Throwing Cold Water On Progress

Talk about a downer. Lawrence Martin at the venerable old G&B has a great, concise explanation of three major institutional changes that many people want to see in Canada in the coming decade in time for Canada’s 150th birthday in 2017 : a re-evaluation of our relationship with the monarchy, electoral reform and a green revolution.

You thought I was crazy? Another Strategic Proposal for NDP-Libs

Well, my last post suggesting that the Green Party strike a strategic deal with other parties to get their fair share of the votes generated a lot of good discussion.  Most of you answered my final question “Am I crazy?” with a decided “Yes, Mark, you are, now go play.” Fair enough, I can take it, maybe it is a crazy idea. We worked out some more plausible ideas in the comments where the Greens don’t give up so much. Well, today a atom bomb of an opinion piece in the Canadian #fairvote community by UBC Poli.Sci prof Michael Byers.

How the Green Party Could Make a Difference

It looks like we’re not going to have a federal election for at least 5 months now so its time for the parties to pull back and consider strategy.  Clearly that’s what the Liberals are doing with their recent change of chief of staff.  So I’d like to suggest a bold change of strategy for the Green Party.  Fair warning, you’re probably not going to like it   Note, I am not  a Green party member and have no involvement with their campaigns so this approach will anathema to people for all kinds of reasons I can think of and probably many I cannot.  But hear me out.

Reckless Talk by Polling ‘Experts’

You know what they say about polls…well I don’t believe they are all lies and statistics about Canadian opinions can be very useful, when considered in a balanced way.  Apparently if you are the head of a polling firm, such as Nik Nanos, however, you are able to infer trends from a very short sequence of data.  Just taking a look at the chart in this article with a short, narrow peak in the past two weeks being called a new normal is a bit of a laugh.  How can a few points define a new normal? 

Goodbye Rex.

Dear Rex Murphy,
I always thought you were intelligent and usually gave you the benefit of the doubt when I disagreed with you, you use such big words you see… but then you wrote this article about global warming.
Well I’m done now, you’ve completely invalidated yourself.  Its all very evocative to compare the environmental movement to the Catholic church silencing Galilieo but just a moment’s look at that community and you’ll know they don’t have nearly that level of control and agreement. 

Whew, that was close! I supported the govt for a whole 5 minutes.

Frightening.

Two stories out yesterday about some upcoming policies coming out of Ottawa. The first sounds quite reasonable, they want to create a national regulator for securities.  Given the meltdown of last fall this kind of body might be able to tighten up some of the investment rules and make sure we don’t have loopholes showing up because one province has different policies than another.  So I was in happy agreement with the government for a whole five minutes on some issue.  I was even more surprised to learn that

Tories lift off towards a false majority, is this Democracy?

Here’s what counts for a majority in Canada:

According to EKOS, the Tories now enjoy 40.7 per cent support compared to 25.5 per cent for the Liberals, 14.3 per cent for the NDP, 10.5 per cent for the Green Party and 9.1 per cent for the Bloc.

Two polls last week showed the same upward movement for the Conservatives, edging them into majority territory.

via Tories ‘really taking off’ in polls – The Globe and Mail.

I continually amazes me that no one looks at these numbers and feels that something is wrong.  EKOS did a seat projection as well (which is very problematic given the small sample sizes in each riding)

The projections – all hypothetical – do not bode well for Mr. Ignatieff

and his Liberals. It would give them 68 seats, meaning he would do

worse than his predecessor, Stéphane Dion, who won 77 seats in the 2008

election.

The EKOS model gives the Bloc 50 seats, up from 47; the NDP 23 seats,

which is a decrease of 13; and the Green Party would be shut out once

again.

Does this seem fair? There’s your issue Mr. Ignatieff: Bloc -> 9%/50 seats Green -> 10.5%/0 seats.  There are Liberals who should be in Alberta, there are Conservatives who should be in Toronto, there are Greens and NDP that should be everywhere.  If you are worried these pollsters are right then you have nothing to lose by saying “We need to fix our democracy, we need to look at proportional representation. We need to do it now.”  You can use longer words if you like. But you need something that tells Canadians you are really going to change things.

The Natural Governing, Triangulation and Safety Party

Just like the majority of Canadians, I consider my political views to be centre to centre-left on the ‘political spectrum’.  That’s why I was excited that the Liberals decisively picked a decisive leader after Stephane Dion imploded last fall. That’s why I was glad a few weeks ago when that same leader finally stood up and started acting like an opposition party, opposing a government that a majority of Canadians did not vote for.  That is why this week I am slightly depressed that the promise the Liberals had over the last, has be squandered again and again. There’s a good article up on rabble about the Liberal and their current slide to catch you up to speed on this week’s disappointments if you’ve missed it.

They are saying just what I and others have been saying for a while, that Mr. Ignatieff and his Natural Governing Party(TM) needs to grow a spine and stand for something.  They need to stand for the 60% of Canadians who opposed the Conservative party in the last election.  This is the job of all opposition parties but the leader of the opposition should well, you know, lead that opposition. Flowery words and fancy speeches are nice but frankly Mr. Ignatief’s speeches aren’t even all that flowerly and inspiring, just long winded.  People criticized President Barack Obama this week for accepting the Nobel Peace prize even though he’s provided more inspiring speeches about peace than actual peace itself.  But  if Mr. Ignatieff were that inspiring he might be forgiven.  He’s not.  So he needs to reach an even higher standard of action than Mr. Obama.

The Liberal party seems to have convinced itself in the past decade or two that it does not stand for any particular causes per se but rather for a state of mind.  To be Liberal is to eternally sit on a fence talking about balance and holding Canada together and bla bla “>bla bla.  What do you stand for Mr. Ignatieff?  Do you want to militarize the North?   Are you angry we don’t have national childcare yet? Are you disgusted by our lack of progress on global warming? Do you dream of a future Canada with high speed rails linking our major metropolises, of being a voice for peace, of leading green technology or bioscience or robotics or nanotechnology?  Do you want Canadians to believe in their democracy again, to make sure every vote cast in Canada counts the same whether its in Nunavut or Charlottetown or Toronto or Prince Rupert?

Do you believe in anything? We know you do, you’d been a writer and academic for three decades.  You must have an opinion on everything?

So tell us.  And stand for it.  Or die trying.  That’s the only message people will respect at this point.

If you read this blog you know what issue I think the Liberals should focus on, if you agree electoral reform should be one of these issues sign this twitter petition to demand Ignatieff declare his party will fix our democracy by committing to to real electoral reform : pass the link on act.ly/nk

Onward to the Future! Uhm…who has the map?

You should read this fantastic analysis of knowledge in the modern world by Peter Nicholson at the globe & mail.

I have several responses and comments to add to it. On losing experts with peripheral intellectual vision (my new favourite phrase):

For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind.

The question for humanity is, is there an alternative to this source of innovation? Perhaps the online interconected mind?

So we decry the increasing compartmentalization of knowledge – knowing more and more about less and less – while awaiting the great syntheses that some day may be achieved by millions of linked minds, all with fingertip access to the world’s codified knowledge but with a globe-spanning spectrum of different perspectives.

There is an assumption amongst many open-source and open-knowledge advocates that there is an equivalence between lots of information memorized and indexed in one mind and 10 times or 100 times more information, stored online with many thousands of individuals processing and modifying it.  This is the kind of thing Google likes to push forward. Its a compelling idea, if a little frightening, that each of us as individuals becomes something like a neuron in a brain and contributes to an even more complex system.  But it is far from clear that this online ‘mind’ would be anywhere near as complex as a single human brain. If the data on the internet is not linked together and processed in a dynamic way then how would anything new ever be discovered from it?  Wikipedia and Google’s databases are dead data with human interpretation.  The new and stunningly ambitious Wolfram Alpha search engine would pipe up here that they are actually processing this data.  But I think they are overstating their tool. They are really just automatically compiling statistics on the fly that will be useful to human beings, this is very different from the level of thought that is needed to connect the dots in the internet’s constellations of data.

I see two interesting futures for knowledge and data in this context:

1. an online ‘mind’ (or at least a problem solving, data access system) which we are a part of but which is not us. As individuals we will likely not understand it and progress could slow since so many people will spend time gathering lots of general knowledge and being ‘links’ in the global brain rather than actually understanding anything deeply.  If the network itself doesn’t pick up the slack in innovation then human progress could slow.  In order to pick up this slack would require an active intelligence that could process all this knowledge such as those prophesied by singularity theorists or else one that weaves together the conversations and thoughts of billions of connected human beings.
2. alternatively, we might converge towards a world of experts where no one knows everything but everyone knows a few things very deeply.  If communication is efficient between different types of experts and people learn to explain the essence of a solution quickly to nonexperts we could enter  into a golden age of collaboration that could be very productive.  This would not require a supermind to gather all the data on the internet and would encourage individuals to continue to acquire knowledge and to our brains for what they are good for: abstract analysis, analogies and intuition rather than storage of raw data.

Mr. Nicholson worries that the first case will occur (probably without the AI saviour) but I think the second case is more likely.

He ends with a fantastic quote:

Those of us who are still skeptical might recall that Plato, in the Phaedrus, suggested that writing would “create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it.”

which reminds me of a fantastic comic by Dresden Codak which contained a satirical story about the changes coming upon us. It references the singularity specifically but is relevant to this less extreme technology transition as well. Its written as a translation of a cave painting during an ancient transition of humanity in the face of exponentially expanding technological progress, the invention of the bow and arrow and writing.  Just a reminder that people have always and will always be afraid of change they don’t understand. But also a reminder that all changes are not necessarily good changes and its best not to throw out tried and true methods before their replacement is out of beta.

You can’t stop the democracy train…

Just a short post to point to you this great article from across the pond on Gordon Brown’s promise to hold a referendum on electoral reform. As the article points out and all of us in BC know full well, a referendum is not necessarily the best way to get change to happen.  On top of that, the system being proposed, Alternative Vote, is one of the weakest choices you could make if you were going to reform.  But it is still about 1000% better than the current First Past The Post system used in Britain which is identical to what we use here in Canada.  More on this later, Canada will almost certainly have an election before this election in Britain so hopefully this will help kickstart the discussion here in the colonies…