Saturday, December 28, 2013
Phil Robertson's Omega/Constant
We've all been treated to endless discussion of the Phil Robertson flap related to his interview in GQ. The "endless" property of this debate inspired me. Perhaps it's not actually computable.
In that spirit, I am reminded of the newest "physical" constant available - the one named for Gregory Chaitin. The abstraction of this constant is Chaitin's Omega - it's an infinitely repeating binary fraction ( each subsequent bit maps to 1/pow(2,x ) for each x in the natural numbers ). Each bit is a yes/no answer to whether or not a particular set of instructions terminates on a particular Turing Machine.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ChaitinsConstant.html
The current value of Chaitin's Constant is known to 64 bits and has a decimal representation of 0.00787499699 Why no, that's not 1/127 and why would you think such a thing? Sheesh.
So allow me to introduce Phil Robertson's Omega. Each bit represents the answer to the recursive proposition R(x) "Is x bad?" where x is a concatenation of "Is" and a repeated string of "of intolerance". We simply textually substitute the nonsense "Is of" with "Is" for clarity's sake (I suppose you can tolerate the "Is of" if you *want*, but I know what I'll do, by golly).
For example, R(0) is ... nothing, undefined ( shame on you for even *thinking* that - "Is" isn't much of a sentence, now), and R(1) is "Is intolerance bad?", R(2) is "Is of intolerance of intolerance bad?" and so forth.
Wait, get that extra "of" out of there... thanks - "Is intolerance of intolerance bad?" says R(2).
So I think we can all agree that R(1) is true. That gives us a first pass value of 0.5 . Calculation of the remaining bits is left as an exercise for the reader.
With any luck, tens of gigabytes of Internet bloviation per second will now be replaceable by a nice compact single decimal constant. Use it wisely!
Monday, December 9, 2013
To David Simon's "Two Americas" in The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-marx-two-americas-wire
This is an excellent essay. It has problems.
But: Where to start?
First, Marx was never right. It's not that he lost; he used as a foundation Thomas Malthus, and Malthus Was Wrong. Malthus could not have known that. Indeed, the first close thing to a Malthusian Crisis in the 20th Century was the Ukrainian crop failures immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. Guess who came their aid? Yep. The capitalist US; this and WWI led to a bubble in wheat, which led to the dust bowl. Oh, and all that Steinbeck that applies. Brought to you by the Bolshies.
Nice, eh?
No less than Mussolini knew that Marx was a dead issue by the 1920s. Mussolini built a system - Fascism - based on having guilds run things oligarchically. We, frankly, did somewhat *same* in the US but without as much uniform-wearing and goose-steeping. It was just how people saw efficiency then - top-down coordination. That's more or less what Galbraith outlined in "The Modern Industrial State".
But mathematicians were undermining this rapidly.
So that leaves us perhaps with a more moderate, perhaps Fabian Socialism.It is subject to corruption. Maybe there is a way for it to work; it mostly hasn't. We are so oh my God terrible at redistribution. It defies all logic. Yes, even the Nordics are, although they are better than we ( the US ) is at it.
And you can't move it up the Maslow hierarchy ( e.g; once food is solved, then the Maslow goods higher up the pyramid are even more complex and need the sort of information transfers that only markets can give). That's where we are now - increasingly, everything is "free" except real estate and other such goods. The second billion iPhones cost a lot less than the first and a marginal iPhone costs next to nothing. Your average flip phone, they more or less *give* away.Pretty quickly, you run up against status, and that's completely intractable. I know "Homicide:" covered this; my understanding is that "The Wire" also did.
Unions? No. Unions only worked when they interfaced with the Galbraith Modern Industrial State apparatus, large monolithic corporations where we'd decided we didn't need competition any more because we would hire the smartest people, so it was all Optimal.
Yeah, right.So long as the rest of the world lay in ruins.
That entire regime was actually kind of hateful. Our dads sucked it up, but it wore them out. They wanted the college kids of the 1960s to have it that much better; "don't be a welder like me, son." Nobody could really speak for G.M. because it wasn't a good company, truthfully. It was a spiteful, petulant organization. You had a narrow band of guys and gals who worked there long enough to retire. The rest was, frankly, pretty hellish.
Other outfits were less so, but it was largely a soul-crushing existence. You might get lucky and find something cool, but rarely. Even the research PhDs I knew lived lives of quiet desperation.
We don't have to do that anymore, no matter what else.
A present-day, taut-run corporation can't entertain the potential of a strike. There's too much
leverege, margins are too thin and it'd kill the firm. The people in the 1% aren't there, anyway -
they've cashed out or are "rockstars" who mainly trade on their name. The live on rents on their reputation, not what they actually do. Yes, this is true of surgeons - if you'll think about it. As soon as it is not, surgeons get the same cost curve as machinists. It's happening. Literally - PR is how people get into the 1% - no, I do not mean the 0.01% - I mean the 1%. Most of it is DIY PR/resume building, but that's what it still is.
You hit a key with Nixon's abandonment of the Gold Standard ( really, the abandonment of Bretton
Woods ) - well, Bretton Woods was terrible to begin with. It was a base hack implemented at the end of WWII and had lived long enough. Had it actually been debasing the currency, then the U.S. should have dominated in exports.
None of that happened. *We do not, to this day, know what happened*.
Global movement of capital was sluggish and declining; Nixon knew what he was doing. From 1973 to 1981, when Fed Chairman Vocker clamped down, ... well that's the cycle time for that mechanism. From '81 on to '00 was a pretty good run.
Yeah - you can trace this back to the abandonment of Bretton Woods - but - as opposed to *what*?
I'd say we have guesses about what *did* happen post 1973. But nobody actually knows. Closest I have seen is a piece by Megan McArdle -
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-05/what-caused-labor-to-lose-big-in-the-1970s-.html
My credo is that of Scott Sumner - that money isn't flowing because the Fed is remiss in "printing" enough money to even cover GDP and population growth. That tracking CPI growth misstates inflation in a way that pushes us towards deflation. That we don't have more GDP growth because the money-machineries haven't worked since 2000. This is for *electoral*, *political* reasons - there is an unreasoning fear of inflation.
Markets channel massive *information*. The more nodes there are in a market ( sellers/buyers ), the faster the info flows and the more of it there is. The large monolithics grew until they became information-infeasible. The 1930s math guys were converging on the monolithics on three fronts - information theory, undecidability and (roughly) the economies of networks
This couples strongly with the basic central tenet of Liberalism - the individual is the King. So not only
does Collectivism of any sort rankle for historical reasons it's inefficient and it does not support the primacy of the individual. This is distressingly difficult - the European socialisms evolved in the wake of the razing of Europe.
So Socialism is *unthinkable* to us. It would require us thinking as if we had been defeated in a total war to change that. Meanwhile, the unemployed have to "start businesses" if they don't wanna join the criminal class, and that is not a bunch who are very open to anything like socialism.The kids don't really buy it, either - they're a lot Libertarian once they think about it long enough. Plus, inter generational resentment plus bad Apocalyptic deficit reporting means Social Security and Medicare scare them.
What made an "us" out of the Depression was all that propaganda on film in the Second World War. Capra, Kazan were either propagandists or reactors-to-propaganda. This isn't me; this is "The Name Above the Title" - a Capra bio saying that. We don't *remember* it in real time. I've asked. It's gone; all of it that's not written down.
I don't have an answer. Nobody does.
This is an excellent essay. It has problems.
But: Where to start?
First, Marx was never right. It's not that he lost; he used as a foundation Thomas Malthus, and Malthus Was Wrong. Malthus could not have known that. Indeed, the first close thing to a Malthusian Crisis in the 20th Century was the Ukrainian crop failures immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. Guess who came their aid? Yep. The capitalist US; this and WWI led to a bubble in wheat, which led to the dust bowl. Oh, and all that Steinbeck that applies. Brought to you by the Bolshies.
Nice, eh?
No less than Mussolini knew that Marx was a dead issue by the 1920s. Mussolini built a system - Fascism - based on having guilds run things oligarchically. We, frankly, did somewhat *same* in the US but without as much uniform-wearing and goose-steeping. It was just how people saw efficiency then - top-down coordination. That's more or less what Galbraith outlined in "The Modern Industrial State".
But mathematicians were undermining this rapidly.
So that leaves us perhaps with a more moderate, perhaps Fabian Socialism.It is subject to corruption. Maybe there is a way for it to work; it mostly hasn't. We are so oh my God terrible at redistribution. It defies all logic. Yes, even the Nordics are, although they are better than we ( the US ) is at it.
And you can't move it up the Maslow hierarchy ( e.g; once food is solved, then the Maslow goods higher up the pyramid are even more complex and need the sort of information transfers that only markets can give). That's where we are now - increasingly, everything is "free" except real estate and other such goods. The second billion iPhones cost a lot less than the first and a marginal iPhone costs next to nothing. Your average flip phone, they more or less *give* away.Pretty quickly, you run up against status, and that's completely intractable. I know "Homicide:" covered this; my understanding is that "The Wire" also did.
Unions? No. Unions only worked when they interfaced with the Galbraith Modern Industrial State apparatus, large monolithic corporations where we'd decided we didn't need competition any more because we would hire the smartest people, so it was all Optimal.
Yeah, right.So long as the rest of the world lay in ruins.
That entire regime was actually kind of hateful. Our dads sucked it up, but it wore them out. They wanted the college kids of the 1960s to have it that much better; "don't be a welder like me, son." Nobody could really speak for G.M. because it wasn't a good company, truthfully. It was a spiteful, petulant organization. You had a narrow band of guys and gals who worked there long enough to retire. The rest was, frankly, pretty hellish.
Other outfits were less so, but it was largely a soul-crushing existence. You might get lucky and find something cool, but rarely. Even the research PhDs I knew lived lives of quiet desperation.
We don't have to do that anymore, no matter what else.
A present-day, taut-run corporation can't entertain the potential of a strike. There's too much
leverege, margins are too thin and it'd kill the firm. The people in the 1% aren't there, anyway -
they've cashed out or are "rockstars" who mainly trade on their name. The live on rents on their reputation, not what they actually do. Yes, this is true of surgeons - if you'll think about it. As soon as it is not, surgeons get the same cost curve as machinists. It's happening. Literally - PR is how people get into the 1% - no, I do not mean the 0.01% - I mean the 1%. Most of it is DIY PR/resume building, but that's what it still is.
You hit a key with Nixon's abandonment of the Gold Standard ( really, the abandonment of Bretton
Woods ) - well, Bretton Woods was terrible to begin with. It was a base hack implemented at the end of WWII and had lived long enough. Had it actually been debasing the currency, then the U.S. should have dominated in exports.
None of that happened. *We do not, to this day, know what happened*.
Global movement of capital was sluggish and declining; Nixon knew what he was doing. From 1973 to 1981, when Fed Chairman Vocker clamped down, ... well that's the cycle time for that mechanism. From '81 on to '00 was a pretty good run.
Yeah - you can trace this back to the abandonment of Bretton Woods - but - as opposed to *what*?
I'd say we have guesses about what *did* happen post 1973. But nobody actually knows. Closest I have seen is a piece by Megan McArdle -
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-05/what-caused-labor-to-lose-big-in-the-1970s-.html
My credo is that of Scott Sumner - that money isn't flowing because the Fed is remiss in "printing" enough money to even cover GDP and population growth. That tracking CPI growth misstates inflation in a way that pushes us towards deflation. That we don't have more GDP growth because the money-machineries haven't worked since 2000. This is for *electoral*, *political* reasons - there is an unreasoning fear of inflation.
Markets channel massive *information*. The more nodes there are in a market ( sellers/buyers ), the faster the info flows and the more of it there is. The large monolithics grew until they became information-infeasible. The 1930s math guys were converging on the monolithics on three fronts - information theory, undecidability and (roughly) the economies of networks
This couples strongly with the basic central tenet of Liberalism - the individual is the King. So not only
does Collectivism of any sort rankle for historical reasons it's inefficient and it does not support the primacy of the individual. This is distressingly difficult - the European socialisms evolved in the wake of the razing of Europe.
So Socialism is *unthinkable* to us. It would require us thinking as if we had been defeated in a total war to change that. Meanwhile, the unemployed have to "start businesses" if they don't wanna join the criminal class, and that is not a bunch who are very open to anything like socialism.The kids don't really buy it, either - they're a lot Libertarian once they think about it long enough. Plus, inter generational resentment plus bad Apocalyptic deficit reporting means Social Security and Medicare scare them.
What made an "us" out of the Depression was all that propaganda on film in the Second World War. Capra, Kazan were either propagandists or reactors-to-propaganda. This isn't me; this is "The Name Above the Title" - a Capra bio saying that. We don't *remember* it in real time. I've asked. It's gone; all of it that's not written down.
I don't have an answer. Nobody does.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)