Economic organization of a POW camp

Via Falkenblog, I stumbled upon this gem [EDIT: the previous link appears to be an abridged version, the full version can be found here]. RA Radford, whom I guess to be a British officer, writes about his experience in Nazi Germany POW camps from an economist’s perspective, describing the camp’s markets and their operations. (Fun fact: the Geneva Convention of 1929 forbids the detaining power from making officers work.)

In the camps, the prisoners received Red Cross and German rations and sometimes private parcels. Simple barter quickly evolved into a money-based economy, with cigarettes serving as the currency (at the permanent camp, a shop was set up that explicitly sold goods for cigarettes only). Prices emerged for the various products, fluctuating according to supply and demand, including the supply and demand of the new-found “money”. Radford describes monopolies, arbitrage, inflation and deflation, middlemen (and how most prisoners disliked them yet used their services), attempts at price-fixing, and in general the trade that took place.

This is a fascinating report of economic principles at work, as practical as it gets, yet very elegant and clear.

Would you rather be happy or rich?

Bryan Caplan, a libertarian American economist, recently visited Sweden and Denmark, and wrote up some of his opinions. His bottom line is a standard libertarian analysis: socialist system taxes the populace into relative poverty. He even takes a stab at the “happiest people on earth” by noting how many of them “miserably bike to work in the rain”. A Finnish friend of mine responded somewhat emotionally (as did many of Caplan’s commentators, both pro and contra) and this got me thinking.

Suppose Scandinavian countries, via their socialist policies, have (on average) happier citizens, but that the United States, via its capitalist policies, has (on average) wealthier citizens (the data in the link should roughly correlate with average income).

This is not a very preposterous assumption. In the positive psychology literature, a standard result is that while we think money will bring happiness, it doesn’t. First, it suffers from diminishing returns. Having enough money for necessities is much better than being poor, but being rich over being plain middle-class doesn’t add that much happiness. Second, people respond strongly to the incomes of peers, and would prefer to earn less in absolute terms as long as they earn more relative to others. Third, owning more stuff brings considerably less happiness than we imagine. All of the above give the socialist approach considerable hedonic weight.

On the other hand, many (most?) economists would reply that socialist policies distort the market severely, causing inefficiency and lack of incentives, slowing down economic growth (if not reversing it) in the long run. Empirically, at least, the US seems to have the lead over Europe economically.

On pain of appearing daft, I’d like to inquire about the usefulness of dollars if it doesn’t translate into hedons. As can be seen here, this is not a trivial question. As for myself, I’d like to speculate about the utility of wealth in the very long run.

Consider this finding. In hunter/gatherer societies (in which most of our evolution took place), if your survived childhood, you would have a reasonable, if tough (by today’s standards) life. But we were also very poor by economic standards – nomadic life doesn’t allow any appreciable accumulation of physical wealth. Agriculture changed this – we settled down and began accumulating wealth, at a considerable hedonic expense. We weren’t evolved for staple food diets or efficient utilization of domesticated animals, repetitive manual labour or (later on) big concentrations of people (which led to big slavery, big wars and big epidemics).

However, our wealth propelled us forward as a species. We spread around the globe, multiplied exponentially (indeed, Robin Hanson considers agriculture to be a technological singularity event), and in the last 50 years managed to outperform our savannah ancestors on many parameters. Today it appears that immortality, space colonization and utopia in general are mere problems of engineering (again see the technological singularity). If we don’t destroy ourselves in the process (which is disturbingly likely), in the evolutionary-near future (thousands of years) we will solve them and win the universe (at least until we lose to entropy).

Techno-utopian daydreams aside, things like basic science, space exploration, dental care, vaccines and sanitation, cheap, immediate entertainment and even safety from crime and war, require wealth to develop. I’ve already mentioned the technological singularity and existential risk, somewhat abstract and futuristic issues, for the development of which wealth is a necessary (although an insufficient) condition. But many important yet costly projects are very down-to-earth – for example, 90% of HIV vaccine R&D efforts in 2005 were funded by US tax payers. The nations that suffer most from AIDS just can’t afford those kinds of expenditures.

In short, I see a basic problem of saving now to have more later, but on the scale of civilizations and centuries. This analysis suggests that we can be happier by letting the welfare state protect us from the world and from ourselves. Or we can be wealthier by letting the invisible hand decide our fates for better or worse. The second path, however, has a better potential to increase happiness on aggregate in the future, even if it may be too late for us (unless…).

This begins to sound suspiciously like what the citizens of Soviet Russia were told for many years – that their generation’s poverty and suffering will lead to the utopia of future generations, and we all know how that worked out. But this analogy is horribly stretched, for neither are Americans unhappy nor are Swedes poor, and there’s just no comparing the USSR to any Western nation. Still, today’s heated debates on economic policy may suffer from a bias of short-term goals at the expense of the long-term development of humanity as a whole. And while I myself am prejudiced against the pursuit of wealth in exclusion to other, nobler enterprises, I can’t but conclude that it is indeed better to be rich than happy.

Politics and science: what does “cause of variation” mean?

One of the more controversial topics is intelligence – its measurement, causes, consequences, etc. While I would prefer to stay away from it, one thing I noticed is that experts usually favour some genetic determinism, and that this is a consensus position, while the public is against it.

One anti-genetic-determinism pundit is David Shenk, who writes The Genius Blog, where he argues that you, yes you!, can become the next Einstein, provided sufficient motivation and resources. This reincarnation of the blank slate hypothesis will die out eventually. What I’d like to address are Shenk’s comments on heritability, which I would probably ignore, if only he didn’t accuse scientists of confusion and congratulate himself on his keen analysis.

The piece boils down to calling estimates of genetic heritability “meaningless”. Consider:

“Cause of variation” is not remotely the same as “cause of trait.”

In discussing “heritability” in the media, scientists have allowed the public to confuse “causes of variation” with “causes of traits.” Heritability studies do not, and cannot, measure causes of traits. They can only attempt to measure causes of differences (or variation) in traits.

So, for example, a heritability study cannot even attempt to measure the cause of plant height. It cannot purport to tell you that some percent of plant height is caused by genes.

What it can attempt to do is measure the percentage influence that genes have on the differences in height in a particular group of plants. But the percentage would only apply to that particular group.

Now, strictly speaking, this is correct. The entire causes of a plant’s height are its entire genome and environment. A plant wouldn’t be a plant if its genome didn’t specify the various cells, their organization and operation in detail, and if the resources needed for its growth weren’t available (earth’s soil, air, water and sunlight). And even if all those exist, the plant can be eaten or trampled or buried under a landslide, and surely those must count as causes for whatever state the plant is in!

But when considering differences within a population, the perspective changes. Most of the genome is constant in a population – a cat can’t give birth to a dog. But a cat can give birth to kittens with different colouring patterns. Now, when we are interested in the causes of the differences between the patterns, we often shorten the language and ask what is the cause of, say, the uniformly black fur. When interpreted literally, the answer would also have to include the causes for the entire cat! But of course what we really want to know is why this cat is entirely black, instead of spotted or orange-striped.

In cases of colouring patterns, we accept the differences to be caused genetically, and we say this without much trouble. Differences in other traits may not be caused genetically. The particular differences between identical twins, for example, are entirely environmentally caused, because there is no genetic variation between them.

Let’s try the same but with numbers. Cystic fibrosis is a disease that is caused by a single gene, we are told. But this is strictly wrong: the entire causes of the whole disease must also include the causes of the human body! But recall that what we’re actually interested in are the causes of differences, in which case it is entirely appropriate to say that a single deleterious allele causes the disease. It is also appropriate to say that the variation in this trait is 100% due to genes. In cases where the population’s genome would have no variation, any variation in traits determined by those portions of the genome would have to be 0% genetic.

What does this mean about heritability? Well, if a variation in a trait is 100% genetic, then by knowing the genome of an individual you’d be able to say where he would fall on the variation distribution. Knowing the genomes of the parents you’d be able to calculate odds for the variation of that trait in their future kids. Conversely, if the variation is 0% genetic, you wouldn’t be able to do this at all.

Now, variation in many interesting traits is not determined entirely by genes. And in many cases, the alleles that give rise to variation can be numerous and their interplay complex. In studies all these effects are aggregated into a single number, which we may intuitively explain as “the degree to which genes influence the trait” or somesuch.Then, the best guess may be a confidence interval. For example, if intelligence is both highly heritable and fixed during a person’s lifetime, then a statement such as “if both parents have an IQ of 110, their kids are 90% likely to have an IQ within the 100-120 range” would make sense. I made up the numbers, but the principle should be obvious.

This kind of research is fine for disease, but is controversial for intelligence and personality. This is despite the fact that it’s just as sound empirically and theoretically. Still, the politics and emotion involved are strong enough to promote poor arguments against long-established expert consensus. Shame.

What I learned: Economics

When I was younger, I didn’t like the idea of economics. I didn’t like money (money being too material and mundane), and I thought economics was about money, so it wasn’t very interesting.

That obviously changed (or I wouldn’t bother to write this post), and I actually remember the conversation that sent the first cracks in my walls of ignorance. It was Michael Katsevman trying to explain the wonders of Facebook in economic terms, and me not understanding what the heck he was talking about. He kindly elaborated (in the following IRC dialog, Michael is procto and I am TFK):

<procto>    now I would use some economics to discuss here
<procto>    but you don’t like it
<procto>    I don’t know how a computer scientist can dislike economics
<procto>    the only reason I can think of is that you don’t know enough of it
<procto>    it’s one of my favourite things in the world
<procto>    proper economics, not just “stocks and bonds and stuff”
<procto>    things like
<procto>    game theory
<procto>    utility theory
<procto>    incentive structures
<procto>    information asymmetry
<procto>    etc.
<procto>    there’s a cool new branch called neuroeconomics
<procto>    which studies decision theory
<procto>    i.e. how people decide stuff
<TFK>    Those things don’t sound like economics per se, although may utilize concepts and methods from it.
<procto>    TFK: ok, want a definition of economics?
<procto>    ”Economics is the science of scarce resources and the decisions people make about them.”
<TFK>    Anyway… when put that way, it can be interesting.
<TFK>    But when people hear “economics” they usually equate it with “economics of business”.
<TFK>    Not abstract mathematical models on decision-making in a prisoner’s dilemma (which I do find interesting).
<procto>    that’s because most people are ignorant
<procto>    I use the term Finance to describe the former
<procto>    vis a vis the term Economics
<procto>    which is a more abstract science
<TFK>    Hmmm. I will henceforth adopt your distinction of terms.
<procto>    :D
<procto>    I like to divide that “type” of stuff into three categories: Accounting, Finance, and Economics
<procto>    in order of increasing abstraction

Economics, broadly construed, is very far-reaching. Many of our choices lay in its domain, obvious examples being what to consume, where to invest, how to spend our free time, how to navigate our careers, etc. Among those obvious examples, there is a lot of interesting research to be found. For example, positional goods – expensive but without apparent increase in utility compared to cheaper alternatives (for example, an original Picasso and an identical print). A most striking example is diamond jewelery, which rose to market prominence with ingenious social engineering by the De Beers group.

Positional goods are consumed conspicuously to display one’s wealth and status and are not limited to the rich. Fancy dressers and sports-car drivers are often not especially wealthy, but they will invest in those particular goods even at the cost of more useful expenditures (or simply saving).

Conspicuous consumption is an example of signaling. A signal is any communication or action which carries information about one’s abilities, desires, alliances. A most obvious example is a plain advertisement or a resume, but more interesting examples include education (covered in the Wiki). The idealistic view sees formal education as a grand endeavor of the soul, while economics sees it as a mere signal of abilities. (“Mere” because the students forget most of the material – it is not important in the workplace, but only for the coveted diploma.) I will have more to say to say on signaling, since it is a mind-blowing concept to learn for a utilitarian.

A much more known field generally associated with economics is game theory. Most famous is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a simple model of cooperation and defection. (I actually learned of it long before I knew its name – in evolutionary biology, it plays a huge role in the study of the evolution of altruism.) In PD, it pays to defect if you only play one game. But when an unknown number is to be played, a tit-for-tat strategy is best. These results are now classic; less known is Hofstadter’s superrationality, which leads to cooperation even in a one-off PD game.

Moving on to more prescriptive ideas, the efficient market hypothesis is one of the few things I’d like to see taught in schools. Broadly, it states that all available information is already reflected in the market prices. Practically, this means that any clever theory you may have about stocks that will rise or fall, and it happens to be true, then other folks are likely to have already thought and acted on it. Worse, markets are anti-inductive: any useful rule regarding their future will quickly be exploited and thus made obsolete. This insight has a wonderful practical application for investing. It also suggests a more serious observation regarding the economy in general and the current crisis in particular – neither crises nor periods of intense growth can be predicted. For if such knowledge existed, it would already be reflected in the prices! It thus makes no sense to rely on or criticize pundits and regulators for market failures (or praise them for market success, as a corollary).

The final important take-away is this – if you have true knowledge, buy now, or forever hold your peace. Very few folks bet against the recent bubble, even though the market allowed such bets. It is much easier to pontificate than to seriously stand behind one’s claims, and this is also material for a future post.

There is another usage for the efficient market hypothesis – prediction markets. In a prediction market, the traded “stocks” represent an outcome, and the price can be seen as a probability measure – how strongly the market believes the outcome will obtain. A most radical usage of prediction markets is futarchy – a style of government driven by prediction markets.

A final idea I’d like to report on today, which is pretty disturbing, is the economics interpretation of human values. We’d like to believe ourselves to be at least somewhat principled, carrying about various Big Issues, but in practice we contribute very little. Being a half-cynic, it always appeared to me somewhat hypocritical, but in economics the verdict is much more harsh – people’s values are measured by their expenditures in resources. After all, if one claims to care about poverty, but does nothing substantial about it – in what sense does one actually care? This type of care would actually be considered criminal negligence if a dependent was involved. And more disturbingly: once one decided to help substantially, which policies would work?

Economics occupies a strange place in academia. It is not considered a hard science – there are no economics blogs on ScienceBlogs.com (but there are psychology blogs). Neither is it a big hit in the social sciences. To what extent do historians, sociologists, anthropologists use economics, or are even familiar with it? In the popular mind, economics is conflated with finance. Yet it appears to be in the unique position of having a no-bullshit view of individuals and societies. Whether we’d like to hear such views, and what practical conclusions we might reach, is another question entirely.

But I, for one, am fascinated. And hope you are, too :-)

What I learned: an upcoming series

One observation about most fields of human endeavor is the impossibility of experiencing any given one completely. You can’t listen to all the music, even in a particular sub-genre; can’t read all the books on a particular topic; and no one knows what science doesn’t know. This raises the existential dilemma of possibly missing out on the most awesome things ever, due to the shortness of life. And it, like so many other silly questions, bothers me.

The standard solution is to consult the market. At any given time, there is a set of ideas the market considers the best. But this is not a general solution. After one has sifted through the “top 10″, examining less popular ideas carries diminishing returns. Alternatively, if 90% of everything is crap and you pick randomly, only 1 in 10 works will be of genuine value. Talk about inefficiency…

A case in point is ScienceBlogs.com. It has lots of good reading, but most of it is, well, standard. Now, I do subscribe to the view that settled science is much better than revolutionary science, in terms of usefulness for public knowledge. But reporting on settled science has a major flaw – its maximum depth.

Consider physics. There are a number of hot topics such as relativity and quantum mechanics, on which popularizations are consistently published. However, any new publication is unlikely to add any additional, unique information its predecessors missed. The more one reads and hears, the more difficult it becomes to find novel insight in popularization, and one’s understanding stagnates.

In the last couple of years, I’ve had the fortune to learn many great ideas which I seldom see in “traditional” channels. They’re neither obscure nor necessarily controversial, but for various reasons are not the consensus or not popularized enough.

In the upcoming series I hope to do them some justice. Not an easy task, since my own understanding is largely superficial. For this reason, I will try to confine myself to just reporting, so if I end up talking nonsense, I can always blame someone else ;-)

Buying books online – cheaper than local bookstores?

Practical money-saving advice for online book buyers not part of the civilized world (the US and wherever else Amazon has local sites):

If you buy from Amazon (or really any other site that charges for delivery), consider BookDepository, a UK-based online shop which ships books worldwide for free. Yes, that’s right, no shipping costs! Books are somewhat more expensive, but shipping + VAT (at least in Israel) is more expensive still. Case in point:

I want to make a purchase of 8 books (all popular non-fiction). Subtotal in Amazon was slightly less than US$100. If there’s only one shipment, that’s $7 for the shipment, plus $4 per item, that’s a total of around $140. Israeli VAT is 15.5%, so my final payment is around $160. If I want to avoid the VAT, I have to split into at least three shipments of less than $50 each, but the per-shipment cost makes this a pointless endeavor.

On BookDepository, the subtotal is roughly $120 – about 20% more expensive than Amazon. No shipping fees, so if sent in a single shipment, that’s about $140 after VAT. However, since shipping is free, I can split this into three separate shipments with no added costs, avoiding the VAT, saving me $40! Woo!

Furthermore, Israeli bookstores usually sell popular titles for NIS60-80, that is $15-20. Taking the cheaper price, that matches BookDepository. However, the titles I’m interested in are usually not available in Israel (unless translated, and I greatly prefer originals), and certainly the convenience of online shopping is much better than physically hunting obscure geek titles. I’m a bit miffed by the economics involved, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Another perk is the possibility to buy books on a whim, without waiting for the wishlist to fill up (this can actually be catastrophic if you’re impulsive, but hey…).

Mileage outside of Israel may vary, since VAT may be  lower or non-existent in other countries, but Amazon’s worldwide shipping charges are still more than 20% of popular titles.

One caveat is that I’m yet to actually buy anything, so can’t report on the gruesome details of the delivery. Still, I imagine it can’t get worse than standard international shipping, which I’d get in Amazon anyway.

Giant hat tip to Mark, who allowed me to cram more enlightenment into my salary.

If you know even cheaper online book deals, please let me know.

A closet survey survey

One of the more novel posts on Less Wrong is  Closet Survey #1, asking participants to voice their craziest opinions – ones which almost nobody holds, including the LW readership. The twist is that the resopndendts are self-professed (aspiring) rationalists, so one would expect a great deal of thought in them, not random nonsense. I skimmed the responses, and I offer a list of the interesting ones. Not all of them are as marginal as the survey asks for, but still pretty controversial.

On abortion:

Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It’s acceptable to euthanize one’s pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.

In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn’t end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.

On war:

Civilians should be considered legitimate targets in warfare, with the decision whether or not to attack them based entirely on expediency. If a cause isn’t worth killing civilians over, it’s not worth killing soldiers over, either.

And a corollary:

Killing enemy soldiers is not much better than killing enemy civilians.

On the sexes:

That both women and men are far happier living with traditional gender roles. That modern Western women often hold very wrong beliefs about what will make them happy, and have been taught to cling to these false beliefs even in the face of overwhelming personal evidence that they are false.

On life:

It is immoral not to put a dollar value on life.

On pedophilia (pretty disturbing, actually):

I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:

“Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender.” Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).

Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.

On race (this one is more popular than the others, but still very controversial):

That within human races there are probably genetically-determined differences in intelligence and temperment, and that these differences partically explain differences in wealth between nations.

But:

I believe that people who try and sound all “edgy” and “serious” by intoning what they believe to be “blunt truths” about race/gender differences are incredibly annoying for the most part.

On the supernatural (this one is interesting because the author is an Overcoming Bias contributor, and a rationalist):

The nature of reality will turn out to be very different from what most people imagine. Supernatural events occur in the world, and supernatural beings walk among us, but they are very rare.

On information availability:

As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.

Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.

Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.

On western medicine (this is very shocking to the layman and less so for the expert):

It’s generally not worth your time to ask a doctor questions about treatments; the responses you’ll get will be soothing but non-informative.

Doctors probably cause more harm than good, considered over all interventions.

My own contribution is minor. I guess my most unorthodox thought is that bearing children is immoral, although I don’t think the human species should go extinct (don’t ask me how I reconcile that contradiction, I don’t know yet). I intend to write on this more later.

Any others?

The nomenclature wars – Darwinism

Yesterday was Darwin Day, which I shamefully failed to celebrate, even though I’m a big evolution buff. Belatedly, I offer my two cents, and truly the contribution is minor. Still, too many words are committed to Google cache over what I think are matters of nomenclature, not substance.

Today’s example is an essay in the The New York Times, calling to “kill the cult of Darwinism” (hat tip to the Grey Thumb). Apparently, associating the modern theory of evolution with the man who gave birth to it creates a false impression of Darwin as the ultimate and last prophet in biology and that nothing substantial came after him. Further, “Darwinism” implies that other “isms” exist, and gives credence to them by automatically assuming the role of their antagonist.

The Wikipedia is very insightful about the contested term, saying that it has different meanings for different people. This alone does not keep many scientists from using and defending it, even at the cost of being misunderstood. A pity, but not a good enough reason to give Darwin the boot.

Perhaps the term the author is looking for is “the modern synthesis“, a rather uncatchy title which dares not betray its subject matter (unless “evolutionary” is injected into it, making it even more cumbersome). It is also what most scientists mean when referring to Darwinism. The reason is an historical one – even though the modern synthesis has progressed beyond Darwin, its core – now expressed as a mathematical law – is faithful to Darwin’s logic. Evolutionary theory will forever be associated with Darwin, because it is built on natural selection, the one insight Darwin will forever be right about.

Whatever the historical roots of “Darwinism”, Darwin is not the only one to become a “cult figure”. In mathematics, entire fields of study are called after people – like Euclidean geometry. But geometry doesn’t stir human prejudice as much as the origin of life, I suppose, so Euclid stays but Darwin “must go”.

Secondly, creationists more often use the pejorative term “evolutionist” than “Darwinist”. After all, as the author rightly notes, evolution is bigger and older than Darwin. Evolution is the original sin and enemy of creationists and IDers, not Darwinism, although the latter is perhaps more obscene.

Thus, the proposed exorcism is a red herring – evolution is a bitter pill to swallow for many, be it associated with Darwin or not. Neither did scientists create a cult of Darwin. There are more famous scientists whose names are associated with genius and wisdom, such as Einstein (although it’s true there’s no “Einsteinism”, Einstein is often invoked as a final authority, even on subjects other than physics). True, to the unititiated it may seem as if evolution hinges on Darwin. The answer is to initiate them, not dabble in nomenclature.

The inherent non-problem with science

A curious phenomenon in the philosophy of science is anti-realism – the idea that despite the success of science, it still fails to deliver an accurate, or even a semi-accurate, description of the universe, and can’t do this even in principle. This is a serious philosophical view promoted even by scientists and science-enthusiasts, despite what appears to me an obvious flaw – they have explained science away, but science didn’t disappear – a reductio ad absurdum if I ever saw one. An exemplar of this view is a recent post in Think Gene, a science blog (!), on the inherent problem of science. (I found it via John Wilkins’ response to the above post, which may be constructive, but I’ll take a different approach. Think Gene replied, feebly in my opinion, but judge for yourselves.)

The author, Josh Hill, challenges Bayes’ theorem, the foundation of science and of rationality in general. The problem with it, he argues, is that it is probabilistic in nature. Since we are not omniscient, we can only assign probabilities to our theories, not absolute certainties (both pro and con). Furthermore, for every set of observations there exist an infinite number of theories, so the money spent on the LHC to find the Higgs boson is wasted – even if we find what we’re looking for, we can’t be sure we aren’t fooling ourselves by working with a wrong theory (out of an infinity available to us). Next up is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which supposedly crushes all hopes of a finite number of theories by principle, followed by a defeatist admission of humanity’s limitations. The readers obligingly agree, and the author proceeds with his daily affairs, talking about the latest scientific findings and theories as if he has never written a post that refutes the efficacy of his subject matter.

An equivalent of this is shooting both your feet off, and then proceeding to win the Olympics in the running competitions. I can only conclude that the shells were blank, and here’s why.

First, regarding the number of theories that may explain a given set of observations. The author says it is an infinity, since we cannot even in principle have absolute information about the state of the world. (The “impossible in principle” part is inaccurate – there’s no real uncertainty in the quantum world – but that’s irrelevant.) But why? Suppose we are omniscient – are we then bound by only one theory, or a finite set? And suppose we subtract the knowledge of a single atom from our omniscience – do we then jump to an infinity of possible theories, or is our search space still finite? When exactly does infinity creep into this knowledge reduction process?

Second, what sort of theories should we be looking for? Let’s take Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Supposedly we should find an infinity of competing, equally-likely theories. One kind comes readily to mind – take general relativity, and add little green men that do the real work in the theory. Any sort of such superfluous information can be added, as long as it doesn’t change the math. Let’s say bare-bones general relativity takes N bits to encode, and our expanded theories take N+M bits. But where is the justification for M bits of apparent knowledge? By themselves they are unsupported – shouldn’t such theories be penalized under Bayes? Occam’s Razor appears to me to be a pretty good pruning algorithm for theories we should not even include in our search space, although unfortunately I don’t know its formalization (yet).

What about theories that contain no apparent superfluous information, are equivalent to the orthodox theory, but are not isomorphic to it? It would be very interesting if such theories popped up – but have they? As far as I know, all competing and equally-performing theories in the past have been shown to be mathematically equivalent. On reflection this is not so strange – you can think of theories as functions that take initial world states and output expected world states. Equivalent theories that predict the same results are functions that on every input give the same output – sounds pretty isomorphic.

The “theory landscape” we’re left with now consists not of an infinity of equally-probable theories (with the probability of each approaching zero, since there’s an infinity of them), but rather a countable number of theories, where one is the most probable (general relativity), one or two are probable to a small degree (string theory, although actually there are many string theories, but collectively we might assign to them a probability on the order of magnitude of 0.1), and the others are very improbable (Newtonian mechanics at high velocities). If you insist on including the theories we have pruned away, they get infinitesimally tiny probabilities. (Since Bayes penalizes superfluous information and since all the isomorphic theories are written under the same theory.)

(This obviously omits all the theories we haven’t thought about. But that’s OK – they represent the incompleteness of our knowledge. Every scientist would tell you that we don’t know everything, and ask for funding to fill the gaps. Scientific progress ensues.)

Enter the age-old question: how can a high probability be equated with certainty? Is it not possible in principle that some of our discarded theories are still correct? Maybe general relativity is a mass-hallucination? How do we prove general relativity, or any other theory?

The short answer is that we can’t. The longer answer begins with asking: what does a low probability mean? The chances of winning a lottery are low. Some still participate, since they feel their chances are high enough to justify the ticket’s cost. But if their chances will visibly drop – the lottery will involve a million random [1, 50] integers – they will not even bother looking at the ticket vendor.

The same approach applies to theories. A very low (say, one in googol) probability of X means that it is not worth to invest even one neuron into the consideration of X. Thus, it is irrational to even consider homeopathy, given the knowledge we have today. I’m sure the author will agree with me on this (otherwise – will he be willing to increase homeopathy-related posts to an appreciable level?), so why the despair regarding science in general?

The author gives the very old example of swans to illustrate the even older problem of induction. But swans and the laws of physics are different types of things. First, we observe the laws of physics much more often than we do swans. Second, we know enough about swans to say that the color of a swan is not something ontologically special – we would not be surprised to find a swan of a different color. But we know enough about physics to say with certainty approaching 1 that an atom of hydrogen is and forever will be indistinguishable from another atom of hydrogen. The probabilities are so different, they aren’t even comparable.

The final death throes of realism in the author’s mind is a variant of pessimistic induction (as pointed out by John Wilkins), which appears to me suspect. Wilkins gives the standard answer, which I think is good enough. Or, as Eliezer Yudkowsky likes to say – the ratchet of science turns, but it doesn’t turn backwards. If the author really thinks otherwise – I dare him to second-guess the modern synthesis or germ theory.

Even if you, dear reader, disagree, then please answer this – how does science alone work, if it is indistinguisable from competing religious, philosophical and other disciplines? And will you, failing to answer this, act out on this conclusion and flip a coin next time your teeth ache to see if you should visit a dentist or a faith healer? And if no – why? To borrow another saying from Yudkowsky, it is not enough to claim that the world is nothing – it is also necessary to show how the nothing works. Good luck.

Of hackers and reality

A few weeks ago I began scouting WordPress for interesting blogs. One such blog is The Ivory Tower, where I had a few interesting exchanges with the author regarding some of the Standard Issues – objectivity and meaning. The author decided to honor me with a separate post, where he first paints a caricature of a code hacker as an incompetent, irresponsible script-kiddie, and then pins it on me. Don’t let my boss find out!

Personal jabs aside, let’s examine the author’s logic:

A hacker can make guesses about the program’s behavior without accepting the responsibility of guessing correctly. … The hacker’s belief that he knows what it does and what it’s supposed to do has no supporting evidence, because he doesn’t have the program’s specifications. … But isn’t this exactly like the scientist’s stand in relation to the universe he studies? We don’t have the specifications for the physical and natural laws of the universe. We have to guess at them. … In any philosophy of science, we have to take account of its nature as a hack.

I had a similar discussion (actually, it was more of a monologue) with Yoni recently. I explained that many sociologists like to pose as scientists, adopting rigorous methods and using math, but often they miss the point. We know they do when they present their Ultimate Truth – that science is a social construct, that it is not really true or progressive – and it fails to account for basic history. And when Tom Lehrer pours his scorn on these clearly dubious approaches, some are annoyed, but still fail to address the problem.

The author’s logic is similar, and so are the failings. Science is defined by evidence – no evidence, no science. Greats like Pasteur and Lister knew what they were doing, and took the responsibility for it (contrast with woo-meisters, who notoriously evade responsibility every way they can). Einstein was so good a hacker, he could point out bugs in God’s system. This is simple history – science does not fit the caricature the author paints. He needs a different metaphor – science as reverse-engineering.

The author says:

The car is what it is, and does what it does, and without some additional specification beyond the car itself, it’s impossible to say whether the car’s condition is correct or faulty.

What specifications are there for the human body? Yet it is absurd to say that human bodies don’t have “correct” or “faulty” modes of operation. Even amoebas do. Their operations, intentions and meanings are defined according to the reality they live in. We do not need an outside guide to define us and to inform our lives, neither do we need outside specs to fix the body when it’s broken.

Even within the metaphor of computer programming, it easy to see that the program’s specifications are not the program, they hold no special status. This is why reverse-engineers are often in a better position to evaluate a system than the original designers. I know a person who did just this with CPython. He knows how it works better than some who have contributed to its code-base, but he read neither the source code nor the docs. Despite this, he can point out where implementation deviates from its own documented specification.

The author’s reasoning leads to a grand reductio ad absurdum. If you think that there is no reality and no truth (defined here), or if you believe in any other form of non-realism, I dare you to take responsibility for your words, stick your neck out and demonstrate it. So far no one has succeeded at this (even though many tried), and despite this glaring failure, such ideas are vigorously promoted. Yet people continue to both enjoy reality in practice while simultaneously rejecting it in theory. If science is a hack, why does it work? Why are its guesses much, much better than chance, and the guesses of other disciplines? If reality is a fiction, why is it so persuasive? Can you do better than science? It appears to me that the author simply ignores these questions, and fails to see how his premises lead him to absurd conclusions. In his defense, the vast majority of people seem hold this contradictory duality of thinking (even scientists). That’s hardly a good thing, though.

In any philosophy of science, we have to take account of the fact that it actually works, and that it reveals a world that is ordered and lawful. How and why does it work, and what does it tell us? Good questions, which only the hackers can answer.