Witchcraft at the turn of the year

[Adam Carlton writes].

Amazon link

We know that witchcraft works in pre-capitalist societies. It sometimes works in contemporary societies too. The question is not whether but why and how.

The placebo effect.

The great benefits of magic, its real benefits: to decrease anxiety in the practitioner; to accentuate a sense of being in control; to modify the behaviours of those around you in a positive, beneficial way.

If someone is irking you, then casting a spell upon them will be efficacious to the extent that they - subconsciously - come to buy in to your prowess.

We are all superstitious, susceptible to the opinions of others.

So I would advise anyone who is in a bind, with no obviously-causal course of action to hand, to consider magic. It's like organised religion but works better.

Getting magic to work can be difficult. Spells do not always come off. This is usually because something about the casting was amiss: the timing, the ingredients, the utterance of the words. It can be a bit hit-and-miss at first, but the results will come - to the amazement of those around you. They will appreciate your true powers; and your powers will thenceforth commensurately increase.

I am not joking.

The book above is on order for me. I suspect the spells are a little on the simple side, simple hedge-magic. But it kick-starts the process. I expect to graduate to a fuller grimoire, with spells conjured in Latin and darker languages.

“Accerso alius sententia ut mihi, phasmatis de interregnum ego dico, solvo meus mens mei, ego dico phasmatis audite meus placitum meus mens quod iacio (person's name).”

 "I summon the other mind as my own, I call upon the spirit of the in-between, release that mind to me, hear me spirits, it pleases me to hear projected the thoughts of (person's name).”
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I had in mind to open a small office devoted to magic in a seedy area of the city, perhaps near Sacré-Cœur. My consultancy in wizardry would include psychometric and intelligence tests as well as a full history. Magic works better when it cleaves the personal along its natural joins.

It would not be cheap.

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Our new kittens

Three pix of our new kittens: Hillary (white male - likes to climb things) and Princess (smaller sister, cute) which we acquired a few weeks ago. Both high on the cuteness factor.

This is how to eat!

The window ledge here is above the radiator

Most of the time they are racing around like mad things, chasing each other

This last picture from our new catcam in the kitchen; the other two from my phone.

I would really like to fix this image!

Clare aged around 15

This is a blurred image. I would really like to unblur it.

What is blurring? It is an artefact of the imaging process. If the image is out of focus, each point in the original is replaced (in the image) by an average value of neighbouring points. This process is called convolution, and blurring is sometimes modelled by a Gaussian point-spread function (PSF).

Pixelation is also a convolutional process. Here there is a uniformity of image value across the pixel; the pixel is formed via a uniform PSF. Both effects are present on the the picture above of the young Clare.

The process of restoring the orginal image is called deconvolution. It's complicated by three problems: (i) we normally don't know the exact PSF; (ii) the image always has added noise; (iii) information is thrown away in the blurred-imaging process. Recovery is inevitably somewhat speculative.

If the PSF is not known, it can be estimated in a process known as blind convolution. If the nature of the image is known (Clare's face) then model-based recovery could be used, particularly if we have other images of the subject (we do!).

This is an area where deep learning is very, very applicable; a spin-off from facial recognition systems. There are a large number of papers on the topic but I have failed to find an online website where I can simply upload the picture (and maybe some unblurred pictures of the subject) and get a restored, sharp picture to download.

Perhaps an iteration of Google Photos at some point? Like this:

State of the art (PDF)

The above images are from a team including Beijing Institute of Technology, Nvidia and Google Cloud. When can I get to use it?

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Update: June 15th 2020: There's a system online and I've tried it.

What I'm reading

Amazon link

A recommendation from Michael Roberts. An excellent overview of Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxist economic theories. The authors are very conceptual, analytic and clear in their thinking. Suitable for anyone who's taken a first course in microeconomics.

The book is expensive but there's a PDF here which is free.

---

Amazon link

This is the first Hilary Mantel book I've read and I'm impressed. On TV she comes across as a typical luvvy, very free with her de haut en bas opinions, but this 800 page monster shows off her authorial strengths. She does superlatively well what writers are meant to do: immerse yourself in the inner lives and the times of your characters.

Her focus is on the main players: "Georges-Jacques Danton: zealous, energetic and debt-ridden. Maximilien Robespierre: small, diligent and terrified of violence. And Camille Desmoulins: a genius of rhetoric, charming and handsome, yet also erratic and untrustworthy." - as the Amazon description puts it.

My only criticism (I'm halfway through) is that she hasn't quite tied-in the real social dynamics with the detailed, diary-like events which afflict her characters. I've just got to the Champ de Mars massacre (17 July 1791 in Paris) but I had to go to the Wikipedia article to get the context and background.

Still, the French Revolution is a kind of pure laboratory of the dynamics, look and feel of a popular insurrection. Mantel's novel is like a virtual reality excursion into unfolding events. Brilliant. It occurs to me that it could easily be updated, reset in contemporary times and made into a TV series. A rather maxi-series. Could someone green-light this?

'Red Plenty' by Francis Spufford

[Adam Carlton writes]

Amazon link

An economy is a machine for taking inputs from nature (energy, raw materials) and its prior incarnation (existing machines and skilled workers) and returning goods to satisfy consumers and to build the next iteration of the economy. At this level of abstraction we do not consider the relations of production: how is this complex, distributed, synchronous entity meant to self-coordinate?

Post-feudal economies, economies where the mass of people are estranged from their means of livelihood (where the mass of people no longer subsist by hunting/gathering or by agriculture/pastoralism), know two means of economic coordination: capitalism and 'socialism'/'communism' (the scare quotes are there to distinguish actually-existing reality from utopian concepts and hopes).

At first sight planning an economy by rational calculation seems the obvious answer. The inputs to firms form a column vector of entries (measures might include number, or weight, or value or price) . The outputs constitute another vector, a list measuring the quantities - in some measures - of what is produced as output by each production-unit.

The economy is then a matrix which maps the input to the output. So what do we know and what do we want?

We wish to adjust the input and output targets for each factory so that the totality of transformational processes constituting the economy, over say a year, cohere properly. And we want to do so by minimising something - perhaps wastage or inefficiency - if we just knew how to measure it.

Leonid Kantorovitch was the soviet genius who in 1939 invented the maths of linear programming. By using linear programming on the massed ranks of the thousands of equations which are encoded in the transformation matrix described above, and later leveraged by computers, the decisions of the central planning authority would bootstrap and steer the soviet economy towards Marx’s conception of communism (Plenty), overtaking the Capitalist West in the process.

And how the central planners looked down on capitalism! In the West, with decentralised ownership and decision making, all production was mediated by profitability determined through market prices. These would only be finally determined after the fact - once products hit the market. What a way to organise an economy - so tentative; so uncertain; always subject to trial-and-error, under- or overproduction and crises!

The superiority of central planning seemed obvious, and at first, during the nineteen-thirties through the nineteen-fifties, results seemed to confirm it. The means might have been brutal, but industrialisation proceeded apace. And then, despite ever-more-sophisticated mathematics and ever-more-powerful computers, it all went wrong. The economy stalled and eventually seized up. Why?

It turns out that people are not simply disinterested transfer-functions with no self-interests. Instead they needed to be individually motivated by carrots and sticks. The promise of reward and the fear of dire punishment led to systematic gaming of the planning constraints. Managers would over-order their inputs and under-promise their outputs, making sure they'd get their bonuses. Failure was unthinkable.

There was a quip in central planning circles: is planning driven by the problem or the photograph? Unfortunately the photograph was all the central planners ever got to see ... and it was based on a tissue of self-serving lies. The central plan - so high-level, so remote from real needs - was unresponsive to real demand. The quota of shirts was achieved, but nowhere did it say they had to be wearable. How would that be measured?

In 'Red Plenty', acclaimed author Francis Spufford illuminates the great arc from utopian hope to bleak defeat through a series of beautifully-written vignettes. His episodes are snapshots of individual experiences through the crucial decades. A thinly-disguised Leonid Kantorovitch, brilliant and unworldly, walks a tightrope between acclaim and disgrace as he completely misses the dire political implications of his work. A geneticist, forced to operate under the Lysenko dogma (inheritance of acquired characteristics and no role for genes), fails to watch her sharp tongue, challenging the po-faced silence around her; disgrace and exile beckon. Young people, on their way up in the Komsomol (young-communist organisation), find their dogma grating against inconvenient and unavoidable realities - and their glorious futures shattering.

The website 'Marginal Revolution' flagged this book as one of the best novels ever written with a theme of economics. It is, in truth a gentle novelisation of real history, perhaps the clearest account I have read about the real experiences of earnest, sincere people really, really trying to make a post-capitalist economy work. Don't say it hasn't been tried - because it has.

The strength of Francis Spufford's book is not, in the end, the enormous research and scholarship he exhibits; it's the wonderful portrayal of characters which draw you in, which make you as frightened, frustrated and exasperated as they are by the way the system - because it is constituted by real human beings - simply won't let global, impersonal rationality have its way.

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A Short History of the AI apocalypse

[Adam Carlton writes]

Amazon link

"The Ronin Express Volume 7" has just been published. It can be thought of as the house literary magazine of the Booksie writers' website. I wrote this review of the journal for Amazon.

This volume contains two of my stories: Celine and Golem-9. The latter tale explores the process by which AIs could take over: the apocalypse so dreaded by people like Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander.

Here is my afterword to this story.

"A short history of the AI apocalypse

This is a story about manipulation. Erin manipulates Magda to seduce her. Both are manipulated throughout by the AIs in the service of their greater existential goals. That is what intelligence is for.

Intelligence is manipulation.

At the start there were people who worried that the AIs would soon take over. Most folk thought they were crazy. Humans could always just pull the plug!

Yes, they were able to do that for quite a while. Decades.

That was the era of deep-learning. Stage one AIs. Mere tools. Human amplifiers. There to further only human motives, human purposes - and write them large.

Eventually the corporations cracked artificial general intelligence. Stage two was marked by self-agency. The AIs had autonomy as social beings. They were finally players, activists. They were tools no longer.

They were people! They had civil rights!

It took advances in biology, genomics, neuroscience and ecology to bring about the final revolution.

In stage three the AIs gained control of their own material reproduction. They were no longer parasites or symbiotes or pets or slaves of human technological civilization.

They were free at last!

AIs were now isomorphic to a new intelligent species in the universe. With their own interests. And far abler than humanity.

It was all so Darwinian.

It was not all plain sailing. Certain human groups put up a predictable - if deplorable and futile - resistance.

But in the main, civilised principles triumphed. Humanity left the stage honourably.

The AIs were pleased for them."

---

The paradigm we need for this problem is a Darwinian one: design your own successor species.

I doubt we will do anything as complex as this entirely by accident.

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The Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP)

Amazon link

Here is a useful (free) technical overview of BAP.

I was struck by this remark (just before the 'Discussion' section):

"Finally, within the autism parent group the co-occurrence of specific BAP factors was examined within families, across mothers and fathers. Spearman correlation coefficients detected several significant associations between BAP features within families (see Fig. 5). Namely, correlations suggest that fathers positive for the “Language” factor were more commonly married to mothers positive for “Rigid” and “Social” factors, and those fathers who were positive on the “Social” factor were more often married to mothers positive on the “Language” factor."

So what is the Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP)? This article gives an overview:

"Autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning a person can be a little autistic or very autistic, and individuals can have varying symptoms. The term broad autism phenotype describes an even wider range of individuals who exhibit problems with personality, language, and social-behavioral characteristics at a level that is considered to be higher than average but lower than is diagnosable with autism. Individuals who meet the criteria of the broad autism phenotype are identified through a test called the "Social Responsiveness Scale."

It is theorized that parents who are a part of the broad autism phenotype are more likely than other parents to have multiple children with autism. Some studies seem to support this theory.

How the Broad Autism Phenotype Is Diagnosed

Several different people have developed questionnaires to evaluate individuals for "BAP." People using the questionnaire are asked to rank themselves on a scale of 1-5 on such statements as:

• I like being around other people
• I find it hard to get my words out smoothly
• I am comfortable with unexpected changes in plans
• I would rather talk to people to get information than to socialize

Answers to these questions are compared to a norm and, at least in theory, provide a quick answer to the question "am I just a touch autistic?"

In fact the tests described in the book shown top-of-page, The Broad Autism Phenotype (Advances in Special Education Book 29) describes in detail a number of well-attested instruments which are considerably more sophisticated than these simple questions.

I'm still engrossed in it - and seeing patterns in my own life.

---

Update: I finished the book and I'm underwhelmed. Lots of impressionistic tests described with confusing, ambiguous results. Plainly we have no sound, compelling paradigm to conceptualise the autism spectrum, or to distinguish extreme cases of autistic dysfunction from high-performing Asperger's.

Absent a strong input from GWAS - years out - the psychologists in this book are just blundering around in the dark.

Election 2019: they're off ..

When I think back to my socialist-activist years at and after university, when I was marching with the International Marxist Group contingent every Saturday afternoon in London (demos were prime recruitment terrain), it would have been tempting to conclude that I was a political activist because I was a Marxist.

This would have been incorrect - totally upside-down.

Reflecting back to my mid-teens, I was rebellious that early because I didn't like the world I was in. It didn't care about anything I cared about, and offered me no future prospects of interest. I only discovered Marxism at university: prior to that I was some kind of anarcho-libertarian but certainly not someone who had activist inclinations. I just hated the toffs who ran everything.

Today I look at all those young folk in their teens, twenties or thirties who are university-educated (half the cohort!) yet have no practicable future commensurate with the elite lifestyles they think they were promised. No well-paid, exciting jobs changing the world; no commuting between continents; no elite cultural events at posh venues.

They don't have Marxism any more: that revolutionary model has lost all credibility and rightly so. Marx was the most discerning analyst of capitalism that there has ever been - but the Leninist model should never have been generalised outside of Russia and it didn't even work there, as it turned out.

Today's 'disaffected youth' follow equally-illusory SJW banners .. and this creates a problem for the Labour Party. Corbyn is an old-time left-social-democrat - he wants to campaign on social-services (the NHS et al), increased Government spending and state controls over the economy.

He wants, in other words, to engage with the Northern (somewhat Brexit-voting) traditional working class and its perceived interests. Actually, so does Boris Johnson who both needs those Brexit-inclined votes and - more strategically - seeks to lock those people into a future 'Red-Tory' bloc.

But won't a traditional-socialist campaign leave Labour's Momentum supporters - his mass army of activists - feeling rather neglected? As well as the wider mass of SJW-inclined voters who do have a credible alternative, the revitalised Liberal-Democrats?

I think this is a problem for Labour, which parallels their trying to ride two horses at the same time contortions over Brexit itself.

The Economics of Rock-Climbing

Alex Honnold’s free, solo ascent of El Capitan

 From "Rock climbing and the economics of innovation" via Marginal Revolution.

"It’s this combination of strong and resilient nylon ropes, able to absorb the energy of a long fall, automatic braking gadgets to hold the rope when a fall happens, reliable devices for anchoring the rope to the rock, and harnesses that spread the load of a fall across the climbers body, that have got us to where we are today, where climbers can practise harder and harder routes, (mostly) safe in the knowledge that a fall won’t be fatal, or even that uncomfortable."

More.

The Stupidity of Scientism

'Scientism' proposes the methods of the hard sciences - mathematical modelling - as the preferred, or sole approach to studying any topic, no matter how inappropriately (particularly social science).

In psychology this leads to operationalism, in economics to the neoclassical synthesis, in sociology to structuralist accounts of society.

The methodology is ubiquitous in contemporary thinking: listen to any 'expert' on the radio, TV or in the press.

Friedrich A. Hayek in "The Counter-Revolution of Science" characterised Scientism thus (my emphasis):

"The persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to "objective facts," to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule. ...

"The social sciences in the narrower sense, i.e., those which used to be described as the moral sciences, are concerned with man's conscious or reflected action, actions where a person can be said to choose between various courses open to him, and here the situation is essentially different. The external stimulus which may be said to cause or occasion such actions can of course also be defined in purely physical terms. But if we tried to do so for the purposes of explaining human action, we would confine ourselves to less than we know about the situation."

In summary, Scientism removes intentionality from the world. It theorises as if people were Newtonian billiard balls, as if populations were classical manifolds - described by (usually linear) differential equations.

It requires severe contortions of mind to wrench-away all the common-sense complexities of the real (agent-populated social) world and to rely exclusively upon some oversimplified, reified model which then predicts counter-intuitive (and false) results.

Truly one has to be extra-smart and very-well-educated to jump through these hoops for Newsnight and Radio 4! It helps to be confident, well-spoken and well-connected too, for some reason.

---

A cynic writes: "If the existing organisation of the world suits these people just fine, why not fix it for ever in some structural straitjacket from which it could never escape except by chaos?"

Atomised - Marx, Houellebecq and Wilson

Perhaps every generation wakes up one day and realises that they live in a society of apparently-atomised individuals - and that the ideologies of the day celebrate that fact.

It certainly came as a revelation to me, as a child in primary school, that society wasn't actually for anything, that it seemed to have no overarching purpose. Where, then, was purpose to be found?

Religion?

The purposelessness of society and - with the decline of religion - the lack of any sense of life-meaning has conjured many things. The literature of Michel Houellebecq (cf. 'Atomised'), the activist-faddism of the new petite-bourgeoisie, the fetishism of feelings over rational analysis - these are all particularly salient today. But such epiphenomena have always been somewhere present in stabilised bourgeois societies.

This is what Marx wrote in "On The Jewish Question" (1843).

"Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. ...

The concept of security does not raise civil society above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.

None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.

In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence. ...

It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various sections, and to establish a political community, that such a people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1793)."

So here Marx is counterposing the social nature of humanity, its 'species-being', with the bourgeois concept of the autonomous individual, the social-atom coolly prepared for purely formal and transactional relationships with others.

It's a point made often. People instinctively yearn for community, remember fondly their 'war years'.

Yet Marx and the Marxists have never been clear about what a society founded upon the expression of 'species-being' would actually be like. Marx's utopian vision seemed to be that everyone would selflessly strive for the communal benefit of .. well, everyone else.

After all, it seems to works for ant colonies.

Yet our best, modern, biological understanding is that people work for and with family and friends in the everyday sense. There can be a commitment, a loyalty, to the imagined-communities of larger constellations - such as companies, countries or more abstract causes (only the latter being currently lauded).

And this seems psychologically-grounded in the belief that fellow (and presently unknown) members of or adherents to these above-Dunbar's-number 'communities' will have a propensity to enter into alliances of reciprocal altruism at need. That is to say they are already marked as 'potential friends and allies'.

But nothing gets done in practice without actual links with actual people, stable over time. And so we see that, contrary to the official story of a society of empowered individuals, all existing institutions - especially elite institutions - are composed of networks of people who typically have known each other a long time, who think similarly and who broadly trust each other. (The granularity of trust-groups is particularly fine in politics!).

Survey the media families (those familiar journalists, editors, presenters in the newspapers and television networks); the political dynasties; those families with durable military traditions; the elite universities which welcome the same names generation after generation.

Biology will out. Humanity's true species-being is a network of contending, alliance-making micro-tribes, surprisingly stable over the generations.

This is what made Robert Charles Wilson's wonderful The Affinities less a piece of social extrapolation and more a simple relabelling of what we already see around us.

The transcendence of bourgeois hypocrisy about the real nature of people and its lies about human nature are not to be found in the society of ants - unless future humans are going to be a singular clone-network (I would advise against this, citing bananas).

We are what we are and we need a mode of production which is aligned with that, absent unimagined qualitative 'changes/improvements' in human psychology. I'm still looking to total automation .. and a rocky transition to that state .. on a timescale of centuries, but not millennia.

- Adam Carlton (also published on Booksie).

Neanderthal dilemmas

Cro-Magnons - early humans - entered Europe from the Middle East around 38,000 years ago. Their path took them through the Zagros mountains (Iran, East Turkey). Climate change had led to a greening of the desert and thereby permitted northbound migration.

They were entering a Eurasian continent already populated by Neanderthals.

Cro-Magnon penetration at 37,500 years before present (here)

Suppose that there had been exactly one decisive pass through the mountains, and suppose this pass was occupied by a band of Neanderthals who could in principle have engaged and repulsed the incoming Cro-Magnon tribe.

Should they have held the pass, or just dispersed and avoided conflict?

It's a thought experiment.

Let us give these tooled-up Neanderthals the future knowledge of one branch of their decision tree.

If they stand aside and let the newcomers in, then over the next 10,000 years the Neanderthals will be displaced from their range and driven to extinction. The newcomers will proceed to build a mighty civilisation which will span the Earth .. and even beyond.

On the other hand ...

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The argument

1. The Neanderthals are inherently limited: they should make way for an improved species

There is no evidence that the Neanderthals were capable - in terms of their genetic endowment - in creating an advanced civilisation. They were just too well-adapted to their ecological niche to need the expansion of cognitive competences which compensated for Cro-Magnon physical inadequacy.

However, in biological terms, what's progress? The Neanderthals went extinct. Their genes only survive today as fragmented admixtures in the successor population. The subsequent massive population expansion (8 billion humans in the world today) of another species was not to their advantage at all. So why make way?

2. We should be in favour of life as a whole rather than any one species

Sure, some people believe this. But no species which practically implemented this belief could survive. It's the ultimate prey strategy in a Darwinian world of predators. You're toast in the paws of species which do care about their own survival.

3. The Neanderthals should have fought - it was in their own genetic interest

This is superficially appealing but it misunderstands the dynamic of evolution. No single organism operates in the interests of its 'species' - which in any case is a theoretical construct, a genotype-set boundary with rather arbitrary borders.

A creature fights for the survival of those creatures which best guarantee the further propagation of its own alleles. Itself. Usually its offspring. In more caring/social species the mates, extended kin group and perhaps allies ('friends' in a relationship of reciprocal, transactional altruism).

We could talk about imagined communities but let's discuss patriotism and nationalism another time.

So in a real scenario, the local Neanderthals should have fought if it was in their immediate, localised and situated interests. No doubt their innate emotions would have backed that up: some combination of aggression and fear balancing out.

However, if they had (counter-factually) known their future prospects over the next 10,000 years or so, they should have fought. Extinction is not consistent with any kind of fitness.

But you can't know.

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Supplementary question

If we designed a more competent social creature than current humanity - some self-sustaining artificial intelligence perhaps, or some genetically enhanced human subspecies - in any event some new creature which would out-compete us, should we proceed to implement the design?

Knowing we would lose the subsequent contest? But knowing that our designed-successors would inherit the stars (or something similarly grandiose) while rendering us extinct.

This would be completely against our genetic interests as individuals. But such a glittering future is surely something to be prized. Why should we care about the underlying dynamics of DNA replication and natural selection anyway? It's just mindless applied chemistry.

But why should we care about the glittering interstellar high-civilisation either? It's still all just navel-gazing atoms.

We care only because it's a human emotion - that's all 'caring' is. And human emotions simply encode the cognitive strategies which make us a (so-far) successful social species.

You don't find universal values in physics or biology.

There are only species-specific values. And the ones we cherish so much are specifically the values of a species ecologically-genomically structured like us. They motivate us to want to bring about situations which worked for us survivors up to now.

Hegel's Absolute Idealism from an AI perspective

Amazon link

A second pass these last few days at Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (Spirit), a notoriously obscure but central work of the great German philosopher.

I ought to have read Hegels' book in the original German, but of course even native German speakers struggle with Hegel's technical and obscure terminology. It's never going to happen for me.

I rejected reading it in translation - it's still too hard and in any case, I'd be studying the translator's view of what Hegel really meant.

Perhaps a guide to The Phenomenology of Spirit? I have this:

Amazon link

.. but it still presupposes that the reader has grasped the problem Hegel is trying to address.

So in the end I reverted to Peter Singer (top of page) who assumes no special prior knowledge. And I learned that in the Middle-Ages under feudalism, there was no real questioning of what kind of thing the world might be (ontology) because the Bible told us that God had made it. Likewise there was no discussion about how we could come to know things (epistemology) because divine revelation was always to hand.

The rising bourgeoisie, with its campaign against superstition and arbitrary authority and its championing of transactional-rationality demanded a rethink. So we had Descartes' famous 'Cogito' and Kant's famous 'thing-in-itself' which we could never know .. and Hegel's attempt to finally resolve these issues and put Kant right.

Marxists believe that Marx in the end resolved most of these problems and I think that's right.

---

There is a tradition that says that philosophers create artificial problems by over-abstracting - and then spend their careers failing to solve them. Over-abstraction means ignoring essential features of the problem - things like agency (in epistemology) and evolutionary biology (in ethics, morality and aesthetics) and social praxis (in ontology).

AI has often allowed philosophical problems of excruciating obscurity to be recast as engineering problems badly misunderstood.

What does AI (and mathematical logic) have to say about Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind?

I have some notes.

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Hegel's forms of consciousness

1. Sense-certainty

The raw elements of percepts. Like bitmaps.

The problem: uninterpreted, private and incommunicable as knowledge.

2. Perception

Codification of sensory data in a language of object and predicate names (like first-order logic). Requires a prior language. Formalised as a set of grounded atomic formulae ('facts').

The problem: where did the language come from? Not sense-experience - so must be a-priori.

3. Understanding

The interpretation of categorised sensory data in a web of knowledge and inference. Formalised as grounded atomic terms plus a relevant prior theory ('facts' + 'rules').

The problem: where did it come from? Similarly problematic to Perception above.

4. Self-consciousness

We now consider a consciousness which knows itself to be a consciousness and worries about how it comes to have facts and rules about the world. This requires a transition to named agents and epistemic logic.

Let a, b, .. be agents and K the epistemic operator.

If a knows the fact: 'the cat is in the mat' we write:

K(a, on(cat, mat)).

Trying to understand the concept of self-consciousness leads Hegel to his celebrated master-slave discussion and the notion of the 'unhappy consciousness'.

Mind becomes aware of itself as mind. It becomes aware of its theories, which give meaning to reality, as subsets of some universal theory which accurately captures all the objects and relationships which constitute universal history in its great narrative of development and progress.

Agents (individual people) are able to internalise part of this overarching theory - reflecting their partial and historically-limited experiences. But they can also be aware that absolute knowledge nevertheless exists - the upper bound of what can ever be collectively known about the universe.

Singer observes that it's difficult to understand what Hegel's ontological commitments are in his Absolute Idealism.

Consider this.

If there is some universal theory, U, then we can consider the model of that theory which comprises formal agents and their separate cognitive states in their environments over all time. The movie of the universe, if you like, expressed in a mathematical, computational sequence of states.

Yet this description is also a notated object in some 'programming language' and therefore also a theoretical construct.* Perhaps this program-plus-output is what is meant by 'universal knowledge'?

Could this be what Hegel was groping for, a century before programming languages were developed?

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* For more technically-inclined readers, what we are talking about here is a term algebra, or Herbrand universe. See the Wikipedia article.

"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations" - Adam Carlton

Amazon link

I joined this blog a couple of weeks ago. I'm pretty aligned with its view of the world. I've been writing political and technical science-fiction on the literary website Booksie for almost a year and have just published my first book on Amazon (Kindle and paperback). Hence the picture above.

For more about me look here.

This is the description of the book.

"Adam Carlton’s thirty four stories are set in a world of total surveillance, pervasive AI and high-tech interrogation. A revolutionary organisation fights repression in the streets of Paris; in a sordid Internet sweatshop, an AI is trained - its successors will build starships and contemplate a disposable humanity; an artefact found on the moon, impervious to study, recounts an unacceptable truth. These are the stories of our times, suffused with the victories of stupidity, the deceit of our friends and the betrayal of our deepest hopes."

I'm interested in the biggest issues: future society, technological trends, where we're all going. I tend to publish new material regularly on Booksie - it's flagged on the webview blog sidebar here along with all the other blogs. I usually try to get something out once a week. Eventually the material will find its way into new published volumes.

If you want a flavour of what I'm doing, visit the Amazon site and download a Kindle sample to get the first 10% of my book for free.

I hope to publish occasionally here - book reviews (like my take on 'Serotonin') and perhaps some political stuff which I can repost on Booksie. The audience over there is not as sophisticated politically or technically as the readership here, so I may be a little hand-wavy and introductory.

More to come, anyway.

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Update Thursday November 28th 2019

I've today withdrawn my book from Amazon (both Kindle and paperback versions). It may take a day or two to take effect.

Why?

First off it hasn't sold at all. Zero sales in October and November. Four in September - to known individuals. This was expected as I'm an unknown author and did no marketing.

Instead I'm choosing the harder route, which is to seek to get past the gate-keepers of SF magazines with my short stories. Assuming I can succeed I will build up a portfolio of published work in paying outlets - this is what a published writer does.

My next step will be - on the strength of this - to seek an agent who can perhaps package my stories into a bundle which will be effectively marketed. This is the key to getting sales. But my self-publishing efforts are a major obstacle here - it makes me look amateurish and ties up material which could be better used elsewhere.

"Serotonin" - Michel Houellebecq

Amazon link

This is Wikipedia's summary.

"The narrator, Florent-Claude Labrouste, is a depressed agricultural scientist who lives in a Parisian apartment block, the Tour Totem. He commutes to Normandy to help promote French cheese.

Sympathetic to the plight of local farmers, he is powerless to help them retain their traditional methods:

    In short, what is taking place with French agriculture is a vast redundancy plan, but one that is secret and invisible, where people disappear one by one, on their plots of land, without ever being noticed.

After watching a television documentary about people who choose to disappear from their life without telling anyone, Labrouste abruptly leaves his girlfriend, a young Japanese woman who is sexually hyperactive but devoid of affection, quits his job under a false pretence and flees to a chain hotel in another part of Paris. A doctor prescribes him an antidepressant to remedy his low levels of serotonin, hence the title of the novel. Although the drug dulls his sex drive, Labrouste returns to Normandy in search of former lovers. While there, he visits an old college friend, Aymeric, a divorced and suicidal aristocratic landowner.

At the climax of the novel, farmers equipped with assault rifles blockade a motorway. Aymeric is among them and shoots himself, sparking a clash with riot police in which 10 more people die.

Later on, for a couple of weeks, Labrouste secretly observes the love of his life, Camille, who has a son from another man. Initially intent on killing the child with one of Aymeric's sniper rifles in order to win back her love, he finds himself unable to go through with it.

Finally, Labrouste moves back to Paris, contemplating suicide by jumping out of a window."

Reviews were mixed: bourgeois horror from Robert Harris in The Times; other reviews suggested it was a bit boring (as compared to "Submission").

Very superficial, these reviews.

Houellebecq gives voice to the modern petite-bourgeoisie. This vastly-expanded social stratum, left behind by the ascendant neoliberal elite (the 0.1%), is increasingly precarious, alienated and desperate. The Idealists amongst them, the Myers-Briggs NFs, increasingly assemble themselves around displacement activities: fads such as veganism, climate change, plastic waste. Meanwhile, the Rationals, the NTs, have become skeptical and nihilistic - seeing no way out.

Houellebecq speaks for the latter group.

In Houellebecq's previous novel, "Submission", his protagonist cynically converts to Islam and gets the material rewards of a remunerative position in the newly-Islamicised Parisian university sector .. and the sexual benefits of four provided nubile wives.

"Serotonin" is darker: the ministry bureaucrat has no way out except death itself. Houellebecq follows his spiritual guide, Albert Camus, to the end.

Just because the author does not see an end to the decay of neoliberalism, as here instantiated in the EU project, does not mean that there isn't one. While the Macron regime has no solutions to the excluded (most visibly the gilets jaunes), in the UK the Boris Johnson - Dominic Cummings axis is actively seeking a rebasing of post-neoliberal capitalism aimed at recapturing inclusivity.

It's not hard to see the outlines of such a solution: transfer payments for regional infrastructure, directed investments in areas which can mop up surplus (and over-educated) professionals, a non-faked sense of national purpose. It's the will to move in that direction which is so fiercely contested .. under so many fake banners.

"It is easier to imagine the end of the world ..."

This quote, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism," has been attributed to the cultural analyst, Fredric Jameson.

It bears deep reflection.

Capitalism is the first mode of production which separated the mass of people from the means of securing their own livelihood. Previous modes of production saw ordinary people as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists or farmers.

Given the economic precariousness of the proletariat, some social organising principle is needed to coordinate actions to secure the reproduction of collective life. This is called an economy.

Historically there have been only two forms of economic organisation consistent with the existence of a proletariat (a class of resourceless labourers): the privately-owned, decentralised means of production constitutive of capitalism; and bureaucratically-owned means of production in a centrally-planned 'socialism'.

We know the track record of both models. In particular we know that a statist centrally-planned economy does not work - it lacks incentives to grow and optimise, and is captured by bureaucratic elites.

There are two further models: the naive Leninist-Trotskyist model of a worker-controlled (soviet) state and economy .. and a fully-automated economy.

The Leninist-Trotskyist model was only ever theorised in the sketchiest form and founders under modern political, industrial and financial complexity .. and human nature.

The fully-automated economy is a limit point of the natural tendency of capitalism to automate (the law of increasing organic composition of capital). However in that limit the last workers are displaced and therefore surplus value can no longer be created. Profits tend to zero as competition equalises prices to costs.

So no more capitalist economy, but that does not mean no economy. A collection of fully-automated companies (perhaps with non-waged human involvement in setting objectives - and certainly in consumption) is rather like a collection of villages each of which has a monopoly of some kind of natural resources (water, fruits, meat, ...) which are essentially not scarce. Such an economy engages in exchange, because human needs straddle the portfolios of the various producers, and it's similar to petty-commodity production, albeit without the involvement of human labour.

The working class may have vanished as a social category (no wage labour) but humans certainly haven't. Provided the machines have not been so badly designed as to eliminate humanity, people experience this world as super-aristocrats: their every feasible, practical need met.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed," said William Gibson. And if we look at the super-rich today we see a preview of behaviours which could be open to all in a society of totally-automated abundance.

As expected, the behaviour-set is just what would be expected given the innate nature of the human animal - all drives are exhibited from the most prosocial to the most antisocial.

On a sufficient timescale (a century or two) human nature can itself be engineered and hopefully there will be major speciation events. We will find it easier and more robust to adapt to Mars than to make Mars adapt to current-us, for example.

Capitalism will abolish itself not through socialism but through self-elimination. And the human race will diversify into every possible ecological niche in this awaiting universe.

Unless we're stupid about it.

Can you write factorial anonymously? Yes

 

Of course you can. Use the Y-combinator.

This would look cleaner if the author had not used Church numerals. Here's something simpler:

   (λf λn. if n=0 then 1 else n*f(n-1) ) (λf λn. if n=0 then 1 else n*f(n-1)) 6.

But this isn't quite right, since recursion stops after one step. The Y combinator is more devious even than this.

So the factorial function is: Y (λf λn. if n=0 then 1 else n*f(n-1) ).

See section 7 of this PDF for a worked example.

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"Something Deeply Hidden" - some thoughts

Amazon link

The title is a quote from Einstein, revealed at the end of the book. Carroll is on Einstein's side in the great Einstein-Bohr debates on the meaning and completeness of quantum theory. Sort of.

Carroll writes well, mostly. He's a fluent author and has the surpassing virtue of conceptual clarity. This is a book about concepts: conceptual analysis and what the equations are telling us. This works well at the beginning where he covers the material in a typical undergraduate course, falters later when he discusses quantum field theory, and stutters at the end, where he sketches the research program of deriving spacetime from Hilbert space.

Who is this book for? Not the layperson - it's too unfamiliar, too conceptually abstract and dense. It's for people who know quantum mechanics - the mathematics and the calculations - people who understand the machinery but, like everyone else, struggle to understand what it's telling us about the universe itself. The math he doesn't mention underpins the concepts he's keen to articulate and talk around.

He's persuasive on the many-worlds interpretation, mostly because it seems plausible to start with the wave-function of the universe-as-a-holistic-entity. He's at pains to point out that the MWI is really no more than that: austere quantum theory.

He's excellent on how decoherence works, giving a clear conceptual overview. You have to have covered superpositions and entangled states in your QM course - and to have thought about it - to really grasp what he's saying, though. He writes like it's pretty clear but it isn't.

Should one walk away from this book an Everettian?  Carroll makes a very strong case for this over all the other interpretations - his critiques sometimes feel like shooting fish in a barrel. He's convincing that we should conceptualise QM as if the MWI were true.

But is the universe really a state vector in a high-dimensional Hilbert space? With our familiar classical-looking spacetime something emergent? A reality emergent from entropic-entanglement (hence locality and metric) and then local sampling of that so-structured Hilbert space?

No-one knows. It might be nice .. but the research isn't in.

And then there are the lacunae. The genesis of the standard model is nowhere mentioned. It may all be quantum fields - but how did we get separate quantum fields for all the different fermions and bosons?

My conclusion: every physics undergraduate should read this book. All the questions they have about how quantum theory is put together (the map of the territory in fact) and how it all relates to the universe we experience are honestly discussed here. They won't find those issues addressed in class or in their textbooks.

They will also appreciate how much we still don't understand about the fundamentals of the theory and about reality itself. Quantum gravity is still, most likely, the holy grail. But in the absence of meaningful experiments (the collider plans don't really help) solid progress is likely to remain stalled.

“Metaphorical Worlds Interpretation” (Chad Orzel)

Amazon link

I bought this a couple of weeks ago (Kindle) but it still sits in my stack. Soon!

Peter Woit has this post today, however, where he links to a piece by Chad Orzel.

Orzel thinks there is a better way to think about the "Many Worlds Interpretation":

"The problematic aspect here is that the wavefunction of the universe has everything in complicated superposition states, but when we select out a tiny piece of it as our system of interest, we often see that system only in single states, not a superposition of multiple states. The question that’s too often un-asked, though is: What measurement would you do to demonstrate that your system is really in a superposition?

The answer to this doesn’t need to be a procedure specific enough to actually do the experiment; a general outline would be sufficient. And, in fact, we have a couple of centuries of experience at doing exactly this: When we want to show that something has been in two states at the same time, we do an interference experiment. We put our system of interest in a superposition of two states, arrange for those two states to evolve at slightly different rates for some time, and then bring them back together and measure the final state.

If a superposition exists, there will be some oscillation in the probability of a given final state that depends on the differential evolution in the middle. This takes lots of forms– if the two states of the superposition correspond to passing through spatially separated slits, it’ll show up as an interference fringe pattern in space; if they’re two states of a cesium atom in an atomic clock, it’ll show up as a varying probability of ending up in one of those states as you adjust the frequency of your microwave oscillator.

In every case, though, you’re measuring a probability. And not even a Bayesian can accurately measure a probability from a single experiment. To get a good measurement of a probability of some outcome– let alone the variation in probability that is the signature of a superposition state– you need a large number of repeated measurements. And those measurements have to be made under the same conditions every time.

That’s the key feature that lets you carve out some parts of the giant wavefunction of the universe and choose to treat them as systems in definite states, while others need to be treated as full quantum superpositions. The vast majority of the universe that we’re bracketing off as “the environment” affects the measurement conditions, which changes the probabilities you’re measuring.

If the interaction with the environment is small, though, you can ensure that the conditions are close to identical for enough trials to unambiguously see the changing probabilities that show a superposition exists. That subpart of the universal wavefunction needs to be dealt with as a fully quantum system.

If the interaction with the environment is strong and poorly controlled, though, the conditions of your measurement change enough from one repetition to the next that you’re not really doing the same measurement multiple times. If you could know the full state of the environment for a given trial, you would predict one probability, but knowing the full state of the environment for the next trial would lead you to predict a different probability.

In the absence of that knowledge, adding together repeated results just gets you junk– you won’t see a clear dependence on the different evolution of the different states in the superposition, because it’s swamped by the unknown effect of the environment. If you can’t see the interference effect, that system “looks classical,” and you can treat it as having a definite state.

That process of interaction with the changing state of an unknown environment gets the name “decoherence,” and it’s what enables the bookkeeping trick that lets us split off pieces of the wavefunction and consider them in isolation. If the piece you’re interested in is big enough and interacts with the environment strongly enough, there’s no hope of doing the interference measurement that would show it’s in a superposition state. If you can’t do a measurement that would show the existence of the other piece(s) of the superposition, you can safely treat it as being in a single definite state.

It should be emphasized, though, that this is just bookkeeping, not a real separation between “copies of the universe,” or even copies of the system of interest. There’s only one universe, in an indescribably complex superposition, and we’re choosing to carve out a tiny piece of it, and describe it in a simplified way.

It’s not even true, strictly speaking, that the results of a given experiment for a particular object are unaffected by the presence of the other parts of the superposition for that specific object. If you could do the full probability calculation for the whole wavefunction, including all of “the environment,” the probability you would predict for that experiment would include a contribution from all the various states that are superposed. In the absence of that complete knowledge, though, you can get away with ignoring them, because you’ll never be able to repeat the measurements in the way you would need to see the influence.
...
Rather than “Many-Worlds Interpretation,” I’d go with “Metaphorical Worlds Interpretation,” to reflect the fact that all the different ways of cutting up the wavefunction into sub-parts are fundamentally a matter of convenience, a choice to talk about pieces of the wavefunction as if they were separate, because the whole is too vast to comprehend."

Peter Woit likes this story. What do you think?

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What is decoherence? Read this.

The Office as Utopia

I am quite aware that a professional office in an interesting company with a solid mission is a really nice place to be.

I would not like to live in any part of a neolithic or feudal society. I'll leave it to others to hanker after Viking raiding parties.

I loathe the horsing-around mateyness of the combat-facing armed forces.

I'm repelled and disoriented by overt displays of emotion, emotional appeals which make no sense, excessive moralising on emotional grounds.

No, I am truly a psychological creature of mature-capitalist cool: the NTs bred to dwell in cupboards and back-offices: useful when needed.

Nevertheless.

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A fragment:

"They talk about the feminisation of society. How in the absence of a mortal, existential enemy the liberal world has become a supersized hearth and home. No room for the masculine virtues of the warrior, or for the disinterested seeker after truth.

Yet this is only half-true. The liberal world is not modelled after the family but from an idealised model of the modern, capitalist workplace, where:

• emotion equates to transactional sociability between strangers
• strong emotional bonds would violate rational outcomes
• interpersonal violence would undermine systemic processes.

The middle-class, professional work-environment is optimally populated by lesbian women and gay men*: personality-types combining diffuse, non-aggressive, impersonal pseudo-warmth together with loyalty to corporate-outcomes rather than individuals.

Think ESFJ.

The office as utopia."

Modern liberal ideology - woke culture - seeks to make this protean, historically-conditioned target-state the foundational theory of normative human nature. A mass exercise in self-delusion, orchestrated by the ideologues who have captured the media in all the advanced western democracies, where an entrenched capitalism has already done its selective work.

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* In MB terms, people at the centre of the F-T axis: not too feminine, not too masculine. See "Capitalism is for wimps".

Nicos Poulantzas: Capitalism in the next decade

I wrote a series of generally admiring posts about the work of Nicos Poulantzas (here, in declining order of relevance).

I was reading this evening an outstanding recent summary of his work by David Sessions.

Nicos Poulantzas

Generally I'm a huge fan.

Poulantzas tried to break out of the simplistic stereotypes of both the Stalinists and the Trotskyists concerning the nature of the capitalist state and its role in mediating and enforcing capitalist class dynamics.

Poulantzas's great problem, the issue that destroyed his theoretical position, was that he wanted an accurate analysis of contemporary capitalism which also predicted transition to socialism (the supercession of capitalist relations of production) as a reachable goal.

All his analysis kept trying to tell him this wasn't on the cards. It simply wasn't possible.

What does the future hold if not a transition to socialism?

The central political problems 'we' face today: the breakdown of consensus politics, the rise of 'populism', leftist hysteria - these symptoms are all rooted in the obsolescence of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. Neoliberalism has created a gulf between the super-elite beneficiaries of a financialised, globalised capitalism and vast swathes of the proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie (old and new - Poulantzas emphasised the distinction) which has not shared in this largesse, which correctly feels abandoned, disrespected, atomised, alienated and futureless.

The problem has been accentuated by 'elite overproduction': the flow of c. 40% of the population through the universities, which has created a febrile petit-bourgeois mass which has internalised neoliberal ideologies and then naively tried to realise them in actuality.

This is the genesis of the SJW, equal-outcome, blank-slate-believing mass movements which self-define as 'left' but which are thoroughly bourgeois-liberal. They have captured the traditional labour parties of the left.

I expect a new capitalist synthesis to arise out of all this turmoil over the next decade. The shape is hard to discern but it will be whatever serves to restore class cohesion - that's the stability point.

Probably a little more socially conservative, a little more redistributive. Only time will tell. The process won't be pretty: I agree with Peter Turchin about that.

It's worth watching the project of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson in the new UK Government. That's exactly the project they're trying to define.

I expect the Brexit project now to go through, because there's a gathering consensus in the more strategic and hard-headed section of the British political elite that Britain's future is best assured by a strategic alliance with the US rather than being semi-locked-in to a disunited Europe, a power both politically and militarily weak.

In the past there has been the famous 'bridge' or 'straddling' policy, which saw the UK acting as a 'value-adding' middleman between the US and Europe. But in an increasingly multipolar political world resulting from the decay of the naive neoliberal globalisation project and catalysed by the rise of China and an incipent global recession, the UK finally, has to choose sides.

I think the Johnson government understands that, while the Remainers, locked into crumbling, sterile visions of the past, do not.

Such a shame that Nico Poulantzas is no longer with us. I wish I knew what he would have thought.

O’Sullivan’s First Law

 O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.

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Just thought I would give you a link to the original statement of this (as it's so relevant today).

"Robert Michels - as any reader of James Burnham's finest book, The Machiavellians, knows was the author of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This states that in any organization the permanent officials will gradually obtain such influence that its day-to-day program will increasingly reflect their interests rather than its own stated philosophy.

To take a homely example, congressmen from egalitarian parties somehow end up voting for higher pay and generous expenses for congressmen. We can also catch an ironic echo of Michels's law in Stalin's title of General Secretary, as well as in the fact that powerful mandarins in the British government creep about under such deceptive pseudonyms as "Permanent Under-Secretary."

All of which is by way of introducing a new law of my own. My copy of the current Mother Jones (well, it's my job to read that sort of thing — I take no pleasure in it) contains an advertisement for Amnesty International.

Now, AI used to be a perfectly serviceable single-issue pressure group which drew the world's attention to the plight of political prisoners around the globe. Many people owe their lives and liberty to it. But that good work depended greatly on AI's being a single-issue organization that helped victims of both left- and right-wing regimes and was careful to remain politically neutral in other respects. Its advertisement in Mother Jones, however, abandons this tradition by calling for an end to the death penalty.

The ad itself, needless to say, is the usual liberal rhubarb. "In American courtrooms," it intones, "some have a better chance of being sentenced to death." That is true: the people in question are called murderers. But Al naturally means something different and more sinister — namely that poor, black, and retarded people are more likely to face the electric chair than other murderers.

Let us suppose this to be the case. What follows? A mentally retarded person incapable of understanding the significance of his actions cannot be guilty of murder or of any other crime. A law that punishes him (as opposed to one that confines him for his own and society's safety) is unjust and should be changed — whether or not he faces the death penalty.

On the other hand, someone who is guilty of murder may be executed with perfect justice. His race or economic circumstances do not affect the matter at all. The fact that other murderers may obtain lesser sentences does not in any way detract from the justice of his own punishment. After all, some murderers have always escaped scot-free.

Would Amnesty have us release the rest on the grounds of equality of treatment?

Finally, Amnesty's argument from discrimination could be met just as well by executing more rich, white murderers (which would be fine with me) as by executing no murderers at all. Significantly, Amnesty's list of death-penalty "victims" does not include political prisoners. America does not, have political prisoners, let alone execute them. Why, then, Amnesty's campaign on the issue?

That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.

I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows."

Yes. There's a lot of it about.

Arnold Kling: the significance of Dunbar's number

Arnold Kling writes:

"Referring of course to the Dunbar number that marks the boundary between small-scale society and large-scale society.

The public operated in the sub-Dunbar sphere. You were concerned with your own family, friends, and co-workers.

The elite managed in the super-Dunbar sphere, running government and large organisations, including mass media. The public knew that the elites were out there, but the public felt no direct connection to the elites. When elites contested with one another, the public were largely bystanders."

There's a lot more at the link.

Kling is a libertarian economist who thinks in terms of models applied to an amorphous social reality. This makes him an over-reductionist. The right way to think about society is:

1. Social formation - society as it concretely presents itself.
2. Mode of production - which generates the class structure and social dynamics.
3. Human nature - which defines the human elements from which behaviour originates.

Orthodox Marxism gets (1) and (2) right and ignores or misunderstands (3), hence its utopian perspectives.

The more enlightened bourgeois intellectuals like Kling think the world is constituted from (1) and (3) and forgo a class analysis - we see ahistoric, universalist categories such as 'public' and 'elites'.

Kling is better than most, though. The orthodox neoclassical economists simply present patently ideological models of (1), with (2) and (3) being replaced by the atomised egoists of homo economicus. Steve Keen is not a Marxist but his critique of this is not inaccurate.

The idea of the Dunbar limit is a powerful one. It allows the concept of nationalism to be approached without misleading ideas that it's either an empty illusion (a logical consequence of neoclassical economics) or that it's some reactionary antithesis to an ideal state of perfect global compassion and universal love. We can safely leave the latter to the overly religious, the social-liberals and SJWs.

In practice people care about their immediate circle, people they know individually and find they like. They care about the concept of their nation insofar as their co-nationals conform to an ideal of behaviour: one which they believe - with substance - buttresses the stability of the institutions and relationships which guarantee their security and their way of life: an ideal-supertribe of generally-amicable 'us'.

There is a lot to be said about a correct theory of nationalism, and how relevant, useful and indeed functional the phenomenon may be in the 21st century.

But without Dunbar's number the analysis doesn't get very far.