The Probability Broach: Whistle blowers

A silver pea whistle

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Win, Lucy and their allies at the Continental Congress have outmaneuvered the Hamiltonians by getting the delegates to vote for unlimited debate. That gives them all the time they need to present their evidence that jackbooted government thugs from Win’s world are planning an invasion, and that the Hamiltonians are in league with them.

Deejay and Oolorie, the scientists who built the Probability Broach, are demonstrating its capabilities by showing videos of Win’s world:

Resuming the Chair, Jenny called on Deejay Thorens, via Telecom, to describe the Probability Broach. A second circuit, to Emperor Norton University, allowed Ooloorie to chip in by split-screen. It was the first I’d seen of Deejay’s recordings of my world. They were depressing. The United States now looked dingy and threadbare to me. I’d forgotten already what grime, noxious fumes, and poverty in the soul of a society can do to the people who have to live there.

Even though he grew up in that dystopian place, Win has internalized the philosophy of the North American Confederacy to the point that he now finds poverty an unfamiliar and disturbing spectacle.

This highlights something I’ve noted before, which is how weirdly, implausibly egalitarian this anarcho-capitalist society is. Everything is cheap and everyone is wealthy; even an average working joe like Ed Bear can own a mansion, multiple cars, and all the drugs, guns and consumer goods he wants.

How can this be the case in a society built on law-of-the-jungle capitalism? Is there no indentured servitude in the North American Confederacy? Are there no private estates with workers locked into serfdom contract? Are there no homeless people, no shantytowns, no workhouses? Isn’t extreme inequality the point of capitalism, because it motivates people to strive?

Other libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, take the stance that in their ideal world, a tiny number of the ultra-rich would live like god-kings, while the rest of humanity would be peons. As evil as this is, at least it’s a realistic outcome of their premises.

But Smith declares himself an anarchist who loves freedom, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to depict corporate feudalism or aristocratic hierarchies. What doesn’t make sense is why those things don’t exist in a world of unbridled capitalism. He has no explanation for why they’re not there.

Suddenly, a delegate rises and demands to be heard. It’s Freeman K. Bertram, the head of the Paratronics corporation, under whose auspices the Probability Broach was built (and, as we found out, he’s also on the side of the bad guys):

“The Chair recognizes Mr. F. K. Bertram.”

“Madame President, we demand this demonstration cease! Those recordings are private property, which these two individuals”—he pointed to the inset images of Deejay and Ooloorie—”are using without authorization!”

… “Is this true, Dr. Thorens?” asked Jenny, knowing perfectly well it was.

“I’m afraid so,” Deejay admitted ruefully.

Bertram shook his fist at the ‘com. “Thorens, you and your, your—specimen, are discharged! Turn those recordings over this very minute!”

This raises a couple of questions.

First of all: Bertram acts as if he can give commands to Deejay and Oolorie, or fire them at will. Can he?

This is the exact reason why academic tenure exists: so scientists and academics can challenge conventional wisdom, advocate for unpopular positions, and otherwise express their views without worrying about displeasing their bosses. At the very least, they can’t just be summarily fired; there’s a process the university has to go through. Is there any such thing as tenure in the NAC?

Second, on the same note: what about faculty unions? Once again, this is a major reason why unions exist: so workers have collective power to push back against unfair, unreasonable, or unethical demands. Does anyone in the NAC belong to a union that gives them this kind of protection? Does that even exist?

Third: are there whistleblower laws? Yet again, this is the reason why such laws exist in the real world: so people can report malfeasance committed by their employer without being punished or retaliated against. Exposing your boss’ secret villainous plot for world domination would certainly seem to fall under that heading.

Obviously, an anarchy like the NAC has no laws, period, so there wouldn’t be whistleblower laws. It apparently also doesn’t have unions, tenure or other worker protections, since no one raises those as obstacles to Bertram trying to shut down the scientists. The only reasonable conclusion is that all employment in the NAC is “at will”—the legal term for an arrangement where employees have no rights and employers can fire them at any time for any reason. But that makes it even less believable that this society is so free and so equal, when not starving depends on staying in your boss’ good graces.

“Wait a minute!” It was Olongo, out of order and towering above the rostrum. “What do you mean, private property? I’m one of your stockholders, and I want to see those recordings!”

“Mr. Vice President, with due respect, we are obligated to make decisions in the best interests of the company as a whole.”

This gives Win an idea, for once. Since nine-tenths of the NAC is represented at this meeting, that must include other Paratronics shareholders. What if they call an impromptu shareholders’ meeting to vote on releasing these records?

Ironically, this scene furnishes a neat demonstration of why private-property rights untempered by any other consideration are a bad idea when it comes to stopping unethical behavior. If Paratronics had been a privately held company, or if a majority of its stock was held by Hamiltonian conspirators, the good guys would have been screwed.

Lucy thinks this is a good idea, and tells Win to bring it to Jenny:

I crossed the great floor self-consciously, but I needn’t have worried: as the wrangling continued down front, I noticed delegates napping, several reading books or their electronic counterparts, and at least two poker games along my route to the rostrum. Someone was working a complicated 3-D crossword in his display, others were walking around, chatting, eating dinner.

As a reminder, Jenny just informed the Continental Congress that they were facing nuclear annihilation and conquest. But even with those stakes clearly laid out, some delegates couldn’t care less and aren’t paying the slightest attention to the proceedings.

Smith probably meant this as an illustration of his principle that everyone should have a right to ignore the government if they so choose. Under the circumstances, it just makes the people of his ancap utopia look stupid. A sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads, and they’re so lazy and incurious that they’re napping or playing games rather than doing anything about it. That may be a more realistic depiction of libertarianism than the author intended.

Image credit: Zephyris via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 3.0 license

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New on OnlySky: Cutting off the tail of climate change

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about some news worth celebrating: we’ve avoided the worst-case scenario for climate change.

Several years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a range of scenarios, dubbed the Representative Concentration Pathways or RCPs, that set out a range of different visions for the future, depending on how much progress humanity made toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The worst of these, known as RCP8.5, painted an apocalyptic picture of a world so hot and chaotic that billions would be at risk from heat waves, coastal cities would flood, agriculture would be starved by drought, and mass migrations would spark war. Civilization would be at risk of utter collapse. That was the future we were headed toward until recently.

The good news is that this dire scenario now looks like it will never come to pass. Despite the best efforts of rich petrostates and science deniers, humanity has made solid progress toward decarbonizing the economy and replacing fossil fuels with green energy. While we waited too long to act and as a consequence have already missed the best-case scenario of a world that completely avoids climate change, there’s reason to believe that worst-case scenario is off the table as well.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

The RCP8.5 scenario represents 4°C or more of warming. As a reference point, this is roughly the same magnitude as the temperature difference between today and the last glacial maximum, when northern Europe and North America were buried under mile-thick ice sheets. Try to picture a future that’s as much hotter than the present as the present is hotter than that.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), you don’t need to use your imagination. Climate scientists have sketched a picture.

In a world with 4°C of warming, 4.7 billion people would be exposed to potentially lethal levels of heat over the course of the year. Summer temperatures in equatorial regions like the Middle East and North Africa could reach 60°C (140°F) on the hottest days. Southern Spain would become a desert. Cities like Karachi and Kolkata would become uninhabitable. As journalist David Wallace-Wells put it in a famous article: “At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”

4°C is a nightmare scenario. That’s why it should be a vast relief to hear that this isn’t the path we’re on.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Robert’s rules of order

Members of the press raising their hands to ask questions

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

Now that the Continental Congress is in session and other business has been dealt with, Win and his friends finally have a chance to inform the North American Confederacy about the enemy at the gates. President Jenny Smythe is on their side, so she yields the gavel to her vice president and addresses the delegates.

(The North American Confederacy’s vice president is a sapient gorilla, Dr. Olongo Featherstone-Haugh, pronounced “Fanshaw”. I’ve commented on this before, but it’s hard not to read racial undertones into the fact that L. Neil Smith never depicts a single Black person in his anarcho-capitalist utopia, but does have multiple named characters who are talking apes.)

“Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Assembled delegates,” she addressed the cameras, “people of North America and the System. Twice in the last century, our culture has embraced new peoples—peoples we had long known, but failed properly to understand. I refer, of course, to simian beings and to the people of the seas, the cetaceans. Today, we anticipate a time when new life is discovered on a distant world, life that shares with us that sum of values we call Civilization.”

“…Fate has chosen me to bring you that news—with two shocking qualifications: the new world is called Earth, its location, anywhere you look around you, for it shares space with our own, existing at a different point along one of the several dimensions of time.”

The delegates are already buzzing over this shocking news, but Jenny has more:

“Ladies and gentlemen! We shall be at war with this new Earth within days—weeks at the most a terrible new kind of war, ending only when all life on both our planets is utterly extinguished!

…Therefore, I move that Congress declare a state of emergency to deal with this situation before civilization itself is destroyed.”

It’s important to include this excerpt for later, because it shows that no one in the NAC wasn’t informed about exactly what level of threat they were facing.

Upon hearing Jenny’s ominous news, the assembly is in an uproar:

A tidal wave of noise swept over the crowded room. Lucy grabbed her mike, punching for recognition. This too was pre-arranged. “Mr. Vice President!—Shuddup, you varmints!—Mr. Vice President!” In exasperation, she drew her enormous pistol, triggering three devastating blasts into the timbered ceiling. Sawdust fell, and with it, silence.

“The Chair recognizes Lucille Kropotkin.”

“About bloody time, too, Fanshaw, old ape. Okay, I second Jenny’s motion, so’s we can explain to all these yahoos here exactly what’s been going on!”

But the Hamiltonians are attending this Congress too, and they’re not standing idly by as their plot is exposed before the world. John Jay Madison rises to speak and is recognized by the chair:

“Mr. Vice President, we have just witnessed the introductory maneuvers of an unprecedented criminal conspiracy… I myself have been accosted by these lunatics, and have some acquaintance with what they’re trying to sell. In the interests of decency, I demand that their fantasies be dismissed immediately, so that we may all go home.” Boos, hisses, interspersed with a cheer or two. One of his henchman rose and shouted, “Second!”

“Out of order, Dr. Skinner. There’s a motion already on the floor.”

This gambit having failed, the bad guys try another one, offering a formal amendment to Jenny’s motion to reconvene as a “committee-of-the-whole” in order to study the problem at length before making any decisions. After a back-and-forth of dueling amendments, it passes:

Slam! went the gavel. “The amendment passes by a majority of 99.44 percent. This body is recessed and reconstituted as a committee-of-the-whole!”

I groaned. Had we lost?

“Great goiters, no!” said Lucy. “We were hoping for something like this, but couldn’t figure a way to swing it ourselves. Those Hamiltonians did it for us, bless their cruddy little hides.”

Win is baffled, but she explains: The bad guys’ plan was to do the NAC version of a filibuster—trying to tie the Congress up in endless debate so they could never actually vote on anything. But, as Lucy says gleefully, the villains played right into their hands. Until that motion passed, any speaker was limited to ten minutes, which would have severely limited their options on how to make their case about what should be done. Now all time limits on debate are suspended, and the good guys have as much time as they want to present their evidence.

L. Neil Smith intended all of this to be boring and convoluted, since he hates politics. But it points to a different problem that I want to flag: None of this parliamentary procedure should exist in an ancap society.

This stuff about “the chair recognizes” and “second the motion” and strict time limits on how long people get to speak are vestiges of a political order that Smith says he doesn’t accept. I thought this society had no laws and no rules!

In an anarchy like this one, which is “free” in a might-makes-right, law-of-the-jungle sense, the way it should work is that when you want to talk, you stand up and start yelling, and the loudest yeller wins by drowning out everyone else. After all, Lucy fired a gun into the ceiling when she wanted to talk! Why is she the only one who’s doing that?

Of course, if they followed this procedure, Congress would be an incomprehensible roar of noise. It would be impossible to agree on anything or take any action, so nothing would ever get done.

That’s an inadvertent demonstration of a philosophical point that this book otherwise staunchly refuses to admit: complete and total freedom isn’t always the best option. Sometimes, you need rules and regulations to get things done. Robert’s Rules of Order, the classic manual of parliamentary procedure, makes this very point to justify its own existence:

Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty.

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New on OnlySky: Conservatism is hazardous to your health

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how American conservatism is slowly killing its adherents.

As recently as the early 2010s, there was no significant difference in American death rates by political affiliation. But sometime within the last decade, that started to change. Conservatives have started dying at higher rates than liberals, not just from COVID-19, but across all causes. This pattern holds true even after controlling for confounding factors like race, income, or geography.

What could be causing this? Here’s one answer: COVID conspiracism, like a malignant cancer, has mutated and spread throughout the ideology of the conservative body politic. They’ve come to mistrust not just the COVID vaccine, not just vaccines in general, but all medical science – and they’re paying the price for it. The Republican party has long fostered a mistrust of science and expertise among its adherents, and now it’s coming back to bite them.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:

Even as the world was going into lockdown and hospitals were swamped with the dying, conservatives refused to believe any of it. They told themselves that the timing was suspicious; that the pandemic must be a plot to oust Donald Trump from office by causing economic and social disruption just before the election. To that end, they concocted all manner of conspiracy theories to convince themselves that the virus wasn’t real or wasn’t a threat.

But while Fox News pundits and QAnon podcasts could sway conservative voters, they couldn’t alter reality. The virus was real, and it was a threat. Many who refused to believe this fact paid with their lives.

A famous example was the conservative talk show host Phil Valentine, who decried lockdowns, promoted quack therapies, and streamed anti-vaccine documentaries from his website. He argued that it was “common sense” that the coronavirus wasn’t a serious threat and that no drastic measures needed to be taken to stop it.

He then got sick with COVID, was hospitalized, was put on a respirator, and died.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Law of unintended consequences

A beautiful waterfall in the middle of a verdant forest

The Probability Broach, chapter 19

We’ll get back to the proceedings of the anarcho-capitalist legislature soon, but Smith opens this chapter with another quote from one of his fictional mouthpieces that I want to discuss:

I often wonder why the ecology movement attracts leftists—there’s a lesson there you’d think they’d avoid at all costs: the economy is like any other part of the environment, small interferences create elephantine dislocations in later years and unpredictable places. If altering algae populations can cause an Ice Age, it’s equally true that minimum wage laws can cause mass unemployment. If they can learn such things about nature, why can’t they learn them about their own society?

—Mary Ross-Byrd
Toward a New Liberty

This is an argument I haven’t seen before, so let’s spend some time analyzing it.

It’s a clever rhetorical tactic on Smith’s part to compare the economy to nature. It’s true that humans’ well-intentioned interference in nature has sometimes backfired and caused worse outcomes than if we had just left things alone.

The classic example is forest managers being vigilant about stamping out small wildfires, which allows dry tinder to build up on the forest floor. Eventually, this results in catastrophic mega-fires that are impossible to extinguish and cause far more destruction.

Obviously, Smith wants to argue that what’s true for the natural world is also true of economics, and that everyone would be better off if we stood back and stopped trying to interfere with the invisible hand of the market. However, there are some important points of dissimilarity in this metaphor.

The first one is that the economy is a human creation, shaped by human decisions, and therefore it’s more under our control than nature is. We can’t control either one completely or perfectly—as pundits have noted, the president can’t dictate whether the stock market goes up or down, nor is there a dial in the Oval Office he can turn to raise or lower prices—but we do have the ability to create incentives which affect people’s behavior on a large scale.

For example, we can discourage consumption by raising taxes (like with “sin taxes” on alcohol and cigarettes). We can encourage saving and investing by raising central bank interest rates, or stimulate consumer spending by lowering them. We don’t have the ability to influence natural cycles in a similar way.

The second point is that most of us believe we have a moral responsibility to protect our fellow humans, in a way we don’t for other species.

When a lion kills a gazelle or a parasitic wasp lays its eggs in a living caterpillar, we don’t consider that an evil that needs correcting. But most of us do feel an obligation to do something when child laborers are mangled by machinery, or sweatshop workers burn to death in a blaze because there are no fire exits. This tips the balance toward intervention in human affairs, whereas we consider nature to be amoral and not obligated to abide by our notions of right and wrong.

The third point is that, despite what Smith seems to believe, no one—not even the most dedicated ecologist—argues that there should be no interference with nature under any circumstances.

After all (unless you’re an antinatalist), we all agree that human beings have to live on this planet. That means we don’t have a choice about interfering with nature. Whether we take up a lifestyle as cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers, grow crops in industrial monocultures and live in skyscrapers, or build a solarpunk utopia with windmills and organic fields, we can’t avoid having an impact on the planet. The question is what kind of impact we’re going to have, and what interventions we should or shouldn’t allow.

Ecologists and environmentalists do believe that human interference with nature is warranted in some cases. For example, when a deadly pandemic arises, even though that’s a “natural” phenomenon, we still create vaccines and treatments. We breed crops and livestock to be more productive to serve our needs, even if those varieties would go extinct without us.

We also advocate interference in nature to undo our past mistakes. This may take the form of removing invasive species from ecosystems where they didn’t evolve and don’t belong, such as the effort to catch lionfish in the Caribbean, or to stop the spread of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes.

Many ecologists also work on captive breeding programs to restore species that were driven to the brink of extinction by human errors. The successful reintroduction program for the California condor, or the attempt to develop chestnut trees that are resistant to blight fungus, are two high-profile examples.

If I can speak on behalf of ecologists, I’d argue what they really believe is we shouldn’t intervene unwisely. Before we take an action that will interfere with natural patterns, we have to study the downstream consequences, weigh the balance of potential harms and benefits, and act only when we have reason to believe it will yield a better outcome than not acting. Not coincidentally, that’s the same thing we’d say about the economy.

Last but not least—and this is the biggest point Smith glides past—these aren’t separate and unrelated questions. To refuse to interfere in the economy is to interfere in nature, and vice versa.

When chemical plants dump cancer-causing sludge into rivers, developers bulldoze storm-absorbing coastal wetlands to build beach resorts, or factories spew ozone-destroying CFCs or climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere… Smith’s libertarian logic would have us shrug our shoulders and do nothing, despite the clear consequences that result from letting these industries run amok without regulation. Often, allowing capitalists to ravage nature in the name of profit destroys more value than it creates.

In an earlier chapter, he hinted that individuals could sue polluters. But there are obvious reasons this won’t work, such as the near-impossibility of proving their pollution definitively caused harm in a single case, even if we know it’s harmful in general.

Before taking any drastic action, either with regard to the economy or the environment, it’s always good to cultivate humility and to study the results thoroughly. But that doesn’t mean we should never intervene for fear of unforeseen consequences. That’s not sound ecological thinking; it’s the bad-faith “doubt is our product” marketing used by tobacco companies, oil drillers, and other merchants of death to evade regulation as long as possible.

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