The Probability Broach: Kindergarteners packing heat

A small child holding a large assault rifle

The Probability Broach, chapter 5

Win sits up, dizzy and bloodied, his head throbbing from the explosion that hurled him into the air. He remembers fleeing from a hail of gunfire and escaping through what he thought was an emergency exit. But his surroundings bear no resemblance to that violent scene:

Through my personal haze, the scene was tranquil, bearing no relationship to the meat grinder I’d just been through: a broad emerald lawn and a five-foot hedge stretched endlessly in the distance. On the other side, a corrugated metal shack showed robin’s-egg blue. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of dark earth and growing things, dappled with sunshine and shade amid small groves of enormous trees; benches and sidewalks somehow tinted tones of red, orange, or yellow.

…Here and there, other people were dancing, talking in small groups, lying in pairs under leafy canopies, moving gently with the music. They wore a bewildering variety of costumes: bright swirly cloaks, skirts or kilts, trousers and tunics—riots of color strewn like shining flowers across the forested lawn.

…A hand on my shoulder—I started. A dark, pretty girl in orange bellbottoms stood behind me. “Are you all right?” she asked, almost apologetically… A sheathed dagger, needle slim, hung from a jewelled chain around her tanned and slender waist.

Unable to comprehend what’s happened, Win can only assume he was somehow thrown clear by the blast (“the Enquirer’s headline would read, POLICEMAN THROWN HUNDREDS OF FEET BY EXPLOSION, LIVES!”).

He croaks that he’s all right and staggers off, hurting and bewildered. People stare at him as he stumbles through the park, and as his head clears, he looks back at them. The first thing he notices, after the unfamiliar clothing styles, is that everyone is armed:

Whatever the local ordinances were, I saw more low-slung handguns, more dirks and daggers, than in a dozen B-westerns and swashbucklers spliced together reel to reel. I found myself grabbing convulsively at my left armpit more than once. Fort Collins sure had changed!

…There hadn’t been a hardware collection like this since the Crusades were catered. Women and children sporting arms right along with the men.

In case it isn’t obvious, Win has entered a parallel universe. It’s L. Neil Smith’s anarcho-capitalist utopia, the North American Confederacy. The NAC is a society with no government, no laws and no police. Everyone is responsible for their own safety, hence why everyone is carrying weapons. At any moment, you might have to defend yourself against someone trying to rob or kill you, and no one’s coming to help you if you can’t.

You might think that a lawless, heavily armed society would be like the Wild West. It should be a place where the threat of violence is always hanging in the air like thunderclouds, where every stranger is regarded with suspicion and hostility, and every encounter takes place through narrowed eyes and hands hovering above pistol grips. Smith insists that isn’t the case:

Something was missing—the barely concealed hostility and fear that haunted my city streets. These people never seemed to push or jostle, never avoided looking at one another. They’d nod politely—even speak!—and they carried their heads high, unafraid of the world around them. It sent shivers down my spine.

This is the “an armed society is a polite society” thinking that’s ubiquitous among gun-worshippers. It’s also completely false.

As ultra-violent America proves by its own bad example, putting more guns in more hands makes society more violent, not less. There will always be angry, unstable people who erupt at the slightest provocation. There will always be abusers and psychopaths who have no qualms about lashing out at others to get their way. In a world where nobody is armed, these confrontations might end in yelling, curses, or at worst, a brawl. In a world where everyone is armed, they’ll end with bullets.

And that’s what happens in the real world, where people know that calling the police is an option when you’re in danger, and where the threat of legal consequences deters people from choosing violence. In Smith’s world, going for your gun is the first and last resort. There’s every reason for lethal violence to be more common, and no reasons for it to be less. His North American Confederacy shouldn’t be a peaceful, well-mannered utopia; it should be a war zone.

But wait – among that panoply of armed strangers, did he mention children? Yes, children:

Even more jarring were the weapons—men and women alike, little people, children. I passed one obvious kindergartener carrying a pistol almost as big as he was! Was there some danger here I wasn’t seeing?

…Yet these people seemed so full of cordiality. Could the source of their pride and dignity be nothing more than the mechanical means of dealing death they carried?

Okay, look.

There’s a reason we don’t let children do things like drink alcohol or drive, and it’s not because we live in an overbearing nanny state. It’s because their brains are still developing and maturing. Kids exhibit a combo of intense emotions, lack of common sense, and impulsive behavior that can be hard for parents to manage at the best of times.

As the father of an 8-year-old boy, I can attest that kids are capable of being intelligent, sweet, compassionate, and insightful. They’re also prone to being stubborn and contrary for no good reason, ignoring directions they’ve been given a hundred times, doing dangerous things out of sheer carelessness, and throwing huge tantrums over inconsequential problems. They stick things in electric outlets, walk into traffic, try to pet strange animals, run up and down the stairs. My son once touched a cactus to see what would happen.

And he’s old enough now to occasionally reason out the consequences of his actions. Smith is proposing that even younger children should be trusted with deadly weapons. I wouldn’t even trust a kindergartener with a permanent marker!

Then there are the teenagers. Again, it’s not just the government passing arbitrary laws because they hate freedom. The frontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in foresight and self-control, isn’t fully developed in teens. That’s why they’re prone to impulsive, risky behavior like dangerous driving, drugs and unsafe sex. (The free market also recognizes this; that’s why they pay higher car insurance rates.)

You can imagine how disastrous it could be to add easily accessible, unregulated firearms to the mix. What happens in anarcho-capitalist world if you’re the parent of a teenager and you ground them for bad behavior? Can they threaten to shoot you?

Libertarians reflexively assume that humans are perfectly rational beings who carefully weigh the benefits and drawbacks of every decision, even in cases where it’s obvious that assumption is false. This is the most shocking example. Owning a firearm, much less carrying it around, demands a level of care, discipline and vigilance that most adults don’t possess.

Kids die, all the time, from finding and playing with their parents’ guns. In the past few years, guns have become the #1 cause of death for U.S. children and teenagers. It takes a willfully perverse mind to look at this carnage and conclude the only problem is that there aren’t enough kids packing heat.

Image credit: Public domain, via NARA/DVIDS

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New on OnlySky: Resurrecting the chestnut

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how human carelessness wiped out a beloved tree, and whether we can bring it back from the dead.

The American chestnut tree used to be part of the fabric of everyday life in the United States. Its nuts were a reliable and abundant source of food for humans, livestock and wild animals. Its timber was used to build homes, ships, railroads, and more. But in the early 1900s, an imported fungal blight destroyed it in the wild and drove it to the edge of extinction.

Almost since the chestnut was decimated, plant scientists have tried to bring it back, breeding and genetically engineering new varieties that they hope are resistant to blight. And now, after decades of labor, these efforts are beginning to bear fruit. A New York nonprofit is distributing a thousand (hopefully!) healthy, blight-immune hybrid seedlings to anyone who wants to plant and care for them. Can we restore it to the wild and bring back the glory days of the chestnut? Should we even try?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

To restore the chestnut, we’d have to make it resistant to blight. There are two approaches that have been tried to achieve this.

One is traditional hybridization, the same method used by farmers for millennia to breed plants with desirable characteristics. Plant breeders cross the blight-resistant Chinese chestnut with its American cousin, then backcross the hybrid with American chestnuts. They repeat this process over multiple generations, with the goal of creating a tree that has the blight resistance genes of the Chinese chestnut, but is otherwise almost identical to the American chestnut.

The disadvantage of this method is how much time it requires. It’s essentially a form of guided evolution, and evolution doesn’t run on human timescales. It takes about seven years to breed each new generation of trees, plus years more to grow them and evaluate whether they can fend off the blight. Plant scientists have been working on breeding blight-resistant chestnut trees since 1922, and their efforts are still ongoing.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Self-hating government scientists

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

Win has found some enigmatic clues in Vaughn Meiss’ office, but nothing conclusive. He goes into the next room, which is the dead scientist’s laboratory:

Vaughn Meiss’s lab made all the stereotypes come true. Remember The Fly? It was just like that—strung with wires and insulators, bulky pilot-lighted cabinets looming in the twilight. Only the posters were out of place. One on the back of the door read, GOVERNMENT SCIENCE IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS—AYN RAND and, penciled below: Ayn Rand is a contradiction in terms.

L. Neil Smith never misses an opportunity to slip in a gibe at the government… except that Vaughn Meiss, prior to his death, was literally a government scientist. He was working for Colorado State University!

As I covered in my review of Atlas Shrugged, government research has given us inventions like nuclear power, space flight, GPS and the internet. To that list, we could add the World Wide Web, hyperlinks and web browsers (created by Tim Berners-Lee at the European physics laboratory CERN), the inactivated-virus flu vaccine (developed by Jonas Salk at the University of Michigan with funding from the U.S. Army), magnetic resonance imaging (invented by Paul Lauterbur at Stony Brook University, part of New York’s public SUNY system), and many more.

This history of innovation doesn’t fit with libertarian dogma that only the free market can create anything new or useful, so they train themselves to ignore it. In fact, L. Neil Smith is so well-practiced at ignoring it that he can write a scene like this with a straight face – where a character invents something revolutionary while working for a government institution, all while decrying government science.

There are multiple levels of hypocrisy here he’s blind to. It’s the same sawing-off-the-branch-you’re-sitting-on vibe as Trump voters who work federal jobs because those are the only good jobs on offer in their fading rural counties, while at the same time yelling about waste and fraud and demanding the government be radically cut back.

As Win is poking around a console (“seemingly the command post, covered with knobs and dials”), he hears footsteps at the door, which he locked behind him when he entered:

Then a crash! The door bulged, glass shattering into paint-covered fragments. The forty-one flashed into my hand as I ducked behind the console. Again! The doorjamb burst, splinters flying, and a cataract of data disks fountained to the floor. A man stood framed in the doorway, tossed his fire-extinguisher battering ram aside, and drew a weapon from his right hip.

The man enters the room, but without spotting Win hiding behind the console. Win gets the drop on him:

As he drifted past, I swapped the Magnum to my left hand, laid the muzzle on the back of his neck, and rose. “Stand easy, asshole!” I whispered, trying to keep an eye on the door. He turned abruptly. I grabbed, jammed my thumb between the hammer of his automatic and the firing pin. The weapon pointed at my guts, the hammer fell. Pain lanced through my hand but the pistol failed to fire. I wrenched it away, smacked him backhand across the face with mine. Blood spurted, black in the dark, and he crumpled.

The stunned thug falls against the console, and his jacket snags on a control. Lights light up, circuits whir into life, and there’s a rumble from across the room. He hears Otis Bealls yell “No! No!”, just as someone else standing in the doorway starts shooting wildly at him:

My forty-one roared and bucked, roared again. The machine gunner was blasted out the door, blood streaming in his wake like crepe-paper ribbons, and slammed into the wall behind…. More company through the door, guns blazing—Bealls was still yelling in the background. I fired—saw things shatter, people fall—and ran for the fire exit, plunging into darkness. Bullets buzzed and pinged behind me. I scrambled down a passageway, feeling dizzy, twisted. Instead of stairs, I found blue sky. I was at the bottom of a freshly excavated hole—like a grave.

Win scrambles out of the hole into “green grass and sunshine”, just as there’s a violent explosion and he’s sent flying into the air.

I’ll say this for L. Neil Smith: he can write a solid action sequence. I had no trouble picturing this sequence of events in my head. Aside from the obligatory bad guys missing every shot, it’s also fairly realistic. (As opposed to Ayn Rand action scenes, where the characters can deliver monologues mid-firefight.)

I still have questions, though. The most important is, why wasn’t Vaughn Meiss’ lab sealed? If its contents were vital to national security, why did the bad guys leave it unlocked and unguarded for just anyone to wander in? They should have sent their goons to cordon it off and confiscate its contents the same day they killed him.

Also, when they found out Win was looking where he shouldn’t have, why did they burst in with guns blazing? Why not just walk in, identify themselves as federal agents and arrest him?

They could have taken him away to somewhere they could interrogate him at leisure, to find out what he knows. That seems preferable to the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach – except, of course, it wouldn’t have given Smith the opportunity to write this very manly and violent fight scene.

If it wasn’t clear, the thug that Win knocked against the console accidentally switched on the machinery, opening a portal to a parallel universe. When he ran for what he thought was the “fire exit”, he passed through that portal and into another reality.

Everything in this book up to this point has been a prologue. Beginning in the next chapter, this book achieves escape velocity – rising from mundane political satire into psychedelic anarcho-libertarian fantasyland.

L. Neil Smith has said what he dislikes in our current politics, but now he’s going to present his alternative. In spite of his best efforts to make it seem reasonable and attractive, it’s a wild parade of absurdities and begged questions. Stay tuned!

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New on OnlySky: In vivo gene editing

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of genetic medicine – which, after decades of promise, has finally arrived.

CRISPR technology gives us the power to edit the DNA inside a living cell. We’re already using it to cure some inherited disorders, like sickle-cell anemia. But those are inherently easier to treat, since we can harvest stem cells from a person’s body, do the genetic edit in the controlled environment of a lab, and make sure that everything is working as intended before we transfuse them back.

The holy grail of genetic therapy is the ability to modify DNA within the body, known as in vivo gene editing. In a new paper published this month, a team of scientists claims to have done just that. With this technique, they appear to have saved the life of a baby born with a rare and deadly genetic disease. More studies are still needed, as is always the case in science; but if this result holds up, it’s certain that more cures for previously untreatable conditions are soon to follow.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

Time was short, and with KJ facing brain and organ damage, his parents and doctors decided to try an experimental treatment rather than waiting for a transplant. The doctors sequenced his genome to determine the exact mutation he had, then designed a personalized base-editing therapy. Rather than using a virus to carry the gene editor, which can provoke a harmful inflammatory response, they encapsulated it in lipid nanoparticles that are taken up by cells and release their contents into the interior.

They engineered human cell lines in a petri dish to carry the same mutation, and dosed them with the gene editor to prove that it altered the DNA as intended. They tested it on mice and monkeys for safety and efficacy. Then, in February 2025, when KJ was six months old, they infused the gene editor into his body—and held their breath.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Visit sunny Colorado

A majestic mountain range, with woodlands in the foreground

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

As part of his investigation into Vaughn Meiss’ murder, Win Bear wants to examine his office at the university. Otis Bealls, Meiss’ department chair, notes that Win doesn’t have a search warrant but agrees to show him around anyway.

Win is more than a little suspicious of Bealls’ suddenly cooperative attitude. He suspects a trap, but having come this far, he doesn’t want to leave without taking a look:

Vaughn Meiss’s office was a cinder-block cubicle in a nest of cinder-block cubicles along a cinder-block hall, all painted a depressingly familiar government gang-green. Bookcases teetered to the ceiling on all four walls, and a desk heaped with books and papers was crammed into the middle somehow. On the ceiling, over crumbing acoustic tile, he’d taped a Propertarian poster: IRS—IT REALLY STEALS!

…One strange datum: the desk was piled with histories covering the Revolution and two or three subsequent decades. Bookmarks—campus parking tickets going back to 1983—indicated special interest in Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Party, and, by golly, Albert Gallatin.

Gallatin, you may remember, is the man whose face is on the strange gold coin Meiss was carrying when he died.

Win doesn’t seem to have consulted an encyclopedia, but in our world, Albert Gallatin was a real person. He was a politician and diplomat of America’s founding generation, a Swiss-born immigrant who was elected to Congress and served as Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury. He also played a role in negotiating a resolution to the Whiskey Rebellion (more on this later).

Another curious thing: in an absolutely jam-packed office, one drawer of the desk, the second on the right, was conspicuously empty, or almost so—a half-empty box of Norma .357 Magnum ammunition, 158-grain hollowpoints; a felt-tip pen bearing the odd inscription LAPORTE PARATRONICS, LTD., LAPORTE, N.A.C., TELECOM GRAY 4-3122; a single pistol cartridge in an unfamiliar caliber marked D & A Auto .476; and—another coin! This one was about the size of a quarter:

ONE HALF METRIC OUNCE
SILVER 999 FINE
THE LAPORTE INDUSTRIAL BANK, LTD.

The other side was even weirder, a ferocious-looking elder in a Karl Marx beard:

LYSANDER SPOONER
A.L. 32-110 ARCHITECT OF LIBERTY

Strangely, Win never speculates about what any of this means. The most he does is make a mental note to go to Laporte later to look for these businesses.

When a detective finds a clue like this, you’d think his brain would go into overdrive to figure out the crime. There aren’t many innocent explanations for someone minting their own money in secret—especially when those coins are found together with a bunch of bullets.

Shouldn’t he suspect a counterfeiting ring testing its equipment? Or some sovereign-citizen-esque plot to topple the United States and replace the dollar, like the German Reichsbürger plot of 2022? That would even fit with the involvement of SecPol.

In his internal monologue, Win brags about how good at his job he is (“In a business lucky to solve one out of twenty, I get my man about half the time”)—but that’s a case of “tell, don’t show” on the author’s part. Win never solves this, in the sense of deducing the solution from the clues he has. A few pages from now, he quite literally stumbles across the answer by accident.

These dubious clues in my pocket, I resolved to stop by the city of Laporte after I finished here. If it was the Laporte in Colorado, something definitely funny was going on. Six or seven miles northwest of Fort Collins, Laporte boasted fewer than five thousand inhabitants—an unlikely place for a bootleg mint, industrial bank, or paratronics factory—whatever that was.

In reading this chapter, I had a feeling of deja vu. Why are libertarians always drawn to Colorado?

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand described Colorado as the last redoubt of freedom when the rest of the world had been plunged into communism. She placed her secret capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch there, hidden in the Rocky Mountains.

The U.S. Libertarian Party was founded in Colorado in 1971. Libertarian thinker Robert LeFevre founded his unaccredited, pro-capitalism “Freedom School” there in the 50s.

And now there’s The Probability Broach, which takes place entirely in Colorado—both the dystopian version, and the parallel-universe Colorado that’s an anarcho-capitalist paradise. The fact that L. Neil Smith lived in Colorado himself is probably part of the reason, but still. Is it just a coincidence that libertarians keep settling there and placing their stories there?

This is only speculation, but I wonder if it’s inspired by Colorado’s geography. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is an ideology of the frontier. It’s premised—whether its advocates realize it or not—on the belief that there’s no need to get along with your neighbors, because you can always pull up stakes, move away and start over somewhere else.

The Rocky Mountains, which are the dramatic backbone of the state, are like a visual metaphor for this idea. They’re a natural boundary, majestic and beautiful yet isolated and forbidding. As opposed to, say, the Great Plains states, which are wide-open and flat and have no obvious place to go where others can’t follow you, the Rockies seem to promise escape to anyone who’s tired of putting up with civilization. That’s exactly what Ayn Rand used them for, of course.

Colorado’s history of gold rushes and silver booms may also play into its libertarian inclinations. There’s nothing more libertarian than the idea that you can get rich overnight by yourself in the wilderness.

Even though mining is no longer the basis of the state’s economy, those cultural memories linger. To a political ideology that worships gold, it will always be tantalizing to dream that the secret to enormous wealth is out there, just waiting for an adventurous person to find it.

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New on OnlySky: The future of dying

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the future of dying, and whether we should be able to take the decision into our own hands.

New York could soon be the eleventh U.S. state to legalize medical aid in dying, or MAID, for the terminally ill. Polls show the general public supports it by huge margins. However, it’s faced opposition from special interests: religious groups are against it because they believe our lives belong to God (by which they mean themselves); and disability-rights groups are against it because they fear people will be pressured to end their lives as a cheap alternative to costly medical treatment and social support.

The religious objections are easily dismissed in a secular society. The disability-rights objections, less so. Their fears aren’t frivolous, not in a capitalist society that values people primarily for how much they can afford to spend. Nevertheless, I argue that there’s a fundamental and overriding question of autonomy to consider. Can we be forced to do what others think is best for us? Do we own ourselves, and thus have the right to choose how we live our lives, including the choice to depart on our own terms – or do we not?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

If we have a freedom, we can choose how to exercise it. That choice necessarily includes the right not to exercise it. Freedom of speech implies the freedom to remain silent. Freedom of religion implies the freedom to be an atheist.

Just the same way, freedom to choose what we do with our lives implies the freedom to stop living. It’s the ultimate declaration of self-ownership and autonomy.

No one other than me can tell me what my purpose is, what brings me joy, or what makes my life worth living. If I decide—with clear mind and heart—that I no longer wish to continue, shouldn’t I have the right to make that choice? Is it fair or just to deny all people their liberty because it might be misused or abused in some cases?

Continue reading on OnlySky…

New role at OnlySky

News incoming!

I’ve been a regular columnist for OnlySky since 2022. Originally conceived as a news and opinion site for all things secular, it hit a funding snag and shut down in 2024, but later relaunched with a new focus on possible futures.

Now Dale McGowan, OnlySky’s longtime editor-in-chief, is moving on. He’s accepted a full-time position with a national nonprofit that’s working to protect the U.S. electoral system. It sounds like a rough job, now more than ever, but I’m glad someone is doing it.

With Dale’s departure, I’ve accepted a promotion. Starting this month, I’m the new editor-in-chief of OnlySky.

If you’ve been reading my blog here on FTB, nothing is going to change. I intend to keep splitting my time between the two sites as I’ve been doing. My weekly column on OnlySky is oriented specifically toward futurism and future prediction, while on Freethought Blogs, I’ll keep writing about atheism and secularism, book reviews (including my ongoing series on The Probability Broach), current events, and whatever else catches my interest.

Now that I’ve hung out my shingle, I have to post a want ad: OnlySky is seeking writers!

We’re accepting pitches on almost any topic. Politics and religion are allowed, but so are science, technology and culture – just as long as it has a connection to the future or to a possible future. We want to hear predictions, speculations, and leaps of imagination about ways the world could be different. Nonfiction is fine, but I’d be happy to publish well-written fiction as well.

The best part: OnlySky pays for original content! It’s not a lot, admittedly, but it’s more than nothing.

If you’re interested, contact me by e-mail or in the comments below and tell me what you want to write about, and we’ll discuss details.

The Probability Broach: Education isn’t efficient

Graduates in their caps and gowns

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

Lt. Win Bear has taken a road trip to speak with Vaughn Meiss’ boss, the chair of the physics department at Colorado State University. After being kept waiting for an hour and a half, he’s finally granted an audience:

I wasn’t going to like Dr. Otis Bealls or his little Errol Flynn mustache. A nicotine-stained yellow-gray, it was the only hair he had—except for a scraggly fringe around the back of his head—and appeared to be growing from his nostrils. Affecting baggy tweeds, cheap velveteen waistcoat, and rimless plastic spectacles he fiddled with continuously, he failed to convey the academic impression he aspired to. The whole ensemble reminded me of the proverbial dirty old man who “carved another notch in his gold-handled cane.”

That’s quite an accusation, considering Win told us from his own mouth that he’s inclined to agree with anything a pretty woman says. It takes one to know one, I guess?

Bealls says he’s willing to assist the police in their inquiries, but he has no idea why Win is there; he hasn’t heard about Meiss’ murder. Win begins, “I understand he worked here…”

“Officer, please! Ph.D.’s do not work here! Janitors, stenographers, other menials work here. If I may optimistically exaggerate, undergraduates work here. Professors pass the Torch of Civilization, deliberate our Vast Body of Knowledge. They Labor in the Vineyards of Science, pushing back the Barriers of the Un—”

“Dr. Bealls,” I interrupted. “One of your Laborers won’t be hanging around the Vineyards anymore. He’s lying on a sheet-steel table at the Denver City Morgue, so full of machine gun bullets, he’s gonna need a forklift for a—”

This exchange, as we’ll see, is supposed to be a clue to Bealls’ character. Just like in Ayn Rand novels, any character who talks about abstract ideals like “civilization” and “science” and “knowledge” is an evil socialist who wants to destroy everything decent. You can recognize the good guys because they only care about money.

Win asks if Meiss had any enemies. He wasn’t popular in the physics department, according to Bealls:

“Variant opinions, particularly in these times of economic reappraisal, betray a certain inhumility. Nor have we room for contumacious individualism. Socially Responsible Science cannot proceed in such a manner.”

… “What form did his particular contumaciousness take?”

“He writes letters—wild, irresponsible things, absolutist, subversive! Do you know, he claims this institution would be more efficient run for profit? As if efficiency were a valid criterion in education!”

Obviously, we’re intended to disagree with Bealls. Everything about his character is designed to bias you against him, from his arrogant manner to his pompous speech to his unattractive appearance. His scorn for efficiency is supposed to sound wildly ridiculous and to exemplify how out-of-touch he is.

However, in spite of L. Neil Smith’s best efforts, I don’t entirely disagree. It’s true: education shouldn’t be efficient.

After all, public schools are free and open to everyone, without regard to their likelihood of future success. They even offer therapy, tutoring and other expensive accommodations for students with special needs!

An “efficient” policy, by contrast, would be to only spend our resources on educating those who stand to benefit the most. You could imagine a society that administers a test to children at a young age, sends those who score best to well-funded elite schools, and consigns everyone else to menial labor and serfdom, Brave New World-style. That would be “efficient” in the sense Smith means. But civilized countries don’t do that, and for good reason.

There’s an economic argument for free education, because educated people both earn more and produce more over their lifetimes, contributing more to GDP. But there’s also a moral argument for education. It’s good for a society to have educated citizens. It benefits democracy to have citizens who know history and philosophy and science, so they can understand the issues and vote wisely. The gains from this policy are harder to measure, but they’re at least as important as strictly monetary considerations.

And, ironically, for-profit colleges aren’t the model of efficiency that Smith thinks. The private education industry is riddled with shams and scams. According to whistleblowers, they aggressively target the most vulnerable, encourage them to take out huge loans to attend, hire unqualified instructors and pocket the profits.

Over the last few years, for-profit colleges have been failing left and right, leaving students burdened with massive debt while possessing no degree and no marketable skills. The only thing they’re “efficient” at is extracting money from the gullible.

On top of his distasteful devotion to profit, Bealls says, Meiss was unpopular because he wouldn’t lower himself to the level of his colleagues:

“I mean they frequently complain he goes out of his way to make his professional undertakings vague and esoteric. They—”

“Couldn’t understand what he was doing.”

“I would find other words. He has no right to set himself above his peers.”

Bealls explains that Meiss once pursued experiments of a “sensitive nature”, but he stopped working on them two and a half years ago. He said he had an ethical objection to proceeding any further:

“So why the panic now? That’s a long time, as government secrets go.”

Bealls went into his spectacle-scrubbing bit again. “Understand, sir, he was—considering his mediocre talent—quite far ahead in the field. The price of catering to reckless independence. I’m afraid no one else has been able—and if that weren’t enough, walking around with all that information in his brain—”

I couldn’t help it. “Was he supposed to turn it in? His brain, I mean. The usual practice is to do that before you start working for the—”

This scene shows how in TPB, like in Ayn Rand novels, intelligence sorts neatly by political ideology. Everyone who agrees with the author’s views is a competent supergenius, and everyone who disagrees is a blithering fool or a brutish thug. There are no unintelligent anarcho-capitalists, and there are no brilliant socialists. (Possibly the one exception is Win himself, but he’s the Dr. Watson whose narrative role is to have other characters explain everything to him for the reader’s benefit.)

Putting all the smart, competent, attractive people on the same side is a glaring sign that the author is stacking the deck in his favor. His utopian society functions in-story not because the worldbuilding is especially well-thought-out, but because he’s brainwashed the inhabitants into artificial unanimity, so they’re all willing to play by his rules.

Of course, real life doesn’t work like this. You can’t necessarily predict someone’s IQ from their political affiliation. To the extent that there’s a correlation, it points the other way: people with more education are more likely to be liberal. L. Neil Smith would have had a heart attack if he knew that Albert Einstein wrote an essay titled “Why Socialism?”

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New on OnlySky: AI and the post-truth era

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about whether AI is making it impossible for voters to trust anything they see or hear.

Zohran Mamdani, a socialist candidate for mayor of NYC, made waves when a Republican opponent accused him of using deepfake technology in his ads to pretend he was fluent in Spanish. It sounds too ridiculous to credit, but it’s just the cresting wave of a problem that’s only going to get bigger in coming years. What happens when anyone can create a perfect audio or video clone of anyone else on demand?

It’s not only that unethical politicians will use deepfakes to frame their opponents for things they didn’t do, although that tactic has already been tried. Just as troubling is the possibility that politicians who genuinely committed misdeeds will try to evade accountability by insisting their opponents are making deepfakes of them!

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

This fits with what we know about human psychology. People with an ideological commitment excel at coming up with reasons to reject evidence that challenges their preconceptions. Young-earth creationists say that dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to test believers’ faith. Conspiracy theorists say that the omnipotent conspiracy plants false flags to lead the public astray. Even scientists, when defending a cherished hypothesis, can argue that contrary evidence is misinterpreted or won’t be replicated.

This is an extension of that trend into politics. The political arena has always been a domain of lies and exaggerations, but we may soon see untruth proliferating like never before. AI gives voters from across the political spectrum a ready-made excuse to wave away anything that casts doubt on their candidate.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Smoke gets in your eyes

An orange-tinted landscape of industrial haze

The Probability Broach, chapter 4

After disarming the bomb in his apartment, Win spends a rough night sleeping on the floor for fear of boobytraps. Before going to sleep, he found two more: another antipersonnel mine under his bed, and a wire rigged to electrocute anyone who used the shower. In the morning, before he leaves for work, he dons his bulletproof vest and takes all his guns and extra ammunition (“This wasn’t my day for regulations”).

Back at the office, since Chief MacDonald never filed any paperwork, Win is still officially assigned to the Vaughn Meiss murder. He checks out a car, saying that he’s going to interview Meiss’ mother to throw off suspicion. In reality, he’s going to Meiss’ workplace at Colorado State University.

It was good to push my Plymouth out of that eternal curtain of brown smoke. Millions of bike-induced coronaries won’t put a dent in pollution, when the State House exempts its own “Public Service” gunk factories. With a cautious eye on the rearview mirror, I settled back and let the miles peel off—ice-blue Rockies on my left, Kansas somewhere off to the right—and tried forgetting corpses, Burgess, maybe even poor old Mac awhile.

Now wait just a darn minute.

Is pollution a bad thing, in Smith’s opinion? This passage implies that it is. That’s a step forward compared to Ayn Rand, who was staunchly pro-pollution (she describes smog from coal fires as “sacred“).

But in the anarcho-capitalist utopia that Smith fantasizes about, it would obviously be impossible to have environmental protection laws. Anyone could pollute to their heart’s content: spew smoke into the sky, pour raw sewage in rivers, dump trash in the ocean, bury toxic waste where it leaches into the soil.

Obviously, for-profit businesses can and have done all these things. They’ve caused a litany of infamous disasters, from Love Canal to Cancer Alley to the Donora death fog to the Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon. But Smith is so dead-set on blaming government for every evil, he shoves that history under the rug and pretends that the state – not private actors chasing profit in an unregulated market – is solely responsible for pollution.

Coincidentally, this passage also shows why the free market can never solve this kind of problem. He hints that the state is pushing people to ride bikes, but it won’t matter as long as they keep spewing out pollution themselves.

That’s Prisoner’s Dilemma logic, and it’s the exact reason why an ancap world would suffer environmental devastation. Everyone who runs a polluting or planet-destroying business will reason, “Why should I bother cleaning up after myself? It won’t make a difference, because everyone else won’t bother!” – and because everyone thinks this way, the problem will never be solved.

The only way to stop this race to the bottom is with a government, which can pass laws that bind everyone. It’s the social coordination mechanism that overcomes the hurdle of individual Prisoner’s Dilemma selfishness. The experience of history proves it: since the Clean Air Act was passed, air pollutants like particulate matter, ozone and sulfur dioxide have declined decade by decade. Millions of people live longer, healthier lives because of this law (even if too many places, especially poor and minority communities, still bear the burden of environmental racism).

I couldn’t forget the body armor, though even with the drop in temperature outside the inversion-bowl that makes Denver the second-stupidest place in America to build a city.

You might wonder, as did I, what L. Neil Smith thinks is the stupidest place to build a city. If he ever says, I couldn’t find it.

The inversion bowl is real, however. It’s a problem that dates back to the late 1800s, as an environmental engineer explains:

“It’s worse in the winter because of something called temperature inversion,” Devore explained, when cold air gets trapped under a layer of warmer air.

“In Denver, because we’re actually in somewhat of a bowl, where we’re bounded on one side by the mountains and the Platte River Valley on the other side, which actually rises up a little bit, so we become trapped.”

Those inversions can last between a day, sometimes even a couple of weeks, she said, and when those happen, the air is stagnant.

When this happens, pollution from any source – soot from burning wood and brushfires, nitrogen and sulfur dioxide from car and truck exhaust, particulate matter from oil and gas drilling – gets trapped and lingers in the stagnant air, rather than being dispersed by wind. The result is a noxious brown cloud that makes the air unhealthy to breathe, potentially for days on end.

But again, the free market will never solve this problem, and Smith doesn’t even try to argue otherwise. The way to fix this is with collective action: vehicle-emissions standards, burn bans, and other laws that protect air quality, so pollution doesn’t build up.

I flipped over to CB for some amateur entertainment.

There was plenty: farmers swapping yarns along their lonely furrows; truckers seditiously exchanging tips. Suddenly the band exploded with obscenity: President Jackson is a ——, four or five unpopular federal agencies are ——. The diatribe began to repeat itself. I slowed, listened—yes, there it was again: a CB “bomb,” a cheap, battery-operated tape player with a seven-minute loop, and an equally expendable transmitter, buried by the roadside and simmering up through a ten-foot copper wire, waiting for FCC gunships to triangulate and blast it to pieces. Remote-control radicalism. The People’s Committee for Free Papua entertained me almost all the way to Fort Collins, then quacked suddenly and went off the air.

Illegal pirate broadcasts and FCC black helicopters! It sounds like a parody of right-wing militiaman paranoia, but this book plays it absolutely straight. (You have to wonder whether “President Jackson” is meant to be Jesse Jackson, or whether Smith was using a generic name so as not to implicate any real-world politician.)

Has the First Amendment been repealed in this world? Can people be imprisoned or worse for protesting the government? This is yet another throwaway detail that hints at a wild backstory – which, alas, we’re never going to get. By the end of this chapter, Win Bear is going to escape from this sorry world for good, with scarcely a glance backwards.

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