Remembering the future

Arthur C Clarke was one of the most interesting, and yet also representative, of the mid to late 20th century futurists. In the 50s and 60s, he was remarkably prescient both about the direction of technology and its impact on society over the range of 25 or 30 years into the future. Beyond that, however, his track record is simply bad.

If this was just a question Clarke's limitations, it would not be a topic worth discussing, but I think his failed prophecies are indicative of something larger. As mentioned before, I've been working on a couple of essays on the way we think about technology and future. The central thesis of the first is that the extraordinary spikes of innovation and resulting social change that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, to a lesser extent, in the postwar era shaped and, in a sense, distorted our perception of the future.

The following passage from Clarke perfectly captures this mindset. His statements about the impossibility of predicting the future while sounding at all reasonable were accurate when he said them and had been even more so 70 or 80 years earlier. From the perspective of the mid-1880s, the world of 20 or 30 years into the future was genuinely difficult to imagine. It was difficult not to be overly conservative. Clarke assumed that the rate of acceleration of technological and resulting social change would not only hold but would actually increase. "Inevitably" he said, which in retrospect seems a little foolish and more than a little sad.

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation because the prophet invariably falls between two stools. If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that within 20 or, at most, 50 years, the progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative. On the other hand, if by some miracle a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn. This has proved to be true in the past, and it will inevitably be true, even more so, of the century to come.

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

So, if what I say to you now seems to be very reasonable, then I'll have failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely unbelievable, have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen.

Russians, Straussians, soft landings, and hamburger emojis

Since February, we've been discussing the curiously stable dynamic that keeps the GOP aligned with Trump even as his poll numbers slip. We've also argued that, at this point in time, this alliance holds the danger of an extraordinarily hard landing for the party. At the risk of overextending the metaphor, the Republicans are desperately hoping for a soft landing but are, at the same time, doing everything they can to maintain altitude.
As many have observed, the GOP of the 70s was able to minimize the long-term damage of Watergate by distancing themselves from Nixon and very publicly refusing to impede the investigation. The response of the party now has been just the opposite. It is as if the Republicans had responded to Watergate by doubling down their defense of Nixon, insisting there was nothing to the accusations, and calling for hearings into the crimes of McGovern, Humphrey, and LBJ.

Obviously, the decision to go all in on Trump is partially motivated by a desire to achieve as many policy goals as possible while still firmly in control of all three branches of government, but there's another factor which might be as large and which is possibly doing even more to eliminate the possibility of a soft landing.

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If some poli-sci PhD candidate out there is looking for a thesis topic, you could do worse than the breakdown of Straussian communication matrices, or as I've put it, "drinking from the wrong pipe." The conservative movement was essentially a three-legged stool built on money, prioritizing strategic offices and elections, and misinformation. This last one was arguably the most important; it is also the one that has proven the least stable.

The initial purpose of this "noble lie" approach was to use the propaganda to keep the base sending money and showing up for the polls through of a combination of rage and fear. As with all Straussian systems, it was assumed that those in power would be in on the joke while the people who believed the lies would simply serve as electoral cannon fodder.

At some point though (I suspect inevitably), a couple of things happen. First, the believers become leaders. This is become blindingly obvious with Trump, but the children of Fox News have been in control of the party since at least 2010 and the roots go back further. Remember how Dick Cheney insisted while traveling that all hotel televisions be tuned to Fox News?

The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realized the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.

One of the essential steps for achieving a soft landing is getting your core supporters to face just how dire the situation is. Fox News et al., however, has simply lost the capacity to do this.

We won't even get into ghosts of Mars

I've been going through old Scientific Americans gathering material for that essay on attitudes toward technology. This letter from 1908 discussing plan to signal martian civilizations caught my eye. I did a bit more digging and found the original article.

As we've mentioned before, the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th was a period when people displayed a stunning flexibility, open-mindedness and in some cases, gullibility. We tend to focus on the naysayers who got it wrong ("Man will never fly." and company), but I'm coming to the conclusion that it was far more an age of belief than skepticism, whether it was a question of technological marvels or ghosts or men from Mars.

 

Rasputian Causality

There's an exaggerated (but not all that exaggerated) account of the death of Rasputin that goes something like this: the controversial monk was, within the space of a few hours, poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, shot again, and then dumped into an icy Russian River where he drowned.

If we were to accept this account, we would have to say that the cause of death was drowning, but even if he had never been thrown in the water, he almost certainly would have died at roughly the same time from the poison or the gunshot wounds or the blows to his head.

More generally, this is an example of a causal relationship where removing the cause does not change the outcome. There are real-world implications to this idea. When we try to apply causal reasoning to practical problems like determining public policy, we almost always do so under the assumption that manipulating causes will change outcomes. That's not always true.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the case of multiple necessary conditions. This was very much the case in the 2016 election and something that most of the attempts at analysis wrong. Almost every piece you read with the headline "________ caused Trump to win" is fundamentally flawed. We almost certainly have here the opposite of the murder of Rasputin. We have a list of factors the removal of any one of which would have changed the outcome. We can debate exactly what goes on the list, but there's not much question that it includes Russian election hacking, conservative media misinformation, mainstream media false balance (particularly and perhaps primarily from the New York Times), irresponsible behavior from the FBI, and voter suppression. In terms of culpability, everyone responsible for any item on that list is responsible for what's happening to the country now and will continue to happen for the next few years.

Or, in other words, there's plenty of blame to go around.

While we're on the subject, there's this really weird movie from 1980.

Richard Thaler and 401(k) contribution limits

This is Joseph

Richard Thaler is narrowly correct in that reducing contribution limits to 401(k) accounts would be progressive.  Duncan Black points out that the implicit trade-off here is is with the estate tax, and not with something like Children's Health (look at the delays in funding CHIP).  Clearly the estate tax is much more progressive than the 401(k) contribution limit and has the desirable property of preventing wealth concentration.

So it is all about the net changes in policy.  If the 401(k) contribution limit was reduced to fund an increase in social security payments (focused on those with lowest benefits) then it would be a very progressive change in policy.  If it funded another worthy program that could also be a decent trade.

But any plan that has room to potentially eliminate the estate tax is hardly progressive, on net, and should be viewed with appropriate skepticism.

The TV movie Hyperloop may have looked cheesy, but at least you could stand up and walk around.

In 1973, Gene Roddenberry attempted to launch a post-apocalyptic science fiction series in the Buck Rogers vein largely built around a subterranean Hyperloop (actually more of a "Hyperloop," but let's not get picky). In the show, the system had been up and running by 1979, meaning we are running way behind.

From Wikipedia:

An elaborate "Subshuttle" subterranean rapid transit system was constructed during the 1970s, due to the vulnerability of air transportation to attack. The Subshuttles utilized a magnetic levitation rail system. They operated inside vactrain tunnels and ran at hundreds of miles per hour. The tunnel network was comprehensive enough to cover the entire globe. The PAX organization inherited the still-working system and used it to dispatch their teams of troubleshooters.

Tax Policy

This is Joseph

I am mostly out for a few weeks, but this is a very interesting piece:

Three or four decades later, scholars are able to look at the fruits of those policies and draw some conclusions. The same main technologies that exist in the United States and United Kingdom are also in use in Germany and Sweden. Those countries are also exposed to the forces of global trade and immigration. But inequality has grown much more sharply in the US and UK than it has in Germany and Sweden. And the main reason seems to be taxes.

and

Lower taxes on the rich straightforwardly engender inequality by giving rich people more money. But they also shift incentives. In the old days of 70 or even 90 percent marginal tax rates, it wouldn’t make much sense for executives to expend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to maximize the amount of money they can personally extract from a company in the form of salary. Instead, you might chase social prestige or other goals. And last but by no means least, tax cuts on investment income increase the extent to which wealth can mechanically beget more wealth as financial assets inherited from or gifted by parents simply earn their natural rate of return over time. 

I think that this gets at one of the key things we forget about economies, that there is not a natural or true economy that would function without interference (or at least nothing that would look like a modern economy).  Instead there are a series of choices that we make about how to distribute resources and create incentives. 

Now there is a moral argument about taxes being a taking.  But it is utterly unclear that you can have ultra-rich people without a strong state to defend them (the classical era and modern approach) or these individuals setting themselves up as warlords (the medieval approach).  That seems to also create a moral obligation for the the rich to contribute to supporting the society that makes their wealth possible.

It would be good to consider these issues more globally when discussing tax reform -- cuts to medicare to create tax cuts for top income earners really needs to be called out as a form of increasing inequality and not as a strategy for growth. 

I just realized we've been at this for at least six years.

Every year or two, some attention-hungry politician realizes they can get puff-peace coverage by pulling themselves up as the taxpayers friend, and derisively pointing out some government research project with an odd sounding name. The ultimate interview whore, William Proxmire, set the mold but he's had a steady stream of imitators ever since.

Of course, Proxmire left office, just as the conservative movement was beginning to aggressively undermine faith in government and libertarian billionaires were starting to set up pseudo-think tanks to provide, if not an intellectual framework, then at least a veneer of respectability. When the Golden Fleece awards started in 1975, it is difficult to imagine a witness denying the very idea that public research can have economic value. In 2017, it's almost expected.

Paul made his case for the bill yesterday as chairperson of a Senate panel with oversight over federal spending. The hearing, titled “Broken Beakers: Federal Support for Research,” was a platform for Paul’s claim that there’s a lot of “silly research” the government has no business funding. Paul poked fun at several grants funded by NSF—a time-honored practice going back at least 40 years, to Senator William Proxmire (D–WI) and his “Golden Fleece” awards—and complained that the problem is not “how does this happen, but why does it continue to happen?”

Paul’s proposed solution starts with adding two members who have no vested interest in the proposed research to every federal panel that reviews grant applications. One would be an “expert … in a field unrelated to the research” being proposed, according to the bill. Their presence, Paul explained, would add an independent voice capable of judging which fields are most worthy of funding. The second addition would be a “taxpayer advocate,” someone who Paul says can weigh the value of the research to society.

...

Two of the witnesses—Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Rebecca Cunningham of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—were generally supportive of the status quo, although Nosek emphasized the importance of replicating findings to maximize federal investments. The third witness, Terence Kealey of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., asserted that there’s no evidence that publicly funded research makes any contribution to economic development.

If you're up for more of the same, here's the related post we ran back in 2011.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Earmarks and Agricultural Research

Sometimes the press isn't good at connecting stories, particularly when those stories don't match up with the journalists' rather constrained world-view. One of the most reliable examples is the coverage of earmarks. The very fact that earmarks are reported as budget stories is troubling, showing how easily reporters can be manipulated into wasting time on trivia, but as bad as these stories are on a general level, the specifics may be even worse.

Like so many bad trends in journalism, the archetypal example comes from Maureen Dowd, this time in a McCain puff piece from 2009. Here's the complete list of offending earmarks singled out by the senator and dutifully repeated by Dowd:

Before the Senate resoundingly defeated a McCain amendment on Tuesday that would have shorn 9,000 earmarks worth $7.7 billion from the $410 billion spending bill, the Arizona senator twittered lists of offensive bipartisan pork, including:

• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. “quick peel me a grape,” McCain twittered.

• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex.

• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa.

• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.

• $819,000 for catfish genetics research in Alabama.

• $650,000 for beaver management in North Carolina and Mississippi.

• $951,500 for Sustainable Las Vegas. (McCain, a devotee of Vegas and gambling, must really be against earmarks if he doesn’t want to “sustain” Vegas.)

• $2 million “for the promotion of astronomy” in Hawaii, as McCain twittered, “because nothing says new jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy.”

• $167,000 for the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles. “Hopefully for a Back in the Saddle Again exhibit,” McCain tweeted sarcastically.

• $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii. “During these tough economic times with Americans out of work,” McCain twittered.

• $200,000 for a tattoo removal violence outreach program to help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past. “REALLY?” McCain twittered.

• $209,000 to improve blueberry production and efficiency in Georgia.

Putting aside the relatively minuscule amounts of money involved here, the thing that jumps out about this list is that out of 9,000 earmarks, how few real losers McCain's staff was able to come up with. I wouldn't give the Autry top priority for federal money, but they've done some good work and I assume the same holds for the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Along the same lines, I have trouble getting that upset public monies spent on astronomical research. After that, McCain's selections become truly bizarre. Urban water usage is a huge issue, nowhere more important than in Western cities like Los Vegas and it's difficult to imagine anyone objecting to a program that actually gets kids out of gangs.

Of course, we have no way of knowing how effective these programs are, but questions of effectiveness are notably absent from McCain/Dowd's piece. Instead it functions solely on the level of mocking the stated purposes of the projects, which brings us to one of the most interesting and for me, damning, aspects of the list: the preponderance of agricultural research.

You could make a damned good case for agricultural research having had a bigger impact on the world and its economy over the past fifty years than research in any other field. That research continues to pay extraordinary dividends both in new production and in the control of pest and diseases. It also helps us address the substantial environmental issues that have come with industrial agriculture.

As I said before, this earmark coverage with an emphasis on agriculture is a recurring event. I remember Howard Kurtz getting all giggly over earmarks for research on dealing with waste from pig farms about ten years ago and I've lost count of the examples since then.

And interspaced between those stories at odd intervals were other reports, less flashy but far more substantial, describing some economic, environmental or public health crisis that reminded us of the need for just this kind of research. Sometimes the crisis is in one of the areas explicitly mocked (look up the impact of industrial pig farming on rural America* and see if you share Mr. Kurtz's sense of humor). Other times the specifics change, a different crop, a new pestilence, but still well within the type that writers like Dowd find so amusing.

Here's the most recent example:

Across North America, a tiny, invasive insect is threatening some eight billion trees. The emerald ash borer is deadly to ash trees. It first turned up in Detroit nine years ago, probably after arriving on a cargo ship from Asia. And since then, the ash borer has devastated forests in the upper Midwest and beyond.

* Credit where credit is due. Though not as influential as Dowd, the New York Times also runs Nicholas Kristof who has done some excellent work describing the human cost of these crises.

When we say the Mars/Tesla connection goes way back, we mean way back

[No, not that Tesla, this Tesla.]

I was meaning to run something topical today (probably something that will run later in the week), but for now, here's another trip through the Scientific American archives.

If the following consists of an old painting from Galaxy Magazine, you'll know I didn't finish today's post

From June, 1951

Baum miscellanea

A few weeks ago, while working on a blog post (I don't remember which one) something (I don't remember what) brought to mind a detail from an Oz book. As has become more or less a compulsion with me, I looked up the specifics which inevitably led to a random Wikipedia walk, in this case through the articles on L Frank Baum. Here are a few bits of trivia that struck me as worth sharing and/or filing away for future reference.

For starters, there's this sly bit of gilded age satire from the Sea Fairies (1911):

"Let's go," said Trot.  "I don't like to 'sociate with octopuses."
"OctoPI," said the creature, again correcting her.
"You're jus' as horrid whether you're puses or pies," she declared.
"Horrid!" cried the monster in a shocked tone of voice.
"Not only horrid, but horrible!" persisted the girl.
"May I ask in what way?" he inquired, and it was easy to see he was offended.
"Why, ev'rybody knows that octopuses are jus' wicked an' deceitful," she said.  "Up on the earth, where I live, we call the Stannerd Oil Company an octopus, an' the Coal Trust an octopus, an'--"
"Stop, stop!" cried the monster in a pleading voice.  "Do you mean to tell me that the earth people whom I have always respected compare me to the Stannerd Oil Company?"
"Yes," said Trot positively.
"Oh, what a disgrace!  What a cruel, direful, dreadful disgrace!" moaned the Octopus, drooping his head in shame, and Trot could see great tears falling down his cheeks.
"This comes of having a bad name," said the Queen gently, for she was moved by the monster's grief.
"It is unjust!  It is cruel and unjust!" sobbed the creature mournfully.  "Just because we have several long arms and take whatever we can reach, they accuse us of being like--like--oh, I cannot say it! It is
too shameful, too humiliating."
"Come, let's go," said Trot again.  So they left the poor octopus weeping and wiping his watery eyes with his handkerchief and swam on their way. 

This description of what we might now call a multimedia show from 1908 demonstrates that the desire for cutting-edge sounding names goes back a long time.

The films were colored (credited as "illuminations") by Duval Frères of Paris, in a process known as "Radio-Play", and were noted for being the most lifelike hand-tinted imagery of the time. Baum once claimed in an interview that a "Michael Radio" was a Frenchman who colored the films, though no evidence of such a person, even with the more proper French spelling "Michel", as second-hand reports unsurprisingly revise it, has been documented. It did not refer to the contemporary concept of radio (or, for that matter, a radio play), but played on notions of the new and fantastic at the time, similar to the way "high-tech" or sometimes "cyber" would be used later in the century. The "Fairylogue" part of the title was to liken it to a travelogue, which at the time was a very popular type of documentary film entertainment.

We even have a genuinely disturbing example of what we would now call body horror from the 1912 sequel to the Sea Fairies.

Sky Island is another split-color country in Baum's fantasy universe, like the Land of Oz. Divided in two-halves, blue and pink, Sky Island supports two separate races of beings, the Blues and the Pinkies. The two halves are separated by a region shrouded in fog, which both peoples are reluctant to enter. The three travellers land on the blue side of Sky Island, which is a grim country ruled by a sadistic tyrant, the Boolooroo of the Blues. In Sky Island, as in Oz, no one can be killed or suffer pain, but that doesn't mean one is safe: the Boolooroo's method of punishing disobedience in his subjects is to slice two of his victims into halves using a huge guillotine-type knife, and then join the wrong halves back together, creating very unhappy asymmetrical mixed people. This is called "patching."

I was about to add a final section on the 1901 fantasy science fiction novel, the Master Key, but I think that one deserves a post to itself.

When I said retro-TV...

This guy actually made a version of a 19th century television by fashioning an old vinyl LP into a Nipkow disk. 








This one works a little better.

The content bubble -- when reality sinks in

[Couple of small edits. Fixed title and added a link I'd forgotten.]

Quick refresher, the content bubble  refers to the explosion in scripted series being produced for various channels, services and platforms. We've spent a lot of time on the drivers of the bubble and the economics of why it's not sustainable, but probably not enough on the reactions of people on the inside.

Ken Levine (who either wrote, directed or produced about half of the sitcoms you aren't ashamed to mention knowing) recently made the following observation in a post about the experience of working on a show that had just hit big. [emphasis added]

How many shows today are produced and aired in relative obscurity? And it takes the same amount of time and effort to produce a show only relatives watch on a network no one has ever heard of than to produce THIS IS US.

Even the first year of CHEERS, when we THOUGHT no one was watching, we averaged 20 million people a week. The show was slowly starting to catch on to where we thought we were an underground hit. 20 million viewers was considered “under the radar” back then. Now the landscape has become so fractured that certain shows on certain platforms shown nationally are seen by 100,000 people. I don’t understand the economics. How can they afford to shell out millions for shows that get way fewer views than cats coughing up fur balls on YouTube?

I suspect in most bubbles, there comes a point when the conflict between the desire to believe and the cold, hard, inescapable numbers becomes so pronounced that the consensus of smart sensible people in the field becomes "this just can't go on much longer." In this case, the realization is sinking in that the handful of winners can't possibly begin to balance out the huge number of losers (particularly when you factor in the rapid growth in PR costs).

Just to be clear, Levine's role in is not analogous to that of an investor in a stock market bubble. He's more like one of the tradesmen who sells high-end goods to the suddenly cash rich investors. The talent behind and in front of the camera is currently benefiting from the bubble and will probably pay much of the consequences for the claps, but they are not the ones green lighting a remake of "One Day at a Time."

The New York Times has a self-congratulations problem.

This isn't exactly a new complaint (you can find similar charges going back to the 19th century), but the frequency seems to be on the rise while the gap between self-image and reality grows more notable. Today's example comes from Farhad Manjoo, who has belatedly decided to join the techno-anxiety craze.

A lot of these worries aren’t new. Though Silicon Valley runs on heedless optimism, much of The Times’s coverage has long been properly skeptical and critical of the implications of new tech. Consider the evil of “revenge porn,” or the rise in accidents caused by drivers looking at their phones. I’ve shared other fears: In 2008, I wrote a book predicting that the internet would lead us into a “post-fact” world.

For starters, lots of people were making similar points in 2008. If you're going to drop a self-reference that implies prescience, you'd better be able to show you were well ahead of the curve.

More importantly, there is absolutely no reason to single out the New York Times for its skepticism and critical attitude toward 21st Century tech. I've been writing about this for years now and here are just some of the news organizations that I've cited for doing more notable work along these lines:

The New Yorker, Vox, the LA Times, Gawker, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and Cracked

This is not to say that the NYT is horrible on this – – if anything, they are probably a bit above average – – but they certainly haven't done anything worth this kind of reflexive self-congratulation, and that tendency toward patting themselves on the back represents a much greater (and previously mentioned) problem.

The NYT has fully internalized the idea that, in all things, it is the world's best paper. This can make for an intolerably smug editorial voice, but, more to the point, it can undermine journalistic judgment, encourage childish behavior and make it almost impossible for the institution to face and correct its own problems.

The NYT's cozy relationship with Thiel and thinly veiled schadenfreude at the fate of Gawker may or may not have had something to do with the gadfly site's habit of pointing out the grey lady's lapses. The paper's decision to force an incredibly unsupportable framework of “balance” on the last election was certainly a major factor in and possibly a necessary condition for Trump's victory.

The New York Times has become HAL in 2001. It can't admit its own fallibility, and the evidence of its mistakes is driving it to make increasingly bad and dangerous choices.

Apropos of absolutely nothing (I mean, seriously, I can't think of a single 21st century example of this), here's an excerpt from the Big Con.

Not the Jonathan Chait book but the classic 1940 study of confidence games, particularly the "long con." It's the book that launched a thousand screenplays, most notably the Sting. I've been meaning to read this for years. It's not easy to find and I had looked for it in a number of libraries until finally giving up and putting it out of my mind. Recently, though, someone mentioned it in an email and I realized that if I couldn't find it in one of the four large library systems I have cards for in LA County, it probably couldn't be found anywhere.

After all this time, I half expected the book to be a letdown, but I've been very pleasantly surprised. One passage in particular jumped out at me:

From the Big Con by David W Maurer

Most marks come from the upper strata of society, which, in America, means that they have made, married, or inherited money. Because of this, they acquire status which in time they come to attribute to some inherent superiority, especially as regards matters of sound judgment in finance and investment. Friends and associates, themselves social climbers and sycophants, helped to maintain the solution of superiority. Eventually, the mark comes to regard himself as a person of vision and even of genius. Thus a Babbitt who has cleared half 1 million in a real estate development easily forgets the part which luck and chicanery have played in his financial rise; he accepts his mantle of respectability without question; he naïvely attributes his success to sound business judgment. And any confidence man will testify that a real-estate man is the fattest and juiciest of suckers.