Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Paul Graham, You Can Open a Satellite Office

The other day, Paul Graham posted an especially weak argument for relaxing American immigration laws to make room for more elite programmers to be imported to startups in California.

Graham, unaccustomed to actually being opposed by anyone, opens his essay with a falsely dichotomous straw man:

American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can’t find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who’s right?

The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don’t understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can’t train them to be exceptional. Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training.

My suggestion would actually be to pay those American programmers more, because they are underpaid relative to their productivity. They need more generous stock options packages, higher salaries, and greater compensation for cost of living increases, especially in California. Investors need to be willing to give up more of their capital gains to technical talent.

This is part of what used to make Silicon Valley more competitive compared to alternative employers, but perhaps one of the greatest fundamental shifts in that industry since the last economic cycle is the over-compensation of investors relative to employees, and the shift in importance from the public stock markets to private gangs of insider investors.

It is convenient for California investors to blame Washington intransigence for under-performance, and certainly Washington is to blame for much, but part of the broader problem may be that the modern Silicon Valley-internationalist model is not a terribly good one.

Further, almost no elite programmers can be said to be ‘trained:’ John Carmack was a juvenile delinquent and mental patient. It’s just bad rhetoric to claim that the choice faced by American employers is either to change US immigration law or to magically train geniuses in a way that they have never been trained before.

And since good people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. Maybe mostly in one hub.

What if most of the great programmers collected in one hub, and it wasn’t here? That scenario may seem unlikely now, but it won’t be if things change as much in the next 50 years as they did in the last 50.

We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity slip. It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for. And unlike other potential mistakes on that scale, it costs nothing to fix.

Maybe so, but going back to the Carmack example, he made his own hub by forming a company around himself, and had no particular need to yammer with other geniuses over drinks, because people looking for his advice simply corresponded with the genius at a distance.

Mr. Graham might respond by saying that he’s speaking of merely ‘great’ programmers rather than geniuses, but that is only a difference of degree. While the genius comes up with an advance that is likely to impact multiple companies over a period of decades, you can at least build an entire department around the merely ‘great.’ But they must be selected in much the same manner.

Graham is demonstrating a belief in the Richard Florida theory of economic growth: that hip, happening urban centers chock-full of queers and artists are what generate economic dynamism.

Computer scientists like Jeff Dean do not result from a Richard Florida process. This ‘hub’ theory is ridiculous in light of the small number of geniuses there are, and their life histories. Geniuses are born and then possibly discovered: they can’t be manufactured.

The earlier version of Silicon Valley believed that much of genius was genetically innate. This would indicate that, to ensure an innovative future, you need to be better at producing smart babies, rather than importing them from foreign countries.

So, the real solution is to encourage artificial selection for intelligence, which would mean discouraging the most intelligent women away from the work force and towards the nursery. After all, from one woman, you can only ever extract one life-time of white collar work, but if you put her to having children, you can get her to produce the equivalent of multiple life-times of productive work through the miracle of reproduction.

Graham and his contemporaries will never do this, because they know what happened to William Shockley, himself an immigrant from England, for arguing for it.

My suggestion to Graham would be to encourage portfolio companies to open satellite offices outside of California, and better yet, to move out of California to wherever the talent is. This is not even out of the question for other elite American industries: investment banks in particular are known for setting up extensive satellite headquarters in foreign countries to better serve clients there, and to facilitate foreign recruitment.

This method gives the home country the benefits of foreign trade, without the downsides of importing a foreign population or needing to change domestic immigration laws. It would be a win-win for everyone involved except for lazy California investors, who, almost uniquely among the investing class, expect companies that they put money into to be within commuting distance of their insipid suburban estates.

Somehow, the far larger and more successful investment communities outside the Bay Area make do with first class travel around the world — maybe it’s time for Sand Hill Road to spring for gold club airline memberships like the other grown-ups and learn how to sleep on a trans-Pacific flight.

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Europeans: Over-Domesticated to Boost Tax Revenue

Darwin wrote about the phenomenon of most plant crosses winding up sterile, and how most animals will not breed in captivity without special inducements.

This got me to thinking again about the recent post here about “grass eaters.”

In the animal kingdom as in humans, mating behavior requires some wildness, or at least what’s correctly called a ritual among the beasts, birds, bugs, and people.

When you disrupt an animal’s ability to conduct their ritual behavior, you also disrupt their ability to knock boots and make kids. Typical rituals involve a physical struggle between males, a singing competition, a physical inspection, or some combination of these.

Elk mating ritual

 

Perhaps the most profound change made during the sexual revolution was the end of most forms of sexual segregation, heralded in popular culture and by intellectuals as a stupendous moral development. What this has meant is a disruption in the mechanism by which men compete with one another.

Rather than grouping off into teams to compete individually and as groups within a male status system to become more attractive to women, instead, everyone is jumbled together. Men who would be competing hard with one another instead find that they are in a non-competitive situation, in which feminine standards of inclusion tend to rule.

This disrupts the instincts of both genders, causing them to behave in odd, novel ways. The stated reason for gender equality is to get more productivity out of the entire population, encouraging both genders towards activities that generate tax revenue. What we have seen, instead, is a substantial drop in the male labor force participation rate. The increase in female participation has cannibalized a large portion of the male participation in work outside the home.

Breeding in captivity

When placed into captivity, most wild animals will stop reproducing naturally, and many undergo extensive physical changes. When the animal stops needing to survive based on its own wits and powers, and can instead laze about in a cage, fed and housed, it loses much of the will to live as it did before.

This is not entirely what has happened with Europeans, but there are echoes between the domestication of animals and that of people. We ask people to travel in regiments to work-places, where large portions of their productivity are siphoned off to bosses, investors, and governments. They are asked to behave in a systematic fashion (so that production can be rationalized) while still showing ‘creativity’ in coming up with solutions.

The most prize performers are coveted by employers, but not for their future children — instead, they are sought after for their present productivity, and no one seems to care all that much about the long term productivity of the population — it’s really about extracting as much revenue as possible out of the people in the moment, without concern for the deleterious effects this might have on their characters and the surrounding society.

Healthy competition requires separation

Competition within a species requires physical separation between genders and competing genetic lines. It is the rule of life that one genetic line in direct competition with another one seeks to have its direct competitor replaced over time.

When the genders are not separated, the natural instincts towards propagation become disrupted. The purpose behind competition within the species becomes muddled. The competitive behavior becomes an end within itself rather than a means to a eugenic end.

You can perhaps temporarily extract more resources from a population by disrupting their natural instincts and turning them towards other ends, but in the long term, you harm the ability of the organism to reproduce itself effectively.

While it may not be appropriate to say that people are exactly like the animals, humans are still animals, and are not immune to the same laws that apply to the rest of the kingdom.

When thinking about problems related to dysgenics, we should also think about what effects over-civilization has on people, their instincts, and their ability to sustain themselves. People need wildness in them to keep the spark of life alive.

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Albert Jay Nock on the Loss of the Great Tradition

Someone alerted me to this long lecture by Albert Jay Nock about the destruction of the classical university system in the United States. It’s worth your time to read the entire thing. Block out a half-hour and go through it. Nock gave this lecture in 1931, long before the real push to destroy standards even really began.

Here are some excerpts:

The thing now was to introduce the sciences, living languages and the useful arts, to make instruction vocational, to open all manner of opportunities for vocational study, and to induce youth into our institutions for pretty strictly vocational purposes. All this was done; the process amounted to a revolution, carried out with extraordinary thoroughness and in an astonishingly short time. Hardly any debris of the old order remains except, curiously, the insignia of certain proficiencies; these now survive as mere vestiges. You are as well aware as I, for example, of what a bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts now represents.

This was used as justification for jumbling together what was a fixed curriculum of a true ‘undergraduate’ program with a lot of bizarre courses intended to better prepare the students for professional life.

What the latter day America could not tolerate was the setting-apart of a minuscule class of highly accomplished students, held to exacting moral standards. Instead, it was brought lower, into ‘practical’ service. It wasn’t so much a choice between promoting knowledge versus ignorance, but in terms of debasing what the entire institution was about. There is nothing there to ‘reform,’ because its entire character has been fundamentally altered into something unrecognizable.

The errors of education came from a vulgarization and misinterpretation of the older intents of American higher education:

This sentiment, I say, served as a quickening spirit, not an enlightening spirit. Its ministrations moved us to the construction, by no means deliberate but quite at haphazard, of an educational theory which may be decomposed into three basic ideas or principles. The first idea was that of equality; the second, that of democracy; and the third idea was that the one great assurance of good public order and honest government lay in a literate citizenry.

Nock goes on to explain how the ideals of Thomas Jefferson were vulgarized to open up the programs to a much larger population. These errors were only amplified in magnitude later on, based on the same initial errors.

Jefferson actually favored an almost impossibly selective higher education system that would shock most contemporary people: the purpose was to select for genius, rather than putting a mass of people through a jumble of subjects.

This confused interpretation of ‘equality’ to the vulgar use by which we know it today:

Thus, again, the doctrine of equality and its corollaries and implications have undergone the most astounding popular misunderstanding; you may remember, perhaps, the humorous and not much exaggerated popular formulation of it in the saying that “in the United States one man is just exactly as good as another, or a little better.” Indeed, in the social sphere, the doctrine of equality has regularly been degraded into a kind of charter for rabid self-assertion on the part of ignorance and vulgarity; in the political sphere it has served as a warrant for the most audacious and flagitious exercise of self-interest. So, when we set about the examination of this doctrine in relation to our educational system, we must first and above all ascertain which doctrine of equality it is that we find at the basis of our system; is it the philosophical doctrine recommended by Menander and espoused by Mr. Jefferson, or is it a popular doctrine which neither of them could or would recognize?

Acknowledging that the majority of people are not educable would be a positive step forward. Unfortunately, Americans have been unable to make that acknowledgement for more than a century. No evidence seems to be able to shake even the elites from their belief that all people can be elevated by a program of education.

Nock’s closing observation at the time is just as applicable now as it was when he spoke:

I do not think that our American society will ever return to the Great Tradition. I see no reason why it should not go on repeating the experience of other societies, having already gone as far as it has along the road of that experience, and find that when it at last realizes the need of transforming itself, it has no longer the power to do so.

Given that the link to the great tradition was severed in the early 20th century, everything that followed proved to be impossible to resist, as that trend grew exponentially. This is our current dilemma.

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