The life of a sofa

Someone once said - I think it was Arthur C. Clarke - that they couldn't think of a good definition of science fiction, only that they'd know it when they saw it. Personally I think hard sci-fi features the consequence of some scientific idea as integral to the plot. If the same story could be told without needing to explain any of the science, then it's not science fiction.

But I digress. They say philosophy isn't so concerned with definitions these days, but some of them definitely still cause headaches. Like, for example, life. That one certainly has everyone jolly confused. The school definition of MRS GREN is clearly unsatisfactory because it denies that mules are alive, not to mention (arguably) old people, which is silly. And I think this Aeon article makes things unnecessarily complicated :

At this point, it is instructive to distinguish two concepts pertaining to acquisition and use of information: we’ll refer to them as life and alive. Alive refers to the continual use of negative entropy. It is the opposite of dead. While alive, a cat can use the negative entropy it acquired in the form of food to generate order in its cells, to construct itself. Things that are alive are constructors. A dead cat is not able to do that anymore. Being alive requires a process of maintaining homeostasis, that is, overcoming perturbations and maintaining the balance of the organism, overall. 

Life, on the other hand, refers to the process that generates the required information. It also generates things that are alive and the information required to produce them. Also included in life are cases where information is acquired to generate things that aren’t alive, such as sofas...  Alive things are the generating systems for expanding this process in space and time by constructing new possibilities. Thus, the cat and sofa are both life, but only the cat is alive.

Sometimes I think there's a good case to be made for rationalising. There are some truths we already know but find it difficult to articulate, so what we're doing in our struggle for definitions is a sort of self-discovery, to put into words what we already know. Thus when someone says something that's obviously wrong, we can justifiably say, "that's stupid", even though we can't actually come up with anything better. And it seems pretty obvious that sofas are not life, they are a signature of life. I don't see any point in omitting that prefix and redefinining life in this even more confusing way.

What I do like about the article, however, is its notion that life has something to do with how information is processed.

Constructors are more sophisticated than things such as sofas. Sofas can be generated only by information, but constructors can also generate new things by processing information (this includes mutant variants of themselves, which allows evolution to work in the first place) – that is, they can use information. A cat is a programmable constructor in this sense and so are you, but the sofa is not. In all these cases however (sofas and cats etc), a process of evolution is necessary to generate them. 

A theory of information that could explain living systems will thus have to account for two aspects of information – how the information is acquired, and how it is used. This information was acquired over evolutionary time, for example through selection, via survival of the fittest. The use of the information is, as Schrödinger pointed out, accomplished by siphoning off negative entropy to pay for the increase in organisation that organisms need to survive, which they can do because they are constructors with information about how to produce themselves.

Of course, defining the precise kind of information processing system that is life is complicated.

Imagine you have built a sophisticated 3D printer called Alice, the first to be able to print itself. As with von Neumann’s constructor, you supply it with information specifying its own plan, and a mechanism for copying that information: Alice is now a complete von Neumann constructor. Have you created new life on Earth?

Presumably not. A robot that can copy itself is just a mechanical device. But...

Suppose you then rig up Alice so it acquires (through your design) more information: it can use rocks and the minerals derived from them as raw materials to make new 3D printers. Are Alice and her offspring (Bob, Charley, Daisy and Eve) now life? 

Well, no, but...

Getting annoyed with continually having to find raw materials for all the little 3D printers running around, you decide to equip one offspring, Eve, with even more acquired information: solar panels for energy that enable Eve to go out by itself and use that acquired information to hunt for minerals. Is Eve now life?

Umm...

...you figure out a way to get your little autonomous 3D printer sent on the next mission to Mars as a stowaway. Imagine Eve has a happy existence in a hidden valley on Mars, and goes on to produce many copies of itself. Humanity discovers the valley a few million years later to find the process of evolution on 3D printers generated a wide variety of them that are quite different from your original design – small ones, big ones, blue ones, red ones, ones that hunt other 3D printers for resources, and so on.

Haaah. Yes. Awkward, isn't it ? At some point in the sequence, we can plausibly say that we have silicon-based life. But where ? What's the critical difference ? There doesn't really seem to be one. And yet it's not clear if we did end up with life in final iteration after all. We might have done, but we might equally still have only very elaborate robots. It's debatable whether that's really all life is, of course, but it's all very messy.

On the other hand, why should reproduction be counted as so fundamental ? If I stow a mule on board the Mars-bound spacecraft, there'll be life on Mars until the mule dies. It has no chance of ever reproducing. Similarly, we can confidently say that plants are alive but we'd also have few problems of declaring a true AI to be alive. These (assuming plants are not conscious) are extraordinarily different entities. What's the common factor ? And as far as reproduction goes, we can currently have only one known method for that. We can't yet create an AI by writing the correct code, but if we could, there'd be no reason that it couldn't simply copy itself by copying files. Our reproduction methods would be fundamentally different : we don't need to know exactly how the standard method works, but there would (presumably) be nothing to stop the AI from having full knowledge of itself and control of the process.

In short, we know life can be unconscious, but can't adequately define what that sort of life is, and we know life can be defined by consciousness, but we have even more difficulty defining that. So we're trying to come up with a definition that unifies at least two radically different states and we don't understand either of them very well. No wonder this is hard.

What can Schrödinger's cat say about 3D printers on Mars? - Michael Lachmann & Sara Walker | Aeon Essays

On a sofa in the corner of the room, a cat is purring. It seems obvious that the cat is an example of life, whereas the sofa itself is not. But should we trust our intuition? Consider this: Isaac Newton assumed a universal time flowing without external influence, and relative time measured by clocks - just as our perception tells us.

Political identity isn't always about ideology

I don't know anything about Australian politics, but I thought the conclusion of this piece was quite interesting:

Modern conservatives don’t fear technology, they oppose new technologies that harm their friends. Put simply: renewable energy is a threat to the mining industry, but robot trucks and trains will boost the profits of the mining industry. Modern conservatives don’t fear social change. They oppose social change that undermines the power of institutions that they like, such as the church, and they embrace social change like the gig economy because it undermines the power of institutions they fear, like the unions. 

It’s no longer ideologies that defines and divides Australian politics, but interests. While the philosophical positions adopted by political parties might be all over the shop, the interests they support remain remarkably stable. The right tend to line up behind wealth, power and the establishment, and the left fire up to support new industries that solve new problems, and to protect marginalised groups from established institutions. There’s nothing wrong with such demarcations, but they have less and less to do with ideology.

Growing up in the UK, it's hard to imagine political parties being formed on the basis of anything other than ideology. For instance, Aneurian Bevan, founder of the NHS, had this to say about the Conservative Party in 1948 :

No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.

It's tough to imagine such vitriol arising from a dislike of their shiny shoes or baffling penchant for making model busses, or even for their ludicrously out-of-touch lifestyles. So the Venn diagram of political tribe and political ideology looks to have been something close to a single circle in the UK for many decades. Well, maybe.

In contrast, I'm reminded of an earlier (more thoughtful) article on the differences between political identity and worldview, which noted that US political parties were once defined on the issue of the size of government. And whether you think government should be big or small has very little direct connection to what you think about abortion or gay rights or the minimum wage. This setup, the theory goes, makes it harder to polarise people since you really do have a very broad political church. A further and more extreme example of this can be found in modern Puerto Rico, where political parties are divided solely and explicitly on how they want the island to relate to the United States. Thus the equivalent of diehard Republicans can be found in the same parties as extreme Democrats.

Whether this actually makes for a better system or not I don't know. From what little I know about Australian politics, it doesn't sound especially nice, even coming from the Land of Brexit. Still, aligning by political parties by something other than ideology sounds like a plausible political reform that wouldn't mean tearing up the entire system root and branch.

But I would also question the extent to which interests and ideology are really separated (though this certainly is possible in principle). We might define tribalism as supporting a cause because it helps a particular group, whereas idealism might be supporting a group in order to advance a particular cause. But these are not necessarily opposite or mutually exclusive positions. When the group and the cause are genuinely aligned, it's only natural to support the group. For example if your goal is to improve the local library system, supporting the rights of librarians makes good sense : it would only be tribalism if you supported them on some other basis, e.g. because you liked their annual bake sale.

So that Conservatives and Leftists support different groups could simply be an inevitable consequence of ideology rather than evidence against it (though that's not at all to say that pure tribalism isn't a factor). Though in the Australian case, the author makes a good argument that the causes supported by political tribes are variable whereas the interest groups are stable, which is a good argument in favour of an interest-driven system.

Another difficulty is that it seems like a very natural, inevitable desire to form groups based on moral values, often resulting in a tragedy-of-the-commons driven polarisation. Leaders often speak of their parties being a broad church, but just how broad this church can really be is extremely variable. It's an interesting question as to why many societies fall into this whereas others don't.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that some associations we take for granted are surprisingly fluid. In the West, to be on the left is generally to be a liberal, whereas to be on the right is generally to be conservative. In the Czech Republic, however, which escaped from Communism not that long ago, to be on the left is to be conservative and to be on the right is to be a liberal. So it's worth being extremely careful about what we mean by political labels.

Modern conservatives don't fear social change, they just oppose it when it undermines their friends | Richard Denniss

As the right line up behind power and the establishment, it's no longer ideologies that divides Australian politics

Social equality through the death of goats

There's an old Czech joke that goes like this :

God and Saint Peter were walking the Earth. It was a cold night and they were looking for a place to put their heads down. Everywhere they were refused, until they reached a dilapidated cottage where they were received with kindness and even a share of simple food. God revealed himself and offered their hosts anything they could possibly wish for. "Lord, we have nothing but a pair of old hens, while our neighbour has a nice, young goat. Every day it gives them two litres of milk..." "You'd like the same ?" interrupts God. "No," replies the villager. "We want their goat to die."

Which brings me on to these two contrasting articles about envy and billionaires. The first is much more in line with my own sympathies and presents a decent little overview of the problems of extreme wealth inequality.

The CEOs of America's largest companies make something like 300 times as much as the typical worker. Is anyone willing to defend the idea that any human being is really able to provide society with labor that is 300 times more useful than another's? Keep in mind the lowest paid workers in the U.S. include jobs such as farm workers and personal home health care aids. These are the people who sweat and toil to make our food; the people who care for our family members or ourselves when we can no longer walk or exercise or shower or take our medicine or use the bathroom on our own.

Does anyone need to be CEO of Apple? That company is staffed by thousands of workers and software engineers and more. They're all perfectly intelligent people. Under a different arrangement, a form of worker-elected committee could run the company just fine. (Some oddball worker co-ops already operate this way.) Does anyone really think that Apple could not possibly function without Tim Cook, or some other individual of similar oligarchical baring, at its head? 

I would probably spin this somewhat differently. A single individual may well create something which is millions - not mere hundreds - of times more useful than someone else. A scientist may invent a new medical treatment, a footballer might entertain millions, whereas a single refuse collector doesn't do anything which directly benefits more than a handful of people. I don't have a problem with the idea that some people create enormously disproportionate beneficial influence, and that some individuals are enormously important. I doubt very much you would have had SpaceX without Elon Musk, and committees are often just another word for indecisiveness. The consequences of changing managerial structure are not going to be simple.

But there are three major caveats as far as the "deserving" aspect of extreme inequality goes. The first is that not everyone gets rich through creating beneficial products - plenty of people get rich by creating enormously destructive products, like arms manufacturers and oil tycoons. Others get rich through simple birthright and don't have to earn a damn thing. Perhaps worst of all are those that receive enormous bonuses as standard despite leaving an institute in a worse state than which they found it, which is laughably stupid. But even those who do do something very useful often require a good dose of luck.

Which brings me to the second caveat : everyone is to some extent dependent on everyone else. Would Jeff Bezos have become a billionaire if he'd been orphaned on the streets ? Possibly, but all of our actions are affected by and dependent on the actions of millions of others. The indirect value of each action is extremely hard to quantify.

And that leads to the final caveat : that we have limited choices. We cannot simply will ourselves to become more creative or more resilient. Yes, there are times in all our lives when we simply have to "man up" and deal with problems - but only to a point. Different people can do this to different degrees, but no-one chooses to have low creativity or intelligence or endurance. We cannot simply decide one day to have boundless energy, enthusiasm or networking skills or whatever other key factors you need to become a billionaire. That some people have different innate abilities does not reflect badly on them - it is simply a fact.

So why on Earth should we reward or punish people according to things they have little choice over ? Incentive is the obvious answer, but do we need to have the top earners this far above the lowest to incentivise them ? I think not. And :

One thing just about everyone agreed on was that the existence of billionaires is offensive in the context of a society also beset by inequality, poverty and deprivation of opportunity. 

Which, provided billionaires (like Bezos) get rich through the exploitation of others, keeping themselves at the top through the action of keeping others at the bottom, is a serious concern. Okay, maybe they create jobs and keep people employed. Fine. But keeping them in shitty jobs while they themselves grow rich as Croesus is obscene. Most importantly of all though :

Billionaires shape our politics. This is not simply a matter of donations, though that certainly plays a role. It's that, as a matter of raw social gravity, billionaires command politicians' time and focus and social circles. Inevitably, politicians come to see the world more like billionaires see it. Which basically means being a billionaire means having enormous influence with which to convince your fellow citizens that billionaires are necessary. This does not require anyone to be an evil genius or a malevolent villain. It simply requires billionaires to be flawed, solipsistic, everyday human beings just like the rest of us, only imbued with wildly disproportionate sway in society.

This is not to say that all billionaires influence politics - but enough do. Does anyone deserve to command such vastly disproportionate resources ? I think not. Being able to earn it is not nearly enough to guarantee that it will be used wisely. I think on this point I'm more worried about the actions of megacorporations than individuals though. How can you possibly have a free market, in, say, the telecommunications sector, which is dominated by just a few gigantic companies ? What hope does a small fish have in that dangerous ocean ?


On then to the second article, which I find altogether stranger.

Often, it [jealousy] can lead to changes, help identify our values, and allow us to reflect on some of our life choices. When this becomes dangerous, and when we become susceptible to manipulation, however, is when those in power attempt to go beyond jealousy and weaponize our envy. Should the NBA be forced to lower their standards so that I had a chance? Should NASA compromise the quality of their rockets so that I can be given a job? Should we take money from rich people so that [insert shrewd politician’s name] can give every person in America/Australia/the UK a job? These questions all have the same themes: “Who should be pulled down so that I might be pulled up?”

On the first point, a desire to change doesn't always lead to an actual change - sometimes it does, but sometimes it can't (I also wouldn't characterise jealousy as being part of aspiration, but that's another matter). But who actually wants NASA or the NBA to lower standards ? Literally no-one. Whereas economics is quite different. We all want to improve our own skills; no-one wants other people to become stupider instead. That particular goat should be left well alone. Money, though, is not a skill, but an essential resource. Limiting the wealth of the 1% would not diminish their own life satisfaction in any meaningful way. Once you've got a billion dollars, what need have you for more ? Literally none (for a demonstration try this). Yet if the limitation of the uppermost wealth enriches those at the bottom, then I cannot see any serious objection to it. Not that this necessarily means anything as blunt as limiting wealth - it's more of a comment on the economic forces that allow vast wealth to flow into the hands of such a small group.

(EDIT : And of course, economics is not well-approximated as a zero-sum game where giving someone a job demands you take money off someone else. Unless you actually throw money into a fire, employing someone to do a job will generate revenue as well as consume it - sometimes more, sometimes less than you put in, and sometimes hard to quantify.)

Envy is destructive in that it promotes not only the acquisition of the possession of another but also a pleasure response from seeing that person torn down. As such, envy is the indiscriminate comparison between ourselves and others, regardless of whether that person "deserves" what they have. In order to achieve happiness, the envier believes they must acquire that which the person they envy has.

True as far as it goes. But when it comes to wealth, the desire to restrict it need not be from envy at all, but just the opposite : from a desire to help those at the top, not hurt them.

When a populist politician takes to the stand and gleefully suggests that everyone should go to college, that everyone should have a job, and that the government will provide you one if you can’t find one, at a livable wage, you should think very carefully about who will have to be bought down to make that a reality, and what freedoms would need to be sacrificed to achieve this "utopia." 

Good God, sir ! If the prospect that everyone should be educated and employed constitutes a Utopia, then you suffer a serious imagination deficit. Where's the blackjack and hookers ? Where are the giant robot dinosaurs and sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads ? Where's my solid gold house ? Utopia my foot, sir ! In fact I feel quite sorry for the author, who clearly doesn't realise that other parts of the world have long since managed this rather mediocre fantasy (I mean employment, not the bit about the robot dinosaurs). I don't think I even want to get started on the nonsensical comment about "freedom", the author doesn't understand what that means anyway.

The problem with this article is that it's not so much wrong as it is devoid of context. The issue is not whether it's right or wrong but surely the conditions under which it applies. Yes, you can indeed desire to hurt other people who have done you no wrong, who have earned their wealth as fairly as possible. And it's so obvious that this is a bad thing that it doesn't need stating. But you can also want more equality not because you want the goat to die, but because they've got ten goats and you think everyone would be better off it they had at least one each.

As a rule, extreme wealth inequality harms those at the top as much as it does those at the bottom. Just take a look at what having buckets of cash has done to the Tory party and then tell me it's been good for their mental health. They think themselves free, whereas their inactions indicate they are anything but. They are living almost literally in a gilded cage, bouncing off the bars of prosperity so hard they appear to have done themselves a mischief in the process.

Do algorithms dream of electric criminals ?

Not a terribly large amount of detail here, but interesting nonetheless.

On 73 occasions, over an eight-year-period, Ebrahimi had reported to the police that he'd been the victim of racially motivated crimes. His complaints went unheeded and a report into his murder concluded that both Bristol City Council and the police were guilty of institutional racism. "That was really a turning point from a data perspective," says Jonathan Dowey, who heads a small team of data analysts at Avon and Somerset Police. The question the force began to ask, he says, was: "Could we be smarter with our data?" 

Humans are susceptible to all manner of biases. And unlike computers, they're not good at spotting patterns - whether, for example, there have been multiple calls from the same address. When Avon and Somerset retrospectively ran a predictive model to see if the tragedy could have been averted, Ebrahimi's address popped up as one of the top 10 raising concern.

I think "not good" needs to be heavily qualified here. Under certain conditions they are absolutely astonishingly good at spotting patterns : try writing an algorithm to spot a tiger in a forest and then tell me humans aren't good at pattern recognition. True, there are plenty of cases where we screw up, but plenty where we do much, much better than an algorithm. Had the data been presented in an accessible format, it would have stood out like a sore thumb (because we're apparently very good at spotting those).

The public may be largely unaware of how algorithms are penetrating every aspect of the criminal justice system - including, for example, a role in sentencing and in determining whether prisoners get parole - but civil liberties groups are becoming increasingly alarmed. Hannah Couchman of Liberty says that "when it comes to predictive policing tools, we say that their use needs to cease".

OK, that is an absurd conclusion, but there's good reason to be skeptical :

Algorithms are informing vital decisions taken about peoples' lives. But if the computer suggests that someone is at high risk of re-offending, justice surely requires that the process by which this calculation is reached be not only accessible to humans but also open to challenge.

Shouldn't a prediction by an algorithm be treated with the same caution as a prediction by any other method ? A prediction based on correlations and extrapolations is not the same as an analytic deduction of what's going to happen next, which is what people may be confusing them with. Surely in general you respond to predictions from credible sources as though they were possible but not certain. If someone tells you that John Smith is going to murder Joe Bloggs, you keep watch, but you don't lock up Smith on those grounds alone. It would be foolish indeed to assume 100% reliability or completeness.

An even thornier issue is algorithmic bias. Algorithms are based on past data - data which has been gathered by possibly biased humans. As a result, the fear is that they might actually come to entrench bias. There are many ways in which this might occur. Suppose, for example, that one of the risk-factors weighed up in an algorithm is "gang membership". It's possible that police might interpret behaviour by white and black youths differently - and so be more likely to identify young black men as members of gangs. This discriminatory practice could then be embedded in the software.

Yes, but on the other hand, the best way of beating bias is through objective measurement. Using human judgement is hardly more likely to avoid bias than using an algorithm. An objective procedure is not the same as being objectively correct, but by defining the problem as clearly as possible, biases can be exposed much more readily than if using subjective judgement.

Which variables should go into an algorithm is hugely contentious territory. Most experts on police profiling want to exclude race. But what about sex, or age? What makes one variable inherently more biased than another? What about postcode? Durham initially included postcode in their Hart tool, but then removed it following opposition. Why should people be assessed based upon where they lived, the objection ran - would this not discriminate against people in less desirable neighbourhoods?

And there's the rub. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but statistical predictions don't care about that : they want as much data as possible. A statistically significant correlation can be absolutely meaningless. Without human oversight this is going to give ludicrous results, but equally, trying to figure out the causes of crime or predict it without data will also give nonsensical answers. And by entrenching bias against a particular demographic, there's a risk of driving that demographic toward further crime.

Perhaps a better approach would be to use this to identify areas where social policy needs to change, rather than finding areas to pre-emptively punish, and for displaying the data in different ways for humans to interpret rather than making direct predictions. We're still in the infancy of using big data to make statistical predictions, but to avoid using it, I think, would be foolish indeed. Only through rigorous examination of the data (and not our own feelings) do we have any chance of establishing which biases are justified, which have complex causes, and which are utterly false.

Could an algorithm help prevent murders?

Algorithms are increasingly used to make everyday decisions about our lives. Could they help the police reduce crime, asks David Edmonds. In July 2013, a 44-year-old man, Bijan Ebrahimi, was punched and kicked to death in south Bristol. His killer, a neighbour, then poured white spirit over his body and set it alight on grass 100 yards from his home.

Review : Chernobyl

The HBO/Sky collaborative effort "Chernobyl" has been rightly and extensively praised by critics. No doubt there are plenty of much more thorough and better reviews elsewhere about its first-rate acting, characterisation, cinemetography and stortytelling, so I won't dwell on that. Nor will I venture into the accuracy, though it does (quite unusually) explain to the viewer in the afterword that one of the characters is invented. As a narrative, it works extremely well, and provided one remembers that it's a dramatisation, not a documentary, it would be hard to find any serious fault with it.

(I will find a minor fault though : the occasional lapse into Russian without subtitles. I get why everyone speaks English with an English accent, because that's the equivalent of how they'd actually sound to each other. Fine. But then the very occasional lapses into Russian feel extra-specially weird, and the writer's excuse that they wanted to make a show that viewers from many countries could relate to just doesn't make any sense to me at all.)

But what I will point out is just how resolutely and unashamedly pro-science the show is, despite any inaccuracies. Insisting on realism in drama is all well and good, but in my view it's far more important to advocate for respecting the truth in the real world (for a much more extreme example, see Doctor Who). Because if you don't do that... that's how you get Chernobyls.

It would have been easy to tell Chernobyl as the story of scientific arrogance left unchecked, of hubris gone haywire, of telling a tale of a villainous and out-of-touch elite who cared not for the concerns of others. It doesn't do that. Instead, it does the exact opposite. It focuses on the heroic efforts of scientists dealing with very human problems by doing exactly what they're good at : finding the truth. We see the villains as the villains they are, but we also see how the insanely hierarchical nature of the Communist system contributes to the problems. Science itself nowhere comes in for criticism. It is science, in the depiction here, that solves problems like Chernobyl. The cause of the disaster is left to the very un-scientific psychological and sociological realities of political ideology, tribalism, and personal character.

Three quotes sum this up well. There's a very nice larger selection here, and I've taken the second two from there. But this first also deserves to be more widely used :

Anyone who's had the more mundane but common experience of seeing months of work compressed into two paragraphs in a paper will recognise themselves in that. And perhaps if they've encountered a response from a referee that says, "this isn't very interesting", they'll be only too familiar with this one :

And that is a key aspect of psychology I'd desperately like to know more about. As an interested outsider, I don't know what's going on in the field, but most press releases I see focus on how irrational humans are, presuming them to be basically rational but flawed. More interesting is to start from the opposite perspective, at least when it comes to higher reasoning*. In particular, what is it about people that means some people profess so loudly that they want the truth that they shout it down in the process ? No-one ever says they want lies; everyone wants to believe they're correct - Flat Earthers seek the mantle of scientific truth as much as anyone. But few enough are actually interested in the truth. I don't count myself immune to this at all - on the contrary, I have in mind several occasions when I was disappointed in the truth and preferred to believe the original lies. So what's the secret to genuinely craving the truth ? Is it innate personal character, upbringing, sociological factors, what ? What would be the key change we could make that would promote this ?

* A guess : for each and every decision we make there are rational and irrational factors affecting us. For decisions like which way to walk or how to use a fork, there are few irrational factors compelling us to walk into a fire or jab ourselves in the eye. But for others, such as political decisions, there are a very great many irrational factors at work, which is why we sometimes make obscenely ludicrous choices even when the decision should be buggeringly simple.

And here, for all that scientists should be philosophers, is a key difference between the two, where scientists are far more similar to detectives than philosophers. In investigating an event like Chernobyl, for all that nuclear physics is concerned with the deepest nature of reality, a scientist is necessarily drawn back into the human world of observations and facts. A philosopher can and should dwell on what knowledge is and how we establish truth. A scientist cannot. He must accept the reality that lies before him and deal with it as he finds it. No amount of brooding over subjectivity or the internal nature of perception changes the blunt reality of a brick to the head or a nuclear reactor in meltdown.

Come fly with me, let's plug and fly away...

An article about the future of flying which doesn't mention Zeppelins. Hurrah !

Alice is an unconventional-looking craft: powered by three rear-facing pusher-propellers, one in the tail and two counter-rotating props at the wingtips to counter the effects of drag. It also has a flat lower fuselage to aid lift. Alice will carry nine passengers for up to 650 miles (1,040km) at 10,000ft (3,000m) at 276mph (440km/h). It is expected to enter service in 2022.

Crucially, electricity is much cheaper than conventional fuel. A small aircraft, like a turbo-prop Cessna Caravan, will use $400 on conventional fuel for a 100-mile (161 km) flight, says Mr Ganzarski. But with electricity "it'll be between $8-$12, which means much lower costs per flight-hour. We're not an environmentalist company, the reason we're doing this is because it makes business sense."

Is it just me, or is that a really quite astonishing drop ? If so, that's a very powerful motivation indeed for companies to switch. Anyone still using fuel is going to look like a crazy person. I was assuming that electric planes would initially be much more expensive than conventional ones.

The big problem with this is that 80% of the aviation industry's emissions come from passenger flights longer than 1,500km - a distance no electric airliner could yet fly. Yet the UK has become the first G7 country to accept the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 - a huge challenge for the air travel business with 4.3 billion of us flying this year and eight billion expected to do so by 2037.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my broad understanding was that aircraft emissions are basically negligible in terms of mass, but may be disproportionately important because of their direct delivery to high altitude and the production of contrails. I couldn't begin to guess what that means for carbon offsetting, but my impression was that agriculture is a far bigger challenge.

So logically, is the only answer is to ditch long-haul flights? This obviously isn't an appealing prospect for the industry. Rolls-Royce's Paul Stein says starkly that the world would be in a "dark place" if we stopped travelling. He argues that in a global economy "where peaceful co-existence comes about from travelling and understanding each other, if we move away from that I am very concerned it's not the direction mankind should be going in".

Why the age of electric flight is finally upon us

Aerospace firms are joining forces to tackle their industry's growing contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, with electric engines seen as one solution. But will this be enough to offset the growing demand for air travel? This week's Paris Airshow saw the launch of the world's first commercial all-electric passenger aircraft - albeit in prototype form.

Belief is not enough

Having looked at how information and beliefs spread a bajillion times, what about behaviour ? In the end, what people believe matters only insofar as it affects what they actually do. This nice Aeon piece looks at the intermediate stage of desire, where on the basis of some information, we want to proceed with some action. We may or may not actually carry it out, and sometimes people do things they don't really want to. Even so, wanting to do things is obviously an important stage of the process in general.

A few recent posts seem relevant here. First, there was the interesting speculation that we tend to copy all the behaviours of people we like because we aren't (or at least weren't in the past) sufficiently rational to figure out what aspect of them made them successful. Successful behaviour occurred (and occurs) more through luck than judgement, so a certain amount of proverbially sheep-like behaviour is actually quite sensible. If all your friends jumped off a cliff, you probably would too, because there'd surely be a very good reason they were jumping off a cliff. A herd mentality makes a degree of sense.

Secondly, doing something because everyone else is doing it is not the same as addiction - but they aren't mutually exclusive either. You can't really be addicted to wearing ponchos (right ???), but you might decide to wear one if everyone else does. As soon as they decide that ponchos are no longer cool, yours goes away the same as everyone else's. But of course you certainly can become addicted to smoking cigarettes, and it's even easier to fall into the habit if all your peers are puffing away. Some things you only want to do because everyone else is doing them, but others have internal causes.

Thirdly, some group behaviours can arise due to psychological universals, not because of the spread of ideas. That is, all - or at least a very high fraction - of people tend to behave in similar ways in certain similar circumstances. Some behaviours are highly individual, but not all. So it's not all down to the societal network or organisational system. As above, you can't really said to be addicted to eating a healthy amount of food, for example, or do so only out of a herd mentality, but internal modes of thought can give rise to more sophisticated universal behaviours as well.

On to the Aeon piece then :

We often get infected by the desires of people around us. And we get infected by the emotions of others – a film can seem much funnier if everyone in the audience is laughing out loud. Our emotions are influenced by the emotions of others. And our desires are influenced by the desires of others. 

The difference is that emotions are fleeting. When you leave the cinema, you might no longer find the film that funny. And if you are no longer in the same room as the yawners, you will stop yawning. But desires that you form on the basis of other people’s desires can stay with you for years and decades, and have a major impact on how your life turns out to be.

Which is an important point about the different ways information can affect us. It can cause us to do something only once, merely responding to present circumstances, or actually change our beliefs and long-term behaviour.

While in the case of testimony we are pretty good at screening out false beliefs [caveats later], we are completely defenceless against some forms of desire infection. But if this is true, then the whole idea of an autonomous self is somewhat illusory. Much of what we do in life is drifting along fuelled by the desires of those around us.

Well, I don't know about that. A self so powerful and knowledgeable that it didn't need external input would be essentially God. Us mere mortals must instead rely largely on external information on which we can respond. I don't see that that diminishes the self in any way, it's just that we shouldn't define the self by our actions or opinions - it's much more fundamental than that. The self is what makes the internal choices based on internal and external influences. Since it doesn't have infinite internal knowledge, it's necessarily subject to external forces. Yes, of course you can be influenced by sex/drugs/rock and roll/all your friends jumping off a cliff, but that doesn't mean you aren't making a choice based on what you know.

But I digress. On to the different ways beliefs can influence desires. The article describes basic thirst, which can have a purely internal cause, thirst for a specific drink based on prior knowledge, desire for a drink based on other people's recommendations about what's good to drink, and desire based on everyone else's actions without understanding them :

In the cult film Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, there is a scene at a rock concert where the protagonist grabs a piece of the guitar that one of the band members has just smashed. Once he has managed to escape all the other fans who want the same guitar piece and is safely alone on the street, he throws the piece away. The protagonist’s desire was formed on the basis of the other fans’ desires but it is not based on a belief that he acquired by means of testimony. He does not seem to have a belief that this guitar piece is very valuable or precious – given that he throws it away once he’s on the street.

Or to be pedantic, it's not formed on the basis of a belief in the value of the thing he's after, but presumably a less direct belief that he should have it. Like when a crowd of people are looking up and someone new joins in : they have no knowledge of what they're looking at, but good reason to suppose they might see something interesting if they look up. Or why they fill in timesheets for no good reason. You can believe that you need to do something (and actively want to do it) whilst having absolutely no understanding of it whatsoever.

If I find myself with a desire that does not seem to be based on any of my beliefs – or maybe it is even in conflict with some of my beliefs – I can rationalise my desire and come up with some (confabulated) explanation for why I want what I want. We have plenty of experimental evidence from social psychology that we go to great lengths to make sense of and rationalise our actions, preferences and desires. And post-hoc confabulated rationalisations of this kind can cover up the importance and prevalence of direct desire infection.

And while contradictory information acts to shape our beliefs, what about desires ? This may be even more complicated.

Beliefs form a coherent network, but desires don’t. We can, and very often do, have conflicting desires. Just because a desire I acquired by means of desire infection contradicts some other desire of mine, I will not normally reject it. Contradictions between beliefs are easier to spot than contradictions between desires.

Our screening of false beliefs often fails. And, as some techniques in psychiatry show, some ‘unwanted’ desires often do get screened out, for example, by making the conflict between them blatantly obvious. But while there is a default mechanism for the screening of beliefs, there is no comparable default screening mechanism for desires.

I would add that there are many different levels of belief. Sometimes we have explicit, sincerely held beliefs but fail to act on them. At other times we do things we strongly professes not to want to do at all : what people think they believe and what they actually believe can be - in a sense - in conflict (implicit bias). And then there are things over which we have virtually no control at all : you can't really will yourself to like or dislike a movie, you just simply do. Your opinion can change, but not because you wanted it to do so.

Cigarette or beverage commercials are very efficient ways of infecting you with desires. They are not trying to communicate a message [beyond, "you want a beer", I suppose]. If they did, they would probably choose a more efficient message than Real men smoke a certain brand of cigarette. Such commercials are trying to trigger desires in you, bypassing your screening mechanism, which is probably against smoking and consuming sugary beverages. And they do so very efficiently: even though you think that a certain brand of sugary beverage is very unhealthy and bad for you, if the commercial is well-done, it will nonetheless trigger a desire in you.

That's an important point. I can sincerely believe that drinking is bad for me, but just not care because goddammit given me the frickin' beer already. It's interesting to think of beliefs and desires as being orthogonal, that you could have one without the other. Perhaps that's what winning hearts and minds really means. Perhaps implicit bias arises not from some deep-seated belief, but from a totally different aspect of personality over which we have little or no control. Hence people can genuinely believe something but act hypocritically.

Of course, beliefs and desires aren't completely orthogonal. We can form a belief by rationalising desire, and desire can arise from belief. But even if they are not totally independent, that's still interesting - not so much for the notion of the self discussed in the article, but in the practical, sociological implications. Getting people to believe something is true (e.g. "I should cast my vote") and getting them to actually do it may have quite different aspects. Making people believe the facts is different from getting them interested or enthusiastic in a fact-based policy.

Can you stop yourself being infected with other peoples' desires? - Bence Nanay | Aeon Essays

Most of what we know, we know from someone else. I believe that Moroni is the capital of the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean because a friend of mine just told me this five minutes ago, and I have no reason to think that she is trying to trick me.

The trouble with clowns

The current state of British politics just makes me despair. Honestly I find it worse than just after the referendum. Sure, there was a brief moment when a crazy racist frog managed to persuade a small majority of people to do a very stupid thing, but that's okay. People do stupid things all the time. Done them myself. Making a daft mistake is annoying, but absolutely forgivable. Without forgiveness, life would hardly be worth living.

And yet...

It's very hard to forgive people who don't even want to try and learn from their mistakes. Brexit has already slain two Prime Ministers and will likely claim a third, regardless of the strategy adopted. I simply cannot fathom how anyone could have endured the last few years and not realised that Brexit is absolute bullshit. And it is, utterly, objectively, demonstrably a stupid decision. I'm not going to justify that here, because that's not the point of this post. It doesn't take any special insight to see the blindingly obvious and I'm fed up with trying to persuade people that fire is hot anyway.

The point is that there are still, despite everything, people not only willing to stand by their initial decision but even up the ante on the stupidity. Like deciding that electing Boris Johnson is a good idea.

Boris. Johnson. As Prime Minister. In the Mother of Parliaments. Whoop-de-bloody-doo.

Are these people for real ? Are they just setting him up to fail ? I doubt it - now's hardly the time, and any hopes that was Theresa May's game plan when she made him foreign secretary were cruelly dashed. No, they really seem to actually be this outstandingly stupid.

What I never understood was why Boris pulled out of the leadership bid last time because Michael Twerpface Gove decided to run. Sure, that was an act of betrayal, but not running signalled that Boris must have considered himself to have all the popularity and charisma of... well, something even less appealing than Michael Gove.

The problem with Boris is that in one key respect he's remarkably similar to Trump. Trump has made an asset out of stupidity, Boris out of being a clown. And I have to say that when Boris was happy enough just to play the joke, things were well enough. He was genuinely funny - no shame in admitting that, even given some very unlikable tendencies. But the minute he started believing in his own lie, things went south very fast. As soon as he realised he might actually have a chance at the leadership, he was willing to sacrifice whatever it is he actually believes on the altar of popularity.

It's not that people like Trump and Boris don't necessarily believe anything. If they know their place and leave actual politics to grown-ups, things are at worst manageably awful, while at best they make their case for their viewpoint the same as everyone else (as Boris did with his documentary calling for Turkey to join the E.U.). But they abandon their ideals as easily as they drop their trousers at the sight of a pretty girl, which is to say far too often.

Boris plays the fool remarkably well, in part because he is in many ways quite genuinely a fool. It's not like he's uneducated or even stupid - he just doesn't care very much about the truth, but only about himself. He can laugh off any mistake or hypocrisy he makes because it's just silly old Boris, no harm done. For Boris, it's a good thing to laugh at him, because it just shows how fun and silly and harmless and un-establishment he is - just as with Trump it's a good thing to hate him, because in the tiny minds of his supporters it shows how biased you are. And you can't mock someone who isn't afraid to be mocked, there's no point. Neither can you wound them by bringing up pesky things like facts, because they don't care about them. When they're on the sidelines, such men are at worst an amusing nuisance. When they achieve power, you have someone in charge who's rejected reality and substituted their own. You cannot hold someone to account who makes an ally of stupidity.

We still haven't learned this. We still keep trying to fight them with fact-checking and bringing up past hypocrisies. It won't work. You can't fight a clown by criticising their silly shoes or choice of make-up, because these are the very things that make the clown a success. It's fun to laugh at the clown when they're being a clown. It's much less fun if they're trying to organise the budget of a country.

Not that we should stop fact-checking. We should keep doing it, because those who do care about the truth will take notice. It's also an important source of future ammunition. But it we want to persuade the supporters of these dangerous buffoons, we have got to change tactics.

Boris himself shows all the signs of doubling down on his past mistakes. This, a person who had the audacity to prepare two articles on Brexit of diametrically opposed positions, is still telling people that we need to have the courage to tell people we can make a success of Brexit. Has the man never seen Yes Minister ? Because the words, "Courageous ? Why courageous ?" have rarely leapt so quickly to mind. If leaving the E.U. is such an obviously good thing, it shouldn't require any courage. And as for needing courage to tell people they can do something, that's utter crap. It doesn't take bravery to tell people they can do things. It takes bravery to tell them that they can't.

What a complete pillock.

And if you need further proof that their supporters don't respond well to evidence, look no further than the latest staggering poll :

Yeah, inspiring stuff, isn't it ? English nationalists are willing to destroy the UK and even the Tory party - this is a poll of Tory members, FFS - instead of averting Brexit. The only thing they hate more than avoiding Brexit is Jeremy "Beardy Weirdy" Corbyn.

And don't forget, this is an issue that the nation as a whole really didn't care much about until very recently. Forget all claims that Brexit "won't be as bad as all that", because Brexiteers literally do not care if it is. Which somewhat undermines claims that Brexit is actually going to be a positive thing, if its supporters are willing to break and smash the country to get it. Why should I believe them if they openly profess not to care if it hurts people ? People have spoken of the different moral values of conservatives and liberals, but where the hell is the "morality" in not caring about ruining your own country ? No Remainer would ever want to stay in the E.U. if it meant wrecking the country and the economy. What can men do against such reckless hate ?

I don't know. All I've got are Tolkein quotes.

I found this very nice painting here but I don't know who the artist is.

An addicting addiction

Following on from recent tirades about risk perception and innate versus social behaviour, here's an interesting article about how perceived norms enforce behaviour beyond evaluating risk. In fact I'd call this one anti-clickbait, since the article is more interesting than the title.

As far as the title subject itself goes, for me I see nothing intrinsically problematic with people discussing their opinions. Experiencing and discussing other points of view is generally a good thing if you're sincere about it; a philosophy overdose isn't a real thing. As for what people actually do there though, that's another story... I may or may not go on an explosive rant about the current state of Tory party politics to make my point, but I haven't yet decided if this is more likely to just make me even more angry rather than providing an outlet.

Whereas addiction is something people experience mostly as individuals, social norms are shared mental states shaped by the views and beliefs of other members of the society and by our subjective perceptions of those beliefs. And I believe that with appropriate interventions, social norms can be swiftly and completely overturned.

Norms are enforced through the approval or disapproval of a societal majority. The enforcement comes in many different guises — from verbal feedback, to barely noticeable glances and body language, to the guilt and shame that individuals feel when they fail to comply to the norm. Our behavior stems not just from our own choices and values but also from our beliefs about what others think is morally appropriate.

Strikingly, social norms often remain intact even when most people privately oppose them... more than 80 percent of Saudi men surveyed were privately in favor of female labor force participation and that the men dramatically underestimate their peers’ support for female employment. Because of those false beliefs and the fear of social penalties, the men are reluctant to reveal their true preferences. This strengthens the existing norm, which even further incentivizes the men to keep their preferences hidden.

When researchers intervened and corrected men’s beliefs about the expectations of their peers, the number of husbands encouraging their wives to sign up for a job-matching mobile application grew by nearly 60 percent among those who had underestimated the general level of support, and the number of women who actually applied for jobs outside the home grew by 10 percentage points.

I've said previously that our expectations can sometimes make societal change much harder to implement by thinking the battle can't be won and therefore isn't fought at all. It would be very interesting indeed to see if there are general conditions under which knowledge of everyone else's opinion makes change easier, and to what extent, and when this is plays a less important role.

Framing the issue solely as social media addiction, besides being unhelpful, might in fact hinder social change. Measures that give teens and parents more control over the time they spend on social media — including Apple’s Screen Time and Android’s Digital Wellbeing — work well to increase awareness of our behavior, but they do nothing to change expectations about the private beliefs and hidden preferences of other people. Because of this, strategies that target individual behavior will be largely ineffective when it comes to changing the social norm.

So in that sense spending a lot of time on social media is like being famous for being famous, an unavoidable necessity - or maybe even like saying we're addicted to living in houses. We are social creatures and if everyone's hanging out socially in some venue or other, then that's where we go. Social media is innately fun. It's fun to learn new things and hear other opinions. The question is how, given its unique attributes as a form of communication, we do this without blowing our heads off in the process.

No, You're Not Addicted to Social Media

One afternoon last April, at a coffee shop deep in suburban Philadelphia, I overheard a curious conversation between what looked to be a teenager and her grandfather. They were discussing the impacts of social media, and the girl bemoaned how depressed it made her feel.

Just some balls

I found this on MeWe, which has the extremely annoying quality of not having public posts so I can't link back to the original. Anyway, this is a very nice little illusion which benefits from being seen in high resolution. If you focus carefully on any ball and try and ignore the lines, you can see that they're actually all the same shade of beige. But if you just casually look at the whole image (especially if you unfocus your eyes), they look like vivid red and green and purple (or at least they do to me anyway).

Here they are again with the lines removed :

The original author of the post adds the provocative comment :

Our brains fill in a picture of reality based on context. This contextual rendering happens visually as well as cognitively, which is probably why the people or person who define an argument have already won that argument, and why gaining control of the narrative is so sought after.

This is appealing, but is it true ? I'm not entirely convinced. Yes, our default comparisons are relative, since we don't have absolute standards to hand by which to judge everything. But we don't all do this in all situations. In his excellent introductory course, psychologist Paul Bloom gives an example of someone wanting to earn an amount of money defined not by his own goals but by what his peers are earning. And yet while some people do this, others don't. No-one goes in for science to make the big bucks; no-one goes in for unskilled labour to make slightly more than their peers. It would be very interesting to examine under what conditions people default to relative comparisons and when they default to their own innate standards. An example can be seen in yesterday's chart : note the strong mismatch between what the public search for and what the media report.

In this particular case, we shouldn't forget that we are capable of establishing the true colour through careful and controlled analysis. It's a nice example of just how wrong our first impressions can be, but perhaps a more optimistic message is that we can reach the truth at all despite the difficulties.

As far as defining the argument goes, I'm not sure. In some ways it's a very good thing to be as specific as possible - the more vague something is, the harder it is to refute. Specificity is a crucial part of a scientific methodology, because specific claims (especially numerical ones) can be objectively tested. If claims are successfully refuted, people can and do change their minds.

The difficult part, to which no general guide can be given, is what to do if they don't. Sometimes there can be legitimate reasons - one might only realise after the fact that a theory carries implicit assumptions that invalidate the test, not so much shifting the goalposts as realising that they were somewhere else the whole time. Whereas at other times people do indeed simply redefine the argument to suit their own agenda and are not really interested in the truth at all. Steady State theory comes to mind as a classic example of shifting the goalposts, whereas dark matter seems much more like a case of trying to find out where the goalposts really are*.

* I still plan to write a post to explain that more properly, but I'm making an effort to get back into CGI again right now.

Finally, while controlling the narrative is generally something to avoid, exploring the narrative is essential. That is why history continues to be interesting, because new perspectives illuminate the past in different ways. Examining narratives from different perspectives is an enriching and sometimes mind-wrenching experience. Yet for all that, establishing fact is possible, albeit, as Plato put it, often rather difficult. We should not lose sight of the simple premise that some things are right and some are just plain wrong.

On this account no sensible man will venture to express his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable, as is true of written outlines... Only when all of these things — names, definitions, and visual and other perceptions — have been rubbed against one another and tested, pupil and teacher asking and answering questions in good will and without envy — only then, when reason and knowledge are at the very extremity of human effort, can they illuminate the nature of any object.

Reality versus The Media

An interesting chart to be sure.

I seem to bang on quite a lot about the media being the major weak link in our (meaning the West, not America because I'm not American) socio-political system. While the media does provide some direct, unfiltered reporting of what politicians say and do, much of it also cloaks events in the veils of opinion. Any event can be twisted towards any interpretation possible. Any mistake can be seen as brazen evil. Any statement of bigotry can be seen as just and fair. Were I to have a magic wand to reform society, my first target would be without hesitation the media, not the politicians.

And yet it would be foolish to believe the media do things simply because they are bad people. That would be as pointless as the age-old complaints about the moral decline of society and how people are all just worse nowadays somehow, usually made without any justification or reasoning. While it's clear that the media get things all out of proportion, at the same time I can't help but feel that some of this is entirely natural. Not everything happens because of the network structure of society. 

In this case, dying from natural causes is certainly a hell of a lot less threatening and interesting than dying due to unnatural ones. Yes, we can all make better choices and increase our chances of living healthier for longer, but ultimately, we all gotta go sometime. And yes, stories of murder and violence sell more newspapers than telling people that an old grandma passed away peacefully in her sleep one summer's eve. But it's undeniable, I think, that stories of murder and violence do hold an innately greater fascination than those of natural causes : we don't focus on them because the news reporters are bad people, or even because they lack training in statistics to see the bigger picture, but mainly just because that's innate human nature. Any unusual event is going to attract more attention than a normal occurrence - if it wasn't in some way unusual, it wouldn't be news. The sheer abnormality of terrorism and murder means it's bound to get more attention than people dying of old age.

Of course how we deal with threats is intimately connected with how we report them, but while we shouldn't let the media off the hook for massively exaggerating the threats from terrorism and murder, neither should we ascribe them the full blame for this. Readers are interested in such events; journalists are interested in writing about them - and the papers are necessarily interested in selling papers. Magic wands aside, this isn't an easy wheel to break.

EDIT : To be clear, I mean to say not only that the skewed reporting is due to human nature, but even that there's a certain logic to it; the exaggeration of some risks isn't just because we're bad at evaluating threats (note the emphasis though). If you’re old or seriously ill, chances are you already know about it. You already have the information you need to act on and have probably already accounted for the risk factor - or equally, if you know you’re not old or seriously ill, you know you don’t need to worry about those. There’s no point in reporting them because they develop in a generally known way : continuously reporting the risk of developing cancer would just be repetitive and largely to no purpose.

In contrast, violent crimes threaten more or less everyone in an unpredictable way. In some sense, it presents an extra risk on top of the background level of risk that’s already accounted for - if a murderer is on the loose, it's much more important to be told about that immediately than it is to be informed of the health risks associated with drinking a Coke. Which is not to say that disproportionately reporting it doesn’t cause enormous problems, only that it’s not wholly without logic as well as being driven by more emotional causes.

Contrast this with my earlier stance where I compared how much more likely you are to die from drowning than terrorism. Perhaps it's not as easy as I thought to even state what a sensible risk perception is. Everyone already knows that deep water is dangerous, but people in the desert seldom stop to worry about it. Risk must be evaluated locally (both due to location and current circumstances), and reporting that accounts for that is extremely difficult. While I still broadly agree with Stephen Pinker's stance that we should see terrorism as just another hazard and not treat it as anything special* - you are after all just as dead from a heart attack as a bomb - to properly state the risk of death from different causes is highly misleading if we present only the global averages.

* Especially since terrorism only works because it causes fear and gains attention.

And finally, note how different the searches are from the media reports. Although we have to be extremely wary of interpreting what "searches" actually imply here, it would seem that the news media's influence is far from total.

Review : Apollo 11

I finally saw this, purely by happy coincidence so close to the anniversary of the Moon landing. It was excellent.

I'm not sure if I should call this a movie or a documentary; I almost think it's something new. With the exception of a few new diagrammatic graphics, it's made entirely of original news and other recorded footage of the time, restored to full HD in superb quality. This really adds something. It feels like the reporting of an event that happened yesterday - rather than back in the distant past, when everyone was slightly blurred and only didn't notice because they were so grateful they'd escaped the even worse earlier condition of being monochrome.

The editing is superb too. It's got the factual content of a news report, the depth of a documentary, all delivered with the narrative and cinematographic style of a movie. Basically if Christopher Nolan filmed the news, it would look like this. There are no modern-day interviews (in fact little of any interviews at all), and contemporary commentary is used sparingly but always appropriately, much like the minimalist soundtrack. It's quite unlike First Man, which is very much a biopic of Neil Armstrong up to the end of the mission, being exclusively about the mission itself and not the astronauts. So in that sense I suppose it's more conventional, but overall the experience is quite different to any other Moon landing story.

While the movie itself is completely apolitical, saving the brief commentary on the unity of mankind (which will no doubt enrage some silly idiot or other), it's hard not to see this through the darkened and broken lens of contemporary politics. America had shitty politicians then as well, and a global political situation that was infinitely more dangerous than the present. And yet they managed to pull off the greatest feat of exploration in history. If you'll pardon a final cliché, by restoring this story of the past to make it accessible to the present, perhaps we may yet think better of the future.

I give this 10/10. It does exactly what it set out to do with absolute perfection, or so close as makes no difference.

Can't we all just get along ?

Fake news, in its most direct incarnation as made-up drivel on the internet with intent to deceive, is best fought through removal. While this can also be necessary for other forms of behaviour, for some it won't do much good and can even be counter-productive. Removing detailed discussion of a novel outright lie (e.g. that Hillary Clinton is a werewolf) will curtail the spread of that lie. Trying to do the same with endemic attitudes (e.g. racism, sexism etc.*) is only going to alienate people, drive them further away, and feed their own victim narrative. Thus discussion can be necessary even with those who hold abhorrent views, though there are limits to which one should go. Debate online does not imply concession, much less legitimisation - which needs a prominent recognised forum. Nor are discussions and censorship mutually exclusive. There is very little point in debating with the diehards (who are better off censored), except in to present the alternatives to more casual followers : there is, as Doctor Who put it, nothing worse than when ordinary people lose their minds.

*These did not spring forth from Facebook, but social media does allow the bigoted to get organised more easily.

There is no foolproof guide on deciding when to censor, when to debate and when to simply walk away. If a person has been convinced solely through online discussion, then presenting them an alternative in the same venue (especially in sufficient numbers) may succeed. If, however, there is some external cause driving their belief, then the presence of online strangers telling them they're wrong may only backfire. At some time or other we've all wandered in to a debate completely dominated by people with a diametrically opposite position to our own - it almost always ends with neither side giving any ground. Things are far more successful when participants are put together on an equal and fair footing.

All in all, I think the approach used here is a good one : form an organised group to be present en masse (since quality engenders authority), don't argue directly with the ringleaders (but do let and encourage moderator intervention, including blocking users and deleting comments where necessary), seek to change the tone of the debate before changing minds, and provide alternatives that will persuade at least the more casual (but usually more numerous) followers rather than the devotees. The combination is more than the sum of its parts : trying to debate without deletion or delete without debate are both ludicrous approaches, but used in concert they can allow productive debate to flourish.

Nina is part of an international movement working to find and combat hate speech on the platform. She and her fellow #IAmHere members spend their spare time scanning Facebook for conversations happening on big pages, often run by mainstream media organisations, which are overwhelmed with racist, misogynistic or homophobic comments. 

They don't attempt to change the minds of people posting hate or argue directly with extremists. Instead they collectively inject discussions with facts and straightforwardly argued reasonable viewpoints. The idea is to provide balance so that other social media users see that there are alternative perspectives beyond the ones offered up by the trolls. The groups stick to fighting hate speech, which Facebook defines as a "direct attack on people based on protected characteristics - race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability."

Further digging made it clear that many users creating and liking hateful comments were just as organised and targeted as #IAmHere. Researcher Jacob Davey, an expert on the far right at the London-based Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), says: "Troll armies bring themselves together in almost semi-military style hierarchies. You can see these groups coming together and engaging in harassment on Facebook, which appears to be both silencing moderate discussion and dominating certain discussion points."

Starting in 2018, Germany's NetzDG law required social media sites to remove hate speech within a day of it being reported, and analysis shows that explicitly racist posts have decreased on Facebook since then. A study of #IchBinHier activity by researchers at the University of Dusseldorf also found that its commenters are often successful at changing the tone of online debates. On the other hand, research carried out by Kreissel and the ISD found that coordinated right-wing extremist online hate campaigns have increased three-fold since December 2017.

'I spend three hours a day on Facebook fighting hate'

A network of tens of thousands of online volunteers is fighting hate speech on Facebook. They organise under the slogan "#IAmHere". It's 7:30 in Berlin, and Nina's alarm clock is going off. Before getting up and making breakfast for her 13-month-old daughter, who is sleeping in the next room, she reaches for her phone.

A tale of two shities

I'm not going to give a running commentary on the Conservative party leadership, because even a light jog would be exhausting. I will say something about a couple of recent developments though.


Here we Gove

Let's do the less interesting one first : Michael Gove's admission of trying cocaine. The only noteworthy thing here is the revelation that Michael Gove is interesting enough to have tried cocaine. I don't care all that much that be broke the law or even about the crime itself, except insofar as cocaine production supports drug cartels and whanot. That aside, a crime that affects only the individual is easily forgivable. It's not like he admitted driving over hedgehogs for fun or enjoys deflowering nuns (or vice-versa) or anything.

I don't even care all that much about the hypocrisy. Of course I do care a bit, because hypocrisy is bad and should be avoided. But everyone slips from their own standards from time to time, and it's not as if he was a full-on junkie. I can forgive that. And when he says, "The thing to do is not necessarily then to say that the standards should be lowered. It should be to reflect on the lapse and to seek to do better in the future", I think he is quite right.

But therein lies what I do have a problem with. If standards aren't to be lowered, if follows that he should be punished along with everyone else found guilty of the same crime. When he says that he didn't declare drug use before becoming a minister because he wasn't asked, I think that demonstrates contempt of the law. When he says that he was fortunate to avoid prison for a profound mistake, I think that demonstrates contempt of the public. Other people have to suffer greatly for their crime - he gets to become a prominent politician. Why is it "lucky" that he avoids punishment ? Isn't punishment supposed to be about deterrence and rehabilitation ? Yes, yes, I know it doesn't do that terribly well in practise, but the point is that a politician thinking it's "lucky" to evade justice is an abhorrent thing. Which nicely sums up what I think of Michael Gove as a human being.

This probably won't win me any followers, but it's the same with Julian Assange : "no, I don't need to participate in the judicial system, because it won't treat me fairly". When we start having such selective confidence in the law, we're in trouble.


Behold the BoJo

On to the second case : Boris "The Muppet" Johnson. Now Boris also may have tried cocaine, but he was never (so far as I know) a campaigner against drugs, so isn't tainted with hypocrisy on that score. He is, however, manifestly hypocritical on Europe. More importantly, he told a great big lie on the side of a great big bus, but though a prosecution was launched, the case won't go to trial.

It's important to be clear about the nature of the lie. Politicians tell falsehoods all the time, and break promises even more often. But this particular lie had some rather unusual characteristics. It concerned not (just) a promise for the future, which are always uncertain, nor did it rely on difficult estimates or predictions grounded in complex theories, nor did it even contain an opinion. Falsehoods in such things are forgivable, and often unavoidable.

For example, I can freely say, "Boris Johnson is a colossal shithead" or, "Boris Johnson is as bad as someone who eats live babies" or even, "Boris Johnson is magnificently handsome and has the best hair in the world" because those are all, implicitly but very clearly, opinions. They are all unavoidably about what I think, not about the way the world actually is. No-one can say I don't think Boris Johnson is a jerk, because I do. Prefixing some statements with "in my opinion" can be profoundly important.

Had I said, though, that Boris Johnson actually does eat live babies, that would be another matter. That would be contradictory to the observable facts. Prefixing it with "in my opinion" doesn't help, because we can test the assertion of cannibalism. Metaphors I suppose are a bit of a grey area, but it would be trivial for me to declare an article to be parody or satire - or even just laden with rhetorical hyperbole - and so license myself to say things like, "Boris Johnson is a cyborg who's neural circuitry is long past its warranty".

The Brexit bus did none of those things. It claimed as fact something which was at demonstrable odds with reality. It wasn't an estimate, or a prediction, or need any clever financial modelling to produce. It didn't rely on classified intelligence. It wasn't claimed as rhetoric or metaphor or satire. It was a statement about observable reality, not something we'd be doing in the future but something we actually are doing right now, that was refuted constantly by just about anyone who mattered. It was a lie of the most direct variety possible.

So why has the prosecution been thrown out ? We have to wait a bit to find out - and then change whatever law needs changing. Politicians do need to be able to tell falsehoods, as we all do; they should not have to go around worrying that every single statement they make must be verified in court. But if they are able to get away scot-free with such clear-cut cases as this, then they have a license to say whatever they please. Boris may be derided in the press as a moron, but Boris courts mockery rather than avoiding it. For such a man, the ill words of his peers and the press have no force.

As with all laws, we don't necessarily have to decide on the boundary conditions right away - cases which do involve predictions or statistical modelling are another matter. We just need to agree that statements as willfully contradictory to the proven current facts count as lies. The rest can wait. And again as with all laws, some people may be found innocent or be unable to be brought to trial that we disagree with. But at least having that possibility of being found guilty acts as a deterrent : Boris could potentially be found guilty in the future, whereas knowing that this case won't proceed may embolden him.

Which is why it's so important to know the judge's reasoning. Is there precedent ? Is it not considered possible to try politicians for telling lies ? Are there particular extenuating circumstances for rejecting this one, and can such things happen again ? I can imagine some very good reasons for rejecting the case, but then again I can imagine some very bad ones too. We'll see.

Gove: I was lucky to avoid jail over cocaine

Michael Gove has admitted he was "fortunate" to avoid prison after using cocaine several times 20 years ago. The Tory leadership hopeful previously said he took the class A drug while working as a journalist.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...

This makes me start humming the Sharky & George theme tune...

Sea bass, for example, have been observed diving to the bottom of the sea when they hear a loud noise. Might they do the same, in a predictable manner, when encountering an underwater vehicle? "We have a fairly good feeling that we will see that response, we just need to quantify it," says Dr Helen Bailey, research associate professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. 

"We can implant miniature depth sensor tags on the fish so we can detect the movement, and there is already the technology in place for that to be a real-time system." She says there's no reason why an army of black sea bass couldn't provide a cost-effective warning system against enemy subs.

This feels like what would happen in Aquaman and Saruman got together with Mark Zuckerberg.

Snapping shrimp, found all over the world in shallow water at latitudes less than about 40 degrees, continuously snap their claws together, creating a constant sound signal that bounces back off surrounding objects. As with conventional sonar systems, measuring the time it takes for the sound signal to return, and its strength, can reveal the size, shape and distance of underwater objects. 

"The concept doesn't rely on the shrimp changing its behaviour in any way when the vehicle approaches, it just uses the sound it creates," says Ms Laferriere. This is important because you don't want your surveillance system to be detectable or to make its own noise that interferes with the sensors. "It's a passive system," she adds. "It will be low-power and capable of detecting even the quietest vehicles."

So basically a giant information-gathering system about hitherto uninteresting details about fish. They should call it Fishbook, or possibly MyPlaice. Maybe Grouper Plus, if it doesn't catch on. Or Fins Reunited. Twilapia, if desperate. I'll stop now. Anyway, I'd be more interested to know what this could help us learn about fish than using the poor unwitting things as spies.

How fish and shrimps could be recruited as underwater spies

We have a long history of trying to use animals as spies, weapons and warning systems, but the latest plans to use marine organisms as motion sensors may be the strangest yet. When a beluga whale was spotted wearing a harness recently, some speculated that it had been trained to spy for the Russian army.