Strategy, Tactics, and Games

First of all, read this post.  Now.  http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/09/24/strategy-tactics/  It is pure genius.

After you’ve done that, I have analysis to do.  I’m not going to regurgitate a single shred of the information in the above article because I have too much to say.

First of all, the author Venkatesh Rao is absolutely correct, and not only did this idea never occur to me, I never thought to question the idea that the fundamental assumptions used in the creation of strategies and tactics were fundamentally flawed- adding a level of meta-tactical formulation that is essentially lacking in most decision-making.  Now, more specifically, the idea that tactics are general and strategic thinking is unique to situations, while it appears to be generally true, and it’s a much better approximation than the old model that strategy is somehow more all-encompassing than tactics, it falls victim to the same thinking that the old model did.

What do I mean by this?  Well, strategy by this definition does actually include tactics necessarily.  Because it’s constructed for an individual circumstance it must necessarily be built up from the different tactical options available to the agent.  However, tactics do not necessarily have to be a part of a grander or lesser strategy.  A tactic can be described in pure game-theoretical terms without any real-world interaction.  This is accomplished by building a tactic up from axioms in a way that strategies derived from doctrines aren’t.  A doctrine is an assumption about the world for practical purposes and is therefore derived from experience in an inductive fashion- as a practical assumption which is most often true, or otherwise useful to assume.  Tactics derived from axioms are arrived at deductively.  For example, in a military situation, we know that we want to destroy as much enemy materiel as possible while incurring as few losses as we can.  This is not a doctrine- this is an axiom.  Similar axioms are such assumptions as “guns have range” or “guns are highly lethal to humans.”  So if we build up a number of axioms like this we can arrive at a situation where we have whatever weapons in whatever known situation, and we can compute tactics such as have troops use cover, use infantry with anti-armor weapons to engage enemy tanks, use tanks to engage enemy assault infantry, etc. etc.  So maybe we arrive at an effective tactic of creating a formation with the tanks in the front, and a large number of infantry in a supporting role, to be brought forward when the enemy fields their tanks.  It’s important to note that we can change these parameters however we like and we’ll arrive at different tactical results.  For example, if we changed the situation to include the axiom that all infantry are highly effective at killing tanks, then it may not be worthwhile to field tanks at all because they would be destroyed too easily, and it certainly wouldn’t be a good idea to have them go first if they were all you had.

In a strategic sense, we have a different way of looking at our available units.  We could talk about units in the same abstract sense as before and still come up with concepts of strategic interest, but in order to formulate a valid strategy we would really need to know the specifics of what we’re dealing with.  Do we have 122 tanks and 300,000 troops to call upon?  What’s the supply situation, what about morale, training, enemy targets available, etc. etc.  From this we might formulate a diverse array of potential strategies to maximize the effectiveness of the resources available.  However, in order to do that we need to have both good doctrine, or practical assumptions about the nature of the world, and good intel, or exact specifics about the situation at hand.  The difference is fairly easy to handle.  If we know that setting the tempo of the military engagement is critical, that’s a doctrine.  It has direct strategic significance by reducing the infinite field of possible strategies down to a more manageable number of probably useful ones very quickly.  Intel would be “the enemy has 513,889 soldiers located in that city” or “the enemy is going to attack in three days.”  Intel is necessary for making operational decisions, or low-level instance decisions.  I suppose it could be said that operations are simply a lower-level form of strategy, but they’re low enough level that it is practical to consider them fundamentally different.  Strategic thinking is necessary to make them work, as opposed to abstract tactical deduction, but the strategy selected is known and an implementation is all that is required.

Strategic thinking is not, as I and many others once thought, “higher level” than tactical thinking.  I would argue that it requires more experience and more intelligence to think strategically in a given field than to analyze it tactically.  With strategy, you are necessarily dealing with imperfect information and chance.  Chess is a game of pure tactics, with very little true strategy.  I would argue that more complex games like Go actually do include levels of strategic thinking because you have to address the board at hand and your opponent in a unique fashion.  However, in chess, you don’t care who your opponent is or what the individual situation is.  Given a sufficiently advanced derivational strategy you could compute the ideal move in a given situation.  The same thing could be said for Go, of course, but the computational capacity required is so immense that it is utterly impossible with the resources of a human brain.  However, chess masters make this sort of analysis when deciding what to do.  Ah, who cares about individual games.

Real time strategy games tend to contain strategy, with a fairly sparse diversity of individual tactics.  Some tactics that are generally common in all RTS games are things like rushing, turtling, spamming, and so on.  Strategically, however, you have to look at the terrain and what units your opponent is fielding and make a decision that will only hold for this specific situation.  One of the main flaws in RTS games in my book is that maps tend to play out the same way each time because the terrain has too little effect.  This sounds like I’ve got it backwards, but bear with me.  Two armies meeting in a field with no terrain at all have very few factors to make strategic decisions on.  Barring some really different logistical or technological factor, the battle will probably play out much the same way every time you ran such a simulation.  Now, if you added in a little terrain, just enough to create a few significant areas of strategic significance, then the nature of the game changes.  Both sides try to hold the same strategic areas, and succeed to the degree of the resources available and the ease with which they can hold a specific area (if it’s closer to them, etc).  However these battles will also play out the same way every time because there aren’t enough options.  If you’ve only got a few points of obvious interest to both sides then they’ll fight over them every time.  The tactics utilized to obtain them may be different, but the strategic objectives are not up for negotiation.  In order to have a strategically interesting game there must be a greater number of possible strategic choices than a given side can hope to capitalize on.  What do I mean by this?  If we increase the number of points of strategic significance, up to the point where it is no longer an option to simply take them all, then the game starts to become strategically interesting in the sense that different players will make different strategic choices on the grand scale.  Now, I have to mention here, that it is also important to have multiple dimensions of possible choice.  If you have a wide selection of areas which will all give you resources, then the strategy doesn’t actually change.  You just have to get as many of them as possible- and the order that you take them becomes the individual strategy and doesn’t make an interesting strategic setting.  Perhaps the best way to create strategic significance is to give the players the ability to create strategic weapons, and depending on where they place them, the course of the battle changes.  The issue with this method though is that a given setup will lend itself to specific places to put such weapons.  So if you put these choices in the players’ hands, they’ll quickly settle on where the best choice is and just repeatedly place there.

I am trying to bring to light the principle of strategic consolidation.  This is known in game theory as Nash equilibria.  Ideally, in order to create a strategically interesting situation, you would ideally make it so that there are no Nash equilibrium for your setup.  However this in almost an impossible task.  So instead you can set about creating as many of them in as complex a formulation as possible so that it doesn’t play out the same way too often.  I would posit that there must be a way to create a game which, from its fundamental structure, will be strategically interesting every time.

Now how would we go about doing this?  The first point is we must somehow factor in the right level of extra-structural and intra-structural factors.  Meaning, the map, player choices, and other circumstantial factors must have a variable level of influence, but not so variable that any one of them can ever break the game.  Of course, it would always be possible to create a map which breaks strategic interest, or for a player to be outright retarded.  However we as the hypothetical game designers get to put certain parameters on these things.  For example, maps should be between X and Y size with properties A, B, and C, yada yada yada.  We will only make a game that is always strategically interesting if our input parameters are followed.  We will also assume that all players will be trying to win, although we have to allow for disparate skill levels.  That said, because we’re trying to make a strategic game, if we’re doing our job right then better players will straight up destroy worse players.  This is acceptable because we can keep the game strategically interesting by always introducing a flaw in any given strategy chosen that the other player might exploit, except that they might not be skilled enough to.

Alright, now we begin in earnest.  Because we want our game to be strategically interesting, we need a large diversity of points of interest, which necessarily entails a map of a certain size.  As a result, we will have to scale our unit balance accordingly.  Ideally we would have bigger maps = better, but then we run into the issue of time limitations.  Games need to be limited to a certain time frame, or nobody will ever finish them and they won’t be fun.  We could get around this in a number of ways, such as having games run in phases or have a perpetual game, or maybe run it in turns, etc. etc.  However all of these will curtail the structure of the game in a significant way.  So instead we’re just not going to worry about time being an issue.  Our theoretical game won’t account for the players having fun in any realm outside of the actual strategy of the game.  For example, we will not concern ourselves with the processing power required to run it, the graphics, the cost of the computer, or the market share of people who might be interested in buying such a game.  So we will have maps that are exceedingly large with lots of different points of interest such as geographic features, resources, and perhaps even significant locations such as cities.  Regarding our resource model- we want it to be simple enough that the player doesn’t have to break their brain in order to get units to play around with, but we also need it to be extremely important.  The ability to reduce the opponent’s ability to fight is a fundamental and necessary strategic concern.  As an aside, in order to have a diverse array of points of interest, we might cheat and have a massive variety of resources.  This is effective to a point.  I don’t know what the ideal number would be, but certainly 100 is far too many.  I would be leery of anything upwards of 10 or 20, and in order to have numbers that high it would need to be necessary to be able to convert them conveniently (at a price, possibly substantial).  The other important issue is logistics.  Most modern strategy games ignore them because they are something of a pain.  However I am confident that it is possible to implement a logistics system that the player doesn’t have to worry about except in the sense that they keenly feel the need to protect it, and to attack the enemy’s.  The player should never have to give orders to manually maximize the efficiency of their logistics systems.  The player is for making strategic and tactical decisions, not daily maintenance.  If they were so inclined they should be able to change whatever they wanted, but a liberal dose of heavily customizable helper AI would do RTS games a great deal of good.  Similarly, the player should be in a position to decide what gets produced, but should not have to manually queue up individual buildings and units.  Using a flexible template system complemented with artificial intelligence would be fantastic.  The player can say “I want a firebase built here.” and the servitor AI summoned will see to it that the location in question has whatever buildings the player associated with a firebase are built there.

In a similar vein, the player should never be called upon to give orders to individual units.  This is a critical point.  The UI built on top of the basic unit level should be sophisticated enough that the player can quickly and easily pick out whatever units they want, organize them automatically into squads, order squads or companies, battalions, armies, whatever to be built and assembled automatically, and have those units automatically organized for them.  If iTunes can do it with massive libraries of mp3 files then an RTS game can do it with units.  Complex reports and commands should be routine.  The player should be able to get a complete breakdown of whatever subsection of units they like, according to whatever criteria they like.  For example, I might ask my war machine AI to give me a complete breakdown of my air force.  It will show me a page saying I have a total of 344,000 planes and then a breakdown by grouping, role, and further breakdown by type, with individual conditions and orders should I ask.  I should be able to look at a procedurally generated map showing what I have where and what they’re currently doing.  Regarding complex commands, it should be possible for the game to understand more complex elements than “move” and “fire.”  For example, if I want to mount a sustained bombing run on an enemy base, it’s not a complex task.  I just want to get a whole lot of bombers and have them kill everything in this here area while returning to base/aircraft carrier for fuel and ammo when necessary.  The player absolutely should not be required to designate every single target for every single bomber, and then manually order them to return.  It should definitely be an option to order specific units to destroy a specific target, but a more abstracted and powerful UI solution would be much better.  For example, I might designate a specific area as an enemy base which I label “southwestern air staging base” or whatever.  Having the game automatically divide the map into sectors would be handy too.  Being able to then draw symbols and regions on this fabric that you can order units around with would be fantastic.  Anyway, I can then designate specific enemy targets within that area with different values depending on how badly I want those targets destroyed.  I might even create an algorithm describing a way to automatically determine which targets I want destroyed more, such as always aiming for factories or artillery pieces or whatever else.  Then when I order a sustained bombing run, my bombers do what I want them to even when I didn’t specifically order them to.  I can go do something else without having to micromanage.  I guess that’s the whole point of this paragraph.  The age of micromanagement is over.  Hopefully future RTS games will realize this, and we will look back on the RTS games of today as basically RPG games with more units.

To go further into what abstraction might do for our strategy game, RTS games need to start having operations.  By operations, I mean a large, coordinated plan with many active elements all going together, which the player could give specific names if they wanted to.  Including specific objectives as conditionals would be fantastic.  For example, if a player defined an objective as “blow this up” then your AI will understand that if the offending enemy is destroyed, that statement will return true.  The player could then have a breakdown by operation to see how they’re going in all their operations at once.  Your operation readout might be:

Operation FIrestorm - In Progress
• 5:11 of planned 14 minutes elapsed.
• 4 of 11 objectives completed
• General force strength 87%”
- notes
• massed assault eastward on sectors B65 through B88
Operation Lightning Spear (covert) - In Progress
• Jammers operational
• Cloaking operational
• believed to be undetected
• 1:30 of planned 7 min 35 seconds elapsed
• 1 of 5 objectives completed
• 100% General force strength

I am aware that none of this seems like it has any bearing on how to make a game that stays strategically interesting.  It seems to me that the main stumbling block for RTS games today is the user interface.  They are just not suited to having a really strategy-oriented game.  The player has to do too much.  While this increases the twitch factor- not necessarily a bad thing, it detracts from the ability to create large and sweeping, grand strategies.  Using groupings to combine individuals into squads, squads into companies, companies into battalions, and battalions into armies would be a huge improvement.  Doing it atomically allows a computer to easily construct the desired units based on input from the player.  For example, I design a squad of 20 soldiers and give 2 of them machine guns and everyone has grenades.  I then say give me a company with 13 of those squads, 3 units of 3 tanks apiece, 1 unit of 3 anti-air vehicles, 2 units of snipers, and 1 command squad unit.  I’ll put 30 of those companies into a battalion, of which I would like you to build one at this base, one at this base way over here, and another at this third base.  Automation is the name of the game, to free the player up for making the decisions that really count.

Impulsiveness

Is impulsiveness a desirable characteristic?  I am the categorical thinker- I like to think about things before I do them.  However, as part of that thought process it’s important to be able to suspend thought when necessary.  As such, whether or not impulsiveness has a place in the repertoire of the contemporary rationalist is an interesting question.  Firstly, we need to look at where impulsiveness is typically used.  Impulsiveness is often associated with interpersonal exchanges, with social people and people who enjoy parties.  It is strongly disassociated with business or financial decisions, with some exceptions such as small purchases and gambling.  So while common sense thought acknowledges that impulsive action is improper for weighty decisions, for more trivial matters it helps a great deal.

Before we get into the topic, we need to make some distinctions.  There is impulsiveness and then there is recklessness.  The way I conceive of the terms, impulsiveness is thinking of an action and allowing it to proceed into reality without too much analysis.  Recklessness, on the other hand, implies a full knowledge of the action beforehand, but doing it in spite of your analysis that it is foolhardy.  I will talk about both, but first let’s cover the less complex issue of impulsiveness.  In social situations, impulsiveness is a great aid because you can’t think too much about what you’re going to say.  There are a large number of very smart people who have difficulty in social situations because they don’t realize that their strategy for dealing with reality is not universally applicable- it needs to be changed to fit their needs of the moment.  When I was a kid I was like this.  I have since learned to pragmatically and completely apply rationality and can piece together the solution to such puzzles.  Basically, if you think too much about what you’re going to say, you give an unnatural amount of weight to when you do speak.  So unless you’re able to spout endless amounts of deep, profound thoughts, invariably you’re going to be putting a lot of weight behind fairly trivial statements, and the inconsistency comes across as awkward.  Impulsiveness will decrease the weight of what you’re saying and give it a sort of throwaway characteristic which helps you in a number of ways.  Firstly, if it doesn’t work out, nobody really notices, and you can keep going with whatever suits you.  Secondly, it puts you in a more dominant position of just saying whatever you feel like saying.  You aren’t vetting your thoughts to check if the rest of the group will approve.  This brings us to the second flaw in the introverted thinker’s social rut, the fact that they are attempting to apply thought to the situation to do better and it shows very obviously to the rest of the group.  This is a complex point that I can’t encapsulate in one post, but basically any attempt to earn approval guarantees denial of it in direct proportion to the effort spent.  The introverted thinker’s goal is to earn approval, and his model for deciding what to say is, logically, fixed upon achieving that goal.  While their intentions are good their entire approach has so many incorrect assumptions they aren’t even capable of recognizing the fact that their whole paradigm is nonfunctional.  They just dive right back in with a “it must work” attitude instead of reworking from first principles.

Impulsiveness is also a pragmatic tool to be used liberally in situations of doubt.  When it is clear that hesitation will cost more than immediate action, you have to go.  When I was younger I had this model of “going for help” which essentially contained the idea that the concept of help was distant.  So “going for help” would take a long time, and there was a significant chance that the window would close for whatever the situation was.  So my primary course would have been to just go do it myself.  This is an incorrect application of impulsiveness because of incorrect information.  A proper application of impulsiveness might be, for example, you are handed a test with 100 4-answer multiple choice questions, you have 100 seconds.  Now there is no way you could conceivably cover 25% of the questions if you legitimately tried to answer them.  However, if you guess randomly you have a 1 in 4 chance on each question and so over 100 questions you should get 25 correct.  This is clearly your best strategy given the rules of the game.  You concluded that the best strategy is to suspend rational inquiry into each question because it is simply not worthwhile.  You wouldn’t work for an hour to earn a penny, and you wouldn’t think for X seconds per question.

The other fallacy that makes impulsiveness distasteful to many is the idea that the answer actually matters.  With our test example, you don’t actually care what the answer to any given question is, you have all the information needed to create a sufficient strategy.  For social impulsiveness, the simple fact of the matter is that your actions really don’t matter that much.  Provided you don’t do anything truly inappropriate, at least.  The, and I use this term very reluctantly, “antisocial nerds” ascribe a great deal of value to their interactions and to what each party says.  This is a misunderstanding of the nature of the communication.  The actual content is unimportant.  Nobody cares if you’re talking about the weather, cars, or anything else.  True, this doesn’t make logical sense, and in a perfect world people would communicate usefully instead of feeding their egos by the fact that they’re talking to people.  Most of the “extroverts” are pleased by the fact that they’re talking to people, and are anxious when seen by themselves- this mentality is communicated to introverts and affects them quite adversely because they prefer to be alone for some part of their day and they may believe that there is something wrong with them.  Don’t buy it, please.  The people who *need* to be around others to validate themselves are the unstable ones.  It’s similar to the way men and women treat sex.  Men are usually sexually insensitive and are more pleased the by fact that they are having sex than they are enjoying the sex itself.  They are usually seeking validation from society instead of their own enjoyment.  Of course, most women can pick this up immediately and they would prefer not to be some boy’s tool to self-validation.  Women, you aren’t off the hook, you do the same thing, but not with sex.  Instead, you get validation from men paying attention to you while others are watching.  Don’t get me wrong, it goes both ways.  Some women perceive that they get validation from having lots of sex, and some men get validation by attention from women, they’re just not as common as the other way around.  Impulsiveness as a concept is often bundled with these behaviors which, although nobody really knows why, are widely believed to be “creepy.”  That’s just not the case.

Now, recklessness is a whole ‘nother can of worms.  Doing something that you know to be crazy, or doing something because it’s crazy, has a completely different backing behind it.  Most reckless people do it because the cost of the reckless action is balanced or outweighed by the enjoyment or rush they get from it.  This is the same mechanism that makes skydiving fun, even though skydiving is actually reasonably safe.  If you had a significant chance of dying you wouldn’t be able to sell it to people as a recreational activity without some serious social pressure backing it up.  Ziplining is another example- there has only ever been one zipline death, and that was under suspicious circumstances.  But we perceive it to be dangerous and enjoy a rush from it.  There is, however, a time when outright reckless behavior can be a rational course of action.  Usually these circumstances fall into two categories though, 1) you’re trying to make other people/agents believe you’re reckless, or 2) direct and/or thought-out strategies can be expected or countered easily or are otherwise rendered ineffective.

Category 1 is the more common of the two and can potentially occur in any game or strategic situation.  Essentially your strategy is to do something stupid in the hope that your enemy will misjudge your tactics or your capabilities, enabling you to take greater advantage later on, or in the long run.  In poker, it is sometimes a good thing to get caught bluffing.  That way, next time you have a monster hand your opponent might believe you’re actually bluffing.  If you’ve never been caught bluffing before, they would be much more likely to believe you actually have a hand and fold.  Obviously, if you get caught bluffing enough times that it seriously impacts your pile of chips, you’re just bad at poker, but a single tactical loss can be later utilized to strategic advantage.

Category 2 is much more interesting.  Let’s take a game like Total Annihilation.  By the way, TA: Spring is totally free and open source, and it’s easily a contender for the greatest strategy game ever made.  Although it’s not fundamentally that complicated, there is no in-game help so it can be very confusing for new players.  Feel free to log in to the multiplayer server and just ask for a training game- after one or two you should be up to speed and ready to play for real.  Anyway, in Total Annihilation, at least the more standard-fare mods, there are dozens if not hundreds, there are huge weapons that deal death massively and can pose a serious threat in and of themselves to the opposition.  Things like nukes, long range artillery, giant experimental robots (and you can FPS any unit, bwahaha!!), etc. etc.  Anyway, the construction of one such piece can actually end the game if it stands uncountered or undestroyed for too long.  However each has a counter, which range in effectiveness.  For example, antinuke protects a fairly large area, but if you throw two nukes at it, it can only handle one.  Shields protect against long range artillery but they have a small area and cost a lot to run, and so on.  Now, a calculating player can probably figure out the ideal choice for the opponent in a given situation.  If he’s focusing all his stuff in one place, he may as well get both shields and anti-nuke, but the other player(s) could then steal the whole map.  If he goes for the whole map himself, the other player would probably get air units to attack his sparsely defended holdings.  If he consolidates in a few carefully chosen locations, nukes might be in order, and so on.

This is where we get to the recklessness-as-tool element.  Potentially the greatest advantage in complex games of strategy is surprise, or doing something that the enemy did not expect and must react to.  Ideally the enemy has limited ability to reorganize to counter the new threat.  This is true of real-world military action- there are issues with communication, chaos, and a host of others that make reacting quickly difficult.  The more resources sunk into the threat, the more resources that will be necessary to counter it (assuming that the attacker isn’t just stupid).  There would have been no point in the Manhattan Project, for example, if the enemy could put horseshoes on all their doors to render nuclear weapons impotent, and it would never have been started.  Now let’s say we have a game of TA where it would be obvious that hitting the enemy with a nuke would be the best course of action.  Of course, this same idea will have occurred to the person about to get nuked.  OK, so then big guns are the best strategy.  Except that your opponent can think of that, too, because he might guess you’re not going to use nukes because it’s too obvious.  And so on through all the possible options, whatever one can think of, the other can too.  Whatever strategy you might use to maximize your utility can be equally though of by the enemy.  We are dealing with a perfectly constrained system.

But what if we de-constrained the system just a little bit.  We remove the rule that says we must maximize value.  Now we could feasibly do anything up to and including nuking ourselves.  So we need a different rule in its place because now we’re working with a screwed up and dysfunctional model.  This is where the trick is.  Because you might still have a meta-model of maximizing value in your selection of an alternate strategy, meaning you will be just as predictable, albeit through the use of a much more complex algorithm.  No, you have to truly discard the maximizing value paradigm in order to get the additional value from surprise, and the trick is to not lose too much to put you behind after your surprise factor is added in.

My problem here is I’m trying to reduce a complex and multi-dimensional strategic game to a single aspect under consideration.  My other problem is that many of you will have never heard of Total Annihilation.  The same idea applies to more or less any other sufficiently complex game, such as Starcraft, but value is too directly transformed in most modern games to make such meta-strategies significant.  If you have more troops, or the right kind of troops, you win.  If you’re behind, you’re behind and there’s not a lot you can do about it other than try harder in doing what you were doing before.  So while surprise might give you some advantage, it’s probably not going to be worth enough to be behind to get it.  Careful application of force certainly helps, but it’s not as vital as in Supreme Commander or Total Annihilation.  No, I’m not harping on the games in question, I’m not demanding that you must play them, I’m just sharing my particular taste in video games.

Impulsiveness once again.  I seem to be digressing more and more these days.  Basically what I’m trying to communicate is that in some situations (games to use the theoretical term) the act of analysis must be take into consideration in your planning.  How much time can you spend analyzing, what should you be analyzing, how is the enemy thinking, etc. etc.  Once you bring the act of thinking into the purview of strategic considerations, impulsiveness is one option for a viable strategy that just does not occur to someone who cannot conceive of the act of thinking as a strategic concern.  They implicitly believe that life is a game of perfect information with unlimited time for a given move.  The truth is, you’re acting when you decide what to do, and that act will have an effect on the world and on the results you get.  There are lots of proverbs about hesitation, but they don’t seem to extend to when to think and when to just act.  On the whole, I think most people have an implicit understanding of this type of decision making- it comes pre-packaged with the HBrain OS, but they haven’t really considered exactly what it is they’re doing on a consistent basis.  I’m just here to point it out so those who haven’t can read about it and be provoked into it.

The St. Petersburg Paradox

I’m in more of a mathematical mood right now, so I’m going to cover a piece of abstract mathematics.  I want to talk about the St. Petersburg Paradox.  While a famous problem, you can wikipedia it for more information if you like, here’s a short summary.  Imagine we have a game of flipping a coin.  Starting at $1, every time the coin lands heads, you double that amount.  When it eventually lands tails you win however much you have earned so far.  How much should it cost to play?

Now I very much enjoy this problem in a pure mathematical sense, but Daniel Bernoulli, the man who invented it, apparently took the mathematics of this problem rather too far.  Bernoulli noticed, as the more astute among you probably either deduced, or probably already knew, that the game’s expected value is in fact infinite.  This means that no matter what the cost to play, you should always accept.  However most common people wouldn’t pay even $50 to play this game.  Bernoulli deduced from mathematical bases a utility function of the game which would explain this behavior using a logarithmic idea of value.  He supposed that people’s valuation of money decreases as the amount of money they possess increases, or to use another term, he proposed a diminishing marginal utility function for money.  While this approach, I guess, works, the even more astute among you will have noticed that this doesn’t actually solve the paradox.  You can just have a game’s payoff function that uses the inverse of whatever utility function and still end up with an infinite payoff that nobody will take.  Other mathematicians have wrestled with this problem, and so far the conclusion, as far as I am aware, is that utility must be bounded in order to resolve this type of paradox.

Now, I am not a professional mathematician, but I believe that I have solved this paradox.  SImply put, all these mathematicians have been assuming that people have the same conception of reality that they are working with; a mathematical one.  These mathematicians have assumed that people think of money as a number.  That seems obvious, right?  Money is measured numerically.  Well, yes, but the fact that different people have different ideas of what money or other commodities are valued at means that it isn’t a number.  Numbers are objective, inherently.  Two people must categorically agree that a 7 is a 7, it always was, is, and will be 7, and that 7 = 7, which also equals 6 + 1 and an infinitude of other identities.  However we all know that two people might have a differing opinion of various exchanges, such as $3 for a mango, for example.  Someone who loves mangoes might buy at that price, someone who doesn’t, won’t.  So we can’t say that $3 = 1 mango in the same way that we can say that 7 = 7, even if all mangoes in the world were always bought and sold for that price.

The issue here is that these mathematicians, while brilliant direct deductive thinkers, think of the universe in a flatly rational way.  While this is probably the best single perspective through which to view the universe, it fails when dealing with people that lack a similar rational strictness.  Have you ever been beaten by someone at a game you were clearly better at, simply because the other player just refused to play “properly”?  This happens all the time in poker and numerous gambling or card games.  In games like chess this rarely happens because in a game of perfect information, “proper” play can be categorically proven to be superior during the game itself.  If it would result in a bad situation, then it isn’t proper play.  Where information is limited, “proper” play might land you in situations you couldn’t predict or prevent.  Anyway, a more textured view of the perception of the universe would allow for nonlinear and unconventional conceptual modes for perceiving the universe.  For example, perhaps a certain subsection of people conceive of money like power.  The actual number isn’t as relevant as the power it holds to create exchanges.  The numbers are negotiable based on the situation and on the value sets of the parties involved  So the St. Petersburg Paradox could be equally resolved by saying that power doesn’t scale in the same way that money does.  If you offered someone a utility function of power, it would mean nothing.  Power is not infinitely reducible: the ability to do something doesn’t blend seamlessly into the ability to do something else.  The atomic unit of power is much larger than the infinitely fine divisions between any given numbers.  Having ten very small amounts of additional power is also not the same thing as one very large new executive power.

People can link together abstractions and concepts in many, many different ways.  For example, some successful investors say that instead of looking at your money like it’s your fruit, look at it like your bag of seed with which to grow more seeds.  True, you’re going to have to sell some of those seeds to get what you need, but its purpose is to grow.  As you accumulate more and more, the amount you can draw off increases while still maintaining useful volume.  This gives a completely different outlook on money, and will generate different decision behavior than looking at money as something to be spent as it is earned.  This same principle can apply anywhere at all, because in order for something to exist in your perceptual map, you have to think about it.  You might think of movies like books that have been converted, like picture books, like snatches of real-life experience, like a sequence of scenes strung together like string being tied together, or like a strip that runs through its full length in only one direction the same way every time.  There are other possibilities of course, but that’s as many as I could think of while I was in the process of typing this post.  This is only looking at a small slice of the possibilities of conceptual remapping (analogues and analogies, specifically) but other forms would require a great deal more explanation.  I think you get the point though.

Back to mathematicians and the St. Petersburg Paradox.  The paradox only exists if you look at utility in the mathematical sense.  There exist models, such as the one that “common sense” seems to indicate, that don’t see a paradox.  These models instead see a game that has a sliding scale of value and beyond a certain point the value is zero (or negligible).  This gradual fading of value is responsible for the probable effect of many people deciding to play the game at differing values.  I don’t think even the most hardcore mathematician would play the game for $1 million a round, even though it will eventually pay for itself.  The utility solution fails to take into account the common sense evaluation of time and effort as factors in any given activity.  You could factor in such an evaluation, but you would probably then be missing something else, and so on until you have built up a complete map of the common sense and shared perceptual map of the most common conceptual space.  But then you have duplicated the entire structure you’re attempting to model and created a simulation instead of a simplification.

On simulations and conventional models, we currently use both.  Our simulations, however, tend to be based in the real world, and we refer to them as experiments.  This is how we collect evidence.  The problem with the natural universe is that there is such an unimaginable profusion of activity and information that we can’t pick out any particular aspect to study.  An experiment is controlling all those other extraneous factors, or removing/minimizing them from a confusing universe so we can focus on a single test.  Once we have our results from that test we can move on to test another part of reality.  Eventually we will have built up a complete picture of what’s going on.  Simulations are data overkill from which we can draw inductive conclusions because we don’t understand all the underlying mechanics.  Models are streamlined flows, as simple and spare as possible, which we can use to draw deductive conclusions.  For example, the equation for displacement for a falling object [dp = v0*t + (1/2)a^2*t] is a simplified model, subtracting all other factors than the one being considered, allowing us to deductively conclude the displacement for any values of v0, t, and a.  Mathematical conclusions are a sequence of deductive operations, both to make mathematical proofs and to solve/apply any given instance of an equation/expression/situation/etc.

Our minds operate on the most basic level using models primarily, and simulations second.  This is because most of the time, a model is close enough.  You don’t need to include every factor in order to get an answer at sufficient precision.  You don’t have to factor in the time, the temperature, or the quantum wobble of each atom in a baseball to figure out where it’s going to land.  If you wanted a perfect answer you could simulate it, but you can get it to an extremely high level of precision by simply ignoring all those marginal factors.  They are not worth computing.  Now we are beginning to factor in the distinction I’ve brought up before between algorithms and heuristics.  Models are often heuristics, and simulations are often algorithms.  Models can include algorithms and simulations can include heuristics, but on the whole a simulation (given correct laws and good starting conditions) will algorithmically compute exactly what is going to happen.  A model, on the other hand, is a much more efficient process that throws away data in order to make calculation simpler.  Usually a lot simpler.

Now I am willing to bet that some readers will be confused.  I just said that simulations need the right laws and starting conditions- isn’t that the same thing as a deductive process needing the right logical framework and initial premises?  Well, yes.  That’s because a logical construct is a simulation.  However, it is a simulation constructed using information already stripped of extraneous information by creating a model of it.  The line between model and simulation is not black and white- they are simply approximate labels for the extremes of a spectrum, with conflicting ideals.  The perfect model is one law that determines everything.  The perfect simulation is a colossal, gigantically massive data stream that represents everything, down to the last spin on the last electron.  This is also where we get the fundamental distinction between philosophers: the conflict of rationalism versus empiricism.  The rationalists believe the model to be the “one true philosophical medium” and the empiricists believe it’s better to use simulations.  The tricky part is that in order to construct a simulation, you have to have models to run each of its laws and each of its elements.  In order to have a model, you have to have a simulation to draw patterns from.  So we have an infinite recursion where rationalists and empiricists are chasing one another’s coattails for all eternity.  Fortunately, most people who have thought about this much have come to more or less the same conclusion, and figured out that rationalism and empiricism go hand it hand quite nicely.  However there is still a preference for choosing to understand the world through one mode or the other.

How does all this apply to the original issue of the St. Petersburg Paradox?  So we have mathematicians who are definitely rationalists- I imagine there aren’t many professional mathematicians who are empiricists.  And these mathematicians construct a model that represents a certain behavioral set.  Their problem, however, is that reality doesn’t actually support the conclusion they are saying is the most rational.  So they change the model, as they should, to better reflect reality.  All well and good.  Their problem, though, is that they are actually doing their job backwards in one concealed respect.  Implicit in their model is the idea that it is the case in the simulation they are describing that the population they are describing has the same conceptual map that the people who created the model did.  I am aware that I could have simply said we have some ivory tower mathematicians who are out of touch with reality, but I wanted to cover in-depth what the disconnect with reality is.  They are correcting their model by making it better reflect empirical reality in one respect, but in so doing they are simultaneously doing the same in reverse by assuming things from their meta-models onto reality.  We have rationalism and empiricism, simulations and models, inductive and deductive thinking, all chasing their dance partner around.  But the most vital thought is that the process must only go one way.  You must always push forward by correcting both to better fit the other in reality, rather than working backwards and assuming things onto reality which are not the case.  If you do this, and then entrench your position with a rationale, you are screwing up your meta-model of reality.  And, like a monkey with its hand caught in a banana trap, the tighter you squeeze your fist the more surely you get stuck.  For every ratchet backwards on the progress ladder, you get more and more firmly stuck in place, and it even gets harder to continue to go backwards.  The wheel spins one way, it grinds to a halt in the other.

The Fundamentals of Reason

I realize that I talk about reason and rationality a great deal, but I haven’t done a great deal to explain exactly what I mean by those words.  In fact, through a great part of history it was perfectly acceptable to treat divine inspiration or the product of a drug-induced hallucination as a basis for decision-making.  However that is clearly not rational by today’s standards.  I want to try and stay away from the philosophy of science, though, since that sort of discussion will not have meaning for too many people.  What I want to get across is that we are all fundamentally rational beings because rationality is a prerequisite of survival.  If we did fundamentally insane things on a regular basis then our species would be long extinct to make room for those that react to reality instead of a fantasy world.

Everyone, even the craziest of the crazies, is fundamentally rational.  They know how rationality works, even if it hasn’t been formalized for them.  They know how to apply it to make the right decisions and to sort truth from falsehood.  The trouble comes because rationality is so flexible.  As a meta-rational strategy, it may be wise to ignore rationality.  It may be proper to do any conceivable action in the right circumstances.  If you live in a society where those who don’t jump up and down and make monkey sounds when the man in the absurdly tall green feathered hat says “mookly!” are killed, then you damn well better jump and make monkey sounds.  If you live in a society where your interests are served by neglecting strict basic rationality in favor of a unified community perspective, even if that perspective is clearly ridiculous, it may be a reasonable choice.  Rationality, for those who have experienced it in formal form, is a very seductive thing because it lets you know things.  Truly know, not just “think” or “suppose” but actually know, and prove to a specific and known degree of uncertainty and ambiguity.  The first step is to establish that all propositions may be false given certain future evidence.  If we discovered a rock that fell up, that’s a vital piece of information.  It doesn’t actually prove that gravity is false though, as the stereotypical example says.  Because clearly there’s some value in the model of gravity because it’s been right so often in the past.  If it needs to be extended to cover a more general field of circumstances, so much the better.  This is how knowledge is advanced.  Once you acknowledge that you can never be absolutely sure (and I mean in the sense of absolutes) of anything, there is a ceiling on the strength of propositions.  This ceiling is, put succinctly, “To the extent that it is possible to know anything, I know that ______”  Now, a lot of postmodernists take this to mean that nothing means anything.  Ridiculous!  What it means is that if you observe something, you don’t get to say “that didn’t just happen because I know X.”  Conversely, if you fail to observe something, you can’t say that “I know it is so anyway because X.”  This one is trickier because it may actually be valid in certain circumstances because you can put a weaker proposition in the position of being negatively tested against.

OK this is getting a little confusing.  I shall rephrase.  If a devout Christian fundamentalist who believes that the Bible is literally true, word for word, was presented with a real-life situation which clearly contradicted the Bible, and continued to believe in the Bible, that’s a problem.  The fundy is assuming that the Bible is true in absolute terms.  The contents of the Bible are so true that even reality cannot touch it.  This is, of course, living in a fantasy world.  However this is a common example of someone attributing far too much strength to a proposition- more confidence in a specific statement than you can possibly have while still keeping an objective view of the world.  For the fundy faced with a contradiction, they have basically two alternatives.  Firstly, they might conclude that the Bible isn’t literally true and that reality is, well, real.  Or, they can come up with an explanation of some kind that will explain why the contradiction can exist, explain how it isn’t really a contradiction after all, or shatter their thinking faculty by believing that contradictions are admissible in reality.  There is a fourth option: ignore the problem.  While there are countless problems that are given this treatment at any given time, the invasive nature of religion invariably fills the victim’s life and worldview until they are forced to take one of the aforementioned options.  Modern religions dislike dabblers- they prefer converts, and vector mechanics are selected for accordingly.

The second pillar of rationality is deduction.  The ability to conclude things.  Now, some would say that premises are more important than deductive ability, and while they would probably be right.  It is possible to be a hardcore rationalist operating from very bad premises, arriving at awe-inspiringly terrible conclusions with great certitude.  However, your premises are only subject to rational analysis once you have established the ability to measure them.  Which requires deductive, abstractive, and meta-analytical faculties.  So I place deduction higher.  Anyway, most people understand how this works.  Socrates is a man.  All men are mortal.  Therefore, Socrates is mortal.  Actually this is rather a more complex statement than necessary to prove deductive faculty.  7 = 7, and therefore 7 = 7 will do nicely.  The basic laws are available on Wikipedia, but the structure you use isn’t as important as the ability to follow one.  True, single-order binary logics using only true and false statements have very strict and well-understood laws for operating and maintaining truth values.  But what if you want a system with three states, or n states, or a paradigm specifically designed to deal with ethical choices?  The ability to understand, follow, manipulate, formulate, and eventually innovate in thought forms is important.

Thirdly, your premises.  This is where a lot of people screw up.  If you start from bad premises, there is nothing you can do to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, even if it is factually true.  In fact, it’s worse if you arrive at a conclusion that is correct through flawed reasoning because you will then apply that reasoning elsewhere with undeserved confidence.  This is how we get Creationists on TV talking about how the banana is perfectly shaped for the human hand, therefore there must be a God who designed both the banana and the human hand.  They are operating from some extremely bad premises, but actually, if you admit their premises for the sake of argument you arrive at a relatively strong hypothetical conclusion.  This type of thing happens a lot for religion.  It’s like a compression algorithm in the religion virus’ DNA that also increases its rate of spreading.  It reduces the amount of information that must be transferred (only the premises, not the whole structure), it makes it easier to bypass the natural pseudo-rational approximant functions naturally embedded in the brain, and also enables the subversion of those very faculties once the premises are accepted.  Religion is itself evolved to be an amazingly effective virus for transmission between minds.  It’s what makes discussion about it so fascinating; I’m always finding new things that the religion virus has capitalized upon and been selected for.  You see the same type of thing in a lot of famous books and movies- it appeals to a wide diversity of people and has been selected for among a large population.  The “classics” then provide the seeds upon which new diversity is created.  Of course, in this case the metric by which we measure the species’ utility is entirely subjective and changes with the times so it’s less of a purist evolutionary system, but still an interesting thought.  Also, it’s important to point out that each “species” has essentially one organism: the contents of the book.  In olden days this wasn’t so- every bard and performer had their own version which they performed for specific results.  This is probably why a lot of the very old tales, including fairy tales, have an almost mystical amount of power in them.  They have been naturally selected for in a much more proper fashion with more than a single set of genes in the pool.  Modern books are all carbon-copies of one another because we’re so precise in our exchange of their information contents.  Anyway, now that I’m thoroughly off topic from the basis of rationality, it’s time to return.  If you start from good premises, and use proper rational tools, then you must arrive at a valid solution.  Now it’s important to note that while at one point in time given a certain set of information, a set of premises may be proper and produce the right results.  However, later in time, you may encounter a result which contradicts your original construction.  This is OK, it just means that your premises weren’t perfect, they only covered certain cases.  In reality, it’s more or less impossible to create a model to cover all cases without creating a model as complex as reality itself, thus defeating the point of using a model in the first place.  This is the difference between a rational model and a pure simulation.  A pure simulation would duplicate exactly the information content of the subject matter being considered, and is not necessarily a tool or vessel of intelligence.  If it were, we could say the universe as a whole is a vast intelligent being because it has so many atoms that all can be represented as information patterns performing constant exchanges that we are contained within and thus may never understand.  The second we “understood” the picture, our minds contain a new piece of information which we haven’t accounted for, and so on forever in infinite recursion.

Anyway, I started this post off in fairly short and focused form, but now my mind is all over the place.  It’s a pleasant way to be, but it isn’t conducive to great writing in a linear mode like a text stream.  I hope I’ve given you some food for thought to chew on, and of course the basis for the tools to do it with.

The Fallacy of Composition

The fallacy of composition is an especially effective and insidious mental tic that affects many decisions made in society.  To go over the basic nature of the fallacy quickly, it means to ascribe properties to a group as a logical result of the composition of that group.  When described that way, it seems perfectly logical.  However we arrive at such propositions as “I shall get all the strongest men in my army, and they will form my strongest unit.” (example originally used by Madsen Pirie in How to Win Every Argument)  Now in a sense this is true.  If you are looking to make a military unit that is adept at moving large amounts of freight.  However military units aren’t strong in the same sense that men are strong, and this misapplication of semantic significance leads to the fallacy.  If you wanted a strong military unit you need things like discipline, competence, efficiency, morale, ability to survive in tough conditions, and so on.  If you were to convert the desired properties appropriately, such as specifying that you want to select men for their ability to work together, keep morale up, survive, or whatever else you’re looking for, and those skills are commutative, then you might be getting somewhere.  As I said earlier, if you got 100 men who are adept at lifting things, it is the case that the group of 100 men will be adept at lifting things because every member within it is, and direct action is commutative.  For example, if you have 100 people playing ping-pong, it is correct to say the group of 100 are all in the act of playing ping pong.  However, I didn’t specify if they were playing each other, other people, or if there are only 100 people playing ping pong (they could be 100 among many more).

This seems like an obvious fallacy, used as above.  How could anyone fail to notice that?  Well this same logic, or illogic, is used in countless places in modern public discourse.  For example, whenever anyone argues that it is moral for the government to give money to group X, they are probably utilizing it.  For example, charity.  There is a soup kitchen that feeds homeless people and needs money.  Or some other program to help the homeless, the needy, the hungry in foreign countries, etc. etc.  They probably say or otherwise imply something along the lines of “it’s a kind act to give your time or money to help other people, therefore it’s moral for us to help them.”  Consider the actual significance of the statement: because it’s moral for an individual to give money to charity, it’s moral for society.  Now, while that might (arguably) be a proper application of individual-group semantic conversion, consider that the “society” as a semantic identity is not a decision-maker.  “Society” cannot actually do anything because it is just a vague/y specified conglomerate of individuals.  Things can happen to a society, in the same way that I as an agent can drop a ball or eat a sandwich.  But the sandwich cannot act in such a way to determine whether or not I eat it.  In order for “society” to do anything, there must be some agent controlling that group- implying the existence of a government or controlling body.  So what you’re really asking is whether it’s moral for the government to give money to charity.

This is a sticky issue for many people, but consider where the government gets its money from.  Taxes are involuntary.  If taxes were optional, nobody would pay them.  If you presented people with the option of A) Taxes, get complete government services, or B) No taxes, no government services, a great many would choose to live independently.  This is unacceptable for governments because it actually puts competitive pressure on them.  They actually have to offer value to get people to stay with them, they have to somehow convince recalcitrant customers that their product will help them.  Every company would really rather have a guaranteed income backed by threats of persecution.  Now, among the people who gave their money voluntarily, knowing the mechanism through which it will be filtered before eventually being spent,  I have absolutely no issue with that money being spent on anything at all.  I can have an issue with things they might do with it, of course.  If they use that money to buy tanks and attack people, we’re going to have a big problem.  But I don’t have an issue with the basic operation of such an entity.  However, government taxes are basically bold-faced theft.  Worse, they’ll try to convince you they’re doing it for your own good.  If it really was for my own good, then you wouldn’t have any issue with me choosing or not choosing your service.  If it’s really going to help me, I would choose it anyway, wouldn’t I?  Even the Mafia at least has the good decency to be honest with you.  They want your money, and they’ll beat you up if you don’t give it to them.  The greatest subtlety of the mob is calling it “protection money.”  The government actually believes it is protection money- it’s called National Security and Homeland Defense.  I’ll be totally honest with you, I really don’t see any significant threat that isn’t actually created by the government itself.

While it is true that there are terrorists, who may or may not hate America, it is certainly true that they are ascribing specific characteristics to Americans that are based on actions taken by the US government.  By the same token, many Americans are ascribing characteristics to Muslims or Middle Easterners based on the actions of a few extremists.  While some would call this simple generalization and stop there, I think it’s more detailed than that.  The thought process is a back-and-forth interplay between the individuals in the group and the conception of the group itself, a sort of repeat fallacy of composition, over and over again, getting worse and worse each time on both sides.  Like telephone played with abstract sketches in a kindergarten art class.

I’m getting a little off topic, and just found another instance of the fallacy of composition somewhere in the tangent sea.  Anyway, the government is not subject to the same type of moral analysis as an individual.  Neither are corporations.  They are groups, not individuals.  Moreover, moral laws as applied to individuals will apply to each individual in that group.  Moral laws for groups will apply to the entire group.  So, the government, as any group, would be virtuous in giving to charity if the money belonged to it in the first place.  Using charity as a justification for theft is just ridiculous.  However that’s exactly what the “generous” politicians are asking you to do.  Let’s say they convince some people that it’s a good thing for people, and therefore the government, to give to charity.  Fine.  Then why isn’t the politician, and why aren’t the individuals so convinced, going and donating money to charity instead of voting to force others to do so against their will?  And why isn’t the politician simply asking people to donate to a particular charity, as opposed to asking for taxes to be spent in that fashion?

Personal Dynamism

People change.  In fact, people must change.  A lack of change, a lack of improvement, constitutes a failure to meet a basic human need for novelty and variety.  At the same time, however, we are also pre-wired to want security.  Change is risk, plain and simple.  As a result, there is significant opportunity for confusion in the change/security dichotomy.  Conflicting drives are a very effective way for genes to regulate behavior.  Basically genes are applying fuzzy logic motivational rules to control the motivations that follow.  If the current behavior results in state X, such as hunger, then increase drive Y to bring state X back to normal operating parameters.  The same applies for tilting too far in the opposite direction.  If you eat too much, you won’t be hungry for a while.  And if you ate way too much, maybe the thought of food makes you nauseous.  It’s a very effective and direct feedback mechanism that genetic programming controls, but which enables our brains to react to situations in real time, as opposed to genetic time.  Anyway, I’m getting into the more general field of the mind/gene barrier.

Anyway, change is the source of intelligence’s power.  Intelligence creates the ability to understand the current methods or situation, analyze it for inconsistencies, errors, risks, and opportunities for improvement.  Intelligence makes possible the formulation of alternate methods or solutions, selecting the one that will work best (possibly through analogy experiments) and the adoption of the changes to create an improved model.  All well and good.  However, the model that is in place is *known* to work by the intelligent agent.  As a result, intelligence overly focused on security/risk avoidance instead of positive progress will resist the plan being changed.  Now, I would like to point out that intelligence can refer recursively as much as is practical, so there can be any number of meta-plans acting on the plan selection process.  So it might be a meta-plan to weight the intelligence process more towards risk aversion than potential gain.  In and of itself there is nothing wrong with this strategy- there are a great many situations where exactly such caution is called for.  But here’s the rub.  Proactive risk aversion, or the changing of the current model with intent to preserve the security of the current model, is clearly self-contradictory to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds.  I should rephrase that.  Proactive risk aversion is positive action in order to preserve the status quo.  If you change something, there is always the possibility that it might not work, this is certainly true.  However, if you take proactive action and change something, you have just taken the same risk that you were trying to avoid.  So neurotic risk-aversion is actually a psychologically addictive feedback loop.

I’m aware that’s something of a jump.  I’ll go from the top once again.  There are two base mentalities regarding dynamism.  The first is that change is a good thing because if it doesn’t work, you go back to what does work, and you haven’t lost anything.  This is a common mentality among the educated, literati, scientists, students, and the young.  The reason should be clear: these are people who have studied human systems, or who have little experience with them, or perhaps even both.  Despite the fact that this is quite a healthy world view, they tend to hold their own sets of contradictory beliefs.  For example, most of this mental demographic has a fairly bleak outlook on the world in general, but that people are generally good.  The world is in bad shape, X, Y, and Z need to be changed now, the system isn’t working, etc, etc., yet the rationale behind why it isn’t working tends to center around the effects on the people, on social injustice, and so on.  This world view does lend itself to the change-dynamism model, but it’s something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem to figure out which came first.  But then, in social development, chicken-and-egg problems, contradictory beliefs, endless recursion, loops, etc. are all terminated by the limit of the brain’s hardware, or social restraints on modes, methods, or avenues of thought.  Basically, the mind automatically garbage collects and is built using simulation and virtualization to be software-crash-proof.  Also note the inherent implied optimism of “we can fix this” present but unstated.  Challenge such a person with the assertion that the problem is simply intractable or impossible, and they will become agitated at the very least.

Anyway, the other common (American) model, is more often associated with conservatives.  The security-centric model believes that it is better not to change anything because the system as it is works pretty well, all told.  Risk aversion mindsets imply that the world is a good place in general, although there may be an endless host of exceptions or reasons why it might not be (constructive/reductive distinction).  In fact, in order to justify such a model there must be risks to avoid, which necessitates the existence of at least one perceived threat or danger.  The danger is irrelevant, and even whether or not it exists is irrelevant.  They’ll buy into it anyway because its unifying and preserving benefits outweigh the moral imprecaution against lying.  To lie in service of another is a virtue, they say.  To be villified for the sake of your country is the epitome of sainthood.  I’m not directly flaming Bush here (at least not just him alone), but I tell you what, I have truly had enough of this ridiculousness.  Can we as a country just grow the hell up?

Both these outlooks are actually neutral about human nature, which is significant.  It’s possible to be change-centric yet have a negative view of human nature.  This produces something akin to the classical modern Democrat who believes that government is necessary to save people from themselves, but that they deserve to be helped anyway because they’re human.  Conversely, they might also believe that humans are inherently good and get their justification for why they should be helped axiomatically.  Security-centric models might derive their “it works fine” attitude axiomatically from a belief in good human nature.  Or, they might believe that human nature is inherently bad, and that therefore they can’t be given power, each person should control their own lives, etc. etc.  Note the fascinating distributed blend of commonly held American values, such as freedom and equality.  So now we arrive back at the original point.  In a security-centric mindset, proactive steps are self-defeating.  The only way to truly satisfy that mindset is to do nothing, which we resist.  The illusion that there exists an avenue with which you can preserve modern culture/values/life/whatever is just blatantly self-contradictory.  You can only do nothing, and things will stay the same.  Now, if you want to go “back” to the good ol’ values, that’s a whole nother can of worms, but the two concept spaces are intertwined quite thoroughly.  Regression and risk-aversion go together, although a disciplined and rational strategy of risk aversion will simply hold the current model in stasis.  Proactive attempts at status quo maintenance, if sufficiently forceful, will produce regression.  You can’t change the system in an attempt to keep it the same unless you’re delusional and ignoring reality and your own thoughts.

Back to the topic at hand.  People need to change personally, and this trend is what causes society to change on a grand scale.  The problem is that many people actually put the societal change ahead of their own personal change.  Yet another occurrence of post hoc ergo propter hoc causing cart-before-the-horse or cargo-cult thinking.  I used to put links for these things into my posts, but nowadays I figure if people don’t know they can just google it.  I would recommend googling cargo cults if you haven’t heard of them.  Those who actually listen to popular psychologists’ analysis of the times in search of meaning for their own lives- a significant number if their TV numbers can be trusted, are looking to be given something which cannot be given.  Consider primitive man.  We had tribes, the men hunted mammoths or whatever, and the women made baskets and took care of the children.  I would be the first to say it was primitive, quality of life sucked hardcore, and generally it wasn’t a good situation.  However, the fact that everyone experienced challenges produced a personal strength and ability to survive that we just can’t match now.  If one of us was to go back to those days we would just commit suicide because it would be just too much to bear.  What, we have to find food?  No toilets?  No medicine?  I can die from flu, dysentery, cholera, oh my god, there’s no personal hygiene.  No houses, no beds, absolutely no TV’s or computers, no entertainment at all except campfire stories and chatting with the few people in your tribe, any of which might die on any given day.  Not much changed back then, but each individual certainly did.  Of course, they probably didn’t live long enough to get into a serious rut, but the point still holds.  They went from child to adolescent to adult to dead under continuous pressure the entire time.

Now we have more time, entertainment, hygiene, medicine, comfort, even luxury.  But we don’t enjoy it as much because we’re followers.  There is no trial by fire to become an adult.  We can just coast through life being passive.  It’s a lot easier.  It’s safer, it’s at times enjoyable.  But at the end of the day you haven’t done anything worthwhile.  I have a test for you.  Could you physically make yourself get onto a crowded bus, and then just scream?  In the middle of a big crowd, could you actually make yourself yell, loudly?  I’m not saying that’s what you have to do- that’s a rather pointless action.  Hey, if you enjoy it, go right ahead.  My broader point is that so many people don’t do what they want to for the same reason that they cannot make themselves scream in that crowded place.  Even more generally, we as human beings try to be consistent in our behavior.  We try to act the way others expect us to act based on how we’ve behaved in the past.  Even if we want to do something different.  Personal dynamism, brutally murdered by modern education and societal pressures. R.I.P.

It’s not totally dead, though.  There are a few bedraggled communities still keeping it afloat.  Just like the few basement scientists in the Dark Ages, keeping that candle alight.  I have to bump all the venusian artists out there, we’re one of the biggest.  The Objectivists who have extended on Ayn Rand’s work instead of taking it as gospel, the proud geeks, and the few Singularitarians who have not succumbed to groupthink.  I have no doubt there are numerous authors and scientists and philosophers and individuals not affiliated with any of these groups who are doing the same on their own.  I imagine the movie Fight Club has probably reached quite a few of them, although hopefully nobody goes from dynamic to apocalyptic.  Good on you, all of you.  The world needs you.

Common Sense Ethics

A significant aspect of the study of ethics is that ethical experimentation is an entirely mental and rational activity.  No laboratory is required, simply a rigorous and serious application of thought.  Why then, I am inclined to ask, do so few people consider ethics at all in their daily lives?  Ethics is essentially an attempt to answer the basic question: “What should I do?”  I don’t mean should in the general sense, but in the sense that the speaker is asking what good truly is.  A vanishingly small fraction of the population takes any time at all to analyze their ethical framework or meta-ethical processes, which is a shame because it’s a faculty that is available to you at all times.  You would think that some people would consider it, if for no other purpose than that they’re bored and want something to think about or discuss.  Instead, most people simply absorb the ethics that are heaped upon them in the form of societal common sense, and run into the sign “stop thinking here” and obediently and immediately cease extending the field.

Common sense makes a great starting point for ethical discussion.  For example, there is the stereotypical children’s ethical mandate of not stealing, learned at a very early age and forcibly conditioned into each and every one of us.  However, it is the role of moral philosophers to question every last scrap of ethical knowledge we have, and to generalize to create rules that apply to reality in as broad a way as possible.  In the case of stealing, it turns out that it’s fairly easy to prove it’s immoral.  Let’s assume theft is moral.  So, by stealing something, I am claiming the rights to property, while at the same time denying the right of someone else to that same property.  Contradictory, and infeasible, so theft is immoral.  Even though this proof is so simple, nobody really thinks of morality in these terms.  Ask someone why theft is bad and they’ll be confused, maybe spluttering back “because it is” or some similar platitude, or maybe regurgitating some quote they heard that sounds like a plausible explanation.

The truth is that a great deal of our common sense ethics is flawed.  Now, most people know this.  In fact, a great part of our education is growing out of our common sense ethical paradigm.  Unfortunately, most modern and postmodern thinkers look at the flaws in common sense ethics and conclude that there can be no ethics, and that everything is relative.  And because common sense ethics, unextended, creates a fertile soil for extreme relativism, most students are fully prepared to accept these ideas because it rings true for them.  We can’t judge another society because we are simply using one cultural standard to judge another, yada yada yada.  In a way this is true, and in a way it isn’t.  This elaborate construct of confusion is presented as the postmodern crux used to conclude that meaning is relative, nothing means anything, ethics are all gray and confusing, we should just live out our lives, yet at the same time you’re special adding a second layer of confusion and there are still more on top of that.  It’s a morass.  Anyway, I am here to say that ethics do make sense.  The world is not inherently a confusing and shades-of-grey place.  True, there are lots of situations where what you should do is difficult to decide.  On the one hand is ethics, and on the other is raw utility which does in fact have ethical significance (more on this later).  Maybe you have to choose which of a number of equally deserving groups should receive your help.  These are all tough choices, but they’re not ethically rigorous choices.  You are not ethically constrained in all situations of your life because in such situations you can usually use a different decision metric to arrive at a more representative conclusion.  For example, when deciding the best way to build a house, an architect isn’t asking what is the most ethical way to make the building not collapse- he’s dealing in structural analysis, and stress, loads, tension, compression, etc. etc.  He’s not ethically constrained in how he should build the house, and is free to use another, more useful, model.

One of the most serious misapplications of ethics is the distortion of what value or utility actually is.  Firstly, utility is simply a mental construct used to formalize the exchange of value.  The concept of utility does not exist in reality, therefore utilitarianism will always default to the subjective perception of the decider.  There is no objective, universal analysis of what utility is.  The idea that there is will truly mess up any model that uses a utility metric (or, all standard-type decision making models).  Secondly, utility is always convertible.  You can convert X utility into anything.  There are a number of common sense ethical fallacies, such as that human life is somehow worth a “different sort of stuff” than other ethical concerns.  True, human life is extraordinarily valuable, and pinning a utility value to it is probably one of the most difficult ethical problems, but it does have a price tag, because utility is subjective.  The idea that ‘human life’ and ‘other stuff’ are inherently unexchangeable contradicts what happens every day, when people kill one another for the sake of causes, or hit men killing people for money, or euthanasia.  To say that human life is infinitely valuable, and can only be meaningfully compared relative to other human life, produces an extremely convoluted ethical meta-model and decision making model.

Perhaps this analysis sounds a little cold.  OK, let’s have a thought experiment.  I present you with a button.  If you press this button, you will receive $1 billion in cash, immediately.  There is a warehouse through that door behind you stuffed with hundred dollar bills, and it’s all yours if you press this button.  The catch is, hoho, that there is a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance that someone will die if you press this button.  There is a 1 in 1 billion chance that you will have murdered someone to get filthy rich yourself.  Do you press the button?  Is it ethical to press the button?  If you could press it any number of times, how many times would you or should you press it?  Bear in mind that if you press it a billion times, your expected value is 1 person killed in exchange for $1.0 x 10^18 dollars.  That would be, just to print it out for you, $1,000,000,000,000,000,000.  A billion billion dollars, more money than exists in the world right now.  You would literally be able to buy the entire planet if you were so inclined.  Any thoughts?

Here is my analysis of this problem.  You may press that button as many times as you like, up to an infinite number of times.  Now, when dealing with extreme limits, weird things happen, so don’t tell me that I would kill an infinite number of people by doing that- we’re dealing with practical reality.  For example, when you drive to work, what is the risk you are running of killing someone in return for getting to work for one day?  And you are actually having to work for your day’s pay, so your value from arriving is thereby reduced.  If you could just press this button and earn your day’s pay, you have just drastically cut down your fatality footprint on the world.  As the days you drive to and from work approaches infinity, how many people have you killed versus using the button?  Yet we have no moral problem with putting our fellow man at risk when we can just ignore the risk because it isn’t in our interest to cause harm.  Because it is assumed that you don’t want to get into an accident and that you’re trying to avoid one, we ignore the risk of causing one for practical, common sense ethical issues.  Therefore, driving a car is considered perfectly moral, while pressing the button causes a little anxiety.  Now, if you still don’t accept the button concept, let’s play with the numbers.  What if it was a trillion dollars and a 1 in a trillion chance of killing someone?  What if the odds were astronomically small, like 1 in 10^20?  What about 1 in 10^100?  If you believe that human life has an infinite value relative to earthly things’ finite value, you may not press the button as long as the risk of killing someone is nonzero.  So you are condemned to a bubble-life where you never see, talk to, or touch anyone, ever since you might give them a disease.  You will never operate machinery or pick up things you might drop on them, you may never do anything on the grounds that there is some impossibly small chance that you may cause measurable harm to another person.  If you wanted to really push the boat out here, we might say that according to quantum mechanics, you have no guarantee that the statue of liberty’s atoms won’t vibrate in just such a way as to cause her to take a walk down Broadway.  I don’t even want to think about how ridiculously, insanely unlikely that is.  However, that means that morally, you have no right to exist, because there is always some freakishly obscene chance that your atoms will all decide to explode, or that pencil you’re holding will morph into a knife and fly across the room, etc. etc.  And as long as the probability is nonzero, you can’t risk it.  Let’s not even get into the issue of the relative value of life.  Do apes count?  Monkeys?  Cats?  Clams?  Microbes (on whom you commit genocide on a daily basis)?  Why are you assigning such insane values to human life, other than the fact that you want to neurotically control other humans to protect yourself?  Are you that terrified of someone deciding to kill you?

Moral codes are the most frequently used tool to control people’s behavior, and they’re especially good for doing so on a mass scale.   Religion is basically a systematic attempt to control the morality of a large group of people.  In order to best hold on to power, a religion is best served by shutting down the rational capacity of its believers, and it has the perfect vector to do so to those already ensnared.  I’m not going to get into this too much right now, but a moral code that shuns rationality is basically codified obedience to authority, and if you’re already caught by that authority, they have the power to make you reject all other authority, no matter what your religion’s leaders or followers may do.  The idea that all morality flows from faith is absurd if you think about it for two seconds, and that’s what makes religion so powerful.  By citing the sacred versus the profane- very deep voodoo parts of the human mind for exalting and villifying- you can come to any conclusions you like by direct association.  We have the power of hypochondriasis, and can become holy rollers, being possessed, speaking in tongues, we can produce whatever magical effects desired given the right motivation and stimulus, which then feeds the demon that produces those effects.  You can make people shun thinking at all, it’s so powerful.

The second major ethical issue I want to address is the idea of truth.  Now, people say things like “lying is bad.  Never lie.”  Well, if you think about it, why?  Why is telling somebody something that is not true an immoral action?  OK, first of all, by what standard is something true?  Statements in English will have many standards which will be necessary before they will be true.  They must be grammatically, syntactically, and semantically correct, they must refer to objective or subjective reality as appropriate, they must speak about something which exists, make a declarative statement which introduces new information or refers to definitions, and cannot be self-referential, circular, or contradictory.  We have just outlined the nature of propositional statements only.  What about questions, commands, or interjections?  I know I’m talking in a way similar to people who talk as if there is no real truth, but that’s not what I’m saying.  There is indeed a real truth, and we can know it, but to say that it is a moral imperative to share that truth does not follow from those premises, and one of the reasons it does not follow is that the methods by which we understand the world are themselves suspect.  I am saying that the idea that “Statement A will be either true or false” is a meaningless statement.  While the real world has truth values, language and the human experience is subjective and relativistic.  I can experience the world very directly and assume it’s valid.  However, if I say a true statement to someone else, they have no way of knowing that my subjective reality is valid, just from my statement that it is so.  This refers back to the nature of consciousness.  I know that I’m conscious.  But I have no way of knowing that you are, or that anyone else is.  I assume so because I know I am, and you look and act in a way that is quite similar to me (relative to, say, a monkey, a tree, or a lump of quartz).  If there were some way to directly share consciousness, then we would be the same person with twice the mental hardware and be left in the same quandary relative to everyone else.

Back to truth.  Basically what I’m saying is that you cannot utter statements which can be objectively true because they are statements- they are a representation of reality which must necessarily occlude and distort information in order to fit into language.  By the same token, you must compress your understanding of reality by editing and distorting information in order to think about it, causing a subjective experience of reality because everyone will do so differently.  That’s all subjectivity means- it’s being encoded differently in each of us.  I realize I haven’t said this before.  Objectivity and subjectivity are not inherently inconvertible either.  Objective reality simply means that it refers identically to reality.  Now, the only way that’s possible is if it is reality, because otherwise it will be a reference or a copy.  Subjectivity is when you have a reference or a copy, and in our case it must necessarily be distorted and cropped in order to be useful.  The reason it’s subjective is because we all edit and crop differently.  In any given moment, we’re paying attention to different things, we’re learning different things, we have different models based on things we have experienced or learned, etc. etc.  If somehow we could all have lossless thought encoding, we would experience an objective reality (although still a reference) and could agree perfectly by citing endless amounts of evidence.  It still wouldn’t be the objective reality, but close enough that the difference is irrelevant.  The hardware required is unimaginable, but it may be possible.  Now, the fact that it’s possible to get “close enough” proves the point that speaking only the truth is not morally required.  You can refer to reality by using a statement which is not true.

I need to clarify here.  When I say that lying is not morally required, I am not saying that lying is morally acceptable.  Attempting to manipulate someone else’s mental model by supplying them with faulty information is just evil.  However if someone asks about an embarrassing part of your life, don’t feel bad about just lying about it.  You have done no wrong.  If you try to steal people’s money by claiming that if they give you $5 today you’ll give them $10 tomorrow and then disappear, or otherwise take advantage of people, you’re not evil because you’re a liar, you’re evil because you’re a manipulative thieving scammer.  Actions, objects, and so on, are all morally neutral.  Knives are neither good nor evil- they are merely an arrangement of atoms.  They just are.  Actions are merely sequences of motion- they just are.  Keep in mind though that words in language tend to combine objective meaning with connotation, secondary motivations, and other bits and pieces.  So when I say stealing is bad, the simple raw action of taking someone’s property is actually morally neutral.  However when we use the English word “to steal” we are saying a great deal more than just that.  We are saying things like 1) the thief has no right to the property in question, 2) the victim is innocent and unwitting, 3) the victim has full and morally legitimate property rights to the item in question, 4) the thief is greedy/lowlife, etc. etc.  Maybe I should have simply gone with the short and simple version instead of appearing to contradict myself by being complete.  Too late now.

Conservatives

Keeping the more progressive sections of the populations from running off into whatever fad madness strikes their fancy.  Without them, we would waste countless resources every year reacting to every whim or fashionable cause to grace the earth, and we would waste ourselves uselessly.  Of course, if you actually let them push their own policies they can range from pointlessly restrictive to outright draconian or criminal by today’s standards.  The design of most modern governments deliberately incorporates a slow-down mechanism.  For example, the American government’s House of Representatives can be subject to large and sweeping change with the times because each representative sits for two-year terms.  If public opinion sways massively enough, half the house could be toasted in one cycle.  On the other hand, the Senate features six-year terms, putting the brakes on any movement without sufficient staying power to stick around to replace senators.  To go even further, the Supreme Court is appointed for life by the President of the day, so justices can put the brakes on movements decades later using mindsets that are hideously out of date and out of touch.  Some might say that they counteract the impulsiveness of electoral politics because nobody has the power to remove them and can act impartially.  While these are all good points in the design of a governing body, and I believe that the American government was, in its day, the finest form of government that 1776’s brightest could create.  I am not going to go off on my usual tack of how these same design features could work for a non-coercive power such as a DRO, and indeed these types of traits are one of the main reasons to choose one DRO over another.  However, I am instead going to analyze the nature of government today in a more conventional fashion.  To say the least, times have changed.  The old system of government really is out of date.  The world is changing faster than the government can accommodate.  Technology is the greatest and most prevalent difference between the age of governments- there was a large string of revolutions around the time of the American revolution- and the modern world.

First, let’s talk about the effect of technology’s dramatic extension of our life spans.  Firstly, the minimum age for office in the United States varies but generally it’s about 30 or so, maybe a little older.  Convention often requires a few more years.  Google tells me the average lifespan in 1776 was 33 years.  Now, keep in mind that this factors in infant mortality, so children who live through the first year or two would probably live to be much older than 33.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that the average adult in average health around the time of the American revolution would live to be about 50 or 60.  if you could expect to live to 55 then that meant you had about 25 years in office before making way for the next generation.  While that’s a long time, it’s manageable.  The turnover is approximately the same length as one generation, about 20 years.  Today, however, the average lifespan in the US is known much more precisely to be 78.14 years.  Also, let’s not forget that the infant mortality rate has lowered dramatically in the last 300 years to just 6.3 per 1000 live births, so that number is much more reflective of the actual age of the population.  So now the possible political impact over time of any given person is increased from a scant 25 years to a full 50, if not more.  Especially in the case of Supreme Court justices, they can live to be even older than 78 and further extend their influence.  The median age in the US is now about 38, or 40 years behind the life expectancy.  I would like to note here that this effectively sets the political decision-makers back as much as two generations from the modes of the age, rather than less than one.  This gap is more significant if society is changing rapidly because being behind will produce behavior that seems irrational and ridiculous.  I’m not being unkind here, I’m simply stating that actions that seem reasonable to a mind which is perceptually based in a time that is sufficiently different will make poor decisions.

My basic point here is that while a small restraint on the whims of today are a good thing, yet too much restraint will produce a resistance to the needs of the modern world, a stubborn refusal to accept reality that will cause serious problems.  The important thing to realize about at least some of the old-fashioned, outdated generational phenomena is that the new phenomena exist for a reason.  At least, the ones that we care about.  Fads or the awesomeness of anything are insignificant and while there may be a reason it’s not a substantive one, it’s a subjective one.  What I’m talking about is stuff like the terror threat.  We don’t need to be afraid- the world is not a scary place.  Virtually all its people want to cooperate with us, not attack us.  The whole threat is just blown so far out of proportion it’s disgusting.  But we’re talking about a generation ago- the Cold War.  This generation is accustomed to having a massive threat hanging over them.  In fact, they probably don’t feel comfortable unless there’s an enemy out there which they can try to defend against or outmaneuver.  Now, if there actually is a massive and frightening enemy out there then that sort of mindset is quite useful.  But if you don’t, the security measures and the paranoid aggression and the “preemptive strikes” against enemies that couldn’t possibly harm you are just insane.  Yet these Cold War babies are the ones running our government, and the people voting them into power are generally about the same.  The young are generally credited with having more energy and are therefore more politically active.  Yet that is simply untrue.  The young adults who actually care are probably about the same proportion of the population as older age groups.  Yet they have a large amount of political pull for two reasons- 1) Their time is cheap.  They don’t have high-paying jobs that require constant attentiveness and leaves them worn out at the end of the day.  And 2) they are generally in line with the zeitgeist of the time because they were raised in it, recently.  The thinking intellectuals of the time tend to flow with the times, they enjoy progress immensely.  Conservatives, on the other hand, are averse to change and risk.  So progressive, liberal, etc. tends to get the young, the academics, and the intelligent.  Conservatives get the uneducated, the super-rich, and those who just don’t know any better.  Once again, I’m not bashing conservatives.  There are a lot of intelligent conservatives, but as a general voting population you have the very successful and intelligent who are very wealthy, and then the trailer park crowd, the rednecks, etc.  Part of the reason why the Democrat/Republican debate is so fervid is that it is by definition impossible to resolve.  This goes a long way towards explaining both parties’ successes.  Republicans tend to be economically and socially conservative, where Democrats are liberal.  Democrats want to give out services and taxes are a necessary evil to fulfill that goal.  Republicans want to get rid of taxes, and the abolishment of services is an unfortunate side effect.  There can be no compromise here in the same way that two sides of a tug-of-war can’t agree to disagree.  When one side wins, the other one must necessarily have lost.
(all numbers in above paragraph courtesy of the CIA World Factbook)

So while being modern is fantastic, it’s vital that we understand why we’re being modern and progressive.  We vet with rational choice which elements are improvements, and which are just madness.  In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do with this blog.  The biggest issue is that everything anyone does has secondary, tertiary, and other ripple effects that nobody can predict.  For far-reaching changes like the invention of a new product or new capacity in technology, or new discovery, the effects are rapid.  For slower phenomena like cultural drift and parenting artifacts, such as the behavioral effects of being raised with a single mother, the effects take longer to take effect, are more subtle, and more enduring.  Older people tend to be conservative because the environment they grew accustomed to, in their opinion anyway, worked well.  Even if they believe it was a nightmare, they still bought into it.  The old guard act as a fallback position.

Think of it like this.  When you’re designing a product you keep meticulous records of everything you try.  When you try something and it works a little bit, you’ve made progress.  You incorporate elements of the improvement into your future experiments.  But if the next experiment doesn’t work at all, you haven’t lost anything because you retain the information from the previous experiment which worked.  In fact, you have gained some critical data which you can use to further discriminate between functional and useless designs to try.  However, due to the term of cultural shifts, this same type of rational analysis doesn’t necessarily take place.  It is possible to go backwards as generations forget or are conditioned into behaviors that a previous generation improved upon already.  In fact, because at certain stages of psychological development we rebel against parental or authority figures, there is a certain subsection of the population that is actively resisting progress and striving to regress at any given time.  If the forces for progress falter substantially, there will be a serious loss of ground into ignorance and barbarism.

Now we arrive at the real issue.  Technology, only a product of the more enlightened sections of society, has the effect of amplifying the regressive parts as well.  The Internet has the effect of strengthening communications and sharing of information, which makes it easier for the regressors to organize and entrench their positions.  Groupthink is strongest among the regressive elements, since rational and intelligent individuals recognize and avoid groupthink communities, and the artificially elevated levels of certainty and social proof that go with it.  I think it’s important to point out right now that the regressive sections of society don’t think of themselves as regressive.  They believe themselves to be seeking the “good old times”- a return to good old American values of family and patriotism and freedom.  It’s the “good old” part that is mistaken.  Historical categorizations tend to be extremely positive, such as the noble savage description of the Indians, or the free-and-easy cowboy reputation of the wild west.  They are all wrong.  There has been progress in virtually every year since the Industrial Revolution, technologically, socially, morally, and in so many other ways as well.  The devaluing of nationalistic and family values is one of those advances.  They were necessary to group mankind together into cohesive tribal groups, but in a global community they are destructive forces which must be overcome.  The hard part of removing them completely is that a majority of the population believes there is a moral imperative behind these principles.  You cannot convince such people that they are incorrect because they will interpret any attempt as an immoral person’s attempt to corrupt them.  Interestingly, they tend not to recognize the same effect in others and believe religious conversion to be effective on its own merits.  They ignore the marketing, conditioning, and manipulative elements of the conversion process.  But I digress.  Anyway, moral imprecations produce circular logic.  That’s their purpose.  You cannot violate a moral imperative and remain a moral person.  Therefore, questioning the limits of morality is itself an immoral act.  I’m not saying it’s a logical conclusion, just that it’s the way moral imperatives work.  Particularly so for religious moral imperatives where there is a power base being challenged by questioning their commandments.

I need to find a way to wrap this up.  My basic point is that conservatives serve as a pacifying force for turbulent times, mitigating the effects of rapid cultural shifts.  However, at the same time and as a result of the same pro