Tab dump 16-11-09 (though really not so much a tab dump as three-four blog posts in one)

First off, Andrew Corsello's blistering and sublimely, viciously angry takedown of Ayn Rand. It is at least ten thousand characters too long, and not so much an article as a 26.000 character rant, but it is readable, funny, immensely satisfying and it makes a good point when it connects the dots between Randian uncritical thinking and the clusterfuck of the global economy. Highlights include this wonderfully obtuse letter to the editor from Alan Greenspan, literary critic and bigtime randroid, on the occasion of Atlas Shrugged being panned in a review.

To the editor:

"Atlas Shrugged" is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

Alan Greenspan

Corsello comments:

It's a remarkable letter for two reasons. The first, of course, is that Greenspan wrote it; a line can be drawn from that letter to the wholesale deregulation of the American economy, to the invention of hydra-headed derivatives and credit-default swaps, and finally to the collapse of the financial and housing markets.

I recently made an offhand remark about how Rand had a way of reaching nice, likeable, intelligen but maybe involuntarily celibate young men and turning them into horrible people. Morsello really captures this process. And the article ends, orgasmically, with this outburst:

Fuck you, Ayn Rand.

Fuck you for turning some of the most open and interesting people I ever met into utopian dickheads.

Fuck you for injecting them with a sneering sense of superiority, and with the tautological belief that anyone who didn't "get it" was a jealous know-nothing—which, ipso facto, only proved that superiority.

In the very last paragraph, you learn why the author is so angry. It's a nice payoff.
*
A fabulous interview with climatologist Stephen Schneider on climate skepticism. He also makes some really well-argued points along the way about both the injustice of the climate problem, and more importantly the entire scientific process itself. How it works, and why the climate skeptics are arguing in bad faith.

You talk about subjectivity, but isn’t science supposed to be objective?

No. Science is truthful, which doesn’t necessarily mean objective. How can science be objective about the future? How much data do we have for 2100? Try zero. We have data for 2009 and previous years. We take that data, analyze where we think it’s high quality, analyze where we’re not so sure of the quality, show how well the data explains multiple phenomena from the past, and ask how closely related those phenomena are to the future.


(...)

Once we build our climate models, we must always make a subjective judgment, because it is going to be a prediction outside the realm of direct verifiability. We have to be able to predict whether this is a potential catastrophe for humanity. We can’t just hang around and wait.

In your book, you suggest a kind of continuum: from objective data to subjective determinations based on the data, and then to value judgments.

Right. What to do about what we know--that’s a question of values. But it’s values informed by science. In 1973, I got a call from the Council on Foreign Relations wanting me to talk about policy. I told them that if we’re using the atmosphere as a free sewer to dump our tailpipe wastes, and it’s going to cause change that could harm agriculture, ecosystems, ice sheets, and sea level, then maybe a smart move would be to slow down the rate at which we pollute. That’s a value judgment, and I’ve been making them from the beginning. I’m a very risk-averse person and I worry much more about the planetary life support system than the bottom line of the coal industry.

How then do you defend against charges that you’re an activist?

I am an activist. I want the world to be a better place, and I define specifically what I mean by that: If one group, the rich, benefits from an activity like dumping their waste in the atmosphere and the other group, the poor, are hurt by it and don’t get much benefit, that’s an inequity. Therefore, in my value system, that’s a higher criteria for action than aggregate dollars. I don’t have aggregate dollars as my moral principle. I look at who’s responsible. But I never say that without admitting that those are my values. So, that’s activism.

What’s the difference between being a climate-change skeptic and a denier?

Every good scientist is a skeptic. In fact, I would argue that every good citizen is a skeptic. We have to learn to discern, and listen to the quality and logic of an argument.

Read the whole thing.

*

For the Norwegians:

Bergens Tidende har flere interessante artikler i dag om gatevold og unge frustrerte menn som er verdt å lese. Ikke minst fordi den tar opp spørsmålet om integrering og sosial kapital – for første gang på lenge ikke som et etnisk/kulturelt spørsmål, men som et sosialt spørsmål, som vi kan behandle, avgrense og møte med sosiale, politiske, økonomiske og pedagogiske virkemidler. Ikke som noe abstrakt, fremmed og fjernt. Denne serien med artikler er noe av det mest tankevekkende jeg har lest om norsk integrering på flere uker, og innvandring nevnes ikke med et ord (bortsett fra når det er snakk om innvandringsfiendtlige miljøer).

Collective action problems: a pox on the body politic which must be eradicated at any cost - or a big, fluffy, puppy-like animal? You decide!

At the end of the day, a short observation. Something I've been thinking about for years, but which keeps cropping up in conversation these days for some reason, so I feel like writing it down:

I think that the greatest single obstacle that I can think of to the advance of human civilisation is collective action problems in all their forms. The most basic form is, I think, the prisoner's dilemma, in which the solution obviously is honour among thieves - or rather, well-founded trust, the trick of the imagination on which our societies and economies are built, and the sense of collective responsibility which that trust creates. 

If the measurement of value is projected beyond the yardstick of the self into the society surrounding it as a whole, the collective action problems go away, or at the very least become organisational and not existential. This also avoids freeloading, the cause of collective action problems, commonly presented in the form of the Tragedy of the Commons.

In short, the reason we spend more money on weapons than anything else, the reason we can't raise taxes to the proper level across the globe, the reason we can't implement proper work management laws and human rights, the reason we need to put up with populist tabloid newspapers rather than substantial vehicles for public discussion is either:

a. The value system for the change does not yet exist on a large enough scale. (Not a problem e.g. with war - who doesn't oppose war?)
b. We can't organise a change on such a massive scale for reasons of coordination costs.
c. We can't change for fear of competitive oppositional advantage. "Somebody else is doing it, so we can't stop doing it!"

C is the reason that we...

- Have an army. If not, other countries will invade us with their armies which they have for fear that you will invade them. (I still think that standing armies represent the single greatest failure of the human imagination we have.)

- Can't fix the environment. Because if we start having carbon taxes and spending lots of tax money on green infrastructure, other countries will gain a purely temporary competitive advantage which they will later lose again when they are all drowned in the seas of armed refugees, mad with hunger, pouring out of the third world as their ecosystems collapse, a problem which we should maybe have thought about sooner.

- Can't have good labour laws in, say, Malaysia - because other countries might get Malaysian manufacturing jobs.

- Can't raise taxes in states struggling to create welfare societies. If they raise taxes, business will flee.

- Have to keep making bad tv and bad newspapers, or the other tv stations/newspapers will sell more. Because God knows we're not in the business to make good tv/newspapers - we're in the business of making money.

I think that the "solution" to a lot of these issues at the present time, since "...oh, you're such an idealist, Martin! [exasperated sigh, rolling of eyes] It will never happen, dreamer!" is the proliferation of welfare states. People who are hungry and uneducated are generally not capable of projecting value into things or other people, other than their own survival.* I read somewhere recently (I forget where) that the paradox of being poor is that you have less of a buffer, so every decision you make has to be right. But you are also lacking in the resources and personal security which help you make right decisions.  I think this is exactly right. The path towards the decline of collective action problems lies in welfare and education. 

Does any of this make sense? 

* However, the opposite can also be true. Some affluent people invest a lot of personal commitment to ideology which values selfishness. I remember sitting at my computer at University a year and a half ago, seeing the person at the desk in front of me reading Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. I was reading an article on child mortality rates in the third world (30.000/day of easily preventable causes) and felt like: 

a. I wanted to smack him in the back of the head for callousness. 

b. I couldn't leave my laptop there when I went to lunch. I just couldn't trust him.