Month: July 2019

Emergence
This book is about evolution and emergence. The author points out that nothing in biology makes sense except in the context of evolution and extrapolates that variation, selection and environmental pressures can explain much of how developments in human societies happen. He makes clear that he is not talking about “social Darwinism” or any of the deterministic ideas so often badly used a few generations ago, but societies are indeed subject to evolutionary principles. Science tells us what is, but not what ought to be. Einstein said that your theory decides what you can observe, determines what is even within the decision universe. When things do not make sense in our theory, our model, we often do not perceive them at all.

Theories and mental models determine what we can see
Our dominant model of society has been physics, machine like. Evolutionary interactions are not important in this model. But the physics model is only a sub-set of complex human societies, which do indeed evolve. Our mistaken assumption is often that we assume direction and planning, when this is not necessary in emergence. Evolutionary pressures give direction and incentive, but they are not planning.

You can often do before you understand
He points out that you can have competence in doing something w/o comprehension of how or why it works. This is a very simple but very profound idea. And very often competence precedes comprehension. A big mistake of the “new math” I learned as a kid is that they tried to make us understand before we used math. As I learned math later, you just practice until it makes sense. It does not make sense first, except maybe for those few prodigies among us.

Some things are designed, others develop and some just happen
The author makes a distinction among things that are designed, those that are developed and those that are just created by conditions or randomness. He tells a story about hiking in the woods. If you hear a crash and look up to see a bolder rolling towards you, appropriate action is to get out of its way. This is a physical and not an adaptive force. Now consider the same crash. You look up and instead of seeing a rolling bolder, you see a charging grizzly bear. Your appropriate response is surely not the same. Your response to the bear is developed, interactive. Your response to the bolder is mechanical. Now consider a snowflake. It seems designed, but it is merely the result of conditions. A snowflake is not designed or developed to do anything. It just is.

No harmony
In a prescientific world, people believe that everything has meaning, that everything happens for a reason, because they believe they live in a designed world. This is a comforting view even, especially, in life’s hardships. This idea is the basis of our believe in the balance of nature. It is comforting to think that there is some sort of default condition, something nature would return to if we “let nature take its course.” It also allows us to criticize the “sin” of others against nature.

Nature, however, is not and never in harmony. It is always out of balance, disturbance dependent and always becoming. Traits exist because of historical processes: contingencies and random events. Outcomes are influenced by environmental factors and constrained by many of them, but the outcomes we observe are not destiny.

Adaptive better than adapted
An organism that is perfectly adapted to its environment is fragile because environments inevitably change. Being adaptive is better than being adapted. This goes for human and “natural” environments. I put natural in quotes, since what we call human and natural are just subsets of the total. They are not distinct except in our formulations.

As I was listening to this part of the audio book, I was spraying some of my pine trees to fight an outbreak of turpentine beetles. I was changing environmental conditions in hopes of frustrating the breeding and population expansive of these little nasties. My own land ethic informed me that it was the right thing to do; it also constrained how much I put on. I wanted to do the minimum. The decision was informed by science that told me that the chemicals I used would produce an outcome I desired. Had I not observed the affected trees, or reacted in the way I did, the forests would be different in a small way. If the beetles could think it through, they would call me a contingency, maybe a constraint.

How can altruism emerge?
The author explained how altruism could emerge from organisms in competition with each other. Individual organisms would have incentive to benefit at the expense of others. But the unit of evolution is not always only the individual. In isolation, selfish individuals will enjoy advantages over their more generous competitors. This does not happen in group settings. Selfish individual beats generous individual, but cooperative groups beat selfish ones. Cooperation can develop because it helps the group. The danger is cheaters and free riders and human groups and all social species, have developed systems to catch cheaters and freeloaders. I often say that reciprocity, not generosity, is the basis of civilization. This is evidence.

Humans are very cooperative
Humans are extraordinarily cooperative compared with any species besides social insects. It is amazing that we can (usually) walk safely among strangers and get the things we need from them w/o the need for coercion or deception.

A big problem for all sharing and social societies is the “tragedy of the commons,” whereby each individual has incentive and even pressure to take as much as he/she can from commonly held assets, even when everybody can see that the resource is being depleted or destroyed. This is illustrated in common pastures and fisheries. There are examples of successfully overcoming the commons problem. The most common effective method is to create stable property rights, but the author also gives examples of groups that were able to figure out how to share. These are usually bottom up affairs that emerge rather than are imposed. They allocate the resource in ways that member consider fair and they have mechanisms to detect and punish freeloaders and cheaters. One size does not fit all, and they need to adapt to change. This can be hard, and some do not make it.

Intelligent design
Evolutionary process need not be random. We humans can “intelligently design” the process, if not manage all the parts. The key is the goal. We do not specify, cannot know all the steps. Think of the process like a toolbox. When the plumber or carpenter shows up at your house to fix a problem, he has a box of tools with different ones appropriate to different tasks. He does not specify which tools before assessing the problem, but he is reasonably confident that his abilities and tools will be sufficient for the task.

Mega societies
The book finishes with a discussion of mega-societies and super organisms. An individual body is made up of “cooperating” cells. They work for the common good. Those that do not are problems, cancerous. Similarly, social insects form super society. The author thinks that humanity could be moving in this direction and thinks it would be a good thing.

I was with him for much of the book. The ideas make sense and I believe that emergence is the most powerful factor at work in our world. I do not share his enthusiasm for humanity becoming a super organism. As we said about, science can inform us about what is and what could be, but our values determine what ought to be. I just don’t see an ant hill or a beehive as a laudable goal for humanity. I prefer a little more disorder and even suffering if that is the price of freedom

But that is my main caveat. I found the book very informative. There are lots of things I did not write about, such as his discussion of epigenetics or cultural learning process. Those are worth topics too, but I did not want to write a whole outline. Read the book. It is worth the effort.

It is not a pleasant book. There is a lot of moral ambiguity and in the end the hero does not win, the good guys do not triumph. There is no deliverance, at least not in the lifetimes of the main characters. The only consolation is that the truth came out a generation later.
Witold Pilecki was a truly brave man who did all kinds of heroic things. He volunteered to allow himself to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz. His mission was to lead an uprising from there and a break-out. He succeeded in getting sent there and suffered mightily. He reported on conditions in the camp and would have made the world aware. He witnessed truly horrible things and reported them, but his reports did not change the situation, because of a mixture disbelief and cynical interests.

The book talks about Pilecki’s bravery and his suffering, as well as those of his colleagues. He lost his family and friends. He did his duty and then some. It was unrequited, however. He did manage to escape the camp but could not bring relief to his comrades. He fought in the Warsaw uprising and was captured by the Nazis. This time he was sent to a prisoner of war camp and freed by U.S. troops. He chose to go back to Poland. He had not fought the Nazis just to have the communists take over Poland. Unfortunately, they had. He was arrested, tried in a communist show trial and executed. The communist deleted him and rewrote the history. His story was submerged until after the fall of communism. His journals and writings did not come out until then.

His journal went into detail about the horrors of the Nazis and their casual use of violence. They would execute scores of random Polish citizens for minor infractions. In the camps they made a special effort to target educated and intelligent Poles. Of course, it is well known what they did to Jews. They developed systems that could kill 3500 people in two hours. Of course, they murdered millions.

I was a site officer for the Auschwitz camp five separate times. I recall a pond, full of frogs. It was very fertile because it contained the ashes of hundreds of thousands of victims. Of course, these were the big ones. Sometimes statistics with such large numbers do not convey as much. As Stalin said, the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic.

The book recounts a situation where the SS rounded up some Polish peasants. They killed the adults right away. For some reason (the author doesn’t know) they separated the children. He counted 36 the first night. Some of the older kids figured out they were going to die and started to cry. The slave laborers tried to comfort them, until the SS killed them with injections of phenol to the heart. They next time, they had 80 children. The Polish officer did not observe after that, but likely these were not the last.

We live in interesting times. We are so far from the industrial murder of the Nazis & communists that we confuse the nasty rhetoric of politicians with mass murder. It is useful to relearn the history.

The trite phrase applies – this is a tapestry of the time of Louis Brandeis. It is well worth the time both for the insights it delivers and for the historical perspective. I was familiar with Brandeis in a supporting role in reading I did on Oliver Wendell Holmes, for his quotation that the states are the laboratories of democracy and for his role in the sick chicken (Schechter) case that put the brakes on some of the more radical new deal overreaches. There is a lot more. I have broken these notes into sections of things I learned.

Jewish in America a century ago
Brandeis was the son of Jewish-German immigrants. He was very aware of being Jewish, but his culture was also heavily German, and he was proudly an assimilated Jew. The events of the Holocaust have forever changed how we view history, but we should probably consider history as it was seen at the time. The German-American Jews were not always enthusiastic about the arrival of Russian Jews, who were culturally different. During WWI, before the USA got into the conflict, American Jews were generally in favor of the Central Powers. The German origin Jews shared cultural affinity with Germany. The Russian origin Jews considered the Russian Czar the bigger enemy.

Of course, there was also no Israel in those days and no Palestine. Brandeis became an active Zionist, and evidently just did not see it as a challenge is Jews moved to Palestine. He seemed to think that the local Arabs would welcome the new settlers, as they would improve the local economy. Recall that there had never been an independent Palestine. Before WWI, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire and it became a British mandate. Zionist intended that the Jewish homeland be part of the Ottoman Empire and later as part of the British mandate.

The book goes into some detail about Zionism.

Scientific management
The early 20th Century was a time of great confidence in science and engineering, even in places where it did not really apply. Scientific management was developed by practice and theory at that time. The most famous proponent of scientific management was Fredrick Taylor. Historians and business students still learn about scientific management (sometimes called Taylorism and even Fordism, after Henry Ford). The idea was to apply engineering principle to production, and it was effective as far as it went, but it did not account for humanity. It treated people like machines or parts or machines and was a machine age ideology. Today we tend to associate it with the unpleasant conformity.
Brandeis embraced scientific management and applied it in his law practice and his work as a judge. He figured out, for example, the firms like railroads could run more efficiently and so pay workers more or cut fares. He really did not understand the business, but it seemed logical and science. This sort of arrogance was characteristic of progressive ideas on management of the economy. It is easy to criticize them now, but at the time it seemed to make sense. This was, after all, a machine age and so much seemed to be made better by scientific analysis. It is like the adolescent who discovers some of the rules of life and thinks they can be applied universally. Assembly lines worked. They just were not pleasant places to work and just expanding them to society was not sustainable.

Conservation and the environment
The early 20th Century was an origin time, a kind of heroic age of conservation, with heroes like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. As in the earlier theme, it was also still part of the machine age and most people thought in terms of production. The science of ecology was not well developed, and the dominant ideas were of a top-down management or exclusion. Brandeis was not much into this debate, but he did get involved in a major conservation case – Pinchot v Ballinger. I was unaware of this. Brandeis was not much interesting in the conservation aspect, but it was subsequently seen as a conflict between use and conservation aspect of the movement.

Free speech
Back in Brandeis’ day, progressives were the ones fighting for free speech. Most of the cases in those days were against leftist and/or related to censorship during World War I. Brandeis and Holmes went with the “clear and present danger” criteria, i.e. speech should be free unless it met that criteria, narrowly defined. It was later to be modified to make speech even less restrictive. It is only recently that progressives have turned on the concept. Holmes and Brandeis believed that even “wrong” speech should be protected, since it helped find the right.

Personal life
There was fair amount about Brandeis’ personality. He was evidently very detail oriented, always checking the facts and the background. He complemented well his friend and colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes was interested in the broader context and had little desire for the details. Holmes was a superb writer and could well put his idea out. That is one reason we remember him better. Holmes also drew on a wide variety of sources. He sometimes quoted poetry in his decisions and read Greek classics in the original.
Brandeis was rich, but he always lived simply. He explained that it didn’t matter how much you earned but how much you spent and went on that when he was young and relatively poorer, he decided to live simply. He just kept it up as he got richer. He bought expensive suits, because they lasted longer, but he did not buy many. And when he replaced them, he just got the new version of the same one he had.

The Brandeis often entertained at home and these were stunning intellectual affairs. Brandeis would talk about anything except cases he might decide. The attraction was the thought, not the food. People commented that they went away hungry. The food was good quality but there was not much.

Life & times
This is a good life and times book about a man who lived a long life in interesting times.1