Polyanna on Steroids

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futurism, forecasting, internet

Émile Coué taught his patients to repeat as a mantra, "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better." It is no coincidence that he is a co-discoverer of the placebo method. There is no irony in saying that many of his patients did indeed improve, because reassurance can powerfully influence our feelings and speed our healing, whether emotional or physical. Now, if only we could induce society as a whole to adopt this mantra!

Byron Reese may be the man to do it. He just needs a bigger pulpit. For the time being, his book must do: Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War. The book was published in 2013, shortly after the beginning of the second term of President Obama. The one positive thing to come out of Mr. Obama's work is his book The Audacity of Hope. By comparison with Mr. Reese's book, it seems short-sighted.

Using the past as a springboard into the future, Infinite Progress outlines the large trends that the author expects to continue into the future, and to produce ever-increasing prosperity, from which the other benefits will be derived. Thinking back over his contentions and discussions, I must agree in part. These things can happen. Whether they will or not, human nature will have a big part to play, but so will nature. The current Coronavirus pandemic and the over-reaction of the immune system of the body politic is a Black Swan to beat all black swans.

I was much enamored with the book The Black Swan, and have written about the principle a few times. However, I was seduced, as was N.N. Taleb, the author, by the Cauchy Distribution he cites as a good model for stock market activity (it isn't, but that's another story). I was seduced into thinking that black swans are part of the normal course of things; that they are extreme but otherwise unexceptional. Of course, they are not. The Europeans who were astonished to see black swans in Australia didn't initially realize that the Australian Swan is a different species, Cygnus atratus, than the mute swan, Cygnus olor. I also considered floods and the seeming over-abundance of 1,000-year floods in some areas. However, on closer examination, the extreme floods are produced by a different climatic mechanism than the more ordinary seasonal floods of the five-to-hundred-year variety. They are part of a different population, a different species of storm, if you'll forgive me the use of a biological term.

As dominant as the present pandemic seems to be, the trends Byron Reese outlines may be delayed, but possibly not by very much. I like his analyses, and I hope he is right. But allow me to comment on the five trends, not as a skeptic, but for a cautionary purpose.

• Ignorance – To summarize a story from a century-old Christian tract: A believer was witnessing to a friend who owned a soap factory. The friend was skeptical. They came across a dirty boy playing in a mud puddle. The believer asked, "Why is this boy dirty? Your soap factory is nearby!" The friend said, "Soap is only helpful if you use it." The believer replied, "So is the Gospel." Then, from a piece of calligraphy on my bedroom wall: "Wisdom is knowing what to do / Knowledge is knowing how to do it / Success is doing it". Near-infinite knowledge on more subjects than any person will ever even know exist (Wikipedia has 6+ million articles in English and many more in 300+ other languages; Google indexes 30 trillion web pages). It isn't hard to find out a lot about anything. But I have a maxim and a corollary that are worth a book of their own: "Those who will learn from others have fewer scars. Most people have too many scars."
  
• Disease – Most doctors begin their careers full of optimism and altruism. Far too many succumb to a profit motive and end up using "treatments" that maximize cash flow rather than minimizing suffering. Most drug and medical equipment companies were begun similarly, and followed a similar, cynical path. Perhaps we must adopt an attitude of "I pay only for success, not for 'trying'." By the way, it is stated on page 90 (in the eBook), "Even smallpox has been sequenced and is available for download." One insane person can bring it back; millennials and younger are not vaccinated… But to the point, let's make sure cures are profitable and infinitesimal "improvements" are not.
• Poverty – Jesus said, "The poor you will always have with you." He knew human nature. People differ dramatically in ability, and some just roll nothing but Snake Eyes. However, as prosperity spreads, as Reagan's Trickle-down Theory works its magic (don't scoff, it led to the biggest postwar boom ever, including the recent one from 2/2017-2/2020), "poverty" will be defined as having a smaller TV, and perhaps only one thereof (rather than not having a house in which to put one); having only one "good suit" (rather than having only rags); and so forth. America's poor are better off than all but the richest Africans. The other question to ask is, can Earth sustain that level of prosperity for all? Is our planet big enough? This is not sufficiently addressed in the book. A big part of the book's plan is offloading all dehumanizing tasks to machines. Are we ennobled by idleness? Because there may not be enough "humanizing" tasks to go around.
• Hunger – The author seems to have assimilated without question a statement by Colin Clark in 1967, that the minimum space necessary to feed a person was 27 square kilometers. I beg your pardon?? He must have misread Clark. The land surface area of Earth is about 148 million sq km, and the arable (farmable) area is 31 million. At 27 per, that could only feed a little over one million of us. Arable surface per person is presently just over one acre. I looked up Colin Clark's writings. His estimate of maximum population ranged from 28 billion to about twice that (…for American standard of living, and 148 billion at a Japanese standard of living), but he over-measured the arable surface, so as well as I can determine, he considered the land needed per person at about 270 square meters (Japanese standard) or 680 sq m (American standard). As the author tells us, most hunger is structural, meaning people can't afford food or can't travel to where it is affordable, because the Earth still has a food surplus. I'll comment later on population growth. The author believes we'll always find away to increase yields.
• War – The trends and discussion boil down to this: Make war economically unaffordable, and most warfare will end. More trade, more co-industry and so forth. Of course, there is still fanaticism we must deal with, and the lesson of the 9/11 disaster and the ensuing 19 years is that the existence of "The Great Satan" (i.e., the USA) is sufficient reason for ongoing warfare between Islam and the West. (Note, I consider the term "radical Islam" to be a redundancy). Ideology will always trump prosperity.

Will there come a time of plenty and peace? As a Christian, knowing human nature from decades of counseling unhappy people, and believing the Bible, I see peace only in the kingdom of God. But of course this book has no relation to anything Biblical. The author is a historian, not a theologian. So let's suppose his dream largely comes true. Not as all problems being solved, but the five big ones he identifies being largely mitigated. Will the 24^th Century be a Star Trek century of peace and plenty? A lot depends on how rapidly human population approaches the "Japanese standard of living" threshold of 148 billion. For it is sure to do so.

The global rate of population growth is 1.1%/yr. That's lower than it was when I was a child, by about half. Will it go lower? First let's look at what results if it doesn't:

• near-Today (3/2020): 7.8B
• Year 2100: 18.7B
• Year 2200: 56B
• Year 2300: 167B – This is close to the year the Enterprise would be launched in Star Trek.

Oops! We've already passed 148B. Will farming methods have improved enough that we can feed one-sixth of a trillion people? Probably. But there won't be a chicken in every pot, that's for sure. Not even a vat-grown pseudo-chicken. So here is another maxim of mine:

Just because Malthusian predictions have been shown to be wrong several times, doesn't mean that will happen forever.

OK, Let's cut the rate of population growth in half, or a bit better, to 0.5%/yr. Then:

• Year 2100: 11.6B – Better…
• Year 2200: 19.1B
• Year 2300: 31.5B
• Year 2400: 52B – About where the table above was in 2200.

And so it goes. Hundreds of years may seem like a long time, but sooner or later the permanent mantra of all living things, "Reproduce or else!" must come to an end or we'll just eat the whole planet. Isaac Asimov once showed that, if 10% of all substances on the surface of the earth could be converted to food, Earth would still be exhausted, at a 0.5% growth rate, in a couple of thousand years, and if we have gone to the stars by then, all possible planets in this galaxy will be comprised or people and people's food from pole to pole, in another 11,000 years.

And all that is not even a black swan. The sixth item that needs to be tackled is the human drive to reproduce, or everything else is temporary. Thus, I must conclude, even though the book's title is Infinite Progress, we must content ourselves with "Really immense progress" followed by some very well-thought-out Plan B when that isn't enough.

Does that mean I deny the author's reasoning? Not at all. I hope he is at least partially right. But there are so many ways to go wrong, and so few ways for things to go right, that it will be an uphill slog. I like the optimism. That alone makes it worth reading and thinking about.

Stats for Blogger - New Look

kw: blogs, blogging, statistics, analytics

I leave my Blogger tab at the Stats section, so when I start the browser that is the first thing I see. A few weeks ago Google announced it was upgrading Blogger. I had the chance to try it out, and I saw that in a few months nearly everyone will be transitioned anyway. I generally like it. It operates more like a mobile app, and I can live with that. As to the statistics, however, I wasn't so pleased.

The nice four-pane Overview is gone. One may gather them piecemeal, and more items are available than before. However, I liked the hour-by-hour detail in the Weekly view of activity. Now it is daily, unless you look only at the past 24 hours.

I primarily look at total volume and the worldwide distribution, particularly when I'm commenting my amusement with spider scanning from Russia or Asia. As it happens, today there was a new spike in the weekly chart that mostly occurred yesterday. Here are the charts for the past week and month:

For reference, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, for the past few years my daily Views were between 30 and 50, except when a spidering operation was hitting the blog 100 times or more daily. The bump after June 8 is likely to be another round of spidering. The Countries charts (7 days and then 30) give me a clue a clue or two:

Not many people even know where Turkmenistan is. The 7 day chart shows it clearly; it is the third country to the northwest of India. That small country was the source of some earlier spidering, and it appears to be the source of the "bump" in views over the past few days. 

Interestingly, another section of the Stats usually shows that Chrome is most frequently used, but during the past week and the past day, it has been MSIE, which is how Internet Explorer is reported by Blogger Stats. 

There is an option to see even more using Google Analytics, which I haven't delved into. Perhaps there I can see or build a chart showing hourly views over a week or longer, but that a project for another day.

Unreasonable and Beneficial

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, motivation, creativity, nonconformists

Do you know the old song "High Hopes"? Part of it says,

Just what makes that little old ant

Think he'll move that rubber tree plant.

Anyone knows an ant, can't

Move a rubber tree plant!

But he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes;

He's got high apple pie, in the sky hopes.

So any time you're gettin' low,

'stead of lettin' go

Just remember that ant:

Oops! There goes another rubber tree –

Oops! There goes another rubber tree –

Oops! There goes another rubber tree plant!

Then there was Harlan D. Sanders…you know, Colonel Sanders. I am not sure how he lived to age 65; by then he had failed in business a number of times, and in the legends that swirl around his name the range is from seven to more than 1,000. One might think he'd get discouraged, but he was too scrappy to keep an ordinary job; he had to be self-employed. When the timing was right, his fried chicken business finally made him wealthy. Apparently his "business failures" had kept body and soul together until then.

In Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, by Adam Grant, we read of a number of people who didn't settle for the status quo. They didn't conform. That's all it takes to be a non-conformist. The thing is, there are a lot more non-conformists than there are successful non-conformists. But, really, there are a lot more musicians than there are successful musicians. Are you a non-conformist, but feeling dragged down? The book may have some useful ideas for you.

The book's focus is people who caused good things to happen, who were Originals. George Bernard Shaw put it this way:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Thus, each chapter presents and a principle or maxim that an Original must deal with, and shows how someone did so. We learn quite early that it is risky to go against the grain (or against the tide). The first chapter, "Creative Destruction" (headed by the Shaw quote above) tackles that notion. The author highlights the origin of the online eyeglasses industry by four young men who started Warby Parker, in the face of enormous, "Nobody will want that!" -style criticism. I've used Warby Parker. I heard of them long before I tried them out. They're actually losing the marketing edge to some even less reasonable competitors, but they're the big dog in that arena. Adam Grant had passed up the chance to invest in WP in 2009, "…the worst financial decision I've ever made…", he tells us.

As much as we might idealize those who "speak truth to power," we recognize that most of those who do so get effectively squashed. In Chapter 3, "Out on a Limb", we find that we need to build credibility and status to be heard by the powers that be, assuming that is relevant. In the CIA of thirty years ago, Carmen Medina saw the need for faster communications in all directions within "the Company". She thought electronic communications—which weren't all that new—could help. After persistently speaking up she was "sent to Siberia" within the agency, and lucky she wasn't fired outright. By building credibility and status from her "Siberian" post, several years later she was able to co-create Intellipedia. Now it is indispensable. 

That reminds me of Martin Luther. He was a nobody, a monk in Wittenberg, a rather nowhere place 80 km southwest of Berlin. The changing political climate (and newly invented printing press) set the stage for his "95 Theses" to "go viral". A generation earlier, he'd have soon wound up in prison or the grave. And he soon gained political protection from anti-clerical German princes, or he'd be forgotten today and any Protestant Reformation would have started decades later, if at all.

To quote Shaw again, a quote R.F. Kennedy used:

"You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' "

I count it a character flaw of mine that it seems I always fail at "speaking truth to power", and quail in the face of opposing authority. Yet somehow I build a career on doing things I'd been told not to do by supervisors whom I was able to hoodwink long enough that they saw I was making clients happier, and "overlooked" my insubordination. But it took dying (and being resuscitated) on the operating table to give me the gumption to take a stand and stick to it when I thought it was warranted, which capped my career with significant success.

Few of us are in such a position that being a non-conformist will really get us anywhere. But look around. Nearly everything that makes this old world livable started with an idea, but even more, with a person who went against the tide to make the idea a reality. As Henry Ford said, "In 1890 people just wanted a better horse." Ford was not the first to produce a working and practical automobile (that was probably Carl Benz). He was one of a host of dreamers (including Olds, Nash, the Studebaker brothers, Cadillac, and DeLorean) who shaped the industry. The most powerful force is an idea.

I could say that I suggest this as a book to be read by any entrepreneur, (or wannabe). Maybe. Or maybe it's best to let folks with a gleam in their eye dive in and duke it out in the public arena. A key characteristic of Originals is that they are, well, Original! I think they ought to read it anyway.

There is a quirk in the eBook I read. At the bottom of nearly half the screens (virtual pages) I find the first syllable or two of a word, often in the middle of a line that ends prematurely. There is no hyphen. The next screen begins with the rest of the word. I don't find this in any of the other eBooks I have read, so far.

Roots of Western Culture

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, collections, medieval literature, translations

Pity poor Peter Abelard! The primary logician of his day, famous as a theologian and philosopher, he is hardly known today, nine centuries later. That in itself is no surprise, but among those who might have heard his name, it was in combination: "Heloise and Abelard". The love letters between him and his paramour are more famous than any of his "professional" writings. Much more.

One of Heloise's letters has been collected, in translation from old French, in the omnibus volume The Portable Medieval Reader, and reads in part:

Heaven knows! in all my love it was you, and you only I sought for. I looked for no dowry, no alliances of marriage. I was even insensible to my own pleasures; nor had I a will to gratify. All was absorbed in you.

Pretty steamy stuff for the early 1100's. The full letter is five pages of small type. It is followed by a seven-page semi-biography of Abelard written by Peter the Venerable, the abbot at Cluny where Abelard was cared for in his declining years. Twelve pages out of 687 may seem a small enough amount to devote to one philosopher, but in this Penguin volume, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (both editors translated some of the items) and published in 1949 (I have the 1981 paperback reprint), there is a lot of ground to cover: representative writings from 1050-1500 AD. The editors selected 150 items to survey the 450 years so allocated. All the items are, of course, European.

I decided from the outset to at least categorize the articles. Rather than struggle with an HTML table, here are the results from a spreadsheet:

As you might expect, in the interlocking cultures dominated by the Holy Roman Empire, the largest single category is Religion and Theology. Religion of the Middle Ages is quite foreign to the modern mind, even among Roman Catholics, who are its direct descendants. For the hierarchy of the Church, it was intensely political. The political order of the Roman Church today pales by comparison. For the laity, it was a strange combination of nanny-state and not-so-benign neglect, in which failure to attend Confession and Mass was a punishable offense.

But to me the historical documents hold the most interest, and I suppose I could have made History a secondary category for them all. I was so taken with excerpts from the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor that I wrote of it separately. Education beyond learning to read and add was a serious matter in the 1100's.

Poetry also occupied the literate people of the time, but I confess that none of the translations in this volume do much justice to the originals. It's hard to take a tightly-crafted poem and translate it well; one must sacrifice either the sense or the rhythm and rhyme.

It is no surprise that only three articles explicitly describe science. Prior to Roger Bacon in the 1200's, science cannot be fairly said to exist. It took nearly 400 more years for Galileo to come along and make science a discipline of disciplines. Of course, Tycho, Kepler and Copernicus were scientists, but "science" wasn't a "thing" yet.

Rather than drag on and on, I'll leave it to you, should the matter interest you, to locate a copy of this volume, no doubt quite as bedraggled as mine is; or perhaps someone else has produced a newer volume of equal value and scope. This book given to me by a friend, and sat by my bedside for three years while I went through the articles, one every few days. It isn't something one can settle into an armchair and read for hours. Having finished reading it, I find it worth keeping on hand for reference.