It’s Super Tuesday, and I’m about to go cast my vote for Barack Obama. Although both he and Hillary would be enormously better for the country than anyone the Republicans have to offer, I (along with my fellow political elites) think he offers the best chance to break away from a certain kind of corrosive political mindset that characterizes our present system. As just a single example, see this post by Katherine at Obsidian Wings, about Hillary’s proud assertion that “Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process,” to great applause. I suppose that it sounds good to deport people who commit crimes. But how precisely can we be sure that they really did commit a crime, if there is no legal process? It’s not a thoughtful policy — it’s just a cheap trick to take advantage of some anti-immigrant sentiment, since that’s what seems to be riling up people in the heartland this year. I would like to get past that.
Nevertheless! I’m writing this post to get on the record my annoyance with Obama’s main theme, one beloved of politicians since back in Athens: “Change.” It was, of course, the same theme that Bill Clinton ran on in 1992. And for good reason: after eight years of George W. Bush, almost everyone outside the die-hard 27% wants change of some sort. Including me, that’s for sure.
Still, as a physicist it bugs me. I can’t hear the motto without thinking: change in what direction? The reason why this is such a great political slogan is because anyone can project onto it whatever kind of “change” they most prefer. But it’s highly unlikely that generic change would be a good thing. In the phase space of political configurations, one must imagine that the subspace of “good” configurations (however you want to define them) is one of fairly low-entropy — there are far more ways to have an ineffective or actively dangerous government than to have a good one.
If that’s true, and you just adopt “change” as your motto, you are far more likely to make things worse than to make them better. It’s just the Second Law of Political Dynamics, people.
Of course, reasoning along these lines is just what brings some people to become conservative (in the true and essentially-abandoned meaning of the term) — there are too many ways to make things worse, so let’s keep it as it is so as to not mess stuff up. And it would be a terrible way of thinking if that’s as far as you went, as it would shut off any opportunities for future progress.
The key is that you want to have directed change, not generic change. The way that you change things really does matter! And I think, electioneering slogans notwithstanding, that the kind of change Obama represents is a good one: toward a more sensible diplomacy, a less confrontational politics, and a more compassionate society here at home. It won’t be easy, of course — you can lower the entropy of an open system, but only by doing work.
All of which reminds us why politicians so rarely have physicists in their inner circle of advisors.
The problem is that ‘goodness’ is subjective. I tend to see the problem as more quantum mechanical. The political landscape is a giant unknown wavefunction (political density function), and every observer has there own observable to find the expectation value of goodness. The question of ‘change’ is then if politicians use the Schrodinger picture by actually changing the political landscape to make things better for more people, or the Heisenberg picture, where nothing actually changes except the way people look at it.
Hi Sean:
I could write essays above some of the points you’ve raised, but I will try to make it short. Allowing for ‘change’ is only part of the problem. The more important point is whether the system reacts appropriately to feedback. In your picture, consider ‘good’ to be a maximum, it doesn’t matter what the measure is, the question is whether you can find it without random search (i.e. whether you can set up a process to get there). You do a variation around ‘now’ and need to figure out which direction the gradient increases. Politicians in their campaigns point into a direction where they believe a hill is, but there is no guarantee this will indeed work out as desired, the situation is much too complex to make sensible predictions. I don’t know whether the change Obama has in mind will be flexible enough to deal with feedback appropriately, or whether he will just stubbornly insist on his ‘vision’ as others insist on their ‘vision’.
What is worse though is that even taking into account feedback and readjusting directions doesn’t help at all if you are stuck in one local maximum, but need to get through a valley to reach a higher one. Which is how I would see the present situation. Best,
B.
Sean,
it is easy to misread your last two sentences as
“It won’t be easy, … only by doing work.
… which reminds us why politicians so rarely have physicists in their inner circle of advisors.”
I guess you do not want to apply that physicists shy away from work? 😎
sorry, apply = imply in my previous comment
Sigh.
This blog post and these comments are the reason I usually say this: “if I like a candidate, they are doomed to lose”. 🙂
Yes, I vote for Obama early, and though I live in Illinois, I only voted once. 🙂
B, there is significant danger in the “We are at a local maximum” point of view though. I mean it’s the kind of logic often cited: We have to take away your freedom to give you more freedom eventually. Terrorists of all times justify their violence in the name of a visionary society without violence. Economists say that these hardships for the poor and un/wrongly educated are necessary for the market to find its optimal configuration (overlooking that we’re all dead in the long run). George Bush brings War and chaos because it’s only through this valley that we can get to democracy and freedom.
IMO we should be most critical of anyone who is making things just a little bit worse so they can be spectacularly better eventually. Much more so then we are at the moment.
Ich kann nicht sagen, ob es besser wird, wenn es anders wird,
aber soviel kann ich sagen: es muss anders werden, wenn es gut werden soll.
“I cannot say whether things will get better if they change.
But this much I can say: things must change if they are to get better.”
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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A couple of comments:
Given the current administration (regime) almost any change would be good as IMHO they are much closer to “bad” in your diagram as can be tolerated in a democratic society. Just look at the proposed budget. Increase defense spending and cutbacks on health and education and ever widening deficits to protect the tax cuts on the rich. I think that’s what “change” is really code for. Moving in the opposite direction. The cost of the war alone is likely to exceed one trillion dollars.
I also think that the political process is more about personality than substance on the issues. We should (I think this is a topic of an SF novel) vote for algorithms (not to be confused with Al Gore Rhythms) which define policy positions and execute them without personalities involved (or insurance/pharmaceutical lobbyists either)
I voted for Obama. But I think Clinton would be a fine president as well. I actually like her position on health care a touch more than Obama’s. But her refusal to admit a “mistake” on the vote to authorize the war is a sticking point for me.
e.
Wow…the part saying “or in the country they came from” makes it even worse. In many parts of the world (some even allies of the US) saying something unsavory about Mohammed would easily get you killed, or engaging in gay sex, or a number of other things. Do we really want some Iranian deported just for, say, buying Satanic Verses?
“Anybody who committed a crime in this country or in the country they came from has to be deported immediately, with no legal process,” to great applause. I suppose that it sounds good to deport people who commit crimes. But how precisely can we be sure that they really did commit a crime, if there is no legal process?
I don’t support this policy but I think she is saying that, once they’ve been convicted of a crime, there will be no recourse for the criminal to not get deported. The crime will have the usual legal process.
Your post reminded me of Karl Popper’s observation that based on government’s on-going failure to achieve their goal of maximizing happiness that they should perhaps shift to a policy of minimizing avoidable suffering–perhaps a more achievable goal.
Just reflect on the fact that Bush ran the first time on change. It gives a bad taste in the mouth.
As a minimal government conservative, I disagree with your co-location of low entropy and good. If you instead assume that the lowest entropy values are bad, then random change would indeed be a good thing.
However, we observe that policy changes are generally not entropy (or work) neutral. Historically, government workload increases, and entropy decreases in democratic societies. So a pessimist would say that the difference in political flavors merely changes whether you spiral towards the (bad) low entropy state in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
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“If you cry ‘Forward!’ you must make it absolutely plain which direction to go. Don’t you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?”
Anton Chekhov
fh, I agree that there is danger in it. But there is also truth in it. I don’t want to constrain any freedom – in fact I think we need more freedom, though not of the type neo-liberalists like to call upon. We are much too tightly constrained to a political system that can’t appropriately deal with the complexity of our present situation. Also, one has to keep in mind a) our landscape is time-dependent and what is a maximum today might no longer be a maximum tomorrow. What then? b) As Jesse above pointed out what people regard good and what not is not objective at all, with sufficient ‘motivation’ (for not to call it advertisement) many people might come to believe change is per se a good thing. In fact, that’s why most people think capitalism is a great thing, because it provides the illusion of constant improvement (until something goes wrong that is).
The thing I love about minimum government conservative types is that they tend to win and balloon government enormously. They claim success in minimum government by taking X dollars out of entitlement programs and giving 10X dollars to the Pentagon. Orwell, your double-think logic LIVES!
I think a better comparison with politics are Nash equilibrium points and a system that is driven/damped into some sort of strange attractor basin around these Nash points. The two main Nash equilibrium points are Democraps and Republithugs. The driving force that drives the ball around the basin of attraction is money, and the Fourier expansion of frequencies of this driving force look a lot like WallStreet.
Though seriously we need a serious change of the guard, and Obama looks like the best bet at this point. I was originally for Kucinich, but so much for that.
There has been one remarkable thing about GW Bush. I dislike hearing him, and I dislike seeing images of him. The two together is simply too horrible, and as a result I never watch the TV new programs — and that is a blessing. Thank you GW Bush for that small favor, but it fails to make up for the rest of your horrors.
Lawrence B. Crowell
actually, change is the norm. life itself, as a thermodynamic system, is only possible through a dynamic equilibrium, not a static one. so change is nothing special, it is the rule. therefore, trying to define a political phase space or a position therein is totally futile. how would you fix any reference frame? it’s not like in physics, where one meter is exactly defined. take an arbitrary politically charged word – like patriot e.g. within a few years, its meaning can change 180 degrees.
upshot is that crying for change is nothing but a tautology. so actually putting change into the rhetoric can be a sign of contact with reality and therefore rather positive as such. or can you imagine kim yong il crying out for change?
Since Sean has conclusively debunked the idea that low-entropy states can ever arise from high-entropy states by means of a fluctuation, the present government can only have evolved from better governments in the past. Ergo, Sean believes that Reagan was better than Bush senior, who in turn was better than Clinton, etc. All that remains is to explain the utter perfection of George Washington.
Sean, this is the reason why I think I’m ‘philosophically’ conservative even though I side with liberals on almost everything. My thinking is, although we have a lot of bad things going on in this country, from an economic standpoint in the context of the entire world and its history, we have a very good thing going on here. Sure, there are a lot of things we can improve, but I think we should be careful when changing the fundamental structure of how our economy runs, because there are far more ways it could get worse than get better.
The reason I side with liberals, even on economic issues, is because I see conservatives as those advocating for this kind of dangerous change. Our country was most prosperous under a better-funded government with higher taxes and greater regulatory power. The changes during the Bush administration take us away from that, and Republicans are pushing for more. This is happening at a time when we should be pushing in the other direction, because the ‘experiment’ of the 50s-60s showed that overall well-being was increasing as we moved in that direction. On the other hand, Democrats seem pushing for policies that aren’t even “centrist” in that they don’t even fully restore taxation levels of the recent past. The most dangerous proposal on the table is public health care, which most of us support because we believe the social value to be worth any possibility for economic damage.
Hi Mike:
but I think we should be careful when changing the fundamental structure of how our economy runs, because there are far more ways it could get worse than get better.
We rapidly change the ‘fundamental structure’ of how our whole world runs. If we fail to adjust our economical and political systems to it, the outcome is worsening through doing nothing. The alternative is to slow down change. Best,
B.
This is the argument that creationist use against evolution. You aren’t a closet creationist are you Required?
The point is the life and human societies use available free energy to locally reduce entropy at the cost of increasing it overall. Hence global warming.
I forgot to add that the level of global warming might be related to the quantity of hot air released during US Presidential election campaigns.
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Thanks for posting about the statistical probabilities of change. I agree with your overall point: what kind of change, exactly? A change in underwear? A change in the weather. Hey, it’s all change!
However, I think Hillary Clinton is capable of more directed change than Obama. But I suppose we’ll see. I’m just convinced that, even if elected, Obama will never measure up to the expectations he has set for himself.
Maybe Obama would pursue a more sensible diplomacy but I believe Hillary would, too. But a “less confrontational politics, and a more compassionate society here at home?” I don’t know that either candidate is capable of that–or anyone, for that matter. How do you legislate that, exactly? Well, it obviously shouldn’t be legislated–but that’s my point. How do you get people to be more compassionate or less confrontational? And how does that make more jobs, provide for the poor and elderly, or solve the immigration controversy? Moms and Dads should teach compassion and how to handle confrontation. I have parents, and I want something different in our next president.