Educated Confusion

This weekend, I found the consequences of a hawk catching a pigeon in my driveway. It basically looked as though a grenade had blown it to pieces.  There were about a hundred and fifty feathers spread all over, strangely, there was not much red in the picture. This led me to a few thoughts on economics.

Also, this weekend, a couple of friends of mine, were having an extremely esoteric argument about version control systems. This is all the rage in programming right now.

It is wonderful that we have enough free time to discuss these obscure topics, but it is also one of the primary reasons that economists are led to believe that they are the only ones thinking about the “important” or “real” problems.

Seeing the pigeon, bothered me in a strange way, perhaps that I am not thinking about the important problems enough. Second, it’s body was completely annihilated, it is rare that we humans are left like that. Even if we die from a car accident or cancer, our bodies are usually left in tact for a funeral and burial. Humans like to control this process. To leave another human to be eaten by an animal is an insult to our pride. We are obsessed with the process.

The free spirited mind spends so much time thinking and arguing about the minutia, but in the end success or failure is binary, life or death. It is similar to how kittens play, while adults hunt and defend.

Your business and/or professional model must work or you will die. You can struggle all you want and still, indeed, fail. There is nothing wrong with incorporating new thoughts and techniques into your hunt, but do not place too much time and energy into fine tuning means to an end, while loosing sight of the end. In fact, we all fail eventually!

I propose a new law that will empower all people. It is called the Health Care Reform Amendment Act 2010 and will henceforth be called The Law, with all the weight and profundity so implied.

Past reforms have proposed ridiculous ideas such as giving all people free health care managed by the government, while others have proposed forcing individuals to buy health care. These are all ridiculous and untenable. How can one imagine a resource distribution model that circumvents the market place? I call such nonsense flatly un-American. This is, above all things, a deeply principled nation after all.

I propose a new free market approach. First, company HR departments will be prohibited from buying insurance for their employees. This will empower individuals to research and purchase insurance based on it’s merits and price.

Second, we will circumvent the Hippocratic Oath by prohibiting individuals from going to the hospital if they do not have insurance. It will now be a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment.

This will empower individuals to make their own decisions about healthcare. Smart, shrewd individuals will be rewarded, while those who make bad decisions will be punished with death in the street at the scene of a car accident. More important than rewarding good decisions, The Law must assuredly punish bad ones. Its the American way.

These changes are necessary America. Without them, we will continue to give away health care and promote moral hazard in it’s most dastardly form and individuals will be crushed under the force of bureaucracy and government. I am sure you all agree no fate is worse than that dealt at the hands of government; even an identical or markedly worse fate at the whim of the American privateer.

This supposed link between minorities and the sub-prime crisis has bothered me for quite some time. Many conservatives are making the argument that illegal immigrants, minorities or the poor along with their Democratic allies have somehow created this sub-prime crisis. My fundamental argument is that the poor and minorities don’t control enough wealth to have the impact that conservatives are implying.

Let’s start with some basic numbers and do some basic arithmatic. The estimated value of the stock market in the USA in 2008 was 36 trillion dollars. The value of all real estate owned by households was in the range of 20 trillion. Insurance companies held 6.3 trillion, while the US GDP was 13 trillion. Commercial banks held about 10.8 trillion. Even with massive overlap in the asset classes that puts us up to at least 65 trillion in trade-able assets. The sub-prime was estimated at about 1.4 trillion in 2007, which makes it about 2%.

It gets a bit harder to discern what percent of the 1.4 trillion in subprime loans were made to minorities, illegal immigrants, and poor people, but one can estimate that if they were able to get loans at a rate similar to whites, then the percentages of loans should be similar to their percentage of the population.

That gives us the following.

• 9.4% Black Subprime = 132 Billion = 2/10ths of a percent value of US tradable assets
• 10.4% Hispanic Subprime = 146 Billion = 2/10ths of a percent value of US tradeable assets

Out of these numbers, what percentage could be illegal immigrants? Let’s estimate high and say that 25% of Hispanic, subprime loan customers are illegal. That gives us the following

• 2.6% Illegal Hispanic Subprime = 36.5 Billion = 1/20th of a percent value of US tradable assets

Honestly, what effect could 1/20th of a percent have on our economy. It just sounds like rhetoric.

Links

• http://www.180people.com/2008/November/The-Sub-Prime-Loan-Crisis-and-the-Illegal-Immigration-Link.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_States#Race
• http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/realestate/03mort.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=sub%20prime%20loans%20minorities&st=cse

Just read this article and, I hate to admit it; I really, really hate to admit it. I think Microsoft is right on with this one and it scares me. I see so many people looking at new technology in this down economy and that is helping Redhat because MS Server with SQL Server is about 5K/year. Compared to about 1K/year for RHEL5/MySQL, it looks pretty good. But if your cloud computing offers are about the same price, now you have competition and since Microsoft holds the home court advantage, this is bad.  People love the mushy familiarity of Windows, and if I they can buy it at 12 cents/hour, that is a pretty attractive offer.

Steve Ballmer is still an idiot though.

Update: Technically Linux on Amazon is a bit cheaper at .10 cents/hour, and Microsofts solution is a bit more expensive on storage too at 15 cents/gigabyte

I often read Matt Assay’s “Open Road”. For the most part I like reading his take on the open source world, but every now and then he posts something that makes me feel like I am researching lesser known connections of some political organization. Really, I didn’t know the Heritage Foundation was connected to Chechnyan Rebels. But wait, aren’t they leading the war on terror?

Recently, he posted a comment about the the differences between the Apache licensing and the GPL (here). I followed one of the links to a blog post from a guy named Benjamin Black (here), notice the title. Both are positing that the Apache license is better than the GPL because it allows more freedom and does not infect your code like a virus, which is generally true, though I am not convinced that this is worse than total freedom. They posit that this can lead to abuse.

Benjamin Black gives two examples of people abusing the GPL. His first example may have some merit (here). It looks like they are dual licensing it, which means they can choose who gets freedom to do different things. The second example is of from Zed Shaw who wrote Mongrel which is a web server that, I believe, is popular among Ruby programmers, though I have never used myself. Zed explains that if he doesn’t GPL than other people and companies can abuse him, which he explains here (here). I think Zed makes a fairly strong, if emotionally connected, points and I feel quite similar to him when I am coding myself.

Either way, I am glad we have the choice between all of these different licenses, but I think I will stick with the GPL for now. The debate rages on, which side are you on?

About two months ago, I watched a documentary on PBS entitled The Truth According to Wikipedia. As the title suggests, the film focuses on Wikipedia. But it’s really an exploration of how the Internet has enabled worldwide collaborative ventures, and how this has affected the way the world gathers, assembles, shares, uses, and discusses information. The creators were able to present in a clear, informative manner (a rarity for issues-based documentaries, in my experience) the reasoning of both proponents and critics of Wikipedia-style approaches to online media.

One of the critics featured in the film is Andrew Keen, founder of the defunct website, audiocafe.com. During the 90’s and early 2000’s, Keen was a strong proponent of Internet ideals, such as universal access to digital content, but more recently has developed a profound distaste for all things Web 2.0. In the past few years, he has gone on the offensive, arguing that the core values of the New Internet – decentralization, participation, and user-generation of content – have had an increasingly corrosive effect on our economy, politics, and culture. Consider the following excerpt from the film, where Keen addresses an audience of Web 2.0 architects and enthusiasts who believe that their,

‘MyWorld’ … will lead to ‘more democracy, more equality, and more freedom.’ Now I [i.e. Keen] strongly disagree; that’s the essence of my polemic. I argue ‘me’ – that this personalization of media, personalization of culture, the fragmentation of society, indeed, into ‘me,’ into everything becoming increasingly more personalized, is resulting in reality in less democracy, less equality, and less freedom. (The Truth According to Wikipedia, @ circa 12:15 – 13:01)

A bold thesis, to be sure. One that challenged me to evaluate my own intuitions on this issue and intrigued me enough to read Keen’s book on the subject, The Cult of the Amateur. I wanted to see how strong his argument was in support of his view. It essentially boiled down to this:

1. In order for our culture to survive. society needs “gatekeepers,” individuals whose judgments and abilities to perform certain duties can be trusted.

2. Experts and professionals are the gatekeepers of society.

3. But Web 2.0 principles destroy expertise and professionalism, since they require that one extol the anonymous amateur, elevating amateur judgment and performance to a level equal with and sometimes even superior to that of the expert or professional.

4. Therefore, Web 2.0 principles are a threat to the survival of our culture.

Keen spends virtually no time arguing for (1) and (2), instead opting to make the case for (3). He cites statistics about how, since the mid-90’s, profits have increasingly fallen in professional journalism and the music and film industries; he highlights cases where misinformation spread via the Internet has had damaging effects on people’s personal and professional lives; and he points to trends in marketing that increasingly blur the line between advertisement and content.  According to Keen, this evidence not only shows that blogs, social networking cites, and peer-to-peer file sharing technologies are responsible for lost revenue in journalism and the entertainment industry, effectively ruining the careers of media professionals the world over, it shows that amateurs and advertisers are taking over their roles and filling the Web with untrustworthy, low-quality content.

Of course, Keen’s own interpretation of this evidence is questionable: one could maintain that professional journalism and the music and movie industries are seeing reduced profits because they employ a legacy business model ill-equipped for the digital age, and one could dig in one’s heels and cite contrary evidence regarding the amount and quality of trustworthy content on the Internet. But debating the fine points about how Keen’s evidence should be interpreted is really a moot point. His analysis suffers from a more basic problem insofar as he has, at best, shown only that increased untrustworthiness of Internet content and decreased revenue in professional journalism has coincided with the implementation of Web 2.0 principles when what he needs to show in order for his argument to work is that the implementation of Web 2.0 principles has caused the supposed ‘destruction of expertise and professionalism.’

But suppose for a moment that Keen does establish a causal connection. Should it then be beyond any reasonable doubt that Web 2.0 threatens to unravel our culture? This hinges on the plausibility of Keen’s assumptions that gatekeepers are needed for the continuation of culture and that only experts and professionals can fill that niche. Now even granting that professionals are to be exclusively identified with gate keepers, it doesn’t necessarily follow that professionalization of a field or cultural activity will guarantee its survival. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere about my own field (i.e. philosophy), professionalization has largely proven to have a cannibalizing effect and the key to its survival may perhaps involve some degree of “informalizing” and “amatuerizing.”  So, contra Keen, Web 2.0 principles might enhance rather than threaten the survivability of culture in at least some cases.

Of course, Keen could admit that a healthy dose of amateurism is needed, while still maintaining that a society’s culture can’t do without its gatekeepers. But this begs the question: just what is it about the role of the gatekeeper that makes him or her so indispensable?  According to Keen, culture is about truth, and “the gate keeper is the key player in the truth, because the gatekeeper, whether they’re an editor at an encyclopedia, or a record agent, or a newspaper publisher, they’re the one’s who determine truth” (The Truth According to Wikipedia, @ circa 24:00-24:20) And in The Cult of the Amatuer, Keen draws on the work of anthropologist Ernest Gellner and political scientist Benedict Anderson to explain that gate keepers provide society cohesiveness by presenting the public a shared narrative and common worldview:

As anthropologist Ernest Gellner argues in his classic Nations and Nationalism, the core of the modern social contract is rooted in our common culture, in our language, and in our shared assumptions about the world. Modern man is socialized by what the anthropologist calls a common “high culture.” Our community and cultural identity, Geller says, come from newspapers and magazines, television, books, and movies. Mainstream media provides us with common frames of reference, a common conversation, and common values. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, explains that modern communities are established through the telling of common stories, the formation of communal myths, the shared sense of participating in the same daily narrative of life (The Cult of the Amatuer, p. 80).

The notion that truth, trustworthiness, and their intimate relationship (among other things) lie at the heart of culture should be unproblematic. However, Keen’s description of culture’s gatekeepers as determiners of truth sounds far less like our own cultural ideal – namely, a culture that is both free and democratic -  and more like the ideal state of Plato’s Republic. Indeed, Keen’s gate keepers are virtually indistinguishable from Plato’s description of the guardian class, whose role is to present a noble lie to an overwhelming mass of people inherently incapable of understanding truth. The culture Keen envisions is oligarchic, one in which societal control is placed in the hands of an elite class who have presumably exclusive access to truth and a monopoly on creativity. By contrast, a democratic society, whether it has professionals or not, leaves no room for Keen’s gate keepers. It assumes a fundamentally different epistemology and “technology” – one in which each person is presumed to be endowed with an inborn capability to discern truth and to utilize their creativity for productive purposes. Reality is supposed to be the determiner of truth, and it is through observation, conversation, and debate that we arrive at it. If anything, then, the principles of Web 2.0 would seem to compliment or support the ideal of democratic culture, rather than usher in it’s demise.

Has Web 2.0 had a Corrosive Effect on Democracy? by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

My senior year in college I wrote a paper about Open Source and it’s implementation in Brazil. This work follows that same line of thought. This is really cool because it shows how different governments are implementing open source.

It’s especially interesting that some countries (USA, China) have such active communities, while other countries (France, Spain) are so aggressive to implement in their governments.

http://www.redhat.com/about/where-is-open-source/activity/

I use Linux for several philosophical reasons and technical reasons. I think open source code is open knowledge and pretty much a basic human right. This article highlights why others use open source. One of his most innovative ideas, is people don’t criticize you for the way you do something, they normally say, “Hey, I didn’t know you could to ABC like that.”

http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2009/042109-why-i-use.html?page=1

This article is fairly long and comes off at times a defense piece for Alren Specter, but in general his points are well taken for me.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22656