An Enhanced Model of Zombie Infestation

It’s finally here! I have corrected what I saw as the major flaw in the zombie-infestation model I described earlier, and proceeded to draw a number of interesting conclusions about the effects of zombies on a human population based on my enhanced model.

I even went to the length of learning LaTeX so as to write it up properly.


Here it is! [pdf] (link updated Nov 2010)

There’s actually a lot more I could do, but I don’t have enough time at the moment. I have run a lot of simulations, implemented in Ruby, which guided me to the approach I took. It would be interesting to parameterise the difference between my model and the Ottawa one – they had zombies becoming corpses when killed by humans, whereas I have made them destroyed altogether – I could add another parameter γ which is the proportion of killed zombies which are destroyed. It would be zero in the original model and one in mine, and I could calculate how values less than one affect my conclusions.

There is a serious side to this. In accepting the approach taken by Munz, Hudea, Imad and Smith? I constrained myself, while improving the model, to using the same basic technique. If I could include some phenomenon in the model as a rate of change of a population variable, I did. If I couldn’t model it in that way, I didn’t include it. So including a natural decay rate of zombies would be easy, but introducing the effects of age on humans or zombies would be very difficult.

Most strikingly, I didn’t make any correction to an obvious error in the model, that humans and zombies do not achieve better “combat” results by outnumbering the enemy. I didn’t do it because the line I did take was more interesting. But Mencius Moldbug’s law of sewage applies – if you base a conclusion on N assumptions, and one of them is crap…

Of course, nobody would really rely on such crude mathematical treatments when planning for unlikely events, would they?

Would they?

Political Passivism

For two years now I have been hanging on the words of Mencius Moldbug, who’s analysis of the politics of our time (Unqualified Reservations) I find almost completely persuasive.

Having advanced a vision of government by for-profit corporations, MM has at last started to lay out the path by which we can get from democracy to responsible, effective, secure government.

His answer so far validates both my high estimate of his understanding, and my pessimism. The logic is completely sound.

The problem with government is politics – the fact that no government can aim primarily at the welfare of the population, or for that matter even at its own profit, when it is constrained most of all by politics to do whatever is necessary to hold off rivals for power.

Anyone who attempts to improve the government, in any aspect, by any method, is committing politics and is therefore part of the problem. MM gives us a steel rule – that in order to become worthy to hold power, the first requirement is “absolute renunciation of official power”.

Will this approach – passivism – work? It doesn’t seem likely. But, it doesn’t seem likely that activism will work either. I’ve said before, long shots are all we’ve got

Passivism appeals to me. I even put forward my own version when I refused to sign a petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign. But I have not completely abandoned activism, albeit in the form of half-hearted engagement with the least effective activist movement imaginable.

Since passivism is the prerequisite to step 1 of the procedure for reaction, and since 9a implies at least a 9b, there may be something I can do to bring about a better government. When I find out, I will consider it here.

Politics is a spectator sport

More evidence for my claim that the main value of politics to ordinary people is as a spectator sport:

The Monkey Cage writes:

the actual audience for news wants to hear more about strategy. Why? Probably because they already know what candidate or, in this case, policy they favor — at least in broad terms (e.g., yea or nay on health care reform) — and so they want to know whether their preferred policy is “winning.” That’s what strategy coverage provides them.

via TGGP

(By the way, I’ve been quiet lately because I’m working on something that will revolutionalise the state of the art of zombie population modelling).

Zombie Attacks

OK, yes, I have read the paper constructing mathematical models of an outbreak of zombie infection (as described in Wired and many other places.

The problem with it is that it’s stupid. It’s not stupid because it’s a stupid idea, or a waste of time, or the wrong approach, or anything like that, it’s just done really badly.

Basically, the authors make some simple assumptions about the rate at which the dead rise from graves, the rate at which they turn humans into zombies, and the rate at which humans kill them, and show that in any outbreak the zombies will kill everyone. They add a few slightly more subtle tweaks, and show that the zombies will still kill everyone.

Their conclusions rest entirely on one assumption that they make at the beginning and never defend, which is that dead people turn into zombies without any provocation, at a rate proportional to the number of dead people. That is, the number of new zombies rising in a given night is proportional to the number of people who have ever died (and not already risen). Even if you kill a zombie, it just goes back to being a dead person and will rise again in due course (proportional to the model parameter ζ).

Well, duh. Obviously in those circumstances the human race will be replaced by zombies. It really doesn’t take a lot of mathematics to work that out.

The problem is that this falsifies their claim to a serious conclusion:

… While the scenarios considered are obviously not realistic, it is nevertheless instructive to develop mathematical models for an unusual outbreak. This demonstrates the flexibility of mathematical modelling and shows how modelling can respond to a wide variety of challenges in ‘biology’.

I could believe that if they had shown that the modelling showed how different outcomes related to different assumptions. But that they published this without identifying the key assumption that produced their “zombie takeover” conclusion — the assumption that there is no way, natural or technological, from preventing any corpse from eventually becoming a zombie, contrary to pretty much all authorities as well as common sense — the only conclusion is that the mathematical model distracted them from thinking properly about the scenarios.

There’s just no point doing this sort of thing unless you take it seriously.

Update: Wrote my own improved model

The Rights of the Mob

Previously on Anomaly UK, I have discussed Rights and the relationship between rights and Mob Violence

I am brought back to these subjects by a programme I happened to catch last night on BBC4, about the Miners’ Strike.

The point I had previously missed, but has to be taken into account, is that a mob of protesters is generally recognised to have additional rights beyond those that exist in law.

From a legalistic viewpoint, the violent clashes of 1984 were very clear. The government has the duty of keeping the roads open – that has been the case for as long as there have been governments and roads. If a group illegally blocks the road, they must be removed, without more force than necessary, but with as much force as is necessary. If that means charges of mounted police, then send in the horses. If it means tanks, send in tanks. If it means machine-guns, load them up. It is out of the question that the law can be openly defied by violence.

Clearly, that’s not the situation – nobody saw it that way. The horses were controversial, tanks and guns would have been out of the question, while giving up and allowing the strikers to block the road was a real possibility. Nor was the restraint on the government’s actions some irrational daintiness on the part of Lady Thatcher – to have employed sufficient force to make victory in the field certain would have torn the country apart. The Police and Army would have run real risk of mutiny, workers in other industries would have sided with the miners – these were real dangers which put the outcome of the overall dispute in doubt.

Any model of where real power lies in the country, such as I have been attempting to create, is incomplete unless it can explain what rights a mob is understood to have, to form and to break the law without facing any greater force than lightly-armed police.

The limitation of the power of the state is simply that it can’t shoot everybody – it requires a level of voluntary cooperation from the population in general in order to function. But that only pushes the question back – why would rolling armoured cars through picket lines have forfeited that cooperation? It breaks some unwritten rules, but where did they come from?

I wrote in the context of more recent disturbances that rights are acquired by violent precedent – that if a group has won a conflict in the past, they will be assumed to win again, so that conflict is avoided. But that does not cover the case – what is the precedent for the use of military levels of violence against mobs in England not being successful? The chief candidate that comes to mind is the Peterloo Massacre, but that was not really unsuccessful, in that a revolt was averted. 1972’s Bloody Sunday would seem more relevant, being both recent and a case where lethal force used by the government did backfire politically, but I get the feeling that at the time Northern Ireland was seen as more of a special case, being at that time a conflict between two groups in the population rather than one group against the government.

My impression is that Peterloo is the key precedent, and the reason it counts as a defeat for the government is because the British regime in its entirety – from the TUC to Margaret Thatcher herself – is descended not from the government of 1819 but from the protesters of 1819. They won in the end and the measures that the ancien regime used against them are now out of bounds.

Remember 42 days?

Really excellent point at Heresy Corner last month. After all that fuss, for weeks and weeks, about whether the counter-terrorism bill of last year would include the provision for detaining terrorist suspects for 42 days, the subject is now so forgotten that when the minister concerned talks about it, it is not newsworthy.

This is the best demonstration of my recent claim about the limits of voter influence. Because we all knew all along what Heresy Corner proves, that the argument was never about a concrete legal proposal at all. The question was a symbolic one. What was at stake was entirely feeling or impression — did the government need to show it still wanted to do more for security, or was the whole fluid inspections, photography restrictions, CCTV thing going too far? Should we trust the security services or the civil-liberties lawyers? Would the new powers affect “ordinary people” or just outsiders, and if so was that a bad thing or a good thing?

The technical questions about arrest, and evidence-gathering capabilities before and after charge, PACE, legal discovery and so on were far too complex to be part of the debate, even with the enormous coverage the issue got. The questions of what it meant for the authority of Gordon Brown, the status of members of his cabinet, the future positions to be taken by the Conservatives, and the momentum of political sentiment in the public were much more tractable. The end result was the government lost. That was what it was all about, and the details of criminal procedure being no more relevant now than they were then, there is nothing more to be said.

Celebrity and Politics

So, Esther Rantzen has confirmed that she will by standing at the next election, in spite of my entreaties.

I do not think she will win, but she may be a harbinger of what is to come. I have suspected for a while that media figures are capable of moving into politics very successfully, through the more normal mechanism of joining major parties rather than running as independents. In the long run, the question is not so much whether celebrities will be able to win seats in parliament, as why they would want to.

It is necessary to understand what an MP is. Technically, MPs are legislators, who vote in parliament on bills and motions. However, that is now a ceremonial role, with no effect on the government or the country. The position of MP is an apprenticeship to the ministers or shadow ministers. In the same way that apprentice footballers have the irrelevant job of cleaning boots to keep them in their place and instill obedience, MPs have the irrelevant job of turning up for votes in accordance with the whips’ orders. (They also have the even more irrelevant job of acting as a kind of Citizens’ Advice Bureau for their constituents, but I’m not sure whether that’s to give them practice running an office, or for some other nefarious end.)

Therefore being an MP is, in itself, no more desirable a prize than being a football club boot-cleaner. OK, it is rather better paid, but that’s not much of a pull for the average TV star. It doesn’t even provide much publicity – does anyone remember hearing much about, say, Gyles Brandreth during his time in the House?The position of MP is only meaningful as a step towards the front bench, just as a football apprentice is only in it for his chance at the first team.

The advantage that a celebrity has is recognition. But while recognition is an advantage while rising in a political career, it is a handicap as the top approaches. When it comes to a party leadership contest, the most important factor is actual power – Gordon Brown was able to succeed Blair because he was already powerful. But after that the biggest advantage is not being disliked. In a leader-of-the-opposition contest, the ideal is for the general public not to know anything about you at all. That worked for Cameron, Duncan-Smith, Hague, and Blair. (Howard was an exception, but he was never intended or expected to win a general election).

Therefore, if a soap star or newsreader wanted to succeed in politics, they could probably get selected as a candidate, probably get into parliament, would probably be able to rise quite rapidly to a junior government role – PPS, or Minister of State, but would find it quite difficult to reach a major cabinet position, because of all the people who didn’t like them.

We see glimmers of the future in Brown’s elevation of Alan Sugar. Not being an MP, Sugar is out of the main political career path, but if his entrance had been a bit more planned he could have got a seat in the Commons and been better situated for a less temporary role. He would have gained his current position in his first parliament, but the odds would not be in his favour for further promotions.

The celebrities with the greatest advantage would be those whose public roles gave them credibility on political issues; the interviewers, newsreaders, and pundits. Robert Peston, say. Or more lightweight figures like Nicky Campbell, or Rantzen twenty years ago rather than now.

I suspect the step has been slowed by the reluctance of party grandees to admit potential rivals with such inbuilt advantages. In today’s environment, however, the potential candidate only needs to announce his intention, and the onus is on the party to explain why they are refusing him.

The key question, as I said, is whether celebrities would want to abandon their media careers for politics. Most wouldn’t, at the moment. We have seen that those that did, like Martin Bell and Robert Kilroy-Silk, set their expectations too high.

But once a few more oddities have blazed the path, the game changes, because ambitious young things with eyes on the greasy pole will see media as the career path to the cabinet – not in one explosive burst but by working through the ranks just a bit quicker than the normal rate. Rather than hanging around the think tanks and party research offices, they’ll be driving with all their ambition into the local TV studios, working the system with whatever influence they have at their disposal to get them the foothold of popular visibility, so that they can then switch to party politics with a head start over their anonymous rivals. Rising stars will be guided by their political mentors through tame TV or newspaper departments. The end result is that the two sectors just merge into one. Media figures will expand their reach from the political areas they currently own (such as the London Mayoralty) to those which are currently held against them by the party machines. Shifts from media to politics and back, like Kilroy-Silk’s will become commonplace.

What’s most important is not the effect on politics, but the effect on media. That is always the way – politics stays the same, but what it touches gets polluted. The Robert Pestons and Jeremy Paxmans (Paxmen?) of the future will not be doing their jobs because that is what they set out to do – they will be doing their jobs to get the public reputation that will put them in high government office. The detrimental effect on the media will be equivalent to the detrimental effect on Parliament of making an MP job nothing more than a stepping-stone. The lines have been blurring for some time.

Voter Power

In my previous post, I wrote

. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

That probably needs to be explained more carefully. I’ve talked about the three-way game between civil servants, politicians and voters before, but there’s a lot more that can be said. It’s easy to argue in terms of “Democracy means the people control the government” or “Our democracy is fake”, but the truth is more complex.

To a first approximation, democracy in Britain is fake. The real power lies with the civil service, who have to reach a compromise with other powerful interests in the media, other industry, the universities.

They also have to deal with the politicians who are nominally in charge of them, and who themselves are answerable to the electorate. In theory this is what gives the voters the power.

The politicians want to satisfy the voters by doing popular things, but that only works for them if they can appear successful. If the permanent establishment wants one thing, and the voters want another, the politician will do better in elections by following the wishes of the establishment than by following the wishes of the voters. Because if they do what the voters want, the establishment can make them look bad – everything that goes wrong (and lots of things always go wrong) will look like the politician’s fault if the government is following a policy which the establishment opposes.

What it amounts to is that the fact that politicians are elected is an essential part of the system, which would be very different without it, but that its effect is not to take power away from the permanent establishment to any large degree. The voters have no fine control over policy, but within the permanent establishment (which obviously itself contains factions and differences of opinion) policies which have more appeal to voters will always have a slight advantage over policies which have less.

On this very coarse level, what most clearly gains votes is the expansion of the clients of the state – those on benefits or those in government employment. An establishment policy which cuts government employment will be one which politicians will be able to resist, one which adds them will be very hard to resist. Detailed arguments about economics or technicalities are insignificant in electoral terms compared to that – because the context in which they are presented to the voters is set by the civil service and media.

Two Kinds of Democracy

Arguing against democracy can get confusing because democracy exists in two very different forms.

What we have in Western Europe and America I call “Old Democracy”. It has parties and regular elections, which are carried out fairly, and it also has powerful non-party institutions of civil service, law and media which stabilise the whole edifice. These powerful institutions get their power mostly from tradition – from the fact that they have had power for a long time and are widely respected as such.

These systems of government are very different from those created by a pro-democratic revolution or a pro-democratic invasion. Those normally produce “Young Democracy”, in which power is concentrated in elected institutions.

One cannot argue for or against democracy without distinguishing these two forms. Their merits and faults are quite different.

Old Democracy is the system of which it is tiresomely said, that it is the worst form of government ever tried, except for all the others. The claim is irritating but more than plausible – the most successful governments of the last hundred years, leaving aside a few city-state tax havens, have been of this kind.

Young Democracy, on the other hand, is what Old Democracy purports to be. The voters can vote for what they want, and they get it. Any theoretical, rather than empirical, defence of democracy applies to Young Democracy, not Old Democracy.

Young Democracy, however, is highly unstable. If the people can vote for what they want, then before long they will vote for “Strong Government” which will put an end to free, fair elections. The best case for a Young Democracy is that the unelected institutions solidify power and it becomes an Old Democracy before that happens.

The faults of Old Democracy are more subtle. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

The endpoint of Old Democracy is the utter bankruptcy of the state and its collapse under the weight of its ineffective functions. I don’t think that has ever happened in the West – economic growth has kept up with the growing cost of government – but I would expect it to look something like the end of the Soviet Union. which I do not classify as an “Old Democracy”, but which in its late stages shared many of the characteristics of a very old Democracy.

Alternatively, it might not be coincidence that economic growth and the expansion of the state keep pace with each other. It may be that Old Democracy exercises just as much waste as the economy can afford. The growth of the state is not an inevitable process of Old Democracy per se, it is its inevitable response to economic growth. Old Democracy would therefore be stable in the long run.

The virtue of Old Democracy is its stability. I have made the case before. While Mencius Moldbug may have come up with something better, he has yet to describe how it could come about, and my own suggested path to non-democratic government is no more than a sketch.

Supporters of Democracy are able to switch between the two forms as it suits them. Thus a commenter at UR was able to say

You like to offer up weak, fledgling democracies that collapse into dictatorships as arguments against democracies, but really they’re just arguments for creating democracies that can stand up to the overly ambitious sociopath and his cronies.

But a democracy that can stand up to its new leader is one that can stand up to the voters – i.e. an Old Democracy. The implication that it is voter power which protects democracy from tipping into totalitarianism is the opposite of the truth.

I must admit finally that the labels “Old Democracy” and “Young Democracy” are not ideal. Not every Old Democracy was previously a Young Democracy – the non-elected institutions in Britain are older than the mass suffrage, and I’m curious about the history of post-war Germany. And Old Democracy is only one possible outcome of Young Democracy – the Old’s link with the Young is more a matter of its own propaganda than a natural one.

Hierarchy of security needs

Mencius Moldbug’s latest has a real gem where he talks about the political needs of a society as a hierarchy of needs parallel to Maslow’s psychological hierarchy of needs.

there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace, order, law, and freedom. Once you have each one, you can work on the next. But it makes no sense to speak of order without peace, law without order, or freedom without law.

His claim is an essential tool for understand how I can whinge about ID cards and yet make allowances for brutal policing in China or Iran.To analyse the reasons behind the hierarchy, the first need is peace, and the second order. Order is valuable, but if an enemy is present, the inhabitants must use violence against the enemy. If inhabitants are using violence, you do not have order. Therefore, peace must come before order.If you have peace, you can then impose order, and stop inhabitants using violence within the realm. We also desire law, meaning that by following some published laws, I can be assured I will not be the subject of violence from or approved by the state. But if violence is not controlled between inhabitants, then safety from the state is of little value. The state has to first reduce violence between inhabitants to a low level before we can get benefit from the state following law.Once we have law, there is then value in freedom. Freedom means that the state will not restrain me from doing things I want to do, to the greatest extent practical. I cannot have any freedom if I do not know what the state will and will not punish, so law is a prerequisite to freedom.Therefore, the hierarchy is : peace, order, law, freedom.I want to live under a good government, and a good government is one which will provide freedom. But I cannot have freedom unless there is law, there cannot be law unless there is order, and there cannot be order unless there is peace.We have order where I live, and mostly we have law. I would like more freedom than we actually have, and I think it is entirely practical to allow more freedom without compromising the more basic social needs of order and law.In China, there is order and they are working on law. There is much less freedom than in Britain even under New Labour, but allowing freedom to political rivals is almost sure to wipe out law and severely reduce order. We can see that order has broken down in part of China just recently.The hierarchy of needs also explains some of my differences with Mencius. We could do with a little more order and law around here, but we have enough to support freedom. Mencius gives the impression that in his area, at least, order has broken down. Now, I don’t live in the leafy, peaceful suburb where my mother went to school, my grandfather used to play bowls, and I used to play in the park when I visited, and where the Shine My Nine gang now kills those who encroach on its women. But then, I live in Luton, which isn’t exactly cut off from the problems of the rest of Britain. And yet in my view we have at least the necessary minimum of order. I would like more, but I don’t think we have to abandon law and freedom to get it.(Is it not possible to have order without the state, some will ask? I think not, though that’s another discussion).