Charles Murtaugh has a post this morning on “the talent myth,”–the notion that if you take a bunch of talented people and put them into an organization, you can expect to get a talented organization.

I’ve known a lot of people at the space agency over the years, and for the most part they are smart, dedicated folks. Many of them pull their hair over the decisions that come out of the agency. But there are also many who justify those decisions. Until, that is, they retire or resign, at which point I’ve often heard them say something like, “How could I have made that decision?”

People studying artificial life and artificial intelligence often refer to it as an emergent property–a side effect of putting a bunch of entities together that interact with certain rules. For instance, individual ants are as dumb as a bag of buckwheat. They have very primitive programming to do very basic things when confronted with various situations. Yet somehow, when congregated in a colony, the colony itself can behave in what appears to be an intelligent manner. Attack it, and it will defend itself, often in sophisticated and responsive ways.

Another example of this is the chevron flight of geese. No goose is permanently in charge, or organizes them into the V-shaped pattern. But each goose has a few basic (presumably instinctual) rules–fly to one or the other side of the bird ahead of you, and slightly behind, to pick up a little benefit of its backdraft. Don’t create a parallel line–if the bird in front of you is to the right of the one in front of it, you stay to the right as well. Only one bird can draft another, unless it’s the leader. Trade off and lead occasionally.

That’s it.

When we program these rules into artificial computerized lifeforms, they will fly in similar V’s. No more organization than that is necessary–no need for a permanent leader or organizer.

Of course, the most obvious example of lots of dumb things appearing to be (or in fact actually being) smart is the human brain. No neuron or synapse is intelligent. But put a bunch together, and you can get an Einstein, or a Mozart.

Of course, you can also get a Cynthia McKinney or an Alec Baldwin.

So clearly it’s not enough to just put a bunch of dumb things together–how they are put together matters as well. But it at least offers the possibility that if you had a large enough bagful of Michael Moores (admittedly, it would require all of the burlap that the world will produce for the next century or so), you might have a chance of getting something intelligent as a result.

But to get back to my NASA example. I have a theory that the converse is true as well. You can aggregate a bunch of really smart things (like rocket engineers) and come up with something really, really dumb–an entity that would make decisions that no single individual among them would ever make, sans psychotropic drugs. Call it, if you like, the “committee effect.”

I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I suspect that it’s kind of like the rule for determining the resistance of a parallel network of resistors. If resistors are in series, that is, connected end to end in a long row of them, it’s easy to determine the total resistance–just add them up. So two resistors of ten ohms each become one resistor of twenty ohms when one end of one is connected to one end of the other, and the resistance is measured across the two free ends.

Parallel resistors, in which both ends of the resistors are connected to each other, so that the current flows through them all simultaneously, instead of first one and then the next and so on, has a different rule to compute the net resistance.

It’s: Total Resistance = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+…+(1/Rn))

where the “R”s represent the individual resistances, and there are n resistors. In words, it’s the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the individual resistances.

For the example given above, it would be one over the sum of one tenth plus one tenth, or one over two tenths, or one over one fifth, or five ohms. So instead of doubling the resistance, as in the series case, we’ve halved it.

It can be shown that if all of the resistors are of equal value, the formula simplifies to the original resistance divided by the number of resistors.

Which is a frightening thought, if the same rule applies to my emergent stupidity theory. Assuming for simplicity that everyone in a government bureaucracy has the same IQ (it doesn’t change the answer that much if you allow variation, but assuming they’re equal makes the calculation much simpler, as one can see from the formulas above), that means that the net IQ will be that IQ divided by the number of agency employees. If you add the number of lobbyists and interest groups to the mix, you can drive it down another order of magnitude in value, to the point that it has the intelligence of a lobotomized fern (only slightly smarter than Margo Kingston). And my theory would seem to be borne out by the quality of decisions coming from, for example, the US Agriculture Department, or the INS, or the State Department.

All of this, of course, is a long way of saying that I’m not encouraged by the prospects of merging several agencies and departments into a much larger (and probably dumber) one called the Department of Homeland Security, and then actually entrusting it with homeland security…

There’s a very interesting piece in today’s Arab News, whose lede is that bin Laden is dead.

But that’s not what’s interesting. Considering the source, what’s interesting is that it almost reads like a blogger piece–it indicts Wahhabism, cynical Europeans, naive and not-so-naive funding sources and complacent Americans. It identifies Pakistan and the Sudan as culprits.

Andrew Sullivan, from whom I got the link, writes:

The reasons given for the death of Islamism in the Arab world are also eye-opening. Could we be winning this propaganda war?

But Andrew misses what is to me the most significant thing, which is not what it says, but what it doesn’t say. The only significant way in which it differs from an essay by Victor Davis Hanson or Daniel Pipes is that it doesn’t mention…Saudi Arabia.

I’m wondering if the Sauds are now getting ready to accept the truth, and give up on the Wahhabi colonization and dreams of an Islamic empire, in exchange for being allowed to deflect blame away from themselves?

You know, no harm, no foul? Let us not bicker and argue over ‘oo drove airplanes into ‘oo’s skyscrapers–let bygones be bygones.

Let’s not focus on the past. Let us instead just stride forward, hand in hand, into a westernized future, in which we keep our oil money and our power to oppress people at home.

I just reread the article cited in my earlier post on Magaw being sacked, because of one of the comments.

Magaw’s strained relationship with Congress, airport operators and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta ( news – web sites) prompted Mineta to ask him to leave, government sources said Thursday.

Gee, Norm, wasn’t it you that said something like “his background and experience make him the perfect candidate for the job” when you appointed him a few months ago? I don’t have the exact quote, because when I google your appointment speech, it comes up “Page Not Found” at the DOT web site.

It’s nice to be able to change inconvenient histories, I guess, when you’re a cabinet secretary. No embarrassing backtracking required that way.

Here’s a not very sympathetic piece on cryonicists in the WaPo.

A four-year-old retarded girl was tethered to a mosque and starved to death in the hot sun, in Uttar Pradesh, to exorcise her demons.

I know, what’s the big deal? She’s just a girl.

Here’s another article that does nothing to clarify what Ted Williams actually wanted. But if he signed up himself, why aren’t the children producing the documentation?

And here’s another article stating that he had no interest in it when he was healthier.

Alcor will take (or at least in the past has taken) patients who were signed up by their families after a declaration of death, but they don’t like to have to deal with messy contentious situations like this. It’s possible that they didn’t know that the daughter would be opposed, and fight it.

And while I’ve said before that if it were up to me, the default in all cases would be cryonic suspension, I certainly wouldn’t force it on someone who didn’t want it (while I consider a refusal to take such measures a form of suicide, I believe that people have a right to suicide). If the son and executor can’t produce some evidence of Williams’ desire to be suspended other than their own word, given the evidence to the contrary, at least from the reportage to date, if I were the judge, I’d allow him to be cremated.

In this opinion piece by Uwe Siemon-Netto, he attacks cryonicists’ attempts to prolong their lives as, among other things, “unethical,” “immoral,” “abhorrent,” “selfish,” and something that only an atheist would do.

For faithful Jews, sticking a dead man in a tank and perhaps experimenting with him is abhorrent because it disturbs the eternal rest of the departed. To Christians, it is singularly egregious because it mocks the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life,” as the Nicene Creed defines the third person in the Trinity.

He, like many, continues to miss the point. Calling these people “dead,” is an opinion, not a fact. Just what life-saving measures would he not consider an affront to God, and which ones will he refuse if the circumstances arise?

Though not combined, over at Jay Manifold’s site. (By the way, Jay just got laid off, so if anyone has any employment possibilities, you might want to mosey over there and check out his resume).

He’s got some more feedback and links on the frozen soul issue, and a nice memorial of Apollo XI, with his own memories.

Jim Crogan has an extensive piece in the latest LA Weekly (a lefty publication, for what it’s worth) on the connections between the OKC bombing and the Middle East.

It seems to remain difficult to get anyone in the mainstream media to touch this story.

Kevin McGehee is concerned about someone in cryonic suspension somehow retaining consciousness and going mad, like someone in a perpetual sensory deprivation chamber.

I’m not, for at least two reasons.

First, the suspendee is given a heavy dose of barbiturates to prevent any pain that occurs during the temporary resuscitation necessary to circulate the anti-freeze. Since the body doesn’t metabolize in suspension, this drugged state would persist until the body is repaired and revived.

Second, I find the notion that a body frozen at that temperature, with no ability for synapses to fire, could possibly have any consciousness at all to be much more unlikely than even the prospects for future reanimation.

There may be some good reasons not to be suspended, but this isn’t one that I would even consider.