Areté

Moving on

2012-02-04T07:17:00.000-08:00

Hi all. I'm officially closing this blog. It's over a year since I've last posted, so this probably won't come as a surprise to anyone.

Why, then, am I bothering to close it? Why not just leave it up in case I feel like re-starting in future?

Well, if I re-started, it probably wouldn't be here. My views are the same, but my pre-occupations are very different. These days I'm more of an economics geek than a science geek. I don't enjoy arguing with creationists or Christians. I have a slightly higher dating success rate. And I try not to wear my heart on my sleeve so much.

In short, a lot of the stuff on this blog would now be moderately embarrassing for me if it were ever linked to my real identity. Not so much because it's wrong, but because it doesn't match the image I present. Having someone find your early blog postings is like having your mum show them your baby photos.

At some point I may start blogging somewhere else, either under another pseudonym or with my real name. If you're interested in finding out where, leave a comment on this post.

So long and thanks for all the ~~fish~~ comments.

Theistic argument run-down

2010-09-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog post, Larry Moran raised the question: what are the best arguments for God? The subtext here is that apologists and "faitheists" are always claiming that there are sophisticated arguments for God out there, but rarely seem to be able to describe them.

One commenter, Martin, has risen to the challenge:

A few off the top of my head:

1. Kalam cosmological argument
2. Argument from contingency
3. Plantinga's modal ontological argument
4. Maydole's modal perfection ontological argument
5. Fine-tuning arguments
6. Argument from reason
7. Evolutionary argument against naturalism
8. Moral arguments
9. prosblogion.ektopos.com is loaded with arguments

Not bad, and kudos to Martin for actually coming up with some concrete claims. Ideally he would have said which of these arguments he finds most convincing, but that's a different issue. Let's have a look down the list.

1. The Kalam cosmological argument

This is a variant of the standard fine-tuning argument, employed by apologist William Lane Craig. The standard version takes as its premise that anything that exists has a prior cause. This lays it open to the reductio ad absurdum that, since God allegedly exists, He too must have a prior cause (a meta-God), who must also have had a cause (a meta-meta-God) and so on. Not a terribly elegant explanation.

The Kalam version simply states that everything that has a beginning has a prior cause. Since God is conjectured not to have had a beginning, He therefore doesn't need a cause. Since the universe is conjectured to have had a beginning, it does need a cause, and God fits nicely into the gap.

This argument has attracted a range of criticisms. In particular, it has been argued that things do appear without prior cause all the time in quantum mechanics. Various effects in QM only make sense if "virtual particles" are continually appearing from nothing (in pairs so as not to violate principles of symmetry) and vanishing again.

Craig's defence is that these events don't really count because the particles aren't coming from nothing; they're arising from fluctuations in the background energy field of the universe. This is technically accurate. But it means it's Craig's assumption is impossible to test. If anything within the universe can take the universe as its "prior cause", what exactly would count as a refutation?

There are of course other criticisms, but I only have the one evening. At the very least, though, this argument cannot be considered a "proof" in the same league as mathematical proofs or scientific theories. Like most extant philosophical proofs it is linguistically fuzzy, and it relies heavily on intuitions that are of dubious worth in a non-Euclidean universe.

2. Argument from contingency

A big topic in philosophy has been the study of the distinction between "necessary" truths (1+1=2 can't not be true) and "contingent" truths ("Lifewish is sitting in front of a keyboard" is true but could be false). There is an entire system of logic designed for drawing these distinctions.

The theistic argument from contingency (aka the modal cosmological argument) basically points out that it is really really difficult to reason from the existence of necessary truths to the existence of contingent truths. Basically, how did the first universe-like thing (whether that be this universe, another universe, or something more exotic like an M-brane) come about?

Since the universe is contingent, it is argued, there must have been something to start it off. God, who is assumed to be necessary, is considered a good candidate for this.

I haven't even looked into this one and already I can see a few refutations. For example, under what circumstances can necessary things give rise to contingent things? If it is easy for this to happen, could there not be a necessary thing other than God that's capable of the task? If it is hard, how come God can do it? Intuitively it seems odd that a necessary God could give rise to a contingent universe; how would He know which universe to create out of the various options?

It's also open to question in what sense the universe is contingent. Even if it is contingent, maybe it's part of a multiverse that is in some sense necessary. There are various other options to be considered, any one of which is enough to screw up the chain of logic.

Again, this argument is a nice philosophical tetherball to play with, but it is not terribly convincing to anyone who isn't already convinced. It exhibits basically the same cracks as all the other regress arguments, albeit with a slightly fancier wallpaper covering.

3. Plantinga's modal ontological argument

The classic ontological argument is: imagine the greatest God it's possible to imagine. If that God were real, He would be even greater. But then He wouldn't be the greatest God it's possible to imagine. For consistency with our initial premise, we have to assume that this God is real.

Plantinga's variant attempts to translate the fuzzy concept of "imagine" into more rigorous modal logic (the logic of "possible worlds"). First, assume that, in some possible world, there is a God that is "maximally excellent" (I love that phrase, it's very Bill and Ted).

But a maximally excellent God would presumably have the power to reach into other possible universes than their own (otherwise you can imagine an even more bodacious deity). So they'd be maximally excellent in all possible worlds, including our one.

This argument seems to have been absolutely slated by every philosopher who looks at it, including Plantinga himself. (See here for discussion.) Plantinga argues that, since the premises are "rational" (by which I think he means "not obviously daft"), the conclusion must be rational.

All I can say to that is: rational? You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. To me, and to most other skeptics, "rational" has a higher meaning than just "too complicated to understand, let alone critique". Security through obscurity is a bad principle to build a worldview on.

4. Maydole's modal perfection ontological argument

This is a relatively recent argument, and I hadn't come across it before. The original paper is behind a paywall, so I'm forced to rely on this forum post.

On investigation, this proof is like every other modal "proof" I've read: it smuggles in its conclusion via a complicated statement that sounds plausible until you think about what it actually means.

The statement: "If it's possible that there exists an x that is an F, then there exists an x so that it's possible that x is an F."

How it's being used: "If supremacy is possible then there must exist something that's potentially supreme."

Using this starting point, Maydole pulls a cunning trick. There is a standard theorem in modal logic that if something is possibly impossible then it's impossible. This makes more sense if you translate it differently: "If, from the viewpoint of some possible world, X is false in every possible world, then X is false".

By defining supremacy in terms of impossibilities, Maydole uses this theorem to create a sort of "potential world contagion" in a similar way to Plantinga's argument. Once the walls between possible universes are broken down, the possibility of God becomes the proof of God.

How to criticise this argument? Difficult without spending a full blog post on it - as with Plantinga's variant, the argument's main defence is its length (and I still only have the one evening). To start with, though, I would note that, in the version I linked to, statement P3 does not actually follow from statement M2.

I suspect that this error is a side-effect of the forum member's attempt to boil the argument down. But it demonstrates how fragile the argument is as a whole... and how little progress I can make without access to the original paper. I may research it in more depth at a later date if anyone is remotely interested.

5. Fine-tuning arguments

These have been refuted to death. The basic form is:

1) The universe (or some part of it) has a certain property with a certain value.
2) Human life wouldn't be able to tolerate a different value of that property.
3) Therefore God fine-tuned that property, because He cares about us so much.

Classic refutations:

1) Human life might not exist if the property were different... but some other wildly different lifeform might. In a universe with four dimensions, I wouldn't be typing this blog post. But a fifty-armed intelligent plasma cloud might be.

(See also Douglas Adams' puddle analogy).

2) Even if the property's value was an amazing slam-dunk, how many shots were there at the hoop? Many modern physical theories require there to be a ridiculously large number of alternate universes, each with slightly different attributes. Maybe we're just in the one of them that happened to be habitable?

(Note that there is no extant physical theory that requires God to exist...)

3) If God cares so much about getting the environment right for us, why is 99.9999etc percent of the universe uninhabitable vacuum? Why is 99.86% of the solar system's mass stuck inside the Sun, rather than being used to make more habitable planets? Why is 71% of the Earth's surface covered by relatively unhelpful water rather than fertile soil? God does not seem to be going out of His way to make things easy for us; why should the "fine-tuned" property be His one exception?

6. Argument from reason

Here I assume that Martin is referring to the transcendental argument. Roughly stated: in a Godless universe there's no obvious reason to think we'd be able to come to accurate conclusions. So, by arguing about anything (including God's existence), we are implicitly conceding that He exists.

I like to think of this as the Argument from It's My Ball And You Can't Play With It.

There are two really insanely obvious counters to this. Firstly, the ability to accurately model the behaviour of things confers a strong survival advantage. So we'd expect it to crop up occasionally in evolved species.

Such a creature might not be capable of discovering Ultimate Truths. But there's a pretty strong argument that we don't do that either.

Secondly, even if there were no Godless cause for rationality, this argument doesn't explain why God would be any more likely to create thinking organisms. Why would God not create mad creatures? Only by positing a very very specific God - a God that's naturally inclined to create sane humans - can we get to the conclusion. But then we might as well just posit a universe that is inclined to give rise to sane humans, and save ourselves the trouble of coming up with a proper causal explanation. This would make biology classes a lot shorter...

(In fact, many prominent believers have claimed that reason is in some way inferior. Why would God sully His hands with such an invention?)

Without dealing with both these counterarguments, the "argument from reason" is dead in the water.

7. Evolutionary argument against naturalism

This is just Plantinga's rehash of argument #6, focusing on the question of whether evolution can give rise to "true" rationality. Given his complete lack of understanding of evolutionary biology, I'm going with "no"...

See here for more discussion, if you're really keen. If you're a veteran of the Darwin Wars, or you're familiar with the classical transcendental argument, there's not a lot of interest here.

8. Moral arguments

In brief: people do good stuff, therefore God.

We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here, I'm afraid. The evolution of morality has been studied in truly obscene depth (see for example Matt Ridley's book The Origin of Virtue). It turns out that, in a vast range of situations, moral behaviour follows directly from evolutionary premises.

For example, around some coral reefs there are big fish who get food stuck in their teeth. There are smaller fish who clean their teeth for them (thus getting a free meal). But what's to stop the feeder fish from eating the cleaner fish that groom them?

It turns out this does occasionally happen. But the cleaner fish have got very good at distinguishing individual feeder fish, and can recognise a back-stabber they've seen previously. So any feeder fish that goes rogue soon runs out of targets. It also doesn't get its teeth cleaned, which is not good if you've got a hot date in the evening.

It's harder to account for "heroic" (read: suicidal) morality - people throwing themselves on grenades and so on. However, I'd like to draw your attention to the principle of overcommitment. This says: I will do what I've promised to do, and I will do it in a really over-the-top fashion.

This can have useful effects. For example, if you're the kind of person who goes psycho and beats the crap out of people if they spill your beer, no-one is going to come near your glass. The "mutually-assured destruction" of nuclear war is another example. Paradoxically, by gaining a reputation as a nutter, you can

The converse is also true. By becoming the very avatar of all that is nice and friendly, you can get people to give you more slack than you'd get any other way. Think of the respect people have for those who spend their lives and money on charitable causes. It's an excellent way to get girls.

The problem with this is that you have to keep doing it. The moment you throw a comrade on the hand grenade rather than jumping on it yourself, your cover is blown (even if you aren't...).

9. prosblogion.ektopos.com is loaded with arguments

Maybe so. But at this point I'll draw your attention to a famous quote by Einstein. On being informed that the Nazis had published a booklet called "100 Scientists against Relativity", he commented "if they were right, one would have been enough".

Similarly, if God existed, one truly solid demonstration would be worth a hundred of the half-baked "proofs" I've dissected above.

Best skeptical film ever

2010-09-28T10:22:00.001-07:00

Watson: You know, Holmes, I've seen things in war I don't understand. In India I once met a man who predicted his own death, right down to the number and the placement of the bullets that killed him. You have to admit, Holmes, that a supernatural explanation to this case is theoretically possible.

Holmes: Oh, agreed. But... It is a huge mistake to theorise without data. Inevitably one begins to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts.

- Sherlock Holmes (2009)

I am convinced that the scriptwriter for this film is a guerilla skeptic. It's bloody marvellous to see someone taking the mickey out of credulity, rather than the usual attitude of "it's not mainstream therefore it must be right".

Another great moment is the hilarious gypsy fortune-teller Holmes employs to try and scare Watson off getting married ("Oh, I see patterned tablecloths... oh... and china figurines, and... ugh! Lace doilies!"). And there's more, but first I should issue a SPOILER ALERT.

As it turns out, the villain (Lord Blackwood) has built an entire evil master-plan based on convincing people he has mystical powers. The first time we see him is overseeing the sacrifice of a young woman. When confronted by Holmes and Watson, he lures Watson into charging at him with violent intent.

And if Holmes hadn't been there, Watson would have died right then, untouched by human hand... Holmes stops Watson and points out the so-thin-it's-invisible skewer of glass extending from Blackwood's fingers to just in front of Watson's nose.

Trick 2: When in prison, Blackwood appears to put a spell of some kind on a warden, leaving him struggling in agony on the floor. This is a simple one to solve: the warden was bribed. Never underestimate the profit motive.

Trick 3: Blackwood is sentenced to death and hanged. But death is only the beginning! The stone on his tomb is broken, apparently from the inside, and his grave is empty (of Blackwood, anyway).

Holmes' solution: a special waistcoat with a hook near the throat, and the collaboration of the hangman (more bribery), allow Blackwood to survive his hanging. A drug-induced coma allows him to deceive the medical examiner. The tombstone was pre-broken then stuck back together with a water-soluble glue. When it rained the night after Blackwood's hanging, the glue dissolved and the stone fell apart under its own weight, releasing Blackwood.

Trick 4: It turns out that Blackwood's intended power base is a mystical (credulous) secret society that includes several MPs, judges, etc. One of the steps he uses to convince them of his "power" is to kill the Order's leader in his bath, again untouched by human hand.

Solution: A chemical painted round the rim of the bath that reacts with water to produce a rather nasty acid. Once the police drain the bath ("out of common decency" - idiots), the chemical is effectively undetectable. OK, so that's not exactly one you could figure out at home, but it's definitely another point for skepticism's scoreboard.

Anyway, you get the idea. There are some wonderful lines in it as well. My current favourite:

Member of the Order: "We know you don't believe in magic, Mr Holmes. We don't expect you to share our faith, merely our fear."
Holmes: "Of the two, fear is the more efficacious condition."

Well said, Holmes. Well said.

Oh the horror.

2010-09-25T13:24:00.001-07:00

Taxpayers are funding the purchase of pornography for sperm donors, screams The Sun, with its usual tone of faux outrage (remember, this is the newspaper that invented Page 3).

According to other reports, men who come in for sperm donation are routinely provided with "porn magazines, a cup of tea and a biscuit".

But this misses the most important question...

...What kind of tea, precisely? Earl Grey is one thing, but in my opinion Assam is a perversion of all things holy.

In the news: Qur'an burning

2010-09-09T00:07:00.000-07:00

Burn a Koran Day will go ahead.

OK, so I don't agree with fundamentalist Christians on a lot. Here's a list of exceptions to that rule.

1) They have every right to burn the Koran without fear of physical reprisal, either from their government or from other citizens.

2) They should have that right (and I'd feel the same if they were burning a book I valued).

3) People really are more afraid of upsetting Muslims than Christians.

4) Although I'm not terribly impressed by the individuals involved here, the real assholes of the piece are the folks in predominantly Islamic countries who whip up a riot at the drop of the hat.

Regarding point #4, can Gen. Petraeus & co please note: these people cannot be placated. They cannot be bought off by our silence on religious matters. And this is because they're not really doing it for religious reasons; they're doing it because it enhances their personal power in their local community.

As long as there are people who have a personal incentive to riot, riots will continue to happen. (If no excuse comes along, they'll make stuff up.) It's simple socioeconomics.

It's like trying to talk rationally with a belligerent drunk bloke who's accusing you of spilling his drink in a pub. It doesn't matter whether you really spilled his drink. He's not there to talk rationally, he's there to thump someone. All you can do is ignore, evade, or punch back.

Was it something I said?

2010-09-06T23:57:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, a gay guy tried to pick me up* at a club.

This doesn't bother me; if anything it's rather flattering. It's a free country and, although I happen to be straight, I'm not freaked out by people who aren't. I just did what I always did: acted friendly but noncommittal and ignored the fact that my forearm was being gently squeezed...

(Incidentally, this is great for helping me empathise with women in the same situation. But I digress.)

What does bother me is that this happens with curious regularity. Everywhere I go - pubs, clubs, bars - inebriated gay guys try to hit on me. I seem to have far more (inadvertent) success with homosexual males than I do with heterosexual females. Am I giving out mixed signals or something? Do I register a false positive on gaydar?

Inquiring minds want to know.

* Not literally, I'm 6'4" and 16stone so he'd have needed to be Arnold Schwarzeneggar. Who, as far as I'm aware, is not gay.

Religion stuff

2010-08-25T02:41:00.000-07:00

There's a middle-aged couple who run the dry-cleaners down the road from me. In the past I've been a regular there, financial jobs like mine having a high formal-suit quotient. So I've got to know them quite well.

They're lovely people. Immigrants from Rajasthan (largest state in India), they've been over here a couple of decades now. They're really friendly and always make me feel welcome.

They're also quite religious. Once upon a time that would have been a problem for me, not because it bothered me but because it would start me ranting. I'd debated the God question online for so long that the thread of the argument had burned its way into my brain. In recent years I've been trying to train myself to resist this compulsion.

So when we started chatting about it, I did my best to shut up and listen. And what I learned was quite interesting to me. I've always been fascinated by small religions, and this couple are both passionate about one I hadn't ever heard of before, called "Santmat" (roughly: the way of the saints).

Santmat is a classic "medley" religion. Just as Sikhism originated in an attempt to meld Hinduism with Islam, Santmat claims that each of these groups has an equally valid handle on the truth. In particular, they each have genuine gurus, or saints - individuals in whom the spark of the divine burns most strongly.

In the usual three-blind-men-and-an-elephant fashion, these saints all perceive the same divinity, but interpret it to their followers in a way that is appropriate to the time and place in which they operate. Saying that one religion is truer than another is nonsensical; if each has a true saint at its heart, they are just as valid. If you don't find one religion convincing, that just means that you're not destined to become a follower of that particular guru.

For this reason, I'm not entirely sure that Santmat can be considered a religion in the normal sense. It's more a philosophy, a system for putting all the other religions in context. The part that does count as a religion is the Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which is a group formed around a particular lineage of saints.

Each of these gurus made more converts for the Radha Soami movement. The sociology of this is interesting. You must remember that in Santmat, the important thing is the saint you follow rather than the name you call your religion. So followers of each guru tend to see themselves as distinct from the other "waves".

For example, my friends from the dry-cleaners were converted by the guru Maharaj Charan Singh Ji. Although he passed away in 1990, I think they feel a stronger affinity for him and his "generation" of believers than they do for the current guru (Baba Gurinder Singh Ji, Charan Singh's successor). Certainly the religious literature they've been feeding me seems to focus on him. There's no acrimony; your choice of guru to follow is as personal as your choice of woman to fall in love with, and people aren't expected to have the same preference.

Generally a rather nice, innocent religious group, with no blots on its history. So do I find them convincing? Am I going to find a guru of my own?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is: probably not. Firstly, of course, I find their cosmology unconvincing. I don't see any particular reason to believe that we have souls, for example.

The Santmat rebuttal here is: I don't believe in souls because I listen to scientists; they do believe in souls because they listen to saints. We've just chosen different gurus.

But this misses the point. In short: how do you choose a guru?*

The Santmat approach is your basic touchy-feely "you just know he's the one" kind of thing. But this is a problem for me because, back in the material world, many people have felt like that about some very scary characters. Hitler was considered quite the role model at one point, as was Stalin (still is, in some circles).

So, in situations where we can test how good people are at picking good gurus, we find the answer is: not very.

But that's kinda nihilistic. If people are bad at choosing trustworthy gurus, how do I know my scientists can be trusted? After all, there are some scandals in the history of science too (cold fusion, Hwang Woo-suk's cloning research, I could go on all day).

The answer is nicely paradoxical. I trust the scientific community because I don't have to. They don't expect me to. When they tell me something, they also present me with the data to back it up, and the method that gave rise to that data, and I can go away and confirm it all for myself.

By and large I don't bother to check the data - it'd be very time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, there are lots of other scientists who are generally willing to replicate experiments, especially interesting or controversial ones. Scientists keep each other honest.

I don't see any evidence that gurus have that kind of skeptical mindset. Until I do, I won't be believing in souls.

* I should mention that this question is explicitly raised in one of their books (ch2 of The Science of Spirituality). Sadly, I don't think they actually answer in plain language. As far as I can tell, the chapter just boils down to: you'll know him/her when you see him/her.

What is evil?

2010-08-07T03:14:00.000-07:00

Evil is trying to please yourself, or someone important or close to you, at the disproportionate expense of someone less important or close to you.

Discuss.

Strategy

2010-07-04T05:38:00.000-07:00

Jack of Kent asks "Is skepticism getting a reputation for arrogance and smugness?" I've just left a comment, which I think is worth reprinting here, with extra commentary.

I think the important thing isn't so much what you say as how you encourage third parties to spin it.

For example, IMO, the 10:23 campaign did a good job of branding itself. It came across as cheeky, cheerful disrespect (with a serious underlying message).

Sad though it may be [to accept this], gently taking the mickey out of someone is a vastly more effective strategy than engaging them in serious debate. Not because it makes the point any better, but because it is looked on more kindly by the framers in the media.

A rule-of-thumb used by many people is that, if you feel passionately about something, that is a point against your position. I can understand why they feel this way - in my experience, deeply-held beliefs are actually less likely to be right, because emotion tends to inhibit skepticism.

It's a pain in the arse for me, though, because I always aim to practice what I preach. So every debate I get into is (on some level) deeply personal. For example:

If someone presents an argument for God that I can't refute, I'll spend one day a week in church for the rest of my life.
If someone presents an argument for homeopathy that I can't refute, I'll use it as a treatment for my own conditions.
If someone presents an argument against global warming that I can't refute, I'll... actually I have no idea what I'll do, but I'm sure it'll be significant.

This leads to a rather serious outlook on these matters.

As mentioned, though, I've come to the conclusion that seriousness is simply not an effective strategy if I actually want to convince people. It's a paradox: if you care, you must appear not to care.

As such, I'm going to make a change to my hierarchy of debate. Step #1 should now be split in two:

1) If someone has clearly done less reading up on the subject than me, I will try to judge whether they are willing to accept correction.

a) If so, I will gently try to explain what they've got wrong.

b) If not, I reserve the right to cheekily, cheerfully, ruthlessly take the mickey out of their dogma. Or just to ignore them completely.

Which approach I take will depend on whether there's anyone listening who might be influenced by the discussion, and how bored I am at the time.

Yes, I play guitar

2010-06-20T11:02:00.001-07:00

Well, "play" is kinda a strong word for something that sounds like our cat did right after he had the operation. But I muck about.

Current target of mucking about: I've been picking up a few classical pieces. Found a nice arrangement of Bach's Minuet in G, which I've memorised but am not yet up to full speed on. I learned Greensleeves a while back, which is harder on 'tar than you'd think.

I've also got a couple of less well-known ones under my belt: Sarabande from Robert de Visee's Suite in D minor, and the first piece from Giulani's Op. 71 No. 1. Both fairly easy by classical standards, but the de Visee piece in particular is lovely. The Giulani piece is a bit mechanical but a great warm-up.

I also tend to make a note of any chord sequences or arpeggios that catch my fancy. The following are a couple of my favourites.

Shamelessly ripped from the Inner Life of the Cell soundtrack:


--------------------------------
---6---6------------------------
--7---7----5---5---7---7---3---5
-7---7----7---5---8---8---5---7-
5--------7---5---8---8---5---7--
--------5---5---6-------3---5---

Variations on the chord set G, C6 (?) C, D:


3-3-0-2-  --------------2-3-  --------------3-3--
3-3-1-3-  ------3---1----3--  ------3---1----2-3-
0-0-0-2-  --0----0---0------  --0----0---0-2-----
0-2-2-0-  ---0--------0-----  ---0-2---2--0------
2-3-3-x-  ----3---3---------  -2--3---3----------
3-0-0-x-  3-----------------  3------------------

-----------0---2---  ---3---3---0---2(3)-
---3---3--1---3-3--  --3---3---1---3-3---
--0---0--0---2---2-  -0---0---0---2---2--
-0---0------0------  ------------0-------
----3---3----------  ----3---3-----------
3------------------  3-------------------

The rhythm should be more like 1--4--7-1--4--7- on the second one, and 1-34--7- on the last three. This explains why it appears not to scan properly*. The (3) is because, if you hammer down your little finger (which you'd need to get in position for the next repetition of the G chord, anyway) you can get a lovely ringing high G just on the edge of hearing.

Got a really boring scale on the bass strings? Slow it down by a factor of six and fill the gaps with arpeggio:


------------------------------------------------
---3-----3-----3-----3-----3-----3-----3-----3--
--0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0-
-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0
------0-----2-----3-----------------------------
3-----------------------0-----2-----3-----3-----

---0-----0-----0-----0-----0-----0-----0-----0-----0--
--0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0-
-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0-0---0
------------------------------------------------------
------------------------3-----3-----2-----0-----------
0-----0-----0-----0-----------------------------0-----etc

Next project: actually learn some !"£$%^& scales. I'm currently memorising music by throwing lots of neurons at the problem. Having some sort of framework in place would presumably make learning new stuff easier. Not to mention making improvisation easier. I suck at impro.

Also, my mum has requested that I get good at an arrangement of the Trout Quintet I came across. I hear and obey.

* A limerick:
There was a young bloke from Milan
Who wrote poems that never would scan
When asked why this was
He said "it's because
I just like to fit as many syllables into the last line as I possibly possibly can."

News from the trenches

2010-06-03T11:59:00.001-07:00

Just a quick update from yours truly. In true blogger fashion, I'll start by making excuses for why I've been so slow posting lately:

1) Exams. I did three actuarial exams this sitting, which is generally acknowledged to be borderline suicidal. I would estimate I passed two out of three, but don't ask me which two.

2) New placement. I'm working on a redress project: figuring out how much people are owed due to a company's breach of FSA rules. The subject of this one is Pensions Switching, an issue that has a good chance of becoming the Next Big Scandal. So far the Daily Mail hasn't found out about it, though.

3) Crappy connection. Grrrr.

In other news, I've started studying for actuarial subject CT8. This is a good one for me - it covers all that stochastic modelling stuff I've been babbling about. I'm already halfway through the course. If all goes to plan, I'll be able to effectively finish it before the results from the last set of exams come out on 2nd July. The fact that I'm in danger of being overtaken on exams by several of my younger friends has absolutely nothing to do with this sudden spurt of action...

I'll write more about the new placement at some point. Not so much because of the actuarial content (nothing really interesting there) but because we're having to develop a complete set of spreadsheets from scratch. I seem to have wound up handling the quality control, which sounds boring but is actually the ideal role for a skeptic. Watch this space.

An observation

2010-05-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

Skeptics and scientists both attempt to employ the same scientific method. The difference is that scientists focus on hypotheses that are promising, whereas skeptics focus on hypotheses that are popular.

This can have ramifications. For example, I've noticed that a lot of people with first-hand scientific experience (inc. my dad, for what it's worth) don't have a lot of respect for Karl Popper's attempts to distinguish science from non-science and identify a distinct scientific process. They tend to see science as working in a more intuitive, less formalised, fashion.

That's for two reasons. Firstly, scientists are mainly surrounded by promising hypotheses generated by other competent scientists. Skeptics aren't - we deal with the daftest ideas that human ingenuity can devise. And secondly, if a scientist comes across a non-promising and unsupported idea, they are "allowed" to discard it out of hand. Skeptics aren't, because then the cranks and quacks start whining that we're not treating them fairly.

Going the other way, I know many skeptics* are disturbed by the climate science community's complete PR failure in the case of "Climategate" and other alleged scandals. "Why did they not see this coming?" we ask ourselves. "Have they never dealt with people like this before?"

No, they haven't. They're scientists, not skeptics. They spend all their time working through complex climate models and looking at atmospheric data. They've never argued with a creationist, or tried to talk sense into a Holocaust denier. They're not equipped for this kind of debate.

Scientists and skeptics are natural complements, and there is a lot of overlap between the two groups. Skeptics have always taken scientists seriously; hopefully in the future this will go both ways.

* By this I do not mean climate change pseudoskeptics. I should mention that I don't have the knowledge (yet) to evaluate the claims of modern climate science, so I can't comment on whether it's correct. But what I do know is that most of the main claims made by climate change deniers are ludicrously simplistic and/or just plain wrong.

British law: Bloody inconsistent

2010-05-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

It's been barely a month since the brilliant response by the Court of Appeals in the BCA vs Simon Singh case. Sadly, they can't all be gems. Paul Chambers has just been convicted.

In case anyone hasn't come across this case, Mr Chambers made a comment on his Twitter feed expressing frustration at the closure of his local airport:

"Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!"

Pretty normal for Twitter, you'd think, and frankly rather mild for the Internet as a whole. Sadly, the Crown Prosecution Service didn't agree. When they got wind of this comment, they decided to prosecute him for sending a message on a public network that was "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character".

Quite apart from the WTF that we have such a fuzzy law on our books, there is no evidence that Mr Chambers intended to menace anyone, or that anyone in fact felt menaced. This is apparently a case of the CPS deciding that Mr Chambers must be guilty of something, and then hunting up an obscure law to fit. (We actually have a law specifically dealing with bomb threats, but that would have required the CPS to make a more solid case so they (ab)used an obscenity law instead.)

Now, as an average netizen, I'd normally respond with a comment like:

"These vindictive fascist little jobsworths will be first against the wall when the revolution comes."

But given the CPS's apparent inability to recognise hyperbolic comments, I wouldn't dream of saying any such thing.

Status report

2010-04-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Just so you're not surprised by continued silence on my part... the last post was by way of a stress outlet. I'm still not done with exams, I'm just past the point where I can bring myself to revise very hard.

Exams end in 1 week. The traditional post-exams hangover will take a bit longer. It usually takes me a couple extra weeks to reacquaint myself with the concept of a social life (and in particular with those parts of my social circle that like to drink large amounts of CH3CH2OH). So expect to hear from me within the month.

Gazing towards Olympus

2010-04-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

I don't normally write fiction because... well... I suck. No way of sugar-coating it, my writing stinks.

That said, I would rather it didn't always stink. So in recent months, in between episodes of screaming exam panic, I've been casting around for stories to experiment with. This one popped more or less fully-formed into my head. I think it was sparked by this Penny Arcade comic about the game God Of War III.

I actually have no idea what GoW3 is about. My version is probably cooler though.

Now, I know what you're thinking: a bird that talks? But the plain truth is, you can't live thousands of years without picking up a few things.

I'm not actually sure how long it was. Certainly in the early days I was just an eagle like any other. Every morning I'd glide over to that mountain, just as the dawn struck it, ready for another breakfast of liver-and-onions. Without the onions, obviously. And with a lot more screaming. But it was a simple life, with a noticeable absence of clocks and calendars. Could have been millennia for all I know.

I think it was some time during the Roman occupation that he started speaking to me. Not surprising really - you chain a guy to a sodding great big rock in the boiling sun for a few hundred years, he'll wind up talking to everything from stones to flying pigs. That's dehydration for you. Eagles is small fry by comparison.

But it was nice, you know? Even when I was just another dumb beast, it was soothing. I'll let you in on a little secret: even birds of prey can get a bit squeamish at times. Cute little lambs gambolling in the green meadows, claws out, whoosh... you'd have to have a pretty stony heart not to feel slightly sorry for them. Not to feel a touch of existential angst on occasion. It was reassuring to know that at least one of my victims didn't hold it against me.

So he spoke to me, and for a century or ten that was all there was to it. There's precedent, you know: prisoners in towers befriending the sparrows, and all that. Befriending the eagle that rips out your viscera every morning is a bit of a stretch, but he always was soft-hearted. That's how he got into this mess in the first place.

And, then as now, soft-heartedness can have some... startling effects. Some time just after they started building churches, it clicked. I began to understand what these funny sounds he made were in aid of. I'm still quite proud of that accomplishment. I mean, even Champollion had the Rosetta stone to help him, you know what I mean? And already spoke a language, for that matter. I was operating from a bit more of a standing start.

Of course this didn't really mean much for fifty years or so, the eagle throat not being noticeably designed for speaking back. But I think he realised I could follow him. He started trying to turn his ramblings into a dialogue, inviting me to nod my head or shake my tail or whatever. He was more than half-mad with hunger and thirst by this point, but we eventually worked out a sort of talon-tapping routine that could get the message across.

(Incidentally this proved to be a useful investment in fine motor skill. After all, how do you think I'm writing this? My typing speed isn't great, but as long as I can get access to a keyboard... Let's just say that some web-cafes shouldn't leave their skylight unlocked, haha.)

Actually he mostly talked about you lot. Humans I mean. He really couldn't get over whether he'd done the right thing or not, giving you fire. He would often ask me to go out and report back to him on how you were doing, what works of art you were producing, what buildings you were constructing. I remember spending a week one time trying to explain the Sistine Chapel to him. I mean, come on, the Sistine Chapel? In glorified Morse code? But he got the general impression at least.

Come to think of it, that was maybe not so tactful, showing him how the world had moved on. Zeus had traded his thunderbolts in for a new throne, the rest of the Pantheon had reinvented themselves as angels and saints and the like, and yet here he was still chained to a mountain. They'd forgotten him. And all the art of mankind, that he had helped bring into being, depicted him as a serpent or monster. You lot aren't exactly much for gratitude.

And I suppose that was the next big development. I started to see his point. He really did want the best for you, you know. Most of the gods spent their time hanging round mountaintops; he was down in the valleys with you. Depressingly keen on helping people, three thousand years before Robert Baden-Powell.

He didn't deserve his punishment. I don't know if Zeus had got up on the wrong side of the cloud that day or what, but damn. Chained to a rock with yours truly performing impromptu surgery on a daily basis. That's gotta sting.

I started eating less of his liver. Some days I'd just make a scratch, give him a bit of an appendectomy scar in case anyone dropped by to check. I brought him berries, fruit, water. Took a while to work out what he was able to stomach (I swear I didn't know about the peanut allergy!) but eventually he started to get healthier. You don't exactly shake off millennia of torment overnight, but he began to seem a little more like his old self.

Sadder, of course. Maybe wiser. Certainly more angry. But hey, at least he'd stopped screaming. My eardrums were endlessly grateful.

And that brings us up to the present day. Or at least up to the day - a week ago now - when he asked me to help him. When I agreed to take the final step.

It wasn't easy. People look at you funny if you, an eagle, walk into the local library and check out a book on lock-picking. And some of the other stuff he was asking for... well, normally if someone's packing that kind of hardware, any wise bird avoids them on pain of taxidermy. But there are ways. As I said before, you don't live for thousands of years without picking up a thing or three.

So here we are. Or here I am, anyway. His chains are empty, his rock is bare. I can see the indentation he wore in it from lying there so long. And I can remember the look in his eye as his hands caressed the rifle's stock. I remember how he gazed towards Olympus.

I guess I'm still waiting for the other shoe to fall. What happens if Zeus comes looking for me, afterwards? Or... what happens if he doesn't? Either way, it's going to be one hell of a light-show.

I never told Prometheus about the Crusades, or the Holocaust, or napalm, or the bomb. I couldn't stand to see the look on his face if he'd found out what that fire he carried had been used for. If he'd known the cost of giving fire to man. Eating his liver would have been nothing by comparison.

But I think I know what he would have said. The true fire, the true spark of warmth, is the one in the mind and the heart and the eyes. The physical hearth and forge, the technology, is just a conduit for the greatness in man. I understand this because I felt it too. I felt it when my beak fumbled with the lockpicks, when I dropped the heavy gun by his side.

He gave fire to man. I gave it back.

I hope we were right.

Fluffy nonsense

2010-04-03T06:07:00.000-07:00

I hate Business Economics, indeed. With a passion. I hate it so much because the cello part is the worst cello part ever written in the history of

Wait, wrong rant.

I'm currently studying for actuarial exam CT7* (Business Economics). Essentially, the purpose of Business Economics is to determine when a sale will occur and at what price. I've hated this subject from the get-go, but it's taken me some time to really articulate what I dislike about it...

What is Business Economics?

To understand Business Economics, the first thing you need to know is: price is determined by the demand for a product and the supply of that product. When the demand at a given price equals the supply at that price, the market is in equilibrium and all produce will be sold. Markets tend towards equilibrium.

The supply function is determined by the seller's return on investment at various prices. A seller will pick the price that maximises their RoI. You can draw a "supply curve" showing the amount that will be produced at various prices. This will be a fairly straight upwards-sloping line.

The demand function is determined by the buyer's utility function. This is a subjective measure of how much value a buyer gets from a product, denominated in currency (e.g. £). Buyers will seek to maximise their total consumer excess: their total utility minus the products' purchase price. You can draw a "demand curve" to show how the amount bought varies at different prices, which will be a fairly straight downwards-sloping line.

To really understand Business Economics, the second thing you need to know is: all of the above is counterfactual bollocks. Markets don't really work like that under any circumstances. You can't draw demand or supply curves, and they wouldn't look like their descriptions if you could.

Theology meets practicality

These two different views of BE are both presented in the same textbook. Chapters 4-7 and 9-12 describe everything about a business in terms of demand and supply. Chapter 8, however, discusses the marketing mix.

The marketing mix is a widely-referenced checklist of things to consider when selling a product. It lists the following components of a successful sale:

1) Product
2) Price
3) Placement (e.g. location, visibility)
4) Promotion (e.g. advertising)

The traditional demand/supply model handles the first two of these fine, but is completely blind to the last two. The only way to account for e.g. the effect of advertising is to say "well, that just means that the person's utility function is higher for this product than it would otherwise have been".

But this just highlights the problem with the demand/supply model. It's not answering the question of "what determines price". It's just restating it in a more sciencey fashion. It is theology rather than science: no more meaningful than answering the question "what created everything" with "God did it".

In short, it sucks.

What went wrong?

I'm not sure why it sucks so much. My best guess is that the people who came up with this theory of economics had "engineering envy". In engineering, you start with various general principles (the laws of science) and reason your way to specific applications of those principles (bridges, buildings, microcircuits, etc).

I would conjecture that the early economists rather liked this idea, so they came up with some vague principles (the "laws" of demand and supply) and tried to reason from them to specific conclusions. But because those broad principles were not reality-based, the effect is similar to a Christian trying to reason from the existence of the Trinity to the existence of an earthquake in Haiti. It's an exercise in applied fuzziness, goalpost-moving, equivocation and redefinition of terms that would shame a Jesuit***.

This entire approach sucks.

First Principles

I'm still working on my own Grand Unified Theory of Economics, and probably will be for some time. But I already know where to start looking.

Look at the big picture again, and start to zoom in. Zoom in on a single continent (Asia). Zoom in on a single country (India). Zoom in on a single region (Uttar Pradesh). Zoom in on a town (Agra, home of the Taj Mahal). Zoom in on a little shop selling tables made of marble, and inlaid with semiprecious stones. Zoom in on the room where a tourist and a salesman are sipping tea together.

That tourist is me. That salesman, I am fairly sure, overcharged me by an order of magnitude for what was, I must admit, a rather lovely souvenir for my parents.

When an economic model can explain what happened in that room, in concepts more meaningful than the data they abstract...

When an economic model can explain what happened in that room, in a way that helps me to identify and avoid such situations in future...

When an economic model can explain what happened in that room, in enough detail that I can see how to return the "favour"...

...then I will consider it worth learning for exams.

Rant over.

----------------------------
* "CT" stands for "Core Technical". To become a fully fledged Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries** I need to have completed:

9 x Core Technical exams
3 x Core Applied exams
2 x Specialist Technical exams (from a choice of 9)
1 x Specialist Applied exam (from a choice of 6)
1 x Partridge in a Pear Tree.

** In Britain, for historical reasons, we have both an Institute of Actuaries and a Fellowship of Actuaries (collectively known as the Profession). Most Cambridge grads join the IoA. This is so that, when we've claimed our congregational MA and achieved the rank of Fellow of the IoA, we can put the letters MA FIA after our name and pretend to be Sicilian dons.

*** Yes, I know that the Jesuits were actually quite science-minded for their time. Their reputation for inflicting "sophisticated" theological arguments on the uninitiated is probably still valid.

Contagion effects

2010-04-02T13:32:00.000-07:00

One interesting topic of financial research in recent years has been the concept of "contagion". This is the effect whereby (for example) financial troubles at one bank can lead to a "domino effect", potentially bringing down the entire damn economy...

(This sort of thing is very important from an actuarial perspective - it goes back to my discussion of stochastic asset models. It's common to try to invest in a low-risk fund when a policyholder nears retirement; however, in a contagion-ridden market, there may be no such thing as a low-risk fund!)

I have three comments on this:

1) At the same time I was in Cambridge last week, they were holding a conference on this very subject. I've been reading through some of the papers, and they're rather cool - I might summarise some on this blog later.

2) There seems to be a strong link to principles of ecosystem collapse (see for example this excellent paper from PLoS CompBio). I'm surprised there's not more cross-research going on. (Or maybe there is and I just haven't found it?)

3) Some kind of contagion principle seems to apply to the use of the term "in respect of". You can measure how heavily-regulated someone's industry is just by seeing how often they employ this phrase. After some consideration, I have decided that it can almost always be replaced with the word "for". This, of course, is vastly shorter, thus saving wear and tear on keyboards.

OK, so that third point didn't really relate to the other two, but it's been bugging me for a while. As someone with a love of the English language and its intricacies, I really hate it when people try to fake linguistic sophistication by use of stock phrases and pompous legal jargon. It's like I'm a fan of automobile engineering and they're the blokes from "Pimp My Ride".

Interesting turn of phrase

2010-04-02T12:30:00.000-07:00

I'm having a lazy day.

This is probably not a good idea - actuarial exams start in under 3 weeks. However, I'm still recovering from last weekend, when I received my congregational MA at Cambridge and got absolutely wasted on College port* with some old friends. I vaguely recall dancing on tables. And I had a busy week too, so what the hey.

In particular, I'm taking the time to read up on a few blog archives, mostly related to skepticism in the UK. Of particular interest recently has been the Appeal Court decision in the trial of science writer Simon Singh. The (very senior) judges running the show apparently gave the legal version of two raised fingers to the British Chiropractic Organisation. A most welcome verdict.

(I actually walk past the BCA's head office on my way into work each day. I'm considering dropping some Sense About Science literature through their door in case they feel like signing up. Worth a try.)

One interesting thought for the day was in this pro-CAM comment on the Adventures In Nonsense blog. FYI, the blog author is the guy who sent out 500 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority about chiropractors who claimed to treat infant colic.

The comment uses an interesting phrase: "open-minded skeptic". I am actually impressed that a pro-alternative-medicine commenter would use this phrase; many of them seem to think it's an oxymoron. But let's examine what it means to say a person is an "open-minded skeptic".

"Open-minded" = is willing to examine any new claim
"Sceptic" (with a C) = demands good evidence for any new claim before accepting it
"Skeptic" (with a K) = gets pissed off if he/she receives no good evidence and yet finds people still parroting the same sodding claim

On this basis, I would say that most of the folks on Simon Singh's side in this battle of public opinion are indeed "open-minded skeptics". I'm happy to quietly support them; I only wish I could do more.

------------------
* If you ever visit Christ's bar, do not buy the College red or white wine, it gives you a splitting hangover. The port, however, kicks ass but leaves neurons standing. There's also a cafe called Taffy's just out the College's side gate where you can buy a fry-up cure for what ails ya the following morning.

Cheers, Mate

2010-03-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

Thanks to this guy for cutting short my evening-long search for a way to rip CDs to MP3.

He's right, it is ridiculously hard on Linux. My understanding is that that's because That Can Get You Sued, and Canonical is probably big enough to be a tasty target for the MP3 patent holders.

Normally I would use the ogg format, but I just got a cheap mp3 player thingy and none of the cheap ones seem to handle ogg. I did check.

How to do Stochastic Calculus

2010-03-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

Context

I have recently had to learn a mathematical approach called "stochastic calculus" as part of my actuarial exams. As misery loves company, I've decided to share the details with you...

This post is a short tutorial in stochastic calculus, with an emphasis on getting to the point where we can solve practical problems and skipping as much foundational material as I can get away with.

What is stochastic calculus?

Stochastic calculus is a useful tool in financial maths. In normal calculus, you might take a function and find its derivatives (gradient, curvature, etc) as time changes. Or you might take a differential equation (an equation relating a function to its derivatives) and use it to figure out what the corresponding function looks like.

"Stochastic" just means probability-related. In stochastic calculus, you take a random variable and find its derivatives, or take a differential equation and find the random variable it represents.

An example. Let's say we're looking at the size (n_t) of a population of lemurs. We reckon that the rate of population change is directly proportional to the size of the population. In mathematical notation:
dn_t/dt = g.n_t
where g is a constant growth factor (or shrinkage factor if negative). If we solved this with differential calculus we'd find that:
n_t = n₀.exp(g.t)

But wait! Real populations don't work like that. They behave far more randomly, which can lead to very different results. In particular, you'll notice that, no matter how negative the growth rate is, the lemurs can never go extinct. Sadly this is not true of real animals.

How do we represent this uncertainty? One way is to add a "noise" term to the calculation. So:
dN_t/dt = g.N_t + v.W_t.N_t
where v is a constant volatility factor and W_t is a continuously-changing random variable - a "stochastic process". You'll note that we're now using N_t rather than n_t, to show that population size is probabilistic rather than predestined.

Brownian motion

Which stochastic process should we use for our noise term? This would depend very much on the situation - our team of biologists would need to research how species' populations change in practice. However, a very popular choice is based on "Brownian motion". It's typical to try to reframe any stochastic problem in terms of this process.

Brownian motion is named after the phenomenon of pollen grains bouncing around in water (they're small enough to be affected by the impact of individual water molecules). It is a "random walk" process, with several nice properties:

- it is distributed as N(0,t²) (e.g the standard deviation at time t is t^0.5)
- it has independent increments, so you can model B_2t as B_t + B'_t
- dB_t.dB_t = dt (please take it on trust that this is important, we'll see how it's relevant later)

In the case of our population equation, we might set W_t such that W_t.dt = dB_t. In other words, B_t is in some sense the integral between times 0 and t of W_t. This allows us to rephrase our equation as:
dN_t = g.N_t.dN_t + v.N_t.W_t.dt
= g.N_t.dN_t + v.N_t.dB_t

Interlude: What the hell is that?

I keep using terms like dB_t and dN_t to mean increments of random variables. Intuitively, this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. Random variables, even time-dependent ones, don't have fixed values - that's kinda the point - so how the blazes can they have well-defined increments?

The answer is: the increment is also a random variable, just an infinitesimally small one (in the same way that dt is an infinitesimally small deterministic variable). When we say (for example) I = ∫₀^t 1.ds, the answer is clearly: I=t. When we say I = ∫₀^t 1.dB_s, the answer is equally obvious: I = B_t, the sum of the random increments.

More complex expressions like ∫₀^t B_s.dB_s are quite hard to understand intuitively. Multiplying a random variable by an infinitesimal random variable and taking an infinite sum? Wtf? Basically, the purpose of stochastic calculus is to allow us to transform messy situations like this back into simple ones like the two in the preceding paragraph.

The Ito formula

So anyway, we now know what the stochastic differential equation looks like. How do we solve it? We use an equation called the Ito formula to figure out what it should look like, and then we forcibly bring the two forms together.

The Ito formula says that if:
dX_t = u.dt + v.dB_t
(u, v real numbers)

and:
Y_t = f(t, X_t) for some function f(t,x)

then:
dY_t = ∂f/∂t.dt + ∂f/∂x.dX_t + 1/2.∂²f/∂²x.dX_t.dX_t
using e.g. ∂f/∂x as a shorthand for ∂f/∂x(t, X_t)

Usually it makes sense to take X_t = B_t.

A simple example. Let's say we're evaluating I_t = ∫ B_t.dB_t. We can rephrase this as: dI_t = B_t.dB_t

The variable I_t will end up depending on time and on the effects of the random variable, so we can write: I_t = f(t, B_t). Therefore, by Ito's formula:
dI_t = ∂f/∂t.dt + ∂f/∂x.dB_t + 1/2.∂²f/∂²x.dB_t.dB_t
= (∂f/∂t + 1/2.∂²f/∂²x).dt + ∂f/∂x.dB_t because dB_t.dB_t = dt (see the section on Brownian motion above).

Since we know: dI_t = 0.dt + B_t.dB_t
we can say that: ∂f/∂x = x
and: ∂f/∂t = -1/2.∂²f/∂²x
From the first of these partial derivatives, we have:
f = x²/2 + g(t)
We can now rewrite the second equality as: ∂f/∂t = -1/2.1
giving: f = -t/2 + h(x)
So overall: f = x²/2 - t/2

Therefore (drumroll), we have: I_t = f(t,B_t) = B_t²/2 - t/2

That population equation

Now we've got the tools in place, let's solve that population equation. First assume that there is some function f(t,x) such that N_t = f(t,B_t)

We know that:
dN_t = g.N_t.dN_t + v.N_t.dB_t
and that:
dN_t = (∂f/∂t - 1/2.∂²f/∂²x).dt + ∂f/∂x.dB_t

Therefore:
∂f/∂x = v.f
f = exp(v.x).p(t)
(I'm using p(t) and q(x) as my dummy functions rather than g(t) and h(x), to avoid confusion between g and g(t))

And:
∂f/∂t + 1/2.∂²f/∂²x = g.f
∂f/∂t + 1/2.v².f = g.f
∂f/∂t = (g - v²/2).f
f = exp((g - v²/2).t).q(x)

So overall we can infer that:
f = C.exp(v.x + (g-v²/2).t) for constant C

In other words:
N_t = N₀.exp(v.B_t + (g-v²/2).t)

QED. This is similar, but not identical to what we'd expect from looking at the traditional differential equation.

How we can use this

Now, just having an equation is not terribly useful. But once we've got it we can start asking interesting questions such as "what is the probability that the population of lemurs will have shrunk at time t?"

P(N_t < N₀) = P(N₀.exp(v.B_t + (g-v²/2).t) < N₀)
= P(exp(v.B_t + (g-v²/2).t) < 1)
= P(v.B_t + (g-v²/2).t < 0)
= P(B_t < (v²/2-g).t/v)

Since B_t ~ N(0,t), this can be worked out using a set of tables. For example if g = 5%, v = 2%, and t = 5, then:
P(N₅ < N₀) = P(B₅ < (0.0004/2 - 0.05)*5/0.02)
= P(Z < (0.0004/2 - 0.05)*5/0.02/5^0.5)
= P(Z < (0.0004/2 - 0.05)*5/0.02/5^0.5)
= P(X < -5.5678)

Past a certain point the population of lemurs is likely to go extinct (although this is not modelled well by the equation - N_t can never reach 0). If the population was declining, and we could figure out values of g and v, we could determine the probability of extinction. We could then allocate our animal conservation money appropriately.

Applying these principles to pension fund capital is left as an exercise to the reader.

Why is that not the full story?

There are several things I've left out here, two mathematical points and two practical points.

Firstly, W_t is not a "real" distribution. If you actually try to work out what dB_t/dt looks like, you find that it is infinite at infinitely many points. That is just plain weird.

Fortunately, there is a mathematical hold-all concept - the "extended distribution" that sweeps all that under the carpet. And since it all works out OK, the specifics aren't really a concern, any more than you need to know Real Analysis to understand differential calculus.

Or are they a concern? Point #2 is that there are actually several ways to define ∫...dB_t, which give mutually exclusive results. Explaining the differences is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice to say that the one we've been using - the Ito integral - is mathematically nice.

Practically speaking, what we've looked at here is only half the battle. As responsible scientists, we'd want to produce sensible values for g and v, and in general confirm that the population is behaving as the equation predicts. This calibration is a nightmarish task that I'm not even going to begin to discuss here.

And finally there's the question of whether our general approach - all founded, you'll recall, on Brownian motion - is remotely sensible. There has been a lot of muttering recently pointing out that extreme events are far more likely than the normal distribution would suggest. It is very hard to produce Brownian processes that can emulate this behaviour, and nigh-on impossible to calibrate. There is a strong suggestion that a broader family called Levy processes might be more plausible, but they are also a bugger to calibrate.

This sort of thing won't be solved any time soon.

References

I learned SC from the textbook by Bernt Oksendal (5th edition). In retrospect this was probably a mistake, as he goes very deeply into the mathematical fundamentals before covering anything remotely practical. If you can get past the first 3 chapters without falling asleep then it's not a bad book, although not terribly readable (even by maths book standards...).

Sucks to be us

2010-02-02T11:48:00.000-08:00

I get a lot of emails from the Institute of Actuaries, the professional organisation of which I am a (student) member. One running theme is a rather plaintive request for people to view actuaries as more trustworthy. They write endless editorials on actuarial ethics, they arrange super-special "professionalism" training, they commit us all to worryingly restrictive codes of conduct... the list is endless.

I've always been a bit surprised by this. I don't have a pension, I don't have life insurance, I don't have a car to insure, so pretty much my first contact with the actuarial profession was when I signed up to become one. I've been wondering for some time now what the fuss is all about...

Well, it turns out that they're not wrong to fuss. I just came across the following passage in a book on scams that I'm reading:

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been disappointed and forced to complain about 'with-profits' bonds, endowments and pension plans. And these all come from highly respected - and really big - life insurance companies.

How do these complicated schemes work? Well, no one really knows, often not even the people who should know. It's all down to the 'experts' at the insurance companies which run these schemes. Using obscure mathematics coupled with a finger held up to the wind, they make up the numbers year on year.

Wait a minute. That's us he's talking about. This sucks.

Do actuaries deserve this slagging-off? Well, partly yes, partly no. (Equivocation never harmed anyone...)

Where's the money?

Let's take an example: that with-profits thing he mentioned. With-profits is superficially rather a clever idea. Let's say you're putting money into a pensions fund for your retirement. There are two main kinds of investment fund: fixed interest and unit-linked.

With a fixed interest fund you are guaranteed (say) a 3% per year rate of return. In a way this certainty is good - that money is as good as in the bank. But in a way it's bad, because you are going to get a very crappy rate of return. This is because, if the market crashes, that 2% is going to start looking like quite a large number. No fund provider wants to be caught out that way, so they will all low-ball their figures to compensate.

With a unit-linked fund, a certain amount of money is put into a pot for you. That money is used to buy shares in various companies, in the hope that their share price will go up. Usually you'll just specify some broad criteria ("I want all my money in Asian shares") and a fund manager will sort out the investment specifics. This approach generally gives a much higher rate of return - e.g. you might get 10% instead of 3%. But it is inherently risky - you might also get -50%.

As pensions actuaries, we want to get the best of both worlds. How can we do this? There are three main approaches (that I'm aware of):

1) Shuffle money from unitised to fixed-interest funds as the member approaches retirement (I mentioned this last time as a good use of SAMs)
2) Invest in an index-linked fund (see footnote*)
3) Invest in a with-profits fund

Technical interlude

A with-profits fund is where you take a fixed interest fund and strap a unitised fund to the roof. The fund provider will keep a pot of money, which it will invest in various companies etc. They will guarantee you a relatively low rate of return (3%, say) on your contribution to this pot.

Then, at the end of every year, they will take a look at how their investments have done. If the investments are doing much better than the guaranteed rate (10%, say), they will tell you "we declare a bonus of (say) 5%". The value of your investment will thus increase by 8%, with the remaining 2% being kept in the pot for a rainy day**.

The point is that, under the with-profits model, the fund provider doesn't need to plan ahead so carefully - if they overdo the bonuses this year, they can just make it up by under-doing it in future years. With-profits funds allow the provider to wing it. They don't have to be as cautious as they are with fixed-interest funds. And that reduced risk translates directly into better rates of return.

What are the characteristics of a with-profit fund? In any given year, there's a limit to how badly they can do (handy if a recession strikes just before you're due to retire). However, in the long term, they won't do as well as unit-linked funds (because they have that extra protection, which must be paid for). They're generally quite a good solution, and fill a very useful niche.

With-profiteering

Now, being smart people, you've probably noticed a gap in the above explanation: how precisely is the bonus calculated? That's an excellent question.

And the answer is very fuzzy. The provider's actuaries will look at the state of the market, look at the state of the fund, and make an educated guess as to what bonus they can afford. There is no hard-and-fast method, and no requirement to document their method. From the point of view of the paying public, the actuaries all go into a dark room and come out a week later saying "right, you're getting 8%". In the words of my generation: What The F***?

Now there are actually good reasons for some of this reticence. An example: many of these calculations use stochastic asset models (see last post) that are just too damn complicated to explain to the general public. Due to the huge pile of regulation hanging anvil-like over our heads, it can often be legally safer to shut up than explain what you're doing. Especially if there's any chance of being creatively misunderstood***.

Regardless of this, the opacity of the system - the secrecy, the lack of information, the argument from authority - definitely promotes suspicion. It's a fricken' invitation to conspiracy theory. I personally would be surprised if the bonus system had ever been abused too badly, just because there are so many people breathing down the average actuary's neck. But you can see how people could come to that conclusion, and there's no way to refute them. Skepticism FAIL.

What can the Institute of Actuaries do about this? Bugger-all, sadly. They don't have the power to compel all these companies to open up, which is really the only way to fix the situation. Hence the rather frantic "oh we're so professional and ethical" song and dance - it's the only thing the poor sods can do to stop their collective street-cred going down the pipe.

Who does have that power? The UK government (in the UK, anyway) and its regulator the Financial Services Authority. Will they act? On existing funds this is very unlikely - it would be too much of a can of worms to open. However, the general trend is towards greater transparency with financial information****. Maybe one day we'll get this mess sorted out.

And the profession will breathe a sigh of relief.

Disclaimer: I am not a subject matter expert, please take all the above with a pinch of salt.

* An index-linked fund guarantees you (say) 1% plus your central bank's base interest rate per year. This removes some of the risk that the buying power of your money will fall (e.g. due to hyperinflation). So although the amount of money you'll get when you retire is uncertain, the number of mars bars you'll be able to buy with it is closer to being fixed.

In terms of returns, index-linked funds are less good than unitised funds, but not nearly as bad as traditional fixed-interest funds. In terms of risks, the order is reversed (as you'd expect).

** There are some complexities (e.g. various bonus types, market value reductions, etc) - this is just an overview not a technical manual.

*** In the UK, the life office Equitable Life went bankrupt at least partly because A) people managed to creatively misunderstand their pensions' guarantee structure, and B) a court decided to hold them to the most expensive interpretation.

**** For example, under the new Solvency II requirements (basically saying how much money an insurer needs to put by in case everything goes wrong at once), the rather complicated models used by each company to calculate their funding requirements must be disclosed. I consider this a very positive step, not least because I want to play around with the models (and possibly blog about them!).

Actuarial theology? Wait a second...

2010-01-25T06:49:00.000-08:00

It's funny how different subjects can overlap. This point was forcibly brought home to me by a paper I was reading which compares different "stochastic asset models" (SAMs).

Would you expect a topic like this to tie directly into the philosophy of religion? I didn't. But guess what I found...

Meet SAM

SAMs are bits of mathematics and/or computer code that are used to predict roughly what possible values an asset could hold in future. Actuaries use these to guesstimate how much money you need to put into a pension scheme to get a given payout, and how that money should be invested in the meantime.

As a very simple example, we generally stick money in high-interest (high-risk) assets to start with, and then move it into low-risk (low-interest) assets later on. That's because, as someone approaches retirement, there's less time to recover from disasters - if the market crashes two days before they hit 65, we want to ensure that the piggy-bank is still reasonably full.

Normally the asset ratio is taken to be a simple linear function of time. So for someone retiring at 65, you might say: put min(1,(65-age)/10)*100% of their money into a high-risk fund (e.g. Asian shares) and max(0,(age-55)/10)*100% into a low-risk fund (e.g. government bonds). This is a nice simple linear relationship.

However, it is also a very rough rule of thumb pulled straight out of our actuarial buttocks. The problem is, we don't know how the assets are likely to behave over time, so we can't come up with a more realistic strategy. SAMs are intended to fill that hole.

A SAM will normally be a set of difference equations (or differential equations) with a bit of randomness ("innovations") thrown in for good measure. The equations are intended to codify the relevant bits of economic theory - for example we expect that retail prices will be affected by inflation. The model is then initialised with numbers estimated from the last few years' worth of real-world economic data.

Whoops

The problem* is, these models can sometimes have "interesting" side-effects. For example, the paper I'm reading refers to a type of model which it calls a "random walk variant with alpha-stable innovations". I think I know what that means, but anyway the interesting bit is the following quote:

"The alpha-stable distribution [...] is in some ways the most intellectually satisfying possibility. [...However, they are] not satisfactory for the pricing of derivatives because the prices of simple options are theoretically infinite [...]"

Yeah, that'd be a problem.

An option is a simple kind of contract - basically a form of insurance. If I run a sawmill, I want to ensure that I can get some logs cheaply no matter what. One approach would be to arrange a "future" contract - a contract which sets a price and time at which I can and must buy the wood.

However, this isn't perfect: what if the price of wood drops massively? In that case I'll be paying good money for something I could buy cheaper elsewhere. Instead of a future, I could arrange an "option" contract, which sets a price and a time at which I can - but don't have to - buy the wood**. This gets me the best of both worlds - no risk of excessive gain or loss. I'll normally have to pay a bit of a premium for the privilege, of course.

These options are vital tools of business, and to be told that they should be infinitely expensive is disturbing. How can that be the case?

Wtf?

As far as I can tell, the logic seems to be: extreme market events are more likely than you'd think. Let's consider a simple case, an option to buy a tonne of wood for £100. We need to work out how much loss the option seller expects to suffer. This will depend on the probability distribution of the lumber's cost C at the option's expiration date.

If we knew for sure that the cost would be £150, we could say P(C=150) = 1. The option seller would then have to buy wood at £150, and sell it to me for only £100. Her loss would be £50, so she'd presumably charge me at least £50 for this (rather useless) option***.

If we guessed that the option price would either go up or down by £30, and that the odds were the same, we could say P(C=50) = P(C=150) = 0.5. If the price went down, I'd be daft to exercise the option, so the seller's expected loss is 0. If the price went up (as it would 50% of the time), the seller would lose $50 as before. £50 × 50% = £25, so the option would probably cost a bit more than £25.

Let's consider a more complicated case:
P(C<=100) = 1/2
P(C=200) = 1/4
P(C=300) = 1/8
P(C=500) = 1/16
P(C=900) = 1/32
...
P(C = 100*(1+2^n)) = 1/4 × 1/2^n for n between 0 and infinity

It's easy to prove that 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... = 1, so this is a valid probability distribution.

In this case, what is the option seller's expected loss? It will be:
0×P(C<=100) + (200-100)×P(C=200) + (300-100)×P(C=300) + (500-100)×P(C=500) + ...

This can be rewritten as:
Sum[n = 0 to infinity] { 100 × 2^n × 1/4 × 1/2^n }
= 25 * Sum[n = 0 to inf] { 1 }

But if you add ones together an infinite number of times, you get infinity! This is what's known as a "fat-tail" effect - the "tail" of the distribution is so long and wide that it completely overwhelms the rest of the calculation.

Wager 2.0

From a practical economic perspective, this is a disaster for the model. It's implausible that the value of anything can be infinite - there isn't that much money on the planet.

But I'd like to draw your attention to something. Here we have a model - a belief system of sorts - which, if true, can grant us amazing rewards. All we need to do is act on this belief (e.g. buy an option) and our expected gain goes up to infinity.

Does that remind you of anything?

Pascal's wager is one of the oldest arguments for God. It states that, if you believe in God, you could get to go to Heaven - an infinitely valuable reward - and at worst you'll lose a finite amount of time spent praying etc. If you don't believe, you definitely won't go to Heaven. The "fat tail" of Heaven's infinite goodness is supposed to overwhelm the mere finite rewards you can get from living a happy Godless life.

By the same logic, the infinite return we can expect from buying an option under the alpha-stable model should overwhelm our mere finite uncertainty about whether the model is actually valid. There is no way we can be infinitely sure that the alpha-stable model is wrong - statistics just doesn't work like that. So (in theory) the logic will always hold.

I've given some thought to Pascal's wager, and I think I've found a fair number of holes in it. I haven't thought much about option pricing yet; the same holes may be present there. But in the meantime, a single thought is buzzing round and round in my head:

Should I buy an option?

* OK, so there are all sorts of other problems. But I'll save them for another post.

** Actually this is only one type of option (a European call, to be precise). For more information, see the Wikipedia page.

*** I'm ignoring interest here as it's not really relevant to the point.

What actuarial is really about

2010-01-03T07:46:00.001-08:00

See here. Also here, only less so.

Enjoy.

Hierarchies of debate

2010-01-02T03:38:00.000-08:00

I've just read an interesting post by a guy called Daniel Loxton on James Randi's accidental endorsement of pseudoscience.

I agree with Loxton that only informed debate is useful in scientific matters. But I think his hierarchy of debate as written is a bit too close to an argument from authority. I'd phrase it slightly differently...

1) If someone has clearly done less reading up on the subject than me (e.g. someone saying that evolution cannot add new information, which I know from studying information theory is complete mince), I will vocally disagree with them.

2) If someone has clearly done more reading than me (e.g. they're a Professor of Atmospheric Dynamics at a reputable uni), I will quietly challenge them in the hope that they'll help me improve my understanding. If they appear unable to do so then I'll jump to step #4.

3) If someone appears to have roughly the same level of knowledge as me, I'll aim to trade information with them via debate until we can reach a consensus.

4) If I can't judge whether someone is more or less competent than me, I'll go away and read basic science textbooks until I can judge. (Or I'll shut up. But I don't like shutting up.)

I'm currently at step #4 with my dad on climate change. He's normally more scientifically literate than me, but he's also an AGW skeptic, which seems to go against the consensus. I think it's likely he's just been getting information from dodgy third-hand sources, but I've been getting my information at third hand as well so I can't really protest about that. Yet. I'm working my way through the IPCC report as we speak, and looking up references where possible.

I'm at step #2 with my actuarial science course notes. I have a suspicion that basically the entire financial economics community is taking an approach of "these are the kind of mathematical models we know how to use, therefore we'll assume finance really behaves like that". But I need to do a lot more background reading and questioning, in a state of humility, before I can say for sure.

I consider myself to be at step #1 with the "does God exist" debate, but only because the majority of theists seem to be stuck at step #4 (without the shutting up part). There are some with better knowledge than me, but they tend to be like Henry Neufeld, who freely admits that he believes in God on essentially non-rational grounds.

What hierarchies do you guys use?

Just my opinion

2009-11-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

Anyone who uses the word "quantum" in a serious discussion, and who has never solved Schroedinger's equation, should be stuck in a box with a radioisotope, a neutron-triggered poison dispenser, and an introductory textbook on quantum mechanics. This is what we call "incentive to learn".

First nominee for this treatment: Deepak Chopra. Anyone got their own preferred woo-merchant?

Not Sophistication

2009-11-03T13:17:00.001-08:00

Yeah.

So.

This is kinda embarrassing...

How can I put this? Some people are alcoholics. Some people snort cocaine. Some people visit prostitutes. Some people have scary fetishes.

I'm afraid my personal addiction is not nearly as socially acceptable.

Yup, I'm a Dungeons and Dragons webcomic freak.

I swear I never saw it coming. It started off small, just a little bit of Order of the Stick when I was feeling bored. Then a gamer friend landed up in hospital, and I bought him some OOTS books to keep him company, and... I couldn't resist their siren song. I fell into depravity like an expensive, beautifully-painted character model onto a stone floor*.

Next it was Goblins. But hey, two comics ain't so bad. I could give it up any time I liked.

I dabbled with Irregular Webcomic, but quickly moved on to harder drugs. I tasted Looking For Group, and life was sweet for a while.

But then I discovered Darths and Droids and DM Of The Rings. Webcomics about fantasy films, in the style of D&D adventures? I think I've hit bottom here. It's time to admit: I need help.

The really irritating thing is that I don't even play Dungeons and Dragons.

* It's well-known that the force of impact of a dropped model is proportional, not to the height of the table it's knocked off, but to how annoyed you'll be if it gets broken.

Sophistication

2009-10-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

You know that guy? The one who is always in great shape despite apparently living off fast food. The one who always gets top marks despite apparently never revising for exams. The one who can drive, skate, ski, swim, fight, play every card game known to man, and all without ever seeming to break a sweat.

Everyone knows someone like this (guy or girl). After years of wondering how the blazes they do all that and still look so laid back, I've come to a conclusion.

They're frauds.

Sure, they may have a slightly broader range of talents than the average bloke. Sure, they possibly started out with slightly better strength and dexterity than us mere mortals. But there is no level of innate ability that could set them that high above the rest of us.

I think that, for every burger you see being eaten, there's an hour in the gym that you never find out about. For every cakewalk of an exam, there are many frantic hours of secret preparation. For every activity that they're "just naturally good" at, they have undoubtedly spent time preparing and training.

This is reassuring. It means that anyone can do what that guy does. Anyone can upgrade themselves to the status of god among men. It just takes a lot of work. Specifically, it takes a lot of work without any sort of immediate reward.

I now have a goal in life. Firstly, to practice the discipline required for this sort of long-term training plan. Secondly, to develop the sophistication required to STFU.

I will make better progress towards both of these goals if I get a good eight hours sleep. Goodnight.

Bwahahaha

2009-10-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to cut back on my public use of mad-scientist laughter. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, it does disturb my co-workers somewhat.

To compensate, I intend to use my blog as a gloating platform. I consider this to be ethically acceptable on three grounds:

1) My blog, my rules (incidentally, the new dress code round here is "winged monkey")
2) Blog-reading is strictly voluntary - you fools chose to read this garbage
3) It's not like you can do anything about it anyway

Those preliminaries out the way, I would just like to say I'm very happy. And boastful. But mostly happy.

About four months back now, I got bounced up to a different part of England - I'm sure I've whined about it previously. My temporary home is a hotel in a little sea town that wishes it was Las Vegas. For generations, anyone with any brains or talent has been escaping from this dump*, and the result is reminiscent of Innsmouth without the successful fishing industry.

Coming to terms with the mindless tedium presents an interesting challenge. As a partial solution (because there's only so many books you can cram in a suitcase - believe me I know) I've taken up Taekwondo. I've previously done Karate, but they don't have a club for that within walking distance of the hotel, so what the hey.

I've actually been really enjoying it. This is the first martial arts training I've done in about three years, and it's been good to feel the old skills starting to come back (plus a few new ones). It's been going so well that I've been rather looking forward to the grading, which was earlier today.

Ah, the grading. I used to think the sweetest words you could hear in a grading were "you've passed". It turns out I was wrong. The sweetest words are "we've decided to let this student skip a belt". I've jumped yellow-belt entirely and gone straight to yellow-with-green-tag. Who thinks up these colours?

Normally I would take this with a large dose of humility - until this morning I was the only adult white-belt at the club, so they could have just been letting me catch up with my "peer group". However, when they were handing out the new belts, it transpired that they did not have a green-tag belt with them, which suggests that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision based on my performance in the grading.

Quite apart from providing me with excellent bragging rights, this episode also highlights the unreasonable effectiveness of the human brain (yes, even mine). Once connections are made, they tend to stay made. Once a skill is learned, it persists far beyond its anticipated sell-by date.

The moral: never be afraid to spend a bit of time learning a new skill, or polishing an old one. I'm going to be leaving this area in December, so I'll only have had a few months with this club. But even this short few months has been good for me. And I know that, next time I decide to take up a martial art, it'll be easier than ever.

* This is unduly harsh. There are many good, intelligent people here - I work with a bunch of them. But the social agenda seems to be completely controlled by people who think fart jokes are the height of humour, big flashing lights make a place look modern and tasteful, psychics can solve all your problems, and Sophistication is an island in Greece.

Where did they go?

2009-09-27T14:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not a good programmer. I'm naturally quite techie, but I've never really had the patience to sit down and make great art with my PC. The skills I have are those I was able to absorb from those in my immediate vicinity - replication not initiation.

That said, I do enjoy absorbing the culture of tech - the story of mel, the jargon file, esoteric languages, and the old tales of the MIT AI lab and Xerox Park. I read books by Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Buried somewhere on my hard drive is the complete archives of Phrack mag, although I barely understand half of it (typically the obsolete half - yay analog phreaking!).

And one of the things I pick up from these shards of geekiness is a sense of wistfulness. They talk about the September that never ended. They talk about the AI Winter. They refer to newsgroups and communities of unsurpassed elegance and sophistication, that now no longer exist. There's a sense of stumbling across the forgotten artifacts of some lost higher civilisation. Once heroes and wizards strode the Earth; now there are only echoes.

Where did they go? What happened to the cypherpunk generation? Did they all quit programming, or wind up in wage-slave jobs that crushed their creativity, or die of drug overdoses, or get locked up for not respecting someone's lack of respect for computer security? Have the elves passed into the West, making way for the Age of Man?

I hope not. I like to think that, somewhere, these ideals hold on. Somewhere, in a hidden mailing list, on a firewalled server, carried by a stream of encrypted emails spliced into innocuous data, the crypto-anarchist dream lives on. It's just waiting to be found, locked behind doors that cry out for the right key. So what if the key in question is 8192-bit?

Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe the cypherpunk movement just died out, faded back into oblivion. It would be a poorer world if that were so, but the world has no responsibility to respect our desires.

But I allow myself this one dream. And in consolation for the lack of evidence, I hold this thought tightly:

If they couldn't hide themselves from people like me, they wouldn't be worth admiring...

How To Learn French

2009-09-20T03:02:00.000-07:00

1) Work your way through Wikibooks: French

2) Download a freeware French-English dictionary (I'm usingFreedict - open-source but not very user-friendly).

3) Download a good book here and ici, and read them side by side.

4) Tune in to web radio (alternatively pick a DVD, and set the language to French and the subtitles to English).

It's amazing how long you can spend on the internet and still not use it to its full potential.

An example thereof

2009-08-17T15:50:00.003-07:00

In my last post I explained why it was a good thing to be skeptical before passing ideas on.

Now, I've just come across a great reference to "the world's oldest apocalypse prediction":

"Our earth is degenerate in these latter days. There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common."
- Assyrian clay tablet, circa 2800BC

This reference is sourced to Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts. The problem is, I can't substantiate it. I don't have a copy of the Book of Facts handy and, even if I did, I would need to know more about the clay tablet in question before I could trust Mr Asimov's word on this.

So if I were to use this quote in any sort of serious discussion, I would need to accompany it with a shot of skeptical "penicillin". I would have to make my friends aware that I could not stake my life on the it being accurate. This would be boring and long-winded.

The only alternative is to try to track down the tablet in question online. This is not proving easy: googling for the translated text just finds thousands of people who have quite clearly copied it straight out of the Book of Facts. This is not corroboration.

So I need to dig deeper. With a bit of effort, I'll be able to figure out how the Assyrian research community organises its information, which should give me some idea of where to find this particular tablet. So far I've come across the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (not so helpful as it doesn't give translations) and the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project (which appears to be defunct).

Beyond that, I may have to gatecrash the local university library. Watch this space.

It may take a while to learn the truth here. Heck, I might actually need to learn Assyrian to track down the tablet (or to demonstrate that it probably doesn't exist). I am unlikely to go that far. But the time I do spend on this exercise will be time well used - a tithe spent on improving the information available to the community as a whole.

Wash your hands before blogging

2009-08-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

On this blog I often talk about skepticism. But what actually does this mean? Beyond the statistics, the science and the logic, what is it that defines us as skeptics? What is the driving force behind our community of pedants?

The answer is simple. When you get right down to it, modern skepticism is about hygiene.

Bear with me here...

Why do we wash our hands? Because there are tiny self-replicators called bacteria and viruses that can infest them. These bugs eat the nutrients on our hands, and given half a chance will take a bite out of the hand itself. They are harmful.

They also spread rapidly. When we perform the various acts of hygiene - using a tissue when sneezing, washing our hands after using the loo, cleaning up after our dog - we aren't just protecting ourselves. We're protecting those around us. Washing your hands makes you safer, sure, but it also helps slow the spread of disease through your community.

Why do we apply skeptical principles to our thoughts? Because there are tiny little self-replicators that can infest them. We call these replicators "memes", by analogy to biological genes. A meme is simply a bit of information that can "copy" itself from one human mind to another. It could be an email hoax, a news story, a technique for producing origami boats, a poem, or even a blog post.

Some of these memes are useful; some are harmful. Memes can encourage you to feed the homeless, or to give all your money to scammers. In general, memes that correspond well with reality are less likely to cause harm. Truth is usually better than falsehood.

When we pick up biological diseases, we have a responsibility to ourself and others to limit the damage those germs can cause. When we pick up memes from others, or when we pass our memes on, we have a similar responsibility to ensure that they are realistic. We must use the disinfectant of rationality, the soap of science and the hot water of critical evaluation to ensure that no-one will be injured or killed because we infected them with a dangerous untruth.

This explains some of the distaste that scientists and skeptics sometimes show towards people who believe in UFOs, homeopathy, psychics, creationism, conspiracy theories... and gods. It's not the beliefs that disturb us; rather, it is the lack of intellectual caution that these beliefs demonstrate.

In general, these believers have not bothered to "wash their hands". They have not attempted to protect themselves from bad memes, and they happily pass on their mental plagues to others. These people are walking around with unwashed minds, ready to transmit all sorts of potentially-harmful diseases.

It's unhelpful. It's dangerous. And it's certainly not hygienic.

Rituals of my people

2009-07-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I went to the christening of my cousin's second son. It was a full church service, and was rather well attended by various family members and friends of the proud parents. The kid is very sweet. All told, a nice day out.

So what's bugging me?

Well, like I say, this was a proper church service. It's actually quite a while since I've been to a church except as a tourist, so this took some getting used to. And, after spending years discussing religion in blogs and forums, I found myself with a very strong urge to hit the "reply" button...

I was amused by the Bible reading that included Matthew 13:47-49a and carefully airbrushed out the less family-friendly Matt 13:49b-50. I was mildly irritated by the liturgical question-and-answer format - what if you don't agree with the prescribed answer*?

And I was actually rather bothered by the content of the liturgy. There are several parts that to a non-Christian like myself are a bit disturbing. For example:

Faith is the gift of God to his people.
In baptism the Lord is adding to our number those whom he is calling.
People of God, will you welcome these children and uphold them in their new life in Christ?
All: With the help of God we will.

I'm sorry, but this child is not old enough to be considered one of "our number". He's part of your community, sure, but at his age you can't meaningfully say he subscribes to your beliefs. Beliefs come later. And he might not share your views even when he grows up. Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch...

The entire liturgy is founded on the assumption that, if you're born into a particular family or community, you're going to grow up as a Christian. I reject that assumption. The kid will follow his own path and, as a responsible relative, I'll support him whatever that path might be.

If he becomes an atheist then that's cool. If he becomes a Christian then fair enough. If he becomes a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or goat-sacrificing Satanist then I'll still be on his side. Any other attitude is reprehensible.

If atheism's popularity increases, I foresee a day when we'll start to develop rituals and liturgies of our own. When that day comes, there will be a lot we can learn from the Christian versions.

In the case of child baptisms, I hope we learn what not to say...

* I handled this situation by just not saying anything while everyone around me muttered their responses. Who says I'm not tactful? Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I saw some other folks doing the same thing.

Walk on by

2009-07-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

There's a topic I've been meaning to cover for about two years now. And every time I decide to write about it, something comes up, goes down, or otherwise gets in the way. I'm jinxed.

It's a simple little thing: how we walk.

Now mostly this isn't something we think about much. If strolling down the street required cogitation at every step, there would be even more couch potatoes in the world. But there's a lot to find interesting...

An example. Next time you walk down a street, try to imagine that you're encased in a big solid sphere, like those Zorb balls. Convince yourself that the ball is rock solid - no-one can get through it to bump into you. Visualise the people around you rebounding from the ball if they try to push too close.

What you'll find is that you can walk straight at someone and they will always get out of your way. This is really kinda cool. And it doesn't seem to be anything to do with physical size or intimidation - I've seen tiny women pull this trick on burly blokes.

On close examination, it turns out that the "simple" act of walking past someone is actually quite complicated. As you approach a person, you use a range of subtle cues to plan a route round them, based on the direction you think they're going to head in.

The most important of these is probably foot position - your feet tend to point in the direction you're planning to go, and other people will pick up on this. If you really want to confuse someone, try walking past them on their left while keeping your feet pointed towards their right. Chances are good that they'll walk into you.

That's why the Zorb ball trick works. When you visualise being surrounded by an impenetrable force field, your feet point straight forward regardless of who is in your way. Everyone else unconsciously notices this and walks around you.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

W00t

2009-07-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

Just passed another actuarial exam. That makes three so far (out of eleventyumpteen...).

For bonus points, this is the one I didn't think I was going to pass first sitting. I am very happy right now.

Downside: by long-standing tradition, I have to buy cakes for the entire office come Monday.

Effect/Cause

2009-06-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

A common theme in modern skepticism is how people naturally see causation where none exists. Got cancer and live near a phone tower? Must be evil vibes from the GSM network. Got a child with autism? Must be that damn MMR jab.

"But surely that's just something that crazy people do? Us nice normal skeptical folks would never put the cart before the horse," I hear you cry. Well, I'm sorry to break it to you, but it's a natural human trait. And the thing about natural human traits is they don't just affect the nutters; they apply to everyone...

An example from the world of martial arts. I used to do a lot of Karate, so I have a feel for how to punch, kick and otherwise mutilate an opponent. I haven't trained for years but, as a result of a change of location, I've decided to take up Taekwondo. My first lesson was yesterday.

So a few minutes into the lesson I'm kicking and blocking like mad, but it just doesn't feel right. I'm stiff, I'm tense, my techniques don't flow nicely. This sucks.

Now, one thing I've heard people tell beginners in a whole range of sports is "relax and your technique will improve". So I decide to consciously try this. I systematically unclench my arms and try a few more punches.

And amazingly... it completely failed to work. My arm muscles, not being trained for this kind of task, weren't able to throw my fists forward without over-punching (which bloody hurts). My untensed leg muscles weren't able to lift my feet above hip height.

This turns the old adage on its head. It's not a case of "relaxation leads to improved technique". It's more like "being out of practice leads to poor technique, and your weakened muscles tense up trying to compensate".

So correlation has been confused with causation, and the resulting expert advice turns out to be useless. I wonder how often this happens?

Stalinism ahoy!

2009-06-12T12:14:00.001-07:00

As you may have noticed, I've been doing a bit of redecoration round the ol' blog. A new template, proper use of folds, and an upgrade to the new Blogger Layouts, should all combine to make the blog both readable and maintainable.

But that's just Phase 1 of the evil master plan...

For Phase 2, I'll be going back through the blog archives. In true Stalinist fashion, I aim to delete all the blogorrhea that's accumulated over the years: the whiney posts, the inappropriately rude posts, the posts that I clearly wrote after several pints of whiskey (it's amazing how the ability to type is always the last thing to go).

Whilst I'm at it, I'll add these new "tags" that all the cool kids are experimenting with. I'm really just a victim of peer pressure...

Phase 3 needs a bit more thought. Basically, I'll make a list of stuff I know just well enough to post about, and set up a poll or something to see what my - largely nonexistent - readers are most interested in.

Which neatly leads us to Phase 4. If I'm going to put more effort into this blog, it would be nice to know that someone is reading it. I know I'm never going to be Pharyngula, but I worry that if I spend too much time talking to myself I'll wind up in a padded cell. And those things don't even have wifi access.

In thinking about this, I've found that I don't really understand how blogs attract and retain readers. This is something I'll need to consider further.

I'm a weirdo

2009-06-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

Today I walked about an hour out of my way to give blood. The sugar rush from the cookies afterwards has to be felt to be believed. I'm now awaiting receipt of that lovely letter they send out: "Thank you for giving blood. Unfortunately we cannot accept your donation because you have HIV, Malaria, Asian Bird Flu and at least two Hepatitis variants. Consult your local undertaker."

On the way home I saw a very small fledgeling bluetit that had apparently fallen out of its nest and waddled into the road. Needless to say, it was a little bit shellshocked. I picked it out of the road and stuck it in the bushes before it could metamorphose into a very wide fledgeling.

I wasn't able to help an old lady across the road, but only due to a regrettable shortage of old ladies in these parts. This being the North of England, where fat is the fifth food group, they probably all die young of coronaries or acquired diabetes...

These acts of madness are not isolated incidents. Only a couple of weeks ago, whilst on camping, I took half an hour of time out from the festivities to help the bloke in the next pitch put up his tent. And I'm no better in this respect (or worse, I hope) than the average guy on the street.

There was no obvious benefit to me from any of these. Apart from the cookies, the blood donation was just a very long-winded way to get mildly dizzy. Bluetits are not known for their gratitude, and this one gave me nothing but a mildly increased risk of Asian Bird Flu. And one of my (young, female, single) co-campers did comment "oh, you're so nice", but sadly she's not otherwise interested in me.

So why do we do this crazy stuff? Needless to say, I have a ~~theory~~ hypothesis . And it allows me to neatly illustrate a misunderstanding that many people have with evolutionary biology.

The key concept I'd like to introduce here is the difference between proximate and ultimate causes. Humans perform a great many activities that - considered in the short term - are daft in the extreme. Consider the well-known spike in mortality rates for people in their early 20s, due largely to deaths from violence (accident, homicide, suicide).

All told, the human race appears to consist of idiots who waste their time and life expectancy for no better reason than "I felt like it". We shall call this the proximate cause of their actions.

Occasionally people are able to justify their behaviour in terms of some longer-term plan. For example, I work for a financial company because I'd quite like to make lots of money, but I work in pensions rather than investment banking because I would prefer not to die of exhaustion by the age of 30. In this case, we say that the proximate cause is supported by prior causes.

Very occasionally, we can trace our chain of causes all the way back to some very fundamental cause like "I don't want to die young". At this point, logic has to get off and hop - as David Hume pointed out, you can't reason from "is" statements to an "ought" statement. I reckon that these low-level goals are hardwired into me by evolution, so the ultimate cause of my actions is reproductive fitness.

But what about situations, such as giving blood, where I myself can't see any link between action and reward?

Well, the important thing to realise is: just because I can't see a link, doesn't mean it ain't there. Anyone who put my life under a high-resolution microscope might observe that, in giving blood, I've probably endeared myself to many of my co-workers. By making this comparatively harmless sacrifice, I've demonstrated that I'm a good, upstanding, altruistic chap who is welcome to marry their sister.

Now it's important to note that none of this went through my head. I didn't think "hmm, let's manipulate my colleagues' feelings"; what I thought was "ooh, there's a blood drive on, I can go help save someone's life". My impulse to do good appears to be completely disconnected from any sense of the consequences.

But of course it's not disconnected at all. The impulse is a side-effect of how my brain is structured, and of how it was programmed when I was young (which is more or less a side-effect of how other people's brains are structured). My brain structure is controlled by my genes. My genes have spent 3.7 billion years avoiding being wiped out, and they've achieved this by producing survival machines (like me) that are comparatively successful.

The result is that our actions - our unthinking, instinctive, intuitive actions - are quite often smarter than we realise. No matter how dumb the behaviour, there's probably a shred of logic hiding behind it.

In short: maybe one day I'll rescue a baby bird and consequently attract a bird of the human variety.

Actuaries 101

2009-06-05T08:45:00.000-07:00

So it occurs to me that, in my last post, I left one important question unanswered: what, in fact, is an actuary? What do they do, and why is it considered a remotely sensible use of time?

Actuarial science is best considered as forward-looking accounting. Traditional accountants look at what has happened in the past and try to figure out whether a company is broke or not. Actuaries look at what is likely to happen in the future and try to figure out whether a company will survive it all...

An example. Let's say that you send a ship to India to pick up some tea. You want to be sure that you don't go broke if the ship sinks. So you buy an insurance policy.

The company who sells you the policy has a dilemma: how much do they charge? If they charge too little for their policies then, in the long run, too many ships will sink and they'll go bust. If they charge too much, their competitors will steal all their trade. By this point, their stockholders are probably breathing down their neck for proof that the company is doing the right thing.

How do they handle this situation? They ask an actuary. The actuary will look through the mathematical literature on ship failures, consider the specific situation, and propose an actuarial model: a set of formulae that will put a price on that policy. The model may handle a number of factors - expected weather conditions at this time of year, age of ship, amount of maintenance done, even the professional opinion of engineers paid to examine the ship. The goal is to calculate a figure that will keep the company's "risk of ruin" - their chance of going bankrupt - below a certain level.

The three main areas of actuarial work are:

1) General insurance - dealing with the risk of expensive stuff breaking
2) Life insurance/assurance - dealing with the risk of people breaking
3) Pensions - dealing with the risk of people staying alive long after they've stopped earning

I mainly work in pensions, where the problem we deal with is that we don't know when someone will die. There are two different approaches to dealing with this:

1) Defined contribution schemes. These schemes hold a specified investment portfolio for each policyholder (PH), normally linked to the amount of money that the PH has fed into the scheme over the years. If, ten years down the line, all the scheme's investments fail, the PH just doesn't get much money. The hard part, then, is projecting the policy's value at date of redemption.

2) Defined benefit schemes. These set out in advance, according to some horrible messy formula, precisely how much money a pensioner will get. The hard part, then, is figuring out the amount of money the scheme needs to have right now in order to pay for all this. This is called scheme valuation and it is the subject of much actuarial thought, and of the heavy-duty actuarial software described in the last post.

In general, companies don't like DB schemes because, if the scheme's portfolio fails, the company has to carry the can. This is hard to allow for unless you have an unlimited source of money. So companies prefer DC schemes.

By contrast, governments are perfectly happy with DB schemes. After all, if the scheme needs more money, they'll just raise taxes. And having a deterministic formula for benefits makes negotiation with unions easier. In the UK, I suspect that this rather blasé attitude is likely to backfire at some point when the public realises how good the benefits are in the public sector...

Actuarial software

2009-06-05T07:39:00.000-07:00

I now have a wonderful little tool called a dongle, which means that, even if my company persists in sending me to far-flung* locations, I can keep playing with teh intarwebz.

And I can keep bothering my readers (if any are still around) with pointless theorising. Bwahahahaha.

On with the show. My last post discussed actuarial software, specifically how hard it is to get hold of. Since then I've done a little bit of research on the subject...

Q: What is actuarial valuation software?

A: It's software that allows you to pull some numbers out of thin air ("make actuarial assumptions"), punch 'em into a standard statistical model, and thus figure out how much money your company needs to stockpile to ensure that employees get their promised pensions.

Q: Why not just use spreadsheet software?

A: Because many of the statistical models require incredible amounts of processing power. Also spreadsheets are too easy; if actuaries used them then we'd lose our aura of mystery.

(More seriously, these models are easy to screw up so it's best not to have the uninitiated trying their hand at them.)

Q: Why not use a general-purpose programming language?

A: Because actuaries generally don't think of themselves as programmers. Most of them can't code for toffee, and can't be bothered to learn - after all, that's not what gets them the big bucks. The purpose of actuarial software is to allow actuaries to program without actually needing to know any of the relevant concepts.

Q: Are the statistical models really worth all this effort?

A: Not really. There's no such thing as a crystal ball, and no such thing as an actuarial model that won't be blatantly wrong thirty years down the line.

A good example is smoking. A lot of the mortality rates we use are based on the tacit assumption that a sizeable proportion of the population has been inhaling plant-based tar for a lot of their life. Now that smoking is becoming less common in developed countries, our models can't always deal with the resulting increased life expectancy. See the intro to this article for an indication of how technical this can get.

So why do we bother? Let's get this straight: actuarial models will not allow you to prove that you're saving the right amount for your employees' retirement. However, it will allow you to prove that you're saving some money, and that the amount you're saving is justifiable.

This is of great interest to regulators, so they force pension schemes to jump through these hoops. It's like getting a degree from a prestigious uni - it doesn't actually prove that you've got two neurons to rub together, but it does make it a lot easier to filter out morons. Read up on information asymmetry for more info.

Q: Back to the main topic. What does actuarial software actually do?

A: Your standard actuarial software package will contain:

1) A bunch of standard actuarial algorithms, designed to predict e.g. mortality of pensioners.
2) A set of modules to handle country-specific or industry-specific regulatory requirements.
3) A lot of dainty footwork to allow things like distributed processing (important given how hefty some models are).
4) A user-friendly interface (remember, this has to be used by actuaries, who are generally not techies).

Q: And you're actually planning to produce all that???

Probably not. But it's an interesting goal to think about.

* This is Britain I'm talking about. In USA terms, this translates to "the other end of the state".

Rant: The closed-source black hole

2009-03-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

So despite my best efforts, I seem to have ended up in an actuarial career path. The only question now is how best to get ahead in that path.

As a tech geek, one approach that makes sense is to learn the programming languages and toolkits associated with actuarial science. There are many of these for different tasks.

One common task is asset valuation, and possibly the most popular tool for this is a software package called MoSeS. As far as I can tell, it's basically a new interface and a huuuuuge set of libraries slapped on top of Microsoft Visual Studio.

And that's all I can find out...

I've searched Amazon. Apparently there's no such thing as a MoSeS textbook. There's no such thing as a MoSeS user manual (at least not that they're willing to sell separately).

I've tried Google. There's no such thing as a MoSeS help page or online documentation. The absolute best I can find is a bunch of newsletters on Towers Perrin's website, which at least confirm that MoSeS uses C++ syntax but don't tell me an awful lot else. I can't even figure out how to buy a copy.

In fact, every single line of enquiry I've followed reaches their website and then stops dead.

Why? Because if they provide no documentation, people will be forced to buy their training courses. Because if they provide no purchasing info, they'll be able to negotiate prices on a case-by-case basis (with all the arm-twisting that implies). Because, when you get right down to it, actuarial companies are usually rich enough to pay over and over and over.

Now of course Towers Perrin have every right to do that - it's their product so they make the rules. But as a long-time FOSS user, I have serious trouble getting my head round this concept. I keep thinking "that's a stupid way to behave, if they keep on like that then someone will fork the codebase". And then I remember, oh yeah, it's closed source so no-one can do that.

The actuarial world has always been relatively slow to adopt change. This is a natural side-effect of e.g. working with pension schemes that will almost certainly survive longer than the people currently maintaining them. Sadly, in software terms, it appears that actuaries have gotten as far as 1976 and stopped there. This is a damn shame, especially since I have to work in this industry.

I now have a mission in life: to get good enough at FOSS programming, actuarial science and copyright law that I can help create an alternative to this intensely painful arrangement.

The Downside

2009-03-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

Today I'm feeling slightly irritated with skepticism. This doesn't happen often, so it's possibly worth discussing why.

Skepticism isn't a state so much as a goal. It involves a constant churn of invalidated notions, and an excessive focus on seeing, hearing and speaking no falsehood. As Feynman puts it: "The first principle is not to fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

In general, the effects of this are good. I have a somewhat better idea of what is sensible than the average human being. I'm better able to recognise when the emperor has no clothes. I recognise when my beliefs are not secure, and I am careful to state any caveats that may apply.

In many situations (particularly the regulation-happy financial industry), this is a good thing. In other situations, it sucks...

In particular, I've been reading about Cold Reading and Bavarian Fire Drills and similar psychological tomfoolery. I understand far better than most how these principles work. And yet I know I'll probably never manage to pull one of them off.

That's because I'm pathologically honest. If I were to try bluffing my way past a gate guard with the tried-and-true "don't you know who I AM???" tactic, I'd be forced to stop and say "well actually you probably don't know who I am, but you should let me through anyway. Pretty please? Alternatively, don't hit me too harOWWWWW!"

Needless to say, this is sub-optimal. Especially when the time comes for salary renegotiation.

There's really only one solution for it: I need to train myself to lie better. Now in the scientific world this would be a bad thing, because it would mess with people's "data hygiene" (although scientists tend to have access to fairly strong "data disinfectants"). In a long-term friendly relationship, this would be a bad thing, because it would damage the basis of trust. In many other situations, it's just unnecessarily cruel.

But in adversarial situations, such as the salary renegotiation or bartering in a market or dealing with evangelicals*, effective lying - or at least the charisma that's required to lie or bullshit effectively - is a survival trait.

Next question: how precisely does one exercise this faculty? Answers on a postcard.

* I've got into a habit where, if I wind up in a conversation with someone trying to convert me, I make a comment like: "Look, I've been in this debate for years, and I know all the arguments really well. So if I come out on top, that doesn't necessarily mean a lot."

This is the point where I realise I'm doing something wrong.

My First Patch Submission

2009-02-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

21:00 - Hmm, that's odd, the device manager on my Ubuntu laptop won't open up. It crashes. Very strange.

21:05 - Wait a second, that's not just a crash, that's a Python stack-trace! I know Python, I bet I could figure out the problem here. (And then everyone will love me and my name will live forever etc etc. Really I'm just in it for the girls.)

21:15 - Hey, it looks like hal-device-manager only consists of two Python scripts! This should only take five minutes.

00:10 - Wow that took a long time. But I've finally found the bug (see below) and I'm ready to submit it.

00:15 - Uh, where do I submit it?

00:30 - OK, so it looks like Ubuntu are getting the code off of Debian, who are getting it off FreeDesktop.org. Before I get in touch, I'd better check that the FreeDesktop folks haven't fixed it in the latest version of their code.

00:40 - Uh, where in tarnation is the code for this app? I can't find it in the git repository anywhere? Better google for it.

00:45 - Whadda ya mean, obsolete? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *sob*

For anyone who is the least bit interested in this sort of thing, the bug was actually kinda cool. What the code attempts to do is:

1) generate a list of devices (each of which has a predefined "parent" attribute)
2) for each device, create a list of that device's children (thus defining a device hierarchy) and ensure that the children's "parent" attribute points nicely at the parent
3) recursively set some of the children's attributes based on the parent's attribute

This works fine... except when there is more than one device with exactly the same name, and where those twin devices have a child. In this case, step 2 will result in the third device being registered as a child of both twins. From the child's point of view, the second twin will be designated as its parent.

When step 3 happens, the first twin is initialised. Then its child is initialised. But to do this, the child needs to check some of its parent's attributes. And who is the parent? The second twin, which hasn't yet been initialised. So the child can't get the info it needs and thusly throws a tantrum.

The patch is to stick a strategic "break" statement into the code:

--- DeviceManager.py.old 2009-02-12 23:15:48.000000000 +0000
+++ DeviceManager.py 2009-02-12 23:16:44.000000000 +0000
@@ -286,6 +286,7 @@
                     if p.device_name==parent_name:
                         device.parent_device = p
                         p.children.append(device)
+                        break
             if device!=virtual_root and device.parent_device==virtual_root:
                 virtual_root.children.append(device)
             if device==virtual_root:

I suspect this situation won't come up very much, possibly only on those systems that (like me) have a Broadcom BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX ethernet controller.

That education rant

2009-01-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

Edit 14 June 08: I'm marking this post as purgeable because large chunks of it are borderline unreadable, even to me. If anyone finds the subject matter particularly fascinating, leave a comment and I'll rewrite it.

There is a phenomenon in the educational system known as "dumbing down". It's a least-common-denominator situation: where some people have trouble understanding a concept, you either remove the concept from your syllabus or spend crazy amounts of time explaining it.

The problem this creates is that the "improved" material is far harder for smart people to understand. Case in point: my actuarial study notes...

Actuaries are (ideally) clairvoyant accountants. Whereas a normal accountant can only see what your assets are worth now, an actuary can look at something like the cashflows associated with a pension scheme or insurance policy and make an educated guess about how much those cashflows will be worth in the future. This requires substantial maths to try to pin down the odds of various events (death, illness, car crashes) happening to the individual who took out the policy.

So actuaries have to be quite heavily trained. In England, this training is regulated by the Institute of Actuaries. The IoA run the actuarial exam system. They also provide a sort of syllabus known as the "Core Reading", which is a very terse description of everything examinable.

Problem is, a lot of people who take the exams don't have a strong maths or finance background.So a secondary market has grown up, which is mostly filled by the Actuarial Education Company (ActEd), a for-profit organisation supplying lecture notes. ActEd license use of the Core Reading material from the IoA, and they intersperse it with lots of detailed discussion.

This can sometimes be very useful. For example, where the Core Reading might just list a type of tradeable asset by name, the ActEd notes will provide a detailed description with examples. However, sometimes it can be very very annoying.

Currently I'm trying to read up on Markov Chains. For me, this is not a difficult concept. But revision is going veeery veeery sloooooowly, because for every five lines of actual maths I also have to digest two pages of wordy, confusing, often seriously dubious information. This slows my learning pace down to a crawl, not least because I frequently have to re-read stuff to convince myself that yes, they are bothering to say something that obvious.

If their only problem was overdocumentation of the Core Reading, I'd be unhappy but I'd accept it. I'm aware that many people (cough*economists*cough) don't have my familiarity with mathematical terminology, and these people also deserve some support. But what I can't handle is the fact that the Core Reading is also underdocumented.

Sounds paradoxical? Well, let me explain. The average mathematical proof, as written down, will contain approximately one part non-obvious statements to four parts obvious ("trivial") statements. The trivial bits are just mathematical filler - they make it easy to see the links between the key non-trivial assumptions and the conclusion.

As a mathematician, I would expect ActEd to take the following approach: lay out the whole proof, devote a fair amount of time to justifying the key assumptions, and if necessary spend a smaller number of column inches dissecting and rephrasing the rest of the logic.

Apparently ActEd disagrees. Their main approach appears to be: go through the proof step by step (no overview), ignore any steps that would take too long to explain, and go into mind-numbingly overwrought detail on the bits that economists might possibly be able to get their heads round. It's a sort of triage approach.

For example, one section of the material I'm working on is devoted to "time-homogenous Markov jump processes". This is a very technical name, but the concept is simple. Imagine a system (say a person) that can be in a number of states (say healthy, sick or dead). Specify the rates of transition between the various states (for instance the rate of transition from dead to healthy is zero).

One problem we often need to solve is: what are the odds of staying in a certain state S for a certain length of time T. Now it's fairly easy* to find out the odds of a person starting in one state (say healthy) and being in that state again in e.g. two years' time. But that doesn't take into account the possibility that they might have skipped between states (healthy->sick->healthy).

One approach to calculating this is as follows. Define a set of events** B_k. B₀ is the event that the system is in state S at times 0 and T. B₁ is the event that the system is in state S at times 0, T/2 and T. B₂ gives S at times 0, T/4, T/2, 3T/4 and T. And so on, with each new event doubling the number of times after time 0 that the system must be in state S. All of these are relatively easy to calculate.

Notice two other things. Firstly, event B_k "contains" event B_j if j is less than k. For example, you can't hit S at times 0, T/2 and T (event B₁) without automatically hitting S at times 0 and T (event B₀).

Secondly, the event that the system stays in state S until time T (the thing we were having trouble calculating) is the union of all the events B_k. You achieve stasis (an event we'll call {T₀>T}, meaning that the first transition time is later than T) by achieving all the events B_k.

This is hard to see, but imagine if the system hopped out of state S for just a minute then hopped back in again. There would be some value of k large enough that a multiple of 0.5^k would fall into that minute. So if you leave state S, you forfeit that event, and therefore you forfeit the entire ensemble of events.

So we can now outline a method for calculating the probability of {T₀>T}.

Step 1: {T₀>T} = U_0-∞(B_k)

The U symbol means a union of events, and the ∞ means that you include all such events right up to k=infinity.

Step 2: U_0-∞(B_k) = lim_n→∞(U_0-n(B_k))

This means that, if you take a finite union (up to n) and then let n tend to infinity, you get the same result as just going straight to infinity.

Step 3: lim_n→∞(U_0-n(B_k)) = lim_n→∞(B_n)

This follows from our earlier note that each of these events contains all lesser events. If you take the union of a finite number of events, you just get the largest of those events.

Step 4: Therefore P({T₀>T}) = lim_n→∞(P(B_n))

P(X) just means "probability of event X taking place".

We now have a nice elegant approach to calculating this nasty value P({T₀>T}). We can just find a formula for the values P(B_n), and then see what happens as n gets bigger and bigger. The limiting value of this series will be the probability we're after.

Now, this was not an easy proof for me to explain. But allow me to point out three things:

1) Anyone who's got this far in the course will already have a thorough understanding of terminology like events, unions, probabilities, etc. ActEd doesn't need to explain that at this point.

2) The ActEd notes focus entirely on the symbol-manipulation steps 2-4. These steps are basically trivial - they shouldn't require much more than the line or two of elaboration I gave them. The mathematically interesting step 1, which should be analysed in detail, is completely ignored.

3) And yet they still took more words to describe this proof than I've used in this entire essay!

Reading these notes is giving me such a headache.

* Trust me on this. Or alternatively complain loudly and I'll provide you with a more detailed explanation.
** An event is a thing that may or may not happen, depending on the random behaviour of the system being studied

Practical philosophising

2009-01-11T05:07:00.000-08:00

Edit 14 June 09: I'm considering purging this post. There's some good philosophy going on in there somewhere, but it is not well-argued. I'll probably rewrite it as a sequence of posts at some point.

The basic principle of modern skepticism is that it's not about what you believe, it's about why. A good decision made for bad reasons is an oxymoron: flukes don't count.

Of course, this is not a complete answer. How do you know if your reasons for believing are good? For a start, you can look at how different approaches have panned out in the past...

In some areas, this is pretty much a solved problem. As far as figuring out how e.g. fundamental physical objects interact, it's a gimme: the scientific method as applied to physics is where it's at. Similarly for chemistry, cosmology and basic biology. By following the scientific method, you can analyse, understand and, most importantly, predict. The end justifies the means.

So what are the limitations of this method? What are the pathological situations where it breaks down? My favourite example is poker. By definition it's impossible to predict the responses of a good poker player: if they were predictable, they wouldn't be any good. The scientific method breaks down when someone is actively trying to subvert your results, which is why many excellent scientists get badly suckered by psychics.

And yet, in many ways, this is the area where understanding is most important to us. We live in a world constructed almost in its entirety by other people, none of whom would feel terribly comfortable if they thought we fully understood them. The man who understands you can manipulate you, can use you for his own ends. Attempting to understand someone borders on the disrespectful, and people will resist it tooth and nail.

The extent of this effect can be demonstrated by looking at the quite frankly convoluted procedures psychologists have to use. To get useful results from a subject, the good psychologist will have to thoroughly deceive that subject about the goal of the experiment. If you're doing an experiment about attention spans, tell them it's about pattern recognition. If you're doing pattern recognition, tell them it's about political reactions. Otherwise your data will be hopelessly contaminated by your subject's second-guessing of their own behaviour.

So how can we understand another person well enough to e.g. date effectively? There are two basic approaches: the theoretical and the practical.

The theoretical approach tries to achieve an understanding of your date that's one level deeper than your date expects. This approach is well known by stage magicians: by planning one step further ahead than your audience expects, you can create the most magical effects.

One example that I like was provided by my sister. When she was younger, a number of her friends were big fans of the horoscopes in the local paper. So if she was on the out with a friend, and that friend's horoscope said "a person wearing blue will be important to you today", my sister would wear blue. By understanding the factors that influenced her friend, she could achieve a closer relationship.

In dating, a similar role is played by the modern romance. Human beings are strongly conditioned by films and books to expect certain things of each other. This doesn't always work out well for us as a species. It's noticeable that the heros from action movies would have real trouble with the heroines from romantic films. So when an action-loving bloke meets a romance-loving girl (or vice versa) there are likely to be fireworks. And not in a good way.

The way to get round this is exactly what you'd expect: watch lots of sloppy romance films. This is a real issue for me - I'm a hide-behind-the-sofa kind of guy when it comes to this sort of thing. I empathise with the characters far too much to watch them blithely making fools of themselves in this way. I can't stand Mr Bean either.

But in the interests of fostering better communications between the sexes, I'm willing to make the effort. I just watched my first romantic comedy in years: the film Hitch, with Will Smith playing a relationship coach. I can't say I enjoyed it - in fact I spent most of it clutching my head and yelling at the screen "no! You idiot! Don't do that!!!" But I feel I've grown as a person. Soon I hope to be able to view stuff like this without needing heavy doses of anaesthetising whisky first.

Oh, and the practical approach to dating? That's to just try it a few times and see what works. In the end, this really is the only way of getting anywhere with something as complex as a woman...

Pythonia

2009-01-07T14:09:00.000-08:00

"I aten't dead"
- Granny Weatherwax

Warning: blog post contains factual inaccuracies. See comments section for discussion.

So I keep meaning to write up my experiences in India, and I keep getting distracted. For example I've developed an interest in clockwork (don't ask).

Even more braincell-consuming is my ongoing effort to produce some sort of computer game worthy of the title. This is going very slowly, mostly because I'm taking a very anal approach to it. In short, I want to make it Pythonic.

An explanation. My favourite programming language, Python, puts a lot of effort into inculcating its users with good programming style. This is something very different from simply being able to program in the language, in the same way that not every writer of English prose can compete with Shakespeare. Good Python code, like any other form of poetry, should be elegant, non-kludgy, readable, evocative... Pythonic.

In particular, Pythonicism discourages "procedural" programming. This is code that consists primarily of single instructions linked by commands to go to a given line. For example, if you wanted to print out the numbers from one to twenty, a procedural approach would look like:

line 1: x = 0
line 2: add 1 to x
line 3: print x
line 4: if x < 20 then go to line 2
line 5: quit

The problem with this approach is that, unless you read and comprehend the entire program, it's a pain to figure out what the blazes it's doing. Let's say you start reading at line 3. What does x equal? From line 4 you can figure out that it's a number, but there's no clear indication of what x starts out as or how it changes over time. This is not a problem for this program as it's so short, but a 1000-line example would soon make your brain explode.

By contrast, a Pythonic approach would look like:

line 1: for x in range(20):
line 2: print x

If you start reading at line 2, you'll see that the text is indented, which means it's a consequence of some preceding statement. "Oh," you'll say, "I need to look to see what this command is a subclause of. I'll look at the line above." And you look, and lo and behold the line above contains all the info you need to understand x: its starting point, its limit, and its mode of change. Not only is this code shorter, it's vastly more readable. That 1000-line program starts to look manageable.

The Python idiom actually has a very simple root: the principle of minimum power. Always use the most restrictive command that can achieve a given goal. It takes a bit of thought to realise that a "for" statement is less powerful than a "go to" statement, but it's true. A "for" statement imposes certain constraints: the list of values must be predefined, and in any iteration you can only move to the next value in the list.

By contrast, with "go to" statements, you can achieve any pattern of recursion, however convoluted. When you read code, what you're mostly doing is narrowing down the possible explanations for what the program actually does and how it does it. "Go to" statements do not narrow things down at all, so code with them in is harder to read than code that uses more restrictive statements. This is why "go to" statements are evil: any program containing them tends to become an unmaintainable mass of spaghetti.

So Pythonicism makes for nice programs. But it also makes for headaches on the developer's part as he/she desperately wrestles with how to make a program not only functional but elegant. This is not easy. It's like trying to write instructions for an educationally subnormal employee that at the same time read like the most beautiful sonnet.

The example I'm hitting is game design. The game I'm working on is extremely simple in concept: it's a turn-based game, and the actual game logic is not complicated in the least. But I'm having real trouble because I can't see how to structure the code Pythonically. Procedurally, things look like this:

1) Start the program up
2) Draw the menu screen
3) Once the "start new game" option is selected, initialise all the game variables
4) Draw the game-board screen
5) Let the user play a round (updating the board as they go)
6) Let the computer play a round (updating the board as they go)
7) Go to 5

This is perfectly viable... and completely procedural. A more Pythonic approach is still forming in my brain, but certain subtleties have become apparent. Firstly, the user actually has two roles: "dungeon-master" and "player". As dungeon-master, the user gets to choose the game settings (difficulty etc) and save or load games. As player, the user is limited to playing with the pieces they're given - no metagaming.

Secondly, the core logic of the game should be agnostic as to whether a given player is human or AI - no cheating. There will therefore be two equivalent components that provide player decisions, one of which happens to have a lot of AI code in it and one of which happens to have a user interface. The user-interface component will have to be tolerant of occasional switches from player mode to dungeon-master mode. This raises a number of design questions, for example what happens if two players try to use dungeon-master mode simultaneously?

So what's the pay-off from this incredibly abstract approach to designing the game? Well, there are two main advantages. Firstly, once I've got the structure sorted out to my satisfaction, inserting the actual game logic will be a piece of cake: I won't have to worry about unexpected interactions between the various bits of code, because each will have a well-planned interface to the wider world. Secondly, extending the game will also be very easy - for example I could make it a network game with minimal effort.

It's still painful though. That's the joy and despair of poetic Pythonic programming.

Epiphalicious

2008-12-15T13:14:00.000-08:00

So I recently took a trip to India, to attend the wedding of a friend from work. This was great fun and the trip was a hell of a learning experience in its own right (of which more anon).

There was, however, one element of the trip that proved a little... distracting. You see, I wasn't the only one who was willing to hop on a long-haul flight for the chance to see a proper Indian wedding. I had a fellow-traveller. A girl. Who I've had a mild crush on for a while.

I'm fairly sure she has no interest in me, and the trip probably did little to change her opinion given how fish-out-of-water we both were in Delhi. However, it's a demonstrable fact that close proximity to someone enhances one's emotional response to them*. In short, the crush has devolved into full-scale infatuation.

And then comes the office Christmas party. And she's wearing a gorgeous dress, looking incredible, and I'm feeling like the village idiot as I shamble around trying to dance without breaking anyone's toes. I can't even pluck up the courage to make a move. This sucks...

Now at this point you're probably thinking this is going to be another of those pitifully whiney posts I've been coming out with lately. But somewhere between the champagne and the Jack Daniels, I have a join-the-dots moment. I figure out what it is that's making me unhappy.

The girl is a part of it, sure, but I've had the same frustration when faced with my inability to move up the career ladder. It's the feeling that I've hit my limits, that I've found some kind of glass ceiling beyond which I can't progress. I stare out across the impenetrable ocean of my own inadequacies and weep, for there are no more worlds I can conquer.

This is just an organising principle for thoughts that have been percolating for a while, but describing problems helps me find solutions. It occured to me that, as long as I'm improving in one area of my life, I won't care so much about the rest.

And improvement takes less effort than I expected. I've spent the weekend tidying my flat. I've given a load of my old books to charity. I've sorted out dry-cleaning and food shopping and getting various parts of my life organised, and taking a bit of exercise.

Ah, the exercise. I'm very badly out of shape, and the first fifteen minutes of my half-hour jog on Saturday nearly did me in. But I reached the top of a hill, and I felt my muscles start to fall into line, and I got my breathing in check, and I looked at the world spread out before me, and I felt happy.

It's Sunday as I write this and I'm just about to head out for another run. I know it isn't solving all my problems: at some point there will be a reckoning with the girl, if only to give me closure. But I now know that, when the moment comes, I'll be a better person than I am today. And that's enough.

* Or at least that's how I imagine it would look to an outsider. Speaking from the inside of my own skull, I just think she's really smart, attractive, unconventional and generally fun to be around.

I don't know what they're smoking, but I want some

2008-12-10T11:49:00.000-08:00

So I've just spent a couple of days frantically coding in (you guessed it) Excel/VBA. And I'm actually feeling surprisingly good about it.

This is because the task I'm dealing with involves extracting large blocks of data from various databases and then processing it in Excel. Up until a week ago, this was a truly hideous task for me, requiring a big messy chunk of partially-hardwired code to handle dumping the data into Excel.

Now, though, I'm happy. I've discovered a feature that takes care of all that: the QueryTable object. You just feed it an SQL query, point it at a cell, and it handles the rest. It has its limitations, but is generally rather nice. Apart from one issue.

Yes, there's always something. But this particular problem had me scratching my head in bewilderment: this lovely little feature has only the most cursory mention in the help file. I'd have been using it for months if I'd known about it.

The documentation it does have is likewise minimal. It took me two hours to figure out how to use a parametrised query, and actually getting a system up and running took a full working day.

Why, Microsoft? You actually did something right for a change: you produced a conceptually-elegant tool to solve a clearly-defined and commonly-occurring problem. There is almost nothing about QueryTables that I can complain about. So why the blazes aren't you shouting to the world about it?

Please please get the hang of when it's appropriate to blow your own trumpet. Or alternatively, pass me that spliff.

Ground Rules

2008-12-04T13:46:00.000-08:00

In the great discussion about God, it's quite common for otherwise perfectly sane people, on both sides of the argument, to start frothing at the mouth and claiming that the Other Side wishes to censor, physically injure or otherwise silence them.

In many cases, this is sheer paranoia. Most folks, religious or otherwise, tend to be pretty nice when you get to know them, and are happy to allow space for the beliefs of others.

In many cases, this is not paranoia. Religious arguments tend to attract a worrying number of nutjobs of all stripes. Once the legislators get involved, it's quite easy for little things like free speech to go right out the window.

As such, I would like to propose a code of conduct for religious debate. The purpose of this code is to mark out a middle ground in this debate between the various groups of crazies who want to see all belief systems but theirs forcibly purged from the planet.

Please leave a comment if you agree with this code, or if you wish to suggest changes to the wording. By signing up, you are showing solidarity with folks of other religious denominations who stand against the forces of zealotry in their own ranks.

The Moderacy Manifesto

I hold beliefs that touch on religious topics (henceforth "religious beliefs"). I feel these beliefs are justified. I reserve the right to discuss these beliefs: to present arguments in support of my beliefs, and to critique the arguments of others.

I recognise that other people hold different beliefs on these topics. I acknowledge that these people feel their beliefs are justified. I respect their right to hold and discuss their beliefs, even where those beliefs conflict with mine.

I do not judge an individual's moral character solely on the basis of their religious beliefs. I accept that it is possible to be a good person whilst holding religious beliefs different from mine.

I do not approve of religious discrimination that results in physical, legal or financial hardships. I will not materially discriminate against anyone solely on the basis of their religious beliefs. However, I reserve the right to materially discriminate based on their actions, even when those actions are inspired by religious beliefs. I also reserve the right to discriminate in ways that do not result in hardship.

I ask my government not to censor, fine, imprison or otherwise penalise any individual or group simply for holding or discussing particular religious beliefs. I ask my government not to endorse, subsidise or otherwise support any individual or group simply for holding or discussing particular religious beliefs. This includes individuals or groups that hold the same beliefs as me.

Although I may disagree with other participants in this discussion, I respect their sincerity and I respect their rights. I believe that mutual tolerance, of the form described above, is the best way to demonstrate that respect.

Ubuntu 8.10: The Verdict

2008-11-20T15:21:00.000-08:00

I've been using the latest version of Ubuntu, codename Intrepid Ibex, for a couple of weeks now. Given this, I think I can give a fair verdict on it.

The verdict is: meh.

There's not really much that's actively wrong with Intrepid. I've noticed a general decrease in system responsiveness and reliability compared to Hardy Heron (the last release), but frankly that's like saying Kilimanjaro is unacceptably small compared to Everest. It's still damn good by comparison with e.g. every instance of Windows I've used in the last few months. I have high hopes of penguinising my dad in the near future, as his loathing for his company Vista laptop increases.

The only other issue was the grace notes (quite ironic). Intrepid has a bunch of cute little features (see below) which, unfortunately, weren't actually installed when I upgraded my system. I've since hunted them down and installed them, but this definitely abbreviated the honeymoon period.

The big disappointment for me is probably OpenOffice 3.0. As far as I can tell, there is no way in which it is substantially cooler than 2.0, and the list of "great new features" is going to make any MS Office user roll their eyes and yawn theatrically. Considering what projects like Firefox and KDE have achieved in the same time, this is starting to get a bit silly. The longer this goes on, the more chance that Novell will be successful in forking the codebase and filling it full of Microsoft encrustations*.

So what do we get out of this release? Well, whilst there's nothing here to really make you go "wow", there are a number of little exploratory tweaks that could easily snowball into major developments. For example, each user now has an encrypted section in their home folder. Throw in the GnuPG plugin for Thunderbird and it looks like Ubuntu is rapidly becoming the first OS to have user-friendly crypto built in.

Another window on the future is Ubuntu's collaboration with the BBC to provide well-integrated access to media. Basically a huge chunk of content has just become available as a glorified playlist, via the Totem player. No need to piddle around on websites, just click through the list. I'm currently listening to the Digital Planet podcast.

Finally, a fair bit of love has been bestowed on Nautilus, the file browser. It has Firefox-like tabbed file browsing and a rather impressively effective previewing system. Very cute.

In general, this version took two steps forward and one step back. If you're on Hardy, I wouldn't particularly recommend you upgrade. That said, I'm glad it's out. Its showcase of features has enough neat ideas to keep the community busy for a long time.

* This may be an unfair accusation against Novell. However, their deals with Microsoft have scared the crap out of most penguinistas - we're worried they'll go kamikaze on us like SCO did a few years back. They would get caned if they tried, but Linux needs that sort of problem like it needs a hole in the head. Given this, everything that Novell touch (especially stuff like Mono and Moonlight that they touch with Microsoft's help**) tends to be interpreted as an early chess move in the game leading up to lawsuit. This may or may not be paranoia.

** It's definitely not paranoid to be worried about Microsoft. It used to be that they'd just try to squish open source. These days they seem to have graduated to trying to corrupt it - embrace, extend and extinguish. Microsoft is the living expression of why the open source movement needs the free software movement - open source's pragmatism doesn't handle attacks of this kind very well.

Cuts like a knife

2008-11-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
- William of Ockham

The scientific method is probably the most important investigative tool we as a species have ever produced. As generally understood*, it is a means of comparing and contrasting hypotheses. It uses three conditions: accuracy, predictivity and parsimony.

Accuracy is easy to understand: a new model of the universe must be consistent with existing data. So general relativity looks like Newtonian dynamics at low energies, quantum atoms behave like point particles on human scales, and so on. A theory of gravity that did not produce an inverse square law would be no damn good.

Predictivity is similarly straightforward: a model can't just describe what has happened so far, it must also give us some clue what's coming up. This is for two reasons. Firstly, it limits people's ability to equivocate, which stops science descending into an angels-on-pinheads talking shop. Secondly, it means that the entire business occasionally generates useful real-world results.

Parsimony, also known as Ockham's Razor, is not so clear. In short, it states that you shouldn't include more "stuff" in your model than necessary. So never assume a conspiracy where stupidity is an adequate explanation; never infer psychic powers where outright fraud is a possibility; never choose epicycles over ellipses.

But what do we mean by "simple", and how do we justify this principle? The two questions are interlinked: a thorough justification of the Razor will of necessity give us a working definition of simplicity. Let's take a quick tour through some historical arguments put forward for this enigmatic principle. We should accept the simplest explanation because...

1) ...Simplicity is so damn cool.

This is probably the original view of Ockham's Razor. As far as Classical civilisation was concerned, simplicity was a desirable goal in itself, without needing any further justification.

This presupposes some kind of human aesthetic sense which would allow us to distinguish the simple from the complex. It's very "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

I remain unconvinced by this for two main reasons. Firstly, I don't think it really answers the question; it just wraps it in even fuzzier clothing. Secondly, even after several thousand years there is no consensus about whether God is defined as simple or complex. If our aesthetic sense can display inconsistency in a case as grandiose as this, what hope does it have in other, subtler, contexts?

2) ...Simplicity is more likely to be true.

This is an intriguing notion. Could it be the case that the universe is in some way geared towards elegant explanations? It's actually quite a common belief, not just amongst the religious, but also among scientists who see elegance amidst the chaos.

However, I'm not aware of any good explanation of why this should be the case. In the absence of that, it's impossible to say that this rule holds generally. And I'm fairly sure there's a certain amount of confirmation bias here.

There are some broad philosophies that would make this explanation more plausible. In general, though, I fall on the side of Sir Arthur Eddington: the mathematics is not there until we put it there.

3) ...Simplicity makes better targets for science.

This was Popper's take on parsimony. He believed that simple hypotheses were, if false, far easier to squash than complex ones.

This view has a certain amount of empirical support. Consider for example the epicycle "hypothesis". Turns out that, by sticking enough extra epicycles onto a planet's orbit, you can match almost any data set. So the hypothesis was rendered so fuzzy as to be undisprovable. Undisprovable hypotheses are the plaque in science's arteries: they seriously impede progress and they're almost impossible to get rid of.

In this sense, simplicity relates to the number of "magic variables" that an hypothesis contains. Epicycle theory had an arbitrary number of magic variables that could be set by scientists: the radii and rotation speed of the epicycles. Galileo's elliptic orbits, by contrast, were specified entirely by a single gravitational constant plus the masses and present velocities of the various heavenly bodies. It took several centuries to disprove epicycles. By contrast, if Galileo had been wrong, it could have been demonstrated in a matter of months.

4) ...Simplicity is functional

Let's say you have a tiger charging towards you. You have two explanations of its progress: one in terms of mass, momentum, chemical interactions and the behaviour of various neurons, and one in terms of it being a bloody great big cat that wants to eat you. Which model do you think would do most for your survival chances?

Humans only have a limited amount of computational resource at hand, so it makes sense to shepherd it as much as possible. Why waste valuable neurons believing in yetis, ghosts, gods? It doesn't make it any easier to dodge the tiger, and it reduces the space available for beliefs that could.

From this point of view, simplicity means computational simplicity: the model that generates the most accurate results in the shortest time. One interesting feature of this is that simplicity may actually vary from organism to organism: a cyborg with a silicon brain might have far different preferences from a mammal with a bunch of neurons. Heck, even different processors could lead to different views of the world.

This is probably the most popular explanation for Ockham's Razor as far as the philosophers are concerned. Game over? Probably... but this explanation also causes great fuss. Philosophers do not generally like pragmatism - it can change so easily from situation to situation, making a mess of all our overarching frameworks.

If Ockham's Razor is pragmatic, then a sufficiently strong pragmatic incentive could lead us to discard it. Furthering our position within the tribe, motivating ourselves, avoiding depression - all these become valid reasons for unparsimonious belief**.

We skeptics can find only a Pyrrhic victory in justifying the Razor by reference to pragmatism. In slicing away the gods, we slit our own philosophical wrists.

* According to Karl Popper, anyway. Kuhn would disagree. I tend to equivocate on this: I think that, while Kuhn probably describes the practice of science better, Popper provides a necessary level of justification. In football terms, Kuhn is the coach who talks about positions and tactics; Popper is the coach who talks about human biology.

** Or at least for giving the impression of belief. But for someone who isn't a good liar, it might be necessary to persuade themselves.

Bah

2008-11-10T14:13:00.001-08:00

So in the run-up to halloween I did a lot of thinking about my costume. I was going to a party where I knew people were going to make an effort, and I ended up spending many hours on a rather nifty scarecrow outfit.

It helps that I'm ridiculously lanky, but height maketh not the scarecrow. I ended up hollowing out a pumpkin pinata* to make a mask. I worked through several pages of half-remembered electronics-related maths to give the mask glowing red eyes** that wouldn't explode at any inopportune moment (say, when my real eyes were 3cm away cos I was wearing the bloody thing). I even spent a couple of spare train journeys really puzzling the other passengers by meticulously attaching strands of raffia to rings of elastic, to create that "straw falling out the sleeves" effect.

It went really well, and I got second prize. I was only pipped to the post by a guy who came in the best Marlon Brando getup I have ever seen.

And now a friend of mine is having a birthday, and throwing... a fancy dress party. Based on the theme 1985. I wasn't even toddling in 1985. I do not have much awareness of fashions at the time. And the party is on Friday, so I'm panicking.

The pertinent questions, therefore, are as follows:

1) How much Adam Ant garb can I acquire at short notice from the local fancy dress store?

2) How much Adam Ant garb can I get away with wearing on public transport without being given a lovely new fancy dress outfit, this one with the sleeves tied together?

Answers on a postcard.

* I'm aware this should have a squiggle above the "n", but I'm lazy, so there.

** Incidentally, it is perfectly possible to carry a large round object stuffed full of wiring and batteries on the London Tube without anyone so much as batting an eyelid. So remind me: what's the point of all these CCTV cameras again?

A => B

2008-11-04T15:33:00.000-08:00

It's UPGRADE TIME!

And, for me, new version of Ubuntu => time to change desktop background. I don't know why I've got into the habit of doing this, but it keeps life interesting. Last time I nicked a picture of Mars off the NASA website, but this time I want something a bit more fun.

I just so happen to notice that the new version of Ubuntu has a new built-in theme: Dark. Cue a frantic search for Lovecraftesque backgrounds. Something black and murky, with slimy tentacles just visible at the edges of the light.

And I can't find a damn thing.

There are lots of pictures that use Lovecraftian monsters - shuggoths, Cthulhu of course, even a rather good one of the colour out of space. But these are all Lovecraft backgrounds, not Lovecraftesque backgrounds.

The difference is subtle, but real. Lovecraft backgrounds include his characters. Lovecraftesque backgrounds convey his flavour of cold-sweat, hair-raising uncertainty about one's place in the world*. It's the "Signs" principle: that film was a lot scarier when you couldn't actually see the damn aliens.

On the bright side, I did find a rather nice collection of steampunkania. But I want tentacles, dammit. I don't suppose anyone has any suggestions?

* Of course, in Lovecraft's stories, our place in the world is actually very clearly-defined: Cthulhu's small intestine.

I Am Not Alone

2008-11-03T11:25:00.000-08:00

It's intensely reassuring every time I discover that someone else has the same views as I do. Especially when it's obvious that they're far smarter and more articulate than me.

Riddle me this

2008-10-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

OK, so I moan about the job market et al. But really I'm having a rather good few weeks. The VBA training courses are over*, so I don't have to worry about producing more training materials. A couple of other sources of panic have passed me by. I'm working 8-6 to make up hours, and I'm struggling with my halloween costume, but these are fairly minor problems really.

And so I do what I do every time my mind starts to free itself up: I come up with interesting little tasks for myself. I've been working on a pygame-based strategy game. I've started looking back over my textbooks in search of cool concepts. And I'm trying to invent a new kind of puzzle.

A whatnow?

Every month, the UK's actuarial trade mag, The Actuary, has a puzzle page. Since the actuarial profession consists entirely of maths geeks, these are often rather good (I'm still trying to figure out how they do the 16*16 Sudokus without employing a supercomputer or two).

However, it's quite rare for the puzzles to show real innovation. Normally they're of a pre-existing type (crosswords, sudoku, logic puzzles, number grids). The actual problems are damn hard, but they're not conceptually challenging**.

I'd like to change that.

I'm working on what I believe is a new design of puzzle. It will require not only sudoku-style pattern recognition, but also excellent spatial awareness. This is because it is played on the surface of a truncated polygon. Yes.

It's not going to make me famous, but if I'm contemplating leaving the actuarial profession then I would like to go out on a high note. Causing actuaries across the UK to spit coffee over their keyboards would be a good start.

* Actually they went really well. I discovered about an hour before giving the second training day that some of my trainees were from other companies that were paying my company for the training. This caused much panic. But the day went like a charm, the trainees really enjoyed it, and I can now put "professional trainer" on my CV :)

** The November edition contains a counterexample, but even that is just a combination of sudoku and another pre-existing type.

A compass is no good if you don't have a map

2008-10-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

A definite advantage to working in a group full of contractors is that they're very happy to give careers advice. This is not something you get normally: the average co-worker, unless they're very chilled, will not tell you to ditch your company and strike out for greener pastures.

I've got a fair number of interesting ideas off them. In addition to searching for conventional jobs, one guy suggested that I take up contracting myself. On that front, I'm probably pretty employable: certainly the work I'm doing at the moment poses little challenge. Also I have an actuarial exam* under my belt, which looks damn good on a CV.

This option would probably do wonders for my bank balance. Contractors quite often get a stupidly large pay packet compared to conventional employees. There are two downsides, though. The first is reduced financial stability, which might be a problem if we hit a recession. The second is lack of career development, which is a massive issue for me. I would honestly rather hammer railroad spikes through my skull than do boring job after boring job for years on end**.

A second option, which I've just spent a fair chunk of evening discussing, is say "screw it" and go get an MBA or something. This idea holds a fair amount of interest. Technical skills for me are pretty much a solved problem, whereas managers tend be be confronted with challenges that involve people and are hence much weirder and more interesting.

My worries here are (again) twofold. Firstly, I'd hate to feel like I was running back to university as soon as it looked like the real world was putting up a fight. It is important to me that I retain my self-esteem in this area. When I feel like I'm on top of the world and everything is going consistently well - that's the time to go back to uni. Of course, at that point I may not feel like I need to.

Secondly, I read Dilbert. I know what people think about the stereotypical MBA, and I would hate to have them think that way about me. I've been in the real world for slightly over two years now, so I'm not a complete n00b, but it would worry me to study an entire course about management without ever having, y'know, actually been a manager.

I'm bouncing off the walls trying to figure out what to do next with my life. Some of those walls are figments of my imagination - for example, financial stability isn't really an issue for a young single male. This doesn't help much, though, because I don't really know which of the walls are illusory and which are solid and waiting for me to bust my nose on them.

Basically, I think this situation calls for a bit more self-confidence... and a lot more reading the job pages.

* Possibly two - fingers crossed for the November exam results!
** Which of course is why I'm doing the job search in the first place :(

The Joys of Jobhunting

2008-10-15T15:15:00.001-07:00

As of a few days ago, I'm finally getting my act together and looking round for a new job. Hopefully a change of company won't be necessary - I do actually like the people I work for - but if they try to send me out on placement again then they'll have to catch me first.

We're now several evenings on, and certain axioms of jobhunting are starting to become clear to me. To whit:

1) The jobs that catch your attention are the ones you have neither training nor experience in.

I've lost count of how many really cool jobs I've looked at and reluctantly clicked past when it became clear that BA Hons Cantab was not going to cut the mustard.

2) The jobs that match your specialist skills are boring as hell.

As a maths grad, my options are apparently finance, finance or - just to push the envelope a little - finance. I do not find finance particularly interesting. It varies between the accountancy end of the spectrum, which requires basic numeracy but no real maths knowledge, and the predictive disciplines (actuarial, quant, etc), which require the ability to pull large numbers of assumptions out of thin air and then pass the blame when it all falls through.

There's also cryptography, but apparently only if you have a first class degree. I have a 2II. Ohttre gung.

3) The jobs that you don't need specialist knowledge for are dangerously vague.

At present, the best example of this is "project management". Beware of any job with this label: chances are it's a pure documentation job. What has happened is that large number of job jobhunters have decided that PM is the fashionable thing. In response, large numbers of recruitment agencies have started mentioning PM in all their ads, regardless of appropriacy.

Ditto "analyst", which normally turns out to be a sales job.

4) More recruitment agencies does not equal more opportunities.

It is incredibly hard to find actual decent job opportunities online. The major online recruitment agencies just recycle each other's listings. Any good jobs vanish like a rump steak in a piranha pool, and the remainder circulate until they're withdrawn or some idiot applies for them.

This seems to be a classic case of the Internet exposing how dysfunctional an industry is. Maybe recruitment agencies are better in person than online, but I doubt it.

5) Life's too short for this crap.

Every single vacancy you come across will have the phrase "please send CV plus cover letter in it". Sounds easy, right? Problem is, it takes a fair few hours to thrash out a decent cover letter. This can quickly become a limiting factor.

Requesting a cover letter is good sense on the part of the company. If applying for the job ceases to be a ten-minute task, applicants can't just employ a "CV shotgun" approach but must actually consider whether it's worth their time to apply. It encourages respect for the application process.

Unfortunately, this encouragement of respect is entirely one-way. In general, companies don't bother to reply to CVs they don't like, not providing even a soupçon of feedback. When you've spent three hours preparing your application, this is very lame.

Conclusion) I hate jobhunting.

As far as I can tell, the entire jobhunting process is a sneaky trick by companies to help them retain their employees. I've been actively hunting for less than a week and I'm already concluding that sticking hot needles through my fingernails would be less painful than attempting to leave my current employer.

But I know that, if I don't, before I know it I'll be a 40-year-old "placement specialist" and candidate for Ark B. I want to do something with my life, dammit.

That height rant

2008-10-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

My, how things have gone downhill. Remember the good old days of conspiracy theory? You had the shooting of JFK, the CIA, the KGB, various mafias. And if all else failed, just call in SPECTRE.

These days, sadly, the conspiracies are much more mundane. I'm the victim of one at the moment. I've never successfully interrogated one of its operatives (damn cyanide pills), but I've been calling it CAT.

Campaign Against Tallness.

Now you may be thinking, what kind of conspiracy is this? It doesn't sound very intimidating, does it. But before you come to that conclusion, please examine Heathrow airport's Terminal 1 building. As a 6'4" tall guy, I have no problem with the ceiling (6'7") or even the doorframes (6'5"). What I do have problems with is the emergency lights (6'3"). The emergency lights in their sharp-edged, plate steel cases that are positioned right above the centre of the main walkway.

I feel this particular design feature conclusively proves not only CAT's existence, but also its dryly sadistic sense of humour. Blofeld had nothing on these guys.

Another CAT operative is at work in the car industry. Ever seen one of those cute little smart cars? Ever tried getting into one when you're 6'4"? Didn't think so.

And don't get me started on clothes. You would not believe how few trouser brands there are that even fit a 34" leg, let alone look good. Size 12 trainers? Sorry, that's one size higher than anyone holds in stock. Tough cookies.

So what actually is the evil goal of CAT? My best guess at the moment is that all its members are sensitive about their diminutive stature. By selectively eliminating tall individuals, or at least limiting their ability to breed*, they can ensure that soon everyone will be their height or lower.

For example, another of my (6'4") friends has a massive white streak in his hair from running through a (6'2") door. If he'd been running any faster, he'd have been permanently removed from the gene pool.

Of course their evil plan is ultimately self-defeating. Someday they may succeed in wiping out all the tall people.

But at that moment, CAMS (Campaign Against the Medium Sized) will stab them in the back. Bwahahahaha...

* And doesn't this just bring a whole new meaning to "not tonight baby, I've got a headache"?

That VBA Rant

2008-10-06T13:50:00.001-07:00

So in addition to my regularly-scheduled job, I somehow agreed to do some training for the group of grads who joined the grad scheme the year after me. In Visual Basic for Applications. Which I loathe.

Now it's easy for me to say I hate Microsoft products. I'm a Linux user and a civil liberties geek, so it's fairly natural for me to hate those monopolistic bastards and their locked-down software. But this goes waaaay beyond that.

Visual Basic was the first programming language I ever learned. A friend introduced me to it when I was fourteen, and I was soon able to produce a cute little quiz program that got me really good marks in IT class. At the time I thought VBA was the bee's knees.

The process of disillusionment took a while. It probably started when I took an internship at a software company that did all their work in Python. The people were really nice, but it was immediately obvious how bad my programming style was. Stuff that should be completely intuitive for any programmer just wouldn't fit into my skull. I left with a much expanded repertoire of concepts, and a very strong sense of what makes code easier or harder to maintain.

My education continued over the years. A key resource was the comedy site The Daily WTF which, in addition to being hilarious, is a brilliant primer on how not to write code. There's a strong dose of the scientific community to professional programming: most coding conventions have arisen from years or even decades of gradual refinement by large numbers of skilled practitioners.

The icing on the cake was probably my university years. I did maths, and the programming modules were by no means focused on best practice, but I got very very good at elegantly expressing difficult algorithms in code. Software is the true language of mathematics; standard mathematical notation is just a shorthand.

And there's something beautiful about writing code for a well-designed programming language. When concepts and implementation tie together neatly, it brings a tear to your eye. Python is very good on this point: if you can think it, you can probably express it in Python code.

And then I took on a summer job with a telecoms consultancy. Who did all their programming in VBA for Excel. And I realised how very far I'd moved on. By week 4 I was gnawing at tables trying to get this kludgy toy language to do what I asked it to.

It doesn't have proper error handling. It doesn't have a proper object layer (try passing a function as an argument and call me a liar). It's not even remotely self-consistent in approach or content. Most of the Excel component is a wrapper round the Excel UI, which means that things like text search aren't at all programmer-friendly. Source control? Don't be silly.

Almost every language has something going for it. Java is slow and ugly, but at least it's portable. Lisp is impractical, but so very elegant. C++ is time-consuming, but good grief it's powerful. VBA is ugly, platform-specific, hard to use, lacking in basic and advanced functionality, but... there is no but.

As languages go, VBA stinks.

And yet, despite knowing this, I've managed to land myself in an industry with the highest concentration of VBA users on the planet. The vast majority* of actuarial "tools" are just spreadsheets with a VBA layer to do the messy stuff (batch-processing, goal seeks, etc).

I really can't take much more of this. It's as if I was a semi-pro mountain biker and the company forced me to ride around on one of those tiny clown bikes. It's as if I was a fencer and the only weapon they'd give me was a feather duster.

What makes it worse is that most people don't think this way. They've never even spoken to programmers, they show no awareness of software best practices or concepts like separation of concerns. Their idea of version control is taking a backup copy every few days (and that's only if they're particularly on-the-ball). Even commenting the damn code is seen as a bit avant-garde.

Most of them have had no formal training. Now I freely admit that neither have I - I'm a software dilettante. But I know my limitations, and I put a fair amount of effort into discovering what lies beyond them. By contrast, most people in the finance industry are alchemists: they take what they've learned from one or two tutors** and elevate it into divine knowledge.

I worry that, if I stay too long, I'll turn into one of them.

So I'm producing this VBA training material, and hating every minute of it. It's like swimming through treacle. The only good thing I can say is that, once the training is over, the company will have someone else to lumber with VBA-related tasks.

Rant over.

* The only alternative appears to be COBOL. This kinda says it all.

** Who learned it from their tutors, who learned it from their tutors. The chain generally terminates with a bloke who read "VBA for Dummies".

Depressing much

2008-09-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

It's no secret that I'm not particularly enthused by my current job. I'm on placement (e.g. my company is renting me out) to a big life office. The job title was "manual calcs" which, in the actuarial world, usually means a fair amount of juicy maths.

Actuarial maths doesn't really float my boat, but I figured I'd at least get some good old-fashioned brain stimulation. No dice. The job turns out to be basically data entry: extracting information from old systems and posting it to pensions administrators. Not exactly world-changing stuff.

One thing I don't mind about the job is that it gives you a certain feeling of connection. You read all these names, all these dry facts about people, and you wonder what their life is like. This lady went to Australia. Was it an elopement? This guy married at the age of 60. Did he finally meet the love of his life?
This young fella who was only in the scheme for a year. Did he find his dream job elsewhere?

Then there's the death claims. These quite often give a sense of connection, but for entirely the wrong reasons. Today I processed one that really got to me: a top-tier medical professional, lonely and living alone, committing suicide.

When you read something like that, you can't help but wonder: will that be my life? Will I live without love? Will I die with no-one to mourn me?

I'm 23 and I've been single for 5 years now, which time included my entire university career. I'm fairly sure that I'll be able to fall off this particular wagon given time, but it's not immediately obvious how to go about this. That's really disturbing, when you think about it: the only thing between me and a really depressing death claim is 40 years.

I'm not scared of kicking the bucket (no, really!). I just don't want to have too many regrets when it happens. The situation definitely calls for me to do something drastic. The problem is, I don't have a damn clue what.

Answers on a postcard.

Eureka

2008-08-26T11:30:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite books, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stevenson, contains frequent references to a specialist mailing list for crypto geeks. The problem is that, in the real world, any mailing list offering high-level cryptographic discussion quickly gets colonised by opinionated numpties. So, in true Darwinian form, they're quite hard to locate.

I think I've just stumbled across one here. This is great for me, because I've wanted to develop a more advanced knowledge of cryptoanalysis for some time. Probably not so good for the list that it's been discovered by the outside world.

Once my forthcoming actuarial exams are over, I'll have to have a browse through the archives (in between learning Bengali and ancient Assyrian and brushing up on my computational biology). I'll let you know if I discover anything particularly interesting.

Random poetry day (week?)

2008-08-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- "If" by Rudyard Kipling

This poem is the best expression of the Stoic philosophy I've ever come across, and every time I read it I find some new application to my life. Stoicism is intended to inure people to the stresses of existence - a good lifestyle for kings, generals, and those who try to arrange large lunch gatherings.

On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

2008-08-14T15:35:00.000-07:00

...is the title of a rather good book I came across a couple of years back. Despite being dated by its Freudian lingo, it was a rather well-thought-out consideration of an apparently simple question: why do generals suck so badly?

It used to be (possibly still is) a well-worn aphorism among soldiers that, whilst the poor sod in a different uniform might kill you, it was your general who would murder you. That was adequately demonstrated by the "meat-grinder" battles of the World Wars, where millions of men were thrown into combat with effectively no chance of achieving the mission objectives or coming out alive.

Or, for another example, consider the infamous defence of Johore (in Malaya). The British commander decided what direction he thought the attack would come from, concentrated all his forces in that direction, and stubbornly ignored all evidence to the contrary. He even ordered that no barricades be built because it would be "bad for morale". Of course, when the Japanese arrived, the defensive line was obliterated.

Why would someone give orders that were so blatantly stupid? OtPoMI gives a thorough discussion of this question, and turns up two main conclusions:

1) The reputation of the military is such that the people who join it tend to be insecure people looking for a stable foundation.

2) The structure of the military is such that risk-averse careerists tend to rise through the ranks fastest.

The result of this is that you get a whole range of commanders who replace self-confidence with bluster, who are inexperienced at dealing with trouble, and who see each battle not as a learning experience but as a threat to their personal reputation. You get people who, faced with a deteriorating situation, are completely unable to get their brain in gear, let alone sort things out (in fact, the Johore story gives a clear example of generals focusing on morale to the exclusion of reality - were they just trying to clear their heads?)

In short, you get people who are likely to screw up really badly.

I've currently got a bit too much of that in me for my liking. In yesterday's restaurant debacle, I was more worried about my reputation as an organiser than about the actual event. A good leader would have focused on making sure everyone was happy, even if this meant ditching the restaurant early and hitting the canteen. But I was too busy panicking to display that level of flexibility.

A good leader would have accepted that this was just one of those things, taken his lumps from the rest of the group, and moved on. I got defensive. I don't think I did anything particularly dumb, but the potential was there. Again, I was focusing on my reputation, and thus failing to "keep my head when all about were losing theirs and blaming it on me".

I have a naturally careerist streak. I don't necessarily apologise for this - it's an excellent source of personal motivation, and frankly I'd have done a lot better at uni if I'd developed this tendency sooner. But it does leave me open to precisely this sort of funk. Before we left for the restaurant, the dept manager had complimented me for arranging the leaving do unasked. If anything, being in the spotlight like this just made me freeze up even worse when everything went pear-shaped.

However, one advantage I have over the generals of yesteryear is that no-one can(successfully) accuse me of avoiding novelty or challenge. Hell, I went to one of the weirdest (and hence most successful) universities in the world. I can hack it.

The problem with careerism isn't so much that it leads to bad behaviour as that it leads to overfocusing on reputation and hence to bad stress reactions. I hereby resolve to learn to control this behaviour. In a way, yesterday was great, because I learned how much damage my adrenal gland can do me. Next time the shit hits the fan, I intend to be carrying an umbrella.

Opposite of "up"

2008-08-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

Feeling fairly down at the moment. I'm dealing with the aftermath of a massive adrenaline spike round about lunchtime, followed by an emotional kick in the goolies during the afternoon.

Today was a co-worker's last day in the team - she's leaving for a more interesting job elsewhere. I've only been on the team for a couple of weeks now but, when I found out that no-one had arranged a goodbye lunch for her, I figured "what the hell, worth a shot".

This is the first time I've organised something like this, so I made a point to cover all bases. I booked the restaurant, sent emails to the group, kept a log of who was coming. I even called in to the restaurant earlier today, just to make sure nothing could go wrong. I got everyone out of the office promptly, made sure they made it to the restaurant, ordered food, and sat chatting while we waited for it to arrive.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

After 40 minutes, we're getting a bit worried. The food hasn't arrived and, although the conversation has been excellent, we do need to be back at the office in about half an hour for a team meeting. It's only a three-minute walk so this isn't a problem, as long as the food arrives now. I check with one of the waitresses and she tells us it'll only be five minutes more.

So we wait. And wait. And wait. And all the time my blood pressure is getting higher and higher as I contemplate the consequences of having invited everyone to a lunch at which no food was actually served.

Turns out that the restaurant next door had closed for the day, so all its business was coming to our restaurant. And, being such helpful fellows, they couldn't possibly turn anyone away...

Eventually the manager comes over to us and confesses that there's unlikely to be any food arriving. He's very apologetic, and offers us a stack of free pizzas for collection in half an hour or so. So at least people got some lunch in the end, but it was still bloody stressful to feel like I'm responsible for everyone going hungry.

That was Act One. By this point, I'm on the boil, out of my mind on fight-or-flight hormones, I feel like the sky is falling, etc, etc. And another co-worker (who hadn't even been to lunch) picks that moment to request that I don't talk to him again except about work stuff.

That's kinda harsh. The worrying thing is, I have this complete uncertainty about whether I did anything to deserve it. I've said nasty things to this guy previously, but only in a well-defined context of mutual bloke-on-bloke teasing. Did I cross a line? Did I go outside that context? If so, why did he wait til now to say something?

Or, more worryingly, is it something I'm not even aware of that set him off? I react very badly to adrenaline. Round about the lunch-induced hormone spike, there are periods where I can't remember precisely what I said to whom. What did I say to him???

My brain is currently frying in its own juices on a mixture of emotional exhaustion and Othello-level paranoia. So no management skepticism tonight. I'll be OK come tomorrow, when my body chemistry is normal and the molehill stops looking quite so mountainous.

Vertigo

2008-08-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

One of the useful features of a new job is a chance to reinvent yourself a bit. I've been doing OK on that front, but of course there's some things you can never change.

For example, as a long-time introvert, it's inevitable that I'll seek peace and quiet to recharge my batteries. As an introvert, I should do better when focusing on my own personal tasks than when interacting with others. Right?

Well, actually, I spent today's "dead time"* organising a leaving do for a team member. And, despite the slight possibility that everyone will weasel out and the restaurant will break my legs for booking too much space, it's been really energising. It totally got me raring to go, and my ability to focus on work improved dramatically.

So what's the secret here? What is it that turns an habitual introvert into a contact-seeking extrovert? After a couple of weeks in my current role, I think I've put my finger on it.

Extroverts are people who have really. Boring. Jobs.**

* In case my employers come across this, I should clarify that this refers to e.g. the time between handing over a massive stack of completed cases and being given another massive stack to start on.

** I'm not so bothered about my employers reading this, because it's a widely-acknowledged fact of life in our team. If they fired everyone who said the work was dull, they'd get lonely real fast...

Random poetry day

2008-08-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much

- Excerpt from Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Hat tip to Matt Ridley and his excellent book The Red Queen

Management Skeptic #3: Detecting Lemons

2008-08-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

This series discusses the concept of "management models" from a skeptical viewpoint. In my first post, I raised the question: do "management models" such as PRINCE2 improve a practitioner's ability to manage? In my second post, I discussed a common argument in support of this claim and demonstrated why it doesn't hold up.

This post analyses a second common argument in support of management models, and provides more reasons why a course can be popular without being any good.

Argument #2: Management models must be good, or why would companies buy into them?

In my last post, I discussed how a qualification can be very useful for job applicants without actually achieving anything in itself. Candidates who have been on well-marketed courses like PRINCE2 will often be seen as more competent, regardless of their real proficiency. As a counterexample I presented the "VISCOUNT4" thought experiment: a training course that is deeply popular despite sucking.

But why, one might ask, does this work in the long term? Why would companies hire people with a worthless qualification, and how can they prosper if they do? In short, why doesn't the "natural selection" of capitalism weed out VISCOUNT4-style courses?

From this question, it's easy to start jumping to conclusions. If these companies survive then preferential hiring of PRINCE2 practitioners must be beneficial for a company, so clearly PRINCE2 itself must make managers more effective...

I already discussed one objection to this chain of logic: it's possible that this preferential hiring is doing damage, but that the self-interested interviewers still favour a qualification that many of them possess.

In this post, I will provide another answer. I'd like to draw your attention to one of the most fascinating developments in economics since the young Adam Smith got a summer job at the nail-making factory: the new concept of information asymmetry.

The basic principle is simple. When someone suspects that a purchase isn't worth the asking price, they won't buy it. For example, why is it that the value of a car drops dramatically as soon as it leaves the vendor's turf? Because a small number of cars in any batch will be dodgy - "lemons" - and, by trying to sell your car on so soon, you're signalling to the world that you've been landed with one of them.

This sounds like common sense, but it creates a headache for economists. For example, back when England's currency was based on precious metals, it was well-known that "bad money drives out good". Some coins would be adulterated, forged, and otherwise tampered with in order to extract some of the value from them. Of course, when you found that you'd been landed with one of these lemons, you'd try to palm it off on some other sucker, but you'd keep the good coins safe in your wallet.

After a while, the very fact that you were trying to pay with a coin sent a signal to the vendor that that coin sucked. The value of money declined, which made it even more futile to pay with a good coin. A race to the bottom ensued that required heavy-duty government intervention to resolve.

The job market seems like it would be very vulnerable to this effect. If companies tend to retain good employees and ditch bad ones, soon the very fact that someone is after a job is itself enough to taint their application. How do we get around this? How does a good candidate signal to the employer that they are indeed a good candidate?

The answer is that they perform a task that is relatively easy for them but would be deeply painful for a poor candidate. Back in the old days, hunters used to prove their strength and tactical expertise by slaying a large predator, and anyone who hadn't yet done so was given reduced privileges within the tribe.

These days, students flock to universities in their thousands, in the safe knowledge that the time spent (wasted?) on some obscure academic subject will repay itself when they hit the job market. It's (fairly) easy for a smart, disciplined individual to pass exams, but very difficult if you're a poor candidate.

Similarly, although VISCOUNT4 may not contribute to a manager's effectiveness, the fact that someone has put themselves through expensive training courses demonstrates a great deal of commitment to the cause. Imagine: they could have gone on a three-week bender, they could have spent a weekend in Amsterdam's red light district, they could have knocked a month off their mortgage repayments, but instead they went on a training course. What dedication that individual must have!

So, counterintuitively, even if VISCOUNT4 sucks it may still be in employers' best interests to hire VISCOUNT4 practitioners. The world is weird that way.

Management skeptic (post #2)

2008-08-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I raised the question: what advantage do "management models" such as PRINCE2 convey to the practitioner? Are they really worth the expensive training courses?

I've discussed this with many people, and they all seem to think the answer is "yes". In fact, it's almost unquestioned in management circles that applying management models can improve your management ability. In particular, implementation of quality management models like EFQM is in many cases required before people will entrust you with business. And you have to pass an exam on the Actuarial Control Loop (a variant of the management control loop I mentioned last time) before you can become an actuary.

If management models really are effective then that's fair enough. But I'm not sure the question has been answered.

In this and future posts I'll look at the various arguments provided for management models, with a description of why each gets my skeptical spider-sense tingling.

Argument #1: Management models look good on your CV

This one is actually true: if you've taken PRINCE2 (for example), it's generally assumed that you're a more competent project manager than a similar candidate who hasn't. This contrast is amplified by the number of managers who have taken PRINCE2 and therefore have an incentive to emphasise its coolness.

However, this effect isn't directly due to PRINCE2 itself, but rather to the packaging, marketing and community that surrounds it. Consider an imaginary qualification, which I'll call VISCOUNT4. This qualification is completely useless, but the VISCOUNT4 company has excellent advertising skills and soon manages to convince everyone that what their CV really needs is a VISCOUNT4 certificate.

As a result of this, VISCOUNT4 becomes immensely popular, and is subject to the positive feedback loop I mentioned above where managers with VISCOUNT4 tend to hire other managers with VISCOUNT4. The course quickly becomes a prerequisite for project management. But it still sucks.

In short, the popularity of PRINCE2 is not an argument for the effectiveness of PRINCE2, because the VISCOUNT4 scenario demonstrates another way that this popularity can arise. The PRINCE2 model cannot be said to have value simply because the PRINCE2 marketing is superb.

The Pink Link

2008-08-05T00:41:00.000-07:00

It's well-known that many animals use colour to signal to each other (the classic example being baboons' bottoms), and of course this applies to humans too. We have the additional advantage that we can change our colour scheme without application of any nasty hormones.

I think I've identified one interesting example of this. It's noticeable in (British, financial-sector) offices that the colour pink is rarely worn by guys - unless that guy is a manager.

My best guess is that this originated as a statement of independence - the guy is signalling "I'm so powerful/self-confident that I don't need to obey peer pressure. That's a message that would be expected to propagate within the management community (because they like to think of themselves as standing out from the crowd) but not outside it. It's like deliberately picking the wrong urinal.

If I've noticed this trend, other people probably have too, so I suspect that the fashion is evolving into a way for management-inclined individuals to make their presence known to each other. In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I'm going to wear a pink shirt into work today and see if my new boss (who I've also seen wearing pink) pays any attention.

Watch this space.

Update: Nope, doesn't make any noticeable difference apart from getting me the occasional funny look from co-workers. I still think there's a correspondence here between managers and pink shirts, but clearly it only goes one way.

Update #2: Just received some rather good feedback from the new boss at the client company via my boss from the company that's farming me out. Bear in mind that this has passed through two layers of management, so is probably more motivation than message. However, this is the first time anyone has ever used the word "charismatic" to describe me, so I must be doing something better than I usually do.

This feedback provides slight support for the Pink Principle. It's a rather weak data point, but I've at least reverted from "skeptical" to "undecided" on this question.

I can has intarweb?

2008-08-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Yes, u can has intarweb!

In English: I'm currently on contract (basically my company decided to farm me out for a few months to another company). This means that I'm staying at a hotel. With wifi (which my flat still lacks). And sod-all to do in the evenings, pardon my French.

Given half a chance, I'll use some of the time to complete the series on management skepticism, and maybe expand it a bit. It's something I need to think through anyway.

Other random thoughts, before I forget:

Interesting

Never mind literary criticism, try management...

I want to be this guy :)

Argh (or, In Defence of Dawkins)

2008-06-17T11:26:00.001-07:00

One comment I hear a lot in discussions about atheism is that Dawkins (who apparently is the One True Atheist) is very simplistic in his approach to religion. This is semi-true - his book The God Delusion does indeed go lightly the "sophisticated" theology.

However, this seems vastly more acceptable when you realise that very few of the folks at whom his book is aimed will have Plantinga's works on their bedside table. In fact, they're rather more likely to be familiar with crap like this.

Given this, can I say once and for all that, despite not discussing the evolutionary transcendental argument in much depth, Dawkins' book is a fine piece of work that is generally appropriate to the audience for whom it was intended.

DRM rant

2008-06-12T14:18:00.001-07:00

One of the things that Linux doesn't do too well at is dealing with the bizarre obfuscations that many media companies use to protect their content. For example, I just came across an interesting-sounding movie called "The Fall". Now, you'd have thought that a trailer, at least, would be easy to find and view. Sadly not.

Step 1: Attempt to view a Flash trailer. Fail. It appears that something in the Flash code is sufficiently weird that Gnash (the open-source Flash viewer) can't handle it.
Blame: partly on open source, partly on whoever wrote the code.

Step 2: Look up the trailer on Apple's trailer site. Find that the page requires some kind of Quicktime plugin, which isn't available for Linux. Blame: mostly on Apple.

Step 3: Download the trailer directly. Discover that the URL actually leads to some kind of 138-byte redirector file. There is no apparent reason for this - I can only assume that it's intended to stop people downloading the trailer rather than streaming (why???). Blame: Apple.

Step 4: Look at the redirector's bytecode, and find the trailer address embedded in it. Guess the URL, download the trailer and watch it as nature intended. For Pete's sake, people, if you're going to obfuscate then a useful tactic would be to NOT PUT THE FILENAME AS PLAINTEXT IN THE OBFUSCATOR!!! What the hell are these people smoking?

Verdict: Apart from the Flash thing, non-Microsoft users like myself would be fine if it wasn't for the IDIOT COMPANIES who apply COMPLETELY POINTLESS "PROTECTION" to their oh-so-valuable film trailers. Gah.

Update on psychic testing

2008-06-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

A while back, I mentioned that I'd hopefully be doing some trials with a friend who claims the existence of psychic powers etc. Yesterday we finally got round to doing some preliminaries.

The tests will be a lot less complex than I'd expected because, rather than testing for psychic communication between two believers (my friend and a third party), we're going to test his ability to channel energy through a pendulum into my hand. It'll be a straightforward "which hand am I holding the pendulum over" thing.

Protocol 1 (non-rigorous tomfoolery)

Our initial experiments were not terribly promising. I thought I could feel something the first time we did it, and guessed correctly. So far so good. However, I suspected that the "something" I could feel was in fact heat off my friend's hand, so for the second and third runs I covered each of my hands with a sheet of paper. I got both wrong.

Protocol 2 (slightly more rigorous)

At this point, my friend commented that, when he'd been mucking about with a fellow believer, the first run in any given sequence had generally been the most successful. He speculated that, after that point, there was some kind of psychic residue contaminating the experiment that took a while to wear off.

To eliminate this factor, we arranged a new protocol: every time we see each other (about once a week), we'll repeat the test once. For the moment, the only specific precaution against bias will be closed eyes and paper-covered hands. After five runs, we'll check the tally of results to see whether there's any statistically significant effect. If there is, we'll up the rigour. If not, we'll investigate other test options.

PS. To my friend's credit, he didn't use the "psychic residue" as an excuse for failure. In fact I had to persuade him not to include the initial negative results in the final tally.

What is a statistically significant effect?

The basic approach used for statistical testing is "significance levels". If something is "significant at the 5% level", that means that the chances of getting a false positive (an apparently significant result that appeared by accident) are 5%.

If there is no psychic effect then, over five trials, the probabilities of success are as follows:

P(5 correct guesses) = 1/32 = 3.1%
P(4 correct) = 5/32 = 15.6%
P(3 correct) = 10/32 = 31.2%
P(2 correct) = 10/32 = 31.2%
P(1 correct) = 5/32 = 15.6%
P(0 correct) = 1/32 = 3.1%

If we wanted to do a significance test at the 20% level, we would say that the result were significant if 4 or 5 successes appeared (since P(5)+P(4) < 20% < P(5)+P(4)+P(3)). This is a pretty damn easy hurdle to pass, so if we don't get 4 successes then there's probably not much point carrying on with this protocol.

If we wanted to do a success at the 5% level, we would say that the results were significant if 5 successes appeared (since P(5) < 20% < P(5)+P(4)). This is a slightly tougher hurdle - if we pass it (e.g. if we have 100% success rate) then it'll be worth applying stronger controls.

Protocol 2 scoreboard

Date: 1 June 08
Correct guesses: 0
Incorrect guesses: 0

Pissing off Pirsig

2008-05-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've just been rereading my recent post on "the art of religion", and I'm getting a strange feeling of deja vu. There are a lot of concepts in there that, on reflection, I blatantly nicked out of the early chapters of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M Pirsig. This is the book that this blog was supposed to be about, back when I thought I'd be able to blog with discipline (ha!).

In ZAMM, Pirsig splits the world into two viewpoints: "classical" (logical, structured, analytic) and "romantic" (intuitive, free-flowing, perceptual). This is precisely what I was describing as the "scientific" and "artistic" approaches. So far so ~~plagiaristic~~ good.

But Pirsig spends the rest of the book dumping on this classification. He points out that the urge to classify viewpoints is itself a product of the classical approach. True romantics don't even think in terms of sciences and arts; all that they see is whether stuff resonates with them, whether it turns them on or off.

This also maps directly onto my post. It's noticeable that many people who are religious for "artistic" reasons like to describe their beliefs as scientific (e.g. scientology, Christian science, scientific creationism). This can be seen as a side-effect of their romantic viewpoint - they like the connotations of the word "science", so they attach it to their beliefs. Questions of whether this label is appropriate are as irrelevant as they are ugly.

I'm trying to say what I mean here without coming across as snide, which is quite difficult given that I'm about as analytical as it gets. I honestly don't mean to denigrate this behaviour - it's only from my viewpoint that it seems inappropriate. One could argue that the reverse behaviour - describing scientific concepts as beautiful - is just as inappropriate, and I'm guilty of that all the time.

Still, it's surprisingly hard for me to breach Pirsig's divide and see the world in terms of art not science. It's also mind-expanding, tolerance-inducing, and all that good stuff.

I'm aware that some people are bothered by my description of religion as an art rather than a science. If you're one of them, I'm more than happy to discuss whether religion succeeds or fails as a science - drop me a line in the comments section.

I'm still working in a different country from my primary source of intarweb, so it may be a few days before I respond.

Still scary

2008-05-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

Read Flowers For Algernon again today. It still seriously freaks me out. I'm definitely developing a love/hate relationship with that book.

On the other hand, the existentialist dread it induced did inspire me to go jogging. Causing low-level damage to one's leg muscles is very life-affirming.

How to do it

2008-05-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

Let's say you're a creationist, and you've decided to make a lot of noise about evolution. So you reach for your keyboard and start typing:

"The human eye is composed of so many different interlocking parts that it can't possibly have..."

STOP RIGHT THERE! You've just fallen for a schoolboy error: you're about to make an argument for which thorough, accurate and catchy refutations are available. Probably you read this argument in an ISCID pamphlet, right? Didn't you consider that evilutionists may also have read that pamphlets, and prepared themselves to rebut its claims?

Instead, and I cannot emphasise this enough, you should pick an argument that they haven't come across before. Dembski actually had the more mathematically-inclined evilutionists feeling uncertain for a bit. Behe managed to look convincing for at least half an hour. I repeat: the best arguments refer to areas of academia the evilutionist is unlikely to have hitherto explored.

Exhibit A:

"It's simple, really, but the best ideas always are. Make a graph whose vertices are all possible genotypes with two vertices connected if they are one mutational step away from each other. That graph is isomorphic to a Cayley graph of a certain matrix group with respect to a standard generating set. (Surely that's obvious?) Such Cayley graphs attach in a natural way to arithmetic Riemann surfaces, as I explained in obnoxious detial in Chapter Five of my thesis. It is now a consequence of Selberg's eigenvalue conjecture for such surfaces (which everyone just knows is true) that these graphs have weak expansion properties. That is, they have relatively small Cheeger constants, which implies that they fracture easily. Which in turn implies that evolution by natural selection can not move efficiently through the graph. QED."

Pure genius at work!

The art of religion

2008-05-05T04:57:00.000-07:00

Henry Neufeld is a really nice guy. He's one of those folks who, if he was a church leader in my area, I'd probably go to church with just for the sake of having more fun discussions. It helps that he has a fair amount of respect for skeptical atheism - and, unlike 99.99% of religious people, he actually understands what it means to be a skeptical atheist.

As a result, my discussions with him tend to throw up a significant number of conceptual gems. In particular, I draw your attention to this post on his site: Believing in Words and Symbols. The underlying theme is that he really only has one core belief: that there is Something out there. Everything else - the Trinity, the Resurrection - is really just a language, a set of myths that seem to convey the feelings he experiences.

It was only once I'd heard this concept expressed clearly that I realised I'd come across it before. Looking back, a number of books I've read and people I've spoken to have touched on the same thought: that the important part of religion is the central Mystery, and the rest is just the clothes we put on it. It seems to be a fairly common theme in the more mystical variants of religion - consider the Gnostic creation myths, for example, or the Buddhist koans. This kind of religion isn't a science - it doesn't claim to describe the universe exactly. Rather, it is an art that allows people to express their deep feelings more clearly.

Possibly the only reason I'm seeing this common thread so clearly is that I've reached a point in my personal journey where I'm able to appreciate it. When I was younger, I spent an inordinate amount of time making what I might describe as a scientific sweep of religion, searching through the stewpot of superstition for anything that might have real applications. I wanted to dissect demons, bottle angels, and unleash whatever power the mind might have.

Sadly, I was born too late. Whilst the early scientists might have deduced vaccines and antibiotics from old wives' tales, in this day and age almost anything useful in religion has already been ripped from its clutches and absorbed into the realm of science. There are no demons, no angels, and the only consequence of trying to "unleash the mind" is a mild headache.

These days I'm attempting a more sophisticated analysis of religion - what might be described as a psychological sweep. Religion is a wonderful resource for students of psychology. Since very little reality-based testing occurs, it tends to attract and retain superb examples of cognitive bias and glitching. I'm of the strong suspicion that some of these are universal ~~bugs~~ features of the human brain - the question is which ones and why.

On a more complimentary note, religious traditions often contain ways of dealing with common cognitive issues that more "rational" approaches leave out. To quote Anton LaVey:

"One of the greatest of all fallacies about the practice of ritual magic is the notion that one must believe in the powers of magic before one can be harmed or destroyed by them. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as the most receptive victims of curses have always been the greatest scoffers. The reason is frighteningly simple. The uncivilized tribesman is the first to run to his nearest witch-doctor or shaman when he feels a curse has been placed upon him by an enemy. The threat and presence of harm is with him consciously, and belief in the power of the curse is so strong that he will take every precaution against it. Thus, through the application of sympathetic magic, he will counteract any harm that might come his way. This man is watching his step, and not taking any chances.

On the other hand, the 'enlightened' man, who doesn't place any stock in such 'superstition', relegates his instinctive fear of the curse to his unconscious, thereby nourishing it into a phenomenally destructive force that will multiply with each succeeding misfortune. Of course, every time a new setback occurs, the non-believer will automatically deny any connection with the curse, especially to himself. The emphatic conscious denial of the potential of the curse is the very ingredient that will create its success, through setting-up of accident prone situations. In many instances, the victim will deny any magical significance to his fate, even unto his dying gasp - although the magician is perfectly satisfied, so long as his desired results occur. It must be remembered that it matters not whether anyone attaches any significance to your working, so long as the results of the working are in accordance with your will. The super-logician will always explain the connection of the magical ritual to the end result as 'coincidence'."

Ever since reading this, I've taken to "warding off bad luck" by drawing a favourite symbol on my chest whenever I feel I'm tempting fate. It works surprisingly well.

Evidently this useful little trick was incorporated into Catholic doctrine a while back, and has lurked there ever since. What other gems of wisdom are waiting to be separated from the dross of accumulated memes?

Plantinga's unnatural naturalism

2008-05-04T12:17:00.001-07:00

So, firstly, I'm back off holiday. Secondly, the rest of my life is starting to settle down. I currently work in a different country from the one I live in, which is causing some problems, but that still leaves me with the occasional snippet of time for blogging.

Thirdly, my sister just started a new module of her Philosophy degree: religious philosophy. Needless to say, this has resulted in many fun discussions. So far, though, it's all been window-dressing - I know the arguments inside out. Most of it stopped being interesting a while back, which is why these days I'm more focused on religious psychology.

One guy that did catch my attention, though, was Alvin Plantinga. This guy gets points for coming far closer than average to a reasonable summary of the skeptical atheist position. However, he still commits some howlers at time, which IMO betray a comparative ignorance of science and, in particular, evolutionary biology.

As an example, I draw your attention to his "paper" (actually more a lecture transcript) An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Eschewing all the philosophical language, the central point is that Godless rationality is self-defeating, since brains that evolved by natural selection don't give a damn about truth as long as they carry on surviving and breeding.

Anyone who's been in the skepticism trenches for a while will recognise this as a variant on the transcendental argument, aka the Argument from It's My Ball And You Can't Play With It. This is one of the more annoying arguments for God because any counter-argument you make can itself be interpreted by the theist as more self-refuting rationalism. Plantinga, however, lays the argument out clearly enough that the fault lines are visible, which is why I like him.

In his article, he summarises the evolutionary position as "beliefs are adaptive". He then uses a neat example to show why this could lead to "pathological beliefs" (beliefs that are adaptive but false) as easily as true ones. Imagine a critter that enjoyed petting vicious tigers, but thought that the best way to pet a tiger was to run very fast in the opposite direction. Then its beliefs would lead to the most survival-enhancing result (legging it) so would be selected for, despite being completely unreflective of reality.

Extending this logic further, the claim is made that a brain produced by unassisted evolution will not be particularly adept at picking true beliefs; rather, it will pick beliefs that cause survival. Hence, if we were produced by evolution, our cognitive systems would be so unreliable that we couldn't justifiably say we were produced by evolution. Catch-22.

There are two objections to this argument, one obvious and the other subtle. The obvious one is the classic "stopped clock" issue: although the critter's behaviour turned out for the best this one time, that doesn't mean it'll be effective in general. Plantinga's critter is going to spend far too much time running away from cute little bunny rabbits, which is a waste of time and resources. So its beliefs are still soundly beaten by the more reality-based position that tigers are scary and scary things should be run away from.

The subtle objection is to Plantinga's characterisation of the evolutionary position. What he is describing is not belief formation in humans. It is closer to belief formation (or the creation of equivalent neurochemical constructs) in nematode worms. Nematodes have only a few "beliefs", so it is possible for evolution to act on each of the worm's underlying rules-of-thumb in turn.

Humans operate by a different method. We are selected on the basis of our belief creation methodology - the generator of our beliefs - rather than the individual beliefs themselves. From evolution's perspective, this is massively more efficient because, rather than selecting for billions of different rules, you can just select for one generator and let it get on with it. The resulting creature will be able to adjust its beliefs on the fly when it meets new evidence, and will hence be more effective.

It's not immediately obvious whether there exist "pathological generators" that could reliably produce pathological beliefs, but I'd strongly suspect not. However, I'm open to informed argument.

Roadtrippin' out

2008-03-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna be incommunicado for the next few months. I thought I should mention it in advance so that my adoring fans (snigger) don't get too worried for me...

The first reason for this enforced absence is that I'm being shifted to the other end of the country by my company. That's probably not a bad thing - Scotland is a nice place and the work I'll be doing is interesting. It's an opportunity not to be sneezed at.

The second reason is slightly at odds with the first: I've got an exam in mid-April. I'm starting to panic. It's a really evil one, and I'm not feeling at all prepared. Given that I have three weeks left, this would not be a problem but for the third reason.

The third reason is that I'm off on a road-trip with friends from university: from LA to Miami in two weeks. The two weeks immediately prior to my exam, no less. I am going to be soooo jetlagged.

In case anyone's interested (they probably aren't), one of my more techie mates has produced a website for the road-trip. This includes a marked-out route map, so feel free to hurl tomatoes as we pass.

The fourth reason is that I will need a heck of a lot of time to recover from the first three. Jetlag + exam panic + job stress = very little brainpower, let alone inclination to blog. See you in a month or so!

Management skeptic (post #1)

2008-03-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

One of the best ways to think of skepticism is as an eternal game of hunt-the-value. When presented with a notion, we ask: is this valuable because it gives accurate predictions, or because it makes us feel good, or because it provides interesting questions, or what? And we don't appreciate being tricked into misclassifying a notion's value.

For example, in discussion with the Buddhist group I've been gatecrashing, one of the points that kept coming up was: does the value of meditation lie in simply sitting and breathing and focusing? Or does the Buddhist cosmology also make a difference? We had a rather lengthy rambling chat about this, after which I concluded that I wasn't going to pin these people down without bringing in a nailgun.

I feel the same about "management models" at the moment. A management model is a chunk of crystallised management philosophy, often described by flow diagrams. The simplest ones are very simple. For example, the management control loop can be represented by a circle with clockwise-pointing arrows round the edge and the words "think", "act", "evaluate", "decide" spaced round the edge.

In this case, the idea is that you should plan out what you want to do, figure out how to do it, and perform some sort of evaluation of how that approach worked for you. Once the results are in, you decide whether you need to adjust your goals, fine-tune your methodology, or simply accept that you're doing OK until the next round of evaluation comes up.

This is a very simple model, but it makes a great deal of sense. It explains, among other things, why so many New Year's Resolutions fail. People may decide what they want to achieve, and they may even work out how they're going to achieve it, but they rarely set themselves any sort of regular evaluation timetable to see how well they've done so far. Lacking an essential component of this management model, they dismally fail.

However, management models don't stop there. For example, a popular project management model called PRINCE2 actually can't be represented on anything smaller than A3. One of my managers has a placemat with it on, and it looks like Management Control Loop meets Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Given the enormous investment in time and money necessary to train as a PRINCE2 practitioner, the question becomes increasingly important: where does the value lie in this system?

To be continued

The Exegesis Impulse

2008-02-25T03:59:00.000-08:00

I know, it sounds like a science fiction story, doesn't it? "Exegesis" is a very cool word in its own right, but when "impulse" enters the game you know the result is going to involve lots of polished metal and/or advanced biotech.

Sorry to disappoint. This is actually going to be a discussion of scripture.

The word "exegesis" originally comes from a Greek word meaning "to lead out" - to garner meaning from a text based on the words within it. That's a fair enough pursuit. It covers pretty much the whole range of Bible commentary - technically, any study of the Bible that doesn't make reference to contextual historical information is exegetical.

I was actually quite shocked to read this definition. For some time now, I've understood the word to have a subtly different meaning. Exegesis, in many contexts, means "filling in the gaps by making shit up". It's in this sense that I'll discuss the word.

The prevalence of exegesis

You don't have to go too far to see that exegesis is not a rare phenomenon. Your average nativity play will have a whole host of details that aren't in the original text - the three kings, for example, as opposed to an unspecified number of wise men.

A more fertile field for this activity is creationism. From a scant two chapters of Genesis, creationists have devised a complete history of events surrounding the Earth's origins. It's got everything: huge sheets of water inexplicably falling from low orbit, a fascinating "hydrological sorting" effect to explain why trilobites always appear lower than turtles in the fossil record, holes in the Earth's crust for the water to hide in afterwards, etc. Some versions even have complex relativistic effects to explain how we can see 10,000,000,000-year-old starlight in a 6,000-year-old universe.

All these variants have two things in common. Firstly, they're completely implausible. To pick on one example, hydrological sorting can't account for the different radiological signatures of different layers, because lots of swirling water is too crude a tool to distinguish between isotopes.

Secondly, they're nowhere to be found in the Bible. Genesis doesn't say anything about fossils or plate tectonics or relativity. These ideas are exegesis - people see that Genesis doesn't appear to match up with reality, so they make shit up to fill the gaps.

How far back?

Exegesis is also not a recent phenomenon - even as early as the second century AD, people were adding little "finishing touches" to scripture. For example, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, it's strongly believed that Jesus was born in a cave. This is not mentioned anywhere in the scriptures, although it does show up in a couple of Gnostic gospels and in the beliefs of sundry contemporaneous religions about their messiahs.

So how far does the rot go? How can we tell?

One easy way to detect exegesis is what you might call a "comparative biology" of stories. For this I'll call on the writings of a blogrollee of mine, who discusses his deconversion story here. Come back when you've read it, OK?

As this story indicates, a major feature of exegesis is that it gives different results every time you do it. After all, if the meaning of your source was obvious then you wouldn't need to make shit up to fill in the gaps. So all we need to look for is completely different versions of the same story, and we'll know that one or both of the authors is happily exegesising.

A tale of two gospels

Enter Matthew and Luke. It's long been known that these two gospels share a lot of material with Mark and with each other, often word-for-word. The current best guess at which came first is known as the Synoptic Hypothesis. It's generally believed that Mark was first on the scene, and that Matthew and Luke had copies of his work handy as they wrote.

The reason for this is simple. Where Mark tells a simple story or leaves a gap, Matthew and Luke tend to elaborate - and they do so in completely different ways. Consider, for example, the Nativity story. Take the version in Matthew (Matt 1:18-2:23) and the version in Luke (Luke 2:1-40), and compare them. You will find precisely five points of overlap: the names of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, and the towns of Bethlehem and Nazareth.

Everything else, and I mean everything is completely different. Herod and the slaughter of the innocents are mentioned only in Matthew. Quirinius' census is mentioned only in Luke. Matthew talks of magi. Luke talks of shepherds. Matthew says the family fled to Egypt. Luke says that the family wandered over to Jerusalem. And will you just look at the two different lineages given for Jesus...

With sufficient rhetorical wriggling (exegesis!) it's almost possible to construct a single story that covers all the options. But, to be quite blunt, why the heck would you want to? There's so little overlap between these stories that they might as well be about different people.

To me, the reason for this lack of overlap is fairly simple. The authors of Matthew and Luke would have known that Jesus' parents were called Joseph and Mary. They would have known that Jesus came from Nazareth. And they'd have noticed a prophecy in Isaiah suggesting that the Messiah would have been born in Bethlehem. They took these facts and... exegesised. Matthew used Herod as his bogeyman to drive Joseph and Mary out of Bethlehem, whilst Luke took a completely different but believably bureaucratic option by attempting to link the birth to a Roman census.

Taking this as our working hypothesis, it instantly becomes clear why the historical census of Quirinius appears to have happened well before Jesus' birth, and why no contemporary author mentions such a barbarous act as the slaughter of innocents (despite trumpeting a range of Herod's infamies). It's because Matthew and Luke were making shit up.

How far back? redux

You'll notice that, up until now, I've been treating Mark as a reliable source, and only expressing skepticism about Matthew and Luke. There's a very simple reason for this: we have no earlier Gospels, so we have no way of knowing which aspects of Mark were historical and which were innovation.

Until very recently, I wasn't really bothered by this. Probably a few things in Mark were exaggerated a bit, but I saw no reason to disagree with the core of the story. Now, though, my feelings are different.

I've seen how fast exegesis can proceed, even in this modern information age where debate and criticism thrive. I've seen that exegesis was at least as powerful in ancient times - by most estimates, Matthew and Luke were written no more than a decade or so later than Mark. I've started to explore the motivations for these differences, in particular the three-way struggle between Romans, Jews and Christians that inspired much of the Bible's antisemitism. And I'm troubled.

As far as we can tell, Jesus died no later than 40AD. As far as we can tell, Mark was written no earlier than 65AD. That's at least 25 years gap, double the distance between Mark and the other synoptic Gospels.

Given that much time, and that much room for exegesis, how do we know that Mark wasn't... making shit up?

Skeptic's credo

2008-02-17T08:29:00.000-08:00

One common rejoinder that we skeptics hear is "what about love and friendship and so on? Are you saying we should be skeptical about them too?"

It's true that the scientific method is not necessarily the best tool to handle other people. As I've discussed previously, science tends to say "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence", even where a wise man would be saying "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action". Science tends to downplay the importance of individual correlations, secure in the knowledge that in the long run any genuine effect will show up again.

Most skeptics are aware of this. The scientific method to us is an ideal: if you have the time to apply it fully then that's wonderful, but in most cases that isn't an option. So to say "skeptics disagree with irrationality" is simplistic. In reality, our position is more nuanced. One statement of it would be:

It’s OK to be irrational as long as you don’t treat your shot-in-the-dark guesses as the final word, and are willing to discard them when better options come along.

That has applications far beyond the study of nature.

Go Google!

2008-02-17T06:38:00.000-08:00

I just noticed that Blogger now allows people to sign their comments using OpenID, a truly cool idea that I'm hoping will take off. The basic principle is that, rather than one company (say Microsoft) running an identity-management system (say Microsoft Passport) that no-one else can interoperate with, we should instead develop a system that's "distributed". In other words, anyone should be able to start up their own identity server at any time.

Most other components of the internet have already gone this route. You can use email without your ISP having Microsoft Exchange installed (thank Darwin). You can set up a website without your web host having Microsoft IIS. But identity management still operates as a series of "walled gardens", with each forum or group you sign up to demanding its own username/password combo. It's an unuseable mess.

Better to have a system where anyone can set up their own identity server, or their own account on someone else's server, and have it recognised by all the "identity consumers" (forums etc). I'm expecting Google to start up its own OpenID server in the near future, and I can't wait!

Other interoperability things I'm hopeful about: the OpenDocument format for breaking down the walls between Office applications, MetaPlace for creating easier motion between virtual worlds, BugLabs for encouraging greater reusability of gadget components, and OpenMoko for making it possible to "unbundle" phone software and hardware.

I should mention that IMO there's a small chance that MetaPlace will go evil. It's not actually possible to set up your own MetaPlace server yet - at the moment its just a very big walled garden with lots of sub-gardens. Until the system is truly distributed, the MetaPlace company will have a somewhat unhealthy amount of power.

OpenMoko and BugLabs may be hitting the opposite issue - it's taking them worryingly long to release a commercial product. Openness is not a magic wand, sadly.

In each of these cases, though, the idea is damn good, and the fact that someone's doing something about it is guaranteed to be extremely disruptive, regardless of immediate outcomes. In the technology world, disruption is good.

So much so, in fact, that I'd strongly recommend everyone ensure that they're able to receive OpenDocument files. Since Microsoft is currently being a refusenik (for obvious reasons), this will mean you'll need to download a free Office product such as OpenOffice. Have fun!

So much for La Resistance

2008-02-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

The problem of psychological blocks is as old as humanity. There are so many actions that would sometimes be both beneficial and socially acceptable to perform, but we just can't bring ourselves to. Trying to convince yourself to perform a task that you just don't wanna do is like trying to claw your way out of a very deep, very slippery well.

I've just been given the proverbial leg up. For the past month, I've been working in my company's Business Development team (aka sales), and a big part of what this team does is cold calling. Not the sleazy 7:00-call-when-you're-in-the-bath cold calling, I hasten to add. This is strictly business-to-business stuff - the people we're calling up are managers who are paid to handle this crap.

And it's a job that needs doing. No company can survive without new business and, while ideally we'd garner new work by word-of-mouth, for a small company like ours that just isn't fast enough.

Sadly, my psyche didn't get the message. For some time now, I've just been sitting there, allegedly making calls but in practice finding every excuse I can to avoid picking up the phone. The aversion I feel is incredible, and scarily subtle. It's like that scene in Lord Of The Rings where Bilbo "decides" to give the ring to Frodo, and sets off without being consciously aware that it's still in his pocket.

As a result, until this week, I've been functionally unable to make many calls. On a good day I'd make one call, maybe two, and then I'd find something else to distract myself with. This has been setting up immense cognitive dissonance, because I know I should be doing it. I just couldn't bring myself to. I've been a very unhappy bunny.

However, as of earlier this week, there are signs of change. On Wednesday, I was feeling extremely tired. I couldn't even muster the brainpower to think about the pros and cons of calling. I just picked up the phone and left some of the most incoherent messages ever entrusted to voicemail. It was only at the end of the day that I realised: hey, I just made five calls. What the heck?

On Thursday and Friday, the change continued. I reached for the phone, I felt the block, but I knew I could ignore it. I was able to make five calls a day, and this coming week I'm looking to increase the rate.

This is the first time I've really been motivated to overcome such a deep-rooted mental block, and the ripples of this change are still spreading. I know my enemy now, and I know that I can overcome it. That knowledge lets me do things that I never thought possible. Maybe I'll finally learn to ask girls out...

Funnily enough, this experience has a lot of shared features with some of the conversion stories I've read. I'm not an alcoholic or a drug abuser, but I was as constrained as any of them in my actions. Those constraints resulted in very deep tiredness - so deep that my overactive superego shut down for a bit. At that point, the slightest push was enough to get me over the hurdle. Such a push could well come from religion, but it apparently doesn't have to.

Oh yeah...

2008-02-17T03:29:00.000-08:00

...Sadly, the aforementioned gunk about female education probably wouldn't work on those Western countries (you know who you are) with large populations of fast-breeding semi-educated folk. In these cases, the power of education is devalued by the fact that everyone else has it too. Getting a degree in English is, genetically speaking, a complete waste of time if you end up flipping burgers anyway.

I'm honestly not sure how to handle this second-phase population boom.

On Charity

2008-02-14T04:47:00.000-08:00

The parable of the sparrows

Imagine a little old lady sitting at her window. She looks out and sees a flock of the local sparrows desperately pecking at the frozen ground, trying to find food where none exists. In her kind-heartedness, she gets out of her chair, fetches some bread, and scatters it around the door. The sparrows descend on the bread in a cloud of tiny fluttering wings, and the nourishment it provides gets them through the day.

The next day, the little old lady sees the sparrows hungry again, and feeds them some more bread. This turns into a habit that she keeps up for the rest of the Winter. As a result, many more sparrows survive the cold.

The following year, the sparrows breed at their usual rate of a couple of surviving offspring per adult. But, because there were more adults, there are more offspring. More survive the Autumn.

When Winter strikes, the little old lady's heart breaks for the sparrows. She feeds them again and again, and far more survive than would usually have done so. The following year, the flock size increases yet again.

The next Winter, the sparrows frantically peck round the old lady's door, but she isn't there. She's gone to live with her daughter in Melbourne.

Any observer watching the poor starving birds struggle and fail and die in the snow would have to ask themselves: was the old lady actually compassionate, if her actions resulted in more sparrows starving to death than would otherwise have done so?

Malthus strikes back

Painful though it may be to make the link with human populations, the analogy is inevitable. In many poor countries, most members of the population are happy to breed at the maximum possible rate. And, if we include this "animal assumption" in our assessment, we can see that cataclysm - war, famine or plague - is inevitable.

Many commenters have looked at the world today, in all its technological glory, and asked why, if our science is so advanced, we can't cure world hunger or bring an end to disease. Some even declare this to be a failing of science, that it can't welcome us into an age of universal utopia.

But the problem isn't science. The problem is that the people we have in this world are too inclined to squander the windfalls which science offers. Science is no more culpable for hunger in Burundi (with its 3.6%pa population growth rate) than it is for the AIDS-related deaths of South Africans (whose president is an AIDS denialist). Technological solutions to social problems almost never work.

Darwin takes his due

So the question becomes: how do we break the "animal assumption" of blind increases in population size? The problem is that, in many circumstances, this increase is actually the best evolutionary strategy. In a high-risk environment such as your average third-world country, the more kids you have, the better your genes' chance of survival in the short term. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.

But why isn't this true in the western world too? How have we overcome this paradox?

The answer seems to be: education. An educated population is in general slower-breeding than an uneducated one. In particular, education of females makes a hell of a difference.

There are two obvious reasons for this. Firstly, a good educational system will typically include some sex education, which reduces the chance of "accidents". This alone could be a major aid in poor countries, but its effect is limited by the fact that (for the aforementioned Darwinian reasons) people want to have kids early and often.

Secondly, and more significantly, education creates opportunities. If you're a young woman without education, you've got no prospects - the only consequence of waiting to have kids will be to reduce the number you can have. If you're a young woman with education, though, waiting to have kids may give you the chance to grab a high-paying job, earn lots of money, and thus raise the kids in an environment where their survival odds are greater.

Conclusion

Charity that treats its recipients as animals, that simply feeds, shelters and heals them, may make the donor feel warm and tingly in the short term, but in the long term it's self-defeating. If we're going to perform acts of pure charity, we should do so in a way that achieves greater happiness for a greater number. We can only do that by breaking the "animal assumption".

In this post, I've discussed one possible way of achieving this: education, and particularly education of girls. If anyone knows of any others, please tell me. In the meantime, I know where my money is going to go.

Hat tip to Berlzebub at the Common Ground group blog for reminding me I had this essay in my Drafts folder.

Meditation session

2008-01-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

The Buddhist group wasn't nearly as scary as I thought they might be. Their leader was - there's no other word for it - ditzy, and talked well past the limit of the audience's attention span, but no attempts were made to brainwash the participants (unless they've just purged all memory of it from my mind...)

The meditation technique was extremely simple, just a slight elaboration on "breathe slowly and pretend stuff doesn't exist". Currently I'm trying to work weightlifting into my daily schedule, but, once I've made space for that, I'll definitely start trying to fit a little meditation in.

The tea-and-biscuits session afterwards was interesting. Having done my background reading, I was sensitised enough to pick up on a few slightly worrying concepts, but nothing worse than the average Christian group spouts on a regular basis. My concerns were comfortably defused by the comparative openness of the person I was chatting to (the group leader/teacher). By contrast with my last attempt to study meditation, she didn't try to conceal the religious beliefs colouring her thoughts.

I don't find the Buddhist cosmology any more realistic than those of other religions, but I don't find this particular tradition any more scary than most of the other religions out there. As such, I'll keep going to the meditation group for a bit longer.

Incidentally, I had one of those perfect Kodak moments today. During lunch with my friendly neighbourhood evangelists, one made a comment about the importance of scripture. That gave me the ideal opening to reach into my bag and pull out the Koran, the Bhagavadgita and a collection of Buddhist scripture (which I happened to have on me - no really!), with a comment along the lines of "which scripture did you have in mind?".

Curse these cults!

2008-01-29T10:17:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling a bit irritated. Yeah, I know that's not exactly a rarity, but at least the reason is interesting.

A Buddhist centre down the road from me is running a meditation class. To me, this sounded great - I've always wanted to learn meditation - and I've been gleefully anticipating the taster session for weeks.

This morning, though, I bothered to look up the group that's doing the lessons. It turns out that the New Kadampa Tradition is to Buddhism what ISKCON (aka Hare Krishna) is to Hinduism. It's a semi-cultish movement based loosely on the original tradition, nothing more.

Why do these groups seem to be so popular? Why do the Hare Krishnas have the manpower to canvass the high street? What's with the sudden growth of these rather imitative little cults?

My conjecture is that the situation is analogous to the phenomenon of invasive species. These traditions typically have their roots in rather minor subtraditions of age-old practice, and grow up fighting their corner against equally sophisticated, often quite similar competitors.

But then the tradition gets exported from its native habitat, into the midst of a population that's never been exposed to it before. This population has no basis for comparing the new tradition with its rivals, and no culture of criticism to provide resistance to its spread. Like bulfrogs in Australia, the tradition grows and spreads. For some reason, there's normally a personality-cult aspect to this phenomenon, although that could just be selection bias on my part.

I like this way of thinking about the formation of religions. As with language, the analogy to biology is not precise - species have no feature corresponding to patois or to combined traditions. But it's easy to visualise, which helps me to spot further examples.

And, of course, there's one very obvious example. A strain of Judaism that was inspired by a charismatic personality, transmitted to a large population of non-Jews, and as a result quickly morphed into a new religion that had little in common with its ancestor.

What would have happened if Srila Prabhupada had been killed off when his movement was just becoming popular, murdered by a government intent on removing the disturbance he caused? What would the backlash have looked like, as his followers fought to spread their truth before it could be obliterated? What would the world have looked like three centuries later, after the Hare Krishnas had become the dominant religious force? What about five centuries later, when "heretical" works had started to be purged? What about two millennia later, when all the newspapers and books that would have placed ISKCON's beliefs in context had long ago rotted away?

What stories would be told of his life? Would we think of him as a Messiah?

More ways not to communicate

2008-01-26T10:42:00.000-08:00

So I'm in Oxford to meet up with a few friends from work, who are for some explicable reason meeting up a couple of towns over from our actual office. Should be a good evening - drinks at a pub, followed by a nice Lebanese restaurant.

Unfortunately, I get to Oxford before realising I was supposed to look up directions for the pub. Oops. I ask around, but no-one round the train station has ever heard of it.

Brainwave! I've got my mobile with me. I only have the one phone number, it being a new phone, but surely that should be good enough?

"We're sorry, but the person you called is not available right now. Please leave a message after the tone..." Dammit.

Ah, but hold on a sec, this new phone has 3G internet, doesn't it? The invite included the pub's website, so I can look up directions!

"Error: can't connect to network. Have a nice day..." Bugger.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a Coffee Republic, having walked halfway across Oxford trying to find somewhere with wifi. And I've just discovered that the pub is actually two blocks over from where I'm sitting.

Can we please just go back to the days of maps?

A (stereo)typical conversation

2008-01-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

Evangelical: "You know what really convinces me that the Bible is true? Its coherency. So many books, so many stories, and there's no contradictions anywhere."

Me, reaching for a copy of the Bible: "OK, what about this one between ***flickflickflick*** Matthew 2:14 and ***flickflick*** Luke 2:22. One states that the family ran straight off to Egypt and stayed there until Herod had copped it. The other states that, immediately after the "time of purification" (40 days, as per Leviticus), the family went to Jerusalem. FYI, Jerusalem and Egypt are on opposite sides of Bethlehem. How is this not a contradiction?

Evangelist: "Huh, I never noticed that. Did you get that off one of your atheist websites?"

Me: "No, I got it about five minutes into a personal attempt to see how the various Gospel stories line up. It's not exactly a subtle error."

Evangelist: "Mind if I get back to you on this?"

Moral of the story: It's very easy to be sure you're right about something, simply because you haven't solicited enough critical scrutiny. I have no grounds to be smug here - I know I've done the same thing in the past. All I can say is that I'm aware of the problem and do my best to counter it.

Abstract algebra

2008-01-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

In our last post, our intrepidly heroic mathematicians were hunting around for a new tool with which to attack some classic conundrums of geometry. The tool they eventually settled on is known as abstract algebra. This post will attempt to summarise it very briefly.

Compared to the 100 pages of lecture notes I'm working from, anyway.

Abstract algebra

The purpose of abstract algebra is to study and categorise various kinds of mathematical structure that crop up with depressing regularity. What do I mean by "structure"? Well, let's take a look at a really simple example: a group.

A group is formed of two components. Firstly, you have a big bag of thingies. Any thingies, it really doesn't matter that much. We'll refer to the bag as X, just to save my having to use the word "thingy" too much.

Secondly, you have a rule that combines two thingies to give a third. We'll refer to the bag as #. The rule must have certain "nice" properties:

1) Closure - the product of two thingies is a thingy. Formally, if x and y are in X then so is x#y.
2) Associativity - if you apply the rule twice to merge three thingies into one, it mustn't matter which two order you do the merging in. Formally, (x#y)#z = x#(y#z).
3) Identity - there is a thingy that can be ignored when applying the rule. Formally, there exists a single element e of X (the identity element) such that x#e = e#x = x for all x in X.
4) Inverse - for any thingy, there must be another thingy such that, when they're merged, you get the identity element. Formally, for any x in X, there exists an element y such that x#y = e.

Got that? No? Well that's not a problem, because I'm going to give you a concrete example.

The set will be as follows: {..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, ...}
The rule will be as follows: +

So 1+1=2, 2+6=8, etc. Looking familiar now?

The group that we've just described is the set of integers (whole numbers) under addition. It obeys all the four rules:

1) Add two integers and you get a third integer
2) (a+b)+c = a+(b+c)
3) a+0 = 0+a = a
4) If x is an integer then -x is also an integer

There are lots and lots of other examples:

A) The set of integers under multiplication
B) The set of reflections and rotations of a shape under composition (aka the dihedral group)
C) The set of hours on a 12-hour clock under addition (aka the cyclic group of order 12)

Example A is pretty straightforward - proof that it's a group is left to the interested reader.

Example B is more interesting. Consider, for example, the dihedral group of a triangle. Imagine the triangle is a piece cut out of a sheet of paper - you can flip it over or rotate it around in any way, as long as it still fits in the hole. Why not get yourself a real sheet of paper and try it?

Start off with one point of the triangle sticking directly upwards. You'll quickly find that the valid operations are as follows:

a) Keep it as it was
b) Rotate it 120° left
c) Rotate it 120° right
d) Flip it in the top/bottom line of symmetry
e) Flip it in the top-left/bottom-right line of symmetry
f) Flip it in the top-right/bottom-left line of symmetry

So our set is {a,b,c,d,e,f}. Our group rule is composition, which means doing two of these operations one after another. So for example, b#c = a, and d#e = b. Try it!

Is this a group? It quite clearly has closure, identity and inverses. It turns out to also have associativity, although this is less obvious.

One interesting point to notice is that the operations {a,b,c} form a group in their own right, even without including d, e and f. This subgroup consists of all the ways that a triangle can be rotated. It is called the cyclic group of order 3.

Example C, the clock, is fairly basic - most of the time it behaves just like the integers under addition. Just remember that 4 hours past 10:00 is actually 2:00, and you'll have understood most of what's going on here.

This group also has subgroups. For example, consider what happens if you're only allowed to move the clock on in four-hour intervals. The times you can reach are 0:00, 4:00 and 8:00 (I'm writing 12:00 as 0:00 here - either way, it's the identity element).

This subgroup is in fact the cyclic group of order 3 - so the dihedral group of order 3 and the cyclic group of order 12 both share it as a subgroup, despite having very different origins and properties.

Permutations

There's one last group that I'm going to describe, because it will be particularly relevant later on. That is the "permutation group".

A permutation is just a rearrangement or shuffle. For example, we could reorder the list "1 2 3 4 5" to "2 5 3 4 1". Call this permutation p.

How does p behave? Well it replaces each 1 with a 2, each 2 with a 5, each 3 with a 3, each 4 with a 4, and each 5 with a 1. Mathematicians have a very concise way of describing this, called cycle notation. A cycle is just a list of elements [a,b,c,...,z], so that the permutation takes a to b, b to c, c to d, z to a, and so on.

In our example permutation p, there are two very obvious cycles. p takes 3 to 3, so [3] is a cycle of p. Similarly, [4] is a cycle of p. p also takes 1 to 2, 2 to 5 and 5 to 1, so [125] is the final cycle. All our knowledge about p can be conveyed by writing it as [125][3][4].

It's easy to note that these permutations form a group - if you do one permutation followed by another, the result is a third permutation. All permutations can be undone, and there is an identity permutation [1][2][3][4][5]. Associativity is slightly less easy, but not hard, to show.

Permutation groups are a particularly important example of finite groups - groups with only a finite number of members. For example, cyclic groups and dihedral groups are finite, but the integers are not finite. The group of all permutations of n objects is called the symmetric group of order n, written as S_n. For example, the group of all possible shuffles of a set of cards is S₅₂.

These symmetric groups are important because it can be proven that any finite group is a subgroup of some symmetric group. This will become relevant later.

This series of posts has gotten far longer than I intended. I'll take a short break before the next post.

Galois Theory in brief*

2008-01-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

* Disclaimer: may not actually be brief.

Galois Theory is a really elegant area of mathematics. It relates two different topics - abstract algebra and geometry - to produce results that are greater than the sum of the parts.

History

Galois Theory has possibly the most romantic history of any mathematics ever. It was originated by Evariste Galois, a student in France during the 19th century. He was a firebrand of a revolutionary, and kept getting kicked out of universities as a result. Eventually, it seems, someone in government decided that he was too much trouble to have around.

So they set up a honeypot Before Evariste knew where he was, he had been trapped into a pistol duel over a woman (whose identity we don't know). His opponent was one of the greatest duelists in Paris. Galois knew he didn't stand a chance.

The last night of his life, he spent scribbling down diverse thoughts about mathematics. In the margins, he scrawled comments like "I don't have the time! I don't have the time!". The following morning, he went out to fight, and was shot down and left to die. His notes were passed on to a maths professor.

After languishing in various inboxes, the papers reached someone who could see them for the genius they were, and Galois became one of the great heroes of mathematics. It turned out that he'd cracked a set of problems that had been around since the ancient Greeks.

Geometry

Geometry is the study of shapes - triangles, hexagons, spheres, etc. This subject naturally gives rise to a number of interesting questions, one of which involves the concept of constructibility. A shape is constructible if it can be drawn using only an unmarked ruler ("straightedge") and a compass.

For example, the triangle can be constructed by the following procedure:

Et voila, one beautiful equilateral triangle. So a three-sided shape is constructible.

A four-sided shape turns out to be very easy. It turns out to be possible to bisect any angle*, so just take a straight line (technically an angle of 180°) and bisect it. That gives you two lines at 90° to each other - a right angle. Draw two more perpendicular lines and you've got yourself a square.

Well, a rectangle actually. But the idea's the important thing :)

So you can draw a triangle and you can draw a square. Can you draw a pentagon? The answer turns out to be "yes", but the procedure is so intricate and icky that I'm not even going to try to explain it. By this time, mathematicians were coming to realise that a new approach was needed.

That's where abstract algebra came in. To be continued...

* Procedure left as an exercise for the interested reader. Or google it. What do I care?

I really like the skeptical atheist community

2008-01-02T15:09:00.000-08:00

They raise moral questions that I actually have to think about before discussing.

If anyone's interested then, before clicking that link, I would strongly recommend reciting the Skeptic's Morality Mantra seven* times:

"Ick" is not a valid argument
"Ick" is not a valid argument
"Ick" is not a valid argument
"Ick" is not a valid argument
"Ick" is not a valid argument
"Ick" is not a valid argument
"Ick" is not a valid argument

* Because the regular septagon is the smallest regular polygon that you can't construct with a ruler and compass. Galois Theory kicks ass.

My brain on Nietzsche

2007-12-31T10:31:00.000-08:00

The spate of low-level panic induced by reading Flowers for Algernon prompted me to spend a lot of time thinking about how my brain works: the good, the bad, and the irritating. After some cogitation, I've got a new model to play with. In this model, my mind is analogous to a boardroom at some large bureaucratic company.

Bear with me.

The reason I'm going off down this highway of thought is one of the most enduring flaws I see within myself: a serious lack of self-discipline. I've never been good at telling myself to jump through hoops. I need to see the cheese before I can bring myself to run the maze. The annoying thing is that, once I'm up against a deadline, I'm really rather effective - at GCSE* in particular I pulled some extremely good results out of a very small bag of revision.

Of course, then I went to Cambridge Uni, which demanded a less deadline-oriented approach to education, and I crashed and burned messily**. So I'm keen to figure out precisely what is going on in my brain.

It's well-known that neural networks operate by a process known as "pandemonium", whereby a bunch of different subnetworks all "yell" loudly, and the loudest one gets listened to. The behaviour of my brain is going to be heavily based on the different subnetworks that are competing for head-room - its cast of characters, if you will. Enter stage left.

The first character is a workmanlike kinda guy, wearing jeans with patches on the knees and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Don't assume that he's a slacker, though; this individual is a creature of pure drive and motivation. He's the part of me that takes over at the end of a long weekend, when I'm in a good mood and get this inexplicably strong desire to tidy my room or lift some weights. I think of him as the Uebermensch - he's the man with the plan, and if he was in charge of me the whole time then the sky would be the limit.

The rest of the characters all have their own individual traits, but I'm going to refer to them by their collective name: the bureaucrats. Most of the time, they're snooty about the Uebermensch - what's this poorly-dressed peon doing invading their boardroom? How dare he! If you want another metaphor, think of the stereotypical pompous arts professor, astounded that anyone would dare challenge the obvious rightness of his opinions about everything. The bureaucrats are the parts of me that bicker and play politics and laze about. When the bureaucrats are out in strength, the Uebermensch doesn't have a chance - his voice can't be heard over the ruckus. That's what happens when I start procrastinating and realise that three hours have vanished.

Of course, the situation all changes when there's something on the line. The stereotypical arts professor, regardless of his social constructivist philosophy, wouldn't want to get in a plane that hadn't been designed by a qualified mechanic. Similarly, when trouble looms, the bureaucrats don't hesitate to hand over the reins to the one guy in their midst who's actually good at achieving things. They go and hide and let the Uebermensch get on with it.

I'm being a bit hard on the bureaucrats here; they're not all bad. In fact, it's probably one of them that's dominant within me as I write this. But they're not good at doing stuff. They're only good at talking about it. That's why I'm sitting here typing rather than doing one of the hundred jobs that are clearly visible on all sides of me.

If this model is accurate, what should I be trying to achieve? I need to feed the Uebermensch, to make him big and strong so that he can hold his own against the orgiastic laziness of the other characters. I need to figure out how to make the Uebermensch appear more frequently. I need to figure out how to make him stay longer once he's out of his cage***.

Observations so far:

1) the Uebermensch comes out most often when I'm well-rested - by his nature, he's more prone to tiredness than the bureaucrats.
2) intellectual activity is actually bad for the Uebermensch - in particular, I'm doing him no favours by blogging.
3) the presence of people tends to act as a disruptor - it's more likely that the Uebermensch will become dominant, but more likely that he'll fall from grace again.

Hopefully I can put together some sort of strategy for boosting my effectiveness based on this. Fingers crossed.

* For you USians, I think this is equivalent to end of high school.

** By which I mean I got a 2:2. Not burned so much as mildly scorched, but I'm convinced I had the potential to get at least a 2:1.

*** In one of my rare nods to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book that started me blogging in the first place, I would equate this with what Pirsig refers to as "gumption". When you've got gumption on your side - when the Uebermensch is loose - stuff just starts to happen.

The Horror!

2007-12-31T10:12:00.001-08:00

Edgar Allen Poe? A rank amateur. HP Lovecraft? A purple-prose poseur. Mary Shelley? Bram Stoker? Cheesy hacks, the lot of them.

If you want a real horror story, try Daniel Keyes.

Flowers for Algernon is a story about a guy with IQ 70 - barely functional - who is experimented on to increase his intelligence. Soon he's at IQ 180, soaking up the world's knowledge like a very smart sponge. In particular, he learns everything there is to know about the experiment that was performed on him. And he learns that the experiment's premise was fatally flawed. In a very short time, his new-found genius is going to dissolve like a snowflake under a blowtorch. He's going to lose it all.

The book tracks his slow deterioration down through normal levels of intelligence, getting less and less coherent as his brain decays. By the time the story is finished, the person he had briefly become has evaporated. I swear, this story had me up half the frickin' night with nervous insomnia.

My mind is what makes me who I am. The thought of losing that freaks me out on a level so basic it's hard to describe*. If I ever contract Alzheimers and degenerate to the point where I cease to be me, someone please shoot me. I don't want to think of myself continuing like that, as a soul without a mind.

* Obligatory religion tie-in: I feel the same about the thought that I might have a road-to-Damascus experience and spontaneously convert. If that happened, if I accepted religion on any other grounds than solid evidence, I wouldn't be me any more.

When people say "just pray to God and he'll change your heart", they seem to have this strange idea that that would be a good thing. I consider this to be painfully wrong.

The art of not listening

2007-12-30T12:18:00.000-08:00

Families, huh? I've known plutonium that was less reactionary.

We just had the usual Christmas row, where my mum orders my sister (who is 18 going on 30) to do the thank-you letters, my sister gets irritated at being ordered around, my mum misinterprets the irritation as bone-idleness, and it all spirals down from there.

This is probably a not insignificant part of why I try to be cold-blooded in my decisions: because I've seen the merry hell that an emotion-driven approach to life can wreak.

New laptop

2007-12-19T13:51:00.000-08:00

I just got my new laptop through in the mail. I heard that Dell was retailing laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled, so I thought I'd give it a try. Here's a brief review.

Hardware

I went for the absolute minimum on all hardware options, and it doesn't seem to have done me any harm. The system is very fast and responsive. The keyboard is nice and clicky. The touchpad is a pain in the ass cos I keep banging into it, but that's true of every laptop I've ever used.

One concern I have is that I think one of my speakers just spontaneously blew out while I was writing this. I'm hoping it's just a glitch that'll correct itself.

Software

Ubuntu is - as always - a very nice system. The only problem I've had so far is wireless connectivity. My family's ActionTec router has an odd feature: as well as entering the WEP hex key, you have to enter a key number from 1 to 4. This is not supported in the Ubuntu user interface. There's apparently some way to make it work via command-line wizardry, but I'd really rather not.

Fortunately, apparently all I need to do is set the key number on the router to 1. Unfortunately, this has given my dad, who is a Windows geek, an opportunity to be irritatingly smug.

One slight tweak that would have been nice would be if the good folks at Dell had configured the regional information before sending it to me. I had to choose timezone and keyboard layout. This wasn't a problem for me, but someone who didn't know what the different keyboard layouts were might have had trouble. Also, Firefox's spell-checker was set to German for some reason.

Conclusion

Generally a nice system, and fully useable for normal people. This is a laptop that your granny can use, if you spend a whole 5 minutes setting it up for her. And she'll probably enjoy the selection of simple games, too.

A couple of annoying niggles, but nothing life-threatening (apart from the possible speaker failure, which I'm willing to chalk up to bad luck). I hereby give this system an initial mark of 7 out of 10. Not bad for a bottom-of-the-range gizmo like this.

Lovely gesture

2007-12-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

I just got a CD through the post. David, the guy running the local Humanist group, routinely records and writes up the meeting notes. Once he'd done that for the meeting I attended, he sent me the recording as a souvenir of my brief tenure as chairperson.

That is just so sweet!

Tat Thoughts cont.

2007-12-13T06:27:00.000-08:00

The discussion on this thread is getting hard to read because of its length (most of which is my fault). I'm creating this post to make things more readable. See the comments section for my response to Terri's last post.

When I have a moment I might break each of the key issues out into its own post, which will make keeping track of the lines of argument infinitely easier.