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The Pendulum Swings

Best Entries, Culture / /

I’ve often commented that human beings don’t so much solve problems as they trade one set problems for another (in the hope that the new set of problems are more favorable than the old). Yet that process doesn’t always follow a linear trajectory. Initial reactions to a problem often cause problems of their own. Reactions to those problems often take the form of an over-correction. And so it continues, like the swinging of a pendulum, back and forth, until it reaches it’s final equilibrium.

This is, of course, nothing new. Hegel’s philosophy of argument works in exactly that way. You start with a thesis, some sort of claim that becomes generally accepted. Then comes the antithesis, as people begin to find holes in the original thesis and develop an alternative. For a time, the thesis and antithesis vie to establish dominance, but neither really wins. In the end, a synthesis comprised of the best characteristics of the thesis and antithesis emerges.

Naturally, it’s rarely so cut and dry, and the process continues as the synthesis eventually takes on the role of the thesis, with new antitheses arising to challenge it. It works like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth until it reaches a stable position (a new synthesis). There are some interesting characteristics of pendulums that are also worth noting in this context. Steven Den Beste once described the two stable states of the pendulum: one in which the weight hangs directly below the hinge, and one in which the weight is balanced directly above the hinge.

On the left, the weight hangs directly below the hinge. On the right, it’s balanced directly above it. Both states are stable. But if you slightly perturb the weight, they don’t react the same way. When the left weight is moved off to the side, the force of gravity tries to center it again. In practice, if the hinge has a good bearing, the system then will oscillate around the base state and eventually stop back where it started. But if the right weight is perturbed, then gravity pulls the weight away and the right system will fail and convert to the left one.

The left state is robust. The right state is fragile. The left state responds to challenges by trying to maintain itself; the right state responds to challenges by shattering.

Not all systems are robust, but it’s worth noting that even robust systems are not immune to perturbation. The point isn’t that they can’t fail, it’s that when they do fail, they fail gracefully. Den Beste applies the concept to all sorts of things, including governments and economic systems, and I think the analogy is apt. In the coming months and years, we’re going to see a lot of responses to the tragedy of hurricane Katrina. Katrina represents a massive perturbation; it’s set the pendulum swinging, and it’ll be a while before it reaches it’s resting place. There will be many new policies that will result. Some of them will be good, some will be bad, and some will set new cycles into action. Disaster preparedness will become more prevalent as time goes on, and the plans will get better too. But not all at once, because we don’t so much solve problems as trade one set of disadvantages for another, in the hopes that we can get that pendulum to rest in it’s stable state.

Glenn Reynolds has collected a ton of worthy places to donate for hurricane relief here. It’s also worth noting that many employers are matching donations to the Red Cross (mine is), so you might want to go that route if it’s available…

Magic Security

Arts & Letters, Best Entries, Harry Potter, Security & Intelligence / /

In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, there are a number of new security measures suggested by the Ministry of Magic (as Voldemort and his army of Death Eaters have been running amuk). Some of them are common sense but some of them are much more questionable. Since I’ve also been reading prominent muggle and security expert Bruce Schneier’s book, Beyond Fear, I thought it might be fun to analyze one of the Ministry of Magic’s security measures according to Schneier’s 5 step process.

Here is the security measure I’ve chosen to evaluate, as shown on page 42 of my edition:

Agree on security questions with close friends and family, so as to detect Death Eaters masquerading as others by use of the Polyjuice Potion.

For those not in the know, Polyjuice Potion allows the drinker to assume the appearance of someone else, presumably someone you know. Certainly a dangerous attack. The proposed solution is a “security question”, set up in advance, so that you can verify the identity of the person in question.

  • Step 1: What assets are you trying to protect? The Ministry of Magic claims that it’s solution is to the problem of impersonation by way of the Polyjuice Potion. However, this security measure essentially boils down to a form of identification, so what we’re really trying to protect is an identity. The identity is, in itself, a security measure – for example, once verified, it could allow entrance to an otherwise restricted area.
  • Step 2: What are the risks to those assets? The risk is that someone could be impersonating a friend or family member (by using the aforementioned Polyjuice Potion) in an effort to gain entrance to a restricted area or otherwise gain the trust of a certain group of people. Unfortunately, the risk does not end there as the Ministry implies in its communication – it is also quite possible that an attacker could put your friend or family member under the Imperious Curse (a spell that grants the caster control of a victim). Because both the Polyjuice Potion and the Imperious Curse can be used to foil an identity based system, any proposed solution should account for both. It isn’t known how frequent such attacks are, but it is implied that both attacks are increasing in frequency.
  • Step 3: How well does the security solution mitigate those risks? Not very well. First, it is quite possible for an attacker to figure out the security questions and answers ahead of time. They could do so through simple research, or through direct observation and reconnaissance. Since the security questions need to be set up in the first place, it’s quite possible that an attacker could impersonate someone and set up the security questions while in disguise. Indeed, even Professor Dumbledore alludes to the ease with which an attacker could subvert this system. Heck, we’re talking about attackers who are most likely witches or wizards themselves. There may be a spell of some sort that would allow them to get the answer from a victim (the Imperious Curse is one example, and I’m sure there are all sorts of truth serums or charms that could be used as well). The solution works somewhat better in the case of the Polyjuice Potion, but since we’ve concluded that the Imperious Curse also needs to be considered, and since this would provide almost no security in that case, the security question ends up being a poor solution to the identity problem.
  • Step 4: What other risks does the security solution cause? The most notable risk is that of a false positive. If the attacker successfully answers the security question, they achieve a certain level of trust. When you use identity as a security measure, you make impersonating that identity (or manipulating the person in question via the Imperious Curse) a much more valuable attack.
  • Step 5: What trade-offs does the security solution require? This solution is inexpensive and easy to implement, but also ineffective and inconvenient. It would also requires a certain amount of vigilance to implement indefinitely. After weeks of strict adherence to the security measure, I think you’d find people getting complacent. They’d skip using the security measure when they’re in a hurry, for example. When nothing bad happens, it would only reinforce the inconvenience of the practice. It’s also worth noting that this system could be used in conjunction with other security measures, but even then, it’s not all that useful.

It seems to me that this isn’t a very effective security measure, especially when you consider that the attacker is likely a witch or wizard. This is obviously also apparent to many of the characters in the book as well. As such, I’d recommend a magic countermeasure. If you need to verify someone’s identity, you should probably use a charm or spell of some sort to do so instead of the easily subverted “security question” system. It shouldn’t be difficult. In Harry Potter’s universe, it would probably amount to pointing a wand at someone and saying “Identico!” (or some other such word that is vaguely related to the words Identity or Identify) at which point you could find out who the person is and if they’re under the Imperious Curse.

Sharks, Deer, and Risk

Best Entries, Culture, Movies, Politics, Security & Intelligence / /

Here’s a question: Which animal poses the greater risk to the average person, a deer or a shark?

Most people’s initial reaction (mine included) to that question is to answer that the shark is the more dangerous animal. Statistically speaking, the average American is much more likely to be killed by deer (due to collisions with vehicles) than by a shark attack. Truly accurate statistics for deer collisions don’t exist, but estimates place the number of accidents in the hundreds of thousands. Millions of dollars worth of damage are caused by deer accidents, as are thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths, every year.

Shark attacks, on the other hand, are much less frequent. Each year, approximately 50 to 100 shark attacks are reported. “World-wide, over the past decade, there have been an average of 8 shark attack fatalities per year.”

It seems clear that deer actually pose a greater risk to the average person than sharks. So why do people think the reverse is true? There are a number of reasons, among them the fact that deer don’t intentionally cause death and destruction (not that we know of anyway) and they are also usually harmed or killed in the process, while sharks directly attack their victims in a seemingly malicious manner (though I don’t believe sharks to be malicious either).

I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier’s book, Beyond Fear, recently. It’s excellent, and at one point he draws a distinction between what security professionals refer to as “threats” and “risks.”

A threat is a potential way an attacker can attack a system. Car burglary, car theft, and carjacking are all threats … When security professionals talk abour risk, they take into consideration both the likelihood of the threat and the seriousness of a successful attack. In the U.S., car theft is a more serious risk than carjacking because it is much more likely to occur.

Everyone makes risk assessments every day, but most everyone also has different tolerances for risk. It’s essentially a subjective decision, and it turns out that most of us rely on imperfect heuristics and inductive reasoning when it comes to these sorts of decisions (because it’s not like we have the statistics handy). Most of the time, these heuristics serve us well (and it’s a good thing too), but what this really ends up meaning is that when people make a risk assessment, they’re basing their decision on a perceived risk, not the actual risk.

Schneier includes a few interesting theories about why people’s perceptions get skewed, including this:

Modern mass media, specifically movies and TV news, has degraded our sense of natural risk. We learn about risks, or we think we are learning, not by directly experiencing the world around us and by seeing what happens to others, but increasingly by getting our view of things through the distorted lens of the media. Our experience is distilled for us, and it’s a skewed sample that plays havoc with our perceptions. Kids try stunts they’ve seen performed by professional stuntmen on TV, never recognizing the precautions the pros take. The five o’clock news doesn’t truly reflect the world we live in — only a very few small and special parts of it.

Slices of life with immediate visual impact get magnified; those with no visual component, or that can’t be immediately and viscerally comprehended, get downplayed. Rarities and anomalies, like terrorism, are endlessly discussed and debated, while common risks like heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and suicide are minimized.

When I first considered the Deer/Shark dilemma, my immediate thoughts turned to film. This may be a reflection on how much movies play a part in my life, but I suspect some others would also immediately think of Bambi, with it’s cuddly cute and innocent deer, and Jaws, with it’s maniacal great white shark. Indeed, Fritz Schranck once wrote about these “rats with antlers” (as some folks refer to deer) and how “Disney’s ability to make certain animals look just too cute to kill” has deterred many people from hunting and eating deer. When you look at the deer collision statistics, what you see is that what Disney has really done is to endanger us all!

Given the above, one might be tempted to pursue some form of censorship to keep the media from degrading our ability to determine risk. However, I would argue that this is wrong. Freedom of speech is ultimately a security measure, and if we’re to consider abridging that freedom, we must also seriously consider the risks of that action. We might be able to slightly improve our risk decisionmaking with censorship, but at what cost?

Schneier himself recently wrote about this subject on his blog. In response to an article which argues that suicide bombings in Iraq shouldn’t be reported (because it scares people and it serves the terrorists’ ends). It turns out, there are a lot of reasons why the media’s focus on horrific events in Iraq cause problems, but almost any way you slice it, it’s still wrong to censor the news:

It’s wrong because the danger of not reporting terrorist attacks is greater than the risk of continuing to report them. Freedom of the press is a security measure. The only tool we have to keep government honest is public disclosure. Once we start hiding pieces of reality from the public — either through legal censorship or self-imposed “restraint” — we end up with a government that acts based on secrets. We end up with some sort of system that decides what the public should or should not know.

Like all of security, this comes down to a basic tradeoff. As I’m fond of saying, human beings don’t so much solve problems as they do trade one set of problems for another (in the hopes that the new problems are preferable the old). Risk can be difficult to determine, and the media’s sensationalism doesn’t help, but censorship isn’t a realistic solution to that problem because it introduces problems of its own (and those new problems are worse than the one we’re trying to solve in the first place). Plus, both Jaws and Bambi really are great movies!

What is a Weblog, Part II

2 Comments / Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Weblogs / /

What is a weblog? My original thoughts leaned towards thinking of blogs as a genre within the internet. Like all genres, there is a common set of conventions that define the blogging genre, but the boundaries are soft and some sites are able to blur the lines quite thoroughly. Furthermore, each individual probably has their own definition as to what constitutes a blog (again similar to genres). The very elusiveness of a definition for blog indicates that perception becomes an important part of determining whether or not something is a blog. It has become clear that there is no one answer, but if we spread the decision out to a broad number of people, each with their own independent definition of blog, we should be able to come to the conclusion that a borderline site like Slashdot is a blog because most people call it a blog.

So now that we have a (non)definition for what a blog is, just how important are blogs? Caesar at Arstechnica writes that according to a new poll, Americans are somewhat ambivalent on blogs. In particular, they don’t trust blogs.

I don’t particularly mind this, however. For the most part, blogs don’t make much of an effort to be impartial, and as I’ve written before, it is the blogger’s willingness to embrace their subjectivity that is their primary strength. Making mistakes on a blog is acceptable, so long as you learn from your mistakes. Since blogs are typically more informal, it’s easier for bloggers to acknowledge their mistakes.

Lexington Green from ChicagoBoyz recently wrote about blogging to a writer friend of his:

To paraphrase Truman Capote’s famous jibe against Jack Kerouac, blogging is not writing, it is typing. A writer who is blogging is not writing, he is blogging. A concert pianist who is sitting down at the concert grand piano in Carnegie Hall in front of a packed house is the equivalent to an author publishing a finished book. The same person sitting down at the piano in his neighborhood bar on a Saturday night and knocking out a few old standards, doing a little improvisation, and even doing some singing — that is blogging. Same instrument — words, piano — different medium. We forgive the mistakes and wrong-guesses because we value the immediacy and spontaneity. Plus, publish a book, it is fixed in stone. Write a blog post you later decide is completely wrong, it is actually good, since it gives you a good hook for a later post explaining your thoughts that led to the changed conclusion. The essence of a blog is to air things informally, to throw things out, to say “this interests me because …” From time to time a more considered and article-like post is good. But most people read blogs by skimming. If a post is too long, in my observation, it does not get much response and may not be read at all.

Of course, his definition of what a blog is could be argued (as there are some popular and thoughtful bloggers who routinely write longer, more formal essays), but it actually struck me as being an excellent general description of blogging. Note his favorable attitude towards mistakes (“it gives you a good hook for a later post” is an excellent quote, though I think you might have to be a blogger to fully understand it). In the blogosphere, it’s ok to be wrong:

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s a fact of life. It isn’t a cause for shame, it’s just reality. Just as engineers are in the business of producing successful designs which can be fabricated out of less-than-ideal components, the engineering process is designed to produce successful designs out of a team made up of engineers every one of which screws up routinely. The point of the process is not to prevent errors (because that’s impossible) but rather to try to detect them and correct them as early as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake. It’s not that you want to be sloppy; everyone should try to do a good job, but we don’t flog people for making mistakes.

The problem with the mainstream media is that they purport to be objective, as if they’re just reporting the facts. Striving for objectivity can be a very good thing, but total objectivity is impossible, and if you deny the inherent subjectivity in journalism, then something is lost.

One thing Caesar mentions is that “the sensationalism surrounding blogs has got to go. Blogs don’t solve world hunger, cure disease, save damsels in distress, or any of the other heroic things attributed to them.” I agree with this too, though I do think there is something sensational about blogs, or more generally, the internet.

Steven Den Beste once wrote about what he thought were the four most important inventions of all time:

In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with the notion that these are the most important inventions, it is undeniable that the internet provides a stairstep in communication capability, which, in turn, significantly improves the process of large-scale collaboration that is so important to human existence.

When knowledge could only spread by speech, it might take a thousand years for a good idea to cross the planet and begin to make a difference. With writing it could take a couple of centuries. With printing it could happen in fifty years.

With computer networks, it can happen in a week if not less. After I’ve posted this article to a server in San Diego, it will be read by someone on the far side of a major ocean within minutes. That’s a radical change in capability; a sufficient difference in degree to represent a difference in kind. It means that people all over the world can participate in debate about critical subjects with each other in real time.

And it appears that blogs, with their low barrier to entry and automated software processes, will play a large part in the worldwide debate. There is, of course, a ton of room for improvement, but things are progressing rapidly now and perhaps even accelerating. It is true that some blogging proponents are preaching triumphalism, but that’s part of the charm. They’re allowed to be wrong and if you look closely at what happens when someone makes such a comment, you see that for every exaggerated claim, there are 10 counters in other blogs that call bullshit. Those blogs might be on the long tail and probably won’t garner as much attention, but that’s part of the point. Blogs aren’t trustworthy, which is precisely why they’re so important.

Update 4.24.05: I forgot to link the four most important inventions article (and I changed some minor wording: I had originally referred to the four “greatest” inventions, which was not the wording Den Beste had used).

What is a Weblog?

2 Comments / Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Weblogs / /

Caesar at ArsTechnica has written a few entries recently concerning blogs which interested me. The first simply asks: What, exactly, is a blog? Once you get past the overly-general definitions (“a blog is a frequently updated webpage”), it becomes a surprisingly difficult question.

Caesar quotes Wikipedia:

A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. “Weblog” is a portmanteau of “web” and “log”. The term “blog” came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log.

Of course, as Caesar notes, the majority of internet sites could probably be described in such a way. What differentiates blogs from discussion boards, news organizations, and the like?

Reading through the resulting discussion provides some insight, but practically every definition is either too general or too specific.

Many people like to refer to Weblogs as a medium in itself. I can see the point, but I think it’s more general than that. The internet is the medium, whereas a weblog is basically a set of commonly used conventions used to communicate through that medium. Among the conventions are things like a main page with chronological posts, permalinks, archives, comments, calendars, syndication (RSS), blogging software (CMS), trackbacks, &c. One problem is that no single convention is, in itself, definitive of a weblog. It is possible to publish a weblog without syndication, comments, or a calendar. Depending on the conventions being eschewed, such blogs may be unusual, but may still be just as much a blog as any other site.

For lack of a better term, I tend to think of weblogs as a genre. This is, of course, not totally appropriate but I think it does communicate what I’m getting at. A genre is typically defined as a category of artistic expression marked by a distinctive style, form, or content. However, anyone who is familiar with genre film or literature knows that there are plenty of movies or books that are difficult to categorize. As such, specific genres such as horror, sci-fi, or comedy are actually quite inclusive. Some genres, Drama in particular, are incredibly broad and are often accompanied by the conventions of other genres (we call such pieces “cross-genre,” though I think you could argue that almost everything incorporates “Drama”). The point here is that there is often a blurry line between what constitutes one genre from another.

On the medium of the internet, there are many genres, one of which is a weblog. Other genres include commercial sites (i.e. sites that try to sell you things, Amazon.com, Ebay, &c.), reference sites (i.e. dictionaries & encyclopedias), Bulletin Board Systems and Forums, news sites, personal sites, weblogs, wikis, and probably many, many others.

Any given site is probably made up of a combination of genres and it is often difficult to pinpoint any one genre as being representative. Take, for example, Kaedrin.com. It is a personal site with some random features, a bunch of book & movie reviews, a forum, and, of course, a weblog (which is what you’re reading now). Everything is clearly delineated here at Kaedrin, but other sites blur the lines between genres on every page. Take ArsTechnica itself: Is it a news site or a blog or something else entirely? I would say that the front page is really a combination of many different things, one of which is a blog. It’s a “cross-genre” webpage, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less effective (though there is something to be said for simplicity and it is quite possible to load a page up with too much stuff, just as it’s possible for a book or movie to be too ambitious and take on too much at once) just as Alien isn’t necessarily a less effective Science Fiction film because it incorporates elements of Horror and Drama (or vice-versa).

Interestingly, much of what a weblog is can be defined as an already existing literary genre: the journal. People have kept journals and diaries all throughout history. The major difference between a weblog and a journal is that a weblog is published for all to see on the public internet (and also that weblogs can be linked together through the use of the hyperlink and the infrastructure of the internet). Historically, diaries were usually private, but there are notable exceptions which have been published in book form. Theoretically, one could take such diaries and publish them online – would they be blogs? Take, for instance, The Diary of Samuel Pepys which is currently being published daily as if it’s a weblog circa 1662 (i.e. Today’s entry is dated “Thursday 17 April 1662”). The only difference is that the author of that diary is dead and thus doesn’t interact or respond to the rest of the weblog community (though there is still interaction allowed in the form of annotations).

A few other random observations about blogs:

  • Software: Many people brought up the fact that most blogs are produced with the assistance of Weblogging Software, such as Blogger or Movable Type. From my perspective, such tools are necessary for the spread of weblogs, but shouldn’t be a part of the definition. They assist in the spread of weblogs because they automate the overly-technical details of publishing a website and make it easy for normal folks to participate. They’re also useful for automatically propagating weblog conventions like permalinks, comments, trackbacks, and archives. However, it’s possible to do all of this without the use of blogging specific software and it’s also possible to use blogging software for other purposes (for instance, Kaedrin’s very own Tandem Stories are powered by Movable Type). It’s interesting that other genres have their own software as well, particularly bulletin boards and forums. Ironically, one could use such BBS software to publish a blog (or power tandem stories), if they were so inclined. The Pepys blog mentioned above actually makes use of wiki software (though that software powers the entries, it’s mostly used to allow annotations). To me content management systems are important, but they don’t define so much as propagate the genre.
  • Personality: One mostly common theme in definitions is that weblogs are personal – they’re maintained by a person (or small group of people), not an official organization. A personality gets through. There is also the perception that a blog is less filtered than official communications. Part of the charm of weblogs is that you can be wrong (more on this later, possibly in another post). I’m actually not sure how important this is to the definition of a blog. Someone who posts nothing but links doesn’t display much of a personality, except through more subtle means (the choice of links can tell you a lot about an individual, albeit in an indirect way that could lead to much confusion).
  • Communities: Any given public weblog is part of a community, whether it wants to be or not. The boundaries of any specific weblog are usually well delineated, but since weblogs are part of the internet, which is an on-demand medium (as opposed to television or radio, which are broadcast), blogs are often seen as relative to one another. Entries and links from different blogs are aggregated, compared, correlated and published in other weblogs. Any blog which builds enough of a readership provides a way connect people who share various interests through the infrastructure of the internet.

Some time ago, Derek Powazek asked What the Hell is a Weblog? You tell me. and published all the answers. It turns out that I answered this myself (last one on that page), many years ago:

I don’t care what the hell a weblog is. It is what I say it is. Its something I update whenever I find an interesting tidbit on the web. And its fun. So there.

Heh. Interesting to note that my secondary definition there (“something I update whenever I find an interesting tidbit on the web”) has changed significantly since I contributed that definition. This is why, I suppose, I had originally supplied the primary definition (“I don’t care what the hell a weblog is. It is what I say it is.”) and to be honest, I don’t think that’s changed (though I guess you could call that definition “too general”). Blogging is whatever I want it to be. Of course, I could up and call anything a blog, but I suppose it is also required that others perceive your blog as a blog. That way, the genre still retains some shape, but is still permeable enough to allow some flexibility.

I had originally intended to make several other points in this post, but since it has grown to a rather large size, I’ll save them for other posts. Hopefully, I’ll gather the motivation to do so before next week’s scheduled entry, but there’s no guarantee…

Time Travel in Donnie Darko

6 Comments / Best Entries, Movies / /

By popular request, here is a brief analysis of time travel used in the movie Donnie Darko. As I’ve mentioned before, Donnie Darko is an enigmatic film and I’m not sure it makes total sense. At a very high level everything seems to fit, but when you start to drill down into the details things become less clear.

In the commentary track of the Directors Cut DVD, writer/director Richard Kelly attempts to clarify some of the more mystifying aspects of the film, but he still leaves a lot of wiggle room and ambiguity. He describes the time travel in the film as being driven by a “comic book logic,” which should give you an idea of just how scientifically rigorous the subject is treated in the film (i.e. not very). Time travel is essentially a deus ex machina; it drives the story, but its internal mechanics are unimportant. So this analysis isn’t really intended to be very rigorous either, just a few thoughts and attempts to clarify or at least call out some of the more confusing concepts.

Before I really get into it, I suppose I should mention that what follows contains many SPOILERS, so read on at your own risk. Another thing that might be useful is to go over other less than rigorous time travel theories that have been presented in film and literature. This list isn’t meant to be complete, but these four theories will help in dissecting Donnie Darko. Again, many SPOILERS, especially in the case of lightning (as I’m assuming most people haven’t read it).

  • The Terminator: The main timeline is set, and traveling back in time cannot change anything. Indeed, traveling back in time to change the present will sometimes cause the very thing you’re trying to avoid, as happens in The Terminator (for obvious dramatic reasons). This is among the more plausible time travel theories, as it avoids those messy paradoxes. As such, it is one of the more popular theories, used in many other stories (like 12 Monkeys and, funnily enough, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure). A more pretentious name for this is Circular Causation, but I think The Terminator gets the point across…
  • Back to the Future: There are, I suppose, many ways to interpret time travel in this movie, but in this theory, there is still only one timeline, but you can change the past (and thus the present). In this theory, it’s possible to go back in time and kill your father (before he had you), and in such a case you will “disappear.” This is also a common theory, but the presence of paradox makes it less plausible. There are probably ways to explain this theory in terms of alternate universes (multiple timelines) as well…
  • The End of Eternity: In Isaac Asimov’s novel, a group of people known as Eternals develop time travel and decided to improve upon history by introducing carefully calculated changes in the timeline. There is more to it than that, but the concept of a society using time travel to manipulate history is an important concept that is relevant to DD.
  • Lightning: In Dean Koontz’s novel, time travel is only allowed in one direction: to the future. This takes care of the “kill your father” paradox rather neatly. You can, however, change the future. There is a catch though, which is probably more for dramatic effect, but which bears importance in the Donnie Darko discussion – essentially, fate doesn’t like it when you attempt to change something in the future: “Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.” Not particularly scientific, but interesting and again, relevant to DD.

Donnie Darko sort of contains elements of all four, and since it includes the Back to the Future theory, it also sort of includes a paradox. To start, here is a diagram that will help visualize the time travel present in the film:

Donnie Darko Timeline

It’s not really to scale, but you get the point. Basically, the main timeline is displayed in the line segment AD (and it is a thicker line, as it is the timeline that is meant to be). BC (the black line) represents the tangent universe, a sort of alternate timeline, and this is where the majority of the film takes place. CB (the grey line) represents the time travel in the film. More details listed below:

  • AB – Point A is the start of the film, and the segment AB takes place before the tangent universe begins.
  • BC – Point B is the point at which an airplane engine lands on Donnie Darko’s house. It is also the point at which the tangent universe begins. It is unclear as to why or how the tangent universe begins, but in the main timeline Donnie is killed, while in the tangent universe, Donnie is sort of called out of his room by a mysterious force and thus is not killed by the engine. As the movie goes, shortly after point C, the entire universe (I assume this includes the main timeline as well) is destroyed. This implies that tangent universes must be resolved and cannot be allowed to continue. The film references a fictional book which describes the tangent universe thusly:

    If a Tangent Universe occurs, it will be highly unstable, sustaining itself for no longer than several weeks.

    Eventually it will collapse upon itself, forming a black hole within the Primary Universe capable of destroying all existence.

    This particular information is referenced in the Directors Cut, but not in the theatrical cut.

  • CB – This segment is represented by the grey line between points C and B. At point C, a jet engine falls off an aircraft and travels back in time, hitting Donnie’s house at point B. I assume that this event is what causes the tangent universe to form in the first place, which is paradoxical – how can the tangent universe exist when it is caused by itself?
  • BD – The period immediately following point B is shown in the film, but the rest of the segment is not. It is unclear whether or not the jet engine falls off the plane at point D (which parallels point C) or not. I get the impression that it doesn’t, but if it did, it might help resolve the paradox shown in CB.

Even after all this, there are still many, many, many questions to be answered. There are a few other things we need to establish first.

First, does Donnie have some sort of superpower? Donnie is obviously different from other people. The film doesn’t show any sort of explicit references to his powers, but it is sort of implied by his visits to a psychiatrist and his visions. I suppose the water trails he sees (which show the future path of a person, sometimes including himself) could be an expression of his abilities (as it allows him to see into the future). It’s clear that Donnie made a decision near the end of the movie that he was going to “fix” the universe and allow himself to be killed by the jet engine, but it’s not clear how that happens. Does Donnie actually cause that to happen, or is he just aware of it happening and going along for the ride? There is a sort of messianic theme in the movie, so I’m assuming that Donnie has some sort of power to send himself and/or the jet engine back in time and link the two universes together (and to collapse the tangent universe without destroying all of existence).

Richard Kelly, in explaining his take on the story, indicated that he wanted to communicate that there was some sort of technology at work in the tangent universe, manipulating everyone’s actions, and attempting to set things right. It is unclear what exactly this technology is, how it works, or who is using it, but his point is that someone is orchestrating events in the tangent universe so as to fix the universe (or to allow Donnie the opportunity to fix things). When he mentioned this concept, I immediately thought of Asimov’s Eternals, people who manipulated time and history for the betterment of mankind. In Donnie Darko, perhaps there exists a similar group of people who are tasked with ensuring that tangent universes are closed. Or perhaps, Donnie himself is subconsciously manipulating events to help fix things.

I also thought of Koontz’s Lighting and that infamous line “Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.” In that scenario, there isn’t really a technology at work, just fate, perhaps augmented by Donnie’s supernatural abilities. Indeed, it could be some sort of combination of these three explanations: Donnie Darko has powers which are augmented by some sort of technology and fate.

What is Frank (the demonic looking bunny), and what role does he play in the story? This is very unclear. He may be a ghost, he may be the result of Donnie’s unconscious awareness of the future, or he may be a projection from the technological puppet-masters.

There are obviously a number of other explanations. What if the timeline actually follows a linear path (i.e. the linear presentation in the movie)? In that scenario, the timeline would go from A to B to C to D, except that B and D are essentially the same point in time (perhaps the main timeline stopped while the tangent universe worked itself out). So the time travel line would occur between CD.

And of course, this doesn’t really take into account all the themes of the film. I suppose I should also note that I’ve been analyzing the Directors Cut, which references a lot more of the fictional book, The Philosophy Of Time Travel by Roberta Sparrow (a character in the film). The Directors Cut gives more information on the guiding forces in the story, and it gives a more sci-fi bend than the theatrical cut, but both cuts are sufficiently ambiguous as to allow multiple interpretations, many of which end up being pretty silly when you drill down into the details, and some don’t make much sense, but in the end that doesn’t really matter all that much because you have to figure it out for yourself…

The Stability of Three

Best Entries, Culture, Neal Stephenson, Politics / /

One of the things I’ve always respected about Neal Stephenson is his attitude (or rather, the lack thereof) regarding politics:

Politics – These I avoid for the simple reason that artists often make fools of themselves, and begin to produce bad art, when they decide to get political. A novelist needs to be able to see the world through the eyes of just about anyone, including people who have this or that set of views on religion, politics, etc. By espousing one strong political view a novelist loses the power to do this. Anyone who has convinced himself, based on reading my work, that I hold this or that political view, is probably wrong. What is much more likely is that, for a while, I managed to get inside the head of a fictional character who held that view.

Having read and enjoyed several of his books, I think this attitude has served him well. In a recent interview in Reason magazine, Stephenson makes several interesting observations. The whole thing is great, and many people are interested in his comments regarding an American technology and science, but I found one other tidbit very interesting. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t break with his attitude about politics, but it is somewhat political:

Speaking as an observer who has many friends with libertarian instincts, I would point out that terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I’m afraid might turn out to be quite stable.

I took particular note of what he describes as a “triangular system” because it’s something I’ve seen before…

One of the primary goals of the American Constitutional Convention was to devise a system that would be resistant to tyranny. The founders were clearly aware of the damage that an unrestrained government could do, so they tried to design the new system in such a way that it wouldn’t become tyrannical. Democratic institions like mandatory periodic voting and direct accountability to the people played a large part in this, but the founders also did some interesting structural work as well.

Taking their cue from the English Parliament’s relationship with the King of England, the founders decided to create a legislative branch separate from the executive. This, in turn, placed the two governing bodies in competition. However, this isn’t a very robust system. If one of the governing bodies becomes more powerful than the other, they can leverage their advantage to accrue more power, thus increasing the imbalance.

A two-way balance of power is unstable, but a three-way balance turns out to be very stable. If any one body becomes more powerful than the other two, the two usually can and will temporarily unite, and their combined power will still exceed the third. So the founders added a third governing body, an independent judiciary.

The result was a bizarre sort of stable oscillation of power between the three major branches of the federal government. Major shifts in power (such as wars) disturbed the system, but it always fell back to a preferred state of flux. This stable oscillation turns out to be one of the key elements of Chaos theory, and is referred to as a strange attractor. These “triangular systems” are particularly good at this, and there are many other examples…

Some argue that the Cold War stabilized considerably when China split from the Soviet Union. Once it became a three-way conflict, there was much less of a chance of unbalance (and as unbalance would have lead to nuclear war, this was obviously a good thing).

Steven Den Beste once noted this stabilizing power of three in the interim Iraqi constitution, where the Iraqis instituted a Presidency Council of 3 Presidents representing each of the 3 major factions in Iraq:

…those writing the Iraqi constitution also had to create a system acceptable to the three primary factions inside of Iraq. If they did not, the system would shake itself to pieces and there was a risk of Iraqi civil war.

The divisions within Iraq are very real. But this constitution takes advantage of the fact that there are three competing factions none of which really trusts the other. This constitution leverages that weakness, and makes it into a strength.

It should be interesting to see if that structure will be maintained in the new Iraqi constitution.

As for Stephenson’s speculation that a triangular system consisting of libertarians, statists, and terrorists may develop, I’m not sure. They certainly seem to feed off one another in a way that would facilitate such a system, but I’m not positive it would work out that way, nor do I think it is particularly a desirable state to be in, all the more because it could be a very stable system due to its triangular structure. In any case, I thought it was an interesting observation and well worth considering…

Elections in Iraq

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Iraq held its first national elections in over 50 years today. I don’t have much to add to what has already been said, but I will note that it doesn’t surprise me that the insurgents were quieter than expected. One of the big advantages of terrorism is the surprise factor, and on a day like today, security forces are expecting attacks and are much more likely to spot unusual activities and investigate. My guess is that attacks will intensify in the coming weeks, as the insurgents test the new government…

Lots of people are commenting on this so I’ll try to perform some of that information aggregation that blogs are known for, starting with the Iraqi Blogs, then moving on to the rest of the blogosphere…

Update: Moved all the links into the extended entry. Click below to read on…

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Elections in IraqRead More »

Stigmergic Notes

1 Comment / Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Culture, Weblogs / /

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the concepts discussed in my last post. It’s a fascinating, if a little bewildering, topic. I’m not sure I have a great handle on it, but I figured I’d share a few thoughts.

There are many systems that are incredibly flexible, yet they came into existence, grew, and self-organized without any actual planning. Such systems are often referred to as Stigmergic Systems. To a certain extent, free markets have self-organized, guided by such emergent effects as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Many organisms are able to quickly adapt to changing conditions using a technique of continuous reproduction and selection. To an extent, there are forces on the internet that are beginning to self-organize and produce useful emergent properties, blogs among them.

Such systems are difficult to observe, and it’s hard to really get a grasp on what a given system is actually indicating (or what properties are emerging). This is, in part, the way such systems are supposed to work. When many people talk about blogs, they find it hard to believe that a system composed mostly of small, irregularly updated, and downright mediocre (if not worse) blogs can have truly impressive emergent properties (I tend to model the ideal output of the blogosphere as an information resource). Believe it or not, blogging wouldn’t work without all the crap. There are a few reasons for this:

The System Design: The idea isn’t to design a perfect system. The point is that these systems aren’t planned, they’re self-organizing. What we design are systems which allow this self-organization to occur. In nature, this is accomplished through constant reproduction and selection (for example, some biological systems can be represented as a function of genes. There are hundreds of thousands of genes, with a huge and diverse number of combinations. Each combination can be judged based on some criteria, such as survival and reproduction. Nature introduces random mutations so that gene combinations vary. Efficient combinations are “selected” and passed on to the next generation through reproduction, and so on).

The important thing with respect to blogs are the tools we use. To a large extent, blogging is simply an extension of many mechanisms already available on the internet, most especially the link. Other weblog specific mechanisms like blogrolls, permanent-links, comments (with links of course) and trackbacks have added functionality to the link and made it more powerful. For a number of reasons, weblogs tend to be affected by power-law distribution, which spontaneously produces a sort of hierarchical organization. Many believe that such a distribution is inherently unfair, as many excellent blogs don’t get the attention they deserve, but while many of the larger bloggers seek to promote smaller blogs (some even providing mechanisms for promotion), I’m not sure there is any reliable way to systemically “fix” the problem without harming the system’s self-organizational abilities.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

This self-organization is one of the important things about weblogs; any attempt to get around it will end up harming you in the long run as the important thing is to find a state in which weblogs are working most efficiently. How can the weblog community be arranged to self-organize and find its best configuration? That is what the real question is, and that is what we should be trying to accomplish (emphasis mine):

…although the purpose of this example is to build an information resource, the main strategy is concerned with creating an efficient system of collaboration. The information resource emerges as an outcome if this is successful.

Failure is Important: Self-Organizing systems tend to have attractors (a preferred state of the system), such that these systems will always gravitate towards certain positions (or series of positions), no matter where they start. Surprising as it may seem, self-organization only really happens when you expose a system in a steady state to an environment that can destabilize it. By disturbing a steady state, you might cause the system to take up a more efficient position.

It’s tempting to dismiss weblogs as a fad because so many of them are crap. But that crap is actually necessary because it destabilizies the system. Bloggers often add their perspective to the weblog community in the hopes that this new information will change the way others think (i.e. they are hoping to induce change – this is roughly referred to as Stigmergy). That new information will often prompt other individuals to respond in some way or another (even if not directly responding). Essentially, change is introduced in the system and this can cause unpredictable and destabilizing effects. Sometimes this destabilization actually helps the system, sometimes (and probably more often than not) it doesn’t. Irregardless of its direct effects, the process is essential because it is helping the system become increasingly comprehensive. I touched on this in my last post among several others in which I claim that an argument achieves a higher degree of objectivity by embracing and acknowledging its own biases and agenda. It’s not that any one blog or post is particularly reliable in itself, it’s that blogs collectively are more objective and reliable than any one analyst (a journalist, for instance), despite the fact that many blogs are mediocre at best. An individual blog may fail to solve a problem, but that failure is important too when you look at the systemic level. Of course, all of this is also muddying the waters and causing the system to deteriorate to a state where it is less efficient to use. For every success story like Rathergate, there are probably 10 bizarre and absurd conspiracy theories to contend with.

This is the dilemma faced by all biological systems. The effects that cause them to become less efficient are also the effects that enable them to evolve into more efficient forms. Nature solves this problem with its evolutionary strategy of selecting for the fittest. This strategy makes sure that progress is always in a positive direction only.

So what weblogs need is a selection process that separates the good blogs from the bad. This ties in with the aforementioned power-law distribution of weblogs. Links, be they blogroll links or links to an individual post, essentially represent a sort of currency of the blogosphere and provide an essential internal feedback loop. There is a rudimentary form of this sort of thing going on, and it has proven to be very successful (as Jeremy Bowers notes, it certainly seems to do so much better than the media whose selection process appears to be simple heuristics). However, the weblog system is still young and I think there is considerable room for improvement in its selection processes. We’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg here. Syndication, aggregation, and filtering need to improve considerably. Note that all of those things are systemic improvements. None of them directly act upon the weblog community or the desired informational output of the community. They are improvements to the strategy of creating an efficient system of collaboration. A better informational output emerges as an outcome if the systemic improvements are successful.

This is truly a massive subject, and I’m only beginning to understand some of the deeper concepts, so I might end up repeating myself a bit in future posts on this subject, as I delve deeper into the underlying concepts and gain a better understanding. The funny thing is that it doesn’t seem like the subject itself is very well defined, so I’m sure lots will be changing in the future. Below are a few links to information that I found helpful in writing this post.

An Epic in Parallel Form

Best Entries, Computers & Internet, Culture, Weblogs / /

Tyler Cowen has an interesting post on the scholarly content of blogging in which he speculates as to how blogging and academic scholarship fit together. In so doing he makes some general observations about blogging:

Blogging is a fundamentally new medium, akin to an epic in serial form, but combining the functions of editor and author. Who doesn’t dream of writing an epic?

Don’t focus on the single post. Rather a good blog provides you a whole vision of what a field is about, what the interesting questions are, and how you might answer them. It is also a new window onto a mind. And by packaging intellectual content with some personality, bloggers appeal to the biological instincts of blog readers. Be as intellectual as you want, you still are programmed to find people more memorable than ideas.

It’s an interesting perspective. Many blogs are general in subject, but some of the ones that really stand out have some sort of narrative (for lack of a better term) that you can follow from post to post. As Cowen puts it, an “epic in serial form.” The suggestion that reading a single blog many times is more rewarding than reading the best posts from many different blogs is interesting. But while a single blog may give you a broad view of what a field is about, it can also be rewarding to aggregate the specific views of a wide variety of individuals, even biased and partisan individuals. As Cowen mentions, the blogosphere as a whole is the relevant unit of analysis. Even if each individual view is unimpressive on its own, that may not be the case when taken collectively. In a sense, while each individual is writing a flawed epic in serial form, they are all contributing to an epic in parallel form.

Which brings up another interesting aspect of blogs. When the blogosphere tackles a subject, it produces a diverse set of opinions and perspectives, all published independently by a network of analysts who are all doing work in parallel. The problem here is that the decentralized nature of the blogosphere makes aggregation difficult. Determining a group as large and diverse as the blogosphere’s “answer” based on all of the disparate information they have produced is incredibly difficult, especially when the majority of data represents opinions of various analysts. A deficiency in aggregation is part of where groupthink comes from, but some groups are able to harness their disparity into something productive. The many are smarter than the few, but only if the many are able to aggregate their data properly.

In theory, blogs represent a self-organizing system that has the potential to evolve and display emergent properties (a sort of human hive mind). In practice, it’s a little more difficult to say. I think it’s clear that the spontaneous appearance of collective thought, as implemented through blogs or other communication systems, is happening frequently on the internet. However, each occurrence is isolated and only represents an incremental gain in productivity. In other words, a system will sometimes self-organize in order to analyze a problem and produce an enormous amount of data which is then aggregated into a shared vision (a vision which is much more sophisticated than anything that one individual could come up with), but the structure that appears in that case will disappear as the issue dies down. The incredible increase in analytic power is not a permanent stair step, nor is it ubiquitous. Indeed, it can also be hard to recognize the signal in a great sea of noise.

Of course, such systems are constantly and spontaneously self-organizing; themselves tackling problems in parallel. Some systems will compete with others, some systems will organize around trivial issues, some systems won’t be nearly as effective as others. Because of this, it might be that we don’t even recognize when a system really transcends its perceived limitations. Of course, such systems are not limited to blogs. In fact they are quite common, and they appear in lots of different types of systems. Business markets are, in part, self-organizing, with emergent properties like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Open Source software is another example of a self-organizing system.

Interestingly enough, this subject ties in nicely with a series of posts I’ve been working on regarding the properties of Reflexive documentaries, polarized debates, computer security, and national security. One of the general ideas discussed in those posts is that an argument achieves a higher degree of objectivity by embracing and acknowledging its own biases and agenda. Ironically, in acknowledging one’s own subjectivity, one becomes more objective and reliable. This applies on an individual basis, but becomes much more powerful when it is part of an emergent system of analysis as discussed above. Blogs are excellent at this sort of thing precisely because they are made up of independent parts that make no pretense at objectivity. It’s not that any one blog or post is particularly reliable in itself, it’s that blogs collectively are more objective and reliable than any one analyst (a journalist, for instance), despite the fact that many blogs are mediocre at best. The news media represents a competing system (the journalist being the media’s equivalent of the blogger), one that is much more rigid and unyielding. The interplay between blogs and the media is fascinating, and you can see each medium evolving in response to the other (the degree to which this is occurring is naturally up for debate). You might even be able to make the argument that blogs are, themselves, emergent properties of the mainstream media.

Personally, I don’t think I have that exact sort of narrative going here, though I do believe I’ve developed certain thematic consistencies in terms of the subjects I cover here. I’m certainly no expert and I don’t post nearly often enough to establish the sort of narrative that Cowen is talking about, but I do think a reader would benefit from reading multiple posts. I try to make up for my low posting frequency by writing longer, more detailed posts, often referencing older posts on similar subjects. However, I get the feeling that if I were to break up my posts into smaller, more digestible pieces, the overall time it would take to read and produce the same material would be significantly longer. Of course, my content is rarely scholarly in nature, and my subject matter varies from week to week as well, but I found this interesting to think about nonetheless.

I think I tend to be more of an aggregator than anything else, which is interesting because I’ve never thought about what I do in those terms. It’s also somewhat challenging, as one of my weaknesses is being timely with information. Plus aggregation appears to be one of the more tricky aspects of a system such as the ones discussed above, and with respect to blogs, it is something which definitely needs some work…

Update 12.13.04: I wrote some more on the subject. I aslo made a minor edit to this entry, moving one paragraph lower down. No content has actually changed, but the new order flows better.