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Blair's Conversion

What’s the problem with Blair becoming a Catholic?

Some people have problems with Catholicism, either with the church policies, or with doctrinal questions, or with the notion of a political leader of one country being under the authority of a religious leader in another. But only a few people; not enough to matter.

Some people have problems with religion itself. But only a few people, indeed I suspect a majority of British politicians would confess one denomination or another.

Some people have problems with the fact that Blair, as Prime Minister, apparently had some kind of informal attachment to the Catholic Church, without making it public or official. Now we are getting closer to the issue, but by political standards of hypocrisy, this is still very minor stuff.

The real problem for the British is that to take religion so seriously that one would change denomination is just icky. It’s OK to have a religion, but, as with a sausage, one shouldn’t care or take too much notice of what’s in it. That makes people uncomfortable. Part of that is a reasoned objection to the sort of behaviour that might result from taking religion seriously, but I think mostly it’s just that worrying about the details of religion is in bad taste.

Even atheism is frowned on for the same reason. I previously held that one who does not positively believe in some specific idea of God should be considered an atheist, since they are not a theist. But I was wrong. The British distrust declared atheists, because atheists take religion too seriously. It’s like being vegan, only worse — there are, arguably, immediate practical justifications for veganism, but there is no practical justification for involving oneself in the details of religion to the extent necessary to call oneself an atheist. It is much more decent to just go along with whatever public aspects of religion fit one’s social activities, while utterly ignoring any inner content, like everyone else does.

I’ve been moving in this direction a long time, but I think now I better understand why. I will in future be vaguely non-committal about my religion, because anything else shows poor taste.

Climate Controversy

I’m really worried about the possibility I’m deluding myself about climate. I see something like this, and I’m so certain that it’s basically correct.

I don’t think there’s another case of new science shooting so rapidly into politics that scientific conventions have huge political relevance. Nor do we have new research being shoved into school syllabuses within two or three years.

This immature science is being accelerated in this unprecedented way for political reasons, and I feel justified in opposing it for political reasons.

On top of that, there’s the group effects. Like Pauline Kael allegedly not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon, I don’t know anyone who believes the full orthodox media view of climate change. That’s not entirely true, but the exceptions are people who I wouldn’t believe if they told me it was raining, never mind what the weather will be in 50 years.

I tell myself that for every one of these people, there are several equally qualified who disagree; I know that there is dishonesty on the sceptic side as well as the alarmist side, I am fully aware of my own political bias, and yet I’m still not even able to take seriously the proposition that the argument is settled.

I reckon I’m in the top 1% for intelligence, and I certainly know a thing or two about computer modelling, but what possible basis can I have for the conviction that I am right and a whole lot of experts are wrong? I don’t even have a degree in a physical science.

At least this isn’t some metaphysical question. The issue is likely to be resolved in my lifetime, one way or the other. I’m looking forward to it.

Democracy and Entertainment

Yesterday’s bit on the greater resources of television current affairs departments compared with political parties was more of a question than an answer. I’ll try to work out what it means.

There are a few caveats:

The money that is spent on news programming includes things like studios and cameras as well as developing the content to put on them.
MPs get paid by the government, which is extra resource to the parties not counted in their budgets.
The civil service plays a role in developing policies for the ruling party.
Political parties have an incentive to be vague about policy, whereas media organisations can afford to be more specific and clearer – they gain more by being provocative than by being right.

Nonetheless, I still think that Channel 4’s policy on higher education is the product of more research and investment than went into the Labour party’s. MPs are paid to be MPs, not to develop policy, and the civil service has its own goals and constraints and is not under the control of the Labour party.

What does this mean?

First, I should be less sceptical than I have been about the “power of the media”. I have always felt that, since the media is constrained to doing what gets it audience, its independent influence on policy is small. However, if what it needs to do is to provide some alternative policy with which to challenge politicians, but it has relative freedom to choose which alternative to develop, then its independent influence is greater than I thought.

Next, why is it the case that we (as a society) invest more in reporting politics than we do in politics itself. Either something is seriously screwy, or we value politics as entertainment more than as a way of controlling government. Or both.

I think it’s quite clear that the population does treat politics mostly as entertainment. The resemblance between Question Time and Never Mind the Buzzcocks is too close to ignore. If someone arrived from another planet and had to work out which of the two concerns how the country is governed, I think they might find it tricky. (I think they get similar numbers of viewers). There are even hybrids like Have I Got News For You to make it more difficult still.

Further, I think voters are correct to see politics primarily as entertainment. Since my attempt to construct an argument that voting could have a non-negligible probability of affecting an election – the infamous correlation dodge – died a logical death, I am left with the usual reasons for voting – primarily how doing it makes me feel. Those reasons apply equally well to voting for Big Brother or Strictly Come Dancing.

In conclusion, I think our system of government is one which selects leaders and policies as a byproduct of the entertainment industry. This might not be a bad thing: the traditional alternative is to select leaders and policies as a byproduct of the defense industry, which I don’t think is obviously superior.

Basra Update

I’m paying close attention to how Basra develops, not because I have a particular strong opinion on it, but because I don’t. I can make suggestions and interpretations, and wait and see if things turn out in a way that makes sense.

The lastest article from the BBC says that two thirds of residents of Basra city interviewed in a survey overwhelmingly think that things will improve when British troops leave the province.

“The majority of those questioned felt that once provincial control was handed over to local Iraqi security forces, the security situation would begin to improve.”

The problem is that I don’t know why they think this. Do they think that local security forces will have greater legitimacy when not attached to occupying foreign troops, and will therefore be able to keep order more effectively? Or do they think that the security forces will act more competently without the influence of the outsiders? Or, conversely, do they think that local security forces will become irrelevant without the British Army behind them, and that other organisations will take over responsibility for security, and do a better job of it? That wasn’t asked in the survey (full pdf is linked from newsnight page here.

For what it’s worth (and why should I claim to know more than the 16% of Basra residents who answered “Don’t know” to the survey?) I suspect the first answer is true. I think until the troops actually leave, there will always be some doubt among the locals that they ever will. Resolving that doubt will have a beneficial effect.

The other point on the BBC yesterday was about the apparent growth of extremism in the region.

“Many residents told the BBC that militias have tightened their grip in Basra since the last British troops pulled out of the city in September, after months of relentless attacks.

“They accuse Shia militias, including the Mehdi army of Moqtada Sadr, of a campaign of intimidation and violence, particularly against women.”

The key thing to remember here is that religion does not create sectarianism so much as sectarianism creates religion. The reason why extremists are shooting improperly-dressed women now, rather than ten years ago, is because, with a power struggle in the offing or in progress, religion matters now. To disdain religion today is treason in time of war.

If the power struggle goes away, so will the extremism (possibly with some lag).

News and Politics and Money

I get news mostly from online newspapers, and I tend towards the barest reports. As a result, whenever I see television news, I’m shocked and put off by the heavy slant it carries.

But my shock this evening was more than usual. Watching Channel 4 news, what struck me for the first time was that Channel 4 appeared to have a more clearly defined and clearly expressed position on the issue they were reporting than did any of the politicians they were interviewing.

But why should that be surprising? Channel 4 has more resources to devote to policy than does any political party. Channel 4 spends 54 million pounds a year on news, documentary and current affairs programming. The two main parties each spend something like 10 million a year, but most of that is spent not on “content”, but on content distribution – posters, leaflets, etc.

British political parties’ policies are being constructed on an almost totally amateur basis, compared to the media – and I think it shows. There are think tanks, but I don’t think they turn over tens of millions a year.

I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this. In the US they spend a lot more on politics, but don’t seem to get noticeably better policies. But my attitude towards politicians when I hear them is likely to change.

Reference for channel 4 finances: http://www.channel4.com/about4/annualreport/annualreports/index.html page 47

Torturing Robots

Interesting piece on boingboing about some robotic toy dinosaur called a Pleo.

I’m impressed with the robot’s behavior. It snuggles when you hold it. It falls asleep when you cradle it. It gets frisky when you scratch it under the chin. It’s much more lifelike than Sony’s discontinued Aibo.
So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous. It’s not rational to be upset by seeing animals or strangers suffering, but most normal people are that way, and we like to think that the people around us are normal like that. This irrational attitude is naturally quite blurry, and I would be less comfortable in the company of those who enjoyed even simulated suffering.That drives my view of animal rights: I don’t care whether any given species does or doesn’t feel pain. I don’t think it’s an important question, and I’m not sure it’s even a meaningful question. I care whether the animal appears to feel pain.

If you could miraculously prove to me that cats don’t feel pain and that mushrooms do, it wouldn’t change in the slightest my attitude towards those who kick cats or pick mushrooms.

Revealing bit of geek history: the ZX81 manual contains the following code example:

10 IF INKEY$ = “” THEN GOTO 10
20 PRINT AT 11.14; “OUCH”
30 IF INKEY$“” THEN GOTO 30
40 PRINT AT 11,14; ” “
50 GOTO 10

It’s introduced as “for fun”

The identical code appears in the ZX Spectrum manual, (with the typo fixed in line 20; the dot should be a comma), but with the introduction “for sadists”
(The program displays OUCH in the middle of the screen while any key is depressed).

Somewhere between 1980 and 1982, they had doubts about how much fun it was to cause simulated pain to an 8-bit computer.

Health and Safety

It is becoming normal to bash the “Health and Safety” for wrecking one thing after another. The latest example is the Tate Modern work “Shibboleth 2007”, which apparently is causing chaos and destruction by means of being a hole in the floor.

But it is only natural that we are more risk-averse than our predecessors: we can afford higher levels of security, so why shouldn’t we have them? Health is a good thing, and safety is a good thing, so what’s wrong with a “health and safety” culture.

Nothing, fundamentally. It becomes problematic is when it gets unrealistic. It gets unrealistic by becoming too formal, too rules-based.

In any organisation, there are two problems. One is that the people working in the organisation do not entirely share the organisation’s purposes and priorities, and they can direct the resources of the organisation to their own purposes instead. The other is that rules and procedures cannot cover every contingency; the right decision can only be made by the right person having power to make it.

These two problems can each only be solved at the expense of making the other worse. I’ve written about the issues before: Deskilling and Overskilling, Microsoft Bugs, School Uniforms and thought crimes, In each case I am complaining about replacing intelligent decision-making with inadequate procedures, however, I would be the last to deny that an absence of any rules governing job performance would cause problems of its own.

We have to balance rules against discretion, but we tend to have too many rules and too little discretion. What drives this is accountability. In a particular case, we might get better outcomes by allowing more discretion, but if something does go wrong, which it can either way, it is more convincing to say “I followed the procedures, but they turned out to be bad” than to say “I made what seemed to me the best decision, but it turned out to be wrong”.

The dilemma will always be with us, but I think we could get a more effective balance simply by insisting, when it comes to blame, that obviously stupid procedures are no excuse for anything. If you’re trying to write down a procedure, and it clearly is not going to succesfully deal with a large number of cases, give up and say the operative in question must make the best determination they can. We will get more agency problems, more corruption, but less blind stupidity, and I think in balance we will be slightly better off.

Two digressions:

Boris Johnson took some stick for his Telegraph article blaming rule-based health & safety culture for the shooting of Charles de Menezes, but I found it quite persuasive, although slightly speculative. The rule “don’t let unarmed surveillance officers arrest a possibly-armed terrorist suspect” was not a stupid one, but avoiding that “listed” risk at one point in time led to being forced to take much bigger risks later, involving probably just as much risk to the officers, as well as the unnecessary death of an innocent man.

It is not just risk where a rule-based system leads to irrational choice between small “listed” costs and larger “unlisted” costs. Part of the process of reducing waste in the civil service (and in private businesses, for that matter) is to set different budgets for different activities. That appears to have led, in one case, to deciding not to provide a specific R&C data dump for the NAO, (which would have resulted in a charge to the budget from EDS), but instead to copy an existing dump, which contained far more information than the NAO asked for. The cost incurred as a result was rather more than a few grand for a couple of days’ work by a contract programmer.

Those digressions aside, I don’t really have answers, except to tweak the balance in the case of health and safety by declaring that a stupid procedure is no excuse for a stupid action.

Credit and Confidence

One can get the impression that things that happen in the economy – like the recent credit difficulties – are the outcome of some strange arbitrary game played by bankers. It is worth pausing to explain the story, not in terms of ABCP issued by SIVs holding MBSs but in terms of real people and real stuff.

Credit is letting someone else use your stuff for a while. Lets say we have two farmers who each have one field, neither of which can be efficiently divided. In the long run the fields produce more if left fallow from time to time, but neither farmer can afford to do without his only field this year.

They make an agreement. Farmer B will leave his field fallow this year, and Farmer A will give him some of his output, to make it possible. Next year, they will switch; Farmer B will provide A with part of the output of his newly nitrogenated field, and A will rest.

A is giving B credit. A is running two risks: one is that he will later discover that he needs, or can make better use of, the product he’s given B. The other is that B might not stick to the agreement – he might get sick, or have his crop eaten by locusts, or run away with blacksmith’s daughter.

Nonetheless, if A is confident that he will get back his stuff, he will make plans based on that assumption. He may even make agreements with other parties that involve him giving some of that stuff to them after he gets it from B.

If something then happens that makes it even doubtful that B will be able to give A his stuff, there will be some immediate effects. A may have to change plans he has made, and abandon projects he has already started. He might not be able to make the deals with C that he was hoping to make, because C doubts whether he will have the stuff he is owed by B. If he has already promised stuff to D, then D will have to start revising his own plans in the same way. Thus a fall in confidence in credit can ripple through a wide network, and have large effects, even before any debts have actually defaulted.

I have deliberately left out of this explanation money and banks. In the real world they play a major role in making credit deals easier, but the fundamental situation rests on people and on stuff.

That Teddy Bear

Two claims I have heard:

1. “She ought to have known”. Really? I mean, maybe she stepped over a well-known line that anyone out there ought to have known, but I’m not going to take the Sudanese authorities’ word for it. There might be something quite different going on.

2. “If you go to live among barbarians, you run the risk of being treated barbarically”. Normally, I would tend to agree with that, but I’m not convinced we treat teachers any better in this country. Not that we flog them, but if you combine the ever-present risk of being drummed out of your career for some political incorrectness at least as obscure as the proper naming of soft toys, with the physical risk of being killed, maimed or driven clinically insane by violent pupils that you’re not allowed to defend yourself from, the overall risks may be lower in Sudan, despite the occasional flogging or lynching. It makes more sense to turn it around, and say that, just as there are various hazards associated with being a deep-sea fisherman or a coal miner, anyone choosing a career of teaching has to be aware of the occupational hazard of being unjustly had up for corrupting the morals of the young, whatever country you work in.

Ingredients of Modernity

Looking at modern Western society, and comparing with the past, there are about five things we have which clearly distinguish us from past societies.

We have:

Prosperity
Individual Freedom
Democracy
Political Stability
Secularism

Following Mencius Moldbug, I have been wondering, particularly, what the relationship Democracy has to Freedom and Prosperity. Is it synergistic with them, as normally assumed, or parasitic on them, as MM claims?

I’ve thrown the last two into the mix in case they are important. Much of Europe has been politically unstable within the last 70 years or so, but possibly that is long enough. The fifth ingredient is really the weakened influence of religion, or at least of Christianity; I’m not sure that secularism is exactly the right word for what I mean.

I’m prepared to accept without discussion the dependence of prosperity on freedom. The freedom to do business freely means the freedom to associate, to communicate, to hold private property, and so on – those freedoms can only be taken away at the cost of stifling economic development. This podcast went into detail, but the basic idea is simple enough.

I think it is at least equally obvious that prosperity depends on political stability. Revolutions are just so damned destructive.

So how does Democracy fit in? The pro-democracy argument is that democracy is the buffer that allows freedom and political stability to coexist; that a non-democratic state will generally be forced to curtail freedom in order to preserve stability.

Anti-democrats can argue that democracy is frequently corrosive of political stability, freedom, or both. But that argument is not sufficient. It may be that democracy does not guarantee either freedom or stability, and yet it may nevertheless be the case that the conjunction of freedom and stability depends on democracy.

Are there historical non-democratic states that were both free and stable? Some past European monarchies might be claimed to fit. For that matter, Victorian Britain was not democratic in the modern sense, due to property qualifications. Were these free enough to count? If attempting to change the government is an essential freedom, then no non-democracy can be considered free, but even without begging the question that way, it is still debatable.

And perhaps it is not freedom that is incompatible with stable non-democracy, but freedom plus prosperity. If the poor are poor enough, they have no power which needs to be recognised by the system. Once a modern economy gets going, they have sufficient resources to demand a share in power.

That actually sounds very plausible to me. But perhaps there is some alternative to democracy that can square the circle between a proletariat unconstrained by either poverty or lack of personal freedom, and a government that excludes them from power.

The best answer that MM has come with is the machine gun.

Perhaps the great tragedy of democracy is that mob power became identified with political power at exactly the last point in history at which mobs were militarily relevant. In the age of the machine gun, the military is at all time sovereign whether it likes it or not. As long as it acts in a unified and disciplined way, it can do whatever it wants. As the experience of China shows, it’s by no means always a mistake to fire into a mob. If the sovereigns of the Concert of Europe had realized that technology was on their side, the murderous degringolade of the 20th century might never have happened.

It might be the kool-aid, but somehow I’m just not able to find that convincing. Surely it can’t be that simple? I suppose the standard objection is that at some point the army will refuse to fire.

I haven’t changed my mind since July: While I accept many of the criticisms of the anti-democrats, and the proposition that democratic states preserve freedom only by restraining democracy, the costs of defending a rationally-run state seem prohibitive.

In other words, I don’t really like democracy; I think it’s basically a trick, but it’s a necessary trick. Giving the mob enough power to pacify it is less damaging than forcing it to accept not having power.

This conclusion is significant for developing countries. I think they need individual freedom, they need political stability, they need prosperity, and, in the long run, they will need democracy in order to make the new forces created by prosperity and freedom balance. Starting with democracy is the wrong way round, as without freedom and prosperity it will be only nominal.