Creationism Freud Evolution

Here's a good answer to Creationists: "dogs!"

Why? They clearly evolved from a common ancestor, we did it ourselves through artificial selection, and it was fast.

Here's a rebuttal. When I was studying psychology - an Open University module back in the 1970s at the University of Sussex - we had a lecturer who got pretty emotional about Freud. "This is not science!" she growled: she was one of the dying breed of behaviourists.

Like the creationists, I didn't buy her argument at all. Why? Because her scientific model was rubbish. It didn't even account for the phenomena ... denied that emotions, consciousness and inate psychological capabilities were real.

So you don't have to believe in scientific theories which don't account for the phenomena. Doesn't mean you have to believe anything else ... sometimes 'we just don't know' is the best answer. In fact, if you do believe in scientific theories which are not deep enough to account for the phenomena, you risk terrible mistakes. Behaviourism entailed scary child development practices.

However, the converse does apply. When theories do explain the phenomena, and make successful and counter-intuitive predictions, then you should believe the science and disbelieve contrary prejudices.

Sorry creationists, that's where your juggernaut leaves the road!

Time to roll out the Wagner

According to American vets from Iraq, interviewed on BBC's Newsnight last night, US troops in the Sunni North were regularly driving around shooting anyone they saw. Apparently they carried shovels which they could leave with the corpses, if challenged, to 'prove' they had shot insurgents digging-in bombs. It's all very 'Apocalypse Now'.

A related fact from the same programme. UK and Australian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are not handing suspects over to the Americans, for fear of their mistreatment.

The ex-SAS soldier on the programme supplied the key. "The Americans have not made the transition from war-fighting to counter-insurgency." he said.

There seem to be a few more elements to add to the mix. The honour culture of the American South, from where so many recruits are drawn, which can flip instantly from warmth to a lethal response if the subject feels 'dissed'. I guess seeing your buddies blown up would count. Also a kind of US parochialism mixed in with naive patriotism and a deep sense of American superiority over all other cultures.

And then there are the usual factors in the Sunni north:

• social distance between the troops and the locals
• lack of a shared culture and language
• dissimilar appearance and dress
• the lethal insurgents are indistinguishable from the 'civilians'.

All very predictable, and all just the same in that other war.

Special Cats

A tall, elegant woman speaking into her mobile phone.

"I'm worried about Gucci."

"Yes, they're special cats, a rare breed. I can't let them go out. They spend all day on our rather comfortable couches and playing in our deep-pile carpets, but I'm worried."

"No, Gucci has taken to vomiting and excreting on our bed. Imagine! I thought it was attention-seeking, but the vet said she's probably stressed."

"No, I think she's being bullied by Chanel ..."

Overheard at 'The Cottage Inn', Maiden's Green, near Bracknell while waiting for a business colleague to arrive for lunch, 15/3/06.

The martian anthropologist

"The martian anthropologist" is a mythical entity appealed to in the social sciences to achieve distance from human prejudices. If you (the 'martian') were shown a number of alien entities communicating via a public protocol, there would be several routes to analysis, including:

1. Take the protocol, examine its lexicon and syntax, and try to derive a mathematical semantics for it.
2. Take an anthropological, ecological view and ask what these alien entities were trying to achieve through their communication. Then do step one.

The second approach looks to have more potential, somehow, but most natural language research has chosen the first course, on the basis that it is easier.

Back in the beginning, Montague semantics translated words, phrases and sentences of English into a massively complicated logic (higher-order with numerous modal operators capturing temporal and intentional attitudes). The semantics were standard but not recognisable as the world you and I inhabit.

Situation semantics created a richer semantic model in which the denotation of propositions was not collapsed to mere truth values, but was taken to be 'complex collections of relationships between entities and attributes at a location in time'. But still, intentionality and agency were either missing or untheorised.

I have always thought that building models of agency in paradigms drawn from economics and games theory was likely to be more promising. After all, isn't evolution just applied microeconomics? The result will be mathematical models capable of providing semantic valuations for formalised languages, but they will also constitute theories of human-style social psychology.

This must be the next big thing after todays' evolutionary psychology, surely?

A related point. Religions are also a public protocol, dual to something more hidden in the ecology of groups and social psychology. As they say, it was no accident that the great monotheistic religions developed 2-3,000 years ago at the onset of the agrarian revolution (+ the zerotheistic Buddhism and philosophical Taoism).

The God of the Old Testament (shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims) is unquestionably a muscular, patriarchic entity bestriding a dominance hierarchy - the embodiment of the agrarian pre-state embodying rules rather than the arbitrary dictates of the current warlord.

Note: Islam was later refined through a nomadic honour culture, while the New Testament represented a transactional innovation, a subversive, but constrained ideology in the interstices of the Roman Empire (Crossan). It is unlikely that Jesus would have signed up to the later evolution of 'Christianity' as an arm of that very same empire.

The principles underlying Buddhism and 'philosophical Taoism' are also transactional. Is this anything to do with the proposed greater cooperation found in east-asiatic sociaties, based on selection pressures for these traits during the time of the last ice-age (c.f. Richard Lynn, here)?

Net neutrality and rents in the value chain

Today's Economist (11th March 2006) makes the point that we should avoid knee-jerk reactions when it comes to regulating the Internet to ensure equal access ('net neutrality').

The issue is the desire of US carriers investing in core and access networks to charge content providers such as Google and Yahoo a premium rate for carrying their traffic - at a higher QoS. The carriers make the point that they are investing heavily in new fibre networks, especially in access, and it is difficult to cover these investments based solely on household monthly broadband subscriptions. There are moves in Congress to pre-emptively regulate against this.

At the moment, everyone who connects to the Internet gets a single 'best effort' service, but due to historic massive investment in Internet infrastructure, this 'best effort' is actually pretty good. "Too good", the carriers say, but nevertheless, how could they get any buyers for putatively 'superior' classes of service?

The carriers say they will not actively damage anyone's traffic as they introduce superior classes of service at various price-points. However, a superior service class has to buy something extra, so the most likely story is that the carriers will slowly permit utilisation levels on the Internet to rise until the resulting congestion separates out an increasingly tardy 'best-effort' experience from superior 'gold', 'silver' and 'bronze' services.

The implications of this go beyond the attempt to directly extract economic rents from content providers upstream in the value chain. After all, Google et al could choose to buy their Internet access from many other ISPs. AT&T and Verizon will have to modify the current Internet peering arrangements, charging their peers to carry ingress premium traffic: look out for the arrival of a settlements model.

Now, there is nothing wrong in principle with offering a portfolio of products at different price points - train operators also sell first and second class tickets. The problem is monopoly pricing - exploiting market power. The forthcoming North American duopoly rings a few warning bells.

The best antidote to monopolistic practices is competition rather than regulation. I hope those rumours about Google quietly buying up a lot of transcontinental dark fibre, and investing heavily in WiFi/WiMAX access networks turn out to be true.

Joining the ranks of idiot users

I took my car into the local garage today - for the last week the front passenger window has not been working. Was the motor burned out or was the electric switch faulty? I didn't know.

Half an hour after I had delivered the car, the garage called. The window worked fine. Had I perhaps depressed the window-lock tab, they wanted to know.

On the driver's door ledge, the window-lock button is physically next to the electric door-lock, just in front of the two levers which raise/depress the front-passenger and driver windows.

I have to say I have not given one thought to the window lock mechanism since I bought the car in 2003. I vaguely believed it was there to stop the rear windows being used by kids, as on previous cars I have owned (in fact in my current car, the rear windows are manual).

"No", I confidently told the garage, "this has nothing to do with the windows lock - the switch fault must be intermittent".

Ando so with those words I have damned myself into the same category as all those computer users who believe that the CD drive is actually a plastic coffee cup holder. Trust me, it doesn't feel good.

A dying bird

Clare saw a bird die this morning. The Chaffinch flew down from the top of the garage, after a freezing cold night. About a foot off the grass, it just fell out of the air. She picked it up and carried it into the house. Although still warm, it was quite dead.

Apparently it is too beautiful to bury, so it is currently resting in the wood pyre in the garden.

Birds spend the night in the open, and rely on their stored energy to keep them sufficiently warm. A cold snap like the present one kills many.

I have been instructed to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow and lavishly spread birdseed on the back lawn.

Munich

We went to see 'Munich' last night - Steven Spielberg's movie about an Israeli vengeance squad tasked with assassinating those claimed to be behind the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The Wikipedia article on the massacre suggests that the movie is not a documentary. A very fine film which we did not forget the moment we walked out of the door.

From matters of blood, honour, homeland, life and death to economics. The cinema tickets cost £6.50 each. We were given vouchers worth £1.50 each to see our next film, so that our next tickets would cost only £5.00 each. Why did the cinema do that?

A first thought might be that by lowering the price, the cinema was stimulating demand, and that this would somehow increase its returns. However, why issue a voucher? Why not just decrease the price to £5 per ticket for everyone. No, only people who had already bought a ticket were eligible for the reduced price.

This is an example of 'diminishing marginal utility'. By buying tickets for Munich at £6.50, we had already established that this was a fair market price for the film we most wanted to see. Had there been another film we valued more highly than Munich, then we would have seen that one.

Given that the portfolio of films changes fairly slowly, the cinema was bidding for our custom for our next-preferred film. As we certainly valued that lower than Munich, the cinema therefore gave us a lower price (£5.00). (Note that the marginal cost to the cinema is effectively zero, so they always make money).

Always nice to see effective price discrimination in action.

Checking out the neighbours: hypertelescopes

Topical item: telescopes capable of resolving earth-like planets around other star systems. According to the current New Scientist, creating a distanced swarm of telescopes in space could create the resolving power to image even quite small features on an alien planet.

While not a near-term prospect, in a few hundred years of progress, why not a a whole bunch of reflectors at the earth-sun Lagrange points L4 and L5? With around 200 million miles separation, you should get a pretty good image. (You might have to wait for the right time of year, for the L4-L5 axis to be orthogonal to the direction to the star system).

Suppose they were hostile. Could we take them out, or could they take us out easily? One weapon the military apparently like is the relativistic impact weapon. If you crank up a projectile to ever closer to the speed of light, its apparent incoming velocity to an observer at the target tends to infinity (the projectile catches up with its own light). Doesn't give much time for defensive action, and the energy delivered goes up by much more than the square of the velocity. Perhaps a combination of laser drive initially and then Orion to really pump the energy up? Terminal guidance might be challenging - from the kinetic weapon's point of view, the target is approaching at speeds which also tend to infinity.
Enough of this bad-taste military SF. I blame the cold weather.

Age discrimination

I'm 55 and increasingly, the senior clients I deal with are younger than I am.

People in their fifties and sixties complain of age discrimination in employment, and consequentially lobby for regulation. Governments try to raise the pension age for all the well-known reasons, which promises to make the problem of ageism worse. But perhaps market mechanisms can solve the problem?

Suppose a senior worker is just as productive now as they were twenty years ago. But for 'irrational' (= non-economic) reasons they experience prejudice today, monetarised as $P. What does this mean?

If a thirty-something worker gets paid $W, the fifty-something worker will have to accept pay of $(W-P) for the same job. If they are prepared to take a wage-cut, then problem solved.

Or perhaps not. Maybe seniors don't want to suffer a purely prejudicial wage deficit? Can economics remove the $P differential?

If the job is customer or client-facing, and customers don't like dealing with oldies, then the answer is no. There is evidence that better looking people earn around 15% more in client-facing positions.

If the job is back-room, where real performance rather than bodily-age is important, then employers preferring to hire seniors at $(W-P) should have a preferential cost advantage, which ought to bid $P away in a competitive market.

However, if the source of prejudice is younger fellow employees, then the thirty-somethings may require extra pay to compensate for having to work with or amongst a bunch of geriatrics. This nullifies any price-savings on pensioners, and can perpetuate the discriminatory wages.

The model may be simple, but the lesson for employers is to fight age prejudice amongst their own staff, having first assured themselves that there is no performance basis for it!

There is another angle to this. It is widely noted that over a career, workers are first paid below the true value of their work, while at the end of their careers, workers are overpaid. Various semi-plausible reasons have been advanced for why this is the case: perhaps it serves to minimise employee churn where experience counts? However, in a volatile economy, perhaps the rationale weakens, and older workers will simply have to accept their real market rates. Their peak earnings may then come in mid-career. Another nail in the coffin of final salary pensions.

Note: this discussion is taken from the excellent "Microeconomics the Easy Way”, pp. 265-267, by Walter J. Wessels. It was stimulated by a special article on senior working in The Economist.