Matthew Taylor

Tony Blair’s outgoing policy chief has said he fears the internet could be fuelling a “crisis” in the relationship between politicians and voters.

What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It’s basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are.

He challenged the online community to provide more opportunities for “people to try to understand the real trade-offs that politicians face and the real dilemmas that citizens face”.

In one sense, he’s right: the big problems in politics are not about politicians, they are about competing and incompatible demands.

What prevents these difficult problems being even seriously addressed, however, is the venality, stupidity and mendaciousness of politicians.

It’s not the public who are ignoring the real issues, it is the politicians.

If we were to get politicians who were not venal, stupid and mendacious, the real difficult problems would not go away, but at least they could be faced.

The Freedom Bill

The Liberal Democrats are hardly really a party – they have no coherent political position, and no core of policies that their members and supporters share, but I think this initiative has not received the positive response it deserves:

Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are proposing a Freedom Bill to sweep away unnecessary laws.

They list a “top 10”, including ID cards, restrictions on protests, control orders, indefinite DNA retention of innocent suspects, and so on.

They also ask for suggestions from the public.

BBC story

My voting paradox has a name

I learn from Chris Dillow that the question I asked about voting – “Is the fact that others’ votes are correlated with mine something I need to take into account when estimating the effect of my vote?” – is in fact a long-standing question with a name: Newcomb’s Paradox

The questions are not quite identical – Newcomb postulates an entity called “the Predictor”, whereas I am working from the observed fact that opinion polls more or less work.

The question may come down to why Fred Bloggs’ vote is correlated with mine. I used a thought experiment in which Fred and I are identical robots being fed identical inputs, and our votes are correlated 100%. In that case, the correlation is due to the fact that the two votes are determined by the same inputs.

On the subject of free will, I take the view that what matters is whether my decisions are all determined by the world outside myself – and I think it’s pretty obvious that they usually aren’t, and that therefore I am free.

The fact that my actions are determined by the state of the world including myself is both trivial and uninteresting.

The bit that is interesting is “what am I”. The relevant answer is that I am a phenomenon of matter – that what I refer to above as the world outside myself must necessarily not include my brain and body. The reason this subject has caused confusion historically is that there was an assumption that my body was external to my self.

(There is much more to the answer than that, but that is the part that is relevant to questions of determinism and freedom).

Scott Adams is interesting on this, though he doesn’t yet get the point. I suspect he eventually will.

Michael Wolff

Astonishingly ignorant column in Vanity Fair by Michael Wolff.

“Brand America, which ruled the global marketplace with its vision of cool capitalism, has been discontinued. This is Bush Country now, and the world is recoiling from a new image that makes the U.S. as much a danger to its friends—including chief enabler Tony Blair—as it is to its enemies”

You WHAT?? “cool capitalism”? Capitalism may be tolerated in Britain, more than in mainland Europe, as a necessary evil, but only a handful of lunatic-fringies like me would ever have called it “cool”.

Similarly with the YouGov poll Wolff quotes – I’m sure the results would not have been greatly different in August 2001 or in 1998. Clinton was talked about in very much the same terms as Bush is now. The first reaction in Britain to September 2001 was largely a sniggering “Now they see what it’s like”.

As the infinitely better-informed Robert Kagan wrote in the lecture I mentioned here, ‘Samuel Huntington warned about the “arrogance” and “unilateralism” of U.S. policies when Bush was still governor of Texas.’

If American commentators like Wolff can be so unaware of what is really going on in Britain, of all places, what are the chances of there being any insight into what’s going on in Iraq or Pakistan?

At the risk of repeating myself ad nauseam: The major global conflict today is between the EU core and the USA; Britain is very divided regarding the conflict; the antics of primitivist Islam and the war on terror are a sideshow, but may in the long run develop into a proxy war, if the EU position goes from hoping the Islamists can damage the USA to supporting them outright. Blair is as enthusiastic about invading Iraq as he was about invading Yugoslavia, and would have been pushing Bush to invade Iraq had any pushing been necessary.

Ubuntu Dapper on IBM 300PL

(This probably belongs on some Ubuntu wiki page rather than here on my blog – if you’re not currently trying to get Ubuntu to install, this will probably not be of much interest to you).

I picked up a 500Mz P3 box on eBay yesterday, and had a bit of trouble installing Ubuntu on it. I solved the problem in the end, so here’s the solution for those with similar troubles.

The machine is an IBM 300PL model 6862-U60

It would boot off the Ubuntu “Dapper Drake” 6.06-1 disk, but would hang at various points through the boot process.

Pressing F6 at the first ubuntu boot screen lets you see and edit the kernel boot line. I deleted “splash” and “quiet” from the boot line to see more output. That showed that the problem was I/O errors on the CD-ROM drive (hdc).

hdc: media error (bad sector) status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: media error (bad sector) error=0x34 { AbortedCommand LastFailSense=0x03 }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 0
Buffer I/O error on device hdc, logical block 1

I tried different discs, a different CD-ROM drive, and connecting the CD-ROM as slave on the primary controller instead of master on the secondary. No change (except for it being “hdb” instead of hdc in the last case, as expected.)

I tried an old Ubuntu disc (Breezy Badger, in fact). It ran perfectly. I noted that doing “hdparm /dev/hdc” from a shell under the Breezy CD showed that dma was not enabled. It looked like dma wasn’t working properly on the CD-ROM. (the chipset is an Intel PIIX4)

I added the kernel option “ide=nodma” before the ” — ” on the boot line to see if the Dapper CD would work. It got further, but still failed once it came to trying to unpack the package files.

The problem is that while the kernel wasn’t automatically enabling dma on the CD-ROM, the Ubuntu system was enabling it itself in the installer.

There is a separate option “nohdparm” which prevents that. Because it’s a Ubuntu option not a kernel option, it goes after the ” — ” on the boot line.

My full boot line was therefore:

boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw ide=nodma — nohdparm

(I hadn’t touched anything before “rw”)

And with that, the installer worked perfectly.

Quick summary: Press “F6” when the Ubuntu screen comes up, remove “quiet” and “splash”, add “ide=nodma” before the ” — ” and “nohdparm” after.

Once the system is installed onto the hard disk, edit /etc/hdparm.conf, and add the following

/dev/hdc {
        dma = off
}

so that the CD-ROM drive will work correctly in the installed system.
The onboard sound isn’t automatically detected; it’s a Crystal 4236B; I added the following line to /etc/modules:


snd_cs4236

(There might be a neater way of doing that, I don’t know).

Owning Stuff

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing picks up the story about the 82-year-old woman who paid $2000 in rental for a telephone, but he manages to draw a useful conclusion from it beyond “Aren’t old people daft”.

“Even if you know you’ll never miss a payment, we all know that owning enriches you, renting enriches someone else.”

I think this is fundamentally true. In the long run, the way to benefit from capitalism is to accumulate capital.

His point is directed at the entertainment industry, who are attempting to convert their market from consumers buying and owning recordings, towards consumers renting the right to access recordings. This approach may make sense in the context of the costs of enforcing copyright, but it suffers from the fact Doctorow recognises, that if the industry is not selling ownership of recordings, it is not selling so much value to consumers, and therefore should not expect to take as much money.

An unrelated obstacle to owning stuff, and thereby gaining the full benefits of capitalism, is the general shortage of storage space. That is yet another reason why the War on Housing is the biggest problem facing Britain today.

Meeting with the Representatives of Science

I’ve made two comments about Pope Benedict’s lecture last week – one complaining about the bad internationalization of the website, the second dealing with the spurious outrage from Islamic rentamobs.

Given that, I will complete the “trinity”, so to speak, by addressing the actual content of the speech.

Benny is cool with science. “The scientific ethos, moreover, is – as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector – the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit.”

But he claims that science depends on assumptions about the nature of reality which are not themselves scientific:

“This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty.”

The conclusion is that to justify the presupposition of “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality”, one must resort to the twaddle of the philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Kant, thereby importing Christian theology into the scientific worldview.

Of course, there is no necessity to do any such thing. The only necessary presumption to start doing science is that there is an external reality which exhibits some regularities. One can then start to probe what those regularities might be.

That necessary presumption is unprovable, but it is necessary not only for science but for any kind of social activity. The only alternative to it is solipsism, for if one denies that an external reality exists, or if one claims that it could vary entirely unpredictably, there is no mechanism by which one could become aware, even in principle, of the existence of another mind. It would then follow that anyone other than me that I am aware of is merely a figment of my imagination, and there is no point in attempting to to convince them of anything.

A sad story

An 18-year-old woman was convicted yesterday in Cardiff Crown Court of making false rape allegations. (Attempting to pervert justice).

She was dancing at the house of a stranger she met in a bar, and claimed she had been drugged and raped.

In the normal way of things this case would just have dropped into the 94% of reported rapes that do not lead to a conviction – the figure that Carol is so upset about.

What made it different is that one of the four defendants had phone-video-camera footage that proved the allegations were false.

Even without it, the case would quite likely not have made it to trial. If it did, her personal website on which she described herself as a “wild girl” whose hobbies were “sex and pole-dancing” would have been used by the defence. It would perhaps have been suggested that if that evidence had been disallowed, a conviction might have been more likely, and that such a change would improve the 6% conviction rate.

I do not mean to suggest that all or most of the 94% are false allegations of this kind. But I am sure some of them are. Lack of evidence is not a “technicality”: If the only evidence that a crime took place is the word of the alleged victim, and the accused says it didn’t happen, no reasonable justice system will be able to provide a conviction.

Imagine that she was really telling the truth. In that case, she would be equally unlikely to see the men convicted. There’s simply no way she could prove what really happened.

Andrew Hall of the Criminal Bar Association was quoted in the Times story Carol linked to saying “In my view the system generally works, in that guilty people are generally convicted and innocent people are acquitted.” I don’t think I would go that far. I suspect a lot of rapists are acquitted for lack of evidence, but I don’t think the criminal justice system can do anything about it.

That’s not the same as saying nothing can be done about it. I addressed this issue before at great length a year ago, here and here. We have thrown off the restrictions or repressions of sexual behaviour that were previously the norm, and while they were to some extent the product of superstition, bossiness or patriarchy, they were also protections from real danger. The existence of law and morality do not remove the neccessity of protecting ourselves – that is why we lock our doors. Women who behave like C.S. did are running the risk of being raped (not that that reduces responsibility of rapists), and men who behave like these four men are running the risk of being falsely accused (not that that reduces the responsibility of the false accuser). Casual sex with strangers is dangerous in more ways than one. While people behave the way these five people behaved, the 94% is here to stay.

I will repeat the position I took a year ago:

The whole old-fashioned customs of slow courtship can be seen as a mechanism from protecting women from unprovable rapes, and men from un-disprovable false accusations. It can also, of course, be seen as the rituals of a society not at ease with sex, and again as the result of seeing women at least in part as being the property of men. Return to the past is not an option. But wishing away problems that are eternal does not help either. The idea that we should only have intimate contact with a person if we have already publicly demonstrated a close association with them seems to me neither repressed nor sexist – it is a costly restriction on our freedom that protects us from some dangers

(footnote: I have not named the girl here – in the perhaps arrogant hope that this blog will still be around and searchable in years to come, I do not want to be providing information about her to search engines. She’s been idiotic and done herself a lot of damage, but she’s 18 and still has a life ahead of her. For the same reason, I deplore the newspapers’ decision to publish photographs of her in her underwear to illustrate the story).

The Church again.

There has been an important development in the story about the Pope’s lecture at the University of Regensburg.

They’ve fixed the HTML. If you follow the same link that I gave in my previous entry on the subject, the rubbish characters have been replaced by html entities for the correct greek letters. It now renders correctly, at least in IE on my desk.

I didn’t think the other controversy arising from the lecture was worthy of comment, but now that people are being killed over it, I feel compelled to state the obvious.

Benny was talking about the relationship between religion and reason, and the different attitudes to that relationship that have shaped Christianity through history. His conclusion in a sentence is: “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.”

Along the way, he affirms that the “synthesis with Hellenism” (i.e. Greek philosophy) is not an incidental “preliminary inculturation” of Christianity, but is a necessary part of it: “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.”

It was in the context of this “synthesis” that he opened with the “startling brusqueness” of Manuel II Paleologus.

“The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident.”

Benny then moves on through history: “in the late Middle Ages we find … in contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God’s voluntas ordinata.

“The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity – a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age.”

… “Fundamentally, Harnack’s goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God.”

So there is the reason for citing a 14th century emperor — to show the views that were current before the first “dehellenization” in the middle ages.

There are two questions that have been raised regarding this lecture. One is whether Benny anticipated the global reaction to the “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman” snippit of the quotation, but had some nefarious reason for wanting to stir things up.

Maybe I’m being overgenerous, but the Church seems to me to have a track record of saying exactly what it means, right or wrong. If Benny had wanted to take a more aggressive stance towards Islam, he could have done so in his own words.

The second question is whether he should have anticipated the result. Again, the church is not a modern political party. It does not employ focus groups, and if it has spin doctors, they are not primarily concerned with “popular opinion”. The Pope may be regretting having used the words he did (though interestingly, his so-called apology does not actually say so), but I do not think it occured to him or anyone else to scan what he was preparing to say for things that could be taken out of context by the ignorant and the stupid.

Thin Models

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has called for ‘stick-thin’ models to be banned from the catwalks during London Fashion Week.
There are three problems with underweight fashion models:

  1. They don’t look very good.
  2. They will suffer ill health through being underweight, and encourage others to do so.
  3. They make people unhappy by presenting an unattainable ideal.

The first problem is really a minor one. If you want to look at attractive women, there are many useful resources available. Just remember to avoid fashion shows and fashion magazines.

The second is the main problem, but since the medical industry is still recommending that people adopt a body weight that is more unhealthy than that which they consider “overweight”, it’s a bit rich to be blaming the dressmakers.

The third is seen as a problem, but in fact it’s the whole point. Fashion is all about exclusivity and status. It’s about in-groups and out-groups, and the most prestigious in-group is the one that people want to join but can’t.

Beauty doesn’t cut it as a marker for fashion. There are just too many beautiful women. Take any beautiful woman, say from the best 5% of the 18-25 age group, and it’s impossible to find another woman that would overwhelmingly be recognised as definitely more beautiful.

Thinness (and tallness) is another matter. You can find a model who’s tall and thin, but if your competitor gets one taller and thinner, everyone will agree that yes, that model is taller and thinner than yours. You want your fashion to be associated in people’s minds with the most exclusive of in-groups, and that means the very tallest and thinnest of models. You want a model who’s one in a thousand, not one in twenty.

It doesn’t make sense to complain about thinness of the model because it presents an unobtainable dream, when the job of the model is to sell a $5000 dress.