Buying virtue with technology

We don't own slaves, and none of us are slaves. This is an unambiguous good.

But when you look back at history, slavery was pretty much universal. Sometimes subsets of slaves became incredibly weird and powerful, like Janissaries and Mamelukes, but some institution of bound labor was something everyone had as part of their cultural toolkit. Many variations existed, from house slaves that were able to behave more like servants, to field slaves that might work side by side with a small farmer--even Ulysses S. Grant did this, in his farming days.

And brutal large enterprises, like the latifundia of late Republican Rome that Tiberius Gracchus used as justification for his reforms or Athenian silver mines, used slaves up without mercy.

Anything that benefits us can be found to have a moral justification. If we don't have property we define property as theft. Once we have property to defend, our attitudes mysteriously change. Most of us like comfort, security, and pleasure, and become enormously resentful if some change threatens this arrangement. And in history, comfort, security, and pleasure were rare enough to be worth fighting for savagely, and accepting the enslavement of others to achieve.

And now? Who needs hewers of wood and drawers of water to be comfortable? Our thermostat turns on the furnace, and water comes right out the tap at the right temperature. Vacuum cleaners clean better than a brigade of maids with feather dusters and brooms, cars take us places faster and more comfortably than a sedan chair or coach, washing machines keep our cotton and synthetic clothes cleaner and more comfortable to wear than any handwashing of linen and wool.

And owned human beings require food, lodging, and care. They get sick, they get old, they get violent, they try to run away. They're high maintenance. Russian nobles often had serf orchestras. Much cheaper to buy some speakers and download some mp3s.

SF novels where slavery returns in some form seem to think that oppression is the point. They contend that people own slaves to express their power. Pushing other people around can be fun and emotionally satisfying for a certain type of individual, but this is quite secondary to the comfort and service they provide. Slaves that can't make your life physically more comfortable are a too-expensive luxury.

So if we look back at history and congratulate ourselves for our relative virtue, we haven't really earned it.  Really, to consider ourselves virtuous, we should all be saints compared to people from past centuries. But I doubt that ethics classes indicate that the most powerful force for good behavior toward others is the one that brings us microwave popcorn and HD TVs.

The pleasures of peer review

I just got back from Rio Hondo, a writer's workshop run by Walter Jon Williams and Maureen McHugh, in the mountains above Taos, New Mexico. Rio Hondo is a peer workshop, where a group of writers (12 in this case) get together to read and critique each others' work.

I don't know if other genres have such workshops, but they are very much a part of the culture of science fiction and fantasy, starting, I think, with Milford, started by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm in the 60s. Most writers I know were indoctrinated early, at Clarion, a workshop where students spend some weeks with a succession of instructors.  I never went to Clarion, though I had a friend in college who did. At that time, I had no interest in becoming a writer. That just happened as I got older, and by the time I realized it was a big part of my identity it seemed too late.

Plus, like many of you, I am not a joiner, and like to pretend I am not affected by trends. Nevertheless, given my spotty career, I was pleased to be invited to this one, and had a great time. Many of the attendees like to cook, and Rio Hondo is known for the quality of the food. Plus, it's up in the mountains, with some great hiking trails. I can't sit still for that long, and afternoon hikes kept me balanced.

I have never intimately involved in the science fiction community, so it was great to meet a whole bunch of new people, all whip-smart and a pleasure to be around. Aside from Walter Jon and Maureen, attendees were Daniel Abraham,  Karen Joy Fowler, Ty Franck, James Patrick Kelly, David D. Levine, Kristin Livdahl, Ben Parzybok, Diana Rowland,  and Jennifer Whitson (who writes as Jen Volant).

I'm used to getting up early, but Diana was always up before me and got the best seat, by the window, every morning.  She also makes a mean chicory coffee. 

I'm pleased to carry on a writing career while working full time, but Ben and Maureen do the same while running companies, and having to take meetings and resolve other issues during the course of the workshop.  Diana and Daniel had deadlines, and worked on their books. I just ate, hiked, and talked. David and Jen are both intellectual resources on areas of interest to me (interface design and organizational behavior, respectively), and were willing to share their knowledge. Ty has a intimate grasp of every part of popular culture, and one evening gave a bravura performance characterizing every nationality's favored form and style of horror movie. Walter Jon led our hikes and managed the rest of our affairs.  Karen told stories of workshops and Hollywood.  Kristen educated us about animals and their humans (she runs a pet adoption agency). And Jim Kelly was as charming as a ruthless story doctor can be.

Believe me, it takes some nerve to use up the time of these 11 people on your story.

It was a pleasure to spend time with everyone. Maybe this will get me back into this world a bit more.  I'm sure you will be seeing  the work we read here, and all of it will be worth your time.

Memories of Murder

A few days ago I watched a South Korean serial killer movie called Memories of Murder. It was reminiscent of the recent American film Zodiac in that it was not glamorous or clear--no taunting, no profiling, just a painful mystery, as one woman after another is killed.

It's set in rural Korean in the mid-80s. It starts with a couple of local cops, provincials more used to rousting drunks and beating up political protestors than with investigating a serious crime. Evidence is trashed, and suspects are picked up because of rumors and gossip.

And these guys are thugs, though its just regular. There is one vivid scene where, after beating a poor mentally handicapped suspect up repeatedly, they sit with him and watch a popular Korean detective show.

A big city cop shows up--and shows them that the murder they are looking at is only one of a series. The movie is excellent on the dailiness of it all. The local cop really does want to solve this crime--he works hard to collect histories and pictures of anyone possibly connected--but he just doesn't know how to go about it.

The background is cement factories, long dirt roads, small restaurants with TVs, a rural school. I particularly liked the dailiness. It's rare to feel that the detectives are part of the world they are investigating.

It gets a good rating from me:  much character stuff worth emulating here.

The spotlight of history

Regular readers know that I read a lot of history. I like to think it helps my fiction, but it's always been a favorite form of reading for me.

I've recommended some fun reads in past months, and readers have appreciated those recommendations.  But not all periods of history, not even all significant periods, with big events and big effects, are popular as topics for books.  In Greek history, for example, you've got the Persian invasion, the Peloponnesian War, and the artistic production of the fifty years in Athens that lie in between those two periods.

I recently decided to learn Greek history more broadly, and picked up The Ancient Greeks, a critical history, by John V. A. Fine.  It is specifically a history of politics and events--he explicitly says he's not the one to go to for art, literation, philosophy, etc.  So that's a distinct lack. But if you want to get the entire picture--or as much of it as we have, this is a good way to get it. Just don't expect a quick, entertaining read.

And that "as much of it as we have" is key to Fine's method, as he tells the reader in the preface:

My aim has been not to produce a smoothly flowing narrative which can lull a reader into unthinking acceptance of the views presented, but to try to make him think. One should never forget that we, as our predecessors were, are constantly being misled because we accept too readily the views that have become sacrosanct through tradition. A history which does not constantly cause one to reflect on what he is reading and to be cognizant of the nature and ambiguities of the evidence is hardly performing the function that a historical work should

The book covers from the earliest days until the Macedonian conquest of the peninsula. You can see the Peloponnesian War as just one large event in a series of miserably endless wars that never resolved anything.

If you want to work on the foundations of you knowledge of the classical world, this is an excellent way to do it. If you want to kick back with some entertaining reading, not so much.

Fear and loathing on the bike trail 2010

Food is never just about nutrition, and bicycling isn't just about getting from one place to another.

Well, maybe there are places where it is, but this country is not one of them. Riding a bike always seems to be some kind of statement, while being, yes, a way to get from one place to another, or a fun way to go in a loop through the countryside.

Consider the rhetoric you hear when someone proposes converting a disused railway bed to a bike trail.  Suddenly, the addition of a strip of asphalt a few yards across becomes a vast and unnatural expanse of pavement, and a way for thieves and criminals to penetrate pristine neighborhoods. It  is conceptually different than any of the other roads, parking lots, and driveways that surround it.

You might guess my attitude from my word choice, but, then, I don't own a house abutting on an abandoned rail bed that I've treated as an extension of my yard for years.  I might then be tempted to use the rhetoric of private property to assert rights over property I don't actually own too--good thing for my self-respect I don't.

But only some homeowners consider such things negative. Some people like having paths without traffic on them near their house.  If you count pedestrian and bicyclist deaths by cars as "secondhand driving", cars are way more dangerous to innocent bystanders than cigarettes.  But in this case everyone smokes. Even so, many people find  a small "no driving" area appealing, particularly if they have young children.

Does bike path support or opposition correlate with other political positions nationwide? Or is your position dictated almost entirely by whether or not you bike, or whether or not you abut a railroad right of way? Most politics is not as driven by naked self-interest as most people think, but this is a case where it in fact might be.

But it doesn't take an attack on someone's backyard to bring out the anti-bike in someone. We're all over, we get in people's way all the time, we ride at night without lights, and we act as if the road

The business of life

Next week I'll be off at an all-week writing workshop called Rio Hondo, held at some ski condos up above Taos, New Mexico.  I had a story I thought was pretty much ready, but as so often happens, once I started working on it, I realized that it was nowhere near ready. I rewrote a lot of it.  My productivity would be much higher if I figured out what I was doing sooner.

Ah, well. I get there in the end.

A week of vacation--where I'll be reading and commenting on two stories a day.  I usually don't have the time to spare for this kind of thing, but this year I have a bit of time saved up, and decided to give it a shot. Surprisingly enough, other writers can actually be kind of fun to hang out with.

So that's why I've missed some posts.

Our crumbling infrastructure--and sense

The physical substrate of the world we live in can be astonishingly fragile. For example, Boston's water supply was recently contaminated because of the sudden collapse of a pipe in the distribution system.  My city, Cambridge, escaped, because it has its own water treatment plant.

Now, the contamination was really fairly minor. You could shower, wash, etc. And even if you drank it, it would probably just make you a little sick, unless you have a compromised immune system. In much of the world, this would have been perfectly good water.

But it came out of a clear blue sky. One pipe (actually, a collar connecting two 10-ft pipes) ruptured, and an entire metropolitan area had water problems. And a federal emergency was declared, which is, frankly, kind of embarrassing.  A plumbing problem, even a big plumbing problem does not make us a disaster area.

And people were accused of price gouging when they sold...bottled water.  People reported stores that sold bottle water above some "fair" price.  Economists, of course, are all over this one.  But, for heaven's sake, it wasn't like they were withholding insulin from diabetics, or something. There was plenty of water pouring out of every tap. A few drops of bleach, or a boil, and you could have as much drinkable water as you wanted. 

Almost no one really believes in the free market. They just believe in cheap stuff. Fortunately, that's what the market usually provides. When it doesn't, people want to whack the delicate machinery of the market with a big monkey wrench to get it working again.

Infrastructure isn't only physical. It's behavioral too. If it's poorly maintained, you can get a catastrophic failure.  We'll need to be prepared for more disasters of both kinds.

The status quo test

Cambridge, where I live, is like most places: propose a change, and you get a lot of meetings where people denounce it.  A new building, a new bike path, a new field house--whatever it is, they're against it. There are some reasons for this. Our town is dense, and each new structure is larger than what it is replacing.

But the rhetoric does get...overheated. When there was discussion of building some structure at Fresh Pond Reservation, someone described Fresh Pond as "Cambridge's Yosemite".  I guess, in the same sense that Joe Sent Me, the bar I like to drink at with my friends, is Cambridge's Mermaid Tavern, and I its little Willie Shakespeare.

This is the thought experiment I perform whenever trying to parse out such changes:  what if what is being proposed were the status quo, and the current status quo what is being proposed?  Would you tear down that apartment building so there could be a parking lot?  Would remove those nicely drained paths from Fresh Pond?  And I love Fresh Pond--the first part of my first novel, Carve the Sky, is set there, in the far future.

And sometimes, sure, you'd go right back, tear that hideous apartment building down and put up a battered old house, throw that piece of "public art" back into cauldron it was poured from.

But you have to shake yourself free from status quo bias. Next time a change affronts you, try this thought experiment to see if it's really the quality of the change, or just that it is change at all.

Read the histories

One annoying piece of advice from a know-it-all fictional character immediately after stating some dubious political opinion such as "whenever people turn to entertainment rather than to duty, the system collapses within a decade", or "democracies only last fifty years" is: "read the histories!" This is supposed to demonstrate the truth of the assertion.

Robert Heinlein, for example, liked to do this, and I think he got it from GB Shaw.  They never say which histories, exactly, though I suspect they mostly mean works by Thucydides, Tacitus, and Plutarch. A Classical historian writing about Classical events with a moralizing atttude always gives the most status to your pronouncements.

I read the histories. The more I read, the less sure I am that they really tell us anything particularly clear about what moral virtues we should possess to successfully run a civilization, or a life. The Romans were corrupt, depraved, and totally self-interested while they were on their way up, while they ruled a vast empire, and while they were on their way down. Trying to find some kind of overall civic virtue among the squabbling generalissimos of the Later Republic is a futile endeavor.  Republican government was then submerged in the rule of the Emperor--and the system went on from triumph to triumph for another two and a half centuries, and remained incredibly powerful for two centuries beyond that.  What does that tell us about republican virtue?

And then there are the events, and the interpretation of them. To have to clearly distinguish between what is known to have happened, and what people of said about them: "This is reminiscent of the way William III had to let James escape to the Continent so he wouldn't have to try him: Macauley's account is not without interest here...." or "You cite Justinian's reconquest of the West as an example of imperial overstretch, but there is reason to believe that without the plague, he might well have succeeded in reincorporating at least North Africa and Italy for the long term...and don't pay too much attention to Procopius, that Sixth Century Kitty Kelley."

Of course, once you get specific, you've given your opponent (or person you're trying earnestly to instruct) something to argue with: "Just think of how much better atheists would have handled both those situations!" Better to stick with "read the histories".

Just blame PowerPoint

Is PowerPoint the focus of evil in the modern world? Is it the secret cancer that has eaten away at the ability to think clearly, present information to others, and understand the inner meanings of things? Has it made our military weak and obsessed with presentations rather than combat?

A periodic rant against PowerPoint seems to be a mandatory part of the discourse. But there has been a flurry of it, particularly in its military manifestation.  First the New York Times blamed it for our inability to pacify Afghanistan. Then an ex-Marine writing in Armed Forces Journal blamed it for poor military thinking in general.

Yes, we are at the mercy of potentially powerful cognitive tools that are misused by fools for their own feeble and inane purposes. We know this.

But I find the notion that military briefings have been damaged by PowerPoint to be particularly absurd. Somehow I suspect that these hierarchy-obsessed exercises in obfuscation and butt-covering have always been pretty much the same.

I was a civilian engineer working with the military in the early 80s.  Back then we had no PowerPoint.  Instead, we had another miracle of up-to-the-minute technology: vugraphs and overhead projectors. Vugraphs were transparencies held in plastic frames. You typed them up and printed them. Then you projected them up on a screen. They usually consisted of a bunch of bullet points, incomprehensible acronyms and diagrams, and amusing quotations. I never saw a large meeting of military people where this technology was not used. I presume something similar was used while planning the Vietnam War.

It's not that I love PowerPoint or anything. Like most professionals in the modern American workplace, I have to create, edit, or sit through a large number of long decks with too many bullets. But PowerPoint is but one tiny ridge in the vast nail file that abrades my life. I'm not defending it, but I see no reason why it should get singled out for special abuse.

Bike etiquette: the traffic light

Daily, I commute to work on my bicycle. Since I live in Massachusetts, much of the year is too cold and rainy for there to be much bike traffic to contend with. A windy day in the teens means clear bike lanes and easy locking at my destination.

This solitary period is over, and there are many more people pedaling along with me. But though there are a fair number of people on bikes, I'm not sure there is yet a clear bicycling culture, as I presume exists in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

Cultures are defined not by explicit rules, but by the assumptions and practices that happen without even thinking about them.

For example. You ride at a certain pace. You are faster than some, slower than others (actually, I travel exactly at the best Goldilocks pace). You pass a couple of bicyclists who really don't seem to be working that hard, but then stop for a light.  The people you passed come to the light too...and push in ahead of you.  To me, this would be a clear violation of social norms, if there were social norms. Because, of course, you just have to pass them again, and with Cambridge and Boston streets as narrow as they are, this takes a bit of attention to traffic, etc.  They should recognize their slowness and acknowledge that you deserve to be ahead of them.

Of course, if people faster than you, having passed you, stop at a light ahead, and you don't feel a stop is necessary (e.g., you see it as safe to go through the cross street even though a strict interpretation of traffic signals might indicate that you shouldn't), you feel no hesitation in blowing past them, even though they will then catch up to you and have to pass you, etc. They should stop being such sissies and acknowledge your greater daring.

So, at the very least, you should stop well to the right at a light, leaving room for others to go past you, even if it is red, because it's not your job to enforce traffic regulations. Don't sit in the middle of the space, all wide and sassy, as if you've been riding all winter and feel smug about your own toughness and a little irritated at all these wandering newbies getting in your way.... Of course then you have to watch people pump through intersections when it is clearly rude and dangerous, forcing cars to hit their brakes, etc. and know they are reducing the margin of courtesy that you rely on to get home safely. Sometimes slow people who really don't deserve it leave you far behind as a result.

It really shouldn't be that hard to get it right.  After all, I do.

On reading history

It's clear that not all history is equally interesting, or equally popular.  Sometimes it seems that at least three quarters of all history books are about either the American Civil War or World War II, with most of the remainder devoted to the Founding Fathers,  the British Empire, and maybe a bit about the Winning of the West. In this case, English-speaking people triumphing over other races and nationalities (sometimes nobly over each other) is what makes it "interesting".

So, when history buffs get exasperated because students, particularly those of other ethnic backgrounds, ask how any of this is relevant, they should think twice.  Reading about young men on battlefields or middle-aged men in council chambers is a more specialized taste than it might first appear.  And believe me, I fit right into the demographic.

But despite the wails I used to read about overly technical monographs by professional historians and the death of narrative history, I think we are living through a kind of golden age of pop historical writing--as we are of pop science writing.  As a result, I can read three excellent books on the fall of the Roman Empire in close succession, and then start a fourth, Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, to find out what happened after it.

I know, I know:  Romans didn't speak English, but movies make it seem like they did, and so this hasn't moved that far from the Anglotriumphalism of mainstream history reading. At least it's about a defeat. That should count for something.

Next time: periods of history with narrative, periods without. Is the difference real, or just a matter of whether a great historian was around?

"Alarm fatigue": is the Facoder a solution?

A recent Boston Globe story related how a patient died at Mass General because various monitors were either beeping and unheeded, or had been turned off.

When alarms are going off constantly for non-critical matters, you become desensitized to them, or even interfere with their function just to have some peace and quiet.  Then, when the real critical matter comes up, you ignore it, and your patient dies, or the reactor overheats, or the train goes through a switch and crashes.

To improve things, you'd have to decide ahead of time which things are critical, and which aren't, and make sure the alarms reflected this priority.  Only a few problems would qualify: the mind can't pay attention to more than a couple of things at once.  You'd need to make sure less-critical but still important problems get bumped up for investigation periodically.  But if one of those "non-critical" problems then causes a death, you, the alarm designer, are in real trouble. And you know that somewhere, at some time, that will happen. What really matters is not what makes sense, but what you can be sued for.

The problem, however, was solved years ago by David E. H. Jones, who wrote a wonderful column for New Scientist called "Daedalus", about bizarre yet plausible devices created by a company called DREADCO.  I have a collection of these columns, long out of print, called The Inventions of Daedalus, which includes a column on the Facoder, from 1973. My copy is not inscribed, but I remember it being given to me by my old friend Dave Platt, with whom I have recently reconnected.  Thanks, Dave!

Here's the principle of the facoder.

Unless they have some autism-spectrum disorder people respond to human faces with subtlety and complexity. They instantly gauge moods, even with limited cues. Even simple caricature faces can convey these emotions.

Using the example of a control panel for a complex chemical plant, Daedalus proposed a "facoder": a display of schematic faces, instead of dials or other readouts. As a specific system started to malfunction, the face would look more and more alarmed, instantly attracting the attention of the monitoring engineer. The entire mood of the plant could be gauged with a quick glance across the display, much as a performer gauges the mood of an audience (this is my analogy, not Daedalus's, BTW). A bank of happy faces would be the reward of good management.

The same thing could be installed a a nurse's station, with faces standing in  for patient vital signs. In a hospital setting, unlike the chemical plant or nuclear power plant, these would be competing with real patient faces, so it would have to be used with due consideration for the human desire for emotional shortcuts.

I'm actually surprised some version of the facoder hasn't come to pass.  I think its time has come.

If commuting is so terrible, why do people do it?

In his Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer points out that when they weight house cost and commuting time, people tend to overvalue extra features of the house and underestimate the misery of extra commuting. He cites one estimate that a person with an hour commute (I presume driving) has to earn 40 percent more money than someone who walks to work to be as satisfied with life.

That's because driving is a gigantic waste of time. No wonder people talk on the phone, text, and try to use their computers while driving. And they have plenty of time for it, if they buy a big house in the exurbs that is guaranteed to have nothing much anywhere near it.

The choice for me was obvious.  I live in a small house close in to town rather than a larger house elsewhere, and have bicycled to various jobs over the past decade.  We own one vehicle.  I loathe commuting. But this choice is not obvious for most people.  Maybe they don't like the small space:  believe me, every time my growing children visit a Midwestern relative with a gigantic suburban house, I hear about it.

But commuting isn't only soul-sucking.  It's expensive.  You have to buy another car just for getting to work (think about how weird that really is), and then pay to maintain it.  According to the the H+T Affordability Index some people are touting, my choice of location may even seem reasonably priced.

But when you fiddle the metrics to show that you're doing things the smart way after all, it starts to seem a bit more like a Smugness Index.  You have to beware of that particular metric.

Now, someday I may need to get a job that requires an auto commute.  I've certainly interviewed for them.  What will I do if I have to take one?

Get a travel mug and become best friends with the reporters on NPR, I suspect.  We do what we must.  But my Smugness Index is going to go into the toilet.

Classical architecture standing on one leg

I recently wrote a story in which one of the characters, a woman named Andrea, is an architect who has some distinct positions on the history of Classical architecture. My workshop colleague, Steve Popkes, suggested that this particular potted history overloaded the story, and, on revision, I decided he was right.  The story is about public spaces and some particularly high-tech ways of formulating them, not about architecture per se.

Steve also suggested I put it in the blog, and I decided he was right about that too.  Read it here, because you won't be able to read it there.

Andrea had always insisted that the original Greek style had never travelled as well as people thought.  It was developed with foursquare structures supported by forests of columns, with a big cult statue inside.  Sacrifices and divination rituals took place in the open air out front:  once you’d stuck in enough  columns to hold up the roof, there wasn’t a lot of room left.

The Romans had conquered Greece, taken their graduate students as slaves to teach them literature and history, and mushed up their architecture to spread as a paste over triumphal arches, circular arenas where people were murdered for entertainment, and vaulted concrete baths.

Then people had to let the whole thing slide for a while.  The one thing the sight of Classical architecture did tell you was that there was a powerful state around, with some taxing power.  When the Renaissance decided the previous thousand years or so had been a big mistake—a horrendous job, a terrible marriage—and demanded a do-over, they fell on Classical remains and the notes of Vitruvius and then wrote their own stories about them in stone:  architectural fanfic.  Through analysis and experiment they created tight ratios of proportion:  column height, arch width, bay spacing.  Mess with the ratios, and whatever you built became a drunken slur.  Like any language created rather than evolved, it said some things much better than others, and some concepts were inexpressible.

The following Baroque loved the implied hierarchy of the language, the austere discipline not so much.  They stretched the triumphal arch into entire cathedrals, cut the pediments into pieces, and covered everything with swollen swags and simpering cherubs.  As long as the pastry cart included an acanthus leaf or two, they were happy.

After some screwing around with Gothic, Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian pastiches, there had been a renewed period of more academic revival--not stringy-haired fanboys scribbling late at night but grad students grimly bucking for tenure with heavily footnoted articles—that had dominated the offices of government departments, banks, and other bureaucratic institutions across the European and American national states.

Then it ended altogether, and everyone forgot about it, except as random details on suburban office parks and drivethrough banks…and except for Andrea.

The problem of loyalty in District 9, Avatar, and Alice

Loyalty is an essential human motivation that has always played a major role in fiction. Divergences between different logics of loyalty, as between friendship and family, or between military duty and personal faith, are major power sources for compelling plot and character.

So why has every recent science fiction or fantasy movie I've seen not only ignored any possible conflict of loyalties, but seemingly denied the very existence of loyalty as a virtue, or even a meaningful personality trait? Note that I don't see a lot of SF movies, except when accompanying offspring.

Let's take a look at three examples:  District 9, Avatar, and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.

District 9 I've gone off on before. But to summarize, Wikus, a resettlement bureaucrat, has an evil job. That's not so bad, even a good setup for some personal growth.  Something awful happens to him. In his struggle for survival, he kills many of his former office friends and colleagues, without any sign that this has any effect on him at all.  Then he betrays a new friend and kidnaps that friend's son in a desperate attempt to save himself. He does miss his wife, so he betrays only two of three of his loyalties. The new friend is the worst, because it sits right at the narrative spot where Wikus would build a new connection and find his true loyalties--but his loyalty remains himself.

In Avatar, Sully, a former marine turned mercenary, bonds with two other former marines turned mercenaries: his commander, Col. Quaritch, and a tough female pilot, Chacon. That they are all mercenaries, not serving military officers, does make some of the subsequent betrayals easier to understand: mercenaries certainly have loyalties, but they often get chewed up in the incompatabilities between the military and commercial ethos. (Mercenaries are popular heroes of a certain type of SF I used to really like to read, but it was implicit in those stories that military ethics are superior to commercial ethics, a point I'd rather see argued than asserted. In Avatar, both are found wanting.)

Sully falls for the native people the military force was hired to eliminate, and turns against his former colleagues.  He switches his loyalty to the Nav'i, and works to fit into their status hierarchy. Plot spoiler here.  Once he switches loyalties he and Chacon kill many of the mercenaries, without any sense that either of them ever cared about or was friends with any of the people they served with.

Of course, Sully's grotesquely incompetent military decisions lead to the deaths of huge numbers of his new buddies as well. Pyrrhic victory comes, but just barely, and through luck.  His new tribe properly should hang him from the nearest giant glowing tree once all their dead family members are sent on to the Great Server. But that's another story.

But at no point is there any conflict of loyalties, despite the fact that the human race seems to be facing some gigantic crisis that the mining company and mercenaries are here to help solve, however corrupt and incompetent they may be at it.  These are desperate people, and desperate people don't usually behave well. My children liked it.

Finally Tim Burton's Narnia remake, Alice in Wonderland.  Alice is the young unmarried daughter of an impoverished widow in late Victorian Britain. She is slated to be engaged to a dim but wealthy man. In case you were wondering, that's actually the happy ending of many novels of the period, but here it starts things off. 

Within Wonderland Alice herself has no problems of loyalty.  But consider the bandersnatch, serving the Red Queen.  His loyalty is easily turned: just give him back the eye that got gouged out when he was trying to capture you.  You'd think a beast like that would at least have the virtue of devotion to duty.

Then, when Alice returns, all is well. Despite the fact that she has learned nothing and brought back nothing from her adventures, she can dispense with marriage, with family, and with everything else, and make her fortune the way late-Victorian adventuresses so often did:  by finding China on a map.  "Yes, just look on the other side of the fold". Why didn't she just decide to discover America? This is too dumb to be called a spoiler.

But now I'm whinging on something else altogether. I'm not saying that the loyalty you are discarding is right, or deserves to be kept. Should Alice give up a chance at happiness and marry a wealthy but tedious lord so that her mother doesn't end up in the workhouse? Should Sully help despoil Pandora so his own race can survive? Should Wikus let himself get killed just because he has a honking ugly but magic hand?

Hey, it's fiction, there are no wrong answers. But do you value a character who does not show loyalty? I'd never thought about what an important personal virtue that is until I saw its lack. Is it any wonder than none of these characters have close personal friends?

As a writer, all I can do is the opposite.

Steam engine time for intelligence?

Friend and helpful commenter Jim Cambias comments, on my speculations on whether the highest possible intelligence in any era is getting higher or not, that

it seems to be steam-engine time for intelligence. We're smart, but so are cephalopods, dolphins, crows, parrots, raccoons, and of course the great apes. Humans just got across the finish line first. It's not surprising, really. Darwinian selection puts a kind of "ratchet" on random variations in brainpower, so I'd expect the trend to be generally in the smart direction. Especially since there's no "half a wing" problem with intelligence -- being smarter than the average annelid is just as much an advantage as being able to master language and tool use.

 Is the smartest example of any phylum smarter now than in past eras? How gains in smartness transfer across great extinction boundaries isn't completely obvious. Being smart is no defense against getting hit by an asteroid, or having the seas turn anoxic, or whatever global cause kills almost everything. The smartest don't survive in that case--though those that do may gain some advantage in the disordered environment following the catastrophe. So I'm on the fence about whether you'd always expect the next era to have higher peak smartness than the previous one.  If you drop primates out of the analysis as an outlier, are the remaining peak smartnesses higher than they were in the Cretaceous?

Are we really in a world ripe with smartness? If so, is there any reason for it aside from ratchet effects?

But who are you going to shoot at?

As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty much a wimpy blue stater who favors gun rights. Not that I'm likely to own a gun myself, though my teenage son learned to shoot at summer camp and likes to go to the shooting range. Believe me, that's a real Cambridge conversation starter. But the recent Michigan militia arrests have led me to consider how useful guns actually are.

I believe they are a constitutional right, but I have trouble regarding guns as some kind of a means of preserving political freedom.  Say you oppose the recent healthcare reform bill. Great.  I happen to be a wimpy blue stater with a free-market bias, so I might even agree with your position.

Say you even think the whole thing was an incredible abuse of government power, a creeping coup, an example of what elected representatives do when they start to ignore poll numbers--something you used to encourage them to do, by the way.

Anyway, the government is illegitimate, and its actions illegal. Fortunately, you have guns.

OK, great. Who are you going to shoot at? And if you just threaten someone, who do you threaten and what do you want them to do?

Politically motivated people with guns in our society are like drivers caught in traffic. They have immense theoretical power, but that power is chained by circumstance. It doesn't matter how much horsepower you have, or how big your vehicle is.  You're stuck, watching the traffic light creep a little bit closer with every passing minute....

You just hate that damn traffic! That's the problem you want to get rid of. But no matter how many other cars you smash into, it doesn't seem to go away.

So, while in movies, a tattered but proud resistance with comfortable facilities in a remote area holds off an oppressive government whose sexually perverse agents obligingly wear ominous black whipcord uniforms so you can pick them out, here we sit instead, listening to those nattering idiots on drive time radio, wishing we could just shoot someone, anyone.

It's enough to make you turn to fiction.

How likely is intelligence?

On The Big Questions, Steve Landsburg addresses a perennial SF question:  how likely is evolution to evolve? He quotes a review by an astroscientist Charley Lineweaver of a book called Intelligent Life in the Universe, where Lineweaver eloquently denounces what he calls the "Planet of the Apes Hypothesis", or convergentism.

In the movies "Planet of the Apes", humans are wiped out, and various great apes evolve toward intelligence, making it seem inevitable that intelligence will evolve.

Lineweaver cites what he calls five natural experiments whose result oppose this conclusion:  the island continents of South America, Australia, North America, Madagascar, and India. Intelligence did not evolve on any of them.  There is nothing convergent about the evolution of intelligence, nothing inevitable.

Let's leave aside the fact that "Planet of the Apes" is more satire than investigation of evolutionary process (talking animals, like Jonathan Swift's intelligent Houyhnhnms, are a staple of satire), and consider what might or might not be convergent in evolution.

Certain things seem to be widely applicable.  Eyes, for example.  There are so many eyes in the world, working so many different ways, that you can say evolution converges on them.  Wings too.  Birds, bats, insects...the damn things are so useful, that they often evolve.  Not everything needs them, so not everything has them.

Intelligence...not so much.  It's clearly not as useful a gadget as eyes or wings. But, leaving various hominins aside, has the outer edge of intelligence been pushing upward over time?  Hominins are a statistical outlier, but can we say that the most intelligent species on the planet in, say, the Oligocene was more intelligent than the most intelligent species of the Jurassic, which was more intelligent than the most intelligent species of the Ordovician?

Hard enough to tell what body parts those things had, much less what their behavior must have been like. From my limited knowledge, I'd say that Jurassic beats Ordovician, but it's harder to prove that Oligocene beats Jurassic.  If there was another mass extinction, including us, would the next go-round create an even more intelligent species, or are we just a fluke?

Can anyone think of a way to confirm or deny the hypothesis that the "smartest thing on the planet" has been getting smarter through time?