The End of Politics?

It wasn't so long ago that you could look at a political landscape and feel all kinds of ire at the repression of political freedom. And it is still true today that you can do that. But there are fewer kinds of ire now. In a world without borders and states, the individual will and action become more important and yet less so, since there will be fewer instruments to leverage that power.

What happens as we sink (or rise) towards greater equipotential is that each person will have more space and less effect. Suppose that information, energy, time and material resources are all distributed evenly. Then there are fewer or no gradients, and work cannot be done. This is why great works require great inequities.

But no, this is not a politically safe statement to make.

Burial Grounds

In some cultures, people are buried. In some, they are left in the cold, clear mountains to be carried away by ice, air and raptors. In others, they get funeral pyres or cremation. Sailors used to be buried at sea.

In many cultures, we honour dead ancestors in their absence. We remember them in stories and images, in spirit and in essence. After all, they are the people whose lives gave birth to ours. I don't know why we want to keep our cemeteries as if they were necropolises though, cities of the dead.

The dead will come to outnumber the living, given finite resources. The world population currently exceeds the combined total of all the dead perhaps up to about 1000 AD. But in a twinkling of an eye, we living will soon be overwhelmed.

The physical spaces some cultures set aside for their dead are not sustainable. Soon, 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust' will have to become the truth, not just a mealy-mouthed platitude uttered at some funerals at which the corpse is to be interred with the hope that the body will last forever.

Some believe that bodies must be intact for the resurrection of the dead — certainly, this belief is as old as Ancient Egypt. I find it hard to believe, however, that a Power which can raise the dead cannot simply reconstitute the bodies from the dust of the cosmos.

And so, we should favour the living over the dead. If a road must pass through the last resting-place of my ancestors, I think they would be amused. No mere road would have served to baulk any intentions of theirs when they were alive.

Four Convenient Myths of Education

There are four main myths of modern education:

1. That all students of the same age should be in the same school level or class.
2. That school should be timetabled.
3. That students should have streams, tracks, or fixed subject combinations.
4. That teachers should specialise.

The first three of these are issues of administrative convenience, based on various ideas such as Piaget's now somewhat discredited concept of stages of learning, Bentham's Panoptikon for prisoner surveillance, and other systems designed with the assumption that all humans behave similarly or ought to do so. The fourth also assumes that this is so of teachers, that teaching ability is something that can be trained as a specialisation, and if so, it works only if the training is keyed to a particular subject or group of subjects.

It is this last one which irritates me the most; the first three can be passed off, explained away, or excused partly on the basis of administrative concerns (more about which, later). However, if a person can learn many subjects from different teachers, why can't a person teach many subjects to different learners?

I think that only the absence of hard work, cognitive effectiveness, and communications skill might be obstacles to the ability to teach any subject well. This absence, however, should not be the case in anyone who has graduated from the system of education in which he or she is deployed to teach. After all, hard work, thinking and communicating are three basic traits all systems should imbue the student with in ANY system.

The main reason, going back to the other three myths, is that of administrative departmentalism. Administrators are happy to divide people into neat groups, in what is called a Fordist arrangement. This form of specialisation is economically tidy. It is also efficient but not effective, because it ring-fences knowledge in a world that requires transdisciplinary prowess.

And that brings me back to the idea of putting administrators in charge of systems. About two millennia ago, Paul of Tarsus, in a letter to the church at Corinth, spoke at length about spiritual gifts and the building-up ('edification') of the Church as a whole (you'll find this in chapters 12-14 of the First Letter to the Corinthians). He went so far as to rank the gifts of the Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 12:28).

In that ranking, he placed the gift of apostleship first; that is, the ability to establish and provide strong foundations for an organisation. Prophecy was second; that is, the ability to look forward and provide direction for an organisation. Teaching was third; that is, the ability to provide education and disseminate knowledge relevant to the organisation and its goals. These were the three major, numbered gifts.

He then listed as subsidiary gifts the following: wonder-working, healing, helping, administration, speaking in tongues — in that order. Indeed, he spent all of chapter 14 of that letter pointing out that the gift of speaking in tongues is of the least importance, especially if no interpreter is present or no interpretation is provided.

This is a key to breaking up the myths of education. Good education is provided by establishing firm cognitive foundations, mapping a way forward, and teaching each person to find their way through the map based on the principles earlier established. Mass education, like Fordist mass production and mass food provision, has corrupted good taste. Or as Paul pointed out in chapter 15, "Bad company corrupts good character."

In the case of an impoverished state in which paucity of resources forces standardisation or 'optimal' resource allocation, perhaps the first three myths have to be supported. But whomever aspires to be a teacher, that person should take a good hard look at the idea of specialisation and realise that teachers can, and should be able to, teach anything.

All it takes is sufficient preparation, time, and effort. And of course, if you're that teacher, bear in mind that no matter what language you think you're speaking, it's a good thing if your students understand what you're saying.

Research Engines, Morality and Ethics

What pains me, a child of the 1960s, is that this age of humanity provides so many more resources than the age of my birth — but people don't seem to use them as much as they should. Take for example this choice paragraph that an acquaintance of mine (to my thinly disguised horror) produced in the course of a discussion:

You say there is 'medical ethics' and 'legal ethics' but no 'medical morality' and 'legal morality' but I say we use 'medically moral' and 'legally moral'. I raise the possibility that this may be that due to Zipfian distributions in English, leading to the words being used interchangeably in when sentences are constructed differently.

The discussion was about the distinction between morality and ethics. I asserted that there were clear empirical distinctions; that is, humans in general have a sense that the terms are not completely interchangeable. Behind my assertion is my belief, on empirical grounds, that the two terms have nuances that are sufficiently different that they overlap somewhat but far from completely.

Now, anyone can check our claims using Google as a measure of modern usage. If the terms used receive roughly the same order of magnitude of hits, you can assume that they are roughly as frequently used. Furthermore, Zipf's law is an empirical finding that the frequency rank of popularity is inversely proportionate to the number of hits in a sample. With this information, anyone can carry out a crude test of his own or someone else's assertion very easily.

Obviously, my interlocutor didn't think of doing this. Here is what I found with Google alone:

• medical ethics (1.84 m hits)
• legal ethics (1.44 m hits)
• medically moral (103 hits)
• medical morality (27.4 k hits)
• legally moral (575 hits)
• legal morality (11.3 k hits)

Clearly, ethics and morality are not interchangeable in terms of frequency of use. But what about Zipfian distribution? Perhaps what he was trying to say was that 'morality' was the 2nd or 3rd ranked term (in order of preference) after 'ethics' in this context. That is, it should appear with 1/2 the frequency or 1/3 the frequency.

Well, a quick look at the data shows that the relative frequency is 1/100 or so, which is clearly a) of a different order of magnitude, and b) would rank the terms as somewhere roughly between 64 and 128 positions apart. In other words, his assertion is probably false at a high level of confidence — morality cannot be substituted for ethics in such cases.

So why do people conflate morality and ethics? It boils down to a lack of historical context. The Romans translated the Greek ethikos as Latin mores without realising that to the Greeks, ethikos implied the customary conduct of a person within a polis as imposed by a city-state's sociocultural milieu. That is where the confusion came from, because to a Roman, mores/moralis was more about individual character and self-moderated behaviour towards society.

That is why 'morality' should refer to attitudes and behaviours towards society, arising from the basis of personal choice — the term is aesthetic or 1st person in nature, whereas 'ethics' should refer to the behaviours and conduct that a group of people consider normally acceptable (whether or not individuals might have reservations). It is as easy as that, and while etymologists and philosophers still have some hairs to split, the point remains that these distinctions are validated by extremely widespread usage.

Salt and Pepper

Looking into the mirror over the last few days (you need to do that to shave), I've noticed a distinctively salt-and-pepper appearance beginning to develop. I now have sufficient white in my hair so that the stubble looks like markedly heterogeneous. At the same time, an objective count shows that less than 0.1% of the population (yes, I counted more than a thousand hairs, vanity of vanities) has gone white.

But it's good to have more salt, I guess. If you're going to be the salt of the earth, maybe too much pepper is a bad thing. That was the thought that came to me as I heard incoming news from my social aggregator (Wyvernet) about the goings-on at the old place.

You see, they're hosting the local Odyssey of the Mind competition. This year's different though. The seasoned old veteran lady with the mad skillz has been replaced by a team which knows naught about OM set-up. No taped-off areas, no waiting areas, a lack of planning... sigh. It's not that I want to denigrate the place, but two things occur to me at this point.

Firstly, the tacit working knowledge of a place and a system is something that really runs the show. You can lose the old staff but you will also lose the practical working knowledge that they carried in their heads. This will eventually show up if you don't put a plan in place to transmit, record and store it while it's still available.

Secondly, I actually have a citation for my services (as part of a group) to this programme. The whole bunch of us are mostly no longer there. If you're going to get rid of elements in your organisation, it's probably not a good idea to uproot an organ without proper replacement.

Connected with that is the idea of what an organ really is. Some organs are more obvious than others: the liver, the kidneys, these things look like concentrated bundles of stuff. But the skin, the lymph network, these things are distributed organs. If you were to eliminate sizeable chunks of them, you'd die in a most uncomfortable way. Think about what would happen if you lost a third of your skin or a third of your blood vessels, or a third (distributed) of your guts...

So... more salt, a bit less pepper. Life is good.

A River Of Poetry

If you want something to do and it must involve the reading of much that is excellent, eclectic and elegant, look at the Library of Congress's 180-poem spread. It's also a useful source for 'unseen poem' critical commentary quizzes and examinations.

Some of my readers will recognize some of those poems; all I can say is, "You have the Internet. Use it well." *grin*

The Patriarchal Ranking System

Somebody asked me a question which has only just sunk home. That person said, "Why do you always have to think differently? Isn't it dangerous? You might be a heretic."

I must admit I was a little shaken, in the sense that it is obviously true that if you think differently, you might be a heretic. But this was with regard to my habit of saying odd things about biblical characters. (Incidentally, I don't like that phrase – it seems to imply that the people we're talking about are factitious personae in some drama.)

So I trawled through the deep-freeze of my organic datastore and realised that there are perhaps a few things that make me say things most other people wouldn't. Here they are, in order of influence:

1. Family: My family has always been an amazing resource; my great-grandfather translated the Bible into Peranakan Malay, my grandfather did his daily bible study in Greek and Hebrew, and my father has always been able (as long as I've known him) to give the Bible chapter and verse for any quote read out to him (and vice versa).
2. Database: The natural outcome of coming from an academic family is that you tend to have huge hands-on experience with data sourcing and processing. In the days before the Internet, and even now, the man with the library-trained brain will normally beat the untrained brain given the same software and hardware.
3. Education: I was brought up as if my life would be spent teaching literature and history, but I was trained to teach chemistry and computing. The mixture of disciplines allows me to look at a given topic in many different ways.

I think the blend of these three elements makes me a little unconventional. However, any mistakes I have made are mine alone and should not be blamed on my family, my sources, or my education.

That said, I wondered how I actually put these things together. Well, perhaps this is a good time to say that I don't exactly know. However, I have a rough idea. My training in computing, which began a long time ago, makes me attempt to gather all the data I can find in a single brute force search (which is easy to do nowadays because you can find thousands of Bibles online) and then try to put them into a logical construct. The outcome of this construction process tends to be unusual. For example, doing an exhaustive search for anything to do with Jonah produces a psychological picture you won't see in Sunday School. Better still, it will be completely defensible since it is built by analysing everything in the text that has anything to do with the subject.

The best way to explain is to do it on the spot and see how it works (since I don't know what I specifically do, I should just do it and blog about it). So without further ado, let me leave you with yet another construct (or the outline of one). Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the Patriarchal Ranking System! (Please don't take this too seriously; I don't actually prepare sermons or bible studies this way.)

Let us begin by defining 'patriarch'. Essentially, we begin with node 001 (i.e. Adam, the 'son of God' – see Luke 3:38) and note that the term is used rather narrowly if defined solely by the text. Such a definition could conceivably cover Abraham (see previous post), Isaac, Jacob and his twelve approximately immediate male descendants. That gives 15 candidates. However, a slightly broader interpretation is given from an historical survey of usage, which would include the line of Adam via Seth and Noah to Abraham.

Since all the subsequent nodes are contingent on node 001, it looks as if we must rank Adam as #1. But this would mean that you would then be numbering them off in genealogical order, which is a trivial solution. Surely we can do better than that.

Aha, the Bible compares Jesus to Adam directly. Surely that trumps everything? Well, not quite. If it were so, we'd have to look at all the various people Jesus is compared to, and this would include that infamous psalmist David and a score of others. Besides, it's only Paul who is doing that comparison.

Maybe we should consider the amount of space given to them. Actually, this would mean that Abraham would win hands-down in a head-to-head fight (argh, this is why you should never mix metaphors). But this solution tends to make the Jews unhappy because it would mean that the next patriarch on the list ought to be his eldest son, Ishmael (and there goes the West Bank haha).

By this time, you can tell that it isn't easy being me. I don't really have a patriarchal ranking system, and I apologise for being a little offensive along the way – but I must say that anybody who thinks I think differently from anybody else is making a very trivial statement. After all, each of us must demonstrably think differently from each other one of us. Nobody has exactly the same neural net, right?

The New Emperor's Clothes

In recent news, the Americans have discovered that their government has been looking at ways of effectively ruling the world. (You can even download the PDF of that briefing document, if you want.) Such fools, these mortals be.

The problem with the American (well, Republican American) point of view is that Empire is a silly thing to have. About the only thing that our historical experience of empires (and, yes, our empirical experience) has shown is that they are hard to manage and bring few long-term benefits to the dominant political entity. In fact, history shows us that only when great powers come to dynamic equilibrium do benefits accrue significantly to all.

Why isn't Empire, empirically speaking, a good idea? The obvious thing is that Empire is by nature inefficient. As Empire grows, the only thing that keeps it borderline efficient is the promulgation of universal values (i.e. the values, language(s), culture, religion etc of the Imperial overlord). If the imperial power fails to clone itself into the cultural DNA of every one of its subsidiary centres of authority, the day of imperial overstretch will arrive. Just as a rubber-band comes to grief more violently the greater the degree of overstretch, so too goes an empire.

One simple chain of reasoning will suffice to show why Empire doesn't work (and we won't even have to go to Edward Gibbon or Isaac Asimov for this). Consider a resource that occupies space and must be moved (which is most of them). The more locations that produce it, and to which it must be moved (and its consequent products as well), the more roads you need to build and maintain. This is why sea-lanes and air-routes are strategically vital for an empire; land empires have serious logistic problems. However, eventually even sea and air routes will fail, as the total transactions in physical terms multiply.

The solution is either to find transport with zero logistic cost (or close to it), or resources which require no transport (or close to none). In real terms, this means you develop teleportation or you became an information-driven empire. The former is not within our reach above the scale of the sub-atomic for now. The latter... ah ha, you might say.

No, information empires don't work either. Consider the necessity to store and process data. If you have a single datum, then it has no relationships with anything except the 'identity' relationship. It just is. You store it, and you need at least one more bit to store the information 'identity'. It therefore needs at least two bits to store one piece of information (as opposed to data). Consider two data points. They will have at least one relationship between them, and one 'identity' relationship each. So to store two points as information, you need five bits at least. For three data points, you have three 'identity' bits, three 1-to-1 bits, and perhaps three 1-to-2 bits and maybe a 'this is a chain' bit. It is obvious that for an empire of data, you would quickly bog down in a morass of unprocessed information.

But it is still possible for a pseudo-empire to flourish. If there are wise and intuitive leaders (or powerfully controlled decentralised authorities), they can decide what to throw away by rule of thumb. They might actually be able to cut the information load down to a minimum and wing it. This seems to be the driving force behind any empire that actually succeeds: willful ignorance. Paradoxically, a desire for unknowing may save a glutted empire. It is certainly no long-term solution, existing as it does on a wing and a prayer. But it may last long enough for the imperial power to put an eagle up in every courtyard before the whole shebang collapses.

The Plan: Part I – Criterion 4 Situational Appraisal

Today I sat in a large and beautiful lecture theatre listening to some excellent speakers who knew what education was all about. One statement in particular caught my ear: "If we could deliver an excellent education in a shophouse with 13 students, we can deliver an excellent education regardless of physical immensity and grand buildings, because an excellent education has less to do with the quality of the buildings than with the quality of the teachers."

I have many thoughts passing through my headspace now. One of them is: there is something about certain people which makes them inspiring and powerful mentors. Some people lack it, and they will never have it.