Fighting hindsight bias

I'm not sure if this is quite the same thing, but whenever a political issue is in the air, people make all kinds of predictions that essentially cover all of parameter space. E.g. if decision X happens, people will respond with outcome Y or Z or whatever. But it's only after the decision is actually taken that the response is really known. Suddenly it feels genuinely obvious that people respond as they do, even if their response was hardly predicted by anyone. Apparently it's either incredibly difficult to wargame responses even when the prospect of a decision is known, or maybe people are just fundamentally unpredictable.

I think it would be rather fun to keep track of predictions and it should probably be standard practise for any newspaper. To that end, while I was compiling this blog I labelled posts with a "predictions" category if I made (or the article therein contained) a specific, testable prediction. You can already examine these here, but at some point I'll post a review of them.

The saying goes that hindsight is 20:20, but Boyd says it’s worse than that. “It makes people think they can look back at past events and interpret something; it makes them think they have new ability to predict.” He says that in order to correct for hindsight bias, you have to realise you don’t possess a crystal ball.

Thaler says a simple fix could be to write things down; to make a record of how a decision was made at the time so that companies can learn lessons after the event. “Any company that can learn to distinguish between bad decisions and bad outcomes has a leg up,” he says. “Memorialise the fact that the CEO and the other people that have approved this decision all have the same assumptions, that no competitor has a similar product in the pipeline, that we don't expect a major financial crisis.” 

American businessman Warren Buffet, Boyd says, has a formula he calls ‘value investing’. “He follows it, but he knows the odds of succeeding are what they are. He doesn’t always hit magic; he loses occasionally, but he doesn’t say the odds were against him those times. Successful people understand risk for what it is and don’t make revisions in hindsight. Go with the odds, not the gods.” 

Kathleen Vohs says there is one de-biasing tactic she favours known as the ‘consider the opposite strategy’. Before rendering a decision you should flip it and think: how could this not have gone the way you anticipated? “Once you have your little narrative in your mind, think: how could the outcome go in a different direction or not occur at all?” she says. “If you flip the script like that in a number of ways you can reduce hindsight bias.”

EDIT : adding this nice essay by George Orwell on much the same thing.

How hindsight bias skews your judgement

On 8 November 2016 - US election night - the betting odds of Donald Trump winning the presidency had narrowed to five to one. By the following morning, he'd managed to pull off a feat many thought impossible, but that didn't stop the I-told-you-sos - friends, family members and even online soothsayers - who claimed to have known all along that Trump would triumph despite such bad odds.

Food-based philosophy

I found an awesome little budget bookshop a few weeks ago, so naturally I picked up a a bunch of philosophy books. First on the reading list was one I'd never heard of : the Upanishads. Written between 900-600 B.C., but expressing ideas developed over millennia, this Vedic text has a fair claim on being the oldest work of philosophy in existence. Seems like a good place to start.

The Upanishads don't read much like later Western philosophy, where authors try and spell out their positions clearly and distinctly (to coin a phrase). Whereas Plato proceeds in a very systematic, methodical way, never advancing an argument by anything beyond the smallest increment (a method I call "tautological analysis" because successive statements are so similar to each other), arguments in the Upanishads are stated directly, fully-formed and (apparently) decisive. They are explicitly not an attempt at rational inquiry. They are more a blend of theology, philosophy, mysticism and spirituality. Oh, there's a rational aspect to them, but that's not really what they're for.

Despite this, they contain a few fair ideas which are strikingly similar to near-contemporary Greek philosophers and much later medieval thinkers. Reading the Upanishads is an interesting experience, but sometimes the mystical weirdness can be laid on a bit thick - there are large passages I make no claim to understand (not without good reason, as we'll see). So here I thought I'd try and cut through all that, and offer a few selections I thought made for an interesting illustration of how like and unlike the Upanishads are to more well-known (in the Western world) ideas.


Food, glorious food

Okay, the Upanishads don't develop an entirely food-based system of reasoning. But they are weirdly obsessed with it, to the point where if you ever met the authors you might want to keep your arms and legs to themselves. It's not that the authors advocate cannibalism, but it comes close enough, on occasion, that you feel the need to state "it's not that the authors advocate cannibalism." Take for instance this manic hymn :

I am food, I am food, I am food ! I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food ! Him who eats food, I eat as food.

By any modern standards the author of that little ditty was clearly a rabid lunatic who needs to be locked up fast (i.e. I have no idea what they're on about). Other parts feel like they were almost profound until some hungry nutcase got their hands on the text :

From food are produced all the creatures which dwell on Earth. They live on food, and in the end they return to food.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... if there's one message from the Upanishads (there isn't, but if there was it would be this) it's the essential oneness of all things. Food is no exception to that, but it's one the text dwells on quite a lot.

The earth when eaten becomes threefold; its grosses portion becomes faeces, its middle portion flesh, its subtlest portion mind.

Mind-food duality ? I dunno what Descartes would have to say about that because I've only just started reading the Meditations. Certainly the Upanishads have a lot more profound comments than "you are what you eat", even if sometimes they are deliberately inscrutable.


Knowledge

Before examining what the Upanishads have to say about mind itself, perhaps it's worth considering what they say about what we can know at all. Despite (or arguably because of) being full of mystical woo woo (I'd have used a less derogatory term, because I'm genuinely interested in it, but a) I couldn't think of one and b) "mystical woo woo" is slightly amusing), the Upanishads do contain many interesting and important insights. For example, they recognise that our perception does not directly reveal the true nature of external reality, but only our own internal sense of it. The mind is, in effect, a sensory organ :

As people say, "My mind was elsewhere, I did not see; my mind was elsewhere, I did not hear", it is clear that a man sees with his mind and hears with his mind. Even if a man is touched from behind, he knows it through mind. 

Thou couldst not see the true seer of sight, thou couldst not hear the true hearer of hearing, nor perceive the perceive of perception, nor know the knower of knowledge. This is thy self, who is within all. Everything else is suffering.

There are certainly plenty of Platonic overtones to all this : the idea that we cannot know the true "form" of anything. But these explicit statements about own knowledge only being of our own perceptions is not really very Platonic, with Plato explicitly denying that knowledge is perception (Descartes and Spinoza, on the other hand, were much more sympathetic).

So what exactly is knowledge ? Being a text seemingly designed for one's own reflection, rather than presenting much in the way of well-defined conclusions, it seems to me that the Upanishads don't offer any firm commitments. Sometimes they tend towards the view that perception of the external world is knowledge after all :

"What is the nature of knowledge ?""Your majesty, speech itself. For through speech, a friend is known to be a friend; what is sacrificed, what is poured out, what is to be eaten and drunk, this world and the other world, all creatures [are known]. By speech alone, your majesty, Brahman is known; speech indeed, O king, is the highest Brahman.""I shall give you a thousand cows with a bull as big as an elephant".

Pity the poor cows that have to suffer the amorous affections of such a monster ! And elsewhere :

The eye is truth, for the person dwelling in the eye proceeds to all things.

So we know things by sensing the world around us, even if our limited senses and internal perceptions don't give us the full picture of reality. The problem is that not only are our senses incomplete, but that they are also inaccurate :

Even in a mind which loves the truth, and has gone to rest in itself there arise, when it is deluded by the objects of sense, wrongful thoughts resulting from former acts.

How, then, can we say we truly know anything at all if we cannot entirely trust our senses ? The philosopher might answer that we cannot. The scientist might say that repeat testing is good enough to overcome any deficiencies. The Upanishads answer, if they have one at all, deflects the problem rather than addressing it. Unlike Plato, who tended towards the view that all human traits are just different types of knowledge, the Upanishads have a very different, sometimes very silly message :

Do not ask too much lest thy head should fall off.

Knowledge, they say, isn't everything. Not everything can be known or analysed. There is some much greater aspect of reality. In many ways the whole of the Upanishads feels like an attempt to express the literally inexpressible.

The devas love what is mysterious, and dislike what is evident. 

He, the Self, can only be described as "Not this, not this !". He is incomprehensible, for he cannot be comprehended; her is imperishable, for he cannot perish; he is unattached, for he does not attach himself; he does not suffer or feel, because he is unfettered. 

What is without thought, though placed in the centre of thought, what cannot be thought, the hidden, the highest - let a man merge his thought there : then will this living being be without attachment.

I love the notion of a thought you cannot think, of things you simply cannot comprehend. It flies in the face of the scientific effort to understand reality, yet, paradoxically, the idea that our brain tissue ought to be able to understand the Universe is clearly absolutely bloody bonkers. How can we possibly account for things we can't understand ? Why should there not be an aspect of reality that we are fundamentally incapable of understanding - not just through rational analysis, but even through the more mystical, emotional methods of religions and philosophies ?

I dunno. But I'll close this section with my favourite quote from the whole work :

All those who are devoted to what is not real knowledge enter into darkness: those who delight only in knowledge enter, as it were, into greater darkness.

Psychology

Despite such explicit acknowledgement that we can't know everything, the Upanishads don't shy away from making blunt conclusions. There are some curiously modern aspects to many of these, for example a section in the Chandogya Upanishad has something similar to the hierarchy of needs (albeit blending physical and spiritual requirements). It runs thus :

Name  <  Speech  <  Mind  <  Will < Awareness  < Contemplation  <  Understanding  < Power  < Food  <  Water  <  Fire  <  Space  <  Memory  <  Hope  <  Spirit.

Which is clearly pretty extensive so I'll skip over the details. Other statements are far clearer. They even reference the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect (which Plato also understood very well) on more than one occasion :

Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind. The deluded living in ignorance in many diverse ways, consider themselves as having obtained everything.

Knowledge might not be everything, but the Upanishads don't dismiss it either. In particular, again in similarity to Greek thinking, self-knowledge is essential. They repeatedly use the metaphor of a chariot to describe how man experiences the world :

These perceptive organs are his reins; the active organs his horses, the body his chariot, the mind the charioteer, the whip the temperament... A wise man... turns he senses with the mind inward to enter the heart. Let the wise man successfully restrain his mind, that chariot yoked with vicious senses. 

He who controls both knowledge and ignorance rules over every cause, over all forms, and over all sources.

It might not have been intended, but I can't help feeling that last quote has some pretty direct political implications. Anyone trying to manipulate a society doesn't limit themselves to controlling what people know - they also try and control what people don't know. Which has, of course, both good and bad implications.

On an individual level, the Upanishads advocate self-knowledge as a means of self-control. As various Western philosophers would later suggest, man is free not when he is able to indulge his passions, but when he's able to control them :

Freedom from desires is, as it were, the highest prize to be taken from the choicest treasure. For a man full of desires, being possessed of will, deliberation, and I-consciousness, is a slave, but he who is the opposite, is free. Let a man stand free from will, deliberation and I-consciousness - this is the sign of liberty, this is the path that leads to Brahman, this is the opening of the door, and through it he will go to the other shore of darkness. 

The world of Brahman belongs to those who find it by means of discipline and self-control; for them there is freedom in all the worlds.

But self-knowledge, like any form of knowledge, is limited. The main topic of the Upanishads is the Brahman, the infinite One, the Ultimate Reality, God. Call it what you will. Comprehension of such a thing is impossible. Knowledge is, at most, only a tool to reaching enlightenment - and not the most important one at that.

Where the fire is rubbed, where the wind is checked, where the soma flows over, there the mind is born.The self cannot be gained by the Veda, nor by understanding, nor by much learning. He whom the self chooses, by him the self can be gained. To him the self reveals its own nature.

Consciousness

Again, despite reality being fundamentally indescribable and unknowable, the Upanishads do offer some suggestions as to its nature. Understanding consciousness and the soul is an important component of becoming something greater than oneself. For a start, at a very basic level, it's clear that consciousness is not a binary proposition. The Upanishads suggest there are four different levels :

The first is the state of waking. This knows only external objects. The second state is the state of dream. This knows only internal objects which are there in the mind.

So far, so rational. We know about external reality when we're awake, but only our internal reality in our dreams. We aren't dreaming about some other reality when we sleep, we're only exploring our own mind. But the third state is much more mystical :

When one if fast asleep, bereft of dreams and desires, the self is in the third state. As the darkness of night drives away the visible world, so does the dreamless sleep push aside the word of objects, external or internal. Experiences now collapse into one undifferentiated point of consciousness, restful and blissful. This is the knower and source of all, the inner controller. His is the beginning and the end of becoming.

Socrates famously declared that a a dreamless sleep is an experience to be welcomed, but neither he nor Plato made any claims that such deep sleep accessed some other realm. The "Self" of the Upanishads is, I suppose, the Platonic form of mind. Plato went to great lengths in the Republic to describe how our senses serve to confuse us (though elsewhere he contradicted this), but the Upanishad conclusion on the importance of pure thought is altogether more mysterious.

Now about the self in the fourth state. He is not directed at all, and so he knows not, and is himself unknowable. He is unseen, unusable, ungraspable. He is without signs, without indications, unthinkable and indescribable. His only proof is his presence : peaceful, benign, pure oneness. This is the supreme self.

Throughout the work there is a constant reminder of Brahman, a concept "inconceivably subtler than subtle", the infinite oneness, as the ultimate goal. How can one know the unknowable, even to the extent of knowing it even exists ? To the devotee, such a question makes no sense. You cannot think unthinkable thoughts. This fourth state of consciousness (of perhaps lack thereof) should also be set alongside some distinctly panpsychic tendencies* :

* Look, if you don't get anything else from this post, you've got to admit that "panpsychic tendencies" is a cool band name.

And what comes from the heart and the mind, namely, perception, sentience, understanding, knowledge, wisdom, inspiration, thinking, resolution, readiness to suffer, memory, conceiving, willing, breathing, loving, desiring ? All these are various names only of consciousness... whatsoever breathes and moves, and whatsoever is unmoving - all that is led by consciousness.... the world is led by consciousness. Consciousness is its cause.

Understanding (for want of a better word !) all this and achieving enlightenment carries profound consequences. As Plato would have approved, such a journey of self-discovery is vital for the sake of the immortal soul :

From meditating on him [the supreme self], from joining him, from becoming one with him there is cessation of all illusion in the end. When that one is known, all fetters fall off, sufferings are destroyed, and birth and death cease. 

This body indeed withers and dies when the living self has left it; the living self dies not.  

That which is beyond this world is without form and without suffering. They who know it, become immortal, but others suffer pain indeed.

Hail to you, that you may cross beyond the sea of darkness !

God

Or rather, Brahman. Or perhaps not, because the concept of Brahman is a tricky one. It hasn't gone unnoticed by scholars that Spinoza's (more on him in a future post) idea of the Ultimate Reality is almost plargarisingly close to that of the Upanishads :

He is beyond all the forms of the world and of time, he is the other, from whom the world moves around. There is no effect and no cause known of him... his power is revealed as manifold, as inherent, acting as force and knowledge.

While Spinoza takes this considerable further, rendering God into useless omnipotence, the Upanishad view of Brahman as the infinite, the union of all things, is distinctly similar. And just as Spinoza's view of God was that he was far beyond such petty human notions as good and evil, so too do the Upanishads have a note of caution in their teachings. Paradoxically, achieving enlightenment requires a desire to do good, but ultimately results in moving far beyond it.

Being freed from good and freed from bad, he, the knower of Brahman, moves towards Brahman.

This has disturbing consequences :

By no need of his is his life harmed, not by the killing of his mother, not by the killing of his father, not by theft, not by destroying a foetus. If he even commits sin, brilliance does not desert his face.

Yet Spinoza doesn't seem to have murdered babies and the Upanishads clearly don't endorse the prospect. They define a triad of instruction of self-control, giving, and mercy - hardly the behaviour of a reckless brute. Somehow, this concept of infinite oneness, of an inviolable perfection that cannot be stained by human sin, seems to have brought solace both to Spinoza and the ancient Vedics. Certainly neither of them seem to have used their various ideas of the infinite nature of the Universe and mind as an excuse for hedonistic parties or murderous rampages.

This person, when embraced by the intelligent self, knows nothing that is without, nothing that is within. This is indeed his true form, in which his wishes are fulfilled, in which the self only is his wish, in which no wish is left - free from any sorrow.

The Upanishads concept of Brahman is similar but not quite the same as Spinoza's God. While the Upanishads embrace the nature of infinity, they don't wholly reject the idea of an interfering God as Spinoza does, nor are they so ambiguous as to the immortal nature of the soul. Like Plato, they fully embrace the notion of an afterlife and the need (later adopted with gusto by Christianity) to do good works on Earth in order to enjoy immortality :

Now if a man departs from this life without having seen his true self, then that self, not being known, does not receive and bless him, as if the Veda had not been read, or as if a good work had not been done. Indeed, if one who does not know that self, should he still perform here on Earth some great holy work, it will perish for him in the end. Let a man worship the self only as his true state.

According to the Upanishads, for all that self-knowledge is limited, it is still possible to know the Self. While dreams access internal knowledge, sleep is, perhaps, a route to another realm after all :

When the sun has set, and the moon is not there, and the fire is gone out, and the sound is stilled, what then is the light of man ? The self indeed is his light.Who is that self ? He who is within the heart, surrounded by the senses, the person of light consisting of knowledge. He, remaining the same, wanders along the two worlds, as if thinking, as if moving. During sleep he transcends this world and the forms of death.

The Upanishads are fraught with more outright examples of mystical practises, of rituals and incantations and the power of words. I doubt you could really call them a work of philosophical inquiry, but they undeniably present a work of philosophical exploration. Replete with mysticism, they also contain clearly rational and sophisticated ideas. If nothing else, they are a powerful reminder that religious thinking is not always synonymous with primitive superstition, nor faith an act of pure irrationality. And of course, they're also a reminder to get something to eat.

Marcus Aurelius, the snuggly emperor

It's been said that there are three types of people when it comes to politics : hobbits, who are inoffensive but just don't care very much, hooligans, who are wildly passionate but also stupid, and the rare, precious Vulcans, who are more intelligent and passionate than the hobbits and able to rise above the mud-slinging of the hooligans.

Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161-180 A.D., was a Vulcan.

Yes, yes, I know there are no horses on the planet Vulcan, and he didn't have pointy ears or do the Vulcan death grip or even try and mind meld with anyone. In fact, he'd have probably hated the very idea of having to share someone else's brain, because his Meditations suggest a deeply melancholy soul who was acutely aware that he had the weight of the known world on his shoulders. Marcus, a fierce introvert, would far rather have been left alone, preferably tucked up nice and snug in bed :

At break of day, when you are reluctant to get up, have this thought ready to mind : "I am getting up for a man's work. Do I still then resent it, if I am going out to do what I was born for, the purpose for which I was brought into the world ? Or was I created to wrap myself in blankets and keep warm ?"

The most powerful man in the world and all he really wanted was to be nice and snuggly. Likewise though he usually praises philosophy, meditation and learning above all things, sometimes he has to remind himself that he ought to bloody well go outside and do something :

And give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch, but in true grace and heartfelt gratitude to the gods.

The ruler of the world was a snuggly bookworm. It's a good thing the Romans hadn't discovered cocoa, because Marcus probably would have drank it to extinction if they had. Wine ? Women ? No – snuggles and books for this Imperator.  It's hard to read the Meditations without wanting to give him a great big hug. Unlike so many other emperors – not least of which his own son Commodus – Marcus was no hedonistic pleasure-seeker who cared about no-one but himself. Instead he seems to be constantly reprimanding himself for not being the very best emperor he could possibly be. He continues his conversation with himself :

"But this is more pleasant."Were you then born for pleasure  – all feeling, not action ?"But one needs rest too."One does : I agree. But nature has set limits to this too... The point is you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love both your own nature and her purpose for you... you have less regard for yourself than the smith has for his metal-work, the dancer for his dancing, the money-grubber for his money, the exhibitionist for his little moment of fame. These people, when impassioned, give up food and sleep for the promotion of their pursuits, and you think social action less important, less worthy of effort ?"

That's a sentiment which is found throughout the whole work. Somehow, Marcus manages to blend an awareness of his own supreme importance without falling victim to arrogance - conscious that "the whole Earth is a mere point in space... the whole of present time is a pin-prick of eternity." He might have thought himself better than a blacksmith or a dancer, but he also knew that the limits of his earthly power were truly minuscule.

And sometimes all he wanted to do was stay in bed with a good book. Who can blame him for that ?

Just like a Vulcan, Marcus wasn't devoid of emotions – he only sought to control them. As a Stoic, he believed that we have an internal choice as to how to respond to external crises, that things can only hurt us if we let them. The essence of it is very Buddhist-like and easy enough to understand :

One man prays : "How can I sleep with that woman ?
Your prayer is : "How can I lose the desire to sleep with her ?"

Marcus doesn't seem to have felt the need to remind himself to stop fooling around with all the sexy ladieeez very much. Most of his reminders to himself are about his own mortality, the need to treat people with decency, and that only his own responses are what cause difficulties – not the problems themselves. That he has to keep reminding himself of this is testament to the fact that while he may have succeeded in controlling his responses, he never became an unfeeling automaton. But sometimes it can feel like he takes this to absurd extremes. In the same passage he says something that's not nearly so comfortable :

Another : "How can I save my little child ?"
You : "How can I lean not to fear his loss ?"

While we can probably all accept that we can be driven mad with anger or lust or ennui*, the idea that we shouldn't fear the loss of a child is an altogether more disturbing idea. Marcus wrote his Meditations as private thoughts to himself, so we don't know exactly what he meant by this. He doesn't appear to have been a callous or cruel man; had he gone around not caring who lived and who died he'd be up there with the likes of Nero and Caligula. Perhaps in an era of high child mortality, this quotation would have been viewed more as an unavoidable practical necessity. Or perhaps he only meant that one should not go so mad with grief as to become incapable of taking sensible actions.

* Or Justin Beiber music or the Go Compare guy.

That's the great paradox of Marcus' stoicism : if it's only Marcus' own reactions that mean anything, if he's just an insignificant mote in the infinite cosmos, if his life is basically irrelevant and his soul either immortal or non-existent, why then should he bother doing anything at all ? "A king's lot : to do good and be damned", he says at one point. Or even worse :

Just as you see your bath – all soap, sweat, grime, greasy water, the whole thing disgusting – so is every part of life and every object in it.

Yet somehow he clearly managed to drag himself out of his nice warm bed and away from his beloved books, and either "teach or tolerate" those who made the world such a disgusting place to live. But there were some things that really ticked him off, like smelly people and grammar Nazis. Seriously :

Are you angry with the man who smells like a goat, or the one with foul breath ? What will you have him do ? That's the way his mouth is, that's the way his armpits are, so it is inevitable that they should give out odours to match. 

From Alexander the grammarian : not to leap on mistakes, or captiously interrupt when anyone makes an error of vocabulary, syntax, or pronunciation, but neatly to introduce the correct form of that particular expression by way of answer, confirmation, or discussion of the matter itself rather than its phrasing – or by some other such felicitous prompting.

If someone puts to you the question, "How is the name Antoninus spelt ?", will you shout your way through each of the syllables ? What then if they get angry ? Will you lose your temper too ? Will you not rather calmly go through the sequence of letters, telling each one in turn ?"

So there you have it. At one point, all of Europe was ruled by a nerdy bookworm who loved being snuggly and hated smelly grammar Nazis – and he's widely revered as one of the most successful rulers of all time. Nerd power !

Crime : it's all in your breath

I've heard of the lead-crime hypothesis before, but this seems to be more general.

 The most polluted days correlated with the worst test scores. On days where the air quality was cleanest, students performed better. “We could see a clear decline [of performance] on days that were more highly polluted,” says Roth. “Even a few days before and a few days after, we found no effect – it’s really just on the day of the exam that the test score decreased significantly.” 

In 2018 research his team analysed two years of crime data from over 600 of London’s electoral wards, and found that more petty crimes occurred on the most polluted days, in both rich and poor areas. It's important to note that this finding is purely correlational – but Roth has reason to believe that there is a causal link. 

His team also compared very specific areas over time, as well as following levels of pollution over time. A cloud of polluted air, after all, can move around depending which direction the wind blows. This takes pollution to different parts of the city, at random, to both richer and poorer areas. “We just followed this cloud on a daily level and see what happened to crime in areas when the cloud arrives… We found that wherever it goes crime rate increases,” he explains.

Importantly, even moderate pollution made a difference. “We find that these large effects on crime are present at levels which are well below current regulatory standards.” In other words, levels that the US Environmental Protection Agency classifies as “good” were still strongly linked with higher crime rates.

The most obvious question is how much does air pollution drive crime. The BBC article doesn't say, but it provides a direct link to one which does. And it's not small.

The researchers found that a 10 point rise of the air pollution measure, the Air Quality Index (AQI), increases the crime rate by 0.9 per cent. This means that the crime rate in London is 8.4 per cent higher on the most polluted day (AQI 103.6) compared to the days with the lowest level of pollution (AQI =9.3).

That seems too strong to ignore. At the same time, it's far too small to blame all crime on air pollution. But chemicals which impair reasoning and judgement that push the criminally-inclined over the edge ? That I can believe. Pollution would seem to be an important contributing factor, but no more or less than that. Naively, the short timescale argues in favour of a direct causal connection but I'd be interesting in alternative interpretations.

How air pollution is doing more than killing us

In the future, police and crime prevention units may begin to monitor the levels of pollution in their cities, and deploy resources to the areas where pollution is heaviest on a given day. This may sound like the plot of a science fiction movie, but recent findings suggest that this may well be a worthwhile practice.

Wanna learn maths ? Go clubbing !

This procedure is not recommended.


“I was very shallow,” he laughs. “Life rotated around girls, partying, drinking, waking up with a hangover and then going out and chasing girls and going out to bars again." Maths wasn’t on his radar whatsoever.

But on the night of Friday 13 September 2002 everything changed. While out with friends, Padgett was attacked and robbed by two men outside a karaoke bar. They took his already torn leather jacket. Padgett staggered to a hospital across the street where he was told he had concussion and a bleeding kidney thanks to a punch to the gut. “They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me home,” he remembers.

But while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences [extreme OCD] from his attack, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things, changed. Everything that was curved looked like it was slightly pixelated,” he explains. “Water coming down the drain didn’t look like it was a smooth, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these little tangent lines.”

While in the MRI scanner, hundreds of equations, including fake ones, flashed on a screen in front of Padgett’s eyes. The researchers then watched which parts of his brain lit up in response.

“They found that I had access to parts of the brain that we don’t have conscious access to and also the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the part of the brain that does mathematics, which obviously makes sense,” says Padgett.

...Brogaard believes the brain injury Padgett sustained caused him to develop a form of synaesthesia where certain things triggered visions of mathematical formulas or geometric shapes, either in his mind or projected in front of him. She also hypothesised that synaesthesia made Padgett an acquired savant.

I find it fascinating that synaesthesia can make you better at maths. Does it actually change the computations the brain is doing, or only make you more aware of them ? Or just lead to a drive to understand what's happening by changing perception, hence the great deal of time he spent learning mathematics online and in college courses ? Anyway, this all ends happily :

Since his diagnosis, Padgett has published a book about his experience called Struck by Genius, he’s toured the world telling people his story and educating them about maths. He started a company called Outliers which helps produce movies about people who have had unique or rare/interesting life stories. He even sells his drawings of fractals.

The two men who attacked him that fateful September night were never convicted despite Padgett identifying them and pressing charges. Years later, however, one of the men, Brady Simmons, wrote to Padgett to apologise while he was undergoing treatment for prescription drug addiction following a suicide attempt. In a sense, two lives were changed in the years that followed the attack. “I’m a completely different person,” says Simmons. “When I look back the abysmal person that I was in the past, I just don’t see how I existed on that level.”

So essentially : bit of a lad gets beaten up by douchebags, becomes mathematical whizz, turns life around; douchebag repents their earlier ways, doesn't become mathematical whizz but does turn life around. The universe indeed works in mysterious ways.

The violent attack that turned a man into a maths genius

Jason Padgett sees maths everywhere. Even something as ordinary as brushing his teeth is governed by mathematics - he turns the tap on and dips his toothbrush into the water 16 times. "I don't know why I like perfect squares," he says.

Dodging the bullets of Brexit

It's fair to say that I've never been as nervous about any political decision as last night's vote to extend Britain's exit from the EU. True, all of the noises beforehand were about the length of the delay, not whether there should be one at all. And no-one seemed to want to repeat the previous mistake of a mere technical extension of a couple of weeks, which, while it did finally push the Maybot onto a new track, moaning and wheezing as it went, it didn't and couldn't actually solve anything. But it was still possible that the Maybot might have squeaked something especially foolish or that Macron would have been feeling more vindictive. Fortunately the stars were reasonably well aligned.

For me, the stakes are extremely high. While the Czech Republic (to its great credit) has made a lot of positive noises about protecting the few thousand British workers residents here, that depends on the British government reciprocating the rights of Czech workers resident in the UK. The official statement says the UK will do this for all EU workers currently resident there, but a statement of intent is not the same as a legally binding agreement. So it was entirely possible that come Saturday morning I could technically have been rendered an illegal immigrant. Not a fun prospect at all.

Granted, that wasn't very likely. And granted further that doesn't mean the Czech Republic would kick me out of the country. It may not even have been very likely that if I left the country (which I'm planning to do for Easter) I wouldn't have been able to get back in. But it's awfully difficult to find much assurance in probabilities when its your neck on the line. Would Britain have been treated instantly as a third country ? Would some special arrangements have been made ? We'll never know. The bottom line is that I didn't sleep much last night.


I recently suggested what sort of Brexit I could tolerate, were there to be no way of averting it entirely. The closer we are to Brexit In Name Only, the better. My ideals would be membership of the customs union, single market, and freedom of movement, thus preserving the major economic advantages and political ideals of EU membership, though sacrificing the political influence that comes with it. Where my red lines would be drawn I honestly don't know. I like freedom of movement as an ideal from a moral standpoint, but I also have an obvious selfish reason to support it. What might make me feel better about the whole prospect would be if there was some vaguely plausible plan proposed as to how to deal with withdrawing it : how am I, as a non-permanent resident on a (basically) permanent contract supposed to deal with this ? What exactly is it I'm supposed to do ? Just how much more restricted would I be ? Presumably not totally - there are, after all, plenty of non-EU citizens living here, but without knowing for sure this is an enormously uncomfortable position to be in.

The stay of execution that's been granted leads me to wonder along similar lines of compromise. Never mind what might actually happen next. My question is : what's the most reasonable course of action politicians could now take ? I mean reasonable in the real world, that is, accounting for the different opinions and strength of feelings on all sides, including - especially ! - those I don't agree with.

There are still three possible end states : leaving with an agreement, leaving without an agreement, or not leaving at all. The middle option now seems very unlikely but it's not impossible. The question is what process we should use to decide between the available choices. We're not out of the woods yet - we're in a clearing in the woods, a rather pleasant sunny spot, but the dark and gloomy woods still surround us, still filled with ravenous creatures and dangerous pitfalls that eventually we have to confront.

A 6 month extension is not quite as long as might be ideal, but long enough - as Tusk said - to allow us to completely change strategy. Therefore the most reasonable option would seem to be to continue the cross-party talks for a few weeks or perhaps a month. Either the talks will produce something acceptable to both sides, or they won't. If they fail, then it's either a general election or a second referendum. The problem with a general election is the risk of another hung Parliament so that might not solve anything. The most reasonable thing to do, in that case, would seem to be a second referendum.

If the talks succeed, then the leaders have to go back to their parties and gain wider support - at least enough to put it to a parliamentary vote. If it fails, we have some time to resume the talks, but not much. We might be able to vote a few times on revised compromise agreements, but not indefinitely. Again, a general election or second referendum would be necessary.

It's also unclear if Labour could accept any kind of deal without a confirmatory referendum. If it was BINO or close then they might, but anything else seems doubtful - they'd be risking very large numbers of defections and electoral catastrophe. It is possible, though, that the House would vote on and reject a second referendum. In which case Labour could probably escape blame, the deal would go through, and there wouldn't be much we could do about it.

If a general election wouldn't necessarily break the impasse, would a second referendum do any better if it was to occur ? Perhaps. Polls show that Remain is in the lead, followed by No Deal and then - oddly - May's Deal. My guess is that the first two are clear options that people understand, whereas May's Deal is a weird, highly uncertain compromise - even if it's objectively better than No Deal, no-one likes it. So while Parliament has all but rejected No Deal, it would be foolish to exclude this from the options. Brexit supporters would never accept the legitimacy of such a vote. Heck, I don't think we can really have a vote in which the second most popular option is disallowed, even if it's a really shitty option. Also, excluding it would likely lead to massive loss of faith in the political system, driving voters towards ever more extreme parties. Giving them the option won't stop them protesting if they lose (nor should it !), but does prevent them claiming the result is invalid. The risk that people would vote for No Deal is real, but denying them the option is only likely to inflame support for it even further, alienating those who might have voted Remain instead.

The trickiest part is how to get a decisive result from a referendum which needs at least three options. One of these will be May's Revised Deal, which might be more popular than the current version. Still, an equal split would be just as bad as a hung parliament. We could in principle select the option which wins the most votes, but because the choices are not entirely dissimilar this wouldn't help. For instance, if slightly more voted for No Deal, then there could still be an overall majority for a softer form or no Brexit at all. Conversely, if slightly more voted for Remain, then there could be an overall majority for leaving (with or without a deal). If only, say, 40% voted for Remain with 30% each for Deal or No Deal, who (apart from Noel Edmunds) could honestly say that the people preferred to stay in ?

So while a second referendum could in principle settle the issue decisively, it might well not. The way to avoid this is probably through a transferable vote, where everyone ranks their preferences such that their second preferences are counted if there's no majority for any one option. This guarantees a majority for a single decision and forces voters to compromise. That option is not possible for Parliamentary elections but could be applied to a second referendum.

All of these options carry risks and uncertainties. All of them still allow the most radical options of leaving without a deal or simply calling the whole thing off. The question now that everyone should be asking themselves is simple : which option do I dislike the least ? We might yet get a definitive clean break or choose to stay, but if we're going to get anywhere at all we have to at least try and compromise.

(Here's my secret preference : go back to the EU and get an indefinite extension. They could allow us to leave whenever we want (the deal includes a 2 year transition period, so no cliff edge), so long as we ratify the withdrawal agreement. Let's just make our status as "cats-who-want-to-leave-but-not-really" official and be done with it.)

Thanks, Google...

Sometimes Google translate goes haywire. This email was supposed to be about someone expecting a delivery.



A BEAUTIFUL DAY,

IN THESE DAYS PAVLU SUCHAN SHOULD LOAD A SHIP.

IF YOU ARE BORING THE COURIER WHICH WILL BE DELIVERED, PLEASE SAVE
HER.

YOU WILL NEED TO ACCEPT THE ACCEPTANCE CODE THAT IS:

29 29 90.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

THANK YOU

Aphantasia : a weird lack of mental imagery

Sounds like the name of a ghostly Disney princess but actually it's much more interesting than that :

The former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios says he has a "blind mind's eye". Most people can close their eyes and conjure up images inside their head such as counting sheep or imagining the face of a loved one. But Ed Catmull, 74, has the condition aphantasia, in which people cannot visualise mental images at all.

I don't need to close my eyes - is that normal ?

Eventually Ed realised he was not alone and that, perhaps counter-intuitively, some of the greatest talents in animation could not visualise either. Oscar-winner Glen Keane, who created Ariel (The Little Mermaid), also has no visual imagery. Ed told the BBC: "He is truly extraordinary, he's one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation. "[And] he said that he could never visualise either."

The homework also revealed stark differences between two artists and good friends of Ed's who had worked on Frozen. One can see an entire movie in his head and play it backwards and forwards and never needs to see a movie twice because he can visualise it. The other cannot see anything at all.

Okay, I can't do that.

He added: "People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination and one of the messages is, 'they're not the same thing... you would think if a person could visualise, they're more likely to be able to draw. [But] If you open your eyes and you take out a pencil and pad, how many people can draw what they see? The answer is a very small number, so if you can't draw what is in front of you then why would we expect that you would be able to draw what you visualise?"

And very few people can draw something as common as a banknote from memory. To some extent mental images could be the brain providing a sense of the experience of visualising something without providing the visual cues themselves, as in the cases where impossible occurrences in dreams seem completely normal. We could be, in effect, imagining that we're seeing all the details but really we're not, a sort of internal blindsight (where the brain receives visual information and can produce accurate responses to it but the conscious mind is unaware of it). So that would mean :

• Hallucinations are when you mistake your internal visualisation for external perception.
• Blindsight is your brain forgetting to create the internal visualisation stage - you perceive things, but not in the usual way.
• Internal hallucinations are when your brain tells you you're seeing something in your mind's eye but actually you're not.
• Internal blindsight would be when you hallucinate that you're having a hallucination, that is, you may think you're not seeing something internally but actually you are (hence the surprising drawing skills).

How on Earth you would know if someone is really able to see something internally versus them just thinking that they can (they might be shite at drawing), I have no idea. All I know is that if you can't ever be sure that what you perceive is real or external or internal or you brain fooling you into confusing these states, then defining knowledge is clearly flippin' complicated.

My head hurts.

'My mind's eye is blind' - ex-Pixar chief

The former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios says he has a "blind mind's eye". Most people can close their eyes and conjure up images inside their head such as counting sheep or imagining the face of a loved one.

Put your thinking cap on

Working memory is where your mind keeps temporary information, and has been described as the "sketch pad of the mind". You need your working memory to write down a phone number as someone reads it out to you. Problem-solving, mathematical calculations and decision-making all involve working memory too. Robert Reinhart, an assistant professor at Boston University, and one of the researchers, says: "It's essentially where consciousness lives." 

Working memory declines naturally with age. But the older adults' performance improved with brain stimulation. Dr Reinhart said: "We can bring back the more superior working memory function that you had when you were much younger. 

The team at Boston University, in the US, gave people in their sixties and seventies the working memory of someone in their twenties. The effect lasted at least 50 minutes after the stimulation stopped. But larger studies are now needed to see if stimulation could help people in the "real world" or in treating brain diseases like Alzheimer's.

According to a podcast on the Financial Times, the 50 minutes was how long the study was scheduled to last, so no more measurements were taken after this. The researchers expect the effect to persist for "hours at least".

The study showed that brainwaves become out of sync - like musicians giving a disjointed performance - as we age. The team at Boston University started by recording people's brainwaves with an electroencephalogram. They used electricity stimulation - specifically high definition transcranial alternating current - to strengthen and resynchronise the brainwaves. 

Dr Reinhart says: "I think it is possible to sort of turbocharge even normal, healthy, cognitive functioning people, including young people. "But the largest improvements appear in the people with the greatest deficit at baseline... people who are struggling the most."

I wonder what other effects might be possible. For instance it's possible to induce blindsight by wearing magnets.Perhaps a Penfield mood organ or a dream machine is not so outlandish...

Precise brain stimulation boosts memory

Using electricity to precisely stimulate the brain can boost people's working memory, a study suggests. The team at Boston University, in the US, gave people in their sixties and seventies the working memory of someone in their twenties. The effect lasted at least 50 minutes after the stimulation stopped.

Meanwhile, in post-Soviet Russia...

Professor Dvorkin is worried that kundalini yoga, which has roots in Hinduism, "could lead to uncontrollable sexual arousal... and in consequence to the development of homosexual relationships between inmates," according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets report. He said this raised security concerns, as some prisoners "might go on hunger strike in protest" if they thought inmates serving their food were gay, the paper says.

I mean, those yoga pants... DAAAAMN !

Fortunately, even Russia isn't quite that mad :

But the prison authorities have decided to disappoint both of these moral crusaders, as official research shows that yoga is beneficial to inmates and has no links to homosexuality.

Prison Service Deputy Chief Valery Maximenko told Govorit Moskva radio that inmates who practice yoga need less medical attention, and that "nobody is being drawn towards homosexuality by it. But, even if they are, we have democracy in our country, and everyone has the right to choose their own path... within the law," he added, in an unusually candid statement for a senior Russian official.

And as a bonus there's a second weird story from Russia today on how to declare victory over General Winter :

"You can't be serious??? A photo from 3 April (!!!) to show you dealt with the mounds of ice at the bus stop I complained about on 25 January!!!," she tweeted to the council's Our St Petersburg customer portal... An unimpressed Natalya Vakhlova tweeted the photos, noting that "given it's been well above freezing for some time now, it's not hard to work out that the ice melted on its own."

Council official Sergei Malinin told the site that the street cleaners simply hadn't had time to take photographs while on the job, and acknowledged that sending victory reports with sunny pictures "could look like making fun of citizens". He said the council would try to do better, but one St Petersburger had a better idea. "They should wait until June and declare all the problems solved in one go," he told Fontanka.

Normally I could point and laugh at the silly Russian monkeys. I can't very well do that with half the UK thinking that getting out of the world's largest economic bloc would be a good idea though, now can I ? Stupid Brexiteers won't let me have any fun !

Russian jails drop yoga ban

Russia is reinstating prison yoga classes that were suspended after a complaint based on the concerns of a leading opponent of religious minorities. Senator Yelena Mizulina asked the prosecutor-general to check the legality of kundalini yoga classes introduced on a trail basis in Moscow remand centres, and they were duly suspended during the subsequent investigation, Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reports.