The Samovar

OK, not nobody, but almost nobody.

To believe something, you have to act in a way that is consistent with the belief being true. Otherwise, you’re just saying that you believe it. If someone tells you that twiglets are highly toxic and will kill you instantly, at the same time as munching a bag full of them, you’re likely to doubt they really believe it. Same thing if they told you that it would lead you to an eternity of damnation. You wouldn’t trade in the brief pleasure of eating a bag of twiglets for an eternity of damnation if you really believed in it. But this is exactly the situation of people claiming to believe in God whilst simultaneously doing things all the time that are inconsistent with it being true. Anyone who believes in hell but sins anyway - they don’t really believe in hell. Someone who believes in the teaching of Jesus, but also thinks that capitalism is a great idea - doesn’t really believe in Jesus’ teachings at all. And so on.

Now at this point, a Catholic will come along and say: you don’t necessarily go to hell if you sin, as long as you repent afterwards. But… if you sin planning to ‘repent’ afterwards, that doesn’t count (so I’m told). Well, I bet quite a lot of that goes on if people were honest with themselves. It seems to me that if you really believed in God, you wouldn’t try to sneak stuff by on a technicality. If you have any respect for the concept at all, you’ve surely gotta believe that He is wise to that.

In fact, when a religious rule is inconvenient, it tends to be ignored, or the meaning of it changed. In a capitalist society, the stuff that is antithetical to the pursuit of wealth is ignored. In a liberal society, the stuff about stoning adulterers and homosexuals is ignored. Conversely, in an illiberal one the stuff about loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek is ignored.

When it comes to a clash between what religion says you should do, and what is convenient to do in real life, convenience wins out over religion almost every time. Or in other words, the reason that there are so many adulterous affairs is that people don’t give any credence to the idea that they will be eternally punished for it in the afterlife (no shag is good enough to warrant infinite and everlasting pain as a consequence, surely?). In practice they behave, quite sensibly, as if the notions of religion were false. And for these reasons, I think it’s fair to say that most people don’t believe in God.

The meaning of ‘belief’

I suppose to make my case a bit more convincing I need to say something about the meaning of the word ‘belief’. Three obvious possibilities come to my mind when trying to define what belief might mean, someone believes something if:

1. They say they believe it.
2. They act in a way that is consistent with it being true.
3. They are in some internal state correlative with the concept ‘belief’.

The twiglet example shows that (1) isn’t good enough, and it’s not clear that (3) has any meaning although it’s obviously compelling in some way. So for me, I have to go with (2), although I’d modify it slightly. I would say that to believe something is, roughly speaking, to act in accordance with a mental model of the world in which the proposition is true. I prefer this way of talking about it because it deals with the difficulty of defining what is or isn’t true (you can define truth or falsity of a proposition relative to a model without having to define it for the real world), and it gives a slightly more precise idea of what sorts of actions would count as consistent (i.e. those that are made by some decision-making procedure based on a mental model relative to which the proposition is true). This definition has its difficult points too, but I think it’s a helpful starting point at least.

In my experience of explaining this idea to people, there are various sticking points that stop people from agreeing that nobody believes in God. For starters, it seems kind of rude to suggest all these people are saying they believe in God but don’t really. Well, maybe that is rude, but is it any ruder than saying that one of their fundamental beliefs is wrong and that their view of the world is completely warped? I don’t think so, but even if it is that’s no reason not to say it. I think a more fundamental sticking point is that most people tend to have some sort of mixture of definitions (1) and (3) in their minds when asked about what belief means. If there is a mental state correlative to ‘belief’ - and introspection and intuition says there is - then surely the best person to report the status of that mental state is the person concerned. All very democratic, but people are often very bad at introspection and may themselves think that the fact that they are saying something without attempting to deceive means they believe it. The problem with that is: what about the unconscious?

The last sticking point is perhaps the most interesting of all, that in many ways it seems as though people do act in a way that is consistent with it being true. They go to church (some of them), they try to avoid sinning too much, they pray, etc. My response to this is that all of these actions are consequences of their believing that they believe, but not their actual believing. And I think that’s not a contradiction. The thing is, our mental models are disjointed fragmentary ones, not grand theories of everything. To get by in the world, we only need incomplete, heuristic models of situations that tend to recur. A mental model of the world in which we act as if we had a mental model of the world in which God exists doesn’t necessarily mean that we do indeed have a mental model of the world in which God exists. Mental models, and decision making procedures based on them, don’t have to be complete or accurate. They don’t need to be deductively complete or consistent, because most of the time we’re not capable of nor interested in making all the deductive conclusions possible from our different fragmentary mental models. In particular, our mental models of ourselves are often quite incredibly wrong. We think “In situation X I would do Y”, but then situation X happens and we do Z, the exact opposite of Y. It happens all the time. So it’s perfectly possible that we can believe that we believe in God, and consequently do all of the things we associate with a person who believes in God, but not actually believe in God (which would if we thought about it deeply enough, entail doing all sorts of things we wouldn’t actually do).

Dennett

With most ideas, someone has already had them before you (often Hume in my experience, the clever bugger), and this is no exception. I haven’t read much Dennett, but it appears he has covered some of the same ground. I’m told that he makes a distinction between belief and opinion that is somewhat akin to what I’m talking about here. I didn’t find anything directly about this (please post a link in the comments if you have a good one), but his article Do Animals Have Beliefs? has this interesting nugget which might have some relevance to the discussion of the three definitions of belief above:

There are independent, salient states which belief-talk ‘measures’ to a first approximation.

I also found this YouTube video of him saying that he doesn’t believe that believers really believe. It’s my first embedded video on this blog, too.

Seen on a street in Paris - anyone care to enlighten me as to what this might mean?

Democracy is one of those words that everybody uses but about which there is not a great deal of clarity as to what it means. The first ideas I can remember having of democracy were that it means a government elected by the people, or a government representing the will of the people. The first idea led me to declare that democracy was not a good thing, the second to declare that we do not live in a democracy (for various reasons to do with the biases and influences in our political process, and the impossibility of designing a perfect voting system). I no longer believe these. Instead, I now say that we do live in a democracy, that this is a very good thing, but that it means a lot less than many people think it does, and that we can do better.

For the past few years I’ve been considering an alternative view of democracy, which although it seems fairly obvious, doesn’t appear to be widely considered (Wikipedia’s article on democracy doesn’t mention anything like it anyway).

Democracy as elections, and democracy as government by the will of the people both have problems which relate to each other. The main problem with the democracy as elections theory is that it doesn’t explain why this should be a good thing. The most obvious response is that this process ought to result in a government that is representative of the electorate. Likewise, if you try to define democracy as meaning a system with governments that are representative of the people, you then have to explain how the system ensures that. Both of these views of democracy rely on the other, and they each have meaning only if they can be satisfactorily connected. Democracy as government by the will of the people is the intent, democracy as elections is the process used to try to ensure that.

It’s usually considered that you also need to have free and fair elections, secret ballots and a free press. It’s intuitively obvious at first glance that these things are all good ideas, and that not having them creates problems. The question is: does having them guarantee a representative government as a result? I know of no convincing argument that it does. Indeed, it misses out what I consider to be a fairly major additional requirement: that there is a certain level of equality of wealth and power in the society concerned. Even adding this in as another basic requirement for democracy, it’s not clear that this would guarantee a representative government. Maybe you also need a certain universal level of education and political awareness? How do you specify and guarantee that? You could go on and on.

There’s also the problem of what these requirements themselves mean. What is a free press for example? Is it just a press free from censorship? Or is there a requirement for a certain level of diversity? Can a press in a ruthlessly competitive free market, relying on advertising for most of its income be considered enough to satisfy the requirements of a democracy? Other questions you might need answers to are: what level of equality is required? What level of education and political awareness? Which form of voting system should we use (FPTP, PR, etc.)? This last question is related to perhaps the most fundamental question of all: what exactly is the will of the people? What does that even mean? These are all enormously complex questions, and without answers to them it’s not clear that we can say we know what democracy means in the standard view.

My alternative view doesn’t explain away the problems mentioned above, but I believe it clarifies the problems, connects the theoretical issues with reality more firmly, and suggests more useful ways of moving forward.

The first view is that democracy shouldn’t be seen as a positive guarantee of good government, it should rather be seen as a negative guarantee: a guarantee that the extremes of bad government are excluded. It’s clear that all our voting procedures, our not-quite-free press, our unequal society and so forth do not necessarily guarantee a government that is good in any sense of the word. But, it’s also clear that in this system it would be very difficult to get a really awful government that acted manifestly against the interests of everyone in society. In England, this view is a historically accurate one. The Magna Carta came about not because the barons wanted a good government that worked in the interests of everyone in society, but because the King was abusing his powers too much and it was hurting them. Further extensions to democracy in England came about gradually, slowly increasing the number of people whom the government could not systematically abuse. Each increase was hard fought for and was a reaction to abuses by the government, rather than an attempt to create a positive system of government. We should not expect a historical process that advances in reaction to abuses to have produced a system that goes far beyond the prevention of abuses to guarantee positive good government that works in the interests of all.

This view has several consequences. First of all, we should realise that the democracy that we have has been very hard fought for, and we need to preserve those aspects of it which prevent these extreme abuses. A danger of thinking of democracy in purely positive terms (how can we make government work better for everyone rather than how can we prevent the government abusing its power), is that by underestimating the importance of the negative aspect it potentially opens the door to precisely those abuses which democracy evolved to exclude. If you believe that the democratic process guarantees a government that is good in some positive sense, then it doesn’t make any sense to put restrictions on what that government can do - why hamper their good efforts? The present Labour government in the UK has introduced or attempted to introduce several pieces of legislation which reduce the limitations on its own power, supposedly to allow it to serve us better (to protect us from terrorism). The now infamous Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill attempted to give ministers the power to overturn legislation without consulting parliament. It’s important to realise that our democratic process doesn’t guarantee positive good government, and that’s why it’s absolutely essential to maintain those aspects which stop the government from abusing its power, even if that also makes it more difficult or stops them from doing some things which might be considered positive. Our democracy is not yet secure enough that we can forget about this fundamental negative aspect of it. In fact, it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It wasn’t until 1928 in the UK when women were given equal voting rights to men that the majority of the population participated. Even now, the 21% of the population under the age of 18 cannot vote (see this fun age pyramid).

A second consequence of this view is that democracy develops by narrowing the window of opportunity for abuse. Advances in democracy are moments when an old form of systematic abuse ends. This can be a progressive notion. For example, at the moment I would argue that there are various structural aspects of our democracy and capitalist economy that mean that a series of governments which systematically favour the interests of the wealthy is possible. Changes in our society that made governments that were systematically biased in favour of the wealthy impossible or unlikely would be an advance in democracy. I would go further and say that the democratic case for socialism is strong, but that’s another story.

The obvious criticism of this view is that it misses out the positive aspect of democracy. Sometimes elected governments do things which are positively in the public interest, and the reason for that is that they were elected to do so. The creation of the NHS or the welfare state might be a good example of this. There are a few responses to this. First of all, there is a question of whether or not the creation of the NHS and welfare state were positive acts, but rather acts taken to avert further dissent (i.e. defensive manoeuvres). Secondly, the alternative view doesn’t say that positive acts are impossible, just that there is no guarantee that they will happen. To argue for the positive view of democracy you would have to argue how democracy makes these outcomes more likely. It’s not obvious to me that this is possible even if we had a good idea of what socially good outcomes might mean. Indeed, there is some good evidence that democratic structures don’t encourage such outcomes. For example, the median voter theorem is a mathematical idealisation of two party democracy which suggests that governments will tend to suggest policies which favour the median voter. This is clearly not encouraging policies which are representative of the electorate, but it is encouraging policies which exclude the worst extremes (although actually, the median voter theorem is a sort of perturbation analysis so it doesn’t say anything about extremes). A good example of this was Brown’s last budget which increased the tax burden on the rich and the poor, but decreased it for those in the middle. The third response to the criticism is that where abuse of a system is possible, it seems that it tends to happen. This makes understanding the extent to which democratic structures exclude possibilities for abuse much more important than understanding how they enable positive acts.

The idea of this way of looking at democracy is to better understand what it actually is and how things really happen, a realist view rather than an idealist one. But I am an idealist, so I also want to understand how to make things better and believe it can be done. This way of looking at things helps in various ways. First of all, it’s always good to be realistic about what is actually going on to better understand how to make things better. Much thinking about democracy appears to be of the self-delusional form. Secondly, it already suggests a whole series of ways of improving democracy by reducing the window of opportunity for abuse. Lastly though, it provides a better framework for proposing positive improvements to our democracy. By dropping the fiction that democracy is about good government and representing the people, it concentrates our attention on systematic analyses of what different democratic structures can do. It also strongly emphasises that positive functions of democracy have to be backwards compatible with the important negative function.

One day, we will perhaps reach a stage where we have a society of rough equality, where no part of it is systematically abused by any other part of it. At that stage, our thinking about democracy and government can begin to focus on ways to achieve more directly positive outcomes, but we haven’t reached that stage yet (and if we do reach that stage, we’ll likely be thinking about everything very differently anyway). At the moment, our problem is the opposite. We have many governments of democratic nations around the world systematically attacking fundamental aspects of democracy, we have the press becoming less and less free as it reduces spending to compete for ever diminishing profits and becomes more and more reliant on government and corporate propaganda. We also have the prospect of potential crises such as climate change, which mean that the negative function of democracy will become even more important than ever if we want to avoid the worst happening to our society in the aftermath of the crisis (for example, the BNP has an electoral strategy that is designed around gaining power in exactly this sort of crisis situation).

OK, this is not the entry I promised in my last blog entry, but…

What is the quickest way to type 250 c’s in a row in a standard Windows text field? I make it 24, can anyone beat that?

c, c, (press and hold) ctrl, a, c, v, v, v, v, v, a, c, v, v, v, v, v, a, c, v, v, v, v, v

I haven’t written much on this blog for a long time, and I have five planned entries to write so I’m soliciting opinions about which people would prefer to read. Let me know what you think if you have any preferences. In rough order of which I think would be more interesting or more likely to complete:

1. Nobody believes in God. In which I will argue that hardly any people who identify as religious behave in a way that is consistent with their really believing in God.
2. Democracy. In which I will describe two somewhat uncommon (but by no means wholly original) views I have about what democracy means: democracy as a word without a fixed meaning but with Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’; democracy as a historical phenomenon designed to exclude tyranny rather than as a way to guarantee good or representative government.
3.  Arationality and Honesty. In which I’ll talk about what it means to be rational, put forward the hypothesis that it’s impossible to be completely rational, relate this to the epistemological theory of pragmatism, then turn to ethics and the idea of coming to terms with our own inconsistency, and taking responsibility for your actions rather than trying to act according to a moral code, and finally talk about propaganda, cognitive dissonance and this alternative ethical theory.
4. Capitalism. My eight reasons/meta-reasons for being opposed to capitalism.
5. Religion and Politics. I’ve had this sitting in my WordPress drafts folder for over a year now so it’s fairly unlikely I’ll ever actually finish it. In it I’ll talk about terrorism, Islam, authority, hierarchy, democracy, politics and the possibility of irresolvable differences of opinion, and finally a suggestion that politics is much more important to talk about than religion.

Alternatively, if you have any suggestions for what I ought to write about instead - let me know…

So, a while ago Edward the Bonobo suggested that I should spend less time on politics, and more time on food, so this entry is devoted to the delights of eating in Paris.

Let’s start with my local cake shop (well, local to where I work, not where I live), La Boulange cinquieme. After trying most of the pâtisseries near where I work, this one won out for me, for their fantastic tarte aux framboises. If you happen to find yourself in the latin quarter of Paris (the 5th arondissement), I can recommend a visit (although there’s somewhere else you should go too - more on that below). You’ll find it near the southern end of rue Gay-Lussac (but watch it, it’s not open at the weekend). Here are a couple of pics of some the large cakes I bought for my dad’s birthday party, although I’m afraid the picture quality is not very good because they were taken on my phone, first the tarte aux framboises (they do little individual ones too):

And the Opéra (a sort of chocolatey coffee wafery affair):

I bought four cakes from this shop for my dad’s party, including a clafoutis (a sort of baked custard and fruit tart) and a tarte aux noix (walnut and caramel tart). I was actually quite lucky to get them, because normally for the large tarts you need to order in advance (something I didn’t know at the time). It was quite fun going into the shop and saying “Bonsoir, je voudrai quelques tartes entiers, s’il vous plait“, “Oui Monsieur, lesquelles?“, “Er… les toutes“, “Les toutes?!”, “Oui, les toutes“, “Tres bien Monsieur“. It’s not often you get to go into a shop and buy up their whole stock of something. And I’ve had very friendly service there ever since then. (Please excuse my almost certainly wrong French above.)

The other cake shop you should visit if you are south of the river in Paris is Pierre Hermé about half way up rue Bonaparte north of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The French take their pastry very seriously, and this is reflected in the fact that Hermé was awarded the Legion d’honneur in 2007. I went for his most famous cake, the Ispahan. The photo below is from his website because my camera phone photo doesn’t do it justice. I had the small, individual version of this tart, which consists of a rose macaron like biscuit, with raspberries, lychee and a rose petal cream. Wow! If you love cake and you don’t mind the expense (it was about €6-7 for an individual portion), it’s definitely worth the trip.

While I was there, I also couldn’t resist getting one of the famous macarons (a tiny little sandwich of two almond meringues with various different fillings). His flavours are very unusual. Normally you get things like raspberry, chocolate, coffee and so forth. I went for his olive oil and vanilla macaron and I can tell you it was amazing. I shall be back to try some of the others, although I’m not sure about the foie gras and chocolate one.

Next stop, chocolate. A friend advised me about a chocolatier called Patrick Roger which he claimed was the best in France. So, while I was doing christmas shopping, I thought I’d pop in and get some presents there. He wasn’t wrong, eating chocolate from this place is a seriously different experience to eating chocolate from anywhere else I’ve been been. Or in the words of my mum after she’d eaten some - what is the point of eating ordinary chocolate ever again after something like that?

While I was there, I noticed that the shop sign had something which seemed rather boastful. It said Meilleur Ouvrier de France (best [chocolate] maker in France). Well, it turns out that this is an award given every three years to the best places in various categories (food ones are the ones I’m interested in, but they also do many other things). So now I’m on the lookout for more MOF shops (the MOF website is unfortunately totally hopeless and can’t be used to find out where they are). I found the MOF fromagerie at the north end of the rue Monge near where I work, and bought some cheese there, but to be honest I’m not a huge fan of smelly, mouldy French cheese so this wasn’t such a revelatory experience as the chocolate.

Last but not least, restaurants. I haven’t had such good luck in restaurants in Paris as I had hoped, so nowhere stands out particularly. If you want an excellent and inexpensive place in the 13th arondissement (where I live), I can highly recommend l’Ourcine on rue Broca. They do a set three course meal for €30, which was fantastic both times I went. If you want something a bit posher than that, but you don’t want to go to the sky high trois étoiles places, you might like Au Trou Gascon in the 12th arondissement (just north of the river to the east). I had the five course dîner Gourmand which is very good value at €50, and consisted of:

• Gambas, royale de foie gras, émulsion de chataîgnes (prawns, foie gras mousse, chestnuts)
• Noix de St Jacques, endives fondantes (scallops with endives)
• Filet de biche, semoule de brocoli, fumet cacao (fillet of venison, some sort of brocoli thing, smoked in cocoa?)
• Faisselle pastorale, miel citronné, huile d’olive et pignons (faisselle is a soft white cheese, here served with honey, olive oil and pine kernels)
• Glace chocolat noir « minute » servie devant vous, éclats de marron, meringue vanillée (very dark chocolate ice cream with chestnuts and vanilla meringue)

Other than the cheese, which as I’ve said I’m not a big fan of, it was all delicious. I wouldn’t have minded a more interesting pudding that chocolate ice cream and meringue, but it was a good one.

OK, that’s all for now. Expect a report if I get round to visiting somewhere like the restaurant Hélène Darroze (the only Michelin three star restaurant in Paris run by a female chef). The lunch menu seems just about possible for a special occasion, at €70.

For many years, the ZNet website has been one of the best if not the best web site for the left. They’ve just finished a major upgrade to their site which could make it even better. The idea is to create a left wing community rather than just a site with lots of articles to read. Members can create their own blogs, join groups, discuss on the forums, etc. And many more things are coming. So, go check it out now! But, the upgrade has been a costly one, and ZNet needs more sustainers (people who make a periodic donation) to keep their operation running, and more importantly to expand it. So, take a look at the site, and if you like it take a look at this and think about joining.

One of the things about being ill is that you have to spend a lot of time in bed with nothing much to do. Having watched the whole first series of the Sopranos, I had to find something else. So here’s the result. I revisited an old program I wrote many years ago to solve the Countdown numbers game.

In this game, you’re given six numbers between 1 and 100 and a target number between 100 and 999. You’re given 30 seconds to try to make the target using the six numbers and the operations plus, minus, times and divide.

I originally wrote a program to solve this many years ago (when I was about 14 I think), but the algorithm I used was pretty horrible. I worked out by hand all the possible arrangements of brackets you could have for six numbers, and then tried each operator and number in each appropriate slot. It worked, but it was ugly programming.

Recently I’ve been learning Python for an academic project, and so I thought I may as well try rewriting it in Python. I think the solution I’ve come up with is nicer than any of the solutions I’ve found on the internet (mostly written in Java or C), although having written it I found this paper which uses a very similar solution to mine (but in Haskell rather than Python).

Python programmers might get something from the minimal code below (all comments and docs stripped out), or you can take a look at the full source code here, including detailed comments and docs explaining the code and algorithm.

My ideal (as always with Python) was to write a program you could just look at and understand the source code without comments, but I don’t think I achieved that. I’d be interested if a more experienced Python programmer could do so. Let me know.

This version is incomplete, from the slower version, and is supposed to be understandable without explanations (takes about 40 seconds to find all solutions, too slow for Countdown):

def ValidExpressions(sources,operators=standard_operators,minimal_remaining_sources=0):
    for value, i in zip(sources,range(len(sources))):
        yield TerminalExpression(value=value, remaining_sources=sources[:i]+sources[i+1:])
    if len(sources)>=2+minimal_remaining_sources:
        for lhs in ValidExpressions(sources,operators,minimal_remaining_sources+1):
            for rhs in ValidExpressions(lhs.remaining_sources, operators, minimal_remaining_sources):
                for f in operators:
                    try: yield BranchedExpression(operator=f, lhs=lhs, rhs=rhs, remaining_sources=rhs.remaining_sources)
                    except InvalidExpressionError: pass

def TargetExpressions(target,sources,operators=standard_operators):
    for expression in ValidExpressions(sources,operators):
        if expression.value==target:
            yield expression

This version is actually complete, from the faster version which needs the comments to explain (takes about 15 seconds to run, good enough to win Countdown):

sub = lambda x,y: x-y
def add(x,y):
    if x<=y: return x+y
    raise ValueError
def mul(x,y):
    if x<=y or x==1 or y==1: return x*y
    raise ValueError
def div(x,y):
    if not y or x%y or y==1:
        raise ValueError
    return x/y
standard_ops = [ add, sub, mul, div ]

def expressions(sources,ops=standard_ops,minremsources=0):
    for i in range(len(sources)):
        yield ([sources[i]],sources[:i]+sources[i+1:],sources[i])
    if len(sources)>=2+minremsources:
        for e1, rs1, v1 in expressions(sources,ops,minremsources+1):
            for e2, rs2, v2 in expressions(rs1,ops,minremsources):
                for o in ops:
                    try: yield ([o,e1,e2],rs2,o(v1,v2))
                    except ValueError: pass

def findfirsttarget(target,sources,ops=standard_ops):
    for e,s,v in expressions(sources,ops):
        if v==target:
            return e
    return []

Intellectuals are more prone to propaganda than others.

That’s one of the claims of Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda which got me quite excited about it. His explanation of this is that intellectuals want to have an opinion on every subject, they follow current events carefully, and because they’re intelligent they think they can understand what is going on. This leads to their being more prone to propaganda because there isn’t enough time to have an informed opinion on every subject, because following current events carefully means being led by the news agenda and investing energy in comprehending things from within that given framework, and because intelligence is not enough to understand complex events which require huge breadth of knowledge and experience.

I find this idea very interesting, but there’s another aspect that I want to focus on, which is that intellectuals want to try to understand the world by simplifying it. They want to reduce complex ideas to simple models of them, and to understand them by doing so. This ties in with Ellul’s claim because if you have a simple model of the world that you think explains everything, it’s very hard to give it up. You end up reinterpreting events and facts to fit the theory rather than the much more onerous and difficult prospect of giving up the theory, which would require you to rethink the whole way you look at the world. One of Ellul’s points is that one of the two main functions of propaganda - what he calls integration propaganda - is to intensify currently existing ways of looking at the world and to turn them into actions. Integration propaganda must work better on someone who has a strong personal incentive not to give up his already existing simplified model of the world.

What I would like to understand though, is why people who seem to be intelligent, caring, and even kind, can be capable of believing things that are quite mad, and have consequences which are morally horrific. The obvious example is Nazism, but there are many less dramatic examples. Some people are not upset, for example, by the sight of a homeless person freezing on the streets during the winter.

I can see two sorts of explanation for this, at the emotional level and the rational level. I’m going to come back to the emotional part in a future post, but roughly speaking it’s something like cognitive dissonance. It’s too hard to live in the world if you are to have an emotional reaction to everything that is horrible, and so we have a strong incentive to try to see the world in a way that makes unpleasant things inevitable or out of our control. The other type of explanation is that we want to try to understand things by simplifying them, but that the world is too messy and complicated for this to really work, so we end up making the facts fit the theory.

The neoconservative economist believes that free markets are always efficient, so he sees the creation of new markets as the solution to all the world’s problems. The Marxist sees everything in terms of a dialectical process and class conflict. Both see the pain and suffering that happen as a consequence of these theories as necessary, and so are not shocked by them. The theist believes absolutely in the teachings of their religion, and so cannot see the human suffering that those beliefs can entail. For example, the Catholic who opposes the use of condoms in Africa. On the other hand, the vehement atheist sees that belief in God is wrong and so blames religion for all the world’s problems, blinding himself to the political or economic cause of many of them. Consequently, they can end up supporting incredibly bloody war and torture on a scale that dwarfs the Crusades, as in the case of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris for example.

The intellectual is particularly prone to this sort of thinking, because reductionism is our intellectual cultural heritage, something they are totally immersed in. Reducing complex situations to simple models of them through mathematics, physics, etc. has enabled us to make enormous leaps forward in our understanding and control of the physical world. But there is no successful reductionist model of politics or of human problems. Attempting to find reductionist explanations of politics or human behaviour is a reasonable scientific endeavour, albeit so far an unsuccessful one. But believing that we are already in a position to understand people or politics so simplistically, and - worse - acting on those beliefs, is a gross intellectual error (even if it is understandable). Empiricism is incredibly hard, even trained scientists working in much more concrete fields than politics or human behaviour find it very difficult to separate a good scientific explanation of a phenomenon from a confusion.

We cannot wait for an empirical scientific understanding of politics. We have to try to understand the world now, and make decisions and actions based on that understanding. I think it is important that we recognise that we cannot be over-reliant on reductionist models to guide our thinking on these matters, but that leaves a huge open problem of what we can rely on. My feeling is we can use these models of the world, but we need to bear in mind that none of them have a very wide scope, and that all of them are likely to be wrong in fairly major ways. In the end, we need to rely on our essentially human judgement rather than our theories as the final arbiter of our political thinking. That doesn’t mean abandoning reason and logic, it means being committed to pragmatically training our judgement and trying to make decisions as best as possible within the limits of our ability to reason about the world. It means attempting to imperfectly understand complex situations as they are rather than perfectly understanding over-simplifications of them. It means attending to the details rather than trying to find a theory that enables us to ignore them.

This is of course, incredibly difficult. One strategy that may make it more tractable is the idea of having multiple, overlapping, and weakly held principles for understanding the world rather than a smaller number of strongly held principles which attempt to explain everything in one grand scheme. Combined with this is the strategy of having multiple views on a given situation with varying degrees of conviction, rather than having a single one. These views can even be, in fact probably must be, mutually contradictory. Again, this is not to abandon reason in favour of accepting contradiction, but to remember to bear in mind that there are alternative views on a given situation rather than to put the alternatives out of mind. This may of course not be the best strategy. It would have been a bad strategy in the long term for understanding physics, for example. The test for whether or not it is a good strategy, is whether it helps us to get a better understanding of things from an empirical and pragmatic point of view. The main point is not that this strategy is necessarily the best one, but that the reductionist strategy is consistently leading us into error.

I’ll end with an example of this method applied to a reasonably contemporary political problem, the US invasion of Iraq. Before the invasion happened, there was huge debate about whether or not it was a good thing, or could be a good thing. Perhaps, regardless of the US’ reasons for wanting the war, it could have been a good thing for the Iraqi people. Well absolutely. It could, despite the hundreds of thousands of casualties, still be a good thing in the long run, although that seems a very remote possibility now. The reason I opposed it was not because I could foresee these hundreds of thousands of deaths - in fact that vastly exceeded my worst imaginings of how bad it could be - but that everything about the proposed war was dubious. The US and the UK governments lied to us repeatedly and their motives were clearly not either disarmament or helping the Iraqi people. Mostly, I felt that whether or not the war had a positive outcome would depend on the way in which it was conducted, and given that the principal agent in that clearly didn’t have the interests of disarmament or the Iraqi people at heart, I couldn’t believe that they would conduct it well. My opposition to the war was not based on predictions about what would happen, it wasn’t based on the illegality of the war according to international law (which wouldn’t concern me greatly if the war had really been a huge success for the Iraqi people), it was made in ignorance of what the US’ real motives were in the war. And yet, I believe, despite all that uncertainty and ignorance on my part, my judgement was essentially correct, and that subsequent events have shown that to be the case. You can read what I wrote about it in February 2003 here.

p.s. I’m not sure that I would recommend Ellul’s book. I haven’t finished it yet, but it appears to be rather self-contradictory from chapter to chapter and even occasionally from paragraph to paragraph.

p.p.s. When you’re reading a book about propaganda on the train, it’s weird how suddenly when you look up from it you realise that everyone around you is reading propaganda: the Economist telling you how great capitalism is; the glossy magazine telling women they have to look like these incredibly thin models; everything stuffed full of adverts, advertorials and PR-driven stories.

Wikipedia has a very bad reputation for accuracy, and recently it’s been getting a bit of a trashing for its internal politics. Despite this, millions of people continue to use it, and I think it’s easy to see why.

Despite its problems, Wikipedia is a better resource for the public dissemination of knowledge than almost anything else out there. It can be misused by blindly relying on what is included there, but this isn’t a reason to attack Wikipedia. You just have to approach it with the right attitude: a Wikipedia article is a starting point for further research, not an end point. It’s a means for discovering new information as much as a repository of information. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of this. Discovering that certain knowledge exists is itself a very difficult and important thing to do.

Wikipedia articles are like a quick and dirty map of a knowledge space. They give you a rough idea of what something is about, even if the details may be wrong, and they suggest where you could go to find out more. As a sample, I picked the Wikipedia entry on dynamical systems more or less at random. As well as a decent length article, it has a bibliography of 17 books, including 13 serious academic books at varying levels and 4 popular mathematics books, and 22 internet links, including complete books available online, tutorials and the web pages of relevant research groups.

The nature of knowledge is that it is constantly expanding, and at the moment it is doing so at an incredible rate. Traditional repositories of knowledge like textbooks and encyclopaedias find it difficult to keep up, and are often years if not decades out of date. Wikipedia may be less authoritative than these, but it is often only days after a new discovery is made that a detailed write up is available on wikipedia with links to the original research paper for those who need more accurate information. Textbooks and printed encyclopaedias cannot compete with this.

It is interesting that much of the criticism of Wikipedia comes from those with a vested interest in doing so. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has criticised Wikipedia, and it’s obvious enough why they would do so because they’re in direct competition. But Wikipedia also gets a very bad treatment from the press, by people who are not directly in competition with it. The coverage from The Register (article linked to above) is a case in point. Their stories about Wikipedia are hostile almost to the point of absurdity.

So why is this? My feeling is that it’s because the model of public knowledge espoused by Wikipedia is a direct challenge to the elitist model of knowledge of journalists, and the reason they attack it so strongly is the same as the reason they attack blogs so strongly. Their whole reason for existence is based on the idea that they are providing something through their expertise and knowledge that cannot be obtained elsewhere (for free). If people could just directly access knowledge without going through them, why would be bother doing so? They feel their existence is threatened.

And they are right to feel that way. Wikipedia articles on new scientific discoveries are often much better researched than the write ups in newspapers, and Wikipedia authors often seem to have a better understanding of the discovery in question than the science writers in the newspaper. This shouldn’t be surprising: a newspaper typically only has one or two science writers (and they’re often failed scientists or those with only an undergraduate degree in science), whereas a Wikipedia article could be directly written by someone in that field or even by the original authors themselves. A newspaper article will never cite it’s sources because there isn’t enough space, but most Wikipedia articles do so (and those that don’t are conspicuously flagged).

Similarly, blogs often provide a much broader and more interesting range of political analysis than you find in a newspaper. One of the criticisms that traditional media such as newspapers level at blogs is that they don’t do investigative journalism, but in fact the heavy competition and diminishing revenues of traditional media mean that they are doing less investigative journalism than ever. When the US invaded Iraq, the traditional media were telling us how great everything was because their information was all coming through the filter of the military forces. On the other hand, Iraqi blogs gave a much broader picture.

Getting back to Wikipedia, the journalists and others would be right to criticise Wikipedia if the point of it was to provide an authoritative reference point for factual information. But this really shouldn’t be the point, and the criticism is fundamentally based on an inaccurate picture of the nature of knowledge. Truly authoritative knowledge is very rare. Anyone relying on a single source, however authoritative that source is, is making a serious error. Wikipedia shouldn’t be relied on in this way, but neither should an Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry or even a scientific textbook (and certainly not a newspaper article!). The critics cannot understand this point, or cannot concede it, because their view of themselves is that they are this sort of authority, and so they cannot comprehend the suggestion that this sort of authority is not needed.

So in defending Wikipedia from its critics, I am not - as they might imagine - denying the need for expertise, but attacking the false and elitist nature of expertise that they represent, and defending a view of knowledge that is inherently diverse.

As a postscript, a very interesting project is Scholarpedia. It is inspired by Wikipedia, but has a different balance of openness and expertise by essentially restricting editing rights to academics, with the level of control increasing with scientific status. As the front page of Scholarpedia states, “The approach of Scholarpedia does not compete with, but rather complements that of Wikipedia” (my emphasis). Scholarpedia is a recognition that both expertise and the dynamic, open approach of Wikipedia are important. At the moment, Scholarpedia is restricted to articles about theoretical and computational neuroscience, some mathematical fields, and astrophysics, but it will grow.