I have always loved reading Supreme Court Decisions. I think the writing is much more beautiful and accessible that most people realize. Here are a few passages from the famous case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

…

These principles grew in soil which also produced a philosophy that the individual was the center of society, that his liberty was attainable through mere absence of governmental restraints, and that government should be entrusted with few controls, and only the mildest supervision [p640] over men’s affairs. We must transplant these rights to a soil in which the laissez-faire concept or principle of noninterference has withered, at least as to economic affairs, and social advancements are increasingly sought through closer integration of society and through expanded and strengthened governmental controls. These changed conditions often deprive precedents of reliability, and cast us more than we would choose upon our own judgment. But we act in these matters not by authority of our competence, but by force of our commissions.

…

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, but, at other times and places, the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. [p641] As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure, but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism [p642] and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us. [n19]

We think the action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute and pledge transcends constitutional limitations on their power, and invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control.

The decision of this Court in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, and the holdings of those few per curiam decisions which preceded and foreshadowed it, are overruled, and the judgment enjoining enforcement of the West Virginia Regulation is

Affirmed.

An amazing sentence:

…if the car from 1971 had improved at the same rate as computer chips, then by 2015 new models would have had top speeds of about 420 million miles per hour.

That comes from a recent Guardian article on the future of computer chip progress. There are many points of interest including this:

There have been roughly 22 ticks of Moore’s law since the launch of the 4004 in 1971 through to mid-2016. For the law to hold until 2050 means there will have to be 17 more, in which case those engineers would have to figure out how to build computers from components smaller than an atom of hydrogen, the smallest element there is. That, as far as anyone knows, is impossible.

Last March, AlphaGo, a program created by Google DeepMind, was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained on a database of thirty million moves, running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent’s brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)

But computer chips are using the architecture of the human brain to become more efficient.

Building on decades of work by Mead and others, engineers have been racing to roll out the first so-called neuromorphic chips for consumer use. Kwabena Boahen’s research group at Stanford unveiled its low-power Neurogrid chip in 2014, and Qualcomm has announced that its brain-inspired Zeroth processor will reach the market in 2018. Another model, I.B.M.’s TrueNorth, only recently moved from digital prototype to usable product. It consists of a million silicon neurons, tiny cores that communicate directly with one another using synapse-like connections. Here, the medium is the message; each neuron is both program and processing unit. The sensory data that the chip receives, rather than marching along single file, fan out through its synaptic networks. TrueNorth ultimately arrives at a decision—say, classifying the emotional timbre of its user’s voice—by group vote, as a choir of individual singers might strike on a harmony. I.B.M. claims the chip is useful in real-time pattern recognition, as for speech processing or image classification. But the biggest advance is its energy efficiency: it uses twenty milliwatts per square centimetre, more than a thousand times less than a traditional chip.

That is from a fascinating New Yorker article by Kelly Clancy.

That is the question asked by a new and fantastic (and very short) Wired article. The whole article is quotable. Here is one bit:

These sorts of coders won’t have the deep knowledge to craft wild new algorithms for flash trading or neural networks. Why would they need to? That level of expertise is rarely necessary at a job. But any blue-collar coder will be plenty qualified to sling Java­Script for their local bank. That’s a solidly middle-class job…“We need to get more employers saying, ‘Yeah, we just need someone to manage the login page,’” he says. “You don’t have to be a superstar.”

The problem is not that overworked professionals are all miserable. The problem is that they are not…

It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.

That is from Ryan Avent piece in the Economist 1843 Magazine titled Why Do We Work So Hard?

Question of the day: How much of Instagram Stories’ success against Snapchat is because of Boomerang?

Your opponent has answered “Yes” to the question “Can I change your mind?” (and means it). Most of us can’t. Many more of us say we can if only so-and-so could prove XYZ. Once we’re shown XYZ is proven we immediately bring up esoteric notions about what actually constitutes evidence and proof, want to know who funded the study that proved XYZ, and generally do anything we can to not actually change our mind.

You’re willing to accept the same evidence from your opponent that you require. Number 1 above is more or less fine if we also let our opponent get away with the same sloppiness. The left admonishes the right for not believing in climate change, but continues to be suspicious of GMOs despite similar universal evidence (all the same national and international organizations with white papers on the negative consequences of climate change have position papers that are pro-GMO). My position is that we are human and thus all inconsistent and so we should not be so hard on others for being so. Admitting our inconsistency and emotional nature can let us have a more honest conversation about our beliefs that are not masked in “facts” and “evidence.”

You can answer a series of the next obvious questions about your position. For example, if you believe the rich should pay more in taxes you should know how much they currently pay in taxes. If you believe we should have fewer refugees you should know how many we currently have. Many people think they know the answers to these questions and actually don’t. If “Warren Buffet’s secretary pays more in taxes than he does” is the mental model you have for high earners under the U.S. tax system please humbly have a seat.

You can pass an Ideological Turing Test. Meaning that if we put you behind a curtain you could fairly and accurately represent the views of your opponent. You should not, for example, say, “The rich believe they shouldn’t be taxed much because everything trickles down to the rest of us and there’s nothing wrong with the masses fighting ever harder for the few remaining scraps” or “Liberals believe most immigrants should be let into the country with very little screening, live off of welfare until they get a job, all so they can have more fake pseudo-intellectual conversations with foreigners at their bohemian dinner parties.” Or anything approaching those two positions. Almost every position has a very reasonable line of argumentation based on experiences and ethics of those that believe it.

You know what it would mean if you were wrong. What if the minimum wage was genuinely bad for poor people? What would that mean for your identity and life experience and the friends you have and the things you do? What if gay people really were born that way? Or what if sexuality was actually all a choice? What if climate change was real and a serious threat to future human survival? What if taking steroids didn’t really help Barry Bonds that much? If you can’t honestly imagine all the ways your life and identity are tied up in believing what you believe you’ll never be able to have an honest conversation.

You know why you need other people to believe the same thing you believe. You want to say that it’s because people’s lives are at stake. And sometimes that’s true. I’m not arguing there is never a time to fight. But many people’s beliefs seem devoted to signaling as much as to helping people. Not everyone has to agree with you. You might be wrong, remember. Often, time spent convincing people to believe what you believe is not only fruitless, but takes away time you could be spending addressing the problem. Let people disagree with you and love them anyway, admit you might be wrong, and push ahead humbly.

If you failed any one of these tests, and especially if you passed all of them, perhaps you should listen to, and empathize with, your opponent; not actually call them your “opponent” to begin with; and spend as much time questioning your own views as those you disagree with. This not simply so you can feel warm and fuzzy, although you will, but because it’s probably a much better approach for being persuasive out in the wild.

 

1. On epistocracy

An interesting idea many will despise:

Epistocracy comes in many forms. An epistocracy might give everyone one vote, then grant extra votes to citizens who pass a test of basic political knowledge (such as the citizenship exam). Or it might grant the right to vote only to citizens who pass such a test.  Or it might instead hold an “enfranchisement lottery”: Immediately before an election, choose 10,000 citizens at random, and then those citizens, and only those, are permitted to vote, but only if they first complete a competence-building exercise.

Trump would have likely fared better under an epistocracy.

2. Apparently cows like to milk themselves

3. The Sinbad genie movie (very interesting)

4. Reddit has a meme economy

5. What’s the most mysterious photo ever taken?

6. Soviet era minced meat commercial is strange in many ways

That is the title of a profound article from The Guardian. There are many points of interest.

One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds. We go walking or running to improve our health, not for the pleasure of movement; we approach the tasks of parenthood with a fixation on the successful future adults we hope to create.

The article concludes that productivity is just a way to avoid asking and answering hard questions about how you’re living and a way to artificially feel immortal in a existence that always ends in death. Do read the whole thing.

You can seek to impose order on your inbox all you like – but eventually you’ll need to confront the fact that the deluge of messages, and the urge you feel to get them all dealt with, aren’t really about technology. They’re manifestations of larger, more personal dilemmas. Which paths will you pursue, and which will you abandon? Which relationships will you prioritise, during your shockingly limited lifespan, and who will you resign yourself to disappointing? What matters?

Somehow I’m late to finding this. But it’s amazing. More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTRxrbgOHnw