Month: October 2016

The Dictator’s Handbook is Self Falsifying

by doctormo

I’ve been reading “The Dictator’s Handbook” this week, a recommendation from CGP-Grey (youtube) and a damn good one. It’s a description of how people who want power, get power and how they keep it once they have it. I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but suffice to say that it has a lot of good things to say about murdering people to get what you want.

The idea I want to explore in this blog post is using understanding, and “Life the Universe and Everything”. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; in the story we are told:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened.

This is why in the story the answer to the question of Life the Universe and Everything is “42”, but that the question itself was unknown. Knowing both question and answer would cause the above self destruction/recreation and it’s imperative that the characters never find out both.

The nature of understanding in that universe is thus that it is not just non-understandable, but deliberately evasive. The rules of the game will change as soon as you know the rules of the game. Not in some god like way of keeping you in the dark deliberately, as if the universe had agency, but because somehow what you know is tied to how things work.

So how does this relate to Dictators?

Well the book is so good at explaining the mechanics of the interpersonal relationships in ruling a country or business that it may change the behaviour of people who have read the book. It may change their behaviour enough to actually make the book’s premise false. Not that it’s false when you haven’t read the book, only that it’s false when you have.

But, this make one giant Saturn sized assumption. That it is possible to change how you act in a certain circumstance given this knowledge. If it’s not changeable, then knowing it doesn’t matter and no amount of self-help or ingenious insights into the human condition will change our society. But the book’s preface is that knowing the rules that rulers rule by can help improve society, so it expects behaviour to be changeable and if is then someone somewhere will figure out how to exploit this new behaviour.

Once you have the sort of second order exploit, you get a very complicated dance between people who understand, people who do not understand and people who want to exploit either group.

Hence the mechanism described in the book will “instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable”. Thanks Douglas Adams.

To drive this idea a bit further. This in my mind creates two quantifiably different types of truth. That which is understandable but unchangeable is solid or foundational truth. Like Mathematics, knowing 2 + 2 = 5 and why doesn’t allow you to change it’s truthfulness. Then there is mutable truth, where knowing how and why something is true allows you to manipulate it into falsity. This is especially true in biological and social sciences where adversarial mechanisms are in constant flux.

What do you think?

Total Aid

by doctormo

In politics, I’m not happy. As the world becomes politically harsher, crueller and more self serving; we hear and see the heart breaking plight of millions of Syrians and others fleeing their war-torn countries.

Someone recently asked me what the difference is between the wars we have today and the First and Second World Wars. Apart from the global nature of the wars, the Syrian war is different because it’s not Total War. This concept involves the participating countries dedicating every part of their military, economic and civic power into fighting the war. This was very different from past wars, where non-combatants didn’t usually get slaughtered, far away factories didn’t get bombed and neutral nations didn’t get invaded for resources.

There’s pressure from both sides of the Atlantic to increase the amount of our country’s power dedicated to fighting Russia, Syria, whoever else. In the name of democracy, or in the name of survival. I’m just not sure it’s helpful for the two western countries doing the least for Syrians to be the ones advocating more violence.

For example. The UK Government is under attack for it’s position that foreign nationals should pay for all National Heath services. Including pregnant women from Syria. At this stage, anyone from Syria can hardly be said to have a country where you could send the bill, anyone who is missing a safe home country should be helped by the health system in the UK and anywhere else in the word. Not just emergency care, but pre-natal and other care too.

Instead of Total War and partial war I’d like to propose the concept of Total Aid and Equivalent Aid. The Later is simply that in times of crisis, we can mobilise our countries to fight, not fight with violence, but fight with compassion. To give everything we have to help, protect, heal and stabilise the people and structures that the crisis is threatening. This doesn’t have to be war, although the Syria crisis prompts me to consider this.

One would imagine us taking in Syrians in large numbers, to take the risk that a rare minority will be criminal or idealogical. Our security and police services ARE strong enough and competent enough to help too and I see no reason they should be missing from a plan for Total Aid. Health care, education, social support and basic structural support can come from all quarters of society, from all classes and all means. Your country needs you, to help another country.

Once mobilised, we our support and teaching would leave many people and their organisational structures able to go back and rebuild (if possible) or relocation and rebuild. It’s easier to rebuild if you have a social structure that’s not torn apart and the friendships and good will created by reaching out and embracing our brother country in whole would lead to better relations even surpassing idealogical and religious tensions.

We would also be leading by example and showing how strong we are that we can help so well and with so much good. Until the crisis is put to bed and the world as a whole can move on.

OK, so maybe you’re not convinced by Total Aid, maybe the troubles in the world could get so great that we need to think about our own lot. For you I offer option two. Equivalent Aid. That is, under agreement, treaty or convention a country will not spend money or take action with military violence without committing the same scale of operating and budget to helping survivors cope with what we have wrought on them.

I’d consider this the bare minimum human effort. The point at which a country goes from being a good country to a bad country. We are far from the point of spending the kinds of trillions on aid that we would have to to meet this target. But if we want to bomb places, if we want to invade things and generally mess up the place. Then we should at least be ready to pay for helping put some of it back together with equal force.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Free Software Faith for the Long Term

by doctormo

I’ve been an advocate for Free and Open Source Software for a long, long time. When I first got into it, it felt right, just, progressive. I struggle with how to communicate that feeling of freedom to others, to make them understand how important Free Software is.

When we talk of Free Software dialectic conflicts, there are two big fronts; the first is the idea that Proprietary software is a /better/ way to make software. Developers get paid, investors make money, huge profits can be poured into research and development. This is your Microsofts and Apples. Let’s ignore that idea today.

The second battle is practicalism. This idea says that it doesn’t matter how the software was made, just that it needs to work. Let’s explore why this idea is an important conflict. Practical solutions often favour the short term and the local. That is, they are solutions which usually a single person will make a decision about what software to use and the criteria most important is the cost (money, time, effort) to get it working in the here and now.

The conflict comes about because often Free Software is a more expensive proposition in the here and now. It’s more expensive because it takes more time to set up, or it’s tools are not tested as much, or not designed as well, or the more insidious reason: the wider world does not support Free Software causing the Free Software solution to be on the loosing end of a powerful network effect.

But proprietary software often has hidden costs. After the initial purchase costs, these are often either societal or long term costs. Societal and long term are the direct opposite of a practical decision. Thus they are not considered, or not valued highly when making the decision.

There is one parallel which I hate to make. Religion. Here is another societal and long term cultural device. Most religions ask participants to give up the bad behaviours in the here and now and be a little more patient for the better life or better after life. I’m horribly simplifying here so please forgive me. But religions mostly work on faith and their evangelicalism pressures people to consider the societal and long term. This is why I think Free Software advocates are so often compared to religious fundermentalists. It’s a cheap shot; it does not follow that faith in Free Software is faith against evidence. That’s just a bad argument.

But it’s worth considering that Free Software is a hard sell precisely because it’s a societal good that requires powerful network effects on it’s side in order to be fully effective. Having a self-sacrificing religion of one is foolish, but a society of good intentions can be a powerful force. We in the Free Software world often have to invest more, pay more and spend more time to make the Free Software world we want to see, and to see it happen for ourselves and our friends and families. But this will only be the case so long as the network effects are against us and I don’t believe they always will be.

Now consider Ubuntu. Here’s platform that tried to move some of the power away from practicamism by making Ubuntu easy to install, easy to use, a joy to behold. Things that are genuinely empowering to Free Software. As it built itself up, the negative network effects started to weaken and Ubuntu users enjoyed for a time, a level of support from the wider world that had not been experienced before.

But that naturally led to the in-fighting. It’s typical for the front runner to be targeted by all the also-ran distributions. The FSF targeted Ubuntu’s practicalist concessions (even though they were fairly minimal), Other distributions ripped Ubuntu and their community apart, trying to block Ubuntu’s success. I’m not saying they meant to do it, or that it was a conspiracy. But that these other communities did not see Ubuntu’s success as their own success and naturally tried to undermine it as humans are likely to do.

So for very human reasons, we’re here with no real champion for Free Software in the practical arena. Ubuntu has fallen for its own hype and is not able to being the Free Software faith with it, even if it was successful. The societal and long term benefits of Free software remain largely unknown to the majority of the world and we wait patiently for a successor that can try again to change the world.

What do you think? Comment below.