Review : Ancient Worlds

I have to say that the blurb for for Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds gave me very "meh" feelings and I only picked it up because I was in a budget bookshop. I tend to gravitate towards highly focused, narrative histories, so this epic world(ish) history of connections between different civilisations seemed like something that wouldn't normally be my thing.

Much to my delight, the only thing Scott writes badly is the description of his own writing. Yes, there's some commentary on hitherto under-appreciated connections between East and West, but that's not really what the book is about. Mainly it's about how different ancient civilizations responded to different external and internal pressures, and the resulting changes this produced in their systems of government and societies. This is firmly in the realm of my other favourite sort of history : interpretative history, where the author attempts to extract general trends from specific cases. And since understanding how society works could hardly be more important at the present time, I give this a very solid 8/10 overall.

(I would note, though, that as a standard history this is pretty rubbish. The focus is on how and why things happened with only a bare minimum of the more fundamental what. Start with (e.g.) Tom Holland before going for this one.)

The book is organised in three parts. The first looks largely at the different internal political systems in ancient societies (mainly Greece, Rome, and China), essentially man's relation to man. The second looks more at the relations between those different societies. The third looks at man's relation to the divine and the role religion played in social organisation. All three are well done, but I found the first much the most interesting as it had the most refreshing perspective, stripped of modern ideologies of the inestimable virtues of democracy without denigrating it in the slightest. The second section is more of a standard narrative history, well-told but not very original (though I learned a lot about the Seleucids, who are too often overlooked), while the third is somewhat in between the two. 

I'll limit myself here to how Scott views the different forms of government, which I found to be much the most engaging aspect. It's often said that democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others, but is that really true ?

The origin of ancient democracy is sometimes mythologised as a single revolutionary event. Scott argues that it wasn't like this at all, but a gradual development. Athens did eventually have its famous direct democracy, but only after the Persian Wars, not during the invasion themselves*. Its route to democracy had arguably begun much earlier, as the lawmaker Solon sought to give each sector of society a "fair" distribution of power - fair only meaning more equal than previously, not actually equal. Rome began down a similar path, even sending delegations to Athens to learn about its system of government. Both such societies emerged from the shackles of tyranny, but neither immediately went for direct people power.

* Indeed, the word "democracy" wasn't even in use at the time. Ancient interpretations of what it actually meant varied from the extreme of Athenian mob rule to simply electing an outright despot. Modern interpretations are similarly complex.

Why did the two later diverge ? Circumstance. Scott is very, very good at stressing how both wider, underlying systematic context and the role of specific events and individual actions can be influential. In this case, the naval battle of Salamis. Infantry battles were limited to the rich elites, but naval battles required the common man. Having played such a vital stake in the survival of the city, ordinary Athenian citizens weren't about to be put back in their place. But neither did the elites particular want to even try : by elevating everyone to a quasi-equal status, the proto-democracy had already enabled the city to field far larger armies than it possibly could under a monarchy or tyranny. That the next step of total equality led to a powerful navy as well was a major advantage to everyone, not a hindrance. Democracy, then, in Scott's view was born more by happenstance and accident than any grand ideological plan, born more from warfare than of welfare.

And especially war ! This is wonderfully counter-intuitive to the modern era, but in the ancient system, Scott stresses quite heavily how much more advantageous a more equal system was to the army. Always careful to keep his interpretations separate from the raw facts, he takes an evolutionary perspective : similar pressures only give rise to similar outcomes in similar situations. Rome, in contrast to Athens, didn't have such a pivotal naval moment as Salamis. It had no key event where sheer people power would result in a full democratic process - its major battles were all infantry-based. Consequently it continued with its middling road of a Republic, neither excessisively tyrannical to the masses but not giving them all that much clout either. Its system, in some ways, was much closer to the modern system of representative government than the direct democracy of Athens.

(It would have been nice to have some comments on the modern perception that war leads to authoritarianism rather than greater freedom. Obviously the particular societies are markedly different, but it's so counter-intutitive to invoke war as leading to freedom that some effort to explain this would have been very welcome.)

China, on the other hand, didn't face the same external threat as Greece but it did have internal warfare on an epic scale. It had similarities and differences to both Greece and Rome. The continual need for infantry-based defence kept power in the hands of the elites, while the enormous logistical demands encouraged the development of an efficient administrative state. Indeed, who the ruler was ultimately didn't matter very much, with most of the decisions taken by the civil service. This produced not a true monarchy or dictatorship, but a hereditary oligarchy, a cast system that ensured a smooth transfer of power. This was very different to the somewhat socially mobile society of Rome and in stark contrast to the totally socially mobile world of Athens, in which every citizen was expected to do a wide variety of jobs and participate in the government at some point in their lives. 

The Athenian system was far more pleasant for the commoners than Rome's - even Plato conceded that democracies are nice places to live while they last. His concern was more that they didn't last, and Scott vindicates this. Of all the dozens of different democracies of time, none lasted more than a few generations. Rome, by contrast, went on to rule the world, albeit becoming an autocratic empire in the processes. Even given the powerful role of chance, this seems like more than a coincidence.

Having this broad trend highlighted is very informative. If you focus more on the minutiae, the overwhelming feeling I get from reading pretty much any part of Roman history was just how perpetually unstable it was. But even its Republican phase endured substantially longer than any ancient democratic system, as though its very instability was a source of strength, perhaps more a measure of flexibility and adaptability than genuine chaos. Not that it was perfect. Scott notes the weakness of the short-term, dual consularship system in which military glory was seen as the pinnacle of achievement, citing the miserable failures against Hannibal as evidence of this (Carthage itself seems to have a similar system to Rome but suffered from much greater corruption). Then as now, short-termism was a problem.

Ironically the solution was sometimes to double down. Yet while the Republic could and did invoke dictators to rule in emergencies, it did so only rarely. Of course we all know how this eventually ended, but what's more remarkable is just how long this lasted - it was very rarely used, and when it was, there was little enough threat (until the end, by which point the Republic was on its last legs anyway) of the dictator failing to relinquish power. Scott describes the Roman's idealised example of Cincinnatus, who was summoned from his farm to lead the army against some invading tribes, and then two weeks later returned to his farm without a fuss. The powers of a dictator were clearly limited to addressing a specific task, not used for constitutional reform. I suppose this was partly necessary in a society where the Commander In Chief was personally taking to the battlefield and waving a sword around, rather than consulting with generals and pushing little model troops around with a big stick over a nice cup of tea.

It's not just all about warfare though - far from it. Scott lucidly sets out just how strange the highly individualistic philosophy of Socrates, now widely held as a paragon of virtue, would have seemed to societies in which selfless duty to the state was seen as the highest goal. Ironically, self-improvement requires selfishness. There was no need for Cincinnatus to have the slightest bit of concern for his own moral well-being so long as he did his duty, and in the even more egalitarian society of Athens, the "unexamined life is not worth living" philosophy of Socrates would have been genuinely difficult for most to comprehend. Athens was all about the group; for someone to focus on the individual so much would have been weird indeed. 

This goes some way to explaining why Socrates (and similarly Confucius) was so unpopular - he went fully against the ideals of the state. Socrates, in a sense, really did corrupt the youth against Athenian ideals. Likewise Plato's fixation in his Republic with a single individual doing a single job is revealed as a direct counter to the democratic system in which individuals were expected and required to do many jobs. And whereas Republican Rome viewed different social strata as having different but always important functions (analogising the state to a human body), such a perspective made no sense in fully democratic Athens. In the Roman views, this free-for-all system was like having a ship without a captain : ultimately doomed.

Democracy at the time was not something other societies particularly yearned after even by their intellectual elites - it just didn't work all that well. The Roman Republic was viewed by its supporters as having the ideal mix of elements : monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy could all be found within it (similarly Plato speculated that an ideal system would be a blend of methods rather than one or another). Of course this didn't last forever, and it's a shame Scott doesn't have more to say about the stresses that transformed the Republic to the Empire (Tom Holland's Rubicon has a great narrative, but Scott is more skilled at drawing out the general trends and reasons; Gibbon viewed the empire's system of appointing rulers as being meritocratic, on the occasions when it functioned properly).

You'll forgive me for skipping over the rest of the book. Scott has equally insightful commentary on the development of ancient religions, again citing similar pressures that led to similar ideas going virial. I found his view of Constantine, much the most difficult of the major Roman emperors to understand, as a ruthless but genuinely tolerant ruler to be very refreshing. Likewise he notes the impact of religion on how societies were governed : how diversity of beliefs was sometimes a strength but sometimes a polarising weakness, how different rulers sought to use religion to their own secular purposes, and how innately peaceful religions were sometimes (but not always) corrupted to warfare. And I've skipped entirely his narrative of the Seleucid Empire and India, all of which is well worth reading.

But it's the system of government that most interested me. The overall impression I had is that we've no right at all to treat our modern systems as stable. When we take the long view of history, most modern democracies haven't even lasted as long as the ancient experiments. Yet the systems themselves and the pressures they face are also different, and exactly how it will play out is anyone's guess. Democracy may indeed be the least awful form of government, but whether or not they're stable, or innately doomed to regress to authoritarianism... that remains to be seen.

Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West

My book, "Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West" was published by Hutchinson (UK and Commonwealth) on 1st July 2016 in hardback and in January 2017 in paperback - order your copy here!

A path to prosperity

As y'all know, one of my hobbies is thinking about how to make the world a better place. To that end I've ventured a different decision-making system to the current political shitstorm in which everyone hurls their own faeces at each other until something sticks, and I think there's much merit in it. A better decision-making process is by definition a good thing. It's important to realise that the fact we know of better, more cooperative approaches to problem-solving does not automatically mean we know what the specific solutions actually are. The point is that we combine expertise and diversity in a better way than we do presently, but, not being experts ourselves, by definition we won't be able to propose the actual solutions.

To my mind, fixing the decision-making system is of paramount importance because it's the root of the problems. If we keep insisting that the existing processes are fine, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that they are not, we'll just keep shouting at each other to no avail, getting ever more angry and ineffectual. We have to fix how we decide things, or we'll end up deciding nothing - or worse, oscillating between diametrically-opposed positions with no kind of sensible compromise. At best, we'll lurch forward in an unpleasantly dynamic dystopia.

All that being true, this feels a little bit of a cheap cop-out that avoids suggesting any practical answers. It's surely helpful to have a broad end goal (and underlying principles) in mind, if only to illuminate the problems we're trying to solve. So what would my personal utopia look like ? While I'm not ready to venture a fully-fledged design of the Grand Duchy of Rhysyland, as it would obviously be known, let's see if we can make a start.

Let's do this by combining a few different strands of thought here from various social media sources. First, Joe Carter has a very nice post outlining the development of the species and how we evolved to live in conditions different from those we've created for ourselves. Setting aside (valuable) criticisms of evolutionary psychology, I don't think anyone could doubt this basic premise. It's difficult to say exactly what our distant ancestors thought and felt, but that we evolved in radically different conditions than those we now "enjoy" (in a very loose sense, because it's 2020), and therefore different selection pressures were at work, is - I think - undeniable. At the end he concludes with three questions :

• What would you say we need to do differently on a personal and community scale?
• Do you consider yourself a contributor to what will move us forward as a species?
• What can we do better as individuals and as groups to help us get our “sea legs” to successfully navigate the necessities of current developmental place as a species?

Likewise, Nila Jones asks the question (in a private post) :

Imagine it’s 15 years from now. We have made it through the current time, and things are ok. What does our world look like? What does our society look like? What did we do to help get there from here?

One answer comes in this charming Existential Comics, in which an ideal society is posited to be, "pretty much the same, except we tax the rich like 6% more !" I have to admit I have some sympathies for this, I hope not without justification. Materially at least the Western world is still, largely, thriving. Basic sanitation and disease control - the current pandemic notwithstanding - are taken for granted, along with clean, warm shelter, and access to information undreamt of by previous generations. The world is hardly perfect, but it's a catastrophic error to assume it has no value whatsoever.

At the same time, whatever Stephen Pinker might say, a lot of people are clearly very unhappy with their lot in life despite the lowliest commoner now being materially far better off than any of their ancestors. But I suspect measurements run into several problems here : people are not all that good at evaluating their own happiness; they can be justifiably unhappy on behalf of other people's ill treatment if not their own (and worry for the future does not necessarily alleviate present happiness); and you can't really know what someone's experience is really like unless you live it - quantitative measurements are misleading. Material improvements can disguise deep and crippling problems.

Elsewhere, Edward Morbius asks similar questions :

What are the Big Problems? Optionally: who is (or isn’t) successfully addressing them. Individuals, organizations, companies, governments, other. How and/or why not?

He also notes that the answer, "everyone should be cleverer !"(i.e. the problem is just human stupidity) simply does not work. You can't have everyone being equally successful at applying critical thinking to every single area because, he says :

That specifically Does. Not. Scale. It fails two ways:

1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue.
2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them).

There is, I’ll posit, a broad gulf between “verify everything” and “be prepared to question any belief”.

So, we want a better world. How do we get there, accepting that despair is a luxury we cannot afford and that we are not an innately irredeemably stupid species ?

During the Brexit crisis I developed a habit of asking myself, "what is the best, most reasonable way politicians could proceed right now, accepting the poor decisions they've made prior to this point and that the more ideal solutions are simply not possible ?". Let's apply this on a larger scale and sketch a possible, optimistic timeline (not a prediction !) of the next couple of decades. In this way we can trace an outline of the major problems (both resulting from individual poeople and their organisational systems), the decisions that will need to be taken to overcome them, and even a few thoughts as to what it is we as individuals need to do to ensure they're enacted. I'd welcome alternative visions here, especially as I have a strong Anglo-American bias.

(Also, this exercise is itself a partial answer to what we can do as individuals : we can articulate not just what it is we think is wrong with the world, but what improvements we'd like to see. There's no point starting a revolution unless you have some idea of where you want to end up.)

c2020-2025

• America decisively elects Joe Biden as President. Contrary to the more dire predictions, any efforts on Trump's part to contest the result are short-lived and any protests are localised and utterly ineffectual.  (Trump is then found guilty of crimes against common sense and is sent to a stockade, where small children delight in pelting him with tomatoes and constantly jeer at him that he's "not as good as Obama". On release, he inexplicably falls into a pit of plague-infected vipers and dies horribly.)

This relies almost entirely on voters not being brain dead. There's not much we as individuals can do at this stage, except continue campaigning if you're into that sort of thing.

• A better way to avoiding the worst effects of COVID-19 is found that doesn't require such drastic economic hits. Politicians start better supporting alternative approaches to business, e.g. relocation to the suburbs to better support working from home, more home delivery services, a better outreach campaign that actually succeeds in the public almost entirely following the rules, until eventually a vaccine is found and the pandemic declines to a manageable, if still unpleasant, level. The situation isn't good, but it becomes bearable.

Here the responsible parties are largely the political leaders and their scientific advisors. The only thing we as individuals can do is contact them to tell them what we need as well as what they're doing wrong. It's not enough for us to just complain, we need to present alternatives.

• The UK reaches a trade deal with the EU, initially held together mainly by sheer hope despite the prospect of the internal market bill allowing it to break international law. The EU grumbles and puts up with this until Boris Johnson continues sliding in popularity and, seeing a resurgent Labour as a very serious threat, is replaced by a more traditional Tory. Much of the mad Brexiteer cabinet is replaced with people with some degree of competence, significantly helping with crisis management. A less adversarial approach to dealing with the EU is adopted, aligning the UK closer to its neighbouring counties.  (Dominic Cummings is removed from government with much rejoicing and is forever the butt of "Should Have Gone To Specsavers" jokes. Subsequently he dies in an bizarre jousting accident with an optician in Barnard Castle.)

This one is dependent largely on happenstance and individual leaders. It's a plausible occurrence but there's not much any of us can do to make it more probable. 

• Green economic deals become prevalent, generating massive investment in renewable energy sources and creating new jobs. Investment in fossil fuels dwindles to negligible levels. Small-scale testing of geoengineering projects is intensified as a supplementary approach to dealing with climate change, recognising that we need to clean up the mess we've already made as well as halting the ongoing damage.

Another systemic, governmental problem. We can and should try and limit our energy usage but the pandemic has decisively shown that this doesn't get us very far. More important by far is to switch to better energy sources - if you have the luxury of choosing where your energy comes from, do so. Raising awareness of geoengineering schemes (in which I include solutions such as planting trees and high intensity grazing, along with direct carbon capture by more artificial means) is important, but ultimately the solution is technological and economic, to make different energy generation techniques affordable. We have to not merely make fossil fuels unprofitable, perhaps through taxation, but their replacements actually generate profit themselves.

• The success of the BLM movement makes it politically untenable for governments to avoid addressing structural inequalities, both in terms of race and poverty. Societies slowly begin to accept that most suffering is the fault of the oppressors and not the oppressed.

Depends on the ability of protestors to persuade people that what they're campaigning for is in everyone's best interests. Everyone can join in this one - the hard part is that it means talking to people we don't much like talking to. Ideally, we need a much wider movement based around a single unifying principle, as well as (or better yet in addition to) specific causes.

• America begins reform of its system of government, forbidding politicians from appointing judges, removing the electoral college system, etc. Equivalent (but not equal) reforms are needed in Britain but won't happen during this period because the Tories will still be in charge.  

Without this, the system is barely functional. Tackling the root cause of unfairness needs to be a matter of urgency and not something you tinker with when you have the time. I daresay many other countries also need reform, but I don't know enough about them to comment.

c2025-2030

• Widespread distribution of a vaccine brings the pandemic to an effective end, except for local outbreaks here and there. Society returns to something which is not all that different from the old normal but with some significant differences : working from home is now not unusual, working hours are generally slightly shorter but with more of a blur between home and work life. Daily commuting is a thing of the past for most, as is the idea of a regular 9-5 shift, with flexibility of working hours being far greater.

Unlike many of the others, something like this feels like a natural, inevitable progression, and relies only weakly on individuals requesting it. As businesses realise that there's absolutely no need for a 9-5 slog, and that they don't need to buy or maintain expensive office buildings, their use will fade. This won't, however, be uniform by any means.

• Joe Biden does not run for a second term but is replaced by a more progressive candidate. Labour gain power in a coalition of the left in the UK. The UK aligns itself so closely with the EU that it might as well not have left, and talk of eventually rejoining begins to sound less like fantasy. A conscious effort is made towards a more proportional, cooperative political system with stronger, more decentralised system of local government. This is in part assisted by reduced working hours that allow people the time needed to become more active citizens. The system is entirely state funded and donations (of any kind) to political parties become criminalised.

I doubt very much any serious long-term political reforms are going to happen under the prevailing establishments. Any system which says, "Donald Trump should be elected", rather than, say, "Donald Trump should be shat on", is fundamentally broken. Likewise there's something amiss when the UK keeps electing people to office who claim expenses on cleaning their moat. Sweeping electoral reform is needed, not least a system which allows the formation of a less idiotic, more unified left that actually wants to win power and not just shout hopelessly from the sidelines. The difficult part is persuading those currently at an advantage that a new system would be fairer and advantageous to them as well as the opposition.

• A movement against giant corporations gains strength, recognising that monopoly-like control is inherently flawed and anti-capitalist. With a very few exceptions, the largest companies begin to be broken up. Much greater restrictions are placed on corporation size. The number of new billionaires falls sharply. Most essential services are nationalised, though private sector alternatives are allowed and even encouraged for the wealthy.

Excessive wealth inequality begets an absurd concentration of power and influence, which is unfortunately inherently difficult to overcome. But not impossible. There needs to be sufficient demand from the bottom for government to enact the necessary regulations. This means raising awareness of just how much better life would be if money were more equally distributed, rather than going into endless corporate profits built on the backs of underpaid underlings, and how fewer companies means a lack of the competitive aspect of capitalism which is otherwise one of its strengths. As individuals, we can switch our services to smaller companies (and use open-source alternatives wherever possible) and spread the word of better alternatives, but ultimately reducing monopolies of power requires legislation. Sheer resources are just too effective and tempting a means of crushing the opposition.

• More radical economic and social policies (e.g. some form of basic income, wealth taxes, maximum wage, free housing for the homeless) begin to be trialled on large scales, acknowledging that economic inequality does not reflect meritocracy but luck, with simple resources being the major factor that keeps people in their economic conditions. 

Some of these are already in progress on very limited scales. There's already a substantial movement for UBI, but what would really vitalise it would be demonstrations that it's affordable (and potentially requiring a smaller state bureaucracy with far less cheating and corruption) . The left needs to win the ideological argument that subsidising individuals can lead to sustainable self-sufficiency rather than perpetual laziness.

• Fossil fuels begin a steep decline. Electric cars and other road vehicles begin to come of age, with range anxiety a thing of the past. However, fossil fuels are by no means gone, and there's heavy investment in various direct carbon capture technologies and other geoengineering schemes.

As previously, this is mainly a technological-driven change.

• Media empires begin to collapse. The major networks still exist, but individual outlets tend to be self-owned and not part of larger corporations. Much greater restrictions are placed on political opinion pieces. All outlets are required to represent all parts of the political spectrum and are forbidden from outright supporting any party or candidate.

A purely free-market driven approach to the media is, very possibly, one of the worst ideas in the history of civilisation. We're paying people our hard-earned money to sell us lies that make us angry, afraid, and stupid. This. Must. End. We don't necessarily have to regulate what's said, but we do need to prevent the growth of uniform media monopolies. Without a diversity of opinion, we don't have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense of the term - just a bunch of nutters spouting drivel.

c2030-2040

It's harder to speculate what we can actually do to contribute to events this far away, but I shall at least outline what I'd like to see happen.

• Having set ourselves on the road to success, the challenge becomes maintenance. This requires radical constitutional reform that prevents the bullshit politics of the previous decades. The Great Dullening will see politics become ever-more boring, to the point where if anyone says of a politician, "but he's do dull !", passers-by will slap them and scream, "REMEMBER 2020, YOU FUCKWIT !". Most of the practical measures here will be consolidating the changes of the previous era, generating and supporting movements against populism and polarisation.

• Philosophy courses are introduced in all levels of schools. While not everyone can or should try and verify everything at all times, it's considered essential to know how to spot the basic flaws in an argument. People are taught, somehow, to genuinely care if people are lying to them or not. They get very angry if politicians are caught doing telling fibs and are taught not to get involved with things they don't understand. The media include far more international coverage so that different countries can learn from each other.

• Population levels begin an almost unconscious decline. Supplemented with UBI (or equivalent) and much greater automation, living standards are maintained and even improved.

• Rewilding schemes begin to reclaim areas of land formerly used for farming. Lab-grown foods begin to replace the needs for huge tracts of land for cattle, thus precipitating local extinctions of cows and chickens. Eco-tourism becomes the new thing. Consumerism becomes seen as a sign of self-indulgent vanity. Superyachts are repossessed and converted into the foundations of new coral reefs.

• The entire military industrial complex collapses for some reason and is replaced with a series of garden centres and second-hand charity bookshops. Russia falls into the sea and North Korea gives up. Everyone lives happily ever after. End of history.

Super Spreaders Are Super Statistical

The usefulness of statistical parameters is hugely context-dependent. Even very simple quantities like the mean and standard deviation don't always give meaningful information. The latter is particularly vulnerable : if the distribution is indeed close to Gaussian then it's invaluable, but if it isn't, then it can be woefully misleading. But even the simple mean or median isn't immune - you can have data sets which simply don't have "typical" values that could be described by a single, simple parameter. Of course, this doesn't mean statistics is useless (far from it !), only that actually understanding what you're measuring is not so straightforward.

In the context of the pandemic, this article from The Atlantic does the best job I've yet seen of explaining why the R number is misleading. I've seen references to the "k" value before but they weren't so well-explained and I didn't really get it until now. That said, without any fear of hypocrisy I have to say that this article is far, far too long. The important bits can be reduced to a few paragraphs.

The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic — or our preventive practices.

A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it. This highly skewed, imbalanced distribution means that an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries. 

It makes some degree of intuitive sense that if the spread is dominated by the super spreaders, then it will be unpredictable and chaotic and not follow any neat expectations. But who are these super spreaders ? Are they a particular demographic, some group who are naturally more infectious, or is it more a function of behaviour and/or environment ? According to this it seems to be mainly environmental, but not all factors are yet accounted for.

In study after study, we see that super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated, indoor environments where many people congregate over time—weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, and such—especially when there is loud talking or singing without masks... Cevik identifies “prolonged contact, poor ventilation, [a] highly infectious person, [and] crowding” as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can also occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air and accumulate, especially if ventilation is poor. 

So does the R number even really mean anything, or is it so strongly dependent on environment and other factors that we can't actually say if someone typically spreads it to N other people ? From the above it sounds like the latter is closer to reality. While this largely invalidates all those nice graphical explanations about exponential growth, it clearly doesn't mean the virus is less dangerous than thought - the figures speak for themselves on that front. What it might mean is that it's potentially more controllable. And it has interesting consequences for contact tracing : we should concentrate on going backwards, finding the source of the infections rather than who might become infected next.

The reason for backward tracing’s importance is similar to the friendship paradox: your friends are, on average, going to have more friends than you. Friendships are not distributed equally; some people have a lot of friends, and your friend circle is more likely to include those social butterflies, because how could it not? They friended you and others. And those social butterflies will drive up the average number of friends that your friends have compared with you, a regular person. (Of course, this will not hold for the social butterflies themselves, but overdispersion means that there are much fewer of them.)

Or in short you're more likely to know someone popular than be popular yourself. This is important :

...if we can use retrospective contact tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, we are generally going to find a lot more cases compared with forward-tracing contacts of the infected patient, which will merely identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because most transmission chains die out on their own... “backward tracing increases this maximum number of traceable individuals by a factor of 2-3, as index cases are more likely to come from clusters than a case is to generate a cluster.”

Presumably this would also help identify if super spreaders are some particular demographic, people with naturally high infectivity, or driven by environment. If we knew that, we could pre-emptively tackle the worst spreading areas before they even begin.

This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic

Updated at 1:17 p.m. ET on October 1, 2020 There's something strange about this coronavirus pandemic. Even after months of extensive research by the global scientific community, many questions remain open. Why, for instance, was there such an enormous death toll in northern Italy, but not the rest of the country?

Life Under Lockdown (VIII) ?

Not much blogging lately on account of a PUPPY. If you haven't read that one yet, you might want to read it after this one to balance out the cynicism.

He who is last shall be first ! And also vice-versa.

To recap, the Czech Republic did an outstanding job of stomping on the coronavirus when it first started. Fifty cases per day ? Total nationwide lockdown. Cases peaked at about 300 per day, but not for long, and steadily dropped. They reached a sustained low of about 50 per day, which lasted a full month or more. A re-opening plan was devised to gradually ease restrictions, which was similarly well-implemented, at first.

Then things hit a snag. The government was found to have implemented certain measures under the wrong act, so a court ruled it had to immediately lift them. It could have re-implemented them under a different act, but instead it said, "meh, let's just bump up the re-opening schedule by two weeks and purely coincidentally avoid having to pay people extra money". To be fair, things were going extremely well at that point. How much lower cases would have fallen with an extra two weeks we'll never know.

At first, they looked to have gotten away with it. Cases didn't do much at all. But gradually - so gradually as to be quite imperceptible at first - they started to climb. Even then they were kept well in check. There was no spike, no explosion, except for a couple of cases here and then (one in a mine and one in a nightclub*). Hospitalisation figures remained steady. I don't really understand how the figures remained so low for so long as they did, given that restrictions were completely over. But they did.

* These two things aren't normally connected, unless there's a craft beer pub in a mine somewhere. MineCraft. It sells itself.

Not any more. Now we're in a far worse state than we ever were before. We had a peak of 300 per day in the first wave - with 4,400 cases yesterday, we're well exceeding ten times that. Growth hasn't been as rapid as in the first phase, but it's been unrelenting, and deaths have gone from a few per day to 20-30 per day.

The contrast to the swift, decisive action at the start of the pandemic could not be greater. For weeks we've been getting nothing but the absolute minimum of incremental changes. Wear masks on all forms of public transport. Close the bars at midnight. Oh, fine, 10pm if you must. Wear masks in public indoor spaces, except for an exception list a mile long. Don't have more than a hundred people at a funeral. That was about it.

Only when cases reached 2,000 per day did we even begin seeing the possibility of localised lockdowns. A state of national emergency has been declared and more radical restrictions are promised on Friday, which there'd damn well better be because mucking about with wedding invitation lists is doing precisely bugger all.

The problem is that this already far too late. We know from the first wave that it's going to take at least a month for any of this to have an effect, so we're looking at tens of thousands of cases at least before things start to improve again. We've already gone from one of the success stories of Europe to being one of the worst failures.

Not so long ago the Tories accused the government's advisors of scaremongering over a possible 50,000 cases per day, which already no longer looks outlandish. Whether the Czech Republic is likely to follow the UK's trajectory and see tens of thousands dead remains to be seen, but it appears to be a worrying possibility as long as we keep making these incredibly petty, incremental adjustments. It doesn't necessarily have to involve a full-scale national lockdown, but something equivalently drastic is needed : a hugely ramped-up contact tracing scheme, more intervention to allow businesses to operate under unusual restrictions, greater outreach and enforcement of the rules, etc.

Originally I planned to say that even the UK is doing better than this : at least they're trying local lockdowns and acknowledging the problem. At least they tried to have covid marshals, even if they had a shite funding scheme and no real powers. But there the failures might just be different, not better or worse. As revealed in PMQs, some areas under lockdown have seen a tenfold rise in cases, which Johnson claimed - with frightening tautology - was due to... the spread of virus. FFS. What did he think it was due to ? Magical eagles messing with the figures ?

Anecdotally, people here are following the rules but absolutely no more than that. They wear masks where they have to. The bars close when they're supposed to. They even use disinfectant in the supermarkets, sometimes. They pay no attention to social distancing whatsoever. They don't mind crowded spaces or make the slightest effort to avoid each other. They're going to bars and restaurants as usual. At least, though, the rules themselves are clear and don't seem to have the crazy complexity of those in the UK.

For my part, I'm doing just fine. I even enjoyed my staycation very much, though it wasn't the visit back home I would have preferred and which seemed perfectly viable just a few weeks ago. I'm enjoying a David Attenborough VR series on insects very much and continuing to hammer the barbarians in Rome 2 Total War, as well as binge watching the hell out of Netflix. But I get why this particular lifestyle isn't what everyone wants, and I would no more want to stop people going mud wrestling or opera singing than I would want to be forced to go mud wrestling or opera singing. The problem is that it seems to be a straight choice between stopping social activities or allowing a catastrophe, and I don't get why people are reluctant to accept that. Who wants to go out if it means risking people's lives ? A hell of a lot of people, it turns out.

There was a Czech news report this morning that a few "doctors" (including a homeopathist, which tells you a lot) have said, "stop scaring people", much as Tories in Britain said the same thing or Trump did in America. But it is scary. It should be scary.... if people don't take proper precautions. Johnson keeps banging on about common sense, but the problem is this isn't a matter of common sense at all. This is a matter of highly uncertain science, both of the virology and behaviour. Common sense, for instance, would suggest that people would know that wearing a mask and not shaking hands are highly prudent things during a pandemic, let alone that they probably shouldn't share drinks in nightclubs. Yet people don't follow this, so it either isn't all that common or something else is at work.

I suggest that it's not "common sense" but intuition. Common sense implies some quasi-Bayesian reasoning and at least a small degree of actual thought. Intuition relies on heuristic shortcuts developed over a lifetime of experience, which works very well under normal circumstances but fails abysmally if anything changes. Or at most, it's a little knowledge being a dangerous thing : "sure I can go clubbing, the number of cases is still so small there's very little chance I'll be infected". 

And in some ways this kind of reasoning would even be right. The risk to the individual remains low. But the risk of a major spreading event is high. Common sense and intuition just isn't designed to handle the prospect of unlikely events having massively far-reaching consequences, because such things are far from common. The science here is hardly perfect, but it's orders of magnitude better than letting people do whatever they think is sensible - because they don't have any good grounds to decide what actually is sensible. And after all, half of the population are stupider than the average.

I guess I don't really have much of a point to this other than, "things suck". Sorry about that. I plan to stay inside as much as humanly possible. I just hope that governments realise that we need much more dramatic action than limiting bloody wedding attendance, before it's too late.

A worked example in victim blaming

It's nice to know the West doesn't have a monopoly on being arseholes, isn't it ? No, it isn't. But in case you need a reminder, here's a piece in which the author - the so-called "Czech Defender of Rights" - seems to think that logical fallacies are something you should go out of way to cram as many in per sentence as possible.  

Whenever there are violent demonstrations in society, like now in the US or recently in France, the state must use violence against these perpetrators.

For starters, define "violence". Does property damage count as violence ? Why "must" the response always be more violence ?  A violent demonstration is not an open rebellion, and there is a necessary use for violence. See the suffragette movement, for example. You can't keep oppressing people and not expect them to fight back, that's just plain silly.

We see in the US that the police there was reluctant to act against looters and arsonists for fear that if they acted against them, they would have been accused of being racist. That is racism in reverse.

And that is ignoring that black people are treated with extreme violence in comparison with white criminals.

From the very beginning [of the refugee crisis] it was wrong that countries did not distinguish between economic migrants and people who escaped wars.

Yes ! Quite so. Let's stop calling refugees "migrants", right ? I'm sure that's what you're getting at.

If thirty-year-old men who should wage a war against evil in their country instead run away, that is wrong.

Umm, wait, no, that's not what...

 We can see that these are no refugees but simply people who want to have a better life.

Hang on Stan, you're doing it wron-

We cannot accept that an immigrant should come to this country and is given a flat and 20,000 euros.

 Christ on a bike. You're... accusing people who walk halfway across a continent of being lazy freeloaders ? What's wrong with you ? Fuck off Stan.

The Czechs are not racist or xenophobic. 

Yes, they are. Just as the Brits and Americans and French and Japanese and New Zealanders are all racist. Racism is everywhere, it's a matter of degree. To say that no-one in an entire country is xenophobic is completely and utterly barking mad.

They simply have had their experiences. 

Yes, their experiences of being racist to people they don't like.

The so called "excluded areas" in our country are not the result of the fact that their inhabitants are poor. Poor people do not destroy their flats, they do not throw rubbish out of their windows. 

Whut ?

There exist certain categories of people whom the Czechs refuse to live with. I read in the papers that a ministr visited an "excluded locality" and was shocked by what he saw. A minister is shocked by what many people see every day?

Whut ?

Social housing is not a problem of poverty. 

Whut ? Look, Stan, you're just not making any sense.

It is important to help poor people but then there are people who destroy the housing stock. The Roma must accept responsibility for their own behaviour, for their approach to work.

Right, so you're not racist, you just think it's okay to infer that the Roma are house-trashing lazy slobs. Okay then.

The Roma complain that they are refused jobs because they are Roma. The entrepreneurs are saying: "I will not employ you because you are a Roma and I know that a Roma will not come to work on Wednesday."

Did you know, there's a special word for making premature judgements about an individual based on their race ? Hmm, I wonder what it could be...

If Roma representatives guaranteed that this would not be happening, and if they persuaded their own people not to behave like this, the situation would be different. But that is not happening.

You want someone to defend their ethnic group based on the behaviour of individuals, and you're not a racist, eh ?

The majority society is being accused of being racist towards the Roma, but this is not true. The Roma have the same rights and duties as everyone else and their behaviour is not caused by poverty. Poor people do not throw rubbish out of the window and do not destroy their flats.

Let me see if I have this straight... you're saying that society isn't being racist towards the Roma when it behaves in an incredibly racist way towards them ? Righty-hoo then. Your defence appears to be, "it's not racism if it's true".

The office of the defender of rights under my leadership will get rid of activism. We will not be doing nonsensical research, we will not be sending activists anywhere. We will be reacting to people's problems about which they write to us.

Whut ?

I have had much contact with society. As a lawyer, defender of people who rent their flats, I have been to all the excluded localities, I have represented the Roma all over the Czech Republic, I went to various courts and defended Roma renters. No one should say I am against the Roma, that insults me. 

You... literally just called the Roma a bunch of lazy property-wrecking slobs, and you're the one feeling insulted ? That level of self-delusion is truly impressive.

Sigh.

Czech defender of rights: "The Roma don't work and are not a minority" | 13. 9. 2020 | Britské listy

13. 9. 2020 Whenever there are violent demonstrations in society, like now in the US or recently in France, the state must use violence against these perpetrators. If demonstrators start using violence, they must realise that the state will use violence against them.

If you can beat them, keep beating them ?

This is an interesting observation. Despite the left rarely and barely having any political clout in British politics, the right continuously acts as though the left have already won - or at least, as though their political position were far less secure than all the evidence suggests it actually is.

In the United Kingdom, the spectre of a Marxist takeover is also invoked across the rightwing spectrum, including the attorney general. Conservative commentators like to claim that the left in Britain “controls almost every institution”. What exactly is going on here?

“Control” cannot refer to the classical liberal notion of representative government: winning elections and forming governments... when it comes to political representation, the left in Britain has been in opposition for the best part of the last 100 years. Even in the few cases in which it succeeded in winning elections, it did so while relinquishing traditional leftwing commitments, promoting an image of itself as competent and pragmatic, neither right nor left.

The usual state of affairs in Britain seems to be to view the right as unlikable but competent and necessary while the left is well-meaning but ineffectual and misguided. Case in point : the Liberal Democrats. This isn't an absolute by any means, but it's a useful generalisation to keep in mind.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci coined the term “cultural hegemony”, by which he meant the capacity to exercise influence in society through educational institutions, the arts or the media. When the right claims that the “left is in control”, it is pulling a Gramscian move: they know the left has no political or economic power, but claim that it nonetheless pervades society and culture.

But to some degree I think it does; nothing cannot come of nothing. If I can make a totally unjustified anecdotal observation, most mainstream fiction does seem to have a left-liberal bias. Because how could you make a drama in which exclusion and intolerance were the order of the day ? You can't, because they never solve anything. When was the last time you saw a fictional fat cat trying to do what's right against the evil machinations of their downtrodden and poverty-stricken underlings ? You never did, because it would make for terrible, nonsensical television.

On the other hand you do see plenty of stories about fighting oppression, because absolutely everyone can get behind fighting oppression - be that a local bully, and evil corporation, or an authoritarian government. Perhaps Firefly comes to mind as a chilling vision of a left-wing dystopia or government "meddling" gone amok, but in general, everyone wants to be free both to act as they wish and free from other people stopping them from doing this. Everyone can agree the fictional Alliance in Firefly goes too far. Everyone can agree that some non-total level of freedom is a good thing. Everyone can agree that evil alien invaders are something you should fight against. Those black-and-white cases are easy, and largely transcend political boundaries. Nobody wants total government control. Nobody wants ungoverned anarchy. Well, anarchists do, but they don't count.

So perhaps I'm wrong in claiming that most fiction has a left-wing bias. Perhaps it just has a bias towards a universal, politically independent morality. When one of the evil aliens turns out to be good, who could stand up and say, "they should kill him anyway" ? Probably no-one. Nobody ever knowingly defends unfairness.

If that's so, then what would a genuinely left or right-leaning work of fiction actually look like ? We can perhaps glimpse it in the way that right-wing celebrities often play parts that the left would say espouse their own values. To the left, the orcs are the forces of intolerance; to the right, they're the EU or Muslims or something. To the left, the Rebel Alliance are an oppressed minority fighting against fascism; to the right, they're standing up for traditional (Old) Republican values and fighting against Communist tyranny. That's the gist of it, anyway. Doesn't have to be taken too literally or 100% accurate.

But if fiction can easily be interpreted to suit the viewer's inclinations, is there any charge at all in a left-liberal fiction bias ? Maybe. Diversity is an inherently leftward position. The right does value fairness, but it doesn't go out of its way to help the unfairly treated. The right, correctly or not, says that you should achieve success by yourself and not rely on anyone else to get you there. So diversity of race, age, gender etc. are all indicators of a left-leaning bias. When a fictional character argues for inclusivity of cultures, that is a left bias. Who would ever write a popular mainstream fiction of separate but equal and defend it as desirable ?

Despite the blog's title I do at least try to keep each post at least internally self-consistent. Here I'm on far less steady ground. I started with the view that yes of course most fiction is inherently left-leaning, but now I'm far less sure of that. Okay, there might be some inherent preference to it, but much less than I might have insisted upon at the start. Eye of the beholder, and all that - just as I'd ascribe values and behaviour to the right that they do not at least profess to hold. The right, surely, do not identify themselves as intolerant, unfair, ruthless and uncaring - that's my bias assigning them the values I see them upholding. Of course, the values they truly believe and uphold are another matter; there's not usually all that much wrong with the ones they claim to cherish.

(You'll have to excuse me for feeling intolerant today. There are honourable, sensible people on the political right, but it feels increasingly to me that the majority are hypocritical nutters. It's not their values - for the most part - that I have a problem with but their implementation. Sorry about that.)

This may explain how so much apparently left-leaning fiction can persist in a conservative society : everyone sees only what they want to see. No-one wants to see themselves as the villain. Fiction is inherently open to interpretation, so unless a moral message is absolutely explicit, it's rarely problematic to those who disagree.

But this means that the right's attempts to depict the left as an ungracious winner seem even stranger. Why bother to attack someone with much less (but not zero) political or cultural clout than yourself ?

For the right, those who question the legacy of the empire or making efforts to decolonise university curriculums have created a situation in which “the very underpinnings of western liberal democracies are being subverted and destroyed”. Instead of asking why so many of the songs we sing, roads we walk down and statues we pass contain traces of an injustice whose legacy continues to shape the present, Conservative MPs are urged to be “the vanguard” of the opposition to the left’s “remorseless cancel culture”.

It would be a formidable achievement for a left that has neither adequate political organisation (in both Britain and the US, the leading progressive parties, in opposition, are run by their centre or right factions) nor any kind of significant control over the economy to be culturally hegemonic. 

The fantasy of leftwing hegemony in rightwing countries is not about principles, but tactics... Cultural Marxists explained how narratives developed to ensure that those who would have reason to protest against a failing system ended up being co-opted, and how progressive struggles lost ground just when they seemed to have gained momentum. They emphasised that it was not enough to focus on material oppression; one must also understand forms of injustice based on discourse, symbols and culture, and learn from the conflicts they provoke.

When representative political institutions fail, and when the economic system faces its worst crisis since the Great Depression, the only way to secure compliance is to demonise leftwing alternatives.

Just as you should never trust a skinny chef, so no-one fears a poor thief. Thus it behooves the mainstream right to exaggerate the influence of the left and underplay their own success in going against a fearful opponent*. This may also explain why Americans can seem (to Europeans) incredibly insecure in their apparent own world domination. The apparent successes are at least partly illusory and depend more on belief than any more solid foundation. There is, in the right, perhaps a subconscious fear of the fragility of their own genuine achievements, that, for example, economic success has been achieved at the enormous cost of environmental sustainability; a guilt that their actions do not actually reach the high ethical standards they claim to value. After all, if they really thought things were going as well as they claim, they wouldn't need to shout about it so much. A case of "methinks they doth protest too much" writ large.

* A sort of weird variation on the straw man fallacy, in which the opponent is easy to disparage but in this case is depicted as having a whole array of dangerous weaponry they do not, in fact, have. I propose we call it the "Scarecrow" fallacy after the villain in Batman of the same name.

Why does the right keep pretending the left runs Britain? | Lea Ypi

ost of my students would struggle to name any "cultural Marxists". The work of social theorists such as Theodor Adorno, pioneer of the so-called cultural turn in post-war Marxist studies, is barely taught in humanities and social science departments these days.

Dune Version 2

Since Christopher Nolan has gone down the path of Being Hugely Annoying, can the other movie I was looking forward to this year bring some much-needed cinematic delight ? Maybe. I have a big soft spot for the original David Lynch version, very much a broken masterpiece as it is.

If you haven't see the film, the special effects on the restored blu-ray version aren't quite as bad as the YouTube trailer makes them appear. The sandworms are even passable, though a lot of the spaceship shots now look... odd.

The original, despite its many, many flaws, has a lot going for it. It has style. It has more style than you can shake a stick it. From a very creepy Kyle McLachlan to a furious Patrick Stewart charging into battle with a pug (yes, really), or the the baroque stylings of the ships (albeit sometimes on too low a budget) or, best of all, the feckin' awesome soundtrack, to my mind it captures the spirit of the book as well as anyone could ever hope.

"Dun, dun, dun-dun.... Dun, dun, dun-dun...." I mean, that's all the music needs to do, really. The whole thing reeks of mysticism. And it's deliciously dark, if sometimes very silly : e.g. the Sardukar troops wearing actual used body bags. It's not a crowd pleaser, and it damn well shouldn't be.

A friend of my once told me he thought the original has "nothing much" to do with the book. Well, I re-read the book earlier this year, and he's wrong. Most of the movie is a direct scene-by-scene (often word for word) extract of the book. In some ways - dammit - I will even say it makes slight improvements. The dark pantomiminess of the Harkonnens is more evident in the movie than the novel. The exclusion of Count Fenring (an imperial servant who has a long but essentially pointless sequence in the book), Harah (Paul's rather annoying first wife), the invented Guild Navigator sequence (presumably inspired by later novels) and the simplification of Paul and Jessica's escape from the Harkonnens are all well done. As are the frequent voice-overs of the character's thoughts, with so much of the book literally being about what people are thinking rather than what's happening.

One of the major problems of the movie is that it essentially shows all the important set pieces but lacks a consistent linkage to hold them all together. If you haven't read the book, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. It's too weird and unusual a universe to drop on an uninformed viewer and expect them to figure it out for themselves : the novel is complicated. It has subtext and history that's inevitably difficult to capture in a movie; lordly, it even comes with a damn dictionary.

And it does also muck around unnecessarily with the story : instead of developing better soldiers through inspiring fanatical loyalty, the Atreides get the easier option of Bene Gesserit-inspired weaponry; the ending of Paul making it rain is okay but nowhere near as satisfying as the more political version of the novel. Sometimes it's silly and cheap. It's not everyone's cup of tea, no doubt about that. I get why it's unpopular, but to me all of this is washed away by its dark flood of mystical baroque stylings.

"Dun, dun, dun-dun...." sorry, I'll stop now.

What about the latest offering from the director of Blade Runner 2049, which I liked very much ?

It's got potential. It's clearly a very different beast. It definitely doesn't have budget problems or look as though anyone will ever describe it as "cheap" or "silly". It's also appears faithful to the book, even if using "crusade" might be politically more acceptable today than "jihad", which frankly is a bit of a shame. Does it have mysticism ? Ye-es, but it's hard to tell exactly how well that will pan out. Clearly it's no so heavy-handed as the David Lynch film, which might well be an advantage. The music ? Well it's a trailer, and modern trailers have a habit of using different music from the film for some reason, so we probably shouldn't judge it there. The main characters also appear closer in age to the those in the novel (at the start, the novel's Paul even behaves quite childishly - he matures intellectually throughout the book, rather than being a fully-fledged Duke-in-waiting or potential messiah from the word go). And it's got wormsign the like of which even God has never seen, so there's that.

There's not much more than can be inferred from a trailer, so I won't. I shall cling to optimism with the voraciousness of the desperate, but this is 2020 so I expect the ending of the movie will feature a giant pink sandworm playing Scrabble or something. We'll see.

Review : Tenet

I should probably start by saying that I find Christopher Nolan extremely hit-and-miss as a director. I liked The Prestige, I loved Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception, but The Dark Knight Rises* was a broken masterpiece, Interstellar was a pile of well-rendered crap and Dunkirk was ultimately pointless.

* Sod off Robin, I want more Anne Hathaway in a leather catsuit.

Unfortunately I have to say that Tenet is in the latter category. In some ways it reminds me quite a lot of Ad Astra, which is going to sound bizarre so let me explain. Minor spoilers ahead.

First, the audio. The only Nolan film where I previously thought the audio was off was Interstellar, but then only occasionally and not for anything crucial. Contrary to other web denizens, I had exactly zero problems understanding Bane's voice in The Dark Knight Rises. It was hugely charismatic and basically perfect in every way. Here it is again, in case you've forgotten :

But for Tenet I have to agree with the Guardian :

There is a wonderful exchange in Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Tenet, between Robert Pattinson and John David Washington. “Hngmmhmmh,” says Pattinson. “Mmghh nmmhhmmmm nghhh,” replies Washington. Marvellous.

It’s hard to imagine that Nolan is unaware of the criticism. Price suspects the director wants to make the audience work harder to understand the dialogue; he thinks Nolan believes this will make the film a more immersive, engaging experience. But, Price says, “I think he is the only one in the world who believes that.”

The audio bothered me from the word go. With the opening scenes set in Ukraine, I thought I was just listening to Ukrainian (being in a Czech cinema, all the subtitles were in Czech). It took some considerable time before I could be certain they'd switched to English. Pretty soon I began wondering if they'd done any audio tests at all, because this kept going throughout the entire movie and never let up. I imagined myself sat in a sound test trying to write down what the actors were saying and pausing it every few seconds to say, "nope, sorry, didn't get a word of that. Let's try that bit again, Chris."

Probably I missed a good 20% of the dialogue. I got the gist of what was going on, but missed so many details that a lot of scenes simply didn't make any sense. And the rest of the time it was such a struggle to hear what was being said that I found it annoying and boring, not engaging.

It's not just the dialogue either : I'm gonna go full grumpy old man here, but dammit, the whole audio felt too loud. Sometimes I even suspected it would be easier to hear what was being said if they just turned it down a notch. At other times I felt that the constant hail of gunshots and explosions was just irritating, not exciting. I don't know if I'd quite say the audio was distorted, but it was close.

But it's the dialogue in the film which is more important. Since the plot is innately confusing, the audience needs information. Nolan did this masterfully in Inception, delivering a plot which could have been confusing as heck in such a way that it made perfect sense. Here he did the opposite. The plot is cleverly palindromic, but delivered in such a way as to be far more confusing than necessary. So not knowing why characters are doing certain things - or even what they're trying to do - isn't so much cutting down to the bone as it is into the bone so deeply that the film's leg falls off. It's a bit like having a film about the Spanish Armada but being no clue as to where the ships are going or what they're going to do when they get there.

And the movie does this in other ways too. It's got a plot, but nothing you could call a story. It's a sequence of set pieces with even less than the bare minimum of required linking explanatory scenes to hold them together. Now, that in itself isn't too bad; kudos for trying something different. But without crystal clear dialogue, trying to figure the damn thing out is tedious and annoying.

Here's where the comparison to Ad Astra comes in. The first half of the movie I did actually enjoy quite a lot. The action sequences are quite fun - the bit with the plane is something I've never seen before - and the plot and tone of the movie are at least self-consistent. Did I understand everything ? No, but I didn't feel I needed to. The on-screen experience stood for itself.

After that things got steadily worse, until by the end of the movie I just wanted the thing to be over.

The basic plot is that some people are trying to stop some other people in the future from destroying the world by reversing time. Midway through, our chief protagonists are "inverted", meaning they move backwards through time so we see quite a lot of the previous sequences in reverse. This is clever and well done. In the first half there's a distinct mystery element, and though it's hugely derivative (the temporal cold war is lifted straight out of Star Trek Enterprise; meeting people in reverse is the same Doctor Who / River Song plot; everything going backwards is taken straight from a Red Dwarf episode) it's also well done. It's a straightforward serious action sci-fi flick, no doubt about it.

After that, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. The world-destroying plotline is clearly epic, but it's delivered in an impressively humdrum way that gets ever-more cliched as the movie goes on. The "here it is in reverse" trick is played too often, the characters are so generic as to be utterly unengaging, the villain's reasoning for destroying the world far too obvious and boring. The rest of the characters are similarly dull at best - their motivations and emotions either unclear or cliched and two-dimensional. There's no tension, no sense of threat, no reason to care very much about anything that happens. 

Even the action sequences are, uniquely for a Nolan film, dull. Okay, Chris, you've done them full scale, but they're just not that impressive. The big car chase sequence doesn't hold a candle to the one in The Matrix Reloaded and the final end battle looks like it was taken from Call of Duty. It's nothing we haven't seen a million times before, with a hugely overused but underexploited time-travel gimmick thrown in for no reason. You could literally take the time travel out of the movie and tell the same basic story without any loss. In short, the movie misses its own point and doesn't quite know what sort of tale it wants to be.

They say it's one to see on the big screen, but I disagree. There's nothing spectacular enough here to benefit much from being on a big screen; the action sequences are too understated and underdeveloped. It's like the movie can't quite get over its own perceived novelty and is convinced audiences will be equally enthralled by its clever but useless gimmick.

In fact I thought quite often that this would be a better suited to a good ten-episode TV series. It needed a lot more time to develop the characters and their motivation, and just to explain just what the hell was happening. As it stands, it's a series of "this happened and then this happened and then there was an explosion and a really slow car chase and then this dude got an army from somewhere and someone died." The premise is clever, the execution was not. So tiring was it trying to follow what was going on that I completely zoned out during several key scenes (at the start, didn't even realise the whole audience had been gassed, and I don't even remember the final scene at all).

Overall then, I'm not impressed. I'd give the first half of the movie a solid 7/10, but falling to maybe 2/10 by the end, and 4/10 for the whole thing. I might change my mind if I watch it again on the small screen with subtitles, but we'll see.

U-turn if you want to, but only under certain conditions

Back when I was ranting about designing a better political system, I promised a more general look at when it's good to be wrong. Any useful system has to be able to self-correct when it makes mistakes, or it's doomed to failure.

The current political climate of so many u-turns that we've certainly gone more than 360 degrees by now seems like a good opportunity to start to flesh this out a bit more. U-turns are traditionally politically undesirable, whereas in science changing your mind is also known as "thinking". Or at least, it often appears that way. Maybe in practise it's not always as neat as that. As the BBC note :

YouGov polls indicate more people viewed U-turns as a good thing (49%) - rather than a bad one (23%) - during the pandemic. Even before the coronavirus crisis, though, YouGov's polling suggests more people saw policy changes as good than bad. 

Chris Curtis, political research manager at YouGov, said: "In most cases U-turns by the government don't end up moving the polls. "If anything, YouGov data shows that people seem to see them as a positive sign that the government are willing to listen and change their mind if people complain or situations change."

(Without going into details about the poll, it's worth remembering that the public vote on the government as a whole, not individual policies - and the collective effect can be different from the sum of the parts. Hence the poll may well be misleading, which would explain why Labour are now on level pegging with the Tories.)

In response the scientist in me wants to shout, "hooray, the public understand that learning is a good thing !". On the other hand the political activist in me wants to fall into despair, wailing, "don't they understand that these people are dangerous authoritarian clowns ?". I strongly suspect that I'm both right.

To understand this, let's ask a question : what would the ideal u-turn be ? I suppose it would be if a decision was made in true accordance with the evidence, then reversed when new evidence showed the exact opposite. You couldn't really blame anyone for doing that. Politically, you'd also have to prepare people ahead of time, warning them about possible, uncertain policy changes. You'd have everyone prepared so that the change could be implemented as smoothly and as swiftly as possible. And your switch would be from one course of action that was bearable (neither harmful nor helpful) to one that was actually beneficial.

The extreme opposite would be a combination of first following the evidence for a beneficial result, then switching to an actively harmful policy in spite of the evidence, while continuously insisting ahead of time that you wouldn't change course and so springing it on everyone at the last minute. And a persistent climate of uncertainty is damaging in itself : people lose faith in the government's ability to do the right thing or ensure that it will help them when it decides to change tack. More directly, an inability to plan ahead causes obvious problems at all levels.

From this we may conclude that the important aspects of a u-turn are :

• How the change corresponds to the changing evidence
• Whether the change is positive or negative in terms of its effects
• How well you prepare people for the change ahead of time.

The current barrage of u-turns is full of aspects of all of these, good and bad. A current list can be found here, though unfortunately the once-proud Independent is now so rife with adverts that the text is barely legiglibe. Let me reduce this list to its basics :

1. Right to remain in the UK for foreign NHS staff, initially not allowing this for anyone except doctors and nurses but then expanding it to all care workers
2. Removing the NHS £400 surcharge for non-EU migrants after insisting they would have to pay
3. Allowing MPs to vote remotely after insisting they would have to appear in person
4. Giving free school meals throughout the holidays after saying the scheme would end
5. Declaring that the UK would have a "world beating" contract tracing app and then scrapping it altogether
6. The whole exam results fiasco, in which the government insisted on using a wealth-biased algorithm to compute results despite knowing this didn't work, and then switching to teacher assessment instead
7. Giving a short extension on an eviction ban shortly before it was due to end
8. Continuously changing advice on masks

Which I think is by no means a complete list, but it'll do. I'm not going to go through all of them anyway.

For the most part, the course changes do at least seem to have been for the better, so in that sense the public are right to approve of them. But rarely (if ever) have they been implemented in a sensible way. Worst of all these by far was the initial strategy of seeking herd immunity and then switching to total lockdown. This did go from bad to good, but it did not follow the evidence - the government appeared to have listened to a minor and bizarre sect and not the wider scientific community. It wasn't some obscure and esoteric piece of virology : it was blazing obvious that the mortality rate would be far too high for the herd immunity strategy to be endurable. Any warning of the change of strategy anyone had ahead of time came only from watching other countries. The switch was so fast that it cannot possibly have been due to following the evidence, which was there from the very beginning.

Basically this particular u-turn was a bit like walking towards a hail of machine-gun fire and then deciding, after having received a nasty nick on the shoulder, to run as fast as possible in the other direction. Yes, they did the right thing, but they should have been aware of that from the very start. That they took so long to realise this is a damning indictment of government incompetence, not a sign that they were responding to changing evidence.

A generally more positive example is that of masks. Again the switch was from bad to good, but this time, while the evidence certainly did shift only very slowly, the policy shift was still too slow. The country seemed to have real difficulty grasping the idea that masks are protecting everyone around the wearer, not the wearer themselves, while other countries not so very far away embraced this wholeheartedly. I mean, it's common sense : if you're being asked to cover your cough, then wearing a mask can only help. Fair enough that there was (and continues to be) some uncertainty on this one, especially currently with school mask policy, but it could have been implemented in a clearer, more decisive way.

While most of the changes were all but inevitable, what was a matter of pure choice was political insistence that they wouldn't happen. Treat NHS staff like dirt because of some trivial associated costs ? Changing course was a good thing; insisting that this wouldn't happen is what's problematic. Likewise, there was no need at all to insist on the high, superlative-laden rhetoric about the contact tracing app. The failure of the app is not the fault of ministers, but making promises they couldn't keep was absolutely and entirely their fault. Yes, they're now being slightly nicer to the foreign staff in the NHS, but only because their starting position was about as bad as possible; no, Boris Johnson didn't personally write the code for the tracing app, but there was no need to make exaggerated claims about its efficacy. Similarly for the exam algorithm : admitting it doesn't work is fine, but you should have been able to test this and spot problems well before using it in anger.

In short, when you start off by saying shitty things about your foreign workers that you never needed to say, or by ignoring obvious scientific evidence, or by throwing out undeliverable promises and unsubstantiated figures (a practise this government continues with gusto), then doing a u-turn doesn't much absolve your incompetence. Sure, it's way better than sticking to your guns and continuing to be an utter twat, but it doesn't mean you're listening. It doesn't mean you're learning. It means you're held hostage to events and your own stupidity. It means you'll make all the same mistakes next time around. U-turns are bad when a more competent administration would not find them necessary because they got things right from the start.

(As a side-note, I'll also point out that this is particularly true in the current case where the government has a thumping majority. In principle it could carry on regardless and outvote everyone else. That it doesn't means that it's clearly aware of its own stupidity, or at least unpopularity.)

This has gone in a more political direction than I intended, so what does this have to do with science ? How come science doesn't have these same problems with changing its mind ?

In the past I've suggested that in part it's because scientists don't have to take nearly so much flak from the media. And it's true that politicians get raked over the coals for literally everything they say, at least by someone, while scientists are treated very differently. But, while perpetual criticism is definitely a problem, this comparison to science is too simplistic.

In fact, science as a whole doesn't actually do that many u-turns. Rather, the emergent consensus arises through changing probabilities on a whole array of theories. That is, there are usually a multitude of different ways to explain any phenomenon, and the evidence weights each differently. As the evidence changes, different explanations change in plausibility, only on very rare occasions going from outright rejected to completely accepted (or vice-versa). Far more often, things just become more or less likely. Science has discoveries and incompleteness more than it does naked contradictions.

This is clearly quite different to a political u-turn, in which someone has to stand up and say, "I was wrong about that" and take the heat for it (or more often try to deflect the heat with a shield forged from purest bullshit). In politics the change is specific, away from something previously endorsed as beneficial to one previously denounced as unworkable or harmful. Science rarely has the direct equivalent, which would be to declare something to be impossible and then pronounce it as certain. It just keeps assessing probabilities, which is not the same thing.

And the emergent nature of the consensus is different from an individual having to confront a policy change. While individual scientists do make decisions and consciously change their opinion, such that any given moment one may find a plethora of contradictory views on a topic in a rapidly churning sea of information, the collective effort is slow, methodical, and careful. It's this emergent nature of the consensus which most distinguishes scientific findings from political judgements. Watch an individual scientist over time, or better yet pick a series of individuals all at once, and what you'll get is not so different from a bunch of squabbling good-for-nothing politicians. For politicians, on the other hand, individuals are far more important, as it's often at that level - not at the consensus level - that arbitrary decisions have to be made.

Nobody has to do that in science - or at least, not in the usual sort-of scientific discovery process. Nobody gets to say, "this is true now". Since no one individual is usually responsible for a major breakthrough, it's vanishingly rare that the media need to single them out for bad behaviour or silly mistakes - simply because no individual was responsible for the emergent viewpoint. Sure, they have changing views on their own particular little corner of reality, but usually these are so small that they're only important as part of the collective whole.

And scientists have only opinions and beliefs. They don't have authority or set policy. They determine the facts and theories on which politicians have to act, but they don't have to take those decisions themselves. They can and do advise on a course of action, but not actually make the decision. It'd be a bit weird to pour scorn on someone for changing their own mind, which is not the case when it comes to that person taking action that impacts others. Science is a form of exploration, and consequently expects and desires change, knowing ahead of time that it will learn from its mistakes... whereas politics is expected to set stable policy that everyone can live by. Both the purpose and standards of the two systems have some marked differences.

So there we have it : a set of criteria on how to judge if a political u-turn indicates competence or ineptitude, and some possible reasons why this isn't an issue for science. Whether this actually helps in developing a better political system I leave to a future post.

Can't see the trees for the search engine forest

Fed up with Google ? Would you like a search engine that's not only trying not to be evil, but actually do good instead ? Perhaps Ecosia's worth checking out.

Founded by Christian in 2009, Ecosia makes its money in the same way as Google - from advertising revenues. It earns cash every time someone clicks on one of the adverts that appears above and beside its search results. Ecosia then donates 80% of the profits it makes from this to tree-planting charities. To date it has funded more than 105 million new trees, from Indonesia to Brazil, and Kenya to Haiti. As obviously not everyone clicks on the adverts, the company estimates that, on average, it takes 45 searches to raise the 0.22 euro (20p; 26 US cents) cost of planting of one tree.

And unlike the billionaire founders of Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - he promises to never buy a super yacht. "While they have big yachts I have an inflatable dinghy that I take to lakes. Ego consumption is not appropriate in a world where there's climate change." Christian would, in fact, struggle to buy a yacht if he ever wanted one, as he put two legally binding restrictions on the business - shareholders and staff cannot personally sell shares or take profits outside of the company. 

All of its electricity comes from solar power, and 80% of its users are said to be 29 or younger. Its search engine uses Microsoft's Bing's technology, with whom it has a long-term arrangement. "They really like what we are doing," says Christian.

It'd be tough indeed to demand any more of them, unless you insist that the entire staff be vegans who live in tree houses and survive on nothing but rainwater and dead leaves. Now, I'm not overly-fond of of Google, but I'm not exactly against them either. Would I prefer to use a search engine that plants trees for me ? Of course ! The question then becomes : is it any good ?

Let's try a few examples. Since Ecosia is powered by Microsoft, I suppose this is really testing Bing. But that's okay, since absolutely nobody - literally nobody at all - uses Bing anyway.


Search : fish
Google's first result is a selection of thumbnail images of fish, followed by the Wikipedia entry for fish, a map entry showing fish restaurants, some links to educational websites about fish, then a selection of YouTube videos. It's a pretty comprehensive take on the search term, if a bit cluttered. On the right there's a couple of snippets about the animal and something called the Friendly Interactive Shell.

Ecosia's page is a lot cleaner. Wikipedia appears as a snippet on the right, followed inexplicably by a snippet about Derek William Dick, whose stage name was fish. Never heard of him. In the main section, the first result is a fishing game, followed by a somewhat eclectic selection of fish-based links - some about actual fish, others about artists and games and suchlike. There's also a selection of news results.


Search : astronomy
Google gives me the Wikipedia entry as a featured snippet on the top, with a larger entry on the right and a selection of "people also searched for" results. The main section gives me a Q&A section, followed by a list of astronomy websites, interspersed with local results and news stories.

Ecosia gives me Astronomy Magazine in its right-side snippet. The main section is entirely links to astronomy websites, including some in Czech.


Search : philosophy
Ecosia gives the first result as philosophy.com, which, bizarrely, is a skincare products site. Google omits this. Other than that they're both about equal.


Searching for an address
I looked up my home address and the results were basically equivalent, except that Google comes up with Maps while Ecosia doesn't.


Calculations
Both gave the same results for simple addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. Ecosia assumes trigonometric calculations use degrees while Google prefers radians, though both allow you to just type in the units. Google comes up with an interactive calculator, Ecosia does not. Google also lets you do simple graphs, which Ecosia doesn't.


Image search
Google annoyingly creates a huge sidebar when you display and image, whereas Ecosia highlights the centre of the screen instead, which is a good deal less intrusive. Google (in Chrome) now needs an add-on to get the direct image link, whereas this is native to Ecosia.


Based on these quick field tests, there's not much to differentiate the two. I still like my Google homepage because I'd had it forever, and it provides ready access to gmail and the other services I still use, but I set my search bar engine to Ecosia. I'll try and develop the habit of using the search bar instead of going to the home page, if only for the sense of self-satisfaction that I've made a small contribution to planting some trees.

The search engine boss who wants to help us all plant trees

The BBC's weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Christian Kroll, the founder and chief executive of internet search engine Ecosia. Christian Kroll wants nothing less than to change the world. "I want to make the world a greener, better place," he says.