Leadership

Utah's Governor Cox and Military Installation Development Authority propose Utah playing a leading role in nuclear and artifical intelligence technologies. The form of this leadership seems largely to be a matter of siting nuclear reactors, radioactive waste dump sites, and data centers in the state. Utah's leadership is mainly about cheap resources, tax breaks, and lax regulation. This is a plantation economy that impoverishes the majority, channeling the benefits to a small power elite. This is no kind of true leadership.

Nuclear and artificial intelligence technologies are clearly important, whatever role they might play in the future. Utah could take on a true leadership role. True technological leadership is a matter of the expertise of the people. Expertise can be organized in a variety of ways, in industrial corporations, in governmental agencies, and in civil society groups such as universities.

Nuclear technology is vast and involves expertise in a very broad array of disciplines. Applications include energy production, weapons, and medicine. Nuclear technology continues to be a key source of international conflict. It is a cornerstone of industrial and military power. On the other hand, mining and waste disposal bring disease and ecological degradation, and are thus vectors of disempowerment. Politics is therefore a field of major importance for nuclear technology. Geology is important not just for locating raw materials but also for understanding the pathways by which waste materials might escape their disposal sites over their long half-lives of radioactive toxicity. Biology and public health expertise is important for tracking and managing the risks of exposure to radioactive materials. All of these fields of expertise are invigorated by engagement across a range activities, from research and development to application.

Artificial intelligence is similarly vast. There are computer science and computer engineering challenges involved in making these systems more effective and efficient. There are sociological problems, to understand how these systems are changing the way people behave, are changing the structure of society. There are political problems, to understand how these systems empower some groups and disempower other groups, and how regulation might ameliorate the most negative of these shifts.

Our Utah officials could take bold steps to cultivate real leadership in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence. This means investing in people and organizations, rather than a race to the bottom, selling off assets at discounted prices.

Bot vs. Bot

We live in a revolutionary time! One huge component of the revolution is computer technology, on which the internet is built, on which social media are built, on which political manipulation of people's perceptions is enabled. Political power is all about the ability to steer the behavior of people. Enforcing obedience with threats is a very inefficient way to steer behavior. To surround people with a story that motivates people to behave as one wishes, that is far more effective. And now the technology is in place to provide that capability.

Control over the story is always the fundamental political battle. What changes is the technology. How do people learn the stories through which they make sense of their world? It's not that the struggle over the story is anything new. Sometimes, though, the story can be trapped. Some group manages to take control of the story, to use control of the story to maintain that control. Whatever struggle is possible, that has to go underground. Centuries can go by, where any sort of deviation from the approved doctrine is subject to the most severe penalties. It's a form of societal suspended animation. It's quite risky, too, because such a rigid structure cannot respond effectively to external threats.

Is our present revolution one where rigidity is melting away, or where rigidity is setting in? Probably we have not quite reached that fork in the road. We seem to be more in a metastable situation, where we might fall one way or another, but we have not yet fallen. How might we work to maintain social vitality, to keep multiple stories in play, to cultivate sensitivity and responsiveness?

One approach is through some kind of central regulation. The various social media platforms already embody centralized power. Platforms can be required to, perhaps, balance coverage of opposing views, for example.

I suspect that central regulation can't work. Power corrupts! We need a distributed approach!

Fight bots with bots! That's my idea! Yeah, we are being inundated with a tsunami of misinformation. We need a counter-tsunami!

I don't know enough about the patterns of social media, viral memes etc., to be able to elaborate this idea in any real detail. But the basic elements are simple enough. The basic pattern we seem to be falling into is roughly: 1) hate mesmerizes people; 2) hate divides people; 3) divided, mesmerized people are disempowered; 4) disempowered people can easily be exploited. To counter this pattern, we need bots that dissolve the bond of mesmerization, bots that bring people together, bots that empower people.

Bots are simply social media agents. They can post messages, reply to messages, and react to messages. Bots can also work in teams, and also cooperated with human teams. Bots are inevitably a bit stupid, but their great virtue is their low cost. The scale of the problem is huge. How many bots are active now on social media, spawning all sorts of hate-filled misinformation... they're cheap! The folks playing these games have deep pockets! The only way to fight this battle effectively is to counter with a force of similar magnitude.

One fundamental component of the battle is to understand the terrain. One function of a bot army is scouting. Stories are introduced and spread on very many different internet platforms. How exactly users discover these platforms... there must be many ways. I am an old guy and so I am very out of touch with what's really happening. I know a lot of on-line games also function as social media platforms. Surely bots play on-line games too, and as artificial intelligence technology advances, they will get harder and harder to distinguish from human players. And anyway the bots don't have to be too good at fooling people. If they are just acting as spies, they can pick up a bit of information here and a bit there. The objective is to discover trends early.

Once any sort of hate-inducing misinformation meme is discovered to be spreading, a variety of counteractions can be triggered. Alternate stories can be introduced, the more accurate the better. Existing stories that counter the misinformation can be given positive reactions, or reshared. The social media platforms will amplify whatever is getting a lot of activity, so simply creating a lot of activity related to alternate stories will tend to quash the misinformation.

New media are almost always destabilizing. We just need to learn to manage what we have unleashed!

Health Science

The exact reason for the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson may never be known, but it has certainly brought into focus the widespread frustration with medical insurance. The reluctance of insurers to pay for medical care care often enough means that people fail to get proper medical care, leading to pain, disability, and early death. Medical expenses drive many people to bankruptcy, despite their having medical insurance that on the surface should have prevented financial disaster. The medical insurance industry is generating tidy profits. Thompson's compensation was $10 million per year, and no doubt other top executives are similarly well off. There is a clear imbalance between the benefits to executives and stockholders, versus their customers.

Of course, many corporations beyond the medical insurance industry are also biased toward shareholder profits and executive compensation, at the cost of the quality of the products delivered to their customers. What makes medical insurance special is the degree of need. Medical care is often a matter of life and death. But medical insurance is just one component of medical care. U.S. health care expenditures total $4.5 trillion. Private insurers paid about 30% of this, or about $1.4 trillion. About $0.25 trillion went to the insurance companies themselves, for expenses and profits. So medical insurance is about a 6% overhead on medical spending. The small size of this number doesn't reflect all the costs of the insurance industry: for example, they have a lot of control over who gets what treatment, and may make inefficient decisions. And of course the real bottom line is not financial, but people's health.

I have seen charts that compare U.S. healthcare costs and outcomes with those of other countries. It looks quite clear that the U.S. spends an enormous amount on health care, but does not get commensurate health care results. People often post medical bills on social media, with astounding charges, often for relatively routine procedures. Pharmaceutical prices are often prohibitively expensive. To some extent, the medical insurance companies are caught in the middle. People cannot afford to pay huge insurance premiums, but they often need very expensive medical care. The insurers have somehow to allocate available funds to the most necessary care. No doubt they do an imperfect job of it, but the task is really impossible.

Health care corporations are like any other corporation: they are controlled by shareholders whose goal is profit, return on their investment. What incentives can be put in place to motivate corporations to provide high quality products at fair, affordable prices... this is a general problem. Part of the solution is the competitive nature of markets. Part of the solution is regulation by governments or other supervisory bodies. Part of the solution is cultural, a matter of changing understandings and expectations among all the various players.

Health care is a vast network of businesses and practices. Ultimately, it incorporates everything we do. For example, workplace conditions create stresses that often result in strains and injuries requiring medical attention. If workplaces were less physically stressful, there would be less need for medical care. Health care starts at home. If people help each other catch problems when they are small, there would be less need for medical care. How much of our increased medical expense is due simply to the increase in people living in greater isolation, away from extended families, away from people who catch problems before they need professional attention?

My particular interest here is in the scientific facet of healthcare. Medicine is the supreme example of a science where pure science and applied science are inseparable. Modern science is founded on physics, the supreme example of a science where pure science and applied science are separable. This separation of science from its use bears much responsibility for our global environmental crisis. Modern science is essentially driving itself out of business. The environmental crisis and the healthcare crisis are both pointing to the need for a new kind of science, a new vision of science, where pure science and applied science are understood to be inseparable. Medicine is thus the proper foundation for this new science. The healthcare crisis represents the birth pangs of a new science.

Consequences

Our actions have consequences. When we're being careful, we choose our actions so they'll have the best possible consquences. Most commonly what this means is that we try to change the world so it satisfies our desires more. But our actions don't just change the world, they change our selves. We often divide our activities into two phases, e.g. rehearsal and performance. The purpose of rehearsal is to refine our capabilities. Performance is when apply those capabilities to create an aesthetic experience for an audience, for example. But this division is just a rough cut. All of our actions change who we are at the same time that they change the world.

This division of experience into self and world is problematic. An athlete might consider their own body to be a component of the world. One's actual self might be perhaps the rational component of mind, something constant underlying even one's shifting mental capabilities. One of the essential insights of the Buddhist tradition is that the search for this constant underlying component of the self is futile. And yet this framework of thinking, e.g. "I will do this," seems practically unavoidable. If we want to use a conceptual framework of self and world, how can we think about this without getting distracted by illusions?

Organizational behavior is a doorway to a different perspective. It is not just individual human beings who act. All kinds of organizations act: political, military, industrial, academic, religious, etc. At a planetary scale, all of humanity acts. A basic principle of systems theory is that analysis starts with a clear definition of the system to be analyzed: what is part of the system, and what is not. A complementary axiom is in easy reach: the self is what is not in the system. The key point here is that the division of experience into self and world is like establishing a coordinate system or a frame of reference. It has no ontological foundation but is a practical step to allow conceptual elaboration for solving specific problems.

In organizational situations, it is commonly understood that actions both change the world and also change the self, i.e. change the organization engaged in the action. Teams develop cohesion by working together.

That what we are is a dynamic pattern that is constantly being shaped by our actions and experiences, that an important factor in choosing our actions is how those choices will reshape who we are... this perspective seems easier to achieve when we feel safe and secure. When things are good, we are happy to train ourselves to make them even better. When things are difficult, our entire focuse is on fixing problems with the world so we have no desire or opportunity to train ourselves. People do train themselves to be able to respond to difficult situations, though mostly that is to make themselves more capable of making whatever necessary changes to the world. But sometimes people do understand that shaping the world to meet their desires is not going to go very far, and they need to shape their own expectations. Aging gracefully can include such adjustments. What an older person can do is not the same as what a younger person can do. There is a lot less frustration in playing the hand you've been dealt.

At the planetary scale, the growing human population and the growing levels of consumption are driving us up against ecological limits, mostly prominently due to climate change but many other problems are accelerating too, such as aquifer depletion and ocean desertification. The reflex response is to demand that the world change in order to let us preserve our way of life. But of course our way of life is always changing and will continue to change as a consequence of our actions. However one chooses to partition the situation, it is always a dance between self and world. Our habits change, our understandings change, our values change. This dynamism is both a challenge and an opportunity. If our response to our discomfort is to become ever more stubborn and insensitive, we can certainly ramp up the level of mutual frustration to a catastrophic breaking point. But if we can respond to discomfort with care and flexibility, then we can discover tender joys in the most suprising places.

What Is To Be Done?

We are constantly faced with decisions about what to do, at every scale. Oranges are on sale: how many should I buy? Fossil fuels are creating climate havoc: should we switch to nuclear fission power?

In the simplest situation, one can foresee with sufficient accuracy the results of each alternative action, and choose the one with the most positive result. This formula outlines some major dimensions of a decision-making situation. One needs a set of alternative actions from which to choose; one needs to understand the results of each possible action; one needs to evaluate each of these possible results.

Commonly enough it is not possible to predict accurately the results of actions. We must decide in the face of uncertainty. We might have a pretty good idea about the probilities of the possible results of each possible action. For example, in a card game, we can calculate quite accurately the probabilities for each combination of cards we might draw from a well-shuffled deck. When developing a financial plan for living in retirement, actuarial tables can give reasonable estimates for survival to whatever age. Comparing the uncertain results of various possible actions is quite difficult. Given a choice between one action whose result is a certain $1, against another action whose result is $0 with probability 99% and $100 with probability 1%.... the expected value for each action is the same, $1. Whether to buy a raffle ticket for $1, that is a choice where expected return is not going to sufficient information to make a decision.

Many real world situations do not permit probability calculations with any realistic promise of accuracy. Probabilities are applicable in situations that repeat. Of course situations never repeat exactly, but a large number of situations can be similar enough so that the outcomes of each possible action can be tabulated to provide guidance for what to do when the situation occurs yet again. But sometimes situations don't repeat with any reasonable similarity. What's the probability that Donald Trump will be elected President in 2024? Of course one can assign this whatever probability seems appropriate, but there is no way to check this number against the facts. In situations like this, one can look at the set of plausible outcomes of each possible action. An action might turn out well, or might turn out badly. How well? How badly? Comparing these sets of plausible outcomes is not simple or mechanical, but that's what's required for deciding on what action to take.

Sometimes a decision involves a significant action that takes place essentially at a single point of time. For example, if I am considering a major purchase, at some point I have to signal my decision to complete the transaction. But oftentimes what is called for is an ongoing series of actions. There is deciding what to cook for dinner tonight, and then there is deciding on my diet, on my pattern of meal selection. I don't have to plan out my meals for the rest of my life; I can decide on meals more or less on the spot, depending on my schedule, my activities, the availability and prices of various food items, etc. In a game like chess, there is no way to plan out the full sequence of moves one should make in order to win. Each move must take into account the preceding moves of one's opponent, which cannot be predicted with anything like sufficient accuracy. One can, however, potentially decide on a strategy. A plan is a sequence of actions. A strategy is like a table of possible situations that might arise in the future and what action to take in each situation. Market orders versus limit orders in the stock market would be an example. A market order is the decision to buy or sell some number of shares. A limit order is conditional: whether any shares are bought or sold depends on the market price. A market order is a plan, a limit order is a strategy.

Deciding on a strategy can be very difficult. It can be impractical or impossible to tabulate all the possible situations that can arise in the future. And when one encounters a situation in the future, one might choose a quite different action than whatever had seemed the wisest back when one was contemplating future possibilities. Our understanding of actions and outcomes evolves: we are always learning, or at least we can be learning. So an effective strategy for action is one that enhances the quality of one's future decisions, by providing opportunites for learning along the way, and leaving open as wide a range of possible actions in the future as possible.

We should not be planning to imprison ourselves; we should be planning to liberate ourselves.

Digging Down to the Foundations

Lately I'm reading Michael Millerman's book Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political. Dugin is the target of the book, and the main reason I'm reading it. I'm in the middle of the Rorty chapter at the moment. The overall notion seems to be that Dugin is the one who has picked up Heidegger's ball and is running with it. Strauss and Rorty have either misread Heidegger or anyway have refused to pick up his ball, for opposite reasons. Strauss is more fundamentalist than Heidegger, and Rorty is more historicist.

In a curious coincidence, my wife has been reading The Great Bliss Queen by Anne Klein. She tells me that Klein is discussing a debate within feminism between essentialists and constructivists. It sounds pretty much the same as the debate between Strauss and Rorty - or their followers, anyway. These debates are a bit like the conundrum, "Why not tolerate intolerance?" It's like a dog chasing its own tail.

This brings to mind a simple analogy that I use to illustrate the potential for Buddhist thinking to provide a way to escape the deadend represented by these debates. We're trying to investigate the true reality underlying the diverse appearances that we experience in the world. We start digging down through the shifting sands of the surface, looking for the solid bedrock that holds everything up.

The fundamentalist essentialist vision is that indeed, we can cut through the fog and confusion, and whether we land on the Bible or the U. S. Constitution or Feynman's Lectures on Physics, we will find solid ground. The constructivist historicist vision is that we can dig our way straight through to empty space on the other side. The web of appearances is free floating. It might be a fair amount of work to move the whole mess, but it is quite possible, and perhaps a worthy project. We have that freedom.

The middle way of Buddhism, or of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism at least, is a third alternative. It's not that we find some third sort of thing once we have dug through appearances. The vision is that we can dig and we can keep digging and actually we can just keep on digging endlessly. The investigation of appearances never reaches any kind of point where further investigation isn't possible. Of course we might run out of the resources needed to keep investigating. But we can also relax our desperate search for foundations once we realize that every layer of appearance is supported by yet another layer of appearance. There is no bottom. It's not that the bottom is hollow - that's the constructivist historicist vision. There is no bottom.

What are the practical consequences of this vision, that's hard to say. Mostly it's a matter of avoiding futile and destructive projects. The MAGA crew seems to want to scrape away the shifting sands to return society to whatever solid ground they put their faith in; once they've killed off all the liberals they can start killing each other over transubstantiation versus consubstantiation etc. The progressive crew seem to want to pick up the whole mess and move it to a less strife-filled place; maybe an annual cycle of presentations from the Human Relations department will do a lot, but the inertia of the entire system will assert itself long before we start knocking up against the constancy of the speed of light and the limits it imposes on interstellar colonization.

Buddhist practise seems to be mostly a matter of letting go of grasping. The subtle details come from a deepening perception of how we are grasping. The extremes of eternalism and nihilism are classical mirages at which we grasp. Fundamentalism and constructivism are modern manifestations of these philosophical extremes.

I've become interested in Dugin because he seems to be a major philosophical inspiration behind the right wing movement. Recently I read an observation, that the right wing extreme in the USA is not really philosophically grounded. It's basically a gang of street thugs. There's this character in the movie A Fish Named Wanda, this thug who lies around reading Nietzsche and shooting his pistol. Perhaps this is a good model for someone like Steve Bannon.

Justice

I'm no lawyer, but what we saw happening at the U. S. Capitol building on the 6th sure looked like criminal activity. What should we do about that?

Generally speaking, the justice system is our collective means to respond to crime. We bring criminals to justice. But there are voices, mostly friendly to the criminals, warning us that justice will further division at a time when we especially need unity. Justice, division, unity: these are complicated ideas with many possible meanings.

What is the proper function of justice? Revenge? Punishment? Compensation? A crime has been committed: what should we do about it?

A crime is a breaking of social bonds. The proper function of justice is to heal those bonds. Justice should be social therapy.

Punishment and compensation can work as components of a therapeutic program. No matter what, a path must be provided by which criminals can be reintegrated into society. Justice must exercise discrimination but never promote division. The wisdom of Solomon is indeed required to judge what form justice should best take in any given situation. We mortals are stuck bumbling along the best we can. But if we at least understand what we're trying to accomplish, that ought to improve results.

Unity: to the extent that it opposes diversity, it is a flawed goal. One image of unity is a watertight boundary surrounding perfect uniformity within. This is a kind of death. A vital society is a cohesive society. Cohesion means rich relationships among diverse components. Diversity without cohesion is merely plural unity, just as dead as singular unity. Society is a fabric, a network.

The core work of justice is in repairing and strengthening social relationships.

The Character of Character

It’s a simple easy idea that there are good people and bad people. Bad people should be locked up. Bad people should not be allowed on the police force. Police should get tough on bad people. Good people should be trusted. Good people should have opportunities to improve their circumstances.

Perhaps it is the core idea of Buddhism that this notion of good people and bad people is dangerously simplistic. Certainly there is some validity to it. But the more one looks closely, the reality is not so simple. Buddhism is known as The Middle Way for a variety of reasons, but one reason is that it can encompass a simple idea along with an understanding of the limits of that idea, ways that an idea can blind us to important details. How can we be blinded by the idea that some people are good and other people are bad?

How somebody behaves is highly situational. A person whose children are starving and whose efforts to feed them by legitimate means have been constantly frustrated, such a person might be reduced to stealing to save the lives of their children. Another person might have a very active physiology and have a hard time sitting quietly for a long time. Put in a situation where they need to sit quietly, they may not be good at following the rules. In a different situation where constant movement is required, their behavior may well be very good.

Whether a particular behavior is good or bad can be strongly dependent on the perspective of the observer. Someone strongly defending one side of a divisive issue can appear good or bad depending on which side of the issue the observer leans toward.

The behavior of a person is generally very complex. In a day or a month or a year, even in an hour, a person can perform many actions, some of which may be very good and others not so good at all. A person experiences many different situations and also what’s going through their head is always shifting. One situation could make a person angry and they carry that anger into the next situation which can open the door to rather bad behavior. A person could be a hard worker on the factory floor but then go home and abuse their family, taking out their workplace resentments and frustrations.

People do change over time. Some of that is just from getting older and slowing down. Age can bring experience and understanding. But age can also bring bitterness and frustration. There is a feedback loop where a person’s behavior leads them into situations which can then steer their behavior. For example, prisons have a reputation for converting petty criminals into hardened criminals. The possibility for such a feedback loop to lead in a positive direction is equally present.

The most potent driver of change is a conscious intention. Parents, teachers, ministers, supervisors, therapists: each of these can work to guide a person to evolve in a more positive direction. It can certainly happen too that one person works to steer another person into some negative behavior pattern, to exploit that person one way or another. To help another person improve is one of the best behaviors possible; to lead another person astray is one of the worst.

To realize that one’s own pattern of response and behavior is malleable and within one’s own power to shape, this is the essence of the Buddhist path. None of us are fixed quantities. We are each a process of constant becoming. To cherish our own positive potential, and that of everyone we meet, is the seed that yields the fruit that nourishes most deeply.

The dangerously simplistic notion of good people and bad people, that seems to be at the foundation of much of our current political strife. Can we reform society effectively by putting all the bad people in prison? Can we reform the police effectively by firing all the bad police? Certainly we need to find ways to suppress bad behavior of all sorts. A good starting point would be to work to understand what sorts of situations promote bad behavior and to keep people out of those situations. Putting violent criminals in prison and firing abusive police officers, these are reasonable and necessary actions. But those are only superficial remedies.

What is Essential

Saving lives or saving the economy? That is a truly bizarre dichotomy! More lives could be lost from the collapse of the economy than from the pandemic: that is a perspective that at least focuses on what matters. Merely staying alive, that is a very low bar indeed, but it is certainly a good place to start.

The natural instinct in a crisis like this is to work to reestablish the routine by which we had been living adequately enough. Of course, to ignore a pandemic is not going to make it go away. Wishing doesn't make it so. There is no way to escape this unscarred, but facing the situation and realistically engaging with it, that is the approach that will minimize the damage. We do have to balance lives lost due to supply chain disruptions etc. against lives lost directly from the pandemic. People need food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. There is enough to go around. A modicum of ingenuity can keep people supplied.

The shock of this pandemic reveals in a variety of ways that our routines have not served our needs so very adequately. This virus is the kind of thing that comes around every decade or so. A healthy economy, a healthy society, is one that can handle such challenges effectively and efficiently. So far, the United States appears to be stumbling.

In the short run, we need extraordinary measures to make sure that people are fed and housed. Insuring adequate medical care seems, sadly, out of reach in this crisis. In the longer run, we need to restructure our routines so that the next pandemic doesn't knock us off our feet. Our way of life has been driving us against many ecological limits. Plague, drought, flood, famine: we can expect ever more frequent crises as long as we mistake recovering our routines as essential.

A Simple Fix

Chris Hedges recently wrote about some top CEOs who proclaim the positive value of capitalism. These terms and ideas get packaged and promoted so heavily that it becomes very difficult to see how they actually work. I'd like to take them apart a little bit and suggest a simple change that could have profound effects.

Our large scale society functions by way of complex organizations. Our welfare, indeed our survival, depends on the smooth functioning of these organizations. These organizations can only maintain themselves by earning profits, i.e. by selling finished products for prices high enough to pay for raw materials, maintain factories, pay workers and managers, etc. Investors who contribute start-up and expansion up-front costs need to earn a reasonable return on their investment, or they'll find something better to do with their money.

The distortion at the foundation of many of our problems today is that investors hold the ultimate decision-making power of corporations. Corporations are created and structured by means of the law. The law gives investors this power. A change in the law would change the way corporations are organized.

The classic straw-man for corporate governance is government control of corporations. But there are many other alternatives. Much of our problem today is that corporate power is too centralized. Government control would increase centralization. What we need is to distribute power.

Corporate governance needs to be widened. The Board of Directors of a corporation, the embodiment of regular decision-making, should include representatives from the workers and the managers, from suppliers and customers, from the local community, from folks living downstream and downwind, as well as from investors. Investors should not, in most cases, have a majority vote. Investors deserve a fair return on their investments, but this should be balanced with the legitimate concerns of the other stakeholders of the business.

It would be a catastrophic error to blame all our ills on big businesses and therefore to work to destroy those businesses. The fabric of our society consists of the goods and services flowing through these businesses. A small adjustment to the steering mechanism would have a profound effect on the path of evolution of this fabric. This is a simple and practical step that could fix the worst excesses of our current system.

Beyond Wonk Perfection

Some years back, the Washington Post's Wonkblog published an example of how precincts might be partitioned into districts unfairly versus fairly.

I would like to propose an improved partition, better than the "perfect" example of the Wonkblog:

In the Wonkblog's perfect partition, each district is entirely red or entirely blue. This makes the representation very rigid. Shifts in voter sentiment will not be reflected in shifts in representation, until the shifts are massive. In the partition I propose, some districts have slim majorities and others have large majorities. This approach is less rigid.

Partitioning the Vote

My earlier notion for preventing gerrymandering was not very effective. Looking at the data for the Michigan 2018 election, the Democrats had a majority of the vote but a minority of the districts. My proposed rule would have done nothing to prevent that.

Exactly what a good rule might be, I don't know. It's a difficult problem! But the basic criterion that seems logical is that the fraction of districts won by each party should be roughly proportional to the fraction of votes for that party. A general shift in voter preference should be reflected with a proportional shift in election results, in the fraction of districts won by a party. This would be achieved by having district boundaries drawn so that the fractions of votes for each party across the districts varies across a reasonably wide spectrum.

The challenge with this approach is that the notion of "a general shift" is too vague to be of much use. Still, a simple model can get the idea across.

Here is an idealized situation, a state with ten districts. When the vote is split equally, the range of district results could be:

With a general drift to 60% of the vote for one of the parties, the number of districts won could change proportionally:

A further shift, to 70%, would continue to be reflected in the proportion of districts won:

Against Gerrymandering

The notion of a free market strikes me as oxymoronic. It's like a game without rules. It's nonsense. A game is defined by its rules. Similarly, markets are defined by rules. Of course, good games and good markets have rules that are fair, for example. Finding ways to structure markets effectively is a worthy challenge.

The recent Supreme Court decision, to keep the federal judiciary out of the business of how to draw the boundaries of legislative districts, strikes me as a move in support of a free political market. Why try to figure out what a fair market might look like? Let the market decide what is fair! But the problem with anarchy is that it is impossible. We can decide on rules using methods developed over the centuries and codified by brilliant political thinkers like the framers of the United States Constitution, or we can revert to the cruder methods of tyrants.

Of course the framers didn't provide all the answers. We the people have the responsibility, working with the general framework set out in the constitution, to work out the rules and regulations, the laws and institutions, by which we may prosper fairly and equitably.

It's clear enough that legislative boundaries can be gerrymandered to amplify the dominance of whichever party. Even if some branch of the government took on the task of preventing such corruption, it's not so clear what kind of rule could work against it effectively. I would like to propose a rule here that could work.

The basic trick used in gerrymandering is to concentrate the voters of the minority party. The voters of the majority party are spread across districts, so there are just enough to win in a very large number of districts.

So here is an effective anti-gerrymandering rule: for each x, there cannot be more districts with more than (50+x)% minority party voters than there are districts with more than (50+x)% majority party voters.

In other words, minority party voters cannot be concentrated in districts more than majority party voters are.

This is a simple rule that would prevent the worst abuses of gerrymandering.

Capital Gains Indexing

I have seen reports that the President is considering changing the accounting of capital gains for tax purposes, adjusting the cost basis to reflect inflation. This would of course reduce the gain, and thus reduce the tax. Since almost all capital gains are earned by the very wealthy, and those taxes therefore paid by the very wealthy, this would be be a dramatic tax cut for the wealthy. These days the old maxim, the rich get richer, is as true as ever, so it would seem that such a tax cut is not at all appropriate.

However, it would be very simple, from an accounting perspective, to adjust for inflation in capital gains taxation in a revenue-neutral way. Of course, a change in tax accounting will change behavior, so precise revenue neutrality is too much to expect. But the resulting change in behavior should have great benefit to the economy and society. Short term capital gains are earned largely through speculation, taking advantage of price fluctuations. Long term capital gains are earned through investment, where the growth in underlying value is the primary determinant. This growth in underlying value is what benefits society. The tax code should encourage long term investment. Long term capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate than short term capital gains. This would be the effect of adjusting the basis to reflect inflation. Simply increasing the tax rate on capital gains could easily make the new accounting revenue neutral.

A parallel accounting adjustment would help the middle class. Interest earned should be corrected for inflation. When inflation is running at say 2% while bank savings accounts are paying 0.1%, perhaps the smart move would be to make the 1.9% loss a tax deduction. This would encourage savings and help middle class families build nest eggs.

Good and Evil

Some years ago I was on an airplane and sat next to a person who was a life coach of some kind. I think we could all use a bit of help in leading better lives, so I was keen to find out what kind of approaches she used. I don’t remember exactly what I was struggling with myself at that time, but I asked this life coach how she helped people think through ethical dilemmas, situations where it was difficult to see which action was best.

This life coach said that she really didn’t think there was any such thing as an ethical dilemma. A good person would just know in their heart what the right thing to do would be. If a person doesn’t know right from wrong, then coaching isn’t going to help them anyway.

I was completely shocked by this answer. The idea that some people just inherently know the right thing to do where other people don’t… the idea that in the real world there is generally a choice between a right thing versus a wrong thing, rather than a choice where every option available has negative aspects… these ideas strike me as so utterly simplistic! And this woman was a life coach! These were the ideas she was encouraging in her clients. I have to admit, I let her know that I thought her approach to ethics was naïve to the point of being delusory and destructive. We did not disembark that flight with warm friendly feelings!

This idea, that people can be divided neatly into good people and not-good people, clearly has well established roots in American culture. It has roots in Calvin’s theology and the Puritans, the folks who came over on the Mayflower. This idea seems to be alive and well today. I hear strong echoes of it when I hear gun advocates contrasting law-abiding citizens versus criminals.

Recognizing the Puritan roots of today’s political conflicts certainly doesn’t solve any problems. John Calvin was no fool. I suspect one difficulty is that his theology was too subtle for most of his followers, so what we’re stuck with is a crude distortion. Perhaps some kind of return to Calvin, learning to dig deeper into his ideas, could be a way to help folks out of their simplistic Manichean trap. Anyway, I hope that a more accurate diagnosis of the problem can help lead us into a healthier way of living.

Accounting

Self and other, us and them, winning and losing, growth and decay: life is struggle. And yet, as one looks closely at the pattern and how the parts fit together, the struggle appears more like a dance. A dance alternates between posture and movement. We can understand a situation in one way, and then look at it from a different perspective. Each phase illuminates the other, with boundless transformative potential.

The basic game in Buddhism consists of a very large number of players called sentient beings, each of whom has a score called karma. It gets tricky though: while most of the time we can track a sentient being because it is attached to a physical body, those physical bodies are subject to gross impermanence, a.k.a. birth and death. How does the associated sentient being come to have whatever karma they do at the time they become associated with a newly born body? What happens to the karma of a sentient being when their body dies?

There is a similar problem in particle physics. There the players are elementary particles such as electrons and quarks. Each particle has a score which includes components such as position and momentum. Curiously, elementary particles are also subject to gross impermanence. What happens to the momentum of a particle when the particle ceases to exist? In physics, particles decay into other particles. Two particles might collide and both cease to exist as a result of the collision, but in their place new particles will appear. These newly appearing particles will carry the scores of the particles that have ceased to exist. In physics, quantities such as momentum are conserved. Momentum can be transferred from one particle to another but it cannot be created or destroyed. These conservation principles are the cornerstones of modern physics. The details of what kinds of particles there are and how they are created and destroyed, these details are constantly being reworked and refined through advances in theory and experiment. But a principle like the conservation of momentum is accepted more or less as an axiom. Of course every principle in science is subject to revision based on evidence. But conservation of momentum is so fundamental that some rather fanciful interpretations of the data will be allowed in order to maintain the conservation principle.

The understanding of beta decay is an example of such fanciful interpretation. Atomic nuclei are composed mainly of protons and neutrons, two types of particles. The simplest atomic nucleus is that of hydrogen, which consists of a solitary proton. This solitary proton is quite stable. Left to itself it will not manifest any sort of gross impermanence but will continue its existence indefinitely. Solitary neutrons, on the other hand, are quite unstable. They can be ejected from a complex nucleus through radioactive decay or through collisions, but they do not last very long outside a nucleus. What one observes is that the neutron decays into a proton and an electron. However, if the momenta of these new particles are added up, the sum will not be equal to the momentum of the neutron that disappeared. The great physicist Enrico Fermi posited a rather fanciful interpretation in order to preserve the principle of the conservation of momentum: there must be a third, invisible, particle also created alongside the proton and the electron. This third particle carries the missing momentum. Further physical principles showed that this third particle could only have tiny mass and would have no electrical charge, so Fermi called it a neutrino: like a very small neutron. These tiny particles were actually detected some years after Fermi’s prediction, one of the great successes of modern physics.

Karma is about as fundamental to Buddhism as momentum is to physics. Cultivate virtue and avoid evil: why? In order to improve one’s situation in the future. If the karma accumulated through one’s actions does not actually lead to future consequences, if karma can come or go independent of one’s actions, then the argument for cultivating virtue falls apart. For the most part it is not too difficult to see how karma might be accumulated and stored in association with a physical body. For example, it is not easy to see how memories are accumulated in a physical body, but it is clear that somehow they are. Karma is much like a habit, which is a kind of memory. The challenge comes when a body manifests gross impermanence, i.e. birth and/or death. We do not generally observe any kind of subtle body which could carry the karma to a newly born body or from a newly deceased body. But the situation is quite similar to beta decay in particle physics. We can maintain the principle of karma by hypothesizing the existence of such subtle bodies. And when expert observers use advanced methods that can actually detect such subtle bodies, we can have confidence in the accuracy of their reports.

The analogy with particle physics, where sentient beings are like particles and karma is like momentum, can be explored in other ways. Emmy Noether proved a mathematical theorem that provides some of the deepest structure in modern physics. She showed that conservation principles are associated with symmetries. For example, conservation of linear momentum is associated with the translational symmetry of space. The interchange symmetry of sentient beings seems like a natural reflection of the conservation principle of karma. After all, a modern paraphrase of the law of karma is: what goes around, comes around. What we do to others, we ultimately do to ourselves.

There is another perspective on the world, another way of seeing the world as a game, another system of accounting: economics. The players are economic agents such as individuals and corporations. Their scores are their property, which can be reduced to the single dimension of monetary value. The analogy between money and karma can shine a little light on the nature of money. Money, like karma, is relational. Karma is a pattern that relates sentient beings. Money is a pattern that relates economic agents. Henry Ford manifested this insight when he understood that the workers in his factories were also his customers. Naively he would maximize his wealth by raising the prices of the cars he was selling, and lowering the wages of the workers who made those cars. But in fact that naïve formula misses the fact that money lives by flowing in a network. Stationary money is dead money.

Particle physics can provide some further insights to challenge our understanding in Buddhism and economics. The wild thing about particles is that they don’t exactly exist or not exist at any particular time. This is very much in line with the argument of the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna, who showed that atoms cannot exist. One of the fascinating manifestations of this kind of quasi existence of particles is associated with the physics of crystals. Particles such as holes and phonons exist in crystals but not in empty space. Particles exist as collective behaviors of other particles. Particles become a way of understanding a system rather than parts whose existence is prior to the system.

This kind of shifting perspective can be seen in another game, in biology. At one level, biology is about organisms and their interactions. At another level, it is about species. Species can compete with other species much like organisms can compete with other organisms. At yet another level, biology is about genes. The evolution of a species can be viewed as a competition among the genes in the gene pool of the species.

This shifting perspective creates some of the great challenges of our time. Climate change is a consequence we all experience of actions we all perform. Individual persons can act, municipalities can act, corporations can act, nations can act, international organizations can act: these are not separate actions, but different perspectives on actions. The fact that we can see a situation as actions by, and consequences for, different sorts of beings, depending on the perspective we choose to take: this does not imply that these actions and consequences are not real. On the contrary, it is just this resilient play, this presentation of fresh appearance to every perspective, that makes the system real, that makes the world real. There is always more to learn.

Profit

I saw a film last night, Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution, written and directed by Jamie Redford. It was a pleasant enough film. Redford admits that he doesn’t know much about the subject; the film was about his beginning to learn about it a bit. I spent a few years working in the field, developing software to help manage the grid as more PV panels are introduced, which create large net load fluctuations that utilities need to respond to. The film didn’t address the puzzles that my path brought me to! But probably for many people it would be a good introduction to some of what is going on.

The major dramatic confrontation of the film was how the Nevada Public Utility Commission cut the rate that home PV owners would be paid for energy fed back into the grid. Obviously this makes installing PV systems less attractive. For those who had already installed systems, their electric bills would be increasing substantially. The damage was quite real.

The film then showed how a year later the Nevada legislature passed bills that reversed the PUC decision. The people had rallied and defeated the big bad corporation. The way the movie portrayed things, the people were in favor of new clean technology, while the corporation was holding on to their old ways that made them big profits.

I was disappointed to see the situation pictured this way. I don’t know about the specifics in Nevada, but I would like to sketch out some general parameters, to propose a more fruitful perspective, one that opens opportunities for greater progress.

At the foundation, there seems to be a widespread notion that being driven by profits is at the core of the capitalist system that is destroying our world. I’m not an economist or political philosopher by any stretch. But I suspect that a lot of these highly trained folks go off into specialized concepts and leave the basics rather unattended. Getting the basics backwards creates real obstacles! I would like to try to tidy up a bit to help us move more effectively in a positive direction.

Profit, meaning that some enterprise provides more benefit than it costs, is not a goal peculiar to capitalism. I would say that profit is the foundation of life. Every organism expends resources in order to gain access to further resources. If the newly acquired resources are not of greater value to the organism than the resources expended to acquire them, the organism is running at a loss. Such losses lead to death. Life requires profit.

What precisely distinguishes capitalism? I expect there are many conflicting definitions. I think a useful criterion would be: ownership by investors. By ownership I mean decision-making authority. Every enterprise is given coherency by some decision making process. There are all sorts of people involved in an enterprise, such as customers, workers, managers, suppliers, neighbors, and investors. In a capitalist system it is the investors who have the final authority in how the enterprise is to be run.

One curious feature of the situation in Nevada regarding net metering for residential PV systems is that the Public Utility Commission is, at least theoretically, not representing the investors in the utility. Generally a PUC is appointed by the government and represents the public interest. Electric power utilities in general are heavily regulated by a variety of government agencies and other non-investor bodies. Electric power is not a very capitalist industry! Of course there are powerful investors with enormous influence and decision making authority, so there is a large capitalist component.

Political power doesn’t really flow through textbook channels. Large investors can certainly cast their votes at shareholder meetings, the classical capitalist channel. But there are many other channels of influence. I don’t doubt that the Nevada PUC is pressured in a variety of ways by big money interests, certainly including utility investors. This kind of corruption, where centers of concentrated power can steer decisions to funnel even more wealth and consequent power back to those same centers, is hardly a distortion particular to capitalism. Still, a capitalist system will manifest such steering in its particular way.

Why did the Nevada PUC resist the growth in residential PV systems? No doubt it was to preserve the utility’s profits. But that answer barely scratches the surface. The folks with residential PV systems wanted to stay connected to the grid. If there is no profit in maintaining the grid, the grid will die. So if folks want to stay connected, it’s in their own interest to help insure the profitability of the utility.

The whole electric power system is enormously complex. Some of this complexity is technological and some of it is social. Technologically, the power system can be divided coarsely into generation, transmission, and distribution. The social structure is governed by regulations which vary from region to region. In general, the electric power system was de-monopolized some decades ago. The ownership of generating plants is typically different than the ownership of transmission and distribution systems. Transmission networks usually cross many state lines. Electric power consumed in one state is very often generated in a different state.

The decision of the PUC very likely was intended to protect corporate profits, but the profits of which corporations? If the clean energy revolution is to succeed, what enterprises need to maintain profitability? How can we structure the power system, socially and technologically, to make clean energy profitable? What structures should we avoid that will put the health of the system at risk?

There are certainly large investments in fossil fuel generation – in coal mines, natural gas wells, in railroads and pipelines, and in generating plants that burn fossil fuels. The investors in these facilities want to continue to receive a good return on their investment. Folks that work in these facilities, the municipalities that receive tax revenues from their operations, etc. – it’s not just the investors who want to see these enterprises continuing to operate and continuing to be profitable. For the clean energy revolution to succeed, these are the people whose projects need to be derailed. To whatever extent there can be established alternate ways for these various groups to survive and even thrive despite this disappointment – the less these folks fight against clean energy, the more the revolution can grow.

It’s hard to say exactly what the clean energy system of the future should look like. Redford’s movie provided admiring portraits of large scale facilities such as wind farms and solar thermal generating plants. It’s hard to foresee a practical future where each home and family manages energy usage independently, off any grid, i.e. where the grid is gone. Of course the grid is barely a century old, i.e. humanity survived through almost all its history without the electric grid. So it is entirely conceivable that the grid could just disappear as quickly as it appeared. Still, in trying to plan out a practical path for a clean energy revolution, it seems most practical to incorporate a grid, where generation and consumption can be more loosely coupled.

Building and maintaining a grid, the transmission and distribution networks, together with large scale generation and large scale storage facilities, is a considerable expense. The consumers of electric power who use the grid will have to provide the funds, one way or another, to keep the grid running. Nowadays the main way that consumers pay for their use of the grid is by paying for their total energy use each month, or, equivalently, for their average power use. But this becomes a problem as more and more consumers are also generators of power. Distributed generation adds new sources of fluctuation of power flow in the grid. Distributed generation makes maintaining the grid more difficult and more expensive, while reducing revenue.

Our modern era has created such huge networks that people often lose track of where things come from. We earn money by working at a job and then spend that money paying bills. By keeping up with our bill payments, we maintain the privilege to acquire the various things we need and want. It’s actually our work that fulfills our needs and wants. But there are so many abstract layers between that the connection is hard to recognize. There is a lot of work required to maintain the electric power grid. The idea that there is a greedy corporation that charges us for electric power and that the smart game is to arrange things to avoid paying that corporation: that idea has lost sight of the fact that we rely on systems that take a lot of work to maintain.

There are many challenges we face in bringing about a clean energy revolution. One fundamental shift that we need to navigate is how we pay for the maintenance of the electric power grid. A consumer that uses zero net power but that sometimes pushes energy into the grid and at other times draws energy from the grid, that consumer is deriving benefit from the grid. If the grid is to survive, the users of the grid need to pay to maintain it. Net energy consumption is not going to work anymore as a way to allocate costs across consumers. The clean energy revolution requires us to find a new way to charge consumers for their use of the grid.

This perspective turns upside-down the picture presented by Redford’s movie. Again, I don’t know the specific details driving the decisions of the Nevada PUC. But it is quite reasonable to guess that the PUC understood that net metering is not a method of cost allocation that is going to enable the survival of the grid. Net metering is not going to move the clean energy revolution forward in the long run.

It’s hard to say what sort of cost allocation system can work well in the new clean energy world. For example, maintenance of the grid could simply be funded through government tax revenue. But this approach tends to insulate consumers from the costs their actions incur. Such a lack of feedback tends to foster inefficiency. Another approach is to use smart meters. The typical consumer’s power meter today just accumulates the total power used. Alternative meters could track various statistics of the fluctuations in power consumption and generation. Part of a consumer’s bill could be proportional e.g. to their 90th percentile peak power consumption. After all, the grid operations need to maintain readiness to supply such peak power usage, so it is reasonable to bill customers for such access to power.

After the showing of the movie yesterday in Salt Lake City, there was a short period of discussion with Jamie Redford who was present in the room. I had the opportunity to ask him, “What about smart meters?” He said he hadn’t heard too much about them but had heard about some resistance from consumers who worried about electromagnetic radiation – generally these meters can be read from the street by way of microwave communications. Redford noted that most of us regularly use cell phones that emit very much the same sort of microwave signals, so the resistance to smart meters seemed a bit misplaced.

If the clean energy revolution requires smart meters rather than net metering, it might just be that the consumers are more of a drag on progress than the Public Utilities Commission!

Redford’s film was a reasonable introduction to the clean energy revolution. I hope I have argued effectively here that we need to take the discussion a few layers deeper if we are really going to fulfill the promise of clean energy!

Conscious Change

A shocking event like the recent Mandalay Bay massacre can wake us up to a broader problem: our culture is infected with violence. Our military actions abroad, abusive action by police inside our country, our enormous prison system, gangs in our cities, bullies in school, violence within our families – certainly mass shootings are a serious issue but our problem with violence goes far beyond that. Is this violence something rooted in our essential character as a nation or as a species? Or this some passing phase, an arbitrary visitation from the vast realm of possibilities, that will depart as mysteriously as it arrived?

This kind of disease is exactly what the medical practice of Buddhism specializes in. Buddhism addresses more specifically the coming and going of such behavior patterns in individuals, but its insights can be generalized to societies. Of course, societies are made up of individuals. Each of us can individually work to uproot whatever violent patterns or tendencies they might experience, and the traditional approaches of Buddhism can be very effective for that. But we can also address our collective problems using similar methods.

Gun control is a key issue in the public debate over how to respond to mass shootings. Some of the opposition to gun control comes from advocates of violence, for whom, if there is a problem at all, it is how to maintain the space for legitimate violence while working to suppress illegitimate violence. Unfortunately this kind of “I am right, you are wrong” approach to violence is one of escalation. With any luck we can learn to see through its deception before the destruction and suffering reach yet more horrific levels.

Another objection to gun control is that it is too superficial. If a person intends violent action, the lack of a gun is a minor obstacle. Criminals will find illegal guns or use other means to indulge their lust for violence. We need to address that criminal mindset directly. Unfortunately the real root of the problem is quite elusive. Each problem is an outcome of several other problems. We have to change everything to change anything. Even if it were possible to design some total new structure for society that would have no place for violence, how could such a reboot of society be brought about? Archimedes envisioned moving the earth, given only a separate place to stand. Who stands outside society, to be in a position to re-engineer it from a clean slate?

The Buddhist approach to conscious change is incremental. The core insight of the Buddha was interdependent origination. The search for a control panel and a seat beside it from which to steer change, this search is futile. Because things arise in networks of interdependence, change must also occur through such networks. We need to steer our behaviors across their full range. The resulting changes can then reinforce each other and lo, the earth moves.

The basic dimensions involved in individual conscious change are outlined in Buddhism as: view, meditation, and conduct. These same dimensions exist in society and can provide a path by which we can extract ourselves from the pervasive violence in our lives.

These dimensions of society already form the cornerstones of exemplary cultures of conscious change. Modern science is built from theory, experiment, and application. In isolation, these elements cannot come to life. It is by bringing them together, each informing and correcting the others, that modern science has achieved the vitality through which it has transformed our world.

The framers of the United States Constitution also understood the vital importance of conscious change and the kind of interdependence required to achieve it. Our three branches of government, legislative, judicial, and executive also inform and correct each other to keep our government responsive to the evolving needs of the citizens.

An event like the Mandalay Bay massacre can wake us up to the need for conscious cultural change. These three dimensions can provide a rough outline for the kinds of work required. Exactly what kinds of structures and institutions might be most effective for this work – probably we will have to stumble along the way and learn from our mistakes. But if we can address the full scope of the interdependence that generated our disease of violence, we will have the power to cure it.

Violent behavior is one link in a cycle. It spawns the anger and divisiveness that then regenerate further violent behavior. To cut this cycle, it is essential to suppress violent behavior comprehensively, across its full range. Violent suppression is absurd and counterproductive. More restrictive government regulation of citizen weapons is a perfectly reasonable component of a program to suppress violence, but such restrictions must be implemented in a nonviolent way. A key element in conscious nonviolent change is an incremental evolutionary approach.

Armed violence by the public is only one strand of the violence that pervades our culture. Violence perpetrated by government agents must also be addressed. Our military actions around the world must become less violent. Our police at home must become less violent. Of course any such constraints will make it harder for these agents to fulfill their missions. But a surprising amount of the time these missions arise from the unintended side effects of prior violent action. As the general level of violence decreases, the sense of crisis lessens and with it the impulse for violent responses.

The arms industry is another component of behavior that promotes violence. With an incremental, evolutionary approach, it is practically impossible to predict where the path leads. To eliminate all need for weapons seems barely imaginable in the long run and completely unrealistic in the short term. But definite concrete steps need to be taken to curb the worst excesses of weapons production. One good step could be the prohibition of making and selling of land mines.

Certainly it will be important that violence from gangs, domestic abuse, etc. be reduced somehow or they can re-infect the broader society. Different opportunities for action will be available to each person and institution involved in the conscious effort to cure ourselves of our addiction to violence. Some folks will pick up the ball early in the game. Others might be much slower in coming around. If movement can become widespread enough in the network of interdependence, the whole world can move.

The simple suppression of violent behavior is not enough to shift the whole network. Changes in conduct must work hand in hand with changes in view and meditation.

View manifests in society as art, literature, media, etc. Violence is clearly even more pervasive in our video entertainment than it is on our streets. We are not going to cure our streets of violence so long as the glorification of violence is a major theme of our video games. It is good that an event like the Mandalay Bay massacre can inspire some people to support stricter regulation of fire arms. Can it also inspire film makers to stop glorifying violence?

Meditation in society manifests primarily as education and training. In general the antidote for violence is to cultivate a deep understanding and appreciation for the other people with whom one interacts. Before the army deploys to a new country, soldiers could learn the language and culture of the people there. Police need to understand the situations of the people in the communities they serve. Religious leaders must not promote bigotry but work instead to enhance understanding across sectarian boundaries. These are not new ideas, of course. But if we can put together a comprehensive program of nonviolence… the whole world can move!

Diversity

What is diversity? It is attributed to a set with many members when the members have characteristics that differ among those members. The most interesting case is where the set is a human community or organization with many human members. Humans have many characteristics, such as: gender, age, size, skin color, neuropsychological pattern, language competencies, religious belief, economic status, organization role, geographical history, ancestral characteristics, etc. Members of a diverse community share at least their membership in that community, while differing in at least some of their other characteristics.

Communities usually have structure beyond a simple boundary between members and non-members. People are generally members of many communities at the same time. People in one community will belong to a variety of other communities. That is part of the diversity of a community.

Communities encourage or discourage various actions of their members. Of course the community is composed of its members; it is the members’ actions which do the encouraging or discouraging. The vector of encouragement combines with the vector of diversity to drive the evolution of the community. This dynamic interplay is what creates our world.

Diversity can be accommodated in various ways; by providing services adapted to the particular needs of community members with their individual characteristics, and also by discouraging member actions that conflict with such accommodation. Of course to discourage is to fail to accommodate, so there are difficult conflicts to resolve. Should a conservative religious organization be permitted to restrict leadership roles to members of a particular gender?

A deeper question is the extent to which diversity should be cultivated, not merely accommodated. There are types of accidental or historical diversity which are not fundamental to the purpose of the community. It is relatively easy for a community to cultivate such diversity. For example, a physics research group might welcome members from many national backgrounds, and make a special effort to cherish that diversity, e.g. by celebrating the holidays of those many nations.

More challenging is the question of the extent to which diversity should be cultivated which touches the purpose of the community. A certain amount of diversity of opinion is essential to the advancement of science, but adherence to totally discredited theories would seem to be good reason for some sort of corrective action. But it is very difficult to know exactly where to draw this line. More than one discredited theory has later triumphed. Another sort of diversity involves frameworks which are more incommensurable than contradictory. For example, an art department may face a decision whether to support both realistic and abstract artists, who may find each other’s aesthetic judgements almost unintelligible.

Communities throughout history have managed diversity in various ways. There are often roles that are rigidly assigned based on a member’s characteristics such as gender or ancestry. Beyond this sort of functional diversity, any accommodation is most often seen as a temporary stage on the way to ultimate uniformity. This general trend has led to the globalization of today. Globalization has proved a mixed blessing and by now seems self-limiting, having exhausted the planetary resources required for its own sustenance. Just as fragmentation of a population creates the opportunity for biological speciation, the collapse of global commerce will make room for the reemergence of cultural diversity.

Did the suppression of diversity by globalization participate in the failure of globalization? If we are to learn from that failure, we need to find new ways to cultivate and cherish diversity!

Markets and Tournaments

Prices are a way of evaluating options. Given two floor mops, if mop A works twice as well as mop B, then an efficient market ought to mark mop A at twice the price of mop B.

We could put prices on sports teams in just this way. For example, gambling pools should, given enough information, be able to put proper odds on each team in a match or a tournament.

But a tournament is more interesting than a match. Suppose we have a tournament with four teams playing, A, B, C, and D. We might be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which team will win in a match between any particular pair. But that doesn't let us assign any kind of price or value to each team. A might always win against B, and B against C, but it might happen that C always wins against A! In a four way single elimination tournament, the final champion team will depend on the way the tournament is arranged: on how the teams are paired up in the first round, etc.

Given a tournament structure, accurate pairwise odds will map cleanly to accurate odds on the eventual champion. But different tournament structure can easily give a different most likely champion. Teams don't have a universal value, but only relative to the tournament structure.

Decision making in general is a matter of evaluating options. Accurate evaluation depends on understanding the context in which the various contemplated actions will unfold. This is just a manifestation of the unity of emptiness and interdependent origination. The value of a thing is not inherent in the thing but rather is a property of how the thing is situated in its environment.