Economics, General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Swarm Savvy

14 Comments

This article about how bees and ants make collective decisions reminds me of my emergent stupidity theory:

So clearly it’s not enough to just put a bunch of dumb things together — how they are put together matters as well. But it at least offers the possibility that if you had a large enough bagful of Michael Moores (admittedly, it would require all of the burlap that the world will produce for the next century or so), you might have a chance of getting something intelligent as a result.

But to get back to my NASA example, I have a theory that the converse is true as well. You can aggregate a bunch of really smart things (like rocket engineers) and come up with something really, really dumb — an entity that would make decisions that no single individual among them would ever make, sans psychotropic drugs. Call it, if you like, the “committee effect.”

I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I suspect that it’s kind of like the rule for determining the resistance of a parallel network of resistors.

[Danger Will Robinson! MATH ahead!!]

If resistors are in series, that is, connected end to end in a long row of them, it’s easy to determine the total resistance — just add them up. So two resistors of ten ohms each become one resistor of twenty ohms when one end of one is connected to one end of the other, and the resistance is measured across the two free ends.

Parallel resistors, in which both ends of the resistors are connected to each other, so that the current flows through them all simultaneously, instead of first one and then the next and so on, has a different rule to compute the net resistance.

It’s: Total Resistance = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+…+(1/Rn))

where the “R”s represent the individual resistances, and there are n resistors. In words, it’s the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the individual resistances.

For the example given above, it would be one over the sum of one-tenth plus one-tenth, or one over two-tenths, or one over one-fifth, or five ohms. So instead of doubling the resistance, as in the series case, we’ve halved it.

It can be shown (exercise left for the algebra student) that if all of the resistors are of equal value, the formula simplifies to the original resistance divided by the total number of resistors.

[End MATH]

Which is a frightening thought, if the same rule applies to my “emergent stupidity” theory. Assuming for simplicity that everyone in a government bureaucracy has the same I.Q. (it doesn’t change the answer that much if you allow variation, but assuming that they’re equal makes the calculation much simpler, as one can see from the formulas above), that means that the net I.Q. will be that I.Q. divided by the number of agency employees.

If you add the number of lobbyists and interest groups to the mix, you can drive it down another order of magnitude in value, to the point that it has the intelligence of a lobotomized fern (only slightly smarter than Joe Biden).

And my theory would seem to be borne out by the quality of decisions coming from, for example, the U.S. Agriculture Department, or the INS, or the State Department.

All of this, of course, is a long way of saying that I’m not encouraged by the prospects of merging several federal agencies and departments into a much larger (and probably dumber) one called the Department of Homeland Security, and then actually entrusting it with homeland security…

Just for those morons in comments who imagine that I was ever in favor of the DHS. I think the theory goes a long way toward explaining the hundred days, hundred f-ups that we’ve been seeing since the end of January as well.

Political Commentary

Missing Dick Cheney

6 Comments

This is kind of amazing, considering that it’s Hillary supporters:

Cheney never needed to be babysat. Whenever he said strange things on television, there was clearly an alternative motive at work. Most of his oddball appearances on the Sunday morning shows were so ballsy that even though they often made steam shoot out of our ears at the time, we laughed at how utterly brazen and in your face they were. Cheney was the master of the F-U, in a way we doubt we’ll ever see in politics again. When one reporter, in March of last year, told Cheney that 3/5 of Americans thought the Iraq War wasn’t worth it, Cheney said, “So?”.

Great Merciful Zeus, that’s ballsy. Refreshingly so.

Joe Biden would have said something memorably ridiculous in response to the same question, but more likely than not he would have made up crazy nonsensical things, and contradicted himself as he stumbled and rambled his way to commercial.

We don’t know what Joe Biden does all day, but the amount of breakfasts he is required to have with Hillary Clinton each month seem to indicate Biden needs to be babysat by grown-ups. On days Clinton’s not watching him, we’re not sure who has that duty, but “breakfast with the Vice President” sure seems like “it’s your turn to keep him from embarrassing himself for part of the day”.

The contrast between Cheney and Biden is pretty amazing.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Workers Take Over The Means Of Production

17 Comments

At Chrysler:

The agreement with the union essentially relieves Chrysler of a portion of the $10 billion it owes to the union’s retiree health fund. In exchange for giving up its claims to some of that $10 billion, the union is getting the significant equity stake in the company.

Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said that if the union winds up with a majority stake in its employer, that “puts the UAW in a strange position.”

“If it takes company stock as a part owner in the company, it would be bargaining against itself,” he said. “It can never act as adversarial in that relationship. Also it’s in a position that to make the company more stable, it has to reduce health-care benefits of its own retirees.”

“A strange position.” No kidding.

What I don’t understand is why Fiat would want a 35% stake in a company that is owned by the UAW.

[Update a few minutes later]

It seems to me that shareholders of GM, Chrysler, Bank of America and many other companies that have been screwed over by the government have massive grounds for lawsuits. The tricky part, of course, and particularly with this particular government, is getting permission from it to sue it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Politics Of Amnesia

4 Comments

Put her under oath:

Maybe, for instance, the speaker doesn’t remember that in September 2002, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was one of four members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA about the interrogation methods the agency was using on leading detainees. “For more than an hour,” the Washington Post reported in 2007, “the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

“Among the techniques described,” the story continued, “was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder.”

Or maybe the speaker never heard what some of her Democratic colleagues were saying about legal niceties getting in the way of an effective counterterrorism strategy.

“Unfortunately, we are not living in times in which lawyers can say no to an operation just to play it safe,” said Democrat Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the 2002 confirmation hearing of Scott Muller to be the CIA’s general counsel. “We need excellent, aggressive lawyers who give sound, accurate legal advice, not lawyers who say no to an otherwise legal opinion just because it is easier to put on the brakes.”

Also, Scooter Pelosi. The thought of this incompetent hack and liar being third in line for the presidency would be more frightening if the imbecilic Joe Biden weren’t number two. How did we end up with such a government?

[Update late morning]

The country’s in the very best of hands.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Busted

The country’s in the very best of hands:

The cavalier use of brute government force has become routine, but the emerging story of how Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke forced CEO Ken Lewis to blow up Bank of America is still shocking. It’s a case study in the ways that panicky regulators have so often botched the bailout and made the financial crisis worse.

In the name of containing “systemic risk,” our regulators spread it. In order to keep Mr. Lewis quiet, they all but ordered him to deceive his own shareholders. And in the name of restoring financial confidence, they have so mistreated Bank of America that bank executives everywhere have concluded that neither Treasury nor the Federal Reserve can be trusted.

Boy, that’s not a very flattering picture of Hank Paulson. Looks like Darth Vader without the mask.

Popular Culture

So It’s Not Just Me

5 Comments

Andrea Harris hates reggae:

I don’t hate Marley as a person — for one thing, he’s dead, so it would be pointless. But I hate the people who keep flogging him as some sort of Jesus of music. That song, “No Woman No Cry”? Hey, how about not getting stoned on weed and sitting around like a stinky lump. Also she’s tired of you stealing her brassieres, Mr. Pot-Made-My-Moobs-Grow.

The reason so many white people like reggae is because most white people live well above the Tropic of Cancer and thus think of reggae and other genres of “island” music as “exotic” and a promise of an escape from driving down icy streets every day to a nine-to-five job or shoveling snow. I sympathize, but since I actually grew up in the tropics I also know that living year-round with humidity in the 90s coupled with temperatures in same, every insect on earth, and a yearly threat of hurricanes isn’t exactly a vacation, and the prevalence of music where every single song has the same drunken-donkey-walk rhythm and must always be sung in high, whining tones doesn’t help. It’s almost as bad as salsa.

Yes, living in Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean in general, was hell for me, musically.

Not to mention, almost everyone who loves reggae seems to think that you also have to have dirty hair full of mud (I don’t care if the mud came out of a forty-dollar jar you bought at your stylist’s — your dreadlocks look like you went outside after a good rain, scooped up a wad of dirt from the back yard, and rubbed it into your hair) and smoke pot. Marijuana smells worse than the stinkiest cigarettes, and I’m pretty sure all the second-hand pot smoke I inhaled at too many concerts contributed to the destruction of my sinuses.

You may or may not be surprised to learn that she doesn’t like ska, either.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should add that technically, Miami (which I think is where she grew up) is not the tropics, but it’s miserable enough to seem like it.

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