Racists chasing dystopia

Normally I like to save reviews for the entirety of a book, but the latest one I've picked up doesn't lend itself to that format very well. Radicals Chasing Utopia, a 2017 book by Jamie Bartlett, is an eclectic look at the work of various fringe groups looking to bring about drastic change in society. Since each chapter forms a standalone text, I'll do separate posts for each section that particularly grabs my interest.

I have to give enormous kudos for Bartlett for being willing and able to engage with people he obviously doesn't agree with. In chapter two he explores the world of the far-right anti-immigration lobby in Europe. It's abundantly clear he doesn't share their viewpoints, but he does manage to maintain a civil relationship with them. I doubt very much I could ever do that. Indeed, some of the more extreme opponents think we shouldn't even try, and I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that. After all, why engage with such awful people as neo-Nazis ?

Two reasons. First, to understand what drove them to become neo-Nazis, and second, the help them see the error of their ways.

Well... there's a more obvious third reason. People often ask, "is it okay to punch a Nazi ?", which is frankly an absurd question considering what we had to do to stop them the last time around. My big caveat is that whole societies do not turn wholesale to far-right zealatory for no reason, and that treating them all as Hitler-level fanatics (who are utterly unpersuadable and probably do need to be shot) is massively counter-productive. 

Anyway, as a journalist, it isn't Bartlett's place to explore anything but the first option. Fair enough. But in this he falls flat on his face. As I've said many times before, we should try and work out the underlying reasons why people are turning to hate groups and address those reasons rather than pandering to their superficial xenophobia. People do not become bigoted idiots for no reason at all, but they don't usually turn into racists twats as a result of evil foreigners. Something else is going on.

Bartlett makes an honest but ultimately disappointing effort to examine this. As he says :

It's lazy and simplistic to call Pegida supporters racist, ill-informed bigots. The people who do so not only misunderstand them; they risk making the problem worse, because it provides Pegida supporters with the ammunition that the liberal elite are trying to silence them.

I don't really have a problem with that in principle. Demonstrate to me that something beyond idiotic bigotry is guiding these people and I'll listen. Hell, we should all desperately want this to be true, because if there is some more quasi-rational reason for the appeal of these populist monsters, we'd have a much better chance of stopping them. The problem is that Bartlett immediately goes on to starkly contradict himself :

The problem with groups like Pegida is more subtle. They have a tendency to tar all Muslims with the same unfair stereotypes, often in an intentionally inflammatory way, and do not apply their 'defending Western values' message consistently.

Errmm... how exactly is this not ill-informed racist bigotry then ? Judging an entire group of people based on the actions of a few abhorrent individuals is pretty much the definition of idiotic racism to me. Okay, he makes the point that Tommy Robinson is indeed "well-informed" about the contents of the Qur'an, but this entirely misses the point. Being well-informed and being stupid are not at all the same thing. Knowing the contents of a religious text and truly understanding it - and, more importantly, understanding how its followers interpret it in practise - are not at all the same thing either.

I give further kudos to Barlett for immediately and unequivocally pointing out the flaws in the logic of the far-right : the ignorance of the good deeds done by religious groups, the cherry-picking applied to the statistics, the confirmation bias at work, and the ludicrous double-standards when Robinson et al. insist they can't be responsible for the actions of the more abject Nazis within their own groups. As he says, what's really going on is an "irrational fear" here, not anything justified by the evidence.

So what causes this irrational fear ? In part it's learning by induction, with Bartlett listing the various horrors committed by religious extremists that did genuinely happen. But that's not enough to create widespread hate groups. Bartlett's opinion is that it's about the white working class having no political figures to stand up for them any more :

Jeremy Corbyn joined the anti-Pegida-UK demonstration... marching under the banner "We Chose Hope". He was joined by local Labour MP Laim Byrne who said, "We don't want our community threatened by racists." Jess Phillips MP called Tommy's plans a "costly hate rally". Racists. Idiots. Not a frustrated group of people who find, in the flag-waving and chanting, some reclamation of power in a system that ignores them.

But that's bollocks though, isn't it ? Someone opposing racism is not automatically opposed to the white working class, they just hate racism. And that's commendable. Look, politicians have a duty to defend the interests and welfare of their constituents - not to pander to their worst tendencies. Suppose, for example, a community feels their jobs are threatened by an influx of migrant workers. Should their MP halt the immigration ? No - the right approach is to ensure job security through enforcement of minimum wage laws and other economic policies. There's no contradiction - none, none whatsoever - in standing up to racism and simultaneously aiming for prosperity for all.

Bartlett continues :

Not a group of derided people for whom the bravado and aggressive patriotism is something they can feel pride in. Not a set of citizens who have become politicised and are, even if I think they are misguided in their targets, getting involved in politics for the first time in their lives, and so should at least be given a hearing. Heaven forbid it might be any of those things. They're just hate-filled racists. So it's a good job we abandoned them. Look at what these idiots think after all !

Except that Robinson and the other ringleaders aren't getting involved for the first time, they've been at it for many years. As Bartlett himself says, they're not uninformed. But they have, undeniably, come to monumentally stupid and bigoted conclusions. There may well be some truth to the charge in their group members feeling hard done by, but when such people resort to racist chanting on the street, just what kind of response does he think they should be given ? Society should accept some responsibility for allowing things to get to where they are, but to blame Labour figures for standing up to racism and not mention years of Tory austerity (never mind years of demonising immigrants in the gutter press !) is not in the least bit sensible. Attacking people for attacking racism is bloody stupid.

Elsewhere Bartlett gives rather too much credit to the surface statements of the bigoted idiots :

In fact, most Pegida supporters see themselves as anti-fascists, standing up to Islamist totalitarianism. The speeches I heard usually contained the antithesis of fascism : support for free speech, liberty, democracy, and gay rights.

Yeah, but freedom and liberty for who and to do what ? Bartlett immediately follows this up with examples of the far-right cherry-picking statistics to rationalise their existing conclusions. He's trying to paint them as not unintelligent in that they're aware of the evidence, but, to me at least, ends up doing the exact opposite. Willfully ignoring the overwhelming data showing that most Muslims are - guess what ! - entirely normal people is in my mind on par with Flat Earth lunacy. 

By all means, criticise the faith. But demonsing its believers is madness. I'm not in the least bit persuaded that these hate groups are anything more sophisticated than that, even if they themselves obviously don't see it that way. You can't ask a villain if they enjoy their villainy, because they're never going to say, "yes, I really like hurting people, mwhahahahah !"

I have the distinct impression that Bartlett is a lot more confused about what's going on than he himself is aware of. He says :

But even if politicians did listen, I'm still not quite sure what Pegida would actually tell them, apart from to stop immigration from Muslim-majority countries, and perhaps ban any new mosques being built. There is a vague desire to protect traditional culture, but what that actually is was never clear to be. They want Muslims to integrate more, but exactly how they're supposed to do that - especially when they are being singled out and shouted at - was never really explained. It's all emotion and indignation. Feelings rather than a set of demands, and feelings are almost impossible to satisfy.

Which is in direct agreement with what the "metropolitan liberal elite", as he derisively labels them, have been saying all along. I don't get how he remains so unaware of the contradictions here : are the hate groups misunderstood, misinformed, poorly treated individuals in need of some care and attention, or are they a bunch of racist bigots who've used the evidence to rationalise their position and aren't actually willing to listen to reason ? It's all very strange.

On the situation across the pond Bartlett seems on even less firm footing :

Many left-wing parties now seek to represent both a socially and economically liberal graduate class and a less liberal blue-collar working class. The two groups interests don't always align, and most political leaders - well-educated liberals themselves - are more at ease with the language, politics, lobbying groups and ideas of the progressive wing.

Fair enough as far it goes, but sadly this hint of getting at the root of the problem is all we're given. Again, progressive liberal policies seem to me to be infinitely more closely aligned with the working class than those of the right, who actively choose to harm the poorest rather than help them. And he goes on :

As a result, billionaire politicians with economic policies that won't help them, like Donald Trump, can attract millions of working-class voters who feel forgotten with the right language and identity-based promises. That a billionaire has been able to successfully position himself as a man of the people should shame liberals. It's an indictment of their stunning failure.

Except that just isn't true : Trump voters tend to be wealthier, not poorer, and aren't strongly split by education level. Bartlett paints an appealing narrative, and I almost wish it was correct so we could more easily address the problems, but it was already clear this was not the case before the book was published. Given that the major split in Trump voters is by race, I think this is a stunning and shameful success of the right, not a failure of the left in trying to prevent bigotry. Bartlett has got things badly backwards.

Pegida might be misunderstood, patronised and lazily smeared as a bunch of ignorant fascists and racists, but that doesn't mean their ideas are harmless, or that their desire to defend Western values won't be twisted by others to promote illiberalism or xenophobia.... David Duke, former Grant Wizard of the openly racist Klu Klux Klan, said he has "the same message" as Trump.

Bartlett ultimately completely fails to convince me that these groups are in any way misunderstood or lazily smeared. He presents no clear reason why they should have these grievances and seems to willing to take their professed values of liberal democracy at face value, not considering the reason Tommy Robinson excludes the more openly-Nazi individuals might be nothing more than a way to avoid obvious criticism. In the end, he gives far too much credit to people whose ideas are manifestly and utterly wrong. The problem is indeed more complex and subtle than we might give it credit for, but not necessarily in the way Bartlett thinks it is.

Review : The Fens

I usually try and keep reviews to things I found interesting, even if I disagree with them, but in this case I'm prepared to make an exception.

Francis Pryor is a wonderful man. Britain B.C. is a truly remarkable book that presents a vivid account both of archeology itself and its goal of understanding prehistory, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Likewise the sequels Britain A.D. and Britain in the Middle Ages, and also Home are all, if not quite so magisterial, well worth reading. Pryor is adept at delivering a sense of passion even for what are otherwise quite mundane topics - the prehistory of farming is, frankly, not something I could ever stand more than a few pages on coming from anyone else. And if he uses more anecdotes than most authors can get away with, he does so because they're interesting and relevant, enlivening the subject without distracting from it.

Not so, alas, in The Fens. It really should be called Francis Pryor Unleashed, because here he goes full-on into the realm of "old man stories than don't go anywhere and just aren't interesting." If Francis Pryor ever wants me to come and be a literal cheerleader (pom poms and skimpy outfit included) for him, then I will, but for specifically this book : sorry, no.

The first half or so of the book, where he concentrates on the prehistoric elements, is pretty solid. When Pryor describes archeology and his interpretations of life in the distant past, he's on form. There's nothing much new here but it's a nicely told tale. There's even some interesting commentary on the sociology of the people of the fens, some worthy attempt to get to grips with a mindset shaped by a very different world. The only real downside is that he constantly (but only slightly) over-promises and under-delivers, e.g. setting up a tale of a particularly intriguing archeological discovery but then failing to explain what exactly was so intriguing about it. It's all a bit stream-of-consciousnessy. Still, I'd give the first half a thoroughly decent 7/10.

The remainder of the book is, however, just plain bad. There's almost no history whatsoever - nothing about how things came to be, just long-winded descriptions of what's currently there. It reads like a travel guide to some forgotten corner of England that the author is almost worryingly obsessed with. He literally goes off on tangents about places where he had particularly nice tea and cake or fish and chips, like listening to some old twit bang on about their holidays in a place that just isn't interesting in the slightest. Yes Francis, of course you like fish and chips - you're British, we get it. Enough already !

You know those books that are so good you don't want to finish them ? This is the opposite. By the end I really just wanted it to be over so I could do something else. As Pryor himself nicely articulates :

Before us was a huge expanse of recently mown sedge fen, with water-filled dykes and alders in the middle distance. Herons were everywhere, as were greebs, moorhens and ducks. It was fabulous. Then I glanced at my companion and saw the place through her cold, disapproving eyes : it was a large, flat, wet field with nothing whatever to commend it. Even the herons looked depressed.

And unfortunately no amount of enthusiasm can convince me that a travelogue of a flat, damp, sleepy corner of England is something that needs to exist. History ? Sure ! The different changes that took place over time - especially the world view of our prehistoric ancestors - is hugely interesting stuff. But a travelogue ? Hell no. Look, I've been there, and there are some very nice places : I like herons too. But I don't need to write a book about where the best fish and chips are - that's the kind of thing my grandparents would prattle on about ad nauseum, and if it was irritating to listen to, it's equally unengaging to read. Even the author's masterful enthusiasm can't disguise the fact that this is like listening to Grandpa Simpson. See, enthusiasm can make a good topic great, or a mediocre subject quite interesting - but it can't turn narrative-free description of completely and utterly normal places into something worth reading.

Sorry Francis, but this is one to skip. If you only read one Francis Pryor book this year, make sure it isn't this one. With the latter section being a dismal 3/10, I'd give this no more than 4/10 overall. Quite why it seems to be doing so well in reviews in the press, I honestly don't understand.

The mind of a monster

One of the many, many things that annoyed me about Stephen Pinker was his brusque dismissal of utility monsters. Such a monster gains pleasure from the misery of others, supposedly - according to critics of utilitarianism - causing untold amounts of suffering for sake of the good of the monster. These creatures "don't seem to be much of a problem", according to Pinker. I found this stupid because surely you're not supposed to take the idea so bloody literally. Far more useful to treat them as thought experiments, as ways of probing interesting moral dilemmas.

But what if we do take them literally ? That's explored in this rather nice overview from the BBC.

“I want to eat you, please,” the monster said.

“Sorry, but I’d prefer not to be your lunch,” the philosopher replied, and moved to keep walking.

“Wait,” said the monster, holding up a clawed finger. “What if I could present you with a sound argument? Your idea of happiness is only a mere fraction of what I am capable of feeling,” it says. “I am as different to you, a human, as you are to an ant. If I eat you, it will give me more well-being and satisfaction than all humans who have ever lived.”

The philosopher hesitates while trying to think of a counterargument. “Well, gosh, that’s certainly a valid...” But time’s up, the professor is lunch.

This immediately struck me as bollocks, ironically enough for a bit of subtlety that Pinker explained quite nicely (and the article does briefly mention later on) : the difference between happiness and value. Why should a monster's happiness ever be worth anyone's life ? By that logic, genocide is fully justified because it makes dictators happy. The whole premise is invalid : we value happiness, but we don't value people because they're happy - sad people matter too ! True, we also deem it worthy to cause happiness, but we don't automatically or unequivocally assume that happiness acts as a counterweight to suffering. The two are not opposites, even in the case where one leads directly to the other. The problem is brilliantly described in Doctor Who :

All dead. If the Dalek gets out it'll murder every living thing. That's all it needs. 

But why would it do that !? 

Because it honestly believes they should die. 

Daleks are utilitarians in extremis : my happiness outweighs your suffering, and my happiness depends on your death. Sucks to be you !

Surely a better approach is to try and maximise happiness while also minimising suffering, with the latter the more important by far. And it would have to be more complex than mere addition and subtraction, otherwise that would again lead to the Dalek-like conclusion of wholesale extermination, albeit as quickly and painlessly as possible. No, you'd need some kind of integration or perhaps convolution. What you want to do is minimise both the number of people enduring poor conditions and the degree to which each individual experiences anything unpleasant. Only once everyone is no longer ever in any serious danger, or at least to a degree they're content with, do you start trying to give everyone a solid gold house or whatever. You try and raise everyone up to some minimum standard first, not push a few down so others go up higher.

In essence, there are two aspects to the problem : why use happiness as the goal (rather than lack of suffering), and why the monster ? That it is undeniably good to be happy doesn't outweigh that it might be even better not to suffer - no proof is offered to equate happiness with value. And why the subjective emotional state of one monster should outweigh the equally real and valid feelings of a philosophy professor, even if the capacity of one is greater than the other, is also far from obvious. Why do the monster's feelings matter more ? What good is it going to do to make the monster happy ? Is the monster just going to sit there like a great big smug lemon, cheerfully guzzling philosophers and feeling amazingly content but not actually helping anyone ? Good God man, that's monstrous indeed !

There's an even more fundamental aspect to this which I'll return to later on. For now, suffice to say that I think "minimise suffering first, then maximise happiness" is a useful guideline, but cannot ever be anything more than that.

To return to the article, certain pretentious scientists think that utility monsters might indeed have to be taken literally :

Bostrom is one of the main academic proponents of the idea that we ought to prepare for the sudden arrival of super-intelligent machines, far smarter than the best human minds and capable of raising new ethical dilemmas for humanity. In a recent paper, posted on his website, he and Shulman propose scenarios where one of these digital minds could become a well-being “super-beneficiary” (a term they prefer to “monster” because they believe such minds should be described with non-pejorative language).

Well, I prefer "monster" because I happen to think that Daleks are Not Nice, and I immediately suspect that these researchers might need a good slap in the face. But let's proceed :

One thing they identified during this exercise was that digital minds might have the potential to use material resources much more efficiently than humans to achieve happiness. In other words, achieving wellbeing could be easier and less costly for them in terms of energy, therefore they could experience more of it. A digital mind’s perspective of time could also be different, thinking much faster than our brains can, which could mean that it is able to subjectively experience much more happiness within a given year than we ever could. They also need no sleep, so for them it could be happiness all night long too. Humans also cannot copy themselves, whereas in silicon there is the strange possibility of multiple versions of a single digital being that feels a huge amount of well-being in total.

If our demise meant their success, then by the basic utilitarian logic that we should maximise well-being in the world, they’d have an argument for metaphorically eating us. Of course, only the most uncharitable interpretations of utilitarianism say we are obliged to detrimentally sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others’ happiness.

But this is all wildly speculative. Why would such a being have any need for us to suffer at all ? Why can't it just increase its sense of well-being at will without having to eat anyone ?  Or to take it to its logical extreme, I could equally well speculate about a device which does absolutely nothing else at all except experience happiness. Would there be any ethical questions about switching a device off or on ? The poor thing would have an utterly meaningless, pointless existence. Merely having such a device in the world - and indeed, merely making real people happy - does not automatically equate to moral good. We can state that quite confidently without even needing to tackle the much harder question of what we mean by "moral good". Creating a inanimate cube which sits around all day doing nothing at all except feeling orgasmically happy is not something which makes the world a better place.

I think, probably, I'm not generally obligated to make myself unhappy in order to satisfy others. Far better to strive to avoid making other people unhappy (and actively helping them to avoid misery when it's inflicted on them) rather than satiating their desires. The pursuit of happiness is usually and individual choice, whereas the avoidance of suffering often requires a societal effort. That is, only once you've reached some minimum standard can you freely fend for yourself - until that point, you need the assistance of other people.

The much more fundamental point is that happiness is not something you can numerically quantify or subject to mathematical principles : you can't define morality as the vector sum of happiness. More than that, you can't even objectively define value itself, still less say why happiness is all that matters. And if you can't properly define it, quantifying it is absolutely hopeless. Utilitarianism is a useful, thought-provoking guideline, but God help anyone who takes it any further than that.

The intelligent monster that you should let eat you

One day, a philosopher was walking down the street, when a monster jumped out. Despite its terrifying fangs, it was actually more polite and articulate than expected. "I want to eat you, please," the monster said. "Sorry, but I'd prefer not to be your lunch," the philosopher replied, and moved to keep walking.

How can you be so stupid ?

With the US election result still undecided, the obvious question is : how is this possible ? How is it that ~70 million people can be dumb enough to vote for someone manifestly opposed to all that America claims to hold dear ?

Spoiler alert : I don't know. But to expand on the last post, there are a few key points I want to raise :

• There is no known method to guarantee a correct determination of the truth with 100% certainty.
• Data can only ever inform the conclusions you can draw, not decide it by itself. All conclusions are ultimately subjective.
• As a result, cultural change has been more radical and more frequent than we often recognise. We have a bias in believing the current, local cultural situation - whatever that happens to be - is normal and stable.

Societies throughout history have believed far more outlandish things than the idea that a talking racist toupee would make for a good benevolent dictator. The Aztecs sincerely believed that the earth needed to be fed on human hearts, and wore the bloodied skins of their enemies inside-out. The ancient Chinese based their society on a philosophy which amounts to little more than almost comically-pantomime villainy. The Greeks and Romans, for all their other achievements, were warlike conquerors unashamed of slavery and human sacrifice, with little notion of equal rights for the entire feminine half of their population. 

(Think about that : a full 50% of your populace treated as lesser despite this flying in the face of all available evidence. Mad as clams, the lot of 'em. Good job we don't have such problems today, hah hah.)

Even as ideological revolutions raged through the end of antiquity, and societies collapsed and transformed themselves towards their modern incarnations, it was hardly a linear or stable process. Medieval rulers believed themselves appointed by divine right; social mobility was essentially a non-starter. The Mongols and Timurids had no compunctions about annihilating entire cities merely for the sake of a warning - a very much bloodier business considering the equipment available. In contrast the Victorians thought that showing an ankle was the height of impropriety, while some of their finest minds happily endorsed racism, eugenics, and other forms of bigotry. Barely a few decades ago it was considered perfectly acceptable to openly ban "blacks" and Irish. Hell, go back to the original Bill and Ted movies to see "fags" used as an insult that no-one batted an eyelid at.

These differences were by no means uniform, to say nothing of the hypocrisy often at work. The point is that what seems ludicrous to us today was absolutely normal in other circumstances - some of them not so very different from our own. Human beings are capable of believing absolutely anything, no matter how stupid, in very large numbers. And they can change. The modern Swede is far more likely to be found assembling flat-pack furniture than he is in terrorising monks; the modern Mexican is more likely to be cheerfully drinking tequila than delighting as he rips the heart out of yet another sacrificial victim.

I believe that rather than drawing Stephen Pinker's conclusion of almost inevitable linear progress, what this show us is that people are very, very stupid.

Or rather... they are highly malleable. Circumstances are everything. So with Trump the issues for me are twofold :

1. How do Trump supporters ignore the mountains of historical and contemporary evidence demonstrating time and time again that their cult leader's ideas are about as disproven as it's ever possible to be ? What's odd is not (so much) the stupidity itself, it's the way it's so strongly polarised against everyone else around them. Virtually the entire Western world (as well as America's own professed values) is against Trump, whereas in the historical cases the entire world was radically different. What, then, are the particular conditions that allow Trump to flourish, and moreover, continue to flourish in spite of his utter lack of any positive achievements ? How can they say, "this failed businessman would surely be good for the economy" ? There's no existing culture that says, "failed businessmen are the most fiscally sound people".
2. How do they ignore his personality ? Do they actually endorse his "pussy grabbing" antics ? Do they think it's fine to be so incoherent he can practically contradict himself in two words ? Are they okay with fantasising about dating their own daughters ? I mean, I can't imagine anyone thinking, "sure, this lying egotistical maniac with incest fantasies seems like someone I'd like to invite round for dinner", much less, "decide on foreign policy". Is his personality actually an asset for them, or do they overlook it due to other concerns ? 

The difficulty is the fire-is-hot problem : with enough evidence, given the known methodological practises of the day, sometimes conclusions do seem to be all but inevitable. So do Trump supporters have not even the most basic clue about how to argue a position ? Are they so tribally indoctrinated (or indeed inoculated) that they automatically dismiss everyone outside their bubble as a liar ? Do they just fundamentally lack any concern for the truth ? Has the left drastically overestimated its own cultural influence ?

I don't know. What's clear, though, is that for such a culture to persist in the face of such a contradictory onslaught indicates that something has gone badly wrong. Only radical reform, not incremental changes but wholesale slash-and-burn tactics, have any chance of altering this in the long term. Cultures can and do change, and fortune's wheel is ever turning. But put it like this : the change from being feared for Viking raids to being lauded for affordable furniture was not small. Minor adjustments just won't cut it. Good luck, America - and to us all.

These statisticians will shock you !

My university education included very little about the people behind the science. Besides a few obligatory anecdotes about Fritz Zwicky, and a picture of Thompson looking incredibly smug at having just discovered the electron, there wasn't much at all even about the history of science - let alone any biographical information. In some ways this is a good thing. Science strives for objectivity : the original purpose of a parameter should not matter, only understanding how to use it. What matters most is the collective, accumulated scientific knowledge, not a detailed understanding of long-debunked notions of yesteryear.

"I discovered the electron. Now it's time for coffee."

Of course this has a weakness. With such a narrow focus on current understanding, we miss out on a philosophical exploration of what happened : sure, we can learn about the current best practises, but at the expense of understanding how we got to where we are now. Sociologically, it's not a good idea to be totally ignorant of how discoveries happened - it brushes aside both ugly facts and beautiful truths (the story of Ruby Payne Scott alone encapsulates both). This is not healthy. We should have some inkling of whether a discovery was made by a racist maniac or a disabled lesbian war veteran. It's inherently a good thing to know. And while our investigations into galaxies and hydrodynamics probably benefit from a coolly analytic approach, and couldn't be much influenced by racist ideologies even if we wanted them to, the same cannot be said for sociological statistics. Keeping things "objective" in this case is arguably dehumanising. 

My suggestion is that each lecture course in the sciences should dedicate one, or at most two, additional lectures to the history of its subject. It wouldn't have to form part of the assessment. It would add a lot of interest in what are otherwise some very dry areas, and well as providing information which is all too easily forgotten. A couple of quotes on the monsters in the field will suffice.

Fisher continued to have disturbingly close ties to Nazi scientists even after the war. He issued public statements to help rehabilitate the image of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a Nazi geneticist and advocate of racial hygiene ideas who had been a mentor to Josef Mengele, who conducted barbaric experiments on prisoners in Nazi camps. In von Verschuer’s defense, Fisher wrote, “I have no doubt also that the [Nazi] Party sincerely wished to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives, such as those deficient mentally, and I do not doubt that von Verschuer gave, as I should have done, his support to such a movement.”

According to Pearson, conflict between races was inevitable and desirable because it helped weed out the bad stock. As he put it, “History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.”... Pearson considered the colonial genocide in America to be a great triumph because “in place of the red man, contributing practically nothing to the work and thought of the world, we have a great nation, mistress of many arts, and able ... to contribute much to the common stock of civilized man.”

Which would probably be a "holy shit !" moment from John Oliver. The average man in the street probably hasn't heard of Fisher or Pearson, but the average scientist probably has. I've used their findings - their impact was far-reaching indeed.

As a statistician, Fisher is personally responsible for many of the basic terms that now make up the standard lexicon, such as “parameter estimation,” “maximum likelihood,” and “sufficient statistic.” But the backbone of his contributions was significance testing. Fisher’s 1925 textbook Statistical Methods for Research Workers, containing statistical recipes for different problems, introduced significance testing to the world of science and became such the industry standard that anyone not following one of his recipes would have difficulty getting published... In the process, his methods made possible whole new research hypotheses: questions like whether two variables were correlated, or whether multiple populations all had the same mean.

Which doesn't sound like a fundamentally racist ideology, and it isn't. What Fisher got wrong was his interpretation of what this all meant. He seems to have had an innately binary, absolutist viewpoint : this is right or wrong, the data either supports a conclusion or it doesn't, with those conclusions being inescapable from the data alone. Again, to re-use a useful quote, "it's the difference between thinking that all the facts you have are all the facts there are".

Like Pearson, Fisher maintained that he was only ever following the numbers where they took him. Significance testing, for Fisher, was a way of communicating statistical findings that was as unassailable as a logical proof. As he wrote in 1932, “Conclusions can be drawn from data alone ... if the questions we ask seem to require knowledge prior to these, it is because ... we have been asking somewhat the wrong questions.”

Last year, a letter signed by over 800 scientists called for an end to the concept of statistical significance, and the leadership of the American Statistical Association issued a blunt decree: “Don’t say ‘statistically significant.’ ” The heart of the problem with significance testing is that making binary decisions about homogeneity was never a meaningful statistical task. With enough data, looked at closely enough, some inhomogeneities and statistically significant differences will always emerge. In the real world, data are always signaling something. It just may not be clear what.

As first argued by psychologist Edwin Boring in 1919, a scientific hypothesis is never just a statistical hypothesis—that two means in the population are different, that two variables are correlated, that a treatment has some nonzero effect—but an attempt at explaining why, by how much, and why it matters. The fact that significance testing ignores this is what economists Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak in their 2008 book The Cult of Statistical Significance called the “sizeless stare of statistical significance.” As they put it, “Statistical significance is not a scientific test. It is a philosophical, qualitative test. It does not ask how much. It asks ‘whether,’ ”—as in, whether an effect or association simply exists. “Existence, the question of whether, is interesting,” they said, “but it is not scientific.”

But it may not be obvious as to how this kind of thinking - flawed though it is - translates into racism. I would hope that in the modern world it's inherently obvious that you can't simply say that something is either significant or it isn't; the very fact that p can take any value ought to indicate that (dare I say it !) all by itself. Pretty much everyone uses different sorts of significance measures but hardly anyone in the sciences, in my experience, is driven to become a proponent of Eugenics Wars as some of the early statisticians were. Indeed, this binary-absolutist style of thought seems incredibly ironic : statistics, to me, inherently relies on understanding various biases. To do statistics properly inherently relies on considering alternative interpretations and trying to avoid fooling oneself. How, then, did the attempt at objectivity lead to such vile conclusions ? The answer, I think, is that it didn't.

For the purposes of eugenic discrimination, it was enough to state that distinct racial subgroups existed or there was a “significant” correlation between intelligence and cleanliness or a “significant” difference in criminality, fertility, or disease incidence between people of different socioeconomic classes. The first hypotheses were taxonomic: whether individuals could be considered to be of the same species, or whether people were of the same race. 

The separation was everything—not how much, what else might explain it, or why it mattered, just that it was there. Significance testing did not spring fully formed from the heads of these men. It was crafted and refined over the years specifically to articulate evolutionary and eugenicist arguments. Galton, Pearson, and Fisher the eugenicists needed a quantitative way to argue for the existence of such differences, and Galton, Pearson, and Fisher the statisticians answered the call with significance testing.

I would suggest that binary thinking can drive racism, but racism doesn't necessarily follow directly from it. Despite the protestations of the early statisticians, you have to have some underlying preference for it in the first place, which you can use data to incorrectly support. A career in statistics isn't going to lead to joining the KKK unless you already have a perverse and warped mindset. These early villains were expressing their existing beliefs through their undoubted analytic prowess, not having their opinions shaped by the data. They would fall firmly in the top-left of the supervillain chart. In short, crude and racist ideas drove statistical methodologies, not the other way around.

Most scientists now understand that the data do not speak for themselves and never have. Observations are always possible to interpret in multiple ways, and it’s up to the scientist and the larger community to decide which interpretation best fits the facts  What we should be asking is what causal mechanism explains the difference, whether it can be applied elsewhere, and how much benefit could be obtained from doing so.

I'm pleased to report that I made that exact same first statement, almost word for word, in my lectures on galaxy evolution :

The most obvious (and tempting) conclusion from this graph, if we take it at face value, is that chocolate makes you more intelligent. But again, we don't really know what the independent variable is here. It would be equally valid to suggest that maybe it's the other way around. Maybe when someone in a country wins a Nobel prize, the rest of the populace eat chocolate in celebration ! My point is that the data doesn't interpret itself. Interpretation is something that happens in your head - there and nowhere else - and not by the data itself.

Returning to the Nautil.us article :

 “What the future of science needs is a democratization of the analysis process and generation of analysis,” and that what scientists need to do most is “hear what people that know about this stuff have been saying for a long time. Just because you haven’t measured something doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Often, you can see it with your eyes, and that’s good enough.”

Exactly ! With the proviso that of course this doesn't mean chucking statistics out completely - that's the attitude of a racist idiot - only that they don't tell the whole story by themselves. They inform the story but never dictate it. If you can see a trend by eye, you can quantify it statistically, but if you can't, then you have to be much more careful about what the statistics are saying. Your eyes can certainly fool you, but so can numbers. There is no philosophically iron-clad method for establishing truth.

In the 1972 book Social Sciences as Sorcery, Stanislav Andreski argued that, in their search for objectivity, researchers had settled for a cheap version of it, hiding behind statistical methods as “quantitative camouflage.” Instead, we should strive for the moral objectivity we need to simultaneously live in the world and study it. “The ideal of objectivity,” Andreski wrote, “requires much more than an adherence to the technical rules of verification, or recourse to recondite unemotive terminology: namely, a moral commitment to justice—the will to be fair to people and institutions, to avoid the temptations of wishful and venomous thinking, and the courage to resist threats and enticements.”

How Eugenics Shaped Statistics - Issue 92: Frontiers - Nautilus

In early 2018, officials at University College London were shocked to learn that meetings organized by "race scientists" and neo-Nazis, called the London Conference on Intelligence, had been held at the college the previous four years. The existence of the conference was surprising, but the choice of location was not.

Don't you dare bloody screw this up, Keir

So absolutely everyone is under lockdown again, and not before time. This means Keir Starmer, who called for this weeks ago (a day after it was revealed as official scientific advice to the government some weeks previously) is fully entitled to a massive, "I frickin' TOLD you so !". But he almost certainly won't do that, because he's just too honourable : rubbing people's noses in the dirt isn't really his style. I'll leave lockdowns for a future post; right now it's high time to venture some thoughts on my latest political would-be hero. 

I've been following the antics of Starmer with sufficient diligence that he should probably be a little worried. I'm very concerned and conscious of the last time I experienced the disappointment of political impotence, namely in the weirdy-beardy shape of Jeremy Corbyn. I really thought we might get someone truly radical, moral, honourable and inspirational. I bought in to the Corbyn hype for some time, only to be brutally disappointed to find out he's just another bloody cult leader*. But let's not dwell. I'm reading the report on the anti-Semitism investigation in full, so that will be another future post.

* You look me in the face and tell me that singing "oooh, Jeremy Corbyn" isn't a little but culty. Go on, I dare you.

Such a bitter disappointment has the paradoxical effect of making me yearn all the more strongly for a true political hero while simultaneously making me more skeptical that they exist. Of course, I know full well that there are no true heroes, but that doesn't stop me wanting one. I can't honestly tell you which of these contradictory effects is stronger.

Let me lead with the most negative thing I can find to say about Starmer : he's a schemer*. He's planned his rise to power very carefully. He's courted all sides of the political spectrum of the Labour Party and largely won them over. He'll say what he needs to say to win power. There's more than a little opportunism, even if justified on fine moral grounds, about then suspending his hard-left former colleagues. Even if we accept that those suspensions are justified (and I suspect that they are), he still worked with them previously. He somehow managed to work alongside and under people whose ethical standards are now in apparent conflict with his own. He could have left, but chose to stay.

* "Schemer Starmer" rolls off the tongue very nicely, if you like Trumpian nicknames.

But... what good would it do to leave ? Others did, and where are they now ? Change UK lasted all of five minutes and make the political impotence of Corbyn look like a teenager with an overdose of viagra. If you're actually serious about enacting political change, you can't flee into the political wilderness. You can't magic up a new political party and start a revolution - you'll make the moral high ground into nothing more than inconvenient hill to die on. So you have to stay. If that means serving the snakes, so be it. Both choices are morally bad.

This is an apologist view, of course, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate it - better, indeed, to try and win people round than continuously fight everyone you disagree with. It takes an obvious leaf out of Tony Blair's playbook. And whatever his moral views might be, Starmer is keen to learn other lessons from Blair, some of which I recorded back in in February. How does Starmer measure up on those ?

Not having the Labour Party be a campaign group : instead, Starmer is extremely clear that the priority is to actually win power. There's no point being in continual opposition -  a political party has a moral duty to try and see its policies enacted, not just to insult the current government. Activism is fun but achieves absolutely bugger all by itself. Starmer has emphasised this repeatedly.

Meeting people where they are : i..e. be prepared to win over Tory voters, not think of the Tories as so awful that you wouldn't want to ever be associated with them. Starmer's been given an easy opportunity here to win back the voters who reluctantly turned Tory last time because they couldn't vote for Corbyn. His approach to a constructive opposition suggests he might also be willing to take this further and not deliberately alienate Tories for being Tories, which is what political activists usually delight in. Starmer is also particularly astute at quoting other expert sources (including Tory MPs), rather than relying on manufacturing his own points - thus minimising the tribalistic element inherent in the system.

Frankly, I freakin' love this. Alistair Campbell isn't keen on it, but just because it's a different style than attacking the enemy at every turn doesn't mean it won't work. In Campbell's day, the Tories were still seen as unpleasant but competent, whereas currently the competency is largely a farce. Attacking them only when they get things wrong (which is becoming ever-more frequent) makes those attacks look a lot more credible, while avoiding having to piss off potential converts. More than that, it's the right thing to do : co-operate to find the best decision, not get angry for the sake of it. It's how Parliament should work all the damn time.

I could never do this myself, mind you. I've concluded that the current Tory leadership are all a bunch of corrupt, self-serving, bloody nutters. I hate them.

Not fighting a culture war : we can't say much about this so far, as Starmer's biggest weakness is his lack of clear policy (still understandable at this early stage). But he's been rightly keen to avoid re-opening Brexit, of which he was a firm opponent. Again as Blair predicted, it looks likely that our exit from the EU won't be a short one. Trying to defend an argument already lost would be political suicide (which of course does not rule out a closer alignment with the EU in the future).

Leadership sometimes means saying no to your own supporters : well, he's clearly done that.

Party membership is a mixed bag : excluding anti-semites would seem to be a thoroughly good start; you do need a broad church, but not so broad it includes racists. It remains to be seen how politically united the party can become, but so far the suspension of Corbyn has provoked remarkably little backlash or even any sound and fury. The timing - moments before BoJo announced another massive u-turn - couldn't have been better.

Assessing support for individual policies is a failure : because people judge them in aggregate, not individually. Starmer would seem to have taken this lesson to heart. Of course, we have little idea what his policies would actually be, so...

Labour needs to be radical : he's promised a policy manifesto "unlike anything you've seen before", but of course we've no way of judging this yet.

On that last point there's some strong grounds for hope that Starmer's moral principles are not as weak as those of Blair; learning political theory from a past master does not mean a shared morality. Starmer's term as Director of the Crown Prosecution Service, leading cases for human rights and prosecuting terrorists, certainly lies strongly in his favour.

Against this, it's hard to envisage Starmer saying anything really radical. This, for now, is a major advantage : he's Mr Sensible. He's dull. And unlike Gordon Brown (or Theresa May), he's not made the fatal mistake of trying to be something he's not. Dull ? Sure ! He owns his dullness. And good lord, in these troubled times, political excitement is the very last thing we need (anyone saying that this is a disadvantage of some kind had best look at the polls). He isn't trying to define himself by other leaders either. The problem is we have absolutely no idea what Starmerism, when it eventually emerges, will look like.

So far I like Starmer a lot. He's not perfect - he does occasionally get his facts wrong, and he does sometimes give unconvincing non-answers in interviews. But then, perfection is not a realistic standard to expect in an imperfect world. What I've been really impressed with is his willingness to admit mistakes and apologise (see his LBC appearances) without any associated bullshit excuses, his agreement with the government on the occasions it gets things right, his straight-talking, fact-driven approach bereft of rhetorical bluster, and the fact he bought his terminally ill mother a donkey sanctuary. Best of all, perhaps, is his emphasis on tackling structural inequalities rather than blaming it all on individuals. He understands organisations and just doesn't moralise about making bad choices.

He's far more convincing than any leader since Blair. And indeed, the only political leader to have higher opinion ratings at this point in their leadership was Blair himself.

Could he be posed to stage one the greatest political comebacks in history ? I won't make a prediction. They say he's got a mountain to climb, and they're right. Boris Johnson is already on the top of the mountain but he's lost all his equipment, sprained his ankle and is stumbling around ever more incoherently trying to find a compass. Starmer may be at the bottom, but he's got all the right gear, an extremely accurate map, and a team who aren't a bunch of bigoted idiots. Let's see how this turns out.