Lost Worlds

If That's How "We" Are Then Include Me Out

In this week's London Review of Books, the culture critic John Lanchester writes about, and around, global warming. He declares:

Electric light and power, and television, and computers, and fridges, not to menton cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust; we don't know how they work but we're happy to benefit from them.

Who is "we"? I am neither a professional scientist nor an engineer but I understand perfectly well how these things work. All of them. I suppose Mr Lanchester means, by "we", people of a liberal humanities background who overwhelmingly occupy the media and most of politics; people who not infrequently pronounce upon a science or technology of which they know little and understand less, while proudly waving their ignorance as a badge of their refined sensibilities and social standing. In a world which is run more and more through technology, the sort of chap who says "Oh, I barely know how to turn the damn thing on, let alone how it works" seems less like the elevated being he imagines himself to be, and more like an idiot, in both the modern and the ancient Athenian senses of the word.

I suspect Mr Lanchester knows perfectly well how his stuff works and is just pretending he doesn't, in order not to seem common or blokeish.

But that approach leads him to make remarks like: "there is one school of thought, and a few nutters".

Tell that to Copernicus or any other scientists ("nutters") involved in serious paradigm shift. The truth about science is that, first, there's only a model, which it's everyone's duty to throw rocks at to see if it falls over, and, second, science being emphatically not a democracy, it's perfectly possible for one person to be right and everyone else wrong.

To us caring, egalitarian relativists, that may seem tough. But it's a tough world, and may do for us yet.

Technorati Tags: culture, global warming, infantilization, journalism, media

Eat Shit; 110,000,000,000 Flies Can't Be Wrong

The oldest trick in the Dud Logic Toolbook is confusing correlation and causality. The climate is changing: check. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are rising: check. Mankind dumps a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: check. Ice core studies show high carbon dioxide levels in previous periods of rapid climate change: check. Therefore mankind's carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for climate change: hold on a moment.

There is nothing in that dodgy multi-part non-syllogism to justify drawing that conclusion. So to concentrate our resources on reducing our CO2 emissions may be barking up the wrong tree or, just possibly, barking up no tree at all. A good idea to do something rather than to do nothing? Yes. Better still to consider the worst-case scenario (as they say)? Yes again.

What we should be doing, therefore, is planning for damage limitation, because if climate change is nothing, or little, to do with us, and everything, or mostly, to do with nature, then all hell is going to break loose and we had better be prepared. Save the Earth? No. The Earth will be fine. It has shrugged off bigger species than us in the past. Wehat we mean is: Save Our Own Skins. And reducing CO2 may, of course, help; but let's not persuade ourselves that it's a cure or even a cause.

Writing in The Times today, Mary Ann Sieghart addresses herself to this question but floats elegantly around the point. She accuses the complacent of "denial", but announces in a rather de haut en bas tone:

You see, there comes a point at which you have to admit that 95 per cent of the world's scientists can't be wrong.

This betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is that it's almost shocking to find it the pages of a great national newspaper.

It's not just that science is emphatically not a democratic process. More crucially, it's that most of what Thomas Kuhn called "paradigm shift" has occurred, at least initially, against the received opinion of far more than 95 per cent of scientists. And, most crucially, that's how paradigm shift science has to occur, because the prevailing paradigm ("malaria is caused by bad air") is, by definition, what the great majority of scientists believe.

The Ibsenesque notion of the solitary scientist battling against mass prejudice is Romantic and unrepresentative of most scientific progress. But neither evolution by natural selection, nor the "deep time" against which it took place; neither Newtonian nor Einsteinian mechanics; neither heliocentricity nor electromagnetism nor the wave/particle duality of light: none of these represented the prevailing paradigm — or, to put it another way, all were cases where 95 per cent of scientists were most emphatically wrong.

This is, of course, because reality is often ambiguous. Copernican heliocentricity was opposed by natural philosophers who said "Well, it certainly looks as though the sun goes around the Earth," to which the best reply was "So what would it look like if the opposite were true?"

But the difference between scientists and politicians is that politics is the art of the possible, whereas science is the understanding of the actual. Which is why scientists, once persuaded, are happy to say "We were wrong".

Richard Dawkins tells of the "elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford" who firmly and persistently maintained that the Golgi Apparatus -- a part of cellular micro-anatomy -- was an artefact. "One Monday, the [visiting lecturer] was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said -- with passion -- 'My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.'" [1]

Can we imagine any politician, anywhere, ever, saying such a thing?

---
1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London, Bantam 2006, 283-4)

Technorati Tags: global warming, media, science, society

Drug Company Behaves Reasonably Well, Considering, But They Can Afford To

Won't remind anyone of the story of the widow's mite because I wouldn't want to detract from Bristol-Myers Squibb's donation to the World Aids Fund, which you can increase by lighting a candle. Beautifully-designed page, too; sometimes (but only sometimes) Flash is worth using. (Thanks to my good friend the drummer Timothy Bye -- move your ass, Gadd -- for pointing it out to me.)

Technorati Tags: Aids, Medicine, society

Ooh Look Ma, Big Brother's Got A New Computer.

Brian Hughes comments on my recent post about privacy:

Do you really think "the Government" has got nothing better to do than keep an eye on boring old farts like us? And how many people d'yer think they'll need to employ for the task?

Privacy? British Lower Middle Class invention circa 1908. Bah!

Fairly near the truth; The Invention of Privacy would be a good book for someone to write. Plenty of cultures don't even have the concept, even in Europe; Turkey, for example.

But it's not "the Government" who will be keeping an eye on us. It's the Government's computers. And that's a very different thing. Even now it can be quite chilling; have a look at this and see if you like it...

Technorati Tags: computing, society

You Can't Even Run, Never Mind Hide

Web 2.0 is all very well but what about Web 1984? We were discussing how long it would be before the whole of Britain reached the number-plate recognition camera tipping point: the moment at which all everybody's movements would be tracked every minute of every day. We all had different timescales, but agreed that it would certainly be by 2015. The wearied cry of the aged springs to the lips: "Thank God I won't be alive to see it." But (probably) I shall be and so will you.

The opposing cry of the terminally smug also leaps to mind: "The innocent have nothing to fear". It's the cry of the idiot through the ages -- idiot, that is, in the ancient Greek sense of one who absents himself from public life. And at its core lies a category mistake: that there is a direct link between "innocence" and "freedom". Not, I would argue, the case. There is a link between certain sorts of guilt and the removal, temporary or permanent, of freedom. But is "innocence" the necessary precondition for freedom? No. The necessary precondition is, as Thomas Jefferson observed, eternal vigilance.

Jefferson's remark may, in our present context, seem cynical. But government -- all government -- is less concerned with preserving our liberties than with extending its powers. Power is what drives individuals to put themselves forward as our rulers. As the late Auberon Waugh wrote, the desire to hold political office should in itself be enough to disqualify a man from holding it. This is not cynicism but experience.

Over the last decade or two, and under various propositions of allegedly unarguable benefit -- reducing road accidents, reducing crime, safeguarding "homeland security", deterring paedophiles, increasing our health, saving money, protecting intellectual property, maximising investor return -- we have allowed our freedoms to be eroded to the point, I suspect, of no return. Facial recognition technology coupled with search engines, data mining, data aggregation, communications interception, numberplate recognition technology, biometric ID cards, mobile phone triangulation, ATM and credit card tracking, just for starters, have led us to the point where cradle-to-grave, 24/7 monitoring of individual private citizens is an achievable reality. The only individuals who can remain outside the system are those who... remain outside the system. The very individuals who, according to the PR, these measures are designed to monitor.

It is the condition of the infant to be subject to continuous surveillance. Web 1984 is the web from a different angle: not the web we travel, bringing with it infinite riches in a little room, but the web as the fly sees it: a monitored reticulation which can trap when it chooses, the fat black spider of Government poised in a corner, calibrating the vibrations and poised to spring.

Privacy is now more endangered than ever before. We need to reconsider what we mean by it. Is privacy a fundamental right, or is it a privilege which may be rescinded incrementally by governments? At the moment we are losing it by default, nor is it from our failure to make ourselves heard, because we are not even shouting.

Technorati Tags: media, society

Give It To Me, Big Montage

The Independent on Sunday. My journalistic alma mater. October 9th, 2005, page 10. "The lonely minister, the blonde and the honey trap". David Blunkett and a rodent-faced estate agent. You know the story. And there's the photograph of the two of them together, she standing in front of him in a Little Black Dress, circled fist at Blunkett crotch-height as though miming a quick mercy-toss. Ugh.

But wait. She may be in a Little Black Dress, but he is in a suit, overcoat, and scarf. Is he preternaturally sensitive to the cold? Is she warmed by the inner fires of lust? Or greed? Or—for we must think the unthinkable— could the IoS have (I hardly know how to say this) faked the picture?

They faked the picture. Look closely and you can see the tell-tale borders of a piece of incompetent PhotoShopping, done by an intern who knows not of blending, the healing brush or the <feather> setting.

Truth in journalism. A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, sixteen: "This newspaper is telling a lie and, what's worse, isn't even bothering to tell it convincingly."

Technorati Tags: journalism, media, UK, politics