“The Beneficence of Others”, Abstruse Goose

“A few honest men are better than numbers.” Oliver Cromwell, letter to Sir William Spring (September 1643)

“If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men—and cowards.” Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter

The famous Tueller drill reports that a knife man can cover 21 feet & stab in just 1.5 seconds—faster than most trained people can draw and shoot a gun. While victims fight back, they are still dispatched in seconds .

There is a lesson here. I take away this message: most people don’t really care. Most organizations lack asabiyyah. The existentialists tell us we have tremendous power & freedom but we don’t use it and we forget it except on occasion when we read with awe of prodigious feats by religious figures like self-immolation or self-mummification or the Kaihogyo’s endless marathons, or enjoy fictional examples. I agree that we have tremendous destructive powers, but this also implies that we have limited constructive powers. (Destructive powers don’t interfere with each other, but they mean that it is far harder to create than to destroy. Anyone can destroy a DVD with ease, but to manufacture it, much less create whatever it stored, is much harder—a task fit for an entire country or civilization.)

Destruction can be useful though. Many people all over the political spectrum has expressed earnest desires in the last few years to destroy some group or institution. Terrorists come to mind.

But the odd thing is, very little destruction has happened. A nut with a gun has an average kill or destruction rate better than that of your average terrorist. A little effective planning, and a nut could do a lot. Marvin Heemeyer is a case in point. Despite unrelenting police opposition, he and his armored bulldozer destroyed 13 buildings worth $7 million. He was stopped by his own incompetence when he drove the bulldozer into a basement; he then committed suicide.

I also point out a far more effective terrorist strategy than existing ones in the preceding essay on terrorism.

A good answer for terrorists specifically is the social one; but what about everyone else? Why do they not pursue their targets with all the highly effective means possible?

The answer is motivation and values. We value ordinary comforts & life. The power is available to us only at the cost of everything else. Fruitful comparison might be made with idiot savants or autistics with obsessive interests, or less pathologically, subgroups like ‘otaku’ or ‘anoraks’.

Fictional examples are also of interest. Larry Niven offers us the Known Space’s Pak Protector—a genius variety of human who are obsessed with protecting their kindred. Though described as super-intelligences, Niven, being an ordinary human himself, depicts Pak feats within reach of a motivated human. Vernor Vinge postulates ‘Focus’ in his A Deepness In The Sky: a hyperfocus or permanent state of being ‘in the zone’—with the monomania that implies. (It is worth noting that studies of human genius frequently say that raw IQ and talent suffer diminishing returns past 130 IQ, such that while very high IQ individuals are still far more likely to make breakthroughs or reach the heights of professional accomplishment than any lower percentiles (see for example the SMPY lifetime achievement results), there’s still a good chance of being fairly ordinary and they don’t come off as an entirely different species—perhaps because they are held back by being less exceptional in other key ways like motivation, openmindedness, conscientiousness, extraversion, or monomania, traits which currently cannot be affected.)

Fanatics are frightening. Suicide tactics in even small quantities can be highly effective. The Jewish sicarii, or Japanese kamikaze are cases in point. Though small in number, they were more effective than conventional methods. (Kamikazes were neutralized by the end of WWII, but only by vast opposition—hundreds of defending planes, pickets stationed more than 50 miles away, improved artillery, etc.) That terrorists do so little enhances this point: one 9/11 was so effective that for a million dollars or two at most, it triggered the expenditure (and waste) of thousands of lives and literally trillions of dollars. 1 or 2 million dollars wouldn’t even buy a dictator a worthless tank which the USAF could bomb! Compare this to something like Occupy Wall Street, which has determinedly avoided violence, in a misguided attempt to shame the shameless and inspire action. (The shame seems important; Gandhi succeeded with minimal violence on his part because he waged in essence a propaganda campaign against the British elite, who never before had trouble holding India, while it is often forgotten that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, perhaps because the South African elites were unified and could not be simply shamed—so the ANC switched to international propaganda combined with long-term threats.) Moral suasion is neither sufficient nor necessary, and I suspected OWS would run into a similar fate as the Bonus Army: burned out of their camps, dispersed, and ultimately as effective as the anarchists and socialists of yore who were giants compared to their pusillanimous contemporaries. As it turned out, OWS was easily dispersed by police when they tried, and at least of August 2013, the OWS programme has been a failure & they have disappeared from national consciousness.

The idea of elite cohesion (or asabiyyah) is an interesting one; what I wonder, as I watch modern politics, is ‘are the current Anglosphere elites more or less cohesive than past cohorts, and if they are, is this due to free market ideologies and mechanisms which serve to punish dissidents and elevate those who are capable [sociopathic and intelligent enough to ’sparkle’?] and also who wish to defend and cleave to the status quo?’ Some interesting quotes from “Insight: The Wall Street disconnect”:

Paulson responded by putting out a press release that described his $28 billion, 120-person fund as an exemplar of the American Dream: “Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City.” Other captains of finance like to portray themselves as humble entrepreneurs. One owner of a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund grumbled in the midst of the financial crisis that he has to worry not only about making trading decisions but also about “all the hassles that come with running a small business.”…“I think everyone gets what the anger is about… But you just can’t say, ‘Well I want all debts forgiven.’ That is not happening,” says one West Coast trader, who like most still working in the financial services industry, declined to be identified by name in this article…“At first I had friends who were scratching their heads at the protests,” says Ader…Thomas Atteberry, a partner and portfolio manager with Los Angeles-based First Pacific Advisors, a $16 billion money management firm, says his success “wasn’t a gift” and he had to work hard to get where he is. Atteberry says he understands the frustration many feel about income inequality. But he said the problem isn’t with those who are successful, but rather our “tax codes and regulations.”…Many of America’s well-to-do, not just Wall Streeters, say they don’t feel particularly advantaged. A recent survey by marketing firm HNW Inc. found that half of the nation’s richest 1% “don’t see themselves as being part of that elite group.” Also, 44% of those surveyed told HNW’s pollsters they already pay too much in taxes….“I think Wall Street hasn’t taken in how much anger there is out there and they haven’t taken partial responsibility for the financial crisis,” says Brookings Institution fellow Douglas Elliott, who was an investment banker for two decades before joining the liberal-oriented public policy group. “I think both sides—Wall Street and Main Street—misunderstand each other.”

Suppose people angry at Goldman Sachs were truly angry: so angry that they went beyond posturing and beyond acting against Goldman Sachs only if action were guaranteed to cost them nothing (like writing a blog post). If they ceased to care about whether legal proceedings might be filed against them; if they become obsessed with destroying Goldman Sachs, if they devoted their lives to it and could ignore all bodily urges and creature comforts. If they could be, in a word, like Niven’s Protectors or Vinge’s Focused.

Could they do it? Could they destroy a 3 century old corporation with close to $1 trillion in assets, with sympathizers and former employees throughout the upper echelons of the United States Federal Government (itself the single most powerful entity in the world)?

Absolutely. It would be easy.

As I said, the destructive power of a human is great; let’s assume we have 100 fanatics—a vanishingly small fraction of those who have hated on GS over the years—willing to engage even in assassination, a historically effective tactic and perhaps the single most effective tactic available to an individual or small group.

Julian Assange explains the basic theory of Wikileaks in a 2006 essay, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” / “Conspiracy as Governance”: corporations and conspiracies form a graph network; the more efficiently communication flows, the more powerful a graph is; partition the graph, or impede communication (through leaks which cause self-inflicted wounds of secrecy & paranoia), and its power goes down. Carry this to its logical extreme…

If all links between conspirators are cut then there is no conspiracy. This is usually hard to do, so we ask our first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number? (divide and conquer). The answer depends on the structure of the conspiracy. Sometimes there are no alternative paths for conspiratorial information to flow between conspirators, other times there are many. This is a useful and interesting characteristic of a conspiracy. For instance, by assassinating one ‘bridge’ conspirator, it may be possible to split the conspiracy. But we want to say something about all conspiracies.

We don’t. We’re interested in shattering a specific conspiracy by the name of Goldman Sachs. GS has ~30,000 employees. Not all graphs are trees, but all trees are graphs, and corporations are usually structured as trees. If GS’s hierarchy is similar to that of a binary tree, then to completely knock out the 8 top levels, one only needs to eliminate 256 nodes. The top 6 levels would require only 64 nodes.

If one knocked out the top 6 levels, then each of the remaining subtrees in level 7 has no priority over the rest. And there will be 27−26 or 64 such subtrees/nodes. It is safe to say that 64 sub-corporations, each potentially headed by someone who wants a battlefield promotion to heading the entire thing, would have trouble agreeing on how to reconstruct the hierarchy. The stockholders might be expected to step in at this point, but the Board of Directors would be included in the top of the hierarchy, and by definition, they represent the majority of stockholders.

We could in fact partition a binary tree in half just by assassinating the root node, the CEO, and this has become a revived strategy in this age of the corporation; John Robb, “Piercing the Corporate Veil”:

CEO kidnapping isn’t new. It is common practice in Brazil, Mexico, etc. The difference in Iraq is the motive. In Iraq, it isn’t purely financial gain. It is being used as a way to unravel the fledgling Iraqi government. Here’s why. America’s second largest ally in Iraq isn’t the UK. Not even close. Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army. They are the battalions of foot soldiers in Thomas Barnett’s sys-admin force – connecting Iraq to the US and the world. This role converts CEOs into generals/colonels in the US globalization machine (leaders of new entrants in the rapidly expanding long tail of warfare). They are now legitimate and highly prized targets. …The corporation is a particularly bad organization for warfare. It is much too centralized. The institution of the CEO is a particular weakness (a systempunkt in global guerrilla lingo). The CEO’s network centrality makes him/her a single point of failure for the entire corporate organism…. Financial trauma. The departure of the CEO from a public company can create substantial market volatility in the company’s stock (see this Fed study for more) for up to two years after the event. Note: This volatility offers the incentive of rapid financial gains to guerrillas with the foreknowledge of attacks through leveraged investments in options and derivatives… …a CEO is an excellent strategic target as well as a tactical target. As a rule of thumb, I would consider all CEOs that reside/work within a nation-state at war with non-state guerrillas at risk. Under almost all measures of this new method of warfare, CEOs are better targets than government or military officials. Remember, in this flat world, it is easy to pull up a CEO’s name, address, credit history, and even a satellite photo of his/her home from a Cyber Cafe in Peshawar.

A worrisome counter-example is Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost an entire office and 2⁄3 of its headcount on 9/11, but is still around. But this fits into the graph formalism well if we look at the details and notice that the damage was entirely confined to a single group in CF. An office is just a subgraph—losing an entire office meant that the hierarchy was preserved: one subtree was lopped off, and the main tree continued. Every survivor knew where they were in the hierarchy. “The Survivor Who Saw the Future for Cantor Fitzgerald”, reveals many interesting details from the ‘attack’ point of view relevant to the graph perspective:

Cantor was the linchpin of its business (“In 2001, more than 70% of all Treasuries were traded through Cantor.”), a business which, thanks almost directly to 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq with the continued deficits & war-spending, was about to boom from $5.7 trillion to $16.1t 2000-2012: …based on data released by the company and payouts to families, Cantor and eSpeed made about $150 million a year, on average, in the five years after the attacks. For all its losses and sorrows, Cantor actually had the wind at its back. eSpeed thrived in 2002 and 2003 thanks in part to the nation’s ballooning debt. As the government sold more bonds to finance its deficit, the bond market grew and Cantor had more Treasuries to trade.

the Cantor CEO and chairman, Howard W. Lutnick, worked in the NYC office yet by sheer luck happened to not be there

Cantor had a London office and which was able to handle Cantor’s main business: Unable to reach Mr. Lutnick on Sept. 11, Lee Amaitis, the head of the London office and a close friend, began mapping out a plan. He helped reconfigure Cantor’s trading systems so that trades could be processed through London, rather than New York. Mr. Lutnick and his remaining employees in New York soon decamped to a windowless computer center in Rochelle Park, N.J. Thanks to eSpeed, Cantor could clear its trades electronically. Forty-seven hours after the planes hit, as the bond market nervously reopened for business, so did Cantor.

the aforementioned eSpeed was also crucial—the humans were not that necessary: In 1999, he took public Cantor’s electronic trading subsidiary, eSpeed. Some of his brokers feared that such electronic trading systems would eventually put them out of work. In fact, Mr. Lutnick’s electronic push helped Cantor stay afloat after Sept. 11. Cantor lost almost all of its brokers—but eSpeed didn’t need brokers. Without the new trading technology, Cantor might have gone under. “In a way, eSpeed saved them,” says Richard Repetto, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill, which itself lost 66 employees at the World Trade Center.

One could launch the attack during a board meeting or similar gathering, and hope to have 1 fanatic take out 10 or 20 targets. But let’s be pessimistic and assume each fanatic can only account for 1 target—even if they spend months and years reconnoitering and preparing fanatically.

This leaves us 36 fanatics. GS will be at a minimum impaired during the attack; financial companies almost uniquely operate on such tight schedules that one day’s disruption can open the door to predation. We’ll assign 1 fanatic the task of researching emails and telephone numbers and addresses of GS rivals; after a few years of constant schmoozing and FOIA requests and dumpster-diving, he ought to be able to reach major traders at said rivals. (This can be done by hiring or becoming a hacker group—as has already penetrated Goldman Sachs—or possibly simply by open-source intelligence and sources like a Bloomberg Terminal.) When the hammer goes down, he’ll fire off notifications and suggestions to his contacts . (For bonus points, he will then go off on an additional suicide mission.)

GS claims to have offices in all major financial hubs. Offhand, I would expect that to be no more than 10 or 20 offices worth attacking. We assign 20 of our remaining 35 fanatics the tasks of building Oklahoma City-sized truck bombs. (This will take a while because modern fertilizer is contaminated specifically to prevent this; our fanatics will have to research how to undo the contamination or acquire alternate explosives. The example of Anders Behring Breivikreminds us that simple guns may be better tools than bombs.) The 20 bombs may not eliminate the offices completely, but they should take care of demoralizing the 29,000 in the lower ranks and punch a number of holes in the surviving subtrees.

Let’s assume the 20 bomb-builders die during the bombing or remain to pick off survivors and obstruct rescue services as long as possible.

What shall we do with our remaining 15 agents? The offices lay in ruins. The corporate lords are dead. The lower ranks are running around in utter confusion, with long-oppressed subordinates waking to realize that becoming CEO is a live possibility. The rivals have been taking advantage of GS’s disarray as much as possible (although likely the markets would be in the process of shutting down).

15 is almost enough to assign one per office. What else could one do besides attack the office and its contents? Data centers are a good choice, but hardware is very replaceable and attacking them might impede the rivals’ efforts. One would want to destroy the software GS uses in trading, but to do that one would have to attack the source repositories; those are likely either in the offices already or difficult to trace. (You’ll notice that we haven’t assigned our fanatics anything particularly difficult or subtle so far. I do this to try to make it seem as feasible as possible; if I had fanatics becoming master hackers and infiltrating GS’s networks to make disastrous trades that bankrupt the company, people might say ‘aw, they may be fanatically motivated, but they couldn’t really do that’.)

It’s not enough to simply damage GS once. We must attack on the psychological plane: we must make it so that people fear to ever again work for anything related to GS.

Let us postulate one of our 15 agents was assigned a research task. He was to get the addresses of all GS employees. (We may have already needed this for our surgical strike.) He can do this by whatever mean: being hired by GS’s HR department, infiltrating electronically, breaking in and stealing random hard drives, open source intelligence—whatever. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Divvy the addresses up into 14 areas centered around offices, and assign the remaining 14 agents to travel to each address in their area and kill anyone there. A man may be willing to risk his own life for fabulous gains in GS—but will he risk his family? (And families are easy targets too. If the 14 agents begin before the main attacks, it will be a while before the Goldman Sachs link becomes apparent. Shooting someone is easy; getting away with it is the hard part.)

I would be shocked if Goldman Sachs could survive even half the agents.

The reader will object that this is an absurd mad intellectual game! Which it is. Where are 100 humans who would not flinch at such cold-blooded mass murder, who will devote unceasing years to the mission, who will live on $1 of bulgur pilaf a day to save money for bombs & bribes?

Coordination problems Why do large countries like France or China focus on hammering smooth all their ethnic and linguistic diversity and establishing “patriotism”? Why did Robert D. Putnam find that “diversity” in America correlated with low community trust, public goods, charity, friends, and quality of life? Why do our 100 fanatics seem the stuff of fiction? Reading in economics once, I hit the phrase “all economics is coordination problems”, and it seemed exactly true to me: why do businesses have all these managers and infrastructure and sheer apparent waste? Because of principal-agent problems and similar issues, all of which can be construed as coordination problems. Why do we need them? Because there are so many heterogeneous people involved, all differing in various ways with different interests, and they need to be hammered into a coherent force. Why not just select similar people, eliminate this massive overhead of coordination, and just let them work on stuff? After all, this seems to be exactly what happens in places like the Apollo program or the spy satellite programs, startups like Github or Apple or Google or Microsoft; far from illustrating how “diversity is strength”, these programs seem to thrive on being a homogeneous cluster of geeky young male White/Asian techs sharing the same cultural shibboleths like Star Wars or Monty Python, with a striking absence of women, blacks, Hispanics, or humanities types. If this blatant systematic discrimination was not useful, why do we see so few startups blasting apart established tech giants with their underpriced women? (Alan Greenspan, for example, ran a profitable economics firm using discriminated-against women.) The easy answer is simply that the discrimination works in getting the people they need with the Right Stuff. Well… it works for a while: there’s only so many energetic skilled young techies. But when you can cluster enough of them in one homogeneous company, you may get something amazing. Amazing until it keeps growing, heterogeneity builds up, and problems with coordination start happening…