Definitely a 'yeah, but...' article. It's not wrong, and there are cases of remarkably successful persuasion where we might guess it to be impossible. The problem is the techniques of individual persuasion have been known since antiquity. Why don't they work ? Or rather, why do extremists still sometimes triumph ? Because knowing rhetorical techniques is not enough. It's a network problem and must be treated as such. Articles like this fail because of several reasons : 1) they have a very limited reach; 2) the networks we participate in do not encourage such well-intentioned behaviour as the author would like (and sometimes thrive off its very opposite); 3) there are completely separate factors at work - it's not all about information transmission.
No amount of 'we just need to be nicer / more respectful to [or other variants of 'better'] each other' articles will ever work. If that were so, the world would already be a Utopia. It's not that they're not worth reading, it's just that the effects are a lot more limited than the authors would like. Real solutions have to be far more radical.
https://plus.google.com/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/izrupauy1it
https://aeon.co/ideas/reach-out-listen-be-patient-good-arguments-can-stop-extremism
Sunday, 23 December 2018
Farewell to Paddy Ashdown
You could never accuse Ashdown of being dull, but this was a life more interesting than I realised.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33440958
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33440958
Radical people don't evaluate their mistakes properly
There's probably some underlying principle behind Dunning-Kruger. Stupid people can't tell they're stupid, irrational people can't tell they're irrational [1], and now we can add that over-confident people can't tell they're over-confident.
[1] Where this leaves people who start wondering what being rational is on the first place, I'm not sure. In a philosophy club, probably.
Via Andres Soolo, who asks the interesting question of whether over-confidence causes rigid thinking or whether it's the other way around.
One common feature of radicalism is a confidence in the rightness of your ideas, even if they go against those of society at large. So why do radicals have so much certainty? A new study pins the blame on a faulty metacognition, the process by which people recognize when their ideas might not be correct and update their beliefs accordingly. While the study didn't directly measure political radicalism, it did look at two traits that associate with it: dogmatism and authoritarianism.
The researchers decided to use a simple task with no obvious cultural implications: estimate how many dots were in an area after being only shown a brief glimpse of it and describe how confident they were in their estimate. In a second experiment, the participants were asked to make the same estimate as in the first experiment but were then given some additional information about the dot density of the image. This allowed them the opportunity to update their confidence level based on new information.
"Dogmatic people manifest a lowered capacity to discriminate between their correct and incorrect decisions," is how the researchers put it. This was also true for authoritarians. Critically, the lowered capacity wasn't the product of a general overconfidence, since that trait had been examined in some of the survey questions. And, informatively, people with radical beliefs were less likely to update their confidence in response to the additional information, a feature that the authors consider a defect specific to metacognition.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/radicals-dont-evaluate-their-mistakes-very-effectively/
[1] Where this leaves people who start wondering what being rational is on the first place, I'm not sure. In a philosophy club, probably.
Via Andres Soolo, who asks the interesting question of whether over-confidence causes rigid thinking or whether it's the other way around.
One common feature of radicalism is a confidence in the rightness of your ideas, even if they go against those of society at large. So why do radicals have so much certainty? A new study pins the blame on a faulty metacognition, the process by which people recognize when their ideas might not be correct and update their beliefs accordingly. While the study didn't directly measure political radicalism, it did look at two traits that associate with it: dogmatism and authoritarianism.
The researchers decided to use a simple task with no obvious cultural implications: estimate how many dots were in an area after being only shown a brief glimpse of it and describe how confident they were in their estimate. In a second experiment, the participants were asked to make the same estimate as in the first experiment but were then given some additional information about the dot density of the image. This allowed them the opportunity to update their confidence level based on new information.
"Dogmatic people manifest a lowered capacity to discriminate between their correct and incorrect decisions," is how the researchers put it. This was also true for authoritarians. Critically, the lowered capacity wasn't the product of a general overconfidence, since that trait had been examined in some of the survey questions. And, informatively, people with radical beliefs were less likely to update their confidence in response to the additional information, a feature that the authors consider a defect specific to metacognition.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/radicals-dont-evaluate-their-mistakes-very-effectively/
It's not about a flag
Well worth reading in its entirety.
Of course the NFL players are not actually protesting the flag. That would be as pointless as arguing with a sock, screaming at a table cloth, or a whole bunch of other stuff Trump probably does on a daily basis. The protest was originally about racial justice, and black people being shot dead by the police. You have to ask yourself how abusive a relationship has to be if even kneeling in silence is too provocative, how you are valued in a country where even the statement that your life matters ignites furious dissent.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/22/frankie-boyle-review-2018-forget-brexit?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Of course the NFL players are not actually protesting the flag. That would be as pointless as arguing with a sock, screaming at a table cloth, or a whole bunch of other stuff Trump probably does on a daily basis. The protest was originally about racial justice, and black people being shot dead by the police. You have to ask yourself how abusive a relationship has to be if even kneeling in silence is too provocative, how you are valued in a country where even the statement that your life matters ignites furious dissent.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/22/frankie-boyle-review-2018-forget-brexit?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
J. K. Rowling's biblical anti-Corbyn rant
J. K. Rowling gets it.
http://va.newsrepublic.net/s/eZhrjUp
http://va.newsrepublic.net/s/eZhrjUp
Saturday, 22 December 2018
The effects of misinformation on the left and right
The headline is misleading, but fortunately the article is more interesting than it sounds. A nice discussion about the complex interplay between ideology and identity.
According to this, conservatives and liberals both value safety, but to different degrees and in different ways. Both sides fear and hate the other because they pose a threat, albeit for different reasons : conservatives threaten minoritites, liberals threaten stability. Since they have more fluid thinking, liberals fear of threats can recede more quickly than that of conservatives. While the idea that liberals are more flexible is practically true by definition, I was more intrigued by the discussion on how polarisation and hatred of the opposing side occurs when ideology combines with identity : that worldview isn't the same as how we identify ourselves. I also like how they identify fear on both sides of the political spectrum.
Interestingly, in laboratory conditions there's little or no evidence that either are more vulnerable to misinformation : the current wave of conservative nuttery may be more due to the sheer volume of misinformation on the right wing side than on the left (not that there isn't any at all on the left, obviously). But the tendency for the right to experience so much more from its current crop of lunatic leaders may point to a root psychological cause.
A worldview isn’t an identity. It is a way of understanding the nature of the world. Is it safe or dangerous? Should we protect traditional ways of doing things, or is it safe to challenge them?
Today’s political acrimony results from Americans’ worldviews becoming married to their partisanship. Because people’s worldviews organize their whole life — not just the political part of it — a party identity defined by them produces intense conflict. Opposing worldviews have always existed in America (and probably since humans have been around). What is new is that they are now mapped neatly onto Americans’ party identities [whereas previously party identity was more about size of government, and thus included more broad-ranging worldviews].
The reality that the world is actually safer hardly matters. What matters to today’s politics is that the bases of the two parties see it much differently.
If your worldview suggests the world is dangerous, the specter of terrorism will, of course, be especially concerning. But social change is potentially dangerous, too. Existing traditions and hierarchies have maintained order for millennia. Racial and gender equality threaten those hierarchies. LGBT people challenge those traditions.
If you think the world is safe, you don’t see refugees as trying to infiltrate the country to do harm. They need our help. You don’t see identity groups vying for equality as threats. Instead old traditions and hierarchies are the real threats because they perpetuate discrimination.
Take 9/11, for example. Americans across the worldview spectrum were petrified. In the short run, the more fluid became more willing to trade civil liberties for security, more willing to support the use of torture. The fixed were already likely to support those things before the attacks. As time passed, however, the fluid went back to valuing civil liberties and opposing torture. Their worldviews hadn’t changed. That being said, our research makes clear that fear benefits Republicans in a worldview divided system. Opinions creep to the right, at least for a time.
Sure, there is partisan media on the left, but its audience is much smaller and it lacks misinformation peddlers like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones. Why the much higher demand on the right? We think the answer must lie partially in the individual differences between liberals and conservatives.
The most likely reason would be a differential need for what psychologists call cognitive closure. Those we consider having fixed worldviews have a greater need for closure which suggests a greater need to avoid cognitive dissonance. They therefore are more likely to believe information that confirms their worldview. These differences may drive the supply of misinformation coming from political elites to some degree.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/18/18139556/republicans-democrats-partisanship-ideology-philosophy-psychology-marc-hetherington
According to this, conservatives and liberals both value safety, but to different degrees and in different ways. Both sides fear and hate the other because they pose a threat, albeit for different reasons : conservatives threaten minoritites, liberals threaten stability. Since they have more fluid thinking, liberals fear of threats can recede more quickly than that of conservatives. While the idea that liberals are more flexible is practically true by definition, I was more intrigued by the discussion on how polarisation and hatred of the opposing side occurs when ideology combines with identity : that worldview isn't the same as how we identify ourselves. I also like how they identify fear on both sides of the political spectrum.
Interestingly, in laboratory conditions there's little or no evidence that either are more vulnerable to misinformation : the current wave of conservative nuttery may be more due to the sheer volume of misinformation on the right wing side than on the left (not that there isn't any at all on the left, obviously). But the tendency for the right to experience so much more from its current crop of lunatic leaders may point to a root psychological cause.
A worldview isn’t an identity. It is a way of understanding the nature of the world. Is it safe or dangerous? Should we protect traditional ways of doing things, or is it safe to challenge them?
Today’s political acrimony results from Americans’ worldviews becoming married to their partisanship. Because people’s worldviews organize their whole life — not just the political part of it — a party identity defined by them produces intense conflict. Opposing worldviews have always existed in America (and probably since humans have been around). What is new is that they are now mapped neatly onto Americans’ party identities [whereas previously party identity was more about size of government, and thus included more broad-ranging worldviews].
The reality that the world is actually safer hardly matters. What matters to today’s politics is that the bases of the two parties see it much differently.
If your worldview suggests the world is dangerous, the specter of terrorism will, of course, be especially concerning. But social change is potentially dangerous, too. Existing traditions and hierarchies have maintained order for millennia. Racial and gender equality threaten those hierarchies. LGBT people challenge those traditions.
If you think the world is safe, you don’t see refugees as trying to infiltrate the country to do harm. They need our help. You don’t see identity groups vying for equality as threats. Instead old traditions and hierarchies are the real threats because they perpetuate discrimination.
Take 9/11, for example. Americans across the worldview spectrum were petrified. In the short run, the more fluid became more willing to trade civil liberties for security, more willing to support the use of torture. The fixed were already likely to support those things before the attacks. As time passed, however, the fluid went back to valuing civil liberties and opposing torture. Their worldviews hadn’t changed. That being said, our research makes clear that fear benefits Republicans in a worldview divided system. Opinions creep to the right, at least for a time.
Sure, there is partisan media on the left, but its audience is much smaller and it lacks misinformation peddlers like Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones. Why the much higher demand on the right? We think the answer must lie partially in the individual differences between liberals and conservatives.
The most likely reason would be a differential need for what psychologists call cognitive closure. Those we consider having fixed worldviews have a greater need for closure which suggests a greater need to avoid cognitive dissonance. They therefore are more likely to believe information that confirms their worldview. These differences may drive the supply of misinformation coming from political elites to some degree.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/18/18139556/republicans-democrats-partisanship-ideology-philosophy-psychology-marc-hetherington
There's a giant mushroom in Michigan and I want to eat it
2,500 years old and weighing 400 tonnes, the obvious question is... is it yummy ?
http://va.newsrepublic.net/s/NFTZjUp
http://va.newsrepublic.net/s/NFTZjUp
The EU was just not that important to Britain until we made it so
A long and very detailed statistical analysis of what Britons currently think of the political situtaion. The second chart is possibly the most interesting.
Now, obviously the importance of the EU is going to increase because of the referendum. But the magnitude of the increase is striking - as is, especially, how low down the scale it was beforehand. While it had occasional, brief flares to as high as a few percent or so, most of the time it previously hovered around zero. It wasn't even remotely a major concern until we made it so. All this hoo-hah is over an issue we clearly don't actually care that much about - its total dominance of the political field is wholly artificial.
Other interesting findings :
- Whatever Michael Twerpface Gove might think, experts are by far and away the most trusted demographics : nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists and judges are all "generally trusted" by over 80% of the population, whereas journalists are at a mere 26% and politicians at a deplorable 19%.
- 49% of people think the economy will get worse in the short-term due to Brexit, but 55% believe it will improve on the longer term (5-10 years).
- 59% think leaving the EU will allow Britain to make better decisions for itself.
- Immigration is seen as more positive but still too high. 41% of those who are now less concerned about immigration are only so because they think it has fallen or will fall, while 39% do so because they now feel better informed about the benefits of immigration.
Now, obviously the importance of the EU is going to increase because of the referendum. But the magnitude of the increase is striking - as is, especially, how low down the scale it was beforehand. While it had occasional, brief flares to as high as a few percent or so, most of the time it previously hovered around zero. It wasn't even remotely a major concern until we made it so. All this hoo-hah is over an issue we clearly don't actually care that much about - its total dominance of the political field is wholly artificial.
Other interesting findings :
- Whatever Michael Twerpface Gove might think, experts are by far and away the most trusted demographics : nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists and judges are all "generally trusted" by over 80% of the population, whereas journalists are at a mere 26% and politicians at a deplorable 19%.
- 49% of people think the economy will get worse in the short-term due to Brexit, but 55% believe it will improve on the longer term (5-10 years).
- 59% think leaving the EU will allow Britain to make better decisions for itself.
- Immigration is seen as more positive but still too high. 41% of those who are now less concerned about immigration are only so because they think it has fallen or will fall, while 39% do so because they now feel better informed about the benefits of immigration.
The State of the Nation 2018
Get in touch With the year nearly at an end, we have reflected on the highlights (and lowlights) of 2018 to bring together our thoughts on the current mood of the nation.
Corbyn simply doesn't understand
This man just doesn't get it.
Originally shared by Joerg Fliege
The Labour policy on Brexit continues to be: there will be Brexit, but we will get more unicorns from Brussels.
(The policy itself is not the news; the news, in a fashion, is that Labour still has not pivoted towards a Remain position.)
Under these circumstances, we have to entertain again the possibility of a hard Brexit. If that is the case, would we prefer
(a) a Tory-led Singapore-on-Thames ultraliberal globalist Brexit, or
(b) a Labour-led socialist utopia Brexit?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/21/jeremy-corbyn-labour-policy-leaving-eu
Originally shared by Joerg Fliege
The Labour policy on Brexit continues to be: there will be Brexit, but we will get more unicorns from Brussels.
(The policy itself is not the news; the news, in a fashion, is that Labour still has not pivoted towards a Remain position.)
Under these circumstances, we have to entertain again the possibility of a hard Brexit. If that is the case, would we prefer
(a) a Tory-led Singapore-on-Thames ultraliberal globalist Brexit, or
(b) a Labour-led socialist utopia Brexit?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/dec/21/jeremy-corbyn-labour-policy-leaving-eu
Friday, 21 December 2018
Thursday, 20 December 2018
Talent-luck : time to go mobile
Time to go mobile
It occurred to me that something similar might result if instead of agents having the ability to make their own luck, they simply moved towards good opportunities and away from bad ones. In reality you can turn some events to your advantage but not others, but you can also move to areas where there's a greater chance of success[1] than in deprived slums[2]. The effect, in this vastly over-simplified model, should be the same.
[1] Like a formula 1 racing track.
[2] Like Stevenage.
For a while I was toying with the idea of keeping the agent and event distributions similar to the standard case, i.e. random, and then gridding the event distributions to find the closest local maxima to each agent. But that seems complicated and would likely be very slow. Instead, I've gone for a simpler approach. Here, all the events in the left half of the world (blue in the talent-wealth plot) are initially bad while all those in the right (green) are good. They still move around randomly so there's a little bit of mixing, but not very much.
This makes it easy to set the agent's movement direction. By default they move randomly. However, there's a chance (proportional to their talent) that they will instead move significantly to the right or left instead. Agents with talent more than 2 sigma above the mean are guaranteed to move to the right, while those with talent more than 2 sigma below the mean are guaranteed to move left, with a linear interpolation in between. Essentially, talentless people are Darwin Award candidates who actively seek out opportunities to lose everything, whereas the highly talented people always seek out positive events. The point here is to illustrate an extreme case, not to show anything comparable to a real-world scenario (which would be ludicrously more complicated).
This is at the stage of "sort of working", but I just don't have time to sit down and think about what's going on and what should be changed right now (this might make for some nice animations eventually). What we see, though, is a more meritocratic distribution of wealth than in the standard case, with the most talented possessing a much larger fraction of the total money, by a different mechanism to the case of talent actually affecting the luck status of events the agents encounter. The distribution of wealth is roughly a power law. The talent-wealth plot, well, that's less pleasant. I have to think of ways to tinker with this to get something more linear. I suspect the movement speed of the agents needs to be adjusted.
Some preliminary thoughts in a new section of the main document :
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.g5576cfgvsjy
Tuesday, 18 December 2018
Fake mummies as old as the real thing
At least with fake mummies you have to put some real effort into it. Though a fake mummy that's 4,000 years old is probably about as interesting as the real thing... I wonder what they'll make of Trump and Alex Jones 4,000 years from now.
Originally shared by Event Horizon
There's not much information at the link. I saw a story on DeutscheWelle TV news a few minutes ago. Perhaps it is fake news ? 😆
Something more for the archaeology of the present moment: the amplitude of complexity and technological depth augments inversely to the diminishing cycles of frequency - this aperture of frequency being a moving window upon (and as) a fleeting present moment.
Wilfrid Sellar's notion of "manifest image" is apt - that bundle of beliefs, interpretations and notions with which we weave meaning out of (or as) our world; a semiotic vocabulary with which to cultivate or inhabit a personal or shared narrative space. If the scope and range of living memory and cultural or semiotic relevance is shrinking, pari passu the technological and conceptual means of sophisticated investigation and definition, it may just be that any signification or aspiration to meaning and purpose is better than none at all. In a rapidly accelerating frame, the vacuum of metaphysical or ideological anchors may invoke an anxiety and desperation to seek conceptual purchase on just about any thing at all, true or demonstrably not.
Fakes news may be old news but technological sophistication breeds a deep and (generally unacknowledged) self-propagating insecurity, itself a rationale, platform and foundation upon which artifice and falsehood thrive.
I may have to unpack this extensively later but, and perhaps ironically, I doubt I will have the available time with which to do so...
#FrameDragging
https://www.deutschland.de/en/news/exhibition-fakes-in-archaeology
Originally shared by Event Horizon
There's not much information at the link. I saw a story on DeutscheWelle TV news a few minutes ago. Perhaps it is fake news ? 😆
Something more for the archaeology of the present moment: the amplitude of complexity and technological depth augments inversely to the diminishing cycles of frequency - this aperture of frequency being a moving window upon (and as) a fleeting present moment.
Wilfrid Sellar's notion of "manifest image" is apt - that bundle of beliefs, interpretations and notions with which we weave meaning out of (or as) our world; a semiotic vocabulary with which to cultivate or inhabit a personal or shared narrative space. If the scope and range of living memory and cultural or semiotic relevance is shrinking, pari passu the technological and conceptual means of sophisticated investigation and definition, it may just be that any signification or aspiration to meaning and purpose is better than none at all. In a rapidly accelerating frame, the vacuum of metaphysical or ideological anchors may invoke an anxiety and desperation to seek conceptual purchase on just about any thing at all, true or demonstrably not.
Fakes news may be old news but technological sophistication breeds a deep and (generally unacknowledged) self-propagating insecurity, itself a rationale, platform and foundation upon which artifice and falsehood thrive.
I may have to unpack this extensively later but, and perhaps ironically, I doubt I will have the available time with which to do so...
#FrameDragging
https://www.deutschland.de/en/news/exhibition-fakes-in-archaeology
Becoming the exploiters
This is about a plausible explanation as any I've heard. Found on the internet.
An electric tractor with no batteries
Next up, electric cars with really long cords trams.
(Though actually, why not have tram-style overhead lines for the tractors ?)
http://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/17/john-deere-unveils-an-autonomous-electric-tractor-with-a-really-long-extension-cord/
(Though actually, why not have tram-style overhead lines for the tractors ?)
http://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/17/john-deere-unveils-an-autonomous-electric-tractor-with-a-really-long-extension-cord/
Monday, 17 December 2018
Using bacteria to create carbon-negative bricks
One of those trying to drum up greater support for such alternative cements is Ginger Krieg Dosier, co-founder and CEO of BioMason - a start-up in North Carolina that uses trillions of bacteria to grow bio-concrete bricks. The technique, which involves placing sand in moulds and injecting it with microorganisms, initiates a process similar to the one that creates coral.
"I have a long fascination with marine cements and structures," explains Ms Krieg Dosier, a trained architect who was surprised to find no real green alternatives to bricks and masonry when she began research at an architectural firm more than 10 years ago.
The discovery led her to create her own solution, which, after years of development, now takes only four days. It happens at room temperature, without the need for fossil fuels or calcination - two of the main sources of the cement industry's CO2 emissions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46455844
"I have a long fascination with marine cements and structures," explains Ms Krieg Dosier, a trained architect who was surprised to find no real green alternatives to bricks and masonry when she began research at an architectural firm more than 10 years ago.
The discovery led her to create her own solution, which, after years of development, now takes only four days. It happens at room temperature, without the need for fossil fuels or calcination - two of the main sources of the cement industry's CO2 emissions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46455844
Talent-luck updates : a false meritocracy
Added a new section including the last update plus a little more. This one shows that it's possible to get something that looks a lot like a meritocracy - even a really extreme one - but actually is nothing of the sort : "...it’s more analogous to finding all the rich people and giving them some intensive training whilst also finding the poor people and making them watch Jeremy Kyle all day until their brains fall out. It may look like a meritocracy, but it clearly isn’t."
I think the end is in sight for this one. The only additional thing I'd like to try is to have the more talented agents move towards areas of greater event concentration. That would make for a reasonably complete examination of this two-parameter model. Then I'll try and publish it...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.6ywyacchet0o
I think the end is in sight for this one. The only additional thing I'd like to try is to have the more talented agents move towards areas of greater event concentration. That would make for a reasonably complete examination of this two-parameter model. Then I'll try and publish it...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.6ywyacchet0o
Do parachutes prevent deaths ?
A very interesting and novel study examining the effects of strongly nonlinear impact dynamics and unwarranted statistical extrapolations. A late entry, but the best paper I've read all year, hands down. Worth reading in its entirety including the acknowledgements.
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
Bloodhound rescued !
Yay !!
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
Bloodhound supersonic car project saved (Fantastic news!)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-46591860
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
Bloodhound supersonic car project saved (Fantastic news!)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-46591860
Case study of the replication crisis : science is just frickin' hard
This is about the so-called replication crisis in psychology. In this case study, it appears that it's nothing to do with poor analysis techniques at all. It's simply because people are really frickin' complex. Cultural influence and self-belief matters enormously and finding genuine universal properties is hard. Maybe some studies really were badly done, but this one looks like a case of things working exactly the way they're supposed to : a basic claim is made, then further findings start to reveal the nuances of the situation.
As anyone who has ever tried a diet knows, exerting willpower can be exhausting. After a whole day spent carefully avoiding the snack machine and attempting to take mindful joy in plain baked chicken and celery sticks, the siren call of cookies after dinner may be just too much to bear. This idea — that exercising self-control gets harder the more you have to do it — is called ego depletion, and it’s one of the most well-known concepts in social psychology. There are popular books on it. Most of us have probably have personal experience with it.
But what if a huge study of thousands of people found no evidence for ego depletion? What if some cultures actually show reverse ego depletion — where exerting willpower actually makes exerting more willpower easier? What if I told you that ego depletion does exist — but only if you believe it does?
“In psychology, nothing happens all the time. We find stuff that happens sometimes. That’s about as well as we can do.” People have bad days and good ones, sleepless nights and restful nights, good and bad childhoods. “I think the scientific question should be, ‘what are the conditions under which [ego depletion] does and does not happen?’” Baumeister says.
This idea — that sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t — isn’t particularly satisfying. Most of us were taught that, in science, a scientist forms a hypothesis, tests it and then throws it out if it doesn’t work. That’s what the philosopher of science Karl Popper thought, says Janet Stemwedel, herself a philosopher of science at San Jose State University in California. In this view, scientists go out every day and “throw hypotheses in the deep end of the pool to see if they can swim.” By Popper’s standards, if ego depletion fails to replicate, it’s a failed hypothesis. It deserves to drown.
I think everyone knows that abject falsification is an unusual extreme. Much depends on how specific the claim being made is. If it's that "ego depletion is a universal phenomenon and a fundamental feature of the human brain", then that claim is clearly BS and deserves to be shot down (certain issues with the measurement techniques notwithstanding). But if it's the more interesting and vague claim that "ego depletion is a thing that happens sometimes", then saying that it doesn't always happen so the theory is wrong is itself BS : it would be neglecting a very interesting finding about how strong our subjective beliefs influence us. It's right to make claims as specific as possible so that they can be testable, but there's a huge difference between examining the fundamental mechanism proposed and the conditions under which it operates. This happens in physics as well as psychology.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/05/i-told-you-he-was-tricksy.html
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/willpower-ego-depletion-social-psychology-replication
As anyone who has ever tried a diet knows, exerting willpower can be exhausting. After a whole day spent carefully avoiding the snack machine and attempting to take mindful joy in plain baked chicken and celery sticks, the siren call of cookies after dinner may be just too much to bear. This idea — that exercising self-control gets harder the more you have to do it — is called ego depletion, and it’s one of the most well-known concepts in social psychology. There are popular books on it. Most of us have probably have personal experience with it.
But what if a huge study of thousands of people found no evidence for ego depletion? What if some cultures actually show reverse ego depletion — where exerting willpower actually makes exerting more willpower easier? What if I told you that ego depletion does exist — but only if you believe it does?
“In psychology, nothing happens all the time. We find stuff that happens sometimes. That’s about as well as we can do.” People have bad days and good ones, sleepless nights and restful nights, good and bad childhoods. “I think the scientific question should be, ‘what are the conditions under which [ego depletion] does and does not happen?’” Baumeister says.
This idea — that sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t — isn’t particularly satisfying. Most of us were taught that, in science, a scientist forms a hypothesis, tests it and then throws it out if it doesn’t work. That’s what the philosopher of science Karl Popper thought, says Janet Stemwedel, herself a philosopher of science at San Jose State University in California. In this view, scientists go out every day and “throw hypotheses in the deep end of the pool to see if they can swim.” By Popper’s standards, if ego depletion fails to replicate, it’s a failed hypothesis. It deserves to drown.
I think everyone knows that abject falsification is an unusual extreme. Much depends on how specific the claim being made is. If it's that "ego depletion is a universal phenomenon and a fundamental feature of the human brain", then that claim is clearly BS and deserves to be shot down (certain issues with the measurement techniques notwithstanding). But if it's the more interesting and vague claim that "ego depletion is a thing that happens sometimes", then saying that it doesn't always happen so the theory is wrong is itself BS : it would be neglecting a very interesting finding about how strong our subjective beliefs influence us. It's right to make claims as specific as possible so that they can be testable, but there's a huge difference between examining the fundamental mechanism proposed and the conditions under which it operates. This happens in physics as well as psychology.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/05/i-told-you-he-was-tricksy.html
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/willpower-ego-depletion-social-psychology-replication
Sunday, 16 December 2018
Talent-luck : allowing talent to vary
More fun with the talent-luck simulations...
https://repl.it/@RhysTaylor1/TalentVersusLuck-1
I was wondering what would happen if talent was allowed to vary. Most people are capable of learning and it's often said that mistakes are more valuable than successes. So I tried implementing a variety of ways in which talent can change, including the two examples shown here. The basic approach is to allow talent to vary whenever an event occurs. In these examples, talent increases either when an agent is unlucky (top) or lucky (bottom). The effects of talent are limited in both cases to allowing agents to exploit lucky opportunities, the standard behaviour proposed in the original model - the only thing which varies is the distribution of talent.
The top plot shows that if talent increases when agent's "learn" from their mistakes, then there's a an anti correlation between talent and wealth. The least talented (faint red line in the left hand plot) possess a roughly constant share of the total wealth whereas the most talented generally lose out. The slope of the wealth distribution is the same as in the non-varying talent case while the distribution of talent can be seen to be non-Gaussian at the end (I capped the maximum at 1.0, hence the spike). If anything, this mock-society is anti-meritocratic, rewarding the stupid people more than the brightest.
In constant, if good events are rewarded, the effects are totally different. The wealth of the most talented evolves in almost exact parallel with that of the richest (solid red line in the leftmost plot) whereas the least talented always lose out.
When I saw this, I thought, "hmmm, that's funny", and then I had to go out. It was a very counter-intuitive finding. Since talent plays only a very limited role in this situation at any timestep, I didn't expect to be much of a shift. I certainly didn't think that increasing talent based on good results could result in a strongly meritocratic but highly unequal result whereas learning from experience should make the most intelligent people fail miserably.
A few hours later while walking home in the rain and rather tipsy, I realised what was going on, and I think this is a nice example - if more were needed ! - of correlation not equalling causation. I know that talent has only a very little role in this setup, and that doesn't change throughout the simulation. Consider the top set of plots. Here, every time a bad event happens, the agent loses money. But their talent is also increased. The more money they lose, the more talent they gain. The role of talent is so limited that this doesn't actually help them very much at all : sure, they're now better exploiting good opportunities when they do come along, but if those don't happen then they just keep getting poorer and smarter. The overall trend is far more reflective of the distribution of talent than it is of the effects of talent. If talent is allowed to affect the results of negative events and the status of the events themselves, then a positive correlation re-emerges.
I hope by now it's clear that how this applies to the real world is anyone's guess. I'm using these labels of talent and wealth more for convenience than anything else - they should not be taken literally, the model is nowhere near that sophisticated.
The Soviet 80s prototype for a media centre
Designed in 1986, SPHINX (again an acronym, this time for “Super Functional Integrated Communication System”) wasn’t just a computer, as it might seem, but a complex system for home automation, digital entertaining, communication, telecommuting, and even telemedicine. The project was commissioned by the State Council For Science and Technology, directly controlled by the Soviet Government, to VIINITE with the intention of creating “a revolutionary computer”.
The core of the system was a modular “memory unit” consisting of a CPU to which three triangular memory expansion modules could be connected. Such configuration was intended to allow different users – each member of a family, for example – to use different programs at the same time, in multitasking.
The system was intended to replace all the technological devices in a house, computers, telephone, television, radio, audio system, and so on. To do that, a number of peripherals were included.
– A large flat-panel display and TV with two spherical satellite loudspeakers, for home entertainment, and video-conference.
– One (or more) desktop unit – combining a computer and a video and multimedia player – with a keyboard, a 19” 15:9 ratio monitor, two detachable flat loudspeakers, wireless headphones, and an optional telephone. Such a unit did not have a mouse, replaced by a sort of d-pad with four triangular directional buttons.
– A handheld remote control with a small LCD screen, a microphone and a speaker which can also be turned into a palm computer.
– A number of futuristic wearable devices (never prototyped) including a smartwatch, smartcards, and augmented reality sunglasses.
Via Ralph H.
Originally shared by Inexhibit
The legendary #SPHINX, the high-tech system designed by Russian engineer and designer Dmitry Azrikan in 1986 with which the #SovietUnion tried (without success) to subvert the #computer world.
https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/project-sphinx-when-the-ussr-tried-to-change-the-computer/
The core of the system was a modular “memory unit” consisting of a CPU to which three triangular memory expansion modules could be connected. Such configuration was intended to allow different users – each member of a family, for example – to use different programs at the same time, in multitasking.
The system was intended to replace all the technological devices in a house, computers, telephone, television, radio, audio system, and so on. To do that, a number of peripherals were included.
– A large flat-panel display and TV with two spherical satellite loudspeakers, for home entertainment, and video-conference.
– One (or more) desktop unit – combining a computer and a video and multimedia player – with a keyboard, a 19” 15:9 ratio monitor, two detachable flat loudspeakers, wireless headphones, and an optional telephone. Such a unit did not have a mouse, replaced by a sort of d-pad with four triangular directional buttons.
– A handheld remote control with a small LCD screen, a microphone and a speaker which can also be turned into a palm computer.
– A number of futuristic wearable devices (never prototyped) including a smartwatch, smartcards, and augmented reality sunglasses.
Via Ralph H.
Originally shared by Inexhibit
The legendary #SPHINX, the high-tech system designed by Russian engineer and designer Dmitry Azrikan in 1986 with which the #SovietUnion tried (without success) to subvert the #computer world.
https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/project-sphinx-when-the-ussr-tried-to-change-the-computer/
Where exactly is "the edge of space" ?
In the mid-20th century, scientists tried to set that limit at how low you can go and still sustain an orbit — an altitude known as the Karman line, named after aerospace engineer Theodore von Karman. At some point atmospheric drag becomes too big a factor to sustain even a highly elliptical orbit — one that swings in close and then out much farther.
For years, the official Karman line has been set at 100 kilometers. But that was not the value Karman set for it. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Acta Astronautica, McDowell recalculated the Karman line, and found it’s considerably closer — just close enough to make SpaceShipTwo a space-faring craft.
When North Korea launched a missile last year, reportedly over Japanese airspace, it was actually higher than the International Space Station, McDowell said. “Of course it’s in space, and it doesn’t make sense to say it’s in Japanese airspace,” he said, but without an international agreement about the boundary between air and space, such confusion is inevitable.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-15/virgin-galactic-s-spaceshiptwo-may-or-may-not-have-gone-to-space
For years, the official Karman line has been set at 100 kilometers. But that was not the value Karman set for it. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Acta Astronautica, McDowell recalculated the Karman line, and found it’s considerably closer — just close enough to make SpaceShipTwo a space-faring craft.
When North Korea launched a missile last year, reportedly over Japanese airspace, it was actually higher than the International Space Station, McDowell said. “Of course it’s in space, and it doesn’t make sense to say it’s in Japanese airspace,” he said, but without an international agreement about the boundary between air and space, such confusion is inevitable.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-15/virgin-galactic-s-spaceshiptwo-may-or-may-not-have-gone-to-space
Relative comparisons make fighting racism seem harder than it really is
I somehow didn't connect this to racism when the press release came out.
My guess would be it cuts both ways. Genuine racists may get worse when their perceived "problems" diminish : removing the foreigners (or minoritites or whatever group is supposed to be a problem) won't make them more content, but will actually make them think things are worse than before. Conversely, if racism itself diminishes, then those trying to fight racism won't perceive this either, and suddenly the song Baby It's Cold Outside becomes worse than the Holocaust.
The idea that concepts depend on their reference class isn’t new. A short basketball player is tall and a poor American is rich. One might have thought, however, that a blue dot is a blue dot. Blue can be defined by wavelength so unlike a relative concept like short or rich there is some objective reality behind blue even if the boundaries are vague. Nevertheless, in a thought-provoking new paper in Science the all-star team of Levari, Gilbert, Wilson, Sievers, Amodio and Wheatley show that what we identify as blue expands as the prevalence of blue decreases.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html
My guess would be it cuts both ways. Genuine racists may get worse when their perceived "problems" diminish : removing the foreigners (or minoritites or whatever group is supposed to be a problem) won't make them more content, but will actually make them think things are worse than before. Conversely, if racism itself diminishes, then those trying to fight racism won't perceive this either, and suddenly the song Baby It's Cold Outside becomes worse than the Holocaust.
The idea that concepts depend on their reference class isn’t new. A short basketball player is tall and a poor American is rich. One might have thought, however, that a blue dot is a blue dot. Blue can be defined by wavelength so unlike a relative concept like short or rich there is some objective reality behind blue even if the boundaries are vague. Nevertheless, in a thought-provoking new paper in Science the all-star team of Levari, Gilbert, Wilson, Sievers, Amodio and Wheatley show that what we identify as blue expands as the prevalence of blue decreases.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html
Sometimes making things harder makes them more popular
On how cognitive ease makes things worse in some situations and possible solutions.
The frictionless design of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which makes it trivially easy to broadcast messages to huge audiences, has been the source of innumerable problems, including foreign influence campaigns, viral misinformation and ethnic violence abroad. YouTube’s most famous frictionless feature — the auto-playing function that starts another video as soon as the previous one has finished — has created a rabbit-hole effect that often leads viewers down a path to increasingly extreme content.
What if Facebook made it harder for viral misinformation to spread by adding algorithmic “speed bumps” that would delay the spread of a controversial post above a certain threshold until fact checkers evaluated it?
Or if YouTube gave users a choice between two videos when their video finished, instead of auto-playing the next recommendation?
This approach might seem overly paternalistic. But the alternative — a tech infrastructure optimized to ask as little of us as possible, with few circuit breakers to limit the impact of abuse and addiction — is frightening. After all, “friction” is just another word for “effort,” and it’s what makes us capable of critical thought and self-reflection. Without it, we would be the blob people from “Wall-E,” sucking down Soylent while watching Netflix on our self-driving recliners.
I'd be prepared to endorse considerably more "paternalistic" approaches than those. If you design a system whereby users are actively encouraged to take the easiest approach regardless of the consequences, it should come as no surprise to find that's exactly what they do. People are not sheep : they can and do think for themselves, but they - we - are also, like it or not, part of a system. It does absolutely no good to merely tell people to be more skeptical or whatever, you've got to make it easier (and rewarding) for them to do this. Perhaps there could be some easier way to search for the content of posts on fact-checking websites and/or some way to gamify skepticism. For all the faults of social media, designing a system which utilises both cognitive ease and difficulties is not a simple task.
Tulerie’s co-founder Merri Smith told me a fascinating story from the company’s early days. In the beginning, Ms. Smith said, the company invited women to join via a brief Google survey, which it emailed to hundreds of prospective members. But only one person filled out the survey. So Ms. Smith and her co-founder decided to try a more complicated approach. Anyone who wanted to join had to conduct a brief video call with a company employee first.
Logically, the new strategy should have failed. But it was a huge hit. Prospective members flooded the invite list, filling up the company’s interview schedule weeks in advance. By creating a more complex sign-up, Tulerie had signalled that its service was special and worth the effort.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/technology/tech-friction-frictionless.html
The frictionless design of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which makes it trivially easy to broadcast messages to huge audiences, has been the source of innumerable problems, including foreign influence campaigns, viral misinformation and ethnic violence abroad. YouTube’s most famous frictionless feature — the auto-playing function that starts another video as soon as the previous one has finished — has created a rabbit-hole effect that often leads viewers down a path to increasingly extreme content.
What if Facebook made it harder for viral misinformation to spread by adding algorithmic “speed bumps” that would delay the spread of a controversial post above a certain threshold until fact checkers evaluated it?
Or if YouTube gave users a choice between two videos when their video finished, instead of auto-playing the next recommendation?
This approach might seem overly paternalistic. But the alternative — a tech infrastructure optimized to ask as little of us as possible, with few circuit breakers to limit the impact of abuse and addiction — is frightening. After all, “friction” is just another word for “effort,” and it’s what makes us capable of critical thought and self-reflection. Without it, we would be the blob people from “Wall-E,” sucking down Soylent while watching Netflix on our self-driving recliners.
I'd be prepared to endorse considerably more "paternalistic" approaches than those. If you design a system whereby users are actively encouraged to take the easiest approach regardless of the consequences, it should come as no surprise to find that's exactly what they do. People are not sheep : they can and do think for themselves, but they - we - are also, like it or not, part of a system. It does absolutely no good to merely tell people to be more skeptical or whatever, you've got to make it easier (and rewarding) for them to do this. Perhaps there could be some easier way to search for the content of posts on fact-checking websites and/or some way to gamify skepticism. For all the faults of social media, designing a system which utilises both cognitive ease and difficulties is not a simple task.
Tulerie’s co-founder Merri Smith told me a fascinating story from the company’s early days. In the beginning, Ms. Smith said, the company invited women to join via a brief Google survey, which it emailed to hundreds of prospective members. But only one person filled out the survey. So Ms. Smith and her co-founder decided to try a more complicated approach. Anyone who wanted to join had to conduct a brief video call with a company employee first.
Logically, the new strategy should have failed. But it was a huge hit. Prospective members flooded the invite list, filling up the company’s interview schedule weeks in advance. By creating a more complex sign-up, Tulerie had signalled that its service was special and worth the effort.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/technology/tech-friction-frictionless.html
Saturday, 15 December 2018
The feedback effects of logical reasoning
Is there any point thinking about what to do? It is often said that our judgements and behaviour are really caused by immediate intuitions and gut feelings, with reasoning happening only afterwards. But that claim misses an important point. Experiments also indicate that reasoning shapes the cognitive system that produces future responses. The more we reason that something is good or bad, right or wrong, attractive or unattractive, the more influential that attitude becomes over our intuitions and gut feelings.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.
De Beauvoir argued that this repeated endorsement of the same goals and values embeds them into our cognitive systems through sedimentation. Because girls and boys are subject to different expectations, we develop gendered sets of goals and values. De Beauvoir argued that the same process also embeds gender stereotypes into our outlooks.
The interesting question, I guess (well one of many) is how much thinking about logic and analysis and skepticism really engenders those qualities. I can easily accept that moral ideologies are shaped in a very large part by environment - in fact I find it difficult to see how it could be otherwise. But sincere self-skepticism and unbiased curiosity, those I'm not so sure about. It's not at all obvious to me what makes some people into intelligent but uncritical and only able to rationalise their beliefs, while others really value the truth regardless of what they'd prefer (of course, we all do both - it's a matter of degree).
https://aeon.co/ideas/sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes
Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.
De Beauvoir argued that this repeated endorsement of the same goals and values embeds them into our cognitive systems through sedimentation. Because girls and boys are subject to different expectations, we develop gendered sets of goals and values. De Beauvoir argued that the same process also embeds gender stereotypes into our outlooks.
The interesting question, I guess (well one of many) is how much thinking about logic and analysis and skepticism really engenders those qualities. I can easily accept that moral ideologies are shaped in a very large part by environment - in fact I find it difficult to see how it could be otherwise. But sincere self-skepticism and unbiased curiosity, those I'm not so sure about. It's not at all obvious to me what makes some people into intelligent but uncritical and only able to rationalise their beliefs, while others really value the truth regardless of what they'd prefer (of course, we all do both - it's a matter of degree).
https://aeon.co/ideas/sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes
Forever blowing energy-saving bubbles
Mechanical sails and air lubrication.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-46540862/smart-ships-using-the-wind-and-air-bubbles-to-save-fuel
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-46540862/smart-ships-using-the-wind-and-air-bubbles-to-save-fuel
Brilliantly bonkers, but better bee backpacks brings bountiful...business ?
Brilliantly bonkers, but better bee backpacks brings bountiful... business ?
Originally shared by Eli Fennell
Bumblebees with Bugged Backbacks Beat Bug Bots with Batteries
Researchers at the University of Washington have equipped Bumblebees with sensor backpacks, in an alternative approach to building insect-sized drones for the same purposes.
The ability to equip thousands of small drones, or conversely to equip small living creatures, with small sensors is potentially invaluable for applications such as large scale agriculture, by efficiently gathering thousands upon thousands of individual data points such as location, temperature, and humidity.
Insect sized drones currently suffer from extremely limited battery life, operating for a half hour or less at a time. Flying insects like Bees are much more power efficient. Previous research, however, has utilized GPS chips attached to the insects to gather location data, which in itself is inefficient, exhausting their portable batteries very quickly.
This new approach removes the GPS chips from the equation by instead calculating location data by measuring Radio Frequency signals from wireless Access Points near the hive, which both download and transmit data from the sensor backpacks on the bees, as well as wirelessly charging their batteries, whenever they return within range of the Access Point.
While true insect-sized mechanical drones may some day become a reality, in the meantime it seems likely that approaches such as this, which utilize living insects and other insect-sized animals in combination with other technologies, are likely to be more successful in the near term.
Living things are typically far more energy efficient than any current human technologies, thereby allowing researchers to focus on designing efficient sensor tech, without worrying about the energy costs of physical locomotion.
#BlindMeWithScience #Bionics #Drones
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/12/boffins_build_bugged_bugs/
Originally shared by Eli Fennell
Bumblebees with Bugged Backbacks Beat Bug Bots with Batteries
Researchers at the University of Washington have equipped Bumblebees with sensor backpacks, in an alternative approach to building insect-sized drones for the same purposes.
The ability to equip thousands of small drones, or conversely to equip small living creatures, with small sensors is potentially invaluable for applications such as large scale agriculture, by efficiently gathering thousands upon thousands of individual data points such as location, temperature, and humidity.
Insect sized drones currently suffer from extremely limited battery life, operating for a half hour or less at a time. Flying insects like Bees are much more power efficient. Previous research, however, has utilized GPS chips attached to the insects to gather location data, which in itself is inefficient, exhausting their portable batteries very quickly.
This new approach removes the GPS chips from the equation by instead calculating location data by measuring Radio Frequency signals from wireless Access Points near the hive, which both download and transmit data from the sensor backpacks on the bees, as well as wirelessly charging their batteries, whenever they return within range of the Access Point.
While true insect-sized mechanical drones may some day become a reality, in the meantime it seems likely that approaches such as this, which utilize living insects and other insect-sized animals in combination with other technologies, are likely to be more successful in the near term.
Living things are typically far more energy efficient than any current human technologies, thereby allowing researchers to focus on designing efficient sensor tech, without worrying about the energy costs of physical locomotion.
#BlindMeWithScience #Bionics #Drones
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/12/boffins_build_bugged_bugs/
Anonymity reduces gender bias for observing proposals
Last year, despite efforts made to reduce bias, proposals for medium and large programs on the Hubble Space Telescope had an acceptance rate of 24% for programs led by men and 13% for programs led by women, an imbalance largely in keeping with the telescope's history. This year, in one of the most competitive cycles ever, that suddenly changed to a near-equivalent 8.7% acceptance rate for women and an 8.0% acceptance rate for men, reversing the trend seen over the past 15 cycles. What happened? Anonymized proposals.
Interesting but unsurprising. I'd be more interested to see what happens with regards to prominent researchers versus novices. Are people being awarded time essentially because they've already been awarded time, or are they more successful simply because they write better proposals ? My guess would be more variability in the proposal quality of famous researchers. That is, if you're well-known, you probably do have a better chance of getting a lower-quality proposal accepted, but on average your proposals tend to be better.
https://www.metafilter.com/178225/Focus-on-the-Science-Not-the-Scientist
Interesting but unsurprising. I'd be more interested to see what happens with regards to prominent researchers versus novices. Are people being awarded time essentially because they've already been awarded time, or are they more successful simply because they write better proposals ? My guess would be more variability in the proposal quality of famous researchers. That is, if you're well-known, you probably do have a better chance of getting a lower-quality proposal accepted, but on average your proposals tend to be better.
https://www.metafilter.com/178225/Focus-on-the-Science-Not-the-Scientist
Friday, 14 December 2018
The Irish border has its own wonderful Twitter account
The Irish border is personally unhappy about Brexit.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-46459904
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-46459904
Thursday, 13 December 2018
Virgin Galactic at the edge of space
The latest test flight by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic successfully rocketed to space and back. The firm's SpaceShipTwo passenger rocket ship reached a height of 82.7km, beyond the altitude at which space is said to begin.
The company said the space ship's motor burned for 60 seconds, travelling at 2.9 times the speed of sound as it gained height. The rocket carried two pilots and a mannequin named Annie as a stand-in passenger, as well as four research experiments for NASA. It did not breach the 100km Karman Line, where Earth's atmosphere ends.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46550862
The company said the space ship's motor burned for 60 seconds, travelling at 2.9 times the speed of sound as it gained height. The rocket carried two pilots and a mannequin named Annie as a stand-in passenger, as well as four research experiments for NASA. It did not breach the 100km Karman Line, where Earth's atmosphere ends.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46550862
Wednesday, 12 December 2018
Population mountains
Visualising cities by population heightfields. Much better to see it than describe it.
What stands out is each city’s form, a unique mountain that might be like the steep peaks of lower Manhattan or the sprawling hills of suburban Atlanta. When I first saw a city in 3D, I had a feel for its population size that I had never experienced before.
That feeling goes a long way to improve my own geographic instincts. In 1993, there were 14 cities with over 10 million people. Today, 20 additional cities qualify (and another 11 will by 2030), with many sprouting from farmland in our lifetimes. Unless you’ve visited one of these new cities of 10 million people or tracked its growth closely, its scale can be hard to envision.
https://buff.ly/2AZAUKh
What stands out is each city’s form, a unique mountain that might be like the steep peaks of lower Manhattan or the sprawling hills of suburban Atlanta. When I first saw a city in 3D, I had a feel for its population size that I had never experienced before.
That feeling goes a long way to improve my own geographic instincts. In 1993, there were 14 cities with over 10 million people. Today, 20 additional cities qualify (and another 11 will by 2030), with many sprouting from farmland in our lifetimes. Unless you’ve visited one of these new cities of 10 million people or tracked its growth closely, its scale can be hard to envision.
https://buff.ly/2AZAUKh
A huge Viking camp discovered in England
Professor Dawn Hadley, who led the research from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Archaeology stated: “The Vikings’ camp at Torksey was much more than just a handful of hardy warriors – this was a huge base, larger than most contemporary towns, complete with traders, families, feasting, and entertainment. From what has been found at the site, we know they were fixing their boats there and melting down looted gold and silver to make ingots – or bars of metal they used to trade. Metal detectorists have also discovered more than 300 lead game pieces, suggesting the Vikings, including, women and children, were spending a lot of time playing games to pass the time, waiting for spring and the start of their next offensive.”
http://www.histecho.com/archaeologists-discovered-evidence-huge-viking-camp-england/
http://www.histecho.com/archaeologists-discovered-evidence-huge-viking-camp-england/
My other statue is on Easter Island
South America’s largest trove of religious monuments and megalithic sculptures isn’t on Easter Island, nor even in Peru or Chile, as most travellers might assume. It’s Tierradentro’s 162 underground tombs carved into solid volcanic bedrock, and the more than 500 monolithic stone statues and tumuli (ancient burial mounds) surrounding the nearby town of San AgustÃn, sprinkled throughout 2,000 sq km of the serried mountains and highland plateaus of the Upper Magdalena Valley in southern Colombia.
These mementoes of an advanced, yet unknown (and unnamed), pre-Columbian, northern Andean culture had largely been off-limits during five decades of civil war. Now that the region is finally safe from Farc guerrilla activity, the awe-inspiring, yet little-known, Unesco World Heritage sites are easily visited and are guaranteed to amaze and inspire.
At the top of a large knoll, half screened by masses of overhanging foliage, we came upon a solitary statue – nicknamed Doble Yo (Double Self) – staring dead ahead, a perverse smile carved upon his lips. He wore a carved jaguar fur, its large head resting atop his own head and topped, in turn, by the skin of a crocodile. “This statue fuses male and female,” Pérez said. “It also symbolises the coupling of human and animal spirits upon which shamans relied for sorcery and power.”
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181209-south-americas-other-easter-island
These mementoes of an advanced, yet unknown (and unnamed), pre-Columbian, northern Andean culture had largely been off-limits during five decades of civil war. Now that the region is finally safe from Farc guerrilla activity, the awe-inspiring, yet little-known, Unesco World Heritage sites are easily visited and are guaranteed to amaze and inspire.
At the top of a large knoll, half screened by masses of overhanging foliage, we came upon a solitary statue – nicknamed Doble Yo (Double Self) – staring dead ahead, a perverse smile carved upon his lips. He wore a carved jaguar fur, its large head resting atop his own head and topped, in turn, by the skin of a crocodile. “This statue fuses male and female,” Pérez said. “It also symbolises the coupling of human and animal spirits upon which shamans relied for sorcery and power.”
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181209-south-americas-other-easter-island
Twenty billion tonnes of bacteria
Scientists have estimated the total amount of life on Earth that exists below ground - and it is vast. You would need a microscope to see this subterranean biosphere, however. It is made up mostly of microbes, such as bacteria and their evolutionary cousins, the archaea. Nonetheless, it represents a lot of carbon - about 15 to 23 billion tonnes of it. That is hundreds of times more carbon than is woven into all the humans on the planet.
"Something like 70% of the total number of microbes on Earth are below our feet," said Karen Lloyd from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, US. "So, this changes our perception of where we find life on Earth, from mostly on the surface in things like trees and whales and dolphins, to most of it actually being underground," she told BBC News.
The role all these organisms play in shifting carbon about the Earth is profound, according to the DCO's executive director, Bob Hazen. "You cannot understand carbon on Earth without understanding the diversity and influence of life. Cells turn over carbon - they take carbon in, they breathe it out. They do amazing things to transform their local environments," he explained. "Although the total amount of carbon in other sources is much, much larger than in life, life has a disproportionate affect on Earth's carbon cycle."
"The current known upper-limit for life is 122 degrees Celsius, which happens to be the temperature of sterilisation equipment we typically use in labs," said Dr Lloyd. "But there's no-one I know who thinks that's the theoretical limit. For example, we know some of the problems associated with high temperatures, such as the disordering of lipids and membranes, is at least partially compensated by higher pressures. Which means it's possible we could find even higher temperature organisms the deeper we go down."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46502570
"Something like 70% of the total number of microbes on Earth are below our feet," said Karen Lloyd from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, US. "So, this changes our perception of where we find life on Earth, from mostly on the surface in things like trees and whales and dolphins, to most of it actually being underground," she told BBC News.
The role all these organisms play in shifting carbon about the Earth is profound, according to the DCO's executive director, Bob Hazen. "You cannot understand carbon on Earth without understanding the diversity and influence of life. Cells turn over carbon - they take carbon in, they breathe it out. They do amazing things to transform their local environments," he explained. "Although the total amount of carbon in other sources is much, much larger than in life, life has a disproportionate affect on Earth's carbon cycle."
"The current known upper-limit for life is 122 degrees Celsius, which happens to be the temperature of sterilisation equipment we typically use in labs," said Dr Lloyd. "But there's no-one I know who thinks that's the theoretical limit. For example, we know some of the problems associated with high temperatures, such as the disordering of lipids and membranes, is at least partially compensated by higher pressures. Which means it's possible we could find even higher temperature organisms the deeper we go down."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46502570
Theresa May's confidence vote
I bet she wins. And then we're stuck with a deal everyone hates.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46535739
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46535739
Monday, 10 December 2018
Automatically translating cuneiform
The headline has nothing much to do with the article, but never mind.
I presume the logical extension of this is to include cuneiform in Google translate...
Pagé-Perron is coordinating a project to machine translate 69,000 Mesopotamian administrative records from the 21st Century BC. One of the aims is to open up the past to new research. “We have information about so many different aspects of the lives of Mesopotamian people, and we can’t really profit from the expertise of people in different fields like economics or politics, who if they had access to the sources, could help us tremendously to understand those societies better,” says Pagé-Perron.
“We have more sources from Mesopotamia than we have from Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt together,” says Jacob Dahl, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford. The challenge is finding enough people who can read them.
Pagé-Perron and her team are training algorithms on a sample of 4,000 ancient administrative texts from a digitised database. Each records transactions or deliveries of sheep, reed bundles or beer to a temple or an individual. Originally impressed into the clay with a reed stylus, the texts have already been transliterated into our alphabet by modern scholars. The Sumerian word for big, for example, can be written in cuneiform signs, or it can be written in our alphabet as “gal”.
The wording in these administrative texts is simple: “11 nanny goats for the kitchen on the 15th day”, for example. This makes them particularly suitable for automation. Once these algorithms have learned to translate the sample texts into English, they will then automatically translate the other transliterated tablets.
“The texts we’re working on are not very interesting individually, but they’re extremely interesting if you take them as groups of texts,” says Pagé-Perron, who expects the English versions to be online within the next year. The records give us a picture of day to day life in ancient Mesopotamia, of power structures and trading networks, but also of other aspects of its social history, such as the role of female workers. Searchable translations would enable researchers from other areas to explore these rich facets of life in the ancient world.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181207-how-ai-could-help-us-with-ancient-languages-like-sumerian
I presume the logical extension of this is to include cuneiform in Google translate...
Pagé-Perron is coordinating a project to machine translate 69,000 Mesopotamian administrative records from the 21st Century BC. One of the aims is to open up the past to new research. “We have information about so many different aspects of the lives of Mesopotamian people, and we can’t really profit from the expertise of people in different fields like economics or politics, who if they had access to the sources, could help us tremendously to understand those societies better,” says Pagé-Perron.
“We have more sources from Mesopotamia than we have from Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt together,” says Jacob Dahl, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford. The challenge is finding enough people who can read them.
Pagé-Perron and her team are training algorithms on a sample of 4,000 ancient administrative texts from a digitised database. Each records transactions or deliveries of sheep, reed bundles or beer to a temple or an individual. Originally impressed into the clay with a reed stylus, the texts have already been transliterated into our alphabet by modern scholars. The Sumerian word for big, for example, can be written in cuneiform signs, or it can be written in our alphabet as “gal”.
The wording in these administrative texts is simple: “11 nanny goats for the kitchen on the 15th day”, for example. This makes them particularly suitable for automation. Once these algorithms have learned to translate the sample texts into English, they will then automatically translate the other transliterated tablets.
“The texts we’re working on are not very interesting individually, but they’re extremely interesting if you take them as groups of texts,” says Pagé-Perron, who expects the English versions to be online within the next year. The records give us a picture of day to day life in ancient Mesopotamia, of power structures and trading networks, but also of other aspects of its social history, such as the role of female workers. Searchable translations would enable researchers from other areas to explore these rich facets of life in the ancient world.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181207-how-ai-could-help-us-with-ancient-languages-like-sumerian
Sunday, 9 December 2018
The epic miniatures of Paris
Welcome to the Musée des Plans Reliefs — home to one of France’s most curious historical treasures, a unique collection of miniature fortified cities created in secrecy for French monarchs throughout history to plan their next attacks.
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/12/07/reviving-the-real-life-middle-earth-maps-in-a-secret-paris-museum/
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/12/07/reviving-the-real-life-middle-earth-maps-in-a-secret-paris-museum/
Talent-luck : simulating social security
Talent versus luck : now with social security...
Full write-up here (not gonna do a summary every time, sorry) : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit?usp=sharing
Since the exact positions of the events and the agents seem to be quite important, I wondered what would happen if their minimum and maximum wealth was limited. For example, a very talented agent who's unfortunate enough to have a run of bad luck might end up so impoverished that recovery was impossible. Maybe if he had some social security to get him through a rough patch, he'd be able to go on to bigger and better things. Perhaps that would help reduce scatter in the talent-money trend. And maybe if agents were forbidden from becoming dangerously wealthy, it would improve social equality and the underlying talent-money trend would become clearer.
Both of these things are very easy to do in this magical simulation land : I simply set agent's wealth back to the starting value if it ever drops below it, and restrict it to some maximum if it ever exceeds it. The maximum was chosen based on looking at the typical wealth distribution that results.
I also realised that until now I've been concentrating on the richest and most intelligent people in the simulation, and not given much thought to the poorest and stupidest. Time to stop neglecting those who need the most help ! Here, the 20% poorest are shown by faint black line while the 20% least talented are shown with a faint red line.
The first row in the figure uses the standard conditions : talent affects whether lucky events will increase wealth or not, but that's all. Capping the maximum wealth doesn't change very much. Limiting the minimum wealth doesn't help the most talented very much (maybe a little bit) but it does prove useful for the talentless and poorest people. The wealth of those demographics evolves in a very similar way. So even though there's still no (obvious) talent-wealth correlation, it has improved things, in a sense : the poorest people tend to be the stupidest*. Hooray, I guess, if crushing the idiots is your thing.
*I need to check that more rigorously though, I'm just basing this on the similarity of the curves rather than comparing agent numbers.
Oddly, capping both the minimum and maximum wealth splits those two demographics apart again : the most and least talented people basically never get any more or less share of the total wealth than at the start. The poorest people, on the other hand, no longer lose quite as much as they did previously.
The second row shows the case of allowing talent to affect both whether unlucky events will cause harm and whether events are lucky or unlucky to begin with. As previously, this causes a clear talent-wealth correlation whilst maintaining the power-law wealth distribution (not shown here). Under those conditions, regardless of whether we cap wealth at all, the stupidest and poorest people tend to be one and the same. Which made me feel guilty : rewarding the most talented is one thing, but crushing the least talented is quite another... I'm so sorry, agent no. 532, forgive me ! It's better than giving the stupid people all the money, I guess, but actively punishing them for being stupid wasn't what I had in mind. Though, if both upper and lower wealth caps are used, all the demographics plotted are much more equal than in the other cases.
I've also found that sometimes these plots look a lot more chaotic, especially if the simulation is given more timesteps. What I think is happening is that a few agents are able to amass vast amounts of wealth, much more than any others, which skews the statistics. I could try removing these outliers, but a wealth cap - a relatively high one - would probably be an easier solution.
Full write-up here (not gonna do a summary every time, sorry) : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit?usp=sharing
Since the exact positions of the events and the agents seem to be quite important, I wondered what would happen if their minimum and maximum wealth was limited. For example, a very talented agent who's unfortunate enough to have a run of bad luck might end up so impoverished that recovery was impossible. Maybe if he had some social security to get him through a rough patch, he'd be able to go on to bigger and better things. Perhaps that would help reduce scatter in the talent-money trend. And maybe if agents were forbidden from becoming dangerously wealthy, it would improve social equality and the underlying talent-money trend would become clearer.
Both of these things are very easy to do in this magical simulation land : I simply set agent's wealth back to the starting value if it ever drops below it, and restrict it to some maximum if it ever exceeds it. The maximum was chosen based on looking at the typical wealth distribution that results.
I also realised that until now I've been concentrating on the richest and most intelligent people in the simulation, and not given much thought to the poorest and stupidest. Time to stop neglecting those who need the most help ! Here, the 20% poorest are shown by faint black line while the 20% least talented are shown with a faint red line.
The first row in the figure uses the standard conditions : talent affects whether lucky events will increase wealth or not, but that's all. Capping the maximum wealth doesn't change very much. Limiting the minimum wealth doesn't help the most talented very much (maybe a little bit) but it does prove useful for the talentless and poorest people. The wealth of those demographics evolves in a very similar way. So even though there's still no (obvious) talent-wealth correlation, it has improved things, in a sense : the poorest people tend to be the stupidest*. Hooray, I guess, if crushing the idiots is your thing.
*I need to check that more rigorously though, I'm just basing this on the similarity of the curves rather than comparing agent numbers.
Oddly, capping both the minimum and maximum wealth splits those two demographics apart again : the most and least talented people basically never get any more or less share of the total wealth than at the start. The poorest people, on the other hand, no longer lose quite as much as they did previously.
The second row shows the case of allowing talent to affect both whether unlucky events will cause harm and whether events are lucky or unlucky to begin with. As previously, this causes a clear talent-wealth correlation whilst maintaining the power-law wealth distribution (not shown here). Under those conditions, regardless of whether we cap wealth at all, the stupidest and poorest people tend to be one and the same. Which made me feel guilty : rewarding the most talented is one thing, but crushing the least talented is quite another... I'm so sorry, agent no. 532, forgive me ! It's better than giving the stupid people all the money, I guess, but actively punishing them for being stupid wasn't what I had in mind. Though, if both upper and lower wealth caps are used, all the demographics plotted are much more equal than in the other cases.
I've also found that sometimes these plots look a lot more chaotic, especially if the simulation is given more timesteps. What I think is happening is that a few agents are able to amass vast amounts of wealth, much more than any others, which skews the statistics. I could try removing these outliers, but a wealth cap - a relatively high one - would probably be an easier solution.
Simulating the evolution of consensus in Wikipedia, for some reason
An Agent-Based Model of Wikipedia Edit Wars : How and When Consensus is Reached
A very strange but interesting paper which tries to model how quickly consensus is established by editors of controversial Wikipedia articles. I can't help feeling that there's an awful lot of complex modelling gone in to producing conclusions which for the most part are obvious and common-sense. At the same time, trying to model consensus-formation is very interesting, even if this particular case is oddly specific. It does have the option of calibrating against well-documented examples though.
The model includes a bunch of different parameters :
- The ability of agents to commit changes or reversions to articles, which can be both positive or negative in favour of a given viewpoint (hence four possible actions they can take)
- The credibility of different agents
- A probability that agents will actually take one of the possible actions
- A "payoff" given to agents for taking actions, which varies in a highly complex way based on the agent's stance and the other agent's actions and credibility
- A desired level of payoff for each agent
- The ability for agents to "learn", in the sense that the probability of the actions they take vary based on their results, though I can't make head nor tail as to how this is actually implemented
All of this results in the rather uninteresting conclusions :
- The more likely an agent is to make a revision, the longer it takes to establish consensus
- Consensus is established more rapidly when credibility of the agents involved is higher, up to a point
- Consensus is established most rapidly when everyone agrees and most slowly when opposing sides are about equal (well, blow me down with a feather (!))
It's still an interesting idea. I'd like to see it applied to more general situations.
http://casos.cs.cmu.edu/publications/papers/2015AnAgentBasedModelofEditWars.pdf
A very strange but interesting paper which tries to model how quickly consensus is established by editors of controversial Wikipedia articles. I can't help feeling that there's an awful lot of complex modelling gone in to producing conclusions which for the most part are obvious and common-sense. At the same time, trying to model consensus-formation is very interesting, even if this particular case is oddly specific. It does have the option of calibrating against well-documented examples though.
The model includes a bunch of different parameters :
- The ability of agents to commit changes or reversions to articles, which can be both positive or negative in favour of a given viewpoint (hence four possible actions they can take)
- The credibility of different agents
- A probability that agents will actually take one of the possible actions
- A "payoff" given to agents for taking actions, which varies in a highly complex way based on the agent's stance and the other agent's actions and credibility
- A desired level of payoff for each agent
- The ability for agents to "learn", in the sense that the probability of the actions they take vary based on their results, though I can't make head nor tail as to how this is actually implemented
All of this results in the rather uninteresting conclusions :
- The more likely an agent is to make a revision, the longer it takes to establish consensus
- Consensus is established more rapidly when credibility of the agents involved is higher, up to a point
- Consensus is established most rapidly when everyone agrees and most slowly when opposing sides are about equal (well, blow me down with a feather (!))
It's still an interesting idea. I'd like to see it applied to more general situations.
http://casos.cs.cmu.edu/publications/papers/2015AnAgentBasedModelofEditWars.pdf
Hogback stones
Originally shared by Assia Alexandrova
Copying here an FB post about hogback stones in its entirety, because they are absolutely fascinating. They are Christian viking gravemarkers.
Posted by "Find Her in the Highlands"
What an amazing afternoon I had. As most of you know I'm researching to write a novel set in the 9th century when the Picts and the Vikings (and others) were battling for Scotland. I've been visiting lots of Pictish stones, and was dismayed to learn that the Govan Old Parish Church, which houses 5 Viking hogback stones, was closed for the season. I contacted the The Govan Stones Project about a possible visit and today the lovely Emma opened the church for me.
I was not prepared for the amazing stone treasures that the church holds. I spent 2 hours with my jaw on the floor as the winds howled around the church, and the rains lashed the huge stained glass windows. It grew dark while I was inside, creating the perfect atmosphere for tales of medieval kings, mysterious creatures, saints, battles and treachery. Emma made coffee to keep us warm in the cold church, and as we walked around she showed me stone after stone recovered in the cemetery of the church, dating back to the medieval Kingdom of Strathclyde between the 9th and 11th centuries. Some were likely recumbent stones to mark graves. Others were likely "signposts" of the day, marking important places.
And then there were the hogback stones. I have never seen anything like them - they look otherwordly. This style of stones was created by Vikings when they raided and settled across England, Scotland and Ireland. They were likely to mark the graves of important people. They don't even exist in Scandinavia - they are the product of the Vikings embracing Christianity and using Christian burial yards, but putting their own spin on their grave stones. It seems the most widely accepted theories are that they either represent the tiled roofs of Viking longhouses, or upside down boats. (The Vikings were known to bring their boats inland and tip them over to serve as shelter.) Creatures of various sorts are usually holding the ends of the stones. The Govan hogbacks are the biggest in existence, and 5 in one place is incredible. (If you have been to Kelvingrove Art Gallery you will likely have seen replica castings of these stones.)
I asked about Pictish influence in the area. Not only could Emma tell me there was an influence, she brought me to the next jaw dropping artifact - a stone sarcophagus thought to belong to St. Constantine, the son of King Kenneth MacAlpin. The carvings definitely have Pictish influence, and the mounted horseman bears a striking resemblance to the warriors I saw on my recent visit to Sueno's Stone in Forres, which may depict a great victory by Kenneth MacAlpin.
It is astounding that these stones still exist - Govan was completely enveloped in the industrial ship building boom in the 1800s and there is no telling what other treasures lay under the subsequent developments. Please plan the Govan Stones into your next visit to Glasgow - it is absolutely a must see, and I'm excited to do what I can to help them with their efforts to raise awareness and funding for this amazing place. I would write more but the coffee shop is closing!
Copying here an FB post about hogback stones in its entirety, because they are absolutely fascinating. They are Christian viking gravemarkers.
Posted by "Find Her in the Highlands"
What an amazing afternoon I had. As most of you know I'm researching to write a novel set in the 9th century when the Picts and the Vikings (and others) were battling for Scotland. I've been visiting lots of Pictish stones, and was dismayed to learn that the Govan Old Parish Church, which houses 5 Viking hogback stones, was closed for the season. I contacted the The Govan Stones Project about a possible visit and today the lovely Emma opened the church for me.
I was not prepared for the amazing stone treasures that the church holds. I spent 2 hours with my jaw on the floor as the winds howled around the church, and the rains lashed the huge stained glass windows. It grew dark while I was inside, creating the perfect atmosphere for tales of medieval kings, mysterious creatures, saints, battles and treachery. Emma made coffee to keep us warm in the cold church, and as we walked around she showed me stone after stone recovered in the cemetery of the church, dating back to the medieval Kingdom of Strathclyde between the 9th and 11th centuries. Some were likely recumbent stones to mark graves. Others were likely "signposts" of the day, marking important places.
And then there were the hogback stones. I have never seen anything like them - they look otherwordly. This style of stones was created by Vikings when they raided and settled across England, Scotland and Ireland. They were likely to mark the graves of important people. They don't even exist in Scandinavia - they are the product of the Vikings embracing Christianity and using Christian burial yards, but putting their own spin on their grave stones. It seems the most widely accepted theories are that they either represent the tiled roofs of Viking longhouses, or upside down boats. (The Vikings were known to bring their boats inland and tip them over to serve as shelter.) Creatures of various sorts are usually holding the ends of the stones. The Govan hogbacks are the biggest in existence, and 5 in one place is incredible. (If you have been to Kelvingrove Art Gallery you will likely have seen replica castings of these stones.)
I asked about Pictish influence in the area. Not only could Emma tell me there was an influence, she brought me to the next jaw dropping artifact - a stone sarcophagus thought to belong to St. Constantine, the son of King Kenneth MacAlpin. The carvings definitely have Pictish influence, and the mounted horseman bears a striking resemblance to the warriors I saw on my recent visit to Sueno's Stone in Forres, which may depict a great victory by Kenneth MacAlpin.
It is astounding that these stones still exist - Govan was completely enveloped in the industrial ship building boom in the 1800s and there is no telling what other treasures lay under the subsequent developments. Please plan the Govan Stones into your next visit to Glasgow - it is absolutely a must see, and I'm excited to do what I can to help them with their efforts to raise awareness and funding for this amazing place. I would write more but the coffee shop is closing!
All these plates
Very cool illusion. I saw it once in my feed when I checked my phone very early in the morning and it took about a minute before they inverted. The second time (right now) it took a few seconds. A thoroughly strange sensation. So far I can't seem to make them flip back in the same way I can usually do with a little effort for similar illusions (e.g. the rotating statue, the tube train gif). Weird.
Saturday, 8 December 2018
Printing 3D circuits with... Vegemite
I smell an IgNobel.
If nothing else, this will bring hope to millions of schoolchildren suffering in soldering lessons...
om/91739/3d-printed-vegemite-conductive/
If nothing else, this will bring hope to millions of schoolchildren suffering in soldering lessons...
om/91739/3d-printed-vegemite-conductive/
Talent-luck : changing the starting distributions
Talent versus luck : the story continues...
I added a couple of new sections, hope the links work, let's see..
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.oa3a1zrn8fhn
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.1rdxtmtmxpl4
(They do, but give it a second to load properly)
So far I've tried adjusting the effects of talent, the movement of the events, and the initial distribution of talent. All of these turn out to be rather important, and unlike the original claims, it can be shown that a Gaussian distribution of talent can transform into a power law distribution of wealth. I wondered just how strong this could be, if it could overcome initial disadvantages from an unfair wealth distribution. Thus far the wealth has always been initially uniform, so here I tried using an initial power law.
Admittedly I did this in a lazy and somewhat contrived way. I let the simulation run once, then reset the counter, move the agents to new random positions and run it again. As found at great length, the positions do matter : the random walk of the events meant that repeat encounters with the same events can be very significant. So moving the agents puts them in entirely new locations far from the places where fortunes were won and lost. However, any subtle trends between talent and wealth (which are present, albeit weakly) are likely to continue to be enhanced.
What happens is the agents who finish the first run as very wealthy continue to amass even more wealth. The most talented agents show a lot more fluctuation. But this doesn't seem to be due to resetting their position : the same thing happens if the standard conditions are used but allowed to run for longer. I think this is because the chance of multiple repeat encounters (which can have dramatic effects) is just low enough that they're unlikely to happen during the standard 80 timesteps but fairly probable over 160. Individuals who have much higher wealth than the rest become more probable the longer the simulation goes on, and they can dominate the end results.
More interesting might be to start with a wealth distribution that's completely "wrong", that is, give most of the money to the stupid people and start with the geniuses in poverty. It would be fun to see if altering the effects of talent can be sufficient to overcome initial disadvantages.
In the second new section, I tried allowing talent to control the reward/loss level of events, rather than the levels being fixed at doubling or halving wealth as before. Now agents can only double their wealth if their talent is maximum (1.0) and only halve it if it's zero. This gives the most talented people a much greater share of the wealth, despite, quite interestingly, there still being no obvious trend in the talent-money plot (which now has a weird fan-shaped structure which for some reason I found absurd).
Next up I think will be to allow talent to vary, i.e. agents to gain the benefit of experience.
I added a couple of new sections, hope the links work, let's see..
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.oa3a1zrn8fhn
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit#heading=h.1rdxtmtmxpl4
(They do, but give it a second to load properly)
So far I've tried adjusting the effects of talent, the movement of the events, and the initial distribution of talent. All of these turn out to be rather important, and unlike the original claims, it can be shown that a Gaussian distribution of talent can transform into a power law distribution of wealth. I wondered just how strong this could be, if it could overcome initial disadvantages from an unfair wealth distribution. Thus far the wealth has always been initially uniform, so here I tried using an initial power law.
Admittedly I did this in a lazy and somewhat contrived way. I let the simulation run once, then reset the counter, move the agents to new random positions and run it again. As found at great length, the positions do matter : the random walk of the events meant that repeat encounters with the same events can be very significant. So moving the agents puts them in entirely new locations far from the places where fortunes were won and lost. However, any subtle trends between talent and wealth (which are present, albeit weakly) are likely to continue to be enhanced.
What happens is the agents who finish the first run as very wealthy continue to amass even more wealth. The most talented agents show a lot more fluctuation. But this doesn't seem to be due to resetting their position : the same thing happens if the standard conditions are used but allowed to run for longer. I think this is because the chance of multiple repeat encounters (which can have dramatic effects) is just low enough that they're unlikely to happen during the standard 80 timesteps but fairly probable over 160. Individuals who have much higher wealth than the rest become more probable the longer the simulation goes on, and they can dominate the end results.
More interesting might be to start with a wealth distribution that's completely "wrong", that is, give most of the money to the stupid people and start with the geniuses in poverty. It would be fun to see if altering the effects of talent can be sufficient to overcome initial disadvantages.
In the second new section, I tried allowing talent to control the reward/loss level of events, rather than the levels being fixed at doubling or halving wealth as before. Now agents can only double their wealth if their talent is maximum (1.0) and only halve it if it's zero. This gives the most talented people a much greater share of the wealth, despite, quite interestingly, there still being no obvious trend in the talent-money plot (which now has a weird fan-shaped structure which for some reason I found absurd).
Next up I think will be to allow talent to vary, i.e. agents to gain the benefit of experience.
Things could always be worse
Are you having a bad day ? Not compared to this seal you're not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46487944
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46487944
Friday, 7 December 2018
Preparing the Ariane 6 for faster launches
At the moment, the 90m-high gantry is just a giant framework of girders, but in the coming months it will be covered in metal panels and the interior fitted with decks to encase the rocket. Unlike its predecessor Ariane 6 will be put together horizontally in a nearby building, before being hoisted-up into the launch tower for final assembly, fuelling and testing. Then, a few hours before launch, the whole structure will be moved away on rails to leave the rocket exposed on the launch pad.
It currently takes 35 days to prepare an Ariane 5 for launch. The rockets have to be hauled between different facilities on an extensive rail network, so the boosters and satellites can be added. With Ariane 6 the aim is to cut that time to just 12 days.
But constructing a new launch gantry is only part of the engineering challenge. The most impressive engineering is below ground. On the surface, the launchpad will resemble an apron of steel and concrete but, once complete, its support structure will reach some 30m beneath the soil. Either side, a pair of 20m-wide tunnels have been built to funnel the flames from the exhaust and carry the water that’s sprayed at the rocket during launch.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181206-the-rocket-tower-being-built-in-tropical-jungle
It currently takes 35 days to prepare an Ariane 5 for launch. The rockets have to be hauled between different facilities on an extensive rail network, so the boosters and satellites can be added. With Ariane 6 the aim is to cut that time to just 12 days.
But constructing a new launch gantry is only part of the engineering challenge. The most impressive engineering is below ground. On the surface, the launchpad will resemble an apron of steel and concrete but, once complete, its support structure will reach some 30m beneath the soil. Either side, a pair of 20m-wide tunnels have been built to funnel the flames from the exhaust and carry the water that’s sprayed at the rocket during launch.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181206-the-rocket-tower-being-built-in-tropical-jungle
Controlling information : part III
Part three. On the spread of ideas in groups and how to stop them, the backfire effect, and why this is much more complicated than the idealised case of arguing with someone one-on-one. I look at why sometimes if you want to stop an idea from spreading it's better to talk to people rather than censor them, but also why sometimes shutting them down is absolutely the best option. Some problems we can tackle as individuals. Some we can't : if you want to stop, say, social media from whipping people into a frenzy, you have to treat it as a network problem. As individuals, there's only so much we can do about that. The main thing is not to give up, or even to try and be nicer to everyone, because that probably won't work. Yes, this is a long summary, but it's an even longer post, so I can (maybe) finally stop blabbing on about speech regulations for a good long while.
(The original, very long post can be found here.)
A single source of an idea, it turns out, is not much good : we've all got that one friend who believes in magical pixies or whatnot but we don't go around being so silly. But if we have multiple people [around 25% of those we know, it seems] telling us the same thing, we're far more likely to be persuaded.
The obvious route to stopping an idea would be to cut the links, and this would indeed work in this model, but adding more connections can have the same effect. The key is that it's about how much supporting information people receive : or rather the fraction of sources they're all exposed to that support an idea.
Anything that contradicts trusted information will, so long as it only makes up a small fraction ( <10% or so, as we've seen) of the information flow, be distrusted. We seldom if ever evaluate evidence solely on its own merit, and for good reason : to the brain, things that trusted people say are at least as good as facts, if not treated as facts themselves. Which means that a source can become distrusted and its argument backfire simply by saying something radically different to what everyone else is saying.
In real life, we have multiple sources competing for trust, multiple answers to choose from, and some issues are discussed frequently (cognitive ease again !) while others rarely get a mention. It's this highly complex mix, I think, of multiple options, competing sources, varying trust levels, and varying issue discussion rates that might explain why sometimes the backfire effect seems to happen very easily yet sometimes not at all. So yes, it does help to use the persuasive techniques discussed last time - but complex network effects can override them.
Educating people to be more critical and whatnot is fine, but in terms of changing already established ideas there's a major problem :
If ideology [here meaning methodological reasoning as well as the moral sort] is shaped by environment at all, the only real arena for changing this is in schools. It's only in schools and other educational institutions that we have a common environment where we all go with the expectation of learning analytical and critical methods. Beyond that, there are very few venues indeed where the entire populace expect and accept that they're going to be taught how to think.
And yet... changing the system can and does happen. The paradox of environment is that it appears both strong and weak. One way to square that particular circle - if fucking with geometry is your thing - might be that our social institutions exploit the relative, recent nature of our default comparisons. They do have a role in making change genuinely difficult, and therefore (whatever Kennedy might say) undesirable, but what they mainly do is make change appear more difficult than we tend to believe. They make the battles harder to fight, but more importantly, they influence which battles we fight at all. If we can break through that, then there are other factors we can exploit : social norms are not the only thing shaping our ideas. Don't get me wrong here. Major social change is extraordinarily difficult, otherwise every nutcase under the Sun would be remaking society every five minutes; cultural norms do change, but some institutions are astonishingly resilient.
And on groupthink...
...if you tell someone in such a situation not to believe in UFOs [or whatever] you're not merely asking them to give up a single cherished belief, which would be bad enough. You're also asking them to admit that their trust in a large number of people has been mistaken, that their whole basis of evaluating information is flawed, that nothing they thought they could trust is correct. You're inevitably not just talking about the issue, but their faith in and friendships with other people and their own capacity for rationality.
We can't break this through actions as individuals on social media. We have to do something much more radical.
In a new environment, people are forced to make entirely new connections and are praised and (socially) punished for entirely different actions. If that environment favours different views to what they were used to, we can expect at least some of their ideas to change (this is in part how rehabilitation works, after all, though obviously there are some major caveats to that). Not all though, because strongly contrasting viewpoints can persist in [but, crucially, do not spread] even extremely hostile environments. Indeed we could expect some individuals to hold even more strongly to some of their beliefs. But most, the theory suggests, ought to change many of their ideas as they become integrated into the new setting.
Just throwing a bunch of diehard vegans together with a bunch of fox hunting enthusiasts is hardly likely to result in anything other than a bloodbath... Yes, we can succeed in changing people's minds if we make more connections and give them enough different information that contradicts their view, but no, we definitely can't do this just by whacking 'em together or bombarding them with different arguments. As with the other parameters, flow rate may backfire above a certain threshold - if someone never shuts up about the same boring issue, we stop listening, and if it doesn't actually affect our own belief directly, we may well see them as biased.
Thresholds, I think, are key. I thought about using the phrase "non monotonic behavioural responses", but I resisted.
An idea held by few people may be harder to spread because its low acceptance rate causes us to label it as fringe, so anyone believing it is weird, and we're clearly not weird so we shouldn't believe that. Whereas if lots of people believe it, well, that's mainstream, socially acceptable, so there's less of a psychological barrier to acceptance. So while techniques that strengthen belief - praise and shame - might not be able to change someone's stance, they might be able to maintain it by keeping everyone in agreement. Sustaining hearts and minds, if you like.
Most fake news isn't driven by a belief in "alternative facts" at all; its goal is not a misguided attempt at enlightenment in the way that people who genuinely believe in Bigfoot try to do. Rather, it is an attempt to confuse and sow mistrust - not to convince the viewers that anything in particular is true so much as it is to persuade them that they can't trust particular sources (or worse, that they can't trust particular claims and therefore any source making them). It aims to replace dispassionate facts, those pesky, emotionless bits of data that can't be bent, with emotion-driven ideology, which can. It thrives on the very polarisation that it's designed to promote, as well as the erosion of both critical and analytical thinking that it exacerbates. Removing it is likely, in the long term, to do far more good than harm. Fake news isn't about encouraging rational debate, it's about shutting it down.
Sometimes people claim that things like fake news or certain so-called politicians are symptoms, not causes. We see here that just like with a disease, sometimes a symptom can also itself be a direct cause. After all, the very reason viruses give us symptoms is to spread themselves around. If you had a perfect cure for the common cold but couldn't give it to everyone at once, you'd never eliminate the cold virus because it would continue to re-infect people. Similarly, even if you could devise a perfect way to disinfect victims of propaganda, you'd still have to stop it in order to both prevent its continued spread and its damaging effect that makes victims harder to treat. Cures, treatments and vaccinations are different and as such they must be applied differently.
And if you're not convinced by fake news, you might still believe that other social groups are. What it's doing here is handing people ready-made straw men : arguments which are much more absurd than anything that someone really believes (yes, some people believe in higher taxation; no, no-one believes the rich should be hunted down and eaten). The fact that they're easy to debunk actually becomes a very powerful asset. Instead of discussing the details of opposing but equally sophisticated (and boring) fiscal policies, we end up seeing the other side as believing in exciting but incredibly dumb things like flying squirrel monsters from Uranus, or whatever. It wrecks the credibility of the other side and makes them appear far, far stupider than most of them really are. The other side become self-evidently pantomime villains and therefore anyone agreeing with them is obviously stupid... again, as we've seen previously, this is a route to crude, absolute thinking, the polarisation the fake news creates also driving its own spread.
Finally, there are some general conditions under which regulations on controlling information (I use this in the broadest sense, I'm not distinguishing lies from truth here) might work. There are some situations where it definitely won't, and in those cases it would be foolish to even try. But there are some which are much more plausible, which depend on both the nature of the information and the manner in which it's restricted :
According to what we think we know, it follows that a ban will be in general effective if :
The information is subjective, overtly promotional, already disliked by a large majority of people, hard to understand, difficult to arrive at independently, appears to contradict other knowledge, and doesn't excite curiosity (especially if the gist of it is well-known and only specific details are lacking).
The ban is applied uniformly to (or better yet by) all media outlets and not just one or two, the resulting inaccessibility of the information is sufficient to be discouraging rather than challenging, the lack of reporting itself goes unreported, the restrictions are not so harsh that they cause a dislike of whoever instigated the ban (e.g. tolerating minor infractions and only enforcing more flagrant violations), corrective measures are used to persuade those who still believe in the idea which account for their personal situations, and any attempts at replacing the banned information or source are dealt with in the same way.
We as individuals don't have full control over the networks we find ourselves in... but we can damn well talk to those who do. We can and should give them advice, to tell them what isn't working. We can also demand that ethics training be taken seriously and be mandatory for company executives, not just a totally uninteresting lecture that the grunts have to endure. Moral philosophy can be explored intelligently and engagingly; it cannot be something that executives of companies that thrive on information are allowed to brush under the carpet.
And that, I hope, is the last I'll be saying about this until at least the end of the year. :)
A single source of an idea, it turns out, is not much good : we've all got that one friend who believes in magical pixies or whatnot but we don't go around being so silly. But if we have multiple people [around 25% of those we know, it seems] telling us the same thing, we're far more likely to be persuaded.
The obvious route to stopping an idea would be to cut the links, and this would indeed work in this model, but adding more connections can have the same effect. The key is that it's about how much supporting information people receive : or rather the fraction of sources they're all exposed to that support an idea.
Anything that contradicts trusted information will, so long as it only makes up a small fraction ( <10% or so, as we've seen) of the information flow, be distrusted. We seldom if ever evaluate evidence solely on its own merit, and for good reason : to the brain, things that trusted people say are at least as good as facts, if not treated as facts themselves. Which means that a source can become distrusted and its argument backfire simply by saying something radically different to what everyone else is saying.
In real life, we have multiple sources competing for trust, multiple answers to choose from, and some issues are discussed frequently (cognitive ease again !) while others rarely get a mention. It's this highly complex mix, I think, of multiple options, competing sources, varying trust levels, and varying issue discussion rates that might explain why sometimes the backfire effect seems to happen very easily yet sometimes not at all. So yes, it does help to use the persuasive techniques discussed last time - but complex network effects can override them.
Educating people to be more critical and whatnot is fine, but in terms of changing already established ideas there's a major problem :
If ideology [here meaning methodological reasoning as well as the moral sort] is shaped by environment at all, the only real arena for changing this is in schools. It's only in schools and other educational institutions that we have a common environment where we all go with the expectation of learning analytical and critical methods. Beyond that, there are very few venues indeed where the entire populace expect and accept that they're going to be taught how to think.
And yet... changing the system can and does happen. The paradox of environment is that it appears both strong and weak. One way to square that particular circle - if fucking with geometry is your thing - might be that our social institutions exploit the relative, recent nature of our default comparisons. They do have a role in making change genuinely difficult, and therefore (whatever Kennedy might say) undesirable, but what they mainly do is make change appear more difficult than we tend to believe. They make the battles harder to fight, but more importantly, they influence which battles we fight at all. If we can break through that, then there are other factors we can exploit : social norms are not the only thing shaping our ideas. Don't get me wrong here. Major social change is extraordinarily difficult, otherwise every nutcase under the Sun would be remaking society every five minutes; cultural norms do change, but some institutions are astonishingly resilient.
And on groupthink...
...if you tell someone in such a situation not to believe in UFOs [or whatever] you're not merely asking them to give up a single cherished belief, which would be bad enough. You're also asking them to admit that their trust in a large number of people has been mistaken, that their whole basis of evaluating information is flawed, that nothing they thought they could trust is correct. You're inevitably not just talking about the issue, but their faith in and friendships with other people and their own capacity for rationality.
We can't break this through actions as individuals on social media. We have to do something much more radical.
In a new environment, people are forced to make entirely new connections and are praised and (socially) punished for entirely different actions. If that environment favours different views to what they were used to, we can expect at least some of their ideas to change (this is in part how rehabilitation works, after all, though obviously there are some major caveats to that). Not all though, because strongly contrasting viewpoints can persist in [but, crucially, do not spread] even extremely hostile environments. Indeed we could expect some individuals to hold even more strongly to some of their beliefs. But most, the theory suggests, ought to change many of their ideas as they become integrated into the new setting.
Just throwing a bunch of diehard vegans together with a bunch of fox hunting enthusiasts is hardly likely to result in anything other than a bloodbath... Yes, we can succeed in changing people's minds if we make more connections and give them enough different information that contradicts their view, but no, we definitely can't do this just by whacking 'em together or bombarding them with different arguments. As with the other parameters, flow rate may backfire above a certain threshold - if someone never shuts up about the same boring issue, we stop listening, and if it doesn't actually affect our own belief directly, we may well see them as biased.
Thresholds, I think, are key. I thought about using the phrase "non monotonic behavioural responses", but I resisted.
An idea held by few people may be harder to spread because its low acceptance rate causes us to label it as fringe, so anyone believing it is weird, and we're clearly not weird so we shouldn't believe that. Whereas if lots of people believe it, well, that's mainstream, socially acceptable, so there's less of a psychological barrier to acceptance. So while techniques that strengthen belief - praise and shame - might not be able to change someone's stance, they might be able to maintain it by keeping everyone in agreement. Sustaining hearts and minds, if you like.
Most fake news isn't driven by a belief in "alternative facts" at all; its goal is not a misguided attempt at enlightenment in the way that people who genuinely believe in Bigfoot try to do. Rather, it is an attempt to confuse and sow mistrust - not to convince the viewers that anything in particular is true so much as it is to persuade them that they can't trust particular sources (or worse, that they can't trust particular claims and therefore any source making them). It aims to replace dispassionate facts, those pesky, emotionless bits of data that can't be bent, with emotion-driven ideology, which can. It thrives on the very polarisation that it's designed to promote, as well as the erosion of both critical and analytical thinking that it exacerbates. Removing it is likely, in the long term, to do far more good than harm. Fake news isn't about encouraging rational debate, it's about shutting it down.
Sometimes people claim that things like fake news or certain so-called politicians are symptoms, not causes. We see here that just like with a disease, sometimes a symptom can also itself be a direct cause. After all, the very reason viruses give us symptoms is to spread themselves around. If you had a perfect cure for the common cold but couldn't give it to everyone at once, you'd never eliminate the cold virus because it would continue to re-infect people. Similarly, even if you could devise a perfect way to disinfect victims of propaganda, you'd still have to stop it in order to both prevent its continued spread and its damaging effect that makes victims harder to treat. Cures, treatments and vaccinations are different and as such they must be applied differently.
And if you're not convinced by fake news, you might still believe that other social groups are. What it's doing here is handing people ready-made straw men : arguments which are much more absurd than anything that someone really believes (yes, some people believe in higher taxation; no, no-one believes the rich should be hunted down and eaten). The fact that they're easy to debunk actually becomes a very powerful asset. Instead of discussing the details of opposing but equally sophisticated (and boring) fiscal policies, we end up seeing the other side as believing in exciting but incredibly dumb things like flying squirrel monsters from Uranus, or whatever. It wrecks the credibility of the other side and makes them appear far, far stupider than most of them really are. The other side become self-evidently pantomime villains and therefore anyone agreeing with them is obviously stupid... again, as we've seen previously, this is a route to crude, absolute thinking, the polarisation the fake news creates also driving its own spread.
Finally, there are some general conditions under which regulations on controlling information (I use this in the broadest sense, I'm not distinguishing lies from truth here) might work. There are some situations where it definitely won't, and in those cases it would be foolish to even try. But there are some which are much more plausible, which depend on both the nature of the information and the manner in which it's restricted :
According to what we think we know, it follows that a ban will be in general effective if :
The information is subjective, overtly promotional, already disliked by a large majority of people, hard to understand, difficult to arrive at independently, appears to contradict other knowledge, and doesn't excite curiosity (especially if the gist of it is well-known and only specific details are lacking).
The ban is applied uniformly to (or better yet by) all media outlets and not just one or two, the resulting inaccessibility of the information is sufficient to be discouraging rather than challenging, the lack of reporting itself goes unreported, the restrictions are not so harsh that they cause a dislike of whoever instigated the ban (e.g. tolerating minor infractions and only enforcing more flagrant violations), corrective measures are used to persuade those who still believe in the idea which account for their personal situations, and any attempts at replacing the banned information or source are dealt with in the same way.
We as individuals don't have full control over the networks we find ourselves in... but we can damn well talk to those who do. We can and should give them advice, to tell them what isn't working. We can also demand that ethics training be taken seriously and be mandatory for company executives, not just a totally uninteresting lecture that the grunts have to endure. Moral philosophy can be explored intelligently and engagingly; it cannot be something that executives of companies that thrive on information are allowed to brush under the carpet.
And that, I hope, is the last I'll be saying about this until at least the end of the year. :)
Brexit : uniting the Tory old guard with millenial lefties
That moment when you're a millennial lefty and agree with the Tory old guard...
There are no solutions that help the fortunes of the least privileged in the most stressful circumstances that are dissociable from public expenditure. If this House is going to vote solemnly and knowingly, as we have heard here today, for a slower economy, for lower tax revenues and for lower public expenditure, those who will suffer most are those least able to bear the strain.
When the election comes, it will have been a Tory who led the referendum campaign, it will have been a Tory Government who perpetuated the frozen living standards, and it will be a Tory Government who are blamed for what we are talking about today. I will have no part of it.
Brexit : bringing people together !
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/watch-michael-heseltine-speech-to-the-house-of-lords-on-brexit-1-5808081
There are no solutions that help the fortunes of the least privileged in the most stressful circumstances that are dissociable from public expenditure. If this House is going to vote solemnly and knowingly, as we have heard here today, for a slower economy, for lower tax revenues and for lower public expenditure, those who will suffer most are those least able to bear the strain.
When the election comes, it will have been a Tory who led the referendum campaign, it will have been a Tory Government who perpetuated the frozen living standards, and it will be a Tory Government who are blamed for what we are talking about today. I will have no part of it.
Brexit : bringing people together !
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/watch-michael-heseltine-speech-to-the-house-of-lords-on-brexit-1-5808081
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