perfidy

Reuters is reporting that Poindexter, in charge of the DARPA department that brought us the aborted Total Information Awareness Agency and the recently deceased Policy Analysis Market, is on the way out, according to anonymous sources.

The headline: "A Good Idea With Bad Press".

That pretty much describes the DARPA futures market proposal. I've been thinking about it more and I still think the dead-pool aspects, though a minor part of the overall proposal, make this something the government shouldn't be doing. In short, I think it's a fantastic idea except for the part where you can win money when people die. Even though that is not the focus of the program, critics were able to seize on it and their objections were never fully answered.

This is because the pointy-heads at DARPA have a huge PR problem. It's their job, I realize, to come up with the craziest ideas they can, in the hope they will make the US and world a safer place. The problem is they don't have anybody on staff who knows how to take out the crazy-talk when speaking to the press. Just check out the nutty charts on the DARPA site. It's all cutting-edge research and conceptualization, but without a smiling avuncular face to explain it, the improbable aspects dominate. 

The good part is, now that DARPA has made the idea current and public, a thousand private nonprofit futures markets like the one Ross is currently programming will come into being. Rather than one government-run system, we could end up with many distributed markets-- quite possibly a better scenario than the one recently retracted by DARPA.

[moreover]: A TechCentralStation column by James Pethokoukis puts to bed my main objections to this program: "Indeed, who cares about a "yuck factor" or terrorists pocketing a few grand if thousands of lives could be saved?"

Fair enough. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable buying futures in terrorist acts, but I think the benefits clearly outweigh the yuckiness.
 

"I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about--hell, Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word--I'm talkin' about... ethics."

Trivia: name that film!!

One further hint: "Take your flunky and dangle."

I bring up ethics because it occurs to me that my main objection, such as it is, to the Great Leader Board of Terrorism is an ethical one.

That is, I don't participate in dead pools, and find them distasteful. To be on, much less profit from, the date of someone's death, dances on the line between macabre and cruel. So with the DARPA Terrorism Futures Market. The good part about the aforementioned list of nutty predictions cited by Ross at Spiral Dive is that, if they come true, a thousand flowers of democracy bloom, puppies roll in daisy patches, and nobody gets blowed up.

But in the DARPA process, anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups. Winners would win based upon the deaths of people. Period. Say more air attacks happen, and such an event has been on the Big Board. Some people would collect winnings from a government-sponsored program because they were "lucky" enough to bet on the date of the next 09/11/01. Policy considerations aside, that is positively grotesque, no matter how predictive such a futures market may be.

For that reason, I'm very glad that DARPA has cancelled the program. Their brand of heady, amoral weirdness is better left out of the light of day.

Please note that I do find the general idea appealing, and the potential is fascinating. I'm rather excited to see what Ross can put together in the way of a sample system using less macabre predictions. But the government should not be in the business of sponsoring dead pools.

Bloomberg is reporting that DARPA is creating a online futures market for ideas.

Traders could bet on the likelihood of events ranging from the overthrow of a government to the collapse of an economy or the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

This is the Delphi boards from John Brunner's clasic book Shockwave Rider come to life. (On my top five sf novels list.) I have been trying for years to get someone who knows more about programming than I do to help me create this idea. One of my goals for finally getting webspace was to finally do it. Now the goddamn defense department has gone ahead and created it. (You can see the Policy Analysis Market here.)

[Update:] The NYT now has a story, and is claiming that "the White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events ... that were visible earlier in the day ... could no longer be seen." However, you can still see the images here, here, and here. A general article on Ideas Futures Markets can be seen here.

The purpose of the site is to leverage knowledge that many individuals each have about one area into knowledge of a whole area or sequence of events. DARPA says, "Prices and spreads signal probabilities and confidence. Since markets provide incentives for good judgment and self-selection, the market will effectively aggregate information among knowledgeable participants.'' It continued, "This approach has proven successful in predictions concerning elections, monetary policy decisions and movie box office receipts -- DARPA is investigating its success in defense- related areas."

The mechanism is to set up mutually opposing outcomes - each of which represents a futures contract that pays $1. For example, the question, "Will terrorists attack Israel with bio-weapons in the next year?" has only two possible outcomes. You can bet (purchase a contract on one side or the other.

The interesting thing is that it doesn't stop there. There are derivatives and hedge contracts as well, that serve to combine information. The example given on the PAM website is historical - two contracts, one on the likelihood of the collapse of the Jordanian monarchy, and the other on the likelihood of Saddam's regime lasting a month once the US began hostilities. In a matrix, there are four possible combinations of outcomes, and each of these represents a derivative. The price on each is in effect an aggregate prediction. Further there are hedge bets - for example, you could bet that if Saddam lasts longer than one month, then the Jordanian monarchy will collapse. If the first part of the prediction doesn't come true, you don't lose money, but you would gain significantly if the whole thing did.

In all, this is very similar in concept to the idea of the Delphi boards in Brunner's novel. The boards were organized more on the model of racetrack betting, but they did involve speculation of future events. And the underlying assumption was identical: if you ask enough people, even if they are unaware of the complete body of information regarding the question, the average of their answers will approximate the actual result. If anything, the DARPA concept is potentially more powerful than the Delphi boards, because it seems to allow combinations of predictions in infinite variety. In this manner, new questions conveniently packaged with answers can be discovered, rather than merely answers to questions explicitly asked. Further, the price mechanism could allow more responsive and informative predictions than artificially moving the odds in response to betting on the part of participants.

Needlessly to say, I think this is very cool. I am very upset that they got their first. However, currently the site is only aimed at the middle east. This could be expanded. I am now on a crusade to convince those with the knowledge I need that they must help me. Ross, you're first on my list.

As a side note, some Democrats were upset in completely predictable ways. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota called it, "the most Byzantine thing I have ever seen proposed by a federal agency.'' But more to the point, he was worried about people's feelings:

How would you feel if you were the king of Jordan and learned that the U.S. Department of Defense was creating a futures market in whether you're going to be overthrown?

Well, seeing as I am always going on about the power of markets, I kind of have to be behind this idea. I am going to try to sign on when the site begins registration on Aug 1. Should be interesting.

Small Times is reporting that advances in rapid prototyping are bringing the idea of desktop manufacturing to reality.

Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you’re hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the “buy” button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors – literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours.

This will revolutionize the most profitable sector of the internet economy: online pornography

This is possibly the most boring headline I have ever written. Who cares! It's interesting! Via slashdot comes this story which explains a Bayesian approach to email spam-filtering in easy to understand terms. Read it here!

Check it out: Via geekpress, I see that somebody has created a program which will allow computer users to set up ad hoc one-on-one or small encrypted networks. Cool! Apparently it makes the powers that be verrrrry angry, as it could push file sharing "even further underground." Seeing as how all files are not illegally traded music files, and I can think of a million legitimate uses for such a tool, said powers can take a flier at the proverbial rolling donut. I think this is great, handy, and very dangerous. 

Best part: the program is called "Waste". He's a Pynchon fan! 

[moreover] If you haven't read "The Crying of Lot 49," it's time you do. 
 

Popular Science is running an article about the latest advances in "less-than-lethal" weaponry at the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate. There is some very excellent analysis of the pros and cons of nonlethal crowd-control weaponry (after all, guns all look like guns, no matter what they are firing), some suitably awestruck descriptions of the improbable sci-fi devices currently in beta testing, and even a self-test of one of the farthest out of the weapons. Why do I suddenly feel like I've stepped into a James Bond film? From the piece: 

Broadly speaking, the directorate slots nonlethals into three categories, depending on their intended strategic use: counter-personnel, counter-materiel and counter-capability. Counter-personnel objectives, naturally enough, include controlling crowds, incapacitating individuals, denying areas to personnel and clearing people from buildings or battle areas. Counter-materiel systems are used to deny areas to vehicles, vessels or aircraft, and to disable or neutralize equipment. Counter-capability objectives include disabling or neutralizing facilities and systems, and denying use of weapons of mass destruction. As you ascend this scale, from humans to systems, from soft targets to hard, there are bumps along the way at which on-the-ground reality seems likely to strain the semantic tolerances of the word nonlethal. Take, for instance, the high-tech end of the counter-materiel category, where we find supercaustic agents designed to rapidly corrode metals; depolymerizing agents that dissolve or decompose plastics; and, most impressively, the Advanced Tactical Laser, which will produce a four-inch-diameter beam of energy that can slice through a tank from a distance of 9 miles, presumably counting on the quickness of enemy soldiers to maintain its nonlethal credibility. (Indeed, in recognizing that no weapon or confrontation can be controlled well enough to justify the term nonlethal, the directorate prefers the phrase "less than lethal.") 

On the counter-personnel front, the technology is only marginally more tame. Nonlethal, after all, does not mean nonviolent. Although information here remains scarce—and the directorate won't share details—the pulsed-energy projectile rivals the Active Denial System pain beam in its sci-fi promise. The weapon will fire a pulsed (in brief shotlike bursts) deuterium-fluoride laser that will produce an ionized plasma on whatever surface it hits. That in turn will cause both pain and a kinetic shock, and could literally knock people off their feet.

Later in the article, the author takes a couple shots with the "pain beam" right in the back!! It hurts!! Cool!!

As an added fun Wednesday bonus, check out these nutty charts and documents from the Total Information Awareness Office! 

Those government pointy-heads sure have some ca-razy ideas! 
 

Andrew Sullivan is writing over at MSNBC about the government's increased efforts to rely on private data-collection firms to get the information they are barred from collecting themselves. 

Now, that's just a dirty trick, not to mention stupid. Private data collection firms don't have a great duty to verify the truth of their data any more than the government does. It has taken Li'l Sister Two-Cents years to clear her name, after another person with the same name ran into huge credit trouble. The databases just never seemed to be be updated, time and again. 

This is the awesome power the Gubmint wants to harness? I guess we shouldn't look forward to them changing the name on the J. Edgar Hoover building after all.