What Are We To Make of the Tea Party?

I've been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement, and feel I've figured out a few things.

The Tea Party Movement is not a political party, it has no clear leaders, it is an amorphous grass-roots movement without a clear platform. The people in the movement dislike politics as usual and don't want there to be leaders or a platform. A few issues are central

1. Fear that Obama, with the filibuster-proof majority he had (note past tense) in the senate, was going to take the country wildly toward the political left.
2. Objection, in principle, to the bailouts, particularly of Wall Street firms.
3. Concern about increased taxation and the growth of the federal government.

Because the movement has no leaders, it has no official platform. Because there is no official platform, there is no one to define what the Tea Party Movement is about and what it is not. Thus, many extreme right wing causes are trying to identify with the Tea Party, and there is no authority to refuse their entry into it. This makes the Tea Party look particularly frightening to outsiders. Side movements trying to capitalize on the movement include

• The Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party is not entirely a side issue, in that it agrees with all 3 of what I have listed as the central concerns of the Tea Party. Most people in the Tea Party, however, would probably not agree with the Libertarians' advocacy of the legalization of prostitution, all drugs, and gambling.
• The John Birch Society, which espouses theories about communist conspiracies.
  
• Various efforts to end the Federal Reserve, or undermine the independence of its monetary policy.
• Advocates against illegal immigration. For 8 years, the Bush administration failed to take any serious measures on this issue, and some people are hoping the new movement will embrace it.

Fear and anger are key emotions driving the movement. Fear:

• The fear is generated by people seeing the values of their 401k's and their homes drop radically, at the same time, in 2008. This fear is compounded by the fact that few people understand the economics of what happened. Also there are many casualties who have lost their jobs and/or their homes.
  
• Fear of a new black president who had the most liberal voting record in the senate.

Anger:

• There is great anger over the bailouts. Senator Diane Feinstein, for example, said that 90% of the phone calls and emails her office was receiving about the bailout were against it, yet she voted for it. The bailout of Wall Street was one of the most unpopular things the government has ever done. The fact that many Republicans, including Bush and McCain, supported the bailout, left many conservatives feeling betrayed.
  
• Anger at the Democratic decision to stimulate the economy with increased government spending rather than via a tax cut.

Regarding issue #1, the desire to obstruct Obama in anything he was going to do, the Tea Party has had some success -- it helped elect a Republican to fill the position vacated by Edward Kennedy, ending Obama's filibuster-proof majority in the senate. But this could have been accomplished by just helping the Republican Party.
Regarding issue #2, anger over the bailouts, the Tea Party can do nothing. The bailouts are in the past. They can try to prevent more bailouts from happening, but that's about it.
Regarding issue #3, desire to shrink the government, the Tea Party can accomplish nothing. Republicans have a record, under Reagan and W, of cutting taxes without commensurate spending cuts. This was irresponsible and caused huge deficits. At some point, if this effort is to be successful, there needs to an agreement on what services will be cut and then a bill needs to get through congress. That's really hard, and to do it, you need to have an organization that can hammer out a specific platform -- there's no way that sort of difficult consensus can be formed by a leaderless, platformless, amorphous mob.

http://tr.im/nytimesteaparty
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Real Estate: Evils of the Owner-Occupied Paradigm

For many years, it has been the conventional wisdom in the United States that home ownership was the best investment strategy for the average person. Since 2006, we have seen real estate prices drop 32% nationwide and more severely than that in some areas, and along with that, we have seen a rash of foreclosures. The time is ripe to be rethinking our investment strategies.

US Home Prices Nationwide: 1994 - mid 2009

Reasons Why Buying the House You Live In Is Not a Good Idea

Diversification: One of the most important factors in an investment strategy should be diversification. You want a lot of little investments, of different types, so that if one investment goes sour, it doesn't wipe out your whole portfolio. You can't get much less diversified than a house -- not only is it a single investment, but if you start out with a 10% down payment, that house is 1000% of your portfolio! So if the house declines in value by 10%, you lose 100% of your initial investment.
Potential Debt: The traditional way to buy a house is on credit. You are investing with money that is not yours. That means that a small increase in the house's value will result in a large payoff for your initial investment. Many people experienced this prior to 2006, seeing huge increases in their net worth as their homes appreciated. It also means that a small decrease can leave you with negative net worth. In my book, having negative net worth is many times more bad than being rich is good. I prefer not to invest money I don't have, and follow an investment strategy where the worst case outcome is flat broke.
Pre-Bubble Mentality: Prior to 2005, most people buying real estate believed it was a fundamental law of physics that real estate prices would always rise. When most people are thinking that way, it is called a bubble. It was a matter of time until the bubble burst.
Planning For Hard Times: It really is a good idea to have sufficient savings to carry you through a couple of years of unemployment. Relying on credit to get you through tough times is risky -- banks respond to tough times by restricting credit. Furthermore, a computer glitch or identity theft can destroy your credit rating at any time. Generally, a mortgage payment is much higher than a rent payment for the same sized dwelling. And if you become unemployed for an extended period of time, you'll have no income to write off the mortgage interest against during that time.
When the economy goes badly, the banks are reluctant to extend credit, and are raising interest rates and lowering credit limits. If you rent your dwelling, then when hard times hit, you can easily move into more modest accomodations. If you own your dwelling, you probably can't move out of it and into a cheaper place without selling the old one -- a major hassle and a disaster in a down real estate market.
Industry Diversification: If you work in an area dominated by a single industry, like Silicon Valley or Detroit or Manhattan, and you work in that single industry, real estate values in that area will fluctuate along with that industry. This means that if your industry takes a beating, you are liable to wind up long-term unemployed and needing money for relocation or retraining at the same time as the net equity in your house goes negative. Not a good position to be in.
Moving Becomes More of a Hassle: When you move to a new place, many errands have to be taken care of, learn your way around the new city, find schools for your kids. Buying a house adds a huge decision with potentially disastrous consequences to the list of errands to be made when moving.
Too Many Constraints on a Single Decision: A house you own has to satisfy too many requirements at once. It has to be appropriately located, the house itself has to be the kind of place you want to live in, and it has to be a very good investment. It is unlikely that you'll find a house that really meets all these requirements very well.

Prior to the Bubble Bursting

The government had an attitude that the more Americans owned their homes, the better. I remember in Bill Clinton's autobiography he spoke with pride about how the rate of home ownership increased during his presidency. This attitude is flawed -- many people are not cut out to be responsible home owners. And we have a great system for identifying who those people are, it's called the FICO credit score. People with lousy credit scores should not be given home loans, they are not responsible enough to handle it.

Another way to see if someone is going to be able to pay a mortgage is to demand a substantial down payment. If they can handle their money well enough to save up a down payment, that does a lot to demonstrate that they'll be responsible about paying back the mortgage. In addition, it provides a cushion, so that if the value of the house sinks by less than the down payment, the home owner still has positive equity in the house and is less likely to walk away from it or declare bankruptcy. But prior to the bubble bursting, many loans were being made with no down payment required.

Reasons For the Financial Crisis

Many people attribute the financial crisis to "too much greed". Baloney. A bank that isn't greedy is not a good bank. Greed is what drives the system.

The biggest issue that drove the financial crisis was that too many people, both home buyers and Wall Street investors, thought it was a fundamental law of physics that real estate prices would always rise forever. Home buyers took out many interest-only loans, a practice that makes no sense if you believe that real estate prices might fall. The financial system made loans to many people with poor credit or who otherwise showed signs of being likely to fail paying them back. The reason the financial system was willing to make these loans is that they felt it was guaranteed the value of the house would be greater than the outstanding value of the loan, even if no down payment was made, so that worst case, the value of the loan could always be recovered by foreclosure.
When real estate prices fell, all these deals fell apart. In some states, the homeowner was legally allowed to abandon their home loan if they let the bank take the house. As a result, when home prices fell, many homeowners whose houses were worth less than the outstanding loan walked away, a tactic called "rational foreclosure". With so many loans failing without sufficient collateral to cover the cost of the loan, the banks lost so much money that it caused a crisis.

The biggest mystery of this, to me, is why the people on Wall Street were so stupid. I can understand the homeowners being stupid, the guys on Wall Street had high IQ's and MBA's, and they just should have known better. One guess I have is that many of them did know better, but they were not investing their own money. The worst thing that could happen to them if there was a meltdown is they would lose their jobs in a down market. If this happened, they wouldn't be individually disgraced, since the industry as a whole went bad. And at the rate these guys were paid when times were good, they had plenty of resources with which to weather hard times.

What's Next?

Looking forward, I think people will not, within a generation, assume that owning the dwelling they live in is a sure-fire ticket to easy prosperity. Now that people know that real estate prices can go down, and down a lot, people will be much more careful about buying houses. People will buy houses because they really want to live in them for decades, and if their planning horizon is much shorter than that, they'll rent.
It could be a generation before real estate prices, in real terms, reach the highs of the summer of 2006. Several factors, which will not be repeated soon, contributed to housing values reaching those heights:

* People had not, within living memory, seen housing prices decline significantly on a nationwide basis.
* People were taking out interest-only loans, and loans with negative amortization.
* Mortgages were being extended to uncreditworthy people.
* Home loans were being made without requiring a down payment.

since none of these conditions are going to be repeated for decades, I anticipate that we will not see real estate prices reaching their 2006 peak again for decades.

How are we to invest for retirement from here on out? That's a good question. In the meltdown, all major asset classes -- real estate, stocks, bonds -- took a nosedive. People aren't going to feel safe investing in anything that's likely to deliver a good return. Hopefully people will at least diversify.

A mixture of stocks and bonds is naturally easier to diversify that a house. Even better, mutual funds or, better still, exchange-traded funds (ETF's) -- equity (stock) funds, and bond funds. Since each mutual fund spreads the money over a variety of investments, your portfolio is effectively even more diversified. Use equity funds for growth, and the bond funds for safety. And you don't have to go into debt to buy stocks and bonds.  Yes, if there's a recession, your bond funds will lose some (but probably not a lot of) value, and your equity funds will lose a lot of value, but your nest egg will always have positive worth.

One way to invest in real estate and avoid the problem of under diversification is to buy REIT's, which are funds that invests in real estate. This also avoids the hassle of having to maintain it, and also you can buy in small quantities.

Another reason people should be encouraged to invest in stocks and bonds rather than real estate is that investments in stocks and bonds help fund companies, which employ people and make stuff. Investment in real estate, for the most part, achieves no social good but rather just chases up the price of land.
I've heard the argument made that a purchase of stock only helps industry if you bought the stock directly in the IPO. This is wrong. As long as you own stock in a company, you have a relationship with that company. The shareholders can, at any time, choose to dissolve the company, sell the assetts of the company such as equipment, and return that money to the shareholders. Until they do that, they are continuing to invest in the company and their money is at work doing what the company does.

Movie Review: The Secret

This movie discusses the "Law of Attraction", supposedly a secret that will unlock untold and unlimited human potential.

This movie reminded me a lot of when I took "The Forum" (descended from EST), which is typical of the self-help genre, which tends to have the following characteristics:

• Hardly any of the presentation is spent discussing the specific techniques that are supposedly going to improve your life.
• Most of the presentation is spent vaguely praising itself. There is a lot of dramatic imagery involved.
  
• A very strong pitch is made that you have the ability to completely control your life, the implication being that if you adopt the (barely discussed) techniques, everything in your life will improve.
• The actual wisdom being imparted is actually very simple, not really enough to justify a whole movie or book, the rest is just window dressing to make it appear to be the core issue of the universe.
  

The "Law of Attraction" states that the universe delivers to you whatever you think about. It doesn't distinguish between good and bad. If you focus on the bad things, they will inevitably come to you. The way to make good things happen is by focusing just on those good things. That's it. That's the whole secret.
I think there is value to this. If you are focused solely on those bad things, without having positive thoughts about a way out, that's not a very constructive approach.
But I have also seen a couple of the most catastrophically failed people I've ever met who were totally following this philosophy.

• One was a drug dealer who I knew in college. He was totally focused on how he was going to build his drug dealing business into a billion dollar corporation, and ignored the risks involved - this risks to his health caused by all the drugs he was taking, and the risks posed by the dangerous criminals he was associating with. He lost his sanity because of drug use and never really recovered.
• Another was a guy who read some books about instant millionaires on Wall Street, who borrowed tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards to play the stock market. He did not think about the risks he was taking, and would not listen to my advice that these books he was reading were not economically sound, but just focused on the great wealth he was going to be enjoying, He had no health insurance, he drove without auto insurance. He lost his shirt in the market (by short-selling a high-tech startup, which makes absolutely no sense to any investor who takes risk into account), and last I heard was being sued by multiple banks while unemployed.

Fear is in many ways a very healthy instinct, keeping us from doing a lot of stupid things. It is a highly underrated emotion. Thinking about risks, avoiding them, and making preparations for the unavoidable ones, is very sound practice.

Another drawback of positive thinking comes to mind. I remember one time the state lottery jackpot was up to 100 million dollars. Normally I don't buy lottery tickets, but that week I bought one.
The whole week I spent a lot of time thinking about all the magnificent things I would do with 100 million dollars. At the end of the week (surprise!) I didn't win. I realized I had made a mistake in buying the ticket. The $2 lost was insignificant to me, but the wasted brain time, which could have been devoted to actually improving my life, which was instead devoted to stupid daydreams about what I would do with the money, was unacceptable. I've never bought a lottery ticket since. The human mind cannot accurately comprehend a one in a million probability, and does not allocate its time well.

There is a lot of talk about visualizing what you want, but that really is no "secret" to athletes. I remember being told in football practice to visualize myself doing the proper technique, and it is definitely a useful tactic.

But the movie makes claims that the supernatural is behind this principal. One guy in the movie claimed to "create" parking spaces for himself by visualizing them ahead of time. If "the secret" really works, I'd want a lot more than parking spaces from it -- I'm reminded of the time Homer Simpson got any wish he wanted and he asked for a really nice sandwich.

The movie talks a lot about sickness. There are always miracle cures occurring - a certain fraction of cancers just go away by themselves, and sometimes people heal when the doctors gave them no hope. For this movie, they dug up some of these people who then claim it was all done with the power of their minds.
I am reminded of a study discussed in a psychology class I took in college. Periodically, wildfires approach suburbs in Southern California, and sometimes they burn down some of the houses. People take numerous measures to save their houses - they stand on the roof with water hoses putting out burning embers than land on them, they run around the yard stomping out the flames. So for this study, they went around the neighborhood taking a survey of what measures were taken to save houses, then studied the correlation between measures taken and house survival. They found no correlation. What people did to save their houses made no difference. In the survey, they also asked people if the measures taken influenced saving their houses. The people whose houses survived tended to think their measures helped. The people whose houses burned down felt there was nothing that could have been done.
I am reminded of hearing about how people would be told in EST seminars that they are responsible for having gotten cancer, and this movie is doing exactly that. If the sick person actually listens to this drivel, their suffering is compounded by feeling guilty for having brought this upon themselves.
Furthermore, people may shun surgery and medication and try to just think themselves healthy. Interestingly, the movie offers no actual studies of survival rates of people who turn to modern medicine as compared to those who adopt a program of positive thinking according to the dictates of the Law of Attraction. But this movie isn't really addressed to the type of people who ask for statistics. Like most quack medicine, the focus is all on testimonials rather than studies.

They claim that The Secret has been passed down through the ages, in secret. What is not made clear is If this were true, Why was it kept secret? The movie specifically states there would be no ill effects if everyone embraced The Secret, there is enough abundance to go around. So the more people knew this, the better. There would be no reason for a few giants to hoard this wisdom and shut out the majority of the human race. There is also no specifics of the history of this secret through the ages, no specific examples of anyone trying to suppress anything.

Book Report: "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, from an assertive (for a Muslim) mother and a progressive, but largely absent, father. Her father had been educated at Columbia University in NYC.

Her father's political activism against the Somali government made it necessary for the family to leave the country, first traveling to Saudi Arabia, where blacks are referred to as "slaves" by their classmates and teachers, then briefly to Ethiopia, then to Kenya.

As a teenager and young adult, Ayaan sought Islamic teaching, eager to get to the "core of Islam" and reach the point where it would begin to make sense, but she generally found the answers she was receiving to be unsatisfying. Since most of her education occurred in Kenya, she spoke English very well, and read many western books.

By Somali custom, all marriages are arranged, and one day her father returned home to happily announce that he had found a great husband for Ayaan, a Somali man who lived in Canada. When the suitor came by and visited Ayaan and her siblings, they found out that not only were his Somali language skills deficient, but he didn't speak English all that well either! Further conversation showed that he was an idiot. Ayaan pleaded with her father to be released from this arrangement, but he turned a deaf ear to her. The wedding ceremony happened with no women, not even Ayaan, present.

Ayaan was shipped to a relative in Germany, where she was to spend a few weeks before proceeding to Canada. Determined to run the first chance she got, she told her uncle she was going on a brief trip to Holland to visit a friend, and once there, applied for asylum status, and was shocked at how generously the Dutch welcomed her into their welfare state. Her clan and her father disowned her.

European society seemed better in every way than the one she came from. It was more prosperous, less violent, the people were kind, and civil servants were cordial and uninterested in bribes. Lessons in Dutch were available, and she acquired it quickly and was able to earn a comfortable living as a Dutch-Somali translator. In her translation work, she was constantly exposed to the dysfunctional nature of her native culture, in contrast to the more advanced Dutch culture around her. She attended a university, and, determined to understand how such a great society could be created and why the other societies she was familiar with were doing so badly in comparison, majored in political science. She moved in with a white boyfriend, living with him for several years.

She kept asking herself, if Islam was the one true religion and Allah the one true God, why were these societies of infidels doing so much better than the Islamic societies? And as, in her studies, she read the history of Europe, it seemed to be the history of the Catholic church losing more and more of its power, and of the secularization of governments.

Very slowly, she became not only an unbeliever, but developed a strong belief that, for progress to occur in the Islamic world, someone had to criticize Islam, as Christianity had been criticized in Europe, and bring about the secularization of those countries. But who was to criticize Islam? Any white European who did it would be dismissed as a "racist". Anyone who did it in Somalia would quickly be killed. She had studied the Koran extensively, and understood well what she was rejecting and why. Ayaan did what she felt was right and began to make her voice heard.

As she spoke out, she began to receive death threats from Muslims. She switched political parties as her own Labor Party was too politically correct to be comfortable with her views and won a seat in Dutch parliament with the more conservative Liberal Party.

She continued to speak out, and it became clear to everyone that she was a full-fledged infidel. According to Mohamed, any Muslim who renounces their faith is to be killed. Her life changed radically, as she found herself surrounded by burly bodyguards, her whereabouts a secret.

Still determined to speak, she wrote the script for a 10 minute movie about the oppression of women by Islam which was directed by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh was murdered in the street by a radical Muslim, who left a note on the body saying that Ayaan was the next target.

Holland erupted in rioting -- Mosques and Islamic schools were burned down, and in retaliation, Christian churches were burnt.

The book ends with Ayaan moving to the US to work for the American Enterprise Institute.

It should be made clear that Islam did not oppress Ayaan particularly badly for a Somali girl. The female circumcision and arranged marriage were strictly normal for that society, and she received a pretty good education. Her father did not beat her mother. The family was quite progressive for that country, and would have been more so had her father been around more (the circumcision of his children occurred in his absence and against his express wishes).

It is important to understand the courage it must have taken for Ayaan to criticize the religion she had been raised to believe had a monopoly on goodness. As Richard Dawkins says, this woman is a hero. (show less)

Book Report: Systems of Survival

Systems of Survival, by Jane Jacobs

The most fascinating book about anthropology and politics I've ever read. I kept seeing things in it that I had thought of before, but never heard from anyone else.

The idea is the observation that nomadic societies are very different in their values systems than are agricultural ones. One example is given of a nomadic tribe in Africa that was told by a government to settle down and become farmers. They were provided with adequate land, equipment and training. They hated it, the whole experiment just didn't work. To apply themselves to an agricultural lifestyle would have required a big values shift. This is one of the most difficult transitions for a society to make. It means acts which used to be morally contemptible are now acceptable, and some acts previously considered commendable are no longer tolerated.

The book describes these two values systems in detail, goes through various examples of these two systems, and we see how capitalists are in the agricultural values system, and communists in the nomadic values system. Very much so. This means that the formerly communist countries that are trying to develop a working capitalism are dealing with a major values shift, and that's hard, and difficult, and takes time. Not only do they have to change the laws, they have to adjust to entirely new concepts of right and wrong.

It is interesting that the Cherokee Indians, who did the best among all the tribes I've heard of at coping with the injustice of the white onslaught, were an agricultural society before we showed up.

Most of the book is discussing the values systems of different societies around the world. This is very valuable, since values of different societies are one of the key issues determining the success of these societies.

It always struck me how those who condemn capitalism would have this overwhelming disgust at actions that I felt were completely acceptable trading practices. The values systems.differed, and it is the norm for people with different values systems to condemn each other. After all, it is easier to condemn someone as having no values than to understand how his values might in some ways be superior to your own.

For most of my life, especially during the cold war, politics were dominated by the conflict between capitalism and communism. Most people, even the capitalists, felt the communist system was "more moral" and defended capitalism on strictly pragmatic grounds. The Libertarians tend to defend capitalism and denounce communism on moral grounds, but they are so few in number that theirs is a viewpoint that is rarely heard.

The book describes the values systems as "Guardian" (communist or government) syndrome, and "Commercial" (capitalist, business) syndrome.

Guardian rules:

• Shun trading
• Exert prowess
• Be obedient and disciplined
• Adhere to tradition
• Respect hierarchy
• Be loyal
• Take vengeance
• Deceive for the sake of the task
• Make rich use of leisure
• Be ostentatious
• Dispense largess
• Be exclusive
• Show fortitude
• Be fatalistic
• Treasure honor

Commercial rules:

• Shun force
• Come to voluntary agreements
• Be honest
• Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens
• Compete
• Respect contracts
• Use initiative and enterprise
• Be open to inventiveness and novelty
• Be efficient
• Promote comfort and convenience
• Dissent for the sake of the task
• Invest for productive purposes
• Be industrious
• Be thrifty
• Be optimistic

This book does, in my opinion, have a capitalist bias.
For example, they feel that honesty is value cherished primarily by the commercial syndrome but not the Guardian syndrome. But in the US military, which is about as heavily in the Guardian syndrome as you can get, it is considered a very serious offense for one officer to lie to another -- people are subject to severe discipline at West Point for telling even the most harmless lie.
The book says the scientific world is heavily in the commercial syndrome, which is not really true, most of the most important scientific work is funded by philanthropists and government, and the scientists just give away the fruit of their labor for free.
The rules say ostentation is a quality of the Guardian syndrome, but many businessmen, especially sales types, feel it is very important to have luxuries to impress clients.

Book Report: "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blank Slate"

The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins
The Blank Slate - by Steven Pinker

The Selfish Gene, written in the mid-70's, is a detailed essay by a biologist about evolution, particularly discussing animal behavior. Dawkins' writing comes across as very intelligent while at the same time very accessible. I have believed in evolution since I was old enough to understand it, and the analysis made felt like second nature to me, except that Dawkins, being a biologist, can discuss the matter in much more detail. Dawkins talks at length about how altruism and kindness can be evolved traits. The whole book is a delight.
But at the end of the book, I was left asking myself why Dawkins didn't make the next step and start talking about how genetic incentives influence human behavior. When I read The Blank Slate I found out the answer.

Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, is enthusiastic about the field of Evolutionary Psychology, formerly known as Sociobiology, and he is furious about the political lynching the socio biologists received at the hands of the academic left in the '70's. In this book he talks primarily about two false dogmas that dominated academia during the 20th century: the myth of the noble savage, and the dogma that all human behavior is culturally, and not genetically, determined. Dawkins was right at the boundaries of sociobiology, and he caught some of the flak, but had he talked much about evolution and human behavior, he would have paid dearly.

To change gears a little, I never really understood why the Catholic church was so threatened by Galileo's assertion that the Earth traveled around the Sun. Pinker gives us some context. For one thing, there were some literal statements in the Bible, like Joshua ordering the sun to stand still (but that could just mean Joshua successfully stopped the Earth's rotation). But Pinker clarifies:
"According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below... Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained with the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals..., and then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a great chain of being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications".
I wondered why the church made up all this crap when they had no idea what they were talking about. The answer is obvious -- religions have been doing that since day one. The telescope had not been invented, it did not occur to these people that their assertions could be tested and even discredited. Furthermore, the church controlled intellectual life, so they could oppress anyone who challenged their assertions, which is exactly what they wound up doing to Galileo.
The moral dimension is central here. When you're making a theme of the cosmos to sell to the masses, it is easy to fall into the temptation of making sure the story has a moral ending, a conclusion that will lead people to live moral lives. And once such a dogma is in place, anyone like Galileo who wants to challenge it is no longer just talking about the trajectories of big rocks, he's undermining the moral foundations of society and must be attacked, discredited, and oppressed by any means available.
Similarly, the political left in academia made up a bunch of dogmas about genetics and human nature out of thin air -- they did not research the matter carefully, but asserted their dogmas as a matter of political fashion, and based a whole set of moral conclusions and planned social policies upon them. Once these ideas were established, they defended them by vicious personal attacks on anyone who actually did some research into what the truth was.

Pinker is a major intellectual giant, he has read many of the great thinkers through the centuries, he takes us on a whirlwind tour of anthropology and psychology through recent centuries, and the things he comes up with are impressive:

On Noble Savages

"The begin with, the stories of tribes out there somewhere who have never heard of violence turn out to be urban legends. Margaret Mead's descriptions of peace-loving New Guineans and sexually nonchalant Samoans were based on perfunctory research and turned out to be almost perversely wrong. As the anthropologist Derek Freeman later documented, Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on the wedding night, a young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping, and the family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert had been described by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas as "the harmless people" in a book with that title. But as soon as anthropologists camped out long enough to accumulate data, they discovered that the !Kung San have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities. They learned as well that the San had recently avenged a murder by sneaking into the killer's group and executing every man, woman, and child as they slept. But at least the !Kung San exist. In the early 1970's The New York Times Magazine reported the discovery of the "gentle Tasaday" of the Philippine rain forest, a people with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons. The Tasaday turned out to be local farmers dressed in leaves for a photo opportunity so that cronies of Ferdinand Marcos could set aside their "homeland" as a preserve and enjoy exclusive mineral and logging rights.
Anthropologists and historians have also been counting bodies. Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the US."
Pinker then shows a chart of various primitive societies and the rates of male deaths caused by war, and notes that while in the US and Europe in the 20th century, including deaths in WWI and WWII, the deaths are about 2%, while deaths in the tribes listed ranged from 10-60%, with an average of about 30%. In addition, Pinker adds
"Moreover, Keeley and others have noted that native peoples are dead serious when they carry out warfare. Many of them make weapons as damaging as their technology permits, exterminate their enemies when they can get away with it, and enhance the experience by torturing captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting on enemy flesh."
Pinker mentions that Edward Wilson, the author of Sociobiology, remarked that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory, and was criticized for this when the "against-socio biologists declared that this had been 'strongly rebutted on the basis of historical and anthropological studies'" - Pinker looked up these "studies" and found "the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare".
Steven Jay Gould, the great evolutionist, came out against the socio biologists, and was hostile to any attempt to analyze warfare in terms of evolutionary motives because, as he said "each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence, each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan.". Pinker answers "once again, a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in chapter 3 show that 'pacific clans' either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the 'murderous bands.'"

On The Blank Slate

Pinker discusses the studies that can be done and that have been done, keeping track of identical twins raised together, identical twins raised apart, siblings raised together, siblings raised apart, unrelated adopted siblings raised together, and unrelated individuals raised separately, and with these studies, one can get a very good idea of the contribution that genetics and family will make on intelligence and personality. Family environment can affect intelligence measured when a child is young, but the influence decreases. I had heard the same thing elsewhere, that the intelligence of a young child will tend toward that of its adopted family, but as it nears adulthood, its intelligence converges on that of its biological parents.
Pinker says "The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology.... Here are the three laws:

• The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
• The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
• The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families."

Pinker goes on to tell us it is really amazing how little impact the family has on the child. He estimates the genetic contribution being 40-50%, the family contribution 0-10%, and the random, or at least so far unexplained, contribution is about 50%.
There are many, many studies that show correlations between how children are raised and how they turn out, but it turns out that most of these researchers were so certain of the dogma of The Blank Slate that they only studied children being raised by their biological parents, so all they were really observing was the genetic component!
Pinker goes on"The First Law is a pain in the neck for radical scientists, who have tried unsuccessfully to discredit it. In 1974, Leon Kamin wrote that 'there exist no data which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores are in any degree heritable', a conclusion he reiterated with Lewontin and Rose a decade later. Even in the 1970's the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980's it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity. As usual, the attacks have not always come in dispassionate scholarly analyzes. Thomas Bouchard, who directed the first large-scale study of twins reared apart, is one of the pioneers of the genetics of personality. Campus activists at the University of Minnesota distributed handouts calling him a racist and linking him to 'German Fascism,' spray-painted slogans calling him a Nazi, and demanded that he be fired. The psychologist Barry Mehler accused him of 'rehabilitating' the work of Josef Mengele, the doctor who tormented twins in the Nazi death camps under the guise of research. As usual, the charges were unfair not just intellectually but personally: far from being a fascist, Bouchard was a participant in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960's, was briefly jailed for his activism, and says he would do it again today.
These attacks are transparently political and easy to discount. More pernicious is the way the First Law is commonly interpreted: 'So you're saying it's all in the genes," or, more angrily, "Genetic determinism!" I have already commented on this odd reflex in modern intellectual life: when it comes to genes, people suddenly lose their ability to distinguish between 50% and 100%, 'some' from 'all', 'affects' from 'determines'. The diagnosis for this intellectual crippling is clear: if the effects of the genes must, on theological grounds, be zero, then all nonzero values are heretical."

Other Dogmas

Pinker really despises the political movement called "Post modernism", which is a very politically correct belief system. His first chapter discussing this belief system is titled "In Touch with Reality". He says
"With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact not inaccurate when assessed against objective benchmarks such as census figures or the reports of the stereotyped people themselves. People who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites, that Jews have higher average income than WASPs, that business students are more conservative than students in the arts, that women are more likely than men to want to lose weight, and that men are more likely than women to swat a fly with their bare hands, are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct. People's stereotypes are generally consistent with the statistics, and in many cases their bias is to underestimate the real differences between sexes or ethnic groups."
Regarding the passion that the politically correct have for arbitrarily changing the vocabulary we're allowed to use (without the general population being given a chance to vote on the matter), he comments on how "Even the word minority -- the most neutral label conceivable, referring only to relative numbers -- was banned in 2001 by the San Diego City Council (and nearly banned by the Boston City Council) because it was deemed disparaging to nonwhites. 'No matter how you slice it, minority means less than,' said a semantically challenged official at Boston College, where the preferred term is AHANA (an acronym for African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American)."

Politics

There is a whole chapter about politics that is fascinating. Identical twins separated at birth have a tendency to have similar political views.
Pinker describes two fundamental views of human beings, the "Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian vision". In the tragic vision, people are seen not as bad, but as inherently selfish, and also quite corruptible. In the Utopian Vision, humans are a blank slate that society can mold into any form necessary. Given either of these two assumptions, a whole set of political positions follows, and the chapter sheds plenty of light on many issues.

There is so much great stuff in this book I can hardly cover it all, but it is basically a summary of how academic progress in anthropology, psychology, and even the fine arts in the 20th century was stifled by the political left.

The priests of different religious sects ... dread the advancement of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl upon the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Richard Dawkins

The aftermath of the Galileo episode is still with us, and the consequence is that many clergy have learned that it's not their place to tell scientists what is true and what is not. The debacle with the Post Modernists is still going on, but I predict that in the end they, too, will learn that political ideologues also have no legitimate role in deciding which scientific statements are valid and which are not.

Tips For Job Searchers

I put this list of tips together a few years ago after a quite successful job search.

Resume

• Don't use a functional resume if you can possibly avoid it. Everyone wants chronological.
• If you want to change fields, try to avoid too much detail about the field you're trying to get out of. My resume was previously going on and on about EDA CAD, saying things that were incomprehensible to anyone outside of that field (including the headhunters) resulting in my getting hardly anything but EDA CAD interviews.
• Keep your resume down to 2 pages
• State employment offices often have free classes in how to write a good resume, and coaches who you can show your resume to for advice. This can make a big difference.
• Things are substantially complicated by the use of Word to do resumes, and the fact that Word is an ugly, unreliable and shifting standard controlled by an evil empire, and Word resumes will look different when viewed on a variety of different platforms. But Microsoft Word is the gold standard in resumes. It's what the headhunters want to deal with. Some people like to publish their resume as a pdf, rtf file or other format, headhunters don't like that. Many headhunters want to edit / reformat your resume, at least to remove contact information, and they can't do that with any format other than Word or text. I've often showed up for interviews and found the manager was reading a substantially reformatted version of my resume. I never saw one that the headhunter had actually improved, but I figure let the headhunter do it, a happy headhunter is a headhunter who is more likely to find me a job. Also, the internet job boards are usually only able to cope with text or Word formats, most of them deal primarily with text format, so you have to have your resume available both as a text and Word document. If you send multiple formats to the headhunters, like a Word and a pdf file, they will use one (Word if it's available, or text), forwarding that to the hiring managers, and throw the others away.
  
• Don't just do your resume in Open Office or Wine on Linux and start sending it out. I learned this one the hard way a few years ago. Although Open Office and Wine are trying hard to emulate Microsoft Word, for some reason, possibly legal, they aren't allowed to use exactly the same fonts, so things don't line up exactly the same way and your resume can look like a disaster (columns collapsing, pages overflowing 5-10% followed by a page break) when the headhunter views it using real Microsoft Word. Over a couple of months in 2002, I sent out many copies of a resume I had painstakingly done with Wine before finding out it looked absolutely horrible when the headhunters were viewing it with true Microsoft Word.
• When you save your resume on Microsoft Word, don't save according to an old format. Saving to an old Word format was a good idea when new Microsoft products could read old Microsoft formats, but now Microsoft deliberately hobbles new versions of Word so they can't read files created by old versions of Word (to force people to buy every release that comes out).
• Make sure you view it with the latest Word. I did my resume on Word 2000 and then viewed it on Office 2007, and it looked awful. It is outrageous that a resume viewed on a later version of the same company's product doesn't look the same, but that's Microsoft for you. You don't have to buy the latest Microsoft Office, just do you resume on whatever version you have, then take it on a RAM key to an internet cafe, and edit it on the latest Word there.
  
• Just because your resume looks good on true Microsoft Word, don't assume you're home free. View it with Open Office. Often the different fonts will bite you then. Though basically none of the headhunters will be using Linux to view your resume, they will be forwarding it to managers and engineers, many of whom will be Linux or Unix-based. Generally, I have found that the fonts on Linux are a little bigger than the ones on Windows, so a resume has to have about 5% empty space at the bottom of the page on Word to fit right on Open Office.
• One thing a headhunter told me is to make sure that your contact info appears on every page of a printout of your resume. Many headhunters have a pile of unstapled printouts of resumes all over their desk (I think I would use a stapler if I were in their position, but we have to play the game their way) and the pages get mixed up and they have trouble telling which page belongs to whose resume.
• Don't change your resume too often, when you overhaul it, spend days on it. You have to examine it very carefully for typos, typos will kill you. The spelling checkers don't understand the computer jargon and acronyms, it's really easy to get typos into your resume, and every time you make any change whatsoever, you have to check it looks good from Windows, and that it looks good from Open Office. If you don't have Open Office, you can download it for free here.
  

Job Boards

• The places to post your resume to get results seem to be craigslist.org, Dice, Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs. Craigslist seemed to be the most widely read.
  
• The main thing I have to offer is my extensive C/C++ background. Most job boards can't cope with a search for "C" and return all job listings that contain words containing the letter "c", so you have to look at lots of irrelevant jobs. Some object if the search string contains a "+" character, perhaps thinking it's a regular expression. Only Dice and Careerbuilder were able to search effectively for "C" or "C++" jobs.
• Dice is particularly good in that you can narrow down your job search to specific telephone area codes. No other job board that I saw can do this.
• I was able to set up Dice and Careerbuilder to deliver to me, every day, an email listing all the new jobs in C/C++ in certain geographic areas that I was looking for. This was very efficient in time usage.
• A lot of robots scan job boards to harvest email addresses to spam with really stupid offers for work at home schemes, "resume blaster" services, and invitations to visit obscure job boards that don't really have any worthwhile jobs on them. When you start a job search, create a new email address that is forwarded to your regular email address. When you finish your job search, forward that email address into oblivion so your real email address will be unspammed by these parties in the future. In my text resume, I put spaces between every char of the email address to make it harder for the robots to harvest.

Editor

• If you use soft keys in your editor, turn them off at the beginning of your job search so you get proficient at using your editor without them. You may be asked to write some code during the interview, and it probably won't be feasible to load your own softkeys into the editor.
  

Web Presence

• Headhunters and HR departments now commonly google candidates to get the dirt on them. Article.
  
• Visit your social networking sites, such as facebook, linkedin, and twitter, and make sure nothing that you don't want a headhunter to see is visible on those sites. Update the privacy settings so a stranger can see as little as possible.
• Age: If you are a programmer over 40, headhunters will discriminate against you illegally and quite strongly. Make sure that neither your pictures nor your full birthday are visible to strangers on any social networking site. If you dropped some of your early career off of your resume, make sure it's not showing on linkedin either. Take the dates of your college degree off of linkedin.
• Google yourself. See if anything unfortunate shows up, and if you can, clean it up.
• One trick to make websites, such as your blog, ungooglable is to remove your full name from text everywhere, and have your full name be visible only on a picture.
  

Interviews

• Always eat a big breakfast before interviews. You may need the energy, and you can't be sure what sort of lunch opportunity you're going to have. If you're in a strange town, the "Big Breakfast" at MacDonald's will do just fine.
• Usually, they ask you if you would like a coke or something between each person you talk to. Always go for the coke so you'll be as awake as possible. Bring change to pay in case it's a vending machine. When I was interviewing at Amazon in Seattle, they didn't have a coke machine in the building, and at the end of the day I was getting exhausted and stumbled on this unbelievably basic question, something everybody learns in college, which I think cost me the job.
• Always bring several copies of your resume with you. Often you show up and the engineer interviewing you has either a text version of your resume (which in my case is much harder to read than the Word version) or a horribly mangled version the headhunter has forwarded to him. It's good to be able to pull out a nicer resume and say "read this" and when I've done that they've always agreed that what I gave them was more usable than the headhunter's version. Plus it will have your contact info on it.