Archive for July, 2015

I try to vary my reading. Should I read books on science and scepticism? Or science fiction novels? Or classics? I aspire to a mix of all three.

Sometimes this seems like a silly thing to do. Take Jane Austen for example. I remember reading Pride and Prejudice and thinking to myself “why am I reading this? It is just a bunch of women gossiping, this is neither entertaining nor useful to my life.”

Little did I realise that a year later I would be reading Thomas Piketty, who decides to illustrate the otherwise very dry economic theory with comparisons to the characters of Austen’s novels.

There is a use for the petty troubles of the landed gentry after all…

1914 was a simple time. Back then, you could actually work out what was happening in a James Joyce novel. This is why the description of the book includes the following helpful line.

This book holds none of the difficulties of Joyce’s later novels, such as Ulysses, yet in its way it is just as radical.

It is indeed more comprehensible. The opening dialogue of each story may not be quite as verbose as a Jane Austen novel, but you can pretty much work out what is going on within the first half of the story (the book itself being a collection of short stories).

In some ways though, this takes away a little piece of the James Joyce magic. The descriptions, by being less surreal, become a little less vivid as well.

In Them Jon Ronson spends a few years hanging round with people considered extremists.

He begins with Omar Bakri, who he says is labelled as “Osama bin Laden’s man in Great Britain”. This was pre-2001 mind you. He also goes to meet the Conservative MP trying to get him denied citizenship. It’s soon clear that both sides are right-wing idiots.

Some of it is at least humorously stupid though. For example at one of Omar’s rallies they plan to release blank balloons carrying postcards containing a call to war against the West. Unfortunately the postcards are too heavy and so his follows spend a fruitless day trying to waft the balloons into the air. It sounded very Four Lions.

He goes to visit Ruby Ridge, or at least would have done if such a place existed. Turns out the media just merged the names of the two closest places when they turned up to report on the US government killing half of the weaver family, coincidently (so I assume) just before Wacko happened.

He follows David Icke around. You know, the man who thinks that the people running the world are lizards. Actual lizards, that disguise themselves as humans. You might also remember him as the man who declared he was the son of god and predicted earthquakes and other natural disasters on the Terry Wogan show.

Unfortunately the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) think that he uses lizards as a codeword for Jew. Thus you get a very rich, powerful organisation bullying a man who almost is almost certainly mentally ill. It feels like everyone comes out a loser in that one.

He goes chasing after the Bilderberg Group, which was probably pretty secret when the book came out, but now has an official website and Wikipedia page. Though it’s not all clean fun as they did actually seem to follow Ronson around for a while.

He even follows Ian Paisley around on a preaching tour of Africa. He seems to hate everyone and have a terrible sense of humour. Though I am sure most people had guessed that already.

There is no coherent narrative or structure to this book. Ronson just finds people that have been labelled as crazy and follows them around until interesting stories come out. Sometimes he will go back to them later, sometimes not.

All of this makes for a slightly random, but definitely entertaining read.

Last week we had dinner with Gijsbert who pointed me to the new version of his PsyToolkit. This is a piece of software for building psychological experiments, though more relevant to us civilians are the tests and scales available on the website

There are now over 60 on them, so myself and Elina spent Saturday night filling them all out. Of course how much you can take from them is questionable. However, they are all academically published scales.

I came up with some interesting results:

• I am not a psychopath – which was the result I was hoping for
• I am only slightly dissatified with my life – win
• I’m only minimally depressed
• I have high self-esteem – probably thanks to me being so great
• I’m not narcissistic – pretty surprised at that!
• I am highly sceptical of adverts
• I have high general anxiety
• I do not have internet addiction – apparently
• I am a perfectionist – did not expect that!

Of course I am now basically going to do nothing with this information. However, it was fun to do the tests.

I also suggested he added the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) which he prompted did. Pleasingly, my score dropped from 11 to 9 this week, meaning I am no longer postnatally depressed!

This time last year I was running eight community groups. Anxiety Leeds, Leeds Tornadoes, Leeds City Toastmasters, White Rose Speakers, Humanist Action Group, Sunday Assembly Leeds, West Yorkshire Humanists and Leeds Skeptics.

I have been gradually cutting that down over the past year. I moved on to being a Toastmasters area governor (so looking after five clubs rather than two) and that too has now come to an end. Leeds Skeptics is now in the capable hands of Trevor and I’ve moved to Leeds Samurai, so I can train without the organisational hassle.

All in all then I am a now mere civilian in four of those groups and can attend as and when I have time.

I’ve cut down on my personal commitments too. Last year I was having regular lessons for guitar, singing and Finnish. Now I am down to Finnish and piano.

It’s an interesting experiment, not cramming far too much into my life and hoping it all gets through the doorway. So far, it’s working out okay. It’s still a lot of groups, and I won’t say I have much unscheduled time, but I am now finding more time to revise, and even a bit of timing to garden (luckily this only requires limited attention when all you have is a balcony). Besides which wedding planning quickly turns into a full time job…

When I was a kid, working out what class you were was simple. If you brought TV Times you were working class, if you bought Radio Times you were middle class and if you had a man to read the TV listings to you, you were upper class.

As I have grown older though, I have begin to wonder whether it might be slightly more nuanced than that.

A traditional British view might divide people into the aristocracy, the lords and ladies, the middle or ownership class, who own factories and businesses, and the working class, who work in them. I use traditional in a loose sense here because that has only been the case since the industrial revolution. This view fits with the wider social description of the class “between” the peasants and the nobility.

In more recent times, many new definitions have been brought forward. Some of which may have been promoted by governments in an attempt to create an aspiration. The advantage of this being that people will make sacrifices in order to achieve it, thus suppressing criticism of their policies.

Further education being a good example. Did you parents go to university? Or enjoy a high-prestige job such as a doctor or lawyer? Under some definitions this would categorise you as middle class.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty divides society up into the top 10%, the middle 40% and the bottom 50%. Though he does this with the explicit statement that these are arbitary boundaries that are useful for statistical comparisons across states and not meant to be taken as definitions.

He does note however that one of the major changes of the last century was a shift away from a 10% owning everything, to 10% owning most things, while the 40% managed to gain a house (the bottom 50% still owning nothing). Home ownership could therefore be considered the qualification for middle class.

Ultimately then it would seem there is no agreed definition of what the middle class actually is. It would therefore seem wise to define it in the context of any debate being had.

How has wealth inequality changed over the previous few centuries and what does that tell us about the present? That is the rather large question that French economist Thomas Piketty attempts to answer in this book.

No doubt his writing is in a far more coherant and structured format than my description of it, but here goes.

H begins with a global outlook. Poor countries are gradually catching up with rich countries, and he notes that wealth inequality is primarily within a country. China is making rapid progress in catching up with Europe for example, while the working class of Europe are not making the same gains on the upper class.

Nevertheless, it is a long and hard struggle. Once one country has an advantage, it can essentially own another. This is how European nations managed to maintain colonial domination while running a trade deficit. We could simply put our colonies into debt and then force them to work for us to pay it off.

Once they do grow, they are unlikely to overtake us because as they become a first world country the growth levels off. They are also a long way behind. Europe has 2000% the wealth of China for example, so even growing at 8% a year, once you factor in that Europe is also growing, that is a long way to catch up.

The oil countries could see huge growth though because of their sovereign wealth funds.

Europe itself remains incredibly rich. Richer than anyone else in the world. Though admittedly the United States are the only real competition. However this wealth is all in private hands. European governments themselves are heavily in debt, mostly to their own citizens, and typically have a capital of 0, because their public assets only just cover said debts.

It is traditionally highly unequal wealth. Far from being the land of the financially free, it was the United States that pioneered high tax of the wealthiest and it is only in recent decades that America’s wealth inequality has become greater than Europe’s.

This wealth is very concentrated. One way is labour inequality. Some people are paid far more than others. Though this is not always the close. In 1970s Scandinavia the top 10% of earners claimed 20% of the earnings. This seems a reasonable level of inequality to me.

A much more pressing issue though is capital inequality. Even in the most equal societies the bottom 50% will typically own nothing. Before the World Wars 1% typically owned 50% and 10% owned another 40%. The Wars changed this, but only as far as to allow the next 40% to buy their own home, which is not much by comparison, and still leaving 50% without assets.

Capital inequality is typically inherited. Thus it is not a useful form of inequality because it does not provide motivation for people to earn money. The point of inequality is to motivate people to work hard and earn money, but there is no utility in allowing people to merely inherit large amounts of capital – in fact this encourages them to do nothing.

It is also worth noting that labour inequality does not necessarily provide this motivation either. This is because the differences in “super manager” compensation cannot be directly related to a persons output but rather by industry and non-talent based conditions (luck).

Once people are rich the problem of wealth inequality perpetuates itself. Inflation, which many assume would reduce wealth, actually makes the situation worse. This is because poor people see their savings eroded by inflation while large amounts of capital is able to better protect itself.

It does this in a number of ways. By being larger, the capital of American university endowments when compared to individual savers for example, can afford to spend far more on management. Harvard has around $30 billion, so can spend $100 million a year on management with that only being 0.3% of their capital, which will be more than made up for in growth.

Secondly, with a bigger fund you can diversity into more risky assets. This produces a less predictable short term but a more profitable long term. Thirdly, many options that Harvard invest in may simply be entirely unavailable to small amounts of capital, such as products which require a large minimum investment.

Thus the rich get richer and the poor get poorer with no relation to the work, productivity or utility of the individual. There is no self-correcting mechanism for this.

What can we do about this?

Free university could be one way. It seems to have reduced inequality in the Nordics, though this has not been entirely proven. Picketty also suggests minimum wage will not help in the long run.

He suggests a global tax on capital. This would be low, initially at 0.1% of total capital, progressively rising to 0.5% for the largest fortunes.

This would have to be done in a global level, or at least a European level and require cooperation from banks. Otherwise people would just hide their assets. Indeed, it should be noted that the balance of payments for Earth is currently negative! More wealth flows out that comes in. This is of course theoretically impossible, but could be accounted for by tax heavens not being transparent.

A global tax on capital would encourage people to generate money and become rich, which ensuring that these fortunes cannot be used by future generations to unfairly dominate the economic landscape.

In summary, the following points:

• Capital inequality is the biggest form of inequality
• The twentieth century saw some reduction in the importance of inheritance, but this is now returning
• Large inherited fortunes serve no utility to society
• Large fortunes are able to perpetuate themselves and thus the rich get richer and the poor get poorer
• There is no natural self-correcting mechanism for this
• The best way to tackle this would be with a global tax on capital

Why do people maintain their bigoted beliefs even when it works against their own immediate interests? Bakers and hotel owners not selling to gay people or atheists for example.

In a recent blog post entitled “Why Are People Bigoted, Even When It Costs Them Money?” Greta Christina proposes that people act this way because it is of overall benefit to maintain their white/straight/male privilege than it is to reap the immediate benefit.

According to the theory, maintaining privilege is profitable, even when factoring in the short-term loses.

Unfortunately, I believe the blog post is short on both evidence or further explanation.

Presumably, a secret cabal designed to maintain each privilege is not being suggested. Especially as she herself would presumably be included in the while cabal, but not the male cabal, and therefore be able to see both sides of the situation. If that is not the case though, it is difficult to explain why such a system does not fall foul of the tragedy of the commons.

More importantly, though, there is a lack of evidence for the hypothesis while far simpler explanations can easily fill the gap. Occam’s razor must come slicing in.

Firstly, there is an assumption that people do things for rational reasons. We know that people don’t. Arguably, people never do.

Why won’t a baker sell a wedding cake to a gay people? Because he irrationally believes that there is a giant man in the sky who hates gay people.

When it comes to perpetuating male privilege, perhaps it is because we subconsciously favour people similar to ourselves, as Steven Pinker and Noreena Hurtz both point out. In the hunter-gather tribe environment that our brains evolved in, it probably did pay to be a racist. Even if things have changed, and I think they have, evolution has not had time to catch up.

That is not to say that these things are good things of course. That would be the naturalistic fallacy. But if we want to address issues such as gender discrimination in academia, we need to be able to tackle the root cause of the issue and for that we need evidence-based solutions.

Jon Ronson is a journalist who writes books the same way Louis Theroux makes documentaries. He goes and interviews odd people and pokes them gently but persistently until interesting stories fall out.

In his book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry he looks at what psychopathy is, how it is diagnosed (there is a checklist), what can be done about it (very little) and where you might find psychopaths. The answer to the last question is apparently prisons and CEOs.

He starts off by narcissistically whining about his own problems and anxieties. I find this annoying at first as he sounds too similar to myself for comfort, but gradually come round to it as the book goes on. He is very much a character in the story. Given a preference, I think I would opt-out of that, but it doesn’t ruin the book.

If you ever worry that you are a psychopath, then good news, that probably means you are not one. Psychopaths typically do not suffer from anxiety. However, if you want to double check, you could use the PCL-R, a checklist developed by Robert Hare.

Ronson also provides advice for psychopaths looking to avoid the media spotlight – be as boring as possible because then no journalist will want to write about you. Statically, that should be useful to just under 1% of my visitors…

Explaining how the mind works is a big topic to take on. However, if anyone is up to the challenge, I imagine Steven Pinker has to be on the shortlist.

His central premise is that the brain is a series of specialised systems. Rather than being one general problem solver, it is a collection of machines designed to do different things.

For example, we have a language module and a facial recognition module. We know this because one system can be damaged. In a condition called prosopagnosia people are unable to recognise faces. They can recognise every day objects and show no cognitive impairment, except when it comes to recognising faces, when even their own family are a mystery to them.

This is perhaps why we have been unable to recreate human intelligence with computers (though why would we, artificial intelligence is just a different kind of intelligence). It’s not that computers are too specific, following their specific code – it is that they are general problem solvers and the brain is not!

That does not mean of course that the brain cannot adapt and repurpose. If you lose the sight of an eye, for example, that part of the brain will be used up processing imagery from the other eye. However, there is design (albeit naturally guided by evolution) and purpose behind the modules of the brain.

The brain does some things really well. Colour for example. How do we know what colour snow is? It sounds easy, but it isn’t! In direct sunlight, snow reflects lots of light. Indoors, it reflects less. But it is the same thing. A camera struggles to tell. That is why you often need to set the white balance, to tell it is looking at white snow in poor light rather than grey snow in good light. The brain does all this for us though.

It takes our sensory input and presents us with the world. Tilt your head, and notice the world doesn’t move. Again, if you did this on a camera it would list. Your brain, however, keeps things steady.

Other things it is less good at though. We are not great at recognising left from right. Why? Because any rule regarding left or right had to be generalised to both sides in our hunter-gatherer evolved brain. Hence we have no problems with up and down, but often struggle with left and right.

This is all a result of the environment in which we evolved. Phobias, for example, are all things we used to be scared of. Snakes and spiders for example. You do not need to teach a monkey, or a human for that matter, to be scared of a snake – they are innate. Yet similarly, we never develop of a phobia of electricity, even though that kills far more people.

We also calibrate our happiness based on other people. Pinker claims that there is no objective measure, we just use society to gauge what can be reasonably expected and set our levels based on that. Again, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, that we would balance our pursuit of happiness.

This makes a case for reducing income inequality. If one person makes £50 and someone else makes £500 it is not an everybody wins situation. Of course, you have to balance that with fairness and freedom, which is difficult.

He then talks about reproduction, which is quite a depressing section. Like most animals, we use sexual reproduction. The advantage of this is that you swap half of your DNA out every generation, thus making it harder for pathogens to crack the safe as it were. Good stuff there, we all enjoy sex. However, then he talks about babies and children.

It’s a war. The baby wants as much from its mother as it can, fighting her body to draw all the nutrients into the womb. Then once it is born it fights for all the attention, trying to stop the mother from having further children as this would reduce its own attention. To an extent anyway – eventually the chance of 50% of its DNA being in a sibling becomes worth it and it gives up screaming.

Pinker also discusses the sexes in nature. Most species operate with the female bearing the offspring and therefore having the most investment in it. Therefore females tend to be most picky about selecting mates of which there are plenty of options, whereas males want to spread their DNA as far and wide as possible, and compete with each other to do so.

This has interesting social implications. For example, the idea of men being “players” and women being “sluts” is, dare I say it, natural. This does not make it moral or right of course! However, these are not social constructs, but in fact the very opposite! These are naturally occurring tendencies that we are now overcoming thanks to society.

Indeed if people could be conformed to socially constructed gender roles this would soon be selected out because the powerful men in society would force them all to be celibate and cuckolded.

He also offers an explanation for the irrationally of love. Irrationally is actually a good way to fall in love. If you did it for rational reasons, you would just leave when you found someone better, which statically speaking if you get together in the first 30 years of your life, you probably would. Therefore falling in love for irrational reasons helps nature maintain monogamous relationships.

All interesting stuff. It felt a bit disjointed at times. It wasn’t one cohesive story but then that is the point of the book. The mind is not one unified general problem solver but a series of systems.

To me, this is Pinker’s “how it works” manual while The Blank Slate is the “what the consequences of that are” book, both of them together forming the full story. It has not changed my thinking is the radical way The Blank Slate did, but it s certainly is fascinating.

If you enjoy this, you will almost certainly enjoy Dan Dennett’s Consciousness Explained too.