Saturday, December 16, 2017

Alternative History #7: German-Led Native Shock Troops in California

For the previous installment, see Alternative History #6: A Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Egypt.

For the next installment, see Alternative History #8: Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia.

Imagine a more Habsburg-involved colonization of the New World (at least before the very late French-driven attempt that inspired the Cinco de Mayo holiday.) Charles V (Carlos Quinto) was, after all, both the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor - and you might imagine that the settlement of California especially would have gone very differently.

The Spanish, thinking more in practical imperial terms rather than as conquistadors eager to repeat the glories of the recent Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors, would gather and train troops from the native nations up and down the West Coast of the New World. Picture an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission natives, complete with cavalry and infantry units, with German-speaking white officers - wearing Czarist uniforms from the nearby Russian colonies on the northern coast. They would be the elite men of the empire, the Holy Roman Empire's answer to Britain's Gurkhas, dispatched from a central location to defend the imperial governor in the event of a revolt.

Outlandish? There's this from Wikipedia, about New Helvetia, which would later become Sacramento:
The settlement was defended by an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission Indians, all consisting of 150 infantry, 50 cavalry, and German-speaking white officers. This group, wearing Russian uniforms purchased from Fort Ross, marched to the Pueblo of Los Angeles area and briefly defended Governor Manuel Micheltorena from the revolt of the Californios.
The difference is that the German-speakers were Swiss and not Austrian, as John Sutter founded New Helvetia and named it after his ancestral homeland. Perhaps most unlikely of all, Sutter is today buried in Lititz, Pennsylvania, in good old Pennsylvania Dutch country. More on strange north European involvement in the Pacific - Russian Hawai'i here, and an almost-war in Samoa between American and Germany in the late 1800s.

Friday, October 27, 2017

If You Take Parfit Seriously, You Should Commit Yourself To Creating Superintelligence

Cross posted at Speculative Nonfiction and Cognition and Evolution.

Derek Parfit makes the argument that if utilitarianism as it is commonly understood is to be taken to its conclusion - the greatest good for the greatest number - that mathematically we should care not just about making individuals happy, but making more individuals, to be happy. If you can have a world of a billion people all just as happy as a world of a million people, then that that's a no brainer.

The problem is when you get to the math of it. The "repugnant conclusion" that if the total amount of happiness is what matters, then you should favor numbers over quality of life. That is, a world of a hundred billion people with lives just barely worth living is better than a world of a hundred people with great lives - because the great lives are probably not a billion times greater than those of the hundred billion in almost total misery.

The obvious objection is that you're talking about theoretical people when you talk about those hundred billion. The counterargument is that we do care about theoretical people - our descendants - and you might already make environmental decisions to preserve the environment for the happiness of your grandchildren; right now you avoid (hopefully) littering the street to avoid upsetting people you've never met and will probably never meet.

There are other objections of course; for instance, that experienced happiness in an individual is what matters; otherwise slave plantations could be (in fact, probably are) morally acceptable.

But following Parfit's repugnant conclusion to its end, if the total amount of utility is what matters, then increasing the amount of utility possible to be experienced also matters. That is to say, there is no reason to stop at considering theoretical people, but rather we should consider theoretical kinds of experience, and theoretical kinds of experiencers. And there is nothing in Parfit's thesis provincial to or chauvinistic about humans. (If there were, that might solve the problem, because you could say "the closer something is related to me, the more I should be concerned with its happiness" - me and my brother against my cousin, et cetera - which, at very close genetic distances, is in fact what most humans already do.)

Therefore, we should try to make a world of a hundred million bipolar (manic) people who can experience hedonic value far in excess of what most of us ever do (assuming we can keep them manic and not depressed.) Or, even better, created an artificial superintelligence capable of experiencing these states, and not devoting all our resources to creating as many copies of it as possible. But cast aside those constraints - if you believe it is possible for a self-modifying general artificial intelligence with consciousness (and pleasure) to exist, then by Parfit, the only moral act is to give up all your recreation and resources to live in misery and dedicate your life to the single-minded pursuit of getting us one second closer to the creation of this superintelligence. The total suffering and happiness of life on Earth up until the moment of the singularity would quickly shrink to a rounding error, compared to the higher states these replicating conscious superintelligences might experience. Therefore, if you are not already singlemindedly dedicating yourself to bringing such a superintelligence to life, you are forestalling seconds of these agents' pleasurable experiences (which far offset your own suffering and maybe those of all living things) and you are committing the most immoral act possible.

This problem is superficially similar to Roko's basilisk (in the sense of your actions being changed by knowledge of a possible superintelligence) but I think it should still be called Caton's basilisk.

As a result of these objections, I do not think we need to take the repugnant conclusion seriously, and I do not think not dedicating yourself to creating a super-hedonic superintelligence is immoral.

Monday, October 23, 2017

The People Afraid of Their IQs

[Cross-posted to Cognition and Evolution.]

There has been some gnawing of tongues on the topic of IQ. Here I'm not talking about its very existence, which isn't open to debate (it's very real - disagree? Then you, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are equally smart. I thought so.) It's that some people - young people, mostly - seem to be scared to find out what their IQ is, because it might not be as good as they would like, and then their life would be ruined.

These people are assuming a high degree of determinism. Yes, IQ is important (go to the link above and follow the links.) But at the same time, Warren Buffet has said that if you could trade every IQ point above 120 for money, you should. The greatest chess player in history Magnus Carlsen has said that too-high intelligence has been a handicap to some of his predecessors, who got distracted by other endeavors. Jeff Bezos of Amazon studied undergraduate physics at Princeton, noted how much harder he had to work than some of his peers, and switched out. What are we to make of this?

Let's start off by assuming that IQ is completely determined by factors out of your control, and furthermore completely determines your future. That being the case, learning one's IQ has been likened to being handed an envelope with your date and manner of death inside.[1][2] Anxiety-provoking? Sure, just like getting the result of an important test back - which, by the way, is invariably the direction the discussion goes, and no, no one likes the day the envelope comes, but everyone would be very upset if one year the nice people at ETS decided to rip up all the tests and give everyone an average. And just like the day you get your test results back, the only possible rational answer to whether you would want to know your death date is YES, and when people actually have such a choice in real life, they almost invariably DO want to know it. Cryonics crowd aside, you already KNOW you're going to die. You even have a rough idea of about when it will happen, statistically. You don't know what from, but you can make some guesses. When someone receives a terminal diagnosis, now they DO know what they'll die from, and they have a much narrower statistical window on when. So put yourself in this position: your doctor has just told you that you have pancreatic cancer. What is your VERY NEXT THOUGHT? "How long do I have?" You'd be pretty angry, and justifiably so, if she told you "I typically don't tell people the life expectancy because they might not want to know that."

There are many other mostly genetically predetermined attributes that strongly affect our quality of life, but the difference is that the rest are all obvious and easy to compare, so we can't remain ignorant of them; e.g., height, physical attractiveness, and to some degree wealth. Readjusting expectations and recovering from narcissistic injuries is hard, but for people who don't want to know their IQ, what's causing them to suffer is much more likely to be their anxiety tolerance and ego strength (which you can improve), than it is their intelligence (which you basically can't.)[3] Jordan Peterson has made the interesting comment that people who are more intelligent than the median in their communities unsurprisingly tend to elevate this trait above all others, but (more insightfully) because of the nature of intelligence as something that we use to build a worldview, people become unidimensional about human value and take intelligence as an end in itself rather than one of many traits to be prized, along with, e.g. impulse control or emotional stability, which are certainly not the same thing even if they co-vary. This tendency leads to these people who define themselves as "intelligent" avoiding communities filled with people smarter than themselves, and in so doing, limiting their own progress in life and the amount they can contribute to the world at large. It also leads to the ridiculous convention of clubs for smart people (Mensa.) Is there a club for tall people? No. Well actually yes. But it's not called a club for tall people, it's called the NBA, and they DO something with their tallness. And by golly, come to think of it, there ARE clubs for smart people (physics departments, Google engineering, medical schools, law firms, consulting agencies, etc.)[4]

Two specific reflections on this.

1) While genetics is the single greatest determinant of IQ, it is not the be-all end-all deterministic measure that many fear it is. In particular, "smart" may correlate with, but does certainly not equal, happy, moral, or successful, and furthermore there is an endless list of capacities, tendencies and talents that may correlate somewhat, but certainly not entirely, that determine the chances of success in various paths in life. I suspect that Peterson's unidimensionals get most upset in the U.S., where we most resent anyone telling us that any characteristic outside of our control has any influence over our future, despite the obvious reality.[5] Think of the trigger points in these discussions: race, socioeconomic class, upbringing, genes, the wiring in your brain - somehow the second we turn 18 we should be able to leave all the behind and emerge as an un-caused cause, right? (I wonder how much of the hostility to the very concept of IQ stems from this kind of thinking.) Below I've reproduced a figure in the Vox article (which in turn is reproduced from elsewhere) but what's interesting is how broad some of the bars are. What a broad bar should tell you is that there are more people in that profession (more outliers in absolute terms), and/or that IQ isn't as important. Case in point, protective service workers - intelligence appears to be less of a determinant there than for some of the others. I would expect ability to remain calm and vigilant and tolerate distress is at least as important.



2) As an aside, what Buffet was really saying is that there's an inflection point for the marginal value of IQ points around 120. We should grant that an additional IQ point in 2017 is more likely to benefit you than it was in 1917 - the world is hopefully a truer meritocracy, and a lot more value created by industries requiring intelligence rather than brawn or bravado. But there is still more likely to be an inflection point for the IQ vs wealth graph (as opposed to IQ vs overall utility - see #1 above.)


To the extent that IQ is a proxy for achievement, happiness, and self-worth, then just go try to do the things you're worried about and you will get rapid feedback - i.e., Scott Aaronson's recommendation that you just go try to do physics. "But what if I fail?" Think about it this way. How many people have actually said, "You know, if only I had an IQ test, I would've known better, and I wouldn't have made this massive career commitment that I now can't retreat from without massive damage to my finances, freedom, etc." But - interestingly - people certainly do say things like "If only I'd known X about myself, I would've chosen a different career," where X is something about your utility function, like the value you place on time vs. money vs. freedom, security vs. opportunity, ability to get along with certain personality types, etc. The key is to learn about your own many dimensions and find your selective advantage. How sad is Jeff Bezos that he couldn't keep up with the physics students at Princeton?



[1]If a genie told me I was going to die on a certain date and time from a certain thing, I would enjoy making life difficult for fate. Shark attack in 2022? I will move to the Mojave desert and not come out. Yes, I know, something will happen with a great white shark being transported by air between aquariums, and the plane will blow up and the shark will fall on me or something, but I'm really really going to make the universe work for it. I would grant my wife exclusive rights to my story in advance.

[2]While knowing your death date would help you plan, it would mess up the possibility of insurance, assuming everyone gets such an envelope and knows that everyone else does.

[3]If you're still not convinced that you shouldn't be crushed by your potentially low IQ, then consider that many people smarter than you and me both believe that by the end of this century, machines of far greater intelligence than any human who ever lived will exist, and none of the at-that-point meaningless differences in processing power between us flatworms will matter anymore.

[4]In a forum discussion I once referred to academia, medical schools, etc. as "clubs for smart people" and was immediately told "NO. Those are clubs for people with IQs 120-130." Yikes! I guess this particular Einstein had just cured cancer AND made a killing in the stock market that morning so they had time to police the forums for claims like this.

[5]Social media is not helping this, and I'm not the first to think there's a connection between prevalence of social media and the rise in social anxiety in Millennials. But I propose a specific mechanism which accounts for it, which is the failure of insulation between status hierarchies, or between layers of the same hierarchy. For example, growing up in an outer suburb of a rural state that doesn't touch saltwater, until the early 2000s it was easy to be blissfully unaware of the pecking order of academic, corporate and governmental hierarchies; you went to State U., got a good education, and worked in a nearby town without any sense that people in the Big City or at Corporate HQ were better or smarter. That's no longer the case, and already by age 15 there's no hiding from this reality. (I believe this is the hardest thing about growing up now as opposed to when I grew up.) I also think this explains part of the virulence of the culture wars, as each group, particularly the social conservative bloc in middle America, is suddenly aware that there are people who despise them, and that they're at the bottom of, and being relentlessly judged by, this status hierarchy they've suddenly noticed and which is ruled by exactly the wrong kind of people. (Contexts with overlapping status hierarchies would therefore be expected to improve happiness at least in the short term, and status hierarchy monoculture to make it worse; e.g. North Korea; also, professional training programs where you're at the bottom of the totem pole, spend all your time with people at the program, and have no social contacts outside the program.)]

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Endowment Effect as a Rational Strategy Part 2: Don't Be A Sucker

Many seemingly irrational decision-making biases can be rational in some settings which differ from typical experimental settings. For example, psychologists and economists scratch their heads that in single-round games, people will expend resources to punish wrongdoers, even when there is no net benefit for the punisher. But in multi-round games, expending resources to punish wrong-doers may actually provide a net benefit and act as a deterrent against future wrongdoing. The irrationality arises because some of these behaviors are rigid with respect to setting, and even in single-round games where we'll never see people again (e.g. someone who cut you off on the freeway) we continue to punish wrongdoers regardless of setting or expected net benefit.

The endowment effect is a bias where we place irrationally high value on things already in our possession, as opposed to the open market. ("That car over there is a clunker, he'll never get three grand for it. But mine? Same year, same condition? Five grand easy. Great car.") Curiously, a group of hunter-gatherers without access to markets (i.e., roads) do not show the endowment effect. Their close relatives who do have access to markets, DO show the endowment effect. I speculated that this could be because the endowment effect is in fact a defense against information asymmetry. Somebody who buys and sells cars for a living knows how much your car is worth more than you do, and they can screw you. Consequently the endowment effect gives you a cushion. If you've never been screwed in an open market before, you don't develop this defense. (So goes my theory anyway.)

Sure enough, Data Colada brings us a paper by Weaver and Frederick which strongly suggests it's trying to avoid a bad deal which is what motivates the endowment effect.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

Little Correlation Between Box Office and Film Quality

[Added later: this post was prophetic. The Blade Runner sequel (2049) came out two weeks later and as I'm adding this comment, has been out for a few days. There couldn't be a better illustration of this principle. Reviews from critics and moviegoers alike are extremely positive (including my own here - major spoilers) yet it's underperforming even its modest first-weekend projections. Whether or not word of mouth will increase revenues, it's certainly following in the footsteps of its predecessor, a classic which was initially written off as a box office failure. Movie studio stocks have plummeted as investors realized: even if you make a movie this good, in this day and age, you can't make back your initial investment, and maybe movies are dead as a commercial project, especially relative to video games (see end of linked post).]

I'd been wanting to do an analysis like this for some time. Fortunately a professional (Yves Bergquust at USC) has beaten me to it. It's worth reading the whole article because it's loaded with quantitative analysis of the American film industry, but the upshot for our purpose is that there is no correlation between quality (Rotten Tomatoes rating) and box office.

This reinforces the studios' disinterest, judging by their output and stated explicitly when they're speaking honestly, in making "critically-acclaimed award bait." As with most entertainment, Hollywood doesn't know much about what results in success, but they DO know that spending effort or money on making a good movie has no connection to financial success. Given the medium, that's critically important. A failed experimental painting or short story wastes a few days and dollars of a single person's resources. But movies are intense, multi-million dollar temporary startups. You MUST consider ROI.

To that end, I was also interested to see if budget or ROI are related to quality, and it turns out they are - but of course based on the non-relationship discussed above, that doesn't mean big budget equals big box office. And, bad news for Hollywood, what budget-box office relationship DOES exist is getting weaker over time - which is disastrous, because that means they can't predict ROI anymore.

I'd also like to see if total take (not just box office, also including back-end, ie video) has any better relationship to quality. Cult films that develop a following long after they leave theaters suggest that if there is a profit-quality signal, it would be more likely to emerge using the total take. I would also assume that as distribution channels have multiplied, that box office is less important as a fraction and predictor of overall revenue.

Sunday, August 6, 2017

What Determines Amount of International Tourism?

I was looking at Gunnar Garfors's 25 Least Visited Countries in the world. I had always wondered about this, so for fun I decided to compare the tourist numbers he provides against the countries' populations, areas, population densities and per capita income. There is not a strong correlation for any of these, but population had the strongest with r^2=0.15. Grouping countries by island vs. landlocked vs non-landlocked, island countries had a lower average visitation rate.

The real relation is likely going to be an equation of cost and payout - that is, the average cost of visiting, versus what people think they'll get out of visiting there. Countries that are safe with developed tourist infrastructure (which per capita income is a proxy for) and good promotion (which increases the perceived value) and at least tolerable climate will be the best in terms of payout, but the average cost is going to be more complicated - to get lots of tourists, you need lots of countries relatively near you with money, and minimal administrative barriers (i.e. no unfriendly ergo uncooperative political relationships.) This reads like a description of Europe, and not surprisingly, 6 of the 10 most visited countries are in Europe, and the U.S. is the only one in the western hemisphere. If you wonder if local culture is in danger of being destroyed by all these tourists, most-touristed-country France has more tourists per year than its total population, and French culture seems to be in no danger of disappearing. If you're wondering, North Dakota is the least-touristed state in the U.S.

Defense Contractors - Is War Profitable?

Companies like Boeing get some of the revenue from selling consumer (civilian) hardware, and some from defense. Other companies are far more dedicated to producing military hardware (north of 90% of their sales in some cases.) Of the top 10 defense contractors in the world per Wikipedia, I looked only at the 7 U.S. ones that would exist in a similar tax and regulatory environment. The correlation is that the more arms sales, the less revenue.

So why be a defense contractor then? What often matters more is measures of unit profitability (indices like EPS, P:E - or if you're an employee, profitability per employee.) And sure enough, excluding outlier L3, the more military business, the more profitable per employee.

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

War Requires Material Capacity and Lack of Institutional Constraint

In Never at War, Spencer Weart shows that in the modern era, democracies are extremely unlikely to fight other democracies, but that non-democracies fight democracies, and each other, much more often. You can try to think of counterexamples (Mexican-American War, maybe) but you'll be straining to do so.

A new paper by Blank, Dincecco and Zhukov show that prior to the modern era (i.e., 1200-1800) parliamentary states were actually MORE likely to go to war than absolutist states were. Their argument is that parliamentary states were successful in that they actually had more capacity to make war than the absolutist states, but they had not yet developed institutional constraints to prevent them from doing so, as presumably occurred in the modern era. (H/T slatestarcodex)

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Education Ratings by State


This is from Education Week. No Bad Stripe visible here, but the Northeast sure does stand out. Looks like those Puritans and Midlanders are doing something right! To ask this more provocatively: are educators demanding to find out what they're doing in the Northeast so we do it everywhere? If not, why not? (Not that genes and geography are destiny - I have no ready explanations for Wyoming and Idaho, aside from good and bad policy decisions respectively.)

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Per Capita Income and the Bad Stripe

The Bad Stripe runs southwest from extreme SW Pennsylvania through West Virgina, turning westward through Kentucky and part of Tennessee, crossing the Mississippi through the Ozarks and into eastern Oklahoma. As seen in previous posts about it, it sticks out as a more-or-less contiguous zone of low happiness and quality of life indicators which is a border zone between North/Midwest and South, and is thought of by many as Greater Appalachian (or the greater reach of the Border Reavers, if Albion's Seed is your bag.) Long ago I thought this was just an area of contiguous mountains and hills, hence low population density and slower development, but you can't say that about western Kentucky and Tennessee or eastern Oklahoma.

The county-level per capita income map shows a poorer area roughly paralleling the Bad stripe, along with some of the Black Belt to the south and east of the Southern fall line cities.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

U.S. Presidents, Quality and Remembrance by Experts vs. Popular Opinion

Previously I measured the prominence of U.S. Presidents, using a quantitative measure (mentions in print as indexed by Google N-gram; a person publishing a book mentioning a President will have a greater level of expertise than someone chosen at random from the general public and asked about this President.) From this you can see which Presidents are being forgotten more or less quickly, based on how long they've been out of office. I also compared this how relatively forgotten or well-remembered they are against performance ratings given by historical experts. By doing this, you can see which bad Presidents we remember better than their time out of office would predict (and who maybe we should forget), and which good Presidents are unjustly slipping from memory.

Reading back through the Wiki article, I noticed they've added memorability and performance measures from the general public. Memorability and performance rankings from non-experts is bound to differ from the measures I performed already. So, for memorability I used the Roediger and De Soto Science paper,[1] and for performance I used the net favorability figure from the 2013 Rasmussen poll.

Here is the overall scatter plot for forgetting over time. The x-axis is years out of office, the y-axis is percent of general public remembering the President by surname.


As before, I guessed that forgetting happens more and more slowly over time. That is, people forgot about Polk faster in the first fifty years after he left office than the second fifty years. In the expert data this was born out and it was born out in the popular data as well, using the same two comparison groups (forgetting rate of the group J.Q. Adams through Cleveland, compared to McKinley through Reagan; not shown). In fact in both data sets there is a slight "negative" forgetting in the earlier group, i.e. the longer ago you were President, the better. (I started with J.Q. Adams because he was the first President who was not a founder, but the effect remained.)

Because of this effect (non-linear trend due to faster drop off in the more recent past) again I used a power law for goodness of fit, to determine whether Presidents were forgotten faster or slower than they otherwise would have been, on average, for that length of time out of office. I had to exclude Obama because he was in office (zero years out) during the survey and you can't include a zero value in a power law calculation. The figure on top is forgetting relative to appearance in print in 2000; on the bottom, to American's ability to remember this President's surname in 2014.




Here, there was a difference. For the experts, relative to how long they've been out of office, Gerald Ford was the most forgotten. Here, it's Chester Alan Arthur - who also holds the dubious distinction of being most forgotten in absolute terms as well (only 7% of Americans could remember him - tied with Franklin Pierce.) In fact, in popular remembrance Ford is not relatively more forgotten, but LBJ is (and in fact since this poll didn't distinguish LBJ and Andrew Johnson, presumably a least a tiny bit of this number is for the other President, so it's probably slightly worse than it appears here.) In fact there's only one other President from the last hundred years more forgotten relative to his time out of office than LBJ, and that's Harding. Charts are side-by-side for comparison. You can see the cluster of obscure late nineteenth century Presidents, more forgotten by the public than they are in print.

WHAT ABOUT PERFORMANCE VS. REMEMBRANCE?

First let's look at the net favorable ranking that the public gave for these Presidents, compared to their relative remembrance (distance above or below the remembrance curve, with a linear adjustment so the units come out the same for comparison to the previous blog post. X-axis is performance (left is better), Y-axis is memorability (up is well-remembered.) In other words, George Washington will be in the upper left.


The rankings above are not zero sum. That is, the public could conceivably rank everyone favorably, or unfavorably, and indeed you can see clustering on the left (good performing) side of the graph. But to compare apples to apples, let's line them up ordinally - so it IS zero sum - and compare to the experts rankings. By doing this, we break the Presidents into four quadrants based on whether they're in the top or bottom half of the performance rankings, and whether they are relatively forgotten or well-remembered based on where they are relative to the remembrance curve. The chart above is based on experts rankings and overall mentions in print; below, on public remembrance and net favorables.





The "unjust quadrants" are bad and relatively well-remembered, as well as good and forgotten. This chart looks somewhat different from the experts' rankings. For one thing, in popular opinion there's more clustering of the good, well-remembered Presidents (possibly those two variables are the more like the same thing, outside the experts.) Also, the worse-than-average Presidents are remembered in print a little better than than by the general public (see the group just above the memory line on the right side of the experts/print graph.) As Ford is the most forgotten in the expert/print world and Arthur to the public, I predict that over time public opinion converges to the experts; i.e. Ford will eventually be just as obscure as Arthur is now.

And finally, in the public mind, there is one clear outlier who performed poorly but is remembered well - Richard Nixon. In the latter, there isn't such separation. The three I've circled are, from left to right, Reagan, Wilson, and Garfield. Garfield!?![3] That last one may owe more to the comic strip;[4] and anyway, if only 19% of people remember you (as opposed to Reagan's 66%) how do they know if they like you or not? Consequently, an argument that the experts' rankings are at the very least more internally consistent. You should see the post, or at the very least read about the most unjustly forgotten successful President (per the experts), James Polk.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Note that the popular poll apparently went just by surname, which of course gives us five pairs of Presidents who can't be distinguished. When I assumed people were remembering one half the time and the other one half the time, or when I completely excluded them, the forgetting trend was the same.

[2] Internet surveys are not infrequently gamed, and the lowness of Reagan's numbers is suspect here, but it's the best I have available. To be clear, this isn't an endorsement of the Reagan administration - if you're liberal and you're annoyed by the thought that Reagan's memorability should be higher, compare to how much you hear Reagan being fetishized by Republicans and then go back and look at how low this number is. If it makes you feel better, assume that the number is not representative of full public opinion because Republicans don't know how to use the internet.

[3] A final insult to Arthur. You're the VP for a guy who is assassinated after just a few months in office, and you serve out almost his whole term, and people still remember him 2.5x as much as you?!?

[4] This comic generator is fun too.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

The Grammar of Rock Singers and Dictators

I once asked a friend to translate Van Halen's Standing on Top of the World into Japanese, so I could sing it at a karaoke bar in Japantown, San Francisco. My friend said, "I don't know if you can really translate it." Glance briefly over the lyrics and you may understand her complaint:

Hey, baby, woo
I know you believe in me, that's all I ever need
No no, nothin's gonna stop it
Nothin' will discourage me, oh, no

Hey baby, uh, it's the only way out
Oh, little darlin'
Now come on, what's it all about?

Oh, I know you wanna touch
I got to have a little taste
I don't wanna sink my teeth in that fine piece of real estate, yeah

Hey baby, woo! make it nice 'n sweet, oh
Oh, little darlin'
Let's take a walk down easy street


If you're using the term for infant for "baby", or literally translating "I got to have a little taste", or goodness forbid actually trying to understand the meaning and direction of each phrase, you're probably not going to translate the important component of the song. Another friend once asked in frustration about this song, "What is this even about? This song is about nothing. It's just Sammy Hagar selling his personality."

It's becoming increasingly clear that the actual propositional content of human utterances is often secondary to other purposes those utterances may have - particularly, emotional or tribal afiliation purposes. This goes double for beliefs which are professed explicitly for tribal loyalty signaling. When your team wins an upset, and you hold up one index finger as you scream triumphantly into the camera, everyone (including you) knows that your team really isn't number one. Although "beliefs" are often thought of as propositional attitudes, the important part of these team cheers is not the actionable, semantic, propositional content. It's the visceral and emotional loyalty signals it sends. Sometimes, where the stakes aren't so high (as at a football game) you can jokingly point out to your friend that no, we're not really #1, and he'll say "I know, but you know what I mean. Don't ruin the moment." However, in more serious settings, you cannot directly address the emptiness of dogmatic statements ("God is great", "Hail Mary full of grace", and "From each according to ability...", etc.) without giving away the game - so people sometimes get confused, and start to take all their own utterances literally. More interesting perhaps are the gyrations people go through to avoid acting on things that they absolutely insist they believe - and indeed, most people are able to say these team cheers without thinking too much about them or why they don't seem to be able to meaningfully affect their actions in concrete ways.

Donald Trump is difficult to translate, and has frustrated translators the world over with his incoherent stream of narcissistic consciousness. A recent article points out that in fact translators have had this same difficulty with other twentieth century demagogues. Whether this is clever manipulation of crowds or merely the result of impoverished minds, I won't speculate. The important point is that somehow, they communicate something, even if it's semantically jumbled propositionally empty territorial barking. We can think of this as finally boiling off the pesky, pin-down-able, commitment-laden propositions from language and leaving behind a distilled tribal chant, empty of formal meaning but chock full of visceral power. Trying to translate Donald Trump or Van Halen lyrics exposes the vacuum of actual content in both cases, without bringing along the emotional tribal-identity impact that is really the only thing there. Consequently, those who look for inaccuracies and broken promises in Trump's words hoping to finally wake up his supporters are, unfortunately, playing checkers against a wrestling team.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

Predictions from the Clash of Civilizations: and Let's Start Promoting Liberal Democracy


Aside from the lesson contained in its title, Samuel Huntington makes the worrisome (and probably true) prediction that religion will re-emerge as an important force in international politics in the near future.*

The book is very much a product of its decade - written by an older American scholar in the 1990s,** immediately after the end of the Cold War - and contains frankly superficial compilations of historical and cultural detail.  But he does give several supporting arguments for his thesis, all of them relating to two observations:  modern states engage in wars for the people, not wars for kings; and that religion is one of the central defining characteristics of civilizations and therefore of individuals' identities.  As history has progressed, civilizations are in contact with their neighbors more and more - and the human tendency to define oneself in opposition to the Other comes forward.  We've gone from occasional trade caravans received only in royal palaces and seen by few, to universal social media - before, the Other was a rumor.  Now, the Other is constantly in your face (even if it's a domestic Other - more on this later) and social media has produced a status monoculture.  This gives rise to the idea captured in the book's title and in particular bloody border of Islam that is the best-known takeaway from this book.  It's worth stressing that he wrote this book five years before September 11th.

But Huntington's argument would seem to apply to domestic politics just as well.  Many Americans seem not to know what their political values are, other than if it pisses off the opposition, it must be good.  And when the opposition has built a system that seems rigged for them to succeed, exalts their status, and denigrates yours, your identity (and your ability to define it against the Others) is in crisis.  At civilizational borders you can just do your best to avoid the Others, but if you're in the same country there is no such strategy.  Brexit and the election of Trump may both have been driven in part by basic threats to identity, exacerbated by class boundaries that are causing a realignment in the liberal and conservative parties on both sides of the Atlantic.

How so?  Both of these stories are about a revolt by socially conservative, poor, ethnic-majority people living outside the successful metropolitan centers, against the professionals in those metropolitan centers who have run the show.  (This is what exposes the cracks in both the liberal and conservative coalitions; see #4 here.)  Professionals define themselves by their profession and the abstract principles that enable their profession (globalism prominent among them).  In the 21st century, that's a winning strategy.  But the concrete thinking authority-fearing folks in the interior who just want to raise a family and enjoy country life?   They're no longer safe from the reach of international competition.  They used to be comfortable, not constantly aware that a world existed beyond their communities, and they identified strongly with those communities.  Maybe they weren't rich, but they knew who they were, and if anyone looked down on them, at least they weren't constantly reminded of it.

But now after we've seemingly finished cognitively sorting ourselves geographically, the people in San Francisco and London are unambiguously more materially successful, all the while demonstrating what looks to the folks back home like flagrant disloyalty to the homeland and (even worse!) looking down on (insert rural province here) because of their loyalty and respect for authority. From the Trump/Brexit crowd's perspective, the status monoculture is inescapable, and it's upside-down, with them at the bottom.  Whether or not the provincial folk were starting the next Google, what was important was raising a good family in their town and being considered good folk by the people they knew.  Now that's being taken away, with all the psychological impact of loss of meaning you might expect (e.g. chronic unemployment and the opioid epidemic).  Another telltale of how the modern classes define themselves is the effect one's class has on ethnicity.  The salience of ethnicity decreases among professionals, and increases among the loyalist left-behinds.  (In the U.S., witness the high rate of interracial marriage among physicians and engineers; and in fact, white-Asian marriages produce wealthier households than either Asian-Asian or white-white.)

Huntington notes that the last four centuries of Western history are the exception to the rule,*** as Western civilization spread around the globe mostly without a religious motivation at the center of its motives - thanks to the Treaty of Westphalia, which, maybe not coincidentally, has come in for rough treatment recently from the alt-right.  But it's probably not a coincidence that this vacuum was eventually filled with political philosophies.  The ideas of democracy have been carried (imperfectly) at the head of the most successful empires of the day, and needed no marketing.  But as the Rise of the Rest continues, the values of liberal democracy and reason may need some slick PR and catch phrases, otherwise we may regress to the historical mean.  What would the beginning of Huntington's era of future civilizational religious struggle look like?  One aspect would be a drop in the global status of liberal democracy, very similar to what we've observed in the last few years with the rise of China, Brexit, and the election of Trump.



*Hitchens was more specific on the re-emergence of religion as a driver of geopolitics, and poignant for us in 2017.  Shortly before his death:  "We will live to regret conversion of Russia into a heavily-armed, self-pitying, chauvinistic theocracy."

**As an example of a 1990s-ism in this book:  the Chechen conflict has a prominent place.  Then again even the clearer-thinking Peter Turchin suffered from this myopia a bit when in the 1990s he predicted the rise of an Islamic Chechen state.

***Huntington does overstate the exceptionalism of Europe's nonreligiousness, which bears expanding in a footnote.  For one thing, it's interesting that there could even be a Peace of Westphalia, and that a (second!) religious schism was tolerated in Europe.  There is no such equivalent between Sunni and Shi'a who have coexisted in severe tension often erupting into war, almost since the death of Mohammed, and his thoughts on what aspects of Europe or its culture made coexistence possible would be useful.  Second, Europeans certainly were partly motivated by extending Christendom  (applying more to Catholic powers than Protestant, and more earlier than later) and an attempt to reclaim what Christians believed were rightly their own lands (the Crusades, and the Iberian Reconquista, both obvious civilizational conflicts, and the latter of which he gave no attention, even though there are Spain-Morocco tensions to this day.)  Third, he rightly observes the bizarre coincidence that Europe didn't originate its own religion and today practices a Middle Eastern one, but leaves out the observation that Buddha was blue-eyed Indo-European whose religion spread to East Asia and is nearly absent from the land of his birth.  Huntington somehow concludes by stating that Europe is the exception to history's rule for not originating a religion that it then evangelized to the rest of the world, but really there have been only three successful evangelical religions (Christianity, Buddhism and Islam), only one of which began and obtained political power in the region of its birth (Islam).  It's actually Islam and the Islamic world which are the exception.  As Islam can be thought of as Abrahamism v3.0 (Christianity is the earlier version), from an evolutionary standpoint we would expect it to have to be more virulent and power-seeking to surpass its antecedents.  The obviousness of the replacement of religion in later Western expansion with political philosophies seems to need little comment.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Some Historical Analogies for This Point in American History

Several of these analogies have been lucidly argued elsewhere, and I've provided relevant links. Whether history rhymes or repeats, these patterns may prove instructive to anticipating the near future.

1. The end of the Belle Epoque and the Eve of the First World War. We don't need more essays despairing the rise of nationalism in turning politics away from globalism, heralding the end of the Davos order, but the rational detente of late 1800s Europe fell apart quickly in the face of nationalism and entangling alliances. Trump's election by nationalists and his entanglements with Russia expose this similarity. Today, Russia increasingly tests whether people in Cleveland want to risk a nuclear war over Lithuania. Little appreciated today is the shock World War I represented for globalism (or at least European internationalism), resulting in a decrease in international trade that didn't return to pre-WWI levels until the 1970s. For me, this analogy is the most poignant of all that I list here, since there are clear cyclical waves in trade and political relationships, some of them quite macro. The most obvious is the onset of the Middle Ages in Europe after the fall of Rome, but even this was a repeat (and a pale one) of the dark ages of antiquity, the late bronze age collapse in the Mediterranean. A decrease in international relationships is of obvious advantage to regional powers with chronically anemic economies but large militaries, like Russia. [Added April 2020: economist Alex Tabarrok implies with his lightly edited quote by Keynes that we are seeing the end of the neoliberal Belle Epoque as COVID-19 causes the collapse of supply chains and countries to draw back into themselves. I think this is a little overblown as many of the economic indicators that worsen in pandemics return quickly once it passes, and the real Belle Epoque ended because of a long war and the devastation of Europe and both human and physical capital. That said, if this is indeed another Fin-de-Belle Epoque, I greatly prefer it be from pandemic instead of war.]

2. The Washingtonian Dynasty Losing the Mandate of Heaven. It's a truism that Chinese dynasties last on the order of two centuries. This pattern holds for other large states. Taking the Roman Empire as a succession of two states punctuated by the Crisis of the Third Century, we have two dynasties of not quite two centuries. The U.S.'s founding moral authority and legitimacy stem from our belief in the specialness of our constitution. Though I count myself a patriot I must admit that if I heard an Australian or Mexican or Indian talking about her constitution with the same unquestioning reverence that we hold toward our own, it would seem rather strange (never mind if someone from Indiana or Oregon talked that way.) Red and blue state Americans have not begun to question the constitution in earnest as much as have irreconcilable ideas of what it means. If the American Civil War was nearly a North-South constitutional echo of the East-West scriptural schism of Europe, this may be the Reformation. What has suddenly exacerbated this difference? One possibility is a status monoculture brought about by social media. There are few things worse by being looked down upon by morally illegitimate people, pretending to be in the right, and bashing traditional values that only your own side really understands. With social media and outrage-mongering fighting for our attention, this fight for status is shoved in our faces.

3. The internet as the printing press and the American cultural divide as mid-millennium Europe's Protestant-Catholic divide. The internet and in in particular social networks have suddenly and inescapably forced on Americans the realization that there are people elsewhere in our own country with fundamentally different values than our own, and different ideas about the origins of our government's moral legitimacy. This is problematic, because humans really have only three ways of dealing with the "other": remain ignorant of them (which we no longer can), convert them, or decide that they are subhumans/gentiles/outlanders who are not worth converting (or to whom conversion can or should not apply). In mid-millennium central Europe, the printing press not only spread ideas but spread awareness of the people in the city next door who despise your moral authority and who might even try to force you to follow theirs. Even empires cannot comfortably or sustainably solve the disappearance of moral-authority silo walls; the Ottoman Empire had the unique solution of millets, but even this was uneasy and eventually collapsed. For a much more thorough treatment of aspects of the Thirty Years War analogy see Venkatesh Rao's essay.

4. The end of the Whig party and Trump as Zachary Taylor. Of course, part of this story must be the dramatic realignment of political coalitions occurring on both sides of the Atlantic, a shift similar to but more profound than the cultural-coalitional mismatch Nixon exploited in his Southern strategy. That realignment is the shift of cultural conservative blue collar whites into the GOP and the more surprising transformation of wealthy coastal professionals into Democrats. It's absurd to assume that a country of 320 million can be adequately represented by two political parties, and surely both major parties have their contradictions, but the GOP's tripolar values of God-country-market is far more explosive and has only been held together by the heavier-handed authoritarian style inherent to the right everywhere. In practice, those three values reduce to two values - respect for authority, and individual freedom - because God and country largely covary. Respect for authority versus protection of individual freedom further correlate closely with intelligence and education, and the basic cognitive divide that modern economies and elections expose are vexing for traditional coalitions of conservatives and liberals alike. (Odd, that educated liberals fight for entitlement programs that redistribute wealth to uneducated people to collect while they sit at home watching FOX.)

The analogy here is between the GOP and the Whigs, an American national party that died in the 1850s with an outsider President, driven by internal conflict over a question that exposed their divisions. When slavery was was forced to the center of national attention by the admission of southerly states after the Mexican War, the Whig coalition (of Northern industry-men and Southern plantation owners) disintegrated - having until that time been held together by their hatred of over-reaching Federal executive Andrew Jackson. As we are learning, a party that knows its values only in opposition to a hated enemy can rarely sustain itself. Mexican War general Zachary Taylor was a complete outsider to politics who was elected as the last Whig President. It might be mentioned here that if you count up the governors and members of Congress who came to their position with no history in politics, you'll notice that Republicans dramatically outnumber Democrats. The current President is only the most dramatic such example. For an expansion of this analogy see Gil Troy's essay.

5. Trump as Carter.  I won't belabor this one except that a) you can’t do much better than this essay by Julia Azari and b) pushing the analog probably too far, that would make Obama the Democratic Nixon, rather than the Reagan. Aside from the paranoid streak that was Nixon's undoing, this would not otherwise be an insult: both were tireless public servants and serious policy wonks, with pragmatic centrist styles. (Nixon a centrist you say? He established the EPA and laws protecting whales, removed the U.S. from the gold standard, and proposed national health insurance, which may today be as unbelievable as Obama defending the TPP may appear in a few decades.)

Sunday, February 5, 2017

The Chimpanzee Undead

This account of a wild chimp troop in Senegal is curious.
"The chimps...abused and cannibalized his body for nearly four hours...As a leader, Foudouko was very dominant and feared by the other chimps...It was obvious the other chimps were still afraid of Foudouko. They showed signs of fear, especially when Foudouko’s body would jerk or move during the attacks."
Early Christians believed that the Roman emperor Nero - an infamous persecutor of Jews and Christians alike - was so powerful, and so evil, that even death would not stop him, and that he would return from the grave to conquer Rome and continue his terror. Christians remained so terrified of him that they began to believe he was the Antichrist, and encoded warnings about him in the Book of Revelations - in chapter 13. "Let him who hath understanding" - hint hint - "reckon the number of the beast. For it is the number of a man." HINT HINT. "The number is 666."

But Nero's case was certainly not the only one. Independently around the world, people have often feared that their local tyrant might come back from the dead, and mutilated their bodies in specific ways to prevent this. For example, in Europe, these dead rulers were called "vampires", with stakes through the heart as the appropriate countermeasure. One can imagine that during these ritual mutilations the villagers would be showing signs of fear, especially if the count's body would jerk or move during the attacks.

Friday, February 3, 2017

Review of Journey to Fusang, and Some Problems with Alternate History

This is cross-posted at Speculative Nonfiction.

Added later: this account of Chinese settlers in Old West/Gold Rush era California reads very much like a real-history (alternate alternate history?) version of the novel. Highly recommended, read it!)


I'd had William Sanders's Journey to Fusang on my to-read list for years, and I finally got around to it. As much as I enjoyed the book, it exposes some of the problems common to the alternate history genre and even those specific to what-if-the-Mongols-invaded-Europe stories. It also made me wonder which historical branchpoints are most valued by "the academy". Each of these is covered herein.


Part I: Review of Journey to Fusang

After five centuries of European cultural domination of the world, it's difficult not to be fascinated by the now almost fantastic idea of non-Christian non-Europeans conquering parts of Europe. Of course this did happen in three corners of Europe - the Moors in Spain, the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans, and of course the Mongols. And if there were an award for depth of impression per years occupying European territory, the Mongols would win hands-down. Their advance beyond Russia lasted just a few years. And in the territory they actually held onto, modern Russia, they were there for a scant two centuries. Even in the East the dynasty they established (the Yuan) fell apart in about the same length of time, despite some useful innovations - among them, the world's first adoption of paper money, not to mention an honest attempt to change the Chinese writing system to a sensible phonetic one.

The Mongols' western high water mark was Poland and the Balkans, where they achieved several characteristically cunning and blitzkrieg-like victories before making winter camp. In the spring of 1242 they decamped just as suddenly and faded back into Central Eurasia. The reason typically cited for their withdrawal is the death of Ogedei Khan; in the Mongol institution of selecting a new khan, the kuriltai, you get a vote only if you're physically present at the succession talks, and the sub-Khans leading the European campaign did not want to be left out of the decision. As with most things in history, the reality is probably more multicausal and complicated. For example, Europe was littered with well fortified castles that were frustratingly well-designed against sieges, and what's more Mongols were not all-weather super-men and they didn't do well in cold, wet, marshy areas, e.g. Europe.

But simplifying history for the sake of a good story (this is after all a novel, not a textbook), in Journey to Fusang, Ogedei's sickness does not lead to his death, and the spring of 1242 sees the Mongols conquer Europe from the Vistula to the North Sea and the Mediterranean. England and Ireland are spared the ravages of the grim horsemen, as there is apparently no western Khan ("khan of all the Germanies") as enterprising as Kublai (or there is, but England is protected by the same divine winds that defend Japan.) In the late 1600s when the action takes place, England and Ireland both call themselves Catholic though each has its own Pope. Milton is a gambler in London, and Shakespeare escaped to Ireland and wrote light comedy. Though, as a result of the conquest, nothing like the Renaissance happens in Europe, nor any Reformation, and there is certainly no European discovery of America. The European continent remains a cultural backwater stuck in a Malthusian trap of subsistence agriculture and ignorance, leading the protagonist at one point to make a comment about French women rearing litters of children named Pierre and Temujin. The East Coast of North America is being colonized by Moors and various other Islamic people, and the West Coast by the Chinese - the crown jewel of whose possessions is sunny Fusang and its colonial capital, a hilly metropolis by a bay. Somehow amidst all this the Aztecs not only survived but prospered, accumulating guns from Muslim traders, and they're a constant concern along the colonists' borders.

The protagonist is Finn, an Irishman, and a trickster and con-man extraordinaire, who finds himself captured by a Moorish slaving ship, which he escapes with a similarly-minded Hebrew indentured crew member. They find themselves in the great city of Dar Al Islam (New Orleans). The book does rely on incredible turns of fortune (in one moment the protagonist is in deep, the next he's on top of the world) and the plot is rarely predictable. Eventually our hero makes his way to the interior where we meet Comanches with names like Muhammad Ten-Bears. The large, dull, fair-haired English slave whose dumb luck brings him along for the adventure is a clear parallel to Lewis and Clarke's black slave York (the natives are amazed at his size and complexion and, as York did, the fellow takes advantage of their fascination by fornicating with scores of their women.) Eventually the group of Islamic frontiersmen end up in Taos, where they encounter Chinese colonists for the first time. I particularly liked the description of the strange energy of Taos - I'm about as un-spiritual as they come but I find the place oddly unsettling. They also hole up in Acoma for a siege. In the real world, Acoma Pueblo is a cliff dwelling that's been continuously occupied since well before Columbus, and would be as good a place as any to wait out a siege. I should point out that the breathless description of the ninja they encounter is one of the few things in the book which ages it poorly and marks it as a work of the eighties.

Tension builds as both the Chinese and Muslims discuss nameless troubles in the north, which turns out to be a Russian Khan and his horde that crossed the North Pacific and invaded from - not the soft underbelly, but the undefended top half of North America. What results is very much a recapitulation of Mongol sieges and brutality, but in the American heartland. (Among other towns, Taos is completely destroyed.) The Russian khan's ultimate goal is the conquest of the Aztec empire from which he can invade the settled parts of the continent, which would precipitate a kind of world war. Of course through a combination of cunning and luck, our hero is able to stop the invasion, and after recovering from the injuries he sustains in doing so, he migrates to Fusang.

For me, what really sets this apart from other alternate histories was the scoundrel protagonist's cynicism, insulting descriptions and occasional misleading narration. For instance, as he and his Hebrew companion are traveling up the Mississippi to their frontier outpost (and not helping with the work at all - remember, these are escaped slaves that people are tolerating!) the manager of the expedition has finally had it with their shiftlessness:
Ibrahim had discovered Yusuf and myself standing in the shade of a cypress tree, overseeing the work and occasionally calling out useful suggestions, and had delivered a lengthy and surprisingly emotional speech in which he listed various discrepancies and points of dissatisfaction with our general performance to date. It worried me to see a man his age and weight get so worked up in that hot climate.
The Irishman abounds with politically incorrect observations of the many people he meets, although usually not without self deprecation. Even the people in whose colony he finds himself are not safe:
Arabs, on the whole, are an amazingly mendacious people; they will lie even when the truth would serve their purposes better, and show no shame even when caught at it. Among themselves this does not harm, since they never believe each other anyway; but it can be annoying for a man brought up in a scrupulously truthful country such as Ireland.
And near the end of the novel in Fusang, the protagonist and his sidekick, having made the acquaintance of a member of a shady Fusang organization, are recommended to one of the city's underground bosses, who deals with them thus:
He said, "Lu Hsu says you wish to work for us. He says," he said, rattling the letter, "that you are a pair of liars, cheats, seducers, and thieves, and cold-blooded killers if need be. He says that one of you would steal a hot stove and the other would sell it to a man dying of sunstroke. He says only a fool would trust either of you within a thousand li of his cash box, his stable, or his wife, and that even for Europeans you have set new marks in treachery, fraud, and deceit. Gentlemen," he cried warmly, "I have never seen a finer letter of reference. I am prepared to offer you immediate employment, early promotion, and full benefits."
In short, the book works as a historical thought experiment about the impact of Europe on North American cultures, the protagonist is hilarious, and it's a solid adventure novel to boot. Highly recommended.


Part II: Problems of Alternate History, and of Mongols-Conquered-Europe Stories Specifically

There are really three main problems (or assumptions) that alternate history novels have to address to succeed, and this novel is an excellent vehicle for exploring them. But it's useful to compare to three other alternate history novels, because you'll see some repeated motifs.

Book, AuthorBranchpoint and Changes
Lion's Blood, Stephen BarnesHannibal defeats Rome; North America colonized by Egypt in north and Ethiopia in south using European slaves, with Aztecs getting guns and flourishing
Conquistador, S.M. StirlingAlexander the Great does not die young; Europe and Middle East merge into millennia-long superstate, scientific progress retarded
Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley RobinsonBlack Plague kills all Europeans; Americas settled by China and Islamic world, history becomes a struggle between the two
Journey to FusangMongols conquer Europe , leaving it a backwater; Americas settled by China and Islamic world, with Aztecs getting guns and flourishing


Alternate History Problem #1: What is the point? Why would you read a book about a history that never happened? Do you just want to be shocked by strange people in familiar places (mosques in frontier-era Arkansas, and Native Americans named Muhammad Ten-Bears), or are you trying to isolate historical cause and effect (did Chinese and African colonization of North America only fail to occur because of European domination?) I couldn't shake the feeling that Sanders wanted a Mongol-like horde in the American plains just for the sake of it. Granted, a Mongol horde on the American prairie is kind of cool, but that could not have carried a whole novel. At the same time, even the shocking reversal of oppressors and slaves here or in Lion's Blood was clearly written in the service of a thought experiment. Was there something about various human cultures that predisposed one people to enslave, or be enslaved by, another? Or is this something we would've all done to each other given the chance, and it's all just random, and history really is just one damn thing after another? (These days we get very uncomfortable saying that one culture might somehow be "better" than another, but here's a fact: either culture has some impact on human flourishing, or it's meaningless background noise. There's no middle ground; we have to pick one of those, and being uncomfortable with the choice doesn't make it go away.)

Alternate History Problem #2: Is warfare really the only thing that makes a difference in history? Most alternate history is about what would have happened if some episode of mass violence had transpired differently. Is everything else we do really so meaningless? In the four novels cited here, the branchpoints for two out of four is a war, one out of four is a change in the life of someone who's famous because of war, and one is from a plague. What if the steam engine were developed earlier? What about antibiotics, or intensive agriculture, or monotheism, or electricity? (For example: why no Byzantine industrial revolution? People have asked the same question of China but it should count for something that China developed intensive agriculture, centralized state bureaucracy, literacy, paper money, and gunpowder, some of which happened after getting sacked by the Mongols.)

These questions are far from useless. Economists are constantly asking questions of how developing nations can improve themselves, which invariably become questions about why certain advances occurred certain places, and not elsewhere. You might argue that it's not the wars themselves where the future is set; that Sun Tzu was right, and the outcomes of battles are determined long before they begin, by the culture and technology of the countries that produce the armies. Case in point: a normally clear-thinking friend once asked me seriously about the possibility of Mexico having won the Mexican-American War. Once the American military of the day was fully engaged with its Mexican counterpart, there was no question of the outcome. One question at least implied by many alternate histories is the impact of culture and political situation on the advance of science. Conquistador assumes that a unified Greece-Egypt-Persia would have halted progress, where Robinson assumes it would have advanced essentially the same in the absence of Europeans, merely with name substitutions (qi for electricity for example.) (I would argue the contrary in both cases.)

And here we come to some of the problems specific to Mongols-conquering-Europe stories. It's assumed that a Mongol sack of Europe would have flattened the West and removed it from the world stage. No doubt it would have been an unpleasant time to live in Paris or Rome. But in China, a Mongol conquest is not alternate history. The town of Yamen, a coastal town two hours' driving time from the metropolis of Guangzhou, was the site of the last surrender (or suicide) of Song officials to Kublai Khan, who then established the heavily occupied and directly administered khanate. If you haven't noticed, China did not collapse into a permanent dark age. You could argue that without the Mongol conquest, China might today be even further ahead (maybe it's time for an alternate history where the Great Wall was a little higher and kept the Mongols out, and by 2017 China has colonized the solar system.) A further puzzle is this:  in two novels, Europe is eliminated as a serious contender for founder of global civilization (whether due to Mongols or plague), but automatically China and the Arab world - both also sacked by the Mongols! - end up colonizing the Americas.  Why?  Even in real history, there was nothing stopping the Chinese or Arabs from such voyages, and in fact the famous Chinese treasure fleet was sailing before Columbus, and less than two centuries after Kublai's conquest. It was not because of European oppression or Mongol depradations that they were brought home, but domestic Chinese politics. (Arguments for an age of discovery driven by the Islamic world are even more obscure; despite this, three of the four novels cited feature Arabs colonizing North America's Atlantic coast, with only two novels showing Chinese colonization from the Pacific.)

Finally, there seems a strange urge to describe an armed modern Aztec nation-state, flourishing unmolested by non-European colonial powers who give them guns. In both novels cited above that contain an armed modern Aztec nation-state, their colonizing neighbors came from the Islamic world. The Spanish were not famous for their tolerance of Aztecs or their culture, but it's absurd to argue that Islamic conquistadors would have been more progressive. On the other hand, I freely admit that Barnes's Aztec knights were extremely cool, almost like an alternate history answer to Niven's kzin. In Journey to Fusang, Yusuf describes Tenochtitlan thusly:
He sat down on a coil of rope. "How can I describe it to you? What's the biggest, finest city you've ever seen?"

"Tangier," I confessed. "By a great margin."

"Tanger?" He made a scornful snorting sound. "Tangier wouldn't make a minor suburb of Tenochtitlan. It's bigger than Rome or Constantinople or even Baghdad - why, there are independent kingdoms in Europe and Africa that cover less area than Tenochtitlan alone. And all of it laid out carefully with long straight streets, even canals in some parts like those of Venice, and market squares bigger than most European towns. Flowers growing everywhere, and the people looking so clean and well-fed, even the poor...and in the center, dominating the whole city from wherever you stand, that great pyramid, with its two temples on top - the blue one for Tlaloc the rain god, the red one for Huizilopochtli, he's the really nasty one - with a whole city-within-a-city of lesser temples and palaces clustered at its base. Finn, I've seen the ancient buildings of Greece and Rome and Egypt, and I'd put these people's work up against any of it.

"And then," he said, still in that quiet, almost toneless voice, "while you stand there trying to take it all in, trying to grasp the wonder and the beauty of it all, like St. John seeing the New Jerusalem - just then you glance across the street and see a priest striding along in his black cloak, face painted black, hair hanging to his knees and matted solid with years of accumulated dried blood, and the stink of rotting blood coming off him like a walking slaughterhouse - and then you remember, and you can't believe it, and yet there it is. The same people. How can it be?"

Note again: in the real world Baghdad was sacked quite badly by Hulagu Khan; while not today the center of global learning that it once was, it was hardly reduced to an irrelevant backwater.

A summary of the motifs across these novels:

Book, AuthorBlacks Enslave WhitesMuslims Colonize Eastern N.Am.China Colonizes Western N.Am.Modern Aztecs w/ GunsBack-ward Europe
Lion's BloodXXXX
ConquistadorX
Years of Rice and SaltXXX
Journey to FusangXXXXX



Alternate History Problem #3: Balancing realism with entertainment. This is fiction. It can usefully explore ideas, but ultimately it has to be carried by a narrative, and if that is lost, the medium fails. If Hannibal had won the Second Punic War, the map of Europe (or whatever it would be called) would look completely different and be populated by people who looked and spoke and worshiped completely differently from how they do today. If a branchpoint is set long ago and still faithfully followed through, it would result in a world so bewildering and unfamiliar to us that its people would be uninteresting. Conquistador's branchpoint was Alexander's surviving his fever in Babylon, but Stirling mostly used that as a way to produce a mostly-empty North America to be settled from our timeline. Of the four novels here, Lion's Blood is the worst offender, but neither is Fusang innocent. In the case of Lion's Blood, there's a fourth century B.C. branchpoint, but Christ - the same Christ - is still born 250 years later, and founds the same religion? And Mohammed more than 800 years later? Of course, a modern world without Christianity or Islam would essentially be invented out of a whole cloth - so such a degree of honesty is inadvisable, unless it's directly relevant to your thought experiment; e.g., whether evangelical monotheism would still inevitably have appeared. Sanders peripherally mentions Shakespeare and Milton but has the good form at least to make their output different.

There is also the problem that people with a different viewpoint would not use the same names for the same places (obviously) or imbue them with the same significance. By putting cities in recognizable locales (the mouth of the Great River, or the hilly city by the bay) you can cheat to some degree. Rice and Salt opens with a Central Asian horseman riding alone through an oppressively silent city of white bone-like monuments under the moonlight, and ascends a hill to inspect the most prominent. Ignorant of European history as you would expect such a person to be, he can only describe it in terms of pure sense experience, and it takes a few pages before the reader realizes he is plodding through the Acropolis. I respect Robinson for this opening, because it risks the unobservant reader's missing the symbolism, but there's a substantial reward to the reader who recognizes the landmarks. (Many writers would have succumbed to the temptation of exposition, with the rider mumbling to himself "Well you know, these structures symbolize the foundational philosophy of this continent...")


Part III: Branchpoints Favored By the Academy

I compiled some stats for the Sidewise Awards. Uchronia's overall list would be a more accurate measure of what people are writing, but this is a better approximation to what people value. Order is by number of entries in category in the novel awards.




The distribution between short- and long-form is clearly different. Possibly, people are more likely to explore new territory in shorter form. Interestingly, from the novels, the post-WWII awards all went to stories set in the Kennedy or early Johnson administration - two of which are about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which terrifyingly could easily have gone differently, and not nearly as well. Also note that the short form pieces were more likely not about war or tragedy, with 5 of 21 titles being about some form of science or technology that developed differently (as opposed to 0 out of 21 of the novels.) Notably, of the ~42 titles I went through, there was a one triple winner author (Ian MacLeod), then two each for Stephen Baxter, Harry Turtledove, Chris Roberson, and William Sanders.

Also notable - the closest any of the branchpoints was to the release of a novel was about 50 years; for short stories, 38 years. Is that because if we don't wait a generation to write our alternate history - until all the stakeholders are dead or out of power - it's mere polemic?

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Making the Outdoors into a Status Game: Humans Are Weird, Volume # 178,822,941

Cross-posted to MDK10 Outside.

A friend of mine had lived in Philadelphia and Atlanta, and then moved to Olympia, Washington. She immediately fell in love with the place. She noticed - or thought she noticed - two things: that people there were really outdoorsy, and that they weren't concerned with the silly oneupmanship status games that she witnessed constantly back East.

That was before she witnessed, at a party, of grown-ups, two people arguing over who had the lower REI co-op number, and therefore who was the more genuine outdoorsy person.

I've had similar experiences in Moab and Banff, both of which towns I despise. I mean, really stomach-turningly hate, like a pagan hates the squat stone gods of an enemy tribe. I love where these towns are. Of course I love the Canyonlands and slickrock trails and rock mazes, and the Canadian Rockies and meadows. But I hate the people that congeal in these towns. Not all of them of course. But there are many people who just really need you to know how active and outdoorsy they are, by their branded gear, by the conversations they steer you into...exactly the sort of nonsense we go outside to avoid! (And, full disclosure, maybe I despise it so much because I catch myself doing it.) Let's not leave out Rainier Mountaineering Incorporated. Are they still around? I ran into one of their guides in Mexico once. He wasn't nearly as revolting as I expected he would be. (But still pretty bad.) The Red Rock Casino in Vegas on the other hand is much more open in using the name and theme and proximity to the canyons on the west side of the strip as their particular mechanism to part outdoorsy folks from money. There's an honesty in that which I very much appreciate.

Here we take a time out for a little exploration of the bizarre psychology on display among your fellow humans. And exhibit A in such a discussion is always the very fact that it can even seem bizarre: if you're human, and you spend by far the most time interacting with other humans versus other species, shouldn't understanding and acceptance of our cognition and behavior be automatic? The fact that it can even seem bizarre is bizarre!

Of course if you went to Moab for a race or some other competition, that is explicitly a zero-sum game, so that's a little different. You can't run a marathon and complain that everybody was just trying to win, because the race is explicitly and only a zero-sum status game (even if your goal is a PR). Along these lines, I had another friend in college who would play video games with us and criticize us for trying to rack up points instead of exploring the world inside the game. "Oh, points! Points for Mike!" he would cry with contempt. To which the rest of us offered "It's a game you moron!" (He was, and still is, in fact, a moron.)

The reason that Moab and Banff (and maybe even Taos) can feel so strangely claustrophobic and annoying is that we go out into the wild blue beyond to get away from this nonsense, but by the very fact of people with these interests and personality compositions being concentrated in one place, the games we all play when we socialize become all the more annoying and ridiculous. What my naive friend in Olympia learned that day is that humans will make anything into a status game, even outdoorsiness, as is clearly the case in outdoorsy towns, where outdoorsiness defines status. While life certainly does have zero-sum games, it also has a lot of games which are not. But status games, relying on relative position as they do, are necessarily zero sum. You can't become first in any order without displacing the person who's already there. Have you ever noticed how perspicacious people seem to avoid status games? My bet is that it's because these folks wisely learn to minimize competing in zero-sum games to the extent possible, status-oriented or otherwise. And like it or not, if you spend a lot of time doing outdoor activities, unless you hide those activities, it's likely an important part of your identity, so on some level you're using that to signal qualities about yourself, and to protect our identity we have to puff up our fur in a kind of implied social threat display. (Yet another of my dubious friends wanted to cloak himself in a featureless black sphere, a social event horizon that permitted no information to escape from him - but he soon realized even this would be in vain, as lookers-on would inevitably start commenting on what he was trying to say with such a dramatic choice, and anyway a guy I know has a much better event horizon, no I had an event horizon before it was cool, well I'm so cool I don't need an event horizon, etc.)

Instead of wearing branded gear, signaling by having a blog would be much better. More cultured. It would tell you, if you were a sophisticated observer, that the person is not only outdoorsy but also a man of letters, perhaps even with some capacity for ironic self-reflection.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Have We Reached Peak Bowl?

Cross-posted at the MDK10 Outside blog.


This figure is from an earlier post about the bowl system. The reason for the expansion of the bowl system is easy: more money, for the teams and cities. As long as the fans keep coming, what's not to like?

But there must be a saturation point for any market, and maybe we've hit it for the bowl system. After 39.8% attendance this year, San Diego's Pointsettia Bowl is being discontinued - after being underperformed only by one other bowl, the Quick Lane Bowl in Detroit at 29.4%.