Year: 2017

#Brexit Negotiations Stalemate? The Way Out.

Can’t help feeling a take on the current stalemate is being missed.

(I’m a strong remainer, and see continuing with #Brexit as a damage-limitation / opportunity-maximisation exercise. Referenda? Don’t get me started. But rather than be that bystander wanting to start from somewhere else, surely the best route out of this mess is obvious:)

That is, obviously we have no real knowledge of the actual quality of negotiation dialogues between UK and EU teams, it would be mad to expect the public reporting to reflect to reality or totality of what’s going on – that’s the nature of any negotiation.

The question of whose court the ball is in is irrelevant too, as is the idea that “no deal” is some take-it-or-leave-it walk-away option. So, how about this:

Whatever the content of the proposals (offers) we’ve made so far to the EU, there will ALWAYS be the devil in more detail not yet tabled explicitly. All we need to know is if the EU rejects or disagrees with anything – at the level of detail – we’ve so far proposed. “No comment” is no disagreement; “Ah, but what about detail xyz” is no disagreement. The ball is always in our court unless we receive counter proposals.

Pretty sure all the existing agreements we need to honour or change – content and financial – will be the problem of many separate UK institutions and organisations, not just central government and its ministries. That’s where the detail will be resolved. The less detail agreed by the central UK team the better surely? Even the legal standards and court-jurisdiction stuff.

Obviously – as I’ve said since Cameron first announced the mad idea – the whole thing has always been a waste of time and effort and risk to good-will and good-order, but the worst use of that effort would be to have a central team attempt to commit to badly negotiated details on a 52/48 mandate.

The Tensions Between Science and Psychology – recent bookmarks

A collection of interesting links I’ve had bookmarked for a while:

Yaïr Pinto in Aeon: When you split the brain, do you split the person?
The Divided Brain is an important topic to understand better, too easily dismissed amid misunderstood myths.

Ben Medlock in Aeon: The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines.
Agreed. Too much talk of “AI” is simply hype for machine automation, whereas conscious intelligence is unlikely to evolve without life. Part of the hype downplaying sentience.

Chris Frith in Aeon: Our illusory sense of agency has a deeply important social purpose.
Again, part of the mad campaign to downplay sentient agency or free-will as illusory.

Bret Stephens in NYT: The Dying Art of Disagreement.
Another regular topic here on Psybertron.

Daily Nous piece: Scientism’s Threat to Philosophy.
And another one.

Robby Berman in The Big Think: We Survive Because Reality May Be Nothing Like We Think It Is
The because is a novelty, but reality-as-mental-construction is true but misinterpreted-as-therefore-being-unreal.

Andrew Masterson in Cosmos (originally linked and shared at the Grauniad): Physicists find we’re not living in a computer simulation. The Matrix myth debunked again too. Reality IS a computation, there is no programme between us and it.

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Starts with a Bang in Forbes: Is The Inflationary Universe A Scientific Theory? Not Anymore.
Good to see the inflationary fudge debunked. The fudge being caused and persisted by science’s denial of the significance of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

Philip Ball in Quanta Magazine: Quantum Theory Rebuilt From Simple Physical Principles.
Reconstructing quantum physics from simpler principles that make it possible to understand the weirdness including several information-based reconstructions. Integrated Information Theory looks most interesting, some previously collected links here, as well as several Carlo Rovelli references. [Post Note – another Philip Ball piece “The Trouble With Scientists.“]

David Lucas in Quillette: E Pluribus Unum: Out of Many, One.
Why hypocrisy is vital. Wisdom being the ability to hold conflicting ideas, and find integration in their whole rather than choice between them. Lucas uses art to illustrate this wisdom.  [Etymology … Art > “rt” > arete & craft ]

Hedda Hassel Mørch in Nautilus: Is Matter Conscious? –  Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.
I’ve had a draft post in progress for some time, but still unpublished. Reacted to the click-bait headline in the title question, but was obviously drawn to implicit truth of the sub-title.

And, slightly off the general umbrella topic, but interesting none-the-less:
Kevin Hartnett in Quanta Magazine: A Unified Theory of Randomness
But, underlying the evolution of all others.

Accelerationism – Careful what you wish for

Had this Grauniad piece bookmarked for a couple of weeks:

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in.

As usual the headline is misleading click-bait. Anyone could have predicted that ubiquitous speed-of-light comms was going to “accelerate” things in general – Kondratiev, Kuhn and many more already did. In fact my whole agenda has been about understanding and dealing with the fact the acceleration in comms continues to exacerbate long-standing problems with humans evolving fast enough to keep ahead of the technology curve. Simple fact is our problems – in acting best on what we know – are made worse faster than solutions can be made better.

The piece is about more than predicting the situation, more than the headline.
This paragraph seems a pretty honest statement of what Accelerationism really is:

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified — either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled. They often believe that social and political upheaval has a value in itself.

Obviously I’d agree there is no point resisting performance acceleration in every computer-aided application. The only moderating test should be appropriateness; recognising effectiveness (and unintended consequences) as well as basic efficiency. Narrowly defined efficiency isn’t everything.

Where I part company with the accelerationists is in the idea that the whole trend should be encouraged to accelerate as fast as possible. Sure we should embrace opportunities for “fast failures” wherever we can, they are the best learning opportunities provided people are actually listening, understanding and reflecting.

But these fast learning opportunities have to be in the context of a (relatively) stable background. This is basic evolutionary theory – that mutation at the genetic / epigenetic level can only ever be constructive in a phenotypic population of high “fecundity and fidelity”. That is conservatism (with a small c) – most things in life most often need to follow established patterns. Once the rate of mutation is too great – most mutations are degenerate – there ceases to be a reproducing population.

All change and no stability is chaotic anarchy, a useful precursor to revolution, but not conducive to progressive evolution. Not surprisingly accelerationists are explicitly quite happy to smash the establishment system(s) – it is their primary intention.

Upheaval has value – value in learning to better make better changes faster – but the upheaval is not an end in itself, except to the anarchist. All opportunity and no establishment. What we should be doing is getting to grips with learning and understanding what is happening and how to achieve the right balance between change and stability, and the mechanisms to best moderate the processes in free-democratic societies.

What we are agreed on is that, right now, the speed of communication is faster than humanity’s ability to learn. The last thing we need is to treat the whole of humanity as one enormous opportunity for a fast failure. We are not a repeatable experiment.

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Interestingly whilst the above link was sat on my desktop, Taleb posted this last weekend:

The Cult of Youth #Lab2017

Worrying trend at #Lab2017.

Reported on Newsnight last night and Angela Rayner interviewed on @BBCR4Today this morning. Corbyn / McDonnell emphasising – and McCluskey reinforcing – succession-planning in their government strategy, citing the younger female appointees to the shadow front-bench as part of that strategy. Rebecca Long-Bailey, Dawn Butler and Angela Rayner for example. So far so good. I’m better than good with that. Good with them as individuals too, from what little I know them.

What I’m not good with is the spin – the meme – “look at this uneducated girl from working-class background succeeding in making it to the front bench“. Not good with Rayner’s grasp of the English language either, given her education brief, but hey, she wasn’t my reaction to the original spin.

  • Great for hope, and hope has value – part of the anybody can achieve anything fallacy – but still spurious. They “succeeded” because of the political choice.
  • Great for gender balance – no buts.
  • Not great for the cult of youth. A balance is good, as is the “blooding” of succession-planning-exposure, but wisdom comes from living.
  • Not great for the “proud to be thick – I failed my Maths O-level” brigade. If education is just about qualifications for a job, who needs education if you’ve got a (good) job? And, if experts know no better, who needs education? Education and experience, knowledge and wisdom are to be valued.

Uneducated and inexperienced youth is another populist gimmick. Another on top of the whole Momentum-youth-and-personality-cult of Corbynism generally. Populism stinks in grown-ups.

Non-Biological Lamarckism and Residual Scepticism?

I expressed some scepticism at Massimo Pigliucci’s “One more time: no, epigenetics is not Lamarckism.”

Mary Paniscus also expressed some scepticism at the essay, but the difference is that she knows her genetic biology a lot better than I do. I need to clarify my residual interest in Lamarckism.

Firstly Massimo (and Mary) are correct. Epigenetics is not an opportunity – an excuse – to bring Lamarckism into biological evolution. Genetic or epigenetic, however and whenever the mutation occurs in relation to the environment, inheritance is “atomic” via the cells involved at conception / inception. There is no sense in which the mutation is in any direct sense adaptive in positive response to the environmental situation that may have caused the mutation. They are generally negative (maladaptive) damage to the existing genetic / epigenetic state, and can only turn out to be positive to individuals of the species (phenotype) in the long run. At the direct causal level, the evolutionary change is only randomly related to the mutation.

[Aside – such mutation cannot be inherently “positive”, not until the phenotype can value it as an “affordance” providing an advantageous opportunity to the species. All mutations that don’t wreck the reproductive cycle, and all historically preserved mutations, have that potential, but it’s the behaviour in the phenotype generations that turns the otherwise random – generally maladaptive – mutation into an evolved trait.]

That selection from random variation is the essence of Darwinism, so there is no sense in which it is Lamarckian, even if the mutation arises from environmental exposure. That’s true both genetically (DNA-based) and epigenetically (generic-atomic) anyway.

My scepticism is on two levels beyond biology because (a) Massimo is a philosopher and (b) my interests are epistemological and human. Biology is only part of science and science is only a part of this rational interest.

  • Firstly, causation itself. The significance in which it makes any sense to say “this event caused this outcome” when processes operate indirectly across many levels. As Mary says, phenotypic evolution is always indirectly related to genetic (or epigenetic) mutation. (The epigenetic / genetic confusion – opportunity for critics to slip-in spurious agendas – arises only from the “atomic” naming problem – see previous post on this. Words matter.)
    .
  • Secondly, in non-biological evolution (in Dennett’s design spaces) dealing with sentient and intelligent beings, not all changes are random, many are intentional and purposeful (if you’re not in denial of free-will, that is)(*). The situation varies from (0,0,0) to (1,1,1) Darwinian. The non-Darwinian end of that vector might usefully be thought of as positively Lamarckian – adaptive learning? Here, it’s just a word, a label. Neither Darwin nor Lamarck was anywhere close to the mechanisms of how all these processes happen, nor were they thinking beyond biological species when they proposed their ideas. No reason to demonise Lamarck just because Darwin was right.

So, neither of these points invalidates Massimo’s headline. Epigenetics is NOT an excuse to slip Lamarkism back into biological evolution. My scepticism simply expresses the fact that philosophically, beyond biology, there is more to this.

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[(*) And remember, even genetic (and epigenetic) changes can be engineered by imperfect human intention.]

Neuro-Linguistic-Programming and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Hearing a news story this morning from BBC’s science correspondent Tom Feilden, apologetically reporting a study finding value in Neuro-Linguistic-Programming (NLP) behind treatment for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME) …

Here the BBC R4 Today clip.
Here the actual Lancet-published paper here.
Grauniad story here (doesn’t mention NLP).

NLP suffers from confusion with natural language programming in the AI / Technology space, but is in fact a thoroughly discredited marketing packaging of 1970’s life-style neuro-bollox. At least that’s the story you’d get from Wikipedia.

Scientifically discredited in the lack of repeatable objective evidence to support it, that is. That doesn’t mean it’s not real or true or valuable to careful practitioners. Let’s face it science is prepared to discredit the reality of human consciousness itself, so it’s unlikely to support a method of psycho-talking-therapy that targets behaviour modification through choice of language subconsciously affecting conscious action. CFS/ME as an illness has always suffered from scepticism as essentially a psycho-somatic condition, the subjective feeling of a disease with little causal explanation of any physical condition. So much “mental illness” and explanations of the sub-conscious relationships with physical behaviour and competence could be considered scientifically doubtful.

Frankly, at the common sense level, NLP is simply a talking therapy. However it works, it’s good to talk. Better to understand limitations to the science of using it, with care.

One problem is the packaging as a “thing” with a name, as if it is objectively well-defined. A recurring theme here. The other problem is that however well or badly defined, the model can have metaphorical and analytical value, often a checklist or taxonomy of issues, but will obviously fail if its values are codified prescriptively – like some magic recipe.

NLP suffers all of these problems. What’s in a name?

  • Neuro? Definitely a neuro-bollox prefix for anything “mental” these days, irrespective of how brain stuff supports mental stuff. But of course it does, unless you’re a consciousness-denying scientist that is. No-one using NLP needs to explain how the brain works, simply show that careful use of language in talking therapies can subconsciously and positively influence physical behaviour. (In that sense, nudge depends on similar thinking. The whole of psycho-therapy suffering problems trying to satisfy its own demands to be scientific, to be treated as a science.)
  • Linguistic? Well OK, we’re dealing with the language of communication. One out of three ain’t great.
  • Programming? Hmmm. This is a consequence of the will-to-systematise (and sell) the magic TLA recipe. Psycho-therapeutic modification of feelings and behaviour – mind-games – are never going to be programming when dealing with real humans and not machines.

I see Castaneda is cited as being an influence on NLP – guaranteed to attract the hippy-new-age-alt-lifestyle-bollox reaction. He he.

Also interesting that lack of “NICE” accreditation for NLP is also cited. Another symptom of overly scientific management expectations in public organisations.

Listening to the news item on BBC R4 Today. Both critics and practitioners acknowledging “flakey” nature of NLP basis. An obvious scientific issue is the discounting the credibility of subject testimony when dealing with any “mental” condition, but use it we must with care when we’re dealing with how people “feel”. Science is almost by definition in denial of the subjective. You need to be an expert on the subtleties to understand what makes good science in this domain.

The real bollox is the expectation of shoe-horning all aspects of human life into some mechanistic scientific mould. We humans are flakey and science does have its limits.

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[Post Notes:

Expert reactions here.

All I’m adding to this debate is it whilst it is pseudoscience, that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable or useful, especially if you’re open minded, understand how to treat the myriad of subtleties, and the procedure is not being spun simplistically for dishonest commercial reasons. See @DeeVeeBee contribution.

And as well as the original discrediting of NLP – commercially interested pseudoscience – LP itself has been debunked and challenged recently. Some of these are referred to in the expert reactions above, but provided here thanks to @ssppeerroo

Skeptics Dictionary debunking of LP
Advertising standards adjudication.
Original promotional material (since taken down from the web).

My own points unchanged. About Pseudoscience / NLP / LP / CFS / ME generally, not about LP & ME specifically.]

Asymptote to Asymptote

Over the course of the last couple of days BBCFour TV showed:

Tilda Swinton (June 2017) as Gertrude Bell in Letters from Baghdad

@RoryStewartUK (2010) Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia Episode 1 and Episode 2

These caught my attention because apart from her association with T E Lawrence, Bell is of local interest and I’m guessing showing the one provided an opportunity to re-show the other, older documentary. The significance of “the Middle East” as a ubiquitous issue for UK, US & European politics is reason enough to take the lessons of Bell and Lawrence seriously. Like Rory I’ve been fascinated by TEL since childhood, read just about everything by or about him and visited UK and Jordanian locations of his life. Bell I’ve only known by association and general knowledge until recently moving back to living not far from her Redcar home.

In fact it was that moving around, US and Norway and back to the UK that meant I missed Rory’s documentary first time around. It was 2012/2013 before I picked-up on Alan Little’s Lawrence Man & Myth and Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia and the fact that US-led operations in Iraq were drawing on TEL’s contributions to working with Arabs, and taking them perhaps too prescriptively rather than simply learning his lessons.

Somehow since then I also managed to miss the critically panned Werner Herzog / Nicole Kidman Queen of the Desert

Anyway, this is just a link-gathering post for now. The Asymptote to Asymptote title is a quote from TEL used by Rory illustrating TEL’s overly flowery classical language in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was a classics scholar of course, and I still find his poetic writing very relevant – both content and style – to my epistemological and humanist agendas, despite the original interest like everyone else in the flawed visionary hero.  It was also instrumental in my seeing barriers broken between the practical military engineering and a man of letters – in some small way not unlike C P Snow’s Third Culture.

Full on-line copy of Seven Pillars here.

The irony is that the choice of the word asymptote in the quote is self-deprecating in a later quote where he admits he’s using it inaccurately in its true mathematical sense. He is of course talking about the perennial swing between binary extremes that dominates any more subtle discourse. More truth in literature than scientific fact.

Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes.

They inhabited superlatives by choice.