Book reviews

Amazon link

Their big idea is that most brain processing occurs at a subconscious level, that intuitions are subconscious processes which lead (opaquely) to conscious conclusions (metarepresentations), that reasoning is an opaque process associating such metarepresentations with other metarepresentations allowing us to justify our actions to ourselves and others, mostly in reputational support.

This social rationale for reasoning explains why the accounts we give ourselves for our actions are often quite superficial and weak while in justifying ourselves to others we often strengthen our reasons through dialogue. And also that in most cases our reasoning is ex post facto.

The confabulatory rationale for reason is something designers of neural network AI systems will have to take on board. Since, according to the authors, our reasoning powers evolved for public relations purposes, justifications for our underlying evolutionary drives, expect the corresponding motivations of corporeal AI systems to be rather salient to their conversational capabilities.

The book is marred by its style of writing, too keen to show off its authors' liberal susceptibilities, moral qualities and faux-affability. I did not feel on their team. The book is also way too discursive, reminiscent of late-Dennett. They would probably think this a compliment.

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Amazon link

I was quite impressed with this book for a while, as Rodrik explained that globalised capital really 'wants' a global 'democratic' institutional framework to ensure its continued replication .. and that nation states and pesky local interests (eg the working classes) get in the way and need to be shunted aside.

His solution was a return to a (modified) Bretton Woods arrangement of more enlightened nation states. My suspension of disbelief finally crumbled when he started advocating unrestricted immigration and the removal of border controls as a major driver of future economic growth. And this is the guy who accuses others of believing more in their oversimplified economic models than facts on the ground!

Even Hive Mind, with its hand-wringing cop-outs, was a lot better than this.

Marx on Slavery

Expecting a vitriolic rant on the absolute evils of slavery in the antebellum American South? There are plenty of those, but here Marx is more interesting, more analytic:

"This is one of the circumstances that makes production by slave labour such a costly process. The labourer here is, to use a striking expression of the ancients, distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale, from an animal as instrumentum semi-vocale, and from an implement as instrumentum mutum.

"But he himself [the slave] takes care to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but is a man. He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different being, by treating the one unmercifully and damaging the other con amore.

"Hence the principle, universally applied in this method of production, only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness. In the slave-states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the date of the civil war, ploughs constructed on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a hog or a mole, instead of making furrows, were alone to be found. Conf. J. E. Cairnes. “The Slave Power,” London, 1862, p. 46 sqq.

"In his “Sea Board Slave States,” Olmsted tells us: “I am here shown tools that no man in his senses, with us, would allow a labourer, for whom he was paying wages, to be encumbered with; and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would make work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordinarily used with us.

"And I am assured that, in the careless and clumsy way they must be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could not be furnished them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers and find our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Virginia cornfield – much lighter and more free from stones though it be than ours.

"So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for horses on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive one, is that horses cannot bear the treatment that they always must get from negroes; horses are always soon foundered or crippled by them, while mules will bear cudgelling, or lose a meal or two now and then, and not be materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected or overworked.

"But I do not need to go further than to the window of the room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time, treatment of cattle that would ensure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer owning them in the North.”

From Note 17 of "Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value", Capital Volume 1.

In this chapter Marx notes the extreme inefficiency of slavery as compared with the capitalist purchase of labour-power rather than the person of the labourer themselves:

"Then again, the labour-power itself must be of average efficacy. In the trade in which it is being employed, it must possess the average skill, handiness and quickness prevalent in that trade, and our capitalist took good care to buy labour-power of such normal goodness.

"This power must be applied with the average amount of exertion and with the usual degree of intensity; and the capitalist is as careful to see that this is done, as that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought the use of the labour-power for a definite period, and he insists upon his rights. He has no intention of being robbed.

"Lastly, and for this purpose our friend has a penal code of his own, all wasteful consumption of raw material or instruments of labour is strictly forbidden, because what is so wasted, represents labour superfluously expended, labour that does not count in the product or enter into its value. [note 17]."

Generalised slavery is incompatible with the capitalist mode of production as the use of slaves does not create surplus value - the basis of profits. Classical antiquity was not capitalist.

Putting aside moral issues, slaves replacing workers is a form of total automation. But unlike designed systems, human beings are understandably unenthused by a lifetime role as servitor.

Diary: what I'm reading

Amazon link

Peter Turchin recommends this book in his latest, rather blood-curdling post. He writes,

"It is strange to actually live in a society experiencing a structural-demographic crisis, after studying many examples of such crises in the past. Unfortunately the crisis is developing largely according to the classical pattern. The degree of political polarization is at its highest levels since the (First) American Civil War. Intra-elite infighting is tearing the Republic apart. ...

"Steve is one of the “heterodox economists” (meaning that they are pretty much ignored by the mainstream). His starting point is the theory of Hyman Minsky (another economist who was largely ignored by the profession). Minsky’s theory makes a lot of sense to me, however. Let me try explain it in one paragraph.

"The main dynamical driver is the magnitude of private debt (combining what’s owed by both corporations and households) in relation to GDP. Currently this indicator is at 150% of the US GDP. Why is it bad?

"Actually, for a while, as private debt grows, things are just fine because expanding credit drives economic growth (think of new housing construction during building booms). But eventually the cost of servicing accumulated debt starts to depress consumption (the more you pay for your mortgage, the less money you have to buy things). Falling consumption results in overproduction of goods and declining profits for businesses, which makes investment a losing proposition. Credit collapses, businesses go bankrupt, or downsize their labor, less employment means even less consumption, and (absent large-scale increase in government spending) the economy enters a downward-trending “death spiral” of a prolonged depression.

"The precise timing of the turn-around point is very difficult to predict (it’s another example of earthquake-like dynamics). Yet Steve Keen is one of very few economists who predicted the General Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008.

"If Steve is right in identifying the main cause of the GFC, then we should listen to what he says in the book about the likelihood of another crisis in the next few years. Unfortunately, the news is bad, because we are still at a very high level of private debt in relation to GDP."

Turchin also sees the world economy in the 'winter' phase of the current Kondratiev cycle (I recently wrote about these here).

In any event, I acquired the book and will read it along with this:

They say the first four chapters are tedious, and that after that, things pick up (most readers have abandoned by then). In these early chapters Marx writes at length and repetitiously about the nature of the commodity, use-value and exchange-value, money and the transformation of money into capital.

He's a lively writer, always good for a venomous quip at the expense of an opponent; his knockabout style is far from politically-correct. It helps to be aware of just how important - how foundational - these concepts are for the whole development of Marxist economics.

Still, I'm glad I've got beyond chapter four.

Diary: a picnic at Brean Down

Yesterday was that rarity in England, a late-summer Bank Holiday which was actually hot. And remarkably the tide was in at the beach here, just south of Brean Down (pictured).

Brean Down: reminds me of a Predator drone

We didn't make it on to the peninsula itself, settling for a Waitrose-inspired picnic at the top of the beach and a walk along the damp sand.

Refreshments (!) at the entrance

The rights to beach-parking are held by the local council. It's £3 for the day and the beach is plenty big. That's more than you can say for the toilets located behind the Burgers and Fries. The women were queued twelve deep and the facilities were rudimentary.

What economic incentive would be required to create first-class facilities?

The demographic is mostly lower-middle-class parents-with-families

Lower-middle-class parents-with-families sounds snobbish, but is observationally accurate. There is an osmotic social gradient running from north to south along the coast here. Burnham-on-Sea, four miles to the south, features large, tattooed people; the shops are poor and the general sense is of a benefits culture.

The beach where we picnicked fronts many caravan parks and was populated mostly with young families on holiday. I heard Birmingham accents.

Progressing north beyond the Down itself you get to Weston-super-Mare which, while still working class, is becoming increasing gentrified as a dormitory for Bristol; it has a Waitrose.

So here is my video panorama: the look and feel of an English beach afternoon in summer.

A theorisation of Corbynism (Hardt and Negri)

An orthodox Marxist would be extremely interested in Momentum, the radicalisation of predominantly young, middle-class professional types organised around Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. It would seem highly reminiscent of the 'New Left' student movements of the sixties and seventies (full disclosure: I was there).

Said Marxist would, however, be far less impressed by the level of consciousness of the movement's thinking: its faddish diversities, its self-indulgent identity politics, its horizons delimited by left-wing social-democracy.

Traditionally we would call such proto-ideologies petit-bourgeois and see their proponents as candidates for a deeper education. But ancien-Marxism seems falsified by history - no lessons there to learn. The result - inevitably - is the theorisation of left-populism by itself as the new anti-capitalism.

Parenthetically, this rather ignores just how popular Corbynism and its American and Continental cousins are with the left bourgeoisie!

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The poster-children for this way of thinking - after Paul Mason's efforts - are the theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, boosted by left-academics such as Phil Burton-Cartledge.

Phil has written a series of posts explaining the new ideas - I'll just quote a summary.

"What is clear for Hardt and Negri is the revolutionary party is out. As the properties of fixed capital are distributed among our growing legions of cognitive and socialised workers, the 'functions' of the revolutionary party are diffused among the politicising networks.

"Rather than the received conception of a vanguard of class conscious cadres providing leadership for the rest to follow, cadre building applies to the class as a whole. The power of the multitude lies in its being the living substance of the common, and increasingly their common lines of flight are putting them on a collision course with capital.

"Biopolitical production wrapped up in dense webs of communication brings people together, educates them, politicises them. For example, the incessant identity-related debates are no longer the concern of radical elites beavering away in academies but are now the property of millions of people, as the fall out from Charlottesville demonstrates.

"The aim then is to build up the capacity for self-organisation, forge new institutions that bring out the common interests of socialised workers without denying their difference. The image is of a self-activating, self-coordinating swarm that can simply overwhelm capital and the state in a process of creative destruction, of replacing one form of organising society with another."

None of this is well-defined. None of this has the ring of truth. Seems more like opportunistic pandering to a set of inchoate longings which have nothing to do with undermining capitalism and everything to do with its further development. Notice how the critiques of capitalism - how very bad it is - have a ritualistic and anaemic quality.

Those middle-to-upper-class Momentum supporters, those SJWs in the States, those French supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in La France Insoumise, are having the time of their lives under capitalism.

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I feel, nonetheless, slightly motivated to read the final book of Hardt and Negri's trilogy, Commonwealth, if only to understand their thinking more fully.

I have to say though, that I do rather prefer my own vision as to the future destiny and supersession of capitalism - it's a lot more grounded in reality.

Amazon link

"Together Hardt and Negri's work is considered to be responsible for a resurgence of interest in non-orthodox Marxism and its political manifestations.

"Commonwealth is the final part of a trilogy that began with "Empire" in 2000, a book that was published during the emergence of the alter-globalization movement. "Multitude" followed in 2004, developing the ideas that had been introduced in "Empire," in particular the concept of the multitude as a new revolutionary subject. "Commonwealth" is a worthy addition to the trilogy, expanding and clarifying on the understandings in the previous books, but perhaps more significantly grounding their analysis within an extended discussion of "the common...".

"Commonwealth" is a book that challenges presuppositions about the utility of Marx, and introduces the possibility of combining his insights with the ideas of other significant authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, who are not traditionally associated with the radical communist project."

From the Amazon page.

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Following on from John Gray's insightfully scathing review of Commonwealth, I should perhaps turn to Slavoj Žižek, a writer who prefers to épater les bourgeois rather than flatter them.

In Gray's words,

"A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Žižek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

"Žižek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."

"In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions. Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organised terror their goals would never be achieved."

Amazon link

Gray is reviewing Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,  but perhaps it's worth waiting a couple of weeks for the prolific Comrade Žižek's latest opus: Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through?

But perhaps it's time to lose patience with showmen who really haven't a clue as to what is to be done?

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Next: What the Owl said to Lenin and Trotsky.

Diary: Westhay Moor and Nature Reserve

Last visited in August 2014, not much has changed at Westhay Nature Reserve.

It's a frog? A toad?

Clare in the Hide

Ducks, coots, a heron and a swan we saw today .. and flies and dragonflies

The Somerset Levels are built on peat .. and rain

This is the lake at the furthest western extent of the Reserve

Talking of water, why do all those American warships keep crashing into stuff?

I read differing accounts. Some say that in the modern US Navy they're all so into their technical specialisms that no-one rates watch-keeping any more .. or sleeping, for that matter; others blame something akin to GPS spoofing .. and say it's an act of war.

Exercise fetishism, genetic confounds

I observed a few days ago that, at age 66, my physical capabilities were in visible decline.

"Let it be noted that in my mid sixty-sixth year I finally realised that my body was not immortal and that age would wreak its toll on both competences and recovery time.

"I observed recently that due to over-enthusiastic lifting, I was now experiencing chronic elbow joint and tendon twinges which have not yet recovered. As a consequence I have to rethink this whole weight-lifting thing.

"I suspect I will be doing more running and cardio work going forwards, with strength stuff more focussed on the core and upper back, where I have historically had muscle issues. Biceps and triceps can maybe go hang!"

So at some point I'll be packing away those weights, and going for a brisk walk rather than a run.

But will it make any difference?

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We're led to believe that vigorous exercise is the only way to stave off the myriad complaints of old age: heart disease, cancer, dementia .. .  But such exciting and well-publicised studies are correlative and seldom investigate genetic confounds. The only way to be sure is to conduct twin studies.

And so I was led to this news item: "Exercise Differences Do Not Produce Longevity Differences in Identical Twins". You should read it, but I will just quote the bottom line.

"High physical activity level was associated with longer lifespan when looking at non-identical twins that differ for their genetic background.

"However, in identical twins, that share the same genetic background, in pairwise analyses comparing physically active members of a twin pair with their inactive co-twin, there was no difference in lifespan.

"Our results are consistent with previous findings, that animals that have high aerobic capacity are physically more active compared to animals with low aerobic capacity. The findings in human twins were in agreement with this: discordance in physical activity level was clearly more common among non-identical twins than in identical twins showing an effect of genetic background on physical activity level.

"Vigorous physical activity in adulthood did not increase lifespan in human twins, even though physical activity is well-known to have various positive effects on health, physical fitness, and physical function.

"Based on our findings, we propose that genetic factors might partly explain the frequently observed associations between high physical activity level and later reduced mortality in humans. "

I therefore conclude that backing off from intensive physical exercise is unlikely to have much impact on either my general state of health or my longevity, assuming I avoid perverse outcomes such as complete indolence or gross obesity.

We sometimes counterpose exercise to everything else we do, as if our bodies would turn into jellyfish if we failed to lift those weights, or run those miles.

But formal exercise simply adds the icing on the cake to any reasonably active lifestyle.

It's not as if the opposite to vigorous exercise is going to be chronic bed rest.

Diary: the Mid-Somerset Show

It was reminiscent of The Archers as we reviewed the contenders for the best cucumber competition. Yes, this morning found us amongst the welly-brigade at Shepton for the Mid-Somerset Show (free entry, £10 parking).

Clare laughs at sheep (why?)

There were orange ones, sheep with black heads, small ones, large ones and some
which looked liked goats. Almost like they were genetically diverse or something

Well turned-out heavy horses - Clare was particularly impressed

Clare and myself in the prize-winning cheeses marquee

Clare fronting that remarkably tall slide for tiny tots

These descendants of wolves are now almost handbag dogs.
They're waiting to be judged.

As the judges walked around sundry sheep, pigs and dogs I was at a complete loss as to their ranking criteria. Was it teeth and gums, the rotundity of their abdomens, the health of their pelts?

I had a sneaking suspicion the judges were really assessing the fitness of their owners.

Diary: Blacktop + anomic aphasia

Today has been a physical day. First the hoovering - no joke with thick pile carpets and an exceedingly heavy vacuum cleaner - which I slovenly accomplish once per fortnight. Then, brimming with energy, I did the two mile run into the Mendips in a new best time, just under 18 minutes.

One is pleased with oneself.

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I guess it must have been oil on the drive asphalt

This asphalt damage on the driveway is, I think due to an oil spill. It's made the surface spongy and crumbly. After much searching, both in local hardware shops and on the web I ordered this: Dap Blacktop Asphalt Filler & Sealant 27065.

Amazon link

This afternoon, time to put it all together. The Blacktop is squeezed out using the gun thing you see in the picture below. It's brown and thick and poisonous and carcinogenic. Clare got to use her compétences de cuisine to smooth it off.

Clare using her compétences de cuisine

It now has to sit, protected from the rain, for a further 72 hours. They claim it dries to black: God, let's hope so!

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Let it be noted that in my mid sixty-sixth year I finally realised that my body was not immortal, that age would wreak its toll on both competences and recovery time. I observed recently that due to over-enthusiastic lifting, I was now experiencing chronic elbow joint and tendon twinges which have not yet recovered. As a consequence I have to rethink this whole weight-lifting thing.

I suspect I will be doing more running and cardio work going forwards, with strength stuff more focussed on the core and upper back, where I have historically had muscle issues. Biceps and triceps can maybe go hang!

At least the brain still mostly works .. oh wait .. yesterday I completely forgot the word 'autistic' for three and a half minutes. I had started with neurotypical and then navigated to Asperger's and then altruism (!) - at which point my left parietal lobe entered an indefinite wait state.

I said to Clare, "Given the amount of hard physical labour, let alone intelligence this house requires to keep it functional, I despair of what will happen when we get old."

She observed that we bought the house from a couple of 90+ year olds, and that it was indeed in a terrible state of disrepair.

We agreed not to get old.

Diary: vexatious Sunday

My day starts with the Sunday Times and I'm reading Dominic Lawson on the James Damore/Google affair. I'm reminded of the illiterate and distorted editorials in The Times and The Economist (previous post) and I fantasise about cancelling my subscriptions as I ponder the old dilemma: (i) do they know the science but choose to lie about it, which makes them mendacious hypocrites; or (ii) have they not even bothered to check the relevant body of knowledge carefully cited by Damore, choosing instead to ventilate their blank-slate wish-fulfillment fantasies - which makes them incompetent.

In either case, why am I spending good money reading them? I console myself that The Economist does a good quarterly Technology Review and The Times occasionally has some useful news in it.

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While Clare is at Mass I resume Frederick Beiser's Hegel.

When you read highly abstract discussions relating to substance, essence, the necessary, the contingent, the noumenon and phenomenon, the synthetic a priori, it's tempting to think that the underlying problem set these guys are wrestling with is impossibly abstruse.

Not so: at the end of the eighteenth century, with enlightenment rationality crumbling under the Reign of Terror and religion on the ropes, Hegel and the Romantics are struggling with straightforward questions.

• Is the universe a Newtonian machine or is there scope for free will?
• If knowledge is just representations in our minds, can reality be truly known?
• If we have free will, and God is not a personal judge, whence morality?

I think we have a good scientific framework for these questions today (not, of course, uncontroversial), but Hegel was definitely on the right track. His stuff is abstract both because the right scientific toolset hadn't yet been developed, but also because in a dynamic world of evolving connections, the individual concrete element of reality is conditioned by its relationships with other things - and some of those relationships are inherently abstract.

Quick example: you concretely see a human walking from one location to another where they start doing certain things in a structured way and conversing with others. What extra information about that scenario's history of embedding relations do you need to properly and fully understand what is happening?

If I tell you the person is a priest and he walked to his church? If I say she is a barista and she walked to her coffee shop in a now-desanctified church? How much more do you need to understand completely and fully? A lot.

You get the idea.

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In our irreligious age, residual belief in God seems a mere foible. But Hegel was not an atheist, and to be consistent God had to be present in the ontology of reality. Looming over everything was Spinoza's immanent God, a divine presence infusing everything. But this leads to quietist, passive conclusions. If we are part of God, what scope for novelty or freedom?

Hegel adds conflict, dynamics and process through the dialectic, but does he really have a solution?

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In the afternoon we strolled to Wookey and had toasted teacakes on our return.

The evening progresses,  I watch BBC coverage of the IAAF World Championships and my distaste with the deep feminisation of media culture surfaces again. Some Brit has just been disqualified in a walking race of epic length after three warnings, at the 10 km mark or thereabouts.

He seems tearful but full of resolve to do better in future. The BBC interviewer is like a trauma therapist: "How do you feel?" "Can you recover from this?" "You put in so much hard work!" ..

Call me systemising rather than empathising but - insofar as I care - I would rather have liked some footage of his DQ faults, and someone explaining technically what he had done wrong and what he should do about it.

Dispassionate analysis? Not what this is about.

OK. I'm done with being vexed for today .. until the BBC News at ten o'clock.

".. then I must be .." *

The Economist this week writes:

"Mr Pichai had good reasons to sack Mr Damore. One is the content of the memo. It says many reasonable-sounding things: that “we all have biases” and that “honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots”. But these are just camouflage before a stonking rhetorical “but”: the argument that innate differences, rather than sexism and discrimination, explain why women fare worse in the technology industry than men. “Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance)”, Mr Damore writes, “may contribute…to the lower number of women in high-stress jobs.”

"Research has indeed shown some smallish group-level differences in personality and interests between the sexes. But drawing a line from this to women’s suitability for tech jobs is puerile. An unbiased eye would light on social factors rather than innate differences as the reason why only a fifth of computer engineers are women. "

In today's Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson observes of The Financial Times:

"... the Financial Times, which in an editorial denounced Damore’s memo as “almost pure drivel”. That paper is facing industrial action on behalf of its female employees, who suffer from a 13% gender pay gap (according to the National Union of Journalists).

It, too, has an internal reason for declaring to the world how deplorable it finds young Damore, so it published another article accusing him of a “long email rant against diversity programmes . . . a rambling confused mash-up of outdated science”.

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When these idealogues attend a performance of 'The Life of Galileo' by Bertolt Brecht,

"This was a lively, heartfelt performance which showcased reason and science vs. obscurantist arguments from authority designed solely to buttress the interests of those in power. This never fails to be relevant."

they root for Galileo, bravely sticking it to The Man. It never occurs to them that they are The Man.

---

The genius of Brecht was to give good arguments to the Catholic Inquisition. The interrogator points out that regardless of any purely-scientific merits of Galileo's thesis, the practical effects of the new doctrine would be to undermine the primacy and sanctity of scripture and thus subvert the social order, undermining authority and leading to dangerous chaos.

A very high price to pay for some arid, esoteric and contested version of 'truth'.

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* Imposter.

Habitamus prope Abonam ..

Sasha Trubetskoy's famous Roman Roads of Britain.

We live slightly southeast of Abona. Click on image to make larger.

Diary: garden surgery + Burrington Combe

The jet stream's looping to the south of the UK giving cool weather and endless rain, broken today by a rare ridge of high pressure and sunshine.

Taking advantage, the tree surgeons arrived this morning to sort things out.

Dense foliage almost hides the gardeners' truck

While the garden rang with the buzz of the chain saw, I ran my two mile route into the lower Mendips in a new best time .. and without knee-joint failure. So I was pleased.

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Just a small aside: Clare arranged all this - I'm not a garden person - and they were actually booked in for tomorrow (Friday). At 8.30 this morning the doorbell rang which I answered.

A young man dressed in casual clothes smiled winningly at me, said "Good Morning" and put out his hand to shake mine. I glared at him (we have our share of door-to-door scammers) and said coldly, "Who are you?".

He looked quite nonplussed. Explained he was the gardener,  they'd had a cancellation and as the weather was good today they'd decided to do us. Mumbled something about voicemail (we'd received no voicemail).

That being cleared up, I offered them tea, which they declined, and they went about their business.

Clare tells me she went out a little while later to check progress and confided, "My husband mistook you for Jehovah's Witnesses."

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This afternoon we drove to nearby Burrington Combe for an hour's stroll. There's a good view of the Severn south of Portishead and occasionally the landscape faintly echoed with the rumble of jet turbines - we saw an airliner lifting off from Bristol's Lulsgate airport a good five miles away.

Clare at our terminus - on the rocks

Your author in his favourite ninja attire

We mixed up the walk by debating the most likely scenarios for war between America and North Korea. It must be real because the markets are in free fall. I read lots of vaguely reassuring commentary in the newspapers, explaining how conflict is unlikely as it's in no one's interest.

Yep.

If it gets hot, the first logical step for the US military is to sterilise the NK artillery lines abutting the DMZ. They could do it in a non-nuclear way. Think Daenerys's dragon amplified a millionfold.

I think Seoul is safer than the pundits imagine but the casualty rate for the North would be horrendous.

Diary: what I'm reading

I encountered Hegel (1770-1831) through others: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács. He seemed to precurse those theorists as some dark formless cloud: Jehovah brandishing an absolutist dialectical idealism.

It's time to engage with the void, to sketch the contours of the man himself. Although I have only just started Frederick Beiser's book, Georg emerges as a rather earnest young intellectual, engaged with Christianity (he trained in a Protestant seminary), absorbed into the early Romantic movement which brought us Keats, Byron and Shelley.

Amazon link

His mature works, however, have a reputation of being 'difficult' and obscure.

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I'm prepared to add Hegel to my - rather short - list of heroes, joining Marx, Lukács and J. S. Bach. One day I need to do the Central European pilgrimage, searching out the geography of their lives and times.

When I was studying philosophy at Warwick University c. 1970, I reacted strongly against the anachronistic treatment of Plato, Aristotle, St. Anselm, Descartes, Kant et al. I was being asked to study in isolation systems of ideas based on outmoded, rigid categories of thought applied to an obsolescent framing of problems.

In most cases modern physics, computer science and AI had totally transformed the paradigms in which these issues were posed. I felt like I was being asked to learn the Phlogiston theory of heat on equal terms with modern Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics - yet none of the lecturers seemed to notice or care. I never subsequently changed that opinion.

I guess that made me a historicist - like Hegel .. and Marx.

For Marx, philosophical categories were mediated by and abstracted from the concrete (social) experiences of individuals within their specific historical circumstances: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas".

Made a lot of sense to me.

If Google did heavy lifting ...

Following on from the James Damore affair (read first).

Suppose Google's business involved heavy, manual construction work. The relevant Division is full of tough, strong endomorph types. They are mostly male with a smattering of shot-putter women.

Top software development is the mental equivalent of this level of performance ..

The HR people go crazy. This tip of the company spear is shockingly male-dominated, showing entrenched .. well, you know. They demand more diversity training and proactive affirmative action hiring. We want a 50-50 equal gender ratio. And we want it now.

A Damore-equivalent naïf observes that men are on average quite a bit stronger than women. That any women who can hack it are more than welcome in the Division. But biologically there just aren't that many applicants compared to qualified men. Going for 50-50 is going to be a stretch. Perhaps this equality of outcomes thing is, well, .. inappropriate?

As Google's CEO fires him, does he still say this?

"However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace. Our job is to build great products for users that make a difference in their lives.

To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK. It is contrary to our basic values and our Code of Conduct, which expects “each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination.”

Plainly the female employees of the Division - by virtue of the fact they were hired in the first place and are meeting the standards - are not  'less biologically suited'. No one said otherwise.

But comparison of the male-female population distributions for physical body strength indicates that women in the general population are 'less biologically suited'. It's why we have separate male and female sports events.

Female-Male trait distributions overlap, but are sometimes not identical.
If you're hiring for extreme values of such a trait, don't be surprised
 if the applicant pool sizes differ quite substantially.

I'm not sure the CEO's sophistry would work for physical strength employment. But cognitive and personality traits are not so obvious at a glance and playing word-games is easier.

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Further reading.

*  "Women's Brains" - male-female comparison: Human Connectome project (N = 900).

*  "Women and Minorities in Science"  - a typically-erudite analysis from La Griffe.

*  "Sex Differences in Mathematical Aptitude" - La Griffe analysis relevant to software dev.

"It doesn't matter who you click with. Happy #PrideAmsterdam"

From Royal Dutch Airlines via Twitter.

Be diverse; be safe.

'Accelerando' and the architecture of superintelligence

After four years I've just re-read Charles Stross's Accelerando and was again blown away. Here are my summer of 2013 thoughts. But in a nutshell, as the solar system transitions through the Singularity, posthumans of superintelligence transcend even augmented versions of ourselves.

Can we say more?

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Intelligence is a reified concept. It presents as a trait of performance but is frequently conceived of as a mechanistic 'thing'. It's as if we took athletes such as Usain Bolt and Mo Farah and claimed they had a high 'quickness-quotient'. We would discuss the heritability of QQ and perhaps derive a scale. We would discuss biological correlates - is there a QQ module somewhere in the body?

IQ is clearly telling us something about performance, but to a greater extent than admitted it's collapsing several different things into one measure.

• Reaction time (where we're defeated by houseflies).
• Logical inference - where we're easily beaten by simple AI systems.
• Pattern induction (eg Raven's Progressive Matrices):  AI programs do well.

But perhaps the best definition of intelligence is the 'ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations'.

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Back in March I wrote a piece about the architecture of intelligence, 'Roger Atkins: Mind Design notebook'.  I proposed that we should think of the intelligent mind as operating over a semantic network defined by nodes, links and overall processing speed.

-- Each node is a minitheory: some facts, rules and cached deductions + relevant inference rules. For example, you have a small minitheory about your pet and a much larger one about yourself.

-- Each link represents a kind of relation between theories (there are many). The classic 'ISA' relation familiar from object-oriented languages and ontologies would be an example. Also similarity relations for analogical reasoning.

-- Processing operations over a semantic net include:

• Take a node (minitheory) and deepen it with new facts, deductions or rules. Or create a new node on encountering or constructing some new entity.


• Create a new connection or relationship between nodes via an insight as to how they relate. A more richly-connected semantic net is potentially more powerful.


• Given a problem, navigate around the semantic net to form a solution (then add it).

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With this architecture, a more intelligent entity has:

• a larger and more densely-connected link-set
• more and more-elaborated nodes
• faster link-traversal, new-link-creation and node-processing.

Links between different, and perhaps remote nodes will likely be rather abstract and removed from direct experience. For example, a notion of symmetry underlies both natural beauty and artificial design. A sophisticated semantic net requires the handling of complex abstraction.

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This architectural model gives us a handle both on superior human intelligence and on posthuman superintelligence.

Firstly, why can't we just go and build an AGI today? Because the root set of competences in every human's semantic net are nodes and links which encode the experienced physical and social world, a net which requires a degree of innervated embodiment we have as yet no clue as to how we might build. Only when 'they walk amongst us' will designers be in with a chance.

Secondly, how would a superintelligence differ from today's humanity? A superintelligence would possess a semantic net with improved performance along all three dimensions. Observe however that no matter how complex a network of abstract nodes, at the base is the set of nodes which must connect to the complexity of the world. Even the brightest genius condemned to a sensory-deprivation cell wouldn't be that performative. Nothing there to work on.

I suspect that the sum total of new social experiences is parameterised by the possibilities of new physical environments, whether occasioned by exploration and/or technologies. And even these are ultimately bounded by the free energy available, as Accelerando reminded us with such gusto.

I think the take-home message is broadly as Stross imagined it. A superintelligence which walked amongst us (Hi Aineko!) would be bounded by the limitations of purely human technology + culture. But a society of superintelligences able to drive forward  their own physical, technological and cultural environment?

Well, let's just say there would be plenty of headroom.

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Note: in this view, artificial neural nets are an engineering implementation of the semantic net architecture described above. We know from human neural nets (aka 'brains') that a 'compiled' semantic network runs real fast in the subconscious (maybe it is the subconscious) while trying to 'consciously' work on your own semantic network to address novel, complex problems is really hard work and a real test of IQ.

Diary: exercise from an advanced standpoint

... advanced in age, that is!

I am incredibly irritated by my 66 year old body. Fairly basic stuff like a two mile run and a weights session inflict unacceptable damage to my joints. Twinges in my knees and soreness in my elbows and tendons.

The only benign exercise is cycling, but I'm not a fan of road cycling - too many cars for my poor bike-handling skills, especially on steep uphill sections. Conversely, lengthy exercise-bike sessions are just too boring.

I am mostly at a loss. I will ration road runs to once a week and use lighter weights with more reps.

James Damore gets fired

The rainbow colours of diversity

The ex-Google employee was terminated for observing (in an internal memo) that genders differ in their aptitude for, and interest in, computer science.

• Razib Khan predicted: "whoever wrote that memo will surely be fired".
• Scott Alexander rebutted the Google official line indirectly (wrong about aptitude).
• Greg Cochran simply mused about 'The Index'.

Steve Hsu has this to say, while Scott Aaronson has written an elegant and oblique post.

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Blank-slate ideology asserts that all humans - of whatever gender and/or race - are cognitively biologically-identical, and that therefore all detrimental differences of outcome are solely due to oppression. When elites defend plainly-wrong ideas with the utmost ferocity, I am reminded of Marx's point, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas."

Why would the ruling elite want to believe it? Because it would be so dangerously divisive to look at any human subgroup and affirm that group's lower average cognitive performance or competence. Even identifying plainly outperforming groups - such as the Ashkenazim - risks opening the door to the concept of differences. So extreme is this impetus to faux-egalitarianism that many people deny even physical performance differences between genders or races. Social cohesion is the game.

I keep reminding myself (I already wrote about this) that globalisation is the economic driver for blank-slate ideology. Its young, educated beneficiaries are eager converts (arguably against their own longer-term interests) to causes so apparently egalitarian, culturally left-wing .. and economically convenient for globalised capital.

At least we haven't reintroduced the auto-de-fé yet or I wouldn't be writing this.

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The Google CEO's sophistry was particularly disingenuous: see "If Google did heavy lifting ...".

Robo-Tyrion

I said to Clare, "Game of Thrones has got rather boring since they decimated all the extended families. When it was the Starks vs. the Lannisters, you could identify with all the intra- and inter-family personal dynamics."

But I was wrong, Series 7 is just as gripping as ever. Grown up Machiavellian realpolitik.

Apart from really sharp screen-writing, brilliant plotting, fantastic locations and the mega-budget to pay for it all, one secret of their success is the continuity of actors. How would you handle a situation where actors playing Cersei, Tyrion, Jon, Jaime or Sansa decided to skip the next series?

Peter Dinklage plays Tyrion Lannister

Must enormously increase their bargaining power. What joy for their agents.

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The BBC is in trouble, not just for gender differences in pay but also for the sheer amount paid to their top staff. Radio presenter Chris Evans gets paid more than £2.2 million a year to present the breakfast show on Radio 2, which draws nine million listeners.

It's well-known in economics that the bulk of the economic value associated with a superstar ends up accruing to the talent themselves. Top footballers, rock stars and, yes, presenters get paid stupendous fees.

The reason is that they own a monopoly on their personal skills and typically engage in an auction process (via their agents) which allows them to identify and achieve their monopoly market value.

No competition, you see. But more on this in a moment.

With the BBC it's more complicated as they are a monopoly buyer (to a first approximation) in the UK entertainment market. If you want a truly mass audience, the BBC can potentially deliver it in a way that ITV, Channel 4 or Sky can't.

In theory, this should give the BBC monopsony power - lowering the price it has to pay for stars.

But in practice, the star will always win. The BBC cares most about the marginal, additional audience a top star can attract over the next best alternative. It's prepared to pay a hefty marginal price for that additional audience .. and since the absolute number of stars is not that large, the premium doesn't really register on its bloated budget.

Hence Chris Evans.

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But technology has a way of undermining these simple truths. Game of Thrones is scripted and recorded. A lot already gets done in post-production. Soon it would not be hard to lose the estimable Peter Dinklage and hire a similarly sized actor. Use the latest AI to restore Mr Dinklage's face and voice and you've saved, no doubt, a shedload of money - and perhaps the series, if Mr D. was otherwise going to be a no-show.

I understand there's plenty of discussion around copyright for personal avatars and digital representations in Hollywood right now.

How is that going, I wonder?

My Personal Genome Project report has now arrived

Personal Genome Project Logo

I discovered the Personal Genome Project in September 2014 and immediately tried to sign up. They weren't taking new volunteers.

In December 2015 (15 months later) I finally did succeed in registering, but no-one was very interested in taking a spit-sample.

In May 2016, my sample collection kit arrived and I duly spat for science. I returned my sample for sequencing, at which point they stored it .. and nothing whatsoever happened.

It is now August 2017. Fifteen further months have passed and this morning I received an email from the PGP. I have been sequenced!

Here is my report (PDF) - I waive all privacy concerns.

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My genome will now be released for research. Was there anything interesting in the report? No. Was it different in any important respect than that which I already received from 23andMe? No.

As usual, the report is mostly centred around SNPs. Unfortunately most interesting phenotypic traits are polygenic, the full connections with genomic variation yet to be unravelled. The SNPs - taken individually - simply adjust your odds ratio up or down for various conditions. Example: some of my SNPs elevate my odds for baldness; others lower it.

Insofar as the science centres around connecting my personal genome with my own phenotype characteristics, research should now focus on the latter.

I look forward to the first request for the promised punch biopsy.