On the word "Tend"

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
Lord Action, letter to Mandell Creighton (1887)

When concepts of economics are explained, the use of the word "tend" or "tendency" often causes confusion. An important example is distinguishing between the known tendencies of economic actors, and better-known exceptions to those tendencies. It's important not to confuse the two.

Few would deny that private sector firms make mistakes, including very glaring and stupid ones; likewise, no one claims that all consumers are privately rational in any sense, let alone expectations. In the first case, the fact that private-sector firms make mistakes in planning or pricing is mitigated by the fact that it is very unlikely for all firms to make the same mistake for long. The tendency is for at least someone to identify the mistake and profit from it, thereby drawing attention to it. In the second case, judgments about the future rate of inflation, interest rates, and so forth are not likely to be consistently wrong (biased) UNLESS there is some reason for everyone to make the same mistake, like a sudden change in government policy (see REH).

The point of a tendency is that it is often overridden by random events; for example, it is possible for people to make huge errors about the demand for 3G cell phone service five years out But it is unlikely that those errors will be all in the same direction, since the point of a true error is that it is random. Even if such an event should occur, as perhaps the result of a hugely popular fad, there will be some force in place that tends to compel a correction. Again, if a firm makes a really huge error about the demand for 3G cell phone service, this will quickly be felt through losses, firings of executives, and so on.

When we say a certain thing tends to happen, it is usually a milder form of saying that it will happen. Lord Acton's quote is truthful, but there are notable cases where the person who held such power transcended it and was not corrupted; and there are cases where people appear to have acquired power for explicitly bad ends; in the latter case, it's difficult to say that the person was made corrupt, i.e., susceptible to wickedness, by the acquisition of power. Acton wants us to know that great men are almost always bad men, but not always bad men. The virtuous outlier may exist; and power may not so much corrupt, as enable evil.

However, Acton was not merely acknowledging the existence of exceptions. He was probably trying to point out that the various attributes of political power (in this example) have a dynamic that overcomes good will gradually, but decisively. This is a subtle distinction. Things being hosed down with water don't tend to become wet, they become wet. The sense of "spraying water all over a thing" is almost identical to the sense "that thing becoming wet." The two concepts amount to almost the same thing: wetness means recent contact with liquid. On the other hand, a tendency to become wet implies some intermediate cause. Acton meant (I think) that power, as extraordinary agency, is not in and of itself evil; his argument for liberty comes from the fact that the way power is concentrated into the hands of a ruler, is likely to transgress ethics, and leads to a generalized lassitude towards ethics on the part of the ruler. In other words, the conditions that caused absolute power also to create a moral wilderness for the ruler, leading to a thwarting of moral impulses and a desperate resort to immoral ones.

I am reminded of the concept of Maxwell's Daemon, a wonderful imaginary invention that consists of two chambers connected by a tiny sliding door; anytime a particle moving inside chamber A approaches the door, the daemon observes its velocity and opens the door if that velocity is higher than the average in chamber B. If not, the door remains closed. Conversely, anytime a particle in chamber B approaches the door that is moving more slowly than the average in B, the door opens to let it through. Such door would consume infinitesimally small amounts of energy itself, yet defeat the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; heat transfer would be from cooler A to hotter B. While the molecules in B might be immensely hot, and those in A bitterly cold, and this would mean the average velocity of particles in A is lower than that in B, nevertheless, outliers in either direction would make it through the door often enough for the transfer to continue.

Now suppose the daemon finally broke down. It opens randomly, although as frequently as before. Being random, it will sometimes do what it was supposed to do, and there will still be gas molecules in B that are much slower than the average in A, which make it through the door. But the vast majority of molecules will be moving faster than that, and in the great majority of cases it will be the fast particles in B or the slow particles in A that get through. This will be a true example of a tendency. The temperature in A will be observed to rise, and that in B will noticeably fall, because temperature reflects the motion of many moles of particles. And the tendency to spell it "Maxwell's Demon" will tend to triumph.
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ADDITIONAL READING: In searching for the Lord Acton quote, I noticed this excellent essay on the meaning and context of it. Special thanks to Brian Martin; here's a link to the rest of his online book, Information Liberation.

The Expert's Dilemma

A common problem faced by experts on a particular subject is hostility for ideological reasons. I've paid a lot of attention to this problem, and I think it's especially severe in economics. Economics, after all, professes to explain the whole of the social sciences using ideas that are basically pure deduction. The only other field of study I can think of that does this is theology. Economics requires a set of basic premises that are assumed to be immutably true, and while these premises are few in number, a vast body of assumptions is derived from them. These include the proposition that for-profit, privately-owned enterprises tend to allocate resources correctly, that consumers tend to make rational and free choices about how many hours they work per year, or how much they will spend on their home, or if they will take public transit to work, or any other consumption decision.

Economics, because of the deductive foundation of its judgment, is of all the branches of study the most ideological. Computer science is another field of study that tends to be very ideologically bound, since critiques of its decisions suffer the same problems as in economics: the web of human motives and abilities is so complex that it relies mainly on deduction from basic principles. A common defense is, "In technology, something either works or it doesn't"; because of this, IT is supposed to be liberated from dependence on induction. In my experience, there is almost no non-trivial technical decision that is so bad that it cannot be made to "work" to some decision-maker's satisfaction.

Of course I do not want to imply that this proves economics or computer science are bad disciplines, or that their practitioners are lying quacks. I am just pointing out a difficulty that confronts both fields. I think it is important for practitioners to acknowledge this (which is why when I was writing about Unix I was so impressed by Eric Raymond's books and essays.) In fact, ideology is a common tool that allows people to form orderly and structured judgments. It is very frequently used as a substitute for thinking, but it is so useful to public thinking and problem-solving that it is useful nonetheless. Therefore, I cannot bemoan the presence of ideology, either. Even if I thought it was an unmitigated bad, I should still have to concede that it is a part of life and shall remain so.

At the same time, however, we often see occasions when an expert discovers facts that challenge the foundational beliefs of an ideology. The expert is a loyal supporter of the ideology, but he cannot deny the evidence. The example that comes to mind is Eric Raymond's essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (CatB; discussed here). I read the essay, then several responses that Mr. Raymond had graciously linked to at his essay page. One response to CatB provoked this aggravated rebuttal from Raymond:

Nikolai Bezroukov's article in First Monday [critiquing CatB], unfortunately, adds almost nothing useful to the debate. Instead, Mr. Bezroukov has constructed a straw man he calls vulgar Raymondism which bears so little resemblance to the actual content of my writings and talks that I have to question whether he has actually studied the work he is attacking. If vulgar Raymondism existed, I would be its harshest critic.

I wanted to like this paper. I wanted to learn from it. But I began to realize this was unlikely when, three paragraphs in, I tripped over the following: he promoted an overoptimistic and simplistic view of open source, as a variant of socialist (or, to be more exact, vulgar Marxist) interpretation of software development.

There are many sins of which I can reasonably be accused, but the imputation of vulgar Marxism won't stand up to even a casual reading of my papers. In CatB, I analogize open-source development to a free market in Adam Smith's sense and use the terminology of classical (capitalist) economics to describe it. In HtN I advance an argument for the biological groundedness of property rights and cite Ayn Rand approvingly on the dangers of altruism.

The first point I want to make here is that I would think long and hard before I made a facial challenge of anything Mr. Raymond said about computer software development. He has qualifications that are hard to match, let alone exceed. His knowledge of computer science is huge, he's devoted a lot of time to pondering the organizational or cultural implications of it, and he has a fair understanding of many other fields besides that one. Also, as it happens, he's right—even a casual reading of his work doesn't allow anyone to imagine that he's a socialist.

So I would say he's an expert, and also that he's ideologically compatible with the prevailing economic system and its ideological proclivities. If a capitalist party membership book existed, his would be in good order. And yet, his observations might be carelessly construed to negate the ideal intellectual property regime:

Nikolai Bezroukov: In a really Marxist fashion, Eric Raymond wrote in Homesteading the Noosphere "ultimately, the industrial-capitalist mode of software production was doomed to be out competed from the moment capitalism began to create enough of a wealth surplus for many programmers to live in a post-scarcity gift culture." I used to live in one society that claimed to "outcompete" capitalism long enough to be skeptical.

I have familiarity with the practice of Marxist party congress criticisms, having read much of E.H. Carr's history of the Bolshevik Revolution; and I have to say that Bezroukov's article really does sound like he imagines he's criticizing Raymond for taking the "line" of (say) "undisciplined Preobrazhenskyism" or something. The fact that Raymond actually has a huge volume of objective, reliable experience with the matter he's writing about, means nothing to Bezroukov: Raymond's somehow gone pink.

Bezroukov is not a dummy, and he has his own considerable credentials. My own suspicion was that he needed to "prove" his own ideological reliability by attacking someone who had been insufficiently guarded in his corporation-unfriendly observations. As a minor functionary in the actual institutional apparatus of the capitalist state-corporation nexus, he had to attack an attacker of Microsoft—and make him menacing. (Raymond never wrote anything like "Microsoft must be destroyed.") That attended to, he could discuss open source software as a sociological phenomenon. But by attacking Raymond as an ideologically unsafe line wobble, he illustrated that absolutely no one is safe. One must toe the official line, regardless of what one has seen, or face the consequences.

This is the Expert's Dilemma.

UPDATE (17 September 2011): Oddly enough, I stumbled across Dr. Bezroukov's reviews on Amazon and of course had no recollection of this critical post I had written five years ago. I feel I own him an apology. It turns out we have very similar attitudes about market fundamentalism, and I had completely misunderstood him. His approach was to criticize Raymond from the position of Raymond's own obsessive anti-Communism, an approach I usually attempt to imitate and ought to have recognized.

It's been five years and I suspect absolutely no one has ever read this webpage. I liked so many of Dr. Bezroukov's book reviews (e.g., this one and this one) I paid his website a visit, where I noticed a lot of material critical of Eric Raymond. Something in the murky depths of my memory stirred and then I remembered this essay.

Nevertheless, the point still stands, despite an imperfect example.

Subtopia

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore the way technology and the built environment have molded our lives. That's a very broad subject, and I've been torn between focusing on writing about technology on which I need to be conversant for work, and the sociology of material culture. One of the blogs I've noticed, but feared was a bit too far afield to link to on the sidebar (at least, for now) is Subtopia, a blog devoted to the militarization of the urban landscape.


Click for larger image

When I first became aware of the subject, I was astonished at the degree of specialization. Surely there's not much to say about this subject? On the other hand, I know I have a lot of hobbyhorses that would appear to be exhausted in no time. And after a few minutes of utterly fascinating exploration, I discovered that Subtopia has an endless reservoir of material. First, with the phenomena known collectively (and wrongly) as "globalization," the world in which we live has become criss-crossed with defensive boundaries. The most famous are probably the Israeli "security fence" and the Mexico-US border. Other famous examples include the border between the Koreas, the Spanish (Ceuta)-Moroccan border, and neighborhood barriers enforcing segregation. This enforcement of borders, though, is by no means confined to windswept, austere border regions. The mania for prisons and gated communities reflects the deep divisions imposed by the soaring disparities in income or privilege; surveillance cameras and electronic sensors are used to regulate and control movement, even when that movement is sanctioned.

Now, I want to make some clarifications here for my readers. I'm not opposed to walls or controls or regulations. To be honest, looking at photos of the barrier between the US and Mexico fills me with great shame and sorrow, but I understand the demand for them. The industrial system per se seems to require hard boundaries as a form of heat engine, rather the way the invention of the steam engine required the ability to machine tool steel containers for high-pressures. Still, I believe people need to know the artificiality and occasional barbarism of these barriers. Perhaps then they might realize how arbitrary and random their station in life is.

[Virtual] World Wide War

Fast-Moving Zombies: Botnets Stay a Step Ahead of the Fixes, Greg Goth, IEEE
Over the winter I and my contacts at the company's ISP noticed a distinct surge in "malware." In communication with my company's ISP, they occasionally mentioned the desperation and frustration of warfare. Mostly the malware was spam, which has been roughly doubling every year since at least 2000.

Much of the increase has been as the result of "botware," or malicious computer programs installed against the user's will and knowledge. Botware floods the internet with literally trillions of e-mails each year, and utilizes the latest spam-thwarting technology.

Users who might be truly interested in discovering whether their computers have been turned into bots can do a fairly simple check from the command prompt. Typing netstat -an reveals both local and foreign IP addresses and the port numbers via which they’ve communicated during the computer’s current session. Users who don’t use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and see port 6667 displayed on the list of addresses in the command prompt can almost guarantee that their machines have been hijacked.

IRC's are easily installed and activated on Windows machines since the OS was designed to automatically load patches and other programs from the web.

Trend Micro’s Moriarty says IRC is still a bot boulevard, but other protocols are now being exploited as well. “IRC is still predominantly the main source of communication,” Moriarty says. “However, starting around April and May of last year, we started noticing bots starting to use port 80. So now they’re blending in with the normal mix of Web traffic, and it gets a little more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

Another industry veteran also says he sees a trend away from IRC bots. Andre M. DiMino, cofounder of the Shadowserver Foundation, a volunteer-run resource center focusing on malware, botnets, and electronic fraud activity, says P2P botnets are making a strong appearance. “It’s definitely shifting,” DiMino says. “There’s a lot of P2P bot traffic now. For instance, the Nugache worm ... was a real classic P2P worm. We now believe it was originally released as a proof-of concept on [the normally unassigned] port 8 because we’re seeing more variants. Originally, it was really easy to find — it had a hard-coded list of IPs and was kind of dumb when we first saw it, but now appears to be proof-of-concept. I kind of look at it as IRC botnets could be the bad guys’ honeypots — we’ll all be looking for IRC bots,but the real bad stuff will start happening on other vectors.”

What are some things that Windows users can do to reduce the risk of malware? Basically the problem is that most Windows boxes are configured so that users can log in only as an administrator. I've noticed that this is not the case in Windows XP, where computer users must chose among a variety of possible identities. Still, a lot of users do tend to log on as an administrator all the time. In this mode, Windows has standing permission to install pretty much anything on the hard drive. Another countermeasure implemented by ISP's is to configure customer machines so they prevent outgoing IRC transmissions:

For example, whereas XP Service Pack 2 has no easily discernible way for users to configure their machines to avoid outgoing IRC communications, some ISP home network equipment does. AT&T’s broadband wireless router manufactured by 2Wire, for instance, lets users disable outgoing IRC traffic, but it’s not the default setting. And some users have been frustrated by system crashes caused by downloading other free firewalls that are incompatible with their ISP-supplied software, XP firewall, or both.

What puzzles me, though, is not merely the invasion of the bots--it's the deluge of spam, spam replete with alarm words that one could reasonably expect an automated spam filter to detect. Is the proliferation of spambots and botnets just maxing out the filters?
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ADDITIONAL READING: "A Taxonomy of Botnets" (PDF), by Dagon, Gu, Zou, Grizzard, & Dwivedi;