The League of Extraordinary Loonies

[avram]

I was just browsing through the opening pages of that League of Extraordinary Gentlemen collection I picked up yesterday, and couldn’t remember if Campion Bond (the League’s government liaison) was a pre-existing literary character (as just about everyone else in the book is) or an invention of Moore’s; the annotations say the latter.

But while skimming through the annotations, I noticed this quote from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, in which Sherlock Holmes talks about his brother Mycroft:

"Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has decided the national policy. He lives in it. He thinks of nothing else save when, as an intellectual exercise, he unbends if I call upon him and ask him to advise me on one of my little problems."

Robert Heinlein chose Mycroft as the name for the self-aware computer that handles all important functions in the moon colony, as well as running a revolution against Earth, in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, my favorite of his novels. I hadn’t realized till now just how appropriate the name was.

One thing that makes it such a great novel is that the message many take from it — it’s much beloved by libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who read it as portraying a viable depiction of a state built along their preferred lines — is actually undermined by the details of the book. The very first sentence of the novel tells you that the colony eventually becomes enmired in just the sort of statist social cruft that libertarians hate now, and the primary reason given for the necessity of the revolution is to impose a restriction on trade which, left unrestricted, will eventually destroy the colony.

What I’ve just realized — what the Doyle quote illuminates —is that Heinlein’s Mycroft is actually a central planning device of just the sort that runs the idealized socialist anarchies of Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution books! (Though updated, of course. MacLeod has lived through the days of distributed computing apps running as screen savers, something Heinlein never encountered.) A fact that I’m sure is not lost on MacLeod, and I’m surprised it took me this long to make the connection.

And speaking of Heinlein, remember that list of predictions for the year 2000 he wrote back in 1950 (and updated a couple of times), published in Expanded Universe? Justin Rye went down the list on 31 Jan 1999, tallying up the old master’s score. The total? About 20%. (I’d actually have granted one or two minor points that Rye didn’t, but not enough to boost the score all that much.)

Comments

Central planning

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Let's add, furthermore, that within the impure capitalist societies we can observe, companies are run along lines laid down by the legal statutes that define the space they can exist in -- a space that is envisaged as making each company a perfect central command system under the control of its directors. If you don't do what your manager tells you to do, they can fire you, and if they don't do what the board says, they get fired. (Firing, within the context of the local company, is the equivalent of the much more unpleasant consequences liable to be applied to a dissident in the much broader context of a nation state run along the same lines.)

There are huge corporations out there (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Baan) whose sole job is to build central planning bureaux for other corporations. And the political implications of this tend to go unnoticed.

A truly free market would trigger an amazing flowering of central planning ...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Rye's completely wrong about Prediction Eight. Psychoanalysis is a dwindling cult, only surviving as psychotherapy in New York and Boston, and no longer considered scientifically relevant at all. Freudianism holds on as a school of thought in literary theory and so forth, but the chances are vanishingly tiny that someone with a mental illness will be treated according to those principles.

Pure, Skinnerian operant psychology may no longer be fashionable, but psychotherapy based on behavioral principles is booming. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has been found in multiple studies to be the most effective type, and is correspondingly popular. And psychotherapy has certainly not become "like a religion" - instead, there's been a huge push to develop lists of "empirically supported treatments," and vast amounts of research on psychotherapeutic effectiveness.

I'd give Heinlein 9 out of 10 on that one. I hope Rye is more accurate on the predictions I know much less about.

[avram]

I'd have given him higher than 0.7 on Prediction 11, the telephone one. That's certainly closer to having come true than Prediction 1. But I've have given a lower score on Prediction 15 (world state, communism). And prediction 19 is only half unfalsifiable, so I'd give him 0.5 on that one.