The law is a ginormous metaphorical Trolley Problem

A little while back I read a nice Aeon piece explaining why the Trolley Problem is so annoying : it's because the details of thought experiments change the moral question the philosopher is trying to ask. Context is critical, and you simply can't generalise to say that it's always wrong to save one person or kill five. The details are essential aspects of the morality of the situation.

This essay neatly explains this in the much more important context of the law. I tried to explain why laws can never be absolute myself, but this does a far more eloquent job. Just like with the Trolley Problem, the law simply can't cover every possible situation. So it strives to generalise as much as possible, to try and get at the underlying morality while preserving an indispensable flexibility.

Thinking back, perhaps some of the problems I had in explaining this stemmed from my implicit definition of "absolute". I take it to mean, in this context, something like "applied entirely literally without exception to anyone under any circumstances, giving the same punishment regardless of any and all extenuating circumstances". This is most definitely absolute, but I hope it's abundantly clear to everyone that this is not at all the same as fair. The law should always be fair, of course, and there's a strong overlap with this meaning "applied equally", but the Venn diagram would most certainly not be two perfectly overlapping circles. When the law is consulted, it's not always a simple as following instructions : some discretion, some judgement, must frequently be applied in how to apply it given the specific case in hand. Sometimes we may even need to disregard it completely.

This is especially relevant for laws which are deliberately made difficult to alter, e.g. constitutions. A legal code written five hundred years ago would have no notion of mass data collection, targeted advertising, organ donation or stem cell research. At best we could look to it for broad guidelines, but we couldn't possibly expect it to provide specific instructions. And sometimes we might find no clues at all. If we take any particular text as gospel, assuming it to be written by some omniscient and infallible entity, we're lost. We can't absolve ourselves of the need to think - and yes, this will mean imperfect, subjective decision-making. But that's the point. All text that was ever written, bar none, was written by flawed individuals suffering from varying degrees of madness. There is no reason to suppose that legal codes are any exception to this.

On, then, to the article.

A publicly accessible list of actions that specifies what each particular individual is allowed to do under what circumstances and when would be equally unworkable. Instead of a body of highly specific edicts indexed to individuals and their situations, we rely on laws. Hart calls them ‘general forms of directions which do not name, and are not addressed to, particular individuals, and do not indicate a particular act to be done’

This doesn't mean that the law should be vague, only that there are some things on which it needs to be specific and some on which it needs to be general. It would have been nice if the article could have generalised the criteria for these but it gives a good gist.

Laws, while general, can still be more or less particular. The balk rule of baseball... applies only to people who are actually engaged in playing the game, and only some of them (the pitchers); players who are not pitchers, and people who are not even playing baseball, can do whatever they want on the mound. Still, there must be some degree of generality. It can’t be that only a certain relief pitcher for the New York Yankees is not allowed to fake the throw.

To preserve their generality and practicality, laws must be relatively simple and straightforward. Built-in exceptions would thwart this purpose. The law doesn’t say: ‘Do not drive over the speed limit, unless you are heading to the hospital for an emergency and are a really good driver.’ It says: ‘Do not drive over the speed limit,’ period.

Which is of course not to say that you can't make exceptions, only that such exceptions cannot and should not be defined in law (unless perhaps when such exceptions are common and clearly morally different, e.g. in some countries you're explicitly allowed to ignore traffic lights after a certain time as highway robberies are so common).

The particularities and peculiarities, major or minor, that make for the variety of human behaviour are typically irrelevant when it is time to decide whether to enforce a law. If you are speeding, your height, weight, income and musical talents don’t matter. If you are underage, then your hipster haircut and the fashionable clothes you’re wearing when you try to buy alcohol will be of no exculpatory help.

Still, differences do sometimes make a difference. There will be occasions when taking account of the particularities of an individual and her situation is appropriate, even obligatory for those charged with implementing the law – if not from a legal perspective then from a moral or practical one. This is where judgment comes in.

In the moral sphere, judgment is a matter of reasonable discrimination. A person with good judgment recognises what is both typical and distinctive about the particular case at hand, and notes whether what is distinctive is relevant. The fact that the man in the grocery store [when buying alcohol and being asked for ID] was obviously decades above the legal drinking age is relevant; the fact that the wine he wanted to buy was a Merlot is not. Circumstances are everything. The police officer who declines to give a speeding ticket to a driver on his way to the hospital because the driver’s wife is in labour in the back seat is making a judgment call.

Which is, of course, where it gets messy and controversial. There simply does not exist some overarching moral principle we can exercise to make judgements, still less some foolproof way to extract the specific from the general. But this doesn't mean we can make any subjective judgement we like. We can't say, "yeah, he was speeding, but he had a really cool pair of sunglasses so that's okay." What stops us from doing this is the need to justify our actions to other people.

No single rule can accommodate the variety and complexity of situations in which humans are required to act and the expectations they are called upon to meet.  A lie that saves a life or even simply eases a friend’s suffering might be permissible. Sometimes, there is no available rule, and we have to rely on deep-seated moral intuitions, or even just feelings of love or kindness, for guidance. Moral agency cannot consist simply in the mechanical application of a universal principle.

Judgment involves acknowledging that the rule has been broken, that the perpetrating party is technically guilty, but also making a conscious choice not to enforce the rule. When using your judgment, you must be prepared, if challenged, to defend that choice with reasons. It is to recognise that the full application of the rule would result in an unjust, or at least undesirable, state of affairs.

This is where the need for checks and balances, often in a triumvirate structure, comes in. You have competing parties presenting arguments and a referee ensuring that they're following the rules of persuasion. The problem of needing an infinite chain of watchers is avoided through separation of powers : some people get to make arguments, others to decide if those arguments are correct, and still others if those arguments follow the agreed-upon rules. Of course this isn't foolproof : if the entire institution is corrupt, or mad, or made of cheese, then it won't work. You have to have some baseline level of competence and morality for it to function correctly. The point is that while you can't eliminate the subjective, capricious element entirely, you can indeed reduce it to acceptable levels. Out of the vague and whimsical ideas churned out by the weird blob of goo that is the human brain, you can sometimes extract something halfway decent. The miracle isn't that we're very good at this, but that it's possible to do it at all.

Judgment is an exercise in discretion: circumstances are everything - Steven Nadler | Aeon Essays

In a high school in Wisconsin, an African American security guard is dealing with a disruptive student, also African American. While being led away by the guard, the student repeatedly calls him a notorious racial slur. The guard tells the student several times: 'Do not call me a [n-word],' using the actual word.

How about a nice Communist revolution then ?

At least I can only assume that's what the author is advocating. Much of the piece appears to be wholly against the notion of private property but without every spelling out what it is he's in favour of. So straw man or no, the obvious inference is that he wants full-blown Communism, in which trenchcoat-wearing officials go around knocking on people's doors and stealing their shoes for the glory of the state.

I'm not saying this is what the author really believes, of course. I'm just saying that this is quite a natural conclusion, and he really should have tried to say if this is what he's getting at or not. As it is, he doesn't really specify any concrete changes at all (except for some token platitudes at the end), just some vague ideals. There's much I agree with in this essay, and much I don't. I'll concentrate on the stuff I support but there are a few points I can't let go.

The real tragedy, however, lies not in the commons, but in the private. It is the private that produces violence, destruction and exclusion. Standing on its head thousands of years of cultural wisdom, the idea of the private variously separates, exploits and exhausts those living under its cold operating logic.

Nowhere does he specify what he means by "the private". By keeping things so absurdly vague, this gives the distinct impression that he means any and all forms of private ownership. Sure, we could try abolishing that, but oh wait, we already did... it really, really didn't end well.

In the midst of a global depression, the US president Franklin D Roosevelt evoked an ‘industrial covenant’ – a commitment to living wages and a right to work for all. During the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr gave voice to the broader idea when he said that no one is free until we are all free. Cultures that fundamentally departed from this awareness usually did not, in the long run, fare well, from the Roman Empire to Nazism or Stalinism.

I'm thoroughly in favour of the general sentiment here - we should seek improvement of the whole, not just the individual - but, seriously, the Roman Empire ? It lasted two thousand years ! And undermining the point even more, it only fell because of rival imperial powers. It wasn't replaced by anything better or out-competed by more collectivist societies (feudalistic hierarchies weren't exactly an improvement, and certainly didn't prioritise the welfare of the common man). See recent post for a review of the different ancient systems of government and the individualist/collectivist tendencies of different societies. There is, sadly, a big difference between the questions, "is it nice ?" and "will it survive ?".

Where would we be without the work and care of others? Without the food from the farmer? Without the electricity and housing and roads and healthcare and education and access to information and hundreds of other things provided to us, day in and day out, often for free, and routinely without us knowing what went into their existence? Seeing ourselves as seemingly free-floating individuals, it’s both easy and convenient to indulge in the delusion that ‘I built it. I worked for it. I earned it.’

The painful flipside are the billions of those who, through no fault of their own, drew the short end of the stick. Those who were born in the wrong country, to the wrong parents, in the wrong school district – ‘wrong’ for no other reason than that their skin colour or religion or talents didn’t happen to be favoured. The limited focus on the individual can here be seen as nakedly serving power: if those who have privilege and wealth presumably earned it, so must those who have pain and hardship deserve it.

Discussed at length here. While I strongly agree with the general sentiment, I don't think we need absolute equality (as the author - at many times - appears to imply). Someone who's worked harder or longer deserves a greater reward. We greatly underestimate the role played by luck and, more importantly, the indirect role of other people, in our own success, but it doesn't follow that the most desirable state is total equality. Nor is that to say that poverty is inevitable - it isn't.

Most definitions of mainstream economics are based on some version of Lionel Robbin’s 1932 definition as the ‘efficient allocation of scarce resources’. The answer to scarcity coupled with people’s presumed desire for more is, of course: keep producing stuff. Not surprisingly, the guiding star for success, of both policymakers and economists around the world, is a crude, if convenient metric – GDP – that does nothing but indiscriminately count final output (more stuff), independent of whether it’s good or bad, whether it creates wellbeing or harm, and notwithstanding that its ongoing growth is unsustainable. It’s circular logic: (1) scarcity makes people have endless needs, so the economy needs to grow; (2) for the economy to grow, people need to have ever more needs.

Here too I'm in strong agreement. We need a better, more holistic measurement of economic success, crucially including sustainability. I just wish the author would suggest something practical beyond stating the (important) ideological points. To repeat : we tried Communism already, and it was an awesome failure. By all means propose an alternative that learns from its mistakes, but don't just re-iterate the problems of unregulated capitalism.

When large corporations, run by people who preach the gospel of the market and private gain, need the public to bail them out, few in power raise the most obvious question: why do you need public money to bail you out if you are supposed to be pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? A deeper question might be: why should wealth and privilege – largely built on the free work of nature and the cheap work of labourers – be rescued, when in trouble, by the very people otherwise deemed ‘disposable’?

By any available measure, capitalism (based on private interest) has generated unprecedented wealth and knowledge. This explosive creation of wealth, however, came, and continues to come, with a steep and exponentially rising price. Powered by fossil fuels, it is both depleting and burning up the planet. Perhaps it’s finally time to recognise the carnage that created the wealth.

We live in a different world now. Whatever might have been justified in the past to overcome poverty and scarcity no longer holds sway. Today, we face an entirely different challenge. Not too little, but too much. Not scarcity, but abundance. We no longer need more, but rather better and more fairly distributed, in order to provide prosperity for all. Collectively, we produce and grow enough for every child, woman and man to have a good and dignified life wherever they live.

And yet, our dominant economic systems continue to follow colonial extraction and brutal exclusion, in the process creating two organically related, existential problems: the perpetuation (and in some cases intensification) of poverty, and the violation of the biophysical limits of our planet. 

Yes ! But at this point I'd like to hear some hard-nosed economics to back this up. The guy's an economic historian so he ought to be able to do this. I agree with the ideology, but that's exactly why it's so necessary to challenge it with data. I might give Ferguson's Civilization a go at some point - he writes from a different perspective in a way I can respect, whereas the present author is writing from my existing perspective but in a way that doesn't add anything new. So this is just reinforcing confirmation bias, which isn't a good thing. Show me some hard data as to the conditions when things work and when they fail.

Instead, we should ask, what do we really value? And how do we measure it? When authors write about economies for the common good, or for the wellbeing of all, they highlight a very different set of values than those, based on private property and private gain, that dominate modern economies today – not efficiency but health and resilience; not the bottom line but collective wellbeing. 

Most civilisational traditions agree that everyone brought into this world should have an equal claim to thrive. If we follow those traditions, we must conclude that cultures ‘already parcelled out’ into private property and wealth are morally bankrupt. They value the private over people.

But, look man, what is it you're actually advocating ? Burning everyone's house down ? Stealing their cars ? You need to explicitly deny this, otherwise you sound like you're longing for a second season of Russia : The Soviet Years. "Let's all be more collectivist" is a fine sentiment, but I see no inherent conflict in being individuals with private property who want to contribute to the common good. Self-improvement requires a measure of self-interest and even selfishness.

The challenge of reclaiming the commons from capitalism - Dirk Philipsen | Aeon Essays

I've witnessed massive swarms of fireflies grace my garden like never before, drawn to the air cleansed of our arrogant greed, their glow a flashback to the time before us, omen of Earth without us, a reminder we're never immune to nature.

Yo Dawg, Heard You Like Thinking

 ... so we gave you this Aeon piece about thinking about thinking so you can think about what you think.

But I digress.

This is an interesting piece on the interplay between language and thought. In essence : where do thoughts come from ? Does language only express what we're thinking or does it also shape and enable it ?

For my part, as I've probably mentioned before, I've always found it interesting that I'm able to think in complete sentences. This means that the process of assembling the sentences - that is, articulating what I want to say - must be done at a deeper, subconscious level, otherwise I'd just spew at random works with all the eloquent coherency of an American president.

Taken to extremes, this means that language is just some way of expressing, storing and conveying what it is we're really thinking. Articulation crystallises our thoughts into something more real, something we can easily reach back to and trigger that essential essence we began with. There's a very interesting everyday experience which occurs most often when thinking about something complex, or when a memory is on the tip of the tongue; the moment when you have that literally indescribable awareness and understanding of the deeper thought process but are unable to capture it in words. Eventually, usually, something snaps in the mind and you find some way to express it verbally (or otherwise), generally capturing the vital essence of the original in a handy, far more memorable form. It's like diving through a cloudy sea and clutching the solid pearls of wisdom, or, more commonly, cat memes.

This process is not perfect. Language seldom ever captures our original thoughts and feelings perfectly even to ourselves, and while it may succeed in recreating that deeper process in us, it's less successful at triggering an identical response in others. But it's usually good enough to make ourselves understood, and often the flaws are helpful by accidentally invoking ideas we might not have otherwise had. It does a good enough job to get us through the day, but it itself, in this view, is not what we're thinking on the deepest level.

But there's also at the very least an interplay between language and thought itself. This is somewhat easier to see with visual art. One begins with a vague image in one's head, but the act of physically expressing it changes it from the original concept - sometimes subtly, sometimes wholesale. Likewise when you say something, sometimes you realise that isn't what you meant at all. Language is also a process of discovering what it is you're really thinking as well as being, at least on a very shallow level, itself a thought process.

The tricky part, then, is the nature of this deeper underlying thought. How can you think something in words that you haven't already expressed in words ? If it's not language, then what the heck is it ? How do you begin to analyse something which you can't even - by definition - describe ? Paradoxical indeed...

What is it for a thought to be clear? What made our initial thought unclear? And how do we make a thought clear, in the relevant sense? These questions engage fundamental issues about the relation between thought and language, and between the unconscious and conscious mind. 

The point of searching for words, in the hard cases, is to clarify what we’re thinking; and the clarity that we’re after seems to consist in the knowledge that we’re thinking some specific thought. At the same time, our choices of words make sense to us, and so it seems that we must make them for a reason. But it is hard to see how we could have a reason to accept or reject any words if we don’t already know which thought we’re trying to express.

In describing a picture or translating a sentence into another language, we have the picture or sentence clearly in mind and search for the words that would fit it. We can’t select the appropriate words unless we know what the picture depicts or the sentence says. So, if our goal is to express a particular thought, it’s unclear how we could select the appropriate means for achieving it, if we’re ignorant of what we’re thinking.

Consider an analogous case: emotional expression. In her account of emotional expression, the philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse in 1991 argues that many actions expressive of emotions can’t be explained in terms of reasons at all: I might allow myself to smash a vase in the grip of anger, but I don’t deliberate and decide to do it for the reason that it would optimally express my mental state.

Could we therefore say that an emotion is something akin to a direct thought, the more fundamental substrate from which we articulate our deeper thoughts into language and images ? Maybe.

[In contrast] Articulating a thought takes sensitivity, flexibility, attention and care. Articulating my objection to the government measure is manifestly something that I do rather than something compulsory that overtakes me. Although the process is controlled by the thought, it is simultaneously controlled by me. There lies an intriguing feature of our involvement in articulation. Once the process is underway, I can become absorbed in it and experience myself as intentionally carrying it out. The words that I produce are deliberate not in the sense of being deliberately selected but in the sense of being unimpeded by internal censorship or constraint. 

This understanding of articulation provides a way out of the paradox by showing how we can not only recognise but, also, actively produce the words that express our thoughts without drawing on any explicit knowledge of what we’re thinking.

I'm not sure how that helps though. It seems to me it just opens up the age-old questions of what we really mean by the self and free will. What does it mean to say that I am actively producing words ? I certainly do feel like I'm in control of my thoughts - at least some of them - but what is this "I" and how the hell does it work ? How does my non-physical self influence the physiological processes occuring in my brain ? How could we produce the same effect in a computer ? It's a very nice article, to be sure, but ultimately all it does (indeed, all it can do) is articulate the problems, not address them.

What comes first: ideas or words? The paradox of articulation - Eli Alshanetsky | Aeon Essays

I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again.

Review : An Anthropologist On Mars

Continuing my trend of picking up cheap books I would not otherwise give a second glance at. A random assortment of seven unusual neurological conditions, all wrapped in a silly title* and a proverbially bland cover ? Doesn't seem like my thing at all, really.

*It isn't really, of course. I just tend to prefer more direct sales pitches.

(Also, as an aside, never use Goodreads. The comments there have an incredibly high fraction of morons.)

Once again I was delighted to be wrong. What made me decide to give it a go was the philosophical aspect. Rather than stating the surface conditions, the behavioural problems and the details of neurology (which even in the outstanding The Idiot Brain did at times feel like a litany of which bit of the brain does what), Sacks concentrates on the subjective aspect of what it's like to be someone experiencing these conditions. Just because we can't know for sure doesn't mean we can't try.

Sacks never falls into the obvious trap of creating a freak show. He writes with warmth and compassion for what are at times tragic conditions, emphasising that these are real people as entitled to dignified treatment - both medically and socially - as much as anyone else. The philosophical aspect is kept very much implicit (he only mentions qualia once), but it's no less interesting for that.

Overall, what emerges is a world view far more subjective than we often suppose. That is not, to nip the idea in the bud, at all to say that reality itself is subjective - it isn't. But our perception of it is essentially totally subjective. What we perceive has to be broadly self-consistent, but there's no particular reason our internal reality has to be anything like the way it happens to be. For many people, their entire inner world is radically different to that of the rest of us.

Perhaps the easiest examples of this to understand concern vision. Sacks details an extreme case of a painter who, through an accident, overnight became entirely colour blind. Not just the usual red-green colour blind, but perceiving the world in something like greyscale. But not exactly like slipping on a pair of nightvision goggles : something altogether stranger was at work, almost like perceiving a colour entirely different to anything we usually see, with a contrast range that was extremely sensitive to context. Initially tragic for an artist dependent on colour, he eventually came to terms with - and even embraced - living in a fundamentally altered world.

Motion blindness is sadly mentioned only in massing, but is even weirder. Like a reverse T-Rex, sufferers cannot sense motion. They can see objects, but their brain is unable to register movement correctly. When something as fundamental as movement is perceived subjectively, the idea that our eye is something equivalent to an objective camera would seem to be nothing more than an exceptionally common but blatant fallacy.

Just how far this goes is demonstrated by a patient who had his vision restored decades after going blind as a child. We're all familiar with optical illusions, but we tend to think of them as demonstrating some weird quirks. Not so - they actually reveal just how fundamentally subjective our vision is.

I once had my my ears bunged up for a few days. After they were syringed - a pretty icky and thoroughly weird experience - I was expecting it to be like that moment when your ears un-pop after a flight, or if you've got a bad cold : fully restored to normal in a singular moment of blessed relief. But it wasn't like that at all. Initially I was worried something was wrong. I could hear all kinds of strange noises, which I gradually realised were the doctor adjusting some equipment way across the room. The slightest sound was clearer and more distinct than I'd ever experienced before, a strange but not unpleasant experience. Pretty soon though, my brain decided this superpower was unnecessary and after a few days everything was normal again.

In the case of vision, it seems that something analogous can occur if the loss was only for a short period. But with a period lasting decades (perhaps especially with the loss occuring in early childhood), things are not the same at all. The brain loses all of its heuristics for making sense of the world. Far from seeing the world directly, it's more like we're constantly reading the images around us, transforming raw shapes and colours into meaningful objects : tables, kittens, boobies, dinosaur ninja pirates, and so on. Without these heuristic tricks, the poor patient had to learn to read the world essentially from scratch. As with hearing, there wasn't a moment of revelation, no pulling back the veil - but things were, unfortunately, so much worse than that.

With a lifetime of exploring the world through touch and sound, vision meant very little to him. His was formerly a world of time, with no concept of distance. Motion blindness ? With even space itself being a new idea, he had far more difficult challenges. Suddenly this new sense was thrust upon him and the experience was overwhelming, particularly as everyone around him fully expected an awakening, an instantaneous moment of clarity, and could not understand the scale of the change he was experiencing. Even perceiving shapes and colours was difficult. He went through a highly variable process, sometimes able to perceive colour but not shape. At other times he experienced blindsight, the condition in which the brain processes the visual signals unconsciously, with no conscious awareness of it at all.

But blindsight may not be as weird as his generally condition. Arguably we all do something like blindsight when we daydream, but what he had most of the time was the reverse of this : his brain was not doing any of the unconscious processing of the visual signals. He could see, consciously, a flower or his wife but have absolutely no idea what they were. The visual information was all there but simply had no meaning. He did, to some degree, eventually learn to read the world visually, but never achieved the fluency that most of us take for granted.

"Meaning" is a running theme throughout the book, and goes far beyond vision or the other senses. Sacks focuses particularly on autism. While the sighted usually take the idea of distance for granted, most people are able to take the idea of meaning itself as a given (the only time we'd try and define it is as a philosophical exercise). But the autistic, and those with similar conditions, do not have this. They can know things without understanding them in the slightest. They might "know" what being happy is but never experience it for themselves. Or, less debilitatingly but no less strange, they may be completely enthralled by (say) music or drawing, but have little or no understanding of anything else. They can have normal (or sometimes extreme) intelligence and emotional awareness but only in very specific areas, with otherwise vacant individuals becoming essentially non-autistic when confronting their field of interest. Sometimes they can learn to judge the emotions of others, even predict how they'll react, but still have absolutely no idea of why people react in a certain way. They have no in-built theory of mind at all; everything they do to understand people is done consciously.

There are definitely hints here that intelligence can be remarkably specific. Rather than being a general property, intelligence itself - not just knowledge, but the very capacity for understanding and problem-solving - can be limited to incredibly specific areas : music, mathematics, dance, animal psychology. It's not that they're just not interested, it's that they fundamentally cannot understand anything outside a narrow area.

Often this is simply tragic - there's no compensating ability, no way for them to productively interact with the world. Their seems a great deal of controversy over whether they're emotional but unable to express themselves or genuinely lack emotions, or if they're triggered differently to the rest of us. Many need constant help. But others do manage to get by by themselves, and sometimes achieve great success - albeit not without issues. There's more than a little of the stereotypical scientist about the whole thing :

What one does see in Temple's writings are peculiar narrational gaps and discontinuities, sudden, perplexing changes of topic, brought about by Temple's "failure to appreciate her reader does not share the important background information she possesses". In more general terms, autistic writers seem to get "out of tune" with their readers, fail[ing] to realise their own or their readers' state of mind.

A more perfect description of an academic paper I cannot imagine. Small wonder that the negative stereotype of a scientist is someone broken ! But then of course we can flip this around : as an astronomer, I just "don't get" why more people aren't thrilled about galaxies. I don't get the appeal of team sports or why you'd rabidly follow the antics of brain-dead celebrities. That, of course, is very different to lacking a "theory of mind" - even the most inane socialite could probably at least realise when I'm thrilled about some discovery without understanding it, just as I could understand said socialite's idiotic glee at the new outfit some washed-up actor has dredged up.

Nonetheless, there are similarities between obsession and autism. While it's obvious specialist knowledge does not automatically translate into expertise in other fields, perhaps it's more fundamental than that. Perhaps intelligence is not some global, general property at all, but a multiplicity of abilities, a plurality of interests that can be aligned in remarkably specific ways. The evil genius may be more than about an inability to overcome personal bias : someone could be conceivably exceptionally talented at gaining power but have no clue whatever as to how to use it.

Sack's book is a mixture of the tragic and the hopeful. Some of these conditions are simply awful and ultimately fatal. But others can, if managed properly, bring advantages as well as disadvantages, with individuals having unique and valuable perspectives and abilities. I suspect Sacks would have some sympathy for the idea of "neurodiversity", with at least some of the autistic fiercely defending their condition as an integral and important part of their identity. Some conditions undoubtedly do need treatment. Others may only need compassion and acceptance.

Review : Ancient Worlds

I have to say that the blurb for for Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds gave me very "meh" feelings and I only picked it up because I was in a budget bookshop. I tend to gravitate towards highly focused, narrative histories, so this epic world(ish) history of connections between different civilisations seemed like something that wouldn't normally be my thing.

Much to my delight, the only thing Scott writes badly is the description of his own writing. Yes, there's some commentary on hitherto under-appreciated connections between East and West, but that's not really what the book is about. Mainly it's about how different ancient civilizations responded to different external and internal pressures, and the resulting changes this produced in their systems of government and societies. This is firmly in the realm of my other favourite sort of history : interpretative history, where the author attempts to extract general trends from specific cases. And since understanding how society works could hardly be more important at the present time, I give this a very solid 8/10 overall.

(I would note, though, that as a standard history this is pretty rubbish. The focus is on how and why things happened with only a bare minimum of the more fundamental what. Start with (e.g.) Tom Holland before going for this one.)

The book is organised in three parts. The first looks largely at the different internal political systems in ancient societies (mainly Greece, Rome, and China), essentially man's relation to man. The second looks more at the relations between those different societies. The third looks at man's relation to the divine and the role religion played in social organisation. All three are well done, but I found the first much the most interesting as it had the most refreshing perspective, stripped of modern ideologies of the inestimable virtues of democracy without denigrating it in the slightest. The second section is more of a standard narrative history, well-told but not very original (though I learned a lot about the Seleucids, who are too often overlooked), while the third is somewhat in between the two. 

I'll limit myself here to how Scott views the different forms of government, which I found to be much the most engaging aspect. It's often said that democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others, but is that really true ?

The origin of ancient democracy is sometimes mythologised as a single revolutionary event. Scott argues that it wasn't like this at all, but a gradual development. Athens did eventually have its famous direct democracy, but only after the Persian Wars, not during the invasion themselves*. Its route to democracy had arguably begun much earlier, as the lawmaker Solon sought to give each sector of society a "fair" distribution of power - fair only meaning more equal than previously, not actually equal. Rome began down a similar path, even sending delegations to Athens to learn about its system of government. Both such societies emerged from the shackles of tyranny, but neither immediately went for direct people power.

* Indeed, the word "democracy" wasn't even in use at the time. Ancient interpretations of what it actually meant varied from the extreme of Athenian mob rule to simply electing an outright despot. Modern interpretations are similarly complex.

Why did the two later diverge ? Circumstance. Scott is very, very good at stressing how both wider, underlying systematic context and the role of specific events and individual actions can be influential. In this case, the naval battle of Salamis. Infantry battles were limited to the rich elites, but naval battles required the common man. Having played such a vital stake in the survival of the city, ordinary Athenian citizens weren't about to be put back in their place. But neither did the elites particular want to even try : by elevating everyone to a quasi-equal status, the proto-democracy had already enabled the city to field far larger armies than it possibly could under a monarchy or tyranny. That the next step of total equality led to a powerful navy as well was a major advantage to everyone, not a hindrance. Democracy, then, in Scott's view was born more by happenstance and accident than any grand ideological plan, born more from warfare than of welfare.

And especially war ! This is wonderfully counter-intuitive to the modern era, but in the ancient system, Scott stresses quite heavily how much more advantageous a more equal system was to the army. Always careful to keep his interpretations separate from the raw facts, he takes an evolutionary perspective : similar pressures only give rise to similar outcomes in similar situations. Rome, in contrast to Athens, didn't have such a pivotal naval moment as Salamis. It had no key event where sheer people power would result in a full democratic process - its major battles were all infantry-based. Consequently it continued with its middling road of a Republic, neither excessisively tyrannical to the masses but not giving them all that much clout either. Its system, in some ways, was much closer to the modern system of representative government than the direct democracy of Athens.

(It would have been nice to have some comments on the modern perception that war leads to authoritarianism rather than greater freedom. Obviously the particular societies are markedly different, but it's so counter-intutitive to invoke war as leading to freedom that some effort to explain this would have been very welcome.)

China, on the other hand, didn't face the same external threat as Greece but it did have internal warfare on an epic scale. It had similarities and differences to both Greece and Rome. The continual need for infantry-based defence kept power in the hands of the elites, while the enormous logistical demands encouraged the development of an efficient administrative state. Indeed, who the ruler was ultimately didn't matter very much, with most of the decisions taken by the civil service. This produced not a true monarchy or dictatorship, but a hereditary oligarchy, a cast system that ensured a smooth transfer of power. This was very different to the somewhat socially mobile society of Rome and in stark contrast to the totally socially mobile world of Athens, in which every citizen was expected to do a wide variety of jobs and participate in the government at some point in their lives. 

The Athenian system was far more pleasant for the commoners than Rome's - even Plato conceded that democracies are nice places to live while they last. His concern was more that they didn't last, and Scott vindicates this. Of all the dozens of different democracies of time, none lasted more than a few generations. Rome, by contrast, went on to rule the world, albeit becoming an autocratic empire in the processes. Even given the powerful role of chance, this seems like more than a coincidence.

Having this broad trend highlighted is very informative. If you focus more on the minutiae, the overwhelming feeling I get from reading pretty much any part of Roman history was just how perpetually unstable it was. But even its Republican phase endured substantially longer than any ancient democratic system, as though its very instability was a source of strength, perhaps more a measure of flexibility and adaptability than genuine chaos. Not that it was perfect. Scott notes the weakness of the short-term, dual consularship system in which military glory was seen as the pinnacle of achievement, citing the miserable failures against Hannibal as evidence of this (Carthage itself seems to have a similar system to Rome but suffered from much greater corruption). Then as now, short-termism was a problem.

Ironically the solution was sometimes to double down. Yet while the Republic could and did invoke dictators to rule in emergencies, it did so only rarely. Of course we all know how this eventually ended, but what's more remarkable is just how long this lasted - it was very rarely used, and when it was, there was little enough threat (until the end, by which point the Republic was on its last legs anyway) of the dictator failing to relinquish power. Scott describes the Roman's idealised example of Cincinnatus, who was summoned from his farm to lead the army against some invading tribes, and then two weeks later returned to his farm without a fuss. The powers of a dictator were clearly limited to addressing a specific task, not used for constitutional reform. I suppose this was partly necessary in a society where the Commander In Chief was personally taking to the battlefield and waving a sword around, rather than consulting with generals and pushing little model troops around with a big stick over a nice cup of tea.

It's not just all about warfare though - far from it. Scott lucidly sets out just how strange the highly individualistic philosophy of Socrates, now widely held as a paragon of virtue, would have seemed to societies in which selfless duty to the state was seen as the highest goal. Ironically, self-improvement requires selfishness. There was no need for Cincinnatus to have the slightest bit of concern for his own moral well-being so long as he did his duty, and in the even more egalitarian society of Athens, the "unexamined life is not worth living" philosophy of Socrates would have been genuinely difficult for most to comprehend. Athens was all about the group; for someone to focus on the individual so much would have been weird indeed. 

This goes some way to explaining why Socrates (and similarly Confucius) was so unpopular - he went fully against the ideals of the state. Socrates, in a sense, really did corrupt the youth against Athenian ideals. Likewise Plato's fixation in his Republic with a single individual doing a single job is revealed as a direct counter to the democratic system in which individuals were expected and required to do many jobs. And whereas Republican Rome viewed different social strata as having different but always important functions (analogising the state to a human body), such a perspective made no sense in fully democratic Athens. In the Roman views, this free-for-all system was like having a ship without a captain : ultimately doomed.

Democracy at the time was not something other societies particularly yearned after even by their intellectual elites - it just didn't work all that well. The Roman Republic was viewed by its supporters as having the ideal mix of elements : monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy could all be found within it (similarly Plato speculated that an ideal system would be a blend of methods rather than one or another). Of course this didn't last forever, and it's a shame Scott doesn't have more to say about the stresses that transformed the Republic to the Empire (Tom Holland's Rubicon has a great narrative, but Scott is more skilled at drawing out the general trends and reasons; Gibbon viewed the empire's system of appointing rulers as being meritocratic, on the occasions when it functioned properly).

You'll forgive me for skipping over the rest of the book. Scott has equally insightful commentary on the development of ancient religions, again citing similar pressures that led to similar ideas going virial. I found his view of Constantine, much the most difficult of the major Roman emperors to understand, as a ruthless but genuinely tolerant ruler to be very refreshing. Likewise he notes the impact of religion on how societies were governed : how diversity of beliefs was sometimes a strength but sometimes a polarising weakness, how different rulers sought to use religion to their own secular purposes, and how innately peaceful religions were sometimes (but not always) corrupted to warfare. And I've skipped entirely his narrative of the Seleucid Empire and India, all of which is well worth reading.

But it's the system of government that most interested me. The overall impression I had is that we've no right at all to treat our modern systems as stable. When we take the long view of history, most modern democracies haven't even lasted as long as the ancient experiments. Yet the systems themselves and the pressures they face are also different, and exactly how it will play out is anyone's guess. Democracy may indeed be the least awful form of government, but whether or not they're stable, or innately doomed to regress to authoritarianism... that remains to be seen.

Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West

My book, "Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West" was published by Hutchinson (UK and Commonwealth) on 1st July 2016 in hardback and in January 2017 in paperback - order your copy here!

A path to prosperity

As y'all know, one of my hobbies is thinking about how to make the world a better place. To that end I've ventured a different decision-making system to the current political shitstorm in which everyone hurls their own faeces at each other until something sticks, and I think there's much merit in it. A better decision-making process is by definition a good thing. It's important to realise that the fact we know of better, more cooperative approaches to problem-solving does not automatically mean we know what the specific solutions actually are. The point is that we combine expertise and diversity in a better way than we do presently, but, not being experts ourselves, by definition we won't be able to propose the actual solutions.

To my mind, fixing the decision-making system is of paramount importance because it's the root of the problems. If we keep insisting that the existing processes are fine, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they are not, we'll just keep shouting at each other to no avail, getting ever more angry and ineffectual. We have to fix how we decide things, or we'll end up deciding nothing - or worse, oscillating between diametrically-opposed positions with no kind of sensible compromise. At best, we'll lurch forward in an unpleasantly dynamic dystopia.

All that being true, this feels a little bit of a cheap cop-out that avoids suggesting any practical answers. It's surely helpful to have a broad end goal (and underlying principles) in mind, if only to illuminate the problems we're trying to solve. So what would my personal utopia look like ? While I'm not ready to venture a fully-fledged design of the Grand Duchy of Rhysyland, as it would obviously be known, let's see if we can make a start.

Let's do this by combining a few different strands of thought here from various social media sources. First, Joe Carter has a very nice post outlining the development of the species and how we evolved to live in conditions different from those we've created for ourselves. Setting aside (valuable) criticisms of evolutionary psychology, I don't think anyone could doubt this basic premise. It's difficult to say exactly what our distant ancestors thought and felt, but that we evolved in radically different conditions than those we now "enjoy" (in a very loose sense, because it's 2020), and therefore different selection pressures were at work, is - I think - undeniable. At the end he concludes with three questions :

• What would you say we need to do differently on a personal and community scale?
• Do you consider yourself a contributor to what will move us forward as a species?
• What can we do better as individuals and as groups to help us get our “sea legs” to successfully navigate the necessities of current developmental place as a species?

Likewise, Nila Jones asks the question (in a private post) :

Imagine it’s 15 years from now. We have made it through the current time, and things are ok. What does our world look like? What does our society look like? What did we do to help get there from here?

One answer comes in this charming Existential Comics, in which an ideal society is posited to be, "pretty much the same, except we tax the rich like 6% more !" I have to admit I have some sympathies for this, I hope not without justification. Materially at least the Western world is still, largely, thriving. Basic sanitation and disease control - the current pandemic notwithstanding - are taken for granted, along with clean, warm shelter, and access to information undreamt of by previous generations. The world is hardly perfect, but it's a catastrophic error to assume it has no value whatsoever.

At the same time, whatever Stephen Pinker might say, a lot of people are clearly very unhappy with their lot in life despite the lowliest commoner now being materially far better off than any of their ancestors. But I suspect measurements run into several problems here : people are not all that good at evaluating their own happiness; they can be justifiably unhappy on behalf of other people's ill treatment if not their own (and worry for the future does not necessarily alleviate present happiness); and you can't really know what someone's experience is really like unless you live it - quantitative measurements are misleading. Material improvements can disguise deep and crippling problems.

Elsewhere, Edward Morbius asks similar questions :

What are the Big Problems? Optionally: who is (or isn’t) successfully addressing them. Individuals, organizations, companies, governments, other. How and/or why not?

He also notes that the answer, "everyone should be cleverer !"(i.e. the problem is just human stupidity) simply does not work. You can't have everyone being equally successful at applying critical thinking to every single area because, he says :

That specifically Does. Not. Scale. It fails two ways:

1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.
2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).

There is, I’ll posit, a broad gulf between “verify everything” and “be prepared to question any belief”.

So, we want a better world. How do we get there, accepting that despair is a luxury we cannot afford and that we are not an innately irredeemably stupid species ?

During the Brexit crisis I developed a habit of asking myself, "what is the best, most reasonable way politicians could proceed right now, accepting the poor decisions they've made prior to this point and that the more ideal solutions are simply not possible ?". Let's apply this on a larger scale and sketch a possible, optimistic timeline (not a prediction !) of the next couple of decades. In this way we can trace an outline of the major problems (both resulting from individual poeople and their organisational systems), the decisions that will need to be taken to overcome them, and even a few thoughts as to what it is we as individuals need to do to ensure they're enacted. I'd welcome alternative visions here, especially as I have a strong Anglo-American bias.

(Also, this exercise is itself a partial answer to what we can do as individuals : we can articulate not just what it is we think is wrong with the world, but what improvements we'd like to see. There's no point starting a revolution unless you have some idea of where you want to end up.)

c2020-2025

• America decisively elects Joe Biden as President. Contrary to the more dire predictions, any efforts on Trump's part to contest the result are short-lived and any protests are localised and utterly ineffectual.  (Trump is then found guilty of crimes against common sense and is sent to a stockade, where small children delight in pelting him with tomatoes and constantly jeer at him that he's "not as good as Obama". On release, he inexplicably falls into a pit of plague-infected vipers and dies horribly.)

This relies almost entirely on voters not being brain dead. There's not much we as individuals can do at this stage, except continue campaigning if you're into that sort of thing.

• A better way to avoiding the worst effects of COVID-19 is found that doesn't require such drastic economic hits. Politicians start better supporting alternative approaches to business, e.g. relocation to the suburbs to better support working from home, more home delivery services, a better outreach campaign that actually succeeds in the public almost entirely following the rules, until eventually a vaccine is found and the pandemic declines to a manageable, if still unpleasant, level. The situation isn't good, but it becomes bearable.

Here the responsible parties are largely the political leaders and their scientific advisors. The only thing we as individuals can do is contact them to tell them what we need as well as what they're doing wrong. It's not enough for us to just complain, we need to present alternatives.

• The UK reaches a trade deal with the EU, initially held together mainly by sheer hope despite the prospect of the internal market bill allowing it to break international law. The EU grumbles and puts up with this until Boris Johnson continues sliding in popularity and, seeing a resurgent Labour as a very serious threat, is replaced by a more traditional Tory. Much of the mad Brexiteer cabinet is replaced with people with some degree of competence, significantly helping with crisis management. A less adversarial approach to dealing with the EU is adopted, aligning the UK closer to its neighbouring counties.  (Dominic Cummings is removed from government with much rejoicing and is forever the butt of "Should Have Gone To Specsavers" jokes. Subsequently he dies in an bizarre jousting accident with an optician in Barnard Castle.)

This one is dependent largely on happenstance and individual leaders. It's a plausible occurrence but there's not much any of us can do to make it more probable. 

• Green economic deals become prevalent, generating massive investment in renewable energy sources and creating new jobs. Investment in fossil fuels dwindles to negligible levels. Small-scale testing of geoengineering projects is intensified as a supplementary approach to dealing with climate change, recognising that we need to clean up the mess we've already made as well as halting the ongoing damage.

Another systemic, governmental problem. We can and should try and limit our energy usage but the pandemic has decisively shown that this doesn't get us very far. More important by far is to switch to better energy sources - if you have the luxury of choosing where your energy comes from, do so. Raising awareness of geoengineering schemes (in which I include solutions such as planting trees and high intensity grazing, along with direct carbon capture by more artificial means) is important, but ultimately the solution is technological and economic, to make different energy generation techniques affordable. We have to not merely make fossil fuels unprofitable, perhaps through taxation, but their replacements actually generate profit themselves.

• The success of the BLM movement makes it politically untenable for governments to avoid addressing structural inequalities, both in terms of race and poverty. Societies slowly begin to accept that most suffering is the fault of the oppressors and not the oppressed.

Depends on the ability of protestors to persuade people that what they're campaigning for is in everyone's best interests. Everyone can join in this one - the hard part is that it means talking to people we don't much like talking to. Ideally, we need a much wider movement based around a single unifying principle, as well as (or better yet in addition to) specific causes.

• America begins reform of its system of government, forbidding politicians from appointing judges, removing the electoral college system, etc. Equivalent (but not equal) reforms are needed in Britain but won't happen during this period because the Tories will still be in charge.  

Without this, the system is barely functional. Tackling the root cause of unfairness needs to be a matter of urgency and not something you tinker with when you have the time. I daresay many other countries also need reform, but I don't know enough about them to comment.

c2025-2030

• Widespread distribution of a vaccine brings the pandemic to an effective end, except for local outbreaks here and there. Society returns to something which is not all that different from the old normal but with some significant differences : working from home is now not unusual, working hours are generally slightly shorter but with more of a blur between home and work life. Daily commuting is a thing of the past for most, as is the idea of a regular 9-5 shift, with flexibility of working hours being far greater.

Unlike many of the others, something like this feels like a natural, inevitable progression, and relies only weakly on individuals requesting it. As businesses realise that there's absolutely no need for a 9-5 slog, and that they don't need to buy or maintain expensive office buildings, their use will fade. This won't, however, be uniform by any means.

• Joe Biden does not run for a second term but is replaced by a more progressive candidate. Labour gain power in a coalition of the left in the UK. The UK aligns itself so closely with the EU that it might as well not have left, and talk of eventually rejoining begins to sound less like fantasy. A conscious effort is made towards a more proportional, cooperative political system with stronger, more decentralised system of local government. This is in part assisted by reduced working hours that allow people the time needed to become more active citizens. The system is entirely state funded and donations (of any kind) to political parties become criminalised.

I doubt very much any serious long-term political reforms are going to happen under the prevailing establishments. Any system which says, "Donald Trump should be elected", rather than, say, "Donald Trump should be shat on", is fundamentally broken. Likewise there's something amiss when the UK keeps electing people to office who claim expenses on cleaning their moat. Sweeping electoral reform is needed, not least a system which allows the formation of a less idiotic, more unified left that actually wants to win power and not just shout hopelessly from the sidelines. The difficult part is persuading those currently at an advantage that a new system would be fairer and advantageous to them as well as the opposition.

• A movement against giant corporations gains strength, recognising that monopoly-like control is inherently flawed and anti-capitalist. With a very few exceptions, the largest companies begin to be broken up. Much greater restrictions are placed on corporation size. The number of new billionaires falls sharply. Most essential services are nationalised, though private sector alternatives are allowed and even encouraged for the wealthy.

Excessive wealth inequality begets an absurd concentration of power and influence, which is unfortunately inherently difficult to overcome. But not impossible. There needs to be sufficient demand from the bottom for government to enact the necessary regulations. This means raising awareness of just how much better life would be if money were more equally distributed, rather than going into endless corporate profits built on the backs of underpaid underlings, and how fewer companies means a lack of the competitive aspect of capitalism which is otherwise one of its strengths. As individuals, we can switch our services to smaller companies (and use open-source alternatives wherever possible) and spread the word of better alternatives, but ultimately reducing monopolies of power requires legislation. Sheer resources are just too effective and tempting a means of crushing the opposition.

• More radical economic and social policies (e.g. some form of basic income, wealth taxes, maximum wage, free housing for the homeless) begin to be trialled on large scales, acknowledging that economic inequality does not reflect meritocracy but luck, with simple resources being the major factor that keeps people in their economic conditions. 

Some of these are already in progress on very limited scales. There's already a substantial movement for UBI, but what would really vitalise it would be demonstrations that it's affordable (and potentially requiring a smaller state bureaucracy with far less cheating and corruption) . The left needs to win the ideological argument that subsidising individuals can lead to sustainable self-sufficiency rather than perpetual laziness.

• Fossil fuels begin a steep decline. Electric cars and other road vehicles begin to come of age, with range anxiety a thing of the past. However, fossil fuels are by no means gone, and there's heavy investment in various direct carbon capture technologies and other geoengineering schemes.

As previously, this is mainly a technological-driven change.

• Media empires begin to collapse. The major networks still exist, but individual outlets tend to be self-owned and not part of larger corporations. Much greater restrictions are placed on political opinion pieces. All outlets are required to represent all parts of the political spectrum and are forbidden from outright supporting any party or candidate.

A purely free-market driven approach to the media is, very possibly, one of the worst ideas in the history of civilisation. We're paying people our hard-earned money to sell us lies that make us angry, afraid, and stupid. This. Must. End. We don't necessarily have to regulate what's said, but we do need to prevent the growth of uniform media monopolies. Without a diversity of opinion, we don't have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense of the term - just a bunch of nutters spouting drivel.

c2030-2040

It's harder to speculate what we can actually do to contribute to events this far away, but I shall at least outline what I'd like to see happen.

• Having set ourselves on the road to success, the challenge becomes maintenance. This requires radical constitutional reform that prevents the bullshit politics of the previous decades. The Great Dullening will see politics become ever-more boring, to the point where if anyone says of a politician, "but he's do dull !", passers-by will slap them and scream, "REMEMBER 2020, YOU FUCKWIT !". Most of the practical measures here will be consolidating the changes of the previous era, generating and supporting movements against populism and polarisation.

• Philosophy courses are introduced in all levels of schools. While not everyone can or should try and verify everything at all times, it's considered essential to know how to spot the basic flaws in an argument. People are taught, somehow, to genuinely care if people are lying to them or not. They get very angry if politicians are caught doing telling fibs and are taught not to get involved with things they don't understand. The media include far more international coverage so that different countries can learn from each other.

• Population levels begin an almost unconscious decline. Supplemented with UBI (or equivalent) and much greater automation, living standards are maintained and even improved.

• Rewilding schemes begin to reclaim areas of land formerly used for farming. Lab-grown foods begin to replace the needs for huge tracts of land for cattle, thus precipitating local extinctions of cows and chickens. Eco-tourism becomes the new thing. Consumerism becomes seen as a sign of self-indulgent vanity. Superyachts are repossessed and converted into the foundations of new coral reefs.

• The entire military industrial complex collapses for some reason and is replaced with a series of garden centres and second-hand charity bookshops. Russia falls into the sea and North Korea gives up. Everyone lives happily ever after. End of history.

Super Spreaders Are Super Statistical

The usefulness of statistical parameters is hugely context-dependent. Even very simple quantities like the mean and standard deviation don't always give meaningful information. The latter is particularly vulnerable : if the distribution is indeed close to Gaussian then it's invaluable, but if it isn't, then it can be woefully misleading. But even the simple mean or median isn't immune - you can have data sets which simply don't have "typical" values that could be described by a single, simple parameter. Of course, this doesn't mean statistics is useless (far from it !), only that actually understanding what you're measuring is not so straightforward.

In the context of the pandemic, this article from The Atlantic does the best job I've yet seen of explaining why the R number is misleading. I've seen references to the "k" value before but they weren't so well-explained and I didn't really get it until now. That said, without any fear of hypocrisy I have to say that this article is far, far too long. The important bits can be reduced to a few paragraphs.

The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic — or our preventive practices.

A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it. This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. 

It makes some degree of intuitive sense that if the spread is dominated by the super spreaders, then it will be unpredictable and chaotic and not follow any neat expectations. But who are these super spreaders ? Are they a particular demographic, some group who are naturally more infectious, or is it more a function of behaviour and/or environment ? According to this it seems to be mainly environmental, but not all factors are yet accounted for.

In study after study, we see that super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated, indoor environments where many people congregate over time—weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, and such—especially when there is loud talking or singing without masks... Cevik identifies “prolonged contact, poor ventilation, [a] highly infectious person, [and] crowding” as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can also occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air and accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor. 

So does the R number even really mean anything, or is it so strongly dependent on environment and other factors that we can't actually say if someone typically spreads it to N other people ? From the above it sounds like the latter is closer to reality. While this largely invalidates all those nice graphical explanations about exponential growth, it clearly doesn't mean the virus is less dangerous than thought - the figures speak for themselves on that front. What it might mean is that it's potentially more controllable. And it has interesting consequences for contact tracing : we should concentrate on going backwards, finding the source of the infections rather than who might become infected next.

The reason for backward tracing’s importance is similar to the friendship paradox: your friends are, on average, going to have more friends than you. Friendships are not distributed equally; some people have a lot of friends, and your friend circle is more likely to include those social butterflies, because how could it not? They friended you and others. And those social butterflies will drive up the average number of friends that your friends have compared with you, a regular person. (Of course, this will not hold for the social butterflies themselves, but overdispersion means that there are much fewer of them.)

Or in short you're more likely to know someone popular than be popular yourself. This is important :

...if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own... “backward tracing increases this maximum number of traceable individuals by a factor of 2-3, as index cases are more likely to come from clusters than a case is to generate a cluster.”

Presumably this would also help identify if super spreaders are some particular demographic, people with naturally high infectivity, or driven by environment. If we knew that, we could pre-emptively tackle the worst spreading areas before they even begin.

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

Updated at 1:17 p.m. ET on October 1, 2020 There's something strange about this coronavirus pandemic. Even after months of extensive research by the global scientific community, many questions remain open. Why, for instance, was there such an enormous death toll in northern Italy, but not the rest of the country?

Life Under Lockdown (VIII) ?

Not much blogging lately on account of a PUPPY. If you haven't read that one yet, you might want to read it after this one to balance out the cynicism.

He who is last shall be first ! And also vice-versa.

To recap, the Czech Republic did an outstanding job of stomping on the coronavirus when it first started. Fifty cases per day ? Total nationwide lockdown. Cases peaked at about 300 per day, but not for long, and steadily dropped. They reached a sustained low of about 50 per day, which lasted a full month or more. A re-opening plan was devised to gradually ease restrictions, which was similarly well-implemented, at first.

Then things hit a snag. The government was found to have implemented certain measures under the wrong act, so a court ruled it had to immediately lift them. It could have re-implemented them under a different act, but instead it said, "meh, let's just bump up the re-opening schedule by two weeks and purely coincidentally avoid having to pay people extra money". To be fair, things were going extremely well at that point. How much lower cases would have fallen with an extra two weeks we'll never know.

At first, they looked to have gotten away with it. Cases didn't do much at all. But gradually - so gradually as to be quite imperceptible at first - they started to climb. Even then they were kept well in check. There was no spike, no explosion, except for a couple of cases here and then (one in a mine and one in a nightclub*). Hospitalisation figures remained steady. I don't really understand how the figures remained so low for so long as they did, given that restrictions were completely over. But they did.

* These two things aren't normally connected, unless there's a craft beer pub in a mine somewhere. MineCraft. It sells itself.

Not any more. Now we're in a far worse state than we ever were before. We had a peak of 300 per day in the first wave - with 4,400 cases yesterday, we're well exceeding ten times that. Growth hasn't been as rapid as in the first phase, but it's been unrelenting, and deaths have gone from a few per day to 20-30 per day.

The contrast to the swift, decisive action at the start of the pandemic could not be greater. For weeks we've been getting nothing but the absolute minimum of incremental changes. Wear masks on all forms of public transport. Close the bars at midnight. Oh, fine, 10pm if you must. Wear masks in public indoor spaces, except for an exception list a mile long. Don't have more than a hundred people at a funeral. That was about it.

Only when cases reached 2,000 per day did we even begin seeing the possibility of localised lockdowns. A state of national emergency has been declared and more radical restrictions are promised on Friday, which there'd damn well better be because mucking about with wedding invitation lists is doing precisely bugger all.

The problem is that this already far too late. We know from the first wave that it's going to take at least a month for any of this to have an effect, so we're looking at tens of thousands of cases at least before things start to improve again. We've already gone from one of the success stories of Europe to being one of the worst failures.

Not so long ago the Tories accused the government's advisors of scaremongering over a possible 50,000 cases per day, which already no longer looks outlandish. Whether the Czech Republic is likely to follow the UK's trajectory and see tens of thousands dead remains to be seen, but it appears to be a worrying possibility as long as we keep making these incredibly petty, incremental adjustments. It doesn't necessarily have to involve a full-scale national lockdown, but something equivalently drastic is needed : a hugely ramped-up contact tracing scheme, more intervention to allow businesses to operate under unusual restrictions, greater outreach and enforcement of the rules, etc.

Originally I planned to say that even the UK is doing better than this : at least they're trying local lockdowns and acknowledging the problem. At least they tried to have covid marshals, even if they had a shite funding scheme and no real powers. But there the failures might just be different, not better or worse. As revealed in PMQs, some areas under lockdown have seen a tenfold rise in cases, which Johnson claimed - with frightening tautology - was due to... the spread of virus. FFS. What did he think it was due to ? Magical eagles messing with the figures ?

Anecdotally, people here are following the rules but absolutely no more than that. They wear masks where they have to. The bars close when they're supposed to. They even use disinfectant in the supermarkets, sometimes. They pay no attention to social distancing whatsoever. They don't mind crowded spaces or make the slightest effort to avoid each other. They're going to bars and restaurants as usual. At least, though, the rules themselves are clear and don't seem to have the crazy complexity of those in the UK.

For my part, I'm doing just fine. I even enjoyed my staycation very much, though it wasn't the visit back home I would have preferred and which seemed perfectly viable just a few weeks ago. I'm enjoying a David Attenborough VR series on insects very much and continuing to hammer the barbarians in Rome 2 Total War, as well as binge watching the hell out of Netflix. But I get why this particular lifestyle isn't what everyone wants, and I would no more want to stop people going mud wrestling or opera singing than I would want to be forced to go mud wrestling or opera singing. The problem is that it seems to be a straight choice between stopping social activities or allowing a catastrophe, and I don't get why people are reluctant to accept that. Who wants to go out if it means risking people's lives ? A hell of a lot of people, it turns out.

There was a Czech news report this morning that a few "doctors" (including a homeopathist, which tells you a lot) have said, "stop scaring people", much as Tories in Britain said the same thing or Trump did in America. But it is scary. It should be scary.... if people don't take proper precautions. Johnson keeps banging on about common sense, but the problem is this isn't a matter of common sense at all. This is a matter of highly uncertain science, both of the virology and behaviour. Common sense, for instance, would suggest that people would know that wearing a mask and not shaking hands are highly prudent things during a pandemic, let alone that they probably shouldn't share drinks in nightclubs. Yet people don't follow this, so it either isn't all that common or something else is at work.

I suggest that it's not "common sense" but intuition. Common sense implies some quasi-Bayesian reasoning and at least a small degree of actual thought. Intuition relies on heuristic shortcuts developed over a lifetime of experience, which works very well under normal circumstances but fails abysmally if anything changes. Or at most, it's a little knowledge being a dangerous thing : "sure I can go clubbing, the number of cases is still so small there's very little chance I'll be infected". 

And in some ways this kind of reasoning would even be right. The risk to the individual remains low. But the risk of a major spreading event is high. Common sense and intuition just isn't designed to handle the prospect of unlikely events having massively far-reaching consequences, because such things are far from common. The science here is hardly perfect, but it's orders of magnitude better than letting people do whatever they think is sensible - because they don't have any good grounds to decide what actually is sensible. And after all, half of the population are stupider than the average.

I guess I don't really have much of a point to this other than, "things suck". Sorry about that. I plan to stay inside as much as humanly possible. I just hope that governments realise that we need much more dramatic action than limiting bloody wedding attendance, before it's too late.