Echo Chamber Government
Tuesday, January 18, 2005, 03:39 PM - Politics
Most of the media reaction to Seymour Hersh's latest piece in the New Yorker has been about the purported secret missions into Iran. I find Hersh's main discussion about the growing non-accountability of Pentagon black operations to be much more troubling. Here's my synopsis:The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. ... The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as "facilitators" of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.Great, so we're going back to the old El Salvador protocol, which has already proven ineffective on so many levels, but this time it's on a global scale and without even the appearance of Congressional oversite. Compound that with the new mandate for CIA to provide politically correct analysis, and we've got a recipe for disaster.
[snip]
The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia. The President's decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A.
[snip]
The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. "It’s a very, very gray area," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.'s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. "Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, 'No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to 'prepare the battlefield.'"
[snip]
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys."
[snip]
... in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began "coming down critically" on analysts in the C.I.A.'s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded to see more support for the Administration’s political position."
[snip]
"...The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, 'Why are you doing this?' or 'What are your priorities?' Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it."
1. Too few people making decisions in an environment where they will hear only what they want to hear. This is never a Good Thing, no matter what the philosophical orientation, be it business or government. It tends to lead to disasters.
2. Too much power in the hands of a non-elected official. This structure that the Bush administration is setting up invites the overstepping of Constitutional boundaries. The scenario of a future Secretary of Defense leading a "cleansing" of the "corrupt" political system is now much closer to being possible. Because it has happened so often before throughout history, it's is pollyannaish to ignore the possibility. Remember, that's why the Founding Fathers insisted on separation of powers and a citizens' army.
Then there's this choice bit:
"Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.And just like it happened in Iraq? Again, it seems they're being told only what they want to hear. The conditions leading to the collapse of the communist bloc are not equivalent to the conditions in the Middle East and predicating a strategy on a purported equivalence is just dumb.
Unfortunately, the machinations of the Bush administration seem to be creating a government of echo chambers: one with too few voices and too few ears.
Blaming the Military
Thursday, January 13, 2005, 07:17 PM - Politics
Andrew Sullivan is touting this article by Michael O'Hanlon on the lack of planning for the occupation of Iraq. I disagree with Andrew's assessment. O'Hanlon's piece is a mish-mash of contradiction and his conclusions, taken to an extreme, are potentially dangerous.The core of his argument is:
The standard explanation for this lack of preparedness among most defense and foreign policy specialists, and the U.S. military as well, is that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and much of the rest of the Bush administration insisted on fighting the war with too few troops and too Polyannaish a view of what would happen inside Iraq once Saddam was overthrown. This explanation is largely right. Taken to an extreme, however, it is dangerously wrong. It blames the mistakes of one civilian leader of the Department of Defense, and one particular administration, for a debacle that was foreseeable and indeed foreseen by most experts in the field. Under these circumstances, planners and high-ranking officers of the U.S. armed forces were not fulfilling their responsibilities to the Constitution or their own brave fighting men and women by quietly and subserviently deferring to the civilian leadership.O'Hanlon then proceeds to bounce back and forth between justifying the position that "Phase IV" was unplanned; listing past examples of good and bad planning; and praising generals who did back-channel contingency planning in other situations. He ends with this:
So in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, Powell was right, and Clark was right, and the CINC's (sic) were effective instruments of American foreign policy. They were prepared to challenge their civilian superiors — not on direct orders, but in ongoing policy debates where the civilian authorities would have preferred silence but had no political or legal right to insist on it. Alas, the uniformed military did not do as well in recent times. Had General Franks or General Myers acted similarly when the Iraq war plan was devised, the country would have been better served.The central failing of O'Hanlon's article is that it ignores to take into account the climate of the time.
1. The Bush administration was dead-set against nation building. Our military was not to be used as a security force, especially in internal disputes such as Bosnia. The message to the military was loud and clear when it was announced that the Institute for Peace (or whatever it was/is called) would be shut down. No more soft missions. No more molly-coddling. Just straight up kick-ass force deployment. Post-planning was for others.
2. All post-invasion planning efforts, other than the Chalabi fantasy, were squelched. The State Department was continually marginalized. Again, the message was clear. While the Powell doctrine sounded great on paper, Powell was actively prevented from implementing it.
3. From the beginning, Rumsfeld & Co. were on a mission to reform what they saw as a bloated, Army/labor-centric military. The emphasis was on high-tech and special forces. They had an agenda, and this was going to be their test case. Objections were nothing more than reactionary stonewalling.
4. Some generals did object, such as Gen. Shinseki, and were promptly shunted aside. Rumsfeld promoted those who would play ball, like Tommy Franks. Whether those promoted agreed with the Secretary or kept quiet because they saw what happened to the objectors is beside the point. The message from Rumsfeld was clear: my way or a ruined career. He was not willing to listen to other views, something that O'Hanlon admits in his conclusion was properly done in the Clinton administration.
Given all this, O'Hanlon's criticism of the military leaves a sour taste. It's the same kind of argument where the blame, and punishment, for atrocities is laid on the grunts and the officers giving the orders are excused.
Taken to extreme, O'Hanlon's argument asks for an involvement in the public sphere by the military that is unwarranted and potentially dangerous. The military in a democratic society must be subservient to the will of the people's elected representatives. The military should not be allowed a substantive role in the formation of policy other than as directed by the elected representatives. This may not lead to the strongest or most focused military organization, but that's the cost of democracy.
O'Hanlon suggests that our military leaders in some way failed their Constitutional duty in their lack of planning. I strongly disagree. First, the essential mindset of a proper military organization is adherence to the chain of command. Let's keep it that way so that an elected representative remains the Commander-in-Chief, both in fact and in name. Second, there is no Constitutional duty of voice an opinion. There is a protection for those who desire to, but there is no requirement to do so. And third, (unfortunately) there was significant Congressional and public support for an invasion of Iraq. Granted, there was significant second-guessing about Rumsfeld's plans, but his plans did not rise to the level of dereliction.
If O'Hanlon's thesis is correct that the military failed a constitutional responsibility, then that's saying that the military has some independent status outside of the established chain of command. That, to me, is a very dangerous road to go down.
Social Insurance
Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 06:54 PM - Economy
A good write-up on The Agonist by Numerian on the distinction between Social Security as an insurance system and Social Security as an investment program. It's an important distinction to make.Recently I've read pundits (can't find a link) who, in support of the Bush "reforms", brand Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, where the first in reap all the benefits. By this logic, one could brand all insurances as Ponzi schemes. For the past how-many years, I've paid my health insurance premiums. Yet, fortunately, I have in no way received a suitable return on this "investment". That lack of return is not a reason to dismiss health insurance.
Similarly, Social Security is an insurance vehicle. I'm not just insuring a modicum of retirement income, I'm insuring against disability and I'm insuring my family against certain financial shocks in the event of my untimely death. I do not expect to get rich off my Social Security insurance any more than I expect to get rich off my health insurance.
Just as I am perfectly happy to NOT reap a return on my health insurance premium payments, I will be ecstatic if, when the time comes, my personal good fortune allows me a comfortable retirement so that I can decline to receive my Social Security payments. And I will in no way feel taken, because that's how insurance works.
And yes, Social Security is a forced-participation insurance program. But then, so is car insurance a forced-participation system: you can't register a car without proper insurance. Forcing car insurance is justified because it protects others from your possible negligence. So too, Social Security protects both me and others from the depradations of economic disaster with the ensuing social ills of unnecessary poverty visited upon hard-working people, one of whom just may be me.
The Republican "reformers" point to the supposed benefits of investing in the Market as a justification for their proposals.
It was in the 1970's that Wall Street began to propagate the notion that equities provided superior returns to all other investment alternatives. The academics who first propounded this view were cautious to point out that this superior return was the product of long term averaging, and interregnums of flat or down markets could last many years. This reality became lost in Wall Street's avidity to look at stock market performance as the only true and reliable indicator of a company's success.By placing all their eggs in the one basket of the Market, the "reformers" are gambling that the inevitable market corrections won't impact retirees' investment accounts. But isn't that how investments work? When the market is up, invested value goes up. When the market is down, invested value doesn't stay up.
What becomes clear is that the true "reform" that's being proposed is not of the Social Security system per se, but of the very nature of the social contract embedded in the Social Secuirty system. To me, taking away my insurance and replacing it with an investment gamble is a bad and irresponsible reformation of the social contract.
Solar
Monday, January 10, 2005, 11:32 AM - Tech
This one from Technology Trends is both fascinating and optomistic. Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed nano-crystals that promise to capture 5 times more solor energy that the best current solar cells.Edge 2005 Annual Question
Thursday, January 6, 2005, 06:20 PM - Ideas
Some of the responses I particularly enjoyed from the edge.com 2005 Annual Question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?":CARLO ROVELLI
I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be the useful and convincing one.RUPERT SHELDRAKE
I believe, but cannot prove, that memory is inherent in nature. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.DONALD HOFFMAN
I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.LEE SMOLIN
I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory. I believe this because I have never encountered an interpretation of the present formulation of quantum mechanics that makes sense to me. I have studied most of them in depth and thought hard about them, and in the end I still can't make real sense of quantum theory as it stands. Among other issues, the measurement problem seems impossible to resolve without changing the physical theory.JUDITH RICH HARRIS
I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three—not two—selection processes were involved in human evolution. The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness. The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty—not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it.
More Folksonomy
Tuesday, January 4, 2005, 04:47 PM - Tech
A strong article by Andrew Mathes on folksonomies.1. He makes the distinction between a categorization system and a classification system. The flat space of a folksonomy is a category system. The formal hierarchy of a taxonomy is a classification system.
2. He points out, as I did earlier, that a folksonomy can be the beginning point for the creation of a formal taxonomy. I'd extend this by saying that if the universe of users is controlled, say by profession, then the utility of the folksonomy as a collection of terms improves.
3. He references the strengths and weaknesses of system creators, be they administrators, creators, or users. One clear strength of folksonomy is that the meta-tagging is based on how terms are referenced by users.
4. Group folksonomies, such as del.icio.us, add a component of communication that enhances the creation of the meta-data:
This tight feedback loop leads to a form of asymmetrical communication between users through metadata. The users of a system are negotiating the meaning of the terms in the folksonomy, whether purposefully or not, through their individual choices of tags to describe documents for themselves.5. The barriers to entry are much lower with a folksonomy system, such as del.icio.us, than a formalized taxonomy system, because the user is creating the terms and is not forced to learn a system of terms first.
6. Based on Andrew's discussion, I conclude that there's an important difference between the definition of a word and the definition of a term. A word is used to describe something in particular. A term is defined by the objects it is used to categorize:
Examining all photos in Flickr tagged with "iraq" includes photographs (of)Iraq, US troops in Iraq, as well as photographs of war protests. Although this may not be a community, what we are seeing is a group of people helping to define a term with their photographs and metadata.7. An interesting direction:
I hypothesize that it follows a power law scenario. That is, the most used tags are more likely to be used by other users since they are more likely to be seen, and thus there will be a few tags that are used by a substantial number of users, then an order of magnitude more tags that are used by fewer users, and another order of magnitude more used by only a handful of users. Examining this sort of distribution of tag use could give a better indication of whether a folksonomy converges on terms and foster consensus, or if as the user based grows the vocabulary grows at a more even rate, and the distribution of terms flattens, perhaps indicating less agreement.8. Another interesting direction:
The use of a folksonomy to supplement existing classification schemes and provide additional access to materials by encouraging and leveraging explicit user metadata contributions is a possible area for research and further development in information retrieval systems. If information retrieval systems begin to incorporate user-centered information management tools, the organizational schemes developed by the users have the possibility to be of great interest to other users and improve the systems.I wonder if it is workable for del.icio.us to include two tag fields - one for tagging the article, and a second for tagging the tags. This could be the beginning of a classification system.
Moral Hazard
Tuesday, January 4, 2005, 04:42 PM - Economy
A daughter used the phrase "moral hazard" the other day. I followed up with a little bit of googling. I ran into this:The government can and sometimes does take a similar approach. It can give so little aid to those in distress that it provides little encouragement for people to put themselves in the situation, but it then provides little help for those in distress. As it expands a program to provide more aid to those in distress, it also encourages people to put themselves in distress. If people are paid to be poor, some will become poor. If people are paid to have children out of wedlock, some will. If people are paid to be unemployed, more will be unemployed. Thus government programs that act to insure citizens against some misfortunes have a basic tradeoff that cannot be escaped.Fair enough, I guess. Unstated, but worth noting, is that there is a moral hazard in not providing a program; a person without unemployment insurance and no job can tend to steal. So the question to ask is which morally hazardous situation is better to accept - freeloaders or theives and the consequensial additional costs to the jurisprudence system.
That doesn't mean that all situations are governed by moral hazard calculations. The view that they are only leads to thinking typified by this insufferably arrogant and pompous quote culled from Peter Gosselin's article in the LA Times (via DeLong):
Some financial industry executives and Bush administration officials suggest that the rise in bankruptcies reflects profligacy among Americans. They are particularly incensed about Chapter 7 bankruptcies, which let people effectively wipe out their debts after forfeiting most of their assets but not their future earnings. These critics of the law want to change it by making it harder to go bankrupt.This suggests that everyone who buys fire insurance intends to burn down their house.
A Chapter 7 filer is a predatory borrower, Assistant Treasury Secretary Wayne A. Abernathy suggested in a speech last year, someone who "in a calculated way borrows as much as he can, with little thought of paying it back, or in some cases, with no intention of paying it back."
Abernathy's type of reasoning does not take in the full context of a moral hazard. For instance, with no Chap.7 protection, lenders are incented to allow clients to over-extend. This is the way the company stores used to work. It's called economic slavery. I would hope that Mr. Abernathy is not in favor of that.
Personalization
Tuesday, December 28, 2004, 02:57 PM - Tech
Just reading Chris Anderson's article The Long Tail (from Jon Udell). He ends with a comment:This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare.I've never been a real fan of "personalized" sites because most of them that I've visited or heard discussed use personalization to restrict content. Your past habits are used to present current content. You looked at these news articles in the past, so here's some more of the same. What I don't like is presumption that the loss of serendipity and the blinders placed on my exploration of content is beneficial to me.
The personalization Anderson refers to, such as that at Amazon, is based on comparing my selections with selections made by the group and providing feedback from the group. Rather than constricting content, this type of personalization removes blinders by showing pathways to break habits. That's a beneficial service - call it guided serendipity.
It's similar to the folksonomy aspect of del.icio.us. The big difference, of course, is that while Amazon drives the selection algorithm, the selection process on del.icio.us is driven by the tags each user chooses to use.
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