There’s a fascinating comparison to be made between computer scientists and libertarians. It is pretty old, originally having been posted to libernet in 1992 by Stuart Reges, but it remains very much worth reading and digesting. It explains a lot about how libertarians argue, and why the internet seems to be so libertarian. The piece was reposted here. Its original title appears to be Libertarian IQ. I’ll repost it at the end if you prefer your reading in something more colourful than 72-column monospaced text. Some highlights:

Just as programmers have a model of computation, libertarians have what I call a model of interaction. Just as a programmer can “play computer” by simulating how specific lines of code will change program state, a libertarian can “play society” by simulating how specific actions will change societal state. The libertarian model of interaction cuts across economic, political, cultural, and social issues. For just about any given law, for example, a libertarian can tell you exactly how such a law will affect society (minimum wage laws create unemployment by setting a lower-bound on entry-level wages, drug prohibition artificially inflates drug prices which leads to violent turf wars, etc.). As another example, for any given social goal, a libertarian will be able to tell you the problems generated by having government try to achieve that goal and will tell you how such a goal can be achieved in a libertarian society.I believe this is qualitatively different from other predictive models because of the breadth of the model and the focus on transitions (both of which are also true of programming). On newsgroups I often see questions … [that] … libertarians almost always quickly answer by saying, “I’ll tell you exactly what would happen…” And, surprisingly, the libertarians tend to give the same answer in most cases.

I think most people find this odd about libertarians. They understand how an economist might be able to predict the effect of a certain law on the economy or how a social scientist might be able to predict how drug legalization might affect the ghettos, but they don’t understand how somebody could predict all of these things, especially someone who has no formal training. Libertarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to understand how someone could fail to have such a model of interaction… The nonlibertarians have no comprehensive model of interaction, and as a result, they can’t communicate in a meaningful way with those who do. Their attention is always focused on misleading superficial problems rather than on the underlying causes of such problems.

Hat tip: Neil Blakey-Milner. The full text follows below:

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If I was quiet recently, it’s not because I really was. I’ve been chairman at a conference on eGovernment, at that grand cultural icon of South Africa, Emperor’s Palace. If you haven’t been there, think Orlando, Florida, but without the sophisticated style and elegance.

Here’s a thought that struck me, about the love for unions among government employees. One speaker, on the use of artificial intelligence in decision support, suggested that if a machine can be coaxed to do something, it can do it better than humans. “Woah,” responded the audience. Not because of some Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired philosophical disagreement about the nature of intelligence and consciousness, but because this sounded far too much like that evil capitalist anti-employment plot, automation. Another presenter spoke of the value of self-service technology. Not only would it improve, he said, the citizen’s experience of government service delivery by giving them a choice of channels, or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of service bureaucracies especially at local government level. It would also benefit those who don’t have access to the requisite technology for alternative channels (such as internet access or even a mobile phone), because pressure is taken off the call centres and walk-in government service offices.  Again: but what about jobs?

I wrote a column for Maverick magazine on the similarity between ANC economic policy and that of the Apartheid government. This is another symptom.

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