American Light Novels’ Absence

I think one of the more interesting trends in anime is the massive number of adaptations of light novels done in the ’90s and 00s; it is interesting because no such trend exists in American media as far as I can tell (the closest I can think of are comic book adaptations, but of course those are analogous to the many mangas -> animes). Now, American media absolutely adapts many novels, but they are all normal Serious Business Novels. We do not seem to even have the light novel media - young adult novels do not cut the mustard. light novels are odd as they are kind of like speculative fiction novellas. The success of comic book movies has been much noted - could comic books be the American equivalent of light novels? There are attractive similarities in subject matter and even medium, light novels including a fair number of color manga illustrations.

• Question for self: if America doesn’t have the light novel category, is that a claim that the Twilight novels, and everything published under the James Patterson brand, are regular novels?

  Answer: The Twilight novels are no more light novels than the Harry Potter novels were. The Patterson novels may fit, however; they have some of the traits such as very short chapters, simple literary style, and very quick moving plots, even though they lack a few less important traits (such as including illustrations). It might be better to say that there is no recognized and successful light novel genre rather than individual light novels - there are only unusual examples like the Patterson novels and other works uncomfortable listed under the Young Adult/Teenager rubric.

Cultural Growth through Diversity

Leaving aside the corrosive effects on social solidarity documented by Putnam and Amy Chua’s ‘market minorities’, I’ve wondered about the artistic consequences of substantial diversity to a country or perhaps civilization. In Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, one of the strongest indicators for genius is contact with a foreign culture. This foreign contact can be pretty minimal - Thomas Malthus drew on threadbare descriptions of China’s teeming population, and the French philosophes had little more to go on when drawing inspiration in Confucianism, as did the later rococo and chinoiserie artists; much of American design and art traces back to interpretations of East Asian art based on few works, and the sprawling American cults or New Age movements and everything that umbrella term influenced post-’60s were not based on deep scholarship. They did much with little, one might say. This seems fairly true of many fertile periods: the foreigners make up, at most, a few percentage points of the population.

For example, Japanese visual art is pretty mediocre from the 900s to the 1600s - but great between then and the Meiji era. What happened? They shut off access to the outside world, and that’s apparently how we got ukiyo-e. But what did the Meiji era, when the doors were flung open to the accumulated treasures of the Western world, ever produce? And to go the other direction: the Impressionists and other artists of the time received trickles of Asian artwork which apparently inspired them (my own single favorite block-print by Hiroshige also exists - as a Van Gogh painting!), but what has happened since as masses and masses of artwork became available?

However, the modern era which is likely the most globalized era ever for cultural products, in which population movements are so much vaster and in which English-speakers have access to primary sources like they have never had before (compare how much classic Japanese & Chinese literature has been translated and stored in libraries as of 2009_15ya to what was available when Waley began translating Genji Monogatari in 1921_103ya!). This would seem to be something of a contradiction: if a little foreign contact was enough to inspire all the foregoing, then why wouldn’t all the Asian immigrants and translations and economic contact to America spark even greater revolutions? There has been influence, absolutely; but the influence is striking for how a little bit helped (how many haiku did the Imagists have access to?) and a lot done not much more, and perhaps even less. There’s no obvious reason that more would not be better, and obvious reasons why it would be (less overhead and isolation for the foreigners; sheer better odds of getting access to the right master or specialist that a promising native artist needs). But nevertheless, I seem to discern a U-shaped curve.

It seems cultures benefit most from cross-pollination when there’s only a little, but globalization is forcing contact way beyond that, if you follow me.

In schools, one sees students move in cliques and especially so with students who share a native language and are non-native English speakers - one can certainly understand why they would do such a thing, or why immigrants would congregate in ghettos or Chinatowns or Koreatowns where they can speak freely and talk of the old country; perhaps this homophily drives the reduced cross-fertilizing by reducing the chances of crossing paths. (If one is the only Yid around, one must interact with many goyim, but not so if there are many others around.) Is this enough? It doesn’t seem like enough to me.

This is a little perplexing. What’s the explanation? Could it be that as populations build up, all the early artists sucked out the novelty available in hybridizing native material with the foreign material? Or is there something stimulating about having only a few examples - does one draw faulty but fruitful inferences based on idiosyncrasies of the small data set? In machine learning, the more data available, the less wild the guesses are, but in art, wildness is a way of jumping out of a local minima to somewhere new. If Yeats had available the entire Chinese corpus, would he produce better new English poems than when he pondered obsessively a few hundred verses, or would he simply produce better English pastiches of Chinese poems? Knowledge can be a curse by making it difficult or impossible to think new thoughts and see new angles. Or perhaps the foreign material is important only as a hint to what the artist was trying already to achieve; in psychology, there is an interesting variant on the cocktail party effect ‘key’ effect where one hears only static noise in a recording, is given a hint at the sentence spoken in the recording, and then one can suddenly hear it through the noise. Perhaps the original aims are entirely unimportant, and what is at play is a sort of pareidolia or apophenia (akin to electronic voice phenomenon/sine-wave speech, to continue the sound metaphor). Richard Hamming:

[“You and Your Research” excerpts on reading yourself uncreative]

Ross Douthat

My own favored explanation, in The Decadent Society, is adapted from Robert Nisbet’s arguments about how cultural golden ages hold traditional and novel forces in creative tension: The problem, as I see it, is that this tension snapped during the revolutions of the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers (and the pre-Boomer innovators they followed) were too culturally triumphant and their elders put up too little resistance, such that the fruitful tension between innovation and tradition gave way to confusion, mediocrity, sterility.

I may be over-influenced here by the Catholic experience, where I think the story definitely applies. As R. R. Reno argued in a 2007 survey of the so-called “heroic generation” in Catholic theology, the great theologians of the Vatican II era²¹ displayed their brilliance in their critique of the old Thomism, but then the old system precipitously collapsed and subsequent generation lacked the grounding required to be genuinely creatively in their turn, or eventually even to understand what made the 1960s generation so important in the first place:

…a student today will have a difficult time seeing the importance of their ideas, because the grand exploratory theologies of the Heroic Generation require fluency in neoscholasticism to see and absorb their importance. Or the theories introduce so many new concepts and advance so many novel formulations that, to come alive for students, they require the formation of an almost hermetic school of followers…

In these and many other ways, the Heroic Generation’s zest for creative, exploratory theology led them to neglect—even dismiss—the need for a standard theology. They ignored the sort of theology that…provides a functional, communally accepted and widely taught system for understanding and absorbing new insights.

I think this frame applies more widely, to various intellectual worlds beyond theology, where certain forms of creative deconstruction went so far as to make it difficult to find one’s way back to the foundations required for new forms of creativity. Certainly that seems the point of a figure like Jordan Peterson: It’s not as a systematizer or the prophet of a new philosophy that he’s earned his fame, but as popularizer of old ideas, telling and explicating stories (the Bible! Shakespeare!) and drawing moral lessons from the before-times that would have been foundational to educated people not so long ago. Likewise with the Catholic post-liberals, or the Marx reclamation project on the left. It’s a reaching-backward to the world before the 1960s revolution, a recovery that isn’t on its own sufficient to make the escape from repetition but might be the necessary first step.

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: If you’ve had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to go forward once again.

In this version, creative stagnation comes by ‘eating the seedcorn’. But instead of being cross-national, it’s cross-temporal/generation: a younger generation builds up by tearing down its elders, but then no edifice is left for the next generations.

This seems particularly clear in music with the disappearance of jazz from American culture, historical literature like skaldic poetry, and contemporary literature. Take the quip about free verse being like ‘playing tennis with the net down’. If you took the Williams or Nadal or another tennis great, and asked them to play a beautiful game of tennis with the net down and simply pretend the net was up, I think they would rise to the challenge and play an excellent game! They have too much taste and integrity and are too molded by a life spent with the net to make a bad move; perhaps one will spot the other not quite clearing the invisible net, but the return stroke is too cool to object to. They know the rules so well and are so skilled that they know when to break them, and cooperate. like in D&D or other games: the final and ultimate rule is that the only rules are what makes a great game.

But, what happens with their successors in the game of netless tennis? Having been raised without a net, where do they get their taste from, and how do they learn when to break the rules? Instead, they’ll imitate without true understanding, and will not create any new beautiful net-less serves; netless tennis will have begun to degenerate, and players gradually compete in dishonesty to claim they won. ‘That went low!’ ‘No, it didn’t.’ ‘What? It totally did’ ‘I disagree. And that means I won. Loser.’ Without any rigid framework or grounding in uncheatable reality, it involutes and degenerates and becomes l’arte pour l’arte and corrupted by parasites, cliques, and fads.

T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, etc, all were raised inside the Western tradition and knew it intimately, even if they did not write like it. They had the ear for what free verse works, somehow, according to the ineffable internal workings of English. Williams can write “This Is Just To Say”; his imitators 50 years later… do not, and are just writing prose with random linebreaks. And so while the first generation of free verse poets gave us giants like Eliot, whose verse works even when it has thrown away much of the Western tradition of meter and rhyme, and were read and admired by the world, within a generation or two, it’s become what you see in Poetry magazine today, and read by no one except the author, and a few other professional poet-academics.

TV & the Matrix

One of the most common geek criticisms of The Matrix is that the supposed value of the humans to the machine overlords is as an energy source; but by any comparison to alternatives like burning coal, solar power, fusion plants etc, human flesh is a terrible way of generating electricity and feeding dead humans to other humans makes no sense. An example:

NEO: “I’ve kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you’re telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven’t you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?”

There’s a quick way to rescue the Matrix-verse from this objection: that was simply a dumbing-down for the general movie audience. To take an existing SF trope (eg. from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos), the real purpose of humans is to reuse their brains as a very energy-efficient (estimates of the FLOPS of a human brain against the known ~watt energy consumption indicate orders of magnitude more efficiency than the best current hardware) highly-parallel supercomputer, which would justify the burden of running a Matrix. From the Matrix short story “Goliath”:

“…we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that they weren’t using to crunch numbers and store information.”

But this raises additional questions:

1. the AIs won the war with the humans in this version too, so why do they need any human computing horsepower?

   Perhaps the AIs collectively are superior to humans in only a few domains, but these domains had military advantage and that is why they won.

   Or more narrowly, perhaps the AIs are collectively superior in general, but there’s still a few domains they have not reverse-engineered or improved on human performance and those are what the human brains are good for.

   More intriguingly, it’s well-known in machine learning & statistics that something like Condorcet’s jury theorem holds for prediction tasks: a collection or ensemble of poor error-prone algorithms can be combined into a much better predictor as long as their errors are not identical, and a new different algorithm can improve the ensemble performance even if it’s worse than every other algorithm already in the ensemble.

   So the humans could, individually or collectively, be useful even if humans are always inferior to other AIs!

2. how do you make use of intact humans brains? With existing machine learning/AI approaches to neural networks, each neural network is trained from scratch for a specific task, it’s not part of a whole personality or mind on its own. What do you do with an entire brain with a personality and memories and busy with its own simulated life? If the AIs want the humans for image-recognition tasks (very handy for robots), how do they extract this image recognition data in a useful manner from people that are spending 24h in a computer simulation?

   The most obvious way is to hire researchers normally: run a shadowy “hedge fund” or “defense agency” and assign real problems from outside the Matrix; many techniques are generalizable, and the circumstances guarantee that no-one will be able to figure out what the R&D is for. This will show up as countries spending ridiculously large amounts of money on their financial sectors despite the minimal economic gain associated with them, and ridiculously large amounts of money on “national defense” (one can perhaps use up as much as a twentieth of GDP without risking verisimilitude: one must keep defense budgets plausible when trying to extract useful work from large industrialized countries with weak neighbors, sea borders, and no realistic threats to their national security, but if all else fails, wars can always be ginned up and subjects’ fear centers stimulated en masse). That approach has limits though, as world-class mathematicians etc are intrinsically rare; so how do you get anything useful out of the remaining 98% of the human populace, since you can hardly hire them to labor outside of the Matrix? Especially the many less intelligent members of the population, necessary for verisimilitude but difficult to employ usefully.

   Insert the tasks into the simulated environment in a naturalistic way, of course. You have an image which might be a bat? Insert it and see if people think “a bat!” You need to recognize street numbers? hijack someone walking down a “street”, replace the real house number with the unrecognized image, and see what they think. Ditto for facial recognition.

   This works because it may be easier to detect a human brain thinking “bat” than it is to recognize a bat; the human may say “bat” (very easy), subvocalize the word “bat” (fairly easy), or think “bat” (not so easy, but near or at the 2014 fMRI state-of-the-art). You could make it even easier by feeding your human brains a test set or library of known-images, figuring out the common brain signature which corresponds to “bat”, then one can easily deduce the brain signature on subsequent unknown images, thereby classifying the unknown images - very similar to existing machine vision practices.

   Of course, to do that on all topics of interest and not just bats, you would have to feed human brains a great deal of imagery which could make no sense as part of their ordinary daily life.

   Ideally, they would be raptly focused on a rapidly changing sequence of images, and as much as you can feed them, so the equivalent of a full-time job, perhaps 5+ hours a day or 24-33 hours a week. You would want this to have a clear intelligence or SES gradient, where the poor or less intelligent spend the most time watching TV (even though this is severely self-sabotaging and irrational behavior as they are least able to afford such a useless leisure activity), to minimize the loss of any superstars to TV watching and extract as much useful pattern-recognition work as possible. You’d want to start programming human brains as early as possible in life, perhaps starting around 2 years of age, so as to minimize how much food & energy they use before they can start computationally-useful tasks. And given how strange and alien as this all sounds to any normal healthy human lifestyle, you would need to make the test-set uploading as addictive as possible to ensure all this - it’d be no good if a lot of humans opted out & wasted your investment.

In other words, television is how the Matrix operators exploit us.

Cherchez Le Chien: Dogs As Class Markers in Anime

In the anime Azumanga Daioh, a key bit of characterization for schoolgirl Chiyo Mihama comes when her friends visit her house and are awestruck that it is enormous, has ample yardage & greenery. The final proof of her family’s wealth is when out of the mansion comes bounding an enormous friendly white Great Pyrenees dog named Mr Tadakichi. Mr Tadakichi emphasizes the space available to the Mihama family (someone living in a 6-tatami apartment does not have room for a large dog nor permission from their landlord) and their ability to care for a foreign breed of dog (it eats a lot and must be regularly walked). Further, the dog breed is French, and France has strong connotations of wealth & elegance (see also Paris syndrome).

Then I began to notice that in anime, cats were far more common than dogs, and I noticed that in anime/manga set in contemporary Japan, dogs seemed to be associated almost exclusively with either rural settings or with people implied to be middle to upper-class.

It seems to me that the use of Mr Tadakichi was not accidental: no other character in AD has a dog, and this makes sense when one considers the space & permission issues - Chiyo is the only rich character, and so of course she’s the one who has a family dog, who has a summer house by the ocean, who is going to study overseas rather than endure the hell of college entrance exams, etc. The other parts are more obvious than dog-ownership, though, and I might have noticed a peculiarity of AD: perhaps it’s only that one manga/anime where dogs are signifiers of wealth. What about all the other anime?

TODO: methodology? Claim is dog-owning characters will be more likely to be wealthy than other characters. This is not within-series (imagine a series like Maria-sama where every girl is either rich or middle-class; if they all had dogs, that would clearly support the hypothesis even though there would be no correlation with their variants) but across series. Collect a random sample of normal characters, then collect a full list of dog-owning characters, compare the log regression where owning a dog = success? Can I use the same sources as in the hafu anime character database - TvTropes, AniDB, WP, MAL, Baka-Updates Manga, Google/Scholar?

Aanother nice example of subtle Japaneseisms in anime: the implicit appearance of aoi in how uses of green/blue are unstable and shift between blue and green far more often than a Western animation would eg. in Saga of Tanya the Evil, Tanya’s stereotypical brilliantly bright blue eyes often shift into distinctly green colorations despite no particular lighting/scenery reason for it.

Tradeoffs and Costly Signaling in Appearances: the Case of Long Hair

At some point I confused two tsundere anime characters: they both had brown long hair and flat chests and I messed up a comment. This pairing of long hair and flat chests seems to be common for tsundere character designs (eg. 4 of 5 ’notable examples on Know Your Meme with the exception being from an unpopular and fairly obscure anime; indeed, as TvTropes’s list indicates, almost all of the Rie Kugimiya-voiced characters have this pair of traits).

When I realized my mistake, I noticed that their counterpart female characters both had short brown/black hair and ample bosoms. This inverse relationship struck me as a little odd because the counterparts only need one distinguishing feature, as many characters get by with, so why did they have the opposite length of hair and opposite cleavage settings? And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like this pattern held true in real-life too: I might see women with long hair, or with cleavage, but rarely with both.

Of the 2x2 table of short/long hair and large/small breasts, the counterpart can’t have the original long/small combination because that would be confusing; and if the counterpart had short/small, that would unavoidably cast them as either ‘child-like’ or more masculine which is often inappropriate, so the short/small combination would be avoided; but that still leaves long/large as an option, which changes only one aspect.

But then I remembered: what is the stereotypical haircut of a new mother in both Japan and America - isn’t it to cut the hair very short, often less than shoulder-length? And isn’t long hair in many cultures associated with young women, and unwed young women in particular, and considered positive? (“for a woman, if her hair is abundant, it is a glory to her”; “hair is the richest ornament of women”; “they say that the hair is everything, you know”; “the bald woman boasts of her sister’s hair”; “if you meet a red-haired woman, you’ll meet a crowd”; “when the month of May arrives, women’s hair grows and penises become strong”; “one hair of a woman draws more than a bell-rope” / “one hair of a maiden’s head pulls harder than ten yoke of oxen” / “one hair from the head of a woman pulls more than a ship’s hauser” / “beauty draws with a single hair”; - but remember men, as attractive as blonde hair may be, “falseness often lurks beneath fair hair” / “often a troll-woman is under fair skin, and virtue under dark hair” and remember women, “short hair is soon brushed”!) And as pointed out by evo-psych theorizers, long hair may be sexually attractive as a costly & thus reliable signal of health; further, if the hair is blonde, then (in pre-hair-dye eras) it’d be a reliable signal of youth too.

If long hair really is an attractive asset for a woman (and I think a lot of men would agree that barbigerous factors matter, if not as much as breasts or buttocks), then one might wonder why marriage is accompanied by hair-cutting. After all, why deliberately make yourself less attractive? Surely it’s nice to be beautiful and admired even if you’ve already found a husband. Plus, everyone grows hair so it seems like a relatively egalitarian aspect of attractiveness - it’s not set in stone like so much of one’s appearance.

The answer may be that long hair is not just a reliable signal, but a costly one: the longer hair is, the harder it is to take care of it. One has to use up more shampoo & conditioner cleaning the full mass, rendering showers a complicated affair; the weight of long hair is a literal burden; brushing the hair may take a long time; one has to keep an eye out to avoid getting the hair in one’s eyes, caught in anything around you, avoid knocking things over with one’s tresses, keep it clean, or avoid stepping on it in the most extreme cases.

I don’t know how much time & effort is involved in maintaining, say, hip-length rather than shoulder-length hair, but it must be considerable to explain why hip-length hair is so unusual even before marriage.

Further, as commenter Jay points out, if the point of attractiveness is to secure a long-term relationship for reproduction, then as well as being expensive & unnecessary, hair that has been cut short or concealed is serving as a commitment mechanism in indicating less interest in & less potential for adultery/divorce (women literally letting their hair down only at home for their husbands):

It is quite possible that the act of cutting one’s hair is signaling. Signaling to one’s mate that she intends to remain faithful. Assuming that men value longer hair as a measure of genetic/health quality, the act of cutting her hair has the effect of reducing her perceived quality as a reproductive partner while her actual value remains unchanged. Judging from this perspective, it is optimal for one’s mate to reduce their perceived sexual value after pair bonding has happened, to reduce competition. In this scenario, the woman can signal her commitment to the relationship by reducing her market value - cutting her hair. Assuming the above idea is true, it should be observable that women who don’t cut their hair after marriage/children are more likely to cheat.

This doesn’t explain the apparent inverse relationship where one has either breasts or hair. Hair may be costly, and so women shed it at the first opportunity, but why isn’t long hair universal before marriage?

I think this may be explained by the optionality of hair: one cannot choose the size of one’s breast without resorting to desperate measures like surgery, one cannot change one’s eye colors without unpleasant measures like colored contact lenses, one cannot change the shape of one’s face, losing weight & being fit is a lifelong battle - but hair is optional. So suppose one lucks out and has a curvaceous cleavage men drool over; perhaps that is sufficient and you don’t want to go to the extra costs of long hair, and so you never grow flowing locks and this works for you. But suppose one instead has a chest like a cutting board, what can you do about that? Not much… but you could compensate by instead growing long hair, so wouldn’t you? It’s better than being both short-haired and flat-chested. (There will be exceptions of course; a supermodel might be both busty & hairy because their job makes it worth their while, some women may simply like long hair a lot and want to have long hair regardless, and one may be cursed with bad hair & growing is never worthwhile.)

So the apparent inverse correlation of hair length and bust size is generated by Berkson’s paradox where there is no correlation between hair & bust initially, but then, conditioning on aiming for a threshold of attractiveness & cost-benefit optimizing, an inverse correlation is generated by bustier women tending to cut their hair & less busty women growing their hair.

In general, if a factor of attractiveness is optional and costly, we’d expect people blessed with more non-optional/uncontrollable factors to avoid the optional/controllable costly ones, and that the optional costly factors will vary with perceived prospects or need for attractiveness (eg. we’d expect sharp decreases in hair length after marriage, and gradual decreases with age).

To test this:

• compile a set of tsundere female characters, a random selection of non-tsundere characters, and classify each by hair length & breast size, and see if there is an inverse relationship in both groups or whether it’s a tsundere artifact

• real-world datasets?

  • Perhaps photos from dating sites where women might be expected to be explicitly optimizing for physical attractiveness? (But what dating sites record both hair length and breast size? Surely not representative ones…)

  • Do porn preferences map onto attractiveness preferences enough? Then we might see the inverse relationship there. (One might worry that all porn performers would have huge surgically-augmented breasts, but an analysis of the IAFDB says the modal breast size is 34B and natural hair colors are common albeit blonde is still 6x overrepresented. The IAFB, unfortunately, doesn’t have hair lengths which would allow for checking an inverse correlation.)

• more exotically, increases or decreases in cost should cause corresponding decreases & increases on the margin

hair <- read.csv(stdin(), header=TRUE)
Source,Hair,Bust,Count
D,0,0,6300
D,1,0,10400
D,0,1,35200
D,1,1,90100
S,0,0,44800
S,1,0,78400
S,0,1,281600
S,1,1,792000
G,0,0,448056
G,1,0,712656
G,0,1,2245572
G,1,1,5741820
B,0,0,290000
B,1,0,487500
B,0,1,1450000
B,1,1,3825000
SC,0,0,10254
SC,1,0,16715
R,0,0,142002
R,1,0,220206
R,0,1,854070
R,1,1,2123856


summary(lm(log(Count) ~ Bust*Hair + Source, weights=hair$Count, data=hair))
# Coefficients:
#               Estimate Std. Error   t value   Pr(>|t|)
# (Intercept) 12.5573170  0.0400583 313.47599 < 2.22e-16
# Bust         1.6513538  0.0416067  39.68965 5.9265e-15
# Hair         0.4831628  0.0483397   9.99515 1.8094e-07
# SourceD     -3.7524417  0.0990217 -37.89515 1.0763e-14
# SourceG      0.4129648  0.0193262  21.36817 1.6455e-11
# SourceR     -0.5934732  0.0251471 -23.60008 4.6621e-12
# SourceS     -1.6183374  0.0369046 -43.85187 1.6355e-15
# SourceSC    -3.3185000  0.2261675 -14.67275 1.8117e-09
# Bust:Hair    0.4657983  0.0521960   8.92403 6.6273e-07
#
# Residual standard error: 36.8839 on 13 degrees of freedom
# Multiple R-squared:  0.999131,    Adjusted R-squared:  0.998596
# F-statistic: 1867.51 on 8 and 13 DF,  p-value: < 2.22e-16

The Tragedy of Grand Admiral Thrawn

In the sprawling Star Wars Expanded Universe, one of the most memorable characters was Grand Admiral Thrawn. Thrawn was introduced by Timothy Zahn in 1991_33ya in his The Thrawn Trilogy (best-sellers credited with reviving interest in the EU)—and then immediately escorted out in the third book, The Last Command, when he was assassinated by his bodyguard in Chapter 28 (of 29) at the climax of a Rebel attack on a key Imperial facility:

…“Don’t panic, Captain,” Thrawn said. But he, too, was starting to sound grim. “We’re not defeated yet. Not by a long shot.”

Pellaeon’s board pinged. He looked at it—“Sir, we have a priority message coming in from Wayland,” he told Thrawn, his stomach twisting with a sudden horrible premonition. Wayland—the cloning facility—

“Read it, Captain,” Thrawn said, his voice deadly quiet.

“Decrypt is coming in now, sir,” Pellaeon said, tapping the board impatiently as the message slowly began to come up. It was exactly as he’d feared. “The mountain is under attack, sir,” he told Thrawn. “Two different forces of natives, plus some Rebel saboteurs—” He broke off, frowning in disbelief. “And a group of Noghri—”

He never got to read any more of the report. Abruptly, a gray-skinned hand slashed out of nowhere, catching him across the throat.

He gagged, falling limply in his chair, his whole body instantly paralyzed. “For the treachery of the Empire against the Noghri people,” Rukh’s voice said quietly from beside him as he gasped for breath. “We were betrayed. We have been revenged.”

There was a whisper of movement, and he was gone. Still gasping, struggling against the inertia of his stunned muscles, Pellaeon fought to get a hand up to his command board. With one final effort he made it, trying twice before he was able to hit the emergency alert.

And as the wailing of the alarm cut through the noise of a Star Destroyer at battle, he finally managed to turn his head.

Thrawn was sitting upright in his chair, his face strangely calm. In the middle of his chest, a dark red stain was spreading across the spotless white of his Grand Admiral’s uniform. Glittering in the center of the stain was the tip of Rukh’s assassin’s knife.

Thrawn caught his eye; and to Pellaeon’s astonishment, the Grand Admiral smiled. “But,” he whispered, “it was so artistically done.”

The smile faded. The glow in his eyes did likewise… and Thrawn, the last Grand Admiral, was gone.

“Captain Pellaeon?” the comm officer called urgently as the medic team arrived—too late—to the Grand Admiral’s chair. “The Nemesis and Stormhawk are requesting orders. What shall I tell them?”

Pellaeon looked up at the viewports. At the chaos that had erupted behind the defenses of the supposedly secure shipyards; at the unexpected need to split his forces to its defense; at the Rebel fleet taking full advantage of the diversion. In the blink of an eye, the universe had suddenly turned against them.

Thrawn could still have pulled an Imperial victory out of it. But he, Pellaeon, was not Thrawn.

“Signal to all ships,” he rasped. The words ached in his throat, in a way that had nothing to do with the throbbing pain of Rukh’s treacherous attack. “Prepare to retreat.”

What did Thrawn mean by “it was so artistically done” and is this plot twist a deus ex machina, a letdown in an otherwise excellent trilogy that rose above the usual EU level of pulp fiction?

It’s a little bit of a deus ex machina, but as they go, I think it’s acceptable because all the mechanics are laid in place well in advance in The Thrawn Trilogy, and the assassination itself serves the major literary purpose of demonstrating Thrawn’s fatal flaw of hubris leading him to a tragically bad end.

For years I was vaguely puzzled by the ending: sure, it made logical sense that the Noghri would retaliate by killing him, didn’t violate any rules or worldbuilding or anything, but it felt unmotivated and lacking in literary purposes—why did Timothy Zahn choose that particular way of dealing with Thrawn when Star Wars villains have often been dealt with in so much less final ways? (Admiral Daala, for example, returns constantly; even Emperor Palpatine, who died so definitively canonically, nevertheless gets brought back in Dark Empire as multiple clones.)

After reading a boring Greek tragedy, The Last Command finally clicked for me: the trilogy was also a classical tragedy.

So first, the timing of the assassination is not implausible: the bodyguard can pick and choose the time, and since they can’t expect to escape alive, they’ll want to maximize the damage—major combat was common for Thrawn, his bodyguard would know this perfectly well, and also know that killing him in the middle of a battle based on having access to Thrawn’s strategic genius would maximize the damage.

Second, the betrayal is also plausible, because Leia had at this point spent most of a book on the Noghri home planet, uncovering the deception, so it’s been thoroughly established for the reader that ‘the Noghri clans know how they have been deceived and enslaved for generations and that their gratitude/worship of Darth Vader (and then Thrawn) as a hero is the cruelest of lies’; the reader expects them to be… not happy about this.

Third, that Thrawn wasn’t expecting it is what makes it so ironic and dramatically satisfying: his last line is “But… it was so artistically done.” Some people read this as referring to the battle or perhaps Thrawn’s long-term plans or even the assassination itself; the interpretation here being that Thrawn is stabbed in the back by his trusted Noghri literally stabbing him in the back—this is ironic, certainly, but does it really merit a wistful description like that? But I’d always read it as obviously referring to Vader’s deception of the Noghri where the environmental cleanup robots etc were actually keeping the planet poisoned & destroyed; he understands the only reason Rukh would ever assassinate him is that the deception has failed and the Noghri found out, and he is disappointed that the so elegant and artistic scheme—the pollution remediation robots were in fact the cause of the pollution—has collapsed.

Now, the reader might reasonably say ‘hey, maybe you shouldn’t rely for bodyguards on a race of murder-ninja-lizards who you are tricking into generational servitude by a vast scheme of planetary destruction masquerading as a charity and who might find out at some point and not be happy, and find someone else to be your bodyguards?’, but the reader is of course not a twisted strategic genius who delights in deception & trickery & exploiting the psychology of his enemies (remember the definition: “thrawn (adj). twisted; crooked”) and enjoys keeping ‘his friends close but his enemies closer’, so to speak. This delight in twisted deception is Thrawn’s fatal flaw, which leads him into the hubris of taking such an extreme risk which will explode in his face, and the lack of necessity is precisely what makes it tragic; and a good tragedy always ends in death. And the fact that the assassination happens during a critical battle, which might have paved the way to victory, aside from being rational in-universe, only increases the tragic element: he and his empire were undone by his fatal flaw at the height of his powers and success.

Unlike a more standard tragedy where our protagonist is a good guy, Thrawn is an irredeemable bad guy, so while he realizes his proximate mistake (‘what a pity that my deception failed… even though it was so skillfully & cleverly done’), he has no anagnorisis of his own fatally-flawed ‘thrawn’ nature, like a hero would.

Thrawn would never reflect on how cruel his scheme was, or how unnecessary it was; he took too much pleasure in the cleverness—and that is why at the end of the trilogy he dies an unrepentant villain.

On Dropping Family Guy

The other day I saw a mention of Family Guy, and I remembered: I used to watch it all the time on Fox & Adult Swim, and liked it a fair bit. I still have several seasons’ worth in my big DVD binder, so I could watch some anytime. But I haven’t watched it in ~4 years. Why did I sour on it?

It’s still available on TV, so that’s not it (although the wretched American Dad and The Cleveland Show series seem to be on a lot; Seth MacFarlane does not know his limits). Nor is it that I now dislike animation; I watch as much anime as ever, and I enjoy The Simpsons whenever I get the chance. And The Simpsons highlights another reason which is not the reason: many Family Guy episodes are awful, but that’s equally true of The Simpsons, especially in the later seasons. We watch for the good episodes, and forgive the bad.

No, I think the reason is more that I became tired with Family Guy. Something in it tired me out. After some thought, I realized that the humor was the reason, and specifically the kinds of humor FG used.

Yes, there’s more than one kind of humor in FG despite its reputation. One venerable classification of culture is into ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’. The former requires education and knowledge, while the latter caters to the ‘lowest’ common denominator (or to put it nicely, is ‘universal’ or ‘accessible’).

The kind of humor FG is known for is clearly ‘low’. Jokes about bodily functions, sex, norm-breaking in general - these are without question low. The Simpsons has, of course, low humor of its own: pretty much anytime Homer says “D’oh!” is an instance of low humor.

But then again, The Simpsons also has ‘high’ humor - characters, guest appearances, allusions, background images, things one might not even realize are meant to be funny until one has already gotten the joke. In the classic episode “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo” where they go to Japan, on the flight there Marge tells Homer to not pout about going to Japan rather than Jamaica because “You liked Rashomon” to which Homer replies “That’s not how I remember it.” The first several times I saw this, I had no idea what the allusion meant until Rashomon happened to be shown in school and I learned the plot revolved around differing retellings of a crime, at which point Homer’s reply became funny. I suspect 99% of viewers have never seen Rashomon, and almost as many have no idea what the plot was or what the joke was, but for the last 1%, it’s funny.

Does FG have this “high” humor? Yes! Although here is the difficulty: although I know that there is high humor, most of it I don’t understand. Whenever Stewie or Brian break into song or dance, I understand that probably some classic movie or Broadway musical is being alluded to & homaged, but I have no idea what. I don’t even when I think I should: in one FG episode, Brian finally becomes a writer for The New Yorker, a publication I have read sporadically for many years - nevertheless, most of the jokes go clean over my head.

Isn’t that weird? I think of myself as a fairly knowledgeable guy, and I catch much of the high humor on The Simpsons (I read a few episode guides from The Simpsons Archive identifying all the jokes and allusions, and had seen a good fraction of them). Which raises a question, at least for me: if I am missing all or most of the high jokes on FG, who exactly are they aimed at? Especially when the Adult Swim demographic skews younger (and more ignorant) than me?

But regardless of why the high jokes are incredibly high and elitist in a sense, I am still missing them. I like a little low humor, but I like best a mix of high and low (heavy on the high). If I am missing out on most of the high, then I am left with the dregs: the low humor, which after sustained exposure wore thin. And exhausted me.

And so I stopped watching.

Pom Poko’s Glorification of Group Suicide

The first time I watched Studio Ghibli’s 1994_30ya Pom Poko has so far been the last: I found it a transparently thoroughgoing narrative about mass suicide in WWII, and as harrowing as Grave of the Fireflies - but worse in a way because there is no condemnation of the mass suicides. Instead, we somewhat admire and sympathasize with them.

Alexandra Roedder wrote:

I always saw Pom Poko as being what it claimed to be: a story of the development of the Tama region of Tokyo, told with a strange kind of humor to offset (maybe?) or emphasize the sad facts of the development’s impact on the environment. The mass sacrifice strikes me as being a part of the portrayal of the era, relying on the cultural memory (for lack of a better term) of kamikaze from WWII, not a commentary on it.

But WWII also brought the end of the traditional sort of Japanese development and increased Western-style development - like the city we see by the end, and things like the nightclub (or casino?) where they met the foxes.

The parallels are there, if you want to see them.

The Tanuki (the traditional Japanese) see their traditional way of life threatened by modern foreign-style development with apartments and powered construction vehicle (Western conquest & economic development), and fight back against the initially minor developments (embargo) and then escalate into full warfare (Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War), which ultimately leads to failure against the humans’ superior tools (American materiel advantage), individual kamikaze missions, and mass suicidal attacks of multiple Tanuki in separate places, groups, and methods (Japanese use of suicide submarines, kamikaze planes, banzai charges), and finally, as despair and defeat set in, sheerly futile mass civilian suicide like scores of Tanuki setting off as part of the Buddhist cult-boat to the afterworld (the mass Okinawa suicides with the imperialist justifications - and remember that Buddhism was heavily implicated in this ideology too, it wasn’t just Shintoism, having come to terms with the imperial government during the Meiji restoration).

That you see them as good-humored shows that the suicides are not condemned but if anything approved of them as noble and demonstrating their purity of heart. (I understand Gone with the Wind is not without its own good humor to offset the sad story of the decline of the Old South.)

We all know of the conservative trends and Japanese nationalism which lingers in Japanese politics and manifests in such forms as: denying that any bad things like war crimes happened during their pre-WWII expansion or during WWII itself with the general denial of culpability exemplified by the comfort women; the revisionism in textbooks about such incidents (no doubt whipped up by those who hate Japan) like the Rape of Nanking; the war criminal shrine; and the martyr complex over the nuclear bombings as a perpetual club against the West.

The trend is not absent from anime. Grave of the Fireflies is all about Japanese suffering, for example, with not the slightest sense that other countries were suffering even more.

I like Ghibli movies well enough, but my own particular focus is Gainax films and Hideaki Anno in particular. One of the striking aspects of the WWII material that Anno loves so dearly is that in his discussions, at hardly any point does he exhibit any sense of guilt or culpability or sense that the conquests and Pacific War might have been a bad thing for any other reason than Japan losing it and suffering the consequences. When the topic comes up, they say other things - from an Atlantic interview:

Anno understands the Japanese national attraction to characters like Rei as the product of a stunted imaginative landscape born of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. “Japan lost the war to the Americans”, he explains, seeming interested in his own words for the first time during our interview. “Since that time, the education we received is not one that creates adults. Even for us, people in their 40s, and for the generation older than me, in their 50s and 60s, there’s no reasonable model of what an adult should be like.” The theory that Japan’s defeat stripped the country of its independence and led to the creation of a nation of permanent children, weaklings forced to live under the protection of the American Big Daddy, is widely shared by artists and intellectuals in Japan. It is also a staple of popular cartoons, many of which feature a well-meaning government that turns out to be a facade concealing sinister and more powerful forces.

Further examples of this rhetoric and regret over losing the Pacific War can be found in Takashi Murakami’s long essay “Earth in my Window” or in Sawaragi (transcribed from Little Boy, 2005_19ya)

One can’t help but wonder - if the “Pacific War” led to peace since then, is that really so bad? I suspect I already know how the Chinese and Koreans regard this tragedy. (And why is it the “Pacific War”, anyway? Japan was engaged in Asian land wars or occupation or subversion for decades before Pearl Harbor.)

I’ll give another example for Anno. Numbers-kun translates part of an Anno interview with one of his favorite film-makers, Kihachi Okamoto:

Then some talk about Okamoto’s Nikudan. Anno watched it twice and Okamoto said it’s more than enough…Anno said he still remembered a lot of the scenes and how they are edited and linked. But the ones he watched most are Japan’s Longest Day [1968_56ya] and Okinawa Battle. He even played it as BGV [background video] when he was doing storyboarding at one time, and then slowly his attention was drawn to the video and ended up spending 3 hours watching it.

I have not been able to watch The Battle of Okinawa yet, but Animeigo’s liner notes do a good job indicating why it might be a tad controversial…

Okinawa came up in my Evangelion research, incidentally, because Okinawa comes up in Gunbuster as one of the (very subtle and easy for non-Japanese to miss) indications throughout that Japan has been restored to its rightful dominant place in the world²², in Evangelion there was a cut episode with a trip to Okinawa, and for End of Evangelion, OST commentary indicates that the victorious JSSDF shock forces (who cut down surrendering NERV personnel without mercy and burn them alive with flamethrowers) were intended to demonstrate man’s viciousness and inhumanity. During the nonfictional battle of Okinawa, of course, the victorious troops using flamethrowers were American. Very few (non-Japanese) people ever notice the Okinawa references in EoE.

Takahata’s films always seem to have that kind of “laugh because we can’t do anything else” humor.

But Isao Takahata being the director is one of the signs: recall that one of his other films was… Grave of the Fireflies.

Tedne suggests:

Someone claimed that it was a parable of the decline of the radical Left in Japan. I think it is a good parable of the decline and fall of indigenous communities. The Tanuki who kill themselves are simply trying to be true to themselves; same thing with their warfare. Under extreme threat people sometimes take extreme actions. There is no simple and compelling reason to either condemn or commend that.

It can be both; the radical Left - and Right, let’s not forget Yukio Mishima²³ - had certain classic positions. What was the Left most opposed to? The security treaties with America and the bases Okinawa. They were young, energetic, and wished to ‘revolutionize the world’ in service of an ideal, one might say - just like their noble kamikaze forebears. And likewise failed, for similar reasons.

Further, I disagree that the presented actions are normal. The pervasive suicide in Pom Poko is not an universal. People rarely commit suicide: groups fighting to the last man or committing suicide are so rare that they command considerable attention when they happen deliberately. One can command considerable attention just by threatening to kill oneself, and self-immolation - both in the Middle East and Asia - are compelling protests. In practice, people surrender, adapt, and live on. (Unsurprisingly!)

The concept of suicide-bombers and kamikazes live on because they are so unusual; lone assassins and fanatics may occasionally hazard certain death, but entire organized bodies of men? One has to look far for counterparts. (The Greeks at Thermopylae? But most of them survived. The concept of forlorn hopes at sieges? But they expected to win wealth & glory if they broke through, and certainly didn’t carry petards with them even if that might’ve been an effective idea.) Far more common in history is soldiers deserting or mutinying at what they consider a suicide mission. US observers, even knowing of the much-discussed suicidal strains in bushido like seppuku, were still shocked by the course of the Pacific War; so it was that Admiral Nimitz could write to the Naval War College:

The war with Japan has been [en-acted] in the game room here by so many people and in so many different ways that nothing that happened during the war was a surprise - absolutely nothing except the Kamikaze tactics towards the end of the war; we had not visualized those.²⁴

Allegories can be difficult to understand the more remote and foreign they become: who can read Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and understand all the political or historical material without a scholarly apparatus? I think something similar is happening with Pom Poko. If we were to come up with a contemporary Islamic allegory, how would people react to it?

It’s not that hard to come up with an isomorphic version which would make an average Westerner a little uneasy: a tribe of cheerful Arabian Djinni under the good King of Djinn discover that oil drilling is extending into the Empty Quarter which they have lived in for so long; they declare jihad and attempt to fight back, using their magical powers, but while 1 or 2 rigs catch on fire after some male djinni magically blow themselves up and some other djinni can commandeer a truck to smash into the gate of an oil refinery, their efforts are generally futile. Dozens of djinni decide in their despair to permanently depart the world on a giant magic carpet bound for Paradise (where they hope for houris), while the rest wish together and perform one last spell in the urban streets of Riyadh: evoking the Golden Age of Baghdad and the One Thousand And One Nights with the bronze giant and roc and princes of Serendip and enchanted women and divers other fantastical characters & objects. Exhausted, they abandon their smoky forms to masquerade as ordinary turban, bisht, or hijab wearing immigrant workers & expats in the Saudi government & oil industries, only periodically showing their true colors.

Full Metal Alchemist: Pride and Knowledge

What do you think about Ed transmuting the literal gate to break the rules in the end of FMA?

That wasn’t rule-breaking; that was awesome. It was tremendously satisfying.

One of FMA’s running themes was the narrowness of those interested in alchemy. They were interested in it, in using it, in getting more of it. Obviously folks like Shou Tucker or Kimbly sold their soul for alchemy, but less obviously, the other alchemists have been corrupted to some degree by it. Even heroes like Izumi or the Elrics transgressed. Consider Mustang; his connection with Hawkeye was alchemy-based, and only after years did the connection blossom. Consider how little time he spent with Hughes, in part due to his alchemy-based position. Mustang didn’t learn until Hughes was gone just how much his friends meant.

Similarly, Greed. His epiphany at the end hammers in the lesson about the value of friends. How did he lose his friends? By pursuit of alchemy-based methods of immortality.

That is why Ed was the real hero. Because he realized the Truth of FMA: your relationships are what really matter. No alchemist ever escaped the Gate essentially intact before he did. Why? Because it would never even occur to them to give up their alchemy or what they learned at the Gate.

Have you ever heard of a monkey trap made of a hole and a collar of spikes sticking down? The monkey reaches in and grabs the fruit inside, but his fist is too big to pass back out. If only the stupid monkey would let go of the fruit, he could escape. But he won’t. And then the hunter comes.

The alchemists are the monkey, alchemy is the fruit, and the Truth is the hunter. The monkeys put the fruit above their lives, because they think they can have it all. Ed doesn’t.

Were there things I disliked? Yes, the whole god thing struck me as strange and ill-thought out. I also disliked the mechanism for alchemy - some sort of Earth energy. I thought that the movie’s idea that alchemy was powered by deaths in an alternate Earth to really fit the whole theme of Equivalent Exchange - TANSTAAFL. It’s good that the Amestrian alchemy turns out to be powered by human sacrifice (TANSTAAFL), but that turns out to be due to the Father character blocking the ‘real’ alchemy, and so, non-Amestrian alchemy turns out to be a free lunch!

A Secular Humanist Reads The Tale of Genji

After several years, I finished reading Edward Seidensticker’s translation of The Tale of Genji. Many thoughts occurred to me towards the end, when the novelty of the Heian era began to wear off and I could be more critical.

The prevalence of poems & puns is quite remarkable. It is also remarkable how tired they all feel; in Genji, poetry has lost its magic and has simply become another stereotyped form of communication, as codified as a letter to the editor or small talk. I feel fortunate that my introductions to Japanese poetry have usually been small anthologies of the greatest poets; had I first encountered court poetry through Genji, I would have been disgusted by the mawkish sentimentality & repetition.

The gender dynamics are remarkable. Toward the end, one of the two then main characters becomes frustrated and casually has sex with a serving lady; it’s mentioned that he liked sex with her better than with any of the other servants. Much earlier in Genji (it’s a good thousand pages, remember), Genji simply rapes a woman, and the central female protagonist, Murasaki, is kidnapped as a girl and he marries her while still what we would consider a child. (I forget whether Genji sexually molests her before the pro forma marriage.) This may be a matter of non-relativistic moral appraisal, but I get the impression that in matters of sexual fidelity, rape, and children, Heian-era morals were not much different from my own, which makes the general immunity all the more remarkable. (This is the ‘shining’ Genji?) The double-standards are countless.

The power dynamics are equally remarkable. Essentially every speaking character is nobility, low or high, or Buddhist clergy (and very likely nobility anyway). The characters spend next to no time on ‘work’ like running the country, despite many main characters ranking high in the hierarchy and holding minister-level ranks; the Emperor in particular does nothing except party. All the households spend money like mad, and just expect their land-holdings to send in the cash. (It is a signal of their poverty that the Uji household ever even mentions how less money is coming from their lands than used to.) The Buddhist clergy are remarkably greedy & worldly; after the death of the father of the Uji household, the abbot of the monastery he favored sends the grief-stricken sisters a note - which I found remarkably crass - reminding them that he wants the customary gifts of valuable textiles²⁵.

The medicinal practices are utterly horrifying. They seem to consist, one and all, of the following algorithm: “while sick, pay priests to chant.” If chanting doesn’t work, hire more priests. (One freethinker suggests that a sick woman eat more food.) Chanting is, at least, not outright harmful like bloodletting, but it’s still sickening to read through dozens of people dying amidst chanting. In comparison, the bizarre superstitions (such as trapping them in houses on inauspicious days) that guide many characters’ activities are unobjectionable.

The ‘ending’ is so abrupt, and so clearly unfinished; many chapters have been spent on the 3 daughters of the Uji householder, 2 are disposed of, and the last one has just been discovered in her nunnery by 1 of the 2 protagonists (and the other protagonist suspects). The arc is not over until the would-be nun has been confronted, yet the book ends. Given that Murasaki Shikibu was writing an episodic entertainment for her court friends, and the overall lack of plot, I agree with Seidensticker that the abrupt mid-sentence ending is due either to Shikibu dying or abandoning her tale - not to any sort of deliberate plan.

Long Term Investment

“That is, from January 1926_98ya through December 2002_22ya, when holding periods were 19 years or longer, the cumulative real return on stocks was never negative…”

How does one engage in extremely long investments? On a time-scale of centuries, investment is a difficult task, especially if one seeks to avoid erosion of returns by the costs of active management.

In long-term investments, one must become concerned about biases in the data used to make decisions. Many of these biases fall under the general rubric of “observer biases” - the canonical example being that stocks look like excellent investments if you only consider America’s stock market, where returns over long periods have been quite good. For example, if you had invested by tracking the major indices any time period from January 1926_98ya through December 2002_22ya and had held onto your investment for at least 19 years, you were guaranteed a positive real return. Of course, the specification of place (America) and time period (before the Depression and after the Internet bubble) should alert us that this guarantee may not hold elsewhere. Had a long-term investor in the middle of the 19^th century decided to invest in a large up-and-coming country with a booming economy and strong military (much like the United States has been for much of the 20^th century), they would have reaped excellent returns. That is, until the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. Should their returns have survived the inflation and imposition of a new currency, then the destruction of the 3^rd Reich would surely have rendered their shares and Reichmarks worthless. Similarly for another up-and-coming nation - Japan. Mention of Russia need not even be made.

Clearly, diversifying among companies in a sector, or even sectors in a national economy is not enough. Disaster can strike an entire nation. Rosy returns for stocks quietly ignore those bloody years in which exchanges plunged thousands of percentage points in real terms, and whose records burned in the flames of war. Over a timespan of a century, it is impossible to know whether such destruction will be visited on a given country or even whether it will still exist as an unit. How could Germany, the preeminent power on the Continent, with a burgeoning navy rivaling Britain’s, with the famous Prussian military and Junkers, with an effective industrial economy still famed for the quality of its mechanisms, and with a large homogeneous population of hardy people possibly fall so low as to be utterly conquered? And by the United States and others, for that matter? How could Japan, with its fanatical warriors and equally fanatical populace, its massive fleet and some of the best airplanes in the world - a combination that had humbled Russia, that had occupied Korea for nigh on 40 years, which easily set up puppet governments in Manchuria and China when and where it pleased - how could it have been defeated so wretchedly as to see its population literally decimated and its governance wholly supplanted? How could a god be dethroned?

It is perhaps not too much to say that investors in the United States, who say that the Treasury Bond has never failed to be redeemed and that the United States can never fall, are perhaps overconfident in their assessment. Inflation need not be hyper to cause losses. Greater nations have been destroyed quickly. Who remembers the days when the Dutch fought the English and the French to a standstill and ruled over the shipping lanes? Remember that Nineveh is one with the dust.

In short, our data on returns is biased. This bias indicates that stocks and cash are much more risky than most people think, and that this risk inheres in exogenous shocks to economies - it may seem odd to invest globally, in multiple currencies, just to avoid the rare black swans of total war and hyperinflation. But these risks are catastrophic risks. Even one may be too many.

This risk is more general. Governments can die, and so their bonds and other instruments (such as cash) rendered worthless; how many governments have died or defaulted over the last century? Many. The default assumption must be that the governments with good credit, who are not in that number, may simply have been lucky. And luck runs out.

In general, entities die unpredictably, and one has no guarantee that a, say, 1500 year old Korean construction company will honor its bills in another 500 years because all it takes is one bubble to drive it into bankruptcy. When one looks at securities turning into money, of course all you see are ones for those entities which survived. This is ‘survivorship bias’; our observations are biased because we aren’t looking at all of the past, but the present. This can be exploited, however. Obviously if an entity perishes, it has no need for assets.

Suppose one wishes to make a very long-term investment. One groups with a large number of other investors who wish to make similar investments, in a closed-end mutual fund with a share per investor, which is set to liquidate at some remote period. This fund would invest in assets all over the world and of various kinds, seeking great diversification. The key ingredient would be that shares are not allowed to be transferred. Should an investor perish, the value of their share would be split up amongst the other investors’ shares (a percentage could be used to pay for management, perhaps). Because of this ingredient, the expected return for any individual investor would be extremely high - the potential loss is 100%, but the investor by definition will never be around for that loss. Because the identity and number of investments is fixed, potential control of the assets could be dispersed among the investors so as to avoid the situation where war destroys the headquarters of whomever is managing the assets. The technical details are unimportant; cryptography has many ingenious schemes for such secret sharing (one can easily heavily encrypt a file as usual, and then using eg. Shamir’s Secret Sharing, create & distribute n keys where any chosen number of keys up to all n are needed to decrypt the file).

From Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “The Apocalypse Bet”

Suppose you think that gold will become worthless on April 27th, 2020 at between four and four-thirty in the morning. I, on the other hand, think this event will not occur until 2030. We can sign a contract in which I pay you one ounce of gold per year 2010^–₁₀2020, and then you pay me two ounces of gold per year 2020^–₁₀2030. If gold becomes worthless when you say, you will have profited; if gold becomes worthless when I say, I will have profited. We can have a prediction market on a generic apocalypse, in which participants who believe in an earlier apocalypse are paid by believers in a later apocalypse, until they pass the date of their prediction, at which time the flow reverses with interest. I don’t see any way to distinguish between apocalypses, but we can ask the participants why they were willing to bet, and probably receive a decent answer.

Or Garett Jones

How can these prophets of doom cash in on their confidence? After all, they think that the state of the world where they’re proven right is a state of the world where nobody can reward them for being right. Aside from the self-congratulation, how can they benefit? By signing a contract right now. If you’re reasonably sure Treasuries will be worthless in a dozen years, you should find somebody who disagrees, and convince them to give you $1 today. If you’re right, then 12 years later you get to keep the money. If you’re wrong, you have to pay the other party the normal rate of return on the $1, plus a little extra. $2 should be plenty if you can back the contract with some collateral; maybe $4 otherwise. Notice what you’re doing here: You’re writing an uninsurance policy. You get the premiums up front, and you pay out only if things turn out fine. Since the other party is pretty sure things will turn out fine, the deal you’re offering from their point of view is about the same as any other investment. That’s why you only have to offer about the normal rate of return. The hard part here, of course, is convincing the other party you’ll repay in the future–your barrier to riches isn’t the apocalypse, it’s your own trustworthiness. That’s where attorneys and insurance companies come in. Lloyd’s is happy to offer hole-in-one insurance [more], so the industry has no problem writing policies that pay out upon joyous events.

Measuring Social Trust by Offering Free Lunches

People can be awfully suspicious of free lunches. I’d like to try a little experiment or stunt sometime to show this. Here’s how it’d go.

I’d grab myself a folding table, make a big poster saying ‘Free Money! $1 or $2’ and in fine print, ‘one per person per day’. Then, anyone who came up and asked would get $2. Eventually, someone would ask for $1 - they would get it, but be asked first why they declined the larger amount.

I think their answers would be interesting.

Even funner would be giving the $2 as a 2-dollar bill, and not 2 dollar bills. They’re rare enough that it would be quite a novelty to people.

Good Governance & Girl Scouts

See Girl Scouts and good governance.

Chinese Kremlinology

It is dangerous to judge a very large and complex country with truly formidable barriers to understanding and internal opacity. As best as I can judge the numbers and facts presented for myself, there are things rotten in Denmark. (The question is whether they are rotten enough.)

But at the same time, we can’t afford to buy into the China-as-the-next-threat hype. When I was much younger, I read every book my library had on Japan’s economics and politics, and many online essays & articles & op-eds besides. They were profoundly educational, but not just in the way that their authors had intended - because they were all from the Japan as Number One (Ezra Vogel) / Rising Sun (Michael Crichton) period of the bubble ’80s, and they were profoundly confident about how Japan would rule the world and quite convincing but even as I read them, Japan’s bubble had popped brutally and it continued to stagnate. This dissonance, and my own susceptibility to the authors I had read, was not lost on me. (There was another sobering example from that same period for me - I had read Frank Herbert’s Dune with avidity, thoroughly approving of Paul’s actions; then I read Dune Messiah and some of Herbert’s essays and interviews, only to realize that I had been cheering on a mass murderer and had fallen right into Herbert’s trap—“I am showing you the superhero syndrome and your own participation in it.”)

Years later, I came across Paul Krugman’s “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle”, which told me about a economic (as opposed to military or geopolitical) parallel to Japan’s ascension that I’d never heard of - Soviet Russia! (And it’s worth noting that one of the other ‘Asian Tigers’, South Korea, despite its extraordinary growth and own mini-narratives, is still 3k or so below Japan’s per-capita income.)

Ever since I have been curious as to China’s fate (much greater than or comparable total wealth to the US?), skeptical of the optimistic forecasts, and mindful of my own fallibility. Falling into the narrative once, with Japan, is understandable; fool me twice with Soviet Russia, that’s forgivable; fool me three times with China, and I prove myself a fool.

Domain-Squatting Externalities

In developing my custom search engine for finding sources for Wikipedia articles, one of its chief benefits turned out to nothing other than filtering out mirrors of Wikipedia! Since one is usually working on an existing article, that means there may be hundreds or thousands of copies of the article floating around the Internet, all of which match very well the search term one is using, but which contribute nothing. This is one of the hidden costs of having a FLOSS license: the additional copying imposes an overhead²⁹. This cost is not borne by the copier, who may be making quite a bit of money on their Wikipedia mirror, even penalized by Google as they have since become. In other words, cluttering up searches is a negative externality. (One could say the same thing of the many mirrors or variant versions of social news sites like Hacker News. Who are they imposing costs upon unilaterally?)

Domain-squatters are another nuisance; so often I have gone to an old URL and found nothing but a parking domain, with maybe the URL plugged into a Google search underneath a sea of random ads. But, the libertarian objects, clearly these domain-squatters are providing a service since otherwise there would be no advertising revenue and the domain-squatters could not afford to annually renew the domain, much less turn a profit.

But here is another clear case of externalities.

On parking domains, only 1 person out of thousands is going to click on an ad (at best), find something useful to them, and make the ads a paying proposition. but those other thousands are going to be slowed down - the page has to be loaded, they have to look at it, analyze it, and realize that it’s not what they wanted and try something else like a differently spelled domain or a regular search. A simple domain-not-found error would have been faster by a second at least, and less mental effort. The wasted time, the cost to those thousands, is not borne by the domain-squatter, the ad-clicker, or the advertiser. They are externalizing the costs of their existing.

A Market For Fat: The Transfer Machine

One day sweating at the gym, I suddenly thought, “if only I could pay someone to take this fat off my hands - someone who enjoys this crap!”

Well, what if you could? What if there were a machine which could transfer kilograms of body fat between people? Let’s stipulate that the machine is cheap to operate, perfectly safe, requires the two people to be within a meter or two, and can instantaneously transfer kilograms of body fat between two people in such a way that the presence & absence is as if they hadn’t eaten the equivalent. (The fat can’t simply be dumped into the drain, like a magical liposuction.) What would happen?

Many people are unhappy with their excessive amount of body fat, as body fat is unattractive and unhealthy, so they would eagerly get rid of it. Relatively few people are in need of body fat (fat is an important nutrient, the absence of which leads to ‘rabbit starvation’, and body fat is an important organ and lack of it can cause problems ranging from being more easily injured to infertility in women, but at least in the contemporary USA, lack of body fat is a rare problem outside of bodybuilders & people with eating disorders (neither of which group wants transfers), and is rare even in Third World countries where obesity is increasingly the threat to poor people), so it would seem supply exceeds demand, requiring a market in body fat.

So probably people would wind up paying other people to take body fat off their (sometimes literal) hands. But there are limits to transfer as human skin is only so elastic and takes a while to grow (morbidly obese people who lose scores of kilograms often must undergo skin reduction surgery to deal with the loose flaps which can become infected), so transfers will be limited in size (perhaps 10-20kg is the safe upper limit) and will need to be regular & of small size.

The effect on the fitness industry would likely be catastrophic. Fitness and diets are at present bizarre poor-functioning markets because they can only sell inputs; there is no one you can pay to remove 1kg of fat from you, you can only pay for a gym membership or X training sessions or for Y prepared meals or Z diet recipe books, and not only are the average effects of those interventions either unknown or grossly exaggerated, they hide enormous individual variation, rendering rational shopping & comparison futile to a great extent. And despite their inability to deliver, they suck up dozens of billions of dollars in costs a year, and a gym membership can easily cost >$1k/year. In contrast, the ability to transfer fat and reliably immediately causing verifiable benefits would immediately attract a large fraction of clientele, destroying much of the demand for fitness/diet services, and such a collapse would have consequences eg. inability to pay fixed costs like the primary expense, rent.

Gyms notoriously are designed to be undercapacity, under the assumption that only a small fraction of members will use it heavily (or at all) and the rest cross-subsidize the users, so a shift to only serious gym-users (to people building muscle, and those busy working off fat transfers!) would further damage the economics of many gyms, as serious gym-users will visit more often, use more equipment more heavily, be more demanding, and likely be skewed towards powerlifting/bodybuilding which requires much more space per customer than a bunch of treadmills cheek-by-jowl. Fitness is a major costly signal at present, signaling a mix of leisure/wealth/self-discipline/low-discount-rates over the long-term, so the collapse of visible fitness (in the form of low body fat percentage) into a simple (and likely cheap) signal of short-term financial wherewithal (as one can impulsively go pay for a large transfer of fat) would force the middle/upper class (the jogging class) into finding new, more costly signals.

Paradoxically, the fact that fat can be transferred and is a cheap signal would result in universal demand from the middle/upper-class, precisely because it would be so easy that there would no longer be plausible excuses for not doing it; maintaining a stable weight is difficult and time-consuming and near impossible for some people, so one can only be blamed somewhat for failing to do so, but with fat transfer, failure to do so could only indicate severe deviancy/deficiency, somewhat like smoking or having yellow teeth or not having a college degree. So even as fat ceases to be a particularly informative signal, it becomes a mandatory signal, which would induce more demand for transfer. There would also be effects on the supply end of people: many fitness instructors admit they do it to show off and will sacrifice money for the privilege; so the collapse of the signal will eliminate much of the personnel.

What would replace low body fat as a signal? Signals are fairly arbitrary so it’s hard to be confident, but one natural replacement would be substitution with food. Food consumption is already heavily moralized (just walk into a Whole Foods to see or consider why nutrition science has such a dismal track record of accurate causal inference) and the increasing signalization (“Instagrammization”?) of gourmet food & restaurants has been noticed by many people; one of the fundamental constraints on consumption of craft beers and “bean to bar” chocolate and steak dinners is, however, fear of weight Transfer offers a way to lift that constraint while simultaneously serving as a minor costly signal of financial status - someone who consumes organic cruelty-free beef regularly while remaining thin is signaling both their sophisticated palate, refined moral sensibilities, and wealth. Or to put it another way, transfers become the mythical vomitorium enabling wealthy gluttons to purge their food binges. So trends towards elaborate exhibitionist feasts could be accelerated (incidentally increasing the supply of excess fat).

Who would be buyers and sellers?

Rich people tend to be thinner than poor people, but are still far from optimal weights, so the existing SES gradient of fat/health/wealth would probably increase: poor people would become richer but fatter; poor people also have high discount rates and are more impulsive, so while they may be happy to make the deal, the long-term consequences will be bad. This would be particularly acute for drug addicts, who would be able to score in exchange for ‘just’ taking another kilogram of fat and, repeatedly doing so, might wind up with hundreds of excess kilograms. (The money itself will only minimally help health, given existing results on the causal effect of monetary shocks & free health insurance.) On the positive side, being a fat recipient is the epitome of unskilled labor and provides an additional option of a de facto Basic Income without the draining effect of blood donation.

And since most everyone will have some spare capacity for transfers (perhaps after a delay for skin growth to catch up), there’s no reason that fat could not be securitized: personal loans could be collateralized by body weight (eg. someone 10kg underweight could pledge 30kg), agreements to fat transfers could be purchased and bundled together for large-scale fat transfers or to implement futures (ie. pay people for the right for a 1kg transfer, and hold onto it until potentially prices rise in the future and then sell the right to other people at the new price). Fat might itself be ‘borrowed’ in the sense of people renting fat reductions for short terms - visits to a beach, important meetings, weddings, and special occasions in general. One might not be able to afford a permanent transfer to reach one’s ideal weight, but one might be able to afford temporary transfers where the fat is eventually returned (with a little extra as interest), which could be paid for monetarily or in kind by oneself temporarily holding additional fat later, which might be more easily described in units like “kg-days” - eg. for work one might borrow -5kg for the work week, incurring a debt of 25 kg-days (transferring the 5kg to someone who wants to be thin on the weekends and doesn’t mind being fat during the week) and then pay it back by carrying 12.5kg on the weekends for 2 days (repaying the other person by letting them be particularly svelte on the weekend for partying or whatever). An active futures market could incentivize serious research into weight loss, as anyone who cracks the code of weight loss and can burn fat more efficiently can then profitably exploit the knowledge by taking fat deliveries and then disposing of the fat at sub-market rates; organizations engaged in such “arse arbitrage” would be called, of course, “pudge funds”. Prices would fluctuate with the weather & season, reflecting available food and exercise opportunities, and would doubtless be affected by many other variables too; an efficient fat market would have to increase prices slightly whenever Netflix releases a new TV series for binging, all of which subtle adjustments would require “high caloric trading” specialists to provide liquidity. Health insurers would crunch the numbers and, moral hazard issues aside, might often conclude that paying for transfers is cheaper than incurring long-term expenses from diabetes or bariatric surgery. Life insurers, on the other hand, would be less happy, as transfers could result in dramatic decreases in the life expectancy of an insured person right after they subscribe to a policy, and might define transfers as grounds for canceling life insurance policies.

Young people are cash-poor and time-rich, and have high metabolisms, while old people reverse all that (and many an old person has ruefully recalled how they could eat anything when they were young without gaining a gram), so there’s a natural set of exchanges there, although it will be limited by the fact that young people will not want to take on too much fat because of the impact on personal attractiveness (most valuable when young), and because there are far more old people than young people (young people are really advantaged only adolescence to late 30s, but then they might live another 40 years getting fatter, for net fat years).

There are also large individual differences. Diet and exercise studies routinely show large differences in individual responses to the interventions with tiny long-term effects, with a small fraction of participants often gaining weight or worsening; forced-feeding and starvation experiments also demonstrate rebound and homeostatic effects. All of this has large genetic contributions. For this and other reasons, “calories in, calories out” is either false or tautological. And large people presumably burn more calories as their basal metabolic rate or during exercise than small people, giving them an advantage. Hence, some people will have large comparative advantages in fat loss because they are large or simply find exercise or dieting relatively easy. This would form a nice side job for them, or if the price of fat rises high enough, potentially a full-time job.

Indeed, in the extreme case, someone, a “fatpreneur”, might be able to stop eating food entirely (perhaps still consuming vitamin pills and a few nutrient-dense foods for essential nutrients) and burn donor fat constantly as their job; 1kg of body fat is ~7000-10,000 (k)cals, with daily caloric needs at 2000_24ya kcal (minus the caloric content of the essential nutrients), so a fatpreneur could live without eating directly on 1-2kg a week, disposing of 52-105kg of fat annually in a steady state. A fatpreneur likely could accumulate a steady client list and make weekly rounds collecting ~2kg of fat. (Perhaps we could call this the “gag economy”.) Fatpreneurs could burn even more calories and thus fat if they exercised, but exercise burns relatively small amounts (often <500 kcal per workout, which if done every other day is <1750_274ya kcal or 0.25kg fat/week, increasing annual totals to ~65-118kg) while being exhausting, time-consuming, and unpleasant - which is, after all, a large part of the problem and why there is so much fat, because “you can’t outrun your fork” - so it’s unclear if exercise would be a good use of their time and worth the extra fat disposal capability. The fat disposal (and savings on regular food consumption) may be enough on its own, and they are better off pursuing normal employment. Given only 105kg/year, to earn a modest passive income of $30k would require fat prices of >$285/kg (and exercise would add a marginal $3700).

Fatpreneurs will be rare, precisely because so many people find mere normal weight maintenance impossible in the modern environment, and we shouldn’t forget that “food is not about calories”: at all levels of American society, food is a luxury and a religion, it is not about mere sustenance. This can be seen in the levels of expenditure - Americans often eat out, spend considerable money on luxuries like alcohol or tobacco or meat among the poor or homeless, these make up a large fraction of expenditures, and this is true worldwide even among the most impoverished Third World countries whose people earn <$2/day, alcohol or other drugs like khat will be major expenditures, and in general spend several hundred dollars a month on food despite a nutritious diet being doable for ~$2.85^$2₂₀₁₀/day (“Stigler’s diet problem” is a classic optimization challenge, with one of the more recent attempts being Garille & Gass2001, finding some possible diets costing annually $711.76^$412₂₀₀₁/$611.56^$354₂₀₀₁/$1,124.66^$651₂₀₀₁/$924.26^$535₂₀₀₁—vastly smaller than actual American per capita food expenditures in 2014 of $6,112.68^$4,576₂₀₁₄). Eating food and meals is a beloved luxury people will pay thousands of dollars for, and even people using meal-replacement methods like Soylent find themselves missing food psychologically; so it is highly unrealistic to imagine that more than a small percentage of people would become fatpreneurs unless fat prices were at least $40/kg ($\frac{4576}{118}=39$) and probably much higher than that would be necessary. Aside from people unusually insensitive to lack of food consumption, two possibilities are to integrate transfers with medical treatment: the ill, such as cancer patients enduring chemotherapy, are often underweight³⁰ and could in fact benefit from regular transfers of fat (although they would probably benefit much more from transfers of muscle instead), which would provide several hundred thousand people per year in need of several kilograms; finally, to avoid being a trivial scenario, I defined transfers as only between living people, but what about terminal or extremely sick people? One could imagine them taking on large transfers to cover medical bills or try to leave an estate; if one is dying, some additional kilograms is barely harmful & may be helpful. The problem with this is that dying can be unexpected and abrupt, and people are generally not interested in monetizing their corpses despite a human body being worth tens of thousands of dollars as parts & creating a lucrative industry for human tissue.

The fatpreneur’s problem immediately suggests another consequence: increase in the demand for stimulants and appetitive suppressants like modafinil, nicotine, amphetamines, or ephedrine. (This doesn’t include the more extreme options which people might be incentivized to use, such as 2,4-Dinitrophenol or clenbuterol.) They’re already popular for the ability to increase motivation for work or study, but with a market for fat, their use can now outright pay for themselves. A year’s supply of ephedrine or modafinil might run ~$200 in bulk, so only a small total fat loss is necessary to make their use profitable solely via weight loss. Generalizing wildly from modafinil & ephedrine, standard stimulants might cause 0.25kg/month weight loss or 3kg/year, so any fat price >$66/kg would make a number of stimulants profitable. It’s also often noted that quitting smoking leads to weight gains on the order of 2-5kg as nicotine is no longer suppressing the appetite or smoking substituting for snacking, so a negative consequence is that this will further discourage smokers from quitting as the side-effects of quitting become more financially salient.

What about international trade with Third World countries, exporting the body fat? International trade doesn’t seem as promising as it might because simple scarcity of calories long ago stopped being the fundamental cause of hunger and malnutrition. Food in bulk, like rice, is incredibly cheap. Where starvation and mass famine exists, it is solely a political phenomenon: the “Maduro diet” stops at the borders of Venezuela, and somehow the clouds causing torrential floods in North Korea never manage to pass the DMZ. Poor countries struggle with bad politics/laws/governments, micronutrients like iodine, logistics barriers to distributing existing food, and issues like that - not lack of calories per se. For these problems, sending hundreds of thousands of impoverished villagers to the USA or bringing fat Americans to them are either illegal, ineffective, or infeasible. It makes no sense to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on bribes & passports, then the plane ticket, to fly someone halfway across the world to load up on fat equivalent to a few hundred dollars of food at most (and the equivalent of low-quality food at that, without any micronutrients), and fly them back. It would make more sense to do as an adjunct to tourism, or as a kind of “medical tourism” in its own right, to let tourists get rid of the kilograms at a discount (and let them gorge on the cruise ship buffets without guilt). But like medical tourism presently, it would probably be a minor phenomenon.

What would be a reasonable market-clearing price? At the moment, there is a huge oversupply of American fat. As noted, the other end is limited - even an exercising fatpreneur can optimistically only burn 105kg of fat per year. A series of Gallup polls ending 2017 asks American adults (>18yo) about total & ‘ideal’ weight, finding an average difference of 7.25kg; this is based on self-reports, so the reported total weights are likely convenient underestimates of their true weight, their ‘ideal’ weight is probably still far from medically optimal, and Gallup notes that the ‘ideal’ weight is gradually increasing over time indicating what one might call “normalization of deviance” (ie. Americans are so fat they are ignorant of or in denial about how fat they are). Once population-scale changes had occurred, expectations would probably reset and many more kilograms would become excess. Anyway, this gives a ballpark: with ~234 million Americans over 18 (as of 2010_14ya, anyway, close enough), that implies there’s >1.7 billion kilograms (or >18 trillion kcal) of unwanted fat. To clear the backlog in 1 year would require >1.6m fatpreneurs. 1.6m is an enormous number but perhaps not unreasonable - if there are 234m adult Americans, then only ~1% need to be freaks willing to give up food and live off burning fat, and it’s never a good idea to bet against “>1% of the population being X” even where X is something very weird (eg. that appears to be roughly the percentage of Americans convinced the Earth is flat).

Once the backlog is cleared, what might the steady state look like? (Since as a starting point, we can assume people won’t change their habits.) Fat accumulates over a lifetime, as the obesity crisis is considered to start in childhood with obese children, so that 7.25kg difference appears to accumulate slowly over several decades; if it takes 20 or 30 years, that implies an annual permanent gain of ~0.24kg, so over that ~234m Americans, there’s on the order of 5.85m kg to dispose of per year, equivalent to 560k fatpreneurs. So both the stock and flow of fat are enormous.

For perspective, a gym membership is typically >$700 and members are typically still not at the ideal weight; reportedly, around 57m Americans in 2016 were members of a health club, which is difficult to reconcile with that 7.25kg gap and the overall USA obesity crisis, if gyms were all that effective. Even if we imagine that the entire gap is erased by the gym membership, as an upper bound on the value of the gym membership, that implies a willingness-to-pay of >$100/kg and possibly much more. Then there is the large time consumption (at 3 gym visits a week, 1.5 hours per visit to allow for travel/shower/overhead, and minimum wage, the time alone exceeds the membership costs), and then there is the sheer unpleasantness of exercise. For example, at $550/kg, the cost of erasing the fat gap would roughly equal the cost of LASIK, a highly popular elective surgery which merely removes glasses - how much more would people pay to be thin…? An even more striking survey claims that, going beyond gym memberships, general fitness spending has reached $1,860/year for the average American adult (again, without success), giving >$256/kg.

So the fat market could, if necessary, easily support prices of several hundred dollars per kilogram, and make stimulants & fatpreneurs profitable. Given the extremely large stock & flow of excess fat, the rarity of people gifted in weight maintenance, the high utility placed on eating, the induced demand from signaling/arms races, increases in fat flow from being able to trade money for risk-free food consumption, and revealed preferences from current fitness expenditures versus efficacy, I expect that market-clearing prices would wind up being quite high and definitely >$100, and >$1,000 doesn’t strike me as an absurd price. At $500, an average individual would need to spend $3.6k (so somewhat less than LASIK) to eliminate their gap, and the whole stock would require total payments of $850b to clear, with recurring annual costs of ~$3b. All doable.

More generally, what happens once fat has a clearcut price? The effects on food are ambiguous. On the one hand, by providing an option for avoiding the most negative consequence of food consumption, demand for food would increase in general (and particularly for the rich); but, on the other hand, people love bundling & illusions of freeness (“$0 is different”) and fixate on clear prices (eg. the obsession with gas prices while ignoring mileage). So though the option should make food in effect cheaper, even if the net price is reduced, food will feel much more expensive when anyone can calculate that at $500/kg or $5/100 kcal ($100\cdot \frac{500}{10000}$), a Big Mac’s 563 kcal for $3.99 means it costs approximately 7 times ($\frac{\frac{563}{100}\cdot 5}{3.99}=7.06$) as much in fat reduction as it does to buy. (Of course, this was always true - everything one eats above maintenance costs a ton of effort in dieting/exercise to get rid of, hence those not-so-amusing comparisons about how “it takes 10 marathons to burn the calories in a single bag of M&Ms” - but there was never any easy way to connect a given caloric value to a total cost. It’s much simpler to just remember “each 100 kcal costs $5”.) So perhaps the signaling demands and the price illusion effect will largely wind up canceling each other out.

Finally, what are the effects on health? That depends on what the net effect is. If fatpreneurs and other fat burning outlets are insufficient to produce net decreases in excess fat due to equivalents of risk homeostasis, then societal utility will increase but it won’t be accompanied by health benefits. If they are, the life expectancy benefits could be considerable: moderate obesity correlates with life expectancy reductions on the order of a year or two, which is consistent with one meta-analysis of RCTs of weight loss - eg. Kritchevsky et al 2015 finds a RR of 0.85 from a mean weight loss of 5.5kg after 2 years, which RR, if permanent & maintained, would translate to, given American mortality curves, +1.4 years life expectancy. Assuming half the adult US population needs weight loss and gets 1.4 years from transferring their full gap, that could translate to 160 million man-years.

Overall, thinking about it, I get the impression that a market for fat would not change society all that much, but exaggerate existing trends and correlations, and the benefits would probably far exceed the costs.

Urban Area Cost-Of-Living As Big Tech Moats & Employee Golden Handcuffs

Some speculations on Bay Area real estate & SV’s future:

Possibly the single biggest pain point for tech workers in the Bay Area or NYC is the ever-escalating cost of living, driven by local taxes and rent, with the cherry on top of incompetent & malicious local governance. (I was told by one real estate/tech company headquartered in SF that that was in fact the one major city they didn’t & couldn’t operate in!) Certainly it is their biggest quality of life issue whenever I talk to them, whether online or in person. (SF’s tragedy is that it could have had Houston’s housing, Vancouver’s cosmopolitanism, Tokyo’s mass transit, LA’s media, Shanghai’s economic dynamism, & Amsterdam’s air quality/environment; instead, it got Houston’s cosmopolitanism, Vancouver’s housing, Tokyo’s economic dynamism, LA’s mass transit, Shanghai’s air quality, & Amsterdam’s media.)

As absurdly high as their salaries may become, the cost of living drains it away, and many wind up better off after moving away, because the steep salary cuts are outpaced by even steeper cost of living. Considering that labor is one of the single largest costs for big tech companies, the cumulative dysfunctionality here over the past decades must amount to hundreds of billions of dollars essentially flushed down the drain. Why don’t they fix it, or, if political realities render that impossible, leave? The usual answer is agglomeration efficiencies (‘all the good programmers are already in X, we can’t leave!’), but they can coordinate a move, or simply follow a leader who makes a big commitment to a better location. Steve Jobs and other tech CEOs were able to coordinate an extremely illegal wage-fixing cartel when they wanted to cut costs, after all, so a legal HQ or office move (or simply freezing net labor growth in the Bay Area & grandfathering in those offices) shouldn’t be that hard, and the advantages only increase with time.

Even if they can’t take steps as drastic as that, it seems like they could do more than - whatever it is they have done about it thus far. Which seems to be, I’m not sure what, exactly. The main response seems to be buying up big office buildings or real estate for new HQs now before the prices can go up even further, which may be a practical response but is treating only a symptom.

One suspicion has creeped up on me: if they don’t act like they care, maybe… they don’t care. Why would they not care? Even if employee happiness/burnout/turnover is foolishly ignored by them, the sheer expense of salaries ought to make them care. Unless… the salaries have a silver lining which help offset their cost.

What if the salaries are golden handcuffs? If salaries must keep pace with Bay Area CoL, this has a few implications:

1. collective employee savings will remain minimal, as whatever excess there is can be absorbed by the landlord oligopoly simply raising rent some more

2. not working is an unattractive option, as the cost of simply existing is so enormous

3. job hunters will prioritize jobs which pay in cash, as cash is needed to pay rent, and other assets are not accepted, whether they are shiny gold rocks or stock options

These points mean that employees will have a hard time saving up large amounts of capital to serve as cushions, retirement savings, or seed investments for a startup of their own; they will be risk-averse to being fired or switching jobs, as those incur loss of working time/salary and risk extended periods of unemployment, and, perhaps most importantly, startups - which are cash-poor equity-rich - will struggle even more to be founded or then hire employees. After all, how can a startup compete with a FANG or AmaGooBookSoft or whatever big tech company offering salaries like $200k+ & perks to the best software engineers? Sure, that startup might be able to offer them handsome stock options with an expected value (in the very distant future after the increasingly-hypothetical IPO) of say $150k, but this equity is effectively worthless to an engineer who needs to make rent now. A FANG, on the other hand, can pay cash on the barrelhead and throw in some options as a bonus, for that old-time SV flavor.

Aside from cash salaries needed for rent and other expenses, there is student debt, particularly for younger employees or employees with graduate degrees. Perhaps the only thing in the USA outpacing real estate costs is college tuition/student debt. Well, two things - student debt and health care. People are if anything even more terrified of losing a good health insurance plan than they are of being evicted/potentially homeless or their kids not going to college. Here too a FANG or other giant has the scale and brawn and cash and tax advantages to offer a gold-plated health insurance plan - of the sort which cannot be bought on the market and if it could one could not afford it - which cannot be matched by any startup.

Imagine a FANG software engineer, who, after years of the Big Tech grind, contemplating quitting to join a startup. The startup seems like it could be big, very big, and he’s excited. His wife acknowledges this and encourages him to follow his dreams and make a mark - but exactly how much can it pay, in cash, not equity? Their house, which is necessary for them and their two kids and dog (he admits to some lifestyle creep but is unwilling to go back to his grad school days of scarfing free pizza to make ends meet), costs $4k/month and the landlord will be raising the rent soon, he hasn’t paid off his student loans from CMU (which cost $200k in student debt), and their savings won’t last much more than a year considering all their other expenses. Incidentally, does the startup offer a comparable health insurance plan? What would she and the kids do if he was hit by a bus or developed terminal cancer? We would not be surprised if perhaps the engineer puts off the decision to quit, resolving to do it next year, perhaps, working on it as a side project, after saving up some money, and maybe asking for a raise… (Not that he winds up having time or energy to work on it - given his daily commute over a crippled transportation infrastructure to work, necessary for a house which costs ‘only’ that much.)

There are further pernicious effects on startups. They will need to raise more cash, more often, reducing returns for founders and increasing overhead (if for no other reason than the time it takes to do VC funding rounds); the high fixed costs make raising funds more a matter of life and death, and possibly promotes herding/groupthink/conservatism among investors (do the investors in a particularly risky/novel startup want to take the risk of investing in a startup which might not be able to raise money in the next round despite success?); they will be less able to prototype and experiment before needing to raise VCs, perhaps unable at all; the escalating increase in costs offsets other positive trends such as decreasing computing costs from cloud computing etc.

Since this is bad for startups, it is good for FANG. The threat from disruption is lessened because their employees are increasingly indentured servants, or perhaps we should say, serfs. They are tied to the land (by rent), and resort to protection (from medical bills) from the feudal lords to which they pledge allegiance. They have difficulty leaving, making for less turnover and longer tenure (while turnover is much higher than in most industries, it doesn’t seem to be nearly as high as it used to be - contrast multi-year or multi-decade careers at individual tech companies with how it was during the Internet Bubble), and more importantly, have difficulty leaving for or founding disruptive new startups which are serious threats to the incumbents, who at least are known factors to each other & have reached a certain modus vivendi. In this scenario, the extremely high cost of living is a ‘moat’ equivalent to regulation or barriers to entry, which ward off rivals: they must be able to pay escalating inflated salaries just to enable employees to keep living as accustomed. (And to the extent that all the key employees have relocated to the Bay Area, this moat is more, not less, effective.)

Decluttering

Ego depletion:

Ego depletion refers to the idea that self-control and other mental processes that require focused conscious effort rely on energy that can be used up. When that energy is low (rather than high), mental activity that requires self-control is impaired. In other words, using one’s self-control impairs the ability to control one’s self later on. In this sense, the idea of (limited) willpower is correct.

Wonder whether this has any connection with minimalism? Clutter might damage executive functions; Killingsworth & Gilbert2010 correlated distraction with later unhappiness, and from “Henry Morton Stanley’s Unbreakable Will”, Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney:

You might think the energy spent shaving in the jungle would be better devoted to looking for food. But Stanley’s belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in studies. In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, “Clean up your room!” The people in the messy room scored lower self-control, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. When offered snacks and drinks, people in the neat lab room more often chose apples and milk instead of the candy and sugary colas preferred by their peers in the pigsty.

In a similar experiment online, some participants answered questions on a clean, well-designed website. Others were asked the same questions on a sloppy website with spelling errors and other problems. On the messy site, people were more likely to say that they would gamble rather than take a sure thing, curse and swear, and take an immediate but small reward rather than a larger but delayed reward. The orderly websites, like the neat lab rooms, provided subtle cues guiding people toward self-disciplined decisions and actions helping others.

Paul Graham, “Stuff”:

For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876_148ya, the bedrooms don’t have closets. In those days people’s stuff fit in a chest of drawers. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a lot less stuff. When I look back at photos from the 1970s, I’m surprised how empty houses look. As a kid I had what I thought was a huge fleet of toy cars, but they’d be dwarfed by the number of toys my nephews have. All together my Matchboxes and Corgis took up about a third of the surface of my bed. In my nephews’ rooms the bed is the only clear space. Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven’t changed correspondingly. We overvalue stuff.

…And unless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting. (This could explain why clutter doesn’t seem to bother kids as much as adults. Kids are less perceptive. They build a coarser model of their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.)…Another way to resist acquiring stuff is to think of the overall cost of owning it. The purchase price is just the beginning. You’re going to have to think about that thing for years-perhaps for the rest of your life. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. Some give more than they take. Those are the only things worth having.

Michael Lewis, “Obama’s Way”:

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

It’s striking how cluttered a big city is when you visit them from a rural area; it’s also striking how mental disease seems to correlate with cities and how mental performance improves with natural vista and not urban vistas.

See also latent inhibition:

Latent inhibition is a process by which exposure to a stimulus of little or no consequence prevents conditioned associations with that stimulus being formed. The ability to disregard or even inhibit formation of memory, by preventing associative learning of observed stimuli, is an automatic response and is thought to prevent information overload. Latent inhibition is observed in many species, and is believed to be an integral part of the observation/learning process, to allow the self to interact successfully in a social environment.

Most people are able to shut out the constant stream of incoming stimuli, but those with low latent inhibition cannot. It is hypothesized that a low level of latent inhibition can cause either psychosis, a high level of creativity[1] or both, which is usually dependent on the subject’s intelligence.[2][3] Those of above average intelligence are thought to be capable of processing this stream effectively, an ability that greatly aids their creativity and ability to recall trivial events in incredible detail and which categorizes them as almost creative geniuses. Those with less than average intelligence, on the other hand, are less able to cope, and so as a result are more likely to suffer from mental illness.

Interesting decluttering approach: “100 Things Challenge”

• https://web.archive.org/web/20100301094213/http://www.guynameddave.com/100-thing-challenge.html

• https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html

• https://www.denverpost.com/2008_16ya/01/23/the-psychology-of-clutter/

Optimizing the Alphabet

Here’s an interesting idea: the glyphs of the Phoenician-style alphabet are not optimized in any sense. They are bad in several ways, and modern glyphs are little better. For example, ‘v’ and ‘w’, or ‘m’ and ‘n’. People confuse them all the time, both in reading and in writing.

So that’s one criterion: glyphs should be as distinct from all the rest as possible.

What’s a related criterion? ‘m’ and ‘w’ are another pair which seem suboptimal, yet they are as dissimilar as, say, ‘a’ and ‘b’, under many reasonable metrics. ‘m’ and ‘w’ are related via symmetry. Even though they share relatively few pixels, they are still identical under rotation, and we can see that. We could confuse them if we were reading upside down, or at an angle, or just confuse them period.

So that’s our next criterion: the distinctness must also hold when the glyph is rotated by any degree and then compared to the rest.

OK, so we now have a set of unique and dissimilar glyphs that are unambiguous about their orientation. What else? Well, we might want them to be easy to write as well as read. How do we define ‘easy to write’? We could have a complicated physiological model about what strokes can easily follow what movements and so on, but we will cop out and say: it is made of as few straight lines and curves as possible. Rather than unwritable pixels in a grid, our primitives will be little geometric primitives.

The fewer the primitives and the closer to integers or common fractions the positioning of said primitives, the simpler and the better.

We throw all these rules in, add a random starting population or better yet a population modeled after the existing alphabet, and begin our genetic algorithm. What 26 glyphs will we get?

Problem: our current glyphs may be optimal in a deep sense:

Dehaene describes some fascinating and convincing evidence for the first kind of innateness. In one of the most interesting chapters, he argues that the shapes we use to make written letters mirror the shapes that primates use to recognize objects. After all, I could use any arbitrary squiggle to encode the sound at the start of “Tree” instead of a T. But actually the shapes of written symbols are strikingly similar across many languages.

It turns out that T shapes are important to monkeys, too. When a monkey sees a T shape in the world, it is very likely to indicate the edge of an object - something the monkey can grab and maybe even eat. A particular area of its brain pays special attention to those important shapes. Human brains use the same area to process letters. Dehaene makes a compelling case that these brain areas have been “recycled” for reading. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes,” he writes. “They lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.” https://www.nytimes.com/2010_14ya/01/03/books/review/Gopnik-t.html

• “Dimensions of Dialogue”, Joel Simon: “Here, new writing systems are created by challenging two neural networks to communicate information via images. Using the magic of machine learning, the networks attempt to create their own emergent language isolate that is robust to noise.”

Multiple Interpretations Theory of Humor

My theory is that humor is when there is a connection between the joke & punchline which is obvious to the person in retrospect, but not initially.

Hence, a pun is funny because the connection is unpredictable in advance, but clear in retrospect; Eliezer’s joke about the motorist and the asylum inmate is funny because we were predicting some other response other than the logical one; similarly for ‘why did the duck cross the road? to get to the other side’ is not funny to someone who has never heard any of the road jokes, but to someone who has and is thinking of zany explanations, the reversion to normality is unpredicted.

Your theory doesn’t work with absurdist humor. There isn’t initially 1 valid decoding, much less 2.

Mm. This might work for some proofs - Lewis Carroll, as we all know, was a mathematician - but a proof for something you already believe that is conducted via tedious steps is not humorous by anyone’s lights. Proving P/=NP is not funny, but proving 2+2=3 is funny.

‘A man walks into a bar and says “Ow.”’

How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe, and one to put the clocks in the bathtub.

Exactly. What are the 2 valid decodings of that? I struggle to come up with just 1 valid decoding involving giraffes and bathtubs; like the duck crossing the road, the joke is the frustration of our attempt to find the connection.

Efficient Natural Language

Split out to “How Complex Are Individual Differences?”

Cryonics Cluster

When one looks at cryonics enthusiasts, there’s an interesting cluster of beliefs. There’s psychological materialism, as one would expect (it’s possible to believe your personal identity is your soul and also that cryonics works, but it’s a rather unstable and unusual possibility), since the mind cannot be materially preserved if it is not material. Then there’s libertarianism with its appeal to free markets and invisible entities like deadweight loss. And then there is ethical utilitarianism, usually act utilitarianism³¹. They’re often accused of being nerdy and specifically autistic or Asperger’s; with considerable truth. Most have programming experience, or have read a good deal about logic and math and computers. Romain2010 gives the stereotypical image:

Cryonics is a particularly American social practice, created and taken up by a particular type of American: primarily a small faction of white, male, atheist, Libertarian, middle- and upper-middle-income, computer-engineering “geeks” who believe passionately in the free market and its ability to support technological progress…When I interviewed him, Jerry Lemler, former president of Alcor, claimed that a “typical cryonicist” is highly educated, white, American, male, well-read, employed in a computer or technical field, “not very social,” often single, has few or no children, is atheistic or agnostic, and is not wealthy but financially stable. Lemler also told me that cryonicists tend to have very strong Libertarian political views, believing in the rights of the individual and the power of the free market, although Lemler himself is a self-proclaimed “bleeding heart Liberal.” Less than 25% of Alcor’s members were women, and only a small fraction of these women joined purely out of their own interest; most female Alcor members were the wives, partners, daughters, or mothers of a man who joined first. Lemler also said that cryonicists are highly adventurous, although he added, “You may not see that in their current lives. In fact, we have the bookish types, if you will, as I just described. You wouldn’t think that they’d be willing to take a chance on this particular adventure.”…Like any group, the cryonics community is by no means uniform in demography, thought, or opinion. The majority of cryonicists I met were, indeed, software or mechanical engineers. But I also encountered venture capitalists, traders, homemakers, a shaman, a journalist, an university professor, cryobiologists, an insurance broker, artificial intelligence designers, a musician, men, women, children, people of color, people in perfect health, and people who were terminally ill. Nevertheless, a sort of Weberian “ideal type” (Weber 2001_23ya[1930_94ya]) of the typical cryonicist has emerged, and this is how cryonicists recognize themselves and one another. …In an effort to bring the quite passionate technical discussion to a close, one member made a public aside to me, the anthropologist, loud enough for the benefit of everyone in the room. He said, “You know that a typical cryonicist is a male computer programmer, don’t you?” Everyone laughed. Another member shouted out, “And a Libertarian!” Everyone laughed harder. Everyone appeared to enjoy the joke, which seemed to reaffirm the group’s identity and to promote a kind of solidarity among them.

The results of one long-running online survey (from the sample size, LessWrongers probably made up <0.5% of the sample); “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Roots of an Individualist Ideology” (as summarized by the WSJ):

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use “cold” calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed “effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks” more than others do. The researchers found that libertarians had the most “masculine” psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which “may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women.”

This clustering could be due solely to social networks and whatnot. But suppose they’re not. Is there any perspective which explains this, and cryonic’s “hostile wife phenomenon” as well?

Let’s look at the key quotes about that phenomenon, and a few quotes giving the reaction

The authors of this article know of a number of high profile cryonicists who need to hide their cryonics activities from their wives and ex-high profile cryonicists who had to choose between cryonics and their relationship. We also know of men who would like to make cryonics arrangements but have not been able to do so because of resistance from their wives or girlfriends. In such cases, the female partner can be described as nothing less than hostile toward cryonics. As a result, these men face certain death as a consequence of their partner’s hostility. While it is not unusual for any two people to have differing points of view regarding cryonics, men are more interested in making cryonics arrangements. A recent membership update from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation reports that 667 males and 198 females have made cryonics arrangements. Although no formal data are available, it is common knowledge that a substantial number of these female cryonicists signed up after being persuaded by their husbands or boyfriends. For whatever reason, males are more interested in cryonics than females. These issues raise an obvious question: are women more hostile to cryonics than men?

…Over the 40 years of his active involvement, one of us (Darwin) has kept a log of the instances where, in his personal experience, hostile spouses or girlfriends have prevented, reduced or reversed the involvement of their male partner in cryonics. This list (see appendix) is restricted to situations where Darwin had direct knowledge of the conflict and was an Officer, Director or employee of the cryonics organization under whose auspices the incident took place. This log spans the years 1978_46ya to 1986_38ya, an 8 year period…The 91 people listed in this table include 3 whose deaths are directly attributable to hostility or active intervention on the part of women. This does not include the many instances since 1987_37ya where wives, mothers, sisters, or female business partners have materially interfered with a patient’s cryopreservation(3) or actually caused the patient not to be cryopreserved or removed from cryopreservation(4). Nor does it reflect the doubtless many more cases where we had no idea…

…The most immediate and straightforward reasons posited for the hostility of women to cryonics are financial. When the partner with cryonics arrangements dies, life insurance and inheritance funds will go to the cryonics organization instead of to the partner or their children. Some nasty battles have been fought over the inheritance of cryonics patients, including attempts of family members to delay informing the cryonics organization that the member had died, if an attempt was made at all(5). On average, women live longer than men and can have a financial interest in their husbands’ forgoing cryonics arrangements. Many women also cite the “social injustice” of cryonics and profess to feel guilt and shame that their families’ money is being spent on a trivial, useless, and above all, selfish action when so many people who could be saved are dying of poverty and hunger now…Another, perhaps more credible, but unarguably more selfish, interpretation of this position is what one of us (Darwin) has termed “post reanimation jealousy.” When women with strong religious convictions who give “separation in the afterlife” as the reason they object to their husbands’ cryopreservation are closely questioned, it emerges that this is not, in fact, their primary concern. The concern that emerges from such discussion is that if cryonics is successful for the husband, he will not only resume living, he may well do so for a vast period of time during which he can reasonably be expected to form romantic attachments to other women, engage in purely sexual relationships or have sexual encounters with other women, or even marry another woman (or women), father children with them and start a new family. This prospect evokes obvious insecurity, jealousy and a nearly universal expression on the part of the wives that such a situation is unfair, wrong and unnatural. Interestingly, a few women who are neither religious nor believers in a metaphysical afterlife have voiced the same concerns. The message here may be “If I’ve got to die then you’ve got to die too!” As La Rochefoucauld famously said, with a different meaning in mind, “Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always die with it.”…While cryonics is mostly a male pursuit, there are women involved and active, and many of them are single. Wives (or girlfriends) justifiably worry that another woman who shares their husbands’ enthusiasm for cryonics, shares his newly acquired world view and offers the prospect of a truly durable relationship - one that may last for centuries or millennia - may win their husbands’ affections. This is by no means a theoretical fear because this has happened a number of times over the years in cryonics. Perhaps the first and most publicly acknowledged instance of this was the divorce of Fred Chamberlain from his wife (and separation from his two children) and the break-up of the long-term relationship between Linda McClintock (nee Linda Chamberlain) and her long-time significant other as a result of Fred and Linda working together on a committee to organize the Third National Conference On Cryonics (sponsored the Cryonics Society of California).³²

Going back to Romain 2010_14ya, reproduction is also a theorized concern:

For many cryonicists, having children is considered an unnecessary diversion of resources that can and should be devoted to the self, especially if one is to achieve immortality. Phil, one of the few cryonicists I know with children, once said to me, “They’re good kids. But if their moms hadn’t wanted them, they wouldn’t exist.” He did not see much value in passing on genes or creating new generations and preferred to work toward a world in which people no longer need to procreate since the extension of human lifespans would maintain the human species. Indeed, I have heard some in the community theorize that having children is an evolutionary byproduct that could very well become vestigial as humans come closer and closer to becoming immortal. I have also heard several lay theories within the cryonics community about genetic or brain structure differences between men and women that cause men to favor life-extension philosophies and women to favor procreation and the conservative maintenance of cultural traditions…In a very different example, Allison wanted to have children but decided that she will wait until post-reanimation because she was single and in her mid-30s and thus approaching age-related infertility (medicine of the future would also reverse loss of fertility, she assumed). When I suggested that she might freeze her eggs so that she could possibly have genetically related children later in life, she responded that she has too much work to accomplish in the immediate future and would rather wait until she “came back” to experience parenthood.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, remarking on the number of women in one cryonics gathering, inadvertently demonstrates that the gender disparity is still large:

This conference was just young people who took the action of signing up for cryonics, and who were willing to spend a couple of paid days in Florida meeting older cryonicists. The gathering was 34% female, around half of whom were single, and a few kids. This may sound normal enough, unless you’ve been to a lot of contrarian-cluster conferences, in which case you just spit coffee all over your computer screen and shouted “WHAT?” I did sometimes hear “my husband persuaded me to sign up”, but no more frequently than “I persuaded my husband to sign up”. Around 25% of the people present were from the computer world, 25% from science, and 15% were doing something in music or entertainment - with possible overlap, since I’m working from a show of hands. I was expecting there to be some nutcases in that room, people who’d signed up for cryonics for just the same reason they subscribed to homeopathy or astrology, ie. that it sounded cool. None of the younger cryonicists showed any sign of it. There were a couple of older cryonicists who’d gone strange, but none of the young ones that I saw. Only three hands went up that did not identify as atheist/agnostic, and I think those also might have all been old cryonicists.³³

Some female perspectives:

Well, as a woman, I do have the exact same gut reaction [to cryonics]. I’d never want to be involved with a guy who wanted this. It just seems horribly inappropriate and wrong, and no it’s nothing to do at all with throwing away the money, I mean I would rather not throw away money but I could be with a guy who spent money foolishly without these strong feelings. I don’t know that I can exactly explain why I find this so distasteful, but it’s a very instinctive recoil. And I’m not religious and do not believe in any afterlife. It’s sort of like being with a cannibal, even a respectful cannibal who would not think of harming anyone in order to eat them would not be a mate I would ever want.³⁴

“You have to understand,” says Peggy, who at 54 is given to exasperation about her husband’s more exotic ideas. “I am a hospice social worker. I work with people who are dying all the time. I see people dying All. The. Time. And what’s so good about me that I’m going to live forever?”

…Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché. Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008_16ya paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.”From its inception in 1964_60ya,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

…Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. So why is this happening?”…A small amount of time spent trying to avoid certain death would seem to be well within the capacity of a healthy marriage to absorb. The checkered marital history of cryonics suggests instead that a violation beyond nonconformity is at stake, that something intrinsic to the loner’s quest for a second life agitates against harmony in the first…But here he doesn’t expect to succeed, and as with most societal attitudes that contradict his intuitions, he’s got a theory as to why. “Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future - a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway - is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.”³⁵

As the spouse of someone who is planning on undergoing cryogenic preservation, I found this article to be relevant to my interests! My first reactions when the topic of cryonics came up (early in our relationship) were shock, a bit of revulsion, and a lot of confusion. Like Peggy (I believe), I also felt a bit of disdain. The idea seemed icky, childish, outlandish, and self-aggrandizing. But I was deeply in love, and very interested in finding common ground with my then-boyfriend (now spouse). We talked, and talked, and argued, and talked some more, and then I went off and thought very hard about the whole thing…Ultimately, my struggle to come to terms with his decision has been more or less successful. Although I am not (and don’t presently plan to be) enrolled in a cryonics program myself, although I still find the idea somewhat unsettling, I support his decision without question. If he dies before I do, I will do everything in my power to see that his wishes are complied with, as I expect him to see that mine are. Anything less than this, and I honestly don’t think I could consider myself his partner.³⁶

To add a data point, I found myself, to put it strongly, literally losing the will to live recently: I’m 20 and female and I’m kind of at the emotional maturity stage. I think my brain stopped saying “live! Stay alive!” and started saying “Make babies! Protect babies!”, because I started finding the idea of cryopreserving myself as less attractive and more repulsive (with no change in opinion for preserving my OH), and an increase in how often I thought about doing the right thing for my future kids. To the extent that I now get orders of magnitude more panicked about anything happening to my reproductive system than dying after future children reach adulthood.³⁷

Quentin’s explanation is even more extreme:

What follows below is the patchwork I have stitched together of the true female objections to a mate undergoing cryonic suspension. I believe many women have a constant low-level hatred of men at a conscious or subconscious level and their narcissistic quest for entitlement and [meaningfulness] begrudges him any pursuit that isn’t going to lead directly to producing, providing, protecting, and problem solving for her. It would evolutionarily be in her best interest to pull as many emotional and physical levers to bend as much of his energies toward her and their offspring as she can get away with and less away from himself. That would translate as a feeling of revulsion toward cryonics that is visceral but which she dares not state directly to avoid alerting her mate to her true nature.

She doesn’t want him to live for decades, centuries, or millennia more in a possibly healthier and more youthful state where he might meet and fall in love with new mates. She doesn’t want her memory in his mind to fade into insignificance as the fraction of time she spent with him since she has died to be a smaller and smaller fraction of his total existence; reduced to the equivalent in his memory of an interesting conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk one summer afternoon. She doesn’t want him to live for something more important than HER. So why not just insist she join him in cryonic suspension? Many of these same wives and girlfriends hate their life even when they are succeeding. Everyone is familiar with the endless complaints, tears, and heartache that make up the vast majority of the female experience stemming from frustration of her hypergamous instinct to be the princess she had always hoped to be and from resentment of his male nature, hopes, dreams, and aspirations. She thinks: “He wasn’t sexually satisfying! He isn’t romantic enough! He never took me anywhere! He didn’t pay attention to me! Our kids aren’t successes! We live in a dump! His hobbies are a waste of time and money! My mother always told me I can do better, and his mother will never stop criticizing me! I am fat, ugly, unsuccessful, old, tired, and weary of my responsibilities, idiosyncrasies, insecurities, fears, and pain. My life sucked but at least it could MEAN something to those most important to me.” But if they are around for too long it shrinks in importance over time.She wants you to die forever because she hates what you are. She wants to die too, because she hates what she is. She wants us all to die because she hates what the world is and has meant to her.

In the same vein:

But why not go with him then [into cryonics]?

Show me the examples of the men who asked, or even insisted that their wives go with them, and said “If you don’t go with me, I won’t go”. The fact that men generally don’t do this, is likely a big contributor to the female reaction. Imagine your husband or boyfriend telling you, “I just scheduled a 1 year vacation in Pattaya, and since I know you hate Thai food, I didn’t buy you tickets. I’ll remember you fondly.” That’s very different from the man who says, “I’ve always dreamed of living in Antarctica, but I won’t do it without you, so I’m prepared to spend the next 5 years convincing you that it’s a great idea”.³⁸

Indeed, I buy the “one way ticket away from here” explanation. If I bought a one-way ticket to France, and was intent on going whether my wife wanted to come with me or not, then there would be reason for her to be miffed. If she didn’t want to go, the “correct” answer is “I won’t go without you”. But that is not the answer the cryonicist gives to his “hostile” wife. It’s like the opposite of “I would die for you” - he actually got a chance to take that test, and failed.³⁹

Robin Hanson tries to explain it in terms of evolutionary incentives:

Mating in mammals has a basic asymmetry - females must invest more in each child than males. This can lead to an equilibrium where males focus on impressing and having sex with as many females as possible, while females do most of the child-rearing and choose impressive males.

…And because they are asymmetric, their betrayal is also asymmetric. Women betray bonds more by temporarily having fertile sex with other men, while men betray bonds more by directing resources more permanently to other women. So when farmer husbands and wives watch for signs of betrayal, they watch for different things. Husbands watch wives more for signs of a temporary inclination toward short-term mating with other men, while wives watch husbands more for signs of an inclination to shift toward a long-term resource-giving bond with other women. This asymmetric watching for signs of betrayal produces asymmetric pressures on appearances. While a man can be more straight-forward and honest with himself and others about his inclinations toward short-term sex, he should be more careful with the signs he shows about his inclinations toward long term attachments with women. Similarly, while a woman can be more straight-forward and honest with herself and others about her inclinations toward long-term attachments with men, she should be more careful with the signs she shows about her inclinations toward short term sex with men.

…Standard crude stereotypes of gender differences roughly fit these predictions! That is, when the subject is one’s immediate lust and sexual attraction to others, by reputation men are more straight-forward and transparent, while women are more complex and opaque, even to themselves. But when the subject is one’s inclination toward and feelings about long-term attachments, by reputation women are more self-aware and men are more complex and opaque, even to themselves…if cryonics is framed as abandonment, women should be more sensitive to that signal.⁴⁰

The “selfishness” of cryonics does seem to be an issue for women and many men; one might wonder, would other heroic medical procedures be more socially acceptable if they involved “other-directedness”? I suggest the answer is yes: cord blood banking costs thousands with a lower (<0.1%) success rate (usage of the cord blood) than many cryonicists expect of cryonics (the Fermi estimates tend to be <5%); sperm banking costs a similar amount, while egg/oocycte banking may cost something like half what cryonics does! In the media coverage I have read of those 3 practices, I have the impression that people see them as legitimate medical procedures albeit ones where the cost-benefit equation may not work out. (Cryonicists, on the other hand, are just nuts.) Perhaps this is because sperm and egg banking - while fundamentally selfish, since if you cannot use your egg or sperm later, why don’t you want to adopt? - involves the creation of another person as hallowed by society.

Lighting

I am well aware of the effects of lighting on my mind from reading up on the effects of light (and blue light in particular) on circadian rhythms & melatonin secretion, and have done a sleep self-experiment on red-tinting my laptop screen. (There seems to be a voluminous literature on bright lights being beneficial for alertness in the workplace, but I haven’t read much of it.) Despite this, my room is lit primarily by a lamp with 4 CFL light bulbs which I inherited, and not designed in any sense - I’ve focused on modifying myself more than my environment.

The 4 bulbs are puny CFLs: 13 watts (52 total), with a light temperature of 2700k (yellowish). Particularly during winter, when darkness falls around 4PM sharp, I find the illumination inadequate. A LW discussion reminded me that I didn’t have to put up with perpetual gloom - I could buy much larger CFLs and replace the smaller ones.

So after some Amazon browsing, and getting frustrated at how CFL listings equivocate on how many watts they draw vs how many watts-equivalent-incandescent-bulbs they are, I settled on “LimoStudio 2 x Photo Studio Photography 105 Watt 6500K Day Light Fluorescent Full Spectrum Bulb” for $22.15 & ordered 2014-12-06. They arrived on 2014-12-09 & I immediately installed them. Their temperature is much bluer and 2 105 watt bulbs would roughly quadruple light output (assuming equal efficiency) and since brightness is perceived logarithmically, make the room something like half again as bright. (They’re almost comically larger than the small 13 watt bulbs.)

I had to move the lamp since the naked bulbs in corner of my eye were giving me a headache, but the lighting works well in that corner. It’s nice to have things brighter and it does indeed feel like it reduces sleep pressure in the evening; downsides: shows the walls dirtier, shadows much sharper, feels like it may be much harder to fall asleep even with melatonin if I leave the lights on past 11 PM. A small benefit is that I still have some incandescent light bulbs installed; with 2 CFLs bumped out of the lamp, I can take them and replace 2 incandescents, which should save some electricity.

During the darkest winter days, just 2 of them now feels inadequate, so I ordered another pair on Amazon on 18 2014.

One handy way to quantify the effect is via my laptop webcam. Since 2012_12ya or so, I have run a script which periodically takes a snapshot through the laptop webcam and saves the photo. I haven’t gotten much use out of them, but changes in ambient lighting over time would seem to be a perfect use-case. I’ve written a script using Imagemagick which analyzes each webcam photo and calculates the average brightness (as a grayscale intensity) and the average LAB color triplet. (I originally used RGB but the 3 colors turned out to correlate so highly that the data was redundant and I was told LAB better matches human perception; in any case, the LAB values turn out to be less inter-correlated and so should be more useful.) The light intensity might affect sleep patterns (particularly sleep timing) and daily productivity.

Possible Amazon Mechanical Turk Surveys/experiments

• Sunk costs: see whether manipulation of learning affects willingness to endorse sunk costs

• backfire effect idea: manipulation of argument selection affects backfire effect?

• followup SDr’s lipreading survey, unexpected and contrary to my theory

• can one manipulate the subadditivity effect in both directions for cryonics? In one version, enumerate all the ways things can go right and in another all the ways it can go wrong.

• test my theory that Ken Li actually does suck:

Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” is the most critically acclaimed Fantasy short story in history, to judge by its simultaneously winning the short story category for the 2011_13ya World Fantasy Award & Hugo Award & Nebula Awards (narrowly missing the Locus Award), a sweep which had never happened since the youngest award was started in 1975_49ya - 35 years before.

Presumably this means that the story is, if not the best fantasy story ever, at least an extremely good story and by far the best of 2011_13ya. So I read it eagerly with high expectations, which were immediately dash. The story is not that good. The prose is OK: not nearly as wooden as, say, Isaac Asimov, but not as spare & finely-honed as Ted Chiang’s, deliriously excessive as R.A. Lafferty, extraordinarily smooth and literary as Gene Wolfe, mannered as John Crowley, dream-like as Neil Gaiman… The plot itself is sentimental. In fact, as I read it, words kept rising to consciousness that should never be associated with a winner of any of those awards much less all three simultaneously, words like “trite” and “maudlin”. With a skeptical eye, the story crumbles even more into a pitiful sort of self-indulgent narcissism, in which a character angsts over small issues which seem large only because they live a life so blessed that they have never known real hardship; with even a little bit of perspective, their complaints become almost incomprehensible, and what was meant to be moving becomes absurd. Part of my objection is a lurking sense that Orientalism and/or “diversity” promotion lies behind the triple crown.

One of the difficulties in attributing people’s evaluations of something to essentially tribal or ideological motives is that typically it is hard to rerun or vary the scenario to control for the key aspect; for example, if we wondered how much the Barack Obama’s presidential election owed to racial politics (rather than other factors that have been mentioned, such as John McCain’s uninspiring campaign or choice of Sarah Palin, Obama’s slick staff, the well-timed meltdown of the American economy etc), we are left to parse tea leaves and speculate because there is no way we can re-run the election using a Barack Obama who chose to identify as white rather than black, or an Obama who was simply white, and we cannot even run polls on a hypothetical alternative Obama with the same biography as a junior senator from Illinois with no signature accomplishments because the parallels would be obvious to too many Americans one might poll.

If we were to hypothetically vary Liu’s story, we would want to replace the main character with an equivalent character whose non-Anglophone nationality was involved in WWII, resulted in many refugees and women from that country returning as wives to America, who might know a beautiful paper-working art suited for depicting tigers, and who was mocked on ethnic or racial grounds. Remarkably, this turns out to be easily doable on all points: Liu’s story could easily turned into a story about a half-German boy in America mocked for being a filthy Nazi whose mother came from the German post-WWII wasteland and who spoke mostly German while making Scherenschnitte for her son who later spurned the paper cutout animals and even later realizes the cutouts formed German words (in Fraktur, which is a pretty hard-to-read family of fonts) with the same ending. The question is, if we take Liu’s story, rename the author “Ken Schmitt” or “Ken Hess” or “Ken Brandt” or “Ken Schmidt” perhaps (making sure to pick a surname as clearly German as Liu is Asian, and ideally a single-syllable as well to control for issues related to memorability or length), make the minimal edits necessary to convert it to the above version - do you think this hypothetical “The Scherenschnitte Menagerie” would’ve won even 1 award, much less 3?

It seems highly unlikely to me, but unlike with Obama, we can produce the variant version without trouble, and in any survey, we can count on very few SF/F reader-respondents having actually read “The Paper Menagerie” (short stories are generally published in specialty magazines, whose circulations have declined precipitously over the past decades, and rarely ever achieve the popularity of the top SF/F novels). If we surveyed a sample of SF/F readers and saw a preference for the original Liu version (especially if the preference were moderated by some measure of liberalism), then any non-ideological explanation must explain how the original version using Asia is so enormously esthetically superior to an isomorphic version using European-specific details.

With all this in mind, it seems like it should be easy to design a survey. Take the two versions of the story with the two different author names, ask the respondent to rate their randomly-chosen story 1-5 (Likert scale), ask how much SF/F they consume, their general politics, a question asking whether they had heard of the short story before (this could be tricky), and some additional demographic information like age, ethnicity, and country. For extra points, one randomize whether a short biography of the author appears after each story, to see if there is “who? whom?” reasoning at work where knowing that Liu is from China increases the positiveness of ratings but knowing that “Schmitt” is from Germany does not affect or reduces ratings.

Somatic Genetic Engineering

What’s the killer app for non-medical genetic engineering in humans?

How about germ-line engineering of hair color? Think about it. Hair color is controlled by relatively few, and well-understood, genes. Hair color is a dramatic change. There is massive demand for hair dye as it is, even with the extra effort and impermanence and unsatisfactory results. How many platinum blonds would jump at the chance to have kids who are truly enviably blond? Or richly red-headed (and not washed-out Irish red)? A heck of a lot, I’d say. The health risks need not be enormous - aside from the intervention itself, what risk could swapping a brunette gene for blond cause?

What sort of market could we expect? Demographics of the United States lists 103,129,321 women between 15 and 64; these are women who could be using dye themselves, so appreciate the benefit, and are of child-bearing years.

Likely, the treatment will only work if there’s natural variation to begin with - that is, for Caucasians only. We’ll probably want to exclude Hispanics and Latin Americans, who are almost as homogeneous in hair color as blacks and Asians, so that leaves us 66% of the total US population. 66% * 103,129,321 will get us a rough estimate of 6.806535186e7 or 68,065,351.

https://www.isteve.com/blondes.htm claims that “One study estimated that of the 30% of North American women who are blonde, 5⁄6^ths had some help from a bottle.” (0.3 * (5/6) = 0.25 or 25%) says Demographics of Mexico says 53,013,433 females Canada 2006_18ya Census 16,136,925

or 172,279,679 when you sum up Mexico/Canada/USA (the remaining NA states are too small to care about); 25% of 172,279,679 is 43,069,919. 43 million dye users.

Here’s a random report https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.asp?report_id=305358 saying hair dye is worth 1 billion USD a year. Let’s assume that this is all consumed domestically by women. (So 1,000,000,000 / 43,069,919 per year is 23)

A woman using hair dye on a permanent basis will be dying every month or so, or 12 times a year. Assume that one dye job is ~20 USD* (she’s not doing it herself); then ((1b / 20) / 12) gives us ~4,166,666 women using hair dye, or 1⁄24 or 4.1% of eligible women. This seems rather low to me, based on observations, but I suppose it may be that elderly women do not use much hair dye, or the trend to using highlights and less-than-complete dye jobs. But 4% seems like a rather safe lower end. That’s a pretty large market - 4 million potential customers, who are regularly expressing their financial commitment to their desire to have some hair color other than their natural one.

If each is spending even $100 a year on it, a genetic engineering treatment could pay for itself very quickly. At $1,000, just 10 years. (And women can expect to live ~80). Not to mention, one would expect the natural hair to simply look better than the dye job.

There’s a further advantage to this: it seems reasonable to expect that early forms of this sort of therapy will simply not work for minorities such as blacks or Hispanics - their markets wouldn’t justify the research to make it work for them; their dark hair colors seem to be very dominant genetically, and likely the therapy would be working with recessive alleles (at least, it seems intuitively plausible that there is less ‘distance’ between making a Caucasian embryo, who might even have a recessive blonde allele already, fully blond, as compared to making a black baby, who would never ever come anywhere near a non-black hair color, blond). So marketing would benefit from an implicit racism and classism: racism in that one might need to be substantially Caucasian to benefit, and classism to be able to pony up the money up front.

* I think this price is a low-ball estimate by at least 50%; hopefully it will give us a margin of error, since I’m not sure how often dye-jobs need to be done.

The Advantage of an Uncommon Name

Theory: as time passes, it becomes more and more costly to have a ‘common’ name: a name which frequently appears either in history or in born-digital works. In the past, having a name like ‘John Smith’ may have not been a disadvantage - connections were personal, no one confused one John Smith with another, textual records were only occasionally used. It might sometimes be an issue with bureaucracy such as taxes or the legal system, but nowhere else.

But online, it is important to be findable. You want your friends on Facebook to find you with the first hit. You want potential employers doing surreptitious Google searches before an interview to see your accomplishments and not others’ demerits; you do not want, as Abigail Garvey discovered when she married a Wilson, employers thinking your resume fraudulent because you are no longer ranking highly in Google searches. As Kevin Kelly has since put it:

With such a common first/last name attached to my face, I wanted my children to have unique names. They were born before Google, but the way I would put it today, I wanted them to have Google-unique names.

Vladimir Nesov termed having a common given and surname like “John Smith” as being “Google Stupid”. Clive Thompson says that search rankings were why he originally started blogging:

Today’s search engines reward people who have online presences that are well-linked-to. So the simplest way to hack Google to your advantage is to blog about something you find personally interesting, at which point other people with similar interests will begin linking to you - and the upwards cascade begins.

This is precisely one of the reasons I started Collision Detection: I wanted to 0wnz0r the search string “Clive Thompson”. I was sick of the British billionaire and Rentokil CEO Lord Clive Thompson getting all the attention, and, frankly, as a freelance writer, it’s crucially important for anyone who wants to locate me - a source, an editor, old friends - to be able to do so instantly with a search engine. Before my blog, a search for “Clive Thompson” produced a blizzard of links dominated by the billionaire; I appeared only a few times in the first few pages, and those were mostly just links to old stories I’d written that didn’t have current email addresses. But after only two months of blogging, I had enough links to propel my blog onto the first page of a Google search for my name.

This isn’t obvious. It’s easy to raise relatively rare risks as objections (but how many cases of identity theft are made possible solely by a relatively unique name making a person google-able? Surely few compared to the techniques of mass identity theft: corporate espionage, dumpster diving, cracking, skimming etc.) To appreciate the advantages, you have to be a ‘digital native’. Until you’ve tried to Google friends or acquaintances, the hypothesis that unique names might be important will never occur to you. Until then, as long as your name was unique inside your school classes, or your neighborhood, or your section of the company, you would never notice. Even researchers spend their time researching unimportant correlations like people named Baker becoming bakers more often, or people tending to move to a state whose name they share (like Georgia).

What does one do? One avoids as much as possible choosing any name which is in the say, top 100 most popular names. People with especially rare surnames may be able to get away with common personal names, but not the Smiths. (It’s easy to check how common names are with online tools drawing on US Census data. My own name pair is unique at the expense of the Dutch surname being 12 letters long, and difficult to remember.)

But one doesn’t wake up and say “I will name myself ‘Zachariah’ today because ‘John’ is just too damn common”. After 20 years or more, one is heavily invested in one’s name. It’s acceptable to change one’s surname (women do it all the time), but not the first name.

One does decide the first name of one’s children, though, and it’s iron tradition that one does so. So we can expect digital natives to shy away from common names when naming their kids. But remember who are the ‘digital natives’ - kids and teenagers of the ‘00s, at the very earliest. If they haven’t been on, say, Facebook for years, they don’t count. Let’s say their ages are 0-20 during 2008_16ya when Facebook really picked up steam in the non-college population; and let’s say that they won’t have kids until ~30. The oldest of this cohort will reach child-bearing age at around 2018, and every one after that can be considered a digital native from osmosis if nothing else. If all this is true, then beginning with 2018, we will see a growing’long tail’ of baby names.

So this is a good story: we have a suboptimal situation (too many collisions in the new global namespace of the Internet) and a predicted adjustment with specific empirical consequences.

But there are issues.

• Rare names may come with comprehensibility issues; Zooko’s triangle in cryptography says that names cannot be unique, globally valid, and short or human-meaningful. You have to compromise on some aspect.

• There’s already a decline in popular names, according to Wikipedia:

  Since about 1800_224ya in England and Wales and in the U.S., the popularity distribution of given names has been shifting so that the most popular names are losing popularity. For example, in England and Wales, the most popular female and male names given to babies born in 1800_224ya were Mary and John, with 24% of female babies and 22% of male babies receiving those names, respectively. In contrast, the corresponding statistics for in England and Wales in 1994_30ya were Emily and James, with 3% and 4% of names, respectively. Not only have Mary and John gone out of favor in the English speaking world, also the overall distribution of names has changed [substantially] over the last 100 years for females, but not for males.

  (The female trend has continued through to 2010_14ya: “The 1,000 top girl names accounted for only 67% of all girl names last year, down from 91% in 1960_64ya and compared with 79% for boys last year.”⁴³) The theory could probably be rescued by saying that the advantage of having an unique given name (and thus a relatively unique full name) goes that far back, but then we would need to explain why the advantage would be there for women, but not men. On the other hand, Social Security data seems to indicate both a 2-century long decline in the popularity of the top ten names and also a convergence of top-ten name rarity; from Andrew Gelman:

  

• Pop culture is known to have a very strong influence on baby names (cf. the popularity of Star Wars and the subsequent massive spike in ‘Luke’). The counter-arguments to The Long Tail marketing theory say that pop culture is becoming ever more monolithic and hit-driven. The fewer hits, and the more mega-hits, the more we could expect a few names to spike and drive down the rate of other names. The effect on a rare name can be incredible even from relatively small hits (the song in question was only a Top 10):

  Kayleigh became a particularly popular name in the United Kingdom following the release of a song by the British rock group Marillion. Government statistics in 2005_19ya revealed that 96% of Kayleighs were born after 1985_39ya, the year in which Marillion released “Kayleigh”.⁴⁴

• Given names follow a power-law distribution already where a few names dominate, and so small artifacts can make it appear that there is a shift towards unpopular names. Immigration or ethnic groups can distort the statistics and make us think we see a decline in popular names when we’re actually seeing an increase in popular names elsewhere - imagine all the Muhammeds and Jesuses we might see in the future. Those will show up as decreases in the percentages of ‘John’ or ‘James’ or ‘Emily’ or ‘William’, and fool us, even though Muhammed and Jesus are 2 of the most popular names in the world.

• One informal analysis suggests short first names are strongly correlated with higher salaries.

• the impacts of names can be hard to predict and subtle (see some examples cited in Alter’s “The Power of Names”)

(Much of the above appears to be pretty common knowledge among people interested in baby names and onomastics in general; for example, a Washington Post editorial by Laura Wattenberg, “Are our unique baby names that unique?”, 16 Sunday May 2010_14ya, argues much of the above.)

Backups: Life and Death

Consider the plight of an upload - a human mind running on a computer rather than a brain. It has the advantage of all digital data: perfect fidelity in replication, fast replication - replication period. An upload could well be immortal. But an upload is also very fragile. It needs storage at every instance of its existence, and it needs power for every second of thought. It doesn’t carry with it any reserves - a bit is a bit, there are no bits more durable than other bits, nor bits which carry small batteries or UPSes with themselves.

So reliable backups are literally life and death for uploads.

But backups are a double-edged sword for uploads. If I backup my photos to Amazon S3 and a bored employee pages through them, that’s one thing; annoying or career-ending as it may be, pretty much the worst thing that could happen is that I get put in jail for a few decades for child pornography. But for an upload? If an enemy got a copy of its full backups, the upload has essentially been kidnapped. The enemy can now run copies and torture them for centuries, or use them to attack the original running copy (as hostages, in false flag attacks, or simply to understand & predict what the original will do). The negative consequences of a leak are severe.

So backups need to be both reliable and secure. These are conflicting desires, though.

One basic principle of long-term storage is ‘LOCKSS’: “lots of copies keeps stuff safe”. Libraries try to distribute copies of books to as many holders as possible, on the premise that each holder’s failure to preserve a copy is a random event independent of all the other holders; thus, increasing the number of holders can give arbitrarily high assurances that a copy will survive. But the more copies, the more risk one copy will be misused. That’s fine if ‘misuse’ of a book is selling it to a book collector or letting it rot in a damp basement; but ‘misuse’ of a conscious being is unacceptable.

Suppose one encrypts the copies? Suppose one uses a one-time pad, since one worries that an encrypted copy which is bullet-proof today may be copied and saved for centuries until the encryption has been broken, and is perfectly certain the backups are ‘secure’. Now one has 2 problems: making sure the backups survive until one needs them, and making sure the one-time pad survives as well! If the future upload is missing either one, nothing works.

The trade-off is unfortunate, but let’s consider secure backups. The first and most obvious level is physical security. Most systems are highly vulnerable to attackers who have physical access; desktop computers are trivially hacked, and DRM is universally a failure.

Any backup ought to be as inaccessible as possible. Security through obscurity might work, but let’s imagine really inaccessible backups. How about hard drives in orbit? No, that’s too close: commercial services can reach orbit easily, to say nothing of governments. And orbit doesn’t offer too much hiding space. How about orbit not around the Earth, but around the Solar System? Say, past the orbit of Pluto?

That offers an enormous volume: the Kuiper Belt is roughly ~1.95x10³⁰ cubic kilometers⁴⁵. The lightspeed delay is at least 20 minutes, but latency isn’t an issue; a backup protocol on Earth could fire off one request to an orbiting device and the device would then transmit back everything it stored without waiting for any replies or confirmations (somewhat like UDP).

10³⁰ cubic kilometers is more than enough to hide small stealthy devices in. But once it sends a message back to Earth, its location has been given away - the Doppler effect will yield its velocity and the message gives its location at a particular time. This isn’t enough to specify its orbit, but it cuts down where the device could be. 2 such messages and the orbit is known. A restore would require more than 2 messages.

The device could self-destruct after sending off its encrypted payload. But that is very wasteful. We want the orbit to change unpredictably after each broadcast.

If we imagine that at each moment the device chooses between firing a thruster to go ‘left’ or ‘right’, then we could imagine the orbit as being a message encrypted with a one-time pad - a one-time pad, remember, being a string of random bits. The message is the original orbit; the one-time pad is a string of random bits shared by Earth and the device. Given the original orbit, and knowing when and how many messages have been sent by the device, Earth can compute what the new orbit is and where the device will be in the future. (‘It started off on this orbit, then the random bit-string said at time X to go left, then at X+1, go left again, then at X+Y, go right; remembering how fast it was going, that means it should now be… there in the constellation of Virgo.’)

The next step up is a symmetric cipher: a shared secret used not to determine future orbit changes, but to send messages back and forth - ‘go this way next; I’m going this way next; start a restore’ etc. But an enemy can observe where the messages are coming from, and can work out that ‘the first message must’ve been X, since if it was at point N and then showed up at point O, only one choice fits, which means this encrypted message meant X, which lets me begin to figure out the shared secret’.

A public-key system would be better: the device encrypts all its messages against Earth’s private key, and vice versa. Now the device can randomly choose where to go and tell Earth its choice so Earth knows where to aim its receivers and transmitters next.

But can we do better?

Measuring Multiple times in a Sandglass

How does one make a sand hourglass measure multiple times?

One could just watch it and measure fractions by eye - when a 10-minute timer is down to 1⁄2, it has measured 5 minutes. One could mark the outside and measure fractions that way.

Or perhaps one could put in two-toned sand - when the white has run out and there’s only black sand, then 5 minutes has passed.

But the sand would inevitably start to mix, and then you just have a 10-minute timer with grey sand. Perhaps some sort of plastic sheet separating them? But it would get messed up when it passes through the funnel.

Then, perhaps the black sand could be magnetically charged positively, and the white sand negatively? But magnetism attracts unlike. If the black is positive and white negative, they’ll clump together even more effectively than random mixing would.

We can’t make a color homogeneous in charge. Perhaps we could charge just black negative, and put positive magnets at the roof and floor? The bias might be enough over time to counteract any mixing effect - the random walk of grains would have a noticeable bias for black. But if the magnet is strong, then some black sand would never move, and if it’s weak, then most of the sand will never be affected; either way, it doesn’t work well.

Perhaps we could make half the black sand positive and half negative, while all white is neutral? Black will clump to black everywhere in the hourglass, without any issues about going through the funnel or affecting white.

How might this fail? Well, why would there be only 2 layers? There could be several alternating layers of black and white, and this be a stable system.

We might be able to remedy this by combining magnetized black sand with magnets on the roof/floor, imparting an overall bias - the layers form, but slowly get compacted together.

The real question is whether strong enough magnetism to usefully sort is also so strong to clump together and defeat the gravity-based timing.

Powerful Natural Languages

Split out to “On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages”.

A Bitcoin+BitTorrent-Driven Economy for Creators (Artcoin)

One criticism of the Bitcoin system by cryptographers & commenters is that the fundamental mechanism Bitcoin uses to prevent double-spends is requiring proof-of-work (finding certain very rare random numbers, essentially) for each set of transactions to make it hard for anyone to put together enough computers to be able to find multiple valid sets of transactions and spend the same coin twice. (People are motivated to actually do the proofs-of-work since when they discover a valid set of transactions, the protocol allows them to invent 50 coins for themselves.)

The computing power applied to the problem is nontrivial: it is literally equivalent to a supercomputer, distributed among the various participants. But this is a supercomputer which is devoted solely to calculating some numbers which satisfy a completely arbitrary criteria. Yes, it works - Bitcoin is still around and growing. But can’t the situation be improved? Even distributed computing projects like Folding@home do some good; even the distributed cryptographic projects did some good by proving points about the insecurity of various algorithms.

After all, checking random numbers has the necessary property of being hard to figure out and easy to check, but this sounds like the P vs NP problem - and that’s so interesting because countless real-world economically valuable problems possess the same property. Why can’t we take Bitcoin and replace it with a succession of real-world problems suitably encoded? We’ll call it “Artcoin”. This way we get a secure Bitcoin (because no one can afford to compute multiple solutions) and we also put the computing power to use. Everybody wins.

With centralized systems, we could do other things like implement micropayments for BitTorrent (eg. “Floodgate: A Micropayment Incentivized P2P Content Delivery Network”). Nor are alternate blockchains are not an impossible idea. The Namecoin network is up and running with another blockchain, specialized for registering and paying for domain names. And there’s already a quasi-implementation of Bitcoin micropayments in an amusing hack: Bitcoin Plus. It is a piece of JavaScript that does the SHA-256 mining like the regular GPU miners. The idea is that one includes a link to it on one’s website and then all one’s website visitors’ browsers will be bitcoin mining while they visit. In effect, they are ‘paying’ for their visit with their computational power. This is more efficient than parasitic computing (although visitors could simply disable JavaScript and so it is more avoidable than parasitic computing), but from the global view, it’s still highly inefficient: JavaScript is not the best language in which to write tight loops and even if browser JavaScript were up to snuff, CPU mining in general is extremely inefficient compared to GPU mining. Bitcoin Plus works because the costs of electricity and computers is externalized to the visitors. Reportedly, CPU mining is no longer able to even pay for the cost of the electricity involved, so Bitcoin Plus would be an example of negative externalities. A good Artcoin scheme should be Pareto-improving.

One issue that pops up is how do you input the specific real-world problem into the Artcoin network so everyone can start competing to solve it? Perhaps there could be some central authority with a public key that signs each specific problem; everyone downloads it, checks that the signature is indeed valid, and can start trying to solve it. But wait, Bitcoin’s sole purpose was to be a decentralized electronic currency. (No one needs a new centralized electronic currency: you call it ‘Paypal’ or ‘Stripe’ or something.) If there was such a central authority in Artcoin, no one would use it!

And they would be right to not use it. One little noted property about NP problems is that the exponential blowup in difficulty refers to worst-case problems: one can construct easily solved instances. This means our Artcoin could be rendered completely worthless and vulnerable if the central signer decide to generate and sign an endless stream of trivial problems, at which point any fraudster could double-spend to his heart’s content.

If we had some magical way of estimating the difficulty of an arbitrary NP problem, we could devise a hybrid scheme: ‘if the just-released problem is at least 95% difficult, try to solve it; else, just try to solve the old random number problem.’ Any central authority attempting to water down the proof-of-work security would just see his signed problems ignored in favor of the old inefficient scheme, and so would have no incentive to release non-real-world problems even if a third party (like a government) attempted to coerce them.

A more P2P scheme would be to have clients simply verify any solution for a set of transactions, and let anyone supply problems so users can pick which problems they work on. Maybe your mining pool has a SF bent so you donate your collective power to solving SETI@home problems, while my mining pool prefers to work on protein folding problems. But this would seem to run into the same problem as before: how do you know a third mining pool isn’t “solving” trivial instances it made up for an otherwise perfectly acceptable NP problem?

If we had some way of estimating, we could implement this P2P scheme as well: users can subscribe to their favorite charity publishers of problems (or the publisher could pay the solver a sum to incentivize participation), and if any publisher attempted to weaken the system by publishing trivially solved problems, peers would simply reject the problem in favor of a different problem & solution or a hash.

How could we measure difficulty? Obviously you could measure difficulty by trying to solve the problem yourself: if it takes 1000 seconds, you know it’s no harder than 1000 seconds. But what good would this do you? You could broadcast a message to all your peers saying “these problems are supposed to take at least 20000 seconds to compute, but this only took 1000 seconds!” but you have no proof of this; they could do the check themselves so as to reject trivial solutions & their linked sets of transactions, but if peers rechecked work just because some stranger on the Internet cried foul, they’d spend all their time rechecking work and the system would fail.

Does this magical way of estimating difficulty exist? I don’t know. I’ve asked, and have been pointed at imperfect predictors: apparently 3-SAT has a curious and well-known spike in difficulty of problems when the total variables divided by number of clauses reaches >=0.5, a “phase transition point”. A randomly-generated problem can be inspected and predicted with substantial accuracy how difficult it will be: “Predicting Satisfiability at the Phase Transition” claims to reach “classification accuracies of about 70%”.

SAT-satisfiability prediction is a good step, but still incomplete: a 70% failure rate is far more than necessary to implement double-spend attacks at random just by hoping that several easy instances will be chosen, and it does not forbid offline pre-computing attacks.

William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Have you ever tried to change the oil in your car? Or stared perplexed at a computer error for hours, only for a geek to resolve it in a few keystrokes? Or tried to do yardwork with the wrong tool? (Bare hands rather than a shovel; a shovel rather than a rake, etc.)

So much depends on the right tool or the right approach. Think of a man lost in a desert. The right direction is such a trivial small bit of knowledge, almost too small a thing to even be called ‘data’. But it means the entire world to that man - the entire world.

So much depends on little pieces of metal being 0.451mm wide and not 0.450mm, and on countless other dimensions. (Think of the insides of a jet engine, of thousands of planes and even more tens of thousands of people not falling screaming out of the sky.)

Williams is sharing with us, in true Imagist style, a sudden realization, an epiphany in a previously mundane image.

Here is a farm. It seems robust and eternal and sturdy. Nothing about this neglected wheelbarrow, glazed with rain and noticed only by fowl, draws our attention - until we suddenly realize how fragile everything is, how much everything has to go right 99.999% of the time, how without a wheelbarrow, we cannot do critical tasks and the whole complex farm ecosystem loses homeostasis and falls apart.

(I sometimes have this feeling on the highway. Oh my god! I could die in so many ways right now, with just a tiny movement of my steering wheel or anyone else’s steering wheel! How can I possibly still be alive after all these trips?)

Simplicity Is the Price of Reliability

Why should we care about simple systems and long part lifetimes? Because for many things, the only way to build a reliable system is out of as few and more reliable parts as possible.

Kevin Kelly in “The Art of Endless Upgrades” notes a lesson from a home-repair story:

When we first moved into our current house, newly married, I had some caulking to do around the place. I found some silicon caulking that boasted on the tube that it was warranted for 20 years. Cool, I thought. I’ll never have to do this again. Twenty years later, what’s this? The caulking is staring to fray, disintegrate, fail. I realize now that 20 years is not forever, though it seemed that way before. Now that I am almost 60, I can see very permanent things decay in my own lifetime.

Consider a 20 year lifetime for a part. This may sound like a lot, and just like Kelly, you may intuitively feel that 20 years is close enough to ‘forever’ as to need little more thought. But each such part or object cannot be considered in isolation, because you have many objects. On a yearly basis, I photograph all my possessions for backup purposes and to sort through my possessions; despite my best efforts to keep clutter down and to photography multiple objects in the same photo, I find it takes more and more photographs every year, and for 2015, had to take 281 photographs of what is probably at least 10 objects per photo so perhaps 3000+ individual objects (of which each may have many components and parts which can break in exciting & novel ways). Kevin Kelly notes that in an inventory of his own household, there was probably 10,000 objects, surprisingly close to the Inventory of Henry VIII of England’s crown holdings of 17,810 items (pre-Consumer Revolution), but far more than a selection of Third World households, who supposedly averaged 127 objects. Self-storage complexes, overflowing garages, hoarders… Thousands of objects, at a minimum, without including infrastructure: the circuit breakers, the hot water tanks, the faucets, the showerheads, the light bulbs, the fans, the lamps, the switches, the floor & roof boards, the pipes and plumbing, the septic tank, the grinder, the windows - the list is fractal. Stuff breeds stuff, and kipple lurks under every corner.

But each of these objects can be a problem. They can be lost, or forgotten, or decay, or they can damage other things. (They can also be mental burdens.) If an object lasts 20 years or 7305 days, but you have 10000 objects, then on average something will break on a daily basis; worse, on a good 30 days, 3 objects will break simultaneously; on around 16 days, 4 will, and on a handful of days, 6 or more objects will break.⁴⁶ (Fortunately, most objects breaking do not cause serious problems, and many objects easily last 20+ years and don’t contribute too many failures. But if you’ve ever wondered why in military histories, it seems like every ship or airplane is half-broken all the time and units routinely are disabled by mechanical problems, this is partially why: many moving parts and objects placed in harsh environments.) If one object breaking can cause another to break, things get even worse…

I recently ran into an example of this. I use a Zeo EEG-based sleep tracking device, and it is one of my favorite objects which I have used to run many self-experiments. I also record my sleep using an Android smartphone accelerometer-based app, since I know my Zeo will not last forever (in particular, the rechargeable battery is expected to die within a few years) and I will most likely be forced to replace it with an accelerator app.

Sometime in late 2015, my Zeo stopped working. The headset would not relay any data no matter if it should have been fully charged or not. I concluded the battery had finally died as I long feared; Zeo Inc closed a long time ago, so there are no replacement headsets (or if some can be found used, they will probably cost $200+ and be using original batteries as well), and one has to DIY by finding a random rechargeable battery, cracking open the headset, and soldering the new one in, which is all new to me. While I was getting around to this, the lights went out in my bedroom: they flickered irregularly, began going out for hours at a time, and then finally one day they went out entirely. This was irritating and made my bedroom difficult to use, but not a big problem, because of the 4 sockets in the bedroom, the socket nearest my bed (the one my smartphone, Zeo, and electric mattress for cold nights were all plugged into) My landlord lackadaisically began to think about calling an electrician.

I did some work on repairing my broken Zeo: reading up on the topic further, ordering the new battery for $9, and most tricky, cracking open the headset which turned out to be almost impervious to my prying, even when I put it in a vice, and to my horror, when I finally wiggled a razor blade through the corner and started to crack it open, I had cut too far into it and cut a metal ribbon connecting the circuit board with the metal headband! I had no idea if I had destroyed it or not, but I hoped that if I superglued it down, the physical connection would be enough for the EEG functionality to work. Unnerved by that, I didn’t cut out the original battery and try to solder in a new battery (likely botching it and destroying the irreplaceable headset); I would do that sometime later. After about a month of the blackout, my smartphone began having trouble recording through the night, apparently running out of power; I wasn’t sure what was going on, but after verifying that the smartphone would properly charge while plugged into my laptop, and while plugged into its charger plugged into a socket in the living room, I concluded it had to be the power strip or loose placement in the power socket in the bedroom. While wiggling the charger around, the lights abruptly came back on, and I began hearing ‘pop’ sounds and I noticed simultaneous flashes from behind the faceplate of the power socket. Immediately yanking everything out, I smelt burnt insulation and feared the worst: an electrical fire inside the walls. I unplugged everything, flipped the circuit breaker, and after monitoring my bedroom with a fire extinguisher for a few hours, insisted an electrician be called within the week. He came, and… the whole thing was nothing but a loose wire in the one socket I had thought was working! The poor connection caused it to heat up and burn the insulation, and blocked electricity from flowing ‘downstream’ to the lamps. Then the smartphone hadn’t been charging because it wasn’t getting enough electricity through the charger, and as I quickly verified, the Zeo had been suffering the same problem and was perfectly functional. (The superglue had worked.)

I hadn’t known it was possible for digital devices to appear to be turned on and receiving power but only partial power as I naturally assumed that if the Zeo turned on and appeared operational then the power socket must be perfectly fine, and I was completely surprised that the one power socket I had verified as working - did it not power everything I had plugged into it? - was both malfunctioning, had been for at least 3 months if not for years before that, and this was the root of multiple apparently unrelated problems. So one loose wire had caused a cascade of issues eventually costing: the electrician’s repair bill, $9, 3 months of sleep logs, a good deal of trouble on my part, and nearly destroyed an nearly irreplaceable favorite possession.

Such a cascade of issues and odd edge-cases with interacting objects is common. With enough objects in a system such as a home, at least some objects will always be failing and can trigger interactions with some other objects; all of these interactions cannot be predicted because each of these objects is complex in its own right, and their behaviors must be understood on a superficial and black box level.⁴⁷ Cook gives some principles in his well-known “How Complex Systems Fail”:

4. Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.

   The complexity of these systems makes it impossible for them to run without multiple flaws being present. Because these are individually insufficient to cause failure they are regarded as minor factors during operations. Eradication of all latent failures is limited primarily by economic cost but also because it is difficult before the fact to see how such failures might contribute to an accident. The failures change constantly because of changing technology, work organization, and efforts to eradicate failures.

5. Complex systems run in degraded mode.

   A corollary to the preceding point is that complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws. After accident reviews nearly always note that the system has a history of prior “proto-accidents” that nearly generated catastrophe. Arguments that these degraded conditions should have been recognized before the overt accident are usually predicated on naïve notions of system performance. System operations are dynamic, with components (organizational, human, technical) failing and being replaced continuously.

6. Catastrophe is always just around the corner.

   Complex systems possess potential for catastrophic failure. Human practitioners are nearly always in close physical and temporal proximity to these potential failures - disaster can occur at any time and in nearly any place. The potential for catastrophic outcome is a hallmark of complex systems. It is impossible to eliminate the potential for such catastrophic failure; the potential for such failure is always present by the system’s own nature.

7. Post-accident attribution accident to a “root cause” is fundamentally wrong.

   Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is necessary insufficient in itself to create an accident. Only jointly are these causes sufficient to create an accident. Indeed, it is the linking of these causes together that creates the circumstances required for the accident. Thus, no isolation of the ‘root cause’ of an accident is possible. The evaluations based on such reasoning as ‘root cause’ do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes.

My Zeo accident follows several of these: the Zeo could’ve failed at any time due to the battery getting too old, insufficient voltage or amperage, electrical surges from lightning strikes, the headband conductivity being destroyed by sweat/dirt, software errors etc. A failure in a separate object triggered a latent but unknown Zeo design flaw (not telling the user it is unable to charge the headset due to insufficient electricity and trying to anyway); this led to further errors. Root-cause attribution is difficult as none of the causes are individually sufficient, and even now I don’t see how I could have done better without being an electrician.

Trying to add in preventive objects or procedures runs the risk of creating even further problems; as one sysadmin on HN says

Your fail-safes are themselves the source of faults and failures. I’ve seen, just to list a few: Load balancers which failed due to software faults (they’d hang and reboot, fortunately fairly quickly, but resulting in ~40 second downtimes), back-up batteries which failed, back-up generators which failed, fire-detection systems which tripped, generator fuel supplies which clogged due to algae growth, power transfers which failed, failover systems which didn’t, failover systems which did (when there wasn’t a failure to fail over from), backups which weren’t, password storage systems which were compromised, RAID systems which weren’t redundant (critical drive failures during rebuild or degraded mode, typically), far too many false alerts from notifications systems (a very common problem even outside IT: on hospital alarms), disaster recovery procedures which were incomplete / out of date / otherwise in error. That’s all direct personal experience.

When I was still contributing a bit to the DVCS darcs, I thought then-maintainer Eric Kow’s efforts to set up automated tests & buildbots, while well-intended in trying to catch errors in patches & ensure that the code always compiled and software engineering best practices, wound up wasting far more time than it ever saved because the testing infrastructure itself kept crashing and needed constant configuration & upgrades. Given limited contribution time, dealing with the buildbots did not seem like a good investment. This also applies to programmers tempted to automate or script stuff on their computers: how much time are you really saving and was it worth the risk that one day a year from now you’ll wake up and discover a cron job hasn’t been running for months because of some Bash error? (Due to upgrading to a Shellshock-resistant Bash, in my case, which caused an inscrutable interaction with an exported function name in my Bash aliases file.)

Complexity and automation create a technical debt in the form of the fallout from future unreliability. “The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”

November 2016 Data Loss Postmortem

On 2016-11-26, I woke to find my Acer Inc. laptop cold and dead. The power had not gone out overnight, according to the microwave and the UPS, and the power indicator on the laptop was not on. I swapped the power cord for a generic replacement power cord I’d gotten from Best Buy when the first laptop power cord had died on me back in May; this made no Attempts to drain the battery and reset the laptop (this laptop had a hardwired battery) did nothing, and the laptop, then and later, remained totally unresponsive and gave no activity. It was well and truly dead. My best guess is that the motherboard broke/was fried. This is an unusual way for a (non-Apple) laptop to die, and has never happened to me before (my problems have always been with the screen or keyboard or hard drive or battery/power supply). My best guess for why the motherboard died is that the stress of doing deep learning on the GPU finally caught up with it; I thought it was handling it fine because the CPU only occasionally had to be throttled, but the cumulative months of running char-rnn/torch-rnn for projects like RNN metadata may’ve been too much and it shorted out or something.

The laptop in question was a Acer Aspire V17 Nitro Black Edition VN7-791G-792A Gaming Laptop 4^th Generation Intel Core i7 4720HQ (2.60GHz) 16GB Memory 1TB HDD 256GB SSD NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 17.3-inch Windows 8.1 64-Bit I had bought in 2015-07-24 from Newegg for $1,215.21; it had a 1 year warranty on it, which had expired. In any case, even had the laptop still been under warranty, I would’ve had to buy a new laptop simply because I am leaving on a long trip to England on 10 December, and there was no way I could ship a laptop to an Acer repair center, the entire motherboard replaced (which would probably cost easily $500+), be shipped back to me, and all my data recopied & OS set up in time for me to leave. So I had to buy a new To replace the Acer laptop, I decided to go with a brand known for reliability, good laptop keyboards, power, and Linux support: a Lenovo ThinkPad P70. ThinkPad P70s have the 17-inch screens I love, and I added 32GB ECC RAM because Rowhammer is frightening and I like the idea of more reliability, and expedited shipping. Perhaps because I was buying the day after Black Friday, it cost a lot less than I expected: $1,886.59. It shipped on 2016-11-30, and UPS soon said it was in Anchorage Alaska, so it should definitely make it by 10 December, and indeed arrived on the evening of 1 December, well ahead of my expectations. (This suggests that paying $20 for expedited shipping might not have been that necessary, but I think it was the right choice - I didn’t want to risk it.) Had it not arrived in time, my backup plan was to drive to Best Buy, buy a regular laptop, and simply return it afterwards.

I pulled out the 1TB Samsung SSD I’d put in and inserted it into the old half-broken Dell Studio 17 laptop I keep as my backup laptop. (It’s half-broken because about a third of the keyboard is missing or about to break, there is a permanent line of LEDs lit up on the screen, and it’s ancient - 4GB RAM, only 2 USB ports etc.) The drive failed to boot with FS corruption, and then LUKS decryption with the passphrase failed despite at least 30 tries on my part. The SSD had been corrupted by the motherboard in its death throes, apparently. Even though the entire partition was there and even most of the LUKS header was there and could be seen using cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda5, the key was not available. Reading up, I learned that LUKS-encrypted hard drives have no redundancy or protection from any kind of corruption, and this is by design/laziness, claimed to be in the interests of security, to quote the cryptsetup man page (emphasis added):

LUKS header: If the header of a LUKS volume gets damaged, all data is permanently lost unless you have a header-backup. If a key-slot is damaged, it can only be restored from a header-backup or if another active key-slot with known passphrase is undamaged. Damaging the LUKS header is something people manage to do with surprising frequency. This risk is the result of a trade-off between security and safety, as LUKS is designed for fast and secure wiping by just overwriting header and key-slot area.

(“Did you just tell me to go f—k myself?” “I believe I did, Bob.”)

This is BS because the security rationale makes no sense (how many milliseconds would it take to erase a second header stored elsewhere on the partition? has anyone ever in the history of the world been saved from law enforcement or hackers because there was only one header rather than two?); I suspect the real reason is that the maintainer admits in bug reports that the current LUKS format doesn’t allow for multiple copies (1, 2), and this is just them engaging in sour grapes about how It’s Actually A Good Thing. I can safely say I had no idea whatsoever that Linux encrypted drives were this fragile and permanent data loss so trivial, or that we are expected to do things like sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup /dev/sda5 --header-backup-file luks-header.bin.crypt if we want to avoid it. Such fragility is itself counter to security as it encourages users to not use encryption: they have to choose whether to be mugged by bitflips or by the FBI.⁴⁸ What a choice.

A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible. This was unfortunate, but OK, I have a good backup situation. It was well-timed, if anything, as I had been busy on 2016-11-15 improving my backup situation by creating a fresh un-passphrased PGP key X for unattended backups and setting up a Backblaze B2 account for a remote off-site backup (Backblaze storage is ~10x cheaper than Amazon S3). So I had available for recovery of my data:

1. 3 passphrased LUKS-encrypted external USB-2 drives, which I rsync manually to periodically irregularly at my whim (partially because they are so slow), rotating among them; stored in ziplock bags in a locked fire safe in a separate room. These had full backups as of 1 November, 5 November, and 14 November. Useful but outdated.

2. an incomplete Backblaze full backup, using duplicity backups encrypted to key X. It was going to take a week or two to do the first full upload, so unsurprisingly it had been interrupted by my Acer laptop’s untimely demise, and was of no use; oh well.

3. a plugged-in USB-3 4TB external drive that I had a cron job which did daily duplicity backups encrypted to X; I could see the new duplicity archives created at midnight, so the incrementals were all there. (This external drive is not passphrased LUKS-encrypted since it’s a RAID and I didn’t want to risk breaking it and quickly filled it up to the point where I couldn’t reformat it for lack of anywhere to copy the contents, so I left it as a NTFS FS and simply made sure that all duplicity archives backed up to it were encrypted; same thing in the end.) Very useful—I could pull my data off it quickly and I would lose nothing more than some background activity since midnight. All I needed was key X to decrypt it.

At this point horror dawned. My most recent immediately accessible backup was the manual backup drive done on 14 November, but I had created key X on 15 November. Copies of key X existed on the SSD - whose master key had been corrupted and could not be decrypted - and on the USB-3 external drive—all of which was encrypted to key X—and on Backblaze - also encrypted to key X—and nowhere else.

What happened was that I had simply assumed that my regular backup procedures would migrate key X onto the manual external drives, and then in any disaster, I would simply copy over all the data from one of them, and grab incrementals from Backblaze or the USB-3 external drive. This was almost right and off only by a day. But so much of my time was used up with Thanksgiving festivities and writing and digging in a new Ethernet cable and shopping that my usual manual backup routine of syncing every 5 days or so fell into abeyance. This made my backup improvements merely a complex verschlimmbesserung.

So I’d lost 16 days of data.

The timing was really remarkably bad.

The previous night, I had wondered mentally if I spent too much on backups. That morning, staring at my bricked laptop+16 days data loss, I knew I spent too little.

The 5 stages of backup & data loss grieving:

1. Denial: it’ll work if I hold the power button; I must’ve mistyped the password, LUKS isn’t broken; I have incremental backups!

2. Anger: no header file copies at all‽ Curse you LUKS developers! If only I had made even one backup more recently!

3. Bargaining: even one backup would be enough, I can survive missing a few days, one of the other drives…

4. Depression: gone, all gone, 14 days of data… I don’t even remember what I’ve lost, why I write things down in order to forget them

5. Acceptance: “vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.” Shoganai. At least I didn’t lose as much as Shōtetsu. Let’s draw up a list of what’s been lost and figuring out how to recreate them.

Thus began my short stay in computing hell…

The data loss was bad enough but the rest added insult to injury. I wasted almost 2 days in the Ubuntu LiveCD trying to copy the /dev/sda5 partition off the SSD before I realized that creating a bzip2-compressed disk image of an encrypted partition was, besides being very slow between the ancient laptop CPU & USB-2 connection, pointless and a huge waste of my time. Then I tried to install Ubuntu 16.10 on the Dell Studio 17 only to encounter a baffling array of glitches, crashes, reboots, and extremely slow hard drive write speeds, which went away when I reinstalled 15.04, so apparently the Dell Studio 17 either is having internal hardware issues or has become so old that standard Linux distros are incompatible out of the box (which is just peachy) or the Ubuntu release is broken. 15.04 at least works, but the keyboard remained a PITA to use for anything, and I also had to fight issues with the old software in 15.04 (eg. my Xmonad configuration doesn’t work, the versions of Xmonad shipped are that ancient; and the Chromium is too old for the Ledger extension, so I can’t use my bitcoins without finding someone who’s backported Chromium 50 to 15.04…). And I can’t avoid using the broken laptop by plugging in a USB keyboard unless I want to also be unable to plug in any of the USB drives because it only has 2 USB ports and one is used by the Logitech trackball. Further, Acer’s website and support are notoriously bad, and they didn’t help at all (after waiting 40 minutes in chat with a thorough description of my problem to get a price quote on a repair, they simply disconnected me).

Data recovery proved tricky. I wrote down everything I could possibly think of which I had done in those 16 days, got copies of IRC logs for hints as to my activities, synced with the Github mirror of Gwern.net to recover (most) of my writing during that period, and tried to match up with my offline activities. I definitely lost 2 weeks of data on some of my self-experiments and other metrics, along with some new music I’d downloaded from What.cd and whose name I’ve forgotten, and some Geocities-related char-RNN training logs + checkpoints, all of which is sad but not a huge deal. In retrospect, the data loss doesn’t seem to be that bad (although I’ve spent several days working through it) in part, ironically, for the same reasons that I had slackened on manual backups. Of course, this assumes I haven’t forgotten that I’ve forgotten having done something important…

(In July 2017, I realized that my arbtt window-tracking logs, which I keep for productivity analyses, hadn’t been updated since December 2016, costing me over half a year of data; I discovered that I had deleted my local user binaries because they were compiled on the previous system, but had forgotten to reinstall arbtt locally and my cron job hardwired the local version. This was because the arbtt packaged by Debian/Ubuntu was too outdated so I installed from HEAD, and then the error from the missing binary was not reported in system emails because the call is wrapped in an infinite loop which ignores errors; and that was because arbtt would segfault once a month & stop recording data. I reinstalled arbtt, checked that the latest version worked & removed the hardwiring, and added a daily arbtt report which would expose any lack of data collection - but the lost data is forever.)

So, post-mortem time - one always prepares to fight the last war. What was the primary cause for this huge waste of time, money, and effort; what other causes worsened it; and how might all be prevented in the future?

1. • Cause: the proximate cause of data loss was the Acer laptop bricking. This could be due to Acer’s build quality (not always sterling) or due to the stress of GPU neural network training.

   • Solution: I have bought a higher quality brand & model (Lenovo ThinkPad) and will avoid extensive laptop GPU training in the future (either build a deep learning desktop or use the new Amazon GPU instances, which are far better than the previous ones).

2. • Cause: the next-proximate cause of data loss was the LUKS header being corrupted.

   • Solution: in future OS installations, dump a copy of the LUKS header using ‘cryptsetup’ and archive it in the local FS (where it can be recovered from backups) and online. I’ve added this to my OS installation checklist, done so for the new ThinkPad, and also for the 3 external drives with encrypted FSes.

3. • Cause: the penultimate cause of data loss was key mismanagement and key X’s secret key only being available in key-X-encrypted backups, creating a vicious circle.

   • Solution: whenever creating new keys for backups, export the secret key to a passphrase-protected file and upload that to the Internet.

4. • Cause: another penultimate cause of data loss was writings which could’ve been public (eg. my ongoing chocolate reviews) on Gwern.net and, thus, retrievable from Github, were instead kept private. For example, my ‘model criticism’ demonstration wasn’t really done after I started it on 21 November, but on a whim I committed it, and so I don’t have to rewrite the whole damn thing.

   • Solution: I am going to review my drafts to see what can be added.

5. • Cause: the ultimate cause of data loss was manual backups being irregular because they were too slow/painful.

   • Solution: I am upgrading the 3 manual drives’ USB-2 enclosures to newer faster USB-3 enclosures (2 2.5-inch and 1 3.5-inch enclosure) and schedule regular reminders to do a manual backup so it can’t slip from mind so easily. Another source of friction is the varying sizes of the HDDs: I have to be careful about the 500GB one to use rsync rather than duplicity otherwise it’ll run out of space quickly. So I’m replacing that with a 2TB one, and after finishing upgrading everything, I’ll switch the rsyncs to rdiff-backup, so everything will be consistent: either encrypted duplicity, or rdiff-backup to encrypted drive. (Total cost: $155.)

6. • Cause: I wasted most of a day and was much slower in restoration because of the Dell Studio 17 laptop incompatibility with a reasonably recent Ubuntu, USB-2 enclosures, and a shortage of USB ports in the Dell laptop.

   • Solution: the speed is partially addressed by the USB-3 enclosure upgrade (at least, for restoring to a different laptop, one with USB-3 ports); the USB port shortage I am addressing by buying a USB hub⁴⁹; and the incompatibility is a little more difficult. I am concerned about the glitches, but I’m not sure I want to scrap the Dell laptop entirely and look for some cheap regular $600 laptop on sale after Christmas to use as my backup laptop. Is that going too far? Maybe. Building a desktop would help inasmuch as then the ThinkPad would count as the backup computer, but building a proper desktop is a commitment I’m not sure I want to make after spending $1,800 on a laptop…

Hopefully all this should prevent any recurrence or make dealing with it far less difficult. Nevertheless, it’s cost me a ton of time, money, and stress. A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible.

The ThinkPad arrived fortunately quickly on 2016-12-01. I immediately began installing & copying over. Despite the certification of ThinkPad P70s with Ubuntu 14.04, the install was not super-smooth. I pulled out the default HDD with Windows on it (which did work when I booted it up to test) and put in my 1TB Samsung SSD, and toggled the graphics in the BIOS to “discrete” rather than “hybrid”. The Ubuntu 16.10 LiveCD wouldn’t even boot (I tested the laptop thoroughly with the builtin BIOS tools and the optical disk drive was fine, just like everything else), so I’ve chucked it (it’s now betrayed me twice, with the Dell and ThinkPad so I think the CD is just broken) and I later burned another.

Installing with 15.04… initially went well but on rebooting gave me problems: it would freeze after GNU GRUB loaded Ubuntu. After much puzzling, I learned there was a bootloader graphics problem - I could work around it by either using ‘rescue’ mode to bypass the GRUB splashscreen stuff and simply tell rescue mode to boot as normal, or I could type in the FS encryption password blind and then it would work! After this, things went much smoother albeit with a ton of waiting on the USB-2 enclosures to sync with the SSD (the new enclosures not yet having arrived). The audio required an upgrade of the kernel module snd_hda_intel, and I experienced problems when I tried to change the ext4 filesystem mount options (apparently it no longer allows you to change options like journal=writeback in /etc/fstab as it will throw an error and dump you into a read-only root filesystem on boot…?). Ubuntu 15.04 turns out to no longer be supported by Ubuntu, where “supported” means “won’t even let you upgrade to the next OS version”, so I had considerable difficulties figuring out how to tweak apt to get it to upgrade to 15.10 so it could then upgrade to 16.10, but eventually that worked out. Then I began taking advantage of the 32GB of RAM by putting /tmp/ & Firefox’s cache into it. Very nice.

I then established that Internet, Firefox, IRC, syncing Gwern.net, torrents (using rtorrent), audio, video, Mnemosyne (for spaced repetition), backups to external drives & Backblaze, the trackball, email, and some other things are all working without any noticeable problems. The WiFi works out of the box, surprisingly, not even requiring an apt-get installation of a proprietary driver. Display brightness appears to not be supported based on dmesg errors, and I haven’t checked laptop suspend yet. The boot thing is still an issue but not a major one.

Hardware-wise, I am enjoying the ThinkPad so far. The keyboard is decent with an acceptable layout, the screen is at least as good as (and may be somewhat larger than) the Acer was, the battery & SSD were easy to install and the hardware was not hostile at all with everything labeled, the BIOS is nicely featured, the 32GB RAM is very nice to have, the 4 USB ports save me from port starvation, I appreciate that the Ethernet port is in the back of the laptop, the laptop feels sturdy, the lid overhangs slightly so it’s easy to open which is a nice touch, my cat walking on the touchpad hasn’t crashed X yet… So far so good.

How Would You Prove You Are a Time-Traveler From the Past?

An accidental time-traveler from the future to the past, the A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court scenario, has it easy; even though they will have a hard time adapting to the past and may die untimely and will discover most of their knowledge is too vague or relies on a vast invisible infrastructure, they may possess impressive technological artifacts & will still remember enough to refute contemporary theories & provide simple experimental proofs of their claims & help people avoid dead ends. Aside from accelerating scientific and technological development by possibly centuries (possibly more if the time travel can be repeated), they also prove the existence of usable backwards time travel, which would have cosmic implications.

What about the other way? What about an accidental time-traveler from the past to the future? This scenario is not so immediately consequential but would have the same implication, as most forward time travel mechanisms ought to be impossible in our universe or for people of the past or only allow backwards time travel (wormholes, relativistic vehicles, Tipler cylinders, FTL travel, exotic space-time geometries with closed timelike curves) and so a verified instance of forward time travel implies either one of those remote possibilities or some entirely unknown way, all of which imply our understanding of the world is deeply wrong (eg. availability of relativistic vehicles in the past implies aliens or a totally wrong human history).

The forward scenario is much harder. For concreteness, let’s imagine a mad steampunk scientist from 1850s Victorian England. How would we distinguish them from a con artist or prankster or lunatic? The time traveler doesn’t benefit from temporal asymmetry in their education or ambient tacit knowledge, since all science in the 1850s is well-known now, and anything about Victorian England that they know which we could verify, presumably they could have looked up in the same databases. Likewise, accents can be trained with sufficient effort, polygraphs and other forms of lie detectors like fMRIs are beatable with training or unreliable, and any backstory like a scientist disappearing in an explosion in the 1850s proves nothing. If they had traveled forward deliberately, they could have attempted to create hidden but verifiable knowledge like objects buried in particular places or letters left with lawyers, but even that may not provide sufficient evidence - how can one be sure that the objects were not buried more recently or the law offices were not broken into, or a genuine long-term letter on some mundane issue like an inheritance has not been swapped with a time-traveller-related letter, or that the excavators themselves can be trusted (eg. Mormonism’s “golden plates” whose evidence amounts to no more than the questionable printed testimony ascribed to the “witnesses”)? Verifying the physical age of a letter or ink is inadequate as there is plenty of genuine paper or substances surviving from Victorian England which can be used in a forgery. And of course they may have traveled forward accidentally or involuntarily, so it would be suboptimal to require verification which must be planned in advance. What proof could a time-traveller offer of being from Victorian England which could not be faked for reasonably small sums of money like <$1b? In general, Victorian people know and can do a subset of what a modern person could know or do, and hence while a modern person could prove to Victorians that they are from the future, how could a Victorian person prove to moderns that they are not a modern?

This may seem impossible because of the asymmetry, but there are in fact a few ways in which Victorian people are not subsets of modern people. The key insight is to think about ways in which things have been lost or become unavoidable with the passage of time which might distinguish Victorians from moderns:

1. nuclear isotope dating

   Atomic bomb testing in the atmosphere has endowed all people worldwide from 1945_79ya to ~2030 with excess carbon-14. Carbon isotopes cannot be filtered from food and cannot be removed from bodily tissues such as bones nor can those bodily tissues be replaced by any method; all time-travelers from before 1945_79ya will thus exhibit very anomalously low levels of carbon-14. This test would provide proof of time-travel from an era predating atomic testing (or backwards time travel from an era post-dating ~2030 assuming no future atmospheric bomb tests or nuclear warfare). The only way to cheat this test would be to either falsify the entire test, or perhaps spend billions of dollars over several decades on ultracentrifugation raw ingredients to build a closed ecosystem to support a woman and grow the fake time traveler from conception to adulthood⁵⁰. Given appropriate care in performing the test akin to those used in testing claims of psi (taking multiple samples at multiple times under the supervision of stage magicians, distributed to multiple blinded independent testing centers etc), a positive result would offer striking evidence in support of time travel.

2. DNA: human DNA remains effectively immutable as of 2017; state-of-the-art human CRISPR editing allows only a few edits of high but <100% comprehensiveness before the viral vector becomes ineffective due to immune system response, and full human DNA synthesis would cost >$1b (and would be impossible to conceal, would affect commercial synthesis price curves, and any entity engaged in human DNA synthesis would use it for vastly more important things than hoaxing); thus any test based on DNA would indicate either being from the past or future. There are several possibilities; in decreasing order of strength:

   • family pedigree tree: due to recombination and the presence of many variants, any particular human genome can exist in few places in a tree without being astronomically unlikely; a time traveler’s relatives/descendants/ancestors should be easily located given their claimed biography & samples taken from them or their grave, or searched for & extracted from existing large DNA datasets like 23andMe or UK Biobank. Their sequenced genome will either fit perfectly into the claimed position & imputed genomes, or it will not. (It would be astronomically unlikely for just the most common 1 million SNP markers to randomly fit, and even less likely for full genome sequencing revealing family-specific mutations to be fooled by chance.) Like carbon-14 levels, the only way to cheat this test would be to fake the test.

   • complex trait polygenic scores: in Western countries, particularly the UK, there has been selection for & against certain traits (such as height or education, respectively) which will increase/decrease the respective polygenic scores. The polygenic scores are individually weak evidence but aggregated across many traits, may provide a worthwhile amount of evidence.

   • ancestry admixture: the UK has experienced considerable immigration since the 1850s. Immigration admixture is evidence for a modern origin and thus its absence for a Victorian origin.

   • mutation molecular clock: more generically, as mutations are always accumulating, if only neutral ones, a Victorian genome will look somewhat different than, and have somewhat fewer mutations than, a contemporary genome (especially given relaxed selection/dysgenics). This test is probably too weak to be worth considering.

   • gut & skin microbiota species & mutation clock: microbes have much shorter generation times, so while individual microbiomes are modifiable and not nearly as reliable as a test based on one’s unalterable genome, it may be possible to try to measure whether the time traveler’s microbiomes look properly archaic and similar to what would be estimated with a Victorian diet. The composition of the microbiomes could also be checked for plausibility.

3. immune system: one of the signature accomplishments of public health, and major forms of progress since Victorian England, is the development of germ theory, a wide array of vaccinations, and the suppression or extinction of many infectious diseases & parasites.

   This offers a variety of checks. Blood samples can be taken to measure antigen levels and immune system response to various agents. The time traveler may have been infected with smallpox and now resistant; I don’t know if it is possible to distinguish a past smallpox infection from a cowpox inoculation or smallpox vaccination (cowpox is a different species, as is the modern smallpox vaccine’s Vaccinia, but they are similar enough to offer protection so perhaps they are similar enough that a vaccinated person cannot be distinguished from a survivor), but if it is, it would show that either they are a time traveler from a period where smallpox is endemic (such as the 1850s) or the Russian/American biowarfare stockpiles have leaked (catastrophic global security news). Other diseases are still prevalent, so only imply a weaker conclusion that the time traveler, if fake, was willing to hazard their health.

4. pollution: another major change from Victorian England to modern England is massive improvements in the quality of the environment.

   Lead, mercury, fine coal dust, heavy metals - all serious issues among even the wealthy of Victorian England, present at levels radically unacceptable & unseen except in toxic Superfund sites. Tests of their blood, lungs, and bones would indicate levels hardly ever seen in modern times. Similar to nuclear isotope dating, these poisons can accumulate over a lifetime; while it is possible for someone to deliberately poison themselves or a child for many years to provide verisimilitude for a fake time traveler, like the infection or isotope strategy, it would be a hazard to their health and evil.

Are there any others? Perhaps now-extinct plants’ pollen or foodstuffs? Or some long-abandoned Victorian medical procedure which leaves unique traces? Maybe.

So that is ~8 ways to check whether a Victorian time traveler is really from Victorian England. Most of these would work for other time periods as well, possibly even better (polygenic scores & ancestry, mutational clock, microbiota) although some would not (pollution may not be a major factor in various times & places, and the family pedigree tree doesn’t work well if the family cannot be sampled). Of these, the first 2 are extremely difficult or impossible to beat without spending billions of dollars, and several are dangerous to defeat.

On a more philosophical level, is it even possible to prove you are a Victorian time traveler? Suppose one did pass all of these tests; given how incredibly unlikely time travel is based on a century of physics research, the absence of all other time travelers or traces thereof, how it would upend our understanding of the universe & human history, isn’t time travel (forward or backwards) like psi in that a flaw in the proof will always be more likely than it being true? Wouldn’t it be more likely that passing the ancestral DNA test was due to a sophisticated hacking campaign targeting the lab’s equipment or reports, or a breakin to tamper with calibration samples, than the person actually being a bewhiskered bewildered scientist accidentally blown 2 centuries ahead? Wouldn’t it be more likely that they’d discovered a flaw in carbon dating or some ultra-low-carbon-14 foodstuff or some other issue in standard isotopic tests or a one-in-billions mutant freak who does not biologically age than our understanding of physics so broken & incomplete that a Victorian gentleman might be still around to donate blood after stepping through a time portal?

With psi, the more rigorous the experiments became, the weaker the effect becomes. What once was secreting ectoplasm & communicating across time with ancestral spirits & moving tables with the power of one’s mind has become reduced to a slight excess of 1 bits in a radioactive random number generator’s output stream - if even that. The sheer puniness of the effect disproves any claim to being an evolved power of the human mind which could accomplish any of what has been ascribed to psi. With these time travel signatures, however, the effect should be large and easily observed. Nevertheless, I would say that it is not possible based purely on the Victorian time traveler’s body to ‘prove’ time travel to the level of rationally believing in it P > 0.99; if I heard of such tests being done, I would not believe they had been done or done honestly.

What such tests can do is offer enough evidence to pursue time travel. Given the implications, time travel need not be 100% proven to be worth researching - just not be P~=0 as at present and with no feasible research program. Knowing it may be possible is half the battle; and what has been done accidentally should be doable intentionally. And accomplishing it will then be proof.

The Reverse Amara’s Law

Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is applicable to many technologies, especially computers, AI, the Internet, solar panels etc—the visionaries are right in the long run but frequently grossly overestimate how long it’ll take something to become universal. (More discussion in my review of The Media Lab.)

If the law is more than a triviality or tautology, then the reverse of it should be interesting to consider. It gives a 2x2 matrix: something can be overrated in the short & long runs, underrated in short & long runs, overrated short underrated long (Amara), and underrated short and overrated long (anti-Amara).

The first category is boring: any technology which failed and which anyone was enthusiastic about, since failing in the short run is generally how one proceeds to fail in the long run as well. That is how most failures go, and since most new things fail, the entries are innumerable, and the surprising thing is that we remember a CueCat or Segway at all. The second category is a little more interesting: a technology which keeps becoming more important, surprising people then and now. There are not as many clear examples here since at some point people tend to catch up and start gauging it appropriately—no one now is going to underestimate the Internet’s long-term effects now. Something like AI might still be underestimated by many. The third is Amara’s law, many possible examples can be found by searching for mentions of it.

The fourth is hard. Something which exceeded expectations, shocking people, but then just as their beliefs start catching up, whiplashes them by suddenly stalling out or stopping, leading to ‘overshoot’ of predictions:

1. Nuclear Bombs:

   the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bombings were apparently regarded quite casually by the US government & military (whatever the scientists later might portentously intone while recalling things). The bombings, however, represented one of the most important shifts in human history by inaugurating the Cold War and nuclear race to ICBMs & hydrogen bombs, and potentially to the fall of human civilization. Many involved deeply regretted it and their lack of foresight later.

   Indeed, early in the Cold War, a fatalistic attitude prevailed, that nuclear war over the coming decades was inevitable, among many other implications. Very few people, especially intellectuals or politicians, appear to have seriously expected that humanity would be lucky enough to make it to 2019 with not a single nuclear war, much less a single additional military use of atomic bombs; they would also be surprised just how tiny the ‘nuclear club’ was at its peak.

2. the Apollo Project & Space Race:

   In 1940_84ya, hardly any person would have believed that humans would be engaged in routine space missions within 20 years, much less that in 1969_55ya, men would walk on the moon and do so repeatedly thereafter until the feat lost its novelty. After all, in 1940_84ya, not so much as an insect had been sent into space yet (leading to wacky speculation about the deranging psychological effects of space travel, among other things), and aside from a few marginal research projects and efforts, there was little human interest in space flight.

   The extraordinary success of rocketry and space travel, powered by the military-industrial complexes of Germany, Russia, and the USA, led to dreams by Werner von Braun et al of Moon bases, Mars colonization missions, missions to Jupiter, asteroid belt mining… Who could blame them when humanity went from wooden propeller airplanes to orbiting space stations like Salyut 1/Skylab in <30 years? If the projections were not nearly as fantastical as the 1989 Rockwell International plan, they still wound up being fantastical in hindsight. The subsequent exploration & colonization of the solar system has been as disappointing as the Space Race & Apollo were extraordinary.

3. military technology seems to be a possible source of examples: militaries are often accused of “fighting the last war”, which implies repeated reverse Amara’s - being surprised by a new technology or warfare method introduced in a war, and then overcorrecting.

   • trench warfare in WWI doesn’t seem to’ve been all that expected, and then extensive preparations for trench warfare in WWII were not that useful to France

   • another WWII-related example might be aircraft carriers: drastically underestimated by battleship-centric navies initially, becoming lords of the sea, floating airbases, around which blue-water navies built their battle groups, and then perhaps increasing overestimated as submarines/missiles/drones developed?

4. more debatable examples:

   • zeppelins

   • fax machines

   • supersonic flight

   • asbestos

   • DDT

   • cryptocurrencies?

Worldbuilding: The Lights in the Sky Are Sacs

On page 217 of evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller’s 2011_13ya book Spent, in the middle of some fairly interesting material on Openness to Experience, one reads:

…Our six verbal creativity tasks included questions like: “Imagine that all clouds had really long strings hanging from them - strings hundreds of feet long. What would be the implications of that fact for nature and society?”…

To make the obvious point: strings hundreds of feet long strong enough to support themselves and any real weight are better termed ‘ropes’. And ropes are heavy. There’s no obvious way to change physics to permit just ropes to not be heavy, in the same way you can’t remove fire & keep cellular respiration. (If we insist on the ‘string’ language ad the implication that the strings are weak and thin, we can take some sort of arachnid tack, which would be either creepy or awesome.) So let’s engage in a little worldbuilding exercise and imagine alternatives, in the spirit of Carl Sagan’s Jovian ecology of floaters.

A cloud with a rope dangling is an awful lot like a balloon or lighter-than-air vehicles in general. How do they work? Usually by using hot air, or with an intrinsically lighter gas like helium or hydrogen. Both need good seals, though, which is something a biological organism can do. But where is an organism going to get enough heat to be a living hot air balloon? So maybe it uses helium instead, but then, where does it get helium? We get helium by applying hundreds of billion of dollars in R&D to digging deep narrow holes in the ground, which is not a viable strategy for a global population of clouds. So hydrogen? That’d work actually; hydrogen is very easy to obtain, just crack water! Even better, the organisms creating this hydrogen to obtain flight could reuse the hydrogen for energy - just burn with oxygen! The Laws of Thermodynamics say that burning wouldn’t generate any new energy, so this isn’t what they feed on. But the answer presents itself - if you’re in the sky or better yet, above the cloud layer, there’ something very valuable up there - sunlight. Trees grow so big and engage in chemical warfare just to get access to the sun, but our hydrogen sacs soar over the groundlings. There might be a similar competition, but the sacs have their own problems: as altitude increases, ambient pressure decreases (which is good) but temperatures plunge (bad) and other forms of radiation increase (ultraviolet?). As well, if our sacs are photosynthetic, they need inputs: water & carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, and the usual organic bulk materials & rarer elements for themselves. Which actually explains where our ropes are coming from: they are the sacs’ “roots”.

How could such a lifeform evolve? I have no idea. There are animals which glide (eg. flying squirrel), others which are dispersed by wind (spiders), and so on, but none that actually crack water into hydrogen & oxygen or exploit hydrogen for gliding or buoyancy. And there are serious issues with the hydrogen sacs: lightning would seem to be a problem… Still, we could reuse our ‘competition for solar radiation’ idea; maybe a tree, striving to be taller but running into serious engineering issues to do with power laws, tweaked its photosynthesis to divert some of the split hydrogen to storage vacuoles which would make it lighter and able to grow a little taller. Rise and repeat for millions of years to obtain something which is free-floating and has shed much of its old tree-form for a new spherical shape.

Imagine that a plant or animal did so evolve, and evolved before humanity did. Millions of floating creatures around the world, each one with lifting capacity of a few pounds; or since they could probably grow very large without the same engineering limitations as trees, perhaps hundreds to thousands of pounds. When humanity gets a clue, they will seize on the sacs without hesitation! Horses changed history, and the sacs are better than horses. The sacs are mobile over land and sea, hang indefinitely, allow aerial assaults, and would be common. It’s hard to imagine a Great Wall of China effective against a sac-mounted nomad force! There’s barrage balloons, but those are impossibly expensive on any large scale.

More troubling, early states had major difficulties maintaining control. When you read about ancient Egypt or China or Rome, again and again one encounters barbarians or nomads invading or conquering entirely the state, and how they were, man for man, superior to the soldiers of the government. Relatively modest technical innovations meant that when the Mongols got their act together and refined their strategy, they conquered most of the world. Formal empires and states are not inevitable outcomes, as much as they dominate our thinking in modern times - they didn’t exist for most of human history, didn’t control most territory or people for much of the period they could be said to exist, and it’s unclear how much longer they will survive even in this age of their triumph & universalization. History is shot through with contingency and luck. That China did not have an Industrial Revolution and oddball England did is a matter to give us pause.

What happens when we give nomadic humans, in the un-organized part of history, a creature unparalleled in mobility? At the very least, I think we can expect any static agriculture-based empire (the Indus, Yang-tze, Nile) to be strangled in its cradle. Without states, history would be completely different with few recognizable entities except perhaps ethnicities. The English state seemed closely involved in the Industrial Revolution (funding the Age of Exploration, patents, etc.) and also the concurrent scientific revolution (it is the Royal society, and even Newton worked much of his life for the Crown). No state, no Revolution? As cool as it would be to ride a sac around the world, I wouldn’t trade them for science and technology.

But optimistically, could we expect something else to arise - so that the sac variant of human history not be one damn thing after another, happy savages until a pandemic or asteroid finally blots out the human world? I think so. If a sac can lift one person, then can’t we tie together sacs and lift multiple people? Recycling ropes from dead sacs, we could bind together hundreds of sacs and suspend buildings from them. (I say suspend because to put them ‘on top’ of the sac-structure would cut off the light that the sacs need and might also be unstable as well.) A traveling village would naturally be a trading village - living in the air is dangerous, so I suspect there will always be villages planted firmly on the ground (even if they keep a herd of sacs of their own). This increased mobility and trade might spark a global economy of its own.

I failed to mention earlier that the sacs, besides being a potent tool of mobility exceeding horses, could also constitute a weapon of their own: a highly refined and handy package of hydrogen. Hydrogen burns very well. If nothing else, it makes arson and torching a target very handy. Could sacs be weaponized? Could a nomad take a sac, poke a spigot into it, light a match and turn the sac into a rocket with a fiery payload on impact? If they can be, then things look very dim indeed for states. But on the flip side, hydrogen burns hot and oxyhydrogen was one of the first mixtures for welding. Our nomads will be able to easily melt and weld tough metals like iron. Handy.

I leave the thought exercise at this point, having overseen the labefaction of the existing world order and pointed at a potential iron-using airborne anarchy. Which of the two is a better world, I leave to the unknowable unfolding of the future.

Remote Monitoring

Desire: some way to monitor freelancer’s activity (if they are billing by time rather than results).

Why? This enables better compliance and turns freelancers into less of a lemon market - allowing for higher salaries due to lower risk. Reportedly, such monitoring also helps one’s own akrasia - one could use it both while ‘working’ and ‘not working’, just with someone else (akin to coffee shops perhaps). The idea comes from Cousin It and Richard Hollerith’s https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MhWjxybo2wwowTgiA/anti-akrasia-remote-monitoring-experiment (even if it wouldn’t go as far as letting one’s life be managed!).

Potential solutions:

1. remote desktops: screenshots or video. Requirements:

   • cross-platform (Linux, Windows & Mac)

   • secure (eg. using SSH for transport, especially since we already use SSH for full-text access)

   • easily toggleable on and off

   Of the remote desktop protocols, only the VNC protocol is acceptable: has many open source & proprietary cross-platform implementations for both client and server on, and can be tunneled over SSH. (Nick Tarleton says Macs are already compatible with a VNC client user.) TightVNC seems like it would work well. (One difficulty: the natural tool to use once a VNC server is running on the remote desktop is vncsnapshot which does what you think it does, but the Debian summary warns it does not work over SSH. vnccapture may or may not work.)

2. browser URL logging (since much work takes place in browsers). Requirements:

   • cross-browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari; IE users can die in a fire)

   • at a minimum, passworded

   RescueTime has a paid group tracking set of features that seems designed for this sort of task. There are many other Internet possibilities. (I used to use the Firefox extension PageAddict which worked well for this sort of thing but is unmaintained; the most popular maintained extension, Leechblock, doesn’t export statistics. about:me would probably work, but wouldn’t be automated.)

3. Other

   For example, my sousveillance script; it would be trivial to set up a folder and then add a call to the script like scp xwd-?????.png yyylj@euclid.u.washington.edu:/rc12/d16/yyli/screenshots/gwern/. This should be easily implemented for Macs, but for Windows? I am sure it is doable to write some sort of batch script which integrates with Task Scheduler, but I left Windows before I wrote my first script, so I don’t know how hard it would be.

Surprising Turing-Complete Languages

Split out to Turing-complete.

North Paw

A direction sensor belt (a ring of vibrators around one’s waist; the one closest to North buzzes gently). See the Wired article on it, and a 2009 article describing Sensebridge’s North Paw product The feelSpace homepage is here. There is a thread on Hackers News about building one’s own. Here’s a version of the belt made using Arduino. There’s a quasi-commercial version available for $119-214 from Sensebridge and through Think Geek (video), intended for wearing on one’s ankle (the original ankle-based project is “Noisebridge”). There’s an Arduino-based belt, then there’s a hat! I think most approaches are just a little baroque; it might make more sense to have each vibrator be independent - with a vibrator, a compass, and a battery. After all, each one should be able to know independently of the others whether it is facing North or not.

Parts:

• https://www.imagesco.com/catalog/DigitalCompass/DigitalCompass.html

• Digital Compass Navigation PC Board

• https://www.imagesco.com/kits/digital-navigation-boards.html

Tutorials:

• https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials

I had been meaning to buy or build one ever since I read the Wired article back in 2007_17ya or so, but had never quite gotten around it. The topic came up briefly on Hacker News and I suddenly remembered my intention and I worried that Sensebridge no longer sold them 7 years later; fortunately, they still did, so I took the hint and decided to get around to it.