DataPacRat's Warren

There she is!! is a five episode Web Original Animated Series by Amalloc of the Korean web animation team SamBakZa.

The series is drawn in the Korean Manhwa style, done without dialogue to K-Pop music. It’s about a girl rabbit who meets up with a boy cat, and falls in love with him, much to his initial dismay.

…

The sheer emotional impact and cuteness of its art, plot, and message can not be adequately explained with words. Having taken five years to complete, There she is!! is still considered one of the best flash series on the internet and is a must-see.

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

At about 1:45pm today (+/- 5 minutes), I had a thought which may very well be entirely novel, explanatory, and predictive. I’ve spent the last few hours trying to poke at it, and haven’t found any obvious flaws in it, so now I’m seeing if I can explain it.

0. Intro.

Combining a few disparate bits of math may give us some useful conclusions about the nature of legal systems, and why some systems are more effective and stable than others.

Don’t worry if you don’t like numbers; nothing here is more complicated than multiplication, and I’ll work through that for you.

1. Laplace’s Sunrise Formula.

There’s a sort of math called “Bayesian Induction” which can help people figure out how strongly you should hold a belief given a collection of evidence of various strengths; and Bayesianism seems to be the closest we can come to Solomonoff Induction, the most accurate method possible if we had unlimited computing power. However, the Bayesian approach involves ‘updating’ ones beliefs based on new evidence, rather than saying how confident one should be in one’s beliefs before performing a Bayesian update. Fortunately, there’s another bit of math that covers that, known as Laplace’s Sunrise Formula, or the Rule of succession.

It was originally created to answer the question, “Knowing only how many times the sun has risen, what are the odds of it rising tomorrow?”, but can also be applied to a coin with an unknown bias somewhere between 100% heads and 100% tails, or a bag containing chips of one or more colours. It has two inputs—the total number of tests so far (the number of days, or coinflips, or chips drawn from the bag), and the number of successful tests (the number of sunrises, or coins flipped heads, or blue chips). It has one output—the probability that the next test will be successful. For large numbers of trials, the formula gives at least roughly the expected odds—if you flip a coin a million times and it comes up heads 500,000 times, the formula gives you approximately 50% odds that the next flip will also be heads. But the interesting part is that it also applies to low numbers of trials—or even single tests—or even none at all.

The formula is: (Successes + 1) / (TotalTrials + 2) = ProbabilityNextTrialSucceeds

If I have no prior evidence for how a coin is weighted, then before I make my first test, the formula gives me (0+1) / (0+2) = 1/2 = 50% odds that it will go either way, which agrees with common sense that if you don’t know, then all options are equally likely. After the first flip, if it’s heads, the expected odds shift to 2/3 that the next will be heads; if it’s tails, the odds shift to 1/3. This is a rather interesting case, because some experimenting has been done with certain creatures evolved with the pressure of natural selection to adapt to make the best possible choice in such tests—and they do, in fact, treat this as being what the actual odds are, implying that this is, in fact, the most accurate odds.

2. Probable Cause.

The math in this part doesn’t have anything to do with the previous part—they don’t come together until the next part.

The standard of proof in civil lawsuits is usually ‘preponderance of the evidence’—if it’s more likely than not that you broke my window, you can be deemed responsible for paying for it. However, for criminal charges, the standard is ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, and it can be required that every member of a jury agrees that that standard has been met.

Some clever people have done some analysis of such court cases, and in general, this standard of proof seems to be met when people are 75% confident. That is, on average, if a jury thinks there’s at least a 25% chance someone is innocent, they don’t convict.

3. Putting ‘Em Together.

Several conceptions of libertarian legal systems suggest eliminating the ‘criminal’ category altogether, treating all harm done to others as civilian torts. While working on the fundamentals of a libertarian code of laws, I was considering the same, but wanted to be sure that doing so would not eliminate some vital piece of social infrastructure – even if the actual contribution made to society wasn’t necessarily what most people thought it was, the way that one of the most important uses of a free market is to establish what the prices of things are.

So I wondered, why does a criminal conviction require a higher standard of proof than that required to pay civil compensation? And I realized that at a 75% certainty level, the most important information created by a jury isn’t necessarily whether or not the accused actually committed a crime—but whether or not they will do so in the future.

Some clever people working with SETI have determined that our own existence does not provide any evidence for or against the existence of life on other planets; if we did not exist, then we would not be around to ask the question in the first place. In a parallel case, we can never really know when someone is presented with a good opportunity to commit a criminal act and refrains from doing so; we can only know of those cases in which, presented with such an opportunity, somebody does perform a criminal act. Therefore, using Laplace’s formula, we cannot assume that an accused has had any other such opportunities—we can only act on the basis that they have had the one opportunity that we know about, and that they took advantage of that opportunity. Laplace’s formula thus tells us that we can be 2/3rds confident that, if presented with a similar opportunity in the future, they will again take advantage of it.

If we combine that 2/3rds confidence with the 75% confidence required for a jury conviction, we then see that the information generated by a criminal trial is our confidence that a convicted person will reoffend:

2/3 * 3/4 = 2/4 = 1/2 = 50%

This implies that a criminal conviction’s value isn’t in determining whether they committed a previous crime, but in demonstrating that they are more likely than not to commit another one in the future. This is unexpected and somewhat startling. It could very well be false; but, if true, has certain further implications.

For example, it could be suggested that if this information is important, then the closer any given society adheres to it as a standard, the better the foundations of their free market will be, and thus the more wealthy, prosperous, and stable that society will be.

For another example, this could suggest the main rationale for criminal punishments beyond civil recompense, the reason some punishments end up being utilized more than others, and which punishments should be chosen in a given legal system to accomplish any particular goals. Fines in excess of simple damages could be expected to be useful to pay the damages of the convictee’s future criminal actions. Imprisonment could remove the convictee from having the opportunity to reoffend, and rehabilitation could remove the desire. Both of those, plus corporal punishment and the death penalty, could be based on the theory that increasing the negative consequences will make a future reoffense less likely. That doesn’t mean that this latter theory is correct; if it isn’t, then it could be expected that the more stable and prosperous a society is, the less likely these punishments will be applied.

4. Libertarian Law

In libertarian terms, the usual list of what actions are considered an ‘initiation of force’ are “force, fraud, and threat”. The latter is usually interpreted as being a person stating that they are going to commit an act of force or fraud—but it is possible that this is not the most useful interpretation. If, using the best evidence-gathering and analysis techniques possible, you learned that it was at least 50% likely that an individual was going to initiate force against you, then it just might be moral to use the necessary amount of retaliatory force against that individual to limit their freedom to initiate force against you. If it was at least 50% likely that that individual was going to initiate force against someone in a society, then even without necessarily knowing who the particular target is going to be, it might be moral for the members of that society to act in their common defense.

Or maybe it isn’t—but now, at least, the question can be asked, with a better knowledge of its mathematical underpinnings.

Addendum:

As an example of a prediction, based on the idea that criminal law’s stability comes from its use as a way to identify the people who threaten to cause harm in the future: In addition to using data of instances where one individual did cause harm to others, the system could also use data of instances where one individual tried to cause harm to others but did not succeed. For example, if I try to steal your wallet and fail, then I haven’t caused you any damages; but if it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that I made the attempt, then that would provide the same information about my future willingness as a successful attempt would have, and thus the more successful legal systems will likely treat ‘attempted crimes’ and ‘conspiracy to commit crimes’ as being on a similar level to actual acts of causing harm.

As a second example, if it can be demonstrated that harm was done, but not by any conscious attempt, then while the person who caused the harm may still be liable for the actual damages, there may not be any reason to expect the perpetrator to be any more likely to commit such acts in the future than anyone else who suffers an accident, and so the more successful legal systems will likely take into account the perpetrator’s intentions. It is also plausible that there could be still another category, of people who cause harm to others not by conscious intent, but by a disregard for the consequences of their actions that is severe enough that such a person is as likely to repeat their behaviour as if they were a more ordinary criminal.

The above are, admittedly, somewhat ‘retrodictive’ predictions. For a true prediction, I offer this: As we gather more data about how the human brain works, and how minds go about making decisions, then the most successful criminal legal systems will be those which take advantage of the data to determine which minds are most likely to cause harm in the future, and use the countering methods that have the best statistics at preventing such re-offenses; rather than any criminal justice system which uses any other methods, such as being based on any particular political ideology or philosophy about how criminals ‘should’ be treated.

Letter from MamaLiberty (a.k.a. Susan Callaway) with reply from DataPacRat

Re: “The Paradox of Government” by DataPacRat

DataPacRat,

The difference between the “government” model we have now and what you are talking about… “… a group that is at least as powerful in the defense as organized criminals are in the attack”—is that it would be a voluntary organization and funded voluntarily.

All the difference in the world, whether you call it a “government” or not.

MamaLiberty (a.k.a. Susan Callaway)
mamaliberty@rtconnect.net

To which DataPacRat replied:

MamaLiberty,

That may be entirely true, but “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”? How is an average person to tell the difference between a group of criminals claiming to be using force in self-defense, a group of libertarians actually using force in self-defense, and a group that started out by only using force in self-defense but which has fallen from those ideals?

I also have to ask a fundamental question—both because I don’t actually know the answer, and what the answer really is is important. Is it possible for a voluntarily-funded, voluntary organization to fend off an attack by organized criminals? What evidence exists pointing to one answer or another? If ‘yes’, what are the necessary conditions? And, if the answer in at least one situation turns out to be ‘no’, what fallback plans should be considered?

Thank you for your time,

DataPacRat
datapacrat@datapacrat.com

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Or, Why Can’t We Seem To Get Rid Of ‘Em?

Just about anyone reading this article will agree with the proposition that just about every government that now exists has major flaws. One of the more common proposals to deal with this problem is to simply get rid of government entirely, of politicians and their hangers-on, so that the non-politician general public can get on with their lives unhindered. Some variation of the above forms the background of several of the books by our host, El Neil. [see the main page of this journal for links to books by Our Mr. Smith—Editor] Unfortunately, this seems to be an infeasible response—but not for the most obvious objections, that nobody’s done it yet, or has put forward sufficient evidence to support the feasibility of a plan with that end.

The problem of government isn’t necessarily that it’s evil in and of itself; it’s at least conceivable that some branch of humanity would be able to create a non-evil government. What makes governments evil is that they do evil—that they cause harm to people, that they infringe on individuals’ rights. Some people even say that a government is the greatest threat to peoples’ rights there is, and it’s hard to disagree with that.

But—and this is the important part—governments aren’t the only threats to peoples’ rights. They aren’t even the only organized threats. Mobsters, mongols, and mercantilists would all cheerfully violate large numbers of peoples’ rights for their own gain. And as heroic as the image might be in fiction, in reality, when a rugged, lone individualist with right on his side comes into conflict with a bunch of people clever enough to increase their wealth at the expense of others by banding together… then, most often, that individual will lose. By targeting a series of individuals, such monsters could gain greater and greater power over a larger number of people in a larger area—until, finally, they would have all the attributes of a government (whether or not they called themselves that). The only real difference between such a government and the ones we have today, is that the new one would not be set up to allow any rights of any of the large population to be respected; whoever was at the top of that gang wouldn’t have any reason to respect the average person’s rights. The difference is that of between a bloodthirsty mankiller of a beast; and a dangerous, potentially lethal, but at least partially tamed animal.

The only thing I can think of that would prevent such a tyranny to be formed is for the average people to organize themselves into a group, so that individuals couldn’t be targeted and picked off one by one; to form a group that is at least as powerful in the defense as organized criminals are in the attack.

And this is the paradox—in order to fend off the formation of a tyranny, the only thing able to do the job is something that itself still has all the indicia of a government. The only choice that seems to be available is in trying to make arrangements to minimize the harm done—to tame the beast as much as possible.

Of course, I could be wrong—and if I am, I want to be told I am, so that I can try to base my plans for trying to reduce the infringements of rights on how the universe actually works, rather than on how I think it works or would like it to work.

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Jacksonians, Jeffersonians, Hamiltonians, Wilsonians—the idea isn’t new, but looking at it from certain perspectives can still offer new insights.

For some time now, I’ve associated Meade’s four archetypes with colours, both to remind myself of their meaning, and to save my fingers when typing about them. Wilsonians are White, the colour of hope and peace; Jacksonians the Red of blood-stirred martial pride; Jeffersonians the cool Blue of rational thought; and Hamiltonians the Green of greed for money. I’ve long associated myself with the Blues, and doing so has helped me to be able to frame why I disagreed with various people about whole clusters of issues. However, I recently noticed that while I was able to come up with insulting stereotypes of the other three groups, I was having trouble coming up with a similar negative version of my own group—and this lack of self-awareness gnawed at me.

Taking the time to think about it, I realized that the negative versions I was able to come up with had something in common: the negative form of Whites is exemplified by the Hollywood elite, who spend their time trying to impress their peers by talking about helping others rather than actually doing anything that helps; the negative Red stereotype is the jingoistic redneck, who tries to impress his peers by talking about being honourable rather than actually being honourable; and the negative Green, the fat-cat banker and financier, tries to impress their peer by talking about the wealth they make rather than trying to improve their company’s finances. Looked at that way, I was finally able to identify another group that can spend more time trying to impress their peers with a virtue rather than actually practising said virtue: the hallowed halls of backbiting tenure-track academia.

Once I knew the negative forms of each group, I was able to take a better look at them: by stripping away those people who exemplify each faction’s worst, I could finally get a better understanding of what each group could be at its best: Whites who actually do go out and try to help other people; the personal honour and integrity of the Reds; the skill at increasing wealth and the economy of the Greens; and the rationality to solve abstract problems of the Blues. And from there, it becomes easy to see what such people have in common: their desire to go out and improve the world, as exemplified by the archetype of the hard-headed Engineer. Similarly, the negative forms have their own overlap and archetype: their desire to increase their status compared to other people and so control them, in the form of the Politician.

While on opposite poles, both Engineer and Politician have one thing in common, the axis around which the entire system revolves: whether you’re trying to control the world or other people, the one thing that’s a necessary prerequisite is controlling yourself.

Lastly, comparing the methods of Engineer and Politician, when they work in the other’s area, reveals that their methods have a fundamental difference. Should a politician try to convince a bridge to try harder to carry more weight, or the Earth that holding off on having an Earthquake past the next election cycle is in its own best interests, or simply repeat to the sky that it can’t fling down meteors until the sky itself believes it can’t… then reality will simply continue following its own natural course, completely heedless of the Politician’s efforts. However, an Engineer who, as usual, carefully examines how people react to various events, what levers can be used to push them this way or that, and then applies such observations and corrects the application with increasing experience… can, at least in theory, do at least as good a job at persuading people as a Politician who seeks control over them.

Of course, there’s a difference between theory and practice. There has been a distinct lack of people who are able to frame arguments appealing to Whites, Blues, Greens, and Reds—and so there seems to be some additional insight I’m missing to explain that lack. Or perhaps this entire structure is flawed from the start and would be better thrown away by a model with better explanatory and predictive power. If such is the case, then I welcome any feedback that would improve my understanding.

Thank you for your time.

Letter from DataPacRat

In response to Paul Bonneau, who wrote a letter in the previous issue

The core of our disagreement seems to be your view that “quantifying is what the state does”. While that may be so, that doesn’t mean that “quantifying”, in and of itself, is necessarily a bad thing, any more than “buying” or “shooting” are, in and of themselves, bad things. Numbers are the most powerful tool of instrumental rationality—which is, simply, the science of winning, of achieving the best possible result in any given situation. And, while numbers can, naturally, be used by a government to limit many peoples’ freedom, they can also be used by an individual to increase theirs.

I freely admit that “lifetime discretionary income” is probably not the best yardstick with which to measure someone’s freedom. That doesn’t mean that the entire approach is useless—only that better measuring standards would allow for better planning, so that you could tell whether your liberty is increasing, staying steady, or decreasing, and what actions have the greatest impact thereon.

If you have any suggestions about how to measure an individual’s liberty, I would love to hear them.

Thank you for your time,

DataPacRat
datapacrat@datapacrat.com
lu .iacu’i ma krinu lo du’u .ei mi krici la’e di’u li’u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti

And then Mr. DataPacRat replied to furthur communication he received from Mr. Bonneau:

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 9:10 AM, Paul Bonneau wrote:

DataPacRat, our main point of contention is not that “quantifying is what the state does”, but that you are looking for the greatest good for the greatest number (and using a pretty strange definition of good in the process). You have a utilitarian conception of liberty, and I don’t believe liberty is a utilitarian thing even though it usually, as a side effect, increases utility. I would rather be more free even if it decreased my utility.

The very fact your method led to a nonsensical result—that reducing or eliminating taxes might harm what you call liberty—should tell you that you are on the wrong path. Science tells you now to reject your hypothesis.

One of the things I have studied, in my quest to learn what techniques are useful in differentiating truth from falsehood, is the ‘absurdity heuristic’: that things that are obvious nonsense tend to be false. While often very useful to weed out certain sorts of ideas, there are a number of situations where this heuristic is simply outright wrong. Throughout history, it has done worse than maximum entropy—it has ruled out the actual outcomes as being far too absurd to be considered. Thus, in order to find the truth, even what is obvious nonsense cannot necessarily be ruled out simply because it /is/ nonsense. Thus, even if what you are referring to as ‘Science’ may now tell me to reject my hypothesis, ‘truthseeking’ and ‘rationality’ don’t, at least not on that particular ground.

Other grounds are, of course, another matter. For example, we could go over whether finding areas where lots of people have greater freedoms necessarily has any correlation with the freedom of any given individual in that area. But since, as you point out, I’m a utilitarian (or at least something close to whatever is meant by that term), and you say that you’re not, then we’d probably have to find /some/ common ground before our discussion could get to where it produced useful new insights for either of us. For example, I could suggest that you have, in fact, implied that you have a ‘utility function’—that you want to be ‘more free’, even at the expense of decreasing your utility according to other measures. (Utilitarianism, at least the form I’m closest to, doesn’t necessarily imply that everyone has to use any particular objective standard of value, any more than everyone has to agree on whether something is beautiful, or offensive.) Which brings us back to my original point—how can you tell when you /are/ ‘more free’, compared to anyone else, or compared to yourself at different times?

PS: If you wish to continue this communication, please extend the courtesy of using your real name.

PS: I am the only person who uses the name ‘DataPacRat’, and don’t try to conceal its connection to my real name—I simply prefer to use the name I’ve chosen for myself, when online. If you wish to know my real name, a simple Google search would have revealed it on the first result page; among other places, at

profiles.google.com/DataPacRat
en.wikifur.com/wiki/DataPacRat
twitter.com/#!/DataPacRat and
www.facebook.com/DataPacRat

It would take an annoying amount of effort to reconfigure my mail system to add my real name to the From: header and then to change it back when emailing others, so since my real name is only a single click away, I trust that that will be sufficient for you.

PPS: It may amuse you to know that before I received your letter, I had already submitted an article proposal to The Libertarian Enterprise specifically about online pseudonyms. (I make no guarantees about whether it will be accepted, of course. [See “How to Live Free in an Unfree Internet” in this issue—Editor]) Thank you for your time,

DataPacRat
datapacrat@datapacrat.com
lu .iacu’i ma krinu lo du’u .ei mi krici la’e di’u li’u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
— Commissioner Pravin Lal, “U.N. Declaration of Rights”
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

Given the nature of most governments worldwide, the only way to say certain things without risk of being arrested (or worse) is to do so anonymously, in a way that cannot be traced to your physical self. However, in order to have what you say be paid attention to, you also need to be able to say more than one thing, and have those things tied to a single identity: a pseudonym. Almost everyone on the internet has some ‘handle’; the hard part is having a pseudonym that allows you to remain anonymous.

Here are a list of steps that will allow you to have a reasonably anonymous pseudonym, allowing you to fully exercise your right to free speech, and proof against anything short of investigation by a Three-Letter Agency… and, as long as you avoid doing anything in real-life to tie yourself to your pseudonym, which would give them some reason to consider you as potentially being linked to your pseudonym, providing reasonable protection even against that.

Step 1: Have a clean computer

The easiest way is to make sure your own computer is free of viruses, trojans, and other malware with a firewall, regular scans, and ad-blockers in your browser (for Firefox, these include Adblock Plus, NoScript, Flashblock, RequestPolicy, and GhostScript) to prevent drive-by infections. Another option is to use a LiveCD (such as TheAmnesic Incognito Live System), simply bypassing any infections on your computer by using a read-only OS.

Step 2: Truecrypt

This is a rather marvellous piece of software. Not only does it allow you to keep a collection of files encrypted, preventing people from casually reading your data, but its ‘hidden volume’ function means that a single file can contain two separate encrypted volumes — and if you don’t give away your password to the second volume, there is no way to prove whether or not a second volume exists at all. This means that even if somebody tries to use rubber-hose cryptanalysis on you, you can give the password to the first volume (in which you might have placed something somewhat embarrassing but not truly incriminating, such as some sort of exotic pornography). For added fun, you might have several different Truecrypt files, at least some of which do not have any second volumes at all. Truly dedicated freedom-lovers will investigate the latest neurology research on techniques for forgetting things, so that with a bit of time, you can forget any passwords for second volumes you had.

Some governments insist on copying the contents of whatever computers or physical media are in your possession when you cross their borders. One way to get around this is to place a TrueCrypt volume on an online filehosting service, similar to DropBox, and only carry an essentially blank computer around with you, downloading the TrueCrypt volume containing your private data when you need it.

Step 3: Tor

If someone has access to networking data, or one of the websites you visit, then it is possible to trace the connection back to your physical computer. Tor uses several clever techniques to create a network of computers bouncing packets between each other so that such traces will only reveal that someone using Tor connected to the site.

Step 4: GPG

This is what allows you to not just be anonymous, but pseudonymous. Through something called ‘public key cryptography’, by making a ‘public key’ available on a public keyserver, it is possible to use your ‘private key’ to digitally sign a message as provably being from a particular identity. GPG also allows you to encrypt outgoing email; this, combined with Tor to prevent being traced, allows you to use any free email provider, such as GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, as a secure communications channel. GPG becomes much more convenient to use when accessed through Thunderbird Portable with the Enigmail addon.

Step 5: Bitcoin

This is currently the most anonymous available online medium of monetary exchange. There are those who disparage various aspects of it, but if you’re not trying to ‘mine’ bitcoins or hoard them in hopes their value will increase, but simply use one of the available exchanges to buy and sell bitcoins as you need them, it is possible to engage in online commerce as your pseudonym without those transactions being traceable to your physical identity. (There are, of course, certain common-sense caveats; if your pseudonym is paid 742 Bitcoins, and then you immediately use an exchange to sell 742 Bitcoins for physical US Dollars, certain observers will probably notice the correlation.)

Step 6: Prepare for your mistakes

Once you have all of the above tools, and you use them right, then you will have the ability to do just about anything you wish online without those actions being traced back to your physical self.

You are not always going to use them right.

You might accidentally connect to your email account over a normal internet connection rather than Tor, or you might say something as your pseudonym which reveals an important detail about yourself. It takes practice before proper security habits can become ingrained enough to get reduce these risks — and since the only way to practice these techniques is to use them, then in order to get your mistakes out of the way in a harmless manner, you’ll want to set up a ‘practice pseudonym’. Use it to get the hang of these tools, but since you know in advance that you’re going to do things that will connect this identity to your physical self, don’t use it for anything which would get your local government annoyed with you.

After a few months of practice, during which you will have learned important details not covered in this summary (including keysizes, browser fingerprints, and scrubbing EXIF data), you will, finally, have the full power of anonymity and pseudonymity at your command, and will, finally, be able to fully exercise your right to freedom of expression.

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Heinlein wrote:

What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Just as the basic scientific method is the bare minimum necessary to advance real knowledge, but there are specific methods within science (such as Bayesian reasoning) that come closer to the ideal of Solomonoff Induction and thus increase knowledge that much faster, it seems plausible that the Zero-Aggression Principle itself is merely the bare minimum necessary to support individuals’ freedoms, and that there could be some particular methods within the overall aegis of libertarianism that are better than others at that task.

But in order to find out what those methods are, we need some way to measure which methods do better—some way to quantify how much freedom an individual has. I don’t recall having read anything on the matter in libertarian circles—if work on this has already been done, then I’d be happy to hear about it. But until then, I’ll just have to try to muddle through on my own.

Yudkowsky wrote:

When there’s a confusing problem and you’re just starting out and you have a falsifiable hypothesis, go test it. Find some simple, easy way of doing a basic check and do it right away. Don’t worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency. Just check as fast as possible whether your ideas are false before you start investing huge amounts of effort in them.

So—is there some reasonably simple way of measuring peoples’ freedom to do stuff? Some groups have released studies measuring quality of life in different countries, amalgamating various factors into a ‘happiness index’ or ‘quality of life’ measurement… and somewhere in there may be something useful.

But we might have a set of numbers that are easier to find than that. Looked at one way, the general method used these days to determine how to allocate resources is through ‘price’ and ‘money’; and the more money one has to distribute, the more freedom one has to distribute it to various things. So, in at least one sense, we could try comparing the ‘discretionary income’ of various groups, which is income minus the costs of the necessities of life (eg, food, shelter, health care, paying taxes to keep out of jail, etc). And, if possible, instead of the mean discretionary income, we’d be better served by the median, that of the average person in that society. For similar reasons, we’d also be better served by calculating the total discretionary income acquired throughout someone’s lifetime, than simply looking at the annual figure. If this idea works out, then those groups which tend to be qualitatively higher in respecting individual rights (such as one or more of the sortings listed at [this link]) should at least roughly correspond to having higher median discretionary income. And, if not, then this is yet another wrong idea to replace with a better one.

Unfortunately, just because a given metric is chosen doesn’t mean that the numbers can be immediately found through Google, in which case you just have to work with whatever closely-related numbers can be found. In this case, the closest I’ve been able to find so far is [here] , which lists about 30 countries by disposable income rather than discretionary. But since discretionary income is at least related to disposable income, we can try checking those 30 countries to their listing on freedom indices to see, as a minimal standard, if the top half of the list has more countries listed as ‘free’ than the bottom half.

(Note—at this point, I don’t know what the answer will be. I have a guess—but that guess could turn out to be wrong just as easily as it turns out to be right.)

Looking at the data gives us:

1st column: Freedom House 2011
2nd column: Economic Freedom 2011
3rd column: Press Freedom 2010
4th column: Democracy Index 2010
Good to bad: blue, green, yellow, orange, red

US: blue, green, green, blue
Switzerland: blue, blue, blue, blue
Germany: blue, green, blue, blue
UK: blue, green, green, blue
Austria: blue, green, blue, blue
France: blue, yellow, green, green
Netherlands: blue, green, blue, blue
Australia: blue, blue, green, blue
Taiwan: blue, green, green, green
Sweden: blue, green, blue, blue
New Zealand: blue, blue, blue, blue
Japan: blue, green, green, blue
Spain: blue, green, green, blue
Korea: blue, yellow, green, blue
Hong Kong: yellow, blue, green, orange

Singapore: yellow, blue, orange, orange
Israel: blue, yellow, yellow, green
Russia: red, orange, orange, orange
Czech Republic: blue, green, green, blue
Latvia: blue, yellow, green, green
Slovakia: blue, orange, green, green
Brazil: blue, orange, yellow, green
Lithuania: blue, green, blue, green
Poland: blue, yellow, green, green
Thailand: yellow, yellow, orange, green
Mexico: yellow, yellow, orange, green
China: red, orange, orange, red
Romania: blue, yellow, yellow, green
Philippines: yellow, orange, orange, green

And counting up the columns:

1st half: Column 1: 14 blue, 1 yellow, 0 red.
2nd half: Column 1: 8 blue, 4 yellow, 2 red

1st half: Column 2: 4 blue, 9 green, 2 yellow, 0 orange
2nd half: Column 2: 1 blue, 2 green, 7 yellow, 4 orange

1st half: Column 3: 6 blue, 9 green, 0 yellow, 0 orange
2nd half: Column 3: 1 blue, 4 green, 3 yellow, 6 orange

1st half: Column 4: 12 blue, 2 green, 1 orange, 0 red
2nd half: Column 4: 1 blue, 10 green, 2 orange, 1 red

… so by all four measures, the countries with lower disposable incomes tend to be less free. This means that this idea doesn’t immediately fail the sniff test… and so it just might be worth following up on, to see if this continues to be a useful quantification, and if so, what predictions can be made from it that can help guide us as we make plans to increase our freedom. Or perhaps some other measurement will be discovered to be more useful in helping us make such predictions—in which case it would be worthwhile to find it.

So, what useful ideas can the simple existence of “lifetime median discretionary income” as a metric give us?

The most obvious is that it when we’re faced with a question of what we can do to increase liberty, we know that there are particular actions we can take which will have the greatest benefit, and we can concentrate on identifying them.

We can also get at least a rough feel of what some of those actions may involve, which we might not have otherwise thought of.

For an obvious example: When someone dies, they no longer receive any income at all; thus, working to prevent deaths, and generally extend lives, helps to increase the total discretionary income those people can accumulate over their lives, and is thus an action promoted by use of this metric—which meshes very well with the standard libertarian view of the Right to Life being rather important. So far, so good.

For a counterintuitive example: To calculate discretionary income, both taxes and health care are subtracted from gross income. Reducing taxes means less is taken out of gross, and so is one of the most obvious ways to increase discretionary income. However, if reducing taxes increases the cost of health care by more than the taxes are reduced, then discretionary income will go down—which the use of this metric advises against. What it does advise is to use whatever system results in the minimum cost for health care, whether that cost is paid directly or via taxes (along with some further suggestions about maximizing the benefit-to-cost ratio for health care practices). This perspective goes against the usual grain of libertarian thought, in which taxes are generally viewed as an unalloyed evil… but it may be worth considering what your true goal actually is: increasing liberty even if doing so requires the use of government, or getting rid of government even if doing so reduces individuals’ liberty.

Perhaps this counterintuitive piece of advice means you think that the metric being used is utterly useless. You are entirely free to think that, and say so however you wish. I am also entirely free to ignore what you say if you simply disparage one metric without suggesting a better one. After all, as Heinlein wrote:

If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.

If anyone reading this is interested in using numbers to figure out the winningest strategies for maximizing liberty, please email me at datapacrat@datapacrat.com.