Three years ago at the blog -- The Myth of the Wright Brothers

Having covered yesterday the lies we tell ourselves about the Apollo program, let's take a look at another favorite.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Wrong about the Wright brothers

Following up on yesterday's post, the standard narrative about the Wright brothers was they were two nobodies laboring in obscurity. When the breakthrough came, no one could believe it. 

To support this account you'll often see this quote from Scientific American:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This would seem to be another of those "man will never fly" anecdotes, but context matters.  For starters, the Wright brothers weren't unknowns; they weren't even particularly long shots. They were known to anyone who had been seriously following advances in heavier than air flight. Samuel Langley had reached out to them. Scientific American had given them positive write-ups in 1902 and this in 1903:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Even with the disputed flights, the magazine initially took a more guarded tone:

 The Wright Brothers,  in this  country, who in 1903 made the first successful flight  with an aeroplane, self-propelled and carrying its operator, have recently made a  flight, the particulars of  which have not been given to  the public. 

So if the Wright brothers were recognized as leading pioneers in the field, why was the press so skeptical, even hostile? One reason was that, due to fear of their ideas being stolen, the brothers had become extremely secretive, but the bigger factor was the astounding magnitude of the breakthrough. The brothers claimed to have made one of the all time great advances in transportation technology, but they offered no proof and no explanation for why no one had noticed the airplanes making multiple half-hour flights over the skies of Ohio.

The skepticism was justified. It was also short lived. As soon as confirmation came in, the brothers were hailed as having "already solved the  problem of  the century." Here was the lede of the Scientific American article that appeared less than four months after the "fabled performance" piece:

We love stories about how innocent and clueless our forefathers were about technology, particularly compared with how sophisticated we are today. At least with respect to the turn of the century, I think we may have gotten it exactly backwards.

 

The myth of Apollo

While it has become newly relevant, we've been on this beat for years now.

The seductive notion that it is only our failure to dream big which is holding us back from the glorious future we've long been promised is dangerous- - it leaves us vulnerable to fools and con men - - and it is at odds with the historical record and the way technology advances.

The stories that techno-optimists tell us and themselves are mostly half true at best. They didn't laugh at the Wright brothers. If you go back and read the press coverage in places like Scientific American before the breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, you'll see that, though they weren't the front runners, people were taking them quite seriously, and the skepticism that came immediately after their first flight was pretty much entirely due to their own decision to be highly secretive with their first flights.

Nikolai Tesla did not die in poverty and obscurity because his ideas were too innovative and people couldn't recognize his genius. Tesla was a huge celebrity and more than a bit of a Fame whore with celebrities like Mark Twain touring his laboratory. Tesla died broke because he blew all of his and his investors money on a plan for wireless transmission of power over considerable distance which was a terrible idea at the time and remains unworkable to this day.

Then we get to the all-time favorite dare to dream story, the moonshot. The standard story goes something like this...

The idea of a manned lunar mission seemed out of reach, at least for decades, but then the Bold and charismatic young John F Kennedy made a commitment and gave a speech that inspired the nation to embrace what was possible. It was thanks to that moment of inspiration that man walked on the moon just a few years later.

Pretty much everything in that story is largely false.

Though Kennedy's timeline was aggressive, it was not seen as impossible.

I think we have reversed the symbolic meaning of a Manhattan project and a moonshot. The former has come to mean a large, focused and dedicated commitment to rapidly addressing a challenging but solvable problem. The second has come to mean trying to do something so fantastic it seems impossible. The reality was largely the opposite. Building an atomic bomb was an incredible goal that required significant advances in our understanding of the underlying scientific principles. Getting to the moon was mainly a question of committing ourselves to spending a nontrivial chunk of our GDP on an undertaking that was hugely ambitious in terms of scale but which relied on technology that was already well-established by the beginning of the Sixties.

From The conquest of space by Willy Ley 1949 [emphasis added]

Then, of course, there is the possibility of using atomic energy. If some 15 years ago, a skeptical audience had been polled as to which of the two "impossibilities" – – moon ship and large scale controlled-release of atomic energy – – they considered less fantastic, the poll would probably have been 100% in favor of the moon ship. As history turned out, atomic energy came first, and it is now permissible to speculate whether the one may not be the key to the other.

Nor is there any evidence that the speech, while undoubtedly brilliantly written, actually moved the needle.

Paul Burka, the executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, a Rice alumnus who was present in the crowd that day, recalled 50 years later that the speech "speaks to the way Americans viewed the future in those days. It is a great speech, one that encapsulates all of recorded history and seeks to set it in the history of our own time. Unlike today's politicians, Kennedy spoke to our best impulses as a nation, not our worst. " Ron Sass and Robert Curl were among the many members of the Rice University faculty present. Curl was amazed by the cost of the space exploration program. They recalled that the ambitious goal did not seem so remarkable at the time, and that Kennedy's speech was not regarded as so different from one delivered by President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Rice's Autry Court in 1960; but that speech has long since been forgotten, while Kennedy's is still remembered.

 As best I can tell from a google search, the speech didn't seem to attract that much coverage, and almost all of that was focused on the proposed spending increase.

 

Even in the write-up in the student paper of the university that hosted the event, the part about going to the moon "in this decade" went unnoticed.

 

 

 I hate to spoil a thousand perfectly good TED Talks, but the actual immediate impact of this admittedly great speech appears to have been virtually nonexistent. People paid it little attention at the time and even less to its inspirational passages, with the Apollo program remaining largely unpopular through most of its duration. 

The actual story of the Apollo Program starts with the cold war mixed with American politics and the good fortune to have D.C.'s most vocal advocate for manned space exploration suddenly become president in 1963 just as the political costs were starting to add up.

 

 

Your chance to see Martin Shkreli unironically say "Pay it forward."

 

 

 

 Last Wednesday and Thursday, we started a thread on Marc Andreessen's “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (along with a bit of prehistory Tuesday). The manifesto concludes with a truly odd list of "patron saints" of techno-optimism, and if you want to understand the culture behind the movement, that may be the best place to start.

 Many of the names are famous philosophers or scientists like Nietzsche  and Ada Lovelace who have said or done something vaguely relevant to the topic, though in many cases such as Bertrand Russell and Andy Warhol, you get the feeling that Andreessen may not have been all that familiar with most of their work.

There is at least one fictional figure, John Galt, in case you thought I was kidding about the whole Randian thing. Though somewhat curiously, Ayn Rand herself does not make the list.

But particularly for those who want to catch the numerous dog whistles, the most informative entries are the ones you've never heard of.

Max Reed, who we mentioned in our previous post provides some useful background.

The inspiration and audience of this manifesto is the adherents and proponents of “effective accelerationism,” or “e/acc,” a Twitter community nominally centered around the promotion of unregulated, uncaring, and extremely rapid technological advancement but whose real attraction is smug own-the-libs shitposting.

...

On an practical level everything you need to know about “e/acc” is that its foremost proponent is an anonymous A.I.-company founder with a Twitter handle “@BasedBeffJezos” (one of the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism,” according to Andreessen’s manifesto); that is, it’s less an ideology or philosophy than an affective organizer for bored men over 35 with MBAs who admire Jeff Bezos and still laugh at circa-2015 Twitter jokes.

 

As Read pointed out, a visit to Beff Jezos' Twitter page is an excellent introduction to the techno-optimist movement and the kind of people you meet there.

The myth of the Greeks and especially the Spartans looms large in this corner of Twitter, with 'myth' being the key word. The touchstone here is the movie "the 300." which shows up constantly both in the form of memes and as a source of information, and more to the point, misinformation about the period.  

It's not difficult to understand the attraction the Spartan myth holds for these people (and why they react so strongly when an actual historian like Bret Devereaux corrects the record). One of the explicit  tenets of the movement is the idea that, unlike previous ages, the modern world does not allow greatness, along with the implicit but still obvious belief that, had they been born in those earlier times, Beff, Marc, and Elon would have been kings and warriors, not the far more plentiful peasants and slaves. 

It's not just Spartans. The overwhelminlyg male e/acc crowd likes to see themselves as knights...

... and action heroes.

 

 I mean, seriously, these are grown men.

 

 

 They take themselves very seriously...

 

...even when talking about things that shouldn't be taken seriously.

The techno-capitalist worldview is one where tech bro founders and venture capitalists have no known limitations.

 

There is only one force that can hold them back.

Regulators.

This last tweet is a triple threat, not only childishly insulting regulators, but also featuring fan favorites Joe Rogan and a Cybertruck.

More on the challenges of settlers

This is Joseph.

So as the current events in Israel/Gaza continue to be tragic, I do think that it is worth noting that the question of who "owns" land is rapidly and quickly very difficult. I have a great deal of sympathy for the notion that oppression is bad and that ongoing oppression is a serious problem, especially when it is coupled with human rights crimes. I also note the current international order is predicated on the idea that nation states should not expand with force (they do anyway, but we try to limit this as a good option). 

So lets look at an example of peace: Ireland. As recently as 1998 there had been a 30 year insurgency in Northern Ireland that killed around 3,500 people (in a region with 1.5 million inhabitants at the time), This was small potatoes compared to past events like this and this. And before you say much about the potato famine, something like 20% of the population of the island either dies or leaves while it is under British governance. It's not the only human rights atrocity of the age (look at central Europe during the 30 years war) or the colonization of North America). 

But somehow there are no calls for expelling people from Northern Ireland. There is a debate about the reunification of Ireland but no real evidence that this is a violent question but more of a political one because of the complications caused by Brexit. Yes, we have evolved to the point where armed uprising is over and there is no strong ideal of using bombs and bullets. 

The other question that is very pragmatic is how long land claims should exist for. It's not an easy question and it resists analysis. This is very important to political philosophy like Libertarianism, because if the starting wealth is not allocated justly then those who were unjustly deprived of wealth have complicated claims that are hard to address. John Locke is smarter, with the labor value of property. But that gives insight into historical contributions that are hard to address, especially as groups shift and merge over time. 

Some examples of complicated questions include:

• Greek claims to Istanbul/Constantinople (1454 was a long time ago and the Byzantines who owned it at least partially assimilated)
• Lenape claims to New York and surrounding areas (clear that they were hard done by, hard to see how to rectify this without a serious amount of harm to the current residents)
• Should the Anglo-Saxons go back to Northern Europe? And how would you tell who they were and where they should be relocated to? 
• Who inherits the Roman claim on North Africa? Or, if it is extinct, how and why?
• Does Russia own Siberia? Or, by extension, America own Alaska?
• What about Soviet era claims on Ukraine (or East Germany for that matter)

I could keep going all day. Migration, including violent migration, occurs as early as we have history. Bret Devereaux has a nice piece on Greek colonization that makes it clear that, at least in some cases, the locals were not happy to have a new city appear and steal the best local land:

At the same time, its clear that some colonies began with the subordination or more often violent expulsion of the local population in the region of settlement, while in others the steady inflow of migrants to a new colony created demands for land that in turn ended with violent expansion.

It is totally unclear how these claims might go back. Because if it is just a continuous identifiable group with a claim that at least some people hold up, then Istanbul is a live issue as is and there can be no end to these potential claims (try proving it wasn't held continuously by someone in the group). 

Now add in the problem of immigration. And not just modern states like America or Canada, but even ancient Rome had immigration. Are immigrants settlers? Uh, yes. Which rather complicates everything. After all, if the government of the day allowed settlers in legally, can that be reversed later? If so, how? 

So I think the example of the British Isles is the way to go. A society that respects the rights of the inhabitants and provides a just governance to all. Many ways that this can be done but liberal democracies seem to be a pretty reasonable and effective solution. But I think that "blood and soil" theories are a rabbit hole and end up in a very dark place. Instead, I would like to make the focus on ongoing oppression. The homelessness crisis among first nation in Canada is a disgrace and, unlike land claims, there is no barriers save government incompetence and racism to ending it today. 

Let's focus on making people's lives better and in finding constructive paths forward. 

Ten years ago at the blog -- A lot has happened with over-the-air television since 2013

When we first started writing about digital over-the-air television more than a dozen years ago and arguing that the industry was viable and promising, we were part of a very small minority. Rajiv Sethi was the only blogger of any stature who was making the case. Editorials were popping up arguing that the audience was small and shrinking and that we should close down the medium and sell off the bandwidth.

Since then, the number of terrestrial superstations (channels like Weigel's MeTV that would be carried on the subchannels of various broadcast stations across the country) has exploded. with virtually every major player jumping on the bandwagon. 

Industry pioneer and last of the independents Weigel (basically the Turner Broadcasting of digital OTA) has expanded its line-up from two to seven channels. Flagship MeTV not only dominates OTA, it is also does the same with basic cable ("it’s the fifth highest-rated cable network in the country, behind only Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and HGTV"). Weigel developed the business model, launching primarily for the antenna market, expanding the audience through cable, the keeping viewers who cut the cord. 

MeTV has also broken through big with its affectionate homage to classic TV horror hosts, the retro-cool Svengoolie. Long a cult figure with fans like Penn & Teller, Mark Hamill, Rick Baker, Joe Mantegna, and DC Comics editor Dan Didio...

The character (played and written for decades by Rich Koz) is now mainstream enough for write-ups in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. 

The second biggest player, Katz (since acquired by by Scripps) has even more channels including a twenty-four hour news channel and the powerhouse Bounce TV, which has made a serious investment in original scripted shows that have been pulling in numbers that the vast majority of streaming originals (and pretty much all CW shows) would kill for. 

And that's just two of many players.

From the consumer standpoint, when you get past specific brands like CNN or TNT, OTA television is largely interchangeable with basic cable in terms of quality and selection (often better in terms of picture quality due to cable's compression and with more non-English programming). The most noticeable difference is the lack of a bill.

From a business standpoint, terrestrial superstations are arguably the one segment of the television industry that has been both growing and consistently profitable over the past ten years.

 About the only thing seeing ratings gains in broadcast TV these days are the low-budget diginets — those network running on local TV subchannels. Of course, Ion and Me TV have been doing quite well for years — and aren’t really diginets, since they air as full-blown affiliates or owned TV stations in most markets. But among the diginets seeing growth or at least stability this year were Grit (up 5%), Bounce (flat), Family Entertainment TV (up 14%), Cozi (up 6%), Ion Mystery (formerly Court TV Mystery, up 13%), Laff (up 2%), Dabl (up 28%), Court TV (up 7%) and Cleo TV (up 44%).

[One note and one quibble: Bounce's monster hit Saints & Sinners had its sixth and final season apparently due in part to declining ratings. Holding onto that big of an audience while transitioning to a new slate of shows is beyond impressive. And while you can certainly argue that Ion doesn't belong on this list, MeTV invented the business model.]

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Free TV blogging -- subtle signs of a tipping point

It may not look it, but I think this might be kind of a big deal.

As (very patient) regular readers know, I've been following the over-the-air television story for a long time, partly because I'm a satisfied user but mainly because there's a push to shut down the medium and I believe that the loss of OTA television would reduce media diversity and acerbate the effects of income inequality.

There's been a definite progression in coverage since the conversion to digital in 2008. Other than a few pieces specifically on the conversion (such as this very good story from the LA Times and this not-so-good one from the NYT), there was almost no mention of the new medium for the first year or so.

Then came the comment stage: articles about relevant subjects like cable problems and cord-cutting would make no mention of OTA options but the comment sections were full of readers saying "what about rabbit ears?"

The CBS/Time Warner dispute prompted another stage marked by a considerable increase in coverage. With the largest markets in the country losing cable access to the number one network, reporters more or less had to discuss other options for viewing television. The resulting stories were of somewhat uneven quality, but they did start addressing over-the-air as a viable option.

Now we have what might turn out to be the fourth stage in the coverage. Here's a passage from a recent post by Brad Reed of the tech site BGR complaining about Comcast's service:

Now, I know there are solutions to this. I plan on installing a digital antenna and unplugging the Comcast cable all together so I can once again watch football in HD. But it’s appalling to me that Comcast has sent me a product that the company has billed as an “upgrade” that has actually downgraded the quality of my service dramatically. What’s more, Comcast is telling me I’ll need to pay an extra $10 a month to access channels that are free to access over the air.

The worst part about all this is that I’ll have little choice but to continue paying Comcast for a television service that I’ll never use simply because the company’s glorious bundling plans make it cheaper for me to have TV and Internet than just Internet alone. And it’s not like I can switch providers since Comcast has a regional monopoly in my area.

I do have one small quibble with this story – there is no such thing as a digital television antenna – but on the whole this is the kind of story we've been waiting for: A writer for a tech savvy site who knows what is available over the air and who understands the value of having an option to a cable monopoly. This was almost impossible to find a couple of years ago.

One of the points I've been hoping/meaning to get across (as a blogger, I've always had a poor conception-to-expression ratio) is that competition is only meaningful if customers know their options.   That knowledge is not automatic. It has to be derived from personal experience, word-of-mouth, journalism/media coverage or marketing.

When you have a new product (and digital OTA is a new product, as or more distinct from analog OTA than cable was from that same medium thirty-five years ago), customers are particularly dependent on coverage and marketing to tell them they have another option. Unfortunately, most companies with major marketing budgets had a vested interest in the failure of the free TV model while the media had no interest in the story for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that companies like Weigel Broadcasting didn't have top dollar PR firms writing the journalists' stories for them.

As a result, there was a real danger that the new medium was going to be chopped up and sold for parts before the slow dissemination of information through direct experience and word of mouth could reach critical mass. For a time, I thought it was the likely outcome. Now, I think the odds for OTA are looking pretty good. The technology has always been more than competitive. Now that journalists and tech writers are including antennas in their discussions of television, that technological edge can start making a difference.

 

Three Proposed Changes to Daylight Savings Time

 The first (from XKCD's Randall Munroe) has some obvious issues.

Monroe also suggests an alternate solution in the title text, averaging out the spring and fall changes and setting clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

While Monroe's 39 minute approach is more practical, it still doesn't address the primary advantages and drawbacks of the current system. Most people like getting an extra hour of weekend and dislike losing an hour. Historically, this has been presented as an unavoidable trade-off, but it doesn't have to be if we just broaden our thinking. If we just set our clocks back twice a month, by the end of the year, everything will work out even. 

The good people at Explain XKCD point out an unexpected benefit of the current system: in at least two separate cases, terrorists have blown themselves up due to failure to spring forward or fall back.

Following up on yesterday's post

Via Scott Lemieux (" Checking in on the intellectual giants of Silicon Valley")

Max Read has perhaps the best analysis to date of Marc Andreessen's manifesto, and unlike Noah Smith and Ezra Klein, he has no interest in putting a nice spin on things.

The basic thrust of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is that technology is the key to human thriving, and that certain malign elements in society--Andreessen names “experts,” “bureaucracy,” “sustainability” and “social responsibility” as “enemies”--have convinced us otherwise. These “enemies,” who “are suffering from ressentiment” must be escorted “out of their self-imposed labyrinth of pain,” for the good of humanity, and convinced of the error of their ways. Once their path is cleared, techno-optimists can make “everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.” Eventually, “our descendents will live in the stars.” He concludes: “We owe the past, and the future. It’s time to be a Techno-Optimist. It’s time to build.”

If that sounds particularly familiar, it may be because “It’s Time to Build” is the title of a post Andreessen wrote in April 2020, in which he offers a broadly similar, if somewhat less lofty, argument: “The problem is inertia… The problem is regulatory capture… Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building?”

Well, yes, indeed. What are you building? One reason that, three and a half years later, Andreessen is reiterating that “it’s time to build” instead of writing posts called “Here’s What I Built During the Building Time I Previously Announced Was Commencing” is that Marc Andreessen has not really built much of anything. In the years since he determined that it was time to build, his fund invested tens of millions of dollars in a video-game Ponzi scheme that immiserated its players and a company that sells blockchain transaction records said to reflect ownership of ape cartoons. That’s not just not building; it’s so not-building it’s not even the opposite of building, which would be “destroying,” and has the benefit of relating to the real world in some way. It’s ”venture investing in crypto companies,” which is its own little onanistic universe, conceptually and practically unrelated to “building” entirely.

While we're on the subject, let's look at some other recent A16Z investments.

In May 2022, the firm announced the launch of its largest fund to date at $4.5 billion. The fund is set to focus on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. The firm stated that $1.5 billion was allocated to seed investments while the remaining $3 billion would be earmarked for venture investments.

In August 2022, the firm announced it would be investing about $350 million in Flow, the latest organization begun by WeWork founder Adam Neumann. The purported aim of Flow is to create a branded product in the housing market with consistent community features, reimagining how real estate works in the US.  The decision was met with some criticism due to Neumann's previous business issues in his time at WeWork. 

The firm committed to $400 million in equity investment towards acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk that completed in October 2022.

Now back to Max

So why bother writing it all out, especially as a 5,000-word statement of purpose placed on the front page of your website? One obvious reason is marketing. a16z competes for start-ups just as start-ups compete for investment, and this kind of manifesto will be particularly attractive to some of them--in particular, the kinds of young right-wingers who tend to run defense and surveillance start-ups and probably use the word “based” in conversation. Andreessen Horowitz has spun up a whole “American Dynamism” practice that “invests in founders and companies that support the national interest: aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing.” Its website cites the Apollo Space Program and the Manhattan Project as landmarks of American dynamism.

Praising such examples of highly centralized and coordinated government programs--not to mention investing heavily in businesses reliant on fat government contracts--would seem to contradict the glib anarcho-capitalism of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. But both are symptomatic of a crisis in Andreessen’s world. After a decade of high-profile failures and embarrassments, venture investing is no longer seen as credible or reliable. The political economy of the U.S. has shifted in labor’s favor, and economists and wonks are increasingly in favor of industrial policy as an engine of growth and stability rather than free-floating individual investment. A V.C. confronted with this reality might both shift his strategy away from software platforms and crypto companies and toward the more reliable proposition of government contractors--and he might also grumble about all the people holding him back.

 [If you haven't already, this might be a good time to get a bit of historical context from our earlier post.]

Andreessen really wants to come off as erudite. As we said yesterday, "the length and pretension ("what the Greeks called techne") call to mind a sophomore philosophy major who came to a dorm room to bum some pot and simply won't shut up." Unfortunately, like Musk, his act is only convincing if you aren't familiar with what he's talking about.

 Read again,

As an example, take the citation of Nick Land--an English accelerationist philosopher who wrote impenetrable but influential books as part of the legendary Warwick CCRU before decamping to Singapore to focus on doing racist tweets--is particularly telling:

Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.[…] We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human – in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.

For whatever it’s worth, this gets Land exactly backwards: According to his constitutionally pessimistic accelerationism “techno-capital” (not “the techno-capital machine,” Jesus--has Andreessen even bothered to read the stuff he’s approvingly citing?) is our boss, not the other way around; or, more accurately, it’s a kind of far-future alien intelligence using us for its own development and will discard and eliminate us when it reaches self-sufficiency. Land’s most famous quote is “Nothing human survives the near future.”

Look, I’m not really convinced that Land is particularly interesting as a theorist--to the extent he’s redeemable it’s as kind of accidental writer of cosmic horror, a 21st-century H.P. Lovecraft who has similarly turned his pants-pissing anxiety about race into a strikingly ugly but revealing cosmogony--but he is an honest-to-God Weird Freak, not airport-book guy going, like, “technology plus markets equals techno-capital.”

 

From the people who told you crypto was the next big thing...

If you haven't already, you're probably going to be hearing a lot about techno-optimism in general and this manifesto by Marc Andreessen in particular and be warned, it's going to be bad. 

Of course, that won't be your first impression. Like effective altruism, which largely comes from the same bunch, the movement/philosophy sounds pretty good when presented in thumbnail form:

- The belief that technological innovation is the most important and certainly the most sustainable driver of economic growth is so obvious as to be a truism.

- The idea that we should focus primarily on increasing capacity rather than reducing demand is entirely reasonable.

- The notion that we should all be more optimistic about technology is a not particularly consequential but not objectionable approach.

If that were all there was to the movement it wouldn't exactly justify the hype but it would be mostly harmless. Unfortunately, that brief description leaves out the most important and troubling parts.

First off, the movement is very much an expression of prime Silicon Valley flakiness. Those of us who have spent too much time following the tweets and bizarre quotes from Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, et al. will pick up on lots of familiar motifs and dog whistles, though particularly in the manifesto, those whistles tend to be pitched well within the range of human hearing.

When you get to the part about Andreessen's concern over declining birth rates in certain countries, it helps to know the context. We've done at least two posts on hipster eugenics, but in case you've forgotten, here are some relevant passages from the definitive Business Insider article by Julia Black. [emphasis and commentary added]

Malcolm, 36, and his wife, Simone, 35, are "pronatalists," part of a quiet but growing movement taking hold in wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. People like the Collinses fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization. [As has been pointed out numerous times (including this post by Joseph), these nations maintain a growing population though immigration which suggests that these particular pro-natalists have less of an issue with birth rates and more of an issue with which people are being born -- MP] It's a theory that Elon Musk has championed on his Twitter feed, that Ross Douthat has defended in The New York Times' opinion pages, and that Joe Rogan and the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen [pretty much the king of Ithuvania -- MP] bantered about on "The Joe Rogan Experience." It's also, alarmingly, been used by some to justify white supremacy around the world, from the tiki-torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "You will not replace us" to the mosque shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who opened his 2019 manifesto: "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates."

...

The payoff won't be immediate, Simone said, but she believes if that small circle puts the right plans into place, their successors will "become the new dominant leading classes in the world." [Boy, that has a familiar ring to it -- MP]

...

These worries tend to focus on one class of people in particular, which pronatalists use various euphemisms to express. In August, Elon's father, Errol Musk, told me that he was worried about low birth rates in what he called "productive nations." The Collinses call it "cosmopolitan society." Elon Musk himself has tweeted about the movie "Idiocracy," in which the intelligent elite stop procreating, allowing the unintelligent to populate the earth.

The manifesto itself is basically a Randian/ libertarian screed with a few truisms and vague inspiring statements about technology. Not surprisingly, regulators and environmentalist are held responsible for most of the world's ills.

The main tenant of the movement when it comes to technology is the belief that, other than regulation, it is pessimism and doubt that keeps us from having this near utopia. Just as with the Great Pumpkin, flying cars and fusion reactors won't appear unless everyone sincerely believes.

 One of the many interesting contradictions in the movement is that they ache with nostalgia for the world of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program and all the other wonders from an era which, like all good Randians, they consider a dystopian hellscape. Remember, Atlas Shrugged was Rand's take on Eisenhower's America. 

These somewhat disturbing antecedents are reinforced by the extended passage from Nietzsche and the weird, almost chant-like cadences of the manifesto:

Our enemy is stagnation.

Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.

Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.

Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.

Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.

[It might be fun at this to veer off topic and delve into how Andreessen made his fortune, but we need to stay on the subject.]

I apologize for this post meandering about without a coherent central thesis, but with this material, it's difficult to do anything else. The choppiness gives the feel if an interminable tweet thread while the length and pretension ("what the Greeks called techne") call to mind a sophomore philosophy major who came to a dorm room to bum some pot and simply won't shut up. 

All of which might be forgiven if there was anything here that could pass for a fresh insight or idea, but if you've followed Andreessen or Musk or Thiel or any of that crowd, everything here will be familiar and will not have improved at all in the retelling.

Five years ago at the blog -- with Techno-Optimism bullshit waxing, this is a good time to revisit two of the movement's favorite examples

The "we've forgotten how to be great" crowd love to talk about the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project, but only in vague, inspirational terms ("look what can happen if you'll only believe"). When dealing with this kind of mythologizing, I find it useful to check in with contemporary sources. 

Thursday, November 8, 2018

A few points on Willy Ley and "the Conquest of Space"

To understand the 21st century narrative around technology and progress, you need to go back to two eras of extraordinary advances, the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the postwar era. Virtually all of the frameworks, assumptions, imagery, language, and iconography we use to discuss and think about the future can be traced back to these two periods.

The essential popularizer of science in the latter era was Willy Ley. In terms of influence and popularity, it is difficult to think of a comparable figure. Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson hold somewhat analogous positions, but neither can claim anywhere near the impact. When you add in Ley's close association with Werner von Braun, it is entirely reasonable to use his books as indicators of what serious people in the field of aerospace were thinking at the time. The excerpt below comes with a 1949 copyright and gives us an excellent idea of what seemed feasible 70 years ago.

There is a lot to digest here, but I want to highlight two points in particular.

First is the widespread assumption at the time that atomic energy would play a comparable role in the remainder of the 20th century to that of hydrocarbons in the previous century and a half, certainly for power generation and large-scale transportation. Keep in mind that it took a mere decade to go from Hiroshima to the launch of the Nautilus and there was serious research (including limited prototypes) into nuclear powered aircraft. Even if fusion reactors remained out of reach, a world where all large vehicles were powered by the atom seemed, if anything, likely.

Second, check out Ley's description of the less sophisticated, non-atomic option and compare it to the actual approach taken by the Apollo program 20 years later.

I think we have reversed the symbolic meaning of a Manhattan project and a moonshot. The former has come to mean a large, focused and dedicated commitment to rapidly addressing a challenging but solvable problem. The second has come to mean trying to do something so fantastic it seems impossible. The reality was largely the opposite. Building an atomic bomb was an incredible goal that required significant advances in our understanding of the underlying scientific principles. Getting to the moon was mainly a question of committing ourselves to spending a nontrivial chunk of our GDP on an undertaking that was hugely ambitious in terms of scale but which relied on technology that was already well-established by the beginning of the Sixties.

________________________________________________

The conquest of space by Willy Ley 1949 [emphasis added]
Page 48.

In general, however, the moon messenger [and unmanned test rocket designed to crash land on the moon – – MP] is close enough to present technological accomplishments so that its design and construction are possible without any major inventions. Its realization is essentially a question of hard work and money.

The manned moonship is a different story. The performance expected of it is, naturally, that it take off from the earth, go to the moon, land, takeoff from the moon, and return to earth. And that, considering known chemical fuels and customary design and construction methods, is beyond our present ability. But while the moon ship can make a round-trip is unattainable with chemical fuels, a moon ship which can land on the moon with a fuel supply insufficient for the return is a remote possibility. The point here is that one more attention of the step principle is possible three ships which landed might have enough fuel left among them for one to make the return trip.

This, of course, involves great risk, since the failure of one ship would doom them all. Probably the manned moon ship will have to be postponed until there is an orbital nation. Take off from the station, instead of from the ground, would require only an additional 2 mi./s, so that the total works out to about 7 mi./s, instead of the 12 mi./s mentioned on page 44.

Then, of course, there is the possibility of using atomic energy. If some 15 years ago, a skeptical audience had been polled as to which of the two "impossibilities" – – moon ship and large scale controlled-release of atomic energy – – they considered less fantastic, the poll would probably have been 100% in favor of the moon ship. As history turned out, atomic energy came first, and it is now permissible to speculate whether the one may not be the key to the other.

So far, unfortunately, we only know that elements like uranium, plutonium, etc., contain enough energy for the job. We also know that this energy is not completely accessible, that it can be released. He can't even be released in two ways, either fast in the form of a superexplosion, or slowly in a so-called "pile" where the energy appears mainly as he. But we don't know how to apply these phenomena to rocket propulsion. Obviously the fissionable matter should not form the exhaust; there should be an additional reactant, a substance which is thrown out: plain water, perhaps, which would appear as skiing, possibly even split up into its component atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, or perhaps peroxide.

The "how" is still to be discovered, but it will probably be based on the principle of using eight fissionable element's energy for the ejection of a relatively inert reactant. It may be that, when that problem has been solved, we will find a parallel to the problem of pumps in an ordinary liquid fuel rocket. When liquid fuel rockets were still small – – that was only about 17 years ago and I remember the vividly – – the fuels were forced into the rocket motor by pressurizing the whole fuel tank. But everybody knew then that this would not do for all time to come. The tank that had to stand the feeding pressure had to have strong walls. Consequently it was heavy. Consequently the mass ratio could not be I. The idea then was that the tank be only strong enough to hold the fuels, in the matter of the gasoline tank of a car or truck or an airplane, and that the feeding pressure should be furnished by a pop. Of course the pump had to weigh less than the saving in tank wall weight which they brought about. Obviously there was a minimum size and weight for a good home, and if that minimum weight was rather large, a rocket with pumps would have to be a big rocket.

It happened just that way. Efficient pumps were large and heavy and the rocket with pumps was the 46 foot the two. The "atomic motor" for rockets may also turn out to be large, the smallest really reliable and efficient model may be a compact little 7 ton unit. This would make for a large rocket – – but the size of a vehicle is no obstacle if you have the power to move it. Whatever the exhaust velocity, it will be high – – an expectation of 5 mi./s may be conservative. With such an exhaust velocity the mass ratio of the moon ship would be 11:1; with an exhaust velocity of 10 mi./s the mass ratio would drop .3:1!

The moon ship shown in the paintings of the second illustration section is based on the assumption of a mass ratio of this order of magnitude, which in turn is based on the assumption of an atomic rocket motor.

Naturally there would be some trouble with radioactivity in an atomic propelled rocket. But that is not quite as hard to handle as the radioactivity which would accompany atomic energy propulsion under different circumstances. A seagoing vessel propelled by time and energy could probably be built right now. It would operate by means of an atomic pile running at the center high enough to burden and water steam. The steam would drive a turbine, which would be coupled to the ships propeller. While all this mechanism would be reasonably small and light as ship engines go, it would have to be encased in many tons of concrete to shield the ships company against the radiation that would escape from the pile and from the water and the skiing the coolant. For a spaceship, no all-around shielding needed, only a single layer, separating the pilot's or crew's cabin in the nose from the rest of the ship. On the ground a ship which had grown "hot" through service would be placed inside a shielding structure, something like a massive concrete walls, open at the top. That would provide complete shielding or the public, but a shielding that the ship would not have to carry.

The problem that may be more difficult to handle is that of the radioactivity of the exhaust. A mood ship taking off with Lee behind a radioactive patch, caused by the ground/. Most likely that radioactivity would not last very long, but it would be a temporary danger spot. Obviously moon ship for some time to come will begin their journeys from desolate places. Of course they might take off by means of booster units producing nothing more dangerous in their exhaust them water vapor, carbon dioxide, and maybe a sulfurous smell.

 

Canadian Universities: the Quebec edition

This is Joseph.

Quebec is planning to double tuition for interprovincial students attending English universities, starting with the entering cohort in 2024. They are also seizing part of the proceeds from international students:

Quebec also announced changes to the system for international students. As of the fall of 2024, Quebec will take the first $20,000 in tuition that universities charge international students. In the past, universities could keep the entirety of international tuition.

It also seems like they will be taking a cut of the increase in interprovincial fees:

 And make no mistake, this policy is intended to be — and will be — an absolute disaster for the anglo universities. The province made no effort to consult them, and by all accounts they were totally blindsided by the announcement. The concession by the province to grandfathering tuition for those students already enrolled is minor compared to the effect, which will be to significantly decrease enrolments. The fact that the province is going to take a slice out of this higher tuition money, and use it to fund the province’s French-language universities, is just the extra kick in the nuts.

Although I have been having trouble confirming this. But the fee hike is huge:

Tuition for Canadians outside Quebec will jump to $17,000 from $8,992, Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry announced Friday. She said the government will charge universities $20,000 for each international student they recruit and direct that money only to francophone universities

This will shrink the number of out of province students and, given international students already pay $20-28K tuition, shatter university revenue.  So why is this happening. One possibility is that the government in Quebec sees what is happening elsewhere: 

And is trying to get in front of the disaster before it strikes. After all, I rather doubt Cape Breton Island has build a few thousand apartments nearby.  It's also becoming clear that the international student boom is aggravating a housing crisis brought on by poor policy at the municipal and provincial level across Canada. Just look at this chart (via Mike Moffat, cited in the last sentence:

But Canada is struggling to build housing. The final post is the key "In short: Canada cannot simultaneously be a high-growth and a low-growth country". I agree and think we should be a high growth country. 

Now you can quibble with the full impact of a massive increase in housing (infrastructure, new investment in scare health care resources, the need for more tradespeople -- it's a big list) but the key point is that the housing bubble, and its impact on ordinary Canadians, is underneath it all. Some of it is NIBMY-ism but there is also just a shortage of housing (even rents are exploding) that is not at all being addressed.

So is this move by Quebec good policy? No. Because it shifts the pain entirely to the Anglophone universities while subsidizing the Francophone ones. It will strengthen French in Quebec, fair enough, and it is true that there are a lot of English speaking students in Canada who are about to learn just how incentivized Ontario universities are to not admit them. But it still fails to grapple with the underlying problems in a clear way. Instead, it sacrifices a lot of the drivers of the wonderful hybrid culture of Montreal and that is a shame.  

Ten years ago at the blog -- thinking about the self-evident

 Looking back over this, I wish I would have spent more time on how much the obvious is a moving target. This is especially true with learning math where concepts have a way of going from incomprehensible to obvious so quickly that the student has no idea how they got there. 

While what the essayist is writing may be obvious to them out the time, it is hopefully the product of lots of study, observation, and reflection.

 

 

The obvious and the obviously obvious

This quote (cited by Andrew Gelman via a badly chosen URL [use this one: https://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/james.html]), "The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time." got me to thinking about what we mean when we say "obvious" or, more precisely, the different things that different people mean when they use the word in different contexts.

The obvi-... er, first example that comes to mind is this anecdote I first encountered in The World of Mathematics."

A famous math professor was giving a lecture during which he said "it is obvious that..." and then he paused at length in thought, and then excused himself from the lecture temporarily. Upon his return some fifteen minutes later he said "Yes, it is obvious that...." and continued the lecture.

A slightly different form of this anecdote was cited by Paul Renteln and Alan Dundes in their essay on mathematical folklore, unfortunately, it seems fairly obv-... make that, fairly clear to me that they missed the point of the joke:

This metajoke says a lot about mathematicians. First, they are often very quick thinkers, able to reach conclusions far faster than others. Second, they can see the humor in some jokes but are easily bored by the routine or familiar. Third, they often dismiss results that are obvious to themselves as “trivial”, even though the results may not be trivial to others. The following joke vividly illustrates this penchant.

A mathematics professor was lecturing to a class of students. As he wrote something on the board, he said to the class “Of course, this is immediately obvious.” Upon seeing the blank stares of the students, he turned back to contemplate what he had just written. He began to pace back and forth, deep in thought. After about 10 minutes, just as the silence was beginning to become uncomfortable, he brightened, turned to the class and said, “Yes, it IS obvious.”

The problem with this interpretation is that the students' confusion is not only not a central feature of the joke; it's not even a standard element (note that it doesn't appear at all in the previous version).

The joke here isn't that what's obvious to a mathematician may not be obvious to mere mortals. Instead, it's the far more interesting point that mathematicians and their ilk (and if you're reading this...) often use the words like "obvious" in a way that, though relatively precise, is very different from the way normal people use them. In common usage, being obvious is itself obvious. Normal people sometimes wonder if something that seems obvious is really true but they never spend time wondering if something that is true is really obvious.

At the risk of speculating on the motives of the apocryphal (and keeping in mind that I haven't taken a pure math class in more than a decade), I'd say that 'obvious' in this context means 'does not require a lemma.' You will hear mathematicians use the word in this sense, even though the question of whether or not a proof is complete is often far from obvious inn the traditional sense.

You could make a similar point about the way economists use 'rational' but that's a topic for another post.

 

Thursday Tweets -- a lot of philanthropists insists on having things named after themselves

This was going to be part of our regular tweets post, but I didn't it getting lost in the crowd.

Even for Elon, this is some cartoonishly evil asshole techbro shit.

Most of Earth: “The MSM is biased.”
Wikipedia: “Cite MSM source to confirm this claim.” 🤣🤣

Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias.@jimmy_wales, what are your thoughts?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 6, 2022

While musk is a baffoon and this message is comically stupid. Musk and the techno fascists/accelerationist contingent turning their gaze towards Wikimedia and Wikipedia betrays their actual intent. Ending our ability to know what is real, What is true, and facts. pic.twitter.com/3pJgdQL6FN

— karl (sad trombone noise enthusiast) (@brainnotonyet) October 23, 2023

I see that this community note has disappeared pic.twitter.com/AGLbPe53ya

— Steve Peers (@StevePeers) October 23, 2023

We regret to inform you that Elon Musk, billionaire owner of a troubled website, still doesn't understand how Wikipedia works. https://t.co/aFvVSLrtEQ

— Motherboard (@motherboard) October 23, 2023

Why is Elon Musk attacking Wikipedia? Because its very existence offends him | Zoe Williams https://t.co/9tGq7Zoo2T

— Paul “Halloween Name” Myers (@pulmyears) October 24, 2023

There's a lot of reasons I hate Elon Musk, but this has to be top 5.

Wikipedia is the singular greatest library humanity has ever built. He has more than enough money to save it.

And he wants to turn it into a conspiracy/dick joke. Because they say some mean things about him. https://t.co/mgbhORPrZI

— Bryce (@BryceorSome) October 22, 2023

Though this offer is too outrageous to be entertained, it's also worth noting that the ratio of what Elon says he's going to give to charity to what Elon actually gives to charity is remarkably low. Musk is a master of the effective altruist trick of claiming that money you give yourself is actually going to help humanity.

Elon Musk, poster boy for arrested development, says he’ll give Wikipedia $1 billion if they change their name to 'Dickipedia' https://t.co/WPpPtdGmI6

— David Lazarus (@Davidlaz) October 23, 2023

Musk has been trying to bully Wikipedia for years, sometimes successfully. This may have something to do with him being a serial revisionist.

Elon Musk didn't like his Wikipedia page, so he asked the community to do something about it. They did. @donreisinge https://t.co/NYZ9lMae6j via @Inc <— Wikipedia, where history is rewritten on request.

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) December 23, 2019

In late 2019 Musk even asked to have the descriptor "investor" removed from his Wikipedia page, kicking off considerable discussion among the editors there: https://t.co/84uGX0P5Nb

Uh... what changed? pic.twitter.com/dKcblvq1bO

— E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) May 5, 2022

“The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord.”

Following up on yesterday's post,

One of the points raised in that post was that, in contrast to the Republicans...

While the members of the democratic establishment may disagree on many points, they all speak basically the same language, mostly hold common values, are inclined to follow the rules both inside and outside of the party, and at least in the Trump era, have proven surprisingly predisposed toward sticking together.

Josh Marshall argues that the embrace of rule-breaking is a fundamental aspect of the MAGA GOP.

Eight years ago Will Saletan said, “The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord.” There’s probably no short summary, phrase or aphorism I’ve repeated more times on TPM. Because it’s that good. Today we’re seeing another permutation and illustration of that enduring reality.

...

What we see here is the same core message of the last three weeks and in many ways the last dozen years. The only way to get to 217, the hold outs argue, is a coalition of the rule-breakers and the rule-followers. For years the latter group has mostly gone along with that. What happened last week is that a section of the rule-followers rebelled and wouldn’t have it.

This is more basic than a fractured caucus or any of the personalities involved. It is the logical end result of a party and political movement based on rule-breaking, as a central value and mode of operation. When rule-breaking becomes the norm, organizations and polities fall apart … without a strongman. For eight years Donald Trump has been that strongman. It’s Trump’s general indifference to the House Speaker debacle and perhaps focus on his unfolding legal woes that has allowed the chaos to drag on.

This is always the relationship between civic democracies and the broken states where strongmen thrive and dominate. Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism.

 

What Republican Establishment?

 

 

Dems in Disarray

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) October 23, 2023

 David Weakliem and Andrew Gelman both posted a somewhat different take on Trump's position. Here's  Weakliem

That is, Trump doesn’t seem to have an exceptionally large number of enthusiastic supporters among the public . . . I think his continued strength in the party is mostly the result of Republican elites’ reluctance to challenge him, which is a mixture of genuine support and exaggerated ideas about his strength among Republican voters.

I'll try to do a post looking at these numbers soon, but in the meantime, here's part of the bigger issue I have with this idea.

 

It's possible my choice of illustration will age badly and Emmer will sweep into office on the first ballot, but even if that happens, the events of the past three weeks have brought home the level of dysfunction in the Republican Party.

Admittedly, the current house is something of an extreme case where less than 3% of the Republican members have effective veto power over the party, but we have seen thin margins before, and we have never seen anything like this, at least not in living memory. The basic dynamic is that of a group of distrustful people sitting in a rubber life raft in the middle of the ocean, each holding a big, sharp knife. The most powerful person in this situation is the one who is perceived as being most willing to kill them all.

When we talk about the current Democratic establishment, things look remarkably normal. The head of the party is the president, a long time loyal member who has served in various leadership positions. The vice president has a similarly conventional record. In Congress we have Schumer and Jeffries, likewise veterans of the party with conventional resumes. After that, you have influential members in the senate in the house, as well as former office holders who still have powerful voices in the party. We might quibble about exactly who is in the establishment, but your list and my list would almost certainly have most of the same names.

While the members of the democratic establishment may disagree on many points, they all speak basically the same language, mostly hold common values, are inclined to follow the rules both inside and outside of the party, and at least in the Trump era, have proven surprisingly predisposed toward sticking together.

There is now nothing comparable on the other side. Traditional party leaders like McConnell are fewer in number, have less of a voice, and are widely distrusted by the base.  If you made a list of members of the Republican establishment/elite eight years ago, how many names on that list would be on today's list? No list in 2015 would leave off Bill Kristol or Liz Cheney, both were conservative royalty, but today neither has any real influence on the GOP. Along similar lines, the Bushes, for decades one of America's most powerful political families, seem to have gone into the witness relocation program.

Rupert Murdoch is still around, but, for reasons we'll get to next time, does not have the power he once had. The donor class still has the power to get politicians (and possibly judges) to do what they want, it's not clear how much leverage they have in this case (more on that later as well). 

We've been talking about the devolution and growing dysfunction of the GOP here at the blog for about a decade. The current state of things is just the logical conclusion of what has been going on for years. The rise of Trump exacerbated the situation but it did not cause it. Much of it traces back to Gingrich. The Tea Party greatly accelerated things. Add to that feral disinformation fed by decades of propaganda and apocalyptic rhetoric designed to keep the base angry and afraid. 

While we can debate just how loyal Trump's supporters are, taking down a front runner with an overwhelming lead would be a daunting task for even the most powerful and organized party establishments. I doubt the leaders of the GOP could have done it in 2016. I am sure they can't do it now.