Musk again? A lesson in inefficiency and ambiguity

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, September 1, 2023

A friend, explaining why he admires Elon Musk, describes the efficiency of Musk’s auto-transport tunnel: subway train cars are expensive because they can’t be mass-produced, they require large tunnels the boring of which require exponentially greater energy for every increment of diameter, and trains must support rush hour capacity even on off hours, whereas autos are mass-produced cheaply on the assembly line, they require little tunnel space, and on off hours, only the occupied ones run. He concludes that the Musk tunnel is efficient.

Well not so fast, pun intended. And there’s an important linguistic and conceptual lesson to be learnt from that lack of speed.

The carrying capacity of a packed subway/metro car is about 250 people. The average train is eight cars, so about 2000 people running, in NYC, every two to five minutes in rush hour. Off-loading that efficiency onto autos would require about 2000 autos every five minutes, or about 7 autos per second. A car would have to have 1/7th of a second to load onto Musk’s tunnel platform to meet rush hour demand. Not likely.

Even if that were possible, consider an on-ramp for a midpoint station B from destination A to C. In rush hour, there’d be a constant flow headed from A towards C.

A–>——B–>——–>C

To accommodate cars coming from station B, that traffic flow would have to slow down to allow a car to enter into the single-lane traffic of the tunnel, and the on-ramp itself would have to be backed up for the one-by-one entry onto the tunnel, even if this were all automated. A subway train typically has dozens of stations between its endpoints. Imagine the traffic jam in a single lane tunnel at rush hour, each car containing one person since the 2000 people in each train have now been distributed into individual cars. Depressing.

In other words, the Musk tunnel can’t handle rush hour traffic if used for a metro system. It would probably be so slow that either long lines would drive people away, or it will be priced high enough to prevent long queues. You don’t need to think long and hard to figure which option will be the business model. It only makes sense as a luxury shuttle from airport to hotel district for the business class, with a discount during off hours.

And what does the subway/metro serve? The entire public, the society as a whole, the economy that serves everyone. The inefficiencies of the system are sacrifices to the priority it serves. And it is fast. Very fast by compare!

Tunnels are not new. We know when and where to use them efficiently for the public. There’s a reason why we use tunnels only for A to B destinations, like midtown NYC to Weehauken — nobody needs to get out in the middle of a river.  There are projects that serve money, others that serve the public, and some that serve the vanity of their promoters’ public image.

Here’s the lesson: a grotesquely inefficient idea implemented efficiently remains grotesquely inefficient. Its efficiencies are intended to create more profit for the owner. So of course there will be efficiencies in any business model. That does not at all imply that the business purpose is efficient.

This notion of “efficiency” is trading on an amgibuity between the efficiency of the business idea (Musk’s is not) and the efficiency of its implementation (conveniently for his profit). The inefficiencies reveal the respective purposes: serving the public, the society, the economy as a whole or making money serving a luxury economy. This is why Adam Smith despised the wealthy — their servants could have been employed in the productive economy that serves all, but instead were wasted on serving wealthy individuals with no benefit to the nation’s economy, the wealth of the nation.

And it’s a lesson for the libertarian: because the market supplies demand, in unequal societies the wealthy will be served more and better in ways that are inefficient for the economy as a whole and the nation. Smith’s book is not entitled “The Wealth of Individuals” but “The Wealth of Nations”. Remember that.

An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

An addendum on Hanson’s grabby aliens:

If we were to assume that all of human futures are determined by those elements of human nature that have persisted through history, we might conclude that we will continue to expand our influence on nature, organize it, harness it etc. This seems to be the assumption Hanson makes in predicting that aliens with advanced technology will be grabby — they will succeed by Darwinian selection over their environment, dominating it, organizing it, harnessing it just as we have in our Darwinian selection here. Darwinian libertarianism is Hanson’s idee fixe which he applies to everything. But as David Deutsch likes to say, not without some (though not entire) justification, we can’t predict the technology of the future. More important, technological advances have been the great game changers in human history. They are changes in our relationship with our environment, and in our selection. Reliance on physical environment, like reliance on slaves, will last only as long as no technology replaces it as fossil fuels and machines have been replacing slavery. Besides, humans, unlike most organisms, do not have as our essential environment something in non human nature. The essential environment of humans is other humans, and that relationship is mediated through language, a symbol system denoting information, not bits of physical nature.

A social species depends on cooperation more than competition. Consider that language is itself a form of cooperation and it is by far a away the most important, pervasively transformative technology we’ve ever acquired, to such an extent that it compensates for shocking downsides among which is our credulousness. For an informationally dependent social species it would be natural for the future technology to develop as informational and representational, not physical hardware. The future is likely to be one of seeking information in symbolic and non symbolic forms and organizing those with efficient means that don’t require disturbing anything at all. It seems pretty easy to predict that the future would be knowing, seeing, understanding, and not doing, moving, destroying or transforming anything but ourselves. Why travel with our burdensome bodies that require replenishment and produce waste, when we can travel through information, — like virtual reality but far more sophisticated and comprehensive. Hardware is just cumbersome, a clumsy start to a universe that began with physics instead of symbols. And lucky too, since without physical things there’d be little to symbolize, no one to symbolize and no one to understand them. 

You can see this move towards information already in the metaverse. Virtual reality already has advantages over physical travel, and we’re only at the beginning of its development. Several months after scoping out the streetview of a city I hadn’t actually visited — observing carefully the bus stops and the people waiting there, the stores and restaurants and the people sitting at the street cafes, the view from the city’s heights, the waterfront scenery — in talking on the phone to a resident there I mistakenly recalled that I’d been there. I could not for the life of me tell whether I’d actually been there or not, the memories were so vivid, normal and memory-lifelike.

That’s the easiest explanation for the Fermi paradox. Aliens will not travel and will generate little effort. Information is lightweight and efficient. We can’t find them because they’re all at home quietly sitting on the couch experiencing information pure. If they want to exercise, if they’re still stuck in bodies, they can bring out their retro tech and ride a bike. 

A note on the Great Stagnation

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

It’s ironic that The Great Stagnation was coined by a libertarian, since the problem seems to be one of market incentives. In the private sector, we get the innovations that make money easiest. Even more ironic to hear a Peter Thiel place blame on the university, the one institution where those cheap incentives are least present and most easily overcome and where the structures are in place to overcome those cheap incentives. The university is not without structural flaws, and private sector incentives have found a place in it. But non private incentives are also encouraged, and inquisitive minds looking beyond private incentives justifiably seek the university as a home for their research. In any case, the private sector is not well equipped to overcome market incentives and the history of the last half century tells us that it increasingly finds ways to bury itself in those incentives until it can’t dig itself out of its own dysfunctions or the shit it excreted with which it has covered itself and everyone else, whether that’s externalities like pollution or the multiplication of inessential gadgets that pile the waste heaps higher and higher.

The new libertarian, overcome by bias

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

If Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is the core text that defines libertarianism, then today’s libertarian isn’t libertarian. The argument against government intervention today is as much a defense of possession — property and the unlimited acquisition of property — as it is an argument that markets are more efficient than legislation. And the fiercest argument over legislative meddling is about wealth distribution — appropriating property. Possession again. Opposing taxation has become the central principle of the new libertarian, whether because it is an easy electoral issue, or because Americans have lost trust in their government or become remote from it, or simply fail to understand their government, what it does and gives them or fails to give them and for what reasons, yet they understand the tax bill well enough. Taxation has become the issue to argue against, and freedom, easily embraced by American mythology since America’s childhood and the childhood of Americans, is the stronghold of defense against the IRS.

This defining of libertarianism by what it opposes changes the focus of libertarianism, since the opposition today is not what opposed it when Adam Smith wrote. The role of legislation in wealth redistribution from rich to poor was not his concern. It was government intervention in favor of local commerce, not the poor, that troubled him most. The book is mostly a defense of free trade, not a defense of the rich. He has nothing good to say about the property-rich, and only scathing criticism of their role in the economy. He thinks they produce little, they remove potentially productive labor from the labor force for the sake of having servants who, like the rich themselves, produce little but the personal conveniences of the rich and only the rich, not for the wealth of the nation.

Libertarianism, in other words, has fallen victim to our current cultural polarization in which one side wants the government to intervene in a woman’s own body and choice of pronoun and the books her children may have access to as long as no tax funds are involved, and the wealthy deserve to be defended, defending wealth, deploring wealth redistribution, defending the right to bear arms and deploring the right to personal privacy, defending religion and the death penalty, deploring immigrants and people of color — the whole inconsistent constellation of so-called conservatism, opposed by those who defend wealth redistribution, deplore gun ownership and insist we do something to prevent climate change even though we manifestly can’t (upcoming post on Fool’s Errand Attachment), defend free speech but censor select speech, defend scientific pronouncements from liberal establishments but never criticize them scientifically — the whole inconsistent constellation of current so-called liberalism.

Even the often brilliant and innovative libertarian Robin Hanson falls victim to this polarization. In his pervasive Social Darwinism he deplores encouraging the weak but ignores the weakness of the wealthy. Privilege is conveniently exempted from his Social Darwinism. Privilege weakens as much as struggle strengthens, although it’s worth knowing that competitive struggles will take advantage of any means to win, and the results can be devastating to the society as a whole. It’s easy to forget that the unit of selection is not the individual but the gene or species. A selection for an individual can be destructive to the future of the collective. Monopoly is one such means of success for an individual. Also the use of influence to obtain legislative favors, another observation of Smith’s that greatly troubled him. To prevent such influence would require regulation, but again, today’s libertarian is anti-regulation. They’re just pro-make-money, not at all a Smith interest.

Smith prioritized production, not possession. It’s wealth of nations, not wealth of individuals. Smith objects to gov’t intervention in markets that curtail production. It’s all about the benefits of free trade, especially across borders. What would he have thought about taxing as wealth distribution? He doesn’t say.

In his Age of EM, Hanson warns that the middle classes have a low fertility rate compared with criminals. He describes this with the word “maladaptive” — a term of art in genetics. Reading between the lines in the context of his Darwinism, he’s implying that criminal genes are proliferating and successful genes are not. The enthymeme here is the assumption that becoming middle class is an effect of genes, and criminal behavior is also genetic. I would be surprised if either were true. Using his own social Darwinism, I’d expect the criminal to be smart, risky, fast and aware, the average middle class member more security-seeking, more risk-averse, less aggressive and more dependent on the state, on law, on protection from above. Exceptions will abound, but I’d expect the causes of criminality in a class society would be differences of socio-economic status, upbringing, education, cultural values, and opportunities far more than genes, as if there could be a gene for criminality. And let’s not forget the illegal and legal criminality in the corporate world. 

Hanson is a strange hybrid of fox and hedgehog. He has one theory to explain everything, but he has the great talent of finding surprising details. But they are always consistent with his one narrow idee fixe, social Darwinism.

So he points out that whenever we try to improve ourselves, we choose inequality. This is a bit loaded, since taking it as a Kantian categorical, it just means all boats will rise. But there’s no mention of which kinds of inequalities might be be costly with little benefit compared with inequalities that provide great benefits to all, and few downsides. Nor does he take into account the value of the incentive for the improvement. It matters: do you want doctors who seek wealth or doctors who are genuinely interested in medicine or helping the ailing? Surely these incentives should be on the table for discussion, not merely the fact that we all at some point want to improve regardless how unequal that makes us.

Finally, don’t forget that natural selection does not ensure that any species of the moment will not go extinct. Extinction is very much a part of the process. What might make a species successful in one environment may be disastrous in another. Uncurated ecologies lose species, and weeds will thrive. If our essential necessary environment is each other, then it’s up to us to learn how to live with each other, and that includes dealing with our inequalities. If that means eliminating wealth, well, the Smith of Wealth of Nations would applaud. What’s wrong with the goal of rising to the level of competence but not beyond?

Privilege is the dark secret of the libertarian think tanker. Every libertarian should deplore it, but the think tankers protect it. Privilege, socially supported, is not Darwinian success, any more than a monopoly is a free market efficiency.

I’d like to see an educational program that will separate the elite from the economically privileged. Our current private education system replicates inequalities by syphoning the privileged into positions of power through their elite educations. What we need are educated elites without privilege.