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

Wednesday, 17 July 2019

In your own time

Here's a good excuse to venture some questions I've been wondering about for a while.
Using the fMRI to monitor brain activity and machine learning to analyze the neuroimages, the researchers were able to predict which pattern participants would choose up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision. And they were able to predict how vividly the participants would be able to envisage it.
But in these and similar experiments, how can they know when the conscious decision was reached ? Is it fair to say that the decision is only reached the exact moment the brain transmits the signals to the finger to press the button ? For example, I can decide to go on holiday months ahead of time, and it wouldn't be sensible to say I've only made the decision when I actually step out my door, or even when I finally arrive at my destination - up until that point I can still abort without actually having taken any holiday. So couldn't there also be a delay between deciding when to press the button and actually pressing it ? How could the participant ever remember the exact moment of conscious choice ?

Similarly, they are presumably choosing randomly, so could in principle make an instantaneous "decision" but with no actual thought behind it. They were given quite a long time to make the choice - again, how does anyone tell when the decision was actually made, and what happens if the time available is reduced ?

Also, as far as I know these experiments have thus far been very simple decisions with no real consequence. It would be interesting (but perhaps experimentally difficult) to see what happens with much more difficult choices that actually have a significant impact. The sort where one can go "ummm" and "ahhh" over for hours before finally deciding - and still it may boil down to random. And likewise a comparison where the choice is more instant and depends on individual preferences, e.g. do you want to vote for the Monster Raving Loony Party or someone else ?

So all in all, I'm not convinced these experiments pose much difficulty for the notion of free will. You can predict people's decisions before they make them anyway, whether you do so using scans of the brain or by following their pattern of behaviour is immaterial. That people are predictable doesn't violate free will - that would demand free will meant making entirely random choices, which would be paradoxical and silly. There's no contradiction between having free will and having predictable desires.

That's not to say that there might not be some cases where the hard work is done behind the scenes in the unconscious though, because there certainly are. I'm not consciously aware of every finger movement I'm using to type this out. I'm conscious of my thoughts being slowly assembled as I type, my unconscious assembling letters and words and sending them for a final review to my conscious perception. But it is undeniably my words that I write and by my will - that they have been influenced by the article doesn't change that. Only an omnipotent and omniscient entity could have pure internal will, and that, mercifully, is certainly not me.

Neuroscientists can read brain activity to predict decisions 11 seconds before people act

Free will, from a neuroscience perspective, can look like quite quaint. In a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in Australia were able to predict basic choices participants made 11 seconds before they consciously declared their decisions.

The Brain IS A Bayesian Net

I've occasionally rambled that there's a big difference between our basic, everyday sort of reasoning (e.g., How far do I need to lift this spoon ? How hard should I push on this door ?) and our higher reasoning (e.g. Is this galaxy experiencing ram pressure stripping ? Is Nigel Farage actually a demonic toad or is that just me ?). I've noted that our everyday reasoning appears to be generally extremely sensible - unless something goes catastrophically wrong, I can get the spoon in my mouth and not my eye; I can push the door open and not have to struggle. Those sorts of thought processes appear to be difficult to fool - they nearly always get things right, apparently in a very evidenced-based, logical way.

In contrast derailing higher reasoning appears to be easy. Only only has to whisper "politics" and everything collapses into a heap and spontaneously ignites.


I suppose it could be that our everyday, unconscious thoughts are rarely affected by emotions and other irrational factors. They're not immune to such influences (optical illusions being perhaps the best example), but they require rather contrived circumstances compared to what we generally encounter. It doesn't seem that your mood strongly affects what you actually see, though it certainly does affect how you interpret it.

You might also remember this post ("Your brain is NOT a Bayesian net"). It seems to me that the article below presents a nice contrast. As far as higher reasoning goes, the brain does a crappy job of considering everything it knows all at once. It seems strongly influenced by emotion and short-term memory. It definitely does not stop to consider all its accumulated knowledge and do a detailed comparison - it couldn't, because then we'd be stuck for six weeks every time we wanted to put on a new pair of socks. The best example is probably this :


So the brain is fooled by what it has to hand. It certainly can do highly complex, rational analysis, but that requires a conscious, deliberate effort. That's perhaps what consciousness is for.

In contrast the article below suggests that the brain's reasoning is much more Bayesian :
In this new study, Jazayeri and his team wanted to understand how the brain encodes prior beliefs, and put those beliefs to use in the control of behavior. To that end, the researchers trained animals to reproduce a time interval, using a task called "ready-set-go." In this task, animals measure the time between two flashes of light ("ready" and "set") and then generate a "go" signal by making a delayed response after the same amount of time has elapsed. 
They trained the animals to perform this task in two contexts. In the "Short" scenario, intervals varied between 480 and 800 milliseconds, and in the "Long" context, intervals were between 800 and 1,200 milliseconds. At the beginning of the task, the animals were given the information about the context (via a visual cue), and therefore knew to expect intervals from either the shorter or longer range. 
Jazayeri had previously shown that humans performing this task tend to bias their responses toward the middle of the range. Here, they found that animals do the same. For example, if animals believed the interval would be short, and were given an interval of 800 milliseconds, the interval they produced was a little shorter than 800 milliseconds. Conversely, if they believed it would be longer, and were given the same 800-millisecond interval, they produced an interval a bit longer than 800 milliseconds.
But this is just dealing with one task with very limited, immediate prior knowledge. It would be interesting to see how many sources of prior information both humans and animals are able to incorporate into a decision, and for how long this lasts. I suspect the Bayesian thing will be limited both in time and extent. I doubt there will be much direct applicability to what we believe in the stronger sense of the word, as opposed to what we currently suspect or happen to think. We might higher-reason in Bayesian-network fashion, but it will certainly be over a limited range of information and unfairly prioritise the recent. Or much more, wholly irrational factors may be decisive. It's interesting either way.

Neuroscientists find brain activity patterns that encode our beliefs

For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is influenced by our expectations. These expectations, also called "prior beliefs," help us make sense of what we are perceiving in the present, based on similar ...

Monday, 15 July 2019

Pirate school

AVAST ye scurvy dogs ! Feast yer eyes upon this savvy arrrticle on Pirate School. Marvel ye at tales of pirates learning the sine and the cosine and the ship's logarrrithm ! Arrr ! Best yet get yerselves down to yonder Pirate School and behold the arts of navigation. Them landlubbers in the movie industry don't oft include scenes of pirates doing mathemaaaaatical calculations, but this fine piece fer Aeon puts 'em to rights. There be just the one problem : it be not written like a pirate. Arrr !
Celestial navigation was certainly feasible, but it required real technical skills as well as fairly advanced mathematics. Sailors needed to calculate the angle of a star’s elevation using a cross-staff or quadrant. They needed to track the direction of their ship’s course relative to magnetic north. Trigonometry and logarithms offered the best way to make these essential measurements: for these, a sailor needed to be adept at using dense numerical tables. All of a sudden, a navigator’s main skill wasn’t his memory – it was his mathematical ability.
Van den Broucke taught readers and students a useful technique: how to use the Little Dipper to tell time. The handle of the dipper points at the North Star, and the bowl of the dipper rotates around it over the course of 24 hours. That means that when the two farthest ‘guard stars’ moved 15 degrees, one hour has passed. Once the constellation has rotated 90 degrees, six hours have passed. This functionality was so useful that most early textbooks included diagrams, often with volvelles, moveable discs that help the reader understand the concept.
It be faaascinating ter that back in days of yore, it were pr'bly just as difficult ter learn the most advanced knowledge of the day as it is nowadays, even though we be more advanced by far than way back then. It be also fascinating to think of pirates singing nautical songs about naaavigation. Arrr !
To help students remember the stars, the song rendered all the constellations in 12 rhyming verses... These verses were set to the tunes of familiar hymns. Devout sailors could sing along, or so seemed to be the intention... Gietermaker left the songs out of subsequent printings. He did retain two volvelles, suggesting that sailors found the hands-on spinning discs more useful than the verse and tunes.
They be not bawdy enough, pr'bly ! And they be having to wrestle with descriptive maths problems on the seven seas just like schoolchildren today :
"A Merchant man … falls into the hands of pyrats; who amongst other things take away his sea-compasse. When he is gotten clear, he sailes away as directly as he can, and after two dayes meetes with a man of war [ie, a large naval vessel]."What is the next step? Naturally to hunt down the pirates! Since the merchant had ‘sailed since at least 64 leagues betweene the south and west, what course shall the man of warre shape to finde these pyrates?’
And just like today, they be focused on learning the test and not proper stuff :
Instead of paying 36 florins for an entire winter of lessons, Amsterdam-based mariners paid just 6 florins for a crash course focused on the oral and written portions of the tests. Later manuscript workbooks confirm this strategy: students often focused on the questions they knew would be on their exam. Teachers at the close of the 17th century were already ‘teaching to the test’

How European sailors learned celestial navigation - Margaret Schotte | Aeon Essays

In 1673, in a North Sea skirmish that killed nearly 150 men, the French privateer Jean-François Doublet took a bullet that tossed him from the forecastle and broke his arm in two places. How did the precocious young second lieutenant choose to spend his convalescence?

When botanists go bad

Or at least get angry. These particular botanists are upset about the idea that plants could be conscious and have written an angry letter explaining why.
Taiz told the Guardian: “Our criticism of the plant neurobiologists is they have failed to consider the importance of brain organisation, complexity and specialisation for the phenomenon of consciousness.” 
The broadside drew a robust response from the University of Sydney’s Monica Gagliano, who conducts research on the cognitive abilities of plants, including perception, learning, memory and consciousness. She said the criticisms failed to take account of all the evidence and focused only on work that supported the authors’ viewpoint. “For me, the process of generating knowledge through rigorous science is about understanding the evidence base behind a claim,” she said. “Where is their experimental data? Or are we expected to just accept their claim at face value?”
I read the original letter (it's not long) and I think it's got some good and bad aspects. There's a lengthy discussion as to whether plants have similar structures to animal brains, but I think that's all somewhat immaterial; we have not yet established what consciousness is or how it arises. They comment on that fascinating experiment supposedly demonstrating that plants can learn, but all they say is :
However, Biegler has cautioned that such a conclusion is premature and that additional controls are required to establish the specificity of the response as well as to definitively rule out the effects of sensory adaptation and motor fatigue.
Which amounts to saying little more than that the result could be wrong, or that they simply don't believe the result.

They comment more extensively on an experiment designed to test whether plants can have conditioned responses, in which plants were apparently "trained" to grow towards the direction of a fan by combining it with blue light. They say this may be only a statistical artifact caused by the use of a maze to direct the plants, but they cite only a personal communication in support of an experiment using "more stringent conditions", so we can't know from this which authors actually ran the better experiment.

Next they address the interesting observation that anaesthetics have similar motion-suppressing effects on plants as animals. Here they seem on much firmer ground, claiming that this could be due to, well, motion-suppressing effects, which in no way implies the necessity of consciousness.

The remainder of the letter is given over to describing how consciousness could arise in animals given a sufficient level of physiological complexity. I didn't find it at all convincing - how could we ever know what's conscious and what isn't ? A far better discussion can be found in Other Minds, which looks at octopus intelligence (which I'll get around to reviewing properly at some point). That book does a good job of showing that while the octopus is probably not as intelligent as some urban myths might suppose, it probably is a basically intelligent, self-aware animal.

Here it seems to me that they take for granted the idea that consciousness requires complexity. Perhaps this is so, but I think they've missed the point of the "hard problem". Consciousness is a distinctly non-physical phenomenon : my imaginings have no physical substance; the electrochemical flows in my brain are not at all the same as my perceptions of imaginary giraffes. So is complexity really required ? Why can't rocks and electrons be conscious, after a fashion ? I'm not saying that they actually are, of course, just that both the ideas that consciousness derives from physics and that consciousness has nothing to do with physics seem to have severe problems.

Group of biologists tries to bury the idea that plants are conscious

The gardening gloves are off. Frustrated by more than a decade of research which claims to reveal intentions, feelings and even consciousness in plants, more traditionally minded botanists have finally snapped. Plants, they protest, are emphatically not conscious.

Friday, 5 July 2019

The modern far right : blame the French, not the Germans

Or at least that's the conclusion of this very interesting essay.
New Right ideas are clearly not a revival of 1930s fascism. Despite some similarities, today’s nationalists are more directly inspired by a late 19th-century French line of thinking. Maurice Barrès came along 1897. He was the thinker behind a very specific set of nationalist ideas that developed more restrictive definitions of national identity than those of the previous nationalist pioneers. 
Barrès theorised that the culture and integrity of a nation was “eternal”, and that any change to it, whether brought about by foreign influence or progressive politics, would bring about its demise. Any cultural change, be it to the arts, to the role of women, or to racial assumptions, was seen to erode the spirit of the nation and its way of life. Ideas about the state, belonging and politics, which emerged from Barrès tended to advocate racial and cultural exclusion as necessary to national survival. The key idea introduced by Barrès was the link between race and culture. It meant that culture needed to remain unchanged if it was to survive, as did the race that produced it. Even more importantly, it introduced the notion that any progressive, modern or culture-changing idea endangered the nation’s survival. 
Whereas in contrast the more well-known far right movements of the 1930s didn't fear social change in itself. Instead they had a specific goal in mind and saw no problem in modifying society so long as it was in accordance with their vision.
Mussolini, for example, sought to dismantle Italian family values and relations, so as to foster new relations between individuals and the state. Likewise, fascists sought racial purification and expansion through modern science. In anticipation of populating huge empires after the destruction of their original populations, Nazi scientific ambitions sought to double the German population by intervening in women’s bodies to ensure each pregnancy yielded twins. Fascist nationalism gave total control to a saviour-leader. It demanded total discipline over the entire country and all of its social, cultural, biological, economic and even artistic functions.
The fascist generation of nationalists hoped to radically change their societies. Today’s nationalists want only to stop and reverse social change.
And yet... surely they still have an underlying ideological-driven goal ? Does it really make much of a difference if they aim towards a mythical past or a hypothetical future ? It sounds less to me like the different far-right movements have "some similarities" and more like they have similar goals but different justifications.
Here, race is relevant only insofar as it determines which culture an individual may belong to. Cultural belonging is underpinned by birth, which is why speaking and defending culture, as the New Right does, has powerful racial implications. But conveniently, the emphasis on culture circumvents restrictions on – and public revulsion for – overt racism.
Which sounds to me more like a cloak for racism rather than a fundamentally different ideology.
What our research shows is that we are living through the latest battle in a 300-year long ideological war over the meaning of humanity itself. On one side is the belief in a universal idea of humanity, which produced notions of equal rights, humanism and liberalism. Opposing it is the belief that marks all forms of nationalism: that humanity is not a single entity but rather, one divided by nature into national identities.
The New Right, like Barrès before them, purport that culture is biologically mediated rather than socially determined. If one is of the wrong biology then participating in another culture is difficult, if not impossible. The restoration of the nation logically requires the purification of culture and – by implication – race... This way of thinking is used to explain all manner of grievances ranging from shifts in the world of work, loss of control over one’s destiny, hopelessness, and community decay.
Finally, some interesting comments on the structure of the movements :
This system of New Right electoral alliances clearly emerged in the Brexit referendum: despite superficial disagreements, Vote Leave, Leave.EU and UKIP never fully contradicted one another. The same is true of Drumpf’s Republicans and alt-right “very fine people”; Le Pen’s Front (now Rassemblement) National and Génération Identitaire; and Salvini’s Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Nuova and Casa Pound. These alliances are mostly leaderless, unstable and scarily undisciplined.
This is what makes this new generation of nationalism truly viral. Without a permanent structure, these shapeshifting alliances can dodge attacks by reinventing new coalitions of similar members, as occurred with Farage’s Brexit Party.
These coalitions depend on the continued presence of grievances that directly affect people’s lives, particularly growing poverty even when working, the collapse of stable and safe social identities linked to work, the increasing instability of employment security, and the rapid change of local communities due to emigration, migration, collapsing housing affordability, and redevelopment initiatives that displace communities. These provide precise and urgent electoral rallying points. The New Right stems from 19th-century ideas, updated for our times. It ultimately promotes a rather sad view of humanity, where everything is determined by nature, not by individual choice. A world where culture is biologically mediated, immobile and restricted, not the fruit of learning and creativity. If their success is to be confronted, the basic grievances they claim to resolve will need to be addressed and solutions offered.
Which reminds me of Niall Ferguson's rule 5 : it take a network to beat a network. I'm not so sure about this here though. UKIP seemed to be entirely dependent on Farage. When it collapsed, he merely had to stamp his foot and most of the party came running along to lick his boots. Isn't that more of a hierarchy than a network ? Would either party have ever become a significant political force without him ? I rather doubt it.

On the other hand, UKIP's days as a fringe party ended when Farage began tapping into the racist zealotry and started leaving behind the criticism of the EU's bureaucracy (or at least that's my purely anecdotal observation). So perhaps the ideology is sustained by network forces but the way this is actually manifested as a group is due to hierarchy. The tribal identity this generates may be easily transferred if one believes a new group is essentially the same as the old.

What's harder for me to understand is whether the leaders of these groups result from the same forces or if they are something different. They tend to be much wealthier and far more secure than most of their members, and it's clear that they don't really have their underling's best interests at heart. Are they simply using such groups to conveniently advance their own interests or is it more complex than that ?

Finally, one has to wonder what it would really take to disrupt such networks. If they are entirely driven by social change, then addressing such grievances does not seem at all easy, because some of these changes are inevitable. It doesn't seem likely that they are purely hierarchical either, so removing the leaders would only cause temporary disruption. Where's their weakness ? Can we persuade them that they shouldn't try to fight the changes but accept them instead ?

The New Right: how a Frenchman born 150 years ago inspired the extreme nationalism behind Brexit and Donald Trump

Dressed in pastel-coloured Sunday best, Charles does not look like your typical far-right extremist. Yet he is a member of Génération Identitaire, a militant French youth group keen to overcome the thuggish reputation of the far right.

Thursday, 4 July 2019

A confusing view on Feynman

I agree with almost all of this, except for one or two key points. The bits about Ockham's Razor and beauty and simplicity not being a guide to truth are spot on. But about Feynman, for all his faults as a human being (which were pretty serious) :
Feynman was unquestionably one of the outstanding physicists of the 20th century... In the area of philosophy of science, though, like many physicists of his and the subsequent generation (and unlike those belonging to the previous one, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr), Feynman didn’t really shine – to put it mildly.
That's not the Feynman I recognise, who had a great many superbly eloquent quotes about the philosophy of science. Whether Feynman really said that you can "recognise truth by its beauty and simplicity", which the author admits is from a single source, I find it unlikely that that's how he actually went about doing science. "If it disagrees with experiment it's wrong", which is a 100% certain Feynman quote, blows that sentiment out of the water anyway. So it seems unfair to target Feynman for an attack of beauty.
The moral of the story is that physicists should leave philosophy of science to the pros, and stick to what they know best. Better yet: this is an area where fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue is not just a possibility, but arguably a necessity. 
I cannot for the life of me see how it's possible to study philosophy of science (at a professional level) without actually doing any honest-to-goodness research. I wouldn't trust the view of such a self-proclaimed philosopher unless they could show me their papers and talk me through their failed explorations, their months of work that compressed to a sentence of two, the hideously confused views of the referees they had to deal with, and their struggles to persuade everyone else that they were doing something interesting. That's one area of philosophy where I think it's vital to get down and dirty with some actual damn data.
Ironically, it was Plato – a philosopher – who argued that beauty is a guide to truth (and goodness), apparently never having met an untruthful member of the opposite (or same, as the case might be) sex. 
Da fuq ? I dunno which version of Plato this guy was reading, but I suggest he burn the copy and scatter the ashes to the four winds, because that sentence makes no sense.
It is therefore a good idea for scientists and philosophers alike to check with each other before uttering notions that might be hard to defend, especially when it comes to figures who are influential with the public. To quote another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a different context: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’
Okay, but how does that work in practise ? When should I call the philosophy department ? When should they call me ? How would either of us know when to do this, given that we may not know our own ignorance ? Nay, a philosopher of science should be a scientist first and a philosopher second, otherwise he won't know what he's on about. Philosophy is implicit in what the scientist does, but science is not implicit in philosophy.

Richard Feynman was wrong about beauty and truth in science - Massimo Pigliucci | Aeon Ideas

The American physicist Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying: 'You can recognise truth by its beauty and simplicity.' The phrase appears in the work of the American science writer K C Cole - in her Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life (1985) - although I could not find other records of Feynman writing or saying it.

Is the Long Peace long enough ?

Is the decrease of nation-state conflicts since WWII due to real causes, or is it simply a statistical fluke ? Stephen Pinker favours the former, others the latter. The interviewee here also generally falls into the latter camp - or rather, he seems to think that's it's just too early to tell. The problem is that if the changes after WWII really have made war less probable, at least for the West, we still haven't had long enough to tell if this is the kind of gap that might happen anyway through chance.
If you replay the statistics of the past 200 years, you would see periods of time that are as peaceful and at least as long as this long peace. This approach is what you would call a change-point analysis, because we know when we think something changed in the history of the production of wars. Can we tell a difference between the statistics on one side of that change-point from the statistics on the other side? Looking at the sizes of wars and then separately at the rate at which they’re produced, we don’t see any evidence of a change.
I think of myself as an optimist. I look at the broader set of evidence, and I see that there are reasons to believe things are changing. The pattern appears consistent with an idea that there is a trend here—that the risk of a large war among some nations is going down in part because there has not been a large war on the European continent since World War II, a clear success of efforts to promote peace. But if those efforts really are having an impact, we may not know for a long time how big that impact is.
I don't know how detailed his investigations have been because I haven't read the paper. But I wonder if it's really so valid to model the prospect of war statistically. In any given conflict there must be many different contributing factors and variable circumstances. So if any group of nations were to enact policies that made war between them less likely, that wouldn't prevent some other external nation coming along and attacking them anyway. I imagine that it might be possible to somewhat account for this, but surely there must be so many varying effects at work it would be difficult even to say if the chance of war had really gone down or not.
What makes things so interesting is that so much has changed in the world over this 200 year period. Public health. The world population. The number of nations. Technology has revolutionized everything. A wide variety of completely crazy geopolitical events have unfolded—plenty of nastiness in terms of nations becoming more autocratic along with nations being more democratic, et cetera. And yet, evidently the statistics of war have remained stable despite the changes in either direction. Why? I don’t know. I hope somebody else will look into this and tell me what the answer is.
Well, I'm again reminded of this answer on Quora which claims it's all due to age distribution. But I haven't found the original paper, so it's hard to check the details of that. It's also worth mentioning a recent study which found that non-violent protests are much more successful at regime change than violent revolutions.
The long peaces are relatively common statistical patterns under this model just because large wars are extremely rare. Because it’s fully specified, we can use that model to ask a question about the future: If that relative decrease in war were to stick around for a much larger period of time, how many more years would it need to hold before you could really say, yes, this postwar period is different from what we would expect from a stationary model where nothing’s changed. That’s where the number of 100-140 years comes out. At that point, we can then say definitively, by only looking at the severities and frequencies of wars, that the long peace is different. If you had a more sophisticated model that included information like where wars were fought, who was fighting in them, and why, et cetera, you could maybe shrink that number to some degree.
That leaves me confused as to what the analysis actually did. If it was just looking at the frequency of wars and periods of peace, then I don't think it says anything much. Surely at the very least you have to look at which nations are fighting which nations in order to account for varying local and global effects; you could at least say if the peace between Britain and France is statistically unusual or not. Otherwise I don't see that a global analysis would tell you very much. Direct link to the paper here for anyone who wants to check (I may or may not do this, time permitting).

Why Our Postwar "Long Peace" Is Fragile - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

You could be forgiven for balking at the idea that our post-World War II reality represents a "Long Peace." The phrase, given the prevalence of violent conflict worldwide, sounds more like how Obi-wan Kenobi might describe the period "before the dark times, before the Empire."

A little bit of utilitarianism does you good

This is a very nice little essay about someone I've never heard of but now think I should probably read. There are a lot of loud echoes of Plato in here.
Europe was at that time a profoundly hierarchical society, where a few privileged people ruled over the entire population with an arbitrary and unaccountable authority. Enlightenment philosophers took inequality to be the germ of social injustice. Beccaria had the ambition to radically reform his society, the institutions and the laws... Mindful of the interest of the many, Beccaria formulated a motto: the greatest happiness shared among the greater number, which was subsequently adopted by the English utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham. Beccaria saw this maxim as a fundamental tenet of a new science, whose object was human society and whose name was ‘the science of man’, echoing Hume’s project in that phrase. 
I've set out my objections to utilitarianism here (skip to the section of that title). For me, it's not so much wrong as it is incomplete. You can't really numerically quantify happiness, so you can't know if giving everyone a kitten creates net happiness (through cuddly kitties for many) or sadness (through the allergies of the few). And there are actions which are morally wrong but cause no actual suffering, like humanely murdering hermits. But while I don't think that utilitarianism is much of a guide to what is moral or just, I think that as a general guideline, it's a jolly good idea to strive for the combination of maximum happiness and minimum suffering. If it could be modelled mathematically, it would probably not be a simple linear sum of the two, but something that would preferentially minimise suffering first and consider increasing happiness only within that restriction.
Under the social contract, people agree to pool together a minimum portion of their freedom so as to guarantee its protection under the unified power of an authority: they swap their natural freedom in the state of nature for political freedom in the civil order of the state. 
The social contract is not a moment of celebration. People grudgingly agree to sign a pact with each other, and they are frequently tempted to break that pact to pursue their own advantage. What moves them to stick to the pact is the feeling of uncertainty, which makes it impossible to enjoy their natural freedom to act according to their immediate passions. The uncertainty as to how to exercise natural freedom leads everyone to accept a basic necessity: something has to be given away in order for everyone to enjoy genuine political freedom. 
Everyone’s minimum portion of natural freedom constitutes the public deposit of sovereignty which is the basis for the right to punish those actions that are injurious to the human society. The right to punish is a necessary evil that is exercised by the sovereign in order to respond to the radical uncertainty created by the unfettered exercise of natural freedom.
One of the greatest mistakes of the current era is, in my view, the notion that we should strive to maximise "freedom to", and not "freedom from", in any and all circumstances. Freedom by itself is neither innately good nor bad. It's certainly nice to be able to make one's own choices, but only insofar as they don't conflict with the same rights of others. Beccaria seems to agree :
"Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law."
A further utilitarian aspect comes when considering how to make the punishment fit the crime :
In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen, it is essential that it should be public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, and determined by the law.
So the smallest possible punishment for the greatest possible gain. That's a utilitarian philosophy I can get behind. While there are an awful lot of similarities with Plato thus far, here's a key difference :
To justify punishment using reason meant to reduce – even to minimise – the quantity and quality of violence within the society. Not only the violence attached to crimes, but also the violence entailed by the reaction to crimes by private parties and by public authorities. Beccaria’s goal was to regulate the right to punish, and eradicate from its practice all forms of vengeance and religious beliefs.
Plato believed that punishment should be used primarily (or even entirely) as a method of instruction and correction, never for the sheer joy of retribution. But whereas Beccaria sought to remove the religious, mystical, irrational aspect of punishment, and set out to deliberately minimise violence, that wasn't Plato's goal at all. He modelled his ideal societies firmly on the idea that people had to be controlled and manipulated, that religion was a key part of the state, and that violence was a legitimate (if undesirable) tool. He would have seen using violence as a failure, but nowhere does he express any sentiment that it should be minimised. Many of his punishments used violence which was strongly disproportionate to the violence of the crime (e.g. punishing bribery with death).
Because the intervention of criminal law is limited by necessity, the state can use criminal law only as a final resort. If there are other means to prevent crimes, they should be used. This part of Beccaria’s thought is often ignored by those who consider him the forefather of utilitarianism in England or the ancestor of law and economics in the United States. This is so because Beccaria asks for the least penal intervention, and for the maximum provision of social services as part of the same package. It is criminal law that must be kept to a minimum, not the state. Beccaria requires a robust intervention of the state to redress inequality and to prevent crimes by educating and assisting people, not by repressing them.
To me the key difference between modern, progressive, European socialism, and the old-style approach of Communism, is choice. The primary role of government should be to help the residents of the state. "Help" inherently requires a choice, that in large part they can opt-out of the state's preference. Hence the NHS doesn't infringe choice because everyone is free to choose paid healthcare if they wish. An affordable and effective state-run service does not preclude the existing of private alternatives.

But of course there are many much trickier situations as to what constitutes "help", which in some case necessitates removing choice. Imprisoning murders is generally reckoned to be helpful. What about imprisoning people who illegally download movies ? I don't think that's at all helpful, I think that simply increases the power of corporations, leading to ever-more extreme inequality of power and wealth to the point where there's no longer a fair and level playing field. Even if someone does have a powerful moral argument, they can all to easily be dismissed because they're seen as just not important enough.
What hurts our society more? Should we invest endless amounts of resources tracking petty thieves and minor infringements, or should the system focus its attention on grand-scale criminality?

Cesare Beccaria's radical ideas on crime and punishment - Lorenzo Zucca | Aeon Essays

On 12 April 1764, the citizens of Milan witnessed the brutal killing of Bartolomeo Luisetti. He had been condemned to death after being accused of sodomy. Luisetti was killed by asphyxiation and then burnt at the stake in front of the crowd.

Wednesday, 3 July 2019

It's okay to lie to the people, rules court

So today we learn the reasons why Boris Johnson won't appear in court to answer for the use of false statistics in a referendum. There could, in principle, have been very good reasons why this won't happen. Are there ? No really, no.
The High Court said it was not proved Mr Johnson had been acting in a public office when claiming the NHS could get £350m extra a week after Brexit. Outlining their reasons on Wednesday, they said it was "not sufficient" to argue that Mr Johnson made "contentious and widely challenged" statements about Brexit and the NHS while he was an MP and London mayor and that this therefore represented a "breach of duty". They concluded it had not been demonstrated that Mr Johnson made the comments "as he discharged the duties of the office".
I do not understand how that can be. He was an MP and mayor running a political campaign. Surely, it is inherently part of the duties of the office of MP to run (or at least participate in) political campaigns, even if that is a somewhat voluntary duty. MPs don't have to campaign on every issue, but for those they do choose to participate in, I don't see how it can possibly be considered not to be part of their official duties.
They pointed out that Parliament had passed legislation to make it a criminal offence for anyone to make false statements about a candidate during a campaign for the purposes of stopping them being elected. But Parliament, they concluded, had "deliberately excluded" legislating to include false factual statements about statistics within the auspices of the criminal law. "Parliament twice made a choice not to do precisely that which the interested party now seeks to achieve," they ruled.
But that's mad ! Nay, not mad, disgusting. In what world can you have a sensible campaign based on lies ? None at all. Not for the first time do I feel that, personal issues notwithstanding, Britain deserves the kick in the teeth of a hard Brexit for its persistent and wilful stupidity.

Of course, BoJo's response is even more ludicrous :
Mr Johnson's legal team argued that the offence of misconduct in public office should be about the secret abuse of power and there was nothing secret about the £350m claim, which they said had been challenged during the campaign.
Which is so contemptibly stupid. So it's okay to lie as long as it's in public, is it ? That's insane.

At least the prosecution are sensible and not defeated quite yet :
"You cannot have an MP, a public office-holding MP, on TV speaking to millions of people lying about how the public purse is being used," he told the BBC... Mr Ball said he still believed Mr Johnson's actions constituted "an abuse of public trust" and he was "slightly concerned there has not been the level of engagement with our written submissions that I have would have preferred". 
"Our legal argument is that Mr Johnson was carrying out several duties of an MP," he added. "Why do we elect MPs? One of the things they are responsible for is determining what happens to public money, where it goes, how it is spent, meaning they have authority and expert knowledge when it comes to the public purse." 
Mr Ball, who crowd-funded more than £300,000 to bring the case, said he would consult with his legal team before deciding whether it was appropriate to appeal against the ruling.

Johnson accuser may appeal '£350m claim' ruling

A man who took Boris Johnson to court over claims he lied during the 2016 EU referendum says he could continue with his private prosecution despite judges ruling it had no legal justification. Marcus Ball said he would "keep going" and appeal against the judgement if his lawyers advised him to do so.

Hungary has had a bit too much to think

Ah, Hungary, the other sick man of Europe.
The country’s Academy of Sciences appears to be the latest target for increased state control. The academy consists of a society of distinguished scientists and intellectuals, alongside a broad research network of 15 institutes and 150 research groups comprising about 3,000 scientific researchers.
The government’s plan would separate these institutes from the main academy, and create a governing board in which government-appointed delegates would have a majority. Parliament, which is dominated by Orbán’s Fidesz party, is currently debating the bill. It is expected to be passed and come into force by 1 September. 
Hungarian government officials say it is reasonable for the government to have a say in how state funding is used. “The academy of sciences is a sovereign institution, but not independent from national interests,” said the foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, at a conference in Bratislava last week. “It’s obvious that they should make research in areas and directions which are important from the perspective of the future competitiveness of the country.”
If I go to a florists and order a bouquet, it's reasonable for me to specify what sort of flowers I want. It's my bouquet, and while I rely on the technical skill of the florist to actually create the arrangement, I get to have some input into the design if I already have something in mind. I may know roughly what I want, just not how to get it.

Now if I have no clue at all what sort of arrangement I want, I must rely on the florist more heavily. I might still be able to suggest some changes to the final product, but if I ask the florist to design the thing, then I am paying them for their design as well as the physical product. I then absolve myself of much of a claim to know what design is appropriate. My role in the process diminishes.

If I pay for university tuition, then I'm paying the hear the expert opinions and findings of the professors. In doing so I implicitly declare that they know more than me, and that I will listen to their opinions even if they differ from my own. Of course, I'm also expecting that they'll listen to me and answer my questions, but I'm paying for the right to be educated properly, not to taught things that I already know or necessarily agree with. My role in deciding what they teach me is, after I enroll in a course, next to zero.

So if I'm a government seeking to fund scientific research, I am declaring that I don't have knowledge and wish for people to acquire it on my behalf. If I then say, "but I'm going to decide who's best to set what knowledge I need and how to get it", then I am basically saying, "I don't know what kind of flowers I want but I know who will make a good choice on my behalf, so I'm sending in this team of people I think would be good a running a flower shop even though I know nothing about flowers myself." It's silly. Of course science can't be separated entirely from politics, but this level and type of interference is daft. And anyway, as the old saying goes : "Do not meddle in the affairs of scientists, for they are nervous and quick to hide under a blanket."

Hungary eyes science research as latest target for state control

Academy will be managed by nationalist government in unprecedented move

Review : The Golden Road

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