Month: February 2014

I was thinking this hearing the news stories around bitcoin going maintream, and noticed this post on LinkedIn today.

“the bitcoin industry embraces what it was built to avoid – rules and regulation”

Sooner or later every (would be) anarchist discovers “we” chose governance because it’s good for “us”. You listening Russell Brand?

As business advice – clearly comes across pretty cheesy to quote “Desiderata” as your inspiration – you only have to look at the comment thread in reaction to this LinkedIn post.

But as I’m always saying:

“What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?”

[No idea if Angela Ahrendts and her LinkedIn persona are for real – LinkedIn is a weird place, but who knows?]

London scenes blended from 1850’s / 1950’s to present day. Nice app.

Not sure about the “battleground” metaphor, but otherwise sounds about right. It’s a plug for tonight’s Horizon documentary featuring Daniel Kahneman on how we really make decisions. My governance agenda:

Post doc notes : Hmmm. Too much emphasis on “error and mistake”, too much emphasis on error relative to some “perfect” rational model – assumes perfect rational is best or right answer. Wrong, or wrong to assume necessarily right. Deviation from perfectly rational sure, but not “error”.

The loss aversion trait is only wrong if the “long term (mean) stats” are what really matter to the person making the decision as opposed to some hypothetical (non-existent) average rational agent. In practice we do NOT face an unmediated stream of repeat opportunities – all other things being equal (which they never will be).

Same comments I made when I read Kahneman originals.

Can’t believe no-one actually mentioned the bird-in-the-hand adage – it really is worth-two-in-the-bush. A loss DOES have negative worth two (or more) times greater than a prospective gain. Wisdom (and truth) in old wives rules of thumb. (Of course in some “perfect” markets, statistical long term population calcs do matter – but not in many real human situations. – Hence (macro) economics Nobel prize, but not individual human psychological.)

Kahneman’s work is very good in researching and understanding how the mind really does make decisions, but applied qualitative interpretations are as doubtful as the affects he documents. Come in Mr Quine.

One to watch later from IAI TV.
Now having watched:

Polly Higgins – all true, but mostly irrelevant, except the basic point “we” must take our responsibility for the planet, a duty of care.

Bjorn Lomborg – hits the point. A polarising debate between doomsayers and deniers is the last thing we need. Ultimately, like all anthropogenic activity, its technology-driven economic activity that changes things, laws and tax-funding regulate and incentivise but don’t solve.

Crispin Tickell – Anthropocene concept, OK. Climate change one issue amongst many – 20/20 hindsight – too non-committal (…. and why we never get anything done, says Bjorn).

Nigel Lawson – Climate change not the issue, it’s ever changing. Many of the warming effects, of emissions, greenhouse effects and conversion of fossil energy to low grade heat etc, are a reality, even if net global warming is an issue not worth debating. (Hmmm, Nigel vs Crispin enter into the gainsaying childish argument.)

Ho hum. No progress.

One for the “Everybody Wants a Revolution” pile.

The Limits of Non-Cooperation as a Strategy for Social Change

Civil disobedience is vital, but it is insufficient to transform society. A new science of cooperation illuminates the path ahead.

The strategy must be to achieve “solidarity” through collaboration. Resistance and revolution are mere tactics.

[Hat tip to Henry Gurr for the link.]

Reading Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God (2014)

Only read the first chapter The Limits of Enlightenment, but already finding lots of interest. In fact the style despite his usual sardonic wit is more academic paper (based on what was originally a lecture) with lots of referenced quotes to make his arguments. A couple of things to note for now:

For me, Gibbon’s “celebrated sentence”:

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrates as equally useful.” (Quoted previously).

For the MoQists:

“The two camps, rational and experiential, are for the most part speaking past each other”

“In one sense, feeling is the most incontrovertible of grounds, while in another sense it is a notoriously slippery one.”

Well – decided to go for a standard theme, so the formatting bugs seem resolved, as do the social media links, but still cannot find 13 years worth of uploaded images and media anywhere on the server.

Only solution looks like progressively re-finding and re-uploading each important image – quite a time-consuming chore – ho hum. [Update – on a first 80/20 pass I’ve re-attached the top 20% with 80% of the value. That will have to do for now – if you find any interesting images missing, let me know.]

Other minor item is to organise the page links in the header, since the standard theme simply defaults the top level pages, whereas I had manually linked pages beyond the WordPress-managed blog pages previously.

Sometimes the young are too creditably laid back. I still can hardly believe Loudon was under 30 when he wrote this:

I am a full fledged, grown-up adult
I’m tryin’ make a dent, tryin’ to get a result
I’m holed up in a Hollywood hotel suite
Tequila to drink and avocado to eat

They got all kinds of victories and lots of downfalls
They got drugs in the rugs and ghosts in the walls
Starlets in the lobby that can make a man drool
Blood on the curtains and a phone by the pool

Well I never did see so many TV stars
And I never did see so many rented cars
I never did see so many desperate eyes
And never did I hear so many bold faced lies

When I was ten years old, I was alive
In Benedict Canyon down on Hutton Drive
Well now I’m right back in my old backyward
And I’m tryin’ to get a billboard on the boulevard
I’m tryin’ to get a billboard on _ the _ bou _ le _ vard

Well I never thought I’d see the age of twenty-five
And it’s been twenty-eight years now that I’ve been alive
And in a matter of months I will be thirty years old
And the apprehension that I feel can hardly be told

I am a full fledged, grown-up adult
I’m tryin’ make a dent, tryin’ to get a result
I’m hold up in a Hollywood hotel suite
Tequila to drink and avocado to eat
Tequila to drink and avocado to eat

“Hollywood Hopeful”
Loudon Wainwright III  (1975)

Everyone must have ambition to make a dent,
by whatever means they choose to measure it.
We live in hope, otherwise, why bother?

I empathise with Jeremy Paxman squirming at the explanation of the value of a “year of code”. I support the year of code wholeheartedly, but let’s understand why it’s valuable, and recognise the bullshit in “create your own web-page as a business“.

As far back as 1972/73 I recorded schoolteacher / form-master Ester Pearson teaching us to code – Basic and early Fortran via teletype and punch-tape – he having switched to maths and computing from French and modern languages for the purpose. Bar a few weeks at university first year, I’ve never written a line of code, but I’ve published thousands of web-pages. I’m not proud of that particularly, but it’s a fact. [Not quite true, I did write script-based technical analysis and calculation routines and high-level simulation language code in my early engineering years too.]

The point is, I mentioned my old maths teacher last when I reviewed Dan Dennett’s “Intuition Pumps” – where Dennett presents his laws of computing and registry programming exercise – the very same exercise Pearson had taught us 40 years ago. As I said (and meant) then, it should be compulsory primary school education [See Note *].

I could also have mentioned ex-colleague Siobhan from back around 96/97 – on a project where we’d employed a developer to create an information management solution, not entirely successfully, when Siobhan announced she’d researched some programming courses and would we support her in doing one or more. I wasn’t sure of the direct applicability to our current job, but supported the educational initiative – what the hell, go for it. Sadly our immediate management at the time was explicitly against it – even rather scornful of the idea.

More recently my own younger son, working in a not specifically IT related business, spotted some opportunities to extend the functionality of basic geographic layout and design tools with some information linking and data driven functions – and it turned out he had an aptitude to execute the idea in scripted code. Useful functionally, and naturally I’m encouraging him to develop it further but not necessarily, at least not exclusively, for the immediate application value.

Coding – can represent a skill at some given situation in time, but the core point is not to be a skill !! “Apps” didn’t exist x years ago, in x years time they’ll be superseded by Gocs (or whatever) – something we’ve never heard of or predicted. Programming languages and tools are evolving as fast as technological possibilities. It’s not a skill that can necessarily be applied to employment at the end of a course, or at the end of 7 years education. It’s knowledge about what computation is, a transferrable concept like understanding how humans function.

So what is computation? It’s a fundamental concept about how the world works.

But do we have any better understanding of computing than the audiences who switched on to watch Ian McNaught-Davis in the 1980s? I somehow doubt it.

[* Note – The rules referred to are “The Seven Secrets of Computer Power” – six “laws” you can learn from the registry programming exercise, and a seventh that says there are no more laws to learn. On-line PDF version here, or here at Google Books, and subject to a few minor technical errata by Dennett.

[My most developed work-in-progress version as a teaching resource.]

• SECRET 1: Competence without Comprehension: Something – e.g., a register machine – can do perfect arithmetic without having to comprehend what it is doing.
• SECRET 2: What a number in a register stands for depends on the program that we have composed.
• SECRET 3: Since a number in a register can stand for anything, this means that the register machine can, in principle, be designed to “notice” anything, to “discriminate” any pattern or feature that can be associated with a number, or be different between any number of numbers.
• SECRET 4: Since a number can stand for anything, a number can stand for an instruction or an address.
• SECRET 5: All possible programs can be given a unique number as a name, which can then be treated as a list of instructions to be executed by a Universal machine.
• SECRET 6: All the improvements in computers since Turing invented his imaginary paper-tape machine are simply ways of making them faster.
• SECRET 7: There are no more secrets!

Note that these are the secret and incontrovertible conclusions, but the point is to learn (to believe and understand) them through the Registry Programming exercise. In practice of course, a real group of people in a practical time-scale for running the exercise will only actually learn the first couple directly empirically, but having got the simplicity of the principles, the rest follows inductively and can be demonstrated by progressively more elaborate computer-assisted simulation exercises – where interest is piqued.

Once interest is piqued, of course the student can go any number of ways into “hey, I get computing why don’t I learn to program what can be done with current tools and technologies?” to “hey, it’s intriguing how basic those rules are and independent of any clever 20th or 21st century technology; I wonder what that tells us about how information and knowledge works more generally in the world?” or “hey, if I put those two ideas together, maybe I could learn something about how information and computation (or knowledge and brains) are evolving?” or …. maybe, just think.

All of which presumes that wise education is at least partly aimed at learning to understand the workings of the world at large, the world of humans that is not some disembodied objective world, and not simply about knowledge, qualifications and skills directly aimed at only 1/3 of student’s future lives.

Enjoy.]