Threats to free speech

Here are two stories of companies threatening the free speech rights of their employees (and former employees). Both came to my attention via Slashdot.

First, who owns your twitter account? This is an issue of trade-secrets, non-compete contracts, and trademarks. The lawsuit is in Federal courts.

If you set it up as a company representative (e.g. using their name), does it belong to them? This is the issue that is contested in an ongoing court case, where the company "Phonedog" is suing a former employer who had amassed 17,000 twitter followers under the name "Phonedog_Noah". When Noah left Phonedog, he changed the name and continued to use the account. Now Phonedog wants $2.50 for each subscriber to the list. What a crock!

Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account - NYTimes.com

My first thought is that if the company wanted control over the account, they should have established it themselves. Either they should have set up their own server, or they should have established some sort of corporate account with Twitter (if Twitter allows such things). If Noah contracted with Twitter under his own authority, then it is his account. Noah is a free man, and can do whatever the fuck he wants with his account.

The other thing that bugs me is how they treat the subscribers an their property. Noah's subscribers are people with their own interests, and Phonedog can go fuck themselves if they think that they have the right to disrupt communications to these people. The question here is "what did the subscribers think that they were subscribing to?". If they wanted to hear Noah's opinion, then they are Noah's audience. If they wanted to hear about Phonedog, then they are Phonedog's audience. I'd think that the proper way to deal with this sort of divorce is to shut down the account in question, and give the subscribers the following non-exclusive options: if you want to hear Noah go to A, if you want to hear Phonedog go to B. I don't know how Twitter works, and whether this is plausible (I'm sure they'd loose a chunk of their subscribers), but it seems to be the only way to handle this split while respecting the audience.*

This lawsuit is in Federal courts. It shows why we need to invalidate all contractual arrangements that constrain a person's ability to make a living or their free speech rights (e.g. non-compete and non-disclosure agreements).

The next situation is that the Heartland institute is threatening lawsuits over alleged leaked/forged documents. It seems that they want to sue all their opponents for defamation or something. So far, there is no actual lawsuit, just vague threats. Fuck them. I think I'll jump in the pool just because of these threats.

http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/02/15/heartland-institute-responds-stolen-and-fake-documents

*An alternative would be to clone/fork the account. On the one hand, if Twitter allowed such behavior, it might expose the audience to a bunch of spam (equivalent to selling an address list). However, if the chain of inheritance is transparent, subscribers would be empowered to punish anyone who is selling the subscription list (perhaps simultaneously unsubscribing from the original feed and all cloned feeds)

Life as a start up

A fairly new book about the "networking economy" is getting some press -- "The Start Up of You", essentially encouraging college-educated professionals to treat their careers like a startup... which includes using a lot of professional networking to find new opportunities. Appropriately, it is written by the founder of LinkedIn. Based on the reviews at Amazon, it seems to be a little bit stuck in the Silicon Valley experience, and is probably targeted at white-collar corporate workers.

One commenter recommended "My Start Up Life" as a more "real" alternative.

Of course, the problem with reading a book by a big-shot Silicon Valley CEO is that not all of us want that type of life, and even for those of us who want that life, we won't be able to achieve it. One of the ideas that really bothers me (based on a superficial exposure to the book) is the notion that we need to work harder and take more risks. That works fine for some people, but most of us have obligations and lives outside of our professional activities.

My other concern is that this will be another sort of "Who Moved My Cheese"-type book -- encouraging workers to take control of their jobs, even though there are a lot of very real obstacles to doing so. Kevin Carson has expounded on these issues before.

Finally, this also brings to mind what I read in Jack Welch's book "Winning" -- that workers are completely dependent upon their employer for good recommendations. Since your boss may be a jerk, it is a good strategy to cultivate several "employment" relationships and build a network that can substitute for that reference letter from your old boss. Relying on one person (or company) may appear to be the route to economic stability, but such small, narrowly focused groups can often fail in the blink of an eye.

More education resources...

Two more potential "unschooling" resources to consider:

MIT's Online Education Prototype Opens For Enrollment 

The above Slashdot title is self-explanatory.

I've also recently found another simulation system: NetLogo. I've played with a couple of the biology simulations, and they seem pretty solid. There's tons of other science simulations, both in the built-in library and in the online database of community contributions. I haven't done any programming, but it looks like it could be a rather simple (and quick feedback) system to practice the basics of computer programming.

The real problem in our healthcare system...

Darien Worden has a good essay at C4SS describing how all this bruhaha over contraceptives coverage is just culture-war grandstanding by demagogic politicians with no interest in actually addressing the real problems of our society.

It could almost serve as a plank to the Left Libertarian platform that I'm assembling.

In defense of networking

I've been defending the social value of professional networking over at the anagorism blog, and wanted to make a comment here. The argument (as I understand it) is about how much of a role direct social interactions should play in the establishment of economic relationships, and how much this match-making process can be formalized.

My belief is that there are situations where formalization (e.g. credentials, match-making services) can be useful, but that such situations should be viewed as the exception rather than the rule. Rather, in my vision of a "good society", most relationships (including economic relationships) would be established by networking (e.g. recommendations from trusted sources). I view this as the contrast between a mass-society on one hand, and a personal society on the other. In one society, humans are commodities to be fit into predefined categories by managers, while in the other society, humans define their own needs and pursue these needs with their friends and trusted colleagues.

There are all types of problems with the formalized society, ranging from its inability to innovate to the problem of establishing universal trust in the managers. Granted, the network society can have its own problems -- two of them being wasteful competition and nepotism. I won't address the former, because I don't think it is really solved by formalization. While the later (nepotism) isn't solved by formalization either, the anagorist position provides a clear challenge for finding ways to minimize it in a network society.

The main way to accomplish this is to identify socially privileged networks (e.g. government, academia), and assure that they have some sort of open access point by which outsiders can gain access. In academia, there is a semi-formalized admission process for university, after which students can approach professors and try to develop relationships. I am usually up for establishing new access points, but am opposed to proposals that would formalize the entire system from top to bottom.

The thing that really bugs me about anti-networking critiques is that they build on the corporatist assumption that jobs are something that a deity-like employer creates, and then bestows upon an imbecile worker. In the world I live in, and the wold I want to live in, the worker plays an equal role in creating the job. I think this is undeniably true in an abstract sense (supply and demand together determine the quantity produced), but I also see it in the individual hiring decisions of managers. Managers do not necessarily decide to hire a person and then go seeking a person to fill that slot -- often they hire employees opportunistically; it is only after a prospective employee approaches them and says "here I am, here's what I can do" that the employer decides to take on the project that the employee can work on. There are a lot of pieces that have to come together to make a project work, and it takes efforts to bring them together. If you can bring your skills to someone who has the complementary pieces already, you can make things happen.

Dear Chinese: Don't send a person to the moon

To my Chinese friends and their countrymen:

I read with dismay a recent report that the Chinese state is thinking about sending humans to the moon. Meanwhile, our own idiot politicians are spewing a lot of hot air about the glory of space colonization. While these minor-demagogues justify these projects in the name of "national greatness", these activities should instead be viewed as sources of shame. We should not allow these thieves in government to spend our money on their silly propaganda campaigns while our neighbors are suffering from want of anything.

Lest you think that I object to China's technological advancement, I can only say that I welcome the discoveries that Chinese scientists are contributing to human knowledge, and I look forward to the immense expansion of scientific research and technological progress that will occur as Chinese prosperity increases. It is for this reason that I hope that China will not squander its resources on space colonization -- these funds should be allocated in a manner that accomplishes scientific and commercial goals; instead, we are at risk of being drawn into a space race that only benefits the egos of politicians.

American patents, Chinese slavery

Yesterday, I made the argument that copyright is slavery, yet I admitted that it is only a tiny bit of slavery. Today, B. Psycho inadvertently reminds me that I should not have made any such concession; Intellectual Property plays a central role in a system that comes quite close to total slavery -- the devil's bargain between American tech companies and the Chinese state.

The gist of this accusation is Chinese workers allow themselves to be worked like slaves only because various restrictions on commerce (such as Apple's patents) prevent them from making a living any other way. These laws undermine the traditional method by which a free man would earn a living -- by working under an established and experienced mentor, and eventually setting up his own enterprise using the skills he learned on the job and the reputation that he developed. However, in the modern world, this form of upward mobility is prohibited by the law (both here and in China), creating permanent classes of employers and employees -- masters and slaves. In the Apple/China situation, patents prevent the workers from being independent, but other legal arrangements can produce a similar effect. The most glaring in my mind are the "non-compete" clauses found in many employment contracts; it's too bad that most progressives are satisfied to reform slavery without eradicating it.

Copyright is Slavery

With the recent protests against SOPA and PIPA, the prosecution of Megaupload's staff, and the subsequent Anonymous attacks on the websites of various copyright enforcers (e.g. DoJ, RIAA, MPAA), it is time to distill this issue to its essence: copyright is slavery.

This statement may seem a bit extreme, since our own experience demonstrates that copyright is compatible with basic political and economic freedoms (more or less). Still, I stand by this blunt statement; copyright may be just a tiny slice of slavery, but it is still slavery.

Copyright is slavery because it empowers one person to prohibit another person from engaging in a fundamental human activity -- the sharing of songs and stories. The owners of copyright will argue that these songs and stories would not exist except for the efforts of the copyright owner (and perhaps the copyright system itself), and therefore the copyright owner does not deprive anyone of anything. This may be true in the narrow sense -- that a particular song or story would be unavailable -- but it ignores how these songs and stories interact with the human brain and are assembled into "a personal cultural catalog", as I'll call it. It is this catalog that is unjustly privatized by copyright, ultimately giving copyright owners a sort of ownership over other persons. Furthermore, the commercial value of copyright is largely derived from how humans relate to each other by sharing stories and songs, so copyright results in the privatization of our social lives by third parties and the centralization of cultural control.

Supporters of copyright dismiss the idea that our personal cultural catalogs are in any way relevant to the legitimacy of their copyrights. They point out that the assembly of our catalogs are our business, and that they did not force us to listen to their songs, nor did they force us to obsess over the characters of their stories. In some sense (they claim), copyright can be viewed as a contract between the producers and consumers of culture, where access to the story or song is only granted if the consumer agrees to respect the copyright of the producer; given this contract, if the consumer decides to weave the story or song into their own life, that is their own decision taken as a free person. Leaving aside the issue of whether slavery contracts are legitimate, this contract theory of copyright does not hold water. The main reason is that no such contract exists. Without an explicit contract (agreed to before any exchange takes place), a person cannot be expected to understand the implications of the restrictions that are being placed on him. Furthermore, there are only some situations in which such a contract could even be feasible -- such as when purchasing a book or entering a movie theater; the idea of a contract is absurd when copyrighted content is broadcast to our radios or televisions. Finally, the most important parts of our cultural catalogs are collected when we are children, and children cannot be expected to enter into contracts that will restrict their actions for their entire lives.

So that's my argument that copyright is a form of slavery. A quick Google search did not reveal any other arguments for this position. Still, if you want a more elaborate legalistic examination of the issue, I refer you to Stephan Kinsella.

Let's wrap up with a song (Copyright Slavery, by Der Plan [German with some English phrases])

Philip Coogan’s *Paper Promises*

Tyler Cowen is promoting Philip Coogan’s *Paper Promises*.

The Amazon blurb reads:

For the past forty years western economies have splurged on debt. Now, as the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid, we find ourselves again in crisis. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with the crises in the 1930s and 1970s, governments will fall, currencies will lose their value, and new systems will emerge. Just as Britain set the terms of the international system in the nineteenth century, and America in the twentieth century, a new system will be set by today's creditors in China and the Middle East. In the process, rich will be pitted against poor, young against old, public sector workers against taxpayers and one country against another.

So, this raises the question of what will happen if America (and the debt-ridden world) does not accept the system proposed by China and the Middle East. I suppose we would be cut off from their credit. I hope that we have the self-respect to do so. Given that the credit offered by China and the Middle East is just wealth that has been looted by those states, we would be morally justified in rejecting it.

Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout

Wikipedia will be offline tomorrow in protest of two bills before Congess -- SOPA and PROIP. The reason is basically this:

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

More at: English Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout - Wikimedia Foundation

International Trade

This is a plank of my "Left-Libertarian Platform". This post may be updated to better explain the left-libertarian position on this issue, and therefore the comments section is not the best place for esoteric discussion. However, I would appreciate comments that help to clarify the left-libertarian position. Please let me know if I have overlooked an important aspect of this issue, if many left-libertarians disagree with my description of the issue, or if there is a particularly good external resource discussing this issue in depth.

America's political and economic elite have internationalized protectionism and monopoly under the deceptive banner of "Free Trade Agreements". These treaties restrict the actions of citizens on both side of the border, while transferring state powers from representative local institutions to international corporations. The entire notion of these agreements is based on the cowardly logic that our domestic economic dysfunction is caused by the economic decisions of foreign countries. Rather than fret over their "unfair" trade practices, our leaders should be focusing on removing the rot from our own institutions.

Free trade does not require hundred-page treaties; it can and should be implemented by simple, unilateral decisions to remove barriers to cross-border trade. If a foreign country wishes to offer us subsidized exports, then we should take advantage of that opportunity rather than waste time pondering what the market would look like in an idealized world where every nation adopted our preferred economic policies. These treaties are one of many ways that America's ruling class co-opts the political system of developing countries, to the detriment of the citizens of both countries, thereby fueling resentment against the USA. [see Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks]

While there are legitimate concerns about developing commercial relations with tyrannical regimes that plunder their people's wealth, such concerns are rarely a factor in deciding actual American trade policy. More often, trade restrictions are designed to protect the (often ill-gotten) wealth of American companies abroad, or suppress any challenge to American geopolitical superiority.

Left-libertarians support the following changes to American foreign trade policy:

• End the embargo on Cuba
• Stop demanding that trade partners enact domestic economic reforms (particularly with respect to foreign ownership of capital) as a condition for allowing Americans to trade with them.

Copyright, Patents, and Trademark

This is a plank of my "Left-Libertarian Platform". This post may be updated to better explain the left-libertarian position on this issue, and therefore the comments section is not the best place for esoteric discussion. However, I would appreciate comments that help to clarify the left-libertarian position. Please let me know if I have overlooked an important aspect of this issue, if many left-libertarians disagree with my description of the issue, or if there is a particularly good external resource discussing this issue in depth.

The existing system of intellectual property (IP) in the USA is corrupt. This system is supposed to promote innovation, facilitate honest commerce, and fairly reward productive work; yet, in reality it stifles creativity, enables fraud, and allows a plutocratic elite to transform their political power into monopoly profits. To make maters worse, in response to public disdain for the restrictive privileges granted to the IP industry, Congress is resorting to increasingly intrusive enforcement methods that threaten to disrupt the Internet and limit freedom of speech (e.g. the DMCA).

Left-libertarians support radical reform, if not abolition, of the intellectual property system in America and worldwide. In addition to the harm caused to Americans -- as consumers, producers, and citizens -- the USA's IP cartel is restricting prosperity-promoting international trade. They demand punitive trade restrictions on any country that does not provide them with powers similar to those that they have in the USA. These mandates are enshrined in treaties such as NAFTA and CAFTA, which have had the effect of limiting access to life-saving drugs (along with other technologies) for the residents of these developing nations. The people of America have been used as bargaining chips in these efforts to extend the USA's exploitative system of IP to countries that America's plutocratic elite have plundered for many decades (with the help of local elites). [see International Trade]

To address these problems, we must first recognize that intellectual property is a government policy (as specified in the USA's Constitution), not a natural right (as asserted by advocates such as Sonny Bono). As such, we are justified in limiting these grants of monopoly privilege in whatever manner serves the public interest. We support the following reforms to limit the powers granted by IP:

Copyright:

• Immediate revocation of any copyright that has extended beyond its initial time-span (i.e. nullification of the retroactive provisions of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act).
• Elimination of the variable-time components of copyright duration (e.g. "life + 70 years) so that there is never any doubt over whether a copyright is still effective.
• Reduction of the term of copyright so that important aspects of culture become public within a reasonable time. The initial term of American copyright (14-28 years) is sufficient to maintain most of the commercial value of most copyrights, while recognizing the role of the general public in creating value for cultural goods.
• Expansion of "fair use" exemptions to prevent copyright from being used as a tool for silencing critics.

Patent:

• Greater scrutiny of inventions before granting patents, so that competing inventors do not need an army of lawyers to protect them from unjustified patent suits.
• Greater stringency on the criteria used for deciding if an invention is patent-worthy.

Trademark:

• Non-transferability of trademark to parties that cannot reasonably be expected to provide a product or service that is comparable to that provided by the original owner of the trademark (e.g. the Cult Awareness Network).

Enforcement:

• Limiting IP enforcement to civil cases seeking monetary compensation comparable to the lost profits arising from IP infringement.
• Revoking IP (partially or fully) whenever the owner exaggerates the powers granted by IP, or denies the fair use rights of others.

A left libertarian platform

It is often hard to describe what "left libertarianism" is, particularly because the movement includes many idiosyncratic (and strongly expressed) opinions. Furthermore, any explanation is at risk of being bogged down by preconceived notions about "libertarianism" and "anarchism". Finally, it is often difficult to clearly distinguish between ideology and utopianism.

To avoid these communication problems, I'd like to lay out the main agenda of left-libertarianism in the form of a political party platform. I'm not suggesting that left-libs actually attempt to implement this platform through electoral and legislative politics; I'm just trying to present the left-lib perspective in a manner that is compatible with mainstream political discourse. I'd like these articles to be accessible to readers who are not familiar with libertarian debates. I also would like for readers to decide that they support part of the left-lib agenda even if they don't accept the more abstract conclusions about institutional analysis and moral philosophy, or the ultimate goals of some activists.

Inevitably, the opinions expressed here are my own, being informed by my engagement with the Left Libertarian community. Some planks will be summaries of common arguments made by left-libs, others will be my own attempt to understand an issue in light of the principles and concerns that seem to motivate left-libertarianism. I see two main principles in left-libertarianism: eliminate legal (i.e. forcible) obligations as much as possible; eliminate barriers to attaining the basic necessities of life. 

Below are a list of issues that I intend to address. I appreciate any input; whether it be suggestion for additional planks, independent attempts to write a plank, or links to influential writings on these issues.

Planks:
Copyright, Patents, and Trademarks
International Trade 
Immigration
Global prosperity
Labor law
Cultural diversity
Terrorism
Banking
Secrecy
Free speech
Religious freedom
Sexism
Debt
Military intervention
Taxes
Victimless crimes
Death penalty
Social services
Corporations
Elections
Contracts
Privacy
Pollution
Licensing
Police and prosecuters
Education
Domestic slavery
Abortion
Healthcare
Guns
Due process

The election horserace is not news

Once again, we have descended into election season and the news media will be full of campaign coverage. This is a damaging habit for our society; many important issues will be ignored, and these conversations will reinforce the pernicious attitude that electoral politics are of supreme importance. While many intelligent people have written rants against this sadly predictable shift in attention, I'm thinking that we can do more. I'm thinking that this could be the motivation for a movement to pressure the news media to maintain coverage of broad issues, and not dwell of the idiocy of the campaign. What do you think?

I don't have many ideas right now for how to organize this opposition, aside from writing a letter to my typical news station -- NPR. But I'll give a little outline of how much coverage is appropriate for the campaign.

The first consideration is whether campaign news is useful -- will it affect any of my decisions. I can see two possible uses: helping me decide which candidate (if any) to support; and helping me to anticipate policy changes that may occur over the next five years. However, most of this coverage is useless to the vast majority of people who will be voting for a candidate: either they have already decided, they aren't paying attention, or they will wait to see what the situation is as their own election-day approaches. I'm guessing that the only people who find this information useful are the big donors and party activists who are trying to figure out who has the best shot... but these political junkies will get their news from specialized publications, not mainstream outlets. As for predicting future policies, that's pretty useless at this point: elections are pretty unpredictable, as are the actual policies that will be implemented by the elected candidate. After all, G.W. Bush gave every indication that he was opposed to nation-building ("humble foreign policy" and all), and we saw how his Presidency played out.

So even if this reporting is not useful, it is still news. I'd still like to hear the results from the Iowa caucus, and that Bachmann dropped out. That would take all of 30 seconds to report; it does not justify an hour of "special coverage", plus all-day analysis the next day. Also, it is good to be informed about how our political system works, and so it's good to have an occasional feature story about how political campaigns are waged, but the day-to-day updates are just absurd.

So why do the news agencies focus on the election? Is it because they think it's important? These people do tend to be political junkies. Is it because it is easy? They can collect all their facts from election judges and campaigns (and polling data is common enough). However, I don't see how it's any easier for a talk-show to focus on this issue over any other -- there are plenty of other experts to invite on the show (but maybe political advocates are more eager and polished than non-political experts?). Finally, do they think this is what their audience wants? There are plenty of political junkies out there. This comes down to being a culture war of sorts (without the violence and harassment of the Republican's culture war) -- will news programming be determined by the interests of partisan hacks and those who have succumbed to the cult of the Presidency, or by the rest of us who realize that real life and real change is best found in places other than the campaign trail?

Michael Eisen on censoring dangerous knowledge

Michael Eisen has some interesting comments on the validity of (self-) censoring scientific publications. He argues that this increase in the transmisability of the flu (among ferrets) is not particularly important, and therefore this should be seen as being purely a test case for whether the scientific establishment will self-censor, and what do we define as "dangerous knowledge". As many pundits have pointed out, suppressing the details of the experiments is unlikely to make anyone any safer -- either because the details will be leaked easily enough, or  because it would be straightforward for anyone with the relevant skill-set to replicate the experiments, with or without the details.

Philosophical Diquisitions on Enhancement Technology

John Danaher has another excellent Disquisition, revisiting the topic of artificial enhancement of human abilities and whether it should generally be seen as a type of cheating.

What Republicans don't get about racism

The racist "Ron Paul" newsletters are in the news again (just heard about it on NPR). If you know the story, basically Ron Paul and his supports claim that the racist comments were written by a staff member and slipped by Paul's lax editorial oversight; Paul disagrees with all of it, and there's nothing more to say. Unfortunately for Paul, there is more to say, and I doubt that he will say it because -- like most Republicans -- he doesn't understand the totalitarian danger that lurks in racism.

Most Republicans recognize that "racism is wrong", but it is the wrong sort of "wrong". They think of it as an intellectual error. Or a type of meanness. Either way, they think of it as a failure of the individual who is  racist. They ignore any  social aspects of racism more profound than self-segregation. They ignore that racism is fundamentally a political ideology, justifying the oppression of some people by others. They ignore that its continued prevalence is a social failure, not just a personal failure.

Most Republicans have internalized the conclusion that racism is "very wrong", but they way they apply this conclusion illustrates that they still don't get it. They still focus on the individual expressions of racism, while ignoring the social structure behind it. If one black racist acts threatening towards a white guy, they throw a fit and then get all self-righteous when the traditional anti-racist coalitions don't see it as anything more important than regular street crime. Republicans do this because they don't see the political nature of racism, and they can't distinguish between racism that is politically impotent (i.e. black racism) and racism that could lead to tyranny (i.e. white racism).

This is the stuff that Ron Paul doesn't get about racism, and why he too often tolerates the company of racists (e.g. the people who wrote his newsletters and his 2008 anti-Latino advertisements) -- he doesn't get how these individual acts fit into a larger system of oppression.

For more thoughts on related issues, see Gary Chartier's summary of the relationship between "left-wing market anarchism and Ron Paul"

When knowledge is dangerous

Well, it's finally happened: in the course of researching a disease, someone has created a virus that could decimate the human population, and states are moving towards censoring the findings:

For the first time ever, a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics. 

In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.  

The intent of the "authorities" (both scientific and legal) seems to be that the details of these experiments be restricted, so that only "legitimate scientists" have access to the information needed to replicate the experiments. I'm torn on this issue: clearly we don't want to hand a weapon of mass destruction to a homicidal maniac, but this restriction on scientific communication could usher in its own problems.

I don't have a clear thesis to argue for, so I just want to list a number of points that need to be considered while debating this decision:

• The scientific establishment (epitomized by the journals Nature and Science) wants to maintain its independence from political institutions and will resist any formal censorship. That is all well and good, but we still need to be concerned about self-censorship. The openness of science is integral both to its progress (addressed below) and to its authority among the public. This notion of "legitimate scientists" risks encouraging the notion that professional scientists are elitist snobs who want to rule over the ignorant masses, in part by keeping them ignorant. This type of move is very dangerous both for science and for democracy.
• Censorship can at best delay the independent development of this technology (10-20 years, I'd say). It also is likely to retard the progress of mainstream research into infectious diseases, with the extent dependent upon how well implement the system of access is. Regardless of the calculus here, the point is that we cannot stop technologies from spreading to our enemies, and the best strategy for protecting ourselves may paradoxically be to allow technologies to spread freely, while dedicating our resources on maximizing our own capabilities to respond to infectious diseases -- whether natural or engineered.
• The release of a pathogen like this new flu virus will probably be either ineffective or suicidal. Either the virus won't spread well and the outbreak will not expand, or it will expand rapidly and affect the entire globe. Anyone seeking to use it as a tool for "Clash of Civilizations" terrorism would be extremely foolish. While the terrorist may be able to inoculate himself and his close associates, the only societies that could engage in widespread inoculation are Western and Japan. So there would be some terrorists who may be able to use this weapon effectively, but they aren't our typical Islamist boogeymen (think: Unabomber, or White Supremacists)

I'm sure that they'll be a lot of debate on this topic in the future.

The international post-humanist movement

I'm getting sick of these "all American" fascists trying to shut up anyone who offers a cultural vision that threatens to supplant their own religo-national ideal. I'm used to them attacking liberals and progressives (by which, I do not mean Democrats), but their recent anti-Islamic crusades are really starting to bug me. First, the fashion police attack Dunkin Donuts because of a scarf worn by Rachel Ray; now the WWJD-shirts are trying to drive advertisers away from the show "All-American Muslim". Oh, and then there's the whole "Ground Zero Mosque" BS.

I'm not gonna let them ostracize every group that disagrees with their bizarre belief system.

I'm getting sick of these skirmishes. I want to confront them directly, because I know that these stone-throwers can be defeated -- just like al Quaeda and its sympathizers can be. These movements are primitive, and are heading to the dustbin of history. I figure that the best way to neutralize them (and minimize the damage that they do) is to have them focus their hatred on a social movement that they have no hope of defeating. For that role, I propose:

The International Transhumanist Movement

Basically, the point here is to tell these barbarians that everything they hold sacred is a load of crap, and that we fully intend to leave them in the dust. We will tell them that all of their differences -- be them religious or nationalist -- are nothing compared to the difference between the post-humanist goal and everything that has come before. We embrace science and technology. We seek artificial intelligence, and we will happily become cyborgs. We will put all of their superstitions behind us, and realize a wonderful world of technophilic hedonism. We intend to become so powerful that they will be little more than ants to us, and their culture will only continue to exist due to our grace.

The problem is, we have only been drifting in this general direction, not seeking it whole-heartedly. There are a few organizations seeking to address the issues of our post-human future, but they do not engage in the culture war. Perhaps there is good reason -- maybe the idea of post-humanity is repulsive to most people. I just read Ian Bank's "Use of Weapons" (part of the Culture series), and I'm kinda jazzed about the possibility to live a pleasant life while simultaneously undermining these authoritarian movements.

I don't know what is the best strategy, but I expect that the conservatives will start attacking the transhumanist movement within my lifetime, as an ideal target for their politicized nostalgia. For now, I can rest knowing that technophilic hedonism is well established in our culture...

All intellectuals should learn how to program a computer

Mattan Griffen at General Assembly argues that all entrepreneurs need to learn how to write computer programs. He basically argues that if you have an idea about how to make the world a better place, you need to be able to implement it at least at a rudimentary level. He sums it up in this pithy assertion:

Very quickly, society is becoming divided into two groups: those that understand how to code and therefore manipulate the very structure of the world around them, and those that don't – those whose lives are being designed and directed by those that do know how to code

I'll extend this, and assert that all intellectuals need to learn how to write programs. The gist of my argument is that we now have ready access to incredibly powerful tools for manipulating information. If you cannot use these tools, then you cannot manipulate information at the same level as your peers, and therefore you cannot participate in the modern intellectual community.

Personally, I have encountered many situations where a "philosophical" issue would benefit greatly from the sorts of calculations that computers can perform easily. Most notable is the demand for mathematical modelling or simulation: it often is not possible to fully explore the implications of your assumptions without explicit modelling. This applies to political philosophy and social theory just as it applies to biology. I have even seen students of the history of science who could have benefited from computer simulations -- for instance, some classic scientific texts (e.g. Galleleo's) describe experimental results that are inconsistent with modern scientific knowledge; historians may try to examine this issue by recreating the experimental conditions of the historical scientist, but this requires immense work and ends up being a guessing game. Computer simulations can examine the effect of possible confounds much more efficiently.

An added bonus of formal modelling is that it forces the thinker to be explicit about their assumptions, so it is a great aid to communication. Too often, philosophers (both amateur and professional) are just talking past each other.

So, my advice to all the young thinkers is this: if you want to learn how to think, learn how to program.

Update: I suppose that I should provide some tips on how to learn programming. Personally, I took a college level class, and then taught myself in the context of some projects I was working on, and I just picked up bits and pieces from different sources (another self-taught programmer, some books, and some websites). It probably was not the most efficient approach, but it worked well enough.

Right now, I can recommend two sources:

• Eclipse for Total Beginners (to learn Java)
• The Alice programming environment (a toy language for 3-D storytelling)

good luck.

All nations are invented

A big fuss is being made over Gingrich's comment that the Palestinians are an 'invented' people. I don't really understand what Gingrich was trying to get at -- this assertion is often used as a premise to deny the legitimacy of Palestinian demands for self-governance. Maybe this is what Gingrich was getting at, but he does say that he supports the idea of Palestinian statehood (as long as they don't fight for it, I guess)... so it's hard to say. Either way, his "invention" comment seems to be a non-sequiter in the context of where he spoke it, so I can only assume that he's using some sort of dog-whistle to get votes from the supremacist wing of the (Christian) Zionist movement.

Anyway, the discussion of whether any particular nation was "invented" is kinda pointless, since nationality is intrinsically a myth. All nations are invented.

The "University challenge" -- decreasing costs; increasing access

At the Economist magazine, the "Schumpeter" columnist discusses some changes in the structure of higher education, and offers some suggestions for decreasing costs and thereby increasing access to education:

Schumpeter: University challenge | The Economist

I don't have any particular comment on this, but one of the commenters at The Economist website brought up the "University of the People" which seems to be an establishment-backed effort to develop a model for low-cost online education.

Physics simulations: ideal gas

I'm thinking of shifting my focus more towards educational issues, with a focus on how education shapes power relationships in our society. I figure that part of the "libertarian agenda" in education consists of empowering people to control their own education, so that they aren't forced to participate in any hierarchical/oppressive institutions.

As such, building awareness of new educational tools is key. In that spirit, I recommend PhET, which produces simulations to help instill an intuitive understanding of scientific concepts. The most recent simulation is pretty good... a simulation of transitions between states of matter, and also seems to demonstrate some aspects of the ideal gas law (i.e. PV=nRT). The only problem I noticed is that when the user increases the volume, thereby decompressing the substance, the temperature does not drop... or maybe it's been too long since I studied thermodynamics.

Anyway, check it out:

Click to Run

Vegimite > Marmite

It's so hard to get my hands on Vegimite and Marmite here in the USA. If stores do carry these yeast extracts, the portions are small and the price is high. For a long time, I couldn't find Vegimite at all, even though it was it was what originally turned me on to yeast extract as a food (I've always loved YE it as a microbiological growth medium...which I actually did eat once). Fortunately, today I encountered a store clearance at a grocery store and was happy to find the awesome Australian ale dregs, so I was finally able to compare the two side-by-side.

This confirmed my suspicions, Vegimite is better than Marmite, which explains why the Marmite never lived up to the high expectations that had been established by Vegimite. By smell, the Vegimite is more hoppy. I'll be evaluting the taste again in the near future... I'm so happy.

For you serious people, I am NOT turning this into a food blog.

In fact, I'm thinking that I'm going to focus much more on educational (and scientific) issues, as opposed to broader issues about power relations. I've got a bunch of topics that I want to address, but I'm slowed down by my long-windedness. If you've got any topic you want discussed, advice for how to approach this topic, or good blogs for me to check out, please leave a comment.

Market Communism

NPR's "All Things Considered" aired an inspiring story about and Indian medical charity and how they manage to fund eye surgery for patients without the means to pay (India Eye Care Center Finds Middle Way To Capitalism : NPR). Basically, they charge the market rate to the rich, which in turn subsidies the poor:

That high quality allows Aravind to attract patients who are willing to pay market rates. Then it takes the large profit made on those surgeries to fund free and subsidized surgeries for poor people — like K. Karuthagangachi....

it's only possible to provide free surgeries on the scale that Aravind does by running an operating surplus, like a profit-making company. That's what Aravind manages to do, even though it's legally a charitable trust.

On one hand, this is not all that surprising--American hospitals (and often lawyers) operate on a similar principle. My fear is that, like their American counterparts, these organizations may eventually turn into "profit-making" enterprises for their highly paid managers, while using their supposed "non-profit" status as a way of winning special privileges from the local community.

Anyway, this story shows the stereotypical Indian twist -- finding a way to radically reduce the cost of a service:

Fifteen years after it was founded, Aravind's ability to provide free and subsidized surgeries was being limited by the high cost and availability of the intraocular lenses needed for cataract surgery. That's not a problem most charitable organizations could overcome...

But Aravind attacked the problem with the help of an American social entrepreneur named David Green. Green had been helping Aravind collect donated lenses to be implanted in their cataract patients. But donations were averaging only about 25,000 a year. That wasn't nearly enough to meet Aravind's needs, and the lenses cost several hundred dollars to buy. So Green helped Aravind set up its own lens manufacturer on-site, a subsidiary named Aurolab.

"Now today Aurolab sells, I think this year it will be 1.8 million lenses," he says. "So you can see that when you have a business model, an economic model, it enables something to scale because it's not dependent upon charity, which is fickle."

And even more remarkable: By squeezing out profits made by middlemen in the production and distribution chain, Aurolab is now providing some lenses at the astoundingly low price of just $2.

This is a refreshing story showing how a "communist-minded" person can leverage "capitalist" processes to transform the lives of many who have been left out of the system. This isn't traditional philanthropy -- since the market service and the charitable service are intimately connected. We could even say that the charitable impulse came first, and the marketing impulse followed in its wake. The desire to help the poor inspired a business model that may not have occurred to a person who was only looking for profit. In contrast to the doctrinaire bickering that I always read on the web (touting the primacy of profit-driven capitalism or charity-driven communism), it is nice to see that in some situations, charity can drive advances in productivity and market savvy can help those who are incapable of helping themselves. Maybe there is hope for humanity.

Don't hollow out the military; shrink it

The military establishment is claiming that across-the-board budget cuts would "hollow out" the military. They are probably right -- the USA probably cannot maintain a global military presence with a smaller military budget.

The solution is clear: pull back on the military's forward deployment and aggressive posturing. For instance, don't establish a new base in Darwin, Australia.

Let's see if that becomes part of the debate. I bet only Ron Paul would make this point.

"See the violence inherent in the system"

Previously, I described how some of the Occupy tactics were inherently radical and were an open challenge to the authority of the established system of power (i.e. law enforcement). In such a situation, the protesters should expect a forceful response. However, that does not mean that I believe that they deserved what they got. A humane (and self-confident) system should not resort to such violence in order to enforce its laws on non-violent resisters.

One of the main distinctions that I made was between breaking the law and obstructing law-enforcement. Law breaking is not radical, especially if the law-breakers passively accept being arrested; obstructing law-enforcement is radical. While I think that the Nov 9 protests at UC Berkeley fall into the later category, the Nov 18 protests at UC Davis seem to be a simple act of law-breaking, yet it was met with a similar level of violence (update below). Here's the video:



Given the brutal responses to these Occupy Cal protests, and other Occupy protests around the country, the public mood is starting to change (at least, mine is). William Lind provides an interesting comment on the tactical achievements of these protests. James Fallows offers some well-worded comments from the mainstream liberal perspective.

this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population... And by the way, when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?

Now brutal police tactics are becoming the issue. Public outrage over police behavior can move in two directions -- reform or revolution. Of course, reform is what mainstream liberals (and probably most of the student protestors) are hoping for; they want a system that is basically like today's, but a little more sensitive to people's rights and needs. The alternative is a radical restructuring of our social relations, which is probably the desired outcome for some of the protesters. The non-violent protests of Nov 9 were bound to provoke some sort of forceful response -- yet they were still not violent. They force observers to ask themselves whether "the system" is worth this sort of violence. My preferred outcome is a little of each -- that we strongly question the law enforcement mandates (such as drug prohibition) that have enlarged our police forces and created constant conflict between law enforcement and much of the public (a hope echoed by E.D. Kain)

It all brings to mind a scene the comic/satirical classic, Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- when some peasants refuse to recognize the authority King Aurthur and are subsequently manhandled into submission:



Come, see the violence inherent in the system.

Update: I found another video of the UC Davis event that shows a broader perspective, and it looks like the line of students were blocking the cops who were trying to leave with a protestor who they had arrested. So these students were obstructing law-enforcement.




Update 2: This 3-part video shows the whole confrontation. In part 2, around 6 minutes, you can see the crowd encircling the cops yelling "set them free" after which a "mic check" is held and someone announces that they cops will be allowed to leave only if they release the people who they had arrested (for setting up camps, or something).

Occupy America

Shit. I'm starting to get the feeling that America is under occupation...

New Video of Police Brutality at Occupy Oakland - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

What is the economic value of a college degree?

I've been pondering whether tuition-free university education for everyone is a worthwhile ideal (I doubt it). However, some people claim that such opportunities are essential to prevent the economic division of our society into "haves and have-nots". One of the favorite statistics offered by this crowd is the income difference between people with degrees and those without. Any educated person should recognize that such statistics are just the starting point for deciding what the value of a degree is (i.e. correlation is not causation). The obvious considerations is that people who complete college tend to have been born with more opportunities in their life (colleges select for motivated people from higher SES groups), and that these are surely contributing to the income differences, independent of actually attending college. There is also the feature of "indentured servitude" resulting from college debt -- the graduates HAVE to work hard to cover their expenses.

Anyway, I found one good discussion of what the value may be (though it isn't a proper analysis of the factors involved). For the most part it provides recommendations for books and reports looking at the issue.

Something more for me to read.

Occupy Cal: what can you learn at university?

Part I: Occupy Cal, and the function of the university
Part II: Occupy Cal: The exclusive university

The Occupy Cal protestors have accused the university of functioning to divide the "haves" from the "have nots". Everyone recognizes that attending a university can provide economic advantages, and that many people are not able to attend a university (especially not their top-choice), so it's easy to see the logic behind that assertion of divisiveness. I argued that the exclusivity of universities contributes to their economic efficiency and educational effectiveness, so increasing enrollment and decreasing tuition is not an option. How can a university provide its services without excluding a large portion of our society from economic, intellectual, social, and political opportunities?

To address this issue, I intend to examine the benefits that the university provides to its students, and whether the university structure is the only way (or even the best way) for most people to gain those benefits. If there are alternative ways to acquire those benefits that do not require selectivity in admissions, then the university can either reform to adopt those more inclusive practices, or alternative institutions can provide these services to the people who were excluded from the university.

Since the professed ideal of the university is to advance learning, I'll start with that topic (a separate post will address the issue of getting "one's foot in the door" by way of professional networking and credentials). As described below, I do not believe that an institution like the University of California is the appropriate context for most people to study.

To begin, it is worth noting that many people -- both those who hold degrees and those who don't -- dismiss the effectiveness of formal education, especially higher education (see yesterday's comment). Many people are fond of the expression "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.", or dismiss degrees as "Bull Shit, More Shit, Piled Higher and Deeper". I can attest that many people have developed strong critical thinking and writing skills without formal "higher education". There are also many examples of successful entrepreneurs who did not attend a university. A degree clearly is not a perfect predictor of economic or intellectual potential. Likewise, I have seen many students (in both high school and universities) who clearly had no motivation for book learning, and were therefore wasting their time by enrolling in classes; they would have learned more at almost any job.

With that being said, I do believe that many people (including myself) benefit greatly from the education offered at a university. I can think of no better way to quickly absorb a field of knowledge than to have a series of experts tell you what to study and how to verify that you have learned it. During that four-year grind through one abstraction after the next, it can be helpful to have a carrot dangled in front of you (in the form of a degree and the opportunities it offers) to make sure you stay focused and learn the full breadth of knowledge within the field.

What may be apparent for the above regimen is that there is no reason that it should cost $15,000 a year (UC budget pdf). Many universities have placed their curricula online specifically to facilitate independent study, and professors regularly post their syllabi online for their students. If a student studies 10 subjects in a year, then books should cost about $1000 if they are being purchased from the university book store, and work is being done to lower this price. If this is all a university offers (as some people suggest that it is), then a motivated student should be able to teach themselves the standard subjects without the expense or bother of the university.

The problem with the above setup is that it does not provide the student with either the peer group or the expert feedback that can address the student's confusions and assure that he does not walk away with a false understanding of the topic. If simply finding a few study partners were sufficient, then a university would not be needed-- meeting at the local library should be possible. However, it may not be easy to find good study partners from the general population; the academic exclusivity of the university (applied even at the level of individual courses) identifies groups of students with similar capabilities, and the administrative structure of the class pressures students to study the material at the same pace. If we could develop a system to allow independent students to find appropriate study partners -- those who are able to study the topic at the specified pace-- then this benefit of the university would be diminished. One troubling possibility is that by attracting competent students to their community, the university depletes their availability in the outside community, and essentially gains leverage via a network effect and a sort of "vendor lock-in" applying to the higher-education industry as a whole.

But leaving aside the availability of study partners, we still have to consider the traditional explanation for why the university is a good learning environment -- expert guidance. Peers often cannot identify each other's mistakes or explain concepts effectively. Only experts can reliably correct students or answer their questions. This part of teaching is very labor intensive, and since the labor comes from experts, it can be very expensive. To top it off, upper-level classes (in sciences, at least) often cover current research topics and rely on the extensive expertise of the instructor. Sometimes the course material is so new that it has not been synthesized into any standard text, and a detailed syllabus cannot be provided prior to the beginning of the semester. At this level, the content of the course can sometimes be dominated by the contribution of the students themselves, and relies on an extensive shared body of knowledge that can be hard to create outside of a formal program with several years of instruction.

The expense of this type of education forces us to ask "exactly what kind of higher education can be provided to the entire population?". Higher education is typically divided into three categories, and California supports all three as public institutions: the research university, the teaching university, and the community college. The first category is the most expensive to maintain, in part because it demands the highest level of expertise from the faculty (expertise arising from ongoing cutting-edge research). This is what I'm normally thinking of when I discuss the university, and the exclusiveness arises directly from the fact that there simply are not enough experts at this level to teach every student in this style. Furthermore, most students probably would not benefit from the type of instruction offered by these experts; only students who have mastered the broad knowledge of a field of study are at a level to understand what these professors are trying to teach. To top it off, these professors are not necessarily the best teachers, and they stereotypically have a hard time explaining concepts to people who do not already have extensive knowledge of the field.

The alternative is to learn from those experts who decided to focus on teaching, with research being a minor part of their activities (all people who hold a Ph.D. in sciences have successfully conducted research at some point). These professors are often better teachers than the professors who focus on research -- having more experience at teaching, and paying more attention to the theory of teaching. These professors would probably be the main workforce of "universal higher education". At the large research universities they often teach the lower-level classes, and they dominate at the smaller colleges that don't maintain active research programs. The third group of experts are those who have mastered their field of study, but have not conducted research of their own. We commonly see this among high-school teachers and the teaching-assistants at universities, but there is no reason that this level of expertise wouldn't be sufficient for most adult learning. My impression is that many instructors at the community college level have this sort of expertise.

The point of all of this is that when we talk about "universal higher education", we shouldn't be thinking of institutions like the University of California -- we should be thinking of the California Community Colleges. Rather than focusing on the institutions that educate the students with the greatest academic achievement, we should be focusing on the institutions that help the people who have had the most trouble. Even if the coursework offered by these institutions is no more advanced than that offered by many high-schools, there is still value in making these services available to the general public because many people were unable to learn these topics in high school, for a variety of reasons.

Focusing on community colleges rather than 4-year bachelor-degree programs is not only much more cost effective (~1/3 of the cost for instruction, as I understand it), but it also is more compatible with the ideal of a widely-educated population. Community colleges are spread throughout the community (as their name implies), enabling students to take classes without structuring their entire lives around study. This saves a lot of money that would have to be spent on room and board, and also allows a student to attend classes while holding down a regular job or raising children. While universities are attempting to be more accommodating to "non-traditional" (i.e. older) students, the basic structure of the 4-year program is optimized for young adults with no family commitments, and it would be foolish to try to extend that to the entire population.

Finally, we need to consider the elitist attitudes that prevent us from allocating our intellectual resources in a way that includes everyone. This "elitism" does not arise from the pragmatic exclusivity of the institutions of higher learning, but instead comes from our tendency to focus on the pinnacles of intellectual achievement rather than focus on enabling intellectual engagement among the broad base of society. This elitism is expressed in part by the attempts to increase the accessibility to the elite University of California, which necessarily draws resources away from the community college system. This largely reflects the selfish ambition of people with moderate opportunities who want to have the best opportunities, regardless of the poor opportunities that others have.

The other elitism comes from the fact that public science funding is often allocated to pure research in a way that provides no broad educational benefit. The decision to hire full-time researchers at national laboratories necessarily depletes the pool of experts who could be participating in broader (i.e. undergraduate) educational activities. Even professors at academic institutions often acquire so many grants that it eats into the time that they allocate to teaching. Our public scientific funding agencies has decided to pursue scientific advancement that is disconnected from broad education. This may be an appropriate decision, especially if we like our new technologies-- but if we care about public education, we need to consider how these decisions affect the allocation of intellectual resources. Scientific progress will continue at a rapid pace even if all public research funding is linked to broader educational activities, and the academic establishment needs to take a hard look at how it uses the resources that it has before it complains that outside forces are preventing it from achieving its educational mission.

What do university administrators do?

One of the main targets of the Occupy Cal movement is administrator salaries, connecting the increase of these salaries with the increase in tuition. The administrators shoot back by pointing out that their salaries make up a tiny portion of university expenditures, and that the real problem is that the legislature (the EVIL Republicans!) has cut university subsidies.

I don't know what the salaries are at Cal itself, but I've noticed extravagant salaries at other institutions (up to $1 million /year for top administrators), which doesn't always match the salaries of football coaches, but is substantially more than the salaries of even the most prominent professors.

With salaries like this, I'd expect the administrative activities of the university to be seamless-- professors would be able to quickly hire technicians, and graduate students would not have a two-month gap in their health insurance coverage following the annual renewal of coverage. But that's just a fantasy land.

I'd like to know how school administrators command such high salaries, and what they are spending their time on if not actually making sure that the administration runs smoothly. Maybe they are just glorified lobbyists, trying to eek more money out of the state. Maybe they are well-dressed sycophants, drawing money from the pockets of wealthy alumni, or perhaps they are slick PR men running immense propaganda campaigns. Maybe they are exceptionally competent administrators, but their fiefdom is so immense that it is impossible to run it efficiently.

Well, I'll hopefully find an answer as I finish reading Benjamin Ginsberg's essay at The Washington Monthgly -- Administrators Ate My Tuition. Being a PoliSci professor and JHU, he may have some insight (or he may just be venting faculty frustrations).

Occupy Cal: The exclusive university

Part I: Occupy Cal, and the function of the university.

Tuesday's protest at the University of California Berkeley campus included a declaration of an "Open University", which apparently is meant to provide a free education to anyone who wants to participate. This action is clearly motivated by the perception that university is unnecessarily exclusive, and consequently divides our society into "haves" and "have nots".

While economic success is clearly obtainable without a university degree, formal higher education is still widely perceived as the most reliable course to personal prosperity. Such education is intended to provide students with useful (i.e. marketable) skills early in their adult lives, but also enables them to build social relationships that will be advantageous throughout life. While most people recognize the value of these opportunities, it is easy to resent the fact that some people have these opportunities while others are excluded. This resentment is especially pronounced if those opportunities improve a person's ability to compete for economic and social goods without increasing the total amount of such goods in our society. I intend to address the social implications of these opportunities in a future post, but for now I want to focus on a factor of university organization that impacts both of them -- the exclusivity of the university.

Plenty of people are unable to attend the university of their choice (or any university at all) -- either they are explicitly rejected during the application process, or they decide that they do not have the financial resources to pay for tuition while also covering food, shelter, and healthcare for themselves and any dependents. Exclusion for financial reasons seems particularly unfair, since it depends more of the economic success of a student's parents than on their own virtues. Furthermore, to the extent that a university education increases a person's future earnings, economic exclusion from the university contributes to a multi-generational stratification of society based on wealth.

The origin of this economic exclusion is obvious -- the university needs money to operate (e.g. maintain buildings and pay salaries), and it therefore needs some way to motivate people to contribute money. The most straight-forward way to raise revenues is to change fees to the people who benefit most directly from the services provided, and exclude those people if they do not pay. Alternatives exist; for example, money can be raised from philanthropists or can be allocated politically. Our current university system relies on a combination of these revenue sources, with complicated mechanisms designed to maintain both accessibility and adequate instructional resources (e.g. scholarships, loans, subsidies, work-study).

The current debate over the role of the university is driven primarily by concerns over increasing tuition and the consequent student debt. The question is how to reduce the burden on the students themselves? One option is to reduce university expenditures, perhaps by increasing administrative efficiency or reducing salaries of the top administrators. The "Open University" model suggests one path to reducing administrative costs -- abandoning the evaluation and credentialing activities of the university. But more attention is given to the loss of political funding for higher education, and protestors seem most concerned with maintaining the status quo for the California educational system.

The other form of exclusivity is based on academic potential. There are pedagogic reasons for this exclusivity -- uniformity of student capabilities makes it easier to teach students simultaneously, and it increases the chance that students will be able to help each other understand the course material. This is the same reason that many courses have prerequisites. Many educational reformers have tried to integrate classrooms with students of different academic ability, but my understanding is that this normally ends up slowing the progress of the most capable students. While it may sound "elitist" to the students who are excluded, I believe it is totally appropriate to seek the company of people who will advance one's own goals while avoiding those who would inhibit them. If this exclusion is institutionalized at the level of the university, so be it.

California has maintained a three-tier system of public higher education, which traditionally allows for some exclusivity on the basis of academic potential while minimizing exclusion based on economic resources. The UC system has traditionally relied greatly on academic exclusivity, since it only had a limited number of openings for students, but everyone wanted to attend due to the extremely low tuition. This structure is changing as the UC system expands enrollment and raises tuition; UC is perhaps becoming more like other universities around the country.

Overall, I think that academic exclusivity is a good thing (in the absence of a good teaching model where all students benefit from a mixed-ability academic community), and while economic exclusivity is unfortunate, it is pretty much unavoidable at the scale of the general population. Economic exclusivity is pretty much unavoidable for anything that has a cost--as a university education does-- and the failure to pass those costs onto the final consumer results in the squandering of resources (I've seen it first-hand). Even with these costs, access can be provided to the most promising and motivated students by way of scholarships. I'd be hesitant to provide such funding to the mass of young adults who drift towards university education with giving much thought to it. These students often have plenty of time but little money, and have yet to realize the value of their time. By placing a dollar amount on the educational services that they are requesting, we can encourage them to think about what they expect to gain from attending university, and perhaps prevent a few of them from squandering a couple years of their lives engaged in activities that are not appropriate for them.

There is always room for improvement in our institutions, and perhaps we will find ways to deliver higher-educational services with less expense, or in a way that does not segregate students based on academic ability yet still enables the most capable students to excel. Until then, the exclusivity of the university is something that we have to work with, and reflects the simple truth that a university education is not right for everyone.

Occupy Cal: Whose univeristy?

The Occupy Cal crowd has decided to set up camp on the campus of UC Berkeley, despite the UC administration's vows to disassemble it. No doubt the protestors will feign surprise/outrage when the police try to evict them.

As indicated by the chants of the protestors, the issue comes down to this: whose university is it? The protestors claim some sort of democratic authority (on behalf of both the university community and the broader public for whom the university was nominally founded), yet for all their democratic/consensual formalities, they are incapable of representing those groups. They are only capable of representing those people who are willing to spend their time participating in those primitive "General Assemblies" and who are willing to lend legitimacy to the Occupy movement by participating. In the end, the Occupiers have no democratic legitimacy.

Still, the Occupiers are attempting to declare themselves as the legitimate government/owner of the university, or whatever other location they decide to occupy. This is bound to draw a forceful response from the other institutions that claim ownership/sovereignty over those sites. In some situations, that conflict may be intentional and necessary, yet I don't see how the demands of these protestors justify such conflict. Their main message is that they want the state to provide additional funding to the university -- but their tactics delegitimize those very institutions that they are seeking to expand. WTF?

In the end, these skirmishes have come down to establishing "the right to occupy" as part of the first amendment right to assemble and petition the government. I don't see the point in picking this fight. I don't want to live in a society where any mob of political activists can just set up camp in any public space -- thereby excluding everyone else from using that space.

I'm not even sure why tents matter -- except that some of the more theatrical activists like the symbolism (even as they ignore the substance). There may be some issue with people traveling great distances to participate in the protest, and not being able to afford proper housing in the area. However well this logic applies to Washington D.C. or Sacramento, I don't see how it could be relevant to these local protests (unless homelessness were some major part of the agenda). My suspicion is that these protestors are simply seeking to emulate the occupation of Tahrir Square without acknowledging the conditions that prompted Egyptians to use occupation as a tactic -- both their vulnerability to kidnapping if they dispersed, and eventually their demand for the overthrow of the government.

In the end, the university does not belong to a bunch of protestors (especially when most are the recipients of services), and declaring an "Open University" does not in any way make the benefits of the university available to the general public.

Occupy Cal, and the function of the university

The "Occupy Cal" crowd is pissed about how the University and the police treated them last Wednesday, and are calling for a "general strike" at the University of California Berkeley campus for this coming Tuesday (Nov 15). This is modeled on the "strike" at the Oakland port at the beginning of the month.

I've put the word "strike" in quotes because it does not fit the definition of "strike" as I understand it -- being the refusal of workers to continue doing their regular jobs. In both of the above "strikes", the organizers are seeking to disrupt regular economic activity by bringing in large numbers of protestors who normally do not directly participate in those economic activities.

In this case, someone supporting this action has explained why UC Berkeley is being targeted in this way:

“In calling for a strike, activists realize that the university’s function in society is to create a division between haves and have-nots. Therefore, this is meant as a special kind of strike, one where all those who have been excluded from the UC system converge on the campus and help occupy it. At the same time as we shut the university down, we open it up to all who have been excluded from it,”

This statement brings up some important issues; however, if I were to take it literally, I would say that it presents a view of our society that is both terribly naive and borderline paranoid. Instead, I will be charitable to the authors and assume that they presented this narrow view of things for the sake of rhetorical impact, and for the same reason selected as "the function" of the university one incidental effect of its activity. I assume that they intended to start a conversation among the stakeholders in the University system (UC, and academia as a whole), so let's get started.

What is the function of the university (and UC in particular)? I interpret "the function of an institution" to mean the goal being sought by the people who support and participate in that insititution. With that interpretation, the function of the university (and especially UC) is clearly not to divide our society. Still, divisiveness may be an unfortunate consequence of how the institution operates. An undeniable truth is that the people who participate in the university are often seeking their own prosperity; they are the getters, and are likely to become the "haves". This in itself is not particularly profound -- people regularly participate in activities that advance their own prosperity (from maintaining one's own home, to providing commercial services, to learning skill sets, and even seeking collaborators for projects). This is all normal and appropriate, and it is likewise appropriate that we form exclusive institutions to coordinate activities among people who are capable of advancing each other's productivity.

So how does the university produce social division by providing educational services? Stay tuned for more ideas on how that occurs (to the extent that it does), and what might be done to reduce those divisions.

Do they understand what they are doing?

This past Wednesday, riot police tried to disperse a large group from the campus of UC Berkeley. As pointed out by the Chancellor, the protestors engaged in activities that were outside of what he understands to be the tradition of "peaceful" resistance. I wonder if the protestors understood that they had crossed that threshold, and what it implies about their attitudes towards established legal authority.

For those unfamiliar with the events, this is how I understand the course of events: there was a big rally, then some people set up tents, cops amassed and told the protesters to take their tents and leave, protesters refused. A negotiator said that the protestors could occupy the plaza constantly for a week, as long as no camping equipment was set up and people didn't sleep there. When the protesters rejected this offer, the cops tried to dismantle the campsite, but were blocked by a crowd. The cops then beat their way through the crowd and took the tents.

Here's the video of part:



Here is the core of the Chancellor's letter:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

...

We call on the protesters to observe campus policy or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly non-violent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions.

Basically, the distinction that he is making is between those who use the legal system as a stage on which to protest-- using their arrest for theatrical purpose-- and those who stand outside of the legal system and try to gain sympathy when the legal system imposes itself on them.

This later activity is fundamentally radical, since it rejects the legitimacy of the legal system itself. The only alternative to the use of force is the abdication of authority by either the University administration or the police. We've seen this tactic used repeatedly in the Occupy protests, but it is also paired with rhetoric that suggests that the protestors don't comprehend how these actions are an immediate and radical threat to the establishment (e.g. "stop beating students"). On the other hand, the rhetoric of "occupation" is inherently radical, but it doesn't seem to be a turn-off to the non-radical left. People apparently treat it as nothing more than a brand. But we've also seen this contradiction in the Tea Party movement, where they simultaneously spouted radical rhetoric (including the name) even as they demanded respect from the establishment.

In the end, I'm not sure exactly what these people wish to achieve, or how they expect their actions to achieve these goals. It seems that the protests have become focused on the tactics of protest themselves -- the perpetual occupation of public space for the sake of protest, and camping as a form of protest. Right now, I don't find these to be particularly compelling reasons to get involved.

However, there are some good fights to be picked over this issue. There are plenty of cities with overly restrictive requirements for permits to gather. It may be interesting to see these rules presented as a form of class-warfare, which weaken the ability of regular people to engage in political propaganda, even as the wealthy have the alternative outlet of mass-media.

Why "99%" is not about income

In a previous post, a comment suggested that I am trying to tell the Occupy movement (i.e. the 99%ers) what they care about. The 99% slogan is clearly about income/wealth inequality, yet I insist that the "real issue" is special privileges.

I'll briefly state why I don't think that I'm projecting my own values onto their action:

1) 99% is just a slogan. It cannot encompass the subtleties of the issue.
2) Many of them have explicitly stated that their main concern is that the 1% "give back" to the community that enabled their success. There is apparent tolerance for a large income disparity, as long as there is a social safety net and opportunity for upward mobility (e.g. education subsidies).
3) Many of them have distinguished between the worthy rich (e.g. Steve Jobs) and the unworthy rich (e.g. bailed-out bankers)
4) I'd bet that if you surveyed the group, almost everyone would say that there is a problem with special privilege and subtle corruption of public institutions. A lot of them (maybe a majority) may say that income disparity itself is a problem, but I'd bet that almost all of them would also say that privilege/corruption is a problem. So I think I'm safe if I treat "privilege/corruption" as a concern that I share with the Occupy crowd, and put income inequality (per se) on the back burner.
5) If you follow the campaign finance reform movement (which I think is a big part of the Occupy movement), the concern with wealth inequality is derived from a concern with unequal political influence.

At the end of the day, I also believe that much of the wealth inequality in our country arises from special privileges and corruption of public institutions. Maybe the Occupiers don't agree, but I don't think I'm projecting my opinions on them when I focus on the solution as I see it.

The 99% are to blame

This past week saw two "riots" on college campuses. There was a bit of a scuffle with cops as the Occupy Cal group (i.e. the "99%-ers) tried to establish a campsite on campus. Across the country at Penn State, a spontaneous riot broke out following the announcement of Joe Paterno's dismissal for his failure to adequately respond to news that one of his assistant coaches was raping 10-year olds in the team showers.

Each of these confrontations is worthy of much discussion, but what I find most interesting at the moment is how the events at Penn State undermine the narrative being presented by the Occupy crowd.

Joe Parterno is the 1%. Even by the standards of University faculty, sports coaches have extremely high pay. Paterno was bringing in around a million dollars a year, while several other head-coaches bring in multimillion dollars salaries. University payscales are a perfect microcosm of the more widespread inequalities that the Occupy movement decries.

My view is that "gods are not allowed to make mistakes"-- when someone of Paterno's stature and power is this neglectful of his duties, he deserves to be thrown out on his ass. However, consider the reaction of the great masses in the Penn State community -- they defended Paterno, with massive public protest. They embraced the idea that a person like Paterno is above the law; he is so great that he can do no wrong. Even more telling, there was no Karl Rove manipulating public opinion behind the scenes. This was totally spontaneous.

I have read innumerable essays by concerned leftists pondering why the lower classes repeatedly vote against their own interests. These overly partisan egalitarians find the obvious answer -- it's the other party! (i.e. the Republicans). If they would open their eyes, this riot (which is just part of a long-standing phenomenon) would put their partisan theories to lie. There is no need for sophisticated propaganda to create massive inequality. A college education does not cause people to open up their eyes to what really matters. The truth is that most people are morons. Most people are willing slaves who fantasize about having a king. They dream of a benevelent lord who will provide them with bread and circus, absolving them of any responsibility for their own lives.

A half-century of middle class unionism and public universities has done nothing to lessen this peasant mentality among the masses. It's time to consider the possibility that democracy has failed. Democracy is impossible because when power is given to the masses, they give it right back. Those of us who want freedom will have to find it ourselves. If we want a society of equals, we will have to find it separately from the servile masses. We obviously can't physically separate ourselves from them, but we can weaken the institutions that they use to force themselves on us.

Stopping others from working is not a "general strike"

Occupy Oakland has jumped the shark with today's "general strike". From a population of over 7 million (in the San Francisco Bay Area), they managed to assemble maybe 7000 people. Based on this support from 0.1%, they felt that they had the prerogative to shut down the Oakland Port and disrupt the lives of the people who work there. I haven't heard from the organizers, but I can't imagine any reason that the port would be viewed as particularly evil -- it seems that they were just looking for a choke point in the local and national economy.

Protests shut Oakland port, tensions flare in streets | Reuters

If you're pissed at the government, then block government buildings. Leave the port alone.