Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

La religion, parasite du système cognitif

Sat, 11 May 2013 06:44:05 GMT

Que pensé-je de la religion, me demande-t-on? D'abord, mettons-nous d'accord sur ce dont nous parlons. Une religion est un ensemble de croyances et pratiques injustifiées et injustifiables, accepté d'autorité et par mimétisme; ce qui caractérise la religion, c'est la revendication de la foi, i.e. de l'acceptation de la croyance en l'absence de justification. Comme cette absence de justification peut également soutenir toutes les variantes de toutes les absurdités, une religion n'a de stabilité dans les croyances véhiculées que parce que les articles de cette foi s'imposent aux dissidents sous peine d'exclusion du groupe, de vexations, voire de mort violente (i.e. il y a quelques siècles dans la chrétienté encore, dans l'islam toujours, et dans le socialisme, partout où il règne en maître).

Notons que le mot "dieu" n'a rien de sacré et n'est pas nécessaire pour faire une religion. On notera d'abord qu'il n'existe qu'en français, que ne parlent qu'une toute petite minorité de croyants; et même en français, on peut faire une religion sans le mot "dieu": les fondateurs du socialisme moderne, par exemple, de Rousseau à Pierre Leroux en passant par Auguste Comte ou Charles Fourier, en revendiquaient bien le caractère religieux ou para-religieux, d'ailleurs. Religion athée, donc.

Les religions sont des mèmes auto-propagateurs (Dawkins), qui infectent les esprits susceptibles de l'être. Ils occupent un "potentiel psychologique à l'exploitation" (pour reprendre le concept de Raymond Ruyer), inhérent à la faiblesse des esprits humains. Ce qu'elles font des esprits infectés dépend des religions. Toutes les religions ne sont pas équivalentes: certaines sont plus bénignes que d'autres, et la concurrence entre religions favorise les unes, cependant que le monopole favorise les autres.

Des religions en concurrence peuvent coévoluer avec leur population hôte vers une co-adaptation mutuellement bénéfique, où les religions qui véhiculent avec elles des tabous, habitudes et disciplines relativement plus bénéfiques ont relativement plus de succès que celles qui mènent plus directement leurs hôtes à l'échec. Mais même avec de tels compagnons mémétiques, une religion est une infection parasitaire: l'appel à la foi est une neutralisation du système immunitaire mental, le filtre à conneries par lequel un esprit sain rejette les idées injustifiées. Cette neutralisation fait qu'une religion ouvre nécessairement la porte à des superstitions néfastes qui pourront se transmettre avec elle. Il n'y a pas de symbiose possible.

Comme de nombreux agents infectieux, la même religion peut prendre plusieurs formes, l'une plus virulente que l'autre, selon le degré d'hygiène de la victime. Ainsi, le même parasite sera ver solitaire, un inconvénient mineur asymptomatique chez qui mange de la viande infectée par des larves, mais cysticercose, une maladie mortelle atteignant le cerveau chez qui ingère des selles infectées par des œufs. D'où l'importance d'une bonne ségrégation des entrées et des sorties du système digestif. La religion, parasite du système cognitif, agit de même: chez qui se contente d'ingérer comme tout le monde de la nourriture spirituelle infectée par la pratique religieuse, elle n'est qu'un inconvénient mineur, qui peut être asymptomatique, n'ayant pas d'effet négatif sur le comportement, sauf l'émission d'idées infectées en sortie du système cognitif; mais chez qui en vient à croire sérieusement à ces idées infectées que la religion produit chez les autres ou chez lui-même et en suit les conséquences logiques que la plupart ignorent, le résultat peut être une maladie mortelle atteignant le cerveau, et causant un comportement violent de fanatique. D'où l'importance d'une bonne ségrégation des entrées et des sorties du système cognitif.

Toute religion, une fois au pouvoir, est ipso facto criminelle — mais cela tient juste à ce que le crime soit l'essence du Pouvoir, plus qu'à la religion en elle-même, qui peut fort bien ne nuire qu'à ceux qui l'acceptent volontairement. Cependant, certaines religions mettent la conquête du pouvoir dans leur dogme (le judaïsme originel, l'islam, la religion aztèque, le socialisme, etc.), alors que d'autres au contraire acceptent un pouvoir étranger dans leur dogme (le judaïsme d'après la conquête babylonienne, le christianisme, l'hindouïsme, le bouddhisme) et sont donc plus directement compatible avec une société tolérante paisible. Bien sûr, otez le pouvoir aux unes, ou donnez le pouvoir aux autres, et vous les verrez évoluer pour s'adapter à fonctionner respectivement sans ou avec ce Pouvoir. Mais il y a beaucoup d'inertie, et il faut de nombreux siècles et une nouvelle génération de prophètes et de textes sacrés pour circonvenir le message originel de la religion. Il n'est donc pas du tout innocent qu'une religion soit écrite par des vainqueurs et célébrant leur violence victorieuse, plutôt que par des vaincus et prônant la liberté de conscience.

En conclusion, les religions sont des maladies mentales. Leurs effets varient, mais elles sont toujours néfastes et potentiellement dangereuses. Malheureusement, on ne connaît ni vaccin, ni remède fiable, même si le progrès de l'hygiène et des conditions de vie a permis l'élimination des variétés grossières du passé, qui ont été remplacées par des versions plus élaborées; et nous ne sommes pas en train de gagner cette course aux armements mémétiques.

The Ogre, the Midget, and Us

Tue, 07 May 2013 22:53:01 GMT

When the Soviet invaded Czechoslovakia for attempting to give a human face to socialism, W. H. Auden wrote this poem, titled "August 1968":

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

He is all too right that the victorious Ogre is a brute, unable to speak. Unhappily, he forgot to write this sequel, which omission I am now fixing:

A midget comes forward and greets
Great King oh let me sing your feats
The Ogre, flatter'd, in a stir,
Creates the dwarf his Minister.

Now dwarfs are dukes while ogres reign
And as the conquer'd scream in vain
Atop the rotting flesh and flies
A dwarf will laugh at man's demise.

So of course, the Ogre will always find a midget, an intelligentsia, members of the talking class, a clergy, to speak for him. The result in the long run is described in this sequel to the sequel:

Today is Noble who bears sign
Of blood from Ogre, midget, line
We'll mock or jail who'll dare to tell
Our Founding Ogre wasn't swell

At school when children learn to read
The Midget's holy word's their creed.
The moral taught: follow the lead
Of Ev'ry Savior Ogre's Deed.

There. Now you know the missing bits of the story. I had put the original poem to music years ago, but had the idea of sequels I wanted to complete before I'd publish everything, and only recently have worked my way to satisfactory rhymes. I have then continued the melody and added chords, which to my pleasure are more elaborate than anticipated. You can download the Lilypond source, or the printable PDF. To give you an idea, here is a recording of me singing it a cappella: The Ogre, the Midget, and Us, take 2 (in MP3). Once again, that's a song that I'd like to record, with the proper band of merry musicians...

Many thanks to Mencius Moldbug for pointing me to the original poem.

Bastiat était-il libéral? Anarchisme et minarchisme

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 05:18:24 GMT

Bastiat n'était pas libéral et encore moins minarchiste

D'aucuns libéraux aiment à clamer que Frédéric Bastiat, héros de tous les libéraux, était comme eux un minarchiste. Or, non seulement Bastiat n'était pas minarchiste, il n'était même pas libéral. Quoi?

Les libéraux sont unis par leur théorie du Droit qui défend la propriété individuelle et par là délégitime les interventions de l'État dans les affaires humaines. Cependant, parmi les questions qui divisent les libéraux depuis longtemps, il reste celle de savoir si l'État est une institution utile voire nécessaire, ou s'il est par nature une institution parasite aussi nocive que superfétatoire. Selon leur réponse à cette question, les libéraux se rangent alors parmi les "minarchistes", qui réclament un état "minimal" réduit à faire régner l'ordre, et les "anarchistes", pour qui le progrès des relations humaines passe par l'abolition de l'État. Bien sûr, avant de répondre à la question, encore faut-il avoir défini ce qu'on entend précisément par "État". Malheureusement, alors qu'il y a là lieu à un examen conceptuel pour élucider le cœur du débat, d'aucuns préfèrent ressortir l'argument aussi bien d'ignorance que d'autorité selon lequel Bastiat aurait tranché, et pour le minarchisme. Or s'il a tranché, c'est bien en sens inverse!

Car enfin, entendons-nous: nous battons-nous sur des mots ou sur des concepts? Pour ce qui est des mots, non seulement Bastiat ne s'est jamais réclamé du "minarchisme", mais si tant est qu'il fait jamais mention de "libéralisme" dans son œuvre, c'est pour se prononcer explicitement contre le libéralisme! En effet, le premier mot n'existait même pas à l'époque, le débat auquel il répond ne faisant pas encore fureur. Le second mot existait, mais n'avait pas de sens bien précis, sinon d'être un mot fédérateur pour de nombreux opposants à l'ancien régime, dont les idées variaient notamment dans chaque pays, et plus encore d'un pays à l'autre. En France, plus spécifiquement, "libéral" n'avait de sens bien défini qu'en s'appliquant au parti du même nom et aux thèses qu'il avançait; or, les libéraux, à travers notamment leur tête de file, Adolphe Thiers, ne défendaient de libertés que celles qui les arrangeaient; et c'est à cette occasion que la seule mention de "libéralisme" dans l'œuvre de Bastiat en est une ferme dénonciation.

Le sens changeant des mots

Le terme que Bastiat revendiquait haut et fort était celui d'économiste, s'attachant ainsi à une tradition qui depuis son origine avait pour objet l'étude des interactions mutuellement volontaires entre humains et la dénonciation de l'intervention de l'État, c'est-à-dire de la violence irresponsable, dans ces affaires humaines. Ce mot correspond bien à ce que nous entendons aujourd'hui en France par "libéral", et si nous devions arguer non pas sur les mots, mais sur les concepts, alors Bastiat était sans aucun doute un "libéral" au sens actuel, et sans conteste l'un des plus grands et des plus aimés parmi nous. Cependant, notons comme les mots "économiste" et "libéral" ont tous deux évolués depuis la moitié du XIXème siècle, pour prendre un sens fort différent de celui que chacun avait alors: depuis qu'à la fin du XIXème siècle les États ont fondé des chaires d'"économie" dans leurs universités pour faire la propagande étatiste, le mot "économiste" suggère de nos jours quelqu'un qui manipule des statistiques pour fournir des justifications aux spoliations étatiques. Quant au mot "libéral", il n'a actuellement de sens bien défini en France que parce qu'un opprobre général en réserve l'usage sérieux aux seuls héritiers de cette école anciennement appelée "économiste", qui a adopté ce nom déserté par tous les politiciens, leurs propagandistes professionels les "journalistes" et autres spécialistes du détournement de langage, qui ne s'en servent aujourd'hui que comme invective vide de sens. Dans d'autres pays, où le mot ne fait pas autant repoussoir, son sens à la fois est plus flou et ne couvre pas les mêmes concepts, au point qu'aux États-Unis où il est ouvertement revendiqué par une large fraction de la population, son sens actuel est à l'opposé diamétral, signifiant plus ou moins la même sens que "socialiste" en France: une sensibilité dite "de gauche", réclamant davantage d'action de l'État, moins de libertés économiques, un relâchement des mœurs encadré par une mainmise bureaucratique sur la santé, etc.

Qu'entendons-nous par "État"?

Donc, si nous devons débattre des concepts, il faut examiner ce que l'on entend par le mot "minarchiste", avant de prétendre en affubler Bastiat. Ainsi, un libéral respecté et respectable m'affirme sa thèse dite minarchiste selon laquelle "L'objet de l'État est de protéger les droits naturels des individus". Mais de quoi parle-t-on? S'agit-il de décrire le phénomène historique connu sous le nom d'État, où une organisation état-blit un monopole de la violence sur un territoire, la conquête, l'usurpation, et le meurtre de masse? Depuis quel jour béni cet État, de criminel et archi-nuisible ennemi du peuple, a-t-il changé du tout au tout et s'est-il mué en bénéfique ami de la société? Identifions ce moment historique, et célébrons-le! Était-ce sous H'ldw'gh, chef des Francs, connu pour avoir dépeuplé des villes entières? Était-ce sous la Terreur de Robespierre? Sous la botte de Napoléon? Sous Pétain? Est-ce que de Gaulle fut notre sauveur, ayant magiquement transformé l'État d'un magistral coup de képi? Non, non, non et non. À aucune de ces "révolutions" l'État n'a changé de nature; il n'a changé que de mains. Certes, il s'est adapté au progrès technique et moral, il a affiné les méthodes de ses rapines, élaboré sa propagande, éliminé certaines mesures oppressantes qui ne rapportaient plus pour en adopter d'autres qui lui rapportent davantage. Il n'en reste pas moins en toutes ses activités et à tout instant, un parasite qui draine les ressources de la société au bénéfice de ses agents.

Si la protection des droits individuels est aux antipodes de l'action historique du phénomène "État", l'affirmation selon laquelle l'État est censé défendre ces droits est-elle un énoncé valide d'un point de vue prescriptif plutôt que descriptif? Fort bien, mais à qui ou quoi cette prescription s'applique-t-elle? Cette prescription prétend-elle s'appliquer au phénomène décrit précédemment? Mais par quelle magie attend-on d'un monopole violent qu'il fasse soudain le contraire de ce qui constitue tout à la fois son principe de base, la condition de sa survie, et l'intérêt de ses agents? Autrement dit: les libéraux, combien de divisions? D'ailleurs, s'il existait une force humaine supérieure capable de renverser un État donné, les détenteurs de ladite force possèderait de facto le monopole précédemment détenu par l'État renversé. Changement de main, pas de nature. Ils auraient beau abdiquer, le sceptre serait ramassé par d'aucun militaire moins hésitant à s'en saisir et en user, quitte à ce que le territoire soit divisé entre belligérants rivaux. Autrement dit, pour reprendre Mencius Moldbug, il y a conservation de la souveraineté. La seule façon par laquelle l'intérêt des détenteurs de chaque once de pouvoir politique subséquent soit aligné avec l'intérêt des citoyens sous leur autorité respective est que l'État statique et centralisé ait été atomisé en un magma dynamique de petites entités chacune réduite à un seul individu, auquel cas nul ne se verrait accorder de monopole de la violence sur autrui — et cette collection de souverainetés individuelles constituerait ni plus ni moins que la solution "anarchiste". Un réseau décentralisé de souverains armés peut-il résister à une organisation centralisée d'oppression bureaucratique? Comme le remarquerait aussi Moldbug, la possibilité future d'un tel résultat (et son impossibilité actuelle) est une question de technologie militaire plutôt que de philosophie juridique.

Une autre façon de prendre cette prescription, c'est comme une définition de ce qu'on entend ou voudrait entendre par "État", un deuxième sens du mot, bien distinct du premier sens de monopole de la violence, comme phénomène historique ou comme concept juridique. L'État en ce sens serait une institution utilisant effectivement la violence pour protéger les droits naturels de l'individu, indépendemment de son organisation, de son histoire, etc. Mais alors, en ce sens, l'État n'existe pas, n'a jamais existé, n'existera jamais, et ne peut pas exister, à moins encore une fois d'être réduit à une collection de souverainetés individuelles; car seuls les individus, en déployant volontairement leurs propres resources, peuvent chacun se défendre sans violer le droit d'autrui dans l'opération; tout transfert forcé des resources de l'un pour protégé l'autre serait ipso facto une violation des droits du premier et donc de la prescription définitionnelle. La réalité elle-même est anarchiste, et l'étatisme, minarchiste ou pas, est une chimère: Le concept d'État qui a ce sens prescriptif est à l'opposé du concept d'État qui a le sens descriptif précédent.

Ce que Bastiat n'a pas dit

Ayant visité les concepts, revenons à Bastiat. Mon interlocuteur cite donc à l'appui de sa thèse "minarchiste" le dernier paragraphe de l'État: "Quant à nous, nous pensons que l'État, ce n'est ou ce ne devrait être autre chose que la force commune instituée, non pour être entre tous les citoyens un instrument d'oppression et de spoliation réciproque, mais, au contraire, pour garantir à chacun le sien, et faire régner la justice et la sécurité." Il s'agit clairement d'un énoncé prescriptif, dont le lien avec le phénomène historique est explicitement mis en doute; plus encore, ce paragraphe intervient à la fin d'un long pamphlet où Bastiat dénonce systématiquement l'État, aussi bien le phénomène historique de monopole de la violence que le mythe universellement propagé par ses propagandistes que le bilan par principe nécessairement négatif ou nul des actions d'un tel monopole. Bastiat en appelle à l'institution d'un concept qu'il définit prescriptivement dans cette même phrase, à l'opposé radical de la réalité de l'État dont il fait la description fort peu glorieuse dans tout le reste de cet essai.

Deux concepts opposés dans un même mot, voilà qui porte à faire des confusions et contresens graves plutôt qu'à donner des conseils efficaces. Mais à aucun moment, Bastiat ne confond les deux sens du mot "État", pour attribuer à l'un des deux concepts une des propriétés de l'autre; à aucun moment il n'est amené aux contresens que cette confusion engendre à profusion chez des esprits moins clairs qui se proclament alors "minarchistes". Donc, si Bastiat n'a pas eu la présence d'esprit ni la discipline intellectuelle d'introduire une distinction lexicale entre État monopole de la force et État institution de défense des droits, il semble avoir fort bien distingué les deux concepts dans ses arguments; et il n'a jamais présagé des formes idéales ou même possibles que pourrait prendre une telle institution de défense des droits — et en particulier sur la présence ou non d'un monopole légal.

Ne reprochons pas à Bastiat de n'avoir pas éclairci cette opposition conceptuelle quand la question n'était pas posée à l'époque, n'ayant semblé le sujet le plus pertinent à débattre ni pour ses prédecesseurs ni pour ses successeurs immédiats. Bastiat a été un innovateur en de nombreux points; sa carrière écourtée l'empêcha de l'être sur davantages. Il nous donc faudra attendre Albert J. Nock et son livre de 1935 "Notre ennemi, l'État" pour trouver un auteur qui distingue explicitement par le mot "État" le monopole de la violence et le mot "Gouvernement" l'organisation de défense des droits individuels; mais ni cette nomenclature ni aucune autre d'ailleurs n'a jamais été largement adoptée, précisément parce que les idées libérales n'ont pas voix au chapitre.

Rendre à Bastiat ce qui est à Bastiat

Après avoir éclairci ce que Bastiat n'a pas dit en faveur de l'État, peut-on trouver ce qu'il aurait dit sur le concept d'anarchisme? Nous savons de par son échange avec Proudhon que le mot pas plus que le concept ne lui faisait peur, et qu'il savait à la fois célébrer ce que Proudhon incluait de liberté dans le mot et rejeter ce qu'il y incluait de socialisme. In fine, Bastiat ne s'est pas prononcé explicitement sur un concept d'anarchisme séparé des idées socialistes, qui ne fut pas mis au débat, et qu'il ne jugea jamais comme le plus pressant à offrir. Toutefois, nous possédons des signes sûrs que s'il avait une opinion sur ce concept, elle n'était pas celle d'un rejet radical. En effet, Gustave de Molinari, jeune collaborateur et ami proche de Bastiat, dans la onzième de ses "Soirées de la rue St Lazare" de 1849, distinguait explicitement d'une part le concept de gouvernement comme organisation fournissant des services de sécurité et d'autre part le concept de monopole sur de tels services de sécurité, par opposition à un "gouvernement libre"; et il dénonçait ce monopole comme porteur d'injustice autant que d'inefficacité. Or, Bastiat, qui a très certainement lu ces "Soirées" voire en a discuté le contenu avec Molinari, non seulement n'a pas dédit Molinari après coup [PS: si, il l'a fait — voir plus bas], mais fin 1850, sur son lit de mort, déclarait clairement Molinari comme étant son successeur intellectuel. [PS: je trouve bien des traces d'une telle affirmation, mais une recherche dans les sources primaires ne révèle rien, et il faut donc la considérer comme une rumeur infondée.] Si tant est que Bastiat aurait été "minarchiste" plutôt qu'"anarchiste", il n'a donc pas jugé cette divergence d'opinion comme assez importante pour mériter de déshériter Molinari.

Prétendre de Bastiat qu'il était minarchiste est donc un mensonge éhonté. Non seulement Bastiat ne s'est pas explicitement prononcé sur la question, mais il n'a pas jugé la question assez importante ou urgente pour qu'il lui soit à propos d'en débattre publiquement. Tout indique qu'il avait des sympathies anarchistes, sinon des convictions bien nettes à ce sujet. Il faut une certaine dose de mauvaise foi pour mettre dans la bouche d'un mort le parti-pris d'un débat qui n'existait pas à son époque, et sur lequel les seuls indices disponibles semblent indiquer qu'il aurait pu pencher en sens inverse. Laissons à Bastiat ce qu'il a dit et ce qu'il n'a pas dit, les concepts qu'il a su distinguer par des explications claires et ceux qu'il n'a pas su séparer par des noms distincts. Et surtout, débatons des concepts plutôt que des mots. Fi des étiquettes — aux idées!

PS: Une recherche plus approfondie montre que Bastiat était présent lors de la réunion de la Société d'Économie Politique du 10 octobre 1849 où ce chapitre du livre de Molinari fut discuté. Le passage pertinent est celui-ci:

M. Coquelin ayant pris pour point de départ de la discussion l'opinion de M. de Molinari (qui pense que, dans l'avenir, la concurrence pourra s'établir entre des compagnies d'assurance, capables de garantir la sécurité aux citoyens qui seraient leurs clients), a fait remarquer que M. de Molinari n'avait pas pris garde que, sans une autorité suprême, la justice n'avait pas de sanction, et que la concurrence, qui est le seul remède contre la fraude et la violence, qui seule est capable de faire triompher la nature des choses dans les rapports des hommes entre eux, ne pouvait pas exister sans cette autorité suprême, sans l'État. Au dessous de l'Etat la concurrence est possible et féconde; au dessus, elle est impossible à appliquer et même à concevoir.
M. Bastiat a parlé dans le même sens que M. Coquelin; il croit que les fonctions de l'Etat doivent être circonscrites dans la garantie de la justice et de la sécurité; mais, comme cette garantie n'existe que par la force, et que la force ne peut être que l'attribut d'un pouvoir suprême, il ne comprend pas la société avec un pareil pouvoir attribué à des corps égaux entre eux, et qui n'auraient pas un point d'appui supérieur. M. Bastiat s'est ensuite demandé si l'exposé bien net bien clair et bien palpable de cette idée, que l'État ne doit avoir d'autre fonction que la garantie de la sécurité, ne serait pas une propagande utile et efficace en présence du socialisme qui se manifeste partout, même dans l'esprit de ceux qui voudraient le combattre.

Bastiat était donc bien minarchiste, même si par incompréhension avouée.

Cela fait un bien mauvais argument d'autorité (par le même argument, on prendrait aussi bien Bastiat comme autorité pour justifier la religion catholique qu'il admettait suivre sans discuter ce qui le dépassait), mais ma foi j'ai eu tort de mettre en doute le minarchisme de Bastiat, et d'accuser mes contradicteurs d'ignorance. Dont acte. Mea culpa.

Il reste que l'important, ce sont les concepts et pas les mots. Si la contribution de Bastiat au débat est (1) l'incompréhension de la structure d'un marché libre, (2) la confusion entre suprématie de fait a posteriori et monopole de droit a priori, et (3) la croyance en ce que l'État serait "un point d'appui supérieur" plutôt que la violence sociopathe exercée par la lie de la société exonérée de toute responsabilité civile et pénale, cela reste une bien mauvaise référence en faveur du minarchisme.

2012-12-12 Boston Lisp Meeting: Marc Battyani, Alex Plotnick

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:05:38 GMT

When? TOMORROW, Wednesday December 12th 2012 at 6pm.

Where? MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room at the Stata Center).

Who Speaks? Marc Battyani will showcase his web framework written in Common Lisp. http://www.fractalconcept.com/

Who Also Speaks? Alex Plotnick will show how to roll your own frontend to the Common Lisp REPL.

Many thanks to Prof. Gerald J. Sussman and MIT for providing the room.

I apologize for a last minute notice.

Let's meet for the last time this year, and see how we can improve meetings next year.

ASDF 2.26 in Quicklisp

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:30:49 GMT

I am pleased to announce that Zach Beane (Xach) recently updated Quicklisp to use ASDF 2.26 (from October 2012).

At Xach's suggestion, I will describe the many changes made since the previous ASDF 2.014.6 (of April 2011) used by Quicklisp. Note however that since Quicklisp first tries to load an implementation-provided ASDF and only loads its own if none was found that is more recent, the improvement is only massive on those old implementations that haven't upgraded ASDF in a while. If you are using a recent version of a maintained implementation, a lot of these features were already made available to you while using Quicklisp.

Major Features

The new inherited :around-compile attribute enables you to specify a function to be evaluated around the compilation of Lisp source (2.019). This way, you may notably bind special variables including the *package*, proclaim optimization settings, rename packages with package-renaming, enable λ instead of LAMBDA with lambda-reader, more generally tweak the reader with named-readtables or replace it completely with reader-interception, muffle warnings with asdf-condition-control, etc.
The new :compile-check argument to the function called by the :around-compile hook, allows you to invalidate compilation of a file when it fails some invariant of yours (2.23). This is notably used by asdf-finalizers to ensure all finalizers were included in the fasl.
The new inherited :encoding attribute lets you specify the character encoding of your Lisp files (2.21). Only :utf-8 is supported, and is recommended; as well as the default :default for backwards compatibility (i.e. let the implementation pick some implementation-dependent, environment-variable-dependent, configuration-dependent encoding). If your system :defsystem-depends-on (:asdf-encodings) you can specify whatever encodings your implementation supports, or let the encoding be autodetected, Emacs-style.

Minor Features

A :force-not (sys1 sys2 ...) feature was added to complement the recently fixed :force (sys3 sys4 ...) feature. Based on it, a require-system function was implemented that avoids trying to reload existing systems (2.21). On implementations that support it, the require hook has been changed to use that instead of load-system (2.22).
Classes asdf:cl-source-file.cl and asdf:cl-source-file.lsp are now provided for people using these common alternate file types (2.015).
load-system now uses asdf:*load-system-operation* instead of directly using 'asdf:load-op so you may change the default, which is nice for users of asdf-bundle and/or poiu (2.24).

Semantic Improvements

The source registry now eagerly populates a database of .asd files rather than querying the file system at each search (2.015). You may flush the cache with (asdf:initialize-source-registry) or more generally flush all configuration with (asdf:clear-configuration) (from 2.007) — we particularly recommend you do the latter before you dump an image.
:defsystem-depends-on can now be used to define classes for the system and its modules and components, with keywords being accepted to denote same-named classes from package ASDF (2.016).
Better integration with Quicklisp. More generally, the find-system protocol was both extended and made more robust (2.015, 2.016), allowing for systems that are not backed by files and eliminating some infinite loops.
When a system is not found, we offer a restart to reload after re-initializing your source-registry (2.019).
Self-Upgrade: ASDF is more robust when it upgrades itself (2.015 to 2.019). You must still, more than ever, upgrade ASDF as the first thing before you load any other system, if it is upgraded at all. See manual for details on self-upgrade. 2.27 will automate it some more, but that won't be effective until all implementations have upgraded to 2.27.
Internal APIs: notable refactoring and simplification of many internals, making them easier to extend and fixing many bugs along the way (2.015 to 2.24). The guts of ASDF have been slowly but completely rewritten since ASDF 1.
More robustness. For instance, survive invalid version strings (2.015), better support for pathnames in general and logical pathnames in particular (2.015 to 2.23), proper configuration directories on Windows (2.016 to 2.26), fix many bugs including very old ones from ASDF 1 days, and add more tests. Example old bugs include surviving incompatible redefinitions of an .asd file (2.019), surviving clock skews (2.018), having :default-component-class do something useful (2.22), fixing :weakly-depends-on (2.20), etc.
Some updates to the documentation.

Portability

There have been plenty of implementation-specific fixes and improvements, for each and every single platform. They are too numerous to list; some are minor, some are major, all are meaningful. Note the new support for two implementations, MKCL and XCL. Also note that Cormanlisp, GCL, Genera and RMCL are dead: though support for every one of them has been significantly improved since 2.014.6, I am now unable to test any of them. The actively supported implementations are as follows: ABCL, Allegro, Clozure CL, CMUCL, ECL, GNU CLISP, LispWorks, SBCL, Scieneer CL.

Not Improved

If you are looking for radical improvement on to how to build Common Lisp code, ASDF is the wrong place to look. For more declarative dependency declarations, reproducible builds, parallel or distributed builds, try XCVB. For integration of dependency-management with the package system, try faslpath or the upcoming quick-build (ask drewc or nyef). For a Lisp that has a sensible module system and proper evaluation staging, try Racket (no, it won't run CL code, but you could make it if you really wanted).

Libraries

Related to ASDF, but not part of ASDF itself, here are some improved libraries.

asdf-utils: ASDF includes a lot of utilities, notably to portably manage pathnames; these utilities are not exported from package ASDF anymore (2.25). If you're writing an ASDF extension, you might want to use them using the asdf:: prefix. But in general, we now recommend you should use the symbols exported by the new package asdf-utils.
inferior-shell: We strongly disrecommend the use of asdf:run-shell-command: it's a non-portable crock copied over from mk-defsystem, that does the wrong thing on many levels. Instead you should use inferior-shell:run or the underlying xcvb-driver:run-program/.
asdf-condition-control: Also using xcvb-driver underneath, you may want to use asdf-condition-control to control which warnings should be ignored during the build, and which should trigger conspicuous breakage.
asdf-encodings: If you want to use latin1, koi8-r, euc-jp, or some other national encoding in your Lisp source files, you can, with asdf-encodings. We still recommend you use utf-8 everywhere.
asdf-bundle: On supported implementations you can now want to deliver your code as a single fasl file, or one fasl file per system, using asdf-bundle, which was evolved from the now obsolete asdf-ecl.lisp. All active implementations are now supported except ABCL which has its own abcl-jar contrib. [NB: asdf-bundle may be merged into asdf in the near future.]
asdf-finalizers: ever needed to evaluate toplevel code from a deftype or from deep within a lexical macro expander? Now you can do it correctly with asdf-finalizers and its eval-at-toplevel. Example use with a monomorphic list-of.
poiu: compile in parallel, load serially in the current image; poiu can boost the compilation speed of your large systems. It has been updated to work well with the latest ASDF, and several bugs have been fixed.
cl-launch: cl-launch enables you to invoke your Lisp code from the shell in a uniform way over all Lisp implementations. On supported implementations, you can dump precompiled images or even executable images. It was updated to work with ASDF 2.

Better integration with SLIME

Also related to ASDF, I recently rewrote SLIME's swank-asdf extension. If you grab a recent SLIME (late November 2012), it will do the Right Thing™ when you compile a .asd file. I recommend you add the following incantation to your ~/.swank.lisp, so it will also compile asdf-controlled Lisp files the same way as ASDF:

(in-package :swank)
(pushnew 'try-compile-file-with-asdf *compile-file-for-emacs-hook*)

Using this hook, SLIME will heed your output-translations, which avoids pollution of current directory with fasls; but more importantly, it will use the same :encoding as ASDF and its :around-compile hooks, which are essential to the proper compilation of components that depend on them. While I'm at it, I recommend you also use these in your ~/.swank.lisp, so you always use the latest installed ASDF:

(require "asdf")
(asdf:load-system :asdf)

Indeed, the only proper time to upgrade ASDF is early during start up, so if you have a version that's later than what your implementation provides, the right time to upgrade ASDF is just after loading it; if there is no installed ASDF source code from which to upgrade, the load-system won't do anything bad (indeed, it won't do anything at all). If you want to use an old or unmaintained implementation that doesn't provide ASDF 2, you'll have to replace the above require by more complex code that you may copy and adapt from slime/contrib/swank-asdf.lisp.

If you, like me, believe slime-asdf should do all these things by default, please gently tell your SLIME hackers.

Why you should NOT care about Israel and Palestine

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 04:09:28 GMT

Personally, I don't care much about either Israel or Palestine as such. And frankly, unless you've got direct family ties to Israel or Palestine, neither should you. It's a minor conflict between two small people who are relatively privileged, in a region where much more serious things happen at a grander scale: compare to the massive civil war in Syria, and be worried about the progress of radical islamists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, etc. It should be a tiny blip on anyone's radar, if at all, and people for whom that's not the case are visibly deranged.

Yet we're witnessing large-scale derangement around these events, and that itself is much more of a source of concern than the events. This derangement bodes a lot of bloodletting to come, and the little we can do online is to fight this derangement — for don't delude yourself into believing you can do anything about this conflict itself by protesting or cheering online. I don't care about Israel or its enemies (so far as I can tell, Israel and its enemies already take good care of themselves), and have little sympathy for States and military organizations in general. But I do care about this general world-wide derangement, and I'm sad whenever I see friends become victims of the syndrome one way or the other.

For instance, according to previously friendly online acquaintance Brad Spangler, an active left-leaning free-market anarchist, my refusal to unilaterally denounce Israel in its current conflict and instead my deriding those who do it with such passion, imply that I'm in the pay of the Mossad, and that I'm a criminal whom he vows to horrible torments and meanwhile blocks from his account (which prevents my giving a documented account of all the insults and absurd accusations he hurled at me). Though he is usually a strong proponent of freedom of opinion, the possibility that I might just be wrong, and that wrongful opinions may be held without making one a criminal suddenly seem alien to him. He becomes totally irrational over some absurd conflict that shouldn't even register on the scale of relevance, and in which he possesses no stake.

Just across the Syrian border, a hundred times more people are dying, but there's no indignation whatsoever from Brad or much anyone else against either of the mass-murderous belligerent parties. If we are to somehow care for the people of Palestine, the local tyrants year after year kill more Palestinians than Israel does, their local State being a greater direct enemy to the Palestinians than Israel; you'd think that of all people, Brad, as an anarchist, should be tickled by this; but no, the de facto Palestinian States do not even deserve one bit of criticism according to him or to any of the people who claim to love Palestinians. Whether you care for the actual non-combating civilians or the militants all too often accounted amongst "civilian" casualties by anti-Israel groups, you'll find that Hamas and Fatah kill more people than Israel, in their internecine wars, and in their systematic murder of Christians who speak up to Islamic dominance, women who speak up to rape, homosexuals who are outed, or anyone who would fails to profess enough hate towards Israel. You'd think that left-leaning people would care about freedom of opinion, of religion, of sexual behavior, and about the treatment of minorities; but you'd be wrong, these are secondary concerns: the color of the flag on a neighboring territory is more important than the actual fate of people in that territory.

More one-sided arguments abound, and I will excerpt a few more from Brad's Facebook activities. Suddenly, US aid to Israel becomes a big thing and the cause of the conflict with the US government being painted as obedient puppets of Israel, but US or European subsidies to Palestinian Arabs and to all surrounding Arab regimes, which combined top the previous, somehow do not count; unfailing support to the State of Israel is a sign of US partiality, but unfailing support to all its mortal enemies is not. A more balanced analysis might conclude that the Establishment always supports the status quo that confirms its power; that politicians have to spend money on everyone to buy their votes, then can never stop spending or lose the votes to the other politicians, all the while benefiting from the money spigot through corruption and kickbacks. But people who rail one way or the other only care for one-sided accounting. The evil genocidal rants of an Israeli politico who represents a powerless minority are inflated, whereas the systematic everyday genocidal evil of the majority party in power in the Arab region is ignored. Popular support in Israel for this action in particular are denounced as Israelis desiring war rather than peace in general, whereas Palestinians teaching their kids from the earliest age to glorify genocide and suicide bombing is ignored, and the Palestinians are presented as peace-loving victims. Israel is presented as an Apartheid State even though its minority Arabs have full citizenship, including voting rights, elected representatives and freedom of religion, whereas in Arab and other Islamic countries, Jews were expelled, Christians are oppressed, atheism is a capital offense, and you'd better not be yellow, white or black.

The Israeli military are reproached their very strength and efficiency, and the Palestinian militants are alternatively celebrated for their weakness and inefficacy or made apologies based on it. Strength becomes a vice, weakness a virtue; the least mistakes of the strong, criminal as they indeed often are, are presented as deliberate and unforgivable; but the indeed deliberate systematic targeting of innocents by the weak, criminal to a much higher degree, is presented as normal and justified. Civilization is condemned as such, while barbarity is praised in itself.

It's all a bizarre world of one-sided blindness and reversal of the most basic values. Blindness certainly is present on both sides and irks me just as much when the culprit is pro-Israel. But the reversal of values is not symmetrical. Moreover, the massive propaganda machine of the left, that notably controls most of the Western intelligentsia and all of France, is completely on that anti-Israel side. Which is why its elaborate manipulations are more in need of being addressed, whereas the trivial manipulations on the other side are more transparent and find little support, thanks to that same propaganda machine.

Note that I'm not going to argue the valid arguments on either or both sides of the conflict, neither am I going to discuss potential solutions and non-solutions — that would be a completely different discussion. My entire point here is to make you realize how the vast majority of the arguments used are invalid. They are attempts to lure and maintain the listener into irrational beliefs and irrational behavior, seeking absurd non-solutions.

Please don't take sides without learning more about the issues. But more importantly, please realize you don't have to take sides, and therefore you don't have to learn about the issues. The most important skill you should acquire is the ability to resist the pressure and intimidation to take side. Massive propaganda is used to incite you to take side, both ways. However those who are trying to manipulate you are not your friends, or the friends of anyone but themselves (if even); they are not inciting you to take actions that are useful to yourself, or to anyone involved; and they are certainly not inciting you or anyone to beliefs or actions conducive to long-lasting peace there or anywhere.

Please stop caring. Morally, indifference is vastly superior to selective indignation that you get manipulated into. And it's also vastly healthier than letting yourself manipulated: every time you're caring for something you shouldn't care about, you're not caring about something you should.

Boston Lisp Meeting: Tuesday 2012-11-20 Jianshi Huang (黄澗石) on Making CL more popular for startups

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 14:55:24 GMT

Boston Lisp Meeting:
Tuesday 2012-11-20
Jianshi Huang (黄澗石) on Making Common Lisp more popular for startups — the lean approach

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 20th 2012 at 1800 at Chatham Café at Google, 3 Cambrige Center. Jianshi Huang (黄澗石) will speak about Making CL more popular for startups — the lean approach.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Marc Battyani and François-René Rideau will tell their experiences of last month's ILC 2012. One slot open.

1 Jianshi Huang (黄澗石) on Making CL more popular for startups — the lean approach

Rapid prototyping becomes essential when choosing a tech stack in startups. Jianshi will share his experience of using Common Lisp in the 7 months of his startup projects and 4 years of work in MSI, and will discuss how to make Common Lisp more popular for startups. Jianshi will also share the feedbacks he gathered from the Chinese Lisp community and Lispers he met in the west coast.

Jianshi has been a Common Lisp programmer for 6 years, with a 4-year work experience at Mathematical Systems Inc. in Japan http://www.msi.co.jp with a team of excellent CL programmers. At MSI, we use CL almost for everything, from data mining to high-speed network monitoring, from graph visualization to programming language implementations. Jianshi joined a startup as a tech co-founder this April. The startup went through two incubators, Startup Chile and TechStars in Seattle.

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

Marc Battyani and François-René Rideau will tell what they saw or failed to see at the International Lisp Conference 2012 last October in Kyoto.

There is still one slot open for the next meeting. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at tunes@google.com.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 20th 2012 at 1800 (6pm) at Chatham Café at Google, 3 Cambrige Center.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

We are trying a new location this month, at the Google offices right outside Kendall Square Station. The downside is that Google requires attendees to register at least one day before. Please send an email with your name or usual pseudonym to boston-lisp-register@google.com (we don't send acknowledgements unless requested). It is OK to register and not come, but not OK to come without being registered, so if you think you might come, please register.

Chatham Café is a Google conference room on the fourth floor of the 3 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02139, right next to Kendall Square Station. http://wikimapia.org/3930737/3-Cambridge-Center

3 Cambridge Center (3CC) is the building on the North side of Main street, immediately West to the main T exit (Red Line outbound). The entrance to 3CC is on the side of the building opposite the T exit. A Googler will be waiting for you downstairs between 5:30pm and 6pm. If you arrive late, send me a text message at 617 575 9012 or tunes@google.com so someone can usher you in.

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=3+Cambridge+Center,+Cambridge,+MA

Many thanks to Google for welcoming us.

4 Dinner

We unhappily couldn't secure a sponsor to offer us dinner, but we're big boys and can provide for ourselves. After the conference, we will head down to the Cambridge Brewing Company and will take it from there.

5 More about the Meeting

We are resuming the Boston Lisp Meeting after a hyatus of over a year and a half.

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html

For more information, see our web site http://common-lisp.net/project/boston-lisp/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to tunes@google.com.

Of Fred and his countless Likes

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 06:21:51 GMT

[I am reposting below a testimony from my friend Perry Metzger.]

I used to have a friend who was a con man. I don't mean this metaphorically, I mean it literally. I'll call him Fred, because I doubt he'd want me blabbing his actual name online. Fred used to run a bogus psychic hotline service that he advertised in supermarket tabloids (this was 20 years ago when such things still were popular) — the most gullible people he found from the hotline were then cultivated for bigger cons or were sold to other con men.
Fred was a really friendly, nice, charismatic kind of guy. I knew his secret but most people would never have guessed that he was a predator. I hung out with him because I thought he was fascinating, and he was. I was very careful never to have any business dealings with him, but even knowing what he was, it was very hard not to like him — though I knew that was the result of wiring defects in my brain that Fred was good at exploiting.
Later, Fred tired of the cons he was running and (I am not making this up) went into politics, not as a politician but as a back-room operator. He found it paid better, was safer, and for someone like him was really easy to do. (Really, I'm not making this up.) I lost track of him a couple of years after that — no doubt he's still out there doing his thing.
Fred taught me something very valuable, which is that certain human beings are completely and totally unscrupulous. They don't really operate the way you and I do. They can cry or laugh on command, they learn how people work, how to manipulate them, to become their friends instantly, and to pick their pockets literally or metaphorically without compunction.
The US is currently run by people like Fred. You might not like hearing this because perhaps in the last few days you've put up a nice picture of a politician hugging a child and captioned it "aw!" or put up a video of a politician showing emotion as he explained how much they had touched his life.
You might not like hearing this because no one wants to believe other human beings are capable of being such complete and thoroughgoing predators on their fellow men. You might especially not want to think you've fallen pray to such people — that you've been had. No one wants to think they've been had. We all imagine we're better than that, that we, of all people, can judge a predator.
However, we've built a system that puts tremendous selection pressure on politicians and political operatives from the moment they enter the system. With a handful of possible (possible) exceptions that I can name, only the most ruthless and evil con men even get to the point where they are really in the running for high office. Only the truly most astonishing ones make it past all the selection barriers to the point where they make it to the Presidency. The system literally filters hundreds of millions of people to find the handful who are true and complete masters of the art of manipulating others.
It is not a coincidence that Bill Clinton called Barack Obama horrible things a few years ago during the primaries and a few months later was smiling and campaigning for him — and that people liked him throughout and never held it against him. It is not a coincidence that Barack Obama can order someone's death one minute and the next minute be photographed with a paternal smile as he tousles the hair of a child during a photo opportunity, and that people say "aw!" when they see him do it. It is not a coincidence that people who have met George W. Bush generally say he is remarkably genial and likable in person even though he's also personally responsible for a large fraction of the number of deaths that Pol Pot caused.
Fred is a real person. I don't know for sure that Barack Obama or George W. Bush are exactly like him — they haven't confided in me the way Fred did, and maybe they're that even more dangerous sort of con man, the kind that believes his own lies while he's telling them. It doesn't matter though.
What does matter is this: out of hundreds of millions, a few such people will be found. Such people are all too real, and they are predators upon their fellow men. They are not your friends no matter how much you've seen them on television and feel you know their heart.
It doesn't matter that they can weep on cue. I understand that they look sincere when they hug an injured person at a disaster site. However, normal people don't arrive at a disaster site after a day of planning, with a phalanx of cameramen specifically to record them hugging someone and weep on camera on cue. Normal people don't have a giant pool of advisers and managers finding such opportunities so they can then create such images so they can exploit the wiring flaws in the brains of millions of people. Normal people are not trained and honed to the peak of perfection this way and provided with a giant infrastructure specifically for exploiting other people's weaknesses and emotions in order to engender trust in the face of obvious signs of danger.
Normal people evolved to deal in hunter-gatherer groups of a few dozen at most. Normal people do not have highly evolved defenses against sociopaths equipped with armies of press agents who are also often themselves sociopaths. If you are reading this, you are (probably) a normal person.
These people you see on television are not your friends. If they come out of the crowd and look you in the eye and hug you and say they feel your pain, your impulse is naturally to feel like here is a person who wants to be your friend and who feels your pain, but it is a cynical lie. No human being can care individually about thousands of people they meet in a week. They aren't trying to help you, they are there to manipulate you, to get you to ignore reality, ignore reason, ignore thousands of lies small and large, and to say "aw, gee, he's just a nice ordinary guy, I can trust him after all."
In the contest that ended this week, Mitt Romney's fangs showed just a little bit too much. It was just a touch too obvious that something wasn't right about him, that he wanted something from you, that he didn't really love all of you individually as though he was your own brother.
That does not mean that Barack Obama loves you either. He's probably just as evil, or possibly a bit more evil or possibly a bit less. The difference was that he is better at the long con. The seams in the presentation show less, the smile is a better simulacrum of the real thing, his talking is smoother, his ear for language better, his flubs fewer, his tears more genuine seeming, his choice of team members on his long con superior.
We had a contest, and without a doubt Barack Obama is the better predator — he won, he gets unlimited power for another four years, he is our Emperor.
However, just because he's that good doesn't mean you have to fall for it.
Now quit with the postings showing me things like this (see below, as posted by several people on my friends list), because you're smarter than that, and even if you have to repeat "it's all a lie" to yourself for two hours to overcome his charisma, you should learn how to do it already. Yah, I know he seems completely sincere here — that's his job. He's a professional. This is what he does for a living. (Remember the people who get Oscars every year? More to the point, remember Fred?)
Obama Tears Up Thanking Volunteers

[As I (Faré again, not Perry anymore) recently posted on another site, "That narcissistic egomaniacs be power hungry for the thrill of mass murder, well, duh. But that otherwise intelligent well-meaning people, all too able to see through one of these warmongering megalomaniacs, shall fawn over the empty words of the other pathological liar, eagerly blind to his exact equal psychopathy — THAT never ceases to amaze me." The truth is they work against us as a tag team.]

Vertical vs Horizontal Aggression

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 13:39:00 GMT

One of my dreams last night went into a discussion of political history. Feudalism is born as warring groups of all sizes develop structured alliances to defend against "horizontal" aggression by other groups. But soon enough, the pressure is towards the information and action focusing on "vertical" aggression between lords and vassals: you're in contact with them, you know them more and more intimately, and inasmuch as feudalism is effective, it does raise the costs and risks of horizontal aggression. This pressure has two effects: One, horizontal aggression diminishes at all levels but the top levels where it is concentrated: kings, dukes, earls, whoever has effective as opposed to nominal sovereignty. Two, power gets concentrated as the intermediate levels slowly get ground away from above and below through vertical aggression while the top levels grow through horizontal aggression, leaving centralized states as an end-game. The theory makes measurable predictions, that indeed horizontal aggression diminishes with time while vertical aggression increases; it doesn't actually stop at feudalism. And it was a pretty cool dream including diagram with fat arrows of horizontal inward and vertical outward pressure squeezing the aggressive action.

Consolidating Common Lisp Libraries

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:35:58 GMT

I'm starting a movement to consolidate Common Lisp libraries. To participate, here's the ten point program summary:

Pick your favorite problem domain
Identify all libraries that address it
Work with various library authors
Pick the most promising library
Declare it THE library
Add missing features present in other libraries
Declare other libraries obsolete
Rename package to short name identifying domain
Invite all users to migrate to new library
Profit

Most of it is pretty straightforward, but below are some details.

Purpose

The whole point of the exercise is to build a stronger Common Lisp community, where people cooperate better, by being able to more easily use other people's code or have your code used by other people.

Background

At ILC'2012, there was a vast consensus that the Common Lisp library situation could be vastly improved. On the one hand, thanks to Quicklisp (with congratulations again to Xach), it is easy at long last to load a set of libraries with all their transitive dependencies. On the other hand, in the times before that was easy, we have developed a culture of non-sharing, whereby everyone reinvents his own libraries, each only covering the parts of the domain used by the author. Moreover, it is quite hard to navigate through the set of existing libraries and figure out which is the best one to use for a given problem, and so people choose at random, by cloning some system they've seen, or following the advice of a friend.

For a same problem domain, there may thus be more than a dozen different libraries, and each of them might cover only 80% of the domain at best, leaving users to fend for themselves for the 20% or more remaining unimplemented features. Of course, which 80% (or often, less than 50%) of the domain is covered by a particular library varies with the library, and the union of all libraries might still not cover 100% of what users desire. Olin Shivers once famously complained about this state of things in the world of Scheme, in the preamble to the documentation to his Scheme Regular Expressions library. The situation is no better in the world of Common Lisp today.

As an extreme case, I counted no fewer than 18 different unit test libraries in Quicklisp: (length '(lisp-unit xlunit unit-test fiveam stefil hu.dwim.stefil pcl-unit-test tap-unit-test cl-test-more monkeylib-test-framework ptester testbild xptest eos rt lift test-harness nst)) Cliki lists many more, and this still doesn't include countless library-less ad hoc solutions, nor does it count an unknown number of proprietary systems, of which at least four different ones have been developed at ITA. Do we need that many different unit test libraries? Is there even more than one different underlying design principle behind them?

Details

Each of the points in my 10-point program is important.

1- First, we can subdivide the work as building one consolidated library per problem domain. This means that this general consolidation project can be distributed among many people; it doesn't need to be done by a single person. Moreover, whoever works on consolidation in a domain should care enough about the domain to do the Right Thing™, rather than stop with yet another half-done job. Presumably, one of the existing library authors would be concerned enough to do it.

2- To fully solve the problem domain, we must identify all the libraries, and all their current and desired features, so that we may provide a 100% replacement to each and every one of these existing libraries, based on an architecture that makes all the future features possible.

3- It is extremely important to work with existing library authors. They are the ones who possess the expertise and the influence, that we want to cooperate. If for some reason there are irreconcilable differences that will lead to the survival of more than one library, these differences deserve to be documented, so that users can make their choice based on meaningful information. Sometimes, it might be possible for authors to layer their different approaches features on top of a common core library, or to build the common layer on top of a parameterized substrate that can offer the same functionality in different flavors: just because there is ultimate incompatibility at some level doesn't mean there cannot be code sharing at another level, after proper refactoring.

4- Out of the inspection of the existing code base, and the discussion with the various authors, one library should emerge as most promising, because its architecture is more expressive, because its maintainer is more responsive, because it sports more features, because its code is cleaner, because it has more a comprehensive test suite, because it has more enthusiastic users, etc.

5- By gathering a public consensus on which library to further develop as a 100% solution, our consolidators will already do a great service to the community: by directing the efforts of implementers and users alike into a single library, they will multiply the value of work poured into that problem domain, whereas that value was previously diluted over many libraries.

6- Often, it will appear that more work is required for the chosen library to satisfactorily replace the functionality of all the other existing libraries. That's fine. The consolidator, hopefully with the participation of the authors of previous libraries, will have to integrate all the demanded features in the common framework. This include bug fixes in corner cases, tests and documentation. Because these features were already written once, the difficulty is in integrating them, designing a nice interface to them, etc.

7- Even before the consolidated library is a 100% solution to the problem domain, it might be sufficient to replace some or all of the previous libraries. These libraries can then be declared officially obsolete, in their documentation, on cliki, on cl-user.net, in quicklisp, etc., with a link pointing to the new consolidated library. These libraries may well remain as historical documents, as personal toys, as backward compatibility tools, or as platforms for future experimentation. But hopefully, there should be no reason left for normal users to use anything but the consolidated library, until maybe one of the experiments succeeds and becomes the new best solution.

8- When the library is able to replace 100% of the functionality of all previous libraries, it may be renamed after the problem domain, and its package renamed accordingly. This will make it easier for users to find the library, and to understand read code that refers to the library. For instance, the future 100% solution to pattern matching would be called simply pattern-matching and its package would be PATTERN-MATCHING.

9- Now is the time to direct users to use the consolidated library and migrate their existing code. In odd cases, it may be necessary to fork a library that isn't maintained anymore, so it can be modified to use the new dependency. Or if there is not only no active maintainer but also no active user, the library might be declared obsolete, especially so if it is itself a candidate for being consolidated away.

10- When all this hard work is done, you can hopefully enjoy a better cooperating Common Lisp community, where it is easier to locate what library to use for a given goal, where the fewer active libraries are of higher quality, where your can pride in the code you write being more useful to more people, rather than being yet more effort thrown into yet another not-so-usable and not-so-used code base.

So there. Go talk to your fellow hackers and try to work together. A little communication goes a long way.

PS: after some research, I propose we use the clocc-devel mailing-list to discuss this Consolidation in general and synchronize our efforts, with the understanding that the technical discussion specific to each consolidated domain would be moved to the respective library's mailing-lists.

Boston Lisp Meeting: Thursday 2012-10-04 François-René Rideau on the Lisp Interface Library

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:17:43 GMT

Boston Lisp Meeting:
Thursday 2012-10-04
François-René Rideau on LIL: CLOS reaches higher order, sheds identity and has a transformative experience

http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, October 4th 2012 at 1800 at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room). François-René Rideau will speak about LIL: CLOS reaches higher order, sheds identity and has a transformative experience.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Speakers welcome.

1 François-René Rideau on LIL: CLOS reaches higher order, sheds identity and has a transformative experience

François-René Rideau will present his work on the Lisp Interface Library, that uses Interface-Passing Style to provide parametric polymorphism to Common Lisp in a way that integrates with the ad-hoc polymorphism of CLOS. LIL implements both pure and stateful data structures, and provides automatic transformers from one kind of interface to the other, and from Interface-Passing Style to traditional object-oriented style.

François-René Rideau is a cybernetician who currently works at Google on Common Lisp infrastructure for an airline reservation system.

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, October 4th 2012 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room).

The Star conference room, MIT 32-D463 on the fourth floor of the Ray and Maria Stata Center, 32 Vassar St, Cambridge MA 02139. NB: there are two sets of elevators, you want to use those on the south-western side, further away from Main St.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Stata+Center,+Vassar+Street,+Cambridge,+MA

Many thanks go to Professor Gerald J. Sussman for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

4 Dinner

We don't have any sponsors to offer us dinner, but we're big boys and can provide for ourselves. After the conference, we will head down to Mary Chung's on Central Square.

5 More about the Meeting

We are resuming the Boston Lisp Meeting after a hyatus of over a year and a half.

Boston Lisp Meeting: Thursday 2012-08-30 Eli Barzilay on Hygienic Macros for Beginners & Power Users

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:51:12 GMT

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, August 30th 2012 at 1800 at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room). Eli Barzilay will speak about Hygienic Macros for Beginners and Power Users.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Speakers to be announced.

1 Eli Barzilay on Hygienic Macros for Beginners and Power Users

Eli Barzilay will explain how you too can enjoy the power and safety of hygienic macro to build the syntactic abstractions with which to elegantly express your programs.

Eli Barzilay, who teaches and does research at NEU, is one of the maintainers of PLT Racket.

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, August 30th 2012 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room).

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Stata+Center,+Vassar+Street,+Cambridge,+MA

Many thanks go to Professor Gerald J. Sussman for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

4 Dinner

We don't have any sponsors to offer us dinner, but we're big boys and can provide for ourselves. Before we start the conference, we'll organize a big pizza order, where those who want can chip in; after the conference is when we'll eat it.

5 More about the Meeting

We are resuming the Boston Lisp Meeting after a hyatus of over a year and a half.

A Refutation of (Global) "Happiness Maximization"

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 06:59:01 GMT

As promised, here is a detailed rational refutation of the utilitarian concept of (Global) "Happiness Maximization" in general, and its specific variant that concludes in favor of wireheading, the cultivation of individuals in vats in a permanent state of artificially stimulated bliss.

Wireheading

To recall the background, I recently had a discussion with a very intelligent and extremely well-meaning colleague of mine, Jeff Kaufman, who, as an aside during an evening he organized to foster efficient philanthropy, was seriously defending the utilitarian ideal of "Happiness Maximization" to its wantonly absurd consequence, wireheading: putting humans, by force if needs be, into vats, where the pleasure centers of their brains will be constantly stimulated for lifelong bliss through properly implanted electric wires and/or chemical injections. Or perhaps instead of humans, the Utilitarian Elite would use rats, or ants, or some brain cell cultures or perhaps nano-electronic simulations of such electro-chemical stimulations; in the latter cases, biological humans, being less-efficient forms of happiness substrate, would be done away with or at least not renewed as embodiments of the Holy Happiness to be maximized. He even wrote at least two blog posts on this theme: hedonic vs preference utilitarianism in the Context of Wireheading, Value of a Computational Process.

Failing the Smell Test

Now, in my previous post, The Criminal Stupidity of Intelligent People, I gave several blanket principles by which one might reject such mass-criminal schemes. Indeed, there is no question that Jeff is much more intelligent than most, and much more knowledgeable of this topic than anyone; few could oppose him a rational refutation like I'm going to offer (no false modesty from me here); yet one need not have identified the precise mistakes of a demonstration to reject its provably absurd conclusions. Just like you can without looking reject elaborate alleged proofs of the squaring of the circle, you can without looking reject proofs that some higher principle calls for mass murder: that's the Libertarian principle, recognizing that peace is the first social value, and it depends on mutual respect for other individuals' life and property. You can also reject any denial of intuition, tradition or common sense that does not first explain why intuition, tradition and common sense work in most usual cases yet not the case that is being considered. That's the Conservative principle. Finally, you shouldn't yield to the opinion of any self-styled or even established expert, however intelligent and authoritative they may be, before you've pitted the proponents of that opinion against the most intelligent and authoritative opponents of that opinion you can find (who are seldom those that the proponents would choose to debate). That's the Eristic debate principle. And that's where I come: to champion the debunking of "Global Happiness Maximization" in general, and "Wireheading" in particular.

Individual Utility

Let's start by questioning the very concept of "happiness" or "utility". Certainly, it is sometimes useful when trying to make a decision to measure opportunities and their consequences in terms of ordinal preferences, and even of some scalar utility. But that doesn't mean that there is an objective way to always precisely measure everything in such terms: the notion is fuzzy and uncertain; ascribing measures is costly and imprecise, totally subjective, and relative to a narrow choice at hand. Even under the best hypotheses (von Neumann Morgenstern utility), it is only defined up to a costly measure and an affine transformation. It certainly isn't a well-defined number easily accessible through introspection, even less so through external observation. Here's for one individual's "utility".

Given individual (cardinal) utilities or even just individual (ordinal) preference scales, the only objective notion of interpersonal optimization is Pareto-optimality: to respect each person's property and let them interact through voluntary exchanges and consensual transactions. Any enhancement that respects everyone's rights and interests is legit and improves each and everyone's utility. This is the Libertarian principle of progress through peaceful commerce. Anything else that tries to go "beyond" this Pareto-optimization necessarily violates some individual's rights, and obviously doesn't improve each and everyone's utility. Yet that's what collectivist "utilitarians" claim to do.

Problems with Collective Utility at a Small Scale

Collectivist Utilitarians somehow claim to aggregate individual utility functions into some collective utility function. Now, even assuming each individual's utilities could were somehow well-defined and could be measured or estimated, there is no objective way to do interpersonal utility comparison and establish such an aggregate. Any set of weight you attribute to individual utilities to compute your common scale is purely arbitrary and subjective. Yet, the collectivist utilitarian claims to somehow establish an official common scale that can be agreed upon as "objective", as opposed to just acknowledging the infinite plurality of ways to place each individual's utility on a scale, related to each other by how much more or less weight each unified scale gives to each individual's utility as compared to the other unified scale.

In a given small newly formed homogeneous community, there could be a case made that somehow giving "equal" weight as less costly than endlessly trying to argue for each one's importance; but already this "equality" supposes one possesses a common measure. What is this measure? Time? But you cannot even equate in either subjective or objective effects the same amount of time spent by the same person doing different activities; it makes no sense at all doing such equation between two different persons. Furthermore, not everyone gives the same value to the widely varying amount of whatever available time they have left to live that isn't already bound to some existing obligations and necessities of life. Money? Assuming the community is advanced enough to possess some currency, indeed you could try to equate each member's marginal preference for a small (but not too small) amount of currency; that's indeed what neo-classical economists typically do when they indulge in their kind of calculations. But even then you'd find that this is a very elastic scale, and that it is as "unfair" as it is coarsely-defined: it gives disproportionate weight to lazy and greedy people living in cheap areas with plenty of time on their hand and in their future to spend money as opposed to old hard-working generous people in sophisticated areas. Indeed, whichever way you define your common scale, when you're trying to apply this a scale to very large heterogeneous populations, it will yield absurd results. And even assuming you started with an agreed upon distribution at one point in a small newly formed homogeneous community, your distribution won't hold water as the community grows, some people leave, others join, babies are born, some people become superproductive pillars of the community while others become criminals negatively affecting it, with everything in between.

Meaninglessness of Collective Utility at a Large Scale

Now, depending on their ambition and their gall, collectivist utilitarians may claim to be able to establish a common utility scale not just over a small group of people for a day, but over an entire country for a year, over humanity for centuries, over all living organisms on the planet for millions of years, and even over all entities in the entire universe for aeons to come. But what common scale can you establish between a few humans who hardly know each other, between billions of humans who live completely different lives and have no clue about each other's existence, between humans and rats or other mammals, between mammals and insects or microbes, between animals and plants, between biological life forms and electronically simulated life forms, between life forms as we know them and potential future emergent artificial intelligences, between terrestrial life as we may know it and life that may have evolved in completely different ways in other parts of the universe? How can you establish a common scale between entities that live at different places in different times, separated by vast distances and durations? How can you establish a common scale between actual entities that are known to exist, entities that exist but are not known to exist, and infinitely many potential entities that may or may not some day come into being or fail to come into being depending on a large number of unpredictable decisions and unknowable events and their largely unforeseeable consequences? Yet this is the kind of feat that collectivist utilitarians such as Jeff not only assume to be possible, but claim can be the basis for making effective decisions that are to bind each and every one.

Of course, if you take the building of such scales seriously, you'll find that depending on the fine-tuning of the contributing factors to your scale, you might have to consider such dilemmas as follow: Should we forcefully impregnate women, inconveniencing them somewhat for the sake of the large number of potential unborn happy descendants years from now? Is the fraction of life value associated to ebola virus big enough that we should sacrifice each and every human on the planet for the sake of feeding their bodies to a tremendous number of copies of these valuable life-forms? Should our omniscient economic advisers assign to everyone a positive or negative tax (or subsidy) factor on everything he purchases, perhaps with a different rate on each potential purchase? Or should they directly buy what each of us needs according to their perfect knowledge of our utility? If we count "each man equally" in an open system such as "a country", shouldn't we encourage prolific invaders to replace the inhabitants of the country after either slaughtering them or letting them die without children or with few children? Depending on how you compute GNP (or GNH) statistics, you may want to import richer and happier invaders (so they bring their capital), or poorer and unhappier invaders (so their portion of GNx increases most). If you slaughter the original inhabitants, though, you may also want to excommunicate or exterritoriate them before you do them in, so that their suffering does not count negatively for "the country", before you re-import the loot from their dead bodies. Or maybe GNP and GNH studies are only valid for "closed" systems, and then require some World or Universe Government to oversee everyone, and strictly regulate and control the procreation of new children to maintain a fair approximation of closedness between the initial inhabitants; the only totally fair non-approximative way to keep the system closed would be to strictly forbid children; but if there are no children at all, "in the long run, we're all dead". Maybe to be meaningful, the National Utility Scale can only be used by a country's government at a given date; then to continue action it will have to morph into some kind of government of the descendants of the inhabitants of the country at said date, the authority of which is somehow prorated by their contribution to the subject's genetic material. Plenty of questions such as these, absurd as they may sound, naturally arise as prerequisites to any further action, when one claims to put Everyone and Everything on a same Utility Scale with an explicit formula.

Assuming Knowledge of the Unknowable

The implicit premise of any discussion about Ethics is that there are choices to be made that haven't been made, and that the future is therefore unknown, and essentially so. But the implicit premise behind Collectivist Utilitarianism is that there is a knowable objective scale that allows decisions to be made mechanically for everyone. Of course, if the claim is that "there is a scale, but it's unknowable and we can't use it", then it's not much of a claim, but is more akin to invisible pink unicorns and mystical gods retired from the world. Now if the claim is "we don't know but we can act as if we knew", then it's just a justification for the arbitrary power and dreadful decisions of those entitled to act as if they knew even though they admittedly don't. In any case, the pretense to sum over unknowable variables is bogus. Inasmuch as it might possibly mean anything, the knowledge of it is out of the reach not just of mere humans but of any finite entity within the universe. The entire project of a global utility calculation is found to be meaningless.

In the end, any concept of utility, happiness or suffering only has a clear or knowable validity but in the context of an individual who makes decisions based on such a concept. Those evaluations that are valid for one individual are both invalid and unknowable for other individuals. These evaluations do not meaningfully generalize to "collectives", much less to a whole planet, even less across years, and not at all to the entire Universe across future aeons.

Hidden Totalitarian Premise

Furthermore, a damning feature of any recommendation issued in the name of any collective utility is that it presumes totalitarian ownership by the few individuals who may or may not decide based on such recommendations over all the resources of all individuals in the alleged collective that will be somehow shuffled by the decision. Wherever such recommendations depart from those of Pareto Optimality, they require violence toward some parties; such violence implies that the party who imposes the decision either can exercise some tyrannical supremacy, or will experience abject failure in trying to enforce its recommendation. In the first case, this violent tyranny more than offsets the alleged positive consequences of the recommendation; in the second, its failure invalidates the unachieved positive consequences that allegedly justified it. In either case, the denial of Pareto Optimality and Libertarian property rights as a limit to action by some proclaimed Utilitarian Elite ignores the costs of enforcement of such action, that offset any benefits, as showed by the Law of Bitur-Camember. Although really, it's usually the elite being spiteful rather than ignorant of how victims are sacrified to fulfill their own personal preferences, plans, and lust for power; and the same elites cultivating ignorance, misunderstanding, apathy and disorganization among the masses upon which they trample.

Back to Individualism

There remains the case where some individual only acts on his own respective property without initiating conflict with any other individuals, while respecting every one else's individual property rights, but claims to act in the name and interest of a Collective for which he has established some Collective Utility Scale. We can then start by examining whether the actions of this individual is indeed compatible with said avowed Collective Utility Scale, or if he are just lying to himself or to others; but if he is indeed sincere and coherent, which he may be, that only means that he has some possibly strange but extended notion of one self. Which might not be so strange when the Collective is actually a tight knit family, clan, etc. Everyone living in society has some notion of extended self.

But what is strange and probably mystically deluded is when one claims to act in the interest of the entirety of Mankind, when one in the end is only actually possibly helping but a small number of very specific individuals out of billions of humans; and this delusion becomes blatant evil when under the claim of acting according to some Objective utility scale, one systematically acts to give to people in proportion to the objectively awful criteria that these recipients should be the worst kind of lowlifes, the dumbest, laziest, nastiest and least shameful at demanding money "due" to them.

Even assuming the latter pitfall is avoided, the implicit recognition of the preeminence of the Universal Law of Libertarian Non-Aggression by those who respect it casts a shadow on any attempt to "Maximize Utility" that explicitly ignores or rejects this preeminence in its recommendations: however you account for Mankind as a whole, you'll find that violations of Universal Law are the one greatest source of dis-Utility in the world, and that as long as such violations casually occur, the greatest possible charitable act may be to act towards the universal recognition and enforcement of this Universal Law.

This seals the notion of a Global Happiness to calculate and maximize for what it is: at best, a long diversion from Pareto Optimality back to Pareto Optimality; usually, a useless unknowable, unactionable fantasy that only serves as the cover for some people to grab the power to decide over others; at worst, a criminal absurdity. There is only one knowable and actionable way to foster Happiness, which is to care for those you love and to uphold the Law by defending victims from their aggressors. Gross National Product, Gross National Happiness, etc., are but pretenses for bureaucrats and politicians and through them lobbyists to steal from confused citizens. And the particular variant of Global Happiness Maximization that recommends Wireheading is but a criminal absurdity. Nevertheless, there are often useful concepts to clarify in examining the crazy fallacies of intelligent people; indeed same or other intelligent people may use in other contexts and theories as well; therefore let's examine the notion still.

Wireheads as Paperclips

The implicit hypothesis behind Wireheading is that "happiness" or "utility" consists in an independent electro-chemico-mechanical phenomenon that can be physically isolated within a human's brain or an animal's brain; for instance, Jeff seems to equate it with some pleasure center of the brain releasing or receiving dopamine. Once isolated, this "happiness" can be replicated, miniaturized, and mass-produced. Therefore, this whole Wireheading is just another variant of the infamous Paperclip maximizer that anyone in the field is warned about: an imagined runaway AI is tasked with producing paperclips; it ascribes a positive utility to the sheer number of paperclips in the universe, and is so successful at maximizing this utility that it turns everything into paperclips; in particular this includes taking apart the bodies of humans and posthumans to use them as raw material for its goal. Wireheading is similar, except that paperclips have been replaced by wireheads or by whichever streamlined reduction thereof (if any) our pan-philanthropic utilitarian wireheading overlord comes up with.

A Pixie Dust Theory of Happiness

Behind this wireheading proposal, we have therefore identified a pixie dust theory of happiness. A pixie dust theory is one where some phenomenon (in this case happiness), is believed to have its source in some kind of magical compound (in this case, a brain in blissful stimulation, or its isolated reduction to some unstable dopamine-receptor chemical complex), each uniform physical or ethereal amount of which (in this case, physical copies) possesses value in itself that it additively contributes to the whole: the more pixie dust, the more happiness. In a previous essay (fmftcl), I debunked the pixie dust theory of freedom. The pixie dust theory of happiness can be debunked the same way.

Freedom isn't possibly embodied in quantum wave collapse, elementary particles to be called eleutherons, or magic souls or microsouls that angels mystically attach to the brains of individuals to endow them with free will. Similarly, happiness is not possibly physically embodied in dopamine-receptor reaction complexes, elementary particles to be called hedons, or actual dust sprinkled by invisible pixies on the neurons of some people to make them happy. Instead, both are phenomena that result from the situational interaction of an individual with the rest of universe, (of being "thrown" into the universe, would say Heidegger; a good reading suggestion at this point is "Understanding Computers and Cognition" by Winograd & Flores). More than that, they are functional sub-phenomena of life, i.e. of an organism behaving in such a way as to sustain itself, in a feedback loop with its environment. Freedom is the acknowledgement that the inside of the organism controls its behaviour much more than any other entity outside it; happiness is the judgment regarding the organism achieving its goals, whatever they be.

Neither freedom nor happiness makes any sense for a neuron in a vat, where it doesn't actually control an organism thrown into the universe, where it doesn't have meaningful goals to achieve. Its existence, artificially sustained by an outer organism, is a pure waste of resources and of information-processing ability. It is interesting how Jeff, who finds his satisfaction in trying hard to maximize his impact on the world (and indeed speaks of giving efficiently for maximized "impact"), doesn't realize that happiness means nothing to brains in a vat that can have no impact whatsoever on the world. Trying to isolate these phenomena from the rest of an individual organism's behavior, what more to "maximize" them afterwards, is absurd on its face — even more so than trying to isolate magnetic monopoles so as to thereafter maximize their intensity. It's not even impossible: it doesn't make sense at all.

Emulated Happiness

Jeff recognizes that the substrate of consciousness, and therefore of happiness, need not be biological, but could be electronic, be it through emulation. In this, he is totally right: the ability to process information and act upon it isn't tied to any specific chemical process, and there could therefore be living organisms, and sentient beings, based on a substrate of electronic computations on silicon transistors rather than on organic chemistry inside and across neurons. But combining this common piece of wisdom with the above pixie dust theory of happiness, he reaches new heights in absurd statements that he cannot get out of.

Indeed, from this substrate independence of consciousness and consequently of happiness, he concludes that a bone and flesh wirehead is no better than an emulated wirehead in a physical simulation of the universe, or in a properly optimized abstraction thereof. Once you have captured the simulation blueprints of a "maximally happy moment" (by unit cost of replication by the wirehead maximizer), be it a junkie at the top of his high, a rapist ejaculating inside a helpless high-profile victim, a mass-murdering tyrant getting a kick out of slaughtering a billion victims, or the three combined at once, then you can run this maximally blissful moment in a closed loop, and replicate that loop identically on gazillions of computers, each a paperclip to our paperclip multiplier.

Now, a basic principle of software abstraction and optimization is that programs that have identical input, output and side-effects are indistiguishable and that one can replace the other. Since this simulation in a closed loop has no input, no output and no side-effect, then it is indistinguishable from the empty program that does nothing. You don't even need to run the simulation, or to capture it for that matter; doing nothing is already a valid implementation of the paperclip multiplier to unreachable transfinite heights, far beyond what any physical implementation thereof could even conceivably dream of achieving. Jeff, faced with this prospect, tries to somehow demand an actual expensive computation of some physical process, his original pixie dust; somehow you have to disable optimizations and observe the blissful brain in its dopaminergic glory. Jeff obviously hasn't read Greg Egan's Permutation City, in which delicious SF novel all kinds of concepts related to the emulation of consciousness are explored, to the point of absurdity — with each reader getting to decide where it starts to be absurd and why.

Of course, even without optimization at the level observed by Jeff, what about optimizations and pessimizations at an intermediate level below? What if a hedonic simulation is run on a redundant computer, where two identical processors in lockstep simultaneously carry the same computation? Does that make the simulation count double or single? What if the redundancy happens in software rather than in hardware? On the contrary, what if a de-duplicating server optimizes zillions of identical computations by running them on one virtual machine instance? What if after the first simulation, the results are cached, and the computation implemented as a virtual lookup, itself optimized away, except when you plug a monitor to observe said results? One way or the other, "linearity" (as in "linear logic"), the resource-like nature of some phenomena, is not preserved by software abstraction in general. If happiness is embodied in some pixie dust, then software emulation is going to do strange things to it incompatible with accounting for utilons. Yet Jeff, a software engineer, doesn't seem to register.

Terminal Insanity

Jeff falls in the most basic insanity trap, as notably identified by Korzybski's General Semantics: confusing a thing and its representation. The map is not the territory; the representation of something is not the thing itself; a software emulation of a happy man is not a happy man; the neural switch that triggers a feeling of happiness is not the feeling of happiness; the feeling of happiness in a man itself is but a representation, an internalization, of a situation of happiness, real or not, that if real relates the man to his environment: the goals he is pursuing are reached; his frustrations are overcome; his impact is large; his choices are vindicated; his actions are meaningful; etc.

What makes the mental representation of something worthwhile is its connection to the reality, with the thinking individual choosing how to act within in his real environment based on this representation in his mind. When the representation of reality is inadequate, the mind is mistaken. When the relation to reality is broken, the mind is insane. A concentration camp prisoner injected with drugs inducing a feeling of happiness is not actually happy; his feeling of happiness is not just a mistaken representation, what more it is a representation that has been deliberately corrupted. When there isn't even a reality to be adequately or inadequately represented, and not even an individual acting in that reality, then there isn't a mind at all that may be sane or insane; and the person who claims that there is is himself deeply mistaken, if not insane. What makes mental representation meaningful is that it's actually connected to sensors and actuators, at which point this connection is making it worthwhile, or not; and that's precisely the opposite of Jeff's view of utilons as an isolatable physical phenomenon.

Understanding Criminal Altruism

In conclusion, here was another case of very intelligent, well-meaning people making criminal recommendations based on seriously accepting absurd ideas. It is important to recognize these ideas as absurd and these recommendations as criminal; but as said Claude Bernard, it isn't enough to say: "I was mistaken"; one must say how one was mistaken. Only by analyzing the root of the issue can we possibly prevent more people from following these same ideas, which, if widespread would be used to justify actual crimes. It is important to debunking these ideas, to confront the essential contradictions in their underlying assumptions. And as we do it, we can explore and restore a few interesting concepts that are often overlooked but unlike the debunked ideas can be used for effective ethical decision making.

The Criminal Stupidity of Intelligent People

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 02:42:51 GMT

What always fascinates me when I meet a group of very intelligent people is the very elaborate bullshit that they believe in. The naive theory of intelligence I first posited when I was a kid was that intelligence is a tool to avoid false beliefs and find the truth. Surrounded by mediocre minds who held obviously absurd beliefs not only without the ability to coherently argue why they held these beliefs, but without the ability of even understanding basic arguments about them, I believed as a child that the vast amount of superstition and false beliefs in the world was due to people both being stupid and following the authority of insufficiently intelligent teachers and leaders. More intelligent people and people following more intelligent authorities would thus automatically hold better beliefs and avoid disproven superstitions. However, as a grown up, I got the opportunity to actually meet and mingle with a whole lot of intelligent people, including many whom I readily admit are vastly more intelligent than I am. And then I had to find that my naive theory of intelligence didn't hold water: intelligent people were just as prone as less intelligent people to believing in obviously absurd superstitions. Only their superstitions would be much more complex, elaborate, rich, and far reaching than an inferior mind's superstitions.

For instance, I remember a ride with an extremely intelligent and interesting man (RIP Bob Desmarets); he was describing his current pursuit, which struck me as a brilliant mathematical mind's version of mysticism: the difference was that instead of marveling at some trivial picture of an incarnate god like some lesser minds might have done, he was seeking some Ultimate Answer to the Universe in the branching structures of ever more complex algebras of numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, quaternions, octonions, and beyond, in ever higher dimensions (notably in relation to super-string theories). I have no doubt that there is something deep, and probably enlightening and even useful in such theories, and I readily disqualify myself as to the ability to judge the contributions that my friend made to the topic from a technical point of view; no doubt they were brilliant in one way or another. Yet, the way he was talking about this topic immediately triggered the "crackpot" flag; he was looking there for much more than could possibly be found, and anyone (like me) capable of acknowledging being too stupid to fathom the Full Glory of these number structures yet able to find some meaning in life could have told that no, this topic doesn't hold key to The Ultimate Source of All Meaning in Life. Bob's intellectual quest, as exaggeratedly exalted as it might have been, and as interesting as it was to his own exceptional mind, was on the grand scale of things but some modestly useful research venue at best, and an inoffensive pastime at worst. Perhaps Bob could conceivably used his vast intellect towards pursuits more useful to you and I; but we didn't own his mind, and we have no claims to lay on the wonders he could have created but failed to by putting his mind into one quest rather than another. First, Do No Harm. Bob didn't harm any one, and his ideas certainly contained no hint of any harm to be done to anyone.

Unhappily, that is not always the case of every intelligent man's fantasies. Let's consider a discussion I was having recently, that prompted this article. Last week, I joined a dinner-discussion with a lesswrong meetup group: radical believers in rationality and its power to improve life in general and one's own life in particular. As you can imagine, the attendance was largely, though not exclusively, composed of male computer geeks. But then again, any club that accepts me as a member will probably be biased that way: birds of the feather flock together. No doubt, there are plenty of meetup groups with the opposite bias, gathering desperately non-geeky females to the almost exclusion of males. Anyway, the theme of the dinner was "optimal philanthropy", or how to give time and money to charities in a way that maximizes the positive impact of your giving. So far, so good.

But then, I found myself in a most disturbing private side conversation with the organizer, Jeff Kaufman (a colleague, I later found out), someone I strongly suspect of being in many ways saner and more intelligent than I am. While discussing utilitarian ways of evaluating charitable action, he at some point mentioned some quite intelligent acquaintance of his who believed that morality was about minimizing the suffering of living beings; from there, that acquaintance logically concluded that wiping out all life on earth with sufficient nuclear bombs (or with grey goo) in a surprise simultaneous attack would be the best possible way to optimize the world, though one would have to make triple sure of involving enough destructive power that not one single strand of life should survive or else the suffering would go on and the destruction would have been just gratuitous suffering. We all seemed to agree that this was an absurd and criminal idea, and that we should be glad the guy, brilliant as he may be, doesn't remotely have the ability to implement his crazy scheme; we shuddered though at the idea of a future super-human AI having this ability and being convinced of such theories.

That was not the disturbing part though. What tipped me off was when Jeff, taking the "opposite" stance of "happiness maximization" to the discussed acquaintance's "suffering minimization", seriously defended the concept of wireheading as a way that happiness may be maximized in the future: putting humans into vats where the pleasure centers of their brains will be constantly stimulated, possibly using force. Or perhaps instead of humans, using rats, or ants, or some brain cell cultures or perhaps nano-electronic simulations of such electro-chemical stimulations; in the latter cases, biological humans, being less-efficient forms of happiness substrate, would be done away with or at least not renewed as embodiments of the Holy Happiness to be maximized. He even wrote at least two blog posts on this theme: hedonic vs preference utilitarianism in the Context of Wireheading, and Value of a Computational Process. In the former, he admits to some doubts, but concludes that the ways a value system grounded on happiness differ from my intuitions are problems with my intutions.

I expect that most people would, and rightfully so, find Jeff's ideas as well as his acquaintance's ideas to be ridiculous and absurd on their face; they would judge any attempt to use force to implement them as criminal, and they would consider their fantasied implemention to be the worst of possible mass murders. Of course, I also expect that most people would be incapable of arguing their case rationally against Jeff, who is much more intelligent, educated and knowledgeable in these issues than they are. And yet, though most of them would have to admit their lack of understanding and their absence of a rational response to his arguments, they'd be completely right in rejecting his conclusion and in refusing to hear his arguments, for he is indeed the sorely mistaken one, despite his vast intellectual advantages.

I wilfully defer any detailed rational refutation of Jeff's idea to some future article (can you without reading mine write a valuable one?). In this post, I rather want to address the meta-point of how to address the seemingly crazy ideas of our intellectual superiors. First, I will invoke the "conservative" principle (as I'll call it), well defended by Hayek (who is not a conservative): we must often reject the well-argued ideas of intelligent people, sometimes more intelligent than we are, sometimes without giving them a detailed hearing, and instead stand by our intuitions, traditions and secular rules, that are the stable fruit of millenia of evolution. We should not lightly reject those rules, certainly not without a clear testable understanding of why they were valid where they are known to have worked, and why they would cease to be in another context (see Chersterton's Fence). Second, we should not hesitate to use proxy in an eristic argument: if we are to bow to the superior intellect of our better, it should not be without having pitted said presumed intellects against each other in a fair debate to find out if indeed there is a better whose superior arguments can convince the others or reveal their error. Last but not least, beyond mere conservatism or debate, mine is the Libertarian point: there is Universal Law, that everyone must respect, whereby peace between humans is possible inasmuch and only inasmuch as they don't initiate violence against other persons and their property. And as I have argued in another previous essay (hardscrapple), this generalizes to maintaining peace between sentient beings of all levels of intelligence, including any future AI that Jeff may be prone to consider. Whatever the one's prevailing or dissenting opinions, the initiation of force is never to be allowed unpunished as a means to further any ends. Rather than doubt his intuition, Jeff should have been tipped that his theory was wrong and taken out of context by the very fact that it advocates or condones massive violation of this Universal Law. Criminal urges, mass-criminal at that, are a strong stench that should alert anyone that some ideas have gone astray, even when it might not be immediately obvious where exactly they started parting from the path of sanity.

Now, you might ask, it is good and well to poke fun at the crazy ideas that some otherwise intelligent people may hold; it may even allow one to wallow in a somewhat justified sense of intellectual superiority over people who otherwise are actually and objectively so one's intellectual superiors. But is there a deeper point? Is it relevant what crazy ideas intellectuals hold, whether inoffensive or criminal? Sadly, it is. As John McCarthy put it, "Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals' ideological riots sometimes kill millions." Jeff's particular crazy idea may be mostly harmless: the criminal raptures of the overintelligent nerd, that are so elaborate as to be unfathomable to 99.9% of the population, are unlikely to ever spread to enough of the power elite to be implemented. That is, unless by some exceptional circumstance there is a short and brutal transition to power by some overfriendly AI programmed to follow such an idea. On the other hand, the criminal raptures of a majority of the more mediocre intellectual elite, when they further possess simple variants that can intoxicate the ignorant and stupid masses, are not just theoretically able to lead to mass murder, but have historically been the source of all large-scale mass murders so far; and these mass murders can be counted in hundreds of millions, over the XXth century only, just for Socialism. Nationalism, Islamism and Social-democracy (the attenuated strand of socialism that now reigns in Western "Democracies") count their victims in millions only. And every time, the most well-meaning of intellectuals build and spread the ideologies of these mass-murders. A little initial conceptual mistake, properly amplified, can do that.

And so I am reminded of the meetings of some communist cells that I attended out of curiosity when I was in high-school. Indeed, trotskyites are very openly recruiting in "good" French high-schools. It was amazing the kind of non-sensical crap that these obviously above-average adolescent could repeat. "The morale of the workers is low." Whoa. Or "The petite-bourgeoisie" is plotting this or that. Apparently, grossly cut social classes spanning millions of individuals act as one man, either afflicted with depression or making machiavelian plans. Not that any of them knew much of either salaried workers or entrepreneurs but through one-sided socialist literature. If you think that the nonsense of the intellectual elite is inoffensive, consider what happens when some of them actually act on those nonsensical beliefs: you get terrorists who kill tens of people; when they lead ignorant masses, they end up killing millions of people in extermination camps or plain massacres. And when they take control of entire universities, and train generations of scholars, who teach generations of bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, then you suddenly find that all politicians agree on slowly implementing the same totalitarian agenda, one way or another.

If you think that control of universities by left-wing ideologists is just a French thing, consider how for instance, America just elected a president whose mentor and ghostwriter was the chief of a terrorist group made of Ivy League educated intellectuals whose overriding concern about the country they claimed to rule was how to slaughter ten percent of its population in concentration camps. And then consider that the policies of this president's "right wing" opponent are indistinguishable from the policies of said president. The violent revolution has given way to the slow replacement of the elite, towards the same totalitarian ideals, coming to you slowly but relentlessly rather than through a single mass criminal event. Welcome to a world where the crazy ideas of intelligent people are imposed by force, cunning and superior organization upon a mass of less intelligent yet less crazy people.

Ideas have consequences. That's why everyone Needs Philosophy.

Boston Lisp Meeting: Thursday 2012-06-28 Kalman Reti on Symbolics Lisp Machines

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 06:42:37 GMT

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, June 28th 2012 at 1800 at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room). Kalman Reti will speak about Symbolics Lisp Machines.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Speakers to be announced.

1 Kalman Reti on Symbolics Lisp Machines

Kalman Reti will talk about some of the history of the Lisp machine and some features of the Symbolics Lisp machines that were unique, including both hardware and software features. He'll discuss how the Alpha emulator works and Brad Parker's hack to make it run on 64bit modern machines. Finally he'll demonstrate Genera running on his laptop.

Kalman Reti worked for Symbolics from 1982 through 1992, mostly on VLSI tools for Ivory but also writing low-level device support (e.g. a LMFS recovery utility, R/W optical drive support, LZW compressor, etc.) The last few years of that were spent doing customer consulting. After being laid off when Symbolics went into chapter 11, Kalman worked for Apple in Cambridge, first on MCL and later, after MCL was sold to Digitool, on Dylan. Kalman was hired after that by Symbolics Technology, Inc., who had acquired the assets of Symbolics from the bankruptcy court, to work on further productizing the emulator for the Alpha. This was used by John Mallery at MIT to run his document distribution system for the White House during the Clinton presidency. When the owners of that venture decided that a financial company had no business owning a computer company, a private individual bought the assets and Kalman spent 4 years as a "captive consultant" for him. Since 2002, when he ran out of money, I've worked for Ab Initio (doing nothing with lisp except emacs hacks).

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, June 28th 2012 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room).

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Stata+Center,+Vassar+Street,+Cambridge,+MA

Many thanks go to Professor Gerald J. Sussman for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

4 Dinner

5 More about the Meeting

We are resuming the Boston Lisp Meeting after a hyatus of over a year and a half.

For more information, see our web site http://boston-lisp.org/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Economics Lesson #1 — Opportunity Cost

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 06:08:53 GMT

"You can't have your cake and eat it, too." This popular saying is often used to remind people of the one central principle behind all Economics, the idea of Opportunity Cost, showing how well entrenched it is in common sense: any given resource (in this proverbial case, the cake) may be put to some use or other, but it is consumed or immobilized in the process, excluding all alternative uses.

And yet, I never got the hang of how the literal meaning of this saying is inappropriate as an illustration of the abstract principle it is purported to illustrate. Have my cake? What for? The entire purpose of a cake, is to be eaten. Now or later, is the only question. Maybe I'm sated right now, and I can't eat it; but trust me, I will, as soon as I have space in my stomach. Maybe I want to eat it later with someone I love, to create a magic moment after dinner. But in the meantime, if anything, the having of it is a liability, not an asset: the cake may melt or go stale, oxydize, ferment or rot, it may be dropped, squished, sat on, forgotten, lost, stolen or eaten by someone else; I may have to carry it carefully wherever I go, or to make a detour to store it in a fridge and then fetch it back. No really, who wants to have a cake? Even the baker is all too eager to find someone to sell it to, who will want it for the eating. If you offer it to a friend, you won't expect your friend to frame it, but to eat it indeed. Finally, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, the best way to have another slice of cake was to promptly finish the current one; there was no extra cake as long as my plate wasn't emptied, and if I took too long to finish it, there might be no cake left for an extra slice as others would have eaten it all.

But maybe after all these are also important points to be made about Opportunity cost, and the saying can remind us of these points as well as of the main concept.

What economists call economic cost, or opportunity cost, is what you have to forsake when you make a choice; and they call benefit what you gain from an opportunity that you wouldn't have gotten from other opportunities to use the same resources. For whichever way you look at things (and ultimately, which way you do look at things is indeed your own choice and responsibility, with its own costs and benefits), the available opportunities are never equal to each other (otherwise, there's only one opportunity and no real choice). Some opportunities are obviously better (eating the cake, sooner than later), as compared to other opportunities that are obviously worse (hoarding onto the cake until after it's bad). Of course, "better" or "worse" only makes sense as part of such a comparison between opportunities; and it is always relative to the interests, goals and values of whichever individual is making the choice; and it is always done according to his limited knowledge of a specific context. (Don't eat the poisoned cake... unless it's an elaborate suicide; but maybe you didn't know it was poisoned.)

When you are offered a new opportunity, it only matters if this opportunity is better than the one you would otherwise have gone for, at which point its benefit is the increase in enjoyment from the new opportunity: "Will you trade your cake for mine? Well, sure, that way we can each enjoy a cake we like better." That's a mutual benefit considering how much you and I, with our respective different tastes, prefer each of our new cake to the old one. Or "No, thanks" — maybe you'd prefer my cake to yours, but so do I, and so this opportunity is of no benefit to me. Similarly, when denied an existing opportunity, it only matters if this was the previous best opportunity, at which point the cost of this denial is to have to cope with the next best alternative. "Oh no, the sauce you poured on your cake contains almonds, but you're allergic to almonds!" Well, now you must do without eating your cake; hopefully you can find someone with whom to trade it.

Of course, it might not always be clear which opportunity is best. You're offered to choose one of many desserts. The chocolate cake is hard to get wrong, but most pastry chefs only do it so well; the crême brûlée can be anything from overly sweet, creamy and gross to beyond perfect with subtle fruit flavors; you know you'll love the passion fruit mousse, but what about that delicious sounding novelty you've never tried? Some of these opportunities may be pretty safe bets, while some are definitely riskier ones, but with a higher payoff (introducing you to new ingredients that you'll love in the future). You may be wrong, and realize after the fact that you have lost as compared to what you could have achieved otherwise; or you may be right, and realize what you have gained as compared to what you were going to do instead. Or you may never know, for you will only get one dessert and won't be invited to that restaurant again. Maybe by tasting a bit of each other's desserts, you and a friend can get a better idea of how well you chose; indeed maybe you both enjoy variety in tastes and should split desserts half-and-half. Or maybe at this moment you have something else on your mind, and the stress of not knowing and the cost and risk of learning are not worth it; then you might best precommit to the safest choice without looking at alternatives or having any regret afterwards. If you really desire knowledge, you can always order several desserts and make up your mind for sure; but it will cost you, for even if your wallet is deep, you can only stomach so much.

Which leads us to another important notion about resources: there is more than one resource, and if you can only put a given resource to one use, excluding other desirable uses, you might achieve these desirable uses by spending additional resources; however, this in turn excludes other alternative uses of said additional resources; meanwhile, available resources are limited. What you spend on more cake won't be spent on other thing; getting twice as much ice cream; eating something healthier (if less tasty); going to the movies; reading a book; paying for your studies; purchasing tools with which you could make a better living; or even, buying survival food, if that's where you're at. Time, stress, knowledge, health, various material resources, the trust and friendship that people have toward you, etc., and yes, money: life isn't about making the best out of one choice regarding one indivisible resource, but a continuous series of choices in the context of of an evolving pool of heterogeneous resources, of which you may allocate parts to various present and future uses, and that may grow or shrink depending on the choices you make.

Indeed, I already mentioned you how eating my cake fast enough might have led to my getting more cake (though eating too fast defeats the whole purpose of the enjoyment of it). In this case, of course, that particular cake had a fixed finite size, but depending on demand, a smaller or bigger cake would be made or bought the next time. On the other hand, eating too much cake might be bad for your health, leading to indigestion, obesity, diabetes, a shorter and more miserable life; at the same time, most of the pleasure can be found in the first few spoonfuls of cake, and in the sensation of being sated afterwards; therefore eating a small cake at the end of a big meal rather than having a big cake by itself can lead to a longer happier life with more overall cake enjoyment. A good use of resources can imply more resources as well as more enjoyment; a bad use of resources can lead to faster depletion for lesser satisfaction. The pie is not fixed.

How much one can learn from examining the ramifications of one popular saying! Its being somewhat off the point only makes the critical examination of it more enlightening. In French, we mock people who want at the same time to both have the butter and the money for the butter: "avoir le beurre et l'argent du beurre". It's a more accurate depiction of the concept than the English saying, since it presents a tradeoff between two desirable alternatives of comparable value in the use of the same resource (some amount of money that can afford some amount of butter). And therefore it's less fun. That's probably why the French tend to outbid each other in ever sweetening the deal, one of them adding the smile of the dairywoman while the other adds her ass instead, and yet another, what more, tops it with the thanks of her husband. After all, if we are allowed to violate the basic laws of Economics, why not go full throttle into fantasyland?

I could go on and on... and I will, eventually. What matters, though, for this first lesson in Economics, is that you gentle reader, may learn to think more like an Economist: one who looks at the world in terms of how individuals choose to act with the resources they control; one who understands the concept of Opportunity Cost and tries to identify the resources at stake behind a choice and the preferences that individuals display as they make these choices; one who evaluates the consequences of these choices and the strategies with which these choices may be made; one who is aware of the importance of knowledge, and of error, in the choices individuals make, and the price of acquiring this knowledge.

Le corbeau et le renard

Tue, 29 May 2012 07:18:41 GMT

Le Faré étant mandé
D'réciter des vers français,
Se trouva fort dépourvu
Quand hélas il s'aperçut
Qu'les seuls vers qu'il susse encor
Fussent les ombres de Mordor.
Comment donc mémoriser
Sans que se fassent effacer
Des mots mille fois appris
Et aussi vite repartis?
Mais pardi par la musique
Parfait art mnémotechnique!
Mettre un poème en chanson
Mieux que toutes les leçons
Vous rappelera longtemps
Les paroles sues antan.
Aussi m'essayai-je aux fables
Jadis immémorisables
Et trouvai-je avec plaisir
Qu'les réciter à loisir
Était devenu facile
Malgré ma mémoire sénile.

Bon, ces vers improvisés ne valent pas grand'chose, mais encouragé par mes succès d'alors à mettre en musique certains poèmes de Sully Prud'homme, j'ai il y a deux ans sur ceux de Jean de la Fontaine composé quelques mélodies par lesquelles j'ai enfin réussi à mémoriser durablement deux fables que j'avais honte à ne pas savoir par coeur.

Voici donc en Ogg Vorbis ma version du célèbre Le corbeau et le renard (paroles). Les mélomanes reconnaîtront peut-être une brève citation du Carmen de Bizet (Bel Officier).

Thou shalt not steal, not even from the State

Wed, 23 May 2012 20:29:59 GMT

I am often disappointed by how some "left-libertarians" as they sometimes call themselves, following Rothbard in his most ill-inspired dalliances: at the same time that they claim to defend individual property rights, they support socialists, communists and collectivist anarchists who attempt to seize ownership of state assets in the name of some collective. As Brad Spangler, such a "left-libertarian" activist, writes:

MONTREAL STUDENT MOVEMENT: There's an old radical saying that rather than being content with the prospect of a whole loaf, let alone half a loaf, we want the whole damned bakery.
My sincere suggestion is that the students in Montreal and elsewhere shift from protesting tuition increases carried out in the name of "austerity" and, instead, make an offer direct to the taxpayers.
That offer is this — let the students and faculty manage the universities as cooperatives funded with voluntary subscriptions and tuition they set rather than taxes involuntarily looted from other producers by (and for the benefit of) the political class.
If cuts must be made, let the students decide where to make cuts — by recognizing the schools as naturally being their own rightful joint property rather than government property.
The state "provides" nothing. Everything it has is stolen. One does not rob when taking anything away from the state.
In short. demand voluntary socialism via the people's own privatization.
Rothbard made almost exactly the same point long ago which I am making now. Confiscation and the Homestead Principle (podcast).

This is so disconnected from both libertarianism and reality that it's hard to know where to begin commenting on such a statement. In summary, some consumers of a service blatantly demand the wholesale robbery of the provider to their profit, and Brad approves, citing "old radicals" (i.e. stalinian communists), as a justifying authority, together with an article by Rothbard that justifies stealing from thieves and from there seizing government property.

‎"People's own privatization", despite Brad's claims to the contrary, is but a glorified word for robbery indeed. Just because the current property holder has an invalid title doesn't automatically qualify the first rival claimant as a good guy with a valid title. Or does it?

If we accept that the second thief becomes a legitimate owner, then it's a great way to launder usurpated wealth and power! After Hitler has no rights in his totalitarian dominion over Germany and confiscation of the property of jews and opponents, does that mean that Stalin is entitled to seize said dominion and property, and is suddenly made a legitimate owner because he took it all from an usurper? In that vein, I suppose George Bush's war were justified because Saddam Hussein was illegitimate; each and every politician and bureaucrat in every country is justified in spending taxpayers' money as he pleases, because the money was already robbed by low-level tax-collecting goons, and robbed again by the higher-level apparatchiks; and each and every mafia don is justified in the wealth he confiscated out of the ill-begotten gains of his underlings. Finally, asset forfeiture laws, instead of being maligned by libertarians, should be applauded, and when a first group of violent cops is found to have unjustly confiscated wealth, then a second group of peaceful cops can legitimately claim it as its own after taking it from the first group. Somehow, I find the consequences of such an argument repulsive, and I don't believe Brad or any libertarian would stand by it.

Maybe then Rothbard's argument doesn't make the second thief a legitimate owner, but instead one to which the same argument applies, and so on, so that by induction, the next thief will be justified, and the next one, etc. Thus the stolen property becomes fuel to legitimize an eternal cycle of violence and robbery. Worse, as more and more wealth becomes touched by thieves, every piece of property slowly becomes tainted by theft, until in the end all is fair game for all to steal, and the notion of property rights soon enough becomes extinct. This hardly counts as a property rights argument quite the opposite, it's a negation of property rights, the essence of what libertarianism stands for. Frankly, I'd rather see all stolen property be destroyed and ill-acquired buildings burnt to the ground, than let it all become the justification for eternal violence, or worse, some destructive green slime that turns everything it touches into more green slime. Happily, that needs not be.

For one person is missing from this entire pseudo-propertarian argument: the victim. Property rights are not a fragile label giving a forever license to steal when tainted; they are a persistent mark, and require the property to be returned to its legitimate owner or his heirs, however many hands have touched it since it was stolen. Whoever assumes the property of some assets must assume the associated debts and liabilities, too; that includes the duty of returning any tainted portion of such assets to a previous legitimate owner they were stolen from, or existing heirs, when identified. In the absence of identified owner or heirs, the assets may be held in escrow, but cannot be considered forfeited until a long enough time has passed to extinguish any expectation of demonstrable legitimate claim, though not so long a time for the good to perish, which would be waste. Even then, it is extremely bad incentive to ascribe the unclaimed assets to those who recovered it from the thieves, rather than to some uncontroversial charities (as much as can be), preferrably ones benefitting the general pool of victims of same or similar thieves.

Spangler adds: I advocate property rights. Leaving public universities in the hands of the state is not an example of freeing the market. I wonder where respect for property rights fits in Brad's mind. Allowing the first-come robber to seize said universities is hardly freeing the market either. Each and every settled piece of property has existing owners. Abolishing the State is returning that property to its lawful owners, it isn't giving it to a new State made of petty robbers. Not that a big organized State will let itself overrun by petty robbers, anyway; and still if somehow that big State imploded, petty robbers seeing their violent claims unopposed would not be less of a State than the former big State, just a heap of pettier ones.

Besides, the current collectivist robbers that Spangler supports are explicitly not challenging taxes and a State to to forcefully collect them to fund this University; quite the contrary, and despite Spangler's wet dreams, they are advocates of a bigger State, more so forceful extracting wealth from the public to hand it to them newcomers at the game of communist usurpation. Indeed, if somehow the protestors wanted the voluntary funding of a university, without tax money but rather through tuitions and donations, they wouldn't need to protest at all, for they can already do that: it's called a private university and there are plenty of them in Canada. (Certainly, the barriers to entry to starting a university could be lowered, but all the protesters I've interacted with were instead adamant to insist on the State control of higher education through forcefully imposed regulations, standards and licensing.) So it is naïve at best of Spangler to give such sympathetic advice to the protesters as to how they could make libertarian (of sort) demands instead of their current communist ones; he might with no less effect give sympathetic advice directly to the current State bureaucrats on how they could behave like libertarians rather than statists.

I am left to infer that the socialist leaders of this whiny bunch appeal to our "left" libertarian friends out of what could be called "vulgar collectivism": just because he believes they're saying magic words such as "people" or "cooperatives", which evoke some sacred sentiments, and otherwise posing as enemies of the Establishment, Brad and other "left libertarians" side with them. Yet, whatever fantasies Brad et al. may have about what "cooperatives" could possibly be, as opposed to the arguably miserable failures that were all previous attempts at large-scale cooperatives, the one and only system that would be condoned by giving away power to the most impudent loud-mouthed claimants in the bunch would be just that: giving away power to the most impudent loud-mouthed claimants in the bunch. They could call it a "commune" or "cooperative" all they like, and say it is "run by the people" and "for the people", the precedent followed and set would once again be that a self-annointed "avant-garde of the proletariat" can speak in the name of the masses and go on to rob said masses and impose their will over other students, teachers, parents, taxpayers, etc. And of course, if these protesters somehow got granted some or all of what they wanted by the Government, that would make them part of the Establishment that lives off stolen goods, rather liberators returning the stolen goods to the victims. It is sadly not a new thing, and we've seen this communism at work before. In the end, the "left" libertarians are indeed "left-wing" in the ease with which they fall victims to the demagoguery of alleged egalitarianism.

Granting ownership right to the loudest claimant is a most counter-productive way of fighting the Establishment. More than that: the Establishment already has the loudest mouth, by definition. By the dubious principle of "Homesteading" as proposed by Spangler after Rothbard and Hess, these State properties are already being homestead — by the very people most hated by Spangler et al.: the State bureaucrats. These people already occupy and make productive the resources at stake and defend them, forcefully, against rival claimants. Any rule that would grant ownership to current occupants, far from expropriating the Establishment from the resources it grabbed, would only make their ownership of it more complete, to the increased detriment of their current victims (again, the main missing party to that pseudo-libertarian argument).

Maybe instead Spangler, after Kevin Carson and other collectivist anarchists, has very high standards for what it means to homestead land (or property in general), and a very low standard for accepting newcomers as new owners against the claims of previous occupants. I have questioned at length this approach in the past (see for instance my comments on another blog): if these standards mean that you lose rights to any property any time that you stop watching it personally, then it's not much of a property right approach. Are you forfeiting part or all of your property if you invite some people in? if some people move in without your permission? If you go on a vacation trip? If you visit your family? Visit a doctor? Go to the market? Shop at a store (assuming there is any left)? What if you stop watching your belongings while in the bathroom? What if you fall asleep? Can you still claim your property five seconds after it's been seized by newcomers? Five minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? If somehow any greedy newcomer can seize the property of previous legitimate owners, then this spells the economic death of the society that adopts such standards for involuntary transfer of ownership, as no one will take pains to create, build, grow, develop, trade, or otherwise produce anything, for that thing would as soon be taken away by the first-come greedy claimant, specialized in looting producers. Unless some loophole is quickly found in such standards and massively exploited, this society will soon be overrun by neighbors with less absurd laws, who will defend their property against the claims of these anti-propertarians, no doubt under complaints by would-be looters that their defense is "violent" and "aggressive". In any case, such rules would be a great regression as compared to the already quite imperfect respect for property rights in current western societies.

Rothbard may be a great philosopher, economist and historian, and yet, Rothbard is far from infallible, and has often ventured with miserable results into fields in which he wasn't qualified. In practical politics particularly, whether domestic or international, his tentative alliances have led him nowhere except to condone criminals and unsavory people on both sides of the political spectrum. Contra Rothbard, I will thus cite one of my favorite authors:

It is no crime to be ignorant of politics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science". But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on political subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

Of course, the original author of the quote is Rothbard himself, albeit discussing economics instead of politics.

Politics is the science of force. Force is. It doesn't magically appear or disappear. It follows its own laws. The study of Force certainly isn't completely unrelated to the study of Law, in which Rothbard excelled; but it is nevertheless quite distinct. (I briefly discussed this relationship in my essay Capitalism is the Institution of Ethics.) And so any applicable solution to abolishing monopoly mismanagement of resources should take into account the balance and dynamics of existing forces, and offer a way out that is a win-win proposition to all the existing parties that will partake, and a win-lose proposition for said parties against those that won't. You cannot wish away the costs of politicking and then claim you have an economical solution; you cannot side with some political group and suppose its opposition will magically disappear (if it disappears, it will be through murder); you cannot support violence without expecting a retaliatory escalation of violence.

Now, in all his political endeavors, Rothbard's basic stance has been that USG, the United States Government, is his first and greatest enemy — which is correct — and he therefore supported any enemy of his enemy as his friend — which is absurd. The Czar may have been the first enemy of the Russians he dominated, but in a rivalry between the Czar and the Bolsheviks, the latter were hardly the friends of the people, and tens of millions discovered to their demise that the Bolshevik's regime was several orders of magnitudes more murderous and oppressive than the one that preceded it. Similarly, USG may be an evil exploiter, the violent enemies of USG can be an even worse threat in case they win, and even when they don't, their violent actions cause USG to become more violent rather than less. Sometimes, it is better to recognize that you have no dogs in the fight; and sometimes even, it is indeed better to help quickly put to death the stray rabid dog rather than let it to either win over the camp guard dog or infect it. As such, for instance, Rothbard's infamous praise of the Vietnam Communist as enemies of USG are particularly disingenious. Rothbard is no authority at all in politics. In the particular piece linked by Brad Spangler, he is naive at best in his praise of Tito's policies as an improvement over not just the Stalinian status quo (which they may well be in this particular case considering the very low bar; but you should be wary of praising his policies in general, for as a whole they have taken his country to civil war), but also the American status quo (which is demonstrably absurd, whichever way you measure things).

The privatization that happened in many countries of Eastern Europe as they abandonned communism, however imperfect, at least recognized some sound principles that Rothbard seems to ignore, and that could be systematized: there have been attempts to return property to previous owners in the few cases when they could be identified; sometimes, the new regime identified a class of legitimate creditors of the State (there is a justification for offering compensation to distinguished victims of State oppression, and for considering currently occupied possessions and promises of future welfare payments, if not as ownership titles of said resources, nevertheless as claims of credit against assets to be liquidated). Otherwise, it was recognized that the remaining capital goods should be distributed among the mass of undistinguished victims, the former taxpayers and oppressed subjects of the State. One could endlessly argue how much each one should be entitled to as compared to other people; an equal distribution amongst people without a distinguished title is but a good first approximation, and one that is easier than others around which to gather political consensus. Workers and managers in a company were often recognized a title to some of its assets, but not all of them (and hopefully, not bigger of a share than workers and managers have through stock grants in a typical free market company); for inasmuch as the capital was provided by taxes and oppression imposed on the population at large, that population has a title to this capital. Basically, as Mencius Moldbug points out, the proper treatment of the State is to declare its bankruptcy, collect and liquidate its assets to the benefit of its victims and other legitimate creditors.

However, we're far from the point where we can consider the liquidation of USG yet, or see it replaced by anything but States. One thing is understanding to what conclusions our principles should or shouldn't lead us eventually. Another thing is understanding what they tell us about what we can do today, and what they tell us about how best to advance or not to advance them. And so, in the case of stolen wealth, the foremost mantra of the social doctor should still be: First, do no harm. Wealth may have been stolen, this is no justification for further robbery.

The second mantra should be: stop the harming. Maybe some universities have been funded through stolen money in the form of government subsidies from taxes; but before you consider changing anything to the current management of said universities, it is more important to stop the continuous theft and abolish those subsidies and taxes. The victims in this case are taxpayers; it is more urgent to stop robbing them than to return their previous taxes to them. As I've argued in a previous essay, it is more urgent to free the slaves than to establish whether and how much slaves or slave-owners should be receiving from whom after the slaves are freed; if the slaves receive no compensation at all, it might well be a sad denial of justice; but this denial of justice is totally secondary compared to the continuing injustice that is the continuation of slavery.

The third mantra should be: don't let it go to waste. It might not be clear yet to whom to return how much of which stolen assets, but whoever holds it in escrow must not be authorized to spend them away in booze and whores, or the bureaucratic equivalent thereof: high salaries for the managers and their proteges, lavish parties, pharaonic buildings, and worst of all, purchasing pseudo-intellectual propagandists of theft to justify more of it. Instead, demand that the money should be well spent. In the case of public universities, that means making sure that the university is as well managed as a private university, that tuitions and donations cover the operating costs, that spending is in line with the utility offered to students, that students are being offered classes that lead to actual jobs, that professors are not being hired to spread government propaganda.

Finally, we must realize that our ideas will not prevail by coopting the demands of communist agitators and trying to sneak in a few suggestions that are foreign to their very mode of thinking. Our ideas will prevail when we spread them fair and square; when we demonstrate how they work, explain why they work, show why they are right, and gather momentum behind them. That is why we must not expand our energy on negative-sum games of claims and occupations, but build our own parallel structures, including universities, by cultivating positive-sum games of cooperation. We must not make demands and issue slogans, but educate people as to how free markets work, and how they are already abiding by them in their private lives. We must not demand transfer of property to people unrelated to the victims, always insist on the restoration of the rights of individuals being victimized, and if not on compensation of past wrongs, at least on the end of the brutality. We must not spend away the little capital of good will we possess in confrontational situations, but earn more such good will the hard way, through education and through example, in mutually advantageous exchanges.

PS: One version of this article was published by the Québécois Libre.

Rocky, Sabaki

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:58:56 GMT

In a previous life, Lucía sang me a few notes of a lullaby, that she remembered her daddy sang to her when she was a kid, to the non-sensical words "Rocky, Sabaki". I hadn't heard such a song before, but I promptly completed those five notes into a complete melody, that to me sounds as a most obvious continuation. Later, she would tell me what her dad had been singing to her really was that lullaby everyone knows and every baby machine annoyingly plays, which I identified as Brahm's lullaby, also known in English as "Lullaby and Goodnight". Therefore, from these misremembered notes, I had made a melody of my own. As I finally have a daughter of my own to sing it to, I wrote words of my own to this melody. And out of the rhymes that I originally rejected from the song, I could not resist writing a second stanza.

As usual, you may download a PDF, the Lilypond source, or an autogenerated midi file, as well as this a cappella rendering: Rocky, Sabaki, take 2 (Ogg Vorbis).

Memories of my uncle Hùng: A Trip to Communist Europe

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:45:31 GMT

My uncle Hùng recently passed away. He was a great family doctor, a famous acupuncturist, a talented painter, and an all-around interesting character (though unhappily not such a successful husband or father). Despite having lived in France for about sixty years, he was still speaking with a noticeable accent, and with a strong aversion to conjugating verbs using anything but present tense (there are no tenses, or conjugations at all, in Vietnamese). In his defense, he had initially learned French in just one month (two? three? I don't remember), memorizing one hundred words a day in a scramble to pass an entrance examination to a French-speaking middle school — which he did, however barely.

I had the honor of living at his house for a year, and he taught me many things, including his colorful approach to cooking: always have a variety of foods so every color is present on your plate; also, clean the utensils as you cook. Sometimes, he would tell me stories over dinner, and so here is, to my best recollection, one of his stories, this one about practical Communism (with parenthetical comments I cannot help from adding). I don't remember whether the trip he told me about was to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, or another country; but that could probably be determined by searching suitable archives. There might even have been several such events at which he was invited, so I may be conflating accounts of multiple trips; but the precise chronology and location of events is largely incidental to the story, so I'll tell it in such a way as for the events I remember from the stories to just succeed one another.

In the 1980s, my uncle had gained some international fame as an acupuncturist, notably after publishing his own treatise and translating some of the Chinese canons of the art. He had been invited to speak at a week-long international conference taking place in some Eastern European "Democratic Republic". (Indeed, communist countries were bankrupt, and could not afford modern Western medicine except for the topmost members of the Party; therefore, they were eager to seek a cheap substitute like acupuncture; furthermore, acupuncture had for it that its main champions were from China, a "brother" communist country. The promotion of acupuncture over Western medicine could thus be branded as another "victory" of Communism over Capitalism. And yet, China not being aligned with Russia means that Eastern European acupuncturists were eager to counterbalance their Chinese colleagues with contributors from anywhere but China to tone down the Chinese dominance.)

After landing, my uncle was received like a VIP by his personal political handler and a translator (who was willy-nilly doubling as KGB snitch when the political handler was absent), and was driven from the airport to his luxurious hotel by a chauffeur in a private limousine. (You see, just because everything belongs to the State and is accounted for as "public", doesn't mean that the "public" actually enjoys the limousine; despite communism, each and every single fragment of enjoyment or suffering in the country was still experienced by "private" individuals. The myth of "Public vs Private" is just an accounting fallacy.) Along the way, everything was beautiful: The roads were well paved, the streets were clean, the surrounding houses were pretty and freshly painted, the people they met looked healthy and happy; you were visiting a calm paradise of a country, if a bit drab and lacking in style. Yet, even at the onset you could tell something was off.

After they were installed in their hotel but before the conference, my uncle and other VIPs were invited to a party offered by some high-ranking government officials, in the VIP lounge of an imposing Olympic swimming pool. As feared, there were some long boring welcome speeches full of political propaganda, made slower by the need of translation; but finally, as some head honcho snapped his fingers, music started playing, and a group of young girls entered the swimming pool in an orderly fashion, then proceeded to give the attendants a show of synchronized swimming. After the show, the young girls were invited to mingle with party officials and VIPs to make friends, and maybe more, while champagne, caviar and other delicacies were served. Life sure was good in communist countries; at least, for the avant-garde of the proletariat.

Now, before, during and after the conference itself, there were ample opportunities to visit famous monuments in the city and the surrounding country. But my uncle noticed that they were always taking the same route, going through the same streets. He asked his chauffeur to use a different route, to see more of the city, but the chauffeur insisted that this was the fastest way, even though, looking at a map, it obviously wasn't very direct. Of course, the chauffeur had been instructed not to go any other way. And so, my uncle argued based on his taste for beautiful cars that the next time, he'd like to be the one to drive the limousine. One way or the other, he managed to go through different streets; it then became obvious why the chauffeurs were instructed to use the official route: because outside of these show streets, the roads were bad, the buildings were ugly and dirty, obviously mismaintained if maintained at all; everything was grey and dirty, and people did not look happy. Complacent tourists were being shown a Potemkin city, but poverty was everywhere else, for them to see if only they insisted in going beyond the places their handlers were taking them.

At some point, my uncle heard that there were fellow Vietnamese men working in this Eastern European country, with a large colony of them at some factory outside of town. He decided to visit them after the conference hours. After a long drive and some asking befuddled locals for directions, there he was, his luxurious official limousine parked in front of the pathetic building occupied by those foreign workers. The man in underwear who greeted him in was even more surprised than he was; but promptly, he welcomed my uncle to these communal barracks where many slept in the same room, with minimal comfort if any, and offered tea and whatever little food they had to this unexpected guest; in return my uncle offered his services as a doctor, which were a boon to these poor factory workers who weren't allowed to see one except in extreme cases. The workers and my uncle could speak in Vietnamese, a language not spoken by the translator, and so could speak freely without fear of government reprisals, and discuss everything: their personal stories, the situation in Vietnam, France, and that Eastern European country. These expatriate workers gladly accepted their miserable working conditions, because they were no worse than in Vietnam, and the pay was better: however poor was communist Eastern Europe, communist Vietnam was worse. These workers were closely watched and had very little freedom to visit the country in which they were working, and even less money to spend, for all the money they earned went back to Vietnam where remained the family they were sorely missing and for whom they were working so hard. Indeed, no one was allowed out of the country without a family staying home to serve as hostages in case they'd somehow decide to Go West. Eventually, this visit ended and my uncle left, to arrive back at his hotel late at night.

Arriving at the hotel, my uncle realized that some things were slightly wrong. There was more animation in the hotel than he expected that late; Russians from the KGB were present, orchestrating something. He was quickly ushered to his room; but as he kept hearing noise and could not sleep, he eventually sneaked out; and there he discovered that some spy game was being played in the hotel's interior court. Apparently, the KGB was having some kind of practice session of stealth fighting in urban settings (probably as part of the same program that Ion Pacepa revealed: training Arab and South American terrorists in satellite countries so as to conduct political assassinations with plausible deniability).

I wish I remembered more of these stories. I wish I had asked my uncle to write them down, or tell them in front of a recording device, while he was still alive. Oh well. I miss you, uncle Hùng.

PS: My mom has some complementary information on that story. The country where that conference took place was Bulgaria. One thing that struck my uncle was the difference in atmosphere as compared to Western countries, as soon as you crossed the borders: in Communist Europe, the air felt heavy and crushing; not just the men, but the earth itself, the buildings exuded oppression: the terror of the political police was indirectly affecting every gesture, every habit, even (or even more so) in the parts of the country that were for display to foreigners. Also, the lease by the Vietnamese government of cheap indentured migrant workers was a systematic large-scale operation, organized for communist Vietnam to pay in nature its large debt to "brother" communist countries, that had heavily financed its war of foreign conquest (however the Western media, after communist propaganda, try to paint the Vietnam War as a popular uprising). Vietnamese workers were paid well below the already little the local workforce was paid (which also explains why they couldn't afford to buy anything locally, lest they find some way to engage in criminal activities outside their long work hours); and from this meager pay, the government would confiscate the major part. And yet, Vietnam was so miserably poor that not only did volunteers abound to go work in these foreign countries in such unenviable conditions, but they were ready to pay officials big bribes to be chosen to go. There was also the hope of Going West after the end of the indenture contract, at which point the communist apparatchiks, possibly mollified by another bribe, might fail to harm the hostage family. Indeed, most of these workers did not return to Vietnam at the end of their contract, though few of them made it to the West; instead, they stayed more or less legally in their new country. There, apart from a few individual success stories, these workers constituted some minority group within the lumpen-proletariat; in that group, criminality was high and the Vietnamese mafia is notorious in Eastern Europe (I remember a Romanian friend just after the fall of communism asking me about Vietnamese immigrant criminality as the first thing that came to his mind as I told him I was half-Vietnamese). My uncle, when visiting Vietnam some years later, also met some distant cousins who made a fortune in Russia's Vietnamese mafia, and, visiting back their country of origin, were being admired and envied for the indecent display of their ill-begotten wealth. So much for the victories of Communism.

Boston Lisp Meeting: Thursday 2012-05-17 Zach Beane on Quicklisp

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:53:38 GMT

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, May 17th 2012 at 1800 at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room). Zach Beane will speak about Quicklisp.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. James Knight will discuss his ideas on how Common Lisp hackers could better collaborate. François-René Rideau will present recent Common Lisp hacks including ASDF 2.21, λ-reader, inferior-shell, and more.

1 Zach Beane on Quicklisp

Quicklisp is a library manager for Common Lisp. It works with your existing Common Lisp implementation to download, install, and load any of over 700 libraries with a few simple commands. http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/

Zach Beane, also known as Xach, is a Common Lisp hacker known for the cool toys he builds and his "just do it" attitude.

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

James Knight will discuss his ideas on what Common Lisp hackers could do to improve how they share software.

François-René Rideau will present recent Common Lisp hacks: xcvb, asdf, package-renaming, asdf-encodings, asdf-bundle, λ-reader, reader-interception, inferior-shell, rpm, fare-memoization, fare-utils.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, May 17th 2012 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 32-D463 (Star conference room).

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Stata+Center,+Vassar+Street,+Cambridge,+MA

Many thanks go to Professor Gerald J. Sussman for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

4 Dinner

5 More about the Meeting

We are resuming the Boston Lisp Meeting after a hyatus of over a year and a half.

Pascal's Wager, or Infinitimidation.

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 23:04:22 GMT

Shankar Raman, at the Cambridge Science Festival, gave a presentation seriously offering us to take Pascal's Wager. According to Pascal's famous argument, the small chance of an infinite payoff of eternal salvation justifies that one should live "as if God existed", even if one doesn't think it very likely that He does indeed exist. Shankar contrasts the argument no less seriously with the mirror case in Shakespeare's Hamlet: in the play, the namesake character contemplates committing suicide, but is kept from it by the fear of the infinite associated cost of an alleged eternal damnation.

Seriously? Come on. If we are to truly accept Pascal's argument, we must not only worship the Catholic God in favor of which Pascal argues, but all the Gods of each and every religion that we're offered, from Anu to Zeus via Kali, Odin and the Flying Spaghetti Monster; we must fear each and every announced catastrophic end of the world and everything we hold dear, from the Sun God getting angry to our failure to offer him a daily human sacrifice, to the entire planet warming into an unlivable hell hole for our failure to sacrifice all that makes our lives worth living; we must prepare for every imminent rapture or return of a Messaiah whereby we will be damned if we fail to submit to the edicts of those who prophesize said events.

In the end, an "infinite payoff" is but intimidation, a trick to focus the victim on one imposed "choice" where only one alternative is acceptable. If this were a universal argument rather than an ad hoc fallacy, we'd have to give all superstition peddlers an equal opportunity to intimidate us, and we would soon then be faced with as many mutually incompatible forced choices each with their totally hypothetical infinite payoffs; and how are we to compare all these infinites? We cannot simultaneously follow two different gods who demand we kill all the infidels, at least not without killing ourselves for following the other god, which would in turn anger other suicide-forbidding gods.

The whole point of positing infinites is for crooks to deny to suckers the ability to make actual rational comparisons on which to base moral choices, so as to turn them into puppets in the power of their forked-tongued masters. I have discussed this topic in the past in my article Sacred is the Enemy of Moral: "To make something sacred is to remove it from the realm of morality: it is to deny the moral dignity of man, his freedom and his responsibility, when faced with choices about precisely those things most precious to his existence."

Now let's have a little bit of humility here, and admit that we are finite creatures indeed; our lives, even made "eternal" (whatever that might possibly mean), only have finite value, however larger that may be than we usually care to examine — not unimaginably larger, though, for people do rationally take life-threatening risks or even wantonly sacrifice their lives at times. The odds of such extraordinary claims as advanced by the proponents of your usual religious superstitions are themselves so extraordinarily negligible as to warrant a negligible weight in our decisions, even with a (exponentially unlikely) fantastic factor distinguishing the value of an alleged "eternal" life from your very real worldly life.

The attempts by crooks to manipulate us with fallacies do warrant a response, but this response is neither to believe what they say, nor to necessarily believe the opposite of what they say (or they could manipulate us through reverse psychology): it is to recognize these crooks as such, and taint what they say, and what other people say as repetition of their arguments, as fallacies to be ignored, and those who fall for the fallacies or even spread them as weak and contagious minds, who may become dangerous if they don't practice proper mental hygiene.

At least this talk gave me the opportunity to speak in a microphone in a Christian Church and suggest that people who take the argument seriously shouldn't forget to make their daily human sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl. Thank you, Shankar Raman, for the opportunity. Shame on you, whoever hired that crook as a professor.

Unevaluated Models

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 22:56:05 GMT

There is no experimental science whatsoever where there is no experiment. Now history, whether political, economical or climatic, doesn't obviously lends itself to experiments: you can't rewind the flow of time and repeatedly measure the effects of introducing just one change in parameter at a time. Hence macroeconomics or climatology are but pseudo-science when they drape themselves in the mantle of experimental science just because they use mathematical models that superficially resemble those of physics and biology.

These models are most often but a way to smuggle arbitrary conclusions, encoded in the very structure of the model and/or choice of fudge factors, in a way that confuses the incautious reader into believing these conclusions are the output of a scientific process rather than the input of a pseudo-scientific fraud. Attempts to question the process are met with intimidation out of the pseudo-authority of the pseudo-scientists. The pseudo-scientific pseudo-peers are thus elevated to the priesthood of a pseudo-atheist church, the hierarchy of which chooses which models to bless as official, which better spin doctors to co-opt as part of the hierarchy, which models to dismiss as having "undesirable" conclusions, and which dissident voices never to promote. These churches can then leverage their usurped authority to negotiate their spot in the sun among the Establishment and extract their share out of the pie of politically stolen riches.

Now, the inability to start from "identical" conditions and redo an experiment using either the same or different parameter values doesn't mean that models are altogether impossible to evaluate in historical contexts, and therefore necessarily worthless. Not only can you (and should you) evaluate these models in terms of internal consistency and consistency with other models that are indeed experimentally validated, you can compare them to each other in terms of predictive power: you can compare the actual facts in the recorded past to the predictions the model could have made in an even further past based on information then available, and see how these predictions themselves compare to those of other models in terms of accuracy, including whatever popular benchmarks or previously acclaimed models you claim to enhance upon. These benchmarks ought to include the best competition, as well as various "null" or "random" models, in which, for various understanding of what things are independent parameters and what other things are derived variables, the parameters are assumed not to change, or to change randomly. And even there, some caution must be taken to distinguish predictions made from data actually available at the time, from predictions made from data retrospectively available from that time; yet evaluation based on retrospective data can also be used to evaluate models, since hindsight may be 20/20 for some directly measured input parameters, yet can be much less than that for other derived output variables, which can help filter bad models of said variables.

Shouldn't such an evaluation be a standard requirement without which any paper proposing a model as the basis for predictions and policy recommendations (as opposed to merely a mathematical toy that might be used in future scientific research) would be rejected sight unseen? After all the burden of the proof always lies in the proponents of a theory, and the statistical regression test of a historical theory should be part of any scientist's due diligence procedure before to claim that said theory models reality better than other theories. Yet I never see any such measure accompanying models that are published, and still most of the time I see papers ending in policy recommendation with a pretense of scientific backing. From which I conclude that even though there could conceivably be some science in mathematical models of the economy or the climate, nonetheless precious little such science is to be found in most of what currently passes for economics or climatology, which is only propaganda used to push political agenda. My guess is that most of the people who are proficient enough to develop good mathematical models of the world and apply them with integrity to the scientific prediction of future events, are already busy making millions in the finance industry, whereas those who stay in the pseudo-scientific academia are mostly the power-hungry fakes and the superstitiously believing sheeple, who are in it to climb the ladder of the pseudo-scientific hierarchy and defend it from the unbelievers who would reveal its fraud.

PS: If there are people with integrity in the economic or climate modeling industries, they will hopefully soon start a "Journal of Verifiable Economic Modeling" and a "Journal of Verifiable Climate Modeling", where no paper is accepted unless it includes all the code, all the raw data with a certified chain of sources, all the manual "corrections" and "fudges" with adequate justificatory annotations for each and every one of them, and, most importantly, a statistical analysis of the past predictive power of the model (depending on both past date the prediction could have been made and past future date the prediction was made for), as compared to other benchmark models and to any other model that is claimed to be improved upon.

How (not) to (re)view Atlas Shrugged, The Movie

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:08:03 GMT

A friend and colleague of mine inquires as to my reactions to David Brin's review of Atlas Shrugged, the movie. Unhappily, Brin's criticism of Ayn Rand is totally off-mark, and tells much more about Brin than about Rand. But if the misconceptions Brin authoritatively and dishonestly spews as facts are shared in any way, my here response will perhaps help dispel them in some of my readers.

I'll address first the most important point of Brin's essay, that he brings up "last but not least" in his hard to read screed, and to which my friend attracts my attention: “Elsewhere, I've revealed the biggest and most telling red flag about Ayn Rand — one that I've not seen mentioned elsewhere. It is that none of her über role-model characters, at any level or in any way, ever indulge in the most basic human project — bearing and raising and loving and teaching children.”

That's so totally unfair. In the book Atlas Shrugged (why does Brin have to capitalize its title in his review?), Rand includes flashback scenes where some of the main protagonists are kids, and other scenes when they were students. The novel involves the stories of two dynasties of tycoons, the founders of which have great love affairs, marry, and issue a line of descendants. The heroin's intent of marriage is discussed in the novel, and while I don't remember whether or not future children are explicitly mentioned, they are not explicitly rejected, and the assumption of a future continuation is implicit in the dynastic background. Therefore, while the main protagonists aren't raising children during the "current" events of the novel proper, the novel emphatically isn't one that altogether blanks out on the issue of children, it's just that children don't fit the plot of these "current" events. Brin's criterion thus looks like but an excessive ad hoc argument by which he uses a double standard to judge Rand's novel; if his argument is not ad hoc, pray tell what other philosophically-bent novels is that criterion to apply to, and how would these other novels fare?

The real underlying criticism is Brin claiming Rand's philosophy is damned because it neglects the important issue of progeny, and sees individuals as coming from nothing and going to nothing. But Ayn Rand has written essays several about education: that I have read and remember of, she notably wrote favorably of Montessori schools, and discussed concept formation in children based on the story of Helen Keller. Her first novel, We The Living, has plenty of family stories with parent-children relationships (admittedly those children are young adults, but I don't see how that diminishes the point). The claim that progeny, posterity and dynasty are altogether absent from Rand's works in general or Atlas Shrugged in particular is easily disproved. Certainly, Miss Rand isn't the most motherly figure in philosophy, and raising children isn't one of her main topics; indeed, she didn't have first hand experience about it and we should be thankful that she did not make herself a figure of authority on such a topic. At another point in his review of sorts, Brin derides Rand for being ignorant of biology, which she was indeed. And there again, she was careful to reserve her judgment when asked questions of biology, which is exactly what a person with intellectual integrity should do: know her limits and admit ignorance; for no one should be held to a standard of omniscience. Now, if we are to criticize her for topics she didn't claim to have authority on, then I accuse her of having written NOTHING, NOTHING, I repeat, ZILCH, on how to grow strawberries in the German Black Forest; now THAT's damning! (Neither has Brin, BTW.)

My friend insists that the essence of Brin's objection is "Rand's reluctance to explore the topic of heirs borne with a platinum spoon in their mouth and getting the fruits of Galt's labor without so much as scratching their pampered asses." Yet explore this topic she emphatically does! Her dynastic stories precisely cover this point. Her idealized model (Francisco d'Anconia) is the heir who forgoes parental support, starts working at the bottom of the ladder before going to college, and builds his own fortune long before he inherits anything. Her most loathed anti-model (James Taggart, brother to the heroin) is the guy who not only lives "second hand" on what he did nothing to deserve, but uses his fortune to become a member of the aristocracy of "pull", all the while cultivating an ideology of guilt about unearned riches. In between, the heroin (Dagny Taggart) does inherit, but keeps the family business running despite her brother's botchery. Also possibly deserving a mention, the wife of the brother, whose life is empty, who was married out of the brother's guilt, precisely because she held not only no fortune but no value, and who ends up committing suicide upon the realization. In the novel, Rand explicitly loathes those who are not "up to" their inherited money, and tells how they are a sorry thing to contemplate, and unlikely to remain rich very indefinitely, there again with a counter-model in the story in the heirs of the factory that once employed Galt. She claims that giving resources to those one values (whether children or not) is the prerogative of the creator or otherwise owner of resources, as well as one's curse if one doesn't use one's prerogative wisely. And so, far from being neglected, the question of inheritance is addressed, at length, in Rand's works in general, and in Atlas Shrugged in particular. Brin's criticism is once again totally unfounded.

Frankly, if that's the best Brin has to say about her, that's pretty slim. Brin in this review is just being pompous, self-important, and doesn't even bother to know what he's talking about.

After addressing Brin's main point, I'll now address some other point he raises in his piece that most irked me. I'll leave many more unaddressed, for I am already giving Brin's essay more attention than it deserves; if any of them raises your interest, I invite you to check its premises rather than take Brin's word.

Brin claims a work should be judged by its intent, and then mocks Atlas Shrugged for its one-dimensional characters. Yet, as Rand made very clear in subsequent commentary, characters of the novel are INTENDED to be philosophical prototypes: Rand has a philosophical purpose with this book, and is precisely trying to isolate concepts so they can be examined independently and discussed clearly. Is the device sound at all? Is she successful at using it? These questions are up to discussion; I'd argue positively in both cases. But Brin not only fails to criticize this aspect of the novel, he misses the point entirely.

Brin describes (his very personal (mis)understanding of) Rand's philosophy as a degenerate version of Marxism, taking from him the notions of class struggle and historical progress, but just stopping one step before Marx in his eschatology. Did Rand take ideas from Marx? Having suffered Soviet propaganda, she certainly knew everything of Marx's ideas. But are these ideas original to Marx to begin with? The idea of social progress is nothing new; the ancient Greeks knew the concept, and there are articulate modern expositions of it in the 18th century (for instance by A.R.J. Turgot), possibly earlier. Class theory? There again, the notion of exploitation is not foreign to thinkers from antiquity, and a modern theory of it was already articulated in the 18th century by the likes of Adam Ferguson, or popularized by pamphleteers like Tom Paine, who in Rights of Man concisely quipped "There are two distinct classes of men in the Nation, those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon the taxes." So yes, Rand is informed of the ideas of Marxism, but her thought is much closer to those of an earlier school of philosophy, classical liberalism. To call her a degenerate Marxist is just ad hominem ignorance. Why not rather call Marx a degenerate Fergusonist or Painiac, distorting the accurate views of these venerable authors with his own mass-criminal socialist lunacies?

Then Brin attacks Rand for wanting to "get rid of constitutional-enlightenment government". I don't know what Brin is smoking, but that's precisely one thing Rand never advocated: she had harsh words against free-market anarchists (such as I am). Rather, Brin is doing what Rand would call a "package-deal": implicitly collating many concepts under his own arbitrary term, and trying to sell us his term as a whole, identifying any rejection of any of the concepts in it as a rejection of the term, and thus of all the other associated concepts. But no, just because she rejects the welfare-state or whatever Brin likes in whatever he calls "constitutional-enlightenment government" doesn't entail any rejection (or endorsement) of any other aspect of what Brin not only assumes is a coherent whole, but seems to assume anyone could only consider but as a coherent whole. I admit I don't know what exactly Brin means by "constitutional-enlightenment government", but I bet it will not exactly match what either you or I, or anyone but Brin for that matter, would put under this over-qualified noun. By its implicit standard, Brin's curse extends to everyone but Brin; and since it's not clear that Brin himself implies any well-identified meaning behind these terms that he could consistently agree to, he might not be exempt from his own curse. Of course the point of Brin is precisely to avoid the identification of concepts and thus any possible rational analytic discussion, and instead arouse irrational emotion through word association and name-calling. Interestingly, Ayn Rand wrote an essay on exactly that, "The Anti-Conceptual Mentality".

Brin mocks that Rand should write a long novel that includes long rants only incidental to the action. Yet, this places her square in the tradition of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and other celebrated Russian novelists. As for integrating her philosophical rants to the main body of the novel, did she do better or worse than her predecessors? I can't say for sure, since I haven't read any of her predecessor's books from cover to cover (indeed, I have read but short excerpts from them); but Rand's rants are definitely key parts of the plot rather than mere digressions, which is more than I can say of Dostoyevsky's or Tolstoy's equivalent. And her discourses have a lot of enthusiastic readers eager to spread them even separately from the rest of the novel, which despite the biased sample I have encountered, I bet is much larger than the cohorts of fans of the digressions of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (of which I have met members indeed).

There is so much valid criticism to raise against Rand: her lack of empathy, of humility, of patience for contradiction; her heavy-handed governmental approach to dealing with communism and other forms of barbarianism at the gates of Civilization; her strange brand of minarchism, whereby she believes in a tax-less monopoly government, against both big-government statists and free-market anarchists; her sexual fantasies with male domination of the female; her taking many of her personal preferences for universal judgments of good taste; the fact that though she has a knack for painting the big conceptual picture, she uses a big brush that glosses over finer details (which, as far as understanding big philosophical questions and making life decisions, is infinitely better than the opposite vice so cultivated in modern academia). But having escaped Soviet Russia in its bloody beginnings can explain — and, to me at least, excuse — a lot of neuroticism. Most of those who appreciate Rand do it for the main points she makes, and not for these easily identifiable and separable quirks of her personality (though once again, I have indeed met a few "Randroids", unconditional supporters even of her most misguided opinions, which makes me confident by contrast that I, and most libertarians, can read Rand without loss of a critical mind).

If anything, the most structuring defect in her philosophy is her irrational belief in Intellectual Property. One sorry consequence of that belief is her denial of her sources of inspiration: wouldn't she have read or at least been told about Garret Garrett's "The Driver" as partial inspiration for "Atlas Shrugged", or Zamyatin's "We" as partial inspiration for "Anthem"? It would have been more honest and saner to admit it than to claim absolute originality. More importantly perhaps, we could decry a consequent defect in her literary works, the weakness of the fictional science in Atlas Shrugged, and especially her ignorance of the importance of network effects in science and technology, which brings us back to her myth of the lone, "atomic" creator of an entire free-standing idea, versus the incremental aspect of intellectual creation and scientific research. Stefan Kinsella wrote (or linked to?) a nice piece on that, but an easy Google search won't dig it out.

While there is a lot of pertinent criticism of Rand floating around, Brin's piece is none of it. It only demonstrates how big a gas bag Brin is. Instead of addressing what she does say, he makes then demolishes straw men of what he fantasizes she said or failed to say. He's a fraud, and those who would take his word at face value are fools.

I could rant on and on, but all these points, real or imaginary, about Rand's work, are beside the real point. Rand's novel is meant as science/philosophical fiction, not historical realism. Whatever inspiration Rand had from however many acknowledged and unacknowledged sources and as many traditions, her novel is singular in its attempt, and success, at expounding and extolling a philosophy and a sense of life based on rational individualism. How "unique" it is or isn't in this more genre, I don't know; and of course any concept of "uniqueness" in the genre is relative to how much we can stretch and restrict the concept of "genre". I admit to never having read any of the authors of novels immediately preceding hers in the tradition of individual liberty, such as Garet Garrett, Rose Wilder Lane or Isabel Paterson. Maybe you dear reader have recommendations? Since then, that tradition, in the science fiction subgenre, has counted great novels written by Robert Heinlein or Vernor Vinge, as well as many others. Being part of a tradition is neither a defect, nor an evidence of plagiarism; it is the sign that you're part of something greater, and alive.

As for the movie itself, what could I say? I found it to be a very good movie, though not an immortal chef-d'oeuvre. What matters most probably, it does rather faithfully convey Rand's philosophy and sense of life. The pace is good, and the storytelling is quite alright, though at times you can feel some awkwardness due to how they had to cut and squeeze the original thousand-page material: notably, with its limited and sometimes stilted repetitions in the movie, the "Who is John Galt?" motto fails to become the joke then un-joke that it is in the novel. I deplore that the movie lacks the atmosphere of mystery and confusion that increases in the first part of Rand's book, to be explained in the second part; but I have no idea how it could have been done in a movie, so I won't count that against them; instead I'll reckon their take of explicitly showing the Galt character without showing his face as rather clever. The scene where they read the blueprint of the invention was almost ridiculous; but that's hard to pull off, as that's also a part where the book is rather weak: that's a definite case where no explanation at all would have been better than these bullshit explanations; future science, whether fictional or not, by definition cannot be adequately explained in terms of current science. Actor-wise, Grant Bowler is great. Taylor Schilling is excellent most of the time. The supporting cast is quite good. I particularly liked the performances of Paul Fischler and Rebecca Wisocky, but I thought Jsu Garcia was a notch under his (there again tricky) role.

"It can jump to one hundred times its size!"

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:43:51 GMT

Endlessly repeated as an echo from Mount Stupid, the invitation to consider with amazement how fleas can jump to one hundred times their height, or how other small animals are capable of similar jumps to whatever multiple of their size.

Now, given some cellular technology, some animal muscle can store and release a kinetic energy proportional to its mass in one extension of the muscles. Various animals will also have the same order of magnitude in muscle to non-muscle ratio, and in muscles usable in a maximal extension, for too great a disbalance would probably be a waste of muscle, or the unability to escape predators. Therefore, the kinetic energy that any animal can release in single action is roughly proportional to its weight by a factor Em = E/m. Any animal that jumps upward may thus jump to roughly the same height z=Em/g, independently from its size.

Of course, some species tend to do better than others, and within species there will be plenty of individual discrepancy; but the performance varies with metabolic efficiency, muscle to non-muscle ratio, and specialization to the task of jumping, not with size. Common excited remarks from documentaries that "this (tiny) animal can jump up to one hundred times its height" are thus particularly misleading, and odiously insulting to the listener's intelligence. They are misdirections making people more ignorant rather than more knowledgeable, by smuggling in the implicit assumption that how high an organism jumps should be roughly proportional to its size, and that animals for which this doesn't hold are somehow notable.

A better documentary would instead explain how the alleged "feat" fits in a better informed set of expectations. A measure of height jumping performance would be in terms of absolute height reached, not in height relative to animal size. That fleas jump much lower than humans or cats show that they are not that good at jumping after all. What does that say about the other factors in jumping performance? It might be notable that fleas be specialized towards jumping at all; what does that tell us about their life cycle and the evolutionary pressures that shapes it? We may expect metabolic performance of muscles (plus supporting infrastructure) to have been optimized long ago by harsh evolutionary pressures and to not vary wildly across species; or does it? Between the flea and other jumpers, the muscle ratio is probably what varies most, and is obviously lower for fleas than for cats. But is this muscle ratio in the expected range for other animals their size, or is it not? Interestingly, how much does this ratio vary across animals of a same species, across unrelated species of similar size, or across related species of varying sizes?

The laws of nature are not scale-independent. Stories based on size-changing rays may make for pleasant fantasy, they are anti-science fiction rather than science fiction. Stories explaining how things work at each scale, how these scales feel different and mutually weird, and how phenomena at one scale are related to phenomena at other scales, are more enlightening. Anthropomorphizing phenomena is often but the failure to even try to understand.

"A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace." — Confucius

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