Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 6 September 2019

Crisis and opportunity

Okay, a few words about the latest Brexit developments.

Where to begin ? This dangerous tragedy appears to be evolving into a truly hilarious farce. I haven't felt this optimistic in months. We could be on the verge of total victory, or the very least mitigation into something bearable. Of course the risk of utter disaster is still very real, and shouldn't be taken lightly, but nor should it detract from a feeling that we might, just might, make it out of this intact if not unscathed.

Boris decided that it was better to prorogue Parliament than try and persuade them not to delay Brexit. He used the stick instead of the carrot, threatening rebels with suspension. He blamed MPs for making it difficult to negotiate with the EU. Result ? MPs didn't like this. When asked to delay Brexit, 21 MPs rebelled and were suspended. Now the Conservatives are in a substantial minority government with no control over those rogue MPs. He used threats without even trying persuasion, thinking he had the authority to boss people around, that respect would be granted to him by mere virtue of the office he held and in utter defiance of his personal qualities. Did he apologise for his actions afterwards ? Of course he didn't, not a bit of it.

Actually, he'd already lost the wafer-thin majority when the delay bill was called, and suspending grandees the likes of Hammond, Clarke and Soames exposes his political incompetence for all to see. It's almost self-evident that if you suspend Churchill's grandson then you're on the wrong tack. The conclusion, again, is that that Boris has absolutely no feel for when to use the carrot instead of the stick, losing his first four votes with barely a pause for breath. He answered not a single question in his first PMQs, instead making weak jokes and throwing the questions back. He didn't even apologise for being a racist, making poultry jokes but paltry excuses (terrible pun intended). And he was called out multiple times for not answering questions, and for barefaced lies about the EU negotiations - everyone knows nothing's happening there, but he unashamedly claimed they were making good progress. That he lies is unsurprising, but what's heartening is that MPs aren't the least bit fooled by it. His actions don't make him look strong, they reveal him as untrustworthy. The latitude MPs give to ordinary politicians is not forthcoming for a chronic liar like Boris.

Then, after losing his own brother as an MP - he can't even keep his family loyal - he decided to give a speech in front of the police in which he declared that he'd rather end up dead in a ditch than implement the delay law. Yes, he'd previously said he'd abide by the law, but now we get a PM declaring in front of the police that he doesn't want to obey the law - already a choice being criticised by the police. Once again a total lack of compromise when flexibility is an asset rather than a liability : the problem with "do or die" is, of course, that "die" is a very real possibility. Not to mention the revelation that Boris planned to prorogue Parliament months ago. One would think that learning to compromise and be open are the most obvious lessons from the failure of Theresa May, but apparently neither of these are obvious to Boris.

While Boris founders in his own floppy-haired stupidity, the opposition have got their act together. They considered various options and went for legislation rather than electioneering. That's turned out to be entirely the correct choice, because the animosity between the cross-party MPs who voted to delay is very real : unlike Boris, Philip Hammond is not a man who says, "I'd rather boil my head than hand victory to the opposition" lightly. This produced an acceptable compromise to all sides, which is exactly what Parliament is supposed to do. They then maintained that spirit of unity by denying Boris an election, his only escape route left. The suspended MPs are in no hurry to risk their positions, and the whole opposition don't trust the PM as far as they can throw him. Thus they will, if they're sensible, try and force him to ask for the extension he so loathes before allowing an election (and they've just confirmed that this is exactly what they'll do). That massively weakens Boris' political capital, forcing him either to backtrack on his "dead in a ditch" stance : he can either resign, ask for the extension in humiliation, or refuse and face litigation - which the opposition have planned for. Or of course he can always find a ditch and go and die in it.

It's obvious to everyone that he has not a clue how to behave. Does this seem like a man capable of running a political campaign ? He cannot keep his own MPs or even his own brother loyal. He receives scathing criticism from otherwise loyal Tories. His only political tactic is to resort to threats and bullying, and that simply doesn't work. Threats have their place in politics, but they are always supposed to be last resorts, not the first response. You cannot threaten someone who does not already feel some sense of loyalty to you.

All this bodes extremely well for those wanting to prevent Brexit or at least prevent a No Deal Brexit. If Boris can't even keep his own party together, and can't even persuade the House to call an election, what chance does he have in the actual negotiations with the EU ? Zero.

What, though, of Boris' only escape route - a general election ? The current delay is purely for political expedience - it's all but certain that an election will happen in the near future. Therein we must temper our optimism, a move the opposition have, fortunately, recognised. There are grounds for optimism here too, but also concerns.

Optimistically, none of the above bodes well for Boris. He's gone on a deranged mission to insult just about everyone, much as he's always done. The police, the opposition, the EU, minorities of all stripes, Parliament itself, his own brother, his own party... is there anyone left he hasn't insulted ? His list of allies grows thin indeed. Expelling MPs en masse is unlikely to be something the Tory party machinery is going to reward come campaigning season. And his singular approach of bully and bluster is fine for preaching for the choir - that's why he won the PM election with the Tory faithful - but useless for winning hearts and minds, which is vital for winning back Tory control of the House. Hell, he's gone off to Scotland - Scotland ! - to rally support, the very part of the UK that probably hates him the most. Boris' persona of an affable clown may be a carefully cultivated image, but his political decisions betray that deep down, he is in fact a complete fool.

This all sounds rosy, but roses do have thorns. The strength in the opposition lies not in itself but in the weakness of Boris. The rebel alliance really is fragile, held together only by Boris' ludicrous intransigence and cross-party animosity. While things don't look good for Boris come election time, we should remember that he's largely untested in such a campaign - even fools have a few strengths. Given the first past the post electoral system, it is still credible that, if the pro-Remain parties don't tread carefully, we could end up with a Tory majority. And with many of the rogue Tories not standing at the next election, there's an opportunity for Boris to replace them with loyalists lunatics. How well that would play remains entirely to be seen, especially given that Brexit opinion polls are still narrow - the public still are not reliably convinced of the full problems of a No Deal scenario.

Is it credible that someone who starts their term of office this badly could make a success of it in the long wrong ? Not likely. But things which can't go on forever can go on for much longer than you think, and Boris still has opportunities to exploit. It's hard, at the moment, to see a No Deal happening at the end of October, and credible to suggest that we might have an even softer version of May's deal or even a second referendum. But fortune's wheel is ever turning, and the very fluidity of the situation warns us that any mistakes could be very costly.

I choose to look at this optimistically. Boris and his hideous gang of craven cronies can be beaten, so long as we refuse to play his game and don't make the mistake of fighting him on his terms. Get that Brexit extension. Humiliate him. Continue to pile on the pressure and expose him for what he is. Attack Boris personally and we may yet be swiftly rid of this gibbering idiot. But only then does the real challenge lie before us. Only then can we start to bring the conversation back to the moderate voices of reason and compromise. Only then will we have any chance of addressing the actual problems we face, rather than the personal politics that's incapacitated the entire British establishment.

For you cannot compromise with a lunatic like Boris. But it's vital, when the dust begins to settle, that we, as reasonable men and women, begin to compromise with each other. Politicians failed to do this last time, but came tantalisingly close to agreeing a solution. We need to make this a European style process of compromise and negotiation, offering us, at the very least, a solution that won't chop our own economic legs off. Politicians wasted most of the time given to them at the last extension, but there is hope that, having seen the risks of failure incarnate in a man such as Boris, they will not make the same mistake again. Such a failure would carry with it the risk of opening the door to far worse extremists than Boris - and that would be more than the country could bear.

Thursday, 5 September 2019

Making no assumptions is daft

I don't know why it's apparently such a problem for some people to accept a very simple and obvious truth :
When asked why he viewed animal behavior in terms of human experience, given that his more standard approach was to trace how humans are like other animals, Darwin responded by saying that it was “more cheerful,” and “less off-putting,” to think of the animals in human terms than to treat humans as having “beastial” qualities.
Humans and animals share certain properties and can therefore be said to be similar. If you prick them, do they not bleed ? Well, vertebrates do. If you wrong them, shall they not revenge ? Well, it might not be revenge exactly, but they sure as hell won't like it and will often retaliate. When it comes to the characteristics they have in common, it makes no difference to see humans as animals as it does to view animals as having human characteristics. No-one would dispute this for blood circulation or lung capacity or whatever. And yet :
Jane Goodall states, as a matter of fact, that “animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain." She “knows” what animals experience because she has seen signifiers of these emotions in their behavior. But if all we had to do to link conscious states like feelings to behavior was to observe behavior, we wouldn’t need arduous scientific research. Mere observation is not sufficient.
The scientific question in an experiment on humans or animals is not whether the organism has the capacity for consciousness in some general sense, but whether consciousness specifically accounts for the behavior that was studied. If this is not tested, the statement that consciousness was involved is not warranted scientifically.
Right then, prove I'm conscious. Go on, you. Prove that I specifically am conscious. You can't, can you ? How would you ever know ? If you wouldn't accept my behaviour as evidence, then you could, I suppose, monitor my brain activity and see that my brain behaves in a similar way to yours. And you presumably accept that you're conscious, so you could safely conclude that I'm conscious. Right ? The author of this piece bizarrely disagrees :
The philosophical “problem of other minds”is sometimes used to justify the conclusion that, since we only have access to our own mind, we don’t really know what is on the minds of other humans. Therefore, the argument goes, claims about animal consciousness are just as justified as claims about human consciousness. But this is not the case.
In human research, methods are available for distinguishing conscious control of behavior from non-conscious control. For example, visual stimuli can be presented in such a way as to allow or prevent conscious awareness (consciousness is prevented by briefly flashing the stimulus and following it with a longer-lasting stimulus that “masks” the first one).20 In such studies, humans cannot verbally report on the identity of the stimulus (they deny seeing anything). Nevertheless, non-verbal behavioral responses (pointing or pressing buttons) or changes in physiological responses (sweating, pupil dilation, or heart rate) can indicate that the stimulus was meaningfully processed. Because verbal responses (in the sense of a sincere, intentional report, as opposed to an automatically elicited exclamation) can only be given about things that one is aware of, verbal report is the gold standard in human consciousness research.
I call bullshit. The author is saying the behavioural responses are not enough to justify a claim of consciousness and then saying the exact opposite ! This is absurd. Who would claim that an illiterate mute human isn't conscious ? Nobody at all, that would be highly offensive. In the strictest sense, each of us can only ever know for certain that we ourselves are conscious. Consciousness is by definition a non-physical experience, there are no fields or particles of consciousness we can measure. Behaviour is really all we've got to go on. Even knowing the EM field in our brain won't tell us what someone is experiencing, not really - not in the strictest sense demanded here.

I agree that it's difficult to decide which behaviour is due to conscious thought and which isn't (and animals may well have different sorts of conscious and emotional experiences to us). But this is true of humans too ! If we apply the standards the author is suggesting here, that is, to make no assumptions whatsoever, we will all of us go around thinking that our inner mental realms are absolutely unique and everyone else is just a sort of squishy automaton; that other people fart in response to eating too many beans with the same degree of agency as when they write poetry in response to horrible tragedies. Come on, this is not a sensible way of doing science. Yes, in the strictest possible sense we can't know whether cats or whales or politicians are really conscious, but if we demand evidence that strict, to throw out common, basic assumptions about the way the world works, we will be essentially saying that we know nothing at all. And that's silly.

The Tricky Problem with Other Minds - Issue 75: Story - Nautilus

Human "exceptionalism" is for many people an unquestioned assumption. For the religious, it is a God-given fact; for humanists, it is a celebration of our unique mental capacities. No other species has created music, art, literature, or built skyscrapers, or imagined going to the moon and figured out how to go there and how to get back.

Wednesday, 4 September 2019

Cromwell, a warning from history

Or at least a warning from the movie version of history (I'm not going to consider its inaccuracies here). With Parliament suffering abuses that are unprecedented in centuries, and even the Daily Mail recognising the problems of the executive going against Parliament, this movie from 1970 is ultra topical.

For some reason this movie was panned by critics, though I can only assume due to idiocy. One review on Rotten Tomatoes seems to be especially confused as to why Cromwell is here portrayed as a fanatic instead of a hero : because he was, and because reality is rarely about heroes and villains. Charles I acted with villainous tyranny, but he wasn't opposed by a hero but just a different sort of lunatic. Sure, Cromwell had ideals which, it must be said, ultimately brought about the end of absolute monarchy - and he is to be applauded for that. But his methods were flawed, even allowing that the civil war was instigated by the king, and his principles confused. He acts both with ruthlessness, compassion, naivety and determination. He is a complex character who occasionally achieves heroic things but is ultimately a deeply flawed human being.

Charles I is always going to be portrayed as a villain, and rightly so (he started the problems and deserves the bulk of the blame), but this movie comes as close as possible to rehabilitating him. But what is it that Cromwell actually wants ? We never really find out, because he himself doesn't actually know. Supposedly it's a more democratic form of government. Yet Parliament itself is clearly shown to be no more or less competent than Cromwell or the King. All three protagonists - Parliament itself being an entity of sorts - are capable of moments of greatness, yet all are equally capable of squandering opportunities, of squabbling, of catastrophic misjudgements and naked greed. In short, while it's not perfectly historically accurate, it's astonishingly realistic.

I've been reading the Penguin Classics selection of Cicero's speeches entitled "On Government" recently (more on that in a future post). Cromwell is a lot like the tragic fall of the Roman Republic in reverse : Caesar rose to dictatorship through military struggle, whereas Cromwell instigated democracy through a civil war. Both struggles feature eloquent, impassioned speeches from their main protagonists : history indeed doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes.

Except, of course, ultimately, Cromwell doesn't end well. It doesn't end with England becoming democratic and free. Instead, a devoted democrat turns tyrant when he discovers that the Parliament he fought for doesn't function as he thinks it should (I imagine the stage directions to Richard Harris consisted solely of, "Look expasterated. No no, more exasperated"). The situation is an omnishambles with no good clear choices; the three main entities are all, to an extent, a victim of circumstance. None of them really fully understand the problems of the system well enough to implement sensible reforms. Consequently, we don't get a happy ending - we get a tragic failure, brief enough in the grand scheme of things but protracted enough for those living through it. In the end, yes, the country did pull itself back together, but that interlude between monarchies was something it endured more than enjoyed. The mere progration of Parliament doesn't even begin to describe just how damn topical this film is right now.

Monday, 2 September 2019

Urrrgh, breeders !

Well now I mean the world can be a pretty crappy place, but bad enough to want the species to go extinct ? Hmmm...
"Wouldn't it just be better to blow a hole in the side of the earth and just have done with everything?"Thomas, 29, lives in the east of England, and although his idea of blowing up the world is something of a thought experiment, he is certain about one thing - humans should not have babies, and our species should gradually go extinct.
Thomas's idea of blowing a hole in the side of the earth - he imagines a big red button that would end human life and says he'd "press that in an instant" - is actually highly controversial because of a key anti-natalist principle: consent. Put simply, it's the idea that creating or destroying life requires the consent of the person who will be born or die.
Which I find immediately to be fundamentally and irredeemably stupid. You can't give consent unless you already exist.
Kirk lives in San Antonio, Texas. He says he recalls a conversation with his mother when he was just four years old. She told him that having children was a choice. "This doesn't make any sense to me, to voluntarily put someone who has no needs or wants prior to their conception into this world to suffer and die," he says.
Kirk, you're an idiot. Yes you are. I don't care much about how you've reached that conclusion, it's bloody stupid. It gets more sinister :
Posters frequently share experiences of their own mental health, and occasionally condemn those with mental health problems for having children. 
Among the intense philosophical and ethical debates going on anti-natalist groups, there's a darker and less edifying undercurrent. Some routinely insult parents - calling them "breeders". Other slurs are directed at children. "Whenever I see a pregnant woman, disgust is the first feeling." wrote one user next to a picture that said: "I hate baby bump".
In some anti-natalist groups, users allude to the notion that babies shouldn't be born in war zones, if there is a high chance of disability, or even to low-income parents. 
Yes, because eugenics and disgust at other human beings has always worked out ever so well in the past. See, I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to have fewer children for environmental reasons, but to insist that the species goes extinct is a truly perversely pointless kind of defeatist nihilism. It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

The people who want you to stop having babies

They believe humans shouldn't have children. Who are the anti-natalists - and how far are they willing to push their ideas? "Wouldn't it just be better to blow a hole in the side of the earth and just have done with everything?"

The needs of the few

More on information spreading. And why not ? Surely in this age when we abandon reason for madness this is one of the most important topics of our time. Playing tactical games to avoid having lunatics in charge is not good enough. Here's an agent-based model that aims to explain polarisation if the participants are acting rationally but with fallible memories :
“These agents were assigned an opinion, but could change their opinion after interacting with other agents,” says Jiin Jung, co-author of the paper and researcher at Claremont Graduate University in California, US. If they were all acting rationally, you would expect them to share their opinions and sometimes to alter their views if they found that others’ arguments were stronger than their own. The agents were made to behave rationally or irrationally by manipulating their memory. Some of the agents were given perfect recall, while others were given a more fallible memory.
“Those with unlimited memory could remember any type of argument from any perspective,” says Jung. “Those who could forget were split into some who randomly forgot and others who forgot weak arguments or old arguments.” 
“Agents with unlimited memory did not become polarised,” says Jung. But no human has a perfectly infallible memory. What is more interesting is what happens when we account for the fact that our attention spans, memories and energy to debate can change. “If we are rational with a limited memory span, that causes the bipolarisation of opinion in a group,” says Jung. “Even though we are completely rational, our society can become polarised because we forget the arguments of others.”
I would imagine that this uses the classic agent-based modelling trick of reducing things like assessing arguments down to simple parameters, rather than any complex model of how an agent should evaluate an argument. But I'm not sure this is telling us anything new or interesting. It's already well-known that if we hear totally new information on a topic, we're like as not to believe it. Only if it noticeably contradicts our existing beliefs do things get more complicated. All this boils down to, I think, is saying that misinformation leads us astray. We don't have an objective standard of truth, so biasing towards the first thing we hear makes as much sense as anything. I don't think that finite memory really adds anything new here. And :
When we meet someone who holds a different belief, we should try not to dismiss it as irrational. Instead of thinking that we need to “correct” their thinking or re-educate them, we could reflect on what might be affecting their judgement.
Yeah, but from this TED talk :
The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. 
We assume people are simply misinformed by default anyway. Which isn't so bad, since it's the most pleasant assumption of all, under an intrinsic belief that we ourselves must be right. The much harder thing to do is to ask ourselves whether we are right. Because, if we're not, we then have to apply those three possibilities to ourselves. It's not too difficult to admit we were misinformed, because that's not our fault, but it's much harder to admit that we were being stupid - and nigh-on impossible to admit we were acting malevolently, which we'll only do in exceptional circumstances.

To be fair, if you do this too much, existence becomes extremely uncomfortable - even if only resorting to the misinformation explanation. So the difficult trick is to manage a degree of flexibility under which any of our beliefs can change, but not all at once - permanently doubting everything leads to uselessly believing in nothing and dribbling everywhere. It's a sensible thing to assume you're right and then question differing information, so long as your opinion can change based on the responses you get.

And yet... we're only too willing to resort to these more difficult explanations when it comes to other people. Plato had it that no-one deliberately commits injustice, and Epictetus (more on him in future posts) added that people were only mistaken about what was right and wrong, not whether they themselves were behaving fairly or not. Maybe. But when I see people openly admitting that they're only acting so as to annoy other people, with a reckless disregard for collateral damage along the way, I have to wonder how far this is true.

Anyway, there's no foolproof guide for working out how to deal with people we (initially) disagree with, so back to the BBC. Perhaps more interesting than the problem of faulty memories, though not entirely unexpected :
Research shows that by associating with extreme minorities your opinions can change in surprising ways. Gaffney’s research builds on work conducted by William Crano, who established that a clear message, even if you do not agree with it, can be enough to move you on other topics. In one of his studies, Crano observed minority groups of students who advocated against allowing gay people to serve in the military. The majority of students did not align themselves with the policy, but they became more conservative on other issues like gun control reform.
Crano suggests extreme opinions put pressure on your entire belief system. You might not immediately change your attitude, but it weakens your other beliefs, meaning they might change later.
Makes sense. It would be a rare individual who would come away from prolonged encounters with any social group without adopting any of their attitudes.
Being small can be very useful. When groups are small they are more distinctive compared to large groups. Small groups might have one, clear message, where larger groups contain multiple voices sharing different messages. This distinctiveness makes smaller groups more influential, particularly if they are very consistent in their views. Likewise, the more uncertainty there is in a population, the more influential a minority group becomes.
This all ties in quite nicely with other, quite different studies. For example this one on how you only need to affect about 10% of a population to radically affect the rest, or this one saying that if only 10-15% of a population are diehards then the rest will fall into line. The BBC article goes on to mention how this is used by both authoritarians and civil rights activists; a more common example, I suggest, are scientists - we may be small but we're hugely, disproportionately influential.

How the views of a few can determine a country's fate

Do you get the feeling that political debate is increasingly polarised? Certainly in the country where I live, the UK, politics appears to be at an impasse. The impression I have is that the same factions seem to be stubbornly rehashing the same debates with little compromise.

Curdle your enthusiasm

We have a tendency to want to pin blame on individual objects, but you would never do that in the physics world. There’s no bad molecule that causes water to boil. It’s a collective effect. And so, we wondered if a lot of the social problems that we face are actually better looked at through that lens.
Or would we ? After all, the spark that ignites the gas that causes the water to boil can be traced directly to the action of individual atoms and electrons. An individual molecule doesn't have a temperature, it just has motion, and that motion derives from the influence of other molecules. On the other hand, motion due to an EM field is a bit different. Still, I don't see that such a model fundamentally changes anything : the end result in an agent-based, network approach is still highly dependent on the structure and number of agents conveying particular information. So :
If you have milk in the fridge, gradually, one day that milk suddenly curdles. That is because microscopically, you’re getting this aggregation of objects into communities. And the math of that works perfectly well for the aggregation of people into communities. Now, the typical reaction is: “Oh, but I’m an individual, I don’t behave like a molecule of milk.” Yeah, but collectively we do, because we’re constrained by the others. So there’s only a certain number of things that we can actually do, and we tend to do them again and again and again.
To continue quibbling over the analogy, you could still model the curdling of milk through the interactions of individual atoms. But it might be a lot simpler to model temperature as a field, so in that sense the analogy could be better. More interestingly though :
We found there’s a closed network of about 1,000 clusters, worldwide, online, across all platforms, propagating global hate of all flavors. Now, if there’s about 1,000 people in each of those (it’s actually between 10 and maybe up to 100,000, so let’s just say 1,000 on average) you’ve got 1,000 clusters of 1,000 people – that’s a million people. And that’s our very, very crude first estimate of the number of people online involved with this.
Q : That’s a startlingly manageable number – 1,000 networks.
Not if you’re trying to find that among seven billion. But they’ve already done the job for you. They’ve already grouped themselves into community.
Again I re-iterate : sometimes things spread more rapidly underground, but sometimes their spread demands exposure. It's going to be a lot harder to build significant networks on direct messaging apps than on open, public, social media platforms. The conclusions of this "curdling" analogy are strikingly similar to what one gets in an agent-based approach, albeit with interesting and important subtleties :
The first proposal] is to go after the smaller bubbles. Smaller bubbles are weaker, have less money, less powerful people, and will grow into those big ones. So eliminating small ones – and we showed this mathematically – rapidly decreases the ecology. It cuts off the supply.
I suppose the only potential difference I would be curious about here is the effect of social prominence conveying authority and therefore trust and belief. That is, famous sources (news outlets or individuals) tend to be more readily believed than anonymous random strangers. But I think this still reduces down to my analogy of seeds in a field : you can either attack the resulting trees and prevent future generations from propagating, or attack the soil itself and kill everything at once. It depends on which factor is dominant - the fertile trees or the soil itself encouraging their growth. If there are already many seeds in the field (that is, if people are reaching a particular conclusion naturally), then attacking the soil is your only option. If, on the other hand, it's coming from just a few big, prominent trees, then attacking them is a necessity.
Number two is that instead of banning individuals, because of the interconnectedness of this whole system, we showed that you actually only have to remove about 10% of the accounts to make a huge difference in terms of the cohesiveness of the network. If you remove randomly 10% of the members globally, this thing will begin to fall apart. 
Which again falls out of agent-based approaches. But the next two are less obvious :
[Third proposal] You get [the hate clusters] engaged in a skirmish, basically, and they think that that’s a kind of supreme battle. It slows them down in terms of recruiting; it just engages them in something that actually isn’t that important... fighting with trolls online is actually worth your time... but do it as a group, do it as a cluster. Don’t do it individually. It will break you. 
[The fourth proposal] is my favorite because it it really exploits the weakness that comes from the multidimensional flavors of hate. There are two neo-Nazi groups, both in the UK, both ostensibly wanting the same thing. But they don’t – one wants a unified Europe, the other wants to break everything apart and obliterate the rest of the countries. So introduce a cluster that draws out the differences. I see it as a way to wear individuals in hate clusters out. In the end, they’ll just get fed up. It’s not that it goes away. It’s just that now they’re actually hating the traffic more than they hate the Jews. It shifts the focus.
Those are not at all obvious from any analogy, but unique to the phenomenon itself. People spreading ideologies are desperate for engagement (perhaps more than they are for actually persuading anyone). It's also a natural tendency to love a good argument for the sake of an argument. If we can't persuade people to argue in a better, more productive way, then getting them to use their talents to stifle the spread of the crazies may be a good second best option. On the other hand, debate engenders legitimacy even when not endorsing the ideas, and even more so if it attracts a large crowd, so I'd be wary of this first proposal (but if there are sufficient numbers with opposing views, wouldn't it be even better to try and persuade the trolls rather than fighting them ?). Setting up a group that exists only to get the haters to fight each other is much more appealing, though I still don't see why the milk analogy is relevant to any of this.

The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk

Lone wolves. Terrorist cells. Bad apples. Viral infections. The language we use to discuss violent extremism is rife with metaphors from the natural world. As we seek to understand why some humans behave so utterly inhumanely, we rely on comparisons to biology, ecology and medicine.

Make America Welsh Again

An interesting article on how the Welsh discovered America and therefore all your base are belong to us, as the old saying goes. Clearly we own America now, so y'all better get ready to switch from ham to lamburgers, start playing the harp, stop saying y'all (seriously, the ll sound is pretty horrible in Welsh) and start singing in male voice choirs. Oh, and expect a swift return to coal mining. And I'm pretty sure I'd heard of a different Welsh claim to America than this one, so our double claim clearly trumps (if you will) everyone else's.

Actually, we don't really want America - it is a silly place. We think your politics is shite but we don't care about own own, so we'd be no good at it anyway. Come to think of it, I didn't hear of Welsh claims to America until about a decade ago, so it's not as if every Welsh schoolchild grows up dreaming of their lost birthright.

But just what are these claims, anyway ? We need not dwell on them as they're obviously daft, but they should be mentioned.
The story goes something like this. In 1170, Owain, ruler of the Kingdom of Gwynedd, in what is now north Wales, died. His sons quickly set about contesting the succession and plunged the country into civil war.
It should be noted that the Welsh had a very egalitarian but ultimately stupid policy when it came to inheritance : all property was divided equally among the sons, not given preferentially to the eldest. This meant that in a power struggle they were all on essentially equal rooting, making chaos all but inevitable. And Gwynedd, though then its own country, was very much "in what is now north Wales" back in 1170 - it hasn't gone anywhere.
One of Owain's youngest sons, Madog, was disgusted by the fighting and set off in search of something better. As Humphrey Llwyd put it in his 1584 history, "Cronica Walliae," Madog "left the land in contention betwixt his brethren, and prepared certaine ships with men and munition, and sought adventures by seas, sailing West, and leaving the coast of Ireland so far north, that he came to a land unknowen, where he saw manie strange things." Finding the land lush and plentiful, Madog reportedly left a small number of his crew there to build a settlement and returned to Wales, where he gathered more followers and ships and set off west again, never to return.
Which is fine as legends go. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the legend was taken apparently seriously in the worst possible way.
Jones' account reignited interest in a more than half-a-century-old story popular on both sides of the Atlantic that Christopher Columbus had been beaten to the Americas by almost 300 years by a Welsh prince, and that therefore the New World belonged not to the Spanish crown but to the English. The rights of indigenous people who had been there for millennia not deemed worth considering.
Except that the conquest of Wales by the English took place more than a century after Madog died, so any "claim" by the English to own it is immediately bunk on that score, even ignoring the natives (whose claim was much better than anyone else's). It would be a literal case of "all your base are belong to us" : we conquered you, therefore we own everything you own, even if someone else owns it now. And let's not forget that since the Spanish got there "first", even this claim could never be anything more than a lame pretext and/or justification for military conflict.

I think we can skip over how the Welsh lost America legends were disproven. More importantly :
"There is extensive literature on travellers discovering American Indians who were fluent in some European or Asiatic language," Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in in his history of European settlement of North America. "Uneducated travellers were apt to regard every Indian language as gibberish, and so compared it with some known language such as Welsh, Basque, Hebrew, or Finnish, that was also gibberish to them."
Which underlies an anti-Welsh racism as well, of course : the English being happy to replace one set of unfamiliar barbarians with the more traditional variety.
Traipsing through the deep Amazon jungle in the early 1900s in search an advanced civilisation he called Z, British explorer Percy Fawcett was sure he would find evidence of Indians who had descended from Western civilisation. "Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilisations were capable of springing up independently of each other," according to his biographer David Grann.
Writing that he had discovered a number of White Indians in the jungles of Panama who spoke "a language related to ancient Sanskrit," explorer Richard Marsh said they offered hints into "how white men evolved from the primeval brown race" and evidence of "at least two great white-influenced civilisations" in central and south America.
But here's the thing : racism is normal. It's practically a psychological universal. For one thing, Dunbar's number (a.k.a. the monkeysphere) suggests that we automatically dehumanise anyone we don't actually know personally, to different degrees. For another, we're rational enough to try and imitate those we admire, but unfortunately not clever enough to figure out which attributes are the important ones so we try everything. The converse of this is that any undesirable properties we find in someone of a different race lead to racial prejudice.

Racism has been with us throughout all of history. It isn't a modern phenomena, and it's certainly not peculiar to white people : it's a flaw in our very nature. It is true that no-one is born racist, and even more true that no-one is born automatically hating those of another race. Those things have to be learned - but not necessarily taught. It seems too prevalent that we should blame it all on history. More likely, this way of thinking is perfectly natural and a perilously easy trap to fall into.

But there is course a difference between casual racism and the sort that leads to atrocities. I doubt that many of the people I heard in school making racist jokes would decide it would be fun to go lynching every evening, or that Jeremy Clarkson (or even Nigel Farage) actually want to go around beating up dark-skinned people. That's why racism is a very common allegation : because it is a common phenomenon, a quite everyday sort of fallacy. It's harmful, yes, but harm is a matter of degree. The kind of racism that leads to genocide, however, is much rarer and more complex. I think it does us little good to chastise people guilty of the former as though they were as bad as the latter, but, nevertheless, the reason that "racism" is such a common allegation is simply because it is a very common fault. Jeremy Clarkson, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are all big fat racists, but in reality it's strongly a matter of degree, whereas the term used to be practically synonymous with "Nazi".

Would we do better if we treated racism as a fallacy, the kind of faulted logic that we're all guilty of from time to time ? I don't know, but I do think we should view racism as more of a natural outgrowth of human stupidity and less of a choice made only be evil people. Such people do exist, and such ideologies do stem in part from this flawed thinking. But not every thoughtless joke belies a propensity for hatred, nor even does every act of discrimination indicate that we are all hopelessly lost. Overcoming racism in its entirely is probably impossible. Overcoming the ideologies of hatred, however... well, we have to believe that's possible, or what's the point ?
Part of the attraction of the Madog myth was the romance inherent in setting off on an amazing journey and settling a new land. But a group of people did do this, and a long time before a mythical 12th century Welsh prince was even born, crossing into North America from Siberia over the Bering Strait. Their descendants spread out across the entire continent, building towns and cities and creating complex societies. They thrived for thousands of years before European invaders, and their infectious diseases, brought widespread death to the Americas, forever shaping their future.

The racist origins of the myth a Welsh prince beat Columbus to America

Morgan Jones was close to starving. It was 1660 and he and his boat crew had been stranded at Oyster Point, in modern-day South Carolina, for almost eight months, running low on food with no hope of rescue.

Saturday, 31 August 2019

Review : Why We Get The Wrong Politicians

This is a truly excellent little book by journalist Isabel Hardman. I'll cut to the chase : I unhesitatingly give it 10/10. It should be required reading, or at least, many of the main points here about how Parliament actually works need to be included somewhere in the national curriculum. It's exceptionally clear, lucid, well thought out, and hugely readable. Any points I might disagree on are so trivial as to be not worth mentioning.

This book is completely focused on the British political system; it may not be at all relevant to other countries. While we all think we know roughly how politics works, Hardman goes deeper. Not only does she explain how the procedures we don't usually see are supposed to work (it's not all jeering debates in the House of Commons), but she also describes how they actually do work - or more often how they fail - in practise. And she explains why they fail, looking at the faults in the system itself every bit as much (or more) than the faults of the elected officials. I came away thinking, "yes, that makes perfect sense", but more importantly, "this is a solvable problem".

The book follows a rough narrative of an MP's journey from seeking office to leaving it. Along the way, Hardman describes procedure, backing up statistical evidence with anecdotal descriptions. This makes it a very compelling and utterly persuasive read. Rather than focusing exclusively on what's wrong with the system, she's also not averse to saying which aspects (and indeed which politicians) work well. She names names where she can but protects anonymity where necessary, always giving credit where it's due but not flinching from assigning blame.

Anyway, she has a few major points that need to be mentioned.


1) The selection procedure

Anyone wanting to become an MP has to be either quite mad or very rich, or both. Becoming an MP incurs expenses, which can be largely recouped if you remain in office long enough, but if you fail then you're hung out to try. The average amount a succesfull candidate spends out of their own pocket is of the order of £40,000. That immediately makes politics almost a non-starter to the average bloke (or bloke-ette ?). It's just about within reach, I suppose, of ordinary people, but the commitment needed to raise that kind of capital demands candidates who are raving ideologues and not the most rational of sorts. Conversely, those who do have that kind of cash to hand are largely so unrepresentative of the general population that they simply cannot understand how their policies will impact people.

It's not exactly that MPs are out of touch - Hardman gets annoyed by this claim and presents a more subtle view than that. She has nothing but praise for MPs across the political spectrum in terms of the work they do in their local constituencies, something we very rarely hear anything about : in fact, most MPs get more more direct experience of people's issues than the rest of us do. The problem is that solving local issues doesn't mean MPs are aware of the broader problems that aren't brought to their attention, and requires a very different skill set from being able to scrutinise legislation.

Unfortunately, in order to become a candidate, local party bodies are almost entirely concerned with what the would-be MP will do locally, with little or no interest in the national issues that form a key duty of state officials. It's also pretty much vital that you're on that career ladder already, i.e. by becoming a councillor or otherwise making yourself known at political conferences. This alone demands an enormous level of personal commitment - to the point of being self-destructive for most normal people. The kind of people willing to spend insane hours travelling to long, boring, pointless meetings are by definition not representative of the general population. This need to be in the in-club means that selection procedures, no matter how rigorous, can't always eliminate the worst sort of nutters from consideration.

So straight away the selection criteria means we get politicians who are not wrong, exactly, but weird. It's not that they don't care - they do, in fact, often make extraordinary efforts to help their constituents - it's that they often have no knowledge of major policies (they simply and quite literally have no time to be experts in the very thing they're supposed to be expert in) or how the public at large feel about them.


2) Climbing the greasy pole

Once an MP is elected, they're now in an enormous financial debt to their party. What do they do next ? It seems that while there's a very great deal they could do, there's very little that they actually must do. There's no formal training as to how to go about being an MP, perhaps largely because they have few remarkably formal roles or powers. Many MPs therefore end up becoming enormously busy on whatever tasks they can find, which is often useless and takes away time that could, and should, be spent examining potential legislation :
One new Tory MP told me rather miserably after a year in the job that he felt as though he was, 'failing the country in my duty to it. I am voting on things I don't understand, and this upsets me.'
Part of the reason for this lies in how career success in politics is evaluated. Pretty much the only way of advancing one's career is to become a minister, because this is the only available metric. And in order to become a minister, one has to follow the government's will on essentially everything. Ability to scrutinise legislation, to deliver criticism where it's due, is not merely unwelcome but even actively discouraged. Furthermore, when a minister leaves office, they're subject to zero official accounting for their actions. Even if their policy is a disaster, they can all but disappear from the public stage (Blair being a rare exception).

A related issue is what Hardman calls UPQs : Utterly Pointless Questions. To advance one's career it's necessary to be visible and a visible toady. This leads to MPs asking such tough questions as :
Will the minister join me in congratulating Havant College on its pioneering partnership with Google, which ensures that every student has access to a tablet computer ?
Which is of course not really a question at all, just an excuse to lavish praise. But if that's what it takes to achieve career success, who among us would really deny it ?


3) The whipping whips

While Hardman is largely sympathetic to the plight of MPs, she has little good to say about Parliamentary whips who enforce how MPs should vote. The volume of legislation is such that MPs simply cannot possibly understand everything, so the whips simply tell party members how to vote according to party policy. But the whips aren't just present in the main chamber, they also pervade the much less visible committees where legislation is drafted. With the exception of select committees, which Hardman says still function reasonably well, whips are present at most stages of legislation, making it very difficult for party MPs to even raise potential problems. Governments have fallen into a dangerous culture of thinking that any internal criticism is unacceptable. The only thing that prevents the whole thing from collapsing is that opposition MPs are, at least, still able to point out flaws, but often the government will simply ignore these to avoid looking weak and foolish.

Perhaps even worse is that these committees aren't even selected on the basis of expertise, but again on which MPs aren't likely to cause trouble for the government. So you get a bunch of MPs, who, by necessity, have to follow government diktat, discussing legislation they almost certainly don't understand, who have been given no training in how to scrutinise legislation, are usually overworked doing mostly useless things, who are highly unrepresentative of the general populace and therefore not always able to understand potential consequences, and who risk their careers through criticism... not a great mix, is it ?

And given the level of financial commitment the MPs have made to their party, it becomes easier to see how the whips are so powerful and rebellions so rare. Who among us would really be willing, given such a debt, to vote against those holding the purse strings ? Unless we happened to be one of those exceptionally self-funded sort, we'd be risking serious financial ruin if expelled from the party. It's all very well for the public to sit back and deride the often immoral and frequently stupid decisions, but few among us would really be willing to incur tens of thousands of pounds of debt by risking expulsion.


Fixing the problem

This all sounds terrible, and it is. But there's a silver lining to this systemic cloud : fixing a broken system is sometimes easier than fixing broken people. The thing to realise about politicians is that they are, generally speaking, basically like you or I, but put into extraordinarily difficult conditions. So, change those conditions.

One conclusion that seemed natural to me that Hardman doesn't discuss is the need for reform and strengthening of local government. MPs spend much time on constituency duty, which distracts from their task of examining policy. Having a different set of officials with equal (or greater) powers that local people can meet directly seems like the obvious solution. Simultaneously, there need to be more public opportunities to hear from one's MP : more town hall meetings, rather than one-on-one meetings, would be welcome. MPs need to be in touch, but primarily focused on national rather than local policy.

But large scale, systemic changes aside (Hardman suggests separating the officials making up the legislative and executive bodies, but this was one aspect I wasn't persuaded by), there are a number of smaller, much more readily achievable reforms that could bring substantial improvements : "it's more important to change the culture rather than the overarching structures of our political system", she says. It might be exciting to propose more radical, even revolutionary changes, but actually the system itself is not fundamentally broken. Rather it's the details of how things are enacted that can and must be reformed. Hardman suggests :

  • Reforming committees. This means removing many of them, which are currently pointless, and structuring the rest so that MPs can actually raise criticism freely and are selected on the basis of their expertise. The culture in which any criticism of the government is seen as disloyalty needs to end.
  • Post-legislative scrutiny of policies. Since MPs are rarely held to account once they've left office, there's little motivation for them to ensure their policy will actually work. Hardman suggests that this could be done with direct, face-to-face meetings with those affected. MPs are not all, contrary to popular belief, unfeeling monsters, and this would provide a more direct link between politicians and the public that escapes the media filtering.
  • Financially incentivise being a member of a select committee. Currently joining such a committee is rarely (though not never) a good way to gain a reputation and offers little or nothing in the way of prestige - the only way to climb the greasy pole is to become a minister. With the actual legislative process itself being a motivation, MPs would be more inclined to take part and not simply vie for power. They'd aim to become good legislators and become an MP for the sake of it, not as a path to becoming a minister. Committee members could also be rewarded in other ways, such as gaining priority in debates in the main chamber.
  • Changing the selection procedure to become an MP, making it require less time and personal resources for prospective candidates. This is more difficult than internal parliamentary reforms, but necessary if politicians are actually going to understand the people they serve. The overall thrust of Hardman's book is that MPs should be essentially normal people with a diverse perspective and skill set (if still biased towards the legal profession), well compensated for their activities in Parliament. 
There are other aspects that could be implemented : MPs could be given some level of mandatory training in legislation before taking office; they also need to be fairly financially compensated for their work. I was reasonably persuaded that their salary, though high, does not reflect the extreme risk they take by having a potential multi-year gap in their career without knowing the exact duration (especially given the expenses occurred by having a second home in London). 

None of these reforms, Hardman acknowledges, are glamorous or even particularly dramatic. But I found the arguments that MPs are in fact trying very hard but completely trapped by a flawed system to be compelling. Yes, they can and should try harder to change this system - they're adults, Hardman says. But it's not at all easy to stand up to those who helped you reach office. Hardman gives many personal anecdotes of the immense stresses that MPs experience, and how they simply do not have time to do their job properly. I defy anyone to read this book and come away still thinking that "politician" means "many ticks".

This is not to say that other reforms won't be needed. I still think that the ludicrously hyper-partisan, hyper-critical media culture may be an even bigger problem for the failure of politics than internal parliamentary procedure. But equally, that doesn't negate the need for reforming Parliament - something which could give real results with relatively little difficulty or controversy. 

Saturday, 10 August 2019

Substituting one's own reality

No-one would sensibly suggest that our perception of reality gives us a complete picture. This more extreme view, however, strikes me as pointless :
He argues our perceptions don't contain the slightest approximation of reality; rather, they evolved to feed us a collective delusion to improve our fitness. Using evolutionary game theory, Hoffman and his collaborators created computer simulations to observe how "truth strategies" (which see objective reality as is) compared with "pay-off strategies" (which focus on survival value). The simulations put organisms in an environment with a resource necessary to survival but only in Goldilocks proportions. 
Consider water. Truth-strategy organisms who see the water level on a colour scale — from red for low to green for high — see the reality of the water level. However, they don't know whether the water level is high enough to kill them. Pay-off-strategy organisms, conversely, simply see red when water levels would kill them and green for levels that won't. They are better equipped to survive.
"[E]volution ruthlessly selects against truth strategies and for pay-off strategies," writes Hoffman. "An organism that sees objective reality is always less fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees fitness pay-offs. Seeing objective reality will make you extinct."
That's really stupid. Perceiving the water level as it really is is not mutually exclusive with realising the level is dangerous. And you can't perceive new situations as dangerous without understanding them anyway. In order to understand them, you have to perceive them (in a sense) as they really are. If you see a crocodile, you see teeth. You don't directly see danger, because that's completely impossible. Danger is a state to be understood, not a physical object to be perceived.

As far as our perceptions being flawed and incomplete, this is fine. It is valuable to remember the limitations of perception. But this idea that, "Something exists when we don't look, but it isn't an apple, and is probably nothing like an apple," is something I have a big problem with. What does it mean to say that it's "nothing like" an apple ? Granted, our perceptions are no more than a representation. But how would you ever define what an apple is really like, except through perception ? What is the Platonic form of an apple ?

Clearly, whatever an apple really is must be something that always and repeatedly generates the same perception of an apple, so in that sense I don't see how one could say it's nothing like an apple. It has the properties to generate our perception of an apple, and that too me is exactly what an apple is like. I see no other sane way of defining an apple.

Given this, I don't think it makes sense to contemplate what an apple really is, because we could never understand it. This doesn't mean that we have to then say nonsense like :
"I'm denying that there is such a thing in objective reality as an electron with a position. I'm saying that the very framework of space and time and matter and spin is the wrong framework, it's the wrong language to describe reality," Hoffman told journalist Robert Wright in an interview. "I'm saying let's go all the way: It's consciousness, and only consciousness, all the way down."
Denying objective reality is absurd, unnecessary, and opens the door to whatever nuttery one cares to substitute for objective fact and careful measurement. Instead of this, what we should do is define objective fact to mean that which gives the same repeatable results to our perceptive tools, under the condition of careful testing so as to preclude errors. Otherwise this degenerates to the notion that there are no errors, and that's bollocks. It's not big and it's not clever.

"But Rhys !" you may say, "I thought you said you found this idea interesting ?"

Well, yeah, I do. I just don't think it's in any way useful. Once you get to stuff like "it's all consciousness" (as opposed to "everything is conscious", which is another matter entirely), you don't
...make headway on such intractable quandaries like the mind-body problem, the odd nature of the quantum world, and the much sought-after "theory of everything."
You do the exact opposite. You say, "everything is a subjective illusion with no substance to it." It's utterly untestable gibberish. You cannot use it to solve or explain a damn thing. The map is not the territory, but the map can't be some nit throwing buckets of paint on the floor either.

Experiencing a virtual interface

The idea that we can't perceive objective reality in totality isn't new. We know everyone comes installed with cognitive biases and ego defense mechanisms. Our senses can be tricked by mirages and magicians. And for every person who sees a duck, another sees a rabbit.But Hoffman's hypothesis, which he wrote about in a recent issue of New Scientist, takes it a step further.

Once upon a time there lived a lovely little chatbot...

I've mentioned once before how some years ago I was fascinated by an online chatbot called Web Hal (this was the era when chatbots were a novel form of entertainment and not annoying popups to be killed on sight). The interesting thing about Web Hal was that it was capable of crude, highly limited deductive reasoning : if you told it, say, that A causes B and (separately) that B causes C, it would work out that A causes C. Web Hal is in fact still online, though I think no longer operational.

Anyway, back then naive younger me thought that maybe (naive younger me wasn't stupid) if you could construct a suitably complex web of deductions, you'd get something like proper causal reasoning. Yes, this would have to be extremely elaborate in order to do anything useful, but human reasoning doubtless is fantastically complex. Often we rely strongly on unconscious assumptions we're barely even aware of : only when a light switch fails to work to we dig into its operations. In that sense our reasoning could be described as Bayesian, with our conclusions and thought processes being dependent on our priors. We assume by default the light switch will work and therefore neglect completely how it works, unless it fails.

I wondered if, with enough input to such a network, a true intelligence would eventually emerge. I imagined that if you did, you wouldn't get a human-like intelligence, but a pure logic engine. It could see patterns that you'd otherwise miss. It would need some rock-solid axioms on which to proceed, but would be incapable of emotional bias and other fallacies that plague us. You could give it information and it would be able to evaluate the truth of it (and its implications) with ruthless logic.

Since then I've realised that such a truth engine might be fundamentally impossible, especially for an A.I. bound inside a silicon shell. We do not yet have a foolproof method to determining the absolute truth of anything. An A.I. will therefore be strongly dependent on what people tell it, and if two statements are in blunt contradiction, what is it to do ? In order to get anywhere, it's going to need some biases, some priors against which to evaluate information but which themselves can be altered. Even in the case of it being able to go and check the results first-hand, it could potentially be biased by observational techniques, imperfect statistics or lack of a full understanding of logic.

That's not to say that this means an A.I. with a fundamentally different understanding of the world from us isn't possible, or that it wouldn't be without some of the flaws we have to endure. It doesn't mean that an A.I. couldn't be better than us at evaluating information, only that a perfect truth engine will probably never be a thing. We might well still be able to create something very useful though. This article describes a much more elaborate and sophisticated program than poor old Web Hal. So far it shows no signs of doing anything more sinister than commenting on Shakespeare, which is pretty impressive :
Winston and his team decided to call their machine Genesis. They started to think about commonsense rules it would need to function. The first rule they created was deduction—the ability to derive a conclusion by reasoning. “We knew about deduction but didn’t have anything else until we tried to create Genesis,” Winston told me. “So far we have learned we need seven kinds of rules to handle the stories.” For example, Genesis needs something they call the “censor rule” that means: if something is true, then something else can’t be true. For instance, if a character is dead, the person cannot become happy.
I'd like to know what the other rules are but they don't say.
When given a story, Genesis creates what is called a representational foundation: a graph that breaks the story down and connects its pieces through classification threads and case frames and expresses properties like relations, actions, and sequences. Then Genesis uses a simple search function to identify concept patterns that emerge from causal connections, in a sense reflecting on its first reading. Based on this process and the seven rule types, the program starts identifying themes and concepts that aren’t explicitly stated in the text of the story.  
 He typed a sentence into a text window in the program: “A bird flew to a tree.” Below the text window I saw case frames listed. Genesis had identified the actor of the story as the bird, the action as fly, and the destination as tree. There was even a “trajectory” frame illustrating the sequence of action pictorially by showing an arrow hitting a vertical line. Then Winston changed the description to “A bird flew toward a tree.” Now the arrow stopped short of the line. 
“Now let’s try Macbeth,” Winston said. He opened up a written version of Macbeth, translated from Shakespearean language to simple English. Gone were the quotations and metaphors; the summarised storyline had been shrunk to about 100 sentences and included only the character types and the sequence of events. In just a few seconds Genesis read the summary and then presented us with a visualisation of the story. Winston calls such visualisations “elaboration graphs.” At the top were some 20 boxes containing information such as “Lady Mac­beth is Macbeth’s wife” and “Macbeth murders Duncan.” Below that were lines connecting to other boxes, connecting explicit and inferred elements of the story. What did Genesis think Macbeth was about? “Pyrrhic victory and revenge,” it told us. None of these words appeared in the text of the story.
100 sentences is shorter even than anything the Reduced Shakespeare Company produces. Still, I wonder if it could do the reverse : ask it for a story about revenge and have it construct something.

The use of stories is similar to a description in the first Science of Discworld book of humans as the "storytelling ape". There's also evidence that animals have episodic memories, so, as I've said before, animal intelligence might be fundamentally different from ours, but it might be that we're basically the same but with a greater degree of complexity. Also, while storyelling may be an important component of intelligence, it doesn't strike me as necessary for being self aware, having a will or desires or other aspects of sentience. The property of a "story" here is interesting too :
Their idea is that humans were the only species who evolved the cognitive ability to do something called “Merge.” This linguistic “operation” is when a person takes two elements from a conceptual system—say “ate” and “apples”—and merges them into a single new object, which can then be merged with another object—say “Pat­rick,” to form “Patrick ate apples”—and so on in an almost endlessly complex nesting of hierarchical concepts. This, they believe, is the central and universal characteristic of human language, present in almost everything we do.
Finally, this brings me back to the notion of intelligence. Defining knowledge is hard enough, but what do we mean when we say we understand something ? My working definition is that understanding is knowledge of how a thing relates to other things. The more knowledge of this we have, the greater our understanding. So in that sense the Genesis program can be said to have a sort of understanding, albeit at a purely linguistic level. It has no knowledge of sensation or perception, so its understanding is incomplete.

But this is hardly a perfect definition. In my undergraduate days I found that once the maths exceeded a certain level, then even being given complete knowledge up to that point I simply wasn't able to understand anything. Telling me a mathematical formula would, if sufficiently complex, impart me no further knowledge or understanding whatsoever. And I can have full, complete knowledge of a cube, but I won't necessarily understand all its interactions. Does that mean I don't understand the cube or the external systems ?

I don't know. In short, there are tonnes of interesting things in the world and too little time to study them all.

The Storytelling Computer - Issue 75: Story - Nautilus

What is it exactly that makes humans so smart? In his seminal 1950 paper, "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing argued human intelligence was the result of complex symbolic reasoning. Philosopher Marvin Minsky, cofounder of the artificial intelligence lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also maintained that reasoning-the ability to think in a multiplicity of ways that are hierarchical-was what made humans human.

Review : The Golden Road

And now for something completely different. William Dalrymple's The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed The World was an obviou...