Can't we all just get along ?

Fake news, in its most direct incarnation as made-up drivel on the internet with intent to deceive, is best fought through removal. While this can also be necessary for other forms of behaviour, for some it won't do much good and can even be counter-productive. Removing detailed discussion of a novel outright lie (e.g. that Hillary Clinton is a werewolf) will curtail the spread of that lie. Trying to do the same with endemic attitudes (e.g. racism, sexism etc.*) is only going to alienate people, drive them further away, and feed their own victim narrative. Thus discussion can be necessary even with those who hold abhorrent views, though there are limits to which one should go. Debate online does not imply concession, much less legitimisation - which needs a prominent recognised forum. Nor are discussions and censorship mutually exclusive. There is very little point in debating with the diehards (who are better off censored), except in to present the alternatives to more casual followers : there is, as Doctor Who put it, nothing worse than when ordinary people lose their minds.

*These did not spring forth from Facebook, but social media does allow the bigoted to get organised more easily.

There is no foolproof guide on deciding when to censor, when to debate and when to simply walk away. If a person has been convinced solely through online discussion, then presenting them an alternative in the same venue (especially in sufficient numbers) may succeed. If, however, there is some external cause driving their belief, then the presence of online strangers telling them they're wrong may only backfire. At some time or other we've all wandered in to a debate completely dominated by people with a diametrically opposite position to our own - it almost always ends with neither side giving any ground. Things are far more successful when participants are put together on an equal and fair footing.

All in all, I think the approach used here is a good one : form an organised group to be present en masse (since quality engenders authority), don't argue directly with the ringleaders (but do let and encourage moderator intervention, including blocking users and deleting comments where necessary), seek to change the tone of the debate before changing minds, and provide alternatives that will persuade at least the more casual (but usually more numerous) followers rather than the devotees. The combination is more than the sum of its parts : trying to debate without deletion or delete without debate are both ludicrous approaches, but used in concert they can allow productive debate to flourish.

Nina is part of an international movement working to find and combat hate speech on the platform. She and her fellow #IAmHere members spend their spare time scanning Facebook for conversations happening on big pages, often run by mainstream media organisations, which are overwhelmed with racist, misogynistic or homophobic comments. 

They don't attempt to change the minds of people posting hate or argue directly with extremists. Instead they collectively inject discussions with facts and straightforwardly argued reasonable viewpoints. The idea is to provide balance so that other social media users see that there are alternative perspectives beyond the ones offered up by the trolls. The groups stick to fighting hate speech, which Facebook defines as a "direct attack on people based on protected characteristics - race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability."

Further digging made it clear that many users creating and liking hateful comments were just as organised and targeted as #IAmHere. Researcher Jacob Davey, an expert on the far right at the London-based Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), says: "Troll armies bring themselves together in almost semi-military style hierarchies. You can see these groups coming together and engaging in harassment on Facebook, which appears to be both silencing moderate discussion and dominating certain discussion points."

Starting in 2018, Germany's NetzDG law required social media sites to remove hate speech within a day of it being reported, and analysis shows that explicitly racist posts have decreased on Facebook since then. A study of #IchBinHier activity by researchers at the University of Dusseldorf also found that its commenters are often successful at changing the tone of online debates. On the other hand, research carried out by Kreissel and the ISD found that coordinated right-wing extremist online hate campaigns have increased three-fold since December 2017.

'I spend three hours a day on Facebook fighting hate'

A network of tens of thousands of online volunteers is fighting hate speech on Facebook. They organise under the slogan "#IAmHere". It's 7:30 in Berlin, and Nina's alarm clock is going off. Before getting up and making breakfast for her 13-month-old daughter, who is sleeping in the next room, she reaches for her phone.

A tale of two shities

I'm not going to give a running commentary on the Conservative party leadership, because even a light jog would be exhausting. I will say something about a couple of recent developments though.


Here we Gove

Let's do the less interesting one first : Michael Gove's admission of trying cocaine. The only noteworthy thing here is the revelation that Michael Gove is interesting enough to have tried cocaine. I don't care all that much that be broke the law or even about the crime itself, except insofar as cocaine production supports drug cartels and whanot. That aside, a crime that affects only the individual is easily forgivable. It's not like he admitted driving over hedgehogs for fun or enjoys deflowering nuns (or vice-versa) or anything.

I don't even care all that much about the hypocrisy. Of course I do care a bit, because hypocrisy is bad and should be avoided. But everyone slips from their own standards from time to time, and it's not as if he was a full-on junkie. I can forgive that. And when he says, "The thing to do is not necessarily then to say that the standards should be lowered. It should be to reflect on the lapse and to seek to do better in the future", I think he is quite right.

But therein lies what I do have a problem with. If standards aren't to be lowered, if follows that he should be punished along with everyone else found guilty of the same crime. When he says that he didn't declare drug use before becoming a minister because he wasn't asked, I think that demonstrates contempt of the law. When he says that he was fortunate to avoid prison for a profound mistake, I think that demonstrates contempt of the public. Other people have to suffer greatly for their crime - he gets to become a prominent politician. Why is it "lucky" that he avoids punishment ? Isn't punishment supposed to be about deterrence and rehabilitation ? Yes, yes, I know it doesn't do that terribly well in practise, but the point is that a politician thinking it's "lucky" to evade justice is an abhorrent thing. Which nicely sums up what I think of Michael Gove as a human being.

This probably won't win me any followers, but it's the same with Julian Assange : "no, I don't need to participate in the judicial system, because it won't treat me fairly". When we start having such selective confidence in the law, we're in trouble.


Behold the BoJo

On to the second case : Boris "The Muppet" Johnson. Now Boris also may have tried cocaine, but he was never (so far as I know) a campaigner against drugs, so isn't tainted with hypocrisy on that score. He is, however, manifestly hypocritical on Europe. More importantly, he told a great big lie on the side of a great big bus, but though a prosecution was launched, the case won't go to trial.

It's important to be clear about the nature of the lie. Politicians tell falsehoods all the time, and break promises even more often. But this particular lie had some rather unusual characteristics. It concerned not (just) a promise for the future, which are always uncertain, nor did it rely on difficult estimates or predictions grounded in complex theories, nor did it even contain an opinion. Falsehoods in such things are forgivable, and often unavoidable.

For example, I can freely say, "Boris Johnson is a colossal shithead" or, "Boris Johnson is as bad as someone who eats live babies" or even, "Boris Johnson is magnificently handsome and has the best hair in the world" because those are all, implicitly but very clearly, opinions. They are all unavoidably about what I think, not about the way the world actually is. No-one can say I don't think Boris Johnson is a jerk, because I do. Prefixing some statements with "in my opinion" can be profoundly important.

Had I said, though, that Boris Johnson actually does eat live babies, that would be another matter. That would be contradictory to the observable facts. Prefixing it with "in my opinion" doesn't help, because we can test the assertion of cannibalism. Metaphors I suppose are a bit of a grey area, but it would be trivial for me to declare an article to be parody or satire - or even just laden with rhetorical hyperbole - and so license myself to say things like, "Boris Johnson is a cyborg who's neural circuitry is long past its warranty".

The Brexit bus did none of those things. It claimed as fact something which was at demonstrable odds with reality. It wasn't an estimate, or a prediction, or need any clever financial modelling to produce. It didn't rely on classified intelligence. It wasn't claimed as rhetoric or metaphor or satire. It was a statement about observable reality, not something we'd be doing in the future but something we actually are doing right now, that was refuted constantly by just about anyone who mattered. It was a lie of the most direct variety possible.

So why has the prosecution been thrown out ? We have to wait a bit to find out - and then change whatever law needs changing. Politicians do need to be able to tell falsehoods, as we all do; they should not have to go around worrying that every single statement they make must be verified in court. But if they are able to get away scot-free with such clear-cut cases as this, then they have a license to say whatever they please. Boris may be derided in the press as a moron, but Boris courts mockery rather than avoiding it. For such a man, the ill words of his peers and the press have no force.

As with all laws, we don't necessarily have to decide on the boundary conditions right away - cases which do involve predictions or statistical modelling are another matter. We just need to agree that statements as willfully contradictory to the proven current facts count as lies. The rest can wait. And again as with all laws, some people may be found innocent or be unable to be brought to trial that we disagree with. But at least having that possibility of being found guilty acts as a deterrent : Boris could potentially be found guilty in the future, whereas knowing that this case won't proceed may embolden him.

Which is why it's so important to know the judge's reasoning. Is there precedent ? Is it not considered possible to try politicians for telling lies ? Are there particular extenuating circumstances for rejecting this one, and can such things happen again ? I can imagine some very good reasons for rejecting the case, but then again I can imagine some very bad ones too. We'll see.

Gove: I was lucky to avoid jail over cocaine

Michael Gove has admitted he was "fortunate" to avoid prison after using cocaine several times 20 years ago. The Tory leadership hopeful previously said he took the class A drug while working as a journalist.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...

This makes me start humming the Sharky & George theme tune...

Sea bass, for example, have been observed diving to the bottom of the sea when they hear a loud noise. Might they do the same, in a predictable manner, when encountering an underwater vehicle? "We have a fairly good feeling that we will see that response, we just need to quantify it," says Dr Helen Bailey, research associate professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. 

"We can implant miniature depth sensor tags on the fish so we can detect the movement, and there is already the technology in place for that to be a real-time system." She says there's no reason why an army of black sea bass couldn't provide a cost-effective warning system against enemy subs.

This feels like what would happen in Aquaman and Saruman got together with Mark Zuckerberg.

Snapping shrimp, found all over the world in shallow water at latitudes less than about 40 degrees, continuously snap their claws together, creating a constant sound signal that bounces back off surrounding objects. As with conventional sonar systems, measuring the time it takes for the sound signal to return, and its strength, can reveal the size, shape and distance of underwater objects. 

"The concept doesn't rely on the shrimp changing its behaviour in any way when the vehicle approaches, it just uses the sound it creates," says Ms Laferriere. This is important because you don't want your surveillance system to be detectable or to make its own noise that interferes with the sensors. "It's a passive system," she adds. "It will be low-power and capable of detecting even the quietest vehicles."

So basically a giant information-gathering system about hitherto uninteresting details about fish. They should call it Fishbook, or possibly MyPlaice. Maybe Grouper Plus, if it doesn't catch on. Or Fins Reunited. Twilapia, if desperate. I'll stop now. Anyway, I'd be more interested to know what this could help us learn about fish than using the poor unwitting things as spies.

How fish and shrimps could be recruited as underwater spies

We have a long history of trying to use animals as spies, weapons and warning systems, but the latest plans to use marine organisms as motion sensors may be the strangest yet. When a beluga whale was spotted wearing a harness recently, some speculated that it had been trained to spy for the Russian army.

The Stone Age professor

Some time ago, I was puzzled about the apparent overcapacity of the human brain. Why should a human of 10-20,000 B.C. have been potentially as smart as modern man, despite not needing to do much more than pick fruit and stab pigs ? Thanks to this excellent piece, I now feel a lot more comfortable about why early humans had the capacity to solve differential equations but didn't :

1. You don't need to be a great hunter to have an evolutionary advantage. You just need some small advantage over prey and be able to out-compete other animals - not necessarily by much, but a bit. So the very first users of technology didn't have to start out as potential Einsteins. They just had to be able to throw rocks at things and have a good chance of success.
2. To actually become a great hunter, you do need an incredibly high mental capacity. The article goes into detail about just how frickin' complex manufacturing some of the seemingly primitive early tools can be, especially in specialist environments. You don't need to be able to understand Maxwell's equations to chuck a rock at a warthog, but if you want to make a bow and arrow... well, you're getting close. Damn close.
3. There are more evolutionary advantages to being a great hunter than just the ability to collect food and not die. Really good hunters may have breeding advantages, thus adding in sexual selection pressure to the innate risks associated with running away from sabre-tooth cats (as if early man didn't have enough to worry about). So there's a clear route as to why the modest advantage of being a decent hunter, with the capability to survive but not thrive, should lead to very much cleverer people.
4. Early humans may have had the capacity to develop into people as smart as us, but probably generally didn't - because nutrition may play an important role in developing brains. So our ancestors may have been just as conscious and self-aware as us, and generally comparable in intelligence, but they may not have ever produced the equivalent of Newton or Da Vinci.
5. Some discoveries evolved through collective cultural luck. The article notes that even starting a fire from basic materials is extremely difficult for modern people if they're unprepared and untrained, as well as many other examples where knowledge can really only be gained through trial and error (there's no way it would ever occur to anyone, no matter how smart, that to get the maximum benefit from corn you have to soak it in a solution containing ground-up seashells : that simply can't be derived from first principles). As the population slowly grew, the probability of beneficial chance discoveries also grew. The capacity for language and human ability for social learning (which the article says is much greater than for any other species of ape) meant that there was little chance of backsliding.

I still wonder at exactly what point human brains reached the potential to become as advanced as they are today, but collectively I think the above points can at last solve the puzzle to my satisfaction.

The last point about luck is more important than you might expect. Aeon had a very nice piece about how choosing randomly (e.g. through divination or whatever) can be advantageous, because although it doesn't lead to better reasoning, it does help reduce bad reasoning. This article takes that much further. Being random can make you unpredictable, which is sometimes advantageous. But far more importantly :

Hunter-gatherers really want to learn the essentials of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and learning it is really hard. Their heuristics are: Learn from people who are good at things and/or widely-respected. People will fear and obey authority figures like kings and chieftains, but they give a different kind of respect (“prestige”) to people who seem good at things. And since it’s hard to figure out who’s good at things (can a non-musician who wants to start learning music tell the difference between a merely good performer and one of the world’s best?) most people use the heuristic of respecting the people who other people respect. Once you identify someone as respect-worthy, you strongly consider copying them in, well, everything.

Understanding why people are doing what they are can be extremely difficult, but understanding that what they're going is successful is much easier. And often (especially back in prehistory), not even the "experts" really knew why they were doing what they were doing, so you couldn't just ask them. They stumbled on solutions by chance and preserved them through tradition and ritual. This meant that not questioning them made a lot of sense, especially in cases where the detrimental effects weren't immediately obvious :

Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning.

Which leads to a paradoxical situation : we evolved the capacity for reason, but it can be self-destructive. Being conservative stops us from messing with things we don't understand.

Rationalists always wonder: how come people aren’t more rational? How come you can prove a thousand times, using Facts and Logic, that something is stupid, and yet people will still keep doing it? Henrich hints at an answer: for basically all of history, using reason would get you killed. A reasonable person would have figured out there was no way for oracle-bones to accurately predict the future. They would have abandoned divination, failed at hunting, and maybe died of starvation.

A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.

So what do we do about it ? How do we preserve the vital conservative element that protects us whilst allowing the carefree experimentation that drives genuine progress ? Eliminating small-c conservatism isn't an option : even in the far future, we're going to need to stop children from poking around in the warp reactor...

Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success

I. "Culture is the secret of humanity's success" sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway. Henrich wants to debunk (or at least clarify) a popular view where humans succeeded because of our raw intelligence.

Fakey McFakeFace

Three short articles on fake news today, so let's combine them into one.

First up, the Independent reports that YouTube is stepping up its game when it comes to removing fraudulent content :

While it has always banned hate content in general, the site has allowed some specific kinds of harmful videos – such as those promoting Nazi ideology or claiming 9/11 did not happen – to continue being hosted on the site. Those videos, as well as other kinds of "supremacist" content, will now be officially banned.

It will also alter its algorithm in an attempt to stop certain kinds of misleading and harmful videos, such as those promoting fake miracle cures or the flat Earth hoax, will stop being recommended in YouTube's "up next" sidebar. It will also encourage more authoritative videos to try and discourage people from being tricked by those stories.

Excellent progress. Also interesting to note that they're trying to account for such content being useful for researchers (presumably psychologists, sociologists and political scientists). YouTube are at least making exactly the right noises : discussion of just about any topic is fine under certain conditions, but promotion of certain content is not. Questioning the origins and social impact of homosexuality, or considering whether a particular religion is moral or not, are absolutely fine topics for academic discussion. So is holding a strong opinion on those issues. But you can't necessarily go around promoting those opinions as fact, or go around deliberately and systematically abusing people (especially on the basis of something over which they have no control). Even in America, freedom of speech legally only extends to not imprisoning people - it says nothing at all about how private companies respond to it. No-one, anywhere, has an automatic right to not be regarded as an idiot if they keep promoting idiotic ideas.

As for the pseudoscience conspiracy crap, good riddance to bad rubbish. The internet was a better place when the odd fringe lunatic would wander by : it's when they all gather together you get problems. It's better for everyone if such groups are denied the opportunity to get organised. Those who can convince you of absurdities and all that...

Right-wing channels also make up a significant part of YouTube's channels and their viewers. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that far-right videos were one of the site's most popular categories. The decision also comes amid increasing scrutiny from conservative politicians about whether YouTube has a bias against right-wing creators. As with Twitter and Facebook, the company has been criticised for undermining free speech and being unfair towards its conservative users, despite the fact there is no evidence of those accounts being discriminated against.

Now that last statement badly needs a citation, and a very clear distinction needs to be made between "right wing" and "far right". The two seem to be synonymous in America, but this is not so elsewhere.

Not that YouTube is anywhere near perfect. The Independent article mentions a recent prominent case of inconsistency, of which this BBC article goes into more details :

At the centre of the dispute is journalist Carlos Maza, who presents a popular series called Strikethrough for the news site Vox. He says he has faced persistent abuse from rival video-maker Steven Crowder, who has more than 3.8 million subscribers on YouTube. Whenever Maza publishes a video for Vox, Crowder will post his own "debunking" video, peppered with insulting language attacking Maza's sexual orientation and ethnicity. So, last week, Maza posted a video compilation of the abuse. In the clips, Crowder imitates Maza's accent and calls him, among other things, a "lispy queer", a "gay Vox sprite" and a "gay Mexican".

YouTube said it would investigate. It conducted an "in-depth review" and on Tuesday it came back with an answer. "While we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don't violate our policies," it said in a statement. However, after receiving further criticism, YouTube announced Wednesday that it would demonetise Crowder's channel due to "continued egregious actions." This means he will no longer make money from advertising revenues on his videos. 

But Maza said this was still not enough, pointing out that most political content is already demonetised and that Crowder would still be able to sell merchandise via his channel. YouTube attempted to clarify its decision stating that Crowder would need to remove links to his t-shirts in order to reinstate monetisation of his channel.

Okay. Abuse and harassment are different from receiving the occasional insult. No-one would suggest we ban all forms of criticism or even ad hominem attacks, because recognising when someone is behaving like a dick (i.e. Crowder) is an essential part of a democracy and such behaviour needs to be called out. But attacking someone for what they are is wholly different from attacking them from what they do, and responding to an unprovoked attack is different from initiating an attack on someone who has done you no harm. Furthermore, amassing a following based on abusing people is not the same as venting frustration and anger at someone who delights in abusing others. Regulating hate speech certainly doesn't mean we all have to be nice to each other the whole time, but letting the systematic abuse and denigration of minorities go unchecked is the height of folly.

But YouTube said Crowder's comments did not violate the policies because they were sandwiched between "debate". In notes provided by Google and published by news site Gizmodo, the company said: "We take into consideration whether criticism is focused primarily on debating the opinions expressed or is solely malicious."

It's inevitable in a contentious area like this that progress is going to be stochastic and increments only by averages. YouTube seem to have got the right idea but not the right implementation. I personally would err on the side of caution, because it's true enough that only unpopular speech needs protecting. But in this case it seems very clear that the intent is to insult and hurt, not debate, so I have to wonder what YouTube are thinking on this one.

Finally, this video first describes a much more objective case of abusive trolls who YouTube failed to take down. The Finnish take the view, quite correctly, that fake news and misinformation is a serious threat to free and democratic societies, not something that should be tolerated. They're trying a fairly large-scale campaign to educate the population so that they won't be fooled by online trolls. But they're only targetting about 10,000 people, so how this will feed into the rest of society I'm not sure. Perhaps they're selecting people they believe are likely to be influential.

What's really interesting is the level of trust in the media. In Finland, trust is high, even in politicians, and they have by all accounts a society which has achieved the golden objective of peace and prosperity at the same time. In Britain, the press and politicians aren't trusted. Somewhat paradoxically, this isn't because the British are a bunch of skeptically-minded critical thinkers, because they seem to fall victim (at least lately) to all kinds of absolute nonsense. I put it to you that this is the end result of a perpetual media campaign of attacking any and all viewpoints with rabid voraciousness, of an unthinking and perpetual criticism : the media are critical only in the rhetorical sense, not in the philosophical sense. In order to think rationally, trusted sources of information are essential. Without this it's all just emotion-driven drivel and things degenerate into a farce.

Mind you, I don't know anything about Finnish media. A comparative study would be interesting.

(Collected thoughts on fake news can be found here).

YouTube is about to delete thousands of accounts

YouTube will delete thousands of accounts after banning "supremacists", conspiracy theorists and other harmful accounts, it has claimed. The decision was made after an in-depth review of its rules on hateful content, YouTube said.

Oi've got a lurvey comboined spaceship-aerrroplane

Cornwall the hub of a spacefaring nation ? But... but it's Cornwall ! Home of cream teas ! Beekeepers ! Faaaarrrmers who say, "oooh-arrrrrr !" a lot for absolutely no reason ! Sleepy country villages by the seaside ! This is literally true, I've been there. Obviously it would be better to launch from a nice tall Welsh mountain....

 The UK government and Cornwall Council are prepared to invest up to £20m into Newquay airport (Spaceport Cornwall) to make it a base for Virgin Orbit. Orbit is the satellite launch system currently being developed in the US by Sir Richard Branson. This system intends to despatch rockets to space from under the wing of a converted Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet. If everything comes together it could see the jet, called Cosmic Girl, operating out of Newquay in the early 2020s. 

This rocket has yet to have its maiden flight but Mr Pomerantz said this should happen before the end of the year. "That's what we're aiming for." At the moment, Cosmic Girl is running simulation missions out over the Pacific Ocean from California. Very soon, the jumbo will do a drop test in which the rocket is released from under the wing and allowed to fly free - but without igniting the rocket motor. This will check the booster's flight characteristics. Assuming that goes well, Virgin Orbit will then move towards the first full-up orbital test of LauncherOne. 

Julian German, the leader of Cornwall Council, commented: "Cornwall is the birthplace of innovation and technology and space is at the heart of our 21st Century economy. "With assets like Spaceport Cornwall, world-class mission control facilities at Goonhilly Earth Station and superb digital connectivity, Cornwall will play a vital role in the growth of the global space economy."

Push on to take Cornwall into orbit

The UK government and Cornwall Council are prepared to invest up to £20m into Newquay airport (Spaceport Cornwall) to make it a base for Virgin Orbit. Orbit is the satellite launch system currently being developed in the US by Sir Richard Branson.

Review : Good Omens

I don't really have much to say about this because it was awesome. 10/10, no questions asked. An absolutely perfect adaptation of a fantastic book and it can't be improved. I saw very mixed reviews from critics who seemed to find some bizarre, amateurish faults with it, like saying that scene changes weren't done correctly. Some people just say things that make literally no sense, and that's one of 'em. Perhaps it's because of a stigma against comic fantasy as a serious genre ? I dunno. Anyway, I thought it was a great surrealist buddy show, perfectly cast (and the Queens soundtrack was a superb choice) and delightfully warm. More like this please.

That's not to say that it's the be-all and end-all of TV shows for all time. I only mean that it did a perfect job with its source material. The team that made this should do Discworld books next : Sky did an okay job with some of them, but this team are better. Good stuff.

Knowledge is awesome

Aeon essays are at least reliably provocative. In this case, I think the author could have saved themselves a lot of bother if they'd at least tried to distinguish "knowledge" from "facts". Of course, defining knowledge is an immensely difficult philosophical problem, but they way it's described here just makes things overly-complicated.

Imagine that 100 prisoners are exercising in the prison yard, and suddenly 99 of them attack the guard, carrying out a plan that the 100th prisoner is no part of. Now one of these prisoners is in the dock. No further evidence is available. Guilt is 99 per cent likely, innocence 1 per cent. Should the court convict? Everyone’s first reaction is – certainly not. The court has no information that rules out the defendant being the one innocent prisoner. You can’t convict someone solely on statistical evidence.

Hypothetical examples are fine, but it's a good idea to make them as watertight as possible (for all its problems, the Trolley Problem does that very well). In this case, why is that particular prisoner in the dock as opposed to the 99 others ? Why is there no other evidence available - can't we at least ask the guards or the other prisoners if they remember what this particular prisoner did ? Why in the world did the others leave out this one guy from their plans ? Wouldn't this prisoner have taken measures to alert the guards or at least make their innocence clear during the attack ?

Anyway, my first reaction is neither, "lock them up !" nor, "set them free !" so much as it is, "hmmm". 1 out of 100 is not quite convincing. Had it been 1 out of 1,000, I'd err towards presuming guilt rather than innocence. If you know that there are so many prisoners involved and you know the chance is much greater that this one is guilty, you should seek to establish innocence, not assume it. Statistical knowledge is a kind of knowledge, a type of fact, it's just not about individuals. Hence labelling it as not being knowledge is confusing and simply wrong.

It might be intuitive, but this legal ban on statistical evidence is puzzling. Think of a man who is convicted because an eyewitness says she saw him steal a necklace. Nowadays, thankfully, the courts know eyewitness evidence can go wrong, and so they check carefully to make sure it’s reliable. Even so, the courts don’t demand 100 per cent certainty, only that the eyewitness makes doubt unreasonable – which seems to mean something like 95 per cent assurance, whenever the judges can be persuaded to put a number to it.

Does an anecdote count as evidence if it's an anecdote about statistics ? Dunno, but I'll offer one anyway. During my PhD, I decided to try a process known as stacking. This is a simple procedure where you take a series of observations and add them together to see if you detect anything. In this case, we had a set of galaxies which were visible at optical wavelengths but not in the radio band (which is sensitive to the presence of atomic hydrogen gas), so by stacking the radio data we could improve sensitivity. As it happened, this still resulted in a non-detection. Booo.

When you stack data, you can measure how the noise level varies, i.e. how the sensitivity improves. It's exactly equivalent to doing longer exposures, except you can do it after the fact. I found that the sensitivity was increased as expected, by a factor of about 10. So it was a bit disappointing that nothing was detected in my sample of some tens of galaxies. But, having not been taught exactly how it worked, it took me a very long time to realise what this meant - in fact, it was probably the most difficult part of my PhD*. It did not mean that every single individual galaxy in my sample didn't have gas down to the sensitivity limit calculated. Rather, it meant that the whole sample, on average, didn't have that much gas. It was quite possible that a few individual galaxies had a bit more gas than that, as long as some others had significantly less.

* I could have just asked someone, but I found it more rewarding to work things out for myself. Also I managed to confuse myself quite severely, which wasn't a lot of fun.

That's what statistical information is. It is most definitely knowledge, but it's knowledge of the population, not the individual.

Maybe we intuitively feel that good eyewitnesses allow us to know about guilt, whereas statistical evidence never delivers genuine knowledge. But, even so, why is it a good idea to let this difference weigh in court? After all, a true belief derived from statistical evidence is just as true as one derived from an eyewitness – not to mention that the statistics deliver truths much more reliably than the eyewitnesses... Nearly all the experts assume that there must be some logic here, if only we can figure it out. But despite huge amounts of effort, none of them has managed to find any. I say that’s because there isn’t any logic to be found. 

Well, I say there's no mystery here at all. Eye-witness testimony is preferred because it's the reverse of statistical information : it concerns the individual, not the population. Information about the population is circumstantial; information about the individual is direct. Of course both are subject to error, but, assuming an equal failure rate, I'd prefer direct information whenever possible. That doesn't mean we have to throw out statistics any more than it would mean throwing out all eye-witness reports, both of which would be stupid things to do. Instead we have to proceed with whatever we've got, preferably using all sources of information in concert and not in isolation.

Deliberately taking this quote out of context :

Of course, the false believers won’t actually find bananas. It’s only the true believers who generally gain what they seek.

That's surely the founding principle of a religion designed for monkeys... but anyway :

Once the notion of belief is to hand, the old notion of knowledge becomes redundant. We modern thinkers can distinguish between three kinds of agents: those whose beliefs are in line with the facts; those whose beliefs misrepresent the facts; and those who have no opinion.

Err, hang on, what exactly are these "facts" of which you speak if they're not knowledge ? Eh ? No, we shouldn't abandon knowledge - that is ridiculous. We need to encourage more truth-seeking, and that demands a respect for the facts. The implied definition of knowledge running through this piece is incredibly unhelpful.

Take lottery tickets again. Many of us buy them at highly unfavourable prices. We don’t know we won’t win, we tell ourselves, even though the statistics emphatically say otherwise. Yet we are very quick to change our minds once we have more direct evidence, such as reading in the paper that we had only four of the six numbers right. Oh well, we tell ourselves, now we know we’ve lost, and we bin the ticket. Yet the chance of having the winning ticket could well have risen significantly if the newspaper is unreliable and capable of misreporting the two bad numbers. Our penchant for direct evidence obscures this. I wonder what proportion of unclaimed winning tickets are discarded for this kind of reason.

Whut ? How unreliable do you think newspaper reports of lottery numbers are ? That's a terrible example.

Bertrand Russell once said that the concept of causation, ‘like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’. Russell was probably wrong about causation. But his strictures apply perfectly to the concept of knowledge. This is indeed a relic of a bygone age, and moreover one that does appreciable harm. We should get rid of it.

No, no. We should try and define it, if not perfectly, then at least usefully. Divorcing knowledge from facts in the way that's done here is not useful at all. Factual knowledge is awesome and we should bloody well keep it.

Knowledge is a stone-age concept, we're better off without it - David Papineau | Aeon Essays

I'm against knowledge. Don't get me wrong: I'm as keen on the facts as the next person. I'm no friend of fake news. I want truth rather than falsity. It is specifically knowledge I'm against, not true belief. Knowledge asks more of us than true belief, and it isn't worth it.

Do you mind ?

I mostly disagree with this. There are large parts which could simply be written as, "people's circumstances influence which ideas they're receptive to". I don't think transhumanism or Cartesian dualism (I read the Meditations recently, but I have to read it again before blogging it) are inherently anti-feminist, but, at the same time, the fact that certain demographics are treated differently does give them a different perspective. Dualism could (and almost certainly would) have arisen in a different way, but that doesn't mean the process bt which it did isn't worth examining.

Likewise, there are some articles which discuss how ideas arise that I find intensely annoying. This isn't because the origin of ideas isn't very interesting in itself, because it usually is (e.g. the purely philosophical reasons the ancient Greeks postulated the existence of atoms, which had little to do with observations). What I find annoying is when an article implies that because the origin process can be understood, this somehow invalidates the idea. It doesn't. Descartes may have had one very good set of reasons for dualism and the Princess Elizabeth another, equally good set, for rejecting it, but that doesn't mean their roles couldn't have been reversed. Nevertheless, I found this bit interesting :

It’s not that Elisabeth simply rejected Descartes’s views without critical reflection, or fell back to simply asserting her subjective opinion. It’s that her particular life experience inclined her to develop different intuitions to him, and gave her good reasons to doubt the plausibility of dualism. As the philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford has argued, the contingencies of what happens to us in life – the people who have shaped us, the challenges we have overcome – invariably shape the sorts of claims that we’ll find persuasive or the arguments we’re inclined to doubt. 

Here, it seems to me that Elisabeth’s experience as a woman meant that she did not have the luxury of entertaining anxieties about the stark separation of mind and matter. One might think that her concerns – as for many women, in fact, and other oppressed peoples throughout history – were not really about how to bridge a gaping chasm between some enclosed inner world and a remote outer one. Rather, Elisabeth’s worry might well have been about how to preserve an inner sense of self against the relentless pressing-in of the world’s demands; about how to assert an entitlement to be a full person with distinct projects; and about how to carve out space to flourish in a society that relies on exploiting you.

While I object to the idea that transhumanism and dualism are just the fantasies of misogynist playboy billionaires, I do think there's a good point here. Because of the way women were treated, their outlook would have been necessarily different (reading the Meditations, I look into myself and find my own awareness to be a singular, utterly unalterable thing : that this is not necessarily so is fascinating). But it could equally have happened the other way around, e.g. with men being seen as overly-emotional and irrational and thus with women trying to aspire to free themselves of such burdens. Of course, we should be extremely wary about drawing too many conclusions from a single example, especially a princess.

The second point I found interesting was the origin of the suppression of women :

Thus when de Beauvoir makes the oft-quoted point that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’, she is not just saying that women’s minds and selves are socially constructed. More trenchantly, she is arguing that women become women precisely so that men can become Human. While the Human has access to Cartesian qualities of reason, truth and clarity, the Other is linked to irrationality, emotion and vagueness; where the Human has civilisation and culture, the Other is aligned with nature and matter; and where the Human has a honed and powerful mind, the Other is at the mercy of the body.

Which makes sense - it feels good to have enemies. I will fiercely defend feminism on the grounds that there is unjustly unequal gender-based treatment of women (and men) in society, and thus, while it's true that all minds matter (to borrow from the article's title and annoying internet-based movements), the present focus is on the unfair treatment of women. Different perspectives on philosophy are valuable, but again, that doesn't mean the underlying ideas are invalid.

The final point I'll comment on is the view of the computational theory of the mind. I don't think this is at all incompatible with feminism, nor does this so-called "embodied cognition" present any difficulties :

New frontiers are opening up that view the body as something more than just a brain-carrying robot. In doing so, they have created the potential for alliances with feminist thinkers influenced by the likes of Fausto-Sterling. Within a broad church that can be called – not uncontentiously – embodied cognition, a growing number of psychologists, scientists and theorists are approaching mental life as something that is not just contingent on, but constituted by, the state of our bodies. In the place of a Cartesian computer, the mind becomes more like a clay pot thrown on a wheel.

Yeah, but I don't see any problem with this except in an overly-strict Descartesian sense. True, if you take mind-body duality very literally indeed, then yes, there are big problems. Clearly the body does influence the mind, if only because the mind relies on external senses - even though the actual perception may be an internal analysis of electrochemcial flows, that process is still triggered by external events. It isn't just the mind making stuff up, that would be preposterous. It's the same as the supposed problems with identity.

The way I see it, the mind is more like an object in an object-oriented programming language : it has its own identity which is independent of, but strongly influenced by, its current properties. The mind processes what it receives externally, just as any computational system does. It doesn't have its own mystical direct perception of the external world - it necessarily receives information via senses. Perception is an internal model that provides a way for us to interpret the external impulses, but that absolutely does not mean the external impulses aren't real, for heaven's sake. It just means the model is to a degree inaccurate and incomplete, not that it's entirely wrong or meaningless.

All this talk of expectations and affordances leads to a potentially troublesome consequence: cognition can no longer be cleaved apart neatly from politics. If I am black, my prediction of what a police officer might afford me is likely to be very different to that of my white friend, as well as eliciting very different felt responses and perceptions. Undoing such expectations (which it might well be reasonable for me to hold) is not just a matter of changing my beliefs, but of modifying longstanding embodied reactions. Similarly, as a woman, I might not expect a dark and deserted street to afford me walking down it at night, while my male partner might feel entirely at ease in that space. The fact that I feel myself to be vulnerable, in a very visceral way, means that I will avoid putting myself in that position, and so my predictions will be tacitly reinforced.

Yes, because your experiences are different to everyone else's. This is hardly much of a revelation. It's an important statement, which implies that direct experience is a more powerful teacher than classroom lectures, but again, not exactly a novel one. Nor do I see any incompatibility with the idea that the brain processes information in a manner analogous to a computer. The only way I can see a conflict there is if the mind is really, absolutely independent of the body, which is ludicrous - I'm not sure even Descartes went that far.

Feminists never bought the idea of a mind set free from its body - Sally Davies | Aeon Essays

We are shackled to the pangs and shocks of life, wrote Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), 'as bodies to wild horses'. Or are we? Serge Faguet, a Russian-born tech entrepreneur and self-declared 'extreme biohacker', believes otherwise.

Going critical

The agent-based modelling approach to the spread of ideas is, in my naive opinion, a fascinating and extremely important development. Nicky Case has an excellent website with a whole bunch of them (looks like more have been added since last I checked), in particular exploring how the structure of crowds can impede or aid the spread of ideas. It's obvious enough that the property of the idea and the pre-existing beliefs of the people are crucial. What's less obvious - or at least can be more easily and precisely revealed through simulations - is that the structure of the network is at least equally essential.

Here Keven Simler presents another excellent set of interactive simulations (Cases' are better at showing the structure, Simler's are better at demonstrating the results; Case also explores complex contagions). You should definitely run them for yourself (it's an easy and not that lengthy read), but here are some choice highlights. I thought it was particularly interesting just how versatile such network-based approaches can be - if I had to guess, I wouldn't have suspected that the spread of measles could be similar to wildfires, but apparently sometimes that expression can be an accurate metaphor.

It turns out that there's a precise tipping point that separates subcritical networks (those fated for extinction) from supercritical networks (those that are capable of neverending growth). This tipping point is called the critical threshold, and it's a pretty general feature of diffusion processes on regular networks. The exact value of the critical threshold differs between networks. What's shared is the existence of such a value.
Below the critical threshold, any finite infection on the network is guaranteed (with probability 1) to eventually go extinct. 

But above the critical threshold, it's possible (p > 0) for the infection to carry on forever, and in doing so to spread out arbitrarily far from the initial site. Note, however, that an infection on a supercritical network isn't guaranteed to go on forever. In fact, the infection will frequently fizzle out, especially in the very early steps of the simulation.

Which I suppose suggests that the timing of interference in the spread of whatever it is that's spreading can be critical, and the nature of the intervention is equally important. Simler goes on to explore one such simple intervention - the presence of nodes who are immune. Interestingly this also includes nodes which can become immune after exposure, as well as those who are temporarily afflicted but then become vulnerable again after some time.

Changing how many nodes are immune absolutely changes whether the network is sub- or supercritical. And it's not hard to see why. When many nodes are immune, each infection has fewer opportunities to spread to a new host. This turns out to have a number of very important practical implications. One is preventing the spread of wildfires... Another outbreak that's important to stop is infectious disease... Finally, we can use the concept of immune nodes to understand what happens in a nuclear reactor.

And then we look at how the connections help spread and restrict transmissions :

Up to now, our networks have been completely homogeneous. Every node looks the same as every other node. But what if we subvert this assumption and allow things to vary across the network? For example, let's try to model cities. We'll do this by creating patches of the network that are denser in connections (have higher degree) than the rest of the network. This is motivated by data that suggests that people in cities have wider social circles and more social interactions than people outside cities.

What surprises me is that some of this cultural variety can arise based on nothing more than the topology of the social network. What I learned from the simulation above is that there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can't spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can't.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It's not that rural folks are e.g. "small-minded"; when exposed to one of these ideas, they're exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it's that the idea itself can't go viral in the countryside because there aren't as many connections along which it can spread.

Anyone want to take a stab at how this applies to political ideologies, e.g. people in the countryside seem to be more right wing and conservative ? It would be interesting to see if people who move from rural to urban areas become more liberal, and vice-versa. And networks can be intensely local as well as global, which is why behaviour among some groups can be radically different from the prevailing norms :

We tend to think that if something's a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something's a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that's certainly true at the extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks. I find this fascinating.

Cities aren't the only place we find dense networks. High schools are an interesting example. Consider, in a given neighborhood, the network that exists among the students vs. the network that exists among their parents. Same geographic area and similar population sizes, but one network is many times denser than the other. And it's no surprise, then, that fashion and linguistic trends proliferate among adolescents, and spread much slower among the adults.

 Finally we get an interesting case study of how all this can work in academia :

Suppose we distinguish two ways of practising science: Real Science vs. careerist science. Real Science is whatever habits and practices reliably produce knowledge. It's motivated by curiosity and characterised by honesty. (Feynman: "I just have to understand the world, you see.") Careerist science, in contrast, is motivated by professional ambition, and characterised by playing politics and taking scientific shortcuts. It may look and act like science, but it doesn't produce reliable knowledge. 

Of course, there's no categorical distinction between careerists and Real Scientists. We all have a little careerism in us. The question is just how much the network can carry before going quiet.

In the simulation it's fun to watch a fairly small percentage of Careerists block the successful propagation of ideas, in which one idea triggers the formation of another. I suspect there are very few scientists who are so strongly career-oriented as to be damaging for knowledge, but on the other hand it might explain why my citations are so low... :P

Though, this does make me wonder why people tend to - for example - like posts on social media but not reshare them : particularly those cases where a post gets lots of likes but few reshares. Why does this happen ? What makes something likeable but doesn't leave one with the urge to tell anyone else about it ?* I do this as much as anyone, though I do make a conscious effort to more preferentially reshare content from people I directly interact with. Content creation and dissemination seems like a major feature of social media - having conversations about the news is fine and all, but a secondary goal. (Somewhat related : people who present their own very good content but never like or reshare anyone else's. What's with that ?)

* For posts such as this one, I totally understand why people might prefer to share the original link rather than this, which is mostly my own comments.

It's also interesting to watch ideas interact with each other, though this simulation makes the assumption that successive ideas always replace the previous one. I wonder if it would be possible to model this more accurately, allowing some ideas to be replaced with others or with agents to have multiple infections independently. Or if agents could change connections depending on their current beliefs, seeking out other, similar agents and moving through the network...

It's also fun to see (though sadly you can't control) that it's not just numbers that matter but structure. If there's no key connection between two nodes that generate key ideas, then key ideas don't get started. These connection routes can be blocked with only a very few Careerists, if they're in the right places. Coherent structures, as I found out personally, don't necessarily need to be statistically significant to be important.

Going Critical

Learn how things spread with playable simulations