The singularity and the knife-edge

John Quiggin21 Comments

I’ve been too busy thinking about all the fun I’ll have with my magic pony, designing my private planet and so on, to write up a proper review of Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near. The general response seems to have been a polite version of DD’s “bollocks”, and the book certainly has a high nonsense to signal ratio. Kurzweil lost me on biotech, for example, when he revealed that he had invented his own cure for middle age, involving the daily consumption of a vast range of pills and supplements, supposedly keeping his biological age at 40 for the last 15 years (the photo on the dustjacket is that of a man in his early 50s). In any case, I haven’t seen anything coming out of biotech in the last few decades remotely comparable to penicillin and the Pill for medical and social impact.

But Kurzweil’s appeal to Moore’s Law seems worth taking seriously. There’s no sign that the rate of progress in computer technology is slowing down noticeably. A doubling time of two years for chip speed, memory capacity and so on implies a thousand-fold increase over twenty years. There are two very different things this could mean. One is that computers in twenty years time will do mostly the same things as at present, but very fast and at almost zero cost. The other is that digital technologies will displace analog for a steadily growing proportion of productive activity, in both the economy and the household sector, as has already happened with communications, photography, music and so on. Once that transition is made these sectors share the rapid growth of the computer sector.
Read More »

Amazing!

John Quiggin13 Comments

A great win for the Swans with a game-saving mark in the final seconds. And finally a reward for the South Melbourne faithful who’ve gone a biblical lifetime (threescore years and ten, with a couple over) without a flag. Tim Dunlop is similarly stunned.

A trillion dollar war (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin15 Comments

Before the Iraq war began, Yale economist William Nordhaus estimated the likely cost at between $100 billion and $2 trillion. At the time most of the interest lay in the fact that the bottom end of the range was twice as much as the $50 billion estimate being pushed by the Administration. But with a couple of years’ experience to go on, Nordhaus’ upper range is looking pretty accurate. Assuming that Bush ‘stays the course’, it’s safe to estimate that the war will cost the US at least $1 trillion by the time all the bills come in, and it could easily be closer to $2 trillion.
Read More »

Lurker Week

John Quiggin41 Comments

Via a chain of links starting at Crooked Timber, I found out that it was Lurker Day on September 21. This is the day when readers of blogs who don’t normally post comments are supposed to do so, ideally with some sort of comment about why they read the blog, how they found it and so on. Given that it’s Friday afternoon now, I’m making it a week instead of a day.

Don’t be put off by the term ‘lurker’ which dates back to the days of newsgroups, when there was a feeling that everyone ought to join in[1]. There’s nothing wrong with reading the blog and not commenting, but I’d really like to know that my page views aren’t all robots and spiders, so a short message from you, just this once, would give me lots of encouragement. Feel free to use a pseudonym; most of the regular commenters do.

fn1. Apart from which, if I can put up with ‘blogger’, anything goes.

Yet more elections

John Quiggin17 Comments

Thinking about the German election outcome, it struck me that this would be an ideal test for betting markets. I’ve always thought that, if there’s a bias in such markets it would be towards the right, so the toughest test for them would be predicting a left-wing upset win like this one (I’m calling a win on the basis that left parties got a majority of the vote, not making a prediction about what goverment might emerge). A quick Google reveals that there is such a market, called Wahlstreet but my German isn’t good enough to deal with their site, which has lots of graphs bouncing around without an obvious control. Hopefully someone will be able to help me.

Anyway, if there’s a contract allowing a bet on the share of votes for the three left parties (SPD, Greens, Left party) and if, two weeks in advance, that market was predicting a vote share of more than 50 per cent (as actually happened), I’ll concede that the case for the superiority of betting markets over polls has been established, at least as a reasonable presumption. [I didn’t follow the polls closely but I had the impression that most of them were predicting a CDU/CSU win until the last days of the campaign].
Read More »

Latham

John Quiggin44 Comments

I’ve been reluctant to post on the Latham book, for a variety of reasons. In particular, I don’t much like politics as blood sport. I found the Brogden business pretty depressing, and similarly with this. The whole affair has certainly brought out the worst in a lot of people, including Latham himself.

Although I’ve seen various selected quotes, I didn’t watch the Denton interview until last night and I still haven’t got around to the book itself. Latham made some good points in the interview and had he chosen, he could have used his current position to make severe but constructive criticisms of the Australian political process and the Labor party. But on the whole he failed to do this, preferring instead to seek revenge on real and imagined enemies. Publishing a book of this kind is always a bad idea, and has obviously damaged Latham himself more than the targets of his indiscriminate attack. It’s also damaged the Labor party, though they are at such a low ebb in any case that it will probably not make much difference beyond the short term. But Beazley, his main target, seems to have emerged almost completely unscathed.
Read More »

Racism and censorship

John Quiggin55 Comments

Via Jack Strocchi, this story about the censorship by Deakin University of an article on the White Australia policy by racist academic Andrew Fraser, accepted for publication in its law review.

There’s a lot of background on this from Catallaxy, Mark Bahnisch and Rob Corr.

My view based on limited information: the refereeing process was highly dubious and, from what I’ve seen of Fraser, any journal with decent academic standards would reject his trash. However, that didn’t happen and the university authorities should not have engaged in ad hoc censorship.

Fraser appears to be right in claiming that an academic publication in good faith is protected under the Racial Hatred Act, so the university would have to find a reason the publication was not in good faith, for example, that normal academic standards were waived in the interests of attracting controversial publicity. This seems plausible, given the recent record of Deakin Law School, but the University hasn’t made such a claim.