Browsed by
Month: February 2014

Theorizing That Some Change in the Aging Brain is Optimization, Not Degeneration – Article by Reason

Theorizing That Some Change in the Aging Brain is Optimization, Not Degeneration – Article by Reason

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
February 9, 2014
******************************

The nature of neural networks is perhaps better understood by more people nowadays than used to the be the case. Forms of neural network are used for a range of computational purposes, where they have proved useful as a way to economically discover solutions to difficult problems in pattern recognition, optimization, and other fields. How a particular solution works isn’t always clear, especially when using larger networks, but if it can be proven to work well then why worry?

We ourselves are neural networks: the complex adaptive phenomena that we choose to call the self arises from comparatively simple exchanges between many, many neurons. The machine is the connections and the state of its neurons, constantly altering itself in response to circumstances and its own operation.

The brain, like all tissues, suffers due to the accumulation of cellular and molecular damage that drives aging. But which of the characteristic differences between a young brain and an old brain are aging, and which are the expected operation of the neural network as it processes and reprocesses the data gathered throughout life? In some cases the classification is obvious: broken blood vessels and white matter hyperintensities are damage, as is the amyloid that accumulates in Alzheimer’s disease. We would be better off without them, and they harm us by destroying physical structures needed for operation of the brain. Once researchers start looking at the structure of neural connections, or activity in response to stimulus, or gene expression maps in various portions of the brain things become a little less clear, however:

The Brain Ages Optimally to Model Its Environment: Evidence from Sensory Learning over the Adult Lifespan

Quote:

The aging brain shows a progressive loss of neuropil, which is accompanied by subtle changes in neuronal plasticity, sensory learning and memory. Neurophysiologically, aging attenuates evoked responses – including the mismatch negativity (MMN). This is accompanied by a shift in cortical responsivity from sensory (posterior) regions to executive (anterior) regions, which has been interpreted as a compensatory response for cognitive decline.

Theoretical neurobiology offers a simpler explanation for all of these effects – from a Bayesian perspective, as the brain is progressively optimized to model its world, its complexity will decrease. A corollary of this complexity reduction is an attenuation of Bayesian updating or sensory learning.

Here we confirmed this hypothesis using magnetoencephalographic recordings of the mismatch negativity elicited in a large cohort of human subjects, in their third to ninth decade. Employing dynamic causal modeling to assay the synaptic mechanisms underlying these non-invasive recordings, we found a selective age-related attenuation of synaptic connectivity changes that underpin rapid sensory learning. In contrast, baseline synaptic connectivity strengths were consistently strong over the decades. Our findings suggest that the lifetime accrual of sensory experience optimizes functional brain architectures to enable efficient and generalizable predictions of the world.

My suspicion is that it would be faster to implement rejuvenation biotechnologies and then assess what happens to an aging brain that remains physiologically young than to fully pick apart and understand present contributions to changes over time in the brain.

This line of research is of interest because of a potential threat to extreme longevity, past the present limits of human life span, once we have build the necessary medical technologies. The threat is this: it is possible that the brain is like the immune system, in that it is poorly structured for long term use, and will fail for reasons inherent to that structure, even in the absence of damage. We have no reason to suspect that this is the case, but equally there is no good reason to rule this out – the scientific community simply doesn’t understand enough about the detailed operation of the brain to say either way with confidence.

On the plus side, this is a comparatively remote potential threat, something that lies decades past all the other fatal forms of damage and age-related disease that we have to deal with. Old people with little physical damage to their brains are sharp and on the ball, to the degree allowed by their failing bodies and decades of increasing caution required in their interaction with the world. Further, by the time we are at the point of worrying about this, biotechnology will be far more advanced. So it is, I think, worth considering, but not worth panicking over.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries. 

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Bernanke’s Legacy: A Weak and Mediocre Economy – Article by John P. Cochran

Bernanke’s Legacy: A Weak and Mediocre Economy – Article by John P. Cochran

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
John P. Cochran
February 8, 2014

******************************

As Chairman Bernanke’s reign at the Fed comes to an end, the Wall Street Journal provides its assessment of “The Bernanke Legacy.” Overall the Journal does a reasonable job on both Greenspan and Bernanke, especially compared to the “effusive praise from the usual suspects; supporters of monetary central planning. The Journal argues when accessing Bernanke’s performance it is appropriate to review Bernanke’s performance “before, during, and after the financial panic.”

While most assessments of Bernanke’s performance as a central banker focus on the “during” and “after” financial-crisis phases with much of the praise based on the “during” phase, the Journal joins the Austrians and John Taylor in unfavorable assessment of the more critical “before” period. It was this period when the Fed generated its second boom-bust cycle in the Greenspan-Bernanke era. In the Journal’s assessment, Bernanke, Greenspan, and the Fed deserve an “F.” While this pre-crisis period mostly fell under the leadership of Alan Greenspan, the Journal highlights that Bernanke was the “leading intellectual force” behind the pre-crisis policies. As a result of these too-loose, too-long policies, just as the leadership of the Fed passed from Greenspan to Bernanke, the credit boom the Fed “did so much to create turned to mania, which turned to panic, which became a deep recession.” The Journal’s description of Bernanke’s role should be highlighted in any serious analysis of the Bernanke era:

His [Bernanke’s] role goes back to 2002 when as a Fed Governor he gave a famous speech warning about deflation that didn’t exist [and if it did exist should not have been feared].[1] He and Mr. Greenspan nonetheless followed the advice of Paul Krugman to promote a housing bubble to offset the dot-com crash.

As Fed transcripts show, Mr. Bernanke was the board’s intellectual leader in its decision to cut the fed-funds rate to 1% in June 2003 and keep it there for a year. This was despite a rapidly accelerating economy (3.8% growth in 2004) and soaring commodity and real-estate prices. The Fed’s multiyear policy of negative real interest rates produced a credit mania that led to the housing bubble and bust.

For some of the best analysis of the Fed’s pre-crisis culpability one should turn to Roger Garrison’s excellent analysis. In a 2009 Cato Journal paper, Garrison (2009, p. 187) characterizes Fed policy during the “Great Moderation” as a “learning by doing policy” which, based on events post-2003, would be better classified as “so far so good” or “whistling in the dark.” The actual result of this “learning by doing policy” is described by Garrison in “Natural Rates of Interest and Sustainable Growth”:

In the earlier episode [dot.com boom-bust], the Federal Reserve moved to counter the upward pressure of interest rates, causing actual interest rates not to deviate greatly from the historical norm. In the later episode [housing bubble/boom-bust], the Federal Reserve moved to reinforce the downward pressure on interest rates, causing the actual interest rates to be exceedingly low relative to the historical norm. Although the judgment, made retrospectively by economists of virtually all stripes, that the Fed funds target rate was “too low for too long” between mid-2003 and mid-2004, it was almost surely too low for too long relative to the natural rate in both episodes. (p. 433)

Given this and other strong evidence of the Fed’s role in creating the credit-driven boom, the Journal faults “Mr. Bernanke’s refusal to acknowledge that the Fed made any mistake in the mania years.”

On the response to the crisis, the Journal refrains from the accolades of many who credit the Fed led by the leading scholar of the Great Depression from acting strongly to prevent another such calamity. According to the Fed worshipers, things might not be good, but without the unprecedented actions and bailouts things would have been catastrophic. The Journal’s more measured assessment:

Once the crisis hit, Mr. Bernanke and the Fed deserve the benefit of the doubt. From the safe distance of hindsight, it’s easy to forget how rapid and widespread the financial panic was. The Fed had to offset the collapse in the velocity of money with an increase in its supply, and it did so with force and dispatch. One can disagree with the Fed’s special guarantee programs, but we weren’t sitting in the financial polar vortex at the time. It’s hard to see how others would have done much better.

But discerning readers of Vern McKinley’s Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts might disagree. Fed actions, even when not verging on the illegal, were counter-productive, unnecessary, and contributed to action-freezing policy uncertainty which contributed to the collapse of the velocity of money. McKinley describes much of what was done as “seat-of-the-pants decision-making” (pp. 305-306):

“Seat of the pants” is not a flattering description of the methods of the regulators, but its use is justified to describe the panic-driven actions during the 2000s crisis. It is only natural that under the deadline of time pressure judgment will be flawed, mistakes will be made and taxpayer exposure will be magnified, and that has clearly been the case. With the possible exception of the Lehman Brothers decision … all of the major bailout decisions during the 2000s crisis were made under duress of panic over a very short period of time with very limited information at hand and with input of a limited number of objective parties involved in the decision making. Not surprisingly, these seat-of-the-pants responses did not instill confidence, and there was no clear evidence collected that the expected negative fallout would truly have occurred.

While a defense of some Fed action could be found in Hayek’s 1970s discussion of “best” policy under bad institutions (a central bank) where he argued that during a crisis a central bank should act to prevent a secondary deflation, the Fed actions went clearly beyond such a recommendation. Better would have been an immediate policy to end the credit expansion in its tracks. The Fed’s special guarantee programs and movement toward a mondustrial policy should be a great worry to anyone concerned about long-term prosperity and liberty. Whether any human running a central bank could have done better is an open question, but other monetary arrangements could clearly have led to better outcomes.

The Journal’s analysis of post-crisis policy, while not as harsh as it should be,[2] is critical. Despite an unprecedented expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet, the “recovery is historically weak.” At some point “a Fed chairman has to take some responsibility for the mediocre growth — and lack of real income growth — on his watch.” Bernanke’s policy is also rightly criticized because “The other great cost of these post-crisis policies is the intrusion of the Fed into politics and fiscal policy.”

Because the ultimate outcome of this monetary cycle hinges on how, when, or if the Fed can unwind its unwieldy balance sheet, without further damage to the economy; most likely continuing stagnation or a return to stagflation, or less likely, but possible hyper-inflation or even a deflationary depression, the Bernanke legacy will ultimately depend on a Bernanke-Yellen legacy. Given, as the Journal points out, “Politicians — and even some conservative pundits — have adopted the Bernanke standard that the Fed’s duty is to reduce unemployment and manage the business cycle,” the prospect that this legacy will be viewed favorably is less and less likely. Perhaps if the editors joined Paul Krugman in reading and fully digesting Joe Salerno’s “A Reformulation of Austrian Business Cycle Theory in Light of the Financial Crisis,” they would correctly fail Bernanke and Fed policy before, during, and after the crisis.

But what should be the main lesson of a Greenspan-Bernanke legacy? Clearly, if there was no pre-crisis credit boom, there would have been no large financial crisis and thus no need for Bernanke or other human to have done better during and after. While Austrian analysis has often been criticized, incorrectly,[3] for not having policy recommendations on what to do during the crisis and recovery, it should be noted that if Austrian recommendations for eliminating central banks and allowing banking freedom had been followed, no such devastating crisis would have occurred and no heroic policy response would have been necessary in the resulting free and prosperous commonwealth.

Notes

[1] See Joseph T. Salerno, “An Austrian Taxonomy of Deflation — With Applications to the U.S.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 4 (2001).

[2] See John P. Cochran’s, Bernanke: The Good Engineer? Mises Daily Article, 21 March 2013 and Bernanke: A Tenure of Failure, Mises Daily Article, 31, July 2013.

[3] See John P. Cochran, Recessions: The Don’t Do List, Mises Daily Article, 17 February 2013.

John P. Cochran is emeritus dean of the Business School and emeritus professor of economics at Metropolitan State University of Denver and coauthor with Fred R. Glahe of The Hayek-Keynes Debate: Lessons for Current Business Cycle Research. He is also a senior scholar for the Mises Institute and serves on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Send him mail. See John P. Cochran’s article archives.

This article was published on Mises.org and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Interview with Chuck Grimmett on Dogecoin – Video by Jeffrey A. Tucker and Chuck Grimmett

Interview with Chuck Grimmett on Dogecoin – Video by Jeffrey A. Tucker and Chuck Grimmett

Comments 1 comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Jeffrey A. Tucker and Chuck Grimmett
February 8, 2014

******************************

Commentary by Gennady Stolyarov II, Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator:

Jeffrey Tucker interviews Chuck Grimmett on Dogecoin and emerging cryptocurrencies.

They engage in a fascinating discussion on the 2-month-old cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Some excellent points include the following:

(1) It is pronounced “doge” as in “Venetian doge”.

(2) This conversation would have seemed ridiculous 1 year ago and unimaginable 5 years ago, yet it reflects reality today. (Even I, upon initially finding out about Dogecoin, had the thought that truth is stranger than fiction recurring in my mind for an entire day without pause.)

(3) Dogecoin offers an excellent opportunity for testing Milton Friedman’s monetarist rule of building a predictable rate of inflation into the money supply.

Dogecoin_logoChuck Grimmett is the Foundation for Economic Education’s Director of Web Media. Get in touch with him on Twitter: @cagrimmett

Jeffrey Tucker is a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), CEO of the startup Liberty.me, and publisher at Laissez Faire Books.

This video is a production of Liberty.me.

David Brooks, The Whigs, and Corporate Welfare – Article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

David Brooks, The Whigs, and Corporate Welfare – Article by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
February 8, 2014

******************************

In a January 30 column David Brooks, the house neoconservative of the New York Times, urged Obama to ignore both his socialist/egalitarian base and the “conservative tradition that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom.” Obama already has nothing but hateful contempt for the latter tradition and needs no convincing by a right-wing statist like David Brooks.

The president should also abandon his life-long infatuation with and devotion to socialism as well, advises David Brooks. In its place he should pursue an agenda of crony capitalism disguised as a “social mobility agenda” with the help of professional propagandists and perverters of American history such as Brooks and his fellow neoconservatives. Of course, Brooks doesn’t use these less-than-flattering words to describe his Machiavellian agenda. He talks of “a third ancient tradition” in American history, namely, “the Whig tradition, which begins with people like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln.”

Either Brooks knows nothing at all, whatsoever, about the Whig Party tradition in American history, or he is lying through his teeth about it. For he describes it as having been devoted to “using the power of government to give marginalized Americans the tools to compete in a capitalist economy.” The Whigs, says Brooks, “fought against the divisive populist Jacksonians” who supposedly sought to “pit classes against each other.” Every bit of this is exactly the opposite of the truth. The Whigs were the party of crony capitalism, of government of plutocracy, by the plutocracy, for the plutocracy. That is why so many historians have marveled over how a man like Abe Lincoln, who grew up so poor, would become the political water carrier for the Northeastern moneyed elite in American politics.

The most divisive economic issue in American politics during the heyday of the Whig Party (1832–1852) was the battle over free trade versus protectionism. If the Whigs stood for anything, they stood for corporate welfare in the form of high protectionist tariffs that would plunder the masses for the benefit of the few. This meant, for the most part, plundering Southern farmers more than anyone for the benefit of Northern manufacturers who would be protected from international competition by the high tariffs. As John C. Calhoun once said, what “protectionism” protects the public from is low prices. Next to slavery, protectionism was the biggest assault on property rights in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Whigs did not believe in “sacred” property rights, as Brooks foolishly writes. Their entire political agenda was based on the government-enforced attenuation of property rights for the benefit of the wealthy and politically-connected.

Next to political plunder through protectionism, the Whigs stood for the worst sort of crony capitalism in the form of needless corporate welfare for road-, canal-, and railroad-building corporations. This was euphemistically called “internal improvement subsidies” at the time. Private capital markets financed thousands of miles of private roads during the first decades of the nineteenth century. As of 1800 there were 69 privately-financed road-building companies in America that would build more than 400 private roads over the next 40 years, as economist Daniel Klein has documented. The great railroad entrepreneur James J. Hill also proved that government subsidies were not needed to build a transcontinental railroad as he and his investors and business partners built and managed the Great Northern Railroad without a dime of government subsidy, not even “land grants.”

When the Whigs did get their way and conned state government into funding “internal improvement subsidies”, it was an unmitigated financial disaster. Very few, if any, projects were ever finished; taxpayers were stuck with enormous government debts to pay off; much of the money was simply stolen; and by 1860 every state except for Massachusetts had amended its constitution to prohibit the use of tax dollars for corporations with which to do anything, according to economic historian Carter Goodrich.

Edgar Lee Masters, the famous 1930s-era poet, playwright (author of The Spoon River Anthology), and law partner of Clarence Darrow, perfectly described the Whig Party on page 27 of his book, Lincoln the Man. Describing the leader of the Whigs, Henry Clay, Masters wrote:

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises. … He was the beloved son [figuratively speaking] of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.

This is exactly correct, and exactly the opposite of what David Brooks wants his New York Times audience to believe. Clay’s agenda, which Alexander Hamilton originally labeled “The American System,” was really an Americanized version of the corrupt mercantilist system the American founders had fought a revolution against. The Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln “American System” included protectionism, corporate welfare, and a central bank to dispense even more corporate welfare subsidies to politically-connected businesses. It was a recipe for political power based on using taxpayer dollars to line the pockets of the (mostly Northern state) business plutocracy at the expense of the general public. Some things never change in a democracy.

It is equally outrageous for Brooks to claim that the Jacksonians were “divisive” and wanted to “pit classes against each other.” This was the function of David Brooks’s beloved Whigs, who were simply an early version of the neoconservatives; it was the libertarian Jacksonians who opposed politicized divisiveness and the pitting of classes against each other. This is exemplified in President Andrew Jackson’s famous veto of the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States, a precursor of the Fed.

The Whigs championed a central bank. The Bank of the United States (BUS) even paid both of Brooks’s heroes, Clay and Webster, many thousands of dollars as bribery money to promote the continuation of the bank despite the fact that it was well known that the BUS had corrupted politics and generated boom-and-bust cycles. In vetoing the re-chartering of the BUS (which was not overturned), Jackson wrote:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. … In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by the law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics and laborers — who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. … In the act before me [the bill to re-charter the BUS] there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.

Neither Jackson nor the Jacksonians were “perfect” libertarians, but by their motto of “equal rights” they meant equality under the law and opposition to the use of the state to dispense “exclusive privileges” and special favors to special interests. They stood for exactly the opposite of what David Brooks claims they stood for, in other words.

Brooks’s commentary turns to slapstick humor at one point when he claims that the Whigs, who were, after all, politicians, were somehow “family-oriented in their moral and social attitudes.” (I assume that he threw this into his article to further dupe the “evangelical Christian” base of the Republican Party into accepting his thesis). The leader of the Whigs, the slave-owning Kentucky hemp plantation patriarch Henry Clay, was indeed “family oriented” in that he had 11 children. But he was also a notorious gambler who rang up $40,000 in personal debt in the 1820s and was famous for staying out late carousing and dancing with women other than his wife while he was in Washington and the wife was back home in Kentucky, according to several biographies.

Armed with this absurdly false history of American politics, Brooks argues for an explosion of governmental central planning by Obama during the rest of his term. He wants Obama to employ “social entrepreneurs” to fundamentally transform American society by “improving family patterns,” expanding early childhood education, “structuring neighborhoods,” paying “young men wage subsidies so they are worth marrying,” training “middle-aged workers” for jobs, and generally micromanaging everyone’s life from cradle to grave. In his words, government should promote “[social] mobility issues from the beginning to the end of the lifespan.”

Something very much like this has been tried before. It was called totalitarian socialism, and it failed miserably.

Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the senior faculty of the Mises Institute.

He is the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked; How Capitalism Saved America; and Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What It Means for Americans Today. Send him mail.

This article was published on Mises.org and is reprinted pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Wow much dogecoin. Very competition. So money. – Article by Chuck Grimmett

Wow much dogecoin. Very competition. So money. – Article by Chuck Grimmett

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Chuck Grimmett
February 8, 2014

******************************

Dogecoin_logoI’ll admit, I was skeptical when I first heard about dogecoin. I even wrote it off. Part of my living comes from running various social media profiles, so I recognized the doge meme from having seen it at least 30 times a day since the beginning of 2013. “A bunch of redditors are, once again, taking things too far,” I told myself.  A cryptocurrency based on a meme? Yeah, okay.

Boy, was I wrong. Dogecoin has proven itself to be money. Here’s why.

First, what is money? The short answer is that money is as money does. More specifically, money is a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value that helps people trade for goods and services.

Now, before you go yelling that no one actually accepts dogecoin in your town or even in your state, let’s dig a little deeper. For any money, it is important to define exactly where it is a medium of exchange. My Turkish lira have little value outside of sentiment for me here in Irvington, N.Y. But in Turkey, I can exchange those pieces of paper for nearly anything.

So, where is dogecoin money? Right here on the Internet. DOGE (shorthand symbol for dogecoin) has spontaneously emerged as the Internet’s tipping currency. All across the Internet, folks are tipping fellow Internet-goers who create or share good content. From dogecoin.com, “Think of it as a more meaningful ‘like’ or upvote, with real value that can be used all across the Internet.” What I totally missed about DOGE in the beginning is that being based on a meme provided an instant bridge for the community that already existed to be introduced to cryptocurrency. Those people embraced it quickly and it took off. The small individual value relative to the US dollar or bitcoin means that people regularly send 10 or even 100 DOGE when they like a piece, which adds to the currency’s popularity and widespread use.

There is quite a debate raging on the forums about whether DOGE is a viable competitor to bitcoin or the US dollar for everyday purchases. It has already proven itself as the dominant Internet tipping currency. It even crossed over into the non-digital world when fundraisers collected 26 million DOGE, worth nearly $25,000 at the time, to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Olympics. Additionally, the dogecoin community raised $30,000 worth of DOGE to help provide service dogs to children in need.

One of the great things about cryptocurrencies is that they provide a low cost way to have real currency competition. Each competes on different margins like security, number of coins to be produced, transaction times, and so on. Another major debate in the DOGE world right now is whether having a steady inflation rate in perpetuity with the number of coins is a good idea. Would DOGE be Milton Friedman’s cryptocurrency of choice to maintain stable prices into the foreseeable future?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I am so very glad that we finally have a mechanism by which to test theories like that in real time. Some currencies will win over their respective markets and some will fall into obscurity, and I’m ready for the ride.

Let a thousand currencies bloom!

Wow.

Like this piece? You can tip Chuck in DOGE:
DQsQVGmKm51iSR1BXDxbf7prZqHvjTShun

Chuck Grimmett is the Foundation for Economic Education’s Director of Web Media. Get in touch with him on Twitter: @cagrimmett

This article was originally published by The Foundation for Economic Education.
Machines vs. Jobs: This Time, It’s Personal – Article by Bradley Doucet

Machines vs. Jobs: This Time, It’s Personal – Article by Bradley Doucet

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
February 5, 2014
******************************Asimo_Robot
For much of human history, the vast majority of people worked in agriculture. Today, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, that has fallen to about 2% of the population in wealthy countries. But all of us whose ancestors used to produce food have not just been joining the ranks of the unemployed for the past couple hundred years. We’ve been working at other jobs, in many cases doing things our grandparents’ grandparents could not imagine. Luddites were wrong to worry back then, but is it different this time?
***
MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson, co-author of The Second Machine Age, thinks it is different this time, but he is qualifiedly optimistic nonetheless. During an hour-long EconTalk with Russ Roberts, he points out that the first wave of machines replaced human muscle, to which we responded by shifting to more cognitive tasks. The second wave, however, is automating cognitive work, which scares people. If machines have both muscles and brains, how can we compete? Are we staring down mass unemployment in the coming decades?
***

For Brynjolfsson, the fear itself is a big part of the problem, pushing us to do counter-productive things like “trying to preserve the past at the expense of the future.” He argues that we can’t stop technology, and actually, we shouldn’t try. “What we need to do is embrace the dynamism that helps us adapt to that. The more we do to try to slow down change, I think the more stagnant we become and the worse off we become.”

So how can we best embrace change? Two things Brynjolfsson mentions are education and entrepreneurship. Regarding the former, he argues not only that we need to become more educated, as the future jobs that have yet to be invented will likely require a more educated workforce, but also that education itself needs to be reimagined to take advantage of new technology instead of carrying on lecturing small groups as we have done for millennia. And how exactly we should do that is, like so much else, up to entrepreneurs. We need to make entrepreneurship easier in a number of ways so that millions of new ideas can be constantly battling it out in the marketplace. “A lot of them are going to be really dumb and they are going to fail,” says Brynjolfsson. But some of them are going to be revolutionary, creating jobs we haven’t even dreamed of yet that allow us to work with the machines instead of trying to compete with them.

And yes, we will probably end up working less, just as we now work fewer hours than we did two hundred years ago. But we will work less to produce more, with many goods and services—think Wikipedia—becoming free or almost free. We already get on the order of $300 billion a year in free stuff from the Internet. As long as we embrace the future and focus on being as adaptable as we can, there’s no reason to fear that the increased wealth of tomorrow cannot be widely shared.

Bradley Doucet is Le Québécois Libre‘s English Editor and the author of the blog Spark This: Musings on Reason, Liberty, and Joy. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness. He also writes for The New Individualist, an Objectivist magazine published by The Atlas Society, and sings.
Putting Innovation to a Vote? Majoritarian Processes versus Open Playing Fields – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Putting Innovation to a Vote? Majoritarian Processes versus Open Playing Fields – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Comments 1 comment
The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
February 4, 2014
******************************

Putting innovation to a vote is never a good idea. Consider the breakthroughs that have improved our lives the most during the 20th and early 21st centuries. Did anyone vote for or ordain the creation of desktop PCs, the Internet, smartphones, or tablet computers? No: that plethora of technological treasures was made available by individuals who perceived possibilities unknown to the majority, and who devoted their time, energy, and resources toward making those possibilities real. The electronic technologies which were unavailable to even the richest, most powerful men of the early 20th century now open up hitherto unimaginable possibilities even to children of poor families in Sub-Saharan Africa.

On the other hand, attempts to innovate through majority decisions, either by lawmakers or by the people directly, have failed to yield fruit. Although virtually everyone would consider education, healthcare, and defense to be important, fundamental objectives, the goals of universal cultivation of learning, universal access to healthcare, and universal security against crime and aggression have not been fulfilled, in spite of massive, protracted, and expensive initiatives throughout the Western world to achieve them. While it is easy even for people of little means to experience any art, music, literature, films, and games they desire, it can be extremely difficult for even a person of ample means to receive the effective medical care, high-quality formal education, and assurance of safety from both criminals and police brutality that virtually anyone would desire.

Why is it the case that, in the essentials, the pace of progress has been far slower than in the areas most people would deem to be luxuries or entertainment goods? Why is it that the greatest progress in the areas treated by most as direct priorities comes as a spillover benefit from the meteoric growth in the original luxury/entertainment areas? (Consider, as an example, the immense benefits that computers have brought to medical research and patient care, or the vast possibilities for using the Internet as an educational tool.) In the areas from which the eye of formal decision-making systems is turned away, experimentation can commence, and courageous thinkers and tinkerers can afford to iterate without asking permission. So teenagers experimenting in their garages can create computer firms that shape the economy of a generation. So a pseudonymous digital activist, Satoshi Nakamoto, can invent a cryptocurrency algorithm that no central bank or legislature would have allowed to emerge at a proposal stage – but which all governments of the world must now accept as a fait accompli that is not going away.

Most people without political connections or strong anti-free-enterprise ideologies welcome these advances, but no such breakthroughs can occur if they need to be cleared through a formal majoritarian system of any stripe. A majoritarian system, vulnerable to domination by special interests who benefit from the economic and societal arrangements of the status quo, does not welcome their disruption. Most individuals have neither the power nor the tenacity to shepherd through the political process an idea that would be merely a nice addition rather than an urgent necessity. On the other hand, the vested and connected interests whose revenue streams, influence, and prestige would be disrupted by the innovation have every incentive to manipulate the political process and thwart the innovations they can anticipate.

It is only when some subset of reality is a fully open playing field, away from the notice of vested interests or their ability to control it, that innovation can emerge in a sufficiently mature and pervasive form that any attempts to suffocate it politically become seen as transparently immoral and protectionist. The open playing field can be any area that is simply of no interest to the established powers – as could be said of personal computers through the 1990s. Eventually, these innovations evolve so dramatically as to upturn the major economic and social structures underpinning the establishment of a given era. The open playing field can be a jurisdiction more welcoming to innovators than its counterparts, and beyond the reach of innovation’s staunchest opponents. Seasteading, for example, would enable more competition among jurisdictions, and is particularly promising as a way of generating more such open playing fields. The open playing field can be an entirely new area of human activity where the power structures are so fluid that staid, entrenched interests have not yet had time to emerge. The early days of the Internet and of cryptocurrencies are examples of these kinds of open playing fields. The open playing field can even occur after a major upheaval has dislodged most existing power structures, as occurred in Japan after World War II, when decades of immense progress in technology and infrastructure followed the toppling of the former militaristic elite by the United States.

The beneficent effect of the open playing field is made possible not merely due to the lack of formal constraints, but also due to the lack of constraints on human thinking within the open playing field. When the world is fresh and new, and anything seems possible, human ingenuity tends to rise to the occasion. If, on the other hand, every aspect of life is hyper-regimented and weighed down by the precedents, edicts, compromises, and traditions of era upon era – even with the best intentions toward optimization, justice, or virtue – the existing strictures constrain most people’s view of what can be achieved, and even the innovators will largely struggle to achieve slight tweaks to the status quo rather than the kind of paradigm-shifting change that propels civilization forward and upward. In struggling to conform to or push against the tens of thousands of prescriptions governing mundane life, people lose sight of astonishing futures that might be.

The open playing fields may not be for everyone, but they should exist for anyone who wishes to test a peaceful vision for the future.  Voting works reasonably well in the Western world (most of the time) when it comes to selecting functionaries for political office, or when it is an instrument within a deliberately gridlocked Constitutional system designed to preserve the fundamental rules of the game rather than to prescribe each player’s move. But voting is a terrible mechanism for invention or creativity; it reduces the visions of the best and brightest – the farthest-seeing among us – to the myopia of the median voter. This is why you should be glad that nobody voted on the issue of whether we should have computers, or connect them to one another, or experiment with stores of value in a bit of code. Instead, you should find (or create!) an open playing field and give your own designs free rein.

To Those of You Who Are Indifferent, This Bell Is Ringing for You – Article by Tatiana Chornovol

To Those of You Who Are Indifferent, This Bell Is Ringing for You – Article by Tatiana Chornovol

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Tatiana Chornovol
February 4, 2014
******************************
Original Publication: Ukrainian Pravda
Translated by Olia Knight
Edited by Isis Wisdom
Source: http://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/chornovol/52ed347c55539/
Reprinted with permission
***
Editor’s Note: The Rational Argumentator is reprinting this article by Tatiana Chornovol in order to continue giving readers an understanding of the horrendous violations of human rights and human dignity by the regime of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. The scale and tactics involved in the repression orchestrated (sometimes through informal means) by Yanukovych are unprecedented in their extent and brutality for any Slavic post-Soviet republic, and, indeed, one would have to look back to the Stalin era to find more widespread atrocities committed even during the time of the USSR. For civilization to return to Ukraine, the Yanukovych regime needs to be removed from power.
                                               ~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator
***

Don’t you agree that no one is safe when there is a maniac in a city? The situation in Ukraine is much worse – we have a maniac running our country and he is served by a repressive state machine that has the ability to create death squads in every city.

Maniacs are usually difficult to detect since they lead normal lives, and often have families and children. But our maniac is worse, since he does not even find it necessary to hide. In only the third year of his presidency, Yanukovych started giving orders to abduct, torture, murder, and freeze ordinary people to death with their hands tied up. For him, this is just political technologies. Besides, he plans to reign for at least two presidential terms and then hand over power by inheritance. What, then, will happen to Ukraine and us?

Those of you who are indifferent, ask yourself, are you ready to live in the country of a maniac who doesn’t even try to look like a healthy person?

If not, then you’re already late. Because we already live in this country. You just haven’t noticed it yet. Because it has not reached your turn yet, but it definitely will, even if you don’t care.

I know what I’m writing about, because I’m among those whose turn has come, I am with the people who are next in line, and I stand in this line again deliberately.

Recently, I witnessed a conversation at Automaidan headquarters. One of the participants was Yaroslav Gonchar, who escaped Berkut. He is the one of the daredevil activists who, with his own car on Obolon [district], stopped Berkut [special riot police forces] buses that were going to Maidan from Mezhyhirya [President Yanukovych’s estate residence]. Tens of Berkut officers first destroyed his car, then started beating Yaroslav and his partner. Yaroslav’s seatbelt helped him stay inside the car, in the heat of their sadistic attack Berkut could not pull him out, and beating him through the smashed windows proved ineffective. That is why he was “not completely beat up.”

The second participant is Volodymyr Maralov, who is “not completely shot up.” He is an activist from the “Road Control” group who was seized from the street by unknown thugs: they interrogated him, and then shot him through the heart. The bullet miraculously turned into the muscles and did not touch the heart.

So, the conversation was as follows: the person who was “not completely beaten up” was interested in what the person who was “not completely shot up” felt when he got shot.

The reply was interesting to me too. I admit, I was really interested, because getting shot with a bullet is now more real than going to the movies, for example. Volodymyr’s response calmed me down a bit because he said it had not hurt him much. At first it pushes you, and then you pass out. I told Volodymyr happily that when you get hit on the head, you feel something similar. Loss of consciousness saves you from the pain.

So, this is how our happy conversation went, since today in our value system, a painless death is good.

Those of you who are indifferent, just imagine what interests us, so if you stay indifferent, because of it, someday indifference will come to you too.

Understand what a terrible parallel reality we suddenly got ourselves into, we, innocent children, who played in peace and love all our lives, had ordinary responsibilities, raised children, maybe were a bit more romantic and idealistic than the majority of the population, maybe believed in dignity, honesty, and patriotism a little more… That’s why our turn came first, and in our lives it’s become commonplace, when by the order of one sadist, the maniac Victor Yanukovych, death squads beat our friends, shoot them, leave them to freeze in the forests, and buried them in graves as unidentified bodies.

In this reality it’s already perceived as a miracle, like proof of God’s existence, that Ihor Lutsenko remained alive, and that Dmytro Bulatov – is alive.

I will be honest, I had already buried Dmytro. When I went outside and felt the cruel frost, my imagination constantly drew the picture of him freezing to death in the forest. When I was told that maybe “he is in hiding,” I still imagined his frozen body covered by snow, because in my memory sounded his sincere: “I am ready to go all the way to the end,” when he came to visit me at the hospital.

That is why after Bulatov was found, I was happy and was not upset that he was tortured: “What’s important is that he is alive.”

But deep down, I am not sure about it. I do not know what is good now. Since in our reality being alive after torture might mean that the torturers will get you later. It is easy to die for the first time…

I remember when I was at Borispyl highway, experiencing numerous blows to the head, moments before I passed out I realized that it was the end. But, I was not scared, because I was ready to die in a somewhat similar manner long before this event. But I also remember thinking happily that I did not feel a strong pain from the beatings and therefore I did not risk being on my knees unconscious before the executioners. Also, it was a joyous awareness that I had done enough to get to Yanukovych even after my death.

But it is hard to die a second time…

Because everything has changed now, it is not enough to die today. It is irresponsible. We must win, which is much more difficult.

Besides, you keep worrying about friends, acquaintances, and strangers from Maidan. Because they are so valuable. This country (your children, those of you who are indifferent) needs those people who are out on Maidan alive, because these are the best people in the country. Whoever has been on Maidan knows that, there, are concentrated the most moral, responsible, intelligent, and brave, who know they cannot entrust their country and their own children to murderers, rapists, and the mafia.

And we have to win because it is our responsibility, because we are strong, because we are not afraid to sacrifice ourselves. It is widely known that people who are ready to die are worth many of those ready to kill.

However, our victory does not depend so much on our qualities but primarily on the number of those who are concerned. So, I appeal to the indifferent and the apolitical – hear, and join us.

I appeal to the military: how can you be indifferent when you gave an oath to serve Ukraine?

I understand that our officers are not always men of honor (in the army corruption and bullying are rampant), and to ask them for help is ridiculous. However, I am asking. I ask the military – realize your responsibility, and that your indifference empowers the maniac. Protect the country to which you swore an oath. Maybe this is your calling. Maybe you were born and joined the army not to take small bribes and die from alcoholism, but to save the country from the maniac and save your children (adults, young, or not-yet-born).

Indifferent people, please understand this faster and start to care. Because our numbers matter the most for a victory.

What to do? What is the plan of action?

In essence, the most important thing is to care. In this, there is work for everyone.

For example, the police tried to arrest tortured Bulatov yesterday. Is this not a good reason for masses of Kyivans to come and support him at the hospital?  However, there was a small group of people at Borys clinic yesterday. We are grateful to them, since the weather was brutal. This small group of concerned citizens looked strange against a background of lit windows in a Kyiv suburb of Poznyaky. Why don’t those who live nearby come for support? Because of their work, because of their kids, because they have to pay their rent, and because they really do not care about what’s happening on Maidan?

Thousands and thousands of indifferent people…

Recently, I used public transportation from Boryspil to Maidan for the first time since I got beaten and walked around the village. It’s a habitual route I used to take hundreds of times. However, this time I was already in a different country – anxious. I looked around at the crosswalks uncomfortably.

I was alone, since my husband and father took my friend Oleg to a hospital. “Titushky” [hired thugs] beat him on the head with baseball bats.

It happened at Cherkasy. “Titushky” jumped out at us from three cars not far from the Regional District Administration. They first attacked the men, since I was dragging my feet.

I grabbed a small cudgel from building materials by the dumpster and helped my husband to fight them off. I must confess, for the first time in my life, I was aggressive and fought the attackers with all my strength.

Then I ran to help Oleg out, three men were trying to strangle him, but I did not have enough strength for an effective attack. They grabbed me. My husband got me away from them. Oleg was on the ground. We were ashamed to run. Literally, we left our friend to his death. He was tortured. They beat him with the bat to kill, targeting his head and body. It was a miracle he survived. He had a 10 centimeter stitch on his head.

Imagine I left my friend! I left the person who protected me with his body…

I became a worse person. When criminals exploit a brutal animalistic rule of life in the country, we all become worse, much worse. We become ready for horrible things.

That is why those of you who are indifferent should not stay away when the bells are ringing. When there is still time to stop the most horrible.

Indifferent people: imagine if Yanukovych’s repressive machine breaks Maidan, then what will his caste of executioners, the death squad, do?

They will continue doing what they always do – kill. It’s a repressive machine that will only become stronger, it always needs more meat and fear.

Then you will envy us, the activists of Maidan. Because in that terrible country of Yanukovych the maniac’s, in the country of terror, thugs, cattle, and watchful eyes, we will no longer exist. We, the happy ones, will not be there.

And you – indifferent ones – will. You will be the torturers, the victims, and the majority of you will be the cattle.

Can you survive as cattle? Sure. But then you would always risk  your children’s wish to not be cattle. Then, you will lose your children, since no one else will protect them, and then you will be all alone in your indifference.

Think about it now. Then it will be too late.

How late was it in 1933 when people who did not care to fight for their independence, ate their children?

Tatiana Chornovol is a Ukrainian activist, investigative journalist, and leader in the Euromaidan protest against the regime of Viktor Yanukovych.
A Spanish-Language Interview With Aubrey de Grey – Post by Reason

A Spanish-Language Interview With Aubrey de Grey – Post by Reason

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
February 2, 2014
******************************

SENS Research Foundation cofounder Aubrey de Grey has been in the European press of late – such as the interview quoted below. Automated translation of colloquial Spanish is almost as bad as that of Russian, so proceed with caution. Even so there is much to be said for living in an age in which I can complain about the quality of automated translation: its existence greatly lowers the barriers to ongoing communication between regions of the world.

Quote:
Question: My daughter asked me why we die. What should I say?

 

Answer: You can say that the human body is a machine, a very complicated machine, but it should not surprise us that it stops working, because that happens to all machines, including cars. The good news is that cars can last much longer than was planned if given a really good and complete maintenance. That’s why there are cars that are one hundred years old even if they were designed to only last ten or twenty. It should be the same for the human body, and the only reason it does not happen is that our body is so complicated that we have not yet understood how to do that maintenance. But we’re working on it.

Question: So I tell my daughter that she will live a thousand years?

Answer: Of course, we do not know, but I think we have at least 50% chance of developing these maintenance technologies if we collect enough money to support research. In 20 or 25 years we will have therapies that affect people who are then 60 or 70 years old and rejuvenate them to the point of granting an additional 30 years of healthy life. That means they will have another 30 years in which we can build even better therapies and rejuvenate them once again. This is what I call the “escape velocity of aging” and is the reason I think the people who are born now may avoid the problems of being old. That means your longevity depends on the risk of dying from accidents, but not on the date you were born.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries. 

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.

Weak Evidence Against a Significant Role for Nuclear DNA Damage in Aging – Article by Reason

Weak Evidence Against a Significant Role for Nuclear DNA Damage in Aging – Article by Reason

Comments 0 Comment
The New Renaissance Hat
Reason
February 2, 2014
******************************

The nuclear DNA in our cells is surrounded by a panoply of exceedingly efficient quality control and repair machinery, but nonetheless damage occurs: individual cells suffer all sorts of mutations over time as molecules react with DNA or pieces are lost or reshuffled during replication. This is more pronounced in long-lived cells, such as those in the central nervous system, or the stem cell populations that support specific tissues.

Cancer spawns from nuclear DNA damage, and the risk of cancer grows greatly with age – not just because of growing damage to nuclear DNA, but also due to the decline of the immune system’s watchdogs and other related consequences of aging. But aside from cancer, does the accumulation of various forms of nuclear DNA damage scattered across our cells contribute meaningfully to dysfunction and decline? There is some debate on this topic, and while the consensus position is more or less “yes, of course,” there is at this point no experiment by which one can conclusively demonstrate that this is the case.

Today I’ll point you to an open-access study in which researchers compare DNA sequencing data from the blood of a pair of 40-year-old twins and a pair of 100-year old twins. Blood cells cycle into and out of circulation on a timescale of a few months, but we might take nuclear DNA damage in blood cells as being representative of the damage present in the population of hematopoietic stem cells that generated those blood cells.

Aging as Accelerated Accumulation of Somatic Variants: Whole-Genome Sequencing of Centenarian and Middle-Aged Monozygotic Twin Pairs

Quote:

It has been postulated that aging is the consequence of an accelerated accumulation of somatic DNA mutations and that subsequent errors in the primary structure of proteins ultimately reach levels sufficient to affect organismal functions. The technical limitations of detecting somatic changes and the lack of insight about the minimum level of erroneous proteins to cause an error catastrophe hampered any firm conclusions on these theories.In this study, we sequenced the whole genome of DNA in whole blood of two pairs of monozygotic (MZ) twins, 40 and 100 years old, by two independent next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms (Illumina and Complete Genomics). Potentially discordant single-base substitutions supported by both platforms were validated extensively by Sanger, Roche 454, and Ion Torrent sequencing.

We demonstrate that the genomes of the two twin pairs are germ-line identical between co-twins, and that the genomes of the 100-year-old MZ twins are discerned by eight confirmed somatic single-base substitutions, five of which are within nucleotide substitutions can be detected, and that a century of life did not result in a large number of detectable somatic mutations in blood.

I would have expected more differences and larger differences to turn up, but, as the researchers note, it is impossible to detect mutations that have not spread to at least some degree. (In this case, that means spreading through the population of hematopoietic stem cells.) A next step might be a survey of whole-genome sequencing by tissue types in old twins, especially those with longer-lived cells, to see whether this low level of exhibited mutational damage is peculiar to blood or typical for most or all tissues.

Quote:

The number of somatic variants may be substantially larger but those present in smaller fractions of cells go undetected. Consistent, detectable somatic variation likely includes somatic mosaicism in blood generated during development or clonal expansion of mutations generated at any point during the lifetime. The frequency of these variants is limited in blood even after 100 years of life. In summary, this study shows that the number of detectable somatic variants in blood by using NGS is very low and that accumulation of somatic mutations is not necessarily a consequence of a century of life. Stochastic somatic variation occurring in less than 20% of cells will go undetected, however.

Reason is the founder of The Longevity Meme (now Fight Aging!). He saw the need for The Longevity Meme in late 2000, after spending a number of years searching for the most useful contribution he could make to the future of healthy life extension. When not advancing the Longevity Meme or Fight Aging!, Reason works as a technologist in a variety of industries. 

This work is reproduced here in accord with a Creative Commons Attribution license. It was originally published on FightAging.org.