This article is BRUTAL and will SHOCK YOU !

If you were expecting scenes of a VIOLENT and SHOCKING nature... I'm afraid you'll likely be disappointed. I lied. But with good reason...

"Trigger warnings are, at best, trivially helpful," writes a research team led by psychologist Mevagh Sanson of the University of Waikato. The paper finds they "have no effect, or might even work slightly in the direction of causing harm." 

All the experiments were structured similarly. Participants first reported their current emotional state to create a baseline. Then they either read a story, or watched a video, about a disturbing topic such as child abuse, murder, and physical domestic abuse. Half of them saw trigger warnings before being exposed to the disquieting material, and half did not. Examples included "TRIGGER WARNING: The following story contains violence and death" and "TRIGGER WARNING: The following video may contain graphic footage. You may find this content disturbing."

I don't know about you, but that just usually inflames my sense of morbid curiosity...

"People who saw trigger warnings, compared to people who did not, judged material to be similarly negative, felt similarly negative, experienced similarly frequent intrusive thoughts and avoidance, and comprehended subsequent material similarly well," the researchers report.

There's something ineffably obnoxious about trigger warnings. I mean, if I'm going to write about something particularly gruesome or disturbing in some way, I consider it only polite to warn people. In turn, I don't particularly want to see acts of Nazi bestiality or whatever other horrors are out there, so warning people just seems like common bloody sense. Yet prefix it with "trigger warning", or worse, "TRIGGER WARNING", and I feel like a massive douche (thus making the phrase itself a trigger warning, which is pleasingly fractal). If people were just allowed to give perfectly sensible warnings without drawing attention to it, no-one would care. There certainly wouldn't be academic studies about it.

As I've previously ranted about extensively, there's a difference between knowledge, belief, and behaviour. Knowing what's coming isn't likely to change my feelings about it when it happens (unless perhaps I embark on a specific course of actions designed to do so, e.g. reflecting on it very deeply). Instead it lets me select what I want to see so I can avoid being grossed out or angered or whatever. These kinds of warnings are very similar to those on TV about sports events scores : I won't be able to brace myself by knowing what's coming, I'll just choose not to view it at all. If I cared about sports, that is.

Finally, the inevitable question is whether they should be used in universities. Well, yeah, of course they should. We shouldn't spare people's feelings when there's a need to discuss the various horrors of the past, but there's equally no reason to ram grotesque imagery down people's throats either. Warnings don't have to be as blunt as the hilarious, "contains scenes of extended mild peril" as found on some movie trailers. Most history books don't start by describing the lurid details of Aztec sacrifices, they build up to it. It ought to be bloomin' obvious to anyone if and when they should stop reading, and it's their own damn fault if they don't. Continuously warning people about every single instance of slight inconvenience - yeah, that's stupid. Giving them a quick overall heads-up at the start... well what's wrong with that ?

Trigger Warnings Do Not Work, New Study Finds

Trigger warnings-those alerts provided to college students in advance of potentially disturbing material-have prompted an intense philosophical and ideological debate. But do they actually achieve their stated goal of reducing emotional distress when dealing with sensitive subjects? New research from New Zealand comes to a firm conclusion: They do not.

Training bees to talk

 Well, sort-of. Not really. But that's how I'm going to spin it.

By deciphering the instructive messages encoded in the insects' movements, called waggle dances, the teams hope to better understand the insects' preferred forages and the location of these food sources. Nearly six decades ago, Karl von Frisch, a Nobel-prize winning ethologist, discovered that the angle of the dancer's body relative to the vertical encodes the direction of the forage, and the distance to the food source is communicated by the duration of the bee's dance. 

During the waggle dance, a successful forager returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction from the hive to the food source by performing multiple, repeated figure-eight-like movements called waggle runs. According to Couvillon and Schürch, different bees conveying the same location can vary their waggle runs, and even individual bees repeating a run may alter their dance. Moreover, bees are inspired to dance only when they have located particularly tantalizing food resources. Anomalies such as these, coupled with a greater understanding of bees' highly developed cognition, inspired the husband-and-wife duo to develop their own distance-duration calibration system six years ago.

Their meticulous calibration process requires that each bee is numbered and videotaped. Team members then spend months in front of computers analysing each dancer's movements to determine a distance-to-duration calibration. "What also makes our research different is that we trained many numbers of bees and followed them great distances," said Schürch. "You can train bees to go to a feeder and move it farther and farther away."

Being able to translate bee communications no doubt has a bazillion fantastic spin-offs, but what I'm really interested in is animal cognition. There was a recent article on how bees can count up to four and even understand zero at some level, which is remarkable. But are they thinking or just responding mechanically to external stimuli ? Do they actually understand (whatever that means) what they're doing or are they just acting on pure instinct ? Does a bee have the same kind of internal experiences as a human or is it no more than a flying furry abacus ? We can never know for sure, but this gives some interesting clues :

The team discovered that the individual noise, or variation between bees, was so high that the difference between location and sub-species was rendered biologically irrelevant. "While there were differences among populations in how they communicate, it doesn't matter from the bees' perspective," said Schürch. "We cannot tell them apart in terms of how they translate this information. There is huge overlap. In effect, a bee from England would understand a bee from Virginia and would find a food source in the same way with a similar success rate."

Which strongly suggests to me that bee communication is purely genetic and instinctive. If they were actually thinking about what they were doing and understanding it, there ought to be language drift between populations. The article doesn't say how much they investigated different species though.

Researchers decipher and codify the universal language of honey bees

March 27, 2019 , Virginia Tech For Virginia Tech researchers Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch, the Tower of Babel origin myth-intended to explain the genesis of the world's many languages-holds great meaning. The two assistant professors and their teams have decoded the language of honey bees in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects' highly sophisticated and complex communications.

Indicators are NOT all blinking simultaneously

So the indicative votes have passes their first stage. Shortly beforehand I wrote elsewhere :

If I were Theresa May and I'd just walked into a door, thereby restoring a modicum of sanity, my plan would be as follows :

1) Solicit opinions on alternative options. This appears to have already been done.
2) Hold a series of indicative, free, non-binding votes on as many options as possible, including the existing proposed deal.
3) Select a subset of the most popular options (with luck no more than three). Hold cross-party discussions with MPs to see if they can be persuaded to reduce those options down to two.
4) Hold further indicative votes to get hard numbers.
5) Repeat 2-4 until a binary preference emerges. If necessary, request further short extension from EU on the grounds that a path to resolution is emerging.
6) Hold binding votes on final two choices.

That might not work, but it's what I would do...

This is very nearly what actually happened. May uttered some usual air-escaping-from-lungs level of stupid comments about being reluctant on the grounds that Parliament might vote for "something completely impractical" - as though Brexit wasn't ! - and still wanting another vote on her deal, despite Bercow and the DUP again rejecting it, and some idiot Tory even suggested making the indicative votes binding (which would have defeated the whole purpose). But ultimately stage 2 was completed. Except, weirdly, the opposition decided that their votes should not be free but that MPs should be whipped (meaning they have to toe the party line or resign). I find this completely bizarre, but not at all surprising coming from Corbyn. It probably didn't make much difference since they were directed to vote against all the harder versions of Brexit, which they likely would have done anyway.

So yes, there were certainly shenanigans aplenty, but ultimately things are going to plan. The results were not optimal, but they weren't necessarily that awful either. There seems to be a general cry of despair that Parliament did not succeed in choosing an alternative yet, but this is unwarranted. Yes, it would have been better if they'd chosen at least one (or preferably several) options by majority. But this is not necessary, because it's only stage 2 of 6. Sure, stage 3 is going to be slightly modified to, "select a subset of the least unpopular options", but that does not invalidate the remaining stages. Knowing now for certain that all options are unpopular, and having quantitative estimates of which ones are the least intolerable if not the most desirable, is a necessary first step.

How bad were the defeats ? There are many ways to slice the data, of which the most sophisticated is probably this one. But I prefer this simpler graph of the net vote against each deal, using data from the Guardian article below. This shows the scale of the challenge to get each proposal accepted, though it lacks details on party support.

I'm not going to do a detail breakdown of each - for that, see this article (I have labelled option O as "managed no deal v. 2", option H as "managed no deal v. 3", and used the results of Meaningless Vote 2 for May's deal). Taking the figures at face value, it seems that only Ken Clarke's custom's union and a confirmatory public vote (i.e. a second referendum) have any hope of passing. If Parliament continues to debate more options, based on numbers it would probably have to include Labour's custom union plans, an alternative, more complex "common market 2.0", and completely revoking article 50. All versions of No Deal have nowhere near enough support to have a hope of passing and can be completely eliminated.

Of course, it might well still be the case the Parliament is not able to choose anything at all. But we won't know that until next week* : at least now they have the data they need to even attempt to forge an acceptable compromise and make a truly meaningful choice.

*Notwithstanding any other unexpected developments that could render all this completely obsolete, which is not at all implausible.

All eight indicative vote options on Brexit defeated by MPs - as it happened

The day's political developments as they happened, including the indicative votes debate as MPs choose from eight options

Pinker's democracy

I'm finally reading one of the notorious Stephen Pinker's books : Enlightenment Now. I'll have more general comments on this in the future (suffice to say that that it's really, really weird), but I thought the chapter on democracy deserved something by itself.

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny.

He goes on to note that the great paradox of democracy is that it seems to work despite neither the voters nor the leaders acting in each other's best interests. Leaders often act only in their own self-interest while the voters are fickle, uneducated and capricious. Why, then, does this work at all ?

Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question, "Who should rule ?", but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. The political scientist John Mueller broadens the idea from a binary Judgement Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain... Women's suffrage is an example* : by definition, they could not vote to grant themselves the vote, but they got it by other means.

* A dreadful one as it happens - I'll return to this in a minute.

Clearly implicit in this is David Davis' message :

So we have three possible guiding principles of democracy :

1. Rule by the people - enacting their will, no matter what.
2. A peaceful process whereby the people decide who gets to rule.
3. A process of giving the people a voice for discussion.

These principles are neither mutually exclusive nor automatically compatible. Option (1) is not much used in modern representative democracies - it's become subsumed by option (2). We get to decide policy only indirectly, by voting only for people who promise to carry out their stated proposals. This means that a modern, healthy democracy is really a blend of all three principles : discussions occur at all levels of society, which filters through to the policies of (potential) rulers, and we then vote on these. Rulers are elected and removed peacefully, knowing that everyone has a fair chance and a chance to change. This does not, however, mean that the process feels very pleasant to those experiencing it - the end goal is a maximum possible level of civic harmony, but in practise this amounts more to minimising dissatisfaction; more a process of working out what everyone is prepared to put up with than what would actually please them.

The possibility of change, however, is quite obviously common to all three options. You cannot use force to get what you want, but you generally don't need to - if things aren't going well for your cause today, perhaps they will improve tomorrow. You can continue to press your case in almost any eventuality. Yet you ultimately accept that your cause may not win because everyone else agrees to accept that too : you win some, you lose some. Democracy in all its forms implicitly acknowledges that situations can change and we are not bound to the mistakes of the past because we can always peacefully undo them. The people's mandate is something that must be listened too, not a stick to beat them with.

Sometimes, though, these principles are at odds with each other. The people may want something different from what their leaders want. They may be given a voice for discussion but the leaders dismiss or ignore them. The people may want (or feel compelled to enact, as the suffragettes were in Pinker's ill-chosen example) a violent process of change. The point is that none of the three principles are at all sensible if chosen exclusively. Rule by the people converges to tyranny by majority without discussion or peaceful implementation. A peaceful election does little good if it's for someone no-one wants. Rulers who hear people's grievances are no use if they don't at least try and address them or still use violence to stay in power even if they do.

So the only way is to seek a harmony between the three, knowing when to give preference to one and when to the others. The problem is that while all three of these principles are noble and well-intentioned, there is no such equivalent guiding light as to how to reconcile the conflicts that emerge between them. There is no meta, overarching principle to help decide which one is most appropriate given the circumstances.

As Pinker goes on :

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratisation, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalise its uppity citizens.

I would say rather that it's a key principle, though not the only one. Rather than tolerating dissent, in response to the violence of the suffragettes governments acted undemocratically to try and suppress the movement - a curious example of an undemocratic action leading to an undemocratic reaction that eventually led to a much more democratic system overall. Attempting to balance the three principles if often messy and sometimes it simply fails entirely, but the institution of democracy itself appears to be resilient, at least to some degree. Pinker provides another messy example :

Capital punishment was once ubiquitous among countries, and it was applied to hundreds of misdemeanours in gruesome public spectacles of torture and humiliation... The abolition of capital punishment has gone global. The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club : China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, and the United States. 

As in other areas of human flourishing, the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies. This American exceptionalism illuminates the torturous path by which moral progress proceeds from philosophical arguments to facts on the ground. It also showcases the tension between the two conceptions of democracy we have been examining : a form of government whose power to inflict violence on its citizens is sharply circumscribed, and a form of government that carries out the will of the majority of its people. The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is, in one sense, too democratic. 

The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy... It was only after a couple of decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos - at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital punishment - that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary. But the United States, for better or worse, is closer to having government by the people for the people.

(EDIT : If you watch Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States, you'll probably come away thinking that the club of highly conservative far-right nations isn't so unlikely at all. Similarly, while the United States does have strong "by the people" elements in its democracy, these are by no means absolute, and the "for the people" element is practically laughable. These caveats are somewhat beside the point of this post, however.)

Capital punishment wasn't abolished through direct democracy but through the judgement of experts. Governments heard multiple different voices and opted against a simple majority choice. This was the correct decision, but on what principle was this based ? Again, there doesn't appear to be one. The prospect of change is not in itself a fourth guideline but implicit in the main three. But how to juggle those three - in particular how to decide which complaints to address, when to prefer that of experts to those of the masses - that is lacking. The messy, practical combination of the three does help somewhat, as it means inevitably that people must compromise and no-one is expecting to get everything they want all of the time. Everyone accepts that the laws won't always favour them, and that it is fundamentally possible and necessary to make choices that some people will disagree with. But this process is far from perfect.

Brexit is all this writ large. The people spoke in favour of a course of action at odds with reality, "something completely impractical" as May has (ironically) described the indicative votes. Perhaps even worse than this is that they spoke passionately, but indecisively. Strength of feeling isn't accounted for in most electoral procedures - doing so would risk creating a utility monster. How in the world could one judge the votes of a hundred casually in favour with that of one who was vehemently opposed ? There does not seem to be any answer to this.

Until recently, we've dealt with the somewhat less consequential choices of electing leaders, accepting the usual sort of compromises on the grounds that they were relatively easy to undo. But with Brexit we face a far more permanent choice, and that is at odds with the whole basis of the system. The very least we could do is check if we're really sure about this. Instead, government policy appears to be a bizarre attempt to selectively determine what the will of the people is and avoid any further discussion. It is not so much undemocratic as it is a gross perversion of the process; turning a responsible, progressive democracy into something more akin to a suicide cult. Sure, it's a democratic process. Is it one we should use in government ? Hell no.

Blame it all on the hippies

This is a much more compelling argument than the idea that we inevitably get stupider and more racist as we get older : successive generations are shaped by their own unique histories. With such different forces at work, they inevitably turn out differently. And of course, there's enough scatter to explain, say, my parents, who aren't of the anti-integration mindset. We should also remember that racism was much more socially acceptable back in the day (that is, after all, a major factor in why the Nazis rose to power at all). But the narrative has a strong appeal : a war generation who saw the world at its worst, a succeeding generation of the relatively privileged who were presented with scapegoats for their misfortunes, and latter generations like mine who have grown up with European integration as being absolutely normal. To the war generation, of course we shouldn't go back to the bad old days. To my generation, of course we shouldn't undo decades of economic and political harmonisation, any more than we should cut our arms off. But to the middle generations, the EU is neither normal nor necessary. Damn those ungrateful hippies.


When defining a ‘war generation’ that experienced the majority of their formative period during the Second World War, as well as a number of other more recent generations, this war generation is revealed as displaying significantly more positive views towards European integration than the immediate post-war generations. In fact, the size of this generational effect between the war and post-war generations is approximately equivalent to the same change in attitude that would be expected from a two-year reduction in education levels, a factor well known to increase Euroscepticism... the war generation have more positive attitudes towards the EU than the immediately following generations. Indeed, only the most recent generation, the millennial generation, display more positive attitudes towards the EU than the war generation.

One explanation for these results is that the war generation give a premium to the pacific benefits of European institutions. Having experienced first-hand the horrors of war, they place a high value on the founding principles of unity that the EU promotes. The most recent generations also view integration more positively, given that these individuals have grown up with the UK’s membership of the EU as the norm. The concept of not being a part of Europe – with its visible signifiers of flags, anthems and institutions – is likely to be discordant to those from the millennial generation. Conversely, the post-war and 60/70s generations in the UK have neither the memories of wartime nor the routinised experiences of EU membership during their formative years. They therefore display the most hostile attitudes towards integration.

However, this analysis also reveals additional elements that are driving the cohort effects between the war and the following generations. Indeed, the post-war generation are in fact more likely to associate the EU with bringing peace than their younger counterparts, and yet they display more negative overall attitudes towards integration.

Explanations for these results can be found in British history; the post-war and 60s/70s generations were the first to confront the fall of empire during their formative years, as well as the first mass immigration from the Commonwealth. This fuelled insecurities over British identity, coming to the fore in such instances as Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood Speech” and the Immigration Acts of the 1960s. These results therefore support the notion that it is during times when identities are threatened that they become mobilised as points of political salience, and that these heightened political environments can shape individuals’ opinions long into the future.

Britain's wartime generation are almost as pro-EU as millennials

There is a significant difference in opinion on Brexit between different age groups in the UK, with older citizens generally exhibiting more negative attitudes toward the EU than younger ones.

Platonic turtles all the way down

The article's title belies the author's intent, but it's still a very good article. Panpsychism is a popular concept. Articles range from the desperately religious (the notion that we're all "shards in the mind of God"), the miserably stupid (in which the author absurdly confuses "possible" with "probable"), right up to the intelligent and philosophical (noting that conscious experiences and relational properties are fundamentally different from discrete physical objects).

Max Tegmark boldly claims that “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage.” Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behaviour of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them". He attributes existence solely to descriptions, while incongruously denying the very thing that is described in the first place. Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real. This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception.

By way of analogy, it is possible to write—as Lewis Carroll did—that the Cheshire Cat’s grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is another thing entirely to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means. To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such.

Whereas vagueness may be defensible in regard to natural entities conceivably beyond the human ability to apprehend, it is difficult to justify when it comes to a human concept, such as information. We invented the concept, so we either specify clearly what we mean by it or our conceptualisation remains too vague to be meaningful. In the latter case, there is literally no sense in attributing primary existence to information.

Well, the map is not the territory and all that. Language, with the dubious exception of mathematics, in an inevitably imperfect description of the world around us. We all of us know (or think we know) at some level what the difference is between physical objects and non-physical concepts. Yet trying to describe the difference with any degree of rigour is bloody difficult. If information is all there is, if it's just descriptions and descriptions of descriptions - a latter-day "turtles all the way down" approach combined with Platonic Forms, then that hardly seems to make sense of the world. So far as we can tell, the Universe seems to obey very strict rules. Replacing its components from physical to non-physical feels like a pointless linguistic sleight-of-hand, a sophistic tactic that doesn't actually achieve anything but sounds damn good.

The untenability of information realism, however, does not erase the problem that motivated it to begin with: the realisation that, at bottom, what we call “matter” becomes pure abstraction, a phantasm. How can the felt concreteness and solidity of the perceived world evaporate out of existence when we look closely at matter?

To make sense of this conundrum, we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modelled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behaviour of that world, not in the world itself.

The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism.

I think the author is playing their own word games here. The heart of the issue is the difference between physical, real objects like chairs and atoms and sausages, and relational properties like velocity and justice. My own take is that these non-physical properties clearly do exist and influence us, though exactly how that happens I leave as a cheerful mystery. The point, though, is that saying, "it's just a subjective experience", or the notion that consciousness is just our experience of the world, (or even an emergent property) gets us nowhere. What the hell is an experience ? Why should I perceive some electrochemical flows but not others ? Do calculators have thoughts ? Do plants ? What do we mean by "non-physical" ? It's often taken to mean something like a ghost, which has something very similar to physical reality but on another "plane", whatever that means. Yet emergent properties, or concepts like justice and colour and mischievousness, are clearly something very different again  - they are much more subtle than merely being a different kind of physical.

No, I don't find the author's argument that it's just our experience at all convincing. It is obvious that our descriptions and perceptions are not the same as the things themselves (Plato worked that one out in depth). That gets us no closer to understanding what the difference between things and our perception of things really is, let alone perception itself.

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that "protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars" are all redundant "baggage." Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself.

Predicting chimp intelligence

During the study, they noticed a wide range of skills among the chimps and wondered whether they could measure this variation in ability—and whether there were studies that could predict the chimps’ overall performance in all areas, like an IQ test in humans. So they gave a battery of physical and social tests to 106 chimps at Ngamba Island and the Tchimpounga chimpanzee sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo, and to 23 captive chimpanzees and bonobos in Germany. In one experiment, chimps were asked to find food in a container after it had been shuffled around with empty containers. In another, they had to use a stick to get food placed on a high platform. The researchers analysed the data to determine if the scores in some tests helped predict performance in others.

"In general, we don’t find any kind of general intelligence factor that can predict intelligence in all areas," Herrmann says. "But we did find a big variation overall, and this one outstanding individual."

The article gives precious few details about how smart this one chimp is. A much better demonstration, fascinating in its own right, can be seen in this short video. In some ways, chimp memory is far superior to humans :

The stand-out individual, Natasha, was the chimp that caretakers—who don’t administer tests to the chimps but do feed them, clean their cages, and accompany them on walks—consistently ranked as the smartest based on only the way she interacted with them. But there's nothing about Natasha's life—extra attention or time spent with humans, for example—that explains how she became so astute. "Motivation and temperament probably play a role," Herrmann says. "That's something that we want to look more into."

That suggests to me a strong genetic component to intelligence. Though it would be interesting correlate this with an analysis of chimp sociology, e.g. apart from their handlers, how do those genius chimps interact with each other ? Do they tend to learn their skills from other chimps ? Are the cleverest chimps the ones with the most social connections ? Of course, then one would have to determine if these social connections drive intelligence or if it's the cleverest chimps who are able to make those connections in the first place...

I guess a better study would be to find some short-lived, moderately social animal (one that can tolerate isolation) and raise some individuals in isolation and an equal number as a group. The isolated group would be a control to determine the rate that abilities evolve without "teaching", i.e. watching other chimps or handlers. The social group would show how abilities spread through the group. What would be particularly interesting would be to compare the rate of polymath animals in both groups : are geniuses naturally gifted or are they made by society ?

Of course, one would have to be very careful to extrapolate this too far to human societies. Someone may be fantastically intelligent yet simply lack the crucial piece of information to make a big breakthrough; they might not find the field they're really good at; social structures may mean their discoveries are not communicated effectively, etc. But it would still be an interesting experiment.

Chimps' Answer to Einstein

Natasha, a chimp at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda, has always seemed different from her peers. She's learned to escape from her enclosure, teases human caretakers, and scores above other chimps in communication tests. Now, Natasha has a new title: genius.

Just for the record

At the time of writing, Britain is in political chaos. The EU has, very reasonably, granted us a short extension to get our shit together and decide what we want to do about Brexit. May has blamed Parliament for this, but while a few right-wing tabloids are still clinging to demonising the EU, most polls show the Tories are seen as the primary guilty party. May's venal statement has been universally slammed, and rightly so; her condescending remark the next day that she was "expressing her frustration" hasn't won her any converts. All that's done is emphasise even more how little a grasp of reality and respect for due process May really has.

My preferred option has always been a unilateral revocation of Article 50. Unlike asking for more extensions, Britain can simply decide to stop this nonsense at a stroke (provided there's no prospect of re-invoking it in the foreseeable future), as ruled by the European Court of Justice. There's currently a poll running in support of this which is at 3.4 million signatures.

How seriously should we take this poll and the possibility of its success ? Well, we're very much in uncharted political waters right now. I never thought we'd even get close to entertaining a No Deal scenario. I never thought that May would have the audacity to blame Parliament for her own mistakes or that the Speaker would feel it necessary to remind MPs that they are none of them traitors. Predictions are a fool's game so I won't offer any. I will say I'm not optimistic though.

That said, some things both good and bad about the poll need to be said.

First, Andrea Leadsom :

Earlier Commons leader Andrea Leadsom dismissed the petition as not being on the same scale as the pro-Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum. "Should it reach 17.4 million respondents then I am sure there will be a very clear case for taking action," she told MPs. She added: "It's absolutely right that people do have the opportunity to put their views and that can then spark yet another Brexit debate."

Well, fair enough for saying that we have another opportunity to be heard. Nothing wrong there. Similarly even the mere possibility that the poll could cause change is cause for hope, albeit heavily tempered with realism and caution.

But the notion that it needs to reach 17.4 million in order to have any serious consequences should be preposterous and wrong on every level. The referendum was legally non-binding but MPs promised - and are still promising - to respect the result. It was therefore engendered with power an online poll can simply never match. Both polls may have legally identical force but a single casual remark by one MP cannot compete with the promises of the entire Cabinet.

The second issue is : are the numbers genuine ? Some kindly soul has plotted the signature numbers as a function of time :

To me, that looks weird. The early stages look fine : a slow rise as it gains virality, an overnight plateau when everyone was asleep... and then it gets a bit strange. First it becomes extremely linear, which it's been suggested was an artificial limit because of the maximum traffic the site could handle. But then it rose much more steeply before a second overnight plateau, before resuming at a similar rate the next day. Currently it's still rising rapidly, albeit in a bit of a wobble.

The BBC has consulted experts who believe it's unlikely this is due to bots. I am not entirely convinced by this : how difficult is it, really, to automatically create email addresses and find UK postcodes for the web form ? I do not understand why that would pose a formidable barrier; if someone can enlighten me, that'd be great. I can tell you from direct experience that there's nothing whatsoever stopping someone who has an email address and knows a potscode from voting. Perhaps some further checks are made later to remove fraudulent entries (I doubt it) but at the voting stage that's literally all there is to it.

I would love the poll to be genuine, and I can't believe it's due to Russian trolls as Nigel "Fuckface" Farage has claimed. All I'm saying is that the pattern of voting seems weird. While the petition grapher does offer other polls, it's difficult to compare because it includes time up to the present day, while most activity on polls is in the early phases (hence on a graph of long-dead polls the early stages are compressed, so you just see a steep rise and a long plateau). I'm not remotely qualified to say anything beyond, "this looks a bit odd to me, can anyone explain ?", mind you.

Third, people have asked why this is happening now. Well, this isn't the first poll about the issue. Far from it. Previous polls calling for a second referendum have amassed votes in the millions, while others calling for rescinding Article 50 have crossed the 100,000 mark. Now, however, it's do or die. Decision time has been kicked down the road once more, but just barely. If we don't have to actually make the decision itself right now, we do have to decide on the process with extreme urgency.


The poll isn't useless, and I would urge anyone who thinks we shouldn't leave to sign it and share it - for God's sake share it ! You have the absolute democratic right to change your mind, you do not have to let the result of a non-binding vote from three years ago determine your future. This is your vote. Yours. You do not have to go along with things just because everyone else is. You don't have to be bound by a result that you have the right to revoke; no democracy could function if it were so inflexible. That endless voting on the same issue would be unworkable does not make the opposite prospect - one vote for all eternity - any the less of a perversion of democracy. A balance must be struck.

I suspect that if any real change does occur, the poll will play only a minor role. More persuasive will be letters - actual letters, not just emails - to MPs and street protests. If you have the opportunity to protest, do so. The voices of the 48%, and especially those who have joined us, must be heard now more than ever. That we may not succeed in stopping Brexit does not excuse us from not trying.

Perhaps all we'll achieve is damage limitation - no matter. If history records this as a catastrophic failure of Parliament, then let it also show that we at least fought it to the end. But more optimistically, since Britain and America competed to see which country could screw themselves the hardest in 2016, let this be year we pulled out of the race to the bottom, dug deep within our collective soul, and found the courage to deal with the loss of face and slowly restored ourselves to some level of dignity. Far better and braver to face up to one's mistakes and admit them than ruthlessly pursing them for the sake of avoiding "embarrassment". If we led the world in a bizarre act of collective stupidity, let's show them that we can get ourselves out of it too. Then we can (eventually) get back to what we do best : mocking the Americans for having stupid politics.

May's dangerous game

This statement was even worse than I was expecting.

Theresa May, who campaigned for Remain, is now blaming Parliament for the deadlock. Yet Parliament wasn't involved in negotiating the deal - that was the responsibility of May and the government. Two Brexit secretaries resigned in the process because they thought the resulting deal wasn't good enough, while the overall rate of resignations under May's premiership is outstanding. At no point was Parliament involved in the negotiation process. Indeed, May said very clearly at the start that she wouldn't even be giving a running commentary. She was also highly reluctant to allow Parliament a "meaningful" vote at all - that only came about because of a court ruling.

Continuing to blame others for her own mess is a direct subversion of the democratic process. Parliament was not involved in the negotiation so MPs feel no sense of ownership of the deal - it is very much May's deal, not their deal. They are not duty-bound to vote in favour of whatever deal is put before them. To insist that they do so makes a mockery of the idea the vote was "meaningful" and therefore undermines Parliament's democratic sovereignty, which was supposedly what Brexit was all about.

In order for a vote to have meaning, there must be an alternative option available. While May dragged her heels even on the first vote, when it was (spectacularly) defeated an alternative should have been immediately presented. As it happened no backup plan was even considered, so no alternative came forth. There was no way Parliament could have made a meaningful choice because they simply weren't allowed to. Instead, May insisted that they vote again on the same deal. It was again rejected, qualifying May for the proverbial definition of insanity in doing the same thing again and expecting a different result.

It is not Parliament's fault that MPs keep doing their duty by declining a deal they had no part in and don't want. The responsibility to present them with an alternative rests squarely with May, not the opposition.

May further undermines the democratic process, ironically, by appealing directly the people. This insults MPs for doing their job while she avoids taking responsibility for what is manifestly her own failure. Her appeal to the public is also pragmatically foolish, as only 37% of the electorate voted for Brexit*. For her to claim that she is doing what the people wants insults those who voted against Brexit, never mind that it remains completely unclear if Brexit is still the majority choice - still less if May's deal is what the people want, of if they think MPs are responsible. This is a something that Brexiteers of all positions have been guilty of : presuming from a very simple question that their specific version of Brexit is what the people crave, despite the fact that no-one has asked the people if that's the case.

* EDIT : And according to this poll, the public blame the government more than they do MPs. 

May's reference to "arcane points of procedure" is a clear shot at the Speaker, who is also doing his duty to protect representative democracy. Forbidding identical votes is a long-established procedure and self-evidently a way to ensure that votes have consequences and therefore meaning. As he explained, the reason this procedure has not been used in recent years is only because identical motions have not been presented to the House. Thus the objective of the convention has been satisfied without recourse to forbidding repeated votes.

Not that May is the sole architect of her own nightmare though. By repeatedly refusing discussions and insisting with obscene single-mindedness on a general election, Corbyn reveals himself to have no more negotiation skills than May. The opposition are hardly blameless, yet ultimately as Prime Minister the burden of responsibility must fall on May. She invoked Article 50. She called a general election. She decided what kind of Brexit deal the people wanted. She forbade discussion with the opposition. She prevented any alternatives from being considered. She decided that MPs got the result wrong. She left them with an impossible choice. And lest we forget, less recently, she voted against things she claims to have later changed her mind on without justification, voted against the result of a previous referendum and even to try and implement a second referendum to revoke the first one.

I'm not saying that all votes must be considered binding or advisory - far from it. But without some consistency, some clear procedures outlined as to when the result of a vote must be inviolable and when it must be tempered with flexibility, the process becomes a farce. By blaming everyone but herself for her own mistakes and arbitrarily deciding which votes to (supposedly) respect and which to reject, the only reasonable conclusion is that May hates democracy.

Theresa May makes Brexit statement

Prime Minister Theresa May makes a statement in Downing Street. (Subscribe: https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe) ----------------------- Get more news at our site - https://www.channel4.com/news/ Follow us: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/Channel4News

The meaningfully meaningless vote cuts both ways, if we're not careful

We are still no closer to understanding the end result of Brexit than we ever have been. At best, we're reaching the end of the beginning. Since the situation is as fluid as ever, I just want to comment on the general principles that Bercow's ruling highlights.

The non-binding question put to the people was whether we wanted to leave the EU or not. That's all it asked. It said nothing of any details whatsoever : whether we wanted a Norway-style model or a hard Brexit; whether we were unhappy with the economics of the EU, its underlying principles, current leadership, or what.

Since then, politicians across the spectrum have insisted that the vote must be respected, despite the margin of victory being a mere 4%. The Conservative government in particular has been voracious in its insistence that the result cannot be altered and that the deal they have (just barely) managed to negotiate is the only possible route forward. No choice has been allowed on any point. Only with the greatest reluctance did it concede that Parliament must be given a "meaningful vote" to ratify its proposal, on the grounds that only Parliament - not the government - gets to make law. To ignore this would have been to set a precedent for nothing less than tyranny by majority.

The government, however, completely failed to acknowledge that there was any prospect of its deal being rejected. It therefore did not even countenance the notion of entertaining alternatives, much less actually propose any. MPs across the board were certainly unwilling to choose (few had the courage to suggest revoking Article 50 or proposing another vote, though some sizeable number did try and push for a "managed" No Deal proposition) but more importantly they were unable to choose because nothing else was on offer. The government's utter refusal to believe that any alternatives were possible resulted in blatant hypocrisy : the idea that the people might want to change their minds was unthinkable, but asking Parliament to vote again (and possibly again and again !) after the most decisive defeat in history was done without any evident shame. It became clear that the "meaningful" vote was anything but.

Speaker John Bercow, however, is not pleased by this. His ruling is that according to long-established (1604) convention, a motion cannot be brought to the House repeatedly in the same Parliamentary period if its is essentially unchanged. This all but rules out the current deal.

The question we have to ask is how we should apply this more generally. Of course Parliamentary conventions need not be identical to those we use in other aspects of democracy, but one would hope they should be at least similar. So, for example, could we have a second referendum with an identical question, recognising that circumstances have changed ? If so, Parliamentary proceedings would have to have some similar governing principle. It is not unreasonable to ask for repeated votes if the situation is different and it appears that the majority opinion has changed even if the question has not - this is precisely why many of us feel a second referendum is justified. But if we then also forbid Parliament from voting again on the same issue, we are at risk of acting in bad faith.

Yet we also have to manage the government's tactics of running down the clock, whereby the only change of circumstance is the purely artificial pressure of time. We will need to insist not merely that time has passed but that an alternative is also available, perhaps from an opposition party. Alternatively, we might require that a repeated motion describe the changed circumstances in detail (I am speaking here only in general terms, not suggesting how we should proceed though the actual current situation).

In this case, a second referendum is unlikely to ask the same question. While there is no legal requirement that repeated referenda be substantially different from each other, those advocating a second vote argue that both circumstance has changed (e.g. we now know the terms and effects of leaving) and/or that the vote itself be altered. This basic procedure of offering a genuine and genuinely different choice is what Bercow is attempting, quite reasonably, to apply to Parliamentary procedures. There are many legitimate grounds for re-examining a motion that was apparently already settled : the principle that a repeated vote be significantly modified is a perfectly sensible check and balance on the system to prevent the ruling government from abusing the democratic process to subvert the will of Parliament.

I only want to point out that we should strive for consistency on this issue. An important loophole in the democratic process has been exposed : Bercow's ruling is an attempt to close this, but we should also be aware of the potential pitfalls. Without some clear guidelines, at the very least, as to the conditions under which a second vote may occur, it would seem ludicrous that either the public or Parliament could continue voting until they get the right answer.

BERCOW'S BREXIT BOMBSHELL: Mister Speaker BLOCKS Theresa May's third vote (full statement)

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow was today accused of sabotaging Theresa May's Brexit deal after telling MPs she cannot force them to vote on it again without changing it 'substantially'. The Commons Speaker cited a 400-year-old Commons precedent to inflict an extraordinary blow to Mrs May's hopes of getting her EU divorce through Parliament.

KABOOM !

If there's a 170 kilotonne explosion in the atmosphere and no-one hears it, does it make a sound ?

A huge fireball exploded in the Earth's atmosphere in December, according to NASA. The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago. But it went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.

The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years. Measuring several metres in size, the space rock exploded 25.6km above the Earth's surface, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons.

It's reassuring that most of our planet is still empty and that asteroids with such enormous energies don't make it to the ground. Less reassuring is that an explosion many times more powerful than the atomic blast that destroyed Hiroshima can occur without anyone even noticing very much and that it was completely unexpected. Even less reassuring than that is that no-one seems particularly alarmed by this. I mean, it's nice to avoid a panic, but could we maybe just please be a little bit more panicy than we are ?

On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe everyone is already at Peak Panic because of other issues and they don't have any panic left to give. Perhaps the political situation is so dire that people are hoping for another solution entirely. If so, the asteroid can help them with that soon enough.

US detects huge meteor explosion

A huge fireball exploded in the Earth's atmosphere in December, according to Nasa. The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago. But it went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.

Thinking again on nuclear power

I find the whole nuclear power debate interesting more from an applied epistemological perspective than the issue itself.

That is, I've got a PhD in astrophysics and have been employed as an astronomer for coming up to 9 years. I read articles on critical thinking as a matter of course. Though I'm no expert in either nuclear physics or medicine, I've been following the nuclear debate for many years. By any objective standard, I should be in a better than average - though nowhere near the top - position to be able to decide who's right and who's wrong. Yet I find myself completely unable to advance beyond a tentative, "cautiously pro-nuclear" stance. Without actually investigating the issues in expert-level detail for myself, how am I to reach a more definitive conclusion ? By extension, how can the the general public be expected to make a proper decision on things like climate change ? How can we even decide which experts to trust ?

The problem with knowing who to trust is that all of the parameter space of expertise versus opinion appears to be occupied : you can find an expert of any qualification level who ascribes to any opinion you want. A senior professor thinks nuclear is safe ? Well, I can find you one who disagrees. A 17 year old vegan hippie environmentalist who thinks nuclear is worse than eating puppies ? Again, I can find you one who disagrees. It's not even clear where the bulk of opinion lies : how many senior experts favour which position. I don't doubt that statistic exists somewhere, but it is not widely reported. Thus I can't even gauge if an article is espousing the view of mainstream science or a minority fringe. I have absolutely no way to deciding which sources of bias are at work. I also have to wonder why this article is coming out now, at a time when the costs of renewable sources of energy are falling so rapidly that it almost looks as though nuclear won't be necessary on a large scale.

It seems to me the arguments boil down to extracting whether very low-level radiation causes a significantly elevated cancer risk, after controlling for a very wide variety of factors that vary strongly from place to place (e.g. diet, exercise, working conditions, exposure to non radioactive chemicals). An increased risk of cancer over a whole lifetime must be set against the other risks that would occur anyway. Determining whether nuclear power is anything more than a contributing factor looks like an impossible task in all but the most extreme cases.


Radiation from Chernobyl will kill, at most, 200 people, while the radiation from Fukushima and Three Mile Island will kill zero people. In other words, the main lesson that should be drawn from the worst nuclear accidents is that nuclear energy has always been inherently safe.

Twenty-eight firefighters died after putting out the Chernobyl fire. What about cancer? By 2065 there may be 16,000 thyroid cancers; to date there have been 6,000. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent — it is an easy cancer to treat — expected deaths may be 160. The World Health Organization claims on its web site that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of 4,000 people, but according to Dr. Geraldine Thomas, who started and runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, that number is based on a disproven methodology.

“That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the “linear no-threshold” method of extrapolating deaths from radiation. LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but that assumption has been discredited over recent decades by multiple sources of data. Support for the idea that radiation is harmless at low levels comes from the fact that people who live in places with higher background radiation, like Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer.

Even relatively high doses of radiation cause far less harm than most people think. Careful, large, and long-term studies of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offer compelling demonstration. Cancer rates were just 10 percent higher among atomic blast survivors, most of whom never got cancer. Even those who received a dose 1,000 times higher than today’s safety limit saw their lives cut short by an average of 16 months.

Thanks to nuclear’s inherent safety, the best-available science shows that nuclear has saved at least two million lives to date by preventing the burning of biomass and fossil fuels. Replacing, or not building, nuclear plants, thus results in more death. In that sense, Fukushima did result in a public health catastrophe. Only it wasn't one created by the tiny amounts of radiation that escaped from the plant. About 2,000 people died from the evacuation, while others who were displaced suffered from loneliness, depression, suicide, bullying at school, and anxiety.

It Sounds Crazy, But Fukushima, Chernobyl, And Three Mile Island Show Why Nuclear Is Inherently Safe

After a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan eight years ago today, triggering the meltdowns of three reactors, many believed it would result in a public health catastrophe. "By now close to one million people have died of causes linked to the Chernobyl disaster," Helen Caldicott, an Australian medical doctor, in The New York Times.

Using bias to forge a more accurate consensus

I distinctly remember a post where I said that if you have multiple ideological perspectives that lead you to the same conclusion, you're much more likely to be right. I can't find that post, but see also this one on how a consensus is stronger with disagreement and this one about modelling how Wikipedia articles arrive at a consensus through moderated discussions.

In their new Nature Human Behaviour paper, “The Wisdom of Polarised Crowds,” Evans and Teplitskiy concluded that polarisation doesn’t poison the wells of information. On the contrary, they showed politically diverse editor teams on Wikipedia put out better entries—articles with higher accuracy or completeness—than uniformly liberal or conservative or moderate teams. It’s a surprising result and so I caught up with Evans and Teplitskiy to offer their interpretations.

It doesn't strike me as surprising... if and only if you can get opposing sides to agree. If they remain ideologically opposed but do agree on the raw information under discussion, I should think there's a very high probability that that information is correct (see also this for more on how social media can be used to fight polarisation rather than increasing it). This doesn't mean the resulting articles will necessarily be persuasive to others, however. And this discussion process is not easy :

People talk about the importance of diversity. It’s not diversity in general; it’s diversity in specific. If you have these different ideologies, it’s associated with different filters on the world, different intakes of information, and so when it comes to constructing reference knowledge on an encyclopedic web page that’s supposed to thoroughly characterise an area, you do a much better job because you have a lot more information that’s attended to by this ideologically diverse group.

Editors working on a social issues page said, “We have to admit that the position that was echoed at the end of the argument was much stronger and balanced.” Did they begrudgingly come to that? They did, and that’s the key. If they too easily updated their opinion, then they wouldn’t have been motivated to find counter-factual and counter-data arguments that fuel that conversation. We found that more diversity is associated with longer conversations. If they were immediately willing to give up on these things, then it wouldn’t have produced the sustained competition that ended up generating the balance that they, themselves, came to appreciate. 

An important and interesting caveat is that diversity does not guarantee improved accuracy. Issues which are genuinely settled do not benefit from more diverse perspectives :

There are few places where there’s enormous amounts of certainty in the sciences. My guess is in places where there is strong certainty, we’re not going to see a big effect from political diversity. Political diversity is not a magical substance. If the distribution of political perspectives aren’t correlated with useful information about the topic at hand, then you’re not going to see a benefit. You’re going to see noise. You might even see a detriment.

All that seems entirely reasonable to me. I think the following probably needs some clarification though :

What do you think about fake news?
The thing most disturbing to me is the onslaught of claims about fake information and fake news. In some sense, all information is fake. All of it has a purpose, an angle. But the fact that now it’s just so easy to claim that it’s fake without any particular support for that claim, and it’s popular to do so, means it’s easier to discount alternative information than ever before. Angles are useful. They motivate people to look in a certain place, to search out information that you probably wouldn’t have searched out if you weren’t motivated by the possession of a belief. Angles end up having a lot of value, unless you discount them all. 

I think that ducks the question. Yes, it's easy to claim something you don't like is fake (people have done that since time immemorial). But it's also true that some news is actually just a pack of lies (again, people have done that since time immemorial). The only "angle" fake news has is its attempt to confuse rather than convince. It is most definitely not useful and is completely counter-productive to the effort to obtain accuracy. Objective facts are a real thing.

My hope is that not just scientists, but people with opinions and political stakes in general, can seriously consider the fact that people who don’t share their political viewpoints have something valuable to say—and even if they don’t have something valuable to say about a particular political topic, that their different experience and perspective has likely given them access to other kinds of information that will be valuable and new to you. That’s the key to unlocking the potential of polarisation: to allow people to constructively contribute to knowledge projects and other projects together. If you know enough about Wikipedia to open up the talk page, which anybody can do but almost nobody does, you’ll see extensive discussions going on. You’ll see people carefully, painstakingly employing diverse perspectives that are perceived by experts as being systematically better. It just produces more robust knowledge because there’s less ideological filtering going on.

This I like. I would add, though, that moderation of the is a key element of Wikipedia discussions in establishing accuracy and maintaining a civility to the articles not usually found in other arenas of debate. Implementing such policies elsewhere would be far from trivial... if you can get diverse people to agree, then yes you've probably got a more secure finding, but actually getting them to agree is bloody difficult - and it's even harder if you want to avoid making them even more polarised in the process.

Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds - Issue 70: Variables - Nautilus

In 2013, James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist and computational scientist, launched a study to see if science forged a bridge across the political divide. Did conservatives and liberals at least agree on biology and physics and economics? Short answer: No. "We found more polarization than we expected," Evans told me recently.

A fickle business

Watching the UK clown show Parliament lately has been a gut-wrenchingly frustrating experience. It seems that MPs are consistently able to decide on what options they want to reject for Brexit but can't agree on a way forward, to say nothing of May's supreme lack of shame at repeatedly calling for yet another meaningful vote. How you can possibly have multiple "meaningful" votes on the same damn issue I have no idea. There's a supreme irony, apparently completely lost on the mad old bat, in her insisting on voting until we get the right answer whereas the marginal result of the original referendum is apparently utterly beyond question. I don't get it.

The recent series of votes made me wonder just how fickle MPs really are. It's theoretically possible to have voted against May's deal, against No Deal, and against an extension. Anyone who did that would presumably have a miracle solution that could be implemented before March 29th... so does such a person exist ? Are MPs just being bloody-minded or is there some method in their madness ?

To answer this, I downloaded the voting records from the recent bills and amendments. It was a bit difficult to find what I wanted on the official Parliament website but fortunately this one is quite a lot easier (later I found an official one here, saving for later use). So I downloaded the voting records for three bills and a selection of their amendments, as follows :

1. The 12th March vote on leaving the EU according to May's proposed deal. This was previously rejected on 15th January by the biggest margin in history of 230 votes. Since then, May worked tirelessly and fruitlessly to acquire nothing but token "changes" from the EU, which is why it was again defeated by a massive 149 votes.
2. The 13th March "no deal" vote. This one is a bit complicated because it was substantially amended, though you could be forgiven for missing this from the raw text. Originally it was verbally stated that if the bill was rejected, we would be actively choosing to leave the EU with no deal - though this is not clear from the wording itself. It was then amended in such a way that it was popularly said to be ruling out leaving without a deal at any time under any circumstances. Again, this is not explicit in the text. It was also not legally binding and the government ended up reversing its decision to hold a free vote, instructing MPs to vote against its own amended bill. Strange times indeed ! I also downloaded data for the failed Malthouse compromise amendment, which would have been a weird sort of "managed no deal".
3. The 14th March extension bill. This means we'll have a third meaningful vote on May's deal on 20th March. If that vote passes, we'll ask the EU for a short extension until June 30th to sort things out (somehow). If it fails we'll be looking at a much longer extension to decide on another course of action. I also downloaded data for two amendments (both failed) : an extension of Article 50 for the House to take control of Brexit and a proposal for a second referendum. Most MPs abstained from the latter as it was felt (including by leaders of the People's Vote campaign) that it was more urgent to secure an extension than tack on a new public vote. There were other amendments to this bill but I didn't consider them as they were very similar.

I would also note that when MPs vote on amendments, they are really just voting on the wording of a bill. They still have to ratify the amended bill if the amendment is accepted - it's theoretically possible they could vote for an amendment but not ratify it. MPs might also choose to vote against an amendment if they don't think it has any chance of currently winning the actual vote, e.g. in this case the second referendum amendment. So we have to be cautious of taking the statistical results too literally.

The idea of leaving without a deal was hitherto not at all popular in Parliament so one may wonder why the vote to rule it out wasn't terribly decisive at 321 to 278. This is likely because of the wording change and the last-minute whips from the government. Ruling out no deal under any circumstances is a bit different from ruling one out right now - the government may be mistaken but genuinely views the "threat" of no deal as a bargaining chip for whatever reason. Moreover, a vote against this bill would not necessarily have been the active decision to leave without a deal. Since the government has said they don't want to leave without a deal and enforced its MPs to vote against this bill, it's highly unlikely that if it had passed we'd have a No Deal on our hands. So it's important to realise that this bill was not a straightforward Deal or No Deal choice.

With all that in mind, what did I find ? I don't have time to figure out a way to make some nice graphics so I'll cut to the chase. Here are a bunch of numbers from the Brexiteer perspective :

• 304 MPs were against both May's deal and the prospect of No Deal. Of those, all voted in favour of an extension. There were no MPs so fickle as to vote no on everything. No-one appears to have actually voted for the magical unicorn of getting a better deal at the last minute.
• 79 MPs were against both May's deal and the prospect of an extension. These were all in favour of the allowing No Deal to remain possible. They were all Conservatives apart from the ten DUP MPs and three from Labour. 
• A total of 278 MPs voted to allow No Deal to remain an option, while 164 tried to get the Malthouse compromise applied to the extension bill. Oddly, there were 7 MPs who approved of Malthouse but voted against No Deal (recall that Malthouse is a form of managed No Deal so this makes no sense). 121 MPs were in favour of keeping the No Deal option but rejected Malthouse.
• Only 26 MPs (25 Conservative and one Labour, Stephen Hepburn) wanted the No Deal option, did not want an extension and did not want the Malthouse compromise amendment. This would seem to indicate the desire for the hardest of hard Brexits is very small.
• 4 MPs were against May's deal, an extension and Malthouse (three Conservatives and the baffling Stephen Hepburn again). In contrast 64 MPs against May's deal and an extension also wanted Malthouse.
• The DUP voted unanimously against an extension, May's deal,  removing the No Deal option (which is bizarre given how clearly this would treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK), against a second referendum, against Parliament controlling Brexit, and in favour of Malthouse.

With the caveats discussed above, and remembering how quick and dirty this is (I see no point spending too long on it because it will all soon be obsolete), it seems fair to conclude that May was right to be worried about the strongly pro-Brexit faction in the Tories. True, the appetite for a "let's get the hell out RIGHT NOW" option is negligible. But the idea of a managed No Deal appears to be taken quite seriously by a large fraction of the Tory party. It's hard to say if the part would split if May hadn't tried to appease them, but they're clearly a group she can't ignore - they are simply too large. Putting party before country she may well be, but if she'd lost complete control, who's to say we'd have been any better off ? The pro-Brexit Tory faction may be so large as to make a shitstorm all but inevitable, once a referendum was called.

Next we should turn to those more opposed to Brexit. We have less data to go on here since fewer options have been presented.

• Of the 391 MPs opposed to May's deal, 302 were in favour of removing the No Deal option entirely. Only 8 MPs who supported May's deal wanted to kill the prospect of No Deal.
• 297 were opposed to May's deal and wanted Parliament to take control. 3 were, weirdly, in favour of May's deal but also wanted Parliament to take control.
• 84 MPs who wanted a second referendum amendment (but remember, most abstained from voting as it was seen to be the wrong time, so the true number is likely significantly higher). All were, unsurprisingly, against May's deal. They were also all in favour of Parliament taking control and of granting an extension. None wanted to keep the No Deal option or explore the Malthouse compromise. All were opposition members.
• Of the opposition MPs, 7 voted for May's deal, 5 for Malthouse, 3 for retaining the No Deal option, 4 against Parliament taking control, and 4 against an extension. This would seem to suggest a very strong opposition to Brexit, at least for the options presented. However, 22 of them (18 Labour) voted against a second referendum option despite being instructed to abstain.

All in all, there are not that many MPs who are truly fickle. The bigger problem seems to be what they've been allowed to vote rather than their consistency : no-one is making a choice because no-one is being offered anything substantially different (though no-one is presenting much of an alternative either). Once options are presented, MPs appear to be consistent with only a few perplexing oddities.

The Tories appear to be split only on what form of Brexit to take rather than whether to take it at all (with a few notable exceptions like Ken Clarke). While the numbers here may disguise support for Remain, there's been little in the way of practical efforts to actually do anything. The opposition are quite clearly more united against Brexit than the Tories. But they too are split on how to proceed; how much is unclear. Even if they could unite around a strategy, it's hard to see them persuading enough Tories to rebel to support it.

A week is indeed a long time in politics. On the other hand, the three basic options - May's deal, no deal or no Brexit - crystallised months ago, and no-one's done anything to allow a truly meaningful vote.

No deal = freedom of movement, apparently

What fresh hell is this ?

Irish goods entering the Northern Ireland market will not face tariffs in a no deal Brexit. However, Irish products entering the rest of the UK would face high tariffs on a range of food products. The details are contained in a new no deal Brexit plan published by the government. There will also be no checks or controls on the Irish border, according to the plan. It says the plan recognises the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland. It is possible that while Irish products would enter Northern Ireland tariff free, products moving in the other direction would face tariffs.

The government said it recognises that Northern Ireland's businesses and farmers will have concerns about the impact that the government's approach will have on their competitiveness. It stated: "These are the only steps the UK government can unilaterally take to deliver on our absolute commitment to avoid a hard border in the event of no deal." 

It added that there will be no checks or controls on goods moving from Ireland to NI. The government is also understood to be confident that the arrangement will not conflict with World Trade Organization rules. Typically the WTO expects all members to be treated equally. So if zero tariffs are applied to one member they should be applied to all members. The special arrangement for Northern Ireland would appear to conflict with that. It is understood the government could invoke an exemption to that non-discrimination principle.

It is understood the government acknowledges there will be a risk of Irish smugglers using Northern Ireland as a backdoor to get goods into GB tariff free. They intend to tackle this with an 'anti avoidance rule' which will be enforced on the basis of intelligence. There is no plan to have routine checks or controls on Northern Ireland goods crossing the Irish Sea.

Absolute madness. The plan for a no deal is to allow freedom of movement across the Irish border. It's a sign of just how desperate the government is to avoid a hard border that it's willing to completely overlook one of its major principles about how Brexit should proceed. It also explicitly treats Northern Ireland very differently from the rest of the UK - something the DUP will never accept. It's preposterous and unworkable.

Of course, in a few hours Parliament will vote to avoid this and we can have some other even fresher hell to deal with.

No tariffs for Irish goods going to NI

Irish goods entering the Northern Ireland market will not face tariffs in a no deal Brexit. However, Irish products entering the rest of the UK would face high tariffs on a range of food products. The details are contained in a new no deal Brexit plan published by the government.

Fighting crime as a network problem

See also this article on treating violence as an epidemic.

A historic drop in shootings and homicides has largely been thanks to the department’s Operation Ceasefire program.

Operation Ceasefire is an expansive strategy that requires cooperation between law enforcement, prosecutors, human services, community groups, faith-based organizations and, crucially, people who are involved in violent crime. Law-enforcement investigators gather intelligence about groups of people who may be involved in violent crime or are at risk of committing a violent crime. Those people are called to a meeting, where they’re offered social services and support.

If they don’t take the help and do commit a violent crime, they’re told that police are watching, and they’ll be swiftly arrested and prosecuted.

Operation Ceasefire relies on the theory that only a few groups of people are driving most of the violence in cities as they become entrenched in turf wars or petty disputes escalate into sprawling retaliatory violence. By directly intervening with the people most at risk for committing violent acts, community groups and law enforcement hope to break the cycle of violence, both by providing people willing to make a life change with the opportunity to do so and by taking people who refuse to off the streets.

It’s the second iteration of the program in Oakland. “The first time we did it, we fell on our faces drastically,” Joyner said in an interview with the Bold Italic in his East Oakland office. “It was kind of a boutique-shop thing—it was more words than substance.”

The relevant figure is reproduced below :

The program started in 2012. While there's not much to go on, it's interesting to see that when the officer numbers increased modestly in 2009, the level of violence drops. It appears to rise again as the officer numbers fall, and only starts dropping when the program is initiated. Until 2014 there is essentially no change in officer numbers but a marked decrease in shootings. Beyond that, violence continues to decrease (though much more slowly) but officer numbers steadily rise.

If we take this at face value, it suggests that sheer officer numbers are indeed important as well as how they're used. That the shootings appear to plateau after 2014 could be due to a number of different reasons. The program might have reached the maximum number of people it's able to, preventing revenge attacks but not able to locate the imitators or address the root cause of the violence. Or of course there could be other causes in the city which are working against the positive effects of the program - it's just not possible to tell from one graph. Also note that the officer numbers also reach a plateau.

All in all, this does seem like a success, but we should be very careful about drawing too much information from one graph. It's also possible that this limited information is disguising just how successful the program really is.

How Oakland Has Seen a Big Drop in Crime - Without More Police

During the past few years, Oakland has seen a historic drop in shootings and murders, all without increasing the number of officers they have. Our writer Scott Morris looks into what has led to this decrease, discovering that it largely has to do with the police department's Operation Ceasefire program.

The Rules For Rulers : why intelligent leaders make stupid decisions

This is nice video which attempts to solve why the world is sometimes such a crappy place and obvious solutions don't get implemented. It makes many good points and is well worth watching. However, it has at least one massive flaw.

From the transcript :

Do you want to rule ? Do you see the problems in your country and know how to fix them ? If only you had the power to do so. Well, you've come to the right place. But before we begin this lesson in political power, ask yourself why don't rulers see as clearly as you, instead acting in such selfish, self-destructive, short-sighted ways ? Are they stupid… these most powerful people in the world ? Or is it something else ?

The throne looks omnipotent from afar, but it is not as it seems. Take the throne to act, and the throne acts upon you. Accept that or turn back now before we discuss the Rules for Rulers.

No man rules alone. The power of a king is not to act, but to get others to act on his behalf, using the treasure in his vaults. The individuals needed to make the necessary things happen are the king's keys to power. All the changes you wish to make are but thoughts in your head if the keys will not follow your commands.

Many keys or few, the rules are the same :
First, get the key supporters on your side. With them, you have the power to act; you have everything. Without them, you have nothing. Now in order to keep those keys to power, you must, second :
Control the treasure. You must make sure your treasure is raised and distributed to you - for all your hard work - and to the keys needed to keep your position. This is your true work as a ruler: figuring out how best to raise and distribute resources, so as not to topple the house of cards upon which your throne sits.

Now you, aspiring benevolent dictator, may want to help your citizens, but your control of the treasure is what attracts rivals, so you must keep those keys loyal. But there is only so much treasure in your vaults, so much wealth your kingdom produces. So beware : every bit of treasure spent on citizens is treasure not spent on loyalty. Thus, doing the right thing, spending the wealth of the nation on the citizens of the nation, hands a tool of power acquisition to your rivals. Treasure poured into roads, and universities, and hospitals, is treasure a rival can promise to key supporters if only they switch sides. Benevolent dictators can spend their take on the citizens, but the keys must get their rewards...

Well, no, because economics doesn't work like that. There isn't a pot containing a fixed, discrete number of golden coins. Rather, if you spend money wisely on projects that will generate wealth, e.g. (to take a very simple example) if you open a goldmine, your pot of money increases. You have spent money yet now have more to spend on your supporters. Granted, though, you cannot simply throw money around however you like - it is possible to wreck the economy through overspending on useless frivolities. So this point is an oversimplification, but the next one is more serious.

...for even if you have gathered the most loyal, angelic supporters, they have the same problem as you, just one level down...They too must watch out for rivals from below or above : thus the treasure they get must also be spent to maintain their position.

No. This assumes that all social relationships are hierarchical whereas in fact many are networks. This is true whether we're talking about leaders having to distribute material wealth or other rewards (e.g. positions of power); not every social transaction is based on such a linearly aggressive reward system. Not everyone continually aspires to the top of the tree : if they did, there would be chaos. More fundamentally, relationships do not merely flow vertically but also sideways. Niall Ferguson makes the nice analogy of hierarchies as towers with networks as market squares. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and both are important in society.

Now a king with many key supporters has real problems : not just their expense, but also their competing needs and rivalries are difficult to balance, the more complicated the social and financial web between them all, the more able a rival is to sway a critical mass. The more key supporters a ruler has on average, the shorter their reign. Which brings us to the third rule for rulers:
Minimize Key Supporters. If a key in your court becomes unnecessary, his skills no longer required, you must kick him out.

Why abandon your fellow revolutionaries? Are the old dictator's supporters not a danger? But the keys necessary to gain power are not the same as those needed to keep it. Having someone on the payroll who was vital in the past, but useless now is the same as spending money on the citizens: treasure wasted on the irrelevant.

This makes sense in a hierarchical despotism. The more that power flows directly from the ruler, the more secure their position. However in a democracy :

In a well-designed democracy, power is fractured among many, and is taken not with force but with words, meaning you must get thousands or millions of citizens to like you [enough] on election day. With so many voters and such fractured power it's impossible to, as a dictator would, follow these rules and buy loyalty. Or is it?

Of course not. Don't think of citizens as individuals with their individual desires, but instead as divided into blocs: the elderly, or homeowners, or business owners, or the poor. Blocs you can reward as a group. If a bloc doesn’t vote, such as younger citizens, then no need to divert rewards their way. Even if large in number, they are irrelevant to gaining power. Which is good news for you: one less block to sway and the treasure you give to your key blocks has to come from somewhere. If you want long years in office, rule three is your friend in a democracy just as much as a dictatorship.

Except that people, even as blocs, don't always vote in their own interests. Trump gives essentially nothing back to anyone at all, yet even now his support among Republicans remains bafflingly high. Support for Brexit, an act of economic self-harm, is waning, but it's still a close call. You don't (only) keep people happy through anything as simple as material rewards - the efficient market hypothesis isn't great, and you can't just go around effectively bribing whole swathes of the populace. Yes, it's important to maintain a stable economy where the majority prosper, but there's far more to winning people over than that.

Dictators have no need to please the crowds and thus can take a large percentage from their poor citizens to pay key supporters. But representatives in a democracy can take a smaller percentage from each to pay their key supporters, because their educated, freer citizens are more productive than peasants. For rulers in a democracy, the more productivity the better. Which is why they build universities and hospitals and roads and grant freedoms, not just out of the goodness of their hearts but because it increases citizen productiveness, which increases treasure for the ruler and their key supporters, even when a lower percentage is taken.

So the more the wealth of a nation comes from the productive citizens of the nation, the more the power gets spread out and the more the ruler must maintain the quality of life for those citizens. Now if a stable democracy becomes very poor, or if a resource that dwarfs the productivity of the citizens is found, the odds of this gamble change, and make it more possible for a small group to seize power. Because if the current quality of life is terrible or the wealth not dependent on the citizens, coups are worth the risk. 

Yes, Kings, Presidents and Prime Ministers but also Deans, Dons, Mayors, Chairs, Chiefs. These rules apply to all and explain their actions: from the CEO of the largest global corporate conglomerate who must keep his board happy, to the chair of the smallest home owner’s association, managing votes and spending membership fees. You cannot escape structures of power. You can only turn a blind eye to understanding them, and if you ever want the change you dream about, there is a zeroth rule you cannot ignore.

Without power you can affect nothing.

There's certainly something to be said for the nightmarish complexity of the need to balance competing interests to keep everyone happy (see Yes Minister for detailed examples). Yet the implication that all power is purely hierarchical is far too simple : not everyone is perpetually assailed by rivals. Information and wealth also flows sideways : if everyone around you is content, I'd bet heavily that you're more likely to be content as well (after all, who wants to be surrounded by a bunch of miserable gits ?). It also doesn't flow linearly from level to level a la the feudal system, but can jump different levels and come from different sources. Someone may, for instance, hate their boss but tolerate them because they like other aspects of their working environment; thus their boss has no need to keep them happy. And not all groups are in direct competition for one another : what's good for the wealth of some can be good for the wealth of others, either directly or through spillover from one group to the others.

The video is nice, and very provocative. I think it has some good points about democracies being better to live in not because the system creates better people but because rules have to deal with people by different mechanisms. Understanding the nature of the system is certainly crucial : getting politicians to behave sensibly is difficult more because of the system that puts and keeps them there than because of their own inscrutable natures. Yet it feels over-simplified and leaves the impression that politics is inherently crappy and always results in poor judgement. This is certainly not entirely wrong, yet neither it is entirely right. What's needed is, perhaps, to examine the opposite (admittedly rare) case of when politicians remain popular for extended periods. I can't avoid the feeling that there is some deep flaw to this that I can't quite put my finger on.

The Rules for Rulers

Che Greyvara T-Shirt: http://cgpgrey.com/chegrey Grey discusses this video on Cortex: https://youtu.be/ILvD7zVN2jo Adapted from 'The Dictators Handbook', go read it: http://amzn.to/2fgBWps Special Thanks: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith & Mark Govea, Thomas J Miller Jr MD, dedla , Robert Kunz, John Buchan, Ripta Pasay, Saki Comandao, Andres Villacres, Christian