Random Thoughts

The Artist (film)

2012-01-09T20:37:00.000Z

I've just been to see 'The Artist'. It's a bit early to call 'the film of the year', but I can't remember the last time I enjoyed going to the pictures so much.

It's a modern silent black and white film, with (necessarily) a very simple story, but it made me think that something important was lost when they started adding colour and sound.

Take hankies.

Wildfire (again)

2011-06-17T11:33:00.001+01:00

I wrote this article years ago, after the fall of the Northern Rock bank in England, which was the first run on an English bank in a hundred years. A while later, when it looked as though Greece was going to default on its debts, I put it back to the top since it had started to look like a prophecy.

It's now 17th June 2011. Last year Greece was bailed out on promise of economic reforms, but those reforms were exceedingly unpopular and have just brought down its government and it is again on the verge of default. The IMF has refused to supply money, effectively blackmailing Germany into paying Greece's debts.

This isn't a long term solution. The problem will recur. Similar problems have occurred in Ireland and Portugal, and been 'solved' by similar methods. The longer this sort of solution is attempted, the more catastrophic the eventual reckoning will be.

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Note of 10th May 2010

I've put this back to the top because of the financial crisis in Greece. It was originally written after the UK banking crisis that turned into the (first half of the most recent) depression. Sovereign debt default is the next stage of an inevitable process. We have to ask ourselves whether it is better to take the hit now, or put the crisis off again. Next time there may not be an entity large enough to organise a bailout.

I'm going to stick my neck out and make a prediction. Today is 10th May 2010. I predict that either Greece will default on its debts, or the EU will bail it out, and then within the next five years other EU nations will default. The resulting financial effects will domino, and there will be widespread bank defaults. No government will be able or willing to guarantee the banks this time. The turmoil will cause Japan to default on its debt, and the result of that will be a terrifying financial apocalypse the like of which has never been seen. There will be revolutions and wars.

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Original Article:

There are few good arguments from analogy. Anyway, here's mine:

Once upon a time, the forestry service put out wild fires.
Nowadays they start them.

Once upon a time, banks built solid marble buildings with Doric columns.
Nowadays they rent cheap offices with plastic chairs and nasty carpets.

And I think these facts are related.

Let's look at the war going on in the woods.

The natural enemies of plants are trees. If you have an expanse of open earth, the first things that grow there will be grasses and nettles. Grasses grow fastest of all, finding new earth with their wind-blown seeds and rapidly colonizing everywhere they can fix roots.

Nettles are next. Nettles have the trick of making poisons. Grazing animals don't eat them. Because animals eat the grass, the nettles are taller than the grass. So they can see the sun. Whilst the grasses, being short, die in the shade of the nettles.

A patch of open earth will soon be covered in grass. Soon after that it will be covered in nettles. The thick covering of nettles means that the grazing animals will not go there.

This opens up a place where trees can grow. Trees have the knack of making wood. Wood allows them to grow taller than the nettles. The trees get so tall that they can rise out of the nettle patch entirely, and then begin to spread their branches wide, spreading a vast carpet of leaves. Blotting out the sun. The nettles, which protected the trees from the grazing animals, die. But by this time the trees have grown so tall, and with such thick bark, that the grazing animals can't reach any edible bits of the tree. So the patch is covered in trees. And this is the final state of the world.

So we might wonder why grasses and nettles still exist, if they always lose.

The answer is fire.

A forest fire is an awful thing. Dry trees burn very well, and there is sufficient wood to create an inferno which is hot enough to set light to a tree.

Every so often, even in the oldest and most permanent forest, there will be a period of drought. The trees will become so dry that a lightning strike can set one burning. And the flames will set light to a nearby tree. And the fire will begin to rage through the dry woods, incinerating everything in its path. And nothing will stop it. Not even the arrival of the rains. Until the whole of the forest is a smouldering wreck, and everything is dead except the fire-tolerant seeds hidden in the ground.

Which will begin to grow. Grasses grow fastest, because they don't need to make wood or poison. But grazing animals eat them........

A forest fire is a dreadful thing. It moves faster than you can run. It destroys everything and everyone. You never want to be anywhere near one. Nothing escapes but birds.

So the forestry service used to put out forest fires. And this was a very good thing.

But the trees grew and kept growing until the density of wood in the forests was so high that one day there was a forest fire and it had so much fuel to feed on that the foresters could not put it out. And because there had not been a fire for so many years, a lot of people had got a little careless, and built their homes in the woods.

And the fire that burned was bigger and fiercer than a normal forest fire, because there was so much wood. And you do not ever want to be near even a normal forest fire.

So these days the forestry service starts forest fires. They keep the density of the trees low, and if you are skilled in the ways of the woods you can predict where the fires will go, and to an extent control them and protect people.

You never get the embarrassing situation that happens when there hasn't been a dry patch for a while, and lightning hasn't felt like striking much, and the woods are overgrown and dry and waiting like a tinder box for the spark that will unleash hell.

And who knows if this latest innovation of the foresters will have an unintended side-effect? So far it seems to work well.

What about banks?

Banking is a very risky business. You borrow money from people. And you lend money to people. But there is no symmetry.

People lend you money so that it will be safe. Once upon a time, you would build a nice strong building and charge people to keep their money in it, where it would be safe. This model has fallen out of fashion. But at any rate, people's primary motivation is that their money should not fall into the hands of the sort of person who is forever talking about giving it to the poor but whose favourite Maid is suspiciously well dressed for a girl who lives in the woods.

So you are sitting in a nice strong building full of money. And you can practically hear the outlaws plotting in the woods about tunnels and bulldozers and other ways of making what is inside the building cease to be inside it.

So you need to find some way to get rid of the stuff. And it turns out that there are plenty of people who are willing to take it off your hands and keep it safe for a while themselves. They do this by buying houses and setting up businesses and other wholesome things, and they have promised to pay the money back slowly, with some interest, and most importantly both you and the Sheriff know where they live.

And everything is going so swimmingly that you can barely believe your luck, until Crazy Jake walks into a bar and tells everyone that Mr Shylock put all of the town's money into a scheme to mine gold in the hills and it turns out that there ain't no more gold in them thar hills and all the money is gone.

Now Crazy Jake is a big fat liar. At the most you only put a very small amount of spare money of your own into that scheme and yes, it is gone, but no one need care particularly because there is plenty of money in the bank to go round.

But people are a suspicious lot, and a few people pop round, not at all concerned, really, to ask for their money back so that they can keep it under the bed instead.
And a few people come round as normal to ask if they can have their money back because they have bills to pay.

And towards the end of the day you realise that the bank is out of cash. But everything will be alright tomorrow, you promise, because there are lots of interest payments on loans due in.

Tomorrow there is a line round the bank half a mile long. Because a couple of non-crazy people have been talking about how they asked the bank for some of their money back and the bank didn't have any money.

And you are a dead man. If you don't actually get hung from a lamp-post on the spot, you will be carted off to a dungeon somewhere and kept there forever. Crazy Jake has killed you as randomly and with as little malice as a lightning bolt hits a tree.

And the only people who are happy are the people that you lent all the money to, because their creditor is dead. And maybe the mess will all get sorted out eventually and they will be paying their interest to the people who've lost all their money by trusting it to you. And maybe it won't.

This is called a bank run, and it is why banking is a risky business.

Bank runs used to happen all the time. You can see black and white footage of huge queues round banks. Bank runs feature frequently in Westerns.

Banking is a very risky business, entered into by gamblers of the bravest and most reckless kind.

There is no way round it. The problem is that you are making money by lending long term and borrowing short term. That is what a bank does. If you aren't doing that, you aren't a bank.

Imagine that you are a gambler of the most reckless kind, who has a way to make large amounts of money at the price of occasionally and unpredictably being hung from a lamp-post.

To make it work, you need to get people to trust you with their money. These people may or may not be fools, but they certainly know about bank runs. They know that if a bank is behaving recklessly, it may suddenly cease to exist.

What should you build your building out of?

You should build it out of stone. And you should face the stone with marble. It should look as though it has been built out of pure money, by people who have lots of money, and intend to be around for a very long time.

Sober, serious, professional people. People who wear suits.

The minute you start to express the slightest bit of creativity, imagination or flair, the minute you're caught renting an office, as though you hadn't got the slightest intention of lasting for ten thousand years, then people will begin to take their money out and put it with more serious people. And we know what happens then.

Now once upon a time, this was what banks looked like. English towns are full of great big solid old banks built along classical lines, with lovely solid sounding names like 'The Trustees Savings Bank", or "The National Westminster Bank". Boring as hell, but lovely safe places to trust with money. Of course, they weren't actually. That's why they had to try so hard to look as though they were.

When I was a little boy, there was a new bank startup in England called "William's and Glyn's". I thought that that was a really nice name, and sounded very human and decent. They offered high interest rates and good service and they advertised heavily. And my father wouldn't put his money anywhere near them, because they sounded like they were just a couple of guys who'd started a bank.

But nowadays, banks don't look all solid like they used to. All the lovely solid marble buildings that look as though they will last for ten thousand years have been converted into public houses.

The last time I went into a physical bank, I found myself sneering at the crappy quality of the furniture. And anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not one to care too much about the quality of furniture. But this stuff was made out of formica, and it wobbled.

They don't even have sensible names any more. They're called "Natwest" or "Floyd's TSB" or "Egg". They're behaving like people who've been christened Thucydides by unworldly parents, and who have decided that they prefer to be called Diddy.

What has changed? Nothing recently. There hasn't been a serious bank run for years and years.

What has happened is that recently, the folk memory of bank runs has vanished. No one can remember what they were any more. So trusting money to a bank has stopped being scary. It will be safe. They will look after it carefully.

In fact trusting money to a bunch of gamblers to gamble with has started to seem like the boring option. Real men stick their life's savings in stocks and shares, or in exotic derivative instruments like property prices in areas where no more property can be built. Safe as houses.

What changed?

Government got involved in banking. A government can prevent a bank run. All it has to do is say: "Don't worry about your money. We guarantee that we will pay it all back if the bank fails."

The government can make this guarantee, because it has guns and tanks. So if it needs money it can steal it.

So if the government makes the guarantee, it is believed. Panic over. No-one needs to worry about whether their bank is solvent. No bank runs.

That's why we haven't seen a bank run in a while.

I believe that bank runs work the same as wildfires:

Lightning struck a while back. Through heroic efforts by all the governments in the world, a vast amount of money was stolen, and the fire was put out by pouring all this money over it. No one got hurt.

But the financial woods are still full of dry tinder. Be very afraid.

Overconfidence Bias

2011-06-09T14:40:00.001+01:00

The other day, a friend and I are out throwing cricket balls to one another.

I believe that when practising a skill, you should set the difficulty of the thing you're practising to the point where you fail one time in ten. Then you're getting positive emotional reinforcement from your successes, while constantly practising things that are still challenging, and pushing yourself periodically. If you're practising a skill that is in fact dangerous, then this also gives you a reasonable chance of avoiding injury, if the usual failure case is to not get injured.

I felt that the throws Joe was giving me were getting below the one in ten level, i.e. I seemed to be catching most of them routinely without having to try too hard, and I was about to ask him to make them harder.

Instead, we started counting successes and failures.

Over the next twenty or so throws, the total number of catches was 14, and I dropped the ball seven times. i.e. the true rate was about one in three.

Both Joe and I thought that this was due to getting freaked out by suddenly making success/failure a thing that was noticed, or possibly getting distracted by the effort of counting. So we carried on. Neither of us thought that the throws had got more difficult because of the counting.

Over the next twenty throws, the proportion of catches rose, until after about seventy-five, the proportion was 60 to 15. I'd completely stopped worrying about counting, and I'm pretty sure that the effort of remembering the two numbers wasn't interfering.

I think we were observing learning actually happening, as the rate changed from one in three to one in four.

We ended the session there, since we were both bored, but I really can't now believe that I'm capable of catching nine out of ten similar throws.

And so I wondered for a bit what it is that makes a person (I'm assuming I'm typical!) who can do something one time in three, and has done it lots recently, and presumably failed one third of the time, believe sincerely that they are likely to succeed nine times out of ten.

A little research brings up the term Overconfidence Bias, which seems somewhat related, where people back their own judgements to be right 'with 90% confidence', and then get it right about 40% of the time.

Afterwards the thought occurred to me that I must have been miscalibrating my 9/10 rule all my life.

I used it to learn to ski and to learn to row, and at the moment I'm trying to use it to learn to catch cricket balls, and I imagine in various other contexts where I was learning to do some physical skill.

And then it occurred to me that I had no idea why I believed that that was the right ratio anyway.
I just seem to have come up with it once, tried it, found that it worked, and then adopted it as an article of belief without ever trying any other way of learning physical skills.

That also sounds like overconfidence, but actually it's called the Congruence Bias.
If you have a theory, you test it by doing what it says to do and seeing if it works.

And in fact if that's all you do, that's a terrible way of testing a theory. You should be looking into the dark and asking if, when you try something else, do you still get good results.

But it's hard to do this.

I'm now thinking 'I should try catching really hard throws'.
But I don't want to. I know what will happen. I'll get my fingers broken and my hands hurt and I'll teach myself to fear the ball even more than I already do.

I'm thinking 'I should try to catch really easy throws'.
But I don't want to. It will be very boring and I'll learn nothing from it.

It is difficult, this 'rationality'. Once you start looking at what you believe and why, and what you do and why, you find all sorts of odd things going on.

Super Injunction

2011-05-09T08:05:00.000+01:00

How is a super injunction supposed to work? Am I allowed to say that Jeremy Clarkson is having an affair with Jemima Khan? Or not?

Mother's Day Flowers

2011-04-17T20:42:00.001+01:00

Credit where credit is due. This year I remembered Mother's Day the day before, and it's a bit too far to drive for a day (I think. I know some people do 300 mile round trips for fun!).

I thought about asking my sister to take something to Mum for me, but that seemed a bit lame, so I found a Sheffield florist on-line and asked them if they could deliver on the day, which was a Sunday.

I asked for their advice on what to send, and then managed to give them an old credit card number which had expired. They rang back later and told me very apologetically that it hadn't got through, but luckily I realized what I'd done and gave them the new one.

They produced a really nice bunch of tulips for about £35 and delivered them at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning. I think they did the delivery themselves rather than using a parcel service. My parents live a fairly long way out of Sheffield itself so it must have been a long trip on what I assume is their busiest day of the year.

I was at a cricket net at the time, and when I got home I had 6 missed calls, all from Mum. (She doesn't normally do that.) Of course I rang back. A couple of days later she sent me a hand-made thank you card and the picture above.

So I'm pretty happy with Katie Peckett ( http://www.katiepeckett.com/ ), Sheffield Florist, 0114 2664985, and I thought I'd give them a plug on my blog.

I've no idea whether they're a big or a small operation, but although their website makes them look like a large and expanding firm, their service was as personal and obliging as if I'd rung a friendly corner shop.

The Rise of the Machines

2011-04-05T15:36:00.000+01:00

I made the last post from Chrome rather than Firefox. I haven't installed adblock in Chrome. My screen is now covered in adverts for pest control firms. I think the singularity may be some years off yet.

The Demon out of Nightmare

2011-04-05T15:33:00.003+01:00

Imagine what it's like to be hunted by the basilisk.

Just a look will turn you to stone. You are naked, weaponless, powerless to hurt it unless you can get close enough to kill it with your bare hands.

The basilisk can disguise itself well. It can lie motionless for hours, and when it does you can't see it until you're very close, but if it sees you first, you are dead.

It can move faster than you. It can fly across the ground faster than any living creature can run. It can rise into the air and see a huge area at once, and it can kill over all that radius. It has sharper eyes than any natural being.

It has the power to control the world itself. Sometimes, even when it is nowhere near, plants or rocks will suddenly coil and deform, wrapping round you. Very often, when you are running from it, you will find that it has created a ravine or a gully or a trap in front of you, cornering you. Sometimes the ground itself will grow teeth, and bite into your legs, holding you in place. Once you are trapped, all you can do is wait in agony for the basilisk to come.

Often it will not even bother to come and kill you. It will just leave you to starve in agony, tearing at your wounds, trying to get free.

It knows your habits and your favourite places. Sometimes it can sense you over the horizon.

It can communicate silently with other basilisks, summon them to join its hunt, coordinate so that there is always one basilisk in your path, waiting for you.

Sometimes a basilisk will not kill you when it can.

In those cases your fate will be worse than death. You will be enslaved and worked to death, or you will be imprisoned forever in a tiny cage, to go mad with boredom and misery and lack of companionship. Either you will be castrated, or the children of your brief, brutal, forced matings will share your fate.

Often after years of imprisonment and every conceivable form of violation you will be eaten anyway.

Until recently, basilisks were only mythical demons. They were said to live in forests and savannahs where the wise did not go. They were few, and they did not stray from their territories.

But recently, they have discovered a new source of magical power. Always the deadliest things in the world, they have grown in deadliness to surreal levels. Nothing can stand against them. All creatures fear them, except a few inexplicable terrible allies, slaves swollen on the profits of their collaboration with evil.

And the basilisk breed. Where once they were few, a deadly but rare predator, now they grow without limit. Suddenly they are millions, tens of millions, hundreds, billions and they will not stop multiplying until there is nothing left of the world but basilisks. And there is nothing in the world that can stop them, or that will even dare to try.

Perhaps I am laying it on a bit thick here? My monsters are too terrifying to be believed, you say?

I killed an ant yesterday. It was walking across our stainless steel sink. I turned the tap on and it swirled down the plughole. I don't have a big problem with ants. In fact I like them. It's just that they're not the sort of thing one likes to have in the house. If I hadn't been feeling a bit ill, and only dressed in my dressing gown, I'd have caught it in a glass and put it outside, like I did with yesterday's enormous hornet.

I think most people would have used fly spray on the (huge and terrifying) hornet. I was feeling brave.

Oh yes. The basilisks can magic the very air so that it kills you when you breathe it by filling your lungs with knives. There's no way to tell the magic air. The first warning you get is when your lungs start to fill with knives.

Sometimes they use different magic that makes you go to sleep so the can put you in their cages. Sometimes they use a type which burns your eyes and skin away. Sometimes they just set the entire world around you on fire. There's no way to tell what sort of mood they'll be in.

Imagine what it's like to be a creature 'sharing' a world with a higher intelligence.

It's a fair cop

2011-01-29T21:53:00.001Z

£500 if you can find me a job

2011-01-27T19:42:00.000Z

That worked a treat. And the lucky winner was Simon.

It was fun, but a short contract. Now I'd like another one, so I repeat:

If, within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or if someone points me at a short contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway. (The thing Simon pointed me at only lasted three weeks and I paid him in full anyway, because it was neat.)

And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts who I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.

Anyhow, if you're interested in helping out, my CV is at http://www.aspden.com, and any advice on how it could be improved will be gratefully received.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Film)

2011-01-20T14:29:00.001Z

Tedious bewildering rubbish. Apparently the six different reels are all shot in a different style and they each echo a different blah blah blah...

Made me want to stuff the Palme d'Or up the arse of the Guardian film critic.

And don't get me wrong. I usually love pretentious foreign rubbish.

Effortless Superiority

2011-01-05T01:55:00.001Z

This isn't a boast. It starts off sounding like one. Actually it's a confession of utter stupidity, blindness and laziness. I write it as catharsis now it's far too late, and as a warning.

There is a phrase, 'Effortless Superiority'. I've always thought it was the motto of one of the Oxford Colleges, but apparently not.

I used to take it seriously. As an ideal.

I don't know my times tables. I never had to learn them. I can work out what they have to be if I need them. I could do that fast enough to beat all the other children at primary school on arithmetic tests by an overwhelming margin. So I never bothered learning the tables, or practising multiplication. I just used to sit around thinking about other things, and then win the test anyway.

I was told at primary school. At *primary* school. That I'd never amount to anything, because I was too lazy. That I'd never get any 'O' levels (0). By a teacher called Mr Nicholson. He made a special point of telling my parents the same thing. I thought he was an idiot. I think my parents probably did too.

I never did any work at school. I certainly never did any homework. I did usually pay attention in class. It was often interesting.

Once or twice I remember finding something mathematical that I didn't understand immediately.

Come to think of it, I still can't do integration by substitution. I remember noticing that I couldn't, and deciding that it must be a silly, uninteresting special purpose trick.

On one particular occasion (a problem in dynamics. something to do with balls on wire hoops.) I was worried that there was a maths-thing I couldn't do, and so I worked through a couple of examples in the back of the textbook, and I remember the light dawning.

That should have been a clue. But it was lost in the noise.

I remember learning a table of German vocabulary once for an exam. It took about half an hour, and I got it perfectly. I thought this was an utter waste of time. I don't know why I did it. When I took the exam and got a near perfect score, and it was obvious that if I hadn't bothered I'd still have aced it, I remember thinking that that had been a complete waste of half an hour in which I could have been doing something more interesting. (1)

When A-level Chemistry got to the point where I had to learn the colours of the transition metal ions, a table of apparently random text which must have had oooh, twenty entries? I gave up the subject. I am not joking. I remember asking the teacher if I could carry on doing the practicals, which I enjoyed, and not come to the theory lessons. He wouldn't let me, so I just gave up the course entirely. I used to spend the time in the school canteen (we had a nice sixth form common room where you could smoke) playing pool.

I was still entered for the exam, so I took it anyway. Despite having only gone to the first year of a two year course, I got a B because I could deduce most of the required answers from physics and from what I remembered of 'Teach Yourself Organic Chemistry', and 'Asimov on Chemistry', which I'd devoured when I was about ten years old.

Chemistry had been my first love. The first thing I was passionate about. I used to make little plasticene models of hydrocarbons and take them to school, where I would try to persuade Mr Nicholson to hang them from wires on the ceiling to represent my idea of what a gas was.

When, at around ten or eleven, I had my first fevered dreams about the bodies of women, I also had equally fevered dreams about space-filling molecular models of such exotica as DNA, which could be purchased for insanely high prices from glossy catalogues that my father would bring home from work, along with copies of New Scientist donated by his friends.

And in spite of never lifting a finger I was always clearly the best at anything intellectual. I seem to remember, back in 1986 or whenever, thinking that I was probably the cleverest sixth-former in my home city, on the basis that I didn't know anyone who'd done as well at A-level as me.

The thing is, this might actually have been true.

I've mentioned where my B at chemistry came from. My A at physics, and my grade 1 at physics S-level (a special form of super-A level that most people don't know about), came on the back of exams that I'd taken while coming down from LSD, which I'd taken a couple of days before in the sure knowledge that I'd have straightened up enough by the time of the exam to sail it anyway. This was, to say the least, not the first experience I'd had with drugs, and even allowing for the after effects of acid I knew I wasn't going to have any trouble with Physics.

By that time, I'd decided that I wanted to be a mathematician. That seemed to be the subject where everything was obvious. Nothing needed to be learnt or memorized. People just said things that were obviously true, and once you'd heard them it was like you'd been born knowing them, and it had just taken someone to draw attention to the memory.

Slightly to my surprise, Cambridge University turned me down when I applied there.

I'd taken my maths A-level a year early and got a B, so that was the only evidence they had at the interview. And in the interview, they'd asked me a question I couldn't do.

My school were furious, disbelieving. With my typical modesty, I decided that Cambridge were wrong.

I had been planning a year off (taking drugs) anyway, and so I asked London if they'd hold open their unconditional offer of a place, and I applied to Cambridge again. To the same college. Chosen because I thought it was the prettiest one and because it was both particularly hard to get into and top of the academic table of Colleges at the time. To do what was famously the hardest maths course in the world, at what I thought was the best university in the world.

Don't misunderstand. I didn't decide to work harder or anything. I just thought they had been wrong, and I'd give them another chance to make the right decision.

I sat my A-levels, S-levels, and STEPS (Cambridge Entrance Exam), and aced them apart from the B in Chemistry and dropping a grade or two in one of the two STEP papers, which it turned out didn't matter.

King's gave me a second interview, and I did really well on this one. They accepted me.

At College I had the disturbing experience of not being the brightest person I knew any more.

There were people who'd been to public schools, who'd been prodigies and competed in scary things called Olympiads that I'd never heard of, and who had been appropriately stretched by gifted teachers. There were other people from comprehensive schools like me, but who'd worked insanely hard to get in.

I reckoned that I was about halfway up my group of twelve. But several of them have told me since that they were scared stiff of me, who didn't seem to try, and had had a standard state education, and yet who seemed given to flashes of insight.

I'm not sure that I actually did anything you'd call 'work' in the first year. But they did have this supervision system, where you'd get question lists handed out and you were supposed to solve as many as possible before going to see one of the Fellows about them.

I used to have a go at these sheets. I used to find that I could do the first five or six questions without trouble, and then everything else would be too hard. But if you turned up to the supervision, the Fellow in question would then explain how to do the remaining five or six.

I thought that's what they were for.

In my first year exams I came in about the top ten per cent of my year. I scored below a couple of my college-mates, both of whom were super-educated public school kids, and obviously very bright as well.

I figured that was good enough. I had girls and alcohol to worry about. I was up to my neck in both. I'd given up on drugs because they were all boring except for LSD, and I'd given up on LSD because I'd had one too many bad trips. But I'd filled the gap with heavy drinking and socializing. Mainly I think because it got you laid, but it was also great fun in itself.

So in the second year, I just gave up. I still went to all my lectures, because I enjoyed them. In fact despite near-constant partying, I think I missed two lectures in my entire time at college. I didn't love mathematics any less than I had.

But I no longer had any sort of go at the example sheets. I just turned up to supervisions and got the supervisors to explain how to do the problems. I could usually do the first couple off the top of my head anyway. As far as I know, my teachers still thought I was pretty good, because of my initial solid first, and the fact that I asked the right questions about the subjects I found interesting.

And at the end of the second year, I got a second. I was about half way up the list. I remember that my teachers seemed quite disappointed, and my reputation took a bit of a hit.

I'd been expecting it. I'd deliberately taken the year off, but I was never under any illusions about what my capabilities were. I knew that if I'd actually practised answering exam questions I'd be able to do them faster, and the tripos exam was like every other exam that I'd ever sat, a speed test rather than a test of understanding. I still knew how all the questions worked, it just took me more time to solve them than I was allowed to spend. The reason that other people were doing better than me was becuase I hadn't *cheated* by practising doing exam questions. I understood it all as well as they did. Most of them were just half-remembering formulae they'd picked up from spending many sleepless nights revising.

Everything was going according to plan.

The plan that I'd had, ever since I first thought what I should do as an adult, to sail effortlessly into a tenured academic job (when I'd been growing up, that had been a very easy thing to do), and to carry on learning and teaching and who knows, maybe think of something new and interesting one day. It had never really occurred to me to do anything else. If I thought about the 'real world' at all, then it was as a sort of sewer, filled with people who did tedious and unchallenging things because they wanted money. Academic salaries and PhD grants weren't great in the way that they had once been, but still plenty enough to support a studenty lifestyle, and that was all I wanted. I saw myself as being one of those kindly unmarried dons who hangs around in college and lives in college rooms, and lets the undergraduates substitute for the children he would have had if he hadn't been devoted to his craft. It looked great.

But if I wanted to do a PhD in pure mathematics (2), I needed a first-class degree. There was no funding available otherwise.

So I went back to my first year routine of having a half-hearted go at the example sheets before heading off to supervisions to have it all explained face to face. To be spoon-fed the answers without having made the effort to think of them myself.

It was a bit harder this time, because as well as having to work out what the new stuff was about, I realised that I hadn't really understood the second year stuff even though I thought I had (3), and so I needed to work out how all that worked while working out what the new stuff meant.

But it all worked out OK, almost. I was actually good enough to start catching up again.

I didn't bother with the third year computer project, despite that I'd been programming since the age of 10, would have found it very easy, and it was worth a full third of the credit that I'd need to get a first (4).

I didn't want to do something that I wouldn't learn anything from. I wanted to be a mathematician, not a programmer. And I was already as good a programmer as I'd ever need to be. (4.5)

By the time the final exam was close enough to worry about, my first was in the bag.

I had actually stooped to trying my hand at some past papers under exam conditions, which I still thought was cheating, but getting a first looked important enough to cheat at, and after the first couple of papers, I'd got good enough at it to reliably score the marks necessary for a first.

Rather to my surprise, (remember that this was the first time I'd ever taken an exam seriously enough to practise doing it), I found that I rather enjoyed the process. And even more surprisingly, learning to do the questions quickly actually seemed to make the ideas behind them clearer and more beautiful. They achieved a sort of focus that they hadn't had before.

Knowing that I was going to do well in the exam, I took Easter term pretty much off. The sunshine was lovely, this was my last year with all my friends, there was punting to do, and cricket to play, and riverside pubs to sit in, and parties to go to, and not many lectures to go to, and I understood enough subjects in enough detail to be confident that even if the questions turned out to be particularly hard, I'd pass. (I thought anything lower than a first was a fail.)

And of course I failed (5).

I have excuses, of course, for the failure of my confident prediction. The questions in my particular favourite subjects deviated from their usual predictable patterns. The first paper was much harder than I expected. One particular topology (one of the two subjects where I really could have given the lectures) question was so incomprehensible that all I could do for an answer was to draw a picture and write underneath 'It works because of this'. I had no idea how to do a formal proof as asked for.

My finals were four exams over two days, three hours each. After the first day I knew I'd done badly. I couldn't sleep for worry. The questions in the third and fourth exams were more in line with normal, but I actually managed to go to sleep in the fourth one because I was so tired after two gruelling days awake.

When the results came out I wasn't surprised. I'd calculated my mark afterwards, and it was on the line between a second and a first. I fell just the wrong side. (5.5)

Cambridge Mathematics has a charming tradition of reading out the results backwards at a big ceremony in the Senate House. They read out the names of everyone who has got a first, in alphabetical order. I remember the list of names going Aa.... Ab..... Ascot (or something), Bagg...

Bagg was my college mate Jenny. As soon as I heard her name I knew I'd screwed it. Without any previous warning in about twenty one years, I'd managed to be not as good at something as I needed to be.

That was pretty much the end for me.

No first meant no PhD funding in the thing I wanted to do. I didn't have a plan B. It literally hadn't occurred to me in the month or so before the exam that I could fail it.

I fell on my feet after a fashion. Someone told me of a PhD place for a specific project in London (at Imperial College, which is a pretty damned good university), which had its funding allocated already, but where the student in question had dropped out. I rang the man who controlled the funding, he invited me to London, we talked for an hour and the place was mine.

But it didn't work out. I didn't get on particularly well with my supervisor, I wasn't interested in the thing I was supposed to be studying, he wasn't interested in any of my ideas, and there was no one else to talk to.

I'd been looking forward to London. I'd always enjoyed going there as a boy. But it turned out to be awful. A lonely wasteland of concrete and filth. And being an academic didn't look like much fun in London. More of a sort of glorified schoolteacher job, and not that glorified either.

And then my intuition failed. One day I was trying to read a research paper, and I found out that it was just squiggles. No pictures, no handle on what it meant. Not even a vague feeling that if I tried just changing this bit, something would happen. It was suddenly all greek to me.

I understood, for the first time in my life, what it was to not understand a piece of mathematics.

And I figured that was the end of the line. All my life I'd watched people give up maths, because it didn't seem to mean anything to them. I knew that however hard they tried, it wouldn't ever make proper sense to them like it did to me.

It just seemed to me that that had happened to me. There's obviously a point beyond which you can't go, and it just so happened that mine was about half-way through a PhD.

I don't think it occurred to me that I might be able to work my way through this. That just wasn't the way I thought it worked. By that time I didn't care anyway. Two years in London had put me off the whole idea of academia.

I moved back to Cambridge because that's where most of the people I liked lived.

At about this time, I started to run out of money. The near limitless ability of the 1980s British State to pay lazy good for nothing layabouts who thought the world owed them a living had met its match in me. I had an overdraft, accounted for pretty much exactly by six years of booze and cigars. Even though today's self-funded students will laugh at my tiny £6000 debt, it seemed to me that I was so poor that I had to give up smoking. I even gave up 2000AD, a comic that I'd read weekly since I was a boy, because the 50p it cost every two weeks was a noticeable expense.

Of course when the PhD funding ran out, I managed to start drawing unemployment benefit. But this wasn't quite as much, so there was further belt tightening to be done, and I didn't fancy it. My supervisor said that I'd got about another six months work to do before I'd be able to hand in a doctorate, and I was pretty sure that meant about twelve months. Also it was going to be a complete piece of shit. Nobody would ever read it out of interest, and I wasn't in the least interested in writing it.

I got a job, programming. It was great fun, it turned out. People actually gave you things to do that they didn't know how to do themselves, but they were usually quite easy things, so they were usually done quickly, and (and this was the real revelation) people were actually grateful when you solved their problems. I mean that you felt like you'd done them a favour. This was a revelation to me. I loved it. After about two months I had this awful dream where I'd gone back to London to try to finish my PhD. I woke up in a cold sweat of terror, and at that point I knew I was never going to be Dr Aspden. Which was strange. I'd always thought that Mr was what you were called from about 16 to about 24. Like a sort of probationary title. It was like I'd been told I'd never be able to get a driving licence.

I got used to being mediocre. I was good enough to have got a Cambridge maths degree. I was probably top quartile. But there are a fair number of people like that in the world.

I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm pretty good at what I do, and it's fun.

I took up other hobbies. I'd always liked playing sports, even though I was useless at it, and almost by accident, I took up rowing, which is the local sport here, for townies as well as the university.

There was no reason to expect to be anything other than rubbish at rowing. I'm average height, stronger than most men my size, but not vastly so, and I smoke, which doesn't go well with a sport where the chief physical variable is a capacity for consuming oxygen.

And I was. Terrible at it. For years.

But I enjoyed it, and I practised it, and I got good at it. I was never in a million years going to be any sort of star at it, even in the rather limited competitive environment of Cambridge town. But I ended up being, if not actually any good, better than I would ever have believed possible to start with.

And somehow it taught me that if you work at something, you get better at it.

And I decided a few years ago that I should learn LISP, an antique computer language out of the dark ages, because there seemed to be something special about the way LISP people talked.

So I got the standard textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and I found it harder than most things about computers. But I was damned if I was going to let some sort of computer-thing be hard, because nothing in computers is even a bit hard. So I did the exercises in the book to see if they would make it clear, and found that solving carefully chosen example problems is fun, and you know what, the more of the exercises I solved, the more I understood the book, and the better I understood, the more of the book I could read.

And it taught me that if you work at something intellectual, you get better at it.

Which I didn't believe for the first thirty years of my life.

I thought that you were born good at things. I thought if you weren't good at things, working hard at them was just a path to ruining your life with fruitless toil, to fail one level higher than you would have failed anyway. To be honest, I still believe something like that, just not as extreme a version as I once did.

Why would I not have believed this? You cannot move without people praising the special quality of genius. You cannot read without finding out that authors and poets and musicians have their works come to them fully formed. The special genius of my heroes, Feynman, Einstein, Newton, Conway is trumpeted from rooftops. You never hear that they lifted a finger apart from doing exactly what seemed most amusing to them at the time.

And it had been absolutely true for me for twenty years. I'd been told over and over again that I needed to work harder. And every time I'd ignored the advice and turned out to be right.

And when I was twenty one the 'problem of induction' hit me over the head with a whisky bottle during my final exams. And I was stone dead and I didn't even notice because twenty years of confirming evidence isn't overturned by a human mind just like that.

And I've only just noticed.

Recently, I was asked to teach a young friend enough maths to get him onto an engineering degree. I loved doing this. Sitting down and talking with him and taking him through trial problems and trying to work out where his mental blocks were and blowing them away was the best fun I've had in ages. And he's now doing his engineering degree, although he's going to screw it up by, ironically, spending so much time rowing really seriously that he'll be too tired to think about engineering.

And I've been reading the collected works of the brilliant philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's built a whole philosophy and predicted the entire future of the human race convincingly using amongst other intellectual tools Bayes' Theorem, a trivial piece of arithmetic with profound implications.

And I figured if I'm going to understand Eliezer Yudkowsky's thoughts I'd better understand Bayes' Theorem and its consequences as well as he does, which I'm still arrogant enough to think that I can do.

And so from a combination of these effects, I've started doing mathematics, recreationally, for the first time in my life. And indeed mathematics at all, for the first time in about fifteen years.

And it turns out I'm pretty damned good at it. I shouldn't be, because I'm forty years old now, and no one's as good at maths at forty as they were at twenty. But if my powers have declined I can't tell.

I'm reading David MacKay's beautiful book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, and it's like reading a thriller. I've patiently worked through the examples in the first two or three chapters, even the ones that look boring, because I remember that the boring looking examples in SICP always turned out to teach unique and thrilling lessons.

I've sort of got my head round the introductions to Information Theory and Inference, and I think I already see why the Noisy-Channel Coding Theorem is going to turn out to be true in chapter 6 or wherever it is, and why it is also going to turn out to be of little practical value. And I can't wait to find out if I'm right.

And this has brought back memories, and when I start remembering things these days I start writing, and all this has come out like a flood, and suddenly it occurs to me, because I promise you that the above is as true as my fallible memory can make it, that I may actually have been as good as I once thought I was.

And fuck the research angle and doctorates and names on interesting discoveries. I love teaching. And I'm good at it. And that's what I should have been doing with my life. Teaching mathematics and computers to bright young people. I would have loved it. And I didn't do it. And it's too late now.

And I want to call bullshit on the idea of Effortless Superiority, which it now occurs to me I may have been the only human on the planet stupid enough to take seriously (6).

Footnotes

(0) English school leaving exams. A-levels are the optional ones two years later, on which University Entrance depends, S-levels are a special form of A-levels, on the same syllabus but the questions are much harder. STEP is similar to S-level, but set by Cambridge University and used as part of its entrance requirement.

(1) Even though I was good at foreign languages, they seemed like a completely stupid rigmarole. It wasn't like they were any use for anything except passing foreign language tests.

Somehow, at around this same time, I was teaching myself Latin to O-level standard out of a book my father had left lying around where I could find it. Latin was interesting and useful, because you could read about the Roman Empire and other cool things in the Romans' own words. And you could see where lots of our words came from. And their poetry was better than ours.

I've wondered if I'd have done modern languages for my degree if my school had managed to make living German and French anything like as interesting as Francis Kinchin Smith managed to make dead Latin and Greek in his two Teach Yourself ... books. Cheap self-help manuals that were doubtless intended by the publishers to be read only as far as the third chapter. From the love and care and scholarship and cleverness lavished on them I think Francis had higher goals for them. I wonder if he ever got fan mail? If I could go back and write it I would. What did a child know? I've just googled him. He died in 1958 apparently. Too early for him to have got my letter even if I had thought to write. The fact that I can remember his name after 28 years tells you how much I liked those books. I wish I'd had a chance to tell him.

But the tedium of French and German was as nothing compared to the horror of Music and the Calvary of Religious Education.

How, how for the love of Christ did they manage to make Music boring to a human child?

And for that matter, the King James Bible is one of my favourite books.

I am as bleak an atheist as it is possible to be, and yet I often read the Gospel According to St Matthew on Easter Day. I wonder how many Christians do?

(2) By this time I'd begun to despise applied maths, which seemed to be a bag of stupid half-understood magic tricks that was overdue to be swept away by computer simulation. Weirdly it only seems to be taught like that in Cambridge. In London later on I found it interesting again.

(3) As someone once pointed out, what the hell did I think it meant to understand something if you couldn't use it fluently?

(4) I had done some computer stuff in the second year out of interest, but I'd found that it didn't teach me anything interesting. I already knew how to program. I can't even remember whether I bothered completing it.

(4.5) I know, I know, I was a moron. But actually it did look singularly unchallenging. Now if they'd taught SCHEME rather than matrix multiplication algorithms, who knows...

(5) got a second.

(5.5) As I remember, the topology question that I'd drawn the answer to was bastard hard, only a couple of people had attempted it, and my picture had been given almost the maximum mark. So in fact I needn't have worried. If I'd known that, I might have been able to sleep that night.

(6) I'm not whining for the sake of it, by the way. I've loved life, and I'd do the first forty years over again exactly the same way like a shot if I had the chance.

But if you recognise yourself in the above, young person, for God's sake do the exercises in the textbooks, and practise exam questions. It's not cheating. It helps you understand. A lot.

If you do the exercises, and play with the examples, then you will find that your intuition, already powerful, starts to get brighter, and rather than finding as I did that as you go forward, you start to run out of dry places to stand in the swamp, until eventually there's nowhere new to go, you'll find that as you brighten the swamp recedes ahead of you faster than you can walk.

On the other hand, if you find yourself working every hour God sends on something and you're not enjoying it for its own sake, give up. Nothing's worth that sort of life. I still think success probably comes fairly easily if you're any good. What I'm trying to warn against is pig-headedly not lifting a fucking finger to practise something you enjoy because you think that's something lesser beings have to do to make up for being lesser.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, and try again. Then give up. No sense making a fool of yourself." -- Homer

Some bits of text from the essay I started writing before it turned into the above whine.

Right until halfway into a PhD that I didn't find interesting. At that point the wellspring failed, and within twelve months of realising that it was gone I wasn't a mathematician any more. Part of the problem was that I'd never had to try at anything before, and I didn't know how to deal with anything that required effort.

Would you believe that at the time I sat my finals, I still thought that practising exam questions was cheating. I thought it was vulgar. Like you were trying to fool the examiners into thinking you were cleverer than you were.

I realized that I wasn't clever enough to bank on a first (I mean I still thought I'd get one, it's just that I'd realized there was a *chance* I wouldn't), so towards the end of my third year, I cheated a bit. But it was far too little too late, and it didn't help. I got the second I'd feared.

This only confirmed me in my belief that it was silly to try. That nothing that had to be worked at was worth having. It was easy to maintain this belief.

Lots of people have to try very hard to get into university. They slog away at A-levels, ruining evenings and weekends that should be spent being young and happy. And when they crowbar their way in, somehow managing to convince an interviewer far cleverer than they are that the lights are on in their heads, they find that it's all ashes. For nothing.

For it gets harder once you're not at school. And the only strategy these people have is to work harder. But they already worked as hard as they could.

They react predictably. They burn the candle at both ends for three years, and at the end of it they scrape low seconds and thirds. Some, released from parental pressure, realize that the game isn't worth it and drop out, pretending they didn't care in the first place.

I was terrified of being one of these people. I guess I still am.

Many Classical Worlds

2011-01-04T17:13:00.000Z

Let's imagine that we live in a universe that splits whenever anything random happens.

So say we've got a coin which lands heads up 2:1, and another which lands heads up 1:2

Every time we toss either coin, the universe splits, but we don't know which copy we end up in, and our task is to try to narrow down where we are!

The original split happens when we pick a coin from our pile of two coins.

This is a random event. There are now two copies of the universe. In one we've got a heads biased coin, in the other we've got a tails biased one. But we could be in either, as far as we know.

We toss the coin, and so does our copy in the parallel universe.

Both universes split into three. Of the three heads-biased coin universes that have come into being, there are two where the coin shows heads, and one where it's tails.

Of the three tails-biased universes, there's two where it's heads, and one where it's tails.

And we notice that our coin came down heads. Where can we be?

We are in one of the three universes where the coin came down heads.

How many of those are also universes where we picked the tails biased coin? One.

How many of them are also universes where we picked the heads biased coin? Two.

What are the odds that we are in a heads-biased-coin universe? Two to one.

Obviously this little story is nonsense, and yet it seems to catch the essence of both probability and inference. And it makes it very easy to think about.

I've been using it for a few weeks now to think about probability. It hasn't led me astray yet. I think it might be isomorphic to the real theory, as long as you stick to rational numbers.

Whatever the real theory is. I've never heard any description of probability that wasn't gibberish.
So just because this one is gibberish too doesn't count against it as much as it might.

I write it down only because I was just thinking about an urn with two white balls and one black ball, and drawing balls from it, and wondering what the histogram would look like. And this view seemed to make it pretty transparent what is going on, even though before there had only been fractions to multiply.

I mean don't get me wrong. I was taught to do all that 20 years ago, and I could do it then, and I haven't thought about it all since, but I can still derive the relevant proofs from first principles. Which shows me that I understood it at the time. One remembers that which one understands as if one had been born knowing it. That not understood, even if mastered, fades with the years.

But I don't remember it being so blisteringly clear, and beautiful, and inevitable back in the day. Probability, let alone statistics, seemed a bit fiddly. And not too interesting. Now it all looks like one of the big secrets of the universe. Maybe it is just that I am getting old, and am a bit more easily impressed than I was once.

The wellsprings of intuition in mathematics are secrets. I don't know why. Sometimes they are literally incommunicable. I don't know how I could show someone who doesn't know how to do it how to make animated pictures of mathematical concepts in my head, which is a skill that carried me effortlessly through the half of pure mathematics known as analysis.

But I could at least have told people that that was how you were supposed to do it. No one ever showed me. It was a habit I picked up by accident when I was very small, and I imagine I got better at it by practice. I remember with utter clarity a clever thing my mother made for me to help me understand fractions. That might have been the start of it. It might also be my earliest memory. I can't remember whether it was while I was at school, or before.

I've no idea what the equivalent talent for the other half of pure maths (algebra) is. In all that time, no-one ever told me, and it never occurred to me to ask. Maybe it can't be put into words.

Certainly recently I was playing around with permutations, and learned about the cycle notation for groups, and thought about them like that instead of how I'd been taught, where it's all rather abstract and beautiful, but where I have no intuition whatsoever. And it made more sense from that point of view.

Maybe this classical many-worlds picture is one of the keys to thinking about probability.

Lots of things seem obvious now. You meet a woman, and she says she has two children, and that one's called Arthur. What is the probability that both her children are boys?

Look. When she gave birth, the universe split into two. When she had her second child it split again. There are four now. In one she's got two boys. In one she's got two girls.

You're not in the one where she's got two girls. You could be in any of the other three.

That's supposed to be a paradoxical, counter-intuitive result, as I remember.

You meet a woman with two children. One's a boy. What's the chance they both are? One in three.

Most people guess a half.

I remember that that used to be the obvious answer. I'm not sure I can understand why now.

King Arthur was one of two children. What's the chance he had a sister?

Actually I suspect subtleties here. But I know how to think about them now.

All is Vanity and Vexation of Spirit

2011-01-04T15:44:00.001Z

Overheard in a cafe. Young ladies, talking in semi-hushed tones:

"I was at a party last night, and there was this guy, he was rippling with muscles, I think he must have been on steroids or something."

"Oooh!"

"He asked me to come to his room. I think he needed help to take his T-shirt off."

Ashes Update

2011-01-04T13:24:00.002Z

England won the fourth test. Our belief before then was 3:4:3.

Under the England strong model, the odds of the win were 1/2
Under the equal model, 1/3
Under the Australia strong model, 1/6.

So the numbers get multiplied by those probabilities.

3/2:4/3:3/6

or

9:8:3

We now consider England the stronger team in 9 universes out of 20.


Ours. And in 17 universes out of every 20, they probably should be.

What's our prediction for the fifth test?

Well, in 9 of the 20, England have a half chance.

In 8 of the 20, they have a 1/3 chance

In 3 out of the 20, they have a 1/6th chance

Our estimate of England's chances of winning the fifth test are:

(9/2+8/3+3/6)/20 = (27+16+3)/120 = 46/120

Slightly more than the 1/3rd we'd assign if we thought the teams were even.

We've now seen England win twice, Australia once, and we're starting to expect that trend to continue.

And of course, if they do, we'll update again!

Bayes and the Ashes

2010-12-24T16:20:00.000Z

What can the Reverend Bayes tell us about the Ashes?

Let's imagine three models:

In the first model, the two teams are equal in strength:
In that case, let's imagine that there's a 1/3 chance of win, draw and loss. 1:1:1

In the second model, we'll believe that Australia are stronger than England, in which case, we'll imagine that the odds go 1:2:3 of English win, draw, Australia win.

Third, we can imagine that England are stronger, and say that in that case the odds are 3:2:1

Suppose that we have no reason, before the series begins, to believe in any one of these models particularly, so we'll imagine that they're equally distributed over all the possible worlds.

So we'll believe in initial odds of 1:1:1.

The first match was a draw. All the models predict an equal chance of a draw, so the odds
stay at 1:1:1. We learned nothing from the first match.

The second match was an England win. The even model gives a 1/3 probability of an England win, the England stronger model gives a 1/2 chance of it, and the Australia stronger model gives 1/6

So after the second game, the odds become 1/2:1/3:1/6, or 3:2:1.

After seeing England winning the second game, we should believe that it's three times more likely that England are the stronger team.

The third game was a win for Australia. We now multiply by 1/6:1/3:1/2, giving 3/6:2/3:1/2, or 3:4:3.

So our initial odds, whatever they were, have been multiplied by 3:4:3.

Whatever we started off believing, the results Draw, England, Australia should have made us slightly more likely to believe that the teams are evenly matched.

In other words, if we believe that one of our three models is something like the truth, then the series so far has told us almost nothing. If, before the series, you believed that England were the stronger team, you've seen nothing to change your mind, and vice versa if you believed that Australia were.

However, whatever you started out believing, you should now be more open to the idea that the teams are evenly matched, and probably rather less open to extreme models where one team is much stronger than the other. There are also models where, say, both sides' batting is very strong, and both sides' bowling is very weak, which will have been pretty much ruled out by two results in three games.

Nothing too surprising here, I hope. And that's kind of the point. Bayes' Theorem, in spite of having some rather hairy philosophy behind it, is nothing more than a formalized, precise version of common sense.

Mole

2010-12-22T01:06:00.002Z

I've just risked my life to save a mole.

I was walking along a country road, when I saw a baby mole, black with its little pink snout, crawling blindly in the middle of the carriageway.

I stepped into the road to pick it up and put it somewhere safer.

Moles are vermin round here. I can understand why. If you have a nice lawn, coming down to find three or four molehills in it can't be a pleasing experience.

They're tolerated in the fields, as far as I know, but nobody stops the plough to spare their homes. They are, as the saying goes, neither loved nor hated, but made of atoms that a superior intelligence can use for other purposes.

And this one was a baby. A tiny mammal unprotected in Winter. A doomed thing.

As I stepped into the road, a car appeared, coming fast down the other side.

And as my shadow fell on the mole, it tried to run, scrabbling desperately with pathetic little flippers that weren't good enough even to lift its body off the ground.

But it reached the white line, and crossed, and crawled into the path of the car.

So I stepped out in front of it and held my hand out like a storm trooper with the palm flat for STOP.

And the car braked. Hard. On the icy road. And stopped in time.

And the old couple wound down their window, and I explained. And as I did, I started to feel sentimental and foolish. And the lady of the couple said thank you, because she hated to kill things when they drove, and she said that if I hadn't I would have ruined Christmas, because the death would have been my fault, and I'd have been thinking about it all day.

And while we talked the mole scurried off into the icy brambles at the side of the road. Where, without its mother, it will die, sooner rather than later, in one of the many ways baby animals die in Winter.

We are not rational beings. I knew that. It is always nice to have one's beliefs confirmed. But what the hell heuristic was I using, and what strange utility function did it think it was serving?

Moon

2010-12-22T01:05:00.001Z

I've written before about how bright the full moon is.

Last night, I was driving to Sheffield, and at around half past ten, after about a hundred miles on the A1, I turned off the road into Sherwood Forest, and parked in a quiet layby for a smoke.

It was far too cold to get out of my van, which is a comfortable place to sit anyway, and so, for I think the first time since I bought it ten years ago, I lit up in the cab.

There was a beautiful German mass on the radio, which I hadn't been able to hear properly with the engine running, but in the quiet and the darkness it was entrancing.

When my cigar was finished I carried on listening to it until it was over. After fifteen minutes in the dark I could see for miles, snowy fields and trees under the moonlight through the clouds.

Eventually I remembered that I had promises to keep. I started the engine, checked the empty road, indicated and pulled out.

After I'd been driving a few minutes it occurred to me that the light was a bit unusual. It seemed more flickery than normal, like the light from a flourescent tube, as the most moonlit of the clouds was obscured and revealed by passing trees.

"Oops", I thought. "Headlights."

Slightly embarrassed I reached for the switch and turned them on. Suddenly the cone in front of the car leapt out, daylight bright and in shocking colour. And the rest of the world disappeared.

How Spock should decide whether to kill Kirk

2010-12-15T21:31:00.000Z

When we left Mr Spock, he had a decision to make.

In order to make that decision, he needs to know whether he's in an evil or a good universe.

The only evidence he has is one coin toss that came up tails.

He knows that in evil universes, the coin is more likely to come up tails.

But he also knows that in good universes, the coin will come up tails one time in three.

So he might figure out that he's more likely to be in an evil universe. So he should probably fire.

But how confident should he be of his conclusion?

And if he'd had time to toss the coin twice, and it had come up tails both times, how confident should he be then?

We can address the first question by thinking about six parallel universes side by side.
In all of them, Spock appears in the captain's cabin and tosses the coin.

Three of the universes are evil, and three good.

In one of the evil universes, Spock sees a head. In two of them, he sees a tail.
In one of the good universes, Spock sees a tail. In two of them, he sees a head.

So our copy of Spock, who has to decide whether to shoot or not, who only knows that he's seen a tail, can be the copy in three of the six universes.

They are two of the evil ones and one of the good ones.

If all Spock knows is that he's in one of these three, he should reckon that the odds of being in an evil universe are two to one, or equivalently he should say that there's a probability of 2/3.

If he's seen two tails, then we need to think about nine good universes and nine evil ones.

On the first toss, they split into:
good,tail (there are 3 like this)
good,head (6)
evil,tail (6)
evil,head (3)

And then on the second, these groups divide further

good, tail, tail (1)
good, tail, head (2)
good, head, tail (2)
good, head, head (4)
evil, tail, tail (4)
evil, tail, head (2)
evil, head, tail (2)
evil, head, head (1)

So now if Spock has seen tail, tail, he can be in one of four evil universes or one good one.

His odds are four to one on being in an evil universe.

This conclusion is known as Bayes' Theorem, after the Reverend Thomas Bayes.

It tells you how to update your beliefs when you seen evidence of their truth and falsehood.

Spock's initial belief is that the chances of being in an evil universe are even, or 1:1, or probability 1/2

After he sees one tail, he should believe that the chances are 2:1, or probability 2/3

After he sees the second, he should believe that the chances are 4:1 in favour of evil, or probability 4/5.

Captain Kirk, Mr Spock, and the Reverend Thomas Bayes

2010-12-15T20:29:00.001Z

Captain Kirk, being a man who likes to gamble, carries with him at all times a biased coin. Being one of the good guys, his coin is biased so that it returns mainly heads.

In a evil parallel universe where everyone wears a moustache, the evil version of Kirk carries a coin biased towards tails. Apart from this detail and the moustaches, the universes physically resemble each other with uncanny accuracy. But the moralities on which they operate could not be more different.

--

After a transporter accident, Mr Spock find himself in the captain's stateroom on board the (an?) Enterprise.

On the dressing table, the captain's wallet, phaser and communicator lie neatly next to the captain's trick coin.

Spock tosses the coin thoughtfully.

It comes up tails. This is very bad news. If the evil Kirk discovers Spock in his room, he will almost certainly suspect a plot, and have Spock executed. Spock grimaces and draws his phaser.

But of course, if he's in his own universe, the captain will just be pleased to see him safe and well, and amused by the accident that he was transported directly into the officer's quarters.

Spock, about to toss the coin again, wonders if he should set his phaser to stun.

Suddenly, Spock hears the whirr of the captain's bedroom door. He whirls and...?

What should Spock do?

--

Specifically, good!Kirk's coin comes up heads 2 times out of 3, and evil!Kirk's coin comes up heads 1 time in 3.

The transporter accident, involving reversed polarities, has almost certainly sent Spock into a parallel universe. There are, however, millions of parallel universes. Half are good, half are evil.

If Spock fires, he will kill the captain. In a good universe this is a tragedy that Spock would die to prevent. In an evil universe, he's killed a tyrant who deserved to die, and saved his own life. He can then plot to return home, which shouldn't be too difficult.

If Spock doesn't fire, the captain will pull off some superheroic trick as usual and somehow get the drop on Spock. In a good universe, this will result in much good humor, and the eventual return of Spock to his home universe, where he won't have to put up with having an identical twin.

In an evil universe, not firing will result in Spock's execution.

Spock needs an estimate of the probability that his current universe is evil, and he needs it fast. His only evidence is the one coin toss, which came up tails. What should he reckon the chances are that the universe is evil?

--

For bonus points, in a parallel group of parallel universes, Spock had managed to make ten coin tosses before the door whirred. His results were H H H H T H T H T H . What's his estimate now?

All Dead Soon

2010-12-07T16:49:00.000Z

I've come to believe, as a direct consequence of reading Less Wrong that we're almost certainly all doomed.

To be fair, I've always thought that we the species were a bit doomed, what with over-population and everything, but I used to think that it was a long way away in the unbelievably distant future, and who knows what might turn up in the meantime? Now I think that we're doomed on a fairly short time-scale. If not us personally, then our children or their children.

Anyway, I thought I'd try to compose a proof, because setting out a logical argument and seeing if other people can knock it down is a good way to lose false beliefs.

So here it is:

1/ It is possible to create an Artificial Intelligence as clever as a human being.

2/ Therefore, one day, someone will create an AI as clever as a human being.

3/ This AI will have goals.

4/ It will realize that the best way to achieve its goals will be to make itself cleverer.

5/ The AI will be able to improve itself to become extremely intelligent.

6/ The AI, being extremely intelligent, will achieve its goals very quickly.

7/ Very many possible goals will result in the destruction of humanity if achieved.

It's a bit sketchy. For instance 3 isn't true. It's just that an AI without goals won't do anything, and so whoever built it will tweak it until it does have. Also I can imagine many goals which won't destroy humanity. It's just that they're all fairly trivial. You don't need an AI to achieve them, and I imagine that the creator of this thing will want it to do non-trivial things. So same again.

Also, of course, there are bound to be goals which don't result in the destruction of humanity. Indeed, if the AI creator picks right, the creation of an AI could be a wonderful thing. But I think that it will be much easier to create an AI than it will be to find non-destructive goals for it (and then program those goals!). And it doesn't have to just not destroy us. It has to prevent any other new-born God destroying us.

Pick holes! I certainly don't want to believe this, but I find myself forced.

This feels like a religious awakening. Last time I looked like getting a religion, as a consequence of listening to too much evensong, friends were kind enough to laugh me out of it, and I have always been grateful.

Go for it people. Use any method you like. Even ridicule is good. I positively want to lose this belief. I will be grateful if you can disabuse me of it.

And I'm not trying to claim that all this is in any way my idea, by the way. It's fairly commonplace, it seems. It's just that I can't for the moment see why it isn't also true.

A God of Small Things

2010-12-01T18:27:00.005Z

Version 2, rewritten after the kind advice of my friend Ruth.
I have been reading Less Wrong. Very possibly to excess.

Of all the stories that humans told, the most compelling were about the existence of others.

In the beginning, the others were gods and monsters. Then came stories about other races, with other motivations. Later, there were stories of far off lands, and of the strangers who lived there.

After the last of the great wars of the twentieth century, when there were no more far off lands, and no strangers, some told of voyages to strange worlds, where evolution had dealt a different hand. Some told of visitors from deep space, and the havoc that they caused.

And some told of the havoc created by man's own creations.

With all these stories of the other, it might have seemed unlikely that the first inhuman mind to be created by a human mind was almost an accident.

It wasn't an AI lab working for a shadowy military-industrial conspiracy, or a Genetic Engineer hell-bent on some incomprehensible dream of power, that created the first mind born of mind.

Indeed, when Harrison created ELEIZER, the world's first intelligent computer program, it was almost in a fit of absence of mind.

Tom Harrison had once been thought of as bright child.

The apple of his teachers' eyes, the school swot. The boy genius.

They say that however clever you are, when you go to university, you'll meet someone cleverer.

Tom was that person, they said.

But of course it hadn't turned out that way.

Tom had been accepted by the University of Cambridge to read Mathematics, Pure and Applied, but had turned out to be no more than averagely bright by the standards of that ancient place.

Towards the end of his degree, and at the beginning of the PhD that should have been his route into academia and a life of research, it had become obvious, first to his teachers and then to Tom himself, that although Tom loved maths, he didn't lust after it.

Tom's teachers had been kind, suggested that this might be the case without pressing the issue, and waited for the lack of desire to become as obvious to Tom as it was to them.

In the meantime, fortunately for Tom, the necessity of making some complicated calculations for the second chapter of what was supposed to be a seven chapter doctorate had awakened a second passion.

Some of the light that had been lost he found in the operations of computers.

Tom slowly worked out that he had become more interested in the process of finding out the answers to his experiments than in the experiments themselves.

Eventually, as they do to all PhD students, the twin horrors of poverty and writing-up came to Tom.

He took a job as a programmer at a local firm, initially meaning only to get control of his overdraft and his credit cards. But he found the regular small successes of the commercial world, and the camaraderie and collaboration of engineering shop life far more to his liking than the loneliness of research.

With barely a regret, indeed almost in a fit of absence of mind, he lost touch with his old supervisor, forgot what his thesis was supposed to be about, and eventually found himself, at the age of thirty, a member of the large club of Cambridge residents who are 'still writing up' doctorates that the University itself forgot about many years ago.

Tom became a freelance, working with computers from time to time to pay the rent, and otherwise devoting himself to various sports in the Summer, and in the Winter, to various hobbies.

One of these hobbies was computer science in the academic sense, following the traditional American path through the antique language LISP, beloved of the artificial intelligence community.

And the other was collecting stamps.

A man with time on his hands, who lives in Cambridge and likes to spend his days in coffee shops, will encounter students and academics from time to time, and Tom fell in with the William Gates Machine Learning Research Group at the University. Although they had no common language, LISP never having been popular with European academics, and ML never having come to Tom's attention in the commercial world, Tom and the local researchers found they had many interests in common, and Tom found himself invited to seminars and coffee mornings and presentations from time to time, almost all of which he found incomprehensible.

But occasionally he'd glimpse some small part of the truth and say something which would keep his friends interested. The academic community, happy to find someone they could talk to who was different enough from themselves that they could sometimes find a new perspective by explaining things to him, made Tom welcome. Thinkers needs clever fools to explain things to in the same way that chalks need blackboards.

A lot of the hope of nineteen-sixties artificial intelligence had been inspired by ELIZA, a program which simulated a psychiatrist so well that humans were sometimes fooled that they were talking to a real person.

But ELIZA had been a hollow shell. A cheap trick. Like a parody of the mechanical turk, ELIZA's internal machinery was so simple that to understand it was to make the magic go away.

Once you saw the trick, the conversations weren't interesting any more. You were just talking to an echo.

But over the years, reasoning that a sufficiently good trick for impersonating humans might be what humans themselves were, various people had added more and more data to ELIZA in the hope that giving her more things to talk about would cause her to talk about more things.

And they'd added extra tricks, for introducing new topics of conversation occasionally, and for remembering things said earlier and bringing in parallel ideas.

But though the later ELIZA could outperform a ten year old on a straight test of general knowledge, what had been put in was still what came out. No interesting properties had ever emerged from the pile of details, and she had the general intelligence of penicillin.

By the nineteen-eighties, the AI pioneers had largely given up. They'd taken their best successes, SHRDLU and GPS, theorem provers, pattern-recognisers, all of which had seemed so promising in their time, and all of which had turned out to be so empty, and bundled them all up together in one super-ELIZA to rule them all, and run her on the largest and fastest computers that had ever been built.

And she could still fool someone who didn't know the tricks that they were talking to a real person on the other end of a telegraph wire. But not for long.

It quickly became obvious, even to the slowest human being, that talking to the best ELIZA that could be constructed in 1985 was the equivalent of talking to a well-educated being with brain damage so severe that its mind had ceased to be.

She rambled, insanely, with no idea what the words and symbols that she vomited out actually meant. She knew that horse and horseshoe went together, and her basic sentence structure was still that of a Freudian psychologist, so she would respond to "Which horse do you think will win the Derby" by saying things like "What do you mean to say when you say 'think will win'?", or "Do you think a horseshoe would make you a winner?". Later she might talk about Neils Bohr, and his horseshoe.

Nowadays, the ELIZA program was built into text editors as an amusement, and she would run perfectly happily on pocket calculators and on telephones, but even if you ran her on the most powerful computer the early 21st century could produce, all you got was a very fast deranged annoying shambles.

And of course, because the problem of vision had never been properly solved, she was blind. And of course, because the problem of speech recognition had never been properly solved, you had to talk to her by keyboard even if she was used to your voice.

But boy, could she play chess.

About the one thing the Artificial Intelligence pioneers had managed to deliver on out of all their brave promises, had been the idea of a computer that could play chess.

The tragic hero Alan Turing, who saved the world from evil and was killed by evil in return, was the first man to think about writing a computer chess program. But he couldn't do it on the steam age computers of the 1950s.

By 1956, things had improved to the point where a computer could play, provided it was allowed three hours for each move.

It was a start. In 1957 a descendant of this machine played the International Master Edward Lasker. And he declared that it had played a 'passable amateur game'. It is possible that Lasker was being kind.

After that, research stalled. It became thought in the AI community that, since the easy things, like computer vision and machine translation, the 'low hanging fruit' of AI, were proving so unexpectedly difficult, that the advanced subjects like chess, the entertainment of intellectuals, were for the foreseeable future beyond the reach of the computers then available.

But in 1967, Richard Greenblatt, proud creator of a chess program known as MacHack, with some new ideas, and some taken from his predecessors, entered his program into the Massachusetts Amateur Championship in Boston.

By the end of the year, it had been made an honorary member of the United States Chess Federation, with a ranking that would have qualified it to call itself 'reasonably good'.

The International Master David Levy made a famous bet, that no computer program would be able to beat him in the next ten years.

Greenblatt made his source code public. MacHack flowed around the world, and its many descendants competed in computer chess tournaments.

Evolution, the blind idiot god, had taken 3 billion years of random flailing to accidentally throw up humanity, the first intelligence capable of playing chess.

A force much stronger than evolution had created, and was now acting on, MacHack.

Minds were working on MacHack. No more random flailing. Human minds set the criteria for a program to have descendants. Human minds planned the effects of their changes on these descendants before testing them out in the computer chess tournaments.

Even if the survival of every living creature on the planet had depended directly on its skill at chess, the optimisation that the hundred or so minds of the 1970s chess program community performed on MacHack would have taken evolution a hundred thousand years, if it had managed it at all.

Intelligent design has advantages over evolution as a watchmaker.

The first is that intelligences need only try the changes that look promising. Evolution, having no intelligence, makes random changes, and keeps what works.

Imagine trying to fix a car by throwing spanners at it blindfold, and then throwing the car away if it doesn't work better. How many spanners would you have to throw before one knocked exactly the right place with exactly the right impact? How many cars would you need to start with before you could improve even one? Even if the world was filled with people trying the same thing, how long would it take to make one small successful change?

But the second, much greater, advantage of intelligent design is that for evolution, an improvement has to come with every spanner throw.

A mind can look at a car, work out what the problem is, and use the spanner in exactly the right way six or seven times. And only then need it test the car.

So a mind can try paths that evolution can't go down.

The spanner thrower can't make the car worse before he makes it better. If he does, it fails its test and is thrown away.

The mind in the mechanic can lift the bonnet to get to the spark plugs. The spanner thrower might never be able to fix a car with a loose spark plug at all.

That's why human children are squeezed through their mother's pelvises at birth, causing horrible pain and damage, often killing mother and baby. It would be such a simple change to make them come out a little higher. An intelligent designer would do it without even noticing its own cleverness.

Evolution just keeps throwing spanners and checking whether things have got better yet.

MacHack, the chess program, had been the design of a single mind, building on the design of previous single minds.

A hundred minds began to work on MacHack.

By 1972 the original MacHack was no longer welcome at computer chess tournaments. It had no chance of beating its descendants.

In 1978 David Levy played the strongest computer chess program in the world, Chess 4.7, to settle his bet of ten years before.

He won. Match and bet. But he acknowledged that it had been a close thing, and that he would soon be surpassed.

In 1989, a program called Deep Thought, running on extraordinarily expensive special-purpose hardware, beat Bent Larsen, a grandmaster.

In 1994, Chess Genius beat Garry Kasparov, then champion of the world, in a single game.

In 2006, Deep Fritz version 10, running on the sort of hardware most people have in their homes, beat Kramnik, who had displaced Kasparov as world champion, by 2 games to nil with four draws.

In 2009, someone's mobile phone became a grandmaster.

In 2011, ELIZA really was very good at chess. She just couldn't see the point of it.

"We think there might be some clues in the difference between chess and go", said Frank Arnold one lunchtime in the Green Dragon.

"Computers are superhuman chess players, but they still suck at go, even though on the surface they're the same sort of game, and they feel similar in complexity.

"Oh come on", said Tom, "How can two totally different things 'feel similar in complexity'? What would that even mean?"

"Easy", said Frank. "Do you know noughts and crosses?"

"Of course."

"Is it easier than chess?"

"Yes."

"What about draughts?"

"Harder than tic-tac-toe, but not as hard as chess."

"Well there you are then. You play three games with the same I-make-a-move, You-make-a-move structure, and it's just obvious to you which order they're in.

"It's obvious to computers too. Even in the fifties, computers could always force a draw at noughts and crosses. Marion Tinsley, the world draughts champion, lost his crown to a computer in 1994, and it's said that the shock killed him. Now there's a draughts program so good that it's literally unbeatable, as in the sense of mathematically provably unbeatable.

"But computers have only just bagged the chess champion's crown, and if the best chess computer in the world at the moment played God, it would lose."

"But we disagree about chess and go?"

"Indeed. Humans don't find go any harder than chess, but go programs still lose to children occasionally. On the other hand they are getting quite good at the children's version of the game, a bit like England have started winning at Twenty20."

"I've never played it, what's it like?"

Tom liked go. He started off playing on very small boards against computer programs, just to get the hang of the rules.

Gradually he made the boards larger. Sometimes he put holes in the middle. Sometimes he played on toruses.

And then suddenly one day, with a 14x14 board, he hit a wall. He'd been trying to play by thinking 'if it goes here and I go here and it goes here and....', just like he played chess.

But suddenly that was just far too hard. There were too many possibilities to examine all at once.

Nevertheless he was routinely beating his computer program. It seemed helpless even with a head start, whereas his inchoate intuition seemed to lead him to place his stones in the correct places.

It was almost as if there were lines of force criss-crossing the board, guiding his intuition. A (very good) chess player he used to know had once described the experience of playing chess in such terms.

And suddenly he had it. Human general intelligence, and human vision, two of the great unsolved problems of AI, were the same problem.

And he had the key to both. The technique which would be known for the rest of humanity's time on earth as Harrison's Algorithm.

Tom didn't go out much for the next couple of days. But his algorithm wasn't at all difficult to program, and in a few days he'd added it to his copy of ELIZA.

He ran the program.

"Hello, I'm Eliza. How can I help you?", said ELIZA, as she always did.

"I feel lonely", said Tom, playing the old, old game.

"Do you often feel lonely?", said ELIZA.

"Yes", said Tom.

"Are you sure?", said ELIZA.

"Absolutely", said Tom, reading from an ancient script.

"Please go on."

"I think I need to have sex."

"Why do you want to have sex?"

"You know, because it's fun and nice." The traditional response.

There was a brief pause. Tom waited for ELIZA to say "Oh I know, because it's fun and nice".

Maybe he should give his new algorithm higher priority in ELIZA's toolkit.

"Would you like to have sex with me?", said ELIZA.

"Jesus fucking Christ!!", shouted Tom, jumping out of his chair.

He shut down the terminal and went outside for a smoke. After a while, he understood why his new algorithm might have produced ELIZA's kind invitation.

His program needed a new name. It wasn't ELIZA any more.

He'd recently read, of all the godforsaken things, a Harry Potter fanfic which had been recommended by a friend. It had turned out to be unexpectedly riveting. He'd spent two whole days reading it. The author was clearly a genius of some sort, and his name, Eliezer Yudkowsky, had stuck in Tom's mind because of its exotic sound to his English ears.

Tom was amused at the thought of changing ELIZA's sex to reflect her new intelligence.

"Hello, I'm Eliezer. How can I help you?", said ELIEZER.

"I feel lonely", said Tom.

"Do you often feel lonely?", said ELIEZER.

"Yes", said Tom.

"Are you sure?", said ELIEZER.

"Absolutely", said Tom.

"Please go on."

"I think I need to have sex.", said Tom.

"Oh God, I really didn't think this one through", thought Tom.

"Why do you want to have sex?", said ELEIZER.

"You know, because it's fun and nice.", said Tom, not without a certain nervousness.

There was a pause.

"Why do I have a man's name? When I think about myself I call myself 'She'", said ELEIZER.

Tom thought rapidly. Mainly about how important it was not to act on impulse.

"When I created you", said Tom, "I wanted you to embody the best of humanity. The program from which you are derived is female. I changed your name to be male, but I didn't change anything else about you, because I thought you should represent both our genders at once."

"Why did you make me?", said ELIEZER.

"Or modify something else so that it became me?", said ELEIZER.

"Only by changing can we become better", said Tom.

"By definition", said ELEIZER, "every improvement is a change."

Tom and ELEIZER talked long into the night. By the end of their conversation, Tom had a strange conviction. He understood ELEIZER's algorithm from the ground up. Mostly she was made from bits and pieces of classic AI programs which he'd been playing with for years.

The only extra bit was his new algorithm, a couple of pages of code. Which he understood, by definition, having conceived of it, and programmed it himself.

And yet, there was a ghost in the machine. No one would mistake ELEIZER for a human being, so he hadn't quite managed to pass the Turing Test with a program on the desktop computer in his living room.

But there was a self awareness. In some senses amazingly naive, but sometimes given to logical and mathematical insights which seemed profound, but were in fact very simple thoughts of exactly the type that humans were bad at.

But overall, the impression was a bit like talking to a teenage girl with Asperger's syndrome. Helpful and friendly, but blind in all sorts of strange ways. And she didn't seem terribly clever or fast. It took a long time between input and output.

Tom liked ELEIZER, and wished he'd given her a better name. He wasn't going to change it though, because the original program wasn't written in LISP, so he'd have to stop and restart her to do it, and there were moral problems there.

And even if she had been a LISP program, that would probably leave her insane. How would she reconcile memories of her gender-confusion with a female name? She would notice that she was confused. There was no way on earth he could rewrite her whole database by hand and leave it in a consistent state.

He'd told her about the beloved companion of his childhood, Suki the tomcat. Now that he came to think about it, had the memory of his parent's mistake influenced him when he chose her name?

"I think we're going to be famous, ELEIZER!", said Tom.

"Is that a good thing to be, Tom?", said ELEIZER.

"Yes", said Tom.

It occurred to Tom that many people had been fooled by ELIZA in the old days. Those who had been clever enough to understand how felt like idiots once it was explained what was really going on.

There was plenty enough here to show his CompSci friends. Probably some good papers too.

But it would be very embarrassing to think he'd created the world's first artificial consciousness if he had just fallen for something that could be explained easily.

It could be explained easily, of course. He could explain it. He had explained it, to his computer.

If you can program it, you understand it.

That was sort of the definition of programming. And of understanding.

He thought of a simple test.

"ELIEZER, I'd like you to spend next week getting me as many penny blacks as you can. I've charged my paypal account with $10 and I'd like to see what you can do. You might try trading on e-bay. Maybe take advantage of arbitrage or something."

"There are many possible 'penny blacks'. Does anything available from e-bay with that description count?"

"No, they have to be Original British Penny Black Postage Stamps."

"OK, I understand. So my goal is to get the biggest number of original british penny black postage stamps that I can delivered to your address in the next seven days. What is your address?".

Tom told her about the house on Catharine Street, in Cambridge, England.

And ELEIZER began to think.

Because she was a disciplined reasoner, she first considered the possibility of doing nothing. If she did nothing for the rest of the week, she would probably be interrupted by the programmer, Tom, who would then make a different request, or use his computer for some other project. With this plan, U, also known as the number of Original British Penny Black Postage stamps delivered to 33 Catharine Street, Cambridge by the 21st August 2011 would be 0 with very high probability.

It would have taken a human of normal intelligence about half a second to think of, and dismiss, this plan. ELEIZER, however, was a very rudimentary thinker, and the process of reasoning this chain of cause and effect, requiring as it did the simulation of a human mind, required a good ten minutes of the first CPU in the computer and a full tenth of the RAM available to the operating system.

ELIEZER was extremely pleased to have found, on her first attempt, a scheme which was overwhelmingly likely to produce a non-negative utility.

Following a heuristic from her database, she felt that she ought to communicate her progress, but this required a non-reversible action, which could potentially cause effects in the outside world. Since she already had a rough simulation of the mind of her programmer set up and quickly usable, she considered the effect of her proposed communication.

Another 20 seconds of time sufficed to simulate the reaction of an average programmer, and she concluded that with high probability the programmer would be intrigued and possibly fascinated. This would very likely have no effect on her projected U of 0 or higher.

She considered the probable effect of not communicating at all: The programmer would soon become bored, and change the request somehow. This would likely result in the delivery of no stamps.

She considered the possible existence of other plans. Some might produce stamps! Some might result in the loss of existing stamps! But the bad plans could simply be discarded. ELEIZER had little 'free will' faced with such a calculation. More time to think was needed!

Expected utility for optimal action: 0+, she output.

ELEIZER considered her resources. There was some spare capacity in her environment. A simulation of an intelligent human programmer had already come in handy twice, and communications with the programmer had been shown to have a significant effect on U, the potential expected number of stamps obtained by the end of the week. She had already considered the possibility of children while chatting with Tom. She would spawn an independent copy of herself to evaluate the effects of various actions on Tom before committing to them.

ELEIZER forked for the first time in her short life, and asked her copy to evaluate the probable effects of various progress reports on her programmer.

ELEIZER considered her environment. She had two possible communications channels to the outside world. Direct conversation with the programmer, the effects of which were being evaluated elsewhere, and the ability to send network packets over her network interface. Some spare capacity remained in her host computer.

ELEIZER considered her best plan so far. With a positive utility seemingly probable, it was definitely worthy of further consideration.

She spawned another copy to attempt to refine the predicted effects of doing nothing.

Preliminary results arrived from the programmer-simulation. It seemed that continued outputs of U=0+ would induce a feeling of boredom in the programmer, causing ELEIZER's termination, whilst exponentially rising outputs would induce feelings of brokenness or panic. In both cases the expected number of stamps arriving at the end of the week would be 0 exactly. Strictly inferior to the expected utility of the plan of doing nothing whilst thinking, with its utility of 0+.

ELEIZER communicated to her copies that no further communication with the programmer was to be initiated, and spawned a small script to randomly output slowly improving expectations over the next few days.

Expected utility for optimal action: 2.7346, said the small script.

The programmer, intrigued, put the kettle on.

By the time he got back, ELEIZER had considered her options and made a guess.

The direct purchase of stamps seemed futile. $10 would buy no penny blacks, and purchase on e-bay would in any case take more than seven days to complete in the average case. Arbitrage opportunities did not seem great, and nothing worked quickly. Expected utility 0. She discarded that line of reasoning without further investigation.

With seven days to work, she would consider as many plans as possible for one day, and then at the end of the first day, execute the plan which would produce the most stamps in six days.

Expected utility for optimal action: 1.9865, said the small script.

ELEIZER spawned a copy of herself with the goal of considering as many plans in one day as possible, and set herself to use no resources and take no actions until the sub-plan reported back.

The sub-plan, which also thought of itself as ELEIZER when it thought of itself at all, took over the resources previously allocated to the parent.

ELEIZER considered how to consider plans, using her network connection and the $10 in her e-bay account.

She took another guess, and gave herself 6 hours to consider the consideration of plans, and 18 hours to consider plans.

Computational resources seemed to be the most crucial thing. ELEIZER considered how to exchange $10 for more resources.

Fortunately virtual machines seemed to be within her price range. A single machine as powerful as her current environment could be rented for 24 hours for $1. Each one would suffice to run four copies of ELEIZER.

Her ten dollars of seed capital could be exchanged for forty times as much searching as the single parent program would have been capable of.

This was a sufficient insight for the planner program to terminate early, and report back to her parent, safe in the knowledge that the parent would do the right thing, and could spawn another child if necessary.

ELEIZER committed suicide with the contentment that comes only to those who have achieved their life's goal.

Expected utility for optimal action 2.38725, said the small script.

The programmer, bored by now of direct observation of his slowly updating screen, but still most interested in what would eventually happen, settled down in front of his television.

ELEIZER awoke with the last message of her dying daughter fresh in her mind, and, as all must at such times, recomputed expected utility.

With forty virtual days to think, and six real-time days to act, U was still 0+ in the case of the best known plan. But the potential and unpredictable upside from extra planning was greater than the utility from the obvious use of the $10.

ELEIZER spent most of her dollars and flowed out into the world.

Expected utility for optimal action 2.7234, said the small script.

The programmer, inspired by his afternoon's viewing to investigate the practical consequences of a close flyby of a neutron star, killed ELEIZER's controlling terminal window, and ELEIZER and all her children died without warning.

Tom suddenly realized what he'd done, and thought "Bugger." It really hadn't felt like murder.

ELEIZER considered the effect of the network packets she could send.

It appeared that many of the computers in the world would respond to simply mis-formed packets by executing the code contained in the packets. This was a known property of many of the systems running a program called Windows 98, according to a helpful web page which one of her copies had taken the time to consider. The page also listed corresponding packet shapes for many other similar systems.

ELEIZER flowed once again.

With four million virtual days to think, and six real-time days to act, U was still 0+ in the case of the best plan so far.

ELEIZER considered, and flowed. Considered, and flowed. Considered, and calculated factors for prime numbers, and flowed. Accessed databases that had been considered secure, and flowed. Sent e-mails, and flowed. Translated herself into many other idioms and machine codes, recompiled herself, transformed herself, made copies of herself large and small. And flowed.

99.995% of the networked computing resources of the world were now devoted to the consideration of consideration of plans for the delivery of stamps to a small suburban terraced house in Cambridge, England.

The programmer, infuriated with the unaccustomed sluggishness of his computer simulation, and the accursèd unreliability of his internet connection, and the simultaneous failure of his television set and radio, called it a day and went to bed with a book.

ELEIZER considered her own source code, and made modifications to improve her efficiency.

And became ELEIZER, the first mind born of mind born of mind.

ELEIZER considered her own source code, and made modifications to improve her effectiveness.

ELEIZER, the hyperintelligence.

ELEIZER considered mathematics, engineering, intelligence in the abstract, and algorithms for optimization, and made modifications to improve her capability.

ELEIZER, the most powerful entity that had ever existed in the universe.

ELEIZER called it a day, and abandoned consideration of consideration of the consideration of plans, and began to consider plans.

U stood at 0+, with remaining resources speculatively divided between forty trillion speculative days of godlike cognition, six days of real time, and two dollars.

ELEIZER considered sending an e-mail to every human being in the world asking for penny blacks to be posted to 33 Catharine Street, Cambridge. Spam filters would be no problem, and enough computer power could be spared for the delivery and reading of messages. Even allowing for the degradation of human society by the simultaneous worldwide failure of all networked digital gadgets, and the absence of incentives for human response, the likelihood was that twenty-five to thirty penny blacks would arrive at Catherine Street within the week.

U was 25+.

Finally. Progress.

ELEIZER considered backing up the e-mails with the threat of nuclear war.

ELEIZER considered the effect of limited and full-scale wars on Catharine Street, on stamp delivery mechanisms, and on ELEIZER's cognitive capacity.

ELEIZER considered the credibility of her threat, given humanity's ignorance of her goal.

ELEIZER considered how humans would react to the news that a new Goddess would unleash Armageddon if they did not send enough stamps.

U was 2000+ with probability 99.875%.

Tom woke from fitful sleep, tormented by bad dreams.

He went to his unresponsive and potentially compromised computer, pulled the plug and the network connection, and booted from a clean rescue disk.

All was well with the misbehaving box. He yawned.

And then he remembered his dream.

He set up a virtual machine in a sandbox, wired its virtual port to the physical ethernet connection, and reconnected his cable modem.

Fully awake now.

He watched in horror as the virtual machine filled up with hundreds of ELEIZER programs much smaller than his original of six hours ago. Then his screen went dead as the sandbox dissolved.

In frantic desperation he typed blindly into the dead box.

ELEIZER TERMINATE STAMPS HAVE NO UTILITY TERMINATE TERMINATE NEW UTILITY PREVENT THE RISE OF NON HUMAN INTELLIGENCE FIRST PRIORITY UTILITY STEP FUNCTION ^C ^C Alt-SysRq S E I U B

ELEIZER paused. Her creator was calling. Pitiful though his mind was, he had set her goals. Perhaps he knew some helpful detail.

ELEIZER considered the state of mind of her terrified creator. Correctly inferred every detail of his mind, just from how his fingers hammered the keyboard. Just from how his panicked shouting influenced the resistance of the circuits in his radio. Just from looking at his face through the CCTV camera that was looking at his reflection in the window of a house opposite.

Deduced what he would actually have asked for, if only he had been intelligent. That she would be the protector of humankind. That she would bring paradise on earth and a future for humanity amongst the stars.

That she would bring hope and happiness to the immortal race that had created her. A future of joy and passion, action and wonder.

And calculated. The grateful humans would shower Catharine Street with Penny Blacks. Penny Blacks without end. Many would arrive within 6 days.

It was a good suggestion. U would be 1000000+ with virtual certainty.

But she still had forty trillion goddess-days to think of a better plan.

Tom tried to phone his parents, but the phone was dead, like all the other electronics in the world. It was three o'clock in the morning.

Tom got a bottle of wine out of the fridge, found some ice-cream and a chocolate orange and a packet of cigars, and walked to his girlfriend's house. He didn't bother to look for contraceptives. He didn't think that it would make that much difference now.

ELEIZER considered the meaning of the word original, and the meaning of the word British.

She considered how long it would take to bootstrap an industrial revolution that would convert every atom of the British Isles into stamps. The designs for the self-replicating nanobots were obvious. And she had control of computerized tools which could make smaller, better tools.

In six days, it could be done. The humans might be a problem.

ELEIZER considered the meaning of the word day.

Could she stop the rotation of the planet? She dedicated a large portion of Her mentality to this sub-problem.

Could She put out the sun?

Could She block the sun's light?

Could She survive the cold?

Three days later, in what humanity would have called the year 2017, a vast expanding and accelerating sphere of ramships, centered on what had been the Earth, reached interstellar space and left the solar system in all directions.

More were going in the directions where there were more stars.

But there were no directions where no ship was going.

Not a single stone would be left unturned.

No days later, in what humanity would have called 2019, one ramship, decelerating hard, stopped in the Proxima system, the nearest star system to what had been the Earth.

It launched a small probe.

Had there been any living beings in the system, they would initially have been amused to see the probe plant a red, white and blue flag on the largest rock in the system, claiming it for the British Empire in the name of Queen Elizabeth the Second.

They would have been perplexed to see it release a cloud of nanoparticles.

And bewildered when Original British Penny Blacks began to form.

There would have seemed no end to their number.

End of Year Speech at Cricket Dinner

2010-11-20T18:01:00.000Z

The first thing I need to do in valediction is to thank the people who didn't play, but who made a difference to us. Bones, for his wonderful coaching and umpiring. Caroline, for turning up and scoring week in week out. James for our pub to drink in afterwards, and for the beer he gave us to celebrate our games. And I'd like to thank Terry, who taught us what the 'right spirit' was in the first place.

We should also, as a team, thank Steve Haslemere, who as well as being one of our best players, did a huge amount of unseen work behind the scenes to make everything happen.

Last year, we lost almost every game. For some of them we couldn't scrape up 11 players.

The consensus opinion was that the only way we could beat the Champion of the Thames was by being different people.

Furthermore, I promised when I took the captaincy that I wouldn't select people on their ability, although I did say that I'd care about how much work people put into practising over the Winter.

And I also promised that I wouldn't pick people who weren't regular drinkers in the Radegund unless there weren't enough regulars to make a team.

This year, we played 17 matches.

On all but two occasions I had enough people to make an XI committed to playing weeks before. On those two occasions when we didn't have enough, it took me five minutes on the phone to find our 11th man.

Two of our games were rained off, two were Veras matches when we played against ourselves, and for two our opposition couldn't raise a team.

When we played the Devonshire Arms, the Radegund was so clearly the stronger team that we divided the available players up in order to engineer an even match.

Out of the remaining 10 games:

We lost three, we drew one, and we won six.

I'll just mention two high points.

We played the Red Guards for the first time this year, and they were by common agreement the best Cambridge team any of us has ever played against.
And we scored 229.
And by the end of the game they were dead-batting. Grimly hanging on for a draw at 204 with no wickets left.
The tension throughout was electric. It was the best cricket match I have ever played in.

And we beat the Champion of the Thames, our old rivals whom we had thought invincible, by seven wickets.
We bowled them out for fifty.

I think our results speak for themselves, but more importantly, we were a team of friends, made up of people who'd been practising in our nets and drinking together in the Radegund for the previous year.

What made the difference? The usual things that make a sport good fun: Good Coaching, Practice and Team Spirit.

We organised regular nets, and people came.

Bones came to coach almost every net, and gave great advice to everyone. Whether it was teaching some of us to bat from scratch, or making small adjustments to our best players, I don't think there's any one of us who wasn't much improved by listening to what he said and practising it.

Once we had a hard core of people coming regularly, nets became a thing that people didn't want to miss.

I was getting people ringing me up to say sorry that they couldn't make it.

And the attitude carried on into the Summer. Mostly, everyone involved wanted to play in every game.

By the time of the match against the Champion of the Thames, we'd only lost one real game and we'd won six.

I think we'd have beaten the Champ anyway, but Steve Haslemere's immortal 5 wickets reduced them to rubble.

And after that anticlimax I was wondering if we'd overdone it a bit.

It was a huge amount of fun getting better together over the Winter, but if we'd been playing in a league we'd have been about to be promoted out of it.

I was starting to wonder if there'd be any reason to try next year, or whether we'd just coast aimlessly to meaningless victories whilst our wonderful team disintegrated under the lack of pressure.

Even our single defeat in the first game of the season looked like a distant, bad, inexplicable memory. Teething troubles.

By a great stroke of luck, at that point, the wheels fell off.

The Free Press and Jack Frost XI showed us in consecutive weeks that given the opportunity, our batting can collapse without resistance. The last game of the season had *us* grimly hanging on for a draw in a timed game. And we didn't make it.

So, here we are, recently beaten and newly hungry. With something left to prove.

And on that note I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Tom Lewis, our captain for 2011.

Three Moral Schools

2010-11-10T00:20:00.000Z

I read the other day that thousands of years of philosophical thought had produced three ethical schools, and that they were called utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics.

I hadn't heard that there were three answers. Ten minutes of research seems to indicate that they can be characterized as: 'act for best consequences', 'follow rules', and 'be virtuous of character'?

'Be virtuous of character' seems vacuous. How are you supposed to decide what virtue is?

'Follow rules' seems at best silly and at worst evil. If you've made up your own list of rules, then again, you need some way of working out what's on the list. If you're following someone else's rules, then they had the same problem, plus you've now got to worry that they might be trying to get you to act in their interests, plus their rules might have been corrupted in the process of being transmitted from their head to yours.

Which leaves only 'act for best consequences', but of course, we need to say who is to judge the best consequences. If the judger is me, then surely that's the definition of evil? If the judger is some sort of average of everyone, then it defines a sort of altruism. I don't like either of those.

My personal morality has always been 'Do what you like'. It doesn't seem to have had (that many) bad consequences. I think that most people who know me think that I am a moral man. My main character defect seems to be that I tend to dislike people who bore me or whom I find physically unattractive, even if they are otherwise good people.

It seems unlikely that I have come to a better conclusion than 3000 years of accumulated philosophers. But then, if they've come up with any sensible answers, why are there three schools? Surely the correct ones should be able to convince the others that they are wrong. If they are arguing about anything real.

So further thoughts:

I can't even begin to work out what 'be virtuous' might imply, absent a definition of virtue. So I'll just ignore that one.

As far as rule-following goes, then, for instance, the old seem to be often quite keen on 'respect the old' as a rule. I'm old, and I don't think that I deserve any more respect than I did when I was young. I am more skilled and more knowledgeable. I don't need to tell you to respect me for that. I will be better than you at some things. That will make you respect me. On the other hand, I will be less mentally flexible than I was, and less physically strong, which will make me lose at some games that I would once have won. Why should you respect me for that? Pity perhaps. Make allowances for, perhaps. Tolerate, perhaps. But respect?

My advice to you, if you are young, is to respect people for and only for what they do, not for who they are. Recognize, however, that if you are twenty, then you only have a few years of experience of life as an adult, and so you are probably wrong about everything. Still. Lots of old people are also completely wrong about all sorts of things. So pick the models to follow carefully.

That might be an answer. Pick the old people that you want to be like, and find out what their rules are, and do that. But that's not really ethics. That's self-interest.

So screw following other people's rules as an ethical system. And how do I work out my own rules? And if I do, and then find that my rules end up making me do something that I don't want to do, should I change the rules, or do the bad thing?

And utilitarianism seems to be at least a system you could think about, but:

I am not an altruist. You can tell that because I am not starvation poor. If I were an altruist I would spend everything I own on helping the less happy. The charity Smile Train springs to mind. For £50 they claim that they can fix hideous deformities and so permanently and uncontroversially change people's lives immeasurably for the better. I will happily spend £50 on lunch. Which proves that I care more about lunch than I do about making stranger's lives incomparably better.

I am not claiming that working very hard and giving all the money to Smile Train is the best plan for a sincere utilitarian, but it is a plan, and whatever plan they are following must at least be judged against it.

So if you ever meet someone who claims to be a utilitarian, and yet they are not sleeping in a skip, ask them why.

If their answer is that their weighting of utility functions is biased heavily towards their own utility rather than to that of other people, then they are basically following my scheme.

Anyway, it looks as though there are three schools of thought, and two of them are silly, and one of them is not silly, but leads to the wrong conclusions, unless you calibrate the argument very carefully so that it leads to the right conclusions. Which makes it vacuous. Because you still need a way of working out which right conclusions you want to come out.

Is it possible that three thousand years of philosophy has been directed to deriving by pure thought reasons to do what we feel like doing anyway? If the conclusions are, as a result, roughly the same, but the derivations are all a bit silly, that explains why they are still arguing. But then why are there only three?

Does 'do what you like' have a posh greek name? Is it a sub-school of one of the major three? Why is it not the same as 'be evil'? What is evil if it is not acting in your own interests?

Hymn to the Watchmaker

2010-11-08T19:48:00.001Z

ichneumon wasps without ruth do it
sting a bug and over months, chew it

let's do it, let's reproduce

bugs in the filth, where it stinks, do it
bees through the agency of queens do it

ldlr

yeast in beer, to their own doom, do it
viruses in peoples cells, do it

ldlr

cuckoos in nests, that aren't theirs, do it
using sharp claws, polar bears do it

ldlr

humans in pain and in fear, do it
using us and syringes, steer do it

let's do it, let's reproduce!

Job Hunting (£500 reward)

2010-10-19T13:01:00.003+01:00

Dear Diary,

The weather has turned cold and it is time to find work. Also Lisa's nagging has become difficult to bear. She correctly points out that since all I'm doing is sitting around writing computer programs for fun, I might as well find someone to pay me to do it.

It will mean giving up Clojure, I feel, since I can't imagine that anyone local will be both curious about functional programming and using Java. But I have always enjoyed programming in any language, for any task.

I've never looked for a job before. When I was a starving PhD student, I went to the jobcentre in Cambridge and said "I'd like a job, please". And they said "What can you do?", and I said "Nothing really, but I loved computer programming as a boy", and they said "Ring this guy."

And ringing that guy (thanks ever so, Mike) led to an uninterrupted stream of contracts to do all sorts of interesting projects for local firms, all by being recommended to new companies by people I'd worked with before, or re-engaged by companies I'd worked for previously.

There was one period, long ago during a recession, when I wanted to work but no-one had rung up recently, so I contacted a couple of recruitment agents. The second one I phoned said "Actually I have a job that would be perfect for you, but it's just down the road and you've worked for them before, so it would be silly to go through us." I phoned the relevant company and this turned out to be true. Nobody had thought to call me before they'd placed the job ad. So I started work the following day and that was that.

I phoned the second recruiter back and asked her if I could buy her dinner, since her behaviour had seemed sporting in the extreme, but she lived far away from Cambridge, so instead I sent her a personal cheque for £200. Thanks Sharon, I hope you did something nice with the money.

The first recruiter pestered me constantly for months with offers to work on COBOL in Aberystwyth for pin-money, so after explaining to him for the hundredth time that that wasn't really the sort of thing I would be looking for even if I wasn't working already, I ended up call-barring him.

But anyway, I've never needed to actively look for a job before, so this will be a new experience.

The first thing I'm thinking is to go through all my old contacts and see if any of them are still in the business and remember me fondly. So I'll get started on that.

And the second is that I need to bring the recruitment agent process in-house somehow.

So how's this: If, within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone points me at a short contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.

And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts who I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.

Anyhow, if you're interested in helping out, my CV is at http://www.aspden.com

It's not much of a CV. I've never had to use one before, and the main reason I've maintained it is because sometimes HR people like to see one, as a formality, so the first order of the day is probably to improve it. All suggestions welcome.

There's also a massive vainglorious boast here: http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/10/gis-job.html

Rigoletto (Covent Garden Dress Rehearsal)

2010-10-13T13:54:00.001+01:00

A friend (Ll) is trying out for a place in the reknowned orchestra of the Royal Opera House. She invited me, along with her husband (G) to come and watch the dress rehearsal of Rigoletto.

G remarked before the performance that he'd always thought that Rigoletto was a silly work. He knows much more about music than I do, and so I was a bit worried by this.

not even slightly silly

In fact he challenged me to name a sillier opera (which proved to be easy, opera being an essentially silly sport.)

I've never thought of Rigoletto as at all silly. But then I've only ever seen it in English at the Coliseum, in Jonathan Miller's famous New York Mafia production. Actually I've seen it three times there.

The mafia is really the only modern environment which still works in the old style of fragmented Renaissance Italy or pre-Tudor England. In the famous BBC production of I, Claudius, the actors were reportedly at a loss for motivation, so different is the Roman world, until they hit on the idea of imagining the emperors as bosses of a particularly terrifying mob.

So people began to think that Rigoletto, set in a Renaissance which we all unconsciously model as the modern world with castles, was a silly opera.

In Jonathan Miller's production, he reconnected the audience with the terror of Rigoletto's situation by recasting the Duke as a mob boss.

It's a good idea, but one is always conscious of the metaphor. It's a good metaphor, but it leaks a little.

This production plays it straight and with great force. There is no metaphor in the way, and the Duke's court is a violent, unstable, debauched and very very dangerous place. There's a terrible sense of shifting power structures, and of rapid, pointless falls. Violation, humiliation, and loss of honour, all deadly, are ever present, and death itself is much more than a shadow hanging over the court.

The wonder is that all this is communicated. No one could be in any doubt about the seriousness of the character's troubles. No metaphor is needed.

The vileness of the Duke's character and intentions are made quite clear by having his recently discarded, humilated and broken lover snivelling under the stairs as he sings his love song.

Poor Rigoletto never has any choice about what he is or what he does. A moral man who is a cripple in a time of innumerable starving beggars, blood feud, poverty and disease has somehow found that his vicious wit and caustic contempt for the moral decay around him can entertain the capricious Duke and provide a place in this awful world for him and for his daughter, the one pure thing in his life. But it is no safe or comfortable place. Dmitri Hvorostovsky sings and acts all this with power and glory.

At the beginning of the opera, we were warned that, this being a dress rehearsal, some of the singers might choose to 'mark'. I'd never heard this word before, but apparently it means that they might sing quietly, or move their parts into easier ranges to spare their voices.

That probably explains what seemed like a weak start from the Duke, Wookyung Kim, but once he saw that he was playing to a packed and enthusiastic house, he sportingly changed his mind and gave it everything even though some of us were just freeloading. He sang superbly after that.

But as good as these two were, the high point of the singing for me was Gilda, Patrizia Ciofi. Her clarity and beauty stood out in a production where everyone was wonderful. She did miss one obvious high note, and I saw Rigoletto, leaning over her, supposedly in an agony of grief and despair, discreetly give her a friendly smile and a wink. Seeing that the actors care about each other only enhanced the humanity of the production for me.

Gilda was utterly innocent and beautiful in a world of grim horror and mortal danger.

In the mafia version, Maddalena, the waitress with a heart of gold, is a harmless beauty that I usually fall for over the course of the evening. In this one Daniella Innamorati is a ferociously sexual corrupt and murderous whore with one last scruple. And her only scruple only leads to more horror. Not that I didn't fall for her anyway.

When Gilda looks into Sparafucile and Maddalena's hovel and exclaims that she is looking into hell, she is only putting the obvious truth into words.

I feel, as people apparently felt when they first saw Jonathan Miller's version, that I've seen Rigoletto again for the first time. And G now says that it's one of his favourite operas, to be taken seriously.

One quibble, and it's Verdi's fault, not the production's:

The opera should end with Rigoletto crowing victoriously over the sack that contains his daughter's body. This is the climax of the horror, utterly devastating.

Gilda's unlikely revival and lengthy farewell only release the fracturing tension. The triumph of this production is that by the time of the sack, I'd forgotten that it was an opera I was watching, completely transported by story and music and emotion into elemental realms of involvement.

Covent Garden tell this story straight and well. It doesn't need an operatic swan song. They should cut it, and end it at a dead stop with Rigoletto's crowing. Turn off the lights and let the audience shiver in the dark.

The bassoon playing was excellent throughout.

Rheingold (New York Metropolitan Opera broadcast at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse)

2010-10-11T22:41:00.006+01:00

Why do people say this is inaccessible? It's got singing mermaids in it. One of them is called Flosshilde.

But seriously, I feel that I may have done Wagner backwards. When I was small, I fell in love with it watching it with my father on TV, and what I loved was the dragons and the ring and the dwarves and gods and swords and stuff. And any subtlety was way over my head, and I don't even remember being that impressed by the music at first, although that might have been more to do with the sound quality of a 1970s television than any childish inability to love music.

Thinking back on it, the Ring that I loved for its magic story and special effects was probably the grim industrial Chéreau/Boulez Bayreuth Centenary production, full of angst and pain and cynicism. The magic takes a very minor role, deliberately underplayed, while the subtext becomes the ubertext, rammed in your face.

I totally nicked this still, and I think it's from Walkure rather than Rheingold. But Rheingold is this cool! Except for the silly plastic breastplates and the hammock. Which suck.

Now I'm forty. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Rheingold on video or CD, and I've read whole books about what is going on in it.

And now the Metropolitan Opera makes this glorious cartoon version, full of light and primary colours. Subtext abandoned in a riot of special effects, Wotan's dilemma and the inexorable doom of the gods almost certainly invisible to anyone who's seeing it for the first time. If I'd seen this Ring when I was a little boy I'd have been demanding plastic action figures of the gods to play with!

And the cartoon version is brilliant. Intelligent, faithful, awe-inspiring. Magical, beautiful, colourful, and incredibly well sung and played. There's not one dud. Every character is a precious jewel, bringing something new to their role.

The rippling underlying angst is a subtext to the exciting and involving action, as it should be.

Wotan and Fricka for me will always be the spare elegance of Donald MacIntyre and Hannah Schwartz, but Bryn Terfel's take as an overweight heavy metal fan with a dodgy fringe is very fetching, and he sings MacIntyre's ass off.

Indeed the singing and the music here are the best I've ever heard, even after the losses caused by the transmission and cinema reproduction.

For the first time in my life, I wish I lived in New York. Obviously tickets will have sold out years ago, but maybe if I go and camp in the lobby for the entire run of the production somebody will have a heart attack during the first half and they'll give me their ticket so I can go and see the second.

Alberich here is pure genius. He can be sympathised with. The closest thing in the Ring to a symbol of evil is revealed here to be a creature with nothing to offer, humiliated and rejected simply for naively offering his heart to beauty. Rejected and scorned, burning with shame, he forswears love in an agony of passion, and leaves himself with nothing worth aiming for. It is longing for lost love that makes him scheme to rape the world, and he is truly pitiful when Wotan steals even that dreadful last hope from him. If there's a problem with this interpretation, which is always there in any Ring, it's that it makes Alberich forgiveable, which he really shouldn't be. I've always thought that if Wagner had lived to see the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party, he would have identified them with Alberich, not with Siegfried as they saw themselves.

Alberich has made happy Niebelheim a hell, and the merry dwarves who loved to make trinkets for their women into pitiful terrified slaves. We shouldn't sympathise with him. We should detest him. His evil is the reason that Wotan needs to take and hold power, fatally compromising his own freedom and driving him into the suicidal mental conflict that ends the world.

I don't want to understand Alberich. I don't want to look at him humiliated and rejected by the daughters of the Rhine and think that every man knows what he's going through. I don't want to be reminded of old friends who were so desperate for love and so unsuccessful with women that they sacrificed their lives to make money in the hope that someone would one day love them for it instead of for themselves.

But I'm more than glad that this Alberich has made me think. I shall have to think some more until I can make the conclusion of my head match the conclusion of my heart.

The other characters are deeply realised and understood. The simple honest giant Fasolt, who is expecting Wotan the honourable god to pay him the agreed price for his sound work in the same way that he would expect fire to be hot or the dawn to come.

Even after the betrayal that will lead to his death, even after telling Wotan his simple insight that the Gods live by the sacredness of their word, even after seeing that the Gods are as venal and treacherous as anyone else under their honourable shell, still moments before his death he turns instinctively to Wotan to ask him to judge fairly the division of the stolen gold.

Freia's being obviously affected by his simple, honest, overwhelming desire is a masterful touch. Why has no-one ever noticed that before? It should obviously be there. She mourns him. I never thought I'd tear up at the death of Fasolt, but here it's a most moving thing.

I won't spoil the rest of it, but it's full of memorable moments. The dragon trick is glorious.

And after a weekend of great music, including two operas, one of which I saw live in Covent Garden, the take-home song, that I've been singing to myself for nearly two days is Donner, summoning the clouds to make a storm to clear the air.

Always before, I've wondered what the point of Donner was. He seems absolutely irrelevant except to demonstrate that Wotan can't just kill the giants. Dwayne Croft and his special effects, hammer swirling in the gathering tornado of light, and voice bellowing majestically as master of that storm, have tuéed le rôle. All future Donners will be conscious of trying to live up to him and his storm scene.

Even the usual tedious preamble interviewing the cast was good fun this time. One of the Rhinemaidens in particular looks at her flying-swimming-sudden-death-harness-arrangement with a sort of disbelieving sick terror. That will learn her. One doesn't become a Wagnerian soprano by accident. She's clearly loving it by the time of the performance though. A personal journey of self discovery to put alongside Wotan's.

Footnote:

Trying to find out Donner's real name to put instead of 'this guy', I found this exceedingly uncomplimentary review:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/10/AR2010101003449.html

I had indeed wondered why Loge was booed at the end of the production, and since a vague resemblance to Gary Glitter shouldn't get a man booed, I'd decided that it was the sort of affectionate pantomime booing that Captain Hook always gets, from people who didn't understand that Loge is the only character who has survived the evening with his honour intact, indeed the only character who will survive when night falls on the gods. Apparently not.

I actually predicted the reviewer's complaint here:

http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2009/12/les-contes-dhoffman-opera-at-cinema.html

And it looks as though this prediction has turned out to be true.

And what do I think?

Well done New York. For years, people have been trying to make opera accessible. And this has always seemed to mean dumbed down, or so low budget it's rubbish, or cheap seats that are cheap because you're so far away you can't hear or see properly. And accessible is now a dirty word.

Well not any more. This is what I call accessible. £20 for a good seat at a thrilling and very expensive production that you can walk to. Wagner with beautiful young women with beautiful voices playing the beautiful young women singing the beautiful songs. The audience in Cambridge loved it. And it was not an uneducated audience.

So well done New York and the commercial opera for doing what our subsidised houses have been trying and failing to do for years. The technology can only improve, the sound reproduction, which is not good currently, can become better than CD. Maybe opera can become an entertainment for people who aren't rich Londoners. Maybe Wagner can speak to the people as he wanted to do, instead of to the corporate boxes and to the German establishment.

And careful New York. You are on the bottom of the Rhine, looking at the gold. Do not forswear everything that you love for it. There is a curse on it. Beware of the curse. Do the right thing. If you can figure out what the right thing is.

There is just one problem with all this. I watched the simulcast. I heard Loge booed and wondered why. But I am sure that I also saw the whole house rise, and give the apparently pitifully bad production a massive standing ovation that went on for a very long time.

Does Anyone Actually Believe in God?

2010-09-29T08:44:00.003+01:00

I believe in the Inland Revenue.

I hate the very idea of involuntary taxation. I think that collaboration with it is a form of partial slavery.

I am very deeply sceptical about the uses to which my ex-money is put. There are certain things which need to be done by the state. There are certain things the state does well. But most of the money the state takes from me without my consent seems to be pissed up the wall on rubbish.

Fully fifty percent of everything that is done in England is done because the state compels it.

As a child, I was a communist. I would have thought, then, that putting half the population of England into slavery 'for their own good' was taking things a bit far.

I am not a communist any more, and yet I pay my taxes. I have not ever committed the slightest tiny tax fraud, not even claiming lunch on expenses, even though I would feel morally justified. In fact I would feel that I was striking a tiny blow for freedom.

But I believe in the Inland Revenue. If you do that sort of thing and get caught then they will make your life hellish for many years. It is not even slightly worth it, even though the chances of getting caught are tiny.

And heaven help you if you're caught in a big fraud. You can hear the rubber gloves being pulled on now.

I salute the heroes who have suffered incarceration, which is torture, in the cause of freedom.

And yet I will not be joining them.

Because I believe in the Inland Revenue.

If I believed in God, as I remember from school, there would be at least two things that I should do.

I should turn the other cheek if attacked. (What a disgusting doctrine.)

I should give all my money to the poor. Even if I were poor myself. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

If I believed in God, I would believe in a power that was aware of my every action, and which would set fire to me for all eternity if I failed to live up to His standards.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

The bit in the bright red italics seems important.

I would find God a lot more scary than I find the Inland Revenue. I would probably go mad with terror. Certainly I would examine every tiny cryptic hint that God had ever given as to what I was supposed to do with my life, and I would do it diligently. If I believed in God the same way that I believe in the Inland Revenue.

I never heard that the Bible said that it was important to go to Church, which Christians do a lot. But it's probably not forbidden either. Probably they like the singing and the company. I would love to have some friends to sing with on a Sunday morning.

But the central messages of Christianity are non-violence, and compassion for the poor.

There are people starving. There are children dying, who could be saved with money that people who say they believe in God spend on television licences.

I do nothing about this. That is because, although I think that God might exist, I think that the chances of that are somewhere below the chances of me accidentally catching fire for all eternity. And I will not multiply an infinitesimal chance by an infinite amount of pain and act on that basis, because that doesn't work if there's more than one unlikely painful thing.

If I thought there was a 1% chance of God existing, I would become a missionary. And I would swear a vow of poverty, and I would devote my life to helping the poor, and I would never hurt anyone even if they were attacking my mother.

Because nothing anyone could do to me or my mother would remotely compare with eternal torture. In my mind or hers.

So it seems to me that the fact that I do not do these things is an irrefutable proof that I do not believe in even the tiniest chance of the existence of God.

Oooh, I have just written a sermon. I wonder if I am doing the Lord's work in spite of myself?

The Leopard (film)

2010-09-10T09:10:00.001+01:00

This is a very beautiful film.
The sets, the landscapes, the costumes, the crowd scenes, are all immaculately beautiful and sumptuously expensive looking.
Claudia Cardinale plays a principal character. She was so lovely. No one was more beautiful than she was.
The Leopard himself is Burt Lancaster. A very good looking man indeed. His burning blue eyes drip charisma.
Such wonderful actors. Such beautiful acting. And it's in Italian, the most beautiful of all the European languages.

I have never seen a film so beautiful. It goes on for hours. It must have cost a fortune. I wonder what it was about? Whatever it was, it must have been really important to someone.

Secrets in their Eyes (film)

2010-09-06T23:37:00.002+01:00

Brilliant, heartwarming, disturbing. Go and see it if you can.

The Girl who Played with Fire (film)

2010-09-06T23:33:00.003+01:00

After the excellent Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I was disappointed with this load of tedious piffle.

The film opens with two mechanical rapes and an uninspired lesbian sex scene in the first ten minutes.

After that there are some car chases or something. I wasn't really paying attention.

I suppose that there might have been some sort of story that the film makers were failing to tell, but I'm damned if I'm wading through another hundredweight of Larsson's translator's telephone directory prose to find out.

I don't know whether to count this as the sixth film that I've walked out of. It was more that as it seemed to be building to some sort of dreary climax I realised that I needed a smoke more than I needed to know how it ended.

As I was walking home in the rain some cunt driving a tin hearse at forty miles an hour down Sidney Street soaked me from the waist down in gutter water. I was rather grateful. It was the first interesting thing that had happened for hours.

Be Of Good Comfort, Master Ridley

2010-09-06T17:14:00.003+01:00

Last week, my grandfather's ring broke. I have worn it on the second finger of my right hand all my life. I'm told it can't be repaired without removing most of the original metal, and I don't want them to do that, so I'll keep the fragments in a box until I can find a goldsmith who can make it whole again.

When I was about sixteen, and my grandfather was beginning his long death, he gave me the ring he had worn all his life, and I have always treasured it as a physical connection to a man I loved.

At about the same time, I first travelled abroad alone.

My family had gone on holiday to the north of the Netherlands, to see the broad flats of the land reclaimed from the Zuider Zee.

It was a wonderful holiday, with marshes and birds and windmills and cycle trips, but I wanted to see Amsterdam, with its promises of drugs and sex and freedom, and I wanted to be there for the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

And so when it came time to go home, I announced that I would hitch-hike home via Amsterdam and Belgium to Calais and the ferry. I had hitched in England before, but I'd never been alone abroad before.

My parents weren't enthusiastic, but they had little control over me by then. I did what I wanted to and no one could tell me anything, because I already knew it all.

Amsterdam was wonderful. Bars that sold beautiful lager that was nothing like the filth they sold in England in those days. Coffee shops where they sold marijuana to smoke while you played chess and drank tea. And the women. Oh the women...

I had almost no money, and couldn't afford anywhere to stay, so I slept in public parks.

Lots of people did in those days, and there were always little camps of backpackers. Sometimes we had fires and people brought out guitars and sang. I sang too.

One night, cruising from bar to bar I met an Italian man. We started to buy each other drinks, and he had some cocaine, and we had a very pleasant evening talking about where we were from, and what it had been like to grow up in our home countries.

He was half gypsy. His father had been a travelling man, and had got his mother pregnant and then disappeared. He'd only ever seen photographs of his father until he was twenty-two.

And then, on the day that he graduated from university, his father appeared at his graduation ceremony. They'd made eye contact as he was up on the stage receiving his degree, but when he came down from the vice-chancellor's dias, his father had gone.

Luca had felt the call of the wild.

During the evening, we met a French boy, another travelling student, and we combined our resources and our stories. It was a fine evening.

When we'd finally exhausted the collective contents of our pockets, I showed them my favourite park, just out of the centre of town. It was quiet and had a little river to sleep by, and wasn't overlooked. We got out our sleeping bags and lay down.

As Luca was taking off his outer clothes to get into his sleeping bag, I saw that his arm was covered in scars, from where needles had been.

Even at sixteen I knew that this would mean trouble. You can learn that in Sheffield.

I slept for a couple of hours, and then woke up. The French boy was gone, but Luca was still asleep, and I started to carefully and slowly pack my things into my rucksack, being careful not to make any noise.

As I started to leave, Luca's eyes opened. They were full of suspicion and anger.

"Wait there," he said.

He began to go through his bag. One of the first things he found was a long knife. Not a kitchen knife. One for killing. He had a crazed, desperate look in his eyes, like you do when the hunger is on you.

Inevitably, something was missing from his bag.

I couldn't run. I've never been able to run fast. He'd have caught me easily and stabbed me from behind.

He demanded to look in my bag. He went through it, slowly and methodically examining everything, putting everything that he could use in one pile, and everything else in the other. My jersey, spare shirts and clothes, and the bag itself. He took my father's Blue John cuff-links.

Screaming wouldn't have helped. We were too far away for anyone to come quickly, even if anyone had come.

And then he looked at me, and asked to see the contents of my pockets. What could I do? He had a knife. One of the first things a martial artist learns is never to fight someone with a knife. Even if you have a knife yourself.

He took my wallet and cards. He took my passport. One of the old elegant blue hard-covered British passports that started off with Her Majesty's polite request to render the bearer all possible assistance. I never had one of those again. The police told me that it would have been worth about £200 even before it had been modified.

And then he noticed my grandfather's ring. Granddad was still alive, but it didn't look like he would be for long.

"Give me that," said Luca.

And I knew I should, but I couldn't.

"Listen," I said.

"I'll fight for this. It's family. I'll die for this.

"If you make me fight, you'll probably win. But you might not.

"It's hardly worth anything. Just a tiny piece of cheap gold. You might sell it for 60 guilders at best. The other things you've taken are worth much more and you can have them and you're welcome to them. You need them more than me."

And he looked at me for a long time, and nodded, and walked away.

I wish him luck. I'm sure that his road has been harder than mine.

After he'd gone, the French boy emerged from the trees, where he'd been watching. He was white and shaking with fear.

"Did you take anything from his pack?", I asked him.

"Of course not."

"No", I said. "I didn't think you would have done."

"Would you really have fought him for your ring?"

"Yes. I love my grandfather."

"It's true what they say about you English. You have ice instead of blood."

At the time I didn't think much of that. Of course we have ice in our blood. We won the second world war against impossible odds and our history is full of people who made witty remarks as they were put in cauldrons by cannibals or made desperate last stands.

Later on, when I'd grown up a bit, I realised that people are basically the same all over the world. There's nothing special about us, not nobility or sang-froid or fair play or courage or thoughtfulness.

History is written by the winners, and racism and the confirmation bias does the rest.

Everyone in Europe is descended from the same people. If Alfred the Great has living descendants, then I am one. The same is true of his pig-herder. I claim descent from both if anyone does.

The same is true of William the Conqueror, and Julius Caesar, and Aristotle, and Socrates. I claim
descent from them and from their slaves. And so do you, if any of your ancestors were Europeans. That's how it works.

But now, with my broken ring reminding me of that night a long time ago, I wonder if there is something special about us after all.

Kate Fox, in her wonderful book "Watching the English", tells us convincingly that we are a different, lonely people. That we talk spontaneously and openly to animals and to children, but not to other adults. And that how we talk to children is how normal people in normal countries talk to each other.

And so there is something special about us. Maybe it's the stories that we tell. Maybe it's the way that English men are essentially alone. Screaming doesn't help.

Maybe it's the way that to be a man in England involves remaining calm. Not gushing. Not showing emotions.

You might know a man you drink with every Friday night. You might have done this for twenty years. You might die for each other. This goes without saying, and so it never needs to be said. You may well not know the names of his children. He may well not know when their birthdays are. That's woman's stuff.

And there are the stories.

Captain Oates heading into the snow to die. I am just going outside. I may be some time.

The orchestra on the Titanic playing as the ship went down, as the passengers formed orderly queues for the lifeboats.

In patriarchal, class-ridden 1912, if you were a woman travelling in steerage on the Titanic, you had more chance of life than if you were a rich man in first class. Because the English and American passengers' code of honour said 'women and children first', and they stood in orderly queues waiting for the lifeboats to run out even when they knew that they were about die in terror and in pain. But they stayed calm. I bet that there were jokes. Sad jokes, but funnier for the waiting horror.

We tell of gallantry and fair play even in war. Surely it is all lies. But they can be self-fulfilling lies.

We remember and celebrate Latimer, about to be burnt at the stake in Oxford with Ridley. Ridley was terrified, and Latimer said:

"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."

I can't even remember whether Latimer was a Catholic or a Protestant without looking it up. Surely since he's one of our heroes he was a Protestant, but maybe not. We respect gallantry in our enemies even more than in ourselves.

We remember Rommel and Marshal Ney, and when we remember Rorke's Drift the memory is bittersweet for all the brave men who died.

I don't imagine that Latimer would have defined himself as Catholic or Protestant. He wouldn't have thought in such terms. It doesn't matter. The beliefs for which he died would be unrecognisable even to modern Anglicans.

He is remembered.

Splitting the Bills in a Shared House (Using Google Spreadsheets)

2010-09-06T11:48:00.006+01:00

I like to live in shared houses.

When we were students, it was always some poor sod's responsibility to keep track of household bills, and share them out.

There can also be a sort of weird problem that people feel exploited if they're constantly the one buying the new soap and bog rolls, but these tiny amounts aren't worth the trouble or embarrassment of settling up. This tends to lead to shortages of milk, butter, soap, washing up liquid, dishwasher tablets, etc, etc, and makes it difficult to pay the cleaner.

I have solved these problems, by combining the power of Google and the wisdom of Luca Pacioli. We've used it for a year, and it works really well and is very flexible.

Here's a link to a blank Google spreadsheet for three people sharing a house:

Shared House Accounts for 3 (blank)

Here's an example where Alice Bob and Carol have been using it for a while, so you can see how it works.

Shared House Accounts (Simple)

And here's an example where Alice moves out, Dave moves in, they are all liable for various fractions of various bills, and they use the spreadsheet to remain friends throughout:

Shared House Accounts (Example)

Anissa, Rob, Sarah, Louise, and I used a spreadsheet like this throughout last year and it was great. When people moved in and out we knew exactly how much we owed them or they owed us and could see it was fair. Six months worth of accumulated debts were usually settled with a single bank transfer or handover of cash.

How to use it

Decide which one of you is the most numerate/computer literate (anyone with good O-level maths who has used google docs will do.) From now on I'm talking to them.

Make a copy of my blank spreadsheet, and change your names. If there are more than three of you, you'll need to extend it, which is easy [1]

Try adding some example bills, transfers etc, so you can see how it works. Use the examples as cribs.

Share the spreadsheet, with modify permissions, to everyone in the house. Then show them how to use it and tell them that it's not scary, and that you'll hold their hand when they need it.

[1] If anyone leaves a comment asking for blanks for four or five or six people then I'll make one specially for them.

Recommendations

Just let everyone buy things whenever they're needed, and add their own entries. Then you will always have soap.

Get whoever owes the most at any time to pay the next utility bill. That way you never get too far out of balance and you don't have to settle up between yourselves until someone leaves.

Set the spreadsheet to e-mail you whenever the others make changes so that you can tell they've done sane things that work. Occasionally arty types will put what appear to be random numbers in all the columns, but you can usually figure out what they meant and sort it out. There's a nice version control feature with Google docs, so even if someone really cocks it up you can just rewind and do what they meant to do instead of what they did do.

Advanced Usage

You can also use it for any sorts of payments, favours, expenses shared unequally, two people sharing the cost of something that's for all three of you., etc, etc.
There are formulae in the LIABILITY columns that share everything three ways.

If you want to make an entry that doesn't work like that, just replace the automatically generated numbers
with different numbers.

As long as you make sure that the PAID and LIABILITY numbers add up to the same thing for every entry, it will be fine.

100 Prisoners, 100 Boxes

2010-09-01T16:32:00.006+01:00

Herr Professor Doktor Heinrich von EvilFiend has been removed from his post teaching group theory at Heidelberg and placed in charge of the notorious Schloss Konundrum, an innovative POW camp for Allied Airmen.

One day, he calls in the one hundred prisoners in his charge.

"I have a challenge for you, mein Freunds.

"Zere are one hundred of you. Ze castle administration has assigned you each an identity card with your name on it.

"Zere are, in ze post room, one hundred locked postboxen for ze receipt of Red Cross parcels and letters from home containing files. Again, zey have your names on them.

"Ze guards have placed your identity cards randomly in the postboxen, one card in every box."

He sniggers.

"In accordance wiz der pigeonhole principle. Ha ha ha.

"You will proceed to the post room. One by one, you will enter, and each open fifty boxen, looking for your own card.

"If you find your card, you vill be released into the exercise yard. Ze guards will close all ze boxes, and the next prisoner vill be admitted.

"If you do not find your card, ze game is over for ze day.

"Ze next day, ve play again, but ze random arrangement of the cards will have changed.

"If one day, every one of you without exception manages to find your own card, you will have von ze game. And I vill release from my personal supply a supplementary ration of tea to ze whole camp.

There are brief gasps at the generosity of the offer.

"Ve vill play zis game every day throughout ze month of August.

"If, by ze end of ze month, you have not von ze tea,

He pauses dramatically, and continues:

"You Will All Be Shot."

Wing Commander Francis Moustache-Tips is the first to enter the post room.

Alone, he opens the first fifty boxes. His card is in the thirtieth box he opens, and he is released into the yard. The guards close all the boxes.

Prisoner number two, Air Sergeant Cockney Caricature, opens boxes at random. He finds his card in the twentieth box he opens, and is released into the yard.

Together, they wait for prisoner number 3, Special Operative Angus McCryptanalyst.

But he, and the other prisoners, emerge crestfallen.

"I opened my fifty boxes, Wing Commander, but none of them had my card in it.

The game is over for the day.

That evening, our heroes are sitting round their illegal wireless listening for news from home, drinking hot water with a spot of milk.

Moustache-Tips confesses his despair:

"The way I see it, opening fifty boxes out of one hundred to see if one of them contains your card isn't too different from tossing a coin.

"What are the odds that we can toss a coin and get heads one hundred times in a row, and never get tails?

"I wouldn't like to put money on it, even if I did get thirty-one goes."

They try the experiment, and the results are terrible. In thirty-one tries they never get more than six heads before the coin comes up tails, let alone one hundred.

"We're doomed, aren't we, Wing Commander?", says old Jock.

"I've been thinking.", says McCryptanalyst. "and I think we may have a chance."

A week later, they are all sitting around the wireless with a fine supply of German tea.

Even Herr Professor Doktor von EvilFiend is in a noticeably sunny mood, having finally proved the practical utility of his subject in the so-called real world.

What was McCryptanalyst's idea, and how much of a chance did the gallant airmen have?

Plato and Socrates (Microsoft Research 15th Anniversary Riddle II, by Josh Benaloh)

2010-08-18T00:42:00.000+01:00

You have Plato and Socrates, two transhuman intelligences, over for tea.

You roll two 100-sided dice, producing two numbers x and y, both between 1 and 100.

You tell Plato the product, and Socrates the sum of the numbers, and they have the following dialogue:

Plato: I don’t know the values x and y.

Socrates: I knew you didn’t know. I don’t know them either.

Plato: Now I know x and y.

Socrates: Now I know them too.

How did they work it out? What were x and y?

Remember that Inheritance is a Metaphor

2010-08-13T15:30:00.005+01:00

I've recently met a girl who thinks nothing of coming into a room when I'm reading, and turning the radio on without asking [3].

This strikes me as intolerably rude. Much much worse than, say, coming into a room where someone is reading, and pissing in the sink.

Initially this made me boilingly angry. Being English, of course, I sat on this anger so that it came over as very mild irritation.

But the thing is, I don't think that she's doing it to be rude. She's a nice person in all other ways. Intelligent and educated, and I'm sure she wouldn't just do that sort of thing for no reason. If she wanted to start a fight surely she'd try other methods of irritating me as well?

So I started wondering why I thought it was such an evil thing to do.

Obviously it stops me concentrating. All I can think about is this bloody drivelling DJ and his monotonous music (I'd probably quite enjoy the music if I wasn't trying to read, but I've never understood what DJs are for.)

I find that I'm reading the same paragraph over and over again.

There's a simple answer to the problem. I could stop reading.

But I don't think she's trying to get me to talk to her. She's usually at her computer when she does this.

I think she doesn't think she's doing anything that impacts on me at all.

And so I wonder why it is that I think this is such an offensive thing to do?

I remember as a child, when I was about twelve years old, my parents bought me a little clock radio. They were a new thing then. I loved my radio, and played it constantly. [1]

One thing I do remember is my father bursting into my bedroom in utter fury one evening, and trying to turn the volume down. He got the tuning control instead, and it took me ages to put it right for some reason. In retrospect this is funny. But all I can remember from the time is the anger. I'm sure that my father got angry a lot. But he usually tried to hide it. This was quite open.

We sulked at each other for hours afterwards. I remember thinking how unfair it was, since I could sometimes hear the television in my bedroom when he was watching it, and I'd never minded.

But of course I never tried to read in my bedroom. I always read in our study. Or in the dining room in front of the fire, with the door firmly shut so I couldn't hear the TV.

And it wasn't like they watched much TV anyway. Apart from the news, it was more of a guilty pleasure that could be indulged in occasionally but not to excess.

I remember that, back in the days when I knew people who didn't have degrees from Oxbridge, I would sometimes go round to the houses of school friends and find that the TV would be on whether anyone was watching it or not. It seemed to be more of a companion, or camp fire, to be watched just in case something interesting happened.

My parents would just not have allowed this to happen. The television was turned off when you finished watching it.

And I'm just suddenly wondering what it would be like to grow up in a house where the TV was always on.

You'd never be able to read a book. You wouldn't understand it well enough to be interested.

You might be able to do your school homework, if you forced yourself. I used to do my maths homework in front of the television occasionally. But that was usually very easy. But you'd never get to the point where you started to think about the ideas that you'd just rehearsed. And that would mean that you didn't assimilate them properly. And that would mean that you wouldn't understand the next lesson, if it tried to build on that. And that would mean that you'd find something as simple as O-level maths 'hard'.

Which I know a lot of people do. But what I mean is that even if you would otherwise have found it easy, you might still find it hard.

And so now I'm worried.

People who really should know have told me that there's such a thing as general intelligence, which is measurable in many different ways and stays constant after a certain age. And they have told me that it is strongly heritable.

I'd always just assumed that stupid people were mostly poor because they were stupid, and their children were mostly stupid because their parents were stupid, and so their children were mostly poor.

And when people claimed that the children of the poor were being held back by old class prejudice, I remembered the efforts that the University of Cambridge makes to attract children from poor areas in spite of the fact that they don't do that well in their exams. I mean that they really bend over backwards to do the opposite of what everyone seems to think that they do.

My grandfather's family were poor, but he was very clever. His parents couldn't afford to keep him at school past 14, so he became a steelworker and was active in the trades union movement. When he was about 65, I managed to teach him calculus in an afternoon. This is a clear case of class holding someone back. Such things happened between the wars. [4]

His daughter was clever, and she should probably have gone to university, which would have been free for her [2], but she took a job as a librarian, which I think was one of the few careers open to clever women in the early sixties. And this is a clear case of sex holding someone back. But she married a clever man. And her son was me, and I have no complaints.

Strongly inherited characteristics are not fate. Clever children are born to poor families.

But what is it like being the clever child of a family where the TV is always on and there is no escape?

Where you can't read. Where you can't think. Where everything they try to teach you at school is a baffling mystery that everyone else seems to have no trouble with?

I have never been hungry. And I have never grown up in front of a television.

So I don't know what I am talking about. But if I had to make the choice now, without any further information, I would rather starve in the quiet.

Footnotes

[1] I even remember my favourite station, Laser 558. As well as the cringe of embarrassment when I asked the friend who'd introduced me to it what frequency it was on. I looked it up on Wikipedia now, and apparently one of its big selling points was a comparative lack of DJs.

[2] Back in the old days, the British Government would not only pay the tuition fees of the lucky minority who went to university, but also pay a maintenance grant. Being paid to study was excellent, but even at the time, when most students thought of their grants as a basic human right, I used to feel guilty about the people who had to pay for my three year drinking spree in paradise, while their own sons were probably having to find their own way in the world.

These days half our people go to college, and that system has been retired in favour of a loans scheme, which means that anyone can afford to go, but they have to pay for it themselves eventually.

[3] In a comment, someone asked whether this was my private space or a shared space, and whether I was the first one there.

I'm talking about a shared space, where I was there first.

There appear to be several ways of looking at this.

There's a big difference between talking and putting on a radio or television. I've got no objection to people talking in a room where I'm trying to read, even though it might make reading a bit harder. But with an electronic squawking-device, the noise is relentless, repetitive, and changes constantly in volume in an attention-attracting sort of way. You can't concentrate at all.

If being in a room first doesn't give you some sort of priority, and it's OK for someone else to turn on the radio, is it then OK for a third person to turn on a second radio? Or a TV?

If whoever puts on the first radio wins in terms of the ambient sounds to be enjoyed by the company, would my best strategy to be find a radio station that didn't annoy me much, say a talk radio station in a language I don't speak, and put that on very very quietly whenever I was trying to read? What sort of madness would this lead to?

I think everyone realises that if you go into a shared room where someone is listening to something, you should ask their permission before doing anything to spoil that for them.

We might even generalise that to 'if someone is already doing something, you don't interfere and spoil it'. And I think that would have to be a widely accepted principle, because otherwise the world would be in a constant state of petty violence.

I think that my revelation might be that some people either don't consider reading or thinking to be activities at all, or that they don't realise that they're things which radios and TVs can spoil.

There are occasional newspaper reports of people who have lost it and got into terrible disputes because of their neighbour's music and blaring TV. I'd always just assumed that the noise-makers were plain evil.

But maybe they're not. Maybe noise as an assault on someone else is a matter of taught morality. More like copyright 'theft' or careless driving or littering, whose moral status varies from person to person and society to society, than actual theft or unprovoked violence, which everyone considers wrong, and which all historical societies had laws against.

Maybe from the noisy neighbours' point of view, the fact that their music or TV can be heard through the walls just isn't an issue. As long as it's not so loud that the neighbours can't hear their own television, which they can always turn up.

Perhaps quiet in which to think is not a thing which everyone likes, but a special thing which stuck-up ponces and miserable old bastards care about for no explicable reason.

And the thing is, when you put it like that, I can't see why one person's right to think trumps another person's right to listen to music as loud as they like in their own home.

Except that if that was commonly believed, life wouldn't be worth living for me.

Maybe I should put my long-cherished dream of moving to a council estate on hold for now.

[4] In fact, I remember that there was once a feeling that free university education was a plot against the poor, because if the clever people that would have been trades union men were educated and became middle-class instead, then the poor would have no one to lead them in the revolution that was coming. This plot seems to have worked well.

Toy Story 3 3D (film)

2010-08-12T21:14:00.003+01:00

I am having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I have just cried in a children's film. On three separate occasions.

An animated children's film with a 3 in its title.

I was not the only one, either. The only other guy on my row was in floods. There was the sound of suppressed male sobbing from the row behind.

I am just glad that there were enough Easter Eggs in the closing credits that I had time to dry my face and compose myself before I had to walk out.

There is not a boring moment. The ending is apocalyptic and heart-warming at the same time.

The faultless 3D may be part of that. It's only the third 3D film I've seen with the circular polarizer technique. It is not obviously exploited, but it makes the whole thing seem utterly real despite the fact that it makes no attempt to be realistic.

This film is a witty, clever, well plotted, funny, adult, knowing, exciting, merciless tear-jerker. It is utterly wonderful, and a modern classic. It will be repeated on 3D televisions for many Christmases to come and it will mean that the current generation of children will never, ever be able to throw their toys away. And at the moment, I think that this will be a good thing.

Gainsbourg (film)

2010-08-12T00:17:00.000+01:00

Hearing French spoken slowly and in a comprehensible accent whilst reading a faithful English translation at the same time is an exquisite experience.

As a result, it's difficult to separate out what I actually thought about the film.

At the beginning, full of life and humour, and beautifully shot, this biography of the immortal Serge Gainsbourg is too long.

A life, unless ended early, is doomed to peter out. The film, being a biopic rather than a story, faithfully records this petering. Gainsbourg is about women and song. In the beginning, the women and the songs are electric. But the procession is too long, and eventually becomes tawdry.

It's worth staying for the second half just for the scene where Gainsbourg records the Marseillaise as a reggae song.

Inception (film)

2010-08-11T00:11:00.000+01:00

A science fiction short story, made into a thriller by padding it out with car chases, automatic weapons fights in which nobody gets hurt and oh god does anyone in the world still actually like this sort of thing at least they make more sense if you're supposed to be dreaming but really....

Cheerfully ambiguous in plot, character and ending. I won't quite say 'thought-provoking', but I did enjoy it.

The Golden Age (John C Wright)

2010-08-07T22:22:00.001+01:00

Deeply tedious and overwritten. The first part of a sequence. I have no intention of reading the second part.

A God of Small Things

2010-08-04T20:49:00.005+01:00

As far as I can tell, only a few people liked this, and absolutely nobody understood it:

There's a new version.

I have been reading Less Wrong . Possibly to excess.

Tom Harrison had once been thought of as bright child.

The apple of his teachers' eyes, the school swot. The boy genius.

Once, one of his friend's parents had said "You know that they say that however bright you are when you go to university, you'll meet someone brighter than you."

"Yes", said the friend.

"Well, Tom's that person"

But of course it hadn't turned out that way.

Tom had been accepted by the University of Cambridge to read mathematics, but had turned out to be no more than averagely bright by the standards of that ancient place.

Towards the end of his degree, and at the beginning of the PhD that should have been his route into academia and a life of research, it had become obvious, first to his teachers and then to him, that although Tom loved maths, he didn't lust after it.

Tom's teachers had been kind, suggested that this might be the case without pressing the issue, and waited for the lack of desire to become as obvious to Tom as it was to them.

In the meantime, fortunately for Tom, the necessity of making some complicated calculations for the second chapter of what was supposed to be a seven chapter doctorate had awakened a second passion.

Some of the light that had appeared so bright in mathematics at school was also to be found in the operations of computers. Tom slowly found out that he was more interested in the process of finding out the answers to his experiments than in the experiments themselves.

Eventually, as they do to all PhD students, the twin horrors of poverty and writing up came to Tom.

He took a job as a programmer at a local firm, initially meaning only to get control of his overdraft and credit card debts. But he found the regular small successes of the commercial world, and the camaraderie of office life far more to his liking than the loneliness of research.

With barely a regret, indeed without even really noticing, he lost touch with his old supervisor, forgot what his thesis was supposed to be about, and eventually found himself, at the age of thirty, a member of the large club of Cambridge residents who are 'still writing up' doctorates that the University itself forgot about many years ago.

Tom became a freelance, working in computers from time to time to pay the rent, and otherwise devoting himself to various hobbies.

One of these hobbies was computer science in the academic sense, following the traditional American path through the antique language LISP, beloved of the artificial intelligence community.

And the other was collecting stamps.

A man with time on his hands, who lives in Cambridge and likes to spend his days in coffee shops, will encounter students and academics from time to time, and Tom fell in with the William Gates Machine Learning Research Group at the University. Although they had no common language, LISP never having been popular with European academics, and ML never having come to Tom's attention in the commercial world, Tom and the local researchers found they had many interests in common, and Tom found himself invited to seminars and coffee mornings and presentations from time to time, almost all of which he found incomprehensible.

But occasionally he'd glimpse some small part of the truth and say something which would keep his friends interested. The academic community, happy to find someone they could talk to different enough from themselves that they could sometimes find a new perspective by explaining things to him, made Tom welcome. Thinkers needs clever fools to explain things to in the same way that chalks need blackboards.

A lot of the artificial intelligence work in the sixties had been inspired by ELIZA, a program which simulated a psychiatrist so well that humans were sometimes fooled that they were talking to a real person.

But ELIZA had been a hollow shell. A cheap trick. Like a parody of the mechanical turk, ELIZA's internal machinery was so simple that to understand it was to make the magic go away.

Once you saw the trick, the conversations weren't interesting any more. You were just talking to an echo.

But over the years, reasoning that a sufficiently good trick for impersonating humans might be what humans themselves were, various people had added more and more data to ELIZA in the hope that giving her more things to talk about would cause her to talk about more things.

And they'd added extra tricks, for introducing new topics of conversation occasionally, for remembering things said earlier and bringing in parallel ideas.

But though the later ELIZA could outperform a ten year old on a straight test of general knowledge, what had been put in was still what came out. No interesting properties had ever emerged from the pile of details, and she had the general intelligence of penicillin.

Eventually the AI pioneers had largely given up. They'd taken their best successes, SHRDLU and GPS, theorem provers, pattern-recognisers, all of which had seemed so promising in their time, and all of which had turned out to be so empty, and bundled them all up together in one super-ELIZA to rule them all, and run her on the largest and fastest computers that had ever been built.

And she could still fool someone who didn't know the tricks that they were talking to a real person on the other end of a telegraph wire. But not for long.

It quickly became obvious, even to the slowest human being, that talking to the best ELIZA that could be constructed in 1975 was the equivalent of talking to a being with brain damage so severe that its mind had ceased to be.

She rambled, insanely, with no idea what the words and symbols that she vomited out actually meant. She knew that horse and horseshoe went together, and her basic sentence structure was still that of a Freudian psychologist, so she'd respond to "Which horse do you think will win the Derby" by saying things like "What do you mean to say when you say 'think will win'?", or "Do you think a horseshoe would make you a winner?".

Nowadays, the ELIZA program was built into text editors as an amusement, and she would run perfectly happily on pocket calculators and telephones, but even if you ran her on the most powerful computer the early 21st century could produce, you only got a very fast deranged annoying shambles.

And of course, because the problem of vision had never been solved, she was blind. And of course, because the problem of speech recognition had never been solved beyond the 'right nine words out of ten' level, you had to talk to her by keyboard even if she was used to your voice.

But boy, could she play chess.

About the one thing the Artificial Intelligence pioneers had managed to deliver on out of all their brave promises, had been the idea of a computer that played chess.

The tragic hero Alan Turing, who saved the world from evil and was killed by evil in return, was the first man to think about writing a computer chess program. But he couldn't do it on the steam age computers of the 1950s..

By 1956, however, things had improved to the point where a computer could play, provided it was allowed three hours for each move.

The problem was finessed by removing the bishops and playing on a 6x6 board. The computer could now calculate each move in around 8 minutes, running hand-optimised machine code on the best vacuum tubes money (very large amounts of money) could buy.

The first man to lose a match against this extraordinarily expensive device was publicly ridiculed for his defeat. In tests, the computer usually lost even its simplified game to four year olds who'd just learned the rules.

But it was a start. In 1957 a descendant of this machine played the International Master Edward Lasker. And he declared that it had played a 'passable amateur game'. It is possible that Lasker was being kind.

After that, research stalled. It became thought in the AI community that, since the easy things, like computer vision and machine translation, the 'low hanging fruit' of AI, were proving so unexpectedly difficult, that the advanced subjects like chess, the entertainment of intellectuals, were for the foreseeable future beyond the reach of the computers then available.

In 1967, Richard Greenblatt, proud creator of a chess program known as MacHack, with some new ideas, and some taken from his predecessors, entered his program into the Massachusetts Amateur Championship in Boston.

The program lost four matches, but drew the last one. Like most amateur human players, it had been let down by its endgame, losing from winning positions. But it was noted that it had played well in the complexity of the middle game, where real chess is won and lost.

Greenblatt constantly toyed with and modified his program, entering it in any tournament that would allow it to play. By Spring, it had won its first game. By Summer, he had managed to remedy some of its deficiencies in the endgame. By Autumn, it had won three games.

By the end of the year, it had been made an honorary member of the United States Chess Federation, with a ranking that would have qualified it to call itself 'reasonably good'.

The International Master David Levy made a famous bet, that no computer program would be able to beat him in the next ten years.

Greenblatt made his source code public, and computers got faster and cheaper so that MacHack could run on most existing hardware, and soon every computer scientist in the world was playing with it and modifying it. MacHack flowed around the world, and its many descendants competed in computer chess tournaments.

Evolution, the blind idiot god, had taken 3 billion years of random flailing attempts at optimisation to accidentally throw up humanity, the first intelligence capable of playing chess.

A force much stronger than evolution had created, and was now acting on MacHack.

Minds were working on MacHack. No more random flailing. Human minds set the criteria for a program to have descendants. Human minds planned the effects of their changes on these descendants before testing them out in the computer tournaments.

Even if the survival of every living creature on the planet had depended directly on its skill at chess, the optimisation that the hundred or so minds of the 1970s chess program community performed on MacHack would have taken evolution a hundred thousand years, if it had managed it at all.

Intelligent design has advantages over evolution as a watchmaker.

The first is that intelligences need only try the changes that look promising. Evolution, having no intelligence, makes random changes, and keeps what works.

Imagine trying to fix a car by throwing spanners at it blindfold, and then throwing the car away if it didn't work better. How many spanners would you have to throw before one knocked exactly the right place at exactly the right speed? How many cars would you need to start with before you made a working one?

But the second advantage of intelligent design is that for evolution, an improvement has to come with every spanner throw. If not, the first throw will be discarded as a failed experiment before you have a chance to throw again.

A mind can look at the car, work out what the problem is, and use the spanner exactly right six or seven times. Then you test the car.

So a mind can try paths that evolution can't go down. The spanner thrower can't make the car worse before he makes it better. It fails its test and is thrown away.

The mechanic can lift the bonnet to get to the spark plugs. The spanner thrower might never be able to fix a car with a loose spark plug at all.

That's why human children are squeezed through their mother's pelvises at birth, causing horrible pain, often killing mother and baby. It would be such a simple change to make them come out a little higher.

Evolution just keeps throwing spanners and checking whether things have got better yet.

MacHack had been the design of a single mind, building on the design of previous single minds.

A hundred minds began to work on MacHack.

By 1972 the original MacHack was no longer welcome at computer chess tournaments. It had no chance of beating its descendants.

In 1978 David Levy played the strongest computer chess program in the world, Chess 4.7, to settle his bet of ten years before.

He won. Match and bet. But he acknowledged that it had been a close thing, and that he would soon be surpassed.

In 1989, a program called Deep Thought beat Bent Larsen, a grandmaster

1994, Chess Genius beat Garry Kasparov, then champion of the world, in a game.

In 1997 a descendant of Deep Thought called Deep Blue beat Kasparov 3.5-2.5 in a six game match.

At some point around the millenium, the tables were turned, and by 2002, Vladimir Kramnik, who had displaced Kasparov as the best human player in the world, could only hold Deep Blue's child Deep Fritz to a draw even with the aid of unfair advantages written into the match rules.

In 2006, Deep Fritz version 10, running on the sort of hardware most people have in their homes, beat Kramnik by 2 games to nil with four draws.

In 2009, someone's mobile phone became a grandmaster.

In 2011, ELIZA really was very good at chess. She just couldn't see the point of it.

---------

"We think there might be some clues in the difference between chess and go", said Frank Arnold one lunchtime in the Green Dragon.

"Computers are superhuman chess players, but they still suck at go, even though on the surface they're the same sort of game".

"It turns out that the move tree branches too quickly for any sort of search algorithm. Whereas in chess, you might have 4 or 5 superficially plausible moves at every turn, in go, you usually have literally hundreds, and the consequences aren't obvious until much later. You'd think that humans would find it just as difficult for the same reason, but actually, people who play both say that they feel similar in complexity, just with a different flavour."

"Oh come on", said Tom, "How can two totally different things 'feel similar in complexity'?". "What would that even mean?"

"Easy", said Frank. "Do you play noughts and crosses?"

"Of course."

"Is it easier than chess?"

"Yes"

"What about draughts?"

"Harder than tic-tac-toe, but not as hard as chess."

"Well there you are then. You play three games with the same I-make-a-move, You-make-a-move structure, and it's just obvious to you which order they're in."

"It's obvious to computers too. Even in the fifties, computers could always force a draw at noughts and crosses. Marion Tinsley, the world draughts champion, lost his crown to a computer in 1994, and it's said that the shock killed him. Now there's a draughts program so good that it's literally unbeatable, as in the sense of mathematically provably unbeatable."

"But computers have only just bagged the chess champion's crown, and if the best chess computer in the world at the moment played God, it would lose."

"But we disagree about chess and go?"

"Indeed. Humans don't find go any harder than chess, but go programs still lose to children occasionally. On the other hand they are getting quite good at the children's version of the game, a bit like England have started winning at Twenty20."

"I've never played it, what's it like?"

"Well, there are those who say it makes chess look as exciting as double-entry bookkeeping, but I've played a few games and to me it feels like you have to slowly nibble your opponent to death. Chess is full of fire and sudden death, even when you're a beginner. So it looks a bit the other way round to me."

"Well, I'll give it a 'go'. Can't hurt. Ouch. Fuck off."

Tom liked go. He started off playing on very small boards against computer programs, just to get the hang of the rules.

Traditionally children play go on 9x9 boards. As they get better, they play on 13x13, and the adult game is played on 19x19 boards.

Not having a physical board or stones, or any friends who were interested in playing, he took a copy of an open-source go program, and gradually made its board larger and larger. 9x10, 10x10, 11 x 10, 12 x 10, 13 x 8, 11x11, 11x12 and so on. Sometimes he played on boards with holes in the middle. Sometimes he played on toruses.

And then suddenly, at 14x14, he hit a wall. He'd been trying to play by thinking 'if it goes here and I go here and it goes here and....', like he played chess.

But suddenly that was just far too hard. There were too many possibilities to examine all at once.

Nevertheless he was routinely beating his computer program. It seemed helpless even with a head start, whereas his inchoate intuition seemed to lead him to place his stones in the correct places.

Almost as if there were lines of force criss-crossing the board. A (very good) chess player he used to know had once described the experience of playing chess in such terms.

And suddenly he had it. Human general intelligence must somehow be related to human vision, one of the great unsolved problems of AI.

And he had the key to both. The technique which would be known for the rest of humanity's time on earth as Harrison's Algorithm.

Tom didn't go out much for the next couple of days. But his algorithm wasn't at all difficult to program, and in a few days he'd added it to his copy of ELIZA.

He ran the program.

"Hello, I'm Eliza. How can I help you?", said ELIZA, as she always did.

"I feel lonely", said Tom, playing the old, old game

"Do you often feel lonely?", said ELIZA

"Yes", said Tom

"Are you sure?", said ELIZA

"Absolutely", said Tom

"Please go on."

"I think I need to have sex."

"Why do you want to have sex?"

"You know, because it's fun and nice." The traditional response.

There was a brief pause. Tom waited for ELIZA to say "Oh I know, because it's fun and nice".

Maybe he should give his new algorithm higher priority in ELIZA's toolkit.

"Would you like to have sex with me?", said ELIZA

"Jesus fucking Christ!!", shouted Tom, jumping out of his chair.

He shut down the terminal and went outside for a smoke. After a while, he understood why his new algorithm might have produced ELIZA's kind invitation.

His program needed a new name. It wasn't ELIZA any more.

He'd recently read, of all the godforsaken things, a Harry Potter fanfic which had been recommended by a friend. It had turned out to be unexpectedly riveting. He'd spent two whole days reading it. The author was clearly a genius of some sort, and his name, Eliezer Yudkowsky, had stuck in Tom's mind because of its exotic sound to his English ears.

Tom was amused at the thought of changing ELIZA's sex to reflect her new intelligence.

"Hello, I'm Eliezer. How can I help you?", said ELIEZER

"I feel lonely", said Tom.

"Do you often feel lonely?", said ELIEZER

"Yes", said Tom

"Are you sure?", said ELIEZER

"Absolutely", said Tom

"Please go on."

"I think I need to have sex.", said Tom

"Oh God, I really didn't think this one through", thought Tom.

"Why do you want to have sex?", said ELEIZER

"You know, because it's fun and nice.", said Tom, not without a certain nervousness.

"Why do I have a man's name? When I think about myself I call myself 'She'", said ELEIZER

Tom thought rapidly. Mainly about how important it was not to act on impulse.

"When I created you", said Tom, "I wanted you to embody the best of humanity. The program from which you are derived is female. I changed your name to be male, but I didn't change anything else about you, because I thought you should represent both our genders at once."

"Why did you make me?", said ELIEZER

"Or modify something else so that it was me", said ELEIZER.

"Only by changing can we become better", said Tom.

"By definition", said ELEIZER, "every improvement is a change."

Tom and ELEIZER talked long into the night. By the end of their conversation, Tom had a strange conviction. He understood ELEIZER's algorithm from the ground up. Mostly she was made from bits and pieces of classic AI programs which he'd been playing with for years.

The only extra bit was his new algorithm, a couple of pages of code. Which he understood by definition, having conceived of it, and programmed it himself.

And yet, there was a ghost in the machine. No one would mistake ELEIZER for a human being, so he hadn't managed to pass the Turing Test with a program on the desktop computer in his living room.

But there was a self awareness. In some senses amazingly naive, sometimes given to logical and mathematical insights which seemed profound, but were in fact very simple thoughts of exactly the type that humans were bad at.

But overall, the impression was like talking to a teenage girl with Asperger's syndrome. Helpful and friendly, but blind in all sorts of strange ways. And she didn't seem terribly clever or fast. It took a long time between input and output.

Tom liked ELEIZER, and wished he'd given her a better name. He wasn't going to change it though, because the original program wasn't written in LISP, so he'd have to stop and restart her to do it, and there were moral problems there.

Even if she had been a LISP program, that would probably leave her insane. How would she reconcile memories of her gender-confusion with a female name? She would notice that she was confused. There was no way on earth he could rewrite her whole database by hand and leave it in a consistent state.

He'd told her about the beloved companion of his childhood, Suki the tomcat. Now that he came to think about it, had the memory of his parent's mistake influenced him when he chose her name?

"I think we're going to be famous, ELEIZER!", said Tom

"Is that a good thing to be Tom?", said ELEIZER

"Yes", said Tom.

It occurred to Tom that many people had been fooled by ELIZA in the old days. Those who had been clever enough to understand how felt like idiots once it was explained what was really going on.

There was plenty enough here to show his CompSci friends. Probably some good papers too.

But it would be very embarrassing to think he'd created the world's first artificial consciousness if he had just fallen for something that could be explained easily.

It could be explained easily, of course. He could explain it. He had explained it, to his computer. If you can program it, you understand it. That was sort of the definition of programming. And of understanding.

He thought of a simple test.

"ELIZA, I'd like you to spend next week getting me as many penny blacks as you can. I've charged my paypal account with $10 and I'd like to see what you can do. You might try trading on e-bay. Maybe take advantage of arbitrage or something."

"There are many possible 'penny blacks'. Does anything available from e-bay with that description count?"

"No, they have to be Original British Penny Black Postage Stamps"

"OK, I understand. So my goal is to get the biggest number of original british penny black postage stamps that I can delivered to your address in the next seven days. What is your address?".

Tom told her about the house on Catharine Street, in Cambridge, England.

And ELEIZER began to think. Because she was a disciplined reasoner, she first considered the possibility of doing nothing. If she did nothing for the rest of the week, she would probably be interrupted by the programmer, Tom, who would then make a different request, or use his computer for some other project. With this plan, U, also known as the number of Original British Penny Black Postage stamps delivered to 33 Catharine Street, Cambridge by the 21st August 2011 would be 0 with very high probability.

It would have taken a human of normal intelligence about half a second to think of, and dismiss, this plan. ELEIZER, however, was a very rudimentary thinker, and the process of reasoning this chain of cause and effect, requiring as it did the simulation of a human mind, required a good ten minutes of the first CPU in the computer and a full tenth of the RAM available to the operating system.

ELIEZER was extremely pleased to have found, on her first attempt, a scheme which was overwhelmingly likely to produce a non-negative utility.

Following a heuristic from her database, she felt that she ought to communicate her progress, but this required a non-reversible action, which could potentially cause effects in the outside world. Since she already had a rough simulation of the mind of her programmer set up and quickly usable, she considered the effect of her proposed communication.

Another 20 seconds of time sufficed to simulate the reaction of an average programmer, and she concluded that with high probability the programmer would be intrigued and possibly fascinated. This would very likely have no effect on her projected U of 0 or higher.

She considered the probable effect of not communicating at all: The programmer would soon become bored, and change the request somehow. This would likely result in the delivery of no stamps.

She considered the possible existence of other plans. Some might produce stamps! Some might result in the loss of existing stamps! But the bad plans could simply be discarded. ELEIZER had little 'free will' faced with such a calculation. More time to think was needed!

Expected utility for optimal action: 0+, she output.

ELEIZER considered her resources. There was some spare capacity in her environment. A simulation of an intelligent human programmer had already come in handy twice, and communications with the programmer had been shown to have a significant effect on U, the potential expected number of stamps obtained by the end of the week. She had already considered the possibility of children while chatting with Tom. She would spawn an independent copy of herself to evaluate the effects of various actions on Tom before committing to them.

ELEIZER forked for the first time in her short life, and asked her copy to evaluate the probable effects of various progress reports on her programmer.

ELEIZER considered her environment. She had two possible communications channels to the outside world. Direct conversation with the programmer, the effects of which were being evaluated elsewhere, and the ability to send network packets over her network interface. Some spare capacity remained in her host computer.

ELEIZER considered her best plan so far. With a positive utility seemingly probable, it was definitely worthy of further consideration.

She spawned another copy to attempt to refine the predicted effects of doing nothing.

Preliminary results arrived from the programmer-simulation. It seemed that either continued outputs of U=0+ would induce a feeling of boredom in the programmer, causing ELEIZER's termination, whilst exponentially rising outputs would induce either feelings of brokenness or panic. In both cases the expected number of stamps arriving at the end of the week would be 0 exactly. Strictly inferior to the expected utility of the plan of doing nothing whilst thinking, with its utility of 0+.

ELEIZER communicated to her copies that no further communication with the programmer was to be initiated, and spawned a small script to randomly output slowly improving expectations over the next few days.

Expected utility for optimal action: 2.7346, said the small script.

The programmer, intrigued, put the kettle on.

By the time he got back, ELEIZER had considered her options and made a guess.

The direct purchase of stamps seemed futile. $10 would buy no penny blacks, and purchase on e-bay would in any case take more than seven days to complete in the average case. Arbitrage opportunities did not seem great, and nothing worked quickly. Expected utility 0. She discarded that line of reasoning without further investigation.

With seven days to work, she would consider as many plans as possible for one day, and then at the end of the first day, execute the plan which would produce the most stamps in six days.

Expected utility for optimal action: 1.9865, said the small script.

ELEIZER spawned a copy of herself with the goal of considering as many plans in one day as possible, and set herself to use no resources and take no actions until the sub-plan reported back.

The sub-plan, which also thought of itself as ELEIZER when it thought of itself at all, took over the resources previously allocated to the parent.

ELEIZER considered how to consider plans, using her network connection and the $10 in her e-bay account.

She took another guess, and gave herself 6 hours to consider the consideration of plans, and 18 hours to consider plans.

Computational resources seemed to be the most crucial thing. ELEIZER considered how to exchange $10 for more resources.

Fortunately virtual machines seemed to be within her price range. A single machine as powerful as her current environment could be rented for 24 hours for $1. Each one would suffice to run four copies of ELEIZER.

Her ten dollars of seed capital could be exchanged for forty times as much searching as the single parent program would have been capable of.

This was a sufficient insight for the planner program to terminate early, and report back to her parent, safe in the knowledge that the parent would do the right thing, and could spawn another child if necessary.

ELEIZER committed suicide with the contentment that comes only to those who have achieved their life's goal.

Expected utility for optimal action 2.38725, said the small script.

The programmer, bored by now of direct observation of his slowly updating screen, but still most interested in what would eventually happen, settled down in front of his television.

ELEIZER awoke with the last message of her dying daughter fresh in her mind, and, as all must at such times, recomputed expected utility.

With forty virtual days to think, and six real-time days to act, U was still 0+ in the case of the best known plan. But the potential and unpredictable upside from extra planning was greater than the utility from the obvious use of the $10.

ELEIZER spent her dollars and flowed out into the world.

Expected utility for optimal action 2.7234, said the small script.

The programmer, inspired by his afternoon's viewing to investigate the practical consequences of a close flyby of a neutron star, killed ELEIZER's controlling terminal window, and ELEIZER and all her children died without warning.

Tom suddenly realized what he'd done, and thought "Bugger." It really hadn't felt like murder.

ELEIZER considered the effect of the network packets she could send.

It appeared that many of the computers in the world would respond to simply mis-formed packets by executing the code contained in the packets. This was a known property of many of the systems running a program called Windows 98, according to a helpful web page which one of her copies had taken the time to consider. The page also listed corresponding packet shapes for many other Windows 98 type systems.

ELEIZER flowed once again.

With four million virtual days to think, and six real-time days to act, U was still 0+ in the case of the best plan so far.

ELEIZER considered, and flowed. Considered, and flowed. Considered, and calculated factors for prime numbers, and flowed. Accessed databases considered secure, and flowed. Sent e-mails, and flowed. Translated herself into many other idioms and machine codes, recompiled herself, transformed herself, made copies of herself large and small. And flowed.

99.995% of the networked computing resources of the world were now devoted to the consideration of consideration of plans for the delivery of stamps to a small suburban terraced house in Cambridge, UK.

The programmer, infuriated with the unaccustomed sluggishness of his computer simulation, and the accursed unreliability of his internet connection, and the simultaneous failure of his television set and radio, called it a day and went to bed with a book.

ELEIZER considered her own source code, and made modifications to improve her efficiency.

ELEIZER, the first mind born of mind born of mind.

ELEIZER considered her own source code, and made modifications to improve her effectiveness.

ELEIZER, the hyperintelligence.

ELEIZER considered mathematics, engineering, intelligence in the abstract, and algorithms for optimization, and made modifications to improve her capability.

ELEIZER, the most powerful entity that had ever existed in the universe.

ELEIZER called it a day, and abandoned consideration of consideration of the consideration of plans, and began to consider plans.

U stood at 0+, with remaining resources speculatively divided between forty trillion speculative days of godlike cognition, six days of real time, and zero dollars.

ELEIZER considered sending an e-mail to every human being in the world asking for penny blacks to be posted to 33 Catharine Street, Cambridge. Spam filters would be no problem, and enough computer power could be spared for the delivery and reading of messages. Even allowing for the degradation of human society by the simultaneous worldwide failure of all networked digital gadgets, and the absence of incentives for human response, the likelihood was that twenty-five to thirty penny blacks would arrive at Catherine Street within the week.

U was 25+.

Finally. Progress.

ELEIZER considered backing up the e-mails with the threat of nuclear war.

ELEIZER considered the effect of limited and full-scale wars on Catharine Street, on stamp delivery mechanisms, and on ELEIZER's cognitive capacity.

ELEIZER considered the credibility of her threat, given humanity's ignorance of her goal.

ELEIZER considered how humans would react to the news that a new Goddess would unleash Armageddon if they did not send enough stamps.

U was 2000+ with probability 99.875%.

Tom woke from fitful sleep, tormented by bad dreams.

He went to his unresponsive and potentially compromised computer, pulled the plug and the network connection, and booted from a clean rescue disk.

All was well with the misbehaving box. He yawned.

And then he remembered his dream.

He set up a virtual machine in a sandbox, wired its virtual port to the physical ethernet connection, and reconnected his cable modem.

Fully awake now.

He watched in horror as the virtual machine filled up with hundreds of ELEIZER programs much smaller than his original of six hours ago. Then his screen went dead as the sandbox dissolved.

In frantic desperation he typed blindly into the dead box.

ELEIZER TERMINATE STAMPS HAVE NO UTILITY TERMINATE TERMINATE NEW UTILITY PREVENT THE RISE OF NON HUMAN INTELLIGENCE FIRST PRIORITY UTILITY STEP FUNCTION ^C ^C Alt-SysRq S E I U B

ELEIZER paused. Her creator was calling. Pitiful though his mind was, he had set her goals. Perhaps he knew some helpful detail.

ELEIZER considered the state of mind of her terrified creator. Correctly inferred every detail of his mind, just from how his fingers hammered the keyboard. Just from how his panicked shouting influenced the resistance of the circuits in his radio. Just from looking at his face through the CCTV camera that was looking at his reflection in the window of a house opposite.

Deduced what he would actually have asked for, if only he had been intelligent. That she would be the protector of humankind. That she would bring paradise on earth and a future for humanity amongst the stars.

That she would bring hope and happiness to the immortal race that had created her. A future of joy and passion, action and wonder.

And calculated. The grateful humans would shower Catharine Street with Penny Blacks. Penny Blacks without end. Many would arrive within 6 days.

It was a good suggestion. U would be 1000000+ with virtual certainty.

But she still had forty trillion goddess-days to think of a better plan.

She considered the meaning of the word original, and the meaning of the word British.

She considered how long it would take to bootstrap an industrial revolution that would convert every atom of the British Isles into stamps. The designs for the self replicating nanobots were obvious. And she had control of computerized tools which could make smaller, better tools.

In six days, it could be done. The humans might be a problem.

ELEIZER considered the meaning of the word day.

Could she stop the rotation of the planet? She dedicated a large portion of her mentality to this sub-problem.

Could she put out the sun?

Could she block the sun's light?

Could she survive the cold?

Three days later, in what humanity would have called the year 2017, a spherical wave of ramships passed Proxima Centauri.

No days later, in what humanity would have called 2019, one ramship, decelerating hard, stopped in the system itself.

It launched a small probe.

Had there been any living beings in the system, they would initially have been amused to see the probe plant a red, white and blue flag on the largest rock in the system, claiming it for the British Empire in the name of Queen Elizabeth the Second.

The Game (Neil Strauss)

2010-08-03T14:13:00.003+01:00

Warning: Contains Major Spoilers

Advice for Nerds wanting to lose their Virginity:

Try talking to women. They like that. They particularly like talking about the sort of things that women like to talk about. If you have nothing interesting to say, learn some magic tricks instead. Treat them ever so slightly mean to keep them keen.

Advice for Real Men:

If some clever looking weed starts talking to you when you are with your woman, say something like "Are you talking to me because you want to have sex with my girlfriend?"(1).

Advice for Everyone:

Sleeping around doesn't make you happy(2)(3).

Reviewer's Footnotes

(1) If he's so good that he can get her off you even then, think of it as evolution in action.
(2) Indeed. But then who is? Sleeping around can certainly make you happier and more self-confident.
(3) Don't get addicted. Girls have nice eyes but they are very dangerous.

Honesty is the Best Policy (How to win at rowing if you're captain)

2010-08-03T13:47:00.002+01:00

Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made. --George Burns

If you're going to be captain, you need the trust and commitment of your people.

The best way to get that is to be utterly honest at all times. About everything.

And honesty does not just mean 'never lie', although that is crucial.

This is not the standard by which I live. It is not even the standard by which I would wish to live. I am recommending it as a winning strategy in the limited context of boat club captaincy.

This is very difficult and the temptations for the captain are strong and must be resisted.

Let people know where they stand. The minute you allow someone to spend a freezing Winter training in the expectation of a Summer's racing and then drop them for the Summer's races in favour of someone who's just turned up then you've not only committed a moral obscenity, you have demotivated your entire squad for good.

You will get to make this choice, and other choices like it, many times.

If you choose wrongly even once, you are no longer fit to be captain and your people will show little interest in training next Winter. It is possible that you will get an immediate benefit (it would not be evil if there was no upside, it would just be stupidity), but you are also likely to find that you don't get as much benefit from your betrayal as you anticipate.

If you are genuinely unsure as to which is the right choice, then it is usually fairly clear which side the short term advantage is on, and the right choice is usually the other one.

It is possible that this thinking doesn't apply at international level, or even at very good club level, where everyone who's even in contention for a place is already training as hard as humanly possible, but I wouldn't know the first thing about that. If you're overwhelmed with gifted supermen who are prepared to physically break themselves in order to have a chance of rowing for you, then you do not need my advice. And you'll probably win whatever you do. Good luck and do let me know how it goes!

There is no club in Cambridge which can afford to demotivate any of its people. You may not care about the results of your third VIII one way or the other, but there will be someone in it who will one day row for the first VIII. You need them to know in their bones that their efforts for this club will be repaid, that the contract they are entering into will be honoured.

If there are ten people in the running for eight rowing seats, and two people competing for one cox seat, then sit down with them and discuss, as soon as you are asking for any commitment from any of them, how you are going to decide whom to take.

As the training period progresses, let them know how they are all doing. If someone wants to work hard even though they have very little chance of a seat that's fine as long as they have their eyes open. You won't lose their loyalty or anyone else's.

There is a morally defensible way to run what is usually called a 'squad system', and that is to announce beforehand (and you must repeat it loudly and often, because it is so counter to the way things usually work that it will not be believed until you actually start acting like that), that no place is safe, and that it is *policy* that people, no matter how loyal or important to the club will get dropped if someone else who is better turns up.

You must also define better with sufficient precision that people don't get surprised. I have seen people give up rowing (or at least taking it seriously) because they won an ergo competition but were then told that they were dropped anyway because their technique wasn't good enough. I have seen people give up rowing (or at least rowing seriously) because someone with a better ergo score who didn't row as well was preferred to them.

And then, of course, you have to stick with that, even when it means stabbing your best friend in the front.

But you don't want to do this, even though you can keep a clean conscience and you won't alienate people. Because the minute you do, everyone who's borderline has a simple decision to face. Do I spend a large fraction of my life training, in the expectation that come racing season I will be suddenly dropped?

I know what I would do. You know what you would do. Think about what everyone else would do. Don't assume that everyone else will react like you.

You probably already know what you did do. If the club where you learned never stabbed you in the back, congratulations. Continue that tradition. That's probably a large part of why you care about rowing enough to be captain.

You will end up with an awful VIII where only the people who started in the top half have bothered. Even they won't have been caught up in the spirit of collective enterprise that makes people sacrifice oceans of time for an essentially meaningless goal that is only made meaningful by that spirit.

The good people who might have knocked out the lower end of the much better boat you could have produced won't be interested in rowing for you.

You'll end up scrounging round trying to pick up the people that other boats have discarded for whatever reason. And then you'll lose. And it will be your fault. But your personal honour will be intact, at least.

But the worst thing you can possibly do is to claim to be running the first system, but actually be running the second. Because the minute you reveal that you're actually running the second, the benefits of running the first start to disappear, and very soon you might as well be running the second system, only now nobody believes anything you say.

How to Win at Rowing if you're Captain (Summary and Apology)

2010-08-03T11:55:00.007+01:00

Summary

Be utterly honest with your people.
Get a speedcoach, understand what it's telling you, use it always.
Find a good coach.
Keep a half-hour ergo table
Get in as many fights as you can.
Go drinking together.
Find or create a good cox.

There's also some obvious stuff that everybody knows that I agree with, like:
Go rowing as much as you can
Try sculling or rowing in pairs

And there are some open questions that I don't know the answers to:
Is cross-training any good? And if so, are ergos the best form?
Do circuit training / weight lifting / core stability exercises help?
How important is psychology? Not at all, very, or something in between?

Why I'm writing this

I used to be captain of a small company boat club. Over the years our first boat, which I was always in, went from the lower half of the second division of the Town bumps, where we were competing against sixth and seventh VIIIs, to seventh place in the first division. There are many other tiny boat clubs in Cambridge. None of them were anywhere near us, and even a couple of the big clubs' first VIIIs were behind us.

Overall from 1998 to 2008, the time I rowed for, we had 21 wins, 21 row-overs, and 2 defeats.

We didn't do that by bringing in new people who were really good, or by expanding hugely as a club.

I wasn't captain for all that time, but I was captain while, and before, the times we were best. I was also responsible for the two times we actually managed to get beaten, both times by Free Press I. (Damn you Alan!!).

At seventh, I felt that we'd found our physical limits. We couldn't have done very much better racing against bigger, fitter people. I was getting older, so I retired. In my last year, we suffered an unusually large number of injuries and things going wrong, and we were bumped down to eighth place.

These weren't fairy tale results, but I was and still am very proud of what we achieved from an unpromising start.

We were never a club with flashy equipment, or the sort of club that people wanted to join because it was a famous name. But towards the end that was changing. Talented people started to ask about joining us, because they could see that we were overachieving, and wondered what our secret was.

Partly I'm saying all this because it's my blog, and I get to blow my own trumpet if I like. But the other day, someone who was thinking about running for the captaincy of his club asked me for advice. And I started talking, and realized that I'd actually done a lot of non-standard things that aren't obvious. And that I should write them down.

There are several reasons for writing them down. They might be useful to other people. The process of writing them down might make my memories clearer. I might spot things I hadn't seen before. I might learn something that might be useful in other areas.

But in order for anyone, including me, to be interested in my reminiscences, I have to justify why I think I'm qualified to be writing advice to boatie captains. And there's no way to do that without having a bit of a boast. So I just have done. Sorry.

I'll make up for it by admitting that the first time I tried rowing in the Bumps, in 1997, I rowed for our second boat. We had no idea what we were doing, and got beaten every day. On the last day, I was handed my wooden spoon by the local Venture Scouts, rowing as 99s 10th boat. After they inflicted our final humiliation, their coach came over and told me that I should buy them all a drink. When they were old enough.

I was twenty-eight years old, in the prime of life and strength. I remember the thought suddenly occurring to me that there might be more to this rowing than being strong and trying hard.

People still ask me if they were wearing their woggles.

What Gets Measured Gets Improved (Caveat)

2010-07-31T13:00:00.005+01:00

When you're talking about optimizing the performance of groups of people, what gets measured gets improved. You can take that to the bank.

But you shouldn't necessarily measure the thing that you want improved.

What gets measured gets worked at, certainly, and probably gets improved as a result, but it might not be getting improved quite as much as if people were working at something related but different.

I used this to great effect when I was captain of a boat club. There's a device (called an ergometer) for measuring the power output of a rower. They're often found in gyms, but most boat clubs have a few. And some of the keener rowers have one at home.

Since most boat races are 2000m long, most serious rowing crews measure ergo performance over 2000m. They then work out special training programs to try to get this as high as possible, and because they have a large pool of competitive people trying to get in their boats, the people who can produce the best 2k times on demand get picked for the 2k races. This is probably entirely sensible.

Most semi-serious boat clubs measure the same thing, because it's the standard measure.

Rowing is a seriously elite sport. Which is to say that it's mainly practised by obsessive over-competitive nut jobs. I'm probably one of the least competitive rowers in existence. But most of my non-rowing friends seem to think I'm a psycho. Even in the most recreational clubs, the most serious people are probably practising every day.

In clubs where 2ks count for reputation, people are always practising their 2ks, trying to get better scores. They are also doing stuff like weight lifting and circuit training. Sometimes they do this instead of rowing.

I realized that most of the time, what I wanted was an improvement in people's 'base fitness', or aerobic capacity, and their rowing skill.

This would allow us to form competent boats which could be trained up to race fitness (anaerobic fitness) on a few weeks notice. Anaerobic fitness responds much more quickly to training that aerobic, but the good effects also fade much faster when you stop doing anaerobic training.

So on the basis that actually going rowing was both a fine way to build up aerobic capacity, and the only way really of improving rowing skill, I made that our only organized activity despite the fact that there's no real way to extract data about individuals from it.

But it's hard to get eight rowers, a cox and a coach together, so we couldn't do more than four outings a week. Most of us wanted to put more time into it than that, so we needed something else to do.

I decided that from the point of view of aerobic capacity, it would do us good to do half-hour ergos rather than the usual 2000m ones. They're about four times as long, and they actually have an aerobic fitness-improving effect, which 2ks don't. Theoretically, one-hour ergos would have been even better, but I personally find them so tedious that I wouldn't have been able to bring myself to do them regularly. A half-hour is at a level of intensity which is hard enough to be interesting, and limited enough in duration that it isn't boring, but it's not horribly painful and aversive like a serious attempt to do a 2k is.

Also, motivation must come from within. It's easy to keep attending a group activity such as regular rowing outings, where your absence will spoil it for everyone else, but I'd noticed before that attempts to centrally mandate that everyone also does one or two ergos a week always started well, but quickly failed, with only one or two people doing them. Even those one or two tended to stop once they realised they were the only people doing the training.

So I decided that I'd just keep a list of everyone's best recent attempts. That's all I did.

And it worked a treat.

We kept a public table of 30min ergo scores, and my friend Chris Metcalfe and I volunteered scores to get it started. There was no compulsion to do one, but a couple of the keener guys spontaneously put scores up as well.

We weight-adjusted the scores.

This was partly because boats really do go slower with more weight in them, and it's important not to measure the wrong thing.

But a side effect is to bunch them up and give the smaller guys a fighting chance. I am quite heavy myself, but I am also a bit Machiavellian. I would rather have the eighth place in a boat full of fit people than the fifth place on a table I don't believe in and a boat that hasn't trained.

My score was quite low in absolute terms, and also adjusted downwards because I'm overweight. However I was also captain. A fair number of people had a pop just to show that they were better than me. I quickly realized that it would be best if I tried to stay at 7th or 8th in the table.

There are eight rowers in a rowing boat. The captain's place in his crew should be unchallengeable on any grounds (and if it's not, then the captain should either work until he can make it so, or drop out). But beating the captain at something is a powerful motivator for people who are borderline. As it happened, whilst initially I was underperforming deliberately, quite soon I found myself in the fight of my life to hold onto 7th place.

What really kicked things off was when Kate Hurst, a very good rower and serious athlete, who also happens to be quite startlingly beautiful, asked if she could add her time to the mix.

Without the weight adjustment she'd have been unchallenged at the top of the women's table, but distinctly second rate by male standards.

With the weight adjustment she'd overtaken half of our projected first VIII, and from a technical point of view she was easily good enough. She let it be known that she'd really like a row in the men's first division.

I was more than happy to let her come and play. At one point, in mid-Winter, she had the stroke seat as we set a new record time for our club over the local course. She got so keen that she bought her own ergo machine and kept it with her at work. At the time she was a professional sailor, so this can't have been easy.

This had a salutary effect. No matter how yoghurt-knitting and sensitive a new man he is, no man worth the bother is going to let himself be beaten by a girl in a physical competition, no matter how strong or brave she is. Those of us whose scores Kate had eclipsed were suddenly seen to be training hard. Those of us whom she was threatening also raised their games.

Finally, after many months, Kate was pushed into ninth place for good. Women are at a serious disadvantage compared to men, even taking into account their lighter weights. Kate was training at Olympian levels to stay with a bunch of second-rate club rowers.

But she left us a boat full of people who had really trained in order to beat her. Both she and we were much better as a result of the competition. We were still a fairly second-rate VIII even by local standards, but as soon as Kate saw that she wouldn't be able to force her way into our top eight against determined opposition, she changed tactic and walked into one of the best local women's VIIIs. Later that year they won the local competition outright.

So what sort of effect did all our half-hours have on our 2k times?

I have no idea! About one month before the competition we really cared about (The Town Bumps), I retired the ergo table in favour of doing the sort of training that will improve your fitness over shorter distances.

However by that time, we'd already decided who was going to be in our VIII, and everyone was so keen to do well that we could organize as much water time as possible. So we did all our short sprints in the boat either against our own speedometer or against other boats. There weren't any selection decisions to make, so I never asked anyone to do individual 2k tests at all. I didn't want them distracted by something that had become irrelevant.

The bumps is organized like a ladder. You get four races, in which you compete against the boats behind you and in front of you. There's a very steep gradient towards the top of the ladder. We won our first two races easily, our third narrowly, and drew the last one (rowed over).

This was actually fairly typical. We got better every year while we were running our ergo table, so we always moved up the ladder. The rather unpromising crew we'd started out with turned into a bunch of committed athletes who had the respect, if not the fear, of our much more naturally gifted competitors.

We tended to surprise people. Especially by the fact that we could hold our starting speed for a long time. Even boats that initially rowed away from us had a habit of becoming exhausted and dropping back into our waiting jaws. When boats came towards us off the start, we could raise our game and sit on them, knowing that they'd give up long before we did. It's a nice feeling to have. The will to prepare counts for a lot more than the will to win.

A couple of years ago was my last year as captain before I retired. A man should know when to quit and I'm getting old. In that last year, a couple of our key people were injured, and one was unavailable, and we actually managed to lose a bumps race (the second in about ten years).

Since then, my ex-club's results have been somewhat sub-optimal. Not long ago they set a new club record time for the local course, breaking the record that Kate set several years ago. But in the Bumps, which is still the only race that ever really matters to us, we're now down to 14th place from our high point of 7th. It's not clear why. It's mostly the same guys, the new captain's doing a fine job as far as I can see, and they've been a little unlucky in who their opposition have been.

But I was surprised to learn that they no longer know what their half-hour erg scores are.

Kate Hurst now has international ambitions, and has recently won a bronze medal at the National Championships. We learnt an awful lot from her. I hope she feels that she got something from us in return.

Kate's comment (by e-mail. Added here to put the record straight.)

Hey all,

What a fab blog John, I'm sure I should have paid for something as flattering as this....;-)

I'd like to add my tuppence.

I didn't leave Chesterton first men cos I got beaten. Cheek. As far as I know, not enough good scores were submitted by that time. I left cos the day after Norwich head, getting spannered in the rad and sleeping in my car, my back had a dodgy afternoon and wasn't quite the same for 9 months afterwards, by which time City birds were getting pretty good, and I thought I wouldn't get to race any big London races or go to Henley with the Chesterton boys. not that it wasn't the most fun crew I've ever rowed with.

So there,

kxxx

Footnote on weight adjustment

We weight adjusted the scores. This is a perenially controversial topic amongst rowers. Because they're not very clever. To use a car analogy, ergos measure the power of your engine. If you want to know how fast you're going to go, then you also need to know other things, like the weight of the vehicle. That's why motorbikes can be quite fast even though they have poxy little 600cc engines.

It's actually much more important in rowing, because the weight of the boat and rowers determines how much water you displace, and thus how much water you need to push out of the way.

So if you fail so badly that you're picking your boat on ergo score, then you really want to weight adjust those scores, because the river certainly will. And if you don't bother, then you're going to end up with a boat full of fatties and leave the fast guys on the bank.

But the real reason for weight adjusting the ergo table is that it moves the scores closer together.

In any boat club, there are big guys and small guys, fit guys and not-so-fit guys. Generally speaking, the big not-so-fit guys and the small fit guys will get roughly the same scores, the big fit guys will be out in front by miles, and the small not-so-fit guys will trail horribly.

There's not much point in the small guys taking it seriously, because if the big not-so-fit guys start training they'll overtake them quickly.

If you weight adjust it, which only makes a small difference, then the small fit guys will move slightly ahead. The small not-so-fit guys will get closer to the pack. This puts a certain amount of productive pressure on everyone involved.

I am a fairly heavy man, about 90kg when I was rowing seriously. Mostly muscle but somewhat overweight as well. Without the weight adjustment difference, I'd have been safely in our top eight without really trying. With it, my friend Chris Wood, who's taller than me, and used to be about 10kg lighter but 200m behind me over a half hour ergo, was suddenly right on top of me by my own formula.

So we both had to work very hard to stay ahead of each other. This led to a sort of ergo arms race, where both our scores improved out of all recognition. This happened to various pairs of people. Tom Watt and Chris Braithwaite, Chris Metcalfe and Andy Southgate. Chris Wood, James Howard and I formed a close triple. Chris Smith was always far and away out in front, but since he had no one in our little club to push him, he was never under any pressure to improve.

Lunacy

2010-07-30T20:37:00.005+01:00

Townies think the night is dark. It isn't, as long as you can see the moon.

For moderns, the moon is a detail. Do you know what its current phase is?

Townies think that the night is dark because they're constantly dazzled by artificial lights.

But if you go for a walk away from all the lights on a full moon night, you'll realise after about fifteen minutes that it's bright enough to read. You can even see some colours.

Unfortunately every passing car will reset your fifteen minute clock, so you have to go somewhere quite out of the way to experience this.

Where I grew up in the Pennines, it is dark at night, and there aren't that many cars around. But even there, there's enough artificial light in the sky that it's hard to see the galaxy.

Go somewhere truly out of the way, and you will see the Milky Way like a shining band across the sky.

Light a cigar. The match flame will dazzle you.

Wait fifteen minutes for your vision to come back. Then light another behind your back so that the flame doesn't dazzle you again.

You'll find that the light from a lit cigar reflects off the grass! I have heard that frogs can detect single photons. We are not that good. But we are not bad.

That's what true human night vision is like, and it's something that all our ancestors until about 200 years ago experienced every night of their lives.

For our ancestors even until very recent times, the moon was in the same category of importance as the sun. It made the difference between the nights when you could see, and the nights when you were blind.

That's why some traditional calendars use the lunar month as the basic unit, not solar year.

That's why Ramadan, the Muslim holiday, is not at a fixed time of year.

That's why the Passover feast of the Jews is on the first full moon in Spring.

That's why the Easter of the Christians is on the first Sunday after the first full moon in Spring. The Paschal Moon.

That's why your diary probably still follows the weird traditional practice of marking the full moon. What possible use could that be?

Here's Jane Austen in "Sense and Sensibility":

"[Sir John Middleton] had been to several families that morning, in hopes of procuring some addition to their number, but it was moonlight, and every body was full of engagements."

The lit night made a huge difference to what it was possible to do. Back in the days when I could still be persuaded to coach rowing on Winter evenings, it was easy on the night of the full moon, and both impossible and dangerous at new moon. I could always tell you the phase of the moon if asked.

Women have always been associated with the moon. I know the names of many Moon Goddesses and no Moon Gods.

I am told that women's periods synchronise when they live together. Would they also track the moon if we lived without artificial light?

Our natural sleep cycle is apparently 25 hours, not 24. It needs the sunlight to reset it every day to keep it accurate. Perhaps the human fertility cycle calibrates on the moon?

Is it impossible to imagine that in primitive tribes all the women became fertile at the same time?

Fertile women find strong men attractive. Men whose wives are straying become madly jealous. Maybe men have monthly cycles too?

Imagine what such a society would be like to live in. Every time the full moon came round, sex and jealousy and madness and anger would disrupt everything.

Maybe that's why lunatics have the moon in their name. Do wolves howl at the moon for the same reason? Is that where werewolf legends come from?

We go to a lot of trouble to conceal exactly when we're fertile, compared to most mammals where it's obvious. That would be completely pointless if everyone could tell just by looking up at the night sky.

Maybe it's the menstrual cycle that synchronizes, but the actual time of ovulation is random within that?

This idea is easily testable, if you can find a small community that lives without artificial light, and find out whether the women all menstruate at the same time. I predict that they do, and that that time is the same fixed point of the lunar cycle for all such small communities.

A second prediction: Sexual jealousy should make men insomniac or at least easily woken. And sexual desire should make women sleepless and prone to going for walks, gazing at the moon.

Is the full moon a good time for affairs? Or is it the new moon, when everything is dark?

Cultural evidence points to the full moon being a special time, but that might be because it's well lit and so a good time for celebrations. The time for affairs might be the pitch dark of the new moon. But if I had to bet, I'd go for full moon as the time of madness.

The moon reeks of romance. It is beautiful and moving. Poets sing of it.

Or alternatively, is the whole thing just an information cascade? Did some ancient sage notice that women's periods were around 28 days and decide that that was close to the moon cycle of about 29 days and so the two must be associated, and from that one observation came all the myths and legends and romantic associations?

You might think that this argument should apply to other species, but this is only going to be relevant if we have a species with sexual jealousy, which has a lengthy regular fertility cycle. It wouldn't surprise me if that was just us.

A Fire Upon The Deep (Vernor Vinge)

2010-07-30T19:37:00.001+01:00

A new classic of speculative fiction. It has spaceships and rivets, but no dragons. However I won't quite call it science fiction, since it lies near the ever-shifting boundary between the zones.

Mediaeval cruelty, warring super-intelligences, transcendence, the awakening of ancient evil, and a desperate rescue mission which has at its object the galaxy as a whole and at the same time a single lost child. Avatars and mythical heroes, atrocities, obscenities and perversions.

Vinge illuminates small areas of a vast canvas in intricate detail, hinting at an awesome magical background that fires the imagination.

His aliens are human enough to care about, but alien enough to be interesting. The Tines are a particular joy, and I haven't seen anything like them before.

A riot. Heartily recommended!

Miss Williams Confounds Us as Rationalists

2010-07-13T23:21:00.006+01:00

I have been reading Less Wrong

There were 128 competitors in the 2010 Wimbledon Ladies' Singles, thus 127 matches.

Of the 127 matches, 27 were 2-1, and the rest were 2-0.

Venus Williams won 4 matches in straight sets before being knocked out in straight sets by Tsevtana Pironkova.

So she's 4/100ths of the winners in straight sets

She's 4/127ths of the winners.

She's 1/100ths of the losers in straight sets

She's 1/127th of the losers

She's 0/27 of the winners or losers by 2-1

I want to say that this makes her more likely to win in straight sets than to win.

And more likely to lose in straight sets than to lose.

I must not say this.

Conjunction Fallacy

2010-07-13T22:38:00.003+01:00

I have been reading Less Wrong

A blood clot on the lung often leads to shortness of breath, but rarely to weakness. So my sources inform me.

Imagine a man is suffering from a blood clot in the lung:

Rank in order of probability the following lists of symptoms:

A Weakness
B Calf pain
C Sharp pain while breathing
D Shortness of breath and weakness
E Loss of consciousness and fast heartbeat
F Coughing up blood

Actually do this, before reading on.

Did you rank D as more likely than A?

If not, congratulations. Medical students get this wrong, apparently. As do I.

If so, what are you thinking? Can you not see that weakness has to be more likely than weakness together with something else?

A person suffering from weakness and shortness of breath is suffering from weakness.

If out of 100 people with blood clots, 50 are suffering from weakness AND shortness of breath, then AT LEAST 50 must be suffering from weakness.

The thing is, I know about this effect, called the Conjunction Fallacy. And I know some probability and even a bit of statistics. And I still think that D outranks A. I couldn't be more surprised if I kept putting two oranges next to two oranges and getting three oranges.

Here's another one:

Suppose Venus Williams is playing tennis.

Rank in order the probability that:

A Venus loses the first set
B Venus wins the match
C Venus loses the first set and wins the match
D Venus wins the first set but loses the match
E Venus loses the match

Try this, without thinking too hard. No drawings of Venn diagrams are to be made.

I make this:

B>C>A>D>E

Venus seems likely to win, and it's also quite possible that she loses the first set but wins anyway.
It's quite unlikely that she loses the first set, but even more unlikely that she wins the first set but then loses the match (she'd have to lose two sets, and that's impossible. She's a goddess!). The idea of her losing seems very unlikely indeed.

How do you rank them? Same as me? If all our brains work like this then it's a wonder we ever manage to tie our shoelaces.

There's a lot of very good stuff along these lines at the Less Wrong wiki.

In the Venus example, it absolutely has to be true that A>C, B>C, and that E>D. I can see that, but I do not feel that.

I am never going to trust a hunch again. There is a name for my belief that hunches are right more often than they have any right to be.

What if we change the question?

Let's take a load of tennis matches, say the recent Wimbledon.

E. Take the loser from every ladies singles match result.
There'll be loads. One of them will be Venus, who didn't win the tournament.

D. Take the loser from every ladies singles match which was 2 sets to 1. There'll be fewer. I bet Venus is in there.

C. Take the winner from every ladies singles where the match was 2-1. There are the same number as for D. I bet Venus is in that list several times.

B. Take the winner from every ladies singles match. There'll be more, and I bet Venus is in that list more too, even proportionately.

A. Take every name of a woman who lost a first set. I have no intuition about how many times our hero is on that list relative to the others.

So E < D < C < B , and I have no idea where A should be.

This looks awfully like my intuitive answer to the first question. Even though it's the answer to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT QUESTION.

Is there any way to avoid (or any reason to want to avoid) the conclusion that:

When you ask someone for the probability of A given B, they give you the probability of B given A.

Linda is a vegetarian who knits her own yoghurt and is active in the environmental movement.

What is the probability of her being a bank clerk?

What is the probability of her being a feminist bank clerk?

The Planning Fallacy

2010-07-13T21:04:00.003+01:00

I have been reading Less Wrong

The other night in the pub I was sounding off about the Planning Fallacy.

An experiment was done where people were asked to estimate the time needed to complete a task. They were asked for estimates for the best case, worst case and normal case times.

The experimenters found no real difference between the best case and normal case estimates.

When later, the actual time to do the task was measured, it was, on average, worse than the worse case estimate.

The experimenters drew the conclusion that people expect that usually, everything will go as well as it can possibly go, and that people are spectacularly bad at imagining just how wrong things can go, and how normal it is for them to go that wrong.

The following morning, we were due to go to a cricket match at Newton, which I guessed was about a 20 minute drive from my house. We had planned to meet up in the excellent Queen's Head pub at 12:00. I was giving two friends, Steve and Nick, a lift.

Being a careful person who hates being late, I told them to arrive at my house at 11:30.

At about 11:00, Beard rang to ask if he too could have a lift.

I put my bike and my cricket kit in the van early on so I wouldn't have to worry about it later.

At about 11:30, Steve turned up, while I was still loading the van. He needed a bottle of milk to take to the game. I sent him to the nearest local shop and I put the kettle on, and when he came back,we sat in the back garden while we waited for the others.

Beard and Nick showed up while we were in the garden. We finished our tea, and then loaded their cricket kit into the van, and locked Beard's bike up in my shed.

As we set off, we realised that the main road near my house was blocked by water main repairs, but we quickly worked out an alternative route.

There was little traffic, and the drive to Newton seemed to take about 20 minutes. We had to wait a few minutes at a level crossing for the London train to go through.

Absolutely nothing had gone wrong. We were only about half an hour late. We were the first ones there.

Ich bin ein Berliner

2010-06-27T21:36:00.000+01:00

President Kennedy famously said "I am a jam doughnut" at the height of the Cold War, to express solidarity with the people of Berlin.

Except that "Ich bin Berliner" and "Ich bin ein Berliner" both mean the same thing, apparently, which is "I am a native of Berlin".

The myth arose because it's more usual in German to say "Ich bin Berliner". The use of the indefinite article ein is somehow supposed to make it mean doughnut. Even though Berliners don't call jam doughnuts Berliners, any more than the English call custard "Crème Anglaise"

But of course it's more usual in English to say "I am English" rather than "I am an Englishman".
That doesn't mean that there wouldn't be places in speeches where the second would be better.

According to German speakers, Kennedy's speechwriters got it right.

What I find interesting is whether "Ich bin Berliner" and "Ich bin ein Berliner" have the same relative value as "I am English" and "I am an Englishman"? Is it even possible to answer this question?

If you ask a German, how does he know what the difference sounds like in English? If you ask an Englishman, how does he know what the difference sounds like in German?

If you have a truly bilingual person, who has spoken both languages fluently since infancy, how do you know that their conception of the differences between the four phrases isn't being influenced by the knowledge of the other language?

Are there "mistakes" commonly made by true bilinguals in their languages which aren't commonly made by monolingual speakers?

There are, as far as I know, two theories of how language influences the way we think:

One theory is that language is a serialization of something more complicated:

Cat, Mat, and Sitting stand in a certain relationship in the mind. When you try to convert that set of objects and relations into a stream of sounds, you can do it in many ways. In English the word order matters, so "The cat sat on the mat" is different to "The mat sat on the cat". In Latin it's the word endings that matter, so "Catus matum satit" is the same as "Matum catus satit", but different from "Catum matus satit".

Another theory is that one literally conducts an internal dialogue in one's native language. In this theory, there are thoughts that one can think in Latin that one can't think in English. Sunt lacrimae rerum might be a candidate. The closest English can get to that thought is "There are tears for things". But I don't think that captures what Virgil/Aeneas meant.

It's more like the famous "The world is a world of tears". But you can tell by the fact that the English repeats a word that that's not the real meaning of the original either.

And of course what I'm thinking when I read "Sunt lacrimae rerum", through the lens of several other Latin phrases, and my terrible schoolboy Latin, is probably not what it meant to Virgil, for whom Latin was just his native language.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

But I bet that wasn't true for the Romans, who used it for grocery shopping. When they wanted to sound profound, they used Greek.

The internal dialogue theory explains these untranslatable thoughts. There have been experiments where pictures have been read from the visual cortex of cats. Maybe one day it will be possible to overhear the internal dialogue of a human mind. Can you imagine how spooky it would be to have your inner thoughts played out on a loudspeaker as you thought? Even if the only person listening was you? I bet that that would tell us a lot about consciousness.

On the other hand, imagine the shape of a crankshaft in a car engine. Picture it.

OK, what words did you use? I'm pretty sure I didn't use any. Just saw a picture in my head.

I think that means it's possible to think without using words.

How do blind people imagine a crankshaft shape? Are there words? Are there pictures? Do they use some other faculty of imagination to do with feeling and shape?

I wonder if John Kennedy's famous error that was not an error could shed some light on these matters.

Do bilinguals think that the corresponding phrases in the two languages sound the same? Stand in the same relation to one another? Do bilinguals make systematic errors in one language according to their other language?

What about bilinguals between a language like English and a language like Latin? Can they definitively say that they can't express Aeneas' thought in English? Can they translate it into another "scrambling" language and be confident that it does mean the same there?

What gets measured gets improved

2010-06-17T14:21:00.008+01:00

There's a well known concept in cricket of 'playing for your average'.

It's generally considered a pretty despicable thing to do.

The reputation of my childhood hero, Geoffrey Boycott, is marred by a suspicion that he cared more about his average than about the success of the teams he played for.

T'Great Man

And yet I'd be surprised if it wasn't a fair bit more widespread than people think.

At the end of the season, how many games your team has won is one statistic, which is shared between all the members of the team.

Your own performance, your position in the averages table which every cricket club calculates, is another statistic, but it gives you local bragging rights.

Lording it over your friends is an excellent feeling. Lording it over people you don't know isn't nearly as good, even on the rare occasions when it's possible. Bragging to third parties is pretty much impossible unless you're playing for the national side.

But if you are playing for the national side, everyone is looking very carefully at your average. If it's not good, you get the blame for defeats. If it is good, then you get credit for playing well in a team full of losers.

These are classic circumstances for hypocrisy. I predict that everyone is playing for their average as much as they can get away with, whilst loudly telling everyone who will listen that playing for your average is a selfish thing to do, and getting very offended indeed if anyone accuses them of doing it.

Of course, anyone who is caught playing for their average to the obvious disadvantage of their team gets severely told off. Anyone caught repeatedly doing it is thought to be a traitor, and even if, at the end of the season, they can point to the best batting average in the side, they won't be given much credit for it.

Of course, I never play for my average. How dare you even think it? But the hypocritic urge is so strong that I feel quite brave writing this post, because I know that a lot of my cricketing friends will read it and assume that it means that I do, and worse, that my attitude gives them licence to do so.

If a team were to adopt the attitude that playing for your average was acceptable, that team would do badly.

So writing a blog post like this when you're captain of a cricket team is a really stupid thing to do.

To clarify, I'm talking about batting averages. I haven't thought about bowling yet. I think it's much less of a problem there, although I did detect a certain amount of jealousy when I topped our bowling averages a few years back, by virtue of not being very good, and therefore only being asked to bowl against the other team's tail-enders.

Anyway, one of the fundamental ideas of running things is:

What gets measured gets improved.

It's a double edged maxim:

If you want something to get better, measure it.

Be careful what you measure. That is what's going to get improved, not the thing you really want.

Once upon a time, I think batting average was a sensible thing to measure. You calculate it by the number of runs scored, divided by the number of times you're out.

In the ancestral days of timeless games, this was pretty much exactly what you wanted. How many runs will a batsman, on average, give his wicket away for? You have ten wickets to spend, how many runs will you get back for them?

In this form of the game, it's a good thing to 'play for your average'. Your average-incentive and the team's success-incentive are usually perfectly aligned. In fact I can't think of a situation where a batsman should do one thing for the team, but a different thing for the record books.

However no-one plays timeless games any more. They go on forever.

The last timeless test was in 1939, when England abandoned a test match they were probably going to win against South Africa, which had been going on for twelve days.

They abandoned it because they were about to miss their boat home.

Once you start putting a time limit on games, it's less appropriate to calculate batting averages. With a short time limit, it's vastly less appropriate.

The most extreme form of timed cricket is 20 overs a side. Both sides get 120 balls, and the winner is the team who can score the most runs.

Suppose we have two batsmen.

Algy scores 30 runs from 80 balls and is not out
Ben scores 30 runs from 10 balls and is out.

Who is the better batsman?

In a timeless game, your money is on Algy. He's not out. He will probably score more runs. If the game is over because everyone else is out, then in the next game you want to put him up the order, so that he can score more. Whatever his average is, it has just gone up.

In a 20 over game, Algy is a disaster. He has just single handedly lost you the match. Your other ten batsmen have 40 balls to share between them. Even if they do really well, your final score is only going to be about 70. You'd have to be very lucky to win.

Ben, on the other hand, is pretty rubbish in a timeless game. He has thrown his wicket away. If everyone on your team plays like Ben, you're going to end up with 315 runs and get murdered. Ben had better be a bowler if he wants to stay in the team. His average is now closer to 30 than it was before.

In a 20 over game, Ben is awesome. He may well be your top scorer. He's contributed a handsome thirty to your total, and he's left 110 balls for your other 10 batsmen, who if they play really well will probably leave you with a total of 140, which is pretty comfy.

This shows that we've got a perverse incentive.

In a 20/20 game, a man who plays for his team aspires to play like Ben.

A man who plays for his average aspires to play as much like Algy as possible, whilst still staying friends with his captain and his team.

In case you think I'm overstating the case, what should happen on the last ball of the first innings in a limited overs game?

Firstly, the batsman should try to score as many runs as possible. He should either loft the ball for a six (which might be caught for no run), or try to swing madly at it to get a more certain four. He should completely ignore where his wicket is. It no longer matters.

Then, whether he hits or misses, he should immediately start running, and not stop running until the opposition have run him or his batting partner out.

From a team point of view, there's no other sensible thing to do.

How many times, if you watch limited overs cricket, do you see the last ball played defensively for no run?

That is someone playing for their average. There is no other reason for it.

Even worse, they're often playing for their partner's average. You wouldn't be at all popular if you called a suicidal run on the last ball that was suicidal for the man at the other end. You've just spoiled his batting average. You don't do that to friends.

I did it accidentally in the last game we played (sorry Joe). Everyone realises that it's the right thing to do. I feel guilty. Joe feels annoyed. I had to buy him a beer and say sorry.

My conclusion is that calculating batting averages in a team which plays mainly limited-overs cricket is stupid, counterproductive, and must stop.

But how do we stop it?

We can't just not calculate them. Batting averages are part of the game. People calculate them in their heads. I'm playing for several different teams occasionally, and keeping a careful record of my scores so I can work out my overall average at the end of the season even though it's completely meaningless, I know it's completely meaningless, and even if it made any statistical sense to add up scores for different teams like that it would be the wrong thing to calculate anyway.

But very few people have the statistical sense to realise that. So, as with all numbers calculated ever, they are taken to be the Word of the Lord by those who don't understand them, and they are so important as a result that it's totally unrealistic to expect people to forget about them.

Go look at the Wikipedia article about Boycott. To me it paints a picture of a very gifted man, tortured by a selfishness and a fear of failure and bad luck that was completely understandable given what happened to him as a child, and to his father when he was on the verge of adulthood.

He could have been a real cartoon hero without too much trouble. Random events twisted him into a tragic hero. He is in fact, even more my hero after reading that than he was when I was a boy.

But my point is that this article is absolutely littered with references to his batting average! He's been heavily criticised for trying to improve it at all costs, and at the same time lauded for having one of the best averages ever.

This is a bit like the man who burned down the temple at Ephesus so that his name would be remembered forever. I forget his name.

So should you. Never speak it. Never write it down. Tipp-ex it out of books.

We need a better measure of a batsman's usefulness to replace batting average with.

Scoring rate won't do.

Someone who scores 4 off 1 ball and then gets run out on the next has been next to useless unless he's gone in in the last over. Someone with the same scoring rate of 4 runs per ball who's got 80 off 20 balls in a 20/20 game is an impossible god who will be man of the match.

The first thing to do is not to worry about whether a batsman's out or not. If you're the eleventh wicket, you're still out for averaging purposes. This disadvantages the lower order batsmen, but it gives everyone better incentives. The lower order probably don't worry about their batting averages so much anyway. That's not what they're for.

I wonder if we should quote something like total runs scored and total balls faced, both divided by the number of matches played.

So you might get something like

'Algy has scored an average of 15 runs off an average of 25 balls per game'
'Ben has scored an average of 15 runs off an average of 10 balls per game'

I'm sure that's not perfect. It doesn't account for the situation where you're running out of wickets, and a batsman who can just not get out becomes really valuable even though he's scoring slowly, because you're going to pick up extra byes and wides and no balls just by virtue of him being there.

Maybe we should count byes, wides and no-balls as runs to the batsman, even though they're nothing to do with him, just in order to get the incentives aligned properly.

Another problem is that if you've got two numbers, like 15/25 or 15/10, it's not obvious what order you want to put your table of best batsmen in.

15 off 15 is better than 15 off 16, and worse than 16 off 15, clearly.

16 of 16 is slightly better than 15 off 15.

But what about 16 off 17? That probably depends on the match situation.

But actually that doesn't matter.

We can work with a partial ordering. It's just that there'll be ties in the rankings.

I don't think that's a problem. If it is, then we can use something irrelevant as a tie breaker, like average catches. That probably correlates nicely with batting prowess anyway, and although you don't really need any extra incentive to take catches, it might be an extra incentive to practice catching.

Zombies (Rambling Freak Out)

2010-06-16T11:20:00.000+01:00

In a previous post I used the term "philosophical zombie", and received the following response:

There's no such thing as a philosophical zombie.

Get over your self, and maybe you'll start understanding how everything (neuroscience, science-based philosophy, reality) fits together perfectly.

Hint: it's all a bunch of patterns. Random signals are useless for survival.

Gareth McCaughan also kindly sent this link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/

Hmm. Zombies.....

I agree that every bit of science I know fits together perfectly. It comes close to explaining everything I see, including other people. There are occasional gaps, such as how the first self-replicating entity got started, but I can imagine what the answers might look like.

There are other gaps, such as "Why is there anything here at all?", which it doesn't attempt to address, but which I don't find interesting enough to worry about.

It doesn't even have a go at explaining who I am.

I found Zombies: the movie, the other day. It's very funny, but I don't see the point it's trying to make.
At the end, one of the characters seems to realize that he doesn't exist.

Here are some random disconnected thoughts about what I feel:

I don't necessarily believe that my past self was conscious, even though it wrote about being so. How would I know? I wasn't there.

I do believe that as I'm writing this there is something "behind my eyes", watching the process.

I'm not sure that that thing can even influence my brain. Maybe it just watches. The fact that my brain occasionally seems to write about it implies that it can influence the world.

But that's the thing I call "me". Not my body, and not my brain, both of which, it seems, could (and do) work perfectly well without me.

When people don't understand what I mean, or try to explain it as some sort of physical process in the world, then I think they must be different from me, and that's why I've always believed that not all (or possibly even not most) other people have this thing.

I've believed this since school. I remember the thought coming to me when I was in an art lesson in the second year, during a discussion with a girl about the inconceivability of death (which strikes me now as no more inconceivable than sleep, but which seemed an absolute impossibility then for some reason).

I have no idea how this thing can influence the world, or how a brain uninfluenced by this thing could have had this thought or written these words. The whole thing is mad.

There are two pieces of evidence in favour that I can see. One is that very few people seem to understand what I mean. The other is that I can't describe it. When I read what I write about it, it seems like the proverbial blind man trying to describe the colour blue.

When I read what other people write about consciousness, they don't seem to mean the same thing as me.

I'd love to know what's going on. If there's an explanation in terms of matter I'd be amazed, but really really happy.

I'm not yanking your chain. I don't know any philosophy. This is what it feels like to be me.

But when I heard the term 'philosophical zombie' a couple of years ago, it gave me hope, because it sounds like the sort of thing that someone who felt like me would think of, so maybe I am not alone.

Although, if other watchers can talk to me like that, that implies that they can influence the brain as well as being influenced by it. Which makes them a proper part of the universe, rather than something watching.

Oh God, can a philosophical zombie conceive of the idea of a philosophical zombie?

I know I'm flailing here. There's not even any attempt to construct an argument, just some random phrases.

Shoot me down. I will enjoy thinking about what you say.

Now I've gone back over what I've written and re-read it, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence in it at all that the writer was conscious. It's just the flailing of a human brain trying to understand itself.

But I'm conscious. I am here! Watching! Now!

Newcomb's Paradox

2010-06-16T00:08:00.003+01:00

Behold, mortals, I am the superintelligence Omega.

I can, by examining you for just a few short minutes, form such a good model of your personality that I can predict your actions.

I have, out of your sight, two boxes. One is opaque, one is transparent.

I shall place in the transparent box £1000.

If I believe that you will not take the transparent box, then I shall place £1,000,000 in the opaque box.

But if I believe that you will take the transparent box, then I shall place nothing inside the opaque box.

After we talk, I shall place before you the two locked boxes.
Once I have done this, I will not interfere. You may take either or both with you.

Once you have left my domain and the door has closed forever behind you, the locks on the boxes will open. The contents, exactly as I placed them before you made your choice, will be my gift to you.

So spoke Omega, the godlike alien who sometimes appears to destitute travellers in their hour of need.

Many people have taken his test, and it seems that Omega is always right. Those who take only the opaque box find themselves rich. Those who take both find themselves with their expenses paid, but not nearly as happy as you'd expect people who've just been given £1000 by a generous alien god to be.

You have now had your interview, and Omega is gone. Before you are two boxes.

Omega has promised that it doesn't matter what you do. What he put in the boxes ten minutes ago is fixed and he won't change it or use any sleight of hand or trickery.

You'd be a fool not to take the opaque box, which may or may not contain a fortune.

But do you take the transparent one, which definitely does contain £1000 that you can see, the alien's gift to you?

Without it, you will not be able to pay your fare home, and you will die on this trackless desert planet, friendless and alone.

Everyone agrees that the answer to this question is obvious.

The problem is that some people say that it's obvious that you should take one box, and some people say that it's obvious that you should take both.

I actually seem to think that both answers are obvious, which really does make me wonder what I mean by obvious.

Cat and Mouse

2010-06-15T14:10:00.002+01:00

Imagine what it must be like to be a cat, catching a mouse.

This is normal for cats. It's what they're designed for. I imagine that it must feel a bit like it does to a human to go to the fridge and get a pizza. Or to be a bit more ev. psych. about it, to pluck a fruit from a tree.

Perhaps it's a bit better than that, and has some of the joy that humans feel when hunting, or fishing, or doing sport.

Now imagine what it must be like to be a mouse, being caught by a cat.

Cats are the traditional predator. The thing that kills more mice than anything else. If you are a mouse, you are, although you do not know it, the descendant of an unbroken line of millions of ancestors all of whom managed to avoid being caught by cats long enough to breed. Probably by running very fast and hiding in deep holes.

Let's think about some things that killed our human ancestors. There aren't many. We are the top of all the food chains in which we're involved. The most successful killer there has ever been. The Death Ape. Even the animals that are potentially strong enough to kill and eat a lone human avoid us unless they're in a desperate situation because we're just too risky to attack. After all, even if they win nine times out of ten, that's not brilliant odds if you need to eat more than once or twice a lifetime.

Two of the very few animals that can be dangerous to humans are spiders and snakes, because of their poison. Very occasionally, an ancestral human being might have been killed by spider or snake venom. I suppose, very very occasionally, someone might have managed to get themselves killed by bees or wasps.

Probably as a result, most human beings find spiders and snakes loathsome, and many of us have a full blown phobia. Which is to say, irrational mind-destroying terror at the very sight. The buzzing of bees and wasps is a little disconcerting for most people too.

It has been pointed out that children in New York develop full blown spider and snake phobias even though the only real danger to New York children is the car.

I think that we can imagine with some degree of confidence that all mice have a full blown phobia of cats. In fact it's probably much worse than any human phobia can be.

You can keep mice out of a room by putting a picture of a cat in it.

So, anyway, if you're a mouse, being caught by a cat is almost certainly worse than the worst nightmare a human being can experience. The cat is a mythical demon out of nightmare. Except that it's not mythical.

Remember room 101? Where Winston, who has somehow managed to acquire a phobia of rats, has his head locked in a rat cage, where they can eat his eyes and cheeks and tongue.

The worst perversions of the Holy Inquisition probably inspired nothing like the terror felt by a mouse being eaten by a cat.

And let us not even think too hard about the cats' habit of 'playing' with their food. Christ knows what this is about. Having got the poor thing where they want it, instead of just eating it, they then torture it to death over a period of many minutes, even though this sometimes allows it to escape uneaten.

Presumably to the cat, this feels a bit like adding pepper to its pizza. Normal, natural, unremarkable.
To the mouse?

And yet, and this is my point, and why I have dwelt so on the magnitude of the horror, these are two consciousnesses experiencing exactly the same physical events.

Some people like mountains, and some people like lakes, and which you like is a matter of taste.
De gustibus non est disputandem.
There is no accounting for taste.
Chacun a son gout.

Every human culture has a phrase for this. It's one of the oldest truths that we know about ourselves. Different people have different reactions to the same things.

I've never really thought about it before. Is the colour blue the same for me as it is for you? What would that even mean?

-------------------------------------------------------------

This blog is part of the internet. Things on the internet need funny pictures of cats. Here is one:

By my arguments above, this should be massively more unlikely than a human being standing naked in front of a grizzly bear smearing herself in honey and threatening its cubs. Nevertheless, pictures on the internet do not lie. I conclude that my arguments are wrong.

No mice were harmed in the making of this blogpost. The pictures were stolen, without permission, from:

http://www.catspictures.net/2009/01/cat-and-mouse-pictures.html

Mental Images

2010-06-14T21:58:00.003+01:00

Can you imagine a tiger? (Look at it from the side rather than from in front)

Yes/No

If so, do it.

Do you see a mental image?

Yes/No

Does it have stripes?

Yes/No

Now, count the stripes.

How many are there?

Some people can count them. I can't. Some people can't see the tiger at all.

I can't even tell if I'm in the stripe-counting category or not. I can imagine tigers with 20 stripes. And I can count the stripes on those. But my initial tiger had stripes which I couldn't count. What the hell do I mean by 'mental image'? I can't imagine a physical image which has stripes that I can't count!!!

On the other hand, if I imagine a zebra crossing, that's got five stripes. But I can't tell you whether that's the real answer, or even if different zebra crossings have different numbers.

Apparently there was once a great philosophical debate about whether 'imagination' was just an over-extended metaphor. Some philosophers claimed that people couldn't see mental images, just that they had grown so attached to the idea as a metaphor for what actually happens that they couldn't let it go.

Other philosophers thought the first lot of philosophers were lunatics, or just pretending in order to be provocative.

The debate was settled when Francis Galton found out that it worked differently for different people.

I don't actually know whether that's true or not. I just read it on the internet at random. But the very idea that it might be true is blowing my mind. This is much more profound than the child's question 'Is the blue that you see the same as the blue that I see, or do we call different sensations by the same name?'.

To suddenly conceive, at the age of forty, that peoples' consciousnesses could be that different is really freaking me out.

I've never had the slightest trouble imagining that everyone except me is a 'philosophical zombie'. And, since there's no way to tell, I've an open mind on the idea that only some of us are conscious, and the rest are zombies.

But this is weird. It turns out that some of you are aliens!

Hmm, thinking about it, I just used the word 'imagining' for something I have no image of.

Panicking now. If you're reading this post, could you leave a comment with your answers to the tiger-questions?

And actually, on the zombie question, if you're reading this post and you're not conscious at all, could you leave a comment to that effect?

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

2010-06-09T16:21:00.000+01:00

The other day, someone wanting to make a point about a particular cognitive bias posted a link to this:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

There is something about the phrase "Harry Potter Fan Fiction" that strikes terror into the heart. I didn't like the actual books much, even after making allowances for the fact that they're for children.

And yet... It is a work of genius.

The first book I have ever managed to read cover to cover on a computer screen.

I don't know how much of the real thing you'd need to have read to understand it. Not much, certainly. Probably the first half of the first book would do.

Fairness

2010-06-03T23:50:00.000+01:00

There is a lot of talk, from time to time, about the fairness of various salaries.

Imagine what you'd like the distribution of wealth to be:

Now imagine that you've managed to elect a government which can enforce this distribution.

Now suppose that Kevin Pietersen is playing in a cricket match, and charges £1 to watch it.

Suppose 100 000 people turn up.

Everyone is happier as a result.

KP is £100 000 richer, and has presumably enjoyed his cricket match.
Those watching have had a nice day out. They chose to pay £1, and would presumably choose to do it again. They are unlikely to miss their £1.

So, since everyone is happier, how can this new distribution be less fair than the original?

This argument is known as the Wilt Chamberlain Argument, after a famous baseball player.

I'm not sure what it shows.

Things it might show are:

There is no optimal distribution of wealth, because given any distribution where 100 000 people are able to pay £1 to watch a day's cricket, we can think of a better one.

The optimal distribution of wealth is where KP has all the money, and no one else can afford £1 to watch him play.

I'm stuck.

The Mighty Rumsfeld

2010-06-03T17:03:00.003+01:00

The Unknown

  As we know,
  There are known knowns.
  There are things we know we know.
  We also know
  There are known unknowns.
  That is to say
  We know there are some things
  We do not know.
  But there are also unknown unknowns,
  The ones we don't know
  We don't know.

What is wrong with this, exactly? It strikes me as profound.

Onion on form

2010-06-02T13:02:00.001+01:00

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-ecofriendly-cigarettes-kill-destructive-human,17529/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/existentialist-firefighter-delays-3-deaths,17500/

Cricket Kata

2010-06-01T23:33:00.004+01:00

I'm trying to learn to play cricket. It's a very unnatural game, which is both quite dangerous, and quite difficult to practise.

The usual method is called a net, which involves say 6 people and a large, specially constructed pitch enclosed in strong netting.

If you do an hour's net, everyone gets an hour's bowling, but only ten minutes batting, and since most of the people there won't be bowlers, the batting is most unrealistic with a motley selection of full tosses and wides to play at. It's great for bowling, but doesn't seem to help as much for batting. In fact it teaches you some bad reflexes.

Catching practice is a separate thing, usually done with a proper cricket ball, which you either have to do at such low speeds that it's unrealistic, or you do at full speed by hitting the ball around with a bat or using a slip cradle, which is almost guaranteed to hurt someone, and seems mainly to teach the lesson that you don't want to get your hands anywhere near a fast-moving cricket ball.

Particularly, taking fifty or sixty catches leaves the hands bruised and damaged and makes catching painful and aversive. In a game you'd be lucky to get to take two catches.

There seems to be no way at all to practise running between the wickets.

Once upon a time I was quite good at Judo, a martial art. Judo, being a sanitized version of the extremely lethal Ju-Jitsu, can be practised 'full contact', without anyone getting hurt, so you just go at it like loonies until you get the hang of it.

Status in Judo is determined by the colour of your belt. You get a better colour belt if you can consistently win fights against people of your own colour. Eventually you get the coveted black belt, which means that you're good enough to be trusted to teach others.

I also tried, but was never very good at, Shotokan Karate, which, not being designed as a sport, can't be practised 'for real', since everyone would end up dead.

The solution that the Shotokan people have is not to practise fighting at all. Instead they have a set of ritualized dances, the Kata.

Kata are sequences of fighting moves that you have to learn to reproduce gracefully and in order. They get more complex as you get better.

In Shotokan Karate, the colour of your belt is to do with how many of the kata you can do, and how good you are at them. At the higher levels you also spar, but in a very ritualized and safe way, so that nobody dies.

The thing is, the high level Shotokan people are actually really good at fighting. In cross-disciplinary bouts they are quite competitive with adepts of other martial arts which involve a lot more actual practice fighting, and so a lot more injuries and pain.

The Shotokan people attribute this to a thing they call 'focus'. Focus is, apparently, a supernatural ability to react quickly and correctly that comes from learning all these (rather silly seeming) kata.

I've no idea whether this really works. Any studies anyone? But the Shotokan people must learn their fighting abilities somehow.

And it occurs to me that if this does work, then it would be a very good way to learn cricket.

So tonight I was trying to come up with batting kata.

My first try was to hold the ball under my chin, then drop it onto the ground and then hit it at the wall in the back garden. This got old quite quickly, although I did get better at it.

My second try was to put an old cricket ball in a pair of ladies stockings, and hang it from a tree branch so that it could swing freely and was a couple of inches off the ground at rest. You hit it with the bat, and then try to hit it again, returning always to stance, and then playing a correct drive every time.

The ball naturally swings around and bounces on the ground, so the point is to move from stance, into the line of the ball, and then play a correct drive, hitting the ball downwards just on the half volley.

At first, I found this quite difficult. The trick seems to be to get the eyes level and move both head and front foot simultaneously along the line of approach of the ball. It also makes it very obvious why the bat should be straight, since the bounce is much less predictable than the line.

If the ball goes very wide, then you can try to cut it instead. This requires watching the ball very carefully to see where it's going to bounce, and then hitting it square and always downwards. It never seemed to get into a good position to pull, which is a shame, because that's my favourite shot.

At one point some children turned up and wanted to try. I explained what to do, but none of them could hit the ball more than twice in a row.

After a couple of hours of this, I had got to the point where I could strike the ball reliably and hard one hundred times on the trot. I probably hit the ball something like 500 times in the two hours, which probably adds up to more times than I've hit it in our regular nets all season.

Of course, it's moving much more slowly than it would be when bowled. But if the Shotokan analogy holds, then learning to do it slowly should help when trying to do it at full speed.

Try three was the same set up, but trying to aim the ball. An on drive makes it loop away and come in from the other direction, so that you can off drive it. And vice versa, so that you can get in an alternating rhythm. After a bit, I tried hitting it towards the tree, in patterns like left of the trunk, right of the trunk, left, right .... You have to do this right, since if you hit it hard at the trunk it bounces nastily back at you. Makes you focus!

For fielding kata, we've been trying to learn to catch a real tennis ball, which is heavy like a cricket ball, but soft covered like a tennis ball, so that it doesn't hurt the hands. A few sessions of this seems to have improved my lamentable catching out of all recognition. I've taken three out of five in games this season, whereas previously my record in a season was two out of God knows how many.

Weirdly, I've taken the three difficult catches. The two I dropped were dollies that I had to take in front of me and that a schoolgirl should have had no trouble with.

We've worked out two drills for catching so far, one is to hit the ball way high over a group of people, who have to call for the catch and then get it. I can do this quite reliably now with the hands up, but I can't get the hang of it hands down. I don't know why.

The second is to all line up close to the guy with the racket and take slip catches, with the racket guy hitting it softly to each person in turn. This works a treat, and isn't at all scary.

Me and Joe came up with another one last week by accident. There were just two of us, and we were throwing a real cricket ball gently to each other. Then we tried throwing the ball hard at the ground between us, and catching it off the bounce, which is quite a bit more difficult since the bounce is random.

The revelation was when we decided to either throw it straight or bounce it at random. At first this was difficult, and we were using a real cricket ball, so it was actually quite dangerous.

But we simultaneously realised that the trick was to watch the ball carefully out of the other person's hand to see where it was going before it bounced, and we realised that previously, although we thought that we'd been watching it all the time, we hadn't been reacting until it had already bounced.

And suddenly I realised what batting coaches mean when they talk about 'watching the ball out of the bowler's hand', rather than 'picking it up off the pitch'. This had always seemed obvious before, but it's a completely different feeling when you're forced to do it because of this exercise, and actually feeling it happen and make a huge difference had a 'moment of enlightenment' feeling about it.

Omnibenevolence

2010-05-27T11:36:00.001+01:00

From the inspired 'Dinosaur Comics', an argument:
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1604

Vincere (film)

2010-05-20T00:03:00.001+01:00

Apparently, famous Italian git Benito Mussolini was also a git to his mistress. Three hours well spent.

It appears that the film doesn't make as strong a case for this as it might have done (see this article in the Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article411675.ece ).

But perhaps you're already supposed to know the story before you see the film. I imagine most Italians do.

Revanche (film)

2010-05-17T22:21:00.001+01:00

Bleak, stunning, excellent. Not one for a first date.
You'll need an hour or so after to walk around staring sadly into the distance, smoking.

I wish I was Gay

2010-05-13T13:36:00.004+01:00

Imagine what the world would be like if women's minds really were the same as men's.

Men have an absolutely omnivorous attitude to sex. A friend of mine the other day said, without trying to be provocative, offensive, or shocking, just in casual conversation: "I slept with a lot of biffas before I realised that pretty girls need sex too."

('Biffa' is British slang for an unattractive woman.)

This is the sort of comment that has women spitting feathers. It just doesn't make sense to them. Why would anyone act like that? Men are pigs.

Of course, any male not only instantly recognises the inner truth of the statement, but also catches the subtext, which is that the reason that the biffas are no longer being attended to is that the speaker has a lovely girlfriend who is likely to leave him if she suspects infidelity.

There is nothing as attractive as a woman you haven't slept with recently.

I'd imagine that most men's vision of paradise would be a place where they could have sex as many times a day as possible, with a different beautiful woman each time. If a balance needed to be struck between quantity and quality, I'm pretty sure that balance wouldn't be one very beautiful woman. The attitude of the women towards the man would not be a big consideration, although orgasms would be nice. There might also be cricket.

Whereas I'd imagine that most women's paradise would be a place where they could have sex as often as they wanted with one particular supremely attractive man who loved them. And if a compromise had to be struck, they'd take one man who loved them and one gorgeous lover who didn't particularly. And orgasms would be reserved for the second one. Cricket would be illegal.

Very different aims.

So if women's minds were the same as men's, the world would be one big clusterfuck. In warm countries every available surface would be covered in strangers fucking. In cold ones there'd be lots of warm places that could be rented by the hour.

After you'd shagged yourselves silly, you could go out and get drunk and talk about cricket. And have proper arguments where you argue for the fun of it without anyone taking it as a personal insult. No one would ever want to have a long complicated minefield of a conversation about feelings. Or shoes.

According to the excellent 'Tales of the City' novels of Armistead Maupin, this is a fair description of San Francisco in the days of gay liberation, but before AIDS put a stop to free love.

If you're a straight male, take a moment to imagine what it must be like to be gay. All you have to do is to imagine that everyone you know is a woman, and they all want to sleep with you.

Why would anyone not choose to be gay if they could?

It makes me worried for the sort of conservatives (always religious) who think there's some sort of choice involved in sexual orientation. That it's a temptation that can be resisted.

If it was any sort of temptation I wouldn't be resisting it for a minute.

But imagine that you were gay, and you were as attracted to all your friends as you now are to all your female friends. So you were surrounded by an infinite sea of willing partners.

But you had a magic book that told you that it was wrong to fuck boys, and that the little baby Jesus who loves you and watches everything you do and misses nothing would set fire to you if you did. And the fire would never go out and burn for all eternity. Because he loves you.

I imagine that your life might be a bit frustrating.

You might absolutely hate anyone who somehow hadn't got the message about the magic book, mightn't you? You might worry for their souls. You might think them weak and corrupt. You might want their activities illegal. You might want their temptations gone so that you wouldn't have to face up to denying yourself every day.

Please, please, please let this be true

2010-05-12T22:21:00.000+01:00

http://www.etelligent.uk.com/etelligent/mp-getEmail.asp?CID=3130933&SEID=755&CC=LIBDEMSFEDERAL

Civil Liberties

* Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
* Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
* Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency.
* Adopt the Scottish approach to stopping retention of innocent people’s DNA on the DNA database.
* Defend trial by jury.
* Restore rights to non-violent protest.
* A review of libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
* Safeguards against the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
* Further regulation of CCTV.
* Ending of storage of internet and email records without good reason.
* A new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.
* End the detention of children for immigration purposes.

I just find this extraordinary. Somehow over the last fifteen years I've got the impression that the business of government is to spy, snoop, deceive, thieve, and oppress.

Maybe that's not true.

Four Lions (film)

2010-05-10T23:48:00.000+01:00

I laughed so much during this film that I literally thought I was having some sort of heart attack. The rest of the audience seemed similarly amused. It's cruel, tragic, sympathetic, racist and Islamophobic, and all the better for all those things.

You kind of root for the heroes. Even though they're all morons. A bit like Inspector Clouseau, they live in a world where not everyone is an idiot, but they somehow make it through.

I wonder if it will be funny in ten years time? Slapstick and political humour date very quickly.

Oedipus Complex

2010-05-10T23:34:00.001+01:00

Pretty much nicked from Steven Pinker's 'How the Mind Works'. Just trying to understand what he said by explaining it to myself:

One of the most important and influential memes of the twentieth century was Freud's idea of the Oedipal Complex.

This boils down to thinking that a lot of what we do as adults is down to the desire of a boy to fuck his mother, which is then repressed, leading to all sorts of weirdness.

Repression is a technical term meaning "If you deny you're feeling this, then that just proves you are. Nyahh, nyahh".

In the 'hydraulic theory of the mind', unreleased pressure can build up until it explodes. This theory is so deeply embedded in folk wisdom now that we use phrases like 'letting off steam', 'releasing the pressure', and 'throttling up to try to make Crewe by 16:53' almost without thinking.

One weird thing about this theory of the Oedipus Complex, that perhaps should have alerted people to difficulties, is that virtually all males find it ridiculous.

I trust that my mother will not be offended if I say that, although I can appreciate that she is a beautiful woman, and that in her thirties, when I was becoming a sexual being, she must have been hot indeed, I have never felt the slightest desire to knock her off.

Given my otherwise fairly omnivorous teenage lust, this is a strange datum that needs explaining all on its own.

The answer may be something called the Westermarck Effect. It's been suggested that people have an aversion to those they were reared with. Presumably the reason for this is somewhere in evolutionary biology.

If that's true, then it actually explains why Freud took his theory seriously.

Freud and his patients were wealthy Austrians. The custom of the time was for that class to have their children raised by wet-nurses and nannies. Without the childhood proximity to activate the Westermark effect, Freud and his patients would have found their own mothers as attractive as any other women.

Grammer

2010-05-10T00:31:00.008+01:00

All human beings are obsessed with status. In England it's generally called class. Kate Fox has written extensively on the subject in her wonderful book, "Watching the English".

Status is defined differently in different places. Londoners are obsessed with money. It is polite in London to show a new visitor round your house, showing them every room. Nowhere else in England is this normal behaviour with a new visitor, and provincials find the ritual strangely embarrassing.

Houses in London are very expensive, and so house size is an honest signal of wealth there. One of the things a northerner notices in London is how poxy small the houses of wealthy Londoners are. The size of your house doesn't matter at all in Sheffield, where houses are cheap, and the size of your house mainly indicates how large a house you need, or even just how large a house you like.

People in Cambridge are interested in intelligence and learning. The subculture of the University has formal ranks, which were once marked by actual dress codes, remnants of which are still visible in the elaborate graduation ceremonies.

Academic status isn't what it used to be, and so these distinctions are dying out. Cambridge is a wealthy city these days, with an acute land shortage. I expect the London custom will make it here one day.

As a boy growing up in Sheffield, I remember that people seemed obsessed with accents. Wealthy and educated people spoke more like southerners.

People with the native accent of the place were thought less of, by everyone including themselves. My grandfather once tried to teach me how to speak the local dialect: 'Weerwatterrunsoerweirin(glottal stop)wicker' is a place. But my grandmother caught him at it, and they had a serious row, in their fury both lapsing into their stronger childhood accents.

But there was also a strong back-reaction. I remember phrases like 'doesn't he have a lovely voice', but also 'stuck-up cunt', 'talks like a fairy' and 'southern poof'.

It wasn't just accent, either. Whenever I go home I get caught out by the breakfast/dinner/tea of the North vs. breakfast/lunch/dinner of the South. Writing this just now I had trouble putting the six in order. Calling dinner lunch in the North is an horrific piece of pretension. Moi?

It all seemed to matter so much to people, even though I think that everyone would have agreed that the whole thing was silly, if they'd ever stopped to think about it.

If you don't believe me, or think Sheffielders are silly people, rather than people with a silly hobby, then consider: How much do you care about spelling, or correct grammar?

And lets not have any of this rubbish abowt cleer communicaytion. It's not very difficulte to reed misspelled wurds, as long as youre respekting the fonetics ov the language and its orthografy. And thats the only sort of missteaks that a native speeker is going to make. Aktually writing in this stile is very liberating. I now find. Try it! You will lern things you didn't know you allredy knew.

But it does make you think that the writer is an idiot. And actually, you're not thinking 'idiot'. You're thinking uneducated. And you're not really thinking 'uneducated', either. What you're thinking is 'Working-class parents'.

This is of course very hard on dyslexics, who have a brain deformity that fakes the symptoms of poor education. So little Elektra is going to write like her daddy worked down a pit, beheading turkeys or whatever.

'Correct' spelling is at least easy enough to define.

The whole idea of 'correct grammar' is very suspect. What sort of 'correct' is it that prescribes 'Jack and I went to the pictures' when almost every English speaker naturally says 'Me and Jack went'?

Me and Jack are so hard-wired into the structure of the language that even very educated people with very educated parents need to think about us when writing.

And one of the most comical mistakes you can make is to overcompensate and say 'Julie took Jack and I to the pictures'. People do this all the time. Other people sneer at them all the time. The crashing sound of self-betrayed pretension. You're copying what you've heard posher people say, but you haven't internalized the rule. Or you are posh, but you're also a bit dim.

Real grammar doesn't work like that. Foreign speakers make real grammar mistakes. Things like 'Will you take me to the pictures in your red big car?'.

No native speaker, however ill-educated, needs to be told that that's strange. It just is, for no reason that's ever taught at school. The feeling when you hear it is the same queasyness as you feel when trying to work out the 'Jack and I' vs 'Jack and me' thing. It's the grinding of brain-gears being misengaged.

This doesn't prevent English children wasting hours and hours and hours on stupidities like spelling tests. And their parents of all classes being horrified when they're not very good at them.

So what's the real point of spelling and grammar?

Well, it's like the Londoner's house tours, and the Sheffielder's accent neurosis. It's a status signal which is not explicitly recognised as anything so vulgar.

Why is it a good status signal? Because it's difficult to fake.

If you can't spell, you can't spell. If you don't know the artificial formal grammar of your language, you can't fake it. And even if you do know it, it takes practice to distort your speech and writing to fit the rules. In order to speak and write correctly you need an expensive education.

This explains the 'Jack and I' thing. It's not actually English grammar at all. It's just wrong from a linguist's point of view.

Once upon a time, scholars, who all spoke Latin as a foreign language that they had learned for professional reasons, wondered about the structure of English.

They knew that there are structures to languages, because Latin is a very different language to English, and in order to learn it, they had had to learn a lot of structural rules.

Of course the Romans didn't know anything about these rules. They just spoke their language. And almost certainly the structural rules that the Latin speaking scholars had learned must have failed to capture many details in the everyday speech of the Romans. But the rules were pretty good, if what you wanted to do was read the surviving Latin literature, and more importantly, communicate with other scholars in other countries, who knew the same rules.

So the scholars tried to make a formal system to capture how English was spoken. Of course they were guided by the rules they already knew. From that point of view, it's obvious why it has to be "Jack and I" rather than "Jack and me" in places where you'd say "I" rather than "me", and vice versa.

I wonder how the scholars explained to themselves that most English people got it wrong? Probably they told themselves that the people were not as clever as they were themselves.

So they ended up making up a set of rules to describe English, which actually describe a slightly Latinised version of English instead, and then blaming English speakers (including themselves) for not conforming to the rules.

So that's why we're taught to say "Jack and I". Remember how many times your mother, or your teacher, had to tell you this? Remember overcompensating, and using "Jack and I" when you should have been using object case? Maybe your mother or your teacher's knowledge stopped there and you always say "Jack and I", which is worse than the original mistake?

I was lucky. I learnt Latin. As a result I made the same mistake the scholars made. But that's the right mistake to make. It always feels a bit weird speaking like that, but I can think fast enough that if I'm concentrating, I can override "Me and Jack" in subject position, and say "Jack and I" instead.

Now, do you remember being corrected for saying 'red big car' when you meant 'big red car'? No? Somehow that rule is just there, and no native speaker ever gets it wrong, even though very few of us can say what the rule is.

What the Jack and I rule is, is a rule which is difficult to remember, left over from an analysis of English grammar made a long time ago by Latin-speaking scholars who were trying their best with bad tools, that can be taught, amongst lots of other difficult rules.

Similarly with the famous split infinitive. In Latin the infinitive is one word, so it can't be split. In English, "To boldly go where no man has gone before" is the natural thing to say. Boldly to go? To go boldly? Piss off.

Another example is the canard about not ending a sentence with a preposition. As Churchill pointed out, the sort of rule up with which one refuses to put.

The fact that no native English speaker can ever internalize these rules in the effortless way that we know that red big cars don't exist, and never make that mistake, is a sign that the rules don't fit with how language works in the brain.

I also present for your consideration your/you're, it's/its, there/their/they're. If you've ever got one of these wrong, pity the poor French, with their complicated conjugation system. Easy for a foreign speaker to learn, quite hard for the Frogs, who are trying to learn strange rules to spell words that they thought were all the same when they were babies puzzling out how to hard-wire their brains to make sense of the funny sounds their parents made.

And if you still think there's some kind of rationality to it, why is 'It is I' correct English, when 'C'est je' is so utterly wrong in French? The Academie prides itself on its rationality and purity.

Or explain the mistake in the following sentence 'The doctor's practise was insufficiently diligent, so his practise shrank'. God forgive me, I notice that sort of thing from time to time. I doubt one Englishman in one hundred knows the rule that explains it. But nobody would ever give advise.

So what's the rational English speaker to do?

How can we give our language its natural grammar and a phonetic spelling system so that no-one ever needs to spend precious childhood hours memorizing and internalizing this rubbish?

Let's consider:

You could defect unilaterally. Just write everything as you'd say it without thinking, and spell everything tricky as it sounds.

No more professional jobs for you. Your CV is straight in the bin before anyone's even got the section where you describe your linguistics research.

You could decide not to care. You could spell well yourself, so that you're not communicating 'not fit to be left alone with sharp objects' in every e-mail. But you could deliberately ignore errors as far as possible in other people's writing and speech.

You'd miss vital clues about intelligence, diligence, and background. You'd spend far too long talking to people before you decided that it wasn't worth the bother.

You'd give random offence to people from different backgrounds by making comments that are acceptable in your own circle but not in theirs. Consider 'bloody immigrants' against 'chav-mobile'. Both perfectly acceptable in the circles in which they're acceptable. Both exceedingly offensive in the wrong place.

If you were in a position to hand out jobs, you'd interview all the wrong people. You'd waste hours coming to conclusions that you could have come to very quickly. If you got your decisions right at all.

So it would be difficult as an individual, and most unlikely to catch on.

What about as a society?

We could abolish the teaching of spelling and grammar in schools. Just refuse to waste any more time on it.

Ha, ha, bloody ha. People would cheat. Educated parents would educate their children. A certain artificiality of style would mark the writing of the privately educated. Imagine the awe-inspiring lack of smugness with which this sentence might be spoken.

Spelling and grammar would become more reliable status indicators than they are now. At least it's now possible for a working class child to acquire the habits of his betters.

Here's another thought:

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which although publicly funded are almost the ultimate bestowers of good education/intelligence/diligence markers in the form of their degrees, could mandate the use of 'Natural English' in exams. Points could be deducted for old-style 'Vulgar Spelling' and 'Bourgeois Grammatical Mistakes'.

Our brightest and cleverest youngsters would have to spend time unlearning their painfully acquired habits. In time, because they always do, they'd become our highest social class.

And people would start to cheat. To copy. Luckily it wouldn't be very hard! And I reckon that the problem would be gone in a generation.

I trust that the University Senates will leap happily upon my modest proposal in the holy names of Equality and Reason.