Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union is Wrong*

*In Foreign Policy, Leon Aron explains in great detail why Eric Hoffer has become my favorite explainer of The True Believer. At 168 pages this work displays a dense fluidity manifesting itself in the mind as a beacon of truth about Mass Movements. The blog post above offers an empirical capsule that gives His Supreme Holliness, Lord Eric Hoffer my admiriation. He is my Higher Power for July - he is my Birthday HP.


[prefuctory nod to Paco's 'science' of economics]"Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons -- economic, political, social -- why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened. How, that is, between 1985 and 1989, in the absence of sharply worsening economic, political, demographic, and other structural conditions, did the state and its economic system suddenly begin to be seen as shameful, illegitimate, and intolerable by enough men and women to become doomed?"

From The True Believer

• Mass movements begin when things start to improve
• When change is 'right around the corner' the individual in a community gives up her autonomy for the movement.
• Mass Movements are religions
• The individual identity is subsumed by the group
• Members of a movement despise themselves as unfulfilled or nullified agents without individual identity.
• Mass Movements collapse when the post-modernist intellegencia on the fringes take over.

Dunning Kruger Effect

I most often hear the Dunning Kruger effect as the misquoted aphorism "Psychologist say that people think they are much smarter than they really are - they don't know what they don't know." This is not a decent statement of the phenomena and is strictly incorrect.

What Dunning and Kruger did discover is that individual scores of IQ or WORDSUM in a population form a distribution across the population studied and that self-assessment off IQ was over exaggerated by the individuals with 'below average' or bottom two quartiles of the distribution. On the other hand, individuals with 'above average' or upper two quartiles of the population underestimate their measured IQ. The phenomena described by Dunning and Kruger can be assessed for any group.

The second finding that is much less well known is that each quartile knows with uncanny precision that the quartile below them is less smart and the quartile above them is more smart. The least intelligent can see that almost everyone is smarter. The most intelligent individuals can determine that most everyone is less smart. Although this is a specific case of innumeracy combined with stupidity, that is a surface reading.

My conjecture after working with the public is that no worse population exists than the 2nd quartile. Every bad thing on earth finds fruit in the 2nd quartile. I will illustrate with an example. I sell data circuits to medium and large businesses. In network terms I am designing and selling Wide Area Networks (WANs) to people with multiple Local Area Networks (LANs). There are two main things on the LAN - data from the interwebs and voice (over Internet Protocol or VoIP). Here is what happened.

An IT vendor named Barry (almost his real name) sold his services to a three city WAN I was providing. For each LAN there was a computer network and a high end telephone system. Barry was installing both at each of the three sites. On the hour following the completion of the circuit - exactly one hour after I had completed my job - Barry called to explain a host of changes he needed to make to my WAN for his LAN to operate properly. Where were these questions before and during the turn up of the circuit? They were trapped in Barry's 2nd quartile skull.

An Unrelated Tabernacle

It turns out that Barry works for his mother who had sold his services to my customer because they all went to the Holiness Tabernacle of Lord Jesus with Signs Following. Everyone we interacted with from this congregation was in the Bottom Quartile except Barry who was in the 2nd Quartile. Barry is the smartest man in the church. Barry is a stupid man in the land of the awesomely stupid. Not only does he not know what he does not know - he has constant feedback from the Bottom Quartile that his self assessment of greater super powers is the least good thing imaginable.

Long story short, Barry called me up everyday for three weeks to attempt yet another explaination of his grand plan. It was intricate and fascinating. I have installed over one hundred circuits and Barry was in a new section - an unexplored territory - of teh stupid. He was asking for configurations that only existed in his fevered mind. No one did it like Barry and Barry did things like no one else. What this means in evolutionary terms is that Barry was jumping into the gaping mouth of a shark he was trying to jump.

Was I short with Barry? Yes I was. I had several conference calls with Barry and the service provider's technical experts. None of us could determine how all of this wasted activity would culminate in the interval between the start of this fool's errand and the last phone call Larry would make before he gave up and admitted defeat. All of us could smell his fear and clearly see his flame-out but we could not hurry him along. Barry had to fuck up at his own leisurely pace. At some point last week Barry stopped calling and threw in the towel.

Then Mama Grizzly took over and wrote a poison pen letter to my boss decrying my malfeasance (I was mean to Barry) because I asked so many questions and did not force smart and competant people to blow up Barry's customer. We were unconvincingly charged with ruining his abject and shabby 'plan' which had unfolded like demon origami before the assembled panel of judges. We had kicked Barry off the island and he knew it. At some point in the process Barry met several of us in the upper quadrant and he found out how his guesses about what to do were not right - his guesses were not even wrong. Barry was fooled by randomness. His own randomness.

Now the Tea Party connection. The mass movement of the stupid and the left behind has pushed Grandma and her red, white and blue Halloween costume onto the TV sets of the proletariat. Like The National Enquirer and the Weekly World News of the old media, these lumps of clay were now glued to the Confirmation Bias Engine. They only news they watch is  Fox News. The only books they 'read' are authored by Glenn Beck, Bill O. and Sister Sarah. The whole of the message bombarding them daily, hourly and by the minute:

"You, dear viewer, are not in the bottom two quartiles of intelligence. Your WORDSUM score is decent. You are not eat up with teh stupid. Fear the hoity-toity and demand notice as the most exceptionalism dimwits. From someone who is smarter than you. God and Jefferson Davis are a good place to start. Oh, and misread The Holy Federalist Papers and the Blessed Constitution."

But that is how mass movements start. The revolution has started and the stupid are the cannon fodder. Same old same old. Except now with added internet - the grave yard of teh stupid.

The Botany of Desire

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan takes a plants eye view of the domestication of humans. Apples, Potatoes, Marijuana and Tulips are showcased as uncommonly persuesive examples of our enslavement. Is it any wonder that Austin and Berkeley were centers of emergent computer technology?

Letter to Fallows: Eric Hoffer Explains the Tea Party

to James Fallows from Kirk
June 21

I am constantly battling my cognitive bias and motivated reasoning regarding the Tea Party. I am reading Eric Hoffer and Clay Shirkey simultaneously - here is my soft conjecture building on my guess that this is mostly about watching Grandma on the TV with her star spangled Patriots Halloween costume. From Hoffer, mass movements start when conditions start to improve - when change is 'around the corner'. This is orthogonal to stated motives of the movement which comprises members intent on preserving gains and preventing loss. The middle class has cradle to grave health coverage which was unimaginable prior to the Great Society - the source of most real gains in income when benefits are included. From Shirkey, these folks have only narrow access to emergent cognitive surplus - the many to one model of MSM/LSM. As far as I can tell this movement propels itself with the images on the TV while the only available feedback mechanism is, well, the TV. Buy Goldline or not to modulate Glenn Beck (as iof), participate in the HuffPo v RedState 'primate do-do flinging' behavior in the comments, or show off your tricorn at a rally. All the while sinking into depression over change.

kirk 'oppose war but stand by our President' holden

I am one (1) Bacon Unit from The Atlantic Monthly!!!!

I Exist

It is true, and I think it cannot be disputed, that these are the most perfect ensemble of words in the English language:

"Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there -- sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up -- nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres -- perfectly still -- just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line -- that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away -- trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks -- rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!*
   A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn't be nothing to hear nor nothing to see -- just solid lonesomeness. Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd see the axe flash and come down -- you don't hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk! -- it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn't run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing -- heard them plain; but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:
   "No; spirits wouldn't say, 'Dern the dern fog.'"
   Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things -- we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us -- the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on clothes, nohow.
   Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark -- which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two -- on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened;
I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.
   Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

   After midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or three hours the shores was black -- no more sparks in the cabin windows. These sparks was our clock -- the first one that showed again meant morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away" Chapter 19, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, SLC

Before Nietzsche, before Sartre there was Twain. Besides the surface level perfection of the words on the page, before the Mississippi comes to life in our minds, apart from the 'thing in itself' of the raft - there exists the most honest narrator in writing. Aritstotle's pure virtue on display here transcends a life lived well to a life lived to the fullest. To become the river - every river ever imagined in the mind of human kind - is to be and to become. Don't look for the moral, there is none. Don't look for deeper meaning, you will not see it. Become Huck.

To live life fully in every present moment strung together with other perfect moments is to exist fully as a member of a race that has few honest moments. I yearn to find my Huck and to be. I become.

*many English professor automatically fail students for plagiarism from the correct use of the semicolon. Go ahead, make my day and write a sentence a fraction as long. Take your time.

The Persistent Delusion of Honesty and Will

the last honest man

I spend four months trying to decide if I will buy the Red Ferrari or the Beige Volvo SUV for the family wagon. I have the money for either car but I must pick based on rational support for the best vehicle argument. I make a list of pros and cons and research reliability, dependability and balls out fun for each ride. Finally my old car dies on the highway and I must choose. I go with the Volvo.

The next day I am driving the family wagon home and it occurs to me that I made the exact right choice. The utilitarian benefit of a seat belt for each member of the family versus two cramped bucket seats is obvious now. The ground clearance will allow me to drive down bumpy roads. There are so many reasons that I correctly picked the Volvo that I am not even sure how the choice was so hard. Why did I ever seriously consider the Ferrari?

Picture Unrelated to an SUV

A month later I read a story about a rich millionaire playboy dying at the wheel of my Red Ferrari. What a fool he was for even considering that middle age crazy death trap. I don't reflect on my difficult decision - I am now convinced that I never considered a sports car at all. What is the evolutionary reason for this behavior? Why is it so easily and popular for everyone to delude themselves in such a way? We don't really know all the answers but from the discipline of Evolutionary Psychology we can suggest plausible causes and conditions.

I may see, hear and smell most of what happens around me. If I was in an isolation tank and one after another the various smells of the day were pumped in to my tank, I could easily identify frying bacon, rotting fruit and a dirty diaper. I could hear conversations that were loud enough for me to hear when I was not so isolated but that I had ignored. If the day was slowed down for me inside the tank I would find that outside the tank I generally ignored 90% of the stimulus 'available' in real time outside the tank. I do not allow most of the stimulus thrown at me during an average day to rise to the level of reflective cognition. I don't think about the things I don't think about. In short, I live a life of constant and repeated self-delusion. I feel free and in charge - I feel like I must have been using all that input to make good choices.

Robert Trivers laid the ground work for reciprocal altruism with his groundbreaking "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" (1971). Many evolutionary psychologist consider the impact of Triver's work the equal of E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology. He may be the most worthy person you have never heard of. In order to pull off the chore of living we don't allow ourselves to know ourselves. Consider the will to act of volition. certainly we have a handle on our behavior - I am not an uncouth yokel with seriously bad manners.


The most deluded of us consider free will to work this way. A fly lands on my nose. I know what flies are and how flies behave and I do not want the shit on a fly's legs on my nose. I prepare for the swat and as the fly departs I attempt to swat it away. I most likely took the input, made the decision to swat and then swatted the fly. The fact is - you did nothing of the sort. When test subjects are monitored for the timing of these events

1. an input - fly lands
2. a cognitive event rising to consciousness (really? how can I be sure?)
3. a decision to swat (really? when does a batter decide to swing at a pitch? really?)
4. a swat

If you still believe that step 3 happens as an intercession between sensation, perception and conscious behavior you are not right - you are not even wrong. There is no step three; never was, never will be. In lab experiments, the impulse that fires motor neurons in your arm and shoulder comes 100-200 milliseconds (100 thousandths of a second is a tenth of a second) before people hooked to electrodes actually 'make a subjective report' that they intended to swat. The swat is unbidden by conscious awareness that I already swatted at the fly before I 'knew' I was going to swat.

Plato's Playboy Mansion Groto

In fact, awareness of having just completed an act that seems like it should be volitional when it manifestly is not corrodes my faith in free will or conscious behavior. This feeling is so easily corroded by the testimony of science that I must begin to reassess what it means to be human - what it means to have sentience for what would sentience mean if it does not give me volition. Our minds have trapped us in the persistant delusion that we are not in straight-jackets. Almost all human behavior is determined by operant conditioning. Unless you are doing your own operant conditioning through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - and you should be - you are a meat puppet in the truest sense.

Not A Greek Philosopher

Plato's Cave is one of the first written accounts of what consciousness might actually look like. We are the prisoners in a cave, chained to a wall and forever forced to watch the shadows on the wall of the cave in front of us. Behind us our betters hold up cut-outs or shapes that cast the shadows on the wall. These shadows are mere pale reflections of objects which are themselves mere representations. This is the only reality available to us in our cave. If let free into the light outside the cave we would be unable to cope with 'reality' - the new kind of reality we have never seen.

What I am suggesting is that we are prisoners to the persistant delusion of continuous availablity of voalition. Our most precious self-delusion is that we have the kind of freedom the people in the cave do not. Where is the kind of free will we can use - apart from this shabby, cheap contrivance we have now?

The short answer is to read Dan Dennett. My compressed version is summed up in the image below. Free yourself from the cave by understanding how the logistics map pinpoints rare instances of indeterminacy in a overwhelmingly deterministic universe.

Kirk Vita - short version

Kirk has an Electrical Engineering degree (BSEE UT class of '79) and is the proud father of three terrific young men. I designed several microprocessors and built an internet neuron for the Rough Beast of the Technium for 30 years. I enjoy reading, swimming, bicycling and running. My turn on's are pretty standard. My turn-offs are people who think that Kuhn and Popper completely disagree with each other and insincere people that are, like completely dishonest about their resentments and hang-ups. When I write blog posts I like to imagine that everyone is reading them naked in a public place.

Kirk Vita - long version

Kirk is a native Austinite who does not like to speak in the third person. I only left Austin for a short time to learn what Midland had to offer. I graduated from UT in 1979 with a BSEE and went to work at Motorola Semiconductor because they had the good sense to move to Austin and hire mostly Longhorns and Aggies. Oh, and some PhD's from Stanford that invented the 68000 instruction set architecture.

TL;DR

I have three wonderful sons that are now fine young adults. I built an awesome front porch for our house in southwest Austin that is very likely the happiest place in the universe (11 dimensions of super-string quantum happiness).

My first chip was the 68881, the floating point coprocessor the the 68020. We were almost finished with the design and had first silicon when the Apple Macintosh program launched with the 68000. So I had some job security. I was part of the teams that built the 68030, an improved version of the 68020 with architectural modifications from Hewlitt Packard and Apollo engineering workstations. I was building the chips that would run future engineering workstations without those more advanced workstations. We were building the personal computers, engineering workstations and networking infrastructure that would build the next generation yadda yadda yadda. Pretty standard stuff that drove the Technium.

The 68040 was the last Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) engine before the Stanford MIPS and IBM Power Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) engines. I worked on the Power PC (PPC) 604 from scratch and then started my own design center so that I could do whatever I want whenever I wanted to do it.

What I did was to build an Internet neuron or networking engine, the 8340. The processor we used for the cell nucleus was the e300, a completely re-engineered PPC603e, or Wart as we called it. We could map this bad boy into any technology and we used it to debug the factory while achieving several speed records. We had the fasted general purpose processor - 300MHz - for just long enough to make a headline in the press (d'oh, the EE Times not the New York Times).

We bolted the system interface unit (PPC107 aka Grackle aka the connectivity engine) to the bottom of the processor which became the engine and drive train for high end embedded (not visible to most humans) applications like Cisco routers and switches. By this time I had a large design team so I convinced several unsuspecting Vice Presidents that I was going to build the next generation compute engine that met their heterogeneous and contradictory requirements. I told the team to build whatever they wanted and I would shield them from the harsh light of reality - I had fibbed to everyone. But there are like 200 different versions of the 8300 platform (called a System on a Chip or SoC). I don't even know what an 8306 is but I know exactly what it looks like. It is a 603e bolted to a 107

We built elf, the cute little CPU architecture that devoured everything in its path. We could re-design this little gem and have it in silicon before the other chip architects could get back from lunch and log in to their email and read my cover story about how my little chip would never compete with their monster machine. Then we replaced their little hobby project in every embedded socket on earth. That's how I roll. The 8572 [right] is an internet neuron or computational internet protocol nexus. Your packets cannot get to your browser without going through about 10,000,000 of these at the edge of the internet - all the edges of the internet (the core of the net is fiber and mega-machines).]

No one has ever been able to figure out exactly what I am really up to so don't worry about not being able to keep up. Just ask me for an ad hoc rumination and I will talk until you walk off shaking your head. The next sentence is a lie. The previous sentence is true. I am available in three flavors, Kirk 1.0, Kirk 2.0 and Kirk 3.0. Check your email for new releases.

If you have a couple of hours I can explain what this picture means.

Letter to Fallows re: Gold Bars as Big as the Sun

Throw a Dart, Monkey Boy

On 23Jun I wrote a phantom letter to an erudite avatar and I explained some long-winded theory that went on and on and never arrived anywhere. Then I publish it in my blog and it is buried forever. Until I hit send and email it to the erudite avatar. And Paco. BOTH! Wasting Pacos time is a tear i can mend. With distant avatars that requires life points.

 On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Paco Ahlgren wrote:

When demand for a good or service increases, so does the price... Fix that hole, and let's talk. Prices only fall according to Moore's law (which is actually about processor speed, I believe), because newer, better chips obviate older ones -- thus causing prices to collapse on older chips (and computers). Falling demand, and/or excessive supply causes prices to fall in the market.

paco

=======================

On Jun 23, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Kirk Holden wrote:

 ==========================

I am a dood and well meaning, freedom loving liberal and empathetic progressive. As such I read The Spirit Level and I obsess over the Gini coefficient. But suddenly the scales have fallen from my eyes. Let's say that the 10 richest men on the planet each had a bar of gold that weighed as much as the Sun. First off, this bullion would need to orbit earth at a great distance to diminish the warping of space-time but for the sufficiently rich this would be a minor inconvenience. This would of course skew the mean of the distribution of all wealth 'to the left' or toward x=1 (currently Mr. Slim) on the number line. In other words, positions one through ten would be Carlos Slim, Bill Gates,..., LeBron James - each with almost infinite wealth. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that at some point even if each person on this list tried to spend a good portion of even their daily interest on the gold, I do not become one iota worse off. In fact, an exponential increase in present spending by these folks would actually make my life better. How?

Let's say they all wanted 1,000,000 jet skis each for Christmas. Suddenly the demand for jet skis would sky rocket. What would happen next is that the price of jet skis would plummet as the incremental cost on the 100,000,000th jet ski would be about $7.00. This is basically an argument from Moore's Law (not Gordon, Larry the jet ski manufacturer). The more of anything we manufacture, the lower the incremental cost of each unit over time. Also, unless these gazillionaires cornered the market for peanut butter and jelly I would never feel the effects of the unequal distribution of income. It's all about the denominator. In short, when I divide by zero - Chuck Norris gets to punch a liberal in the face.

=========================

I am sure there is a precise name for this phenomena but I am an engineer not an economist. There are always secondary and tertiary effects but my point is that even if my purchasing power falls over time I still have my Android, my internet connection and my DVR. And with each of these things the overall utility accrued (all the amazingly useful stuff I have in my living room) is greater than at any time in human history.

 sbop
 kirk 'our libertarian peer Megan M. might possibly agree with me' holden
======================================================
UPDATE: Tuesday

Au is the C60 Atom's little bitch

My murky point was this. The Rough Beast of the Technium controls all supply and all demand. Per Wm. Gibson, the most fantastically wealthy of this noosphere prepare the path for the emergence of each individual B3aST and emergent Rough Beast (teh Singularity of the Singularity of... The Omega Machine). The rich are not like you and I, they each have B3aST already. They can spin gold from imagination. Basing an economy on fermions and bosons certainly makes sense - there is not an alternate reality. But Au is nothing but an atomic number. Especially to the Rough Beast of the Technium. I am partial to Si and C myself.