On certainty

If it were the common practice to speak only when one is certain, then the only people speaking would be the idiots.

Social media and the suppression of creativity

"The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome ...[I]ndividuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.” - Isaac Asimov

What does this mean for us now that our entire lives are spent in the public eye? Isn't recycling an old idea I expect to be 'liked' a better social strategy than venturing something new, untested, and unsettled as a matter of public good taste?

Some words for my students on Yik Yak, freedom, and personal responsibility

As new things are wont to do, they scare the crap out of old people.

As old people are wont to do with new things they don’t understand, they try to take them away from those who they perceive as less responsible than them.

Personally, I’m glad you have a place like this, where you can feel somewhat secure in your anonymity to say anything you want. In this post-911 world—your world, the only world you have ever known—these sorts of places are becoming worryingly few.

Virtually anything we say or do now is potentially under the eyes of surveillance, which means all is under surveillance. There is no relevant difference here.

I’ve surveyed Yik Yak a bit on my own. In my opinion most of it is trivial, some of it beautiful, and some of it ugly. But this is the nature of speech, is it not?

And who is to judge? Me? Some administrator? Your parents?

Though the knee-jerk reaction of many is to bend these rules, the laws of this land still guarantee adults certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

But children are not afforded these rights.

Let me remind you of something because there are those who will tell you, or at least treat you otherwise---You are not children. You are adults. To be an adult means you make decisions for yourself, the fruit as well as the consequences of which shall be yours alone.

You are adults like the world has never seen—a generation unique to this time, this place, your own histories. Old people will understand you more than you think, but less than they think.

They will look to you as the source of degeneration in the world. But since when have they done any better? You live in the world they made for you. Is it perfect?

In these years of college the world will be rent open for you, its inner-workings exposed for you to inspect. You, as all previous generations, inherit the world’s problems to solve in the way you see best.

Perhaps in their advanced age, your elders now feel that their time to make the world a better place has run short and their work left incomplete. Hence, they fear control slipping away from them to you.

So stubbornly they grip tighter, grab and pull what is yours by rights and is the simple fact of the matter.

You are adults. It’s your world and you own it. Your choices make the world of tomorrow—the good ones and bad ones.

I will not tell you whether or not you are permitted to use Yik Yak or what to do with it, and I will do what little I can to see to it others don’t either.

But ultimately this is your free speech and thus your responsibility to protect it. And they will come for it. The first time somebody uses it for something dastardly, they’ll commandeer all of the airwaves, the copper, and the fiber to make sure everybody sees it—to make people afraid, to convince other old people that they need to protect their children, and to convince you that you must be protected like a child.

So we all make a devil's trade—an ounce of security for a pound of liberty.

And thus, the world of tomorrow is created by our choices, our actions.

I want to explore the Darknet.

I don't know what's there. I have every right to be there.

I won't violate intellectual property rights or view child porn.

But if I don't do anything illegal, they are doing something illegal.

This isn't the Soviet Union and I'm not going to start acting like it.

Because if we all started acting like it was, it mind as well be.

I'm a political scientist, and have both the right and a legitimate reason.

Not that I need a legitimate purpose, because my right is already sufficient.

I'm interested in ISIL propaganda. I'm a scholar. I want to study it.

I'm also afraid of going to the sorts of websites I'd need to go to in order to view it.

Do you know what that means?

That means America is broken.

Freedom is broken.

The first stage is of censorship is self-censorship.

The scary thing, I think, is something that we all know.

In the scope of human civilization, freedom is the anomaly.

The default state of human society over the centuries has been tyranny.

We achieved something rare, hard gained and lost relatively easily.

Should we lose it now, how many tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years will it be before it regained?

An atheist monk's prayer.

We are a nation of Atheist monks only pretending to know Jesus.
Me, I'm just learning to fit in.
I have stuff now. It's great. It means I exist.
My existence is made tangible, apprehensible. I am knowable to others by the quality and form of my possessions.
I have furniture I don't even use. It's just there to fill the empty space.
The empty space that was in my soul is now physical volume, and can be filled with stuff.
Stuff is like food. You fill up on it and you're satisfied for a while.
When the pangs return you take another meal. Stuff is food for the soul.
And only stuff guarantees a modicum of afterlife, for we live on in the form of our estates.

Evolution of Universes

The suitability of our universe for the evolution of life is incredibly unlikely, which means there were, or are, many failed (or failing) universes.

This implies that a diversity exists in universes, such that some support life and others don't--or perhaps suitability for life falls along a spectrum. 

If it's somehow possible to create universes, and it must be possible since there are universes, then it's possible that the life in some universes will figure out how to do it.

Universes in which life learns to create new universes will likely create them to be similarly hospitable.

Such hospitable universes, as such, would then, over "time" increases as a proportion of all universes.

Given enough time, virtually all universes may be hospitable to life.

If the universes most suitable to life create universes faster still, as they might since there will be more life within them to do this, then given enough time any given universe can be assumed to be teeming with life.

Given the immensity of the cosmos, it would be incredibly unlikely that we should happen to exist at it's relative youth.

This point is further emphasized by the exquisite harmonies we find in our own universe, and thus we may assume it to be the most "recent" in a very, very old line of progenitor universes.

We know this universe is suitable for life. But what's even more fascinating is that our best guess is that it isn't even rare. Rather, our universe is likely to by one among countless others that are teeming with it. 

Open letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler

May 5, 2014

Dear Chairman Wheeler,

Ordinary Americans have had a hard run over the last 13 or 14 years. We’ve seen economic bubbles burst, our retirements and savings lost, and our tax dollars squandered on expensive foreign wars. Successive waves of banking and media consolidations have left banks too big to fail and the media with interests conflicting with those of the public. In this time we’ve been compelled to accept increasingly invasive security measures in our airports, in our shopping centers, and even our schools and homes. With each passing month, new leaks of classified documents add evidence for the regrettable conclusion that we, the United States of America, are now a surveillance state. And now a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions have irreversibly shifted the balance of ultimate authority in this country from the broad base of the public to a small, but deep-pocketed and well-connected elite. The one thing we really had going for us has been the widespread adoption and of the greatest tool for the promotion of intellectual freedom, free thought and free speech, since the movable-type printing press: the Internet.

In no time in history has human kind ever come so close to realizing John Stewart Mill’s ideal of an efficient marketplace of ideas. All that we have achieved in this venture, from the vast repositories of universally accessible knowledge to communication tools which have given voices to the voiceless, have been made possible through the historic enforcement of so-called Net Neutrality rules. It is the digital expression of the democratic ideal that something revolutionary, something wonderful, can come from anyone anywhere. And time after time it has.

Mr. Chairman, as you consider the adoption of new rules undermining the principle of Net Neutrality, please keep in mind that this decision could very well be the hammer that drives the nail into the Democracy’s coffin. The long term consequences of such an institutional change are always difficult to predict, but we know that enormous corporations lobbying for the changes will be in a position to remake the Internet in a way that disproportionately reflects their narrow economic interests. We can expect fewer people making decisions over what and how people access information, which will inevitably translate into diminished access for the little guys. Perhaps worse, the presence of such “gate keepers” creates opportunities for corruption and collusion between large power brokers who desire to influence the content of public discourse to suit their interests.

Our legislators are unresponsive, now firmly in the grip of corporate power and can no longer be counted on to do anything in the public interests that runs against the interests of their patrons. In court, our rights are only as good as our lawyers, and they have better ones. So many of us don't even realize how important this issue is the future of our country. Not coincidentally, the cable and public airwaves are dominated by a handful of unimaginably wealthy companies that control virtually everything that passes through them, save the Internet. It’s our last bastion of true equality and freedom. Save the Internet. No "fast lanes". Treat all data equally

Thank you for your time.

Submit your own comment to the FCC (14-28) proceeding number : http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=hvz4a

Beasts of this Earth.

I think the greatest disappointment of the last 50 years or so is the building realization that we are not the gods we imagined ourselves to be.

Just beasts of this Earth.

In our culture we have always imagined ourselves to be above the animals, but before we had God to remind us that we weren't gods.

Now God is dead and we've gone on ahead of ourselves. Now reality catches up and we're no longer even afforded the comforting myth that we were created in God's image.

Just beasts of this Earth.

But aren't we sophisticated beasts? Sophisticated enough to see what we are, innovate a morality of our own based on aspirations to something higher, yet be unable to live up to it.

This is the root of our disappointment. Our liberated minds want equality and freedom but our bodies do not. Our bodes just want security and the best genes for their offspring.

If not with our words, our deeds reveal who--or what--is in control.

Just beasts of this Earth.

On Big Data and the Human Spirit

Big Data is more human than traditional data. This is in part because traditional data, in terms of scale, is so much more directly manageable. It’s still pretty hands on, especially in the social sciences. This means that over time we’ve gotten very good at working the human element out, or at least minimizing it. Big Data, not necessarily because of its size, but because of its indirectness means we have a great deal less control over where and how it’s collected. Moreover, it’s often collected as the electronic traces humans leave behind as they go about their lives. That’s all they typically are traces—not a data point in the traditional sense. When you conduct your own survey or download the General Social Survey, each data point is an answer to a question. You know what the data point represents. This isn’t so with Big Data because all your data points really are is a clue. And in order to know what it means, you must exercise that quintessential human faculty of sensemaking. Accordingly, modes of sensemaking are as diverse as we are, each with our own unique brand of it rooted in our upbringing, education, experience, chance, and perhaps even our genes. There is a growing library of techniques, or algorithms, available that may assist the analyst in generating sense from Big Data. That means use routines in order to sift through the universe of clues to find the patterns that tie them together into meaning. But while computational and likely embedded math and logic, they are not mathematics or logic. Those are closed systems of self-referencing definitions, defined by their inventors as perfect. The Pythagorean Theorem only works perfectly with imaginary triangles because no perfect triangles are known to exist. On the contrary, algorithms are merely the computational expressions of someone’s own sensemaking faculties—an externalized digitalization of a human mind. When you begin to create your own algorithms, you’ll be uploading a small bit of yourself to carry on your own human uniqueness inside a macroscopic, but highly simplified, virtualization of the real world.

As the science of Big Data matures, I expect to see a resurgence of the humanities and psychological sciences. Big Data’s promise, of course, is that it stands to give us a greater lens on humanity than ever before. But in fulfilling this promise, we will necessary reach advancements in our understanding of the human being as a thinking and feeling being, which may in the end, allow us to transcend entirely the limitations we’ve forever imagined ourselves to be bound.

The problem with polarization

The lasting hangover following this binge of politically partisan fervor will be that even moderates regard each other as partisans. Tragically, moderates were the ones who had a chance of finding common ground and making incremental progress. 

McCutcheon v. FEC is a blow to American democracy.

In the McCutcheon v. FEC decision (download here) the Supreme Court argues that people would be "delighted to see fewer television commercials touting a candidate's accomplishments or disparaging an opponent's character." The decision continues "[m]oney in politics may at times seem repugnant," tolerating speech we don't like is just the price we have to pay for our First Amendment rights. This seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what people are concerned about. No, nobody likes the endless campaign ads, but we're not upset because they're interrupting Dancing with the Stars. The proper conception of the problem that respectfully acknowledges the concerns of ordinary citizens is that unlimited campaign donations as free speech implies that people with more money get a bigger voice. We cannot ignore the embedded moral hazard, i.e,. the perverse incentives that encourage politicians to screen out the masses in favor of a handful of really, really big donor fish. Rather, the Supreme Court argues talk of corruption must be constrained to clear cases of quid pro quo, dollars-for-influence transactions. I'm sure these Justices are not so naive that they don't realize such claims, like perjury, are virtually impossible to prove.

What's most worrisome is how accepting we, collectively, have become of this practice. Enshrined in the court's decision is the argument that the current aggregate limit on campaign contributions from individuals to candidates ($48,600) allows individuals to contribute the per-candidate maximum of $5,200 to a mere nine candidates! According to data acquired by OpenSecrets (cited at FiveThirtyEight), this deeply unfair limitation on free speech applies to fewer than 600 people. Setting all the high-sounding legal philosophical debate aside for a moment, why are the Supreme Court's priorities such that they are willing to gamble with the liberty of hundreds of millions, for fear that one of these precious few 600 should be denied the opportunity to buy themselves entire legislatures? I argue that this is because this kind of corruption goes well beyond quid pro quo. In politics--as in most everything--priorities follow money. Money has the power to set priorities, by "taking something all the way to the Supreme Court!" Could you do that if you felt your rights weren't respected? No, because you don't have money, and as long as money is equated with free speech nobody will have time to listen to you. Competition ensures that those who attempt to defy this rule lose out to those who heed it. Natural selection.

This 5-4 decision (along party lines) is yet another blow to the integrity of American democracy. It's a hack from the most undemocratic branch of government (by design) that shifts the allegiances from the (by design) most democratic branch of government away from their popular constituencies to a small club of landed patricians.

Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham follow-up thoughts.

I have to admit after watching the debate, I now agree with Richard Dawkins that we shouldn't debate with creationists at all. Nye did well, but imho it wasn't an event he could "win". Ken Ham peddles young earth nonsense for a living--and he's very good at what he does. He's not bound by what science actually says or does and is at liberty to use virtually rhetorical device no matter how fallacious or at odds with reality. He's extremely sophisticated. His arguments and claims are carefully constructed to possess a surface of validity for viewers with a basic, high-school level science education--just enough to give the illusion of scientific credibility to the untrained eye. The end result, I fear, was that a large number of viewers were left with the impression that there really is a scientific debate about whether or not the Earth is 6000 years old. This is a terrible loss because it not only gives radical creationists intellectual cover for their mission to inject religion into science classes, but may find traction among those who were uncertain and/or motivated to believe it. This, I think, is not a trivial fraction of America.