Alright I’m getting really fucking tired of the way the left treats Clarence Thomas. The level of vitriol but even as liberals spew hate at him they demand to know why he can’t “let it go” even as op-eds in major media criticizes him for being angry even while re-attacking him over the whole Anita Hill controversy and liberal blogs demand he be impeached for being so angry. Now maybe I’m going out on a limb here but if Justice Thomas’s views make you angry maybe he fells something similar and being personally attacked as a result is a further catalyst.

As far as Hill goes there is nothing unusual to explain. It would be surprising to find a sexual harassment case where both sides weren’t angry about it. Whatever the truth each person always (mis)remembers events from their own point of view. That’s in the past and whether or not he was a cruel or socially clueless guy back then really isn’t relevant to his legal scholarship. However, what really bugs me about the Thomas issue is the constant suggestion that he is somehow a hypocrite for benefiting for affirmative action and then opposing it. The logical fallacy here is clear. No one would believe that opposing nationalized health care meant you shouldn’t use it if it is created so why would you think this about affirmative action. In fact being able to oppose something that has benefited you is an important virtue (not claiming this is at play here) not a flaw. The new attack is to call him a hypocrite for not believing he was getting an affirmative action appointment to the supreme court¹ but is it really that hard to believe that someone convinced themselves they were being rewarded for their merit? It isn’t like most people don’t convince themselves religion is true because they want to believe.

Now I happen to think that Thomas’s views on constitutional interpretation are harmful and would much prefer a justice who believes in a more evolutionary approach to jurisprudence but this doesn’t mean I can’t recognize that Thomas has a respectable intellectually plausible approach that he follows with at least as much consistency as other supreme court justices. Even if you disagree with his view on the harms of affirmative action it is a plausible theory seriously tendered and your obligation is to cite evidence refuting it not personally attack it’s proponents. For the love of god Thomas is just a guy, he may believe some gloriously wrong things but his beliefs are far more coherent and thoughtful than most liberals (or conservatives) I’ve met. He just happens to be wrong.

The furor and emotion surrounding Clarence Thomas is perhaps the best example of the true nature of politics. People aren’t really concerned about ideas and argument they care about group loyalty and emotional signaling. It doesn’t seem to matter to people that Thomas may have a reasonable argument for his position (they don’t even bother to refute it) they are angry because instead of showing gratitude to his ‘team’ even after benefiting from their gifts he switched sides and criticized those programs. No doubt this was a great way to approach things when you were trying to gain advantage in your tribe but it isn’t a good way to approach serious intellectual issues.

So apparently in the UK some muslim medical students are refusing to practice basic medical skills. Claiming it violates their religious beliefs they refuse to learn about treating alcoholism or treating STDs and some of them are even refusing to do basic examinations of female patients. Apparently there is some thought that maybe they shouldn’t be kicked out of med school for these lapses.

Now if private companies want to give religious employees special exemptions I think it’s radically unfair but that’s their business. If you want to let your muslim cashiers call over someone else to sell alcohol that’s up to you and you’re the one who pays the price of annoyed customers. However, when we are talking about what effectively amount to government standards for the education of doctors that’s a whole other matter. Either it is important that we make doctors learn these skills and accredit them accordingly or it isn’t. Why the hell does it matter that you don’t want to learn it because of your religion rather than because you think it’s gross or just really really don’t want to?

Still, it might be a good idea to tolerate things like not treating women if this was a sufficiently widespread cultural practice (don’t think it is). Of course if I was the UK health system I would never hire such a person if there were alternatives but that’s another matter. However, refusing to learn about things like alcohol abuse significantly hampers a doctor’s ability to treat patients. It isn’t something like gender where the doctor could (theoretically) just avoid situations where the skill is required. Moreover, it is hard enough to get people to be honest and admit embarrassing issues like STDs if some doctors refuse to listen or call in their colleague to deal with the matter it poses a serious health threat.

This really fucking pisses me off. Saying some man in the sky told me to do it shouldn’t be a magic pass to do whatever the fuck you want. Having absurd stories about why it is important for you to do something shouldn’t make us more likely to accommodate you. Sure there is something to be said for increasing utility by respecting strong irrational beliefs but that’s no excuse not to create a general system to handle strongly felt preferences rather than behaving as if it was reasonable to have these stupid beliefs.

It shouldn’t have to be said but obviously I feel the same way about Christian doctors who refuse to properly console patients about the abortion option.

So I was just reading this interesting post about the Storm worm and it got me wondering a bit about cryptography. Since the best suggestion people had for tracking down such a worm was to track down computers the worm uses as command and control servers and turn them into honeypots to generate lists of infected machines and maybe track the thing back to it’s source.

Now a clever worm designer could put in some countermeasures like making sure that commands arrive at infected machines along many paths making it tough to figure out what is ‘upstream’ from the recipient. However, by timing the arrival of these messages you could probably defeat most simple schemes of this kind so I got to wondering if it was possible to create a really robust solution to this sort of problem.

Now there is some pretty interesting work on public key steganography. That is systems that let someone embed information in some apparently random noise using a public key so that just detecting the presence of an encoded message is computationally infeasible without the private key. For instance if you needed to pass secret messages to an agent working for another countries embassy you might embed his instructions into random information that accompanies routine communications between the embassies (say the low order bits of timestamps on emails¹) and without his private key his superiors won’t be able to detect that any extra message even existed. However, this isn’t really what you want to run a botnet. It might help avoid detection of control messages through network monitoring but if security researchers find an infected machine they can extract any private keys it contains and figure out what network connections contain secret instructions to the machine.

What would be ideal here is something like reverse public key steganography. That is a system that works as follows. Imagine you have n channels , C1..Cn, each carrying symbols randomly distributed with distribution D1…Dn and that k << n of these channels are controlled by colluding agents who know some private key S. What we want is the property that anyone who knows public key P can apply some operation Decode(C1..Cn, P) to (with very high probability) recover a message that the k agents colluded to send but that it is computationally infeasible for anyone without knowledge of S to determine which channels are being modified by the colluding agents. In other words anyone (knowing P) can figure out what message is being sent but no one can figure out who is sending it.

I kinda suspect that some system like this must have been devised already and I just don’t know how to search for it. In either case not only would it allow for the creation of a nearly perfect botnet control system (you embed control messages in the random information that accompanies DNS requests or TCP connections) but it would also have some interesting applications for P2P systems and anonymous hosting. Basically it would be useful for any situation where you want to let individuals announce things without revealing their identity. Of course it would be even better if k could be reduced to one or if the system would allow some m<

Anyway if anyone knows if such systems are possible I’m curious. It also raises the interesting question about how one would deal with botnets built by really savvy individuals like governments. If something like this works it could be almost impossible to even identify the infected computers or track down the creators using technology (normal police work like following the money would still work).

So listening to the radio out here in Berkeley one constantly hears righteous denunciations of Haliburtuon, their sub-sub-sub contractors Blackwater and the role of private companies in the Iraq occupation. Now there may be valid reasons to think that private military contractors are harmful but I’ve yet to hear anyone even really try. Instead the fact that private companies are performing military duties is usually cited as if it was an obvious harm itself. Even more puzzlingly one often hears a condemnation of the military contractors on the grounds that the Bush administration wouldn’t be able to support such a massive military presence in Iraq without them.

Trying to be charitable one might try and interpret these individuals as arguing that private military contractors are bad because the Iraq war is bad and they make it easier for the administration to extend the war. While this is a reasonable argument it is incompatible with the usual aim of those bringing up the role of private contractors in Iraq: to marshal further reasons to condemn the war. Moreover, it is in direct conflict with the accepted wisdom of where Bush went wrong in Iraq — entering the conflict without enough troops to stabilize the country. Also most demands for a prompt withdrawal are justified by the price being paid by our honorable young servicemen in Iraq (they certainly don’t present evidence that withdrawal would best serve the Iraqis). Presumably if your objection to the continuing occupation is that the costs to the US military is to high even if it might be somewhat beneficial to the Iraqis for us to stay longer you should welcome private contractors as they lighten the burden that our soldiers must bear¹.

Even more strangely much of the opposition to military contractors seems to focus on the fact that private companies are making a profit on the war. Part of this seems to result from the bizarre belief that since every contractor and subcontractor involved is making a profit somehow the American public must be getting a bad deal. This is tantamount to arguing that the federal and state governments should always build bridges themselves rather than contracting it out to private companies because those companies will be making a profit. At least those who note that the rate companies like Blackwater charge to supply troops are much higher than the wages of US troops are only being foolish not falling into simpleminded anti-profit bias. The military only hires companies like Blackwater when they actually need them and that flexibility demands a premium². All that really matters is whether the US army could hire more soldiers to take over these jobs at a cheaper rate than what companies like Haliburton and Blackwater charge and unless we plan on staying in Iraq for many many years this is highly unlikely³.

The worry that these companies now have a profit interest in the war is slightly more reasonable but seems inconsistently applied. When we use private air carriers to fly our troops over to staging areas or send wounded soldiers to private hospitals for treatment no one seems to worry about the profit interests of these companies. Moreover, the political influence of small mercenary companies like Blackwater is minuscule compared to that of companies like Lockhead and TWA and their interest isn’t continuing war but in increased funding for new military technology which the war in Iraq has curtailed.

Ultimately this whole issue perfectly illustrates how intellectually bankrupt the whole debate over the war really is. Those supporting a continued occupation seem more concerned with rhetoric about supporting the troops and not making their sacrifice meaningless (i.e. the sunk cost fallacy) rather than any evidence that the occupation is likely to pay off. Those demanding a pullout seem more interested in throwing together a bunch of emotional ploys (isn’t it horrible that we hire mercenaries) than in making a coherent argument. The war in Iraq is a perfect example of the sort of failure of public opinion “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” postulates. People take their positions because they have an emotional reaction to the war (support troops/repulsed by war) and it is more appealing to group up with others who have similar emotional reactions rather than actually consider the issues and potentially be forced to support something you find distasteful. Of course when people realize their decisions will really have massive effects on millions of lives (instead of just being something to bitch about over lunch) they tend to get a lot more serious which is why the congress (thankfully) can’t really bring itself to shut down the occupation.

Of course this isn’t to say their aren’t real concerns about the use of mercenaries but thankfully someone else has already written a nice post explaining why these are often overblown.

A few days ago I ran across an article in the New York Times about the loss of “linguistic diversity.” I was pleasantly surprised to see only the reasonable suggestion that it’s important to record linguistic information before it is lost (something I think is definitely important and worth doing). While I still bristled at the undefeased¹ analogy with biodiversity (and the harms of losing it) it was a welcome change from the standard sort of breathless warnings about the loss of linguistic diversity which often feature absurd warnings like the following.

“I claim that it is catastrophic for the future of mankind,” Krauss said. “It should be as scary as losing 90 percent of the biological species.”

“That is somehow interdependent such that we lose sections of it at the same peril that we lose sections of the biosphere,” Krauss said. “Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive.”

Now I don’t have the slightest clue how valuable biodiversity really is but at least (other things being equal) it is valuable. When diseases come along a less genetically diverse group of organisms is significantly more likely to be entirely wiped out. Science fiction books like “Snow Crash” and hyperbolic warnings from prescriptivists of the imminent collapse of civilization aside I know of no linguistic disease threatening to wipe out our species.

Other attempts to motivate concern aren’t much better.

Romaine said that if one-fifth of the world’s buildings were endangered, architects would care. Linguists should therefore care in protecting languages, no matter where or by whom they are spoken, she said.

I would be highly surprised if one-fifth of the world’s buildings weren’t ‘endangered’ but I somehow doubt that the royal architecture society is issuing press releases about the danger of people upgrading from huts to modern housing. No better is the justification given in National Geographic.

More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are expected to die out by the end of the century, often taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world, Harrison said. …. When a language is lost, centuries of human thinking about animals, plants, mathematics, and time may be lost with it, Swarthmore’s Harrison said.

The only problem with this justification is that it doesn’t make one jot of sense. Now it may happen that generally people abandon old traditions and old languages about the same time but if this knowledge is really so important it makes a lot more sense to just pass it on in whatever language people are shifting towards. Moreover, I strongly suspect that the value of traditional wisdom is wildly exaggerated. Folk wisdom resembles Borges infinite library in many respects. There are a great many facts recorded there but they are so difficult to extract and so inextricably intermingled with falsehoods that it is often more efficient just to start all over.

Of course this brings us directly to the old-chestnut that somehow different languages enable different kinds of thoughts so we are really losing valuable ways of conceptualizing the world. Ignoring for a moment that there isn’t a shred of evidence for any sufficiently strong form of this proposition² if true it would actually suggest that language death is an important process to weed out the inferior ways of conceptualizing the world.

Alright so we don’t have a whole lot of reason to fear the loss of linguistic diversity but maybe it’s aesthetically pleasing so what’s the harm? Well actually quite a bit. Differing languages present a huge barrier to understanding and communication (not to mention encouraging animosity and nationalistic hate). Just imagine if all 50 US states spoke different languages. Do you really think the US would have become as economically, scientifically and academically competitive as it is today with language limiting cooperation between the states? Even if each and every american learned five languages most interstate projects would still be unable to find a language that everyone involved could understand.

Adopting a universal language (or several very widely spoken ones) while trying to keep most traditional languages afloat isn’t a much better solution. Either many people are only poorly conversant in the common language creating inefficiencies and discouraging the free flow of ideas, we discourage cross cultural friendships or the small languages die out anyway. If everyone speaks english (or mandarin or whatever) fluently and just one of your friends doesn’t know your traditional language you will all switch to using english while hanging out. Since few people learn more than five languages even minor amounts of cross cultural mingling will make the common language the default and if even a few people get lazy the traditional languages will die out. The only solution is to create the sort of cultural/nationalistic pride that looks down on people who don’t know your traditional tongue which not only creates inefficiency but encourages the sort of nationalism/culturalism that encourages hatreds and starts wars. I mean does anyone really think it is a coincidence that nations who speak the same language tend to have friendlier relations?

Even ignoring all of this retaining your traditional language requires expending resources to learn it and use it. The time that people spend learning their traditional language is time they could have spent learning mathematics or learning a language that will let them communicate with more outsiders. Ultimately trying to keep their native language afloat is an investment of time and effort that many native people around the world have decided just isn’t a worthwhile way to spend their limited resources. Ironically instead of seeing this as a change for the positive some people actually lambast language death because it happens to the poorest cultural groups.

Romaine noted that there are some linguists who claim that language death is a natural process that should not be interrupted. Romaine also said that most language death affects indigenous peoples that are poorly-equipped to prevent it. “Language death does not happen in the privileged communities, it happens to the dispossessed and disempowered,” she said.

Not only does this argument assume the consequent (language death is bad) it reflects a snobbish “let them eat cake” attitude. Wasting resources that you could have used to improve your situation on maintaining a traditional language for purely sentimental reasons is a luxury that only those with excess resources can afford. It makes about as much sense to complain that the poor are the ones most likely to be losing their languages as it does to complain that the poor are the ones lest likely to own Rolex’s. What’s needed is ways to bring them out of poverty not to make them spend their limited resources on luxury goods that those of us in rich countries find attractive. Frankly, I find it kinda ghastly that we would tell these poor groups that their decision about what languages to speak wasn’t good enough for us and that they should go back and spend more of their time learning dead languages so they can serve as living museums for us rather than improving their lot like we did.

Still even all of this misses the biggest cost of this sort of rhetoric, loss of public concern for real harms occurring around the world. There is only so much space in the public consciousness for this sort of breathless rhetoric and concern about linguistic diversity competes with concern about global warming and loss of biodiversity. If people hear enough scary rhetoric like this only to have it come to nothing they will eventually stop being so concerned. Given all the apparently scientific concern for this sort of thing is it any surprise that the whole global warming thing is still meeting with a great deal of resistance. What really needs to happen is that scientists need to take a long view and vocally disassociate themselves from this sort of moralizing rhetoric rather than provide the raw data and become meekly silent while someone turns it into a moral crusade. Whether it is in environmentalism or linguistics the public will wrongly credit the warning to science as a whole unless scientists are much more forceful in separating the science from the moral cause.