The n-Category Café

I agree that science should be given more weight in political decisions. But I would not like to add another layer of judicial powers between the peoples and their government. The main problem with democracy now, is that politicians are serving two masters, their electors and large corporations. There is a simple way to fix that. Corporations are not citizens. Only citizens should have the right to support financially a political party. And there should be an upper bound to the amount an individual citizen can contribute. There is no perfect solutions to most political problems, only partial ones. The point is that partial solutions can take us very far into solving the problems of democracy.

André wrote:

The main problem with democracy now, is that politicians are serving two masters, their electors and large corporations. There is a simple way to fix that. Corporations are not citizens. Only citizens should have the right to support financially a political party.

Corporations are not citizens, but in the United States of America, at least, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are ‘persons’. They did this in 1886, and it would be quite hard to reverse. This year the Supreme Court removed restrictions on the ability of corporations to fund political candidates: they decided that since corporations are persons, they have the First Amendment right to free speech. Justice Stevens offered a dissenting opinion:

Stevens hammers more than once this morning from the bench on the principle that corporations “are not human beings” and “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.” He insists that “they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”

But you can plainly see the weariness in Stevens’ eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out.

In my online diary, I’ve speculated on the possibility that an evolutionary process is underway where people become secondary to corporations:

Darwinian evolution applies at many levels, but in a given situation some levels are more important than others. For example, when single-celled organisms formed permanent colonies, there came a point — a not very precisely defined point — when the survival of the colony became more important than the survival of the individual cells. Around this point, we find it simpler to consider the whole colony as an organism than to consider it as a collection of organisms that happen to be cooperating.

What does it mean to say that the survival of the whole colony is “more important” than that of the individual cells? This is actually a tricky question. But I think there should be some sort of reasonable answer. Maybe it goes something like this. The survival of an individual red blood cell (for example) is so dependent on the survival of its “host” that a Darwinian explanation of what red blood cells do is simpler if we invoke the need for the host to reproduce than if we think of the host as a mere “complicated trick for red blood cells to reproduce themselves”. The idea here is that what is “important” is that which helps us create a simple model of the situation.

One reason I’m interested in this issue is that evolution can be thought of as a kind of “game” — but not a game in the simple von Neumann-Morgenstern sense, in which there is a well-defined set of players who each choose among a well-defined set of strategies and each try to maximize a specific well-defined function. Instead, it’s a “game” in which every type of entity seeks to maximize the number of entities of that type!

Here I say “seeks” in a somewhat anthropomorphizing way, but all I really mean is this: we find more of those entities whose nature is such that they tend to become common — the simple yet powerful tautology of natural selection. And when I say “every entity”, I really mean every entity, from hydrogen atoms, to specific sequences of base pairs, to mitochondria, to red blood cells, to horses, to corporations, and so on.

Of course, this is taking evolution in a very broad sense — a sense that some people find too broad to be useful, but that’s just the mood I’m in now. And when we think of it this broadly, we see that there are a lot of choices to be made in giving an evolutionary explanation of what’s going on.

Most fundamental, perhaps is choosing the set of evolutionary “players” - the “replicators”, the “units of selection”, or whatever. This choice is not always clear: witness the argument between those who favor explanations in terms of “the selfish gene” and those who don’t - or between those who find “memes” persuasive, and those who don’t. Different ways of parsing the world in terms of “players” may prove more cogent in different contexts, and the issue is most fascinating to me here precisely when it’s hardest to make up ones mind! So, I’d like to see work on “games with ill-defined players”. In particular, it would be interesting to learn about games in which coalitions of players can become so tightly bound that it may become simpler to treat them as individual players, which in turn can form higher-level coalitions, and so on - but where players at any level still can and do “defect”.

Believe it or not, I started writing this tonight because I wanted to raise the question: If corporations gradually replaced people as the fundamental “actors” in politics, how would we notice? Indeed, could it have already happened long ago? Already in 1886, the United States Supreme Court ruled that corporations count as legal “persons” with 14th Amendment rights to due process. By now one could argue that they control more of the political process than individual humans do, and that even CEOs are to a large extent only “powerful” to the extent that their objectives match those that corporations are optimized for: doing whatever it takes to bring in money in the form of profits and investment.

And the reason I wanted to raise this was the recent flurry of news, shortly before taxes are due in the USA this year, about how little income tax corporations pay compared to individual citizens! Part of this came from a report by the Government Accounting Office showing that in the years 1996 through 2000, roughly 60 percent of U.S.-based corporations paid no corporate income tax at all. About 94 percent of US corporations reported tax liabilities of less than 5 percent of their income in 2000. And US companies paid an average of 1.188 cents in tax for every dollar in gross receipts! The corporate income tax is supposedly 35 percent, but there are so many deductions and other loopholes that this is completely meaningless.

Naturally, people are outraged… but will anything happen? Don’t count on it. Given how lobbying and elections work these days, people may be less important in making decisions about the tax code than corporations are. Who listens to a measly red blood cell?

Dear John,

I very much appreciate your involvement into fighting the ecological disaster. The task is enormous and few peoples have decided, like you do, to dedicate an important part of their time to it. With science and engineering, you are bringing in your personal style. I hope many scientists will join.

I have also a great admiration for a politician like Winston Churchill. He was not afraid of moving against the dominant current, in this case to tolerate the Nazi, if not to collaborate with them. His words are extremely clear. He was not a defeatist!

I must say I was quite disappointed in reading the philosophy of the azimuth project:

http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/Azimuth+Project

In the front page, one can read: “But isn’t it hopeless?
Yes, it’s hopeless. That’s an important realization.”

I am sorry, but these are words of a defeatist! I cant believe that they are yours! There must be a misunderstanding. Are you giving to the word “hopeless” a meaning that I dont know? Hope, hoffnung, espérance, esperanza, speranza are very powerful words in all languages and they can carry the highest spiritual meanings. “Hope” can be the last thing you have when you have lost everything.

Ok, you also wrote in the front page of the azimuth project:

“But that’s just the first step. Then you have to say: okay, so the problem is “hopeless”. What does that actually mean? Is the world coming to an end? Will everyone die? Will all species go extinct? The answer is obviously no.”

At first, it seems encouraging: “Will everyone die? obviously no”. But there is a second reading which may have escaped you: “Many will die but some will survive”. It is kind of suggesting that we should accept that many will die. Billions of peoples could actually die, dwarfing the total casualities of all past wars. You may say this is just my interpretation. But your message is ambiguous, unlike Churchill’s speech. I really **hope** you will rethink the philosophy of the azimut project.

With warmest regards,
André

Dear Urs,

You and your collaborators have done an amazing work at the nLab. It is now covering a vast amount of mathematical subjects from category theory to higher category theory, geometry and quantum field theory. It is becoming a practical tool for research and teaching. It can be used as a dictionnary and as a guide for exploring many recent developements of mathematics. Many thanks to you and your collaborators! I have been working on the CatLab with a slightly different goal, namely providing a detailed account of certain parts of mathematics.

We agree that the nLab could become the seed of something much vaster, covering all mathematics, pure and applied, elementary and advanced, including the history of mathematics and its relation to physics. How can we get peoples to do it? I do not know. I agree that I should contribute more to the nLab in the future.

I have been working on the $CatLab$ with a slightly different goal, namely providing a detailed account of certain parts of mathematics.

Your pages here are most useful. They are being linked to from the $n$Lab and thus are becoming effectively part of it. (Though there could be more links back, that might make it even more useful for the reader…)

But it is not true that you have a different goal. I have the same goal, among others. I just didn’t have the time to follow it, yet! Maybe I will in a few years.

The value of the $n$Lab is the higher, the more the goals of its contributors differ, because the wider its scope and the tighter the net of interrelations and aspects. We can afford to have a vast scope, for higher category theory provides the overarching storyline that holds everything together and gives rise to everything.

Could you explain 1 in more detail? It sounds good but I don’t know what it really means. If you could provide examples and non-examples that would be great too.

Lakatos’s ideas are attractive, but they can be quite difficult to apply. There are many obstacles. Researchers are rewarded for producing original ideas and they compete naturally. Competition can be fierce and, unfortunately, sometime dishonest. Collaboration is impossible without a fair amount of trust.

Also, reseachers do not always have the global picture of what they are doing. A researcher may be exploring a promising direction, but after a considerable amount of work, the shiny metal may turns into fool’s gold. Also, I believe that many advances are depending on computing as much as they depend on ideas. Ideas are often quite vague, they give you some kind of direction. They may be checked by computing if they are precise enough. I have always learned a lot when the result of a computation is simple but unexpected. Grand research plans are depending on long term forcasting and they do not age well.

Mathematics is vast and complex. But I suspect that this complexity is not completely natural. Too many papers and books are badly written. There should be more expository books. A project like the nLab is making advanced mathematics more accessible. I would like to see expanded. But how?

[Proper names being encouraged for the Azimuth wiki have made me change from pseudonym bane back to David Tweed everywhere.]

I don’t think the computer virus issue is significant in the long term. Unfortunately what has happened is that industrial embbeded chip and software design has grown up without a perceived need for security and fail-safe-ness (ie, when you fail, fail into a safe mode) considerations (even though many in the CS community have been warning about this). Apart from anything else, if computer viruses can cause problems general user incompetence combined with electrical failures can probably cause it too.

Other issues are probably much more significant for evaluating nuclear power.