Ask Zompist: Newspeak

I’ve been rereading the Appendix to 1984. The Party planned to ditch English and have all its members speaking Newspeak only by 2050. (It’s not certain what they planned for the Proles; O’Brien thought they were ineducable, in which case they would still be using Oldspeak.) But Newspeak was designed to have no redundancy in its lexicon and also to be spoken in a rapid, monotonous voice, with no variation of stress or tone (duckspeak) which would make it very hard to follow even in a moderately noisy environment. Do you think a language like that is viable?

—Mornche Geddick

Your question was an opportunity to reread Orwell’s description of Newspeak.  I think it’s a brilliant satire of totalitarian and authoritarian modes of thought; it should be read along with his less fantastical but equally perceptive “Politics and the English Language”.

The main sources or targets seem to be these:

• An aesthete’s aggrieved reaction to the regularities of artificial languages like Esperanto.  Though this is slightly provincial— what’s wrong with agglutinative languages?— it fits in very well with the Party’s blunt destruction of everything from the past.
• The careless meaninglessness and deceitfulness of political jargon.
• The Soviet fashion for syllabic abbreviations, e.g. Sovnarkom for “council of people’s commisioners”.

But that’s not your question.  Would it work?  As a written language, purposely impoverished in meaning and cut off from the past, I don’t see why not.  There are clear examples of the latter: Atatürk’s adoption of the Roman alphabet cut off Turks from centuries of literature; the adoption of báihuà (the Mandarin vernacular) over wényán (the classical literary language), plus the script reform, did the same for China.  To be sure scholars in both cases could continue to learn and study past works, but it was a new barrier.

Could the Party keep the new language immaculate of heretical meanings?  Only by retaining absolute power, which of course is a political not a linguistic question.

Newspeak depends on what’s normally called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; it was intnded to make all other modes of thought but Ingsoc impossible.  But if the political side wasn’t there, I doubt that the linguistic side would hold up.  Suppose the totalitarian state simply collapses, as in V for Vendetta: would the absence of metaphorical uses of “free” continue?  I doubt it; people would simply invent new words or senses.  Writing in 1948, with all the European empires intact, Orwell might suppose that uneducated peoples (denied access to sophisticated liberal thought) could never rebel; I think it’s clear by now that this was wrong— despite his own hatred for imperialism, Orwell grossly underestimated the capacities of non-Europeans.

As for the monotonous delivery “without involving the higher brain centres at all”, I think this should be taken as a parody of political speeches, especially the propagandists for extremists, mouthing out verbiage with no concern for careful thought, beauty, or internal contradiction.  In the world of 1984, it wasn’t a bug but a feature if torrents of Newspeak were hard to follow; the aim was the suppression of thought and progress.

 

Ask Zompist: Advice for the Infected

How do I stop sucking as an Infected?

–Brainsless

Left 4 Dead is a team game, so the first question is, are you and your fellow monsters playing well together?  You should be talking, telling each other what you’re doing, coordinating attacks, noting weaknesses. 

Use the maps to your advantage.  Areas like the basement in the No Mercy subway, or the cornfield in the Blood Harvest finale, are inherently confusing for the Survivors.  Places where they have to drop down to another level and can’t get back up again are excellent places to jump the stragglers. 

Height is your friend– all the attacks work better if you can attack from above.

Hang out in front of a witch or an alarmed car, in hopes that they’ll fire at you and set off the fun.

Boomer: The key class, as he produces the disorientation that makes other attacks devastating.  Tell your teammates where you’ll be attacking.  Always spawn at the last possible moment so they can’t pick you off from afar.  Try to spew on everyone– then go melee the ones you missed, in hopes that they’ll kill you, drenching themselves. 

Forest areas are difficult, but there are generally rocks or little cabins you can spawn behind; you just have to be a little more patient.

Even a four-survivor boom will do little damage if the horde can’t get at them– e.g.  if they’re ensconced in a subway car, or hiding in a room with just one exit.   (On the other hand, it slows them down and keeps them busy, so it’s not worthless.)

Hunter: Basic strategy: wait for a boom, preferably attacking one of the non-boomed survivors.  You get a bonus if you can pounce from a height.

Another basic strategy: Hunter or Smoker attacks survivor A; another hunter pounces whoever comes to rescue the victim.

Pay dirt comes when the survivors start to drift apart, even a little bit.  Get the isolated ones; this works even better if your teammates attack the rest of the survivors to keep them away.

If you’re shoved off a victim, you can often get in a melee attack or two before you’re killed.

Smoker: I’m worst at this myself, but it can be a game-changer, since it can break up a cohesive knot of survivors.  Try to smoke from a height, and always pull backwards (i.e., away from the direction they want to go).

Milling zombies will break your tongue, so it’s hard to smoke in the middle of a horde attack.

Single best smoker attack: pull someone from the roof in No Mercy 3.  (Either the person dies, or someone has to go rescue them, hopefully to be pounced by a hunter.)  Awesomest smoker attack: same level, pull them from the little room near the gas station, through the window, back into the alley they started from.

Tank: Avoid fire (which will kill you quickly) and open spaces (where the survivors can pour lead into you).  Hit trees, cars, and forklifts (fortunately, the game will aim these for you). 

Don’t obsess over any one survivor… hit whoever’s closest.  Use the throw attack if no one is very close; keep aiming throughout the throw. 

Tanks will normally scatter the survivors, making them excellent targets for the other infected.  The latters should attack from behind since the survivors should be paying attention to Mr. Tank.

The director wants you to keep attacking.  Don’t worry about that.  If the survivors set an area on fire, it’s better to give up control to a teammate rather than plunge in.

 

Ask Zompist: Monopolies

I’ve come across a claim by libertarians, ranging from Ayn Rand and Ron Paul to a slew of personal acquaintances, that monopolies and oligopolies are unsustainable without economic aid from the government.  Is there any truth to this claim?  What are the counter-examples?

—Ian

Whenever someone makes a claim like that, the burden of proof is on them.  Ask for three examples. (You can’t do this with an author, of course; but if they don’t provide examples, you don’t have to take their claim very seriously.)

See this old rant (and Josephson’s book) for some examples of Robber Baron monopolies.  What government aid benefitted the steel trust or Rockefeller’s oil refinery monopoly?  Is Microsoft’s near-monopoly on operating systems, or Google’s on search engines, subsidized by government?

The railroads are a special case, both supporting and undermining the libertarian position.  Many were frank giveaways of federal land.  But the railroad companies also blackmailed local governments and simply took over state governments.  Predatory tycoons will simply do as they please and bilk consumers and lesser companies in the absence of a strong government.

 

Ask Zompist: Improving the US Election Process

Since the election fever has died down a bit (and since the right guy won), I have a question about what I consider problems in the American election process.

[1] Election is always on  a workday (Tuesday), instead of Sunday, when most people don’t work, and therefore, more voters would be able to vote. The reason I’ve heard is that this tradition was established because of Christian fundamentalists, who interpreted the Sunday laws in such a way that no travel was allowed on Sunday, and since in the 18th century, it would often have taken a long horse ride or walk to the next town, so Monday was also skipped to be on the safe side, and Tuesday agreed as election day. The reason why it’s still done today, when travel is much faster than in the past, and when the US is officially secular (and therefore, should not cater to some religious group’s wishes over other reasons) is either the inertia of tradition, or to keep normal workers from voting. (Although I think that’s a bit too cynically exaggerated.)

Do you think that a Democratic President (and a Democratic majority) will change that, to a Sunday, or is tradition too holy for Americans?  Or has the problem become moot because in this election those voters who didn’t have the time during Tuesday itself queued up beforehand at post offices and other places to vote by letter?

[2] Then there’s the problem of the Electoral votes. As far as I can guess, the most likeliest reason for this complication is because of not efficient communication and travel system at the founders time, so having each state elect Electors, who then had to travel to the college, was the best logistic option. But today, with instantenous communication and quick counting of results, I don’t see an advantage of the Electoral approach over a direct one: why not count all popular votes across states for a grand total, instead of throwing away one half in each state because winner takes all majority principle? Is it again the case that inertia of tradtion and reverence for the founders is stronger than a practical look at what system would work best? The pragmatic approach to problems is usually – in technologial areas for example – what the Americans pride themselves on, when compared to other nations with strong traditions, but in the field of politics, it seems that tradtion is the!
only reason?

[3] The recent problems (though I haven’t heard as much an uproar about it as 4 years before – are people getting used to massive cheating? That would be a bad sign for democracy, I think) are that electronic voting machines are too insecure and open to fraud ; and that people are crossed off the voters list too easily, for example if their name is similar to that of a felon (that prison inmates are being denied their civil right to vote is another problem). Both have been proven to happen by journalists who were worried that the Democrats were not taking enough steps to stop this, both on local level by challenging the removal of voters, and on federal level by removing electronic voting machines as long as they are that insecure. Will this, too, change now with a Democrat in power, or will they stop worrying because they won despite hindrances?

[4] Shouldn’t more people – both correct politicans and citizens – worry about the democratic process and attitude in society if not only the percentage of people who actually vote is only about 50% and that many of those who try to vote are disenfranchised? I don’t think that the attitude of “It’s only several thousand votes who got lost/were falsly attributed/couldn’t vote, that wouldn’t decide the election because the margin was bigger” is a good attitude.

–Constanze

Better get a coffee, this might take a bit.

I’ve mentioned voting systems before, here and here, and talked here about how Americans are curiously reluctant to modify their governmental structures.  It’s harder to explain why that is; “tradition” rarely stops us in other areas.  At root it may be that the US, unlike European nation-states, defines itself by its ideology, not by ethnicity.  You’re an American if you accept the American way of doing things, which includes our approach to government.  So it’s not lightly changed.

On [1], voting day, your historical account is true I believe.  It’s just not an issue in American politics, though, so it’s not likely to change.  In the states I checked, employers are required to give time off for voting. I’m not sure that weekend voting would be popular anyway— people use the weekend for errands or entertainment. And you’re right that early voting is more and more popular— as much as 1/4 of votes last election.

On [2], I think most people realize that the Electoral College is foolish, especially after the 2000 election which showed that the popular vote winner losing wasn’t just theoretical.

But even a bad system has its beneficiaries.  The Electoral College magnifies the power of small states… every state that has 1 vote in the House of Representatives has 3 in the Electoral College.  And pretty much all such states currently vote Republican, while most of the largest states vote Democratic.  For that reason it’d be hard to get a change passed.  (Constitutional amendments require 2/3 approval in Congress, then ratification by 3/4 of the states.)

As for [3]— I really can’t explain why voting hasn’t been improved.  Often there are mean little political calculations involved— e.g. the Republicans have created a mythical “voter fraud” bugaboo and use it to try to restrain minority or elderly voting.  But it sure seems like voting is a technical problem that just shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.

Voter turnout [4] was 62%, which is pretty good for recent decades.  I’m reluctant to say more, because I think we need research, not speculation, on why people don’t vote.  If we don’t know, we’re likely to propose the wrong solutions.  E.g. if people just don’t care who wins, or are satisfied with either party, easier registration doesn’t help; if it’s the inconvenience, then it does.

 

Ask Zompist: Salting the economists

What do you think— with how much, or how little, salt should we take things said by Paul Krugman (and other economists)? On the one hand, he seems to be smart and insightful; on the other hand, he seems to assume certain things (like the IMF model of development, Ricardo’s trade prescriptions, and the seesaw model of inflation and unemployment) as self-evidently true and right even though there are various reasons (some of them covered by you) to have doubts about them. So, where do you agree with him and where do you disagree with him, and why? And what do you think how economics, as a field, is likely to develop in the near future (keeping in mind that this might well be different from how you might think it should develop)?

—Raphael

I don’t think Krugman in particular supports the neoliberal IMF model.  He’s an unrepentant Keynesian, after all— at the moment, for instance, he’s advocating a huge stimulus plan and actually worried that Obama won’t make it big enough.  That’s the opposite approach to the ‘austerity programs’ that the IMF imposes on developing nations.  Similarly, I remember him advocating currency controls during the 1990s troubles in southeast Asia.

A layman should be cautious, but not over-cautious, when disagreeing with experts.  Mere ignorance isn’t very attractive, and to be sure where the experts are not is a sign of quackery.

Where we can criticize the economists is in the assumptions they make about the world, intended to be simplifying, and arguably distorting instead.  An obvious one (now questioned by many economists) is the rationality of economic actors.  In many areas people simply don’t behave with a cold-blooded eye to their financial advantage.  Sometimes they’re simply valuing things other than money (e.g. prestige or conformism or fair play); sometimes they’re just dumb (e.g. the persistence of racism, which shrinks the market and discards good workers).

Thinking about money and incentives can produce a healthy cynicism— I like Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist for this.  Harford obviously spends too much time in coffeeshops, and he answers interesting questions like “Why do cafés cluster together?” and “Why are consumers willing to spend so much on coffee these days?”  On the other hand, there’s Joel Spolsky’s observation that incentives are counter-productive in management: you get more of what you measure, but rarely in a way that benefits the business.  The workers always learn to game the system, and more direly, their intrinsic motivation (doing a good job) is eroded by the extrinsic one (bonuses and incentives).  Economists helped produce highly inflated compensation for executives; in theory this was supposed to motivate them better, but with the failure of two major industries (investment banking and automobiles), it’s hard to see it as anything but dangerous looting.

Another issue, again recognized by good economists, is externalities.  The market doesn’t properly value non-production costs (e.g. pollution, or the despotism of oil-producing regimes) or long-term ones (e.g. mine cleanup or resource exhaustion or bubbles bursting).

The expert to really distrust is the one who never says “I don’t know.”  In retrospect, Greenspan’s air of authority, which so cowed even Democratic legislators, proved to cover an out-of-touch ideology more than any actual sagacity.

 

Ask Zompist: Feline-descended humans

In Almea, hominids don’t originate from primates but from an amphibian ancestry… So, I was wondering if it was possible to imagine human-like aliens descending from feline-like aliens.

—Opera

Oh dear, you want to create furries, don’t you?  Well, you certainly can imagine it… it’s common enough in sf/fantasy.  Though why does everyone pick cats, wolves, and foxes?  Capybaras, bonobos, wallabies, and platypuses could use more love.

Or do you mean, can you do it plausibly?  That depends on whether you’re writing fantasy or sf.  In fantasy, humanoids are the norm and need no justification.  Fantasy is more about the sense of wonder, or even spiritual or metaphysical exploration; it’s not hung up about biology.

Lots of sf is fantasy-with-phasers; but in theory sf is supposed to be scientific, and there’s little excuse for humanoids— except for the low budgets of TV shows.  Looking around our planet, it’s striking how varied are the animals even within one particular niche— among medium-large herbivores, for instance, we find deer, ostriches, and kangaroos.  Intelligent species should show at least that amount of variety.  The humanoid form, with its long thin limbs, derives from primate brachiation; a species that never lived in the trees shouldn’t look like us.  (And other common attributes of sf humanoids, such as breasts and lack of body hair, aren’t even shared with the other great apes.) 

Think about behavior, too… primates are intensely social creatures, and that was probably the engine for the development of our intelligence, such as it is.  A mostly solitary animal like a cat isn’t likely to go that route.  Lions might work better.  I also suspect that it’s not coincidence that we’re omnivores.  Omnivores have to be more adaptable… also more active; both characteristics could also facilitate intelligence.

 

Ask Zompist: Con- and Civ4 worlding

1. Not having a Wacom tablet, I had to resort to drawing outlines in pencil on paper and scanning them. Should I erase them after colorization or accentuate them for a better aesthetic result?

2. Which is the better worldbuilding strategy in your opinion – top-down, bottom-up, or mixed?

3. I was playing Civ4 attempting to implement the Culture victory scenario you mentioned in your article, and I accidentally picked “Raging Barbarians” instead of “No Barbarians” in the custom game menu. Do you have any special tricks that you use to deal with barbarians?

—Chris

1. Whatever looks better.  In general sharp lines will probably look best; but for maps, use light colors so the text isn’t overwhelmed.  And jeez, get a tablet already. 

2. Again, it’s an art, not a science… do what works for you.  But don’t expect to make something permanent the first time.  If you expect to revise things later, it doesn’t matter so much what order you use to create the first draft.  (My Historical Atlas and Verdurian dictionary went through at least three full revisions each before they were posted to the web.  And they can both use another go-around.)

3. I’m not sure I’ve played Civ4 with Raging Barbarians.  They can be an annoyance, but perhaps less so than the other civs, since they don’t coordinate attacks.  I think the main effect would be to make you militarize a tad earlier, since ordinarily you have a little breather before the other civs come knocking.  The Great Wall can help if they’re really bugging you. 

 

Ask Zompist: The race card

Reports on the U.S. presidential election seem to have focused for the last day or two on accusations from the McCain camp that Obama played the “race card” against McCain.  Having seen the Obama comments in question, I personally have concluded that this is just an instance of faux outrage on the part of McCain in an attempt to play the victim before the voters.

However, as an upper-middle class college-age California Democrat, I’m obviously not in McCain’s intended audience, so I’m wondering exactly why such a ploy on McCain’s part would be in any way successful.  What does this say about American voters?  Is this episode symptomatic of some underlying resentment in “Middle America” towards the Civil Rights Movement?  Is McCain playing on white expectations of the black candidate as consumed with playing the victim?  You get the idea.

—Ian

Certainly there’s ongoing resentment, especially in the Republican base, towards blacks.  Hostility to blacks is openly expressed in talk radio, but on op-ed pages it’s disguised as opposition to “affirmative action” (that is, to attempts to stop discrimination).  The arguments pretend to be meritocratic (as if conservatives believed in merit backed in Jim Crow days), but the game is given away by the fact that there’s no similar outrage directed against athletic scholarships or legacy admissions.

As for McCain, my impression is that he’s rather desperately shooting off his mouth, saying any damfool thing to make Obama look bad.  It doesn’t have the Satanic deviousness of Rovism; it’s just bilious.  He’s accused Obama of being out of touch on Iraq when Obama’s position is increasingly that of our military commanders and the Iraqi government; he criticized him for not going to Iraq and then for going there; he whines about not getting media attention; he sputters over Obama calling him on the race-baiting. 

Billmon has a good post pointing out that McCain’s amazing ability to wow the press corps covers an extremely calculating political career: McCain spouts whatever he needs to say for momentary advantage.

http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/7/31/142834/892/240/560121

McCain has been pushing oil drilling, another infuriatingly dishonest idea.  Restrictions on drilling in Alaska didn’t cause today’s high prices and won’t bring them down.  But as Paul Krugman points out, lying works: half the public believes that drilling will bring quick price relief.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/opinion/01krugman.html

Will it work this year?  We shouldn’t underestimate the power of fear and deceit.  But I think the public is tired of Iraq and of governmental incompetence, and McCain’s ill humor is unattractive and doesn’t add up to much of a program.  The voters don’t like wimps (cf. Dukakis) but they tend to prefer the candidate who seems warmer.  And John McCain doesn’t do warm.

 

Ask Zompist: Blogs vs. non-blogs

The days of creating personal Web sites with static HTML are over. Instead, people blog. As the creator of zompist.com, what do you think of this change?

[To consider: ease of use for creators and readers, juxtapose each's methods for organizing content, does old blog content get "lost" in deep time, blog interlinking creates a "vast but shallow" present, how does each technology facilitate stumbling upon the unexpected]

—Mark Irons

Blogs are a neat example of the power of an incremental improvement in UI.  I used to write my rants pages in raw HTML— not a huge task, but coupled with having to update the change page and RSS feed and upload the files, and being limited to one computer, it was just enough of a hassle that I’d normally skip it.  WordPress makes it just easy enough.  (Except when it messes up paragraphs.  I hate that.)

Similarly, though I have my doubts about Wikipedia, I love MediaWiki.  It makes it much much easier to provide a lot of background information on Almea.

But there’s plenty of things on zompist.com that don’t fit into either format: the culture tests, the LCK, the comics and stories, references like the numbers list, the longer articles and editorials. 

As for the content considerations you mention, I think blogs work best for short thoughts and reactions that don’t build on each other (except in a narrative way).  It’s a little too early to play curmudgeon and complain that the kids today don’t have the patience to read long web pages.  Longer articles are still better for treating a subject in more depth, and for that matter there are still uses for dead trees.

 

Ask Zompist: Improved Garfields

Bob, what’s your take on Garfield minus Garfield (http://garfieldminusgarfield.net )?

I mean, it’s the only webcomic in my feed reader (well, okay, xkcd I can’t avoid, and there’s ELER, which is moribund).

—John Cowan

 

 

Bob

It’s cool, but I prefer the original bit of messing with Garfield: erasing all of Garfield’s text but leaving him in the picture.  I can’t improve on Neil Gaiman’s description: “ a perfectly paced, rather sad strip about a man whose life is wasted and a cat who says nothing”.  It doesn’t always work (mostly because of the annoying facial expressions), but it’s a brilliant idea. 

By the way, for those who don’t check zompist.com any more, I’ve got two new comics reviews up today.