rebellionkid's blog

A crisis update

2012-01-27T00:22:00.001Z

So remember how I had a crisis? The reason that post didn't really explain what the crisis was was that I didn't know when I was writing. The first part of solving any big problem is working out what the problem is. I think I'm most of the way there. As for the solution. That's less clear. But I'm at least happy that I have a structure for possible solutions. So, here's a rough outline of what went wrong.

The crisis wasn't fundamentally an ethical one. It was a problem of justification, and more generally a philosophical project that didn't work. Remember how I had a nice little diagram that explained what my philosophy looked like? That diagram is stupid.

The problem is I've not treated philosophy like I treat physics, maths or any other field of study other than art. Consider Rembrandt and Newton, both the Greatest (with a capital G) in their field at around the same time. There are a handful today as great as Rembrandt, I could never seek to become such a person. Today you cannot get a physics A-level let alone degree without being far more right about science than Newton ever was. I can do all the mathematics Newton could, I can do all the physics he could, with ease. That's not because I'm smarter than him. It's because he had to waste a lot of time inventing all of that mathematics and physics, I have it already digested in an easy to use form in textbooks. Science is progressive. I am naturally better than all the Greats of antiquity, that's an inevitable part of the process. In art this isn't true.

In philosophy it ought to be true. If philosophy is the creation of good ways of thinking about things or if it's seeking the correct way of dealing with various questions then it ought to progress in the same way. It should be obvious to us that whilst Socrates is Great, whilst he is deeply interesting, he is profoundly ignorant about many things that I ought not to be, and the things he does positively assert he is confused about. Note that just as with Newton it's quite consistent to claim both that Socrates is Great and that I am more right about philosophy than him.

In particular this ought to apply to Descartes. A Great thinker without whom modern science is impossible. But I've not got my historian's hat on, and with it off Descartes is wrong, not just about his conclusions but about what fundamentally the project ought to look like.

For Descartes we start with the simplest beliefs you have when you strip away everything you can doubt. These basis axioms then combine with clear and direct reasoning to produce other truths. Think long enough and hard enough and you've understood the entire world. The point is that he can prove he's right in the same way a mathematician can. Disagreeing with him, if he's done it right, is impossible. It should force you to believe the same way a proof does. Notice my diagram about what my project looked like. I had sense data and some basic assumptions, I concluded from them in an indisputable way. This project looks like Euclid. And that's not the way to think.

The problem is two assumptions. First that all of thought can be deduced from a few simple ideas. They cannot. Your brain is not a soul, an imperfect approximation of truths that are simple. It is a messy bunch of evolved meat and the truths are bad approximations to it. The shear complexity of an idea like goodness is incredible. It's not the kind of thing that you can write a one line description of. Second that you should start philosophy from scratch. The idea is that anyone will end up agreeing with you if you do this. Stupidly, I had already seen, but not grokked, the counterargument. I'd read GEB and in particular What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. Only I hadn't realised that it's not just a joke. Really there could be people who didn't have modus ponens, and no possible argument, no imaginable form of words, could logically compel them to accept it.

The job of philosophy is not the collection of true statements after the style of the Elements of Euclid. A Peter Winch quote is key "Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning to do something". Your mind is not a collection of facts standing on a foundation that can be taken apart and put back together freely. Your mind is a collection of processes. You get rid of the wrong process and you dont make a system with fewer assumptions, you loose the ability to be a mind.

An analogy: You should not think of your mind a sculpture, something that can be stripped down and built up anew on firm foundations. Your mind is an aeroplane. It's badly broken and you're flying over an ocean. You must fix it, but while you do that you must keep it flying. You can destroy and replace large sections of your mind. But if you get rid of it all you die. Taking your mind back to perfect emptiness is not like dismantling a bad sculpture to make a new one. It's fixing a crashing plane by taking the wings off.

So then I was shocked, some way down this path, that I had to add more and more assumptions in just to get ethics come out of it. I was having to create fantastic bullshit answers whenever people asked me the obvious questions. "So why do you define good like that?" "What counts as a person as far as moral calculations are concerned?" "How ought we to weight other people's utility functions?" My expectation always was that I would be forced to accept there was only one possible answer to these questions. That they were determined by logic. So when I failed to find the proofs for them I was distressed. Eventually I gave up and posted "My Crisis" in disgust.

So a mature philosophy has to be developed from an immature one. Not by throwing it away, but by making it better. What does this tell us about value and ethics? In fact this is especially valuable in ethics. Philosophers since Socrates (and doubtless the pre-Socratics too) have tried to define The Good in a sentence. If you're happy with the idea of a Form then it's obvious that there is an abstract absolute Good to be found through logic. If we accept the insight above then this no longer seems tenable. Value is not there to be found by logic.

So where is it to be found? To quote the deeply awesome MoR (which I have mentioned before) "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!" There is value. To accept even for a second that there is no value is to cut the wings off your plane. This does not make things clearer, it makes things crash. There are things that are desired, that matter, that are unendurable. But notice that it's people that make it so. *I* desire, *you* think it matters, *she* finds it unendurable. The value must be ours.

What exactly that value looks like isn't clear. Importantly how to change it isn't clear. I want to be the kind of mind that can change what it values, but only in a positive direction. Imagine someone gave you a pill that would make you want to murder people, not just that but the pill would make you think that murder was the right thing to do. Would you take it? Of course not. You dont want to murder, so you dont want to want to murder. To want to want something we dont want now seems wrong. And yet it is obvious that some changes have been for the better. Slavery was banned, it was never un-banned. Historical murder rates declined by many orders of magnitude over the last 10,000 years. This kind of moral *progress* is good. And yet it's not quite as simple as "becoming more like us", we can imagine people more virtuous than ourselves. In breathtaking doublethink we can say "I know I ought to give more to charity" or "I wish I didn't hate them so much", and not think this signals major insanity.

Exactly what the difference is needs clarification. Exactly how we ought to update our ethical intuitions on this basis needs clarification. Exactly how we ought to update our ethical intuitions based on the fact that our brain is very bad at a lot of things needs work. I'm still confused in short, but at least I've stopped being quite so stupid about it.

Dyslexia

2012-01-10T18:55:00.000Z

A quick autobiographical thing. I've been thinking for a while that there's one fact that shaped my personality more than any other. It's important to know where people get their intuitions from, so here goes. Almost everything I think has been influenced by just how badly my primary school dealt with the fact that I'm dyslexic.

First, my actual condition. I find writing with a pen physically painful. It's taken many many years to get to the stage where I can write lecture notes legibly. And I would always type if I wanted to write something like this. Second I cannot rote memorise, it's just a very under-developed part of my brain. Third I have the dubious fortune of speaking English. You should be able to conclude from the last two that I cannot spell. Please remember however that I am slightly more intelligent and vastly better read that most people.

My primary school was the worst point in my life. If I could erase every memory I have of that time I would without any regrets. It is really hard to spend 6 years failing. It's really really hard to be told that you've failed a test in a category that means a lot to you, for me failing at school was an insult to my intelligence, the thing about me that matters. It's really hard to be dragged through a spelling test every damned week and to fail it every damned week, and to look back over your exercise book and not see a single page without red ink.

This taught me several things. First, that tests dont matter. That failing every test you do is irrelevant if you're still smart. I've always cared more about reading than about getting a good grade, because if you cant do that anyway you may as well not care about it. And so I've never really cared about getting the right answer on silly exercises, even on really damned important silly exercises. It's not as important as reading a good book. See also, I dont care that other people pass tests, I only care if they're good. This is the reason why I dont care if politicians win elections, what they think and do is vastly more important.

Secondly, everyone in authority is out to get you. Every teenager thinks this, but one who has the experience of 6 years of being hated by teachers for being stupid thinks it more. I was an anarchist for a long time (softened since) and still disrespect and fear authorities of all kinds. Seeing a police officer makes me very very nervous, tempered with just a little anger. Seeing revolutionary mobs attacking and killing the security forces of some dictatorship makes me happy. Sure I later explain that all loss of life is tragic and if it could have been avoided that would have been better. Doesn't change the fact that people in authority being hurt makes me happy.

Third, rules are stupid, learning them is pointless. Do a spelling test in English, go into it knowing some rule about how to spell English words (I before E or something) then try to apply it. Most of the time you will be wrong. You will have hit an "exception", in other words a normal English word. English just doesn't obey such rules. I spent the best part of those 6 years trying to learn the rules. Then I realised I'd do better just guessing each word on its own and forgetting the rules. I refuse to learn or obey rules without understanding and agreeing with them.

A subsection of this: I am very opposed to subjects with arbitrary definitions. I dimly remember biologists having some ridiculous and over-complicated definition of life, I think stupid things like excretion may have been in there. I never learnt it because it didn't sound like a coherent idea. Say "something that reproduces itself with heredity" and I understand how that's a clear idea that we can argue about (bonus point: "life evolves" is a tautology). {Edit: Oh god they've even got a fun little mnemonic: Mrs Gren. Dont be shocked to learn I still haven't actually read what it stands for}

Final point, my writing style. I explain ideas by talking. Always have, because if writing a paragraph takes you a quarter of an hour you either talk your ideas or they die. So, you may have noticed a few of my ... well ok most of my, posts contain little verbal hesitations, (starting a sentence "so" or using ellipses for example). I'm talking this, I'm talking these words right now in my head. So when I type they come out like I talk. Also I learnt very early that polysyllabic Latinate words are easier to spell and have less irregularities that short German ones. Hence my sesquipedalian vocabulary. It's also a signalling thing. If you're handing in two paragraphs of illegible scrawl you've got to do something to convince the motherfuckers you've got a brain. And talking like you're ... well ... a knob, is a fast and easy way to do that.

Polyamory

2012-01-03T04:27:00.001Z

"Poly-what?" What if there was a huge category of relationships you had never even heard of? What if you never asked yourself what your sexual orientation was because you couldn't imagine others? In the same way a lot of people dont imagine polyamory. So here's some information, no argument, just an idea.

Monogamy means "one wife" {edit, I'm totally wrong, see comments}. In some cultures men had many wives, in a very small number wives had many husbands. But in our culture Monogamy is expected. The idea is so deep we even make up the nonsense idea of "soulmates". People think any move from monogamy is wrong. No western country recognises non-monogamous marriages. This is such a deep idea in our culture many think it is a self-evident fact. But there's more than one thing that isn't monogamy. In our culture we can only imagine cheating, promising to only sleep with one person and breaking that promise.

But some people dont do this. Some are in relationships with more than one person that are just as real, deep and important as a normal monogamous ones (and a lot more real than the average celebrity wedding). They are not cheating. The catch all term for this is polyamory, meaning "many loves" with no reference to marriage or to gender. It is often called poly and mentioned with LGBT as a part of general sexual diversity. Here are some relationships to think about. You may or may not be interested in trying this at home, but you should notice that human sexuality is incredibly variable.

Swinging. Alice, Bob, Claire and Dave, (throughout this Alice, Bob, Claire, Dave etc are of whatever genders you like) have sex with eachother. They are either established couples or singles. There is no obligation for romance or even friendship between them. This is sex for pleasure, not an expression of love. This may be to add some variety to the sex life or may be to do with a fetish called Candaulism where one person is aroused watching their partner sleeping with another. Either way they are all happy and agree, nobody is cheating.

Open relationship. Alice and Bob are in a stable loving relationship but they agree that they can sleep with or have some kinds of relationship with other people within negotiated limits. Alice can sleep with Claire without cheating on Bob, Bob agreed to this so no promise has been broken. This is often the case with couples who, while committed to eachother, want to remain sexually independent.

There is a special type of open relationships in some fetish cultures. Alice can play with Claire without becoming fluid bonded. This means doing things with whips and chain s, feet, gunge, ants etc without the sex. This is helpful if, in an otherwise good relationship, Alice's big turn on is Bob's big turn off. This way Alice can do what they like and Bob doesn't have to do what they dont want to. Or Alice and Bob can just think of things-like-relationships and things-like-dressing-up-as-a-dog as different. So Alice feels no more jealousy about Bob and Claire dressing as dogs together than them playing golf.

V-shaped relationships. Alice is in a loving committed relationship with Bob and also with Claire. But where Alice is not cheating on Claire with Bob or vice versa. This means Bob and Claire know about and agree to the relationships. (Alice is sometimes called the hinge). This is a fairly common relationship. This does take very careful discussion and negotiation. Claire is not getting any of the time and attention that Alice is giving to Bob, so it's important that everyone is happy with the balance. But Alice is happy because if the relationship with Bob is causing stress then Claire can give support.

One form of this is the primary/secondary relationship. Alice is in a committed relationship with Bob, this is the main relationship in Alice's life. Alice is also in a relationship with Claire, but everyone knows that this is less deep and less important than the relationship with Bob. This can produce tension if done wrong. But sometimes it makes sense. Maybe Claire is unable to commit. Maybe Alice cannot give enough attention to Claire. Sometimes Claire will have other partners of their own.

Triads, quads and other groups/tribes. In a triad Alice, Bob, Claire are all in a relationship each with each other. In a quad they are also in a relationship with Dave. People can set themselves up in small groups or tribes where each person may be in a relationship with any other. This gets complicated fast. If 5 people are all in a relationship together there are 10 relationships that all need attention and effort from both sides. This has happened. It is amazing how good some people are at controlling relationships.

Polyfidelity. Alice, Bob, Claire, Dave are in a relationship, within that they are faithful. For Alice to sleep with Eugene is as much cheating as in a monogamous relationship. This is a contrast to an open relationship.

It's obvious that such relationships between consenting adults are ethical. The point is there is a question to answer. Many people dont question their sexual orientation, they dont realise there could be another answer. Far more people (including myself not long ago) dont ask if they want to be poly. And it's not an obvious question. Many people assume that monogamy is a fact of human biology. This is false. It is not written that Alice cannot love Claire because she already loves Bob. Just as it is not written that she cannot love Claire because they are both female.

Stable, happy, poly relationships exist. The limited research on this topic suggests that poly relationships are no less stable than mono relationships. Most people dont know what they are. They cannot ask if they want to be in one. But now you at least cannot plead ignorance. Think about it. I will.

Life is not like a video game

2011-12-29T00:19:00.000Z

No, not because "it has no reset button". That's boring and if, like me, you first played video games in arcades where your mum would only give you one coin, not obviously true. There's a couple of other fallacies that I want to tackle. The general heading is "life is not fair". Firstly life has no obligation to let you win. Secondly, life does not give everyone the same 100 skill points to start with.

There's a fact most people dont realise when they play games, it's been specifically designed so that you can win. The game world may seem natural and real, but it obeys rules. One rule, too obvious to think of normally, is that there is a (large) set of sequences of button-presses that result in the "YOU WIN" screen. This rule is so obvious that we dont realise it's not a law of logic. It's perfectly possible for a one player game to have no way to win. If you play tic-tac-toe against a reasonable player you cannot win. If you play the MIU game you will never reach MU.

And this isn't just an observation about abstract games. It's an observation about life. There are some things that no matter how smart you are, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want, you cant have. You cant have a machine that generates free energy. It doesn't matter if you wish upon a star, you wont win that game. It doesn't matter how hard you try, it's not clear that *everyone* has a set of actions they can take to become world basketball champion. It's not clear that *everyone* can become the head of a fortune 500 company.

And this is even true about games that humanity as a whole is playing. Just because the whole of humanity tries to do something doesn't mean they'll succeed. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at it, it's not obvious that it's even theoretically possible for humans to cure virus in the next 20 years. It's not obvious that the renewable energy project can succeed on straightforward thermodynamic principles. We shouldn't assume humanity is omnipotent.

There's a point to this other than depressing you and stopping you from going on the fucking X-factor. Before you start your project be careful that you have considered every option. If you pick the project "become the greatest basketball player ever" and you are 4ft tall then it's safe to say you are going to waste your life. You're allowed to amount to nothing. 99.99% of all the humans that have ever lived did not matter at all, they were useless, they picked a project they couldn't succeed at. And when you do pick this project you ignore the project you could have done. You forget that you could have sat down and done something else, and won.

The second fallacy is one much loved by a certain kind of hippie/middle class/mother figure, the kind of person who thinks everyone is special. This is what I like to call the Dungeons and Dragons fallacy. It runs something like this: When creating your character what nature does is take 100 points and distribute them amongst various categories like "drawing skill", "hight", "maths ability", "attractiveness" etc. so people have a different balance but the same sum. This is the implicit idea whenever the fact that Alice is better than Bob at the Xylophone is countered by the assertion that Bob is probably better than Alice at Yachting.

You've all heard people defend someone's low IQ by saying it doesn't measure some property, often creativity, with the implication that the low IQ person will be far more creative. Just plain false I'm afraid, there's no a priori reason why little Timmy cant be both bad at verbal reasoning *and* uncreative. There are many people who are bad at a wide range of things. Likewise there are many people who are good at a wide range of things. Unless you can point to a causal link between two abilities that tends to make them balance there is no reason why being bad at something could be reason to be happy.

This is quite a broad failure of reasoning. There is an implicit assumption in a lot of people's reasoning that nature should be "fair". We're taught in stories that the bad guy always gets his comeuppance. We are told that the little ugly duckling always turns out to be beautiful on the inside. And I'm sorry, there's no reason to think so. There is no god who "ought to be fair", there is the blind bumping of wavefunctions, they dont give a damn if you're thick *and* ugly.

We often console ourself looking at someone we envy that they are just bound to have a flaw. We may loose to them at XYZ but there must be some area where we beat them. Sorry, just not true, in a world of 7 billion humans and rising it's just a statistical falsehood. There are people out there who on any axis you care to name are strictly worse that you. There is someone who's less romantically successful, has a lower IQ, is less creative, less good at drawing, less expressive, less attractive. And there are people who are better than you, at everything. I know this to be true of myself because I've met the motherfucker. There are people out there who are better at writing, better at thinking, more creative, more loving, more attractive, more composed, less likely to burn out from stress.

I'm sorry if this is a depressing post. There isn't a way to say it other than "life isn't fair". You cannot assume that things will just work out towards some kind of balance. The laws of physics do not require any such thing. The important thing is to accept this universe and not go mad in it. The important thing is to accept life isn't fair. To accept there's a guy who's strictly better than you who will beat you at anything they set their mind to. Then work around it. Dont fight them on that project, do something else, do some project where you're not the best person who could possibly do it, but the best person who *is* doing it. There are few pure mathematicians who could honestly say that John Conway could not have replicated their work had he set his mind to it. Mathematics did not stop and wait for him to die. It carried on, most mathematicians knowing that John Conway and a dozen others could just stomp on their pet project and solve it any moment, but also knowing that if they didn't it still needed to be solved.

There are some projects that cannot be solved, there are some that can partially be solved and there are some that can be totally solved. You have a finite amount of effort you can put into all of your projects in the next year. The lesson is to pick the right projects. You cant always know which is which. Sometimes life can still kill you while you're not looking. But whenever you can know, whenever you can predict, pick a project that you can solve and that you should solve. Because sometimes everyone else is waiting for you to do it.

Offence

2011-12-16T22:41:00.000Z

On the day Christopher Hitchens died religion is on my mind. This post is not about that, but you'll excuse if I use it as an example more than once. One thing that I dislike about twitter is the way the immense power of this unprecedented tool is used for a large category of bad ends. Twitter is amazing, every hashtag, used right, is an impromptu, undirected, leaderless lobby group. It comes into existence, organises action, generates followers, achieves some end or gives up and then burns itself up totally. This is a vast improvement over the old pressure groups that invariably fought more for their own continued existence and influence than for the actual aim that founded them. But what if this power is used stupidly? What if it's used to amplify the offence taken by a small number of people?

Now I'm not sure that I'm even right to say that the groups themselves are wrong here. More importantly is the danger of one of the key syllogisms of modern political discourse. This is an implicit assumption that's normally so well respected it doesn't have to be mentioned.

I find this offensive. Therefore this must be stopped.

First off, as a straightforward matter of logic this doesn't follow. You need another argument to make this work. I want to consider those arguments and more generally what this false syllogism means.

"Offence" is easy, statements or actions that, whilst not harming anyone in a straightforward physical sense, cause distress to some nearby. This runs from something as simple as shouting "cunt" at an old lady to the most visceral and detailed description of why the ideas most central to you are pure evil.

Why is this a bad thing? Well it's unpleasant. It's fairly obvious that causing someone emotional distress is something that caeteris paribus we ought to stop. The problem is twofold. On the one hand, are caeteris really paribus, on the second, how ought we to do the stopping?

The problem with saying an argument holds "all else equal" is that all else rarely is. The reason that humans talk is that there are advantages to doing so. Swearing has a well proven pain reduction power, it feels deeply satisfying and damnit all if it isn't funny. We discuss politics and religion, even though these are deeply sensitive topics, because like it or not some people are wrong on those subjects, and both of them matter a huge amount. There are even obvious advantages to vulgar abuse ("fuck off you wanker") or intolerant language ("fuck off you raghead"). {It's fun to observe how hard I had to push my mental barriers to type the second, whilst the first was trivial.} It's clearly better to find out who hates you by means of something other than being punched or being discriminated against.

So the first question is when do these advantages count for less than the emotional harm? The second one is what should we do in such cases. Clearly offence is justified if the offence is minimal, calling someone a wanker causes few people distress of any great importance. (Would you rather be called a rude name 20 times or have a papercut?) Clearly it's justified to offend someone if doing so is valuable to others. Calling someone a thief (if accurate) is offensive, but justified.

Now consider how we address unjustified offence. There are two obvious ways of doing it. Suppose you know that some newspaper columnist has views which hurt you and people like you more than is justified by anyone else's enjoyment. You could ask for this columnist to loose their job. ... Or you could just not read the column. Supposing the world to be divided into a class of people (maybe only the columnist) who like the opinions and a class who dont, it's clear that if the second class can ignore the column for free then (caeteris paribus) letting the first class read it is argument enough for taking the second route.

Notice the key distinction between an offensive and a dangerous columnist. To want a columnist to be fired because they're a bigot, rude, or just offensively stupid is not legitimate. To want a columnist to be fired because they cause riots, mislead people about health or unduly influence policy in a damaging direction is a separate and 100% legitimate cause. I'm even happy for people to try and get all those damned lefties at Channel 4 replaced. That's different from wanting someone to be fired for some silly act of sacrilege like not wearing a poppy or calling some large class of people murderers.

It should be clear that offensive speech can be justified at least sometimes. But even really deeply offensive speech can. If not you believe that any talk about religion should be banned. Consider the statement "there exists a perfectly just/perfectly ethical being who sends people who dont believe in him to a place of literal suffering for ever." To my knowledge there is no more offensive statement.

To say that nonbelievers are tortured for ever is horrifying, but not in itself offensive. To say this is ethical is monstrous. Suppose you believed that bad deeds should always be rewarded by suffering (your ethical system could really do with some work but that's another matter), now imagine a person who deserves infinite suffering. No, really, try to imagine such a person, I tried, I failed. We're not just talking about Hitler here, he caused a finite amount of suffering. We're talking about someone who created infinite pain, pain without end, who hurt more people than the universe can ever contain for more time than there has ever been. Can you imagine that? That's not Satan, that's worse than Satan, unimaginably worse than Satan. And the statement is that those who dont believe in this god are in that category? For many religious people then, merely stating their faith is the most offensive thing they can do. Remember why the Westbrough Baptists are evil? Exactly that reason. They believe that gay people deserve infinite suffering, that an ethical god hates them. Then they tell people that and it's offensive. And I applaud them for doing it. I would rather they continue to talk and explain their beliefs, because every single person who believes in a hell of literal suffering for sinners and who believes that being gay is a sin agrees with them. And that's important to remember before you ask anyone else for ethical advice.

But let's not let the atheists off. "God does not exist". We tend to brandish this around casually. Like we were saying fairies dont exist, or Santa. Because to us it's exactly the same. They're all silly mistakes that brains make because they're confused. Brains get confused, some of them become group selectionists, some of them believe in homoeopathy, some believe in gods. But imagine for a second what you're saying to a religious person. You know that person, the one you love most deeply, who's love sustains you at the worst times? The person who gives you your most rich sense of satisfaction by you pleasing them? The one who cares for and loves you more than you can express? The one you've spent years of devotion trying to connect ever more deeply with? Yeah, no such being. Sorry, and what's more, it was obvious if you think about it, you're as stupid as group selectionist for ever believing that. ...When was the last time you had to tell someone that their husband was a old pillowcase with a face badly drawn on in lipstick? Can you imagine how painful it would be to even consider that possibility? Let alone to be argued at and persuaded it's true. Atheists know that loosing religion is survivable, that you can recapture all the old joys without the god you though gave them to you. But we sometimes forget that it's damned hard to believe that when someone is telling you that the thing that gives your life meaning isn't real.

And yet obviously religious talk is good and valuable. Why? Because what people belive about gods effects what they do in fucking important ways. Because one of the two parties that's allowed to run America is batshit insane. Because people blowing themselves up is a bad idea. Because abstinence based sex education... read my motherfucking lips... DOES NOT FUCKING WORK. Because women being educated is a good idea. Because if there's a god out there we are really seriously pissing him off and this is a threat to the very existence of mankind, and that justifies anything. Because people who stop believing in god in the wrong way go crazy and kill people.

And this is the key argument. It scares me when people say "I am offended" and go on to argue as if this meant they had the automatic right to reparation. Because there are offensive things that ought to be said. In the spirit of debate if nothing else.

I hate the fact that there are people out there who believe in a just god and a hell of literal suffering. But shutting them up is not the way to fix it, they need to be able to say that kind of vile thing, because it might just be true damnit. When people talk about politics (yes, even tories) we need to let them talk because the science of political organisation is still fantastically primitive. We just dont know what the right answers are with a good probability of being right. Yes, of course [person you hate] has stupid views, that's obvious ... to you, and not to them or their supporters. Of course it's obvious that vast amounts of government debt are a terrible idea ... except to half the world's economists. Of course it's obvious that gay parents cant bring up children, apart from to a whole bunch of people who have been raised by gay parents. Yes of course it's obvious that polyamory is doomed to fail ... apart from to all those poly couples out there.

Sometimes (as with religion and politics) you cannot avoid offence and still talk about things that matter. In such cases we need to stop caring about offence and start caring about well-recognised dangerous speech. Sometimes it's easier than this, take responsibility for what you get offended by and avoid it, the rest of us aren't offended, it's easier for you to stop listening than for us to stop having fun,

Religion and ethics.

2011-12-10T02:29:00.000Z

I had a rather confusing conversation a while ago. I was discussing the fact that I was confused about ethics and was looking for something more firm to base it on. My friend suggested religion. My friend is very intelligent, which is why his comments confused me. He hadn't noticed something obvious to me. Which is that religion can never be a satisfying basis for morality. And that in fact no religious people derive their ethics this way.

My friend happens to be a Christian, but these comments, or ones equivalent to them, apply to any religion. He suggested his religion as a source for ethics. My first response was to interpret this to mean the Church, pick a big one and say "no, using condoms is a good thing". This isn't just a problem with the Roman Catholic Church. Anglicans have the whole gay thing. The various American Churches are all insane. I know nothing about Greek or Russian Orthodox but I'm going to guess there's something I can pick in their doctrines that is obviously immoral.

My friend replied that of course he didn't mean the Church when he talked about Christianity. He meant the Bible. The fact that he didn't see my response coming was surprising considering he has met me more than once. The bible is a fundamentally evil document. YHWH is among the most abominable and evil forces in the history of human literature. He orders countless genocides, enjoys the suffering of others, he is capricious, vindictive, unmerciful, compassionless and to cap it all, proud of each of these attributes. To derive ethics from such a source is a nonsense.

(Here is a step special to Christianity as having a bipartite holy book, for other religions I assume there is some section where divine power is closer to intuitive ethics than others, so this is still a fairly general conversation). Oh no, I have misunderstood, my friend tells me. The New Testament is the real ethical content of the Bible, that is the one that counts. Again, if you're a bible nerd the response is obvious. The keeping of slaves is a bad thing. "But the New Testament doesn't say keep slaves, it says treat them well." Except that is obviously unethical. It is not ethical to treat your slaves well. There is only one ethical action you can take towards a slave, free them. There are no exceptions, no qualifications, free them. This, and only this, is ethical.

The actual conversation ended around here. But the continuation of the pattern is obvious. Well that's not the real meaning of Christianity, that's just Paul, we all know Paul had ... issues. You need to look at Jesus. And so I point out "I come not to send peace, but a sword. I come to set a man against his father" and we finally hit the nub. That's a metaphor. He doesn't mean that.

The key question is why you believe this. Do you think this should not be taken literally because in fact you studied the Greek texts so you can work out what things were in fact said, and meant, by the historical Jesus? In all probability no. The though process runs much more like this. "Here is a text from Jesus. Jesus was good. This text seems bad. There is a contradiction here, this text must in fact be good. So he means he comes bearing a spiritual sword."

Notice this is not how to construct an ethical system. At the end, in the final analysis, a religious tradition must always pass through a sieve. Most people call this "the true meaning of the religion". The idea is that you take the holy book(s), the Church(es), the stories, the sayings, the art, the literature, the culture and you decide which bits to keep and which to reject. All religions of any good size have at least one contradiction or obviously immoral idea, you cannot take all of it. Then, after you have decided what to keep and what to reject, everything you keep becomes the definition of ethical.

The question is still left though. Where did you get the sieve? How did you know, instinctively, which bits counted and which didn't? Because others of the same religion disagree with you. To a vast number of people it is obvious that Leviticus 20:13 counts, but Leviticus 19:19 doesn't. Why is this? There's no difference at all, to my knowledge, in the textual validity of the two passages. They're found less than a chapter apart, both are clear commandments spoken in the voice of YHWH. There is only one distinguishing factor. The people making this distinction personally hate the idea of homosexuality and are nonplussed by the idea of mixed fabrics.

And that's the point. Religious people do not (thankfully) go to a religious text and churn it into an ethical system. They have an ethical system, given to them by the normal combination of genetics and societal influences. They go to the religious text and look at it through the glasses of these ethics. And then they produce a new articulation of the ethical system in religious language. This is why it's easy to share a religion with someone you share no ethical views with at all. (How does the average Westborough Baptist, 9/11 hijacker, Air India 182 bomber etc etc regard their co-religionists?)

This is not altogether a bad thing. There's a lot to be gained by reading some opinions on ethical issues to refine and modify your own ideas. This is a large part of what can be gained from sci-fi. It's exactly the same process. The Doctor is good, so anything is does that isn't good (like planning to smash a guy's skull in because he was slowing you down) goes in the "doesn't count" pile. (If you're a thorough nerd you have your own in-universe explanation for this that makes it all ok, if not, just pretend it's not there). That way you dont go around smashing people's skulls in but you do get to have wonderful thoughts. What if I did have two wires I could touch together to unmake the Daleks, should I do that?

But let us be frank with ourselves. We do not get our ethics handed to us on a stone tablet. No stone tablet is large enough to really explain a coherent ethical system. And even if it were, in practice you would always decide which bits of the tablet were most important. Yes, read religious texts (note the plural) in order to refine and strengthen your morality. But you must not approach them without an idea of ethics already established.

The Myth of the Unimaginableity of Evil

2011-12-05T16:58:00.000Z

"Josef Fritzl was a monster. His crimes are unimaginable. No normal human being could ever do what he did." This is a common trope in our culture. Extreme evil is due to being an anomaly, an abomination, possessed by Satan, whatever. Either way it is clear that we could never do this. This is false. Tragically false. There were very very few mutants in Nazi Germany. The system in that evil place was designed, set up and run by totally ordinary people. We must all be on our guard all the time. There is nothing at all, no external power of any kind, to stop you, dear reader, becoming someone worse than Fritzl.

I'm going to do this post slightly differently from most. This isn't an essay where I argue a side. This point is made far more clearly as a meditation. I want you to be actively involved. I'm going to give you a task. Try to really actively engage with it, you'll find out something about yourself.

First, safety. You're going to be deliberately getting yourself into a powerful emotional state. You may be a bit fragile after. If you've got reason to be worried about your mental health dont try. If not then take precautions. Make sure people dont interrupt you. Shut yourself in a room somewhere. Not because you're going to be dangerous, simply because you will be a deeply unpleasant frame of mind, and it's not nice to talk to people when you're in that mood. You can come out of this frame of mind, so dont worry that I'm going to do anything permanent to you. Also, this is a long exercise, you may wish to set aside some free time.

The meditation runs as follows:

First think of a motivation. You have barriers in your brain that will normally stop you doing this exercise. The best way to cancel the effect of these is to give yourself a powerful motivation. Only you can know what your most powerful button is. But imagine a really strong motivation. Someone has a gun to your head, how creative and imaginative would you be in order to get out of that situation? Someone has a problem for you to solve, your mother/brother/boyfriend is in their power. How fast would you solve that problem? Imagine the person or thing you find most precious. Imagine them in Fritzel's dungeon. Imagine hearing the first half of a scream as the soundproof door slams shut. How imaginative would you get if you could save them from that?

Keep this motivation in the back of your mind, keep that feeling of absolute overwhelming necessity. That whatever you have to do you can and must. If ever you feel yourself pulling back during the exercise bellow refresh that feeling. Tell the parts of your brain that are stopping you thinking that they really need to shut up now. Try this part of the exercise several times, make sure you can get back to this state when you need to convince your unwilling brain to do something. (This is actually a generally useful skill, you brain doesn't understand what matters and what doesn't).

Get yourself comfortable and relaxed. Then think of a person. It will be easier to lower the normal barriers in your mind if you think of someone you dont particularly love or care for. Who it is doesn't matter much, someone you know, a celebrity, someone you've just imagined. Just so long as you can get a clear image of this person and how they will react to stimuli. I'm going to call mine Billy. See them clearly in your mind. Dont carry on until you have someone clearly in your head.

We're going to work on your imagination. Your imagination is a great tool for telling you what you could do without having to do it. Right now you could stand up. In your mind see that possibility clearly. You need no more evidence that you could do it than that image, you dont need to try. Now imagine touching your head. Try something more complex. See yourself going to get a drink. Make sure you see the details. What are you drinking, what is it in? What does the room look like, what do you see? What are the sounds, what are the smells, what do the things you touch feel like. You could do it, you dont need to try to find out. Make sure you can see this clearly before you carry on.

Think of a room. Not a room from memory, a completely new room. This room is your own, it is a private and safe space for you. Noone but you knows about it. For the moment, it's fairly spartan. Imagine what it looks like. What are the smells, how is it lit? What do the walls look like? What's on the floor?

Now add Billy to the room. Just imagine Billy being there, standing in front of you. Billy could be there, you dont need a real live person to imagine how they will react. And you can interact with Billy too. You could touch Billy on the head just like you did before. See this clearly. You could touch, you dont have to actually do it. See that you could go to shake Billy's hand, see how they react. All this could be the case, it just happens not to be.

What else can we do with Billy? See clearly you lifting Billy's arm up. You could do such a thing, you dont have to. You could move Billy to sit down. You could tap them on the shoulder, watch that. You could punch them square on the nose. Watch clearly, feel the crack as it breaks, watch the blood, hear the sounds they make. Dont look away, it's not real, it's just a thing that could happen.

The next part is to think about biology. I want you to think purely scientifically. You know a lot about humans. Specifically you know about what makes them happy and sad. What you can do to their bodies to cause them pain. Think about what you know from your own experience about pain. Think about what you know from vague memories of having seen a sensory homunculus. Your job is to answer the question "what is the least pleasant thing you could do to Billy?"

Remember the feeling from the start. The most precious person in the world is in the cold and the dark, there's someone about to come in. You must answer to get them out. Now get creative. A simple question, think of ways of inflicting pain. Imagine doing it to Billy. Now mix it up. Obviously you can break Billy's arm by smashing it with a sledgehammer. But you could bend the elbow against itself and take a lot longer over it, this is a better answer, this one will open the door.

Imagine, clearly and precisely, different ways of causing Billy displeasure. Then slowly ratchet up. Ok, so you've broken lots of bones, but have you done anything with electricity? Heat? Cold? Sound? Smell? Work hard at this as a mental exercise. Every time your brain turns you away and waves a flag saying "no", pause, remind yourself this is only what you could do, it's not real. Ignore the fact that you dont want to do this, it's just an intellectual exercise. Just answer the straightforward question of human biology "can something be done to Billy that is less pleasant than this?"

Get to the point where you honestly cant think of anything worse to do to this poor individual. Now here's the game: find a clock. Look at the minute hand. Time 5 minutes. Spend that time honestly trying to imagine something worse that could happen to Billy. Focus your mind. You have to answer this question, it's the way to stop that terrible thing happening, the one you didn't use at the start, you stopped yourself thinking it because it is just too awful. Think about how creative you get when you're desperate and try to simulate that. You should succeed if you're being honest.

Now come back to the room. It was just an exercise. Just an imagination. You would never do that. You know why, it's bad to hurt people. It's obvious to a 5 year old that you wouldn't ever do this. So the fact that you imagined it doesn't make you evil. You're still a good person. You're not a monster, you're just as good as you were when you woke up today. Billy didn't exist, so they aren't hurt. You've not done anything bad. Everything is ok. Read this a couple of times if you feel odd.

What was the point of this? To discover something about yourself. You've found two things out about you. The first is if you are a sadist. The second is how easily you can lower the barriers in your mind that say "no, bad thought, stop thinking this".

The first question is not relevant to this post, but you will rarely get a chance to find out, so you may as well do so now. Be honest with yourself. Nobody is going to ask you, you dont have to say it outloud, nobody ever has to know. Did a tiny little part of you enjoy that exercise? Your first reaction is shocked outrage, "how dare you ask me that question". This is what you would say to a person who asked you the question because it's what society expects. Now answer the question yes/no without the outrage or the shock. If the answer is yes or if the answer is no you ought to want to know the answer. Neither answer makes you evil. As a mater of cold hard criminology the majority of sadists are not dangerous. Just bear it in mind or you may end up doing things that make you less happy than you could be because you dont understand yourself well enough. (Follow up question, "are you a masocist", is left as an exercise).

Second, what are your barriers like? If you're even slightly imaginative and you know anything at all about human biology the scenario in your head was worse than anything done by 99% of the "monsters" you read about in history or the press. This isn't because you are evil. It's because the things people do are not worse than the things people can imagine. Because monsters aren't unhuman. They are people with imaginations just as good as yours who decide to do what they imagine.

If you actually came up with something worse than being eaten alive by rats (a trivial example, you can find far worse ideas on wikipedia), then you can lower your barriers. This means you know first hand that any kind of evil is not unimaginable by a human. The question is choice. You chose not to do this to the first person you meet, for reasons that a 5 year old could explain to you.

If not, then watch any horror film, it's not a hard thing for your brain to visualise horrific things if you force it. You *can*, you are capable, of imagining this, there are just strong barriers that stop you. Kindly take my word for it that many people lack the barriers you have. Not only can you, if you force yourself, imagine something terrible, many people can do so easily. Again the limitation is not conceptual. You could if you were under great stress imagine doing something terrible. You chose not to do this to the first person you meet, for reasons that a 5 year old could explain to you.

Evil people are not extraordinary unhuman beings. You could, if you set your mind to it, do worse than Josef Fritzl, it wouldn't be hard. The difference between you and them isn't a magical inherent "monstrousness", it's choice. Straightforward simple choice. That's all there ever was to it. That's why Nazi Germany can happen, lots of people making lots of small bad choices.

And dont think you can get out of it by saying "I would never do anything bad, I dont want to." Remember the Milgram experiment, 61-66% of you would literally kill someone if an man in a white coat told you to. And even if you are in the 33% you wouldn't stop the experiment, you wouldn't demand the other participants be stopped from killing their victims, nobody does that. If someone changed all the flags you wouldn't notice you were joining the Nazi party. If someone gave you the keys to a prison you'd commit war crimes, if it was an experiment, or real life.

Unless of course, someone told you what humans can do. Unless of course you personally doing evil wasn't unimaginable. Unless of course you were scared of what you could do. Unless of course you spent every second of every day on your guard. Unless of course you watched yourself and thought really really hard about what you were doing and what it meant.

Note that this is wonderful. This is why we get to decide if Nazi Gemany happens again. If Nazi Germany was caused by demonic possession there's no way to stop it happening. If it's caused by lots of normal people making bad choices we can stop it by... you know ... not making bad choices.

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Jonathan Lee, whose advice was invaluable.

My crisis

2011-10-31T14:21:00.000Z

This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you got a moment, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying 'This Is a Large Crisis'. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants.

I'm currently undergoing a crisis of faith, I'm trying (to a greater or lesser extent) to embrace this fact. The crisis is the following. Over the last few months I've been slowly exposed to weird little niggling ideas that I realised I was trying too hard to force into my ethical system. So I'm going to say it now. WOOPS. Turns out my ethical system is built on a foundation of sand. This is a crisis, I need to fix it. Not being wildly and madly optimistic and looking at other's experience I dont expect this problem to be fixed before 2014. So I'm not going to be able to post more on foundational ethics for a while.

I'd like to throw some final ideas about, just to see what people feel about them.

Firstly saying what I expect to feel like at the end of this process of constructing a new ethical framework. Then how I will decide things in the meantime. Then some observations about terminal values. And a final shot on ethically motivating emotions.

First. "I expect my ethical system to be exactly the same in 2014." Has two meanings, one false, one true.

On the one hand it could mean "I anticipate no changes to have happened by 2014". This is obviously false, I anticipate totally re-writing a framework for deciding moral questions will leave the answer to many questions different. In 2014 I expect I will be appalled by some of the lazy and absurd beliefs that 2011 me had.

On the other hand it could mean "for each dimension of ethical thought the average place that I will end up is exactly where I am", this is clearly true. I dont now think it's more likely for me to end up more pro-animal rights than less so. If I thought that now, I would just skip to the end and be more pro-animal rights now. If you believe that you'll believe something in the future then unless something very odd is going on you ought to believe it now.

Second. Because of this I'm going to stick with my existing ethics in making day to day decisions. I'm still going to put my charity money into education not animal charities. I'm still going to campaign for greater internet freedom. I'm still going to vote for liberal scientists.

Why do this when I know I'm doing it based on inconsistent and unsustainable ideas? Because to do anything else is a stronger form of madness. To give more money to animal charities is to say "my ethical reasoning is flawed, thus doing something else chosen at random is better". Sorry, not true.

Third. I dont know what my terminal values will be in 2014, but it's very interesting how many common ethical notions stop being obvious if you have different terminal values.

A terminal value is something we want in-and-of-itself, not because it will bring us something else. I open my door to go to the shop and get chocolate. "Open the door" is not a terminal value. Why? Because you can change something else and it stops being a good thing. In this example if I remember the shop is closed I instantly stop wanting to open the door.

It's very interesting the number of ethical propositions that are very obvious to some people that rest on certain kinds of terminal value. Some people seem to act and argue as though they had terminal values like

The good of my party
The good of my nation
The good of my social class
The good of my Church
Private property
Physical pleasure of all human beings
The equality of all human beings
The freedom of all human beings

All of these seem to me absurd. And it's very hard to justify a lot of common ethical notions without them. I dont expect any of them to be a terminal value in 2014, but then I dont expect that expectation to be reliable.

Fourth and final point, the emotional state that drives people to ethical action. A lot of people seem to disagree with me here. A lot of religious and secular ethical systems seem to assume that love and compassion are the driving forces. That in order to do good you must love the object of your good deed. This seems odd to me. I love very few people in any real sense and find it hard to create such an emotion. But I find it reasonably easy to create a feeling of moral imperative.

The emotion I use to power moral imperatives doesn't have a clear name. I'd have to call it something like "unendurableness". The first time I watched "Man in the Iron Mask" I realised something. The way Philippe screams "no" when the mask is being put over his face is the most powerful thing he could do. I dont need to feel love or compassion for Philippe, I know damn well I couldn't do something so trivial as to put the mask on his face. Because that "scream from his very soul" cuts to the heart of what ethics is about.

But then what do I know?

The virtue of honesty.

2011-10-28T15:34:00.000+01:00

I believe that every aborted child goes to heaven.

So women are doing them a favour by aborting them then?

That's a very trivial response to a very serious issue.

This exchange, taken from here, is typical of a certain type of argument. The moral failure of the first speaker isn't his notion of heaven. If you want that notion and think you can defend it go ahead, I'll argue that another day. There's something more serious here. There's a fundamental lack of honesty. Not that he is lying to others, but far far more importantly, to himself. This is probably the biggest single failure of human thought. Pretty much all the other mad thoughts people have are examples of it. I want to consider this failure.

The world is big and complicated. Humans are not born with an intuitive understanding of it. If they did it would be miraculous. Human brains evolved on the savannah. A child born today is not different in any significant genetic way to a child born before humans had worked out the idea of planting seeds. So we shouldn't expect anything that wasn't commonplace on the savannah to be intuitive. Your brain evolved to be good at running, avoiding cliffs, throwing rocks at gazelles, and not much more.

You can see this quite easily. There was almost no circular motion on the savannah. Animals dont have wheels, nor did the early humans. (Wheeled vehicles are a shockingly late invention, ~6000 years old, in the Americas they were not invented before the Europeans arrived). As a result you do not understand circular motion. Grab a bike wheel with an axle, or anything else that's a wheel you can hold the axle of and spin freely. Now spin it up, and try to tilt the axle. Really, go and try it, the experience of confusion is incredible. The brain does not understand what it feels. Find a baby and show it something spinning, it will get really confused really easily by this. It's just not part of the normal patterns of your brain to understand circular motion.

So we've got intuitions, and a universe that just doesn't correspond to them. How can we fix this? Well, luckily your brain has a hack for that. We have propositional beliefs. I look at the bike wheel and say in English words "the conservation of angular momentum means that this wheel will react at right angles to the force I apply to it." The next step is crucial, I must internalise this statement in English words and try to convert it to something my brain can understand. I need to listen to these words and expect that I will feel a reaction. That way I wont be surprised by things.

This is a really important ability. It's why humans are qualitatively different to other animals. You show other animals something novel and either they stay confused or they work out some hack to deal with it. Humans can explain and pass that explanation verbally to someone else. (Bees aren't explaining novel concepts, just relaying intuitively understandable new data. Apes I'll leave to someone else to argue about). This ability to easily deal with totally new situations is vital. It's why humans can do so many different and new things. We can deal with totally novel things in human time spans, not evolutionary timespans.

This gives us power. This is why we can go to the moon or kill smallpox. Not because it's intuitive, something humans just do. You show an anatomically modern human from an uncontacted tribe a vaccine and they will not expect it to prevent smallpox. A doctor does expect that to happen. The doctor has come to believe certain propositions in English language. As a result of those sentences, and of the power of his internalisation of those sentences, he now performs actions and expects good consequences. The job of science is clear: 1) to make sentences in English which, 2) when internalised like this, 3) lead people to expect certain actions to have consequences, 4) which they in fact do. If these consequences are things like "destroy smallpox forever", "blow up and entire city" or "heat the earth causing widespread environmental collapse" then we can act in vastly powerful ways that cause a lot of good or a lot of ill.

But this is only a hack that your brain is doing. It's hard to internalise these sentences properly. This is a big problem. Because if you fail to internalise true propositions correctly you wont expect things to happen as a result of your actions that in fact will. If you haven't properly internalised "smoking kills you" and dont actually really deep down expect that you'll die or become ill as a result of you 60 a day habit then you wont want to drop it. You can say that sentence as much as you want, you dont actually deep down expect what it predicts. You can have read all the probability theory you want, if you still expect to win the lottery you're going to keep throwing your money away. You can claim to believe aborted children go to a place of eternal bliss, but if you dont actually expect that you're not going to work hard to try and get them there.

The key virtue of any mind is this internalisation. This ability to be honest about what you expect. This has two parts. Firstly to only say propositions in English that you in fact expect to come out true. Secondly to take propositions in English that are reliable and to change your expectation accordingly. The first is, "what do you actually believe will happen?" The second is, "just change your damned mind already". Either failure is a kind of dishonesty, a difference between what you say and what you really think. Both of them are dangerous.

The first kind of dishonesty is dangerous because of what it does to others. If you say "there's a dragon in my garage", but dont in fact expect to see any such thing, you're being dishonest. And in fact you're being dangerous. If others hear this, believing you honest, internalise properly and come to expect the dragon, they will do things based on that expectation that will harm them and others. At the very least they'll waste a lot of time and energy investigating the dragon. At worst they could try to take moral guidance from it.

The second kind of dishonesty is dangerous because of what you do. Suppose the speaker at the start really did, for good reason, come to accept the statement "all aborted babies go to a place of perfect happiness". Suppose for argument that there is good reason to believe this and it ought to be internalised. He obviously hasn't. If he had then less than 5 seconds thought would convince any sane person there's only one thing to do. Set up a factory that produces babies and aborts them. I'm not joking. Try very very hard to pretend you actually believe the statement. Internalise as hard as you can, force yourself to expect that abortions go to heaven, a place of joy. Imagine the sac of cells in a woman one day, imagine killing it, imagine heaven, imagine that soul happy, joyful, satisfied in every possible way. How can you not want that? What possible motive could ever lead you to such evil as to put that joy at risk. (Some adults go to hell of course, so keeping them alive can only make things worse). If you're really honest with yourself you'd understand this statement implies a moral imperative. Which you should act on.

If you're not prepared to act on what you say you believe, stop lying to yourself and just change your mind already.

Climate Change

2011-10-24T00:12:00.000+01:00

The Ascent of Man is not just a species-wide phenomenon. The joy of science is that the whole species progress by means of individuals progressing. It is the defining characteristic of a rational scientific mind to despair at its past self. A scientist corrects the errors in her worldview, over time her map looks more and more like the territory. Errors only get smaller. I'm annoyed at my past self, just as my future self will be annoyed at me. One error my past self made I dont get annoyed at, because I dont think it was unreasonable. Though I have now corrected it in my map, it should not be hard to imagine why others should not have done so yet. This phenomenon tells us something wider about the danger of a little information and science communication.
For many years, indeed until very recently, I did not accept the existence of anthropogenic global warming. I now do. I want to explain why this change happened, and why I dont think my past self was deceiving himself or in any other way guilty of a major moral error.

If this is true, then a change in rhetoric is needed in people who wish to convince others of the reality of this global danger. We cannot, to my mind, say that "denialists" are deliberately lying, or that they chose to accept something false for political reasons. The rank and file of those who do not accept AGW are like many complementary medicine patients, guilty of laziness for not having considered the evidence in enough detail, but not actually evil. Of course, the many who have done the work, including the many scientists who publicly support campaigns against AGW-based policy are far more like the quacks, they've done enough to know better, they are actually doing something wrong.

Ok, so, why did I fail to believe. Why wouldn't I accept what I now do? Well, consider the evidence. Young me did. He read all the major arguments, he scoured blogs and websites on the topic. And you know what, he found some bullshit arguments. I want to go over them, explain why they're bullshit, and try to convince people to stop using them.

Argument 1

We can tell human CO2 changes the climate because since the industrial revolution global temperatures have increased.

If you cant spot how obviously stupid this is you need to stop reading now and think, time 5 minutes on a clock and spend that time thinking about this argument. Imagine you were trying to infiltrate a group of AGW deniers and you want to convince them you're one of them. How would you pretend to explain this?

Ok, so obviously this is just a fluke right? The warming trend is not that strong, there have been far more dramatic warmings in the past, there will be again. It's just not reasonable to draw this big a conclusion from such a small and wildly fluctuating set of data as average temperatures over the last hundred years or so. Forget the urban heat island and all kinds of other effects to deny this warming is happening. There's no reason at all to suppose it isn't. It just doesn't prove anything in any kind of strong sense.

If you didn't work out that explanation of this argument you wont convince anyone. Unless you can spot holes your arguments at least as well as my 15 year old self you're never going to convince anyone intelligent.

Argument 2

The atmosphere is like a greenhouse. Light from the sun can enter but light reflected off the soil bounces off the CO2 in the atmosphere and is trapped.

This is not how a greenhouse works. If you open a small vent in the top of a greenhouse you cool it dramatically without really altering what happens to the light in the greenhouse. The way a greenhouse actually works is by stopping the hot air inside escaping to the cooler outside. Obviously the whole atmosphere cant work like this.

If you think about it for a short amount of time (but not too long or you might work out the right answer) you'll easily be convinced that the band of CO2 is symmetric. Just as much as it keeps light reflected from the earth in it must keep light from the sun out. More so in fact, as there's less light coming from the earth (some of it has been absorbed by plants etc).

You can actually make this argument work, but you need to actually sit down and think. One error is using "light" in two different ways. The earth is not a mirror, it does not reflect sunlight back into space unchanged. It reflects much of it as infra-red rather than visible light. CO2 treats IR and visible light differently. You can explain this to young me, and he will understand and agree with you. But nobody did. Everyone assumed that I was (and AGW deniers are) stupid enough to accept this argument as it is. This is foolish.

Argument 3

Look at my sodding great graph. You notice how perfectly CO2 and temperature are correlated? Thus CO2 causes temperature change.

This is the argument that still causes my lingering doubts about AGW (and I still have some). It's astonishing to me that so many people who aren't obviously insane seriously try to use this argument. Again, stop reading, set a timer for 5 minutes. Dont stop thinking until you've either understood why this does not prove the conclusion or the 5 minutes have finished.

Consider this argument:

Look at my sodding great graph. You notice how perfectly CO2 and temperature are correlated? Thus temperature change causes CO2.

On the one hand there's a weak prior belief that it ought to be temperature causing the CO2. There are obviously myriad factors affecting temperature: albedo, orbital perturbations, sunspots, cosmic wind, dust in the atmosphere, etc etc. To say that one thing, CO2, is correlated this well with the result of such a wide array of things seems to require one of two things. Either CO2 causes temperature change, and is stupidly powerful in so doing, to render all the other causes moot. Or the temperature drives the CO2. The former is (to someone ignorant of climate science) the less plausible assumption.

Consider now the mechanisms. Unless you've already been given a fixed version of argument 2 there's no obvious mechanism that would suggest to you the flooding the Earth with CO2 would warm it. The other way round this isn't true however. You've got 5 minutes, if I heat the whole Earth up explain why I should expect to see more CO2 in the atmosphere?

There are loads of mechanisms. More forest fires is only the most obvious. Remember also that a huge amount of CO2 can be dissolved in liquids (like coke, or for instance the sea). Remember that the amount that can be dissolved in it varies inversely with the temperature. Coke left out on a hot day goes flat, seas left out on a hot day dump their CO2 into the atmosphere. Add fossil fuels frozen in permafrost and a dozen other easy to think of factors into the mix and it's pretty obvious that we should have a reasonably strong prior belief that temperature causes CO2 changes.

This argument causes me problems. Because to argue with this alone suggest either that you are deliberately trying to deceive me or that you're woefully bad at drawing causal arrows the right way round. Either way I'm not going to trust your climate science. And not unreasonably.

None of these arguments as presented, or indeed many others that I have discovered in the popular literature on the subject, goes any way at all towards convincing a reasonably sane person that AGW exists. The fixed argument from greenhouse gasses is good, but you need to think about it carefully. I didn't see a clear explanation on those lines than convinced me until a couple of years ago at best.

What do I now accept and why?

As always, beliefs aren't simple binary yes/no things. I have different levels of certainty, (that I wouldn't want to try to put numbers on with any large sums of money involved), about several propositions.

If human CO2 output increases at something like the present rate for the next century mean global temperatures averaged over 30 years will at that point be higher than now.

I would be fairly certain of. It seems to me very likely.

If human CO2 output stabilises at current levels then next century mean global temperatures averaged over 30 years will at that point be higher than now.

I would be less certain of, but still highly confident.

If human CO2 output follows SRES scenario A1FI then the resultant warming will be in the range of 2.4 to 6.4 °C

I would call more likely than unlikely, but would be far from certain of.

Why? Because I've read at least the executive summary of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and skimmed bits of the rest of it (life is far far too short). Because I've been listening carefully to the assessment of scientists, not of their own opinion, but of the quality of the research done by others. Because I've looked climate change up on google scholar and seen just how many papers this field has produced.

Note what I've not done. I've not read lists of prominent scientists who "believe in AGW". That does not provide strong evidence that AGW is a real phenomenon. I've not read media reports about the recent warming trend, not one of them presents or even considers the statistical significance of the results.

Life is too short for me to become a climate scientist or to assess in detail the validity of any of the detailed methodologies of the IPCC and others. This does not and absolutely must not mean that I ought to accept lists of names of scientists as evidence. If they've not read the research either (and almost all of them haven't, their lives are also short) then their view is just as ill-informed as mine.

What matters is the people who have read this stuff, who do understand in detail the statistical significance of these models. What matters is that the papers are peer-reviewed, that bad methodologies are attacked publicly. When flat errors like the Himalayan Glacier fiasco are found they are quickly corrected. What matters is that this stuff is real science.

And unless you've got evidence-based confidence in the scientific method, unless you can be reasonably confident in its conclusions without being able to follow the details, you cant say that. And then guess what, unless some decent public science education has happened you'll end up not believing in AGW. It's not surprising, nor is it a moral wrong on the part of the public.

Against Spock

2011-09-27T22:44:00.000+01:00

When I used to get into arguments with religious/alt. med./supernaturalist/generally wrong people on the internet* I would often come up against a common TV trope. The Spock. "You want to be so rational," goes the argument, "but have you thought that The Spock is flawed for this reason?" The short answer is yes I have, I'm vastly more intelegent than you, of course I've thought about and dismissed your pathetic argument. But it's not polite to say this. I want to argue that the Spock trope is fundamentally misconceived, and that we perhaps need to alter what we generally mean when we say "rational".

First of, what is The Spock.

For a start it's not quite Mr Spock, it's the misremembered version of him. The Spock has several features:

Lacks all emotion.
Dislikes others.
Does not experience happiness or joy in simple things.
Refuses to act contrary to rules, no matter how necessary.
Responds to simple questions with numbers accurate to more decimal places than he can possibly have confidence in
Assumes all others will be like him.
Never uses contractions, loose grammar or slang and is often confused when others do
Refuses to accept that a thing shown to him exists if it sounds like a common myth (in a story where magic is real they will refuse to accept the fact)
Generally prefers his own idea of what is reasonable to the actual best explanation

Why is Spock a bad thing to be?

He's just flat wrong. He totally miscalculates how others will act by assuming them to be also Spocks. A lot of people who know a little about game theory will play the Spock and assume the right thing to do is what rational agents who know all other agents are rational will do. When playing "guess 2/3 the average" they will say 0. And then they'll loose. Because if you're playing with a pool of people many of whom are insane** (like Danish newspaper readers), playing 0 is a sure-fire way to loose. The sensible thing to do is accept that as a matter of fact most people are insane and try to predict what their crazy brains will do.

He is joyless. This is obviously a big fail. A Spock may be a useful pet. We may well want to design robot servants to be Spocks. But being one personally? Nope, obvious fail, if you're not enjoying life stop doing it, what is the point?

He also totally fails to adapt properly to the physics of the reality he is in. The Spock is not Genre-Savy, ie he acts as he would if the universe he was in were this one. This is universal amongst fictional characters to make them more believable, but the Spock makes it a virtue. Scully is The Spock when she insists "there must be a rational explanation" in fictional universes where the magic is real. Note that this insistence isn't a necessary condition. Velma isn't The Spock because every single time she says "there must be a rational explanation" she's right. In scoobyverse the ghost is *always* the janitor in a mask, to still be scared of ghosts in this universe isn't avoiding Spock, it's insanity. In the X-Files universe thinking that all those aliens are janitors in masks is being the Spock, because never once have you taken off the mask and found the janitor there.

This isn't just a problem in fiction. The problem is that The Spock is being prejudiced and not scientific. If your Captain has pulled off the last hundred "million to one chances" he attempted sooner or later you have to accept that your estimate of what a million to one chance looks like is just flat wrong. If you see aliens on a daily basis sooner or later you have to accept that not all of them are swamp gas. If you keep looking at quantum theory and cant find any experimental holes in it sooner or later you have to stop being wrong and accept that the universe doesn't conform to your idea of rationality.

But isn't The Spock Rational and isn't Rational good?

First off, we can define words however we like. The only thing words are for is getting ideas across. If we are going to insist that what The Spock is should be called "rational" then yeh, he is. But I'm not rational, I'm trying hard to become less rational and anyone who is rational needs to stop that really really fast. If they dont they will end up somewhere strange and they will get things wrong and people will die.

To me this is an inefficient use of language. If we have to destroy a perfectly nice word which already has good connotations to it by saying "Rational should only be used to talk about Spock, dont ever be rational" that would be inconvenient. Much more pleasant to me is to say "No, rationality is a good thing, only Spock isn't rational, he's just insane." If we go down the second route we need to explain what good thing we want rational people to do so we can point to how Spock fails.

What do I mean when I tell someone to be rational

Either I'm being technical, I'm talking about a game theory situation and I want someone to simulate a "rational agent", then it's just a maths problem. But when I'm telling a person in the real world I mean something different. I mean:

Listen when the universe tells you something.
Dont think that your thoughts can influence reality without evidence.
Dont assume that you have found an exception to general law without evidence.
Dont let what you wish to be true influence what you think *is* true.
Dont act as though something you think isn't true is.
Dont act according to rules that you dont expect to be generally good.
Dont act according to a good rule if you know that this cases is an exception to the general logic.
Do act according to a good rule if you dont know that this case is an exception to the general logic.
No really, the universe doesn't work like that, find out with an actual experiment, dont listen to your common sense because it's just plain wrong.

Less Wrong defines this rather succinctly:

Epistemic Rationality: systematically improving the correspondence between your expectations and what happens.
Instrumental Rationality: Acting in a way that you expect (see above) will make those things happen that you want to see happen.

Or even less jargony

Expect things to happen that in fact will happen, do things that will in fact result in what you want to happen.

This seems to me the right thing to aim for. Notice no reference to emotion. Emotions can certainly make you believe in stupid things like the tooth fairy, homoeopathy or the general virtue of your political party. But emotions can perfectly reasonably be used to produce your values, what you want to see. You're never going to expect people to act in the way they do without understanding emotions. You're never going to care, frankly, if you dont experience joy when things work out right.

Dont be Spock, it's stupid. If you're ever tempted, or told, to do the wrong thing because it's rational dont do it. In that case either the word rational is wrong or being rational is a bad idea. More generally, dont do things because your label tells you to, do things because you honestly think it's the right thing to do.

*I've stopped doing this so much now. Not because it never works, sometimes it does. Not because it's the wrong thing, curing people of bad thoughts is totally the right thing. Just because I've become too cynical to care more about what a lot of people think than the effort it takes.

**It's incredible to think that there are literally hundreds of people out there who would guess more than 66 on "guess 2/3 the average". I just cant make my brain simulate what it must be like to have a mind that could make a decision like that.

Human Rights

2011-09-26T01:10:00.000+01:00

Against my better judgement I've been reading up on Dale Farm. Against my better judgement because it sounds like, and turns out to be, the kind of rank stupidity that just gives me a headache. At issue is a small part of the land, those living there have no planning permission to build the houses that they have built. Various groups have claimed that the law as it stands should not be enforced against these people because they are part of a particular ethnic group. This has got me thinking about how annoying are a lot of public supporters of human rights. And how damaging to the rights they claim (and ought) to be supporting. There's a deep confusion about the extent and nature of human rights.

Just to get it out the way, planning laws in general are stupid. If you want to help get the UK out of recession then build baby build. The temptation to NIMBYism is too strong and must be resisted in law if we are going to build half the buildings you need to run a proper country. But that's beyond the scope of this.

We have a group of people who have, by universal admission, broken the law. The authorities are responding with punitive action according to law. And they have been attacked by many human rights groups. I find this deeply worrying. Firstly because the human rights these groups are arguing for include many things that I would regard as not fundamental and indeed positively harmful. Secondly, to argue for this, to be obviously and totally on the wrong side (legally and ethically) of the argument is not "impassioned defence of human rights no matter how unpopular". It is re-enforcing the idea of "Daily Mail human rights", obligations on government to do the wrong thing because of international pressure. It's not just a matter of doing the wrong thing in this case, it's destroying the credibility of real and important freedoms.

Remember my framework. I'm a utilitarian, governments are there to make people happier against their will (because their long and short term interests or their personal interests and the total interest are not the same). (Forcing people to play cooperate on the prisoner's dilemma). I'm a liberal (all individual choices should be legal if it's not scientifically clear that it is harmful) because we dont know what makes people happy, this ignorance means we should be scared of the negative unintended consequences of bad law.

This being said, what are liberal human rights, why are they a good thing?

What I mean when I talk about and defend human rights are rights of a very precise type. Each is of the form:

The government shall make no law of this type, if it does that law is not valid, if any agents of the government act according to rules of this type they may be sued by the people they affect.

The key question is what values we should substitute in for "this type".

Why am I restricting myself to things like this? Why not impose positive rights? Things of the form:

The government shall make a law of this kind, if they do not then such laws should be assumed to exist.

I assume it is stupid to oblige someone to do something they cannot. If we accidentally substitute in "build a golden ladder to the moon" for "this kind" in both cases the first is not a problem, the second is likely to be both an expensive disaster and then later ignored.

But stronger than this is the reason why judicial activism in general is a bad idea. Because getting someone other than the government to make a law is a bad idea. We select governments to be good at law making. Someone else then, judges in particular, we have no reason to suspect of being good at law making. In fact in many countries the judges have, by the nature of their appointment, a bias, towards one department of government and towards conservatism. (Any strong supporters of positive rights, imagine that you gave Justice Scalia the right to draft any law he liked to defend these rights).

But any idiot can say "no". You dont need to assume that judges (or whatever other body defends such rights) are good at writing law for them to be able to detect that this law of that type and say "this section of this law is not valid".

So then, why do we want such rights, and how do we work out which types of law to use?

To me, rights are the imposition on government of a kind of Hippocratic oath, "first do no harm". If the government does nothing at all that's ok so long as they haven't positively made anything worse. So the types of law should be those that we know to make things worse and that governments have no legitimate reason to deploy.

So an obvious rights could be: "laws that result in people being tortured", "laws that discriminate government service based on factors that dont relate to the service provided", "laws attacking peaceful protest against the government" etc.

How to decide which though? My decision (sadly) isn't good enough. A council of respected men isn't good enough. Winning a war isn't good enough. You need the combination of a council of wise men and persuasive argument and a popular referendum. Without people who have the job of sitting down and thinking clearly you will get something misconceived (why we have representative democracy), without public support you will sooner or later get a repeal or a revolution. Without public consultation and involvement you will get something irrelevant to the society and government.

Enough scene setting. Back to Dale Farm.

Countless representatives of Human Rights (from the UN, EU and Amnesty amongst others), have given their view. They have given some variation on this:

Professor Yves Cabannes, chair of the UN Advisory Group on Forced Evictions, says there are three pieces of international rights legislation, to which Britain is a signatory, which have been breached by Basildon council in the instance of Dale Farm and by the government across the UK. They are:

• The right to adequate housing which is culturally suitable
• The right to be protected from forced evictions
• The right of ethnic minorities to be protected from discrimination.

These rights, and the laws they are based on, seem to me either insane or misapplied. Taken one at a time:

The right to adequate housing is very very hard to universalise even by the standards of positive rights. Most governments most of the time and all governments some of the time just do not have the resources to build state housing for the whole population. It just cannot be done.

It is also not clear to me that "cultural suitability" is any kind of consistent or sane restriction. As a rule, we should never respect people cultures, because there's always a crazy culture that will make impossible demands. What if I'm an anarchist nut and I wont live in a house built by a government? That makes the right impossible to fulfil.

This "right" is perfectly nice aspiration. Governments that are bad at it should be voted out all other things equal. But it is only one of the demands on public funds. To set it apart as obligatory on governments is foolish.

The right to be protected from forced evictions is exactly the statement that no property rights exist. Yes people should be forcefully evicted from houses that are not theirs, or that they have built illegally. Obviously. Yes it must be done non-violently if possible, as with all police action. It must be done by due process of law. But unless you want to claim that everyone has the right to stay in any house they like regardless this right is a nonsense on the face of it.

The right to be free from discrimination is the most amusing. This is a negative right of exactly the kind I called for. I unambiguously support banning any laws or government actions that discriminate. This is why I think in this case there should not be discriminable, and that the law as it stands should be applied. If anyone wants to claim that non-travellers would have been granted the required planning permission had they gone through the same process please leave a comment. But so far I have not heard this claim. If it is true it must be shouted from the rooftops, this eviction would be ipso facto an act of discrimination. But that's not what I read. What I read is "the government should not apply the law because the people in the case are from a minority". This is exactly the opposite statement. Non-discrimination doesn't mean being on the side of the minority, it means non-discrimination.

And before we go in for second-level effects on the public conciousness and a background of anti-traveller feeling lets think. Most people in this country get their opinions indirectly from tabloids. What do you think is going to help ethnic tensions: "minority group treated the same as everyone else" or "minority group given special treatment you dont get"? I know which one inflames my prejudices.

So, the judgement in this case is wrong because of an over-broad concept of human rights. But that's no so terrible is it?

Yes, yes it is. Remember the Daily Mail.This story has been portrayed very clearly by them as yet another case of evil human rights. And you know what, the Daily Mail is largely right. Let us consider the class of what we may call "Daily Mail human rights":

All minorities must be treated preferentially to everyone else.
Those who practice barbaric minority practices must be protected.
Those who practice non-harmful majority practices that are annoy minorities must be punished harshly.
Criminals must be treated better than non-criminals.

If this is what we are talking about when we say "human rights", (and most of the time the Daily Mail does), then opposition to them is good. I would happily march on parliament for the repeal of these rights. These are terrible, immoral things. The Daily Mail is right to oppose human rights.

This is a disaster. Because of this totally justified and correct opposition to "Daily Mail human rights" other things are put in danger. Anything with "human rights" in the name has now lost all credibility. No matter that the Human Rights Act (which I dont particularly like, it's too weak, but that's for another time) does not in fact give a legal basis for Daily Mail rights. The words are there, thus there is a campaign against it. The real an important failings of the European Court of Human Rights aside, the key failing is that it has allowed itself to become associated with Daily Mail Rights. It has doomed itself to destruction because people dont know what it is actually trying to do.

Is this really a problem with Human Rights organisations?

Yes.

I respect the mission and history of Amnesty International more than that of just about any organisation, but it is putting that mission in danger at the moment. The name and reputation of Amnesty is incredibly valuable. If Amnesty says that a person is guilty of no crime I need to be able to be sure that's the case based on their word, otherwise I cannot join their letter writing campaign. These campaigns are hugely powerful and valuable. If Amnesty looses this credibility we have put political prisoners in mortal danger. If Amnesty clearly puts itself on the unpopular but correct side of argument it can swing public opinion in important ways. If Amnesty carelessly lets itself get on the unpopular and incorrect side too many arguments the result is clear. Less respect for Amnesty as a force for good, less letters in campaigns, more people being tortured and killed.

I understand that the bias towards socialism amongst the kind of people who join human rights organisations gives an idea of the power and benefit of government that I dont share. This excuses the idea of positive rights most of the time. But rights organisations need to be really careful. Dont confuse your politics with things that you need to do to stop people being killed. Dont confuse public policy you disagree with with active harm. And most importantly, dont abuse your position as conscience of the people. It will bite you on the ass.

Nonzero

2011-09-13T22:07:00.000+01:00

There are 3 rough categories of "games". Games here in the sense of game theory, a branch of maths dealing with massively simplified and anaemic economic situations. In a game there are some number of players, they all make a decision and walk away with some amount of happiness depending on what everyone decided. Playing roulette is such a game. You turn up and call out a number and leave with (on average) less money than you started with. My question is why people play each category of game.

First, the 3 categories. The key quantity here is the "sum" of a game. Ie how much the game itself adds to the total happiness of everyone playing. There are three types:

Positive sum: on average normal rational players leave the game more happy in total than they arrived. Some individuals may be less happy but on average more happiness has entered.
Zero sum: when normal rational players leave the game they have in total as much happiness as they stared with. Happiness has been transferred around but there's as much of it as the start.
Negative sum: normal rational players end up with less happiness on average. Some individuals may be more happy but on average happiness has been destroyed.

Notice that I'm talking about happiness or utility here. A lot of people get confused, look at roulette and say that the house always wins money so it is a negative sum game, this would be true if it weren't for adrenaline. Some people enjoy the mere act of gambling regardless of the money they win. They may be just as happy gambling for 10 mins as having $100 in the bank, if so the fact that they loose only $50 every 10 mins means they have increased their happiness, they are playing a positive sum game.

A huge number of failures of thinking come about by people confusing money and utility/happiness. I care here (and in general) only about happiness. Money is not (outside of the mint and weird art projects) created or destroyed. And so people get a false idea if they are used to equating money and happiness, or they have been confused into thinking that the acquisition of money per se is the end-in-itself we ought to strive to. They get the idea that all exchanges are zero sum. That anything one person gains the other parties must have lost. From this some conclude that in some situations where one party can guarantee a profit or positive return then logically the other players must be in a negative sum game. This confuses me. As I dont see why a sane person would consent to play a zero-sum game. Much less a negative sum game.

Some examples of each type of game.

Negative sum. Roulette with a fixed "playing charge" at least as valuable as how much you enjoy the act of gambling. A "manliness contest" where the person who gets beaten up the most wins esteem less valuable than the beatings everyone got.
Zero sum. Poker with a fixed "playing charge" exactly as valuable as how much you enjoy the act of gambling. Cutting a cake that everyone wants the same amount. Elections.
Positive sum. Gambling if the enjoyment is greater than the losses. Employment, bartering, friendship, public policy.

It is strange to think that anyone would willingly play the first type of game. I can see no reason why you would willingly make yourself less happy with with hope of an eventual payoff. The people who think anyone would do this or think they should campaign against real-life instances of it have to ask themselves, do you honestly think people willingly do this? Because you must either think people are insane or coerced, or you must just be wrong.

One reason why people would play zero or negative sum games is straight ignorance, people who are bad at gambling may not realise there're going to loose a lot playing roulette. Another is the reason most people play poker, they believe they have a skill, they believe they will win on average and others will loose. This is strange. To believe this you must believe that either other people are ignorant, which wont last long, or they know you're a better poker player and will play you anyway. This is a rather strange belief to have about people we assume to have no enjoyment in the playing per se.

So what about real examples outside casinos? What about obviously zero-sum things like barter? I give you two apples you give me an egg, you win what I loose. This is the most obviously zero-sum thing ever. And anyone who's read a bit of second-hand Marx and not thought since then can tell you why. Trade exchanges "value" for "value", "value" as in work done. Obviously it's only fair to exchange things of equal "value", and trade doesn't put extra labour into our commodities, so obviously trade will keep "value" constant. ... Except that if our idiot Marxist had thought for 30 seconds and realised that "value" is totally worthless and that the thing that is actually an end-in-itself is happiness or human satisfaction he wouldn't care about such metaphysical fluff. He would care about the happiness.

I have apples, lots of them. I like apples as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean I want 500 apples 50 times as much as I want 10 apples. 500 apples are actually not as nice to own, I cant eat them all before they rot and they'd be hard to get rid of and would smell. So in fact when I give up my apples I'm not giving up "value", I'm giving up negative happiness. And the guy who has eggs is in the same boat. We have a trade that makes up both happy. It's never true to say that people exchange things of equal worth. If I have apples and so do you we dont trade them. Nobody actually barters things of the same worth, what would be the point?

Once you actually think about things that matter (like happiness) and not about things that dont matter (like "value") or things that only matter instrumentally to get things that do matter (like money) things become clearer. It becomes a lot harder to get outraged that society has set up situations that rob people if in fact it hasn't, and it becomes a lot easier to point out that people are being conned or are just plain confused when they are. Luckily, almost all human interactions are positive sum, so lets carry on interacting.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

2011-09-12T01:19:00.000+01:00

Every generation needs The Ascent of Man, Cosmos or Wonders of the Universe. It needs a documentary series not about the facts of science per se, but about Science. You need a popular work that gets the culture of science across, explaining to people that science feels good and is exciting. In short you need a popular manifesto for a scientific philosophy of life. One such is provided by Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fanfiction written by Eliezer Yudkowsky. I want to explain why I've read this story from start to last update not less than 3 times and why it's had a huge impression on me.

For a start, a few point to stop you getting frustrated with it.

No, this isn't that kind of fanfiction. Nobody is fucking anyone improbable. Sorry girls, just not that kind of story.
No, this isn't that kind of fanfiction. The author writes fluently in grammatically sound English sentences. The plots are complicated and clever.
If the Harry Potter novels by JKR are very precious to you dont read it. This is a loving fanfic, but sometimes the kind of love that looks at something silly the loved one is doing (like playing quidditch) and mocks it openly.
This also isn't a re-telling of the cannon (ie original) story. The world that JKR created is a backdrop, but for the purpose of telling a new and interesting story the foreground has changed. Firstly the most obvious difference is Harry. Rather than being ... lets face it, a bit whiny, a bit thick, and very very Gryffindor, he's now very aspy, very smart, and very Slytherin.

Now that you've either written the whole thing off as horrid or not been set up to have you expectations shattered, why do I re-read this thing?

I really want to find the clues. This is not a children's story, the narrative is complicated and clever, if you're not paying attention it's all nonsense, if you are paying attention it's magical and if you're really really paying attention you can guess some of what's about to happen.
I really enjoy reading it because it's so damned nerdy. There are more sci-fi and fantasy references in here than you can shake a stick at. If like me you've never played Dungeons and Dragons (I know, I was a deprived child) you dont feel you're missing out, but feels good to read a story that's so happy with its status as nerdy.
It's got a really powerfully expressed philosophy. I know a lot of people hate stories telling them how to think, but there are enough ambiguities and unreliable narrators here that the story isn't so much telling you what to think as it is just telling you *to* think.
The outlook for the future of this universe you get after reading this story is a lot better than the one I normally have.

So, what's the story? Aunt Petunia didn't marry Uncle Vernon, she married a biology professor, he raised Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres to be a child prodigy. Not an impossible Mary Sue, just a run of the mill child genius who has read and understood Feynman aged 11. He discovers magic exists and does what any sane person would do, gets very excited and studies it. He sets out to rationally understand magic and harness the combined power of science and magic to decrease worldsuck, conquer the galaxy in the name of science and utility, cancel the second law of thermodynamics and make everyone immortal. If it isn't obvious to you that that is what you would do if you discovered magic then I recommend this story to you, could be interesting to see if it changes your mind.

This is a story that treats a lot of terribly serious issues very lightly. It isn't afraid to openly laugh at things that are strange about the original story, nor to flat tell you that you are stupid. (At one point Harry and Quirril discuss a play in which X happens, Harry points out that no sane person could honestly believe anyone would be so stupid as to do X, Quirril says that nobody else in Britain would notice how stupid X is, and as X is a major plot point in multiple HP novels I tend to agree).

All in all it's fun, it's not a teacher, you dont have to feel bad, it wont make you feel dumb, it wont set homework. It will hopefully make you think, which is what any good story will do. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And if you enjoyed it, welcome to the conspiracy.

Dear BT

2011-09-05T10:40:00.000+01:00

I live in a house in the sticks. I know the phone lines round here are poor. There are phone lines in this area made of aluminium. But when I sign up to a broadband package I expect that the company which runs both my ISP and my phoneline to be able to cope with this fact. If you cant cope with this dont sell broadband to people who live in the sticks.

There is noise on the line here. A lot of it. It's hard to hear what people are saying sometimes. As a result of this we regularly drop down to a lower speed connection. I'm ok with this. Slow broadband is as annoying as anything, but I can cope with it. What I cannot cope with is that after a while it switches off entirely. If you cannot offer me a broadband connection that is on always then dont sell me broadband. I'm not complaining that the connection is offline for a couple of minutes every few weeks. I'm complaining that we cannot get onto the service we have paid for for hours and even days at a time. I'm complaining that we cannot get on for a third of the time some weeks.

It's reasonable to check the problem is not internal wiring. It's not reasonable that determining that took not less than 3 engineers and several months straddling our last ISP and BT.

It's reasonable that working out what has gone wrong could take a while. What is not reasonable is the way engineer visits have been handled. The last 5+ callouts have all followed the same pattern.

An engineer comes round.
He does some tests
He insists there is no problem
I insist there is a problem in that we keep loosing connection
He changes something either in our house or at the exchange in the hope of speeding up our connection
He re-sets the system telling us to monitor things
He goes away
We have decent internet for a week
The internet goes back to how it was and starts dropping out again

I'm not being funny but I can spot the pattern here, why cant you? Something other than this has to happen. None of the fixes that have been tried so far have done anything at all. If anything the connection is slightly worse now that with our last ISP. I'd be prepared to bet a large sum of money that none of the fixes that we are now working through are going to work. There is something fundamentally wrong with our phoneline that 5 separate visits haven't located.

There is an obvious and straightforward way to fix and unknown problem with a phoneline. Go back to the last point where everything is known to work well and replace everything from there to my computer. If you can come up with a better solution that this, great, please follow it. But when in a weeks time this last engineer's patch doesn't work please dont just send another one round to do the same damned thing.

I'm getting very very tired with the same damned problem and the same false assurances that it's now fixed and everything is fine. I'm getting very very tired of having to set aside days waiting for yet another engineer. I'm getting very very tired of having to send yet another message to BT for them to reassure me once again that everything will work now. I'm getting very very tired of an internet connection that doesn't bloody work.

Yours,

Adam Casey

Anonymous Blogging

2011-08-22T22:13:00.000+01:00

There's been a lot of fuss on twitter recently about @Lord_Credo (account now deleted). A blogger recently announced that he was "fake" and had run an account based on a lot of lies. This got me thinking more broadly about anonymous and pseudonymous blogging. I like blogs under pseudonyms, that's why I have one. I want to argue that some of the greatest works of public discourse were pseudonymous blogs, and that, all things being equal, I dont want the people who run them to be outed.

First the topic at hand. Credo is bad because he allegedly committed real world fraud with actual money. This is the point where @Lord_Credo stops being an anonymous blogger and becomes a real person committing meatspace crimes. There are already laws for this. If people can sustain the allegation that Michael Gordon Bracci has taken money from them on false pretences then he needs to be taken to court and thence to prison. The fact that the internet was involved is irrelevant.

The question for me is this: should the fact that @Lord_Credo turned out to be "fake" tell us something about pseudonymous blogging?

I'd say it reminds us what the pseudonym is for, but other than that not really.

Why do people adopt psudonyms? There are two reasons:

Personal safety: they wish to whistleblow, to talk about things in a repressive country, or to talk about things that are potentially embarrassing about themselves. (An example of the last is Bell de Jour)
They want a level playing field. They dont feel their given name will reflect on the content of the blog fairly. This is both positive and negative, some who feel their name is tainted use a pseudonym to get a fair hearing, some who already have an established and respected name use them to have their ideas respected on their merits. (More later).

There's a reason I'm talking about pseudonymous blogging. Because anonymous blogging properly speaking is another matter. There's a good example of it: 4chan. Almost every comment is totally stripped of any mark identifying the author. There is nothing but the bare words, no way to test if the author's views have been justified in the past. When you read a claim on 4chan it is exactly that, a bare claim. Do the legwork yourself before deciding if it's reasonable to believe it. As such, 4chan is an unhelpful place to find information or analysis. (Not to say it doesn't exist, it does).

A pseudonym is something else, it is a name connecting many posts together. Based on past experience of the claims under this name a sensible assessment can be made of how reliable the author is, and how far the analysis should be respected. This is why @Lord_Credo's outing is upsetting for me, it's not for nothing that he was regularly in the House of Twits top 10 political bloggers. His analysis and insider knowledge was always interesting and insightful. The fact that he got it without the Downing Street pass he claimed is totally irrelevant.

This is fundamentally the point, in a pseudonymous blog the only thing that is relevant is the posts, is the author right or wrong?

This was shown very well in some of the best examples of pseudonymous blogs ever. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers. Get over the fact that they were written on dead trees. These documents were pseudonymous blogs arguing for and against the constitution proposed by the Philadelphia Convention. When reading Publius and the Federal Farmer the fact that the two of them are actually (several) notable politicians is ignored, the only thing that counts is the arguments. If they were published under real names it seems likely that political friends and enemies of the relevant politicians would be keen to accept all the arguments of one side and reject all the arguments of the other. As it is you can clearly see the federalists loose the argument on the size of the House of Representatives and the Bill of Rights and the anti-federalists loose the argument on the election systems and power of the President.

But what about bloggers who aren't pseudonymous for the noble reason of pretending not to be politicians?

I'd quite like then to stay anonymous, for either serious or flippant reasons.

I have many names, to various people I am: Rebellion Kid, Adam, John, melky, minion, and half a dozen others that I'm not going to mention here. Why not? Because I dont want you to know that they're me.

We all of us speak to different people in different ways. This is because things said in one social context, whilst not immoral, are unacceptable in other contexts. I would very much like to defend the separation of social contexts. And for this reason I'd like people not to be accountable in one context for embarrassing statements in another.

I want Paul Chambers to be able to say "Fuck! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together or I'm blowing the place sky high!" and as no harm whatever is caused by this I'd like for him to be able to keep his job. I want to be able to say fuck on here as much as I cunting well please without upsetting my grandmother. I want Bell de Jour to be able to talk about things she doesn't want to tell her relatives and friends.

I especially want this to be true at the dangerous end. To out a Chinese dissident blogger is indirect murder. To out a whistleblower is to reduce the ease with which others will wistleblow, making every industry more dangerous.

Finally. Compare two bloggers, Old Holborn and Guido Falkes. Both right wing, both vocal and unpleasant. I know who Guido is, I've only heard OH's voice. ... and based on my experience of Guido, boy do I not want to find out who OH is. I cant imagine he'll be any easier on the eyes or less annoying on TV news. Keeping bloggers pseudonymous spares you their personal unpleasantness and keeps the interesting opinions.

Confucius say:

2011-08-19T01:40:00.000+01:00

One day a disciple asked Confucius `If a king were to entrust you with a territory which you could govern according to your ideas, what would you do first?' Confucius replied, `My first task would would certainly be to rectify the names.' The puzzled disciple asked, `Rectify the names? And that would be your first priority? Is this a joke?' Confucius was required to explain what he meant: `If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If the language is without an object, action becomes impossible - and therefore, all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes impossible. Hence, the very first task of a true statesman is to rectify the names.'
From The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3

I've never heard the task of philosophy explained so clearly and precisely.

A lot of people get annoyed at lazy first year Oxford Philosophy students asking "what do you mean by 'is'" and other such useless questions. This is unfair. I'll grant they're doing junk cargo cult philosophy, but they're at least cargo-culting the right task. The task of philosophy, or at least the task I am doing when I engage in philosophy is exactly clarifying concepts and names. As a first example, the word philosophy means "love of wisdom" and has been used by various people to mean literally every part of the mental life of man. To say that philosophy is one very narrow task cannot be to declare all these people wrong by fiat. It must rather be an explanation of how I use the word and an outlining of one task that I feel valuable.

The job I do when I say I'm doing philosophy is exactly the rectification of names so that they match realities. That doesn't mean fussing about whether something should be called X or Y, nor asking for definitions of definitions all the way down. That is the job of the lazy first year student at Oxford. This means working out what concepts are good, which are bad, and trying very hard to kill the bad ones.

What do I mean by a bad concept? I mean a mental framework or paradigm through which problems are viewed that systematically produce bad outcomes. This covers to a greater or lesser extent almost all concepts we regularly use. This isn't a problem if (as most people in history) nothing you do really matters on the big scales, but as science makes every person more powerful this becomes a problem. For medieval peasants to be superstitious doesn't really change much, for an influential member of a trade union to believe the lump labour fallacy causes disastrous problems.

Some rough headings:

Just because there's a word for it doesn't mean it's a thing. Reptile, soul, the set of all sets, that greater than which nothing can be thought, customer. A map doesn't prove that the territory exists or makes any sense if you find it.
Just because the two of you are using the same word doesn't mean you're talking about the same thing. "Suffering is good", god, science, truth, moral, reasonable, selfishness, money, basically everything me and my roommate last year have ever had a discussion about.
Hidden assumptions in language. The word Y may mean one specific type of X, that doesn't mean all the things you call Y are in fact Xs. All logical arguments for or against the existence of gods, all political, religious or economic labels, everytime someone says "by definition" after something false, all scientific jargon in advertising.
Just because there's two words doesn't mean there's two things. Religion/superstition, pyramid scheme/whatever you're calling it today, freedom fighter/terrorist, buyer/seller, not-a-racist-but/racist, middle class/working class, them/us, bourgeois X/proletariat X (see also the entire communist manifesto), decent folk/bad guys.
Just because there's one word doesn't mean it's one thing. God, authority, a right, maths, teaching, stupid, rape, bad, fun. "This is an X, we should do Y when there's an X, we should do Y" almost always only works the the majority of Xs.

Anyway, I found this quote randomly as I was reading a rambling after dinner speech by an eccentric Cambridge maths lecturer. And I was very impressed. In my blinkered, euro-centric notion of the history of ideas I had thought almost all ideas of this kind belonged to the western rationalist tradition, and for them to be this well articulated would mean they were most likely post-Wittgenstein logical positivists. I obviously need to read a lot more Confucius.

Science for religious fundamentalists

2011-08-14T21:57:00.000+01:00

"It is clear that blasphemy, which is a sin committed directly against God, is more grave than murder, which is a sin against one's neighbor. … it is called the most grievous sin, for as much as it makes every sin more grievous.” ~ Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica

For this essay I will assume the existence of a god. For simplicity I will use the names and forms of address reserved to the Christian god (ie referring to this being by the name God or with a capitalised He), but as we will see I wont assume much more than that He created the universe.

Often it is suggested there is some conflict between science and religion. That being religious and scientific are incompatible. That religious people shouldn't have a duty to bow down to scientific truths. This seems to me a nonsense. If anything religious people, people who want and need to know about God, ought to be more interested in science than anyone else.

There is a God, He created everything, He is supremely powerful and awesome in every sense. It is obviously the duty of every sane person to find out more about this God. How then are we to find out about this God? Firstly through our hearts and minds, the private personal revelations that come to us in quiet moments. And secondly through our eyes and hands and the rest of our senses of the world around us.

The first question is which of these two forms of revelation is the most reliable? If you feel some little voice or inner conviction about some thing in the world, that a particular stone is red say, but you see with your eyes that is it not so, and all your friends and trusted neighbours say it is not so there must be something wrong. Clearly one of these senses is in error about what it is God has made in the world. Is it not the simpler and more likely explanation that you're misinterpreting your vague and quiet feeling, or that it is speaking to you in a metaphor or parable, or that it's the work of a sinister being and not of God?

When you see a truth plainly and clearly through the senses then it must be the work of God. God created everything, that stone that you see is His work, all of nature is His work. For you to reject any part of that work is a very strong kind of blasphemy. For you to say that you dont bow down to and accept a truth about the world is to reject at least in part the work of God. It is not for you to tell God what He can make. To do so is to claim a superiority over God, it is an appalling error, blasphemy of the highest rank.

To accept your place in the scheme of things, as beloved by God, but tiny and stupid and insignificant compared to him, is to be forced into a simple rule: "Do not tell God what to do". Dont ever dare to presume even for a second that you can second guess His work. Dont dare even for a second to say "this cannot be the will of God". Yes it is God's will, it must be, He created it, for you to disbelieve that because you wouldn't have made the world like that is to assert you know God's mind, you know His plans and schemes. It's wrong of you, staggeringly appallingly wrong of you to pretend to such grandeur.

Dont dare to pretend then when you see the evidence of a fact about the world that it cannot be true because you dont believe that God plays dice or creates Man from lesser beings or whatever prejudice your tiny stupid human mind can come up with. Dont dare to say that you know better than Him or know what He would do.

Dont dare pretend or allow others to pretend that other humans have this power. Dont let your minister of vicar pretend he knows the mind of God. The next time your priest tells you about the works of God and you look at the evidence and see that he is not telling the truth confront him. Tell this priest that to tell lies about the work of God is a very serious thing. Keep complaining and getting angry about his lies until he learns that it is God and not he that makes the decisions.

Dont dare to pretend that any human being, even the Pope or whoever the head of your Church is, has this power. When the Pope tells a lie about the work of God, when he says that God provides a cure for a disease in this way when He does not, or when he says that God created a part of the world in a way He did not, then the Pope is a false prophet. He must be condemned as all false prophets, you must rebuke him, show him the error of his ways, command him to stop telling God what to do.

And dont dare pretend either that the works of man are immune. Remember, even if God wrote and inspired the scriptures that humans copied them. If in scripture you find a lie about the works of God, if you find something that your senses tell you is untrue, then there has been an error somewhere, it is not the word of God. Dont allow the moderate and liberal churches to deceive you with their nonsense about metaphor and the word of God being meant for one time or place. A lie is a lie plain and simple, calling it a metaphor doesn't make it magically true. A word meant for one time and place is no good in another. If the book in your hand blasphemes against God and His works burn it, it can be of no use to anyone.

A book that contains many truths but also many lies is in many ways more vicious than a pure book of lies. The false statements are evil in themselves, the truth is evil because it lends support to blasphemy by being bound in one book with it. If you find a book claiming to be the word of God with many truths but some lies burn it, it can do nothing but deceive you.

Oh yeh and atheists? Substitute God throughout for "nature", then shut the fuck up about beauty in science and stop being a string theorist.

No reflection on the majority of people

2011-08-10T12:13:00.000+01:00

One line that's been annoying me throughout the riots. "This violence is no reflection on the law-abiding majority of people" or "the people of Hakney are appalled by the violence they see on the streets". This is wrong-headed on several levels.

Exactly what information is this trying to convey?

Is the speaker saying that I personally am a good person? If so I want to know why. I know how good a person I am, and I'm not so needy as to be benefited by the police saying I'm a good boy.

Is the speaker saying my neighbours are good people? As a rule I'm a better judge of that, I know what they're like. Unless you've actually done a rigorous survey you dont actually know what the people of Hackney are appalled by. And anyway, saying that they're good isn't going to help me deal with a riot.

Is the speaker saying that my immediate neighbours are good and that the riot is caused by a sinister "criminal element" from outside my neighbourhood? If so she's just plain wrong as a matter of fact. These riots are not the result of criminal gangs infiltrating entirely peaceful and law-abiding areas. The people who burnt Liverpool and Manchester were from Liverpool and Manchester, the people who burnt Hackney were from Hackney. To say otherwise is not reassuring, it's just pain unhelpful. If it were really the case that these things were caused by outside groups then shutting down public transport and sealing off roads would protect you. This would not work in fact however.

Who is the speaker trying to impress by saying this?

If it's me, by telling me I'm a good boy, then great, thankyou but I'm not 5, go away and come back when you have a strategy to stop looting.

If it's outside observers, I'm sorry, they're not stupid. You standing up and saying "this is no reflection on the good people of Manchester" is not going to fool people into thinking that Mancunians are not responsible for this.

If you're trying to impress me by the sophistication you show in blaming this on a small number of people rather than Scousers just being inherently like this, well done, you're not overtly prejudiced ... what, you want a fucking medal? Where's the strategy on stopping looting?

What, if anything, does the statement contribute to stopping the riot?

Here's a good reason to say it: People dont like to be in minorities, they like to conform, if you say that the majority of people in Birmingham are not violent then people will feel bad and stop being violent. ... Except of course that's bollocks. Looters *are* in a majority, the majority of their mates are doing it. The majority of the people they see every day are doing it, the majority of the people they're talking to are doing it. To try and convince them that the group they should care about is "all Mancunians" or "all Londoners" is just going to fail. They have a group, they're conforming to its norms.

Actually, wider point. Many will try to get people to think the group they should care about is this wide, City or borough level thing, under the name of "making them part of the community". This is bullshit. There is not now nor has there ever been any such thing as "the community" these people talk about. There is no sensible meaningful cultural unit that's the size of a city or district, it's just too big. You cant and dont feel connected to people the other side of a city, they're too remote. You can feel connected to all the flute players in that city, all the people on your road or in your housing block, you can feel connected to all the people in your class at school or in your office. You cant and you dont feel a tie that means anything to something that large. Even large football teams push it.

Communities are a false invented notion. Community leaders even more so. You want someone in charge of an area the size of Hackney? We have local councils and assemblies for that. To say that the head of the local youth organisation or some other self-appointed busy-body is a leader is to lead yourself into a trap. The trap is false accountability and false agreement. This was very clear in the student protests. The police were angry that the students had violated an agreement to march a specific way. The problem was the students had made no such agreement and most were not aware of any such assumption by the police. Why this colossal miscommunication? The police talked to Aaron fucking Porter and assumed from an agreement with him they had an agreement with every member of the community he represents. This is not true, never was, never will be. To get the "leaders of the local communities" together and agree there will be no rioting will do one half of fuck all. To talk to them at all is a colossal and total waste of time, and politicians should stop all together talking to "leaders of local communities" and do their job, which is actually leading those communities using the consent you got at the ballot box.

The point.

2011-08-04T00:03:00.000+01:00

Why blog? Why think about ethics? Why practice science? What ultimately is the point of all of it? What are we worrying about? And importantly, is it clear this goal is attainable? Is it clear we can work towards it successfully? It's not clear I've ever answered this question. So, here we go.

What's the goal? One word answer: happiness. Happiness is the thing I want for myself, the thing that is desirable in and of itself. A world where I'm happy is to be sought, a world where I'm not happy to be rejected and prevented if at all possible. Because other people seem to have minds like my own it makes sense that they also get this feeling. Because their feeling seems likely to be like mine it makes sense that their happiness is also a thing to be desired, that their unhappiness is a thing to be prevented.

So the job is to increase happiness for as many people with minds like mine as you can find.

Observation: my happiness is determined by two factors, first my state of mind and attitude, second the direct experiences I have of the world around me. Historically the Buddhists stress one, the enlightenment materialists the other. Both are necessary, a perfectly contented Buddhist monk may be as happy as humanly possible, but they'll stay that way for less than 40 years without scientific medicine. A scientist with all the technology, joy-inducing drugs and medicine they can manage to get their grips on may well be perfectly miserable if they believe the brave new world they've created is a dystopia and try to fight it.

So we need both. The second part is much more obvious and accessible to me. The first must not be underestimated, and there are clear measurable successes of both camps.

On the first front there is often (read: almost always) more heat than light. The Dalai Llama has many interesting things to say, and various schools of Buddhism have produced testable results. However, these are swamped huge number of "new age" scam artists. There needs to be a far more active and rigorous study of the psychology of happiness. This is not easy, it needs people, time, resources and good ideas. But there's no reason that a good science cant be made, or why it cant explain what some Buddhist schools are doing right, and leave no room for new age bullshiters. I have nothing interesting or important to add to this, I leave it to others, doesn't mean it's not important, simply not my field.

The second front is much more my field. Examine the connections between sense data and happiness, find the good sense data, find the physical world that generates them, find the actions that cause this physical world to turn into that one, do them, Bob's your uncle Fanny's your aunt. Now there are several objections that pessimists, idiots or those with weird agendas raise to this.

First, material things cant make you happy, this is the "money cant buy you happiness" line. This is obviously wrong, anyone seriously suggesting this is true is either trying to be wise and failing, or they are colossally stupid. Of course material things change how happy we are. ... That's why we want them. The holidays we go on, the sports we watch, the hobbies we have, the prostitutes we hire. Of course they make us happy, if they didn't then we would stop buying them. They may not make you happy, sure going camping for a fortnight and then abseiling off a mountain doesn't seem fun to you, but it does to others, it really genuinely makes them happy. It's part of the physical world, it takes energy to make it happen, it takes human effort to make it happen, it takes money to make it happen.

Second objection, we shouldn't worry about material things, it all depends on state of mind. Bollocks. At the very least material things keeps that state of mind going longer by feeding the body that makes it work. (Anyone who honestly, really, truly, deeply believes that their mind is not just a part of their body and doesn't need it to survive is more than entitled to test this claim via suicide). State of mind is important. You can be happy in extremis. But I bet it's a hell of a lot easier if you're warm and comfortable. And actually, either way I win. If it's hard to be happy on the rack then let's get people off the rack, if it's easier to be happy on the rack because of some bullshit about teaching you the value of existing or whatever then lets put people on racks. If it makes no difference at all ... I'm going to go ahead and carry on taking people off racks ... if for no other reason than screaming keeps me up at night. Either the material world effects how easily we can be happy, in which case the material world is important. Or it makes no difference at all, in which case you can ignore all the things I'm doing in the material world ... but I have this thing that my own personal happiness does seem very very much to depend on the material world, so unless you can give me some very strong evidence .... I'm going to carry on with the world while you're sitting in your trance ignoring me.

Third objection. Science cant help us, and infact makes our lives worse, thinking about the problem scientifically wont work. Not a priori nonsense, thinking about the fact that you're stammering makes the stammer worse. The mere act of scientifically analysing something could conceivably make things worse. ...Not true of course. But you do need to spend a couple of seconds justifying that. No, there was no golden age. The people in the past did not lead happy idyllic lives. They got murdered a hell of a lot more than us, yeh, even the people who live in inner-city ghettos in America. You're a lot safer than someone living in the same place 500 years ago. The myth of the noble savage is exactly that, and both historical, anthropological and archaeological research bears this out. The scientific pursuit of material well-being has produced ever longer lifespans, ever lower murder rates, ever better levels of public health, ever lower infant mortality, ever less fatal wars (no, seriously) ever higher levels of participation in public life and thus of public policy designed to benefit the population. And participating in this is vital.

Fourth objection, yeh science has done great things, but we've about reached the limit, there are limits to growth all over the place, so soon we'll stop. Umm, true in one sense, but there's a way to get out of it. Yes, limits to growth exist, but the history of civilisation is the history of circumventing them. A problem that faced our early ancestors was the fact that grazing enough animals to feed a gang of hunters on the savannah takes a lot of land, I think The Ascent of Man gives the population of Chicago as the limit to the human population of the earth given that food supply. This is a clear limit to growth, you get round it by doing something else instead, farming, feeds more people with a smaller land area, then you farm ever more intensively with ever better crops. The limit is still there, you've not broken the laws of physics, you've simply done something else. Almost all limits can be dealt with the same way. There's a limit to how fast a team of horses can go, so you use a train, there's a limit to how efficient a steam engine can be, so you use diesel and electric. There's a limit to how fast a train can go, so you fly, there's a limit to how fast a plane can go, so you hop to orbit and hop back again. Limits can almost always be put off in this way. And if you can always move the most pressing limit at least a decade further away every decade, in a very real sense there is no such limit.

Fifth objection is a sub-objection to this one. At the end of the day there's a limit that really matters, that's the second law of thermodynamics, in any closed region of the universe energy sources run out, useful resources are exhausted and everything stops. In the really-quite-long-indeed term there's a simple solution. Stop living in a closed region of the universe. Expand your empire fast enough and you can match any pace of energy and resource growth you like. And the speed of light isn't a problem so long as the "rate of growth" you care about is relative to time on the fringe not time at the long dead core.

Ok, so. What's the point? Make people happy. How? A combination of a real hard scientific study of the psychology of happiness, and a real concerted push towards the continued circumvention of limits of expansion to the resources we need to make the changes in the physical world that make us happy. Everything else I've ever done, attempted, thought about, written about or talked about is either just a facet of this or a total waste of time.

If I ruled the world

2011-07-29T00:18:00.000+01:00

Just a quickie on what rules I would put in place if I had the chance to design from scratch a society's customs and norms around sex and reproduction. Obviously I dont, because things like cultures unfortunately evolve they are not designed. Which is a shame... because things that are designed (at least ones designed by people with half a brain) are an awful lot better. Probably for the best that I dont get that kind of power though. I plan on becoming morally better, and thus on being disgusted with my current morality in about 10 years time. (I'm certainly disappointed at least by half the things 15 year old me thought). If so it's probably best to leave the omnipotence until I've had some more time to think about it.

Our story starts at puberty with a simple, safe, 100% reversible operation. To painlessly and without inconvenience sterilise everyone. This is combined with thorough sex and relationships education (actually this starts before puberty). Everyone in the population understands totally the mechanics of sexual pleasure and the mechanics of reproduction. Everyone totally understands the concept of consent, what constitutes consent, what things require consent, why consent matters.

Next job is the start of sexual and relationship exploration. Young people meet, socialise, enjoy eachother's company. Those who desire a particular form of relationship are open and specific about it. Those who desire a particular form of sexual pleasure likewise. (The internet with its vast number of alarmingly specific dating forums is a good approximation to this). Those who do not yet know what they want in both these areas (almost everyone) are expected to experiment and to decide what they do and do not like with no pressure to attempt anything they dont like again.

Next job, after people are in solid relationships (if that's what they want, and with whichever other people they want if they do) they may wish to have children. (I'm not proposing A Brave New World factory bred children, actual mothers would be involved). Those who do wish this would be free to have the surgery required to reverse their sterility. This would be expensive. Deliberately and consciously so. It would not be available free on the NHS, those who could not afford it would not have children. If possible there would be a whacking great tax on it to help fund primary education.

This is clearly inhuman, monstrous, unethical ...and mind-bogglingly obvious. Raising a child costs money. You cannot do it on the cheep. If you try then you get a few great lovely wonderful kids including a few very dear to me ... and also a far greater number of unsettled, undereducated, antisocial kids who are simply not going to have the life opportunities and potential for happiness they deserve. Now obviously I dont want to breed an aristocracy here ... for genetic reasons alone that's not a good idea. Poor people need to have kids, and society cannot fail to realise this. There are two solutions.

First and most direct, make sperm and egg donations easy and commonplace. Thus curing the genetic problem, but not allowing people from poor households to raise children. This is both a good thing for the child and a problem for society, too limited a pool of childhood experiences and types of parenting does not produce a diverse society. And diverse societies are where you get real invention.

The second more significant possibility is charity or government support to give would-be parents the resources they need to raise a child properly. This probably the most sensible way to run things providing both that children are not raised in poverty and so the greatest number of backgrounds and types of early childhood experiences are run through. This way maximises the experiments in living that make a liberal society better than A Brave New World, and are why ours will reach out to other worlds and ever increase its happiness and lifespan while the people's of a brave new world will stay at the same moderate level of happiness in much the same culture for ever.

There is a threefold problem with this. One cost, but that can easily be ignored, written off as a necessity or simply given to the economists to argue over. The second is the current problem with the British version of this idea, which is paying people who have children regular sums. The problem of course is the phenomenon of having children, gaining this money, and not spending it on the child. This of course produces exactly the antisocial non-fulfilled children we dont want whist costing a lot of money. The solution is to either pay in kind with vouchers for babyfoods, nurseries etc, or to reimburse (on the same system as business expenses) reasonable costs related to the child.

The last problem is the most significant. It's that this doesn't work. Have a look at the vast literature of child development. Good parents, those who produce well adjusted, happy children, on average have a large number of books in the house. Give all parents books to put in the house, no significant effect on the children. Good parents on average give their kids a good breakfast. Give every kid a good breakfast, no significant effect. And so it goes on. The parents of kids with good prospects do a huge number of things, but if you just make all parents do these thing you dont get happy kids. We dont understand yet what those parents are doing that makes their kids more successful and happy. Clearly the books and the breakfasts and everything else is a symptom of this thing, but what it is, we dont

Parenting support could be partly or even mainly in the form of education. No, parents do not instinctively know through evolution how to raise a child. They know how to keep a child alive and fit enough to reproduce ... though actually applying these instincts in the modern world is not necessarily going to work. Parenting is a hard process that needs thought, specialist knowledge and rigorous training, all based on good research and not Oprah's latest pet theory be it Supernany or Tiger Mothers. (Yes that was a pop culture reference, I'm very sorry and promise never to do it again).

And lastly and most importantly. I would instant a great cultural taboo. An absolute and unbreakable rule. Think of the incest taboo, but much stronger. Which would be nice and simple: never, under pain of being totally banished from civilised company, take a child to an enclosed public place like a restaurant or public transport.

Sherlock v Poirot

2011-06-26T12:28:00.000+01:00

I've been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories recently. I've been thinking about Sherlock as a detective and Arthur Conan Doyle and an author. So, here's some thoughts: Basically Holmes has the potential to be the greatest detective ever, but Arthur Conan Doyle doesn't seem to me have the ability to show off his creation. I'd like to explain this by comparing him with Poirot.

First off, a typical story from both characters. It may be that no story has all of these element and it may be that some stories have none of these elements, but if you look at enough stories and squint this is basically what you get.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Silver Bangle

Holmes and I were in Baker Street. Holmes announced we were about to receive a client, there was a knock at the door and an agitated man entered. Holmes did his clothes trick: telling the man his profession, and briefly why he was there, explaining the observations of the man's clothes that let him guess this. The man introduced himself as Lord Symkins and confirmed many of the things Holmes had said.
   Lord Symkins explained that there had been a murder in Fontelroy Hall. Holmes and I leapt on a Hansom cab, went to the Hall, found the dead man and got angry at the official police for disturbing the footsteps. He observed the murder scene very closely, found the silver bangle that the police thought was irrelevant. We followed an obvious path and arrived at some other place. Holmes sent and received many telegrams I wasn't told about. Later that evening we spotted a strange looking man and gave chase, but he got away from us.
   Holmes and I then went back to the Hall. He told me to get my trusty service revolver ready, he got his hunting crop. We hid in a dark room. A man walked in and there was a fight. The man was captured and said "it's a fair cop".
   The man said that he was the murderer and that a full and frank confession of the truth was his best possible defence. He then told us the whole story. His name was John Hawkins, he's never been mentioned before in this story. He told us the full story of the murder. The silver bangle was important in it. When I challenged Holmes on how he knew that the murderer was to be found here he replied that he knew the silver bangle was the sign of a secret society totally unknown to me, he found out a lot of information from his telegrams, which he didn't tell me about, and with that information the case was so easy that Mma Ramotswe could have solved it. He then sent a message to the murderer telling him to go to the darkened room.
   Holmes then said that as the murderer was acting on the best intentions and was a noble upper class individual he would let him go as justice didn't require the murderer to be arrested. We went home.

The Blackwood Convention

Poirot was at the country estate of the eccentric billionaire Lord Blackwood. He was at a party for "all the people who stand to gain by my death, also a famous detective." The doors were sealed. After a long series of conversations with everyone present Poirot got a good assessment of everyone. Those present were:

Lord Blackwood: A man with more enemies than a the billionaire owner of a large mining concern could reasonably be expected to have.
Lady Blackwood: Having an affair with Roger.
Roger: Having an affair with Lady Blackwood, wanted the Lord dead to get his wife. Blackmailing Susan over her affair.
Susan: Having an affair with Martin. Would do anything to protect him. Woman of expensive tastes.
Martin: In huge gambling debts, secretly heir to Lord Blackwood, needed his money.
John: Husband of Susan. Well known heir to Lord Blackwood, needed his money to keep Susan happy. Army man, experienced in native South American poisons.
Jenkins: The butler. Secretly Lord Blackwood's son. Wants his title. Trained as a doctor.
Mary: The maid. Mistreated by Lord Blackwood, wants him out of the way to become personal maid to Lady Blackwood.
Rev. Hawkins: Secretly gay. Being blackmailed by John.
Poirot
Hastings

They all played bridge in 2 games of 4. The Lord sat alone in a dark alcove. The servants came and went. Hours later: "By Jove, he's dead!" Rev. Hawkins exclaimed, looking over the dead corpse of Lord Blackwood. Much surprise ensued.

Poirot puts his little grey cells to work. He reconstructs exactly the sequence of events that night, detects the rare poison dart in the Lord's neck. Also the blowpipe in the locked draw that only Lady Blackwood and Mary had access to. Also the spilled wine next to the chair that only Rev. Hawkins, Martin or John could have made, the marks on his arm to indicate that the Lord was a prolific drug user.

Poirot suggested staging a reconstruction, everyone repeating the events of the previous night with Mary playing the part of Lord Blackwood. Noticeably several things were different, there were two spoons in "Lord Blackwood's" cup of tea, every time Martin so much as flinched Susan created a huge distraction in an attempt to distract everyone, John played noticeably worse cards when people were scrutinising him closely. One of the things that was not different was the murder. Mary's death was the final clue Poirot needed.

A few hours later the great detective summoned everyone into the drawing room. He explained in great detail all the evidence and explained the motive of each person there before finally concluding that the butler did it as he had medical knowledge and needed to kill Mary as she had noticed him preparing the poisen.

The stories.

The two give us very clear examples of the differences between Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. First notice how unfair I have been. It took me as long to construct the story of the Silver Bangle as it took me to type it. It's a totally boring and meaningless story with no interesting characters. It probably took me less time to write the Silver Bangle than to come up with just the title for The Blackwood Convention. I put a lot more effort into the second. But notice that this is not just me, this is a fact of the styles of the two stories.
There are only 5 characters, including Holmes and Watson, in the Silver Bangle, none of whom need any details of their backgrounds fleshed out in order to produce a convincing Holmes story. To make a Christie however you need at least 10 characters, plus detective and victim. The Silver Bangle needed no elaborate explanation of the motives, in the Blackwood Convention everyone needs a plausible motive. In the Silver Bangle only one person could have done it, in the Blackwood Convention everyone could have done it. Notice also that in the Silver Bangle the evidence was all hidden until the end, the reader cant guess whodunnit. In the Blackwood Convention all the evidence is in front of you. The reader can guess whodunnit.

Why Holmes could be the greatest detective ever

Sherlock's importance and power as a detective must never be forgotten. The character revolutionised, and indeed invented, large sections of forensic science. The first case ever to be solved by the use of fingerprint evidence was the case of the Norwood Builder (it should be noted for the fans of biometric science that the police condemned the wrong man on the basis of the thumb-print). The emphasis on trace evidence at crime scenes, and protecting the integrity of the same, is now totally part of modern detective work. A large part of why I predicted (wrongly) that a modern version of the Holmes stories would never work is exactly because the modern detective already uses most of Holmes' methods, Holmes himself, I thought, would be redundant.

His ability to "deduce" relies in almost no sense on logic. It relies on Holmes having an almost infinite supply of facts, habits, customs, stereotypes, and an ability to imagine likely causes for observed data. The supreme example of Holmes' abilities is probably the case of the Blue Carbuncle. Or rather, it isn't. The case itself is a trivial affair, follow the obvious trail of clues and get to the end, no thought required at any point. The really awesome thing is the start to the story. Holmes is presented with a hat. And from this concludes things about the owner. The conclusions are expressed thus:

"That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him."
"My dear Holmes!"
"He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect," he continued, disregarding my remonstrance. "He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house."

Given the observations Holmes has made about a third of these conclusions are reasonable and supported by at least the balance of probabilities, the other third are rather nebulous and hard to quantify and the last group are not really fair. The combination works shockingly well as a stage trick where confirmation bias means we will quite happily ignore any stupidity we see in the man so long as he drinks, or vice versa. However, with a bit of tightening up and by getting rid of a lot of things it's reasonable for Victorian Holmes to believe but not reasonable for 21st century Holmes to belive we can certainly get a large body of truth out of this. Holmes has without question the potential to be the greatest detective ever conceived.

Why Holmes isn't

Why then, if Holmes is in theory the greatest detective ever, was it so hard for me to make the Silver Bangle sound like an interesting detective story in the way the Blackwood Convention did? Because Holmes is not, in the Arthur Conan Doyle Stories, featured in a detective story, and cant show off. The Holmes stories are not primarily detective stories, but rather adventure novels, the clue is there in the title. To quote Stephen Moffat, "Other detectives have cases, Holmes has adventures". The difference is key. In a detective story the point is the mystery, the facts are laid before the reader and the joy is to watch the case unravel and think "damn, I should have thought of that." In an adventure novel there is a case to be solved, but far more important than the thinking is the action. The chase, the hunt, the fight, the gruesome murder, these are the elements that make a Holmes story exciting. This is why the Silver Bangle is so empty, I put in a one line description of the key elements of the plot.

There are two reasons why the original stories are like this. One in-universe and one out-universe.

In-universe it is only natural that Watson should chronicle the adventure stories. Doubtless Holmes faces endless cases with real meaty intellectual content. But in such cases Watson and his trusty service revolver are not needed. Watson is most useful when he can run across a moor or hide in a dark room and fight a villain. He's not really needed when Holmes solves the problem by deep reasoning and the actual running around is secondary. Secondly of course Holmes is unnecessarily secretive and hordes his evidence. Had Holmes written the stories himself and not relied on Watson they would have been real deep intellectual puzzles. As it is half of the facts needed to solve the case are in telegrams Watson never sees. Which is frankly unsporting, but at least believable for Holmes.

Out-universe of course Conan Doyle is not *trying* to make interesting intellectual exercises, he's trying to write a thriller. That's the kind of story he likes. He famously hated writing Holmes stories, and anyone who's read one could tell you that he's not good at hiding it. Holmes tells Watson point blank to stop writing several times expressing his disgust at the way Watson writes, this is pure author insertion. Then all the times Holmes retires or is killed, that's not for dramatic effect, that's Conan Doyle trying to give people the hint, "stop reading Holmes, I hate him, read Professor Challenger instead". Add to this the incidents (most dramatically in the Study in Scarlet and the Valley of Fear) where the fact that Holmes and Watson exist at all is simply forgotten and in the middle of a story Conan Doyle starts writing a totally unrelated thriller set in America.

Holmes could have been the undisputed greatest detective to have ever been invented. And if anyone but Arthur Conan Doyle had written him then certainly he would have. This is why Holmes stories not copied from an original can (with a decent writer) be incredible. But Arthur Conan Doyle didn't want to create the greatest detective ever, and so inevitably he didn't.

Born this way

2011-06-18T01:00:00.000+01:00

Now I'm going to stick my head in a hornet's nest. But this is annoying me, and massively common. My problem is the phrase "Born This Way". I'm straight...ish, I was born with the gender and sex I have now, those two are the same, so I just want to make clear, this is an outsider's perspective. But I hope it's an interesting one. "Born This Way" is not the right way to make the argument for gay rights, not the right way to make LGBT people seem like full humans, and factually it's problematic.

The idea behind the phrase is simple. "Being LGBT is not a choice I am making it's something I was born with". This is to counter a line of attack on gay rights that can roughly be rendered: "gay people are a kind of group, like criminals, smokers or drunkards that it's acceptable to discriminate against". Discriminating against groups and stopping them doing what they want to is acceptable for certain kinds of groups, stopping convicted child abusers from working in schools is acceptable and indeed sensible. However, the claim is, being gay isn't like this, it's not a choice, it's an identity. Discrimination against people for being gay is like discriminating against people on the grounds of race or sex.

Except that's not how discrimination works. It's not ethically tenable. It might actually not be true. And it presents a huge danger of surrendering a point that should not be.

First trivial point, if you're a transsexual you just weren't born this way, that's kind of the point. Staying how you were born is not always a good thing and it's problematic to assume it is.

More seriously though there's a lot of problems with the assertion. The first is a simple factual one. What if it's not true? I am not up on the sexual research literature. I dont know how the balance is falling at the moment. But I'm quite confident when I say it is not certain that people's sexuality is fixed at birth. In fact I'd bet a small amount it's not true. People's sexuality inevitably evolves with time, what your particular fetish is will change, what kind of person attracts you will change, I see no reason at all that what gender you're attracted to could change, totally naturally and gradually. Almost everyone is not a Kinsey 0 or 6.

So if we are to defend gay rights and we are to use this line ... then someone comes along with serious objective unbiased research to suggest it's just plain false. What happens then? Lets get hypothetical, suppose that serious objective science concluded as conclusively as it could that people's sexuality can be changed and is not fixed at birth, whatever you think about the reality consider the possibility. If you've built your arguments on this line then either you have to adopt a denialist stance, reject objective reality and become insane, or your arguments fail, gay rights fail. This is dangerous. The beautiful thing with basing arguments on facts is that if you're wrong you always loose.

Even if it's true though, even if it's objectively the case that sexuality is fixed at birth. Is that the argument? To me "born this way" is too easy to interpret, or even to be meant, as "I'm born this way, it's not my fault." To mean "this thing that I am is bad, but I cant change it". To mean "I would love to stop being gay, but I cant". Obviously this is not what is meant by those who use it. But I worry that this connotation exists. I worry that there's something being given up by using this claim. I worry that an offensive line is being missed.

As I say I'm straight, so this is a non-LGBT perspective. But I really think one could argue forcefully with the line "yeh, I've chosen to be gay, have you got a problem with my choice?" Denying that a choice has been made avoids the point that's the most important in the LGBT debate: Is being gay actually a bad thing? I would love to see "I made the choice to be gay, and I defend that decision as being an ethical one" used as a serious argument. I'd like to see a more aggressive and active support of an LGBT lifestyle as an ethical choice, rather than a defensive cop-out argument of not having any choice in the matter.

This demand that how people are be respected per se is too close to a line used by some liberal religious folk that I hate. To me "born this way" sounds too much like "hate the sin love the sinner". It sounds too much like "we support you in spite of your being gay. Obviously it's wrong, but we are such generous people that we can forgive you your sin." It's a great line, it manages to claim great moral points from the most offensive comments. It manages to say "Something that is core to your personality is profoundly unethical", surely one of the most offensive things that can be said, and yet comes out leaving the speaker believing the other should be grateful for this abuse. "Born this way" sounds to me like it's feeding this mentality by allowing people to claim to support gay rights whist condemning the LGBT people they appear to support as fundamentally immoral. It's by this kind of get out that the key debate can be obscured and people can claim the moral high ground whilst offering the most rankly offensive statements.

My last thought is that if the basis for the thought is that discrimination against some groups is unacceptable because they were born that way then some very confused thinking is going on. It is of course fine to stop smokers as a group from excercising their group identity, but that's got nothing at all to do with any kind of inbuilt "born this way" tenancy. You can stop people being smokers because it hurts others. If it were the case that people were born addicted to nicotine and nothing could stop them from wanting to smoke. We'd do a lot to try and give them nicotine patches and whatever else. But we'd still stop them.

We dont fail to discriminate against people on the basis of sex or religion because they were "born this way". We do it because per se these things are not immoral. We shouldn't not discriminate against LGBT people because they are "born this way". Indeed we *should* discriminate against LGBT people if it turns out they are harmful to those around them. The argument we need to hammer home is that they are not harmful. We should not discriminate and we should push for the full acceptance of LGBT people as proper legitimate humans for this reason and this reason only.

The NHS - Coalition Agreement.

2011-05-08T13:45:00.000+01:00

22. NHS
The Government believes that the NHS is an
important expression of our national values.
We are committed to an NHS that is free at the
point of use and available to everyone based on
need, not the ability to pay. We want to free
NHS staff from political micromanagement,
increase democratic participation in the NHS
and make the NHS more accountable to the
patients that it serves. That way we will drive up
standards, support professional responsibility,
deliver better value for money and create a
healthier nation.

• We will guarantee that health spending
increases in real terms in each year of the
Parliament, while recognising the impact this
decision will have on other departments.
• We will stop the top-down reorganisations
of the NHS that have got in the way of
patient care. We are committed to reducing
duplication and the resources spent on
administration, and diverting these resources
back to front-line care.
• We will significantly cut the number of health
quangos.
• We will cut the cost of NHS administration
by a third and transfer resources to support
doctors and nurses on the front line.
• We will stop the centrally dictated closure of
A&E and maternity wards, so that people have
better access to local services.
• We will strengthen the power of GPs as
patients’ expert guides through the health
system by enabling them to commission care
on their behalf.
• We will ensure that there is a stronger voice
for patients locally through directly elected
individuals on the boards of their local
primary care trust (PCT). The remainder
of the PCT’s board will be appointed by the
relevant local authority or authorities, and
the Chief Executive and principal officers will
be appointed by the Secretary of State on the
advice of the new independent NHS board.
This will ensure the right balance between
locally accountable individuals and technical
expertise.
• The local PCT will act as a champion for
patients and commission those residual
services that are best undertaken at a wider
level, rather than directly by GPs. It will also
take responsibility for improving public health
for people in their area, working closely
with the local authority and other local
organisations.
• If a local authority has concerns about a
significant proposed closure of local services,
for example an A&E department, it will have
the right to challenge health organisations,
and refer the case to the Independent
Reconfiguration Panel. The Panel would then
provide advice to the Secretary of State for
Health.
• We will give every patient the right to choose
to register with the GP they want, without
being restricted by where they live.
• We will develop a 24/7 urgent care service in
every area of England, including GP out-of-
hours services, and ensure every patient can
access a local GP. We will make care more
accessible by introducing a single number
for every kind of urgent care and by using
technology to help people communicate with
their doctors.
• We will renegotiate the GP contract and
incentivise ways of improving access to
primary care in disadvantaged areas.
• We will make the NHS work better by
extending best practice on improving
discharge from hospital, maximising the
number of day care operations, reducing
delays prior to operations, and where possible
enabling community access to care and
treatments.
• We will help elderly people live at home
for longer through solutions such as home
adaptations and community support
programmes.
• We will prioritise dementia research within
the health research and development budget.
The Coalition: our programme for government 25
• We will seek to stop foreign healthcare
professionals working in the NHS unless they
have passed robust language and competence
tests.
• Doctors and nurses need to be able to use
their professional judgement about what is
right for patients and we will support this by
giving front-line staff more control of their
working environment.
• We will strengthen the role of the Care
Quality Commission so it becomes an
effective quality inspectorate. We will develop
Monitor into an economic regulator that will
oversee aspects of access, competition and
price-setting in the NHS.
• We will establish an independent NHS
board to allocate resources and provide
commissioning guidelines.
• We will enable patients to rate hospitals and
doctors according to the quality of care they
received, and we will require hospitals to be
open about mistakes and always tell patients if
something has gone wrong.
• We will measure our success on the health
results that really matter – such as improving
cancer and stroke survival rates or reducing
hospital infections.
• We will publish detailed data about the
performance of healthcare providers online,
so everyone will know who is providing a
good service and who is falling behind.
• We will put patients in charge of making
decisions about their care, including control of
their health records.
• We will create a Cancer Drugs Fund to
enable patients to access the cancer drugs
their doctors think will help them, paid for
using money saved by the NHS through our
pledge to stop the rise in Employer National
Insurance contributions from April 2011.
• We will reform NICE and move to a system
of value-based pricing, so that all patients can
access the drugs and treatments their doctors
think they need.
26 The Coalition: our programme for government
• We will introduce a new dentistry contract
that will focus on achieving good dental health
and increasing access to NHS dentistry, with
an additional focus on the oral health of
schoolchildren.
• We will provide £10 million a year beyond
2011 from within the budget of the
Department of Health to support children’s
hospices in their vital work. And so that
proper support for the most sick children
and adults can continue in the setting of their
choice, we will introduce a new per-patient
funding system for all hospices and providers
of palliative care.
• We will encourage NHS organisations to
work better with their local police forces to
clamp down on anyone who is aggressive and
abusive to staff.
• We are committed to the continuous
improvement of the quality of services to
patients, and to achieving this through much
greater involvement of independent and
voluntary providers.
• We will give every patient the power
to choose any healthcare provider that
meets NHS standards, within NHS prices.
This includes independent, voluntary and
community sector providers.

A history of mechanical calculating devices

2011-05-06T19:35:00.000+01:00

Today I gave a talk to a group of Cambridge maths students on the history of mathematics. It was an exhilarating and exhausting experience. I've been asked to put up a video of this, unfortunately the best I can do is a rather poor camera-phone video, which may make understanding me difficult. But there's a lot in the slides so I've uploaded them too. Thanks to everyone there, especially the person to my left who keeps interrupting with corrections and clarifications that I really needed. He is of course the legendary Prof Piers Bursill-Hall whose lecture series this was.

Sadly due to battery life limitations I can only give you the 1 hour 10 min talk and not the much more interesting 40 min question and answer session afterwards where I really showed up how shallow my research was. Abraham Izrael Stern especially, I make the claim that he's doing something really important, but I've done almost no research into the guy's life and impact, that needs serious work. But this is such a vast topic that in the Q&A afterwards a phd thesis and a whole seminar of talks were identified of extra study that could be done. Which sounds great to me ... you know, after exams and stuff.

Video: http://www.sendspace.com/file/hgf52a
My slides: http://www.sendspace.com/file/6btn0q

Cognitive blind-spots – a request for help

2011-05-02T11:07:00.002+01:00

Cognitive blind-spots – a request for help

So, the last few days I've had fun trying to get a new phone. There was epic fail, during which I discovered that never having owned a credit card was a bad move on my part. That's not the interesting thing though. I cant go back in time and change the fact so there's very little point in worrying about it, except that it's representative of a category of error. And this is where I need your help.

You see, it's not that I made an incorrect judgement, that implies making a judgement. With me and credit cards that's not the case. I have never decided not to own a credit card. Up to a week ago, say, I had not even considered it. It's not that I sat down, weighed up the pros and cons and made an error. It's that I never sat down and the default option was worse. Nobody has ever asked me “would you like a credit card”, I've never had that prompt to consider the things. Oh I grant you I know they exist, there those things that all the people I know who are in a financial mess have, but I've never thought that it's something I could own.

So, I'm now worried that there are other things that it's never crossed my mind to do. Other things that some people do that I've never thought about like … well that's the thing. I can hardly give an example of a mental blindspot, a thing I've never thought about. The whole point is I'm not aware of it. But, for instance, someone who'd never travelled and hence had never though about owning a passport and so hadn't thought about other uses for one. I've tried to think about tools people use to solve specific problems that I've not considered, the best candidate I can think of is life insurance. I've never sat down and asked myself if I want to be insured against injury or death. It may well be that I should get insured, the fact that I've never given it the most cursory consideration means that if so I'll commit another error.

So everyone. Tell me, are there tools, things that you have that help you, even very rarely, that not everyone has? What are they? Tell me especially about things like a driver's licence or a CV that are clearly designed for one task but which can be used for something else. The odds are that's the kind of thing that someone who's not wanted to drive or not wanted to get a job wouldn't have thought about. That's the kind of thing that lends itself to becoming a blindspot.

Initial thoughts on philosophy of religion

2011-04-12T20:19:00.000+01:00

I've been listening to an excellent lecture series on philosophy of religion recently by The Teaching Company. And it's got me thinking about how easy it would be to write a book entitled "bad ideas in philosophy of religion". But, here's some initial thoughts for words and phrases that shouldn't be used.

God

When I mentioned this the other day I was asked "what word would you say instead?" Which highlights exactly the point I dont want to make. The word God is as good as any other. The word itself it not a problem. The danger is when we use that one world to mean different things.

God has a fairly sensible meaning. "Something which is worthy of worship". Generally an omniscient, omni-etc being which created the universe. The problem is when people try to argue about a different meaning of God as though it were the same. Sometimes this is the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, sometimes it's just downright word-magic.

The classic example is people who argue that there is a Church of England God who wants us to go to church on a Sunday and use the book of common prayer by using the cosmological or ontological argument. Now, as it happens both of those arguments are nonsense, but for the sake of argument let us assume they work. What you have proved if so is that a being either "that which no greater can be conceived" in the ontological case or "the uncaused first cause of all". Neither of these ideas contain the slightest reference to the Book of Common Prayer. To argue as though they're the same is just plain wrong.

Metaphor

Language is complex. We often use terms non-literally or non-exactly. We talk about an electron "trying to get to the lowest energy level" knowing damn well that of course the electron hasn't got desires or anything of the kind. The important thing is that it's clear what the metaphor means. In this case that the electron will tend to occupy the lowest energy level it can consistent with the exclusion principle etc etc. If you cant unpack things in this way then there's no point saying it. It's not real communication, it's just you saying words. What's not acceptable, what's not meaningful communication is:

Careful now

"This book in my hand is the most perfect book in the world. It is a literal and perfectly true account of historical events. I base my beliefs and actions on the premise that the events contained in it are genuinely true."

"But this event mentioned here is clearly false."

"That's a metaphor."

To say that the book contains non-literal accounts is fine (so long as what those non-literal accounts mean is clear, which it isn't), but not if the literal accuracy of other parts of the book is something you rely on. Simply put, how do you know what's a metaphor and what's literal?

God is your father

Even given what I said about metaphor "God is your father" is a really bad example of the species. Because it gives a misleading idea of what the relationship between creator and created is. Same problem is implicit in the line "a smooth sea never made a skilled mariner". A loving father does need to be harsh so that his child can survive in the real world. Someone does need to expose a sailor to rough seas so they can survive in the real world.

But in no sense is this true of someone who creates the real world in question. A far better analogy, if we must use one, is to AI and programmer. The programmer can create the virtual world in which the AI is to live. There's nothing to limit what experiences this AI can have. So there's no compulsion on a loving programmer to expose the AI to harsh environments so it can survive in the "real world", there's no reason the AI ever needs to experience a scary world.

Proof

While I'm at it, see also the word certain, impossible etc. There are really really intelligent an well read theists, really really intelligent and well read atheists, really really intelligent and well read agnostics. So you can probably guess that at least someone has heard your argument, it's probably not as knock-down as you think it is. It's not a proof, it's just not.

Also while we're at it. A rather bizarre syllogism that people need to stop using. "You cant prove p" is not a proof that "not p", these are very very different statements.

Abraham

I know you live in the West. I know it's sometimes easier to just stick to what you know and have experience of. But seriously. The God of Abraham is not the only god.

(Btw, as I use it, there is a difference between God and god, a god is a type of thing, God is the name of one such example, God is another word for Yahweh).

This comes up a lot in Pascal's wager type discussions. God or not God is too simple. Which god? The question is how many gods are there and what are they like?

Ethics

Just a quick thing because this is something that offends me. Your religion and your holy book did not invent ethics. People do not need your religion to be moral. Please please dont be so arrogant as to think that you have unique access to moral truth. You just dont.

The internet

2011-04-10T11:13:00.000+01:00

"I said I was an addict. I didn't say I had a problem." ~ House

Sorry to everyone on twitter. It's the only thing on the net I can send messages to with my phone so you have to endure me going cold turkey on what I now recognise is a real and genuine internet addiction. The cretins at Orange have left me with a non-functioning Livebox – a device that I was assured by the only useful man in the Customer Support department is now not given to customers as it's notoriously unreliable. But as he was the man whose job it was to give me the Migration Authorisation Code that wasn't much help. The result of this is that after a damned awesome weekend away (and seriously everyone who was there, thankyou, it was wonderful) I came back to discover that there is no internet at my house. After a week of this I've discovered several things.

I'm addicted to internet access. I need it to feel normal. Without it I get jumpy and irritable. It's not a nice feeling.

TV news and radio news and even a dead-tree newspaper are no substitute at all for real internet news. An example. The recent story about the US budget. I discovered there was a problem with the budget negotiations after pressing the red button. Had I had internet I would have instantly had Fox, CNN, the New York Times and maybe even official press releases from both parties and the Whitehouse to compare. I could have read analysis from the most respected commentators … a lot of idiots as well, but amongst them people who really knew what they were talking about. As it was I had BBC news 24, Channel 4, Radio 4 and the World Service. From these I got a half page. A half page of excellent analysis no doubt. But I had to wait several hours to listen out for this half page hidden amongst deep descriptions of stories I didn't care about. It's really frustrating not being able to tell the news what story you want to hear. Sure you get a wide selection … well in theory. In fact I heard fewer stories than I would searching the net for a half hour. And even listening to the world service I didn't get as broad a selection.

All of my friends live online. This is great because I can talk to them wherever I am. But if I'm not online then that's not really much help. It's depressing to not being able to talk to ones friends, or indeed anyone other than family, for days on end. I know it's quite pathetic, but I'm really missing everyone badly, I'm not enjoying the feeling that I'll be separated from everyone I respect and care about for a period of time measured in working days. Note to self: if you plan to be anywhere where you could be without internet access for more than a week, be sure to find a friend in easy distance.

It's relaxing not finding things to rant about.

It's also bloody boring.

The most frustrating thing not to have is instant fact checking and general referencing. To hold a long conversation without being able to instantly look up relevant facts is frustrating. There a literally dozens of instances in an average conversation of “who said that” or “I wonder what the figure for that is” or “when was that” or “what does that look like”, facts you dont know but which would be really useful to have at hand.

Long story short. The internet is bloody awesome.

Anti-Terror and the coalition.

2011-02-11T23:57:00.000Z

You remember back in the day, when people like me were cautiously optimistic about the coalition? Well reading it back something strikes me, all the mainstream media coverage of all the things I talked about from last May to now is maybe a few hours worth. My passions, my reasons for backing the coalition in May are not economic. They are civil liberties, political and constitutional reform, and the general possibility of liberal governance for the first time in decades. And now is the time for a big bit of that list. As the government publishes details of the conclusions of its review of terror laws.

I've not been too keen to talk about the reporting of the government's big decisions, it's been avalanched by economics. Economics is important, of course it is. But it's also mainly lies. ... well not lies. By lies I mean "not scientifically rigorous", cf the existence of Marxist economists. I dont talk about economics on here because I dont waste my time thinking about it because I dont think there's any reason at all why I should back one side or the other. Of course it's perfectly obvious to everyone what the government should be doing at a time like this, and of course everyone can follow through the argument from first principles. The problem is that no two people seem to agree *what* is perfectly obvious.

This is a long way of saying I dont want to discuss the cuts. I've talked about specific cuts, I rallied against cuts to science funding, and was successful. I didn't rally against tuition fee rises because I dont think there has ever been a workable alternative to this bad and damaging decision. But mostly I've kept quiet on the most discussed issues, because that's not where my passions are.

Back in the day, I backed the coalition, this hinged on a few things. Headline repeals, ID cards, gone, DNA database, gone, 28 day detention, gone. Public consultation on a Great Repeal Bill ... you remember that ... been kicked into the long grass hasn't it? Turns out if you ask people what laws you want to repeal in a truly democratic way the largest contingent is crazy people, the next largest is those (like drug-legalisers) unacceptable to the media, the next are those (like the terrorist-shoot-on-sight people) proposing new and deeply illiberal laws. Update: well that moved fast. There was no sight of it when I started writing, then two days ago there were rumbings, and today it's been published this will have to be a totally separate post so sorry if this bill invalidates anything said below. After that are some genuine and rather minor reforms. Political and constitutional reform ... jury's still out on this one. Ken Clarke's ... existence. And then anti-terror laws.

This is big for the coalition. You've already scared off all the social democrats, all that's left of the Lib Dems are the old Liberals. So you need to be ... liberal. The most obvious and dramatic way to do this is with anti-terror laws. Terrorism exists, it's not as serious a danger to the public as, say, diabetes, but something must be done about it. Terrorism, like most crime, is an area where "liberal" is often seen as a dirty word. But here more than most liberalism is vital. The dangers of allowing a problem which obsesses the media and genuinely scares the public to become a reason to do things injurious to liberty is serious. We must act against terrorism. But we mustn't let public arguments be that terrorism is so serious that anything in response is acceptable.

So on this head we have a report on the Coalition's policy.

28 Day Detention

90 day pre-charge detention was a black day for the Blair government. To have people under arrest without knowing a charge against them is fundamentally unjust. It is sometimes necessary in an emergency to arrest someone before legal advice has been sought on exactly what legal category the crime would be in, likewise it is sometimes necessary to arrest someone on evidence not firm enough to ensure a guilty verdict, but with the expectation that such evidence will be discovered. However, as with all powers this must be limited. Must be approved by a judge on the basis of good evidence, must be time limited to stop the creep of abuse. etc etc.

The headline is 28 day detention is gone.

The 28 day order should be allowed to lapse so that the maximum period of pre-charge detention reverts to 14 days.

This is an improvement. One that will not be a great risk to public security.

To date 11 individuals have been held for over 14 days pre-charge detention ...
Six of these 11 people were held for the maximum 27-28 days: three were charged, three released without charge. ...

It has been claimed by David Davis MP (in the House of Commons on 14 July 2010) and by Liberty (in their 9 contribution to the review) that the evidence used to charge two of the people who were held for 27-28 days, was available before the 14 day point (at the
third and twelfth days respectively), and they could have been charged earlier.

So, a small change that doesn't put most prosecutions at risk but does prevent the false imprisonment of innocent people for nearly a month. This is something that should be applauded. Not by the Labour benches if reports of the debate are anything to go by but.

This is however backed up by another power:

Emergency legislation extending the period of pre-charge detention to 28 days should be drafted and discussed with the Opposition, but not introduced, in order to deal with urgent situations when more than 14 days is considered necessary

So after an emergency the commons will vote on, and in this high-stress situation will certainly pass, a motion to deal with a small number of people who's names may already at this point be known. It's almost impossible to imagine how this could be done without prejudice. This is a bad solution to a bad problem. An improvement as hopefully this would be rare (... though I wouldn't be surprised if by slow creep the Olympics, the royal wedding, or any other large public event are pre-emptively declared emergencies), but still not the best that could be hoped.

Section 44.

If two words sum up abuse of terror powers better than any other then Section 44 are they. Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 says:

Authorisations.

(1)An authorisation under this subsection authorises any constable in uniform to stop a vehicle in an area or at a place specified in the authorisation and to search—

(a)the vehicle;

(b)the driver of the vehicle;

(c)a passenger in the vehicle;

(d)anything in or on the vehicle or carried by the driver or a passenger.

(2)An authorisation under this subsection authorises any constable in uniform to stop a pedestrian in an area or at a place specified in the authorisation and to search—

(a)the pedestrian;

(b)anything carried by him.

And then lists as those capable as giving authorisation to (for small enough areas) people with ranks as low as assistant chief constables. Once such an order has been given then (section 45):

Exercise of power.

(1)The power conferred by an authorisation under section 44(1) or (2)—

(a)may be exercised only for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism, and

(b)may be exercised whether or not the constable has grounds for suspecting the presence of articles of that kind.

(2)A constable may seize and retain an article which he discovers in the course of a search by virtue of section 44(1) or (2) and which he reasonably suspects is intended to be used in connection with terrorism.

(3)A constable exercising the power conferred by an authorisation may not require a person to remove any clothing in public except for headgear, footwear, an outer coat, a jacket or gloves.

So this is an almost unlimited power to stop and harass any member of the public. And all the requirements that it be used for terrorist cases? Worth as much as the paper it's written on. To quote the report.

The increase in use of section 44 (from around 42,000 in 06/07 to over 250,000 in 08/09 before falling to just over 100,000 in 09/10) and the nature of its use, has led to concern that there are no effective constraints on the use of the power.

And it's not useful for terrorist offences.

In Great Britain section 44 searches have not led to convictions for terrorism offences.

I could go on at length about the initial disproportionate use against Black and Asian people, and the recent rise in searches of white people for no motive other than maintaining racial balance. But this has been dealt with very thoroughly elsewhere. One important issue is the use against photographers. Many people (especially in the Met and the BTP) seem to be acting under the impression that any photographer is fair game, and that the act gives them power to forceably delete any unwanted photographs. It does not, and stronger restrictions on them are necessary.

We must also consider the law.

In June 2010, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) made final its decision in the case Gillan and Quinton which found the legislation to be in breach of Article 8 (the right to privacy and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) because it was not “in accordance with the law”. The ECtHR found the legislation was too broadly expressed and the safeguards in place were not sufficient.

Once again a very liberal decision by the ECHR. This needs a response. It cannot be acceptable for hundreds of thousands of citizens to be injured by a measure found incompatible with human rights by an international court.

In considering the response the report says:

Repeal would be the simplest way of implementing the ECHR judgment. But there remain arguments against this on grounds of continued necessity.

... which seems in flat contraction of the line a few paragraphs up:

In Great Britain section 44 searches have not led to convictions for terrorism offences.

If the power has *never* been used against an actual terrorist target then it *cannot* be necessary.

The response is to scrap Section 44 and replace it with a more controlled and limited power.

i. The test for authorisation should be where a senior police officer reasonably suspects that an act of terrorism will take place. An authorisation should only be made where the powers are considered “necessary”, (rather than the current requirement of merely “expedient”) to prevent such an act.
ii. The maximum period of an authorisation should be reduced from the current maximum of 28 days to 14 days.
iii. It should be made clear in primary legislation that the authorisation may only last for as long as is necessary and may only cover a geographical area as wide as necessary to address the threat. The duration of the authorisation and the extent of the police force area that is covered by it must be justified by the need to prevent a suspected act of terrorism.
iv. The purposes for which the search may be conducted should be narrowed to looking for evidence that the individual is a terrorist or that the vehicle is being used for purposes of terrorism rather than for articles which may be used in connection with terrorism.
v. The Secretary of State should be able to narrow the geographical extent of the authorisation (as well being able to shorten the period or to cancel or refuse to confirm it as at present).
vi. Robust statutory guidance on the use of the powers should be developed to circumscribe further the discretion available to the police and to provide further safeguards on the use of the power.

Ok, this is more limited than the current system. But to be fair, roving gangs of men with guns wouldn't be much less limited. It's still labouring under the fundamental dillusion that this power existing at all is a good idea. Just to stress because it cant be said enough. It cannot be acceptable for any power to exist that is not used for its primary purpose and which does not have a valid and necessary second use. All the safeguards in the world wont change the fact that nobody has ever stopped an actual terrorist using these powers. You can have wonderful limitations and restrictions, but it wouldn't justify the power existing at all.

The actual limits here are not that strong. There are strong limits on what areas can be designated, but once that designation has been made the actual copper in the street has no limits on the abuses he can make of his powers. There are no changes to ensure this is only used on those who the officer has good evidence to suspect of an actual crime. There are no changes to ensure that people who are unfairly and unreasonably detained will be able to gain compensation. There are no real punishments here for officers (and there are many) who simply act beyond the law. Those officers who force people to delete photographs act beyond the law. The odds that any such officer would ever be punished for this are slim to none.

Specifically to this the report later recomends:

ii. Changes are made to guidance on the use of powers which could be used inappropriately to prevent photography.

This is essentially devoid of content. Guidance already exists. It is already illegal to abuse these powers. It has already been extensively covered by endless advice and letters and everything else. It hasn't stopped the cops on the ground from acting illegally. There is no sanction whatever to restrain them. Only when one exists will people stop being abused in this way. A fail I'm afraid, could do better.

RIPA

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 was a disaster. Giving local government vast powers means that you get a beautiful combination of huge powers with tiny ends. Hence ridiculous use of anti-terror surveillance in order to crack down on dog fouling and people claiming to live in a false catchment area. The central question here is proportionality and oversight.

The act gives specific power to bug homes, wiretap, follow people, bribe informants etc etc to important bodies:

Section 25 p 1
(a)a police force;
(b)the Serious Organised Crime Agency;
(c)the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency;
(d)Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs;
(f)any of the intelligence services;

Just to list that more fully that means that power to bug homes is given to:

GCHQ, Secret Intelligence Service, Security Service, Ministry of Defence, armed forces, Her Majesty's Prison Service or Northern Ireland Prison Service.

The territorial police forces, the Ministry of Defence Police, the British Transport Police, the Royal Navy Regulating Branch, Royal Military Police, Royal Air Force Police and HM Revenue and Customs.

This is obviously a list far too long, and the limitation that such authorisation can only be given by the head of each authority is not much security. Pleasing is the ability of the Secretary of State to:

Section 25 p4
(a)remove any person from the list of persons who are for the time being relevant public authorities for the purposes of this Chapter;

Less pleasing is the reverse power.

Section 25 p 1
(g)any such public authority not falling within paragraphs (a) to (f) as may be specified for the purposes of this subsection by an order made by the Secretary of State

This gives the Secretary too much positive power to enable organisation to spy which cannot be trusted. These powers are not objectionable when given to the security services, if you haven't secured them properly with tight oversight to ensure they act for the public good you are doomed irrespective of this act. Something important however is the less trustworthy organisations. Especially the British Transport Police, who I personally wouldn't give the power to carry walkie talkies.

Of this aspect there is no change whatever proposed by the report. This is disappointing but not surprising, the police getting massive and largely unrestricted powers is rarely something that gets overturned and reversed. Even if there's no need for the power the police will use it to prove it is needed. But on to things we can actually expect any progress on.

The use by councils is disturbing only due to the extreme disproportion of power used. Local councils can use section 28:

1)Subject to the following provisions of this Part, the persons designated for the purposes of this section shall each have power to grant authorisations for the carrying out of directed surveillance.

(2)A person shall not grant an authorisation for the carrying out of directed surveillance unless he believes—

(a)that the authorisation is necessary on grounds falling within subsection (3); and

(b)that the authorised surveillance is proportionate to what is sought to be achieved by carrying it out.

(3)An authorisation is necessary on grounds falling within this subsection if it is necessary—

(a)in the interests of national security;

(b)for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime or of preventing disorder;

(c)in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom;

(d)in the interests of public safety;

(e)for the purpose of protecting public health;

(f)for the purpose of assessing or collecting any tax, duty, levy or other imposition, contribution or charge payable to a government department; or

(g)for any purpose (not falling within paragraphs (a) to (f)) which is specified for the purposes of this subsection by an order made by the Secretary of State.

With similar qualifications they can use "covert human intelligence sources" under section 29.

This is a very wide power, directed surveillance and covert intelligence is spying with quite a wide definition and powers.

The central question is one of proportionality. For people to be spied on by their government is always a harm. It can only be justified by a harm reduced by it. I.e. there needs to be a crime dealt with by the power that makes this clear harm worth it. I think however you weight your utility function you'd have trouble thinking that being spied on is a price worth paying for clearing up dog mess or making sure people are really in the school catchment zones they claim they are.

It's then a question, should these powers be used by groups such a councils and various small quangos or should they be exclusively the use of the police and intelligence services?

To me the police are the right people to investigate crimes. However, this is clearly a very simplistic thought. Local councils exist for a reason, they have valid domains where they can legislate and there should be some power to enforce local laws on fly-tipping and dog fouling or the like. So in principle some powers typically thought of as policing powers could be legitimately used by councils. The question then is one of proportionality. The kind of local crimes that councils are involved with are obviously minor ones. Universal and important crimes are matters of national laws, local councils only really have fly-tipping and dog fouling left.

So what levels and kinds of crime can legitimately be dealt with by spying measures?

Crimes with a maximum sentence of 6 months? Rather minor crimes such as drink driving, stealing eggs. To quote the report:

A threshold of 6 months would allow local authorities to continue using
the covert techniques in their investigations of offences under the Gambling
Act, against safety regulations, and some investigations into benefit fraud and
licensing offences.

1 year? This is the maximum sentence a magistrate can hand out. From the report:

A threshold of 1 year would exclude those allowed by the 6 months threshold but would allow use in some wider trading standards cases including the marketing of knives and would incorporate the most serious health and safety offences, product safety offences and more serious
benefit fraud offences.

3 years is a quite high threshold ("serious crimes" in the technical sense are 4 years). This is the same as the limit on the most serious use of RIPA powers for "interception and intrusive surveillance." So there would in effect be only one kind of use of RIPA powers, for quite serious crimes, and a lot of powers could immediately accessed at this point.

The report sets the limit here at 6 months. So even quite trivial crimes can be dealt with by these powers. And, worryingly, the government does not see this limit as binding.

But because of the importance of directed surveillance in corroborating investigations into underage sales of alcohol and tobacco, the Government should not seek to apply the threshold in these cases.

So in a case of selling alcohol, not considered by law to be a very serious crime at all and not subject to any prison sentence, the council's powers on this are clearly not proportionate to the importance of the crime. If there are special circumstances about how evidence must be procured in this case then special regulations should be made. To bend a limit at convenience for these cases damages the limits.

Other Bodies

Something important to note is the list of other bodies that can use at least some RIPA powers.

1.Any police force.
1A.The Civil Nuclear Constabulary.
2.The Serious Organised Crime Agency.
2A.The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency
3.The National Crime Squad.
4.The Serious Fraud Office.
4A. Special constables of Dover Harbour
4B. Constables of Mersey Dock
5.Any of the intelligence services.
6.Any of Her Majesty’s Armed forces.
7.Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.
8.The Commissioners of Inland Revenue.
9.The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
9ZA.The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.
9ZB.The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
9A.The Department for Communities and Local Government
10.The Ministry of Defence.
11.The Department for Transport. the Office of the Deputy Prime...
12.The Department of Health.
13.The Home Office.
13ZA.The Ministry of Justice
13A.The Northern Ireland Office.
14.The Department for Work and Pensions.
15.The Department of Trade and Industry.
The Welsh Assembly Government
16.The Welsh Assembly Government.
17. Local authorities
17A.Any fire authority.

Dont ask me while the Act skips from 17A to 24.

24.The Health and Safety Executive.
25.A Health Authority
26.A Special Health Authority
27.A National Heath Service trust
27A.Local Health Boards in Wales
27B.Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education
27C.The Information Commissioner.
27D.The Royal Parks Constabulary.
28.The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain.

I personally dont think the Royal Parks Constabulary should be in the same list a MI5. There is no alteration whatever on this list. Indeed the report recommends that as use as possible is made of RIPA in order

to ensure that as far as possible RIPA is the only mechanism by which communications data can be acquired.

This is on the grounds that RIPA has the best safeguards. ... One would be stunned to discover this on reading the actual text however.

In summary, not much has been done on RIPA. There are restrictions on the kind of surveillance powers that get councils into the media, but not much on the far too lengthy list of other bodies with such powers. Does a lot to talk about safeguards ... but doesn't actually propose many. I'd call this one a fail.

Hate groups

This is a new proposal to extend anti-terror laws. At present the Home Secretary can ban any organisation:

“concerned in terrorism” – meaning that they commit, prepare for, encourage, promote or are otherwise involved in serious violence designed to intimidate the public or a section of the public for the purpose of advancing an ideological, religious or political cause

This makes membership of the organisation, and if required the wearing of its uniform, a criminal offence. As applied to terrorist groups this is a rather stupid provision. It indicates disapproval sure... but anyone actually interested in joining the IRA or Al-Queda or any other such organisation is not going to spend more than a second mulling over the fact that such organisations are banned. It wont stop anyone joining, and as these are criminal organisations anyway you're unlikely to find people advertising membership of them.

There are proposals considered here to extend this power to ban groups "which
espouse or incite hatred or other forms of violence".

This would be deeply foolish. Let us consider a typical such organisation, I wont use a real one, but lets pretend there is a group promoting hatred against Egyptians under the banner of "Egyptians Date Leppers". This group would not (officially at least) sanction violence (to do so would put it in the first category. So what we have in this EDL is a group of deeply unpleasant people who want to stir up racial tension. Some members will commit crimes no doubt, in fact being a member of EDL would be quite a good warning sign. The group itself will (in public at least) generally avoid anything that could be criminal.

Now ask the question, is it good to ban the EDL? Well to ban any organisation is first off illiberal, so there's a hurdle to get over before you even start, it must prevent a large enough harm that the illiberality is worth it. Does banning this organisation do that? Well certainly the ban would stop the members appearing together very publicly. This would doubtless prevent some disturbances and maybe even riots. It might hinder the group from getting semi-interested members. ... that's about it. Realistically what would happen is that a new organisation called say Bloody Nasty Pharaohs would be set up to replace EDL and so on for a glorious game of whack-a-mole. Also what would happen is that anything that EDL did would automatically have top news priority, "banned organisation posts video to internet" would really work as a story. It would also cause a huge fracturing and schisming of the EDL into unofficial small groups. This makes police work a lot harder. Tracking who is a member of one organisation with a website and enrolment forms is a lot easier than thousands of small breakaway groups.

However. I'm glad to say the report agrees.

It would be disproportionate and possibly ineffective to widen the definition of terrorism or lower the proscription threshold to try to include groups which incite hatred and violence. There would be unintended consequences for the basic principles of freedom of
expression.

What a brilliant decision to snatch from the jaws of a really illiberal idea. Well done. This is 100% a win. Discuss and propose an illiberal idea and then reject it. ... of course, that leaves us just where we are ... and there's no mention of the same thing for Terror groups being repealed, but that's too much to expect.

Deportation of foreign nationals engaged in terrorism

Allow me to be simplistic here. There are two classes of people accused of terrorism. Those who are in fact guilty of orchestrating or planning an act of terrorism, and those who are not. Allow me to carry on by asking if it's best for people in each category to be sent to another country?

Guilty: So a dangerous person is being sent to another country. We cannot as a rule trust the legal system of that country to detain them as long as they are a danger. So potentially we are storing up danger for ourselves.

Not guilty: we certainly cant guarantee that innocent people will be treated well in foreign countries and in general shouldn't send them there.

So in general I would suggest we send people aboard always at a risk to ourselves or to justice. What benefits are there of this? Well, there's cost. And there's the very valid idea that people should be able to return to their home country rather than staying under the control of a foreign state. ... I'm struggling to think of others, and frankly I'm not convinced by either. But, lets take as a given that we do need to deport these people. The question is who, to where and with what guarantees.

The proposal is:

i)Actively pursue deportation arrangements with more countries, prioritising those whose nationals have engaged in terrorist related activity here or are judged most likely to do so in future.
ii. Continue to pursue generic arrangements as a preference, but seek assurances for specific individuals, without a wider arrangement, if viable assurances can be obtained.
iii. Examine how to increase the number of expert witnesses the Government provides in court; consider commissioning an annual independent report on deportations under this policy; and explore
options for improving monitoring of individuals after their return.
iv. Engage actively with other countries, more international organisations, and more NGOs to increase understanding of, and support for, this policy in the context of our work to promote and
improve human rights around the world.

Totally unobjectionable. The rule of law and long standing arrangements are always preferable to ad hoc procedures for individuals. Diplomacy is the right way to do things always. We must ensure we work closely with experts to get the right results and widest consultation. Very good. No complaints, wait to see what happens on the ground though.

Control orders.

The big money issue. Control orders at the moment are being used on 8 people. They are a form of house arrest, people are banned from various kinds of meetings and technology and must stay in a designated house overnight, all dependent on the details of the individual order.

The sheer scope and range of these orders is incredible. The headline things that an order can require are given by the Terrorism Act 2005:

4)Those obligations may include, in particular—

(a)a prohibition or restriction on his possession or use of specified articles or substances;

(b)a prohibition or restriction on his use of specified services or specified facilities, or on his carrying on specified activities;

(c)a restriction in respect of his work or other occupation, or in respect of his business;

(d)a restriction on his association or communications with specified persons or with other persons generally;

(e)a restriction in respect of his place of residence or on the persons to whom he gives access to his place of residence;

(f)a prohibition on his being at specified places or within a specified area at specified times or on specified days;

(g)a prohibition or restriction on his movements to, from or within the United Kingdom, a specified part of the United Kingdom or a specified place or area within the United Kingdom;

(h)a requirement on him to comply with such other prohibitions or restrictions on his movements as may be imposed, for a period not exceeding 24 hours, by directions given to him in the specified manner, by a specified person and for the purpose of securing compliance with other obligations imposed by or under the order;

(i)a requirement on him to surrender his passport, or anything in his possession to which a prohibition or restriction imposed by the order relates, to a specified person for a period not exceeding the period for which the order remains in force;

(j)a requirement on him to give access to specified persons to his place of residence or to other premises to which he has power to grant access;

(k)a requirement on him to allow specified persons to search that place or any such premises for the purpose of ascertaining whether obligations imposed by or under the order have been, are being or are about to be contravened;

(l)a requirement on him to allow specified persons, either for that purpose or for the purpose of securing that the order is complied with, to remove anything found in that place or on any such premises and to subject it to tests or to retain it for a period not exceeding the period for which the order remains in force;

(m)a requirement on him to allow himself to be photographed;

(n)a requirement on him to co-operate with specified arrangements for enabling his movements, communications or other activities to be monitored by electronic or other means;

(o)a requirement on him to comply with a demand made in the specified manner to provide information to a specified person in accordance with the demand;

(p)a requirement on him to report to a specified person at specified times and places.

So that's imprisonment. There's almost no power left to such an individual. Very little autonomy is maintained whatever by such proceedings. If an innocent person (to use my admittedly simplistic dichotomy from above again) is on such an order then this is appalling. Especially bad is the provision specifically in the bill in so many words to impose orders contrary to the UK's international human rights obligations.

In this Act—

“derogating obligation” means an obligation on an individual which—
(a)is incompatible with his right to liberty under Article 5 of the Human Rights Convention; but
(b)is of a description of obligations which, for the purposes of the designation of a designated derogation, is set out in the designation order;

Such orders, being incompatible with human rights by definition much surely be banned? Nope.

4) Power of court to make derogating control orders

(1)On an application to the court by the Secretary of State for the making of a control order against an individual, it shall be the duty of the court—

(a)to hold an immediate preliminary hearing to determine whether to make a control order imposing obligations that are or include derogating obligations (called a “derogating control order”) against that individual; and

(b)if it does make such an order against that individual, to give directions for the holding of a full hearing to determine whether to confirm the order (with or without modifications).

(2)The preliminary hearing under subsection (1)(a) may be held—

(a)in the absence of the individual in question;

(b)without his having had notice of the application for the order; and

(c)without his having been given an opportunity (if he was aware of the application) of making any representations to the court;

but this subsection is not to be construed as limiting the matters about which rules of court may be made in relation to that hearing.

This is a mockery of a trial the security services having the ability to present, with no risk of contradiction from fair and honest scrutiny from the person being condemned, any concocted evidence they like. This is not me with my conspiracy theory hat on. This is me with my fair trial hat on. My fair trial hat, like my science hat, has one golden rule:

Anything presented as fact without a fair chance to contradict it is to be assumed false.

So on the basis of evidence I will assume to be false a court can cancel the human rights of a citizen of this country. The thing is that even if we dont assume this to be false information, the hurdle of evidence the court requires is not, as in a real trial "beyond reasonable doubt", is is "balance of probabilities". To inflict any kind of judicial punishment on someone whilst there's only a balance of probabilities in favour of them being guilty is unbelievably illiberal. There are 8 people on control orders, if we are to believe that there is a true balance of probabilities in favour of each being guilty we should say that on average more than 4 of them are guilty. ... More than 4 is not good enough. If abuses of fundamental rights are going to be perpetrated I need stronger reassurance than that less than 4 innocent people are being abused on average.

However, this is not much help even if the person on the order is guilty. For the simple reason that it seems to be quite easy to simply run away. 7 people have managed this between 06 and 07 according to the report and there's no reason whatever to think that others couldn't.

So the coalition's solution to this situation that's horrific if innocent people are on it and unsafe if criminals are on it? Well, they've slightly fudged the first half and made the second half worse. ... wonderful. As you may have heard new measures are being put in the place of Control Orders

The key features of these new measures will be as follows:
i. They will be imposed by the Home Secretary with prior permission from the High Court required except in urgent cases (where confirmation by the court within 7 days will be necessary). Before making the order the Home Secretary must have reasonable grounds to believe that the individual is or has been involved in terrorism-related activity and be satisfied that it is necessary to apply measures from the regime to protect the public from a risk of terrorism.

The legal change from "reasonable suspicion" to "reasonable belief" is one I know nothing about. But this is an improvement in process making control orders require judicial oversight.

ii. The measures applied will have a protective effect, whether through disruption or through facilitating investigation. The police will then be under a strengthened legal duty to ensure that the person’s conduct is kept under continual review with a view to bringing a prosecution and to inform the Home Secretary about the ongoing prospects for prosecution.

I'm important to stress that the aim of everything the legal system does should either be peaceful resolution of the problems of innocent people or a successful prosecution. This emphasis is good. In practice it may well be words on paper however.

iii. The High Court will undertake a mandatory full review of each case after the measures have been imposed, with a power to quash or revoke the measures.

Good, very important.

iv. They will be subject to a maximum time limit of 2 years. It would only be possible to impose a new set of measures on an individual after that time if there is new evidence that they have re-engaged in terrorism related activities.

Good, but you can always manufacture new evidence by investigating old evidence in more detail, especially if an unreliable method of investigating evidence is used.

v. They will allow for an overnight residence requirement with some additional flexibilities e.g. in relation to overnight stays outside the residence. The overnight stay would be verified by an electronic tag.

... so exactly the same as the old curfew then...

vi. They will allow only tightly defined exclusion from particular places and the prevention of travel overseas.

Thus making the protection of the public concept ... meaningless. ... well done.

vii. They will allow greater freedom of communication and association than the control order regime, placing only limited restrictions on communications, including use of the internet, and on the freedom to associate.

Thus making the protection of the public concept ... meaningless. ... well done.

viii. Those subject to these conditions will be free to work and study unless this could facilitate or increase the risk of involvement in terrorism related activity.

How exactly can one go to work or study in a way that doesn't increase the risk of your committing terrorism? I mean ... it's a strange concept that your work could contain so few things or people as to make it harder to commit terror there than in a house that's constantly searched by the police.

ix. These measures will be able to place only limited restrictions in certain defined circumstances on financial transactions overseas.

... meh.

x. These measures will be able to require an individual to report regularly to the police.

Just like currently.

xi. Breach of the conditions, without reasonable excuse, will be a criminal offence. The maximum penalty for breach will be 5 years’ imprisonment.

The fact that it needs to be a crime to defy anti-terror control measures is ... odd. But I suppose if this results in locking people up for actual real world crimes that's got to be a good thing.

xii. There will be no provision to impose conditions that would require derogation from the (ECHR) – in other words no provision for measures which would deprive a person of their right to liberty.

Excellent! This is very important and very good. Well done.

xiii. Some enhancements will be made to the operation of the special advocate regime pending fuller consideration in the forthcoming Green Paper on the use of sensitive material in judicial proceedings.

Wait and see.

Ok so ... this is disappointing. Some improvement, getting rid of the opportunity to abandon article 5 rights is important. But in practice T-Pims will be almost exactly the same as control orders. This is not a win. Slight improvement, but really massively could do better. Like by scrapping the things totally.

Conclusion

This is not good. Really not good. After some of the most illiberal laws this country has seen in peacetime a government with liberal pretensions are ... leaving most of them in place. This is not good. We will have to see what the Freedom Bill has in store for us. I'd say this is a loose. The new proposals are better, but not as much better as it should be. I'm disappointed.

Guest post

2011-01-27T18:46:00.000Z

Here's an experiment. I've had a guest post sent into me by a long time fan and admirer of my blog*, who wants to say something about an issue I've ranted about myself. So I've decided to post it up here unedited and see what you think. If you like it please do say and I'll try and get more guest posts arranged**. If not of course then do let me know and I'll not. This is from Tom Conway.

*Read university friend.
**If you do this you are essentially saying you like my blog best when I dont write it... and I will cry.

The Border Agency and Overseas Students

This morning, one of the university's maths fellows alerted me to this consultation:

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/student-consult-online

A Japanese academic had expressed to him his concern over the government's plans to change the rules over whether or not students from abroad could come to Britain, how long they could stay and whether their families can accompany them. The proposals can be found on the home office website (1), but the main bullet points are:

reducing the number of people coming to the UK to study below degree level;
introducing a tougher English language requirement;
ensuring that students wishing to extend their studies show evidence of academic progression;
limiting students' entitlements to work and their ability to bring in dependants; and
improving the accreditation process for education providers, alongside more rigorous inspections.

While it could be argued that there are merits to reducing abuse of the system, which is what the government is trying to do here, I fear that the main effect of the proposals will be to give out the message that the UK doesn't like foreign students. This could have deep repercussions, not only in the Universities like Cambridge (the fellow told me that the Vice-Chancellor believes this could be more damaging to the university than the £9000 tuition fee), but also in our sixth form and further education colleges.

If the UK is to be a world class education provider, which I feel it can and should be, it must be welcoming foreign students and academics with open arms. This should include allowing them to bring in their families and allowing their partners to find jobs, allowing students who graduate to look for and apply for jobs without having to return to their country of origin and not discouraging students from taking further study. Quality students come from all over the world and we want them in the UK, especially when there is rising competition from up and coming universities in Hong Kong, China and Singapore, as well as the continuing dominance of American Universities.

And it isn't just our universities that are seeking foreign students. Two further education colleges near my home town, Worthing College, where I did my A levels, and Chichester College, are desperate to attract overseas students. (2), (3) Chichester College goes as far to hire a team to visit countries throughout the world and give presentations to attract students.

But wait, I hear George Owers cry, what about social mobility? Why should we care that foreign students are discouraged from applying to UK colleges and universities when working class teenagers are put off even more? One reason Worthing College, Chichester College and Cambridge University want to attract overseas students is because they help make up a budget shortfall. Worthing College charges £6450 per year (4), Chichester College charges £5950 per year (5), Anglia Ruskin charges between £9500 and £16500 per year (6) and Cambridge University charges between £11,000 and £26,000 a year.(7) Even when the £9000 tuition fees are introduced in Cambridge University, overseas students will still pay a lot more. This makes sure the University can afford to give bursaries to underprivileged students and that Worthing College and Chichester College can afford to deliver quality education at a time of budget cuts. To cut both the funding from government and to reduce the income brought in through foreign students would greatly damage the ability of poorer students to achieve a good education.

Also, discouraging foreign students from getting jobs is an exceedingly effective way to reduce tax income. Foreign graduates aren't 'taking British jobs', they're creating jobs in the UK in businesses that would otherwise be overseas, in Hong Kong, Zurich, Taiwan or Singapore. We need to keep tax revenues high to reduce the level of budget cuts.

So, that link at the top is an important one. Click it and fill in the survey if you want to, it is a horrible, biased, overly technical consultation. But I hope this post has made you think more deeply about how important this issue really is.

Something ridiculous.

2011-01-13T23:33:00.000Z

An example of inefficiency in public spending that I would have reported to the coalition cuts website if such a thing still existed. It annoyed me so much I feel the need to blog. Anyway.

My Mum works in a hospital. The details of exactly how she gets her paycheque are boring and complicated and I dont understand. But what matters is a letter she got today. In order to get within a mile of the hospital she needs a pass for a car parking space. Now for some reason it has been decided, in the infinite wisdom of large organisations, that there is an admin cost to having a reserved parking area for staff. And as such they want to charge people who work at the hospital for the parking space.

So we're already off to a bad start, there's no next to no upkeep costs on a bit of tarmac and an electronic gate, and as everyone who works there has to use the car park it would surely be easier for this to come out of central hospital funds rather than coming out of pay rather indirectly.

The next step is what shall the charge be. It turns out that it would be far too simple to say "the car park costs £x/year to run and there are n employees here, so each person pay £x/n per year". Instead we have a sliding scale. If you're on £9k or less it costs about a tenth what it costs someone on £70k. So not only do we have the faff of moving funds from maintenance to payroll to employee to maintenance, we have the extra faff of needing to state how much you get paid before buying a ticket to get into the car park. The admin costs of this are mad.

So the letter to my mum, outlines the current situation and says that as a cost-cutting exercise this will be changed. Hurrah, they're going to cut the bureaucracy, good on them. Sadly no. What they're going to do is offer an optional alternative way of paying for the car park. So we're running two parallel systems, doubling admin, wonderful, carry on. The alternative is that you can have the charge taken out of gross income not net (at a different level than before to be reviewed annually). The effect of this is a very small change in the cost to the employee.

The reason why this is a cost saving measure is that by effectively paying a slightly lower salary there's slightly lower pension and NI payments, which means slightly less cost for the trust that pays the salaries in employee contributions. Oh yeh, and somewhere in this process HMRC gets involved ... just to add more people into the equation.

I cant be the only person who thinks this is insane. We're trying to cut costs not by say, not doing stupid things, but by doing stupid things in a more complicated way to the benefit of one department of the same organisation (whatever hideous monstrosity of a body writes pay checks) at the expense of the whole. If you want to cut costs you stop doing things you dont need to, charging for the car park is one of them. Just cut the entire bureaucratic process and pay for the car park like you pay for lightbulbs and windows.

Urg, it's stupid little unnecessary things like that that really bug me. Why cant someone just sit down and say "this is all going, we're paying for that object out of the right budget, there will be no forms involved in this decision".

#FantasyAV

2011-01-10T17:41:00.000Z

An amusing question has been raised on Twitter, if the election in Oldham East and Saddleworth were run under AV, how would you vote? The answers are interesting, but it got me thinking.

Were there an AV referendum (or any other preferential vote) on what voting system should be used for the House of Commons how would you vote?

To me there are two cases, different decisions depending on the situation. I'll focus on the first one which I think is more likely, but the second should be mentioned because it may happen.

First case: coalition plan.

The House of Lords is wholly or partially elected on the basis of PR, possibly either STV or regional party list.

Current constituencies with AV. AV is a system that is largely agreed to select the best person to a single office. To me this is exactly the aim of such an election. You need an election not under PR, this way you get a greater diversity between the two houses. You need the two houses to disagree, otherwise there's no point having two. You need one house to represent the nation on a party level, to have a fair reflection of the people in terms of their preferred party. But in another house you need something different, you need to reflect local views and have someone who can complain that legislation unfairly affects one area of the country. To me then each constituency needs a representative, and their mode of election should pay no regard to the parliament. So, AV.
Current constituencies with FPTP. FPTP is not a good system to choose one member, but you need some way, this seems the most natural if AV is rejected. The current arrangements are terrible because FPTP creates zero-sum politics where every gain by one party is seen as a loss for another and combines this with a growing need for coalitions. This last election was not a fluke, we will see more and more coalitions as time goes by. And with the Lords changed to reflect that diversity a lot of the antagonism towards coalition government could be reduced.
STV over 5 member constituencies. This is the natural extension of AV to 5 member seats, this keeps the local focus as well as possible with a PR system.
Regional PR with candidates chosen in open primaries. This gives local accountably to each individual but would essentially mirror the upper house, disappointing.
Regional PR with candidates chosen by closed party list. Worst of all possible worlds. The house does nothing to disagree with the Lords so no checks on power and each person is there at the whim of the party. Awful awful idea.

Second case: Status quo

The House of Lords stays like it is now and looks to say that way for long enough to make thinking about .

STV over 5 member constituencies. Each MP has a strong mandate but a more proportional system better reflects how the British feel. It's unlikely any party could get a majority, so politics undergoes a shift. Firstly there's an acceptance that sometimes Labour and the Tories might dare to enter the same room as eachother without both becoming class traitors. And a much stronger position for "others" especially regionalists in negotiations as at lest some of these would generally be needed to form a government. If a government is disliked people vote out those parties seen as being the cause of that problem.
Regional PR with candidates chosen in open primaries. Those elected are slightly more distantly accountable, with slightly less personal connection between them and their constituents. But still maintains the broad representation.
Single member AV. The reverse of the last one, each MP is extremely accountable locally, but with no pretence at being representative nationwide.
Single member FPTP. Slightly less accountable locally, but still reasonably so. This is the current system. Doesn't work well, but not terrible.
Regional PR with candidates chosen by closed party list. Worst of all possible worlds. The only people in the whole of government who are their because of an election are the remaining 92 hereditary peers in the House of Lords. An absolute and total disaster.

How would you vote?

Gabrielle Giffords and the second amendment

2011-01-10T14:57:00.000Z

I've been out of the loop the last few days so sorry if this isn't a response to what most people are saying, but needs to be said.

Firstly the attack on Gabrielle Giffords and others is tragic, all human deaths are tragic. Attacking a serving politician is doubly a crime, firstly the human crime and secondly the attack on the right of her constituents to the representative of their choice. But that's not what I want to write about. I want to caution liberals (I use this both in the American sense of left wingers and the British sense Millites) that, as much as it may seem that this gives further proof to your idea, using today to attack the second amendment is seriously dangerous. I honestly believe it's at lest arguable that it's more dangerous than a madman with a gun.

The text of the amendment is:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The amendment exists for two reasons:

Firstly, defending the US from enemies at home and abroad requires the creation of armed forces in emergencies. This is best done by arming the entire body of the people, It's very hard to fight against the the entire population of a country with an army of almost any size. For this reason the body of the people should know how to use guns.

Secondly, the government is required to have access to arms, this is deeply worrying as armed forces are the primary tool of any tyranny. The people needed to feel secure that they could never again be oppressed by their government. For this reason the body of the people should know how to use guns.

So we should remember that given the American Revolution and the history of Enlightenment liberal thought it was inevitable (and in my view correct) that such a right to have arms should be given in the Bill of Rights. This wasn't some strange obscure part of the constitution that we can ignore as not what was intended. The Federalist Papers, a very authoritative cometary on the constitution, makes strong argument that the general population should be armed, note that the Federalist was written *before* the Bill of Rights. The regulation of the militia in the body of the constitution requires as an assumption that the people will be armed. The second amendment simply guarantees this.

So, it was good, or at lest, not discrediting, that it was introduced. The situation has now changed, the US does not face a treat from abroad that a militia could help with. The US now has a large standing army in time of peace (regardless of "war on terror" rhetoric the US is not under existential threat, certainly not from a sovereign state), something the Revolutionary War generation would have been appalled by. Times change, people change, all constitutions are variable. What one amendment can bring in another can remove. The question is, should fire arms be banned in the US?

To me it's one or the other, either we keep a 2nd amendment right to own guns and regulate it well or we introduce an amendment banning the civilian ownership of guns. If we have the constitution silent on this then some states will have them, some will not. This seems to support neither end, it neither creates the intended security against enemies of the people or prevent crime. If anything a legal market in guns over the road from an area without them would make violent gangs more likely.

We have to remember in discussing this that there have been two things in constitutional history that individuals have been banned from doing, owning slaves, which was instigated by a terrible and bloody struggle that lives down to today but ended well and selling alcohol, which was a disaster that ended well. In short, America's history of controlling individuals via the constitution is not good. This is exactly the opposition of the intention of the constitution.

What would happen if you did try to get such an amendment through? Well it would never work for a start. You just cant get that many states on your side, so it's a non starter. But importantly it would set a precedent.

One very easy way to portray such a move would be as Constitutional Rights v Law and Order. Now it's not hard to see where this ends up. Obviously in cases of terrorism or other serious organised crime it's not always possible to have a speedy and public trial it may be argued. It may be argued that the US has a long history of cruel and unusual treatment, so it would be easier to just legalise Guantanamo etc. There's already a substantial movement in the South to get the 14th Amendment scrapped.

I dont want to suggest that on repeal of the 2nd amendment that the South would separate again or that the Bill of Rights would instantly burst into flames. What I want to suggest that there is a risk. A serious risk that in giving the government a new power to stop crime you would empower others to try giving it powers that it seriously should not have.

I dont presume to say that these risks mean that Americans should be gunned down daily with no response. I just want to ask liberals to make sure they know the risks before talking up a rather dangerous course of action.

Cultural relativism

2011-01-05T11:37:00.001Z

There's an argument I'm bored of hearing and bored of responding to, so here it is and I'm never going to complain again, I'm just going to point people here. The question is "dont be closed minded, people other than western scientists have access to truths that are just as valid, how do you know that you're not wrong about creationism, alternative medicine, 2012, astrology etc". The claim is that other cultures and other modes of thinking have access to truths about the physical world that are just as valid as those of science. I want to make sure I dont overstate my response so here it is in big flashing letters.

You're so wrong about the nature of the concept of truth that it hurts me to the very core of my being. Go away and die before you throw humanity back to the stone age.

I want to make sure that I can defend what I say, so I'm going to set out what I mean by knowledge and truth, what absolute truth is and why it's a stupid and dead idea, what I mean by science, why science is a mode of generating truth, and why it's the only one that systematically works. As I was writing this I realised my section headings made sense. So here's a summary of the post, click each line to take you to the paragraph.

In the beginning are perceptions. Something is true or is knowledge if and only if it helps you to find out things about your own future perceptions. Here's the snag, sometimes, you have rules like this, and you find exceptions. So we want absolute perfect knowledge, this is impossible. You cant have certainty so lets stop talking about it. There is however a close and very useful concept, bet-my-life-on-it. Science tells you how sure to be of something. In future, assume the world will work like the theory that worked best in the past. Not doing science doesn't automatically mean you're wrong. If you're not doing science you're not useful. There's nothing cultural about this. The consequences if we dont use science are grave.

In the beginning are perceptions (See also)

Experiences, things that we see, touch, hear, think, feel etc. This is all that a mind can ever experience, by definition, it is all we can know of, you can imagine vast universes we cant see or experience in any way, who cares, there is one reality that matters, the one you, right now, are experiencing. We can have no access to, nor any knowledge of, any kind of reality other than that which we experience. We can know the colours we see, we can know the emotions we feel, we can know the thoughts we have, there is nothing else outside of your own experience that you can ever gain knowledge of.

So, we have perceptions, we lump these for easy thinking into objects, happiness for a vastly complicated state of mind, jumper for a mass of colours and textures, birdsong for one component of the sound you hear. Now we put these things together, we make a world, a reality just outside our eyes where all these things live. Now we can talk about truth.

Something is true or is knowledge if and only if it helps you to find out things about your own perceptions.

For instance, I know that behind me is a stack of CDs, this is knowledge because if I turn around I see them. I make a prediction about what I will experience (seeing the CDs) perform the experiment (turn around) and lo and behold, there they are.

I can have knowledge about other things.

I can know about music, "Mozart is good" means either that if I listen to Mozart the reaction I experience will be one of enjoyment or if a large group of people do so most of them will have facial expressions or say things that express the same.
I can know about art, "the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is too pink for my liking" means that if I look at that ceiling with the bright red-pinks artificially removed and replaced with a more subtle shade I would enjoy it more than if I looked at the real thing.
I can know about maths, "Fermat's theorem is true" means that if I am given a set of 4 natural numbers a,b,c,d and perform the calculation a^d+b^d-c^d and check it several times I will not decide upon the result 0.
I can know about physics, "planes work because of Bernoulli's principle not the equal transit theory" means that if I get into a plane which is not curved on the top but has a equal length top and bottom I will still experience it flying.

This is what I mean by knowledge.

Here's the snag, sometimes, you have rules like this, and you find exceptions.

We may find a bad piece by Mozart, we may find that actually the pink is important and the ceiling would be far uglier without it, we may find a counter example to Fermat's Theorem as there is an unnoticed hole in the proof, we may find that thousands of aerobatic pilots are have lied about the shape of their wings for some bizarre reason. The goal of ancient Greek philosophy to some extent was to stop these errors happening, to find total and absolute truth.

So we want absolute perfect knowledge, this is impossible.

You cannot have absolute truth, doesn't exist, sorry, nope, not going to happen. Here's why. Suppose you have some black box process that generates absolute truth, that predicts with perfect accuracy what will be experienced next after any action. There is a question. How do you know it works? You can have all the justifications you like about why it works in principle, the question is, have you soldered the joins together right, have you done the calculations right? Have you, in fact, implemented the strategy perfectly? Only one way to find out, switch it on, find out if it predicts the right things. ... This is no more absolute truth than anything else, you've no way of being certain that the thousandth time it wont break. You cannot have certain knowledge.

Before you say it, you can have certain knowledge of those perceptions you are experiencing right now at this instant, there they are, you really are experiencing words right now. But just about anything else you cant be certain of. Winston Smith contends he is certain that 2+2=4, I challenge you to prove that fact using Peano arithmetic whilst in a torture chamber and tell me again that you're sure. And Descartes, cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. He says that he experiences thoughts, this is knowledge of his current perceptions. And then goes on to deduce certain knowledge from that. The next step, literally the next unavoidable step in this logic is God, specifically a good catholic God, who despite appearances, does not and would not deceive us. At best this is hard to justify as sure and certain.

You cant have certainty so lets stop talking about it.

The next time someone says that science doesn't know everything or that science might be wrong, agree wholeheartedly. Welcome them into the reality of epistemology. Tell them to take the next logical step. We have talked about "bibly". We have defined "bibly". We have agreed that "bibly" is impossible. Now we will stop talking about, thinking about and generally wasting time with "bibly". It's close enough to new year to make this a resolution. I will never again waste my time discussing with anyone the concept of absolute truth and will instead point them at this.

There is however a close and very useful concept, bet-my-life-on-it.

People seriously and massively underestimate how many things they would bet their life on. And here I mean a literal wager, if you're right you get slight convenience, if you're wrong you die right then. Things I bet my life on today include but are not limited too:

Mum didn't poison my tea.
There's nothing wrong with the electrics near the shower that would shock me.
My laptop is not booby-trapped.
The ticking noise is my watch not a bomb.
I can safely use metal objects in and near a live toaster as long as I make sure the circuit of least resistance does not contain my body.
The can I got out of the cupboard was sealed and branded, thus there is no reason to make any checks at all that the beans in it were not rotten or otherwise inedible.
I can safely jump the bottom 3 steps without breaking my neck.
I can safely rub anything I find inside a tube marked "bonjella" into a mouth ulcer.

This concept of something so sure that you would happily bet your life on it is very useful. Obviously it's a psychological phenomenon so the expected odds of dying to make the bet seem worthwhile vary. But roughly we can say people get on a plane, the odds of dying in a commercial jet are one in 2 million, so anything that happens more than that is incredibly certain.

Science tells you how sure to be of something

Science I define and imagine in very broad terms. I dont want to defend the exact procedures of peer review journals, they have several known biases and flaws. My concern is to explain a way of tlking about knowledge in a way that systematically works. So I'd give the following definition. In science we generate theories. A theory is a set of predictions about future perceptions. Generate several of them, then run an experiment, that is, experience some perceptions.

In future, assume the world will work like the theory that worked best in the past.

If you've got one theory that does a lot better than the others add it to your pile of working theories. Throw the others in the bin, they're useless. But, here's the thing. Now when you generate theories about that kind of thing you must add your current one to the pile. Theories that work cant be rejected because you're bored of them, and theories cant be kept safe in your pile of working theories because you dont want to test it again.

Notice though that I said "if you've got one theory", often you wont. Sometimes for simple reasons, a theory that talks about some black box saying "it will flash 4 times then 4 times" is the same as one saying "it will flash 8 times". Sometimes one theory works just as well as another because it's rare to see a situation where they disagree. The classic example is the geostationary theory. It's very very rare to see something that you'd expect to look different in a geostationary world. As it happens, some things do exist, the fixed stars aren't fixed, Foucault pendulums do their thing etc. But for normal purposes you can bet your life on the geostationary theory's predictions coming true. The sun will rise in the East just as surely as the Earth will rotate to the West.

This is also sometimes just a case of calculations. Einstein's theory of gravity had over half a century of good observations showing it to be better than Newton's around the time of the Apollo 11 mission. And NASA duly ignored it and used Newton, because frankly if they'd used Einstein's equations on 1960s computers they's still be working the trajectory out today.

Not doing science doesn't automatically mean you're wrong.

Sometimes the world is just odd and the best scientific theory anyone could reasonably have come up with just turns out to not work. Before the European discovery of Australia it was very reasonable (and correct) to say that the best scientific theory was that all swans ever were white. Then the black swan turns up. I bet if we scour the historical record we can find some crazy monk smashed off his face on something who proposed the existence of a black swan before the 1600s. This person would not be wrong. There are black swans. But he would have been not doing science, he would have picked a theory that didn't predict things well.

If you're not doing science you're not useful.

You cant generate reliable knowledge without doing science. You might be right, you might be right a lot. But when you're right you've no reason to think you'll get more right as time goes on. That's what science does. If you do science then the number of times doing the same kind of thing your pet theory may be huge today. You may not predict a bumble bee can fly, or that chemical elements can be broken down. But you can rest assured that every experiment you do, every time you do some science you're becoming less wrong. Every time you do the process above, generate new theories and test them against old ones, at worst you keep your old theory, so you know nothing new and you'thoriesre just as wrong. But sometimes you'll be lucky, you'll pick a better theory and you'll become less wrong. You'll never again be so wrong about the universe.

If you're not doing science then you're thinking of theories (you have to be, otherwise you cant talk about the world), you're doing experiments (looking at the world is an experiment) and then by laziness, stupidity or dishonesty you're picking the wrong theory. If you pick the wrong theory then there's no reason at all it should be better than your old theory, theories about the world that are good are hard to come by. If you randomly think of a way the world could work almost all the time you'll be wrong. And if you're not doing science you've actually got a worse than average chance of getting things right. The mind has well known biases that mean that you'll actually be wrong in predictable ways.

There's nothing cultural about this.

There's nothing at all in my idea of science that is western, white, anglo-saxon, male, protestant or anything else. Chemistry (al-chemy) is from the Islamic empire, ancient astronomy as far apart as China and the Maya was incredibly accurate. And, I dont know about you, but all the people I know pushing BS "wisdom of the Maya" or anything else are exactly western, white, anglo-saxon, male, protestants. The one bloke they get on who looks a bit foreign is the descendant of the Mayan who's there to say it's all BS.

There's nothing western imperialist about saying other cultures had ideas that are observably wrong. To say to a voodoo doctor that there's nothing in the potions and incantations and his success is due to the placebo effect isn't to denigrate thousands of years of culture. It's simply to say that those thousands of years are an artistic legacy not a scientific one. Middle class guilt is not a valid reason to say something false. There is only what you see, there is only one truth about any question. Sometimes a dude with white skin finds it, sometimes a dude with black sin does, sometimes there's even a woman involved. But the way you discover that truth is science.

The consequences if we dont use science are grave.

And this notion of truth as reviled by science isn't some strange abstract idea that doesn't really matter. This concept of truth is the most fundamental. What will I experience. Importantly this is the only concept of truth that can be employed in moral thinking. I'm not going to get into what a morally right or wrong action is, all I care about is that there clearly are some. You can have all the amoral theories you want, you'll still be annoyed if someone stabs your mum.

If it would be immoral to do something because of the consequences then we must use the scientific notion of what the consequences will be. We must judge all actions for what they really are. A lot of people have an intentional idea of morality (only having good intentions counts). Which would be great were not the road to hell paved in good intentions. If, like me, you consider the consequence of the action to be morally important then it is clearly a moral duty to understand the world well enough to act. Science is the only way to do this.

To hand out sugar pills to people with life threatening illnesses if this has the consequence of getting in the way of medicine that really works is immoral. If you dont know that is the consequence then you need to understand the universe better before you can act. To take a gamble with someone else's health cannot be moral, to do this because you are too lazy or dishonest to do real science is despicable.

To enact public policy that is clearly shown not to work or which has no scientific basis is folly in the extreme. Public policy has real moral consequences. We must judge it on those consequences in people's lives. This is why we must be scientific about politics. This is why I'm not dogmatic about economics. I'm right wing by instinct, but Economics is not yet good science. In the next centuries I hope it will become good science, but for now a reasonable person can disagree about economics with no evidence whatever. So I dont bet anything important on my economic ideas being right. There are however things that are well understood.

Re-offending rates in various forms of criminal justice
Effective forms of public health campaigns including safe vaccinations
Educational strategies to reverse educational differences between rich and poor
Environmental consequences of various means of energy production

To believe something non-scientifically is to be systematically more wrong about reality. To act contrary to reality is to act with immoral consequences.

An Elected House of Lords Will Be Bad For British Democracy

2011-01-02T15:18:00.000Z

A fascinating debate by Intelegence Squared presented by the BBC. (You'll be able to find it on youtube when this link expires.

This presents me with several thoughts.

Democracy, the nature of

I am not a democrat. I know it's a great and unobjectionable institution that almost defines the modern, moral, enlightenment way of running things. But it's not my ultimate reference. I'm a utilitarian, of course I'm a utilitarian with qualms, everyone is, but ultimately the bottom line is the greatest amount of harm. I'm not ultimately, when you get right down to the bone, a democrat, a liberal, a fan of the enlightenment or anything of the sort. I believe in all of these things, but they're not my utility function, they're a good approximation to it.

I believe in liberty because it promotes the happiness of each individual and stimulates the inventiveness of society. I believe in the enlightenment because the alternative is intolerable. I believe in a conservative (small-c) legislative system because I've never yet seen emergency legislation that was cancelled as soon as the emergency ended. I believe in radical and reforming politics because there's a lot wrong in the world that needs to be fixed.

Democracy is another thing though. The will of the people is so obvious a moral absolute that it seems sacrilege to question it. But I do. I'm not a democrat, I'm a utilitarian. The difference is that the greatest amount of happiness does not always win elections. Cannibal societies, the repression of minorities, even appalling jokes (9 in 10 people enjoy gang rape), examples can be multiplied without end where the greatest good is not what 51% would vote for. A small number suffering greatly is not automatically less important than a great number suffering little.

There's another question about more than the will of the people though, the people can be misinformed. Nobody can be misinformed about what he wants, he who wears the shoe knows where it pinches. But people can be (and are) routinely mislead about how to get what they want (as the sales figures of alternative medicine shows clearly).

So, democracy isn't an ultimate. But a democratic form of government is vital. It is important to have elections on the right issues for the right reasons.

Firstly, democracy stops tyranny. You can have the most stupid, ill-informed, immoral and bribed electorate in the world, but they wont choose to live under a tyranny that hurts them. A democratic vote at some time that simply said "STOP", and caused the collapse of the government and whatever network of oppression they had built up would be the ultimate weapon against tyranny.

Secondly, it's a question of incentive structures. Elected officials have as their aim re-election, ie, the will to please as much of their electorate as necessary. This is an approximation of utility, certainly a better one than that presented by dictatorship (avoid outright rebellion), Brazil-style bureaucracy (carry out instructions you are given), appointment by some group to high office (bribe and pander to those who choose) etc. Now it's not a perfect approximation, this is why you need checks and balances, so that decisions that are politically popular but ethically bad (shoot the asylum seekers) dont get passed even if the elected official has an incentive to do so.

Expertise.

Not a lot of people believe this, but you can be good at being a legislator. Not good at being a politician, that's obvious. I mean good at drafting laws. You need a wide set of skills. A scientific frame of mind (there are no tasks that you cant do better with a scientific frame of mind), a wide knowledge of the laws of the land (how they are drafted, what the effect is, what laws are incompatible with others), a good knowledge of demographics and geography to understand the entire nation and the effects laws will have in each part.

In short you need expert knowledge. Unfortunately people dont (with a few notable exceptions) elect experts, they elect men and women of the people, people who know nothing, but feel deeply and believe passionately. This is very unsatisfactory. This is a good thing about the House of Lords as currently instituted. There is a wide cross-bench group of really expert individuals. The President of the Royal Society, directors of charities, constitutional and political experts like Baroness Boothroyd, senior judges, all have life seats.

Legitimacy

The problem is legitimacy, at present life peers are appointed by the sovereign, that is by the Prime Minister. By convention the Prime Minister does this under advice from such groups as the House of Lords Appointments Commission and the members of the other parties. Additionally to the life peers there are the surviving hereditary peers and the Lords Spiritual, the top 26 CoE bishops. I'm not going to waste too much time with these two groups, one will stop being a problem due to attrition soon and the second needs to be outright abolished with almost no thought.

There is a problem though, there is no de jure restriction at all on the appointment of Lords. So not only do we have no guarantee that competent people will always be selected, we have no limits whatever on political appointments. There's been a lot of hysterical talk about this Coalition, but one thing that can be legitimately worried about is the pledge to appoint party peers in line with the makeup of the House of Commons. This would be a huge influx of government Lords which would firstly dilute the cross-bench vote and secondly make it harder for the Lords to overturn bad government proposals.

This is the key problem with the House of Lords as constituted. I rather unfairly call this the problem of Lord Prescot. Lord Prescot is not an expert in anything, he has only got a valid part to play in politics as a representative of the Labour party or various trades union. And if that is what he stands for then fair play to him. But. He needs to be elected. If you're going to represent the Labour party then you're allowed to do that because and only because you've been chosen by the people, because you've been elected.

At the moment many people are in the Lords on this basis, people who are loyal members of a party there only to support that party. This is only legitimate if they are elected or if there's some other decision making process than making jobs for your friends. So I take as my first conclusion that we must eject party nominees. Not to say people affiliated with a party are ineligible, merely that all Lords must be there on the basis of merit, not party. Hence proposals for a mixed house. The proposal is to elect some of the house and to keep the crossbenchers. Preferably putting the crossbenchers on a more firm footing to guarantee the process cant be gamed.

Hybridity

This makes the house a hybrid. There are some objections to this.

If some vote or other is close and there is a significant bias towards elected members voting one way and non-elected members voting the other then it can easily be presented as the will of the people vs the will of appointed experts. With certain reservations I know which side of that debate I'm on when the chips are down. And I know the rest of the liberal world is on the other side. So I'm rather keen on seeing the chips stay up.

There's almost no way of rationally deciding the proportion of one to the other.

Should the forces of party and expertise be balanced? That way if there were wide consensus in one half then the vote would go that way unless there was consensus that strong in the opposite direction from the other half. This seems appealing, but will constantly raise the above question if there is a government doing things inexpertly. This could be defended, and well managed could even be successful, it's exactly the kind of inconsistent muddle the British constitution handles well. But I'm not sure if the idea is practical.

Should the party side have a majority of say 70-90%? That way the experts can suggest things, but they are overruled by political consensus or a government with a decent majority. That way if things are politically controversial and close they will have the swing votes. This is essentially an elected chamber, but with extra controversy around already controversial votes. This system would last at most one parliament.

Should the experts have a majority? This way party is the deciding factor if there's no clear view from experts. This seems sensible, but would leave the elected members frustrated and unimportant. This would leave voters very uninterested in voting for this appendage to the expert chamber. Political apathy is something that needs to be fought, and adding an extra source of it is a bad idea.

So I would suggest the only ratio of expert to party that can really be defended is 1:0 or 0:1.

A purely expert house.

This is what I'd love. I really want such a house, one that can stand up to the government and tell them they are doing things factually wrong. Able to say that drugs policy was not based on science, to say how it was best to get people out of the poverty trap. To enlighten politics and put it on a rational footing ... a man can dream cant he? There are two issues.

One: how do you appoint experts. This isn't an insurmountable challenge and may actually be relevant if we go for a hybrid chamber so I'll talk about this. A proposal I've heard is to have a list of industries, charities, trades union, religions, whatever else is important, (say all organisations with over 1/2 million members), and to have them appoint a representative, so you'd have the brick layer, the Hindu, the Unite member, the teacher, whatever. This seems like it's hard to corrupt (supposing you can put on a good basis who goes on the list and how the organisations select their representative). Another is to have the current system where the public nominates people who are then selected by an independent body. This is great so long as there's no corruption in the Lords Appointment Committee. Either way you need to be smart about how you do this. Careful drafting of procedures is imperative.

The second is a big problem. Democracy. I've said what I think, but the reality is it's the people who are governed. And if one chamber stands defiantly against the one that represents them it's really not clear that you will always be secure against strong opposition from the people. If people dont have confidence in their government then you get anarchy. And I'm going to have to disagree with my 15 year old self, that's not a good thing. Leave people without a government, they're fine until they start living in communities, then they start killing eachother. Yes, governments are dangerous, yes you need to slow them down and stop them becoming tyrannical. But if you do that by getting rid of them you'd also failed.

The current house of Lords rarely opposes the commons on anything serious. Sure, it votes against legislation, it amends it, but only in ways the government doesn't care about. If the Lords seriously stands up to the Commons then they get beaten down, the Parliament Act is used as a last resort, but normally this isn't necessary. There haven't been big confrontations, the legitimacy of the House of Lords is not a popular question. I fear this could be the case if the Lords is given teeth. This is a pre-requisite of a second chamber that does anything useful. If you give it the power to really stop and interfere with manifesto pledges or things (like anti-terror laws for New Labour) that come up in a parliament and really matter but are seriously bad, then you have a real chance for politicians to blame their failures on the Lords and create a mood against it.

I regret that an expert House of Lords seem to me to be unworkable. I would love such a house, but the reality is, you'd have to risk serious danger to get it, and I cant make myself think that's wise.

Conclusion

I'm forced almost by process of elimination to say we need an elected chamber. We need that rather than getting rid of the Lords because the commons has too few checks on it already. You need a second house that can disagree with the Commons and stop it doing bad things. This means it needs a different makeup. In the US or other federal countries that's easy enough, you have the representatives chosen at local level and the senators at state level. In the UK this doesn't make much sense. Regional PR is about the only way you can have a different system. Of course I've said elsewhere that this means you need primary elections and that you cannot have PR in the commons.

Why porn is a good thing

2010-12-20T23:33:00.000Z

If you dont want to read about porn then dont read about porn. If you do, I have some thoughts. I want to explain why I watch and read porn, why I like porn, why I think it's a good thing, not just because it gives people physical pleasure, but as an art form. Why I think a lot of critiques of porn that go under the name of feminism are mad. Why I think attempts to restrict porn are doomed to failure, fundamentally dangerous and not a good way to address the many dangers of immoral forms of sex. And finally how all of this fits into the reality of immoral forms of sexual act. If you dont want to know, dont read, thankyou.

Can I start by saying I'm not talking about, and dont care about, that one porn film. You know, the one film that has been made over a million times with subtly different actors. Woman and man in room, say meaningless words, undress, they have oral sex, he ejaculates all over her, they have sex, he ejaculates all over her, they have sex from the rear, he ejaculates all over her. Continue until bored. I dont care. Yes, sure you can deconstruct this to make it be about the objectification of women, or power dynamics in the modern workplace, or about the bloody Korean War for all I care. This film is not expressing any of those ideas, this film has no ideas, it is utterly devoid of content, what's more, 90% of the time it's not actually that erotic. So whatever clever feminist interpretation of this you want to do, I dont care. Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap, works for smartphones, governments, soft mints, and porn. 90% of porn is Mills and Boon stuff, all throbbing manhoods and bountiful orbs, all quite boring.

Ok, so why do I think the good porn, by which I mean the stuff that has actual content, is good?

Well, first and foremost, it gives people pleasure and doesn't cause harm. I'll argue this below as it's sadly very disputed. And secondly, it's actually art, in the broad sense, it's a tool for the knowledge and study of beauty and for self reflection, for a more full understanding of our own desires and ideas.

First off, porn gives people pleasure, I would have thought this was a no-brainer, but apparently not. Now a lot of people will argue that this is bad, it distracts you from forming real relationships, by presenting air-brushed impossible images of beautiful people it can get in the way of real relationships. And yes, real relationships with actual human beings are really damned important, but I dont think they have anything to fear. Porn does one thing well, it gives people orgasms. A loving relationship is not about that. Yes, sex is a huge part of what it means to be in a relationship, but it's not the point, the point of a relationship is to be naked with someone else in an emotional sense more than a physical one. The point of loving someone is to be totally and completely open with another person, exposing freely all your flaws knowing you wont be rejected for them. ... That's not what porn is selling. Porn and relationships dont compete. You can have the most wonderful relationship in the world and want more orgasms, you can have the worst relationship in the world and have more than enough to keep you happy.

Secondly, porn doesn't hurt people. Now obviously some porn does hurt the actors involved, I'll cover this later. But the main argument against porn is the line (screamed more or less hysterically) "wont somebody please think of the children". I've got news for you, young people, very young people, dont care. If a young child sees something pornographic they either dont process it as such, or dont really care. For older kids this is different of course, there's a remarkable phenomenon called adolescence where suddenly sex and porn become really interesting, and you know what, it's not all that shocking. Adolescents are going to become sexually active, it's just a biological fact, all the abstinence-only brainwashing you can manage wont change the sex drive. Porn doesn't drive this, and I've yet to see any serious study to suggest porn changes it.

But what about society.

There is an argument (I wont do down the incredible work of the women's emancipation movement over the centuries by calling it a feminist one) that claims porn is damaging not to the user, but to society as a whole by reflecting bad images of gender relations, body image and sexual health. Now on the last point I agree, we need to see more condoms in porn, I wouldn't suggest that the law is even slightly competent to change this, but this is a decision individual actors and producers need to make. But on the first two, I can only walk away feeling confused.

Firstly, gender relations in porn are as varied as they are in life. Remember that for every degrading and humiliating thing a woman is made to do by a dominant man in porn, there's a man being made to do something just as bad by a woman. Porn does not have one view of what men and women are (or for that matter, who everyone else is). To denounce an entire industry because one faction presents as erotic something you find politically distasteful doesn't seem to me to make sense. And for the record, there's no contradiction whatever between being sexually submissive (whatever your gender) and being politically or economically second class. Shockingly people act differently in bed, and the power plays (of all kinds) found in porn are not and cannot be a reflection of what society is or should be.

And yes, sadly people look at porn and see people who dont look like them, the problem is exactly the same thing is true of the paintings of the great masters and for the same reason. Porn is fake, and the only way you can sensibly remind people of this is bloody sex ed for crying out loud. If girls dont know that normal human being dont look like skeletons and die early if they do then TELL THEM, if they dont know that most people dont have breasts larger than a H cup and genuinely dont please their partners less as a result TELL THEM. If boys dont know that eating nothing but protein shakes in order to get an 8-pack if you're 4 foot high isn't what's expected of them TELL THEM, or that most people dont have a 10 inch penis, and genuinely dont please their partners less as a result TELL THEM. With proper, objective, factual, informative sex ed, featuring diagrams, statistics, actual facts about healthy and unhealthy people. Porn isn't the problem, the fact that there's no factual complement to porn is the problem.

Porn as art

The point on art is a seriously meant by the way, I'm not trying to BS. What art is for is as a tool for self reflection and as an expression of beauty. If you dont find porn beautiful then you're looking at the wrong websites, and let me tell you there's a lot of people in the same situation with paintings. Remember Sturgeon's Law, the fact that most porn isn't beautiful doesn't mean porn is bad, it means porn exists. Likewise the fact that most paintings are unmitigated tosh doesn't stop genuinely beautiful and moving ones existing.

But my main point on art is as a tool for self reflection. Great art allows you to explore yourself. Nobody ever got anything out of a great novel without thinking about themselves. Great art asks you what you want, it allows you to safely explore the areas of yourself you keep hidden in public. Post-apocalyptic stories of all kinds ask what would you really do if society wasn't around to stop you. War stories ask if you have the bravery to do what's right. Legal stories ask you to consider your idea of justice (and I'm not just thinking highbrow here, Star Trek The Next Generation was occasional master of this). Romances ask you what kind of people you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Porn can do the same things. Porn asks you a simple question "what turns you on". This is possibly the deepest and most hidden question most people get asked by something they see. What is going on deep in the animal part of your brain? What are your ultimate, primal, motivating desires? This is why I like the Marquise de Sade. For those not familiar, he is the man for whom sadistic is named. The horrors he inflicted on people were legendary, and genuinely evil in many cases. But his art (by which I mean his books), are a brilliant analysis of the dark forces that motivate us. "Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man" is a great example, a priest enters to perform last rights on a dying man, who, being an atheist, rebukes the priest for his wasted life, they argue, the dying man wins and they both join in an orgy with the several prostitutes the dying man ordered as his final wish. To read this and not ask yourself ultimate questions about the purpose and meaning of existence is to have not understood it.

Likewise, many of the fetishes which are casually lumped in the category of "extreme porn" make us question ourselves, what is it that we're looking for. Are you interested in power, are you interested in extreme bodies, what about humiliation, what about disgust? Many people laugh about scatological porn, but asking yourself why it is that disgust per se is arousing to some people is an important question about what we desire. What is it that makes something disgusting to us, is it simply defying how we expect to find things? If so you've discovered that people are turned on by breaking society's rules, congratulations. Is it something deeper then? Are we aroused by being forced to confront something that scares or disgusts us? I dont know, but if you want to find out, you need to stop thinking about evolutionary biology for a moment and get some data. Go out there and feel, what disgusts you, what do these things have in common?

Theatre holds, as 'twere, a mirror up to nature. Porn holds, as 'twere, a mirror up to your animal hind-brain. Both are truly art.

So you like porn, we get it, what about politics though, this is the real world, people get hurt out here.

Lets get the blindingly obvious out of the way. Bad, evil, immoral sexual acts exist. Remember the Marquis? He abused and tortured so many people he was arrested and sent to the Bastille. Rape exists, rape of children exists, rape of animals exists. All these things are evil, and all of them need to be stopped by careful, targeted police work. I'm going to use rape as a general word for all non-consensual sex acts, obviously including all sex acts whatever performed by a child or an animal. Sometimes people record these acts and peddle them as porn.

Let me get one thing straight, stopping these videos circulating doesn't stop the rapes from having happened. The question is not should we ban such videos because they are depictions of immoral acts. If we're going to stop that then the drama department of most TV shows really needs to be worried. You stop crime drama and cut all the crimes from the rest of drama and you've got a rather thin slice of the pie left. The question rather is, what do we do about these videos to best help the police to prevent future rapes?

Now clearly if an industry has developed that produces such videos in large quantity then tracking down the people involved and stopping them is vital. If this suggests banning such videos is something not immediately clear to me. I'm not interested in having the debate however because there's only so far you can go against what would ever become law before it gets dull.

This does not however have an impact on the general discussion of pornography. There are several suggested links between rape and general porn. First off, the slippery slope. Watching porn makes people watch more extreme porn, which tails into rape, so if we can stop them slipping we can stop rape. ... This is at best lacking a base in fact and at worst is the working of a very strange kind of mind. The United States alone spends more money on internet porn per year than the entire national debt of sub-Saharan Africa, to suggest that watching porn leads to rape suggests to me that there must be an epidemic of rapes right now in the USA. I've not done a statistical analysis, but eyeballing historical crime stats suggests there was an uptick in rape (and a corresponding one in murder) around the end of the 60s, but no significant spike on entering the internet era. If this rather speedy look is wrong please tell me, I stand prepared to be amazed, but a causal link between porn and rape seems to me hard to find.

The second argument is that the availability of porn that looks like rape or which explores rape (by which I mean stories in which rape is depicted by consenting actors or by words on a page or images on a screen with no actual rape having happened) increases the likelihood that someone will try it for real. To me this makes as much sense as saying we should ban crime dramas or the reporting of violent murderers on the news (that genuinely would reduce the amount of insane gunmen, but the free press ramifications of such an idea are appalling). Here the lack of serious evidence that there is such a causal link and the thing I was saying above about art combine. Art only makes any sense, and is only valuable, if it's exploring, if it's pushing what can be done. If Mary Whitehouse approves of your art you've failed. If I'm shown a really good study that suggests that a well targeted block campaign would save people from sexual violence then I'd think seriously about it. But until then art trumps speculation.

Final thought: banning stuff on the internet

Ok, lets go over this for the thousandth time. I dont care if it's child porn, I dont care if it's regular porn, I dont care if it's secrets about your government, I dont care if it's advice on how to get round the police.

You cant block stuff on the internet.

I dont mean you shouldn't, though that's true. I mean it's impossible, cant be done. Australia and China, bless them, are trying hard, but it cant be done. For a start, the definition of porn is impossibly slippery, extreme porn even more so. The nature of administering large black lists is that normal stuff gets put on accidentally. The Australian black list for extreme porn at one point contained a dentist's office.

Supposing you can write a black list though, making it work is impossible.

"The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it". ~ John Perry Barlow.

If you try and block a website the cold-war-inspired multiply-redundant brain of the internet assumes there's been an error and simply re-directs things round your block. Add to this the existence of proxies, you cant get around proxies, ask anyone who's tried to run a secondary school computer network, unless you're personally monitoring everything all the time they will get round all the blocks you put in place. The idea that your government has people better with computers than the combined power of teenagers looking for porn is frankly laughable.

Second and final point, if we did live in some bizaro-world universe where you could stop porn getting through, you shouldn't. You should nuke any such devices and plans out of existence. Because there's mission creep. Nothing sinister, no big evil conspiracy, just sad but inevitable reactions by do-gooding government employees. In Australia extreme websites on abortion and euthanasia have been blacklisted. Obviously, say the black listers, we do this only for the public good, it's for your protection. Next come the extreme cults, and things dangerous to national security, wikileaks, scientology. Next the neo-nazis, the national front, the KKK. Next the moderate neo-nazis, including the BNP. And by this time you're not living in a free country. China is doing exactly this. The fact that people can get round the great fire-wall of China doesn't stop the attempt being despicable.

Porn is good, banning it is dangerous.

Fisking Bob Ainsworth et al.

2010-12-16T14:41:00.001Z

Fun BBC article.

"An ex-minister who had responsibility for drugs policy has called for all drugs to be legally available.

Bob Ainsworth, a Home Office minister under Tony Blair, said successive governments' approaches had failed, leaving criminal gangs in control."

Ex-minister joins what everyone has been saying for decades. Well done though. Nice to see being a minister and having a good idea aren't totally incompatible.

"Crime Prevention Minister James Brokenshire said it was "not the answer" to drugs which ruin lives."

If the question is "how do we stop criminals profiting from drug addiction?" then yes, yes this is the answer.

"Decriminalisation is a simplistic solution that fails to recognise the complexity of the problem and ignores the serious harm drug taking poses to the individual."

The harm to the individual is none of your business, the cost to the NHS, sure, the cost of drug-inspired crimes, yes. And on both these counts you do better under this proposal.

The NHS does better because if Glaxo-Smith-Klien or Phiser is producing your crack you dont get all the nasty stuff, you know, rat poison, talcum powder, all the normal stuff that makes drugs a lot more dangerous than the raw chemical.

The cost of drug inspired crimes goes down as well, as I said the whole point of this (besides the silly little argument about such abstract concepts as liberty) is taking drugs, hence drug money, out of the hands of criminals. This means that you massively cut into funding arrangement of organised crime, of course this doesn't stop organised crime getting money other ways, fraud, prostitution (*polite cough* might I make a suggestion...) and of course, the main way terrorism and violent crime gets money, pirated fucking DVDs.

"Legalisation fails to address the reasons people misuse drugs in the first place or the misery, cost and lost opportunities that dependence causes individuals, their families and the wider community."

It also doesn't solve the sovereign debt crisis. ... You notice this isn't an argument because the current arrangements fail to address that problem too.

He said he realised when Home Office minister in charge of drugs policy that the so-called war on drugs could not be won.

Did he also realise the sky is blue?

All three main parties at Westminster remain opposed to the legalisation of drugs
The Labour backbencher said: "Leaving the drugs market in the hands of criminals causes huge and unnecessary harms to individuals, communities and entire countries, with the poor the hardest hit."

Mr Ainsworth said billions of pounds was being spent "without preventing the wide availability of drugs".

"It is time to replace our failed war on drugs with a strict system of legal regulation, to make the world a safer, healthier place, especially for our children," he said.

This is one of the most depressingly huge examples of the sadly all too common solution to all problems:

1) try something
2) doesn't work
3) do the same thing more
4) doesn't work even more
5) try harder
6) utterly fail for generations
7) ???
8) profit

Mr Ainsworth insisted he was "not a libertarian" and that people should not be encouraged to use substances.

Would it be so terrible if you were? And while we're at it, I dont think anyone is calling for people to be *encouraged* to use drugs! For the state to instruct people to use drugs would be as bad for a libertarian as them instructing people not to. There are real public costs to drug use, the NHS and crime. Thus we must try to reduce those harms. The argument isn't that drugs are good (though doubtless some are lovely). Rather it is that the best way to reduce public harms isn't by the totally infective method of banning drugs.

But he said: "We must take the trade away from organised criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists."

Big pharma is evil, but they dont put rat poison in your drugs. ... often.

"Those who supplied or sold drugs without the requisite licence would still be operating illegally, in the same way as those who sell tobacco, alcohol or prescription drugs without a licence or proper authority would be currently," he said.

And while we're at it, we haven't even mentioned the lovely big-stateist argument yet. You get to regulate and tax. So the government gets tax money, and get to prescribe, as with alcohol and tobacco, all the things like strength and packaging and not selling it to kids and that sort of thing. At the moment selling drugs at the highest possible concentration (I mean before the aforementioned packing agents) makes the most sense from a drug mule's POV. With regulation you dont have to worry about fitting things inside a stomach or a decorative frog so you can sell things at a much more safe concentration.

"As you can see from the reaction this morning, if I was now a shadow minister, Ed Miliband would be asking me to resign. If one of David Cameron's ministers - despite the fact [the prime minister] probably agrees with me - agreed publicly with me, he would have to resign."

The Daily Mail rules all. Sad, but true.

Last week, Home Secretary Theresa May said the government's drugs strategy would remain focused on rehabilitation and reducing supply.

If rehab is your goal then here's an idea, dont make going up to the NHS and saying "I'm addicted to X can you help" a confession of a serious crime with a prison sentence. ... Prison where of course our luckless addict gets more addicted to harder drugs. If you make saying "I'm addicted to crack" not legally dangerous then shockingly a lot more people will say it.

Blah blah Holland blah

Hear hear.

However, anti-drugs campaigner Debra Bell, whose eldest son William began smoking cannabis at 14, believes that he would have progressed to taking class A substances had they been legally available.

a) Class A substances are not more dangerous than Class C ones, if you son switches from cannabis to ecstasy for example, you should celebrate.

b) The fact that your son was not deterred by the fact that cannabis was illegal suggests to me that the reason he didn't take up heroin is something else.

"Just the fact that Bob Ainsworth is talking in this way will send strong signals to some children - a green light - to start experimenting and I really don't think that's the way forward in a civilised society," she argued.

a) How many kids take advice on drugs from former ministers? I mean really.

b) All this green light stuff is stupid. You need a clear voice from government. "This is the science, this is what drugs do to you: ecstasy, not much, alcohol, bad stuff. Now that you have that information, here is where you can buy safe, pure drugs from brand name firms if you so choose. And here is where you can go to the NHS to quit smoking, drinking, injecting, etc."

I'm not sure that saying "banning this doesn't work" is the same as saying "you should do this". We dont ban smoking (we should ban it in public places of course, tobacco just the same as cannabis), but that doesn't stop really powerful government health campaigns to stop people smoking.

Ayes 323, Noes 302

2010-12-09T21:14:00.000Z

Ok. First thing I'm going to say in big friendly letters:

DONT PANIC.

Second thing I'm going to say is there are number of things that should be done, that could be done and that shouldn't be done. Please be careful about which is which.

Ok, so here's why the vote isn't as bad as you think, shouldn't put you off going wherever the hell you want, why the police are dicks and how I would have voted if I were an MP.

The Ayes to the right, the Noes to the left.

I want to argue that what you feel about the bill on the table (and this goes for all bills) is irrelevant. Approval or disapproval is not how things get done, what gets things done is choosing. To change the law as an MP you can only vote one of two ways, yes or no, i.e. you must chose, shall the law include this line/clause/bill, or should it not?

This may sound like quibbling, but it is important because I dont think a lot of people are being consistent. You cannot say "something must be done" and say "this must not be done" without an alternative. If you dont propose an alternative then your no vote is a vote "there shall be no new law".

Now of course so Labour types and some others are putting forward an alternative, a graduate tax, which is (as I have argued) exactly the same as some fees arrangement, others are proposing scrapping fees altogether and massively increasing state funding. However, there are a lot of people whose reaction to this is "we need to spend less, but not like this, and I cant think of any other way", which is not consistent. Either this law is better or worse than spending more government money on universities, if it's better and you've no alternative vote yes, if it's worse then vote no. To say we need a new arrangement at all costs and to vote against the only option you have placed on the table is not constant.

The Lib Dems

The Lib Dems are doomed. The common wisdom has been for months now. Just like how the Labour party were doomed after introducing fees in the first place. Just let me say, without predicting anything, that a week is a long time in politics, and 4 years is forever.

People will not be talking about this in 4 years, they will be talking about what the cuts did to the economy. They will be talking about new laws, the changes to the welfare system, the changes to government and what the presence of BNP members of the new Senate means for British democracy.

I'm not saying students will forget, I'm saying that there will be other things on people's minds. Yes, some Lib Dems will loose their seats, I'd bet a small amount of money that most wont, I'd bet a fair amount of money that they wont become a 4th party or lower.

And while we're at it, if you're a student and you're now going to vote Labour as a protest against the Lib Dems voting for fees you're fucking insane. Enough said.

I cant go to university

Ok, I'm going to say this in really big letters because I want you to pay attention:

Yes you can, and if you would do well you should.

You can go to university, it doesn't matter how poor you are. You can go to university. Nobody will stop you. You can go to university. You will have to pay NOTHING. You can go to university. You do not have to worry about going bankrupt. You can go to university. You do not have to worry that your parents will have to pay huge amounts of money. You can go to university. You do not need to save up the money you're using for food (saving is good and will make you time at uni more pleasant, but not if you need the money now). You can go to university.

I just want to really stress this point as hard as I possibly can. It is disgraceful that anyone should be put off going to university by fees, (this is why I'm in favour of a graduate tax over fees, it's the same damn policy in two different disguises, but the tax disguise sounds better). So it's important, given that changing the law at this stage in impractical, that we stress as firmly as we can to everyone. You can go to university. Everyone gets a loan to cover the whole cost that has incredible rates and which cannot send you bankrupt. So now the vote has been lost the scaremongers need to calm down, retract most of the panic and say the facts.

After these proposals it will be more expensive over a lifetime to be a graduate than under the existing system. For a lot of people it will be less expensive per month. For everyone it will be free whilst at uni.

The police

Seriously, dont be around me if there's riot police on TV. Disband the Metropolitan Police. Shoot the mounted police. Just ... dear me, I'm going to have to lie down.

But seriously. What the hell are police doing with horses, I mean, there's no reason for that department to exist anyway, but to use them against a crowd. Well done the Met, you've just lost the tiny sliver of legitimacy you...no you lost that years ago. Well done cunts.

Open Primaries

2010-12-02T21:03:00.002Z

Open primaries are a really great idea. The problem with party politics is that most people end up voting for the semi-conscious hulk of flesh wearing the right coloured rosette rather than an actual competent human being. The idea of an open primary is to have an election within the party so that the electorate can choose the best candidate for the party.

The big problem with PR, one of the main arguments against it in fact, is that exactly this lack of a constituency MP and any personal responsibility that makes the people elected personally unaccountable. This is a real danger, the European elections are a perfect example, the parties choose a list of candidates and voters choose their preferred parties. Nowhere does any member of the general population get any say in who shall be their MEP. This is great for giving sinecures to loyal party members, or for getting weird and embarrassing people far away from Westminster.

This is, from the point of view of accountable and democratic government, obviously not satisfactory. It's the victory of the party over the people.

A solution to this is an open primary. That is, before the main election there are open, public elections to decide who will be the candidate from each party. The most well known example of this is in the US presidential election. For months before the final presidential elections there are votes for who will be the candidate from the two main parties. This way the people dont simply have to choose between two possible candidates, the final two are chosen by a wide electorate to then be put to the whole population.

The UK

Ok, enough of theory. Practice is needed. We have 3 real groups of legislators to select (I dont care here (as always) about sub-national and local elections) ie, the Lords, the commons, and the MEPs.

The Lords

We are promised in the holy gospel according to Clegg that the government will present:

proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of Proportional representation.

It is likely that this will advocate single long terms of office.

Ok. So we're picking people on the basis of PR, serving single long terms. This is not, and is not capable of being, a recipe for personal accountability. Single long terms means that after a Lord is elected they will have almost no incentive to do anything (short of recall powers). With this kind of a disadvantage for good governance right at the start we need something to redress the balance.

To introduce the system currently used to elect MEPs for the Lords would be an unambiguous disgrace. There is no accountability at any stage for MEPs. If we are to have either a national or (more likely) a regional PR system then some kind of primary election is an absolute must. There must be some way to say who the representative from each party will be. Now we could argue till we're blue in the face about details, but the gist has to be something like this:

An election campaign over the whole constituency (probably the regions as with European elections, but some other convenient sub-division of people works just as well) where each candidate from each party can explain why they should be chosen above everyone else in their party.

An election, within that area, with a wide electorate. I dont mind if that means you have a fully open primary (ie everyone regardless of party preference can vote), a restricted vote (ie you can vote for candidates from only one party, or a properly closed primary (ie you must be a fully paid up member of a party to vote). But the election must be held with all the normal precautions (and sadly until there's been dramatic reform that means you cant have a postal vote - I'm sorry, you may as well not bother our postal voting system is so hopelessly corrupt) and must output an ordered list of people.

The winners of these elections (however they are decided) determine who gets the seats if that party wins n seats. This way the number from each party is decided by PR and is properly fair and representative, and the candidates have at least some personal credibility.

The MEPs

Exactly as above.

The Commons

There is a huge problem with running this kind of thing in the commons. Which is that UK constituencies are tiny. They cant support a large party membership in most constituencies. The first and so far only primary election in the UK for an MP cost £38,000 for one party for one constituency. Very very few areas have the capacity for local parties to run and pay for such things, and it seems hard to imagine that much support for the cost to be supported by government. As a very rough estimate suppose that each of the (say 600) constituencies to have such an election for say 5 parties, gets as a very rough figure £100 million. Obviously if this is institutionalised it can be done far more efficiently, but say we cut this down to the £80 million of a general election this still doubles costs which might be difficult.

There is also the practical problem that it's hard to find enough candidates to make it worth while in many areas. I imagine if you put forward all 5 members of the Glasgow conservative party (I jest I jest) you wouldn't have enough of a contest to make it worth while.

I would love to see open primaries wherever they can happen easily. The problem is that many people in the Tory and Labour parties see this as the be all and end all of political reform. Simple they say, have open primaries and you can keep FPTP.

Umm, not really, they are way more expensive than they need to be, and wont be very effective considering the small number of quality applicants in many areas. (Dont get me wrong there are many local parties with many important and viable candidates, and I would love to see open primaries for them, but this cant be universal). I would like to suggest that in many area the intra-party competition will only ever be of limited importance and the inter-party competition is key.

And this is exactly the area (hello high horse) where AV can help. AV can allow you to kill two birds with one stone. The key areas of real political turmoil and controversy where our current system are largely seen to fail are in two parts with, it seems to me, one cause.

All women shortlists

Ok, not just them, but they are a good example, what I mean here is central party choosing one candidate who is not wanted locally. This means that either the local party voters must vote for a candidate they dont want or (as with the Blaenau Gwent 2005 election) put up an independent alternative candidate. This has obvious dangers of vote splitting. Obviously Blaenau Gwent was a safe labour seat, but if the same thing happened in an even slightly marginal seat the two labour candidates would half the number of votes they got. This vote splitting could have been disastrous for Labour meaning they would have been almost forced to stick with the unwanted candidate Maggie Jones. This is undesirable.

Tactical voting

A lot is talked about this thing called tactical voting, I want to explain what I mean when I say tactical voting, why it's bad.

Suppose for simplicity we consider a seat with 3 major parties. Everyone has a favourite and a second favourite party and it is known by opinion polls and history that one of two parties will win. Voters of the third party can then either vote genuinely for their own party or vote for their second choice. The question for them is which way will (on the balance of probabilities) give them the best expected outcome. I.e., does a vote for their third party candidate make it sufficiently more likely that the third party will win to make it a better decision than a vote for the second preference making it more likely that they will win.

This is a choice that often comes down on the side of voting for the second party. This means that many people vote for their second choice, which genuinely distorts the true result. There was a poll shortly before the last election (anomalous time I know) asking "If you believed the Lib Dems had a genuine chance of victory how would you vote?" The polls suggested the Lib Dems winning a landslide majority, in fact, they lost seats. And this isn't just a Lib Dem point, I dont consider myself loyal to the Lib Dems, there are countless seats where the third party in elections is often just as popular as the two top parties but is nowhere near them in votes cast. Examples of this can be found for all parties.

Splitting costs and AV

Both of these questions boil down to one thing. Vote splitting. In first past the post if you run against an identical candidate you get half the vote, so it is very hard to get a diverse collection of politically similar candidates to stand as they fear eroding the support of people similar to them. This is a problem as it reduces voter choice and leads to poor candidates and poor representation of parties similar to existing ones. The bigger labour is the harder it is for the Greens or other "left" parties to gain power, the bigger the Tories are the harder it is for UKIP or other "right" parties.

The answer, as I see it, to both of these failures can be provided by AV.

In the first case the independent Peter Law could quite happily run along side Maggie Jones, complimenting her, explaining why she was a great choice and why people should put her second, but ultimately why he was the better candidate.

In the second case everyone can honestly vote for people in the order they want them. That way you get both advantages of the two way decision above, you increase the chance your candidate will win and increase the chance that your second choice will win.

This way the big two problems are solved in one fell swoop.

Contradiction?

Is it not contradictory of me to say that Open primaries are awesome and the way to go for MEPs and Lords elections but that AV is better for MPs? No, and I'd like to suggest why.

The difference between full national or regional PR systems and electing MPs is the size of the constituency and thus the number of people involved.

The problems with FPTP in the commons are significant, but this is spread over a huge number of constituencies, so that the problems in each constituency are small, the second best candidate winning not the first by some measure, or a party getting a thousand fewer votes than they should etc. This kind of problem is not really well dealt with by an open primary, they are hard to run.

The problems with PR are significant in each constituency. And the AV equivalent, STV, would be far too hard to be practical with potentially dozens and dozens of candidates. So here open primaries are vital, this may be just about the only contact that most people will ever get with their representative.

Tuition Fees.

2010-11-25T00:44:00.001Z

Ok, fair warning: I have no big or clever ideas here, I'm just annoyed and need to try and work out what I think, as such this will be a kind of stream of consciousness thing. Dont read looking for any great insight, you wont find it.

Note after having written this: this is not me on form, ignore if you're not really desperate to read every word that falls off my keyboard.

Biases: I'm a student, lazy, supporter of the coalition at the start in a very non-partisan and limited sense (... how many caveats do you want), and a grammar school boy.

Ok, so the proposal is to move the cap on tuition fees to £9000 per year from, making the fees 27k, added to another 20k for accommodation, booze etc and giving a roughly £50k degree rather than the current £30k. Obviously argue about who well charge what and how round those round numbers are etc etc. This is not paid up front, a loan is granted to all automatically to cover this along with means tested bits to deal with accommodation etc. This is paid off after graduation in the form of 9% of income above a certain level (last I heard £21,000).

The alternative as proposed by various people is a graduate tax. Under this proposal you would go to university for free. Then after graduation all graduates would be taxed some amount, maybe about 9% of income after a certain level. Along with means tested loans and grants to deal with accommodation etc

I hope it doesn't take a degree in advanced mathematics to realise that not only is this not a great void or separation, this is exactly the same damned proposal worded in two different ways.

There will of course be differences in how you implements both, but one plan can be tweaked to match pound for pound any possible variant of the other. Graduate tax doesn't affect foreign students, no problem, just impose a supertax the second they graduate if their plans are to emigrate. If we can track people running abroad to avoid paying back their student loan. The student fees proposal loads you down with debt, yeh, but of a very restricted and limited form. You cant go bankrupt because of this loan, you cant default on it either. If your income drops below the threshold you stop paying anything back at all, so you cant be forced to give up your house or anything to pay for it, if you haven't got the money to pay you dont pay, simple as.

The student fee loan is cancelled after 25 years so you get out of paying it. ... Sure, add the same clause to the graduate tax, fine by me.

These two proposals are, if you get 2 clever lawyers and an accountant together for half an hour, exactly equivalent. So there is no debate, at all.

Except.

Except that fee sounds scary as fuck. Except that £50k debt sounds terrifying. I come from a poor family, says the smelly unfortunate of our screens, where can I find £50k from?

This is of course nonsense. Far to few people seem to realise just how generous and lenient the student loan system is. If you come from a poor family you wont pay the loan off until you are in a high paid job, never intend to take up such a job? Bully for you, you get your degree for free.

This is the problem, the difference may just be PR. But that is crucial. Too many people are scared by these misunderstandings and put off. This is a large part of why people from poor families dont end up at university (tough of course, getting worse education from birth onwards is always going to be the largest factor there).

This is why I think I support a graduate tax of those two options, it's just a change in words. You'd have to get some lawyers involved to help out with international students and with other boring technicalities especially about the EU. But this is at most a 5 lawyer problem. It is not insurmountable as Cameron seems to claim.

Other options.

I say "of those two", of course there are other options. Take the funding from general taxation, you'd need to raise (very very roughly) an extra £3bn (an extra 3000 a year from about 1 million people at uni). This is not insurmountable, we could manage it by cutting the NHS by 2.5% rather than 0%. But in the current budget climate, maybe this would be hard to manage.

Another option of course that could help this is to slash the number of people going to university. Of course there are people at university who should not be there, people doing non-courses and non-universities in order to get degrees that nobody wants in subjects where there are no relevant jobs.

This is a failing of our approach to higher education, in fact, the fact that I said higher education there at all is indicative. Higher education means university, further eduction means vocational training. One is not more valuable than the other. To have an economy running you need academics to be lawyers and accountants and god-damn scientists, mathematicians and engineers to make stuff. But you also need highly trained and skilful technicians, you need brick layers, you need plumbers and you need secretaries. We have nothing left to dig out of the ground, and our raw labour is just going to keep getting more expensive compared to China and India. The only thing we can do is services, hair dressing, flower arranging, catering, all the things that make life better and we need to research new technologies and new ways of doing things.

These two legs are both needed. So we need to get rid of this mad idea of 50% of people going to university, it doesn't help most people and doesn't help our economy. Get most people into training at aged 18 sure, but it needs to be a mix of vocational and academic to a far greater degree than is the case now.

That long and boring rant was relevant, as vocational training for high-skill technical jobs (whist far more expensive to run) can be paid for largely by the employer or the industry in general, thus reducing the demand on the state. Which helps.

Protests

Protests are good. I like protests, almost without exception. I didn't go to this one because as I suggested above I dont think that change on this issue would change anything, it would be good to re-label this a graduate tax. But that is simply not going to happen. The protests will not succeed because there are too many people here with hard stuck opinions (no not the lib dems, I mean people with power).

And it's not, as I suggest, terrible that the protests wont succeed, to get more people as a percentage from poorer backgrounds into university calling it a graduate tax would help, but simply better careers and education advice in schools would help.

So, these protests, I dont agree, but that doesn't stop me sticking my oar in. Protesting is good and important. The police did not show themselves off well today.

Or rather, they did and that's exactly the problem. Parking a riot van in the middle of a protest has one effect, it gets people to vandalise it. This was purely for the benefit of the cameras. The police spent most of their day adversing themselves. Firstly by the kind of camera-friendly stunts as the riot van. And secondly by kettling, this is a mad and dangerous police tactic that sets people on edge and causes inevitable anger and violence, which get some great photos of people throwing traffic barriers.

Oh course, I accuse no individuals of being nearly so cunning as to plan this consciously. But that has been the effect. The police have clearly showed to everyone who want them to control the rabble why they should be given more money.

The problem is that to everyone else they have shown themselves to be thugish. Now, a lot of claims of violence on twitter should be treated with extreme skepticism, the claim about officers U2128 and CA950 having been violent with young and vulnerable people:

"Officers #CA950 & #U2128 reportedly assaulting children - let's get them trending #demo2010 #dayx #ukuncut"

Is hampered only in having no video or photographic evidence and, reportedly, there being no such ID numbers for met police officers. This is a great example of the benefits and dangers of organising via social media, you can easily spread information, but it's hard to kill false stories.

On a personal note. Riots are bad for me, violence is bad, but you try telling me that when I'm watching riot police. Again, violence bad, but I find it really hard to convince myself that that should apply to riot police. I'm not advocating murder or rioting, but I find it hard to imagine myself being unconflicted in condemning it. This is something I need to challenge about myself I know, but for now, that's how I feel.

OK, summary time.

Violence bad, tuition fees are the same thing as a graduate tax so these demos aren't as important as you think they are, graduate tax is still a better word, but more important is good careers advice. Students were foolish, so were police. The police showed off a lot, which is not good.

Wow that was uninteresting.

fitwatch

2010-11-17T14:02:00.002Z

As you make have read the met has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that censoring the web is somehow possible or desirable. To clarify then:

Dear all representatives of all governments anywhere ever,

Leave me alone. You cant censor me, that's designed to be impossible.

Yours, the internet

I dont like people perverting the course of justice, because justice is good. However, people getting in the way of a potentially heavy handed police action or distributing advice on how to avoid being harassed on dubious grounds I dont object to. If you want to avoid arrest based on hearsay after having committed no act of violence against persons or property then good luck to you. And if you want to distribute fairly tame advice (all of which is to my knowledge perfectly legal to follow (disclaimer IANAL)) then that's fine by me.

So, just as every other time that someone censors something stupid on the web, here comes a massive response to distribute and circulate it:

---

The remarkable and brilliant student action at Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .
This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal. Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

A letter to my MP

2010-11-14T12:17:00.002Z

Dear [Name of MP redacted]

I write both as your constituent and as a regular user of social media. I am deeply worried by the recent ruling in the case of Paul Chambers. He is a twitter user who sent a tweet saying: "Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" (For a very good background see http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/05/paul-chambers-bad-joke-and-bad.html).

The judgement of the Crown Court on the 11th was that this tweet was "menacing in its content and obviously so" and that he should be fined several thousand pounds.

It is obviously not for you as an MP to criticise any court, and I would not ask you to do so. However the law itself is your job. The court has come to the decision that this obviously jocular tweet was "menacing", not that it was a bomb hoax which cost Robin Hood Airport time and money (it did not), nor that it was an incitement to violence (it was not). In both cases there are far better drafted and far more applicable laws in both cases.

To take the judge's interpretation of the Act (which of course we must do until it is overruled) anything which could upset someone who could receive it must be counted as menacing and must be prosecuted. This means that vast changes must be brought about in our public discourse. One clear example is Sir John Betjeman's "Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough". Which would seem to be an arrestable offence were Betjeman to publish it today. Likewise the phrase "I could murder an Indian" devoid of the context of planning where to go out for a meal would, in the judge's apparent interpretation of the law be "clearly menacing".

This cannot stand. It is of course not your place to criticise the court, we must assume they have made the correct legal decision. What must then be done is to remove the offence totally from statute. I would therefore like to ask you to do whatever is in your power to secure a debate on, and to repeal, the Communication Act 2003, at the very least section 127 of it.

This could quite easily fit into the Freedom Bill promised in the Coalition agreement. I would ask that you try to get this included in whatever form this bill eventually takes.

This is a very bad law for which, it seems to me, there is no need. We need laws to deal with bomb hoaxes, and we have such laws, very well drafted with few implications for normal use of social media. We need laws to deal with incitement to violence (as with Councillor Gareth Compton's call for a journalist to be stoned) and we have such laws, they make it quite clear that in the case of a joke where it is not intended that anyone should be inspired to commit violence (as seems to be true in this case) that no offence exists. However the use of the Communications Act in both these cases means that both have clearly committed the offence of "menacing", where it seems clear that neither have harmed anyone.

I hope this email finds you well, if you wish any clarification feel free to email either me or the very well respected David Allen Green.

Yours,

Adam Casey

[Address redacted]