Looking Out To Sea

I’ve had less time to read since we moved house. I’m now within walking distance of work so I don’t have the chance to read on the bus while commuting. But I have managed to finish A Life Stripped Bare: Tiptoeing Through The Ethical Minefield by Leo Hickman.

He’s a writer for the Guardian who wrote about his attempts at living the “ethical” lifestyle. The difference being that he was not a green activist or eco-warrior type. It’s interesting to see how the changes he tried to put in place conflicted with his pragmatic needs and his usual way of doing things.

Ethical Audit

The story starts with a trio of “ethical auditors” coming to his house to interrogate the family and show them all the ways in which their lifestyle was unethical. I admit to disagreeing violently with most of what the auditors said, and being in violent agreement with the rest.

At the time it was just a dislike of their claims. For instance, suggesting that the contents of the medicine cupboard (painkillers and cold remedies, I suppose) “only treat the symptoms”. As if that wasn’t the point! Then they had the gall to suggest homeopathy as an alternative (slogan: “it doesn’t even treat the symptoms”?).

The auditors were not above implying imminent danger for the couple and their young daughter — toxins in the cleaning products, in the baby’s bedroom, in the food and so on. And I began to wonder what was supposed to be ethical about the “ethical auditors” — it was surely not their behaviour. I don’t consider it ethical to exaggerate or lie about the risks of whatever chemicals we are exposed to.

The unexamined life is not worth living. —Socrates

So with time I realised it wasn’t just that I disliked the specific claims they made, but that I rejected the auditors’ whole idea of an ethical life. It was unjustified and vague, and seemed to be just as uncritical as the author’s own lifestyle before they arrived.

The advice given was a mixture of typical pro-recycling, waste reduction advice, using public transport and walking more, etc, combined with more reactionary ideas about Big Pharma, GM, chemicalz!!1 and nuclear power. I feel quite content in my view that the auditors had little real idea what they were talking about, extrapolating from their demonstration of ignorance in the wide range of areas they did cover.

The idea of the book was interesting, in the same way that life-swapping reality shows are interesting: watching people living by other people’s rules. But there’s no way we can tell if what they are doing makes any difference. Everything was incredibly important/ dangerous/ relevant without qualifiers.

Good shopping, Good living

I have a copy of the Good Shopping Guide around here somewhere, from a few years ago. It also suffers from the same problem. Each company is given a score for its ethics, but they aren’t effectively weighted to take account of things that matter. Running nuclear power stations is just as liable to affect a company’s rating as having slave workers. That’s not really equivalent in my mind.

At least the Guide gives a breakdown for the different categories, so choosing things which matter to you is easier. I would rather be given real information, and valid reasons, to make up my own mind than the approach shown by the auditors of Leo Hickman’s book.

• The knife-sharpening blocks with the little circular grinding stones inside are very effective.
• Two of the fingers on my left hand would say “too effective”. Ouch, blood, etc.

Whenever I get the chance to read a newspaper I end up really angry. The Observer on 18 May had several columns about abortion and very few of them were sensible. There were contradictions, unverified claims and outrageous lies throughout the whole thing.

I really wished that the reporters would make some attempt to verify the statements made by the interviewees. Do good journalists verify the statements they print? For instance, this opinion of Sister Andrea Fraile in Glasgow is just worthless scaremongering:

‘[Abortion] can be very detrimental to their mental state. Physically it could mean that in future if she wants to have a baby she will have difficulty conceiving. And she may have difficulty sustaining relationships and may turn to drink or drug abuse to help her cope.’

There is no good link between past abortion and future ability to have a baby. Neither will getting an abortion mean you can’t sustain relationships or become a junkie. It’s just all complete nonsense. In place of calling these people out for their repeated nonsense, I would like to suggest a new form of punctuation which I will call “the slap”. It looks like ❢ (that’s HTML entity ❢ or heavy exclamation mark ornament if you want to use it) and should be used like a more flexible version of Wikipedia’s [citation needed].

‘[Abortion] can be very detrimental to their mental state. ❢ Physically it could mean that in future if she wants to have a baby she will have difficulty conceiving. ❢ And she may have difficulty sustaining relationships ❢ and may turn to drink or drug abuse to help her cope. ❢’

It means something like:

• No,just stop it
• You made that up didn’t you?
• This is fraudulent nonsense
• You’ve been rebuked for telling this lie before

…and so on. It’s not a very subtle tool but it’s immensely satisfying. I’m beginning to feel that such people deserve only ridicule.

Is there a meaningful difference between

• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it will give them autism
• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it promotes promiscuous sex

And having asked that, what do you think about compulsory vaccination? I haven’t thought about it yet and I’m ready for bed. Comments please!

A wee while back Rowan Williams got in a bit of trouble with large parts of the thinking world for, amongst other things, saying evolutionary biology was some kind of Dawkinsian cult which wanted to kill all believers. Well, something absurd was certainly reported in the press (which is the same thing, right?).

I’ve given up trying to decide if accurate reporting by newspapers is just a hoped-for ideal that has never been attained, or whether we currently just have a fine crop of journalists who (to paraphrase Terry Pratchett) use truth more as a reference point than as a shackle. Instead, what I can do is find out what he actually said. All the archbishop’s speeches, essays and similar productions appear on his official website eventually. And the official transcript (and the original audio recording) for this Faith and Science speech is now available.

First I’d like to present what Rowan Williams said on the day:

First of all there is the extension of Darwinian theory beyond straightforward biology and genetics. The heart of the conflict between faith and science as it’s frequently presented these days is no longer a simple stand-off between what people might regard as two rival accounts of how the world came to be.

Immediately we can see that, though he later refers to neo-Darwinism, he is not talking about “straightforward biology and genetics”. A curious claim, like saying “I’d like to talk about ice cream — by which I don’t mean the frozen cream dessert or non-dairy equivalents”.

Rowan Williams may be guilty of many things, but clarity is not one of them.

The transcript, however, includes a small aside intended to clarify the matter of his poor wording. I just wanted to leave it out first in order to give you a good idea of what the original audience would have heard. This is what the transcript says, with my emphasis:

First of all there is the extension of Darwinian theory beyond straightforward biology and genetics. [Note: This extension of the theory is sometimes loosely called ‘Neo-Darwinism’; but this is potentially confusing, as this term is more strictly applied to the fusion of Darwin’s original theory with Mendelian genetics. I did not avoid this confusion in the original version of this lecture.] The heart of the conflict between faith and science as it’s frequently presented these days is no longer a simple stand-off between what people might regard as two rival accounts of how the world came to be.

So, in this small aside he has admitted to being foolish and unclear, by redefining perfectly good terms. Fair enough. He goes on:

In spite of all the fuss about creation science versus evolution, that’s actually not where the intellectual energy of the debate lies. The real issue is in this extension of Darwinian principle and theory into an entire theory of culture and intellectual life. This is a vision fairly regularly reiterated by Professors Dawkins and Dennett and it deserves a moment’s explication.

What he’s talking about here is memetics. That’s what it looks like. (Richard Dawkins came up with the word, though he hasn’t done much research into it since it was mentioned in The Selfish Gene. I’m not sure about Daniel Dennett but in the couple of lectures of his I have seen he mentioned memes a bit.) Why Williams ever thought “neo-Darwinism” was a good label for this I’ll never understand. He may have been thinking of Universal Darwinism but I don’t think that’s accurate either.

He suggests that “science” (or maybe just that evil Dawkins fellow) have been concocting fairy stories about the world and letting the stories run away with themselves. They have not paying attention to the evidence. This is a curious argument since it doesn’t reflect the reality of (visible) academic research into memes or the attention that is paid to them. As far as I can tell, memetics as an active research area is dead at the moment. The only Journal of Memetics — not even a paper one at that, just an online publication — has been closed for business for at least three years now. This is not quite the threatening body of science the archbishop makes it out to be.

The whole speech seems rather pedestrian in the end. If you were to replace every instance of ‘Darwinism’ with ‘memetics’ then it would make more sense but it still wouldn’t say more. Susan Blackmore, who is mentioned in the speech as a “follower” of Dawkins (ah, the science-as-religion canard, where would we be without you?), raises most of these arguments in her own book on memes. They are not new to the people interested in the field. The remainder seem to be ordinary philosophical musings about reductionism and so on, or the realisation that popular views of genetics (a “gene for X”) are not very accurate. In any case, there is nothing actually show-stopping in his speech, and no obvious connection to faith.

Anyway, I’m getting a wee bit off the point. In short, Rowan Williams did not call biology a fairy story: he called memetics a fairy story. Though in the process he did admit that Christianity was a fairy story, which was a surprising point. Why did the press not quote that bit so widely? Maybe it’s old news by now.

This is just a rainbow of hilarious (yeah, I went that far):

Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term “lesbian”.

To think that there are genuinely straight Lesbians out there, and lesbian Lesbians too. Or is that Lesbian lesbians?

Either way, maybe this is the kind of thing the EU protected name committees should get involved in. You can’t have proper champagne unless it’s made in the Champagne region — and you can’t have proper lesbians unless they come from Lesbos! Ha, next I’m envisioning someone taking a pornographer to court for fraudulently labelled goods…

Still, the ambiguity must do wonders for their tourism. But finding websites for local companies must be a real pain.

At the moment I’m reading The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore and quite enjoying it. It’s deeper and more thought-provoking than I had originally thought it would be.

The idea that seems most appealing is expansion on the notion of memes as parasitic replicators that Dawkins first uses in his description in The Selfish Gene. It’s certainly true that many ideas are both extremely common and dangerous to our survival. Genetic evolution on its own doesn’t seem to explain the popularity of these ideas.

To what genetic end, for example, do men and women lock themselves in big buildings away from the public and the opposite sex? And yet monks and nuns are a fairly common occurrence throughout history. There are many other examples — honour killings come to mind as being a particularly absurd one. Infanticide is fairly common in the wild if a parent can’t spare resources to keep a new-born alive. But killing your own offspring because they have the audacity to become independent?

And yet there are plenty of examples in biology where one life form can pervert the actions of another to its own end. We sneeze out the cold virus because that helps the virus spread. Ants can be infected by fungus and made to climb to the highest point around before dying. The fungus then bores its way out of the dead ant’s head and spores from this vantage point. Why did the ant climb? Because the fungus did something — I don’t know what — to make it.

It helps the genes of the parasite if the host can be controlled to do its bidding — and these actions may be dangerous to the host. And so the notion of memes as parasites seems all the more compelling — as replicators which don’t care about your survival or that of your line. It only matters that the meme spreads to the population.

And so the meme for shutting yourself away from other people spreads for its own sake and not for yours (or your genes’). Or the meme for killing your daughters spreads (by imitation, by oppression, by proxy) even though it frustrates the efforts of your genes to propagate themselves.

Some memes, like some parasites or infections, can probably be too dangerous. They could kill off the host before spreading. Think about the shortest-lived but most violent infections which inspire books and movies — viruses like Ebola and Marburg. They tend to debilitate their hosts before the infection can spread very far (though not as quickly as in the movies, of course…). And so, I think, might some very powerful memes. Maybe a suicide cult could be considered in this category — a meme-infection with a predefined cut-off point. (Also note that the general concept of suicide cults outlives the active participants, by being recorded in books, films or oral history. Like Ebola has a reservoir of carriers outside the human population, waiting to reinfect at any opportunity, so might the right type of person start another suicide cult.)

The idea seems interesting — I’m keen to see how the idea can be applied to other concepts in the rest of the book. I will definitely see if such a memetic approach can reveal anything new about people.

Last week in The Herald:

Pupils show a lack of interest in computer studies

University students are being used to help rekindle interest in computing science courses in Scottish schools amid concerns for the future of the subject.

… The difficulty for teachers and local authorities stems from the difference between computing studies and ICT, the latter being more common in schools. Computing studies deals with technical aspects of computers and technology, while ICT teaches pupils the user side of technology.

This was certainly the case when I was at school — computing was taught by people who had no apparent understanding of the subject beyond the use of application software. So that was what we learned. Certainly nothing of the mathematics, programming or rich history of the field. (I started Standard Grade computing but dropped it after a couple of weeks when I read through the past papers and realised I stood a good chance of passing the two-year course without study.)

A day or so after that article in The Herald, two responses appeared on the letters page. The first, from the University of Edinburgh’s school liaison in the Informatics department:

Policy-makers at all levels need to understand that being able to “use” Microsoft Word or Google doesn’t make you a computer expert — it merely makes you just another consumer. If we want our children to be prepared for a better future than as readily replaceable call-centre fodder, then we need to understand that the wielders of tools are always under the control of the creators of tools, and that ICT is not computer science.

I don’t recall seeing the situation summarised with such clarity and conciseness before. This is exactly the problem (and what’s more, the problem isn’t even limited to computing or to Scotland).

What really iced the cake for me was the second letter on the subject that day, from a teacher at my old school. Mark Tennant wasn’t around when I studied there but he obviously knows what he’s talking about, and highlights some alarming turns:

Faced with falling numbers in a department that requires costly equipment and resources to run, it is hardly surprising that head teachers are choosing to close computing departments. I would, however, implore them not to take the easiest option, but rather work with the departments to re-invigorate their computing courses for pupils, right from the start of secondary school.

Even contemplating closing down computing departments seems horrifying from my view — but then, if the subject they teach is as dull as Mr Tennant makes out, what merit is there in keeping them open? It seems clear that the people in charge (of the curriculum and of the individual schools) don’t realise what computing should be about.

I wrote to Mr Tennant (tracked him down via his blog) to thank him for his letter and to ask him how I might help. He says (I hope he doesn’t mind being quoted):

If you are wanting to help out with the campaign then the best thing you can do is make some noise — make sure that you respond to any articles in the press, write to your MSP etc. Broadly, there are three messages we are trying to get across.

1. There is a difference between computing and ICT skills, and both are important to have in schools,

2. The computing curriculum is outdated and contains irrelevant content, but we aim to address this through “Curriculum For Excellence”

3. Head Teachers are limiting pupil’s options if they remove computing from their schools, and parents should be very concerned.

I will be writing to my MSP about this. If you feel as strongly I recommend you do the same. You can find out exactly who that is by inserting your postcode or address on the Scottish Parliament website.

Things you can do no problem at all:

• Stand at the cooker, laptop in one hand for reading email, idly stirring soup with the other hand.
• Playing Tux Racer on the sofa.

Things that will take some setting up:

• Connecting up to router console port because there does not seem to be any terminal software in the default repositories.

I have a conundrum to lay out. Or at least, a question which seems to require some nuance in answering.

One the one hand, it’s poor form to rebut an argument without some familiarity with it. Recently Mark Ravenhill wrote a terrible piece about how “Richard Dawkins’ secular army must be stopped or future generations will be denied a source of inspiration” (that’s a direct quote, believe it or not) at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. It’s painfully obvious that the guy hasn’t read anything of what Dawkins has written on religion — he erects and burns straw men with gay abandon. Most of those projected opinions are the opposite of what Dawkins states in his book. And it’s not the first time people have attacked his work at length without bothering to read or understand it. (Mary Midgley’s review of The Selfish Gene is a classic in this genre; you can read Dawkins’ extended rebuttal to it here.)

On the other hand, it’s a common argument from pedlars of pseudoscience and the like to claim they will reveal all the proper scientific details in their book. And refuse to be drawn on the matter unless you read their book. Which is to say, buy their book.

So the question is, what kind of argument is “read this book!” and should it be used with sincerity? When is it valid? In the first case, it’s obvious that if you’re criticising someone’s views you should have at least a reasonable understanding of those views. And yet many people will hide behind that, using the cost and effort as a shield for their weak arguments. I’m not spending twenty quid on Amazon every time I run across a crank with “revolutionary” ideas on physics, medicine or what-have-you. I feel that this doesn’t let them off the hook.

The middle ground exists, when the arguments are large and complex enough to fill a book but the proponent tries to condense them. If someone writes, say, a blog post to describe their ideas, is it reasonable to attack the contents of this post only — is it valid to argue against just the presented arguments? It seems disingenuous to think otherwise — there is no visible difference between someone who presents all of a poor argument and someone who presents the weakest part of a good argument. Both can claim their ideas get better explanation in their book. Buy my book!

I feel a certain degree of unease when I see people use this gambit, whichever side I agree with. It doesn’t help anyone’s understanding to say “you don’t know anything, away and read This Book”. I don’t like to see it used even when I agree with the people who use it. This may be an inherent dislike of unfree information, which is probably related. It’s okay to make a claim if you’re willing to reveal all the information that supports that claim. That seems as good a guiding principle as any.