Good Entropy

Nature, nurture and noise » Gene Expression

The basic problem with the interpretation above is that it limits “innate” influences to “genetic” ones. Just because some trait is not genetic does not mean it is not innate. If we are talking about how the brain gets wired, any number of prenatal environmental factors are known to have large effects. More interestingly, however, and probably a greater source of variance across the population, is intrinsic developmental variation. Wiring the brain is a highly complex procedure, reliant on cellular processes that are, in engineering terms, inherently “noisy”. Running the programme from the same starting point (a specific genotype) does not generate exactly the same output (the phenotype) every time. The effects of this noise are readily apparent at the anatomical level, when examining the impact of specific mutations, for example. In many cases, the phenotypic consequences are quite variable between genetically identical organisms, or even on two sides of the same brain. (If you want to see direct evidence of such developmental variation, take a directly face-on photograph of yourself, cut it in half and make mirror-image copies of the left and right sides. You will be amazed how different the two resultant faces are).

Matthew Yglesias » Political Conflict Isn’t About Free Markets

To borrow an idea from Robin Hanson, I think it’s useful to think about political conflict in terms of valorized figures. On the right, you see a lot of valorization of businessmen. On the left, you see a lot of valorization of pushy activists who want to do something businessmen don’t like. Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se. Consequently, on the left people sometimes fall into the trap of being patsies for rent-seeking mom & pop operators when poor people would benefit more from competition from a corporate bohemoth.

Explaining Socialism’s Moral Decay, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

I’m now finishing up a new introduction for a reissue of Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future. In writing it, I identified three distinct answers to the question: “How could a movement founded to liberate workers from capitalist oppression end up shooting them in the back when they tried to flee the Workers’ Paradise?”

1. The Actonian “power corrupts” story

2. The Hayekian “worst get on top” story

3. The Richterian “born bad” story

Here’s my summary:

Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek have inspired the two most popular explanations for the crimes of actually-existing socialism. While Acton never lived to see socialists gain power, their behavior seems to perfectly illustrate his aphorism that, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For all their idealism, even socialists will do bad things if left unchecked. Hayek, with the benefit of hindsight, suggested a slightly different explanation: Under socialism, “the worst get on top.” On this theory, the idealistic founders of socialism were gradually pushed out by brutal cynics as their movement’s power increased.

Richter’s novel advances a very different explanation for socialism’s “moral decay”: The movement was born bad. While the early socialists were indeed “idealists,” their ideal was totalitarian. Their overriding goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves – depriving them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian punishments on dissenters – so be it.

Patrick’s Price Controls – WSJ.com

On Thursday, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s insurance regulators announced that they had rejected 235 of 274 insurer requests for premium increases for individuals and small businesses over the coming year. This power has been on the books since 1977 but never used, and Mr. Patrick announced in February that he was dusting it off as an opening bid for rate-setting for hospitals, doctors and all other providers as well. The state’s health costs have risen to the nation’s highest since Beacon Hill passed the ObamaCare prototype that was supposed to reduce health costs.

The premium increases were “excessive and unreasonable,” Mr. Patrick said in a statement, though his insurance division issued no actuarial analysis to justify its decision. “Now, the big insurance companies will criticize this action,” he said. “But the fact is that for three years now, both they and health-care providers have sat around the table talking the issue of excessive cost to death and coming up with no solutions.” In other words, price controls are supposedly the only option.

Yet campaigns against the insurance industry are always the first political resort, as Mr. Obama’s assault on Anthem Blue Cross of California showed. In Massachusetts, however, the major insurers—Blue Cross Blue Shield, Harvard Pilgrim, Tufts Health Plan—are all nonprofits. The state itself calculates that they spend at least 88 cents of every premium dollar on the underlying costs of medical care, often more.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists

It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe
generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises
entropy. This is the force we call gravity.
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It also relates gravity to quantum information for the first time. Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe.