I've had a number of anti-war folks ask me lately whether I've revised my opinion that eliminating Saddam was a good idea. I note that none of them have revised there opinions and have a theory as to why they are asking. They are watching the news reports of bad events rather than actually examining any statistics about conditions in Iraq. This sample bias, exacerbated by the political bias of the media they read, make it difficult for them to come to objective conclusions on the matter. Nissim Taleb wrote a great article about the problem of sample bias in a recent issue of Edge magazine.
Take an example of this probabilistic maladjustment. Say you are flying to New York City. You sit next to someone on the plane, and she tells you that she knows someone whose first cousin worked with someone who got mugged in Central Park in 1983. That information is going to override any form of statistical data that you will acquire about the crime rate in New York City. This is how we are. We're not made to absorb abstract information. The first step is to make ourselves aware of it. But so far we don't have a second step. Should newspapers and television sets come with a warning label?
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The second one is a journalist. On the day when Saddam was caught, the bond market went up in the morning, and it went down in the afternoon. So here we had two headlines — "Bond Market Up on Saddam News," and in the afternoon, "Bond Market Down on Saddam News" — and then they had in both cases very convincing explanations of the moves. Basically if you can explain one thing and its opposite using the same data you don't have an explanation. It takes a lot of courage to keep silent.
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We are not made for type-2 randomness. How can we humans take into account the role of uncertainty in our lives without moralizing? As Steve Pinker aptly said, our mind is made for fitness, not for truth — but fitness for a different probabilistic structure. Which tricks work? Here is one: avoid the media. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from watching television is entirely different from the actual risks that we exposed to. If you watch a building burning on television, it's going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real actuarial value, no matter your intellectual sophistication.
At the Foresight conference there were a lot of people enthusiastic about human enhancement and perhaps even about uploading themselves onto silicon. Many of these people also consider themselves atheists and scientists who disbelieve that there is something called a soul that is independent of the mechanics of their physical bodies.
Paul Bloom has done work that shows that most people tacitly believe in souls even if they claim otherwise. Uploaders fit the bill here. If they truly believed that their existence was physical and they valued their own lives, they would be extremely conservative about mucking with the engineering of their brains. Instead they insist on viewing their brains as some sort of prosthetic to be enhanced with technology. As we learn more about how we construct souls, we will understand better what sorts of enhancements are acceptable to those who oppose murder or suicide.
From OpinionJournal we now have confirmation either that one of Saddam's top officers was present at Al Queada's 9/11 planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur or that someone with the same name was present at both meetings.
This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own.
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The reason to care goes beyond the prewar justification for toppling Saddam and relates directly to our current security. U.S. officials believe that American civilian Nicholas Berg was beheaded in Iraq recently by Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, who is closely linked to al Qaeda and was given high-level medical treatment and sanctuary by Saddam's government. The Baathists killing U.S. soldiers are clearly working with al Qaeda now; Saddam's files might show us how they linked up in the first place.
Lilek's summarizes well:
So they found a sarin shell? Eh. Halliburton put it there, it was old, and besides everyone knew Saddam had WMD, and we gave him the sarin anyway, and it would be news if we found 400 shells, but if they were old undeclared shells they wouldn’t count because they weren’t a threat to us anyway – do you know that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi? Why aren’t we invading them? Not that we should, that would TOTALLY be about oil, anyway , did you read Doonesbury today? He had this giant hand talking in a press conference. This big giant floating hand. I think it was a reprint. I like when he has that bald dude who’s in charge of some Iraqi city. Bald dude is like, wasted.
Josh says in backchannel that he is angry. From the context it is clear that he is angry that Bush is in power and wants to debate the issues in public. He articulates the challenge thus:
no discussion about the pros and cons of the bush administration will be without a discussion of domestic issues as well as international ones. the crucial difference between the way you think now and the way i think now has nothing to do with intellectual dishonesty or low iq, (fucker) but that i care deeply about the actual domestic state of this country,
But before we do any of that, I would like to resolve the question of intellectual honesty. Josh, do you believe that the Bush administration claimed that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States.
(Josh, if you want to have this debate in the comments section, that is fine. Personally I would prefer if you responded in your own blog because MT does not allow links to comments.)
Do you want to be healthier and live longer (do you want immortality)? Do you want to be smarter and remember more? Do you want to feel happier and more optimistic? Do you want to be able to communicate telepathically with other people or with your computer? Do you want to be more physically attractive? Do you want more spiritual satisfaction? Do you want more intellectual satisfaction? Dp you want to feel more apart of your community? Do you want to coordinate better with colleagues? Do you want these things for your kids/friends/community/country/world?
I know I do (according to my definition of all these things). More specifically, I want to be able to choose freelywhich technologies I accept and reject. However we live in a world in which:
The problem with all of these enhancement technologies is that they rapidly make our whole social structure obsolete. Unless we have working alternatives, we may not like the net result of losing the definition of "human."
Note: There may not be a choice here. We just need to start planning now.
Does the NSA want effective private sector cryptography that woud enable any random foreign government or terrorist to hide their communication? Does the Department of Energy want a commercial infrastructure for private sector breeder reactors that produce more nuclear fuel as part of the power generation process than they consume (fuel of sufficient quality that it is also usable in nuclear weapons)? If there was commercial nuclear power in the 1930's who would have produced and used nuclear weapons first? Perhaps we don't want widespread commercialization of bio and nano-technology because, although the private sector will optimize their use for good, that technology would be too easily used by our enemies.
At the Foresight conference last weekend Eric Drexler claimed that the National Nanotech Initiative and Richard Smalley were actively trying to inhibit private sector nanotech research. If he is correct, perhaps thoughts like those above are motivating them. It would be bad if people were producing human viruses in the same manner that they are producing computer viruses.
However, given that the capital costs of bio/nanotech are so cheap (two scientists recently designed a "good" sexually transmitted virus that disables HIV for less than $200k), it is not clear that these harmful viruses won't be produced by teen-agers and terrorists in basements in Eastern Europe and perhaps Pakistan anyway. One could argue that crypto is low cost as well except that the R&D is really hard and mathematical and the failure of crypto affects only its users and not everyone else. Basement bio/nano-tech is more like spam. Easy to do badly possible to do well. With bad guys trying lots of different things both for fun and perhaps even to increase demand for products in which they are invested.
So, we face the choice of increased commercialization of bio/nano-tech at the cost of increased likelihood that it will be used for evil and gaining the benefits that such technologies will deliver (greater health, happiness, and wealth). Or we don' eat the apple of commercial bio/nano-tech and remain in our present less-than-edenic-but-not-as-bad-as-it-could-be state. And as with most choices the real issue is not whether but when and how best to prepare.
In most sorts of fights it is better to be on offense than defense. In that spirit we should start thinking now about what bio/nano-tech we would like to procure and what we would like to resist. We should be able to produce a new treatment as easily as they can produce a new disease and we should shift into a psychology of active improvement because it puts us in the mindset of being the ones choosing the changes and forces the bad guys to try to hit a moving target (as the population modifies its genes and biota at highly varying rates).
As a matter of attitude the shift to a psychology of happiness is definitely a good start. We may also need medicine of health that make people feel and be better rather than simply a medicine of cure. We probably need to loosen up on rules about illegal drugs and perhaps restrict the FDA to regulating cure treatments rather than improvement treatments. We should expect that many of these treatments are custom and so perhaps people will demand Personal Producers, desktop machines that produce custom drugs, genes, and nanotech for each persons individual needs.
(Yes I know that this contradicts the Human Dignity argument I've been making. Will follow up shortly).
It seems that Democrats really really want to believe they are smarter, but it turns out they've been hoaxed.
Now we are getting all this evidence of Saddam's WMD, connections w/ Al Queada both before and after 9/11 and they don't want to hear it. Laurie Mylorie notes:
Opinion polls show that most Americans still believe Iraq had substantial ties to al Qaeda and even that it was involved in 9/11. Yet among the “elite,” there is tremendous opposition to this notion. A simple explanation exists for this dichotomy. The public is not personally vested in this issue, but the elite certainly are.America’s leading lights, including those in government responsible for dealing with terrorism and with Iraq, made a mammoth blunder. They failed to recognize that starting with the first assault on New York’s World Trade Center, Iraq was working with Islamic militants to attack the United States. This failure left the country vulnerable on September 11, 2001. Many of those who made this professional error cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it; perhaps, they cannot even recognize it. They mock whomever presents information tying Iraq to the 9/11 attacks; discredit that information; and assert there is “no evidence.” What they do not do is discuss in a rational way the significance of the information that is presented.
So now we know that Saddam had WMD (escaped to Syria and almost used in Lebanon). We know that he was cooperating with Al Queada at least after Aghanistan (because that was where the Jordanian terrorists were recruited). And now Edward Jay Epstein confirms that Saddam was working with Al Queada in the run-up to 9/11. What else is there?
Apropos my last post about the left-liberal abandonment of America as an idea, I just read this review of Samuel Huntington's new book.
Huntington's challenge to the roster of leading intellectual superstars does not stop here. Many who do not share this basic antipathy to the nation nevertheless come under his critical scrutiny because they are too squeamish to take the elementary steps needed to promote the nation; they follow the weak path of willing the ends while denying the means. He cites, for example, Michael Walzer ("A radical program of Americanization would really be un-American") and Dennis Wrong ("Nobody advocates 'Americanizing' new immigrants, as in the bad old ethnocentric past"). This opposition to Americanization, Huntington declares, "is a
new phenomenon in American intellectual and political history."
Aiding this intellectual disaffection have been various effects stemming from economic trends of globalization that work to devalue the idea of the nation in general. The modern economy creates a class of transnational elites who identify more with the world than the nation: "The economic globalizers are fixated on the world as an economic unit . . . as the global market replaces the national community, the national citizen gives way to the global consumer." At the head of this new class of transnationals are the "Davos" men and women, whose ranks include not just business executives but global bureaucrats and members of various internationally minded NGOs. These are the people whose hearts thrill at a ruling from The Hague, whose loyalty goes first to the United Nations, and who regard any expression of patriotism as an act equally as atavistic as attending religious services.
Huntington argues that America has two sources of identity. The first he calls "the Creed," by which he means the basic principles of individual rights and government by consent of the governed as these are drawn from universal arguments, such as can be found "most notably in the Declaration of Independence." The Creed claims to make its appeal to rational precept (to "nature"), which is in principle available to all people. (It is curious that Huntington selects the term "creed" to refer to this dimension, as the word evokes powerful connotations of acceptance on the basis of faith.)THE SECOND ELEMENT of identity is Culture. Culture, as any social scientist knows, is a most useful concept until one is confronted with the task of having to say exactly what it means. Huntington does his best, defining it at one point as "a people's language, religious beliefs, social and political values, assumptions as to what is right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, and to the objective institutions and behavioral patterns that reflect these subjective elements"--in brief, nearly everything. But Huntington boils the concept down, as he must, and culture comes to refer to language (English), to religion (sometimes "dissenting Protestantism," sometimes, more broadly, "the Christian religion"), and to a few basic English ideas of liberty. America's culture, in Huntington's shorthand, is "Anglo-Protestantism."
The problem with Creedalism in this arena is its clear "imperial" implication. Huntington is a nationalist, but a moderate one who has little use for contemporary international Creedalists who believe that "people of other societies have basically the same values as Americans, or if they do not have them, they want to have them, or if they do not want to have them, they misjudge what is good for their society, and Americans have the responsibility to persuade them or to induce them to embrace the universal values that America espouses."
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Huntington ties the origin of the Creed to Anglo-Protestant culture, but he does not--or does not quite--equate origin with essence. He grants that the Creed can--indeed has--spread, albeit in an attenuated form, to nations that are not Anglo-Protestant. But there is no question that his argument moves in the direction of saying that spreading the Creed very far afield, given its chiefly cultural origins, is a delusion.
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A great deal of what is most lovable about America, and perhaps also higher and more valuable, is contained in the Culture, not in the Creed. For Huntington, it is clearly not just a matter of convenience that Americans have one language, which happens to be English; rather, it is important that we speak English and find our roots in Shakespeare, not Cervantes. By the same token, it is not just a matter of convenience for Huntington that America is chiefly Christian, rather than Buddhist or Islamic. He wants it to be that way. More broadly, he argues that such preferences are justified, and they should be openly defended and preferred--not be made objects of shame, hidden from view. But Creedalism (at any rate, the zealous Creedalism that Huntington attacks) is not only indifferent to these cultural preferences, but it is almost antagonistic to them.
From George Will
Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."
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The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation -- our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.
Note: Neo-cons are typically policy geeks who baseline view cultural expression as noise. Positive expression of American values may be a casualty of America's culture wars.
From the NY Post
May 4, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The United Nations yesterday threw up a stone wall in the oil-for-food scandal, insisting that contracts between the world body and private companies should not be turned over to investigators.In a defiant move that has infuriated probers, Secretary-General Kofi Annan threw his support behind a letter from former oil-for-food head Benon Sevan to officials of a Dutch company that inspected Iraqi oil shipments. The letter directed the company not to hand over documents to congressional committees and other "governmental authorities."
Whether "Great Men" or historical trends drive change is a common coffee/beer debate topic. I'm generally on the side of former (strongly influenced by the Mule character from Asimov's Foundation trilogy when I was a kid). Either way, it is very clear that management matters A LOT in running a company or a country. The French stolen passports and the Chinese SARS outbreaks are examples of governmental incompetence. Via WinterSpeak, here is a story about AT&T Wireless' incompetence. It is scary how much they got wrong in the process. Stuff that is so basic about software development. No version control. No rollback. No break the built rules. Nothing! Wow.
Via Fried Man.
Yet another SARS outbreak is hitting China. Apparently because the lab that accidentally caused the last outbreak just did it again!
he latest outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China, with eight confirmed or suspected cases so far and hundreds quarantined, involves two researchers who were working with the virus in a Beijing research lab, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday (April 26).“We suspect two people, a 26-year-old female postgraduate student and a 31-year-old male postdoc, were both infected, apparently in two separate incidents,” Bob Dietz, WHO spokesman in Beijing, told The Scientist.
Its bad when its blank passports. It may be worse when its SARS.
“Normally, it's not possible to contaminate people even under level two confinement, if the security rules are obeyed, with the appropriate hoods, and so on,” Danchin said. SARS work requires level three. “So it suggests there has been some mishandling of something.”“The lab might have all the right rules, but the people may not comply! For example, notebooks are not supposed to be taken out, a lot of things like that. A virus doesn't jump on people!” Danchin said.