Counterfactual Blackmail

So I just want to mention a couple more horrors that are new to me and that we have to deal with if we are going to think morally about Star Trek.

Counterfactual Blackmail (due, I think, to Yudkowsky/Less Wrong and allies)

Imagine you are Captain Kirk and you are heading home after a hard day's teleportation and hoping that not too many people will be there.

And you meet a Romulan!

And the Romulan says: Not only did we mess with the transporter, we made a tape of exactly how to build a Kirk.

And as it happens we have holodecks.

So we have made a lot of new copies of you, and they are all in holodecks, and all having the same experience as the real Kirk, who has just met a Romulan while walking home.

And in every holodeck, the Romulan is demanding 50p, and if they do not hand it over, the holodeck is going to turn into a horrible torture chamber and we are going to extract the maximum amount of pain from every copy of Kirk that we can.

So give me 50p, or else...

You now have to ask yourself, well, this all sounds plausible. Do you feel lucky? It is only 50p, after all.

Romulans are known for keeping their promises.

All Kirks will make identical decisions, obviously. Why would one of them choose differently?

If you hand over the 50p, then you are either going to feel a bit of a fool, or you are going to cease to exist as the Romulans turn off the holodeck and disassemble you. Which as we've previously discussed, you can't work out whether you object to or not.

If you bravely reply "Fie upon thee, counterfactual scrounging-man", then maybe you can afford a Mars bar on the way home, but most likely you are going to get tortured to death.

They don't lie much, the Romulans.

Zombie Interlude

Now to my friends I am sometimes known as Space Cadet. And although I have never got to the bottom of the mystery of why, exactly, they chose this nickname, I feel that it might be something to do with the long term effects of having all these transporter-thoughts crashing around in my head when I was about twelve years old. I remember the exact Art lesson in which I decided that I didn't exist.

Luckily my grandfather (to whom I owe much in many ways) had read enough philosophy to tell me about "cogito ergo sum". Which is a branch to hang on to when you are swirling down the creek and the problem is not so much no paddle as no water.

So thanks Rene Descartes and Donald Phelan because I think that without that it might have gone badly for my infant psyche. But even now I think I could have a decent go at convincing a jury in a capital case that I have no idea how to tell right from wrong.

My eventual conclusion was "There is a me. But it is the thing that hears my thoughts, not the thing that thinks them. The universe proceeds lawfully. And I get to watch, but I have no influence. Somehow what I am tags along with physical bodies, and if I got duplicated, then presumably it would tag along with one or the other copy, or who knows? Maybe it hops from place to place and time to time and person to person. How would I know? I am the thing that exists now. I have no evidence that I existed earlier. I have no evidence that I will exist later. I have no evidence that such an inner listener exists anywhere else. Maybe I am all alone and only exist for this millisecond and that's it. But whatever. None of this can affect how I act or need affect how I feel. I might as well just imagine that everyone else feels the same and it is all just a big mystery."

As a philosophy that worked out just fine for many years. It sails through the free will vs determinism debate that seemed to so exercise the philosophers of my youth.

It actually had excellent positive consequences. As a twenty year old, I didn't identify with my forty year old self at all. I felt free to raise hell and to do many unwise things. That could have all gone badly wrong, but it didn't. And as a forty year old I'm quite grateful for that, since I've got lots of interesting memories to play with in my private Cartesian Theatre.

Unfortunately it doesn't work. Because if I'm the inner listener who hears my thoughts, but cannot influence them, who the hell is moving my fingers in such a way as to write the theory down?

It took me a while to notice this problem. But when I did, I just gave up and stopped thinking about it entirely. Which is probably the sensible thing to do.

But others are clearly more mad than me, and carried on thinking when I gave up, oh yes...

Recently I have read Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and although I am reasonably sure that "Consciousness Denied" would be a better title, it is a riveting book full of cleverness and by the end of it I am actually pretty sure that I myself do not have the Cartesian Theatre that I am perceiving directly as I write.

But I am still sure that I exist. And there is no room for me in Dennett's philosophy. Although it is very possible that I have failed to understand him.

And I only have Eliezer Yudkowsky's word for this, because I have not read David Chalmers' thoughts on this in the original (it's on the stack, ok?), but apparently David Chalmers is also even more mad than I am, because he kept thinking about the inner listener even though he noticed that it didn't just listen, and apparently the theory isn't quite killed by this observation.

But Chalmers has elaborated in great detail just how completely insane the universe would have to be if you had both an inner listener and a zombie brain that thought exactly the same thoughts whether they were true or not.

And that is very insane indeed. And quite complicated, so I'm not going into it.

On the one side, you got Eliezer Yudkowsky and Daniel Dennett, who are proper 'it is all billiard balls' materialists, and who are obviously correct. Except that they are denying the central fact that is the only thing that I directly know about the universe: "I think therefore I am." And I am pretty close to believing that they must be zombies. Except that if they are, how would they be able to let their brains know?

And on the other side, you got David Chalmers, who sounds like his personal experience of the world is like mine. Except that if it is, how does he let his brain know? He says that he doesn't. His brain writes it all down anyway without knowing whether it's true or not. So his theory is exactly the same as Dennett/Yudkowsky, except that it has this extra bit where I exist. Which sounds like an important and necessary bit, even though it leads directly to the complete insanity of the theory.

Earlier, I called Dennett's position 'wrong' and Chalmers' 'mad'. But to be honest I take them both very seriously indeed and I have no idea what to think except that I am very very very confused.

I group the 'wrong' and the 'mad' into the camp 'right-thinking', because they make identical correct-sounding predictions about what we will actually see and feel when we do stuff.

Straightforward Cartesian Dualism. That sounds like it might be right. Except that if we have a transporter then we have an experimental test for it, and I bet it isn't. And if the mind-stuff acts on the world then it doesn't help at all, because it's still lawful billiard balls. But maybe one of the things about primitive mind-stuff is that there's something that it feels like to be it. Pah! No way. That's bonkers too and it's not going to be that easy or we would have sorted it already.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek IV?

So, in the Star Trek universe, if we are right-thinking people, it looks like we can't really decide whether murder is wrong or not.

If Kirk wants to save the world while not breaking a lunch appointment, he can just send a copy of himself off to die heroically, and go for lunch. The copy can feel free to die heroically in a good cause, and if he doesn't, he can teleport home safe in the knowledge that he will never get there.

Oh come off it! At some point we have to draw the sodding line and say that randomly creating copies of people and then painlessly killing them is wrong, don't we?

But notice that there is no difference at all in the predictions of our various theories of consciousness and personal identity.

The only one that made a difference to what we anticipate seeing is Cartesian Dualism / Souls. The first time you operate a transporter you get a guy going "Grr.. Aaargh.. Brainszzz.. ", remember?

So we ruled that one in or out early doors.

All the other theories are about what it feels like to be transported. But we can't find out without actually being transported.

All the other theories make exactly the same predictions about what other people will say about the experience. They will say things like "Relax, don't worry. You step into the transporter, and then you step out on Mars. Doesn't hurt a bit. Feels like your soul comes along with you."

They don't even make any predictions about what you remember. You remember being transported hundreds of times. It's always fine. Works just like it says on the adverts.

And if the right-thinking people are right, that's just what's happening.

And if they're not, when you step into the transporter you die.

Won't actually make any difference, mind. You'll get out the other end and say: "No, feels fine.", "Looks like materialism is the way to think about all this.".

And you'll still be thinking along these lines when you get home and find the real you fucking your wife.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek III?

Well, you don't kill Captain Kirk that easy, Romulan filth.

Of course he gets out of the transporter booth. He just nuts it until the plasteel breaks.

He determines that his copy is on the mother, saving the world-wise, and knocks off for an early lunch.

His wife is pleased to see him back.

When New Kirk has saved the world, he takes the transporter home. Anticipating a certain frostiness at home, Spock and Scottie frig it so that only the disassembler works, and no new Kirk appears back on earth to spoil the happy reunion.

Do you notice what has just happened here? Captain Kirk has just saved the world by having lunch, and Spock and Scottie have just murdered him for his own good.

But the final state of the world is not terribly different from what would have happened had the transporter worked fine. There is a lunch missing. Captain Kirk doesn't remember how he saved the world. Those don't look like major differences to me.

So that is pretty much that for utilitarianism and indeed all forms of consequentialist moralities, I would say.

And maybe next time you approach a transporter booth, you will be a little bit worried?

Especially if you are Kirk. Romulan spies are everywhere.

Shangri La Experiment: More Priors

Forgot that I should write down the predictions of each of my three theories in advance.
I did make some in my head, but I never got round to writing them down.

As I remember my prior predictions were:

There'll be two measurable variables:

Favourite Belt Notch (1,2,3,4,5,6) and Perceptible Loss of Appetite (yes/no)

I'll build prior probabilities by distributing 100 points around the likely predictions, and then putting 5 points in neighbouring cells, and 1s everywhere else.

Willpower (no loss of appetite, some increased girth)

     1   2  3 4 5 6
yes  5   5  5 1 1 1
no   75 25  5 1 1 1


total 126

Shangri-La (huge loss of appetite, loss of girth)

    1 2  3  4  5 6
yes 1 5 50 25 25 5
no  1 5  5  5  5 5


total 137

Helplessness (some loss of appetite, may or may not be noticeable, no change of girth)
 
    1   2 3 4 5 6
yes 5  50 5 1 1 1 
no  5  50 5 1 1 1


total 126

So for instance, if at the end of the month I am on belt notch 2, with noticeable loss of appetite, which was my actual prediction, then I can Bayesify matters thus:

prior H60:W39:S1

likelihood ratios H 50/126: W 5/126: S 5/137

new beliefs H 60*50/126: W 39*5/126: S 1*5/137

H 60*50*137: W 39*5*137: S 5*126

H 411000: W 26715: S 630

rounding:

H 937: W 60: S 1

Which looks right. If the experiment agrees with my pet theory, then I should believe in it lots.
If it disagrees with a mad theory that I don't believe in to start with, I should pretty much give up on that theory, and Willpower is getting dissed because it doesn't say I should notice a loss of appetite if I eat more.

Of course, loss of appetite is highly subjective, and I'm going to be tempted to try to make my experiment come out the way I want, which is essentially 'go, go Shangri-La, fuck off Willpower', so I should also consider what goes on if I report 'no loss of appetite, notch 2'

prior H60:W39:S1

likelihood ratios H 50/126:  W 25/126: S 5/137

new beliefs H 60*50*137: W 39*25*137: S 5*126

H 411000 : W 133575 : S 630

H753: W244: S1

Which also looks right. W is getting penalised for favouring weight gain that didn't happen more than H is getting penalised for hedging its bets on appetite loss. S is getting kicked out into the dark for getting it wrong on both counts.

etc. etc.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek II?

So last post I came up with some semi-plausible bullshit to forestall objections of the 'but that couldn't possibly be true' type that for instance my father and all my friends always say straight out the box whenever I am getting all spectral.

So now let us forget about all that and just talk about the transporter from Star Trek, like men.

This wor.. (and if it doesn't in fact work this way then I could not care less and I decree the existence of a series called Space Trek that has played in selected Cartesian Theaters where it does work this way)

This works thus:

A complete scan is made of a man, and in the process his body is disassembled, and the information is transmitted, and then at the other end, the information is used to build the man up again. At which point he starts saying 'phasers to stun' and we are done.

What is it like to live in the Star Trek universe?

Well, for one thing, you know that Cartesian Dualism is wrong, and that souls do not exist.

Why? Because Captain Kirk says 'phasers to stun', instead of 'grr.. aargh.. brainszzz.. foam..', which is what he would say if his soul was missing. If adolescent-oriented speculative fiction has taught us anything it has taught us that if you suddenly rip the soul out of a man's body, that is what he will say.

So that leaves us with two forms of property dualism, and materialism, and they all make exactly the same prediction, which is that Captain Kirk gets out the transporter station at the other end and heroically saves the situation.

Now in Star Trek, nobody thinks anything of this. It is obvious why. Transporters have been used over and over again and everyone is used to them and it would just be too horrible to think that they had been ripping peoples' souls away and leaving them as epiphenomenal zombies.

As Yudkowsky has written: "How sure are we of this terrible fact?" "As sure as we can be in the total absence of evidence".

So in the Star Trek universe, I step into the transporter without the slightest worry, and it rips my soul away and I am dead. But there is a new me, and he goes home to my wife and they are both quite uncomplicatedly pleased with that.

Maybe. That's what happens if Property Dualism is true. Ouch.

The Property Dualists can argue amongst themselves whether the new guy is conscious or a zombie, but no-one but him is ever going to know one way or another, and if he is a zombie there isn't even anyone there to know. Even if my wife is Mary the Colour Scientist she is not going to have a clue about any of this.

And actually I think I do Property Dualists a disfavour here. Some of them (Chalmers e.g.) think that everything will still be ok, because not only is the new guy conscious, he is me.

So let us call them Property Dualists of type C, and let us from now on not bother to distinguish them from the Materialists.

Materialism is the default, obvious, scientific, rational form of philosophy where the mind is made of quarks and neurons and stuff and they all just bang around and stuff like consciousness and free will and stuff are a bit puzzling but words like 'emergent' tend to get banged around and everyone pretends not to notice that they deny the central fact of human existence which is impossible to express but that I personally feel very strongly about even though I totally agree that if it wasn't true I would be writing this anyway.

You may guess from this that my sympathies are not far from the Materialist and Property Dualist of type C positions, even though the first seems wrong and the second seems mad.

But I am going to create a new category unifying the wrong and the mad, who seem to make the same predictions even from a subjective experience point of view, and call it R, for right-thinking people.

So if you are a right-thinking person, like everyone in Star Trek is, you do not think it a moral obscenity that Captain Kirk goes home to his wife after a day being transported around.

But imagine now that there is a terrible transporter accident, which results in Captain Kirk's body being disassembled a minute fraction of a second after it would normally be.

If you find that terrifying, make the minute fraction of a second shorter as need be until it is not terrifying.

If you do not find that terrifying, make the interval a bit longer.........

Captain Kirk goes into the transporter, and the scanning process happens, but Spock is still there on the other side of the room, and raises an eyebrow in surprise, and Kirk, realising what is about to happen, shouts 'Stop it!', but it is too late. There is a click, and the disassembly beam comes on, and Captain Kirk is killed.

Later on, Captain Kirk goes home to his wife.

I think at this point I can say vAA!

Killing is hard to define in the Star Trek universe.

Now you tell me what is so different about it from our own dear universe where we have the Sanctity of Life.

Can Murder be Immoral in Star Trek?

I claim independent invention of these ideas, as a little boy watching Star Trek.
As an adolescent I even considered writing them up, but there wasn't Blogger. Anyway apparently they're pretty mainstream philosophy, cause I've just read about them in a paper by David Chalmers, and he references Derek Parfitt who must have been watching Star Trek at about the same time. And I've written them up using the standard language.

Right. A transporter works by scanning someone's body, to find out where all the atoms are and how they are moving, and then transmitting that information to somewhere else, where the body is reconstructed.

And this works by what in Star Trek is called 'magic'.

But can it really be done?

Well, I don't see why it would contradict any fundamental physical laws. It looks like it might be non-trivial in the extreme to actually do it, but how close could we get practically?

Here's a plan. Take a scan of someone's body which shows you where all the cells are (Cells come in discrete types. Surely this is hard, surely this is possible).

Take a stem cell from the someone, and clone and specialize by devious means that cell, until you have enough of each type of specialized cell.

Put those cells back together in the pattern you stored earlier.

And bingo! There may be some technical difficulties, but I reckon they are solvable, and I reckon what you got at the end is a pretty good copy of the original guy, except that probably he feels a bit unwell on account all his hormone balances are wrong, but with any luck this does not kill him and a night's sleep or so and he is cool. And in fact maybe he is better off, but that is for another day.

Now the problem here is that suddenly you have got two guys! Because we've totally forgotten to disassemble the previous one while we were scanning him.

And at this point there are various predictions we can make.

If we are Religious, or we are Cartesian Dualists (or members of an allied trade), then we imagine that the second guy has no soul. And we predict that he falls on the floor and flops around and maybe says 'brainzz...' or something.

If we are Property Dualists of the type that I will call type I, then we imagine that the second guy has no epiphenomenal consciousness. But we do not predict that he will start with the 'soulzzz...', because this is an epiphenomenal difference and so it can make no difference to our physical predictions, so there is absolutely no way we can tell the difference between our position and :

If we are Property Dualists of the type that I will call type II, then we imagine that the second guy does have an epiphenomenal consciousness because one just goes with having a brain. But again, this is an epiphenomenal fact, so it makes no difference at all between our predictions and those of :

The Materialists: The second guy, having an identical brain to the first guy, is fully conscious, fully a person.


So that's nice, because now we have an experimental test that we can do, that will rule out or rule in Cartesian Dualism/Souls.

In fact I will volunteer for it, given that some nice guys somewhere will give me say £250,000 because if the second guy starts going around saying 'I am John Aspden and I am a fully conscious being and it is my clear perception that I used to have the following things', I may well be able to convince him that he is the Second John Aspden, but he is going to find this a lot easier to accept if he has his own narrowboat and some money and so on.

On the other hand, although having an identical twin who knows all my secrets might be a bit of a head-fuck, I imagine it will be nice to have someone who is interested in the same sorts of things to have lunch with from time to time. And I am sure my parents will be pleased, because now I will be at home eight weeks a year instead of just the four.

But if the Souls guys are right, then there is going to be a copy of me rolling around foaming at the mouth and the only option is going to be to beat him to death with a shovel. And I am going to need £250000 of recreational drugs to get over it.

Sock Problem

Got it out of a book. Dead Easy. Cat could do it.

A priest has some red socks, some black.

He takes two socks out of the draw. The chances of him getting a red pair is 1/2.

How many socks has he got at least?

What about if he's got an even number of black socks?

Any more?

Hat Problem

Imre Leader via Paul Cook. Two two-hour thinking sessions got me not very far with this, and then the following morning I woke up with the answer fully formed in my mind. I felt a bit robbed. Like I'd been told the answer while asleep. Stick at it. Those who like this sort of thing will like this very much.

There are six people.

For each person, you roll a dice, and write the number on the hat.

They all close their eyes, and you put on each person his hat.

They all open their eyes. Without any communication whatsoever and without looking at their own hat they have to guess the number on their own hat.

If any one of them gets it right then you give them all gold and elsewise you shoot them, or something. You know the score with psychotic maths problems.

Anyway the guys are conferring before the game. What is their plan?

In general choose n, a natural number. n people, n hats, n-sided dice, n pots of gold, n bullets.

An Argument I've seen a Million Times

You got these two things, Alice, and a Banana.

Alice is 'hoopy', but the Banana is 'not hoopy'

But suddenly you are noticing this thing Alana, which is between Alice and the Banana.

And the question is: Is Alana hoopy, or not?

So perhaps you are unwise enough to pick one of these answers. Perhaps you say that Alana is not hoopy.

Aha!, says your interlocutor. Between Alice and Alana is this new thing, which is called Alica.

And at the end of this very long process you are ending up with Albracadabra von Helsingstein and Albracadabra von Helsingstien and only an idiot would claim that one was hoopy and one was not hoopy and so something somewhere must be terribly wrong.

Now I apologize that I am not used the traditional meta-syntactical variables here, like x and y and P and so on and so forth but I think it is maybe cuter with the Banana, and less frightening.

If you want a couple of real examples try (Alice, Banana, Conscious), or (Alice, Rock, Alive), or (Alice, computer simulation of Alice, Morally Significant), (At A, At B, Where) and so on.

If you have maybe spent too much time in maths lectures in your misspent youth you might just say:

Suppose P is a continuous function from a connected space into a discrete space, then P is one-valued.

And this is so obvious that I do not think it is thought of as a theorem. Sorry Dr von Evilfiend if it is really von Evilfiend's Lemma or something.

I am sick of it.

I claim.

From now on it is von Aspdenstein's Argument, and if you want to show that consciousness is not possibly an on-off thing as long as we can move neuron by neuron between Alice and a simulation of Alice then all you have to say is "vAA!", and you are done, and you can move on to discussing exactly where the discontinuity might be, or whether the property might be a function into a connected space like [0,1] or R, or C or a mobius strip and so on.

"vAA!".

I never wish to read this argument again, philosophers.

So next time you are proving that there can't only be five social classes or forty five colours or three musketeers because blah blah blah...

If you feel you have to write it out in full then at least put <vAA!> </vAA!> round it so that I can skip efficiently.

Help! I'm Spalding

I think I am about to join a cult.

This (http://facingthesingularity.com) is the clearest expression so far of the beliefs of this cult. Nothing in it seems surprising or new to me. All of it seems true, except the bit at the end where Luke imagines what a positive singularity might bring, which seems a bit pedestrian and conservative, a bit like an unimaginative Christian's idea of Heaven. And I suspect that Luke knows this perfectly well and is toning it down a bit so as not to scare people.

I believe, as I have mentioned before, that a singularity will occur in the near future, and that its most likely effect is to kill every living human and leave the universe boring, worthless and repetitive.

This belief appears these days to me as well founded as my belief in Fourier Analysis.

Which is to say that I don't understand it intuitively in the same way that I understand addition, but that I can examine every bit of it and see no obvious flaws, and that many of the component parts seem intuitively obvious. I wouldn't be surprised if the details weren't quite what I'd imagined, but I'd bet my life at very poor odds on the general framework.

When I first read about the idea of a paperclip maximizer it immediately struck me as obvious and unarguable and a very real threat.

I filed it in the mental box reserved for sexy doom scenarios which may very well be true but which you can do nothing about, and reacted in my usual way (Global Warming: Say Bollocks to It and Enjoy the Sunshine While You Still Can, etc..).

What I didn't initially believe is the idea that there might actually be something we can do about it.

After a couple of years of thinking about it, and reading the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky, I'm starting to believe that there might indeed be something we can do about it. That we might be able to turn it to our advantage. To make a God who will act as we would wish a God to act.

And I certainly believe that if we don't, we're doomed. One way or another. We are acquiring more and more of the powers of gods, and seven billion half-witted gods aren't going to be sharing a single world in any great comfort as far as I can imagine.

------------

I have worked not terribly hard at all to build myself a pleasant and enjoyable life in a city I love with friends that I love, and I feel that if I ignore the coming Singularity everything will be great and I can carry on like this for the next thirty years and die confident of having lived a life as happy as any human can ever hope to live. Which was always the plan.

And that, sometime, probably after I'm safely dead, everything will suddenly go completely pear-shaped without very much warning, and everything that I cared about will suddenly cease to be.

To be honest, I am not terribly uncomfortable with that.

But if this 'positive singularity' can be pulled off somehow, then I might end up immortal, and happier than any human can possibly imagine.

So this looks a bit like Pascal's Wager. A very small chance of a very large reward.

The small chance has almost no dependence on my actions, and certainly no dependence on whether I 'have faith' or anything silly like that. So I could just carry on as is and reap the vast rewards anyway, if they're there for the reaping.

----------------------------

It occurs to me that I am being underconfident, both in my beliefs and in my abilities. Maybe there is something I can do to change the probability. One obvious thing I could do would be to work a bit harder and donate the extra money to the Singularity Institute.

A minute change to a tiny probability of a vast reward. Paid for by using time that I'd usually spend reading and thinking and watching films in some ghastly office working for venal idiots and giving the money away.

I never give money to charity. I tried occasionally in my youth, but I found that the charities respond to this by sending you vast amounts of disturbing literature about starving people and horrible diseases and endless numbers of emotionally affecting pictures of suffering animals and it had the opposite effect on me to that which was doubtless intended.

The Singularity Institute hasn't done this. It has confined itself to creating large quantities of entertaining philosophical argument and leaving it around where I can find it. For the sheer pleasure of reading Eliezer's philosophy I owe it something.

-----------------------

But Jesus! guys, I know what I'm experiencing here.

This is a religious conversion, pure and simple. This is what the founders of the Jehovah's witnesses must have been thinking, when they discovered the one true way to read the Bible. This is what the latter-day saints and the calvinists and the fucking scientologists for fuck's sake must feel like as their pathetic brains fall for the lame arguments of con-men who have found a clever way to extract money and power from bunches of bloody fools by explaining the mysteries of the universe to them in a way that they can actually "understand".

I don't fall for this crap! I take nothing and no-one seriously (except perhaps myself), and I can feel my natural contrariness and scepticism calling sadly to me as I contemplate jumping off the cliff.

Once I'm gone, I'm gone. Once I'm publically committed to this foolishness, I'm going to turn into a scary swivel-eyed fanatic who can't listen to counter-argument and won't accept that he's wrong out of sheer terror of looking like an idiot and admitting that he's thrown away his life in service to an idea that is just a bit stupid.

And the only thing I can think of is Doctor Who. I can't remember the episode.

The Doctor needs some keys, or something. They are locked in a safe. And there are Daleks coming, or something. And there is this guy, who is a decent and honourable man, who has sworn not to give the keys to anyone under any circumstances.

So he is understandably a little reluctant to give the keys to the Doctor. And the Doctor says 'And when you are standing on your burnt-out world in the shattered remains of your civilization, at least you will know that your personal honour remains intact.'

That seems a powerful argument to me. I think I am brave enough to look like a fool in front of myself if it might save the world.

And I really think it might.

Please help.

I need counterarguments. Read Luke's lovely clear summary of what I have come to believe and tell me whether it's just a load of horseshit for some easy reason I have missed.

Since I need counter-arguments, I am going to try and come up with some myself.

I have gone into King's College and I have hugged my favourite tree, that was my friend when I was an undergraduate, and I have asked it what I should do. And it responded without hesitation "You know what you should do. Yudkowsky is possibly right and no-one else even seems to care about the problem. Most people making counter-arguments are just obviously wrong."

Well. I am not enormously interested in the opinions of vegetation per se, but that lets me know that my unconscious mind has already gone over to the enemy.

Try again.

The Singularity. The Rapture of the Nerds. Eliezer Yudkowsky as the Messiah. Immortality. The End is Nigh. Give us Money. How much more pattern-matching to a bloody religion does a man need!?? Run away. Religions are bad memes that use minds to adapt to infect minds and clever sceptical people fall for them all the bloody time and what makes you think you are special? You have been predicting for ages that religion will evolve round humanity's new sceptical defences until it is capable of infecting any reasonable man again. You expected it to take longer, but maybe this is what is happening.

Nothing about me is special. That's what I'm scared is happening. Maybe if I fall for it I can actually help to make it even more convincing. I always thought I'd be a good priest if I actually believed in anything.

And yet. And yet. What if the Witnesses had been right? What sort of bloody fool would have ignored the evidence of his own mind and damned himself if they'd been right? I have to decide what the truth is, and I can only use my own mind to do it. And my mind is rubbish. That is the whole problem.

So maybe I should wait. Wait until the religious feelings have died down a bit. See how I feel in a year's time.

If I feel like this, there must be many other people who feel like this. Maybe once a few people give significant amounts of money to the SI there will be an avalanche of money going their way.

They seem like nice guys. If they win they'll save me anyway. I don't have to do anything.

Maybe I should bung them £1000 or so and be public about it, in the hope that that will maybe contribute to the avalanche beginning. I've been known to spend more than that on opera tickets, so it's not going to make me look that foolish if it turns out that SI are just a load of blowhards.

Trust your own mind John. It doesn't usually fail you in embarrassing ways. And it's not like you really hate embarrassment that much anyway. What the hell are you worrying about? Why is your whole brain full of flashing alarms and ringing bells?

There needs to be a name for this emotion. Conversion-terror or something. Perhaps we could play Liff with it and pick the name of a nearby village. Spalding.

I am in a state of terrible spalding. Please help. If you have counterarguments to singularity-nonsense that I haven't heard I need to hear them before I turn into a full-blown raving religious idiot.

Cox-Zucker Machine

Bets are invited on whether this is a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox-Zucker_machine

Shangri La Experiment Prior Beliefs and Biases

As a good Bayesian, I should work out what my priors and predictions are. 

As a good sceptic, I should work out what I want to be true so that I can be suspicious of it.

Models

Shangri-La: Appetite will collapse. Weight will drop significantly. Over a month belt notch will move to 3 or 4.

Willpower: Appetite won't change. Weight will increase. Belt will move to last notch and probably become unwearable in the evening.

Helplessness: Appetite will decline very slightly to compensate for extra calories (probably unnoticeably). Weight will stay pretty much the same. Belt notch will stay as it is.

Call these S,W,H for short

Current beliefs

S: fad diet. lots of people think it works, but anecdote only. You get the same evidence for chiropractic, aromatherapy, homeopathy, prayer, acupuncture, etc, etc.

No rational reason that this should be true except that it's got a story that sounds good to me.

Give it a 1% chance. There's a stack of crap in the world, and this is just some that happens to appeal to me.

W: Very much the standard model. It's obviously and uncontroversially true that weight loss = calories in - calories out. The bit I don't like is that 'eat less and exercise more' doesn't seem to be good advice. The world is full of skinny people eating whatever they like and hopeless fatties trying to live on lettuce and rice and making themselves completely miserable. It's probably true that if you eat less and exercise more you'll lose weight, I just don't think it's humanly possible to defy your basic drives by exercise of willpower.

Nevertheless, this is what most people believe, and that gives it respect. I'll give it a half chance of being the truth. (i.e. I notice my confusion and make no prediction)

I also notice in passing that I dislike this model because it means that all the smug types who think that fatties deserve it and that anorexics should just stop starving themselves to death for no reason are right.

And I also note that I dislike the 'soft sciences' and medicine because even though their subject is very hard they pretend to scientific infallibility as if they were physicists. So I love it when they're wrong even though I'd like them to find out the truth (and I accept that they are trying!)

So I'm really badly biased against this model, and I should watch myself for evidence that I'm frigging my own experiment in order to attack it.


H: I hate this model but it looks more true. It says that your weight has a set point that you can do almost nothing about. Fatties stay fat, the scrawny stay feeble. By immense exercise of will you can change yourself slightly but once you stop with the willpower, you'll go back to normal.

This is what I think is true and I've got personal and anecdotal evidence that it is. I'll give it a prior of 90% truth. I'd be surprised if it was wrong, but not nearly surprised enough to disbelieve the evidence.

I notice that I'm baised towards this model because it's mine and I've advocated it publically. I'm also biased against it because I don't like helplessness. I'd prefer either of the others to be the truth.

Immediately I notice that my priors add up to 141% (so what the hell is my brain thinking).

I'll assume that there are only three possibilities and normalize (roughly) to:

H60:W39:S1

Irrelevances

I also note that I believe the following things, and that they make no sense in terms of model W, but that none of them are relevant to this test so I'm ignoring them:

Smoking moves your set point downwards. Unnaturally fast carbohydrate foods (rice, wheat, sugar, potatoes, etc) screw with the system and make you more hungry than you should be, leading to steady weight gain and eventually morbid obesity. The Lord alone knows what is going on with anorexia but it's probably something to do with long term voluntary starvation somehow moving your set point unhealthily low.

Shangri-La Diet Experiment

I'm going to try to run a fad-diet experiment on myself. Here's the protocol:

Experiment

For the whole of July, when I first wake up every morning, I'm going to drink two tablespoons of Sainsbury's Mild Olive Oil. As far as I can tell, this stuff is absolutely tasteless. The only way you can tell you've swallowed it is that your teeth feel oily.

After that, for one hour, I'm not going to let anything that tastes of anything into my mouth. Not tea, not toothpaste. Water is ok, but nothing with flavour. It strikes me that the easiest way to manage this will just be to go to sleep for an extra hour, but if I don't feel sleepy then I'll just read a book or go for a walk or something.

That's it. After that hour is over I'll just completely forget about it, and eat what I like when I'm hungry, and do as much exercise as I feel like.

Models

I have three models for what will happen, and I'm trying to distinguish between them:

Shangri-La: Seth Roberts is right. My appetite should lessen dramatically, and as a result of eating less my weight should drop by a considerable amount. Some advocates have been reporting 2-3lbs a week. That's a vast difference, a stone over a month,  and should be easily noticeable. I'd imagine that my favourite place for a belt will move a couple of notches.

Willpower: The 'standard model' weight change = calories in - calories out. Notable both for its obvious thermodynamic truth, and for the persistent hopeless failure of its (naive) prescription ( try to eat less and do more exercise to lose weight ) over many years. I'll be consuming around 300 kilocalories a day extra, and so after 30 days I should have 9000 extra calories of fat, which is about 3lbs. That should be noticeable. 

Helplessness: My own theory is that a set point weight exists for each person, and that any exercise you do will be compensated for by increased appetite. (Fast carbs can screw up this system and cause obesity, and it appears that smoking can screw it up and cause leanness.), and that the extra 300 kcal should be precisely balanced by a loss of appetite at other times, and at the end of the month there should be no difference at all.

There's obviously also the confounding factor that I'm probably still adjusting to semi-giving up smoking. I can't say whether that will currently be moving my weight up or down, but let's just assume that after six months the effect either way will be small.

Current State

At the moment I don't know my weight and I don't care either. Within reason, muscles are good, fat is bad, and they both weigh something. What I care about is the increasing spare tyre round my waist.

My waist measurement is currently a whopping 37". In the morning, my belt feels comfortable on its second notch. On the first notch it doesn't hold my trousers up. On the third it feels a bit tight and I get the urge to loosen it when I sit down. As the day wears on, I tend to need to loosen it a bit.

Shangri-La Diet

Five years ago now I gave up rowing, ballooned horribly in weight, and started reading up about diets.

As a result of reading various plausible-sounding modern theories about human metabolism, I changed what I ate, cutting down the quantities of various fast carbohydrates like bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice. I also stopped drinking fruit juice and tried to eat more fruit and vegetables.

This worked a treat. In about six months I was no longer overweight. As an unexpected bonus my lifelong tendency to short periods of depression disappeared, which was a greater benefit than the weight loss.

And my weight has remained stable, and my black moods gone, for the last five years.

I've completely stopped worrying about my weight and no longer track it or think about what I eat. (Although it is still true that what I eat is largely what I learned to like while weaning myself off the fast carbs, so I'm probably eating much as I would be if I was thinking about it. I would say my diet these days is probably mostly fry-ups and fruit. There are also significant calories from alcohol.)

Just before last Christmas, I remember noticing that the belt I have worn since I was a student was now on its tightest setting, and I was thinking about making another hole. I was fitting easily into all my clothes, including some I'd had as a student, and the various 36" trousers I got hold of in the post-rowing ballooning period felt very baggy and wouldn't stay up without a belt. I was actually starting to wonder about going to the gym to keep my muscle mass up. (If I had to choose, I'd be fat rather than skinny. Luckily there is a nice broad happy medium between.)

When I went back home to Yorkshire for Christmas, my mother did her usual trick of filling the environment with unlimited supplies of delicious and entirely evil and unnatural foods (which is her way of showing me that she loves me, and although I wish she wouldn't, there is simply nothing to be done if I want to stay friends with her), and over the two weeks of the holiday I went up an entire belt notch. This happens every time I go and stay with them, and I figured the new weight would come off again after a couple of months like it usually does.

But it hasn't done. In fact I've been getting fatter and fatter, and I'm now having trouble fitting into my clothes again.

Just this morning I was wondering what had changed, when I remembered that (after a series of gigantic benders that had left me feeling disgusted with myself and worried about alcoholism) I'd pretty much given up smoking and drinking for the first three months of the year. And although I've taken both up again now, my smoking is more 'a couple of cigars on a Friday night', than a regular habit like it used to be.

And of course smoking is traditionally associated with weight loss. Apparently lots of young girls take it up specifically because it's an appetite suppressant.

Reading up on it, there's apparently some evidence that nicotine lowers the body's set-point, which is supposed by analogy to be the dial on the thermostat of weight.

Apparently if I keep on smoking at my new low rate (which I intend to), the set point will eventually make its way back to something sensible and the weight will go away.

But I wonder if I can cheat.

A guy called Seth Roberts invented a few years ago something called the 'Shangri-La Diet'.

It sounds so much like a fad that if I noticed it at all I dismissed it entirely in my earlier search. My attention has recently been drawn to it by the fact that several people whose intellects I trust appear to take it seriously.

There's lots of anecdotal evidence that it works, some experiments that show that some of the proposed mechanisms in it work in rats, one theory that it works by a mechanism completely different to the one supposed by its inventor, and unless I've missed some, no controlled studies whatsoever to find out whether or not it actually works on human beings. I imagine that it sounds so weird that nobody in nutrition wants to waste their time proving that it doesn't.

So I'm going to try it on myself. It's completely mental and involves eating oil. Oil is really high calorie. My curiosity is roused. It should be easy enough to tell if it works or not!

Prince to Frog and back

I've never managed to disagree with Richard Dawkins before, so this is a big moment for me. He must be getting old. In his latest book: 'The Magic of Reality' he asserts that it's impossible to turn a prince into a frog.

Easy:

Put a prince into a sealed glass box. Add lots of water and boil. Leave to cool. Introduce plant seeds and open the box to the air. Leave it until you have a nice pond.  Introduce frogs (mating pair). Wait. Soon you will have many frogs, and they will be made mostly of prince.

The reverse transformation is harder because of the conservation of mass, but you can turn a lot of frogs into one prince, and it's actually easier. Sometimes you'll get princesses too.

I'm not sure that we'd learn much from the experiment though, so I imagine it might not get past the ethics committee. We'd have to do it as some sort of reality TV show. It's been a while since Dawkins did the Royal Society Christmas Lectures.

Different Minds VIII (Surprise!)

So I've mentioned my new theory about different sorts of minds and how that explains how different people find that different things interfere with their ability to think.

And a lot of people seem to think it's plausible, and some people say that they think mainly in images, and some people seem to think that they think mainly in words.

And it appears that I myself do mathematical thinking in pictures, never in symbols (which is the opposite of how most mathmos work), but computer thinking in symbols, rarely in pictures (I often draw data-flow diagrams, or diagrams of data structures, or state machines or graphs on paper, but I can't do that sort of thinking without a piece of paper, because my working memory isn't good enough/large enough to hold the picture).

But the real shocker came when my friend Neil said "So you have a sort of inner narrator talking to you all the time?", and I said yes.

And Neil was quite surprised by this, because apparently he thinks entirely in pictures, and although he knows what the 'talking to yourself internally' voice sounds like he doesn't use it often.

And a bit later I was talking to my friend Gytha, who is a playwright, and she says that she doesn't have an inner voice either. She works out her plays in pictures, and she doesn't like the laborious process of turning them into words. She thinks that I'm the weird one, and she claims that that explains why I'm so articulate (because I'm always practising).

I hadn't realised that I was particularly articulate. But when a playwright who lives in Cambridge tells you that you are the second most articulate person that she knows, then you have to take that as evidence in favour, and come to think of it most other people seem to have trouble with easy things like 'giving speeches about something you care about with five minutes notice', which I've done a few times and which seems mainly to involve 'working out what you want to communicate and then just doing it'.

So am I the weird one? How often do you hear your inner voice? Does it speak in your native language, or is it speaking something else that needs translated into words?

And isn't it odd that we live in a world where other people have completely alien thought processes and yet we rarely notice.

If someone had written a science fiction story about an alien race that thought by forming and transforming pictures, I would have found it entertainingly weird, and probably dismissed it as an unlikely way of building a mind. But it appears that there are quite a lot of people whose brains work in just that way. And they think that the thing which to me is 'experience of being', is an alien concept.

There really are philosophical zombies. And I'm one of them.

Brainsss.....

Different Minds VII (A Theory)

By this time, I'd come up with the following theory of what was going on:

There are often several ways of thinking about the same thing. Some involve making and manipulating visual images. Some involve language.

When you're trying to think about something, you are actually using the bits of your brain whose real purpose is talking, or listening, or seeing (and reacting to the things you see).

If there's something going on nearby, it can activate one of these systems. For instance, if you see something flashing or moving that causes an alarm, that will refocus your visual system (all of it, including the brain part) to the suddenly interesting object. There's nothing you can do about this. An ancestor who was able to ignore things making sudden movements near him would one day ignore a snake. So he wouldn't be an ancestor of yours.

Similarly you can get alerts from your audio systems. Consider the famous cocktail-party effect, where you can be in a room with twenty conversations going on, and somebody in one of the conversations says your name, and suddenly you can hear that conversation above all the others.

What that means is that your audio system must be processing all the conversations, listening for interesting words, but not bringing them to conscious attention unless it detects something significant.

So even sounds that you don't realize are there are using bits of your brain.

So people thinking audio or language-type thoughts should do it much better in the quiet, and people thinking visual-type thoughts should do it better in the dark.

But worse than that, if you're thinking a visual thought and some sort of alert goes off (like seeing a movement, or something flashing, or a pattern being broken), then your entire visual system should be suddenly repurposed to assess the threat and YOU LOSE THE WHOLE THOUGHT.

And similarly for me, when I'm thinking about something, or reading, and some miserable bastard puts on the radiogramophone, that's it. Every so often something interesting (to my audio threat detection system) happens in the music, and my audio system focuses on it, and my stack of thoughts comes down and I have to build it up again. And once this has happened a few times, I am furiously angry and becoming averse to the very process of thinking.

Now this is kind of a weird theory, because it says that the programmers who don't notice ambient noise (and I would imagine this is all the programmers at github, because anyone like me would have managed to stand it for precisely one afternoon before walking out and never ever going back under any circumstances), are mainly thinking visual thoughts when doing their job.

Whereas the programmers like me (and I know a few examples), who don't notice the visual distractions must be thinking mostly language-type thoughts.

And this means that we are doing the same job in completely different ways. Which is kind of odd, if you think about it.

And there should be some people who can use either or both systems. I would imagine that those guys should be able to tolerate noise or visual distraction better than either Chris or I can, because they'll have alternative systems they can use, so they won't get completely stuck, but I would also imagine that they'd be much better at their jobs in a quiet and uncluttered environment where they can use both systems freely.

And if you are one of the people who uses only one system, then if you're able to learn to use the other one, you should become much better at what you do.


If you've got a theory, it should make predictions:

1/ An MRI scan of a man with music playing in the background should show audio activity

2/ There should be more activity if it's music with words.

3/ And even more if the words are in a language that the subject understands.

4/ Similarly for the visual stimuli, although you'd need to use an innocuous method of providing visual stimulation, and I can't think of any. Background music is ubiquitous and can usually be ignored. There isn't really such a thing as background television.

5/ Brain scans of people programming should show activity in visual areas if they identify as undisturbed by office noise.

6/ But should show activity in language-processing areas if they are disturbed by noise.

7/ Some people will show both or either. They should find that audio and visual noise reduce their productivity but do not disable them.

8/ People who are not disturbed by noise can become more effective thinkers by learning to think using the language parts of their brains as well.

9/ People who do not notice visual noise should learn to think visually.

10/ The best programmers will be driven up the wall by either.

Daniel Dennett says in 'Consciousness Explained', that he thinks that the inner dialogue starts when you use the bit of your brain which speaks to put thoughts into your own head via the bit of your brain that listens. Similarly he says that you can start off by drawing pictures to yourself and end up 'cutting out the middleman' and doing the same process entirely inside your head. Let's calls this sort of thing a feedback loop.

Further predictions:


11/ There will be other modes of thought I haven't thought of, wherever there's a feedback loop to be exploited. Maybe some people think using touch? or emotion? Perhaps that's why some people seem to be 'naturally good at sport' or 'emotionally literate'.

12/ Maybe these feedback loops can be trained too?

Different Minds VI (Clues)

A big clue came when one of my colleagues (another Chris), whom I know to be an exceptionally competent and intelligent man, said that although he literally hadn't noticed the noise, he also hated the overcrowded office because he was constantly distracted by people moving around in his peripheral vision.

I wondered why on earth that would be a problem. And he said that any visual distraction made it difficult to think. He looked at my computer screen and said "For instance, I couldn't get anything done with that messy arrangement of windows".

It hadn't occurred to me that my desktop was messy. I'd just opened various programs and moved the windows so that I could see them all.

So I asked him if he was disturbed by pictures hanging at odd angles, and he said that he couldn't think at all in a room where there was an odd hanging picture. WTF? I mean, if I noticed that a picture was at an angle, I'd fix it next time I was near the picture, but I'd be quite unlikely to notice unless it was about 20 degrees out, and even then I'd probably go through several cycles of forgetting about it and re-noticing before I got round to it.

Whereas to Chris, this was as annoying as music is to me. You can't think near it. It uses the bit of your brain that you want to use when you think.

At this point, I remembered an article I'd once read by Richard Feynman, describing how he'd taught himself to count time. With a bit of practice, he'd found that he could count at a nice even pace, and so could make accurate timings of things. But he'd noticed that there were some things he couldn't time like this, because he couldn't count while doing them.

So being Feynman, he made a list of all the things he could do, and all the things he couldn't do, and then he got colleagues to learn how to count evenly, and then got them to make lists of the things they could and couldn't do.

And to his amazement, the lists were not at all the same.

To cut a long story short, it turned out that some people were counting by saying the numbers to themselves, and some people were counting by looking at an imaginary clock and imagining it move. And that meant that different activities disrupted the process.

So I asked Chris what else he found interfering with his programming. And the list of things freaked me out completely.

One of them was the way the code was formatted.

Programming uses a lot of punctuation. For instance a piece of code might be formatted :

for(i=0;i<10;i++){do(thing)};

The punctuation lets the computer know where various bits of the program start and end. If you're talking to a human you might say 'Go and buy me 20 cigarettes and a mars bar', and it's obvious what that means, but computers are not terribly bright, and have trouble breaking the sentence up into its logical bits, so to help it 'parse' the sentence you have to say something like

Go; //and
Buy (me) { 
   20 * cigarettes ; 
   1 * mars bar ;
}
Come back;

This could be a real piece of code (meaning to do a thing 10 times):

for(i=0;i<10;i++){do(thing);}

But it's a bit dense for human eyes, so we tend to put extra spaces in to make it look better:

for( i = 0 ; i < 10 ; i++ ) {

     do ( thing ) ;

}

They don't change the meaning, they just make it nicer to look at.

And programmers fight holy wars over where to put the damned spaces.

Here's another popular style:

for( i=0; i<10; i++ ) {

      do( thing ); }

A lot of people seem to thing that this is terribly important. Most companies have a complicated document specifying exactly what the 'house style' is.

I have honestly never cared in the slightest. Even though I've never used the term 'special snowflake' about the people who do, it accurately sums up my attitude to anyone who'd get involved in an argument about where to put the damned spaces. If anyone tells me I'm doing it wrong, I usually let them reformat my code so that it suits them. I usually can't tell that they've done it afterwards, but it makes them happier, so what-ever...

But I've seen people get so angry about the issue that I thought they'd fight. And I've never known why.

The funny thing is, even though Chris could tell me exactly which bits of our codebase were well formatted and which weren't (In the same way that I can tell you which Cambridge pubs and cafes play music, which play music with words in it, and which tend to be quiet places suitable for thinking in), he didn't think that my stuff was badly formatted. So obviously even though I don't notice it, when I'm writing code, I have a consistent style I stick to. Except that I couldn't tell you what that style is. And I don't care about it.

Different Minds V (Asking around)

I thought I'd better check my assumption that people talking stops you programming.

Web searching produces contradictory results. Everyone agrees that it's a very complex task that needs lots of concentration.

Noisy crowded offices feature in several lists of 'top ten classic software mistakes'.

Tom DeMarco, a famous software productivity guru makes quiet and privacy the unconditional top recommendations in his famous book 'Peopleware', about how to manage software development. And has done experiments to back his advice up, which come to the conclusion that what is obvious (to me) is also true. You can't program well when people around you are talking.

A lot of programmers work very anti-social hours so that they can get things done when no-one else is around. (At the shop I'm talking about so many of the programmers were doing this that it actually got quite noisy and distracting in the evening. I tried coming in very early in the morning or at weekends to avoid the other avoiders. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a mornings person, and I had to abandon this strategy because it was leaving me permanently exhausted).

Many people wear earplugs or earphones to work.

But some of those people are using their earphones to listen to loud music.

Those people are doing it to block out the ambient noise, and some of them say that it only works with instrumental music (no words), but some of them say that as long as they listen to songs they know well, it's not distracting.

And some programmers don't believe that there's a problem at all. They think that the people complaining about the noise are 'special snowflakes', or that they're trying to get offices for reasons of status. I wouldn't have been at all surprised by management types or HR people thinking this, but these are actual programmers saying this. Most programmers don't care about status. If they cared or noticed that sort of thing they'd stop wearing black T-shirts with the names of children's musicians on them covered in pizza stains. The ones that care about status signalling tend to become management.

One very successful and innovative shop I read about (Github) is actually proud to boast that they have rock music playing loud in their office. I could not have been more surprised if you had told me that they paid people to go around slapping their programmers with wet fish and stealing their computers.

So I asked the other people where I was working. After all we were all in the same environment.

And results were weird. Some people hated it like I did.

Some people found it just as distracting as me, but didn't care. They were getting paid whatever, it's only a job, isn't it like this everywhere?

Some people pointed me to sources of industrial strength ear-defenders.

Some people said what on earth is your problem? Can't you just shut out the noise?

And some people just didn't think it was that noisy.

I was reminded of a situation years ago where a colleague of mine was constantly complaining about the air-conditioning.

Apparently the air conditioning where we were working would randomly switch on and off every five minutes.

I tried to sympathise, but I hadn't the heart to tell him that I hadn't noticed that we had air conditioning before he'd started talking about it, and that even now I had to make an effort to tell whether it was on or not, and that I'd never noticed it switch on or off. Nobody else understood why it was a problem either. Chris found it absolutely infuriating and complained constantly. He eventually left over the issue. This was a sad thing because he was one of our better talents and we missed him badly.

Noise sensitivity is apparently a common symptom of Asperger's Syndrome, common amongst engineers and mathematicians. I wondered if that might be my problem.

I have some friends who are involved in autism research, and I asked them whether they thought I might have the syndrome. They were unanimous that there wasn't a chance. (Although one said "No, you're weird, but in a completely different way. Nothing like Asperger's.", which wasn't super-reassuring.)

Just to check that they weren't being nice to me, I did a couple of online tests, both of which said that I'm slightly less Asperger's than average. (Apparently that means that it's schizophrenia I should be worrying about. Sigh...)

Different Minds IV (Meta Open Plan Disaster)

So, I am sitting in an office where I am being very well paid despite being completely unproductive.

And it occurs to me that something is very wrong here. Once upon a time, engineers got offices to themselves, as is normal for lawyers and academics and other people who need to be able to think complex thoughts.

And yet somehow, over the last twenty years or so, open plan offices have become more and more popular amongst companies that do software for a living.

I can think of two obvious reasons why that could happen:

The first is cost. Obviously open-plan is a bit cheaper. But that's just ridiculous. Say that you rented a house in Cambridge for £1000/month. That would easily get you five large offices plus facilities, so we can put an upper bound on office cost of £200/person/month.

How much of that can you save by going open plan? Being generous, say half of it. Call it 160 hours, so you're saving ~ 50p / hour by having an open plan environment.

I'd guess that the average cost of engineering staff is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than that.

You wouldn't even notice a productivity change of 1%.  By my own estimates, my productivity has been completely shredded by having people talking while I'm trying to think. Even if I'm wrong and I'm only down to working at half speed, cost can't even be an issue.

The second reason would be communication, which is extraordinarily important amongst a programming team (that's why outsourcing never works). But programmers talk much less in open-plan environments than they do normally, because they're conscious of disturbing other people. In every computer shop I've ever worked in, the interesting complicated conversations go on in the kitchen or in meeting rooms, where people can bounce ideas off each other without annoying everyone else.

In the particular shop I'm talking about, it was hard to have meetings in the kitchen because everyone was having meetings there, and what with people making tea and such, it was sometimes hard even to get in!

So I don't think it can be communication either. There definitely are communication problems in the traditional layout, but they're easy to solve by having common rooms with water-coolers and tea making facilities and whiteboards and sofas.

So the only reason I could think of why open plan has caught on is that the people making the decisions aren't programmers.

They actually don't realise that with their big open friendly spaces (and don't get me wrong, I'd much rather sit in a cafe that was all one room than in one divided into separate private rooms) they're completely screwing the productivity of their company.

But then I'm not sure that that explanation can work either. Because isn't the market supposed to sort that sort of thing out? Wouldn't a programming shop that did something that weird and horrific just go out of business, out-competed by its wiser siblings?

Apparently that hasn't happened either.

So I've run out of candidate explanations.

I notice that I am confused.

Different Minds III (Open plan disaster)

So the reason I am thinking so much about what it is like to be me these days is that I suspect that what it is like to be me is not what it is like to be some other persons I could mention.

And this all starts when I am working for a very nice bunch of guys who have an open plan office.

And when we are doing the initial dance, I have noticed that they have an open plan office, and I say "I hate and fear open plan offices, because I can get very little work done, and it is no fun, and I get angry and guilty and begin to hate life itself and then I resign."

But they are all: "Do not worry, it is as quiet as the grave in here, and we have lots of space for very few people, and we are very aware of the problem of noise for engineers, and we will make sure that it stays quiet. And anyway we are going to take over another floor of the building soon and then we will all be lost like dust specks in the vastness of intergalactic space."

And you cannot say fairer than that, so I take the job. Although being of a suspicious cast of mind I make sure that the contract specifies one hour's notice on either side and no hard feelings.

And indeed everything is very nice for a while.

But this company is being funded by the sort of venture capitalists who have more money than sense, and there are always new projects to start, and always new money to hire with, and the new-floor-taking-over does not go so well, and six months later we are crammed in so close that even though everyone is making an effort not to disturb anyone else, there is always someone nearby talking, and so I can't think any more.

Because computer programming is very hard. You need to remember so many things at once that it is not true. A lot of what is called 'software engineering' is in fact clever techniques for making the complexity go away by establishing standard patterns that are easier to remember. But of course once you have those techniques, you can hold more complexity in your head at once, so you do. The point is not only to use the new tools to do the old things more easily. The point is to do better things with the new tools.

The day to day experience of my job is like trying to remember very long telephone numbers whilst doing crosswords and playing chess.

I am not moaning. This is my favourite thing to do. I like it when my brain is working. But I cannot do it when other people are talking. Because they are using the bits of my brain that I need to use to talk to myself with!

Different Minds II (What it is like to be me)

Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do....

For me, consciousness comes with a narrator. It's a bit like watching a film with a voiceover. There's a visual field, which goes all around even though I only see a broadish oval cone of it at once, that's full of colour and movement, and there are sounds, which are usually associated with a specific direction or thing or with one of the people I can see. Sometimes there are other human voices, which are streams of words which often have associated with them feelings like "probably to the left" or "middle-aged middle class male". Or both. Other times there are foreign voices, which have the associated labels, but sound like babble.  With French, which I sort of speak, the streams of babble have occasional words in. If I concentrate on the French, then I hear babble with odd words in, and slightly later, some of the other words resolve, and meaning fragments and partial English translations come available (as separate things)


This bit is very like a film. It's more like a 3d colour multilingual film with very good surround sound and alas no subtitles, than a black and white silent, but it's very clearly the experience that cinema films are tending towards.


Which is odd, when you think about it. Because that's nothing like what the incoming information looks like, as countless eyeball-tracking and speech analysis experiments have shown.

But there's also a continuous narration that is a stream of words that are not in the outside, a "stream of consciousness". At the moment it's saying these words, very slowly as I type them. But if I stop typing then it carries on talking, thinking out the next sentence. I (the conscious perceiver) don't produce the words! I just listen to them.

If I like, I can direct the stream to the screen of my netbook. I can still hear the words, but they slow down a lot, and my fingers move in patterns I can't really perceive (just a flurry of movement, like watching a cloud of midges), and the words appear on the netbook screen.

Apart from the initial decision to start typing, this is nothing to do with me at all. I just watch the words appear. Sometimes I notice that one of the words is misspelled, or that I don't agree with what I've just written, so I backspace and do it again, hoping for a better result.

Sometimes I feel a sense of completeness, and at the same time I feel the little finger of my right hand stretch out to end the paragraph.

The narrator is always talking, whatever I'm doing.

I can stop the narration. If I do, then I become super-sensitive to the colors and sounds around me. But the state isn't stable. Even if there's no-one talking near me. I just tried it for a minute or so, and I watched a man walk past and noticed the articulation of all his joints as he walked, and heard the sound of his footsteps, and thought no words. But then there was a slight scraping noise off to the right hand side, (I am sitting in the blessedly silent Eagle), and I heard my voice say "the sound of a barrel". And then I started thinking again.

And if I somehow managed to hold the silent state stable, in an important sense "I" wouldn't be present any more. Nothing I'd call "thinking" would be going on. I'd just be sitting there waiting for alerts from various systems that monitor the world for sound and movement.

Of course I know that this can't be the truth. Sometimes I think about something (yesterday's mole problem is an example) for a while, can't think of the answer, forget about it for a bit, and then have a method of solution pop into my head by magic the following day (and it still took me an hour and a half to actually draw the diagram, even when I could already see how it was all going to pan out).

So a lot of the thinking must be unconscious, and I must have monitors set to alert me when some sub-process has found an important result. And presumably that doesn't stop when the narrator stops.

In fact, maybe the subprocesses can only work when the narrator releases the resources that it's using to narrate?

I wonder if it's possible to solve a problem by just sitting there deliberately not thinking and wait for the 'answer alert' to go off?

Different Minds I

All children wonder: "Is the red that my friend sees the same as the red I see?". "How would we ever know if he saw green where I see red and red where I see green?"

Partially this question is answered by colourblindness. If you see red and green as the same colour, then your experience of the world can't be anything like mine!

So I think we know that it doesn't necessarily 'feel the same' to different people to be human. And the Lord alone knows what it is like to be a pigeon, with four-colour vision, or a bat who sees with sonar.

I always thought that the biggest differences between human experiences would be between men and women. I notice that at least as far as anything to do with sex goes, women act completely differently from men, and I find it very hard to imagine what it would be like to be motivated in such a way that I would produce the observed behaviour.

But I can at least imagine what it might be like to be a woman. I don't know if my thoughts are anywhere near the truth, but at least I can think them.

Talking to various people over the last couple of months, I've begun to suspect that the differences between the experience of being between me and some of my closest friends are very much greater than the male/female differences.

Some of my friends claim that they don't have anything like what I'd call thoughts at all. And I really cannot imagine what that might be like.

The Angels' Share (Film)

After an hour or so of the usual, the repellent Glaswegian scum put on kilts and the film becomes the closest Ken Loach is going to get to a remake of Brigadoon.

It's coming to the end of its run and there were only ten people in the cinema. We nevertheless gave it a round of applause at the end. Go and see this marvel while it lasts.

The Hunger Games / Catching Fire / Mockingjay

I have no idea why I read these. I knew before I picked them up that they were 'young adult' fiction (which I take to mean no complexity, no sex and the predictable triumph of the obvious hero), and they are, but the pretty yellow bird on the black book made me curious.

And the first chapter led me on to the second. And so on. All the way through I was thinking 'Why are you reading these?', and yet I kept going and buying the next one.

They're really not bad, if you like that sort of thing. I have a strong desire to buy a mockingjay pin and fix it to my favourite tweed jacket. I am resisting that desire as hard as I can.

I imagine idealistic teens will love these books. If you have an idealistic teen then I have a complete set of three in their original beautiful covers. Free to a good home.

Consciousness Explained (Daniel Dennett)

This glorious book is often referred to as 'Consciousness Denied'. Dennett takes a good look at the 'hard problem of consciousness' (What is the ghost in the machine?), and confronts it straight on.

The book is full of superb arguments and thought provoking examples and experiments, and throughout I kept wondering if I'd cease to exist mid-chapter.

In the course of the week it took to read this book, my entire view of what I am and how I work has turned upside down.

But still. Cogito ergo sum. I still buy that. I get the impression that Dennett does too.

This book is a mighty stride towards working out what it is that might be under the illusion of existing. But I'm still confused.

In fact I'm more confused. This is a very good thing and I cannot recommend this book too highly!

Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)

This book is absolutely life-changing. Kahneman and Tversky started the 'heuristics and biases' movement in psychology. Now he's written a popular account of the last twenty years of the research. I already knew about a lot of the stuff in here, but after reading this I feel very differently about it all. He has Feynman and Dawkins' gift of making the subject matter look obvious and the reader feel like a genius. The mark of the true master.

Mole Trouble

This from my friend Matt's eleven year old son Alex. The little sod solved it in his head. It took me an hour and a half, two pieces of paper and two pens:

You got a garden.

There is a mole.

It has dug five molehills in your lawn, in a line connected by a tunnel.

The mole is under one.

----

You hit a hole with your hammer.

If the mole is under the hole, it dies.

If it is not, it moves either left or right.

And repeat.

-----

Example

Call the hills 1 2 3 4 and 5.

The mole is under hill 2. You hit 3. It moves to 1. You hit 4. It moves to 2. You hit 1. It moves to 1 ......etc.

------

Can you kill the mole? How many whacks?

Pretty Fucking Safe

Imagine you live in an idyllic farming village, way up in the high mountains. There's no road, and the trek in is only for skilled mountaineers. As a result, you've literally never seen a stranger.

Your world consists of maybe one hundred people. You know all of them, you trust most of them.

It's not entirely paradise though. Legend has it that around 500 years ago, two men got into a drunken fight in the village pub and one of them was killed. People have been talking about it ever since. 1512 is known as 'the year of the murder'.

So I want you to imagine that you're lying in a field, not far from the village, and it's going dark, and you see a dark shadow moving around in the woods. What would your principal worry be?

How nice it would be to live in such a world. What would we need to do to turn our current crime-ridden society into such a safe place?

To start, let's look at the murder rate for modern Britain. Wikipedia tells me that it's 1.23 murders per 100,000 people per year.

What about our village?

Well, we have at least 500 years of murder records, and there's been one murder. There are one hundred people in the village, so that's fifty thousand people-years per murder, so on the same scale the murder rate looks like it might be around 2/100000 people/year.

So we're done. 21st century Britain (1.23), and indeed the whole of Western Europe (0-2), are around as safe as our village (probably somewhere between 1 and 3).

And yet, people worry all the time about horrible happenings. My own parents (who live in a remote village in the hills) have so many locks on their doors that it can be quite time-consuming to get in and out of the house. And they lock them when they are in.

But it's not just them. I live in Cambridge, one of England's safer cities. Pretty much everyone I know has a degree, and you can reasonably assume that the milkman is only milkmanning to support his interest in baroque Catalan poetry.

And yet when my female friends leave the pub alone, I offer to walk them home. And they often accept. Or indulge in expensive and fattening taxis because they don't feel safe. If they walk home alone, I worry about them.

I myself have been known to feel slightly wary walking down Regent Street (a wretched hive of scum and villany where young people go to enjoy themselves in much the same way that I did when I was their age) on a Friday night.

The control of violent crime is one of the most explosive and politically sensitive issues there is.

What could possibly be going on?


Easy.

You're a monkey. An extremely clever and dangerous monkey, but a monkey nevertheless.

And monkeys live in groups of one hundred or so. The same size as our village.

And if a monkey notices someone getting murdered every day, then it would be wise to be utterly terrified. Because there are not so many monkeys to go round, and chances are that if things continue like this, the monkey and everyone it knows will be dead in a few months.

So the monkey will be well advised to move heaven and earth to investigate what is causing all the killings, and fix it.

And this method of estimating the danger is hard wired. Because all our ancestors for a very long time indeed lived in groups of about the same size. So there's a simple rule: Murder every few hundred years-> not to worry, everything is perfectly safe, indeed unrealistically safe, things can't be this good. (Which is what you feel when you think of the village in the hills.). Murder every year or so-> worry a bit, keep your guard up, although it's probably wiser to worry about tigers and starvation and disease and such. Murder every week -> PANIC!! PANIC!!. And rightly so. This rule served our ancestors well for a long time.


But you're a monkey living in a society of 60 000 000 people, which is a number so big that your monkey-brain has trouble with the number of digits in it, let alone the actual number, which is ridiculously large and absolutely beyond imagining.

And you find murder very interesting indeed. The bookshop in which I am sitting has a whole section devoted to gruesome and horrifying imaginary murders that people have made up for entertainment, and another whole section devoted to artificially scary accounts of particularly awful and memorable murders that actually happened, and there is a whole entertainment industry devoted to gathering news of all the murders that happen throughout Great Britain (which is a very great number. 1.23*600/year, so a couple every day or so), and selecting the most scary, terrifying and thus entertaining ones and delivering these stories to your poor monkey-brain by Marconi-waves,  which brain responds by following its ancient algorithm and getting into a God-almighty tizzy.

And that is the answer.

How do we turn our scary modern society into a tranquil mountain village where almost nothing bad ever happens?

It already is. Stop reading the newspapers. Stop watching the television. Stop reading murder mysteries. Stop watching detective fiction and true crime and CSI:whereever. They are misleading you about the state of the world.

Obviously this is a counsel of despair. It can't be done. Such things are way too interesting and enjoyable to ignore.

But at least try rank the fear with the other unpleasant self-inflicted side effects of modernity, like getting fat because incredible amounts of delicious and unnatural food are just lying around everywhere for the asking, and monkeys know to eat as much as possible in such circumstances because they may not last.

And do not say to yourself 'I live in the midst of dangerous chaos, which I would do well to fear'.

But rather say to yourself 'I live in the safest society there has ever been in the history of the world. Nevertheless, I fear crime, because I cannot help reading about crimes all the time, and this scares my brain, which is not really designed for this sort of thing.'

And try to relax a bit, and not do silly things like changing the way you vote on the basis of which of the various groups of political scum is pretending the hardest about how much they can do about a problem which effectively ceased to exist hundreds of years ago.

Or if you are a member of a group of political scum, try coming up with memorable crime-policies, like barbecueing anyone convicted of murder in Trafalgar Square, which will cost almost nothing, hurt almost no-one, and give everyone in the country a nice satisfying feeling of justice well and truly done, as well as providing an excellent source of entertainment for the sadist community.

But try not to believe that it will actually help. The problem is already solved.

The Artist (film)

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)

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.

-------------------------------------------------------
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. 


-------------------------------------------------------
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 woods are still full of dry tinder. Be very afraid.