Thiel-Kasparov debates

If you have 52 minutes, you may want to watch this video full of intelligent enough debates between the renowned chess player Garry Kasparov (a chronic world ex-champion and a sort of a political activist in Russia) and the renowned venture capitalist Peter Thiel (the founder of PayPal, the first major Facebook investor, a libertarian, and the supporter of world-changing projects, especially by college dropouts):



Video posted via Kasparov's YouTube channel

The topics include Google and its vision for the world, the replacement of humans by machines, the bad consequences of any looming nuclear war, politics in Russia, simultaneous chess games (in which Kasparov hasn't lost since 2001; Thiel is a very good player as well, he was surely strong enough in Nice a few years ago to beat your humble correspondent pretty much "reliably" back in Nice – but my chess scalp is surely not a source of pride for anyone who actually plays the game regularly).




They should have co-authored a book, The Blueprint, but the project has apparently been canceled. Maybe it was just delayed and renamed to The World of Fake Values where they argue that despite the widespread opinions, the world is switching to a slow development of technologies (Kasparov's words around 4:00 sound like an anti-singularity theme...). But maybe the comments about that other books are also obsolete and the book under this title was cancelled, too.




I am interested in your reactions to their ideas. This blog entry was later updated and extended.

At the beginning, Kasparov praises Thiel's intelligence and the breadth of his interests. I must confirm that. He was listening and meaningfully commenting on my remarks about particle physics and e.g. the discoveries that the LHC was or wasn't going to make back in 2010. And that was just a minor interest relatively to biology and evolution (or the lack of it) that he knows a great deal about – partly because he used to study it somewhere, or something like that. He also followed the climate debate (Richard Lindzen was the main speaker about this topic).

Around 3:30, Thiel betrays that it's really a program for Germans and he was born in Germany – he speaks German for a while. (Update: At the end, I learned that it was aired on ZDF, the Second German Public TV Channel, in 2010.)

At 5:00 or so, Kasparov says he had visited Google some weeks ago. It was about Deep Blue and computerized chess. Kasparov thinks that brute force "solved" the problem of computers playing chess well. Well, it's not a fully solved game, I would add, but the computers got better than the humans.

The discussion switches to the question whether machines or machine-human combinations are better and why. Thiel says that the Google ideology says that the computers will replace humans in 20 years. Technology advocates don't like to speak about the failures of technology, Thiel adds. To question a technology has become the greatest heresy, he thinks.

The next topic around 9:00 is whether politicians are smarter people, what they want to spend the money on, and whether Obama is a socialist. In an elevator, near 9:30, we learn that Kasparov isn't optimistic about too many things. Perhaps about the ability to convince the people to look for new ideas. Robots (and ancient ones; and some robots with GPS and cameras) showed by a guy. Another robot chap says that robot got faster and they're asked about the dates when robots will do certain things.

At 12:40, a 2010 Oslo talk by Thiel is shown, saying that technology may be used both for freedom and against it. We shouldn't be utopian about technology. Instead, it's important for us to use it, use it as the first ones, and use it now. At 13:10, Kasparov laughs as he describes the Internet just as a by-product of some work at CERN. Kasparov argues that except for speeds, iPads etc. can't do anything that PCs couldn't do 25 years ago. ;-) It sounds a bit exaggerated to me but I surely agree that the science-fiction novels written half a century ago were more optimistic about the speed of the robotic progress than the present reality. 40 years after Nixon's great words, we still don't have a cure for cancer. We're 40 years closer to the solution, however. ;-) Thiel adds that no one believes that the cure will come in 5 years. (I am actually ambivalent.)

15:50 – some fancy cars I've been in, too. ;-) 16:40 – chess was a good benchmark to measure the computers' progress because it has wisdom. Well, I surely disagree with that proposition. Chess has always been clearly just a particular game that is being won by brute force and the progress in the algorithms etc. was pretty much guaranteed to be just a gradual evolution, not a result of revolutions. There are other, deeper tasks that do require qualitative breakthroughs to be mastered by machines. BTW we're told that over a million of games a day is played via the Internet. At 18:00, they visit a chess club. A minute later, Kasparov doesn't want to play Thiel – it sounds like he doesn't want to crush Thiel but I am not sure whether he realizes that Thiel wouldn't necessarily be hopeless. ;-) Finally, Thiel plays a speedy game against the chess club manager. Thiel (white) doesn't accept draw at some moment. However, it seems he loses at the end and Kasparov is telling him what he should have played differently. Maurice Ashley, a British chess grandmaster, appears.

In the car, 25:40, Thiel says that when he's facing stronger players, he feels that the doom is coming gradually. Kasparov is skeptical and suggests that it depends on the strength of the opponent ;-) (he clearly wants to say that if Thiel played against Kasparov, Kasparov would destroy him rapidly, after a single move that turns out bad). Kasparov mentions his insane record in the simultaneous exhibitions (20-30 opponents at the same moment): no loss since 2001. Kasparov modestly tells us that he just has the stamina to walk around, keep pressure, and the 20-30 enemies just collapse. ;-)

At 28:00, they enter the Empire State Building. It sounds like I have been to the top more often than Thiel. :-) Kasparov boasts he knows the date of the construction. Thiel says that the inability to build a new World Trade Center for 9 years is a bigger failure than 9/11; this suggests that the video is from 2010, at least this part of it. Kasparov talks about some craziness in Russian politics. Kasparov said that the opposition wasn't important, the internal fights under the surface are more important, and young people massively want to flee Russia. Anywhere. Older folks are upset. A general degradation of the country follows.

They visit a human rights activist (in the Human Rights Foundation). He says things are getting worse. That's why they exist etc. Kasparov says that the West doesn't want to interfere, another problem. Thiel mentions a correlation between human rights and the economics (I mostly agree – after all, the human rights are a luxury that the wealthier ones are more likely to afford) – and a country with some ten-to-fourty inflation. The host prepared about 10 different coffees for Kasparov, all kinds – a repayment of the same debt. They discuss the immense inefficiency of the U.N. and lame excuses why it's inefficient (12 languages: but Marriott etc. can do these things profitably, anyway). Thiel says that in 20 years, the iconic status of the U.N. evaporated. The host partly disagrees – some people worship the U.N. – but he says that the U.N. isn't helpful. What should we do, the host asks? Shout loud, Kasparov suggests. Both famous guys propose technological progress as a solution to make the good guys and nations more influential. I am not sure it's this straightforward.

The host says that the human rights fight has become bureaucratized and therefore unappealing for the young; it is mostly a business for old folks in suits who talk in the U.N. The foundation wants to change it. They want to bring in Thiel and his technology and Kasparov and his brain that defeated the IBM computer – and the host believes that he did. ;-) Thiel is frustrated mostly by places that are screwed for a very long time. The host says that we're "racists of low expectations" who think that Haiti won't achieve much which is why we're not holding them accountable. Nice but your humble correspondent of course adds that it's the rational attitude because the expectations aren't just pulled from the air. They are built on lots of hard data that probably won't go away and it would be foolish to think that they may be ignored and the countries may be suddenly totally different than they are. The host says that every country may switch from liberal democracy to dictatorship in a decade. Well, yes, but certain other key things – that also determine the potential to return to liberal democracy – won't really deteriorate this quickly. Kasparov says that democracy has become just a word that may cover terrible atrocities, too. It may but it is a valuable arrangement by itself, one that increases the nations' chances to be decent, too. The host gives the Russian skateboard to Kasparov and the Chinese (?) skateboard to Thiel. Kasparov asks why Thiel received the Chinese ones, the answer is incoherent, but Thiel doesn't get offended easily. ;-)

41:30 – skateboards loaded to the cars. How will it end, Thiel asks? Growth etc. is the only optimistic scenario. For Kasparov, Martians' landing is more likely. Huh? Various degrees of recession and depression are discussed along with the world war (I was never into these doomsday scenarios much). Another bad outcome is a move to the left: governments confiscate the wealth everywhere. If the money doesn't have any value, the system doesn't work. I think these are sort of weird conspiracy theories. Money had an important value even in the communist world. You just can't suppress such basic parts of the human nature and the life of societies.

44:20 – dinner. Peter: a moment for classical liberalism to return. (Klaus is perhaps returning to top Czech politics, as a savior.) Kasparov talks about Buffett who predicts America's fall (China is next). Thiel points out that Buffett is all about avoiding the technology completely. Even on Mars, people will eat candy bars. ;-) Regardless of China, Thiel feels that you can only do decent things in the U.S. Kasparov says that Obama et al. don't care about technologies. Obama is just the community organizer, not a leader. Thiel says that they're not focusing on important things. Kasparov says that they can't even identify them. Thiel idealistically says that technology is "doing more with less" (austerity is "less with less", printing is "more with more"). Food arrives. Worries about propagation of nuclear weapons. Thiel thinks that the risk is underestimated. Kasparov points out that nations value life differently. Dictatorships are powerful because of fossil fuels etc., if the dependence on them is reduced, things get better. Well, I think that he contradicts his previous comments. A reduced dependence on fossil fuels will make the fossil-fuel-producing countries poorer and therefore even more screwed. Thiel asks what makes Kasparov continue while being pessimistic about most day-to-day issues. Kasparov is a born optimist, we hear. There will be too many questions and a few people who will give answers.

End of dinner, good bye, it was fun.

Read More

Some hysteria about Czech politics in the media

The Czech media hype some articles, especially in the German-speaking media such as Die Presse, as evidence that everyone thinks that we have become a banana republic. The president has become a king, we're becoming a Putin-style democracy, and so on. A new Bloomberg article talks about a paralysis and other dramatic words.

I just don't understand what they're talking about. What happened?




Recall that in June, plasma physicist Petr Nečas' center-right government was forced to resign after a bizarre police raid against various powerful people who were linked to the (then) prime minister's secretary and sweetheart, Ms Jana Nagyová.

The three cases "addressed" on the same day had almost nothing to do with each other and they had totally different degrees of severity and plausibility. One of them was that Ms Nagyová succeeded in ordering some units of the military intelligence to look for discrediting materials about Nečas' ex-wife (they were divorced 2 days ago from now). The second one was an accusation against some rich folks in Prague who may have been linked to politics and may have bribed someone or befriend someone but why they think that something serious has happened and what it was remains unknown. Third, three rebel deputies of the center-right party who allowed the government to survive in late 2012 – even though the government insisted that its fate was linked to a non-right-wing plan to increase the value-added tax which the three rebels rightfully disliked – were claimed to be corrupt because they were offered some jobs controlled by Nečas if they leave the Parliament. Ordinary political deals were criminalized.

At any rate, the Nečas government is gone and the constitution says that it's the president who may appoint anyone as the new prime minister.




Mr Miloš Zeman, a self-described leftist who is more right-wing than many right-wingers, was elected the new president and Václav Klaus' successor in early 2013, after a decade he spent in the countryside as a modest pensioner. He has always been a political heavyweight and in some contexts in the 1990s and the following decade, he was almost a full-fledged Klaus counterpart on the left side.

He appointed Mr Rusnok, an ally and an economist who left the social democracy because it was too populist for him a few years ago. He also had clashes with the left-wing party a decade ago when he decided to support Klaus as a candidate for the president instead of the assorted losers, 2nd league politicians, and non-politicians who were officially running as candidates of the social democratic party. Recently, Rusnok was working in some private pension insurance industry.

It was important to realize that the government appointed by the president starts to govern and it is only replaced once another government is named by the president. This is not really a bug of the constitution; I have always believed that this was a deliberate solution to avoid various government-less crises. At any rate, Rusnok's government didn't win the confidence vote yesterday as it only got 93 out of 200 votes – only a few votes were missing. The result was "no" but it wasn't a debacle Rusnok would have to be ashamed of.

Strangely enough, Zeman succeeded in convincing the social democracy (along with the communists and the Public Affairs, the right-wing populist party that used to be the smallest part of the right-wing coalition but it betrayed so that only its smaller leftover, now defunct LIDEM, remained the only member of the center-right coalition) that they should support the government so they did while the fired center-right coalition essentially voted against the government (with the exception of two new rebels; I would probably be a rebel as well if I were an ODS deputy these days). This polarization is already a bit illogical and shows that Zeman celebrates successes in overtaking the social democratic party he lost a decade ago. Mr Sobotka, an annoying leftist and the current chairman, planned not to support the technocratic government but Zeman and his allies in the party ultimately won. As far as I can say, it's a great news if the social democratic party is returning from the obnoxious true i.e. hateful leftists to more sensible and pragmatic folks close to Zeman. I surely prefer a social democratic whose election doesn't look like a catastrophe to me – Zeman's ČSSD obeys this condition while Sobotka's ČSSD may not.

At any rate, Rusnok's government will govern despite the lack of confidence because this is what the constitution says. The president is expected to search for a "new attempt" after such a no-confidence vote but there's really no constitutionally enforced deadline so he can keep Rusnok in his job for months or a year and at least so far, it could be good if he were there until the regular 2014 elections. (The early elections may arrive as early as October 2013, too. It would sound a bit scary to me.) It would help the right-wing parties to score better in the elections, too, because every government is unpopular and Rusnok's government would undoubtedly be marketed as a left-wing one even if it were not. ;-) And yes, there exist aspects in which I prefer weak centrist governments even over right-wing ones because they screw even less things than the nominally right-wing governments – the less government, the better.

None of these developments should have been unexpected. For years, people like Klaus (or myself) would say that the direct presidential elections don't mean any "increase of democracy". It mainly means that some political power groups (including the media – that were not too successful in this case, thank God) decide about the result of such elections and the resulting president will feel much stronger than the presidents chosen by the Parliament.

I think that it wasn't a great idea to switch to presidential elections. But I don't think it was such a catastrophe, either – at least given the fact that Zeman was the winner at the end. So needless to say, I immediately adapted to the direct presidential system. It gives more power to the president. He feels more self-confident. But if he's better than other political forces, it may be a better setup. Every sensible system of rules may work. I used to care whether majority or proportional systems were better, and so on, but I tend to think that these obsessions were childish. It doesn't really matter in average.

The hysteria about the new arrangement is incomprehensible to me. For example, someone says that we're switching to a Putin-like system. Maybe. But we're also getting closer to the American or French presidential systems. Obama was also directly elected, is powerful, and is often able to deal with the Congress as if he were equally strong or stronger. It's interesting that the critics of the current setup never mention the American analogy.

Bloomberg chose a dramatic headline,

Czech Paralysis Extends as President Zeman Seizes Spotlight.

You know, having a technocratic government in resignation isn't supposed to be – and isn't - paralysis. It's business as (almost) usual. There is a government. It enjoys some political support because it was appointed by the president who was elected by the people. This government is doing some usual work (they promise not to do too radical things). And a government that would also enjoy the support of the Parliament is being looked for, at an undefined timescale. Hysterical words such as "paralysis" are totally inappropriate. If the authors of the constitution thought that a no-confidence vote for the government automatically implies a paralysis, they would make sure that this doesn't happen. ;-)

So the direct presidential elections have surely made the president more powerful, just like some of us were predicting, but this doesn't imply any catastrophe.

The first paragraph of the Bloomberg article says:

The Czech Republic’s political deadlock was extended yesterday as President Milos Zeman’s defiance of lawmakers threatens to hamper the country’s ability to tackle its longest economic slump on record.

This is complete bullshit. Virtually no politicians – or journalists – are talking about an "economic slump". We have just gone through some quarters in which the growth was around minus one percent. There's no law of physics saying that the growth has to be positive every year. It's just not, OK? The economy sometimes goes down for a while, too. And it's not always the government's fault much like the growth of the economy isn't always the government's success. You ate or drank too much last night, got bills to pay. So today, your head just feels in pain, you miss Ed dhe bus, and your productivity and consumption goes down. It sometimes happens and it has nothing to do with the government's recent actions.

It's just completely irrational to get obsessed about two or three quarters with a negative growth of order one percent (annualized) if not smaller, something that no one can really detect. The negative growth reflects the reality in the world economy – we're heavily connected to the global economy – at least that's the impression I am getting. It's great that no one in the Czech Republic is getting obsessed about fractions of a percent of the GDP numbers. And it's great that no politicians are obsessed about it, either.

Some nations' politicians will do anything to make these GDP numbers positive. In most cases, this obsession resembles a 40-year-old lady who will buy an arbitrarily expensive make-up to boast skin that looks like the skin of a 15-year-old girl. It's just stupid. It's a denial of reality and whoever doesn't see that it's just a stupid game is being had. And if this growth is just being bought for the increased public debt i.e. by increasing the deficit, it's even more stupid than in the lady's purchase of the makeup. One should really talk about the GDP minus the budget deficit so that these ways to mask negative growth by buying makeup and piling debt would be discouraged because they would be rendered futile.

The growth will undoubtedly return to the Czech economy but I think it's a sign of communist thinking if someone assumes that the timing of this revived growth primarily depends on the top politicians' decisions. I am happy that most Czech commentators and politicians share this viewpoint of mine – most of the growth issues are due to internal dynamics in the economy, not due to some political puppets. Politicians may quickly influence the makeup-like numbers on the surface only (including funny games to move a billion from one coffer to another), not the real state of the economy. Yes, Czech politicians and media talk much more frequently about the goal to reduce and keep the budget deficit below 3% of the GDP – very likely to be the case in this year – than about the hysterical "slumps in the economy".

Bloomberg adds:

The showdown with lawmakers came to a head when technocrat Prime Minister Jiri Rusnok lost a confidence vote. His nomination by Zeman in June without parliamentary backing was an unprecedented snub to parties.

Well, it's not the first time when a government lost a confidence vote. So it's wrong to say that this main outcome is unprecedented. In this case, Zeman could have expected that the Rusnok government wouldn't win the confidence vote. But it was a speculation because the results of votes are never quite known in advance. So there's nothing unprecedented about this issue, either.

The country may now face a snap vote as its increasingly fractured politics remain in crisis.

I would like to know how the bit whether "politics is in crisis" was quantified. Where does this claim come from? What is it supported by? What I see is lots of people who have no idea about the art of politics and who are emitting similar negative statements about the Czech democracy – and other democracies. What I am seeing isn't any politics in crisis. It's business as usual that follows the basic rules described by the constitution. In democracy – or other parts of the real world society, for that matter – it's just not determined in advance what will happen with a government, a parliament, a political program, or other things. It depends on the dynamics of the politics and the ability of the politicians (professional representatives of various groups' interests, philosophies, and values) to pick the right "moves" that will allow them to win certain political battles. In my opinion, people who hate this very dynamical face of the democratic politics are fascists. They are waiting for a new Hitler who will make the world simple, predictable, and not at all "fractured" again. Thank you, I just don't want that. I want politics to be allowed to be fractured. I want politicians to be able to achieve unexpected outcomes as long as the law is respected in the process. I want the deputies to have a de facto and de iure right to disagree with the majority of their partisan clubs – if they were just homogenized screws doing the same thing that a leader orders, they wouldn't have to be there at all. Counting them in advance would be enough.

The Czech government was borrowing the local currency for 1.48% in June and 2.25% today, below the yields of the U.S. treasuries, and the Czech economy remains at the highest GDP-per-capita level except for a slightly stronger Slovenia among the post-socialist countries so I think that these numbers suggest that the markets don't think that some catastrophe is being prepared. The Czech koruna has been stable for years (after many years of fast appreciation) and strengthened by 0.5% or so today, too. But these are not the events and numbers that the Bloomberg writers would care about.

Read More

CATO: against all public funding of science

Terence Kealey, a clinical biochemist at a private university (of Buckingham), wrote the lead essay for the new issue of the libertarian CATO Institute's magazine,

The Case against Public Science (CATO Unbound)

His text is deeply provocative yet insightful but ultimately wrong at many levels. While I have enough libertarian DNA in my blood so that I can imagine a better, more efficient world in which there is no public funding of science, I am also conservative enough to appreciate that the complete abolition of the public funding of science would represent a dramatic revolution and I am against such revolutions unless their positive impact is supported by really solid arguments.

In his interesting essay, Kealey overlooks many important things and makes implausible statements about others. So let's start to ask: Why is the taxpayer paying for the science?




Kealey sketches the arguments rather nicely. It is being said that scientific research brings benefits to the whole society but the discoveries are being almost instantly copied and used by everyone else – the ideas may be (and should be) easily "stolen" – which is why individual sponsors wouldn't be motivated to pay for the research and the governments should overtake and play their role instead.




He traces the history of the public funding of science to 1605 when Francis Bacon (GB) investigated why Spain was the dominant superpower at that time. He concluded that they took the wealth from the American colonies and they were discovered thanks to the scientific research which is why nations should pay for the scientific research if they want to beat Spain (which is not so hard today – apologies to Spaniards who didn't want to be announced the bad news that the 17th century has ended).

The need for the basic research is also discussed in the context of the Second World War when nuclear bombs and other devices had to be developed. Kealey later suggests that there was no link between the "great powers" status of countries and the countries' support for research and development. I beg to differ. Spain was dominant 4 centuries ago and this started his story. When Britain dominated sometime in the 19th century or so, it was also the headquarters of science (think about electromagnetism). Germany's rise to prominence in the early 20th century (1920s and 1930s, regardless of the regime) was accompanied by its leadership in science (it's no accident that the papers that established relativity and quanta were mostly written in German). And the birth of the new only superpower, the U.S., after the war also meant that the U.S. became the leader in sciences. Sometimes it's subtle to determine what is the cause and what is the consequence but the overall power status of nations has always been tightly linked to their visibility in the sciences.

Kealey finally rejects the arguments in favor of the public funding of science for two main reasons: the empirical data don't show that there is any correlation between the GDP growth and the expenditures for the scientific research; and because the fundamental assumption of the pro-public-science arguments, "copying is easy", is wrong.

Both of these reasons he uses suffer from serious flaws. Concerning the first argument, the GDP indeed shows no high-frequency correlation with the scientific expenditures and it shouldn't, for two main reasons: First, the economic impact of the research, especially basic research, arrives with a significant delay. The more basic research we consider, the longer delay we should generally expect. Some basic research isn't done for profit at all. Second, the scientific discoveries are usually spread all over the world so even whole nations that funded the science usually get no advantage that would go above the benefits shared by everyone. The nations that make the discoveries – which quickly belong to everyone – earn the prestige and other things.

Concerning the second argument, copying may be hard and expensive (every kind of work has to be paid for, not only the most spectacular work!) but the work needed to copy is clearly less valuable than the original discovery because it does depend on the original discovery. Moreover, if it were easier to discover things than to copy them, companies wouldn't ever be copying. ;-) Kealey points out that companies pay lots of money for copying but the question isn't whether the copying costs a lot but whether its value exceeds the value of the original discovery and the answer is clearly No.

But let me present my own case in favor of the public funding for science.

First, let me say that all sensible people should agree that the funding shouldn't be "arbitrarily high" and it should follow some meritocratic rules because otherwise lots of money may be wasted – the sticker "science" simply can't prevent money from being wasted. So some competition for funds is desirable and I would even say that to a large extent, it exists in the real world. Also, people should sometimes try to quantify the value of their individual findings, papers, and so on – so that the sum is equal to their salary. Imagine that you're paid just for papers and you write 5 papers in 5 years. So the value of each paper seems to be one times the annual salary. I think that if many people looked at such average papers, they would be shocked what a small pile of garbage may often cost $100,000 or so.

But these are obvious comments. For the distribution of the resources to be meaningful, there has to be an internal competition and meritocracy. Even internally, the research industry has to emulate the rules of capitalism. This is the uncontroversial part of the story, I think.

The controversial part of the story is whether the basic research community, if I unify and call it in this way, should be getting finances from the public. Three weeks ago, a friend of mine in Southern Bohemia told me the fundamental reason why scientists should be paid (and why he thinks that the salaries should be much higher than what I think):

The society should bribe the scientists so that their discoveries are more likely to be used to benefit the society and not against it.

In my opinion, this is the most natural perspective one should take to understand what's going on. You don't need to expect that average citizens will quantify and enforce some perfect justice, rewards for scientists who wouldn't be rewarded otherwise, and so on. They may be assumed to act in the usual egotist way. The reason why citizens as a group pay money to the scientists is simply to possess the results, at least partially, and to expect the scientists to feel loyal and to use the results so that the other citizens aren't harmed.

If you analyze the current situation, you will see that it's distorted relatively to a laissez faire utopia. But it's distorted in several ways and the other side of the coin is completely overlooked by Kealey.

So it's true that scientists – and sometimes unproductive scientists – are getting lots of money from the taxpayer which makes them richer than what they would otherwise be (and this also creates the annoying class of "average and subpar also scientists" who are almost entirely left-wing). But the other observation is that no scientists are "owning" or controlling the human society even though they possibly could.

Let me mention an oversimplified, not quite realistic, but not quite impossible example. The Manhattan Project could have been paid by a wealthy friend of the top physicists. They could have used it against the American nation and other nations and turn them into slaves of this group that is in possession of the nuclear weapons. The most disobedient cities or towns would be detonated away every Monday.



Yes, this story may sound like Humanist Cafe's sick dream about the Gulf of Arkansas and other "denier states" conquered by the sea level rise except that my story could have happened. Science often gives one some rather amazing powers that are sometimes expected and sometimes unexpected (I wish you lots of faith that your humble correspondent hasn't developed any string M-bomb). The development of the nuclear weapons could have been advancing in pretty much the same way as it did in the real world but if the funding flows were different, the bomb could have been used very differently, too.

That's one simple reason why ordinary citizens, even though who don't care about the scientific truth at all, contribute to the research. It's an insurance that they will be able to impose the society's laws saying that new potential discoveries won't be used against the citizens etc. The citizens are a part of the story – they have paid for some of the research – so they can also "punish" their employees, the scientists, and so on.

The idea of Richard Feynman and his friends who enslave the American nation may look extreme or unfair to you but it could have been them who decides what the word "justice" means so your opinions and feelings could have very well been irrelevant. I could say that many other "progressive" changes in our society, including the abolition of slavery, were anti-free-market in a sense because the owners had to abandon some powers that they used to enjoy. Today, we like to think that the slaveowners have never "owned" the slaves except that they did – and they could physically prove their ownership in any way you ask – and the liberation of the slaves was therefore a confiscation or nationalization much like many other cases of it.

Finally, as always, champions of pure science such as myself should emphasize that the most basic research isn't being pursued for economic profit, not even in the very long run, but due to the passion for the truth. People just want to understand how the Universe works. It's popular among the extreme free-market advocates to say that such a thing – research that seems almost obviously free of practical implications – shouldn't be funded at all.

But take it pragmatically. If the very basic research takes about 1% of the GDP, it doesn't mean that every citizen is eager to spend about 1% of her income to fund science. When it comes to the taxation, such rules don't hold in the funding of science and they don't hold for any other entries in the budget, either. It's more realistic to say that about 10% of the society is willing to pay 10% of their income for pure research. The remaining 90% would prefer to pay for other things and the tax system just averages all these amounts over whole nations.

Think about it. I am saying that 10% of the society finds it appropriate for 10% of the GDP – and their own income – to be paid for the scientific research. If you had 30 classmates, I am saying that about 3 people in your class attribute this "10% relevance" to the basic scientific research. Think about various classes you have attended and you will probably agree that it's a very realistic estimate.

Some of the people who don't want any money to be paid to the scientific research simply belong to the "aggressive part of the 90%" that doesn't want to admit that some people have different preferences than themselves. If you changed the redistribution of the tax revenue so that everyone would decide where his money goes, you would ultimately see 1% or so going to basic science, anyway. It's the percentage that the society as a whole finds reasonable and so do I, we could say. If your ideas about the "right funding for science" is much lower than 1%, for example zero, that's fine but you and your soulmates are not the only people in the society. Moreover, the very same complaint could be raised against every other item in the government's budget – warfare and law enforcement, construction of infrastructure, education, unemployment support, anything else.

These are some of the reasons why I am no fan of the utopias such as "abolish all public funding for science". While it's clear that the existing system of the funding of research is extremely far from the principles of the free markets, the society would reorganize itself in such a way that the net funding would be roughly similar even in a free-market-based setup. Moreover, I believe that the general "abolish all public funding for science" is driven by some general negative sentiments against scientists and science itself and not by solid free-market-based or economic arguments. This observation is also supported by the fact that Kealey and his soulmates overlook the powers that the discoverers have given up even though they didn't need to do so.

Via Preposterous Universe

Incidentally, Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler primarily discuss a smaller topic, the stopped NSF funding for political science. I think it's right to stop it; it's not a science foundation's business to fund political science which isn't really a science. It should only fund research that may be agreed to be impartial in the scientific sense and political science just isn't an example. It would be great if the funding for various professional women's and professional blacks' departments could be slashed, too.

Read More

Detroit declares bankruptcy

...but the distortion of the markets continues...

Detroit declared bankruptcy according to the Chapter 9 of the federal law. You may see what it probably means for the city and the bondholders and others. We are talking about the "city proper" only – with 700,000 people, it's the 18th largest U.S. city (but the population was 2 million just decades ago). The metropolitan area hosts about 5 million people and is largely unaffected.



A century ago or so, Detroit was the leader of innovation in the same way as Silicon Valley is today (or at least was several years ago) after Henry Ford would ignite his automobile revolution in the city just decades earlier.

Some popular music was born there – the company Motown (standing for motor town) was founded in 1959. Still, the bankruptcy is no surprise for me because a neighbor on a flight 7 years ago or so has explained to me the ghost-town character of the contemporary Detroit in quite some detail – an hour of zir monologue. Ze told me about the empty skyscrapers and other sad things – I couldn't avoid thoughts about the deathbed of the industrial superiority.

What was going wrong?




First of all, it's clear that Detroit has always heavily depended on the heavy industry which ceased to be the "ultimate core" of the technological progress at some point, perhaps 50 years ago, perhaps more recently. It was destined to shrink a little bit and indeed, the population in Detroit proper dropped to 1/3 of its peak value a few decades ago and returned to the pre-automotive-boom levels of 1910.




Detroit started to be ugly some years ago and people began to move to the suburbs. That turned a specific feature of American cities against the interests of Detroit proper. Unlike the cities in our good old Europe, cities in America are fragmented and what would be called neighborhoods and parts of a big city by us the Europeans are independent municipal entities. So the suburbs were getting the taxes from the former inhabitants of Detroit proper while Detroit proper was in trouble.

I always found it a bit crazy that Cambridge "isn't" a part of Boston, not to mention hundreds of similar examples. You just cross the bridge, much like you cross the Charles Bridge in Prague, and you find yourself in another famous city. It just sounds weird. Most of the time, this would be just an unusual geographic convention that doesn't affect anything. But when it comes to bankruptcies, such conventions do matter.

It seems to me that America should start to abandon this model of separate cities that share a living room, nevertheless. If the people may easily move from one part of the "bigger city" to another and if many of them actually commute every day in between several "small cities" that share the public transportation and other things, it's just crazy that they don't share the public finances as well. Boston should administratively merge with Cambridge and all the other towns of Greater Boston, and similarly in every other U.S. city.

Fine. Back to the reality. The bankruptcy is here and because it means a "reboot", it's a good news for Detroit. If there's a city that needs to be "rebooted", it's Detroit.

I believe that the worsening of the finances and viability of Detroit was helped by some distortions of the markets, unrealistic expectations about the prices, and so on. In particular, I do find it crazy if a skyscraper is empty for several years. If you can't find people who will rent the offices in your building etc., it just means that you must lower the price. It seems to me that some folks were trying to prevent the inevitable gradual decrease of Detroit's importance which is why the discontinuous one that will start today had to arrive.

Similarly, if a city isn't getting enough money for its public services etc., it has to shrink them. It has to reduce the number of people whom it employs and it has to lower their average salary, too. I don't know the exact budgets of the city of course but I do know the mentality of many people and it seems to me that many people were trying to deny the reality.



This is how most of our cities will look like if we fail to protect our civilization against the global warming alarmists and similar Luddite terrorists and if leftists are allowed to control a city for half a century

Now, when the bankruptcy has started, I am sort of shocked by the immensely weak rights that the Chapter 9 gives to the holders of the debt etc. Many people who hold some bonds that were considered the "safest among municipal bonds" will find themselves uninsured – which means that they will receive just a few percent of their previously impressive assets. It's hard to imagine that with this realization, the price of the municipal bonds won't drop and the yields won't go up.

Another thing that protects the bankrupt municipal borrower is the regulation that the bankrupt entity can't be forced to sell its buildings, paintings, and other assets. I find it completely insane. With such rules, "declaring bankruptcy" effectively means "a request to be forgiven the debts without any further problems". Such an arrangement not only means immense moral hazard – an invitation for other cities to follow in the footsteps of Detroit, their role model – and is very bad for the lenders but it will also make it impossible for the city to get really healed. The bad way in which the city officials were managing the city assets has certainly contributed to the bankruptcy and the bankruptcy should be a signal to realize that someone else could be a better manager.

(Of course, I failed to mention the reason that may be the main actual reason behind Detroit's collapse: the city has been entirely run by leftists including unionists since 1962, see the video above. The entitlement programs and government dependency that these stunning left-wing assholes created made the city a near equivalent to the socialist countries with their leading role of the working class. Finally, let me mention one aspect of the situation that MSM totally hide but many of you will say "I see, that's why": Detroit allowed itself to become a black ghetto with 83% of black Americans, leading a hitparade.)

These bankruptcy regulations are wrong, wrong, wrong, and they indicate that even in the U.S., even a lousy irresponsible, clumsy, unhandy bureaucrat connected with the local or global government may always rob or otherwise screw any private entity. In this sense, the difference from Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s when companies were nationalized is just a quantitative one. The institutionalized bias against the private entities is self-evident in both cases.

We will see whether at least Detroit will become a better place if the lenders have to be screwed in this insensitively arrogant way.

By the way, Microsoft switched to a (modest) profit after a loss a year ago but a top Microsoft executive already found a better business for himself and his wife: to import Czech (well, Moravian) wine to the U.S. ;-)

Read More

Summers, Yellen: candidates to replace Bernanke

Sometimes in January 2014, Ben Bernanke will leave the job of America's key central banker. The replacement is already being looked for. According to polls, current Fed vice-president Janet Yellen (picture below) and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers are the two frontrunners. Arguments in favor of both are so asymmetric that I won't try to compare them.



Needless to say, I know Larry in person and we've been on the same side of a battle for some fundamental values at Harvard so his candidacy for the most important economist's job in the world is far more interesting for me than Yellen's. Despite all complaints I could possibly find, I am obviously his supporter. At the same moment, they have a similar background – they're connected with the universities, the Clinton administration, and they're equally Jewish, too.




Alan Greenspan has made that job really influential. It's fun but I don't really think it is such a healthy fact. Ben Bernanke said something on June 20th and the markets saw the greatest drop in two years or so. One question is whether the market participants' reaction was rational. In this case, I tend to answer Yes because similar indications that the stimuli will be abandoned sooner than thought do mean that the equities are less valuable than what you thought a minute ago.




In many other cases, I believe that the investors' reactions are utterly irrational.

But even if they're rational, it's a completely different question to ask whether they're constructive for the economy. I think that prices of things – at least most of them – play a very important role because they quantify the utility and help to allocate the resources to the most profitable places – to places that ultimately bring the optimum "happiness" to the people. Prices, at least not most of the numbers encoded in the prices, shouldn't reflect the mood of a Fed official on a sunny day, his or her breakfast, or whether or not he or she says exactly what he or she means. ;-) They should also not be slaves of the stupid and ignorant investors' group think and mass hysteria but I am not sure whether the Fed officials can cure this particular disease.

I feel that central banks' policies should probably be much more automatic and prescribed than they are – mostly based on some targeting that may take inflation, GDP growth, and even market indices into account – the targeting should attempt to send some combination of these factors (not necessarily all of them) grow at a predetermined nominal rate.

Clearly, this isn't the case in the U.S. where it is normal for the Fed chief to use the argument about the "support of the economy" in rather arbitrary ways to justify whatever he or she needs to do or at least wants to do. This gives the Fed chief a lot of power and this absence of trusted targeting policies is the primordial reason why the words by the Fed chiefs (and even former Fed chiefs) have the ability to drink trillions of dollars out of the equity markets within hours, and so on.

Taking this observation as a fact, it's another question what the candidates might be expected to do, whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, and how it follows from their (claimed and real) successes and failures of the past.

The pundits obviously disagree what is good and what is bad about the actions of the candidates in the past. It's really Summers' past that ignites much more detailed discussions because Yellen hasn't done that much. She's a typical "candidate that irritates almost no one", a negative candidate who wins if the "positive candidate" who really makes people interested, namely Larry Summers in this case, collects more negative than positive votes. She's running as the non-Summers here.

I think that Summers is a very good economist although I am annoyed by some of his big-government, Keynesian, excessive-stimulus, pro-bailout, borderline arrogant socialist proclamations in recent years. However, I would still admit that the huge bailouts he participated in, however misguided, haven't caused any genuine serious problems and they have probably improved many things and protected the world economy from many unpleasant consequences. In fact, if something really bad happens now, I would find it unlikely that it could be attributed to the stimuli that peaked a few years ago.

But Summers isn't "primarily" a big-government economist for me. He's primarily an advocate of the free markets, deregulation, rational allocation of resources and services, a defender of financial institutions and their right to offer complex financial products, and many other things – and those are more important factors that turn him into a warrior on the right side. Various criticisms such as this one in Money Morning are completely misguided. I still remember him as an economist in the Clinton years (the late 1990s) in which I thought that the Democrats and Republicans were equally acceptable to me – two faces of America that always works. Needless to say, this is not how I see American politics today.

It was right and important for Summers to send a memo pointing out that the third world is heavily underpolluted which means that some comparative advantages they possess are insufficiently exploited. It was right for him to promote the dissolution of the artificial boundary between the investment banks and commercial banks. It was right for him to promote the free trade with other countries at various points. And it was also right for him to fight against too big deficits, at least some years ago when he did so. I could write many paragraphs explaining why regulation generally makes things less efficient, why arbitrary bans saying that this company can't do this or that only make it harder and less efficient but the activity ultimately materializes in some way, anyway. I could write essays about the free trade that ultimately helps everyone. I could be explaining why regulators can't be wiser than the actual players in the financial sector. But those who dislike these principles won't listen, anyway.

Also, I believe that Summers is the self-confident enough man who wouldn't be afraid to tighten the policy if it became necessary. Right now, he seems to be an outspoken supporter of quantitative easing and so on which is not hard to understand if the U.S. borrows the money just for 2 percent and something. However, if the yields substantially increased, I am confident that he would change his attitude to an anti-debt person again (although, as a Fed chief, he wouldn't say too much about the fiscal policies). And if the inflation started to run high, possibly out of control, he would quickly morph into an anti-inflation fighter.

I don't know whether those things are true for Yellen because my knowledge of her is infinitesimal. But I just think that the absence of knowledge isn't a good enough background for making someone the most powerful economist in the world so I couldn't recommend her at this moment even though she could be perfectly competent.

Read More

Larry Summers vs Stephen Hawking

Four days ago, the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz published a de facto interview with Larry Summers, the ex-president of an ex-employer of mine:

Former Harvard president Summers rebukes Hawking for boycotting Israeli conference

Note that the fastest free way to get to the article (plus 9 more articles a month) is to "register for free" and choose "Facebook".

Summers, along with Stanley Fischer (an equally Jewish ex-teacher of Summers at MIT and an outgoing governor of Bank of Israel), was recently named as the most promising candidate to replace Ben Bernanke behind the steering wheel of America's central bank. He is bullish on the U.S. (and Israeli) economy, predicting a 3% growth by the end of the year and his answers don't unambiguously prove that he would accept Bernanke's job.




But the most important part of Summers' answers to Haaretz were his opinions about Stephen Hawking's boycott of a presidential conference in Israel. It shouldn't be shocking that Summers chose to publicly react because the "president" from whom the adjective "presidential" is derived is no one else than Shimon Peres, a long-time friend of Summers'.

It's been reported that Noam Chomsky and a few comrades were behind the pressure that led Stephen Hawking to the boycott which is why Summers may want to start to bring some ethical principles back to his town, Cambridge Massachusetts, before he chastises a famous physics professor in the other Cambridge.

I know both men rather well, admire them (although, if I weren't afraid of being insulting, I could say that in recent years, Summers the economist sometimes sounds like Paul Krugman light: I actually do remember Summers the warrior against a spiralling debt rather well), have spoken to Summers many times and, have touched Stephen Hawking ;-) (although being a co-author of Andy Strominger who's been a co-author with Stephen Hawking might be counted as a more intimate path towards Stephen Hawking; no, I haven't fainted in his office yet).

The men would probably agree with one another – and with your humble correspondent – if they discussed feminism and related topics. But needless to say, Summers is right when it comes to boycotts.




Summers says that the right path towards the resolution of things that we see as offensive is a debate rather than ostracism. Academic interchange shouldn't suffer just because this suffering may be used as another tool of political pressure. Except for extreme circumstances. Right. Moreover, Summers disagrees with the idea of singling out Israel – a country that surely doesn't look like an exceptional black sheep in the context of the Middle East where brutal human right violations, chemical weapons, and beheading are on the daily schedule.

I totally sympathize with his second argument and I do agree with most of the first one, too. Well, there exist contexts in which politics and the law are "at the top" and the scientific interactions are nothing else than "examples of trade and aid" that may be uniformly banned if a rogue state could benefit from those things. On the other hand, it's very problematic if such boycotts are invented by individuals or "cliques" in separate industries such as science and it's counterproductive if interactions that may only bring people closer, and not further, and that don't represent a tangible physical threat are discouraged. After all, the freedom that our nations and their governments guarantee for researchers are among the things that make us better than some... other nations (not to mention our own nations in the Middle Ages).

Needless to say, these debates about the right way to criticize Israel are completely academic from my viewpoint because as far as I can say, a politically sensible person in Europe or America should think about the optimum ways to strengthen and extend Israel – to add "Palestine", Syria, and Lebanon to its territory as first three steps, for example – instead of thinking about ways to harass this island of relative freedom and reason in the ocean of unrestricted violence and medieval brainwashing.

Moreover, the boundary between anti-Israel proclamations and bad ol' anti-Semitism is very subtle.

I would say that anti-Zionism is just the "politically correct" label that contemporary anti-Semites (sorry, Jews, your being Jewish doesn't mean that I can't count you as elements of this set! In fact, due to some characteristic Jewish masochism, many of you are among the near-leaders of the set!) like to use for their attitudes whose beef is still the same. Also, I have carefully studied the evolution of anti-Semitism here in Central Europe of the 1930s. It did start with various selective regulations that encouraged non-Jews to treat Jews differently (less pleasantly) and the gas chambers were largely inevitable end points of this journey. This whole journey is unacceptable for me from the very beginning and I think that it's an ethical rule to treat Israel on par with any other similarly large (e.g. European) democratic country that is comparably advanced. Anything else is more or less manifest anti-Semitism.

Read More

All proofs in natural and social sciences ultimately depend on probabilities

Mel B. has sent me a link pointing to a rather incredible attack by an economics professor on the statistical methods in science that was published in the Financial Post:

Junk Science Week: Unsignificant statistics

Stephen Ziliak doesn't want to believe the existence of the Higgs boson – or any other "proof" in science that is based on the notion of statistical significance. In fact, we learn – in big fonts – that

Statistical significance is junk science, and its big piles of nonsense are spoiling the research of more than particle physicists.

Wow. It's remarkable because with this deep misunderstanding of the very key part of any rational thinking, this Gentleman can't possibly understand anything about the proper verification of theories in economics, his field, either. I would argue that because of this lethal flaw in the author's approach to rational reasoning, it is guaranteed at 5 sigma that your humble correspondent and many other physicists and scientists simply have to be better economists than Mr Ziliak, too. He just can't have a clue about the scientific approach to anything.

Statistical significance is absolutely paramount in the verification of hypotheses in all natural sciences as well as all social sciences that more or less successfully try to emulate the scientific character and success of the natural sciences.




Only in mathematics, we may construct rigorous proofs that don't need to mention any probabilities because in principle, the probability that a mathematical proof is right may be verified to be 100 percent. There's no noise and no uncertainty in a rigorous mathematical proof.

However, this "optimistic observation" has two major limitations. One of them is that mathematics doesn't directly apply to the real world. As long as mathematical concepts, theorems, and their proofs are considered rigorous, they can't be reliably and accurately identified with anything in the real world. So they tell us nothing about Nature, humans, or the society. Claims about Nature, humans, or the society simply don't belong to mathematics. They can't be absolutely certain. They can't be rigorous in the truly mathematical sense.

The second limitation is that people aren't infallible so for various reasons, even a mathematical proof has a nonzero probability to be wrong. Even if a proof is carefully verified etc., there's always a nonzero probability that the brain or the computer performed an invalid operation that led to the confirmation of a proof that is actually erroneous. The embedding of mathematicians' brains in Nature guarantees that these brains can't quite share the perfectly clean, infallible features of the idealized world of mathematics.




In natural sciences, the verification and falsification of hypotheses – and falsification in particular is the basic methodology that makes observations relevant (and observations have to be relevant for anything that we call science) – always involves measurements that have some uncertainty, a nonzero error margin, or a risk that a phenomenon is caused by different causes than those we want to search for. This is a fact: the world is simply messy and complicated. It is partly unpredictable. It is not a clean and transparent celestial sphere with perfectly spherical angels.

We may develop mathematical models and theories that are meant to match the observations and they may be free of any remarks about error margins, backgrounds, or false positives. But as soon as we do anything that remotely involves the theories' verification – and in sciences, the verification ultimately boils down to empirical verification – we simply have to acknowledge that each measured quantity has a nonzero error margin because it can't be measured quite accurately. We must acknowledge that an event that looks like a proof of some new phenomenon predicted by a theory was actually caused by a more mundane – while perhaps more rare and less likely – effect that combines the known mechanisms.

We must not only acknowledge it but we must also quantify all these things. We must know whether the error margin of a measurement is small enough so that the measurement is useful and trustworthy concerning the validity of a proposition. In the same way, we must know whether it's conceivable that the event apparently proving a new effect is actually caused by a combination of an older, less extraordinary theory combined with some reasonable amount of good luck.

For all these things, we have to quantify the probabilities.

The Higgs boson was officially discovered once the probability that the pairs of photons or Z-bosons with the right energies that really look like coming from a new, 125-126 GeV heavy particle, were so numerous that such a spike in the number of these events was very unlikely to appear without a new particle. By "very unlikely", particle physicists mean the chance "1 in 3 million", also known as "5 sigma", that the excess was a fluke that appeared in a world without a new particle.

Some disciplines of science try to be as hard and reliable as particle physics so they adopted the same 5-sigma (1 in 3 million) standard for discovery; most other disciplines, especially soft sciences such as medical research, climate science, psychology, and others, are often satisfied with 3-sigma (1 in 300) or even 2-sigma (1 in 20) evidence.

The number of sigmas determine the deviations from the null hypothesis. A null hypothesis is some simple enough explanation "without new players" that admits some controllable noise according to some calculable statistical treatment. If it predicts that a quantity \(X\) has the value \(X_0\pm \Delta X\) where the distribution is normal (and it is very often almost exactly normal, and even if it is not normal, we usually know what it looks like and we can calculate the probabilities for other distributions as well), i.e. \(C\times \exp[-(X-X_0)^2/2\Delta X^2]\) where \(C\) is chosen so that the "total probability of any possibility" equals one, then it is possible to calculate that the probability that \(X\) doesn't belong to the interval \((X_0-5\Delta,X_0+5\Delta X)\) is approximately 1 over 3 million which is so tiny that physicists are willing to take the risk and announce the discovery.

The total significance of the deviation from the Higgs-less null hypothesis is now around 10 sigma or so which makes us really sure that the Higgs-like excess isn't just a fluke. The probability that the excess is just a fluke – a collection of coincidences – is much smaller than 1 in a quadrillion. These numbers are so large because \(\exp(-x^2)\) decreases really quickly with \(x\), more quickly than exponentially, in fact.

When the discrepancy between a theory and the observation becomes this high, we may eliminate the null hypothesis (in this case, a crippled Standard Model where the Higgs is amputated). This is the process of falsification and it's the key empirically rooted procedure by which any science makes some progress in its ability to distinguish viable hypotheses from the disproved ones. To disprove a (null) hypothesis is this straightforward. On the other hand, we can never "quite prove" any detailed theory because there's always a possibility (and, with an exception of the truly final theory, pretty much certainty) that more extensive and accurate experiments in the future will falsify the latest best theory, too. Equivalently, the absence of a statistically significant (e.g. 2-sigma or 5-sigma) deviation in the latest data doesn't mean that the null hypothesis is right and will be right forever. It just means that the deviations as displayed in the performed experiments are smaller than a certain bound which implies that the current theory is "practically" correct. In the future, a discrepancy may be found in more accurate, refined, or extensive experiments that may see tinier or subtler effects than what we can see today.

One simply can't ever deduce any conclusions from the empirical data with absolute certainty. It's always important to acknowledge that an uncertainty is there. And because such an uncertainty may compromise the conclusions, it's always important (sometimes more important, sometimes less important, but never quite forgettable) to quantify the uncertainty, i.e. to know how large it is. The most invariant way of quantification is ultimately one in terms of the probability that a conclusion is invalid because an anomalous observation or a "smoking gun" wasn't really caused by the new effect whose existence we wanted to prove but rather by some good luck (or bad luck) – an amount of luck that can't be quite small (because, as we assume, the observation doesn't look like the most typical prediction of the null hypothesis) but it can't be too large (because it may still realistically happen).

All this methodology is absolutely essential for any controlled, reliable enough empirical tests of any theory or any hypothesis in any natural or social science. We may only discuss how high our certainty should be for us to authoritatively claim that our experiments or observations have established something (the requirements may depend on the context a little bit). 5-sigma is the usual standard of the hardest sciences (led by particle physics) for the discovery. It wouldn't hurt if other sciences adopted the same standards. When a dataset produces 2-sigma excesses, which still has a substantial, "1 in 20" risk of a false positive, you only need a 2.5 squared i.e. 6.25 times larger dataset to achieve a 5-sigma excess where the risk of a false positive is just "1 in 3 million". I am confident that science would be much clearer if surveys with mere 2-sigma excesses were summarized as inconclusive ones. Lots of bad and questionable results in soft sciences are caused by their low standards on how many sigmas we need. These bad apples have far-reaching consequences because many other papers try to build on these bad apples, and so on.

But if someone wants to abandon the null hypothesis testing and the notion of statistical significance in general, he is surely throwing out the baby with the bath water. He can't possibly understand how proper science is done; he couldn't have possibly done any empirical research that could be uncontroversially considered scientific. In fact, as we have often emphasized on this blog, all predictions of fundamental theories of physics ultimately have to be probabilistic (even if you remove all the technological limitations of measurement devices etc.) because quantum mechanical postulates have to be universally valid in the whole Universe and every small or large corner of it.

Mr Ziliak tries to excuse his silly remarks by some confusing assertions about the nature of particle physicists' claims about the Higgs boson. The 5-sigma excess doesn't prove the Higgs boson, he says: it could be a Prometheus particle, too. But if he's serious, he misunderstands what terminology means in physics – and science. You are free to use the name "Prometheus" for the Higgs boson; after all, many of us use many other names at various points, such as the God particle or the BEH boson (only Peter Higgs really noticed the extra bosonic excitation named after him). But while the people are free to choose their language and terminology, physics isn't about terminology. Physics is about the observable phenomena. So even if the source of the bump were Prometheus according to your terminology and your belief system, it's still empirically demonstrated that this Prometheus behaves as the Higgs boson. If it looks like a God particle, walks like a God particle, and barks like a Dog particle, then it is a God particle (if you change one Dog to God). It doesn't matter whether someone says it's a Prometheus, too.

At the beginning, the new particle was given uncertain names and it was Higgs-like because there was clearly a new particle-like effect and its properties were compatible with the properties of a Higgs boson. Later, as we were more certain and knew more accurate values of the properties, we became able to falsify the theory that the bump is caused by something that differs too much from the Standard Model Higgs boson. At this point, we have everything we need to call it the Standard Model Higgs boson. By this claim, we don't mean that the Standard Model will forever be the right and complete theory for all observations. It almost certainly won't be. But the observed properties of the Higgs boson falsify so many competing hypotheses and are so nontrivially close to the predictions of the Standard Model Higgs boson that there's no reason not to use this name for the object. So the new particle may be a Prometheus but according to the physical definition of "being a Higgs boson", it is clearly a Higgs boson, too. Physics determines whether something is a Higgs boson by its decays, rates of production, mass, and other interactions, and if those things agree with the Higgs boson's property, then the particle – whether it is God or Prometheus or anyone else – simply is a Higgs boson and attempts to claim otherwise are just artifacts of a distorted terminology, mistakes, and demagogy.

When I talked about the certainty that the LHC has observed a new particle; a new Higgs-like particle; or a Standard-Model-like Higgs boson (these phrases are increasingly accurate and increasingly strong), I only took the (almost) purely experimental data into account. Aside from these nearly direct observations, we have nearly rock-solid theoretical arguments – that I won't offer to Mr Ziliak because he isn't smart enough to understand them as even the very rudimentary concept of statistical significance is already too hard and abstract for him – that there has to be a Higgs boson with the mass or other properties that can't differ from the observed ones by more than a relatively small amount. The Standard Model (or any theory with particles including the W- and Z-bosons and others we have known for 30 years) would simply produce inconsistent predictions (such as probabilities of some high-energy collisions exceeding 100 percent) if the Higgs boson weren't there. While an experimenter may view all these arguments as biases and he should perhaps only build on what he has seen with his own eyes, other physicists are more than free (in fact, nearly obliged) to use all the available evidence to decide about the existence of the Higgs boson (as well as any other scientific question). With this additional, mathematically sophisticated evidence added to the mix, there's really no doubt that Nature contains a Standard-Model-like Higgs boson. There's no sensible doubt about millions of other scientific claims, either. But the probability that these insights are right is never quite 100 percent although it has gotten insanely close to 100 percent in very many cases.

Read More

Amazon: 3D printers below $1,200

When Howard Wolowitz bought a 3D printer to print figures of himself, Rajesh Koothrappali, Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz, and other heroes of The Big Bang Theory, he had to be chastised by Bernadette because it was her money and it was $5,000 of them.

(Incidentally, I made some research of the 1200 XT 3D modeler PRO device that appeared in the CBS sitcom and I am pretty confident that it's a renamed 3D Systems InVision XT 3D Printer.)

But an ex-president of the Harvard Funds and the famous Pirate of Prague, Viktor Kožený, a technological enthusiast who has just gotten access to $22 million of dollars from his (mother's) cottage in Aspen, Colorado but who became a target of a new execution in Czechia at the same moment (he once offered me to become a shadow minister of education which I kindly refused), recommended me to check the rather new 3D Printers Category at amazon.com and I was kind of impressed how accessible those things have become.




The FlashForge 3D printer is available for $1,199. This price can't be approximated by infinity too well. It's an accessible price, I would say. And the reviews look really encouraging, averaging at 4.7/5.0 stars.




The Afinia printer for $1,599 is often claimed to be used by professionals who say that it works perfectly - and it's a professional quality printer. Top software included. Alternatively, you may check some free software right now.



Afinia 3D printer is printing a Klein bottle, a closed non-orientable manifold with Euler characteristic \(\chi=0\). Sped up to 1 minute. See a 3-minute presentation of a bigger 3D printer.

Does any TRF reader have real-world experience with 3D printing? If you do, what have you used the gadget for? If you don't, what are your dreams what you could print if you had one? Has someone studied the details of the technology, how it actually works?

Read More

Toshiba's Westinghouse claims to be the Czech nuclear frontrunner

While the Czech media discuss politicians' opinions on whether we need an expansion of the Temelín nuclear power plant at all – because of the expected drop in coal and gas prices (due to shale oil) – the Japanese investigative journalists claim that they already know that we need it and the Japanese industrial group is likely to win.



Shinzo Abe, center-right Japanese PM

The leading Czech power utility, ČEZ, will decide whether Temelín will be expanded and who will get the $10 billion contract in Fall 2013. The French state-owned Areva was eliminated in a previous round because it was claimed that some basic conditions weren't fulfilled – Areva is trying to appeal but the chances are slim – which leaves us with two candidate projects: American and Russian. Being right in the middle of American and Russian interests (or, in some contexts, German-Austrian and Russian) is something that a genuinely central European country like ours is intimately used to.

Well, more precisely, they're a Czech-Russian plan and a Japanese-American one. The Czech-Russian group is composed of Gidropress (RU), Atomstroiexport (RU), and Škoda JS (CZ), while the Japanese-American project is proposed by Westinghouse (US) which belongs to the Toshiba Group (JP).




Nikkei.com, a leading Japanese newspapers, claimed that "Toshiba Group [Is] Closing In On Czech Nuclear Order". The project got the highest evaluation in a pre-screening process, AFP tells us.




It's suggested – although I don't quite understand the evidence etc. – that Toshiba Group will be closer to victory also because a group of Central European countries will welcome a new participant at the V4 summit (the Visegrad Group, composed of Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland). Who is it? Is it Slovenia who is trying to join but it may become an outfit for its being so uncritically pro-EU (even more so than Slovakia)? ;-)

No, the new Central European country is called Japan.

On June 16th, while going to the G8 summit in Northern Ireland, Shinzo Abe will stop in Poland to strengthen the Japanese nuclear exports. According to the Japanese sources – not confirmed by the Czech diplomats at all – Abe should sign a treaty about some nuclear cooperation with the new Czech president Miloš Zeman. This would be sort of incompatible with claims by a correctly self-described fa9g0t and, shamefully enough, newly appointed professor Mr Putna (not by Zeman, though) who caricatured both Zeman and his predecessor Klaus as Putin's puppets. Zeman apparently has no trouble with a Russian defeat in this contest.



Any group of high school kids in Japan can easily perform Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony. ;-) Another part, one more. Holst's Planets, Rachmaninov, and other things from them.

I have no robust knowledge about the projects and their advantages or disadvantages. There are obvious reasons why we could think that the Japanese-American project is technologically better and/or safer although I surely don't think that the Russians are losers when it comes to nuclear energy. The Westinghouse option is worse for the Czech economy, too. If we will talk about Westinghouse as the only candidate at some time, I find it natural for the Japanese and their American employees ;-) to build nuclear power plants in other countries rather than Japan. Japan is overfilled with people which makes it necessary to eliminate even very tiny risks and the frequent earthquake under their soil create the risks very often, too. Despite widespread misconceptions, there hasn't been any nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima at all but perception is everything and most people are too stupid to distinguish an earthquake or tsunami from an explosion of a power plant; only the former, not the latter, produced casualties in Japan.

In Czechia, we don't have any earthquakes to mention, the population density is lower, and the public perception of nuclear energy is good enough so that a nuclear power plant could be rather easily built beneath the Prague Castle, if needed. ;-) The question whether two new reactors are really needed it the toughest one, I am afraid. But one thing is almost certain: Nature wasn't generous enough to allow Czechia to participate in the shale gas boom if there's gonna be one.

Read More

Trade war: Chinese solar panels vs EU wine

Business Week and many other news outlets tell us about another worrisome development in a possibly looming trade war between the EU and China (or EU and the rest of the world).

Some EU apparatchiks have decided that China is selling solar panels below cost so they imposed 11.8% tariffs on them – but this fee is meant to grow to 67.9% within two months. Holy cow. China is clearly going to revenge. At this point, they are preparing actions against the European wine. The French who believe that they produce some of the best wines in the world aren't happy but it's their own fault, to a very large extent. And of course that the Chinese investigation of possible subsidies for the European agricultural products should naturally end up with the "guilty" verdict: the European agriculture is subsidized and manipulated with from A to Z. Needless to say, the wines were only picked for symbolic reasons; things would become tougher if China began to target Airbus aircraft, for example.

It's truly concerning to see that among the Chinese communists and the European Union officials, it's the latter who are much more fanatical, unhinged anti-market Mujahideen who don't hesitate to put our continent's and the world economy's health (and perhaps the global peace) at risk whenever they decide to pursue their sick anti-market policies. China says that now, during these trade conflicts, Europe must recognize its decline. It may sound tough but I completely agree with that. If Europe is becoming uncompetitive etc., and there are probably good reasons for that (to a large extent, it's someone's fault, the fault of some very bad policies), it is just completely wrong to try to mask this fact by spitting on others.

The EU "leaders" have already distorted the market conditions so brutally that it may be hard to decide what is actually "normal" and "fair" in the business relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. Incidentally, India and others are still not paying the ransom that the EU imposed upon the foreign airlines operating in Europe and India and probably others are readying reprisals. Not too good.




But let's return to the topic of the tariffs for solar panels.

First, under normal market conditions, there should be no tariffs. If China is helping its products by dumping prices, it's good for the consumers – most of us. Every company – and China is a very large company if you view it in the right way (and some communist policies are its inner issue – every company has the right to organize itself in a way it prefers) – has the right to run campaigns and offer discounts in order to promote its products. It's a completely normal part of the competition. Such a dumping isn't for free; it costs something. The possible benefits include an advantage over competition (especially if the competition can't afford to generate losses or debt, not even temporarily) but this outcome isn't guaranteed. It makes no sense to regulate such things. Dumping and similar things help the consumers to test products they wouldn't otherwise try – and all these things help to make the markets more efficient and consumers more satisfied.

We may find it problematic if a very large "company" such as China, with giant cash reserves, is using dumping prices to prevail in the long run. But whether you like it or not, this extra power does come with the cash reserves. The Chinese have behaved more responsibly in fiscal matters and their greater ability to test the resilience of their competition by dumping prices is one of the prizes you win if you manage to produce savings instead of debt. The converse holds for Europe and its debt-creating policies, of course. So don't whine about it, EU commies and populists: this comparative disadvantage of Europe is your fault.



The tariffs on solar panels are even more insane if you realize that the EU apparatchiks have claimed that "renewable" energy sources were a good thing; they even introduced a huge system of subsidies for these economically unfeasible energy sources themselves. If they were a good thing, they should enthusiastically thank China for sending us solar panels – especially cheap enough solar panels. But quite suddenly, the desire of these officials to irrationally promote excessively expensive "renewable" energy sources is beaten by another hardwired far left-wing instinct, protectionism, and this explosive mixture can't lead to anything good.




China has the unquestionable right to revenge for the disgusting, anti-market harassment launched by the EU officials and start to harass exporters who are sending stuff to China by comparable policies. Europe is the side that started these annoying steps; the EU is the Adolf Hitler of this new war if one is getting started. But do we really want such a thing? Do we want to lose the right to buy cheap foreign products? Do we want our producers to lose the option to export their products to whole and very important parts of the world or to any foreign country?

Do we understand and do the EU apparatchiks understand what this kind of protectionism does to the continental and world economy?

In Europe, the market for many things has been distorted by many illogical and pathological interventions so that sometimes you no longer know what is the actual price of many things. (These things – multiple prices that have nothing to do with each other – are even worse in countries like Argentina, a Latin American visitor recently assured me.) Some imported products are twisted by heavy tariffs. Some products are made cheaper if they agree with some pseudoscientific, ideologically driven criteria of "fighting against the global warming". Others have already been made more expensive with the same excuse, because their production or consumption "contributes to the global warming".

Couldn't we just eliminate all this mess? All this stuff is a road to hell. Every billion dollar that you redirect using these ad hoc regulations is potentially a billion that has been stolen or used for criminal activity according to someone else. You just shouldn't behave that these things can be done routinely.

A trade war may start because of any product but it's no coincidence that products whose prices have been manipulated with – using tariffs, carbon taxes, carbon credits, and similar things – are the most likely products to lead to a trade war because people (and nations) simply can't possibly agree about the right extent to which the prices should be manipulated, subsidized, increased by tariffs and carbon taxes, and so on. And even the same people – in this case the shameful EU apparatchiks – aren't ethical enough to stay consistent in their principles, in their methods to manipulate all these prices, as their sudden opposition to cheap solar panels proves.

Let me tell you once again what is the right extent to which prices or air tickets, solar panels, and hundreds of similar products and services should be manipulated with by tariffs, carbon fees, carbon taxes, carbon credits, and similar fudge factors. The right extent is zero. Everything else is a crime and if the ongoing row will result in a full-fledged trade war with China (or a greater bloc of countries), all the EU apparatchiks and global warming alarmists and protectionists and similar left-wing garbage people deserve a heavy punishment, at least a life in prison. The Old Continent can't afford to let such people escape unpunished.

And that's the memo.

Read More