This is a good story about random human follies.
And in a related note, here's my thought for the day:
Trying to convince a politician to stop supporting a stupid but popular policy is like trying to convince the manager of Wal-Mart to stop selling cigarettes.
And I'll also give a review of Fritz Lang's movie 'M'.
This is a good movie. Although it was made in 1931, in a foreign country, it feels very modern. Aside from a few odd camera angles, and the fact that all the men wear hats, it does not seem like a foreign film or period piece. This may be partially because Fritz Lang helped set the standard for what movies should be.
The plot is driven by the unsolved murders of children. The police respond with a clumsy and heavy-handed crackdown on the 'usual suspects', making life difficult for the local criminals. They decide to hunt down and kill the murderer partially in order to defend themselves, and partially because they honestly want to stop kids from being killed.
The criminal underworld is portrayed as being amazingly organized; even the beggars have an organization that is capable of giving them all orders about where to go and what to watch out for. They are interested in keeping society stable, they see their occupation as a job like anyone else's. (This may have been the inspiration for the guilds of assassins, thieves, and beggars in the Terry Pratchett books.)
At the climax of the film, the criminals capture the child killer (Peter Lorre) and set up a show trial in the basement of an abandoned brewery. He is given a defense lawyer and a chance to plead his case, but it is clear they plan on killing him no matter what. He and his lawyer plead for him to be given mercy and turned over to the law, while the head criminal argues that he is a beast who deserves no mercy. He has already been released from an asylum once as being 'harmless'.
I mostly agree with the criminal mob. The defense lawyer says that 'No one has right to kill a man who is not responsible for his actions'. The crowd starts yelling, and one of them yells, in German, 'He is no man.' This outburst was not subtitled, but I think it should have been, because it is an important point.
The lawyer's statement is nonsense. Anything that is not responsible for its actions should not be considered a human. The whole reason humans are special, the reason we are given more rights than animals, is because we are sentient. That means we understand who and what we are how our actions affect others; we have the ability to control our actions and are expected to do so.
If you encounter a bear, wolf, or tiger, you assume that it will kill you without thought if you do the wrong thing. You cannot reason with it, you know it is guided only by instinct. We try to preserve their animal rights and let them live in peace, but of one of them starts killing people it will have to be destroyed. It is perfectly logical to treat anyone who has an uncontrollable compulsion to kill the same way.
Now, I do not support the death penalty. I agree that cases like this should be handled mainly by doctors. But you should never let a misguided notion of justice do things that put the innocent at risk.
Questions about law and order are a lot easier to deal with if you stop thinking of prison sentences as being for 'justice' or 'punishment' and think of them as 'medical quarantine'. Questions of 'guilt' or 'responsibility' are pointless; the simple fact is that people who are likely to cause damage to society should be isolated from society. Almost everyone will agree that it is right to lock up anyone who is carrying a virulent disease that will spread and kill people. It doesn't matter that the person locked up is innocent and does not deserve to be imprisoned.
Of course, we try to make sure that the conditions of medical quarantine are as good as possible. The same should be true of prisons. There is some truth in the idea that criminals are who they are because they were warped and twisted by growing up in a rotten environment and culture. The fact that they may not be responsible for their actions does not change the fact that they should be locked up, but it does mean that we should not be unnecessarily harsh. The current situation of prisons means that people who go through them end up even more warped and twisted, making them an even greater threat to society.
This is a hard problem. If you lock someone up with a bunch of criminals, they turn into even more of a criminal as they absorb criminal culture and skills. But if you lock them up alone, they quickly go insane. I've never understood this. I would much rather be locked up alone than with a bunch of criminals. But I guess most people need human contact and can't handle solitude. And of course, you can't lock them up and force them into extended contact with normal people.
I guess the ideal situation would be to lock them up with a bunch of human-like robots who are programmed to follow the proper set of cultural norms. That should satisfy the need for human contact, while teaching them how they should act in society. That way, when they have served their time and are released, they should be able to fit back into society ( I am talking here about normal criminals, not the truly insane, like the one in the movie. I drifted off topic a little.)
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Drug Legalization
The news from Portugal
Drug use has remained flat or even decreased, and most of the associated problems have decreased significantly.
Okay, technically, it isn't legalization. If the police catch you with drugs, they take the drugs away, make you see a doctor and a social worker, and maybe fine you. But you don't go to jail or get a criminal record. It is treated as a medical issue rather than a legal one. Our country should have this kind of respect for individual liberty and social justice. Hopefully things will change soon.
Drug use has remained flat or even decreased, and most of the associated problems have decreased significantly.
Okay, technically, it isn't legalization. If the police catch you with drugs, they take the drugs away, make you see a doctor and a social worker, and maybe fine you. But you don't go to jail or get a criminal record. It is treated as a medical issue rather than a legal one. Our country should have this kind of respect for individual liberty and social justice. Hopefully things will change soon.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Three Links
This blog post discusses the placebo article I linked to yesterday, with more good info. The author shows that the placebo effect is stronger when the trials are more rigorous. Bad science tends to make the 'real' treatment look better.
This post talks about a research study that showed how easy it is to get people to sign false confessions. I would like to see more discussion about whether they actually believed they were guilty, or if they were making a cold calculation to make their life easy. I suspect the latter, because far fewer people were willing to falsely claim that another person was guilty of cheating.
This article talks about the literacy of the Internet generation. It argues that writing ability is much better than it used to be, and makes several good points:
"Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again."
But now, people do a lot of socializing via the written world, and they tend to be good at it.
I have been happy with the communication skills of my students. I expect a lot of them and grade quite strictly, and they still manage to do fairly well. I know that I am teaching at an (almost) elite college, and that I am seeing the better students of the generation, but from what I see there is nothing wrong with the literacy of kids today. Some of them may be hopeless at math and abstract reasoning, but that's nothing new.
This post talks about a research study that showed how easy it is to get people to sign false confessions. I would like to see more discussion about whether they actually believed they were guilty, or if they were making a cold calculation to make their life easy. I suspect the latter, because far fewer people were willing to falsely claim that another person was guilty of cheating.
This article talks about the literacy of the Internet generation. It argues that writing ability is much better than it used to be, and makes several good points:
"Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again."
But now, people do a lot of socializing via the written world, and they tend to be good at it.
I have been happy with the communication skills of my students. I expect a lot of them and grade quite strictly, and they still manage to do fairly well. I know that I am teaching at an (almost) elite college, and that I am seeing the better students of the generation, but from what I see there is nothing wrong with the literacy of kids today. Some of them may be hopeless at math and abstract reasoning, but that's nothing new.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Placebos
This is a good article about the placebo effect. It seems to be getting stronger over time.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The Iron Law of Scarcity
Scarcity is an essential assumption in economic thinking. The entire discipline is built around the assumption that human desires will always exceed the resources available.
Some people assume that future technology will eliminate scarcity, and talk about 'post-scarcity economics'. They are mistaken. It is true that a lot of things that are currently expensive will get arbitrarily cheap, but scarcity will never disappear entirely.
This is easy to realize if you compare our current prosperity to the life of people 1000 years ago. Hundreds of things that were very expensive to them, from specific items like wire to paper, to general categories like food and energy, are incredibly cheap. A minimum wage job, or even disability payments from Social Security, would allow you to live a life that is far better, in terms of material goods and comforts, than a medieval aristocrat. And yet most of us still manage to run out of money.
There are many predictions dating from earlier in this century that technological progress would result in a 21st century where people worked 10 hours a day or less, and/or where there was massive unemployment. And it is true that we would only have to work 10 hours a day if we all accepted the standard of living they had in the 50's. But we want more, so we keep working.
But let us assume that technology becomes arbitrarily advanced while following all known laws of physics. Imagine a world where computers can fabricate almost anything for free using dirt, rocks, and spare biomass, and that we all have robot servants to cater to our every whim. Imagine uploading your brain to a computer network and living in any world you desire. What could be scarce in such a world?
Several things, it turns out.
Energy may get very very cheap, but we will never have an infinite supply. There is a limit to the amount of energy that the sun puts out. New technologies have a habit of generating new energy needs. No matter how energy-efficient your technology is, doing anything useful will eventually generate waste heat, and recovering energy form that waste heat would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Even if we built a dyson sphere to capture the entire solar output, there would be a limit on the amount of energy available.
Rare elements will always be scarce. Nanotechnology cannot turn lead into gold. The only way to turn one element into another is to hit the nucleus with a stream of particles, and hope that the particles are absorbed or that they remove bits of the nucleus. This is a very messy and energy-intensive process.
Real estate in meatspace will always be scarce. People will want land for privacy, or simply to play with. Even if we used the mass of the outer planets to construct a ringworld, people would desire more space than is available. It may seem ridiculous that we could use up so much space, but it is easy to imagine that everyone would want a private forest, mountain, jungle, coral reef, etc. as a personal playground. The only way that real estate would not be scarce would be if we had the technology to instantly teleport to any place in the galaxy and create new planets at will.
We will always need a way to allocate the limited supply of energy, rare elements, and real estate. That means either a market or some kind of central planning. Either way, you will need some kind of price system or credit allocation mechanism, which means money.
But suppose we find new laws of physics, and surpass all of those hurdles. Suppose we could teleport at will to any place in the universe, instantly convert any kind of energy into any kind of mass, or even create new universes. Will it be enough? No. No matter what arbitrary level of technology we possess, there will always be one scarce resource: the attention of sentient beings.
If you want a human to do something for you, you will have to pay that person somehow, to compensate for the loss of his or her time. Even if people are immortal, there will be things they would rather do than serve you. And people will want services that only other humans can provide. In fact, the easier it is to fulfull our material desires, the more we will focus on social desires, like talking to popular people and getting into the good clubs and parties.
We will not be able to get everything from AI beings. Either they are inferior to people in some way, in which case people still have value, or they are indistinguishable from people, in which case they will also have desires and will want to be compensated for their time. It is not possible to serve all desires by making AI slaves, or AI entities that have no desires and only exist to serve. Modifying them enough to make them work for free will always be enough to make them sub-human in some way, and people will want to interact with real people.
So there would be an economy built around social desires and interaction. People will pay you to do things like teach them or entertain them, and you will use the money to purchase services from other people. Scarcity, and economics, will exist as long as anything resembling humans exists.
Some people assume that future technology will eliminate scarcity, and talk about 'post-scarcity economics'. They are mistaken. It is true that a lot of things that are currently expensive will get arbitrarily cheap, but scarcity will never disappear entirely.
This is easy to realize if you compare our current prosperity to the life of people 1000 years ago. Hundreds of things that were very expensive to them, from specific items like wire to paper, to general categories like food and energy, are incredibly cheap. A minimum wage job, or even disability payments from Social Security, would allow you to live a life that is far better, in terms of material goods and comforts, than a medieval aristocrat. And yet most of us still manage to run out of money.
There are many predictions dating from earlier in this century that technological progress would result in a 21st century where people worked 10 hours a day or less, and/or where there was massive unemployment. And it is true that we would only have to work 10 hours a day if we all accepted the standard of living they had in the 50's. But we want more, so we keep working.
But let us assume that technology becomes arbitrarily advanced while following all known laws of physics. Imagine a world where computers can fabricate almost anything for free using dirt, rocks, and spare biomass, and that we all have robot servants to cater to our every whim. Imagine uploading your brain to a computer network and living in any world you desire. What could be scarce in such a world?
Several things, it turns out.
Energy may get very very cheap, but we will never have an infinite supply. There is a limit to the amount of energy that the sun puts out. New technologies have a habit of generating new energy needs. No matter how energy-efficient your technology is, doing anything useful will eventually generate waste heat, and recovering energy form that waste heat would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Even if we built a dyson sphere to capture the entire solar output, there would be a limit on the amount of energy available.
Rare elements will always be scarce. Nanotechnology cannot turn lead into gold. The only way to turn one element into another is to hit the nucleus with a stream of particles, and hope that the particles are absorbed or that they remove bits of the nucleus. This is a very messy and energy-intensive process.
Real estate in meatspace will always be scarce. People will want land for privacy, or simply to play with. Even if we used the mass of the outer planets to construct a ringworld, people would desire more space than is available. It may seem ridiculous that we could use up so much space, but it is easy to imagine that everyone would want a private forest, mountain, jungle, coral reef, etc. as a personal playground. The only way that real estate would not be scarce would be if we had the technology to instantly teleport to any place in the galaxy and create new planets at will.
We will always need a way to allocate the limited supply of energy, rare elements, and real estate. That means either a market or some kind of central planning. Either way, you will need some kind of price system or credit allocation mechanism, which means money.
But suppose we find new laws of physics, and surpass all of those hurdles. Suppose we could teleport at will to any place in the universe, instantly convert any kind of energy into any kind of mass, or even create new universes. Will it be enough? No. No matter what arbitrary level of technology we possess, there will always be one scarce resource: the attention of sentient beings.
If you want a human to do something for you, you will have to pay that person somehow, to compensate for the loss of his or her time. Even if people are immortal, there will be things they would rather do than serve you. And people will want services that only other humans can provide. In fact, the easier it is to fulfull our material desires, the more we will focus on social desires, like talking to popular people and getting into the good clubs and parties.
We will not be able to get everything from AI beings. Either they are inferior to people in some way, in which case people still have value, or they are indistinguishable from people, in which case they will also have desires and will want to be compensated for their time. It is not possible to serve all desires by making AI slaves, or AI entities that have no desires and only exist to serve. Modifying them enough to make them work for free will always be enough to make them sub-human in some way, and people will want to interact with real people.
So there would be an economy built around social desires and interaction. People will pay you to do things like teach them or entertain them, and you will use the money to purchase services from other people. Scarcity, and economics, will exist as long as anything resembling humans exists.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Effects of Government
This is an amazing fact:
"Kenyan architect and town planner Mumo Museva took me to the bustling Eastleigh area of Nairobi, where traders have created a booming economy despite the place being almost completely abandoned by the government.
Eastleigh is a filthy part of the city where rubbish lies uncollected, the potholes in the roads are the size of swimming pools, and the drains have collapsed.
But one indication of the success of the traders, Mr Museva said, was the high per-square-foot rents there.
"You'll be surprised to note that Eastleigh is the most expensive real estate in Nairobi." "
from this BBC article
Think about that for a minute. A filthy slum has the best economy and the highest rental rates in the entire city. Why? Because government officials do not go there. The government is so corrupt and rapacious that people would rather work in a lawless filthy slum then be subject to it.
Of course, the person who write the article was amazingly clueless. He should have written 'because of' instead of 'despite' in the first line.
"Kenyan architect and town planner Mumo Museva took me to the bustling Eastleigh area of Nairobi, where traders have created a booming economy despite the place being almost completely abandoned by the government.
Eastleigh is a filthy part of the city where rubbish lies uncollected, the potholes in the roads are the size of swimming pools, and the drains have collapsed.
But one indication of the success of the traders, Mr Museva said, was the high per-square-foot rents there.
"You'll be surprised to note that Eastleigh is the most expensive real estate in Nairobi." "
from this BBC article
Think about that for a minute. A filthy slum has the best economy and the highest rental rates in the entire city. Why? Because government officials do not go there. The government is so corrupt and rapacious that people would rather work in a lawless filthy slum then be subject to it.
Of course, the person who write the article was amazingly clueless. He should have written 'because of' instead of 'despite' in the first line.
Improved Vaccine Delivery
Immunizations could be getting a lot better in the near future. They are testing aerosols and skin patches that should work better than injections.
Yay Science!
Yay Science!
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