Jacob ex Machina

Elsewhere

2012-03-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

I have a new post up at my tech blog about Product Management: The Will to Product

The Courtship of the Philosopher

2012-03-17T23:17:00.002-07:00

I can no more mix with you
than stone can mix with air.
Like stone I am, and feel so low
and hard and strong and rare.

Were you with arms to lift me up
my nature would show true.
I was born to scorn the sky
and seek out earthy truth.

Were I made of softer stuff
I too would dance days past,
drifting each from place to place
each moment like the last.

But my joys I find in heavy things -
filling soul at wisdom's feast.
Come here! Feel your weight as well
substance, knowledge, and peace!

But rock, I know, leaves no mark on wind
and soon you fly away.
Chance meet, chance part, parting goes
each back to natures' place.

The Hunger Games - Book Review

2012-03-04T21:48:00.015-08:00

I started and finished “The Hunger Games” trilogy this weekend. It has the gritty teenage violence that fans of “Ender’s Game” will love and an improbable love triangle that “Twilight” fans will obsess over. It is written in a breezy style that nobody should find challenging. In other words, it was engineered to be a blockbuster. And popular it is - a big-budget movie adaptation is hitting screens less than four years after the first volume was published.

From the perspective of a young male reader, the action too often halts for a rehashing of the love triangle. When we embark on yet another trip around the hamster wheel which is Katniss Everdeen’s brain running in circles over boys my eyes automatically shift into skim mode. But the author’s sense of pacing saves the day. When my patience starts to wear out, Katniss snaps out of her romantic stupor long enough to put an arrow through somebody’s throat. Suzanne Collins is mindful of serving her bimodal audience consisting of action-craving boys and boy-crazed girls.

The books are incredibly gory. Contestants in the games are killed by an endless array of explosion, electrocution, trident, arrow, axe, sword, bee sting, poison, fire, drowning, acid, beast, and too many other ways to remember. It's fun and disturbing to cheer on the shy Katniss as she grows into a killer. The movie budget must have a eye-popping line item devoted to buckets of blood and rancid flesh. And it is a relentlessly bleak story. Katniss is repeatedly disillusioned and abused. All her supports prove to be ephemeral as her friends betray her with a hidden dark side or otherwise are killed without ceremony. By the end of the series, I was forced to like the protagonist out of sheer pity. The Hunger Games contain the most abuse of a main character since Elie Wiesel's “Night”.

Politics and culture in The Hunger Games is shallow. The political system underlying the world of the Hunger Games is self-evidently evil and designed to be so. When she’s not in the world of kill-or-be-killed that is the eponymous games, the system that created and supports the hunger games is Katniss’s major enemy. There is little nuance or food for thought in the political realm but this is dystopia, after all. The most provocative scenes show ordinary citizens of the capitol who are fans of the bloody games without being conscious the moral evil they are supporting. People in many historical nations have been complicit in similar evils, and it is easy to do so today if we are not careful.

The first book is clearly the best of the three - it most purely captures the creative vision behind The Hunger Games. But the series doesn’t die to sequel syndrome as it could. The second and third books wander for a bit, but they ultimately culminate in a satisfying ending.

Fans of dystopian sci-fi should pick up “The Hunger Games” to read on a long plane flight. It is a mass-market book and it shows, but it has many redeeming qualities.

Oh, and count me on team Peeta!

Like a City with no Children in it

2012-03-04T21:01:00.017-08:00

There is a pervasive hostility to the idea of having children among people in my peer group (urban yuppies, mostly). I blame it on the culture of short-sighted hedonism we live in. It’s true that raising young children is a chore, but having children increases happiness in the long run, and the more children the better.

More importantly, what kind of society are we building when the most educated and successful among us, people who make great parents, refrain from having children and passing on their values? When creating the next generation is left to impulsive people who are poor providers and poor sources of wisdom?

What happened to the ideal of leaving the world a better place than you found it?

If you're a sensible, smart person without a criminal record, please consider contributing to the next generation. It's a public good, and you'll eventually be happy you did it.

Links of the day

2012-02-28T23:16:00.000-08:00

A TED talk on the power of the Paleo diet.

Sarah Blakely, the inventor of Spanx hosiery, is an Atlanta legend. All entrepreneurs will find her story of hustle inspiring.

The Power of the Possible

2012-02-19T18:30:00.000-08:00

Our work is constrained by our beliefs about what is possible. We can only create what our minds can first conceive. So when we encounter something that lies outside our mental limits, it is an incredible event. We can think thoughts that we could not think before and create what was previously inconceivable. It is like a painter living in a black and white world who discovers color for the first time.

People that have the capability to do creative work outside the limits of what is currently believed to be possible are rare and important. They have a powerful catalytic effect on human progress. Once a boundary is breached it triggers a wave of exuberant productive energy. New fields of art, science, and technology are launched. Creators delight in discovering that their belief in some limit was wrong and eagerly explore the fresh world of new possibilities.

In the computer industry, Steve Jobs was known as a creative genius, and with good reason. His work in human-computer interaction at Apple Computer corp. revolutionized personal computing. The iPhone is one example of Apple's pioneering work.

Before the iPhone, smart phones looked very different. They were clunky devices with tiny screens and big keyboards. GUIs were activated with styluses. The few applications available for them were crappy and expensive. The programming environment for these phones was atrocious. Due to their limited capabilities and high price, the ownership of smart phones was restricted primarily to large corporations which gave them out to highly paid employees so they could keep up with their email. The devices were good for little else.

Fast forward two years after the iPhone’s release. Now most phones are composed of a beautiful rectangle of glass, controlled by touch. With their large, colorful screens, they provide an excellent web browsing experience and they are doubling their share of global website visits each year. They offer cheap or free programming environments that are a joy to use, generating a burgeoning ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of innovative applications. Phones are now the fastest growing category of gaming devices. A vast crowd of new smart phone owners were created - even my computer-challenged father owns one. In 5 short years the smart phone has revolutionized the web, business, and gaming, and its influence on society is still growing at an exponential rate.

The pivotal point for the cell phone market can be traced to Jobs announcement of the iPhone at WWDC. The effects of that talk spread outward like ripples on a pond until the whole industry was changed forever by Jobs' creative vision. His presentation is rightly considered one of the best technology demos of all time. It is the moment when Jobs' new ideas about what a phone could be were introduced to the world.

For the last week, I’ve been raving about a presentation given by Bret Victor at the CUSEC conference. Aside from Jobs’ presentation of the iPhone and The Mother of All Demos, it is the best technical presentation I have ever seen, and certainly the best to come from a single individual’s creative efforts.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Bret's talk is divided in two remarkable halves. The first part is a mind-blowing technical presentation that presents new kinds of user interfaces never before seen. After watching his talk, I can conceive of possibilities for software that were previously outside my comprehension, like I grew a new sense.

The second part is Bret’s creative manifesto. He lays out an explicit philosophy that guides his work, enabling him to push beyond the boundaries of current software. Few innovators have such self-awareness and none so clearly lay out their methodology for others to follow.

Bret’s passion and idealism recall images of Steve Jobs in his prime. Like Jobs, he has the air of a technological prophet, preaching his gospel. Like any good prophet, Bret hooks us with the miracles before proceeding to the sermon. He promises that if we follow his teachings, then we too will be capable of miracles. It's an enticing offer.

Watch it. It’s one of the best hours of video I’ve ever seen.

Favorite Links

2012-02-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

This is the best technical talk I've ever seen. Brett Victor, author of mind-expanding essays at worrydream.com, gives the clearest exposition of his philosophy in a talk at CUSEC while demonstrating some mind-blowing experiments in user interface. It is up there in quality with Steve Jobs' presentation of the first iPhone and the Mother of All Demos.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

More thoughts to come on why it is so good.

Ethics and Wisdom - what Atheists can learn from Religion

2012-02-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

Morality/Ethics is about how we should treat other people. On the other hand, Wisdom is the art of living well and thriving in our personal lives. Both subjects interest me, but few people in the secular world study them in a serious or systematic way. The exceptions I know of are academic philosophers and the small hyper-utilitarian demi-cult centered around Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Religions have a lot to say about Ethics and Wisdom. Since religions survive and spread by serving the needs of the human psyche, we should expect that we can learn something from their approach to two topics so vital to human interests.

Many religions, including Christianity, have the peculiar habit of conflating ethics and wisdom together. They transform the art of living well from an individual choice into a moral duty. This is accomplished by inserting a second person, God, into our private lives. Private actions thereby gain an ethical dimension since they now effect a third party with an interest in seeing us thrive. In the secular world, a similar thing happens when we enter into a romantic relationship.

This explains the phenomena of religious prohibitions on vices, such as smoking or drinking - activities that hurt nobody but ourselves. Religions also push followers to observe positive virtues, such as staying loyal to their spouses, being thrifty, or working diligently at their jobs. Extensive interference in people’s private lives gives religions a pushy quality, and many people find this attractive. They want a third party to force themselves, and their children, to live well. Others are repulsed either because they disagree with religion’s conception of the good life or they simply dislike having their personal life choices audited by an external authority.

I like the idea of being responsible to someone else for living well. My moral feelings are stronger than my will to act wisely. If an action or inaction hurts only myself, I am far more likely to succumb to it than if it also hurts another person. The secular person is by default a lonely creature, and it is hard for a person to live well when nobody is watching and judging. But a religious person always has someone with them.

Atheists resent the old prejudice that one has to be religious in order to be moral. These prejudices go too far, but it is true that religion offers its followers a powerful infrastructure to help them be moral that atheists lack.

The first way atheist moral practice fails is by lacking an explicit moral code. Our ethical principles are absorbed piecemeal from the art, literature, and philosophy we consume over the years and by osmosis from the culture surrounding us. This serves well under normal circumstances, but we are lost when faced with difficult moral trade-offs or high-pressure situations. Religious morality is better codified. When emotions run high, religious people have explicit aphorisms, principles, and parables that their minds can latch on to.

Next, religions teach us that ethical and moral principles are not merely mental facts, they are skills. Like any other skill they must be practiced and honed over time. Just as you cannot read a book about ballet and then perform a perfect dance, you cannot merely read about morality and then expect to behave morally. Religions know that we need regular reminders for moral principles to sink in, so they schedule weekly rituals where their codes of conduct are reinforced. Service events are scheduled to give followers the opportunity to practice altruism.

Lastly, we can learn from religion's understanding of human social psychology. If there is one fact that has become abundantly clear in the age of social networking, it’s the powerful influence that a person’s friends have on his taste’s, beliefs, and actions. Religions have long been aware of the power of social pressure and they surround the believer with a community of faith to help them all live up to their shared standards.

Atheists practice their morality as atomic creatures, lacking a community of like-minded practitioners. They are more likely to stray from their principles and revert to the mean of the world around them.

The combination of 1) explicit morality, 2) regular reminders, and 3) peer pressure creates a powerful incentive for religious people to behave morally. Over the years, many small groups of atheists have recognized the advantages that religions have in propagating ethical behavior and wisdom and have attempted to organize atheist analogues of churches and community groups. None have been spectacularly successful. But we shouldn't stop trying.

Some favorite links

2012-02-04T22:37:00.000-08:00

I love this post from Less Wrong - Generalizing from One Example.

Also, this interview from Nassim Taleb on the Economist podcast. 8 audacious minutes of Taleb at his mind-blowing best.

On the topic of favorite things, Hayek's essay The Use of Knowledge in Society was a big influence on me.

Aphorisms for the Moral Economist

2012-02-02T20:53:00.000-08:00

Treat other peoples' utility functions as your own

In the long run, the long run is all there is

Contribute more to the commons than you take away

Can you think of any others?

SF

2012-01-28T21:18:00.000-08:00

I have spent very little time in San Francisco for living in such close proximity. So I am spending some time with it to get to know it better. It's dirty, it's smart, and it's expensive. I have no idea how the townies make ends meet.

Tonight I am hanging out in Noisebridge, a community hacker space in the Mission district.

The Game

2012-01-28T18:54:00.001-08:00

I watched “The Game” on Netflix with some friends this week. It’s an entertaining movie, but something about Michael Douglas’s character bugged me.

Hollywood writers like to portray successful businessmen as lonely, misanthropic creatures. Call it the “Scrooge” archetype. Of course, writers only do this because audiences lap it up. Average people like to believe that we have something that makes us superior to wealthy folk. They may have lots of expensive possessions, but we assuage our envy by telling ourselves that their lives are cold and loveless.

Unfortunately, this story is mostly false. In my personal experience rich people for the most part have abundant social circles. Success is attractive and successful people are constantly surrounded by family and friends.

Even rich people who fit the abrasive, nasty Hollywood stereotype have crowds of people around them who look past the insults in hopes to befriend them. You may think that you would never suck up to a rich asshole, but you probably would if given the opportunity. Do it well enough and you will get invited to their opulent house parties. And maybe your kid will get an internship at their firm.

Remember, there is no justice in the world. The universe doesn’t balance the scales. Having great fortune in one area of one’s life doesn’t generate corresponding bad fortune in another. And although being an asshole hurts your chances of success as a practical matter, it doesn't make them zero. Especially if you're incredibly talented. The talented successful asshole is common enough in Silicon Valley to be cliche.

There is good news, then, for us entrepreneurs. You don't have to give up your emotional and social well-being for material wealth. You can have it all.

Atheist Sermon #2

2012-01-28T00:40:00.000-08:00

The idea of God is a picture painted with negative space. He is the man that is missing, the things we wish for that do not exist. We hunger for justice, love, and purpose, so these are the qualities we give to God. But there is no god and these ideals are not intrinsic qualities of the universe. So if we want them, we must fight for them. We must build them ourselves.

Religion crystalizes these ideals in the personage of God and keeps them in the forefront of our mind. It provides a pedal tone, a fixed point that permeates the symphony of our lives. It reminds us of what we ought to be striving for.

Our hearts burn for justice. They cry out for love. They bleed for purpose. So when you are confronted with the Christian gospel, what else is there to do but to think "of course"? Of course, this is the religion that humans would create. This is the shape of the hole in our hearts.

We should all be more godly. Even atheists like me.

There Ain't No Justice*

2012-01-27T21:49:00.000-08:00

Justice is a tasteless dish, fibrous and unfilling.

The wise seek mercy, not justice. It is not given unto humanity to see perfect justice in this lifetime. Religions know this and promise it for the next. They know the hunger for justice in people's hearts and they know it cannot be sated.

The cost of justice is too great. Some people sell their entire future for a single morsel. Only seek it if the hunger is so unbearable that it is worth everything to you.

Some of history's biggest winners were terribly unjust. Murdering the families of your enemies turns out to be a spectacularly successful strategy.

If you love goodness, you must pick your battles and take the long view. Seek to spread the love of goodness in the hearts of men. The nihilists are too powerful to face in a set-piece battle. They are far more cunning and effective than those constrained by morality.

Every age has its evil. It is the task of the righteous to work towards its lessening over time, not its immediate elimination. Preserve the goodness that exists in the world. Cut your losses. And never give up.

*Editor's note: This is adapted from a series of tweets. Don't forget to follow me on twitter.

Links

2012-01-19T01:34:00.001-08:00

Tyler Cowen TEDx talk on why you should be skeptical of stories people tell you.

Why we hike

2012-01-19T00:49:00.000-08:00

*** This is cross-posted from my private blog, originally published 1/3/2010

Escaping into nature is fulfilling because the experience awakens the hunter-gatherer part of our natures that is still there, the undomesticated part, the wolf in us that has not yet become a dog.

Evolution has not yet adapted us to living in agricultural society. Society doesn't suit us. Our descendants may be better fit.

But we might not like them or respect them much. Imagine how wolves would think about poodles.

Pathetic. Weak. Small beings, indulgent in comforts, needing a vast support network to survive. Incapable of self-sufficiency.

But dominant. Evolution's winners.

The End of Portland

2012-01-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

Vacation is over too soon. I enjoyed Portland. It's a small city that's big enough and hip enough to keep you busy. The people are nice, Portland Nice. It would be easy to accumulate a group of Portland friends. Apartment rental prices were about 30% lower than in Mountain View - I checked.

I was proud of myself for conquering the mini-tribulations of surviving the wet weather and getting about on public transportation. By the end of my trip I was a fearless transit veteran. I even took a bus to Beaverton one night to watch a movie at a theater that served pitchers of beer.

My days alternated between being a tourist with my friends Max and Laurel and hacking and writing. I wasn't as productive as I had hoped, but I wrote a few blog posts and got over some humps on my most recent personal programming project. The coolest tourist thing I did was a visit to the Shanghai tunnels. Portland has a dark history of shanghaiing: kidnapping men and shipping them out to sea as unpaid slaves aboard merchant ships. Criminals used a network of underground tunnels to store and transport their victims. The tour of the tunnels was led by a salty old man who had been investigating and restoring the tunnels for near six decades. He had a deep love for his subject and he spun a great yarn.

I'm glad I went.

The Power of Perspective.

2012-01-02T02:43:00.000-08:00

A man living in a box thinks box-shaped thoughts. The tiny rip in the corner, the stain on one side - these are the stuff that occupy his mind. If a mold starts to grow on a piece of the box then the highly-evolved calculating machine in his skull will run in endless loops on the topic of mold.

You will not be able to teach such a man any thoughts about the world outside his box. He will not care to think them. The box is the world. If you want to get through to him, first you have to get him to step outside of the box.

We feel superior to the poor slob stuck in the box. But each of us lives in our own box. It is made by the boundaries of polite opinion, the range of philosophical and political beliefs held by our peers. It is a strange man who holds a belief not shared by a large portion of his friends. He probably has at least a low-grade mental illness.

If you seek to implant alien ideas into someone's head, then logical argument will not suffice. You first have to acclimate them to the world outside their box or their mental immune system will kick in and their brain will reject the procedure. Start by gently relating new concepts to beliefs they already hold. Patience is a virtue. Eventually they will be ready to consider an idea that lies outside their normal worldview.

This technique - establishing a wider mental perspective before diving into controversial ideas - is a necessary tool for the intellectual radical.

Two works I am currently reading use the trick of widening the reader's perspective to powerful effect. One is John Stuart Mill’s classic defense of the right of free speech from first principles, “On Liberty”. Americans take for granted the right to say or write whatever we wish but it is not the norm in the world today, even in the West, and it is a rare sight in human history.

Mill writes to a devout and conservative audience that is happy to see the law prosecute political and religious heretics. They figure that if Jesus is God and they are completely certain of that, and that it is evil to think otherwise, then why not make it illegal as well? Mill blasts through their mental walls with a mortar shell of historical perspective. He reminds them that Jesus himself was executed for speaking religious heresies and nearly everybody thought it was a good idea at the time. That this great evil was perpetrated because of religious intolerance is a powerful advertisement for the virtue of tolerance.

By linking "intolerance of heretics" (good) with "killing Jesus" (very bad), Mill sews cognitive dissonance in his readers' heads. Their old beliefs don't fit together any more. Now their mental barriers fall down and they are outside the box. Now they are ready to consider Mill's logical arguments without triggering their mental immune systems.

The other political tract I recently wrestled with was Moldbug’s “Formalist Manifesto”. Moldbug primes his readers to consider deliciously heretical political ideas by reminding them how much mainstream political thought has shifted over the years. If the current mainstream once sounded dangerous and crazy, then surely not all ideas that sound dangerous and crazy should be rejected outright. Moldbug writes on the topic of political “moderates”:

Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the State, etc, etc - well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates," and nor would anyone else.

No, if you were a moderate in Vienna in 1907, you thought Franz Josef I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So which is it? Hapsburgs, or Eurocrats? Pretty hard to split the difference on that one.

In other words, the problem with moderation is that the "center" is not fixed. It moves. And since it moves, and people being people, people will try to move it.

A reminder of how wrong the status quo can be is a powerful motivator to shine a light on long-held beliefs that have lived in the shadow of unreflective laziness. It helps guard against a slavish adherence to the popular ideas of our age and our clique.

New Blog Taste

2012-01-02T01:34:00.000-08:00

The 1950s gave us working for The Man. The 1960s gave us the cliche of the young person rebelling against The Man. Since then, these things come and go in cycles because kids generally hate their parents and vow to be as unlike them as possible.

FreedomTwentyFive is the chronicle of a 25 year old guy checking out of his day job working for The Man, unsatisfied with the life that our culture offers him. His earnest and wide-ranging search for meaning, his boldness in his personal life, and the several interests and influences he shares with me makes me attracted to his story.

Normally I get bored with earnest 20-somethings doing cliche things like "saving the world", protesting, or rebelling against the man. But Frost (the author) is thoughtful enough to get past my bullshit filter and make me think.

I wish him luck.

Check out the best of his blog.

Some Favorite Links

2011-12-30T17:08:00.000-08:00

The Invention of the Teenager, Michael Blowhard. Adolescence didn't exist 70 years ago, now it is the ideal towards which all of our culture strives.

On Government Employment, Foseti. What it is really like to have a government job. Unelected and unfireable, the permanent bureaucracy rumbles on.

A Formalist Manifesto, Mencius Moldbug. There is no gentler and more entertaining introduction to heretical political ideas in the modern liberal world than the writings of Mencius.

A day in Portland

2011-12-26T17:21:00.001-08:00

My airplane touched down on the tarmac at Portland airport, rather violently, at 5:20 in the evening on Christmas Day. The world outside the window was wet and already dark, forcing me to question the wisdom of flying north for a December vacation. The blast of wintery air that hit me when I stepped through the airplane door did nothing to ease my doubts.

I presume the sun rises here as it does in other places, though there is little evidence of it. The cloud layer brightened a bit in the morning like a lampshade around a dim bulb. The pale daylight revealed a dreary, mossy environment painted with a palette of earth tones.

I braved the chill to go exploring, walking as far as the waterfront. Old transportation hubs are where you find a city's roots. Portland's roots are in the Williamette river. Its banks are lined with barges, warehouses, and lines of cranes like segmented legs on the belly of a black insect. Portland's location at the confluence of the Williamette and Columbia rivers made it an important transportation hub in the pacific northwest when it was founded in the 1850s. The city sprouted around the docks in the classic frontier pattern, filling first with young men looking to make a buck then followed by women and families when it became apparent the settlement would be successful. The past is the least fashionable of the temporal dimensions nowadays, but I am fascinated by the origin of things.

I'm attracted to large industrial operations. I like to watch the machinery of civilization in action, connecting our economy with distant shores and peoples through commerce. Sadly, there were no ships loading or unloading during my visit. They must take a break for Christmas, too.

The influence of the classical business of Portland is felt in its culture. The workers in the docks, factories, and lumber yards form a strong blue-collar faction represented in seedy sports bars, greasy spoons, and strip clubs. This is a danger for a yuppie traveler with a refined palate. I wandered into a burger bar without doing proper reconnaisance, and I was shocked to find no craft beer on tap. They served me a burger made of the thin overcooked beef patties that make up the meals of the proletariat. I forced down the dry meat with a pint of Newcastle and I learned my lesson - beware restaurants displaying advertisements for the Oregon lottery.

Portland is known for its hipsters and yuppie population. They make up the other dominant cultural faction of the city. Artists, musicians, and tech workers settled in Portland over the last few decades, enticed by the relatively cheap standard of living, the proximity of wildlife, and its convenient west coast location. Around them the streets of Portland bloom with art galleries, coffee shops, yoga studios, and craft breweries. Parts of Portland are strongly reminiscent of blocks in San Francisco, albeit with more room to swing your arms and a more friendly vibe. Also the fashion is drabber than in SF, and there are far more children.

Portland is a very pale city. Its culture noticeably lacks the strong asian influence that is found in the San Francisco bay area and other major cities on the west coast. You won't find a good noodle shop without doing a bit of looking. On the upside, the city has lots of things that white people like, such as gourmet breakfast cafes, fancy coffee shops, organic bacon, and craft beer.

In the Northwest, there is a street where creperies, tea houses, and new age shops operate out of quaint old wood houses. I browsed briefly before taking a long hike to Powell's City of Books - which has to be the largest damn used bookstore on earth. It takes up an entire city block. I started working on my laptop in the store's coffee shop, but soon my workspace was aggressively invaded by a rambunctious 5 year old, so I left in search of an alternate spot. I am ensconced in the Backspace Cafe at the moment. It is one of those places that is happy to serve you coffee, food, and free wifi for hours on end. Later I am going to an industrial music show at a classic video game arcade/bar (how much more hipster can you get?). Tomorrow I am meeting up with a friend and we are going to explore Portland's delights together. I hope we make it to Salt and Straw.

HIV in America

2011-12-04T02:39:00.000-08:00

This week I learned the shockingly high rate of HIV infection among gay men in the United States. It's about one out of five. The worst part is almost half of infected men don't know they are infected. Gay men account for 50% of the 1.2 million HIV cases in America.

I came upon these facts while researching why gay men are forbidden from donating blood and some organs in the US and other countries. A large portion of the audience on a technology discussion group I visit blamed the ban on bigotry by health officials. But I knew that the community has a strong progressive bias so I did my own research.

Progressives fervently believe that gay people should be allowed to do whatever straight people can, but a 20% incidence rate in the gay community for a deadly blood-borne retrovirus infection throws into doubt the wisdom of that belief when it comes to tissue donation. Sometimes the facts don't fit the progressive view of reality.

The ban must be hard on the 80% of gay men who don't have HIV who want to help out by donating tissue and are prevented from doing so (and the 10% of gay men who have HIV and don't know it). But it may be more cost effective and save more lives in the long run for donation centers to exclude the entire demographic group rather than increase the power of their HIV screening processes. I'll leave that to health officials to decide in absence of reasons to doubt them.

By lashing out at health officials for their alleged bigotry, progressives are deflecting attention from where it belongs - the tragic problem of HIV in the gay community. I look forward to a day when the ban on tissue donations from gay men is lifted in the United States. But that day should come because the plague of HIV in the gay community is finally defeated, not because health officials are browbeaten with progressive ideology until they capitulate.

In the meantime, keep it wrapped and get tested regularly - especially if you belong to a high-risk demographic group (In the US that's gay men and black heterosexuals. Well, intravenous drug users too, but let's be serious, you ain't gonna listen.). It's the responsible thing to do.

A little Inequality is a good thing

2011-10-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

The United States has the highest income inequality in the OECD. It also has the highest median household income in the world. Those two facts are likely related. We allow risk-takers to get rich, and in the process they enrich our country.

You can't have a wealthy society without some degree of inequality. If everybody has the same income, that means that nobody is experimenting with new methods of production. Experiments in new methods of production are either successes that enrich the innovator or failures which cause a capital loss. The result is income differential. Equality is stagnation. Inequality is dynamism.

Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters don't understand that the economy is not a zero-sum game. Some people getting richer doesn't make us poorer. You have to choose whether envy or prosperity is more important to you. If you choose envy, then you will cheer reductions in income inequality even if it makes us poorer. If you choose prosperity, then you must put up with a little inequality in exchange for living in a richer society.

Different kinds of inequality

2011-10-17T20:18:00.001-07:00

Scott Sumner talks about the many ways to view economic inequality. Worth a read for the expanded point of view he brings to the discussion.

The Downside of Online Education

2011-10-16T02:46:00.000-07:00

Better informed children aren't the only public benefit of education. Elite educational institutions put highly intelligent and motivated people into direct contact with each other. The friendships that people form at university, prep schools, or professional schools form the nucleus of later collaborations that change the world in profound ways. Larry and Sergey met at Stanford University before they built Google. Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at an expensive private high school before they built Microsoft. Zuckerberg forged the nucleus of Facebook with his colleagues at Harvard.

Meanwhile techies largely see the education sector as an elitist, wasteful system that needs to be replaced as soon as possible by online learning applications. But if programmers manage to move education onto the internet through efforts like the Khan academy and Stanford's online classes, they will destroy a huge portion of the social benefit that education provides. The future Paul and Bill will be taking class in the comfort of their parents' homes, separated by the same silicon that connects them.

To create a full substitute for the legacy education system, crowds of creative, smart students have to be thrown together so that they are constantly absorbing, modifying, and emitting new ideas. Putting video lectures on a web page is awesome, but it isn't good enough.

Thoughts on Occupy Wall St.

2011-10-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

Though I loathe Hipster Socialism, I agree with Occupy Wall St. that the financial sector is dangerously cartelized and too intertwined with the government.

Pro-Abortion

2011-10-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

I can understand voters who favor abortion rights. But I can't understand activists who do so enthusiastically, who celebrate what they call a woman's "right to choose". Abortion may be necessary or wise in certain cases, but it carries an enormous negative moral weight. It is not the moral equivalent of getting a tooth pulled. A fetus may not be a person but absent misfortune it will be. Most people realize this and carry a distaste for abortion in their gut. It is only the fanatic activist who can celebrate it and whoop over it, caught up in the untroubled jubilation of religious maniacs.

Like it or not, Hillary Clinton defined a moral platform that appeals to a vast swathe of the American electorate when she said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare".

As usual, I recommend Megan Mcardle's thoughtful writings on the issue:

post 1
post 2
post 3

The Conservative Temperament

2011-09-17T22:05:00.001-07:00

The conservative temperament means accepting the constraints imposed by the current state of the world. Social change is possible, but activists need to acknowledge human nature if they are going to succeed. A plan that involves dissolving the nuclear family or eliminating humanity's selfish instincts fights against millions of years of evolution. It's bound to fail.

Conservative philosophers understand the path-dependency of human culture and the cost of working against it. You will never find a conservative activist calling for a 10 day week or eliminating religion, even among the atheists! Rather, conservatives push for the development of social institutions that work harmoniously with human nature to increase our well-being, including market economies and property rights.

This is why conservatives are not social liberals. All human societies with some amount of social equality have settled on the traditional nuclear or extended family as its smallest unit of organization. Logic does not prevent an enterprising young person from doing a little erotic theorizing to invent novel romantic arrangements, like polyamory. But the conservative's private life isn't some puzzle to be optimized. He knows that people are happiest in long-term monogamous relationships. He knows that being married is the best way to live longer, to stay out of poverty and prison, and to provide a healthy home for his children.

The conservative temperament holds some influence over me. It makes me careful to design my policy recommendations to sell to real human beings, with all their limitations and biases, and not logical robots. But I am too much a libertarian to use the law to support social arrangements that I think are good for people, as conservatives often do. I believe in the primacy of individual liberty as the basis of human dignity. But conservative thought makes me less eager to support or recommend novel social arrangements than many libertarians. It at least leads me to question the libertarian orthodoxy that says we can be happy by living however we want.

A Jolt of Life

2011-09-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

I'm reviving this blog and migrating over sundry posts from other blogs of mine that are fit for public consumption. The main topics of this blog will be politics, philosophy, and economics.

The Ingredients of Creation

2010-04-05T13:16:00.000-07:00

Observation
Intuition
Motivation
Familiarity
Need
Energy
Attention
Serendipity
Conjecture
Confidence
Time

2010-01-09T00:01:00.001-08:00

Saw my first Hindi movie, "Three Idiots". It was innocent and optimistic, very cheesy, but entertaining. The actors cried a lot. I am told it is old-fashioned. The plot was about engineering students at university.

Strange new world

2009-12-31T13:48:00.001-08:00