Everything Is Too Easy

Today, a short look at a BBC article claiming that the modern world is making everything too easy. Yes, really.

It is, of course, all about the age-old argument as to whether making things easier makes us stupider. There's a fair point to be made for "use it for lose it", but the question should really be about when and whether skill atrophy actually matters. There's no point worrying that your driving abilities will degrade if you switch entirely to public transport, and so long as you can guarantee your new option is reliable and available, there seems no point at all in bemoaning this (I've covered this issue before, of course). Indeed, the switch should be the whole goal. That's how progress is supposed to work, or it wouldn't be progress at all.

Likewise, the ancient Greeks believed that warm showers would make them weak and effeminate, whereas most modern people would say that cold showers just make them miserable rather than toughening them up. There are more than enough other issues to deal with without also having to suffer needlessly. I believe we generally do better when our basic needs are met rather than having to struggle for them : I prefer to live in Star Trek's comfortable, scientific Federation rather than with Dune's tough, religiously fanatical Fremen. Struggle should be reserved for the things you want, not the things you need.

Still, there is a case to be made that it would be a Bad Thing if your overall intelligence started decreasing because you stopped trying to think for yourself. You do need to actually engage your brain, and all skills are maintained by continuously operating near their peak levels. What I struggle to see is how it's ever possible (except maybe if you're far too rich) to make your life such utterly comfortable, so devoid of any challenge whatsoever, that this ever becomes of any actual concern to anyone at all.

While modern technology can streamline day-to-day life, making everything from dating to food delivery more efficient, it may come at a cost: early data suggests that our attention span may be shortening, critical thinking capabilities weakening, emotional intelligence fading, and spatial memory getting worse as we offload human tasks to our devices. The technological optimisation doesn't seem to be making us happier, either: despite the continual digital assists and enhanced communication of social networks, people still report high levels of stress and loneliness.

Yeah, but that's the result of social media tending towards interactions with people we'd never want to engage with in real life. You then have to spend ages dealing with stupid people under the dubious grounds that you'll otherwise end up in an echo chamber*. This is partly because most people are, in fact, very stupid, and partly due to algorithmic rage-bait manipulation.

* This apparently something unique to social media : of course, you can walk away from morons in real life, but online we're expected to deal with them calmly and rationally and take them very seriously for some reason. Some people even argue that deleting comments on your own posts is censorship ! Madness. Would you insist on reading every spam letter that comes through your door ? Of course not.

That's why a growing number of people are restoring to the hottest new trend: "friction-maxxing", or rebuilding tolerance for inconveniences. The idea is to find tasks or ways of doing things involve a level of difficulty, time or patience. This could, for example, involve going "old school" and swapping digital tech tools for analogue solutions, such as reading rather than watching YouTube, navigating by road signs in place of Google Maps or calling a friend for advice instead of consulting ChatGPT.

But our brains operate on a "use it or lose it" principle, says Mark. Experiments in animal models show that effortful learning keeps new neurons in the brain alive. Studies also show that cognitively-stimulating activities like learning an instrument, reading, playing games and doing puzzles can preserve cognitive function as we age.

I don't get it. Who is finding their life so convenient that they miss the difficulties ? More importantly, HOW CAN I BECOME ONE OF THESE PEOPLE ? I find that one incomprehensibly weird. How are you not just exchanging one set of difficulties for another ? For example, if I no longer have to worry about how to write the code, I simply have more time for thinking about the problem I wanted to solve in the first place. I can't imagine ever reaching the end of the chain, as it were. Yes, it's good to have some amount of very low-level technical knowledge (some degree of grit for the mill, I guess), but I can't imagine who's living in such a utopia that they've already reached a state of post-scarcity difficulties. I'm a lot happier, not stupider, if I don't have to deal with segmentation faults.

According to one band of experts, the features of our digitised existence – constant notifications, 24-hour news and endless social feeds – can hijack this attention system, resulting in cognitive overload, mental fatigue and trouble focusing.

Much like the research on the effects of technology on our mental capacities, the studies of digital detoxes show mixed results. Some breaks from technology lead to better mood, improved focus, lower stress and more social connectedness, while others show the opposite or null effects. One 2014 study found that restricting screen time at a five-day nature camp improved preteens' emotional and social intelligence, while another 2019 study of university students found an increase in loneliness after abstaining from social media for one week.

Now that one makes a lot more sense. I can definitely see problems with "everything devices", like phones : I have a tendency to stockpile stuff for later consumption rather than immediately reading what interests me; I definitely fall into the infinite scrolling trap.

As per a quite different recent post, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, to a degree I even welcome distractions of my own choosing. I find it helps keep my focus maintained for longer overall if I split it up into chunks, every so often checking something very simple (like a news feed or social media) that doesn't derail my train of thought. Usually, this sort of back-and-forth doesn't become a problem when working, but I'm as guilty as anyone of scrolling on my phone rather than actually watching TV. Especially if I'm watching a show on my computer... the temptation to just quickly check the feed again is, for whatever reason, quite hard to resist. 

But to me this not a technological issue, it's a design choice. I love my digital notebook because it's total lack of features mean I use it for writing notes and reading long web articles, and that's it. Single purpose items, be they digital or otherwise, innately demand more attention because you can't just flick a button for more content. Moreover, so long as I put my phone away, I'm not tempted to go and check it. A single purpose device doesn't feel boring : once you're given something to do, and nothing to distract you from it, you'll just do that thing instead of trying to do dozens of things at once. Printed books do this, but so do well-designed digital products.

But even if friction-maxxing isn't the end-all solution we've been waiting for, "it doesn't hurt", says Mark. "If people are putting in effort, it makes them more intentional and thoughtful." Analogue hobbies such as crafting, gardening or reading – which involve friction as opposed to scrolling or streaming – can act as "active meditation", calming the mind and reducing stress. One 2024 study of more than 7,000 adults living in England found that those who engaged in crafting or the creative arts were more likely to report significantly higher life satisfaction, a greater sense that life is worthwhile and increased happiness. 

"I realised that a good life isn't an easy life," Semple says. "There's an enjoyment that you're cheated out of when you take the easy route."

And this is fair. Most analogue activities are innately more focused because there are no equivalents of "everything devices" or constant notifications. Multi-functionality has its place, but it's not easy to stay to track with such things. The real difficulty is perhaps the web itself. It doesn't make any sense to have a separate physical device for every website or digital tool : some purposes, like photography, can easily and sensibly separated, but many others simply can't. 

What's the solution ? Self discipline is part of it, but it's hardly the whole answer. On a totally different video, I liked the point that it's simply not fair to expect people to be able to resist something that's designed to capture their whole attention. So better designs are also needed, e.g. alternatives to infinite scrolling, more nuanced control of feeds, easy options to control which notifications come through and when (Gmail and DuoLingo, shut the fuck up already)... I don't think this would actually be difficult to do and it would cost exactly nothing.

The problem is getting corporations to see that making us engaged with more and more things but each for less and less time is, in the long term, a stupid metric to gauge product success, and that providing us with one good service is better than the option of a hundred crappy ones. How we reign in this tendency, I don't know.

The Things We Say

I'd like to add a little corollary to that rather long post on bullshit I wrote some years ago.

Bullshit, I contend, is not caring about the essential truth of a statement. This is a slight, but I think important, modification of the more usual principle that bullshit simply means not caring about the truth. Someone can respond with a perfectly truthful statement, but it's context that matters : if their response doesn't address the point you were making (e.g. with whataboutism or other kind of diversionary tactic), then that's still bullshit.

I also came up with a whole taxonomy of different kinds of shitty statements, but I digress.

In keeping with the theme, let me get to the point in a slightly roundabout way. All the crazy political shenanigans of late have made me acutely aware of a lesson I wish Younger Me had realised much earlier. 

That is, there are two main reasons that people say what they say. The first is that it's because they believe what they're saying is genuinely true. They argue with each other because they believe it's an innately good thing to get at the truth, and that disagreement is something that fundamentally needs to be corrected. This doesn't mean they're not open to changing their minds (although this can certainly be the case), just that they're deeply concerned with what's right and wrong. I think this is most people's baseline assumption about most other people, at least in a healthy society.

The second is that they're trying to produce an effect of some kind. We all become familiar with this in different ways : our parents lie to get us to behave, advertisers exaggerate and mislead, politicians... well, they do all kinds of crazy shit. We get fooled because our baseline assumption is still that people are basically honest; we become less naïve when we realise that this doesn't apply in all circumstances; we degenerate into cynicism when we start to behave as though this second reason is the norm rather than the first, when we think that agendas are all there are.

All this is probably obvious. The reason I wish someone had told Younger Me this is because it should be explicit. When you raise what's known subconsciously to full conscious awareness, you can act on it. It's easier to remember, easier to be on guard, easier to avoid the pitfalls both of naivety and cynicism. Learning it implicitly means that the idea will only arise through learned patterns, and so only affect behaviour in rather narrow domains; learning it explicitly means you can choose to analyse behaviour in all circumstances.

How does this tie back in to bullshit ? Very simply. A classical bullshitter uses the second intention, saying things without regard for the truth... but they do, importantly, still care about something. They say what they say because they want to manipulate people. They want them to react in some way, maybe as part of a carefully-determined plan, or maybe in a more vague strategy of simply provoking emotion but still with an ultimate objective in mind.

The corollary I want to propose is that maybe there's a truly deep kind of bullshit. Maybe the kind of nonsense – anger inducing, incoherent, aimless, self-harming verbal diarrhea that vents forth from the Orange One's unshapely orifice – maybe this is simply because there's no plan of any kind whatseover. Maybe the deepest kind of bullshitter is someone who says things for no other reason than it makes themselves feel good for a microsecond. No aim in mind, no master plan of manipulation, nothing but ultra short-term "I like saying this". Literally nothing beyond that.

Now, many people are aware of this already : "however stupid you think his is, he's stupider than that" someone said recently. Indeed, this is a position I've long held myself, there simply being no good alternative for the sheer level of incoherency on display... that, and a healthy respect for Occam's Razor. There's just no need to invoke some master four-dimensional chess when sheer stupidity presents a far more believable explanation.

No, the point of spelling this out is only to make it explicit. When you realise that this is (perhaps) the way some people really are, you can begin to see it as a pattern. You can watch out for it. It can help keep you aware that all of us say things in this way from time to time (who hasn't got carried away and realised instantly that they said something they actually thought was total bollocks ?) and so don't need to treat every such statement in the same way. When you see someone who might commit the odd shitpost here and there but knows where to draw the line, when to be serious and respectful and when to just muck around, you know how to respond.

And when you find someone who essentially always communicates in this way... well, then you can decide for yourself if this is something you approve of. Maybe it is, in some roles. Maybe it's fine for stand-up comedians. But if you think that either a) someone talking completely incoherently really believes in what they say; b) they're doing so because they're actually really clever; and/or c) this person is an extremely powerful politician.... then I don't think we can be friends.

The Scouring

Today, a short look at the The Scouring of the Shire. Surely the most Marmite of all chapters of The Lord of the Rings... I personally hate it. I've read many arguments as to why it's actually the most important section of all, but every time I read it I just think “nope”. Let's begin with a reasonably sensible defence of the chapter I stumbled upon some time ago.

To be fair, there are more than a few reasons why multiple adaptations have forsaken the chapter. For one, it is sort of an anti-climax, taking place well after the principle plot of The Lord Of The Rings is over.

That’s part of it, but more important is that it’s a huge tonal mismatch. We go from epic, literally world-shaping events, to… an impotent wizard messing up people’s gardens. There’s just no way to naturally flow from one to the other in a narratively satisfying way. As Tolkien himself said about Beowulf :

I can see the point of asking for no monsters. I can also see the point of the situation in Beowulf [i.e. all the villains are monsters]. But no point at all in mere reduction of numbers. It would really have been preposterous, if the poet had recounted Beowulf’s rise to fame in a ‘typical’ or ‘commonplace’ war in Frisia, and then ended him with a dragon*. Or if he had told of his cleansing of Heorot, and then brought him to defeat and death in a ‘wild’ or ‘trivial’ Swedish invasion !

Incidentally the truly Norse sagas do stuff like this all the time, and to be fair, they're mostly crap.

Which is exactly the problem. We have the Hobbits go from being key players in the destruction of the last great evil of the world, to having to fight the equivalent of “some Swedish prince”. It’s deeply unsatisfying. The argument is sometimes made that they need to prove themselves, but this makes no sense, because after what they’ve already done, no such activity is necessary.

The way the Shire saves itself is, in part, an opening up. Sam uses one of his gifts from the elves to restore the Shire. Merry and Pippin travel throughout the region and maintain their ties with both men and dwarves. Preservation can mean change. In fact, it may require it. Making the Shire an untouched place carries a stagnant stench. In Tolkien’s books, nothing can be protected forever, and all requires active vigilance and care. In the films, the Shire is already perfect and needs no change at all.

This is well put (the Silmarillion explores in much more detail the moral differences between a healed world versus one perfect from the beginning), but the need to save the Shire is just not apparent. The Hobbits have already fought to preserve it, making them do even more – having people's gardens dug up by some loser wizard after having destroyed Bard-dûr  – doesn’t add anything. It can't, really, because the main task has already been accomplished. It's Done. The ending of Sauron couldn't possibly be any more final; anything that happens next is necessarily a detail.

The argument is also made that it was necessary to show the Hobbits have been changed by their experiences, but this too is abundantly obvious. It's clear to reader and cinema audience alike that the Frodo who comes home is not the Frodo who sets off, nor is Sam, nor even Merry and Pippin to a lesser degree. There's no need to be any more explicit about something which is already very explicit... it would be like asking for more nudity in Game of Thrones.

Finally, another point is that this gives the work an added depth of character realism, but again… it’s a fantasy. It isn’t helpful to try and do this. To my mind the chapter is nothing but a weird and colossal distraction : I can see why it’s there, but it’s not a good bit of writing, even if many of the themes are important. It’s just too much of a clash with the narrative imperative, like trying to set up a creepy graveyard scene only to suddenly fill it with hamsters, or something. But others may disagree.

None of this is intended to criticise the linked article, which I do think is rather good. I take issue with the following, however :

The battle of Helm’s Deep, a slim handful of pages in the novel, takes up 40 minutes in Jackson’s The Two Towers. The necessity of peace and restoration, the hard work they require, are left to the cutting floor, while hour-long scenes of heroic violence take more and more space in each subsequent film. Though the films’ pastoral sequences have warmth and joy to them, they lack the bitter, beautiful edge that Tolkien’s prose grants them. That’s the cost of cutting Return Of The King‘s most crucial chapter: A loss as profound as the one Frodo Baggins suffers by novel’s end.

Yes, battles are exciting, and easier to drum up audience engagement if you've got the budget for it. But the text of the battles is some of Tolkien's most magnificent, and I would reject utterly any notion that the films are in any sense "shallow" by focusing on the spectacle. The stakes in the book are the very highest, practically cosmic in scope, and demand an appropriate and lengthy visual. More importantly, it is precisely the combination of this mythic scale combined with the human-level events (not least of which is Theoden's speech) that give the film tremendous, almost overwhelming emotional depth. Reducing the battles would be the direct equivalent of asking for less monsters in Beowulf : entirely and spectacularly missing the point. The mythic grandeur is exactly where the film most beautifully delivers its most potent message.

Nor do I find anything beautiful or bitter in Scouring; it just feels oddly tacked-on and badly-written. I would note that in the early drafts, Tolkien's "note to self" was that Hobbiton was dominated by a biscuit factory and the returning Hobbits decide to sail away to Greenland, so don't you dare tell me that the man who wrote stuff like this wasn't also capable of writing utter shite as well.

But...

One Quora answer to a question of the politics of Lord of the Rings does offer a better answer :

Sam, the humble gardener, has returned from war. And he does not take shit from anybody. He is appalled by the weakness and complacency of his countrymen. They mindlessly go along with whatever the new rulers suggest… anything to stay out of trouble. And Sam doesn’t play that way. He’s seen some shit. Seen the horrors of war. And he urges his people to resist.

You can read the totalitarian state the Shire is turned into as a far-right nightmare scenario. Or as a far-left nightmare scenario. Either way, it is dark, twisted and bleak. Public [sic; surely "private"] property is taken over by the [abjectly fascist] state, the rivers and fields are polluted and factories pump out black smoke as mighty forests are cut down… and most people just keep their heads down, and don’t resist. That’s Tolkien’s politics in a nutshell — do resist, do fight back, and don’t stand idly by as evil does what evil does best.

This is much more credible. It's not about some vague, unspecified way in which the Hobbits have learned important life lessons, nor about them proving their abundantly-clear newfound abilities (after Shelob, what other horrors can life hold for Sam ?). It's about exactly what those lessons they've learned actually are : to resist oppression, to urge their fellows to defend their idyllic lifestyle when the need arises, to realise that the inevitability of evil is an illusion. It can be defeated even by the small : "help shall oft come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter", as Gandalf says earlier. No-one is truly helpless.

Not, however, that this much changes my mind about the chapter. I can see the point to it, but I still find it badly-executed. For it to have any poignancy would require, I think, some far worse tragedy than trampling a few flower beds, and to avoid the tonal mismatch would require some remaining vestige of the cosmic scale of the threat for the Hobbits to overcome (perhaps if Saruman was left with considerably more power, this might have helped matters). 

Regardless, blending this into the narrative consistently is a virtual impossibility. However important the message might be, there's simply no way of defeating the Enemy and having anything else feel like fighting "some Swedish prince". And again, the Hobbits have already demonstrated this resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, so to now scale things back and give them a challenge manifestly below their abilities proves nothing. 

No, the movie's approach is better by far : show that they're conscious of saving the Shire during the War of the Ring ("courage Merry, courage for our friends") with a very gentle nod to show their changed nature on their return : bittersweet in that Sam is now able to face the altogether difficult challenge of approaching a not-especially-attractive barmaid but that Frodo is truly broken, unable to live in the Shire any more. The theme of Scouring, I accept, is hugely important. But I argue that the movie is not shallow by omitting the chapter, nor does it lack the "bitter and beautiful edge". On the contrary, this is somewhere where the movie is a good deal more subtle and – beware incoming treasonous heresy – greatly improves on the books.

Review : The Brain

I interrupt my mythology book reviews to turn to the completely different matter of neuroscience.

David Eagleman's Livewired was one of my favourite reads of recent years. He put forward a genuinely technologically optimistic study that has absolutely sod-all to do with that stupid manifesto, and felt like a much-needed counterweight to the equally stupid "all technological innovation is crap" cynicism which seems to pervade social media. He also explored things philosophically, claiming that it is a actually possible for us to experience new qualia. 

I've mentioned Livewired a few times over the years and it's my shame that I never did a review of it. I think I'm going to have to re-read it to do it justice.

Anyway, his earlier, shorter book The Brain was an obvious read. The major theme of Livewired was the brain's tremendous adaptability, how it could repurpose itself to accomplish new tasks with old hardware. Eagleman did a very thorough job of describing just how far this could go, setting out both when surprising levels of flexibility were possible but also when limits would be reached. 

There are plenty of obvious overlaps between these two books. Since The Brain covers these much more concisely, perhaps by covering them in brief here, I can shorten my eventual review of Livewired... which would otherwise risk just rewriting the whole damn book, 'cos it was bloody good.

The Brain is a very good, very short read. I give it 8/10 for being such an excellent but little compendium on how the brain works. It doesn't tie itself down in unnecessary caveats or tangents but doesn't skip the uncertainties either. It just gets on with things, so so will I.

Semi-permanent plasticity

Brain development, says Eagleman, continues roughly up to the age of 25 or so. Sure, the earliest years are important (in Livewired he makes a bit more of this, noting that certain very basic skills are almost impossible to develop once out of childhood, e.g. feral children will never fully integrate into society), but much happens throughout adolescence and early adulthood too. New connections are formed and discarded as they prove useful or unhelpful (I believe in Livewired he describes this as a process of babbling).

Teenagers brains, he says, are literally different from adults, just as children are. They're socially awkward risk-takers not just because of lack of experience, but also because of their neurology (though of course, presumably experience plays a large role in shaping their neural structures). They are, paradoxically, emotionally hypersensitive but also prone to seeking out highly emotional activities, and unable to control their emotional responses as much as adults are. In one experiment they got physically anxious when asked to sit in a shop window but at the same time they send each other naked pictures of themselves*. They are quite literally immature.

* Not literally at the same time, you understand.

But that's not the end of the story at all. If all the major wiring is in place by around 25, substantial redevelopment is still possible indefinitely afterwards, at least for re-using old networks in new ways. Sufficient practise at a skill can cause macroscopic changes in the brain basically at any age; in Livewired he says this can occur in a matter of hours.

This plasticity, claims Eagleman, is unique to humans. Most animals rely much more on hardwired instincts*. Human adaptability gives us the tremendous advantage of of immense versatility, which far exceeds the penalty of our very long development period. Continuous practise may even help prevent the onset of dementia such as Alzheimers, not by fortifying the connections so much as creating redundant ones as backups. As some connections fail, even the ageing brain is able to repurpose old ones to do different jobs. The degradation can't be stopped but its effects can be reduced.

* I wonder, though, how much research has been done on animal brains in this regard. After all, animal intelligence has continuously exceeded our expectations.

Decision time 

Plasticity also plays a role when the brain has to make a choice. The brain acts, says Eagleman, as a series of competing networks each vying for supremacy, although I rather prefer his other analogy of a parliament. The idea that we have many voices inside of us is quite real, with different networks continuously firing until, finally, the brain acts to "crush ambiguity into choices" and makes a decision.

Exactly how this happens is still somewhat unclear. There's a reward system, in that the brain favours networks which have previously made predictions that have been validated : if one mode of thinking has successfully predicted a good outcome in the past, that network will be favoured. Conversely, those networks which don't give predictions in agreement with reality are downvoted. The brain, then, acts as a sort of prediction engine, continually checking its findings against different models*. Even abstract concepts can act as a reward or punishment, but immediate, tangible effects tend to override all these. Hence it's easy to avoid doing the things we should do in favour of something else (eating ice cream instead of studying). 

* This makes it all the more mysterious that the brain is generally able to do this very well for low-level activities (few people continuously stab themselves with forks) but is often shite at higher reasoning (like believing in the Jewish Space Laser).

Eagleman's suggested self-help solution is to be like Odysseus and nail ourselves to the mast : ahead of time, ensure that the actual situation we'll find ourselves in is more tangibly rewarding/punishing than it otherwise would be. Don't give the brain the option to be distracted by temptation. Perhaps more interestingly, watching our neural responses (when we've got the option to do so) has also proven helpful in getting participants to learn self-control. Maybe one day we'll have phone-accessible EEG-hats and can cultivate our own desired responses using an app...

But exactly how the brain decides, "this network is the winner" and decides that this is the right approach is nowhere made clear. Emotions, says Eagleman, act as a heuristic for decision-making, combining all the possible effects into a simple sensation we can respond to, which explains that uncomfortable sensation while we haven't committed to anything. This, though, is still more description than anything explanatory, albeit a useful one. 

Finally, it's also interesting to me that neural activity is more coherent and correlated while we're asleep than when we're awake. Is the brain better able to get on with things without that pesky conscious mind sticking its nose in ? Maybe.

The nature of reality

This will have to be either very brief or extraordinarily long, so I'm going for the former. The world we experience is not the outside world itself, says Eagleman. Not only is there a delay in processing different sensory signals, but there's even a different delay for each type of perception. Yet somehow, the brain combines all of this into a unified experiential whole. 

And this unified approach appears to be crucial : to assign meaning to a sensory input, it must correlate to something else. If you only have visual data, you won't be able to see. While I had the impression from some of the case studies of Oliver Sacks that we learn to read the world around us, it's more subtle than that – interactivity is crucial, an idea developed further by Peter Godfrey-Smith (another one who's books I really must blog up sometime). Interestingly, when this multisensory approach is denied, the result is hallucinations... eerily similar to LLMs.

Perhaps one of the most compassionate parts of the book describes Schizophrenia as a sort of waking dream. In this condition, says Eagleman, suffers experience hallucinations without any kind of distinction between them and real, external sensory inputs. This naturally explains their behaviour, which may be perfectly rational but in response to a reality all of their own. I wonder if it doesn't go even further than that : in my dreams I rarely respond rationally to anything, yet at the time it feels coherent and logical. Maybe the logical reasoning centres are also impaired, without affecting the sensation that things have been done correctly... the reward networks might be all messed up.

More philosophically, Eagleman stresses that our perceptual reality is not reality itself : "the real world is not full of rich sensory events; instead our brains light up the world with their own sensuality". Perceptual time is also not experiential time (let alone real time). Experiments have shown that while high-stress situations make us feel like time has slowed, they don't affect our ability to think or perceive more quickly. 

Here I think I'd need to clarify with Eagleman himself exactly what he's getting at. I agree, our perceptions don't correspond directly to reality, in that our sensory experience has no special claim on validity (compared to, say, a bat or a whale), and that we have to learn how to create our own mental worlds*. But all the same, surely our experiences do have some equivalence with external reality. There is something outside that induces an experience; redness is not totally meaningless, nor is pain or sound or heat. We can verify these sufficiently well so as to reliably identify exceptions (like the responses of Schizophrenics) as being disconnected from that external reality. So in that sense, I don't agree that our perceptions are purely fabrications; since we have access to nothing else, it doesn't feel at all useful to me to claim that perception is not reality. Perceptual reality is the only thing we will ever have any access to.

* Eagleman mentions an interesting case of synesthesia in which letters are associated with colours. I wonder how this works, given that the letter symbols themselves have no meaning until they're learned.

Finally, I also don't agree that we don't have free will. Eagleman says (as do many others) that consciousness does appear to have some uses, particularly when learning a task for the first time or when things need to be done in an especially careful, controlled way, or when big-picture thinking is required – integrating one line of thinking from one subject with something seemingly unrelated. Seems fine to me, though as to why conscious experience should be needed for this is anyone's guess. And as for those experiments where brain activity can be predicted ahead of the conscious sensation of having made a choice... nah, I've covered that umpteen times already. Far more likely, in my view, that conscious sensation actually does involve being in control rather than a weird way in which the brain constructs a narrative* of deliberation for no good reason.

* Though I do also agree that constructing a narrative is something the brain does a great deal of, as well as creating a theory of mind for us to predict and respond to other people. Interactivity plays an interesting part here, too : while those with too much Botox are hard to read, they themselves have difficulty reading others as they're not able to be so expressive.

You will all become one with the Borg

Well, maybe. The brain's adaptability is not unlimited but it's tremendously powerful all the same; Eagleman gives the case of a girl with literally half a brain who lived a perfectly normal life (and see that recent post about the notorious but misreported Phineas Gage). A key concept Eagleman develops here is the "plug and play" model of sensory inputs. Essentially, our sensory peripherals – eyes, ears etc. – can be replaced and the brain will still find a way to deal with the information. It takes a while for the brain to learn how to process it, but it works (Kevin Warwick came to much the same conclusion in "I, Cyborg").

Personally I think this is most interesting stuff in Eagleman's repertoire. I love the idea of being able to, quite literally, reject your reality and substitute my own. And this actually works. Experiments have enabled people to "see" using tactile sensors on their backs, foreheads and tongues, hooked up to cameras. They can identify objects and accurately judge distances. It works equally well if the tactile interface is connected to an audio sensor instead of a visual one. And this can be done wirelessly, letting volunteers experience sensory input from other places on the planet – and in reverse, to control mechanical arms remotely. 

Real, it turns out, really is just an electrochemical reaction in your brain. 

Of course, things are still limited. The possibility of digitally scanning the brain is a stupendous, unrealisable challenge. Transhumanist dreams of fully uploading our consciousness are also likely futile even in a materialistic perspective, even if we did manage to scan our entire brain and its neural patterns. If consciousness is indeed just those patterns, then we could simulate the brain inside a computer, yes... but, Eagleman says, while it might well be something (or someone) that experiences something, it still wouldn't be us. Even from his perspective of consciousness being emergent, which I don't really agree with*, a transfer just doesn't work. A copy ? Sure, if it's really the patterns that are conscious, and not something to do with the physical substance. Even then, it would have to be capable of change, of forming new memories and responding to new sensations.

* He attempts to refute the argument of Leibniz's Mill, saying that yes, you can't find perception in any single mechanical part of the brain, but maybe you could in the emergent whole. I just don't see it. To me, the gap between experience and physicality is just too large, too fundamental to ever be bridged. The only way I can see this working is if mind and matter are, somehow, of essentially the same stuff (neutral monism, idealism, etc. etc. etc., you know the drill by now). Otherwise, I have no clue how a gigantic abacus could ever be conscious, or how this would happen if we moved the balls around but only in a very particular way.

In short, a fascinating and worthwhile read. I'm going to have to try and get hold of his TV documentaries and read his other books (of which I'm glad to see there are several) at some point. One day I should try a fuller write-up against materialism, but what's really interesting is that often the disagreement with my own, somewhat more dualist perspective, is that the disagreement isn't really that stark after all.

Head injuries won't necessarily turn Jekyll into Hyde

I already shared this on my social media feed, but it turned out to be rather long. And I find it so interesting I want to keep it here as well as a go-to reference. This version has some very minor editing and additions. It's a lot more "quotes from the article" and a lot less of my own commentary than usual, but if you're already familiar with Phineas Gage, it'll save you a long read on Aeon (if you're not, I suggest you just use the link immediately below instead).

This is an absolute belter of piece from Aeon ! I haven't kept up with them much of late (there's just not enough time) but I immediately went to the site and downloaded a few more articles to get back into the swing of things. Aeon do have the occasional utter dud on an article, but when they're right, they're right.

You've probably heard of Phineas Gage, the 19th century railway worker who survived a horrific brain injury only to come out with a changed, ill-mannered personality. Well, he did survive, but the evidence for a changed personality is next to non-existent.

There are three primary sources written about Gage by people who met him. Harlow wrote his first report in 1848, limited to an account of the recovery, and a second in 1868, which reproduced the first and added further interpretations. Another physician, Henry Bigelow, wrote a paper after meeting Gage the year following the accident. 

Of the two, only Harlow mentions Gage’s personality change. His total word count on the subject is just over 300. [My emphasis] At no point does he ask Gage about it or offer any quotes from him – Gage was dead by the time Harlow wrote the second paper. Nothing written by anyone who knew Gage before his injury survives, only paraphrases noted down by the two doctors. 

So, the sources are scant to begin with. And, according to the psychologist and historian Malcolm Macmillan in 2008, most of those who have written about Gage since the primary sources were published do not appear to have checked them, promoting some aspects of the story, ignoring others and embellishing liberally. Macmillan’s conclusions were echoed in a separate 2022 review of more recent Gage literature, which found that half of the 25 papers analysed gave negative descriptions of Gage that were not based on the primary sources.

It really is quite concerning how often widely known stories turn out to be based on almost nothing. The unfortunate part is that because everyone repeats it, it's easy to assume that this is because it's well-verified. But this, unless the reports are all independent, is circular : more repetition sounds like ever-greater credibility, even when it's just literally repeating what someone else said. Now a lot of independent verifications do constitute powerful evidence, to be sure, but a lot of people repeating the result does not. The difficulty is that the brain doesn't instinctively understand this.

Hanna Damasio’s claim that Gage ‘began a new life of wandering’ seems to be extrapolated from a single use of the word ‘wanderings’ by Harlow, in context of the difficulty he had in tracking down Gage in later life. Nowhere did Harlow or Bigelow suggest that ‘wandering’ was typical of Gage’s post-injury existence.

Of the various falsehoods written about Gage, perhaps the one most clearly contradicted by the primary sources is the Damasios’ claim that Gage ‘could not be trusted to honour his commitments’ and that he ‘never returned to a fully independent existence’. In fact, the sources make no mention of Gage being dependent on anyone from the time he recovered from the injury until the last year of his life when he succumbed to illness. They also clearly state that, after he gave up his public appearances, he worked at a livery stable for 18 months and then he moved to Valparaíso in Chile where, according to Harlow, he worked for nearly eight years, ‘caring for horses, and often driving a coach heavily laden and drawn by six horses’.

As Macmillan pointed out, the available facts about Gage fly in the face of claims made about his transformation and reduced capacities. Macmillan gave a carefully sourced description of the demanding nature of Gage’s job in Chile: the dependability required of him in rising in the small hours, loading passengers’ luggage and possibly handling fares; the high level of dexterity and sustained attention necessary for driving six horses; the foresight and self-control involved in navigating the unwieldy coach along the crowded and sometimes treacherous Valparaíso-Santiago road. He also pointed out that Gage, at first a stranger to Chile, would have had to learn something of its language and customs and ‘deal with political upheavals that frequently spilled into everyday life’.

So really, little or no credible evidence for his supposed changed personality from mild-mannered worker to whoremongering brute. It just didn't happen. He became an expat working in the hospitality industry, for all intents and purposes.

The other case is of Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer famous for those early time series photographs of running horses and the like. I'm never heard that there was a claim he had a changed personality, even though he did something much worse than Gage after surviving a stagecoach accident :

...he discovered that his wife, Flora, had become romantically involved with a local theatre critic and, by one biographer’s description, ‘swindler’ called Harry Larkyns. Soon after that, Muybridge came to suspect that his infant son was in fact Larkyns’s child. Muybridge travelled to the town of Calistoga, 75 miles north of his home in San Francisco, and knocked on Larkyns’s door. When Larkyns appeared, Muybridge shot him in the chest with a pistol. Larkyns died at the scene. Muybridge did not resist arrest, freely admitting to the murder, and was held in custody until his trial the following February.

If the testimonies of his friends are to be believed, it was the instability brought on by the brain injury that led Muybridge to kill Larkyns. ‘The killing would have surprised me much before his accident but not much after it,’ said one defence witness, according to the Sacramento Daily Union. The brain scientists take it at face value – labelling the murder as Exhibit A in their argument for Muybridge’s disinhibition.

Why, then, don’t we find Muybridge alongside Gage in neuropsychology textbooks or Wikipedia articles about frontal lobe function? The simplest answer is that neither the testimonies about his personality change nor the retrospective assessments of the clinicians are believable. Some of them amount to very little even on paper – the mention by his friends of Muybridge’s hair changing colour and his idiosyncratic approach to business, for example. But, more pressingly, the testimonies were given in support of an insanity plea submitted by Muybridge’s defence council, in the hope of saving him from the death penalty. How sure can we be that his friends would have said the same things without the urgent stakes of the trial hovering in their minds?

Even if we accept the testimonies as the whole truth, it’s notable that the jury present at the trial roundly rejected the insanity plea. In violation of the law and of the judge’s instructions, when they acquitted Muybridge, it was on the grounds that Larkyns’s death was not a murder committed by a mad person but a justifiable homicide committed by a sane one. Perhaps they’d read the interview with Muybridge published by the San Francisco Chronicle while he was in prison awaiting trial. He is quoted as saying:

"I objected to the plea of insanity because I thought a man to be crazy must not know what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing. I was beside myself with rage and indignation, and resolved to avenge my dishonour.I objected to the plea of insanity because I thought a man to be crazy must not know what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing. I was beside myself with rage and indignation, and resolved to avenge my dishonour."

Fortunately for him, his photography had made him famous. And so the results were quite different from Gage, who was blamed for doing nothing, whereas Gage was excused murder :

The forces of social status and uncritical trust in professionals that worked so well in Muybridge’s favour did the opposite for Gage. During his life, he may well have had friends. People were willing to employ him. He was cared for by his family towards the end. And there’s no suggestion in the primary sources that he ever became isolated or spurned from any community. However, without powerful or wealthy friends to defend his reputation, the story told about Gage by Harlow operated in isolation after his death. In the absence of dissenting voices, it was treated as fair game by commentators with their own professional agendas.

Finally, the main point of the essay is against the notion of "disinhibition", or at least that this shouldn't be used as an easy explanation for all psychological changes or disorders :

Among those who have accepted the revision of the Gage story, the consensus seems to be that his character probably did change but that any disinhibition that did occur was temporary. But it’s important we subject even this claim to counter-proposals, that we ask what else might have provoked such a temporary change, assuming we believe in it. Some have suggested that psychological trauma might have played a role... But maybe Gage was just pissed off.

On a modern case :

Callum was clear that both examples were out of character but that they still held meaning. ‘In the first instance, even though my family were a bit surprised at what I was saying, it also reassured them that I was still the same person. I was suggesting doing things that demonstrated I remembered my friends, even if my family didn’t want to hear about those things.’

This persistence of self was something Callum also emphasised about the apparent disinhibition. Disobeying doctors’ orders by wheeling himself out of the hospital may have been atypical for his pre-injury character, but this behaviour still belonged to him rather than to some mysterious new identity ‘unveiled’ by the injury. ‘I’m not a different person,’ he said. ‘I’m me after something traumatic has happened to my brain. It was still me doing those things. It was me who was disinhibited.’ And he also insisted that the behaviour held value.

Personalities vary all the time. The difficulty, I guess, is in deciding when a change is legitimate or valid. One person can be excused murder because they lost their temper; another can become a textbook classic because maybe they felt a bit grumpy one morning after taking a bolt to the head. As Cicero said (In Defence Of Milo) :

If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right. When weapons reduce them to silence, the laws no longer expect one to await their pronouncement. For people who decide to wait for these will have to wait for justice, too – and meanwhile they will suffer injustice first.  

And motivation does matter. But Cicero was explicitly referring to self-defence, not premeditated murder (though he had no qualms about this when it came to tyrants and the like : "to end the life of a man who is a bandit and a brigand can never be a sin"). 

Yet when someone respected does something abhorrent, we're all too apt to assume they must have had a good, valid excuse and it doesn't represent their true character. When someone of lowlier standing does something considerably less problematic, we assume that they must have had some horrible psychological problem; we view their character and agency as somehow less valid than that of others – even their trauma must reflect some deep flaw rather than their making a real choice. The tale grows in the telling indeed.

It's okay to like vinyl

Here's a nice if somewhat over-lengthy piece about why people prefer antiquated technologies like vinyl records instead of digital media. The main point seems to be quite simple :

Work, effort, meaning – these ideas are all interconnected for users and consumers of analogue technology. Whereas work is often seen as a means to an end, from earning a living to exercising, "analoguers" get a buzz out of the processes of setting things up, getting things right, trial and error, and building up skills. This "love of the process" was backed up by another photographer, Dan, during a Zoom discussion held amid one of the Covid lockdowns :

"When I'm serious, I don't want to get distracted by what [image] I'm going to end up with. Even with instant photography, I know I'm going to see the shot soon – just not now. I love everything up until pressing the shutter. I love searching for the frame, I like the output, but the whole process is important."

This makes a lot of sense to me, and also echoes both Chris Hatfield and Tim Peake's books in which they say that as an astronaut, you have to enjoy the training. You can't make it all about the big payoff of going to space because that might never happen, and is only a very small part of the end result. As for vinyl records, I think enjoying them because they offer a "richer sound" is frankly silly, but if you actually prefer the slightly slower process of retrieving a disc, putting the needle on the record and pressing a big chunky mechanical button... I'm not going to stop you. In fact I completely sympathise with the need for tactile sensation even in this very limited case. Physical contact gives a feeling of realness you'll never get from playing a digital file. It's the difference between porn and sex, I suppose...

Ahem. Anyway it's got sod-all to do with the sound quality, so just stop pretending that it does. I'm more inclined to the argument that actually it's the poorer sound quality that has value here :

"Half of what you do trying to make music is like a happy accident that ends up sounding better than what you intended. If the machine doesn't do exactly what you thought it was going to do, or goes a bit out of tune, it is all part of the process. You get a little bit of randomness in it, and that randomness can add to what you are trying to achieve."

Similarly, many of Mick Rock's legendary music photographs are technically very grainy because he was shooting in low light and "pushing" the film to its limits, but as a result, they have a painterly feel that has enhanced their appeal and power.

In a sense, while analogue users feel they have greater control over their creativity, this occurs through surrendering to the demands of one's device – along the lines of German electronic legends Kraftwerk's menschmaschine (Man-Machine) philosophy. This runs contrary to the promise of most consumer-driven innovation: functional superiority and increased ease of use.

Again this makes a lot of sense to me. Having to deal with limitations and errors forces you to think a little bit, to really get creative : if you have absolute control then it all becomes a bit overwhelming, whereas if things are more restricted, perhaps it's a bit easier to accept these limitations which are not of your own making. And I suggest that people want these authentic imperfections. Sure, you could recreate it all with digital, but this wouldn't be the same as a genuine accident. We like feeling that we're not totally in control of the process.

The process of slowing it all down also adds value. As a follow-up to a post on my ReMarkable, I really like this tablet. It's just as indispensable six months later as it was on day one. Having to slow down a bit to write, with it more difficult (but not impossible) to undo, forces me to think more carefully. It also helps keep things a bit shorter. And of course, it's got that vital tactile sensation that's quite different, though not necessarily better, than a boring old clunky keyboard* (I do still enjoy also typing on a keyboard). Analogue writing has a different, more deliberate flavour to it than typing. All that being true :

* It's also really useful as a storage device for the long interesting pieces I find and don't want to forget.

Yet none of the people we've interviewed are analogue purists. These vinyl lovers mostly also have Spotify lists; film photographers will sometimes take out their phone to capture material quickly; and modular synth fans often have tablets full of apps to replicate sounds on the go.

Well, sometimes the process matters and sometimes it doesn't. As in the solarigraphy conference I attended/co-organised last year : sometimes people take photographs as a means of self-expression but not for the sake of art. I take photos even of famous landmarks because I want to remember things as I saw it, what the weather was like, were their crowds of tourists or was it empty, under construction, etc. I want to capture my experience, not necessarily evoke any emotions. It matters to me because it's mine.

I suggest we all sometimes want to either enjoy the process or the result, and we value both differently at different times. Sometimes we want to actually create things and enjoy the process, and that act of self-expression by doing things the hard way has value. But sometimes we just want the end result, and that's perfectly fine too. AI tools are in that sense a democratisation of creativity, taking the hard work out of our hands : if you want to see a pug on the Moon and just think that would be amusing in itself, and don't want to attend a six-month painting course to get good enough to produce the end result... that's fine ! If you want to read a silly story about said pug fighting Moon monsters, and don't want it hand-crafted but just value the output, that's fine too. And of course if you want to do it the hard way, nobody should have a problem with that either.

This has consequences everywhere. At work I'm currently in the process of preparing a couple of papers on visual source extraction. A great many people don't want to have to do this, and I quite understand that. Finding every galaxy in a large data set is inevitably a slow and sometimes tedious process regardless of how good the inspection tools are. But for me it's the main enjoyable part of the whole procedure. I like having to carefully sift through the data, clicking when I see a source, adjusting the region used for measurements, comparing this rawest of data with optical images... it's a relaxing and therapeutic process, up to a point. It enriches the whole experience, gives it meaning, and is anyway provably better than most automatic techniques. But I don't mind at all that other people prefer to avoid this and would rather focus their energies on understanding the final catalogues – I only object to anyone saying that visual source extraction isn't a good idea, because it demonstrably is.

Well, there we are. From astronauts to vinyl-loving pretentious hipsters, to astronomers hunting galaxies and doing calculations with circular slide rules, humans love touching things and literally feeling a connection to what they're doing. We value the process and we value the output. And it's all fine... it just won't stop me making fun of vinyl-loving hipsters. Thank goodness cassette tapes don't seem to be making a comeback though, because that would be a different conversation.

Plato's Tweets

I liked that one about Epicurus so much that I decided to read another BBC Future post by the same author : Would Plato Tweet ? And this one's pretty good too. Before I dive back to the usual consciousness/reality posts, I think here I'll stick with the theme of social media instead.

Long before philosophers were writing books and papers, their thoughts had to be transmitted in a way that could grab their audience's attention – there was an element of public display. Early philosophers also developed highly elaborate public personas. Empedocles, who's credited with inventing the idea of the four Classical elements, made his public appearances with extravagant flair – a purple robe, a golden belt, sandals of bronze – and referred to himself as an incarnate god. 

These Socratic dialogues, which are the fountainhead of the whole philosophical tradition that follows, can be read as a fictionalised biography of a career influencer – the Collected Twitter Threads of Socrates, liberally reinvented, yet perhaps faithful in spirit. 

In the age of social media, we may be returning to a state in which a thinker's claim to wisdom relies on their ability to effectively perform it – with the additional requirement that they're able to transmute that performance into content.

That's quite interesting. I've been vaguely thinking about deepfakes and other AI-generated misinformation. I see many claims that some coming deluge will be nothing less than apocalyptic for out faith in news reports, about which I'm extremely skeptical. A more likely worst-case scenario, I think, is that it would return us to a pre-video era, when no videos could be trusted as the gold standard of accuracy because none existed. 

Even this, I think, is not really plausible, but the parallels of social media taking us back to a worse, less well-informed past is a healthy way of stopping us from getting too misty-eyed about a lost Golden Age when you could believe everything they put in the newspapers. It never existed. Today's misinformation problems are just the latest in a long line of attempts to confuse instead of convince; different in their specifics (very importantly so !), but not pointing to some fundamental change or decline in human psychology.

As Plato represented him, Socrates was unimpressed by moral posturing. And so according to the journalist Olivia Goldhill, he would well feel the same about this characteristic of social media, wherein people often hypocritically implore others to be more kind and virtuous. The more you display certainty in your self-righteous posting, Socrates might have argued, the more likely you are in fact ignorant of your own moral shortcomings.

Oh very much this. Not so much for Plato's likely perspective (I'll get back to that), but for the whole accusative, holier-than-thou tone of social media in general. Endless memes about what's wrong with the world, who to support and who to blame... I hate it. The petty judgements, the culture wars that make moral issues out of things which have no moral aspect to them whatsoever... and the endless anti-religion memes ! Just who the hell is it these are appealing to ? Who is ever going to be persuaded by them, and if they're not supposed to be persuasive, what are they for ? And what in the world – this one particularly confuses me – is the point of posting very long articles but then not be willing to have a discussion about them ?

Look, I get the need to vent and rant (he says, going on a rant). I don't get the need to do nothing but state your moral beliefs over and over again. And I don't for the life of me understand why we're not supposed to have a conversation. It's okay to argue with people. Arguing is good for you ! We should be encouraging actual discussions, not just sanctimonosity !

But let's move on.

The sophist Protagoras was said to have espoused a theory of "relativism", which essentially suggested that since our individual perceptions differ, we are each limited to our own subjective construction of reality. One can see how this thesis is exemplified by aspects of the social media experience, as we scroll through an apparent infinity of information, yet always within the confines of our private information bubbles. 

As I was saying, we all live in our own multiverses, which helps explain why the concept is such a good bit of science fiction even if it relies on lousy physics. This brings us to the titular question of whether Plato would in fact participate in social media. Here I somewhat disagree with the conclusion : 

To combat the problem of distinguishing desirable from undesirable information – good from bad influencers – Plato introduced an infamous degree of censorship into his theoretical city. Jenny Jenkins at Swansea University has speculated as to whether he would have allowed citizens to use Facebook, surmising that this would have been a resounding "no". "Facebook does not have the intention of promoting morality, and does not particularly seek to educate its users," she writes, "so I think Plato would have disapproved of it for this reason alone."

This question of filter bubbles / unwelts / multiverses is one that keeps gnawing away at me. We should absolutely and unequivocally clamp down hard on abject misinformation. But beyond that, what do we want social media to be ? A place where we can only ever hurl judgemental, petty memes at each other ? A pseudo-encyclopaedia where factual accuracy must be reinforced at all times ?

The best answer I can come up with is "something like real life". Where we generally agree on most issues with most of our friends, but not everything. There's overlap, but never a complete one, and our attitudes are similar enough that disagreements (at least on issues of no immediate importance to us) aren't at all likely to lead to slanging matches; and of course best of all is when slanging matches don't actually matter and nobody goes away permanently angry.

Now as to Plato, I disagree because I think looking at his ideal society is the wrong approach. Plato didn't actually live in his ideal society, and the article quotes a famous admonishment of his against the written word :

"They will be hearers of much, without learning anything; they will appear to know much, yet for the most part know nothing; and they will be miserable to be around, having become wise-seeming, without actually being wise." (Phaedrus 275a-b; my translation)

But the context is missing here. The point is that you can't take everything literally, that everything is subject to change and cannot be determined with absolute certainty (even if he was indeed after a search for objective truth). Above all, Plato stressed most emphatically that if can you can ever arrive at real Truth at all, it's only through extreme effort and through a process of dialogue with others. So while he might well reject specific implementations of social media, and certainly most of the business models that foster it, I doubt he'd reject the notion itself.

For unlike the physical agora, where the whole crowd may be deceived at once by the ideological seductions of an itinerant sophist, the virtual agora is different for each crowd member. We receive the proffered wisdom of the modern philosophers and sophists "alone together", to use the social scientist Sherry Turkle's phrase. We are each deceived uniquely, adding ever another layer between us and our collective grasp on what's actually there. And it is we ourselves, when we post and repost, tweet and retweet, who deceive one another, circulating our own sophistries.

When social media works well (and it often does work well), it connects interested people with genuine experts, or people of similar interests and levels of knowledge but with qualitatively different perspectives and backgrounds. When it fails it connects idiots. Plato would definitely not approve of the latter because nobody would, but equally, who would disagree with the former ? To disagree with people having productive friendships just because they occur digitally rather than physically wouldn't make any sense. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now :

It may be that some Stoics – whose ranks included people of all classes and extractions, slave and free, Greek and Roman – would have had at least an ambivalent, and perhaps a guardedly optimistic view of the possibilities offered by online social networks. Insofar as they offer a mechanism for connectivity, they can foster real community – particularly when their users are engaging with one another in good faith and to mutual benefit, as may indeed be the case with content creators who provide education, community empowerment or therapeutic support to their audiences. 

A Stoic might ask, are you using this platform as a rational contributor to human well-being and the community of the Universe? Or to aggrandise, entertain or escape from yourself? If the former, go for it; if the latter, delete your accounts.

And I think Plato would probably agree with this. As with all critiques of social media, the problems aren't usually with the messaging system per se, but with the business model around it. Whether you send a letter or a tweet or a phone call, if your dialogue helps you learn or foster genuine connections, this is generally a Good Thing. Plato would certainly not approve of the kind of social media that feeds endless adverts (especially the political kind) to its users, and would undoubtedly insist on strict regulations. But if it could be devised in such a way as to allow good, thoughtful discussions, or just for the typical sorts of everyday conversations everyone has anyway, I don't see him having any objections.

The Monstrous Multiverse

Why is the multiverse such a popular notion ? Scientifically it's bollocks. It replaces physics with statistics and utterly lacks explanatory power.

But psychologically... maybe it's just true ? We live in different mental worlds as a matter of course, inhabiting different umwelts to each other. When I first encountered this concept of our perceived sensory reality, I thought it might be applicable to politics as well as biological sensors. But the more I think about it the more I think I've underestimated its almost infinite scope.

We have different politics, yes, but also different cultures in all aspects, which – often enough, though certainly not always – never interact with each other. Even walking past outside diners at a restaurant, pedestrians don't enter the customer's umwelt, not really, even though they may pass within inches of each other.

Politically... it's partly about morals to be sure, probably even the dominant part. But it's also simply perception. What's relevant to one is of absolutely no concern to others. If you don't actually experience or witness the effects of a policy on a person or a group, it's likely of no concern to you. Awareness is just not the same as experience, like being told the plot of a TV show rather than watching it unfold. So essentially some events are literally not happening in our individual mental worlds.

Of course hard external reality does sometimes collide with these mental realms. It's not that reality isn't real or such. It's just that most of the time, or enough of the time at least, most of reality simply doesn't matter.

And this goes far beyond politics. Large tracts of reality simply don't exist for each of us. There's a whole world of the ins and outs of football shenanigans that don't exist for me. Details of celebrity lifestyles and the finer points of violin techniques alike hold no reality for me whatever. A myriad of mental worlds we'll never have the chance (or misfortune) to explore ! And of course for most people, poor unfortunate wretches that they are, astronomy too just isn't a thing.

To hammer home the point : the same event can be experienced by different people in radically different ways, e.g. an amazing emotional movie to one might be a pile of crap to another. A delicious cake to you might be disgusting to me. The substance, the sensory input, is the same but the output experience is not.

Why does this arise ? Probably from a huge number of causes. We grow up with different experiences, acquire different biases and perspectives, experience different teachings and have natural, pre-determined inclinations. A plethora of tiny differences gradually accumulate and develop. Most children, presumably, are more similar to each other than in the case of most adults.

The multiverse of science fiction is thus appealing because psychologically it captures what we anyway experience. It takes something we experience mentally, something we feel emotionally, and gives it a physical incarnation, just as monsters are our fears made flesh. It's the same basic principle at work, just manifested very differently.

Whether this has any bearing on actual scientists advocating the existence of a real multiverse, I don't know. I suspect not, that this is only a coincidence. I don't think our everyday experiences have much shaped the development of many-worlds theory : this is just a natural interpretation of the quantum mathematics. But maybe it's made people more receptive to it.

On the anti-cult

In my last post, I mentioned that people in the thrall of the bizarre cult of Boris Johnson care only about who he is, not what he says or does. To the fascist cronies of such men, the person is above all : the law, convention, democracy, due process, all of it. There is no ideology at work in the conventional sense, no determination to enact some great social reform except as a side-effect of bringing them to power. For the fascist, the important point is who is in charge, not what they do when they get there. They may well cloak this in promises of what such despots will do to improve the lives of the common folk, but that's not what fundamentally matters to them, not really.

For such a person, there is little problem in believing in contradictory ideas. If their Dear Leader one day declares death to pigeons, they will loudly devote themselves to enacting feathery death at every opportunity. If the same leader declares the very next day that pigeons are now sacred, they will immediately set about constructing great temples and statues to honour their beloved birds. It's not that they aren't aware of the stark contradiction, it's that they don't care. Self-consistency isn't what matters to them. The only thing they respect is their precious master.

The leaders themselves provide excellent evidence of this. Johnson once wrote two letters, one in support of and one attacking Brexit. Trump frequently contradicts himself in the space of a single sentence. You only have to listen to the verbal effluence spilling forth from the bowels of Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg for a few minutes to realise that these people don't have any agenda of their own whatsoever.

Not every cult is necessarily an example of fascism, but every sort of fascism is a type of cult. It enthrones the leader and discards everything else as irrelevant. 

In an earlier post, I mentioned that people can define themselves by being against things as well as in support of them. You can be against abortion rather than trying to have as many babies as possible; against veganism rather than wanting to be being purely carnivorous.

Recently I was reminded of this by seeing some of the rather distasteful reaction on reddit to the missing submersible visiting the Titanic. None of the people on board have ever had much if any media presence before, but certain segments of the internet are reacting in a very personal way. It's not the (rather obscene) wealth of the people they have a problem with, it's the people themselves they object to simply because they're wealthy.

I suggest that this is an anti-cult. Not the opposite of a cult, but cult-like behaviour applied in the opposite way to usual. Just as you can idolise someone because of who they are rather than what they do, so you can demonise them by exactly the same token. It is, of course, a form of discrimination : this person is wealthy, so I must hate them now; regardless of all other considerations I must hate them and them personally. And this is manifestly different from being opposed to wealth inequality itself; hating the person who has the money (irrespective of how they got it or what they do with it) rather than hating the fact they have the money (or hating the system that allowed this) is quite a different state of affairs.

An anti-cult is personal in the same way a regular cult is. It's all personal, not ideological. It's just that it's against specific individuals in and of themselves, regardless of context and circumstance. A regular person might say, "huh, well I don't agree with Donald Trump on most things, but when he said the time was 1:30pm, he was basically right", whereas a Trump anti-cultist would say the time simply must be something else.

We can generalise this to broader issues as well, beyond the exclusively personal. A normal person might have concerns about nuclear power but admit that its low CO2 emissions are an advantage, whereas an anti-cultist will insist that either the low emissions are a lie or even somehow a problem. A reasonable person might not like the monarchy but concede that some of their charitable activities are okay, while an anti-cultist will maintain that these must be damaging or that all charity is therefore bad. To an anti-believer, anything associated with the target of the ire must also fall victim to their displeasure. Anti-cultists like these dedicate themselves to being against certain things not because of the consequences that such things cause, but because they are against those things by their very nature.

This way of thinking may be somewhat more common than it might appear. We are all of us tribal to some degree and we shift our opinions depending on what are tribal leaders determine. If our preferred party changes its stance, we do as well, at least a little bit. Of course, most of the time we're probably not too deep in the grips of true cultism or anti-cultism : we can bring ourselves to sometimes agree with those we overall despise, and disagree on specific points with those we generally find favourable. And if we're pushed too far, we switch allegiances - if we didn't, there'd be no point in having elections. But we're none of us wholly immune to bias, tribalism and anti-tribalism alike.

Acutely aware that "everyone" must necessarily include myself, I nevertheless wonder if I've misread my social media feeds. I've been thinking that they're rife with cynicism, seeing everything and everyone as having an ulterior, malevolent motive. Things that I find inspiring (space travel, virtual reality, new technology more generally) are viewed with a strange, perverted disdain, through a warped ideological lens in which only the complete overthrow of capitalism is ever the acceptable answer to any question no matter the relevance of the financial system to the issue at hand. Any manifestly promising development is at once rejected if it comes from a disapproved source. The technology itself must be bad, the thinking goes, because the developers are inherently bad people. Any level of wealth more than half a sigma above the median is bad, so anyone not having financial difficulties is clearly in need of a guillotine.

It's all a bit mad. Perhaps I just need better social media feeds.

Wild-eyed Wild Isles

Much nonsense was reported about the final bonus episode of the BBC's Wild Isles recently. This didn't air on broadcast TV but was limited to iPlayer, which prompted the Guardian et al. to cry "right wing government cover-up", and claimed that "reputable sources" had told them it was because the BBC feared being too critical of the Tories.

Now these concerns are not without validity in the wake of the Richard Sharp debacle* and Gary Lineker's escapades, but in this particular instance, it was total nonsense. This extra feature was never part of the main show but commissioned by the RSPB, WWF and the National Trust. It was never scheduled to broadcast, and the show was described as five episodes in length on the RSPB and WWF's own websites. The whole furore was a bunch of bollocks.

* A case of very, very obvious conflict of interest. Good that he resigned, but disappointing that he refuses to see what's right in front of his face.

Not the show itself, though. That's superb. The main run of five episodes is up to the usual exemplary standards of Attenborough... but, it is a shame that the special didn't broadcast. It’s very much worth watching (available on Prime outside the UK, I believe), and contains nothing that attacks the government in any way. But I'm not going to do a detailed rundown of the episode. Instead, I need to go a bit more of a rant.

For once, the doom-laden tone of how badly the British environment has fared is kept to necessary minimum. Instead, the focus is on regeneration schemes, including, unexpectedly, cases where meat production can actually be beneficial for carbon capture, and where improving biodiversity is good for profits. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate : this positive approach in nature documentaries is badly needed. There have been a few others over the last year or so but the more the merrier. There is no longer any point - any point whatsoever - in the “doom porn” that too often characterises documentaries about environmentalism; I know the situation is bad, restating that in endlessly detailed and varied ways about exactly how bad things are serves no purpose. It just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy : everything is fucked, so why take any action ? Sure, let’s just all wallow in our own self-loathing, but the hell point is that supposed to achieve besides making everyone psychologically damaged ?

Well for one thing it’s not fucked. It isn’t. The environment is extremely robust if you give it half a chance, and herein are presented ways of living with nature rather than the typical binary “them or us” choice that oft-characterises environmentalism. Too often it seems to me that there is no small number of people who take a perverse delight in resharing every single “everything is awful” articles and must at some level actually enjoy this awfully depressing situation, who must be getting some sort of dopamine hit from it or something. 

Well, I’m done with that. It’s stupid. Stop rejoicing in your own misery. Cynicism is a luxury, optimism is both a burden and a duty.

And I do think that this is a problem peculiar to the left. I don't see the same sort of thing in the right. When a loathsome conservative resigns, I see the left-wing press moaning that there'll only be someone worse to replace them. I see bizarre claims that the next election could result in a hung parliament (albeit coming from both political wings, though for different reasons), despite the fact that local elections don't follow national polls that precisely and with Labour still with an enormous national lead. 

I just don't get it. Sure, complaints and criticism can be the engine of social progress. But this kind of ultra-pessimism baffles me. Such an attitude doesn't help achieve anything, it just keeps everyone perpetually miserable. It's weird.

Rant over, you may go about your business. After you watch the episode, of course.

How to write a popular book

Having read innumerable popular history and science books, I want to consolidate a few thoughts on some all-too-common mistakes. I would not presume to offer anything as grand as a guide, just some observations on things that happen (or don't happen) too regularly to ignore. 

1) Bibliographic references go at the back, footnotes go at the bottom of the page

This is by far the most common and most irritating structural problem of the books I read. Yes, please, do give me references - sometimes even a lay reader like me does like to check the sources. And absolutely do give me footnotes as well. They're both generally a good thing.

But combining references and footnotes and putting them all at the back is daft. Why would I want to keep flicking back and forth between different sections, doing a really tedious lucky dip to see if I get some interesting extra text or just yet another reference ? I mean, IBID ? Again ? YOU MADE ME TURN 356 PAGES JUST FOR THAT ?

Look, it's perfectly simple. Supplementary information that's immediately relevant to the main text : same page please. References : at the back.

Why these points are so often overlooked  is something that confuses the heck out of me because it just seems so bleeding obvious. Yet probably about 90% of authors don't do this. And I can't understand how nobody else seems to want to complain about it.

2) Put maps in relevant sections, not all at once

Likewise, maps are great. But if they're all together (usually at the front) despite referencing different areas or times, they're not much help. And this is silly, because by and large different chapters tend to have a different geographic or chronological focus, so just put each map at the start of the most relevant chapter. I mean, it's fine if occasionally you need to say "see map on page N" which happens to be in a different chapter. I don't mind turning to a different section once in a while; I don't have some weird allergy to looking up page numbers. Just making me do this constantly is very annoying because it breaks the flow of the text.

3) Reference all figures and colour plates

A final structural point : using colour plates is nice, but just because they're usually (by necessity) in a separate section doesn't mean they have to be avoided in the main text completely. Just give them numbers and then refer to them appropriately. Hardly anyone does this, which is just irritating : at what point should I stop to look at the pictures ? Are they just to be perused at random ? Honestly, this takes next to no effort and helps the flow of the narrative considerably.

4) Be chronological, not biographical

This one is a bit more subjective because there certainly are times when it's beneficial to do things out of order. But attempts at doing biographies of historical figures tend to be pretty awful, in my experience. First and foremost, tell me what the person did. This is far more comprehensible if you tell me what things they did in the order that they did them. If you want to extract some common character traits by all means do that, but trying to do this by itself is pretty much guaranteed to fail.

Likewise, in popular science it's helpful to sketch a history of how we arrived at current findings, and here too being chronological is a perfectly sensible guideline if nothing else. Above all, though, try and tell me a story. Tell me how one thing led to another, or how one thing may or may not imply another. You don't have to be rigidly linear and you certainly don't have to make everything artificially certain. But give me a thread to follow and explore.

5) Make a point

Or at least, have a point. I personally enjoy it very much when an author has a clear axe to grind, even if it's not very likely I'm going to agree with them : at least I know what they're up to and feel equipped to mentally argue back, to view their arguments more critically. Trying to draw at the grand underlying trends and causal effects has a particular appeal to me - I want to know why things happen not just how.  As long as your attempt isn't hopelessly stupid, I'll probably enjoy the reasoning process regardless of the end result.

I don't mind either way if an author wants to be explicit or explicit about this. Sneakily trying to bend the narrative so the reader goes away with a certain impression without ramming your own personal pet theory down my throat is fine; on the other hand, being up-front about why you're writing the book is usually a good idea. Of course, one can set this out at the start and/or end without having to labour the point continuously in every section.

But most important of all is that you have some point to make. Doesn't have to be anything deep or insightful, you could just want to tell a good tale. Or you might want to support the established view in defiance of popular alternatives, or indeed do the exact opposite. It's all good. What you absolutely cannot do is have no sort of point at all, otherwise you'll just get a big mess. And if you do have an axe to grind, feel free to grind away... but don't pretend you're not doing it. Don't pretend to be writing something you're not. If you want to wax lyrical on the sins of the decadent West, that is fine - but don't tell me you're writing a history of China, because it'll be obvious what you're up to and you'll come across as biased and annoying.

There we go, that should sort everything out.

Harry's Wondrous World

Prince Harry is a twat. He's a massive douchebag. In fact, he's a colossal, walking arse that just goes around bumping into things and spewing crap all over the place. He is, in short, as dumb as a plank, and I don't like him.

Honestly there's not much else I'm going to say in this post. I really, really do not care about the Prince of Thickos but the news has been so saturated with coverage lately I've decided to get things out of my system.

Actually that's a good lead-in point. Not so long ago, I would have some considerable praise for the Princes for their charitable donations in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. I also felt that there was abundant evidence that the UK media had been hugely unfair in their coverage of Harry and Megan. And that point is probably still true, but the thing is, just because there are two sides to a story doesn't mean that either is correct. In this case, I'm pretty sure that they're both shite.

What I mean is, when H&M decided to up-shop and migrate to America-land, I didn't much mind that they gave an interview to Oprah, even if it was a pretty useless and massively overrated one. Fine, you're giving an interview about how much you hate the press - but that's less ironic than it seems. By all means, get it out of your system. I totally get that. Tell your side of the story and move on. Fair enough.

But... after that, you have to shut the hell up, or your point is null and void. That's just how it works.

Did they ?

No. They've courted the media spotlight with determination that would shame a pimp. Instead of getting an actual job, they've thrived on spewing their boring tale about how much the media hates them by selling their story to the media.

Sigh.

I've not watched any of the interviews nor read the book, and I'm not going to. But I do very much like this unusually unrestrained review from the BBC :

Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, is part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent.

What other royal recollection would cover losing his virginity behind a pub, or go into such prolonged detail about a frost-bitten penis? This royal appendage gets more lines than many of his relatives. Maybe there should be a spoiler alert for the special cushion that's made.

He describes his lonely life at home, self-medicating with psychedelic drugs, drying his clothes on a radiator [my god, really ? a RADIATOR ? my heart bleeds] and planning shopping trips like military raids, to be carried out in disguise and at speed.

What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights. No one worries about paying gas bills in this book. He's back and forth to Africa like he was going a few stops on the Northern Line.

Although, that would have been more exotic for him because he says the only time he got on a Tube train was on a school trip.

He just seems to be degenerating into ever-more incoherent nonsense. That first point is for me insurmountable : you can't credibly claim to hate the media and then go on to whore yourself out to the media, it's just not possible. But then for good measure he also does things like say that his remarks about the Taliban were "taken out of context" without providing any context, blames everyone else for him leaving the royal family despite him being the one to insult everyone in public, and claims that writing the book was "therapy" without realising that writing and publishing are two different things, and claims that he was systematically abused when all that seems to have happened was some modest unpleasantness, and somehow expects that by doing all this in public things will get better because sure, everyone loves having their dirty laundry exposed for all to see. That's definitely going to have them come crawling back to poor Princess Harry.

Oh, and just like the rest of the media, he calls things "leaks", when in fact what happened was that the book was published in Spain. In no sense can actually releasing the book in a different country be called a "leak". You wanted that information in the public domain - forgetting that some people can speak different languages doesn't mean there was any impropriety here. Good grief.

Get over yourself, FFS. He's properly mental. Sure, he's experienced tragedy, but haven't we all ? You don't get unlimited passes for that. You certainly don't deserve a humanitarian award for having done pretty much sod-all.

Or more likely, he's doing it all for money. I mean, he's got all the time in the world but the book was bloody ghost written. This is stupid. What's more likely : he's making an earnest attempt at reconciliation with his self-estranged family by having someone else write a book about how awful they are, or he's a money-grabbing, attention-seeking twat ?

Now I'd despite all this, I'd describe myself as a monarchist... but not a royalist. I mean, I'm comfortable with the idea of there being a monarchical figurehead; I won't say it's the ideal system (that's another conversation altogether), but it's certainly not the worst. Having some rich twerp wave their arms and wear a crown is a lot better than an actual despot, even - perhaps especially - an elected one.

But I'm no fanboy of the royals themselves. I have as much interest in their tedious antics as the most vehement republican. I think the national anthem is a dirge and if I had to choose between listening to the William Shatner's terrible, terrible album on repeat or watch rolling news coverage of the birth of yet another stupid royal baby, it'd be even-stevens at best.

Likewise, as by now should be clear if it wasn't before, I enjoy hyperbole. I find Franky Boyle frequently hilarious. Cards Against Humanity has me in stitches and the more offensive the content, the better (more relevantly, perhaps, I find The Windsors hilarious). Laughing at jokes that would make Jimmy Carr blush does not mean I endorse the content in any way, because, you see, I'm not an imbecile. I'm perfectly capable of laughing at things precisely because they would be absolutely awful if they were intended with any seriousness, not because I secretly believe that all gingers should be drowned at birth and have finally found an outlet for my hitherto-supressed anti-ginger bloodlust.

... that Harry is in fact very very ginger, is a coincidence, I swear !

But, just as monarchist <> royalist, there's a distinction to be made here : this has to be done in its proper place. Hence I don't find anything offensive about Jeremy Clarkson's recent comments about Megan, because this was so bloody obviously not intended as anything serious (even if Megan herself was perfectly entitled to be outraged). That people are often incapable of making this rudimentary distinction is further support for my theory of psychology that holds simply that People Are Stupid.

What I mean is, by all means have your terrible feuds. Call each other whatever awful names you want. But while people too often can't see that something is not intended with any degree of seriousness, what is harmless enough in private can be genuinely damaging in public. So Harry, please, just shut the fuck up already. Leave us all alone. And, more importantly, media, stop paying him the slightest bit of attention. "Literally entitled rich dude is unhappy" is not a headline-worthy news piece. Stephen Colbert I'd hope would have known better. Sigh.

There, I've got it out of my system. As per my stipulations, I will say no more about Prince Harry, his silly wife, or their no-doubt awful children any further. Now if only everyone else would kindly do the same...