POSIWID

Political Theatre

2012-05-22T04:24:00.000+01:00

"Wanting failure for what end?" @Bricoleur questions the purpose of a recent vote in the US Senate. As far as I understand it, the Republicans submitted a budget that was sufficiently similar to President's budget for the Republicans to reject, but sufficiently different for the Democrats to reject as well.

Failure for whom? According to @michaelbd, the purpose of the Republicans is to achieve a certain headline. Presumably this is not the purpose of the Democrats. But what is the purpose of the system as a whole, and does this kind of political theatre represent a systemic failure of the US political system?

Stephen Dinan, Obama Budget Defeated 99-0 (Washington Times, 16 May 2012)

Michael Brendan Dougherty, What It Means That The 'President's Budget' Went Down 99 To 0 In The Senate (Business Insider, 16 May 2012)

Jason Linkins, Senate Unanimously Rejects A Budget Offered By Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) (Huffington Post, 16 May 2012).

Celebrity Opinions

2012-04-29T11:47:00.000+01:00

My son watched @RustyRockets appearance before the Parliament Home Affairs Committee on 24 April 2012 with some delight. Mr Brand is not the first celebrity to be invited to present his opinions to a select committee - we have recently seen several celebrities pontificate on privacy and press freedom, including the actor Hugh Grant.

Brand's opinions on drug addiction are based largely on his own experience as a former addict, and he presented these opinions eloquently and with considerable wit, sometimes at the politicians' expense. He argued that taking drugs should not be seen as a criminal or judicial matter, and users should be shown more compassion.

Not surprisingly, his appearance is widely reported in the media, but from different angles.

The Telegraph columnist Damian Thomson was guardedly positive.

Like lots of supposedly cutting-edge comedians, Russell Brand is actually as pleased with himself as any of those bow-tied light entertainment “legends” who spent their sunset years on Celebrity Squares. Also, he’s a recovering addict, so that’s another layer of smuggery. But this week he appeared before a Commons select committee and – incredibly – talked a certain amount of sense about drugs.

But Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell was scornful.

When Russell Brand appeared before Keith Vaz’s Home Affairs Select Committee, which is reviewing drugs policy, it was hard to determine which of the pair of them was the more stupid, self-regarding or publicity-seeking — the comedian or the MP. Brand turned up late, looking as though he hadn’t washed for a month, in torn jeans and a tatty singlet, draped with more crucifixes than you’d find in the Vatican. His contempt for the workings of Westminster could not have been expressed more eloquently.

By taking evidence from celebrities, Parliament is perhaps creating the unfortunate impression that it regards the opinions of the rich and famous as more important than those of the rest of us. Having thoroughly dismissed Brand's argument, Platell then criticizes the committee (especially its Labour chairman Keith Vaz) for inviting Brand to give evidence in the first place, calling this "a silly, self-aggrandising gesture" and suggesting that Vaz is a man "who craves the limelight almost more than his star guest".

The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde had already made the same point, calling this "an exercise in publicity-seeking".

Chaired by the odious Keith Vaz, whose advance towards the red benches appears to be as ineluctable as it is sensationally ill-deserved, the committee this week followed up its decision to call Amy Winehouse's father to discourse on the cocaine trade with an invitation to Russell Brand to address them on drug addiction. To substitute one genuine expert with a tabloid celebrity may be regarded as unfortunate; to do it twice begins to look like a clear strategy.

The Government has a long history of ignoring expert scientific advice on drug policy. So what is the purpose of inviting celebrities instead? Hyde and Platell share the view that publicity is the sole purpose - the medium (as someone once said) is the message. My son had never watched Select Committee proceedings before, so I guess it's an achievement of a kind to make something accessible that is usually excruciatingly boring.

But let us think more broadly than this. Brand's opinions are unlikely to change many minds. Those who are already sympathetic to Brand's position may be entertained; those who are hostile to his position will be disgusted by Brand's manner as well as by his opinions, and this will reinforce their opposition to them. Thus the political effect of hearing Brand's evidence may be to make it harder for the governent to adopt the kind of policies advocated by Brand (as well as by large numbers of experts whose evidence receives far less publicity). Brand's advocacy is therefore probably counterproductive, in the sense that it weakens the political will to change.

Brand is a comedian, not a politician, so it may be unreasonable to expect him to understand the political effects of his actions. But what about the policiticans on the Select Committee? Are they really so vain and stupid that they cannot appreciate the political effects of their actions, or have they calculated these effects as a cunning plan to preserve the status quo?

Russell Brand calls for more compassion for drug users (BBC News 24 April 2012)

Russell Brand says drug addiction should be treated as a health matter
(Guardian, 24 April 2012)

Marina Hyde, Why bring Russell Brand to testify to a select committee instead of an expert witness? (Guardian, 26 April 2012)

Amanda Platell, Brand and a pathetic Commons cabaret (Daily Mail, 27 April 2012)

Damian Thomson, Even Russell Brand understands that you can't sell cocaine like tobacco (The Telegraph 27 April 2012)

Honesty upsets the natural order

2012-04-18T17:43:00.001+01:00

@Miguel_BOTB explains why football might be right to resist goal-line technology (The Independent, 17 April 2012).

His argument is that from a commercial point of view, a successful sport needs permanent giants - providing instant name-recognition for all but the most dedicated fans. In football, these giants are Real Madrid and Barcelona, Manchester United and a handful of other clubs. Despite (or perhaps because of) the public anger expressed by the managers of these clubs when officials decide against them, officials tend to have an unconscious tendency to give them benefit of the doubt. This unconscious bias reinforces the status quo, and thereby supports the commercial agenda of the sport. Whereas goal-line technology would remove this small element of advantage.

‏@Miguel_BOTB adds "Never really cared much for goal-line technology debate but it's funny to watch the lengths FIFA will go to avoid implementing it." In other words, it is the resistance to change that prompts a POSIWID enquiry - to understand FIFA's true motives for resisting a given innovation, we have to look very closely at what the current system actually does.

The conflict of interest here is between the casual fans (who usually support the well-known clubs) and the dedicated fans (who support a much wider range of smaller clubs and often despise the big clubs). The dedicated fans would support football willy-nilly, so it makes commercial sense to give priority to the interests of the casual fans.

What is Marriage For?

2012-02-26T00:45:00.000Z

@lfeatherstone, who is a Lib Dem MP and Equalities minister in the Coalition government, argues that neither the state nor the church "owns" marriage. Quoting a remark by a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, who had said that the Church doesn't own marriage, she interprets this to mean that marriage should belong to the people, and urges people not to polarize the debate on extending marriage to same-sex couples.

However, Lord Carey disputes her interpretation of his remark. "When I said that not even the Church owns it (marriage), I meant that the Church has no authority to change the definition of marriage as far as Christian thinking is concerned - there is a givenness to it."

For the Pope, meanwhile, marriage owns reproduction. Wrapping up a 3-day Vatican conference on infertility, His Holiness asserted that marriage and marital sexual intercourse (putting it in and jiggling it about a bit) is the proper way to create a human being, and reiterated his attack on artificial procreation (including IVF) as a form of arrogance. Matrimony, he said, “constitutes the only ‘place’ worthy of the call to existence of a new human being”.

The opposition to same-sex marriage seems to be based on the converse assertion, that reproduction owns marriage. The purpose of marriage being to propagate the species, or so the argument goes, therefore no relationship can count as true marriage if it lacks the potential to propagate.

We might imagine that this exclusion would also rule out the marriage of infertile people, as well as those who are past child-bearing age. But there are many examples in the Bible of elderly and infertile women suddely producing children (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Hannah, Elizabeth, ...), so if faith can overcome such obstacles, why can't a child spring (like Dionysus) from the thigh of a man?

Elsewhere, the purpose of marriage is said to be companionship, binding two people together in love and spiritual union, although theologians tie themselves in knots when they try to restrict this to sexual love. (Why shouldn't two elderly sisters who share a house have the same rights of inheritance as a lesbian couple? Why is civil partnership only available to those who share a bed? And what about the curious concept of a celibate civil partnership, which seems to be the only option available to homosexual priests?)

The confusion here is that marriage has many purposes, including social and legal ones. We may not wish to pry into the bedrooms of our friends, and we may be very reluctant to grant the immigration and tax authorities the right to pry into anyone's bedroom. And when a couple (of any kind) proudly and lovingly produce a child, it really shouldn't matter by what feats of acrobatics or bioengineering, and with the collaboration of which other parties, the child was engendered.

But I'm guessing that Archbishop Carey and Pope Ratzinger aren't going to be in a hurry to bless the offspring of - to pick a random example - Elton John and David Furnish.

Lynne Featherstone, This is not gay rights versus religious beliefs (Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2012)

John Bingham, Lynne Featherstone tells Church 'don't polarise gay marriage debate' (Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2012)

Church 'does not own marriage' (BBC News, 25 February 2012)

Pope decries artifical procreation; fertility treatments as ‘arrogant’ (New York Daily News 25 February 2012)

Pope says arrogance drives infertility field, tells couples to shun artificial procreation (Washington Post, 25 February 2012)

Juniper Berry, What the Bible says about God and the infertile woman (Squidoo)

Emergent Similarity

2012-02-19T12:46:00.000Z

Computers and humans seem to have a different notion of similarity. Here are a couple of examples that appeared almost simultaneously on Twitter.

@socialtechno "Twitter told me @dansabbagh is 'similar to' @rupertmurdoch. Computers do not make skilful editors."

@markhillary "Got my Spotify tuned to music similar to the Pogues and Meat Loaf just came on..?"

When statistical analysis throws up a surprising similarity or juxtaposition, we humans naturally wish to explain this by finding something in common. It is quite possible that there is a common characteristic that nobody has previously noticed, and statistical analysis then leads us to a new way of classifying things: scientific progress has sometimes taken this route. But statistical analysis is also perfectly capable of throwing up meaningless similarities - or what we humans with our limited intelligence are unable to find meaningful.

However, computers usually infer similarity between two items not by their intrinsic characteristics (affinity clustering) but by their relationship to external activities (interaction clustering). People who liked A also liked B. People who searched for A also searched for B. We just need to get used to the fact that this notion of "similarity" is not the same as ours.

The Exception Proves the Rule

2012-02-04T02:47:00.002Z

Last week, a story appeared in several papers about a woman who was described as a sex addict. Crystal Warren (42) claimed to have slept with over a thousand men.

Daily Mail 27 January 2012
Daily Mirror 27 January 2012

Earlier this week, the woman was interviewed on breakfast TV. The interviewer, veteran presenter Eamonn Homes (52) caused some outrage by asking her whether she had ever considered charging for sex.

Daily Mail 1 February 2012

Guardian 2 February 2012

In a further twist, the woman is now revealed to have been born a man, and to have had a sex-change operation in 2005.

Daily Mail 3 February 2012
Daily Telegraph 4 February 2012
Sun "Exclusive" 4 February 2012

Not only do many of the details of the earlier stories now turn out to be inaccurate or misleading, but we may now question whether Ms Warren can serve as a legitimate exception to a presumed general pattern of female sexual desire and behaviour, which had presumably been the point of publishing the story in the first place. Nevertheless, Ms Warren is now a celebrity and This is Somerset proudly announces that Ms Warren grew up in Somerset. Obviously the only way isn't Essex then.

See also Alexander Boot Sex Drugs and Eamonn Holmes, Daily Mail 3 February 2012

Are Markets Tools?

2012-01-26T05:18:00.000Z

@umairh tweets "Dear all. Markets are tools. Like any tool, they can break. Like any tool, we can fetishize them as idols. But shouldn't."

The problem with regarding a market as a tool or instrument is that it implies some external purpose - the invisible hand. Many people imagine that the invisible purpose of the market is to benefit people - either people in general or a particular class. Clearly some people do benefit from markets, at least in the short term (for example some speculators).

But maybe the market serves no purpose than its own. In which case, attributing any beneficial or instrumental purpose to the market is a kind of idolatry. See my post on Worshipping the Golden Calf.

God's Purpose In All Things

2012-01-07T05:33:00.001Z

Following the breakup of their daughter's marriage, an evangelical couple in America is reported as having praised God for the impending divorce. This seems to contradict their previous opposition to divorce.

It is perhaps a natural human reaction to say "Thank God" when your daughter splits up with a bloke you never really liked. Once upon a time, however, this would have been regarded as tantamount to taking the Lord's name in vain - in other words, blasphemy.

But if one reads the actual quote rather than the headlines, it is more of a silver lining than outright blasphemy.

"I'm sure Katy is trending on the internet just to get you to church tonight," said Mrs Hudson, 63. "I mean all over the world, who knows how God is bringing them in? The most important thing is you are here and God wants to put the fire in you in 2012," [Daily Telegraph 6 January 2012]

Twitter Populi, Twitter Dei.

But @katyperry warns us not to regard the voice of the parents as the voice of God.

"Concerning the gossip, I want to be clear that NO ONE speaks for me. Not a blog, magazine, "close sources" or my family."

Vox parentis non putrem a matre distinguit. (Whatever that means.)

Cycle of Pain Relief

2011-11-05T15:46:00.000Z

From a documentary entitled "The Last 48 Hours of Kurt Cobain"

"It does become debilitating being addicted man (you know) and you can blame it on other things - My Stomach Hurts, I Had Chronic Back Pain For Three Years, ... The more stuff you do for pain, the more pain you have, and the more you need for the pain, and the more acute your pain becomes (you know)"

One of the consequences of severe pain is that the sufferer starts to focus on the pain itself, rather than the cause of the pain. The pain becomes objectified as the enemy, to be attacked by various forms of pain relief.

Pain relief may provide temporary respite from unremitting pain; but if the root cause of the pain is not dealt with, the sufferer becomes dependent upon the pain relief. Furthermore, the (objectified) pain relief becomes increasingly ineffective as the (objectified) pain fights back. Eventually the (objectified) pain relief itself becomes the problem. There are several feedback loops here, that serve to maintain or even amplify the suffering, as Kurt Cobain himself was painfully aware.

I'm worse at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed.

By the way, techniques such as hypnosis encourage the sufferer to objectify the pain, as a step towards pain management. See for example G. Edward Riley, "Hypnosis, Hypnotherapy, and Hypnotherapists", Find Counseling.com (formerly TherapistFinder.net) Mental Health Journal, April, 2001. See also Jean Jackson, "Chronic pain and the tension between the body as subject and object" in Thomas J. Csordas (ed), Embodiment and experience: the existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Sex and Death

2011-10-14T11:37:00.000+01:00

Evolutionary psychologists have found another link between sex and death. Apparently death makes men more interested in sex.

Researchers at the University of Kansas told men to think about their own deaths, and found that men responded more vigorously to sexual pictures and had increased heart rates when viewing them, compared to when they thought about dental pain. Apparently this proves that men with low life expectancy are likely to shag anything that moves, in the hope of passing on their genes. Oh, for intercourse sake!

The researchers believe that contemplating one's death mimics conditions of 'low survivability'. It obviously hasn't occurred to them (a) that the contemplation of one's own death is a standard meditative practice, and that (b) contemplating dental pain is probably a lot more realistic and unpleasant than contemplating one's death.

(Contemplating one's own death may actually result in a longer and happier life, and we might imagine that women would prefer to get pregnant by men with better life chances. We might also imagine that the total quantity of sexual activity is influenced by female psychology as well as male psychology, but that's probably too complicated for Omri Gillath and his colleagues to work out.)

Bad Economy Means More Sex For Men (Science 2.0, October 2011)

See also Wynne Parry, Why thoughts of death may be good for you (LiveScience, 4 May 2012)

Death as POSIWID 4

2011-10-09T01:39:00.001+01:00

In the flurry of articles and blogposts following the sad but inevitable death of Steve Jobs, many journalists and bloggers have found apposite quotes from his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. I'm about to quote something from it myself, which continues a discussion we've been having here about the purpose of death.

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

[Stanford University, June 2005]

Steve Jobs is here following the Buddhist way of thinking.

"Death, far from being a subject to be shunned and avoided, is the key that unlocks the seeming mystery of life. It is by understanding death that we understand life; for death is part of the process of life in the larger sense. In another sense, life and death are two ends of the same process and if you understand one end of the process, you also understand the other end. Hence, by understanding the purpose of death we also understand the purpose of life." V.F. Gunaratna, Buddhist Reflections on Death

"As long as there is fear of death, life itself is not being lived at its best. So one of the very fundamental reasons for contemplating death, for making this reality fully conscious, is that of overcoming fear. The contemplation of death is not for making us depressed or morbid, it is rather for the purpose of helping to free us from fear." Ajahn Jagaro, Death and Dying

"By understanding the purpose of death we also understand the purpose of life."

Now please go and watch Steve Jobs' whole speech. [Stanford University, June 2005]

Framing a riot

2011-08-08T12:58:00.005+01:00

In Predicting a Riot, @DavidAllenGreen (aka Jack of Kent) points out that riots are used to validate and reinforce existing political opinions. Our political opinions influence how we read any given civil disturbance.

He also points out that a riot is a complex event, with many different things going on, and that to understand causes and effects, we need to be clear about which effects we are trying to explain. He attributes this point to the historian Conrad Russell (son of Bertrand).

Listening to the media reports of the riots in Tottenham over the weekend, I was struck by the amount of time devoted to looting. Although there were some police injuries, the media story was that most people seemed more interested in stealing televisions than attacking the police. Media coverage of other recent protests have been dominated by the unruly behaviour of Cambridge undergraduates and the children of pop stars.

It is difficult to find objective evidence about the causal relationship between the riot and the looting. Thus people will tend to form opinions that are determined by their general political stance. Some will regard the looting as an almost inevitable consequence of the riot, while others will regard it as accidental and opportunistic.

But maybe the looting serves some political purpose. If crowds can be easily diverted from legitimate political protest into pointless vandalism, egoism and self-interested thievery, this serves to discredit the original political agenda. So who benefits from this diversion? Right-wing bloggers such as @HolySmoke are already rubbing their hands with glee The looting is a PR disaster for UK Uncut (Daily Telegraph 8 Aug 2011). And politicians of all parties are distancing themselves from plans to cut police budgets.

Jack of Kent is viewing these events as a contemporary historian, and wondering how these events are perceived by people with different prejudices. But we can go further and ask how these events could be being orchestrated and framed in order to propagate a given set of perceptions.

In a Linked-In discussion A systems perspective on the riots in England, James Llewellyn says that a systemic approach "might ask us to consider whether there is a wider problem at work".

Some systems thinkers apparently don't stop to ask WHETHER there is a wider problem at work, they seem to take it as a guiding principle that there ALWAYS MUST BE a wider problem at work.

For the purposes of this discussion, James chooses to focus on a system he calls "the capitalist system", and (perhaps not surprisingly) finds some problems with this system. (Some systems thinkers follow a second guiding principle: that you can ALWAYS find problems with any reasonably important and complex system, if you look hard enough.)

Having chosen to focus on "the capitalist system", James asks ethical questions (values) as well as cause-effect questions (linear type solutions). He also asks a basic ontological question - does the category of "looter" include Bernie Madoff as well as the kids who stole televisions and trainers?

This ontological question may have some relevance for the aetiology of the riots. Some of the rioters have sought to justify their own behaviour by reference to the "looting" behaviour of the bankers, as well as a socioeconomic classification in which shop-keepers counted as "the rich". If the media are to be believed, some of those caught up in the riots do not appear to have been "have nots" or "underclass", but were middle class aspiring young people, who already had televisions and trainers and were apparently caught up with the fervour of "liberation" and "opportunity". Thus their way of understanding and framing the systems in which they were operating affected their ethical and instrumental choices; those who are convicted of various crimes will experience lasting change to their social identity. As has Bernie Madoff.

What I think this implies for systems thinking is that we are not just called upon to take a systems perspective for our own understanding of some series of events, but also to appreciate the range of systems perspectives taken by the actors in these events, as well as the various commentators upon them.

See also

The competing arguments used to explain the riots (BBC News Magazine, 11 August 2011) with commentary by two criminologists, Professor David Wilson of Birmingham City University and Marian FitzGerald, visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent.

England riots: 'The whites have become black' says David Starkey (BBC Newsnight, 12 August 2011), provocatively blaming the riots on the adoption of what he calls "black culture" by young people of all races, a point eloquently rebutted by Dreda Say Mitchell. "Very dangerous game to invoke the rivers of blood speech and Empire", comments @markhillary.

Scissors Paper Stone 3

2011-07-11T02:09:00.001+01:00

Discussing #Murdoch, @paulmasonnews argues that the network defeats the hierarchy. Mason tries to argue that the fall of News International represents a triumph for "the network", with particular reference to Facebook and Twitter. He references a book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988) (link), and also name-drops Slavoj Žižek.

But of course that's only one possible interpretation of recent events, and only one meaning of the word "network". Reading Adam Curtis's piece from a few months ago, ironically entitled Rupert Murdoch - A Portrait of Satan, we might instead get a picture of News International as (at least until recently) a supremely powerful network, which has now been (perhaps temporally) outmanoeuvred by the establishment hierarchy it for so long tried to subvert.

The establishment probably cares as little about poor Millie Dowler as it does about any foolish and over-sexed footballer. But when her mobile phone turns out to have been hacked, it gives everyone the perfect pretext to express indignation about the scurrilous tactics of a newspaper that has for decades been entertaining the working classes with the foibles of the rich and famous, as well as detailed accounts of crime. (Just read George Orwell on the Decline of the English Murder.)

While we may all deplore the tactics of the News of the World, investigative journalism is one of those activities we all benefit from while turning a blind eye to exactly how it is done. And how are we to hold the establishment to account, if the establishment sets up the rules of the game to make real investigative journalism as difficult and unprofitable as possible? Some moral as well as political dilemmas here.

You're So Pretty

2011-07-06T04:58:00.000+01:00

@the_beheld via @marginalutility asks Should We Praise Little Girls For Being Pretty? @nourishthesoul replies "It's wonderful to remind each other that we are all beautiful, but maybe we have it wrong?" Why I get tired of “You are beautiful!”

What's the purpose of commenting on a person's looks? There are three possible positive motivations - to make the person feel good, to make oneself feel good, or as an attempted building block in a relationship with the person (or her parents). There are also three possible negative motivations - to trivialize or attack the person, to put oneself down in comparison, or to trivialize or block an attempted relationship.

If you want a little girl to feel proud and important, then there are probably better ways of doing it than commenting on her looks. As the_beheld comments, "being praised for something you can’t help can feel hollow or even confusing". (The same applies to telling people how clever they are.)

Telling grown women that they are pretty, or that their daughters are pretty, may be an effective chat-up line on some occasions, but the line often carries a slightly bitter aftertaste, as if there is some buried hostility towards self or other. Some women and girls may become accustomed to hearing how pretty they are, possibly starting with their fathers, but that doesn't necessarily mean they believe it.

Perhaps the Sex Pistols had the right idea when their lyrics progressed from "pretty" to "pretty vacant".

Contradiction and Ambivalence

2011-06-28T15:15:00.000+01:00

As @MarkJBallard reports

Government departments have been cancelling freelance IT contractors supplied through SMEs and giving their interim staff business to Capita under orders from the Cabinet Office's Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG), in apparent contradiction of government SME policy. (Computer Weekly, 24 June 2011)

When the observed behaviour of a large complex entity seems to contradict its stated goals and policies, we may perhaps infer the existence of some contrary (possibly unstated) goals and policies that override or interfere with the stated ones. This is a classic application of the POSIWID principle.

In this case, however, the Cabinet Office defends the observed behaviour by appealing to a different set of stated goals and policies, relating to cost-cutting. Nevertheless, a representative of one of the affected SMEs suggests that short-term cost-cutting is likely to cost more in the longer-term, as a result of reduced competition.

There are also counter-claims that Capita is merely acting as a gatekeeper, passing on 80% of the business to SMEs, thus possibly contradicting the contradiction.

Thus the interpretation of purpose depends on interpretation of evidence as well as variation in timescale. Applying the POSIWID principle to a politically charged situation like this can often be subject to strong disagreement between stakeholders.

What Alcohol Content Reveals About The Purpose of Wine

2011-06-22T10:40:00.000+01:00

According to @felixsalmon (via @TimHarford)

"People like to think of themselves as sophisticates ... In the case of wine, they like the idea of buying something grown-up, with a relatively modest amount of alcohol."

But as Felix argues, there is a growing trend of wine producers deliberately understating the alcohol content on the labels. (The law permits a margin of error, and the wine producers exploit this.) There's an obvious motive for them - if consumers use the labels on the bottles as a guide to regulate their alcohol consumption, then this will result in people drinking more.

But why would the wine producers want to put more alcohol into the wine in the first place, and then lie to the consumers about it? This only makes commercial sense if this is what a significant number of consumers really (unconsciously) want.

As Felix concludes, consumers love to be lied to.

Felix Salmon, Why is wine getting hotter? (Reuters, 21 June 2011)

The Purpose of Conspiracy Theories

2011-06-04T05:54:00.000+01:00

#BGT Prompted by recent allegations suggesting that "Britain's Got Talent" (which she refers to as "Simon Cowell's talentless contest") was fixed, Marina Hyde suggests that we concoct conspiracy theories in order to excuse our twisted fascination with things (Guardian 3 June 2011).

"So what are we to make of people's need to believe in conspiracy theories such as the one floated above? In his famous essay on conspiracy theories in America, the historian Richard Hofstadter noted that a significant part of these tales is psychological projection – people ascribe their own worst traits to the imagined enemy, thus relieving themselves of various kinds of responsibility. And so with an increasingly savvy reality TV audience, who understand that Cowell always wins, yet watch in ever greater numbers and have to find a way of elevating their involvement into something more than a mug's game. Both fans and haters need to develop outlandish conspiracy theories because they can't actually believe millions upon millions are genuinely in thrall to this stuff."

Richard Hofstadter "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964)

Hofstadter's essay and other materials about conspiracy theories can be found on the website of Dr. Kenneth A. Rahn, Sr. See especially The Academic JFK Assassination Site and Nonconspiracists United.

The Purpose of Lists

2011-05-31T20:23:00.005+01:00

@Jason_Silva argues that to understand is to perceive patterns. He has produced a list of people he calls pattern seekers - those who he thinks have made a profound impact on the world by extracting meaning from chaos, and discovering what he calls metapatterns.

@milouness asks why do these lists always have so few women. One possible answer to Carmen's question can be determined by looking at the people Jason includes in his list. For example, he credits Watson and Crick for a pattern that was actually discovered by Rosalind Franklin. This is a common error whose explanation is complex - one reason Franklin doesn't receive the popular credit is that she was already dead (of ovarian cancer, as it happens) when Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for their work together. Another reason was that she was more cautious than her male colleagues about publishing speculative models without further empirical evidence. This omission suggests that Jason is unaware of the detail from which his claimed pattern emerges.

Jason's list seems to have been hastily assembled from the obvious intellectual celebrities of the twentieth century, and therefore merely reinforces established celebrity rather than identifying underrated genius. I'm sorry, but I don't see such lists as contributing very much to our understanding of anything. Is a list just a journalistic meme for having nothing much to say?

See also Zeitgeist magazine reveals the top lists of 2011 (Newsbiscuit).

The Ecosystem Myth

2011-05-31T05:04:00.002+01:00

#AWOBMOLG #systemsthinking Adam Curtis outlined the thesis of his second programme in an Observer article yesterday How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means (Observer 29 May 2011).

Curtis makes an association between ecology and empire, which was first mooted by the Norwegian historian of science Peder Anker in a book called Imperial Ecology (Harvard University Press 2001).

The story starts with the origin of the words "ecosystem" and "holistic", which were coined by Arthur Tansley and Jan Christiaan Smuts respectively. Tansley was a Fabian socialist, while Smuts was a Field Marshall during the First World War, and later became the Prime Minister of South Africa. These two men, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, are identified as co-founders of the idea of self-regulating systems.

But in 1935, Tansley wrote an academic paper called "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms", attacking the presumption of an ecology as a self-regulating closed system possessing homeostasis. He alludes in the paper to the notion that the ideal society can be based on ecological theory, and suggests that Smuts and his followers are motivated not by science but by an attachment to a view of society involving "less exalted wholes". This may have been a coded reference to the racial doctrines that dominated the British Empire, and were later to be institutionalized as Apartheid (although Smuts's own position on apartheid was complicated, as his Wikipedia entry indicates).

Anker sees the rapid expansion of the science of ecology within the British Empire as evidence that ecology was "objectively" in the service of the imperial powers, thus lumping Smuts and Tansley together notwithstanding the strong disagreements between them. Curtis performs a similar rhetorical trick when he talks about the adoption by left-wing communes of an idea of self-regulating systems.

"Thousands of young Americans who were disenchanted with politics went off instead to set up their own experimental communities – the commune movement. And they turned to Arthur Tansley's idea of the ecosystem as a model for how to create a human system of order within the communes."

Tansley may have coined the word "ecosystem", but he explicitly repudiated the idea of using ecological thinking to design human society. So in what sense is it fair to describe this as Arthur Tansley's idea?

"Although Tansley and Smuts and their argument about power would be forgotten, hybrid combinations of their ideas were going to re-emerge later in the century."

As an extreme example of faith in self-organizing systems, Curtis cites an interview with Lucy Annson of UK Uncut, conducted by the BBC Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis. Maitlis invited Annson to condemn the more extreme incidents that had occurred during the UK Uncut protest, and Annson was determined to evade any notion of collective responsibility.

Lucy Annson insisted again and again to Emily Maitlis that she was only a spokesperson for herself, and under the rules of the network no one could stand back and judge the system. Emily said: "You're not a completely peaceful organisation." Lucy came back with the killer line: "I don't think anyone can make an assessment of that, other than the people involved in the actions themselves."

Both Smuts and Tansley would have regarded Annson's statement as absurd, and certainly not supported by any reasonable notion of ecosystem or holism. Given that the purpose of the protest is largely defined in terms of its journalistic coverage, we can surely regard the protest and the coverage as a connected system, involving Maitlis as well as Annson. That's the same holistic sense of the word "involved" as when Donne says "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind".

Annson's denial of collective responsibility is also not a reflection of the actual behaviour of many communes, which as Curtis points out can sometimes be just as dysfunctional and oppressive as hierarchical organizations, if not worse. So although Curtis can mock the moral confusion displayed by Ms Annson, does this really illustrate a more general phenomenon?

I'll probably blog some more when I've watched the programme. For my review of the first programme, see All Chewed Over By Machines.

Why Do Sportsman Believe?

2011-05-28T09:24:00.001+01:00

Reading an article ~~possibly~~ by Matthew Syed (Religion and sport: Do prayers help players? BBC News Magazine 28 May 2011). There is some evidence that religious belief boosts sporting performance, and there are many examples of strong religious faith at the top level of sport,

Atheists observe that the content of the religion doesn't seem to make much difference, and that the visible superstitions and obsessions of some players (former Kent and England wicket-keeper Alan Knott comes to my mind) appears to perform the same purpose.

The article notes that Jonathan Edwards, the triple jumper, abandoned his strong religious faith when he stopped competing. Obviously we can't generalize from one case, but it is a hint that his faith may have had no other purpose in his life.

All Chewed Over By Machines

2011-05-26T00:09:00.010+01:00

#AWOBMOLG Have been watching the first part of the latest Adam Curtis documentary "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace". @socialtechno reckons "It's like a man writing a love letter to someone he doesn't love."

The documentary is named after a rather soppy 1950 poem by Richard Brautigan, and opens with Ayn Rand. Curtis would like us to believe that everyone in Silicon Valley was inspired and influenced by Ayn Rand (based on the fact that a few people named their children and companies after herself or her works) and he uses the life and works of Ayn Rand to frame a powerful but logically flawed dialectic about technological capitalism.

Thesis

"Ever since the 1970s, computer utopians in California believed that if human beings were linked by webs of computers, then together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream, which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network would work to create a self-stabilizing system. The world would be stable, yet everyone would be heroic Randian beings completely free to follow their desires."

This conflates a diverse range of beliefs and theories that were circulating all around the world, certainly not just in California. Those developing these ideas were far more likely to have been inspired and influenced by Karl Marx than by Ayn Rand. (Marx wrote of a world in which "the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all"). Or perhaps Paul Goodman or Marcuse or Sartre or Norman O Brown or Ivan Illich or any number of other postwar European and American intellectuals. Meanwhile, cybernetics was emerging from the work of mathematicians and systems thinkers - including Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, Jay Forrester and Stafford Beer - who posed a radical critique to the managerial philosophy of Taylorism and Fordism.

Curtis refers to this collection of ideas as "The Californian Ideology". According to Wikipedia, this term was coined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, who wrote an essay with this title in 1995 as a critique of West Coast cyber-libertarianism. The essay doesn't mention Ayn Rand, but it does mention some of the writers who appear in Curtis's film, including Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz and Alvin Toffler. By stringing together short clips from his interviews with these and other worthies, Curtis creates the impression that their opinions can all be lumped together into a common belief system, which he can then attack in the next part of the film.

Antithesis

Meanwhile, one of the most influential followers of Ayn Rand was Alan Greenspan, for many years the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Along with other members of the financial elite, Greenspan persuaded President Clinton to abdicate control of the financial sector, and leave financial stability and prosperity to the markets. In some ways this new market libertarianism was a continuation of the economic monetarism that prevailed in the 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher. During the 1990s, however, people started to tell themselves a story in which the new technology somehow replaced the old economy (boom and bust) with a new economy based on unshakeable stability, perpetual productivity growth and a transfer of power from governments to the people. This story (which we now know to have been wishful thinking) echoed some elements of the Californian ideology, but it was overlaid with all sorts of other political agendas.

Greenspan himself observed that there was a puzzling mismatch between corporate profits and genuine productivity growth. If the global economy had been a viable system in the cybernetic sense, designed or emerging according to the principles of Stafford Beer and others, this kind of information would be properly shared and interpreted, and would have had significant regulatory force.

Greenspan's original interpretation of this mismatch was that there was a worm in the apple of new market liberalism: he was soon persuaded to abandon this interpretation in favour of a much more optimistic one. As Curtis shows, using the IMF's intervention into Indonesia as an example, the financial elites leveraged the market system to protect their own interests, even when this ran counter to any notion of stability or general prosperity or natural justice. Ayn Rand would probably have called such behaviour "rational". Curtis gives us a lot of background about Rand's unbalanced sex life, in order to illustrate the mutually destructive nature of Rand's selfish notion of "rationality". He perhaps intended this section of the film as an allegory for the systemic side-effects of the Myth of the Machine.

Greenspan is portrayed in the film as an anti-hero, whose indecision and folly led an unsuspecting world (along with a compliant or distracted President Clinton) into disaster. Curtis also uses the Monica Lewinsky story, a tiny amount of familiar stock footage stretched by slow motion effects, to reinforce the train-crash element of the Clinton presidency. (Although it's difficult to see how Curtis can blame Californian hippies for all that. Might just as easily blame the Cavendish Laboratory.) But this is a fairly conventional version of recent history, which doesn't seem to tell us very much about our changing relationship with technology.

Synthesis

Curtis portrays Clinton as an important pivotal figure in this story, brought down by a series of tragic conflicts. Being as arrogant and selfish as Ayn Rand in his sexual behaviour - but being forced into concealment and deception by his political position. Adoring the old-style democratic politics (says Curtis), but being lured by the evil Greenspan-Iago into the new anti-politics. (Clinton as the glamorous Othello, obviously, who remains handsome even when picking his teeth.)

There is a heroic way of narrating history that concentrates on leaders and their personal strengths and weaknesses. Curtis's previous film, The Power of Nightmares, told a fascinating tale of the leaders of the American Right and the leaders of al Qaeda, and revealed intriguing links and parallels between Bush and Bin Laden.

There is also an "objective" way of narrating history, that downplays leadership and concentrates on the deeper system forces that shape events. George Orwell noted the tendency of Marxists to overuse words like "objectively", but surely nobody can doubt that political activity can sometimes have unanticipated or even counterproductive effects. Systems thinkers including Stafford Beer and Maturana remind us that complex sociotechnical systems may sometimes have a life of their own, preserving their essential characteristics regardless of the espoused intentions and best efforts of the people who are supposed to be in charge. (POSIWID was Beer's name for this effect.) Economists appeal to the "invisible hand", which supposedly creates beneficial outcomes without conscious planning or top-down governance. (By the way, the extreme form of economic liberalism espoused by Greenspan was popular in the 19th century, so it's a bit misleading to credit Ayn Rand with inventing this idea.) And narratives about the power of The Machine tend to belong here.

I've got better things to do with my time than work out how Ayn Rand's version of "objectivism" attempts to reconcile the notion of personal heroism (while steering away from Nietzsche's version) with the notion of system forces (while steering away from Marx's version). But if Adam Curtis believes he can produce a historical account that personalizes how we are watched over by machines, without dealing with the problems introduced by an array of German intellectuals from Marx to Nietzsche, he may be as much a captive of the Ayn Rand camp as the people featured in his film. (See what I did there?)

Notes

Richard Brautigan, "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" (via American Poems). Brautigan was briefly a poet-in-residence at CalTech, so he must have influenced loads of people in Silicon Valley mustn't he?

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1995)
Terry Eagleton, In Praise of Marx (Chronicle Review, April 2011)
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (1994)
Montserrat Tovar, Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace (1994)

Previews and reviews of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"

Adam Curtis (especially comments by Leeravitz and leftnotliberal)
Chris Applegate (24 May 2011)
Brainfisch (26 May 2011)
Andrew Orlowski (The Register 23 May 2011)
Ashwin Parameswaran (24 May 2011)
Paul Rennie (24 May 2011)
Alasdair Thompson (Bright Green 26 May 2011) (via OrgZone 25 May 2011)
Sam Wollaston (Guardian 23 May 2011)
Saturday Review (BBC Radio 4, 21 May 2011)

Satoshi Kanazawa

2011-05-19T18:29:00.007+01:00

@PsychToday descended to new lows of #badscience and #titillation this week when it published Satoshi Kanazawa's latest blogpost on the physical attractiveness of black women, complete with some pseudoscientific tosh about evolutionary psychology and testosterone. Following a storm of protest, Psychology Today has removed the offending blogpost (although it is still available elsewhere, for example on Quora); its other bloggers (Daniel Hawes, Nathan Heflick, Scott Barry Kaufman, Robert Kurzban, Mikhail Lyubansky, Melody T McCloud, Michael Mills, Stanton Peele, Steven Reiss, Gad Saad, Sam Sommers, and others) have felt the need to gang up on Dr Kanazawa, as if that somehow redeemed the reputation of the website. Commentary and criticism elsewhere includes BBC News, Nanjala Nyabola (Guardian). PZ Myers names Kanazawa "among the many reasons that I detest evolutionary psychology".

This is not the first time that Dr Kanazawa's pseudoscientific musings have provoked criticism from his fellow bloggers at Psychology Today. In November 2008, Christopher Ryan argued that Sloppy methodology is the Achilles Heel of evolutionary psychology. I myself took issue with Dr Kanazawa in my piece on Footballers Wives and Evolutionary Psychology.

But is it just Dr Kanazawa who is at fault here, as some of his more cautious critics suggest, or is there a fundamental methodological flaw at the core of evolutionary psychology? Dr Ryan has also recently criticized Stephen Pinker, suggesting that he may have used misleading data in his TED talk on the origins of war (Stephen Pinker's Stinker). For his part, Stanton Peele believes that "Satoshi Kanazawa's racism perfectly embodies evolutionary psychology".

Dr Ryan's generously illustrated blog features posts on human sexual behaviour and the female form, which he compares with other species - notably the bonobo. What he seems to be claiming is that the similarities between human and bonobo are explained not by their common genetic heritage, but by the existence of some evolutionary advantage of these characteristics.

Sounds plausible enough, but then pseudoscience can make all kinds of speculative explanation sound plausible. For example, someone might try to construct an argument to the effect that large breasts change shape more with age and maternity, therefore breast size makes the visual effects of ageing more obvious and helps men to choose younger and more fertile partners with fewer previous offspring. (That might sound ridiculous, but the logical structure is not very different from other arguments I've seen. See my post on the Purpose of Baldness.) But how on earth do we ever choose between conflicting theories, how do research bodies decide whether to fund this kind of research, and what kind of evidence is deemed relevant?

There is a simplistic POSIWID argument behind a lot of evolutionary biology and psychology, which goes like this. Here is an interesting and perhaps puzzling characteristic; therefore it must have some evolutionary purpose (expressed in terms of selective advantage); so the researchers just need to work out what it is. They then corroborate our hypothesis by carrying out a quick study, often using American psychology students as the subjects.

There are several methodological problems with this approach: firstly, in the way the characteristic is framed in the first place, secondly in the presumption that each characteristic must have a clearly identifiable purpose in its own right, thirdly in demonstrating purpose by identifying outcomes that can be correlated with the characteristic in question, and fourthly in inferring evolutionary processes from present-day observations alone. Kanazawa might just as well argue that Michael Phelps does everything he does in order to get laid. Beyond parody.

On Reputation

2011-05-11T15:56:00.000+01:00

From @CJFDillow on the externalities of superinjunctions.

"People can allege that Jemima Khan is shagging Jeremy Clarkson and say that the press isn’t reporting this because of a superinjunction. ... In this way, Ms Khan’s reputation is damaged by the existence of super injunctions (though the social cost of this is mitigated by the fact that Mr Clarkson‘s reputation is enhanced)."

Ms Khan attracted a lot of publicity to herself when she chose to protest about various allegations about her and Mr Clarkson that had been circulated on Twitter. Most people looked at the allegations and dismissed them as highly unlikely. The story, repeated with glamorous pictures in all newspapers, has merely served to remind us about her wealth and beauty, and has probably only enhanced her reputation. Perhaps the real purpose of her protest was to deflect attention and credibility from some other allegations. (See my post on Google-spinning.)

Chris assumes that Ms Khan's reputation would be sullied if she were discovered to have had a relationship with anyone outside the usual round of actors and sportsmen and other good looking airheads. Although I'm not a fan of Mr Clarkson, I imagine that a wealthy and bored woman might find a discreet relationship with him to be quite interesting, and I can't see that her reputation would be particularly damaged. It's not as if she were caught attending one of Mr Berlusconi's or Mr Mosley's parties, or spilling out of nightclubs in a dishevelled state.

Meanwhile, Chris assumes that Mr Clarkson's reputation is enhanced by these allegations. Again, I can't see that a popular and happily married journalist wants to be associated with bored heiresses, let alone by their indignant denials.

Is Google rigged?

2011-04-16T21:32:00.000+01:00

It seems Google can't do anything these days without courting controversy.

Google has defended recent changes to its search system that reduced the prominence of some popular websites. ... Google's head of search evaluation, Scott Huffman, said it was "almost absurd" to suggest that the results were rigged. [BBC News, 15 April 2011 via Lord of the Universe]

The phrase "almost absurd" falls some way short of a full-bloodied denial: Mr Huffman seems to be conceding that the suggestion is not totally absurd.

Meanwhile the word "rigged" seems ethically loaded. According to Merriam-Webster, the word "rigging" means

1. Making (a sailing ship or boat) ready for sailing by providing it with sails and rigging.

2. Assembling and adjusting (the equipment of a sailboat, aircraft, etc.) to make it ready for operation.

Obviously, Google's page ranking algorithms are designed to achieve certain outcomes. Google is a commercial company, not a supremely neutral enterprise (although some people seem to forget this too easily).

Is there a clear dividing line between designing something and rigging something? Perhaps the word "rigging" implies that there is something unfair, impure or ethically problematic about certain kinds of design thinking?

Judicial Ethics

2011-04-15T21:14:00.000+01:00

@LanguageLog defends a Canadian judge against a charge of plagiarism (Is "plagiarism" in a judicial decision wrong?)

The Court of Appeal for British Columbia has recently overturned a decision by Justice Joel Groves on the unusual grounds that the judge's written decision was largely copied from the submission of the plaintiffs, thus creating the unfortunate impression that the judge had been insufficiently diligent in considering both sides of the case.

The written record of a judge's decision serves several purposes. It provides an explanation to the losing side, as well as being a document that can be used by lawyers to predict the outcome of similar cases in future. Above all, it provides evidence that justice has been done.

In the event of a decision being inadequately documented, we might imagine that the proper course of action would be to invite the judge to expand and clarify his decision, and to address any points that he had failed to cover. Obviously this revised document might still be subject to the normal appeal process.

Instead of adopting this course of action, the Court of Appeal (by a majority of two to one) has demanded an entirely new trial. Presumably the appeal judges deem this to be the best way of achieving the purposes stated above. A new trial will be costly and troublesome for both the plaintiffs and defendents, but it will put more money into the pockets of the lawyers. Cui Bono?

Cojocaru (Guardian Ad Litem) v. British Columbia Women’s Hospital and Health Center, 2011 BCCA 192