Poll Number 01: Results

Are we more of a social animal or natural animal?
We think we are more of a social animal, but are we?

As 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin (born 12 February 1809) and 150th anniversary of his most famous published work: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection", TVs have been broadcasting a documentary programme, magazines and newspapers have been publishing articles on Charles Darwin's life and work while book publishers were busy printing new biographies of a great biologist.

I came across one of those articles published on Economist. The article tries to explain many of our social problems and social phenomena, including money, crime, race and women's place in the society, in terms of survival and reproduction, the two keys for Darwin to explain his theory of evolution.

Successful reproduction means one has to be successful at attracting the members of the opposite sex. In this competitive world, where many are competing, being better than other members of the same sex and showing off become necessary (whether you like it or not). In an animal kingdom, the most powerful (and possible the most skilled) ones succeed at attracting the members of the opposite sex. In our society, it is slightly different as we are "social animals", but still the power matters.

For many, money is a mean of survival and for some, money equals power. Whichever way you look at it, the money (which is not natural at all) is an important determinant to one's status in the society, as it enables the possessor to do more than the ones without it. Now, status (in a way, modern day hierarchy) is the "power" in our society.

Status is relative, therefore it suggests people will try be relatively rich and not in absolute terms. Here, my little poll comes into play. I asked three similar questions:
(1) Would you prefer to earn $100.000 when everyone else is earning $50.000 or $150.000 when everyone else is earning $300.000 (assuming price-level is the same)?
(2) Would you prefer to earn $100.000 when everyone else is earning $50.000 or $150.000 when everyone else is earning $200.000 (assuming price-level is the same)?
(3) Would you prefer to earn $100.000 when everyone else is earning $50.000 or $150.000 when everyone else is earning $175.000 (assuming price-level is the same)?

All three questions are basically asking if they prefer to be richer in relative terms or in absolute terms, changing the degree of relativity.
For the question (1), 64% of the respondants said they prefer to be richer than others. However, for the question (3), only 35% of respondants said they prefer to be richer than others as the relative degree of being poorer than others reduced drastically (from 50% to 86% of the earning of everyone else). Of course, these results are not to be relied on fully and I admit my questions are actually quite bad (badly worded and choice of the numbers are not great). But, it does show that what Darwinism predicts is true, whether it explains the results fully or not is another matter.

There is another point, I would like to make: why socialism doesn't work (of course Hugo Chávez disagrees). Socialism is very artificial, it doesn't exist in nature, it is a pure creation of human being. But as we are not 100% social animals, it doesn't work for us. The inequality has to exist as differences between different people cannot be erased. Darwinism will suggest that the best system will be a free society allowing everyone to rise (or fail miserably) through the hierarchy of the society.

But, there is a huge problem. Although, the difference in people's ability is limited to a certain degree, the difference in people's wealth is not really limited (well one can say it is limited, since there is a finite resource available and I just said something different from what I have written in my previous article). Just think of how long it takes to run 100m for different people (World Record holder Usain Bolt managed to run it for 9.69s, I can manage to walk the same distance in 75s or less than 8 times slower) and Bill Gates' wealth against the wealth of someone in Darfur. Even the strongest person on the planet would not be able to beat the lifting power of say, 100 school kids. But the same cannot be said about one's power derived from money. That's where the problem lies, the money magnifies the inequality more than the real differences in people's ability (think of the footballers' salary and their skills, is David Beckham really 1'000 times more skilled than some average footballer?).

I am against socialism, and not against capitalism. But, then I started thinking of semi-capitalism, what about if we have a limit on one's wealth, say £50mn which is more than enough for someone to lead a comfortable life? Of course there is going to be lots of problems with it: how one owns (and controls to a certain degree) a company if their wealth is limited (since most wealthy individuals' wealth is in companies' stocks and shares) and how limited the research and big projects initiated by wealthy people are going to be (think of the works done by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Despite the problem with capitalism, I don't believe the better alternative to it is socialism, as some have been chanting so for the past 6 months or so.


Recommended Readings:
"Why We Are As We Are?", The Economist
"The Black Swan", Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Infinity

Infinity
Imagine infitinite possibilities if infinity existed

I will not dwindle on the mathematical terms of infinity and its strict definitions. However, there are couple of (technical) properties of infinity that I would like to mention before I proceed: (1) Infinity is very different from everything we know in everyday life and is not governed by the same rules which most of us are familiar with, (2) there are different types of infinities. If not interested in any of these technical stuff, you can skip the following two paragraphs.

(1) Most people think infinity as equivalent to some very very large number and equates its magnitude with the vast size of the universe. But that is misleading, even though some of the approximations are good enough (or sometimes almost exact) for practical reasons. However, there is not a single number that can represent infinity. Let's take 100 billion, large enough number for non-scientific people, but it is equal to only 1/500 of the number of cells in our body (estimated at anything between 10 trillion to 100 trillion and I have taken 50 trillion for my calculation). So let's take 50 trillion, but that is only 1/140000000000000 (that's 14 followed by 13 zeros) of the number of atoms in our body (estimated value for 70kg human body). So on, we can always dwarf any chosen number and not just find a bigger number.
Some people talk of the infinite space as the universe. In earlier times, our understanding of the universe consisted of only Milky Way galaxy, which is only one of the billions of galaxies in our universe. Even the entire universe is only 13.5 billion years old (so the largest possible size of the universe can be put at 27 billion light-years across). So again, it is not large enough to represent the infinite size. It is true, that there are people who believe in multiverse (i.e. many universes), but we will (possibly) never know whether that's the reality or not and we will need real infinite number of universes combined together to represent the size of the infinite space. But at this moment, there is no evidence for that reality.


(2) There are different types of infinites. There are infinite even numbers. But even numbers' cardinality is no less than the cardinality of integers, even though set of even numbers is a subset of set of integers. That's because we can establish 1-1 correspondance between the members of 2 sets: for example. 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6... that's a 1-1 correspondance from the set of integers to the set of even numbers. So, in a sense, two sets are equal. However, the cardinality of set of numbers between 0 and 1 (including the irrational numbers) is greater than the cardinality of set of integers, meaning we cannot establish a 1-1 correspandance between the members of the two sets.


Now, let me get to the main points: what is possible if infinity was real? I consider two cases: one with infinite number of people living (and of course, that's only possible with infinite amount of resources available) and another one with someone with an infinite amount of resources.

First, if there were infinite number of people living, then any number of people can be rich through Ponzi-scheme and Pyramid-scheme (note, in some places they don't distinguish between the two). Both the schemes rely on that there will be some more people to pay for your divident/reward/payback after you join the scheme as both schemes use new-comers' money to pay for already-members of the scheme. So the schemes sustain as long as there is a pool of people who can join the scheme and that's not possible in real-life, which is limited by the total population in the world. However, both schemes can sustain in a world where infinite number of people live and therefore any number of people can be rich as there will always be infinite number of people not in the scheme. Unfortunately, there will always be people outside the scheme, which means there will always be poor people and the process will need to last for infinitely long time. But, realistically such a world doesn't exist.

Second, imagine someone with an infinite amount of resources. Then, such a person (let's call him Richard) can always win any kind of betting-game, even with very low probabilty of winning. Let's imagine a game with the probability of 1/100 to double your money. It is very unlikely that anyone will play such a game, as they are going to think that's such a rip-off. But our Richard can beat the system and can still make money, not because of his luck, but because of his infinite endowment. He bets £1. If he wins, then it's over. But if he loses, he bets £2 next time. If he wins this time, he gets £4 back, making a profit of £1 (£4 minus the £2 bet minus the initial loss of £1). But if he loses, he bets £4 next time... and so on, doubling his bet till he wins and he is guaranteed to win if he waits long enough and that is only possible provided he has an infinite amount of money available to him. But then, such a person would not be that desperate to make only £1.

Let me finish my little article by introducing quite well known Hilbert's Hotel, consider a hotel with infinite number of rooms and every room is occupied. Now, assume that every guest brings a friend and would like to get a room for their friends. That is not possible for a hotel fully occupied in real life. But it is not a problem with Hilbert's hypothetical hotel. You move the person in Room 1 to Room 2, and the person in Room 2 to Room 4, etc... Now all the guests are in even numbered rooms and, therefore odd numbered rooms are empty. So their friends can get a room. This is an example that infinity is NOT governed by the same rules as numbers (apple+apple=2 apples, but infinity+infinity≠2infinities).