Shtetl-Optimized

Update (10/27): Peter Norvig at Google points me to his Election FAQ, for those who feel they haven’t yet spent enough time reading about the election.  I’ve just been perusing it, and it’s an unbelievably good source of information—reaching the same conclusions as I did on just about every particular, yet also calm, reasoned, and professional.

1. That’s my mom at an Obama office in Sarasota, FL.  For once, I find myself kvelling to strangers about her.

2. I’m at FOCS’2008 in Philadelphia right now.  Yesterday morning I gave a tutorial on The Polynomial Method in Quantum and Classical Computing, and was delighted by how many people showed up — I wouldn’t have woken up for my talk.  (And before you ask: yes, the PowerPoint slides for this talk include photographs of both Bill Ayers and Joe the Plumber.)

3. Here’s the FOCS conference program — tons of good stuff, as you can see for yourself.  If there’s a talk you want to know more about, say so in the comments section and I’ll try to find someone who attended it.

Note: I was a program committee member, and therefore know much more than usual about the talks—but my objectivity and license as a “journalist” are also severely compromised.  If unvarnished opinion is what you seek, ask my friend and roommate Rahul Santhanam, who’s also reporting live from the conference over at Lance’s blog.  (As you can see, we CS theorists manage our conflicts of interest roughly as well as the Alaska governor’s office…)

4. I apologize that I haven’t had much to say recently.  Against my better judgment, I find myself transfixed by the same topic everyone else is transfixed by, and it’s hard to find anything to say about it that hasn’t been said better by others.  If you want to enter my world, don’t read Shtetl-Optimized; read Andrew Sullivan or FiveThirtyEight.com.  Following the election is, of course, not all that different from following a football game, except for the added dash of excitement that the future of civilization might hinge on the outcome.

(Years congruent to 0 mod 4 are pretty much the only times when I understand what it’s like to be a sports fan.  Speaking of which, I heard there was some sort of “World’s Series” in Philadelphia last night—probably in basketball—and something called the “Phillies” won?  I might be wrong, though.  Maybe it was the “Flyers” … or is that a volleyball team?  Keep in mind, I only lived in this area for the first 15 years of my life.)

5. For a congenital pessimist like me, I confess it’s been difficult to deal with the fact that my team (I mean the Democrats, not the Eagles or whatever they’re called) is winning.  I simply don’t know how to react; it’s so far outside my emotional range.  Since when has the universe worked this way?  When did reason and levelheadedness start reaping earthly rewards, or incompetence start carrying a cost?  I’m sure Nov. 4 will bring something to console me, though: maybe Al Franken will lose the Senate race in Minnesota, or the homophobe proposition will pass in California…

6. Writing blog posts in numbered lists is easier; I should do it more often.  I don’t have to pretend all the little things I want to say are part of an overarching narrative, rather than standing in the relation “and that reminds me of … which in turn reminds me of…”

7. There’s another psychological question inspired by the election that’s fascinated me lately: how does one become more obamalike in temperament?

I’ve written before about Obama’s penchant for introspection and respect for expertise, which of course are qualities with which I strongly identify.  But Obama also has a crucial quality I lack: as the whole world has marveled, nothing rattles him.  Placed for two years under the brightest glare on earth, besieged by unexpected events, he simply sticks to a script, Buddha-like in his emotional control (although not in his quest for power in the temporal world).  His nerves are of carbon nanotube fiber.

When he briefly slipped behind after the Republican convention, I panicked: I felt sure he’d lose if he didn’t completely change his approach.  Sean Carroll recommended chilling out.  I now face the indignity of admitting that I was wrong while a physicist was right.

What struck me most, during the debates, was how again and again Obama would pass up the chance to score points—choosing instead to let his opponent impale himself with his own words, and use his time to hammer home his message for the benefit of any voters just emerging from their caves.  (As an example, consider his pointed refusal in the third debate to say anything bad about Palin—the subtext being, “isn’t it obvious?”)  It’s almost as if he thought his goal was winning the election, not proving the other guy wrong.

I have (to put it mildly) not always exhibited the same prudent restraint, least of all on this blog.  So for example, whenever there’s been bait dangling in front of me in the comments section, I’ve tended to bite, often ending up with a hook through my cheek.

But no more.  As the first exercise in my newfound quest for the Zen-like equanimity and balance of our soon-to-be-president, I now present to you two excerpts from the comments on my previous post, with no reaction whatsoever from me.

Have you considered the possibility that, in the same way a logical deduction is being equated with truth, understanding a thing is just an illusion? If a thing is logical, that only means that it appeals to the reasoning facility of the brain, not that it’s the truth.

Mathematics is just a place where it becomes clear how a human may think. Computers only go for the calculable. And the mathematical truths a computer can produce are at most countable infinite. But there are uncountable infinite truths.

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In this post, I wish to propose for the reader’s favorable consideration a doctrine that will strike many in the nerd community as strange, bizarre, and paradoxical, but that I hope will at least be given a hearing.  The doctrine in question is this: while it is possible that, a century hence, humans will have built molecular nanobots and superintelligent AIs, uploaded their brains to computers, and achieved eternal life, these possibilities are not quite so likely as commonly supposed, nor do they obviate the need to address mundane matters such as war, poverty, disease, climate change, and helping Democrats win elections.

Last week I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, which argues that by 2045, or somewhere around then, advances in AI, neuroscience, nanotechnology, and other fields will let us transcend biology, upload our brains to computers, and achieve the dreams of the ancient religions, including eternal life and whatever simulated sex partners we want.  (Kurzweil, famously, takes hundreds of supplements a day to maximize his chance of staying alive till then.)  Perhaps surprisingly, Kurzweil does not come across as a wild-eyed fanatic, but as a humane idealist; the text is thought-provoking and occasionally even wise.  I did have quibbles with his discussions of quantum computing and the possibility of faster-than-light travel, but Kurzweil wisely chose not to base his conclusions on any speculations about these topics.

I find myself in agreement with Kurzweil on three fundamental points.  Firstly, that whatever purifying or ennobling qualities suffering might have, those qualities are outweighed by suffering’s fundamental suckiness.  If I could press a button to free the world from loneliness, disease, and death—the downside being that life might become banal without the grace of tragedy—I’d probably hesitate for about five seconds before lunging for it.  As Tevye said about the ‘curse’ of wealth: “may the Lord strike me with that curse, and may I never recover!”

Secondly, there’s nothing bad about overcoming nature through technology.  Humans have been in that business for at least 10,000 years.  Now, it’s true that fanatical devotion to particular technologies—such as the internal combustion engine—might well cause the collapse of human civilization and the permanent degradation of life on Earth.  But the only plausible solution is better technology, not the Kaczynski/Flintstone route.

Thirdly, were there machines that pressed for recognition of their rights with originality, humor, and wit, we’d have to give it to them.  And if those machines quickly rendered humans obsolete, I for one would salute our new overlords.  In that situation, the denialism of John Searle would cease to be just a philosophical dead-end, and would take on the character of xenophobia, resentment, and cruelty.

Yet while I share Kurzweil’s ethical sense, I don’t share his technological optimism.  Everywhere he looks, Kurzweil sees Moore’s-Law-type exponential trajectories—not just for transistor density, but for bits of information, economic output, the resolution of brain imaging, the number of cell phones and Internet hosts, the cost of DNA sequencing … you name it, he’ll plot it on a log scale.  Kurzweil acknowledges that, even over the brief periods that his exponential curves cover, they have hit occasional snags, like (say) the Great Depression or World War II.  And he’s not so naïve as to extend the curves indefinitely: he knows that every exponential is just a sigmoid (or some other curve) in disguise.  Nevertheless, he fully expects current technological trends to continue pretty much unabated until they hit fundamental physical limits.

I’m much less sanguine.  Where Kurzweil sees a steady march of progress interrupted by occasional hiccups, I see a few fragile and improbable victories against a backdrop of malice, stupidity, and greed—the tiny amount of good humans have accomplished in constant danger of drowning in a sea of blood and tears, as happened to so many of the civilizations of antiquity.  The difference is that this time, human idiocy is playing itself out on a planetary scale; this time we can finally ensure that there are no survivors left to start over.

(Also, if the Singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service.)

Obviously, my perceptions are as colored by my emotions and life experiences as Kurzweil’s are by his.  Despite two years of reading Overcoming Bias, I still don’t know how to uncompute myself, to predict the future from some standpoint of Bayesian equanimity.  But just as obviously, it’s our duty to try to minimize bias, to give reasons for our beliefs that are open to refutation and revision.  So in the rest of this post, I’d like to share some of the reasons why I haven’t chosen to spend my life worrying about the Singularity, instead devoting my time to boring, mundane topics like anthropic quantum computing and cosmological Turing machines.

The first, and most important, reason is also the reason why I don’t spend my life thinking about P versus NP: because there are vastly easier prerequisite questions that we already don’t know how to answer.  In a field like CS theory, you very quickly get used to being able to state a problem with perfect clarity, knowing exactly what would constitute a solution, and still not having any clue how to solve it.  (In other words, you get used to P not equaling NP.)  And at least in my experience, being pounded with this situation again and again slowly reorients your worldview.  You learn to terminate trains of thought that might otherwise run forever without halting.  Faced with a question like “How can we stop death?” or “How can we build a human-level AI?” you learn to respond: “What’s another question that’s easier to answer, and that probably has to be answered anyway before we have any chance on the original one?”  And if someone says, “but can’t you at least estimate how long it will take to answer the original question?” you learn to hedge and equivocate.  For looking backwards, you see that sometimes the highest peaks were scaled—Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Poincaré conjecture—but that not even the greatest climbers could peer through the fog to say anything terribly useful about the distance to the top.  Even Newton and Gauss could only stagger a few hundred yards up; the rest of us are lucky to push forward by an inch.

The second reason is that as a goal recedes to infinity, the probability increases that as we approach it, we’ll discover some completely unanticipated reason why it wasn’t the right goal anyway.  You might ask: what is it that we could possibly learn about neuroscience, biology, or physics, that would make us slap our foreheads and realize that uploading our brains to computers was a harebrained idea from the start, reflecting little more than early-21^st-century prejudice?  Unlike (say) Searle or Penrose, I don’t pretend to know.  But I do think that the “argument from absence of counterarguments” loses more and more force, the further into the future we’re talking about.  (One can, of course, say the same about quantum computers, which is one reason why I’ve never taken the possibility of building them as a given.)  Is there any example of a prognostication about the 21^st century written before 1950, most of which doesn’t now seem quaint?

The third reason is simple comparative advantage.  Given our current ignorance, there seems to me to be relatively little worth saying about the Singularity—and what is worth saying is already being said well by others.  Thus, I find nothing wrong with a few people devoting their lives to Singulatarianism, just as others should arguably spend their lives worrying about asteroid collisions.  But precisely because smart people do devote brain-cycles to these possibilities, the rest of us have correspondingly less need to.

The fourth reason is the Doomsday Argument.  Having digested the Bayesian case for a Doomsday conclusion, and the rebuttals to that case, and the rebuttals to the rebuttals, what I find left over is just a certain check on futurian optimism.  Sure, maybe we’re at the very beginning of the human story, a mere awkward adolescence before billions of glorious post-Singularity years ahead.  But whatever intuitions cause us to expect that could easily be leading us astray.  Suppose that all over the universe, civilizations arise and continue growing exponentially until they exhaust their planets’ resources and kill themselves out.  In that case, almost every conscious being brought into existence would find itself extremely close to its civilization’s death throes.  If—as many believe—we’re quickly approaching the earth’s carrying capacity, then we’d have not the slightest reason to be surprised by that apparent coincidence.  To be human would, in the vast majority of cases, mean to be born into a world of air travel and Burger King and imminent global catastrophe.  It would be like some horrific Twilight Zone episode, with all the joys and labors, the triumphs and setbacks of developing civilizations across the universe receding into demographic insignificance next to their final, agonizing howls of pain.  I wish reading the news every morning furnished me with more reasons not to be haunted by this vision of existence.

The fifth reason is my (limited) experience of AI research.  I was actually an AI person long before I became a theorist.  When I was 12, I set myself the modest goal of writing a BASIC program that would pass the Turing Test by learning from experience and following Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.  I coded up a really nice tokenizer and user interface, and only got stuck on the subroutine that was supposed to understand the user’s question and output an intelligent, Three-Laws-obeying response.  Later, at Cornell, I was lucky to learn from Bart Selman, and worked as an AI programmer for Cornell’s RoboCup team—an experience that taught me little about the nature of intelligence but a great deal about how to make robots pass a ball.  At Berkeley, my initial focus was on machine learning and statistical inference; had it not been for quantum computing, I’d probably still be doing AI today.  For whatever it’s worth, my impression was of a field with plenty of exciting progress, but which has (to put it mildly) some ways to go before recapitulating the last billion years of evolution.  The idea that a field must either be (1) failing or (2) on track to reach its ultimate goal within our lifetimes, seems utterly without support in the history of science (if understandable from the standpoint of both critics and enthusiastic supporters).  If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I’d say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia (with the obvious potential for black swans along the way).

As you may have gathered, I don’t find the Singulatarian religion so silly as not to merit a response.  Not only is the “Rapture of the Nerds” compatible with all known laws of physics; if humans survive long enough it might even come to pass.  The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs (or mice, or fish, or snails).  After all, we might similarly expect that there should be models of computation as far beyond Turing machines as Turing machines are beyond finite automata.  But in the latter case, we know the intuition is mistaken.  There is a ceiling to computational expressive power.  Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster.  Now, it’s clear that a human who thought at ten thousand times our clock rate would be a pretty impressive fellow.  But if that’s what we’re talking about, then we don’t mean a point beyond which history completely transcends us, but “merely” a point beyond which we could only understand history by playing it in extreme slow motion.

Yet while I believe the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s “near” (where “near” means before 2045, or even 2300).  I see a world that really did change dramatically over the last century, but where progress on many fronts (like transportation and energy) seems to have slowed down rather than sped up; a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans, and supercharging its climate; a world where technology is often powerless to solve the most basic problems, millions continue to die for trivial reasons, and democracy isn’t even clearly winning over despotism; a world that finally has a communications network with a decent search engine but that still hasn’t emerged from the tribalism and ignorance of the Pleistocene.  And I can’t help thinking that, before we transcend the human condition and upload our brains to computers, a reasonable first step might be to bring the 18^th-century Enlightenment to the 98% of the world that still hasn’t gotten the message.

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I was in a miserable mood for weeks—regular readers will know that, for whatever reason, I go through these moods from time to time—and, strangely enough, a key to getting out of it seems to have been watching the Democratic convention and reading Obama’s two books.  I’m not saying this ought to have helped, only that it did.  Why?  Well, I can think of three possible reasons:

Firstly, it’s a truism that the cure for misery is to find something greater than yourself to worry about.  (Quantum complexity research used to fill that role for me, and will hopefully do so again in the near future.)  For someone who’s spent so much of his life inside his own head, it’s fascinating to watch people actually going out and doing something that while often corny and cringe-inducing also bears some recognizable relation to the public good.  What a strange, novel idea!  What’s even stranger, they might even succeed this year.  Of course, there’s a paradox at the heart of this philosophy: if you only worry about something greater than yourself because it distracts you from the tragedy of your own existence, then are you really worried about it in the first place?  But this is no more paradoxical than so much else about the human condition.  The hope is that caring about something greater than yourself will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Secondly, there’s the fact that a man whose writing demonstrates a finely-developed capacity for introspection, self-criticism, and doubt might become the Leader of the Free World in two months.  Reading Obama’s books, this introspectiveness—which is difficult to fake, and which probably doesn’t help him with most voters anyway—struck me as his most endearing quality.  (Of course, Obama also possesses a finely-developed capacity to suppress his capacity for introspection.  If he didn’t, then he’d still be an obscure instructor at the University of Chicago rather than a rock-star messiah.)  I’ll freely confess to bias in this matter.  I’m sure part of the reason why I’ve never been able to identify with the Republican Right, the Chomskyan Far Left, or the Libertarian Outwards—besides my actual disagreement with those philosophies—has been the serene confidence of those philosophies’ major proponents.  Any worldview that isn’t wracked by self-doubt and confusion over its own identity is not a worldview for me.

Thirdly, seeing President Clinton in his stride always cheers me up a little.

Given the above, I’d like propose the following question: what non-obvious things can nerds who are so inclined do to help the Democrats win in November?  I’m not talking about voting, donating money, licking envelopes, or standing on street corners “Baracking the vote”: the first two are easy and obvious while the second two are unsuitable for nerds.  The sorts of ideas I’m looking for are ones that (1) exploit nerds’ nerdiness, (2) go outside the normal channels of influence, (3) increase nerds’ effective voting power by several orders of magnitude, (4) are legal, (5) target critical swing states, and (6) can be done as a hobby.

Do such ideas exist?  Well, the prototype for such an idea is Nadertrading, which I was involved with in the 2000 election cycle (see here).  Before the main Nadertrading sites were shut down by Republican state attorneys-general (on doubtful legal grounds), we Nadertraders had convinced several hundred Nader supporters in Florida to commit to voting for Gore, in exchange for Gore supporters in safe states voting for Nader on their behalf.  Had Nadertrading been allowed to continue just a couple weeks longer, it might have prevented Bush from taking power and thereby changed the history of the world.  I’m looking for the Nadertrading of 2008, and I haven’t found it yet.

A few possibilities:

• Nadertrading Redux. Ralph is running again, and it might be worthwhile to try and reduce his influence in swing states once more.  The trouble is that, after 2000, anyone who would still vote for Nader is likely beyond the reach of any outcomes-based consideration.

• Lobbyists for McCain.  In 2004, I participated in a Billionaires for Bush march in NYC, and can testify that it was a blast.  It seems the 2008 analogue is Lobbyists for McCain.  Downsides: (1) this joke has been done before, and (2) it’s not clear to me that satire, even when amusing and well-executed, actually changes anyone’s mind about anything.
• Publicize and correct voting machine flaws.  Researchers have demonstrated that a voting machine virus would be almost trivial to install and could go completely undetected by poll workers.  And while some might find such a scenario implausible, it does seem likely that more mundane voting machine problems—system crashes, dropped and lost votes, confusing interfaces, etc.—will determine the outcome this year, exactly as they did in 2000 and possibly in 2004.  These irregularities have, for whatever reasons, been far more likely to favor Republicans than Democrats.  To their credit, computer scientists have been at the forefront of studying and publicizing these voting machine flaws, and have even succeeded in improving election procedures in California.  The downsides?  Firstly, it’s probably already too late to do much before November; secondly, computer scientists have been screaming about these problems for years and yet depressingly little has changed in the swing states.

• Build a database and/or statistical model for identifying “problem precincts”.  Wouldn’t it have been helpful if, before the 2000 election, prominent Democrats had known about Theresa LePore, and the possibility that her butterfly ballots flapping their wings in Florida would cause the destruction of New Orleans five years later?  Or if before the 2004 election, they’d known to concentrate their monitoring efforts on particular counties in Ohio?  (A side note: improving the Democrats’ ability to challenge results after the election is over strikes me as a complete waste of time.  Whoever the networks announce as the presumptive winner on election eve, that’s who the winner is going to be.)  I don’t know how to predict 2008’s likely trouble zones, and even if I did, I don’t know what I would do about them.  But this still strikes me as the most promising of the four listed directions.

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Inspired by the discussion of my fable, and specifically a comment of Ronald de Wolf, today I decided to do some amateur political science. Specifically, I created a scatterplot that ranks 156 of the world’s countries (those for which data was available) along two axes:

1. Their “political freedom”, as rated by Freedom House‘s 2008 Freedom in the World survey. This is a 0-to-100 scale, which includes 60 points for various civil liberties (such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion) and 40 points for various political rights (such as transparent elections). (Note that I used the raw scores, rather than the less informative 1-to-7 rankings.)
2. Their “economic freedom”, as rated by the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal‘s 2008 Index of Economic Freedom. This is also a 0-to-100 scale, which ranks the sorts of things libertarians and laissez-faire economists love: free trade, deregulation, privatization, low taxes and tariffs, low or nonexistent minimum wage, etc.

The motivation was simple. Among educated people, political freedom is universally acknowledged as both good and important, whereas economic freedom (as defined by Heritage and the Wall Street Journal) is not. Indeed, a huge fraction of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives—at least over economics—seems to boil down to a single question: Is economic freedom (again, as defined by Heritage/WSJ) the friend or enemy of political freedom?

On one side of this question, we have Milton Friedman:

Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market.  I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity. (From Capitalism and Freedom, quoted by Wu and Davis)

On the other side we have anti-globalization activists like Naomi Klein (author of The Shock Doctrine), who say that “economic freedom” simply means the freedom of multinational corporations to exploit the public, and as such is incompatible with political freedom.  Klein argues that free-market economic policies almost never win democratically, and hence the ruling elites have had to force these policies on unwilling populations using strong-arm tactics of the World Bank and IMF, cynical exploitation of wars, hurricanes, and other disasters, and (when all else fails) state-sponsored torture and murder.

My modest goal was to use the available cross-country data to test these two hypotheses. But before we get to that, a few caveats.

Caveat #1: I know full well that the questions I’m talking about have already been studied in great detail by professional political scientists. Google Scholar turned up Lundström 2005 doing a correlational study between the Freedom House index and various components of the Economic Freedom of the World index (which is similar to the Heritage index), as well as Wu and Davis 1999, Wu and Davis 2005, Berggren 2003, Carbone 2007, and lots more. (Though see also Doucouliagos 2005 for evidence of publication bias in this area.) So why bother to reinvent the wheel?  A few answers:

• This project was really just a way to procrastinate.
• I like making charts.
• My methods were somewhat different from those in the published literature. Rather than using the accepted methodology of the social sciences—which consists of reducing all questions to chi-squared significance tests—I felt free to use my own Doofus Methodology, which consists of staring at graphs and seeing if something pops out at me. After careful deliberation, I decided on the latter methodology for three reasons. First, ultimately I only care about correlations that are strong enough to be obvious to the naked eye.  Second, I might actually know something about some of the countries in question—they’re not just interchangeable data points—and given how informal this study was anyway, I saw no reason to jettison that knowledge.  Third, as we’ll see, when we’re asking about the best forms of government, doing regression analysis on all the countries that happen to exist today can be seriously misleading.  To put it bluntly, the majority of countries are so abysmal in terms of both economic freedom and political freedom, that trying to gain insight from them into a hypothesized tradeoff between the two freedoms is like studying a remedial class of second-graders to find out whether algebraic or geometric insight is more important for winning the Fields Medal.  It’s the outlier countries, the Singapores and Icelands, that should interest us at least as much as the pack.

Caveat #2: The problems with the Freedom House and Heritage surveys—and for that matter, any surveys that try to rank countries on some linear scale of “freedom”—are evident. Indeed, reading the survey methodologies, I found plenty of things to complain about, as I’m sure you would as well. Nevertheless, both surveys struck me as (1) having reasonably consistent methodologies, (2) being reasonably well-accepted by social scientists, and (3) giving results that agree pretty well with intuition, for most of the countries I know something about.  So lacking a better alternative, I decided to go along with these indices.  Just to double-check, I also looked at the Freedom House index versus the Economic Freedom of the World index, and the plot was extremely similar to the one versus the Heritage index.

Caveat #3: A major limitation of my scatterplot is that it only looks at the world of 2008, and disregards a vast wealth of historical examples (Chile under Pinochet, the US under Reagan…).  Future research by amateur procrastinating bloggers should clearly take the available historical data into account as well.

Granting all of this, what can we potentially learn?

1. Political and economic freedom are correlated. Any doofus could have predicted this, and lo and behold, it’s apparent from even a glance at the data. Looking at the countries in question, it seems clear that part of this correlation is due to both freedoms being correlated with economic development, i.e. “having your national shit together.”  In a country like Denmark, you can criticize the government and start a business. In a country like North Korea, you can neither criticize the government nor start a business, at least without being shot.  The studies I linked to above claim some evidence that this obvious correlation has a causal component, as follows: by and large, economic freedom helps make countries richer, and being richer helps make them more politically free.  Assuming that claim is correct, score one for Milton Friedman.

2. A wide range of economic freedom levels is compatible with a “near-maximal” level of political freedom. Let’s look only at the countries on the far right of the scatterplot—those with “US-or-above” levels of political freedom (Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US, and Uruguay). Here the correlation between economic and political freedom seems to disappear entirely, or even become slightly negative. The economic freedom scores of these countries range from 64.3 to 82.4, which is almost half of the total spread across all countries on earth (excepting a few dictatorships like North Korea, Cuba, and Zimbabwe). More to the point, this list includes countries commonly regarded as “socialist” in contemporary political debate (like the Scandinavian countries), and countries regarded as “capitalist” (like Australia, Chile, and the US).  Thus, the idea that countries that already have a high level of political freedom, would increase their political freedom even more by lowering taxes, privatizing industries, etc., does not seem to be borne out by this dataset.

3. There might be a “Pareto curve of freedom”: that is, a basic tension between economic and political freedom that prevents them from being maximized simultaneously. I’ll admit that the evidence on this point is inconclusive.  Firstly, there aren’t enough data points; secondly, the lack of any example of a country maximizing both freedoms is obviously not an impossibility proof.  A true believer in Ayn Rand’s utopia, like a true believer in Marxism, could always disregard any empirical finding by saying that the right experiment has never been tried yet, and would self-evidently succeed if it were.

However, if we do construct the “Pareto curve of freedom” for the Freedom House/Heritage data, what we find is this:

• Iceland, with economic freedom score of 76.5 and political freedom score of 100
• Canada, with economic freedom score of 80.2 and political freedom score of 99
• Ireland, with economic freedom score of 82.4 and political freedom score of 97
• Singapore, with economic freedom score of 87.4 and political freedom score of 49

(The US is conspicuously not on the Pareto curve, though wounded patriots can console themselves that it’s the only country of anywhere near its population size that comes close.)

Note that Hong Kong is not in this dataset, since as part of China, it isn’t ranked separately by Freedom House. However, Heritage gives Hong Kong an economic freedom score of 90.3, which is the highest in the world (Singapore is #2). The political freedom score for China itself is a dismal 18. So, if we assigned Hong Kong the point (18,90.3), that would be a fifth point on the Pareto curve.

To check the robustness of the Pareto curve, I recalculated it using the Economic Freedom in the World index in place of the Heritage index.   The result was basically similar: clustered on the right we find Finland, Iceland, and Luxembourg maximizing political freedom, then Canada, then Switzerland, then New Zealand, and then, as before, Singapore way off on its own maximizing economic freedom.

To confirm the hypothesis of a tradeoff between economic freedom and political freedom, what we’d need in the dataset are “more Singapores”—or better yet, some countries that interpolated between the Western democracies and Singapore.  Conversely, to disprove the tradeoff hypothesis, all it would take is a single country that dominated the rest of the world on both axes, with the political freedom of Scandinavia and the economic freedom of Singapore.  I find it interesting that no such country seems to exist, not even a small city-state or island.

Incidentally, the tradeoff idea is not necessarily rejected by libertarians.  Friedman himself stressed that “political freedom, once established, has a tendency to destroy economic freedom.”  To put it bluntly, if poor people can vote, one of the main things they vote for is to redistribute money to themselves.  There are then three possibilities: either redistribution takes place (and economic freedom as defined by Heritage and the Wall Street Journal goes down), or the poor majority is violently suppressed (and political freedom goes down), or the government is overthrown.  Amusingly, Friedman and Klein seem to be in complete agreement on this central point: it’s just that one of them laments it while the other relishes it.

In summary, I conjecture that the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom is similar to that between jogging and health.  In general, we expect people to be healthier the more they jog, with at least part of the relationship being causal. But it doesn’t follow that jogging 20 hours per day is healthier than jogging one hour; indeed the former might even be detrimental.

Of course, people could accept all this (even find it plunkingly obvious), and still vehemently disagree about the quantitative aspect: exactly how far out is the Pareto curve?  How much jogging is too much?  As usual, it’s the complexity-theoretic questions that are the interesting ones.  The tragedy is that you never even get to those questions if you’re too hung up on computability.

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After reading these blog posts dealing with the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole of strangelet that would destroy the earth — as well as this report from the LHC Safety Assessment Group, and these websites advocating legal action against the LHC — I realized that I can remain silent about this important issue no longer.

As a concerned citizen of Planet Earth, I demand that the LHC begin operations as soon as possible, at as high energies as possible, and continue operating until such time as it is proven completely safe to turn it off.

Given our present state of knowledge, we simply cannot exclude the possibility that aliens will visit the Earth next year, and, on finding that we have not yet produced a Higgs boson, find us laughably primitive and enslave us. Or that a wormhole mouth or a chunk of antimatter will be discovered on a collision course with Earth, which can only be neutralized or deflected using new knowledge gleaned from the LHC. Yes, admittedly, the probabilities of these events might be vanishingly small, but the fact remains that they have not been conclusively ruled out. And that being the case, the Precautionary Principle dictates taking the only safe course of action: namely, turning the LHC on as soon as possible.

After all, the fate of the planet might conceivably depend on it.

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Almost two years ago, a reader named Lev R. won my Best Anthropicism Contest with the following gem:

why aren’t physicists too interested in computational complexity? because if they were, they’d be computer scientists.

As the champion, Lev won the right to ask any question and have me answer it on this blog. Here was Lev’s question:

I like your “Earth Day, Doomsday, and Chicken Little” post, but you dodged the big question. Will the world end (humans go extinct) anytime soon? Or do you think that despite our best efforts, we’ll somehow end up not destroying ourselves?

In general, I despise being asked to make predictions, even about infinitely less weighty topics — especially when there’s a chance of my being wrong, and people looking back Nelson-Muntz-like and saying “ha ha, Scott was wrong!” That’s one of only several reasons why I could never be a physicist.

An answerable question would be one that asked me to clear up a misconception, or render a moral judgment, or discuss the consequences of a given assumption. (Unanswerable: “When will we see useful quantum computers?” Answerable: “Didn’t that company in Vancouver already build one?”) Questions about relationships between complexity classes or other unsolved math problems are also fine. But as for the universe, how am I supposed to know what it’ll decide to do, among all the things it could do within reasonable bounds of physics and logic? How am I even supposed to have a prior? As a CS theorist, I’m trained to think not about what’s likely to happen, but about the very worst that could happen — within stated assumptions, of course. Among the practical consequences of this attitude, I never gamble and I never play the stock market (and not only because, while there are many things I want, almost none of them can be traded for money). I also don’t worry about being put out of a job by prediction markets. Where the Bayesian stops, and says “every question beyond these is trivial or meaningless,” that’s where I’m just getting started.

But despite everything I’ve said, after years of diligent research into the future of the human race — reading hundreds of trillions of books and articles about climate change, overpopulation, Peak Oil, nuclear proliferation, transhumanism, AI, and every other conceivably relevant topic (what do you think I was doing, writing CS papers?) — I am finally prepared, this somber April 1^st, to answer Lev’s question with the seriousness it deserves. Obviously my predictions can only be probabilistic, and obviously I can’t give you the deep reasons behind them — those would take years to explain. I shall therefore present the human future, circa 2100, in the form of a pie chart.

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Until today, I have failed to uphold one of the most sacred responsibilities of the guild of bloggers: that of weighing in on the Democratic primary. This is not because of any desire to keep politics out of this blog: I’ve never succeeded in keeping anything out of this blog. Rather, it’s because I find the question genuinely difficult.

The general election is so damn easy by comparison. There, the only questions I need to ask myself are, “do I prefer the Enlightenment or the Dark Ages that preceded it? Is the Earth 4.6 billion years old or 10,000? Do anti-gay laws spring from a less repugnant part of human nature than Jim Crow laws?” While I look forward to the day when my answers to such questions won’t determine my vote, so far they unfailingly have — thereby eliminating the need for me to adjudicate more complicated social and economic issues that I don’t really understand.

In other words, my view of Democrats and Republicans couldn’t possibly be further from that of (say) Eliezer Yudkowsky, who sees the general US election as a meaningless, Kang vs. Kodos popularity contest. Like Yudkowsky, I can easily imagine two political parties fighting over nothing — but what I see in reality is a clearly-identifiable neo-Union and neo-Confederacy, who every four years re-fight the Civil War. As many others have pointed out, even the geographic boundary between America’s two subcountries has barely changed since the 1860’s; the one real irony is that the “party of Lincoln” now represents the Confederate side. (And yes, if the free-market/libertarian wing of the Republican Party ever broke free of the medieval wing, then this correspondence would break down. I’m only talking about things as they currently stand.)

On the other hand, as Clinton and Obama debated their subtly-different proposals for health insurance, subprime lending reform, etc., I realized that, in a race between Democrats (or a general election in a more normal country), my “go with the Enlightenment” approach can only take me so far. Faced with two non-lunatic candidates, you almost have to, like, know something about policy or economics to make a sensible choice.

So being an ignorant computer scientist, what can I say? Let’s start with the obvious: that after seven years of Bush, to ask whether I’d “prefer” Hillary or Obama is like asking a drowning person surrounded by sharks which of two lifeboats he prefers to be rescued by (and adding, in case it’s helpful, that one lifeboat is rowed by a woman and the other by a half-Kenyan). It’s a shame we can’t elect both of them, and then send one back in time to have been president for the last eight years. As the next best option, I wish the candidates would just agree right now to choose the winner by an Intrade-weighted coin flip, and thereby save money for defeating the religious-right-courting hypocrite McCain.

But of course they won’t do that, and hence the question of whom to prefer. Until recently I had a mild preference for Hillary, my reasons being as follows:

1. Because she’s been despised for so many years by so many people who I despise (and the worse they say about her, the better she seems).
2. Because she’s been doing better than Obama in crucial swing states like Florida.
3. Because with her you get all the advantages of her husband but with considerably less chance of a sex scandal.
4. Because on one issue that I actually follow — ending the Republicans’ “war on science” — her position paper is full of excellent specifics, whereas (so far as I know) Obama has only said much vaguer things in the same direction.

Recently, though, I’ve been tilting more toward Obama, for five reasons:

1. Because he’s winning (still, after last night). This, of course, would be an important piece of evidence about his likelihood of winning the general election, even if it weren’t also a prerequisite to winning.
2. Because unlike Hillary, he’s clearly stated his position on the inefficiency of bubblesort.
3. Because I’m told that some Americans now supplement their reading of text by the viewing of “YouTubes” and “tele-vision boxes” — and in those settings, Obama clearly does better. His jokes succeed where Hillary’s fail.
4. Because the 2000 and 2004 elections suggest that experience is now a severe liability: it simply translates into more stuff that an opponent will twist against you.
5. Because people whose judgment I respect, and who follow politics more closely than I do, seem to prefer Obama by a wide margin. As in Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, the mere fact of these other people’s opinions ought to change my own opinion if I’m a rational agent. Whether for rational reasons or not, it has.

Incidentally, so far as I can tell, the accusations of anti-Semitism against Obama that have filled the right-wing blogosphere are completely baseless. The assumption underlying these accusations is that admiration is a transitive predicate: that is, if x admires y and y admires z (where, say, z=Farrakhan), then x must admire z, even if x claims to “reject and denounce” z. But it’s easy to think of counterexamples: I admire Sakharov who admired Stalin (at least for part of his life), I admire Bertrand Russell who admired all sorts of thugs and poseurs, etc. Of course it’s impossible to know Obama’s heart about these matters, but I don’t think one needs to: it’s enough to know his brain.

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A reader named Prempeh writes in the comments section of my last post:

I’m really no happier because of knowing that a phenomenon called quantum entanglement exist [sic]. Now, you say, this phenomenon has the potential to enable super-powerful computing, teleportation, … I say, until science helps me with a comprehensive, provable, repeatable methodology for using it’s [sic] results to make me (and everyone who wants to be) happy, I really do not see it as significantly more helpful than faith.

NB: Any chance that a unification theory could help the poor stave off devastating climate change caused in part by the profligacy of the west? End the brutality of war? Stop child sexual exploitation? Remove corruption, greed, racism, …

This is not a rhetorical question

A few quick non-rhetorical answers:

1. At the least, thinking about quantum entanglement doesn’t exacerbate problems like war and climate change (if we neglect o(1) terms like the jet fuel needed to fly to conferences). The same can’t be said for many other human endeavors.
2. The scientific revolution 400 years ago led directly to a doubling of the human lifespan, the birth of democracy and its subsequent spread across the world (Galileo, Newton → Spinoza, Hume, Locke → Paine, Jefferson → …), and the cessation of practices such as witch-burning. It’s true that those few lucky enough to have been tribal chieftains with large harems probably wouldn’t want to trade places with a modern; and also true that Hitler and Stalin managed to surpass the already-impressive brutality of the ancients. But on the whole, it seems to me that the human condition improved once we started understanding how the universe works. And given the number of utopian ideas that managed to do nothing but drench this vale of tears in new tears of their own, I don’t see the relative success of curiosity-driven science as anything to sneeze at.
3. I do try to do my tiny part to raise awareness of climate change and other threats to civilization. Of course, every time I do so, I’m attacked in the comments section by hordes of denialists who tell me I should stick to what I know about (like quantum entanglement). There’s just no pleasing everyone.
4. I see the central problem facing humanity — much more central than climate change, greed, racism, or anything else you mentioned — as collective stupidity. If we, as a species, weren’t so collectively stupid, we’d have error-correcting mechanisms that checked the other problems before they spiraled out of control.I also maintain the possibly-naïve hope that, if people could just understand basic conceptual points about how the world works — like why quantum entanglement doesn’t allow faster-than-light communication, but is still not the same as classical correlation — some tiny contribution might be made to fighting the collective stupidity of our species and thereby helping to ensure its continued survival. That, and not the prospect of teleportation or super-powerful computing, is what really motivates me.

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I wasn’t born to be a blogger. I can’t respond to events in real-time. When history happens, I might or might not be there to react. To give one example: I still don’t have any update to share about the Australian models. (Hopefully soon.)

To give another example: last week Al Gore — the most famous American politician to think in complete sentences since Abraham Lincoln — won the Nobel Peace Prize, and where was I? At a workshop in Germany, wondering how it could be that if UNSAT many-one reduces to a set of subexponential density then NP is in coNP/poly. (More on that another time.)

So, Al Gore. Look, I don’t think it reflects any credit on him to have joined such distinguished pacifists as Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat. I think it reflects credit on the prize itself. This is one of the most inspired choices a Nobel Peace Prize committee ever made, even though ironically it has nothing directly to do with peace.

With the release of An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason, it’s become increasingly apparent that Gore is the tragic hero of our age: a Lisa among Cletuses, a Jeffersonian rationalist in the age of Coulter and O’Reilly. If I haven’t said so more often on this blog, it’s simply because the mention of Gore brings up such painful memories for me.

In the weeks leading up to the 2000 US election, I could almost feel the multiverse splitting into two branches of roughly equal amplitude that would never again interact. In both branches, our civilization would continue racing into an abyss, the difference being that in one branch we’d be tapping the brakes while in the other we’d be slamming the accelerator. I knew that the election would come down to Florida and one or two other swing states, that the margin in those states would be razor-thin (of course no one could’ve predicted how thin), and that, in contrast to every other election I’d lived through, in this one every horseshoe and butterfly would make a difference. I knew that if Bush got in, I’d carry a burden of guilt the rest of my life for not having done more to prevent it.

The question was, what could a 19-year-old grad student at Berkeley do with that knowledge? How could I round up tens of thousands of extra Gore votes, and thereby seize what might be my only chance in life to change the course of history? I quickly ruled out trying to convince Bush voters, assuming them beyond persuasion. (I later found out I was wrong, when I met people who’d voted for Bush in 2000 but said they now regretted their decision. To me, it was as if they’d just noticed the blueness of the sky.)

And thus my attention shifted to the Right’s #1 friend and ally throughout history: the Far Left. All over Berkeley I was seeing Ralph Nader placards. At the lunch table, I even heard the strange argument that if Nader caused Bush to win, it would ultimately be for the best, since it would finally force everyone to see how bad things were: an update of the old Marxist doctrine of “heightening the contradictions.” (I wondered: if Nader supporters truly believed that, then why didn’t they just forget about Nader and vote for Bush outright?)

Yet it seemed to me that most Nader supporters were still sane enough that, conditioned on Nader losing (i.e. conditioned on 2+2=4), they would prefer Gore over Bush. The problem was this: how to convince Nader supporters in swing states of something that, were they convincable, they would’ve been convinced of already? That’s when I read about an idea due to law professor Jamin Raskin, called “Nadertrading.” The idea was simple: Nader supporters in swing states (like Florida and Pennsylvania) would vote for Gore, having arranged for a Gore supporter in a “safe” state (like New York or Texas) to vote for Nader on their behalf, thereby helping Nader get the 5% he’d need to qualify for federal funds in 2004. Two separate irrationalities of the US election system — (1) the Electoral College, and (2) the lack of something like Approval Voting to handle three or more candidates — would be played against each other.

Almost as soon as Raskin published his idea, websites arranging the swaps were set up and were being used. Nadertrading clearly appealed to a nontrivial fraction of Nader supporters, possibly even enough to tip the scales of fate. Yet in magazine articles and message boards, I repeatedly saw fallacious arguments against the idea: for example, that Bush supporters could game the system; that you shouldn’t agree to a vote swap if you think there’s any nonzero chance of the other person reneging; that trading a vote has the same moral status as selling it.

So I set up a little web page called In Defense of Nadertrading, to make the moral and game-theoretic case for Raskin’s idea. The next morning, I was surprised to find myself an “expert” on the topic: getting Slashdotted, deluged with email, woken up by a call from CNN, etc. I also got a fair amount of hate mail, some of which I posted on the site and ridiculed: good experience for my blogging career.

The Nadertrading movement took a hit when, in a few states, the sites arranging the vote swaps (which didn’t include mine) were shut down by state attorneys-general (all of whom happened to be Republicans), over the protests of civil libertarians. But sites hosted in other states remained up and running.

In the end, though, the Nadertrading movement simply failed to reach enough of its target audience. The websites put up by me and others apparently induced at least 1,400 Nader supporters in Florida to vote for Gore — but 97,000 Floridians still voted for Nader. And as we know, Bush ended up “winning” the state by 537 votes.

After the hanging-chad circus and Gore’s withdrawal, I tried to bury myself in quantum complexity classes and worry as little as possible about the future of civilization. My main news sources became The Daily Show and The Onion. Yet much as I’ve wanted to forget, for seven years I’ve carried certain questions on my conscience like a sack of stones:

Why does the US have a failed oilman for president rather than the Churchill of climate change? Why was the president vacationing in Texas when bin Laden’s plans to strike the US came up in a daily briefing? Why are we stuck in Iraq?

There are, of course, many correct answers to these questions, but there’s one correct answer I keep coming back to: because I didn’t make a good enough website. Because my prose wasn’t tight enough and my jokes weren’t funny enough. Because I spent too much time procrastinating when I should’ve been pounding away at my keyboard.

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I was, of course, delighted that Columbia University invited my good friend Mahmoud to speak there, and dismayed only by the tedious introduction by President Lee Bollinger. (“Having demonstrated conclusively that today’s featured speaker is a murderous tyrant with no more right to partake in the civilized world than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, let me now, without further ado…”) However long your speaker’s list of achievements, crimes against humanity, etc. might be, I think talk introductions should be two minutes tops.

But since this particular event has already been covered on more blogs than the Monster has subgroups, today I thought I’d roll out an occasional new Shtetl-Optimized feature — in which, for want of anything better to blog about, I discuss some books I’ve read recently.

The Truth About The Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It by Marcia Angell.

Like many in the US, I once “knew” that drug companies have to charge such absurd prices here because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to fund their R&D. This book reveals the hilarious truth about what drug company R&D actually consists of. My favorite examples: coloring Prozac pink instead of green, marketing it for “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” instead of depression, and charging three times as much for it. Inventing new drugs for high blood pressure that are less effective than diuretics available since the 1950’s, but have the advantage of being patentable. Proving in clinical trials that a new drug works better than an old one, as long as you compare 40mg of the one to 20mg of the other.

The book paints a picture of the pharmaceutical industry as, basically, an organized crime syndicate that’s been successful in co-opting the government. It trumpets the free market but depends almost entirely for its existence on bad patent laws that it helped write; it bribes doctors to prescribe worse expensive drugs instead of better cheap ones; it waits for government-funded university researchers to discover new drugs, then bottles them up, makes billions of dollars, and demands credit for its life-saving innovations.

Among the arguments put forward by the rare negative reviewers of this book on Amazon, the following was my favorite (I’ll let you supply a counterargument):

Who do you folks think are paid higher, scientists in the Unis and government programs, or scientists in the industry? … Marcia saying the Universities and the NIH are more innovative in developing drugs than the Pharma Industry is like saying (using sports analogy) Minor League baseball is better than the MLB. Which players do you think are paid more? Common sense my friends.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

This book has received a lot of attention lately, and deserves all of it. The topic is: if humans disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take for the world’s forests and coral reefs to regenerate, garbage to decompose, excess CO₂ to wash out of the sky, giant land mammals to reappear in North America, etc.? Of course this is just a different way of asking: “exactly how badly have humans screwed up the planet?” Weisman’s key insight, though, is that it’s less depressing to read about the world regenerating itself than about its being destroyed.

It’s hard to identify a clear thesis in this book, just lots of interesting observations: for example, that African elephants weren’t hunted to extinction whereas woolly mammoths probably were because only the former evolved to fear humans; and that, if North and South Korea ever reunite, it will be a disaster for the dozens of endangered species that now survive only in a four-mile-wide demilitarized strip between the two. The prose is beautiful throughout, and sometimes reaches heights rarely seen in environmental writing. After explaining the role of volcanoes in climate change, Weisman says: “the problem is, by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s.”

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