Friends are Electric

There are exactly five Nobel Prizes awarded every year, with one more masquerading as a true Nobel Prize.  Our friend Alfred specifically set up three of these five prizes to reward scientific developments which have benefited human kind.  In the case of the peace prize, an individual or individuals who have furthered the cause of world peace, and with literature, those who further the understanding of what it means to be human.  Whether these awards have always reflected their original purpose is open to question.  This is not the question for the moment, however.

There is another prize, one which ostensibly seems to be awarded for scientific achievement in a field of study.  Of course, this field is as unscientific as the study of history, but few realise or are willing to accept that.  I speak, of course, of that mighty social science, economics.

There is no doubt that  the prizes in medicine, chemistry and physics are all rewarding true scientific achievement.  But what makes these fields scientific and economics not?  I would argue that it is the nature of what is being studied.  Medicine, strictly, would not exist without purposeful human study, but the subject of their study, biological organisms, would.  The same can be said about chemistry and physics, as prior to humans both played the same role they do now in the universe.  Economics, however, is entirely different.  It is emergent from human behaviours.  It is not separate and independent from humanity.  In short, it is not universal.

Economics is a social science.  Social sciences are quite unfortunately named, since they have little if nothing to do with science.  Which is not to belittle them, merely condemn them to a specific sort of operation, ideally closer to that of the humanities than the natural sciences.  However, that is a discussion for another time.  Being a social science, economics must understand that what it pretends to be is false, that it is not, as said above, universal and is, more importantly, not fundamental.

Not fundamental.  No other social science, humanity or indeed natural science places itself on such a pillar of self-importance.  Economics claims that only economics is the lense which we can judge our actions, plans and programs.  Perhaps other fields would make such claims if they were in a position to, but certainly we would recognize the absurdity of judging everything through the principles of  anthropology.  It is not that anthropology has nothing important to tell us, quite the opposite really, it is that a single lens view of society is an impossibly terrible way of running things.

The reason why no other social sciences have Nobel Prizes?  None of them have rich backing organizations.  That is how this prize came about, a Swiss bank funded the prize, a Nobel Memorial Prize.  I would argue that they did so to increase the credibility of the field as a science, rather than as just one of many social sciences which we attempt to understand our society with.

A final point on the relevance of a prize in economics: other fields attempt to describe laws of nature, but the way nature functions does not change based on these laws, not true for economics.  For example, gravity works as gravity no matter how we describe it, be it Newtonian, Relativity or some future Quantum-Gravity theory.  Economics does not behave this way, if a new mindset takes over, the way the system itself functions can change.  This is because it is an emergent system which requires humans, or something similar, rather than fundamental to the nature of the universe.

An idealist is someone who follows a set of beliefs blindly, with no regard to the real world, and hopes to have the world adopt their ideas.  There is usually negativity in the word, as someone who is an idealist lacks meaningful contact with the real world where they actually dwell.

I think that this is moderately backwards.  Certainly there are some traces of idealism in those who, often correctly, point out how we as humans could be better.  These people, however, are not the truest idealists.  Nor are they the ones deserving of the condescending undertone of the term.

The true idealists in the world today are those who seriously think that we, as individuals, as a city, province, country or world can continue to live the way we live without consequence.  Without change.  Without taking active part in this change.  The idealists are those who preach the preeminence of the market’s god-hand in deciding fate.  They fail to grasp the true interconnectedness of things, the fallacy of universals and the way the world really works.

It is up to those who understand, or at least understand better, to call these people out on their idealism.

Collective punishment is banned by international law in times of conflict.  Rightfully so, one is responsible for their own actions but certainly not for those of another.  War can never be civilized, but it can be made easier for those unfortunate enough to have it find them.

Collective punishment is not legal in Canada.  For the same reasons.  We would all be against the punishment of an entire city block for the actions of one resident, or the punishment of entire towns for the actions of a few.

But yet, it exists.  Not in the violent  sense mentioned above, not here and now at least (whether the war in Afghanistan is an incidence of collective punishment itself is a question worth discussing).

Insurance, automotive insurance, is an incidence of collective punishment on the basis of age and sex.   The onus, instead of being on the companies themselves to prove that the person is unsafe, is on the driver to prove that they are competent.  This would be understandable, with age as an approximation of experience, so long as those older people just beginning to drive are also subject to the same fees.  And if sex did not factor into it.

But it does.  And so the situation is one of collective punishment against young people in general, with young males punished to a greater extent.

Statistics, is claimed, proves that these groups are more likely to be in an accident and are thus more costly to insure.  This may be so, but it is the company which must show that a particular person, not a general person, is a greater risk and thus warrants a greater rate.  Sexism is unacceptable under all circumstances. Age discrimination is equally unacceptable but a lack of experience is, in this case, I believe a defensible cause for an increased rate.

Current norms are unacceptable, whether or not one could truly qualify them as a case of collective punishment.

What is the purpose of an education?  Forget for a moment post-secondary education specifically.  Much more generally: Why do we go to school?

Well, early on we go to school because its the law.  Why is it the law?  Democracy does not function with an illiterate population.  Truly, one of the major reasons why the residents of what would become Canada pushed for self-government is because individual farmers lacked the resources to educate their children on their own.  They needed the whole of society to support the education of a child.

Did they want an education for their children so that they could work?  In part.  They wanted a better life for their children and wanted a better society to live in.  Work is part of that, but not even the most important part.  Educated masses were the goal, for educated people are more difficult to push around.  It was a way to preserve gains.

Fast forward.  Why do we go to university? To get work? Hardly.  Work is important, and many of us have deluded ourselves into thinking that the goal of our education is a job at the end of it.  Like those who believe they are voting for a party or prime minister, they are not exactly wrong, just confused.  With government, we elect someone to represent us and indirectly select a governing party and prime minister.  With school, the work which comes after is not the goal but a desirable side effect.  The goal is to make citizens of students.  Citizens who can think and question.

Thats how it is.  As for how I think it should be, I believe that the government should only concern themselves with citizenship. Specific technical skills should be left to vocational training, which itself should be handled by the industry or professional organizations.  For example, provincial professional engineering organizations should run engineering schools, which may be associated with universities or collages, but not necessarily.  Vocational training should feature apprenticeships, much like many collage vocational training programs already do.  The focus should be on the utilitarian technical skills rather than abstract knowledge, which belongs in the realm of citizenship focused schools.

The confusion of schooling for knowledge and schooling for technical skills is something I view as negative since it downplays the importance of citizenship in us all.  It is something we should focus on repairing.

While, at least in Ontario, the history curriculum is incredibly weak, I am fairly certain most of us are familiar with the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.  A truly important point in the development of the Canadian nation.

While this was not the only important event in the Seven Years War, it can be seen as a pivotal one, the turning point in the Canadian theater of the conflict.  The battle itself predicted the outcome of the war and shall be considered one in the same for the sake of argument.

In broad terms, a global perspective, the battle itself and the war by extension was a defeat of the French Empire by the British Empire on a generally worldwide scale.   The French colony of New France was merely a pawn in negotiations at the end of the war.  It is well known that had the British seen more prestige or a larger profit to be made in sugar plantations than they had in the fur trade of what would become Canada, then perhaps France would have regained their colony.  However, the French Empire ceded New France, the colony of Quebec, to the British.

From a French nationalist perspective, the battle and the war were a humiliating loss.  The English were an oppressive, occupying power, not liberators.  While little attempt was made to assimilate the French Canadians, this perspective is not unreasonable.

From a British nationalist perspective, it was a victory.  The allowances made for the French Canadian people were seen as unreasonable, especially in the 13 American colonies.

Neither of these perspectives, however, represents what is needed from a Canadian perspective.  The forbearers of one segment of Canadians were defeated by the forbearers of another part of the population.  Since Canada is a multicultural experiment this poses some difficulties.  How, for example, does someone celebrate our shared history while some see it as a triumph and others as a defeat?

I am myself largely of British ancestry, while possessing some French as well.  I grew up in a French Canadian town outside of Quebec.  The battle and the war were treated as a victory.  I do not think this is the way to deal with the event.  It is too simplistic and I feel as though it places too much emphasis on our historical inclusion in the British Empire.  Certainly, we are members of the British commonwealth and have much shared history and culture, but we are an independent nation with our own complex and interesting history and culture separate from our partners in the commonwealth and it is time we embraced this.

The question is how do we interpret this battle, this war.  Canada was founded largely through an alliance between both French and English Canadians.  Their work together lead to confederation.  Without the other party, neither the French nor the English could have been successful.  Certainly other word events, such as the British actions towards the Confederate States of America, helped found the nation of Canada.  Without the work of the Canadian Fathers of Confederation, however, Canada as we know it would not have worked out.

There were a great many years between the 1763 end of the war and the formation of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada in  1791, their unification in 1841 and the final creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.  One cannot discount the numerous important events that took place in these intervening years.  However, these years, as well as all the years since 1867,  do lend something to our shared understanding of the battle and thus the war.

Since 1791, perhaps earlier, Canada and that which preceded it has had two European cultural groups living to a large degree peacefully side by side in the same place, and since 1841 under the same government.  For no less than 169 years this has gone on.  Aside from a brief American incursion during their War of Independence and during the War of 1812 and a few scattered and minor rebellions, Canada has been largely peaceful since the Seven Years War.

So how then do we interpret the Seven Years War and the pivotal Battle of the Plains of Abraham?  As a victory or a defeat?  As a victory and a defeat?

We interpret it as the event which put together, in the same place, two different but similar cultural groups and allowed them to act constructively together in the future to build the nation we now call Canada.   The result of the battle may have been a defeat for the French Empire, but French Canadians have been able to practice their culture and speak their language ever since.  The result may have been a victory for the British Empire, but that empire is no more.

The result for Canada was that the right people were able to work together to found a truly interesting experiment.   Not a perfect entity.  Not a static entity.  Not anything that had been tried yet.  An experiment.  The Canadian Experiment.  And while not all aspects of this grand experiment have been successful, overall the experiment has been successful and warrants further study.

I have never made direct mention of them before, yet I constantly have been discussing the foolishness of their ideology.  And of the many undesirable direct consequences of their ideology. And now a direct attack by those who seek to destroy what for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, citizens of the world have fought for.

The right to self determination.

This is sparked by an exceptionally ignorant editorial in this week’s issue of Imprint, the University of Waterloo student newspaper.   The editorial was titled No government is good.

What, exactly, is so wrong headed about this argument?  The first and most important problem is the argument that a non-functioning government is the best form of government, as though the people we elected to govern our nation are not up to the task  of it.

This idea has its source in a couple of deeply flawed ideas.

The first is the confusion between self interest and disinterest.   The former being what modern economics demands we operate solely by.  The later which democracy functions by.  Certainly economics is an interesting field of the social sciences, as important as any other, but it alone does not have the rights and responsibilities to run government, or any type of government policy.  Human beings are not solely self-interested beings, they are an irreconcilable combination of self-interest and group-interest.

Irreconcilable.  Combination.  Digest what that means for a moment.

Both factors are important for a functional human being.  Leave self interest for where it is best, and leave government to disinterest.  Society functions not based on the wild swings of the market but rather on the interactions of the human beings that make it up.  Interactions which do involve the buyer-seller relations described by economics but also the family, friends, neighbour, etc. relations.   When determining government policy, we must not enter with the thought “How can I get the best deal for myself,” but rather “What policies and practices are going to benefit society as a whole most.”

Ethics.  Operating for the greater good rather than the personal good or the private good.  When I am done school, self interest says that I should no longer care about education (unless I have children).  Group interest tells me this is the highest level of foolishness.  For social reasons as well as economic.  Certianly the old adage that the youth are the future does hold true and influences this, as employees and future employers as an economic argument but, more importantly for the fabric of society, education is the process by whch we train the next generation of citizens to act in the ethical fashion.

The second source of this ignorant argument is the corporatist.  The cult of the professional.

The ideology, which I am unsure if the writer even knows he subscribes to, is the principle that any task should be left to professionals and that the untrained cannot have an opinion, or an opinion which has an effect on the final outcome, about any topic which they themselves have no professional training or knowledge in.  Corporatism has its place, having an MBA decide the direction of pure scientific research would be foolish, since the MBA has no skills to help them.  Where corporatism is most dangerous is in government.

In government, corporatism has two important outcomes.  The first is that government must be run by professionals.  The environment ministry must be run by environmental scientists, since science is unbiased and impartial.  But are the scientists themselves biased?  And since they are scientists, they have no right to discuss policy with the natural resource departments, since environmental science is not the same as earth science.  And neither are the same as human resources, or finance or transportation.  Never mind the fact that all of these departments can be horribly interrelated to such a degree that any single specialist would never be able to see the big picture, the possible outcomes for other departments.  No, if you are not a professional in the field then your opinion has no validity.

Of course, the parliament itself is dominated by nonprofessionals.  The people elect it, and the people are not professionals in the art of government.   This is either solved by having professionals select government or by having the people select from a list of certified professionals.

Either case, our right to self determination goes out the window.   Which is the second important outcome.  We lose our right to govern ourselves.

Which is what the article is all about.  We have no right to determine how we want our society to be governed.  We are to be reduced to a passive role where the only vote of any consequence is which brand of toothpaste we purchase and from which store.   A mere mockery of democracy where societies interest is confused with the interest of large companies.

I can think of three main reasons why someone would care passionatly about spelling, and none are flattering.

The first relates to bitterness.  I can imagine someone caring passionatly about spelling if they were forced to learn to spell perfectly from a very young age.  These people would be bitter about all this wasted time, and take out the angstiness they feel on the world at large by always taking the time to point out every spelling mistake they see.

The second is a serious lack in pattern matching ability.  If you are so handy capped, you may be unable to understand the meaning of a word if it is not exactly spelled out.  In some cases, this is a legitimate worry, for instance form and from.  The difference in stratigraphy and stratgiraphy, however, is slight.  Anyone being a stickler in the later case is probably just an asshole.

The third and final reason I can think of why anyone would care passionately about spelling is a superiority complex.  You correct spelling because it gives you something by which you feel you can legitimately place yourself above other people.  In this case you are an asshole.

Now, before anyone tells me that correcting spelling comes from a legitimate desire to protect the english language, or even from love of it, I’ll point out that if you truly cared you would cease preventing its natural progression.  I would also inquire about your slang usage, and whether you use the original spellings as layed out by the original dictionaries.   The dictionary spellings reflect common usage today, which has often changed over the years.  The original was written out before the majority were literate, and thus reflects closer how whoever wrote it down felt it should be spelled.  I understand that those who care will continue to care and force their ridiculous nitpick on the word as a whole, and feel as though any transgression is the greatest crime imaginable (except of course suggesting that they are misguided), but for all of us who don’t care or who feel hostile towards their tyrannical behaviour, I’m with you.  I’ve got your back.

If their purpose was only to provide a snapshot reference of a language at a given time, one could successfully argue that dictionaries have a purpose which sufficiently justifies their existence.  This is not the current state of affairs, and the usefulness of dictionaries should be questioned.  Perhaps we should even go as far as to question the very existence of them.

Language is an organic thing.  It grows and develops naturally through continued use.  Words and phrases obviously fall into disuse with time, but the structure of language itself is also subject to change. The way we spell and pronounce words today is very different than the way they were done in the past.  Its the natural evolution of language.

Dictionaries function as repositories of `truth’.  They are used as the truth on the subject of language.  If common usage differs from what is contained between their covers, then common usage has deviated from the greater truth and must be corrected. This acts to prevent the natural growth and development of language as a whole.

Language is one of the most important aspects of culture. Dictionaries and their truths act to restrain the natural development of language, and thus of our culture as a whole.

The next time someone quotes a dictionary to prove a point, you would do well to question their motives and arguments. Agents of regressive forces should be resisted.

To anyone who lives within Canada, resentment of Toronto is a known but potentially strange phenomenon.  If you are not aware of it then you are probably from Toronto.  You may also live near another major Canadian city, and resent it for much the same reason which I theorise.  I personally hail from Northern Ontario, which is important as we probably have the greatest resentment for Toronto in the entire country.

As the title suggests, I believe that colonialism is to blame for these feelings.  Toronto is the economic capital of Canada.  Any reasonable person would admit this fact.  It follows that many international companies have their Canadian head offices in Toronto, as well as many Canadian companies.  This means that a large percentage of the decision making power in the Canadian economy is located in Toronto.  When a factory, mine or mill is closed by the head office of a company, likely located in the city, it is other parts of the country which suffer.  So, by virtue of housing these companies, the city is seen as responsible.

Beyond this, companies tend to place all of the management positions in the city.  This makes sense from their perspective as it keeps their corperate headquarters localised.  But this has the effect of keeping many of the high paying, non-directly productive jobs in Toronto.  From the perspective of the rest of the country, however, it seems as though the city itself is parasitising the country, feeding off the success of others while contributing only to its own well being.

Both of these factors, the disconnect between control structures within the city and the front line elsewhere and the parasitic relationship the city has with the rest of the country feel very much like colonialism without the violent  physical oppression.  If you add the media control and the fact that the rest of the country routinely hears local news from Toronto as relevant to their own location, you start to get more of the cultural aspects of colonialism as well as the economic which have already been described.

People within Toronto are unlikely to have an idea about the goings on in the province outside their city.  This is akin to the way many Canadians feel when watching “Talking to Americans” or other such programs.  The cause is the same: the colonial power has no need to know of the goings on in the colonies.

Within Ontario itself, Toronto also plays the roll as political capital.   Again, the reasons why the city is so dominant is clear to anyone who pauses to examine the situation, especially with regard to population and distribution of population.  But, again, to those who exist elsewhere in the province, there is still a dictatorship from the city.  Unless Toronto splits party support quite evenly, the votes of Northern Ontario, for example, are mostly irrelevant.  Once again, the structure is logical but leads to issues.

Considering the above arguments, it is easy to see why the rest of Ontario has an antagonistic relationship with the city of Toronto.  It is a political, economic and cultural oppressor and colonial power.  Within confederation, the same problems can be extrapolated to how the rest of the provinces feel towards Ontario.  The same considerations apply.  As well, anyone living near a major Canadian city, especially a provincial capital, can feel themselves sweeped away by the domination of the city.

The situation, by pure reason, makes perfect sense.  However, this pure reason is not considering the effects this has on people who live in the country, both inside and outside these cities.  The people within are largely oblivious to the way the rest of the country views them, which is largely part of the problem.   This is ignorance, pure and simple, and ignorance is an attribute to be combated.  People living elsewhere have the problem of feeling less important or slighted by this ignorance.  The end result is further dysfunction within Canadian confederation.

For now, I present no solutions or recommendations to this issue.  Personal education would go a long way to mitigating these issues, but I refuse to hold my breath.  Just as Torontonians are blissfully unaware, the rest of Ontario takes joy from its resentment. It is a truly dysfunctional relationship, but it helps to define the cultural landscape in this province and country, and perhaps that is worthwhile.

Or: Why scientific analogies are often fitting

So, just to recap: plate tectonics is the net result of many interactions within the Earth which results in a dynamic surface which features mountain building and, due to different topography, erosion, transport and deposition.  Suffice to say, in this analogy, plate tectonics is a force which changes the topography of a region.  Any further detail is confusing things.

Now, let us pretend we have a little robot which constantly seeks the highest point it can find.  This is not an absolute highest point, but a local maximum point.  It cannot simply find the highest point now and expect that to remain the highest point forever (we will say that this robot experiences geological time, rather than human scale time).  The robot must constantly search out the new maximum point, make small adjustments on a perpetual basis.

In this analogy, the robot is our actor and the altitude is our fitness function.  For whatever reason we have decided that peaks are ideal (this is simply for visualisation purposes, the topography can be n-dimensional).   The robot acts to seek out what is the ideal attainable solution at a given point in time.  Attainable because it is a local maximum, the robot doesn’t actually know if the peak it has found is a global maximum or not.

This is an example of an evolutionary algorithm, (I suggest reading people who actually study this subject, it is very fascinating and I know very little).  Applied to populations, it produces a very nice aggregate function which is excellent for product design and creation (assuming you are knowledgeable enough to navigate it properly).  Applied to an individual, it determines what is best for a given person at a given time, again assuming that such a person is capable of applying such a method.

The most important thing to note is that such functions are highly dynamic and that it is entirely impossible to know if one solution is the best possible solution or just the best so far.

Which brings us to a nice effect of averaging: everyone acting on their own tries out a huge number of possibilities.  Any solution anyone comes up with is entirely appropriate if they determine that it is best for them.  Best for them does not mean best for everyone, or even approaching a good composite function maximum.  Another effect of averaging: the more people creating to find a maximum, the closer everyone gets to finding the average global maximum.

This explains why things go out of style, the driving force of the topography of the system has changed what is considered best.  This also explains why some people defy our understanding: they have different variables which they seek to maximize.  They might also have found some local maximum they are comfortable with and are unwilling to explore around to find another, potentially higher, maximum.

I recommend  Wikipedia on evolutionary algorithms and on complexity economics as starting points.