Interview: Frank Herbert - Saviors and Political Animals

[Zenaan Harkness]

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 at 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