Machine Common Sense (MCS) - DARPA

The DARPA challenge

A past DARPA challenge kickstarted the self-driving car phenomenon. Will this new attempt to equip robots with common sense reasoning and interpersonal skills be as successful?

For some value of 'successful' of course.

DARPA's proposal starts with a short review of the disappointing record on 'common sense'.

"Since the early days of AI, researchers have pursued a variety of efforts to develop logic-based approaches to common sense knowledge and reasoning, as well as means of extracting and collecting commonsense knowledge from the Web.

While these efforts have produced useful results, their brittleness and lack of semantic understanding have prevented the creation of a widely applicable common sense capability."

DARPA breaks its new challenge into two substreams. The first bases itself on human infant cognitive development, as theorised by developmental psychology.

"The first approach will create computational models that learn from experience and mimic the core domains of cognition as defined by developmental psychology. This includes the domains of objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). Researchers will seek to develop systems that think and learn as humans do in the very early stages of development, leveraging advances in the field of cognitive development to provide empirical and theoretical guidance.

“During the first few years of life, humans acquire the fundamental building blocks of intelligence and common sense,” said Gunning. “Developmental psychologists have founds ways to map these cognitive capabilities across the developmental stages of a human’s early life, providing researchers with a set of targets and a strategy to mimic for developing a new foundation for machine common sense.”

To assess the progress and success of the first strategy’s computational models, researchers will explore developmental psychology research studies and literature to create evaluation criteria. DARPA will use the resulting set of cognitive development milestones to determine how well the models are able to learn against three levels of performance – prediction/expectation, experience learning, and problem solving."

The second stream is more bookish, mining the web.

"The second MCS approach will construct a common sense knowledge repository capable of answering natural language and image-based queries about common sense phenomena by reading from the Web.

DARPA expects that researchers will use a combination of manual construction, information extraction, machine learning, crowdsourcing techniques, and other computational approaches to develop the repository.

The resulting capability will be measured against the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) Common Sense benchmark tests, which are constructed through an extensive crowdsourcing process to represent and measure the broad commonsense knowledge of an average adult."

I am impressed by neither approach.

It's too tempting to theorise a situated agent in terms of ungrounded abstractions, such as the belief–desire–intention software model. In this way we think of the frog, sat in its puddle, as busily creating in its brain a set of beliefs about the state of its environment, a set of desires such as 'not being hungry' and an intention such as 'catching that fly with a flick of its tongue'.

While we may describe the frog in such unecological folk-psychological terms - as is the wont of developmental psychologists - Maturana et al pointed out that is not what the frog does.

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At this point it is tempting to bring in Daniel Dennett's ideas about first and second order intentionality but I distrust even this. Treating another animal as an agent (rather than an instrumental object in the environment) which is the hallmark of second-order intentionality, seems extraordinarily rare in the animal kingdom. The Wikipedia article, "Theory of mind in animals", suggests there is partial - but not compelling - evidence for it only in the case of some social animals. But the concept remains ill-defined.

We use a reified intentional language (note: language) with modal operators such as believes and desires to describe those objects we classify as agents. By virtue of  'possessing' their own beliefs, desires and intentions (= plans) they are taken to exhibit autonomy. We don't normally use such language to describe bricks and cauliflowers. We do use such language to describe spiders, mice and roombas - first-order intentional systems.

Some systems (such as people) seem able themselves to characterise objects in their environment (possibly including themselves) in intentional terms. They have the capability, for example, to look at us and see us as agents. We call these systems second order intentional systems. I would include cats and dogs and children here, noting how they manipulate us (spiders, mice and roombas don't seem to notice us as agents).

So how do they do that? That's the interesting architecture question DARPA is asking, and nobody knows.

I expect that a biological second order intentional system possesses neural circuitry which encodes a representation of intentional agents in its environment as persistent objects, together with links to situations (also neurally-encoded) representing beliefs, desires and intentions relativised to that agent. Think of the intuitions underlying Situation Semantics, implemented as computationally-friendly semantic nets: I wrote about it here.

I used to think that the only way forward was to design the best higher-order intentionality architecture possible, embody it in a robot child and expose it to the same experience-history as that involved in human infant socialisation. But I notice that DeepMind and similar have made huge leaps forward in simulated environments which decouple cognitive challenges from the messy (and slow) domains of robotic engineering.

So I imagine that's where the smart money will be.

"AngloArabia" - David Wearing

Amazon link

Given the recent killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who would not be interested in learning more about Britain's ties to the Gulf States?  This book is an edited version of David Wearing's PhD thesis (and more about that later).

Wearing's contribution is summed up in his concluding chapter from which I copiously quote.

"This book has attempted to map the deep underlying structures of UK relations with the Gulf Arab monarchies."

The book is centred around Britain's historical links and current relationships with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

"Gulf hydrocarbons and the petrodollar riches that are generated by their production are important to the UK not only for narrow commercial reasons but also because they play a vital role in addressing some of Britain's specific and fundamental needs as a major capitalist power. London built its relationships with the GCC monarchies through a century and a half of imperial dominance of the Gulf region and another half-century of developing and maintaining those ties beyond the end of formal empire. ...

"The primary significance of the Gulf lies in its vast energy reserves, first because the stability of the global economy depends on the reliable flow of oil and gas from the region, second because control over those resources constitutes a major source of geostrategic power for any state or states interested in global hegemony, and third because the revenues generated by Gulf hydrocarbon production can be 'recycled' to the leading capitalist states in a number of advantageous ways."

Given the importance of oil to strategic adversaries such as China, exclusive control of the Middle East oil fields has been a continuing major priority for the West.

"London therefore seeks to support and complement the projection of US military power into the region, protect the Gulf monarchies from internal and external challenges, and maximise petrodollar recycling in various forms that benefit British capitalism and the UK's status as an international power, from capital inflows to the City of London to major arms purchases. ...

"Britain is not directly energy-dependent on the Gulf, although disruptions in the region's hydrocarbon exports would have a damaging indirect effect on the UK economy. "

That surprised me. It turns out that most Gulf hydrocarbons are sold to Asia. Britain's major import from the region is Qatari gas. Britain gets most of its imported oil from Norway, Algeria, Nigeria and Russia.  Only 3% comes from Saudi Arabia and an insignificant amount from the other Gulf states (p. 52).

"There is a 'dual logic' shaping British and American energy strategies relating to security of Gulf energy flows and US control over them, based on the increasing importance of Gulf oil and gas in meeting global demand and on the growing dependence of emerging Asian powers - China in particular - on Gulf energy imports.

"The UK also has a major commercial interest in Gulf hydrocarbons given that two of its largest corporations - BP and Shell -are among the leading international energy firms. The Gulf has always been important to those firms, and is becoming increasingly so. While they have had to absorb some setbacks in recent years, they have also enjoyed notable successes and remain in a fairly strong position in a region that, overall, remains economically dependent on energy production."

The book documents some remarkable examples of the intertwined links between the British oil majors and the Foreign Office and relevant embassies.

"Gulf petrodollars recycled through UK-GCC trade and investment play an important role in addressing the key macroeconomic challenges facing the British economy and in maintaining Britain's status as a leading capitalist power. This has been particularly true in the period following the sharp rise in oil prices around the turn of the millennium.

"The region has become a key export market relative to others in the developing world. UK-based banks were more successful in attracting Gulf capital than those in other financial centres, and those inflows were highly significant by the standards of the global south, if not the global north. The Gulf bailout of Barclays Bank in 2008 demonstrated that GCC capital could play a highly significant stabilizing role in certain circumstances."

Also a rather opaque one.

"Perhaps the most important role played by Gulf capital, especially Saudi petrodollars, is in financing Britain's large current account deficit, thus also indirectly helping to maintain the status of the pound sterling. In this regard, these net capital inflows are significant compared with those from any other source, whether in the developing or the developed world.

"British arms exports to the GCC states help the UK to maintain the military-industrial capacity required as the basis for global power projection. Exports to the rest of the world are in steady long-term decline while those to the Gulf market have steadily risen in parallel. When questions of corruption have arisen over these arms deals, Whitehall has gone to considerable lengths to avoid formal scrutiny, going so far as to defy the wishes of Washington and some major City investors in the process. "

The UK's SFO (Serious Fraud Office) bribery investigation against BAE - which was somewhat scandalously dropped - is a case in point (pp. 171-177).

"British commitments to the protection of the Gulf monarchies, while plainly of less significance than those of the US, are nonetheless wide-ranging, extensive and multi-layered. The UK's continuing support for Bahrain in the wake of its violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in 2011 amounted to a major strategic vote of confidence in the Al Khalifa monarchy, just as the wider deepening of military ties with the GCC states against the background of the Arab uprisings was a clear expression of support for the conservative regional order.

"Meanwhile, the large-scale material and practical assistance London provided to the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen despite numerous credible reports of indiscriminate bombing, the unfolding of a major humanitarian disaster, and considerable consequent pressure on the British government to suspend arms sales - demonstrated both the extent of Whitehall's commitment to military cooperation with the Saudis and the extent of the latter's dependence on the UK (not only the US) in wartime."

It's not in the West's interests to have an Iranian-backed regime at Saudi Arabia's southern border exerting control over the Bab-el-Mandeb strait connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden - a major oil route. Public angst is really driven by Saudi Arabia's incompetence in waging the war, its failure to bring about a swift victory.

"When evaluating the extent to which each side needs the other in the relationship, we should also consider what each side needs the other for. London needs to support American domination of the Gulf as part of its commitment to supporting US global hegemony, but this commitment is ultimately a choice.

"London needs the GCC states to spend their petrodollars on major arms purchases to sustain its domestic military industry, but only because it has chosen to attempt to preserve its status as an international military power. The social wellbeing of the British population is not necessarily dependent on London retaining this status (many prosperous societies manage very well without it).

"In economic terms, Britain needs Gulf capital inflows to help finance its current account deficit, but that deficit is in no small part the product of a choice to balance the UK economy away from visible exports and towards financial services as part of the move to neoliberalism in the 1980s.

"By contrast, the Gulf monarchies' need for support from the leading capitalist powers is of a more existential nature. The United States is their main protector, but the UK's complementary role and its own state-to-state defence agreements with the Gulf states are not insignificant. Seeking such protection, for monarchical governments with uncertain levels of domestic legitimacy and support, is less of a choice and more of a necessity.

"For the UK, while the difficulty of effecting a departure from long-established geopolitical and economic strategies should certainly not be underplayed, it remains the case that Britain's close relationship with the Gulf states is based on a series of choices, each of which have possible alternatives."

Wearing suggests that Britain could choose to swap its support for Washington's global hegemony for a more neutral and peaceful position, abandon international power projection, restrict its military posture to direct self-defence and move its high-tech manufacturing capacity away from arms production towards sectors such as renewable energy.

The capitalist class is, of course, aware of these options and chooses not to take them. Wearing must therefore have in mind countervailing social forces which could compel his alternative strategy (one which the dominant fraction of the UK elite would consider highly suboptimal and damaging). He does not, however, enlighten us further as to what these might be.

Let me return to the evaluation of this book. The format of PhD theses is heavily formalised and choreographed. You need a literature review, a survey of work already done, the presentation of new material in a thorough and dispassionate form, and an emphasis on sources and detail. All of this generally makes for exceedingly dry reading.

Wearing has done his best, but his book is tedious. It's heavy on facts and somewhat underweight on analysis. It will suit those who are studying the region and need the details but for the average reader it's just too much of an effort to keep the pages turning.

Our future of total surveillance (Jamie Susskind)

Amazon link

Susskind's book was reviewed in The Sunday Times today (here).  It's about a dystopian future of AI super-surveillance sourced from sinister tech companies like Google (I am not being ironic).

I was struck by this quote:

".. the children decide to go on a demo. They heard about it from their friends; artificial-intelligence systems had prevented them receiving online information. Their phones warn them about rain and traffic, but there is none. A drone records their progress. Then, on their internet-enabled glasses, they see pictures of people being interrogated in stress positions; each has the face of one of them. They turn back."

Actually, demonstrators within authoritarian regimes face far stronger disincentives than those described above. Demonstrations still happen because when people get mad enough they'll brave prospects of torture. Or perhaps they lack imagination or think it won't happen to them. All of the above probably.

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There have been a few lone-actor atrocities in the US over the last few days. The so-called 'MAGA bomber', Cesar Sayoc, was found particularly rapidly after fingerprints and DNA were apparently found on suspect devices. Easy to cross-check as Sayoc had a criminal record.

Wikipedia tells us, "According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,220,300 adults were incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2013 – about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the U.S. resident population."

That's a great dataset for machine learning applied to GWAS. Genome to facial appearance is a quick win: you can almost always get a scene-of-crime DNA sample, and all criminals are on Facebook, aren't they?

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I read the review carefully but I'm not convinced there's much new in Susskind's book ..

"His writing is clear and precise; he is a lawyer, he is making a case. Irritatingly, he puts in too many (one would be too many) cheeky-chappy asides such as, “At last, someone has found a use for spinach.” But, on the whole, he steers a course to the future that is as convincing as it is shocking. We can fix this, is his message, but there is also the nagging sense that we probably won’t."

We won't until we do. I'll give the book a miss.

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Related post: Über-surveillance.

A second review of "Beyond Weird" by Philip Ball

Amazon link

Roy Simpson has written his own review of the above book which I'm pleased to guest-post here. He previously guest-reviewed "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli.

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Review of Philip Ball: Beyond Weird (2018)

By Dr. Roy Simpson, October 2018

This review was requested by Nigel Seel and could be read in conjunction with his review of this book.

In reviewing a book such as this it is tempting to first review the style and content of the book, then secondly to add comments concerning one's own view and approach to these matters.

Having been familiar with the basic equations of quantum mechanics for a long time I am not able to say for sure whether the book actually requires the prior familiarity with quantum mechanics suggested in the Seel review. Certainly one has to be interested in physics and its foundations. The book contains a good introduction to the structure and key components of quantum mechanics and eventually leads us towards the questions of interpretation and meaning.

The unusual nature of the formulation of the subject is neatly captured in a chapter comparing the axioms of quantum mechanics with other physics theories. For example we have Newton's Laws:

1. Every moving object keeps moving at the same speed if no force is applied to it. If it is still to begin with, it stays still.

2. If a force is applied to an object it accelerates it in direct proportion to that force .. .

3. For every force that one body exerts on another, the other body exerts an equal force back in the opposite direction.

Special Relativity can be presented with similar physically comprehensible (and experimentally checkable) axioms. By contrast for quantum mechanics we have:

1. For every system, there is a complex Hilbert Space H.

2. States of the system correspond to projection operators onto H.

3. Those things that are observable somehow correspond to eigenprojectors of Hermitian operators.

4. Isolated systems evolve according to the Schrödinger equation.

Now all physics theories have a mathematical content and even Newtonian mechanics can be presented using mathematical structures such as symplectic manifolds, Noetherian moments and differential forms. However Newtonian theory has a basic physical form as stated above. The issue is: what is the Quantum equivalent?

Without an answer to that question it can be difficult to be convinced that the theory has been fully understood, despite the success of the mathematical formulation. So this situation is deemed philosophically unsatisfactory and also impedes progress towards reconciling quantum theory with General Relativity (which also has a physical explanation as well as a successful mathematical form).

The book takes a long look at the most basic interpretation (as these attempts to connect the mathematics with any physical reality are called) of quantum mechanics, called the Copenhagen interpretation.

The book then follows with a more cursory and dismissive view of the Bohm-de Broglie interpretation as an example of a key distinction between such interpretations: are they Ontic (the mathematical entities represent real physical structures in the usual physics sense); or are they Epistemic (the mathematical entities describe the observer's knowledge of the – perhaps unknowable – physical system).

The Copenhagen leans towards the Epistemic, whereas the Bohm is Ontic. Other interpretations are also discussed by the book such as the very Epistemic Qbism interpretation and the Ontic GRW and Penrose-Diosi models. These latter are not just interpretations but are modifications of some of the mathematics (making a physics explanation easier, in the latter case by invoking gravity).

There is also a long and useful discussion of “decoherence”. However this book does not include any mathematics and although that makes the book easier for some audiences, it does detract from some clarity and rigour in the arguments the author wishes to make.

Another interpretation dismissively discussed in the book is the Many Worlds Interpretation. A recent summary of this section is available in an online article by the author here.

There are over one dozen interpretations of quantum mechanics and they are not all discussed in the book. New interpretations appear regularly with an example “The Montevideo Interpretation” (which this reviewer has not yet studied). So the book is not comprehensive in its account of interpretations.

The book gives a long account of the Bell Theorem, which is an experimentally checked theorem implying the non-locality and non-contextuality of quantum mechanics. The discussion here is interesting, but this reviewer has uncovered a recent examination of the Bell Theorem which is more precise about the nature of the “superluminal effects” involved in the statement of the theorem.

Apparently there were two forms of Bell's Theorem: a “coarser” form, and 10 years later a more precise form, which makes clearer what is and is not prohibited by the theorem. However the book does not discuss this level of distinction, and the possible consequences.

The book eventually focuses on the idea of an information-based interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and recent work related to this. This area of work is largely stimulated by the subject of Quantum Computation, and the intriguing question as to whether all of the “engineering” problems in that area are purely engineering problems and not also some scientific (i.e. quantum interpretational).

Of particular interest is the idea of “quantum reconstruction” and “information causality”. Here the attempt is to address the lack of a physics basis by trying to find one in axioms - often based on “information” based ideas. From the present reviewer's perspective this work is encouraging in the sense that the results may be converging on a class of invariant mathematical objects that are being studied in 21st century mathematics.

So overall the book is a good comprehensive account of quantum interpretation and meaning from an early 21st century perspective, especially as viewed by a physical-chemist who has a “user” view of quantum mechanics.

Transgender? Ask an AI

An image of Aiden Katri uploaded to her Facebook page on Tuesday, March 29, 2016, together with a post explaining her decision to conscientiously object (Aiden Katri/Facebook)

Commenting on yesterday's post, "The 'is' and 'ought' of homosexuality", Roy suggested I should write something on the current hot topic of transgenderism.

As a topic this ranks with dissing the Religion of Peace, suggesting the Saudi ruling clique might have psychopathic tendencies or speaking out in support of Brexit.

Obviously I'm not going to go there .. . But wait! Let's be objective about this. We can ask an AI. Time to invoke SWI Prolog in theorem-proving mode.

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Let’s start by introducing a convenient acronym: marbiafl:

“Male As Regards Body - Identifies As Female Lesbian”.

The scientific approach would be to axiomatise the properties of the marbiafl and then appeal to Leibniz's law, the identity of indiscernibles. First we list the properties of heterosexual men, then the properties of heterosexual women (for simplicity just the 95% of the population who are straight) and finally, the properties of transgender people who are biologically male but who self-identify as lesbian females.

property(man, often_aggressive).
property(man, male_genitalia).
property(man, over_muscled_or_fat).
property(man, hairy_face).
property(man, wants_sex_with_women).

property(woman, often_agreeable).
property(woman, female_genitalia).
property(woman, often_slim_and_petite).
property(woman, smooth_face).
property(woman, romantically_inclined_to_men).

property(marbiafl, often_aggressive).
property(marbiafl, male_genitalia).
property(marbiafl, over_muscled_or_fat).
property(marbiafl, hairy_face).
property(marbiafl, wants_sex_with_women).

Now we ask: are transgender people (as defined above) men or women?

transgender_is(X, Y) :- findall(P, property(X, P), Plist), findall(P, property(Y, P), Plist).

This says a transgender person X is a Y (man or woman) if all the properties of X (gathered in Plist) are just the same as all the properties of a Y (a man or a woman). This is Leibniz's law.

Here is how findall works on the dataset already defined, using SWI Prolog:

?- findall(P, property(man, P), Plist).
Plist = [often_aggressive, male_genitalia, over_muscled_or_fat, hairy_face, wants_sex_with_women].

?- findall(P, property(woman, P), Plist).
Plist = [often_agreeable, female_genitalia, often_slim_and_petite, smooth_face, romantically_inclined_to_men].

?- findall(P, property(marbiafl, P), Plist).
Plist = [often_aggressive, male_genitalia, over_muscled_or_fat, hairy_face, wants_sex_with_women].

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We have now trained the AI and it's ready to answer our questions.

?- transgender_is(marbiafl, woman).
 false.

?- transgender_is(marbiafl, man).
 true.

Oh dear! A shock for activists, I wasn't expecting that.

The Economics of Roman Slavery - Kyle Harper

Amazon link

After reading Kyle Harper's excellent "The Fate of Rome" I was motivated to read this earlier book (an edited version of his doctoral thesis) on the nature of slavery in the late empire. I'm some way into it and the book is filled with astonishing detail.

Harper brings an economist's eye to modelling late Antiquity. Some of his neoclassical micro- and macroeconomic concepts are jarringly anachronistic - but despite his criticisms of dogmatic, mechanistic and dated Marxist analyses of Roman slavery his empirically-based research is very assimilable to a more sophisticated Marxist approach. Yes, Roman society integrated multiple modes of production into its interlaced agrarian-mercantile economy.

In Harper's working model, the late Roman empire comprises around 50 million people, of whom 5 million (10%) are slaves. The bulk of the slaves are owned by the top 600 or so senatorial families and the next 1.3% of super-rich aristocratic families beneath them. But the next 10%, professional/artisanal households in the cities and landowner holdings in the countryside, would have owned a few slaves (1-5) each. The remaining 80% of free citizens are the (mostly agrarian) poor working their little subsistence (often leased) plots.

There was little free labour in the western empire: population densities were low and there were other occupational calls for poor freemen, particularly the military. In Egypt, where poor labourers were in abundance, wage labour was much more central.

Slavery endured over a number of centuries. Routine supply-demand calculations show naive assumptions that the supply of slaves was provided solely, or mostly, by war captives are simply untenable. Slaves were expensive and valuable pieces of capital equipment - with the additional utility that female slaves could produce more of them. Slaves were bred just as cattle were. Slave families were a thing.

From pages 150-151:

"Scheidel argues that slave labor emerged in classical Athens because it was cheap while wages were high and that similar conditions perhaps existed in the late Roman republic.

In the empire, by contrast, slaves were dear but their labor was profitable, so that slavery persisted in a high-equilibrium state. Indeed his model is a corrective against one of the most persistent illusions about slave labor: that slaves are necessarily cheap labor.

What matters is the ability to employ slave labor at a profit  - the marginal value of labor against the costs of a slave, which are often high. The emphasis on supply is necessary and even obvious; no critique of the conquest thesis should deny that the supply side was always an economic constraint, as important as the demand side.

But the dynamics of demand are, analytically, more interesting and more challenging. Scheidel's model begins by proposing that slave labor and free labor are in more or less direct competition. Landowners used slave labor not just because free labor was institutionally unavailable, as per Finley, but because it was expensive. It was expensive because it was in short supply. It was in short supply due to high levels of political/military commitment among the free population or because of low population levels.

This model explains why slave labor is so prominent in late republican Italy (with its military mobilization) and so exiguous in Roman Egypt (with its dense population). Scheidel's model adds an important variable complicating the proposition that free and slave labor were in perfect competition in some sectors of agriculture.

He adopts Hanes' arguments about the role of transaction costs in the employment of slave labor. The risk of being unable to find labor at sensitive times in the agricultural cycle, the time and effort spent contracting labor, and the turnover costs of retraining workers were all salient considerations. Slave labor was effectively an involuntary lifetime contract.

Transaction costs, then, should be accounted for along with the raw market price of wage labor. Transaction costs amplified the effects of the demographic context, for "thick" labor markets like those in Egypt not only drove down wages, they reduced the risks and costs of the open labor market for land-owners.

This model also explains why slave labor was adaptive to certain types of Mediterranean agriculture, such as grape and olive cultivation, that required both effort and care in the nature of the labor performed. It thus represents an important advance in the application of institutional economics to ancient slavery by taking seriously the nature of the work regime and the type of labor employed. "

I wouldn't recommend the book as a beach read, it's dense and academic. But it's marvellously informative and raises this question: if we ever develop the robotic analogues of slaves, would our society evolve into anything like that of the late empire?

The 'is' and 'ought' of homosexuality

On Friday I wrote about David Torkington's piece in 'The Catholic Universe' describing, in his view, the homosexual colonisation of the Catholic Church. "The elephant in the room that threatens to bring our Church to its knees" also featured his searing theological attack on sodomy.

Yesterday (Monday) I posted "The evolutionary genetics of homosexuality (GWAS)" which described the work of a large team headed by Brendan Zietsch showing that homosexuality had strong genetic correlates and was associated with greater reproductive fitness in near relatives.

I'd like to draw your attention to a third post I wrote back in October 2014, "Evolutionary roots of homophobia" where I quoted The Economist: "Revulsion against homosexuals is ancient, deep and, in its way, sincere."

The angst is always about male homosexuality.

That there are good evolutionary explanations for a trait is a fact with limited consequences. Psychopathy is also strongly heritable and appears to be under genetic control. It's generally accepted that psychopaths 'can't help it'. That does not make their behaviour acceptable: negative externalities.

My conclusion in the 2014 post was this:

The reason for an evolved heterosexual disgust towards homosexuals (mislabelled as 'homophobia') is that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) homosexuals were more likely to be disease vectors.

This due to the unsanitary nature of some male homosexual sex acts.

In the first world today:  modern hygiene. Our emotions are still there of course, locked in our survivalist genome. The suppression of disgust in the name of compassion - where we know we will pay no real price - is called tolerance.

Psychopaths shouldn't be tolerated; homosexuals in our modern societies should be. Few non-homosexuals, however, feel an inner instinct to celebrate it. If you think you do, view some of the more controversial gay photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and gauge your reactions.

The evolutionary genetics of homosexuality (GWAS)

Tom Whipple, science editor at The Times, has this piece today.

Sexuality genes linked to sex appeal

The genes that make some people gay could also help straight people to have more sex, according to a study that may help to explain the evolutionary paradox of homosexuality.

Although there is no “gay gene”, scientists have long known that there is a strong genetic component to homosexuality. This leads to a conundrum: given that gay people have fewer children, the genes linked to homosexuality might be expected to be less likely to survive.

A leading theory of why this does not happen has now received its clearest validation. US scientists scoured the genomes of 400,000 people and compared their DNA to surveys about their sex lives. They identified a whole suite of genetic variants associated with people having had a same-sex partner.

They also looked at the sex lives of those who had those genes but who had never slept with someone of the same sex — and found an intriguing result.

According to the results, presented by an international team of researchers to the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society, straight people with the gay genetic variants had more sexual partners and were seen as more attractive. This fits with the “gay genes hypothesis”: that the genes that make some people gay persist in the population because they have reproductively beneficial effects in others.

It's been clear for a while (see lead author Brendan Zietsch's paper from 2008) that female relatives of gay men (such as their sisters) tended to have more children than the female relatives of men with fewer gay characteristics, and that heterosexual men with more alleles for feminised traits were also more reproductively successful. This has been called the Johnny Depp effect. The novelty here is the size of the sample, 400,000, and the use of genomic data.

Whipple did not give a reference and it took me a little while to track down the actual paper, from here.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND EVOLUTION SOCIETY
30th Annual Meeting
July 4th – July 7th, 2018

The evolutionary genetics of homosexuality

Brendan Zietsch, Andrea Ganna, Karin Verweij, Felix Day, Michel Nivard, Robert Maier, Robbee Wedow, Abdel Abdellaoui, Benjamin Neale, John Perry

Homosexual behaviour in humans is genetically influenced and is associated with having fewer offspring. This presents a Darwinian paradox: why have genes that predispose to homosexual behaviour been maintained in the population despite apparent selection against them?

Here we show that genes associated with homosexual behaviour are, in heterosexuals, associated with greater mating success. In in a genotyped sample of more than 400,000 individuals from the UK and USA, we for the first time found genome wide-significant association of specific variants with ever having had a same-sex partner, and hundreds of additional variants were significantly associated in aggregate.

Among men and women who had never had a same-sex partner, these same aggregate genetic effects were significantly associated with having more lifetime sexual partners and, in an independent sample, with being judged more physically attractive. Our results suggest that genes that predispose to homosexual behaviour may have been evolutionarily maintained in the population because they confer a mating advantage to heterosexual carriers.

The paper is gated of course, and I haven't been able to find an open-access version. But you get the idea. I suspect we're well down the road to putting Gregory Cochran's 'gay germ' theory to rest.

Posts here: how many views?

Number of views of recent posts as of today - click on the image below to make readable.

The numbers tend to accrete slowly; many posts end up with three figure views. Click on the image below to see the more popular ones.

It seems that corporate security, central heating repairs, family genetics, the 5:2 diet and cats are all pretty interesting for my target demographic .. .

The Elephant in the (Catholic) Room - David Torkington

David Torkington has a piece in "The Catholic Universe" entitled, "The elephant in the room that threatens to bring our Church to its knees".

I found it shocking:

"It is perhaps understandable that in the past gay men were attracted to communities of men as the safest and most desirable place to seek God. When I tried my vocation even before the Second Vatican Council, of 45 others, at least six were gay, although I only realise this with hindsight. At the time gay seminarians kept their heads down; they were there but they were latent. I know several who went on to become excellent priests.

A massive disillusionment after the Vatican Council led many tens of thousands of young priests and religious to leave the priesthood and religious life. The usual figure quoted is 50,000 but I think that is an underestimation. For obvious reasons the vast majority of gay seminarians and priests remained behind. When, in the sixties and seventies, celibacy in general became a taboo subject for the majority of the younger generation, vocations to the priesthood suffered. However, many gay Catholics continued to be attracted to the priesthood and the religious life.

When, in 1979, I was giving a lecture tour in South Africa I came across a seminary entirely populated by gay seminarians. I found the whole atmosphere sick and depressing. They openly admitted that for them, the vow of celibacy meant that this obliged them to refrain from sex with women — but it did not prevent them from having sex with other men. "

The Second Vatican Council affirmed: "The synod does not wish to leave any doubts in the mind of anyone regarding the Church's firm will to maintain the law that demands perpetual and freely chosen celibacy for present and future candidates for priestly ordination in the Latin rite."

"Just as later Rome forbade all talk about women priests, in the 1990s Rome forbade all talk about homosexuality. It was strictly forbidden. It was and has been the green light for homosexual males to flood into and take over many, if not most, seminaries. Later this happened to whole dioceses, with more and more homosexual bishops, archbishops and cardinals, many encouraging and promoting people similar to themselves with what now appears to be disastrous consequences.

One of the most conservative but highly respected Catholic moral theologians in the USA, Professor Janet Smith, has said that many dioceses in the USA are full of homosexual priests and many are run by them. In fact, she claims that well over 70 per cent of clergy in the US are gay.

I don't just mean 'gay' as friends of mine were gay and as many good priests have been and still are gay, but rather militantly gay: not celibate but pushy, pugnacious partisans with agendas hardly distinguishable from secular LGBT communities, which they wish to impose on the Church. This can be seen in parishes they have taken over in the USA. ...

The impression from 'on high' at present is that the sexual horrors which have depraved the Church for all too long are all but over, but that is far from the truth. If paedophilia is finally under control and dealt with, which I very much doubt then pederasty is all but out of control, especially in countries like the USA. "

I had not appreciated that level of homosexual dominance at all levels of the Catholic hierarchy. This is beginning to look unreformable.

I note that David Torkington is a conservative, 'mystical' theologian. His religious position would be considered out-and-out reactionary by most liberals (and by me). He expresses his own views thus:

"Let me be quite clear, sodomy was not only considered an abomination in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, too. If it was committed in the early Church it had to be admitted publicly and the offenders had to undergo the sacrament of reconciliation throughout Lent with all the appropriate penances. If they continued to offend after that they were permanently excluded from the Christian community.

Nothing has changed nor can it change - sodomy is a very serious sin and permanent offenders who are priests. bishops or cardinals are commiting a mortal sin and cannot administer the sacraments lawfully whether there has been an official condemnation from Rome or not. It would be the same if your parish priest installed a mistress in the presbytery.

Their seriously sinful actions ipso facto (by the very act of performing them) instantly separate them from the mystical body of Christ. They cannot therefore perform any of the sacraments lawfully, nor is it lawful for any of the faithful to approach them to do so. Parishes run by such priests are in effect under an interdict whether such an edict has been issued from Rome or not. They simply do not belong to us nor we to them despite all the external similarities. "

---

My thoughts on reading this article were these.

1. David Torkington is surely not long for this world. No doubt the phones on the desk of The Catholic Universe's editor are ringing off the hook with calls from senior functionaries demanding his instant exclusion: 'incendiary charges offered anecdotally, without proof, leading to the Church being brought into disrepute'.

2. Torkington's 'Quietist' philosophy leads him to prayer and meditation as the solution. That's not going to cut much ice with the regional Churches and in Rome itself.

David Torkington's latest book (Amazon, Jan 2018)

3. Any student of public choice theory could tell the Vatican that its predicament flows entirely from the perverse incentives it set up. The Church will always have a disproportionate number of gay clergy - numerous psychological studies show that the traits align. The problem is one of balance .. and not placing theological barriers to powerful human drives. Saintliness is rare while hypocrisy is regrettably common.

The Catholic Church will not make the necessary reforms. Even the Church of England, as theologically light as it is possible to be, is rent asunder on these issues by the global schism between American and European liberals and African/Asian traditionalists.

We live in such interesting times.

Sex and violence: "Misspent Youth" by Peter Hamilton

Amazon link

Call me a Hamilton completist .. .

Misspent Youth was possibly Hamilton's most-panned novel. Here's David Langford's review for Amazon.

"Peter Hamilton is famed for SF blockbusters of far-future interstellar adventure. By contrast Misspent Youth is a social comedy set in the year 2040 in England. When gene therapy rewinds Jeff Baker's age back to his early 20s he finds that wisdom and experience are no match for hormones...

The rejuvenation treatment, developed by federal Europe to impress laggard America, is so complex and expensive that only one person every 18 months can receive it. Jeff is the first because he's a celebrity inventor, father of the "datasphere" which superseded the Internet.

Family upheavals follow. An "arrangement" with his much younger, still beautiful wife Sue lets her enjoy lovers while the aged Jeff turns a blind eye: now things are different. Meanwhile their 18-year-old son Tim is struggling ineptly with teenage sexual pangs and the impossibility of understanding girls. All part of growing up, but Jeff's renewed youth brings farcical complications.

It's not just that Jeff now fancies Sue again. He can't resist even younger women. An early one-night stand is publicised all over the datasphere. Embarrassment escalates when he's seduced by the granddaughter of a long-time pub companion. Worse, several of Tim's ravishing female schoolmates are interested in Jeff the celebrity stud. The dishiest of all is Tim's latest, most hopelessly adoring girlfriend.

Can it be coincidence that the action mostly happens in Rutland?

This comedy of embarrassments and revelations has a darker background: Europe is plagued by separatist movements whose terrorist habits make the old IRA look like pussycats. The turning point in Jeff's tangled relationships comes when he attends a London conference surrounded by protest that breeds riot -- with Tim among the protesters.

A foreshadowed twist leads to a finale that mixes cynicism with sentiment. En route Misspent Youth is a lot of fun."

It's hard writing about sex. The chasms of the bad sex award and suspicions of self-gratifying wish-fulfillment are never far away. When an old man in a rejuvenated body is graphically described as having hot sex with hot teens, the ghost of paedophilia can't be far behind.

I suppose the bad reviews were to be expected.

It's customary for reviewers to write in the author's defence that the sex scenes were 'not arousing' - artistic sensibilities positively call for such a judgement. I would probably concur: Hamilton is good at writing about sex - the reader does not curdle with the embarrassing sensation that they have stumbled into a p**n novel - the writing really doesn't put hairs on your chest.

It seems to me that Hamilton is, however, more interested in two other things: firstly the experience of being a teenager, where personal relationships are always fraught with raw, emotional turbulence and one is always out of one's depth; and secondly the politics of the European Union (he is not a fan). In 2018, the regime-shaking Euro-angst conjured up in this 2009 novel seems more relevant than ever.

No, my critique of this novel is that - competent writer though he is - the miniature scale of the setting and plot makes much of the writing rather tedious.

"I wish I were Nigella Lawson"

I say to her:

"Suppose you said, 'I wish I were Nigella Lawson,' .. given as how you like her.

So imagine your genome hanging in the air and next to it Nigella's.

Sequencing projects find about one SNP per 1000 bases. That's the basis for the claim that people are 99.9% genetically similar. The human genome is about 3 Gbp long. This suggests about 3 million SNPs are different among two random people.

So imagine molecular scissors tweaking your genome: three million base pair edits until we've made you into Nigella, ta-da!

But wait! We already have a Nigella. In every important sense your wish has already come true!"

--- pause ---

"I thought for a moment you were going to say something sensible."

"In The Long Run We Are All Dead" - Geoff Mann

Amazon link

Maddeningly abstract and allusive, Geoff Mann's book situates Keynes within an intellectual arc stretching back to the French Revolution (1789-99) and Hegel's subsequent theorisation of its lessons for modern civilisation. A reminder of the shallowness of contemporary thinking about values, governance and the collapse of the neoliberal project.

Keynes is depicted as taking a stand against delusional neoclassical (and highly mathematicised) theories in which capitalism is assumed to be always at, or returning to equilibrium. Keynes sees the structural instabilities driving boom-bust cycles, highlighting the essential fragility of the 'civilised order'. His vision calls for conscious state action to underpin the conditions of existence of the masses, heading off a revolution of despair after which 'the deluge'.

The author shares many insights into the form elite ideology takes today, as expressed in newspapers, TV, radio and online. For example, the great issue of 'inequality' (a strangely recent concern) is actually a debate within the (bourgeois) middle-class reflecting the relative deprivation of the top 10% as compared to the super-rich 1% or 0.1% due to the neoliberal revolution and specifically the aftermath of 2008/9. The life-history of the broader working class, where unemployment, precarious employment and stagnant, low incomes remain endemic, rarely features in this debate.

Given that the entire history of anti-capitalist revolutions (over, say the last 200+ years) has been one of defeat and/or deeply unpleasant outcomes, the narrative of socialist revolution, the hopeful leap into the unknown, is completely uncompelling. An enlightened Keynesianism, seeking to save (liberal-democratic-capitalist) civilisation - by illiberal political means where necessary - may, in its final inadequacy, open the way to a more profound transformation of social relations. But we cannot assume a blueprint anywhere, and certainly not in the actually-existing Marxist canon.

Mann is too enamoured of fashionable moralistic crusading on climate change for my tastes and fails (as is usual with Marxist analysts) to factor in what we increasingly know about human nature through genomics, psychometrics and sociobiology. These omissions subtract from the force of his final conclusions, which are unnecessarily tentative. But taken as a whole the book is a tour de force of open-mindedness, synthesis and creativity.

See also: "When Keynes comes to town".

"In the Long Run ..." - Geoff Mann

Amazon link

I'm still working my way through this excellent book. Let me quote Michael's Roberts's thoughts from his blog entry, "Best books of 2017".

"Despite the power of Marx’s analysis, it is still the ideas of Keynes that dominate the thinking of heterodox economists in opposing the mainstream. And this is no accident.  In an excellent book, Geoff Mann from Simon Fraser University presents a sophisticated explanation of Keynes’ dominance in the labour and leftist movements.

In his, In the Long Run We Are All Dead, Geoff argues that Keynes rules because he offers a third way between socialist revolution and barbarism, i.e. the end of civilisation as ‘we (actually the bourgeois like Keynes) know it’. This appealed (and still appeals) to the leaders of the labour movement and ‘liberals’ wanting change.  Revolution is risky and we could all go down with it. Mann: “the Left wants democracy without populism, it wants transformational politics without the risks of transformation; it wants revolution without revolutionaries.” (p. 21).

What Mann argues is that Keynesian economics dominates the left despite its fallacies and failures because it expresses the fear that many of the leaders of the labour movement have about the masses and revolution.  As an example, read leading Keynesian, James Kwak’s latest book, Economism. Kwak quotes Keynes: “For the most part, I think that Capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organisation which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.” And Kwak comments: “That remains our challenge today.”

To be fair, it ain’t easy opting for an economic policy that threatens the established order. An inferno will follow from the bourgeois media and institutions. In the autobiographical book of the year, economist Yanis Varoufakis, Greek finance minister during the euro crisis of 2015, outlined the tortuous and labyrinthine encounters that he had with the Euro group in trying to combat the hell that the Troika of the IMF, ECB and EU aimed to impose on Greece.

Adults in the room, my battle with Europe’s deep establishment, is a personalised account, to say the least. Varoufakis’ analysis of the crisis and his justification for what happened (the capitulation of the Syriza government and his resignation from the government) bear all the hallmarks of his ‘erratic Marxism’ (as he calls himself). His battle was lost, but the war continues."

Here's my full review: "In The Long Run We Are All Dead" - Geoff Mann.

"Kingdom of the Wicked Book Two: Order" - Helen Dale

Amazon link

If "Kingdom of the Wicked Book One: Rules" was about establishing the setting - a high-tech Roman Empire in traditionalist Judea c. 31-33 AD - book two is about the ongoing clash of cultures. In truth, books one and two are just the one novel, with the second part being delayed due to the opaque and irritating rules of publishing.

Book one set up the trial of Jesus (Yeshua Ben Yusuf ) and explored its middle-eastern setting. The Romans look a lot like the Americans today. They're behind in electronics and ahead in genetic engineering. Our familiar western culture inherits judeo-christian hangs-up about sexuality and is 'blessed' with an overabundance of 'compassion'; the classical tradition of Greek and Roman paganism wasn't overly burdened with either.

Book 2 initiates Jesus's trial before Pilate. Evidence is presented in the form of backstories - well elaborated - embellishing the Jesus message and its rather startling effects on both Romans and the orthodox Jewish religious establishment. The Sanhedrin are the more bothered.

"Order" is a keen exploration of this culture clash. Dale tells the story through her well-drawn characters: the Romans are generally hedonistic, sexually inventive and uninhibited (this is not a story you could easily read aloud to your wife or servants); the Jews are extremely moralistic and sexually conservative - reminiscent of fifties America, or the Mormons.

We think we know the plot (the Bible) but the magic of "Kingdom of the Wicked" is that events flow organically from the novel's premises and are not artificially grafted on. Roman capitalism depended upon slavery being abolished (the Stoics were the movers and shakers there); the abolitionist movement also ended crucifixion as being grotesquely cruel. Jesus has not obviously committed a capital offence under Roman law (the affray in the Temple) but the political situation in Judea is deteriorating fast.

The ending is surprising, in more ways than one, but Dale brings it off. An excellent and thought-provoking book.

"The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli

Amazon link

Roy Simpson, who frequently comments here, sent me a review of the book above to post as a guest blogger. He wrote:

"Here is the review of the Rovelli book. ... I am hoping the Philip Ball book might arrive next week.

A remarkably hot topic right now is the Riemann Hypothesis since there are several (doubtful) claims that it has been solved. Since I haven't really studied this equation much, I am finding papers which make all rather interesting.

For example in 1949 Casimir used "zeta function regularization" in QFT to calculate his effect; then in 1976 Hawking used "zeta function regularization" to do most of his quantum black hole calculations. As I remarked in your blog

zeta (-1) = 1+2+3+4+  ... = -1/12

Also String theory requires 2/(2-D) = zeta(-1) for the number of Dimensions - giving D = 26!

The reason that this curious sum forms is because of (a) complex analytic continuation - taking a function out of its domain of definition in a unique way and (b) p-adic theory which messes up what is meant by "=" (zero distance) via a fractal like metric. So the interconnectedness of mathematics seems to be in evidence here (something the String Theorists are always proud of).."

Here is his review.

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Review of C. Rovelli : The Order of Time (2018)

By Dr. Roy Simpson, October 2018

The small (214 page) book by Prof. Carlo Rovelli came to my attention as it featured in a “guest interview” in the blog of physicist S. Hossenfelder in August. That interview was conducted by a lawyer with an interest in physics and time and has generated at least 250 comments.

Rovelli has written several very poetic, but informative, popular physics books in recent years and this book continues that theme by discussing his approach to the question of “time” in physics.

In broad terms the book is divided into three parts: first the lessons from General Relativity on time; second the particular ideas about time proposed by Rovelli from his work on Quantum Gravity; third some broader statements about the philosophy of time. None of these parts conveys the details of the theory that a student of physics or a practising physicist would wish (although there are some equations in the notes), but it does all provide a general overview of where Rovelli's thinking is with respect to “Time in Physics” for a general audience. There are links in the end-notes to detailed papers by Rovelli and books by others which can be studied later.

To understand Rovelli's view of physics we should begin by recognising that he is the author of (another) Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics called “The Relational Interpretation”. The underlying idea here was to spread the relational arguments which drove the development of special relativity (time being relative to observers and frames) onto quantum observers and onto physics theories in general. The quantum interpretation that results has some similarity to the original Everett Interpretation, but without the many worlds. He does not believe that “measurement” is a real activity, but only interactions between quantum objects is real. As evident from Part two his relational viewpoint also applies to physics concepts like Entropy – where he emphasises “Relative Entropy” between two subsystems.

To understand why Time is important we also need to understand his research starting point: Quantum Gravity and an associated equation from the 1960s now called the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. Rovelli is also the author of a rival (to String Theory) theory of quantum gravity called “Loop Quantum Gravity” which originated from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (the latter equation plays no role in String theory, as yet).

The Wheeler-Dewitt equation was derived by making many assumptions in a 1960s attempt at a quantization of General Relativity. This equation was thus a kind of “Schrodinger Equation” for General Relativity, generated by advanced versions of the quantization procedures found in Quantum Mechanics textbooks. Now the Schrodinger equation, in its full dynamic form, is a time dependent equation concerning the wavefunction Ψ(q1,q2,q3;t) where (q1,q2,q3) are position variables and t is the usual Newtonian time parameter. In the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, in which the system quantized is all of general relativity Ψ becomes Ψ(g_ij(p)). Here p is an event in space-time and g_ij is (derived from) the general relativity metric (distance function). The equation becomes a so-called functional equation in the function (of position and time) g_ij(p). Furthermore this derivation requires (perhaps fortunately) that the Schrodinger time parameter t disappears.

In short the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is timeless - Ψ once calculated never changes and this Ψ is meant to describe the entire Universe – for all time! This is known as the “problem of time” in Quantum Gravity, and is especially relevant to the approach taken by Rovelli.

Now time is still present in this model via the metric g_ij(p) and so is introduced the idea of “external variables” and “internal variables” - in particular “internal time”. Thus in the Rovelli approach time is not a fundamental feature of physics but an emergent concept, which he believes can be understood taking a relational approach. The more fundamental concept he calls “change”.

So in Part One of the book Rovelli is reviewing the results of General Relativity (such as the effect of location in a gravitational field on clocks) and presents this as evidence that in standard physics time should be considered as relative, forming part of a network of time. There is no “order of time” amongst the clocks in General Relativity due to lack of simultaneity etc.

In Part Two Rovelli discusses Entropy (also part of the physics discussion of time) and introduces his equation for “thermal time” - which is a time simply derived from the state of a dynamic thermal system, effectively by inverting the usual equation for the dynamical evolution of a thermal system.

Again thermal subsystems have a relative entropy. There is also a quantum version of the same idea. Interestingly an experiment was reported in 2013 that entangled two photons in such a way that photon A used photon B as a local clock, suggesting that hiding inside “quantum entanglement” could be an emergent notion of clock and thus time.

Another consequence of the work on the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that there can be quantum solutions in which no emergent time forms. Thus time is not even Universal (in the way that “change” might be) as is commonly assumed in physics and “common sense” (naïve intuition). Rovelli makes some remarks about this, but deeper analysis is needed to understand all of this.

Rovelli takes the view that we are on the cusp of more breakthroughs in time research. We shall see.

When Keynes comes to town

Amazon link

Maddeningly abstract and allusive, Geoff Mann's book situates Keynes within an intellectual arc stretching back to the French Revolution (1789-99) and Hegel's subsequent theorisation of its lessons for modern civilisation. A reminder of the shallowness of contemporary thinking about values, governance and the collapse of the neoliberal project.

Keynes is depicted as taking a stand against delusional neoclassical (and highly mathematicised) theories in which capitalism is assumed to be always at, or returning to equilibrium. Keynes sees the structural instabilities driving boom-bust cycles, highlighting the essential fragility of the 'civilised order'. His vision calls for conscious state action to underpin the conditions of existence of the masses, heading off a revolution of despair after which the deluge.

I have reviewed the book here: "In The Long Run We Are All Dead" - Geoff Mann.

It prompts this analysis of our contemporary predicament in the spirit of Mann's thinking.

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Social Justice Warriors vs the Populists

There was a time when I did not regularly throw my shoes at the television set, when the TV and print media had not yet morphed into latter-day Pravdas.

It was the time before neoliberalism’s decline, before the great crash of 2008.

First had come the sixties transition from post-war factory-capitalism, familiar from a thousand Stalinist agitprop posters. No more conveyor-belt mass-production 'on the track'. The new middle-class economy was fragmented, individualistic and complicated. It wanted mass university education and greedily consumed its output. Not that those jobs were particularly well paid.

And so were sown the seeds of elite overproduction.

Neoliberalism took recognisable shape in the 1980s, a pivot away from national industrial capitalisms towards a frictionless world with international just-in-time supply chains and global capital flows. The opportunities to seek profitable investment opportunities and attain economies of scale rewarded some industries more than others: high tech and finance to name two.

Naturally there was an inspiring vision to accompany globalisation. It postulated a world without borders, where all impediments to the free availability of factors of production should be removed: no tariffs and no irritating state/legal restrictions.

The vision ordained that outdated prejudices limiting international access to labour should be abolished. Free migration! No cultural barriers! No acknowledgement could be made that any performance differences due to race, gender, sexuality, age etc might have any biological/genetic causation. Differences in outcome were always and everywhere to be understood as socially-constructed pernicious hangovers - to be abolished in the name of an enlightened neoliberalism!

Thus was born the phenomenon of the social justice warrior (SJW), prepped to fight those dinosaurs who hadn't yet got the memo.

Since 2008/9 global economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries has been anaemic. Profitability has been poor and the neoliberalism project has been fraying. Those never signed up in the first place, most specifically the non-graduate industrial working class were getting restive as their communities, workplaces and personal prospects got trashed. And so arose their inchoate political voice: Populism.

Those who were meant to be the foot-soldiers of globalisation (all those idealistic young social science graduates) were increasingly abandoned by a failing project on the defensive. They formed that new class fraction, the precariat. Of course they doubled-down on the SJW vision, feeling betrayed. They are the scarily militant snowflakes of the Labour Party's Momentum organisation .. and similar movements in other countries.

The SJW programme, increasingly absurd, continues to infiltrate the mainstream media and leftist politics. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anti-capitalism, despite its seemingly leftist credentials. It is the anguished shriek of a decaying neoliberalism.*

The Populist-SJW conflicts are global, though taking different forms and tempos in North America, Latin America and the different countries in Europe. In some cases (France) the neoliberal cause is still somewhat in the ascendant (Macron). In most countries though, the neoliberal elites are on the defensive.

Neither side has a programme which can work. Classical neoliberalism is discredited: its globalist-individualism falters while continuing to cause too much collateral damage. The elites fear disruption; they sense the masses stirring. Yet there can be no return to fifties-style nation-state economies.

There will be no proletarian revolution. Capitalism will find a new modus operandi. It will not be the re-establishment of a resurgent neoliberalism. This is a struggle of years as there is no simple solution, no way forward which does not succeed in defeating powerful vested interests.

Most likely is the theme Mann develops in his book, a Keynesian, somewhat covert counter-revolution. The result: a more hands on, activist state creating institutional forms fostering inclusivity for restive groups currently felt irrelevant and disposable by internationalist capital. Theresa May understood this in her much ignored remark that making Brexit work was the only way of saving the neoliberal project.

In the UK, both Corbynism and May-style conservatism are groping towards this solution. It will place constraints on the free disposition of capital and it will be expensive. You can see why powerful (but short-sighted) forces resist this new direction.

But the re-integration of the 60% plus of the population who are not graduates and that larger part of the more educated 40% who have been abandoned by the real elites requires it. The challenge is to develop a programme which addresses both constituencies: in the UK Labour and Conservatives engage from different directions.

But painfully, in fits and starts, with much conflict and perhaps violence, this is where we will end up, maybe a decade out.

---

* Ideologies take on a life of their own. Ideological 'praxis' exhibits a relative autonomy from the material conditions which elicit it.

Put more plainly, even though the SJW agenda derives from and serves the purposes of the neoliberal project, it occasionally bites the hand that nurtures it. Sometimes its logic undermines that project.

Notice the liberal media indulgently rowing back from episodes of overreach. It's usually a humourous demurral and no general conclusions will be drawn.

Using Google Photo Books

(And now you decide to study them?)

Google Photos has a new tab: Photo books. This allows you to get an album printed out and delivered to your door in hard copy as an exciting glossy photo album. I decided that such an album would make a nice memento of our recent trip to Egypt.

18 x 18 cm soft-cover book: £11.99 for 20 pages, £0.49 per add. page, up to 100 pages.

23 x 23 cm hardcover book: £22.99 for 20 pages, £0.69 per add. page, up to 100 pages.

VAT included. Shipping not included.

I went for a soft-cover book of fifty photos. With one photo per page, this was fifty pages for around £12 + £15 = £27. Plus shipping.

Setting up the book in preview mode took about an hour. Google recommends photos (that AI working again!) from your selected album but you can delete some of those suggested and add others.

Each photo can be sized from small to page-filling - as you choose differently-sized versions Google auto-crops, which you may or may not like but you seem to be stuck with its choice (I could be wrong).

You can write an optional caption per photo - I didn't bother. Using drag and drop you can reorder photos.

After a week transiting from Germany, the album arrived this morning. Here's what it looked like.

The hedgehog is ours

The cover: Karnak Temple in Luxor - Google's suggestion

A delighted Clare shows internal pages:

Cleopatra with her son (left) and a Temple picture

The quality of the prints is very good, even the close-cropped ones where the program had warned that there might be blurring due to poor resolution.