Originally posted on Tue, 11/06/2012

I’ve been seeing (and commenting on) a lot of suggestions about how to improve our democracy. It’s been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Winston Churchill is most famous for saying that (“it’s been said” and all), but we’ve over half a century with lots of advances in game theory and psychology, so perhaps it’s time to revisit this assertion.

First we must decide what the purpose of government is. It’s not strictly to enforce the will of the people, for several reasons. Even in a democracy of one person– or a dictatorship– a leader might not know what he wants or be wrong, by later judgement. With more people, there’s even less agreement. What’s more, it’s important for people to have certain rights, regardless of the will of the people.

For the purpose of argument, I’d say that the purpose of government is twofold:

1. To ensure an equitable distribution of power. At a minimum, to keep tyrants, corrupt officials, invaders, thugs, bullies, and thieves from taking over. Taken to an extreme, this may mean heavy-handed wealth redistribution. There’s a lot of room for interpretation in between, depending on what you consider equitable. My own take is that, in each generation, every person should have a fighting chance to rise to the top of society, and nobody should become completely disenfranchised. (Note that this is aspirational: I don’t know of any government that always succeeds at either.)
2. To facilitate cooperation, as necessary. That is, to make sure that services that can’t or shouldn’t be provided individually are taken care of, either by providing them directly or indirectly through laws, regulations, and policies. That’s really more of a means than an end, so I’ll append: …in order to sustain the best of human values, for the present and future generations.

That being the case, is democracy the best choice? Many of the biggest problems that face our world are environmental or economic, where experts have a far more nuanced (and often completely different) view than the population at large. Government is most successful when people are intimately involved in measuring outcomes, but don’t necessarily care about implementation details. Sanitation, for example. People don’t know (or care) where the trash goes, so long as they don’t have to care, but will complain immediately if it doesn’t get picked up. Or schooling. School works best when parents complain immediately when things go wrong, and taxpayers are willing to pay to make things go better. But global warming? That takes decades to measure, and few have the expertise to measure it.

Economics is similar. The biggest factors that effect the economy, in my opinion, take 10-20 years to have an effect. Education. Investments in roads and other infrastructure. Cultivating a business community that makes long range plans. And preserving free-market enterprise. (“Business friendly” policies tend to be pro-existing-business, and therefore anti-free-market.)

The biggest advantage of democracy is that it is extremely good at distributing power. Power tends to consolidate. The wealthy and powerful– whether individuals, associations, or corporations– use their influence to gain more influence. It’s a corrosive effect that seeps through the cracks in every society. And once it becomes overwhelming, the disenfranchised try to take back power.

This is not unique to democracy. If anything, democracy works to protect the bullies– by keeping them from getting so powerful that they are overthrown violently. I see society as like a car going down a road. Ideally, the driver keeps the car in the middle of the lane, but at a minimum tries to keep it out of the ditch. The driver, in a democracy, is lazy. People have better things to do than to pay attention to politics. So it’s like a car with a sleepy driver, who wakes up when the car drifts too far, gets back into the lane, and dozes off again. That’s a whole lot better than monarchy and other dictatorships, which is like a bus where the driver doesn’t have to care about staying in the lane. It occasionally crashes, people die, the bus gets repaired, and someone else becomes the new driver. (Or you have a parliament which tries to replace reckless drivers, when the parliament itself isn’t reckless.)

So the qualities that make for a good government are (1) measurable progress toward goals (call it transparency), and (2) responsiveness, which is an antidote to corruption. There are plenty of organizations that do well in this regard that aren’t democratic. Successful, customer-focused companies (such as Apple) make it easy for people to judge them, and people do. They are held to a higher standard, which they don’t always meet. Apple, for example, delights its customers with high-quality products, and is also more transparent than any other electronics company when it comes to fair labor practices in their factories. The irony is that people associate Apple with poor labor practices, because we know more about them. You can be sure that Dell and HP don’t have better practices. Similarly in government, it appears the most corrupt when you hear about every little whiff of potential corruption, which is in fact when it’s the least corrupt.

So is democracy the best? For exposing and fixing corruption, you need activism to come from all corners. That doesn’t necessarily mean everyone voting in the way we think of it. Our election cycle is too infrequent to deal with immediate problems, yet too frequent to provide long-term leadership. And yet, because power tends to collect, we can’t afford to have politicians who persist for too long, lest they become too powerful.

Here are a few things I’d like to see for good governance, whether it’s in a democracy as we know it, or not:

• A democratic process that engages people at the appropriate level. Not asking them to make decisions about technical issues they can’t be expected to become experts in, nor asking them to choose several Soil And Water District Supervisors, and over dozen judges (as I do). But to give them an opportunity to choose a few leaders, whose qualities they can be expected to research and judge.
• A selection process which promotes consensus builders. So you aren’t choosing between the far left and the far right. Nor are you necessarily choosing the “safest,” most center-of-the-road candidate. I think multiple-choice voting (e.g. instant run-off) would be far better than our current system in this regard. That is, the winner would have to be acceptable to a majority of voters, not simply get more votes than the alternative. But you also need a system for choosing the candidates that’s more flexible than the current party system, where a radical group can overtake the nomination process.
• A culture of engagement, where corruption is not acceptable. Where diverse opinions are discussed, but lies and distortions are not tolerated. In some ways, the echo chamber of the Internet is a step back from the old days when most people got their news from a few authoritative sources.
• Resilience against power grabs. Small groups that can take over a nomination process, for one. But also organizations that lobby for tax loopholes that aren’t a big deal individually, but add up to a lot of corruption over time. I’m not sure what the cure for the latter is, except perhaps to limit the complexity of certain kinds of laws. (Referenda aren’t the answer: deceptive advertising influences voters even more than lobbyists influence politicians.)

If you were to design a system from scratch based on these principals, you’d end up with something unlike democracy as we practice it today. But it’s not impossible to get there from within our own system. Like so many things, the theoretical properties (how many legislators, how many parties, electoral or direct elections, etc.) aren’t as important as how well it is implemented. And that implies constant vigilance.

Originally posted on Tue, 10/23/2012

I’ve been a Bruce Schneier fan for years. I read his blog often enough that I don’t feel the need to read his books. But then he offered a discount on a signed edition of his latest book– with the one stipulation that I write a review of it. So here’s the review.

A lot of brilliant thinkers tend to get stuck in their own perspective. There are plenty of mathematical geniuses who can’t contemplate the implications of their ideas. Plenty of programmers who can’t understand why users don’t recognize the brilliance of their user interfaces. Bruce Schneier isn’t one of them. His rose to fame with Applied Cryptography, a book of algorithms. But because great encryption doesn’t help when it’s part of weak security, he’s written written with increasing breadth about security. After 9/11, he wrote Beyond Fear about how we individually and as a society make poor security trade-offs. Now he’s written Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. This takes an even wider view, as he asks: how is it that people can trust each other at all? For example, a man gets into a taxi in a foreign city. The man and the driver will never see each other again. The taxi driver could easily rob him and get away, or he could ride without paying. And yet every day all over the world, drivers and passengers can trust each other.

When I got this book, my first thought was it’s too thick. After all, Schneier has said he wants this to be read by all sorts of decision makers. I’ve heard that if you want to be read by busy people, make your book just long enough to be read in a single long plane trip. Then again, I’m not a best-selling author. But it turns out this isn’t such a long read, it’s 250 pages, plus another 100 pages of notes and references. (This book-to-notes ratio is up there with Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, which has a remarkable amount of overlap with Liars & Outliers.) It’s really two books in one: a quicker, drier, less technical read without endnotes, or a more colorful read with endnotes. I kept one bookmark in the endnotes at all times.

Liars & Outliers is an overview of trust and cooperation. It draws primarily from sociology, economics, and psychology with a big helping of evolutionary biology, game theory, and security. Philosophy and theology also show up, to add a bit of color. It’s about the different strategies for enforcing conformity in a group, and when they do and don’t work. This is practical stuff for anyone who needs to manage a large group, whether it’s an online discussion group, a corporation, or a country of taxpayers. The book takes pains to discuss this from a neutral perspective: the forces are the same whether it’s a just society versus murderers or a murderous society against saints. To this end, Schneier uses the rather awkward term “defector” to refer to rule breakers.

The book is summed up quite well in the first chapter. In fact, if you’re in a hurry you could just read the first two and the last chapter. Occasionally the book starts to read like a taxonomy, as Schneier explains the breadth of, for example, security techniques. This is an academic book trying– and usually succeeding– in being a general-audience book. While it does drag a little at times, there are plenty of popular just-for-fun nonfiction books that drag more. (I’ll admit, though I read a lot, I’m not much of a book reader.) And with the whole history of deceit and treachery to draw upon, he has plenty of colorful examples.

I feel like I’ve said a lot about the book without saying much about the contents of the book. As someone who not only reads Schneier’s blog, but reads many of the same sources he draws upon, there weren’t many ah-ha moments for me. Perhaps the biggest one is this: trust is rare in nature. It’s hard to establish and easy to break, but once established it yields huge benefits. And humans are the most cooperative and trusting species on Earth. Why? In part because we have the greatest capacity to evaluate reputations, so we know when not to trust. In part because of a sense of morality which leads us to punish rule breakers.

I hear plenty of people argue that corporations are inherently inhuman and inhumane. While Schneier doesn’t say that exactly, he spells out each of the pressures society uses to enforce conformity to social norms, and how corporations respond to only two (reputational and institutional [legal.])

The overarching message of the book is that there are different ways of establishing a trusting relationship, and they work on different scales. Neighbors directly evaluate each other. People who know each other only by reputation can go by that. Less intimate groups use morals and institutions to maintain group norms. And when all else fails, security mechanisms can make non-compliance difficult. None of these completely eliminate non-conformity, which is good because even good rules can have bad consequences. The trick is using the right tools– and the right amount of pressure– under the right circumstances. It’s depressing to consider all the ways that things go wrong– from suicide bombers to self-destructive investment banks to a lack of a global response to global warming. But at the same time, humans are amazing creatures in that we even have a cooperative arrangement as abstract as the United Nations or a coalition of corporations.

Originally posted on Wed, 10/17/2012

Yesterday I posted the following query to my friends:

Okay, everyone, here’s a quick homework assignment:

While you’re commuting tonight and tomorrow morning, look at the “go” stop lights. What color are they, REALLY? Yes, I know they are supposed to be green. But are they, really? And are different ones different colors? How many do you see that match the following colors:

1. Yellow-green
2. Pure green
3. Turquoise
4. Blue

No fair looking at photos of traffic lights, either. This is about color perception with your eyes.

(BTW, I’m partially color blind.)

So here’s what that’s all about. I’m red/green color blind, and green traffic lights have a blueish tint so that people like me can tell green from red. And yet people think of green lights as being a pure green. If you do a Google image search for green traffic light you get a mix of photographs– with blue-green lights– and clip art with pure green. Clearly illustrators aren’t looking at real lights.

This makes a difference to me because I see lots of user interfaces where they use red/green or red/amber/green to display key information: from traffic maps to MacOS window widgets. They never seem to use official traffic light colors. The worst, though, is red/green LEDs on appliances such as battery chargers. There’s absolutely no other context that can be used to indicate the status, since the brightness is identical.

Now, color perception is a tricky thing. It took me years to realize that I really am color blind, because I can nearly always figure out the color from context. (If that sounds weird, consider that you usually don’t notice your disabled color perception when you enter a low-light or colored light environment.) And color itself isn’t in nature– it’s a product of human perception. Consider that an apple looks to be the same color whether you see it under the cool light of noontime sun or the yellow cast of sunset. The light rays that hit your eyes are completely different, but your brain uses the background to compensate in order to construct a stable notion of color. That’s why I specified no photos– the background makes a big difference.

So the results? One person said yucca green, which she described as bluish. (Oddly, that swatch has slightly more red than blue.) Another said there’s variation, and the bluish ones are weird. And another said mostly pure green, with some yellow-green.

Oddly, I’d put the “yellow-green” option in just as a ringer; I never expected anyone to choose it. However, if the background is a bright blue sky, green will look more yellow.

So are green lights turquoise? I don’t trust my color vision enough to say. But you can compare. Blue-green traffic light, turquoise (equal parts blue and green light.)

Here are more details, for the pedantic.

Below is a picture of the official luminance ranges for traffic signals. Modern green traffic signals are allowed to be in the range from this:          to this:         . That’s assuming you’re looking at my color swaths on a pure white background. The ITE standard specifies colors relative to the range of human perception (in CIE 1931 color space)– that fingernail shape in the graph below. Computer displays, which shine only three colored lights, display a more limited, triangular color range with red, green, and blue corners. And you can’t get any of the legal traffic light colors from a computer screen!

BTW, I got my CIE 1931 to RGB conversions here. You probably won’t find a better source, because any serious color expert would point out that you can’t accurately convert CIE 1931 to RGB.

And here’s a mind-blowing example of how language affects color perception.

For my 4Dth birthday, I’m designing a scavenger hunt which will include several 3D pictures which require red/blue 3D glasses to view. It’s easy to make them in The Gimp (or Photoshop, if you have a wad to blow on such things.) Figuring out exactly how to do it isn’t so easy. The basic idea is to merge two photos, one from the left eye’s perspective and the other from the right eye’s perspective. The final image should have only the red component of the left-eye picture and none of the red component of the right-eye picture. If you’re shooting a still life, use any camera and take one photo slightly to the left of the other. For close-ups, the eye separation should be very small: an inch at most. For a scene of a room, the eyes should be a natural distance apart, about 3 inches.

1. For the left eye picture, add a layer above the photo filled with pure red ( RGB, a.k.a. #ff0000).
2. Set the mode for that layer mode to “Addition.” You should see the photo in colors ranging from black to red. With your 3D glasses on, the red lens should show the picture as it appears on the screen, the blue lens should show a black picture.
3. Under the Layer menu, select “Merge Down” to combine the two layers.
4. For the right eye picture (a separate document), add a layer above the photo filled with pure blue-green ( RGB, a.k.a. #0000ff).
5. Set the mode for that layer to “Addition”. With your 3D glasses on, you should see black through the left (red) eye.
6. Copy (or “copy visible”) this picture.
7. Paste into the other (left eye) picture. After pasting, hit the “new layer” button in the Layers dialog to turn the floating pasted image into a layer.
8. Set the layer mode to “Multiply.” You should now have a different photo visible through each lens of your 3D glasses.

A NY Times story on education disparities explains that the gap between lower income and higher income families has been increasing at an alarming rate.

There are a lot of things going on here. Wealthier families are spending nine times as much on their kids as lower-income families, up from five times in 1972. They’re also spending more time with their kids, particularly before Kindergarten. And I suspect that’s the crucial factor.

There are a lot of single-parent families out there where the parent is working multiple part-time jobs just trying to pay the bills. Compare that with my family, where we have a stay-at-home mom and both parents read to kids every day. It’s just not fair. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t feel guilty that I don’t deserve it. I think everyone deserves to have the same opportunities.

The NY Times article says it’s not just about money, but I think that would be a fine place to start. Labor protections have been eroding as full time jobs have given way to less regulated part time jobs. And the free market isn’t going to fix that—not when the jobs can migrate to other countries.

The inequalities can be solved through services. My family has benefited from parent training and pre-K services (ECFE, for Early Childhood and Family Education), which the school district provides at little or no cost. (Not counting taxes.) Studies have found negligible difference in education between stay-at-home parenting and high quality day care. (What they’ve found is that good parents are better than bad day care, and good day care is better than bad parents.) If parents work, they need affordable, high-quality day care that will prepare kids for Kindergarten.

Some people will call this Socialism, and claim that it will loose to capitalism in the long run. Well, now we have long term data. If you look at countries that do take care of their kids—such as the Scandinavian countries—they’re doing fine. At best, they’re doing much better than the US; at worst, it’s hard to argue that they’re being held back.

There are those who say we can’t afford this. I say we can’t afford not to. For every Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, there are thousands of micro-entrepeneurs who have the drive to build businesses that employ a few people, but collectively do just as much innovation. We need both kinds of entrepreneur. Both exist right now because of quality, affordable, available education. We as a society need to stop penny-pinching away the investments that pay for themselves. Parents understand this for their own kids. Why can’t we agree on it for all kids?

As we’ve all heard, the job of those high-income earners who benefit from Bush-era tax cuts is to create jobs. But they seem to be slashing jobs more than creating them. So why do the job creators still have jobs?

In all seriousness, it’s disingenuous to expect businesses to create jobs. Whether a business sees itself as maximizing profit or maximizing value for a customer’s dollar, employees are expensive and therefore job creation needs to be avoided.

As a software developer, I’ve probably eliminated at least as many jobs as I’ve created. Mostly I’ve eliminated work, which allows people to work on other things and changes the nature of the job. That’s a productivity increase, but not one that gets measured in government statistics. I think I’ve generally made life better for those who have used my software, and the same is true for computer programmers in general. But there’s no guarantee that new jobs (e.g. webmaster) will outnumber the old ones (e.g. phone answering service.) My sense is that most job-creating innovation comes from individuals making incremental improvements to their own jobs, or even inventing their own jobs. And for that kind of innovation you need a middle class with enough of a safety net to take risks.

But it’s not just me. Recently NPR interviewed millionaires affected by the latest tax proposal, and they didn’t manage to find a single one whose hiring decisions would be significantly influenced by changes in the tax rate.

A surprisingly good post-Halloween variation on my regular refried beans.

Make refried beans with black beans, using the following modifications to give it a rich mole flavor.

1. Add 0.5 tsp cinnamon when adding the oregano to the onion and cumin.
2. Chop 3 fun-sized chocolate candy bars in the food processor along with the rest of the refried beans.

Serve in soft-shelled tacos or as burritos. This is rich enough that salsa and cheese shouldn’t be necessary, but fresh lettuce and tomatoes are a nice addition. For chocolate, I used two Nestle Crunch bars and one Milky Way.

Just watched an interesting lecture on IQ and genomics which makes a number of interesting claims. First, that IQ is as inheritable as height, which is to say that genes are 70% responsible. Second, that it appears to be the result of many different genes, each of which contributes a little bit. (With height, they’ve found 200 such genes.) And third, that although no IQ genes have been discovered, we’ll likely have discovered many of them within the next decade.

This raises many interesting questions, but from an evolutionary standpoint, I see one big one. If IQ is mostly genetic, and it is a major influence in life success (both of which are claimed), why isn’t everyone high-IQ? Is there an evolutionary advantage to a lower IQ (e.g. lower caloric requirements, thus more likely to survive a famine; or lower birthrate?)

This also raises some interesting quandaries. It’s standard practice to do genetic testing on fetuses, to screen for particularly nasty disorders. It’s possible to sequence the entire fetal genome. By the time my kids are grown up, there’s a good chance they’ll be able to do prenatal IQ testing which won’t be as accurate as a real IQ test, but will have decent predictive power.

At work, we’re updating old audio files (uncompressed WAV format) into more modern audio formats. It takes about a second per recording, and we have several million recordings. This means our conversion process will take over a month. These files are big, and the output is on a distributed filesystem: they get copied to many of our servers. So we don’t want to speed the process up too much if it will strain our critical servers.

This gives me some insight into YouTube’s reluctance to embrace additional media formats, even Google’s pet project WebM. Like us, they are sensitive to hardware constraints. Even with virtually unlimited money and resources, it takes time to move gigabytes from one disk to another. Google gets around this by splitting data across many servers, so rather than touching a gigabyte on a single disk you move a few megabytes each across several servers. But when all their data needs to be updated, then every server needs to move gigabytes. So Google has no advantage over an average Joe trying to restore his hard disk from backup. Even if Google could build a new datacenter just for video processing, they’d still have to move all the data out of the existing datacenters into the new one and back.

My guess is that YouTube is using its existing video servers to create WebM versions of its videos, while continuing to serve those videos to users. But it will take months, if not years, to get to a point where they can serve WebM content to users.

I’d been wondering who those 46% who don’t pay federal income taxes are. Here’s a break-down. In short, 23% are at or below the poverty line, 7% get deductions related to cost-of-living (e.g. earned income tax credit, child credit) that push their taxable income below the line, 10% are retired. That leaves 6% in the “other” category.

I find it mind boggling that, here in the USA, 30% of people are struggling to make ends meet.