Pity poor Popper (II)

I have this annoying habit of actually wanting to read the source material. Following the recent post about Popper's notion of falsification being judged too harshly, I went and read a couple of sections from his Logic of Scientific Discovery. I do not have the time or inclination to read the whole thing so I restricted myself to part 1, section 1, subsection 6 ("Falsifiability as a Criterion of Demarcation") and part 2 section 4 ("Falsifiability").

You should probably read the first post before proceeding with this one. In brief, while I don't subscribe to the notion of falsifiability as being a good definition of a scientific theory, and actively support the notion that a theory can also be proven true as well as false (see links in original post for details), I think it's too strong to say that theories are inherently unprovable. And I definitely don't think that this idea has done "incalculable damage to science and human wellbeing", as the Aeon author claimed.

Even my very brief reading of Popper confirms this opinion. It's very clear that Popper already covered the objections raised : that experimental error could be blamed, that a single contrary finding shouldn't be taken to refute a well-established law, that unforeseen implications of a theory should not be ignored.

Popper is hardly an eloquent author. He seemed to have "drunk the Kool aid" when it came to embracing philosophical jargon. For example, over concerns about the asymmetry of being able to falsify but not verify he says :

My proposal is based upon an asymmetry between verifiability and falsifiability; an asymmetry which results from the logical form of universal statements. For these are never derivable from singular statements, but can be contradicted by singular statements.

He goes on at length about "singular" and "basic" statements and I got quickly bored. I don't care if he's being especially rigorous - it's unreadable to the point of being unintelligible. Nevertheless, there are some passages which are abundantly clear. For example, when it comes to falsifications pointing to a scientific revolution, I think he raises a good point, albeit a bit implicitly :

Whenever the ‘classical’ system of the day is threatened by the results of new experiments which might be interpreted as falsifications according to my point of view, the system will appear unshaken to the conventionalist. He will explain away the inconsistencies which may have arisen; perhaps by blaming our inadequate mastery of the system.

But the newly rising structure, the boldness of which we admire, is seen by the conventionalist as a monument to the ‘total collapse of science’, as Dingler puts it. In the eyes of the conventionalist one principle only can help us to select a system as the chosen one from among all other possible systems: it is the principle of selecting the simplest system — the simplest system of implicit definitions; which of course means in practice the ‘classical’ system of the day.

Falsification is necessary for progress. If you can't ever rule something out, you can't possibly make advancements. There is a real risk that you will forever keep making adjustments and not accept the plain truth in front of you, a la Steady State theory, or even begin to consider an alternative. You simply have to throw out epicycles and crystal spheres if you're going to get a better model of the Solar System. Without at least someone to say, "I don't believe this", everyone ends up stuck making tweaks rather than having new ideas. When you have an idea which basically works, e.g. Newtonian gravity, it's far simpler to modify it (i.e. posit the existence of Vulcan) than strike a wholly new path (i.e. accept that Mercury's precession falsifies the theory and come up with curved spacetime instead).

A clear appreciation of what may be gained (and lost) by conventionalist methods was expressed, a hundred years before Poincaré, by Black who wrote: ‘A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination but does not advance our knowledge'.

So disproving a model is extremely useful. But what about the prospect of "ancillary hypotheses" ? There could be legitimately unforeseen consequences of a theory - that can only be examined long after its publication debut - that might save it from any apparent contradictions with observation. Or there might be other, extraneous factors that affect the observations that do not actually challenge the fundamental mechanism in the theory at all. Clearly we shouldn't reject this possibility. Popper says :

As regards auxiliary hypotheses we propose to lay down the rule that only those are acceptable whose introduction does not diminish the degree of falsifiability or testability of the system in question, but, on the contrary, increases it. We can also put it like this. The introduction of an auxiliary hypothesis should always be regarded as an attempt to construct a new system; and this new system should then always be judged on the issue of whether it would, if adopted, constitute a real advance in our knowledge of the world. An example of an auxiliary hypothesis which is eminently acceptable in this sense is Pauli’s exclusion principle.

I like very much the attempt to clarify which kind of auxiliary hypotheses are acceptable but I think there's scope for elaboration here. Sometimes the full consequences of a theory take many years to work out, and we should accept these as being part of the theory irrespective of their testability. On the other hand, I agree that an ancillary hypotheses which doesn't itself have testable consequences - that must be distinct from the possibility that the original model is simply wrong - is not actually much use. 

But this seems to me incomplete. Something about the overall complexity of the model and the fundamental nature also needs to be described here. First, there is value in simplicity, and it would be good to have general criteria as to how to decide when a theory has become too complex (e.g., perhaps, when it can be conceivably be adjusted to fit any new observation). Second, it matters whether your additional hypothesis relates to the basic nature of the model or deals strictly with the observables. If your adjustment only changes what's going on with your observations, then it's probably fine - but if it changes the fundamental mechanism at work, then it's really a new theory altogether, in which case you've effectively admitted the original idea was wrong : but not necessarily that it was devoid of merit.

For example, the statement that galaxy rotation curves can be explained by (a) some hitherto unknown particle is very different from (b) a particular particle having specific characteristics (likewise, some sort of modification to gravity versus a very specific sort of of modification). Of course, theories need to be specific, but one's mere opinions do not. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying, "well, just because this one sort of modification or particle didn't work, it doesn't mean that some other similar thing won't do a better job." That is absolutely fine. The point is that it's a lot easier to test highly specific notions than it is vague general ideas. Falsification has to be as specific as the ideas which can be tested. So if your "adjustment" doesn't actually change the model itself, then there's nothing much wrong with it, but if it does, you're on much shakier ground.

For example, this ghastly "planet nine" business. If the model was changed to say that the new planet's orbit was different because of, say, new discoveries of other outer solar system bodies, then that's okay. If it instead was modified to say that the planet itself was very much larger or smaller than the original, that would arguably constitute a new theory. 

Back to Popper. As well as allowing for certain sorts of amendment to the theory, he goes further in saying that not every modification that doesn't meet his proposed requirements need be rejected :

Our methodological rule may be qualified by the remark that we need not reject, as conventionalistic, every auxiliary hypothesis that fails to satisfy these standards. In particular, there are singular statements which do not really belong to the theoretical system at all. They are sometimes called ‘auxiliary hypotheses’, and although they are introduced to assist the theory, they are quite harmless. An example would be the assumption that a certain observation or measurement which cannot be repeated may have been due to error.

So contrary to the Aeon piece last time, Popper specifically allowed for conflicts between measurement and prediction not to count as an immediate falsification. This is at least rather less absolute than the simplistic view of his ideas. Later he elaborates :

We say that a theory is falsified only if we have accepted basic statements which contradict it. This condition is necessary, but not sufficient; for we have seen that non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science. Thus a few stray basic statements contradicting a theory will hardly induce us to reject it as falsified. We shall take it as falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory.

In essence, Popper is quite aware that you do have to be very sure your observation does contradict the theory and isn't just a weird fluke or a mistake. 

That's really all I have to say. I still don't think falsification is all that amazeballs, and reading Popper is frankly tedious. But we do him a disservice to not realise that he had actually thought through at least some of the basic objections, and to call him a "neoliberal", let alone to saying he did "incalculable damage" is just being weird.

In two minds

Recently I accomplished a long-term goal by finally articulating what I think free will really is. In my view, it means the capacity for mind over matter : for our thoughts, the things we subjectively experience, to change our behaviour and thus give us a limited measure of mental control over the external, objective world. I see consciousness as a sort of field-like thing, highly localised to within our own brain, and only able to affect (and be affected by) the material that gave rise to it. This then prevents any sort of mysticism, albeit while keeping consciousness itself thoroughly mysterious.

Thanks to a comment on that post, I started pondering my way down a rabbit-hole of implications as to what this view might mean. I'll give a shout-out here to this very nice blog : from what I've seen, I disagree with much of it but find it hugely interesting and provocative. So now I'm wondering if, though the idea of field consciousness seems sound enough in itself, the same can be said for its consequences.

What started to nag at me was the idea of split brain memories. This is the bizarre finding that some animals appear to store and access memories in different sides of the brain, depending on how they were formed : e.g. an animal seeing something with one eye responds differently than the case of seeing it with the other eye. And this phenomenon occurs in humans too. When certain connections between the two hemispheres are severed (as is occasionally done through medical procedures to treat severe epilepsy), patients behave as though they have two distinct minds, with one side trying to physically stop the other from doing things. In humans this is . Example 1 :

When Sperry and Gazzaniga presented stimuli to the right visual field (processed by the speaking left hemisphere), the patient responded normally. However, when stimuli were presented to the left visual field (processed by the mute right hemisphere), the patient said he saw nothing. Yet his left hand would draw the image shown. When asked why his left hand did that, the patient looked baffled, and responded that he had no idea.

In some animals a similar condition is perfectly normal. Example 2 (from "Other Minds", which I briefly review here) :

The pigeons were trained to do a simple task with one eye masked, then each pigeon was tested on the same task while being forced to use the other eye. In a study using nine birds, eight of them did not show any "inter-ocular transfer" at all. What seemed to be a skill learned by the whole bird was in fact available to only half the bird; the other half had no idea.

And it's not a straightforward binary condition either. Example 3 (also from "Other Minds") :

An octopus trained on a visual task using just one eye initially only remembered the task when tested with the same eye. With extended training, they could perform the task using the other eye. The octopuses were unlike pigeons in that some information did get across; they were unlike us in that it did not get across easily... The special kind of mental fragmentation seen in split-brain humans seems to be a routine part of many animals' life.

It's also worth recalling blindsight, when visual information is processed only subconsciously; reverse blindsight, when no subconscious processing is applied to the received images such that they simply make no sense, like being unable to read text but applied to everything; and flatworms, who can apparently literally eat memories.

So what's going on here ? Does this point towards an even more materialistic interpretation of consciousness, where it's strictly limited to matter over mind and never the other way around ? Naively, I would think that if consciousness is any sort of field, be that generated by the brain or only received by it, it ought to be able to convey information throughout itself. It seems extremely strange to say that it could only access information with such extreme locality; that part of the field would know things that the rest didn't.

Of course, idealism has no problem with this since everything is imaginary anyway. Illusionism denies consciousness exists, so again, no problem. Compatibility with panpsychism is harder to determine, since it's not obvious how consciousness is combined from its constituent atoms. But it definitely does appear to be a problem for any dualistic field theory of consciousness, be that generated or received by the brain.

However, we also know about blindsight. And as I've suggested, this may not be so uncommon - we all run on autopilot sometimes, lost in thought but for the most part still managing to avoid bumping into tractors and stray hippos. So our brain is definitely capable of sophisticated data processing without conscious intervention. Maybe, then, the physical splitting of the brain simply prevents certain memories from reaching the consciousness at all, so that it's handled by the brain's other faculties that don't require awareness. After all, we're not exactly fully aware of all the signals our brain sends out : we don't feel nerve impulses sent to our arms or lungs or feet, yet they all manage to get by perfectly well without is. 

This makes it at least conceivable that someone could draw something they genuinely weren't aware of, without invaliding conscious field theory (if I may give it an unnecessarily grandiose title) at all. I think this idea would depend on how far it can be pushed - could someone solve differential equations without being aware of them ? A bigger and more fundamental problem might be that something has to make a choice : part of the brain has to decide whether or not to commence drawing, and to be unaware that this choice was made seems extremely strange. The part of the brain that enacts drawing must furthermore understand the instruction to draw... all in all, it would have to behave suspiciously similarly to someone who was fully conscious themselves.

Of course, splitting the brain could just outright split the consciousness. This doesn't invalidate its field nature though : the two halves of the brain would then either generate (or a receive) an additional consciousness to the original state, with the original also being changed by the change of its receiver/generator equipment. And, since they're split, each consciousness will only ever report the experience of being one person, by definition, regardless of whether it does so in writing or speech. So an individual will never feel like they're two people, even if there are multiple consciousnesses coexisting inside their singular head.

This seems perfectly reasonable in cases of medical intervention, but bizarre in the animals that are like this anyway : why should a pigeon have multiple awarenesses ? Of course it might, but this doesn't feel very plausible.

A third possibility relates to how consciousness, in this model, interacts with the external world depends on the exact nature of its receiver/generator. The conscious field is mediated by the brain, so that if the brain is damaged then the field can't interact with the external world in the same way : even if the connections to the arms, hands etc. are themselves undamaged. In this interpretation the field itself would be fine, with no change in awareness or memory, just unable to control the body as it did previously. Likewise, an animal could exist in this state perfectly naturally, without surgical intervention or multiple consciousness in its head, just unable to control itself as a more naïve interpretation would expect. It would be a bit like being left-handed, only taken to an extreme : not unwilling or unaware of what was going on, but simply unable to express a particular memory or perception.

This would seem to be unsatisfyingly strange and quite unprovable, however, it is perhaps not as weird as it might first appear. Recall reverse blindsight, where those restored to sight after a long absence are unable to "read" the world around them, to perceive it but not assign anything any meaning. Or foreign accent syndrome, or dyslexia - it is quite possible to perceive something, to be aware of it, and not understand it, and thus not be able to communicate (i.e.) express it. The major difference being that in those situations people are generally aware of the difficulty.

In short, explanations could be :

• The brain processes some information without it ever reaching the conscious mind. The brain would have to receive external information, decide on a course of action, and then enact it all without conscious intervention. To some extent it can do this anyway, but it raises the question of how far this can go - and of course, ultimately whether consciousness is really required at all.
• Multiple consciousness coexist alongside one another. Each is singular and has access (usually) to the same basic information, but each can only perceive itself. This would be radically at odds with how we normally perceive ourselves, and one wonders why a pigeon would need to have multiple minds - and why I can't let a secondary consciousness take over when I'm bored.
• There is only one conscious field and it is always privy to the memories of the entire brain, but since the field's interaction is governed by the material substance of the brain, its capabilities can be changed in surprising ways. The mind may be perfectly aware of what's going on but unable to express itself due to the limitations of the mediating brain.

I think it fair to admit, though, that while this phenomenon certainly doesn't rule out a consciousness as a field, it does lend credence to a more materialist, illusionist perspective : passive consciousness. Either way, it points to a clear separation of consciousness and memory. Now I pointed that out in the original post, but I think this still leaves a distinct... uneasiness. Yes, there's more to identity than memory. But if I lose all my memories, can I really still call myself the same person ? If my "soul", for want of a better word, need not even be aware of anything I've ever done, in what sense is it really "mine" ?

I don't know. For my part this isn't nearly enough to persuade me that illusionism is anything other than mad. But consciousness does seem, at the very least, to be even stranger than we give it credit for - and that's saying something.

Pity poor Popper

I don't subscribe to the view that science is all about falsifying things. It's rather popular on the internet but seldom crops up much in day-to-day research, which tends to be a lot more free-wheeling. Not that it never comes up at all - people do worry if their model is hard to test - but it's not the dominant strain of scientific thinking, if there even is such a thing.

As discussed at length previously, real science tends to be messy. When it comes to theories and models, broadly they can be said to be scientific and/or useful if : they can be compared with observations; they have different strengths and weaknesses that can be compared with each other; they are at least testable in principle if not yet in current practise; they offer markedly different fundamental mechanisms which affect our intuitive understanding of a situation. A model which does not do this last point, which does not describe the actual physics at work, is not a scientific explanation - no matter how precise its predictions or how thoroughly they can be tested. Hence astrological predictions are not scientific because they lack any mechanistic explanation.

This is a lot more sophisticated than the classic notion of falsification, which essentially makes the process weirdly half-binary : keep testing things until their eventual but inevitable destruction, at which point, come up with something better. Instead, I believe it's entirely possible to both prove and disprove something with sufficient evidence - and given sensible constraining assumptions. If you don't have those, then you will say you never know anything at all, and may as well sod off and stop annoying everyone. But, while being able to do this is certainly very nice, and always desirable, it certainly isn't necessary to doing useful science. Not at all.

But this Aeon piece goes too far*. It leans towards a view of science in which everything is possible, where falsification can essentially never happen. That's not science in my book, it's philosophy. And philosophy is feckin' important, but it ain't science.

* Hypothesis : any article which uses the word "neoliberal" is likely to be awful. Except when the offending word is in quotation marks, obviously.

The process of science, wrote Popper, was to conjecture a hypothesis and then attempt to falsify it. You must set up an experiment to try to prove your hypothesis wrong. If it is disproved, you must renounce it. Herein, said Popper, lies the great distinction between science and pseudoscience: the latter will try to protect itself from disproof by massaging its theory. But in science it is all or nothing, do or die.

Three philosophers were pulling the rug away beneath the Popperians’ feet. They argued that, when an experiment fails to prove a hypothesis, any element of the physical or theoretical set-up could be to blame. Nor can any single disproof ever count against a theory, since we can always put in a good-faith auxiliary hypothesis to protect it: perhaps the lab mice weren’t sufficiently inbred to produce genetic consistency; perhaps the chemical reaction occurs only in the presence of a particular catalyst. Moreover, we have to protect some theories for the sake of getting on at all. Generally, we don’t conclude that we have disproved well-established laws of physics – rather, that our experiment was faulty.

A classic, "yeah, but" moment. Yes, we need to consider implicit assumptions, faulty measurements and the like - and yes, sometimes we can even have more confidence in a theory than an observation. And yes once more, most of the time all we can do is vary probabilities : this new data increases our confidence in theory A, this one favours theory B, this finding suggests something entirely new that we hadn't thought of before. But while it's very stupid to view science as a set of binary true/false choices, it's not much better to suppose that it can never falsify anything. If we found a truly superluminal object, that would instantly falsify relatively. If we found a giant space cat, that would instantly disprove... err, well, lots of things, probably - and simultaneously vindicate anyone who had proposed the existence of a giant space cat.

The notion that science is all about falsification has done incalculable damage not just to science but to human wellbeing. It has normalised distrust as the default condition for knowledge-making, while setting an unreachable and unrealistic standard for the scientific enterprise. Climate sceptics demand precise predictions of an impossible kind, yet seize upon a single anomalous piece of data to claim to have disproved the entire edifice of combined research; anti-vaxxers exploit the impossibility of any ultimate proof of safety to fuel their destructive activism. In this sense, Popperianism has a great deal to answer for.

I just think that's daft. First, anti-science loonies will always be anti-science loonies; they aren't just demanding impossibly high standards of proof - they are just not very good at thinking. This idea that such people are just demanding unreasonably high levels of evidence, and are actually just as rational as everyone else, is pernicious : on the contrary, if you do actually talk to such people, it becomes very obvious very quickly that they are neither especially interested in the truth nor in any way rational : they are already convinced of their own ideas and use that conviction as circular justification for their belief. Second, I'm just not seeing a scientific culture dominated by falsification; at most, reviewers can be overly-skeptical but that's about it. It hasn't "normalised distrust" - science is always and unavoidably more complex than that, relying on a careful, considered, moderated approach, neither too trusting nor too skeptical. Just because some philosopher described it as something else hasn't had that much effect. Popper, in the end, was just not that important : reshaping a culture is a very great deal harder than writing a book.

The abuses of Popper

A powerful cadre of scientists and economists sold Karl Popper’s ‘falsification’ idea to the world. They have much to answer for.

Metadata matters

Nobody forms a conclusion based on objective evidence alone. This is especially true when it's something related to a specialist field and we don't trust our own judgement. We don't want to start jabbing needles in our eyes - we prefer to go to an optician, to benefit from the experience of someone who's already stabbed lots of people in the eye, or better yet, has read all the medical journals describing in great detail why you probably shouldn't do that and should just use eye drops instead.

It makes perfectly good sense to trust an expert when you (a) recognise that you yourself are not an expert and (b) recognise that somebody else is. For example, dinosaurs are jolly interesting, but I don't want to go out and dig them up myself. I want the experts to do that for me. It saves a great deal of time and stops me getting all dusty.

This means that when I read about the latest argument over whether T-Rex was a terrifying super-predator or just an overgrown vulture, and I want to reach my own opinion, I have to heavily rely on metadata. Instead of looking at the bones myself through a high-powered microscope, I'm considering other evidence : specifically the qualifications and experience of the experts involved. Sure, I might well have my own preference based on the issues presented, but if the article describes the findings of Professor Sir Joe Blogs, Oxford Chair of Palaeontology, I place a lot more weight in it than if the exact same thing came from the mouth of Foul Ole Ron, professional drunk.

Buggrit, buggrit, millennium hand and shrimp.

This is all well and good when it comes to esoteric debates of little or no actual import. Jurassic Park not being a documentary, my opinion on dinosaur appetites is about as pointless a thing as it's possible to be interested in*. Less reassuringly, a very similar process affects politics.

* Just because it's pointless doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I'm a big fan of doing things just because they're cool. Hell, I research clouds of gas that don't do anything, so I know all about pointless research.

This press release describes an effort to measure how this works in the real world. Specifically, when a party changes policy, do voters shift allegiance away from that party, or change their opinion of that policy to agree with their preferred party ? Does policy drive opinion, or does opinion drive policy ?

It seems that policy drives opinion to no small degree. Party loyalty, it turns out, is not a small factor.

Slothuus and Bisgaard discovered that among those voters who backed the Liberal Party or the DPP, policy opinions overall “immediately moved by around 15 percentage points in response to their party’s new issue position,” while those of other partisan groups were mostly unchanged. By surveying the same individuals throughout the study, Slothuus said, the researchers could ensure the effect they observed at the party level wasn’t being caused by people shifting party allegiances in response to the parties’ shifts on the issues.

“We can see that these welfare programs were actually quite popular… and many of the voters of the centre-right party were in favour of these welfare programs,” Slothuus said, referring to unemployment benefits and early retirement. “Nevertheless, we can see that they reversed their opinion from supporting these welfare programs to [immediately] opposing these welfare programs.”

That they followed individuals is important. It's of course still possible that the party base has changed its overall opinion, so changing policy and bringing the rest on board, but here we see very clearly that it's not a small shift : tribal loyalty is important. Although it's certainly a popular anecdote that people oppose or support policies based on who's saying it, this is real data in support of that. And it's somewhat surprising, given how much effort politicians go to in formulating policies to win support. Why don't they just tell everyone to shut up and get on board instead ?

Presumably there are limits to how far this can be pushed. If Nicola Sturgeon decided to announce that Scotland was a dreary place and would be better off consigned to the dustbin of history, support for the SNP would crash. If Keir Starmer decided that Labour would officially endorse killing and eating poor people, Labour wouldn't last long. And for a real-world example, witness the collapse of the Liberal Democrats.

Of course, when it comes to trivial issues, it makes sense to support a party you generally align with. That is in part what representative democracy is for : having experts do the legwork. But that makes it all the more interesting that the policy shifts described in the article were major and of real importance. So I had to go and read the original paper.

It's a commendably thorough piece of work. The bottom line is that this shift in opinion is real and by far and away the most probable causal factor is the change in party stance. They were very careful to account for any confounding factors.

One thing that's key to this study, unlike previous similar cases that they cite, was that they were lucky. They didn't have to contrive an experiment or tease data from the archives. They weren't expecting any kind of policy shift of the issues they'd happened to be polling, but there was. And they sampled quite frequently, so they got to see the change in opinions happening very quickly. They also have a reasonable representative sample size (~1,200 individuals, though only 292 of which identified with a political party).

The issues they monitored were a policy to reduce unemployment benefit and abolish early retirement, both in Denmark. These were not issues of minor consequence or emotionless fiscal management :

When the new rules took effect in 2013, 34,000 individuals were falling out of the unemployment insurance system in the first year; two out of three left without any other government income support. This overnight shift in the parties’ policy position sparked intense criticism in the news media.

Due to its popularity, the early retirement program enjoyed a “taboo status in Danish politics,” and the “taboo had been kept intact by the Liberal-Conservative governments since 2001. The minor party in the center-right coalition, the Conservatives, had tried to push for this policy change from within the government, but the Liberals “had previously flatly rejected doing so,” and the Liberal Party “therefore found itself with a considerable problem explaining the party’s new position”.

So these are ideal cases. Two emotive, important issues on which official party policy was unambiguous and the shift was linear, with no indecisive flip-flopping from the leadership. And they noted that respondents correctly remembered how the party stance had changed and the policy implemented, so it was clearly communicated to voters. It wasn't that their memories had been clouded. They knew exactly what was happening.

One potential problem is that there might be some underlying event which causes a widespread change of opinion among the electorate at large, thus with policy change being a consequence of opinion change rather than a cause of it. But their sample is large enough to rule this out. True, a significant caveat is that it took place among the backdrop of recovering from the financial crisis. But there was no wider movement around either of these changes - they were sudden, spontaneous decisions. And, crucially, while those supporting the parties changed their stance, those not identifying with the political groups did not change opinion at all. Since they followed individuals, they can be certain that opinions really did change, and they're not just seeing a change in voters for each party.

Another concern is that the overall position of party members was either neutral or somewhat positive regarding the eventual change well before it happened. As I've noted many times, rallying the troops is quite a different prospect to recruiting new ones : to persuade someone to like something a bit more is a lot easier than getting them to start liking something in the first place. But even here the results are clear. The shift in preference was about the same across all party members, including those who were actively opposed to it previously. Those members didn't suddenly jump fully on the bandwagon, but they became more supportive of the policy all the same. There was no evidence of any backfire effect at all.

The shift in opinion was rapid. For the case of cutting unemployment benefit, their sampling constrains the shift to a two month period exactly coinciding with the policy change : that is, immediately after the party supported the new policy, opinions shifted. This rapid shift, coupled with the lack of change in opinion of voters not associating themselves with the parties concerned, makes it extremely unlikely that there was any other external event that could be a common cause. At most, I suppose the financial crisis could prime people for being more receptive towards the new policy than they might be at other times, but by itself, it clearly hadn't encouraged a shift in opinion whatsoever.

The change in stance was rapid, strong, and prolonged. If anything, they say, it's stronger than what's seen in more controlled conditions. And despite the criticism, opinions remained flatly constant after the switch for months afterwards (for as long as polling continued).

The only issue I can think of that isn't covered here is what steps, if any, the parties took to persuade supporters that the new policy was a good idea. But that two-month switch is astonishingly rapid given the emotive nature of political issues - again, see the Liberal Democrats after they decided to support higher tuition fees. Either the Danish political leaders must have had a truly outstandingly genius bit of argument, or party affiliation plays an enormous role in persuasion all by itself.

Of course, anecdotally this isn't all that surprising. But to demonstrate it objectively is important. As they say, it complicates the democratic process if parties quite literally, and however unintentionally, determine what people think. The ideal is that voters independently examine the evidence about major issues and then vote for the parties that best reflect their conclusions. But this shows the mirror goes both ways : the voters reflect their parties.

Why might people think like this ? One reason is the use of metadata mentioned earlier, with voters treating their preferred parties as experts to defer to. Another is identity-based politics, with political affiliation being such a strong part of people's identity that mentally it may be easier for them to switch opinions than switch parties (these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive). I would add a third prospect : that once some in party change their opinion, their behaviour towards other members changes, and a combination (usually subtle) of praise and shame can bring the rest of the group in line. But this is likely to a slight effect when it comes to such a small group influencing the opinions of a much larger one. It would have been nice if they'd gone back to at least a few individuals and simply asked them why they thought their opinions shifted.

This is all very interesting in terms of psychology. But it may not matter a fig in terms of policy : if party loyalists change their minds, that says nothing about how voting share changes. In these cases the answer was "very little", about 2-3%. So these quite radical policy shifts made little difference to party allegiance. But we perhaps shouldn't expect it to, since individual policies don't always have much impact on voting intention.

Whatever the exact cause of the shift, that political parties may such a large role in shaping opinion is interesting by itself. I cannot think of any issues where I've suddenly changed my mind as a direct result of politicians changing theirs... but I expect that's because the Labour party told me everything was fine and there was no need to worry. Phew, for a minute there I was really worried.

EDIT : A hypothesis. In accordance with the principle that you cannot reason people out of positions they haven't been reasoned into, perhaps these two examples where people took a stance on a more-or-less purely emotional basis, not a rational one. It follows that if they initially adopted (or opposed) the policies based largely on emotion, then they could be persuaded to change their stance based wholly on what other people were doing. If so, then the same would not hold for other policies on which they had formulated their opinion more carefully. The difficulty with this hypothesis is that it seems unlikely that so many people would happen to have adopted both favourable and unfavourable opinions of the policies in this way; one would have thought that at least some of them, especially given the sample size, ought to have been more rational. Yet I cannot escape the strong feeling that, though I've certainly had irrational factors play a major part in influencing my, I myself have never acted this irrationally about policy - and I don't think I'm exceptional in that regard either. Indeed, I don't think I know a single person who is utterly committed to every policy of their preferred party.

The Multi-Dimensional Moral Matrix

Recent events compel to revisit Jonathan Haidt's concept of the moral matrix. I've covered this a few times before, but it's worth trying to draw some different ideas together.

The concept is that a person's moral world view is governed by how much they value five key attributes : care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. Liberals value care and fairness most of all whereas conservatives prefer loyalty, authority and purity.

This system is fine as long as we restrict its use to understanding people's ideologies and not morality itself. The actual moral outcomes of these different viewpoints are almost entirely context-dependent. For example, authoritarianism has a great deal to offer in an emergency while "fairness" (or more accurately reciprocity) doesn't really come into it. If a ship's heading towards an iceberg, you want the captain to immediately overrule any objections and steer it away, not sit down for a protracted discussion about who's in charge. Likewise, "care" is great during a humanitarian catastrophe but pretty useless if someone's holding a gun to your head.

Purity, however, is perhaps where things come unstuck. Certainly this is something that people do value to different degrees, but in what sense that can be said to be anything related to morality is something I haven't been able to determine (suggestions welcome*). It highlights very clearly that this system is about world views, not morality itself.

* The only thing I can think of is from an online psychology course, reminding the audience that people have great difficulty defining why incest is so icky whilst being of the very firm opinion that it is.

The moral matrix (though perhaps it's more of an ideology or political matrix) is useful in reminding us that people can have perfectly decent, honourable intentions but reach different conclusions due to their different innate values. But it's at best highly incomplete when it comes to morality proper. If, for example, you genuinely thought that your freedom and democracy were threatened, would you not think that taking direct violent action was morally justified ? Democracy was, after all, born in blood. Yet while you might sincerely believe that your action was moral, whether you actually were acting morally or not depends firmly on context.

There were two recent comments on social media that made my blood boil. One was that we should "condemn ALL the violence", including that of Black Lives Matter protestors, which is plainly ludicrous - and wasn't helped by the same person linking to a site called "hang the censors" without any apparent embarrassment (I've explained the asymmetry of the issues before so I won't do it again). The second, by another*, was that the recent events in America were not an attempted coup** but a "protest gone sideways". Yes, because it's all so easy for a protest to go sideways if you come armed with guns and pipe bombs and maps of the building you're planning to accidentally storm in a fit of pique. The only interpretation of this that makes any sense is if the rioters were actually crabs.

* A much more respectable fellow, I think, but completely wrong in this particular instance.
** Albeit with piss-poor prior planning, as befits the stupidity of its instigator.

I've mentioned before that if we're constructing a truly moral matrix, respect for the truth has to be included in there somehow. These comments reminded me of two other key factors.

First, a moral person should be able to overcome their own bias. If, according to your own standards, data indicates a viewpoint contrary to your existing one, then your belief should shift towards it and away from your existing stance. Note the careful wording; there is no conflict here with the fact that data doesn't speak for itself and interpretation is something that happens only within your head. And you should follow a similar progression not only with regards to specific conclusions, but how you evaluate information as well. When you learn about different fallacies, you should then take account of them.

Second, a moral person needs a degree of analytic intelligence, to be able to draw the correct conclusions (at least according to their own standards) from the data. If you can't see how the presence of carrying an explosive device into the heart of democracy is the action of a terrorist, you might simply come up short here - a badly organised attempted coup is still, FFS(!), an attempted coup. There might be other reasons, but simple stupidity is a perfectly reasonable explanation at this point. It's true that calling people stupid won't help persuade them, but that's not the goal here.

The "moral matrix" has some real use in reminding us that people genuinely think differently from one another and that those viewpoints are not innately moral or immoral. A true moral matrix, however, would have to be rather different. It would have to include compassion, certainly, and fairness also - but likely greatly expanded beyond the simple idea of reciprocity. Loyalty, for instance, is only sensible when someone acts fairly; being loyal to someone actively trying to harm you is not moral but daft. Likewise authority : having trust in an expert in an emergency is very different from wanting a strongman in power in all situations. One is fair, the other is not. Purity, as far as I can tell, would not come into it at all, while both analytical and critical intelligence would surely deserve inclusion.

So the real moral matrix would perhaps not be a set of simple sliders, but a complex, multi-dimensional parameter space. Such a matrix would have to include true malevolence, which we might, as a starting point, define as wanting to harm others who have never harmed anyone else nor had any intentions to do so, in full knowledge of the situation (this is something that neither Plato nor Epictetus believed was possible, but I'm convinced otherwise). Hypocrisy might feature in there as well. Designing such a system would be a formidable challenge that's quite beyond me.

But for all its complexity, all its shades of multidimensional grey, there are extremes which any halfwit ought to be able to identify as right or wrong. If we can't agree on those, we've reached a "fire is hot" problem, the limits of Aumann's Agreement Theorem beyond which one of us must simply be irrational and not worth reasoning with. 

We should hardly rush to jump to such a conclusion. Just as every person who checks their horoscope is hardly likely to be a Flat Earther or otherwise anti-science, so most opinions are at most warning signs. But those extremes, those positions between which the truth does not lie somewhere in the middle, most assuredly do exist. Just as someone who is a professed Flat Earther is by definition wholly irrational, so someone supporting the failed coup is not someone I ever want to interact with. Their conclusion is so manifestly wrong that we cannot possibly have any meaningful interaction, so I don't propose to try.

The Weird Wildness Of The West

I think it probably comes as little surprise to anyone here that the Western mindsight is quite different from those found elsewhere, so I won't dwell on the weirdness (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) aspect. While the article headlines with how this came about, I found it more interesting how it notes that there are both positive and negative aspects to this. There's a lot of (quite understandable) self-loathing among certain western demographics, a desire for us all to be less selfish and more society-oriented, and yet :

In one of the videos, the child assembled a necklace that precisely matched the one made by the demonstrator in its bead colours and sequence. In the other, the child produced a necklace with a different sequence of coloured beads. When asked which child was “smarter”, 88% of adults in Vanuatu pointed to the “conformer”, compared to only 19% of US respondents. When asked why they selected the non-conformers as “smarter”, the adults in the US explained that the child was “creative”.

While there's a lot of "we must think less about ourselves and more for the good of society !" vibes bandied about, I think few westerners would think that means we must all conform - this "herd mentality" is often decried as the very thing we want to avoid. There's definitely an ironic element of "you must think for yourself and agree with me !" to all this, or, "don't conform with those people, conform with me instead !".

When asked who was better behaved, 78% of adults in Vanuatu thought the conformer was better behaved while less than half (44%) of US respondents felt similarly. Instead, most Americans (56%) thought the conforming and non-conforming children were equally well-behaved.

I would say that in an exercise like this, which basically has no consequences whatsoever, it doesn't matter unless the child was told explicitly that it's important to follow things exactly. I would only label the behaviour good or bad depending on the goal and the circumstance. Being creative when making necklaces is a lot different than when, say, designing ships. More interesting is the implication that those in Vanuatu think conformity is inherently a good thing, though again this is probably laden with situational caveats.

Unlike much of the world today – and most people who have ever lived – Weird people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, guilt-ridden and analytical in their thinking style. They focus on themselves – their attributes, accomplishments and aspirations – over relationships and roles. When reasoning, Weird people tend to look for abstract categories with which to organise the world. They simplify complex phenomena by breaking them down into discrete elements and assigning properties – whether by imagining types of particles, pathogens or personalities.

That all sounds very bad, but :

Despite their seeming self-obsession, Weird people tend to stick to impartial rules and can be quite trusting, fair and cooperative toward strangers. Emotionally, Weird people are relatively shameless, less constrained by the eyes of others, but often wracked by guilt as they fail to live up to their own self-imposed standards.

And the flip side of this :

Analyses reveal that people from societies rooted in more intensive kin-based institutions show greater conformity, less individualism, more holistic thinking, fewer guilty experiences and less willingness to trust strangers. 

Ironic that being individualistic might make you fairer towards others ! Yet it makes a degree of sense. : if you see others first and foremost as individuals, you're less likely to judge them as opposing group members. So the questions this raises for me are : (1) what, if any, is the difference between tribalism and conformism ? and (2) are societies which are more conformist even more polarised against other groups than in the Western countries ?

To the first one I would say there's a world of difference between those who say, "I want this group to be better than it is and I want you to join me in helping achieve this" as opposed to, "I want this group to be the best by making other groups worse and hurting anyone who isn't a member already". In essence, this is the difference between patriotism and nationalism. I don't know if there are more appropriate, more generalised terms though.

To the second, I don't know. Trying to improve your own group seems orthogonal to how you interact with others. But at the same time, it would seem to follow that if you see conformity as a good thing then anyone doing something different would be viewed with more suspicion, but I know next to nothing about non-western politics. It would be a wretched irony indeed if trying to get everyone to pull together for the common good led to even more hatred and division than getting everyone to think for themselves.

Still, while there's a natural tendency to insist, when you deem a certain behaviour better than others, that everyone should think and act in that way, context is often critical. Both collectivist and individualist mindsets comes with costs and benefits. The article is an important reminder that blending the best of both worlds is tricky indeed.

How the 'Western mind' was shaped by the Medieval Church

Most research on human psychology focuses on Western societies, but the way people in the West think can be traced to changes in family structures in the Middle Ages.

Review : Half Life Alyx

And now for something completely different.

I recently went on a spending spree for an assortment of VR games (thank you Steam's Black Friday sale !). Amongst those was the notorious Half Life : Alyx, widely acclaimed as the finest VR game produced thus far.

Don't get me wrong : it is a very good game, worthy of its illustrious predecessors. But it must be said that it is also, at times, as frustrating as whittling matchsticks with a pair of sharpened tweezers.

There's some mysterious, ineffable X-factor to VR games that makes them either fantastically immersive or just a clever gimmick. Alyx definitely has it. The opening scenes are probably the most beautiful of the whole game (to the extent that the ending, though good, felt just a tad graphically lacklustre). City 17 stretches before you into the distance, rendered with immense detail. You can pick up marker pens and use them to draw on things, if you want. You can tune the radio to a different station, startle pigeons, throw stuff around, smash windows, gaze wistfully into the distance, etc. The sound is spot on. The exceptionally high level of interactivity persists until the very end.

(I should also mention that I'm using Virtual Desktop to play wirelessly - settings are given at the end.)

You also get the usual high level of variety - a pleasing mixture of horror and action, creepy tunnels mixed with sunlight open cityscapes. I'd have preferred slightly more of the latter, but that's just a personal preference. All of them are beautifully rendered. The touches of humour here and there are well done. When you're in a scary environment and your guide talks to comfort you, it actually goddamn works.

The Half Life franchise is the best example of linear gameplay I've ever experienced. People criticise VR games for being labelled as "experiences", as an excuse for developing mediocre gameplay. But when it's done well, a VR... umm.... thing really is better described as an experience. The enjoyment is in being there, as much or more than actually interacting. It's a bit like visiting the Grand Canyon : the fun is experiencing the environment, not starting an anti-mining protest group or a Canyon Coffee Appreciation Society. You can do those things if you want to, but it's not necessary.

I read a negative review that criticised Alyx's linearity, but I can only imagine the poor sod had never played a Half Life game before because they're all like this. The clever thing about the franchise is that the actions are so well-scripted, and the route you have to take so naturally defined, that you don't notice it. Of course you go across that plank, of course you have to stack the crates to access the upper level... it's an utterly natural to do so, and doesn't break the immersion in the slightest. When it works well, as it does 95% of the time, it's genius.

The other 5% of the time it's utter crap.

Most of the time the scripting in Alyx is flawless. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares, for instance - you don't have to worry about opening every single door in case there's a zombie behind it. This makes the few such examples that are present absolutely terrifying. And when you have to do something unusual, there are generally enough hints to make it reasonably obvious, but still requiring a bit of thought. Events that happen feel random even though they're obviously not.

But there's one level that kicks all that in the teeth, which, oddly, seems to be among the most popular. Basically you're trapped in this floor with a particular weird and scary blind zombie who relies on hearing. He's immune to conventional weapons and you have only a flashlight to see with. So you have to figure out a bizarre, convoluted series of processes to kill him. In the dark. With creepy noises all around you. And instant death if he hears you.

Sounds good ? It isn't. I hated that level with a passion. It wasn't fun in the slightest - a difficult battle where I stand a chance of winning, that's fun. The instant death, with no chance of survival if he catches you, was scary at first but very quickly gave way to irritation : there's no real fear when you have no hope. It soon became an ordeal not in working out a plausible way to tackle the problem, but exposing the naked script for what it was. And that just sucked donkeys. In about 15 minutes I became sick to the teeth of dying every five seconds and looked up the answer online, which turned out to be a catastrophic mess I would never, ever have figured out by myself because it just didn't make any sense. Literally, it wasn't coherent enough for me to have any chance of guessing it, much less figuring it out through logic. I don't know what the designers were thinking here, but it made me want to kick them in the gonads or something. It was awful : one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever experienced. It's not immersive, it's not an experience, it's just bad.

The other main frustrating aspect is the first gun you get. Loading this thing is a truly ludicrous process. You have to manually eject the empty cartridge (which at first holds a meagre eight bullets, with enemies typically taking three shots to kill), reach behind you to get fresh ammo from your backpack, insert it into the weapon, and then - for some reason - engage the ammo so it's ready for use. Okay, this is very realistic. It's also effin' boring and tiresome. Middle of a battle and you have to do all that ? Most of the time I just gave up. Being right handed but left-eye dominant, it took me a long time to get any sort of proficiency with the weapon, so the chances of me being able to both reload and fire successfully were so low I found it better to get eaten and start again from a previous save. It's just too damn easy (when you're learning) to get the buttons wrong and eject a full cartridge - and then you have to do the whole stupid thing again. Why on earth empties don't eject themselves automatically, and new ones don't automatically engage when loaded, is quite beyond me. 

What doesn't help is that you have no melee weapon - another bizarre oversight. When you run out of ammo, that's it, you're doomed. That just plain sucks. It means the game becomes hopelessly obsessed with scavenging ammo and conserving bullets. This got so tedious after a whole that I gave up and lowered the difficulty setting to the minimum, which, being a keen Half Life fan, made me feel like I'd soiled myself.

This, though, made the whole experience about a thousand times better. I overcame my shame and started enjoying it : on minimum, the game is still sufficiently challenging for me. Indeed, it's almost more of a simulation than a game.

Things do improve : you get better weaponry, with various upgrade options, that makes things a good deal easier. It also takes time to get used to moving around. This being my first big FPS in VR, I certainly didn't do myself any favours by forgetting that it's possible to move, and the more floor space you have, the more you'll enjoy this. Knowing all this, and being able to actually fire the gun with some accuracy now, I have no doubt I'll replay it on a higher difficulty setting in the not-too-distant future.

I spend just under 20 hours completing Alyx. It's a satisfying story, a true experience/game hybrid. The ending's a bit on the scripted and surreal side but it's still very good. Unfortunately here too the final level, while featuring some nice exotic weaponry, is slightly spoiled by the unfathomable aiming system. Too often I ended up blasting the wall with plasma when (to my mind) I was quite definitely aiming at the enemy soldiers. It's good, but certainly doesn't compete with the enormous payoff that is the ending to Half Life 2.

This problem, like the others, is probably not so much in the system itself so much as in the time needed to figure it out. That to me is Alyx's major flaw : it's too immersive. It assumes you actually are Alyx Vance, already a part of this dystopian world and fluent in its somewhat esoteric weaponry. So most of these criticisms are not necessarily the game designer's fault, but mine. At least, that's the impression I've come away with. I might have to post a second review after trying it again.

All in all, I give this a solid 7/10. It's an epic rendering of the Half Life world, occasionally let down by some highly questionable gameplay choices; a truly blisteringly good game obfuscated by some weird trappings. It's also on the pricey side*. I can see why the hardcore are so enthusiastic for this, but for a more casual gamer like me, it's all a bit much. Even so, it left me hungry for more... and a crowbar.

* Arguably. Most experiences that last this long cost a hell of a lot more than what I paid for this in the Steam sale, but on the other hand, it's fundamentally imaginary and limited. I remember when £40 was considered a sensible upper limit for a brand new top-of-the-range game, and I hold to that as a reasonable standard.

Virtual Desktop wireless settings

Initially I tried playing this using Oculus Link, which renders beautifully but makes it very easy to get tangled up in the cable. This became frustrating so I switched to Virtual Desktop. Initially I struggled with this - the rendering was visually perfect but with so many momentary freezes (frame dropping, I think) that it made me feel quite ill after 30-40 minutes or so. Eventually, with a lot of trial and error and Google searching, I found a combination of settings that worked. The final experience for me was almost indistinguishable from using Link - not quite, but still more than sufficient to appreciate the full graphical quality of the game and not have to go for a lie down every half an hour. Here are the settings that worked for me.

The only thing I did inside Alyx was to keep the quality settings on medium - although the frame rate seems fine on high on my system, frames are dropped often enough to become jarring. On medium, with the settings below, it's very nearly as good as running it through a cable. From what I saw, this didn't look vastly different to the high setting options.

Main Virtual Desktop settings :

The key thing here seem to be use use the H.264 codec, not the HEVC option. Not sure if "automatically adjust bitrate" does anything or not.

Virtual Desktop VR settings (captured from the Quest, can't be screenshot from the PC, hence the weird distortion) :

Lowering the "VR graphics quality" doesn't seem to degrade the graphics in the slightest, at least for Alyx. Everyone seems to bang on about the 90 Hz screen of the Quest 2, but I can't say I notice any difference even between 60 and 72 fps. Not sure if "sliced encoding" should be on here - I read somewhere that this isn't supported for Alyx., so you might want to try turning that off.  "Extra latency mode" can probably be turned off too - I turned it on to see if this would affect the frame dropping.

Virtual Desktop streaming settings :

Not sure what any of these do but they worked for me.

The most important settings seem to be the quality settings inside Alyx, the codec, and the VR quality in Virtual Desktop. Note that these do not work well for other games : Skyrim, with these settings, looks like pixelated vomit. Alyx, however, looks fantastic - very nearly indistinguishable from playing it via cable.

Also, since I have a 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz network available, I disabled the Quest's access to the 2.4 GHz network since it's basically unusable for streaming. My PC has an ethernet connection, and even though Virtual Desktop insists on warning me that it's on a different network, wireless gaming works just fine. 

Anyway, all this is what worked for me. Virtual Desktop is great, but it does take a bit of tweaking to really optimise it.

Review : Utopia For Realists

I can't bear to end the year on a negative note, so let's offset the pointlessness that was Radicals Chasing Utopia with Rutger Bregman's infinitely better Utopia For Realists. 

This is everything I wanted it to be. Unlike RCU, UFR focuses on the goal, not the people seeking it. It's well-researched, comprehensive yet succinct, immensely readable, highly persuasive, and - perhaps most importantly - focuses on achievable, consistent visions of the future instead of a bunch of random nutters. And unlike the slightly deranged Stephen Pinker, Bregman understands that statistics shouldn't be cherry-picked to reveal whatever you want them to say, and, more importantly, that although progress has indeed been made, there's far more to life than the absolute standards of living conditions.

I don't have any major criticisms of this book. The worst I can say is that at times it feels a little bit like a confused, breathless mess, somewhat underdeveloped and contradictory - but only slightly. For the most part it stays on point, and seems (at least to me) carefully designed to appeal across the political spectrum. Bregman doesn't want to end capitalism or send us all back to living in the trees, but neither does he deny the real problems facing us. He explicitly views Utopian ideology as useful in shaping our behaviour, unlike Pinker who actually inhabits a Utopian fantasy-fallacy land. Overall, I give it a thoroughly excellent 8/10. Maybe 8.5.

Here's my selection of the main take-home messages. For the details, you should buy the book yourself.

Universal Basic Income

If there's a real downside to this book it's that there's nothing much new here, but the countering strength to this is that it's an excellent summary and bibliography. Bregman attacks all the classical arguments against (U)BI in force, especially the idea that free money makes people lazy. He cites study after study after study showing that they do not; the evidence on this point is overwhelming. My suspicion is that maybe extreme wealth can do this*, but at a very much higher threshold than basic subsistence. People fundamentally need more than mere resources to give their lives meaning, but they do need resources to have any prospect of a meaningful life. As he quotes an economist, "You can't pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you have no boots."

* But not necessarily. Whatever you think of Bezos or Musk, they do at least work hard.

The basic premise seems pretty watertight to me. People are generally good at making decisions that directly impact their own lives - it's only when those decisions affect others as well that they come unstuck. Bregman is not at all keen on what he calls the "surveillance state", here not meaning data harvesting but something more akin to the "nanny state" in the worse sense. That is, welfare programs have become highly centralised and bureaucratic. It's not that welfare is inherently bad - far from it, if anything funding needs to be increased - but it does matter how people access it. The left don't believe that money makes people lazy, but they do believe that they know what poor people need best - and which ones deserve it. This means enacting barriers between the deserving and undeserving poor, whereas in Bregman's view there should be no distinction at all : being poor is inherently a bad thing. Better by far to just give everyone money and let them make their own choices. This not only works but slashes masses of red tape and useless government bureaucracy in the process.

(In essence, both left and right have good points here, but the compromise they've reached is an unholy worst of both worlds. Bregman's view is that what's needed is more welfare, not less, but also far less government meddling : more welfare, less state.)

For my part I'm sold on the idea of replacing targeted welfare programs with simple cash handouts*. I'm less sold (meaning still very much open-minded) that we should give money to absolutely everyone, mainly due to how much this might cost. Bregman is far too hand-wavy when it comes to how much getting rid of all this red tape would really save.

* Not all, obviously. Giving people cash doesn't help them if there aren't any hospitals or schools to go to.

The need for greater wealth equality

Or rather, significantly less inequality - I fully agree that total equality is undesirable. Bregman makes a very solid case indeed here for the need to raise everyone out of poverty, and it's here he makes his greatest contribution against Pinkerism. He shows that sheer GDP per capita (that is, absolute standard of living) is a good proxy for the social health of a country but only up to a point. Beyond that, it's inequality that matters. And it's bad for everyone : this stratification of society causing problems for the rich as well as the poor. The root of it seems to be hyper-competitiveness, with everyone worrying more and more about where they are in the pecking order, resulting in more bullying, suspicion, depression, and loneliness. Yes, you need a certain basic standard, but this is a necessity, not a sufficiency : above the threshold very real problems still occur. You can't ignore these on the grounds that no-one is dying of hunger any more, unless you want to add your own pointless ceiling to the human condition.

One of the most interesting observations here is that poverty decreases mental bandwidth. The poor are very, very good at short-term thinking to make ends meet, but they aren't much use at long-term thinking. This is not a cause but a direct consequence of their lack of wealth, with there being measurable differences in IQ of the same people when they're wealthy and when they're less fortunate. Wealth, it seems, has a direct effect on the functioning of the brain. 

There are two reasons, then, why targeted programs (like better education) often fail : (1) excessive barriers make them very difficult for struggling people to access them, with the conditions of poverty making this literally too mentally taxing; (2) they tackle the symptoms but not the cause. The solution is blindingly simple : just give everyone more money. They won't become lazy : they'll be far more willing and able to work for themselves.

“Look…how would you make sure everyone in the world was well fed?” she demanded.

“Me? Oh, well, I…” The oh god spluttered for a moment. “I suppose you’d have to think about the prevalent political systems, and the proper division and cultivation of arable land, and—”

“Yes, yes. But he’d just give everyone a good meal,” said Susan.

“Oh, I see. Very impractical. Hah, it’s as silly as saying you could clothe the naked by, well, giving them some clothes.” 

—Terry Pratchett, Hogfather 

Bregman's underlying view is that avoiding poverty should be regarded as a basic right. We should stop blaming people for being poor and accept that they need help overcoming their situation, just like with a broken leg or an unpleasant disease. Kicking a man when he's down never does him any good : offer him a hand up instead. 

Work smarter, not harder

One thing that this book got me thinking about was what a true Utopia would feel like. Never mind the numbers for a moment, people ought to be aware of being in a demi-paradise. And clearly we're not, so we aren't. Happiness, Bregman points out in contrast to Pinker, is not really an accurate indicator of people living meaningful, satisfied lives, and anyway a society that was fully happy would be stagnant and apathetic.

Bregman's vision of a Utopia is one in which we work significantly less (though not never). Leisure, like a money, would be regarded as an essential human right, not something you have to earn. With a twenty-hour work week, people would only need to do meaningful jobs (as opposed to bullshit bureaucracy and the like) and, with a UBI providing most of their necessities, more people could be employed rather than less. This prevents any decrease in company-wide productivity (the total number of hours worked remaining at least constant) whilst ensuring that the wealth is far more evenly and fairly distributed. So long as their basic needs are provided for, says Bregman, it's not unemployment per se that causes social ills (alcoholism, depression, etc.), but the exact opposite : the stress of too much work, not too little. And individual productivity peaks at around six hours per day anyway, with real-world examples showing that exceeding this causes a gain that lasts only a few weeks before burnout starts kicking in.

I'm glossing over a lot of nuances that Bregman does at least acknowledge : that not every job is meaningless or unfulfilling (mine certainly isn't either !), that there is huge individual variation from person to person, and that not every job is better done by splitting tasks amongst more people. But there are a few points here that I'm a bit more skeptical of. 

For one, he's rather anti-TV, without giving much of a hint as to what leisure activities he thinks are more appropriate. For another, I'm not sold on the idea that merely changing our educational priorities will guarantee that (say) the next generation will have a huge job market for historians or zoologists; it doesn't follow that the skills we give people will automatically shape market demand. I share the sentiment that we should focus on more on what we want tomorrows' society to be like instead of trying to guess its future needs, but I don't buy the argument that we have such strict control over the future. Nor am I sold on the unavoidability of technologically-induced unemployment; Bregman acknowledges the legion of similar flawed predictions of the past, but fails to draw the lesson that predicting future jobs is very, very hard. And a worrying indication of all these bullshit jobs we do today is that maybe this will continue into the future : unless we're careful, less employment will only lead to more pointless "Hunger Wall" make-work programs.

Conclusion : Politics

These caveats notwithstanding, overall the book is well-informed by philosophy and history. It also reaches across the political divides. While many of the policies will naturally appeal to the left, Bregman cites plenty of examples of how they've been endorsed by the right. Alaska has a UBI (if only a small one), while Utah has a similar program to tackle homelessness. Nixon's failed attempt at UBI can be traced to flawed information on a previous endeavour in 18th-century England rather than (entirely) ideological opposition, with the Democrats ultimately ending what looked like a guaranteed success.

Bregman does an excellent job of reminding us of the need for Utopian thinking, especially in a historical concept. It wasn't that long ago that shorter working weeks and basic income were widely seen not as merely inevitable, but desirable : that work is, essentially, a matter for machines, whereas living is for people. Bregman affords no small measure of blame to the left, not only for the "surveillance state", but also in giving in to certain hard-line factions among the right. Rather than fighting back with their own narrative, he sees the left as now restricting themselves to damage limitation at most. He cites a program of "chastity training" enacted by the Clinton government as being the epitome of the hollowing-out of the welfare state. Personally I found this appraisal of the left and right a much-needed eye-opener.

Bregman contends that one of the root problems is narcissism. The message "you're special" is damaging because everyone innately wants to believe that it's true - which is exactly why it's so dismally successful. The problem is that when things go wrong, this leads people to despair for themselves and to blaming others for problems not of their own making. An especially insidious difficulty is that the real progress that has been made makes it all the easier to fool people that a better life is theirs for the taking, and that it's their fault if they haven't achieved all their goals. And thus we get people saying that people asking for more holidays are "entitled", as though that were somehow a bad thing : you damn well should feel entitled to rest and relaxation, you shouldn't have to work yourself to the bone for a few measly days off each year.

It's time to fight back. Politics, Bregman says, is traditionally the province of progressive left, but the left has become unbearably dull. It doesn't have to be like this, and indeed, until very recently it wasn't. Taking lessons right out of Blair's playbook, he says that the left almost seem to prefer losing to winning over their demonised opponents. Instead of concessions and damage limitation, the left should be arguing more forcefully for their ideals, not less : since you'll usually get less than what you're after, aiming for something ahead of your true goal is just common sense. 

Perhaps societies narcissistic tendencies can give us a clue about how to tackle all this. Widespread narcissism is itself, ironically, not the fault of the average man in the street making bad choices, but due to relentless consumerist marketing and political rhetoricians. Before we can conjure grand narratives of more collective responsibility, maybe we should start with this very same simpler, more appealing message : it's not your fault. Yes, you matter, and you're special, but you're not the Chosen One. You don't have magical powers and you can't be expected to win if the odds are so fully stacked against you. With further irony, the way to achieve a better world may be to stop setting unrealistic goals for ourselves - and start setting them for society at large instead.

Review : Radials Chasing Utopia

The collapse of Arecibo, the imminent arrival of Christmas, and a splurge on VR games have all kept me from blogging or checking any kind of social media much of late. But I will break radio silence to complete my review of Jamie Bartlett's "Radicals Chasing Utopia".

I've already covered his downright weird and wrong-headed chapter on blaming anti-racist activists for the prevalence of racism. Still, I thought there might be enough in the rest to warrant a separate post or two before doing a longer write-up, but there really isn't. It's a tremendously shallow book : lots of breadth, virtually no depth, few attempts at generalisation, little clarity about what the author actually thinks  - and plenty of hypocrisy when he does. Honestly, what's the point of spending so much time and research actually being immersed in so many radical cultures (an undeniably arduous and time-consuming task) only to reduce it to a pathetically thin scraping in a book like this ? Sigh. I give it 6/10 overall, mostly because it's extremely readable.

The Activists Paradox

There is one chapter I liked very much though : "The Activists Paradox", which has some flashes of brilliance. Here he focuses mainly on environmental activism, but - for once - ventures to describe some more general conditions. For example, he nicely distinguishes between (let's call them) career activists and nimbyists (Not In My Backyard) :

Activists are the pros : they roam the country, joining causes and taking risks. They are the people for whom being an activist is part of their identity and social life. It's like being 'a hacker' or 'a foodie' : not just something you do but something that you are. Nimbys are different : they are the ordinaries who are upset about something in their own backyard. They don't have a subculture. They're just angry.

This goes some way to explaining why both are, for quite different reasons, often unpopular and  unsuccessful. A career activist makes an entire lifestyle out of being against things rather than in favour of anything in particular. In that sense they are similar to some of the things they most vitriolically oppose : they define themselves only by things they're opposed to. Their outrage is, to some degree, manufactured and not taken seriously. And their subculture is highly developed and - albeit quite unintentionally - inclusive only of a very particular sort of person :

No other group I spent time with invested the same amount of time or effort trying to get people involved in decision-making or being more diverse. The problem is that activists confuse the ends with the means : they have elevated the procedure and language to the level of a religious sacrament... the result is usually an obsession with language and procedure rather than results. Everyone here very carefully, very deliberately, used the correct hand gestures and appropriate words. And yet nearly everyone was still a white graduate type.

Traditionally right-wing voters worried about the environment would, in theory, share much in common with activists. But they might not see past the obsession with intersectionality or anti-capitalist tropes about open borders and corporatism. This is why direct-action environmentalists seem to elicit such disdain from their opponents. It's not the ideas or the arguments they object to, so much as the type of people they are. It's a visceral dislike rather than an intellectual one.

He provides a very nice first-hand example of this when taking part in an "action" against a coal mine. Both the protestors and the miners got along amicably, with the miners worried for the activists safety. The protestors don't come across as crazed lunatics and the miners aren't shown as capitalist pigs. Indeed, the miners actually support clean energy, but, as one put it, "this lot are against everything". It's not that they don't want renewable energy, it's that they don't see it as currently practical (of course we can debate to what extent this is accurate, but this is a very different prospect to being fundamentally opposed to renewables in principle). There are no heroes and villains here, just ordinary, flawed people.

The tragic thing about activism is that it feels almost inevitable. It's inevitable that only activists get sufficiently motivated by abstract global problems to risk arrest; inevitable that they create a tight subculture; inevitable that this subculture keeps the movement motivated but smaller than it could be.

 Nimbys, however, have an extremely powerful secret weapon : scones.

The anti-fracking movement is not inclusive because its supporters use the word 'cis' instead of male or female; it's because they happen to be naturally welcoming. Consensus decision-making is very attractive at the theoretical level, but at the subconscious level cups of tea and home-made scones will beat it every time.

I suspect one could here go on an extended rant about angry "woke" people on Twitter, but let's leave that for now. More to the point : why are some protest movements successful, at least in terms of numbers, while others remain confined to the hardcore ? Bartlett uses the example of the coal mining incident :

Contrary to popular belief, people don't commit to a cause based solely on a rational or objective consideration of statistics and facts. If they did, there would have been 10,000 people at Ffos-y-fran, not 3,00. People also sign up because they think it will be fulfilling or because their friends are in it or it looks like their sort of thing... they include things that on first sight appear frivolous - language, dress sense, accents, social background, class, skin colour and a thousand small things - but which help people find self-realisation, belonging and fulfilment.

This is partly why the activists at Ffos-y-fran were so homogenous and limited in numbers. The cultural framing created a ceiling. Even their attempts to mitigate the problem through micro-procedure was itself part of the frame. By contrast, the cultural framing of the name Bette or Tina or Maureen [from the "Nanas" group of anti-fracking protestors] is an ordinary and concerned grandmother, not a university-educated professional activist.

He goes to point out that while the Nanas are every bit as informed as the professionals, no-one feels excluded by a worried grandmother. But nimbys in general have a different problem than career activists : their cause is often (by definition) very much local and of no concern to anyone outside their particular area. And as an indirect result they're not taken very seriously. After all, new housing or power plants do have to be built somewhere, so nimbys have to work extremely hard to show why their particular backyard is indeed a special case.

But sometimes, the interests of nimbyists and career activists are closely aligned. And that can potentially lead to real success, as in the case of the anti-fracking movement. Here, then, is at least a partial formula for successful action. You need the training an commitment of the professionals, but you also need the everyday mass appeal of the nimbys. And you want focus. You don't want a movement against carbon emissions to broaden into one against capitalism - no, not even if capitalism really is itself the root cause. The more things you oppose, the more you make the movement about activism itself, the more people you'll alienate and the less successful you'll be.

Overall

Unfortunately the activism section is the only one I really got anything much out of. The others are somewhat educational and generally fairly interesting in terms of specific topics (transhumanism, psychedelics, libertarianism, the far right, commune dwellers) but Bartlett makes no effort to draw any more generalised conclusions. He rarely ventures his own opinion on the different groups, ironically to an extent I found distracting : I want to know what the author thinks of the people he spent so long with ! It's such an obvious thing to expect that it was notable by its absence.

Worse, most of the radicals come across as low-intelligence nutters. I don't think that was his intent, but by passing no more comments than frequent skepticism and stereotypical platitudes, that's what they become reduced to. It feels less of impartial perspective and more a rudderless, aimless meandering; a fair level of description but pretty nearly zero explanation or analysis.

Personally I would far, far prefer to have someone make a good solid argument for or against a position, otherwise it's a meaningless information dump. Put some spin on it, for god's sake man ! I won't hold you to it ! I just want to have a staring position to explore this issue. And - and I can't begin to stress how much this annoys me - PUT ANY COMMENTARY FOOTNOTES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE. AND IF THEY'RE TOO LONG, WORK THEM IN TO THE MAIN BODY OF THE TEXT. I DON'T WANT TO KEEP FLICKING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN THE MAIN TEXT AND A SECTION AT THE BACK BECAUSE THAT IS JUST SO FUCKING STUPID. STOP IT.

(Honestly, this is the worst book for footnote-flicking I've ever read. And that's saying something.)

Now that I've got that off my chest, the final thing I have to mention is that the conclusion section feels downright hypocritical. Throughout the book, Bartlett has overwhelmingly adopted a skeptical position - not one of outright denial, but definitely one that's less than enthusiastic for just about any of the people he's been with. Very rarely indeed does he have a good thing to say about the ideas he investigates (even though he's more considerate regarding the people themselves). So when he advocates in favour of having a society that tolerates and to some degree encourages radicals, I find two faults with his logic - not his conclusion at all, just his reasoning. First, the hypocrisy :

Most people will probably go along with this reasonably inoffensive argument... but they will usually find some sophisticated reason as to why this should not apply to ideas with which they strongly disagree. I heard this often : "not those radicals".

Wait, so you mean exactly as you yourself have just spent the entire bloody book disparaging ? If you thought any of the radicals here actually might be right, you certainly fooled me. And the thing is, his choice of radicals does feel extremely odd. Transhumanism doesn't even advocate for any specific course of action, it just believes certain things are going to happen somehow. True, nation-states are not the only way to organise societies, but I think they've existed (at least in a basic form) a lot longer than Bartlett gives them credit for. While his criticism of anti-terrorism measures seems valid, he presentex exactly zero alternatives and so comes across as a complete berk. And sure, sometimes cults do become fully-fledged world religions, but nothing in the commune he investigates persuades me that it has the slightest chance of avoiding the fate of 99.99% of such endeavours and dying a forgotten death. So why choose this one ?

The thing is, there are plenty of other radical ideas he could have pursued that might have stood a better chance. Re-usable rocketry now looks like it has a real shot at drastically slashing the cost of access to space. Movements for a Universal Basic Income are growing. Calls for Open Borders are still fringe, but surely this is far more plausible than actually doing away with the state entirely. And  while I commend him for getting up close and personal with the far right, to avoid examining the far left feels unfair. 

So yes, I agree with the sentiment that radicals might be right, but I see no problem at all in saying "not these particular nutters". Granted it's less extreme than comparing a Flat Earth conspiracy video with an online university course, but the principle is the same. Not every radical is right, and some are a lot more plausible than others.

The second fault I find with his endorsement of the ideas he doesn't believe is altogether worse and weirder.

Tommy Robinson and Pegida-UK are necessary for the existence of its opposite. Their presence forces us to examine our ideas, work out what we believe, why we believe it and mobilise. If Pegida did not exist, the arguments against it - in this case in favour of multiculturalism, or an authentic British Islam - would lose their vitality and strength. Similarly, the existence of radical Islam, and the fundamental threat it poses to liberal democracy, gives life and meaning to the arguments in defence of individual liberty.

I call absolute bullshit. Yes, we need contrary ideas. No, we don't need to have innocent people suffer in order that we ourselves might not. Sure, the voices for liberty and democracy are (logically) loudest in places which don't have them (because who shouts for things they already have ?) but the idea that we need Nazi-level ideologies to remind us of just how good we have it... sorry, no. This basically says, "you innocent people, you lot all the way over there... your suffering is good because it makes us happier and more secure in our own situation". And that's a whole lot of nope.

Next on my reading list : Utopia For Realists. Improving society surely isn't the province only of nutters, so I'm hoping that will be a lot more me.