The Coming Software Apocalypse

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

Shortly before midnight on April 10, the counter exceeded that number, resulting in chaos. Because the counter was used to generating a unique identifier for each call, new calls were rejected. And because the programmers hadn’t anticipated the problem, they hadn’t created alarms to call attention to it. Nobody knew what was happening. Dispatch centers in Washington, California, Florida, the Carolinas, and Minnesota, serving 11 million Americans, struggled to make sense of reports that callers were getting busy signals. It took until morning to realize that Intrado’s software in Englewood was responsible, and that the fix was to change a single number.

Not long ago, emergency calls were handled locally. Outages were small and easily diagnosed and fixed. The rise of cellphones and the promise of new capabilities—what if you could text 911? or send videos to the dispatcher?—drove the development of a more complex system that relied on the internet. For the first time, there could be such a thing as a national 911 outage. There have now been four in as many years.

It’s been said that software is “eating the world.” More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal’s website crashed; and Seattle’s 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack. Almost more frightening was the realization, late in the day, that it was just a coincidence.

“When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. She became known for her report on the Therac-25, a radiation-therapy machine that killed six patients because of a software error. “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” The electromechanical interlockings that controlled train movements at railroad crossings, for instance, only had so many configurations; a few sheets of paper could describe the whole system, and you could run physical trains against each configuration to see how it would behave. Once you’d built and tested it, you knew exactly what you were dealing with.

Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”

Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing. Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”

This is the trouble with making things out of code, as opposed to something physical. “The complexity,” as Leveson puts it, “is invisible to the eye.” (...)

What made programming so difficult was that it required you to think like a computer. The strangeness of it was in some sense more vivid in the early days of computing, when code took the form of literal ones and zeros. Anyone looking over a programmer’s shoulder as they pored over line after line like “100001010011” and “000010011110” would have seen just how alienated the programmer was from the actual problems they were trying to solve; it would have been impossible to tell whether they were trying to calculate artillery trajectories or simulate a game of tic-tac-toe. The introduction of programming languages like Fortran and C, which resemble English, and tools, known as “integrated development environments,” or IDEs, that help correct simple mistakes (like Microsoft Word’s grammar checker but for code), obscured, though did little to actually change, this basic alienation—the fact that the programmer didn’t work on a problem directly, but rather spent their days writing out instructions for a machine.

“The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work. “Software engineers like to provide all kinds of tools and stuff for coding errors,” she says, referring to IDEs. “The serious problems that have happened with software have to do with requirements, not coding errors.” When you’re writing code that controls a car’s throttle, for instance, what’s important is the rules about when and how and by how much to open it. But these systems have become so complicated that hardly anyone can keep them straight in their head. “There’s 100 million lines of code in cars now,” Leveson says. “You just cannot anticipate all these things.”

by James Somers, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Lynn Scurfield

Puerto Rican Debt Holders Respond to Catastrophic Hurricane by Offering Puerto Rico More Debt

Puerto Rico, facing absolute devastation after Hurricane Maria barreled through last week, desperately needs immediate funding to restore critical infrastructure, particularly its hobbled electric grid. The entire island — home to over 3.5 million American citizens, roughly equivalent to the state of Connecticut — lost power, and satellite imagery shows how little electricity has come back. This affects not only electricity and telecommunications service but access to clean water, as many pumping stations run on the same grid.

A group of bondholders, who own a portion of Puerto Rico’s massive $72 billion debt, has proposed what they are calling relief — but in the form of a loan. So they’re offering a territory mired in debt the chance to take on more debt.

The announcement came after The Intercept spent two days reaching out to 51 of Puerto Rico’s known creditors, asking them if they would support a moratorium or cancellation of debt payments for the island, given the humanitarian crisis. Prior to this announcement, only three of the 51 creditors had so much as donated relief funds to charity or offered sympathy for island residents, all of them banks who actually have to face consumers, and so are a bit more adept at handling public relations. No creditor had supported debt relief.

Of the 51 creditors contacted by The Intercept, only Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and Scotiabank have pledged no-strings-attached money for Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands, in the form of donations to relief organizations totaling $1.25 million. Citi has also waived certain fees for citizens within disaster zones.

Puerto Rico’s other creditors contacted by The Intercept would not say whether donations were made by their firms or their top executives, which include some of the richest people on earth. Holders of Puerto Rican debt have included John Paulson, who got rich betting against the housing market during the financial crash; Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine Capital, who in 2015 called Puerto Rican debt his “best idea” for investors; and Marc Lasry of Avenue Capital Group and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team.

The creditor lists were assembled by Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism in 2015 and supplemented by additional media reports. In addition, the federal bankruptcy-like process in Puerto Rico forced holders of one type of debt, so-called “COFINA” bonds backed by sales tax revenue, to reveal themselves. A full list of known Puerto Rican bondholders and their responses to The Intercept’s inquiries appear at the end of this article.

Experts see even the offer that was made by the bondholders less as a gift and more as a backdoor for creditors associated with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or Prepa, to take advantage of the disaster by enriching themselves. Offering a desperate population the ability to drown themselves in even more debt is hardly generous.

The Prepa Bondholder Group has offered the island’s utility a $1 billion debtor-in-possession (DIP) loan, and a separate swap of $1 billion in existing bonds for another $850 million DIP note. This money would be immediately available for restoring electric power. In all, the deal includes $150 million in debt cancellation on roughly $9 billion in outstanding Prepa bonds.

But for a better gauge of just how altruistic the offer is, it’s an even worsebid than the creditors made before the storm hit. The overall debt relief is slim; in fact, far less than the 15 percent haircut Prepa bondholders proposed in April. And when you factor in accrued interest and higher-value bonds, Prepa bondholders would likely come out ahead.

The bondholders’ offer comes after President Donald Trump offered one of the most historically grotesque responses to a natural disaster, highlighting Puerto Rico’s debt difficulties: (...)

Those grants are certainly important. But to be sure, Prepa bondholders “are not giving away $1.85 billion,” said Adam Levitin, bankruptcy expert and law professor at Georgetown University. “They’re giving a loan [Puerto Rico] will have to pay back. This is not a donation to the Red Cross.”

DIP financing, typically done for bankrupt entities, is considered low-risk because it puts the creditor in a senior position to get paid back in full. By swapping Prepa bonds, which are junior to other forms of Puerto Rican debt, with DIP loans, the bondholders would put themselves in a better position for repayment. They are more valuable bonds to hold. “They cut to the front of the line,” Levitin said. (...)

Although leaders across the political spectrum have stressed the need for aid to Puerto Rico, Congress is likely to delay a package until mid-October. The fiscal control board that governs Puerto Rico’s finances, created by 2016 legislation called the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA, has so far allowed only $1 billion to be “reprogrammed” from other parts of the budget. Austerity measures, like planned furloughs and pension cuts, have still not been formally lifted. And since tax revenues are unlikely to be collected for at least a month, cash flow is nearly impossible to come by.

Meanwhile, streets continue to look like rivers. A dam with a large crack caused hurried evacuations. Food and medications are hard to find. Eighty percent of crops are ruined. Neighborhoods have been deemed unsafe as people struggle to survive. “If anyone can hear us, help,” said one of the island’s mayors. Officials have said full restoration of power could take four to six months, and full recovery will likely take years, with damages ranging as high as $30 billion.

by David Dayen, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

[ed. Vs. Texas and Florida. Honestly, I don't know what Puerto Rico gets out of its subservient relationship with the United States. I experienced an electrical outage in January that lasted only three days and things go to hell real quick (fortunately, we still had water). Imagine: no hot water for showers, cooking, coffee, etc.; no refrigeration (food spoils quickly, no cold beverages, ice, food, etc.); no internet, tv, microwaves or other appliances; no lights at night; no cell phones (charging, remember?); no banking (ATMs, computers, etc.); no fuel (electricity runs the pumps); no home heating or cooling. And that doesn't even get to basic infrastructure like traffic lights, hospitals, airports, police, etc. (hopefully all have emergency backup generators [ed. Update: they don't], but not everything associated with these is tied into the emergency support grid). People are probably trapped and can't get out. We usually don't give electricity much thought, but when it's gone you're pretty much screwed (without the additional "help" of disaster capitalists/opportunists like these). See also: Memento Mori: a Requiem for Puerto Rico] [Photos here:]

Everything You Know About Me, the Female Character You're Falling in Love with in a Romantic Film/TV Show Written by a Man

1. I’m incredibly beautiful but it’s an accident, I swear!

2. I love Jane Austen if this is a comedy, or the Brontë sisters if this is a drama.

3. I eat a lot, lol.

4. I love listening to music almost as much as I love listening to you talk about music.

5. I’m smart but not as smart as you.

6. I’m extremely knowledgeable about exactly one subject.

7. I have a great sense of humor, by which I mean, ha-ha — you’re so funny.

8. I’m not funny, but I am hilariously adorable when I get stressed out.

9. I have only one friend. Now she is funny.

10. I seem mysterious, but that’s just because I have almost no personality whatsoever.

11. My ex-boyfriend is a jerk, or maybe just boring.

12. I’m so nice.

13. When I’m sad, I drink wine alone.

14. I live well beyond my means in a beautiful apartment, but it’s somehow not an issue.

15. I lose my ability to walk in high heels when I get angry.

by Mary Cella, McSweeny's |  Read more:

High School Reading as an Act of Meaningful Aggression

Towards the end of each year I do one of those anonymous surveys where I ask the students—high-school sophomores and juniors—how much they read, as a percentage, of each book. I’ve been doing this for the last 10 years or so, and the results are remarkably consistent: most students read most, but rarely all, of each book. About 15 percent read every single word of every single thing, some of it twice. These the kids who would read the contents list of a 7-11 freezer if told, the same students who tend to sit in the front row and take the kind of notes that end up in the Smithsonian. Another 15 percent admit to struggling to even open the books, but would gladly read the 7-11 freezer list because of its novelty value and the refreshing lack of obfuscating adjectives and modifiers. The 70 percent of students in the middle make up the dominant percentage, the ones who often leave little notes, not quite apologia, but regretful explanations about wishing that they had more time to do all the reading because they would have liked to, that they did most of it, that what they read of The Great Gatsby was really good but what with other homework, and athletics, and Uncle Steve’s birthday dinner, and the cousin in Jersey with leukemia, and x not yet having said anything about prom…well, there was a lot to think about.

All this at three separate independent schools in different parts of California. Like I said, remarkably consistent results, and results that translate across gender, race, and socioeconomic status. In terms of the not-highly-rigorous breakdown of those not-highly-rigorous statistics you get about 70 percent of the students reading about 70 percent of the material 70 percent of the time. All of which sounds terrific, except that most of the time, most of the 70 percent, and even some of the 15 percent taking Smithsonian-esque notes, see words rather than read them. For most high-school students, the act of “reading” recalls the soft glow of something done at night, before bed, in jim-jams with a cup of hot cocoa—the equivalent of night-time elevator music. Or, if not that, they’re “reading” on the bus, in the car, while standing outside class two minutes before the bell. And, at best, gaining an understanding of situation and context: who did what or said what to whom and where at what time in what kind of weather. Seeing words but not really reading them, a marriage without contact.

I want them to see reading as something far more intimate, even fractured at times, as something combative, vulgar, assertive—a constant back-and-forth between reading and rereading, moments of stepping outside the text then coming back and battering at it with questions. Something better done in a flak jacket than pajamas. And high school students hate doing it. Who, what, when, and where, of course, are essential. You gotta figure out who’s sleeping with whom before you ask why. There’s a brother involved? What? No. Wait! They’re on a train? If that part’s hazy, the next stop becomes SparkNotes and PinkMonkey, and you might as well hand out the 7-11 freezer list. But how to truly turn them off? Ask them to annotate. The a-word: to add notes to (a text or diagram) giving explanation or comment. To say they “hate” it not strong enough. The most common disclaimers being about how it takes them out of the story, how if they stop they can’t remember what happened, that it takes too long, that it’s not enjoyable anymore. I’ve had students tell me, with genuine feeling, that reading’s been ruined for them—forever. Well, yes, if “reading” is that thing they do at bedtime with that cup of cocoa, and if that’s the thing ruined forever, then, no, I’m not sorry. How many students do trig curled up in bed without a pen or pencil?

So the task has to be to get them to see reading as something a little more combative, which is not to undermine scanning and context. I love scanning and context, reading for the sheer drama of turning the page, for the drama of occupation, of escape—especially on a beach, or hungover, or sitting in 24E on a flight without a functioning TV. But in a high-school English class, the skill of reading as an intimate, assertive thing stands as the thing I’m more interested in—the premise being that if reading were less of a spectator sport maybe we’d inhabit a world better informed, more critical—and critical in a reflective rather than a reactive sense—a world shaped more collectively by thoughtfulness, by magnanimity.

But annotate what, students ask? A fair question. And the place to begin is questions, the questions that come after the who, what, when, and where have been answered. Why questions—about place, about character, about motives…about the weather. Questions that pick at the story’s fabric in ways that enhance that fabric as opposed to designing a new one. So, for instance, after reading the first couple of pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby out loud in class, students invariably ask questions about why the novel’s named after Gatsby, about what makes him great, if his father gave him any other advice than the part about not all the people in the world having had the advantages he’s had. About how come the narrator doesn’t know the name for a seismograph. Interesting enough questions, but dead ends, as a couple of the students put it (though at least two of their classmates are adamant that we need to pursue the seismograph thing) because they depend either on plot that hasn’t happened yet or hearsay. Better the question that at least allows for the possibility of an answer through what’s already there rather than depending upon the goose chase of the imagination. So when Nick Carraway says that “[R]eserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope” it might benefit us to ask why? Why “hope” as opposed to something else? Why infinite? And what might this tell us about Nick Carraway’s temperament? Questions that allow us to begin to work out the kind of world Nick Carraway lives in and how that world might interact with ours. The kinds of questions that unnerve what’s in front of us, that give us something to hold onto in terms of plot while, simultaneously, digging a little deeper into that plot.

by Giles Scott, The Millions |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I think the author's intent (getting students to read critically) is undermined by the focus on one mechanical approach (annotation). I can't bring myself to deface a book that way and am always saddened to find a used one that I'd loved to have read if not for the myriad squiggles throughout the margins. Instead, I'll just dog-ear the left-hand page of a particular passage/phrase/idea I want to come back to and leave it at that (they can always be unfolded). Btw, I've never heard of PinkMonkey before (have you?). Be sure to read the comments section if you're interested in other perspectives.]

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Ten Years After

[ed. Somehow I missed or forgot that Alvin Lee passed away in 2013.]

Ads Don't Work That Way

There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.

The meme goes something like this:

Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions. They work by creating positive associations between the advertised product and feelings like love, happiness, safety, and sexual confidence. These associations grow and deepen over time, making us feel favorably disposed toward the product and, ultimately, more likely to buy it.

Here we have a theory — a proposed mechanism — of how ads influence consumer behavior. Let's call it emotional inception or just inception, coined after the movie of the same name where specialists try to implant ideas in other people's minds, subconsciously, by manipulating their dreams. In the case of advertising, however, dreams aren't the inception vector, but rather ideas and images, especially ones which convey potent emotions.

The label ("emotional inception") is my own, but the idea should be familiar enough. It's the model of how ads work made popular by Mad Men, and you can find similar accounts all across the web. A write-up at the Atlantic, for example — titled "Why Good Advertising Works (Even When You Think It Doesn't)" — says that

advertising rarely succeeds through argument or calls to action. Instead, it creates positive memories and feelings that influence our behavior over time to encourage us to buy something at a later date.

"The objective [of advertising]," the article continues, "is to seed positive ideas and memories that will attract you to the brand."

Lifehacker echoes these ideas in an article intended to help readers mitigate the effect of ads. "An ad succeeds at making us feel something," it says, "and that emotional response can have a profound effect on how we think and the choices we make."

This is a decidedly Pavlovian account of ad efficacy. Like Pavlov's dogs, who learned to associate the ringing of a bell with subsequent food delivery, humans too can be trained to make more-or-less arbitrary associations. If Coke shows us enough images of people beaming with joy after drinking their product, we'll come to associate Coke with happiness. Then, sometime later, those good vibes will come flooding back to us, and we'll be more likely to purchase Coke.

This meme or theory about how ads work — by emotional inception — has become so ingrained, at least in my own model of the world, that it was something I always just took on faith, without ever really thinking about it. But now that I have stopped to think about it, I'm shocked at how irrational it makes us out to be. It suggests that human preferences can be changed with nothing more than a few arbitrary images. Even Pavlov's dogs weren't so easily manipulated: they actually received food after the arbitrary stimulus. If ads worked the same way — if a Coke employee approached you on the street offering you a free taste, then gave you a massage or handed you $5 — well then of course you'd learn to associate Coke with happiness.

But most ads are toothless and impotent, mere ink on paper or pixels on a screen. They can't feed you, hurt you, or keep you warm at night. So if a theory (like emotional inception) says that something as flat and passive as an ad can have such a strong effect on our behavior, we should hold that theory to a pretty high burden of proof.

Social scientists have a tool that they use to reason about phenomena like this: Homo economicus. This is an idealized model of human behavior, a hypothetical creature (/caricature) who makes perfectly "rational" decisions, where "rational" is a well-defined game-theoretic concept meaning (roughly) self-interested and utility-maximizing. In other words, a Homo economicus— of which no actual instances exist, but which every real human being approximates to a greater or lesser extent — will always, to the best of its available knowledge, make the decisions which maximize expected outcomes according to its own preferences.

If we (consumers) are swayed by emotional inception, then it seems we're violating this model of economic rationality. Specifically, H. economicus has fixed preferences or fixed goals — in technical jargon, a fixed "utility function." These are exogenous, unalterable by anyone — not the actor him- or herself and especially not third parties. But if inception actually works on us, then in fact our preferences and goals aren't just malleable, but easily malleable. All an advertiser needs to do is show a pretty face next to Product X, and suddenly we're filled with desire for it.

This is an exaggeration of course. More realistically, we need to see an ad multiple times before it eventually starts to rewrite our desires. But the point still stands: external agents can, without our permission, alter the contents of our minds and send us scampering off in service of goals that are not ours.

I know it's popular these days to underscore just how biased and irrational we are, as human creatures — and, to be fair, our minds are full of quirks. But in this case, the inception theory of advertising does the human mind a disservice. It portrays us as far less rational than we actually are. We may not conform to a model of perfect economic behavior, but neither are we puppets at the mercy of every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a billboard. We aren't that easily manipulated.

Ads, I will argue, don't work by emotional inception.

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

Well then: how do they work?

Emotional inception is one (proposed) mechanism, but in fact there are many such mechanisms. And they're not mutually exclusive: a typical ad will employ a few different techniques at once — most of which are far more straightforward and above-board than emotional inception. Insofar as we respond to these other mechanisms, we're acting fully in accordance with the Homo economicus model of human behavior.

The guiding principle here is that these mechanisms impart legitimate, valuable information. Let's take a look at a few of them.

by Kevin Simler, Melting Asphalt |  Read more:

Image: via

New Approaches to Aerial Reforestation

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Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

This is outside my usual brief, but one of my hobbies is that I used to ghostwrite letters to credit reporting agencies and banks. It is suddenly relevant after the Equifax breach, so I’m writing down what I know to help folks who might need this in the future. (...)

I’m not a lawyer. I am not your lawyer. I no longer have enough free time to write letters for people. But feel free to read the below to help guide your research in dealing with your credit-related problems.

What problems can this advice help with? What can’t it?

Was your data leaked, or possibly leaked, without an account being opened yet? You might have heard your data was included in the Equifax breach or be unsure about that. Someone could, potentially, use that data to open accounts at financial institutions. Someone could also potentially have robbed your home while you were out. You wouldn’t call the police immediately after returning home on the possibly you might have been robbed – you’d do it only if there was actually evidence of a specific crime. You don’t need to do anything just because your data was leaked or might have been leaked.

I realize some folks find that advice unsatisfying. If you cannot sleep at night without doing anything, direct each of the three credit reporting agencies to put a “freeze” or “hold” on your records. Do not sign up for credit monitoring; it is a great revenue source for credit reporting agencies but almost never a good purchase for consumers. If you want to see what is on your credit report, you’re legally guaranteed three free reports a year (see here); once every 4 months is plenty for most people. You can also get free ones through banks these days; American Express and Capital One, among others, will give them for free as a customer acquisition / retention tool.

Do not use the following advice to correct a problem with an account which is factually yours. If someone has stolen your credit card number and used it to buy things, you should not send letters. Just call your bank; they’ll take care of it. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, that is a really well-understood scenario that banks are very customer-friendly about. The only thing we’re talking about here is accounts/debts which were never yours.

Was an account opened in your name without your consent? Great, you’re in the right place. The rest of this article assumes that you’ve either checked a credit report or been told by a bank that an account exists in your name which you didn’t open. (There exist steps related to the below to help improve one’s situation in the circumstance where your problem is that you’ve not paid debts you legitimately owed, but that problem is out of scope here.)

Understanding the players

There are three big credit reporting agencies (CRAs) in the US: Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. Their business model is keeping records, organized on a per-person basis, about debts. They sell this information to banks for the banks to use in underwriting processes. They also sell credit scoring, a product which gives the bank a single number (or small set of numbers) to evaluate your creditworthiness. The most common score is FICO, named after Fair, Isaac, And Company (which developed it), but there are several varieties of this product. It’s sort of like Kleenex: Fair Isaac was so successful at owning this space that people call credit scores FICO scores.

The CRAs get data from many, many places, but the ones most immediately relevant to you are financial institutions (I’ll call them “banks”, but there are many that aren’t strictly banks) and non-bank creditors (I’ll call them “debt collectors”, since that is the majority case, even though e.g. AT&T can be a creditor which reports to a CRA). (...)

Never pay a penny of a debt which isn’t yours. Paying waives your legal rights, because the system assumes that nobody would pay something they didn’t actually owe. Paying also doesn’t help you, because in most cases paying debts which were once delinquent does not improve your credit scores. Why? Math math, clustering algorithms, blah blah; just trust me.

Understanding a CRA’s incentives

We say “You aren’t the customer, you’re the product” a lot in the tech industry, but this is very, very true of CRAs. Your data is their only product. If they could never talk to you ever, they’d love to do that, because talking to you costs them money but doesn’t make their product (you) much more valuable in most cases. Luckily for you, the CRAs are regulated in the United States, so just plugging their fingers in their ears isn’t an option… but they’ll certainly push that to the limit.

The main regulation CRAs care about is the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The legal code of this is here; the layman’s explanation from the FTC is here. The rest of this post is a very opinionated user’s guide to the FCRA and related legislation such as the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) and long, boring books of regulations without fun acronyms.

Assume the CRAs will do the bare minimum to comply with the law, always. They are among the most odious and user-unfriendly institutions in the United States. You want to minimize your interactions with them; you want to minimize discretion that you give to them about your situation.

You should never call a CRA, ever. They have phone centers staffed with people whose only job is getting you off the phone. They have very limited availability to help, for the same reason that the phone center for Walmart does not have anyone who can help a shoe. You will deal with CRAs only in writing.

These days they have streamlined online applications for writing to them, but I suggest that you only send them paper letters. This is a really weird thing for a technologist to suggest, but when you send paper letters, you can establish and own a “paper trail.” When you type words into their godawful web applications and hit submit, you will likely fail to retain a copy of those words and fail to retain records about what they told you (exactly) and when. This will complicate your resolution with them. Communicate with them only over postal mail. Keep a log of every mail you send (including what you said) and when it was sent; keep a copy of every letter they send to you and when it was sent. You don’t need physical copies; digital is fine. I like organizing all of mine on a per-incident basis in Dropbox.

Retain copies of all correspondence with a bank or a CRA forever. Erroneously reported debts which you thought were taken care of can be resurrected years later by someone failing to check a box during a CSV export, resulting in the debt getting sold to a new debt collector, who will not know that you spent weeks resolving it. You want your paper trail so that your first and only letter to that debt collector credibly promises armageddon.

Presenting like a professional

Banks deal with lots of angry people, and are optimized to treat this like a customer service problem. Some do better and some do worse at this, but you never want identity theft treated like a customer service problem. Their CS department is scored on number of tickets resolved per hour, and each rep’s incentives are simply to classify you as something requiring no followup and get you off the phone.

Instead, you want to communicate with the bank in a manner which suggests that you’re an organized professional who is capable of escalating the matter if the bank does not handle it themselves. You do not yell – not that you’re ever verbally speaking with anyone, but you wouldn’t yell in a letter, either. You do not bluster. (“I will tell on you to my attorney” is, generally, bluster, and that’s bluster that is common to people who do not actually have attorneys.) You instead present as if you’re collecting a paper trail.

Mean words cannot hurt a bank. Threats cannot hurt a bank. Paper trails, though, are terrifying to regulated institutions. Your bank’s customer support representatives are taught to evaluate whether someone looks like they’re competent and collecting a paper trail. If they are, the CS rep is supposed to stop touching the case immediately and instead escalate them to a supervisor or to the legal department.

The legal department (or an analogous group – it is different at every bank) is not scored on cases resolved per week. They are scored on regulatory incidents per quarter, and their target for success is likely zero. Shockingly senior people will be involved to avert regulatory incidents.

What causes a regulatory incident? Bad behavior on the part of the bank? No. Banks screw up all the time; the screwups are literally forecast and budgeted for. Do regulators cause regulatory incidents? Generally no; they’re understaffed and underfunded, and they don’t go on fishing expeditions. The thing which causes regulatory incidents is well-organized people taking paper trails to regulators which allow a regulator to trivially follow up with an investigatory letter. Accordingly, anyone who sounds like a well-organized professional with a paper trail is a problem to be swiftly addressed.

That, dear reader, can be you.

Form letters and the inadvisability thereof

Regulation of CRAs is in some ways consumer-friendly and in some ways is designed to be to the advantage of the CRAs. For example, the CRAs told the regulators that there were businesses and websites offering form letters which correctly cited the FCRA and FDCPA, and that this let people send in a vexatious number of “frivolous” form letters. (Translation: Walmart is annoyed how many shoes found out how to speak.) So the regulators offered the CRAs an olive branch: they’re allowed to close without actioning any case which involves a form letter.

Is that fair? No. CRAs are allowed to respond to you with a form letter, and in fact will, and in fact in many cases it will literally include checkboxes so that they can most efficiently tell you the rationale for not helping you. (...)

So if you can’t just download a letter from the Internet, how should you write a bespoke, artisanal letter such that people reading it read you as a Dangerous Professional?

Professional mien: You’re a professional, and not someone straining to pretend to be one.

If you’ve never been in a customer-facing role, you might not have ever seen this genre of communication, but a lot of folks suddenly adopt electutory tendencies which they believe approximate legal professionals whom the have copious exemplars of from TV. This is not the way actual professionals write, which is generally clear and to-the-point. Write clearly and concisely. You want to outline relevant facts and omit long, windy narrations of e.g. how you were feeling when you discovered that your identity was stolen.

On August 5th, 20XX I accessed my credit report from Experian, numbered 1234567. It shows an account with your institution in my name, with account number XXX123. I am unaware of the full account number. I have no knowledge of this account. I did not open it or authorize anyone to open it.

Restrained emotions: You’re a professional. Someone in the economy has made a mistake; you require it to be fixed with alacrity, but you’re not angry at either the bank or anyone working at it. Why be angry? This is just business to you. It’s business that you will, with night-turns-into-day certainty, cause consequences if your legitimate requirements are not met, but you won’t bear anyone ill will over it.

Showing anger decreases the perception of risk of you filing a regulatory action or a lawsuit. This is counterintuitive to many people. The vast majority of people who show anger are showing anger because they want to show anger. They want someone to validate their emotions. They don’t want to be “disrespected” by the person in front of them. You don’t particularly care about the individual you’re writing to or whether they’re emotionally supportive of you. You want a resolution, no more no less. Professionals know that if they want emotional support they could just buy a dog.

People who can file a regulatory action while being emotionless about it are terrifying, because they suggest that their day job is e.g. administrator for a hospital, that they’re very comfortable with pushing papers around government agencies, and that they will remember deadlines, keep copious records, and consult with other professionals where appropriate. People like this have an annoyingly predictable tendency to convince bureaucracies to give them what they want.

If you’ve ever seen the House M.D. episode (season 1, episode 6, “The Socratic Method”) with the high school student who immediately confirms his understanding of anything a person in a position of authority says, writes it down in a notebook, and references specific facts from the notebook in follow-up conversations, that is exactly who you want to be.

Micro-tip: I never phrase an initial letter with “I demand you…” because I’m a professional. Angry people demand; professionals “require.” If you’ve asked me to pay money that I don’t owe you, I “require” you to stop doing that.

Be very clear about what you want. What you do not want is to give someone the excuse to read your letter and conclude that no further action is required or that a form letter trivially answers it. You want a specific set of actions, you want those actions to be confirmed to you in writing, and you want them done by a specific date.

by Patrick McKenzie, Kalzumeus | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. Not just for credit/security breaches (although CRAs sound like real assholes, don't they?). The dispassionate letter, clearly written with intent of establishing a paper trail, is always the most effective method for getting a response and possible resolution to any bureaucratic matter.]

Federico Fellini, feathers, action on set, 8 ½
via:

The Dying Art of Disagreement

This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday, Sept. 23. The award recognizes excellence in Australian foreign affairs journalism.

Let me begin with thanks to the Lowy Institute for bringing me all the way to Sydney and doing me the honor of hosting me here this evening.

I’m aware of the controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker. I respect the wishes of the Colvin family and join in honoring Mark Colvin’s memory as a courageous foreign correspondent and an extraordinary writer and broadcaster. And I’d particularly like to thank Michael Fullilove for not rescinding the invitation.

This has become the depressing trend on American university campuses, where the roster of disinvited speakers and forced cancellations includes former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former Harvard University President Larry Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will and liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen, to name just a few.

So illustrious is the list that, on second thought, I’m beginning to regret that you didn’t disinvite me after all.

The title of my talk tonight is “The Dying Art of Disagreement.” This is a subject that is dear to me — literally dear — since disagreement is the way in which I have always earned a living. Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.

To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.

But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky — such are the ranks of those who disagree.

And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.

This is a puzzle. At least as far as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades.

We disagree about racial issues, bathroom policies, health care laws, and, of course, the 45th president. We express our disagreements in radio and cable TV rants in ways that are increasingly virulent; street and campus protests that are increasingly violent; and personal conversations that are increasingly embittering.

This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.

Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is geographic, as more people live in states and communities where their neighbors are much likelier to share their politics.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy. In the last election, fully 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox News as their chief source of news.

Thanks a bunch for that one, Australia.

It’s usually the case that the more we do something, the better we are at it. Instead, we’re like Casanovas in reverse: the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

It behooves us to wonder why.

* * *

Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom — at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s “Republic” and Rousseau’s “Emile” — published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.”

The book appeared when I was in high school, and I struggled to make my way through a text thick with references to Plato, Weber, Heidegger and Strauss. But I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not “conservatism” in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called “the Gods of the Market Place.” We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

“The Closing of the American Mind” took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.

* * *

That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.

These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another. (...)

There’s no one answer. What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

The mis-education continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment says, much less of the kind of speech it protects. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States, creating the conditions that make young people uniquely susceptible to demagogy of the left- or right-wing varieties.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color I think X. As a gay man I think Y. As a person of privilege I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought — with all the effort that actual thinking requires — with social identification — with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing and be accused of some kind of political -ism or -phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity to be persuaded. (...)

* * *

I began this talk by noting that Americans have rarely disagreed so vehemently about so much. On second thought, this isn’t the whole truth.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people — your humble speaker included — without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent. (...)

I do not believe the answer, at least in the U.S., lies in heavier investment in publicly sponsored television along the lines of the BBC. It too, suffers, from its own form of ideological conformism and journalistic groupthink, immunized from criticism due to its indifference to competition.

Nor do I believe the answer lies in a return to what in America used to be called the “Fairness Doctrine,” mandating equal time for different points of view. Free speech must ultimately be free, whether or not it’s fair.

But I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens. Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs. In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

I believe it is still possible — and all the more necessary — for journalism to perform these functions, especially as the other institutions that were meant to do so have fallen short. But that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

by Bret Stephens, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Plato and Aristotle in discussion, by Luca della Robbia (1437) CreditDeAgostini/Getty Images

Reggae Shark

[ed. Classic]

The Satoshi Affair

Ten men raided a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office. Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. As one set of agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde. They were looking for ‘originals or copies’ of material held on hard drives and computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile phone records, research papers and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose papers were to be scrutinised, and 32 individuals, some with alternative names, or alternative spellings. The name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ appeared sixth from the bottom of the list.

Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now. (...)

Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story – a story too complicated for her to explain – so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On 9 December, after their first night in the new apartment, Wright woke up to the news that two articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper describing a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ – a technology Satoshi went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright knew his old life was over.

By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his office. They had long heard rumours, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop computers on it – they weighed a few kilos each, with 64 gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before he realised he’d rushed out without his passport.

Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to get him involved.

Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit, with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down the corridor and ducked into the gents. A bunch of teenagers were standing around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the furthest cubicle and deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they said ‘nothing’ and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights of stairs to the car park in the basement, unlocked his car and opened the boot, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove towards the Harbour Bridge and got lost in the traffic.

As Ramona drove along she began texting the mysterious Stefan, who was at Sydney Airport, having already checked in for a flight to Manila, where he lived. Stefan had to make a fuss to get his bag removed from the plane and then he spoke to Ramona, telling her that Wright would have to get out of the country. She didn’t argue. She called the Flight Centre and asked what flights were leaving. ‘To where?’ asked the saleswoman.

‘Anywhere,’ Ramona said. Within ten minutes she had booked her husband on a flight to Auckland.

In the early evening, Wright, scared and lost, made his way to Chatswood. He texted Ramona to come and meet him, and she immediately texted back saying he should go straight to the airport. She’d booked him a flight. ‘But I don’t have my passport,’ he said. Ramona was afraid she’d be arrested if she returned to their apartment, but her friend said he’d go into the building and get the passport. They waited until the police left the building, then he went upstairs. A few minutes later he came back with the passport, along with the other computer and a power supply.

At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the airport’s wifi to Skype with Stefan, using a new account. They had a discussion about how to get him to Manila. There was a big rock concert that night in Auckland, and all the hotels were full, but he crossed town in a cab and managed to get a small room at the Hilton. He booked two nights, using cash. He knew how to get more cash out of ATMs than the daily limit, so he worked several machines near the hotel, withdrawing $5000. He ordered room service that night and the next morning went to the Billabong store in Queen Street to buy some clothes. He felt agitated, out of his element: normally he would wear a suit and tie – he enjoys the notion that he is too well dressed to be a geek – but he bought a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and some socks. On the way back to the hotel he got a bunch of SIM cards, so that his calls wouldn’t be monitored. Back at the Hilton he was packing up his computers when the dependable Stefan came on Skype. He told Wright to go to the airport and pick up a ticket he’d left him for a flight to Manila. His picture was all over the papers, along with the story that he was trying to escape.

Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages threatened to reveal his ‘actual history’. Some said he had been on Ashley Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile, which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicise: ‘Mainly rants,’ he said later. When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world. The next day he put him on a plane to London.

Mayfair

Technology is constantly changing the lives of people who don’t really understand it – we drive our cars, and care nothing for internal combustion – but now and then a story will break from that frontier. I was one of the people who had never heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or the blockchain – the invention underlying bitcoin, which verifies transactions without the need for any central authority – or that it is the biggest thing in computer science.​1 It was news to me that the banks were grabbing onto the blockchain as the foundation of a future ‘internet of value’. The story of a mythical computer scientist was an odd one to come my way. I’m not much detained by thoughts of new computer paradigms. (I’m still getting the hang of the first one.) But to those who are much more invested in the world of tomorrow, the Satoshi story has the lineaments of a modern morality tale quite independent of stock realities. There are things, there are always things, that others assume are at the centre of the universe but don’t make a scratch on your own sense of the everyday world. This story was like that for me, enclosing me in an enigma I couldn’t have named. A documentary is a fashioned thing, of course, as fashioned as fiction in its own ways, but I had to overcome my own bafflement – as will you – to enter this world.

A few weeks before the raid on Craig Wright’s house, when his name still hadn’t ever been publicly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as ‘a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries’). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘My client has acquired life story rights … from the true person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto – the creator of the bitcoin protocol,’ the lawyer wrote. ‘The story will be [of] great interest to the public and we expect the book project will generate significant publicity and media coverage once Satoshi’s true identity is revealed.’ (...)

The ‘Stefan’ who was hovering during the raid on Craig Wright’s house and office is Stefan Matthews, an IT expert whom Wright had known for ten years, since they both worked for the online gambling site Centrebet. In those days, around 2007, Wright was often hired as a security analyst by such firms, deploying his skills as a computer scientist (and his experience as a hacker) to make life difficult for fraudsters. Wright was an eccentric guy, Stefan Matthews remembered, but known to be a reliable freelancer. Matthews said that Wright had given him a document to look at in 2008 written by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto, but Matthews had been busy at the time and didn’t read it for a while. He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 coin for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing seemed a bit cranky. A few years later, however, Matthews realised that the document he had been shown was, in fact, an original draft of the by now famous white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. (Like the governments they despise, bitcoiners deal – when it comes to ideas – in ‘white papers’, as if they were issuing laws.) Last year, when Wright was in financial trouble, he approached Matthews several times. By that time, Matthews had become friendly with Robert MacGregor, the founder and CEO of a Canada-based money-transfer firm called nTrust. Matthews encouraged MacGregor to come to Australia and assess Wright’s value as an investment opportunity. Wright had founded a number of businesses that were in trouble and he was deeply embedded in a dispute with the ATO. Nevertheless, Matthews told MacGregor, Wright was almost certainly the man behind bitcoin.

Matthews argued that since Satoshi’s disappearance in 2011, Wright had been working on new applications of the blockchain technology he had invented as Satoshi. He was, in other words, using the technology underlying bitcoin to create new versions of the formula that could, at a stroke, replace the systems of bookkeeping and registration and centralised authority that banks and governments depend on. Wright and his people were preparing dozens of patents, and each invention, in a specific way, looked to rework financial, social, legal or medical services, expanding on the basic idea of the ‘distributed public ledger’ that constitutes the blockchain. This is utopian thinking, even by normal geek standards, but it’s a hot topic in computer science and banking at the moment, and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in such ideas. Thus: Matthews’s proposal.

After initial scepticism, and in spite of a slight aversion to Wright’s manner, MacGregor was persuaded, and struck a deal with Wright, signed on 29 June 2015. MacGregor says he felt sure that Wright was bitcoin’s legendary missing father, and he told me it was his idea, later in the drafting of the deal, to insist that Satoshi’s ‘life rights’ be included as part of the agreement. Wright’s companies were so deep in debt that the deal appeared to him like a rescue plan, so he agreed to everything, without, it seems, really examining what he would have to do. Within a few months, according to evidence later given to me by Matthews and MacGregor, the deal would cost MacGregor’s company $15 million. ‘That’s right,’ Matthews said in February this year. ‘When we signed the deal, $1.5 million was given to Wright’s lawyers. But my main job was to set up an engagement with the new lawyers … and transfer Wright’s intellectual property to nCrypt’ – a newly formed subsidiary of nTrust. ‘The deal had the following components: clear the outstanding debts that were preventing Wright’s business from getting back on its feet, and work with the new lawyers on getting the agreements in place for the transfer of any non-corporate intellectual property, and work with the lawyers to get Craig’s story rights.’ From that point on, the ‘Satoshi revelation’ would be part of the deal. ‘It was the cornerstone of the commercialisation plan,’ Matthews said, ‘with about ten million sunk into the Australian debts and setting up in London.’

The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring Wright to London and set up a research and development centre for him, with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on his inventions and patent applications – he appeared to have hundreds of them – and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual property for upwards of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. ‘The plan was to package it all up and sell it,’ Matthews told me. ‘The plan was never to operate it.’

by Andrew O'Hagan, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Craig Wright in the Oxford Circus office, uncredited

[ed. Excerpted from the The Secret Life: Three True Stories (out next month)]

Survival of the Prettiest

A little over a decade after he published “On the Origin of Species,” in which he described his theory of natural selection shaped by “survival of the fittest,” Darwin published another troublesome treatise — “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex.” This expanded on an idea he mentioned only briefly in “Origin.” Sometimes, he proposed, in organisms that reproduce by having sex, a different kind of selection occurs: Animals choose mates that are not the fittest candidates available, but the most attractive or alluring. Sometimes, in other words, aesthetics rule.

Darwin conceived this idea largely because he found natural selection could not account for the ornaments seen in many animals, especially males, all over the world — the bright buttocks and faces of many monkeys and apes; the white legs and backside of the Banteng bull, in Malaysia; the elaborate feathers and mating dances of countless birds including bee-eaters and bell-birds, nightjars, hummingbirds and herons, gaudy birds of paradise and lurid pheasants, and the peacock, that showboat, whose extravagant tail seems a survival hindrance but so pleases females that well-fanned cocks regularly win their favor. Only a consistent preference for such ornament — in many species, a “choice exerted by the female” — could select for such decoration. This sexual selection,as Darwin called it, this taste for beauty rather than brawn, constituted an evolutionary mechanism separate, independent, and sometimes contrary to natural selection.

To Darwin’s dismay, many biologists rejected this theory. For one thing, Darwin’s elevation of sexual selection threatened the idea of natural selection as the one true and almighty force shaping life — a creative force powerful and concentrated enough to displace that of God. And some felt Darwin’s sexual selection gave too much power to all those females exerting choices based on beauty. As the zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart complained in an influential early review of “Descent,” “the instability of vicious feminine caprice” was too soft and slippery a force to drive something as important as evolution.

Darwin’s sexual selection theory thus failed to win the sort of victory that his theory of natural selection did. Ever since, the adaptationist, “fitness first” view of sexual selection as a subset of natural selection has dominated, driving the interpretation of most significant traits. Fancy feathers or (in humans) symmetrical faces have been cast not as instruments of sexual selection, but as “honest signals” of some greater underlying fitness. Meanwhile, the “modern synthesis” of the mid-1900s, which reconciled Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, redefined evolutionary fitness itself not in terms of traits, but as the survival and spread of the individual genes that generated the traits. Genes, rather than traits, became what natural selection selected.

And so things largely remained until now. This summer, however, almost 150 years after Darwin published his sexual selection theory to mixed reception, Richard Prum, a mild-mannered ornithologist and museum curator from Yale, has published a book intended to win Darwin’s sex theory a more climactic victory. With The Evolution of Beauty (Doubleday, $30), Prum, drawing on decades of study, hundreds of papers, and a lively, literate, and mischievous mind, means to prove an enriched version of Darwin’s sexual selection theory and rescue evolutionary biology from its “tedious and limiting adaptationist insistence on the ubiquitous power of natural selection.” He feels this insistence has given humankind an impoverished, even corrupted view of evolution in general, and in particular of how evolution has shaped sexual relations and human culture.

As Prum knows, he’s in for a fight. The biologists who most militantly defend the adaptationist Darwinian view of evolution, such as Richard Dawkins, do not gladly suffer dissent. But true to his argument, Prum seeks to prevail less through brute force of attack than by making his case with clarity, grace and charm. Like a bowerbird arranging its display for potential mates, he seeks not to best his chesty, chattering rivals, but to persuade the open-minded. The result is a delicious read, both seductive and mutinous.

Richard Prum is first and foremost an obsessive birder. Having personally seen over a third of the world’s 10,000 known bird species, he draws on his observations and wide reading to defeather and gut the adaptationist view that beauty is an “honest signaling” of evolutionary fitness. His attention never strays far from nature, and his writing in these bird passages is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual. When describing, say, the “throbbing” display of the lavishly decorated argus bird, he delivers a feathery brush of the erotic.

Prum is also an expert on the evolution of feathers, and he writes of them with the insight and appreciation one hears in the funnest art critics — think Kenneth Clark crossed with Sister Wendy. Prum makes an elegant, plausible argument that rather than having evolved for flight, feathers may actually have first evolved as a decorative surface for sexual display: fitness as a downstream benefit of beauty. The art-critic overtones come not by chance. Prum considers birds artists. Manakins (Prum’s study group) carefully choreograph their dances. Bowerbirds mastered perspective in their bower building eons before human painters grokked it during the Renaissance.

Bowerbird males provide Prum some of his most convincing examples. These remarkable birds woo their potential mates by constructing circles, cones, or maypole-like structures out of twigs, then ornamenting both the structures and the ground within and around them with stones, shells, beetle cases, colorful fungi and other found art. Both the architecture and the male’s behavior invite the female to observe and consider while leaving her both the space to do so and a clear escape path. In some bowerbird species the male laboriously arranges and rearranges his display, examining it from various angles and making small fixes, writes Prum, with the care of a “fussy florist.” The males of several species observe the female examining their work while half-hidden behind a tree or some fencelike part of the bower. If she likes what she sees, she stretches her neck and raises her tail in invitation, and the male comes to mate. (This takes only seconds, and the two will never meet again.) If she doesn’t, she leaves.

Prum believes these and similar courtship appeals in other species have arisen from a long, multigenerational, co-evolutionary conversation between mating partners. The male’s aesthetic and social qualities are repeatedly tested, judged and (through selection) modified according to whether they please potential mates. Thus the females’ individual preferences, says Prum, help drive evolution.

Like all selection, this is not intended to reach any particular goal; it just unfolds according to the demands of either fitness, or in this case, beauty. A trait selected for its beauty, of course, might create problems by selecting for ornaments that work against fitness. But, most crucially in the end, and often offsetting these problems, this “aesthetic” courtship, says Prum, creates an environment, temperaments and rituals — a sort of culture — that give the female sexual choice, autonomy and safety. (As noted, she doesn’t get everything; once she and the male mate and part, she raises the offspring by herself.)

Prum sees such aesthetic choices as driving a gradual “aesthetic remodeling” — an evolutionary reshaping of mating behavior, and even of male social behavior more widely, by the civilizing pressure of female preference. Prum stresses this is not about emasculating males, or dominating them; it’s simply about selecting for males who allow females autonomy and choice.

by David Dobbs, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: John Collier’s 1883 portrait of Charles Darwin