The real stupidity of Andy Burnham

Andy Burnham has been given such a bashing over his idiotic comments a week ago about how the internet should be censored that I felt no need to chime in with a “me too”.   Particular derision greeted his claim that he was not against free speech. But the misunderstanding about what the internet is worth elaborating.

He said he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.   The only feasible way to do that is to have a whitelist-based filter that allows “safe” sites to be viewed.  That’s quite doable – I do it myself for my children, using squidGuard.  It’s very much better done at the home end than the ISP, because that way my 9-year-old can ask for a site that he’s heard about, and I can add it to the whitelist, but the filtering can be done “in the cloud” if you can’t be bothered to learn how to use a computer.  Nonetheless, the filter means that essentially, the boys do not have internet access – only this ersatz “pages from ceefax” version, and with the 9-year-old now 10, the time is approaching that it will have to be turned off for him. 

The internet is dynamic.  It changes year by year, very significantly.  That is what has made it what it is.  It is able to do this only because of the fact that, on the internet, anything goes.  That’s not an incidental feature of the network, it’s what made it what it is.  Anything goes in terms of technology (the end-to-end principle), and in terms of content (creating a web page without getting it approved beforehand by the BBFC).

You can make a copy of many of the most useful features of the internet at a given point in time, without that freedom.  But what you have is frozen, dead.  As the internet moves on, it can’t keep up.  It’s like creating a command economy: when you start you have prices, traces of the market that used to exist.  You can plan your economy based on those prices (with whatever adjustments you think will improve things).   But where the market would have changed, you can’t see those changes.  Over time, your dead market prices will become less and less appropriate to reality.

If anything-goes makes the internet unsuitable for children (and a reasonable person might well consider that it does), the only possible course of action is to stop children from using the internet.  Let them revive Prestel or Compuserve for them – that would be more useful than the “child-safe” internet Burnham somehow envisages.

Violence and Class

I’m returning once again to the difficult question of whether Britain is more violent, more unpleasant than it used to be.

In the yes corner is Theodore Dalrymple, writing about public drunkenness.

On the no side, older acquaintances who talk of much more casual violence in the past than there is now, and just as much drunkenness.

I think the key to understanding what has changed is the change in class structure. Taking the 50s or 60s as a comparison, there was still a clear distinction between the professional class (“middle class” we would say, but that seems to mean something completely different in America, so I’ll avoid the term), and the larger working class. Over the last half century, the two have merged into one (with arguably a non-working underclass forming or growing underneath, but that’s another question altogether. Also the upper class has always been a law unto itself). That is not to say that professionals have ceased to be wealthier than manual workers, but they no longer have separate cultures.

That would explain the discrepancy – the previously staid professional class has lost its inhibitions, while the working class has the habits of the old working class but the aspirations of the professional class. They all mix without distinction, but those that remember the old middle class are now exposed, by the new mixing, to the activities of the working class that decades ago they would have never heard about, or at least ignored. Add to that the increased purchasing power of today’s revellers, and there’s no need to posit any fundamental change in attitudes.

I’m not sure I’ve got the right explanation (I wasn’t there), but it is important. A lot is riding, policy-wise, on whether we are facing a major increase in violence and drunkenness, or whether it is all just business as usual, blown out of proportion by the press and the nanny state.

Even if I’m right, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. It means there used to be a powerful section of the population which believed it was above punch-ups in clubs and drinking to unconsciousness on the street, and now there isn’t. If something useful could be done, then something ought to be done. I have no useful suggestions, however – the bansturbation approach towards special offers in supermarkets, opening hours, drinks on trains etc. is as useless as it is offensive to liberty, and it’s not possible for a democratic state to clamp down on behaviour most people think of as normal.

There’s no route back to the past, of course. Dividing people back into professional and non-professional classes with different mores would cut off the economy from too many potential skilled resources, quite apart from the question of justice and equality of opportunity.

If there’s any dynamic that could drive up standards, it’s age. People do tend to grow out of destructive behaviour. If the authority of older people could somehow be increased, that might create some restraint on the young.

It will be interesting over the next few years to see how things change in a recession. The long boom may be partly to blame for irrational exuberance in the streets.

See also this earlier post where I suggested a less developed version of this idea

Science and Politics

This is a classic.

For what Mencius identifies as the religious progressive tradition, nothing can just happen to be true. Discovering something new about the world would not have been sufficient reason for Darwin to have formed the theory of evolution by Natural Selection. For it to have been worthwhile there must have been some ulterior political motive.

It’s always a bit of a shock to find that one’s allies are right only for bad reasons. One of the most startling books I’ve read is Correlli Barnett’s The Lost Victory, in which he showed quite convincingly that the Western leaders who argued against Soviet communism on the basis of the efficiency of the market system did not in fact believe their own (correct) arguments.

In the same way, it seems the ruling class of the 20th century accepted and promoted scientific knowledge not because it was true, but because it was politically convenient. We were just lucky it happened to be true too.

Darwin, whatever Desmond and Moore said, had no such attitude. It is very telling that the modern centre-left projects its priorities onto him.

More blogging in future?

I just got a new PC – an Acer Aspire One. My hope is that I will be able to write blog posts on the train, so there will be a lot more posts on this site in future.

Very early first impressions of the machine: the keyboard (as I type this) is causing me a few problems – I believe it is 85% of normal size. I can touch-type, but I am making about double my normal number of errors as I type. I really don’t like the touchpad, but I don’t like any touchpads. I think I will be learning a lot of keyboard shortcuts over the next few days.

The thing runs Linpus Lite. I’m expecting to use it solely for reading, listening to music, watching video, and web browsing/blogging, and it may well be adequate for that, depending on what the media software is like. If not, I will probably install Debian on it. There’s a fairly detailed wiki page on the debian site about using this machine. Many users run Ubuntu on it, which would be another good option; the problems I had with Ubuntu were to do with running non-standard things on it, which would not be likely to be a problem with the range of activities I expect to use this for.

Arnold Kling's Sheriff

I’ve been thinking about Arnold Kling’s “Stern Sheriff” idea for regulatory management of financial crisis. In brief, he suggests that when there’s a rush for collateral from an endangered institution, regulators should immediately step in and “penalize liquidity preference” – i.e. tell everyone to wait.

What that really amounts to is declaring bankruptcy earlier. After all, if you are demanding payment which you are due, and someone is telling you you can’t have it, the debtor is officially not creditworthy.

Put that way, it seems a very good idea. After all, my layman’s understanding of insolvency is that a party is insolvent not when it fails to make a payment, but when it knows that it is not going to be able to make a payment, and that to take on new obligations while insolvent is not allowed. Of course, in real life, that is presumably wrapped up in a whole lot of very necessary, very complicated accountancy. But the principle is that bankruptcy happens not when the money runs out, but before the money runs out, so it can be shared out fairly without chaos and panic. And that’s all that Professor Kling is asking for.

It seems a good idea, but of course the next problem is that no real financial institution can pay all its debts on time without access to more borrowing. If I accept the stern sheriff, I’m likely to end up at the Moldbug position, that all maturity transformation is wrong, that a borrower that will not have cash on hand to pay every debt as it comes due is insolvent. I’ve argued against that view, largely on the basis that it’s too easy, and too profitable, to do secretly. If you stop financial institutions from doing it, the result will be that everybody else does it.

There is, to be fair, some room for action between a run on a borrower’s credit being possible and it actually happening. But it’s very small. And the earlier you are expected to step in and prevent withdrawals, the more incentive you create to withdraw (or call collateral, or whatever) even sooner, before the sheriff arrives, so that window gets even smaller.

The more of a “hair trigger” you put on bankruptcy, the easier it is for the creditors to expropriate the equity-holders at any time. That conflict of interest becomes much sharper and more problematic for maturity-transforming financial institutions than for other enterprises – perhaps those institutions should avoid having two tiers of financing in that way.

Hey! I just invented the investment-banking partnership and the mutual building society! Maybe I’m onto something…

Strictly Voting Systems

One striking thing about the successive controversies over Strictly Come Dancing is the apparent lack of attention to detail paid to the technicalities.

When it first occurred to me that John Sergeant was likely to win the competition, I spent a while trying to work out whether the judges would be able to get rid of him somehow. I was handicapped by not knowing what the scoring system was, or how many couples were supposed to get to the final.

A day or two later he announced he was quitting, and, after kicking myself for not seeing that coming, I immediately wondered how they were going to handle being one couple short in the last few rounds.

Neither of the two questions I spent time pondering seemed to occur to the show’s organizers. They’ve now got round to explaining in detail how the scoring works. Even there there are oversights; I think it is an error to give both couples in a tie the higher number of points, although it doesn’t matter this late in the competition. Last week’s judge points should have been 2.5, 2.5, 1, rather than 3,3,1. That could have made a difference earlier in the competition.

However, I would take a more drastic approach. Collapsing the judges’ votes into an ordering of the contestants is throwing away information to begin with. It might be better to keep the actual points awarded by the judges, and then add the popular votes, scaled down to the same maximum. For instance, if there were a million votes, each judge point would be worth 1000000/160 phone votes. (about 6000). Apart from making the actual number of votes more important, that would encourage the judges not to bunch their votes into the 8-10 range all the time.

These type of shows have been going for years and years; I still think the problems appearing now are all because previously they never took the voting seriously, and would just cheat if they didn’t like the way it was going. Having people like Undercover Economist Tim Harford discussing it now is a real step forward. Maybe next year’s competitions will be designed by people who’ve heard of Arrow’s Theorem.

Update

20:05 – phone voting is currently going on to select the last two.

Scores carried from last week are

Rachel 5 (3 judges + 2 phone)
Tom 4 (1 judges + 3 phone)
Lisa 4 (3 judges + 1 phone)

Tom ranks above Lisa because in a tie phone votes are worth more than judge votes.

The points from the judges this evening were

Lisa 3 (80)
Rachel 2 (79)
Tom 1 (73 or thereabouts, I can’t remember)

So the running total is:

Rachel 7 (3+2 judges, 2 phone)
Lisa 7 (3+3 judges, 1 phone)
Tom 5 (1+1 judges, 3 phone)

So Tom needs to win the popular vote to make it to the last 2, while the girls each just need to come second to make it.

Again, the compression of the judges’ votes has been very evident – no vote lower than an 8, no vote from 3 of the 4 judges lower than a 9. Len and Arlene, I think, each gave 9 to Tom’s first dance and 10 to the other 5 dances. What’s the point of being there if they can’t say which dance is better?

Tierney on Holdren

John Tierney attacks Obama’s science advisor John Holdren.

Dr. Holdren is certainly entitled to his views, but what concerns me is his tendency to conflate the science of climate change with prescriptions to cut greenhouse emissions. Even if most climate scientists agree on the anthropogenic causes of global warming, that doesn’t imply that the best way to deal with the problem is through drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions.

There is some merit on Tierney’s criticism, but it is obviously the reverse of what’s really happening. Whenever I have talked to a scientifically literate person who accepts the AGW consensus, and I have challenged it, it is never more than a couple of minutes before they something like “well, maybe there is room for doubt, but the things we should do about global warming are all things we should be doing anyway, like reducing fossil fuel use”.

It’s fair enough to believe both of those things, but each proposition needs to stand on its own without support from the other. Both sides of the debate have a tendency to shift ground when presented with strong arguments – do point me back here if you catch me doing it.

What matters about oil

Wonderfully deluded slashdot piece on using coffee grounds as a biofuel.

This is a great example of the misapprehension many people have about fossil fuels.

There are two vital facts about fossil fuels:

1. They burn
2. They are very, very, very cheap.

It’s the cheapness that makes them hard to replace – there are plenty of other things we could use, but none that are as easy to obtain as drilling a hole and pumping stuff out. One commenter pointed out that the year’s supply of coffee grounds would replace less than 3 hours of the USA’s gasoline consumption, but the real point is that the insignificance of a few pounds of stuff that still has to be refined or processed in some way should have been completely obvious to everyone.

Management costs again

Good post from Neil Craig on the cost of Crossrail. It reinforces the point I made last month, that for big or difficult projects, management is the biggest cost. In the private sector there is some pressure to economize on management, though not nearly as much as there should be because the decisions are all made by managers. With public sector funding (and the public-private fairy dust is of zero or negative benefit), there is no pressure.

Democracy Fails

It’s now official. Respected political journalist John Sergeant has agreed with BBC producers that the task of selecting the best celebrity ballroom dancer of the year is too important to be left to the public. If the voters were given a free choice, they would probably choose him, despite his evident lack of ability, and therefore he has felt it necessary to pull out.

What a good job this is the only area where we let the general public decide something by vote!

Best quote: “I know a bit about voting“

Second best quote: Google News

John Sergeant pulls out of Strictly Come Dancing
Times Online – all 1,017 news articles »