Whimsley

A Curious Incident

There is a very seasonal and pretty spooky ghost story at Stageleft, see A Curious Incident.

Real or fake? Well, call me a sucker, but I'd say it's genuine.

Quantum Computing Revisited

So, following on from my recent gripe about quantum computing, it turns out that there are others who have thought along similar lines, and actually done the work of going beyond generalized grumbles.

Specifically, Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized posts about a paper by M. I. Dyakonov called Is Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation Really Possible? Dyakonov goes on about the theory of error-correction in (hypothetical) quantum computers, which I know nothing of, and in particular criticizes the "threshold theorem", but he also makes some more elementary points that I did, so here are a few excerpts from Mr/Ms Dyakonov's paper just to show I'm not completely out to lunch.

The enormous literature devoted to [fault-tolerant quantum computation]... is purely mathematical. It is mostly produced by computer scientists with a limited understanding of physics and a somewhat restricted perception of quantum mechanics as nothing more than unitary transformations in Hilbert space plus "entanglement".

[on decoherence] While the relaxation of two-level systems was thoroughly studied during a large part of the 20th century, and is quite well understood, in the quantum computing literature there is a strong tendency to make it look as an obscure quantum phenomenon.

Elsewhere, Dyakonov takes aim at the assumptions of ideal behaviour that permeate discussions of the feasibility of quantum computing, and to my mind does a pretty good job of bringing a little reality into the discussion. Click the  Shtetl-Optimized link above for some more discussion of the paper.

The State Versus The Market: The Tale of the Toilet

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The Flusher King by Peter Scowen, Toronto Star, Sunday October 22, 2006, p. D1.
Maximum Performance Testing of Popular Toilet Models,  7th Edition, Canadian Water and Wastewater Association.

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The debate seems endless. The left says the market doesn't work; the right says government just makes things worse. It's an old argument, and it's time to get it sorted out.

The trouble is, this argument is always made in the abstract. It's just generalities. Principal-agent problems here, collective action problems there, it's just so much verbal diarrhoea.

If you're going to have any chance of a realistic answer, you have to get your hands dirty and take a close look at a real problem. So that's what I'm going to do.

And the best place to look? In the toilet. Or more specifically, in the low-flush toilet which, after many years of messy failures, is now positively flushed with success. What made it succeed? Was this the innovation of private industry? Schumpeterian creative destruction at work?  Or is this a case of state-mandated standards flushing away a problem that the free market just left floating in the pan?

Thanks to the Toronto Star (link works for free until the weekend) we now have the unadulterated story. Pretty much everything I say here comes from that article.

Let's start at the beginning. In places where households don't pay the full cost of their water, which is a lot of places in North America, there is a free-rider problem when it comes to water conservation. We'd all save money if our toilets used less water when they flushed. It saves in water treatment costs, and it saves because there is less water to send through the pipes. It's just a good thing. But if we don't pay the whole cost of water ourselves, the best choice for each of us is to stick with our current toilet and let others invest in a low-flush model.

But the free market was failing to deliver a low-flush toilet. While government bureaucrats were of the opinion that 6 litres is enough to get rid of what needs to be got rid of, the toilet manufacturers were all selling models that delivered 13 litres (in imperial measurements, that's three furlongs and a fortnight) with each pull of the chain (are there actually any made with chains any more? It would be a great retro item I think.) Why was the free market failing? Well, probably for lack of a push from consumers. If you're not paying the full cost of the water, you don't really care whether your toilet uses 6 litres or 13.

So, the obvious solution here is government intervention, and in some places (the USA) in the early 1990's the government decided to get tough, and used its monopoly on force -- you know, that monopoly the libertarians are always complaining about -- to compel the toilet manufacturers cartel to adopt an environmentally friendly line. They outlawed high-volume toilets. One for the state! (although to be honest I don't know which level of the state it was).

But as we've been told by the libertarians and right wingers, government intervention does not necessarily improve matters, and one reason is the old problem of information. You can sell a toilet that delivers 6 litres per flush, but as a customer how do you know if that toilet is going to do what is needed? Well, before you buy it, you don't, so there is an obvious "market for lemons" problem here. The state can lead the manufacturers to use less water, but it can't make them flush thoroughly. Someone needs to do some testing to establish some clear standards, and who is going to do that?

Market enthusiasts will not be surprised to hear that although the US government (whichever part it was) had got tough in the letter of the law, it seems that it didn't follow through, leaving it to municipalities to find a solution. Seattle and Oakland trusted the Third Way idea that testing could be contracted out to a private industry group called the National Home Builders' Association, which describes itself "a Washington, D.C.-based trade association whose mission is to enhance the climate for housing and the building industry." Market sceptics would just know these tests aren't going to be really solid, and so it proved: they used a set of weighted sponges. Sponges!?

Whether this faulty testing was a fault of Blairite PPP illusions or not, the 1990's was a decade in which government intervention seemed to have made all things loo-related worse.

The most vocal opponent of the low-flush mandate is, of course, ex-Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry. He describes the low-flush toilets as toilets that can leave you lurking in the bathroom at a party "for what seems (to you) like several presidential administrations, flushing, checking, waiting, flushing, checking." If you have to flush two or three times, a 6-litre toilet does not save water, and for years Barry was a vocal defender of "the older 3.5 gallon models - the toilets that made this nation great; the toilets that our Founding Fathers fought and died for." (For those who want the primary source material, much is collected in collections such as Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down).

Mr. Barry has written a lot about toilets, and most of it has been re-read to me by my two teenage offspring, interrupted by long bouts of giggling until cornflakes come out of their nose. For those of you who don't know him, here is a little of Mr. Barry, writing in 2004:

 

I am often criticized for writing immature ''bathroom'' humor, and not enough about important topics. So today I'm going to write about a major international event that is going to take place Nov. 17-19 in Beijing, China: The World Toilet Summit.

 

I am not making up the World Toilet Summit. It was brought to my attention by alert reader Marc Howell, who alerted me to the World Toilet Organization, a group dedicated to improving the world's public toilets, with a website at worldtoilet.org. (''Org'' is a sound made by many of the world's public toilets.)

 

This site states that the World Toilet Summit is a gathering of ''the KEY DECISION MAKERS, KEY OFFICIALS and the MOVERS AND SHAKERS'' of the international toilet industry. The Beijing host committee -- which includes (I am still not making any of this up) an official named ''Stone Wang'' -- states that the summit will feature workshops on ''hot topics'' in the toilet industry. For example, Mr. Seok-Nam Gang of the Korea Clean Toilet Association will present ``Toilets As Tourism Attraction.''

 

Other hot topics include ''Toilets as Marketing Tools'' and ''Generating Revenue Through Advertisements in Good Toilets.'' There will also be a presentation of the ''Loo of the Year Awards,'' a tour of ''toilets and related facilities in Beijing,'' and a ``dinner show.''

 

I think the World Toilet Summit is a great idea, because most of the world's public toilets, in a word, stink. I'm not saying the United States is perfect in this department. We've made some serious mistakes, the worst being the introduction of ''low-flow'' toilets, which clog when asked to handle anything larger than, say, a molecule.

 

Also I am not a fan of those high-tech public toilets with the automatic sensors that either (a) become overexcited and flush themselves 37 times before you even sit down, or (b) lapse into a coma, so that when you're done you find yourself waving your arms like a lunatic and loudly remarking ''Well, I'm done!'' in an effort to revive your toilet so it will flush and you can leave, while the people waiting the stall wonder what kind of sick pervert thing you are doing in there.

(I should add that the second World Toilet Forum is taking place in less than a month   in Bangkok. Its theme, which I also am not making up, is "Happy Toilet, Healthy Life".)

But back to the main story.

As state-opponents might expect, a set of black markets emerged as private industries tried to improve customer satisfaction. Plumbers would fix the toilets so that they delivered more than the 6-litre amount. Manufacturers claimed 6-litre compliance when their toilets actually used more. And more blatant than anything, Dave Barry reported frequently on prohibition-inspired smuggling of 13-litre Canadian toilets across the border by the Canadian toilet cartel. Private industry was finding a way around the government mandate.

But then something changed. The City of Toronto, forswearing the full-fledged coercive tactics used by the brutal US regime, decided instead to offer rebates to people who would install low-flush toilets.

The problem of testing raised its ugly head again, and the City of Toronto got lucky. They contracted Veritec Consulting of Mississauga, where works modern day hero Bill Gauley (47). When Gauley started testing toilets he did not use sponges ("I don't know how many people want to flush sponges" he said), but used mashed potatoes and mashed-up bananas instead. The result was devastating. He proved that existing toilets just were not performing as advertised. He extended his work and joined up with "politics guy" John Koeller of California. They were funded by a number of Canadian and American municipalities to produce the definitive work, and in 2003 they pulled the handle on the MaP Report (Maximum Performance Testing of Popular Toilet Models).

The industry responded with threats to sue, but once they saw the evidence they were convinced. And since then, the Star reports, testing has been paid for by the manufacturers themselves and performance has improved by leaps and bounds. Not only that, but manufacturers now proudly stamp "MaP tested and approved" on their products. Now it is common for toilets to be able to flush not only 250 grams of waste ("the maximum male average" used as a benchmark, which half the toilets in the 2003 survey failed to flush) but 500 grams, even 1000 grams. And as Bill Gauley says "if you've ever seen 1,000 grams in a toilet..."

Market sceptics will note that, as Joseph Stiglitz emphasizes in his survey of his own work "Whither Socialism", the provision of information is a costly exercise that is itself open to free riding. Information is a public good, and now Veritec's MaP testing results are available for everyone to read on the Internet. No individual would find it worth making the effort to do the testing; it took a large city (and a lot of luck) to get us round that particular U-bend.

So who is responsible for the happy ending? Is it government in the form of the City of Toronto? Is it "the industry" who seem to have bought in to the project?

The story shows that the state/market dichotomy is false, and that the phrasing of the question is at fault. Posing the issue as "state versus market" loses touch with reality in the face of this intricate cross-pollination between municipalities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (who is likely to develop a labelling system based on the Veritec tests), Veritec itself (which is a private consultancy) and quasi-state bodies such as the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association.

The closer we look, the more dependent on the specifics it becomes. The story even has an international angle, as  today's MaP tests have moved beyond mashed potato to use cylinders of miso, the brownish soy-based paste from Japan, encased in LifeStyles brand condoms so that they can be reused. And much as I'm sceptical of the benefits of industry-led globalization, I have to admit that the idea came from private company Toto, makers of the formidable Toto Drake toilet. It is indeed a tangled web.

Perhaps the message is that, when we look closely enough, economics falls apart and gives way to sociology and psychology. Perhaps it is that history is, after all, made by individuals, specifically individuals who are prepared to spend hours developing  "test specimens" and flushing them down toilets over and over and over again. Perhaps it is that we need to seek a Buddhist-like middle way between the Scylla of the market and the Charybdis of the state, but a middle way that has a more human side to it than the metric driven public-private partnerships. I don't know.  But one thing I do know is that Bill Gauley deserves the thanks of all of us. Maybe someday I'll even get a low-flush toilet myself.

Book Review at Stumbling and Mumbling

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling writes a very generous review of No One Makes You... Good reviews mean more the smarter the reviewer, so  this is very good indeed.

But the trouble with smart reviewers is that they spot those parts of an argument that you skate around, unsure of how thick the ice is. And while Chris is kind enough to call them "quibbles" his points are good ones. I know it's Not Done to comment on reviews, but maybe I'll make an exception here.

First, he wonders how widespread the market failures I describe are. I don't know that there is a way to answer this question. A market failure does not always reveal itself in any obvious way. When eminent economists find it difficult to agree even on such empirical questions as "is inequality increasing in the USA", I don't know whether we'll see an empirical answer to the prevalence of market failures. And the costs of overcoming asymmetric information problems are sometimes hard to spot because there are so many different mechanisms. But there are a couple of observations that I can make:

• The broader view you take of a market -- that is, as you move away from the purely monetary & private aspects of a transaction to take account of other factors such as status, norms, social impact -- the more externalities come into play, and so the more common failures will be. That is, economists themselves will see only a small part of the failure of markets - others, such as sociologists, will see more.
• There are some industries that are almost exclusively devoted to correcting market failures, and so their costs could be seen as a measure of market failure. Advertising (large-scale at least, not classifieds) and law spring to mind. And it is important to note that just because information asymmetries can be overcome at a big cost doesn't mean the problem is solved.

His second point is about Hayek, whom I've never read much of. The bits I have always seemed to be talking about a reality I didn't recognize. So I can't really address the point, and will go and read. Mea culpa.

But the third point Chris makes, which is that I don't say much about government failure, I do have an excuse for. Basically, it seemed to me that no one needs much convincing these days that governments can, left to themselves, screw things up pretty badly. You only have to read EMT Tom Reynolds writing about government targets today to know that (although, come to think of it, the idiocies he describes are rife in private industry too). Cynicism about politicians and governments is so widespread that the point about bureaucracies hardly needs to be made. What is important is to tackle this idea that markets are a fine alternative.

Well, these scribbles hardly do justice to the points, but that's all I've got this evening. Thanks again to Stumbling & Mumbling for the review.

In the Land of the Taliban - New York Times

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In the Land of the Taliban - New York Times - Elizabeth Rubin

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I've been working on a couple of short essays to put up here, but they are not quite ready yet. Part of the reason is that I've been reading this astounding piece by Elizabeth Rubin, who reports from Afghanistan on the state of that country. I recommend that you click the "print" button on the page, print off all 20 pages of it, and read it closely, because it tells you more about what's going on than anything else I've read in the last two years.

Here are a few tiny pieces, chosen almost at random:

She talkes with one Abdul Baqi about an attack on the family of legislator Amir Dado, until recently intelligence chief of Helmand Province:

Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He would tell me that Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted plastic onto the stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men had captured. Abdul Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a checkpoint where they “grabbed young boys and robbed people.” Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai’s government, these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban as a result of harassment. Amir Dado’s own abuses had eventually led to his removal from the Helmand government at

United Nations

insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of personal safety concerns, put it: “Amir Dado kept his own prison, authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect for human life and made security worse.” Yet when I later met Amir Dado in Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense install him as Helmand’s police chief and claiming that in his absence “the quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically declined.”

 

On a Taliban video:

They invoke a nostalgia for the jihad against the Russians and inspire their viewers to rise up again. One begins with clattering Chinooks disgorging American soldiers into the desert. Then we see the new Afghan government onstage, focusing in on the

Northern Alliance

warlords —

Abdul Rashid Dostum

, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul Sayyaf. It cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing targets on maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from planes and missiles emblazoned with “Royal Navy” rocketing through the sky; then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children. Message: America and

Britain

brought back the warlords and bombed your children. In the next clip, there are metal cages under floodlights and men in orange jumpsuits, bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes of

John Walker Lindh

and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with young Afghan and Pakistani prisoners — Taliban, hundreds of whom would suffocate to death in those containers, supposedly at the command of the warlord and current army chief of staff, General Dostum. Then back to American guards wheeling hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners on gurneys. Interspliced are older images, a bit fuzzy, of young Afghan men, hands tied behind their backs, heads bowed, hauled off by Communist guards. The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again; Americans, Russians — no difference.

Interviewing a school headmistress and landowner, also a Ministry of Women's Affairs deputy:

She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms of pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology. She said that she had just wrapped up the case of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped by Kandahari police officers, something that would not have happened under the Taliban. “Their security was outstanding,” she said.

Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. “Now the governors tell the people, ‘Just cultivate a little bit,”’ she said. “So people take this opportunity and grow a lot.” The farmers lease land to grow poppies. The British and the police eradicate it. The farmer can’t pay back the landowner. “So instead of paying, he gives the landowner his daughter.”

The picture is depressing, it is complicated, and it has the aura of reality. We desperately need to hear more stories like this. The current debate is "us against the bad guys - fight or leave?" is so hopelessly out of contact that it is not worth having.

Radio Interview

I had a radio interview this morning courtesy of Phil Johnson, host of a daily morning show (6am to 9am) in Kelowna, BC.

He has apparently been running a series talking about consumer choices. One of his regular guests is Michael Neill, who (together with Michelle Neill) owns Mosaic Books in Kelowna, and who has apparently been referring to No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart from time to time. Clearly a man of intellect and perception.

Phil Johnson is an articulate host with strong opinions, and we seem to look at the world in a similar kind of way, so the interview was fun once it got started. I say "once it got started" because the phones went on the blink just before he called. Panic! Anyway, it got sorted thanks to a colleague with a mobile phone (thank you Roger). Fifteen minutes later we were all done. It seemed to go by very quickly.

So, my thanks to Phil Johnson and Michael Neill and to Kelowna Oldies 1150. I'll have to celebrate with a glass of the Okanagan's world beating 2004 Shiraz from Jackson-Triggs.

Grameen Bank: An Idea That Works

I submitted this piece as an op-ed to the Kitchener Waterloo Record. I'll post if they accept it.

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Political debate in Canada is stale, swinging between those who look to government for solutions and those who look to the free market. This pendulum has swung back and forth on all the major issues: health care, education, industrial policy, and on and on.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded is a timely reminder that many of the most promising ideas for a better world are about neither governments nor business. The source of these ideas is often the periphery of societies rather than the centre, and they work from the bottom up rather than the top down. The prize is also a reminder that new ideas are often difficult to classify: some claim that the ideas behind Grameen are socialist, others that they are capitalist, and others that this is an innovative form of aid to the poor. But most importantly, pretty much everyone agrees that this is an idea that works.

The Grameen Bank was created at a cost of $27 in rural Bangladesh to address a very mundane problem facing poor villagers: lack of credit. Before you can grow crops you need money to buy seeds; before you can sell milk you need money to buy a cow; before you can sell bamboo chairs you need money to buy  bamboo. The usual route to get this money is to go to a bank for a loan, but big banks can't make much money from tiny loans to poor people, and banks also face a set of problems caused by lack of detailed information. The usual way for a borrower to guarantee a loan is to use some of their possessions as collateral to guarantee the loan, but poor people have no collateral -- that's what being poor is all about -- so there would be no way for a bank to be confident that its loans would be repaid.

For a big bank to individually identify the good risks and the bad risks among its customers would be a costly enterprise, especially compared to the small amounts of the loans that poor people need. So even if a bank were to set up in rural Bangladesh, they would have to charge high interest rates to cover the bad risks, and these high interest rates make loans unaffordable for the very people who need them. End result, no banks.

Without banks, many villagers went to local moneylenders for loans. These moneylenders live locally and had a virtual monopoly on loans, so interest rates were often extortionate and the borrowers were kept in a state of permanent indebtedness. Women faced an additional barrier because they typically had little control over the way household money was spent. So in addition to not having any money, they couldn't borrow it and the rural poor were trapped in poverty.

In the 1970's Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank entered the picture with a conviction that they could help people to break out of the credit trap by providing small loans, typically a few tens of dollars, to help people get on their feet. These small loans came to be called micro-credit. Despite the word "bank" in its name, profit is not the primary goal of the Grameen Bank, but it did seek to be self-sustaining and so it needed some new ideas to make its convictions work where the big banks would not go.

The biggest single innovation, and one that has caught the attention of many around the world, was that the Bank does not lend to individuals, but instead to small groups of borrowers. For each group the members get their loan in turn, rather than all at once, with the member most in need -- as identified by the group itself -- getting the loan first. If the loan is not repaid, none of the other members in the group get their loan.

This simple but ingenious group-lending model is a way of overcoming the information problems that stymied the banks. The group members have an incentive to identify reliable partners, so that they will not lose their own chance for a loan because of a group member defaulting. The group model also helps to prevent members from undertaking projects that are too risky, because other group members would not go along with harebrained schemes that are likely to fail. The fact that each member's loan depends on the repayment of the others lends itself to mutual support so that the early loans get repaid. Mutual support is supplemented by peer pressure among the members of the group to ensure that each member is committed to repaying. The group lending model is a framework that encourages people to achieve things together that, separately, they could not.

The model works. The Grameen Bank has made loans to over 6 million poor Bangladeshis. The repayment rate on loans is around 98%, which is a remarkable number for people living so close to the edge. What's more, almost all the borrowers are women, and the loans give them a chance to break free not only of poverty, but also of many of the social constraints that have prevented them from having control over their own lives. The Bank is now largely owned by its members, and ten of its 13-member board of directors are women.

The Grameen model has been widely imitated, with a recent report saying that over 25,000 microfinance organizations now exist, each serving on average over 25,000 low-income customers. Like any other promising new idea, it has been built on by the industrious, exploited by the unscrupulous, and improved by the imaginative. Some endeavours succeed and some fail. The group lending model of micro-credit is not a panacea, but it is an innovation that has made a real difference to millions of people.

Group lending does not fit easily into the right-wing/left-wing spectrum. Former World Bank president James Wolfehnson claims that the award testifies to "the power of entrepreneurialism", but the Bank is not profit-motivated -- in fact it is aimed at fixing things that the pursuit of profit alone has not been able to fix. The Grameen Bank is not an example of "entrepreneurship" unless you extend the idea to mean "anyone with an idea who works at it", which is a bit far fetched. At the same time, this is a private initiative that is largely independent of the state and which does foster small businesses, so it does not fall under the usual umbrella of left-wing initiatives.

Being left-wing myself, I'd like to label the Grameen Bank left-wing in the sense used by philosopher Peter Singer: it is explicitly on the side of the weak, not the powerful, but in the end it doesn't matter. What does matter is that it works.

The success of the Grameen Bank reminds us that many of our most influential ideas start with small groups a long way from the centres of power and influence, finding ways for people to work together to solve immediate, concrete problems. The most influential ideas about how to make cities more livable started with Jane Jacobs looking out of her kitchen window in Greenwich Village, and it was Jacobs who said that "new ideas need old buildings" -- that they come from the unfashionable parts of town where rents are cheap.

In the middle of all the debate over health services and social services the feminist movement created sexual assault centres and other crisis services for women, addressing a whole set of needs that were not being met within the established framework. Innovations in open source software production such as Linux, and in open content production such as Wikipedia have started independently of governments or markets. The anti-sweatshop movement has led to the creation of independent workplace-monitoring organizations that are a necessary step in pushing companies to implement good working conditions.  The list is long and diverse, and each of these initiatives has gone through times when it is not taken seriously, has been torn apart (or nearly so) by internal dissent, and has faced tough and sometimes unresolved decisions about how to work with existing institutions.

But each idea has made a difference, and each provides far more inspiration than the stale "government versus markets" debates we hear so much.

Book News: Review

The enigmatic Elephantstrunk has some good things to say about No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart. I hope he or she does not mind if I reproduce it here.

Tom Slee’s “No one makes you shop at Wal-Mart” should be bundled with every copy of “The Wisdom of Crowds”. I like “The Wisdom of Crowds” but it always seemed dangerously incomplete. NOMYSAW is not exactly a counter argument but shows that life is a lot more complicated than the TWoC might suggest.
Mr. Slee is clearly exercised by the free ride given to arguments resting on offers of “choice”. Starting with the Prisoner’s Dilemma the book shows ways that the seemingly obvious good of giving people the opportunity to decide what is best for themselves can sometimes make everyone worse off.

It’s not an original point but nor is it in fact a controversial one. What is new is the articulation of what it means and what some popular arguments don’t. The book uses the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a simple example of individuals each seeking to maximise their personal situation and suffering as a result but the most potent are at some level examples of “The Tragedy of the Commons” but in places where the Coasian solution of applying property rights is a less comfortable propositions.

Finding a whole book, especially one so articulate and clear, about a persistent but only half formed idea is quite a thrill. I liked it a lot. Whimsley mentioned on the right is the author’s occasional blog.

Thanks very much Mr/Ms Trunk.

Book News: Speaking Engagements

Maybe it's time to say something about the book again. I've been invited to give a few talks recently - some have already happened, and some coming soon. Thanks to those who have invited me - the ones so far have been very rewarding (for me at least).

Car Free Day was an event sponsored by WPIRG in September. They invited me to speak at the outdoor event in Victoria Park and also at the University. Speaking outside with a small audience is difficult - the surrounding noise makes it feel as if you are shouting at people sitting a few feet from you. If you weren't there to hear me, I don't think you missed anything. The University event was better, with about 20 people there and some good discussion afterwards. Most interesting was a comment about an intriguing high-tech public bicycle system in Lyon named Velo'v, which seems to be a big success according to a Guardian article reprinted here.

Kitchener NDP recently hosted Peggy Nash, a new MP for Parkdale- High Park in Toronto. I was very impressed. She spoke for 45 minutes with no notes on a wide variety of topics, from a recent fact-finding visit to Lebanon to the ins and outs of Parliamentary committees and was obviously smart and very well informed. I was asked to present her with a copy of my book as a thank you for the visit, which was a privilege.

After the meeting I met two philosophy profs from the University of Waterloo. Dave DeVidi is  using No One Makes You... in a Decision Theory course, and Tim Kenyon may be using it next year in a Critical Thinking course.

In a week and a half I'll be speaking as part of a panel at an event at York University named Social Justice: From Rhetoric to Action put on by the Centre for Social Justice.  The programme is still in a draft form - I'll post more when it gets closer. It's a challenge to condense a piece of the book into an edible-sized chunk for talks, but  I think I'm slowly getting better at it.

Finally, I'm an invited speaker next month in an Engineering and Society course that is being run at McMaster University as part of the Peace Studies program. It is called "War and Natural Resources: The Case of Oil" which is being run by Graeme MacQueen and Jack Santa Barbara. I'm sure the course is a fascinating one - I just hope I can hold people's interest.

One trouble with writing a book that covers quite a wide range of topics is that you don't get to give the same talk twice -- transit, social justice, and warfare. But the best way to learn more about something is to tell others about it, so this has been very rewarding.

Quantum Computing: Gripes from a Quantum Fuddy-Duddy

Waterloo is an interesting place to live these days for an ex-quantum-mechanic, mainly because of all that techno-geek BlackBerry money that is being splashed around. When I bike to work I go past the Perimeter Institute in Theoretical Physics at the beginning of my ride, and then go within a stone's throw of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the end, both of which are making waves these days. All these brainy young things pushing the boundaries of what we know and don't know, it's fun to watch.

The main media event recently has been the publication of the book "The Trouble with Physics" by the Perimeter Insitute's Lee Smolin, which is a criticism of String Theory and its 30-year failure to prove itself as something more than a promising candidate for a theory of everything. Smolin's book has been widely reviewed, often in conjunction with Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong" which argues much the same thing. The title "Not Even Wrong" was a devastating putdown coined by Enrico Fermi of another physicist's work - the implication being it was so mistaken that you couldn't even show why and how it was incorrect. My own work was in the relatively mundane work of molecules rather than cosmological elementary particles; that is, it was quantum, but on our side of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, not the other side. Both books argue that String Theory has become so removed from experiment that it has ceased to be science, and has become prone to building elaborate edifices on an insufficiently sound physical basis.

While PI has made the biggest splash locally, the Institute for Quantum Computing is a rising star too. And Quantum Computing is something that I feel I can get more of a handle on than String Theory, so I've been reading a bit about it. And what I see either exposes me for a quantum fuddy-duddy or suggests that Quantum Computing (QC from here on) could do with listening to the critiques of Smolin and applying it to themselves.

So here is what's wrong with quantum computing from what I can see. (Disclaimer: these opinions are based on a number of popular articles, my attempts to follow Scott Aaronson's excellent weblog Shtetl-Optimized, and the bit I have read of Jozef Gruska's 1999 text "Quantum Computing", which I actually got out of the library last week. These opinions are worth exactly what you paid for them.)

Reading a QC book is an odd thing for a regular physics type. Where are the Hamiltonians? Few and far between, it seems ("Hamiltonian" is mentioned in only a literal handful of places -- five -- in Gruska). Everything is about the action of unitary operators on states. For anyone reading this who is not a physicist, here's what that means. In physics, when things interact, that interaction is described by a Hamiltonian. If you're trying to solve a problem, your first step is to construct a Hamiltonian operator that describes the interaction you are studying, and then solve the equations that come from that. Unitary operators, on the other hand, describe a change in a quantum system from one state to another, which may sound like the same thing but isn't. In regular computers, circuits consist of many gates that carry out elementary operations (AND, OR, and so on). If you had a quantum "gate" then a unitary operator describes the change from input to output (that's the change in state), and ignores the way in which the system gets from the one end of the gate to the other. The Hamiltonian would describe the actual physical operation that happens as the light or electron or nuclear spin goes from the input to the output.

That still might not be very clear, so here's the end result: the theory of QC is built in a manner that has become deliberately divorced from the real world. The "implementation" or the actual building of a computer is consciously separated from the theory of the logic and algorithms that you would build on top of this computer. There is a division of labour between theory and experiment that is present right down to the way the theory is constructed, and that is a bit of a problem because it means that every single thing that the theorists say is conditional. All the theorems they prove need a big asterisk next to them saying "as long as someone can make a computer". As a footnote Richard Feynman, who knew what he was doing, did some early explorations in Quantum Computing and did approach it by building Hamiltonians and putting together Schrodinger equations - just what you'd expect a physicist to do.

You can see why the discipline has gone in this manner. Regular old classical computing, after all, followed a similar path. It started off with mathematicians (von Neumann and Turing) who set out a logical architecture of computers and algorithms, and this work was followed (loosely speaking, and as best I understand) by the engineers once the transistor was invented. And it makes sense that those interested in exploring algorithms can do so without needing to know all about welding - this stuff is complicated enough as it is. But we should keep in mind that there is always the possibility that the success of regular computing will not be repeated. The proof of the pudding and all that.

The second thing that bothers me about QC is related to this division of labour. Everywhere you look they are talking about "entanglement" and all the things that go along with it: Bell's inequalities, EPR experiments and so on. In Gruska's book Everett (of the "many-worlds interpretation") is mentioned as many times as Hamiltonian. Again, for a quantum fuddy-duddy this raises red flags. The wierdness of the quantum world is seductive - enough that my 1st year lecturer (the late Peter Dawber) felt he had to warn us "this is interesting, but it's interpretation. My advice is learn how to calculate and solve problems, and don't get stuck in the philosophical quicksand". Good advice that has been repeated by many a lecturer, I'm sure. And yet here are these QC-ers diving headlong into entangled states, and spending more time on them than on things with actual Hamiltonians. Looking in Gruska's index again, entanglement merits 42 mentions. Perhaps this is mainly a rhetorical point, but I do think it is worth making because entanglement is built into the culture of quantum computing.

Entanglement is connected to what happens when you prepare a multi-particle quantum state and then let the particles become separated. So you get paragraphs like this:

Prepare a system with two particles, each of which can have two values of spin, and send them off in opposite directions. Then measure one of the particles to find its spin. This measurement then immediately fixes the spin of the other particle, even though it's a long way away. The state of the two particles is entangled.

But you could also write this paragraph this way.

Prepare a system with two particles, each of which can have two values of spin, and send them off in opposite directions. Then measure the state of the system by checking one particle. This measurement tells you the spin of both particles.

The difference is that in the second phrasing avoids mention of entanglement, and focuses on the fact that this is a single quantum system we are talking about here, and that however far apart the two particles end up being, they still have to comprise a single quantum system, and that means no messing from the classical world. The two paragraphs refer to the same operations and mathematics, but the second avoids extraneous weirdness.

The two most mature methods of actually preparing quantum computers are NMR spectroscopy and ion traps. Ion traps deal with fine control of isolated quantum systems (as required for "entanglement") and involves very exotic and incredibly precise experimental apparatus. This is what you would expect if you are dealing with single systems: the expense of dealing with them grows as the size of the separation grows. NMR deals with many systems (coffee cups, for example - the link is to a PDF file) and uses the fancy techniques of pulsed magnetic resonance to give these systems a variety of kicks. It's recently been extended to 12 "qubits" (individual spins), which is the biggest quantum computer to date.

But here is the odd thing, this most successful technique is not based on the single systems that are needed for entanglement. In fact, these same multi-pulse NMR experiments have been carried out for some years and the word "entanglement" never raised its head so far as I know until the Quantum Computation people got interested. In NMR you are dealing with qubits that are not spatially separated (they are nuclei on the same molecule) and you are not dealing with a single quantum system described by a single state vector (you are dealing with a thermodynamic ensemble of quantum systems described by a density matrix). Myself, I could never follow the theory of multi-pulse NMR, but I'm pretty sure there was no mention of many-world interpretations in it.

So QC should realise that the consequences of "entanglement" are limited to inherently exotic systems with which you are unlikely to be able to build a real computer. It's useful in PR material to highlight the weirdness of the quantum world, but when talking science you should follow Occam, who said "avoid talking weirdness whenever possible". For example, when QC people talk about "maximally entangled states" or "Bell states" they simply mean a state in which you've measured spin along one axis when you're going to measure spin along another axis later. This can be talked about without reference to Bell or entanglement.

This thing with entanglement shows up in all kinds of popular articles by the practitioners of WC. As one example, here is a popular piece by some of the theorists (Steane and van Dam) who have demonstrated that you can use entanglement to enhance communication - that you can exploit the entanglement of a quantum state together with regular messages among observers at different places to get more efficient communications. The article reads in a fun enough way (it's about participants at a game show who each carry their own little qubit into a separate cubicle and then pass messages). But it's not possible. You can't carry a qubit around because in order to exploit entanglement you have to have a single quantum system. This kind of writing comes from thinking about measurement according to the first way I wrote the paragraph above (measure the particle) as opposed to the second (measure the system).

Perhaps I'm being overly picky about this because it is, after all, just a popular article (although it works in some concepts you would need undergraduate physics to understand before the end). But I can imagine QCers saying, "well, it's possible in principle". But like a lot of "in principle" arguments I don't buy it. I think Daniel Dennett dealt with this kind of argument in his brilliant "Consciousness Explained " when discussing the idea of a "brain in a vat" (aka the Matrix) where philosophers argue that you could "in principle" recreate the sensations of the world by stimulating the right portions of the brain. Dennett basically calls their bluff and accuses them of not thinking through the magnitude of the problem, and takes some time to spell out just how hugely implausible it is. Now it's not a proof, but I think the same kind of thing applies to these popularizations of entanglement. You can "in principle" have widely separated parts of a single quantum state outside a hugely expensive laboratory only if you don't think too hard about what the endeavour entails. In a sense, we're back to the use of Unitary operators by the theorists so they don't have to think about implementations.

Well, this has been more rambling than I expected, so here's a summary of what I see as the main points.

• The split between abstract theory and physical implementation in the structure of quantum computing is a dangerous game. It means that everything that quantum computing theory says needs to be taken with a big pinch of salt until realistic quantum computers are demonstrated.
• The widespread use of the rhetoric of entanglement and other ideas that focus on the non-intuitive parts of quantum mechanics exacerbates the problem by pulling QC theory further away from actual implementations.
• The fact that the biggest quantum computers to date are NMR based demonstrates how little entanglement adds to the actual theory of QC. And the fact that the best alternative is the inherently exotic approach of ion traps is disheartening.

I hope I'm wrong. There's a lot of smart people working on quantum computing who I'm sure have thought through these issues more than I have, and they look like in some ways they are making progress (see here). But here are two predictions that will show whether I'm right or wrong in a few years. One is that what constitutes a major advance will be redefined. The participants in a field are always enthusiastic about the major advances that are happening, but if we see major experimental advances that are phrased in terms like "enhance the understanding of what is necessary for quantum computation" rather than "actually compute something" then watch out. Second, the goals (PDF)  set out by some people in the field will not be achieved.

Well, that's my Canadian Thansgiving ramble. Now I'm going to plant some tulips, which, with a bit of luck, will appear simultaneously, as if by magic, in a coherent fashion next spring.

Update: A recent post at Shtetl Optimized discusses a paper that has some of the same criticisms as my post here, except done properly: "Is Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation Really Possible? by M. I. Dyakonov." Fuddy-duddies unite!