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I think this is the story of the Democratic convention: Buchanan’s assessment of Obama’s acceptance speech.  I found it very moving.

If you want to see any of the speeches from the Democratic convention then get it from the DNC—it is in a different class from any other internet video I have seen—the first high fidelity media I have ever seen on the internet.  The whole production is very, very classy.

If you go to the No. 10 blog, view the source, and look at the CSS link, you will see:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/wp-content/themes/networker-10/style.css

and if you inspect this file you will see:

/*
Theme Name: NetWorker
Theme URI: http://www.antbag.com
Description: An adsense ready theme from Antbag.com.
Version: 1.0
Author: Anthony Baggett
Author URI: http://www.antbag.com/
*/

Bearing in mind that the fees that NMM are likely to have charged No. 10 for developing this blog, it is not surprising that the original designer of the theme, Anthony Baggett, is none too happy about receiving no credit, and nothing at all except grief; as you can imagine there has been a back and forth between Anthony and NMM.

Now I have worked in the IP business, and you take extra special care not to get contaminated by IP if you want to sell it on, and NMM look soooooooo contaminated—it is being screamed to the whole internet—and would surely have a really hard time establishing that their work is in no way derivative of Anthony’s.  What really astonishes me is that the agency has no awareness of the first law of holes and is continuing to dig, talking about libelous claims and demanding an apology from Anthony.

Given the horrible mess they have made of this they would really do much better to stop being defensive and think about coming to some agreement with Anthony.  Looking over the email correspondence as listed on the NMM website I am horrified at the way they have handled it.  The fact that the stakes are so high should make them less prickly but they are coming across as more prickly than a prickly thing.  I have not read anything anywhere that is wildly out of line with what all the parties are saying.  NMM started with Anthony’s theme and have produced something which is now quite different.  The minutiae of the exact relationship between the two is hardly the issue; everyone agrees they are substantially different, but it looks so much like a derivative work, and the credit remains in the CSS file, so why no compensation and all these damands for apologies, especially as Anthony appears to have taken great care to stick to the facts of the case on his blog?

William R. Polk

William Polk has a guest piece at Informed Comment warning us about what is likely to happen if we carry down our current track to a war with Iran.  How many M.E. specialists, historians, soldiers, reporters–none of them alarmists or peace-niks–do we have to hear?  This is just what was happening in the run-up to the Iraq war, except the stakes are much, much higher (for us).  It is like we are stumbling along the edge of a precispise with only some aware of what we are doing and praying that we pull away from the edge.  But on we go.

1,500 Reported Killed in Georgia Battle

Robert Farley has some excellent coverage and analysis of the Georgia-Russian war here and then here.

So what gives?  We have an American Ally, being groomed for NATO membership, at war with Russia.  Russia and the USA of course still retain the ability to annihilate humanity if they got sucked into a total war.  And nobody is freaking; the olypics carryon serenely, the UNSC isn’t in session recalled; the duct tape remain on the shelves.

And of course this is an entirely rational response.  What was entirely irrational was the schemes to expand NATO right up onto the Russian border.  The much commented-on discussion between Fukuyama and Kagan included some revealing exchanges that shed much light on this.  Fukuyama tried to explain the absurdity of the current US position of demanding to have everything from Russia: accepting missile defence in eastern Europe, NATO expansion (while excluding Russia), that Russia sabotage their lucrative relationship with Iran, accepting the NATO settlement on Kosovo, return to internal democratisation, be nice to their West-facing neighbours, and, no doubt the moon on a stick.  Kagan resisted but later on made a revealing comment: that the the hubris didn’t start in 2001, but the Clinton administration (or, I would say, Bush I).  Right!  The neocons could not have been so successful in pushing their agenda, and remain so influential, if they weren’t pushing at an open door.  To some extent we have all become neocons and they are really a pathological examples of a much wider movement based on hubris and delusion: how else to explain HR362 and the absurd Iran policies.

What we are seeing now is a tragic ‘correction’ where the Russians and the Georgians are exposing our priorities for us.

Update: via Robert Farley it seems that the Washington Post doesn’t get it and is still very much in delusional neo-con land.

Update II: guardian.co.uk has some deatailed reports on the war and these reports suggest that the Georgians very much started it.

Are they going to start this war?  It remains an abstraction for me.  Each time the lunies have another push at starting a war, they enable the adults to take away more of their toys, and more people stop paying much attention to them.  The more they cry wolf the more they seem to be ignored.

But still HR 362 remains in play and apparently keeps gaining sponsors.  This is of course the US political process doing its dance, but could it end in war?  The chances surely can’t be zero.  But what are they?

We live in interesting times.  Let us pray that they don’t get too interesting.

The Syrian and Iranian leaders, Bashar al-Assad, left, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Tehran on 3rd August

Check out Fisk’s latest article describes the hilarious attempts by Sarkozy and others to detach Syria from Tehran.

Fisk concludes:

In other words, Syria kept its cool. When the US invaded Iraq, the world wondered if its tanks would turn left to Damascus or right to Tehran. In fact, they lie still in the Iraqi desert, where US generals still variously accuse Iran and Syria of encouraging the insurgency against them. If Washington wants to leave Iraq, it can call Damascus for help.

And the real cost? The US will have to restore full relations with Syria. It will have to continue talks with Iran. It will have to thank Iran for its “help” in Iraq – most of the Iraqi government, after all, was nurtured in the Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq war in which the US took Saddam’s side. It will have to accept Iran is not making a nuclear bomb. And it will have to prevent Israel staging a bombing spectacular on Iran which will destroy every hope of US mediation. It will also have to produce a just Middle East peace. McCain or Obama, please note.

Sometimes a picture is really priceless.  The Iranians have repeatedly made clear that they have no intention of attacking Israel, that they anticipate Israel falling apart through its own internal contradictions.  there is not the slightest indication that the Iranians are preparing for any such military intervention or that they would ever be capable of it.  The real point of course is that it is a political attack, and the whole is part of the ‘cold war’ being fought between Iran and Israel, the USA and the industrial nations, a war that the Bush administration decided to fight, and the Israelis appear to be making sure that the Bush administration makes good its promises of taking out Iran after Iraq.

With such confusion and disingenuousness one can only presume that this is political manouevring to prepare for military should it come to that.  Should that come to pass the wealthy people that gave us this mess will not be the ones to pay the price: that will fall to the poor people.

I missed an article by Scott Ritter at TruthDig on the 14th on the consequences of such a war. Elsewhere Gershom Gorenberg picks apart Benny Morris’s Strangeglovian fantasies about Israel using its nuclear wepaons aresenal to settle up with Iran and Commander Huber surveys the inanity of the discorse on the Iraq war.

I am most curious to know whether Gershom Gorenberg agrees with Comander Huber’s analysis.

Matt, as often you are so right about this.

As Scott Ritter points out the Iranians have switched from talking down the US/Israeli sabre rattling as bluster to responding in kind and they are doing this to give Mullen and the realists the ammo to argue that there is no way the fallout for an attack on Iran can be restricted without much more serious preparations than those that have already been made and, of course, those preparations can’t be made before January.

Cheney and the neocons have been desperate since 2005 to bring about regime change and they figure that whatever the outside chances bombing is their last best shot. They don’t care about the risks to the Middle East and the American/world economy: that kind of pain will be felt by poor people and foreign suckers.

However the neocons need a plausible rationale to sell to the rest of us. As Matt says they have a solution in search of a problem.

Part of the reason that so many of us like reading Yglesias is that he comes up with this kind of stuff that might not be always comfortable to read but it sure makes you think—the mark of a philosopher, and the real reason for reading good bloggers.

Clearly if you are going to comment on an area, some mastery of it is required, but anyone who seriously believes that a mastery of Persian, Arabic and Hebrew is necessary to comment on US foreign policy in the Middle East is exhibiting worrying signs of narrowness.  Yglesias finishes his second missive on the subject with a beautiful observation about the Pakistani understanding of US culture and language will make them much more effective in manipulating US policy makers than the reverse.  It is this kind of awareness that makes Yglesias’s commentary so valuable.

Just yesterday Yglesias observed that many commentator’s advocacy of bombing Iran show signs of people with a solution in search of a problem.  I used to work in the tech sector and we learned to recognise this kind of thinking, and Yglesisas is of course dead right.  It is this ability to condense into a short article a critical insight  that makes them so valuable.  Yglesias says that thanks to his shortcommings ‘the overwhelming majority of Americans have never read this blog and never will’ but this is exactly wrong.  It is the chalenging (i.e., worthwhile) aspects of his blog that will act as the barier.  I wish perhaps more of the pundits that populate the mainstream media would read, and, more importantly, understand what he says in his blog.  We would not be in half the mess we are if they did.

Apart from that it seems to be a well-thought through redesign of the control area at the top.  The enhanced-url completion is excellent, as is the ability to pick up links and drag them into folders and the bookmarks menu.

Very smooth.  Very smart.  Almost no disruption.  IE have a real fight on their hands.

Reflecting on my previous article on our seeming determination to smash our economies on the rocks of Iran I thoght of the the Taijitu or yin-yang motif, which I think may summarize the situation.  My understanding is the the motif is intended to symbolise the cyclical waxing and waning of the yin and yang qualities in a given situation.  Notice that when dark yin or light yang are at their maximum, the other is present in the middle, and of course the dominating one must then give way.

This seems to me to symbolise where the industrial powers are today.  Their military-industrial dominance has been derived on the mastery of coal and then oil.  Dominating the oil lies at the heart of the industrial nation’s involvement in the region from the beginning of the oil era at the opening of the 20th century.  It drew the British into the region with their 1914 invasion of Iraq, the carving up of the Arab world after beraking up the Ottoman empire, the overthrowing of Mosadegh and so on.

Of course oil supplies are probably maxing out and can no longer feed the colossal displacement activity that we normally call economic growth.  The underlying source of our power is set to decline.  It is the impotence and frustration that comes from this realistation that may be driving some of the irrational and destructive behaviour.

This reminds me of the games that we are playing at the moment with Iran.  Maybe we are all bored and in need of some entertainment–not able to get the kick out of destroying other people’s countries we need to make the game a little more exciting.  Let us hope that we keep on hitting the grenades into the sea.

Many with a good knowledge of what is going on, and a good track record in finding things out, are saying that we are nat making any sense.  Nothing has changed since the Iraq fiasco.  But when the fireworks start this time we are all going to get seriously hurt.  Before we started destroying the Iraqi people and their country they were an industrialized country with cities, hospitals, schools, power grids, water treatment and so on.  We systematically wrecked that so it makes a good study of what could happen in the industrial world if we pull down all those systems.  They, and our economies, are all dependent on oil.

This is why the Iranians have no need for a strategic nuclear deterrent.  They just need control a single narrow shipping lane.  They have always been clear about this, and they have had plenty of time to prepare.

Nothing that we are doing makes any sense at all.  We accuse them of undermining the nuclear weapons proliferation agreements, but it is us that are destroying these agreements.  We accuse them of destabilising the middles east but it is us that are doing so.  We accuse them of supporting terrorism and yet we hear that the Bush administration has asked for $400m from Congress to terrorize Iran and Congress are playing along and considering authorizing a naval blockade of Iran.  And we continue to terrorize and kill people in the region in quite high numbers, far, far higher numbers than the paramilitary groups that we obsess over.

We are nuts.  I don’t know how it is going to play out and it is not worth losing sleep over.  Worrying is a mug’s game.  All I can do is call it as I see it.

For those that are interested, Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter have interviews (Hersh, Ritter) and articles (Hersh, Ritter) spelling out what is going on.  Gordon Prather’s articles on nuclear weapons proliferation are excellent, as are Gareth Porter’s on the wider issues.

I had a mixed reaction to this book, spending much of it trying to avoid being suffocated by Taleb’s ego. More serious was the ignoring of Taleb’s bar-room philosophy (see my previous article) as he pontificated on anything that lurched into view on his meander to the meat of the book in part 3 (p. 213). He says that he gets emotional (p. 252) because of the irrationality of those around him in not coming round to he is way of thinking (and he does have a point) but there is nothing rational about being ‘emotional’ and the various rage fits he seems to enjoy provoking in others (p. 64) or indulging in himself (p. 128). Interestingly Taleb’s mother elicits the most revealing passage:

I am reminded of a measure my mother concocted, as a joke, when I decided to become a businessman. Being ironic about my (perceived) confidence, though not necessarily unconvinced of my abilities, she found a way for me to make a killing. How? Someone who could figure out how to buy me at the price I am truly worth and sell me at the price I think I am worth would be able to pocket a huge difference. Though I keep trying to convince her of my internal humility and insecurity concealed under a confident exterior; though I keep telling her I am an introspector–she remain skeptical. Introspector shmintrospector, she still jokes at the time of writing that I am still a little ahead of myself.

Why don’t we all listen to our mothers more. As this article is not nearly flattering enough I guess it will never be read but should Taleb ever read these words I really think he should find out just what humility, what its cause are and what it looks like. Humility comes from inner confidence but bluster comes from insecurity. We all have to do battle with our insecurities and arrogant demons but it is going to be much more difficult if these categories are confused.

Of course Taleb does have an important story to tell. Part of it builds on the work of the great Benoit Mandelbrot. From Larry Elliot’s review:

Taleb is a fan of the Polish-born French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who gives short shrift to those who believe financial markets resemble a bell curve, with modest movements the norm and violent moves infinitesimally rare. Looking at the daily movements of the DJIA [Dow Jones Industrial Average] from 1916 to 2003, Mandelbrot said that according to the neat bell curve analysis, there should have been 58 days when the Dow moved more than 3.4%, when in fact there were 1,001.

Instead of just six days when there were movements of more than 4.5% there were 366. Only once in every 300,000 years should there have been a day when the Dow moved by 7% or more, but it happened 48 times. “Extreme price swings are the norm in financial markets – not aberrations that can be ignored. Price movements do not follow the well-mannered bell curve assumed by modern finance; they follow a more violent curve that makes an investor’s ride much bumpier,” Mandelbrot says in his book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets (Profile Books). “A sound trading strategy would build this cold, hard fact into its foundations”.

At the moment, it seems highly unlikely that this “cold, hard fact” has been built into market thinking, where the abiding sense is that this is forever summer. That, of course, is precisely Taleb’s point.

This distills the two of Taleb’s basic points concerning the poor (objective) models being used to model the financial markets and the (subjective) narrative. The preferred subjective narrative is being allowed to drive the models with a scant regard for how well they match the objective reality and this leads us into periodic trouble and will ultimately lead us into big trouble.

Narratives

We all use narratives to structure reality in order to make it manageable. Yet these narratives inevitably have boundaries in time and space where the narrative stops working, not least that they may only suit the person holding the narrative (and a small number like-minded people). Taleb proclaims throughout the book that he is an empirical skeptic which is supposed to make him and the other members of this select group less prone to getting duped by the false narratives we create for ourselves. However I think this is mistaken for two reasons: any thoughtful and sharp person (they need not be intellectual–I am inclined to put Taleb’s mother in this category, who may of course be an intellectual for all I know) will be on the lookout for this kind of thing–it’s what it means to be thoughtful and sharp. Secondly, I don’t think it is a case of trying to separate out the false narratives from the good narratives so much as being aware of the narratives you subscribe to and making a constant effort to find their boundaries.

We see this happening all the time and of course politicians are constantly trying to shape the narratives around them or give them the slip. Taleb doesn’t read newspapers and neither do I (I am even more wary of broadcast media), and I think for the same reason, that they are so narrative driven and it seems to be almost impossible for even honest and sceptical journalists to escape these narratives–any attempt to do so will generally be undercut (the so-called electric fence—see Media Lens, and Flat Earth News).

One narrative that I thought Taleb leaned on extraordinarily heavily was that of evolution.

Some people naively believe that the process of unfairness started with the gramophone, according to the logic that I just presented. I disagree. I am convinced that the process started much, much earlier, with our DNA, which stores information about ourselves, and allows us to repeat our performance without our being there by spreading our genes down the generations. (p. 30)

To my mind this is really naive, because I think we have no idea of the boundaries of the ‘evolution’ narrative that we are so incredibly fond of, sup[porting as it does the mechanistic, materialistic view of life (despite physicists long ago abandoning this view of reality) and enshrining selfishness as a principle in nature thereby acting as a perpetual justification for selfish behaviour (notwithstanding the vehement denial of the neo-Darwinians). Taleb even talked about a 'risk-taking gene' without explaining why a mechanism for controlling the synthesis of protein should have anything to do with risk taking (see Sheldrake's Presence of the Past for an explanation of this point, which can be read as a sharp critique of neo-Darwinism without accepting Sheldrake's [positive] proposals).

Taleb claims to be cautious evolution (p. 189) and intervenes in the Intelligent Design debate with the observation (footnote, p. 170) that it is hard to look at a computer and a car and consider them the result of an aimless process, yet they are. This misses the point. Proponents of I.D. (and I am ambivalent) point to watches and cars and say that just as there is evidence that an intelligent agent has shaped the evolution of these artefacts we can see the same kinds of features in the way the world works around us. Whether a single person has sat down and planned out the evolution of ‘the car’ is not the point.

Anyway this is my own skepticism. My point is that we are all dependent upon narratives–we all see the world from a point of view. The key is to avoid clinging on to those narratives too tightly, to be aware that others may have different needs and that your own needs may change over time. It is called keeping an open mind.

Unknown Unknowns

Taleb spends much of the book discussing his black swans. The name is taken from the induction-breaking observation of an antipodean black swan that forces the observer to conclude that all swans aren’t white after all. On the one hand he seems to go somewhat over the top and the reference to ‘Unknown Unknowns‘ and the fashion for worrying about it in military circles I think is quite ironic. The initial reference was in a situation in where the speaker wanted to suggest that horrific human catastrophe had somehow happened due to some unforseen circumstances that had nothing to do with the gentleman’s own arrogance and actions. It had all been for seen of course, by those had studies their history. For this reason I find Taleb’s suggestion that we should “downgrade ‘soft’ areas such as history and social science to a level slightly above aesthetics and entertainment” (p. 171) a bit wide of the mark. It is because it is so difficult to do well that we should pay great attention to history and those that are good at it, and from as many different perspectives as possible (and the same is true of the analysis of intelligence). (See earlier article Of Causation and History).

The more interesting point that Taleb is making the illusion of stability in the world around us, until something happens to turn our world upside down–the arrival of a black swan. In one of the best passages in the early part of the book he describes the way centuries of peaceful coexistence were blown apart by the 1970s civil war in Lebanon. Of course nobody foresaw it and nobody could have been expected to foresee it. Taleb observes that we have a strong tendency to construct cozy narratives about living in a stable world when we have that good fortune to find ourselves in a settled situation, but this is an illusion. (And indeed it is.) Part of our world lies in what Taleb calls Extremistan.

Extremistan

Taleb’s idea of Extremistan is probably the most important contribution of the book.  (I don’t know whether he started writing about it before The Black Swan: this is the first book I have read by him.)  When you are not in Extremistan you are in Mediocristan according to Taleb, where everything is reasonably linear, linear and predictable and populations can be modeled well by Gaussian bell curves.

In this setup the configuration of the system is often limited by physical realities.  So in a population of people, biometric data will generally cluster around the mean with outliers becoming rapidly more improbable as we dart from the mean.  ‘Ya can’t change the laws of physics!’  As Galileo observed Physics doesn’t scale, so we won’t find people 100m tall.  But that doesn’t stop them being 1cm tall; nevertheless the fact remains that populations can be modeled very well by bell curves where physical characteristics are concerned.  And this extends to jobs that are tied to tactile, physical realities, such as income earned according to the number of hours you spend teaching pupils or the number of widgets you assemble.  As long as you are being paid according to physical criteria, according to the effort you put in then the pay of a population of school teachers or widget assemblers can be modeled reasonably well with a bell curve and you will see few surprises.

Taleb’s point is that you can’t measure pay in general with bell curves.  It will work for a while, but once Bill Gates or a J.K. Rowling turns up in your population of school teachers and widget assemblers the whole thing blows up irretrievable.  The concentrations are so high that the total wealth of a huge population of average wage earners can be doubled by the addition of one high-earner.  This is the problem with a world that is mostly Mediocristan, or gives the appearance of being Mediocristan, but is actually Extremistan.  It is Extremistan because these outliers must be taken into account because they can turn up in your population; they will eventually turn up in your population, and then all your assumptions will get blown away.

Being a quant trader Taleb is interested in the markets on which the world financial system and all our pensions are based.  The people operating the markets (safeguarding all our pensions) and those regulating them have to make sure that the markets don’t break down and that they don’t wipe out our pensions and savings.  What Madlebrot and Taleb have observed  is that they are assuming that the markets are Gaussian and belong to Mediocristan whereas they very much belong to Extremistan.  Given how interconnected all the financial markets are nowadays we really should be taking an interest in avoiding catastrophic failures.  By continuing to live in a pleasant fantasy that they are more table than they are we are inviting problems.  By using Mandlebrot’s models we can eliminate a class of surprises.

What is Really Going On

While some things that may belong to Extremistan are physical in nature, most of them are actually ideal in nature.  Robert Duquette has commented that the weather belongs to Extremistan, for example.  The weather can be quite placid and stable, only to flip quite quickly with the arising or arrival of a tornado.  Weather is know to be chaotic and phsyical (I will come back to this).

However, most of Taleb’s examples are actually ideal phenomena and not physical, such as the money that all our markets ultimately trade (there may be bartering exchanges but I think we can say they are a minority).  The way that money flows is also ideal, it depends upon the preferences of people.  When those preferences are anchored in physical expectations, such as the number of hours worked and so on, and when there is a healthy market for the skills concerned, then extremities are avoided and we see stable, predictable and (IMHO) generally-healthy Mediocristan.

When there isn’t a healthy market and large populations of people start chasing a rarefied resource then that can lead to large concentrations of wealth and we realise we are in unstable, unpredictable and generally-pathological Extremistan.  Notice the ideal nature of this phenomenon.  It is because large populations of people are behaving according to preferences with no real-world physical restraints.  So we get Beatlemania and suddenly all the teenagers are rushing into the shops to buy records from a single pop band, driving up the profile of the band and so on.  Feedback mechanisms, that are ideal in nature, are easy to set up in our modern world of mass communications.  I am not the first and I won’t be the last to observe that this underlies the increasingly chaotic features of modernity.

Final Reflections

One final, way-out observation, and one that is more mundane.  Taleb makes an interesting observation about the phony use of quantum mechanics to justify an indeterminate reality and makes the excellent observation that quantum systems are the very systems that do scale to produce predictable behaviour.  This is a fine observation.  The interesting thing is that when we try to burrow down into physical reality we come smack up against ideal reality.  This I believe is the lesson of the quantum-theoretic revolution in physics which has yet to be more widely understood (its over a hundred years and counting–see my Consciousness Explained? or Stapp’s Mindful Universe for more on this).

Quantum mechanics suggests that unpredictable physical systems may indicate that we are looking at boundaries between the mental and physical, at least in the very small.  There are indeed many problems with mechanical ideas of causation (see my recent article, its commentary and the article it is discussion and its commentary and the random link that Word Press has conveniently found.)  Although may appear far-out, definitely an absurd idea for the mechanicals, could it be that chaotic macro-events like weather may have an ideal aspect after all.  I am just floating the idea.

The more prosaic point is this, and also quite ideal and ethical.  Taleb talks much about epistemologically arrogant we are, that we almost always overestimate the quality of our knowledge.  And indeed this is true.  But I would say the more important underlying point is that we are always overestimating our consequence.  We are habitually selfish and arrogant.  If we were to take an interest in pushing back on plain arrogance, cultivating an inner confidence and honest humility then this would get to the root of the problem.  No?

This column is really very good.