Discovery

Yaarrr!

Every Internet success story can be summarized as:

1. Collect information about stuff.
2. Store stuff in one place.
3. Let people look through the stuff.
4. Enable interaction with the stuff they find.

Take Twitter. Please. The lure of Twitter is not messaging. If you want messaging just like Twitter, you could use a competing service like Identi.ca or you could deploy your own Twitter-like system using Laconi.ca. You can escape the need to scale the impossible scale.

Imagine. No more ugly Twitter timeouts. No more flakey service. Unfortunately, this would forgo Twitter’s main appeal: discovering other Twitter users. They’ve enabled the creation of a managed, centralized, searchable, API accessible database of people that other people want to connect with, 140 characters at a time. No other 140 character communications platform offers the same advantages.

Map

Similarly, a social networking platform like Facebook or MySpace provides a single place to find people. It’s possible that every person on Facebook could create their own web presence by making a home page or starting a blog. However, while that would provide a place where, serendipitously, long lost friends could find them, the chances of finding those long lost friends are improved if you take the basic idea of the web and distill it down to being just about searching, connecting, and communicating with people you know or knew.

Google is even more primal. Google is about finding stuff on the Web. You type in a single search phrase, click on search, and behold the power of PageRank. Google is like an army of people who went out and spent millions of man hours finding stuff on the web and linking to it. PageRank takes this mass of links and pools in a single massive database. Things that a greater number of people found and linked to rise in the search ranks while things that few people pay attention to languish in the dark recesses of the Web. Google provides a single text field that can take you to the highest reach of human achievement and the utter depths of human depravity.

Discovery is the killer application of the Internet. The Internet is a mesh network. There is no single path or hierarchy on a mesh network topology like there is in a star, ring, or bus topology to guide discovery. Each node must discover other nodes because each node has at least the theoretical capacity to be a peer or a gateway for other nodes. If this discovery does not take place, there is no network.

Every node on the Internet asks for the location of other nodes. If a node is not on the same network as the requesting, the node asks the default gateway to find out the location. This gateway usually knows about routes to other networks already. If it does not, it asks its peers to give it the required information. The request bounces back and forth through the Internet until the desired node is found.

This may work for networks but how do humans find other nodes to interact with? In the early days of TCP/IP it was easy. You downloaded a file from a central location and that told you where all the other nodes of interest were. This file was simply a mapping of an IP address onto a human readable name i.e.:

10.10.10.10 foo

This worked until the Internet grew so large that maintaining and downloading a giant file was impractical. The solution was DNS, a centralized system where a hierarchy of nodes maintained a dynamic distributed but centrally accessible database of human readable names to IP address mappings. Human readable names were split into hierarchical namespaces. At the very top were top level domains like .com, .org. and .net. Next came subdomains like google or twitter. These were followed by hostnames like www. The order proceeds from right to left with TLD at the right. Following traditional filesystem hierarchy, it would run left to right e.g. com.google.www. However, things are backward on the Internet so it goes www.google.com. Whichever way the domain name goes, it’s easier for someone to use it (and remember it) than an IP address. In effect, DNS was the first Internet search engine, focused on finding computers on the Internet.

Most people encounter Internet hostnames in a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This standard provides a uniform way to link to an Internet name. First comes a scheme like http:// or ftp:// which tells the computer which Internet protocol to use. Then comes the address or hostname, 10.10.10.10 or google.com. This can be followed by a path like /home/index.html and query strings or fragment identifiers. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the URL (and the World Wide Web), wishes it had a simpler format like http://com/google/www/home/index.html which is more logical but in a universe of HTML tag soup Tim Berners Lee regrets a lot of things.

Indeed Tim Berners Lee further addressed the problem of discoverability on the Web by leading an ongoing but so far futile exercise in ontology that seeks to create a Semantic Web. The Semantic Web seeks to provide standards to attach computer readable descriptions to Web resources. It’s basically the World Wide Web for your machine in the off chance it wants to browse the Web. Central to this idea is the notion of a triple. If you wanted to describe the author of http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/, Berners Lee’s home page, the triple would be:

1. Subject: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
2. Predicate: Author
3. Object: Tim Berners Lee

Unfortunately, most explanations of Semantic Web technologies like RDF aren’t this concise. The best candidate for a Web wide roll out is RDFa, which allows the RDF format to be embedded in HTML. The other barrier is that as soon as the Semantic Web was rolled out, someone would find a way to spam it. This is the problem of metacrap.

The fragility of metadata is an important concern because much planning for improving the web (such as the semantic web) is predicated upon certain flavors of metadata becoming widely adopted and used with care — something which, according to [Cory Doctorow], will not and cannot happen.Doctorow’s seven insurmountable obstacles to reliable metadata are:

1. People lie
2. People are lazy
3. People are stupid
4. Mission Impossible: know thyself
5. Schemas aren’t neutral
6. Metrics influence results
7. There’s more than one way to describe something

Other reasons that result in metadata becoming obsolete (crap) are:

1. Data may become irrelevant in time
2. Data may not be updated with new insights

This means search result will return outdated and incorrect data

This already happened with HTML meta tags which is one reason why search engines before Google were filled with all sorts of terrible results. In the beginning, media is touted as a way to finally bring high culture to the masses but, ultimately, it becomes just another way to find porn.

However, most people will never use RDF or Semantic Web technologies. Many people never even type URLs into their browser’s address bar. They use a search engine to find what they’re looking for. Most people don’t surf the Web on the raw technology of the Internet: they use an aggregator who presents a selected interpretation of the Internet which exposes selected Internet resources for the user to interact with. While the efforts of the teeming millions produce those resources, it is the aggregator who gathers the resources into something coherent. They enable discovery for the Internet user.

However, that’s not the ultimate goal. The “information distiller” who boils out superfluous Internet noise to arrive at the truly valuable data is the ultimate in discovery technology. In a recent piece, Adam Elkus provides an example of what sort of man-machine fusion an information distiller might be based on: John P. Sullivan’s Transaction Analysis Cycle (TAC):

“The Transaction Analysis Cycle is a pattern generator…centered on Analysis/Synthesis. Utilizing this framework, analysts can observe activities or transactions conducted by a range of actors looking for indicators or precursors…Individual transactions…have signatures that identify [them]…These transactions and signatures (T/S) can then be observed and matched with patterns of activity that can be expressed as trends and potentials (T/P), which can ultimately be assessed in terms of a specific actor’s capabilities and intentions (C/I). At any point, the analytical team can posit a hypothesis on the pattern of activity and then develop a collection plan to seek specific transaction and signatures that confirm or disprove its hypothesis. “

TAC may provide a model for better information distillation:

The essential element of TAC is the structured process by which the network develops information collection priorities. Truly crowdsourced TAC would mean more than just aggregation—TAC would help build greater qualitative understanding through analysis and synthesis. The network would actively synthesize information from the cloud, setting priorities about the kinds of “signatures” that must be observed, matched with patterns of activity into trends and potentials, and built into a collection plan that could prove or disprove the hypothesis created. Like Wikipedia, the model would marry the expertise and dedication of an administrative core with a mass of casual users. Collection, visualizations, and aggregation systems would be the processing tools for these networks. To be very clear, the purpose of visualization and aggregation systems would be as means rather than ends—tools to implement command concepts rather than conceive them.

Containing America: The Brutality Threshold

Strategy

America is one of two nations that can destroy civilization with its substantial nuclear arsenal. America has the world’s most powerful air force and navy. It has the army with the greatest arsenal of firepower. America is the only political community that can project power anywhere in the world. America dominates the Global Commons, sea, air, and space. America accounts for a fourth of global economic activity. It has a population of 300 million.

If you wanted to contain this colossus, how would you do it?

One strategy of containment is a variant of one the Soviet Union may have only semi-consciously followed. This strategy involves:

1. Spreading infantry weapons and light explosives into every corner of the globe.
2. Spreading training on how to use the weapons with basic infantry tactics.

This strategy has the following goals:

1. Make intervention in any area sufficiently painful that it deters the United States, with its low threshold for pain, from intervening.
2. If the United States does intervene, make the process as painful as possible and extract the maximum blood price in order to reinforce the historical low threshold.
3. Make the ability to resist sufficiently high to deter the United States with its low pain threshold but sufficiently low that a power following Hama rules can overcome it if they so choose. A nation who can cross the brutality threshold at will, something the United States cannot sustain, will have an advantage.
4. Be low cost.
5. Avoid direct confrontation with the United States.
6. Hedge in the United States until its internal contradictions topple it from its position.

Ricordi: Maxims 41-50

Francesco Guicciardini

Maxims 31-40 from Series C of Francesco Guicciardini’s Ricordi:

41. If men were wise and good, those in authority should certainly be gentle rather than sever with them. But since the majority of men are either not very good or not very wise, one must rely more on severity than on kindness. Whoever thinks otherwise is mistaken. Surely, anyone who can skillfully mix and blend the one with the other would produce the sweetest possible accord and harmony. But heaven endows few with such talents; perhaps no one.

42. Do not strive harder to gain favor than to keep your good reputation. When you lose your good reputations, you also lose good will, which is replaced by contempt. But the man who maintains his reputation will never lack friends, favor, and good will.

43. In my various administrative posts I have observed that when I wanted to bring about peace, civil accord, and the like, it was better, before stepping in, to let maters be debated thoroughly and for a long time. In the end, out of weariness, both sides would beg me to reconcile them. Thus, at their invitation, with good reputation, and without a single note of cupidity, I could could accomplish what seemed impossible at first.

44. Do all you can to to seem good, for that can be infinitely useful. But since false opinions do not last, it will be difficult to seem good for very long, if you are really not. My father once told me this.

45. He also used to say, in praise of thrift, that a ducat in your purse does you more credit than ten you have spent.

46. In my administrations I never liked cruelty or excessive punishments. Nor are they necessary. Except for certain cases that must serve as an example, you can sufficiently maintain fear if you punish crimes with three quarters of the penalty, provided you make it a rule to punish all crimes.

47. Learning imposed on weak minds does not improve them, and it may ruin them. But when it is added to natural talent, it makes men perfect and almost divine.

48. Political power cannot be wielded according to the dictates of good conscience. If you consider its origin, you will always find it in violence—except in the case of republics within their territories, but not beyond. Not even the emperor is exempt from this rule; nor are the priests, whose violence is double, since they assault us with both temporal and spiritual arms.

49. Tell no one anything you want kept secret, for there are many things that move men to gossip. Some do it through foolishness, some for profit, others through vanity, to seem in the know. And if you unnecessarily told your secret to another, you need not be surprised if he does the same, since it matters less to him than to you that it be known.

50. Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but that simply change the faces of those in charge. For you will still remain dissatisfied…

Ricordi: Maxims 31-40

Francesco Guicciardini

Maxims 31-40 from Series C of Francesco Guicciardini’s Ricordi.

31. Even if you attribute everything to prudence and virtue and discount as much as possible the power of Fortune, you must at least admit that it is very important to be born or to live in a time that prizes highly the virtues and qualities in which you excel. Take the example of Fabius Maximus, whose great reputation resulted from his being by nature hesitant. He found himself in a war in which impetuosity was ruinous, whereas procrastination was useful. At another time, the opposite could have been true. His times needed his qualifications, and that was his fortune. To be sure, if a man could change his nature to suit the conditions of the times, he would be much less dominated by Fortune. But that is most difficult, and perhaps even impossible.

32. Ambition is not a reprehensible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined more toward laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole end power, as is generally the case with princes. And when they make it their goal, they will level conscience, honor, humanity, and everything else to attain it.

33. The proverb tells us that a dishonestly acquired fortune is never enjoyed by an heir of the third generation. If this were so because such wealth was contaminated, it would seem that the man who acquired it ought to enjoy it least of all. The reason he is allowed to enjoy it was once told me by my father. According to St. Augustine, no one is so wicked that he does not do some good. God, who leaves no good unrewarded and no evil unpunished, give such a man enjoyment in this world as remuneration for his good deeds, only to punish him fully in the next for his evil deeds. But since ill-gotten gains had to be purged, they could not pass to a third heir. I answered that I did not know whether the proverb itself was true, since one could cite many experiences to the contrary. But if it were true, there might be another reason for it. The natural vicissitude of human affairs brings poverty where there once were riches. And this is more true for heirs than it is for the founder of the fortune. For the more time passes, the more easily do changes come about. Furthermore, the founder, the man who acquired the fortune, is more attached to it. Just as he knew how to acquire it, so he also knows the art of keeping it intact. And being used to living frugally, he does not squander it. But heirs do not have the same attachment to a fortune they have come by effortlessly. They have been reared in wealth but have not learned the art of earning it. Who can wonder, then, that they let it slip through their fingers, either through waste or carelessness?

34. All things whose end comes about not through violence but through gradual wearing away have a much longer life than you would at first suppose. We can see this in the example of a consumptive who is judged to be at his end but who lives on, not just for days, but for weeks and months. So, too, in a city that must be taken by siege, provisions last much longer than anyone would have thought.

35. How different theory is from practice! So many people understand things well but either do not remember or do not know how to put them into practice! The knowledge of such men is useless. It is like having a treasure stored in a chest without ever being able to take it out.

36. If you are seeking the favor of men, be careful never to give a flat refusal to anyone who makes a request of you. Rather, you should give evasive answers, for it may happen that someone who asked for something will not need it later, Or else circumstances may arise that make your excuses seem convincing. Furthermore, many men are foolish and easily swayed by words. Even without doing what you could not or would not do, you can often leave a person well satisfied by answering him cleverly, whereas if you had refused him outright, he would dislike you no matter how things turned out subsequently.

37.  Always deny what you don’t want to be known, and always affirm what you want to be believed. For, though there be much—even conclusive—evidence to the contrary, a fervent affirmation or denial will often create at least some doubt in the mind of your listener.

40. It is a great thing to have authority. If you use it well, men will fear you even more than your powers warrant. Not knowing exactly the extend of your authority, they will quickly decide to yield rather than contest wheter you can do what you threaten.

Lag

Adaptive Market

The incumbent theory: the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH):

[T]he notion that markets fully, accurately, and instantaneously incorporate all available information into market prices. Underlying this far-reaching idea is the assumption that market participants are rational economic beings, always acting in self-interest and making optimal decisions by trading off costs and benefits weighted by statistically correct probabilities and marginal utilities.

A challenger: the Adaptive Market Hypothesis (AMH):

[T]he AMH can be viewed as a new version of the EMH, derived from evolutionary principles. The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:

• (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
• (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
• (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
• (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
• (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
• (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.

EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.

AMH attempts to bridge the widening gap between EMH proponents and behavioral economics proponents. Work in behavioral economics has exposed the following anomalies in economic behavior:

• Heuristics: people often make decisions based on approximate rules of thumb, not on strictly rational analysis.
• Framing: the way a problem or decision is presented to the decision maker will affect their action.
• Market inefficiencies: there are explanations for observed market outcomes that are contrary to rational expectations and market efficiency. These include mispricings, non-rational decision making, and return anomalies.

The AMH follows sociobiology in applying natural selection to more than biology:

Contrary to the neoclassical postulate that individuals maximize expected utility and have rational expectations, an evolutionary perspective makes considerably more modest claims, viewing individuals as organisms that have been honed—through generations of natural selection—to maximize the survival of their genetic material. This perspective implies that behavior is not necessarily intrinsic and exogenous but evolves by natural selection and depends on the particular environment through which selection occurs. That is, natural selection operates not only upon genetic material, but upon biology and also social behavior and cultural norms in Homo sapiens.

The most interesting aspect of this theory is its exposition of the lag between biological adaptation to a prior environment and the current human environment:

The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.

If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.

This lag was also discussed extensively by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan. Taleb’s example is the simple heuristic of seeing a leopard and turning and running. The environment of our primitive hunter-gatherer ancestors rewarded this as a high return activity: running at the sight of a leopard enhanced survivability. However, the same instincts are counter-productive and low return when you turn to the current environment. The urge to panic when the market is crashing could drive you to exit the market at the wrong time. Fight or flight isn’t an appropriate evaluation framework under all conditions.

However, this idea of adaptive lag has applications to problems of adaption overall. A specific example of lag that the AMH paper discusses is the structure of the triune brain:

The starting point is a basic fact about the brain: it is not a homogeneous mass of nerve cells but a collection of specialized components, many of which have been identified with particular functions and types of behavior. For example, the brainstem, which is located at the base of the brain and sits on top of the spinal cord, controls the most basic bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeat and is active even during deep sleep. The limbic system, which comprises several regions in the middle of the brain, is responsible for emotions, instincts, and social behavior such as feeding, fight-or-flight responses, and sexuality. And the cerebral cortex, which is the tangled maze of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain, is what allows us to think complex and abstract thoughts and where language and musical abilities, logical reasoning, learning, long-term planning, and sentience reside. These three areas form the triune brain model, proposed by MacLean; he refers to them as the reptilian, mammalian, and hominid brains, respectively. This terminology underscores his hypothesis that the human brain is the outcome of an evolutionary process in which basic survival functions appeared first, more advanced social behavior came second, and uniquely human cognitive abilities emerged most recently (that is, within the past 100,000 years).

From this we can postulate three biological OODA loops within the human brain, each one with ever shorter lags in adaptation:

1. The reptilian loop
2. The mammalian loop
3. The hominid loop

If we follow the momentum of AMH and take the logic of evolution into less biologically hardwired human “software”, we can see five OODA loops and the steadily decreasing lag between each:

1. The cultural loop
2. The political loop
3. The strategic loop
4. The operational loop
5. The tactical loop

Much of the adaptation mismatches that occur in human political communities and individuals can be traced to adaptive lag. A particular loop is optimized for a specific environment and acquires optimizations peculiar to that environment. However, the environment changes and loops with slower lag times adapt at a sometimes glacial pace. Within the “software” portion of the human brain, culture is the slowest to adapt, followed by politics, and strategy. This is not to say rapid adaption in software can’t happen at these higher levels like culture, only that, on average, adaption will be slower than the lowest levels.

As the AMH argues, systemic human irrationality is not necessarily globally irrational as it is locally irrational. Many adaptations such as heuristics and cognitive biases make sense in a legacy adaption context but make less sense in a contemporary adaption context. They are rational under the right circumstances but irrational under other circumstances. Similarly, the software stack of adaptation contains rationalities under some contexts but irrationalities under other contexts. The true measure of adaptive capacities is how rapidly irrationalities can be replaced with rationalities. Since some irrationalities are bound up in emotion and power distributions, this isn’t always easy. On the other hand, some adaptions which seem irrational to a “rational” observer and that are done away with turn out to have been rational after all. The end result is a stack of OODA loops that contain a mix of rationality and irrationality and lag behind the adaption curve on average.

Whether the AMH claims that evolution produces the same global omniscience that the EMH claims that markets attain is an open question. If the current state of the myriad OODA loops of the contemporary world constitute adaptive market omniscience, then the life of man is truly Hobbesian, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Here’s to an imperfect, inefficient market.

Let Us Pause…

And remember what this day stands for with one of the great Independence Day speeches:

Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in this history of mankind.

Mankind — that word should have new meaning for all of us today.

We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore.

We will be united in our common interests.

Perhaps its fate that today is the 4th of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution — but from annihilation.

We’re fighting for our right to live, to exist.

And should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice:

“We will not go quietly into the night!

We will not vanish without a fight!

We’re going to live on!

We’re going to survive!”

Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President

Freedom to Steal

Let’s butcher some T.S. Eliot:

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a [nation]] is the way in which a [nation] borrows. Immature [nations] imitate; mature [nations] steal; bad [nations] deface what they take, and good [nations] make it into something better, or at least something different. The good [nation] welds [its] theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad [nation] throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good [nation] will usually borrow from [nations] remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Or, if we butcher the most common butchering of this passage:

Good [nations] borrow, great [nations] steal.

While no one actually ever said this, the point is true, for nations if not poets. The road to greatness is paved with theft. Moreover, a nation that selectively encourages creative theft by its citizenry can adapt faster than nations that don’t. If you live in the anarchy that governs the world, where nations are governed by the law of the jungle, this is not only a matter of prosperity but a matter of survival. Originality is a luxury for the wealthy and comfortable. However, wealth and comfort were usually erected on a foundation of original theft and those that lose touch with the grubby reality of their ancestor’s original climb up the greasy pole often find themselves at a disadvantage when the grubbiness returns with a vengeance.

Not all theft is good. The line between what is good theft and what is bad theft seems to be drawn at the point where the material world ends and the immaterial world begins. Stealing the physical is bad. Stealing immaterial ideas is good. The best of both worlds is:

1. Stealing ideas and profiting.
2. Securing any profits against theft.

Seeking to keep ideas from others to keep an advantage is an old stratagem:

19. Now no blacksmith could be found in all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears.”

20. So all Israel went down to the Philistines, each to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, and his hoe.

21. The charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares, the mattocks, the forks, and the axes, and to fix the hoes.

22. So it came about on the day of battle that neither sword nor spear was found in the hands of any of the people who were with Saul and Jonathan, but they were found with Saul and his son Jonathan.

1 Samuel 13:19 (NASB)

The Philistines, while lacking an appreciation for art, did have a keen appreciation for knowledge that bestowed power. Keeping the knowledge of iron working away from the Twelve Tribes not only gave the Philistines an advantage over the hill folk of Israel, it allowed them collect rents on selling goods and services bundled with less threatening consumer iron products. When the Israelites finally acquired iron working, this advantage went away and the Philistines found themselves under effective Israelite attack and rule in the following generations. Secrecy is fragile, advantage is transitory, and betting on control of one technology for too long only leaves you vulnerable to the next big thing. Far better to be looking to steal the next advantage.

The United States in the nineteenth century was notorious for what is today called intellectual property theft. European works that enjoyed some kind of intellectual protection at home found themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous Americans in the New World. A real American hero here is Samuel Slater. American textile makers were desperate for knowledge about British textile manufacture. Slater, having completed an apprenticeship to a major textile manufacturer, took them up on their offer and slipped away to America with the plans for British textile technology stowed away in a place no one could see: his memory. Slater aided the construction of many American textile plants in Connecticut and eventually set up his own. Slater, a high class thief, prospered and died a millionaire when that meant something. Furthermore, the nation he assisted prospered mightily from his theft.

The Egyptians grew powerful from Mesopotamian innovations, the Phoenicians grew powerful from Egyptian innovations, the Greeks grew powerful from Phoenician innovation, the Romans grew powerful from Greek innovations, the Arabs grew powerful from Roman innovations, the Italians grew powerful from Arab innovations, the Portuguese grew powerful from Italian innovations, the Spanish grew powerful from Portuguese innovations, the Dutch grew powerful from Spanish innovations, the English grew powerful off Spanish innovations, the Scottish grew powerful off English innovations, and the Americans grew powerful from the Scottish. Now the cycle is repeating with China and India.

The key to power is not the redistribution of power to the innovator. The key to power is the redistribution of power to those who can fully exploit the innovation. The key to power is not the original conception of an idea. The key to power is taking an idea and adapting it to fit the needs of the unfolding environment. It’s not the observation that dominates the OODA loop, it’s orientation. Successful orientation is successful adaptation and the more that observation is freed to survey the environment, the greater the chance for successful adaption. The vast majority of successful adaptions and innovations happen elsewhere. “Not invented here” is the road to maladaption and eventual system death in the ten thousand cuts of an unfriendly environment.  Ideas are what you make of them.

Every nation has risen to power through extensive and institutionalized theft from the incumbent power. Once it reaches the point where it is producing its own innovations, it switches to a defensive position of protecting its own secret sauce. It becomes locked into the particular bundle of stolen ideas and local optimizations that got it there. Once you become locked into the defense on a system-wide scale, you can only sit there and be sapped by internal parasites and external theft. The road after that is the road to national decrepitude. America is walking that path now while challengers are merely selectively picking off American innovations. A higher dedication to theft may help avert the inevitable landslide. That would involve, however, scraping off an enormous number of rent seekers and usually the only thing that can accomplish that is catastrophic shock on a level the United States hasn’t seen since the depths of the Great Depression.

Motive Makes the War

Desire is what makes war war. The nature of war is determined by the nature of the desires pursued in war, not by the nature of the power used in war. It is tempting to assume the opposite. Power is easier to quantify than desire. Power is easier to grasp than desire. The power used in war is quite vivid. It can easily overshadow the sometimes nebulous desires sought in war. Yet the more spectacular species of power used in war are not always present in war. In contrast, desire is ever present.

The essence of war is hostile intentions. Your intentions are hostile if you want to make others conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to how what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true intentions. Any action taken on the basis of such intentions is war. Hostile intentions come first and hostile power follows.

The stage of war is set by hostile intentions but then the appropriate forms of power must be found to fulfill those intentions in order for hostile intention to become hostile realization. While hostile intentions can shift the nature of available power from forms of power that are less appropriate for pursuing a set of intentions to forms that are more appropriate, often the quality and quantity of desire must be adapted to the quality and quantity of the power available to pursue them. This process of reconciliation between power and desire is the essence of strategy. The reconciliation of power with desire will never be exact and many times will be fatally contradictory.

However, desire is the sun and power a mere satellite and, while the pull of power will influence desire, ultimately the gravitational pull of desire will prevail. While power waxes and wanes, desire will endure.

The Evils of Democracy

Truth in Democracy

It is with great amusement that I observe the “international community” bend over backwards to support the “democratically elected” president of Honduras, who was overthrown and packed into exile by a Honduran military operating vaguely under the aegis of the Honduran Supreme Court. This shows the tragedy of elevating the means, democracy, over the end, liberty. This, once again, raises the crucial distinction between a republic and a democracy.

Democracy is based on the principle that an effective majority can determine everything about a society. Vox populi, vox dei. A republic is based on the principle that concentrations of power have to be avoided in order to preserve liberty for all or part of a population. Democracy is a weighing. A republic is a balancing. In a democracy, some selected degree of control is given to the people because it’s the people’s right. In a republic, some selected degree of control is given through various sundry paths because the people hopefully provide a check on the elites of their polity, preserving space for liberty. It is the series of balances, power being made to counter power and ambition being made to check ambition, that define a republic. If giving people none of the power would maintain liberty, that would be an acceptable republican solution. If giving people all of the power would maintain liberty, that would be an acceptable republican solution. It is the maintenance of liberty, not the expression of the will of a majority, that is the overall goal of a republic.

The Peisistratos playbook has been to use democracy, the means, to undermine liberty, the end. You get support from the poorest against the elites and, using the numerical and moral superiority of commanding an effective majority of the people, you gain enough power to overturn the fundamental law of a political community. This opens the road to tyranny. However it’s a special type of tyranny. It’s tyranny legitimized by the magical invocation of democracy. The clause “democratically elected” attached to any petty tyrant is an instant red flag that something is terribly wrong. Even the original form of democracy instituted by Cliesthenes in Athens was not called demokratia. It was called isonomia (”equality vis à vis law”, iso=equality; nomos=law). Equal rights was the refrain, not equal suffrage. It may even be that sortition, rule by the lot, also used in places by the Athenian democracy, is a better mechanism than majority rule to ensure liberty. Republics like Venice used a mixture of sortition and election quite successfully.

Democracy is not an ideal to uphold. It is an evil to be tolerated because other means have greater toxicity for liberty.

Twitter War: Now With Tasty Frosting

A victim of Twitter War

Three levels of power proposed by RAND:

…(1) resources or capabilities, or power-in-being; (2) how that power is converted…; (3) and power in outcomes, or [who] prevails in particular circumstances…[C]apabilities—demographic, economic, technological, and the like—only become manifest through a process of conversion. [Politics needs] to convert material resources into more usable instruments, such as combat proficiency. In the end, however, what policymakers care most about is not power as capability or power-in-being as converted through national ethos, politics, and social cohesion. They care about power in outcomes. That third level is by far the most elusive, for it is contingent and relative. It depends on power for what, and against whom.

This suggests three stages in the life cycle of power:

1. Potential Power: power that has not been used to pursue desire.
2. Applied Power: power in the process of being used to pursue desire.
3. Realized Power: effect of the use of power on the pursuit of desire.

Thus there are three zones of power in space:

1. Zone of Potential: where power is unconsumed in pursuit of desire.
2. Zone of Application: where power is being consumed in pursuit of desire.
3. Zone of Realization: where the use of power in pursuit of desire produces its effects.

Power cycles through the stages of power in time and the zones of power in space. The point of power is to move through the cycle from potential to application to realization. Successful realization of the use of power constitutes success while failure to realize the use of power is failure. This process parallels the adaption cycle of the OODA loop. The OODA loop passes through a zone of potential in orientation and decision, a zone of application in action, and a zone of realization in observation.

War is a strategy intended to make the enemy conform to our desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist us and sufficient knowledge about our true desires. As a strategy, war is an instrument of politics and the main preoccupation of politics is power. Therefore, the main preoccupation of war is power. To paraphrase J.C. Wylie:

The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of [power over] the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by [power over] the pattern of war; and this [power over] the pattern of war is [obtained through] manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.

The successful strategist is the one who [has power over] the nature and the placement and the timing and the weight of the centers of gravity of war, and who exploits the resulting [power over] the pattern of war toward his own ends.

This power follows a few working principles:

1. Power is exercised in several dimensions of power such as land, water, air, space, society, and cyberspace.
2. Each dimension of power is both a target of power and a medium of power. A medium of power allows power to be projected through it on to a target of power.
3. Each dimension of power has two characteristics: resistance, how well it acts as a medium of power, and persistence, how well some selected degree of power can be maintained over a target of power.
4. While a dimension of power that offers little resistance is a good medium of power, the same lack of resistance gives them a lack of persistence. Thus they function better as a medium for power than as a target for power.
5. Power is accumulated faster through power over a dimension of power characterized by low resistance than a dimension of power characterized by high persistence.

There are three levels of power over a dimension of power:

1. Sufficient power to collect knowledge within a dimension of power (read).
2. Sufficient power to generate change within a dimension of power (write).
3. Sufficient power to exercise absolutely power over a dimension of power (execute).

There are six sub-levels of power, three negative and three positive. The negative (and defensive) sub-levels are:

1. Sufficient power to prevent others from collecting knowledge within a dimension of power.
2. Sufficient power to prevent others from generating change within a dimension of power.
3. Sufficient power to prevent others from gaining absolute power over a dimension of power.

The positive (and offensive) sub-levels are:

1. Sufficient power to collect knowledge about others within a dimension of power.
2. Sufficient power to generate change in others within a dimension of power.
3. Sufficient power to exercise absolute power over others within a dimension of power.

Example: Twitter War. Millions of people got twitter-painted over events in Iran. This is the zone of potential. In the zone of potential things seemed great. People turned their icons green and RT’d many a tweet emanating from Iran. This passed the war into the zone of application. Noise increased due to confused Iranians, mullah disinformation, well-meaning but clueless Westerners, and Iran’s advanced surveillance architecture. Much information passed out of and into Iran. The end result once we reached the zone of realization? Before Iran, Twitter was a way to get millions of nerds excited about a topic to no great end. After Iran, Twitter was a way to get millions of nerds excited about a topic to no great end.

The mullahs and IRG may have been dazed by the reaction of the people just before and just after the election, but they are professionals. Many of the core cadres have extensive revolutionary, subversive, or combat experience. The opposition is primarily composed of hippies who’s appeal and identification with the West is that they are interested in this life. The regime is backed by hardened fanatics who are often, among the rank and file, more interested in the next life. Khamenei, in the words of Zenpundit, is a political valet interested in this life. He is interested in concrete power. The opposition would only ever triumph if they attracted government elements who could present a sufficient physical counter-force to Khamenei’s forces. As of yet, that has not happened. Twitter War would have to…

• Trigger internal forces to side with the opposition.

Or.

• Trigger external forces to intervene on the side of the opposition.

…in order to actually reach the zone of realization with any impact. It is only in that zone that the dream of Iranian regime change can be effected. Twitter is a dimension of power characterized by low resistance and low persistence. It is a target of power primarily because it’s a medium of power through which a war of influence could be waged. It is not the goal. Control of Twitter does not bring you into the zone of realization. Twitter is only a medium of power, a zone of application. The target of power, the zone of realization, is any force sufficient to bring kinetic power to bear on the regime. That didn’t happen because the medium was mistaken for the target. Twitter, a subset of cyberspace, like the sea and the air and space, is not a medium in which power persists. It’s a medium through which power passes through on the way to the target of that power. It is the road to realization, not the destination of realization. At this point, it’s role as a medium seems deficient. Airpower, sea power, and ultimately land power seem to be better bets for shaping the regime’s actions. Broader social power may also contribute in the long run. At this point, Twitter power ain’t there yet.