For example, voters rationally remain ignorant because their input in the election is not correlated to their knowledge about the process and the candidates. When [...]]]> Interesting lecture, put out by the Adam Smith Institute, about The Lessons of Public Choice Theory. It turns out that democracy is a less efficient system than the free market.

For example, voters rationally remain ignorant because their input in the election is not correlated to their knowledge about the process and the candidates. When everyone’s vote counts the same, educational investment just doesn’t pay off.

Another example, regulation doesn’t always pay off. Because, information about the policies and analysis on their effects is politicized out of proportion. The free market provides more information about products through consumer feedback scores Amazon to a consumer, than any voter could ever hope to get about either the regulators and their objectives, or the policies and their potential effects. Lacking information and transparency, government regulation is nearly guaranteed to provide a less cost efficient and worse quality goods.

This lecture is the first time that I have seen the same tools of analysis applied to the economy also applied to the democratic system.

From these [...]]]> I’ve been spending a lot of cog cycles processing ways to make money doing education. It’s apparently quite difficult. With statements like There is No Profit in Education, No Competitive Advantage to Better Learning. and posts about Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed, as well as a (conspiratorialist) video about the College Conspiracy.

From these discussions, I’ve learned some interesting things:

1. The well-to-do view education as an investment, while the ‘poor’ see it as a cost. Those who view it as an investment are relatively price-insensitive, so pushing for quality increases costs and disenfranchises those who would benefit the most (if only their viewpoint could be changed.)
2. Student loan debt has exceeded 1 Trillion. I’m not sure if this is fully represented in the US. debt clock. If graduating students exit college into a recession, and are unable to find a job, this puts additional strain on government finances (because they guarantee student loans).
3. One factor in the rising cost of education is the availability of low interest student loans. It’s a case of too much money chasing too few goods.
4. Our educational standards are slacking. We have a feel-good assesment system that’s been suffering grade inflation for some decades. Unfortunately for the future of society, education majors are the worst offenders. I’ve lamented the lack of talent in my students before, this data only corroborates my feelings.

Basically, we’re doomed. I think the only way to solve this issue is with marketing education, and finding a way to commoditize it, so you can make high-volume sales to the lower economic class. Perhaps, the way out isn’t education, but trade schools.

—

I really wanted to stop above, but I’m just compelled to bring a somewhat harsh viewpoint into the mix. Some of the issues above deal with the economics of education. I’d love for everyone in society to be brilliant and creative; but it’s not going to happen.

Let’s go back to first principles and look at the costs: For a person to be educated now takes the first 20-30 years of their life. We know, from history, that people can be economically productive starting at early age. For arguments sake, let’s say we all have manual labor value starting at 10 years old. So, beyond just the child rearing investment (borne by the parents) that individual is actually a social drain for an additional 10-20 years. These years happen to coincide with what’s usually the most productive in the person’s life. That is, when they’d focus on building a career. So, for any of this to be economically sustainable, we’d have to expect (on average) that the educational investment increases productivity from 30 thru retirement enough to pay for the lost years of work.

Given that, we have to admit that education is incredibly costly. Just in terms of the years sacrificed, not necessarily in terms of money or productivity. This represents an intrinsic cost, that we cannot shuffle away with creative accounting. Because it’s a high cost, we should immediately see that education is not a right. It is a privilege; if not for the individuals, then for society as a whole. We have to be rich enough to afford the investment. This remains true, even if the investment is socialized (i.e. the economics are amortized across everyone, even those that only indirectly benefit).

Because it’s a privilege, it’s not for everyone. Now, I don’t mean to disenfranchise any class of people; but I will go on record as saying that I think education is only for those that can afford it. So, let’s examine what I mean by that. I don’t mean that education is for those already wealthy. I do mean that education, as an investment, is something that should be available to as many as possible. That is, we should seek a financial system that gives us a good return. Those currently in a lower economic class should also have opportunities to raise themselves up. Our goal here should be to lower the cost of this privilege as much as possible to reach as many people as possible. If it’s only for those that can afford it, it should be made more affordable (lowering the cost is not the same as granting an entitlement or right).

One of the best ways to make an investment available is of course by offering a loan. This way people without current means can speculate on the investment return, purchasing their education with the expectation on future earnings. That comes with a strong caveat though, which is not factored into our current system. We should not set people up to fail or default. We should not offer loans for study programs that have low future earnings. Banks would have done this naturally (because they don’t want a client to default on the loan anymore than the client likes to go bankrupt) if not for government incentives to offer more leniently. This malinvestment was perpetrated by government guarantee of all student loans, which eliminates the financial risk to the bank, resulting in more loans to more clients for a wider class of study programs to people with lower expectations of return than would be normally approved by any fiscally responsible institution. This situation of course hurts most those that take the loans. And is only one example of poor government finance decisions that drastically harm the very people that government is supposed to be helping.

Actually, coming from the science background. I see no problem with banks that choose to only issue loans to those which have (a) a promising track record of good grades and (b) declare an interest majoring in a STEM program. Because these are the people and skills that we desire in our society, they have a good rate of return on the investment. I know an undesired side-effect is that the humanities and liberal arts will struggle, but unless they can demonstrate a return, so be it. I know they won’t completely disappear, because they retain good cultural value.

Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding [...]]]> Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote:

Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding of the brain. In fact, to advance their ideas, these authors have to be almost completely unaware of neurology and neuroscience.

I don’t know nearly as much cognitive science as I should, mostly because the school system completely avoids the edifying motto “Know Thyself”. What I have learned has been purely motivated by my own curiosity and experience. To that end I’d like to elucidate why I think this article’s above quote is spot-on.

One of my friends has been diagnosed with Schizophrenia. Which is, despite it’s outward manifestations, is a brain disorder, not a psychological one. I strongly suspect that the disorder arises from a breakdown of one (or more) of the mental agents responsible for maintaining the illusion of a unified mind.

I conjecture that a normally functioning brain is still composed of many different opinions, desires, wishes and goals, all in a trade-off war for satisfaction. If the agent responsible for weighing these differences breaks down, then the illusion of a unified mind can also break down. This is exactly the behavior that you’d expect if the brain were the hardware that runs a ‘Society of Mind‘.

For those that are willing to look, there is a mountain of evidence from behavioral psychology and cognitive science that supports the view that I have from studying computer science: The brain is hardware that runs the software of the mind. The mind (what some wish to promote to a soul) simply doesn’t survive damage to the hardware of the brain. And if you think otherwise, you are deluding yourself. You are, in fact, a self-referencing software loop.

It begins [...]]]> The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored the issue. Here, I seek to provide some links to more fundamental content.

It begins with the hypothetical existence of a ‘Literature patent’. I consider such an idea to be terrible at face value, and the article actually dismisses it as much. It would be ridiculous to expect every author to carefully comb over their work making sure that it doesn’t infringe on any registered plots or (worse!) plot devices (good buy holodeck!) Acquiring knowledge of registered patents would be prohibitive for a beginning author, they’d have to rely on publishers/editors. This significantly raises the cost of creating an innovative work. Not to mention the human effort the government must spend to maintain consistency in it’s patent database, and the legal costs and liabilities for the inevitable infringement.

The article then proceeds to demonstrate what happens in patentable areas. Immediately, there is a land grab on the ‘low hanging fruit’. During this process, established market leaders tend to benefit, because the have the resources (both funds and people) to make a large number of claims and file the required paperwork (economics of scale apply to paper shuffling too). Typically only a relatively few companies will be successful in this endeavor. The initial grab might also appear to be an ‘economic stimulus’, as it will show a remarkably steep and sudden interest in the field, resulting from the underlying similarity of the tragedy of the commons. After the market settles, a few incumbents then use their patent portfolios to threaten up-start competition. As the article points out, in the world of software patents, so much of the field is so obvious, that agents without an explicit interest in software will find themselves infringing as a normal course of their business but will be without their own patent portfolio and unable to make a bargaining counter-threat.

Another economic phenomenon that happens as a result of the patent system’s existence is economic stalemate. This actually happened with the sewing machine, as recorded by Adam Mossoff in A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket, which was blogged about at the Volokh Conspiracy. He recounts how the marketing and distribution of the sewing machine was actually encumbered by the patent system, because the machine required the combination of several innovations, and no single agent held all patents on the functionality. History also demonstrates the practice of ‘patent trolling’, whereby a company, which doesn’t actually produce anything, seeks to profit by legal threats of infringement and licensing agreements on its patent portfolio. The resulting stalemate was finally resolved through the explicit creation of a patent-holding company, whose sole function was to share the patents and resulting profits of all involved manufacturing firms.

So we can see that for areas where copyright is already established practice, the introduction of an extension of the patent system results in litigation and paperwork and encourages the preservation of an established regime of a few powerful companies working in loose collusion, both of which tend to outweigh any potential benefits to development and innovation

Now, I’d like to go out on a limb here, and reject the very concept of ‘Intellectual Property’. Richard Stallman has spoken out against its use, and continuously advertises the fact that it’s deceptive and misleading. At the root of the issue is that ideas and physical matter behave differently. That is, copying != stealing. The reasoning behind this position is fairly simple, when an idea is copied that does not deprive the original possessor from the idea. When you tell me about your theory of X, you don’t suddenly forget after telling me. In contrast, if you give me an apple, now you no longer have that apple. Ideas are part of a different realm of existence.

Finally, I’d like to point out the slippery slope, what happens if we go too far with this property idea: we might lose The Right to Read, or watch How creativity is being strangled by the law.

I hope that through these references, you can see where, how, and why I’ve developed my position on the patent issue; I’m firmly on the side of maximum freedom (and that includes the opening up of all media: open-music, open-software, open-hardware, open-design, open-architecture, open-video, open-government, open-literature, etc…)

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20.

Somehow, [...]]]> Recently the ever popular doughnut chain, Krispy Kreme, got in trouble for supporting our new political administration.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20.

Somehow, the wording of this rather innocuous invitation for free doughnuts, has led some to accuse Krispy Kreme of being “pro-choice,” which translates to pro-abortion; which is also a party political position of the Democratic Party. Of course, the American Life League would take it that way, given their entire existence is predicated on that viewpoint.

Upon discussing this bit of hilarity with my friends, we almost immediately jumped to the conclusion that ZFA set theory must be pro-abortion because of the (highly contentious) Axiom of Choice. This must be what separates the Democratic mathematicians from the Republican ones. It’s not all that nonsense about the Banach-Tarski paradox, it’s about Abortion! I get it now!

This argument was loud and clear in a [...]]]> It’s been 4 days since Californians voted to deny rights to a certain minority of its population. Let’s look at a few of the arguments against gay marriage:

• It protects our children from being taught in public schools that “same-sex marriage” is the same as traditional marriage.

This argument was loud and clear in a TV ad that depicted a child showing the children’s book “King and King” to her mother. The mother of course was absolutely aghast. The ad then threatened that passing Proposition 8 would prevent such dire consequences. This was countered with an ad in which our Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell publicly stated this would not happen. Clearly, since almost everyone in CA came out of the CA public school system, we should all know how it works, and which of these two scenarios is the more believable. In actuality, the CA public education system never actually teaches anyone about its own organization; So we’ve all graduated without any knowledge about the system itself.

So, lets look at the law, CA Education Code Section 51933:

• …
• (b) A school district that elects to offer comprehensive sexual health education pursuant to subdivision (a), whether taught by school district personnel or outside consultants, shall satisfy all of the following criteria:
  • …
  • (7) Instruction and materials shall teach respect for marriage and committed relationships.

So clearly issues regarding marriage will be mentioned in class, and CA schools will be obligated to mention that gay marriage is legal within the state. We also have code 51932, which reads

• (a) This chapter does not apply to description or illustration of human reproductive organs that may appear in a textbook, adopted pursuant to law, on physiology, biology, zoology, general science, personal hygiene, or health.
• (b) This chapter does not apply to instruction or materials that discuss gender, sexual orientation, or family life and do not discuss human reproductive organs and their functions.

Which means that sexual education materials must be non-discriminatory, and thus corroborates that gay marriage will be taught in schools.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves here, the education code still might not require that a child learn about gay marriage, because parents are allowed to remove children from school regarding certain types of education. Codes 51937-51939 which provide notice and parental consent regarding “comprehensive sexual health education¹, HIV/AIDS prevention education, and assessments related to that education” in order that parents can remove their child from such education are unfortunately too specific. That is, parents are not required to receive notice about materials regarding marriage, nor would they be able to pull their child from school². (although any local school could certainly inform parents during a PTA meeting, and simply look the other way when a child is absent)

So I have to counter this with an open question: What is so bad about a kid learning that CA approves gay marriage? To do otherwise would deny them knowledge of the fact that gay couples do get married. Besides which, fact-based education isn’t the same as an endorsement. Besides, CA allows gay couples to adopt children; so learning about gay marriage doesn’t harm children at all. No credible study has ever found that children are negatively impacted by being raised in a lesbian or gay household.

• All major world religions and civilizations have historically condemned the practice of homosexuality.

First, anyone remember the Greeks and Romans? what about Hindu and Chinese art that depicts homosexuality? We don’t have universal historical condemnation of the practice. But even if we did, that wouldn’t necessarily make it wrong. Inter-racial marriage was condemned for a long time, but is completely accepted practice now. It’s time to grow up.

• Being gay is a choice.

Really, and I suppose that you are in full logical control of your attractions? That you are fully conscious and aware of the reasons for your attraction? That you’ve never questioned why you felt an attraction? or felt that your attraction was illogical? People don’t really choose who or what they are attracted to, it’s something that strikes them from within, that doesn’t follow the laws of society or rationality. We don’t choose who we are attracted to or why; we only rationalize it after the fact. For many people, being gay isn’t a choice, it’s the nature of their life.

• Homosexuality is a crime against nature.

This argument actually dates way back, at least all the way to Plato. See the previous blurb about choice. Or look at all the documented cases of homosexuality in nature, in zoos, and among monogamous animals. The fruit fly has a gene that practically guarantees strict homosexual mating practices.

• Homosexuality is dangerous. (Religious)

This argument can get very interesting: Supposing you believe in an omnipotent deity that dislikes homosexual practices, and has been known to destroy entire cities for committing such sins. Then you could reasonably argue that allowing such practices endangers society. But it simply doesn’t hold up to the historical record. People have been gay (and practicing) since before Plato; What happens between conscenting adults won’t bring down the apocalypse. (Or that would have happened already, your deity has had plenty of time and opportunity.)
As an aside, a variant of this argument was used to persecute christians during the Roman Empire because they refused to make sacrifices to a certain pagan god, and thus endangered the city.

• Homosexuality is dangerous. (Secular)

Because of the dysfunctional, unhealthy and changeable nature of homosexuality, legitimizing it as “marriage” constitutes irresponsible and reckless public policy that endangers the future of our children and grandchildren. But I disagree. Driving a car is a reckless act of self-endangerment, yet completely legal (even encouraged). The use of any of a number of household chemicals or cleaners is certainly unhealthy, yet also completely legal (even encouraged through advertisement). Ensuring that people behave in a functional, healthy, responsible manner through the drafting of law nearly always fails. It confuses what is moral and what is legal. There are many behaviors that one might consider immoral (eating horse meat) but that should certainly be legal. Just because your moral code tells you not to do something, doesn’t give you the right to demand the same of everyone else.

• Legalizing gay marriage will lead to legalizing polygamy or bestiality.

Not necessarily, we could easily outlaw marriage between a man and a horse, and simply stick with defining it as being between two people. Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and they aren’t having a sudden outbreak of polygamy or polyandry, nor has the country gotten appreciably hotter (gone to hell).

• But defining marriage doesn’t take away their rights.

Firstly, Separate but equal is not equal. Though, I would actually love for CA to complete remove all references to marriage from all of its current legal code and replaces it with the term ‘civil union’, and then make some small change that grandfathers previous marriages to be civil unions, and out-of-state marriages to be CA civil unions. Then the religious conservatives can have their precious marriage. This is not a workable solution.

CA has a code³ that converts valid marriages in other states into valid marriages in CA. I’m sure that many other states have similar codes. I’m also sure that other states have no such clauses regarding what would become a CA civil union. So, no couples leaving CA under this proposed change would be recognized in other states; and there’s nothing that CA can do about it. For largely historical reasons, the term marriage is in the legal codes, both in CA and elsewhere. Thus, for practical reasons, this forces CA to extend marriage to its homosexual citizens, and not to declare everyone as having a civil union.

• It Preserves Traditional Marriage

Ok. Then we should support arranged marriage? Or disallow divorce? Tradition isn’t always right, sometimes we need to move on.

• Marriage is for Procreation, not Recreation

This argument is found in The Somerville Paper. It argues that �Through marriage our society marks out the relationship of two people who will together transmit human life to the next generation� and further argues that marriage �is not a recognition of the relationship just for its own sake or for the sake of the partners to the marriage�. These are not necessarily true statements. We already allow infertile couples to marry, and the principle reason that people get married is because they love each other, not because they want society to continue, or because they get a tax break. Marriage is about having a long-term loving and stable relationship with another person; it’s not about gender, and it’s not about procreation. [it actually the other way 'round: all the laws regarding marriage are actually cruft that lets society recognize/endorse the pair bonding]

Marriage should be what brings us together today. It shouldn’t separate us. It should be about true love.

This issue is really one about civil rights. Homosexuals are being denied their civil rights, as were blacks, women, and inter-racial couples before them. Having the progressive state of CA deny marriage to homosexuals, feels like being stabbed in the heart. I expected more from my state of California. The U.S. expected more from California.

1. CA education code 51931 (b) “Comprehensive sexual health education” means education
   regarding human development and sexuality, including education on pregnancy, family planning, and sexually transmitted diseases.
2. one of these days I’ll write something about how mandatory education is wrong. Principally, it’s because of issues like the current one only arise in massively coercive systems.
3. CA Family Code 308. A marriage contracted outside this state that would be valid by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the marriage was contracted is valid in this state.