Because the stakes are so low

Two interesting and diametrically opposing viewpoints which even have contrasting headlines. Let's start with the first essay, "philosophy is politics" :

I used to wonder why questions in philosophy never get resolved. For example, take the question of whether we have free will or not. Thousands of years have passed by since the first time this question was asked and people are still debating on it.

I can't say I've ever wondered much about that. I don't think  the nature of free will is something we can can ever fundamentally know - any more than you could "know" if if there's a invisible immeasurable giant wombat that's permanently hiding from you with 100% efficacy. So my answer is a straightforward, "these problems are either really hard or in some cases actually impossible to answer". People have been speculating about the size of the Universe for thousands of year too, and we still don't have a definitive answer today. Even so, this very nice essay presents a fascinating alternative (not necessarily a mutually exclusive one).

The reason there’s no agreement on questions of morality, liberty, free will, etc. is because these topics explore how a human ought to live. So everyone has a pet-theory for these philosophical questions, some are sophisticated, others are naive but none is ‘objectively’ true. The victory of your theory over another is a matter of convincing others that your version is better. And that’s a necessarily political act. 

It really doesn’t matter whether you can experimentally falsify the God-theory. It’s because you have to first get believers to agree that experiment is a way to answer this question. They interpret the word ‘God’ in a religious context, one where scientific context doesn’t apply...Whatever mode of engagement you use with believers – ignoring or discussion – it’s a necessarily political process. They either come out convinced from your argument or they don’t.

 Words are understood in the context of their usage... In law, courts know what exactly the defendant means what she says she didn’t sign the papers out of her free will. Similarly, believers know they’ll go to heaven or hell after they die depending on their freely willed actions on Earth. No ambiguity there. Philosophical problems arise when we use words freely – without any context or giving contexts that make no sense. 

Consider the question: ‘What is the productivity of an orange? 

Obviously, the question is cringe-worthy because it’s nonsense. But we don’t feel similar cringe when we ask: ‘what’s the meaning of life?’ or ‘are machines conscious?’ or ‘why is there something rather than nothing’? Throughout my life, I’ve gone round and round on these questions without any satisfying answers. That should be a hint to me that perhaps these are nonsense questions. 

What matters isn’t whether there’s free will or not, the real question should be how differently would I live my life if I knew the answer. If the answer was that there’s no free will, will I stop functioning? If the answer is that there is free will, will I start murdering people? As you can guess, the answer has very little impact on my future actions.

I don't think anyone could doubt that there's a political element to all acts of persuasion. But I'm not ready to sign off on the idea that "what is free will ?" is as silly a question as "how productive is an orange ?". I agree that because the question can be phrased in a way that sounds sensible it doesn't necessarily follow that it actually is, and I further agree that the context is important to the question. Free will in the sense of "you did it deliberately", i.e. the legal sense, is different to the philosophical context of whether you did something as a result of atoms bashing about or something more ineffable. On the latter, my guess is that our understanding of the nature of reality is insufficient for us to properly distinguish between determinism and alternatives. I have a sort of pseudo-faith that eventually we'll make the conceptual breakthrough necessary to get a more sensible answer, but I'm buggered if I have any clues as to how.


On to the second article, "philosophy is not ideology" :

Philosophers attempt the intellectually rigorous study of perennial questions that seem to defy empirical resolution. Is there a god — or perhaps more than one — or an afterlife? Do we possess free will? How can we know about the external world? Are moral rules objectively binding on us? What is a good life for a human being, and what is the nature of a just society? Philosophers also tackle moral and political questions that are more specific, such as whether abortion is ethically acceptable and/or whether it should be legally permitted.

And it needs to be stated that the examination of the questions and the consideration of different answers is sometimes much, much more important than having a definitive answer at all.

Provided that intellectually careful arguments are offered in their favor, no conclusions are ruled out in advance. In formulating their arguments, philosophers often rely upon claims made by other academic disciplines, but those same claims can also be challenged. Often, philosophers will contest them when they are not supported by compelling evidence—when, for example, certain claims appear to be made more for the sake of methodological convenience, political expediency, or conformity to intellectual fashion, than because their truth has been objectively established.

Disputes run into problems of ambiguous, conflicting, and incomplete evidence, conceptual confusion, and a diversity of bedrock assumptions, intuitions, and values. It is therefore typical, rather than unusual, for philosophers to maintain opposed ideas even after honest and strenuous efforts to find common ground. 

Right, BUT, individual philosophers certainly have ideological beliefs - it's only the discipline as a whole that shouldn't. The act of investigating a philosophical question is not in and of itself a political act, but the way in which any individual proceeds does have a political aspect to it. So "philosophy is politics" in the sense that everyone has their own biases, but, "philosophy is not ideology" in that no idea should be forbidden from philosophical discussions at all. It does not necessarily follow that any and all ideas must be permitted at all times throughout society, but a philosophy arena which restricts ideas is not much use to anyone.

Philosophy is politics - Inverted Passion

I used to wonder why questions in philosophy never get resolved. For example, take the question of whether we have free will or not. From Socrates to Kant and to modern day philosophers (such as Daniel Dennett), everyone seems to have an opinion on free will.

Preaching to the unconverted

They say you can't reason people out of positions they haven't been reasoned into. They also say that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the context of fighting misinformation, if someone has accepted a position due to favouring ideology over evidence, you'll have a devil of a time persuading them using nothing but data. Indeed, such a thing may well backfire, since they will see your position only as evidence as your own bias against them. And even if you succeed, when you go away they'll still be deeply embedded in their network of like-minded friends, so your impact may quickly wane.

An alternative approach is not to try and shake someone's entire world view at all but to engage them on their own terms. This might not be ideal, but in an emergency it can be by far the best approach : first, no-one, no-one at all, likes having their entire world view overturned ("no, sod off, eating babies is wrong, dammit !"), and second, emotional arguments work just as well for facts as fictions. So if they're not being rational, give them an irrational argument instead. You may not like it, but do you want to help them or not ?

In response, myth-busters attempt to squash coronavirus myths. The modus operandi is to report the myth and then rebut it with science, medical research and expert opinion. The problem with this approach is that science, medicine and experts are, for now, handicapped. There is no vaccine and they have no other easy solution to offer. Given this, alternative explanations are bound to emerge... An approach that reaches beyond “the choir” is needed.

Yes, because lengthy rebuttals inevitably have to describe the myth in detail. This is probably fine for someone reasonably rational and unbiased, but not for someone who already believes it. It's too easy to come across as a big jerk if you write a 50,000 word essay entitled, "Why My Opponent Is So Wrong It's Not Even Funny", even if every word is true (I am certainly guilty of this from time to time). And people prefer a wrong explanation to an incomplete one.

I conducted an action research project with working class HIV/AIDS peer educators to investigate and combat the many non-scientific explanations of HIV/AIDS . The project took seriously the HIV/AIDS myths that the peer educators were encountering... I came to see these alternative explanations not as myths, or nonsense, but folk theories which, in the minds of many, were legitimate alternative explanations to that science. Along the lines of the explanation provided by Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science Imre Lakatos of scientific research programmes, these myths about the disease were “auxiliary theories” linked, within the South African AIDS epidemic, to a trinity of “core ideas”: a belief in God, racial oppression, and traditional African beliefs.

Rather than repeating accurate, but ineffective, public health messages over HIV/AIDS, I worked with peer educators on alternative ways of shifting attitudes. 

We identified HIV/AIDS folk theories circulating in their communities and ran workshops designed to develop stories, sketches and parables in local idiom that could counter these in easy to grasp and engaging ways. For example, to the belief that God could cure AIDS and that antiretroviral treatment was unnecessary, they developed the story of a man who encounters a lion and, kneeling to pray, pleads with God to save him. The lion devours him. The message? He should have run and asked God to help him run faster. The lesson? Take antiretroviral drugs and pray that God will keep you healthy.

Fascinating approach, though if I might add one final cliché  : the very people most in need of education are the ones most difficult to reach. Having a conversation with someone whose world view is diametrically opposed to yours is often incredibly annoying. Yes yes - it can be enlightening and enriching and all that, in some conditions, but often it isn't. It's very tempting to fall back on the default position and shout, "NO YOU'RE WRONG !". It's not all easy to become so immersed in an idea - without ever really believing it - that you can work out what sort of arguments would be persuasive.

It would be nice to have given some more examples of arguments they used and general advice as to how they formulated them, as well as anecdotes as to how people reacted. Descriptions of biases and fallacies can be found all over the place, but while they're excellent for self-awareness, they're all too easily used as weapons : "HAH ! That's argument from authority, you JERK !". Knowing our opponent is biased does not help us persuade them - it does just the opposite, and persuades us that they're unreachable. This approach of reasoning with them on their own terms, while difficult, might in the long-term be better : once you've reached across to them it may be easier to pull them over the whole way.

Busting coronavirus myths will take more than science: lessons from an AIDS study

The coronavirus pandemic is accompanied by what the World Health Organisation describes as an "infodemic" - misinformation, disinformation or conspiracy theories: "coronavirus myths". These circulate on social media and are further disseminated by influencers, the click-bait infotainment "penny dreadfuls" of the internet, mainstream media which repeat them for audiences to shake their heads at the apparent credulity of others, and some world leaders.

The call of the fascist

What's the appeal of facisim ? We would do well to remember a quote from this video :

Communism, totalitarianism, dictatorships, fascism, they all come with positives. If they didn’t, they’d never make it to power. The question is what’s traded in return. If we really want to learn from their mistakes, we absolutely need to look at how they got there. It’s disingenuous to only discuss failed societies from a post-collapse perspective.

Above all, we need to get past the simplistic notion that people only do anything because of their innate character. They don't. They are, unfortunately, far more complicated than that. I like the analysis presented in this Aeon piece very much, which compares and contrasts modern-day tendencies towards strongmen with those of the 1930s.

Yes, we must attend to new threats, but old ones can reoccur too. Mass unemployment isn’t what threatens us today... Powerlessness [as well as unemployment] can lead to detachment. But it can also lead to exuberant support for whomever seems to be on your wavelength. 

I would interject here that this is another consequence of inequality that is independent of absolute standards. Whereas certain "progressives" feel that it's absolute, personal standards of living that matter to people's overall satisfaction, others might argue that the statistics do not properly capture a sense of unfairness - perhaps one not always consciously realised. If you have a decent house and a reliable wage, you may still legitimately look at a billionaire with a personal harem of the entire cast of Love Island and sixteen Jaguars and think, "that ain't right". You can feel dissatisfied with society even when your own circumstances are, judged against some absolute standard, pretty good. You can justly feel, "I'm happy with my own life, but that person's wealth gives him undue influence and I don't want them having so much say in what I do" .

The concern for workers’ rights is surely the forgotten element in far-Right ideology. In the first instance, far-Right ideas can bloom in those who consider themselves wronged or ignored by their political leaders. Early fascists latched on to low-paid workers, war veterans and others who felt betrayed by a system that gave them nothing in return for their sacrifices.  

Yet, surely, national inequality is an obsession of the Left rather than the Right? In the end, what is the difference between fascist and Left-wing ideas?  According to Oswald Mosley – the leader of the British Union of Fascists from 1932 to 1940 – the British Labour Party was pursuing policies of ‘international socialism’, while fascism’s aim was ‘national socialism’.

Early Italian fascism broke from socialism only on the grounds of nationalism. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini proposed giving women the vote, lowering the voting age to 18, introducing an eight-hour workday, worker participation in industrial management, heavy progressive capital tax and the partial confiscation of war profits. Of course, he also advocated extreme nationalism and Italian expansionism, but the pro-worker aspects of his programme are striking.

I would here repeat my own personal definition of patriotism versus nationalism, which I think the author broadly agrees with : a patriot loves their own country, whereas a nationalist also hates all others. A fascist can be (it doesn't follow that this is always true) genuinely concerned for their own citizens, or perhaps some narrower demographic, and is quite prepared to step on anyone else in order to help them. Someone who is merely patriotic, however, regardless of political affiliation, wants to help their own country but is not necessarily prepared to weaken others in order to do so. And then of course there are people who just hate everybody, but that's another story.

What keeps this type of more sophisticated nationalism, or patriotism, liberal or progressive is that it is intended to be nonexclusive. You take pride in your country’s achievements while recognising that other countries can take pride in theirs. And you don’t exclude or demonise outsiders. But how easy is it to maintain this position? At the very least, it takes work to prevent it from sliding into the dangerous blind loyalty that breeds racism and xenophobia. The crowd can form too quickly.

Why ? It's easy to love your family without thinking that all other families must be shite. In fact you'd have to work really hard to convince practically anyone that only their own family was important. So why does nationalism become destructively competitive, even among tiny nations who have never done anything to anyone ?

We cannot wish nationalist sentiment away. Much of ordinary political and cultural life depends on it. Pride in national traditions of food, wine, sport, art, music and literature. Attachment to a particular, bounded, territory. Solidarity with those with a shared history.

Perhaps it's simply that such values are frequently taken out of context and deliberately exclude others. Unless your family lives under a rock, you can't be unaware that there are other families - you'll have to interact with them directly quite often. But with something more abstract like a country, it's easy to put together, say, the Museum of Welsh Life that deliberately excludes (or at least neglects) vital contributions to sheep shearing and rugby from other countries. If you only ever give people local examples of things they should appreciate, it's easy to look on contributions from further afield as somehow lesser, rather than celebrating them as part of a common heritage.

Take Medieval 2 : Total War. I always found there were some countries I was more inclined to play as than others. The Byzantines ? Sure, the last vestiges of the Roman Empire, what European wouldn't see them as worthy of leading back to glory ? Whereas, the French... no, no, as a Brit, the French are for fighting, not playing. Hah, the very idea of it !

Mussolini and Mosley are a reminder that espousing a concern for workers’ rights is not, in itself, a protection against authoritarianism. In the United Kingdom today, there is a growing belief that it was the Labour Party’s failure to embrace nationalist policies – thought to be favoured by its traditional voters – that led to its humiliating electoral defeat in 2019.

On the first point I agree, and would add that the certain kinds of populism aren't even really concerned with worker's rights at all - they're just used as a flimsy attempt to appear moral and entrance supporters. As in that famous Charlie Chaplin speech, "dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people."
On the second point, here I do have to raise a serious quibble with the author (and with Aeon's apparent policy against linking to sources, which might have clarified things). I've never heard anyone claiming this explanation for the electoral defeat, nor is it necessary. Brexit+Corbyn = more than sufficient explanation. Also, are Labour's traditional supporters nationalists ? No ! When I was growing up, Labour was unashamedly pro-immigration and no-one questioned their patriotism. Somewhere along the line, long before Brexit was an issue, the British left got into an absolutely catastrophically confused situation of these disastrously mixed messages as to whether it welcomed immigrants or not. They lost the ability to explain why immigration does not infringe the rights and prospects of British workers. With eastern Europeans currently being flown in to provide essential jobs, perhaps both sides will be forced to learn something from this horrible situation.

Fascism has the knack of turning democracy against itself. Democracy has been used as a stepping stone to power, only to be dismantled and replaced by authoritarian rule... The first stage concerns the basic question, What is democracy? Naturally, we identify democracy with majority rule...  But Mill points out that democracy exposes us to a new sort of tyranny: the tyranny of the majority. 

At the heart of democracy is a tension between the rule of the majority and the protection of the rights of the minority. Protecting minority rights means that, in practice, liberal democracy limits the rule of the majority. Many countries have a written constitution, covering issues that are simply too important to be left to ordinary day-to-day politics. 

Liberal democracies have evolved a vast web of institutions that can interfere with an overreaching leader’s plans in different ways, and that collectively protect minority rights. The most visible are the formal mechanisms that limit power or authority. These include the rule of law and law courts. The upper house in parliament keeps watch over executive overreach. Local government provides an alternative source of concentrated authority.

Perhaps we should expand the power of the upper house rather than perpetually wailing about the "unelected lords". Who gives a monkey's if your doctor or electrician was elected ? Rather than making the Lords a mere "revising chamber", perhaps it should be its explicit job to check for constitutionality of a proposed law. It could have a power of veto if it found a law violated fundamental principles, rather than leaving this to the courts.

Healthy politics includes a ‘loyal opposition’, supporting the system but opposing the government of the day. The test for whether leaders understand this concept is if they dismiss expressed opposition as ‘treason’... Fascism disagrees. Mosley wrote: ‘The will of the people is greater than the right of the minority.’ The leader is there to carry out the will of the people, irrespective of the consequences for particular individuals. No one has the right to stand in its way.

An elected tyrant is still a tyrant. But at the same time :

If the first stage of the fascist dismantling of democracy is to prioritise the will of the majority over minority rights, the second is to contest how the will of the majority is made manifest. Is it by majority vote? No, said Hitler, in a speech to Dusseldorf industrialists in 1932. In an argument reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, Hitler argued that democratic voting: "is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy … Thus democracy will in practice lead to the destruction of a people’s true values."

So as a general point, even elections can be democratic or anti-democratic, depending on context. Therein lies the difficulty. It's easy to rally support for or against votes/elections in principle. And it's easy to say,"we want free and fair elections"... but it gets tricky when you start to refine this further. Is it enough that everyone is entitled to vote, even if they actually can't in principle ? Should they, at the other extreme, be forced to vote, and if so should there be an option to abstain ? What if they genuinely object to the whole principle of voting ? Under what conditions can a campaign be considered fair ? It's not that these questions can't be answered - they can. It's that the complexity makes the process perilously easy to undermine and compromise. and of course, uncompromising men are easy to admire.

The concern for workers’ rights, the creation of a pure state and the opposition to social democracy – the three aims of the Nazis, as identified by Lorimer – came together in the development of a majority-pleasing nationalism, in which the will of the people steamrollers anything in its way. We hope never again to see the extreme form developed by the fascists. But defeating fascism didn’t destroy its seeds, and some observers think that they can see its shoots once more.

Authoritarian leaders, who believe that they have been elected with a mandate of radical national renewal, can become easily frustrated with the spider’s web of institutions that prevent them from exercising power as they wish. The press is biased; the news is fake; the judges are the enemies of the people; the universities crush free speech and promote subversive ideologies; the trade unions stand in the way of progress; local government is a viper’s nest; and the upper chamber is full of deluded, self-interested fools.

I see two particular dangers. The first is the most obvious: the increase in Right-wing authoritarianism. But I’m also worried about a growing tendency on the Left: the idea that, in order to regain majority support, it’s necessary to adopt nationalist polices. Some, with roots in the traditional Labour movement, seem to think that, as long as they support trade unions and pro-poor policies, they are on the side of the righteous – whatever else they believe – and that this grants them moral immunity from criticism. But we have seen this combination of views before.

Somehow the British right managed to convince enough people that being pro-immigration was being unpatriotic. This argument needs to be overturned. The point here that being pro-(any demographic) does not equate with morality is, however, well made.

An acceptable nationalism would have to be tempered by liberalism. It would also need to be held in check by democracy that strongly supports the rights of the minority. We should never accept the argument that the intermediate institutions of government and civil society are standing in the way of the will of the people. On the contrary, they must be supported and strengthened. This is our best chance of keeping the unthinkable unthinkable.

If we can end the Great British Bake Off and all those bloody landscape programmes and quash nationalist sentiment, then I for one am all for it.

What 1930s political ideologies can teach us about the 2020s - Jonathan Wolff | Aeon Essays

Ours is the age of the rule by 'strong men': leaders who believe that they have been elected to deliver the will of the people. Woe betide anything that stands in the way, be it the political opposition, the courts, the media or brave individuals.

Queen in name only

Ants don't organise themselves as you might think. Although kings and queens do have fixed, specific roles, there's little or no evidence that this is true for the rest.

The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited.

In the great majority (about 276 of 326) of genera of ants, all the ants in a colony are the same size. Moreover, regardless of size, as ant workers get older, they move from one task to another, switching tasks as circumstances require... Though the largest ants are often designated as ‘soldiers’, in fights between ant species the smaller species often prevails. A large ant, for example, is helpless if six tiny ones grab each of its legs. In some species in the genus Pheidole, the large-headed ‘soldiers’ show no military inclinations; instead they tend to stay in the nest and use their large jaw muscles to crack seeds. But if there are not enough small ants to go outside and forage, the larger ones will do the same tasks as the smaller ones. 

For example, in harvester ants, colonies regulate foraging activity, adjusting the numbers of ants currently out searching for seeds to the amount of food available. An outgoing forager does not leave the nest until it meets enough returning foragers coming back with food. This creates a simple form of positive feedback: the more food is available, the more quickly foragers find it, and the more quickly they return to the nest, eliciting more foraging.  Each encounter, in the form of a brief antennal contact, has no meaning to the ant, but in the aggregate, the rate of encounters determines how many ants are currently foraging.

Distributed processes and division of labour can both be effective, but they don’t function in the same way. For division of labour, specialisation can lead to better work. By contrast, in a distributed process, the fact that individuals are interchangeable makes the whole system more robust and more resilient...  Most fathers might not be as good at changing diapers as most mothers but, at 3am, the finer points of technique don’t matter. If anyone changes the diaper, the baby goes back to sleep.

The differences between networks (horizontal distribution) and hierarchies (vertical distribution) are quite nicely explored in Niall Ferguson's The Square And The Tower. I think the author of this piece has things a bit muddled though :

Plato favoured the horizontal form, in which a single actor performs each task. Adam Smith preferred the vertical, in which different people accomplish parts of a single task. Henry Ford extended and expanded the vertical form in the flow of work in a factory.

That just seems like different degrees of specialisation to me, rather than different types. Plato, not having the concept of an assembly line, proposed that one worker should do one "job", whereas in an assembly line they do one even more specific "task" continuously. The very first Google result for "vertical and horizontal division of labour" tells me that Smith preferred a so-called "vertical" distribution, not a horizontal one. Then things get even more confused with distribution of power versus labour.

I'm not sure this terminology is particularly helpful. The point would seem to be in the degree of specialisation/flexibility and the degree of authority. In a truly "flat" network system, everyone can do every job and everyone makes their own decisions about what to do : every man is an island. In a totally un-flat (feudal) system, workers can only do one single myopic task and their actions are governed entirely by their superiors, whose actions are in turn governed by their superiors, and so on up to the king.

But does examining an ant colony tell us anything useful regarding human societies ?

Switching tasks, either in stages of life or in the short term, is not consistent with organisation by division of labour. However appealing it might be to imagine ant colonies organised by division of labour, the evidence tells us they are not.

Ants can show how distributed processes might allow us to adjust to a changing environment; to build nests, decide when to move, or change from working inside the nest to foraging outside. It is becoming clear that the ant colonies’ algorithms are diverse, in interesting ways. Similar processes are at work in other natural systems without central control. 

Division of labour is a human innovation, drawing on our ability to learn and improve by practice, and to trade goods and services. The growing recognition that natural processes work differently from our symphonies and armies will allow us to see the natural world more clearly. Ant colonies are not factories or fortresses; instead they use simple interactions to adjust to changing conditions. Ant societies, organised by distributed algorithms rather than division of labour, have thrived for more than 130 million years.

So ants are not the micro-version of Plato's Republic we might have deemed them to be. Okay, but individual ants cannot learn, or at least cannot learn as much or in the same way as a human. Doesn't it follow that some degree of division of labour makes sense in certain circumstances ? The ant's flexibility is interesting because we've been previously taught otherwise, but in the end I don't think it has that much relevance for humans, despite the author's laudable effort to convince me otherwise. And then comes the awkward question : what about termites ?

EDIT : Thanks to the ever-perceptive Joe Carter for sending me to this excellent complementary article, describing how ant society may have evolved for "multilevel selection" : if a group is able to out-compete other groups, its genes will propagate. This helps explain eusocial behaviour, but little about morality, leading to the memorable quote :

“But ask me what ants have to say about how we should behave and what they tell us about our own morality. The answer is nothing. Their societies are almost completely female. They eat their injured and they are in almost constant, obliterating war with colonies of the same species. And whereas we send our young men to war, they send their old ladies. There’s not much there to be learnt,” he says.

How ant societies point to radical possibilities for humans - Deborah M Gordon | Aeon Essays

It's easy to find familiar examples of division of labour. In a corporation, some people work in sales and others in accounting; in an orchestra, some play the bassoon and others the violin. Since no one is born an accountant or a bassoonist, in a system with division of labour, differentiated skills must be acquired.

Sacred science

An interesting approach to engage the TMT protestors on their own - supposed - terms. I read an interesting article a while back that said the protests were really more politically motivated than religious, and I think there are overtones of that here as well. I like the approach of trying to connect on an emotional level, appealing to the romantic side of astronomy rather than the practical. I mean, sure, you could write and tell them about the spectral resolution or how many PhD students it's going to keep busy, but that's not likely to work, is it ?

You are much more like the astronomers than you realize. Both of you, native Hawaiians and astronomers, learn by careful observation (maka’ala). You are kia’i mauna, watchers of the mountain. They are kia’i o na hoku, watchers of the stars. Each of you needs the other. Separately, you are out of balance. The two of you need each other and always will, and for that reason... the only end is reconciliation, which can only come through dialogue conducted in the spirit of aloha.

Our sky father, Wakea, was much busier than we thought. He created millions of other worlds. And on some of these planets, the most favored ones, he may have created other living beings... I feel sure that there are some among you, dear kia’i, who know in your gut—in your na’au—that life does exist out there in the cosmos. If you know this, then you must know also that they are your family. They are your cousins just as surely as the taro plant, Wakea’s firstborn child, is your brother.

When you propose to shut down the TMT, you are proposing that we should shut our eyes to our own family. Your own family. This has nothing to do with being for or against science. It is not pono. It violates what I have learned about Hawaiian culture, that ohana comes first.

What will be the effect on you when you abandon your kuleana, your responsibility to Wakea? He brought you to this island and made you stewards of this unique mountain, the mountain you named after him. Mauna Kea is the umbilical cord joining earth to the stars. It is a place that Wakea has designated for looking up as well as for looking down. He could not entrust this place to anyone else. He had to choose gatekeepers who could look in both directions: a caretaking people who valued their connection to the earth, and a voyaging people who valued their connection to the stars. He would not want you to succeed in only half of your mission.

Over and over, the kia’i have referred to the TMT as a “desecration” of the sacred mountain. It is not, and the word should not be uttered again. Instead I ask you to acknowledge that the observatory will consecrate a small part of the mountain to a purpose intended by your own gods. Your mission is not to oppose this consecration, but to make sure that it is done right. Be pono, and make sure that the astronomers are pono too.

I don't know enough (read : anything at all) about Hawaiian culture to say if this is religiously accurate or not. But if it is, it seems hard to maintain the pretense that the protest is really religiously motivated  - why would they act against their own religious goals if that were so ? The letter is then either shaming them for failing in their religious duty or forcing them to confront hypocrisy. It'll be interesting to see the response, if any.

An Open Letter to Telescope Protesters in Hawaii - Issue 83: Intelligence - Nautilus

On July 15, 2019, after a court decision had cleared the way for astronomers to build a new mega-telescope, called the Thirty Meter Telescope, on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, a large group of protesters said, "No."

Troll hunting

This is a very interesting and informative video on how misinformation works on Reddit. It's part of a series looking at other platforms, but this is the only one I've watched so far. Here's my summary if you prefer to read things or just don't have time for a 20 minute video.

Reddit's Chief Technology Officer begins by noting that the basic unit of Reddit is the community, not the site itself. Moderators have control over communities and it's up to them to set and enforce their own rules. The company is the last line of defence against spam and misinformation and copyright violations, and it's pretty unusual for them to get involved. Misinformation does sometimes end up on the front page (and so accumulate enormous numbers of views) and it's a struggle to deal with it.

The Stanford Internet Observatory note that this variable approach to moderation leads to highly variable standards, but it has some benefits. No-one in a cat community complains of censorship if their dog picture is removed. By having a local feel for out-of-place accounts, community moderators are potentially better placed to identify suspicious activity.

The iDrama Lab is an organisation trying to examine the internet holistically. They say that there is unambiguously large-scale, coordinated, inauthentic activity on Reddit. Some people are indeed just weird (and/or inexperienced) but some are absolutely state-sponsored trolls participating in deliberate campaigns of misinformation. Similar tactics are being used today as they were a few years ago, because they still work.

SIO note that unlike Facebook, when Reddit suspends an account it doesn't delete it. This has the advantage that you can then go and study their behaviour (though I have to wonder what happens to the threads they create - can users still interact there and access the misinformation ?). SED says that they display a clear pattern of behaviour. They alternate between showing viral content (cute cat pictures and the like) and deliberately starting arguments on both sides of a debate. They are trying to make everyone fight each other, not win a debate. They also spend some time simply trying to convince people that they're authentic.

One of the really interesting findings comes from the Oxford Internet Institute. They've analysed Reddit threads and can quantify the discussion's cognitive complexity (the toleration of different viewpoints), the identity attacks (use of irrelevant ad hominem arguments) and toxicity (aggressive, confrontational behaviour that cases users to leave the thread). From a single comment by a troll, they see immediate and sustained loss of cognitive complexity (far in excess of the baseline variation), immediate and sustained increases in toxicity, and an immediate but temporary rise in identity attacks.

SED goes on to describe what I found the most surprising results of all : just how carefully prepared these attacks are. Troll activity increased to a sustained level before diminishing until just before the 2016 US election. But the activity varied not only in time, but in type. The 2015 threads were mainly all about amassing a good reputation and followers, posting mainly viral and utterly inoffensive content (e.g. cats, science gifs). Only in 2016 did they start to abuse their position to start divisive arguments.

The IDL say that the goal is chaos, to drive people apart, to prevent them from having common objectives, to increase polarisation. Worryingly, no-one has a good map of the true interconnectivity between the major social media sites. You can't win a war without a map.

Reddit's CTO says that if you see something suspicious, you should absolutely report it. He'd rather have the neighbourhood watch model than a system of mass surveillance (it would have been interesting to hear more about these approaches).

SED finishes off by noting that contrary to his expectations, Reddit is extremely pro-active at taking down accounts : they've removed six times more than what was reported to them. And he notes that the presence of trolls makes users paranoid that other users are trolls, which is exactly what the trolls want : first they make you hate the other, then they make you think the other is a troll. Reasonable discourse becomes impossible in such a situation.
He suggests fighting back by trying to do the opposite of what the trolls attempt. If they reduce cognitive complexity, add nuance to the discussion to make things less black and white (though I wonder here about the "merchants of doubt" problem). To fight identity attacks, remember that everyone is a real person and call it out - but kindly, with compassion. Make the rhetoric less aggressive.

The twisted enlightenment

I've heard lots of criticism of the Enlightenment as to a certain over-simplistic world view and a re-writing of history, but this is a new one on me.

Why do people do good? In the history of western philosophy, there are basically two answers to that question. The first is that people act morally because they are virtuous, because they’re committed to certain principles like honor or fairness. The second answer is that people act morally out of self-interest, because it is good — and ultimately profitable — to be known as someone who does the right thing.

Okay, the first isn't really an explanation at all. "People do good because they are good" is almost a tautology. It just shifts the question back a stage to what makes them become good in the first place.

A new book by David Wootton, a British historian of ideas, argues that the second interpretation has prevailed in the West, and that it has permeated every aspect of our lives. Today, we take it for granted that humans are hardwired to pursue power, pleasure, and profit. According to Wootton, this isn’t true at all.

What ? Who takes this for granted ? Why the hell world is the author living in ? Anecdotally, by far and away the most common problem in "analyses" I see of a myriad of sociological problems is that they are actually just descriptions. "People are cutting down trees because they want shiny new furniture and they should just stop wanting new furniture", they say. Or, "if people stopped wanting to hurt each other the world would be a better place". I mean, these things aren't wrong, but they tell you absolutely nothing about the cause of the problem. "Be better people" is not in any way a practical solution, but it seems the knee-jerk response of analysts everywhere is to point to a problem and say, "don't do that", as though we all just need a bit more knowledge and a massive dose of self-discipline. Far from taking it for granted that we're hardwired to pursue pleasure, the default assumption seems to be that we have an astonishing capacity of free will and we're just not exercising it properly.

In fact, he argues, this view of human nature is an invention of modernity, handed down to us by influential Enlightenment philosophers like Adam Smith, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes. Wootton believes this cultural revolution overturned an entirely different way of thinking about human behavior and morality, and replaced it with what he calls “instrumental reasoning or cost-benefit analysis.”

Again, what ? I think the whole premise here is flawed. Plato is notorious for a) being much, much earlier than Enlightenment thinkers and b) postulating that society influences behaviour and morality. This is much more subtle than the notion that people act so as to be socially rewarded for good behaviour and punished for bad behaviour (although there is that aspect to the issue). Does the author really believe that people don't go around a stealing and killing only out of fear of becoming a pariah* ? Surely both society and innate desire have a role to play, and more besides.

* He doesn't, as he says in the discussion (which is more interesting than the summary).

Now, he concludes, we’re trapped in a world of hedonism and competition, in which the only real goal of society is the satisfaction of wants. And our ethical virtues are bound up with our ideas of material success — namely wealth and power.

Because that was never evident in previous societies ? And, perhaps more importantly, who is the guy hanging out with ? Has he gone through life in a permanent rat race ? While their undeniably is an element of competition and consumerism, do everyday people seem like they're so desperate for material success at any cost ? They don't to me. Competition feels more like an emergent property of the network than an individual driver.

The puzzling question is trying to understand the causal mechanisms. Did capitalism produce selfish behavior? Or did selfish behavior produce a capitalist society? Instead of saying it’s the economy that shapes how we understand the world, I wanted to argue it’s how we understand the world that shapes our thinking about economy.

I think we taught ourselves to be power-maximizing first, to be hyper-competitive, and then created political and economic systems suited to that view of human nature.

Well, Plato was commenting on selfishness as a widespread societal problem thousands of years before the Enlightenment, but I'm not sure you can even demark cause and effect in this case. Selfishness is an innate facet of human nature. So is selflessness. Both are appropriate behaviours depending on context. The challenge is to design a system in which people expresses those behaviours properly.

But again, I deny the premise that individuals are even excessively selfish at all - or at best this needs an in-depth discussion as to what is meant here. Do people in general really look out for their own interests while consciously choosing to do this at the expense of others ? I don't think they do. I certainly don't deny that a few rare individuals, who on occasion can exert disproportionate influence over the rest of us, do this, but as a typical world view... no, I don't see it. Sure, people want things, but society has facilitated the situation where they can readily get them. There's nothing "selfish" about wanting things which are readily available. One can of course argue that a lot of the things we take for granted have some pretty awful environmental consequences, but by itself, wanting to live in comfort in a nice house is not selfish and it certainly isn't hyper-competetive.

How the Enlightenment sold us a twisted view of human nature

Why do people do good? In the history of western philosophy, there are basically two answers to that question. The first is that people act morally because they are virtuous, because they're committed to certain principles like honor or fairness.

Corrections are not a bad thing

I've been avoiding longer blog pieces of late in order to concentrate on CGI and work stuff. One I've had in draft for a while is a look at the general conditions under which people enjoy being proved wrong - and when they don't. Disproving old ideas is the foundation of scientific progress, but even there, it's not always fun if something you've worked hard on turns out to be junk. More on that in a future POTC post.

As far as science goes, it's pretty clear that reporting (in the mass media) has been in a pretty dismal state for some time :

Kovach and Rosenstiel call truth “a complicated and sometimes contradictory phenomenon.” It emerges as facts collect, and each new fact changes a society’s collective understanding of truth. The truth is a snowball rolling down a hill, and each new fact changes the snowball, making it bigger and more multifaceted. 

Journalists, however, have historically done a bad job of explaining to the public that each day’s news report is, by necessity, incomplete and provisional. CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” sums up the attitude.

The evolving consensus on whether or not to wear masks in public is one example of a part of the coronavirus story that has changed quickly. As New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel pointed out, the official advice about wearing masks changed completely in the course of a month.

Again, the findings of science are evidenced-based and provisional, which is why stupid headlines like "mystery solved" or "we finally know..." are so infuriating - and damaging. Genuine proof is a rare thing indeed, not non-existent in any reasonable sense, but not something you should degrade by a cheap headline to get more readers. As scientific debate becomes more public, every minor disagreement between experts can be seen not as an essential, fundamental part of the process, but a petty spat between squabbling, tribalistic incompetents. This completely misunderstands how the scientific consensus is forged. Which is extremely dangerous when someone needs to make a decision based on limited evidence.

Long-developing, ongoing stories – such as the coronavirus today – are particularly difficult for journalists to convey in the day-by-day, article-by-article style which they and the public are used to. With many stories, from climate change to political campaigns to the coronavirus, journalists must rely on expert sources who collect and interpret data and tell the reporters what that data means. These sources change their interpretations, even just slightly, changing the long-term story as more information comes in. 

The problems of uncertainty are particularly troublesome in daily reporting and in the overheated atmosphere of social media, where today’s new development – or new partisan attack – is more important than the big picture... News organizations, of course, have developed systems for correcting themselves when they are provably wrong about something they have published. As my own research has shown, these systems, however, are something that newsrooms have historically entered into reluctantly....  most of the corrections The New York Times publishes are in the nature of a misspelled name rather than about putting facts in the wrong context or explaining how the common understanding of a situation has changed in subtle but important ways.

I would add that there's an even bigger problem for journalism than scientific reporting. At least scientists don't often care about the media reports, so eventually the process works its magic and quietly arrives at a solution behind the scenes. What I think may be in far worse shape is the regular political opinion column.

In principle, through a degree of light legislation and public ability to choose which outlet gets their money, society is supposed to hold journalists to account and produce a reasonable sort of commentary. In practise, this is bollocks. How often do you see a political commentator ever taking stock and reviewing what they got right and what they got wrong ? Hardly ever. It's not that they change their minds that's the problem, it's that they do so for the exclusive motivation to drive sales. If they were to say, "I was wrong about that because I didn't know about factor Y", that would be perfectly fine. But they never do. They never, ever stop to think about how they should form a conclusion, only which conclusions will sell papers. So they can freely say, "John Smith is the sexiest man ever" one day and "John Smith smells of manky bat guanao" the next.

(Just to clarify, I'm talking about predictive pieces more than analyses. There's much value in discussing unprovable notions like just how sexy John Smith is, nothing wrong with that. It's the "political party X is on the verge of disintegrating" pieces I'm concerned with here - the ones that do say something that can be analysed with some degree of objectivity.)

Take Boris Johnson. I've not forgotten his long, sad history of racism, idiocy, authoritarianism and infidelity. I have argued strongly that he should have been voted out of office for his monstrous inability to compromise. I have certainly not forgotten his disgusting attitude in Parliament when openly accused of enabling hate crimes. Nor should we forget his duplicity or egomania.

I could go on, but that's not my point today. My point is that - and I do want to openly echo Keir Starmer here - criticism has a purpose, which carries with it a host of implicit assumptions. It is not for the sake of enjoying someone else's suffering. It has an objective : in this case, to alter the dynamics of the system so that better decisions are taken in the future. The criticism in and of itself is utterly irrelevant. If Johnson's recent experience teaches him a much-needed degree of humility, then his reformed character should be welcomed with open arms. Attacking someone who reforms is only sending a signal to others that they should continue to hate you.

Not that I'm saying Boris Johnson is suddenly going to see the light. I'd bet heavily that he won't. But how many political commentators would ever say, "I was wrong about that" ? Few indeed. The result is we get a continuous stream of vitriol from all sides. Some continue to criticise the government even when mistakes where inevitable, some now applaud them - but few acknowledge their stance has changed in the slightest. The result is a total mess, a complete confusing mass about who's trustworthy, who's principled and who's just in it for the money, who's a diehard and who values evidence above ideology.

I should also mention a long-standing goal of this blog is to review the (sadly neglected) "predictions" category every once in a while. After this rant, I'd guess I'd better put my money where my mouth is pretty soon, so let's shoot for the end of next week. Possibly over on POTC depending on how long it turns out to be, but I'll put the short version here.

Anyway, to return to the theme of the linked article, it'd be great if newspapers (and TV stations) would do regular reviews of how they've done every month or so : what they've got right and what they've got wrong and why. Correcting typos of minor factual details are not enough - that's a way of burying the important results, as a form of bullshitting. Opinion pieces are valuable, but shouldn't be an excuse to say whatever crap will sell papers. Analysing what went wrong and why would help give commentators better perspective and make better predictions in the future. And while a good rhetoric-laden rant every once in a while is good for the soul, by and large I'd far rather have astute political commentary and satire than capricious ramblings about why a particular politician is nothing short of angelic / the devil incarnate / a big pile of poop.

Of course, it's not terribly likely that newspapers are going to start doing this themselves anytime soon. But perhaps it would be fun if someone external were to take up the challenge. Maybe not as a newspaper, but a blog or website - well organised, and with an emphasis on analysing why mistakes were made as well as successes - would be much more interesting than correcting petty typos. I bet a lot could be done just by using direct quotes alone. This is already quite a successful and popular approach to criticising politicians, so why not political commentators ? Not that I'm brave enough to go around mocking journalists myself, mind you...

Journalists are recognizing they're writing a rough draft of history -- and can't say definitively "that's the way it is"

On April 4, a Los Angeles Times story about the varying effects of the novel coronavirus contained a remarkable paragraph: "One thing to keep in mind before we continue: It is possible that the information you read below will be contradicted in the coming weeks or that gaps in knowledge today will soon be filled as scientists continue to study the virus."

Life Under Lockdown (V)

Another week passes and the world keeps turning. There's so little to report here that I'm down to commenting on routine emails : one from BA saying that when travel resumes "it will be epic", which I thought sounded very street, and one from the Zooniverse project saying, "I’m pretty tired. I think everyone is", which had me scratching my head in bewilderment. Who's tired ? Why are they tired ? Haven't they been staying at home like they're supposed to ? I mean, unless you're stuck inside with a horde of screaming brats, the last thing anyone should be is "tired". Frankly I could do this all year.

(Although I hasten to add that if, for some unfathomable reason, a future crisis favours the extroverts, forcing everyone to go outside and talk to as many total strangers as possible, then the shoe will be well and truly on the other foot. Until then, I'll continue wallowing in my welcome preview of retirement. And ten internet points to whoever creates the best scenario in which maximum socialising would avert disaster.)


Progress on FRELLED continues steadily. I can now import axes with a more robust, modular, and accurate code than the old version, which is far superior for dealing with high-resolution cubes. It's not yet perfect but it's generally working well. I've also begun the process of generating an interactive walk-through Arecibo, which should eventually be a lot of fun.

Speaking of which, where the heck's my Oculus Quest ? I check various Amazon sites frequently, and both prices and availability estimates vary chaotically. I guess it won't be arriving this month, which is annoying since I just learned the latest version of Blender has direct support for VR. Oh well, first world problems.


That's literally all the news in the world of Rhysy for this week. So how's the virus doing ? Here I'm pleased to report that I have some good news for Easter - and it's even better than it may appear at first sight :

It seems that things may finally be starting to turn a corner - we may be at end of the beginning, at least. I drafted this post yesterday, but I had to re-write it this morning because things have taken a sudden, dramatic turn for the better. This is where this plotting method really shines, because you won't see this on the conventional plots. I had intended to say that most European countries, although having flattened out, haven't shown any indications of the plummeting curves seen in China and South Korea. This is no longer the case. Take a look at this :

All of these countries - by no means all European countries, but a good chunk of them - are now seeing steep declines. Note that it appears from this plot that France had a previous similar drop, but it didn't - that's China. Sadly most other European countries, including Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the UK, do not yet show the same rapid drops, but if the lockdowns continue, it's surely only a matter of time. It's also highly encouraging to see the US finally start to really pull away from the exponential, with the caveat that it's probably a mistake to plot the US as a single entity here.

Earlier in the week the Czech Republic hit the important milestone of getting the reproduction number down to 1.0, meaning that each person is now infecting an average of one other person, and yesterday it dropped to 0.9, meaning that the virus will eventually die out. There are now plans to begin very gradually easing the lockdown, starting by re-opening small shops (with more strictly enforced hygiene regulations and harsher penalties for those breaking social distancing measures) and allowing essential foreign travel (with mandatory quarantine on arrival).

What's not yet clear is what measures will be taken to prevent/reduce a second wave of infections. Whatever the Czech activists may like to think, it's still uncertain how much difference the compulsory masks have really made - and the massive drops in population density still seem like much bigger drivers of reducing the infection rate. So start increasing the density and we'll be right back to exponential growth. On the other hand, which an increased testing capacity - generally 5-10,000 people per day here, and fall in the number of cases, that ought to make track-and-trace very much easier.


I thought about adding some political comments, but, in order to bring you yet more good news, I've decided not to. So just remember to over-indulge on Easter eggs and, of course, remain indoors.

There should be an app for that

You almost certainly by now know my thoughts on the need to combat online misinformation, but if not they're discussed at considerable length here.

In brief : restricting certain kinds of misinformation is likely to do infinitely more good than harm. Social media should be treated as its own beast and not as a close analogy of more classical information channels  - it has similarities with various different traditional forms of media, and also important differences from all of them. So too does the misinformation being spread there.

The reason so much of it is obvious rubbish is that only a small fraction arises from genuine, hyperpartisan ideologies and weird fringe beliefs. Much more is about deliberately creating distrust and weakening our capacity for rational thinking. No-one is really trying to persuade you that cancer causes cheese or that socialists want to eat your cats - by a saturation-bombing campaign of near-gibberish, they're trying to convince you only that certain outlets can't be trusted. Anyone can stumble on the truth with enough effort, but few indeed - however stupid - will independently reach the claims propagated through fake news outlets. No-one would have otherwise independently concluded that the 5G network causes COVID-19. They're trying to get you to abandon belief in objective facts, which can't be bent or broken, so they can manipulate your emotional beliefs, which can.

For this reason, fake news, unlike truth, must be at least partially above ground to flourish. The inherent goal of fake news is to reach as many people as possible. Debunking such material, fighting speech with speech, is in this instance a mistake - at best it propagates the myth further, at worst it legitimises it. You cannot win a rational argument with someone who has a vested interested in spreading irrationality. Instead, the material needs to be removed outright.

The purposes and ideological basis of fake news outlets means that, unlike other cases, cutting off the supply of such drivel won't cause people to go underground in search of their lost comfort news - for one thing, they never actually wanted it in the first place. But far more importantly, there's no value to the outlet unless it spreads to large numbers of people. The goal is at best to appeal to base emotions, and at worst to spread distrust. It is not, unlike your classical UFO-conspiracy nut, to get people to believe "their truth". They aren't interested in the truth at all, but in actively undermining it. They do not care about consistency; indeed, through its mockery of "elitistic" logic, inconsistency is even a virtue to a fake news peddler. They are not on a moral crusade; unlike the truly devout nutters who will persist no matter the odds, once their audience is denied to a fake news outlet, they wither and die. Fake news serves no purpose whatever if it can't reach a large audience, which necessitates an unavoidable degree of exposure. A traditional loon at least cares about their idea and earnestly believes it; a hyperpartisan political outlet at least wants you to believe the other side is evil; but a fake news outlet cares about the size of their audience and not much else. Going underground is a much use to a fake news vendor as a chocolate submarine.

Thus, classical objections to censorship do not apply when it comes to fake news. Removing it will not provoke any more than the most minimal sort of backfire effect. It will cause little or no wider effort in the populace to seek out the forbidden fruit, since everyone already knows the nonsense being offered. It may cause a brief strengthening of belief in those gullible enough to have been persuaded (either in the information itself or in terms of trust in the source), but, now utterly lacking any independent sources of confirmation, this will fade. While indeed there are circumstances in which forbidding discussions can have the opposite of the intended effect, fake news is not one of them. Regardless of whether you can educate people into spotting bullshit, you can most certainly prevent them holding the highly specific, sometimes dangerous beliefs fostered by propaganda.

Nor does this need to curtail such deceipt lead to a slippery slope towards latter-day Stalinism. The key point is context. Discussing misinformation in universities or on analytical news programs is wholly and utterly different from its outright promotion on social media. The problem with the whole "marketplace of ideas" analogy often used is... well, take a look at Apple how much useless stuff people buy. A completely unrestricted marketplace is never, ever a good idea - people are prone to wanting things that are bad for them; at the same time, a totalitarian marketplace which only sells, say, vegan health foods is pretty awful as well. Nobody in their right mind should want either of these preposterous extremes.

So I welcome this call to deal far more severely with misinformation :

But CCDH says the public needs an easier way to flag misinformation about the disease than at present. The lack of such a dedicated button creates a "barrier to action", the group's chief executive, Imran Ahmed, told the BBC, discouraging users from hunting through the options to report offending posts. 

The CCDH chief is also concerned that users are often encouraged to block or mute the reported accounts. That means "you don't see the reality, which is that they might delete a post, but very rarely delete accounts," he said. He has called for the deliberate spreading of misinformation to be made an offence - and says Facebook and other social networks should take action against the administrators of groups containing the posts 

"[Tech firms] act on it if it poses imminent physical harm, but if it's other information - like conspiracy theories - then that doesn't meet their test as to if an item should be removed," Mr Collins said, before YouTube toughened its policy relating to 5G. "There's not necessarily a blanket ban on misinformation about Covid-19."

Making it easier to report misinformation in general would be a good thing. Should it be an offence ? To a degree, and it should be as complicated as any other offence. Stealing a loaf of bread is clearly not the same as stealing the Mona Lisa or a baby or robbing an orphanage. We would do well to have a "report misinformation" button in general, but it doesn't follow that someone trying to sell homeopathy recipes to cure baldness is the same as someone trying to incite you to burn down a mobile phone tower or throw a party in the middle of a pandemic. Or that a guy yelling about the end of the world on a street corner is the same as a well-organised, highly-funded botnet sending out mass messages of phoney cures for a deadly disease. Sometimes you need to remove content, sometimes you need to remove accounts entirely. It is unavoidably messy, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't act.

Apps 'need dedicated fake coronavirus news button'

Social networks need a dedicated button to flag up bogus coronavirus-related posts, an advocacy group has said. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) said the apps had "missed a trick" in combating the problem.

Survive COVID-19 by learning from vampire bats

Animals are sophisticated enough to social distance when necessary, and in nuanced ways too - not just by avoiding animals that look infected. I wonder if such behaviour is learned or encoded somehow. Fascinating either way. And are there any individuals who don't comply with this behaviour ? Personally I think I'd be fine with this working from home malarkey indefinitely, but lots of people aren't. Are there similarly rebellious animals who try to break quarantine, and what - if anything - do the other animals do in response ?

Ants have evolved the ability to socially distance. When a contagious disease sweeps through their society, both sick and healthy ants rapidly change their behavior in ways that slow disease transmission. Sick ants self-isolate, and healthy ants reduce their interaction with other ants when disease is present in the colony. 

Healthy ants even “close rank” around the most vulnerable colony members—the queens and nurses—by keeping them isolated from the foragers that are most likely to introduce germs from outside. Overall, these measures are highly effective at limiting disease spread and keeping colony members alive. 

Some animals maintain essential social interactions in the face of sickness while foregoing less critical ones. For example, vampire bats continue to provide food for their sick groupmates, but avoid grooming them. This minimizes contagion risk while still preserving forms of social support that are most essential to keeping sick family members alive, such as food sharing.

Social distancing works-just ask lobsters, ants, and vampire bats

Using distance to avoid getting sick has deep evolutionary roots for humans and many other species.

Life Under Lockdown (IV)

The horror of life in a gilded cage continues unabated. There are board games. There are telecons. There is small fluffy doggy galore. All remains well.

Small fluffy doggy remains blissfully oblivious.

The weather has been mostly lovely. It's been generally mild but with the odd cold snap. We even had the largest snowfall of the season, which was admittedly pathetic compared to previous winters. Right now it's warmed up again. Indeed, as I write this, Shirley is sat outside on the decking watching the TV, which remains firmly inside. Civilisation is truly a wonderful thing and I'd quite like to keep it.

In work, things remain much as before, except now I've got some remote Arecibo observing to do so my screen looks like this :

Which would normally be something of a small burden, but is currently providing a welcome change in routine, especially since it's at 10am. As for outreach, my interactive Virgo cluster got noticed by a New Jersey planetarium, so I'm pretty excited about that. Still waiting impatiently for the Oculus Quest to be on-sale again so I can see it in glorious 3D.

If life in this new normal isn't so bad, when, though, can we expect it to return to normal normal ?

Last time we went on a shopping trip, we ventured about 50 m further than strictly necessary so we could have a look down Wenceslas Square. Although we live right in the centre of Prague, we live well off the main tourist route, so it's hard to get a feel for whether social distancing measures are really working. Some nights our dog-walking route feels emptier than usual, other times not so much - but we're firmly in the realm of small number statistics. On the Square we saw very clearly for ourselves that the tourist traps are all but deserted - essentially, the population density hasn't altered much in the emptiest areas (it couldn't fall much there anyway), but in the normally heaving centres, it's crashed.

It would be awfully tempted to go and look at the other tourist areas. Ironically it would
now be perfectly safe to do so because there's no-one there, but we've got more sense
than that.

This confirms a rather fun study by Google, who have released anonymised data on personal movement based on phone locations. So let's compare Prague and Cardiff, because why not :

Prague seems to have dropped off more rapidly and earlier than in Cardiff, but by a slightly lower percentage. Then again, Prague is far more of a tourist trap, so this doesn't account for the huge drop in absolute numbers. Being able to see the pavement down the whole of Wenceslas Square is simply unprecedented.

That said, last week I saw a florist was still open. I thought only essential services were still open for business, and in no Arnie movie does anyone yell, "Quick, this is an emergency ! GET TO THE FLORIST !". On the other hand, we finally had a takeout order that actually did the contactless process properly. It's like finding a baby on your doorstep except a lot tastier.

So is all this actually working ? Last week there were hints, but this week I feel much more confident : yes, it is. The reproduction number is definitely falling, and by some accounts it may fall below 1.0 very soon indeed. We'll see. But one of the more interesting ways to slice the data is equally encouraging. Rather than simply plotting the number of cases against time, which will only show a very gradual flattening if the infection rate drops, it seems it's better to plot number of cases in the past week as a function of total cases, with time shown via animation. In this case, when the infection stops spreading you see a very rapid fall indeed.

Cases in selected countries. The website is interactive and has a full explanation,
but note that the plots look far better when downloaded.

The Czech Republic has been slowly deviating from the pure exponential for a while, but has now very clearly flattened (while testing rates have increased substantially). It's a similar story in the Netherlands. Spain, Germany, and especially Italy all look like they're on the edge of a happy precipice. The UK isn't there yet, and is still suffering from a low testing rate, but does seem at least to moving in the right direction. Even the US is at least looking better than it was. Whether or not we'll see a sudden drop as China and South Korea did remains to be seen, but overall, things are looking positive - if only as far a stopping the infection goes, not necessarily for the handling of the existing crisis.

As for what measure has made the biggest difference, my money's on social distancing. Yet at least some Czechs are keen to point out the value of even simple masks. I dunno. While it would seem common sense that if you're being advised to cover your cough then wearing a mask should also help, I would bet that having the population density diminish by several orders of magnitude is going to make a much bigger difference. But listen to the actual experts, for crying out loud. In any case, I bet all those people who wanted to ban the burqa are feeling awfully silly right about now...


I now feel a lack of anxiety sufficient to venture a few political comments. One of the stupider stories I've seen from Britain is supermarkets banning people from buying non-essential items. This really irks me because it feels like a very British thing to do - not the cliched stiff-upper-lip stereotype, but actually knowing what real modern British people are like. If the government recommends you only only go out for essentials, you can bet that the British response will be to break down into confusion with no common sense at all. I mean, come on. By all means close down the shops which only sell non-essentials, but what the hell's the point in shops which do sell essentials dictating to customers what they can and can't buy ? That's just really dumb - nothing but a totally pointless waste of energy. British people like causing unnecessary complications. It's becoming a particularly irritating art form of bullshitting.

In happier news, Kier Starmer is the new leader of the Labour Party. On paper it would be hard to find anyone more qualified. A high-flying human rights lawyer from a thoroughly working class background, able to to command the respect of the different internal party factions (he voted against Corbyn but was able to work with him without any hint of acrimony or in-fighting), and thick-skinned enough to have campaigned strongly against Brexit in the shadow cabinet for the last few years, he may be uniquely placed to build bridges. He's very much a socialist, but quite clearly not in the hard left holier-than-thou vein of the Corbynites (and modest enough to avoid being referred to as Sir Kier despite his knighthood), and, importantly, willing to work with the government during a crisis. I liked his victory speech very much - supportive of Corbyn personally, while then immediately attacking one of his biggest failings (the failure to tackle anti-semitism). He projects infinitely more competence and authority than Corbyn ever did. It's going to be an interesting experience indeed to see him pitted against Boris.


That about wraps it up for this week. Things are generally looking up. One final point is something the British press are occasionally suspicious of : the exit strategy from the lockdown. But I would have thought this was obvious : testing, en masse. Once the virus has broken out on a large scale, as it has, a lockdown is almost inevitable. What you do during that time is get as much testing capability as humanly possible. Then, once the cases subside to a manageable number, you gradually ease the restrictions and start an incredibly liberal testing regime. The lockdown buys you time to track and test, finding and isolating every single case until the damn virus is either dead or kept at a manageable level. As for what sort of Brave New World emerges, let's not count our chickens until they've hatched.