This article is BRUTAL and will SHOCK YOU !

If you were expecting scenes of a VIOLENT and SHOCKING nature... I'm afraid you'll likely be disappointed. I lied. But with good reason...

"Trigger warnings are, at best, trivially helpful," writes a research team led by psychologist Mevagh Sanson of the University of Waikato. The paper finds they "have no effect, or might even work slightly in the direction of causing harm." 

All the experiments were structured similarly. Participants first reported their current emotional state to create a baseline. Then they either read a story, or watched a video, about a disturbing topic such as child abuse, murder, and physical domestic abuse. Half of them saw trigger warnings before being exposed to the disquieting material, and half did not. Examples included "TRIGGER WARNING: The following story contains violence and death" and "TRIGGER WARNING: The following video may contain graphic footage. You may find this content disturbing."

I don't know about you, but that just usually inflames my sense of morbid curiosity...

"People who saw trigger warnings, compared to people who did not, judged material to be similarly negative, felt similarly negative, experienced similarly frequent intrusive thoughts and avoidance, and comprehended subsequent material similarly well," the researchers report.

There's something ineffably obnoxious about trigger warnings. I mean, if I'm going to write about something particularly gruesome or disturbing in some way, I consider it only polite to warn people. In turn, I don't particularly want to see acts of Nazi bestiality or whatever other horrors are out there, so warning people just seems like common bloody sense. Yet prefix it with "trigger warning", or worse, "TRIGGER WARNING", and I feel like a massive douche (thus making the phrase itself a trigger warning, which is pleasingly fractal). If people were just allowed to give perfectly sensible warnings without drawing attention to it, no-one would care. There certainly wouldn't be academic studies about it.

As I've previously ranted about extensively, there's a difference between knowledge, belief, and behaviour. Knowing what's coming isn't likely to change my feelings about it when it happens (unless perhaps I embark on a specific course of actions designed to do so, e.g. reflecting on it very deeply). Instead it lets me select what I want to see so I can avoid being grossed out or angered or whatever. These kinds of warnings are very similar to those on TV about sports events scores : I won't be able to brace myself by knowing what's coming, I'll just choose not to view it at all. If I cared about sports, that is.

Finally, the inevitable question is whether they should be used in universities. Well, yeah, of course they should. We shouldn't spare people's feelings when there's a need to discuss the various horrors of the past, but there's equally no reason to ram grotesque imagery down people's throats either. Warnings don't have to be as blunt as the hilarious, "contains scenes of extended mild peril" as found on some movie trailers. Most history books don't start by describing the lurid details of Aztec sacrifices, they build up to it. It ought to be bloomin' obvious to anyone if and when they should stop reading, and it's their own damn fault if they don't. Continuously warning people about every single instance of slight inconvenience - yeah, that's stupid. Giving them a quick overall heads-up at the start... well what's wrong with that ?

Trigger Warnings Do Not Work, New Study Finds

Trigger warnings-those alerts provided to college students in advance of potentially disturbing material-have prompted an intense philosophical and ideological debate. But do they actually achieve their stated goal of reducing emotional distress when dealing with sensitive subjects? New research from New Zealand comes to a firm conclusion: They do not.

Training bees to talk

 Well, sort-of. Not really. But that's how I'm going to spin it.

By deciphering the instructive messages encoded in the insects' movements, called waggle dances, the teams hope to better understand the insects' preferred forages and the location of these food sources. Nearly six decades ago, Karl von Frisch, a Nobel-prize winning ethologist, discovered that the angle of the dancer's body relative to the vertical encodes the direction of the forage, and the distance to the food source is communicated by the duration of the bee's dance. 

During the waggle dance, a successful forager returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction from the hive to the food source by performing multiple, repeated figure-eight-like movements called waggle runs. According to Couvillon and Schürch, different bees conveying the same location can vary their waggle runs, and even individual bees repeating a run may alter their dance. Moreover, bees are inspired to dance only when they have located particularly tantalizing food resources. Anomalies such as these, coupled with a greater understanding of bees' highly developed cognition, inspired the husband-and-wife duo to develop their own distance-duration calibration system six years ago.

Their meticulous calibration process requires that each bee is numbered and videotaped. Team members then spend months in front of computers analysing each dancer's movements to determine a distance-to-duration calibration. "What also makes our research different is that we trained many numbers of bees and followed them great distances," said Schürch. "You can train bees to go to a feeder and move it farther and farther away."

Being able to translate bee communications no doubt has a bazillion fantastic spin-offs, but what I'm really interested in is animal cognition. There was a recent article on how bees can count up to four and even understand zero at some level, which is remarkable. But are they thinking or just responding mechanically to external stimuli ? Do they actually understand (whatever that means) what they're doing or are they just acting on pure instinct ? Does a bee have the same kind of internal experiences as a human or is it no more than a flying furry abacus ? We can never know for sure, but this gives some interesting clues :

The team discovered that the individual noise, or variation between bees, was so high that the difference between location and sub-species was rendered biologically irrelevant. "While there were differences among populations in how they communicate, it doesn't matter from the bees' perspective," said Schürch. "We cannot tell them apart in terms of how they translate this information. There is huge overlap. In effect, a bee from England would understand a bee from Virginia and would find a food source in the same way with a similar success rate."

Which strongly suggests to me that bee communication is purely genetic and instinctive. If they were actually thinking about what they were doing and understanding it, there ought to be language drift between populations. The article doesn't say how much they investigated different species though.

Researchers decipher and codify the universal language of honey bees

March 27, 2019 , Virginia Tech For Virginia Tech researchers Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch, the Tower of Babel origin myth-intended to explain the genesis of the world's many languages-holds great meaning. The two assistant professors and their teams have decoded the language of honey bees in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects' highly sophisticated and complex communications.

Indicators are NOT all blinking simultaneously

So the indicative votes have passes their first stage. Shortly beforehand I wrote elsewhere :

If I were Theresa May and I'd just walked into a door, thereby restoring a modicum of sanity, my plan would be as follows :

1) Solicit opinions on alternative options. This appears to have already been done.
2) Hold a series of indicative, free, non-binding votes on as many options as possible, including the existing proposed deal.
3) Select a subset of the most popular options (with luck no more than three). Hold cross-party discussions with MPs to see if they can be persuaded to reduce those options down to two.
4) Hold further indicative votes to get hard numbers.
5) Repeat 2-4 until a binary preference emerges. If necessary, request further short extension from EU on the grounds that a path to resolution is emerging.
6) Hold binding votes on final two choices.

That might not work, but it's what I would do...

This is very nearly what actually happened. May uttered some usual air-escaping-from-lungs level of stupid comments about being reluctant on the grounds that Parliament might vote for "something completely impractical" - as though Brexit wasn't ! - and still wanting another vote on her deal, despite Bercow and the DUP again rejecting it, and some idiot Tory even suggested making the indicative votes binding (which would have defeated the whole purpose). But ultimately stage 2 was completed. Except, weirdly, the opposition decided that their votes should not be free but that MPs should be whipped (meaning they have to toe the party line or resign). I find this completely bizarre, but not at all surprising coming from Corbyn. It probably didn't make much difference since they were directed to vote against all the harder versions of Brexit, which they likely would have done anyway.

So yes, there were certainly shenanigans aplenty, but ultimately things are going to plan. The results were not optimal, but they weren't necessarily that awful either. There seems to be a general cry of despair that Parliament did not succeed in choosing an alternative yet, but this is unwarranted. Yes, it would have been better if they'd chosen at least one (or preferably several) options by majority. But this is not necessary, because it's only stage 2 of 6. Sure, stage 3 is going to be slightly modified to, "select a subset of the least unpopular options", but that does not invalidate the remaining stages. Knowing now for certain that all options are unpopular, and having quantitative estimates of which ones are the least intolerable if not the most desirable, is a necessary first step.

How bad were the defeats ? There are many ways to slice the data, of which the most sophisticated is probably this one. But I prefer this simpler graph of the net vote against each deal, using data from the Guardian article below. This shows the scale of the challenge to get each proposal accepted, though it lacks details on party support.

I'm not going to do a detail breakdown of each - for that, see this article (I have labelled option O as "managed no deal v. 2", option H as "managed no deal v. 3", and used the results of Meaningless Vote 2 for May's deal). Taking the figures at face value, it seems that only Ken Clarke's custom's union and a confirmatory public vote (i.e. a second referendum) have any hope of passing. If Parliament continues to debate more options, based on numbers it would probably have to include Labour's custom union plans, an alternative, more complex "common market 2.0", and completely revoking article 50. All versions of No Deal have nowhere near enough support to have a hope of passing and can be completely eliminated.

Of course, it might well still be the case the Parliament is not able to choose anything at all. But we won't know that until next week* : at least now they have the data they need to even attempt to forge an acceptable compromise and make a truly meaningful choice.

*Notwithstanding any other unexpected developments that could render all this completely obsolete, which is not at all implausible.

All eight indicative vote options on Brexit defeated by MPs - as it happened

The day's political developments as they happened, including the indicative votes debate as MPs choose from eight options

Pinker's democracy

I'm finally reading one of the notorious Stephen Pinker's books : Enlightenment Now. I'll have more general comments on this in the future (suffice to say that that it's really, really weird), but I thought the chapter on democracy deserved something by itself.

One can think of democracy as a form of government that threads the needle, exerting just enough force to prevent people from preying on each other without preying on the people itself. A good democratic government allows people to pursue their lives in safety, protected from the violence of anarchy, and in freedom, protected from the violence of tyranny.

He goes on to note that the great paradox of democracy is that it seems to work despite neither the voters nor the leaders acting in each other's best interests. Leaders often act only in their own self-interest while the voters are fickle, uneducated and capricious. Why, then, does this work at all ?

Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question, "Who should rule ?", but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed. The political scientist John Mueller broadens the idea from a binary Judgement Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain... Women's suffrage is an example* : by definition, they could not vote to grant themselves the vote, but they got it by other means.

* A dreadful one as it happens - I'll return to this in a minute.

Clearly implicit in this is David Davis' message :

So we have three possible guiding principles of democracy :

1. Rule by the people - enacting their will, no matter what.
2. A peaceful process whereby the people decide who gets to rule.
3. A process of giving the people a voice for discussion.

These principles are neither mutually exclusive nor automatically compatible. Option (1) is not much used in modern representative democracies - it's become subsumed by option (2). We get to decide policy only indirectly, by voting only for people who promise to carry out their stated proposals. This means that a modern, healthy democracy is really a blend of all three principles : discussions occur at all levels of society, which filters through to the policies of (potential) rulers, and we then vote on these. Rulers are elected and removed peacefully, knowing that everyone has a fair chance and a chance to change. This does not, however, mean that the process feels very pleasant to those experiencing it - the end goal is a maximum possible level of civic harmony, but in practise this amounts more to minimising dissatisfaction; more a process of working out what everyone is prepared to put up with than what would actually please them.

The possibility of change, however, is quite obviously common to all three options. You cannot use force to get what you want, but you generally don't need to - if things aren't going well for your cause today, perhaps they will improve tomorrow. You can continue to press your case in almost any eventuality. Yet you ultimately accept that your cause may not win because everyone else agrees to accept that too : you win some, you lose some. Democracy in all its forms implicitly acknowledges that situations can change and we are not bound to the mistakes of the past because we can always peacefully undo them. The people's mandate is something that must be listened too, not a stick to beat them with.

Sometimes, though, these principles are at odds with each other. The people may want something different from what their leaders want. They may be given a voice for discussion but the leaders dismiss or ignore them. The people may want (or feel compelled to enact, as the suffragettes were in Pinker's ill-chosen example) a violent process of change. The point is that none of the three principles are at all sensible if chosen exclusively. Rule by the people converges to tyranny by majority without discussion or peaceful implementation. A peaceful election does little good if it's for someone no-one wants. Rulers who hear people's grievances are no use if they don't at least try and address them or still use violence to stay in power even if they do.

So the only way is to seek a harmony between the three, knowing when to give preference to one and when to the others. The problem is that while all three of these principles are noble and well-intentioned, there is no such equivalent guiding light as to how to reconcile the conflicts that emerge between them. There is no meta, overarching principle to help decide which one is most appropriate given the circumstances.

As Pinker goes on :

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratisation, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalise its uppity citizens.

I would say rather that it's a key principle, though not the only one. Rather than tolerating dissent, in response to the violence of the suffragettes governments acted undemocratically to try and suppress the movement - a curious example of an undemocratic action leading to an undemocratic reaction that eventually led to a much more democratic system overall. Attempting to balance the three principles if often messy and sometimes it simply fails entirely, but the institution of democracy itself appears to be resilient, at least to some degree. Pinker provides another messy example :

Capital punishment was once ubiquitous among countries, and it was applied to hundreds of misdemeanours in gruesome public spectacles of torture and humiliation... The abolition of capital punishment has gone global. The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club : China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, and the United States. 

As in other areas of human flourishing, the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies. This American exceptionalism illuminates the torturous path by which moral progress proceeds from philosophical arguments to facts on the ground. It also showcases the tension between the two conceptions of democracy we have been examining : a form of government whose power to inflict violence on its citizens is sharply circumscribed, and a form of government that carries out the will of the majority of its people. The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is, in one sense, too democratic. 

The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy... It was only after a couple of decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos - at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital punishment - that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary. But the United States, for better or worse, is closer to having government by the people for the people.

(EDIT : If you watch Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States, you'll probably come away thinking that the club of highly conservative far-right nations isn't so unlikely at all. Similarly, while the United States does have strong "by the people" elements in its democracy, these are by no means absolute, and the "for the people" element is practically laughable. These caveats are somewhat beside the point of this post, however.)

Capital punishment wasn't abolished through direct democracy but through the judgement of experts. Governments heard multiple different voices and opted against a simple majority choice. This was the correct decision, but on what principle was this based ? Again, there doesn't appear to be one. The prospect of change is not in itself a fourth guideline but implicit in the main three. But how to juggle those three - in particular how to decide which complaints to address, when to prefer that of experts to those of the masses - that is lacking. The messy, practical combination of the three does help somewhat, as it means inevitably that people must compromise and no-one is expecting to get everything they want all of the time. Everyone accepts that the laws won't always favour them, and that it is fundamentally possible and necessary to make choices that some people will disagree with. But this process is far from perfect.

Brexit is all this writ large. The people spoke in favour of a course of action at odds with reality, "something completely impractical" as May has (ironically) described the indicative votes. Perhaps even worse than this is that they spoke passionately, but indecisively. Strength of feeling isn't accounted for in most electoral procedures - doing so would risk creating a utility monster. How in the world could one judge the votes of a hundred casually in favour with that of one who was vehemently opposed ? There does not seem to be any answer to this.

Until recently, we've dealt with the somewhat less consequential choices of electing leaders, accepting the usual sort of compromises on the grounds that they were relatively easy to undo. But with Brexit we face a far more permanent choice, and that is at odds with the whole basis of the system. The very least we could do is check if we're really sure about this. Instead, government policy appears to be a bizarre attempt to selectively determine what the will of the people is and avoid any further discussion. It is not so much undemocratic as it is a gross perversion of the process; turning a responsible, progressive democracy into something more akin to a suicide cult. Sure, it's a democratic process. Is it one we should use in government ? Hell no.

Blame it all on the hippies

This is a much more compelling argument than the idea that we inevitably get stupider and more racist as we get older : successive generations are shaped by their own unique histories. With such different forces at work, they inevitably turn out differently. And of course, there's enough scatter to explain, say, my parents, who aren't of the anti-integration mindset. We should also remember that racism was much more socially acceptable back in the day (that is, after all, a major factor in why the Nazis rose to power at all). But the narrative has a strong appeal : a war generation who saw the world at its worst, a succeeding generation of the relatively privileged who were presented with scapegoats for their misfortunes, and latter generations like mine who have grown up with European integration as being absolutely normal. To the war generation, of course we shouldn't go back to the bad old days. To my generation, of course we shouldn't undo decades of economic and political harmonisation, any more than we should cut our arms off. But to the middle generations, the EU is neither normal nor necessary. Damn those ungrateful hippies.


When defining a ‘war generation’ that experienced the majority of their formative period during the Second World War, as well as a number of other more recent generations, this war generation is revealed as displaying significantly more positive views towards European integration than the immediate post-war generations. In fact, the size of this generational effect between the war and post-war generations is approximately equivalent to the same change in attitude that would be expected from a two-year reduction in education levels, a factor well known to increase Euroscepticism... the war generation have more positive attitudes towards the EU than the immediately following generations. Indeed, only the most recent generation, the millennial generation, display more positive attitudes towards the EU than the war generation.

One explanation for these results is that the war generation give a premium to the pacific benefits of European institutions. Having experienced first-hand the horrors of war, they place a high value on the founding principles of unity that the EU promotes. The most recent generations also view integration more positively, given that these individuals have grown up with the UK’s membership of the EU as the norm. The concept of not being a part of Europe – with its visible signifiers of flags, anthems and institutions – is likely to be discordant to those from the millennial generation. Conversely, the post-war and 60/70s generations in the UK have neither the memories of wartime nor the routinised experiences of EU membership during their formative years. They therefore display the most hostile attitudes towards integration.

However, this analysis also reveals additional elements that are driving the cohort effects between the war and the following generations. Indeed, the post-war generation are in fact more likely to associate the EU with bringing peace than their younger counterparts, and yet they display more negative overall attitudes towards integration.

Explanations for these results can be found in British history; the post-war and 60s/70s generations were the first to confront the fall of empire during their formative years, as well as the first mass immigration from the Commonwealth. This fuelled insecurities over British identity, coming to the fore in such instances as Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood Speech” and the Immigration Acts of the 1960s. These results therefore support the notion that it is during times when identities are threatened that they become mobilised as points of political salience, and that these heightened political environments can shape individuals’ opinions long into the future.

Britain's wartime generation are almost as pro-EU as millennials

There is a significant difference in opinion on Brexit between different age groups in the UK, with older citizens generally exhibiting more negative attitudes toward the EU than younger ones.

Platonic turtles all the way down

The article's title belies the author's intent, but it's still a very good article. Panpsychism is a popular concept. Articles range from the desperately religious (the notion that we're all "shards in the mind of God"), the miserably stupid (in which the author absurdly confuses "possible" with "probable"), right up to the intelligent and philosophical (noting that conscious experiences and relational properties are fundamentally different from discrete physical objects).

Max Tegmark boldly claims that “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage.” Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behaviour of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them". He attributes existence solely to descriptions, while incongruously denying the very thing that is described in the first place. Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real. This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception.

By way of analogy, it is possible to write—as Lewis Carroll did—that the Cheshire Cat’s grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is another thing entirely to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means. To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such.

Whereas vagueness may be defensible in regard to natural entities conceivably beyond the human ability to apprehend, it is difficult to justify when it comes to a human concept, such as information. We invented the concept, so we either specify clearly what we mean by it or our conceptualisation remains too vague to be meaningful. In the latter case, there is literally no sense in attributing primary existence to information.

Well, the map is not the territory and all that. Language, with the dubious exception of mathematics, in an inevitably imperfect description of the world around us. We all of us know (or think we know) at some level what the difference is between physical objects and non-physical concepts. Yet trying to describe the difference with any degree of rigour is bloody difficult. If information is all there is, if it's just descriptions and descriptions of descriptions - a latter-day "turtles all the way down" approach combined with Platonic Forms, then that hardly seems to make sense of the world. So far as we can tell, the Universe seems to obey very strict rules. Replacing its components from physical to non-physical feels like a pointless linguistic sleight-of-hand, a sophistic tactic that doesn't actually achieve anything but sounds damn good.

The untenability of information realism, however, does not erase the problem that motivated it to begin with: the realisation that, at bottom, what we call “matter” becomes pure abstraction, a phantasm. How can the felt concreteness and solidity of the perceived world evaporate out of existence when we look closely at matter?

To make sense of this conundrum, we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modelled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behaviour of that world, not in the world itself.

The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism.

I think the author is playing their own word games here. The heart of the issue is the difference between physical, real objects like chairs and atoms and sausages, and relational properties like velocity and justice. My own take is that these non-physical properties clearly do exist and influence us, though exactly how that happens I leave as a cheerful mystery. The point, though, is that saying, "it's just a subjective experience", or the notion that consciousness is just our experience of the world, (or even an emergent property) gets us nowhere. What the hell is an experience ? Why should I perceive some electrochemical flows but not others ? Do calculators have thoughts ? Do plants ? What do we mean by "non-physical" ? It's often taken to mean something like a ghost, which has something very similar to physical reality but on another "plane", whatever that means. Yet emergent properties, or concepts like justice and colour and mischievousness, are clearly something very different again  - they are much more subtle than merely being a different kind of physical.

No, I don't find the author's argument that it's just our experience at all convincing. It is obvious that our descriptions and perceptions are not the same as the things themselves (Plato worked that one out in depth). That gets us no closer to understanding what the difference between things and our perception of things really is, let alone perception itself.

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that "protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars" are all redundant "baggage." Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself.

Predicting chimp intelligence

During the study, they noticed a wide range of skills among the chimps and wondered whether they could measure this variation in ability—and whether there were studies that could predict the chimps’ overall performance in all areas, like an IQ test in humans. So they gave a battery of physical and social tests to 106 chimps at Ngamba Island and the Tchimpounga chimpanzee sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo, and to 23 captive chimpanzees and bonobos in Germany. In one experiment, chimps were asked to find food in a container after it had been shuffled around with empty containers. In another, they had to use a stick to get food placed on a high platform. The researchers analysed the data to determine if the scores in some tests helped predict performance in others.

"In general, we don’t find any kind of general intelligence factor that can predict intelligence in all areas," Herrmann says. "But we did find a big variation overall, and this one outstanding individual."

The article gives precious few details about how smart this one chimp is. A much better demonstration, fascinating in its own right, can be seen in this short video. In some ways, chimp memory is far superior to humans :

The stand-out individual, Natasha, was the chimp that caretakers—who don’t administer tests to the chimps but do feed them, clean their cages, and accompany them on walks—consistently ranked as the smartest based on only the way she interacted with them. But there's nothing about Natasha's life—extra attention or time spent with humans, for example—that explains how she became so astute. "Motivation and temperament probably play a role," Herrmann says. "That's something that we want to look more into."

That suggests to me a strong genetic component to intelligence. Though it would be interesting correlate this with an analysis of chimp sociology, e.g. apart from their handlers, how do those genius chimps interact with each other ? Do they tend to learn their skills from other chimps ? Are the cleverest chimps the ones with the most social connections ? Of course, then one would have to determine if these social connections drive intelligence or if it's the cleverest chimps who are able to make those connections in the first place...

I guess a better study would be to find some short-lived, moderately social animal (one that can tolerate isolation) and raise some individuals in isolation and an equal number as a group. The isolated group would be a control to determine the rate that abilities evolve without "teaching", i.e. watching other chimps or handlers. The social group would show how abilities spread through the group. What would be particularly interesting would be to compare the rate of polymath animals in both groups : are geniuses naturally gifted or are they made by society ?

Of course, one would have to be very careful to extrapolate this too far to human societies. Someone may be fantastically intelligent yet simply lack the crucial piece of information to make a big breakthrough; they might not find the field they're really good at; social structures may mean their discoveries are not communicated effectively, etc. But it would still be an interesting experiment.

Chimps' Answer to Einstein

Natasha, a chimp at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda, has always seemed different from her peers. She's learned to escape from her enclosure, teases human caretakers, and scores above other chimps in communication tests. Now, Natasha has a new title: genius.

Just for the record

At the time of writing, Britain is in political chaos. The EU has, very reasonably, granted us a short extension to get our shit together and decide what we want to do about Brexit. May has blamed Parliament for this, but while a few right-wing tabloids are still clinging to demonising the EU, most polls show the Tories are seen as the primary guilty party. May's venal statement has been universally slammed, and rightly so; her condescending remark the next day that she was "expressing her frustration" hasn't won her any converts. All that's done is emphasise even more how little a grasp of reality and respect for due process May really has.

My preferred option has always been a unilateral revocation of Article 50. Unlike asking for more extensions, Britain can simply decide to stop this nonsense at a stroke (provided there's no prospect of re-invoking it in the foreseeable future), as ruled by the European Court of Justice. There's currently a poll running in support of this which is at 3.4 million signatures.

How seriously should we take this poll and the possibility of its success ? Well, we're very much in uncharted political waters right now. I never thought we'd even get close to entertaining a No Deal scenario. I never thought that May would have the audacity to blame Parliament for her own mistakes or that the Speaker would feel it necessary to remind MPs that they are none of them traitors. Predictions are a fool's game so I won't offer any. I will say I'm not optimistic though.

That said, some things both good and bad about the poll need to be said.

First, Andrea Leadsom :

Earlier Commons leader Andrea Leadsom dismissed the petition as not being on the same scale as the pro-Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum. "Should it reach 17.4 million respondents then I am sure there will be a very clear case for taking action," she told MPs. She added: "It's absolutely right that people do have the opportunity to put their views and that can then spark yet another Brexit debate."

Well, fair enough for saying that we have another opportunity to be heard. Nothing wrong there. Similarly even the mere possibility that the poll could cause change is cause for hope, albeit heavily tempered with realism and caution.

But the notion that it needs to reach 17.4 million in order to have any serious consequences should be preposterous and wrong on every level. The referendum was legally non-binding but MPs promised - and are still promising - to respect the result. It was therefore engendered with power an online poll can simply never match. Both polls may have legally identical force but a single casual remark by one MP cannot compete with the promises of the entire Cabinet.

The second issue is : are the numbers genuine ? Some kindly soul has plotted the signature numbers as a function of time :

To me, that looks weird. The early stages look fine : a slow rise as it gains virality, an overnight plateau when everyone was asleep... and then it gets a bit strange. First it becomes extremely linear, which it's been suggested was an artificial limit because of the maximum traffic the site could handle. But then it rose much more steeply before a second overnight plateau, before resuming at a similar rate the next day. Currently it's still rising rapidly, albeit in a bit of a wobble.

The BBC has consulted experts who believe it's unlikely this is due to bots. I am not entirely convinced by this : how difficult is it, really, to automatically create email addresses and find UK postcodes for the web form ? I do not understand why that would pose a formidable barrier; if someone can enlighten me, that'd be great. I can tell you from direct experience that there's nothing whatsoever stopping someone who has an email address and knows a potscode from voting. Perhaps some further checks are made later to remove fraudulent entries (I doubt it) but at the voting stage that's literally all there is to it.

I would love the poll to be genuine, and I can't believe it's due to Russian trolls as Nigel "Fuckface" Farage has claimed. All I'm saying is that the pattern of voting seems weird. While the petition grapher does offer other polls, it's difficult to compare because it includes time up to the present day, while most activity on polls is in the early phases (hence on a graph of long-dead polls the early stages are compressed, so you just see a steep rise and a long plateau). I'm not remotely qualified to say anything beyond, "this looks a bit odd to me, can anyone explain ?", mind you.

Third, people have asked why this is happening now. Well, this isn't the first poll about the issue. Far from it. Previous polls calling for a second referendum have amassed votes in the millions, while others calling for rescinding Article 50 have crossed the 100,000 mark. Now, however, it's do or die. Decision time has been kicked down the road once more, but just barely. If we don't have to actually make the decision itself right now, we do have to decide on the process with extreme urgency.


The poll isn't useless, and I would urge anyone who thinks we shouldn't leave to sign it and share it - for God's sake share it ! You have the absolute democratic right to change your mind, you do not have to let the result of a non-binding vote from three years ago determine your future. This is your vote. Yours. You do not have to go along with things just because everyone else is. You don't have to be bound by a result that you have the right to revoke; no democracy could function if it were so inflexible. That endless voting on the same issue would be unworkable does not make the opposite prospect - one vote for all eternity - any the less of a perversion of democracy. A balance must be struck.

I suspect that if any real change does occur, the poll will play only a minor role. More persuasive will be letters - actual letters, not just emails - to MPs and street protests. If you have the opportunity to protest, do so. The voices of the 48%, and especially those who have joined us, must be heard now more than ever. That we may not succeed in stopping Brexit does not excuse us from not trying.

Perhaps all we'll achieve is damage limitation - no matter. If history records this as a catastrophic failure of Parliament, then let it also show that we at least fought it to the end. But more optimistically, since Britain and America competed to see which country could screw themselves the hardest in 2016, let this be year we pulled out of the race to the bottom, dug deep within our collective soul, and found the courage to deal with the loss of face and slowly restored ourselves to some level of dignity. Far better and braver to face up to one's mistakes and admit them than ruthlessly pursing them for the sake of avoiding "embarrassment". If we led the world in a bizarre act of collective stupidity, let's show them that we can get ourselves out of it too. Then we can (eventually) get back to what we do best : mocking the Americans for having stupid politics.

May's dangerous game

This statement was even worse than I was expecting.

Theresa May, who campaigned for Remain, is now blaming Parliament for the deadlock. Yet Parliament wasn't involved in negotiating the deal - that was the responsibility of May and the government. Two Brexit secretaries resigned in the process because they thought the resulting deal wasn't good enough, while the overall rate of resignations under May's premiership is outstanding. At no point was Parliament involved in the negotiation process. Indeed, May said very clearly at the start that she wouldn't even be giving a running commentary. She was also highly reluctant to allow Parliament a "meaningful" vote at all - that only came about because of a court ruling.

Continuing to blame others for her own mess is a direct subversion of the democratic process. Parliament was not involved in the negotiation so MPs feel no sense of ownership of the deal - it is very much May's deal, not their deal. They are not duty-bound to vote in favour of whatever deal is put before them. To insist that they do so makes a mockery of the idea the vote was "meaningful" and therefore undermines Parliament's democratic sovereignty, which was supposedly what Brexit was all about.

In order for a vote to have meaning, there must be an alternative option available. While May dragged her heels even on the first vote, when it was (spectacularly) defeated an alternative should have been immediately presented. As it happened no backup plan was even considered, so no alternative came forth. There was no way Parliament could have made a meaningful choice because they simply weren't allowed to. Instead, May insisted that they vote again on the same deal. It was again rejected, qualifying May for the proverbial definition of insanity in doing the same thing again and expecting a different result.

It is not Parliament's fault that MPs keep doing their duty by declining a deal they had no part in and don't want. The responsibility to present them with an alternative rests squarely with May, not the opposition.

May further undermines the democratic process, ironically, by appealing directly the people. This insults MPs for doing their job while she avoids taking responsibility for what is manifestly her own failure. Her appeal to the public is also pragmatically foolish, as only 37% of the electorate voted for Brexit*. For her to claim that she is doing what the people wants insults those who voted against Brexit, never mind that it remains completely unclear if Brexit is still the majority choice - still less if May's deal is what the people want, of if they think MPs are responsible. This is a something that Brexiteers of all positions have been guilty of : presuming from a very simple question that their specific version of Brexit is what the people crave, despite the fact that no-one has asked the people if that's the case.

* EDIT : And according to this poll, the public blame the government more than they do MPs. 

May's reference to "arcane points of procedure" is a clear shot at the Speaker, who is also doing his duty to protect representative democracy. Forbidding identical votes is a long-established procedure and self-evidently a way to ensure that votes have consequences and therefore meaning. As he explained, the reason this procedure has not been used in recent years is only because identical motions have not been presented to the House. Thus the objective of the convention has been satisfied without recourse to forbidding repeated votes.

Not that May is the sole architect of her own nightmare though. By repeatedly refusing discussions and insisting with obscene single-mindedness on a general election, Corbyn reveals himself to have no more negotiation skills than May. The opposition are hardly blameless, yet ultimately as Prime Minister the burden of responsibility must fall on May. She invoked Article 50. She called a general election. She decided what kind of Brexit deal the people wanted. She forbade discussion with the opposition. She prevented any alternatives from being considered. She decided that MPs got the result wrong. She left them with an impossible choice. And lest we forget, less recently, she voted against things she claims to have later changed her mind on without justification, voted against the result of a previous referendum and even to try and implement a second referendum to revoke the first one.

I'm not saying that all votes must be considered binding or advisory - far from it. But without some consistency, some clear procedures outlined as to when the result of a vote must be inviolable and when it must be tempered with flexibility, the process becomes a farce. By blaming everyone but herself for her own mistakes and arbitrarily deciding which votes to (supposedly) respect and which to reject, the only reasonable conclusion is that May hates democracy.

Theresa May makes Brexit statement

Prime Minister Theresa May makes a statement in Downing Street. (Subscribe: https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe) ----------------------- Get more news at our site - https://www.channel4.com/news/ Follow us: Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/Channel4News

The meaningfully meaningless vote cuts both ways, if we're not careful

We are still no closer to understanding the end result of Brexit than we ever have been. At best, we're reaching the end of the beginning. Since the situation is as fluid as ever, I just want to comment on the general principles that Bercow's ruling highlights.

The non-binding question put to the people was whether we wanted to leave the EU or not. That's all it asked. It said nothing of any details whatsoever : whether we wanted a Norway-style model or a hard Brexit; whether we were unhappy with the economics of the EU, its underlying principles, current leadership, or what.

Since then, politicians across the spectrum have insisted that the vote must be respected, despite the margin of victory being a mere 4%. The Conservative government in particular has been voracious in its insistence that the result cannot be altered and that the deal they have (just barely) managed to negotiate is the only possible route forward. No choice has been allowed on any point. Only with the greatest reluctance did it concede that Parliament must be given a "meaningful vote" to ratify its proposal, on the grounds that only Parliament - not the government - gets to make law. To ignore this would have been to set a precedent for nothing less than tyranny by majority.

The government, however, completely failed to acknowledge that there was any prospect of its deal being rejected. It therefore did not even countenance the notion of entertaining alternatives, much less actually propose any. MPs across the board were certainly unwilling to choose (few had the courage to suggest revoking Article 50 or proposing another vote, though some sizeable number did try and push for a "managed" No Deal proposition) but more importantly they were unable to choose because nothing else was on offer. The government's utter refusal to believe that any alternatives were possible resulted in blatant hypocrisy : the idea that the people might want to change their minds was unthinkable, but asking Parliament to vote again (and possibly again and again !) after the most decisive defeat in history was done without any evident shame. It became clear that the "meaningful" vote was anything but.

Speaker John Bercow, however, is not pleased by this. His ruling is that according to long-established (1604) convention, a motion cannot be brought to the House repeatedly in the same Parliamentary period if its is essentially unchanged. This all but rules out the current deal.

The question we have to ask is how we should apply this more generally. Of course Parliamentary conventions need not be identical to those we use in other aspects of democracy, but one would hope they should be at least similar. So, for example, could we have a second referendum with an identical question, recognising that circumstances have changed ? If so, Parliamentary proceedings would have to have some similar governing principle. It is not unreasonable to ask for repeated votes if the situation is different and it appears that the majority opinion has changed even if the question has not - this is precisely why many of us feel a second referendum is justified. But if we then also forbid Parliament from voting again on the same issue, we are at risk of acting in bad faith.

Yet we also have to manage the government's tactics of running down the clock, whereby the only change of circumstance is the purely artificial pressure of time. We will need to insist not merely that time has passed but that an alternative is also available, perhaps from an opposition party. Alternatively, we might require that a repeated motion describe the changed circumstances in detail (I am speaking here only in general terms, not suggesting how we should proceed though the actual current situation).

In this case, a second referendum is unlikely to ask the same question. While there is no legal requirement that repeated referenda be substantially different from each other, those advocating a second vote argue that both circumstance has changed (e.g. we now know the terms and effects of leaving) and/or that the vote itself be altered. This basic procedure of offering a genuine and genuinely different choice is what Bercow is attempting, quite reasonably, to apply to Parliamentary procedures. There are many legitimate grounds for re-examining a motion that was apparently already settled : the principle that a repeated vote be significantly modified is a perfectly sensible check and balance on the system to prevent the ruling government from abusing the democratic process to subvert the will of Parliament.

I only want to point out that we should strive for consistency on this issue. An important loophole in the democratic process has been exposed : Bercow's ruling is an attempt to close this, but we should also be aware of the potential pitfalls. Without some clear guidelines, at the very least, as to the conditions under which a second vote may occur, it would seem ludicrous that either the public or Parliament could continue voting until they get the right answer.

BERCOW'S BREXIT BOMBSHELL: Mister Speaker BLOCKS Theresa May's third vote (full statement)

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow was today accused of sabotaging Theresa May's Brexit deal after telling MPs she cannot force them to vote on it again without changing it 'substantially'. The Commons Speaker cited a 400-year-old Commons precedent to inflict an extraordinary blow to Mrs May's hopes of getting her EU divorce through Parliament.