Arrakis needs cows

Some TED talks are really very good. This is one of them. It's worth actually watching, but I'll give some transcript highlights below if you don't have 20 minutes spare.

Suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the [land] damage. And it got worse, not better. Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. 

What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. Large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil. 

All of that grass you see above ground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon,and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. 

There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature.

Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight -- we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on -- and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well.

The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have.

At this point you really should look at the talk. Results are shown starting at the 15 min mark.

I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people.

The power of bloody-mindedness

There's a surprising amount that's already known about how ideas spread in different circumstances, both theoretically and observationally. For example, it's been found that if 10-15% of sources contradict an established belief, there's a strong backfire against believing them (e.g. one local lunatic down the pub) - but if the number exceeds around 30%, then the backfire effect drops away (the idea has become mainstream). Similarly, if around 25% of the population believe something, there's a good chance it can completely overturn the existing prevalent idea. We also know that expectation influences belief in a Bayesian-like fashion, that the presence of even a few individuals who are immune can stifle the spread of an idea, and that if 3.5% of a population take part in a non-violent protest, they're virtually certain to be successful.

This new study makes a different claim. It says that the tipping point for a minority belief can be as low as 10%. Why the difference ? Does this overturn the previous findings ? Is this another example of a replication crisis ?

No. Remember, all scientific statements carry with them implicit assumptions. This is especially true for press releases, which in general like to paint a ridiculous black and white picture, neglect any and all assumptions, and degrade research to the status of right or wrong. Not this one though. It's very explicit about what the authors did :

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

This is quite clearly not describing the general case. I'm not sure it's true that, "In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus", but it's obvious that a core of zealots is not a general rule. But it's not unimportant by its rarity either. I only skimmed the actual paper (it's not an easy read) where they note :

There are several historical precedents for such events, for example, the suffragette movement in the early 20th century, and the rise of the American civil-rights movement that started shortly after the size of the African-American population crossed the 10% mark.

And these results are model-dependent simulations (that is, they may not depend on the network structure, but they may depend on the model of interactions and persuasion used) :

Each of the individuals in the models "talked" to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener's belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.

Once the networks were built, the scientists then "sprinkled" in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.

I guess this is a simplified approximation, but the obvious question is how someone reaches a truly unshakeable belief. Everyone starts off life believing nothing much of anything, so all beliefs are formed. How and why do they sometimes become irreversible ? Does this ever truly happen in reality, or are the models simply saying that these agents have such strong convictions that overturning them is effectively impossible in the conditions they experience in the simulations ? It's also unclear to me if their model accounts for individuals varying in how easy they are to persuade (they speak of "binary agreement models" and "opinion dynamic models", but I don't know anything about these) or if it's a case of agents being either open to persuasion or not, or if the agents could ever lose confidence in their beliefs.

Still, the result strikes me as a credible one, providing we remember the assumptions. If you have a group who are mostly open-minded but 10% are absolutely convinced, it seems reasonable to me that that could be enough to convince the majority. Of course, if you also had 10% who are absolutely opposed, then the result might be different. And they note in the paper :

The binary agreement model is well suited to understanding how opinions, perceptions or behaviors of individuals are altered through social interactions specifically in situations where the cost associated with changing one’s opinion is low, or where changes in state are not deliberate or calculated, but unconscious.

Or in other words this result may not hold in the case of changing a belief having a (social) cost associated with it, or being so complex that it requires careful thought. Keeping all those factors in mind, this is still a very interesting result - one which sounds relatively easy to test.

Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas

Scientists have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.

Boris Johnson's chest of drawers

Borrowing an old NewsThump joke... this isn't a cabinet, it's a chest of drawers at the most.

And here we have it, a Cabinet of astonishing venality and idiocy. There are people in there who spoke in favour of the death penalty, who threatened Ireland with food shortages if they continued to hamper Brexit with their pesky border, who oppose gay marriage and who lobby for the tobacco and alcohol industries. And that’s just the human atrocity that is Priti Patel. 

The new Culture Secretary, Nicky Morgan, is someone who said that school pupils were “held back” by studying the arts. That’s quite the appreciation of culture there. The new Housing Secretary is Esther McVey, someone most of us would hesitate to put in charge of a potato gun. Or even a potato. The new Foreign Secretary, the de-facto Deputy Prime Minister, is none other than Dominic Raab. Seriously, it’s Dominic Raab. The guy who hadn’t realised the UK did a lot of trade through the Dover-Calais route.

At least Boris knows enough about other countries to hurl racial abuse at them - I doubt Dominic Raab knows even that much. There's not much else I can offer here. Boris has shown his cards, and they're all dicks.

What do I take away from this ? Two things. First, the only point I disagree with is this :

What does it all mean, John? I fear it means what a senior EU official said it means last week: a No Deal Brexit has gone from being unthinkable to being an odds-on certainty.

Those of us committed to sanity cannot afford the luxury of despair, for that and that alone guarantees we hand victory to the lunatics. But we are currently at the mercy of Parliamentary technicalities and Westminster shenanigans. Boris and co shall soon encounter the brick wall that is reality, but we cannot yet know exactly how this will affect them. That's the problem of bullshit, of course - not that such people don't understand reality, but that they don't care. We're now heavily reliant on some political procedure derailing the machinations of a ship of fools, and that needs the form of a very blunt instrument. It cannot be delicate negotiations and empty promises. It needs something so incredibly direct that even Boris can't ignore it.

Second, supposing that England does decide it wants to carry on laughing as it falls of the cliff of sanity, then I'd be willing to give serious consideration to Welsh independence. Sometimes instruction needs take the form of punishment. So if England is so determined to screw themselves this hard, to wed themselves to bigots and fools, then they can sod off and sail away into the ocean somewhere. I'm quite serious. I'm no nationalist : I'd rather Wales and Scotland banded together and immediately joined the E.U., pending appropriate investment and support, and should our English brethren have the courage to say, "we made a terrible mistake", then they should be welcomed back with open arms. Were I not personally dependent on the outcome of this whole travesty of a farce of injustice, and were I not concerned that the economic fallout could drive even more people to the far right, then I'd be openly calling for a hard Brexit. Not because I think it's a good idea - it's the stupidest idea we've had in living memory - but to teach people a lesson. I'm not convinced they'll learn anything until they experience the consequences first hand.

Boris Johnson's Brexit Cabinet is stuffed full of right wing Tory idiots

Misery loves company. As does incompetence, it seems. Before we get into this, let me just see how painful it is to type the following sentence: Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced his new Cabinet. Yep - pretty painful. Very, very painful. Anyway, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced his new Cabinet.

Austerity => Brexit ?

A whole bunch of people (me included) have already pointed out a likely link between Brexit and austerity. It seems reasonable enough that if you take people's public services away then they're going to want someone to blame, and they're not necessarily going to be too fussy about who that is. Herein are studies confirming those suspicions, at least on a correlative (if not yet causative) level :

He found that UKIP's share of a district's vote jumped anywhere from 3.5 to 11.9 percentage points in correlation with austerity's local impact. "Given the tight link between UKIP vote shares and an area's support for Leave, simple back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that Leave support in 2016 could have been easily at least 6 percentage points lower," Fetzer continued. As tight as the Brexit referendum was, that alone could have been enough to swing it.

"Individuals tend to react to the general economic situation of their region, regardless of their specific condition," Colantone and Stanig wrote. But Fetzer was able to break out some individual data in his analysis of austerity, and he found a correlation with Brexit votes there as well. Individual Britons who were more exposed to welfare state cuts — in particular a reduction in supports for housing costs — were again more likely to vote for UKIP. 

People really are weird. To varying degrees, they're also unfortunate and awful creatures. In a way, it's nice that they react to the general situation and not just their own circumstances (although some of them definitely don't care a jot about the general situation). But this crazy idea that people thought the E.U. was somehow having a detrimental effect on their own lives, without ever (or at least vanishingly rarely) being able to spell out exactly how this happened... there's the downside.

Austerity has a certain appeal. Virtually all of us has experienced the situation where we can't afford everything we want so we have to save up for things. At a basic level, it makes good sense that if the country is in recession we should try and save money. And the economy under Cameron did improve. But there were little or no signs of austerity ever weakening, and for all George Osborne is against Brexit, he was very strongly fiscally Conservative with a capital C.

Inequality in Britain had been worsening for decades, as the upper class in the City of London pulled further and further ahead of the largely rural working class, setting the stage for Brexit. And then austerity fell hardest on the shoulders of the latter group, compounding the effect.

It isn't that the economic dislocation of the 2008 crisis and the ensuing austerity crunch made Britons more racist. By all accounts, half or more of the country has consistently looked askance on immigration going back decades. (Indeed, international polling suggests a certain baseline dislike for immigration is a near-universal human condition.) What changed in the last few years was the willingness of certain parts of British society to act politically on those attitudes. And that, arguably, is where the economics come in.

In the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, much of the campaigning in favour of "Leave" was unabashedly racist. Hard-right political groups like the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) painted a picture of native Britons overrun by hordes of foreign immigrants that were straining the country's health care, housing, public services, jobs and wages to the breaking point. The thing is, the racism was a particular poisonous way of framing a very real underlying economic fear: all those necessities really had become harder to come by.

I'll offer a rough-and-ready version of a narrative explanation of the final stages of Brexit. I cannot speak for the preceding decades economically, but I can confirm that there had been a strong hard right, anti-foreigner rhetoric in the popular press which successive governments disgustingly failed to get a grip on. There was a strong feeling of not hostility but disgruntlement towards the E.U. for many years. It was regarded largely as a fringe issue, but it was very much in everyone's minds.

Then came the global financial crisis. Although we all knew it was coming, the Brown-led Labour government catastrophically failed to persuade enough people that it wasn't Labour's fault. I would say that Labour spending helped the country survive the crisis, that without robust social institutions and services we would have been much worse hit. But the Tories successfully spun a pro-austerity message that Labour had actually overspent (which is probably nonsense, but appealing nonsense) and this, if it didn't exactly result in them sweeping to power, then put them very clearly in charge.

Austerity was something could grin and bear - but only for a while. It got worse. It didn't help that Labour's new leader was a nice chap but totally undetectable, and in trying to distinguish himself from his predecessor, had made the mistake of capitulating to the Tories on immigration. Milliband's message was nowhere near critical enough of the Tory policies in that it did not have a simple enough theme to it. It did not have any clear narrative, it just had policies. And admitting that Labour was wrong on immigration only handed more ammunition to the Tories, giving them the right to claim they were right all along and therefore better able to deal with it.

As austerity deepened, when the referendum came, people were no longer tolerant but angry. They were not all that dissatisfied with the Tory government, who were after all doing pretty much what they said they would do as relatively honest villains (especially now they were unfettered by the Lib Dems, who had rendered themselves pointless). But they were still looking for someone to blame. To their credit, Labour by this point had realised their mistake and elected a charismatic (though unconventional) leader whose politics were much more aligned with many of the voters. And he did have a clear, thematic, anti-austerity message. Unfortunately he turned out to be if not a hard Brexiteer then at least a closet Leaver.

So the final combination was one of angry voters, austerity policies that had genuinely made things worse, a government who were doing what they said they would and improving the economy (though not for ordinary people), a chronic anti-E.U., anti-immigrant atmosphere, and an opposition leader who just didn't care. Even this toxic concoction produced only the slimmest of victories for the Brexiteers, but a victory it was nonetheless.

The unfolding disaster that is Brexit could have been avoided in a plethora of ways, but austerity has a strong claim to be the root cause. Giving the prevailing political conditions, it was likely always necessary but only provisionally sufficient. It's not likely that it would have happened at all without austerity (saving radically different political circumstances), but even so it could have been stopped at any number of occasions. Indeed, it still can. Of course, the article doesn't say as to whether the austerity-Brexit correlation is the strongest one, or if the correlation could be a symptom of a more fundamental relationship, but the link is at least credible.

Supposing that this narrative is correct, then there are a couple of key features :

1. Brexit is a perfect storm of horrible details. That the key driver was austerity does not mean that the whole omnishambles was inevitable - it could have been stopped by any number of different actions. It is not the result of the inevitable tide of history washing away liberalism or whatever Putin thinks.
2. People are stupid and easily fooled. Ignorance is not, contrary to a popular saying, a choice. Rather it results from people (as Plato said) not thinking they need more information because they already have the answers. I do not think the above narrative requires outlandish leaps of logic or extraordinary political insight*, yet it seems to have escaped a large fraction of people that they should blame the people inflicting economic hardship on them and they instead blame someone else entirely.

* At some point I plan to review the posts labelled "predictions", but for now I'll just say I've made plenty of mistakes.

In conclusion, it's depressing stuff. And while instigating austerity enabled Brexit, fighting austerity does not seem to engender a renewed hope in the E.U. Political decisions have highly non-linear and non-reversible consequences. I don't like it.

The overwhelming correlation between austerity and Brexit

Across the pond, the Brexit disaster continues to unfold in newly disastrous ways. Theresa May has resigned as prime minister, and the Trump-esque Boris Johnson looks like a lock to replace her. Parliament members - up to and including Johnson's own fellow Conservatives - are panicking that the new prime minister may try hardline tactics to force Brexit through, plan or no plan.

EAT ALL THE MEAT !

An interesting look at how one effect leads to another.

The former head of the United Nations’ climate change organization, for example, suggested that meat-eaters should be made to feel like pariahs. “How about restaurants in 10-15 years start treating carnivores in the same way that smokers are treated?

Well, there's no question that eating meat is bad for the environment. But as a predatory species this is a very odd suggestion. And no-one is really a carnivore, we're all omnivores (except for Atilla the Hun, but he's dead). Eating meat is an entirely natural thing to do. This is too radical a solution to be sensible. Suggesting we switch primarily to lab-grown meat is more plausible.

We’re often told that going vegetarian is the biggest thing that any of us could do, with headlines telling us: "Cut your carbon footprint in half by going vegetarian." Statements like that are misleading for two reasons. First, that cut isn’t to our entire emissions — just those from food. That means four-fifths of emissions are ignored, according to an analysis of emission from the European Union, which means the impact is actually five-times lower.

Some Google searching finds that agriculture overall contributes about 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so this seems to ring true. I wonder about the indirect effects though, e.g. land currently needed for animals (and growing animal freed) could be restored to forests. That will change not only emissions but also albedo, possibly indirectly through affects on clouds due to changing the local water vapour content and temperature of the air.

Vegetarian diets are slightly cheaper, and saved money will likely be spent on other goods and services that cause extra greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S., vegetarians save at least $750 on their food budgets every year. That extra spending will cause more carbon dioxide emissions, cancelling about half the saved carbon emissions from going vegetarian.

That's the kind of logic - even assuming the answer here is wrong - that we need more of. It's good to start with the absolute basics : what's the emission level generated by such-and-such ? But after that we have to ask what's the full real-world impact of doing such-and-such. David Attenborough once spoke of developing an everyday attitude to fighting climate change, by making it habitual that we consider the energy use and environmental impacts of everything we do. That's perfectly sensible. But I tend to agree with :

It's not you, it's big business: You can't save the climate by going vegan. Corporate polluters must be held accountable. In a first world setting, the reality is that going entirely vegetarian for the rest of your life means you reduce your emissions by about 2%, according to a study of the environmental impact of Swedish vegetarians. Given all of this, it seems downright mean-spirited of the Manchester University scientists to try to shame people for having a summer barbecue. 

It would be a better use of their time to push for more spending on development of artificial meat, which is showing much greater promise than the idea that all the planet’s meat-eaters will develop a taste for vegan alternatives. They should also push for global research and development into green energy.

I tend strongly towards favouring replacement over reduction wherever possible. I would rather people had electric vehicles than no vehicles at all, that they used low-power devices instead of disconnecting themselves. And we need sociological research as much as we need technological ones. For example, risk compensation : as energy use drops, to what extent do we compensate by using more devices ? But we can't and shouldn't go back to living in the trees.

Don't let vegetarian environmentalists shame you for eating meat. Science is on your side.

CLOSE Go ahead, grill a burger. Going vegetarian can help our climate a little bit, but it's an inefficient policy to try to push on people worldwide. Around the world, we're being told to stop eating meat. Headlines, think tanks and activists all ask us to change our diet to combat climate change.

Trees on life support

"Death is only the beginning"... zombie trees !

Curious about how it was surviving without green foliage, they decided to put several continuous water monitors in the kauri (Agathis australis) stump and in two nearby adult trees of the same species.Over the following weeks, they found a relationship between the water flow in the trees and the stump. This meant that when the neighbouring trees would evaporate water through their leaves during the day, the water movement in the stump remained low. But when the trees were dormant during the evening, the water would begin circulating through the stump.Similarly, when it became overcast or rainy and the water flow dropped in the trees, it picked up in the stump. In healthy trees, water flow is largely driven by evaporation, but without leaves the stump’s water flow was bound by the movements of its neighbours.

The stumps of felled trees can sometimes grow back into new trees. I wonder if this is possible for these preserved stumps to recover and eventually grow new leaves and become self-supporting ?

Tree stumps that should be dead can be kept alive by nearby trees

A tree stump that should have died is being kept alive by neighbouring trees that are funnelling water and nutrients to it through an interconnected root system. The finding adds to a growing understanding that trees and other organisms can work together for the benefit of a forest.

The Cosmic Web just got a bit too cosmic

If you've seen my previous debunking of a really stupid internet meme, it'll come as no surprise to find that I think this article is a bunch of bollocks. Even if the authors are a Marie Curie astronomer and a neuroscientist, it's still bollocks.

Galaxies can group into enormous structures (called clusters, superclusters, and filaments) that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years. The boundary between these structures and neighboring stretches of empty space called cosmic voids can be extremely complex. Gravity accelerates matter at these boundaries to speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, creating shock waves and turbulence in intergalactic gases. We have predicted that the void-filament boundary is one of the most complex volumes of the universe, as measured by the number of bits of information it takes to describe it. This got us to thinking: Is it more complex than the brain?

I've never heard of anyone describing such accelerations, but the statement is meaningless without describing what the velocity is measured relative to. Galaxies at the edges of voids aren't falling into filaments at thousands of kilometres per second, but of course they are moving at such speeds relative to very distant galaxies. Galaxies falling into clusters, on the other hand, do indeed reach local speeds > 1,000 km/s, but I never heard of this happening at the void-filament boundary. Clusters form very clear structures at the intersection points of multiple filaments, and are very distinct from other parts of the filaments.

It only gets worse from hereon in.

Here it is again : a comparison of the distribution of dark matter in the Universe (from numerical simulations, on the left), to a slice of the human cerebellum (right). Do these look the same to you ? Because they don't to me. Not even close. I mean, good grief. There are whacking great round lumps in the cerebellum image that aren't at all similar to anything in the simulation. The network structure of the dark matter is barely visible in the cerebellum : what paths there are are generally straighter but make sharper twists and turns. The dark matter network structure is visible because of enormous density variations which are not reflected in the brain. So :

The eye immediately grasps some similarity between images of the cosmic web and the brain.

No it fucking doesn't. This is wishful thinking writ large.

A stunning message emerges from the power spectrum graph in Figure 2 (below): The relative distribution of fluctuations in the two networks is remarkably similar, over several orders of magnitude.

A power spectrum doesn't convey the full details of the structure, any more than the standard deviation tells you about coherent formations. And the choice of features they choose to plot is completely arbitrary - it's a garbage comparison that's totally unjustified.

One of us has recently measured how difficult it is to predict how the cosmic network evolves, based on the digital evolution of a simulated universe. This estimate suggests that about 1 to 10 petabytes of data are needed to describe the evolution of the entire observable universe at the scale where its self-organization emerges (or at least of its simulated counterpart).

Whut ? I saw someone running an n-body universe simulation in realtime once. A small one, to be sure, but you don't need enormous amounts of data. It's going to be of the order of megabytes or perhaps kilobytes, not petabytes. The large scale structure emerges very naturally from gravity alone - yeah, you need much more horrendously complex physics for galaxies and stars and stuff, but not for the web. The only thing I can think they're referring to is storing the data "as is" at any step, which could be large, but you definitely don't need anything remotely like a petabyte to store something that's a much, much closer match to the structure of the brain.

It is truly a remarkable fact that the cosmic web is more similar to the human brain than it is to the interior of a galaxy; or that the neuronal network is more similar to the cosmic web than it is to the interior of a neuronal body. Despite extraordinary differences in substrate, physical mechanisms, and size, the human neuronal network and the cosmic web of galaxies, when considered with the tools of information theory, are strikingly similar. 

Does this fact tell us something profound about the physics of emergent phenomena in the two systems? Maybe. But we must take these findings with a grain of salt.

I wouldn't even call these "findings". They are nonsense statements. But suppose for the sake of argument that some similarity were to be objectively and correctly (for these are not at all the same thing) demonstrated. What would it mean ? What do you want us to do with that knowledge ? How does it change anything, knowing that the action of gravity can, under some conditions, produce something that resembles a structure produced by completely different biological processes ? In a word, so what ?

The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks - Issue 74: Networks - Nautilus

Christof Koch, a leading researcher on consciousness and the human brain, has famously called the brain "the most complex object in the known universe." It's not hard to see why this might be true. With a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion connections, the brain is a dizzyingly complex object.

BoJo is in da House

Boris Johnson has been elected Prime Minister and I feel obligated to comment. I don't think I can say anything particularly interesting though, so I'll be brief. I thought about doing a rhetorical denunciation of the floopy-haired cretinous loon, but I'm currently quite emotionally numb (literally) to politics at the moment so I don't want to.

Anyway, it's not like I haven't pointed out the problem of electing a clown before (not just that they are incompetent, but you can't criticise them for being stupid). Or how Boris is a liar and doesn't care. Then of course there's this list of Boris criticising himself. And I'll remind everyone that while ad hominem attacks aren't very nice, they are an absolutely essential part of a democracy. If you elect someone to speak and make judgements on your behalf, then trust in their character and sincerity is crucial.

There was an interesting remark by ex-chancellor Philip Hammond in the Guardian :

“He is actually a more complex personality than it sometimes seems,” Hammond said of Johnson in his interview. “He is a mainstream conservative on all topics except Brexit. I very much regret his attitude to Brexit. His own story, which is multicultural, multinational and liberal, speaks for itself.”

Hammond is (or rather was) one of the few sensible Tories left in government. He's worth listening to. Boris has hardly any government experience, so while we know a great deal about Boris the man (he's a colossal tit), we know rather less about Boris the politician. Yes, we know about Boris the MP, but practically nothing about Boris the minister. He was either sensible enough to know to keep his trap shut as foreign secretary, or was carefully sidelined by halfway competent people.

What we can say for sure is that, mainstream or not, Boris is unpredictable. This is an idiotic characteristic for a politician because no-one knows what they're voting for, so they can't be held to account.

Comparisons to Trump are obvious. But there are many differences, and I'm not sure how well this really stands up. Yes, Boris is a populist, albeit not without an agenda, who largely cares more about himself than any policies. But whereas Trump has weaponized hatred - all the criticism of me is just liberal bias, i.e. evidence that I'm correct - Boris was weaponized stupidity : it's okay that I've done something very stupid because I'm just silly old BoJo. Those are distinctly different kinds of shit. And while Trump absolutely loathes criticism of himself, spending far more time on Twitter attacking celebrities than doing anything Presidential, Boris rejoices in being a buffoon. He doesn't need to rebuke such allegations any more than a clown needs to pretend they're not wearing silly shoes.

It remains to be seen how far Boris can push this as far as unpredictability goes. I can't imagine Nigel Farage ever deciding that No Deal would be bad for Britain, but Boris is a man who made a documentary about how amazing the E.U. was, and prepared two opposing speeches when deciding whether to back Remain or Leave. How deep in bed with the hard Brexiteers is Boris, really ? To what extent is he trapped by appealing to them ?

The other crucial bit of information which remains vague is to what extent Boris has breadth or depth of support. Is he supported by a few enthusiasts or does he actually have a wider support base ? It's the same with No Deal : what everyone seems to be saying is that it's a few enthusiasts, but when it comes to numbers, it looks more like there's broader support. Parliament had the option to remove No Deal several times but it (at best) barely manages to delay it, despite everyone still insisting that they really don't want it. Similarly, Boris seems extremely unpopular (losing ministers before even taking office) but won the leadership contest handily.

Regardless, the Reuters piece below points out that on the singular issue of the day, nothing has actually changed. Hard Brexiteers don't have the numbers to force through a No Deal. Parliament voted against proroguing itself (though don't expect that one to be settled yet). May's deal is still dead. Parliament won't rescind Article 50. Changing the political declaration won't work : trying to bring us into closer alignment with the E.U. after Brexit will lose support of the Brexiteers, while trying to bring us further away will lose support of Remainers and moderates. A general election would be devastating for the Tories (but expect turbulent polls in the next few weeks). Re-opening negotiations won't work (unbelievably, I heard a report on the BBC this morning that the E.U. is secretly willing to renegotiate in order to get the deal through Parliament, which is not credible). Extending the transition period again loses the support of Brexiteers. Changing the wider circumstances of Brexit, i.e. negotiating deals with other countries to replace the benefits of being in the world's largest economic bloc, has already been revealed as a unicorn, and even if we did jump in bed with the cretinous twat across the Atlantic, this too would be a devastating political choice.

For my part, I cannot see how the necessity of a second referendum is anything other than an inescapable fact. With Parliament rendered impotent, a three-way vote with ranked preferences (thus guaranteeing a majority outcome) looks like the only possible way to break the impasse. It wouldn't even begin to heal the divisions, but it would at last force us to make a f***cking choice.

Breakingviews - Boris Johnson's political triumph will be fleeting

(Reuters Breakingviews) - Boris Johnson has finally realised his ambition. The former mayor of London and prominent Brexiteer is set to become the UK's next prime minister after winning the contest to lead the Conservative Party, garnering 66% of the roughly 139,000 votes cast by party members. His triumph will be fleeting, though.

Leading Europe, not being led by Europe

I'm not a fan of leadership. I don't mean I object to having capable, inspiring leaders, I mean I don't want to be one myself and don't see why everyone else seems obsessed with crawling to the top of the heap. I'd rather be the one actually doing stuff than telling everyone else what to do.

But leadership seems to be an important political narrative. Years back, the Tories were saying they wanted to be "in Europe, but not run by Europe". I personally think that the issue of who's in charge matters only insofar as that's relevant to what they do with their power. If they're going to run things well, then who they are is almost immaterial. Still, "not run by Europe" is okay as far as it goes, though it was already pandering to the lie that we are somehow subservient to other countries in a quite peculiar way. As with any group, all members are required to surrender a degree of direct control, but in return they get a larger slice of indirect control. It isn't just us that this happens to.

I think this article makes an excellent point :

Over many years, Brexiters constructed a fable that presents the UK as the helpless victim of an unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels... Brave Britannia is increasingly portrayed as a heroic underdog determined to fight for its independence from Europe. It matters not a jot that the organisation from which the UK is purportedly seeking to escape is a decent grouping of democratic nations that the UK willingly joined, which it helped significantly to shape and of which at least half the British people now very much wish their country to remain a member. 

I was in a social setting recently with a group of British people with differing views on Brexit. The issue was simmering below the surface when one of them proclaimed that the UK was leaving the EU because “we don’t like France telling us what to do”. There is, of course, a fundamental contradiction between asserting that the EU is run by bureaucrats and that it is subject to excessive influence by other governments.

I mean, that's weird, isn't it ? The idea that we're at the mercy of other countries and utterly helpless, while simultaneously being one of the richest countries in the world. If we're so helpless and at their mercy while being a member of a group that we helped shape, how the hell are we expected to become stronger and more influential when we're outside that group and no longer have any control over its rules ? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

A few weeks ago we had a visitor who told of his experiences of the Czechs requesting British help to get them started on (if I recall correctly) a medical project. And way back in February 2016, there was a call for Britain to take a greater leadership role in the E.U. rather than running away from it, tail ticked between its legs. A vision of Britain leading a latter-day empire is, among many other things, simply too grandiose to have a realistic chance of persuading anyone. But what about the more modest prospect of selling more strongly what Britain actually does for the E.U., instead of (or rather in addition to) what the E.U. does for us ?

British influence in the EU went well beyond that available to most member states. The UK’s impact was exceptional due to several factors. The quality of its civil servants. The effectiveness of its coordination mechanisms. The reach of its diplomacy. The potency of its networking. The admiration for its pragmatism. The predominance of the English language.

Every member state has its strengths and weaknesses. But there is a wide measure of consensus across Europe that British influence on the EU has been exceptional and immense. The EU today looks more like the one the UK wanted a quarter of a century ago than the one France had in mind.

Brexit will change all that. Europe will be the poorer for the loss of British influence. But Britain itself will be diminished even more. It is important that our British friends understand the influence they once had in Europe so that they also know what they are giving up. As an EU, without the UK, continues to shape the legislation and regulatory standards that will affect British business, France will be delighted to find that it has more scope to “tell the UK what to do” than was ever possible when the UK significantly influenced every decision.

We need not pretend that E.U. membership does not bestow interdependency - it does. But perhaps more strongly saying, "look at how much we've shaped and managed this project", in essence, "look at how much we influence them" rather than, "look at how much we need them" would be a better story to sell ? Selling our own contribution ought to appeal to patriotism, whereas selling the benefits from the other sides makes us look (to Leavers) weak. On the other hand, the risk is that this would be interpreted to mean, "we're so strong, we don't need them at all, and they're just a dead weight slowing us down". It's a difficult balancing act. But with a "we're in charge" approach, blaming the E.U. for British mistakes would become a lot harder - and it would be more difficult to paint us as having a more powerful position outside of a group which we're seen to be leading.

... except, of course, that this sort of appeal sounds ridiculous when your Prime Minister is the sort of guy that people are twenty times more likely to describe as "buffoon" than "statesman".

I sat at the EU's negotiating table for years - and saw how great Britain's influence was | Bobby McDonagh

The Conservative party's choice of a new leader will also impact on Britain's influence in the world. Friendship, not showmanship, is valued by foreign governments. Bluster at home diminishes lustre abroad. Over many years, Brexiters constructed a fable that presents the UK as the helpless victim of an unaccountable bureaucracy in Brussels.

Luck versus will

A couple of articles presenting an interesting contrast in viewpoints. Broadly, the embedded one at the bottom says that free will is a nonsensical, meaningless term, that we have no control over anything. Opposing this is a view in Psychology Today that essentially says we're always in control of our responses, even if we can't control every aspect of every situation. Surely there's scope for reconciliation here, to find a sensible middle ground.

Let's start with the Nautil.us piece :

Imagine that an eccentric billionaire has offered you a deal: If you merely intend to drink a toxin tonight, at midnight, that will make you painfully ill for a day, he will wire you a million dollars — it’ll be in your bank tomorrow morning. A sophisticated and reliable brain scanner will determine whether you really formed the intention to imbibe the toxin. After you have the funds in your bank account, you’re free to decide not to drink it. An easy way to become a millionaire, no? Just intend to drink it for the scanner and, once you have the cash, switch your intention. 

This is absurd, of course, and that’s Kavka’s point: We don’t have that sort of control over ourselves. If you intend to drink it (for the sake of the scanner) but also intend, later, to not drink it (to avoid the sickness), you’re really intending to not drink it.

That doesn't ring true to me. I think I can absolutely fully intend to do something and then change my mind about it later on. Happens all the time, it's completely normal. Especially given that the toxin only makes me sick for a day - I would be unhesitatingly and genuinely willing to do that for a million dollars, so that detail is important. I don't think any kind of brain scan is fundamentally capable of revealing that, but the proper test would be to deceive me. Tell me that I'm free not to drink it beforehand, but when it comes to the crunch, tell me that I must drink it or the money will be withdrawn. I guarantee that I'll drink it.

But if the toxin is supposed not to just make me temporarily sniffly, but give me a life-changing affliction or even kill me stone dead within a day or so... then it becomes a very much more interesting challenge. Then it becomes problematic what my real intention is. If I'll knowingly suffer lasting and serious harm, I might well try and fool the test - I would only "intend" to drink the liquid knowing I could change my mind later on, so my intention is not sincere. So yes, fair enough : I don't have full control over my intentions. But I think it would be catastrophically silly to infer that therefore I have no control whatsoever.

Our intentions are only “partly volitional,” Kavka says. “One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.”

There's an awful lot implied in that. Again, constraints by knowledge and evidence do not mean we lack free will. Choice of belief is a very interesting one. I can certainly prefer to believe one thing over another in the absence of what I deem to be definitive proof. I can even assume that something is true, and act accordingly, in the absence of proof. That would be more or less what I call faith : an act of trust based on uncertain, incomplete knowledge, perhaps mingled with desire. It is not necessarily the same as belief, wherein I genuinely hold something to be true given limited or questionable evidence. Faith implies uncertainty in a way that belief does not.

Can I choose what to put my faith in ? Yes. I can sit down and consider the evidence and assess it. I can make objective, quantifiable predictions and test them; I do not have to believe in the predictions to be able to trust in them and act accordingly - I trust the methodology itself. Thus do I put my faith in the scientific method.

But can I choose what I believe ? Here the case is murkier. I can act as though it will rain later, by taking an umbrella as the weather forecast told me to, even though the current sunny weather convinces me it will be nice all day : I have at least some faith, but not belief. While my desire for how things should be undoubtedly affects what I actually believe, I cannot seem to directly choose either what I want or what I believe. I can perhaps influence my belief but only indirectly : by paying careful attention to the forecasts and discovering that they're more accurate than my guesses, my faith in them can shift to a full belief. Or if I'm convinced Nessie exists, I can choose to investigate both sides of the argument and eventually become convinced that she doesn't. So I certainly have indirect influence over my belief, though I may well lack direct control.

Nevertheless, the fact that brain damage affects moral behaviour only underscores the reality that, whatever the “will” is, it isn’t “free.” The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break. In a 2016 paper, Darby noted that people who have behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia “develop immoral behaviours as a result of their disease despite the ability to explicitly state that their behaviour is wrong.”

But this is the same as saying external influences should have no effect on us, which is ludicrous. This is a common mistake in many articles against free will : they assume it should be free to an absurd extreme. Only an omniscient and omnipotent deity could act based solely on internal knowledge, will and desires. The rest of us mortals are necessarily acting based on our perception of the external world, which is invariably incomplete and sometimes simply wrong. If our perceptive tools are damaged, or our abilities to act according to what we consciously want as opposed to how our subconscious acts, then of course we will seem to act in a much more constrained, apparently deterministic way. We behave very differently in dreams and while sleepwalking, for example, when our conscious choices are disabled.

The concept of free will doesn’t make any sense to me. As Kavka’s thought experiment shows, we don’t have much control over our thoughts. Take this article I’m writing: The words I’m committing to print pop into my mind unbeckoned. It’s less me choosing them and more them presenting themselves to me. The act of writing feels more like a process of passive filtration than active conjuration.

Really ? I have the exact opposite sensation. My thoughts are neither unbeckoned nor under my direct control. I very much "beckon" them by choosing what to direct my attention to. Although words sometimes have a way of running away with themselves, one thought inspiring another in a chaotic cascade, the author here surely didn't sit down and decide, "Right ! Time to write a gripping novel about a young boy who fights goblins. What's this ? Oh my, I seem to have written a report about the neuroscience of consciousness instead. Whoopsie !". No, the author clearly beckoned the thoughts by intending to write about neuroscience, and "beckoning" is exactly the right word : they probably didn't know exactly what they were going to write before they started; they only beckoned the thoughts, not pulled them along on a rope.

And when I think of what to write, my thoughts are indeed "presented" to me, but not passively : they are there for my review; I then get to choose which ones to set down and which ones to discard. That's what my consciousness does and where the choice lies. I choose, to some degree, which filters to apply, what sort of logic and rhetoric to use, though only ever to a finite degree because again, mortals aren't gods. Finite choice is all we ever have.

Now, I obviously don't choose every thought to have : direct conscious control of thought doesn't make a lick of sense. Thinking exactly what I want to think would imply I've somehow already thought it, and that's bloody daft. No, my unconscious plays a very deep and important role in assembling thoughts into a coherent, consciously comprehensible structure, but my conscious mind then decides what to do with them. I don't get to do this for everything - my brain does an awful lot automatically, thank goodness - but it would be foolish to suggest this implies I don't have control over anything.

On then to the PT piece.

There were countless things that Michael Lewis needed to do before, during, and after the conversation with the woman at the dinner that set him up for success. Focusing just on that chance meeting distracts us from what really happened. Yes, he was fortunate to sit next to someone who was influential in helping him get a job at Salomon Brothers. But, hundreds of people sat next to that woman over the years and she didn’t convince her husband to hire them, and thousands of people worked at Salomon Brothers but none of them wrote a bestseller about their experience.

But did he really have control over what he did ? He probably tried hard to write as best he could, but no-one, with the best will in the world, can write a bestseller on demand. Was he simply lucky that he managed that ? Or did he have control over his writing through years of experience ? And luck is highly subjective. Getting a job in a bank would be highly fortunate for some but bring nothing but misery for others. So :

A well known quote by the famous scientist, Louis Pasteur, states that, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” This is absolutely true… But, what exactly is a prepared mind? What makes us receptive to chance events, and able to capitalise on them?

The thing is, while we have a degree of control over our responses, we can only make uncertain predictions about the future (albeit with varying levels of confidence and accuracy). We can prepare to have the best possible chance of success, but every choice we make closes off other paths : someone trying to be the best possible writer is not likely to also be highly skilled in lion taming. So when that chance meeting comes along with a world-famous circus ringmaster, that's useless for some but a godsend for others.

We have immense control over our luck because it is a direct result of our behaviour. You certainly can’t control everything that happens to you, but you do control your responses.

Yeah but no. A chance meeting on a plane cannot really be said to be a "direct" result of our behaviour : yeah we chose to get on the plane, but no that didn't have any bearing on whether we'd be sat next to someone who'd give us a break. Such a chance event could have happened anyway in a myriad of other places : on a bus, a train, at a cafe, etc. We can somewhat influence our chances, e.g. by going to places where influential people hang out. But again, we only have indirect control of what it is we actually want. If I really really want to stay in and watch Netflix, instead of wandering the streets trying to pitch a novel to strangers, then that's what I'm going to do. And especially if I'm exhausted, I'll have little or no ability to force myself to do things I know are necessary but I don't especially want to do. Faith has its limits.

Don’t be distracted by the way we use the word luck in our everyday jargon. Often it is deployed as an excuse. For example, people frequently attribute their successes to luck, saying they’re “lucky” to modestly mask the skills they’ve mobilised. And, we give others and ourselves a break by blaming poor performance on bad luck. A careful observer will look behind the curtain to see what actually happened to attract or repel good fortune.

The author is clearly trying to inspire people by telling them to take back control. This is a decent enough message for some, I suppose : yes, you do have control over some things, you're not usually entirely at the mercy of fate. But sometimes you are. Sometimes luck is a valid excuse. And underestimating luck leads us to overestimate the abilities of those at the top. We need look no further than politicians to realise that though some of them may have some specialised skills, most of them are not especially gifted compared to the rest of us. Some of them are actually quite a lot stupider. So yes, utilise your agency, but don't forget about chance. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Can Neuroscience Understand Free Will? - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, "This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy," that gets its title from a line directed at Chidi, a Senegalese professor of moral philosophy who suffers from chronic indecision: The pros and cons of even trivial choices have long paralyzed him.

The robots are coming to give you jobs

Or at least, they're coming to give you jobs in Spain according to this study. Whether this is true everywhere or if this data is accurate I know not.

Figure 1, constructed from the ESEE dataset, provides a clear indication that firm heterogeneity in the adoption of robots matters greatly for the labour market effects of robot technology. It demonstrates that firms that adopted robots between 1990 and 1998 (‘robot adopters’) increased the number of jobs by more than 50% between 1998 and 2016, while firms that did not adopt robots (‘non-adopters’) reduced the number of jobs by more than 20% over the same period. From macro-level information on robot use, as employed in the existing literature, it is impossible to identify and investigate this striking pattern in the data.

We reveal strong evidence for positive selection, that is, we show that firms that adopt robots in their production process are already larger and more productive than non-adopters before adopting robots. Looking at firms’ internal skill composition of labour, we establish robust evidence that, conditional on productivity, more skill-intensive firms are less likely to adopt robots. Intuitively, a more complex production process requires a larger share of high-skilled workers; since these workers are more difficult to replace, there is a negative relationship between the skill intensity of the firm and the gains from automation. Finally, our data show that exporters are more likely to adopt robots than non-exporters, since the gains from doing so can be scaled up to a larger customer base.

What this desperately needs is - unusually - an anecdote. Let's say their numbers are fine. What does this look like on the ground ? Does greater automation mean that new jobs are created (e.g. "to build and maintain those robots !") or that greater production power now needs more staff to do existing jobs that robots currently can't do ?

I'm very much on the fence regarding the predictions that automation will soon render huge numbers of people redundant. On the one hand, I do not believe that everyone can do every job, so replacing menial work could plausibly leave large numbers of people with nothing to do. On the other, not every manual job can yet be done by robots. So robots replacing humans in a limited set of tasks then requires more people to do the remaining manual labour, hence creating more jobs so long as those cannot be automated. That implies there is an end point, a threshold beyond which automation will indeed cause job losses rather than gains... but that, conceivably, is a very long way off indeed.

Robots and firms

The rise of robots has sparked an intense debate about the labour market effects of their adoption. This column explores differences in robot adoption across firms and analyses the labour market effects of robot adoption at the firm level.

Bystanders not just standing by

The press release below does an excellent job of completely ruining the message of a pretty good paper. You can read the paper here, it's not terribly long or difficult.

First, from the press release :

It’s one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don’t count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behaviour refuse to intervene. Psychologists dubbed this non-response as the “bystander effect” — a phenomenon which has been replicated in scores of subsequent psychological studies. 

That was my naive understanding of the bystander effect too : simply that very few people will intervene in dangerous situations, and consequently that should you find yourself in trouble, it can be difficult to get people to help you. Yale's online "introduction to psychology" course suggested ways of beating this include appealing to individuals rather than groups, e.g. by calling on specific features of individuals to get them to help.

But strictly speaking the bystander effect is something different : a "phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present. The greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that one of them will help." This is not the same at all. If individuals are all uniformly unlikely to help, then all you need to get people to help is sheer numbers of people. If, on the other hand, it's a group effect, then this won't work - if everyone sees that everyone else is failing to intervene, then this becomes evidence that they shouldn't interfere, and thus an indefinite number of people will continuously fail to do anything.

The press release does a terrible job of conveying what the point of the study is. It does not find that individuals are actually all quite likely to intercede, which is what the text implies. The numbers quoted tell a better story :

Each event had an average of 16 bystanders and lasted slightly more than three minutes... The study finds that in nine out of 10 incidents, at least one bystander intervened, with an average of 3.8 interveners.

In other words most people (typically 75%, though we should be careful with these averages) don't intervene. The crucial detail is that in most incidents, someone does intervene, and usually more than one person. That's the key message of the paper that the authors are very explicit about :

The knowledge that an individual’s likelihood to intervene reduces in the presence of others does not establish, however, the aggregated likelihood that at least someone will help. From the perspective of the victim this remains the most important question (Latané & Nida, 1981) — will I receive help if needed? 

And so they set out to look at this from an observational perspective, using real-world CCTV data of violent incidents. They're very careful to note the limitations of their study. They looked only at incidents involving personal conflict, not emergencies like car crashes or fires. They're limited to public spaces in the inner regions of three cities, without a police presence, but in principle the footage should be a reasonably complete sample within this domain :

All data were recorded by municipality employed camera operatives, who according to identical guidelines were instructed to record all incidents of public space aggression that contained any level of conflict—from the mildest animated disagreements to grave physical violence.

So it seems at least persuasive that in incidents of this type, most people don't stop to intervene, but there's no group effect that prevents those who do wish to intervene from doing so. Consequently most incidents do receive intervention. They also note that there was no significant difference in intervention rates between the three cities examined, and that theirs is not the first study to have found that intervention rates per incident can be high.

They're careful to detail at some length the possible limitations to this study :

• How they define "intervention", which is quite liberal - but on the other hand they don't have audio, so there may have been additional interventions that were not detectable with pure video footage.
• The propensity of inner-city footage to favour regions of high social activities and alcohol consumption, so they can't say anything about what would happen in other conditions.
• That their investigation is observational, not experimental.

And I would add that they don't comment on the people who didn't intervene, e.g. to try and identify any common factors that may be at work. This might be beyond the possible scope of the analysis given the quality of the CCTV footage, but it would be interesting to at least look at how many people typically walk past before someone intervenes... of the approximate 75% of people who walk on, what fraction simply don't notice, look but realise the situation is already being dealt with, and how many look and choose not to interfere ? Those fractions are also surely going to vary given the specific circumstances.

Another study on how nice people really are : they're more likely to return wallets if they contain money. Apparently the presence of cold hard cash makes people feel more like thieves than if they simply collect and empty wallet, but those numbers too vary dramatically from places to place - from 7% returned in China to 73% in Switzerland.

We should always be wary of saying that any one study refutes all the others. For example, here's an earlier study which apparently found that incident intervention rates were much lower (with the interesting angle as to whether laws actually influence moral behaviour). But I could not find any resulting paper from this. The authors of the present study finish with :

In shifting the perspective from an absence of help to an almost ever-presence, we leave behind the question of ‘why don’t individuals help?’ and explore a new avenue of enquiry asking: ‘what makes intervention successful?

But I would spin it slightly differently. I would rather ask, "under what conditions does intervention occur and what conditions reduce its occurrence ?"

Here's my sneaking suspicion as to why statistical studies sometimes find very different results : it's simply because they're not comparing things in similar contexts. Whether it be planar structures of satellite galaxies, or intervention rates in dangerous situations, a global average rate may be a nonsensical figure : there may well be no such thing as a typical case. Instead, one can only quote rates within very narrow, very carefully-defined parameters. Stating the average height of a human will get you something correct to within an order of magnitude, but it you compare only people of similar ages you'll get a very much more useful, meaningful number.

Of course this a huge, wholly unjustified extrapolation, but I don't think it's a crazy idea. Any suggestions of a "replication crisis" ought to be taken with tremendous caution : unless an experiment is an attempt at an almost identical repeat of an earlier project, it cannot really be called a replication study - and consequently each experiment explores a new part of parameter space, rather than necessarily implying that all psychology research is crap, which is a bandwagon some people are keen to jump on. I would say that if you want to state that there are problems with research, that's fine - that's the nature of research, by definition. So if you want to then go on to say, "and this means the field isn't doing its job properly", then you need to be able to explain exactly why this is any different from the normal, self-correcting-by-design approach of any scientific discipline. You might well have a point, but it's not enough to say, "this research is wrong" to conclude that "this field is poor". Mistakes in methodology are every bit as integral to the scientific process as mistaken findings.

Surveillance Cameras Show Good Samaritans Prevail Over Bystander Effect

It's one of the most enduring urban myths of all: If you get in trouble, don't count on anyone nearby to help. Research dating back to the late 1960s documents how the great majority of people who witness crimes or violent behavior refuse to intervene.

The strange ideology of "law and economics"

This is a nice description of a problem but it leaves the most important and interesting questions unanswered. How did this ideology spread ? Why was it so successful ? Perhaps most importantly of all, why has it been able to spread in some regions but not in others ?

Where does economic power come from? Does it exist independently of the law? It seems obvious, even undeniable, that the answer is no. Law creates, defines and enforces property rights. Law enforces private contracts. It charters corporations and shields investors from liability. Law declares illegal certain contracts of economic cooperation between separate individuals – which it calls ‘price-fixing’ – but declares economically equivalent activity legal when it takes place within a business firm or is controlled by one. 

Each one of these is a choice made by the law, on behalf of the public as a whole. Each of them creates or maintains someone’s economic power, and often undermines someone else’s. Each also plays a role in maintaining a particular distribution of economic power across society. Yet generations of lawyers and judges educated at law schools in the United States have been taught to ignore this essential role of law in creating and sustaining economic power. Instead, we are taught that the social process of economic competition results in certain outcomes that are ‘efficient’ – and that anything the law does to alter those outcomes is its only intervention.

It seems to me that this expresses two key ideas : 1) the idea that "freedom from" is an equally important definition of freedom as "freedom to"; and closely related 2) that freedom under law is therefore not incompatible with freedom, but indeed that freedom without the law is not freedom at all. Such ideas go back at least as far as Plato, though here expressed in more modern legal and economic terms. The article terms the opposite ideology - the idea that only "freedom to" is a real sort of freedom, and that the law must seek to meddle as little as possible and let pseudo-market forces sort everything out, "law and economics". Surely a better term is needed, this being far too easy to confuse with, well, law and economics.

The ideology of law and economics revolves around the concept of competition – suggesting to the world that this is the main value it seeks to promote, thus also seeking to limit governmental intervention with that process. But competition does not take place in a vacuum: it always requires rules, from property to contract to antitrust, that are themselves, logically speaking, limits upon competition. All of these rules in essence authorise economic coordination that is necessary to make competition work. For example, property rights authorise control over economic activity to the extent of their bounds. A contract too is a form of economic coordination.

And competition law itself authorises all kinds of in-firm economic coordination that it prohibits out-of-firm. In short, it’s governmental intervention all the way down. The law from the outset makes choices about where and how it will limit competition, and those choices can either balance economic power or create imbalances. The ideology of law and economics is that only interventions that help to balance power in society are in fact government interventions – but this is not true.

Defenders of the status quo regularly point to ‘economics’ as a defence. They suggest that only the reformers have a moral and political vision. But of course this isn’t true. Just as law and economics does generally, the current framework for antitrust law chooses certain legal rules over others, and takes them to define ‘the market’...  Again, we find ourselves with a choice that is necessarily moral and political: we can allocate coordination rights in a way that exacerbates imbalances in economic power, or in a way that ameliorates them. What we cannot do is pretend not to make the choice.

Well exactly. Choosing not to intervene when you're aware of a situation and know that you could alter the outcome is basically equivalent to choosing the outcome that then results. I mean "basically equivalent" in quite a literal way. It's not a direct, exact equality, because you can't know for sure what the effect of your intervention would be. But it's undeniably making a choice, and arguably a form of intervention.

Personally I find the whole notion of this "law and economics" offensive. Yes, the law makes mistakes. But how delusional does one have to be to think that market forces never make mistakes, or that competition always produces the best outcome ? As Charlie Chaplin put it in that speech, "dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people". Taking away laws to prevent exploitation removes far more freedom than it ever bestows. Far better to seek Plato's moderate balance between freedom and servitude than seek the extreme of either on its own. Such an approach requires constant adaptation - circumstances change, so the law must change with them.

A radical legal ideology nurtured our era of economic inequality - Sanjukta Paul | Aeon Ideas

Where does economic power come from? Does it exist independently of the law? It seems obvious, even undeniable, that the answer is no. Law creates, defines and enforces property rights. Law enforces private contracts. It charters corporations and shields investors from liability.

Animal tales

My working hypothesis is that animals perceive and think about the world in broadly similar ways to us. The more different they are from us, the more different their perceptions and corresponding mental processes (anecdotal evidence : butterflies). That no other animal has created technologies comparable to our own is good evidence that their thought processes are different in some way, but it is at best weak evidence that there is some fundamental difference. Human intellect might be fundamentally different in one or more ways, or it might be basically similar to animals but with some (or all) aspects simply turned up to 11. I don't see any reason to suppose that episodic memories would be a key difference between us and them - the ability to remember what happened in the past doesn't prevent some people from being markedly less intelligent than some animals.

First, they trained 13 rats to memorise 12 odours. They built a special rat ‘arena’ with 12 stops, numbered 1 to 12, each scented with a different odour. When the rat identified the odour in a particular stop on the route, such as second-to-last or fourth-to-last, it received a reward. Then the researchers changed the number of odours and watched to see if the training had taken hold: would the rats identify the second-to-last and fourth-to-last odour in the sequence, even if the number of odours was different? This ensured that the rats were identifying the odours according to their position in the sequence, not just by scent. 

After a year of these tests, the team found that the rats aced the task about 87 per cent of the time. Subsequent tests confirmed that their memories stuck with them, and withstood interference from other memories. What’s more, when the researchers temporarily dialled down the hippocampus, the rats performed poorly, further confirming that it was, indeed, episodic memory on which the rats had relied. Studies in dolphins by other researchers in 2018 showed that the hippocampus fired up when the animals were replaying a memory, confirming that it coordinates memory replay and further challenging Tulving’s view that the hippocampus in animals can’t handle episodic memories.

Animals do have memories, and can help us crack Alzheimer's - April Reese | Aeon Ideas

For almost as long as modern science has been around, the idea that animals can remember past experiences seemed so preposterous that few researchers bothered to study it. Surely only humans, with our big, sophisticated brains, could be capable of 'episodic' memories - recalling a trip to the grocery store last Saturday, for example.

Do you wanna build a cyborg ?

I found this to be a very nice summary of the promise and peril of augmented humans. I won't add much commentary here because I don't know what the answers are.

In 2013 I built a proof of concept system called SuperGlass. Based on research from one of my academic labs, our system could recognize the expression of a face and write the emotion on Glass’s little heads-up screen, allowing an individual with autism to more easily perceive whether the person in front of them was happy, sad, angry, or something else. Simply wearing Glass while continuing everyday social interactions with others allowed these [autistic] kids to learn that secret language of facial expressions; it’s the real-time version of the flashcard-based emotion-recognition training using cartoon faces on cardboard... A team at Stanford has shown that it can improve their expression recognition, even when not wearing it. Our pilot even found that it helped foster empathy. 

But the more I experimented, the more I realized that I didn’t want to “cure” my son’s autism. I didn’t want to lose him and his wonderful differences. SuperGlass became a tool to translate between his experience and us neurotypicals (a scientific term that means “your brain is boring”). It didn’t level the playing field—it just gave him a different bat to play with. 

In an era where jerks like me are building AIs to replicate human tasks, your value to the world will become what makes you uniquely human. The more different you are, the more valuable you become. My son is therefore priceless.

I get that that's a rhetorical point, but still, it seems worth stating that not all differences are valuable or ever will be valuable. Surely that's the crux of the whole dilemma.

As a naive hearing person, it never occurred to me that anyone would choose deafness. But I learned that some parts of the deaf community consider cochlear implants to be genocide: an erasure of their unique languages, way of life, and who they are... Much like autism, I’m often confronted with the dilemma of “curing” people of who they are, versus giving them the tools to share those rich differences with the world. But how can we respect someone’s humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans?

After all, sometimes what it means to be human is tragic. A car accident, fall, or even poverty can take a child’s future away from them... If we know we can make a difference in these people’s lives, isn’t not intervening as morally perilous as augmentation run amok?

The only thing I can state with any confidence, and even this with great caution, is that the "choice" element is very important in terms of respecting humanness. The problem with that comes from the issues discussed below, that such technologies potentially offer such huge advantages that the majority won't see using them as much of a real "choice" at all. Sure, you do technically get to choose whether you want electricity or not, but for the vast majority that's not a real choice at all.

In theory, anyone might have access to new neurotechnologies. But in reality, those most able to take advantage of them are likely to be the ones who need them the least. Simply being born into poverty and stress robs children of their cognitive potential, whereas having wealthy parents dramatically impacts a child’s outcomes, even working memory. 

Where do we draw the line between boosting human potential and eroding our humanity? Any system I build follows my most important technology design rule: You should not only be better when you’re using it, you should be better when you turn it off. Neuroprosthetics shouldn’t replace what we can do for ourselves—they should augment who we aspire to be.

I don’t want to “cure” someone of themselves. Especially not my son. I want them to be able to share that self with the world.

Why I'm turning my son into a cyborg

Imagine if everyone spoke a language you don't understand. People have been speaking it around you since the day you were born, but while everyone else picks it up immediately, for you it means nothing. Others become frustrated with you. Friendships and jobs are difficult. Just being "normal" becomes a battle.

Google Rome

Do you need travel instructions for how to get around in the Roman Empire ? Then look no further ! This is the nearest thing to Google Maps for ancient Rome that you'll find. Sadly it won't quite give you Google's laconic directions ("continue along the Appian Way for 50 miles, then turn right") but it will calculate the fastest, shortest, and cheapest routes between cities. This is actually a research project and sometimes that's almost painfully evident :

Our model approximates the structural properties of Roman communication networks. Simulations of the costs associated with a given route are not meant to reflect the experience of any particular traveler. Rather, they seek to capture statistically average outcomes that cumulatively shaped the system as a whole. No one traveler would encounter such outcomes except by chance. The model simulates the average experience of a very large number of travelers taking the same route in a given month using a given mode and means of transport. It is this experience that is decisive for our understanding of how Roman networks operated. Patterns of connectivity were a function of average outcomes in the long term that shaped the choices of actors and hence the overall structure of the networks themselves.

It could use a better executive summary. For example, you can set both which type of route (fastest/shortest/cheapest) to calculate, but you can also set the method of travel independent of that. That makes it a bit ambiguous as to what it's really calculating. And the prices are given, confusingly, in "denarii per passenger in a carriage" even if you specify foot transport, and "per kilogram of wheat" either by donkey or wagon, whatever that means. Even so, it's fun to play with. According to this it would take about a week to go from Isca (modern day Caerleon, "fort of the legion" near Cardiff) to Londinum in winter on foot, but as little as three days by "rapid military march" in summer. To go all the way to Roma (the use of the original Roman names is cool but also kinda irritating) would take of the order of a month. Lots of fun, but it could use some polishing for outreach.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

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This Week In Stupid

There's a lot going on in the news right now. President Shithead has declared, "I'm not a racist !" after saying overtly racist things, to which the response has been "he's not racist" from the Republicans and everything short of actually doing anything useful from the Democrats.

I'm not going to comment on that one any further. If you can't understand why telling citizens to "go back" to their "home" countries is racist, then you're too stupid to bother arguing with.

On the other hand the Republicans aren't all stupid. For example, there's this report on how everyone is worried about Facebook starting their own currency, which contains the very nice quote :

“Just because we may not fully understand a technology proposal,” remarked Republican Patrick McHenry, “does not mean we should immediately call for its prohibition. But let’s face it. Let’s be honest… it’s Facebook.”

I could not have put it better myself.

What else ? Jeremy Corbyn has been up to his old tricks again, showing himself wholly unable to withstand criticism by firing someone who doesn't like him. I mean, sure, there are definitely times when you have to fire people who don't play ball. But when you used to be one of the most rebellious MPs ever, that looks a bit rich. And firing people because they accuse you of anti-semitism doesn't strike me as a sensible way to persuade people that the allegations you're not listening aren't true. The horrible bit about contemporary politics is just how obviously shite everything is.

EDIT : A close runner-up in this week's contest goes to the ever-ludicrous Nigel Farage, who claimed that Ursula von der Leyen's election is illegitimate because she won just 52% of the vote. Thanks for being such a staunch defender of irony, Nigel.

EDIT 2 : Displaying a similar lack of comprehension of irony, Sajid Javid calls to fight extremism by moderating their language - which is fine until you realise that supporting the actions of the xenophobic sorts of Brexiteers is apparently, for him, not much of a problem. Yay.

But the winner of this week's "stupidest thing" report goes to the story below.

A Christian family who refused to pay income tax because it went "against God's will" have been ordered to pay more than A$2m (£1.1m $1.4m) to Australia's tax office. Rembertus Cornelis Beerepoot and Fanny Alida Beerepoot, of Tasmania, had not paid income tax since 2011.

Just take a moment to let the name "Rembertus Cornelis Beerepoot" sink in, because it's really quite spectacular when you think about it. With luck it'll be taken by the next Bond villain.

Mr Beerepoot had argued that the law of God is the "supreme law of this land" and making people pay tax was weakening their dependency on God, an act which was leading to "curses... in the form of droughts and infertility".

Right then. So why bother eating anything ? Shouldn't God provide you nourishment directly ? Why bother breathing when God should take care of that ? How about blood circulation, is that His job too ? By this "logic", there is literally no task that doesn't reduce God's workload, which for some unfathomable reason is a sin. A bit odd that an omnipotent deity should care if his workload is reduced. And call me crazy, but I think if God didn't want you to pay taxes or breathe or digest food, He'd surely be able to stop you with a less blunt instrument than a drought. Or conversely, if God provides nourishment by working through the earthly means of food and oxygen, then why can't he be said to be providing aid through taxation ? Why, FFS, would it be a sin to redistribute wealth such the wealthiest help the poorest ?

Whether these people really believe that taxes are against God's will or not (and I doubt that they do), it's clear that there are, very sadly, plenty of people in the world too stupid to be left alone.

Australia family argued taxes 'against God's will'

A Christian family who refused to pay income tax because it went "against God's will" have been ordered to pay more than A$2m (£1.1m $1.4m) to Australia's tax office. Rembertus Cornelis Beerepoot and Fanny Alida Beerepoot, of Tasmania, had not paid income tax since 2011.