Obvious strategies

I do not like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He appears to be a genuine nutcase, not just a hardline religious type or an ambitious dictator. Having said that, the policies he is pursuing make perfect sense for someone who thinks the US is out to get him and his regime - and why wouldn't he? US interference in Iran goes back a very long way, into the 1950's at least. More recently, the US gave money and weapons to Iraq as it tried to invade Iran.

So what are his choices? The US has described Iran as part of the axis of evil. There were two other members, both of whom were described as trying to acquire WMD. Iraq, under great pressure, agreed to allow inspectors in. It got invaded. North Korea tested a bomb, announced they were making more, and threatened to use them. It got sanctions, and then oil aid. Which result will Iran want?

Iran and Iraq fought a long and brutal war in the eighties, in which Iraq took territory from Iran (they gave it back at the start of Gulf War I, to neutralize one front). But when the US attacked Iraq, they smashed them. How do you stop that? With nukes.

So if the Iranians are not frantically acquiring nuclear technology so they can build nukes as quickly as possible if they need them, they are not paying attention. Even if they don't want them for anything else.

A huge part of the US army is currently tied up in Iraq, which limits US options in Iran. The longer that goes on, the more time Iran has to prepare, to shore up its position, to rally support in the Muslim world. And to wait for a US economic collapse, given the money Iraq is costing. How do you increase that pressure? Arms for the insurgents are cheap, easy, deniable, and can be sent across a long border to people who are naturally friendly to Iran.

Again, if they aren't doing that, they aren't paying attention.

I don't like it. Iran is a danger to everyone that won't do exactly what they want, as far as I can see. But what they are doing makes perfect sense - and it illustrates perfectly just what a bone-headed move invading Iraq was.

January 20, 2009 cannot come soon enough.

The remains of my faith

Christian apologists often accuse atheists of having "faith" in their atheism, presumably to nullify the perceived atheist advantage of claiming a rationally justifiable opinion instead of blindly following whatever was drummed into them as a kid.

I do not have faith in my religious opinions; what I have is doubt, and lots of it. Doubt in the claims of religions, doubt in their explanations (and my own) of religious evidence, doubt in my conclusions. One of the reasons I follow the creationism debate is to see the quality of the conflicting arguments (and those who claim I'm deliberately looking at a weak religious argument there should reflect on the numbers of followers who believe in it).

But having said that, I do retain a little faith. Possibly drummed into me in my youth, by the example of my fallible but eminently fair-minded parents.

I believe (without a scrap of evidence) that if there is a creator of some kind, it is at worst indifferent to humans and possibly benevolent. That is, that such a creator is not malicious. The creator may not even be aware we exist; we may be just one more variation on the strange chemical chain reactions that sometimes occur on rocky inner-system planets. We may be the equivalent of an ant farm. We might be individually loved for who we are; but we are not under the thumb of Ctulhu.

There's no real reason to think this, although I can offer some weak arguments that boil down to "why would an omnipotent being bother?". You don't get a choice of what universe you live in. But it is what I instinctively believe - although on evidence I default back to "no creator", or "completely indifferent".

But this scrap of faith, I recently realized, is why I don't take the Bible as evidence for God. The God described therein is a capricious, bloodthirsty tyrant. There's no reason such a being should not exist, and claim to be wonderful and loving - and the world is full of humans to serve as examples. But I do not believe that an all-powerful creator would be like that.

Why "capricious, bloodthirsty tyrant"? This passage will suffice:
2Sam 24:1-15
1: And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he
moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.
2: For the king said to Joab the captain of the host, which was with
him, Go now through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan even to
Beer-sheba, and number ye the people, that I may know the number of
the people.
3: And Joab said unto the king, Now the LORD thy God add unto the
people, how many soever they be, an hundredfold, and that the eyes of
my lord the king may see it: but why doth my lord the king delight in
this thing?
4: Notwithstanding the king's word prevailed against Joab, and against
the captains of the host. And Joab and the captains of the host went
out from the presence of the king, to number the people of Israel.

(Skip verses 5-9)

10: And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the people.
And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned greatly in that I have
done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy
servant; for I have done very foolishly.
11: For when David was up in the morning, the word of the LORD came unto
the prophet Gad, David's seer, saying,
12: Go and say unto David, Thus saith the LORD, I offer thee three
things; choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee.
13: So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him, Shall seven
years of famine come unto thee in thy land? or wilt thou flee three
months before thine enemies, while they pursue thee? or that there be
three days' pestilence in thy land? now advise, and see what answer I
shall return to him that sent me.
14: And David said unto Gad, I am in a great strait: let us fall now into
the hand of the LORD; for his mercies are great: and let me not fall
into the hand of man.
15: So the LORD sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to
the time appointed: and there died of the people from Dan even to
Beer-sheba seventy thousand men.

Questions:

• What's wrong with a census? Where can I see that written?
• Who ordered the census? Was that person punished?
• How much of a crime is a census? How many people died for this one?
• His mercies are great? Really?
• What would you trust this LORD person to be in charge of?

I hope that my little scrap of faith is not misplaced.

The House Always Wins

I keep hearing that the US can't pull out of Iraq, because it would suffer an enormous strategic defeat, give encouragement to terrorists, etc, etc.
When I hear this I am always reminded of the guy sitting at the casino tables saying "I can't leave now - I'm ten thousand down! I need to win it back!".

The US has already suffered a major strategic defeat. What was supposed to be an invasion lasting months (remember "Mission Accomplished"?) and a reconstruction that would pay for itself, has turned into a campaign of years, thousands of US lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars. The terrorists have already been enormously encouraged - the efforts of a few thousand of them have tied down the world's biggest military power for four years, and distracted it immensely from attacking Al Qaeda's bases in Afghanistan.

There is a human bias against crystallizing losses that keeps people in the casino, but the important question is not "how much will I have lost", but "what will I gain by staying"?

The sad thing is that the real consequences of pulling out seem likely to be a vicious, genocidal war followed by a destabilizing partition. Worse, these consequences are likely to be merely delayed while the US military stays to keep the peace (such as it is).

I think the US could have prevented this, if it had put enough effort in to start with. That seems to be a widespread opinion (along with "they completely failed to plan for it"). I doubt that it can improve the situation now, although they are trying. It would be nice to see it work. If they really can sort things out, then it's worth staying. From my armchair, I can't see far enough into the future to tell.

But "avoiding a strategic defeat" is not a reason to stay. "Recovering from a strategic defeat" might be. "Avoiding another strategic defeat" might be a reason to go.

Managing Your Brain

I am surprisingly superstitious, I realized the other day.

I keep a folder in my work bag of stuff that I have to act on or do something with - bills, receipts, documents that I need to ring people about. There was a receipt in there for our pair of air conditioners, which was installed a couple of years ago. When they installed it, they mucked up the wiring in a minor way (ran it over the access hatch into our roof, semi-blocking it), and it took a while to get them to come over and fix it - so the receipt lived in my folder for a while.

Not too long after I took it out, one of the compressors failed (on the hottest day of the year), and we had to get it replaced. That took a while too - back into the folder. Once repaired, the receipt stayed there for a while until I cleaned it out.

The other unit's compressor promptly died. The receipt went back into the folder, and I rang the warranty people to come out again. Again, it stayed there for a while until I cleaned it out.

No sooner had it gone back in than we got a letter from the manufacturer saying that they had been told by the consumer comission that they had advertised their units inaccurately, and they had to pay people compensation. Please fill in this form, and send a copy of the receipt. Well, at least that was giving us cash, even if not for reasons I like to hear.

So on the weekend I was clearing out the folder, and I hesitated to put the receipt away. Every time I do that, something goes wrong and I have to get it out again. Why not just leave it there?

I also imagine that the fall of wickets or the scoring of goals/tries/points in major games depends on whether I am tuned in to the coverage, even though there is no causal route for that. And I routinely look for correlations between things I do and grand events like weather that have no possible connection beyond a random butterfly effect.

So how can I look my skeptical inner scientist in the eye? Well, after my moment of doubt I put the receipt away anyway. I am only human, and I have learned to expect occasional mental blind spots and work around them. The relevant faculty can usually be satisfied with an explanation, just as you might feel relieved to remember that bread was the other thing you were thinking of buying, and you don't need it since you found another loaf in the freezer.

Superstition is a useful thing when it calls unexpected connections to mind; we might stay way from the evil hills for centuries before discovering that the dust is full of heavy metals. But like our taste for fat and sugar, it is something to understand, use, and possibly override when we know better.

Another Man's Belly Laugh

I was raised a Christian. We said grace and we went to church and my parents raised us to be civilized human beings, and when I was five I believed it all unquestioningly, because that's what everyone told me.

By the time I was ten, I had come to the conclusion that the Bible - and all the stories in it - were like Aesop's fables. They were there to tell you how to behave, and they were fine for that, but they weren't true in the sense of having actually happened.

Over the next twenty or so years, I went through a whole series of positions between between my original belief and straight atheism. I never came back to any strong sense of faith, because I never saw anything to convince me. God doesn't talk to me, and the people who claim He does don't agree with each other. Creationism made me wonder if Christians were just ignorant idiots; and Christians I knew helped me remember that they were not.

But the thing that finally convinced me that Christianity was just a human invention was the Bible. I had seen all sorts of arguments about historical inaccuracies and contradictions and moral lapses, and I decided to read it and see for myself. I expected mostly that it would not provide me with anything new one way or the other, but I figured that I owed it to myself to read it.

I started at Genesis, and finished at Revelation. I couldn't stay awake for Proverbs and Psalms, but I went through everything else. I was astonished at what I found. I had expected more of what I had encountered in Sunday School; lots of stories where God tells men what to do, men behave well or badly, and God rewards the good and punishes the evil. I had expected to run into all the issues I had seen discussed on the internet; what I did not expect was that it would sound so unlikely in itself.

It sounded like an ordinary politicial history of any other country, with power struggles and propaganda and claims of mandates and legitimacy; and with other countries intervening periodically. The Israel of the Bible is clearly not a major player in the region, and is regularly invaded. Its rulers are often short-lived, and the succession is settled by armed conflict or even one-on-one fights (assuming it's all accurate). Famine and disease are important as well; the four horsemen get a real workout.

But in the Bible, the author regularly claims that things are happening because of the will of God, even when they sound exactly like ordinary human history. Probably the best example can be found in Judges 1:19:
"And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron."

Iron chariots are quite an advantage in the technology of the time, but we are supposed to be talking about the creator of the universe. I don't think there's much I can add to that.

Of course there are miracles described, but the people who see them are clearly a credulous bunch - not unlike people today. It is way too easy to imagine the tales getting bigger in the telling. Moses, in the book of Exodus, convinces the Israelites that he is sent by God with miracles that the Pharaoh is unconvinced by... because his magicians can do the same things. They even manage the plague of frogs before failing at the plague of lice.

When I got to the New Testament I found myself back in more familiar territory. But this means that I found it far from convincing, while not being able to dismiss it. It was completely inadequate to catch up the ground lost in the Old Testament.

I invite anyone who wonders why I am not a believer to read the OT. Don't follow it through a lesson plan, or pick out verses that cover a particular topic, or whatever - just read it. By all means read annotated versions, to make sure you understand the wording and the culture, but read it as a story in itself. If you still don't at least understand my skepticism, I probably wouldn't like you anyway.

I am convinced that if a larger Jewish rebellion against the Romans had resulted in the complete loss of the Old Testament, and a version were discovered today by archaelogists, it would be dismissed by the modern church as completely unrelated or faked. No-one would believe that this was the law and the prophets that Jesus claimed he had come to fulfill.

And neither do I.

Mathematics is out to get you

Yes, there really are a lot of idiots on the roads. There aren't as many as there appear to be, but you're more likely to meet them - at least the ones that drive too fast or too slow.

Driver speeds will typically be a curve that looks a bit like a normal curve. The tails will be a rather foreshortened, because most people do drive near the speed limit. The average is probably a little bit over the limit, at least on roads that are clear enough to do it.

But who are you going to meet? Suppose you drive for an hour on a freeway. Someone who drives exactly the same speed as you will stay exactly the same distance from you the whole trip. Someone who drives only 5km/h faster will need to start no more than 5km behind you, or you won't see them. But someone who drives 10km/h faster can start 10km behind. Result? You'll see twice as many of them as the 5km/h faster ones. The higher the speed, the more of them you see.

The same argument applies in reverse for slow drivers; you will catch up with more of them the slower they are. So people who drive at silly speeds will be over-represented in the drivers you see.

But it gets worse than that for those who are non-average - that is, hoons and hat-wearing Volvo drivers. Consider a line far enough from your speed to be "too fast". If you are on the average, there will be few drivers above it. You'll see them more often than other drivers, but the numbers will still be small. However, if you buy a Volvo and a hat and start driving slowly, the line will shift down, and the numbers above it will increase rapidly. The normal curve, and those like it, typically look exponential as you come in from each end, and only flatten out at the middle.

So hat-wearers will tend to encounter a great many people exceeding the speed limit - much more than they remember from their youth. And hoons will find the roads infested with slowpokes.

So remember - the more you drive at the same speed as everyone else, the fewer idiots you will encounter. And the more you drive like one kind of idiot, the more of the other sort you will have to deal with. It's just mathematics.

Absolute Power

One of the things which I have become aware of through my interest in the debate over Creationism is the large body of right-wing Christians who think it is their right to run society. These are the people who want the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, the Bible in science class, and Christianity as the official religion of the country.

It occurred to me to wonder why it was that I would be so viscerally against a takeover by these right-wing Christians, apart from their planned gutting of science. After all, I am not one of their targets - I am straight, married and faithful; I don't drink or smoke or gamble; and I work at a perfectly respectable job as a software engineer. I swear more than I should, but I am not Robinson Crusoe there.

It took me a while to put my finger on it. Christianity in government creates a pervasive power structure that emphasizes faith, and discourages questioning of authority. Intellectual stifling aside, this is ripe for exploitation by the people that absolute power corrupts; and ripe for misdirection by plain human wrong-headedness. It is an amplifier, and although it talks publically about amplifying the good, it is not adept at determining what actually *is* good.

Its past is littered with holy wars, inquisitions, witch-trials; and at a smaller scale bizarre cults and even sexual abuse scandals that have stayed hidden because of the authority of the perpetrators or the risk of discredit for the authority structure. Faced with these a Christian will tell you that they aren't really caused by the religion, and perhaps show you a verse of the Bible that forbids whatever it was. But while that may be true, the fact is that large numbers of Christians have been swept up in these movements. And not just despite their Christianity, but because they thought they were furthering the cause.

A classic conflict between theory and practice; theoretically religion is on the side of good, but experimentally it is ineffective. Or as a well-known theologian once said: "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."

The instant you mention holy wars, of course, Christians will tell you about the atheist Communists and how many people they killed. Communism is also an amplifier, and it also claims to represent the good, and it also clearly fails to do so. And just as I would be prepared to fight to stop a Christian takeover, so I would be prepared to fight a Communist takeover. Or in fact a takeover by any group that wants to tell you how to think.

The particular problem with holy wars is caused by the fact that while lots of people want "Christianity" in government, they all want their own brand and are prepared to fight for it. Western democracy has learned the long and painful way that the competing demands cannot be satisfied. My own family history includes a tale of narrow escape from such religious persecution, and it is just one among countless others.

The irony of US Christians pushing for influence is that many of the colonists that came to North America were fleeing the results of their faction losing a European fight; and the founding fathers recognized this and deliberately sought to stop it happening in their new country.
Christian campaigners should think about how much their PR resembles that of the Taliban, and how undesirable the results of that have been.

I don't want Christianity in government because sooner or later it will come and demand that I choose sides on some question I have no interest in and do not think worth a fist-fight, never mind a real one. And then I will either have to kill or be killed, because all of these religious questions are life and death matters. Or it will demand that I ignore (or even support) some flagrant injustice.

I would rather fight for freedom. For myself, and for those around me. And I am immensely grateful to my ancestors, of all religions and none, who have created a society where I have not had to.

Proper Stewardship

It amazes me every now and then that the conservation movement is not far more popular in the US than it is. There is a large and powerful Christian fundamentalist powerbase, and it is very strongly Creationist. These people believe that every single species on the planet was specially created by God.

Now, an evilutionist might regard individual species as random productions of an uncaring universe, to be cast aside on a whim; or as unique and very likely irreplaceable adaptations, to be preserved. Or more likely, origin theories might be just one part of a complex picture of how the world should be treated; and that could well include Christianity, fundamentalist protestations notwithstanding.

But if I were a committed Christian, I would be thinking very hard about how I was going to explain to God that yes, he had carefully created a group of living things; and no, I did not know what his purposes had been in doing that; but that I felt comfortable in destroying their habitat, flogging the wood for toilet paper, and grazing cows on the land to feed burgers to already-obsese Americans.

True, in Genesis 1:28 God commands the newly created humans to "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth". But He says "replenish", not "consume"; "subdue", not "destroy". It behooves someone who has "dominion" over something on behalf of another, to think about how they will explain their actions.

There certainly are people out there who think this way; I'm surprised there are not more of them. It concerns me that one reason there are not is a widespread belief that the Earth is to be destroyed - or at least laid waste - in the very near future. This may turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Perils of Prosperity

Assuming human civilization survives the next few decades, finds a solution to the energy crisis, and settles down into something approximating the affluence that the West has come to enjoy and expect, we are going to run into a problem of genetic degeneracy.

I am not talking here about lesser races interbreeding with us and polluting the gene pool (whatever that means, given the human race's distinct lack of genetic variety). Nor am I talking about the lower classes and the stupid out-breeding the smart folks like you and me. Stupid people will always find ways to remove themselves from the gene pool, and I'll start worrying about class when I figure out which group are worth keeping.

No, I'm talking about bona-fide genetic mishaps, the kind that you can nail down to some specific gene, the ones that just cause trouble. Hemophilia. Cystic Fibrosis. Fatal Familial Insomnia. Huntingdon's. Sickle-cell anemia, if we can wipe out malaria as we should.

When humans get prosperous, and death rates drop, they like all their children to survive to adulthood. So far, I don't know of a single person from my school year who has died, and only a few from the years around me. I like it that way.

But if all children grow up and reproduce, we have no genetic selection. Errors accumulate. Some will prove too drastic to result in a viable baby; a miscarriage is the result. But others result in a need for extra medical services, inconvenience, expense, danger. When society becomes prosperous and safe enough for these errors to persist, they will accumulate. Eventually, everyone will have them, and no-one will enjoy that. Worse, there is a limit to how many such conditions one person can tolerate. So the problem will reach equilibrium when it gets bad enough to kill off genetic errors as fast as they appear - that is, infant and child mortality will head back up.

The Catholic Church has one solution - outlaw effective birth control, have enough children to strain the limits of the earth's capacity, and reach the point where we can't afford to keep some of the perfectly healthy alive, never mind the genetically defective. Natural selection will take care of the rest. Who says religion and evolution can't mix?

The eugenics movement had another solution - kill off the unfit. Unfortunately this starts off by killing or sterilizing people, and I for one have relatives with hemophilia who I am fond of and would like to keep. And it also has a habit of going futher into the elimination of people "not like us", which is frankly genetically unhealthy. Eugenics is crude and dangerous, like treating a scratch with amputation. It's the best nature can do, but humans are a great deal smarter.

I prefer to look for a better way, and I think that in the future we will have one - genetic surgery. We will have the technology to identify the genes bearing these errors, and fix them in the germ line. To be sure, some of them are treatable with genetic surgery in each generation, to simply fix the symptoms. And as an experimental start, that may be all we are prepared to do. But one day we will be able to fix them permanently; and some of these problems cause developmental abnormalities that simply cannot be fixed in retrospect.

Look forward to a lot of objections about playing God, and tampering with Nature, and meddling with things we don't understand. Some of these concerns will be well-founded; this kind of technology is incredibly powerful and amazingly dangerous. We should proceed with great caution, because the mistakes will be with us for a long time and they will be human beings. But we should proceed, because not doing so will also have human consequences that will be with us for a very long time.

Look forward also to people using this technology for "improvements". The Olympics will become a strange battleground here, as it has become with drugs - only worse. People will look for ways to make their children stronger, fitter, smarter, more attractive. We'll probably try to outlaw that sort of thing. People will do it anyway, because the incentives will be huge. There will be an "arms race" between illegal alterations and ways to detect them.

None of this should stop us using this technology to prevent people living miserable lives with preventable condiditions. The downside will happen anyway; we can ride the wave and control it, or we can let it dump us.

Spelling Reform

I am a pretty good speller. By that I mean that if you ask me to spell a word, I will almost always get it correct, and if I don't get it I will know that I haven't. (The catch is that I have to write it down to see if it's correct, because I learned all my spelling by reading things). My spelling errors are almost exclusively typos.

So when I say that English is in dire need of spelling reform, it's not because I suffer terribly from mistakes; it's because I can see that it causes problems.

Correct spelling has become a badge of education. English has all sorts of bizarre spellings resulting from historical accidents, like all the different pronunciations of -ough, and the various extraneous 'k's on the fronts of words. If you use words a lot, these odd spellings become second nature, and the phonetic spelling looks bad.

Try it. Rite down yore next sentense in fonetic spelling, and see how it looks to yoo. You have become apparently illiterate and probably stupid. This is why these spellings persist, because almost anyone who knows them will use them to claim status (or avoid looking illiterate, which is much the same thing). And that is much more likely to be true of someone who writes for wide distribution.

But the whole point of using an alphabet the way English does is that you can write down what you hear, and someone else can read it and know what you heard (although you may need to specify the accent of the speaker and/or the hearer; a problem for another day). If we wanted non-phonetic writing, we'd use Chinese, or Hieroglyphics.

So what needs fixing? Well, the letter c should be limited to the 'ch' sound. In other words, it's either an 's' or a 'k' and these letters should be used. Similarly, 'z' should be used instead of 's' in words like, well, used. Silent letters, like the 'k' in "knife", and the 'u' in "guide" or "guard", should be removed. We should use 'j' instead of 'g' where appropriate. I'm sure you can think of more.

Whenever someone brings this up, someone else will chime in with Mark Twain's piece on spelling reform. This is a very funny piece, but it's a deliberate exaggeration for effect. Re-using the old letters for new sounds is guaranteed to make the result unreadable. But also, it illustrates my point about status badging - once the piece starts to use proper phonetic spelling, the writer sounds uneducated, and the reader immediately shies away.

Phonetic spelling is how it should work. There's still room for disagreement, as English tends be rather fluid in what it does with vowels - for example, why do "speak" and "speech" have a different vowel pairing? Also, in some cases, the variant spelling is useful to disambiguate words - "to", "too" and "two" is a classic example. I propose to keep "two" for this reason (or some appropriate variant), because the point of this is to make life easier for English users, not to purge the unholy.

Unlike French, no-one pretends to have a central authority on English, which is good because it would be taken over by prissy conservatives who would try to set the current insanity in stone. So the changes will have to be made by... everyone, acting one by one. Already the US spells organize with a 'z' and meter with the 'er' the right way around. And "lite" and "nite" are creeping into the language.

I call on yoo to help. Wen yoo reed, cut some slak for those hoo spell things the way they sound. Wen yoo rite, always chooze the simpler spelling of the wunz available to yoo. It won't be incomprehensible, even if it duz look a little unfamiliar to start with. And imajine how much easier it will be for children to lern to spell.

We will eliminate the spelling contest, but really, hoo carez?

Hard to see this ending well

I was wrong about WMD; I thought the case for war was better. It turns out that I was wrong about the aftermath as well, and again I thought the case for war was better.

I thought the aftermath would be largely a period of rebuilding by ordinary Iraqis, hopefully assisted by the US government, with occasional resistance by the remnants of the old Iraqi regime. I figured there would be some terrorism carried out by Al Qaeda, assisted by sympathizers inside Iraq. Whether that died away or built up would depend on how good a job the US could do of convincing the bulk of the population that its intentions were benign, how angry the muslim world was to start with, and how effective Al Qaeda were at stirring things up.

I wasn't expecting a civil war. Apparently, neither was the Bush administration. As far as I can tell from the analysis, the US government really did expect its troops to be greeted as liberators and everything to go just peachy. At least, that's as much as they appear to have planned for.

We keep hearing rhetoric from the administration and its supporters about how crucial it is to stay in and fight the terrorists, and what a huge victory Al Qaeda will have if we leave. But the intelligence assessments seem to be saying that Al Qaeda is a marginal player now, and the real fighting is between Sunnis and Shias trying their best to dominate each other or avoid being dominated.

This has an upside and a downside. The upside is that the US clearly sees the occupation as going badly, despite having achieved whatever control of oil, money, and land it was after; and despite the fact the most of the casualties are Iraqi civilians rather than US or even Iraqi soldiers. Its reaction will hopefully tend to dampen down Muslim anger at it; the fact that a purely Muslim conflict is causing large numbers of Muslim civilian casualties will hopefully damage the image of religious extremists everywhere.

The downside is that the most likely reason Al Qaeda is staying out is that chaos and destruction are happening without the need for them to do anything. So chances are that if the situation improves they will step in to keep it going. That in turn means that their goals are currently being achieved - a huge drain on the US treasury, and the distraction of the bulk of the US armed forces - without costing them anything.

Will the troop surge work? Not likely. The Bush administration is trying to use combat forces in policing work, and they are not trained or suited for it. This has been the problem ever since the Shia/Sunni fight started. We do not use the army to take on the Mafia, especially not when the "protection" they offer is from a genuine enemy (Sunnis or Shias, depending on who you are). This is a problem that can only be solved by the two sides finding some common cause.

What it does do is prevent either side from openly appearing in the streets and terrorizing their opponents. But this only lasts while the troop surge lasts; unless something is done to reconcile the two sides in the meantime, it will achieve nothing by itself. Efforts at reconciliation appear to be limited to pressuring the government to stop supporting one of the sides, and get its act together. Unfortunately the only real leverage over the government appears to be the threat of troop withdrawals.

I expect the US will stay in for a while, and eventually give up, declare victory, and leave. If they're lucky Iraq will settle down to something roughly stable, controlled by the Shia majority; probably with some continued violence around the edges, and the Sunnis oppressed in varying degrees. If they're not, there will be a real Yugoslav-style civil war, with uncounted casualties and a fractured mess at the end. Surrounding countries with Kurdish minorities will be tempted to step in, lest a proper Kurdish homeland movement get the takeoff resulting from Kurdish Iraq declaring independence.

Either way Iran will help its Shia cousins from simple solidarity, and also in the hope of gaining influence. The loss of a great regional rival will be a huge bonus for them.

How long will the US stay? Longer if they're silly enough to reward the Republicans with another term; shorter if the Democrats get in. The intervening time seems increasingly less likely to accomplish anything for the Iraqis, and it is hard to see what the extra time will accomplish for the US. They will not be inflicting pain on actual enemies of the US, as was the case with Vietnam; Iran is not silly enough to send its own soldiers in and the US is not silly enough to start a real war with them. Perhaps some international respect for an ability to tough it out and take casualties, for whatever that's worth.

I have said in the past that the US had to stay and see it out, but it is increasing clear that they are not actually capable of achieving any sort of peacekeeping there. If there is to be a real genocidal fight as we have seen elsewhere, the best they can do is get the combatants apart and give them viable states of their own - and the US is unlikely try that until things are so bad that it is no longer possible without at least a great many casualties. For one thing, there is an enormous risk of Iran virtually controlling the Shia state, and the Kurdish one destabilizing the region.

As I say above, the best thing about all this is that what the US is trying and failing to achieve is a viable state in Iraq. The worst thing is that after all the resources devoted to it, chances are they will not get one.

Hitting the wall

The Catholic Church claims that there is a culture of death out there which they have to combat. Well, I got their "culture of death" right here.

The Catholic Church is opposed to every form of genuinely effective birth control. If they had their way, none would be available. Given that most people, given the choice, will want to be in a sexual relationship, they will be having children. We already know experimentally what the consequences of that are: a world population that doubles roughly every 50 years.

This is unsustainable. Not radical-greenie, habitat-of-the-lesser-spotted-Grilby unsustainable; cold, hard, physics unsustainable. There's a limit to how much sunlight reaches the earth's surface; there's a minimum amount of energy required to keep a human alive. No matter how efficient we are, exponential growth will break that limit. Build a Dyson sphere and capture the sun's output; exponential growth will beat it. It takes only 42 doublings - 2100 years - to go from the Earth's entire energy budget to the Sun's. It will take less than 12 doublings - 600 years - to get from where we are now to the Earth's limit. And remember, that's using every scrap of sunlight to keep humans alive; there would be room for nothing else.

Exponential growth is so relentlessly quick that eventually the physical space required just to fit all the people outpaces the speed of light itself.

What's the alternative? Well, all the normal infertility, accidents, celibacy, etc are factored into that fifty-year figure. Assuming a twenty-year generation time, each couple will have roughly an extra 0.6 children. Those extra children will be just like anybody else; left to their own devices, they will reproduce too. The church has no way to stop that, unless 25% of the population suddenly volunteers to become priests and nuns; so instead they'll have to die.

That won't be hard to organize; with the earth packed to the rafters, at the very limits of its capacity to support life, and too many children born each year, death will be a constant companion. Everyone will be hungry; diseases and accidents will easily kill people with no reserves. There will be no room to avoid hurricanes, earthquakes and the like. Droughts and floods that temporarily cut food supplies will be deadly. And of course there will be resource wars, as people try to band together to get themselves a better chance of survival.

This is not about living standards; even if we all live the poorest, meanest lives imaginable, exponential growth will slam us hard into the limitations of physics.

Or, we could just use effective contraceptives. Which "culture of death" would you prefer to live in? One that voluntarily uses the Pill, or one that lives on the edge of disaster and kills off a quarter of its children?

Checking Your Facts

Way back when I first got married, my wife and I were both curious about religion, and thought more information would be helpful. So we signed up to a course run by a local educational institute, covering the Bible - what was in it, who wrote it, etc. The instructor turned out to be very much a believer in the literal truth of the Bible, but for all that taught a fairly informative and non-denominational course. It took most of the ten weeks, for example, for one of the students to realize that he was not a Trinitarian, and take exception.

A fair way through, the question arose of why the Bible should be considered reliable. One of the instructor's arguments was the number of fulfilled prophecies in it. Immediately, I asked him to name one, and the first one that sprang into his head was the destruction of Tyre. Ezekiel chapter 26 contains a prophecy that Tyre would be destroyed and cast into the sea, and never rebuilt. Sure enough, Alexander had besieged Tyre; built a causeway out into the sea to their last redoubt using the ruins of the old city as materials; and destroyed it. And it has never been rebuilt, our instructor told us, despite the presence of a plentiful freshwater spring there.

I was immediately suspicious. There had been a lot of conflict in Lebanon over the years, as there is now. And one of the phrases I frequently heard on the news to describe the location of that conflict was... "the port city of Tyre". I tasked him with this, and he told me that modern Tyre was built on a different site.

Some quick research showed that Tyre the island was indeed built on, and a websearch showed me this site, with buildings on the causeway as well. Surely that was a rebuilt Tyre? No, our instructor said - Tyre was the part on the mainland. The island was just a fortress, and it didn't count. I found more sources that showed pretty clearly (I thought) that Tyre was principally the island, with some settlements on the mainland (Ezekiel, for one, says of it "Thy borders are in the midst of the seas"). Instructor was not convinced, and there the matter rested.

Recently it occurred to me that I had a chance to get more information. Thanks to Google Earth, I have ready access to suprisingly detailed satellite images of a great many places. Perhaps Tyre was one? Sure enough - here it is. It's really easy to spot; on the south Lebanese coast, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Good enough resolution to count the cars, if you zoom in. Take a minute to look around - I'll wait.

So what do we have? Our satellite pictures show the old island well inhabited (some ruins on it - but they are Roman ruins, and only take up part of the island). Alexander's causeway is covered in buildings, built literally on the ruins of what my instructor claimed was the real Tyre. And the mainland has more buildings on it, stretching well back from the shore. So no matter where you think Tyre was, it's been rebuilt, in direct contradiction to prophecy.

There are a number of explanations for this. If you search the web for Tyre and Ezekiel, you'll find a great many people who claim it's down the coast from the original, with no actual evidence that I can see. I believe this is just uncritical repetition of Josh Macdowell's "Evidence That Demands A Verdict", and the satellite photos eliminate this handily. At least one claims the "never be rebuilt" words are basically just trash talk; you'll forgive me, I hope, if I fail to build my religious beliefs around that. And some say that it's been rebuilt, but hasn't regained its original prominence. Fair to say that none of the major cities of the ancient world is as important now as it was then.

Of course, since the original prophecy is quite vague about when Tyre would be destroyed (you have to do some minor language bending to get the original prophecy away from predicting that Nebuchadrezzar would do all of it), it might still be destroyed. Maybe it will happen tomorrow. I haven't seen this excuse used, thankfully.

To be brutally honest, the entire thing illustrates nicely one of my big problems with religion: the evidence provided for it requires you to check your brain at the door, and it is so easy to find large numbers of people who are perfectly happy to. A sane religion would keep the whole episode quiet and chalk it up to experience; Christianity talks it up as if it were a victory. What am I to conclude about its practitioner's ability to find the truth?

Mathematical Literacy

The latest scam I see on television is a small lottery, disguised as a quiz. Legally here you have to get a permit to run a lottery, and probably abide by all sorts of rules; so the standard way to get around that is to include a question on the ticket. Prize goes to the correct answer - but if there's more than one, they can draw the winner at random. Used by sporting clubs all over.

This new lottery asks a question ("Who are the makers of the PS2? Is it A) Nintendo, or B) Sony?") and invites the marks to text their answer to a pay-per-call number, winner to get a prize on the order of $3000. It's presented as if it were a genuine quiz, with the double purpose of satisfying the lotteries rules and sucking in the marks.

I've seen a few of them, so they must be making money; which means the people who enter them are clearly not thinking very hard about what's involved. The organizers are paying out each time the $3000 prize (I assume - although they might get away with not even paying a prize for a little while if they wanted to), the cost of the TV ads, and the cost of their pay-per-call number. I imagine they are not doing this for their health, so they must be making some money over and above that.

TV ads do not come cheap, and these are creeping forward from the post-midnight timeslot into the evening movie timeslot. Which means the advertising budget is getting bigger, and more of your entry money goes to paying that and not the prize. I don't know what the rates are for TV ads, but I bet it costs more than $3000 to run a series of ads like that. So the expected payoff for your SMS message is going to be pretty low - and it gets worse as the number of participants goes up.

Contrast this with the state-run lotteries, which advertise their payoff percentage. It's less than 100%, not surprisingly, but it is considerably more than 50%, and it does not drop if more people enter.

But if no-one else calls, then your expected pay-off is big! So if they are not getting the calls, then it's in your interest to enter. Unfortunately, if lots of people know that, they will enter too, and your payoff will drop. So you need to have some kind of inside knowledge of their call rates that no-one else has, and which it would be in the organizer's interests to reveal if it were true, or give an impression of even if it were not true.

In the end, the fact that we see these competitions run repeatedly means that they are making money and they are not worth entering. If they were worth entering, they'd be taken off the air.

Apparently there are a lot of people out there with access to a mobile phone but not to a calculator.

Normal Service Resumed Shortly

Everyone should have a plan for what to do if they are made God for a day. I would have a few personal issues to sort out first (no smitings, just some people whose improved health would be an improvement in my opinion). After that, though, the real work.

The first thing I would do is remove the leadership of North Korea, which is currently an insane hell-hole. Not to kill them; I intend to be a non-destructive God. I would take an appropriate selection of those currently in charge (I would know which ones, because I'd be omniscient), along with those of their families who wanted to go (again, omniscience is very helpful here), and plonk them down on a tropical pacific island.

Something well off the sea-lanes, where they would not be found (think Lost); with enough land and resources to survive. Let them establish their very own worker's paradise, where they can worship Kim Jong-Il to their heart's content. Meanwhile, the rest of North Korea could get back to living some kind of sane lifestyle.

So much for the entree (which for the Americans in the audience does not mean main course; it's French, go look it up). For the main course, the Middle East.

I propose to remove Jerusalem. Not the people; I'd leave them behind, in miraculous new dwellings wired up with power and water and all that, just as before. All the old buildings and the entire landscape would vanish. Morever, I would do some subtle shifting around of the terrain (including the continents) so that even a GPS unit wouldn't be able to point you unambiguously to the former location of any specific spot. All those sacred sites? Gone.

I don't know how long it would take people to find its new location in Antarctica. Well away from the penguin colonies, for reasons that will be clear later. Satellite surveillance for icebergs might see it, or some bored weather researcher, or maybe there's an automated system out there looking for changes, who knows.

When people went to look at it, they would find that it had some graffiti on it. Big graffiti. Carved in stone, in nice big unmistakable letters. The Hebrew for "thou shalt not kill". Arabic, with the same sentiments from the Koran. And round the edge, in English, "If you can't play nicely together, you won't have it at all". I would also cover it in some kind of really hard transparent polymer cement. No dismantling this one and returning it; it's staying here.

There would be a lot of theological disputes about all this, to put it mildly. Unambiguous evidence for a deity, which tradition was s/he really endorsing, that sounds like my mother - is God female? No doubt atheists like me would be on the end of a lot of "I told you so!". I'd be prepared to wear that, in exchange for God unequivocally telling religious nuts to quit killing people.

Dessert is an asteroid. Not a really big one; less than a kilometer across. Something to make a big noise and a spectacular crater, but not to really mess up the biosphere or anything. On an orbit that brings it to earth in about ten years, to strike somewhere in Antarctica... coincidentally, right where I put Jerusalem. Just to make the point crystal clear.

There will be graffiti on this one, too. Very large letters, on the smooth side, where the engineers studying it to try to move it aside will be unable to miss it. Probably in Hindi or Mandarin, just so nobody got funny ideas about Abrahamic religions being the "right ones". It would say "Learn To Cooperate".

All this might not be enough. There's plenty more nuts out there, after all, and all I would have really done was hand out a few hints. Lots of room for free will. No doubt there would be those who thought it was space aliens, or Satan, or something. But I like to think the bulk of humanity is sane, and given the chance will do roughly the right thing.

Of course, we have the same chance now, too. What will we do with it?

Idiots in Chains

I was a regular Usenet reader way back when David Rhodes (or whoever he really was) first burst onto the scene by spamming every newsgroup in creation to tell them how to MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Excellent, I thought; now everyone on the net will know about chain letters, and we will see no more of them.

To my amazement, it was only the beginning. And back then, before the year September never ended, I had some excuse for thinking people might learn from it. After all, to be on Usenet back then you had to jump through a few hoops, or make it into a university (yes, yes, I know).
I say all this because I got another chain letter in the (ordinary) post the other day. Funnily enough, it was an adapted version of David Rhodes' original work, with his name on it.

These days a meme seems to have taken hold that you should stick on a 5 cent piece to the begging letter, "to get people's attention". Fine with me; not only do I get a stamp for my niece's stamp collection, but I get a little cash for myself. And anything that makes chain letters more expensive to send out can only be a good thing.

I've had three of these in the last year; assuming I'm not on some sucker list somewhere (I certainly hope not!) that means the number of letters sent in that time would have been about three times the number of home addresses in the country. That's enormous! And the people who do this are apparently smart enough to read phone books, write out addresses, and use a photocopier!

What follows is a short rant about the mathematics of chain letters, which you can usefully skip if you already know they're stupid. I just have to get this off my chest.

Chain letters and other Ponzi schemes are illegal in many places (rightly so) and do nothing but cost society money (well, when I say society, I mean the stupid and the ignorant). What's odd is that the "It really works!" screeds in the letters themselves reveal just how much of a waste they are.

The one I got most recently makes some simple and apparently conservative assumptions about how many of your targets will forward the letter on (at each stage, 200 letters per person and 3% responses), and concludes that you will make about $77k per letter, for an expenditure of $211.

In the process, however, it reveals that each person who takes it seriously and sends $10 back up the chain (where you make your money) will spend $201 sending more requests down the chain. Although $10 of that is 5 cent pieces (see above), the rest ($191) is money spent sending pieces of paper around - effectively, invoices and receipts. So your $77k return carries a cost of about $1.5 million in postage and handling. That is without anything actually useful being done. When was the last time you bothered to buy something whose postage and handling costs were twenty times the price of the product?

But I think the reason people do it anyway is because they fail to look at it from anyone else's point of view. Looking at things from other people's point of view is one of the most important pieces of the human cognitive arsenal, and a crucial piece of our system of morals... but it is still far too infrequently used.

In this case, the figures suggest that 7,776 people will send you $10 each. But each of them is doing that in expectation of getting the same return you did. For that to happen, they will need 60 million people to sign on. That's more than the population of this country, and to attract those 60 million the number of letters sent out is 470 billion. You can see that the people you send this on to will need to send letters overseas and probably still won't get the returns, and the people they send it on to are going to need to figure out how to contact aliens.

Well, you think, the suckers down the line won't make it, but I will. But you're doing this because you got the chain letter yourself. You're already in that second tier, and the best you can hope for is that the number one person on your list originated this scam and you'll still make some sort of profit (but probably not the profit advertised). If they are down the chain a little, you're out of luck.

OK, so maybe I'll participate a couple more times - that expands the pool, and it can just keep circulating. That's where all that overhead comes in. You spend $210 every time you go in - to profit, there have to be 21 people who send you $10 each and don't get anything back. In fact, they'll spend $4410 in the process. So once again, you're hoping that you are high up the chain of suckers, and you have no way to tell where you are.

The bottom line is that this scheme produces nothing of value to anyone; it just moves money around. There are a lot more people paying out than getting back, so the odds are that you're one of the suckers. And if you're silly enough to fall for it, you probably deserve to.

No one will have read this far, because the people who know this already got bored a long time ago, and the people who don't know it probably didn't understand it and would anyway dismiss it all as negative-minded nay-saying without actually reading it and thinking about it. If you did read this far, and you learned something... then congratulations, and my work is done. Please pass it on to six people who need it, and don't send me anything.

Not theology, but humanity

In a previous post I mentioned that a particular opinion was not really Christian, but was held by a lot of Christians. And then this weekend, while going through some old papers, I discovered that some years ago I had described myself as philosophically but not theologically Christian. I really have to take that back.

I hold to a whole range of moral opinions that Christians would recognize and approve of. I believe it's wrong to murder, steal, rape, and lie; that it's good to keep your word and look after the less fortunate; and a range of other things that broadly derive from the old principle of "do as you would be done by". But I don't believe these things because they're Christian values - I believe them because they contribute to the kind of society I want to live in, and that principle is far older than any Christian writing, or even anything in the Bible.

I also believe that slavery is wrong, that genocide is wrong, that women are equal to men, that punishment should be proportionate, and that people should not be killed for their religious beliefs. A lot of Christians believe these things as well, but they are much harder to justify as "Christian values" because there are examples in the Bible where these are contradicted explicitly or implictly. Slavery, for example, has been argued for (and against, to be fair) on the basis of the Bible.

And I believe (as my previous post said) that when your country is attacked, you have to defend it with force, or it will be attacked again. Passive resistance only works on very civilized opponents. I will never make a conscientious objector (at least not on that basis). I don't think that's a Christian position; Jesus would not have us bomb or shoot anyone. But it is what most Christians think, because they can see the results, no matter what it says in their Bibles.

So, no. I'm not philosophically Christian; I don't believe anything on the basis that it says so in the Bible. I believe in things based on the effects they will have. That often results in me agreeing with most Christians, but that's because they get their morals from the same source. People who really try to get their morals from the Bible often end up poring over suspect translations and unclear wording, and reaching odd or inhumane conclusions (like forbidding blood transfusions, or pain relief in childbirth). Most Christians are smart enough to ignore the Bible when it says something repugnant.

Why do I care? Well, some Christians like to claim that all morals come from God - theirs, of course. On this basis they'll tell you that atheists have no morals (or are in denial and refuse to acknowledge God's authority so that they can indulge in some horrible sin). Describing myself as philosophically Christian just feeds that line, and it doesn't accurately describe my position.
For one thing, I can't think of a single moral issue where I would be in anything worse than a substantial minority of Christian thought. For example, I think birth control is essential to the future of this crowded planet. The Catholic church would tell me I'm sinful, but most Protestants would disagree, and most Catholics vote with their feet.

Some would like to have a Christian monopoly on morality, and pretend that all good comes from their church, so they can paint opponents to any position of theirs as amoral sinners. It just ain't so, and the rest of us need to stand up and say so.

Casualties of War

This week I heard that US military deaths in Iraq had finally overtaken civilian casualties in the World Trade Center attacks. No doubt there will be people who will say that this shows the futility of the invasion of Iraq; if I understand the opinion polls, some of them will have originally supported the invasion and some will have opposed it. They'll be wrong, and there are two reasons for this.

The first is that this is one of the things we have a military for - to go find the bad guys, and force them to stop shooting at us. They will inevitably take casualties. It's a dangerous business, and the people who do it deserve our gratitude. But they are trained and equipped and they know what they are doing, unlike the civilians who died in the towers. And they can shoot back; it is often better to take a thousand casualties from an aggressor and inflict a thousand in return than take five hundred with no response.

I note in passing that this is not a very Christian position to take, at least not if you read the New Testament. It is a position taken by most Christians, however, especially in the US. There are some who do not (like Quakers) and who are prepared to back their words with action (or lack of it) and face the consequences, and they have my respect and admiration for their integrity. But sadly it is how the world works, and it is not a coincidence that people like the Quakers are a tiny minority.

Of course, the thousand casualties you inflict in return need to be against the agressor. So the second reason is that this invasion had nothing to do with the World Trade Center attacks. They were not financed from Iraq; the terrorists didn't come from there; and they weren't trained there or based there. Getting rid of a brutal dictator and installing a peaceful democracy are laudable goals, but invading Iraq (even if it achieved them) was always going to make the terrorism problem worse by making the US look like it was once again pushing Muslim nations around and installing US-friendly governments by force.

And doing it at the cost of not being able to do things that really mattered in the fight against terrorism, like eliminating Al Quaeda's Afghan bases (where the terrorists *were* trained and organized), was one of the last century's all-time great blunders. Yes, George Bush started a land war in Asia; let's be thankful Osama bin Ladin is not a Sicilian.