Petty Liberties

/ Adam / Leave a comment

In October 2010 the Parliament of Queensland entertained a petition from one of its citizens regarding the pressing issue of the presence of dogs in cafes. Dogs, in Queensland, are banned from cafes, restaurants, and similar establishments, for fear of the health of the public.

The petition, which myself and two thousand, one hundred and forty six Queenslanders signed, proposed loosening the restriction on dogs on cafes, making it a matter of discretion of the owner and of the local council.

We aren’t currently pet owners, though we have been in the past. I’ve seen dogs behave themselves in European cafes and Australian caravan parks. So long as the dog is well behaved, nowhere near food preparation areas, and the cafe owner is fine with it, it seems something people can work out amongst themselves, without the state parliament and police force being involved. It’s not a grand secular humanist right, exactly, though you can construct it from those if you wish. It’s just a petty liberty, the everyday business of civic society amongst free people, and their dogs.

Societies without petty liberties are almost certain to be unfree ones – prisons, or Pyongyang, or a feudal serfdom – lives unequal by default. Yet the loss of any one petty liberty does not a tyranny make. Dogs tied to the footpath lamp-posts of cafes do not foreshadow a canine Krystallnacht. It’s like a political sorites paradox, where these rules take on a different nature when piled in a heap. Different places also have different ideas of everyday freedom. Try smoking at random places in New York and Ho Chi Minh City, or strolling around the local park in the nude in London versus Berlin. There’s also a kind of paradox of the liberal localist – local democracy, as in a city council, may be the most accessible, but it’s also more prone to petty tyrannies like banning outside washing or saying what colour your house can be.

If you look at the very real and beautiful liberalization that has happened across Asia in my lifetime, it has mostly been a matter of returning petty liberties. India threw off the license raj. In China, grand liberties such as free speech or national elections are not a reality, but a whole host of petty tyrannies have nevertheless been relaxed since 1978. That’s what microeconomic reform usually is – the abolition of cobwebs of pettifogging price regulations governing everyday life.

For the last few decades, governments all over the world have had success growing their economies and making their people’s lives better without giving much ground on grand liberties. It’s been the right to free speech unless you insult the powerful, or the right to property unless you’re inconvienent.

When we were in China my wife plowed most of a day into setting up a new blog to keep contact with people back home. Logins setup, content written and uploaded, tweaked, tooled around with. Once she had a fair first cut she tried to view it as a normal reader would. Except she’d tried it out on blogger, and that year, or month, or whatever, the Great Firewall had been configured to block access to blogger blogs. Not the admin interface, mind. You could still create all the posts. You just couldn’t see them. Every page would just hang, loading, until eventually timing out, like an aged uncle who might be deaf or might just be ignoring you.

My wife turned to me with a cry of frustration and asked “Why? Why would they do that?”

I paused. “Because they’re communists,” I replied. A technical reason didn’t seem adequate. The platform she had posted her travel diaries on happened to be the same platform some concerned individuals had used to write about politics or history in a way the CCP didn’t like. Sooner or later, petty liberties become intertwined with grand ones.

To return to pettiness: the dog petition I mention above did, by the way, get a timely reply, in late November last year. The then Minister for Health, Paul Lucas, advised that as it was a matter covered by the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, the state supports that standard, and any change would be carried out through that. For a dog to sit on its owners feet under a cafe table in Mackay, an international committee of politicians and bureaucrats must agree it’s ok.

I think this is a tiny taste of what drives a certain kind of European crazy about the EU. The EU acts always in the name of, and I think for its officers the genuine intent to follow, grand liberties. Its faults show at the edges between those grand ideas and the patchwork liberties of everyday life in a particular place. So the European Arrest Warrant can cause horrible miscarriages of justice because justice systems across Europe vary in approach and quality. More often, though, it’s like being slowly covered in sticky tape. The local community loses its ability to reflect changed attitudes and adapt to new circumstances over time. All bureaucracies expand by their nature. Laws written with good intent become a simple catalogue of petty tyrannies.

It’s a shame to see the British left-wing establishment respond with kneejerk cynicism to the introduction of online feedback mechanisms there, most recently a mechanism for online petitions becoming a trigger for debate in the Commons. Even the usually excellent LRB unimaginatively got into it; rather depressing.

The e-petition itself, though, works rather well as a mechanism – it raises concrete issues that are relevant in people’s day to day lives, and links them to the machinery of government in a timely way. It puts pressure on politicians to trim back the thicket of cruft that inevitably accumulates in any system, or to add services in a particular place, by linking support to thousands of voters. It intertwines people and politicians in specific and transparent ways. It is elegantly democratic.

The Well-Ventilated Cage

/ Adam / 2 Comments

There’s been a brief algal bloom of discussion on urban blogs on the historical roots of anti-urbanism, particularly Ryan Avent and Stephen Smith. It seems as good a time as any to mention the Brisbane experience. Brisbane is a nineteenth century city, and like most Australian cities, a casual attitude to earlier hunter-gatherer settlement meant it suffered from no shortage of land.

Brisbane has a strikingly sparse density for a city of two million – 918 people per square kilometre. That’s about a tenth of the density of New York city or an eighth of Los Angeles. Though it’s worth noting the city limits are drawn to include more suburbs than many other cities, it’s a pretty obvious feature of the city for even the first-time visitor.

The culture of sprawl certainly runs deep in Brisbane, buying a house on land is the conventional wisdom, and new suburbs have been ever unfolding throughout my life and before, while commute times soar ever upwards. It’s a city that demands a car, but where the ubiquitous suburban blocks are often green. I’ve been in forests overseas with less trees than the Brisbane suburbs. It may be one of the few places to deliver on that part of the garden city vision. Perhaps because of this, I had always assumed that the development pattern was driven solely by cheap land and human nature, despite my own frustration with driving for hours to do anything, or the inconvenience of taxi-ing home to the middle of nowhere after a few drinks.

In fact, much like the US examples Stephen cites, the roots are as much regulatory as organic, and they date back to the Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act 1885. This set a minimum lot size of 400 m^2 with a ten metre wide block. The population, though going through a boom, was only a few ten thousands at this time, and it had a huge impact on the development about to occur. The house I am writing this in is on a block of exactly the minimum size and shape specified in the act, even though it was rescinded in 1923. The motivation, as wiki notes, was slum prevention. The cost of not letting people choose smaller houses, if they wanted them, was a city that was too expensive to comprehensively sewer until the 1970s. It was also much hard to keep services like trams economic when cars emerged. Residents were trapped by sprawl, in a well-ventilated cage.

I Wore A Descriptive Robot Ethical Onion On My Belt

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Via the fortuitously broken RSS feed of Intimate Machines, a short academic overview of Robot Ethics / RoboEthics. Intimate Machines is Glenda Shaw-Garlock’s blog, currently in hibernation, possibly thesis-related. While the overview itself is pretty smooth, the major ethical documents in this nascent field seem to be jolly tedious for a subject that lets us answer questions about the morality of electroshock robot camel jockeys.

It’s not the latest output, but the Euron Roboethic Roadmap (PDF) will serve well enough as an example. Firstly, it’s not really a roadmap, which implies some sort of high level direction: it’s more an exhaustive bullet-pointed list of every permutation in which ethics and robotics might intersect, with the more interestingly science fictional ones glossed over in order to seem serious. The project is almost entirely descriptive, and there are no ethical guidelines here of the type a researcher might use to get their project past a roboethics committee. The first proposed national prescriptive guidelines, due to come out of Korea in 2009, seem to have been abandoned with a change of government. (In the meantime, Jamais Cascio has useful early stab.)

Its not clear if this descriptive tediousness, which is hardly inherent to academic writing, is unintended or deliberate policy. Supporting the unconscious side, the prose does have some of the word-counting desperation of an engineering student essay on Othello. Contrariwise, writing is produced with an audience in mind. Rather than researchers – for whom ethical guidelines might include some sort of moral stance – the institutions of public policy seem more clearly in mind. In the case of the Euron roadmap, one’s reminded of the bureaucratic house style of the likely regulator, the EU. Perhaps robot ethics has coloured itself in grey as a kind of self-defense mechanism: robotics researchers want to show they’ve done their homework, thought long and hard about if they are doing the right thing, and are safe and somewhat dull custodians of the world’s mechanized retarded geniuses and flying killing machines. Think of it as the Abraham Simpson school of rhetoric: win by boring your opponents to death.

I don’t think that will quite be adequate.

X.18 When his lord gave him a gift of a live animal, he invariably reared it

/ Adam / 3 Comments

君赐食,必正席先尝之。君赐腥，必熟而荐之。君赐生，必畜之侍食于君。君祭，先饭。– 论语,十:十八

When his lord gave a gift of cooked food, the first thing he invariably did was to taste it after having adjusted his mat. When his lord gave him a gift of uncooked food, he invariably cooked it and offered it to the ancestors. When his lord gave him a gift of a live animal, he invariably reared it. At the table of his lord, when his lord had made an offering before the meal he invariably started with the rice first. — Analects X.18 (Lau)

We must respect working systems. Working systems are living systems and have a life that should be respected. In these early years of software, being handed a living system is often being handed a legacy system. And legacy systems are off-putting to some of the technical senses. They offend our inner fashion designer with their unfashionableness. They offend our inner engineer with their inelegance, or our inner scientist with their reliance on a dead paradigm.

Or they might simply offend our inner creator, because an adopted system is not our system: we have fallen for the greenfield myth. There is no true greenfield in contemporary software, and that is a mark of our success. In Java: you started a new eclipse project for this; it depends on fifty other libraries. You wrote your own library set; they depend on Java standard libraries and the virtual machine. You wrote your own compiler or interpreter: they depend on the operating system. You wrote your own operating system: it depends on the hardware. (But you didn’t really write your own operating system, did you? Even Linus Torvalds needed the GNU toolset.)

And even if you doublethink the greenfield in your mind into existence, you make shiny new eclipse project a tabula rasa, you will leave your desk at the end of that first day. And on the second day, when you unlock the screen and return to your code, you will be doing software maintenance.

When your client, or your corporate lord gives you the gift of a live system, what is your response? The ceremony exists because the logic of the organisation brought it into being, and this is to be respected (恕). It will probably need to change, because to live is to change. Perhaps it needs to merge with some other system, or needs to do its function immediately instead of overnight. This is to the good. When your lord gives you a gift of a live animal, you invariably rear it.