The myth of the zero sum college admission game

A major concern of the commentary in the wake of the recent US Supreme Court decision eliminating the role of race in college admission is how to maintain diversity in elite colleges. What is not being written about is that maybe we shouldn’t have exclusive elite colleges to start with. Americans seem to take for granted that attending an elite college is a zero sum game. However, there is no reason that a so-called elite education must be a scarce resource. Harvard, with its 50 billion plus endowment could easily expand its incoming freshman class by a factor of 5 or 10. It doesn’t because that obviously would make its product less prestigious and diminish its brand. It is a policy decision that allows elite universities like Harvard and Stanford to maintain their status. Being old is not an excuse. Ancient universities in Europe like the University of Bologna in Italy or University of Heidelberg in Germany, are state run and have acceptance rates well over 50%.

The main problem in the US is not that exclusive universities exist but that they have undue power. Kids are scrambling to get in because they believe it gives them a leg up in life. And they are mostly correct. All the Supreme Court Judges, save one, went to either Harvard or Yale law school. The faculty of elite schools tend to get their degrees from elite schools. High power consulting, Wall Street, and law firms tend to recruit from a small set of elite schools. Yet, this is only because we as a society choose it to be this way. In the distant past, elite colleges were basically finishing schools for the wealthy and powerful. Going to an Ivy league school was not what conferred you power and wealth. You were there because you already had power and wealth. It has only been in the past half century or so that the elite schools started admitting on the basis of merit. The cynical view is that world was getting more technical and thus it was useful for the wealthy and powerful to have access to talented recruits.

While it is true that the top schools generally have more resources and more research active faculty, what really makes them elite is the quality of their students. It is not that elite colleges produce the best graduates but rather that the best students choose elite colleges. Now there is an over supply of gifted students. For every student that is admitted to a top ten school there are probably five or more others who would have done equally well. This is not entirely a negative thing. Having talent spread across more universities is a boon to students and society.

As seen with what happened in California and Michigan, eliminating race-conscious admission will likely decrease the number of under-represented minorities at elite schools. But this only matters if going to an elite school is the only way to access to the levers of power and have a productive life. We could make an elite education available to everyone. We could increase supply by increasing funding to state run universities and we could take away the public subsidy of elite private schools by taxing their land and endowments. The fact that affirmative action still matters over a half century later is an indication of failure. There is talent everywhere and that talent should be given a chance to flourish.

My immune system

One outcome of the pandemic is that I have not had any illness (knock on wood), nary a cold nor sniffle, in a year and a half. On the other hand, my skin has fallen apart. I am constantly inflamed and itchy. I have no proof that the two are connected but my working hypothesis is that my immune system is hypersensitive right now because it has had little to do since the spring of 2020. It now overreacts to every mold spore, pollen grain, and speck of dust it runs into. The immune system is extremely complex, perhaps as complex as the brain. Its job is extremely difficult. It needs to recognize threats and eliminate them while not attacking itself. The brain and the immune system are intricately linked. How many people have gotten ill immediately after a final exam or deadline? The immune system was informed by the brain to delay action until the task was completed. The brain probably takes cues form the immune system too. One hypothesis for why asthma and allergies have been on the rise recently is that modern living has eliminated much contact with parasites and infectious agents, making the immune system hypersensitive. I for one, always welcome vaccinations because it gives my immune system something to do. In fact, I think it would be a good idea to get inoculations of all types regularly. I would take a vaccine for tape worm in a heartbeat. We are now slowly exiting from a global experiment in depriving the immune system of stimulation. We have no idea what the consequences will be. That is not to say that quarantine and isolation was not a good idea. Being itchy is clearly better than being infected by a novel virus (or being dead). There can be long term effects of infection too. Long covid is likely to be due to a miscalibrated immune system induced by the infection. Unfortunately, we shall likely never disentangle all the effects of COVID-19. We will not ever truly know what the long term consequences of infection, isolation, and vaccination will be. Most people will come out of this fine but a small fraction will not and we will not know why.

The final stretch

The end of the Covid-19 pandemic is within reach. The vaccines have been a roaring success and former Bell Labs physicist J.C. Phillips predicted it (see here). He argued that the spike protein, which is the business end of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has been optimized to such a degree in SARS-CoV-2 that even a small perturbation from a vaccine can disrupt it. While the new variants perturb the spike slightly and seem to spread faster, they will not significantly evade the vaccine. However, just because the end is within sight doesn’t mean we should not still be vigilante and not mess this up. Europe has basically scored multiple own goals these past few months with their vaccine rollout (or lack thereof) that is a combination of both gross incompetence and excessive conservatism. The Astra-Zeneca vaccine fiasco was a self-inflicted wound by all parties involved. The vaccine is perfectly fine and any side effects are either not related to the vaccine or of such low probability that it should not be a consideration for halting its use. By artificially slowing vaccine distribution, there is a chance that some new mutation could arise that will evade the vaccine. Europe needs to get its act in gear. The US has steadily ramped up vaccinations and is on course to have all willing adults vaccinated by start of summer. Although there has been a plateauing and even slight rise recently because of relaxation from social distancing in some areas, cases and deaths will drop for good by June everywhere in the US. North America will largely be back to normal by mid-summer. However, it is imperative that we press forward and vaccinate the entire world. We will also all need to get booster shots next fall when we get our flu shots.

The inherent conflict of liberalism

Liberalism, as a philosophy, arose during the European Enlightenment of the 17th century. It’s basic premise is that people should be free to choose how they live, have a government that is accountable to them, and be treated equally under the law. It was the founding principle of the American and French revolutions and the basic premise of western liberal democracies. However, liberalism is inherently conflicted because when I exercise my freedom to do something (e.g. not wear a mask), I infringe on your freedom from the consequence of that thing (e.g. not be infected) and there is no rational resolution to this conflict. This conflict led to the split of liberalism into left and right branches. In the United States, the term liberal is exclusively applied to the left branch, which mostly focuses on the ‘freedom from’ part of liberalism. Those in the right branch, who mostly emphasize the ‘freedom to’ part, refer to themselves as libertarian, classical liberal, or (sometimes and confusingly to me) conservative. (I put neo-liberalism, which is a fundamentalist belief in free markets, into the right camp although it has adherents on both the left and right.) Both of these viewpoints are offspring of the same liberal tradition and here I will use the term liberal in the general sense.

Liberalism has never operated in a vacuum. The conflicts between “freedom to” and “freedom from” have always been settled by prevailing social norms, which in the Western world was traditionally dominated by Christian values. However, neither liberalism nor social norms have ever been sufficient to prevent bad outcomes. Slavery existed and was promoted by liberal Christian states. Genocide of all types and scales have been perpetrated by liberal Christian states. The battle to overcome slavery and to give equal rights to all peoples was a long and hard fought battle over slowly changing social norms rather than laws per se. Thus, while liberalism is the underlying principle behind Western governments, it is only part of the fabric that holds society together. Even though we have just emerged from the Dark Years, Western Liberalism is on its shakiest footing since the Second World War. The end of the Cold War did not bring on a permanent era of liberal democracy but may have spelled it’s eventual demise. What will supplant liberalism is up to us.

It is often perceived that the American Democratic party is a disorganized mess of competing interests under a big tent while the Republicans are much more cohesive but in fact the opposite is true. While the Democrats are often in conflict they are in fact a fairly unified center-left liberal party that strives to advocate for the marginalized. Their conflicts are mostly to do with which groups should be considered marginalized and prioritized. The Republicans on the other hand are a coalition of libertarians and non-liberal conservatives united only by their desire to minimize the influence of the federal government. The libertarians long for unfettered individualism and unregulated capitalism while the conservatives, who do not subscribe to all the tenets of liberalism, wish to halt encroaching secularism and a government that no longer serves their interests.

The unlikely Republican coalition that has held together for four decades is now falling apart. It came together because the more natural association between religious conservatism and a large federal bureaucracy fractured after the Civil Rights movements in the 1960’s when the Democrats no longer prioritized the concerns of the (white) Christian Right. (I will discuss the racial aspects in a future post). The elite pro-business neo-liberal libertarians could coexist with the religious conservatives as long as their concerns did not directly conflict but this is no longer true. The conservative wing of the Republican party have discovered their new found power and that there is an untapped population of disaffected individuals who are inclined to be conservative and also want a larger and more intrusive government that favors them. Prominent conservatives like Adrian Vermeule of Harvard and Senator Josh Hawley are unabashedly anti-liberal.

This puts the neo-liberal elites in a real bind. The Democratic party since Bill Clinton had been moving right with a model of pro-market neo-liberalism but with a safety net. However they were punished time and time again by the neo-liberal right. Instead of partnering with Obama, who was highly favorable towards neoliberalism, they pursued a scorched earth policy against him. Hilary Clinton ran on a pretty moderate safety-net-neo-liberal platform and got vilified as an un-American socialist. Now, both the Republicans and Democrats are trending away from neo-liberalism. The neo-liberals made a strategic blunder. They could have hedged their bets but now have lost influence in both parties.

While the threat of authoritarianism looms large, this is also an opportunity to accept the limits of liberalism and begin to think about what will take its place – something that still respects the basic freedoms afforded by liberalism but acknowledges that it is not sufficient. Conservative intellectuals like Leo Strauss have valid points. There is indeed a danger of liberalism lapsing into total moral relativism or nihilism. Guardrails against such outcomes must be explicitly installed. There is value in preserving (some) traditions, especially ancient ones that are the result of generations of human engagement. There will be no simple solution. No single rule or algorithm. We will need to explicitly delineate what we will accept and what we will not on a case by case basis.

The machine learning president

For the past four years, I have been unable to post with any regularity. I have dozens of unfinished posts sitting in my drafts folder. I would start with a thought but then get stuck, which had previously been somewhat unusual for me. Now on this first hopeful day I have had for the past four trying years, I am hoping I will be able to post more regularly again.

Prior to what I will now call the Dark Years, I viewed all of history through an economic lens. I bought into the standard twentieth century leftist academic notion that wars, conflicts, social movements, and cultural changes all have economic underpinnings. But I now realize that this is incorrect or at least incomplete. Economics surely plays a role in history but what really motivates people are stories and stories are what led us to the Dark Years and perhaps to get us out.

Trump became president because he had a story. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol had a story. It was a bat shit crazy lunatic story but it was still a story. However, the tragic thing about the Trump story (or rather my story of the Trump story) is that it is an unintentional algorithmically generated story. Trump is the first (and probably not last) purely machine learning president (although he may not consciously know that). Everything he did was based on the feedback he got from his Twitter Tweets and Fox News. His objective function was attention and he would do anything to get more attention. Of the many lessons we will take from the Dark Years, one should be how machine learning and artificial intelligence can go so very wrong. Trump’s candidacy and presidency was based on a simple stochastic greedy algorithm for attention. He would Tweet randomly and follow up on the Tweets that got the most attention. However, the problem with a greedy algorithm (and yes that is a technical term that just happens to coincidentally be apropos) is that once you follow a path it is hard to make a correction. I actually believe that if some of Trump’s earliest Tweets from say 2009-2014 had gone another way, he could have been a different president. Unfortunately, one of his early Tweet themes that garnered a lot of attention was on the Obama birther conspiracy. This lit up both racist Twitter and a counter reaction from liberal Twitter, which led him further to the right and ultimately to the presidency. His innate prejudices biased him towards a darker path and he did go completely unhinged after he lost the election but he is unprincipled and immature enough to change course if he had enough incentive to do so.

Unlike standard machine learning for categorizing images or translating languages, the Trump machine learning algorithm changes the data. Every Tweet alters the audience and the reinforcing feedback between Trump’s Tweets and its reaction can manufacture discontent out of nothing. A person could just happen to follow Trump because they like The Apprentice reality show Trump starred in and be having a bad day because they missed the bus or didn’t get a promotion. Then they see a Trump Tweet, follow the link in it and suddenly they find a conspiracy theory that “explains” why they feel disenchanted. They retweet and this repeats. Trump sees what goes viral and Tweets more on the same topic. This positive feedback loop just generated something out of random noise. The conspiracy theorizing then starts it’s own reinforcing feedback loop and before you know it we have a crazed mob bashing down the Capitol doors with impunity.

Ironically Trump, who craved and idolized power, failed to understand the power he actually had and if he had a better algorithm (or just any strategy at all), he would have been reelected in a landslide. Even before he was elected, Trump had already won over the far right and he could have started moving in any direction he wished. He could have moderated on many issues. Even maintaining his absolute ignorance of how govening actually works, he could have had his wall by having it be part of actual infrastructure and immigration bills. He could have directly addressed the COVID-19 pandemic. He would not have lost much of his base and would have easily gained an extra 10 million votes. Maybe, just maybe if liberal Twitter simply ignored the early incendiary Tweets and only responded to the more productive ones, they could have moved him a bit too. Positive reinforcement is how they train animals after all.

Now that Trump has shown how machine learning can win a presidency, it is only a matter of time before someone harnesses it again and more effectively. I just hope that person is not another narcissistic sociopath.

The fear is real

When I was in graduate school, my friends and I would jokingly classify the utility of research in terms of the order the researcher would be killed after the revolution. So, for physics, if you were working on say galaxy formation in the early universe you would be killed before someone working on the properties of hydrogen at low temperatures, who would be killed before someone working on building a fusion reactor. This was during the cold war and thus the prospect of Stalin and Mao still loomed large. We did not joke this way with fear or disdain but rather with a somewhat bemused acknowledgment that we were afforded the luxury to work on esoteric topics, while much of the world still did not have running water. In those days, the left-right divide was between the small government neoliberals (conservatives in those days who advocated for freer and more deregulated markets) and the bigger government New Deal liberals (those for more government action to address economic inequities). We certainly had fierce debates but they were always rather abstract. We never thought our lives would really change that much.

By the time I had finished and started my academic career, it was clear that the neoliberals had prevailed. The Soviet Union had collapsed, AT&T was broken up, and the Democratic president proclaimed the era of big government was over. Francis Fukuyama wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” arguing that western liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and would be the last form of government. I was skeptical then because I thought we could do better but I really didn’t consider that it could get worse.

But things got worse. We had the bursting of the dot com bubble, 9/11, the endless wars, the great recession, and now perhaps the twilight of democracy as Anne Applebaum laments in her most recent book. We can find blame everywhere – globalization, automation, the rise of China, out of touch elites, the greedy 1%, cynical politicians, the internet, social media, and so forth. Whatever the reason, this is an era where no one is happy and everyone is fearful.

The current divide in the United States is very real and there is fear on both sides. On one side, there is fear that an entire way of life is being taken away – a life of a good secure job, a nuclear family with well defined roles, a nice house, neighbors who share your values and beliefs, a government that mostly stays out of the way but helps when you are in need, the liberty to own a firearm, and a sense of community and shared sacrifice. On the other side, there is the fear that progress is being halted, that a minority will forever suppress a majority, that social, racial, and economic justice will never be achieved, that democracy itself is in peril, and that a better future will always be just out of reach.

What is most frustrating to me is that these points of view are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I don’t know how we can reconcile these differences but my biases and priors incline me to believe that we could alleviate some of the animosity and fear if we addressed income insecurity. While I think income inequality is a real problem, I think a more pressing concern is that a large segment of the population on both sides of the the divide lives continuously on a precipice of economic ruin, which has been made unavoidably apparent by our current predicament. I really think we need to consider a universal basic income. I also think it has to be universal because suspicion of fraud and resentment is a real issue. Everyone gets the check and those with sufficient incomes and wealth simply pay it back in taxes.

How science dies

Nietzsche famously wrote:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

This quote is often used as an example of Nietzsche’s nihilism but it is much more complicated. These words are actually spoken by a madman in Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science. According to philosopher Simon Critchley, the quote is meant to be a descriptive rather than a normative statement. What Nietzshe was getting at is that Christianity is a religion that values provable truth and as a result of this truth seeking, science arose. Science in turn generated skepticism of revealed truth and the concept of God. Thus, the end of Christianity was built into Christianity.

Borrowing from this analysis, science may also have have a built-in mechanism for its own doom. An excellent article in this month’s Technology Review describes the concept of epistemic dependence, where science and technology is so complicated now that no single person can understand all of it. In my own work, I could not reproduce a single experiment of my collaborators. Our collaborations work because we trust each other. I don’t really know how scientists identify new species of insects, or how paleontologists can tell what species a bone fragment belongs to, or all the details of the proof of the Poincare conjecture. However, I do understand how science and math works and trust that the results are based on those methods.

But what about people who are not trained in science? If you tell them that the universe was formed 14 billion years ago in a Big Bang and that 99% of all the stuff in the universe is completely invisible, why would they believe you. Why is that more believable then the earth being formed six thousand years ago in seven days? In both cases, knowledge is transferred to them from an authority. Sure you can say because of science, we live longer, have refrigerators, cell phones, and Netflix so we should believe scientists. On the other hand, a charismatic conman could tell them that they have those things because they were gifted from super advanced aliens. Depending on the sales job and one’s priors, it is not clear to me which would be more convincing.

So perhaps we need more science education? Well, in half a century of focus on science education, science literacy is not really very high in the general public. I doubt many people could explain how a refrigerator works much less the second law of thermodynamics and forget about quantum mechanics. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law that “All sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is more applicable then ever. While it is true that science has delivered on producing better stuff it does not necessarily make us more fulfilled or happier. I can easily see a future where a large fragment of the population simply turns away from science with full knowledge of what they are doing. That would be the good outcome. The bad one is that people start to turn against science and scientists because someone has convinced them that all of their problems (and none of the good stuff) are due to science and scientists. They would then go and destroy the world as we know it without really intending to. I can see this happening too.

The battle over academic freedom

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, almost all of institutional America put out official statements decrying racism and some universities initiated policies governing allowable speech and research. This was followed by the expected dissent from those who worry that academic freedom is being suppressed (see here, here, and here for some examples). Then there is the (in)famous Harper’s Magazine open letter decrying Cancel Culture, which triggered a flurry of counter responses (e.g. see here and here).

While some faculty members in the humanities and (non-life) sciences are up in arms over the thought of a committee of their peers judging what should be allowable research, I do wish to point out that their colleagues over on the Medical campus have had to get approval for human and animal research for decades. Research on human subjects must first pass through an Institutional Review Board (IRB) while animal experiments must clear the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). These panels ensure that the proposed work is ethical, sound, and justified. Even research that is completely noninvasive, such as analysis of genetic data, must pass scrutiny to ensure the data is not misused and subject identies are strongly protected. Almost all faculty members would agree that this step is important and necessary. History is rife of questionable research that range from careless to criminal. Is it so unreasonable to extend such a concept to the rest of campus?

The depressing lack of American imagination

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang made universal basic income a respectable topic for debate. I think this is a good thing because I’m a major proponent of UBI but my reasons are different. Yang is a technology dystopian who sees a future where robots take all of our jobs and the UBI as a way to alleviate the resulting pain and suffering. I think a UBI (and universal health care) would lead to less resentment of the welfare system and let people take more entrepreneurial risks. I believe human level AI is possible but I do not accept that this necessarily implies an economic apocalypse. To believe such a thing is to believe that the only way society can be structured is that a small number of tech companies owns all the robots and everyone else is at their mercy. That to me is a depressing lack of imagination. The society we live in is a human construct. There is no law of nature that says we must live by any specific set of rules or economic system. There is no law that says tech companies must have monopolies. There is no reason we could not live in a society where each person has her own robot who works for her. There is no law that says we could not live in a society where robots do all the mundane work while we garden and bake bread.

I think we lack imagination in every sector of our life. We do not need to settle for the narrow set of choices we are presented. I for one do not accept that elite colleges must wield so much influence in determining the path of one’s life. There is no reason that the US meritocracy needs to be a zero sum game, where one student being accepted to Harvard means another is not or that going to Harvard should even make so much difference in one’s life. There is no reason that higher education needs to cost so much. There is no reason students need to take loans out to pay exorbitant tuition. That fact that this occurs is because we as a society have chosen such.

I do not accept that irresponsible banks and financial institutions need to be bailed out whenever they fail, which seems to be quite often. We could just let them fail and restart. There is no reason that the access to capital needs to be controlled by a small number of financial firms. It used to be that banks would take in deposits and lend out to homeowners and businesses directly. They would evaluate the risk of each loan. Now they purchase complex financial products that evaluate the risk according to some mathematical model. There is no reason we need to subsidize such activity.

I do not accept that professional sports teams cannot be community owned. There is no law that says sports leagues need to be organized as monopolies with majority owners. There is no reason that communities cannot simply start their own teams and play each other. There is no law that says we need to build stadiums for privately owned teams. We only choose to do so.

The society we live in is the way it is because we have chosen to live this way. Even an autocrat needs a large fraction of the population to enforce his rule. The number of different ways we could organize (or not organize) is infinite. We do not have to be limited to the narrow set of choices we are presented. What we need is more imagination.

The fatal flaw of the American Covid-19 response

The United States has surpassed 2 million official Covid-19 cases and a 115 thousand deaths. After three months of lockdown, the country has had enough and is reopening. Although it has achieved its initial goal of slowing the growth of the pandemic so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed, the battle has not been won. We’re not at the beginning of the end; we may not even be at the end of the beginning. If everyone in the world could go into complete isolation, the pandemic would be over in two weeks. Instead, it is passed from one person to the next in a tragic relay race. As long as a single person is shedding the SARS-CoV-2 virus and comes in contact with another person, the pandemic will continue. The pandemic in the US is not heading for extinction. We are not near herd immunity and R0 is not below one. By the most optimistic yet plausible scenario, 30 million people have already been infected and 200 million will never get it either by having some innate immunity or by avoiding it through sheltering or luck. However, that still leaves over 100 million who are susceptible of which about a million will die if they all catch it.

However, the lack of effectiveness of the response is not the fatal flaw. No, the fatal flaw is that the US Covid-19 response asks one set of citizens to sacrifice for the benefit of another set. The Covid-19 pandemic is a story of three groups of people. The fortunate third can work from home, and the lockdown is mostly just an inconvenience. They still get paychecks while supplies and food can be delivered to their homes. Sure it has been stressful and many of have forgone essential medical care but they can basically ride this out for as long as it takes. The second group who own or work in shuttered businesses have lost their income. The federal rescue package is keeping some of them afloat but that runs out in August. The choice they have is to reopen and risk getting infected or be hungry and homeless. Finally, the third group is working to allow the first group to remain in their homes. They are working on farms, food processing plants, and grocery stores. They are cutting lawns, fixing leaking pipes, and delivering goods. They are working in hospitals and nursing homes and taking care of the sick and the children of those who must work. They are also the ones who are most likely to get infected and spread it to their families or the people they are trying to take care of. They are dying so others may live.

A lockdown can only work in a society if the essential workers are adequately protected and those without incomes are supported. Each worker should have an N100 mask, be trained how to wear it and be tested weekly. People in nursing homes should be wearing hazmat suits. Everyone who loses income should be fully compensated. In a fair society, everyone should share the risks and the pain equally.

Harvard and Asian Americans

The current trial regarding Harvard’s admissions policies seem to clearly indicate that they discriminate against Asian Americans. I had always assumed this to be the case. My take is that the problem is not so much that Harvard is non-transparent and unfair in how it selects students but rather that Harvard and the other top universities have too much influence on the rest of society. Each justice on the US Supreme Court has a degree from either Harvard or Yale. That is positively feudalistic. So here is my solution. All universities have a choice. They can 1) choose students any way they wish but they lose their tax free status or 2) retain tax exempt status but then adhere to strict non-discrimination and affirmative action rules. The top schools already have massive endowments and hurt the locales they are in by buying property and then not pay property taxes. I say let them do what they want but tax them heavily for the right to do so. The government should also not subsidize loans for students that attend such schools.

AI and authoritarianism

Much of the discourse on the future of AI , such as this one, has focused on people being displaced by machines. While this is certainly a worthy concern, these analyses sometimes fall into the trap of linear thinking because the displaced workers are also customers. The revenues of companies like Google and Facebook depend almost entirely on selling advertisements to a consumer base that has disposable income to spend. What happens when this base dwindles to a tiny fraction of the world’s population? The progression forward will also most likely not be monotonic because as people initially start to be replaced by machines, those left with jobs may actually get increased compensation and thus drive more consumerism. The only thing that is certain is that the end point of a world where no one has work is one where capitalism as we know it will no longer exist.

Historian and author Yuval Harari argues that in the pre-industrial world, to have power is to have land (I would add slaves and I strongly recommend visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture for a sobering look at how America became so powerful). In the industrial world, the power shifted to those who own the machines (although land won’t hurt) while in the post-industrial world, power falls to those with the data. Harari was extrapolating our current world where large corporations can track us continually and use machine learning to monopolize our attention and get us to do what they desire. However, data on people is only useful as long as they have resources you want. If people truly become irrelevant then their data is also irrelevant.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen in the future. I proposed an optimistic scenario here but here is a darker one. Henry Ford supposedly wanted to pay his employees a decent wage because he realized that they were also the customers for his product. In the early twentieth century, the factory workers formed the core of the burgeoning middle class that would drive demand for consumer products made in the very factories where they toiled. It was in the interest of industrialists that the general populace be well educated and healthy because they were the source of their wealth. This link began to fray at the end of the twentieth century with the rise of the service economy, globalisation, and automation. After the second World War, post-secondary education became available to a much larger fraction of the population. These college educated people did not go to work on the factory floor but fed the expanding ranks of middle management and professionals. They became managers and accountants and dentists and lawyers and writers and consultants and doctors and educators and scientists and engineers and administrators. They started new businesses and new industries and helped drive the economy to greater prosperity. They formed an upper middle class that slowly separated from the working class and the rest of the middle class. They also started to become a self-sustaining entity that did not rely so much on the rest of the population. Globalisation and automation made labor plentiful and cheap so there was less of an incentive to have a healthy educated populace. The wealth of the elite no longer depended on the working class and thus their desire to invest in them declined. I agree with the thesis that the abandonment of the working class in Western liberal democracies is the main driver of the recent rise of authoritarianism and isolationism around the world.

However, authoritarian populist regimes, such as those in Venezuela and Hungary, stay in power because the disgruntled class that supports them is a larger fraction of the population than the opposing educated upper middle class that are the winners in a contemporary liberal democracy. In the US, the disgruntled class is still a minority so thus far it seems like authoritarianism will be held at bay by the majority coalition of immigrants, minorities, and costal liberals. However, this coalition could be short lived. Up to now, AI and machine learning has not been taking jobs away from the managerial and professional classes. But as I wrote about before, the people most at risk for losing jobs to machines may not be those doing jobs that are simple for humans to master but those that are difficult. It may take awhile before professionals start to be replaced but once it starts it could go swiftly. Once a machine learning algorithm is trained, it can be deployed everywhere instantly. As the ranks of the upper middle class dwindle, support for a liberal democracy could weaken and a new authoritarian regime could rise.

Ironically, a transition to a consumer authoritarianism would be smoothed and possibly quickened by a stronger welfare state. A possible jobless economy would be one where the state provides a universal basic income that is funded by taxation on existing corporations, which would then compete for those very same dollars. Basically, the future incarnations of Apple, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, and Google would give money to an idle population and then try to win it back. Although, this is not a world I would choose to live in, it would be preferable to a socialistic model where the state would decide on what goods and services to provide. It would actually be in the interest of the corporations and their elite owners to lobby for high taxes and to not form monopolies and allow for competition to provide better goods and services. The tax rate would not matter much because in a steady state loop, any wealth inequality is stable regardless of the flux. It is definitely in their interest to keep the idle population happy.

The robot human equilibrium

There has been some push back in the media against the notion that we will “soon” be replaced by robots, e.g. see here. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because there seem to be very few machine induced job losses today doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow or in ten years. In fact, when it does happen it probably will happen suddenly as have many recent technological changes. The obvious examples are the internet and smartphones but there are many others. We forget that the transition from vinyl records to CDs was extremely fast; then iPods and YouTube killed CDs. Video rentals became ubiquitous from nothing in just a few years and died just as fast when Netflix came along, which was then completely replaced a few years later by streaming video. It took Amazon a little longer to become dominant but the retail model that had existed for centuries has been completely upended in a decade. The same could happen with AI and robots. Unless you believe that human thought is not computable, then in principle there is nothing a human can do that a machine can’t. It could take time to set up the necessary social institutions and infrastructure for an AI takeover but once it is established the transition could be abrupt.

Even so that doesn’t mean all or even most humans will be replaced. The irony of AI, known as Moravec’s Paradox (e.g. here), is that things that are hard for humans to do, like play chess or read X-rays, are easy for machines to do and vice versa. Although drivers and warehouse workers are destined to be the first to be replaced, the next set of jobs will likely be highly paid professionals like stock brokers, accountants, doctors, and lawyers. But as the ranks of the employed start to shrink, the economy will also shrink and wages will go down (even if the displaced do eventually move on to other jobs it will take time). At some point, particularly for jobs that are easy for humans but harder for machines, humans could be cheaper than machines.  So while we can train a machine to be a house cleaner, it may be more cost effective to simply hire a person to change sheets and dust shelves. The premium on a university education will drop. The ability to sit still for long periods of time and acquire arcane specialized knowledge will simply not be that useful anymore. Centers for higher learning will become retreats for the small set of scholarly minded people who simply enjoy it.

As the economy shrinks, land prices in some areas should drop too and thus people could still eke out a living. Some or perhaps many people will opt or be pushed out of the mainstream economy altogether and retire to quasi-pre-industrial lives. I wrote about this in quasi-utopian terms in my AlphaGo post but a dystopian version is equally probable. In the dystopia, the gap between the rich and poor could make today look like an egalitarian paradise. However, unlike the usual dystopian nightmare like the Hunger Games where the rich exploit the poor, the rich will simply ignore the poor. But it is not clear what the elite will do with all that wealth. Will they wall themselves off from the rest of society and then what, engage in endless genetic enhancements or immerse themselves in a virtual reality world? I think I’d rather raise pigs and make candles out of lard.

 

 

 

 

The US election and the future

Political scientists will be dissecting the results of the 2016 US presidential election for the next decade but certainly one fact that is likely to be germane to any analysis is that real wages have been stagnant or declining for the past 45 years. I predict that this trend will only worsen no matter who is in power. The stark reality is that most jobs are replaceable by machines. This is not because AI has progressed to the point that machines can act human but because most jobs, especially higher paying jobs, do not depend heavily on being human. While I have seen some consternation about the prospect of 1.5 million truck drivers being replaced by self-driving vehicles in the near future, I have seen much less discourse on the fact that this is also likely to be true for accountants, lawyers, middle managers, medical professionals, and other well compensated professionals. What people seem to miss is that the reason these jobs are well paid is that there are relatively few people who are capable of doing them and that is because they are difficult for humans to master. In other words, they are well paid because they require not acting particulary human. IBM’s Watson, which won the game show Jeopardy and AlphaGo, which beat the world’s best Go player, shows that machines can quite easily better humans at specific tasks. The more specialized the task, the easier it will be for a machine to do it. The cold hard truth is that AI does not have to improve for you to be replaced by a machine. It does not matter whether strong AI, (an artificial intelligence that truly thinks like a human), is ever possible. It only matters that machine learning algorithms can mimic what you do now. The only thing necessary for this to happen was for computers to be fast enough and now they are.

What this implies is that the jobs of the future will be limited to those that require being human or where interacting with a human is preferred. This will include 1) jobs that most people can do and thus will not be well paid like store sales people, restaurant servers, bar tenders, cafe baristas, and low skill health workers, 2) jobs that require social skills that might be better paid such as social workers, personal assistants, and mental health professionals, 3) jobs that require special talents like artisans, artists, and some STEM professionals, and 4) capitalists that own firms that employ mostly robots. I strongly believe that only a small fraction of the population will make it to categories 3) and 4). Most people will be in 1) or not have a job at all. I have argued before that one way out is for society to choose to make low productivity work viable. In any case, the anger we saw this year is only going to grow because existing political institutions are in denial about the future. The 20th century is over. We are not getting it back. The future is either the 17th or 18th century with running water, air conditioning and health care or the 13th century with none of these.

What liberal boomers don’t get

Writer Lionel Shriver recently penned an opinion piece in the New York Times lamenting that the millennial penchant for political correctness is stifling free speech and imposing cultural conformity the way the conservatives did in the 60’s and 70’s. The opinion piece was her response to the uproar over her speech at the 2016 Brisbane Writer’s Festival instigated by a young woman named Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who walked out in the middle and then wrote a commentary about why she did so in the Guardian. You can read Shriver’s piece here, Abdel-Magied’s here, and a blog post about the talk here. The question of cultural appropriation, identity politics, and political correctness is a major theme in the current US presidential election. While there has always been conservative resentment towards political correctness there has been a recent strong liberal backlash.

The liberal resentment has been spurred mainly by two recent incidents at two elite US colleges. The first was when Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council recommended that students not wear Hallowe’en costumes that might offend other students. Lecturer and associate master of one of Yale’s residential colleges, Erica Christakis, wrote an email questioning the need to regulate student’s clothing choices and that students should be allowed to be a little offensive. This triggered a massive reaction from the student body strongly criticizing Christakis. The second incident occurred at Bowdoin College in which there was a “tequila” themed party at a College Residence, where students wore sombreros and acted out Mexican sterotypes. Two members of the student government attended the party and this led to a movement by students to have the two impeached. Both of these incidents led to pretty uniform condemnation of the students by the main stream media. For example, see this article in the Atlantic.

The liberal backlash is based on the premise that the millennial generation (those born between 1980 and 2000) have been so coddled (by their baby boomer parents, born between 1945 and 1965, I should add) that they refuse to be exposed to any offensive speech or image. (Personal disclosure: I am technically a boomer, born in 1962, although by the time I came of age the culture wars of the 60’s had past. I’m a year younger than Douglas Coupland, who wrote the book Generation X, which was partially an anthem for neglected tail-end boomers who missed out on all the fun and excitement of the cohort a decade older. The cruel irony is that the term Generation X was later appropriated to mostly mean those born in the 70’s making us once again, an afterthought.)

My initial reaction to those incidents was to agree with the backlash but the contrast between Ms. Abdel-Magied’s thoughtful heartfelt comment and Ms. Shriver’s exasperated impatient one made me realize that I have underestimated the millennials and that they do have a point. Many liberal boomers believe that while full racial equality may not yet exist, much of the heavy lifting towards that end was done by the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s, which they supported. What these boomers miss is that the main reason that full racial equality has not been reached is because of cultural biases and attitudes that many of them may even possess. The millennial approach may be a little heavy handed but they at least recognize the true problem and are trying to do something about it.

The plain truth is that just being black does carry an extra risk of being killed in an encounter with law enforcement. Whites and blacks still live in segregated neighborhoods. Even in the so-called liberal enclave of academia, minorities are underrepresented in high level administrative positions. There are just a handful of East Asian women full professors in Ophthalmology in all US medical schools. Hollywood executives do believe that movies cannot be successful with Asian lead actors and thus they still cast white actors for Asian roles. Asians are disadvantaged in the admissions process at elite American schools. Racial stereotypes do exist and pervade even the most self-professed liberal minds and this is a problem. This is not just a battle over free speech as liberal boomers have cast it. This is about what we need to do to make society more just and fair. Shriver thought it was ridiculous that people would be upset over wearing sombreros but it does indicate that there are those that automatically associate a Mexican drink with a Mexican stereotype. Some of these students will be future leaders and I don’t think it is too much to ask that they be aware of the inherent racial biases they may harbour.

Forming a consistent political view

In view of the current US presidential election, I think it would be a useful exercise to see if I could form a rational political view that is consistent with what I actually know and believe from my training as a scientist. From my knowledge of dynamical systems and physics, I believe in the inherent unpredictability of complex nonlinear systems. Uncertainty is a fundamental property of the universe at all scales. From neuroscience, I know that people are susceptible to errors, do not always make optimal choices, and are inconsistent. People are motivated by whatever triggers dopamine to be released. From genetics, I know that many traits are highly heritable and that includes height, BMI, IQ and the Big Five personality traits. There is lots of human variance. People are motivated by different things, have various aptitudes, and have various levels of honesty and trustworthiness. However, from evolution theory, I know that genetic variance is also essential for any species to survive. Variety is not just the spice of life, it is also the meat. From ecology, I know that the world is a linked ecosystem. Everything is connected. From computer science, I know that there are classes of problems that are easy to solve, classes that are hard to solve, and classes that are impossible to solve and no amount of computing power can change that. From physics and geology, I fully accept that greenhouse gases will affect the energy balance on earth and that the climate is changing. However, given the uncertainty of dynamical systems, while I do believe that current climate models are pretty good, there does exist the possibility that they are missing something. I believe that the physical laws that govern our lives are computable and this includes consciousness. I believe everything is fallible and that includes people, markets and government.

So how would that translate into a political view? Well, it would be a mishmash of what might be considered socialist, liberal, conservative, and libertarian ideas. Since I think randomness and luck is a large part of life, including who your parents are, I do not subscribe to the theory of just desserts. I don’t think those with more “talents” deserve all the wealth they can acquire. However, I also do realize that we are motivated by dopamine and part of what triggers dopamine is reaping the rewards of our efforts so we must leave incentives in place. We should not try to make society completely equal but redistributive taxation is necessary and justified.

Since I think people are basically incompetent and don’t always make good choices, people sometimes need to be protected from themselves. We need some nanny state regulations such as building codes, water and air quality standards, transportation safety, and toy safety. I don’t believe that all drugs should be legalized because some drugs can permanently damage brains, especially those of children. Amphetamines and opioids should definitely be illegal. Marijuana is probably okay but not for children. Pension plans should be defined benefit (rather than defined contribution) schemes. Privatizing social security would be a disaster. However, we should not over regulate.  I would deregulate a lot of land use especially density requirements. We should eliminate all regulations that enforce monopolies including some professional requirements that deliberately restrict supply. We should not try to pick winners in any industry.

I believe that people will try to game the system so we should design welfare and tax systems that minimize the possibility of cheating. The current disability benefits program needs to be fixed. I do not believe in means testing for social programs as it gives room to cheat. Cheating not only depletes the system but also engenders resentment in others who do not cheat. Part of the anger of the working class is that they see people around them gaming the system. The way out is to replace the entire welfare system with a single universal basic income. People have argued that it makes no sense for Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to get a basic income. In actuality, they would end up paying most of it back in taxes. In biology, this is called a futile cycle but it has utility since it is easier to just give everyone the same benefits and tax according to one rule then having exceptions for everything as we have now. We may not be able to afford a basic income now but we eventually will.

Given our lack of certainty and incompetence, I would be extremely hesitant about any military interventions on foreign soil. We are as likely to make things worse as we are to make the better. I think free trade is in net a good thing because it does lead to higher efficiency and helps people in lower income countries. However, it will absolutely hurt some segment of the population in the higher income country. Since income is correlated with demand for your skills, in a globalized world those with skills below the global median will be losers. If a lot of people will do your job for less then you will lose your job or get paid less. For the time being, there should be some wage support for low wage people but eventually this should transition to the basic income.

Since I believe the brain is computable, this means that any job a human can do, a robot will eventually do as well or better. No job is safe. I do not know when the mass displacement of work will take place but I am sure it will come. As I wrote in my AlphaGo piece, not everyone can be a “knowledge” worker, media star, or CEO. People will find things to do but they won’t all be able to earn a living off of it in our current economic model. Hence, in the robot world, everyone would get a basic income and guaranteed health care and then be free to do whatever they want to supplement that income including doing nothing. I romantically picture a simulated 18th century world with people indulging in low productivity work but it could be anything. This will be financed by taxing the people who are still making money.

As for taxes, I think we need to go a system that de-emphasizes income taxes, which can be gamed and disincentivizes work, to one that taxes the use of shared resources (i.e. economic rents). This includes land rights, mineral rights, water rights, air rights, solar rights, wind rights, monopoly rights, eco system rights, banking rights, genetic rights, etc. These are resources that belong to everyone. We could use a land value tax model. When people want to use a resource, like land to build a house, they would pay the intrinsic value of that resource. They would keep any value they added. This would incentivize efficient utility of the resource while not telling anyone how to use it.

We could use an auction system to value these resources and rights. Hence, we need not regulate wall street firms per se but we would tax them according to the land they use and what sort of monopoly influence they exploit. We wouldn’t need to force them to obey capital requirements, we would tax them for the right to leverage debt. We wouldn’t need Glass-Steagall or Too Big to Fail laws for banks. We’ll just tax them for the right to do these things. We would also not need a separate carbon tax. We’ll tax the right to extract fossil fuels at a level equal to the resource value and the full future cost to the environment. The climate change debate would then shift to be about the discount rate. Deniers would argue for a large rate and alarmists for a small one. Sports leagues and teams would be taxed for their monopolies. The current practice of preventing cities from owning teams would be taxed.

The patent system needs serious reform. Software patents should be completely eliminated. Instead of giving someone arbitrary monopoly rights for a patent, patent holders should be taxed at some level that increases with time. This would force holders to commercialize, sell or relinquish the patent when they could no longer bear the tax burden and this would eliminate patent trolling.

We must accept that there is no free will per se so that crime and punishment must be reinterpreted. We should only evaluate whether offenders are dangerous to society and the seriousness of the crime. Motive should no longer be important. Only dangerous offenders would be institutionalized or incarcerated. Non-dangerous ones should repay the cost of the crime plus a penalty. We should also do a Manhattan project for nonlethal weapons so the police can carry them.

Finally, under the belief that nothing is certain, laws and regulations should be regularly reviewed including the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In fact, I propose that the 28th Amendment be that all laws and regulations must be reaffirmed or they will expire in some set amount of time.

 

 

 

What Uber doesn’t get

You may have heard that ride hailing services Uber and Lyft have pulled out of Austin, TX because they refuse to be regulated. You can read about the details here. The city wanted to fingerprint drivers, as they do for taxis, but Uber and Lyft forced a referendum on the city to make them exempt or else they would leave. The city voted against them. I personally use Uber and really like it but what I like about Uber has nothing to do with Uber per se or regulation. What I like is 1) no money needs to be exchanged especially the tip and 2) the price is essentially fixed so it is in the driver’s interest to get me to my destination as fast as possible. I have been taken on joy rides far too many times by taxi drivers trying to maximize the fare and I never know how much to tip. However, these are things that regulated taxis could implement and should implement. I do think it is extremely unfair that Uber can waltz into a city like New York and compete against highly regulated taxis, who have paid as much as a million dollars for the right to operate. Uber and Lyft should collaborate with existing taxi companies rather than trying to put them out of business. There was a reason to regulate taxis (e.g. safety, traffic control, fraud protection), and that should apply whether I hail a cab on the street or I use a smartphone app.

Worst machine in the world

I really hate leaf blowers. I think they are a huge waste of energy. They mostly make noise and heat and perform a task that perfectly good tools (i.e. broom and rake) can already do extremely well.  I don’t believe they save much time. (Yes, I have raked a lawn full of leaves before.)

 

The nature of evil

In our current angst over terrorism and extremism, I think it is important to understand the motivation of the agents behind the evil acts if we are ever to remedy the situation. The observable element of evil (actus reus) is the harm done to innocent individuals. However, in order to prevent evil acts, we must understand the motivation behind the evil (mens rea). The Radiolab podcast “The Bad Show” gives an excellent survey of the possible varieties of evil. I will categorize evil into three types, each with increasing global impact. The first is the compulsion or desire within an individual to harm another. This is what motivates serial killers like the one described in the show. Generally, such evilness will be isolated and the impact will be limited albeit grisly. The second is related to what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.” This is an evil where the goal of the agent is not to inflict harm per se as in the first case but in the process of pursuing some other goal, there is no attempt to avoid possible harm to others. This type of sociopathic evil is much more dangerous and widespread as is most recently seen in Volkswagen’s fraudulent attempt to pass emission standards. Although there are sociopathic individuals that really have no concern for others, I think many perpetrators in this category are swayed by cultural norms or pressures to conform. The third type of evil is when the perpetrator believes the act is not evil at all but a means to a just and noble end. This is the most pernicious form of evil because when it is done by “your side” it is not considered evil. For example, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was considered to be a necessary sacrifice of a few hundred thousand lives to end WWII and save many more lives.

I think it is important to understand that the current wave of terrorism and unrest in the Middle East is motivated by the third type. Young people are joining ISIS not because they particularly enjoy inflicting harm on others or they don’t care how their actions affect others, but because they are rallying to a cause they believe to be right and important. Many if not most suicide bombers come from middle class families and many are women. They are not merely motivated by a promise of a better afterlife or by a dire economic situation as I once believed. They are doing this because they believe in the cause and the feeling that they are part of something bigger than themselves. The same unwavering belief and hubris that led people to Australia fifty thousand years ago is probably what motivates ISIS today. They are not nihilists as many in the west believe. They have an entirely different value system and they view the west as being as evil as the west sees them. Until we fully acknowledge this we will not be able to end it.

Why science is hard to believe

Here is an excerpt from a well written opinion piece by Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach:

Washington Post: We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

Science doubt has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movie “Interstellar,” set in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding, school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked.

I recommend reading the whole piece.