We All Screen For i-Screens

I'm still finding it hard to get my head around the fact that there are people who think modern life is too easy. 

I mean, I just don't get it. At all. Sure, navigation is easier because you can outsource that to Google Maps, and you can order takeaways online, yes... and that's what's shutting down your critical thinking skills ? You don't have five hundred thousand other things demanding your attention instead ?

Wow. Must be nice. I only wish I had that problem.

Some have it that technology itself is the issue, and that we should claw back a more manual existence, both mentally and physically. I'm not entirely without sympathy here : as I've said before, I do think single-purpose "devices" like books are inherently better for developing focus and deep thought than devices which are designed to be multi-functional. Of course, in practise we need both sorts, but I think this maximal focus is particularly important for children. Reducing reliance on tech in schools is perfectly sensible, not least because kids will find their own ways to distract themselves regardless.

A good learning trajectory, I think is to first learn the fundamentals, do enough of the really hard basics yourself such that you develop a solid intuition for it, then gradually move up to dealing with the higher-level stuff, outsourcing the low-level aspects to dedicated tools. Do at least some addition and multiplication yourself before handing it over to a calculator; do at least a few Fourier transforms and differential equations the hard way before letting a computer handle it; look through an eyepiece before relying on a telescope's CCD*. Even if you forget the details later – and you will – you'll still be far better equipped to spot when things go wrong and figure out solutions. You'll also learn critical and analytical thinking along the way, and maybe even a little wisdom. Those kinds of skills have much broader applicability.

* Though there is no case whatever to be made for going back to an era in which you needed an acoustic coupler to send emails. Sometimes simplifying things is just good.

Then, so my pedagogical theory goes, you can start to ease off on the low-level stuff. To keep doing everything from first principles, solving every equation by hand, doing every task the hard way, is largely counter-productive, or even self-destructive, and futile. No, the point is that by having earned these core skills, you can free up your cerebral burden to concentrate on the bigger picture : deciding what problems to solve, how you want to solve them, and of course why. Your mind is still fully engaged, it's just doing less of the slog-through stuff (though it should probably also keep doing at least some of this) and more of the philosophy. 

This is likely true in general, it's just much more important when you're young because you have so much more to learn anyway. So yes, reduce tech even to zero for the youngest, then gradually introduce it at later stages of children's development. 

In that sense, I completely agree with Wes Streeting* that we should both reduce screen time for the youngest children and also more carefully monitor and regulate it for older children. That's common sense. Children need more sources of stimulation, and need to learn how to interact with each other far more than they need to learn how to use computers. Plenty of time for that later. 

* I had a lot of respect for the man until he decided he secretly loathed working for Keir Starmer for so many years despite being one of the most prominent faces of the refurbished Labour Party. Nevertheless, he's right about this. 

But for adults, I think "screens" as a being the, or even a, cause of society's ills doesn't have much merit to it. Multi-functionality is probably a bigger contribution, just because it's innately easier to get distracted and lose focus with a device that can do essentially unlimited things : if your main means of working is also your entertainment system, then it would be a rare person indeed who never got distracted by anything. 

Still, I think most people learn to overcome this. Most people are not so lacking in self-control that they find the mere presence of a shiny object irresistible.

No, I think the real problem is exactly as set out in this Aeon piece : it's a deliberate design problem. It's the way apps and social media have been constructed to form addictive, habit-forming, compulsive behaviours. It's not that they're just easy to use in a way which makes you want to continue out of a sense of progression and accomplishment – these kinds of apps aren't the pinnacle of productive user experience. It's more like they feed a constant low-level stream of dopamine, a sense that if I keep going just a bit longer, I'll get to the good stuff... which never arrives. We keep going out of a compulsion that's much harder to override than a genuine desire to continue in a task we actually enjoy.

Or, worse, they continuously enrage rather than engage. The brain seems to relish in arguing and it's addictive. Culture wars and Karens seem to strike at something deep in the subconscious.

To digress slightly, as this other article points out, unchecked complaining wires us to see the world differently, to insist that absolutely everything is awful and sink into a pit of doing nothing but whining. Complaints become a reflex action which overrides real thinking. It's such a common problem, and kudos to the article for noting this as a major symptom of the "these days" fallacy. That one in particular winds me up the wrong way (so I guess this is the wrong time to rant about it).

I think this sort of attitude is exactly what the press feed on : the tabloids in particular, but not exclusively. They present everything in the worst possible light. They make us believe, as the ancients did, that progress is impossible. They cultivate the death of hope for the sake of immediate profit. They seek out a deeply (small-c) conservative mindset, so common in the pre-modern era, the same one* which kept social change and improvement at bay for thousands of years. Both progress and conservatism tend to be self-reinforcing : progress by immediately normalising every development such that progressive voices always have something to complain about, and conservatism by insisting that nothing ever really changes so it isn't worth trying. Mix them together and it's all too easy to degenerate into nothing except perpetual whining**.

* I recommend making the time to watch this video as well as the one in the previous link. They're both more nuanced than the somewhat hyperbolic rhetoric I've adopted here, which should not be taken literally.
** PLEASE, for the love of sanity, just shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes about Donald Fucking Trump. 

And with digital devices this is ramped up to eleven. Which swings me nicely back to the Aeon piece I want to concentrate on. Because, it's not the devices themselves that are responsible for this. They just make this much, much easier to do. No, the problem lies with the human beings designing the algorithms, deliberately keeping everyone pissed off so they can't think rationally and see through this endless stream of utter garbage.

Consider a simple observation. The same person who cannot get through a novel can watch a three-hour video essay on the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with teammates, adapting strategy in real time. That’s not inferior cognition. It’s different cognition. And the difference isn’t the screen. It’s the environment.

...The fragmentation correlates not with screens in general but with specific design patterns: notification systems, variable reward schedules, infinite scroll. These are choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons. They are not inherent properties of the medium.

Though I would interject to point out that this doesn't mean there isn't a real problem with declining attention spans, it's just that the cause is not the digital or screen-based nature of the entertainment. And spending hours on a complex game, where things are constantly changing, isn't really the same as spending hours on a single difficult problem. But I take the point that not all forms of modern approaches are by any means bad, especially the tendency towards multi-hour YouTube videos.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’

The predicted disasters were apocalyptic. J W Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was blamed for triggering copycat suicides across Europe. Johann Peter Frank’s six-volume A System of Complete Medical Police (1779-1819) listed ‘reading of poisonous novels’ among the causes of suicide. Arthur Schopenhauer in 1851 described ‘bad books’ as ‘intellectual poison’. If the manipulative potential of novels were truly that great, as one historian dryly notes, women would have been eloping in hordes.

They didn’t. The disaster never materialised. But the panic served its purpose.

The expansion of literacy from a tiny elite to the general population scared a lot of conservatives. The panic wasn’t really about literacy declining. It was about literacy escaping elite control.

The historical pattern is well described, but I don't think much of the modern panic is really all about "elite control". There might be that aspect to it, a sort of snobbery : "you shouldn't be doing this largely harmless thing you enjoy because I never did that, or I just don't like it", rather than much in the way of "you plebs shouldn't learn anything". And to be fair, the author does go on to note that some of the panic arises from people enjoying themselves in the "wrong way" rather than learning the wrong things. 

But the main concern is that the new ways of learning will be genuinely harmful, both in terms of the effects on attention, memory, cognitive skills, and the actual information conveyed. Nobody is now concerned that women will overheat their brains by learning, but people do worry they will be misinformed : this is not the same moral panic as in earlier eras. Still, while digital media is different on all fronts from printed materials... the article is right that this doesn't make it necessarily better or worse. Merely talking to your friends is no more likely to give you the correct information than reading a book or watching a YouTube video is.

Indeed, for all the problems of echo chambers, the internet still gives you vastly better access to genuine expertise than in previous eras. People only remember the classics of literature and forget the trashy novels, the crappy magazines, the stupid TV series of yesteryear, the misinformation and delusions of past ages. We have a survivorship bias, remembering the geniuses but forgetting the contemptible fuckwits of earlier eras (largely because we have out own to deal with).

I would accept that this is all part of the continuous pattern the author describes, and if anything I might say the similarities are actually stronger. Then as now, the concern wasn't (all) about control, but conservatism : the tendency to see anything different as bad... but stemming from legitimate observations that some things the next generation do really are indeed just bad. The mistake is to think the previous generation never did anything equivalent, just because the mistakes they made were different.

What demonstrates that these panics were exaggerated? The predicted disasters never arrive. Adolescent aggression continued after comic book restrictions – because comics weren’t the cause. Novels didn’t trigger mass elopements. Radio didn’t destroy children’s capacity for thought. Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology.

Absolutely fair. Which is not to say that there are never any disadvantages to new approaches at all – there absolutely are – but in terms of the apocalyptic rhetoric, I think all of it is nonsense.

These publications and technologies existed alongside serious thought. The penny dreadfuls didn’t prevent Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill or Charles Darwin from flourishing. What’s different now isn’t the existence of shallow content, which has always been abundant. What’s different is the existence of delivery mechanisms actively engineered to prevent the kind of attention that serious thought requires. The penny dreadfuls didn’t follow you into your bedroom at midnight, vibrating with notifications.

This distinction matters because it changes everything about the available responses... if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.

Yes, this ! Far from making life too easy, the modern user experience is far, far too difficult. Every single fucking website requires you to click through a list ten feet long to reject cookies, dismiss the "subscribe" box, actively opt-out of signing up for notifications.... The stream of interruptions is what kills attention and renders impotent any attempt at focus. Having digital access to work and entertainment is not the problem at all : having the experience be equivalent to finding oneself in a rowdy nightclub in order to read a short article about snails is where it's all gone wrong. 

At best, technology is a proxy for the real problems : taking ourselves offline will help only because those same problems don't exist in most other media. But there is absolutely no reason whatever why those problems have to exist in our digital worlds.

These aren’t concessions to declining attention spans. They’re recognitions that human understanding has always been richer than any single medium could contain. We’re not abandoning literacy. We’re discovering what literacy meant all along: not just the ability to decode symbols on a page, but the capacity to move fluently between all the ways humans encode meaning.

Exactly. If the goal is to be able to think deeply, to be able to process, analyse, and evaluate complex information, then insisting that there is only one correct way to do this simply wrong.

The pattern I observe repeatedly: people who ‘can’t focus’ on traditional texts can maintain extraordinary concentration when working across modes. They struggle with philosophy textbooks but thrive when they can listen to lectures while taking visual notes, discuss ideas in study groups, and write while pacing. 

We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents. You parse information simultaneously across text, image, sound and motion. You navigate conversations that jump between platforms and formats. You synthesise understanding from fragments scattered across a dozen different sources.

But expansion without architecture is chaos, and that’s where we’ve stumbled. The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. We hand them infinite information and wonder why they drown. We give them tools designed to fracture attention and blame them when their attention fractures. We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.

Once again, exactly this. It's the content that matters, not the way it's presented. Those who prefer thinking by discussion should do so (for me, trying this for the low-level stuff is like trying to pee while someone's looking right at me). Those who prefer to read their information alone should be able to, and those who want pre-recorded audio-visual should have it. And deep focus on a complex problem can indeed require multi-modal processing as much as it can solitude and simplicity.

What we need is to prioritise and customise the user experience, facilitating access to the information that's required, when it's required, and in what format. Simply hurling everything at everyone, and making them click away a dozen different unnecessary dialogue boxes to get what they need but then having to organise it themselves, and ejaculating pop-up windows at them at random... this isn't helping anyone. Not in science, not in social media, and not in society.

Not all deep thinking needs to be multimodal though. Clearly, the geniuses of the past were able to manage just fine without any of our modern devices and made the breakthroughs that made our modern world possible. My suspicion is that the process of synthesis, the all-important moment when multiple factors come together to create a new, meaningful statement about the world, is something that happens primarily in the mental domain. The external cognition we use is a necessary precursor to that crucial moment, that threshold when all the collective information we've considered crystallises into a hard, transmissible fact. That moment is a purely mental one.

A genius, then, I might define as someone who can do as much of this process purely in their head as possible. Good for them. But most of us mere mortals need our external supports, and fortunately for us, the impact of any breakthrough depends only on what our discovery is, not how it was made. At least in the terms of knowledge work, rather than insisting that we all refrain from reaching for our digital aids and deliberately make out lives more difficult, what we should be doing is streamlining the experience as much as possible, letting us organise things efficiently, collating and comparing what's relevant while discarding what we find superfluous as we choose. 

Often, this means beginning with a wealth of multi-modal data, sifting and examining in vibrant and unpredictable ways until we eventually reach the key moment of discovery. That the final step usually requires intense focus does not mean the preceding labyrinth should follow the same "everybody fuck off and leave me alone" part of the process. Nor does the fact that the route to discovery is often convoluted and fraught with wrong turns and dead ends mean that we should never try and reduce this as much as possible. 

In both science and society, sometimes we need to struggle and sometimes we need to simplify, and to say it's all just one or the other is just wrong-headed : you want people to think critically about their social media posts, but you don't want them to spend hours selecting the appropriate font; solving a scientific problem should involve some amount of difficulty thought but it shouldn't be debilitating. And simplification is all too often compensated for as we just do more and more of the original activity, or something else comes along that consumes all the time we've saved.

No, I think the road to improving things lies almost entirely in terms of reducing our struggles, not in cultivating them – at least for adults. Maybe one day we'll have to deal with people genuinely getting lazy and stupid because everything is too easy, but that day is probably somewhere – as H. G. Wells predicted – around the year 800,000 AD, not next Tuesday. 

Until then, we should actively work towards more digitisation and more simplification... what we need less of is not technology, but interruptions not of our choosing. We need to minimise unwanted distractions and addiction-forming interfaces. We need designs that respect how people genuinely work, and think in longer timescales : maybe giving everyone dopamine hits is good for quarterly profits, but it's absolutely shit for the economy when, years later, they all forget how to turn their devices on because their brains have been turned to mush by a relentless barrage of doom-scrolling websites that insist they fill in another 300-question survey every twenty minutes.

The Shock Of The Constantly New

I continue to be impressed enough by my reMarkable tablet that I remain subscribed to their newsletter, although not so much that I have any intention of upgrading until mine breaks.

I rarely do more than glance at newsletters unless there's something especially interesting, and this "newsletter fatigue" is probably something the good people at reMarkable want to think about a bit more carefully. Still, they really do seem goal-oriented with their products far more than they are profit-motivated. They genuinely want you to not only like but actually benefit from their pricey yet highly effective digital notebooks.

This rather short but interesting offering* goes into a bit more detail about some of the thinking strategies they suggest employing. While some of their newsletter content is, as to be expected, advertising in the guise of research, this one isn't. The title "Thinking in the Age of AI" is a complete misnomer, as AI doesn't factor into anything here. It's much more focused on thinking in the age of distractions, which has been a problem for a good while longer.

* It's an 18 page PDF that's probably about two pages of actual content, but it is good content, to be fair.

Instead of being a simple article, this is actually an exercise book designed to help concentration (on your trusty digital notebook, of course). I've not tried this, and I honestly don't see the point of writing down how I feel about my innermost mental states for the sake of my own reflection, but the advice seems sensible enough.

Anyway, they say there are three failures of the modern mind :

1 : Cognitive overload. Self-explanatory, really... when there's too much to process and it all comes at once, nothing gets processed well. Nuance is lost and the response is anxiety, tunnel vision, and even a threat-response style of thinking.

2 : Attentional fragmentation. Closely related, a stream of endless novelty. Even if you could process everything in sequence, constantly switching from topic to topic inevitably means a loss of focus. Worse, and I think here is much their most interesting point, is that modern devices train the brain to expect distraction. The unspoken comment here is that we become dependent on it, because that's what we expect our phones to do... if they stop doing it, we go looking for extra simulation. Turn off notifications and we end up scrolling. And this is bloody exhausting and unproductive.

3 : Meaning drift. If we have constant short-term distractions, then on the longer term we're also having to deal with constant, bigger changes. Change outpaces the brain’s ability to build coherence. Which means that even when we do make sense of things and make progress, the ground keeps shifting from under our feet.

A long time ago I remember having a discussion about why the world feels so politically inept, with one of the main proposals being that the pace of technological change is just too rapid for everyone to keep up with. I was rather skeptical at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Is this because I've gotten older and my thinking less flexible, or have the notifications just been ramped up to 11 ?

I'd like to think it's more the latter than the former. I don't feel any less tech-savvy than I did a decade ago; I've always hated techno-socialising so I can appear more backward than I actually am. I hated Facebook then I hate Tik Tok now. I didn't want to constantly check everyone's status in my PhD days and I don't want a single more WhatsApp alert today than is absolutely necessary. I do, however, very much enjoy writing Python code (with and without AI) and getting most of my exercise in VR games. Safe to say I want more technology in my life, not less.

But what I don't want is the unfocused kind of alert swarm that plagues social media like a ravening horde of locusts. I don't want to subscribe to some website's shitty notifications. I don't want to feel compelled to respond to messages instantly instead of within 24–72 hours. I'm trying to get stuff done here : I can't stop for a few minutes without losing my whole train of thought. It does my head in. Sometimes it almost physically hurts.

So maybe this kind of technological "progress" does have a role to play in the explaining the broader political narratives after all. Not through misinformation, but undermining cognitive capabilities in a far more insidious way : overwhelming the brain's capacity for rational thinking by a constant demand for attention, attention, attention. 

In fairness, I can imagine that the larger technological developments may feel like they undermine our basis for how we go about our daily lives, because as we all know...

Lord Vetinari represented stability. It was a cold and clinical kind of stability, but part of his genius was the discovery that stability was what people wanted more than anything else. He’d said it to Vimes once, in this very room, standing at this very window: “They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today.”

... but I think the kind of things which undermine that feeling of desirable, predictable stability is not nearly so much technological as political. And rather than just the clichéd view of childhood as being a golden era and everything went downhill since then, I'll point to the 2008 credit crunch as the point where things started to go very much awry. Then of course we have Brexit, Trump, Covid, Ukraine, the ongoing pointless conflict in the Middle East... it's all of these things, I think, that undermine people's basic world view. 

These are the sorts of things that cause people to lose hope and confidence, not the mere existence of smartphones and virtual reality headsets. The fact that energy supplies are shifting to renewables is not in itself a source of anxiety : if it's a factor at all (except for those who'll need to shift employment) then this comes about only from sensationalised reporting in the fascist side of the press, not because everyone is low-level scared of windmills.

No, the technological aspect does feed into all this but only thanks to its extreme commercialisation. The need to constantly keep aware of pointless developments on a wide variety of topics we're not really interested in from people we've never met... that feeds into the general malaise. And I don't think it even needs to do anything so direct as to decrease out attention spans : being addicted to this kind of crap can simply be fucking depressing.

So what can we do about it ? Well, I don't propose to Put The World To Rights today, and as I said, all this all seems like a second-order effect on the grand scheme of things anyway. But the article does at least offer some good ideas for getting one's shit together. And this doesn't involve shutting everything down completely, but rather in managing things in a more structured way :

1 : Calm down and choose one thing to do next. Breathing and stretching exercises to get your brain to shut up for a minute, and then carefully think about a single thing you could do to meaningfully progress in your task. And then just get on with that for at least ten minutes.

2 : Deep work for 90 minutes. I hear various claims that the human attention span is actually much shorter than this, but I don't believe them. In my experience, when in a good state of flow, 90 minutes does sound about right. This is as much time as it takes to really get to grips with a complex problem and make some useful progress before fatigue begins to sit in. Turn off all distractions during this block, they say, and it's hard to argue with that. The compulsion to check on the latest alert is just too overwhelming.

3 : Decompress for 20 minutes. Take a break to do some housework or whatnot. Change your mental input so that your brain can properly consolidate what it just learned.

4 : Open attention for 30 minutes. Turn on the notifications again, check those messages, allow more free-flowing, unstructured, unfocused attention. Deliberately taking in new input can help in refreshing thinking and even fostering creativity.

5 : Review. Try to keep track of what specifically works for you and what doesn't. How much time do you really need in each block ? Which distractions do you need to take the most care to avoid ? Do you need to work like this every day or maybe just once per week ? Try to schedule this approach ahead of time.

I will add just a few things that help me manage the hellscape that is modernity. First, to-do lists are absolutely essential. I use a combination of simple notepad files (for the more complex descriptions) and the Microsoft ToDo app, which is useful because it allows scheduling, multiple items in lists, lists of lists, and has a very satisfying "ding" sound every time you mark a task for completion. It's also a handy way to jot down all those facts you need semi-frequently (I have a dedicated list "Things to Remember"), for which it has a search function. I also try and be both realistic and flexible here. I try not to schedule more for a day than I can actually do, but if I don't get something done, I just move it to the next day and don't let this become just another thing to worry about.

Second, one aspect where I do record my inner mental state is when I can't avoid having to stop. Writing down the key part of what I was thinking – what I was suspecting might be going on and what I want to try next – helps enormously in getting back into the flow state much faster. If I have to stop for a longer period, like going on holiday, I right a lengthier description, including where all the files are and a short description of what led me to this point in the process (sometimes my "What You're Working On Right Now" file might be a page or two in length). I've long since given up on the fool notion that "I'll just remember it", because I bloody well won't. 

And third, I go for a walk. Sometimes I continue thinking about what I was working on, sometimes I use it as a dedicated break. Either way, the different environment is mentally stimulating without being overwhelming, and even when I think I've had a great idea (Microsoft's app is again good for recording these), the enforced inability to try it out right there and then prevents my brain from over-focusing on the problem. Forcing a temporary shutdown is important, as while it is possible to maintain flow for longer than 90 minutes, I doubt most people can do much longer very often. In my experience, if you try this, you get a sort of false flow : something that can feel like you're making progress but rarely accomplishes anything productive. Forcing myself to stop is by far the best way to avoid this.

Well, that's what mostly works for me, anyway. It doesn't make the world a better place, but it makes my small corner of it a bit more manageable. 

Review : Galileo's Daughter (II)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review-summary of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter. In part one I covered how Galileo was a prodigious polymath, something which often gets lost in the simplified "he was imprisoned for teaching that the Sun goes around the Earth" version of events. I also looked briefly at Galileo as a man, ending with how for him, the idea of a conflict between natural inquiry and holy doctrine barely made sense. 

In this second part, I'll begin with these now largely estranged viewpoints didn't pose a problem for Galileo's own philosophy, but then how this came into such prominent conflict with the Church. I'll end with a look at whether Sobel's own interpretation – that the problem was not one of a clash of world views – is really correct.

3) Galileo the Philosopher

Galileo, says Sobel, believed that God revealed truths through two books. One of these was Holy Scripture, which could never be wrong, but could be misinterpreted and wasn't intended to be taken literally. The second was nature itself, "this grand book the Universe". Observation was truth and could never be wrong. Where the two appeared in conflict, ultimately nature must prevail, and scripture recognised to be symbolic :

"Holy Scripture and Nature are both emanations from the divine word : the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God's commands."

Key here is that while Galileo might be somewhat morally flexible, he really seems to have believed this. Nor was this an unusual or even unorthodox view. While Galileo himself popularised the famous quote that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go... the original source was no less than a Cardinal ! Indeed, the book is replete with high-ranking Church officials endorsing Galileo's work with some enthusiasm, and until the moment of the publication of the famous Dialogue, it would be hard to see him as being anything other than on the best of terms with the Church fathers. 

Not everyone, it's true, was a fan, but the overwhelming nature of his detractors appears to have been one of envy. There might be a smattering of religious fanaticism here and there, but Galileo himself dismissed this as mere "pretended religion", a means to an end, not a sincere belief at all.

This view of nature as the work of God led to a total rejection of the idea of intelligent design. He offers an argument for accepting uncertainty and rejecting the exalted status of mankind which is at once both theological and scientific :

"When I am told that an immense space interposed between the planetary orbits and the starry sphere would be useless and vain, being idle and devoid of stars, and that any immensity going beyond our comprehension would be superfluous for holding the fixed stars, I say that it is brash for our feebleness to attempt to judge the reason for God's actions, and to call everything in the universe vain and superfluous which does not serve us."

In other words, we might not understand why or how God operates, but that damn well doesn't mean we can't observe the world he's made, or reject it because it disagrees with our ideas about how it should be. He continues :

"I believe that one of the greatest pieces of arrogance, or rather madness, that can be thought of is to say, 'Since I do not know how Jupiter or Saturn is of service to me, they are superfluous, and even do not exist*'. Because, o deluded man, neither do I know how my arteries are of service to me, nor my cartilages, spleen or gall; I should not even know that I had a gall, or a spleen, or kidneys, if they had not been shown to me in many dissected corpses."

* While the majority response seems to have been one of awe, a few people had indeed refused to even look through Galileo's telescope. 

Practically minded as he was, he was also thinking of the philosophical implications of what he was doing and his methodology. While he was clear that experiment and observation had the last word, he used thought experiments as guides. For example, when considering whether heavier objects fall faster, he imagined two objects merging in mid-fall to ask whether their speed would then spontaneously increase. Although the notion of gravity evaded him, he at least considered the basis of relative motion, imagining that if you dropped a ball when pulled along on a moving platform, the ball would still keep moving forwards as it fell. In understanding why 45 degrees was the optimum angle to maximise the range of a projectile, he wrote :

"To understand why this happens far outweighs the mere information obtained by the testimony of others or even by repeated experiment."

I like this argument very much. When you understand the reason for something, you can predict what will happen in new situations. You've gained a fundamental insight into how the world works, even, in sense, a measure of control over it. Pure data collection and observation are sometimes an underrated part of the scientific process (likened unflatteringly to stamp collecting), but ultimately this kind of understanding is the nugget of shining gold we're all searching for. This is the epitomy of the scientific endeavour, not to merely quantify the world, but to understand it at the deepest level the human mind allows.

Galileo even came up with an argument that would presage Wigner by several centuries, recognising that the Universe did indeed follow mathematical laws – in sharp contradiction to Aristotle's silly view that the world was just more complicated than that :

"Just as the accountant who wants his calculations to deal with sugar, silk and wool must discount the boxes, bales, and other packings, so the mathematical scientist, when he wants to recognise in the concrete the effects he has proved in the abstract, must deduct any material hinderances; and if he is able to do that, I assure you that things are in no less agreement than are arithmetical computations. The trouble lies, then, not in abstractness or concreteness, but with the accountant who does not know how to balance his books."

Here was a true, practical philosopher*. He saw no contradiction between science and religion and indeed saw his work as revealing the glory of god : "To imagine an infinite universe was merely to grant almighty God his proper due". There were, of course, those who disagreed. Some did so out of envy and jealously, some out of sheer stupidity. And one, in particular, seems to have done so, if we have to reduce it to a single cause, out of an insistence on authoritarian control. Belief in a deity itself was never the cause of the strife, but the need to assert power over others has an awful lot to answer for.

* What's especially fascinating to me is how some other philosophical arguments of this and earlier eras are incredibly sophisticated, yet the practical, natural philosophy remained stuck in an age of astonishing stupidity. This is quite the reverse of the common tendency to proclaim that our intellect gets ahead of our morality. Maybe this is true today, but for the longest time, our practical understanding was incredibly slight and completely outpaced by moral philosophy – if not by how we actually treated each other in reality.

4) Galileo the Criminal

Pope Urban VIII was a cunt. He wasn't the only cunt, and he didn't start out being such a cunt, and he certainly wasn't one of the stupid cunts like what we have nowadays, but nevertheless, he had a nasty, vindictive streak, was thin-skinned, and didn't like to back down in the face of a challenge. He was, I say again, a cunt.

Galileo had a tendency to sail close to the wind, to push the boundaries of what the Church would allow. He also had a healthy fear of being ostracised, and in the face of censure and censorship, he usually backed down. He consistently tried very hard, however, to pre-empt this, discussing his ideas with high-ranking members of the clergy before publishing them and always (until the very end) doing everything through the proper channels. He was personally friends with many high-ranking members of the Church, most of whom praised him for his wonderful discoveries of all kinds, and on good terms with the Pope himself. So how did it all go so suddenly and catastrophically wrong ?

The initial dispute in 1616 was relatively mild. Heliocentrism wasn't deemed heretical, but the Church required it to be discussed as a hypothesis, not fact. The Church, in the wake of the Reformation, was not feeling terribly secure, but Galileo was given personal assurances that his minor infraction hadn't damaged his high standing : he just had to be a bit more careful in the future, but everyone still thought he was the bee's knees.

More problematic was the business of interpreting the Bible. The problem with not taking Scripture as literal truth meant that both sides argued with each other as to whose interpretation was correct, and worse, who got to interpret the interpretations. The Church was moving in a direction of declaring itself the sole authority as to who was allowed to do this, which made Galileo's personal attempts at theology dangerous. Galileo, in contrast, was seeking to save the Church from itself, knowing that while the evidence for heliocentrism was not yet irrefutable – arguments were genuinely lacking, especially a theory of gravity for how it would all work – the time was coming when it would be proved with certainty, and to maintain denial would cause the Church to be ridiculed. People would, quite literally, lose faith.

But for the next 16 years or so, Galileo kept his work to himself and close colleagues. Only after much effort, seeking assurances from multiple clergy, and sending it through the Papal-approved publication censors and channels, did he submit a much more elaborate discussion. Initially, it was received with all the applause Galileo was accustomed to. Only when Pope Urban got wind of it did things go very quickly south.

What seems to have happened was a confluence of factors all making the Pope more of a cunt than usual. As well as the Reformation, he was feeling personally insecure due to accusations of not defending the faith with sufficient vigour. Galileo's detractors, recognising the early censure* of heliocentrism, sensed a chance to bring him low, and they seized upon it in full force. The Pope never read the 500 pages himself – all he heard was the filtered version from Galileo's enemies.

* With just two very small amendments and insertions required by the Church, the stronger term of "censorship" hardly seems appropriate. This was scarcely more than the actions of modern-day broadcast regulators, albeit applied to an arena which is out of bounds to the Inquisition's modern-day counterparts.

What the Pope heard was partly correct and partly an egregious distortion. It was true that Galileo was openly supporting heliocentrism as fact, not hypothesis. Technically he had fully complied with all the directives, but in practise, nobody reading it would ever come away with the impression the geocentrism remained a valid theory. At his trial, he bowed completely to the pressure – there was never any famous "and yet it moves !" defiance from a by now frail old man – and pretended that he actually fully believed in the Ptolemaic model, saying that maybe he'd once considered heliocentrism an interesting alternative but no more than that. He maintained that his work was not intended to promote the heliocentric model in any way. He presented a document that he believed gave him full license to consider it hypothetically, but none of this was enough to satisfy the more belligerent Inquisitors (although only 7/10 signed the final verdict) or the Pope himself... who was, of course, a cunt.

Why do I labour this point ? Because Urban never even read the document, yet doubled down on his wrath. He eventually had Galileo moved, not out of kindness so he could be closer to his daughter, but because his ostensible gaolkeeper was actually treating him as more of an honoured guest, receiving many visitors for scientific discussions. Far worse, Urban had all of his existing (and future) works banned from further printing : a wholly mean-spirited and petty thing to do, an action of pure spite given that half of Europe had already read them. 

The part that seemed to personally wind him up was that Galileo had used some of his favourite arguments to favour heliocentrism... or at least, this is how things are usually described, but really this is a bit too simple. The fuller version is more subtle.

In an earlier essay, Galileo had written an analogy that was pleasing to both scientist and theologian alike, a story of a man who goes around looking to understand the various ways in which animals produce sounds. He learns a great deal, but eventually finds one which doesn't fit any of theories, so realising that the omnipotence of God is greater than he can imagine. Man can learn much, the fictional investigator realises, but the full wonders of the Universe are beyond human comprehension. 

This argument "delighted Urban", and so Galileo used it in the dialogue (as he was instructed to do) for the debater who prefers geocentrism. At the end, he concedes that the magnificence of God is such that he might be wrong, and that God might indeed allow a heliocentric universe. Together with the others conceding that they cannot offer certain proof of heliocentrism, this was enough for the document to pass muster for publication. It all feels very delicate and respectable, and not at all the case of "Galileo made fun of the Pope" which even today is how it's written in some popular descriptions. Rather it seems thoroughly intellectual and nuanced.

What marks Urban as a complete cunt is that he swallowed the argument that Galileo was mocking him without ever bothering to check. He was willing to fine him and sentence him to life imprisonment – Galileo was even threatened with torture – all on the basis of what other people said, despite having been on such personally good terms with the man until almost that very moment. He would have undone all his life's works without ever even trying to check if he was being fed the correct interpretation of what Galileo had actually written. Why he did this is, sadly, the missing piece of the argument, but the result, of course is history.

Conclusions

The censorship of the Catholic Church was indefensible by modern standards, but its importance has been massively exaggerated by New Atheists. Neither Galileo nor Copernicus (who was never branded a heretic) were seeking any conflict with the Church or to undermine religion, but they did have a different approach to theological inquiry. For them, studying the natural world revealed the handiwork of God and was literally incapable of contradiction with holy writ, with the Scriptures subject to human error and therefore subservient to observation. 

For those like Pope Urban, it was not quite that the situation was reversed. It was more that he believed that God was not bound even by human imagination, that God could, if he wanted, commit something logically inconsistent like creating a rock so heavy he couldn't lift it. Whereas Galileo might see God as bound to create things which were ordered and harmonious, Urban imposed no such restrictions.

Galileo also offered an argument of cosmic economics. Whereas the Ptolemaic system offered Earth an exalted central status, but at the same time made it degenerate and changeable, Galileo said that its rarity in the heavens – not its immutability or position – made it valuable. Morality and cosmology were linked, and so Galileo made clever arguments to overturn the Ptolemaic framework on this front too. But the weight of history was perhaps here against him, and worse was the Church's increasing zeal to control information.

And this, I think, is the really interesting discrepancy between Galileo and his detractors. It's not at all about science versus religion in the highest, abstract sense : belief in deities is orthogonal to belief in what those deities happen to do or what they require of humans, and says nothing in itself about how they chose to order the world. It might be fairer to compare science to academia and religions to the Church, human institutions pitted against one another rather than their ideals. And at the heart of it seems a strongly illiberal desire amongst the Church – not the religion – to dictate what is true. 

I always remember hearing a well-known scientific contrarian declare, for no real reason at all, that "at some point you've got to make a decision", that is, to declare what the answer is so that everyone else can move forward. For the scientific consensus this is exactly what you mustn't ever do. Consensus is only successfully forged from independent findings, and only achieves its strength precisely because everyone has worked so hard to pull it down and failed. The idea that anyone gets to decide what's True, to tell everyone else what they have to believe, is anathema to the whole project. 

As scientists, we can only offer evidence and arguments; as humans, we can certainly try and persuade because we think that believing the truth as we see it will be of benefit to others. What we cannot ever do is to Declare Truth. Once we decide on truth by authority, we have lost the path of righteous truth-seeking and fallen into a need for power. The need to control others, for them to believe specific things even when the alternatives are completely harmless... that's what was at work with Urban. That's, I think, the "one trial of Galileo" that was really going on beneath the surface accusations.

It's what we see today among many fanatics, both of religious ilk but also the weirder segments of the political ideologues. To brand all the religious as being unthinking dolts as the New Atheists would have it is to catastrophically miss the point : what we should be fighting against is not spiritual beliefs, but the the illiberal ideas that we must impose our ideas on everyone else, to control rather than convince, to declare rather than discuss. In this age where one political side appears to be degenerating into ever more incoherent fascist farce, maintaining this liberal view is increasingly difficult. But if we can't accept that other people are perfectly entitled to hold stupid but harmless beliefs, then what are we even struggling for ? 

The Wisdom of Russell Howard's Grandmother

Today's post resumes my unusual habit of amateur epistemology.

I've explored the definition of understanding many times, concluding that it's the knowledge of how things connect and interrelate. The more we understand something, the better we can predict how it behaves in novel situations. Fair enough as far as it goes, but I've always found the main issue with this is what happens when we reach some seemingly irreducible fact that we can't understand. We can always memorise a mathematical operator, however complex it might be, but that's not at all the same as being able to apply it in anger.

Here I can offer two explanations for why we reach such limits. The first I can suggest immediately, while the second will take a bit longer and be developed over the rest of the post.

The first explanation is simply hardware. It may be that we just can't hold more than a certain number of connections to some mental objects, just as we can't process things at arbitrarily high speeds. Perhaps the brain allocates only a certain volume to each topic, and when we reach its limit, we simply can't add anything more into that particular bucket. It might be that either we just cannot absorb anything more on a broad subject*, or that an apparently singular individual item just requires too many connections to too many others for us to properly understand it – in essence, a straw that breaks a camel's back*.

* Like when Homer Simpson forgets how to drive because he takes a wine-making course.
** Perhaps somewhat literally. I had several lecture courses which imparted negative knowledge, meaning I had less understanding of the subject than when I went it.

This, I think, gets us a long way, but still doesn't fully address the more fundamental limits of understanding. For that, I'm going to pursue the more philosophical issue of wisdom. Even Plato never really came up with a convincing definition of this, so you can't accuse me of lacking ambition.

It's probably helpful here to recap the last time I examined such issues. In that post I ventured four main ideas :

• Analytical thinking asks, "what if this is true ?", exploring the full consequences of a proposition.
• Critical thinking asks, "is this actually true ?", being a concern for accuracy rather than with exploring any consequences.

Intimately connected with these two main points were two other slightly more amorphous concepts :

• Curiousity is the yearning for more knowledge. It can take different forms, such as the desire to learn about more and more topics (e.g. consuming endless Buzzfeed lists) versus the desire to verify existing claims, but the essence of it is the same.
• Multi-level thinking is the ability to consider a position on different scales, e.g. whether each line of code is syntactically correct versus whether the underlying method is doing what it's supposed to be doing. Grammar Nazis versus fact-checkers, I guess.

All of these are closely related, and separating them like this is somewhat artificial... but, as we shall see, useful.

Which all leads to my proposed definition of wisdom : knowing the best thing to do. 

Hmm. That seems a bit trivial to bother with.

A slightly less compressed form might help : knowing how to carry out the best solution to a problem. But this is probably still too compressed to seem of any use, so let's deconstruct this more fully. It's been carefully phrased to include two key aspects. First, the wise thinker must be able to assess a proposed solution and realise if there's a better approach. But secondly, the alternative they suggest must be something they actually know how to enact. After all, there's no wisdom in realising that everyone would be happier (say) if you gave them all more money unless you have a workable scheme to raise the necessary funding.

This definition works, I think, for both moral and purely logical problems. To give a recent example of the latter : I gave ChatGPT a coding question, saying I'd found a particular method to solve my problem which should work, but it explained that there was a much better approach so it went off and implemented that instead (in this case it worked perfectly – and this was a problem I'd previously spent some weeks trying to figure out from first principles*). 

* For the interested reader : I wanted to use binary_fill_holes to fill in meshes in Blender with an integer grid of vertices. ChatGPT realised that there was a much better, though badly-documented, Blender-internal solution that was the ideal way to meet my objective. With hindsight, my own solution was actually pretty darn close, but the specific implementation was full of holes... pun intended, sorry not sorry.

Morally, the obvious case is Jurassic Park. Sure, you could bring back dinosaurs, but that famously doesn't mean that you should. Or as Russell Howard says, sure, legally you can wake up your gran while dressed as Hitler, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

In some sense this could be described as supercritical thinking. It's concerned not just with all scales of the problem itself, but goes beyond that to consider its full consequences in context, to address whether the proposed solution would be a good approach or even whether the problem is one that needs solving at all. It's a union of critical, analytical, and multi-level thinking all combined and expanded. Rather than knowing what sort of thinking to apply, as I tentatively suggested previously, wisdom might be better described as turning rational thought up to 11.

And this takes us back to the limits of understanding. Wisdom here might be in recognising that these limits simply cannot be broken, that trying to probe any deeper won't result in anything useful – that we should stop when we have a definition that's actionable and have shown that further investigation won't bring any more improvements*. Likewise, I could go further with this post to better define what I mean by "best solution". But this would open up an enormous can of worms that probably wouldn't help and would make everything much longer. The wiser course of action seems to be stop here as far the definition goes. What remains is only a few clarifications and some practical consequences.

* In this particular case, we end up trying to define words by using other words, and hit the limit of what pure language can convey. I have some further musings on this which I may or may not get around to writing up eventually.

Wisdom, like intelligence, is sometimes used as a synonym for raw knowledge. If instead we say it means knowing what's the best thing to do, then clearly this requires knowledge, just as it needs both critical and analytical thinking skills. But it's not the same as any of these. We can immediately see that the correlation could be imperfect, that someone might have a huge breadth and depth of knowledge but be unable to see the relevant similarities across different fields.

This strongly suggests that wisdom is a thing that can be taught... at least, to the same extent that knowledge can be taught. The behaviour of LLMs, as per the earlier example, might offer some clues here. For these, I strongly suspect that knowledge and wisdom are strongly coupled, that all you need to make them wiser is a larger training data set and a bigger context window – they'll consider more information from more fields of expertise at more and more scales automatically*. That said, you can't really "teach" an LLM anything except by fully retraining it, which in effect gives you a whole new model. All you can really do is instruct them.

* Though of course, the quality of the output still depends on the quality of the input training data as well as the prompt.

This is not much like humans, who can certainly be taught and indeed are (mostly) capable of learning from their mistakes. Indeed, wisdom requires knowing what to avoid just as much as when to proceed. Whereas in an LLM wisdom may emerge naturally as a function of size of training data, this is (I think) likely only a trivial result of that training data containing more and more wise behaviour. It's much harder to gauge whether this happens for humans through absorbing sheer volume of knowledge, though I suspect if we're only ever told, "these things are true, learn these parrot-fashion" instead of, "here's how to evaluate knowledge", the result tends to be someone who's neither wise nor critical. Our own training certainly does matter.

Of course, LLMs don't really have beliefs and opinions in the same way that humans do. An LLM is a mass of statistical information and probabilistic weights, with no real fixed ideas at all – certainly not between conversations in the same way that humans have some ideas that they hold as almost permanently fixed. But likewise, updating our own world view in response to new information is seldom easy, just as including it in an LLM isn't as simple as telling it something in a single conversation. The analogies are interesting just as much as for their differences as their similarities.

In any case, the ability to update one's world view is not the definition of wisdom, but it does follow directly from it. The wise thinker knows when a single fact is of limited consequence and when it may necessitate a paradigm shift. They are able to judge when the new information is itself likely wrong and when it's their own existing ideas which are at fault. They consider also the metadata of who said it and why – they do not evaluate it purely on its own merits*. So the ancient Greeks were right to value to self-knowledge, as understanding one's own biases is essential in understanding how we respond to new data, but this isn't wisdom in itself, just as the ability to learn from experience is part of it, but not itself the definition of wisdom.

* The idea that ignoring the source of information is somehow actually the correct, rational approach is a curiously persistent and incredibly widespread error. 

Finally, it's obvious how the Jurassic Park scientists were intelligent but unwise. Russell Howard, by contrast, is much less intelligent but much wiser : having  a really dumb idea but realising that this would be a Bad Thing To Do. What of his grandmother ? Well, if she wakes up convinced that Hitler has returned, she's not very wise at all, but if she realises that this is so incompatible with her well-established knowledge that Hitler is long dead, then probably she's a lot wiser than her grandson. So c'mon Russel, put it to the test. For SCIENCE !

The Logician's Swindle

What makes a puzzle annoying ? When is solving a problem rewarding, and when is finding out the answer just frustrating ? If we could answer this, we might get a long way towards making the world a happier place. Getting people to actually enjoy solving problems, rather than being pissed off at their opponents for discovering a flaw in their arguments, would surely benefit political discourse enormously.

I don't propose to try and answer all of this today. Instead, what I can do is address one particular aspect of the problem. I say that at least one major cause of puzzles being annoying rather than enjoyable is when you've been outright cheated, and that this happens far more often than it should.

Specifically, consider Newcomb's Paradox as described on Veritasium. The video begins :

You walk into a room, and there's a supercomputer and two boxes on the table. One box is open, and it's got $1,000 in it. There's no trick. You know it's $1,000. The other box is a mystery box, you can't see inside.

Now, the supercomputer says you can either take both boxes, that is the mystery box and the $1,000, or you can just take the mystery box.

So, what's in that mystery box?

Well, the supercomputer tells you that before you walked into the room, it made a prediction about your choice. If the supercomputer predicted you would just take the mystery box and you'd leave the $1,000 on the table, well, then it put $1 million into the mystery box. But if the supercomputer predicted that you would take both boxes, then it put nothing in the mystery box.

The supercomputer made its prediction before you knew about the problem and it has already set up the boxes. It's not trying to trick you, it's not trying to deprive you of any money. Its only goal is to make the correct prediction.

So, what do you do? Do you take both boxes or do you just take the mystery box?

Don't worry about how the supercomputer is making its prediction. Instead of a computer, you could think of it as a super intelligent alien, a cunning demon, or even a team of the world's best psychologists. It really doesn't matter who or what is making the prediction. All you need to know is that they are extremely accurate and that they made that prediction before you walked into the room.

I highlight certain parts because they feel crucial. To me, this is saying very explicitly, "don't think about this aspect of the problem, it's not important at all". Were this not so, I would otherwise object to how such a thing could be possible, and the details would certainly matter : was the machine running over a diverse sample of people, or was there something particular about them that helped its accuracy ? But no, this apparently isn't important, so whatever misgivings I have about free will and suchlike, I willingly surrender for the purpose of the test. I put them aside, still fully expecting to be fooled (I suck at logical puzzles) but in some other way.

Having made that assumption, the answer is obvious. If the machine is essentially always accurate, I take one box. It knows, magically, that this box will contain a million dollars, and I walk out happy and rich and in search for a bank offering a good exchange rate to a proper currency. 

But later in the video we get :

Here's how I think about the problem in a way that actually makes sense. You know that the supercomputer has already set up the boxes, so whatever I decide to do now, it doesn't change whether there's zero or $1 million in that mystery box, and that gives us four possible options that I've written down here.

If there is $0 in a mystery box, then I could one-box and get $0 or I could two-box and get $1,000, but there could also be $1 million in a mystery box. And in that case, I would get $1 million if I one-box or I would get $1,001,000 if I two-box. So, I'm always better off by picking both boxes.

Rubbish. Complete twaddle. You just told us that the machine is accurate and we shouldn't factor this in to our calculations, but in this way of thinking you cannot possibly ignore how the machine works. This is not even self-consistent ! By saying that the machine is essentially perfectly accurate, you've eliminated the very possibility of $1,001,000. That can only happen if the machine actually is inaccurate in some cases, which to my mind you've all but told us directly to discount.

This, then is a swindle, and one common to various logical puzzles. "Don't think about this aspect of the problem", they say, only later to say, "Hah ! You should have thought about this aspect of the problem after all, you fool !". Right, so you expect me to think you're a liar ? How is that a fair test ?

The rest of the video is a perfectly decent discussion of free will etc. (Veritasium is one of my favourite YouTube channels), but the poor description from the outset makes the whole thing a mess. Having been told that accuracy was not an issue, I expect something else I've overlooked to come into play. Naturally I overlooked determinism and all that because you told me to overlook it. The pettiness of it all annoys me quite intensely.

Don't worry, I'm not going down the free will avenue with this post. Rather, I just want to briefly outline that this kind of swindle is common to logic problems, and is itself one particular expression of a more general reason they're so often very irritating.

The closest similarity is surely the Monty Hall problem (the one with the prize goats). That one always confused the heck out of me because people never properly explained that I should have been paying crucial attention to the host's knowledge, not how many goats there are or how many doors. But any logic puzzle can suffer if you're not properly informed about what the key aspect of the problem is, or worse, if you're actively told to ignore it.

Not that framing doesn't sometimes reveal something very interesting. Wason's selection is fascinating in showing how the same people can have much more difficulty solving the same task if it's described slightly differently – especially so when the alternative form is nothing they wouldn't also be familiar with. But there, the whole point is to study psychology. No deception is employed, no swindle pulls the solution out from beneath the solver's feet. The facts are laid bare and it presents a straightforward yet surprising challenge to many people who take it. No, framing is only annoying when it's done to deliberately thwart the participant. 

There's also a common tendency for the puzzle-setter to declare the rational solution from authority, saying "this is obviously the correct solution because the alternative doesn't make sense to me". A classic example concerns people refusing small amounts of compensation when they would normally expect a much bigger payout. Time and time again we hear people declaring that accepting the small offer would be rational since they come out with a net cash gain. But to any sensible person there are a multitude of reasons why this would be an extremely foolish thing to do : accepting the initial offer may deny them any chance at the larger amount; they may simply feel insulted and disrespected, and responding to such behaviour is essentially letting the bully get away with it. It is only rational in an incredibly narrow and naive economic sense, and more broadly simply isn't rational at all*.

* Veritasium does this with a unique peculiarity, openly acknowledging that the "irrational" decision of choosing one box is the more profitable. I find this is going deep into "what's wrong with you ?" territory.

Again, this is a sort of swindle, denying the opposing argument by forbidding debate rather than engaging with it on an equal footing. You thought things were going to be fair and above-board only to find out that they were anything but, that the answer had already been decided without you.

Another similarity is the pettiness. Veritasium didn't have to pull the rug out from under the viewer's feet any more than anyone has to accept that getting a smaller payout is somehow rational. 

Very occasionally, I've run public surveys to help me with my own research. I've tried to ensure the wording was extremely careful, including omitting details when this would bias the result. For example I once ran a public poll on how many groups of points – galaxies – people could see in a plot, deliberately not telling them what they were looking at. Some people objected that there wasn't enough information (e.g. what sort of scales they should be considering), and I sympathise that they might find this annoying. But for me this was the whole point, to gauge what people's natural reactions were : I wanted to know if they would instinctively identify the same groupings that appeared natural and obvious to me (most of them did, as it turned out). I needed to know if my additional knowledge was biasing me, or if the groupings I identified would be readily visible without this extra information. 

The point here is that there's absolutely no reason for misdirection. It's perfectly possible to account for this in a way that will give you a meaningful result to the question you're asking. Sometimes, this can only become apparent after the fact, but in those cases the participant should feel relieved, not annoyed. Annoyance only happens when the misdirection was unnecessary. 

A second personal example : group meetings back in my PhD days. These served the valuable purpose of getting the students used to dealing with tough questions. But they also turned the experience into a weekly grilling that made the whole thing quite intensely annoying... instead of having an enjoyable, low-stakes discussion about science, we had to deal with supervisors being deliberately over-critical. That we all knew full well what was going on didn't help in the least. It would have been fine if such sessions had been clearly demarcated and set aside as such, with regular meetings more about science for its own sake. Trying to pretend this was how scientific discussion should happen, though, was just unfair.

Again, there was no reason for the misdirection. This too was a sort of swindle. Oh, you think you're here to discuss your work ? You thought I was being harsh because I wanted to be ? Hah hah, fooled you ! The idea that maybe they could have just not done that was never raised.

On an grander scale, problems with the alternatives to dark matter. This too feels like something of a swindle : proponents often raise objections to dark matter which are based entirely on the properties of the ordinary matter we can see. They make highly dubious inferences about the necessary connection to the dark matter they're trying to demonstrate doesn't exist, saying that the lack of a naively-expected correlation proves it can't exist. Some of these problems can become obvious, but sometimes it's worth spelling this out at the high level because it's all too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Once you start questioning the underlying assumption and realising that maybe the connection isn't so direct after all, often the whole thing falls apart.

And in other arenas too we find possible swindles. As I've covered before, thought experiments become extremely annoying when changing a small detail would profoundly alter the result but the instigator refuses to consider any variation : no, you must focus on this aspect of the problem because I said so, even if my scenario is actually bunk. Just like insisting someone should accept a miniscule payout, it's disrespectful not to think the other person's opinion might have some value. 

Likewise with analogies. An indirect analogy can be extremely powerful when the relevant aspect is sufficiently similar to its comparison subject, becoming thought-provoking in both its similarities and in its minor, extraneous differences. When an analogy is intended to be direct, though, the seemingly-extraneous details can become crucial, so expecting people to shut up and ignore them is not realistic. It's extremely difficult to focus on the "relevant" bit (usually declared by authority) when there are obvious deficiencies in the whole thing. Conversely, it does no good to pretend similarities don't exist when they do, or to overlook them on grounds which are actually minor details or only quantitative differences.

All this sets out some conditions for when puzzles becoming annoying, and gives us a rough working definition : The Logician's Swindle is the use of unnecessary misdirection from a position of unjustified authority.

This is similar to but not quite the same as the Magician's Choice. In the latter, we know we're being denied crucial information, misdirected, and otherwise deceived. We go in with eyes open knowing we'll almost certainly be tricked and often paying for the privilege of suspension of disbelief. We know we won't be able to solve the problem and we enjoy our failed attempts to work out what's going on.

The Logician's Swindle is altogether nastier. Here, we're supposed to have all the information we need to reach the "correct" conclusion, but we find only afterwards that actually we don't – with the swindler often denying this for the sake of making us look foolish. And the conclusion itself may be open to dispute but the proponent argues from a completely artificial authority that it isn't. Worst of all is that "mistakes" can (though do not always actually) carry real-world consequences. In short, it's a scam : a discussion that should be in good faith which actually isn't.

And that's why I hate logic puzzles.

Critically Minded

Here's another short post exploring an idea I'm finding useful. I've used this in a few recent posts, so I just want to set it out on its own.

People seem to think in quite distinctly different ways. The different kinds of thinking are numerous, but there are a couple which I think are often confused : critical thinking and analytical reasoning.

The analytical thinker is generally someone like a scientist, who will pick apart an idea into its component variables and explore in detail what would happen if you change any of them. They'll run with this to the nth degree, examining consequences until they really feel that they've fully understood a concept, or can make a testable prediction to check whether the whole thing holds up to scrutiny. Analytic thinking is often technical : most obviously, perhaps, when it comes to mathematics, but it can apply to other areas too. Anyone who'd ever solved a problem by testing out different aspects to destruction (who hasn't ?) has done at least some analytical thinking.

I would define this as asking the question : what if this is true ? What consequences follow ? How does this one thing affect other things ? That's the essence of analysis.

What I think people often confuse this with is critical thinking. And to be fair, this too is a major component of science. Having decided on a way to test their idea, the scientist should then actually do so, or at least consider the results from someone else's test that attempts to answer the same question. The critical thinker is not concerned with what the consequences are, they're concerned with whether the premise is correct. They don't want to speculate as the analyst does. They want to know if they're right at all.

This mode of thinking I would define as asking the question : is this really true ? Can I verify it ? Could there be another explanation ? That's what I mean by critical thinking.

The analogy I like is from programming, having learned this the hard way through direct personal experience. A really protracted debugging session will go something like this :

• First, I'll check if I have any typos, any missed commas or wrong equals signs, or something where a variable isn't being set correctly. This would be the case of the code not doing what I thought it was doing.
• Next, I'll go up a level and look at the code structure – maybe I've got a loop that's nested wrongly, so it's iterating over the wrong variable or not being terminated correctly. In this case, the code might be doing what I thought it was doing, but the way I thought things should be done was itself partially incorrect.
• Finally, I'll stop and think if the very method I've been using is actually likely to give me the correct result at all, if it's even fundamentally possible for it to work or I've built a horribly complex house of cards and need to start again.

Programming seems like a good analogy for me because it encapsulates both modes of thought. The low-level debugging is analytical : have I got the right variables, what if I change where the loop is run, is my input correct, etc. The high-level stuff is critical : is this method actually going to work if I do it correctly ? This sort of multi-level, or multi-scale, thinking blends quite nicely from one mode of thought to the other. It's something LLMs have become noticeably better at over the last few months, no longer picking over minutiae, but actually stopping to consider the premise of a question.

We can of course imagine in a four-way graph to describe this. We can have (1) those who are both critical and analytical, which is pretty much ideal for a scientist. There are (2) those who are analytical but not so critical, again a trait common in the sciences : these people are fine so long as they're given the right problem to tackle. People who are (3) critical but not analytical are less helpful, something common among loons on the internet : "dark matter doesn't exist because your ugly face, that's why" types. And finally of course we have (4), those poor unfortunates who don't do much of either of these modes of thinking.

Dedicated readers might remember my longer 2015 post about skepticism. Back then I struggled to find a good word to describe this sort of concern for the truth, and perhaps there isn't one : "critical" has the same popular negative connotations as "skeptical" in everyday use. But critical thinking, as a term, does seem to be used in this sense of wanting to find out the truth regardless of the result.

Arguably there's an overlap here with curiosity, which similarly implies wanting to know the truth. The problem is that curiosity can also mean something more like a greed for more and more facts : a desire to travel for the sake of experiences, or to read more and more books to see what they contain, or an urge to run an experiment without any preconceptions as to what will happen at all, rather than to test the validity of a claim. If you follow this blog regularly you'll know I'm intensely curious about mythology, but not because I want to determine if Zeus existed or if I need to defend myself against the afanc on my next trip home. 

Critical thinking, on the other hand, seems to much more specifically capture this sense of a desire for verification. Like everything else, it's not an absolute state of mind. Someone might be extremely critical when they first learn a new fact but far less eager to test something they learned years ago, or their degree of critical reasoning might vary enormously across different subjects (I want to know if, say, dark matter exists, but I don't give a flying crap about whether celebrity X really said statement Y on social media platform Z).

Nor is it realistically possible to hold ourselves to the highest standards of critical thinking at all times. If you go down that way, you end up in a postmodernist Humean nightmare where nothing can ever be truly verified and nothing known, further progress being hampered by intellectual impotence. This is why Ronald Hutton's Pagan Britain annoyed me so, being so resolutely noncommittal that he wouldn't even venture to suggest how we could even test anything, let alone claiming that any one interpretation was actually true. That, in my opinion, is not a productive way of learning anything. Better by far to hold an opinion but be prepared to surrender it rather than never believing anything at all.

Likewise, it's also possible to be analytical to a fault, obsessively examining every detail even when they have no possibility of changing any major result (this is the fault of many a peer reviewer). So our four-way graph would be complicated, with the extreme not necessarily being the place one wants to be. Perhaps this helps with a description of wisdom. Maybe wisdom is knowing what should be done, when to apply critical and analytical reasoning and how much, when to rabidly fixate on an issue and when to let go – where exactly the balance of the different ways of thinking lies to ensure a successful, happy outcome.

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.

Review : Folklore of Wales

Following on from Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter, I couldn't resist picking up another couple of short books on folklore. Both of which I devoured over Christmas, so let's start the New Year with the happy business of witches and whatnot.

The Review Bit

First up, Anne Ross' Folklore of Wales. The only appropriate adjective for this is... well, nice. It has a very distinctive style, an unusual mix of the academic, the readable narrative, and the unbearably twee : for one annual festivity she describes how "the sweet music of the harp would further enhance the happy occasion", without embarrassment. It takes some getting used to, but the clarity and simplicity of the text generally makes up for the often rose-tinted view of the people of the past. And Ross knows when to be lucid and when to be deliberately obscure, when to be literal and when to be quasi-mystical.

As Clegg noted, academics of Ross' generation tended to view the originators of folklore as being simplistic peasants, uncreative and dull, with all their wild beliefs being vestiges of ancient pagan religions rather than their own creations. Ross certainly does fall into this trap quite heavily, rarely acknowledging that largely illiterate people can still be crazily imaginative. She definitely infers too much that weird cults and practices must have been remnants of lost religions proper... but she doesn't lean into this too heavily. We don't get lectured here, with Ross largely concentrating on presenting folkloric beliefs rather than analysing them. Contrary to Clegg's view, it's also clear she loves her subject matter* dearly – on more than one occasion I had to wonder if she was a pagan herself.

* No lectures here on the word "Celtic" either, a word only delivered with lengthy apologies in many recent books. And to be fair, she does sometimes note that some ideas are wholly modern.

So yeah, it's nice. It's a short book but with plenty of illustrations and figures, covering a very wide breadth of all aspects of Welsh folklore. At ~£15 it's pricey for a 150 page paperback, and it would have helped if she didn't keep complaining about the lack of available space* – just add another 50 pages if you want to ! Perhaps the biggest problem is some chapters are rather unstructured, with no clear link between one topic and the next. But it's rare to find any section which is uninteresting, and overall it's well worth a read. A solid 7/10 from me.

* Two other things. She's weirdly horny for cranes (the birds), describing them as though they were near-miraculous and – for some unknown reason – able to run as fast as a horse (hint : they can't). And worryingly, she seems to think that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Wales, It Is A Silly Place

Right then, here's what I learned about my native country.

Commonly Celtic 

I've previously remarked on the similarities of pagan stories across Europe, but I wasn't aware of just how similar Welsh beliefs are with other traditions in Britain. For example the famous "Scottish" Kelpie also occurs in Welsh folklore as the Ceffl Dwr and appears to be essentially the same type of beastie : a water-dwelling horse, sometimes with shapeshifting abilities, that lures the unwary to their deaths. Good marketing on behalf of the Scots, but a bit unfair on the rest of us. Quit hogging the water horses !

I'll get my own deadly water horse, with blackjack, and hookers...

Fairies also occur throughout Sottish, Irish and Welsh myths in very similar form* : smallish (about three feet tall as a rule, though larger in the older stories), chaotic neutral (capable of both good and evil but primarily concerned with doing their own thing), living underground (though again not always in the earlier Welsh stories, where they seem to inhabit more of a parallel world than an underground kingdom), highly magical, and with a distinctive tendency to manipulate time.

* Although it should be noted that the Irish have specific mythological tales describing their origin. I'm not aware of any comparable Welsh stories, with our fairies just being a thing.

There are also soothsayers who are described almost like shamans, with similar ritualistic performances and a dress code not at all unlike what you'd expect for an ancient wizard (quoting third hand, with similar Scottish practises described elsewhere in the text) :

Whenever he assumed to practise the black art, he put on a most grotesque dress, a cap of sheepskin with a high crown, bearing a plume of pigeon's feathers, and a coat of unusual pattern, with broad hems, and covered with talismanic characters. In his hand he had a whip, the thong of which was made of the skin of an eel and the handle of bone.

He certainly sounds like an intimidating chap if nothing else.

Ross also points out more specific similarities between the Welsh Arthur and the Irish hero Finn MacCool. Both lead warbands (early Arthur is not even a king; later Arthur is an Emperor), both invade the otherworld, both command animals, both fight magical pigs*, and both are said to be sleeping rather than dead. She also notes, albeit a bit more tangentially, the similarity of Arthur and the Welsh for bear (arth), as well as the name of the magician Math (of the Mabinogion) and the Irish word for prophet.

* I know wild boar can be dangerous beasts indeed, but still, my modern notion of the farmyard varieties just doesn't accept them as much more threatening than Peppa Pig.

Not that Arthur is just a Welsh version of an Irish hero or the other way around, however. A final interesting suggestion from Ross (and others) is that the linguistic similarity suggests Arthur was originally a Celtic bear god, though this feels like quite the leap of faith to me. Regardless, the Arthurian traditions throughout the British Isles (and indeed France, as we shall see) all have unique attributes, and the English Arthur is no more the Welsh Arthur than he is secretly Finn MacCool in disguise. Perhaps they had a common point of origin, perhaps not... Arthur's origins and evolution are nothing if not complex*. Perhaps it's all just the result of similar cultures exploring similar themes.

* And Merlin's too. In a variation on the Vortigern tale of needing a child without a father, Ross gives a version where the locals set the far more realistic standards that the father only had sex with the mother once. There are even Welsh accounts where he's not Welsh at all, which is not what I expected from ancient legends.

Of course, the original Arthur was Welsh though. That's just common sense.

Monsters in the mist

Not all supernatural tales are as sophisticated or as pan-Brittanic as Arthur. Some are distinctly Welsh*, with a particular focus here on creatures of the mist. Of these, some are widely mentioned but little described, such as the Grey King who appears to have power to control mountain fog, but whether he's a figure of malevolence or just a personification of natural forces is... ahem... hazy. Sinister might be the best word, rather than outright evil.

* Although not entirely. Ross doesn't do a detailed comparison of everything, so it's possible that some of these are found elsewhere as well.

Far less ambiguous is the torrent spectre, a ghostly giant that dwells in streams and delights in causing deadly floods. Oddly, Ross says nothing of interest at all about giants more generally, which is strange as  they appear to be far more common in Welsh legends and folklore than our more famous dragons. She's also a bit confusing with the afanc, the strange crocodile-beaver water monster than does classic monster things, but according to the story here also seduces local maidens... whereas another version of the same local tale I found online says that the poor girl volunteered herself as bait – a far more heroic interpretation.

Some descriptions of the afanc also have it more straightforwardly as a water-dragon. Of the more familiar land-dwelling dragons, every book on Celtic folklore harps on about the incident under Vortigern's castle which gave rise to the big red one on the flag. Ross, to her great credit, gives another dragon story I'd never heard before. The legend says that snakes who drank women's milk and ate communion bread would be transformed into winged serpents or dragons. She relates one particular tale of a nest of such creatures at Moel Bentyrch, where the locals erected a stone pillar. This was not to commemorate the story but allegedly as an active defence against the monsters : covered with scarlet ribbon (which they supposedly hated) and concealing iron spikes in the hope they'd impale themselves on it.

Other creatures are less surreal and more straightforwardly horrific. My two favourite are the cwm annwn (the hounds of hell) and the gwarch y rhibyn (the hag of the mist). The hounds were ferocious white beasts whose appearance and howls presaged death, but they were also said to bite and even kill people, disappearing into the earth at the spot the grave would be dug. The gwarch was even worse. A banshee-like hideous hag that appeared in the mountain mists to rattle on windows, she evolved in the tellings into an almost Balrog-like monstrosity. More on both of these two when I review the next book.

This is getting much too scary, but fortunately some monsters are altogether weirder. Monstrous water-cats are apparently another widespread concept, of which the Cath Palug is surely both the strangest and the silliest. Arising from yet another magical pig hunted by Arthur, which went around birthing a whole assortment of different creatures before the cat, British stories have this later slain by one of Arthur's knights. Not so the French, however, who have the cat killing Arthur and going on to assume the throne. Which is quite possibly a case of deliberate mockery of a folk hero, and not very nice at all.

Believing in believing ?

All this raises the classic question of whether anyone ever really believed in any of this, or if later people just mistook fiction for documentation. Surely the Cath Palug becoming king was never believed by anyone at all and always understood to be fiction, but what of the rest ?

Here things get more interesting. Ross is explicit that many believed in some of this within living memory, and indeed a few still do – as communities, even, rather than the odd crazy loon. She recalls children around Bala being actively scared of a ghostly pig that would emerge at Halloween (best episode of Peppa ever), but also adults who believed in various lake monsters. There are even eyewitness accounts of fairies well into modern times, and people leaving milk out for them in living memory – enough to demonstrate that people took some of this stuff very seriously indeed. The gwarch also appears to have been a figure of genuine fear, not a story to scare naughty children with.

It wasn't just monsters either. Other supernatural ideas also appear to have been widely believed, especially omens and prophecies. The number of rituals for divination was huge : burning candles to see when the flame went out to check for ill health, or checking which way a rooster crowing at night happened to be looking*, or seeing the future through holes in bones, planting hemp at crossroads, and all manner of other bizarre practises and a myriad of variations on a theme. Basically anything you see on a cheap TV show featuring fortune-telling – yeah, someone did that. There are legions of examples of how such seemingly arbitrary rites were exactly that : a way to make a random decision when there was just no way to make a properly informed choice**. 

* Quite who would be able to get up in time to check this accurately isn't specified.

** In relation to the sheer randomness of it all, two examples I particularly like. First, the notion that eating the flesh of an eagle could allow you to cure shingles (and/or grant prophetic powers) by breathing and spitting on the affected area, an ability than some said would be retained for nine generations. Secondly how snakeskin could be used to cure essentially anything, including granting invulnerability. I mean, you can see how some weird ideas stick around a lot longer than they should, but you'd think people would eventually notice that consuming the ashes of snakeskin wasn't making them invincible.

One of the most eerie beliefs was that of the corpse candle. A traveller sees a blue night wandering the fields at night which goes into a house and into the room of someone who'll be found dead the next morning. Similarly, blue lights represented the soul in other, happier but equally weird circumstances, such as girls letting down a woollen ladder hoping to reveal a future lover. The idea seems to have been that their soul would climb the ladder as a blue light and then reveal themselves. 

There were also wells used for both healing and cursing, or even weather control by dropping in pieces of quartz to cause storms. It's interesting to chart how some wells began as extremely holy places but later became sites of evil used exclusively for cursing, dropping in charms and spells in the hope they'd summon some supernatural power to inflict harm on their targets. Many spells appear to be simple things, not much more than writing down what you wanted to happen and dropping it in the appropriate places. While this began as a pagan practise, the rituals evolved to become fully Christian : a sort of modified prayer would be written, explicitly calling on the power of God or Jesus or whatnot. And Ross notes that some such wells only gained their reputation in the modern era, acknowledging that not all folklore is the end product of centuries of tradition.

Conclusions

Ross does, however, state that we're likely now at the very end of such beliefs. She goes on something of a stock rant about the decline of society, how television is corrupting the young and the instant gratification of big-city living is eroding the value of storytelling and village life. It's not at all convincing, and I'd be willing to bet such laments have been made since the first caveman decided to build a hut.

Are such beliefs changing ? Yes, absolutely. They always do. It's difficult to think that we'll ever return to thinking that standing stones would take themselves down to the nearest lake for a drink, or that eating eagles would grant healing powers – and in some such cases, it's far better to let these ideas die (both for our own well-being and that of the eagles). Presumably, Ross wouldn't have felt so nostalgic had she been a bit more skeptical of the idea that most local customs are truly ancient.

That said, I concede that Ross presents a decent case for a more community-oriented view of the past. Not in the meddling, interfering sense we see in cases of witch hunts, but in the common activities open to all. These days we have essentially Christmas as the only major annual communal event, perhaps also New Year, with the others (Halloween, Easter, a few others) being much lesser. In contrast Ross describes festivals of similar magnitude to Christmas happening throughout the year, even just a century ago. Nowadays we have a great deal more activities available for like-minded people to participate in, but fewer that act for community unification.

Are we losing the sense of magic though ? I'm not so sure. If we accept that folk traditions are, in many cases, not ancient, then it seems to point towards how people think at a fundamental level. Two thousand years of the Christian faith was unable to stop people going from door to door with a horse's skull to engage in a rap-battle with the neighbours... I suspect at any point in history one would witness beliefs changing, some dying out while new ones spring up. As in Hogfather, there is a fixed quantity of belief in the universe. You can't kill crazy : if the gods are dead and we have killed them, then – sorry atheists – some other mad idea will simply emerge to fill the gap.