Real people

One partial protection against the ever-present danger in the Blogosphere of losing yourself in an isolated “echo chamber” of like-minded thinkers is to step out of doors – and back in time – and actually meet real people.
A couple of days ago I stepped back a decade, to the London debating club which was the forum for my thinking in the years between talk.politics.misc in the Department of Computing lab and Anomaly UK. The views of people who are adjacent to me in physical space-time are perhaps deserving of more of my attention than they would be had I selected them from the limitless ether.

On the subject of selective education, one member drew a contrast between his own educational experience and that of today’s children. He said that as a working-class boy at a Grammar School, he and those like him had a desire to (horrible phrase) “better themselves” that seemed to be missing today. The “horrible phrase” comment was his own, and when I asked him why he thought it was horrible, he didn’t seem sure – he just said that we didn’t say things like that these days.
He didn’t seem to make any connection between the unfashionableness of the phrase (which he appeared to accept) and the demise of the thing itself, which he appeared to regret. The connection seems obvious to me.

Another speaker, a younger man, interested me because he said he had been dissuaded from going to University by the general perception of lowered standards and value of university education. He was planning to go to Sandhurst. I suspect more people are going to choose career paths that bypass higher education, and that some industries are going to take advantage. The military, with its own well-established training and education system, is well placed to do so.

Language for deception

I’ve been re-reading Dennett’s Kinds of Minds, and was struck by his suggestion that the key advantage in being able to think about one’s desires, rather than simply following them, is that it enables you to be deceptive about them.
What he doesn’t say, but supports the theory, is that it is easier to know what we want people to think we want, than it is to know what we really want. The implication is that our real desires are deeper than the reasons we defend them with. Our “reasons” are fundamentally for consumption by others.
This is a commonplace in politics, where the justifications for our political positions change more easily than the positions themselves. It is consistent, for instance, with Arnold Kling’s recent piece on how the core beliefs of the US left are derived from theories that few still accept.
Not that the problem is confined to the left – that is just one example I read today. It will always be easier to spot that sort of thing in one’s political opponents, but I think it is universal.
I don’t mean to exaggerate and say that reason is entirely subservient to prejudice. But, if Dennett is right, then in order of priority, and of evolutionary chronology, unconscious intentions come first, then reasoned “approximations” to the unconscious intentions, and finally, feedback from conscious calculation to unconscious (or subconscious – I’m not sure of the technical distinction) intention or attitude. That feedback allows us to change our minds based on reason, but its status as a spin-off of other uses of reason explains why it is difficult for us to do so.

Copyright and TV Show DVDs

Via Lawrence Lessig, an interesting Hollywood Reporter article:

Many old TV shows are not being released on DVD because of the cost of obtaining the neccesary rights to the music they contain. While rights to use a song in a film include rights to DVDs etc., the same does not apply to TV series. In some cases shows are being released with the original music dropped or replaced.

This looks like an instance of a wider issue of music being overpriced relative to video. Take any film more than a couple of years old, and you can buy the DVD for less than the CD of the soundtrack album. (As examples, I’ve just checked Titanic and Fellowship of the Ring on Play.com). How can the soundtrack album be worth more than the film? And how can “Who are you” be worth a significant portion of a series of CSI? Any economist got a view?

Lessig cites this as an example of an “anticommons” – an area where too many parties have the right to prevent a good being used, so it ends up underused. This may be correct (transaction costs are significant), but without an answer to my question above, I’m not sure it’s the real explanation.

Update: On reflection, there is a probable reason for the CD / DVD pricing disparity: competition from free TV. Films more than a few years old are likely to be shown on TV, leaving less reason to buy them on DVD. CDs are less subject to this kind of competition – the songs on them get more free-to-listen airplay when they’re new than when they’re old; if I want to listen to the Titanic songs, I’ve pretty much got to buy the CDs, but if I want to watch the film I just need wait a few months until it’s next on air.

It turns out this has little relevance to the TV-show music issue, so it leaves the “anticommons” theory as a strong contender.

Lib Dem troubles

In my previous post I defended the press on the grounds that they had to supply what their customers wanted. On the other hand, they clearly have, and exercise, the ability to set the news agenda. And I can’t help noticing that someone seems to have it in for the Liberal Democrats.

In a matter of about three weeks, three of their senior figures have been “outed” in the press – Kennedy as an alcoholic, then Oaten and now Hughes as homosexuals. Certainly in the first two cases, and possibly in the third, the facts were known for a long time, but someone chose to make them public now. Why now?

There is an echo of the occasion when the then leader, Paddy Ashdown, was exposed as an adulterer in the run-up to an election. The information in that instance may have from a burglary of a solicitor’s office, and political skulduggery was suspected.

There is not an election coming up now, so what is the reason? The Tories have a new leader, one who has a chance at winning over some Lib Dem voters… is there a connection?

Alternatively, Iain Dale suggests that betting on the leadership race might be the reason.

On the subject of Simon Hughes’ continuing candidacy, it has been suggested (by Jonathan Freedland among others) that his sexuality is not a problem, but his past dishonesty concerning it is. I don’t think that is a reasonable position: One can say now that he should have been open, but like any senior politician, he has been around a couple of decades, and being honest in the 70’s or 80’s would have been a less realistic option than it is now. Note that, according to the Wikipedia article, in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, even Hughes’ opponent Peter Tatchell tried (unsuccessfully) to cover up his homsexuality.

Race and the press

Ian Blair said today that the way crime is reported in the press is racist. Specifically, the murder of a white lawyer recently got a lot more coverage than the murder of an Asian builders’ merchant.

There is an arbitrariness about what gets heavy press coverage – Blair also brought up the Soham furore – and very likely race comes into it. The press deals in superficiality, and, at least superficially, the Tom ap Rhys Pryce murder has more “it could have been me” relevance to more of the papers’ readerships than did that of Balbir Matharu.

This works the other way, of course: a murder by a white person is also superficially more newsworthy than one by a non-white.

Is this a bad thing? The superficiality of the media is regrettable, but probably inevitable. Blair was contrasting the treatment of the murders by the press with the treatment by his force – defending himself against similar charges of disproportionate attention. I think we can agree that the police should not be superficial, and particularly that their effort should not be influenced by something as superficial as race. I am reluctant to claim that all murders are equal, in terms of the police effort that should be devoted to them, regardless of the circumstances – I would claim that a random murderer who is likely to strike again is more urgent than a murderer who was settling a specific grudge, for instance – but equality is probably a good rule of thumb.

And if we want the police to be even-handed as regards irrelevances such as race, it would help if the press were too. On that basis, the press should be at least encouraged to take note of criticism such as Blair’s. At the end of the day, though, they, unlike the police, are at the mercy of the lightest whims of their customers.

Two kinds of rules

I’m trying to make sense of this piece by Ed Felten, on what he calls a “weapon of mass virtual destruction” in an online game. (You will probably have to read it first to understand the rest of this.)
The problem isn’t that I think he’s wrong – I’m pretty sure he’s right. The problem is I’m not sure why he’s right.
He says:

Should the FBI get involved in this mess?
It seems to me that they should. A WMVD of this sort is just a fancy denial of service attack, and a deliberate denial of service attack against a large network service looks to me like a crime. It’s possible that the first attack wasn’t meant to crash Second Life — though even if not deliberate it was certainly reckless — but subsequent attacks could only have been intended to cause a crash.

That sounds very promising to start with. A crashing server is a “real world” event, not a “virtual world” event, and since a real human has deliberately caused a real-world harm, we are in the domain of real-world law enforcement.

On reflection, though, the issues start to blur. The jargon term “crash” can be used to describe a large range of computer behaviours. The assumption in this case is that the game server software stopped working, and either terminated itself or had to be terminated by an operator. There are other possibilities, though. For instance, it might have continued to function “correctly”, but, since the majority of the “virtual objects” being maintained were by now copies of the “gray goo”, the actual progress of everything else might have been slowed down, possibly by 1000 or 10000 times. It’s not actually particularly likely, but it’s quite plausible, and it would actually be difficult to tell whether this was the case or not. Even the most casual computer user has been faced with the question “is it working, is it going slow, or is it dead?”

So what? If it doesn’t make any difference to any actual user, then it’s no different, right? But it’s less clear in this case that we’re talking about a “real world” event. A server rebooting is a real world event, but a program processing objects of type A not objects of type B? Not really.

And that, I think, negates Felten’s argument. He calls it a “denial of service” but it is more of a matter of opinion – if the server is servicing the allegedly malicious user rather than other users, that could be seen as a legitimate “aim” of the game. After all, if you kill the character of another player in a game (which in many games is more or less the main point), you are “denying service” to that player, but you are no more guilty of “denial of service” than you are of murder So the fact that you’re deliberately impairing the experience of other players does not make you actions illegal, any more than if you killed them with a sword in one of the more combat-oriented games.

The obvious difference is in the intention of the game, or its organisers. You’re supposed to decapitate people in Everquest, you’re not supposed to destroy the world in Second Life. But that’s weak too – the attraction of Second Life, from what I can see, is it’s open-endedness, the fact that you can do things in it that nobody else thought of doing.

In conclusion, I think that it is reasonable that this “WMVD” could be considered to be against real-world law, but it’s a matter of judgement, and of degree. Effectively, an arbitrary line would have to be drawn – how much are you imparing the service of other users, how far from the intention of the owner of the service are your actions. Many other things are like that, of course.

Two related issues, for comparison:

In sport, there are rules that you can break with purely in-game consequences, and rules that you can’t. For instance in soccer, if you are behind the last defender when the ball is played to you, you are offside, and if the match officials judge it correctly, the other side gets the ball. There is nothing immoral in being offside, even deliberately (in the hope of getting away with it). On the other hand, if you deliberately trip up another player, that also results in the ball being given to the other side, but in addition it is considered to be misbehaviour. If the foul is considered to be deliberate or reckless, you can receive extra in-game penalties, and also penalties that are within the game-system but external to the actual game being played – for example, being disqualified for another game, or being fined by the game’s governing body or your club. In extreme cases, you can be subject to out-of-game penalties, such as being charged with assault or sued. This has happened a few times. The same three levels can apply in online computer games. You can be pursued by some kind of in-game policeman – this is part of the game, like a free kick for offside. You can be excluded or restricted by the game’s organisers – this is like being suspended. Or you can be pursued through the law. The distinctions aren’t always clear. (Was a criminal fraud committed on 22 June 1986?)

Second, similar questions of proper and improper uses exist with other network services. An SMTP server can receive email messages. Some servers are configured to receive only from certain users, but to forward mail to anywhere. Some servers are configured to receive from anywhere, but deliver only to certain addresses. Servers can be, but rarely are, configured to accept mail from anyone and forward it to anywhere. Some servers are not correctly configured to enforce the restrictions intended by their owners. What uses of these servers are proper? Is it a crime to take advantage of a misconfiguration? of a software bug? Over the past 5 years or so, some arbitrary lines have been drawn.

Referrer logs

It’s funny when you get your news from your blog’s referrer logs. I saw a cluster of hits from search engine results for “explosion in Luton”. Looks like there’s something I need to know about…
It seems that a fuel depot in Hemel has blown up – apparently by accident. (Power surge, perhaps?) The BBC have quotes from people here who were woken by the blast, but I slept through it.
Interestingly, the first hit I got from a search engine link was at 0611. The first explosion was at 0603. Someone must have heard the blast and immediately started web searches to find out about it – that shows a distinct lack of understanding of how search engines work.
Update: As you might gather, I have no information on this other than what’s been on television. The depot is 10 miles due south from here, but the smoke is not blowing this way. I was not woken, but many of my neighbours were (and possibly my 3-year-old, but he knows better than to disturb us on Sunday morning). The main effects look like beihttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifng a big insurance claim (100-200 million, I would guess), and disrupted travel for a day or two.

Crime: Why rape is different

In the previous post on rape, I reasoned on a basis that rape is like other crimes. “in general, the biggest cost of crime is the cost of avoiding it.” There are reasons, however, why rape is often different from other crimes, even other very serious crimes.
First, many cases of rape are actually very difficult to prove. Other types of serious crime against the person are much easier to prove – at least much easier to prove that a crime has taken place. If one person kicks another’s teeth in, there is a very strong presumption that a crime of assault has taken place. If one person has another’s wallet, again, it is not very likely that it was given voluntarily. If two people have sex, however, there is no automatic assumption that rape has occurred. One can – at the cost of considerable further indignity to the victim – prove that sex occurred, but not that it was non-consensual.
This is reflected in the part of the Amnesty survey that I didn’t previously discuss – the perceived incidence of rape. Many victims do not report the crime to the police because they know it cannot be proved, or do not want to go through what would be necessary to prove it. Among those that do report the crime, only a few percent actually result in convictions. Again, many victims choose not to endure the trial process.
The second distinctive feature of the common sort of rape (which is what I am discussing) is that it is invariably a crime committed by men against women, so its treatement is affected by – and affects – the status of men and women in society.
Quick aside: The Disillusioned Kid in a comment below draws distinction between “stranger rape” and “aquaintance rape”. I would deal with three categories: Abusive domestic situations, aquaintance rape, and stranger rape. The stranger kind, which as the Kid points out is relatively rare, is more like other crimes of violence – consent is less likely to be an issue, and detection is mainly a matter of identifying the perpetrator. The Amnesty survey, seems to me mainly to apply to aquaintance rape – the friend or acquaintance who “goes too far” with a woman who has been “asking for it” by comporting herself provocatively.
This is where the two features come together. When women had distinctly inferior status in society, the kinds of behaviour discussed in the survey – essentially those of a woman enjoying her freedom and expressing her sexuality while not under the direct “protection” of a man – were considered inappropriate and reprehensible in their own right. This was a piece of the general subjection of women, but had the side effect of protecting them from that kind of rape. (Before getting nostalgic, it is worth reflecting that it gave no protection against domestic abuse, which was perhaps even more prevalent than it is now).
This is what makes the issue politically sensitive: advice about avoiding dangerous “aquaintance rape” situations sounds exactly like asking women to resume their traditional, socially inferior, position. The motives of the “advisor” can be ambiguous. An understandable response to such advice is that the “solution” to violence against women ought not to be one that itself represses women – if anyone’s behaviour is to be restricted, it should be men’s.
Not that the present situation is all good for men, either. In the traditional, patriarchal social order, while “respectable” women had no sexual freedom, respectable men (meaning those with a reputation to protect) did not associate freely with women either. This protected men from false accusations of rape. Because just as rape is difficult to prove, it is also difficult to disprove. A man who meets a woman in private is risking his reputation – he can be accused of rape for reasons of spite or blackmail. Quoting this home office paper:
“Nine percent of cases [of reported rape] were designated false, with a high proportion of those involving 16 to 25 year olds. However, closer analysis of this category applying Home Office counting rules reduces this to three percent. Even the higher figure is considerably lower than the extent of false reporting estimated by police officers interviewed in this study”.
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, in the same way as not leaving the house unlocked for the electrician is.

The DRM problem again:

Just a break from my current theme, to point to this piece “DRM, Incompatibility and Market Power: A Visit to the Sausage Factory” by Ed Felten. It is a superb account of the motives and incentives that produce the DRM that we are seeing today. It needs to be listed along with Cory Doctorow’s 1994 talk at Microsoft as the essential reading to understand the subject. This is why I insist that the mechanisms (technical and legal) of enforcement of copyright are more significant than the questions of what is copyrightable and what isn’t

“Running through this whole convoluted tale are two consistent threads. DRM is used as a weapon not against infringers but against market rivals. And when companies use DRM to undermine compatibility, law-abiding customers lose.”

Crime: Rape

The recent controversy relating to rape was triggered by the Amnesty International poll, which found that 34% of respondents in the UK said that “a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she has behaved in a flirtatious manner.”

The obvious problem with the poll is that we don’t, as a society, have a widely-shared coherent view of what “responsibility” in this sense actually means. The question could be interpreted in very different ways, just on that one point.

I suspect what many of the 34% meant is “behaving in a flirtatious manner increased her risk of being raped”, which is probably true, but is not very interesting or important.

Alternatively, some may have meant “behaving in a flirtatious manner is something which should be generally discouraged, because of the increased risk of rape”. That is a more significant claim, and a more controversial one. It still doesn’t lead very far in terms of policy, however.

Slightly stronger would be to mean “behaving in a flirtatious manner is something women should be punished for, because of the increased risk of rape”. (Someone believing that may or may not feel that actually being raped is sufficient punishment.) That is quite an extreme claim, very much at odds with the publicly acknowledged values of our society. I would be very surprised if many people in this country, outside of some third-world immigrant communities, believed that.

A more interesting interpretation would be, “A rapist should be punished less severely if his victim was behaving in a flirtatious manner, because she shares some of the responsibility”. I could believe that there is a genuine, substantial difference of opinion in the country over this question.

Indeed, there are two reasons why a man might be considered less responsible for rape as a result of the woman’s behaviour. The first is provocation: effectively that in certain circumstances a “reasonable man” might be expected to commit the offence and therefore should not be held responsible. The second is consent: might certain behaviour of the woman be reasonably interpreted as consent, even if not intended that way.

On the question of provocation, as I said, I belive a substantial minority might feel that “behaving in a firtatious manner” or “wearing sexy or revealing clothing” might at least partly reduce the responsibility of the rapist. I would have to disagree with them myself, however. I think that a “reasonable man”, as the legal formulation has it, is quite able to restrain himself from raping even flirtatious or attractively-dressed women. (This is a question of fact, and open to dispute with evidence, but my conclusion is based on the behaviour of reasonable men as I have observed it). On that basis, I feel that a man who chooses not to restrain himself should be held entirely responsible. (That is a question of morality). If an unreasonable man is genuninely unable to restrain himself from raping flirtatious women, then he is dangerously insane and needs to be treated as such. (establishing such inability is a difficult technical question which I will not deal with).

On the separate question of consent, I think it can be generally agreed that none of the behaviours asked about in the survey (including “having many sexual partners” or “being drunk”) actually constitute consent to sex. The question as to whether the man could reasonably believe a woman consented, when in fact she didn’t, gets murky, however.

I think I can see a way through it, however. From the point of view of a potential trial, there are two unknown facts. One is whether the alleged victim actually consented to sex. The other is whether the alleged rapist believed she consented to sex.

The first is quite difficult to establish, but it is essential to do so to get a conviction (and rightly so – if she consented, she wasn’t raped. If you can’t prove she didn’t consent, you can’t prove she was raped. If you can’t prove the crime, the accused cannot be convicted).

Assume the court has established that the victim did not consent. If the court, sitting presumably weeks or months later, can establish beyond reasonable doubt that there was no consent, it seems to me entirely reasonable to assume that the accused, actually present and participating, must have been at least equally able to do so. Bear in mind that “reasonable doubt” is not sufficient reason for him to get on with it – if unsure or indifferent to consent, it is still rape. One could imagine some fairly far-fetched situations where a man might be genuinely mistaken, but as a general rule, if the evidence in front of him does not indicate lack of consent, it’s hard to see how a court could be convinced otherwise.

In summary, I don’t draw any conclusions from the survey results, because the questions were too vague for the answers to be useful. There is possibly a serious disagreement on some substantive points, between a section of the population and Amnesty International, and if so I am in agreement with Amnesty.

The survey produced a lot of fuss, but one of the more interesting responses I saw was a circular that has gone round several blogs, including the disillusioned kid. It first makes the point, correct if a little obvious, that there wouldn’t be any rape, however women behaved, if men didn’t commit rape. It then goes on to say: “Don’t tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.” That’s a remarkable statement. Recall my post before last: in general, the biggest cost of crime is the cost of avoiding it. “Our whole way of life is conditioned by the need to make crime difficult, in ways that are so ingrained that they’re difficult to notice.”

There are a few reasons the original author of the circular might have made that request. One is if he or she doesn’t believe that a woman’s behaviour has any effect on the risk of her becoming a victim of rape. While it’s true that no behaviour is completely safe, I think that’s a severely inaccurate view. Possibly, the author considers it a question of priority: that effort spent encouraging women “to be safe” would be more effectively employed encouraging men not to commit rape. That’s a coherent argument, but as I said, we take considerable precautions to protect ourselves from all crimes, because we generally believe that it is effective. No-one has said that we shouldn’t audit companies’ books, because the effort would be better spent encouraging people not to commit fraud.

Priorities aside, it might be that effects to encourage women “to be safe” have an adverse effect on the behaviour of men. I think this is probably what the author meant. It might be that a mass of voices saying (correctly) that women are more at risk of rape if they behave in certain ways might be interpreted by some men as meaning they are not doing something so bad if they rape a woman who is “defying” this advice. If so, then it may well be a bad thing that this advice is so prevalent.

This is rooted in the very first thing I talked about, the confusion over the meaning of responsibility. There is a notion that responsibility can be “shared”, which I think is fundamentally misleading. We each make our decisions in an environment that has been made mainly by other people, but to judge any decision, legally or morally, we have to take that environment as given. Many people might have responsibility for any bad outcome, but they have it separately, they do not share it. We might put ourselves at risk of all sorts of dangers, from other people or from other elements of our environment, and if we are wise we will consider our own responsibility as we do so, but if we are the victim of a criminal, his responsibility is not lessened by our risky behaviour. If people are
unclear on this point, then that is where we need the “education” that Amnesty and others call for, not telling potential victims untruths about what their risks are.

In this cause, the Amnesty survey itself is “part of the problem” – by talking casually about “responsibility” without discussing what it means, it is actually encouraging the sloppy way of thinking “flirting is dangerous, so it means it’s not so bad if I rape her” that it aims to put a stop to.