don’t know what happened.
A stock market out of control is a scary thing, and it led Jon Taplin to reflect on the problems inherent in complex systems, problems which are likely to get worse as society becomes even more complex.
As societies and systems get more complex the layers of hierarchy cannot keep up with the complexity of the system. American organizational philosophy has always been built around the idea that “bigger is better”. As Alfred Chandler stated in his seminal history of industrial capitalism, the American advantage flowed from the “potential for exploiting the unprecedented cost advantages of the economies of scale and scope.” [ …]
But what Tainter and other writers like Jared Diamond are suggesting is that a certain point, scaling up begins delivering diminishing returns, as MacKenzie points out.
The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour – or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare – diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.
But complexity often leads to tragedy as well. Just as in the forward operating base in Afghanistan or on the floating drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, the front line soldiers only have some of the information needed to handle a breakdown in the complex systems because of the chain of command structure in both the military and the oil business. And of course the complexity of a campaign like the Afghanistan war confuses even the most senior commanders. […]
The real story of today’s market crash will be the war between the high-frequency trading systems and the the retail brokers.
Among the big losers in the selloff were likely to be investors who had put limit orders on stocks they held. If an investor had placed a limit order with his broker to sell his P&G shares if the price fell to $50, then that sell order would have been triggered as the stock tumbled to its low of $39.97. The investor would have lost money on that sale and then lost again when the stock rebounded back to close at $60.76. Worse, if the investor had held the stock for a long time and had a gain, he would be hit with a tax bill on his profits.Accelerating the declines, high-frequency hedge funds, which use computers to trade at super high speed, appeared to pull back from the market as prices collapsed. These hedge funds have grown to account for a significant amount of trading volume, and their absence likely created a void into which prices fell.
As a system becomes more complex, the interconnections between the individual parts grow geometrically. Each new input multiplies exponentially, the number of potential interactions. Yet, the amount of work accomplished typically can only grow arithmetically, by adding more hours or more workers. (Unless new technologies increases productivity) Even the designers of complex systems may not be able to explain how input produces output, and the combination of possible inputs is too large to thoroughly test. Thus, in complex systems, responsible mangement may be impossible because there is much one doesn’t know and you don’t know you don’t know.
Eventually we simply run up against the ability of human beings to process information rapidly. So we let computers do the thinking. But computers are not good at anticipating the unexpected.
The result is system fail.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Adding Insult to Injury May 12, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Arizona immigration law
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It is hard to imagine a policy more Un-American that Arizona’s new policy of mandating police to stop anyone who looks “illegal”.
But Arizona is trying desperately to double down on the racism
Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature Thursday, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”
As ThinkProgress notes, the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican-American studies department is the target here. The state superintendent charges that the program exhibits “ethnic chauvinism.”
So teaching brown students about their history is equivalent to treason? Who knew?
Meanwhile, in a move that was more covert until the Wall Street Journal uncovered it, the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.
I’m not sure what an “ungrammatical accent” is. But for kids trying to learn English so they can, you know, assimilate into society, you wouldn’t want them learning from someone they can actually understand.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
They Are Us? News from the Primate Research Front May 11, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Human Nature, Science.Tags: chimpanzees, DNA, homo sapiens, hybrid, Neandertals, toolmakers
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Time for an update on our ongoing reevaluation of our primate cousins: here’s story #1, from the New York Times. In brief, we’ve known for fifty years that humans aren’t the only tool users, or even tool makers. Now it turns out that humans aren’t the only ones using, well, sex tools, either! One group of chimps in Tanzania does, too (which, by the way, makes it a culture, rather than instinct):
After noting that chimpanzees’ “tool kits” are now known to include 20 items, Dr. McGrew casually mentions that they’re used for “various functions in daily life, including subsistence, sociality, sex, and self-maintenance.”…
…The tool for sex, he explained, is a leaf. Ideally a dead leaf, because that makes the most noise when the chimp clips it with his hand or his mouth.
“Males basically have to attract and maintain the attention of females,” Dr. McGrew said. “One way to do this is leaf clipping. It makes a rasping sound. Imagine tearing a piece of paper that’s brittle or dry. The sound is nothing spectacular, but it’s distinctive.”
The NYT science piece by John Tierney is on the flippant side, but that doesn’t detract from the power of the report: sexual practices among apes can be local, non-inherited, taught, and culture-driven in addition to being biological. Sounds rather familiar.
And here’s story #2: Europeans and Asians are related to Neandertals, after all! Now we’ve heard for ten years that Neandertal DNA hasn’t been found in the human population, but that turns out to be false: Discover Magazine reports that, according to a study published in Science ,
Researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology first sequenced the entire Neanderthal genome from powdered bone fragments found in Europe and dating from 40,000 years ago–a marvelous accomplishment in itself. Then, they compared the Neanderthal genome to that of five modern humans, including Africans, Europeans, and Asians. The researchers found that between 1 percent and 4 percent of the DNA in modern Europeans and Asians was inherited from Neanderthals, which suggests that the interbreeding took place after the first groups of humans left Africa.
Anthropologists have long speculated that early humans may have mated with Neanderthals, but the latest study provides the strongest evidence so far, suggesting that such encounters took place around 60,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East [The Guardian].
So does that mean that Homo Sapiens, just having wandered out of Africa, and the waning Neandertal populations found each other attractive, dated, and intermarried? This is an issue some of us have been wondering about for decades, and what the research apparently shows is that Neandertal male DNA is present in the human population, but not female DNA. A variety of explanations have been posted on various science websites (see the links in the Discover article quoted above) , such as the very good idea that a pregnant Neandertal female would give birth with her own family, while the human mother would raise her hybrid child with the other humans, where the Neandertal genetic material would show up later. That would mean that both species adhered to the ancient matrilocal custom of the family living with the wife’s maternal relatives. But we can’t possibly know about such customs, at least at this stage.
I have another idea which I will float here: evidence of Neandertal DNA in the human population after their move out of Africa doesn’t mean that Neandertals and humans liked each other, or that they lived together as families, or that they had hybrid human-Neandertal societies. As Hemingway says in The Sun Also Rises, “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so…” But the real story may be less friendly, and more realistic: human females may simply have been raped by male Neandertals, as part of warfare, or chance encounters. Let’s remember that rape is not a sexual phenomenon per se, but also a power manifestation. And the human females may have made it back to their home village, to raise hybrid children, or may have raised them in Neandertal captivity if we’re going to go all-out with speculations. Certainly it is also possible that Neandertal women were raped by human males (which would be somewhat harder to imagine, since those Neandertal ladies would be many times stronger than a human male, but gang rape or rendering the woman unconscious would solve that problem…), and raised human hybrid children back with their Neandertal community. But apparently there is no DNA evidence of that, if I understand the results correctly.
So is there a moral to these two stories? I think so… You decide…
Where Were the Regulators? May 10, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: government regulation, Robert Reich
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Via Robert Reich:
What do oil giant BP, the mining company Massey Energy, and Goldman Sachs have in common? They’re all big firms involved in massive plunder. BP’s oil spill is already one of the biggest and most damaging in American history. Massey’s mine disaster, claiming the lives of 29 miners, is one of the worst in recent history. Goldman’s alleged fraud is but a part of the largest financial meltdown in 75 years.
All three of these companies are also publicly-held, which means that much of the financial costs of these failures will be passed on to their shareholders, many of whom are already watching their stock prices plummet. Prominently among those shareholders are pension funds and mutual funds held by people like you and me.
That may seem fair. After all, shareholders benefited when BP made big profits extracting oil without paying attention to a possible blowout, when Massey Energy got fat earnings from its careless coal mining operations, and when Goldman Sachs did wondrously well for its own stock holders by allegedly defrauding others. In fact, it was pressure from their shareholders seeking the highest possible returns — and their executives, whose pay is linked to the firms’ share performance — that led all three companies to cut whatever corners they could cut in pursuit of profits.
But profits aren’t everything, which is why we have regulations that are supposed to be enforced. So a key question in each of these instances is: Where were the regulators?
Good question. But, of course, if we believe markets know best so we don’t need government meddling in business affairs, we will get the regulators we deserve. That has been the prevailing philosophy for the past 30 years.
When shareholders demand the highest returns possible and executive pay is linked to stock performance, many companies will do whatever necessary to squeeze out added profits. And that will spell disaster – giant oil spills, terrible coal-mine disasters, and Wall Street meltdowns – unless the nation has tough regulations backed up by significant penalties, including jail terms for executives found guilty of recklessness, and vigilant enforcement.
Reich is right. We need strong government regulations. But that means we have to learn once again to trust government. And that means we can’t put people in charge of government agencies who think government is the problem.
No one in their right mind would choose to go to a doctor who did not believe in the power of medicine to heal. Yet, Americans persistently elect government officials who don’t believe that government can be effective.
Clearly, we are often not in our right minds when we vote.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Good News on Carbon Emissions May 9, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events.Tags: climate change, environment
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The Energy Information Administration is reporting that carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. were down 7% last year. According to the report, one-third of the reduction was due to the recession, one-third to reduced energy intensity, and one-third to the use of cleaner energy.
The report concludes:
…longer-term trends continue to suggest decline in both the amount of energy used per unit of economic output and the carbon intensity of our energy supply, which both work to restrain emissions.
Emissions were down 3% in 2008. Thus, as Joe Romm notes, that puts us about halfway toward the goal of reducing carbon emissions 17% from 2005 levels by 2020.
Of course, these are minimal reductions necessary to begin to contain climate change and surely will not be sufficient. But this data suggests that the idea that we cannot make substantial reductions without ruining our economy is just bunk.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Facebook–Where Everyone Knows Your Name May 6, 2010
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Current Events, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts.Tags: Carlos Castaneda, Deborah Tannen, facebook, friendship, privacy
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An Indiana woman’s home was burglarized recently, while she was at a concert. The culprits turned out to be Facebook “friends”; she had announced, online, that she’d be at the concert. With friends like that, we surely don’t need any enemies, as the old saying goes. Facebook, along with MySpace and Twitter, is one of the institutions in which a generation may see itself mirrored and reach self-comprehension, and it is a fascinating phenomenon, socially, psychologically and philosophically. Most of my students, and most of my friends’ kids, have Facebook pages, and I see the amazing accumulation of “friends” displayed on their sites—in some cases thousands. I think it probably compares to “counting coup” in the Old West, a new form of collection mania, or transition rites of adolescence (such as collecting phone numbers that you’ll never, ever call—as if they’re proofs of friendship). I assume that everybody knows this is just a new term for temporary, occasional contacts, and not genuine friends, but even so, words are seductive, and some of these contacts get to know a wealth of details about each other that I (coming from a different time and place—I’m kind of a time traveler. We all are, the older we get) would reserve for perhaps only two or three people in my entire life. A friend, to me, is someone who you do activities with (according to Deborah Tannen: the male friendship model), and/or talk about big and small things with (Tannen: the female model), or both. It doesn’t have to involve proximity: a friend can be a good friend, even if you don’t see them for years. Online/phone contact makes up for physical presence in many of our current friendships. On the other hand, people you see every day and deal with on a superficial level, are acquaintances, not friends. So I am not a big fan of the friending phenomenon online, or the social websites where some people spend part of their social life—perhaps even all of it.
However, I, too, have a Facebook page, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing personal on it, on or behind the Wall. I don’t check it very often, because I don’t maintain it to accumulate friends. From time to time I get “friend” requests from strangers, and I ignore them. But quite often I get such requests from students—former and present. I appreciate the (presumably) amicable intent, and I don’t want to seem rude and alienate nice people—but on the other hand, sharing personal information with students is downright unprofessional for an instructor, and may even be construed as professionally unethical: are you more “friends” with students on your Facebook page than with the students who aren’t on your “friends” list? That could lead to the suspicion of preferential treatment of some students. In addition, it may in some cases invite trouble: some people can’t tell the difference between a real Friend and a Facebook contact, and they don’t know where the line should be drawn. So I don’t add anyone as a friend who is not either a real old face-to-face friend or a colleague I know personally, and on my page I state specifically that I don’t add students as friends.
But this issue goes way beyond such personal choices in changing times: it illustrates the new questions arising about how much and when to make oneself available to friends, to students, colleagues, teachers, and the world in general—because this is not an innocent world. Years ago, when I was the same age as students now collecting friends on Facebook, we loved Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, about the old brujo teaching the young anthropologist the secrets of power (as some of us suspected, most of those books were, shall we say, fantasies rather than actual anthropological reporting). One ground rule was, loosely paraphrased, Don’t give away too much information about yourself. The more you spread your information out there, the less control you have over your life. Now Carlos wanted to use this rule for a deeper understanding and use of the powers of the mind, but I’d say that it is a pretty good rule to bring back in these days when privacy is becoming a thing of the past. Our intimate information will soon be out there, anyway, whether it be through ubiquitous webcams, health records online, tax records online, or other means. And enterprising people—with or without political and legal legitimacy—will be able to mine all that information for power and profit. It is already happening. Why add to it by sharing details about your life, simply for narcissistic reasons? Facebook is being challenged by U.S. lawmakers as to changes in its privacy policy, which would allow Facebook members other than your friends to access personal information about you—but even if Facebook restricts the access to “Friends,” it would not be much of a protection, when people add “friends” indiscriminately as a form of collecting trophies, and share details about their lives with untold strangers because it feels good. In addition, the phenomenon of phishing is getting increasingly sophisticated. This excerpt comes from a blogger who is a regular user of Facebook, Dan Tynan from ITWorld:
I still have a dozen other group invitations from various friends. I don’t trust any of them now. I don’t even want to click “ignore” on the odd chance it will somehow corrupt my account and spam all 700-odd people in my FB posse. So this spam attack has effectively killed that feature for me. And if spammers can manipulate Facebook’s group recommendations that easily, imagine what they could do to Facebook’s plan to butter “Like” buttons all over the Web.
We’ll see much more of this erosion of privacy in the future. So your old Professor Cautious recommends: think twice before you share your personal information with selected friends and accumulated strangers on Facebook and elsewhere in Cyberspace…
PS The latest development from The Atlantic: The Facebook Privacy Wars Heat Up.
PPS May 11: In case you were in doubt: here’s what’s been going on since December, according to Wired Epicenter (long and informative article):
So in December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, it reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.
This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.
This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile. They all must be public — and linked to public pages for each of those bits of info — or you don’t get them at all. That’s hardly a choice, and the whole system is maddeningly complex. …
…Care to write a status update to your friends? Facebook sets the default for those messages to be published to the entire internet through direct funnels to the net’s top search engines. You can use a dropdown field to restrict your publishing, but it’s seemingly too hard for Facebook to actually remember that’s what you do……Facebook could start with a very simple page of choices: I’m a private person, I like sharing some things, I like living my life in public. Each of those would have different settings for the myriad of choices, and all of those users could then later dive into the control panel to tweak their choices. That would be respectful design – but Facebook isn’t about respect — it’s about re-configuring the world’s notion of what’s public and private…
They Just Never Go Away May 5, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Bush Administration, Gulf Coast Oil spill
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Republicans are hard at work trying to blame Obama for the Gulf Oil spill. But there is evidence that the real culprit may be our old friend Dick Cheney. (Remember him?)
Political philosopher William Galston presents the case:
Apparently, late in the Clinton Administration, the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service (MMS) wanted an automatic shut off switch installed on deep oil drilling platforms that was essential in preventing underwater spills. But the oil industry opposed this regulation because of the cost of installing this device. And in 2003 the Interior Department relented.
But as Galston reports:
After the Bush administration took office, the MMS became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.”…On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked.
Galston is curious:
So here’s my question: what is responsible for the [Mineral Management Service's] change of heart between 2000 and 2003 on the crucial issue of requiring a remote control switch for offshore rigs? What we do know is that unfettered oil drilling was to Dick Cheney’s domestic concerns what the invasion of Iraq was to his foreign policy—a core objective, implacably pursued regardless of the risks. Is there a connection between his infamous secret energy task force and the corrupt mindset that came to dominate a key program within MMS? Would $500,000 per rig have been regarded as an unacceptably expensive insurance policy if a drill-baby-drill administration hadn’t placed its thumb so heavily on the scale?
Halliburton, the company run by Cheney prior to his selection as Bush’s VP, was responsible for the drilling procedure called “cementing” which is known to be a leading cause of well blowouts and had been completed just prior to the recent explosion.
It is worth asking whether a conflict of interest played a role in this disaster.
How many years will it take to free us from the consequences of the worst Presidential Administration in U.S. history?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
No Magic Bullet May 4, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Obama and bipartisanship
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William Galston thinks Democrats should “quickly pivot to the economy” and stay focused on it until the November midterm elections, instead of doing climate change or immigration.
But I have no idea what it would mean to focus on the economy. I agree with Matt Yglesias:
The bad economy has led to a collapse in trust in public institutions, and the voters—falsely—believe that fiscal stimulus measures haven’t helped the economy. It would have been smart to simply ignore the voters’ half-assed macroeconomic theories back in February 2009 and pass a bigger and better-designed stimulus bill. But at this point, I think a wide range of incumbents (mostly Democrats, but also Bob Bennett) are simply going to have to lay in the bed they’ve already made.
There is not much a President or Congress can do in the short run, in this political climate, to influence the economy.
There are too many people who continue to have “have-assed theories and misconceptions” just as they did in 2009 when the first stimulus package was passed. It would be impossible to pass additional stimulus.
The Democrat’s political predicament is, in part, the result of Obama seeking bipartisanship early in his term. He should have been relentlessly pinning blame for the economy where it belongs—on conservatives and their regulatory gifts to Wall St. His bipartisan schtick will be the biggest mistake of his Presidency.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Activist Judges May 3, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: church state separation, Salazar vs. Buono, Supreme Court
2 comments
If the public discourse regarding Supreme Court nominations is an indication, most people believe that judges ideally make their decision based on the law, rather than personal ideology.
I think there is little evidence for that; judges tend to consult their personal ideology and moral intuitions first and then interpret the law so that the interpretation conforms to their personal beliefs.
An obvious example of this emerged in a decision last week in Salazar v. Buono. The Supremes were considering a deal, approved by Congress, to transfer the acre of land on which a cross commemorating war dead stands to private hands. Five conservative justices approved.
A badly fractured Supreme Court, with six justices writing opinions, reopened the possibility on Wednesday that a large cross serving as a war memorial in a remote part of the Mojave Desert may be permitted to remain there.
The 5-to-4 decision provided an unusually vivid glimpse into how deeply divided the court is on the role religious symbols may play in public life and, in particular, the meanings conveyed by crosses in memorials for fallen soldiers.
In considering the virtues of this deal, the majority opinion stated that the Christian cross isn’t necessarily a symbol of Christianity.
Huh?
Justice Paul Stevens in his dissenting opinion pointed out the problem:
“Making a plain, unadorned Latin cross a war memorial does not make the cross secular. It makes the war memorial sectarian.” He added, in a dissent endorsed by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor, “The cross is not a universal symbol of sacrifice. It is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith.”
I know of no other religion in which the cross is a symbol of sacrifice. To claim that it is universal is transparently dishonest and will find its place among most of the other transparently dishonest rulings made by this conservative majority.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Support for Arizona Immigration Bill is No Surprise May 2, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, politics.Tags: Arizona immigration law, George Bush
2 comments
People from across the ideological spectrum are condemning Arizona’s new immigration statute. Few GOP leaders have endorsed it and it has been condemned by religious leaders and newspaper editorial boards across the country
But according to a recent poll, the public narrowly supports it.
Americans familiar with Arizona’s tough, new immigration law tend to favor it, a new poll found.
51 percent of those who have heard of Arizona’s new law to crack down illegal immigration said they generally favor it, a new Gallup Poll found Thursday. 39 of those who have heard of the law opposed it, while 11 percent were unsure.
Steve Benen is surprised:
I find this very hard to believe, not because Gallup is unreliable, but because I like to think the American character is decent and strong, and would resist efforts like these.
But frankly, this doesn’t surprise me at all. It is in fact an accurate reflection of the United States at this point in its history—bigoted, selfish, angry, and looking for scapegoats. Recall that this is a public that put a selfish, deceitful moron in the White House for eight years. This is a public that was excited beyond measure at bombing the hell out of a weak, largely irrelevant country that had done nothing provocative. This is a country that still denies consenting adults the right to marry, and will vote to shred our educational system in order to hang on to a few dollars every year that would otherwise go to taxes.
We are a deeply conservative country with a powerful authoritarian streak and one election will not change that.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
