Failure must always be an option

An essay I wrote six years ago about some of my experiences working for NASA has gotten some recent attention on Reddit and Hacker News. I thought I'd write a little update, particularly since some of the things I learned from that experience are, I think, relevant to the government bailout of the mortgage industry.

JPL uses an organizational structure called matrix management. There are two orthogonal management structures, one organized according to expertise (the "line management") and another, almost completely independent one organized according to task (the "program office"). The program office's job was to win contracts, and the line management's job was to provide the people to work on the resulting projects. Through most of JPL's history, its contracts were large NASA missions with budgets in the billions of dollars, and so this management structure made a certain amount of sense. A vast amount of paperwork had to be generated to win even a single contract.

For most of my career I worked on contracts that had already been awarded, so the inner workings of the program office were completely opaque to me (and still are to this day). By the time I got involved in a project the contract had already been awarded according to a proposal that had been generated by some mysterious process that I never fully understood, and which I never actually saw. All I knew was that my line management gave me a set of account numbers, and I wrote those account numbers down on my time card, and I got paid every other week. And this was true of most of the rank-and-file engineers that I worked with.

The result of this opacity was that the incentives and reward structure for individual employees was often in direct conflict with the goals of the Lab and NASA. For example, one of the factors that went into my performance review every year was how many papers I had published. In fact, this was one of the major considerations because it was one of the few things that management could get a quantitative handle on. So naturally I put a lot of effort into getting published. The problem is that the things you have to do in order to get published are often very different from the things you have to do in order to actually be productive on a NASA project. Getting published requires getting approval from your academic peers, who work for different institutions, often competing for the same contracts that your institution is trying to win. The result is a lot of politics and mutual back-scratching (and back-stabbing), because those are often more effective strategies to get papers published than actually doing worthwhile research.

I played this game, but I never liked it, and I was never particularly good at it, mostly because I was never able to suppress this annoying tendency I have of calling bullshit by its proper name, which did not make me the most popular person on the conference circuit. I was able to survive for two reasons. First, some of the work I did was actually good, at least as measured by the number of times it was cited by other researchers. (For a number of years I was, as far as I could tell, the most cited CS researcher in all of NASA. I started making that claim on my resume, and no one ever challenged me on it. It's possible I still hold that title despite the fact that I haven't published anything in years.) And second, my line management also had a perverse incentive: while my performance was being judged on how many papers I published, their performance was judged on how well they kept me supplied with account numbers to charge my time to.

The resulting situation at times approached something straight out of Kafka. I was being paid with money raised by people in the program office that I never met, whose identities I didn't even know, distributed through a process whose quality metric was not getting any productive work done but merely keeping everyone on the rolls employed, and given performance incentives that actively discouraged me from doing anything that would actually be useful to those people, but instead rewarded me for pleasing people at competing institutions. That combined with my distaste for politics and the leverage I got from using Lisp led to some truly bizarre situations. Towards the end of my JPL career, when budgets started getting tight and line management started circling the wagons, I had to start writing my own proposals. The review cycle for these proposals was ridiculously long -- months to years -- and in the meantime my line management still had to keep me employed somehow. On a number of occasions I had proposals rejected on the grounds that what I was proposing was impossible, when in fact I had already done the work in the intervening time.

At the peak of my JPL career I attained the rank of Principal, which is the highest rung on the technical career ladder whose existence is publicly known. (It turns out there are "secret" promotions you can get after that.) It's essentially the equivalent of getting tenure at a university, only with no teaching responsibilities. The decision to promote someone to Principal is made by a committee. I never found out who was on that committee, or what criteria they used to make the decision. But whoever they were, they had the power to render me more or less un-fireable, despite the fact that by then I was not really contributing anything to the Lab's mission.

All this was paid for with, including overhead, several million of your taxpayer dollars over a period of fifteen years. And my experience was not an isolated incident. This is not to say that there are not good, productive, hard-working people at NASA and JPL. There are. But there is also an awful lot of dead wood too, and no effective mechanism for getting rid of it.

What does all this have to do with the mortgage crisis? I believe that the mortgage crisis is essentially my experience at JPL writ large. Both situations were produced by a set of rules that produced perverse incentives that rewarded people for acting contrary to the greater good. In my case, I was rewarded for publishing useless papers. In the case of the mortgage industry, banks and brokers were rewarded for making bad loans. And in both cases, if push came to shove, the government with its deep pockets was there to foot the bill.

The big difference, of course, being that the bill for the mortgage debacle is five or six orders of magnitude bigger than the bill for keeping me on at JPL.

The fundamental problem in both cases was a lack of accountability combined with government-backed job security. Those two factors make a truly toxic combination. I was lucky as hell that Google was successful enough that it provided me with the capital I needed to escape the gilded cage I had locked myself into at JPL. But for that good fortune I'd very likely still be there doing God only knows what.

One of the reasons that Google succeeded was that everyone there knew that failure was a possibility. This seems strange now that Google is the 800-pound gorilla, but back in 2000 we were just another obscure little startup in the midst of the market crash brought on by the bursting of the dotcom bubble. We were well capitalized and were seeing steady growth, but success was far from a foregone conclusion, and that motivated everyone to make sure that they were all pulling in the same direction. And every now and then, someone got fired.

I think that the possibility of failure is essential to long-term success. If you have no possibility of failure, if there's always the rich uncle or Uncle Sam to bail you out, you have no incentive to sacrifice or compromise or take risks or stay up late or even to see to it that your actions are serving the greater good. There is a lot of talk nowadays of the "moral hazard" resulting from government bailouts. This is a misnomer. It's not a moral hazard, it's an economic one.

While I tend to think that the current government bailout really is necessary in order to avoid a short-term catastrophe, I really worry about its long-term effects. If we're not very, very careful we could easily render the entire country as dysfunctional as JPL. At that point there will be no rich uncle to bail us out. When that bubble bursts it will make last week, and possibly even 1929, look like a cakewalk.

Racism is alive and well in America

Every now and then the Republicans show their true face.

McCain for the homeless

There are days when I feel like I'm losing the struggle to keep myself from slipping away into abject cynicism. Today was one of those days.

I was in Long Beach visiting one of the subjects of my film. I don't want to say too much about the circumstances of my visit because I think there's a new surprise ending brewing, but suffice it to say that the building I was in was charging below-market rents thanks in large measure to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's section 8 rental voucher program.

It was a pretty nice building as such buildings go. In the past two years I have seen much, much worse. This building is walking distance from the beach (or at least from the touristy Long Beach waterfront -- there's not actually much of a beach there). It's 11 stories high. On the top floor is a common area with a library, a pool table, several computers, and a high-definition big-screen TV, on which I would be showing my movie if the elusive remote control for the DVD player could be located. (If I had my way, any manufacturer who makes a DVD player without an "ENTER" button on the front panel would be drawn and quartered.)

I was waiting around for someone to return from the front desk and I happened to overhear a snippet of conversation triggered by the news that a movie about homeless people was about to be shown. The speaker was clearly a resident of the building. He comported himself as someone intimately familiar with the hardships of homelessness, and I had no reason to doubt him. He started into a tirade that I have heard a time or twenty, about how horrible the homelessness problem is in this country, how somebody should do something, yada yada yada. And then he said this, word for word:

"Things will get better if McCain gets in. He's a true Christian."

Wow.

I resisted the urge to ask the speaker if he thought George Bush was a "true Christian," and if that had helped make the situation any better over the last eight years. And then the urge just went away and was replaced by utter despair. Because I suddenly realized that it would do no good. However this man got to this place, to be off the street thanks only to a federal government program started by Franklin D. Roosevelt, a program that is the very model, according to Republicans, of all that is wrong with modern liberalism, and yet still believe that John McCain is the only savior for his brethren still out on the streets, I was convinced that there was nothing I could do or say in that moment that would change his mind.

And so I said nothing.

The remote was located. The screening was begun. Half way through someone came over and asked how much longer it would be going on. The Dodger game was about to begin.

I stopped the movie. I try not to lose sight of what really matters in life, and in this case it was clear: what really matters is baseball.

There are days when I feel like I'm losing the struggle to keep myself from slipping away into abject cynicism. Today was one of those days.

Rejected

I still have not received any official word from the Santa Monica Film Festival but their web site now has a list of their official selections.

I'm not on it.

:-(

Thanks to everyone who wrote to support my film. I will keep plugging away at this. But it really sucks to have your hopes raised and then dashed.

No word from SMFF

Still no word from the Santa Monica Film Festival, but there has been an interesting development: this morning, their web site said that film selections would be announced on September 3 (which was yesterday). Now all mention of the announcement date has been removed from their web site.

Sounds like there are probably some "interesting" things going on behind the scenes. It's only two weeks before the festival is scheduled to start. They're cutting it awfully close.

A call for help

As some of you may know, for the last two years I have been working on a film about homeless people in Santa Monica, California. Last Spring I decided to finally take the "rough cut" label off and start submitting the thing to film festivals. I submitted to five festivals. Four of them (Mendocino, Los Angeles, Dances with Films and the Secret City Film Festival in my home town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee) rejected the film.

Today I heard from my fifth and final submission, the Santa Monica International Film Festival (SMIFF). Here's what they wrote:


Thank you for your sharing your film with the Santa Monica Film Festival. We would like to include your film in this year’s Festival being held at the World Famous Third Street Promenade and the state of the art Martin Luther King Jr Auditorium at the Santa Monica Main Library. Please confirm your availability immediately by replying to this e mail as our festival is two weeks out. I will be contacting you by phone shortly.


I responded to their email with a resounding "YES!". About an hour later I got a phone call from one of the SMIFF staff who told me that I was scheduled to exhibit between 11 and 1 on Saturday, September 20.

I started calling and emailing everyone I knew to tell them the good news, and to start calling in some favors with regards to publicity. A few hours into this process I get another email. This one says:


I want to apologize for miscommunicating in my last email. Please continue to verify your personal availability and the availability of your film (and exhibition format) for the 19-21 of September. Final schedule and selection have not been made. We will be finalizing it soon and be back to you shortly.


To make a long story short, I called the guy back and he confirmed that indeed I was not actually selected, I was just on a short list of finalists. To say that I was disappointed would be a considerable understatement.

So I'm asking for your help. Go to the film's website and watch the trailer. If you like it and think you'd like to see the film (or if you are one of the people who has already been to one of my test screenings and you liked the film) please take a moment to contact the festival and put in a good word for me. My contact's name is Frank Giarmona. His email address is frank@malibufilmfestival.org. (I guess he's one of the regulars on the festival circuit) and his phone number is 805 570-1370. Please be polite and brief. He's a busy guy. If you're feeling really motivated you can also contact his associate, Lisa Fox at lisabethfox@sbcglobal.net.

Thanks!

Why do smart people do stupid things?

Sam Harris seems to be trying to set the world record for choking on his own foot. In a screed in today's LA Times he writes:


"Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor..."


Leaving aside the question of whether or not Harris is actually right (let us assume for the sake of argument that he is), what on earth does he think he will accomplish by writing this? Does he really think that the people who support Sarah Palin will read these words, slap themselves on the forehead, and say, "Wow, Harris is right. I really am stupid, and all my friends are stupid, and I really do deserve to be poor unless I entrust my fate to someone who has a law degree from Harvard." Or is it more likely that they will respond more like this:


Well, gee, Sam Harris, just who do you think *is* qualified to be president? Someone like *you*? What do you know about my life? When was the last time you had to work two shifts to feed your kids? When was the last time you worried about whether to spend your last dollar on food or medicine? When was the last time you humbled yourself before God? Politics is *not* like brain surgery, and the fact that you think it is just proves that you Don't Get It. I'll take Sarah Palin over the likes of you any day of the week precisely because she is like me.


If Sam Harris really thinks he's going to win hearts and minds by telling people that they are too stupid to govern themselves then he is manifestly stupider than they are. The whole enterprise of democracy is based on exactly the opposite premise. And if Harris doesn't really believe this then I am at a loss to understand what he is hoping to achieve.

Paris Hilton pwns John McCain

This has to be the best political ad ever.

Evolution is winning

This is encouraging. The premier Creationist web site seems to be surrendering on nearly every front. The only argument that AIG doesn't seem to concede (yet) is the so-called information "problem", which flames are being fanned by the infamous -- but just as fictitious as the rest of Creationism -- stumping of Richard Dawkins.

This is good, because the information-theoretic objection to evolution is very easily dispensed with. The objection, due originally to Dembski (a name just begging to be parodied, but I will resist) is that because evolution is a random process it cannot add information to the genome. Therefore, all the information currently contained in all the genomes of all the living things on earth must have been present at creation.

There are three things wrong with this argument.

First is the common straw-man that Creationists keep setting up (well, when you're arguing an untenable position what else can you do?): evolution is NOT random. *Mutation* is random. But evolution is mutation PLUS NATURAL SELECTION, and natural selection is most decidedly NOT random.

This alone is enough to completely demolish the evolution-can't-add-information argument (and 99% of the other creationist objections to evolution by the way). It can, and it does. The mechanism it uses to do so is (non-random) natural selection for reproductive fitness. But there are two other problems with the proposition that evolution cannot produce information that are worth mentioning. So...

Second, it is not the case the evolution *necessarily* produces an increase in information. It just turns out that way most of the time (with a caveat -- see the final point below). Sometimes evolutionary processes create information, and sometimes they destroy information. It just turns out that the trend is generally towards bigger and more complex genomes. But it isn't *necessarily* that way, any more than technology *necessarily* develops by getting more complicated. It's possible for evolution to proceed by simplification just as it's possible for technology to proceed the same way. It just rarely happens. And the reason is the same in both cases: complexity begets complexity because complex things tend to reproduce better in an environment already populated by other complex things.

Finally, it is far from clear that the premise of the creationist's argument is even true because it is at all clear how much of the DATA contained in the genome is actually INFORMATION. Data and information are not the same thing. All genomes contain large amounts of junk DNA that doesn't serve any apparent purpose as far as we know. In the context of such a large amount of essentially random data it is not at all clear how much actual information is contained in the non-junk areas of the genome, and how much of the information content is actually contained in the environment (i.e. the ribosome, and the chemical interactions of proteins). A complete discussion of this would take more time than I have right now. Might make an interesting topic for another post.

How to detect bullshit

Being fully cognizant of the futility of the exercise, I think it is nonetheless instructive to occasionally deconstruct a creationist theory, if for no other reason than to serve as an example for people who don't have an extensive scientific background about how science really works. I'll take as my example for today from a comment on my recent post about how earthquakes and the Hawaiian Islands should be a thorn in every creationist's side (or maybe a spear would be a more apt metaphor).

C. David Parsons disputes the Hawaiian islands chain as evidence for an old earth in part on the grounds that "The gravitational tug of the moon is ... responsible for earthquakes" and "the gravitational attraction of the moon is the mechanism that facilitates the expansion and forced invasion of pressure solids through a geodic crack in the earth's crust." Does this claim stand up to scrutiny? Well, no, it doesn't.

Unfortunately for Parsons, we have an exceptionally good scientific understanding of gravity. Newton's theory is now over four hundred years old. During that time it has only been revised once, and that was over 100 years ago. If these theories were wrong, space flight (and GPS) would not be possible.

It is an elementary exercise to work out the magnitude of the moon's gravitational influence on the earth using Newton's formula:

F = G x m1 x m2 / r^2

where F is the force between two bodies, m1 and m2 and the masses of the bodies, r is the distance between them, and G is the gravitational constant, one of the fundamental constants of physics.

Let us work out the relative magnitudes of the gravitational influences of the earth and the moon on an object at the earth's surface. We could simply calculate the actual forces, which is not too hard, but it turns out that it's simpler to calculate the ratio directly because G and the mass of the test object cancel each other out and can be safely ignored. (If you don't believe me you can work this out for yourself. It's an elementary exercise in algebra.) The upshot is that although the moon is very heavy (about 7.22x10^22 kg) it is also very far away (about 3.84x10^8 meters) and the gravitational influence decreases with the square of the distance. So at the surface of the earth, the moon's gravitational influence is tiny -- only about 3 millionths as strong as the gravity of the earth itself.

Compare this to the gravitational influence of the sun, which is a lot further away (1.46x10^11 meters) but also a lot heavier (about 2x10^30 kg). The sun's gravitational influence at the surface of the earth is about 190 times greater than the moon's. Standing on the deck of the world's largest supertanker with a fully loaded mass of about half a million tons, the gravitational influence of the ship is about the same as the gravitational influence of the moon.

And yet, the moon clearly does have manifest influences at the surface of the earth, most notably, the tides. If the moon can push zillions of tons of seawater around, isn't it plausible that it could also move zillions of tons of magma around too? Well, no, it isn't. To see why you have to understand how the tides actually work. It is tempting to think that the moon causes the tides by pulling water towards itself via the force of gravity. But this theory has a major problem: if this were how tides worked, there should be one high tide every day (when the moon was overhead pulling the water towards it) and one low tide each day (when the moon was on the opposite side of the earth pulling the water away). But in fact there are two cycles of high and low tides each day. How can this be?

The answer is that the moon does not cause tides by "pulling" on the water. It casues tides because of tidal forces (imagine that). Tidal forces are somewhat complicated to explain, but the easiest (though not quite correct) way to explain them is that the earth and the moon make up a two-body system that rotate around a common center of gravity. Because the moon's mass is a significant fraction of the earth's mass, this common center of gravity is not at the center of the earth, but lies about 3300 miles from the earth's center. As the earth rotates about this offset center of gravity, centrifugal forces "fling" the water away.

The important point is that the tidal force is not the force of gravity, but the difference in the force of gravity on the two sides of the earth. And as small as the raw gravitational influence of the moon on the earth is, the tidal forces that it generates are even smaller. This is why the actual tides on earth, while they may appear significant to us on a human scale, are actually miniscule relative to the scale of the planet. There is nowhere near enough energy in the moon's tidal influences to account for volcanism. And it's a good thing too, because if there were then that energy would get dissipated in the world's oceans and they would all boil away.

The title of this post is "how to detect bullshit", and the answer is: do the math. Don't take my or anybody else's word for it. Do it yourself. It isn't hard. As an exercise, consider the Biblical claim that Joshua made the sun stand still (which is to say, that he made the earth stop rotating). Calculate how much rotational energy would have to be dissipated to make that happen. Compare that to the total amount of energy in, say, the world's nuclear arsenals. Here's all the information you need:

The formula for the rotational energy of a sphere is 2/5 x m x r^2 x omega^2 where m is the mass of the sphere, r is the radius, and omega is the rotational velocity in radians per second. The mass of the earth is about 5.97x10^24 kg. It rotates 360 degrees (or 2pi radians) in 24 hours. A kiloton of TNT is about 4x10^12 joules.

Go.

Earthquakes rattle creationism

We had an earthquake in LA today. Five-four. No big deal, but it got my attention, and got me to thinking about what earthquakes have to tell us about the age of the earth.

The modern scientific explanation of what causes earthquakes is that what we think of as solid ground is really just a thin (relatively speaking) layer of frozen rock floating on an ocean of molten magma that makes up the earth's mantle. New crust is formed at mid-ocean ridges, floats along for a while, and is ultimately re-cycled into the mantle in subduction zones. Where the plates of land mass butt up against each other there is friction, and so as the plates move past each other they don't move smoothly, but in little fits and starts that we feel as earthquakes.

Plate tectonic theory used to be considered patently absurd, but is nowadays as well established a scientific theory as you could hope to find. It explains not only earthquakes, but a host of other phenomena including the formation of mountain ranges and why fossils of tropical plants and animals can be found in the arctic. Thanks to modern GPS we can actually measure the motion of the continental plates with mind boggling accuracy.

Which brings me to Hawaii.

The eight major islands of the Hawaiian group (Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Oahu, Kauai and Lanai) are actually just the beginning of an enormously long chain of islands, islets, atolls and seamounts extending over 1500 miles of the Pacific ocean in an almost perfectly straight line. How did they get there? Well, on the southeastern extreme of the Hawaiian chain is the Big Island of Hawaii, and on the southeastern coast of the Big Island is Kilauea, he world's most active volcano. Kilauea has been spewing hot lava into the sea more or less continuously for the last twenty five years (and off and on for thousands of years before that). The lava from Kilauea flows down into the sea where it hardens into rock and becomes new land. The current eruption has created almost 600 acres of new land in the last twenty five years.

Hawaii is growing.

The total area of the Big Island is about 2.6 million acres. If Kilauea keeps building new land at the current rate the size of the island will double in about 4300 years. The historic accretion of the island is being chronicled in great detail. You can actually go to Volcano Nation Park and see it happening before your very eyes. They even have signs telling you which lava flows happened when. And for those who don't have time to actually go there, there are handy dandy maps.

What about all the other islands in the Hawaiian chain? None of them have active volcanoes. The closest thing to an active volcano on the other islands is Haleakala on the southeast lobe of the island of Maui, the next island up the chain from the Big Island. Haleakala is a dormant volcano that last erupted in 1790 [UPDATE: turns out that it was probably closer to 1500]. The lava flowed into the sea, creating a new peninsula that is today the southern boundary of La Perouse Bay. But since then no new land has formed on Maui, and the island has begun to erode away.

As you travel northwest along the island chain a striking pattern emerges: all of the islands are made of the same kind of volcanic material, but the further you get from the Big Island the smaller and more eroded the islands become. On the Big Island you can see the lava coming out of the ground. On Maui you can see the lava flow of 1790 [UPDATE: new evidence indicates that the flow is a bit older, dating back to around 1500 or so] -- it looks like a barren river of rock. But on Lanai, Molokai and Oahu there is no fresh lava at all, but there are still recognizable volcanic features, like Diamond Head. By the time you get to Kauai you have to look very closely to find the clues that it was once a volcano. You can still see the crater that used to be the volcano, but it has mostly eroded away.

Out past Kauai the last "real" island is Niihau, which is privately owned and closed to the public. There is no geomorphic evidence of volcanic activity on Niihau, but we know that it was formed by the same volcanic activity that formed the other Hawaiian islands because of the chemistry of the rocks.

Out beyond Niihau the remaining islands are mostly atolls, which is to say, the remains of coral reefs that formed around the islands and remained even after the island proper has completely eroded away.

The remarkable regularity of the Hawaiian chain can be very easily understood if we postulate that the volcano itself is actually a structure in the earth's mantle that stays in one place as the continental plate moves above it. As each new island forms (as the Big Island is currently being formed) the movement of the plate eventually carries it away from the volcanic hot spot and it stops growing and starts to erode. This explains why the islands are all in a line, why the chain only extends in one direction, and why they appear to get older the further they get from the Big Island. Furthermore, if this theory is correct, we might expect to see a little "proto island" being formed under water to the east of the Big Island. And indeed that is exactly what we find. It is called Loihi and it is on track to matriculate into a fully-fledged island in about ten thousand years, give or take.

Now, here's the rub for the young-earth creationists: if the earth is only 6000 years old, how did the Hawaiian islands form? 6000 years is barely enough time to build one island, let alone the dozens and dozens that make up the Hawaiian chain. To build the whole 1500-mile chain in 6000 years by passing the continental plate over the hot spot it would have to be moving at about a quarter of a mile a year, which is faster than it really moves (as measured by GPS) by several orders of magnitude.

The young-earth creationist's answer, of course, is that God simply created the Hawaiian chain in (more or less) its current form. But that just begs the question: why did He put them in a line? Why did he arrange them just so that it would appear that they were built by the processes that we know are operating today?

The evidence for the extreme age of the Hawaiian islands is not buried in obscure fossil strata. You can go to Hawaii today and watch the island grow. You can set up a GPS yourself and measure the rate at which it moves. (It will take you a while -- the actual rate of motion is a few centimeters a year -- but you can do it.) You can go to the Big Island and see what a one-day-old lava flow looks like, and then you can go to Maui and see what a several-hundred-year-old lava flow looks like. You can even still see the cinder cone of the volcano that created it.

And then you can go to Kauai and see what a few million years of erosion can do.

Set phasers on stun

It's been taken one step closer to reality, ironically, by a toy company.

Kids are startups

I just got back from being out of town and discovered that a one-line comment I posted on hacker news two weeks ago ignited a firestorm of debate. The comment was in response to another comment, which was posted in response to a story about Google's recent difficulties with day care:

As the parent of a 2 month old, it's a difficult question we're facing right now. Who? How? When? Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I? I'm not enthusiastic about those options. Should we hire someone? Not wild about that either. I think the best would be to kind of try and switch off, but it's going to require a lot of flexibility, and perhaps earning less money. The second is probably ok, depending on wherever it is we settle, the second may not be forthcoming from many employers. Sigh...

To which I replied:

With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?

Various people took umbrage:

I hope you must be 21 or something. Maybe when you have kids, you will understand the difficulty of raising them, while trying to have some kind of career.

and (from the person I was responding to):

Wow, I don't think I've ever been so offended by something on this site. Your implication that I haven't thought about the future of my daughter is... something I hope you never say to any other parent.

We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.

and

Do you have any kids? Do you realize how unpredictable it is to plan things for your child, for example, how sick the child is going to be, or how well-tempered?

So for the record, I am not 21. I am in my mid-forties, married, with no kids. But that does not mean that I do not know how hard it is to raise kids. In fact, it is because my wife and I know all too well how hard it is that we decided not to have any. Nowadays it's a choice.

And while you can't predict exactly, it's a good bet that sooner or later if you have kids they will get sick. They will throw temper tantrums. They will do all the things that kids do.

Kids are startups.

And I'm sorry the OP was offended. None of the questions you were asking came about as a result of unpredictable events. You knew before that no matter what someone would need to look after the kid and you'd need to put food on the table. If you are asking questions like, "Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I?" then you have manifestly not thought enough about the future. These are questions that IMHO you should have answered BEFORE you took the plunge, so to speak. Maybe you'd need to change the plan in response to contingencies, but that's not what's happening here. You didn't have a plan before your started. If you did you would not be asking these questions.

Paul Graham wrote:

Here is the rational answer you seem to want. (a) This problem is so hard you can probably never solve it satisfactorily, and (b) you can't know what it's going to be like to have kids before you have them, or what your kids will be like. So however much thought you expend on the question before having kids, you're still going to be working on it afterward.

I'm surprised he didn't come up with the kids-as-startups analogy. It's really pretty good. In both cases there is a lot of unpredictability. But again, in both cases, that is no excuse for not having a plan before you start.

iSightCapture secrets revealed

For anyone who has used iSightCapture and has been frustrated by the fact that it's released in object-code only format, here is qt-capture which is not quite as capable as iSightCapture (it doesn't have any command-line arguments) but does basically the same thing. Since it's just a proof-of-concept and not really finished code I've released it into the public domain. Enjoy.

UPDATE: I've also uploaded an expanded version that lets you capture movies and still images. It also demonstrates how to roll your own cocoa app without using a NIB file. Not really recommended, but kinda cool to see how it's done for someone like me who really like to know what's going on under the hood.

There are no roads in Israel

At least not according to Google Maps.

Outrage at Obama is Justified

Larry Lessig calls the outrage at Obama's flip-flop over the FISA bill leftist hysteria. He's wrong.

Whatever else one might think about the FISA bill, the outrage over retroactive immunity for the telcos is not a leftist issue. It is a litmus test for whether or not you believe in the rule of law. Central to the very concept of civilization is the idea that there is a set of rules that you play by, and implicit in this is that everyone has to know what those rules are. Retroactive immunity sets a very dangerous precedent. It says that as long as you have enough friends in Congress you are no longer expected to play by the rules.

Of course, if you have enough friends in Congress you can get the rules changed in your favor anyway. But there's a huge difference between getting the rules changed up front and having them changed to your benefit after the fact: if you have enough power and influence to do the latter then you can break the rules while everyone else still has to follow them. Only if you get caught do you have to go on the record as having used your influence to unfair advantage. God only knows how many laws that Bush administration and their cronies have broken secure in the knowledge that if some snoopy reporter discovers the transgression they can just strongarm Congress to give them a free pass. (And if that fails, there are always presidential pardons to fall back on.)

It is not for nothing that the Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws.

I am outraged at Obama because he specifically promised to filibuster any bill that included retroactive immunity. That was an implicit promise to stand up for the rule of law no matter the cost. He reneged on that promise. This may well have been politically justifiable, even shrewd, but the larger message is that Obama is not a man of his word, and he is not a man of principle. He is just another politician who will do or say anything to get elected.

But even that is not the worst part. The worst part is that now we have no one (except, perhaps, Ron Paul) who is willing to stand up against the overarching trend in American politics today, which is that national security trumps everything, including the Constitution and the rule of law. Down that road lies tyranny, and Obama stood by and did nothing while the Senate steered us down that path. That is well worth getting outraged over.

I donated to Obama's campaign. I demand a refund.

Tomorrow I plan to write a letter to the Obama campaign demanding a refund of my $2300 campaign contribution because Senator Obama did not fulfill his promise to filibuster the FISA bill if it contained retroactive immunity for telcos. If you want to do likewise the address is:

Obama for America
P.O. Box 802798
Chicago, IL 60680

Senator Obama destroys my last hope

It's amazing how fast things change. Last year I was thinking how wonderful it was to be present at this historic moment when either a woman or a black man would for the first time in history be a major party's nominee for President of the United States. Then Hillary revealed herself to be a lying scumbag, and so I decided to support Barack Obama.

Today, Obama cast a YEA vote on the FISA Wiretap Bill HR 6304 after promising that he would filibuster it. So much as it pains me, I have to say that Obama too is just another lying scumbag.

In a way, Obama's lie is worse than Hillary's. Hillary's lie revealed her to be a liar, but didnt' really matter much in the grand and glorious scheme of things. Obama's lie actually mattered. He promised to defend the Constitution and our civil rights and to stand up for justice and truth. Now not only will justice not be done, but we will never even know the extent to which our civil rights have been violated by the Bush Administration.

I feel utterly betrayed. Every last bit of enthusiasm that I had for this election has been ripped to shreds. What's the point of voting when both parties conspire to shred the Constitution? A year and a half of a Democratic majority in Congress and what do we have to show for it? Nothing. Not a god damned thing. Ralph Nader was right.

Fuck.

No monopoly on idiocy

If you thought that Muslims had cornered the market on hysterical overreactions to minor slights, Catholics worldwide are up in arms over the theft of a soda cracker. The dastardly perpetrator has been accused of kidnapping, and has received death threats.

At least they're not rioting in the streets (yet).

A cautionary tale

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

The U.S.A. under the Bush administration? No. Germany from 1933-1945.

Horrific conditions at San Quentin prison

I heard only a part of this story about San Quentin prison on NPR yesterday, but that was enough to turn my stomach.


With overcrowding, it gets harder for prison officials to take care of the basics. Crumbling walls, broken lights and filth are standard.

'That's human feces,' says inmate Mike Johnson, pointing to his wall. Johnson has been here for five months on a DUI charge. He says in all that time, the feces has never been cleaned off.

'They'll clean down there on the bottom where the (officers) stay,' he says, 'but up here, we're just a number.'

Johnson's 4-foot-wide cell was built for one man. Now it holds two. With such crowded conditions, it's harder to prevent violence."


What the broadcast version included that the print version doesn't is that the two men in the cell have to take turns standing up.

And if you're tempted to say that these criminals deserve what they get, most of San Quentin's inmates are there for parole violations, mostly drug offenses.

This is really starting to get pretty scary. The recidivism rate in California is 70%. Our prisons aren't deterrents for crime, they're mass-production facilities for criminals. What happens when we run out space to warehouse them all?

The witch hunt goes on

A Texas high school student has been arrested for making a map of his school. (Caveat: I have not been able to verify this story. The purported link to the original is broken, so this could be an urban legend in the making. But having heard many first-hand horror stories about police harassing people for taking pictures I find it quite plausible that this could be true.)

I may have to vote for Ralph Nader again

This is so depressing I can barely bring myself to write about it. I thought we elected the Democrats to protect us from neocons running roughshod over our civil rights. Instead, the dems are turning out to be just as much rubber stamps for the Bush administration as the Republicans.

You know, I'm really starting to wonder if the conspiracy theorists may be on to something. With Bush's popularity ratings at historic lows you'd think politicians would be falling all over themselves to distance themselves from him, but they aren't. Congress has yet to stand up to the administration in any meaningful way. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have actually reversed positions in order to align themselves more closely with Bush. Why? What the bleep is going on here?

Say it isn't so!

TPM is reporting that Obama is flip-flopping on telecom immunity. I hope this turns out not to be true. (The video isn't working so I can't tell if TPM's reporting is accurate.) If it is, it will mean that Obama is just another politician with no principles. I was really hoping for more from him.

A great day for murderers and child rapists

The Supreme Court handed murderers and child rapists a pair of legal victories today. Never would have figured the Roberts court for being a bunch of bleeding hearts, but there you go. They're soft on terrorism too so I guess you can call it a trifecta.

Oh well, at least they're still managing to keep the country safe from environmentalists.

In Fino Veritas

Every now and then the religious right slips in its carefully crafted rhetoric to show its true and hateful face. The most recent example of this was yesterday on Patt Morrison's show on KPCC in Pasadena. She was interviewing Karen England, executive director of the Capitol Resource Institute, about the recent California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. During the closing minutes of the show, Ms. England said this:


"This is about restoring the definition of marriage. The definition of marriage has never been committed loving relationships..."


You really have to listen to it to get the full effect. Her voice is just oozing with contempt as she says, "committed, loving relationships."

(The full context is here. The segment starts about 35 minutes in.)

Well, Ms. England, if you're right and the definition of marriage has never been about committed, loving relationships, then I say it's high time we changed the definition of marriage. Just as we've changed he definition of "voter", "citizen", and even "person" for the better over the years.

A bugged life

The title of this post actually applies to two completely different matters. First, I saw a really great movie last night about life in East Germany before the wall came down. It's called "The Lives of Others". German with English subtitles. Highly recommended. One of the best films I've ever seen.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was an obsession that's had a hold on me for the past few weeks. Every now and then I am afflicted with a bout of nostalgia. I have a few boxes of memorabilia stashed away in the garage, and the other day I was digging through one of them and came across a box of 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. For those of you two young to remember, these disks are actually floppy. They bend. And in their day they stored a whopping total of 140 kilobytes of data. Ah, those were the days.

One particular disk caught my attention because its label said "P-Lisp". This was my very first Lisp back in the day, and it arguably launched my career in computer science. So I thought it would be cool to resurrect it and watch it run, for old times' sake.

The plan was fairly straightforward: buy an Apple II from Ebay, get a copy of ADTPro, make a disk image, and run in on an Apple II emulator. I figured getting the Apple would take about a week, and then it would take an hour or two to get ADTPro up and running and grab the image. Just a little diversion.

Little did I know.

I logged on to EBay and found just what I needed: an Apple IIe with two disk drives. The high bid was $5! What a steal! So I, being the naive EBay bidder that I am, bid $10 figuring I was sure to win.

Now, you EBay veterans out there -- I can hear you -- you can stop snickering now. As you might expect, I was outbid and lost the auction. But the person who outbid me backed out of the deal, so I got a "second chance" to accept the deal at my original offer. And because of EBay's auto-bid system I didn't even have to pay the full $10, I just had to beat the $5 bid that was in effect when I placed my bid, so the machine could be mine for $6!

That is, it could have been, if I'd gotten the email in time. The second-chance offer is only good for 24 hours, and I just happened to be on a boat when the message arrived. So by the time I got the message it was too late.

(For those of you who are South Park fans, I would now like to call to mind the episode where the kids are all excited about the fact that some TV network is going to air a program where the word "shit" is spoken without being bleeped out. (It's episode 502 in case you want to go back and review.) The program of course is self-referential, because the discussion of the word is not bleeped out, and there's a little counter at the bottom of the screen that starts counting up the number of times anyone says the word during the episode. The counter reaches an astonishingly high number before it's all over. What follows will be all the more fun if you keep that imagery firmly in your mind as you read.)

No problem, I thought, the seller had already re-listed the computer, so I figured I'd just bid again. This time, though, I had more competition and lost out at $20. (Heck, I'd almost had it for $6, why pay three times as much? Surely another single-digit deal will come along.)

One week and half a dozen failed bids later I decided to give up and order an Apple IIe from Top Micro [UPDATE: Top Micro seems to have gone out of business and their site has been taken over by malware spammers], which had several of them in stock for $20 each -- plus $40 UPS Ground shipping. Oh well, it's all for the cause of historical preservation I told myself. I still needed a disk drive, but I figured I'd figure that out later. There seemed to be a steady trade in Apple II disk drives on Ebay.

The IIe finally arrived. I plugged it in, turned it on, and it came up with the Apple II prompt. Cool! It works. I hit a few keys...

Nothing.

The keyboard was dead.

No problem, I thought, probably just a loose connection, and when it comes to old computers I'm MacGuyver. So I whip out the trusty phillips screw driver and open 'er up.

Inside I found a twenty year old puddle of coffee. Cream, no sugar.

Yech.

So I get out a sponge and a shop vac and clean her up as best I can. No dice.

OK, this is obviously not going to work, so back to EBay, where I finally decide that I'm spending too much time on this and I'll just bite the bullet and shell out whatever it takes to get a working Apple with disk drives. "Whatever it takes" turned out to be about $100, but what the heck, it's all for a good cause, yadda yadda yadda.

While I'm waiting for the new machine to arrive I decide I now have nothing to lose by taking drastic measures to try to resurrect the IIe. So I take out the keyboard and give it a good wash with hot water. (You can actually do that safely to most keyboards as long as you dry them out THOROUGHLY before using them again.) No good. OK, here's my new Apple II+ with disks. So I put the IIe away and go to play with my new toy.

Happily, it works out of the box, and within ten minutes I'm actually able to boot one of my old floppy disks. A little bit of playing around convinces me that the drives are in good working order, and I finally work up the courage to try my P-Lisp disk.

Now, I should mention at this point that my P-Lisp disk was, as far as I could determine, the last extant copy on planet Earth. The Lisp community is not that large, and the subject of P-Lisp comes up from time to time, but I had never heard of anyone ever locating another copy despite periodic requests from history buffs to find one. So this is a pretty important disk.

Amazingly, considering all the things that went wrong on this project (and believe me, we're just getting warmed up here) that this one thing *didn't* go wrong is astonishing. I put the disk in the drive and booted it up and it worked. It just worked! There I was playing with a program that hadn't seen the light of day in over twenty-five years. I quickly made a copy of it, and to my amazement (especially in retrospect) that worked too. Cool, I thought, I'm nearly done.

I need to digress for a moment and tell you a little bit about ADTPro. It's a really cool program for resurrecting old Apple II machines. To understand just how cool it is you have to remember that back in 1979 when the Apple II came out they did not have ethernet ports and USB ports and Firewire ports. They had cassette ports. Like audio jacks that you plugged into an actual cassette recorder. That was your mass storage.

ADTPro comes with audio files that you can play back into an Apple II's cassette port to download bootstrap software so that you can get an old II up and running without any disks. This is quite an amazing thing if you think about it, and I can't even begin to imagine what would possess someone to put so much effort into something that is ultimately not really good for very much except nostalgia. But there it is. Anyway, I dug out a bunch of audio cables, hooked it up, and after just two tries (you have to fiddle with the volume a bit) I had uploaded ProDOS and was ready to upload the ADTPro client.

That was the last thing that would go right for a long, long time.

For some reason the ADTPro client just refused to upload. I must have tried it twenty times, with each attempt taking several minutes. The Apple doesn't give you any indication of what goes wrong, it just gets to the end of the upload and prints "ERR" and beeps at you. After about two hours I was about ready to throw that damned machine out the window.

OK, that was obviously not going to work. Happily, ADTPro can also connect via a serial port, which is a more robust connection than the cassette ports. But Apple II's didn't have serial ports built-in, they were add-ons. So back to EBay to buy an SSC and off to Fry's to buy a USB-to-serial converter (because things have come full-circle and Apples once again do not come with built-in serial ports, which is probably as it should be).

By this time my wife is starting to ask me when I'm going to get that damned Apple II out of the workout room.

I watched my Super Serial Card wend its way across the country via UPS's on-line tracking system. In retrospect, this should have been a sign that I was starting to take this project a wee bit too seriously.

The SSC finally arrives, and I breathe a sigh of relief. I can finally get this damn thing done! I plug it in, fire up ADTPro and start the bootstrap procedure...

And it doesn't work! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

By this time I am completely obsessed. I am determined to get this damned disk image come hell or high water. I am MacGuyver. I eat bugs for a living. No stupid 8-bit machine is going to get the better of me.

Now, I am going to do you a favor and spare you all the details of everything that happened while I was trying to debug the problem I was having with the serial link. Suffice it to say that by the time it was over, two weeks had gone by. I had probably spent twenty hours on it (thirty if you count the trips to Fry's). I had bought three USB/RS232 cables and God only knows how many miscellaneous cables, adapters, breakout boxes, volt meters, crimpers, testers and null modems. I had a frankencable setup so scary it would have made Ridley Scott run screaming in fear.

AND IT STILL DIDN'T WORK!!!

Sometimes it's really hard to know when you've reached the point of diminishing returns. On the one hand I was fully aware that I was spending way more time on this stupid project than it was worth. But on the other hand I really didn't want to quit. I really felt like I was on the cusp of a breakthrough, and that any minute I would figure it out. And eventually I did.

My best advice in situations like that is to get a good night's sleep. I think if I'd actually followed that advice I might have figured it out in half the time. The problem turned out to be a nasty timing-related bug in the device driver for the USB-serial cable that I was using. But the way in which events unfolded turned out to be an almost perfect conspiracy to make this problem as hard to discover as possible.

The first thing that happened was that I bought one USB-serial cable. I chose the name brand (IOGear) figuring it had the best shot at being reliable. I installed the drivers, plugged it in, and it *mostly* worked. There was just one particular circumstance under which it failed, and ADTPro just happened to hit the one magic combination of timing that triggered the bug.

The second thing that happened was that the symptoms were intermittent data corruption. So my attention was naturally drawn to my cabling setup and the old SSC card, which seemed like a more likely source of random problems than a brand spanking new USB device.

The third thing that happened was that I wrote a little Python program that uploaded the bootstrap software successfully. That made me think it was a bug in ADTPro for a long time.

The fourth thing that happened was that I bought two more USB-serial cables, all different makes and models, and they all did exactly the same thing. Of course, they were all running off the same buggy driver too. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I eventually managed to reproduce the problem between two Macs using Python code, which proved that both ADTPro and the old Apple II hardware were blameless. And after another hour or so of sleuthing I finally decided to try a different driver, which solved the problem. Thirty minutes later I had my disk image. My Apple II is now neatly packed away. And I am MacGuyver again.

Whew!

[UPDATE:] You can find the plisp image here.

What if they held an impeachment and nobody cared?

I wish it were a rhetorical question. Believe it or not, Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush today. None of the major news outlets are covering it.

Barbarians, take 2

There is no other word for a society where something like this has to happen before someone starts to pay attention.

The parents of a blind seven-year-old who was sent to a religious school in Pakistan have told how he was hung by his feet from a ceiling and beaten to death after failing to memorise the Koran.

It may not be all Muslims, but it's not just the fringe either.

While officialdom often turns a blind eye, the sheer brutality of the latest case has led the new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, to order an inquiry.

Allah only knows how many other seven-year-olds are out there suffering similar abuse but that we haven't heard about just because they haven't died in so dramatic a fashion yet.

Finally!

Hillary is ending her campaign. Halefuckingleujah. Can you say, "Too little, too late?"

Breathtaking chutzpah

In a display of truly breathtaking chutzpah even by her own standards, Hillary Clinton, who just two months ago was saying that Barak Obama was not fit to be commander in chief, is now saying that she'd be willing to be his vice president. This would be surprising if not for the fact that Hillary has already demonstrated that she has no principles whatsoever, and will simply do and say anything to claw her way into power.

I will be surprised and disappointed if Obama offers Hillary the veep spot. Hillary is a delusional pathological liar and she is not fit to be dog catcher, let alone a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Hillary has obviously not come to grips with the fact that Obama beat her fair and square in large measure because of her despicable behavior and that of her supporters. You have to repent before you can receive absolution.

As for all those Clinton supporters who say they will vote for McCain rather than Obama all I can say is: you and McCain deserve each other.

Kangaroo court

What else can you call it when the judge gets fired because he ruled that the prosecution has to disclose its evidence to the defense?

How to stop spam from free email accounts

If you've noticed an increase in the amount of spam you've been getting lately, it's probably because the captchas for both Gmail and Yahoo mail have been broken recently.

Ye gods, how hard can it be to solve this problem? I gave it five minutes of thought just now and came up with an utterly trivial solution that will completely stop free email accounts from being used for spam:

1. Whenever a message is sent to a recipient that has never received a message from that account before, modify the message to include a link at the top that the recipient can click on if the message is spam.

2. Limit the number of new recipients that can receive email from that account to a few dozen a day.

3. If the number of spam reports from that account exceeds a certain threshold, shut the account down.

4. Require a valid credit card number to set up a new account. Even better, charge $1 for a new account.

Point 4 is going to be somewhat controversial because the email providers will argue that if they do this then people will just use someone else's service. But this is not true. If only the Big 3 (GMail, Yahoo and Hotmail) instituted this policy that would be enough to force everyone else to follow suit. The reason is that spammers would abandon the Big 3 and start using smaller free email providers. Once people realized that a particular provider was laden with spam they would just start filtering out all messages from that provider. Once people with legitimate accounts realize that their messages are being spam filtered they will either pressure their provider to adopt the "credit card captcha" for new accounts, or they will switch to a provider that already uses it.

This would not just make a dent in spam from free email accounts, it would *completely* eliminate it because it would make it unprofitable. A single account could not be used to send out more than a couple of hundred spams before it would be shut down, and creating a new account would be too expensive to make spamming profitable. So the spammers wouldn't even try.

Note that this would not eliminate spam altogether, because spam could still be sent from botnets. But that kind of spam is pretty easy to filter.

Can anyone come up with a reason why this wouldn't work?

A Scientific Theology

One of the things that hard-core atheists like Dawkins get wrong IMO is they underestimate the importance of dramatic narrative in people's lives. This is ironic because it is easy to trace this need back to its evolutionary roots. And yet, Dawkins insists, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to deny this simple fact, choosing instead to take the position that acknowledging the power of myth is "condescending."

I believe that at root all humans share an evolved moral intuition whose core features are more or less the same across the entire species. As a result, the divisive rhetoric that tries to separate atheism from other belief systems is counterproductive because it makes people believe that atheism is at odds with their moral intuition, which manifests itself as religion instead of Scientism.

From a practical and political point of view I believe it would be much more constructive and effective for atheism to embrace the proposition that it is a religion rather than positioning itself as the anti-religion. One of the reasons that atheism fails to win more hearts and minds is just that religions have vastly better marketing departments. I think atheists would do well to take a page or two from their books, and that includes the holy ones.

It should come as no surprise to any scientist that there is much that is good in the Bible. If man's behavior is governed by an evolved moral intuition then no book could survive that was fundamentally at odds with that intuition. "Love thy neighbor" and "thou shalt not murder" are really quite fine and dandy ideas, even if they are not the Revealed Word of God.

In fact, because the Bible is an encyclopedic collection of early human thought, it should come as no surprise that there is a lot of wisdom there that goes far beyond these usual moral platitudes. To be sure, there are irreconcilable differences between Science and fundamentalism, but if one leaves even a little room for doubt that every single word in the Bible is literally true (as most people who call themselves Christian do) then there are a lot of opportunities to find common ground.

There is room in a Scientific worldview for the concept of God. Of course, there is no room in the Scientific worldview for God as an extra-physical being, or for the Bible as having any particular standing above any other work of literature. But even within these constraints I think there's a lot of room for reconciliation. Here, then, is a first-draft attempt to construct a literary narrative for atheism, a Scientific Theology.

The core of a Scientific Theology should be an acknowledgement that there are very deep mysteries about our existence, and the very deepest is the manifest asymmetry of every person's perception of reality. The laws of physics are everywhere symmetric, but my perception of reality is radically asymmetric. The laws of physics are the same in all places at all times, but I am here and now. My most basic reality is therefore fundamentally at odds with what is known about the laws of physics, and this naked fact ought to keep Scientists humble about their worldview. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in Richard Dawkins' philosophy, or yours, or mine.

Let us then take "God" to mean all that is mysterious and wonderful about this existence, starting (but not ending) with the fundamental mystery of existence. This is a Deistic "god". It is not a supernatural being, not a bearded man in the sky. We are created in God's image only in the sense that God and we are both part of the great mystery that is reality. We are made of atoms, but that is not all we are made of. There are a lot of atoms in the universe, but only a few of them are us, and that makes those atoms special. At least part of what makes them special is that they are arranged in very particular patterns. One aspect of those patterns is that some of those atoms are arranged to form brains which are collections of atoms that can process information. This is a truly remarkable and wonderful fact, and what is even more wonderful and remarkable is that brains are actually capable of understanding the natural processes that brought them into being, and in that understanding we are brought closer to God.

Scientific Theology utterly rejects the Calvinist point of view, that we are totally depraved and separate from God. We are part of God and God is part of us. We have (at least the illusion of) free will, and we have knowledge of good an evil. Does it really matter whether the source of this knowledge is an evolved moral intuition or a result of eating the Fruit of the Tree?

Unfortunately, the world is not black and white, good and evil. The world is painted in colors and shades of grey. This is our burden, to make our way in a world where the Way is not clear and cannot ever be clear. The world is complicated. This is what makes it at once wonderful and terrible. We are in fact, as Christian theology says, doomed to fall short of perfection. But the Christian looks at this inevitable failure and turns to Christ. The Scientist looks at it and sees it as a challenge. Our purpose in life is not to serve God, it is to make this world and this life as good as it can be, knowing all the while that it will never be as good as it can be. This is what it is to be human, to struggle against the complexity and ambiguity of the universe, knowing the struggle will never end, victory can never be achieved, but to struggle nonetheless, and then to pass the torch to the next generation to continue the never-ending struggle that is life and death and love and regret and yin and yang and all that makes existence wonderful and terrible. This may not be the way we would want it to be, but that is the way it is. And in the end, life would be very boring otherwise. We are born to engage in this existential jihad. Like it or not, that is the purpose of life.

Scientific Theology should be tolerant of alternative points of view. Not everyone lives a good life. Some people are born into horrible suffering, from disease or abusive parents or material want. We should not insist that everyone squarely face the harsh reality of existence. If someone finds salvation, or even solace, in Christ, it would be cruel to take that away from them. There are real problems with fundamentalism and evangelism and virulent anti-scientific ideas like creationism, but if someone wants to believe that Jesus died on the cross to save them from their sins and doesn't insist that everyone else believe it too, I don't see the harm.

Personally, I see God in all of the information-processing that I don't have direct conscious access to, from my DNA to my right-brain, to all that stuff happening in all those other brains in the world, and now in all those computers in the world. There's an awful lot of thinking going on that is beyond my ken. And every now and then I can communicate with all those other information-processes -- through meditation, through email and blogs, or by looking at the stars or gazing at the ocean. My God is mysterious and powerful and wise and it knows things that I don't, but it is not all-powerful nor all-knowing. My God forms the light and creates darkness. My God inspired the Bible -- and all the other books ever written. My god is familiar and forgiving and sympathetic and vengeful and mysterious and fallible because my god is us.

My God, like any parent, wants His children to grow up eventually. He does not demand prayer and obsequiousness, but if you want to offer up a prayer he's a good listener. Sometimes prayers are answered, sometimes not. But mostly, my God helps those who help themselves. He gave us (via evolution) the wherewithal to make our own way in the world, and wants us to use our faculties to take responsibility for our lives and make the world a better place. He wants us to love each other, because love produces better results than hate. Where love is not possible (and sometimes it isn't) he'll settle for respect.

If this one idea survives me then my life will not have been lived in vain.

Whither free will?

sblinn over on reddit raises an interesting point (particularly since we have a Calvinist lurking out there somewhere):


what does it mean to now have a good working theory of evolutionary morality while not having a good working theory of the free will to exercise it? ... If all we can do is carry out the mechanisms of biology and chemistry, according to our compositions and environmental stimuli, whatever right and wrong are we will still be doing whatever it is this mechanism computes.


There are a couple of answers to this.

First, we are not completely deterministic. At root we are quantum entities. Whether or not quantum randomness actually plays any significant role in our thought processes is not known, but the possibility cannot be ruled out based on our current understanding.

Second, even if we are completely deterministic that does not mean that our actions are completely predictable because of Chaos theory.

Third, even if we were completely deterministic and predictable we somehow have the illusion that we have at least a certain amount of free will. Imagine you get up in the morning and you have to decide whether to wear the red tie or the blue one. Whether or not you actually have free will in your decision, it certainly feels like you do. But there are also clearly things over which we do not exercise free will. You cannot choose to believe that the red tie is actually green, for example. (Well, maybe you can, but I can't.)

A belief in a certain amount of free will, even if in reality it is only an illusion, is a logical prerequisite to morality, and a practical necessity for the functioning of human society. If all our actions are truly out of our control (as the Calvinists would have you believe) then there is truly no reason for morality, because then everything that happens is merely a consequence of the laws of physics or the Will of God or the Hand of Fate (all of which become indistinguishable from each other in that case, by the way). The only reason philosophy (or religion) matters at all is that we each have this sense of self over which we feel like we exercise some degree of control. Absent that, nothing matters. There is no reason to punish murderers, or, indeed, not to become a murderer yourself, because whatever happens is just the inescapable consequence of whatever is out there pulling our strings. Absent free will, there is no more sense getting morally indignant about the Holocaust than about the fact that the sun rises in the morning.

Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion

... is the title of an excellent and well-informed article by David Sloan Wilson. Some highlights:


It is absurd, in retrospect, that evolutionists have spent much more time evaluating the major evolutionary hypotheses for guppy spots than for the elements of religion. This situation is beginning to remedy itself as scholars and scientists from all backgrounds begin to adopt the evolutionary perspective in their study of religion.

...

[Large-scale empirical studies reveal that o]n average, religious believers are more prosocial than non-believers, feel better about themselves, use their time more constructively, and engage in long-term planning rather than gratifying their impulsive desires. On a moment-by-moment basis, they report being more happy, active, sociable, involved and excited. Some of these differences remain even when religious and non-religious believers are matched for their degree of prosociality. More fine-grained comparisons reveal fascinating differences between liberal vs. conservative protestant denominations, with more anxiety among the liberals and conservatives feeling better in the company of others than when alone.

...

By my assessment, the majority of religions in the sample are centered on practical concerns, especially the definition of social groups and the regulation of social interactions within and between groups. New religious movements usually form when a constituency is not being well served by current social organizations (religious or secular) in practical terms and is better served by the new movement. The seemingly irrational and otherworldly elements of religions in the sample usually make excellent practical sense when judged by the only gold standard that matters from an evolutionary perspective — what they cause the religious believers to do.


He then goes on to give an extended example based on the Indian ascetic tradition of Jainism:


Jainism is one of the oldest and most ascetic of all the eastern religions and is practiced by approximately three percent of the Indian population. Jain ascetics filter the air they breathe, the water they drink, and sweep the path in front of them to avoid killing any creature no matter how small. They are homeless, without possessions, and sometimes even fast themselves to death by taking a vow of “santhara” that is celebrated by the entire community. How could such a religion benefit either individuals or groups in a practical sense? It is easy to conclude from the sight of an emaciated Jain ascetic that the religion is indeed a cultural disease — until one reads the scholarly literature.


Hopefully that will induce you to read the whole piece. it is long, but well worth the effort.

UPDATE: Dawkins' reply is also worthwhile, if only for balance.

Can morality exist without God?

[NOTE: This essay is rough and incomplete, but it will be at least three days before I have another chance to work on it. Rather than keep my adoring fans waiting (both of you) I've decided to go ahead and post this draft and make updates later.]

Denis Prager and Joseph Talushkin sum the issue up nicely in their book, "The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism":

If there is no God, there are no rights and wrongs that transcend personal preference ... Moral judgements [are] purely subjective. It is self-evident and acknowledged by the foremost atheist philosophers that if a moral God does not exist, neither does a universal morality. Without God all we can have are opinions about morality...

And indeed they are correct. No less a secular luminary than Bertrand Russell wrote:

I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it.

Prager and Talushkin wrote in 1986 (which is why their book is called what it is and not "The Judaism FAQ" :-) and Russell wrote in 1960. These dates turn out to be significant. The problem of how to define an objective morality without God was in fact solved in 1980 by a fellow named Robert Axelrod. As far as I'm concerned, Axelrod's name IMHO ought to be numbered alongside Darwin, Einstein and Newton as one of the greatest contributors to human knowledge of all time. Instead his work has gone virtually ignored by almost everyone, religious and secular alike. But as usual, I am getting ahead of myself.

It should be noted that defining morality with God is no slam-dunk. First you have to decide which God to follow because there are so many to choose from. Even the God of Abraham, who has pretty much cornered the market of modern theology, comes in three major versions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) and countless minor ones. The putative Word of God includes such guidance as:

When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them... (The Q'uran, sura 47:4)

and

Put away your sword, for those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. (Matthew 26:52)

So which is it? How can we decide which version of God's Word to follow without some standard that transcends God?

The question of whether God sets the moral standard or follows a moral standard was first raised by Socrates in 380BC. The dilemma can be summed up thusly: if God says what he says because He is moral then morality transcends God. On the other hand, if what is moral is defined by the Word of God, then in what sense can morality thus defined be considered "good"? Is it moral to kill unbelievers because Allah says so? What if God said it was OK to kill innocent children? Would that in fact make it moral? (And if your response is: God would never say that, then my response is: 1) he already has said it on a number of occasions, and 2) who are you, mere mortal, to say what God would and would not say?

Even putting aside the metaphysical question of the moral status of God, there are practical issues involved with how to interpret God's word. For example, Leviticus 24:16 says, "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death..." Does that mean we should institute the death penalty for blasphemy? Or take the second commandment. This is commonly taken as a prohibition against idol worship (though the sight of Catholics bowing down before statues of saints really makes me wonder sometimes) but the actual text says, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth." Does that mean that photographs, statues, and portraits are immoral? Muslims think so. How do we decide? These kinds of conundrums are legion, and have kept theologians occupied for millennia.

To these questions I would add one more: why aren't all the atheists raping and pillaging? In Norway, for example, the overwhelming majority of the population is non-religious, and yet you do not see uncontrolled outbreaks of selfish behavior. To the contrary, Norway is socialist, and has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world. Sweden and Japan are similar. By way of contrast, the United States, with one of the highest concentrations of avowed Christians in the world, has one of the highest rates of violent crime, and is notorious for its ever-increasing socio-economic disparities.

The mere fact that this observation appears to require explanation is also indicative of the answer: people have a moral intuition, a subconscious sense of right and wrong, a conscience. And although they differ in detail, there are remarkable consistencies in moral intuition across all the world's religions and cultures. For example, there is an overwhelming consensus that killing innocents without provocation is wrong. There is not a single culture in the world that does not consider killing, lying and stealing to be evil. Conversely, there is not a single culture in the world that does not consider justice (including punishment for transgressions), honesty and charity to be virtues. To be sure, moral intuition is not uniform. For example, some people's moral intuition tells them that abortion is evil, while others' do not. My point is not to say (at this point) that moral intuition is a reliable guide to morality, merely that moral intuition exists. This should be non-controversial except among the most extreme pedants.

If we accept that moral intuition exists two questions naturally arise. First, is moral intuition a reliable guide to morality? Even the most cursory examination reveals that it cannot be absolutely reliable because it is not absolutely uniform. Some people think abortion is acceptable, some people think it isn't. They can't both be right.

The second question, which I believe will shed some light on the first, is: where did this moral intuition come from? There are three possibilities. The first is that it came from God, that it is one aspect of being created in His image. This is an attractive possibility, but alas not supported by the Bible. According to the Bible, moral intuition arose when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good an evil. (To the contrary, the Bible is quite clear that man was not created with the capacity to tell good from evil, which has always led me to wonder how God expected Eve to know that she was supposed to obey God and not the serpent. But that is a matter for another time.)

The third possibility is that moral intuition evolved. This has always seemed intuitively improbable. After all, evolution is all about survival of the fittest, the ends justify the means, red in tooth and claw, and all that, while our moral intuitions tell us things like that we ought to take precious resources and give them to the poor and the weak, which would seem to be exactly the opposite of what Darwinian evolution would lead us to expect. But Darwin is subtle, and evolution produces a lot of things that one might not expect at first glance, like peacock's tails. The puzzle of how Darwinian evolution could lead to non-selfish behavior was solved by Robert Axelrod in 1980.

Axelrod explored a famous mathematical model of moral choices called the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD). PD is a game played with two players. Each player has only two possible moves: cooperate (C) or defect (D). Points are awarded according to the following schedule:

* If both players cooperate each one gets 3 points.

* If both players defect, each one gets 1 point.

* If one player cooperates and the other defects then the cooperating player gets 0 points and the defecting player gets 5 points.

(The Prisoner's Dilemma is called that because it is usually framed as a story about two prisoners who each have to decide whether to testify against the other. But the model applies to a wide variety of social interactions.)

The main thing to notice about the scoring system is that no matter what your opponent does you always do better for yourself by defecting than by cooperating. So on its face there should never be any reason to cooperate. Intuitively, the best Darwinian strategy is to always defect. And indeed, defection is the best strategy for a single round of PD. It is even the best strategy for multiple rounds of PD if the number of rounds is known in advance. (This is because defecting is the best strategy on the last round, so it must be the best strategy on the round before, etc.)

*HOWEVER* (and this quite possibly the single most under-appreciated insight in all of human history) if the number of rounds is not known in advance then it turns out that there is no one best strategy! Which strategy is best for you depends on which strategy your opponent is using.

For example, suppose that you opponent is using a TIT-FOR-TAT strategy (which in this context we may call an-eye-for-an-eye), where they cooperate on the first move and then respond on the next move with whatever you did on the previous move. In that case your best strategy is to alway cooperate. By way of contrast, if your opponent is using a strategy of ABSOLUTE ALTRUISM (always cooperate) then your best strategy (as in the non-iterated PD) is to always defect.

The Prisoner's Dilemma has been around for a long time, but only relatively recently has computing power become cheap enough to really allow an exploration into its dynamics. This is what Robert Axelrod did starting in 1980. And what he discovered is truly astonishing.

Axelrod performed a series of experiments pitting little computer programs to play PD against each other. I won't bore you with the details here. Instead I'll just cut to the chase. Here are the major results.

1. In nearly all circumstances, the "best" strategy (in the sense that it was the strategy that accumulated the most points when playing against a selection of other strategies) was TIT-FOR-TAT. This included tournaments among programs generated by humans as well as programs that were generated automatically and "evolved" according to Darwinian natural selection.

2. No human-generated program ever beat TIT-FOR-TAT. However, automatically generated programs did occasionally (about 25% of the time) evolve that were able to beat it. All of these program were very complex.

3. Nearly all of the programs that were able to "survive" for any length of time in the Darwinian simulations had a number of features in common. They were nice, which is to say, they were never the first to defect. They were easily provoked, that is, it didn't take very many defections before they defected. And they were forgiving, that is, once the opponent started to cooperate again they would quickly start to cooperate in return.

These results are proof that the naive intuition about Darwinian morality, that moral behavior cannot evolve, is wrong. Purely selfish behavior does not reproduce well. Neither does purely altruistic behavior. What reproduces best is a set of behaviors that very closely track the major features of human moral intuition: niceness, retribution, and forgiveness.

Now, of course this does not prove that moral intuition evolved, but it does show pretty convincingly that it could have. The burden is no longer on the atheist to justify their belief in morality. They can now say: my morality comes from a moral intuition wired into my brain by evolution according to Axelrod's model. If a religious person wants to claim that God is necessary for morality the burden is now on them to show why this is not possible. And that would be a heavy burden indeed. It is indeed a shame that Bertrand Russell did not live to see Axelrod's results.

Now, of course this far from the last word on morality. Moral intuition doesn't speak with absolute clarity about what is right and wrong. It requires deliberation and interpretation, just like the Word of God. But (and this is the crucial point) it provides common ground for a discussion about morality between the religious and the secular. For the purposes of achieving a consensus on what moral behavior is it is not necessary to achieve consensus about what the source is. Some people will say God, some will say Allah, and some with say evolved moral intuition. As long as they arrive at the same conclusions that's good enough. If everyone agrees that it's wrong to kill, it doesn't matter that people disagree about the narrative that led them to that conclusion. Of course, it would be nice to get everyone to agree on the narrative also, but that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon. So failing that, arriving at the same conclusions by different routes seems to me to be the next best thing.

There are three features of an evolved intuition as a basis for moral behavior that make it particularly attractive as an account of how human being ought to behave. First, it allows for a morality that changes over time. Religious people recoil at this because they are fond of believing that moral behavior is revealed by God and is unchanging. But this is not reflective of reality. There was a time when slavery and stoning people to death for blasphemy really was considered moral. Now it's not. Darwinian morality allows us to excuse our forbears on the grounds that their moral intuitions might have been different from ours, and may have even been more appropriate to their circumstances. (For example, early societies lived much closer to the edge of survival than modern ones. Dissent is a luxury they may not have been able to afford.)

A second attractive feature of evolved moral intuition that makes it attractive is that it actually embraces religion, or at least predicts its emergence. If moral behavior has survival value, then beliefs that enforce moral behavior also have survival value, and so we would expect those to evolve as well. Surprisingly perhaps, the answer to the question: "is morality possible without God?" turns out to be "no", but not because God is a prerequisite for morality, but rather a necessary consequence of the mechanism by which moral behavior is produced (at least in an environment that includes creatures with sufficiently large brains).

The third feature that makes evolved intuition attractive as a basis for morality is that it can account for behaviors that transcend the short-term needs of our bodies. We mostly think of evolutionary theory as applying to DNA, but evolutionary theory can be applied to any information-carrying entity that is capable of reproducing itself. In the case of humans, there are two different replicators in play: our DNA, and the thoughts and ideas resident in our brains (what Dawkins calls memes). These two replicators are symbionts. Ideas cannot (yet) reproduce without brains, and brains reproduce much better in the presence of ideas like agriculture and antibiotics. But sometimes the needs of these two replicators are in conflict. But a discussion of that will have to wait for a few more days.

Scientific morality: the trailer

For those of you eagerly awaiting my post on Scientific morality, here's a sneak preview. Note that the slide show is four years old and things have evolved (no pun intended) since then, so be kind.

A Critical Examination of Calvinism

I was starting to prepare some arguments against Calvanistic morality when I discovered that someone had already done it for me -- and even more fortuitously, that person is (or at least considers himself) a Christian. Just a heads-up in case wrf3 wants to respond :-) A post on Scientific morality is still in the works.

Untitled

I was going to call this post "On the teleology of informatics" but that just came out sounding way too postmodernist. But I couldn't come up with anything better.

mar13 writes:


There are a wide spectrum of CP. Our David is one of the more servere case due to his brain damage from a skull fracture. ... Please pardon my morbid thought, (and trust me, this is way more painful for me to bring up than yours) but if human dignity is bound up in our information processing, then there is every little reason to keep David [in] existence, except for medical research purposes.


First, let me reiterate how sorry I am for your tragedy, and that I in no way wish to dissuade you from your faith if it gives you comfort (more on this later). But since you ask...

Even from a hard-core Scientific (capital S) point of view, it is not true that "if human dignity is bound up in our information processing, then there is every little reason to keep David [in] existence, except for medical research purposes." Scientists distinguish between a person and their body. They are not the same thing. This is similar to the distinction that religions make between a person's body and their soul, except that the soul is usually taken to be some extra-physical entity that survives the death of the body. The Scientific point of view is that a person *is* the information stored in their brains. So there is an intimate and mostly unseverable bond between a person and their body. We do not yet know how to extract the information that is a person from the brain that information resides in, except for the little bits that come out in what they say and write and do. At the moment, when the brain dies the person dies, even if the rest of the body that person once resided in might still be alive. The status of such a body is not unlike Henrietta Lack's cancer cells. It is human life, but it is not a person.

Now, I don't know David. I can only base my judgement on what you have told me, and what you have told me is that he is a person with CP. A person with CP -- even severe CP -- is still a person.


How would you find strength in these kinds of life problem?


I have never had to deal with anything even remotely as difficult as what you are faced with, so until I am tested that way the only really honest answer to your question is that I don't know. This is one of the reasons that I take issue with Dawkins and Harris. I don't know their life stories, but from what I can tell they, as I, have been the beneficiaries of life's inequities rather than its victims. It's unbelievably arrogant to sit in an ivory tower and tell someone living in the slums of Calcutta that they should not turn to Jesus or Allah or whatever helps them get through their day.

Also, I occasionally turn to God myself in difficult times. I have been extraordinarily blessed and my troubles are trivial compared to what some people have to face, but I have my challenges and I occasionally have a chat with the Big Man. (I tell him I don't believe in him. He says that's OK :-) Even as a Scientist I recognize that faith is a very powerful force. The thing you believe in doesn't have to be real in order to reap the benefits of believing in it, and I don't want to take that away from anyone (unless they try to force me to believe in it too, of course).

But to answer your question directly: Scientists accept that the world is the way it appears to be to our senses. it is a world of great beauty and joy and and, too often, a world of tragedy and despair. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. People die. That's just the Way It Is.

But though we are creatures of information, we are not creatures of logic. We are not Vulcans, we are humans. Logic is only one aspect of ourselves. We have emotions and passions and desires and internal demons. All those are part of the human condition.

We have the power to make the world better than it would otherwise be. (We also have the power to make it worse.) And we can achieve a limited sort of immortality by taking parts of ourselves -- little bits of the information that lives in our brains -- and making them resident in other brains through writing, talking, and generally being known by other people. As long as David is remembered and loved, part of him is still alive in *your* brain (and now, mine, and everyone else who is reading this). In this way we sow the seeds of our souls.

I find my strength by waking up every day marveling at how privileged I am to be a part of this grand adventure we call reality, to be present here, now, and to witness and participate in all the incredible, marvelous, and occasionally terrible things happening here. Whether this will turn out to be enough when the time comes for me to really be tested I won't know until I get there. I hope it is. It's all I have.