The Samovar

Recently I wrote a post that provoked much disagreement, claiming that almost nobody believes in God. On further reflection, I think I can make a clearer statement (although with a less punchy headline sadly). A less divisive way of putting it might be, what should we make of statements like

He believes X but acts as if he doesn’t,

and

He believes X but doesn’t act consistently with those beliefs.

These are quite curious statements, especially the first. I find these statements interesting because I want to try to interpret them as a Pragmatist. Briefly, a Pragmatist tries to only talk about things to the extent that they have real world consequences, and tries to give things meaning relative to those consequences. From this point of view, if we take the first statement as accurate, then we have a real problem. The first clause says that he believes X, but the second denies any connection between X and his actions. To define a pragmatic (I’ll use small p from here on) conception of ‘belief’ would mean defining it in terms of its consequences, but the statement says there are none.

This might seem like a fairly irrelevant problem, but I think it’s more significant than it seems because people make statements like this all the time. I’ll illustrate with three examples:

1. The “champagne socialist” claims to believe in an ideal of equality, but acts to get as much as he can for himself.
2. The theist who regularly sins and just generally doesn’t seem to pay anything more than lip service to his faith.
3. The drug addict, can see clearly that his habit will kill him but keeps on doing it anyway.

The first two seem problematic to me, and the third less so although it shares many similar features.

Now at this point I should say that you could easily disagree that these are problematic. For example, most people aren’t pragmatists and so wouldn’t see the difficulty in finding a pragmatic definition of belief to be a problem. For my part, I feel that something like pragmatism is inescapable - if we’re to make sense then what we talk about has to be grounded in experience. William James sometimes referred to pragmatism as “radical empiricism”, which seems appropriate.

In the entry I wrote about belief in God, I took a point of view which I think is roughly equivalent to what Dennett calls the Intentional Stance. Although I must say I haven’t read his book so I might be mistaken. As I understand it, the intentional stance says: hypothesise that an individual is acting rationally with respect to his beliefs and desires. We can’t know what the beliefs and desires are (they’re internal), but we can see the actions and from that attempt to infer what the beliefs and desires are. Even though we know that individuals are not rational, thinking about in this way might tell us something useful.

Because I’ve been making Powerpoint slides for presentations recently, I couldn’t help but turn this idea into one of those silly diagrams with boxes and arrows. In the diagram ‘internal model’ refers to the model of the world that an individual has, which is continually updated according to their experiences. The ‘plan’ box gets arrows from ‘goals’ and ‘internal model’ because it is a rational maximiser attempting to find actions which, at least in the individuals internal model of the world, would best fit its goals.

Model 1 - The intentional stance?

I think this way of looking at things can tell us a lot, but it has some difficulties with the example of the drug addict. Now the drug addict doesn’t appear to act as if he believes his habit will damage him, although he says he knows it will, wishes to stop, etc. His claims about what he claims to believe also seem fairly uncontroversial in some sense, and are entirely about real world things with real world consequences (unlike the case of belief in God). One response would be to say that his goals are different to what you might think: an addict has the overriding goal of getting high. The trouble with this is that for this to be right, the goals must have been changed by his previous actions. If the individual’s goals as well as his internal model can be changed, then it becomes a lot more difficult to infer anything about the goals or beliefs from the actions. In particular, what is to stop us saying that everyone’s ‘goal’ is to do the actions that they actually do? This fits with the intentional stance but tells us next to nothing. I think I know what the response to this criticism would be: that that would be to multiply the number of ‘goals’ unnecessarily (one for each action). Fair enough, but it does point to a genuine problem with that theory I think.

In the case of addiction, we actually have quite a good scientific theory as to what happens. Taking addictive drugs releases chemicals into the brain which mess up the reward signals that our brain uses as part of its decision making process. It shouldn’t be a surprise that injecting chemicals into the part of us that makes decisions might mess up that process. Now should this be described as messing with our goals and desires, or as messing with our rationality?

Returning to the first two examples of the champagne socialist and the sinning theist, I think most people would say that they really do believe what they say they believe, but that those beliefs don’t directly determine the individual’s actions. This seems a reasonable point of view, but it needs some work to make it more precise. My first attempt is this boxes and arrows diagram:

Model 2 - The adviser to the king

In the top left we have a box with little boxes inside it. The large box represents in some sense the conscious part of this individual’s mind. He has a conscious model of the world, conscious goals, and from this he can formulate a conscious plan. However, in the larger scheme of things, these consciously determined plans don’t have the final say. There is also an unconscious scheme: an unconscious internal model of the world, unconscious goals, and a plan based on these unconscious elements in addition to the conscious ones. It is this unconscious bit that has the final say, and the results of actions taken feed back into both the conscious and unconscious internal models of the world. In this model, the conscious part is in some sense acting as an adviser to the real decision maker, the unconscious part. Relative to this scheme, we can say that the beliefs of the conscious part (the internal model inside the top left box) are that individual’s ‘beliefs’. This could explain why an individual could be capable of ‘believing’ one thing but acting in contradiction to that belief: the unconscious planner is just overriding the suggestions of the conscious adviser.

This model can also explain a lot. You could say that the conscious module at the top left is a sophisticated, rational reasoner, capable of using logic, deduction, etc., whereas the unconscious decision maker uses much cruder rule, something along the lines of: do what’s worked well in the past according to how much dopamine is sloshing around my brain afterwards. This would obviously explain the drug addict example where the unconscious decision maker is getting directly messed with chemically. It would also explain the sinning theist and champagne socialist: the unconscious decision maker with the real power has just realised that the high and mighty ideals of the conscious module don’t make it happy, whereas sex and champagne do.

So this scheme is nice, but it has a different set of problems. The first is that it is much more empirical than the intentional stance scheme. Who knows if this is how the brain really makes its decisions or not? Further neuroscientific research may tell us how we really make decisions, but wouldn’t we like to be able to say something meaningful without waiting for that (which may easily be many decades coming)? In general, ‘belief’ clearly relates to an internal state and therefore a definition of it would seem to have to relate to a model of human thought and behaviour. Or is there another neutral way of defining it? I haven’t got one. Any suggestions?

The second problem is more philosophical, and relates to how we use a term like belief. Suppose the model of decision making in the adviser model was accurate, does it make sense to say that the individual as a whole ‘believes’ what are really just the beliefs of one part of it? Or is this just overemphasising the conscious part of belief? Perhaps we need a new vocabulary of belief that makes this distinction clearer? Or perhaps we should just abandon the word entirely?

I propose that instead we always bear in mind the limit of applicability of a concept. Most concepts are useful when used in certain contexts, but break down at certain edge cases (like for example, the concept of ‘inside’ breaks down at a quantum level when objects can jump between positions without going through intermediate ones). From this point of view then, we could say that the concept ‘belief’ has some everyday uses, but that we should always have in mind the pragmatic limit of applicability. Things like belief in gravity or belief about some observable facts, which people act consistently with almost all of the time, could be still used unproblematically, but talk of belief in ideals or belief in God should raise alarm bells because we know that these beliefs will not inform us as to individuals actions. An alternative conclusion to my previous controversial entry would then be: belief in God is beyond the pragmatic limit of applicability of the concept ‘belief’.

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.

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

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.

I’m part of a small group working on a new scientific endeavour, and we need your help!

We’re writing a new piece of software to simulate the behaviour of networks of neurons (nerve cells in the brain). Well, we’ve solved the differential equations, worked out the technical problems, written the code, but now we’re stuck. We’ve hit a barrier, our own CDD (creativity deficit disorder).

We need a name.

And it needs to be so damned snappy that as soon as someone hears it they’ll want to download our software and stop using the competition (with names like Neuron, XPP and Nest).

So can you help? Your scientific community needs you!

Boring technical details follow for those who are interested (not necessary for thinking up a cool name): The software is going to be written in Python, with some bits possibly in C++, using SciPy and vectorised code for efficient computations. The emphasis is on the code being easy to use for people without much experience in programming, and easy to extend. Initially, the software will focus on networks of simple model neurons rather than detailed anatomical models (although we might get round to adding that later).

George Monbiot is a writer for whom I have an awful lot of respect. In his latest article (via ukwatch), there is lots to agree with. But, assuming he means what he says, he has some fundamental views that I find quite odd.

Like Dr Ridley, I am a biological determinist: I believe that much of our behaviour is governed by our evolutionary history. I accept the evidence he puts forward, but draw completely different conclusions. Ridley believes that modern humans are destined to behave well if left to their own devices; I believe that they are likely to behave badly. If you belong to a small group of intelligent hominids, all of whom are well-known to each other, you will be rewarded for cooperation and generosity within the group. (Though this does not stop your group from attacking or exploiting another). If, on the other hand, you can switch communities at will, travel freely, buy in one country and sell in another, hire strangers then fire them, you will gain more from acting only in your own interest. You’ll have an even stronger incentive to act against the common good if you run a bank whose lending and borrowing are so complex that hardly anyone can understand what is happening.

Dr Ridley and I have the same view of human nature: we are inherently selfish. But the question is whether or not this nature is subject to the conditions that prevailed during our evolutionary history. I believe that they have changed: we can no longer be scrutinised and held to account by a small community. We need governments to fill the regulatory role vacated when our tiny clans dissolved.

…

Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people’s resources, they will dump their waste in other people’s habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract.

The democratic challenge, which becomes ever more complex as the scale of human interactions increases, is to mimic the governance system of the small hominid troop. We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing. At the same time we must ensure that the state is also treated like a member of the hominid clan and punished when it acts against the common good. Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

First of all, the idea of the evolutionary psychology of the “small hominid troop” is a scientific paradigm for which there is scant evidence. Basing fundamental political ideas on such a weak hypothesis is surely not sensible. Fortunately, I don’t think his ideas really do depend on this apparent justification.

The more significant point is his view of the role of the state.  Monbiot believes that “modern humans … if left to their own devices … are likely to behave badly” and therefore “We need a state that rewards us for cooperating and punishes us for cheating and stealing.” This view would seem to rule out the possibility of an anarchist sort of socialism, and mandates a more authoritarian, traditional big-state socialism. For this reason, I think it’s worth looking at an alternative explanation of the observed bad behaviour that Monbiot wants to eliminate, and an alternative remedy.

My view is that most people are mostly good. In order to believe things that are unpleasant, or behave in vile ways towards each other, people have to be pushed into it by social pressures. The reason that people do believe unpleasant things and do behave in vile ways towards each other in great numbers is that there are social pressures pushing them towards it.

One of the things about modern capitalist societies is the way they systematically hide information about the external costs of our actions. An example: it is very difficult to purchase ethical or green products. Information about the exploitation involved in producing products, or the amount of carbon emitted in the production of products, is enormously difficult to estimate. Modern capitalism hides all information except for one thing: the price. Not knowing anything else about the products, of course consumers will just buy the cheapest thing available. This has knock on effects that are very damaging. But the problem here is not that people are mean and don’t care about those knock on effects, but that they don’t have reliable information about them.

That’s one way that a capitalist society creates an apparently callous and uncaring world, and it exemplifies many of the others. For example, a company is owned by shareholders, separate from its management. The management of the company reasons thus: if the shareholders all sell their shares, the company will collapse and I’ll be out of a job, therefore I must do all I can to make the profits of the company as large as possible. The shareholders meanwhile have a choice of companies to invest their money in. Since their individual actions typically won’t affect the fortunes of a whole company, the only question that concerns them is where to put their money to maximise profitability. Note that they can’t even choose to put money into a slightly less profitable but more ethical venture, they have to go for one that pursues profit above all else. If they invest in a company that doesn’t do so, they have to assume that the other shareholders probably won’t, the share price will plummet anyway, the company will go bust, and by doggedly keeping shares in it they’ve neither saved the company nor made any money. (This is just The Prisoner’s Dilemma.) The structural arrangement of the system causes all the individuals involved to behave in seemingly cold and callous ways by separating individuals and groups, and making price and profit the only signal they communicate with.

Those are two key mechanisms of capitalism which contribute to this sort of behaviour, but they also have knock on effects. Those people who are better at having this sort of cold, callous view of the world will do better in a capitalist society than those who don’t. Because of the structural requirements of capitalist companies, these psycopathic / sociopathic individuals will tend to be promoted to the top jobs. Again, this is not because we like this sort of person, or that we want them to be our bosses or leaders, but that the way our society is structured, hiding all information other than price information, pushes them towards the top.

I could continue documenting this sort of thing at enormous length, but the key point is that the structural pressures in a capitalist society all emphasise price and profit, and de-emphasise everything else in life. With all these different sorts of pressures, all reinforcing themselves and feeding back on themselves, of course we end up with a society that seems cold and callous. But, returning to Monbiot, this is not because people are cold and callous.

So, if I’m right about human nature and Monbiot is wrong, an equal and free society is possible. If we can build a society in which the pressures are social rather than financial, we wouldn’t need state coercion to make people behave well. The anarchist ideal is to build such a society, but not by the right-wing libertarian or free-marketeer route of just doing away with government regulation. That government regulation grew along with capitalism as a way of mitigating its most antisocial effects, and getting rid of it without addressing the basic structure of society would make things considerably worse. The anarchist route is a change in the form of society, away from capitalism, either gradually or through a revolution, and an eventual end to state power (or at least, a minimisation of it).

Michael Albert’s participatory economics describes an alternative way to organise a society along these lines. It’s not the only one possible, but it is interesting and important because it incorporates an analysis along similar lines in a fundamental way.

Postscript: While I’m at it, the Marxist notion of the ‘withering away of the state’ is in fact an anarchist one, first posed by William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793, 25 years before Marx was born, available in full online here and here), my emphasis:

In proportion as weakness and ignorance shall diminish, the basis of government will also decay. This however is an event which ought not to be contemplated with alarm. A catastrophe of this description would be the true euthanasia of government. If the annihilation of blind confidence and implicit opinion can at any time be effected, there will necessarily succeed in their place an unforced concurrence of all in promoting the general welfare. But, whatever may be the event in this respect, and the future history of political societies, we shall do well to remember this characteristic of government, and apply it as the universal touchstone of the institution itself. As in the commencement of the present Book we found government indebted for its existence to the errors and perverseness of a few, so it now appears that it can no otherwise be perpetuated than by the infantine and uninstructed confidence of the many. It may be to a certain degree doubtful whether the human species will ever be emancipated from their present subjection and pupillage, but let it not be forgotten that this is their condition. The recollection will be salutary to individuals, and may ultimately be productive of benefit to all.

I’ve been reading some interesting things about games, computers and mathematical proof recently. A couple of months ago, it was announced that the game of checkers (or draughts) had been “solved”: if both players play perfectly then the game ends in a draw. That’s sort of what you’d expect, but it’s not entirely obvious. It might have been the case that getting to go either first or second was a big enough advantage that with perfect play either the first or second player would win. So for example in Connect Four, if both players play perfectly then the first player will always win.

Checkers is the most complicated game to have been solved to date. The number of possible legal positions in checkers is 10²⁰ (that is a one followed by twenty zeroes). By comparison, tic-tac-toe has 765 different positions, connect four has about 10¹⁴, chess about 10⁴⁰ and Go about 10¹⁷⁰ (some of these are only estimates).

There’s a strange thing about the terminology used. A game being “solved” doesn’t mean that there’s a computer program that can play the game perfectly. All it means is that they know that if the players did play perfectly, then the game would end in a certain way. So for example with checkers, it might be the case that you could beat the computer program Chinook (which was used to prove that perfect play ends in a draw). Counterintuitively, the way to do this would be the play a move that wasn’t perfect. The number of possible positions for checkers is too large for them to have computed what the best move is in every single one. They limited the number of computations they had to perform by using mathematical arguments to show that certain moves weren’t perfect without actually having to play through them. So, by playing a move that you knew wasn’t perfect (which means that if you played it against a perfect opponent you would certainly lose), you would force the computer into a position it hadn’t analysed completely, and then you might be able to beat it.

This is a bit like in chess, where a very good player can beat a good computer program by playing a strategy that exploits the way the computer program works. Chess programs work by looking as many moves ahead as possible and considering what the player might do and what the computer could do in response, etc. However, the combinatorial complexity of the game means that even the fastest computers can only look so many moves ahead. By using a strategy which is very conservative and gives you an advantage only after a large number of moves, you can conceal what you’re doing from the computer which has no intuitive understanding of the game: it doesn’t see the advantage you’re working towards because it comes so many moves in the future.

So at the moment, there is no perfect player for either chess or checkers, but the top computer programs can beat essentially any opponent (in chess this is true most of the time but possibly not every time). This raises the question: how would you know if you had a computer program that played perfectly? For games like chess and checkers, the number of possible positions and games that could be played is so enormous that even storing them all in a database might take more space than any possible computer could have (for instance the number of possible positions might be more than the number of atoms in the universe). Quantum computation might be one answer to this if it ever becomes a reality, but an interesting suggestion was recently put forward in a discussion on the foundations of mathematics mailing list.

The idea is to test the strength of an opponent by allowing a strong human player to backtrack. The human player can take back any number of moves he likes. So for example, you might play a move thinking it was very clever and forced your opponent to play a losing game, but then your opponent plays something you didn’t think of and you can see that actually your move wasn’t so great after all. You take back your move and try something different. It has been suggested that a good chess player can easily beat most of the grand master level chess programs if they are allowed to use backtracking. The suggestion is that if a grand master chess or checkers player was unable to beat the computer even using backtracking, then the computer is very likely perfect. It’s not a mathematical proof by any means, but the claim is that it would be very convincing evidence because the nature of backtracking means that any weaknesses there are in the computer program become very highly amplified, and any strengths it has become much weakened. If it could still beat a top player every time, then with very high probability there are no weaknesses to exploit in it and consequently it plays perfectly. (NB: My discussion in this paragraph oversimplifies the discussion on the FOM list for the sake of simplicity and brevity, but take a look at the original thread if you’re interested in more.)

This leads to all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of knowledge. At the one end, we have human knowledge based on our perceptions of the world and our intuitive understanding of things. Such knowledge is obviously very fallible. On the other end, we have fully rigorous mathematical proof (which is not what mathematicians do yet, but that’s another story). In between, there is scientific knowledge which is inherently fallible but forms part of a self-correcting process. Scientific knowledge always get better, but is always potentially wrong. More recently, we have probabilistic knowledge, where we know that something is mathematically true with a very high probability. Interactive proof systems are an example of this.

The argument above about backtracking in chess suggests a new sort of knowledge based on the interaction between human intuition and computational and mathematical knowledge. These newer forms of knowledge and the arguments based on them are very much in accord with my view of the pragmatic nature of knowledge. My feeling is that interactions such as this between computational, non-intuitive knowledge, and human intuitive understanding will be very important in the medium term, between now and when artificial intelligence that is superior to our own both computationally and intuitively becomes a reality (which is I feel only a matter of time, but might not be in my lifetime). At the moment, these new forms of knowledge are really only being explored by mathematicians and computer scientists because the human side is not yet well enough understood. It will be interesting to see how this interaction between human and computational/mathematical understanding will develop as our understanding of how the human brain works improves.

If you found this entry was interesting, you might also be interested in two unfinished essays I have on epistemology without truth and the philosophy of mathematics.