Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

Rahul recently pointed me to a nice 1998 review of datamodels in the database world by Stonebraker and Hellerstein: What comes around goes around. This paper is quite insightful, and I believe a good overview of the field, but it falls into the usual traps shared by most database practitioners. This got me started to think about what programming languages and databases have to learn from each other.

Take Swiss Cheese, the variety that comes with holes (technically known as eyes). There is a clear correlation between holes and cheese: the more cheese there is, the more holes there are. If you purchase twice as much cheese, you'll get a volume of holes twice as big. Since correlations are symmetrical, this also means the more holes there are, the more cheese there is. If you purchase enough cheese to double the volume of holes, then you have purchased twice as much cheese. Thus, a static mind satisfied with correlations may conclude that a good way to increase the total quantity of cheese is to increase the total volume of holes -- which may be achieved quite simply by drilling holes in the given supply of cheese. Of course, this means fails, because it changes the proportion of holes to cheese, whereas the measured correlation upon which the reasoning stands crucially depends on this proportion being a constant. Yet that's exactly how macroeconomic regulation by government works: find some existing correlation between some kind of wasteful government spending and a measure of general welfare, and then forcefully increase the spending in the hope to increase welfare...

Il y a effectivement un équivalent du principe de moindre action en économie, ce que les économistes appellent les lois d'équilibre. Le principe général en est l'équilibre de Pareto, et mon corollaire préféré en est la loi de Bitur-Camember.

Toutefois, il y a aussi une incompréhension générale de la notion d'équilibre chez les économistes néoclassiques et keynésiens, qui voient l'équilibre comme un phénomène statique ou cinématique qui apparaît magiquement malgré l'action humaine et peut être manipulé arbitrairement par ces êtres supérieurs que sont les hommes de l'état tels que suppléés par les statisticiens officiels armés de leurs modèles économétriques magiques.

La blague connue est celle des deux économistes néoclassiques qui trouvent un billet de 500 euros par terre dans la rue, et qui devisent que ce billet est un faux ou une illusion, parce que l'économie est de façon permanente en équilibre (magik!), et qu'à l'équilibre, il n'y a pas de billet dans la rue car quelqu'un l'aurait déjà ramassé... et ils passent donc leur chemin, sans ramasser le billet et fiers de leur raisonnement.

Mon paternel réagissait il y a quelques temps à mon commentaire sur l'académie. Tonner contre - mais en faire partie si l'on peut, me rappelait-il -- définition que Flaubert donne de l'Académie Française dans son Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Si on m'offrait un poste dans cette académie, refuserais-je? Sans doute pas. Cautionné-je pour autant l'existence de cette institution? Certes pas. Et vu que je consacrerai plus d'énergie à dénigrer cette institution qu'à briguer mon accession à icelle, j'imagine assez mal qu'on m'y invite.

... would smell as bad. And here, the name for black magic is the propensity to resort to Type M arguments, as opposed to Type C arguments: Type C arguments explore consequences, Type M arguments question Motives. Another great piece by Arnold Kling. (Cám ơn Patri)

Often, some people will argue that democracy requires citizens who are informed, educated, and able to reason, so that they may vote properly. Damn right it does require people who can argue. But it produces people who can't.

And I've explained why in my essay Government is the Rule of Black Magic, section The Law of Eristic Escalation.

Logical reasoning is the product of civil liberty, and not its premise. Civil liberty is a state of mutual respect for each other's life, liberty and property. When civil liberty reigns, you cannot extract benefits from other people by force or fraud, and you have to resort to persuasion. Because people constantly try persuade each other and to not be persuaded against their own interest, they develop the critical skills that help them filter the bad arguments, and the creative skills that help them create good arguments: they learn logical rationality.

On the other hand, political power destroys reason. Political power is the power to force other people to do what you want, whether they like it or not. It is the opposite of civil liberty. When people have to obey anyway, and suffer when they object, they unlearn the skills of logical argumentation; they focus their intelligence and energy on where these can actually be useful -- like finding how to maximize benefits and minimize burdens given the current laws and masters (which becomes a prevalent concern as political power expands). But whether or not the government is making the best decisions, and what precisely the government should or shouldn't do -- that's a skill that's of no matter to them, since they cannot decide any of it, and can only suffer by disagreeing.

You don't argue between slaves and masters. You only argue between tradesmen. Peaceful argument is the fruit of the institution of voluntary cooperation: the market. In a democracy, citizens qua citizens are not tradesmen; they are mutual masters and slaves. They are ordinarily slaves to a government the decisions of which they hardly ever influence: once every so many years, they can each tip the results by one vote out of millions toward the least evil (according to each of them) between the two (or three) most probable candidates; and in as much as they are a decisive part of political lobbies that may indeed control the decisions of governments, they become masters who don't have to argue with whichever political minorities they are able to exploit.

Reason may be the requisite of a functioning democracy, but democracy, like any political power, destroys reason, and thus destroys the prerequisite of its own functioning properly. This is why any democracy is doomed. Any democracy will see rational debate disappear faster as political power grows, until the regime is a cleptocracy headed by an establishment of droning parasites, and there is no meaningful rational debate left; then the country goes downhill and ends up being conquered by an inside dictator or an outside invader.

Democracy is yet another example of the self-defeating concepts defended by people who indulge in static thinking and who are incapable of reasoning in terms of dynamic consequences. And sadly, humans seem to be genetically predisposed to be victims of such black magic thinking.

Voici en avant-première le tout dernier article de François Guillaumat et Georges Lane sur la fameuse Loi de Bitur-Camember.

Pour rappel, La loi de Bitur-Camember fut originellement publiée dans le Tocqueville Magazine du 21 mai 2002. J'en ai fait l'exposé dans le billet de mon blog: Redistribution = Dissipation. La BD de Christophe d'où provient le nom est aussi disponible sur mon blog: On ne pense pas à tout.

Pourquoi la loi de Bitur-Camember

François Guillaumat et Georges Lane

A random correspondant argues against picking the least of two evils. Quote: you don't have to align yourself toward fighting the worst evil to be morally correct. if you're fighting evil you're fine Yeah sure. So you can help the greater evil prevail and feel morally justified. And he even acquiesces to this conclusion. That's moral bankruptcy. And I'm sorry to tell that this and the rest of his discourse sounded terribly like LRC to me: the very libertarian economists who should know better are not exempt from this failing.

Morality is about making choices between available opportunities; it is the very same as the Human Action of austrian economists. Thus, there is no good but the best available choice. Comparing outcomes to a pipe dream utopia, finding none to be good, calling everything evil, and then feeling justified in doing anything whatsoever, because whatever you do, you can construe one evil that you're fighting -- that's but a rationalization for abandoning any and all sense of morality. It's a trick to evade the necessity of examining moral options actually available in the context of the real world, instead of mere general abstract approximations thereof that are wantonly oblivious of the specific constraints of reality.

I repeat, morality is about making choices and directing behaviour in a world of actual choices and real phenomena. Anything that denies the nature of morality is anti-moral. A good choice is one that leads to a better world, as compared to other available choices. A bad choice is one that leads to a worse world, as compared to other available choices. This is why morality is based on economic reasoning, and why people who deny that morality is rooted in actual choices are doing accounting fallacies.

In Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, Clay Shirky clearly explains the issue of a posteriori knowledge versus a priori knowledge -- the essential theme of austrian economics and libertarian politics. However, in the end, he not only fails to conceptualize the issue, he also steps into the trap laid by relativists: he confuses reality with knowledge about reality (a clear case of insanity, as defined by general semantics), and implies that we create meaning rather than discover it.

The nuance is tiny, but as Aristotle said, the least deviation from truth will be multiplied later. Human creation of meaning entails that meaning is an arbitrary product of human will, and that any disputes arising from divergent opinions cannot be solved by reason but only by brute force. Discovery of meaning entails that meaning is objective, and that disputes can be resolved by reason and other peaceful means. Thus, what appears as a mere detail in something as fundamental as metaphysics and epistemology has dramatic consequences when you later study ethics and politics!

Of course, Clay doesn't explore the political consequences of this tiny detail in his essay. His mistake is benign, and I'm sure he himself would be prone to dampen the mistake rather than amplify it, if he were to be taken in a more political discussion. Still, by admitting such wrong premises, Clay abandons all possibility of arguing back against those people who preach Evil. If he's not doing a disservice to himself, he is doing one to his readers. He is both a victim and a disseminator of one of the fundamental memes by which Evil disarms good people.

In a previous post, I told you of a door hack one of my colleagues did, and what social concepts it illustrated. Mind you, when I was younger, I also did my own door hacks. My former clubmates from the Club Informatique of Lycée Louis-le-Grand may remember one that I did long ago, back in High-School. In retrospect, I realize this anecdote too may illustrate a number of interesting social concepts.

I had submitted a variant of my Black Magic text to the essay contest conducted by The Better-World Project. The results were just published on Build Freedom, and I only got a consolation prize. That was well deserved: the other texts were much more inspiring. I invite you to read the actual winners! Thanks again to Frederick Mann for being such a source of inspiration, through his many sites and projects. Few people in the world know the road to freedom. He does, and he leads the way.

In the "public" sector, failing administrations demand more money to do more of the failing things they do. In the "private" sector, successful companies are proposed more money to do more of the successful things they do. Guess which system works better. Of course, if you've read my paper on economic reasoning, you know that the real distinction is not between "public" and "private" but between "based on coercive compulsion" and "based on voluntary cooperation".

Derisive comments are often made about the syntax of Lisp, as witness some reproaches on my previous blog entry. Thus the half-joking, half-serious backronym of Lots of (Insipid | Irritating | Infuriating | Idiotic | ...) and (Spurious | Stubborn | Superfluous | Silly | ...) Parentheses, and accusations that Lisp syntax would make code incomprehensible to read and error-prone to write. I will take exception to this general kind of comments, and I will argue in defense of the Lisp syntax.

Lisp has this particularity that (1) there are distinct syntaxes for data structures and for program code, that (2) code syntax is a subset of data syntax (code can be seen as data), and that (3) data syntax can be embedded easily into code syntax (by enclosing it in the QUOTE special form). It is then possible to write in Lisp a small program that executes Lisp programs seen as data structures, EVAL. The discovery of such a simple canonical correspondance between code and data is what made Lisp so great. Alan Kay called it Maxwell's Equations of Software.

At the end of the post And Life Goes On... in your blog Baghdad Burning you write:

It's about needing someone who wants peace, prosperity, independence and above and beyond all, unity.

Can't you see the contradiction between unity and all the former things? Unity means that everyone is to do the same. This directly contradicts independence. Unity and hence no independence means that everyone will be fighting to know whose opinion will prevail upon all others. This directly contradicts peace. Unity, hence no independence and no peace means that everyone will have to fight or submit to fighters, and won't be able to do the things they know could improve the lives of those they care for. This directly contradicts prosperity.

As long as you put unity before all the former, you're actually supporting the oppression you're suffering from, be it from dictators like Saddam and Khomeini, or from demagogues like those you have in Iraq currently.

So you think there is nothing interesting to say at the intersection of Computer Science and Political Economics? Well, Feynman said that Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough. And going deeply into it is precisely what I've been doing for ten years now. So there below are some things I have to say about Computer Science and Political Economics.

That is, things beyond the fact that both Computer Science and Political Economics are completely fallacious albeit traditional names: indeed, the former is not a Science (it is an Art, or an Engineering Enterprise, which is one and the same) and to quote Dijkstra it is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, whereas the other is both against Politics and beyond Economics (in either the original Aristotelian meaning of husbandry, or the modern statist meaning of taxable monetary transactions). Good Computer Science is actually Lisp Lore and Craft; good Political Economics is Libertarian Human Action.

Note that if you're not too much into computing, you may skip directly to the paragraph that mention Political Economics and Education. Yes, this is also about Education.

The Evil of Academic Curricula in Computer Science
Chapter I
Parsing Considered Harmful

Is it possible that Political Power be used in the interest of Liberty? Yes, sometimes it just does happen. Does that imply that on the whole, Political Power is good? Nope. But before you may reply to this kind of question, you have to be familiar with economic reasoning, as opposed to accounting fallacies. Then you will understand that before it may be answered, the question has to be refined: good as compared to what?

In a bus to NYC early in January 2005, I met this gorgeous girl who was reading a course in Economics. The textbook was open on a praise of the Fed and its role in regulating the National Economy, with an opposing page in a special color denoting higher science, that justified this role based on one macroeconomic equation by Keynes. It was too tempting, so I started a conversation.

While in the States, I had an argument with, of all persons, a French man. He argued for relativism, that true and false do not matter, and might not exist at all, that every situation is unique, etc. Yeah sure! His example went that everytime he heard that same Opera was unique. And my reply was that everytime he'd have to listen to the noise of a jackhammer for two uninterrupted hours would be just as unique. He was an extreme example of what Ayn Rand called the anti-conceptual mentality.

À la tête de Paris, l'embrayage (la pédale de gauche) a fait passer le socialisme municipal à la vitesse supérieure. Dépenses somptuaires en fêtes pour les amis, en art comptant pour rien mais rapportant gros aux courtisans propageant l'idéologie officielle, en amusements publics donnés en patûre à la couche oisive de la populace, etc. Nous revoilà au temps de l'empire romain: clientélisme, panem et circenses et moeurs dépravées pour couronner le tout. Contrairement au régime municipal précédent, nous n'aurons sans doute pas droit à un enrichissement personnel scandaleux de la part des officiels; à la place, les richesses prélevées de force partiront en fumée dans une pure destruction de richesse à court terme; et ceux qui s'enrichiront le feront avec davantage de mesure ou de discrétion -- ou tout simplement auront une justification légale à leur captation de richesse, comme une commande artistique étatique. La différence entre un voleur efficace et un vulgaire vandale, c'est que le voleur efficace s'approprie beaucoup de richesses avec peu de pertes, tandis que le vulgaire vandale détruit beaucoup de richesses pour peu de profit, si tant est qu'il lui reste quelque chose après son coup. Prédation contre déprédations. Le socialisme aura - peut-être - réduit un peu la prédation municipale, et - sûrement - augmenté énormément les déprédations. Qui paie la facture? Les habitants. Les entreprises. Ceux qui créent encore des richesses à Paris. Mais ceux qui le peuvent quittent Paris et la France, ou ne s'y installent pas. À quoi bon venir subventionner les canailles qui s'encanaillent de la république fromagère?

Jeudi 20 janvier 2005, j'étais de par ma réputation de libertarien invité de Henri de Lesquen dans son émission Le Libre Journal des idées politiques sur Radio-Courtoisie, face à André Bonnet dans le rôle du catholique-traditionnaliste et à Henri de Lesquen lui-même (en l'absence du troisième invité initialement prévu) dans le rôle du libéral-conservateur. Henri de Lesquen avait articulé son émission en trois partie, définies par les questions suivantes: Un état laïque peut-il avoir une morale?, les droits de l'homme peuvent-ils tenir lieu de morale?, Faut-il avoir peur de l'ordre moral?. J'ai été je l'avoue très mauvais: j'ai tenté sans cesse et trop rigidement de revenir au plan que j'avais établi, au lieu de m'adapter aux interruptions et digressions de l'animateur; aussi, j'ai trouvé les bonnes répliques après l'émission plutôt que pendant, et c'est vous qui devez subir maintenant ce que je n'ai pas su dire alors.

Avec son ton léger, très vivant, ponctué par les chants des griots, Madame Brouette est un conte de fée réaliste qui ne tourne pas rond, un condensé de la société sénégalaise et de ses drames structurels, et une ode à la vie qui reprend toujours le dessus malgré tous les obstacles. Le film sent le manque de moyen et l'amateurisme d'une partie de la production; mais loin de chercher à le cacher ou à le nier, le film en prend son parti, et le tourne en un avantage, une note de spontanéité et de vérité, prise avec humour. En fait, comme c'est un film sur la vie dans un pays pauvre, cette pauvreté survécue avec brio est l'objet même du film autant que son cadre. (Spoiler Alert: la suite de cet article révèle trop de l'histoire du film.)

Je pourrais en raconter plus, mais j'en ai déjà dit plus qu'assez. Je vous laisse découvrir un bon moment de magie nègre, débordant de l'exhubérance de l'Afrique.

I quite liked the initial movie Spiderman, which was a didactic story about a geek whiz kid who discovers his moral choices make a difference (and other people's too). But this sequel is more than disappointing: where the first issue was an original ode to morality, this second issue is a boring cliché that instead that promotes a form of moral lunacy, of inversion of values, of philosophical absurdity -- the seed of madness, which leads its individual or collective victims to self-destruction.

( ... ) If I am to guess from the title of this movie, it tells the story of a foreign invader fighting some country's domestic tyrant. Sigh. Yet another movie about Bush's war in Iraq.