Political Theater and Theory of Mind

In the wake of Hillary’s statement that, “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables“, it got me thinking about the verbal slips that reveal a politician’s private thoughts:

• Obama: they cling to their guns and religion
• Romney: 47% who believe they are victims
• Trump, so many to choose from, but let’s take: I love the poorly educated.
• And now Clinton with her basket of deplorables.

You know damn well they discuss frankly who they think are idiots and precisely what they think of us, the electorate, once they’re alone with their friends and allies.  But in public the media has forced them to crop a few rehearsed thoughts into stilted sound bites, to stay ‘on message’, to harp on single themes.

Why do the ‘deplorables’ love Trump so much?  Because he strays from the script and shoots from the hip.  You may not like what he says but in a world of Stepford politicians his Tourettsian dialogue is something the public craves.

Hillary may have erred, but most of her base agrees with her.  Unfortunately, a lot of undecided voters will see her remark (correctly I believe) as revealing elitist sentiments, not unlike Obama’s ‘cling’ quote.  It’s an odd dichotomy that people are individually nuanced, but they don’t view others with the same nuance.  A failing, if you will, of our theory of mind.

Lastly, what does it do to a person – I can’t begin to imagine – to live in a world where the slightest slip of private thoughts into public statements costs you dearly and excoriates you so broadly?  We all have private thoughts but few of us are forced to classify so many of our thoughts as private while facing such a relentless megaphone.

Germinal by Emile Zola

For me personally, an amateur student of history and a lover of books, the stoic miners of Emile Zola’s 19th century French village will remain with me a long time.  The damp stifling horror of the mines.  The poverty and privations of the people.  Germinal brings to life a time that the impersonal chronology of textbooks can only sketch.

It’s not a quick and easy read, not a thriller, but neither is it difficult and it rewards the reader with startling depth.  At no time did I feel the writing was dated, perhaps because it’s a modern translation.  Zola is both a novelist with a powerful story and a political philosopher asking hard questions and refusing to settle for pat answers or to proselytize.  It helps to know a little of the history but it’s not necessary.  Zola fills you in as you read while Pearson (the translator) clarifies obscure terminology with footnotes.  In the Kindle edition, the footnotes work particularly well, popping up with the text instead of taking you away from it.

Important: read Pearson’s introduction after you’ve read the novel.  It has spoilers.  I hate spoilers.  If you don’t mind them or if already you know how the book ends, then the introduction is valuable to understanding the historical context.  If you don’t read it first, definitely read it afterwards.  Germinal is fiction but there’s a genuine tragedy behind it and Pearson will show you the powerful metaphors and leit motifs you may have missed.

Here are a few samples of Zola’s vivid writing that make the book so worthwhile:

such talk never made a man’s soup taste any better

And over these lifeless buildings, wrapped in their black shroud of coal-dust, hung the steam from the drainage-pump as it continued its slow, heavy panting, the last vestiges of life in a pit, which would be destroyed by flooding if this panting should ever stop.

All over the region, along roads still plunged in darkness, the herd was tramping through the mists of dawn, long lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse. Shivering under their thin cotton clothes, they walked with their arms folded, rolling their hips and hunching their backs, to which their pieces, wedged between shirt and coat, added its hump.

Bitcoin and Blockchains: Programmable Trust

Bitcoin has received all kinds of press, from the apocalyptic to the sycophantic.  Meanwhile its underlying blockchain technology has stealthily become an intense focus of research by the banking community.  Could this technology and mechanisms like it become an integral element in the future machinery of finance?  What are the implications for ordinary citizens?

Last October 2015, The Economist published a briefing on blockchain technology explaining how it works and what it implies – one of the most fascinating articles I read that year.   After reading, I felt that blockchains had the potential to change the 21st century more than credit cards, ATMs, and mutual funds changed the 20th.

I’ve annotated the article with Hypothes.is.  To read my annotations within the article you’ll need to join (for free) which I highly recommend and will discuss in another post at some point.

For the article, see The Economist, Oct 31st, 2015, The great chain of being sure about things.

In case you don’t wish to join Hypothes.is, I’ve included my annotations here.

This has implications far beyond the cryptocurrency

The concept of trust underlies exchange. During the 15th-17th centuries, the Dutch and English dominance of trade owed much to their early development of instruments of credit that allowed merchants to fund and later to insure commercial shipping without the exchange of hard currency, either silver or by physically transporting the currency of the realm. Credit worked because the English and Dutch economies trusted the issuers of credit.

Francis Fukuyama, a philosopher and political economist at Stanford, wrote a book in 1995, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, on the impact of cultures of trust on entrepreneurial growth. Countries of ‘low trust’ have close family culture who limit trust to relations: France, China, southern Italy. Countries of ‘high trust’ have greater ‘spontaneous sociability’ that encourages the formation of intermediate institutions between the state and the family, that encourage greater entrepreneurial growth: Germany, England, the U.S.  (I own a copy of Trust and haven’t yet read it – shame on me!)

I thought of this article on Bitcoin in that context – of the general need for trusted institutions and the power they have in mediating an economy, and the fascinating questions raised when an entirely new method of trust is introduced to society.

Trust is integral to human association and the concentric circles of society:  family, ethnicity, neighborhoods, city, and state.  How do we ensure trust within and across those circles? Throughout human history, how have we extended the social role of trust to state institutions? If a new modality of trust comes available, how does that change institutional structures and correspondingly the power of individuals and of institutions. How would it change the friction to growth and to decline?

Prior to reading this article, I had dismissed Bitcoin as a temporary aberration, mostly for criminal enterprises and malcontents. I still feel that way. But the underlying technology and it’s implications – now that’s interesting.

It is the third bucket that contains the most ambitious applications: “smart contracts” that execute themselves automatically under the right circumstances. Bitcoin can be “programmed” so that it only becomes available under certain conditions.

In other words, blockchain technology can facilitate a deferred payment system that works when the payer provides payment in escrow.  Like Kickstarter and other crowdfunding systems. It could manage deposits on purchase-and-sale agreements and handle escrows on legal judgments without a third party holding title to the money. The core financial system itself would ‘hold’ the money by ensuring no transaction took place against the payer’s funds that would make the future payment impossible.

Note that ensuring the ability to pay can be the simple calculation of ensuring liquid assets never fall below the owed amount or it could be complex, taking guaranteed future cash flow into account.  The latter is the kind of calculation a sophisticated blockchain system might be able to make if it held those guarantees of future cash flow.

Could a blockchain financial system be made into a complete deferred payment system for managing loans, mortgages, and coupon bonds? I don’t know how, since the source of those payments is outside the bitcoin system and generally doesn’t exist at the time of the loan or bond purchase. But imagine if a financial system was entirely built around a programmable trust system, then financial instruments themselves become a part of the logic of a company’s assets and liabilities. When a corporate bond coupon comes due, the company treasurer doesn’t create a transaction, instead the coupon payment is automatically transferred to the holder of the bond by the financial system itself. That is, the structure of the bond would be integrated, that is, coded directly into the financial system for automatic execution.

If a future government were to implement blockchain technology and legislate its adoption throughout the financial community (perhaps as an option, in parallel with the preexisting system), it could ‘write the code’ for legally certified instruments like stocks, corporate bonds, mortgages, car loans. It could further write legally permissible derivatives of those instruments (yes, derivatives have tremendous value in reducing risk when used wisely).

At that point, financial companies like Vanguard or Fidelity could issue mutual funds whose prospectuses assert that the only kind of instruments held by the fund were those certified by the government to use the legislated systems. This could reasonably allow safe and less expensive adoption of powerful financial instruments with far less risk to the system.

Sure there are plenty of flaws and dangers in this kind of a system and its complexity may be beyond what our current computer technologies can reliably secure.  But could this eventually be worked out to create a safer, less expensive, more transparent and more accessible financial system than we currently have? Would it help engender some of the trust that our financial titans have lost time and again?  There are enormous benefits to society if it can.

Maschinen über alles

In his article When Your Boss Is an Uber Algorithm [12/1/15 – MIT Technology Review], Tom Simonite tells how  algorithms used by Uber and Lyft nudge drivers toward more profitable behavior.  Nudge might be a hair charitable.  Force, control, and dictate seem more fitting.

By collecting passenger surveys (and controlling the questions in the surveys), by capturing a driver’s willingness to work longer or less pleasant hours, by calculating the delay before a driver responds to an offered fare, Uber and Lyft decide which drivers are offered which fares.  With some drivers drawing a considerable part of their income from fares, the pressure to abide is powerful.

Uber and Lyft go further and offer suggestions to their ‘independent contractors’: don’t talk too much, don’t talk about politics or your other business ventures, do provide snacks and beverages.  Of course, they know if their suggestions are followed.

Somewhere behind this helpful guidance is a human, but the direct interface to the driver is software and its connection to humanity is increasingly remote.

How long before the software acquires an AI component, if it hasn’t already, making the algorithm rendering judgment not one of predictable rules written by people but of machine-learned behavior whose rules are unseen and ever-changing?  Try pleasing a boss like that.

Without quite realizing it, the world has taken steps beyond Frederick Taylor and his stopwatch to a world of stopwatches that have minds of their own.  A world where ‘independent contractors’ struggle to follow the rules as they ebb and flow, to always be helpful and obedient, and to speak only when spoken to.

Will these machines help us gain greater independence or will they steal it for themselves and the people they work for?  And who are they really working for?

Tom Simonite has written a provocative piece based on the underlying research by Rosenblat and Stark published in Data & Society, and Lee, Kusbit, Metsky, and Dabbish, at Carnegie Mellon.

Autonomous Vehicles

In this sub-topic of Technology and Society, we explore the effect of the development of autonomous vehicles.  These can range from the obvious: single devices that travel on land, in the air, and through the water, to the less obvious: swarms of devices that have ‘group intelligence’.  The only requirement for this topic is that the devices are mobile, self-powered, self-guided, and man-made (including man-made biological).

Automobile ownership and housing:  Will there be a reduction in automobile ownership vs. membership in cooperative?  Will cars come to pick you up within minutes of a request and you’ll pay on a mileage plan, like a cellphone minute plan?  What are the effects of automatic, computer-guided car-pooling.  What are the effects on city/suburban choice of living, cost of housing, city planning, lifestyle, businesses.

The ownership society: Will autonomous drones change us from an ‘ownership society’.  In 2050,do we need any brick-and-mortar stores? Do we now rent cars and goods only as we need them, instead of owning them?  I mean, do you really need a fondue set?  Or a pressure-washer?  Or a torque-wrench, if you can have it delivered within 2 hours for a nominal fee?

Story of a Secret State

[*** WARNING: SPOILERS *** But do you care?  Though it may read like a thriller, this book is a memoir.]

I bought Story of a Secret State in an old synagogue in the Kazimierz section of Krakow, where once there were 65,000 Jews and now there are 200.  Jan Karski is one of seven aliases that Jan Kozielewski took during his work with the Polish underground.  He was a devout Catholic who delivered his first-hand account of the Holocaust directly to Roosevelt and to the British high command (he wasn’t granted time with Churchill).  His book is not primarily about that report, though that is what he’s most famous for – it’s about his work with the Polish underground, the ‘secret state’, that operated during the Nazi occupation.  Poland differed from France and other occupied states in that (by Karski’s account) it was wholly unyielding and uncooperative with the Germans.  That they had no Quislings.

The Polish Resistance achieved this by codifying in its founding principles that collaboration would be dealt with harshly: severe ostracism of anyone on friendly terms with Germans and quick death to those who betrayed members of the underground.

Karski was in the Polish artillery when he was captured by the Russians in 1939.  He finagled a transfer to the German side of Poland where he escaped before being sent to Auschwitz.  He served as a courier between Poland and the Polish government-in-exile, which was initially in France before moving to London.  On one mission he was captured by the Gestapo, beaten almost to death, and then liberated by other members of the underground.  Prior to another mission, he was secretly taken by Jewish leaders to a concentration camp in Auschwitz (not to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was the death camp – Auschwitz had several sub-camps).  They knew he was going to England on behalf of the Polish underground and wanted him to see the killings in the camps and bring the story to the world.  Which he did.  And he was generally disbelieved or ignored.

It’s a fascinating book that reads like a spy thriller, but is all true, subsequently verified by historians, and is one of the most powerful accounts of WW II by anyone.  And one of the saddest.

On a personal note, after buying the book I went to a bar mleczny or milk bar which is a traditional Polish fast-food joint (I don’t know why they call it a milk bar, they don’t serve milk).  I bought a cup of barszcz.  I used to hate it when I was young and my mother served it to me but the Polish barszcz is sweet and sour and marvelous.  Anyway, sipping the Polish barszcz in a corner of a traditional bar mleczny with a few other Krakovians who were quietly reading books and newspapers, I started in on Karski’s book.  Now that’s some serious atmosphere for reading about the Polish underground.

All The Light We Cannot See

Of the books that have influenced me, whose images and memories and thoughts stay with me, All The Light We Cannot See is among the most profound I’ve read in the last decade. Before reading it, I read Kristin Hannah’s Nightingale, which was excellent, but not on a par with this.

The story shows the lives of two children who came of age in Hitler’s web, one a blind girl growing up in occupied France, the other a brilliant German boy reluctantly indoctrinated in the Hitler Youth. As Doerr twines these two lives together in a plot filled with destiny, he shows how Hitler brought out the basest nature in people, how he empowered the worst, and who those people tend to be (not nationalities, but personalities). Werner is defined not only by his brilliance but by his heart. Though he knows right from wrong he lacks the toughness of his closest friend and of his sister to hold his course, leading to a life filled with regrets. Marie Laure lives with few regrets but great sadness. Her blindness creates dependencies on others that she has the strength to both appreciate and rise above.

You can feel Werner’s struggle with himself and Marie Laure’s struggle with a world that tears apart her life.  Without ever detracting from the story, reducing the tension, or pulling us from the flow of the novel, Doerr shows us who we are at bottom and what we can be when we rise.

He deepens the book by drawing fully even his minor characters and always speaking through them, never for them. The writing is lyrical but never boastful. He avoids the clichéd phrases that too many modern writers invoke for the appearance of lyricism. His language and metaphors are natural and evocative.

All The Light We Cannot See is a powerful, intricate story of a pivotal time with strong characters and beautiful writing and so much to say. Someday I know I’ll read it again.

After (or before) you read this book, if you want a true story of living under occupation and fighting Hitler from a position of desperate weakness, read Jan Karski’s Story of A Secret State. It’s a memoir that chronicles the Polish resistance written by one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century.