Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

If many top notch computer programmers, in a field where people are largely selected for their ability to understand causes and consequences, fail to understand the difference between a constant and a variable with respect to a given choice, how can you expect people from professions that don't thus select their members to fathom the difference?

And so most people, most bright people even, have the greatest difficulty understanding the difference between variables under their control, and variables not under their control -- be them variables under someone else's control, hypotheses of a given thought experiment, natural phenomena, or universal constants.

Actually, the people who are trained to understand and explain the nature of a choice, its benefits and costs, are economists. And even most economists fail (cám ơn, Constant). Only austrian economists are properly trained, but they are marginalized in academia and media by statist economists whose very raison d'être is to produce cover stories for the depredations of the State, by denying of the very basic principles of economics.

This is how otherwise intelligent people believe that taxes and prohibition can abridge the consumption of services or goods with inelastic demand -- when by definition of inelastic demand, it will instead displace other consumption, and lead the victims of prohibition to poverty and crime when desperate measures are required to indulge in the inelastic behavior. What is constant is the inelastic demand for addictive drugs, that depends on the will of the people targeted by the prohibition, rather than the propensity of said people to abide by the law when the law is changed. And so what the prohibition law does is introduce more crime and law enforcement, displacing peaceful and productive activities at a huge cost to society.

The same people may believe that raising taxes and prohibitions (such as minimal wage) on services or goods with elastic demand will help them increase transfer of wealth from the designated victims (taxpayers, employers) to the designated beneficiaries (tax consumers, employees). But once again, what is constant when you enact laws is not the behavior of the victims, but their will, goals, desires and preferences. And so the consequence will instead be that less productive employees will not find a job, that taxed capital will either run away or be exhausted, taxed work will be less intensive, and black market activities will increase.

All in all, the only people who benefit from laws are for the professionals who specialize in either enforcing or countering the law: scammers, whether legal (politicians) or il-, racketeers, whether legal (bureaucrats) or il-, and their goons with guns, whether legal (cops) or il-.

Oppression thrives on people being systematically unable to properly understand the nature of choice and to apply this understanding to Political Economics. And yet, most anyone can be trained into understanding it. If you want to stop Oppression, start by extirping the seeds it sows inside you. Learn (Austrian) Economics. Knowledge will make you free -- and others with you.

I am always amazed when people fail to distinguish between constants and variables. I am all the more amazed when the victims of such confusion are the otherwise brilliant implementers of programming languages. You'd think that if anyone knows the difference between a variable and a constant, it would be a programming language implementer.

In this recently unearthed posthumous book by J.R.R. Tolkien, the fantasy world filled with dragons and magicians has evolved from warring medieval times to peaceful modernity; furthermore, in the second volume, it is resolutely entering post-modernity.

Suppose some causal relationship between some measurable phenomenon A and some measurable phenomenon B, through some undetermined positive feedback loop (respectively a constant statistical proportion, or some other simple mathematical construct). But how much does A depend on B? Well, do it scientifically, by computing with lots of experimentally measured numbers! You put some historical numbers in, you fit your model to those postdictions, and ask your simulation to make predictions about the future. What do you get? An exponential future growth of A due to B (respectively, a proportional growth of A, or whatever follows your causal law). And what happens if you force B to be higher or lower in the future? Then the growth of A correspondingly goes faster or slower. This establishes a clear dependency of A to B, doesn't it?

Well, yes, of course -- it establishes the dependency you introduced in the model, to begin with. The positive feedback loop is a conclusion of the model only because it was inserted as an explicit premise of the model. To wave around your model with lots of numbers and graphics as a proof that something alarming is happening and that production of B should be stopped (respectively started), is a fallacy: it is a petition of principle hidden under a lot of verbiage, it is intimidation using the usurped authority of "official truth", it is confusion of the layman by a mass of numbers and complex maths, it is numerology dressed up as science.

Unhappily, that kind of pseudo-science is what is taught in universities and used as the basis for public policy, in such domains as economics, sociology, and as of late, climatology. And it is pseudo-science precisely because it is used as the basis for public policy, in a positive feedback loop where government officials fund and establish intellectuals who justify their power.

Next time you're shown a model, skip all the numbers, all the mathematical formulas, the graphics, the computed projections, the "scientific" conclusions, and the policy recommendations. Ask what were the hypotheses on which the model resides; what are the relationships assumed between various phenomena, and why are these relationship assumed not to move in general, and in particular when the recommended policy changes the system?

More often than not, you'll find that the general conclusion was already assumed as a hypothesis to the model, and that the whole model is a swindle to smuggle the premise as if it had somehow been established by the model.

Sure, some keynesian economist will show you some beautiful equation, with aggregates that add apples and oranges, whose multiplicative relationship to some government-controlled variable is magically supposed to be constant, unlike simpler variables. "This equation is true by definition!" will he even claim. Sure. Just like it's true by definition that being hit by a magic long sword +2 will cause you 1d8+2 of hit point damage. That's also the definition, straight from the rulebook. The definition is tautologically true in the corresponding model. Now whether the model accurately describes reality, that's quite a different question. At least the D&D rulebook lets me have fun with friends and doesn't serve as a pretext to massive armed robbery.

When people in the average bring more to civilization than they take away, there cannot be problem with overpopulation, or with funding education and retirement -- people are indeed an asset. When people are all in all more consumptive than productive, then they are a liability indeed, surviving by spending away the capital accumulated by better men; their society is going down the drain and none of the proposed statist remedies can help, whether fostering reproduction or non-reproduction, immigration or emigration, early retirement or euthanasia. Actually, State intervention is usually the one cause that puts society on such a bad slope. And when society collapses, anthropophagy is a poor way to slow down this collapse if it does at all; actually, inasmuch as it would imply murder and/or deception (which as Heinlein noted it needn't necessarily, but which it does in the greenieleftie boogeymen) anthropophagy is rather a sign of the collapse accelerating than slowing down. As Julian Simon wrote, The Ultimate Resource is the creativity of free humans. And the Ultimate Waste is precisely the destruction of this freedom and creativity by ecologists and other Statists.

In his book Discover Your Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen notably explains why one should not give to beggars, by using an argument called rent exhaustion. I explained earlier why undiscriminating charity was indeed only fostering parasitism and vice (though I admit I've been so weak as to subsidize my local liquor store that way a few times since I wrote said article). My argument used the Law of Bitur-Camember, which indeed seems to be essentially equivalent to the argument of rent exhaustion as systematized and applied to any political rent. Unhappily, even amongst Economist (as opposed to mere econometrists), too many will not or dare not explicitly apply economic arguments to Politics itself. Tyler himself, though he doesn't seem to indulge too much in the fallacy of considering the State as above society, won't seem to openly come against it.

Great progress will be made when people cease to implicitly accept the Statist Myth of the State as some entity above society, beyond the laws of human behavior, capable of regulating from outside and violate, counter or alter the laws of human behavior to engineer people's lives according to whichever fantasies of the rulers. Many economists have worked to dispel this myth -- Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan being some of the first to explicitly apply the economic point of view to the systematic study of government. These days, while I like the blogs of many economists at GMU, including Tyler's, Don Boudreaux's blog stands out in its relentless effort to dispel the Statist Myth. But even they seem to do it without systematically conceptualizing it.

Now even many libertarians make the mistake of discussing various policies as if there really was a State above Society capable to turn arbitrary policies into new laws of human behavior at no cost. Actually, the policies that the State enacts are arbitrary neither in their causes nor in their consequences. On the one hand, they are the result of human actions that have great cost; on the other hand, they do not alter human nature, but only modify human behavior through violence and threats thereof.

Laws are only enacted but with powerful lobbies and ideologies behind them, that either are allowed to clash in an expensive war of all against all, or are given free reign as one hegemonic party imposes its one-sided will upon all. And the same parties that clash over each of their turfs always agree in their common cause against the public.

Then again, laws only affect those who get caught. It costs in violent law enforcement, enacted by bureaucrats empowered against the designated suspects. It costs in bureaucratic hurdles that people have to comply with to receive their subsidies and privileges.

Finally, the next best alternative that people find to openly acting as is officially prohibited is seldom to embrace the desires and tastes of the oppressor. People will do in private what they can't do in public. They will rather live in the dark rather than pay the tax on windows.

No one can decree a better mankind. Political power is no magic wand that can achieve that. Prohibiting the perceived symptoms of evil only spreads more evil and dulls out perception in a typical instance of the Law of Eristic Escalation.

People in the know understand that Economics is a point of view on human behavior, and not the field of the statistical study of monetary transactions. Ever since the Armchair Economist, there has been a trend for books that demonstrate how Economic Thinking applies to the study of random social phenomena. In his book Discover Your Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen shows how it applies to your own everyday life. Unlike say Harry Browne in How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, Cowen doesn't use Economic Thinking to address the big questions of one's life. But that's probably a sound choice in many ways. Firstly, it allows Cowen to illustrate how Economic Thinking applies to many topics without having to confront the distortion fields created by religions, ideologies and other past and present strains of the Synopsis. The reader may or may not make the effort to subsequently formalize such Economic Thinking and apply it to other topics -- Cowen provides a gentle introduction. Secondly, Cowen might or might not have many new ideas on the big questions, that have already been discussed in writing, and about which he may not have great life-transforming experiences to tell. Instead he contributes interesting and useful original material by addressing simple issues in which he has been personally involved first-hand for years: how to best enjoy culture, family, health, food, giving. If you enjoy reading, these issues may talk to you.

Notre monde est-il dirigé par des comploteurs agissant dans l'ombre? Ou au contraire les complots sont-ils des mythes sans fondement aucun? L'économie nous apprend à remettre la notion de complot à sa juste place, et à évaluer correctement le rapport entre la probabilité, le couplage, la taille et l'impact de ces complots.

Moi: un système de retraite par répartition qui prétend payer plus qu'un système par capitalisation est une anarque vouée à la faillite parce qu'en moyenne sur la durée de vie d'un assujetti elle dépense plus qu'elle ne collecte.

Elle: la solution est d'avoir plus d'assujettis, par l'incitation aux naissances ou par l'immigration!

Certaines personnes ont décidément du mal à comprendre le concept de cavalerie financière, même avec un diplôme d'économie (obtenu en France, il est vrai). Et dire que les français par médias interposés moquaient à l'époque les albanais qui au début de l'ère post-communiste avaient été massivement victimes de telles opérations. Paille, poutre.

Au moins, aux États-Unis, c'est la Social Security (le système de retraite fédéral) elle-même qui avoue à tout bout de champ qu'elle court à la faillite et que les prestations devront diminuer et les cotisations augmenter.

La retraite par répartition est une arnaque fondée sur la confusion des genres: en mélangeant votre soi-disant intérêt personnel, et une soi-disant solidarité avec d'autres, les socialistes imposent surtout la centralisation des fonds entre leurs propres mains. Le premier but du système est de financer les socialistes eux-mêmes et leur propagande, via les syphons que sont tous les niveaux de bureaucratie, de gestion par syndicats politisés, l'investissement via des structures qu'ils contrôlent dans d'autres structures qu'ils contrôlent, etc. Au bout du compte, l'argent des travailleurs est volé à tous les étages, et le trou est bouché avec l'argent des mêmes travailleurs contribuables. Comme dans toute arnaque, si vous n'avez pas compris qui gagne et qui perd, combien et comment, c'est que le pigeon, c'est vous!

Excellent politique, administrateur exécrable. En tant qu'homme politique, notre président est hors pair. Et c'est exactement pourquoi en tant qu'administrateur, il prolongera et accentuera l'oppression pesant sur les créateurs et la ruine du pays.

Sarkozy est un excellent homme politique. Il sait placer ses amis et ses ennemis, créer de la popularité, du consensus, former des alliances, concilier des opposants, récompenser ceux qui lui apportent un soutien, punir ceux qui le lui ont refusé. Il maîtrise la politique, cet art du possible. Du politiquement possible, s'entend...

Here's my (late) answer to Bryan Caplan's challenge can you write an economically sound answer to the question "When Did Life For the Poor Get Better?" that a five-year-old could understand? 150 words or less!

At no point in time did life "start" to get better for the poor. At most any point in space and time, those who were "poor" were much better off than the poor of two centuries before -- the earlier society could not have fed them all, and would have treated survivors more harshly. Since the dawn of man, tremendous progress has come from inventions, be them technical or social. Techniques that seem primitive today, like heavily salting food so it doesn't rot, once transformed the life of generations. So did trading routes across regions with different resources: salt, game, wood, metal. Or money as a universal intermediate for barter between remote strangers. Or techniques and social mores that ensured increased hygiene. Countless innovations have always served to improve life for everyone. Even slavery was once progress for the poor victims -- over anthropophagy. Obstacles to progress are political oppression and superstition.

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.

Un corollaire intéressant de la Loi de Bitur-Camember est de donner raison à la morale traditionnelle contre les geignements des bienpensants misérabilistes et tiers-mondistes quand elle condamne la charité aveugle faite aux mendiants ou aux pauvres non-méritant, et n'encourage la charité qu'au conditionnel, sous forme de parrainage accompagné de stricte et paternaliste surveillance.

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 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.

Oui, la responsabilité individuelle est une "fiction". Tandis, que "la société", "l'utilité publiique", "l'intérêt nazional" (socialiiiste), le "paradiis communiste", c'est quelque chose de tout-à-fait concret, de parfaitement défini, et de merveilleusement incarné par notre glorieux État et sa bienveillante Administrazion, -- sous condition toutefois que ce soit mon parti, ma faction, mes opinions, mon autorité, qui y prédomine -- sinon, ce même État est un instrument d'oppression aux mains de l'ÉnemydeklaSS. Bon, il y a malheureusement peu de chance que mon avis personnel soit pris en considérazion -- c'est pourquoi je soutiens pleinement la candidature de X..., chef que je me suis désigné, qui est un homme parfaitement droit et honnête, compétent et intellligent, bon et courageux, et surtout, qui ne possède aucun préjugé (différent des miens) (à ce que je sache) (d'après ce qu'il ressort de sa campagne) (du moins en comparaison de toute autre personne) (si l'on restreint le choix aux candidats engagés) (voire à ceux qui ont une chance de passer) (oops, ça ne fait plus grand monde) (merde alors, il ne reste plus qu'à voter Chirac).

One of the first thing that any so-called "macro-economist" does when studying a phenomenon, is to postulate a deterministic model in which there is no choice and all economic costs are thus zero. That is, whenever they introduce mathematical tools, which they do so as to pose as physics-like hard scientists, they begin by negating the very essence of economics: the notion of economic cost. They are actually based upon an epistemology that explicitly denies individuals the essence of their human nature: the ability to make relevant choices. This is true of all economists from all schools of economics, save the few libertarians from the austrian school and its direct relatives. And the crooks include the neo-classical schools (that dictates the economic orthodoxy in most rich countries), and the keynesian and marxist schools (that dictate the economic orthodoxy in France and other socialist countries). No wonder why all these schools of economics produce only lies, in the form of deceitful statistics and bogus assumptions smuggled under the veil of meaningless mathematics.

If mathematical models were to be used at all in economic science, we would need non-deterministic models, replacing (neo)classical economics with quantum economics. And then we'd find that we're not able to even imagine the Feynman diagrams of all possible interactions over which to integrate our economic functions, because the relevant interactions that will take place between agents are precisely those based upon information that others don't have, including the person trying to build the model.

PS: Oh yes, one particular crook from the top of the Establishment just called me ridiculous for rejecting the results of so many scientific studies based on empiricism. You may find more about the fraud that is empiricism in social sciences by reading e.g. Hoppe, whom you may hear in this course.

My officemate, a very fine hacker if there ever were one, did a nice door hack last week. The RFID reader pad that controls the electronic door lock for the suit we're in was too high by a few inches (centimeters? wazzat?), so he removed it from the wall and put it back a few inches below; the result isn't quite as nice and clean as it used to be, but it is much more functional: if you carry your electronic key in your pocket, as every one does, a proper twist of your hip (depending on said pocket being front or back, left or right), and there the door opens -- just like it is with other doors in the company. Everyone involved is happy, and no administrative sanction is taken, sought or even considered. Correction: Everyone involved is happy, thus no administrative sanction is taken, sought or even considered. Incidentally, what the competent administrator did decide when he became aware of the change, and after seeking explanations, was to set straight the pad that had been left slightly crooked, acknowledging the enhancement, rather than putting things back with sanctions as could have been his reflex, into which a bureaucrat would have gleefully indulged. That's the power of capitalism: all consensual transactions are legitimate.

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".

Since I've been discussing the Law of Bitur-Camember by email, I translated to English the comic strip from which it got its name. I appreciate your remarks to improve the translation.

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

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.