We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Neel Krishnaswami points out that we all hate it… or do we?
It’s true. Everybody hates utilitarianism. The Left hates it(1), The Right hates it(2), Libertarians hate it(3), and Adriana Cronin(4) hates it.
And we all hate it for good reason, too. It sounds so reasonable –“maximize the total happiness of society”. But it leads to such stupid conclusions. That small-town America is justified in banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover, because it offends more Baptists than turns on smut-addicted book-lovers.(5). Oops; there goes freedom of speech. That proper social policy involves enslaving 5% of the population to grow opium to keep the other 95% in a drug-induced delirium. Utility must be maximized. And finally, in a mathematical coup de grace, economists armed with the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference have shown that individual utility functions are not commensurable. This means we can’t even define “total happiness” in a sensible fashion, because one individual’s utility function is not on the same scale as anyone else’s.
But. (You knew that a “but” was coming, didn’t you?)
Utilitarian arguments are the only arguments I have known to successfully convince anyone across ideological boundaries. No libertarian rights-based argument I have ever constructed has ever convinced my social democrat (and outright socialist) friends of anything at all. Nor have I ever seen a libertarian react to a plea for social justice with anything other than tired sighs. But start wonking out with per-capita GDPs, life expectancies, crime rates, and accident figures, and suddenly bystanders start paying attention.
A concrete example. A couple of years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine about third world poverty. He complained that the government should do something about it. I pointed out that indeed the government did do something about poverty: mainly, it caused it. He regarded my objections to large-scale government intervention as the usual quixotic libertarianism until I offered the example of microcredit programs as an example of how to bootstrap a market and improve the lot of the poor(6). At this point my friend got really excited, because now he had a concrete charity to try and send money to.
It wasn’t a rights-based argument about why government intervention is harmful that energized him: it was a concrete, utilitarian example (and an avenue for positive action). What he cared about was people not going hungry. He also knew that in political debate, people tend to use abstractions to paper over the difficulties in their program(7). Most notorious are various leftists’ use of euphemism to justify things like the Cultural Revolution, but it’s a universal sin. He, like anyone with healthy political antibodies, narrows his eyes when vague slogans — whether “worker’s paradise”, “but it’s for the children” or even “spontaneous order” — enter the discussion. So any attempt to convince my friend had to get past his suspicion that the political jargon was just bafflegab aimed at preserving the status quo.
This is why utilitarian arguments are so useful. Focusing single-mindedly on making actual individuals better off enables one to avoid getting (correctly) killed by the “that’s ideological bullshit” reaction. A political philosophy beyond utilitarianism is essential to avoid absurdity, but concrete utilitarian arguments are essential both to convince others and to keep ourselves honest.
(1)= Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. The best attempt ever to offer a solid theoretical grounding for the social democratic program. Amartya Sen smashed it with a brief, elegant article that identified a critical algebra error in the setup. Oops.
(2)= Kass, Leon R. The Ethics of Human Cloning. Yes, this Luddite idiot is the chair of the US Bioethics Commission. It is to weep.
(3)= Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Of course you know about this.
(4)= Cronin, Adriana.“EU and e-commerce, or does Bad plus Good equal a greater Good?”, Samizdata.net March 14, 2002
(5)= Sen, Amartya. “On the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal”. This man is depressingly smart.
(6)= see http://www.villagebanking.org/home.php3
(7)= Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language“. Yeah, he’s every conservative’s favorite socialist and every socialist’s favorite conservative, but what can you do?
I’ve finally finished wading through a paper in the field of gravitational physics that leaves me near ready for a double dose of aspirin. I’ll be the first to admit my Physics and Calculus have large flecks of rust flaking off them when I attempt a mountain of arcanity such as this.
I can only say I followed enough of it to say it’s real science and if true we’ve finally moved from physics grad student’s pub time what-if to verifiable laboratory manipulation of gravity. Yes, go back re-read what I just said. You didn’t imagine it.
The gist of the paper, and gist is about all I can give you, is that with high voltage discharges from a superconducting ceramic electrode in a strong externally generated magnetic field a gravity pulse occurs in the direction of the electric discharge. The pulse detection was carried out with an instrumented pendulum up to 150 meters from the generator. The impulse effect, while not huge, is measurable to the unaided eye.
What is important is not the size of the laboratory effect. It is that a coupling between gravity and manipulatable forces exists at all. If his theoretical work is correct, I think there may be a practical engineering field just a decade or so beyond the science.
Bear in mind that none of this is proven yet. Someone might come along and explain away Podkletnov’s results by experimental error, or it might be some new physics with nothing to do with gravity.
But it does look very interesting.
“Impulse Gravity Generator Based on Charged YBa2Cu3O(7-y) Superconductor with Composite Crystal Structure” by Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese is available for download from Cornell University’s archive of research papers.
If you can’t see through the absinthe, don’t drink it
-Adriana Cronin
I do not often post about specific bits of government legislation as it makes for awfully dry subject matter but I am unable to resist publishing this example of incandescent lunacy.
A year ago or so I wrote an extensive piece for the Libertarian Alliance about the nature, scope and effects of the UK Money Laundering laws (soon to be codified in the Proceeds of Crime Act).
One of the offences specified is that of ‘Tipping-Off’. If a banker/lawyer/ financial adviser suspects a client of money laundering then he is obliged to report the matter to a responsible officer within the firm who must then decide whether or not to make a report to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. All this must be done in secret because the client must not be told that he is under suspicion (in case he flees the jurisdiction). To spill the beans is to commit the offence of ‘Tipping-Off’ (maximum sentence 2 years in prison).
Well, as if destroying the principle of client confidentiality and trust is not bad enough we all now have to contend with Section 29 of the Data Protection Act 1998 which requires all companies to disclose all internal memoranda to their clients upon demand, even those voicing suspicions of money laundering and, hence, tipping them off!!
One law now forces lawyers/bankers/accountants to break another law!! How long can it be before one is liable for prosecution just for turning up at work in the morning?
Do we have a Government or do we just have a Random Regulation Generating Machine up there?
Patrick Crozier has given two of my last-Friday-of-the-month talks, which are a regular fixture of the London Libertarian scene: last year about the general background and history of the British railway system and why the privatisation of it went so wrong (subsequently published as Libertarian Alliance Economic Notes No. 91), and, this February, on the political foreground of it – very fraught just now and likely to remain so. During these talks Patrick mentioned that in Japan there exists an interesting exception to the general rule these days that all railways are a mess and getting worse: a superbly efficient, profitable national railway network. Write it up, Patrick, everyone said. Well, now he has, not at huge length but very usefully, over at his recently launched UK Transport blog.
A point Patrick is fond of making about railway systems is that they aren’t so much a matter of seizing upon the very latest whizz-bang technology, as of simply using relatively mundane kit and making all of it work properly, all at once, all the time. I got a sharp email ticking-off (which I hope in due course to respond to more directly) from Neel Krishnaswami for being “fuzzily mystical” about “Asian values” in my earlier Japan related posting of March 06 2002. But, might not the Japanese railway system be an example of the Japanese playing from their stereotypical strength – consensual cooperation, and from their equally stereotypical “weakness” – unwillingness to fly off at an anti-consensual innovatory tangent? Patrick’s point being that this weakness may also be a strength when it comes to running a good railway.
Have fun and experience a sense of premonition reading an article titled Microsoft launches ‘seek and destroy’ XBox by the The Brains Trust (Trust Us / We Know), a satirical on-line netpaper.
That’s why Internet Explorer 6 can automatically send us error reports containing a list of every piece of non Microsoft software installed on your machine, your name, address and credit card details and the 100 porn sites you last visited. It’s our way of being more responsive to our users.
The author takes on many issues, namely Microsoft, Bill Gates and privacy using the kind of journalistic and marketing speak that just begs to be sent up the way The Brains Trust contributors has been doing for the last year or so.
[Editor: Adriana is being naive: there is nothing satirical about this, it is serious reporting!  ]
Take a look at a fine article defending the ancient British sport of foxhunting by former Labour MP Brian Walden in today’s Daily Telegraph titled Ban on foxhunting would be a triumph for the mob. I cannot do better than Walden in laying out the case as to why a proposed ban on hunting with hounds is a monstrous attack on liberty, which libertarians, be they meat-eaters or hard-core vegans, should reject.
We have been deluged with interesting e-mails for publication in the last week, so please do not take it personally if we do not always publish yours. Sometimes we do not publish submissions for editorial reasons or due to excessive length but more usually it is simply because we do not always have the time. Samizdata is a loose but more or less functioning anarchy, so having someone to edit and publish a submission is a rather hit-and-miss affair depending on who does or does not have the time to do it. At the moment the main limiting factor is the sheer amount of incoming e-mail and our available time to digest them all!
And for all who have asked: Natalija Radic is currently off skiing in Austria and so I do not expect to see her posting again for several days yet.
By the way, a few links may have vanished off the side bar due to a minor mishap during template surgery, followed by doing the daily back up the wrong way. Doh!
A followup posting by Michael Wells:
Two weeks after my previous post on North Korean defections, 25 defectors have stormed the Spanish embassy in Beijing and demanded asylum, threatening to commit suicide if they were sent back. China still doesn’t want to acknowledge defectors as refugees, but that position’s becoming harder to maintain as the situation becomes more visible. Pressure from South Korea and (one hopes) the US should help a lot.
I’ll be watching for soldiers defecting along the Chinese and Russian borders. The military is all that keeps Kim Jong Il’s regime in power. If they start going, it’s all over for the DPRK.
Kevin Marks has a rather different ‘take’ on the matter of reputation in the modern world. So is ‘Google envy’ the new snobbery, Kevin?
Neel Krishnaswami is taking a very centralised view of reputation that smells of a synoptic delusion to me. The real revolution in online reputation is happening from the ground up, with Google being the prime example.
Google ranks webpages on how many pages link to them. It then repeats this process, weighting the links from highly linked-to pages higher. In effect, some pages have a higher reputation than others through an emergent mechanism created by all those individual links.
One can argue whether this is elitist or democratic endlessly, but it is certainly based on a Hayekian spontaneous order.
For example, I posted Two Kinds of Order by John Marks on March 11th, and mentioned this to some colleagues who might be interested. I linked to it from a Weblog or two, and Doc Searls did too.
Today it is number 1 on a search for ‘two kinds of order’ out of over 2 million, and a search for John Marks shows it in the top ten, despite there being lots of other John Marks’s on the net.
Have I piggybacked on Doc’s reputation? Yes, but only because he thinks what I and my father wrote is worth reading. If his readers disagree, they’ll stop linking to him, and his reputation will go down.
Cory explains this in more detail, and how a centralised effort can never match this.
Hey, hey! It’s been so long since I have written with a pen,
its sharper than a razor, I don’t feel like Errol Flynn.
Got no computer, I can’t type the letter ‘M’.
You’re not responding right, I guess I better start again.
– ‘Last cigarette’ by Dramarama
At some point when I was growing up, it was impressed upon me by someone, I do not remember who or even when, that good handwriting was something that mattered. I don’t mean mattered just to them, but that it was something that was one of the multiplicity of ways a person could be judged, much in the same way a person could be judged by how they dressed or their smell or the manner in which they spoke. By this I do not mean the shop from which their clothes came, or what sort of aftershave they used or the specific meaning of what a person said. No, I mean were there clothes unkept, clean, carelessly worn, well fitted, did they smell unwashed or was aftershave used to mask rather than attend natural odors, were words carelessly and crudely strung together or well chosen and rich.
Clearly handwriting was another one of those ‘things-that-matter’. So I attended to it, studied calligraphy, adopted formal, social and casual hands, did a wicked gothic black letter and a distinctive cursive italic… and the years slid by.
Then tonight I found myself rummaging through one of several teetering piles of music CD’s I have not listened to for quite a while and popped on ‘Dramarama’, a reasonable but essentially unremarkable late 1980’s band and heard the song quoted above.
And it was true. In spite of churning out thousands of words a day for business and pleasure I have not written anything with a pen for more than two weeks by my best guess. And what I wrote then was a scrawled supermarket shopping list on the back of a page of last year’s The Far Side daily calender.
So does ones handwriting really say anything significant about you in this digital age? Well last year an old chum of mine got married again and asked me to do her invitations by hand, just like I did 12 years ago the last time she got married. I told her I was very out of practice and that she should get them printed but she insisted in that way she knows I cannot refuse. So I suppose she certainly thought it was ‘something that mattered’. Fortunately she provided a vast number of spare invitations as it seems that formal handwriting is most certainly not like riding a bike. It took me several days of concerted effort to dredge up that unused skill before I was producing hand lettered invitations to what I felt was an acceptable standard.
So what does it actually mean? Well there was a time when I would probably have thought a bit less of a person with ghastly handwriting. It was almost as if when handed a hard to read scribble that that person was being presumptuous and disrespectful, forcing me to try and decode it rather than making themselves clear. It was rather like someone who does not deign to look at you whilst addressing you.
But times do change. Although it might still irritate, I do not really accord quite so much stock to the quality of a person’s written hand. In this age of print-outs and IR networks there are people I know very well indeed and yet have probably never even seen what their handwriting looks like.
Perhaps it still is important, just not in quite the same nuanced way it once was. Still, I do hope my friends marriage proves more durable than the last one as I do not look forward to doing her invitations for a third time.
I must confess that I don’t know much about software. I know that it is logical instruction stuff that enables me to do interesting things with my computer and that it is made up of bits, bytes, bobs, bangles, beads and a couple of egg-whites. I also know that it is fabricated by frightfully whizz-bang clever chaps who possess powers far beyond my ken.
I did not know, though, that they were the footsoldiers fighting to bring down Capitalism but, according to Mr. Soderberg, that is exactly what they are.
A word of warning before you open the linked article (if, indeed, that is what you are minded to do): it is a ponderously long and narcolepsy-inducing marxist tract of the kind that I seldom can be bothered to wade through any more but for the inclusion of this early caveat:
“The article address readers sympathetic to the Marxist project and it presumes a basic knowledge of Marxist terminology”
Clearly, it was not meant for the flinty-eyes of a Mammon-Worshipper such as me. It is a sort of shrunken-head-on-a-stick warning that all ye who venture beyond this point risk mortal peril. Well, how could I resist? That’s not a warning, it’s a challenge.
Disappointingly, though, there was no peril, mortal or otherwise and negligible challenge. The thrust of the whole piece is that there are a whole slew of software designers out there beavering away designing excellent software which they then give away for free, thus undermining the corporations who exploit their capitalist intellectual property rights to charge for their (allegedly) inferior products. According to Mr. Soderberg, this heralds the dawn of a new age when the principle of giving away one’s software products for free will be applied to all other products and thus bring about a gift-based society.
All very tedious and all very wrong. As usual when these flat-earthers pop their heads over the parapet, the article is not so much an analysis as an extensive extrapolation of wishful thinking and deeply erroneous assumptions. All Marxists tend to get throbbingly priapic at the thought of folks giving their labour and ideas away for free. For them, it is a validation of their absurd insistence that everyone must give away their labour and ideas for free whereas, truly, it is an example of the kind of voluntarism that lies at the heart of the libertarian view of capitalism.
In other words, if said designers (or collectives thereof) decide to labour for no return then that is tickety-boo by me. And if others decide to that they want a return for their labour that is also tickety-boo. They will only get that return if they produce software that pikers like me are prepared to pay for. In other words, they have to compete and whether they do so successfully is entirely a matter for them.
However the corporations that Mr.Soderberg so dislikes must be churning out some good software because if they were not, they would go bust and in quick time. But that point seems to have been lost on him. Not surprising when you see assertions like this:
“Quite to the contrary, the study supports a connection between general welfare systems and commitment to non-commercial projects”
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but there aren’t a whole lot of magnificent software programmes emerging from, say, Cuba are there?
Mistake compounds mistake as Mr. Soderberg unmasks his vision of a society changed into a gift-society by the act of giving away the software while wholly ignoring the products of capitalism that enable the volunteer designers to do what they do. Nobody is giving away computers for free, or desks or chairs or Kangol hats or pizza or Diet Coke. If Mr. Soderberg wants to excite himself over free information and ideas then let him look no further than this blog and its copious links: loads and loads of folks giving away their intellectual product for free. Does this mean we are all Marxists? Not in my reckoning.
Like all unreconstructed lefties, Mr. Soderberg believes that capitalism insists on the pursuit of profit. Capitalism neither insists nor requires any such thing. It merely requires the voluntary exchange of goods and services upon whatever terms contracting parties agree. People labouring for free is not marxism; people being forced to labour for free is marxism. It is a very easy distinction to grasp and you certainly don’t have to be a software designer to do so.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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