On Tue, Apr 24, 2018 at 03:22:27PM -0400, Steve Kinney wrote:

I made a video from a found audio file, as little hobby project:

Frank Herbert - Saviors and Political Animals

This interview is a pre-Internet artifact recorded in 1984, and makes no reference to cryptography. But IMO it's dead center on topic for CPunks, because self identifying Libertarians and Anarchists need all the help they can get. Frank's ecological models of power dynamics in human affairs provides a stout dose of scientific and engineering sense that may cure any of several loads of ideological nonsense.

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted." - Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert was a true polymath, accepted without credentials as a participating member of the academic Ecology community (a demanding multidiscipliplinary science), as well as being an avid historian and radical political theorist. The mp3 I found included a lot with David Lynch, director of the original Dune movie, and about the film itself. So I cut the interview down to just Frank's historical and political exposition, and added a few appropriate quotes and pictures.

Here's it. Bring popcorn and/or paper & pencil.

https://archive.org/details/FrankHerbertSaviorsAndPoltiicalAnimals

:o)

Simply excellent. Thank you very muchly. Some apropos for your day: On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 11:39:56AM -0400, dan@geer.org wrote:

...

Good interview exerpts - about 26 minutes, about 37 MB.

Thanks. Hard to follow the recording but my ears are getting old...

Herbert's quote:

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

is an interesting statement, or, should I say, restatement and rejoinder to Lord Actor:

All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. -- Lord John Dalberg Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

but so is this one, which may have sourced Herbert:

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. -- David Brin

In any case, this brings us to a point: Algorithms and, in particular, those algorithms that are self modifying, complex, and data driven. They accumulate power, first by self modification, then by their cumulative complexity that produces "we don't know how it works only that it does", and finally by the inherent authority implicit in a mass of data growing in scope and volume and, thus, authority coupled to the necessity of trust once how-it-works is given up upon.

As was mentioned, Herbert was speaking well before the self-modifying algorithm in a world of sensors. So where these folks:

Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes. -- Goodhart's Law (1981)

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. -- Campbell's Law (1976)

Given that the structure of an econometric model consists of optimal decision rules of economic agents, and that optimal decision rules vary systematically with changes in the structure of series relevant to the decision maker, it follows that any change in policy will systematically alter the structure of econometric models. -- Lucas' Critique (1976)

which three I mention because they are germane to the idea (largely due to Tim O'Reilly) of "algorithmic regulation" as the next and prefered stage of government.

I put out an article via Lawfare and Hoover on the national security implications of digitalization. It touches on these subjects.

A Rubicon https://lawfareblog.com/rubicon

Onward,

--dan