Archive for May, 2022

Borders in the global world

May 27, 2022

National borders

First thing that has to be grasped. Fixed borders between countries seem to be a relatively recent development. In ‘olden days’ people would cross from one country, or duchy or whatever, to another as part of daily life, even when the law confined residence to a village. People on the border shifted around and generally ignored it. The borders where whatever could be held by the troops at the time – or when under challenge by other troops. The Roman and Chinese Empires did not have fixed borders as far as I can tell. Borders were fluid although often based on rough geographical features. Borders may be argued over, if they exist at all. In Hunter and Gatherer societies ‘borders’ are matters of respect, and occasionally of what you can defend – other people may wander into your territory all the time. Central sacred sites may be more important than the borders around. Lack of firm borders may not be a problem with the proper requests, or if you don’t meet each other. Borders may be marked by myths or pronounced geographical features. The land owns you, not vice versa.

In the modern world Borders can be so arbitrary they can even be lines on maps drawn on a latitude line, which is purely conceptual and does not correspond to any geographical, or mythical, features at all. These borders are not real other than in the sense that social conventions are real.

Even Islands like Australia do not have clear borders. We have had long term people movement and small trade between Australia, Indonesia, Papua Niugini and the Pacific Islands and this has not stopped, and will probably will not stop without local disruption. In the USA, large sectors of the economy seem to depend on fluid borders, and large parts of Mexico depend on income being sent home from the USA. Cutting that flow off completely may have unintended consequences for both countries.

Taking borders as real and fixed leads to problems, especially in the modern world which, whether we want it to be or not, is global. However, this does not mean that a country has no right to enforce its borders, just that this may be more complex and have more side effects than the people imposing those borders think.

Borders and Climate

Climate change is not local. It does not respect human borders. Our country’s pollution affects people as far away as India or Iceland. We are helping to cause temperatures to rise in Pakistan to 50 degrees C. (122 degrees F). Chinese decisions likewise affect us.

We need to not only work within our borders but across borders. If we make emissions worse, we make it worse for all, including ourselves. We are not safe from the emissions of the coal, gas and oil that we export when they are burnt in other countries – even if these emissions are not counted as being our emissions. Everything we do affects others and ourselves as we live on an interlinked Planet not just in a bordered country. What we do influences how others behave. If we set a bad example, then other people will excuse themselves as well, and that will affect us.

If governments do not understand this, then they have no hope of understanding climate change, or dealing with it.

Borders and Economy

We now live in a global economy. We probably have done so for a long time. However, it is now clear, that economic events in one country affect economic events in other countries. If Russia blocks exports of Ukrainian wheat, that affects the world. If banks in China collapse because of bad local loans, that affects the world. When financial companies in the US tried to defraud home loan owners in large enough quantities – that did affect the world. Money lost in one part of the world effects operations in other parts of the world. If companies go to where the labor is cheapest, and the pollution costs smallest, that affects everyone, and likely puts downward pressure on wages and environmental regulation in other places. If companies can find no tax zones that affects everyone, and lessens money for social spending. Economic crashes may not be confined within borders, especially when companies are not so confined. Inflation and depression are often cross-border events. Neither Biden nor Trump could keep inflation outside the borders of the USA.

Large corporations are commonly cross border institutions. They export something from one country and sell it in another. They make some parts in one country and use them in another. They may generally not be self-supporting in one country – they require many countries, and they ignore borders, except for the advantage that local regulation can give them. Exports and imports between countries can exist within the one company.

Companies have the wealth of small (and sometimes quite large) States, and push States around rather than vice versa. Corporations have the advantage of mobility, which States do not have. They can move from one place to another leaving destruction behind. Consequently, no country has complete control over its economy, and its economy depends on other economies. Economies do not respect borders. If you are going to understand and deal with economies you have to understand this.

Borders and the Military

Military threats also don’t respect borders. Never have. Civil wars are always destructive. It is now easy to smuggle incredibly destructive weapons into countries. The US is probably in as much, or more, danger from internal threats than from external threats. An Atom bomb set off by an internal terrorist is as physically dangerous as a bomb launched by a foreign power, and it is probably more psychologically dangerous. Putin’s Russia is facing a problem, not just because Ukraine is resisting far better than they expected, but also because the economy and resistance to the war is international, and does not respect the borders of the two warring countries. It is also forcing Russia to become dependent on China, and it seems unlikely the Chinese will be long term allies, or do not have some objective here that may not be in Russia’s interest. Ukraine used to be inside Russia’s borders, but it is not anymore. Powerful Russians seem to have thought Ukrainians thought of themselves as Russians, and as living within the Russian border, or within Russian influence, but it seems to have been wrong.

No country is immune to war because of its borders.

Borders and Fences

Borders are long and fragile. It is impossible to entirely fence off the USA from the rest of the world and stop people from crossing the fence, or to stop weather, ecology and climate from knocking the fence down. As plenty of other people have shown this is what has happened with Trump’s famous border wall/fence. It was easy to climb. It collapsed; blown over or swept away by rivers and floods. It stole private land. It was a waste of money and resources, and did not serve to protect the USA from climate problems, economic collapse, migration, or modern military challenges. At best it seems a distraction from the real problems…

Social Categories and Borders

It is generally assumed that social categories have firm borders, and people act as if this is correct, but it is often not correct. A few examples:

‘Racial’ categories, blend into each other. People breed with each other, sometimes by violence, but nevertheless they breed across cultural and racial groups People often seem to have ancestors from all over the world. People breed across borders and then inland from the borders, so the whole group is affected. It is unlikely that any country has ever been pure in ‘race’. Attempts to reinforce racial boundaries attack the reality of the mixtures.

Cultures borrow from each other, and separate from each other. They innovate and change – people are good at having new ideas. Attempts to reinforce cultural boundaries attack reality and creativity.

Class and caste borders are permeable – not only because we breed with each other, but because people do go up and down, people marry in – even in caste societies – wealth gets shared (although people can try and stop this). Attempts to reinforce class and caste borders attack reality and the distributions of talent and ability.

Male and female categories flow into each other, no matter how hard people try to police the boundaries, and punish ‘masculine’ women and ‘feminine’ men. Again, people have different abilities and it seems best if these competencies are recognised and allowed to flourish, so we can adapt to changes in reality.

More obviously, there is a tendency to treat people who identify with political parties, or positions, as if they are all the same, or at best, similar. Even a moments discussion should show people this is not true. Not all ‘right wingers’ think gays or lesbians should be exterminated or excluded. Not many ‘left wingers’ , think that people should be forced to be gay. Not all Conservatives are fans of free markets, or corporate power. Not all left wingers think capitalism and private property should be destroyed. The idea that people who support one thing, will support another is rarely correct. There is far more movement and room for alliance, than many influential people would be prepared to admit. The borders between parties are not as distant as is made out by people in power, and as was shown by the recent Australian election in which right wing candidates who firmly stated that they would promote action on climate change overthrew the established right wing who pretended that they were opposed to climate change. They attracted votes from all sides of politics (possible in the Australian voting system). The category borders appear to stop discussion, stop us from seeing what other people really think and stop the resolution of problems.

Borders

While they can be useful to mark differences, borders of all kinds are largely conceptual and conventional. They do not always solve real problems and may even make the problems worse. We need to avoid being distracted by them, or waste energy trying trying to enforce them, and reach across borders, to solve the world’s problems and to involve people in the process.

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More Information Mess: “This is generally bad, but this is an exception – and the exceptions do not add up…..”

May 27, 2022

The issue:

Just something obvious I’ve noticed recently – which suspect others will have noticed before me

People seem to be using a formulation of a rule which seems designed to discredit the rule it is supposed to be protecting. The formulation is of the form: “X is terrible and should be stopped. But any particular incidence of X can always be dismissed or excused.” These supposedly excusable cases are then claimed to not reinforce the problem of X.

The Heard Depp Dispute

I first noticed this as a regular thing, in a discussion about the Heard Depp trial. I’m not that interested in this trial, but I have noticed that it seems to be caught in a massive propaganda war, and that the ‘reporting’ I’ve seen seems to be overtly trying to influence my opinion on the subject and promote particular agendas and emotional reactions in its audience. Reporting seems to coagulate around two poles

  • a) women are hysterical liars who try to frame men by accusing them of rape and cruelty, when really the problem was the woman. Believe the man, castigate the woman. This is the position I have come across most often.

OR

  • b) Men are inherently violent and untrustworthy and women are constantly in danger all the time. Believe the woman, castigate the man.

I suspect that the divisions are likely to be based on gender and on Democrat and Republican political allegiance. It is also not surprising given the apparent aims of some of the reporting, that Heard claims she has received a torrent of abuse and death threats. The reporting would often seem to be aiming for that level of anger and interaction – perhaps apolitically, just to get eyeballs for advertising as the phrase goes.

To get back to the subject. In this charged atmosphere, I met someone who appeared to argue that he was opposed to Heard because she was ruining #Metoo for other women.

[I am not alleging anything about this particular person, this is a social phenomenon, not necessarily anything to do with individuals or their intentions.]

Anyway, in this case, the proposition mentioned above, appears to go:

“#Metoo is right for pointing out that women get beaten and raped by men regularly and that they then have their protests and charges casually and demeaningly dismissed as falsehoods, hysteria or malevolence.

“However in this particular case Heard is clearly hysterically and malevolently claiming to have suffered from threats and violence, and so her claims should be dismissed.

“This quick dismissal does not reinforce the difficulties that women face in coming forward.”

Given this dismissal, the death threats etc, she has likely received, can be ignored. It appears likely to me that after seeing what Heard has been through, even if she is proven to have lied, other women will feel inhibited about coming forward. Why, if they have been assaulted, should they suffer twice from the violence of the attack, and the violence of the manipulated (?) audience?

I have no idea of Heard or Depp’s real motives of course, or the real events that each interprets differently, or why it is obvious she (or he) is lying. I do know that a British judge thought that “the great majority of alleged assaults” on Heard by Depp had been “proved to the civil standard”. But this is largely ignored. The argument that the person is defending #Metoo does not seem to be neutral or encouraging women to stand up to violence and intimidation, but discouraging it.

This discouragement may be the argument’s intention, but it would seem to be its function.

In using the argument, the person can claim to be virtuous and recognising that violence against women is bad, at the same time as encouraging people to dismiss claims of violence by any particular woman, especially against men they like.

BLM

This argument strikes me as similar to many US based arguments I’ve heard over Black Lives Matter, in this case the formulation appears to be:

“Of course it is bad that so many people get shot by police (avoiding the race issue). We should protest against this and stop it. But in this particular case (whatever it is) when a black person was shot in a confrontation with police they were: a known criminal (even if they were not making threats or engaged in violence); they could have been on drugs; they are unsavory; the police thought they went for a weapon; they were not obeying the police; they were running away in terror; they shouted at the cops threatening them; they acted surprised and guilty when the police knocked down their door by mistake, and so on.”

Again while the person can concede that police shooting people is supposed to be bad, in practice they say this black person deserved it, or it was a sad mistake. The formulation suggests that there is nothing to worry about really. With each particular murder a person excuses, they can still claim to they are virtuous and opposing police violence. In reality, the formulation excuses the police violence it is supposed to be against.

Climate Change

This is a slight variant. The Australian government admits that climate change is bad, and that emissions are bad – but in any particular case of mining fossil fuels, the emissions or burning that result should be ignored, because one case cannot make any difference and is beneficial for someone (usually the mining company). No matter how much the ‘single cases’ add up to produce harm that is supposedly recognised by the arguer, any single case is fine, which eventually means no case should be stopped. Again the person can claim to be virtuous and recognise climate change is a problem, while still doing everything they can to make it worse.

Conclusion

The point of the formulation is that it is a way, the person seeks to establish their moral credibility on the issue (violence against women, police shooting unarmed or unresisting people, or avoiding climate change), while actually excusing the crime they are supposed to be condemning.

A constant use of special cases, undermines getting rid of the evil we are supposed to be condemning, and yet there may be occasions in which the exception is real: the woman is lying or the police responded appropriately. This is the deadly paradox, and its certainly possible and needs to be factored into trials.

However, in climate the special exception is probably more rarely justifiable, because the cumulative bad is inevitable, no matter the virtue of any particular mine or power station.

If the formulation is common, then we can be reasonably sure that people are using it to reassert the established ways of dismissing and denying the problem, while pretending to virtue. Becoming aware of this standard formulation, may help us become aware of it, so we can try and escape it, or argue against it – and remain more neutral during the trial whatever politics gathers around it.

If we were to identify something as “virtue signaling” then this would be a fine candidate. It signals virtue to the audience while allowing the condition to continue, and using the person’s signaled virtue to excuse the crime in this case, and possibly in every case. The exception functions to break the rule completely.

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Brandolini’s Law

May 19, 2022

The original

Brandolini’s Law, or the “bullshit asymmetry” principle is a really neat summation of things that are well-known, but hard to express simply

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Alberton Brandolini, twitter 11 Jan 2013

I’m going to slightly rephrase this as:

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is much greater than needed to produce it.

Not as neat, and its not going to supersede Brandolini’s formulation, but its a bit clearer for those without a science background.

Brandolini’s law is implied in a lot of the material I’ve written on disinformation and the mess of information, but I now have a phrase that summarises the problem, and sets out areas for future research, much better than anything I’ve written.

It is much easier to invent ‘facts’ that appeal to people’s biases, fears and already accepted truths, than it is to make a reasonably accurate statement about reality. An explanation for why someone is wrong is often lengthy, and sometimes impossible.

As an example of impossibility, say for example someone asserts that the President of Agleroa engages in the slave trade of children, and uses his power to hide this.

No one can disprove this. A disproof can simply be another example of his power in action, or “fake news”. How can I show an absence of children being traded etc? To make a disproof requires vast amounts of energy. If for example the bullshitter had made a claim that the President had traded kids on a particular date, and I could find no evidence for that, it does not disprove all the dates that such trades could have occurred, and it might be argued that I could not find anything because I’m operating in bad faith or that the data is hidden beyond my capacities to find it. Even if I succeed in convincing one person that the President is not trading children then, if there is a group of people devoted to slandering the President of Agleroa who find it profitable to spread this accusation, it will still keep surfacing. People may even disbelieve me if I try and show Agleroa is not a real place.

In a similar case a real President was repeatedly said to be fighting organised pedophilia. There was no evidence for this, and it was similarly hard to disprove, because we were told he was working in secret. He apparently didn’t even talk about it, so as not to alarm pedophiles, and this silence could be taken as proof. Those who could be bothered to disprove it, were probably trying to defend pedophiles and therefore not trustworthy.

These situations are like disproving climate change denial.

If a person assumes nearly all climate scientists are lying or conspiring so as to harm them, then there can be no disproof. A person who tries to participate in the disproving by pointing out ‘facts’, is either part of the conspiracy, or a dupe repeating these scientist’s false information. How do you disprove the assertion that nearly all climate change scientists are lying, to a person who accepts that proposition as more probable than they are not lying?

This energy needed to maintain a “true position” means that what I’ve called “information groups” that filter out information rejected by the group, condemn those outsiders who disagree, and which propagate the misinformation the group lives by, and identifies with, become even more important.

Other Formulations

My earliest formulation of a similar position was what I called Gresham’s law of information “Bad information drives out good”. This is partly because bad information is plentiful [is easy to manufacture], but people may want to hoard and hide good information to give themselves an advantage, or it gets lost in the ether [Entropy]. But this is nowhere near as elegant, or as explanatory, as Brandolini’s Law.

Earlier formulations include this from Jonathan Swift:

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

Quote investigator: ‘A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes”

The obvious point here being that human energy use always involves time. Information takes time to discover and test, and it needs to be present at the time it is needed. Misinformation can have its intended effect, and by the time it is satisfactorily refuted, it is too late. Again we can see this with climate change denial claims in which it now seems too late to do anything effective about climate change, so let’s not bother.

Slightly later we have George Holmes:

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.

Holmes “Letters on Infidelity” Leter VIII p146-7

Holmes points out another problem, which is even more common in the information age, disinformation never dies. The disinformation can be reprised with ease, in perhaps a slightly different form if necessary. And, in the unlikely even that the person who revitalises the disinformation wants to find something more accurate, it will take them a lot longer to locate and read the refutation (assuming the refutation is good in the first place :). The short punchy lie is much easier to grasp than the lengthy refutation, at any time.

Conclusions

Brandolini’s Law is a succinct and explanatory formulation that has great relevance for modern information society.

There are two big questions it raises:

  1. Given the huge (and probably increasing) amounts of energy that it takes to maintain a shared sense of the universe in a large society and keep people well informed about reality and responsive to events in reality, is it inevitable that such societies will fragment into factions pushing their own truths and ignoring what is happening, until they collapse? [this is a bit like
  2. What can we do to lessen the law’s effects, so we can resurface from being buried under disinformation and misinformation?

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Australian Election

May 19, 2022

Sorry local politics again, but final election summary of the real issues for the governing Coalition:

1) Climate. The coalition will do nothing except make the problems worse.

2) Energy Transition. More taxpayers’ money for more fossil fuels.

3) Disaster preparation. Terrible Coalition record. No sign they will change as climate change is not real, and its always someone else’s responsibility.

4) Corruption so ingrained the PM has never noticed any. Coalition apparently worried that people will start noticing corruption. So lets avoid any form of investigation.

5) Aged care. Possibly, the most incompetent minister in history. Absolutely (and literally) shit conditions in many places, ignored royal commission….

6) Persecution of people on disability, or unemployment. Should this continue?

7) Allow people who claim to be religious to persecute others and run the government because they are so righteous?

8 ) Completely ignore Covid, increasing Covid deaths and long Covid, because people like me will be told we died of existing conditions which were not previously likely to kill us.

9) Increasing the cost of housing. Well that’s what the Coalition appears to want.

10) Do nothing about banking, ignore the royal commission….

11) Ignore aboriginal people, in the hope they will go away. What deaths in custody?

12) Surreptitiously keep on winding back Medicare until it becomes non-functional.

13) Keep running down hospitals.

14) More tax cuts for the very wealthy and tax increases due for the middle class, because we all know that works to increase the wealth in the right places.

15) Massive funding increases for wealthy private schools as an education reform.

16) Increasing inequality – what a surprise. Obviously the will of God in action.

17) Ignoring women worried about sexual harassment at work – it is still absolutely right for the PM not to have spoken to them and to have said they should be grateful they were not shot at. But making up a problem about trans women in sport, without any sporting organisations complaining about ‘the problem’?

18) Helping the Chinese gain more influence in the Area, through subsidising the sale of Darwin’s port to China, and ignoring or insulting the Pacific Islands.

19) Throwing away money for subs, buying expensive fighter planes that won’t arrive for decades. Buying tanks we cannot use.

20) Lots of ex-coalition members saying don’t vote for this lot, because they are so bad….

21) If you vote against them you will upset the media, particularly the Murdoch Empire.

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