Category: Main

Anomaly UK blog posts

Science in action

There’s a story on the Tunguska Event at Popular Mechanics.

A study suggests that it was caused by a comet that broke off a piece in the atmosphere over the region while the rest of the comet left the atmosphere and carried on back into space. The fireball was caused by hydrogen gas released by the comet, which was previously dissolved in the comet’s ice.

Some points about this story:

It’s really cool. If we could (as they think they might have done) track a comet that had previously hit earth – just wow.

It’s almost certainly not true. It’s guess piled on guess piled on supposition.

That it probably isn’t true is not a criticism. The story quotes another Russian scientist as being “impressed but not convinced”. Me too. Just showing that the theory is consistent with the (little) evidence we have is worthwhile. Some researchers might argue that existing evidence is not consistent with the theory. Some will look for new evidence. If new evidence is found which is consistent with the theory, that will strengthen it.

Imagine if the theory had some obvious political relevance. How would the process work then?

The paper is on arxiv.org

Margaret Moran

An M.P. is supposed to spend time in the constituency she represents, and also in Parliament. Margaret Moran represents Luton South.

Now, it is perfectly possible to live in Luton South and work in Central London – I know, because I’ve done it for over a decade. I’ve spent 2 hours a day, five days a week on a train for that time, costing me getting on for four thousand pounds a year at today’s prices. Note that this is not considered a legitimate expense, so I have to pay income tax on the money I spend traveling.

So I’m a little bit miffed that my MP gets the maintenance of her second home in London counted as a legitimate expense that she doesn’t have to pay tax on. More than that, since the expense is paid by her employer, the state, she not only doesn’t pay tax on it, she doesn’t pay at all.

Now, a bunch of people have been complaining about all this for a while. Good luck to them, but in my merely “miffed” state, I haven’t bothered to join in.

After all, there is one small difference between me and my MP. I chose to live 20 miles from my place of work, her role as an MP means she more or less needs to. So there is some thin kind of argument about her 2-location life being more of a necessary expense than mine. Irritating, but not worth making a huge fuss about.

And now details have been published, it emerges she claimed GBP22,500 for dry rot treatment for her second home.

In Southampton.

OK, now I am no longer miffed.
(For the geographically challenged, Southampton is 80 miles from Westminster, and 94 from Luton)

There is a video of her making pathetic justifications on the BBC. Again, the reason why my employer is not allowed to pay my train fare, even if it wanted to, is because I do not have to live such a distance from my office. There are all sorts of good reasons why I choose to do so, but at the end of the day, I have to pay the fare out of my taxed income because it’s my lifestyle choice.

Moran says that it is essential for her to have three properties because her partner lives in Southampton. Well, guess what. My wife lives in Luton, but that doesn’t mean I can claim the costs of being based in Luton and London as a business expense. It was her choice to come to Luton to run for Parliament, and it is her choice to have a partner who won’t move from Southampton, and reasonable as those choices may be, they are her choices to spend her own money on.

(There was a time when candidates who came to an area in order to stand were frowned upon. I don’t think that’s important – the “local” element of M.P. work is not sensible – but if candidates do want to move from their homes to another area where they think they’ll get elected, they can do so at their own expense.)

Brown and Me

I haven’t signed the “Resign” petition. (Shock! Horror!)

That is not, in fact, because of any respect for him left over from his first term as Chancellor. He does not deserve to be running the government.

But what does it mean to ask him to resign? Either we (a) get another non-entity machine politician from the Labour front bench, or (b) we get a general election where presumably Cameron gets in.

I’m not at all happy with the constitution we have, but having governments chased out of power as soon as they lose the confidence of the media is not likely to improve it. The ousting of Brown would not be a victory in any sense – it would be the psychological substitute for a victory.

If there’s any coherency to my present political position, it is a rejection of psychological substitutes for victory. That is why I can be an activist for the Libertarian Party UK while my guru Mencius writes about “the fundamental comedy of democratic libertarianism – a proposition no less grimly hilarious for its infinite boneheadedness.” Being unsatisfied not just with Tony Blair but also with Gordon Brown, and also with the Labour Party, and also with the Conservative Party, are steps on the road to being unsatisfied with our democracy. Future steps to guide my comrades through are being dissatisfied with democracy itself. I don’t, of course, need a majority to go through this process, but whatever can be done in the end, I’m not likely to do it on my own.

So, if you want to take the system at its word, vote LPUK. After that fails, come with me and Menc….

Climate and Science

Patrick Crozier writes (a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been distracted) that libertarians should actually talk about the economics of climate change, and that the best defence is rapid economic growth that can only happen through a freer market.

It sounds pretty reasonable. I think, as a practical matter, the association of libertarianism with climate denial is harmful to our public image. We would be better off accepting climate science, and, as Patrick says, dealing with the economics.

The trouble with that, as reasonable as it seems, is that I can’t do it.

At least it solves one thing. I used to worry that my view of the science was being influenced by my politics, that I was hostile to AGW because it was inconvenient to libertarianism, rather than because of its merits. But I find, that if it comes to a choice between libertarianism and climate denial, I’m more convinced of the scientific question than the political one. Libertarianism has bigger problems than Global Warming. (In a word, democracy)

Indeed, and this is yet another point due to Mencius, I would say that in the long run, the closed loop of “official science” is the biggest problem of the managerial state. I was trying to work up to this gradually before I got sidetracked.

Frankly, if I was to rely only on work produced within the last 50 years, I wouldn’t believe in evolution. It’s only the work done before the state took over all science that convinces me (and the fact that it’s simple enough that I can work through it for myself). By the time we finally give up on global warming (in 25 years or so), science will be so utterly discredited that it will be irrelevant – gone the way of theatre, or sittings of the House of Lords – something that is still done because the state funds it, but nobody can quite remember what the original point was.

Retreat into history

The reason I’ve gone very quiet of late is that two weeks ago I visited Bletchley Park, and was so fascinated by the details of the cryptanalysis of Enigma that I’ve spent every spare moment since working out the crib/bombe technique, and implementing software simulations to verify my understanding.

I had what I think was a working bombe simulator by last weekend, but running in ruby on my netbook, it was somewhat slower (for a moderately complex menu) than the 1942 electromechanical version. Not having the resources of a state war machine to draw on, that makes it a bit too time-consuming to actually test the process. Every optimisation I attempted made it slower, so I have resorted to a C++ port of my ruby code, which is not yet complete.

(I am aware that many simulators already exist – the point of my simulator is to demonstrate to myself that I know how it is supposed to work).

There’s loads of important stuff to write about, but I just can’t put this down right now.

Politicised Science

Science is about truth. We do science in order to find out the truth. If politicians are taking control of science, that isn’t likely to make it better, because politics is about other things than truth – it is about marketing, compromise and decision.

That is pretty generally agreed. “Politicised Science” is a bad thing.

However, it is also generally agreed that politics, or more specifically policy, should take account of science. If you’re looking for the best policy, science is likely to help.

That all sounds reasonable, but it leads to an interesting political dynamic.

It’s not “politicising science” to decide a policy on the basis of science. Science finds the truth, and the truth is both beautiful and useful.

However, once you have a policy which is the result of some science, anyone who questions that science is no longer just affecting science. They are affecting science, and they are also affecting policy. At that point, they are politicizing the science.

They can’t help it. If a scientist discovers that the moon is made of green cheese, just in the normal way of non-political science, and then a politician advocates a policy of sending a cheese-mining expedition to the moon, then another scientist who claims that the moon is really just a huge turnip is, whatever his political affiliations, necessarily is in the position of opposing the cheese-mining policy. (Sending a mission to the moon just to get turnip would be really stupid).

So if our science is not to be political, what do we do? We’re really stuck. We suddenly have opposing politicians on opposite sides of a scientific question, all motivated to have the science go their way. If the turnipist stays quiet, to avoid the problem, that’s even worse – a scientific position has been completely stifled for political reasons.

There are only two answers. Either we decide we have to live with politicised science after all, or else we refrain from drawing conclusions about policy from any scientific theory that is not established beyond question.

The second option is not a complete solution. It is hard to decide whether a theory is sufficiently established. None the less, it is easier than deciding whether it is true or not. It is also a major sacrifice. A theory that is pretty good but agreed not to be certain, could still influence policy in a beneficial way. The question is whether we give up the good effect in-progress science can have on policy in order to prevent the bad effect politics has on science.

I don’t think that’s possible – it would mean standing up and saying we weren’t going to act on good but immature science. Therefore we have to take the first choice – we have to live with the fact that any science with relevance to policy is political science, and hope that cheesist and turnipist scientists can get to the right answer despite being co-opted by political parties. This is hard, but I can’t see any way around it.

That means that scientists have to overcome their (justified) fear of politics. Because if they don’t, there’s a very bad effect. Going back to the moon-mining issue, it’s not the cheesist scientist who politicised the question. It was the cheesist politician, but the first scientist to enter into politicised science was the turnipist scientist. Therefore, if scientists remain wary of politics, we should expect to see a strong bias on the part of scientists towards the theory that is first invoked by politicians. The supporters of that theory are just doing what scientists do, and whether politicians agree or disagree is nothing to do with them. The opponents of the theory, though, are entering a political debate.

And the closer the scientists and politicians are to each other, the stronger this bias towards the first policy will be. If political action is essential to doing science, the result is Lysenkoism. If politicians could at least make a show of not caring what the results of scientific investigation are, then we would be in with some kind of chance.

As things stand today, I think we are at the beginning of the end. Some kind of valuable science will still be done for the next 20 or so years, but it will be gradually swamped by politics.

Dying Government

In the political news of the last few weeks – the minister’s husband’s porn, the dirty tricks website, the home-video address to the nation – we have the stereotypical last days of a failing government.

What causes this syndrome? It could be an effect of desperation on the part of the government; knowing the odds are against them anyway, they try long shots to get any chance of winning. Most or all of the long shots backfire, but they don’t have that much to loose.

Another possibility is the media attitude. The media is often accused of bias, but I have always felt they are more biased towards what seems like a good story than to any political position. Part of what makes a good story is a familiar overriding narrative – history may be one damned thing after another, but there’s no satisfaction in reporting that. The tragedy of a dying government is a good strong theme you can fit events into, so events that fit the theme are more likely to be reported.

I don’t think either of these is the real reason, plausible as they are. The real glue that keeps government – particularly the party-political part of government – together is loyalty founded on the expectation of future favours. A government without a realistic chance of still being in power in twelve months just doesn’t have any leverage to keep people in line. The result is petty treason: leaks, frauds, and personal vendettas overwhelm the overall direction.

This applies also to the press. As has been evidenced again by the McBride saga, the lobby journalists are very much insiders in the system. They are as keen to qualify for future favours as any backbench M.P. And, like the backbenchers, when there is no expectation of future favours (or punishments), they find themselves free to report what a year previously they would have covered up or at least spun in a less damaging way.

My reason for bringing this up is that it is impossible to understand our system of government, with its millions of employees, contractors and valueless activity, without understanding that patronage is the gravity that shapes it. Almost every political question, whatever the theories and ideals that seem to impinge on it, is eventually decided on the basis of who gets the loot – either in economic value or in more influence, meaning more opportunity to channel loot to others and thereby control them.

To quote one of my favourite lines of Mencius Moldbug’s:

If seventeen officials need to provide signoff for you to repaint the fence in your front yard, this is not because George W. Bush, El Maximo Jefe, was so concerned about the toxicity of red paint that he wants to make seventeen-times-sure that no wandering fruit flies are spattered with the nefarious chemical. It is because a lot of people have succeeded in making work for themselves, and that work has been spread wide and well.

Cheques and Balances

Apparently Gordon Brown is clamping down on M.P.s’ expenses. It’s good to see the executive branch fulfilling its traditional role of holding Parliament to account, particularly on spending matters.

Actually that sounds slightly odd somehow… well, whatever.

Being serious, I think M.P.s turn to shameless looting as they come to terms with their dwindling influence. It’s not that they’re completely powerless. If that were the case they would have nothing to lose by actually taking a principled stand against the government, and might cause some actual disturbance. But as we know, the job of the civil service is to make sure the chips stay up, and M.P.s are left with just enough power to keep them playing. However, this is not enough to justify having devoted one’s life to climbing the greasy pole, so they satisfy themselves with mere money.

Neocameralism

Thanks to those who came to my talk on Neocameralism yesterday.

The “Word of God” is Unqualified Reservations. There is a “Gentle Introduction” there which starts here.

Alternatively, there is another reader’s summary at corrupt.org: Condensed Moldbuggery

The Time article I handed out is American Malvern. The other article on the continuing influence of Unitarianism was in American Thinker

Another source which Mencius frequently refers to is an essay by Charles Francis Adams on the future (in 1900) relationship between the academy and the government – An Undeveloped Function

If anyone would like to continue the discussion, feel free to use the comments here.