evolution

This isn’t the real fourth post in this series — that will come later. But I saw this passage in a section discussing the relationship under the Constitution of the federal government to the state governments, and I laughed out loud:

The chief cause of the superiority of the Federal Constitution lay in the character of the legislators who composed it. At the time when it was formed, the ruin of the Confederation [the US under the Articles of Confederation---ed.] seemed imminent, and its danger was universally known. In this extremity the people chose the men who most deserved the esteem rather than those who had gained the affections of the country. I have already observed that, distinguished as almost all the legislators of the Union were for their intelligence, they were still more so for their patriotism. They had all been nurtured at a time when the spirit of liberty was braced by a continual struggle against a powerful and dominant authority. When the contest was terminated, while the excited passions of the populace persisted, as usual, in warring against dangers which had ceased to exist, these men stopped short; they cast a calmer and more penetrating look upon their country; they perceived that a definitive revolution had been accomplished, and that the only dangers which America had now to fear were those which might result from the abuse of freedom. They had the courage to say what they believed to be true, because they were animated by a warm and sincere love of liberty; and they ventured to propose restrictions, because they were resolutely opposed to destruction.

Does this sound like any government you know?

I’m posting this out of a wish for different times and to stir Bill up, but mostly to stir Bill up.

“This” would be these: scans of documents purported to be from the FDR era and listing all of the some 2200 government agencies which were created at the time.

Can’t argue with the results then — although I think it had as much to do with the war and the resultant explosion in industry, engineering, and the necessity of education to fill those roles as it did with Franklin Roosevelt’s policy.

Bill gives the Bush — and the Wilson — legacy a bit of richly-deserved pwnag3.

You may wonder why I’m bothering with this, given that the Unabomber was caught and put away ten years ago. Evidence from Ted Kaczynski’s trial has come out, including pictures of the Montana cabin where he lived and some of the evidence from the many bombings he perpetrated. A San Francisco TV station has the pictures and stories.

Since he was identified and arrested, and as more details about Ted Kaczynski came out, I became interested in his case. For one, he’s a mathematician. Kaczynski has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard (after being admitted at 15), a Ph.D. in mathematics from Michigan, and he was an instructor at UC-Berkeley. Two of the people he injured with bombs were UC-Berkeley faculty.

A few years after he was arrested, another Harvard grad, Alston Chase, wrote this article for the Atlantic Monthly. I used to get the Atlantic (and maybe I need to start again), and I remember reading this article when it ran in the magazine.

Kaczynski ran into Prof. Henry Murray at Harvard — he of the LSD experiments — and participated in some psychological experiments based on work Murray did with the OSS, the WWII precursor to the CIA. There is no evidence that Kaczynski was given LSD at any time, but some of the experiments were pretty heavy and would probably have had a profound effect on someone who was probably very immature at the time. You can read about the experiments in the article; I’m sure that most of them as they were executed then would fly today.

The over-riding theme of Kaczynski’s young life, including his time at Harvard, was, according to Chase:

According to Perry (Wm. G. Perry Jr., director of the university’s Bureau of Study Counsel), intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, “dualistic” view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and “contingent” once. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solution and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of the college course, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry’s words, “science and mathematics still seem to offer hope.”

Nevertheless, Perry wrote, “regression into dualism” is not a happy development, for it “calls for any enemy.” Dualists in a relativistic environment then to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude “requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any `establishment” and “can call forth in its defenses hate, projection and denial of all distinctions but one,” Perry wrote. “The tendency…is toward paranoia.”

As is evident in his writings Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed’s anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) “there is no logical justification for morality.”

And:

The Murray experiment may not have been as intensely traumatic as these other experiments. And its ethics were definitely acceptable in their day. But the ethics of the day were wrong. And they framed Kaczynski’s first encounter with a reckless scientific value system that elevated the pursuit of scientific truth above human rights.

When, soon after, Kaczynski began to worry about the possibility of mind control, he was not giving vent to paranoid delusions. In view of Murray’s experiments, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in n experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally. Here is a powerful logical foundation for Kaczynski’s latterly expressed conviction that academics, in particular scientists, were thoroughly compromised servants of “the system,” employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral control of populations.

These beliefs are evident in his “Manifesto”, which ran in the New York Times:

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

Read both the article and Kaczynski’s “manifesto”. Both of them are long, I know, but worth your time. That should be enough to convince you that he wasn’t “crazy”. Anti-social? Sure. Nihilist? Yep. Amoral? Well — he killed people, didn’t he? Kaczynski wasn’t crazy.

None of this is to say that I endorse Kaczynski’s beliefs — in fact, I reject utterly his notion that technology and freedom are incompatible. He says technology must necessarily restrict freedom. I say that technology is a tool and can be used to enable or restrict freedom depending on the ethics and morals of the wielder of that technology. Read some of his other statements, however, and see if some of them aren’t in line with those of someone you may know or care about.

On the psychology of leftism:

12. Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white males from middle-class families.

And:

15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

On conservatives:

50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

On school:

115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. [As was done to Kaczynski at a very young age. -ed] It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do are in natural harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits — just the sort of things that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.

None of that is far afield from what you have heard coming from reasonable people, right? Perhaps you even share some of these beliefs. I do.

As Chase notes, that’s what makes Kaczynski truly frightening. Ted Kaczynski was led by his beliefs — many of which were reasonable and are shared by you, me, and millions of Americans — to kill and maim. That’s why we’re so ready to accept a diagnosis of mental illness. We need to accept it. Because, if he isn’t mentally ill — what does that make us?

Okay, I’ll play:

Instructions:
1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. In the search box, type your birth month and day (but not year).
3. List three important events that happened on your birthday.
4. List two interesting birthdays and one interesting death.
5. List one holiday or observance (if none, make one up).

My birthday is October 14.

Three important events:

1. 1962 - Cuban Missile Crisis begins: A U-2 flight over Cuba takes photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed.
2. 1066 — The Battle of Hastings. In England on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, the forces of William the Conqueror defeat the Saxon army and kill King Harold II of England.
3. 1947 — Chuck Yeager flies a Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound, the first man to do so in level flight.

There were many to choose from. Two birthdays and one death:

1. (Born 1890) Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kansan, World War II general, and President.
2. (Born 1927) Roger Moore, British actor, known for playing in several “James Bond” movies.
3. (Died 1944) Nazi Germany’s Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” suicide by cyanide poisoning at Hitler’s order.

The holiday: World Organ Donation Day.

[inherited from: TFK.]

It’s time to begin down the path to real numbers, but we have some things to do first. Namely, we’ll construct the natural numbers using basic concepts related to sets. We shall assume the validity of the standard (Zermelo-Frankel with choice) set theory, which is known believed to be a consistent logical system as discussed previously. To enhance readability(!), I shall paper over some subtleties. I’ll assume that you know (at least intuitively) what a set is, and that you know what the union of two sets is (the collection of all elements in both sets; it helps to recall the Venn diagrams you did in school).

We are all apparently innately familiar with the natural numbers. So, we have some idea where we are going. Any model set we hope to build that does what we intend must accomplish the following:

1. Every member of the set must have a “successor”, i.e., given an element of the set, there must be a way to construct the elements that “come after”. These elements are also members of the set.
2. There is one element that is not the successor of any other element. We shall christen this element 0. (This is just a name, it need not correspond to what we know as zero. But, the only other number we know of that would work is 1.)
3. Elements with the same successor are equal.
4. Any subset of this model set which contains our 0, and given any element the subset also contains its successor, then this subset must in fact be the whole set. You may have heard this called the “induction principle”.

It has been proven that at least one set with these properties does in fact exist, assuming the validity of set theory.

Very well, let us plod on. Throughout, we denote the empty set ∅ and the phrase “defined to be equal to” by “:=”. Then, define:

• 0 := ∅
• 1 := {∅} — “a box containing an empty box”
• 2 := {∅, {∅}} = {0, 1}
• 3 := (∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} = {0,1,2}

Let us define the successor S(a) of a element a to be a ∪ {a}. I claim that this construction satisfies the conditions outlined above (known as the Peano axioms).

All right — so how do you “add” two of these things together? Define an operation called “addition” and denoted by + as follows:

• a + 0 = a; and
• a + S(b) = S(a) + b

This is an example of a recursive definition; i.e. a definition that is applied repeatedly until one arrives at the first of these statements, and then unwound from there. For example, substitute 3 for a and 4 for b. One gets from the definition that 3 + 4 = 3 + S(3) = S(2) + S(3) = S(2) + S(S(2)) = S(S(1)) + S(S(S(1)), and so forth.

This operation we call “addition” is commutative; i.e., a + b = b + a for any choice of a or b. 0 is also what we call an “identity” element; by definition a + 0 = a for any a. Furthermore, 0 together with addition “generate” the entire set — remember, if the set contains an element, it also contains the element’s successor. (In jargon, this set with addition is a “free monoid on one generator”.)

You can define “multiplication” thusly: a * 0 = 0 and a * S(b) = (a * b) + a. This is also a recursive definition. You can test it if you like by substituting 3 for a and 2 for b. If you apply the definition correctly, you will get the expected result. (The set with multiplication is a “commutative monoid with identity 1.” The set with both operations together is a “commutative semi-ring”.)

With some effort it can be shown that these operations satisfy the expected properties of arithmetic, like the distributive law.

The mathematician Leopold Kronecker asserted that “the natural numbers are the work of God, all else is the work of man.” Here, we see that it is not required to assume their existence, although even infants have been shown to grasp the concept of “two” or “three”. They may be constructed from scratch out of a consistent logical system that does not assume their existence.

The question of whether this construction and the theory behind it expresses some fundamental concept inherent in our existence or is simply a word-and-symbol game is another matter entirely.

[References: Wikipedia, Kenneth Ross's accessible Elementary Analysis: The Theory of Calculus, which basically continues where I left off here. It had been a while since I thought about the ideas in this post! UPDATE: And thanks once again to David's fact-checking.]

For sale: One (1) German encoding machine called Enigma.

Pros: A priceless piece of scientific and mathematical history, studied by Alan Turing. German engineering.

Cons: The British cracked the code 60 years ago.

My friend shouted at me last night from the living room to tell me that Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans said that Hurricane Katrina was the “worst disaster in America’s history.” [Surely someone else saw this. I was in the other room and so did not see it myself.]

Since that is obviously ridiculous — I mean, Chimpy McHitlerburton’s weather machine wasn’t very effective. His popularity is at an all-time low and there were poor people left alive there; I mean, what kind of lame-o dictator does that? — we decided to determine the five worst crises in America’s history.

To qualify, the crisis had to pose an imminent existential threat to America. Thus, most weather phenomena — including Katrina, which wasn’t even the most destructive hurricane in American history — do not qualify.

1. The Civil War
2. The 1918 flu pandemic
3. The Great Depression
4. World War II
5. The Cuban Missile Crisis

To my mind, these are the five times in history when the idea of America as a cohesive nation came closest to being destroyed; when things could have gone either way. Cases could be made for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the War of 1812, when Washington was sacked and burned by the British.

What were the worst crises in American history?

Unbelievable.

Apparently, some University of Washington students are in a tizzy over a proposed memorial to World War II ace Col. Greg “Pappy” Boyington, who is portrayed in the classic television series Baa Baa Black Sheep. The presentation of it — along with the joke of campus “liberalism” — here is funny, but this story made me mad.

Some of the choicest quotes from the meeting minutes:

Karl Smith amended the first ‘whereas’ clause to strike the section “he was credited with destroying 26 enemy aircraft, tying the record for most aircraft destroyed by a pilot in American Uniform for which he was” and leaving the reference to the Navy Cross. Seconded. Objection. He said the resolution should commend Colonel Boyington’s service, not his killing of others.

Jill Edwards said she didn’t’ believe a member of the Marine Corps was
an example of the sort of person UW wanted to produce.

Ashley Miller commented that many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men.

Probability of someone named “Ashley Miller” being rich and white: 1.

Spoiled brats.

[inherited from: TPD.]

… Kansas was admitted to the Union as the 34th state. History says that the first “official” shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, SC, but the original War Between the States started here years earlier, in the 1850s.

Thousands of schoolchildren were at the Capitol on Friday, along with several people in period costumes, some Native American dancers, and (I think) even a few Indian Army officers. Not sure what business they could possibly have in Topeka, but hey — glad to have you.

One beef, Governor Sebelius: I didn’t get any of the large sheet cake you presented to the crowd. Just so you know.