Luca and Terry Tao have already reported the tragic loss of the brilliant probabilist Oded Schramm in a hiking accident. I didn’t know Oded, but I knew some of his great results and was deeply saddened by the news. My heartfelt condolences go out to his friends and family.
It was two years ago that we lost Misha Alekhnovich, who I did know, in a whitewater rafting accident. Other mathematicians and scientists lost in similar ways have included Heinz Pagels, Jacques Herbrand, Raymond Paley, Krzysztof Galicki, and Erik Rauch. The teenage Einstein very nearly died while hiking on a mountain near Zurich. I have more than one irreplaceable colleague who’s repeatedly courted death on the ski slopes.
I’d like to issue a plea to any mathematicians and scientists who might be reading: please go easier on the extreme outdoor activities. Let those who live for such things demonstrate their daring by gambling their lives; those who live for the ages can find safer recreations. The world needs more nerds, not fewer.
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-21st-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 nevertaken the possibility of building them as a given.) Is there any example of a prognostication about the 21st 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 18th-century Enlightenment to the 98% of the world that still hasn’t gotten the message.
In the final Democritus installment, I entertain students’ questions about everything from derandomization to the “complexity class for creativity” to the future of religion. (In this edited version, I omitted questions that seemed too technical, which surprisingly was almost half of them.) Thanks to all the readers who’ve stuck with me to this point, to the students for a fantastic semester (if they still remember it) as well as their scribing help, to Chris Granade for further scribing, and to Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing for letting me get away with this. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and only wish I’d kept my end of the bargain by getting these notes done a year earlier.
A question for the floor: some publishers have expressed interest in adapting the Democritus material into book form. Would any of you actually shell out money for that?
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.
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.
Come watch me attempt to explain the implications of a positive cosmological constant for computational complexity theory. If this blog is about anything, it’s about me talking about subjects I don’t understand sufficiently well and thereby making a fool of myself. But it’s also about experts taking the time to correct me. The latter is the primary saving grace.
A visitor from the year 2006, this time travel lecture appears before you now due to a blip in the space/time/procrastination continuum. No grandfathers were harmed in the writing of it. I’m looking backward to your comments.
(Alas, these forehead-bangingly obvious lines can now never be unwritten … or can they?)
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:
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.)
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.
If you don’t like this latest lecture, please don’t blame me: I had no choice! (Yeah, yeah, I know. You presumably have no choice in criticizing it either. But it can’t hurt to ask!)
Those of you who’ve been reading this blog since the dark days of 2005 might recognize some of the content from this post about Newcomb’s Paradox, and this one about the Free Will Theorem.
Addendum (7/28): Here’s my review of The Shock Doctrine. If you want to know what I thought of the book, you should probably just read the review and ignore the dumb fable that follows.
I tried unplugging the router and plugging it back in, messing around with my DHCP settings — everything I could think of. Still no Internet. Hours passed, then a day. In desperation, I finally called the tech support number for my Internet service provider, Laissez-Faire Solutions. After putting me hold for an hour with Brahms and Beethoven, “Ayn” finally picked up the phone.”I don’t know what to tell you,” she said curtly, after I’d explained the situation. “Your connection ought to be working perfectly.”
“But it isn’t.”
“It ought to be.”
“But it isn’t! Look, isn’t it possible that there’s some failure on your end?”
“You don’t understand, sir. There can be no such thing as a failure on our end. If a failure exists, then it must by definition be on your end and your end alone. What is provided to your home qua home is Internet access qua Internet access. It follows, then, as surely as A is A, that either your router is not configured properly, or your cable is disconnected, or in some other way your own stupidity or incompetence have prevented you from getting online, a failure you now seek absurdly to blame on the Internet itself.”
“I’m not blaming anything on the Internet. I’m blaming it on you, my ISP.”
“Let me ask you something,” said Ayn. “Did anyone hold you at gunpoint, or otherwise coerce you to sign up for Internet service with us?”
“Well, I guess not…”
“Then what exactly is your complaint?”
“That the service you agreed to provide isn’t working.”
“As I explained previously, it is working, by definition. If for some fanciful reason you think otherwise, obviously you have the freedom of switching providers.”
“But all the others suck as much as you do.”
“That is not possible. Were it the case that every Internet provider sucked, a provider that didn’t suck would have arisen and driven all the others out of business. The market abhors a vacuum.”
“Yeah, I’ve been waiting more than a decade for this particular vacuum to be filled. Until it happens, what else would you suggest I do?”
“Did you try going to Google again?”
“I’m still getting a ‘Page Not Found’ error.”
Frustrated, I decided to call the Tech-support Cooperative of the People’s International Proletariat (TCPIP). Karl picked up the phone. As I related my conversation with Ayn, Karl doubled over with laughter. “You mean you actually believe they want it to work?”
“Who exactly is the ‘they’ we’re talking about?”
“All of them — the service providers, the government, even the academics who designed the Internet in the first place. We’ve amassed mountains of evidence that they’re all conspiring to keep the Internet broken, in order to force people like you to sign up for expensive, exploitative ‘solutions’ — solutions no one would ever agree to under normal circumstances! Won’t you join us this weekend? We’re going to carouse around some rich neighborhoods and slice their fiber-optic cables. Maybe the fatcats will finally get it, once their precious Internet connections work exactly as well as ours do…”
“To be honest, I really just wanted to check my email and blog comments.”
“This is not about the individual; it’s about the community! There can be no truly reliable connections until the Internet as a whole has been demolished and rebuilt from scratch, until we’ve established a new social order on this planet where everyone is responsible for everyone else being able to get online…”
“Until the millennium comes, can you put me in touch with someone who specializes in fixing Internet connections now?”
“Traitors! Don’t you see Internet access has to get much, much worse before it can get better? That fixing your connection would just be a ruse to lull you into complacency and dim your justified anger?”
So what did I end up doing? Well, until my connection starts working again, I found this unsecured wireless in my apartment building that I’m sometimes able to leech off of, as well as a nearby cafe that offers free wireless from 10 to 4 on weekdays. And when all else fails I use my Blackberry, pecking out emails on the microscopic keyboard (though that connection, too, has become finicky lately).
I talked again this morning to Ayn and Karl, and they completely agreed with each other that I was beyond hope. By focusing so obsessively on “fixing” a “problem,” they explained, I’d become distracted from the real goal: namely, comprehending a universal principle that explained why my Internet access wasn’t working, as well as every other question that I might ever want an answer to. Maybe they’re right. All I know is, at least for now I can usually get my email when I have to.
Here it is. There was already a big anthropic debate in the Lecture 16 comments — spurred by a “homework exercise” at the end of that lecture — so I feel absolutely certain that there’s nothing more to argue about. On the off chance I’m wrong, though, you’re welcome to restart the debate; maybe you’ll even tempt me to join in eventually.
The past couple weeks, I was at Foo Camp in Sebastopol, CA, where I had the opportunity to meet some wealthy venture capitalists, and tell them all about quantum computing and why not to invest in it hoping for any short-term payoff other than interesting science. Then I went to Reed College in Portland, OR, to teach a weeklong course on “The Complexity of Boolean Functions” at MathCamp’2008. MathCamp is (as the name might suggest) a math camp for high school students. I myself attended it way back in 1996, where some guy named Karp gave a talk about P and NP that may have changed the course of my life.
Alas, neither camp is the reason I haven’t posted anything for two weeks; for that I can only blame my inherent procrastination and laziness, as well as my steadily-increasing, eminently-justified fear of saying something stupid or needlessly offensive (i.e., the same fear that leads wiser colleagues not to start blogs in the first place).
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