Two of my favourite bloggers—Commander Huber of The Pen and Sword and Gershom Gorenberg of South Jerusalem—have written similar and different articles on Obama’s foreign policy.  The commander analyses the ducking and diving in Obama’s Iran policy from the perspective of the Pentagon while Gorenberg takes the foggy bottom angle of his Israel policy.  They agree on the difficulties he faces (you have to work with the political context you have rather than the the one you would like) and that while some of his tactical manoeuvres may have caused some dismay, it is quite possible (so they argue) to pick out a coherent strategy.  Needless to say we will need more data, but that reading seems defensible to me, and is consistent with his record, such as it is.

I am most curious to know whether Gershom Gorenberg agrees with Comander Huber’s analysis.

I have added the following comment on Yglesias’s solution-in-search-of-a-problem article, Exciting New Reasons to Bomb Iran.  As I am in the middle of a blogging drought I thought I would repost it here.

Matt, as often you are so right about this.

As Scott Ritter points out the Iranians have switched from talking down the US/Israeli sabre rattling as bluster to responding in kind and they are doing this to give Mullen and the realists the ammo to argue that there is no way the fallout for an attack on Iran can be restricted without much more serious preparations than those that have already been made and, of course, those preparations can’t be made before January.

Cheney and the neocons have been desperate since 2005 to bring about regime change and they figure that whatever the outside chances bombing is their last best shot. They don’t care about the risks to the Middle East and the American/world economy: that kind of pain will be felt by poor people and foreign suckers.

However the neocons need a plausible rationale to sell to the rest of us. As Matt says they have a solution in search of a problem.

Matthew Yglesias, in response to a gripe about blogging and him in particular wrote a ludicrously self-efacing response where he horribly insults his main benefactors in his readers and employers at the Atlantic, and followed it up with another article expressing his regret that he doesn’t have a greater mastery of Middle eastern languages to add depth to his opinions on the matter.

Part of the reason that so many of us like reading Yglesias is that he comes up with this kind of stuff that might not be always comfortable to read but it sure makes you think—the mark of a philosopher, and the real reason for reading good bloggers.

Clearly if you are going to comment on an area, some mastery of it is required, but anyone who seriously believes that a mastery of Persian, Arabic and Hebrew is necessary to comment on US foreign policy in the Middle East is exhibiting worrying signs of narrowness.  Yglesias finishes his second missive on the subject with a beautiful observation about the Pakistani understanding of US culture and language will make them much more effective in manipulating US policy makers than the reverse.  It is this kind of awareness that makes Yglesias’s commentary so valuable.

Just yesterday Yglesias observed that many commentator’s advocacy of bombing Iran show signs of people with a solution in search of a problem.  I used to work in the tech sector and we learned to recognise this kind of thinking, and Yglesisas is of course dead right.  It is this ability to condense into a short article a critical insight  that makes them so valuable.  Yglesias says that thanks to his shortcommings ‘the overwhelming majority of Americans have never read this blog and never will’ but this is exactly wrong.  It is the chalenging (i.e., worthwhile) aspects of his blog that will act as the barier.  I wish perhaps more of the pundits that populate the mainstream media would read, and, more importantly, understand what he says in his blog.  We would not be in half the mess we are if they did.

I have been about a week with FireFox 3 and I have to say I am very pleasantly surprised.  I remember a friend of mine complaining bitterly at the start of the ’90s about the extravagance of the 3-d look that was being rolled out across desk-tops so it is interesting to see the Mozilla people opting for a retro look that seems to take us back to about then.

Apart from that it seems to be a well-thought through redesign of the control area at the top.  The enhanced-url completion is excellent, as is the ability to pick up links and drag them into folders and the bookmarks menu.

Very smooth.  Very smart.  Almost no disruption.  IE have a real fight on their hands.

Reflecting on my previous article on our seeming determination to smash our economies on the rocks of Iran I thoght of the the Taijitu or yin-yang motif, which I think may summarize the situation.  My understanding is the the motif is intended to symbolise the cyclical waxing and waning of the yin and yang qualities in a given situation.  Notice that when dark yin or light yang are at their maximum, the other is present in the middle, and of course the dominating one must then give way.

This seems to me to symbolise where the industrial powers are today.  Their military-industrial dominance has been derived on the mastery of coal and then oil.  Dominating the oil lies at the heart of the industrial nation’s involvement in the region from the beginning of the oil era at the opening of the 20th century.  It drew the British into the region with their 1914 invasion of Iraq, the carving up of the Arab world after beraking up the Ottoman empire, the overthrowing of Mosadegh and so on.

Of course oil supplies are probably maxing out and can no longer feed the colossal displacement activity that we normally call economic growth.  The underlying source of our power is set to decline.  It is the impotence and frustration that comes from this realistation that may be driving some of the irrational and destructive behaviour.

I read an account by a member of the paratroop regiment serving in the Falklands conflict.  After the surrender of the Argentine forces some bored members of the regiment were play a game of cricket, with hand grenades and some improvised bat.  The batter would have to hit the grenades into the sea where they could safely explode.

This reminds me of the games that we are playing at the moment with Iran.  Maybe we are all bored and in need of some entertainment–not able to get the kick out of destroying other people’s countries we need to make the game a little more exciting.  Let us hope that we keep on hitting the grenades into the sea.

Many with a good knowledge of what is going on, and a good track record in finding things out, are saying that we are nat making any sense.  Nothing has changed since the Iraq fiasco.  But when the fireworks start this time we are all going to get seriously hurt.  Before we started destroying the Iraqi people and their country they were an industrialized country with cities, hospitals, schools, power grids, water treatment and so on.  We systematically wrecked that so it makes a good study of what could happen in the industrial world if we pull down all those systems.  They, and our economies, are all dependent on oil.

This is why the Iranians have no need for a strategic nuclear deterrent.  They just need control a single narrow shipping lane.  They have always been clear about this, and they have had plenty of time to prepare.

Nothing that we are doing makes any sense at all.  We accuse them of undermining the nuclear weapons proliferation agreements, but it is us that are destroying these agreements.  We accuse them of destabilising the middles east but it is us that are doing so.  We accuse them of supporting terrorism and yet we hear that the Bush administration has asked for $400m from Congress to terrorize Iran and Congress are playing along and considering authorizing a naval blockade of Iran.  And we continue to terrorize and kill people in the region in quite high numbers, far, far higher numbers than the paramilitary groups that we obsess over.

We are nuts.  I don’t know how it is going to play out and it is not worth losing sleep over.  Worrying is a mug’s game.  All I can do is call it as I see it.

For those that are interested, Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter have interviews (Hersh, Ritter) and articles (Hersh, Ritter) spelling out what is going on.  Gordon Prather’s articles on nuclear weapons proliferation are excellent, as are Gareth Porter’s on the wider issues.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Penguin, 2007.

I had a mixed reaction to this book, spending much of it trying to avoid being suffocated by Taleb’s ego. More serious was the ignoring of Taleb’s bar-room philosophy (see my previous article) as he pontificated on anything that lurched into view on his meander to the meat of the book in part 3 (p. 213). He says that he gets emotional (p. 252) because of the irrationality of those around him in not coming round to he is way of thinking (and he does have a point) but there is nothing rational about being ‘emotional’ and the various rage fits he seems to enjoy provoking in others (p. 64) or indulging in himself (p. 128). Interestingly Taleb’s mother elicits the most revealing passage:

I am reminded of a measure my mother concocted, as a joke, when I decided to become a businessman. Being ironic about my (perceived) confidence, though not necessarily unconvinced of my abilities, she found a way for me to make a killing. How? Someone who could figure out how to buy me at the price I am truly worth and sell me at the price I think I am worth would be able to pocket a huge difference. Though I keep trying to convince her of my internal humility and insecurity concealed under a confident exterior; though I keep telling her I am an introspector–she remain skeptical. Introspector shmintrospector, she still jokes at the time of writing that I am still a little ahead of myself.

Why don’t we all listen to our mothers more. As this article is not nearly flattering enough I guess it will never be read but should Taleb ever read these words I really think he should find out just what humility, what its cause are and what it looks like. Humility comes from inner confidence but bluster comes from insecurity. We all have to do battle with our insecurities and arrogant demons but it is going to be much more difficult if these categories are confused.

Of course Taleb does have an important story to tell. Part of it builds on the work of the great Benoit Mandelbrot. From Larry Elliot’s review:

Taleb is a fan of the Polish-born French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who gives short shrift to those who believe financial markets resemble a bell curve, with modest movements the norm and violent moves infinitesimally rare. Looking at the daily movements of the DJIA [Dow Jones Industrial Average] from 1916 to 2003, Mandelbrot said that according to the neat bell curve analysis, there should have been 58 days when the Dow moved more than 3.4%, when in fact there were 1,001.

Instead of just six days when there were movements of more than 4.5% there were 366. Only once in every 300,000 years should there have been a day when the Dow moved by 7% or more, but it happened 48 times. “Extreme price swings are the norm in financial markets - not aberrations that can be ignored. Price movements do not follow the well-mannered bell curve assumed by modern finance; they follow a more violent curve that makes an investor’s ride much bumpier,” Mandelbrot says in his book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets (Profile Books). “A sound trading strategy would build this cold, hard fact into its foundations”.

At the moment, it seems highly unlikely that this “cold, hard fact” has been built into market thinking, where the abiding sense is that this is forever summer. That, of course, is precisely Taleb’s point.

This distills the two of Taleb’s basic points concerning the poor (objective) models being used to model the financial markets and the (subjective) narrative. The preferred subjective narrative is being allowed to drive the models with a scant regard for how well they match the objective reality and this leads us into periodic trouble and will ultimately lead us into big trouble.

Narratives

We all use narratives to structure reality in order to make it manageable. Yet these narratives inevitably have boundaries in time and space where the narrative stops working, not least that they may only suit the person holding the narrative (and a small number like-minded people). Taleb proclaims throughout the book that he is an empirical skeptic which is supposed to make him and the other members of this select group less prone to getting duped by the false narratives we create for ourselves. However I think this is mistaken for two reasons: any thoughtful and sharp person (they need not be intellectual–I am inclined to put Taleb’s mother in this category, who may of course be an intellectual for all I know) will be on the lookout for this kind of thing–it’s what it means to be thoughtful and sharp. Secondly, I don’t think it is a case of trying to separate out the false narratives from the good narratives so much as being aware of the narratives you subscribe to and making a constant effort to find their boundaries.

We see this happening all the time and of course politicians are constantly trying to shape the narratives around them or give them the slip. Taleb doesn’t read newspapers and neither do I (I am even more wary of broadcast media), and I think for the same reason, that they are so narrative driven and it seems to be almost impossible for even honest and sceptical journalists to escape these narratives–any attempt to do so will generally be undercut (the so-called electric fence—see Media Lens, and Flat Earth News).

One narrative that I thought Taleb leaned on extraordinarily heavily was that of evolution.

Some people naively believe that the process of unfairness started with the gramophone, according to the logic that I just presented. I disagree. I am convinced that the process started much, much earlier, with our DNA, which stores information about ourselves, and allows us to repeat our performance without our being there by spreading our genes down the generations. (p. 30)

To my mind this is really naive, because I think we have no idea of the boundaries of the ‘evolution’ narrative that we are so incredibly fond of, sup[porting as it does the mechanistic, materialistic view of life (despite physicists long ago abandoning this view of reality) and enshrining selfishness as a principle in nature thereby acting as a perpetual justification for selfish behaviour (notwithstanding the vehement denial of the neo-Darwinians). Taleb even talked about a 'risk-taking gene' without explaining why a mechanism for controlling the synthesis of protein should have anything to do with risk taking (see Sheldrake's Presence of the Past for an explanation of this point, which can be read as a sharp critique of neo-Darwinism without accepting Sheldrake's [positive] proposals).

Taleb claims to be cautious evolution (p. 189) and intervenes in the Intelligent Design debate with the observation (footnote, p. 170) that it is hard to look at a computer and a car and consider them the result of an aimless process, yet they are. This misses the point. Proponents of I.D. (and I am ambivalent) point to watches and cars and say that just as there is evidence that an intelligent agent has shaped the evolution of these artefacts we can see the same kinds of features in the way the world works around us. Whether a single person has sat down and planned out the evolution of ‘the car’ is not the point.

Anyway this is my own skepticism. My point is that we are all dependent upon narratives–we all see the world from a point of view. The key is to avoid clinging on to those narratives too tightly, to be aware that others may have different needs and that your own needs may change over time. It is called keeping an open mind.

Unknown Unknowns

Taleb spends much of the book discussing his black swans. The name is taken from the induction-breaking observation of an antipodean black swan that forces the observer to conclude that all swans aren’t white after all. On the one hand he seems to go somewhat over the top and the reference to ‘Unknown Unknowns‘ and the fashion for worrying about it in military circles I think is quite ironic. The initial reference was in a situation in where the speaker wanted to suggest that horrific human catastrophe had somehow happened due to some unforseen circumstances that had nothing to do with the gentleman’s own arrogance and actions. It had all been for seen of course, by those had studies their history. For this reason I find Taleb’s suggestion that we should “downgrade ’soft’ areas such as history and social science to a level slightly above aesthetics and entertainment” (p. 171) a bit wide of the mark. It is because it is so difficult to do well that we should pay great attention to history and those that are good at it, and from as many different perspectives as possible (and the same is true of the analysis of intelligence). (See earlier article Of Causation and History).

The more interesting point that Taleb is making the illusion of stability in the world around us, until something happens to turn our world upside down–the arrival of a black swan. In one of the best passages in the early part of the book he describes the way centuries of peaceful coexistence were blown apart by the 1970s civil war in Lebanon. Of course nobody foresaw it and nobody could have been expected to foresee it. Taleb observes that we have a strong tendency to construct cozy narratives about living in a stable world when we have that good fortune to find ourselves in a settled situation, but this is an illusion. (And indeed it is.) Part of our world lies in what Taleb calls Extremistan.

Extremistan

Taleb’s idea of Extremistan is probably the most important contribution of the book.  (I don’t know whether he started writing about it before The Black Swan: this is the first book I have read by him.)  When you are not in Extremistan you are in Mediocristan according to Taleb, where everything is reasonably linear, linear and predictable and populations can be modeled well by Gaussian bell curves.

In this setup the configuration of the system is often limited by physical realities.  So in a population of people, biometric data will generally cluster around the mean with outliers becoming rapidly more improbable as we dart from the mean.  ‘Ya can’t change the laws of physics!’  As Galileo observed Physics doesn’t scale, so we won’t find people 100m tall.  But that doesn’t stop them being 1cm tall; nevertheless the fact remains that populations can be modeled very well by bell curves where physical characteristics are concerned.  And this extends to jobs that are tied to tactile, physical realities, such as income earned according to the number of hours you spend teaching pupils or the number of widgets you assemble.  As long as you are being paid according to physical criteria, according to the effort you put in then the pay of a population of school teachers or widget assemblers can be modeled reasonably well with a bell curve and you will see few surprises.

Taleb’s point is that you can’t measure pay in general with bell curves.  It will work for a while, but once Bill Gates or a J.K. Rowling turns up in your population of school teachers and widget assemblers the whole thing blows up irretrievable.  The concentrations are so high that the total wealth of a huge population of average wage earners can be doubled by the addition of one high-earner.  This is the problem with a world that is mostly Mediocristan, or gives the appearance of being Mediocristan, but is actually Extremistan.  It is Extremistan because these outliers must be taken into account because they can turn up in your population; they will eventually turn up in your population, and then all your assumptions will get blown away.

Being a quant trader Taleb is interested in the markets on which the world financial system and all our pensions are based.  The people operating the markets (safeguarding all our pensions) and those regulating them have to make sure that the markets don’t break down and that they don’t wipe out our pensions and savings.  What Madlebrot and Taleb have observed  is that they are assuming that the markets are Gaussian and belong to Mediocristan whereas they very much belong to Extremistan.  Given how interconnected all the financial markets are nowadays we really should be taking an interest in avoiding catastrophic failures.  By continuing to live in a pleasant fantasy that they are more table than they are we are inviting problems.  By using Mandlebrot’s models we can eliminate a class of surprises.

What is Really Going On

While some things that may belong to Extremistan are physical in nature, most of them are actually ideal in nature.  Robert Duquette has commented that the weather belongs to Extremistan, for example.  The weather can be quite placid and stable, only to flip quite quickly with the arising or arrival of a tornado.  Weather is know to be chaotic and phsyical (I will come back to this).

However, most of Taleb’s examples are actually ideal phenomena and not physical, such as the money that all our markets ultimately trade (there may be bartering exchanges but I think we can say they are a minority).  The way that money flows is also ideal, it depends upon the preferences of people.  When those preferences are anchored in physical expectations, such as the number of hours worked and so on, and when there is a healthy market for the skills concerned, then extremities are avoided and we see stable, predictable and (IMHO) generally-healthy Mediocristan.

When there isn’t a healthy market and large populations of people start chasing a rarefied resource then that can lead to large concentrations of wealth and we realise we are in unstable, unpredictable and generally-pathological Extremistan.  Notice the ideal nature of this phenomenon.  It is because large populations of people are behaving according to preferences with no real-world physical restraints.  So we get Beatlemania and suddenly all the teenagers are rushing into the shops to buy records from a single pop band, driving up the profile of the band and so on.  Feedback mechanisms, that are ideal in nature, are easy to set up in our modern world of mass communications.  I am not the first and I won’t be the last to observe that this underlies the increasingly chaotic features of modernity.

Final Reflections

One final, way-out observation, and one that is more mundane.  Taleb makes an interesting observation about the phony use of quantum mechanics to justify an indeterminate reality and makes the excellent observation that quantum systems are the very systems that do scale to produce predictable behaviour.  This is a fine observation.  The interesting thing is that when we try to burrow down into physical reality we come smack up against ideal reality.  This I believe is the lesson of the quantum-theoretic revolution in physics which has yet to be more widely understood (its over a hundred years and counting–see my Consciousness Explained? or Stapp’s Mindful Universe for more on this).

Quantum mechanics suggests that unpredictable physical systems may indicate that we are looking at boundaries between the mental and physical, at least in the very small.  There are indeed many problems with mechanical ideas of causation (see my recent article, its commentary and the article it is discussion and its commentary and the random link that Word Press has conveniently found.)  Although may appear far-out, definitely an absurd idea for the mechanicals, could it be that chaotic macro-events like weather may have an ideal aspect after all.  I am just floating the idea.

The more prosaic point is this, and also quite ideal and ethical.  Taleb talks much about epistemologically arrogant we are, that we almost always overestimate the quality of our knowledge.  And indeed this is true.  But I would say the more important underlying point is that we are always overestimating our consequence.  We are habitually selfish and arrogant.  If we were to take an interest in pushing back on plain arrogance, cultivating an inner confidence and honest humility then this would get to the root of the problem.  No?

Bryan Appleyard’s recent comments on the importance of literary tone came to mind reading Gail Collin’s article in the NYT today.  I have been reading Collins on and off for a while and not really getting it, until today.  She is writing on the brouha over Clark’s ’swiftboating’ of McCain and deftly puts it into perspective while also dealing with the McCain campaign package and the way military service has played out in presidential election campaigns.  Obama being the skillful operator has no intention of impaling his candidacy on the issue, knowing that if the past is any guide it won’t do McCain any good—indeed it may be a lethal distraction for the McCain campaign.  They would do better to find something of substance—anything—that is going to appeal to the voters.

This column is really very good.

I have been discussing causation over at Crooked Timber and despite a couple of attempts to explain myself I am not being understood. Having chucked a simple textbook example at me folks seem to have just ignored my point which I find interesting. To recap the point at issue is when does a set of correlations become a cause? I have proposed that it becomes a cause when some of those correlations lie in the future, when there are predictions involved and the correlation is surprising—i.e., is the correlation is true it adds to our knowledge of the world (see here; my thinking here has been entirely shaped by the late, great Richard Feynman). So if I claim that when you jump up and down on one leg while picking your noes, your tooth ache will always disappear then you can try it out and see it is it works—see if you observe this correlation the next time you get a tooth ache. If you do (and repeatedly so) then you have some new tentative causal knowledge that will become strengthened as you reliably see the correlation in a variety of circumstances. The textbook example that people have been throwing at me is that if I take causation is correlation too seriously then I will be forced to conclude that cock’s crows cause sun to rise, but this isn’t a problem here. Suns rising after cocks crowing isn’t surprising to me—I am not looking to explain that correlation having a perfectly satisfactory set of causal relationships to explain it (but thanks anyway).

I prodded noen (a commentator of this blog) and noen was good enough take pity on me and explain what nobody had thought worth spelling out to me:

I’m not sure what you’re getting at Chris. Discovering a correlation is an invitation to further study. One shouldn’t leap to conclusions. The problem is that no matter how fine grained our mechanism is there will always be a leap involved. So we are left with observing that B follows A and concluding that A causes B. We call that deduction but there is a gap in our understanding. There always will be.

Now in my proposed system there is no leaping to conclusions about correlations being causations as causal relationships don’t exist outside in the world apart from observers but are ideal (i.e., mental) constructions. If you are looking to supplement your knowledge concerning a given correlation then it becomes a candidate for a causal relationship because you have decided it is so: by definition there is no jumping to conclusions. And as I am perfectly happy with mere correlations I am not left groping around for mechanisms or worried about any gaps in my understanding. Or at least this remains my conceit.

One of the reasons that I think that there is a gap between me and the others is my Buddhist view of the world sees it as entirely natural place causation as a nexus between the external world and our minds (seeing the two as existing dependently) and to allow said nexus to do some epistemological shovel work. Physicalists—still the prevailing fashion, and misguidedly so (IMHO)—will find this unacceptable. Might this the cause of the gap between me and the others?

[Part of a series of articles reviewing blogs and websites (here The Register) on my blog-roll; see the about page. ]

With The Register reporting in its usual scurrilous style Microsoft’s ongoing difficulties in killing Windows XP, Bill Gates stepping down as the head of Microsoft and Taleb making an instructive blunder on the Mac-versus-Windows religious wars I thought I would indulge myself in a rare techie post.

It is also part of the review Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan.

Windows 3.0 (1990)

One of the many interesting (and instructive) observations that Taleb made in The Black Swans was the following.

A person can get slightly ahead for entirely random reasons; because we like to imitate one another, we will flock to him. The world of contagion is so underestimated.

As I am writing these lines I am using a Macintosh, by Apple, after years of using Microsoft-based products. The Apple technology is vastly better, yet the inferior software won the day. Why? Luck.

This I think is emblematic of the modern diseased, totalitarian mindset, and a central idea in Taleb’s writing. It is no more reasonable to dogmatically assert a lack of narrative than to dogmatically insist on a narrative. Indeed it is more unreasonable to do so yet it is a central feature of enlightenment thinking. The amusing thing about this example is that Steve Jobs learnt his lessons from his brilliant mentor John ‘Pepsi’ Scully and has surely surpassed the master. Jobs on his return to Apple in 1997 realised that Apple were in the furniture and accessories business (h/t: John Rayfield), and Apple products are packaged brilliantly, but to see Taleb herding into Jobs’s honey trap under the illusion that it demonstrates his independence is hilarious.

Windows NT (1992)

Let me explain the narrative that Taleb is missing, why Microsoft’s (and Apple’s) success has nothing to do with luck. I am a computer scientist by training and I have been programming and using computers since the early 1981, starting with the Apple II. I spent most of my computer science career cursing and sneering at the ‘Evil Empire’ and up until 2004 resisted its malign influence by stubbornly insisted on using Linux on my desktop for engineering work.

Windows 95

And I would still much prefer to use a Unix-like environment for all programming and many tasks. Indeed as much as XP has dominated the desktop Unix (now mostly Linux) has dominated the server infrastructure. While there are some tools that can make life more bearable for these tasks on XP (Cygwin) it is still utterly inferior in this department. Apple OS X is based on Unix (actually the Mach kernel, which I worked on in the early 1990s) so as well as having a sexy user interface that non-technical users can appreciate it has a beautiful kernel under the hood that technical people will appreciate—the design goes all the way down bringing the best of the server world and the desktop into the one system. One of my good friends also worked on Mac OS X in the late 1990s.

Windows 98

So what gives? The first point is whether one prefers Mac OS X or Windows XP is quite subjective. From the first moment I started to use XP I found it entirely straightforward to use—everything was where I expected it to be—and ever since I have found that it does exactly what I need it to do. On the other hand I find the OS X interface horrible to use, stumbling over some of the most simple tasks (giving up on one occasion trying to pursuade Safari to download an MP3). Apple’s stubborn insistence on using a one-button mouse—always a stupid idea—but looking more and more stupid with the omnipresence of XP. The appeal of Macs is their difference, like the HP RPN calculators, latterly a badge like designer clothes for people to identify themselves, cluster around and mark themselves out from the crowd. I don’t buy the idea that that the Mac user interface is objectively better than XP—for me it is insufferable. Part of that insufferability is derived from some quixotic design decisions on some basic points that having no rationale other than NIH and being fashionably different—not helping the user.

The second point is that the success of Microsoft has been no accident, and only someone with a pretty stunning ignorance of the computer industry could assert otherwise without a good argument. And the reasons do not lie in savvy business practices and a stupid public as some would have you believe. Microsoft have been careful to provide an easy upgrade path for their users to follow, initially erecting the dreadful Windows 1/2/3.x on MSDross—and they were technically inferior to the alternatives at the time—but they were good enough and met people’s needs. There was no doubt an element of luck to Microsoft early success (and luck in not encountering any subsequent unforeseen events that stopped them in their tracks, i.e., black swans), but to set all of their success down to chance and luck is ridiculous.

The point is that from their initial success Microsoft hardly put a foot wrong up through the development of XP. And this was no accident, suggested by this internal email from Bill Gates email (h/t Sullivan):

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package. The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.

I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

This is Gates in 2003, not 1980, getting the software out of the box and installing it on a PC, illustrating a top-to-bottom preoccupation of what people really, really care about: not having to watch their precious life disappearing down the drain fighting to get software installed and working. Gates has at every point understood what his customers care about (as well as Jobs understands his own customers’ priorities).

Windows 2000

The point about making Windows the success that is decades of development (and I think you can see this in almost all widely-used general-purpose operating systems). Microsoft made their user interface less laughable and almost respectable in Windows ’95 and ’98, but prior to that, in 1992, they commissioned the development of a decent and solid O/S kernel in Windows NT, merging these developments to produce Windows 2000, migrating in the process all their users onto the properly engineered Windows NT kernel (pretty smoothly, somewhat more so than the parallel migration to Mac OS X by Apple). Windows 2000 was refined in late 2001 to give us the smart and stable workhorse of Windows XP. (Over 20 years Microsoft provided a careful upgrade path to get their users from a 1981 home-computer hack to one of the most sophisticated engineering artefacts (ever) that is powering the planet’s desktop computers today. That is an astounding technical achievement which I can’t even begin to do justice to here. That Microsoft have in parallel got everyone to use Microsoft Office is further evidence of their competence, and as we can see from the Web browser wars this need not have been so.

Windows XP (2001)

The Netscrape web browser got off to a good start in 1994 but it was quite appallingly engineered, really deserving to lose out to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, only for Microsoft to became complacent about Explorer and giving FireFox the opportunity rise out of the Netscape ashes and come roaring back to re-establish itself as the browser of choice (considering Microsoft’s natural advantage, an inertia that sees 4 users of IE for every user of FF [see IE and FF] and will protect IE until it gets turned around or stabilised).

The truth of the matter is that in Mac OS X Apple provided too little too late, their own earlier operating system offerings being pretty uneven. In 1984 the Mac interface was ground breaking but it lost its edge and never regained it until OS X. Mac software and the OS kernels alike were generally flaky and not really much better than MSDross. By the time they got their act together in 2001 Microsoft had migrated the planet fairly seamlessly onto a very decent 32-bit multi-user operating system. And Microsoft systems have always been much cheaper than Apple and run tons more software.

The real point about Windows is that it will run on anything while Apple provides an operating system that will only run only on Apple-supplied hardware. (I know it can be hacked to work on anything; that is not the point; Apple don’t have to make it work on everything.) That Windows (from the user’s point of view) just works on everything is a tremendous achievement, and very valuable. That everyone uses the same suite of application programs (which is itself a mighty feat of engineering) is tremendously valuable as it means us losers can exchange documents with anyone (even Mac losers) without having to worry about all the horrors of changing formats. If Microsoft had not ported Office to the Mac then Apple would almost certainly not have survived as a desktop computer vendor.

None of this happened by luck. Not at all. That Microsoft find themselves captive of their brilliant monster that keeps their users happy all these years says it all. And I am really pissed at Microsoft for killing XP—and yes, the competition authorities should look into this.

[By the way, having worked in a corner of the industry watching Microsoft and others pouring vast quantities of money into breaking into the cell-phone market, especially the holy grail of data-stream oriented cell-phones, it is amusing to see Jobs succeed with his iPhone accessory where so many others have failed. This again is no accident. Marketing and narratives are important. They make up our reality. Apple is worthy of respect just as Microsoft; both originating in the microcomputer revolution their genius has always been complementary.]

John Cole makes a good point; it is not as if you need to trawl through hours of debate to reconstruct the context.

SCHIEFFER: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn’t had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

CLARK: I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

That sure is a mean and vicious swiftboating.

By way of Ambinder here is General Wesley Clark’s statement:

There are many important issues in this Presidential election, clearly one of the most important issues is national security and keeping the American people safe. In my opinion, protecting the American people is the most important duty of our next President. I have made comments in the past about John McCain’s service and I want to reiterate them in order be crystal clear. As I have said before I honor John McCain’s service as a prisoner of war and a Vietnam Veteran. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. I would never dishonor the service of someone who chose to wear the uniform for our nation. John McCain is running his campaign on his experience and how his experience would benefit him and our nation as President. That experience shows courage and commitment to our country - but it doesn’t include executive experience wrestling with national policy or go-to-war decisions. And in this area his judgment has been flawed - he not only supported going into a war we didn’t have to fight in Iraq, but has time and again undervalued other, non-military elements of national power that must be used effectively to protect America But as an American and former military officer I will not back down if I believe someone doesn’t have sound judgment when it comes to our nation’s most critical issues.

This strikes me as eminently rational and a very important debate that should be had, addressing some of the issues that have been getting us into deep trouble. We are so absurdly sentimental (and, let’s face it, stupid).

Ambinder from the Atlantic reckons it better left unsaid and Lopez from the NRO the calls it a smear on McCain. We are of course talking about General Wesley Clark’s comments on Sunday.

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

The hyperventilating is quite predictable and Obama will no doubt remind everyone of McCain’s proud and honourable service. But the problem is that Clark was careful to do this himself once you look at the context. Clark is no Wright! He has a much more distinguished military record himself even if it didn’t involve a tour of the Hanoi Hilton. The risk for McCain and the republicans in overreacting like this is that they will give Clark and Obama the opportunity to drive home the point that Clark is trying to get across. That ‘getting into a fighter plane and being shot down’ isn’t a qualification for becoming president, something that McCain supporters don’t seem to understand. To be sure it does no harm, but it isn’t a qualification, and to say so is not to smear McCain (unlike John Kerry’s swift-boating).

Check out the interview.

Notice how sentimental we are and how the media amplifies this. Shorn of its political context (and the context Clark is careful to provide) the above statement is unremarkable to the point of banality.

Update: Andrew Sullivan has a pretty histrionic reaction with Swiftboating McCain; I wonder whether he has even watched the interview.

Update II: I draw people’s attention to my previous post where I point out that Obama’s comforting of distressed citizen in front of the cameras couldn’t be (very strong) evidence of Obama’s compassion. This article is very much in the same line.

Update III: Obama has agreed with Robert that this was going nowhere and Andrew Sullivan has moderated his comments, agreeing that it was just bad politics. So we are all on the same page.

Update IV: Sullivan is reporting a ‘Clark-lash’; folks feel that Clark was unfairly dumped on (I do) and he links to an excellent explanation of what Clark was getting at and why it certainly wasn’t any swift-boat attack.  (Why so many pundits thought Clark was attacking McCain’s record or character remains a mystery to me; the McCain campaign reaction must have queered their whole analysis; it looks as if McCain is holding on to his base, at least for the while.)

[Part of a series of articles reviewing blogs and websites (here Crooked Timber) on my blog-roll; see the about page.]

I have completed Taleb’s The Black Swan and will say more about it later but I first want to take him to task on one of his opinions (one that he doesn’t really hold as it turns out). From page 171:

Popper’s insight concerns the limitations in forecasting historical events and the need to downgrade “soft” areas such as history and social science to a level slightly above aesthetics and entertainment, like butterfly or coin collecting. (Popper who received a classical Viennese education didn’t go quite so far; I do. I am from Amioun.) What we call the soft historical sciences are narrative dependent studies.

To confuse historicism and history is a horrible conflation, and no claims to rural roots should excuse this kind of boorishness. As Aristotle by way of Aquinas and Schumacher reminds us,

‘the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.’(*) ‘Slender’ knowledge is here put in opposition to ‘certain’ knowledge, and indicates uncertainty.

(*) Aquinas, Summa theologica, I, 1, 5 ad 1.

There is a compelling case to be made in my view that if the people who had invaded Iraq had any appreciation of the recent history of the region they would have been much more careful. The 2003 invasion looks awfully like the British 1914 invasion with very similar horrible and tragic consequences for occupier and occupied.

So what is the nature of this knowledge? I would say (after Feynman) that it should be essentially causal.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘These are the conditions, now what happens next?’ But all our sister sciences have a completely different problem: in fact all the other things that are studied – history, geology, astronomical history – have a problem of this other kind. I find that they are able to make predictions of a completely different type from those of a physicist. A physicist says, ‘In this condition I’ll tell you what will happen next.’ But a geologist will say something like this – ‘I have dug in the ground and I have found certain kinds of bones. I predict that if you dig in the ground you will find a similar kind of bones’. The historian, although he talks about the past, can do it by talking about the future. When he says that the French Revolution was in 1789, he means that if you look in another book about the French Revolution you will find the same date. What he does is to make a kind of prediction about something that he has never looked at before, documents that still have to be found. He predicts that the documents in which there is something written about Napoleon will coincide with what is written in other documents.

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, p. 114

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber has an interesting whack at some sloppy thinking in No idea more obscure and uncertain, complaining about the thoughtless cliché regularly heard in social science circles that a correlation isn’t causal.

I grudgingly admit that it’s a plausible-sounding rule, and in the textbooks and stuff. But, to be honest, I read it too many times in various posts and comments threads the other day, and in my raging pique I found myself thinking that the next time it happened I would say, “That’s completely backwards: in fact, causation is just correlation” and fling a copy of Hume’s first Enquiry at their head. Or at the screen, I suppose, but that image is less satisfying, because now who’s the crank on the internet, etc.

The critical point about a set of correlations if it is to become causal is that some of them must be in the future: there must be predictions. If you can provide a decision procedure for determining when a set of conditions have come together and then predict how the situation will evolve then you have a causal relationship, provided you have a ’strong’ prediction that can’t be explained by known causal relationships (the proposed relationship should be surprising).

Some might argue that occupying a Muslim-majority country with armies from Christian-majority countries, countries with especially controversial records in the region, was always going to end in tears without studying the 1914 invasion. However it could be argued that a study of the 1914 invasion would provide quite detailed knowledge of the kind of pain to come.

In a similar vein we could try to study the modern history of Iran for some clues as to how 70 million plus Iranians are likely to respond to military attacks on them by imperial alliances that are still held accountable for a 26-year dictatorship that made their current current government look like a haven of democracy, meritocracy and egalitarianism.

[I have written more on this view of causation while explaining why physicalism is dead, for the duration at least.  Despite being the orthodox school—no—because it is the orthodox school it is hopelessly inappropriate.  Our thinking is so bent in its direction now that such a metaphysics will only make our blind spots that much worse: see Consciousness Really Explained?.]

Jamal Dajani’s latest Mosaic Intelligence Report looks at what has been going on in Afghanistan. The outlook for victory in the ‘good war’ looks incredibly bleak.

Gordon Prather has an article arguing that the Bush administration legacy will be “the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime,” and Scott Horton has interviewed him on the subject. Prather shows a touching incredulity that nothing the Bush administration does in this area seems to make much sense.

Iraq has gone from second to fifth in the Foreign Policy Failed States Index, illustrating perfectly the success of the ’surge’. William Pfaff has a truthdig article, The Illusion of Saving Nations from Themselves, reminding us of how we got here:

The Bush government was elected in 2000 on a platform including vigorous opposition to the United States Army’s doing “nation-building.” Swedes, Danes, the European Union, and NGOs did nation-building. The United States Army was a fighting army.

This was the principle on which the new U.S. volunteer army was formed after Vietnam. It is the explanation why, after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the army looked on, bemused, while the people of Baghdad hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, tore down the phone and power wires, dug up the copper pipes, and destroyed the power generators of the city infrastructure, looting their own capital city of everything that had value and could be sold.

For those who haven’t seen it Seymour Hersh has an article at the New Yorker on Cheney’s covert activities of dubious legality in Iran. By spreading death and destruction in Iran it will probably strengthen the existing regime and undermine similar programmes elsewhere (in Afghanistan) may, whatever the ethics, at least have some chance of success.

Scott Ritter believes military action will be taken in Iran before the 2009 swearing in ceremony.

Time to move the recking ball on to the next victim to distract ourselves from all those high oil prices and the messes we have already created.

Via Juan Cole, here is Ron Paul suggesting that the current price of oil may reflect Israeli/US threats to attack Iran.

The OPEC president agrees and forecasts that it may hit $170 before the year is out.

Paul also talks about Resolution 362; here is the relevant passage:

(3) demands that the President initiate an international effort to immediately and dramatically increase the economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Iran to verifiably suspend its nuclear enrichment activities by, inter alia, prohibiting the export to Iran of all refined petroleum products; imposing stringent inspection requirements on all persons, vehicles, ships, planes, trains, and cargo entering or departing Iran; and prohibiting the international movement of all Iranian officials not involved in negotiating the suspension of Iran’s nuclear program;

As Paul hints, this is proposing a blockade, the consequences of which we can only imagine (it is difficult to see it reducing the price of oil).

The mindset in the preamble of the bill suggests one almost identical to that prevailing at the start of the Iraq war. Those that have been wanting a war should be happy. (And yes I see no reason why the Iranian 2008 WMD programme isn’t as much of a phantom as the Iraqi 2003 one was—see Insanity; I am done with discussing the topic.) But Iran is going to be a totally different proposition.

If it is diplomacy it is reckless diplomacy that must end in tears.

Some may blame AIPAC but the truth is we are all to blame.

In a comment on my Insanity article, Robert Duquette comments on George Monbiot’s critique of the climate change sceptics.

Monbiot should be careful about using an affinity of narrative to explain the global warming skeptics, because the same affinity can be used to explain the gw alarmists. Man-made global warming is the perfect, apolcalyptic morality tale. Monbiot also makes the mistake of questioning the motives of every scientists he disagrees with, while putting those who agree with him under no such scrutiny. Why not question the motives of scientists who work for governmental agencies, agencies that stand to increase in power and influence, and butgetwise, under any anti global warming regulatory scheme? When facts are not with you, question motives.

There has been a huge amount of tosh spouted by the environmental movement, with their own pathologies and a fondness for trying to persuade through fear and emotional manipulation. But these groups are distinct from government and climatologists.

Of course government agencies and climate scientists have an interest in believing that global warming is real, but they have a more powerful reason for believing otherwise, one that we all share. While the individual departments may have an interest in securing a bigger slice of the funding pie, every department adjoining them in academia and government has the opposite interest, and the governments, the ultimate paymasters for all of this, have the most powerful reasons of all to believe it was nonsense, and that is precisely the line many governments have taken. But those governments that have tried to hold this line have had to change their positions, and the governments that accepted what the climate scientists were saying have got themselves into a dreadful political pickle—predictably so—as they are now in a position of having to deliver on past promises, and delivering on those promises is not politically palatable (see, for example, Majesty, We Have Gone Mad).

The monstrous, colossal conspiracy theory doesn’t withstand the most cursory inspection. Meanwhile (and sorry for the repetition) the evidence of global warming that we were being warned about in the 1980s (I have had little reason to doubt it myself since the 1990s) are starting to manifest in front of our eyes. ‘Usage of the Thames Barrier has increased from once every two years in the 1980s to an average six times a year over the past 5 years’ according to a UK government report.

No single weather event and no particularly hot or cold year be chalked down to climate change but the overall trend is difficult to deny.

The talk of the polar ice melting is now being reinforced by the urgency with which the arctic powers (Canada, USA, Denmark, Norway and Russia) have started contesting the rights to extract oil around the North Pole. Before the changes in climate were observed the oil that was there was regarded as unexploitable and so there was no serious attempts to resolve the situation. Not any more. This Summer it looks as if we will have the an ice-free north pole. The less ice we have the less light gets reflected and so the warmer we get—it is feebback mechanisms like this that are causing the real concern.

I really, really want to believe that this is all alarmist nonsense. Who wouldn’t. But the climate scientists consistently seem to be able to defend their positions and the predictions they have been making seem to be manifesting all around me. Against this the ’sceptics’ have not said anything to me that lasts the most cursory inspection by a climatologist—you just have to wait for a few months or often weeks for their pet theories collapse. They shift around telling us that its not happening, its not man made, its benign and finally we find that well there is nothing we can do about it anyway so heck we may as well keep on partying and make the best of it.

My problem is that this is a the pathology of addiction, and as we should expect with addictions, the addiction screws up the host, providing a powerful illusion of being necessary and useful. (I explain in Climate-Change Denial exactly why I think the pursuit of materialistic goals as ends in themselves is a mug’s game.) The really awful part of this is the damage that the denial has been causing as it is much easier to make adjustments gradually than violently.

And Duquette argued yesterday in Environmentalism is a Luxury that now that the pain of higher energy prices has become apparent, the smart thing to do would be to abandon policies that make energy even more expensive.

If John McCain were a smart politician, and I’ve yet to be convinced that he is, he would reverse himself on cap and trade just as he has done on offshore oil drilling, leaving Obama and the Democrats to explain to their working class constituents why they have to bear the crushing burden of skyrocketing fuel bills in order to preserve the scenic ocean vistas and ecological values of globetrotting Democratic elites.

But McCain has now admitted that his proposed plans for offshore drilling will have no practical impact, but wants to stick with the policy anyway for its psychological effects—and of course he doesp; he wants to win the election in November. But it was precisely this issue that finished HRC—her gas tax pander backfired with a marginal win in Indiana. And look at how McCain’s credibility stacks up against Obama in the latest Gallup poll:

McCain, as much as dearly might like to, can’t touch the cap-and-trade policy: i) the Democrats would just have to replay some of the adverts that he has already broadcast and ii) it would blow away the only truly credible distance he can put between himself and the Bush administration, which he must establish to have a chance of winning.

Cheap gas has gone for ever. The reason that the adjustment is now so painful is because of the years of denial and the longer it is carried on the more painful it is going to get. Folks are staring to wake up to this reality. If anyone can convince me otherwise I will be delighted to hear.

[Part of a series of articles reviewing blogs and websites (here Jane Austen's World) on my blog-roll; see the about page.]

As I said in Kiss of Death, yesterday was disapointed by the national maritime museum in Greenwich, the highlight being a talk given at the start on the Death of Nelson, which could have been given anywhere. This I don’t think is much if at all the fault of the museum. One of the most important functions of museums seems to be to preserve artifacts and facilitate scholarly research but my concern is with public education, or perhaps my own use of museums to educate myself. I have long been an admirer of Jane Austen’s world, coming away from many articles feeling as if I had visited a museum (see, for example, From Classic to Romantic: Changes in the Silhouette of the Regency Gown and London’s Lost Rivers).

This is what I realised yesterday. Despite spending hours getting the train out to Greenwich and walking around this world-class museum, I learn more, much more from some of Vic’s articles, and they are more satisfying. For a museum to make sense it needs a narrative–a good guide, possibly a written one (after all that is what Vic is working with). I should have found a good guide book, selected a theme or two and made do with that.

If you have any interest in the regency period you could do worse than browsing the articles in Jane Austen’s world.

Yesterday I finally got round to seeing the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich (the one with the sexy longitudinal grid coordinates). Although regarded as the number one naval museums I found it personally disappointing, about which more in a later article.

I arrived for a talk on the death of Nelson, which was excellent and the highlight of the visit, and the guide said something that caught my attention. When Nelson asked Hardy to kiss Nelson our guide seemed to be very keen that we should understand that this wasn’t a sexual kiss—which I think is a historically respectable sentiment (whichever way you look at it people who are departing are not in the mood for sex) but otherwise I don’t see the point in making such a fuss, but this was not what caught my attention. According to the narrator Hardy knelt and kissed Nelson on the cheek and then administered what she seemed to call the ‘kiss of death’ (though I can find no other instance of the phrase being used in t