| Tuesday,
We begin with this matter...
Jerry,
Great columns in Byte, which I've been reading since
1980 or so. You are the only reason I paid to subscribe to the byte.com
web site.
I know you have far more to worry about, but did you
really spell "supersede" as "supercede", as appears on
this week's installment "An Agile Acrobat"? It seems so
unlikely.
In MS Word XP, I notice that the -cede spelling
checks as "Non-standard word (consider revising)". I was taught
that it is just plain wrong, and that supersede is the only word in the
English language that ends in -sede. The -cede version does not appear in
my copy of "The American Heritage College Dictionary Third
Edition" copyrighted 1997.
Have we progressed to the point that if enough
people do something wrong it becomes OK? Wait a minute - that sounds like
a stupid question now that I've typed it.
Thanks for all you do "so we won't have
to".
Mike Herlihy
Well, usage does count, but it
depends on how long, I guess. I prefer distinctions, particularly in
meanings such as infer vs. imply and lesser vs. fewer, but I fear
that marks me as rather archaic. Precision in language does help in
getting meaning across, but not if no one notices. I
have to confess that was the way I wrote it in the original. Thanks for
catching it. And Dr. Hume says
It took me a long time to retrain, and I still make
mistakes. I'm not sure why supersede should be preferred.
Ed
Which makes me feel a little
better....
My copy of Webster's Encyclopedic
Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language has an entry for
"supercede"
su.per.cede (soo per sed'), v.t., -ced.ed, -ced.ing.
supersede.
granted it's the 1996 copyright, and not that
current, it brings to mind my failing grade in sixth grade spelling
class...
I spelled "color" as "colour",
my mistake!
If anachronisms are such dead weights on us all, let
them fall!
Spelling errors can be fun somethymes......
-pate
And
a serious question:
From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com
Date: Dec. 9th, 2002
subject: The Pournelle Policy, question rephrased
Dear Jerry:
In re to my Wens. letter, I was not saying: "By
God! We have all this power! We must use it to right wrongs, and take to
the world the benefits of Truth, Justice, and The American Way! If one
innocent person is killed anywhere in this world, we must go out and Burn!
Slay! Kill! Avenge the innocent! "Go! Bind your sons to exile! God
Wills It!"
I was asking a question. I figured out that your
policy on, e.g. Sudan, is "It's not our problem." I'm not sure
where I'd draw the line, but I do think that yes, many things are not our
problem. (Although we do have treaty obligations to suppress the slave
trade, which currently flourishes in Sudan).
So, many evil situations worldwide should be ignored
by the US govt. But free speech being what it is, some people will protest
such situations. And some people will flee such hell holes and come here.
Ms. Boof is such a person, and there is a distinct possibility terrorists
complicit with the govt. of Sudan will murder her while she is on US soil.
So I really want to know: What would you do about such actions?
Same question with Ms. Penner. Local Muslim clerics
incited her murder, and somebody pulled the trigger. The local govt. will
probably make no effort to find even the trigger man, and as for the
clerics, they're immune. What is your policy towards such
incitement-to-murder of US citizens abroad?
I am asking these questions because I really don't
know what your answer will be, and I'm interested.
Best, Stephen
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
The only way you can prevent Moslem
enslavement of Christians in Sedan and other parts of North Africa will be
through conquest and colonialism. Periodic punitive expeditions might be
emotionally satisfying but they won't work. You might be able to send in a
small army of paid soldiers to guard a Christian government imposed on the
country. The slave trade
exists, and we would certainly be justified in sending in an expeditionary
force to suppress it; then what? And
if you wish to right other wrongs, students are regularly raped by their
teachers in South Africa; is that our business? Rwanda and Burundi have
simmered down a bit, but there are plenty of riots and unjust punishments
in Nigeria and Ghana, and all over West Africa the Christian Ibos for whom
I have a lot of sympathy have been suppressed. Their attempts to form
their own nation were put down in part by British intervention in the
Nigerian Civil War: in that war a number of American
"mercenaries" fought for the Christians against the British RAF,
as British policy was to maintain the place as a single nation. Should we
have intervened? Against whom? Of
course once someone reaches the United States and is declared legally here
(an important distinction in my view) she is entitled to our protection,
and if some terrorist outfit wants to kill our guests on our soil, it very
much does become our business. At that point you'd get my support for
policies and actions that discourage governments from trying it again:
regime changes are not out of line. But do note that in 1938 and 1939
British agents murdered American citizens, and Russian agents murdered
American citizens: the Brits were fighting their war with Germany, and
there is evidence for the complicity of the US President in some of their
actions here. See the book A Man Called Intrepid for some of the details. The
Russians were for a while operating under the Hitler/Stalin pact, so they
weren't hunting Nazis. They were concerned with control of the left; Carlo
Tresca, the Italian Anarchist leader, was almost certainly murdered by
Russian agents. So were some Trotsky supporters, and of course Trotsky was
murdered in Mexico. Should we
have bombarded London and Moscow in retaliation? When
you seek to right the wrongs of the world, you take on a formidable task,
and one your fellow citizens may not be up to. Moreover, when you begin to
run other places, you must appoint governors and proconsuls, and if those
posts are lucrative you may find competition for them, and some of that
may be corrupt. It certainly has happened in the past. Even the British
Experiment in World Order up to the dissolution of the Empire was not
entirely free of incompetence and corruption, and I put it that way
because their colonial government was by and large remarkably good and
free of that sort of thing. If
we seek to overthrow every government that fails to protect American
citizens abroad, there will be no lack of places to send the armed forces.
We will have to tailor some units for that kind of duty; those soldiers
are likely to be different from the ones we want here at home. Perhaps a
Foreign Legion, based in Puerto Rico and never allowed in the US itself? I
ask seriously. What military units do you use to suppress the slave trade
in the Sudan? And for that matter, there is slavery in Egypt, and there
are rumored to be white slavery rings in Arabia. And Yemen. And God alone
knows what goes on in Somalia now: it's not a lot more pleasant than it
was before our last intervention, the difference now being that the
celebrities aren't going over to there to draw attention to it; but you
can still find the starving children without looking too hard for them:
starving while not a hundred yards from stocks of food held for their
value to power brokers. Do we
go back there, too? If so, how
do we go? As Crusaders? If not, what motivated the troops? And when
we have gone in to Somalia and Nigeria and the Sudan and Rwanda and
Uganda, what do we leave behind when we leave? Or do we never leave?
And See Below
Dear Jerry,
Witness the modern American Businessman in action.
No longer content to trade value for value in an open, honest manner --
now it's all about tricking people and "locking them in":
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/08/1928240
Is it just me, or are all these shenanigans starting
to become tiresome?
On a happier note, I'm delighted to read of your new
writing projects. I hope you enjoy writing them as much as I enjoy reading
them!
Regards,
Gordon Runkle
-- "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the
chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt
It's also easy to over-generalize
from some spectacular examples. Not all businesses are Enron, just as
after deregulation no all banks were corrupt. They didn't dergulate fraud. We
have an increasingly litigious society, and we make it nearly impossible
to compete in the old fashioned way. In California we have laws that let
lawyers sue (and keep any money they can get) in the name of the people
for trivial breaches of regulations: one lawyer is bringing suit against
thousands of nail salons on the grounds that they use the same bottle of
nail polish for more than one customer; no one posits that's a health
hazard, but it may be a violation of a regulation. Anyway, the lawyer
wants tens of thousands from each in punitive damages but he will settle
for a thousand or so if you don't fight him. Most of those he sued don't
have the money to hire lawyers. At
one group meeting someone suggested hiring a Viet Namese gang to make the
lawyer go to sleep. Presumably that was a joke. Most of the nail
parlors are owned by Viet Namese of course. Or
they can kick in some money for a lobbyist. What they can't do is just go
about their business. It's true with many others. Microsoft now
realizes it was mad to try to operate without Washington lobbyist. Now
they pay more than anyone else to bribe, oops, educate, government
employees and Congressional staffers with information seminars at which
there is free food and liquor and... well, you get the idea. Wonder
what the fiduciary obligation to the stockholders is: if you have to pay
what amounts to a bribe, or extortion, are you not required to get as much
return as you can on investments? So
locking in customers is a mild practice. So
it goes. And once we have an overseas empire you will see a great deal
more of it. So it goes. But see below.
To: Jerry Pournelle, Chaos
Manor
CC: Stephen M. St. Onge
Sir
The most basic thing you have to understand is that
the United States has basically two energy economies, which are only
weakly coupled.
One economy is a "stationary power
economy." It uses nuclear power, and coal, and natural gas, and
renewables, to provide power, increasingly in the form of electricity, to
users who don't need to carry a supply of energy around with them. Heating
and cooling is one of the largest uses, and practically, the cheapest way
to save large quantities of stationary energy is to install geothermal
heat pumps. The overwhelming majority of power-using devices are
electrical, so there is a lot of internal flexibility in the system. The
stationary power economy has a "global warming" issue, for what
that is worth, but it does not have a very substantial "middle
east/national security" issue.
The "transportation energy economy" is an
entirely different kettle of fish. Here, the major petroleum products
(gasoline, aviation kerosene, diesel oil) are preferentially employed, at
premium prices, on account of the advantages of a liquid fuel. Particular
vehicles are designed to run particular fuels, which tends to lock the
fuels in. The transportation energy economy is the locus of the
"middle east/national security" issue.
Southern California is an exceptional region, in the
extent to which it has a "room-temperature-climate," and in the
extent to which the two energy economies are locally interlinked. You
don't have our kind of winters, or our kind of summers, which means you
don't have to think as seriously as the rest of the country about heating
and air conditioning bills. At the same time, Southern California's rapid
population growth and NIMBY-ism has given a makeshift quality to its
energy arrangements.
That said, if you want to think about energy and
national security, you need to focus firmly on transportation, and more
specifically on the automobile.
Here is an interesting study:
www.arbitron.com/downloads/outdoorstudy.pdf
The authors conducted a survey to profile different
types of drivers, with a view to doing market research for advertising.
However, what is significant is their finding that most driving is done by
a minority of long-distance commuters, those who commute at a radius of
about fifty miles, spending two hours a day in this fashion, or to put it
another way, about twenty-five percent unpaid overtime. The authors do not
address gasoline consumption per se, but, making some reasonable
assumptions (disproportionate share of driving alone, disproportionate
share of SUV's) it might well be that these "mega-milers"
account for 80-90% of the gasoline consumption of the United States. There
is a sizable fraction of the population who drive, but who aren't into
long distance commuting, and therefore only drive their cars 37 miles a
week.
Again, the authors do not sufficiently address who
the "mega-milers" are, but reading between the lines, they are
probably disproportionately in the kinds of employment suitable to
telecommuting. Long-distance commuting implies specialization. People
skills don't specialize very well. Thing skills do. To take an example,
there are roughly comparable numbers of mostly male engineers and mostly
female teachers. It is commonplace for an engineer to be a specialist in
something like automobile engine ignition systems. That would be
comparable to to a teacher specializing in teaching children the letter P
and only the letter P (no other letters, no numbers, etc.), and teaching
it only to second graders.
Of course there is no substitute for detailed
studies, but it does seem likely that telecommuting could be ramped up
very drastically in a short period of time, focusing on a small minority
with the most to gain, and the greatest possible petroleum savings.
Andrew D. Todd 1249 Pineview Dr., Apt 4 Morgantown,
WV 26505
adtodd@mail.wvnet.edu
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/
It is certainly the case that
finding fuel for transportation is quite a bit harder than finding enough
fuel to take care of the stationary economy. But
until the kilowatts are available, there's not going to be a lot of work
on using them for transport. If all the cars and trucks became electrical
tomorrow most of us would starve as the transport system broke apart. But
if we have electricity we can make power for transport. Methane or propane
work fine. Hybrid cars work. Fuel cells work. Conversion from petrol will
take a while but unless we start in that direction we will never get
there... Certainly we can do
more with telecommuting: but we won't until we have to.
Jerry,
Andrew Todd was wondering in one of his emails to
you who is it that commutes at a 50 mile radius to their work. While I
don't commute 50 miles each way to my current job, I average somewhere
between 25-32 miles each way to my work at Cox.
This varies due to taking different routes to avoid
freeway traffic jams (usually in the evening). That being said however, on
average it takes me 45-60 minutes to get from my house to my work.
Consequently, I listen to a lot of talk radio due to the amount of time I
am on the road each day.
Mr. Todd's leap to calculating what this would
mean for an hourly worker in terms of unpaid overtime is pointless in my
case however as I'm salaried so I get the shaft from the get go on any
amount of time spent above and beyond the call to duty. If I could take
alternate transportation to work I would, however due to where I live and
where a large majority of people who work in that office are ridesharing
is out of the question.
This of course begs the question of why don't I find
a job that is closer to where I live. For reasons not totally obvious to
myself currently the job market for people with my skill set seems highly
depressed here in the Los Angeles/Orange County areas. Until something
better comes up I do what necessity dictates.
The other side of the coin is I could move closer to
my current employer, but that's a solution that isn't very amenable either
since finding a decent neighborhood to rent in South Orange County is not
very cheap due to the yuppies created by the extreme inflation of house
values in the various counties down there. Just thought I'd let Andrew in
on who some of those kinds of people are.
-Dan S.
It has long been contended by
conservatives -- like me -- that a certain stability on one's life is
necessary for the good life for most of us, and that nations of people
without roots or neighbors or community life are unstable at best. Anomie
is the enemy of the good society, or so many of us believe. The
end of the manufacturing economy in the US produced the end of blue collar
stability, and the computer revolution hasn't made it easier for people
like you to find a house and job near each other. I don't know where it
all ends. I do know we can
solve some of the energy problems. A
long time ago Walt Disney hired us at Pepperdine Research to design an
Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow: a place for intellectuals to
work and live together. His notion was that it could support itself on
theme park revenues. It was to be a kind of Bell Labs, supported by Disney
World and by its own exhibits -- surely smart people could build a
community other people might pay to come see? We did some design work and
it might have worked. Mr. Disney wanted this to be a community, of people
living together, scientists and road maintenance and police and firemen
and theme part workers all in one community, mostly with "people
mover" transportation so they wouldn't need many private cars. It was
an interesting dream. Of
course it was abandoned about two days after Walt Disney died, and EPCOT
as it exists today has nothing whatever to do with what Disney hoped
to build. But it was a noble dream and something to think about. On
Energy Independence:
Robert Heinlein, of course, foresaw the technology
described in the attached in "Let There Be Light" (Super Science
Stories, May 1940, also collected in The Man Who Sold The Moon, 1950).
Once again, so far ahead of his time--envisioning a solar cell using the
full sprectrum of light, not just visible light.
I note parenthetically that if they are searching
for a "method to grow very pure crystals," maybe they should be
looking into space as a location for the industry. That would have a nice
resonance.
Speaking of technology, I remain ready to give you a
detailed presentation on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (something YOU
envisioned) if we can ever find a favorable time.
Chris Christopher CAPT Chris Christopher, USNR Staff
Director, Navy Marine Corps Intranet Office Deputy Director for Future
Operations, Communications, & Business Initiatives 703-685-5510
chris.christopher@navy.mil
NMCI Web Site: http://www.nmci.navy.mil
Solar cells aiming for full spectrum
efficiency 10:15 08 December 02
Jenny Hogan
Solar power is set for a boost with the
help of a material that can soak up energy from almost all of the Sun's
spectrum. It should allow solar cells to jump in efficiency from today's
best of 30 per cent to 50 per cent or higher.
<snip>
Certainly ground based solar can be
a very useful component in an energy strategy. I am pretty sure it will
also take orbital component, but every new step in ground based helps a
lot. The Solar Constant being what it is, there are limits to what you can
get on the ground; and of course there are latitude, weather, and
the day/night cycle; none of which are of concern in orbit. On
Another Subject:
Global warming or cooling? Harsher Winters.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/
2002/12/08/news/front/4689103.htm
===== -- John E. Bartley, III - K7AAY telcom admin,
Portland OR, USA - Views mine
A well done article. It is certainly
the case that global warming could cause cooling -- it's in fact a
feedback mechanism we should expect. No one really understands climate,
and we don't really understand the Solar Constant or how Constant it is.
There are also albedo
changes: tiny changes in Earth's reflectivity will have massive
consequences. We don't know how many particulates we eliminated with
cleaning up smoke stacks, and what eliminating those did to albedo. And
much more. As I never seem to
tire of saying, we ought to be spending a lot more on finding out what is
going on, and a lot less on political crap like Kyoto as if we already
knew what to do. The problem could be grave, but accepting Kyoto won't do
anything but bankrupt a lot of people and cut the resources we have to
deal with the problem. But see
Phil Chapman below.
Now
for a major essay. Gregory Cochran is well known for taking evolution
seriously: that is, for questioning how disorders that carry a heavy
genetic burden (make having and raising children greatly more difficult)
can possibly be "hereditary" in the usual sense. Schizophrenia
is one example. His hypothesis
is that absent special reasons for selection for otherwise burdensome
tendencies or afflictions, these are more likely to be contagious diseases
rather than genetically transmitted. In
the following essay he looks at overclocking the human system and possible
consequences. Everyone knows that Ashkenazi have the highest IQ scores on
average of any of the breeds of man. There are many reasons postulated for
this including "breeding" for smart in the same way that Jersey
cattle are bred for milk production. Might
we learn how to get smarter without waiting generations? And can
there be undesired side effects?
Overclocking
Gregory Cochran
There is a good chance that an odd cluster of
hereditary neurological diseases among the Ashkenazi Jews is a side-effect
of strong selection for increased intelligence. The idea is not really
new, but the evidence has gotten stronger with time, and I have recently
found some intriguing supporting data.. Four of these syndromes - Tay-Sachs,
Niemann-Pick, Gaucher's, and mucolipidosis type IV - are recessive
lysosomal storage diseases. The first three of these are caused by
deficient variants of enzymes that break down sphingolipids, which play a
role in neuron membrane structure and also as signaling molecules.
Homozygotes, who have no working copy of the breakdown enzymes, become
ill. Tay-Sachs and Niemann-Pick cause retardation and death in childhood,
but Gaucher's disease is milder and more variable. The form common in
Ashkenazi Jews does not cause brain damage, although there can be other
problems with the spleen and bones. . Mucolipidosis type IV probably
involves a defect in endocytosis. It causes retardation and death in early
life.
Canavan disease is caused by mutations in the
aspartoacylase gene. It is the only known genetic disorder caused by a
defect in the metabolism of a small metabolite, N-acetyl-L-aspartic acid,
synthesized exclusively in the brain in a cell-specific manner. It too is
fatal in early life.
Familial dysautonomia is a recessive disease that
results in abnormalities of the sensory and autonomic nervous systems. It
does not cause retardation, but greatly shortens life.
Torsion dystonia is caused by a dominant gene with
low penetrance.. The symptoms involve inappropriate contractions of
muscles. In a mild case, that might mean a tendency to writer's cramp: in
a severe case, it means uncontrollable contractions that leave your limbs
twisted and useless. About 30% of the individuals with this gene have some
noticeable symptoms, about 10% have very serious symptoms that can leave
them in a wheel chair. The problem is not in the muscles, but in areas of
the brain that control muscles. Torsion dystonia does not cause
retardation... not hardly.
Each of these hereditary neurological diseases is
more common among the Ashkenazi than in any other group, and in several of
these syndromes, the great majority of all cases are found among the
Ashkenazi, who make up less than 0.2% of the human race. ~4% of the
Ashkenazi are carriers for Tay-Sachs, about 1% are carriers for Niemann-Pick,
~5% carry a Gaucher mutation, ~1% carry a mutation for mucolipidosis type
IV, ~2% carry a Canavan mutation, ~3% carry the familial dysautonomia
gene, and about 0.03% have the dominant torsion dystonia mutation.
Altogether about 16% of Ashkenazi Jews carry one of these mutations.
Rare genetic diseases can become common in a group
by chance, especially if that group does not mix much with others and if
it has recently expanded from a small founding population.. Both of those
conditions existed among the Ashkenazi, but that explanation probably does
not work in this case, because for most of these diseases, more than one
mutation of the same gene has become common in this population. That is
the case for Tay-Sachs, Niemann-Pick, Gaucher's disease, mucolipidosis
type IV, and Canavan disease. Only torsion dystonia and familial
dysautonomia are caused by lone mutations. It would be incredibly unlikely
for chance to greatly elevate the frequency of two or more mutations of
the same gene.
It would be even less likely to do this repeatedly
in genes involved in closely related metabolic pathways. So somehow,
natural selection, rather than chance, must have favored these mutations.
If mutations that affect a particular organ or function give a
reproductive edge in some environment, they can become common, even if
they cause disease in double dose. The most famous example of this is the
sickle cell mutation, which gives heterozygotes good protection against
falciparum malaria and causes very serious problems in homozygotes. We
know of a number of other malaria-protective mutations besides sickle-cell
affecting red cells; Hemoglobin C, Hemoglobin E, G6PD deficiency, alpha-
and beta- thalassemia, and Melanesian ovalocytosis. The malaria resistance
mutations involve multiple common mutations of the same gene, and multiple
mutations of closely related genes that affect the same physiological
system - in this case the red cell. Among the Ashkenazi we find the same
pattern, only the system affected is the central nervous system. Jared
Diamond and others have suggested that these Ashkenazi hereditary
neurological diseases might have given protection against tuberculosis,
but this seems unlikely. These mutations are not common in other adjacent
ethnic groups, and they modify molecules whose primary function is in the
central nervous system. In some cases, such as Canavan disease, they are
only found in the brain.
So a change in brain function, as the source of the
fitness advantage in heterozygotes carrying these mutations, is the way to
bet. That notion is not just based on this genetic and biochemical
evidence: we start out already knowing that Ashkenazi Jews have a higher
average IQ than any other group, something like 110-115. What, other than
natural selection, could cause this? We also know that for a long time
they lived under very unusual conditions, conditions very favorable to
this kind of evolutionary change. They had a very different job mix from
their neighbors: none of them were farmers ('Scribe, banker, jeweler,
shopkeeper'), and they almost never intermarried.
Some new evidence - new to me, anyhow - strengthens
the case. It turns out that GM2-ganglioside, which accumulates in Tay-Sachs
and Niemann-Pick patients, is a signal for dendrite growth. In homozygotes
it causes inappropriate dendrite growth neurons. In heterozygotes,
GM2-ganglioside levels would only be slightly elevated and might favor
moderately increased dendrite growth - which might increase IQ. The
build-up product in Gaucher's disease seems to caused increased axonal
growth.
The story in torsion dystonia is more obvious.
Unlike most genetic diseases, it is dominant. You only need one copy of
the mutant gene to have problems. That also means that any benefit must be
large. When a recessive mutation is rare, there are many more carriers
than homozygotes, and even a small advantage among heterozygotes can
balance serious bad effects in the rare homozygtes. A dominant has to give
a hefty advantage, even more so if it has any costs, which the torsion
dystonia gene surely does. So if torsion dystonia is part of this
Ashkenazi pattern of hereditary neurological disease and pays off in IQ,
it must make a big difference, and that difference will probably show up
in patients. ( Note that in diseases like Tay-Sachs, nobody even studies
carriers. Doctors are not geneticists.) Apparently it does. I found
several reports of materially increased IQ among Ashkenazi torsion
dystonia patients.
The difference is apparently so striking that
it is mentioned in the very first scientific article on the disease, by
Flatau back in 1911. Many other physicians made the same observation. And
if you think that being crippled makes you smarter, think again: nobody
every said that about polio victims. Roswell Eldridge, in a small group of
patients, found that the average IQ was 122, 10 points higher than their
controls matched for age, sex, ethnic background, and school.
The same mutation has been seen elsewhere, but
is very rare. In this group the payoff outweighed the trouble, while in
every other human group it did not. We have found the gene (in 1997),
which codes for an ATP-binding protein, but as yet I don't believe that we
know exactly how it causes trouble or what it does normally. But I'll
hazard a guess: the change accelerates some brain system tied to cognitive
functioning - nearly redlines it, leaves it vulnerable to common insults
in a way that can cause spectacular trouble. You might compare to
overclocking a chip. Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you don't.
More generally, if this is what I think it is, all
these Ashkenazi neurological diseases are hints of ways in which one could
supercharge intelligence. One, by increasing dendrite growth: two, by
fooling with myelin: three, something else, whatever is happening in
torsion dystonia. In some cases the difference is probably an aspect of
development, not something you can turn on and off. In other cases, the
effect might exist when the chemical influence is acting and disappear
when the influence does. In either case, it seems likely that we could -
if we wanted to - developed pharmaceutical agents that had similar
effects. The first kind, those affecting development, would be something
that might have to be administered early in life, maybe before birth.
while the second kind would be 'smart pills' that one could pop as desired
or as needed. Of course, we have to hope that we can find ways of
improving safety. Would you take a pill that increased your IQ by 10 or 15
points that also had a 10% chance of putting you in a wheel chair?
Gregory Cochran
Greg has asked me, both here and in
a conference we belong to, to comment on this. I'm still thinking about
it. The arguments are compelling, and many of the details are outside any
expertise I may have: of course they're outside almost everyone's field of
expertise. I want to think on
this more. I have also copied this letter to its
own page, and I will append interesting comments to that page.
Subject: 60th anniversary of pile #1 at U of Chicago
- 12/10/42
Dear Jerry;
As the subject line says. Today marks the 60th
anniversary of the first controlled release of atomic energy from a
fission source. This took place under the West Stands of Stagg Field at
the University of Chicago. It was part of the Manhattan Project under the
direction of Enrico Fermi, the "Italian Navigator" who landed in
the New World and found the natives "very friendly".
Something to remember - Hal Frank - Chicago
Indeed. The Italian Navigator has
Landed in the New World...
And
continuing a discussion:
Hello Dr. Pournelle:
You were recently criticized
for daring to question the rules, regarding the people arrested for sperm
smuggling. Apparently, you don't realize that this is merely a first step.
Like drug smuggling, smuggling sperm is just the start, and before you
know it, you move on to the harder stuff (sorry, but I had to say it; the
pun just leapt to mind). Seriously, though, here is a man with whom the
imperialists are, no doubt, very happy. He has come to be indoctrinated
into the belief that justice, right, liberty, and the protection of the
innocent, not to mention common sense, are not important concepts, and are
only incidental to the rule of law. Even the keeping of order, an
important function of any government, whether or not it values the needs
of it's citizens, is not the function here. Rather, it is the enforcement
of rules.
The reason for this is simple: justice requires
judgment and conscience, two things we are discouraged from developing and
displaying these days. Rule enforcement, requires only blind obedience, a
very desirable thing in a subject population, and so very easy for the
rulers. Rule enforcement is also easy and even fun, for the enforcers. You
get to order people around, get them to do things, and even get them into
trouble sometimes. If you are taken to task for your behavior, told you
are being silly, oppressive, or wrong, it is a simple matter to say that
you were, as so many Germans said after the Second World War, "just
following orders." It should be noted also, that the Nazis were very
big believers in the idea of Zero Tolerance."
The fact that your reader either can not see this,
or may actually agree with it, makes him a loyal, valuable, and pliable
subject; what more could be asked for? I wonder how he might feel some
day, if a valid disagreement with, or a misapplication of, some government
policy lands him in jail? Well since he seems to belive that niether the
rulers, or the rules, are ever wrong, I am a bit afraid, that he may
actually be made to see the error of his ways, and admit his own
wrongdoing. I seem to recall that the communist government of China
operated in a similar fashion in the sixties, perhaps it still does.
Rules are rules, and fair is fair, may be a valid
concept when dealing with the moral immaturity of young children, which is
why most teachers actually do subject their students to this type of
treatment, but adults should be presumed to have moral responsibility for
their own lives. It is unfortunate that the schools seem to be teaching so
little of either responsibility or morals, that we are growing a
generation of what Richard Mitchell calls "clever children of all
ages, rather than responsible, reasoning adults." A clever child,
like any other child, will obey whatever it is that has power or authority
over him, and do as he is compelled to do. The rightness, or justice of
the situation is not a factor here.
I frankly don't care what happened to some mobster,
and have little doubt that overall, he deserves much worse than what he is
getting. My problem is that he got what was coming to a rule breaker,
rather than what was coming to a dangerous, and destructive criminal.
Regulations against smuggling are put into place to prevent drugs, and
weapons from being brought in. Idiotic enforcement of a rule, in this
manner, on the grounds that "rules are rules", makes us all
servants of the law, instead of having the law act as servant of us. This
is generally defended on the principle that this sort of treatment is
fair, and impartial, because there is equal enforcement of the law. Every
time we operate on the fiction that justice and equality are the same
thing, we diminish justice. The law is, or should be, one of many tools
that we use to establish justice. It should not serve as a replacement for
justice.
Any fool ought to be able to see, that treating a
man smuggling his sperm out of prison, in the same manner as a man
smuggling drugs, or weapons in, is hardly equal treatment. Then again, I
could be wrong. It seems that these same people, under the guise of Zero
Tolerance, can not distinguish between a real gun, a toy gun, and a
picture of a gun brought to school. Perhaps children who bring dolls or
action figures to school should be treated as slave owners, and those who
play with toy trucks should be charged with operating a vehicle without a
license. Certainly, Zero Tolerance, makes any other treatment of these
individuals unfair. It actually is considered it unfair, and improper to
treat a traffic offender differently than a felon, when making traffic
stops, or collecting overdue citations. This idea of rules, and fairness,
is why you and I are subject to great inconvenience, and may even risk
getting shot, in all of our dealings with law enforcement, even the most
mundane ones. It is also why there is so much foolishness going on with
what is being called "airport security."
In a nation of free and equal men, law is put in
place for the protection of citizenry, through regulation of commerce, and
the deterrence of crime. In a nation of servants and masters, law is a
tool with which to keep the servants in their place, and assure that they
obey the whims of the masters.
Neal Pritchett
Precisely and well said. Thanks. I
am going to give about one more view on this, and
it's enough. And,
certainly enough to end a long day, there is this:
Fascinating! Well worth reading.
Frank G
-------- Forwarded message -------- Date: Wed, 27
Nov 2002 20:34:36 -0700 From: felix33@earthlink.net Reply-to: Leslie Fish
<TheFish@LeslieFish.com To: frank Gasperik <felix33@earthlink.net
Subject: Fwd: The Six Lesson Schoolteacher
Goddess! This one is a genuine horror story.
---------- The Six Lesson Schoolteacher<?xml:namespace
prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /
by John Taylor Gatto
from Whole Earth Review,
Fall 1991; reprinted with permission.
Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago,
having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license
certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that
isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six
lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for
these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know
what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class
where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there
but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get
away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety
of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard
to see the human being under the burden of numbers he carries. Numbering
children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business
is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job
is to make the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at
the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine
themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have
contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly keeps itself in good
marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like
school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I
make an effort to urge children to higher levels of test success,
promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward. I
insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the
basis of test scores, even though my own experience is that employers are
(rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come
to see that truth and school teaching are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no
way out of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay
where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off
like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my
lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing
vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist
that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work
station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other
class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth
finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret
logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy the past
and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map
makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not.
Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your
will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld,
by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many
personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or
initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my
control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying
constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to
all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children
sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving
their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on the
grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front
of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated by things outside my
ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only
privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only _I_ determine
what curriculum you will study (rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by
the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad
kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of
conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of
value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine.
Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
But kids fight against this, of course, trying
openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will
learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately
there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of
dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This
is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people,
better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no
exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends upon this lesson being
learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the
dependency lesson: The social-service businesses could hardly survive,
including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment
of all sorts, along with television, would wither if people remembered how
to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food
warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals
rather than depending on strangers to cook for them. Much of modern law,
medicine, and engineering would go, too -- the clothing business as well
-- unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our schools
each year. We've built a way of life that depends on Self-evaluation --
the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the
planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards,
grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their
parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People
need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being
watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my
colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private
time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at
low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to
tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own
child's waywardness, too.
I assign "homework" so that this
surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise
use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or
mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.
The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one
can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient
urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription
set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes,
by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same
thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society
under central control.
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even
the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is
only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things. Yet only
a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States:
originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from
regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries
were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident,
inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for
themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit
basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers
from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a
smokescreen behind which schools preempt the time of children for twelve
years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
We've had a society increasingly under central
control in the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we
lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs we
drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So,
too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence,
cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of
the dehumanization of our lives, the lessening of individual and family
importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you
cannot develop into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that; surely
he was right. Look around you or look into the mirror; that is the
demonstration.
"School" is an essential support system
for a vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be
subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it
ascends. "School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal
social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental
betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the
period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak of. And yet the
promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on
this promise by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt -- compulsory
training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling -- that was
the secret Plato reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down
the plans for total state control of human life.
The current debate about whether we should have a
national curriculum is phony -- we already have one, locked up in the six
lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you. This
curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of
content will be sufficient to reverse its bad effects. What is under
discussion is a great irrelevancy.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is
impregnable to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people
-- there is no one right way. There is no "international
competition" that compels our existence, difficult as that is to even
think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the
contrary. In every important material respect our nation is
self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found meaning
where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of
seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity,
generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence
and privacy -- then we would be truly self-sufficient.
How did these awful places, these
"schools", come about? As we know them, they are a by-product of
the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests
feared a revolution among our industrial poor, and partly they are the
result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves of
Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion --
after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause can be found in the
revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of
Africans through the society after the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is
training for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever
of finding the center of their own special genius. And it is training
shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor.
Since the 1920s the growth of the well-article school bureaucracy, and the
less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling
exactly as it is, have enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the
sons and daughters of the middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the
accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw
clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would
take, preempting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy
community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else
cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another
serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like
reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught
by pedagogical procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is
it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people
indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent to almost
everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor,
schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything for very long. They have a
poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy
(like the children of divorce they really are); they hate solitude, are
cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of
the unexpected, addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are
magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum
prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting the
fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could
not survive at all, nor could I as a certified schoolteacher.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear
frequently these days as a form of training which will herald a new day in
mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school
that actually dared teaching the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other
tools of free minds could last a year without being torn to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to
children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum
unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly
anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of
human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools require would cost so
much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First
and foremost, the business I am in is a jobs project and a
contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, even to help
children.
At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26
years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on
the horizon for most families is to teach their own children at home.
Small, de-institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market
system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers. But
the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the
poor, and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class,
foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I
believe the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be
fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment or good
teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's
schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large
measure because the lessons of schooling prevent children from keeping
important appointments with themselves and their families, to learn
lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self- reliance, courage, dignity
and love -- and, of course, lessons in service to others, which are among
the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned
in the time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time,
and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only
thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will
insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this
future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of
natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned
in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail
sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I
teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
One can quarrel with much of this,
but alas, it is getting more and more true as time goes on. I
did not find structured classes mind deadening: I am very grateful to the
Christian Brothers (FSC) for my classical education. And learning some
self discipline is useful. But there is some truth to the above as well.
g
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