Jim Wright

Don't get too singed in your mid-20th century recreation of a Victorian reimagining of a defunct pagan religion that we only know of from the writings of cloistered monks recording oral histories from third generation converts and modified to fit into medieval Catholic philosophy.

But do go outside and get naked and do naked things with other naked people and mosquitoes.

...and Fascinet will be with you in the morning, with apple pancakes and bacon doughnuts.

Fascinet be with you.

1. A Barbarian, A Merchant, and a Trickster God* walk into a Bar.
- I remember writing this chapter.

2. - N-1. Connecting Chapters
- I'm thinking the merchant has to make a circle: City to River to Another City and Back
- 1- N-1 (3,4?) should get rid of Barbarian and Trickster*
- Action-packed barge-building chapter.

N. Thrilling description of medieval grain haggling. As the grain barge leaves a town, the barbarian, carrying a princess* and the crown jewels* and chased by the , jumps on.

N+1. Barbarian's story about stealing jewels* and kidnapping princess*.
- Barbarian is fishing while telling the story.
- Makes princess* clean them.
-- "I'm a princess, not a 'wench.' I don't know anything about cleaning a fish."
-- "Cut from the back to the front, pull out the guts. Then, scale it."
-- "Princesses don't scale fish!"
-- "Just told you how. You're the smartest princess in the kingdom."
--
-- ... story ...
--
-- The barbarian absent-mindedly caught the fish head as the princess* tried to toss it overboard. "Don't waste that. Makes good soup."
--
-- ... story ...
--


N+2. Tense barge chase scene. Barbarian abandons princess* and keeps jewels.* Trickster* boards barge.

N+3. Trickster's story about swapping the real jewels before the Barbarian gets there and sleeping with the real princess while the Barbarian kidnaps a lower-ranking princess.
- Trickster sends real jewels back with princess*.

.
.
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[[ too adversarial. needs to focus on saying "the institutions of science need to be aligned towards the classical ideas of science, otherwise (like now) it will fail pathologically. ]]

The cartoons version of science I've talked through are fairly simple. A scientist looks at something unexplained and comes up with an explanation for it. Maybe at this point he tests his theory with an experiment, maybe his friend the experimentalist does it. If the test comes out positive, the theory is verified. Maybe verification means nothing, though. There might be situations where one test is verified, but some unthought of implication would fail an experimental test. So, maybe a theory is well formulated if it can be falsified, and so passing a test just means that it hasn't been removed from consideration. But after enough tests, that becomes pretty strong. But all creditable theories about how science work in some way see theories and experiments producing together an irresistible cycle that leads inevitably to better and better understanding of nature.

There is an interaction between human creativity as formulated with mathematics and the physical world as revealed by experiments, and it is the scientists themselves who are the guardians of science. Science succeeds or fails depending on the moral character of the scientists. And the scientists are always seen as skilled, imaginative, and most importantly, moral.

Imagination creates theories, and nature washes away all but the sturdiest.

These are good stories, and they work well as long as scientists happen to exist in this sort of cycle in their research lives. This is the Science Unicorn. But scientists aren't perfectly skilled, uniquely imaginative, or selflessly moral. A theory of how science works must include why science fails as well as why it works. This will tell us how science must be structured so that it will keep working as well as it has, and maybe to get parts of the scientific enterprise working better for us than they currently do.¹ It will also tell us when scientists should be believed and when they are likely to be serving some non-scientific objective. There is no guarantee of future progress in science.

I'm basing this off of Michael Munger's "Unicorn Governance," where he characterizes the way most people think of "The State" as the way the government would work if it was made up of perfect people who are perfectly prepared and whose daily and career incentives were perfectly aligned with improving the welfare of all its citizens. Neither of which is true. What I would like to do here is to look at one particular field of physics and show how it deviates from the ideal of science and speculate on why it does. This will hopefully show when science works and when it does not.

The particular case is string theory. I know it gets a lot of flack, much of it undeserved. But it does deserve some of it, and I want to talk about both the good and the bad. And from that, I will try to show both why a scientific theory succeeds or fails at describing the world and how it successfully propagates itself.

And why those two things are in conflict.

String theory has a long history. It was initially devised to describe the inner workings of the nucleus, the strong nuclear force. We now derive the strong force from a quantum field theory called quantum chromodynamics, but string theory kept going, repurposed for a new problem: the theory of everything. String theory purported to be able to integrate all of the fundamental particles and all of the fundamental forces of the standard model of particle physics with the geometric theory of space and time called general relativity, the modern theory of gravity, into a single, elegant overarching system. Vibrations of multidimensional particles are described by a differential equation reminiscent of the vibrations on a string. When certain constants have compatible values, the normal modes are associated with the fundamental particles. This has been the leading candidate for a theory of everything for four decades, and because of that, a leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity.

Sounds pretty good.

What is the reason for string theory's success? It is not that it has shown itself to fit the known facts. It is a highly underdetermined theory. Each of the ten (or twenty-seven) dimensions needs to be quantified in importance, a number to be associated with each one. Any particular set of these numbers is "a string theory." And only some sets of these numbers are consistent, only some of these numbers create a stable world. And those few do not necessarily describe our world, having only the particles we have, no more and no less.


However, there is a huge number of consistent string theories, which means that string theory alone is not verifiable.

Instead, string theory ascribes to experiments the subordinate role of searching through the possible values of these constants -- however you can do that experimentally.

Perhaps string theory can be falsified en bloc, instead. String theory has made many predictions of new particles. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was a European megaproject that was expected to find them. It did not. But, string theorists do not regard this as falsification. Experiment is subordinate to theory, it's job is to find the constants that show us which string theory is right, not to tell us whether it is correct.

Someone intelligent enough to understand string theory, unfortunately, is clever enough to explain away the data and call for a new, larger, more powerful, more expensive experiment to find them.

If string theory has not been successful in some of the best cartoons for science provided to us by some of the best philosophers, why has it been so successful academically? It has been fecund. There was a lot of work to do in string theory. Math had to be made. Results had to be interpreted. Spaces needed to be explored. This provided plenty of work for physicists and mathematicians, and even if string theory is eventually shown to be wrong, much of the edifice that it has built will be useful as a resource for future researchers.

If other scientists use the results of your work, that work has been worthwhile.

String theory is successful because it is useful to physicists in their careers. It's results can be published, and published results can be used for further speculation. Which leads to more publications. And more publications means more grants, which means more money to train graduate students, and so on. In academic science, publications and grants are used as proxies for the merit of a researcher and his topics. Scientists with more publications become better known. Professors with more grants train more graduate students. This is how people get hired, turned and promoted. The more publications in better journals, the more grants for more money, the more a scientist influences science.

If a researcher does work that is easily tested but less fecund, even if he's still getting published and getting grants, he won't do as well as his colleagues, and his work will fall by the wayside.

This is why scientists are not unicorns. They follow the path that leads to jobs, promotions, and awards. String theory did not follow any of the caricatures I've talked about. Verification doesn't explain its success, paradigm shifts don't explain its success, falsification doesn't explain it success. What explains its success is that it furthers scientists' careers.

But just because a theory makes scientists academically successful doesn't mean that it reflects reality.

For science to be successful it has to reflect reality. And for the processes of science to to reflect reality, the careers of scientists need to reward scientists who follow processes similar to falsification.² As soon as that contract is broken, whether by funding agencies, P&T committees, or political actors, a field veers off from its progressive course and falls into a random walk away from its last contact with science and falls back into mysticism.






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¹ All science is working well for its practitioners. They are, in general, the winners in the current state of science.

² Still our favorite cartoon.

An interesting case comes from Poland. In the middle ages, it was more convenient to use volume for the measurement of most things than weight. Balances were costly and untrustworthy -- it is easy to shave or hollow weights to bamboozle the rubes. This was particularly true of grain, the most important trade product of the Grain was bought and sold by the bushel, but a bushel wasn't a bushel. Bushels varied from region to region. For example, a bushel of grain sold in Gdansk was just smaller than 14 1/2 gallons (54.7 liters) while the Krakow bushel was 10 gallons (37.8 liters).² Everyone in these cities used the same bushels to trade, and you can even track which villages traded with which cities by bushel size. This is not to say bushels were free of forgery and other chicanery. One of the important jobs of the local government, the lord, the mayor, the aldermen, was to procure an official bushel. These bushels were costly, made of metal and often ornate. This prevented modification or substitution, and allowed people some confidence in the measurement, and eased some of the transaction costs to trade. The farmer' own bushel baskets were less precise versions, made to store and move the grain more than to measure it precisely.

[[Calvin and Hobbes cartoon: the bushel is a unit of weight equal to four pecks."]]

There sere still disputes. Some came from how high grain was poured into the bushel. Would it be poured from the natural height of the hands against the legs, or would it be poured from shoulder height. The famer preferred the latter, the the trader or the government the former. The difference between the two methods was significant. You could get an extra bushel's for every two for oats, or four for wheat, by pouring from shoulder height. Custom often dictated how this was resolved. Traders would also buy their grain in heaped bushels, whereas they would sell in in stricken bushels. This allowed them to get around church strictures against selling for profit. But again, the methods of heaping and striking were reasons for dispute. Even the shape of the bushel

Books Read
December
67. The Tailor King, Anthony Arthur
66. Five Leaf Clover, Mark Hayden
65. Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein
64. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
63. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
November
62. Six Furlongs, Mark Hayden
61. The Hong Kong I Knew, Mark Isaac-Williams
60. Paradise Lost, Milton
59. The Fabulous Riverboat, Philip Jose Farmer
October
58. The Medieval Village Economy, Robert Townsend
57. Shadows of Sanctuary, Rober Asprin, Ed.
56. Seventh Star, Mark Hayden
September
55. The Three Theban Plays, Sophocles
54. Tales from The Vulgar Unicorn, Robert Asprin, Ed.
53. Eight Kings, Mark Hayden
52. The Nine of Wands, Mark Hayden
51. Another Fine Myth, Robert Asprin
August
50. The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, Tim Harford
49. Tenfold, Mark Hayden
48. An Introduction to Mechanics, Kleppner and Kolenkow
47. The 11th Hour, Mark Hayden
46. The Measure of Reality, Alfred W. Crosby
45. The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius
44. Evolution of the Thermometer 1572-1743, HC Bolton
July
43. The Book of Silence, Lawrence Watt-Evans
42. The Medieval Machine, Jean Gimpel
41. How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley
40. Myth Directions, Robert Asperin
39. Theogony and Works and Days, Hesiod
38. The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi
37. The Sword of Bheleu, Lawrence Watt-Evans
36. The Faerie Queene, Spenser
35. No Free Lunch, Caleb Fuller
34. The 12 Dragons of Albion, Mark Hayden
33. Seven Altars of Dusarra, Lawrence Watt-Evans
June
32. Cactus Tracks & Cowboy Philosophy, Baxter Black
31. Undecidability, Uncomputability, and Unpredictability, Aguirre, Merali, and Sloan, eds.
30. The Face of Chaos, Robert Asprin, ed.
29. In Search of Monsters to Destroy, C.J. Coyne
27. The Sicilian Mafia, Gabetta
28. The Lure of the Basilisk, Lawrence Watt-Evans
26. The 13th Witch, Mark Hayden
25. Beowulf
May
24. Liberalism, von Mises
23. She, H. Rider Haggard
22. Thebaid, Statius
21. A Fine and Pleasant Misery, Patrick McManus
APR
20. Madwand, Roger Zelazny
19. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Jan Potocki
18. Real Ponies Don't Go Oink! Patrick McManus
MAR
17. Faustus, Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
16. The Misenchanted Sword, Lawrence Watt-Evans
15. Metamorphoses, Ovid
FEB
14. Rhialto the Marvelous, Jack Vance
13. Changeling, Roger Zelazny
12. Inadequate Equilibria, Elizer Yudkowsky
11. Shalako, Louis L'Amour
JAN
10. The Telegony, D.H. Smith
9. The Changing Land, Roger Zelazny
8. The Aethiopis: Neo-Neoanalysis Reanalyzed, Malcolm Davies
7. The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, Morrison and Baldick, Eds.
6. Dilvish, The Damned, Roger Zelazny
5. Wandering Towards a Goal, Agurre, et al., Eds.
4. The Ulysses Theme, W.B. Stanford
3. Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, Akutagawa Ryuosuke
2. Will We Ever Have a Quantum Computer? Mikhail Dyakonov
1. Rules of Civility, Amor Towles


Shakespeare's Plays

Comedies		Histories		Tragedies
The Tempest MAR The Two Gentlemen of Verona APR The Merry Wives of Windsor APR Measure for Measure APR The Comedy of Errors MAY Much Ado About Nothing MAY Love's Labour's Lost MAY A Midsummer Night's Dream APR The Merchant of Venice MAR As You Like It MAR The Taming of the Shrew APR All's Well That Ends Well MAR Twelfth Night MAR The Winter's Tale MAR Pericles, Prince of TyreAPR ☠ The Two Noble Kinsmen MAY ☠		King John FEB Richard II FEB Henry IV, Part 1 MAR Henry IV, Part 2 MAR Henry V MAR Henry VI, Part 1 MAR Henry VI, Part 2 MAR Henry VI, Part 3 MAR Richard III★ FEB Henry VIII MAR Edward III ☠ FEB		Troilus and Cressida JAN Coriolanus JAN Titus Andronicus JAN Romeo and Juliet MAY Timon of Athens JAN Julius Caesar JAN Macbeth★ JAN Hamlet FEB King Lear FEB Othello★ FEB Antony and Cleopatra FEB Cymbeline FEB

★ Actually good, so probably not really written by Shakespeare.
☠ Authorship promoted to Shakespeare because literary theorists ran out of things to say.

One of the key concepts in physics, and especially macroscopic physics - is one of the most misunderstood: entropy. In the popular imagination it has something to do with disorder and chaos. In fact, "organizational entropy" is just an idea around the inefficiency of a large bureaucracy. But the physical concept of entropy has more to do with information and probability. Here, I would like to talk about entropy, information, and knowledge, and how they relate to science.

[I'm thinking this is too much stuff for 10 pages.]

( outline )

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¹ The practice in textbooks is This contrasts with normal practice, which is to number every equation so that

² And from time to time, can manage to express. There's a lot of tacit knowledge, or intuition, that experts build up in their training, and that is often difficult to relate.

³ Philosophers argue about what this knowledge thing is all the time. It's a sub-field called "epistemology," and it makes no sense.

⁴ Monotonic: a measure is monotonic if it always gets larger as its parameter does. That is f(x) is monotonic means that when y > x, then f(y) > f(x).

⁵ Shannon, C.E., "A Mathematical Theory of Communication I." The Bell System Technical Journal" 27 379 (1948). Shannon, C.E., "A Mathematical Theory of Communication I." The Bell System Technical Journal" 27 623 (1948).


Hayek, F., "The Use of Knowledge in Society." AER . [Critique.]

So far, I have talked about the development of government as a natural outgrowth of voluntary structures similar to mafia. As a population grows beyond the point where individuals can individually keep track of everyone else's reputation, people will become circumspect in trading with strangers. They need a broker, a go-between, who specializes in keeping track of reputations, and who has the ability to punish those that fail to keep their end of a bargain. After this, I looked at just such a sprouting quasi-government in large U.S. prisons. When prison populations were low, the prisoners found that a combination of reputation and vigilantism were sufficient to keep their stays as comfortable as possible. Then, when populations get large, this order breaks down, and prisoners suffer. In order to keep themselves safe, prisoners form mutual protection societies, the costs of which are that trades happen in-group (in fact, contact with the out-group is considered suspicious) and that sometimes they'll be called upon to do something for the group (especially those whose reputation is low). One thing I liked about these considerations is that they are spontaneous: people accede to structure in order to obtain benefits that are commensurate with their costs.

However, I do feel that this does not solve the magic problem in the anthropology of the state. That is, it still has the same magic feeling that it always did when I listened to archaeologists talk about state formation. "There were some greedy people who wanted power. They raped, they murdered, and then said, 'Worship me.' And everyone did." Something is missing. Especially in that it requires smaller groups of people to be able to spontaneously oppress larger groups, and to hold on to power for generations. In the last post, I went through the official list, showing that anthropology has not advanced. The theory of state formation is still making its magic pronouncements. Here, I'd like to look at two or three more cases: Ancient Rome and Sicily, and maybe lobsters.³


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³ Did I already do lobsters?

Last time, I discussed how the evolution of government could have been organized like gangs due to the need for brokers when populations got too large for people to trust each other in trades. This is in no way to assume that they would not provide other services. This isn't a particularly effective government, since the brokers, too, have limited capacity to provide services to the public -- furthermore, they don't want one. In order to have trusted providers, there must be untrusted ones.¹ Being in the in-group is most valuable when there is an out-group.

So, there will be multiple gangs over a territory, there will be multiple brokers. That's one reason why there's magic in this explanation: why would a group who makes money by providing selective services move to providing general services?

( Rant, Part 3 )----------

¹ Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia
² I'm summarizing Box 28.1, pp.493-3 from Ames, "The Archaeology of Rank." You might notice where it gets me annoyed. But it's not Ames who is getting me annoyed. I think he's done a very good job of summarizing the state of the art in the formation of elites and governments. But, state of the art anthropology isn't very good. It needs some VC's to swoop in, monetize the field, and rend the meat from its bones.
³ This cannot be true. Everyone knows stress is a tensor.
⁴ This is an absolutely unfair editorial translation on my part.
⁵ This was started on the day I did the other two. I think it's only three weeks to write three paragraphs. Such efficiency.

In order to get an idea about what this government thing is, I'd like to talk about why we need a state by taking a guess at why it happened, using the context of horse trading, prison life, and farming. Hopefully, this will be enough to explain why it never went away. This will probably not do what I intended it to do, and it may take several parts, but it is mainly to get this typed out so that I can adapt it for the physics and politics class.

( Rant, Part 1 )

¹ The story of the Neapolitan coachman and his "dead" horse is quoted in Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia (1993) from a 19th century Italian source. His name was not given.

^? It should be possible to incorporate: George A. Akerlof, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism." The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 84, No. 3. (Aug., 1970), pp. 488-500.