Review : Why We Get The Wrong Politicians

This is a truly excellent little book by journalist Isabel Hardman. I'll cut to the chase : I unhesitatingly give it 10/10. It should be required reading, or at least, many of the main points here about how Parliament actually works need to be included somewhere in the national curriculum. It's exceptionally clear, lucid, well thought out, and hugely readable. Any points I might disagree on are so trivial as to be not worth mentioning.

This book is completely focused on the British political system; it may not be at all relevant to other countries. While we all think we know roughly how politics works, Hardman goes deeper. Not only does she explain how the procedures we don't usually see are supposed to work (it's not all jeering debates in the House of Commons), but she also describes how they actually do work - or more often how they fail - in practise. And she explains why they fail, looking at the faults in the system itself every bit as much (or more) than the faults of the elected officials. I came away thinking, "yes, that makes perfect sense", but more importantly, "this is a solvable problem".

The book follows a rough narrative of an MP's journey from seeking office to leaving it. Along the way, Hardman describes procedure, backing up statistical evidence with anecdotal descriptions. This makes it a very compelling and utterly persuasive read. Rather than focusing exclusively on what's wrong with the system, she's also not averse to saying which aspects (and indeed which politicians) work well. She names names where she can but protects anonymity where necessary, always giving credit where it's due but not flinching from assigning blame.

Anyway, she has a few major points that need to be mentioned.


1) The selection procedure

Anyone wanting to become an MP has to be either quite mad or very rich, or both. Becoming an MP incurs expenses, which can be largely recouped if you remain in office long enough, but if you fail then you're hung out to try. The average amount a succesfull candidate spends out of their own pocket is of the order of £40,000. That immediately makes politics almost a non-starter to the average bloke (or bloke-ette ?). It's just about within reach, I suppose, of ordinary people, but the commitment needed to raise that kind of capital demands candidates who are raving ideologues and not the most rational of sorts. Conversely, those who do have that kind of cash to hand are largely so unrepresentative of the general population that they simply cannot understand how their policies will impact people.

It's not exactly that MPs are out of touch - Hardman gets annoyed by this claim and presents a more subtle view than that. She has nothing but praise for MPs across the political spectrum in terms of the work they do in their local constituencies, something we very rarely hear anything about : in fact, most MPs get more more direct experience of people's issues than the rest of us do. The problem is that solving local issues doesn't mean MPs are aware of the broader problems that aren't brought to their attention, and requires a very different skill set from being able to scrutinise legislation.

Unfortunately, in order to become a candidate, local party bodies are almost entirely concerned with what the would-be MP will do locally, with little or no interest in the national issues that form a key duty of state officials. It's also pretty much vital that you're on that career ladder already, i.e. by becoming a councillor or otherwise making yourself known at political conferences. This alone demands an enormous level of personal commitment - to the point of being self-destructive for most normal people. The kind of people willing to spend insane hours travelling to long, boring, pointless meetings are by definition not representative of the general population. This need to be in the in-club means that selection procedures, no matter how rigorous, can't always eliminate the worst sort of nutters from consideration.

So straight away the selection criteria means we get politicians who are not wrong, exactly, but weird. It's not that they don't care - they do, in fact, often make extraordinary efforts to help their constituents - it's that they often have no knowledge of major policies (they simply and quite literally have no time to be experts in the very thing they're supposed to be expert in) or how the public at large feel about them.


2) Climbing the greasy pole

Once an MP is elected, they're now in an enormous financial debt to their party. What do they do next ? It seems that while there's a very great deal they could do, there's very little that they actually must do. There's no formal training as to how to go about being an MP, perhaps largely because they have few remarkably formal roles or powers. Many MPs therefore end up becoming enormously busy on whatever tasks they can find, which is often useless and takes away time that could, and should, be spent examining potential legislation :

One new Tory MP told me rather miserably after a year in the job that he felt as though he was, 'failing the country in my duty to it. I am voting on things I don't understand, and this upsets me.'

Part of the reason for this lies in how career success in politics is evaluated. Pretty much the only way of advancing one's career is to become a minister, because this is the only available metric. And in order to become a minister, one has to follow the government's will on essentially everything. Ability to scrutinise legislation, to deliver criticism where it's due, is not merely unwelcome but even actively discouraged. Furthermore, when a minister leaves office, they're subject to zero official accounting for their actions. Even if their policy is a disaster, they can all but disappear from the public stage (Blair being a rare exception).

A related issue is what Hardman calls UPQs : Utterly Pointless Questions. To advance one's career it's necessary to be visible and a visible toady. This leads to MPs asking such tough questions as :

Will the minister join me in congratulating Havant College on its pioneering partnership with Google, which ensures that every student has access to a tablet computer ?

Which is of course not really a question at all, just an excuse to lavish praise. But if that's what it takes to achieve career success, who among us would really deny it ?


3) The whipping whips

While Hardman is largely sympathetic to the plight of MPs, she has little good to say about Parliamentary whips who enforce how MPs should vote. The volume of legislation is such that MPs simply cannot possibly understand everything, so the whips simply tell party members how to vote according to party policy. But the whips aren't just present in the main chamber, they also pervade the much less visible committees where legislation is drafted. With the exception of select committees, which Hardman says still function reasonably well, whips are present at most stages of legislation, making it very difficult for party MPs to even raise potential problems. Governments have fallen into a dangerous culture of thinking that any internal criticism is unacceptable. The only thing that prevents the whole thing from collapsing is that opposition MPs are, at least, still able to point out flaws, but often the government will simply ignore these to avoid looking weak and foolish.

Perhaps even worse is that these committees aren't even selected on the basis of expertise, but again on which MPs aren't likely to cause trouble for the government. So you get a bunch of MPs, who, by necessity, have to follow government diktat, discussing legislation they almost certainly don't understand, who have been given no training in how to scrutinise legislation, are usually overworked doing mostly useless things, who are highly unrepresentative of the general populace and therefore not always able to understand potential consequences, and who risk their careers through criticism... not a great mix, is it ?

And given the level of financial commitment the MPs have made to their party, it becomes easier to see how the whips are so powerful and rebellions so rare. Who among us would really be willing, given such a debt, to vote against those holding the purse strings ? Unless we happened to be one of those exceptionally self-funded sort, we'd be risking serious financial ruin if expelled from the party. It's all very well for the public to sit back and deride the often immoral and frequently stupid decisions, but few among us would really be willing to incur tens of thousands of pounds of debt by risking expulsion.


Fixing the problem

This all sounds terrible, and it is. But there's a silver lining to this systemic cloud : fixing a broken system is sometimes easier than fixing broken people. The thing to realise about politicians is that they are, generally speaking, basically like you or I, but put into extraordinarily difficult conditions. So, change those conditions.

One conclusion that seemed natural to me that Hardman doesn't discuss is the need for reform and strengthening of local government. MPs spend much time on constituency duty, which distracts from their task of examining policy. Having a different set of officials with equal (or greater) powers that local people can meet directly seems like the obvious solution. Simultaneously, there need to be more public opportunities to hear from one's MP : more town hall meetings, rather than one-on-one meetings, would be welcome. MPs need to be in touch, but primarily focused on national rather than local policy.

But large scale, systemic changes aside (Hardman suggests separating the officials making up the legislative and executive bodies, but this was one aspect I wasn't persuaded by), there are a number of smaller, much more readily achievable reforms that could bring substantial improvements : "it's more important to change the culture rather than the overarching structures of our political system", she says. It might be exciting to propose more radical, even revolutionary changes, but actually the system itself is not fundamentally broken. Rather it's the details of how things are enacted that can and must be reformed. Hardman suggests :

• Reforming committees. This means removing many of them, which are currently pointless, and structuring the rest so that MPs can actually raise criticism freely and are selected on the basis of their expertise. The culture in which any criticism of the government is seen as disloyalty needs to end.
• Post-legislative scrutiny of policies. Since MPs are rarely held to account once they've left office, there's little motivation for them to ensure their policy will actually work. Hardman suggests that this could be done with direct, face-to-face meetings with those affected. MPs are not all, contrary to popular belief, unfeeling monsters, and this would provide a more direct link between politicians and the public that escapes the media filtering.
• Financially incentivise being a member of a select committee. Currently joining such a committee is rarely (though not never) a good way to gain a reputation and offers little or nothing in the way of prestige - the only way to climb the greasy pole is to become a minister. With the actual legislative process itself being a motivation, MPs would be more inclined to take part and not simply vie for power. They'd aim to become good legislators and become an MP for the sake of it, not as a path to becoming a minister. Committee members could also be rewarded in other ways, such as gaining priority in debates in the main chamber.
• Changing the selection procedure to become an MP, making it require less time and personal resources for prospective candidates. This is more difficult than internal parliamentary reforms, but necessary if politicians are actually going to understand the people they serve. The overall thrust of Hardman's book is that MPs should be essentially normal people with a diverse perspective and skill set (if still biased towards the legal profession), well compensated for their activities in Parliament. 

There are other aspects that could be implemented : MPs could be given some level of mandatory training in legislation before taking office; they also need to be fairly financially compensated for their work. I was reasonably persuaded that their salary, though high, does not reflect the extreme risk they take by having a potential multi-year gap in their career without knowing the exact duration (especially given the expenses occurred by having a second home in London). 

None of these reforms, Hardman acknowledges, are glamorous or even particularly dramatic. But I found the arguments that MPs are in fact trying very hard but completely trapped by a flawed system to be compelling. Yes, they can and should try harder to change this system - they're adults, Hardman says. But it's not at all easy to stand up to those who helped you reach office. Hardman gives many personal anecdotes of the immense stresses that MPs experience, and how they simply do not have time to do their job properly. I defy anyone to read this book and come away still thinking that "politician" means "many ticks".

This is not to say that other reforms won't be needed. I still think that the ludicrously hyper-partisan, hyper-critical media culture may be an even bigger problem for the failure of politics than internal parliamentary procedure. But equally, that doesn't negate the need for reforming Parliament - something which could give real results with relatively little difficulty or controversy. 

Substituting one's own reality

No-one would sensibly suggest that our perception of reality gives us a complete picture. This more extreme view, however, strikes me as pointless :

He argues our perceptions don't contain the slightest approximation of reality; rather, they evolved to feed us a collective delusion to improve our fitness. Using evolutionary game theory, Hoffman and his collaborators created computer simulations to observe how "truth strategies" (which see objective reality as is) compared with "pay-off strategies" (which focus on survival value). The simulations put organisms in an environment with a resource necessary to survival but only in Goldilocks proportions. 

Consider water. Truth-strategy organisms who see the water level on a colour scale — from red for low to green for high — see the reality of the water level. However, they don't know whether the water level is high enough to kill them. Pay-off-strategy organisms, conversely, simply see red when water levels would kill them and green for levels that won't. They are better equipped to survive.

"[E]volution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for pay-off strategies," writes Hoffman. "An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct."

That's really stupid. Perceiving the water level as it really is is not mutually exclusive with realising the level is dangerous. And you can't perceive new situations as dangerous without understanding them anyway. In order to understand them, you have to perceive them (in a sense) as they really are. If you see a crocodile, you see teeth. You don't directly see danger, because that's completely impossible. Danger is a state to be understood, not a physical object to be perceived.

As far as our perceptions being flawed and incomplete, this is fine. It is valuable to remember the limitations of perception. But this idea that, "Something exists when we don't look, but it isn't an apple, and is probably nothing like an apple," is something I have a big problem with. What does it mean to say that it's "nothing like" an apple ? Granted, our perceptions are no more than a representation. But how would you ever define what an apple is really like, except through perception ? What is the Platonic form of an apple ?

Clearly, whatever an apple really is must be something that always and repeatedly generates the same perception of an apple, so in that sense I don't see how one could say it's nothing like an apple. It has the properties to generate our perception of an apple, and that too me is exactly what an apple is like. I see no other sane way of defining an apple.

Given this, I don't think it makes sense to contemplate what an apple really is, because we could never understand it. This doesn't mean that we have to then say nonsense like :

"I'm denying that there is such a thing in objective reality as an electron with a position. I'm saying that the very framework of space and time and matter and spin is the wrong framework, it's the wrong language to describe reality," Hoffman told journalist Robert Wright in an interview. "I'm saying let's go all the way: It's consciousness, and only consciousness, all the way down."

Denying objective reality is absurd, unnecessary, and opens the door to whatever nuttery one cares to substitute for objective fact and careful measurement. Instead of this, what we should do is define objective fact to mean that which gives the same repeatable results to our perceptive tools, under the condition of careful testing so as to preclude errors. Otherwise this degenerates to the notion that there are no errors, and that's bollocks. It's not big and it's not clever.

"But Rhys !" you may say, "I thought you said you found this idea interesting ?"

Well, yeah, I do. I just don't think it's in any way useful. Once you get to stuff like "it's all consciousness" (as opposed to "everything is conscious", which is another matter entirely), you don't

...make headway on such intractable quandaries like the mind-body problem, the odd nature of the quantum world, and the much sought-after "theory of everything."

You do the exact opposite. You say, "everything is a subjective illusion with no substance to it." It's utterly untestable gibberish. You cannot use it to solve or explain a damn thing. The map is not the territory, but the map can't be some nit throwing buckets of paint on the floor either.

Experiencing a virtual interface

The idea that we can't perceive objective reality in totality isn't new. We know everyone comes installed with cognitive biases and ego defense mechanisms. Our senses can be tricked by mirages and magicians. And for every person who sees a duck, another sees a rabbit.But Hoffman's hypothesis, which he wrote about in a recent issue of New Scientist, takes it a step further.

Once upon a time there lived a lovely little chatbot...

I've mentioned once before how some years ago I was fascinated by an online chatbot called Web Hal (this was the era when chatbots were a novel form of entertainment and not annoying popups to be killed on sight). The interesting thing about Web Hal was that it was capable of crude, highly limited deductive reasoning : if you told it, say, that A causes B and (separately) that B causes C, it would work out that A causes C. Web Hal is in fact still online, though I think no longer operational.

Anyway, back then naive younger me thought that maybe (naive younger me wasn't stupid) if you could construct a suitably complex web of deductions, you'd get something like proper causal reasoning. Yes, this would have to be extremely elaborate in order to do anything useful, but human reasoning doubtless is fantastically complex. Often we rely strongly on unconscious assumptions we're barely even aware of : only when a light switch fails to work to we dig into its operations. In that sense our reasoning could be described as Bayesian, with our conclusions and thought processes being dependent on our priors. We assume by default the light switch will work and therefore neglect completely how it works, unless it fails.

I wondered if, with enough input to such a network, a true intelligence would eventually emerge. I imagined that if you did, you wouldn't get a human-like intelligence, but a pure logic engine. It could see patterns that you'd otherwise miss. It would need some rock-solid axioms on which to proceed, but would be incapable of emotional bias and other fallacies that plague us. You could give it information and it would be able to evaluate the truth of it (and its implications) with ruthless logic.

Since then I've realised that such a truth engine might be fundamentally impossible, especially for an A.I. bound inside a silicon shell. We do not yet have a foolproof method to determining the absolute truth of anything. An A.I. will therefore be strongly dependent on what people tell it, and if two statements are in blunt contradiction, what is it to do ? In order to get anywhere, it's going to need some biases, some priors against which to evaluate information but which themselves can be altered. Even in the case of it being able to go and check the results first-hand, it could potentially be biased by observational techniques, imperfect statistics or lack of a full understanding of logic.

That's not to say that this means an A.I. with a fundamentally different understanding of the world from us isn't possible, or that it wouldn't be without some of the flaws we have to endure. It doesn't mean that an A.I. couldn't be better than us at evaluating information, only that a perfect truth engine will probably never be a thing. We might well still be able to create something very useful though. This article describes a much more elaborate and sophisticated program than poor old Web Hal. So far it shows no signs of doing anything more sinister than commenting on Shakespeare, which is pretty impressive :

Winston and his team decided to call their machine Genesis. They started to think about commonsense rules it would need to function. The first rule they created was deduction—the ability to derive a conclusion by reasoning. “We knew about deduction but didn’t have anything else until we tried to create Genesis,” Winston told me. “So far we have learned we need seven kinds of rules to handle the stories.” For example, Genesis needs something they call the “censor rule” that means: if something is true, then something else can’t be true. For instance, if a character is dead, the person cannot become happy.

I'd like to know what the other rules are but they don't say.

When given a story, Genesis creates what is called a representational foundation: a graph that breaks the story down and connects its pieces through classification threads and case frames and expresses properties like relations, actions, and sequences. Then Genesis uses a simple search function to identify concept patterns that emerge from causal connections, in a sense reflecting on its first reading. Based on this process and the seven rule types, the program starts identifying themes and concepts that aren’t explicitly stated in the text of the story.  

 He typed a sentence into a text window in the program: “A bird flew to a tree.” Below the text window I saw case frames listed. Genesis had identified the actor of the story as the bird, the action as fly, and the destination as tree. There was even a “trajectory” frame illustrating the sequence of action pictorially by showing an arrow hitting a vertical line. Then Winston changed the description to “A bird flew toward a tree.” Now the arrow stopped short of the line. 

“Now let’s try Macbeth,” Winston said. He opened up a written version of Macbeth, translated from Shakespearean language to simple English. Gone were the quotations and metaphors; the summarised storyline had been shrunk to about 100 sentences and included only the character types and the sequence of events. In just a few seconds Genesis read the summary and then presented us with a visualisation of the story. Winston calls such visualisations “elaboration graphs.” At the top were some 20 boxes containing information such as “Lady Mac­beth is Macbeth’s wife” and “Macbeth murders Duncan.” Below that were lines connecting to other boxes, connecting explicit and inferred elements of the story. What did Genesis think Macbeth was about? “Pyrrhic victory and revenge,” it told us. None of these words appeared in the text of the story.

100 sentences is shorter even than anything the Reduced Shakespeare Company produces. Still, I wonder if it could do the reverse : ask it for a story about revenge and have it construct something.

The use of stories is similar to a description in the first Science of Discworld book of humans as the "storytelling ape". There's also evidence that animals have episodic memories, so, as I've said before, animal intelligence might be fundamentally different from ours, but it might be that we're basically the same but with a greater degree of complexity. Also, while storyelling may be an important component of intelligence, it doesn't strike me as necessary for being self aware, having a will or desires or other aspects of sentience. The property of a "story" here is interesting too :

Their idea is that humans were the only species who evolved the cognitive ability to do something called “Merge.” This linguistic “operation” is when a person takes two elements from a conceptual system—say “ate” and “apples”—and merges them into a single new object, which can then be merged with another object—say “Pat­rick,” to form “Patrick ate apples”—and so on in an almost endlessly complex nesting of hierarchical concepts. This, they believe, is the central and universal characteristic of human language, present in almost everything we do.

Finally, this brings me back to the notion of intelligence. Defining knowledge is hard enough, but what do we mean when we say we understand something ? My working definition is that understanding is knowledge of how a thing relates to other things. The more knowledge of this we have, the greater our understanding. So in that sense the Genesis program can be said to have a sort of understanding, albeit at a purely linguistic level. It has no knowledge of sensation or perception, so its understanding is incomplete.

But this is hardly a perfect definition. In my undergraduate days I found that once the maths exceeded a certain level, then even being given complete knowledge up to that point I simply wasn't able to understand anything. Telling me a mathematical formula would, if sufficiently complex, impart me no further knowledge or understanding whatsoever. And I can have full, complete knowledge of a cube, but I won't necessarily understand all its interactions. Does that mean I don't understand the cube or the external systems ?

I don't know. In short, there are tonnes of interesting things in the world and too little time to study them all.

The Storytelling Computer - Issue 75: Story - Nautilus

What is it exactly that makes humans so smart? In his seminal 1950 paper, "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing argued human intelligence was the result of complex symbolic reasoning. Philosopher Marvin Minsky, cofounder of the artificial intelligence lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also maintained that reasoning-the ability to think in a multiplicity of ways that are hierarchical-was what made humans human.