I disagree. Sites like Pitchforkmedia and various TV fanboy sites have allowed the kind of informed fandom which used to be the province of the psychotic few to become the stomping grounds of the many. I think this has led television criticism, previously a rather arid and trailer-parkish affair, to develop some of the mad richness of the opera aficionado-ism of yore. In general, tha kidz today are versed and skeptical to a degree unimagined in my already ironic and postmodern youth, and I think they owe a lot of that to the ease of forming critical communities and disseminating recherche insider trivia via internet.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Very good point. The fact that The Shawshank Redemption is usually rated as one of the top ten movies of all time on the IMDB is a reflection on the IMDB (and its voting methodology), not on the art of cinema. (Sorry if you're one of those who love it.) A "market" of a sort has established its value, but I don't particularly value that market.

In fact, most of us have already learned to balance quantitative and qualitative online opinions pretty well. If I were looking for a restaurant in a strange city, I'd skim the overall ratings, get a sense of which ones seem widely admired and to have sent a high percentage of patrons home happy, but as soon as I wanted specifics about the cuisine, I'd look to reviews by reasonably learned or reliable individual critics-- which could be newspaper reviewers, or could be people on a site like Chowhound who seem literate, thoughtful and similar in taste to myself. The value of online sources of information comes precisely from the individual's own ability to zero in on total strangers who offer the level of insight you're looking for. For that reason I believe the real wiki is the one in my head sorting it out, more than anything structural online.

(Very different from, say, discrediting Sgt. Beauchamp for writing about the realities of war for a pro-war publication -- there, you have people wanting to shut down disloyal sources rather than any particular concern for truth.)

I'm sorry, but that's just incorrect, and an example of what Sunstein describes, groupthink believing what it wants to believe despite the facts it would encounter if it left its cocoon. The Beauchamp affair in fact demonstrates the precise strength of the Internet in bringing varied expertise to verifying journalism. Entirely legitimate questions were raised about Beauchamp's account-- can a Bradley be driven like that? Did the "melted face" person exist? Was a cemetery like that one found?

The questions were mostly answered accurately (a Bradley can just barely be driven like that, but doing so would expose the crew to greatly increased danger and almost certainly earn a severe reprimand not to mention intervention by the troops being put at risk; no trace of the "melted face" person can be found, and Beauchamp has subsequently moved the location of the event to Kuwait, invalidating its point about the dehumanizing effects of war, which he would not have experienced yet in Kuwait; cemeteries have been excavated, and guidelines call for respect and proper care, but hey, out in the field, something else could have happened). In short, the stories mostly didn't check out, and insisting they did and that the scrutiny was illegitimate just because it was undeniably partisan is the act that shows "no particular concern for truth."

I'm just catching up to this week's discussion, but, overall, it seems that Prof. Sunstein's ideas are rooted in a modernistic, normative, industrial-age point of view. Things like pricing systems, deliberative democracy, informed citizenries, and a working news media, these are all outdated, overtaken in an age of corporate media, privatized armies, global surveillance and an endless war on terrorism.

Sunstein, in a previous post, mentioned the citizen and the consumer -- well, what's the difference? When terror strikes, good citizens go shopping.

I agree that Hayek can be applied to the little things, good wiki pages and bloggers disseminating information about the political events of the day, but if by the phrase "the promise of the Internet" we're talking about political power and political resistance, I doubt there's any applicability for pricing systems.

The whole thesis is based on the idea that more and better information will create an optimal democracy, but more and better information is impossible, because that's the way the system works. We went to war in Iraq with 70 percent of the country thinking Saddam had a role in 9/11. It's easy to look back at that, and say, gee, if we only had better information, we could have avoided that mistake.

But I think we have to examine how easy it was to fool the country, how, systematically, everything just fell into place. It was easy to tweak the system -- give a speech or two, plant some controversy here, leak some bad intel there, etc.

We can either conclude that if we only had more and better information, we could have avoided the war. Or, we can conclude that the system was designed to work the way it did.

It was a feature, not a bug.

In other words, there is no "free market" of knowledge upon which to apply pricing systems when the government operates in secrecy, when policies are implemented by the private, above-the-law armies of Blackwater, and when everything you discuss is being monitored in an out-of-the-way switching room at AT&T's corporate offices.

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

What I am describing is searching for facts that fit your thesis, the thesis being Sgt. Beauchamp must be a fraud because those stories didn't fit some fantasy flag-waving version of war.

Nothing about Beauchamp's stories undermined the war. They were written for a pro-war publication. Anyone who says these things don't happen in war either has no knowledge of war, or does, but wants to lie about it to keep the wool over people's eyes. Even Andrew Sullivan went ballistic on these guys. I know there's still back and forth about the accuracy -- the army won't release a report that says Beauchamp made this stuff up, Beauchamp tells the magazine he stands by his story and that he's been pressured to say certain things or such and such happens, blah, blah, blah.

But lets pull back for a moment and look at the big picture: A soldier writes, in a sensitive way, about how the daily realities of war desensitizes a soldier, for a publication that supports the war, but wants to present a soldier's view. The purpose of the Bradley, etc. is the same purpose of challenging Aron Braussard's breakdown on Meet the Press over a guy's mother after Katrina. They focus on some inconsistency to claim he's a charlatan so they can shut down the empathy one might feel after seeing him bawling over some guy's mother who calls every day, wondering when they're coming to save her, and drowns.

I admit, I'm not immersed in the details of Beauchamp as I am in others, so I sure would like to see this stuff you're talking about that discredits those stories.

If it does, this seems to be an example of how blogs DON'T reinforce one another around a false idea the pushes our politics.

Quite surprised to check in on the TPM website and see an article approving of Hayek!

They're following their leaders' lurch rightwards, not the other way around.

This is probably why Rep. John Linder (R-GA) made his infamous comment that had redstate.org seeing red. Under your theory, it makes perfect sense.

Liberal blogs have been influential, the Georgia lawmaker acknowledged. But he dismissed their conservative counterparts, saying, "I don't pay any attention to them."

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins

First off, the New Republic no longer supports the war. It's a good little liberal now.

Second, I feel like you're missing the point of the "marketplace of ideas" by getting hung up on the motives of this or that participant. The motives don't matter-- what matters is how the marketplace reacts to new information brought to it. If the new info is unverifiable, wacky, phony, a smear job with no solid basis to it, its bubble will pop very quickly. The marketplace itself is the method by which something either gains or loses legitimacy. It will often happen that somebody on one side will have the reason to start a story making the rounds. That's not a bug, it's a feature, the self-correcting mechanism of the marketplace by which each faction keeps an eye on the others.

In this case, yes, rightwing sites started with a feeling that Beauchamp's stories didn't pass the smell test and that a liberal mag was being fed what it wanted to hear by an ambitious writer who might not have even been a soldier (though of course it turned out he was). I think you'd be surprised to read the tentative and probing way this started, far from the rah-rah talk radio ranting you probably imagine:

Is it possible that American soldiers would be so sadistic when confronted by a badly burned woman, who may be a fellow soldier? Well, yes: Anything is possible when it comes to human depravity. But consider: these are enlisted men who, by the author's own account, don't know who this woman is or what rank she might hold. (Incidentally, wouldn't soldiers be able to distinguish a soldier from a contractor--especially if she is a regular at the chow hall?) Would they really ridicule her with raised voices in a public place, on "one especially crowded day"?

That's from the Weekly Standard and while partisan, it is entirely responsible, it seems to me, about raising fair questions about the veracity of an account, and avoiding dismissing the account outright on blustery patriotic grounds. I could find a summing-up account about the ways in which Beauchamp's story proved suspect, but I think that's missing the point-- even if it had checked out 100%, there was nothing bad about subjecting it to scrutiny and verification, any more than there is about any subject of any example of investigative reporting in any newspaper, magazine or blog.

That's utterly simpleminded.

Which were Woodward and Bernstein, motivated by partisanship or by Truth with a capital T?

Which was Mary Mapes?

And did it matter-- or did the facts they found (in the former case) or failed to find (in the latter) matter most?

I think you make the common mistake of assuming that Darwin says it is the act of winning that makes one superior. Just because a meme spreads does not make it correct. VCRs didn't outsell Betamax because they were better. The fact that more people read Harlequins does not make them the superior works of literature.

Let's say, you belong to a cult that believes that if you all commit suicide when the Hale-Bop comet arrives, you'll get carried away by aliens. This could be an unsuccessful idea, but if one in every million people who watch the news report buy into your religion, you've expanded membership. For a time, anyway.

Drudge works precisely BECAUSE the accuracy of an idea is not necessarily what allows a meme to survive and thrive. It could be many other things: marketing, or by appealing to our biases, telling us what we want to hear, or by achieving some political ends.

I don't care if they're partisan. What I care about is if their approach is empirical, or propagandist. Do they look to science to figure out what's going on, or to manipulate until you're right?

Figures don't lie, but liars can figure. Do you make facts, or find them? That's what I want to know. Do you try to form opinions, whatever your passions, based on what you see, or do you try to see what feeds your passions?

Shawshank would have been an example I'd have used. I don't happen to like it. But it is a kind of solid, mainstream movie. It's really well done according to all the conventions of what a Hollywood movie should be. For that reason it shouldn't be rated among the top movies of all time because it isn't innovative. But, it is. Because in a popularity poll, things with mass appeal are going to win out.

The consensus of taste can really distort measures of quality.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Ooh, you're so smart and I'm just a sheeple. You read Chomsky and I watch Fox News*, so you see how things REALLY are in the land of monolithic media.

So why are you posting here?

* Actually, I don't.

Where is the search for Truth altruistic?

Are most scientists searching for the Truth or are they looking for evidence to support their theory and other scientists are trying to find evidence to falsify their theory?

Is our judicial system altruistic, or is it comprised by advocates for and against the accused?

Are journalists altruistic, or are they predisposed to find fault with those they report on?

I am hard pressed to think of any altruistic search for truth in our society. I think most of us understand that most acts are acts of advocacy, but that take as a whole they will converge one the Truth.

I don't read Chomsky.

I don't think you're a sheeple. Just someone who gets his kicks by trying to prove how liberals are all assholes. It's a tired genre, though.

Thanks for saying I'm smart. I'm way too modest to say so myself.

(PS, I'm surprised at you, Max, resorting to whining so quickly into the argument. Usually you're a much more formidable debate opponent. But I guess that line about the Weekly Standard being "responsible" was waaaay too much of a softball. I'm almost embarrassed to have taken a swing at it. But not that much.) :-)

Hey... my wife went to the University of Chicago Law school. Obama taught there. A lot of smart people. A lot of wrong people, but shhhh, don't tell them.

The participants in judicial system are most certainly advocating at a starting point one position. A defense attorney is going to selectively use empirical evidence to place his client in the best light in front of a jury and the prosecutor is going to do the opposite.

As for motivation, I think it is naïve to assume that all scientists, lawyers, journalists, and teachers(?) are interested in the “common good”. Most of us assume that the participants in the various institutions are self interested or partisan to some degree, but that the market place of ideas will converge on the “common good”.

I think it is naïve to assume that all scientists, lawyers, journalists, and teachers(?) are interested in the “common good”.

Sure. But I think it's cynical to assume all people are only motivated by their own selfish interests.

Some people actually give a sh!t in some form or other. In fact, I'd say most people do.

(This has been a very large and somewhat intellectual discussion. Any respectful response would have to be of considerable length and detail not appropriate to this format. So without any inference of dismissiveness I would like to submit the following observation.)

When we think of modern day Afghanistan we think of two things – unconquerable and anarchistic. Throughout history the most advanced and organized societies have tried and failed to control that region in the way that was so successful in other parts of the world. It seems that it proved easier to dominate a Pharoac Egypt or a modern, industrial Japan than it is to do so in this “backwater” of mankind. The explanation seems to lie in the other thing we think about Afghanistan – its anarchy. Every family is an authority unto itself. Every tribe has its hierarchies. Every valley has its long tradition of alliances. Apparently following the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” they come together to eject any interloper and then quickly dissemble back into their fundamental atomism.

We like to think of this as primitive, almost pre-civilizational behavior. But is it? How else do we rationalize our support for Musharref? How else do we rationalize the tactics of Obama and Edwards vis a vis the Clinton candidacy? How different would our policies and our politics be without these alliances of convenience? And intrinsic to these alliances are the two attributes that they are strong and temporary.

Rather than seeing a weakness in the anarchy of the internet’s discourse, why not see strength? Groups, “group think” and such are just the strong and temporary alliances that never last and never prevail. The thousand year Reich lasted twelve years and was defeated by an alliance of capitalists, socialists, communists and ordinary men and women, an alliance that dissolved as quickly as it formed.

“Radical” is just an epithet. Four score months ago I would have been a radical to pronounce that Habeas Corpus is not a seminal legal principle of U.S. Constitutional law. Today I am a radical for proposing that it is. The strength of any idea is not found in a count of its supporters but in the discrete quality of its content. In thought or on the internet, this is the only measurement that matters. Only as an individual can one make this measurement and so it is the individual who needs to be nurtured, not some collective experience.

Now this is interesting, Larry, and though I disagree with you, I've had this disagreement - intelligently on both sides, I would like to think, with friends who are anarchists (I'm anything but).

The internet is not anarchy.

Don't confuse "capable of fully interconnected nearly simultaneous communication" with anarchy. In fact, that capability is a result of very well planned and very well implemented infrastructure.

Second, I would point out that "planing" doesn't only imply long-term pre-decision of courses of action that can't be adjusted for situation and circumstance. "Planning" can also mean identification of policy that is preconceived, but applicable to the most dynamic of situations and circumstances.

In a computer operating system, we write what are called "interrupt handlers" and "device drivers", and at higher levels, these map to event management policies and mechanisms, and to full and complete applications (like web browsers and word processes, which are entirely based on this model). The software that is so comprised is the result of planning.

In the early days of user-oriented programming, before GUIs and window systems, people like me racked their brains trying to figure out how to write interactive software at all, because the obvious model was to build it as sequences of steps that the user would have to follow, and of course, so constraining user behaviour was obviously a bad idea. It just doesn't work, so it was never a viable practical or conceptual approach. All such software now is effectively collections of bits of policy, organized so as to be applicable to events.

But that's planning. It's in fact "central planning."

On the subject of intelligence, I would commend to anyone Albert Einstein's essay "Why Socialism?" It really is time we get past this worship not just of the individual, but of the presumed efficiency of the Reptilian complex, and start taking advantage of our collective capacities for thought and action. There's more to life, and to the "meaning of life," than just the individual, and that seems to me the substance of Einstein's essay.

Einstein's essay was written about the same time (within a decade, anyway), as Hayek's essay on knowledge (in 1949).

What are the exogenous factors that determine how the data on the Internet is accumulated and summarized? Who and what social, political and economic forces set the priorities? I think that is the direction this discussion is going.

I would like to free-ride on both of your posts, and agree that markets really do perform an excellent job of simplifying and reacting to massive amounts of data in such a way that the data can be acted on by large groups of people. But the process of simplifying all that data to provide a simple, clear result like the price is normally done within a power structure of some sort that limits access to the market. No money, no access. This is essential to achieve an efficient price mechanism, but it also excludes large amounts of data that do not bear on the immediate price. Those data are what the Econ 101 textbook on supply and demand call exogenous factors.

Then, there is the fact that markets are very expensive to maintain. Oliver Williamson's superb discussions of transaction costs points out that for markets to react to the latest data the market-makers have to always be collecting new data and busily transmitting the market results to every other potential market-maker. All this data collection and transmission is very expensive. It is also unnecessary for people who make essentially the same transaction over and over, like a steel mill that buys coal and iron ore from the same sources.

By the judicious application of power (that is, the steel mill buys its suppliers) the expense of data collection and remaking the same decisions over and over is replaced by an administrative decision on where to allocate the iron ore and coal. Administrative decisions are based on power - usually but not always modified by placing it in a bureaucratic social setting - rather than on market allocation. The elimination of the high costs of market transaction normally result in cheaper steel - along with bureaucracy and rigid, pre-made decisions. This is both the advantage and curse of large, efficient production runs. It' cheaper, and it works as long as market conditions for the product or service don't change.

About half way between buying your suppliers and conducting a market transaction for each purchase is a rigid contract system, usually between a much larger and thus more powerful entity and smaller ones. This is the Sears and Wal-Mart model. The purchaser retains flexibility to discard a supplier, but loses the administrative flexibility to easily and cheaply direct how they operate. Because of the power differential, the supplier is still effectively owned, without the security of that being on the larger companies' balance sheet normally provides. This is also the current position of another factor of production, non-unionized labor. The issue is power, not economics, and the discipline of economics focuses on markets while ignoring power relationships.

While I agree with Hayek on how much information is built into prices using the market mechanism (and I will agree that it is a marvel), all that information is built into the price by markets in which the surrounding power structure is simply assumed as a "given," or as the economists call it, an exogenous factor.

Economists measure prices. Power is not something that can be reliably measured, so economists ignore it. For economists doing regression equations, the effects of power are one of those factors that end up in their error factor. (Old social scientist joke - but true.)

People given both quantitative data (prices) and qualitative data of equal importance (power relationships) almost invariably make decisions based on the quantitative data alone. [That explains the entire philosophy of economic Libertarianism, by the way. Some Libertarians will explain it away by claiming that the use of power to cause someone else to do something is simply illegitimate and immoral.]But back to markets.

Markets optimize that massive collection of data that is incorporated in price, but the basis of optimization is exogenous to the market. Families have, raise and educate children, but that is an essentially non-economic function. People in a market economy do that on the side, as a personal goal and a personal reason for entering the market economy. It is not the business of having a family and raising and educating children that is accounted for by the fantastic data accumulation tool of prices. It is the motivation of individuals who participate in the economy that is reflected in those prices.

That goal and similar noneconomic goals are better reflected in the economy of power - the arena we call politics. The factory system which is the social basis of the Industrial Revolution is an amazing tool for productivity, and the financial markets which are a major part of it do a generally good job of allocating goods and services to support the society and its families. But it is an imperfect tool, imperfectly understood and often improperly used.

The same can be said for the markets of power, that is legislatures or parliaments, some of which are governmental and some of which are built into businesses (board of directors) and churches.

My point is that using the Internet to accumulate and summarize large amounts of data is a new tool which both resembles and differs from economic markets and democratic power mechanisms. It has the clear capability to accumulate and summarize massive amounts of important data. It also differs sharply in many ways from markets, from business organizations and governance and from democratic from methods of political governance. What is really important is to determine what factors are used to prioritize the data which is discarded and which is incorporated in the summaries, as well as what factors are endogenous to the system and what factors are exogenous.

At the moment, it appears that almost everything is endogenous, but that's not true. Anything which cannot be adequately described in written language is already excluded. That is only obvious when you become aware of it. What else is excluded? What else is used to prioritize summaries? A group of racists will set different priorities than will people who are members of an inclusive society, so generally accepted social attitudes are exogenous. How about the limitations on people who even have access to the Internet? What else is exogenous?

We've got a long way to go before we begin to understand what we have here. I think this discussion is moving us forward.

Good points, but I think you're leaving out how predictions may change outcomes.

For example, Hersh predicted a rush to war with Iran and motivations for it, and the media generally covered the possibility, which brought a lot of debate to the subject and invalidated many of those arguments, and pressured the admin to issue reassurances. And the concern is that as the media moves on, the pro-war forces will be freer to again agitate behind the scenes.

Can't wait till this admin is history!

btw, I think the dilemma in my above post is a general problem I have with Sunstein's posts.

When he's talking about the dangers of polarization in the internet, I think he's stating an obvious truth but which is only half the story, and probably the lesser half. The more we focus on the possibility of polarization, and ignore the self moderating aspects of the internet, the more tempting some sort of paternalism becomes, which as this discussion has shown tends to be intuitively unpopular among the most liberal and open minded, and probably going to be most popular with the most narrow minded. Which is rather self defeating. Call it the paradox of fascism and authoritarianism, which always begin with the intention of moderation and unification.

On the other hand, to overly focus on and praise the wisdom of crowds, generalists as opposed to specialists, is to elevate a lack of expertise to expert status, perhaps best illustrated by the Cultural Revolution's lynching of intellectuals. Many of the contributors to Wiki on factual matters are actually experts in their fields. Wiki isn't really the wisdom of the crowds in the populist sense (which is how many interpret it) on matters of specialization and facts, so much as it's a tool for aggregating crowds of experts. And increasingly Wiki is moving towards a peer reviewed model such as science journals and traditional encyclopedia use, i.e. it's gaining controls. Though it will always be far larger than any physical encyclopedia, and able to cover a far wider range of subjective topics.

So, it has something of a Zen-like paradox to it all. (pardon the cheese) The more we glorify the novelty of the net, the more we'll run into old problems. The more we attempt to define problems narrowly and fix them, the more we're likely to harm the whole and break it. To glorify markets and crowds and forget controls is foolish. To glorify experts and authority and forget the value of crowds and democracy is equally foolish.

And the internet is, so far, the best example and furthest effort towards some optimum balance, in no small part due to the open and chaotic way in which it grew which allowed for rapid emergence of functional, and frankly rational, outcomes.

I think people should stop the hand-wringing and just leave it be; with the most basic exceptions of preserving net neutrality to prevent monopoly, policing obvious crime such as pedophilia, and standardizing technology for interoperability where it's clearly beneficial to market growth. (Bill Joy has some excellent thoughts on serial standards as inherently more efficient than parallel standards is lieu of Moore's law.)

As someone said, Sunstein has solutions in search of a problems.

JohnOneOne, both of your posts have been terrific. Regarding this one, since the Internet is the result of a well planned infrastructure, what causes so many problems when people like Prof. Sunstein try to fit it's activities into neatly labeled boxes and, as has happened here, it refuses to go into any box, labeled or not? It seems intuitive to me that the Internet's blogosphere won't neatly sort itself out as he's trying do, but I couldn't tell you why.

On the subject of individuals and collectives, another part of our problem lies with our worship of economic freedom, specifically individual economic freedom. It seems like we, as a nation, put the protection of that freedom ahead of all other freedoms, instead of at least treating them equally. If it could be proved beyond any doubt that collectively we all do better economically, I'm not sure that the champions of individual economic freedoms would change their tunes. It's disheartening.

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins

It's not anarchy but it's the closest we'll ever get to a functional anarchy in the dissemination of information and news.

Don't confuse "capable of fully interconnected nearly simultaneous communication" with anarchy. In fact, that capability is a result of very well planned and very well implemented infrastructure.

The Internet, and it's true of any network in general, is actually much closer to anarchy than anything you can define as well planned.

The essence of a network is its instability. A network is never fixed, and diagrammatic attempts at defining it are simply point-in-time snapshots, always one step behind the actual. The network is always in a state of flux.

If anything was well-planned in the creation of the Internet, it was in its fail-safe-ness, it's ability to have one or more nodes taken out, and yet keep on ticking.

Your opinion about the Internet simply doesn't fit with what I know of it's technical underpinnings, and I've contributed to them directly.

Dynamic doesn't mean "unplanned." In practice, we don't use fixed diagrams to manage networks. We use protocols.

DNS has always had as its intent to separate the human-accessible "names" of nodes on the Internet from the "numbers" the network itself uses for its fundamental node-to-node communications (i.e., the basic network-layer "Internet Protocol" - "IP," as in IP address, the number to which I'm implicitly referring). DNS was unfortunately rather static for a long while, but it can be very dynamic now. DNS is a plan, and in fact, a plan for how to control the Internet's dynamism.

DHCP is a similar plan, a formal and effective one. And it also achieves dynamism in network structure, at a lower level than DNS. So like DNS, it is only one of many such protocols.

TCP assumes an unreliable transport, but plans for it, and thus manages in most cases to achieve sustained reliable communication between endpoints.

The underlying point of the redundancy inherent in the Internet was a plan, to make it survivable in the face of widespread failure, e.g., as a result of attacks on the physical infrastructure. In that respect, it was modelled after (i.e., planned) the Interstate Highway system, which was imagined both as a redundant network of lanes of commerce, but also as a redundant network for military command and control.

The telephone networks, which have been digital (using PCM) since the '50's, have planned even more for "stability." SS7, the signalling protocol suite long used (until the recent advent of packetized telephony over the Internet, i.e., "VOIP") provides for live failover of network components even in the absence of traffic, something IP-based networks still can't provide, with the target of what's called "5 9's" (99.999%) or better reliability and availability. I've implemented some of this protocol suite for particular situations, so I know what is it, and why it is. Cell phone "roaming," among other things, is implemented using this signaling protocol suite and its descendents.

Ever heard of a "FISU"? When you know what a FISU is and what purpose it serves, you will know something about "network instability" in practical terms. But to describe it as anarchy is to not understand what it actually is, in real, technical fact.

It may be true from some perspective that the essence of a network is its instability; I would put it differently, that the essence of an effective network is is ability to accomodate instability and remain (or become) effectively stable. And I hope you would agree that stability and dynamism are different things (I would use the term "robust" instead of "stable", to capture what I mean, since I know that a network can be both robust and ever-changing, i.e., "dynamic").

That's why I said it's as close to anarchy in information dissemination as we'll get - at least until some new technology comes along. Of course there is control and planning of the internet - I can't think of a single method of information dissemination that doesn't have some level of control, what I object to is Sunstein's theory that more control of information dissemination on the internet is necessary for our democracy to survive.

Information is power and the more a government controls information the more power it has over its citizens. We now have more access to better information than we have had in the past without leaving our homes with a modicum of interference by our government and institutions. Will it in the future be subject to more government control? Probably, I can't think of any information dissemination method that hasn't sooner or later fallen to the powers that be. In my own personal opinion, it is the patriotic duty of every citizen to find means to circumvent these controls as quickly as possible - that Sunstein wants to add another layer of control, no matter how benign he thinks it is, is dangerously misguided and foolish.

As to Sunstein's use of Hayek to bolster his opinion, well, I want to be fair here, but taking a quote out of context and claiming that it supports his position is disengenuous at best - Hayek actually says in that essay the exact opposite of what Sunstein claims he is saying, and he is saying it in reference to business decisions, not political decisions.

I have nothing against good planning - I do however, have something against government or institutional control of information. I believe that the closer we get to functional anarchy in distribution of information the better we can plan and organize our affairs as individuals and as a nation. Governments that control and hide information from citizens are always up to no good and this administration is an excellent example of how dangerous this is when taken to an extreme.

I suspect that the marriage between Christianity and the Right may be something specifically American. Many so-called Christian parties exist in European countries and they are rarely associated with the extreme right.

I don't know if Jesus was a socialist but today he would certainly be seen as extreme leftist radical. I believe The The's lyrics "If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today / He'd be gunned down cold by the C.I.A." got it exactly right.

Throughout the history of Christianity, especially the first one and a half millennium, there were several very radical leftist popular movements which used Jesus and his teachings as an argument against church and state establishment (which in turn called them heretics of course). For instance the Cathars completely rejected the Old Testament, and later 'heretics' and reformation forerunners like Wyclif and Hus also emphasized Christ's teaching as part of their "leftist" social critique.

What all that means to me... is that the Bible is so self-contradictory and open to interpretation that it is next to meaningless. Anyone can find justification in it for just about anything.

Capitalism is and economic system and I don’t think is has anything to say about establishing social relationships.

Someone here hasn't read his Marx... 

RB, straight from capitalism.org

Capitalism is a social system based on the principle of individual rights. The term capitalism is used here in the broader philosophical political sense, and not in the narrower economic sense, i.e. a free-market. [emphasis in the original]

Capitalists reject your either/or conjecture ...

From the same site -

Edited to add: And here is Einstein's On Socialism essay that refutes capitalism in favor of socialism.

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins

I don't know that the site you cited is the athorative word on capitalism.

I am not enamored by celebrity. Einstein made great contributions to physics, that does not make him an athority on economic systems.

Can you be specific about what you disagree about in my comment?

“For example, what is Blackwater doing in Iraq? If that's not the triumph of capitalism over the polity, I don't know what is…”

This has nothing to do with the economic system, Problems with Blackwater have to do with oversight and rules. We out source production of military aircraft to privately held companies. Is that “the triumph of capitalism over the polity”?

What I find interesting is that JohnOneOne was able to make his case for a socialist Jesus easily. Novak, on the other hand, goes through these excruciating exercises that end up making no sense to explain Christianity and Capitalism.

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins

The significance in Blackwater isn't simply one of rules, or outsourcing parts production.

Here we have a private army, running lawless in Iraq. A privatized army, paid for by the citizenry, with no accountability, shrouded in secrecy (would people really know Blackwater without the recent incident killing Iraqi citizens?), one that also works domestically, patrolling the streets of New Orleans, armed and ready.

Outsourcing the military, accountable not to the Commander-in-Chief, but to the CEO. Yes, this is capitalism triumphant. 

Are socialist systems not “based on consumption”? It seems that the planners in such systems are constantly trying to determine the needs of the population and planning for its production by state owned means of production. Now there may not be as much consumption since there is a shortage of goods to consume, but it is not clear to me that socialist societies do not hava a desire for material goods.

It may not be human nature to “purchase” goods, but it is has certainly been human nature to aquire material goods by some meand to make ones life more comfortable ever since we were hunter/gatherers.

Are you assuming FISU over dual physical SSCOP links? I usually think of network instability as at least the network level, rather than things of link-local scope. BGP, and the associated support mechanism, deals with an unstable environment, where the tables never truly converge.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I think you are naive if you think that people in our soceity do not really want the goods and services they consume.

If you are making the argument that the central planners in a socialist economic system can restrict access to good and services that they deem excessive, you are correct. I am not sure that would make a better society.

So Blackwater would be a Socialist organization if the ex-military employees own the company (maybe they do)?

I don't think that most people would agree with your definitions. If a group of private citizens can profit by the ovwhership of the means of production it's not socialism.

Of course, what it might also demonstrate is that socialism is way out of date, and capitalism is a modern improvement long postdating a Jewish carpenter of the Roman Empire period.

I have little doubt Novak would be among the individuals that Jesus threw out of the temple :-)

We wander from our topic, but that's the way of these discussions.

(Memekiller): "I'm saying, yes, truth is illusive, we are all susceptible to our biases, humans have an ingrained need to conform, and a remarkable ability to lie to themselves. Which is why I find these rightwing loonies who attack the credibility of anyone who's not a true-believer and selling the Kool-Aid because they can't accept that you could both, say, fight for your country AND not be a Republican."

And vice versa: socialist loonies who attack the credibility of anyone who's not a true-believer, because they can't accept (for example) that you could be both compassionate AND skeptical of arguments for your local violence dealer (the State) as the supplier of charity (welfare), pre-college education services, or pensions.

A decent point. We all accept larger gaps in the evidence and logic of an argument which seems to be moving toward a conclusion with which we agree than in an argument which goes against our preconceptions. ALL of us.

(Memekiller): "Malkin doesn't care if Kerry got shot at in Vietnam. He's a Democrat, and must be destroyed, whether we find something, distort something, or make it up, it doesn't matter. What matters is what we make the facts say."

I don't read Michelle Malkin often, but that's unfair. Dunno 'bout her war blogging, but she's not a reflexive partisan on other issues. Malkin complained when John Lott promoted his defense of concealed carry laws through sockpuppets.

Did John Kerry get shot? I understand he put himself in for a purple heart or three, but I understand that none of his injuries required hospitalization. Then again, I wasn't there.

(JohnOneOne): "Capitalists make the huge mistake of conflating markets with capitalism..."

Who, then, are "capitalists"? Does this mean that advocates for the system of private property, title, freedom of contract, and State enforcement, through courts, of contract are NOT "capitalists"?

(JohnOneOne): "...when what they more likely mean to do is equate unregulated financially-based markets with capitalism, i.e., networks for exchange devoid of policies for exchange (from a CS perspective, such is ridiculous; of course, some may add "we want laws" - particularly contract law - but such law is nothing if not central planning)."

If --that's-- all that's intended by "central planning", most Chicago School economists would have no objection to central planning.

(JonnOneOne): "...I put the distinction differently. Markets are mechanism, and yes, they are widely and generally useful, since one might in fact term any communications network a "market"; but the distinction between capitalism and socialism is not about mechanism at all (e.g., markets vs. central planning) - it's about motivation: profit vs. social benefit, or finances vs. public welfare, or however else the idea of motivation for economic activity might be stated."

Then the distinction evaporates. Motives are invisible. "Profit" is a bookkeeping term: the difference between total revenues and total costs. In an organization which has no line in it's balance sheet for "profit", all revenues must be attributed to "costs". This says nothing about the motives of employees of an organization.

(JohnOneOne): "Hayek was right at some initial level of observation but wrong in his conclusions."

At one time, Paul Samuelson considered Hayek's paper "small beer", but he changed his mind.

(Robert Brown): "You will find that almost no one on this site rates based on the merits of the comments being rated."

So it seems. It occurs to me that we have in this evidence which relates to Mr. Sunstein's thesis. Hayek's article describes the price system as a feedback mechanism which incorporates a broad array of information about resource requirements and preferences. Political markets, insurance rates, and betting pools do something similar.

When people form political alliances (e.g., within a corporate bureaucracy in support of one or another rising star) are they not "betting" on their chosen horse, the candidate to whom they can attach their careers? Political activists do something similar. Political parties are marketing organizations for candidfates. Ideology is the special sauce which keeps the customers coming back. Party activists function analogously to cooks and counter help at MacDonalds, but their stake is greater. The MacDonalds cook can always quit and work at Wendys.

Anyway, market bubbles indicate that the price system isn't perfect (nobody ever said it was). Persistent bad political policy (e.g., the US State-operated school system, in my opinion) is the political equivalent of a market bubble, in that feedback failed to correct it.

The ratings applied to comments often amount to "high fives" to people who agree with the person giving the rating. This differs from prices in that money spent on X is not available to spend on Y, while evaluators of comments can dispense as many "1"s and "5"s as they please.

Dunno where I'm going with this, so I'll stop here.

Oh, there remain some that will rate a comment on its eloquence and creativity, even if there is an ideological disagreement. When I think of William F. Buckley Jr., my first image is of his unique raising of a single eyebrow, and then the way he might choose to express that nonverbal communication in his prose. Buckley sometimes is far too fond of the polysyllabic response, and violates Churchill's advice that the most effective commentary is from the gut, not the intestines.

If, for example, one was to disagree with me, and even with an ad hominem, I still would rate highly an insult with the style of Churchill, never forgetting John Randolph of Roanoke: "He shines and stinks, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight", or Vinegar Joe Cannon responding to a declamation of "I'd rather be right than President" with "You, Sir, are in no danger of ever being either."

There are people here that will question and explore their own assumptions and conclusions drawn from them, and appreciate the same courtesy from others. There are others whose rhetoric rises not far from "you doo-doo head", or play any number of cliche cards rather than address the substance of an issue.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Nancy, Lady Astor: "Winston, if I were married to you, I'd put poison in your tea!"

Winston S. Churchill: "Madam, if I were married to you, I'd drink it!"

I gave it a 5. You'd have to be a part of the larger conversation here to understand why it gets a 5. You would have to understand what sorts of things we typically get from Mgmax and what we typically get from cscs. I don't feel bad about it. In any case, the ratings are not and cannot be objective.

Looks like you earned yourself a 1. I guess that's just how things go. And no, they wouldn't be more objective.