The mythical pre-history of plant-based meat

In reading Matthew Cobb‘s fascinating new book on the history of ethics and genetic engineering I came across this quote from Martin Apple, president of the world’s first transgenic plant research institute, the International Plant Research Institute, in 1981:

We are going to make pork chops grow on trees!

Of course, long before the first soy latte was even a twinkling in the woke barrista’s eye, people were concerned with plant-based substitutes for meat and dairy for religious reasons. And this reminded me obliquely of the myth of the barnacle goose.

In the Middle Ages it was widely believed that this bird grew from its snout from trees hanging over the water, or out of a barnacle attached to the bottoms of ships or loose pieces of wood. This raised a conundrum for medieval rabbis: For purposes of kashrut, should these geese be classed as fish, meat, or something else?

Some authorities said they were neither fish nor fowl, but rather like shellfish were impermissible no matter how they were slaughtered. But Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel Ashkenazi of Regensburg said that, effectively, they are fruits:

Regarding birds that grow on trees, there are those that say that they do not require shechitah [ritual slaughter], because they do not reproduce sexually and are like any wood. (Quoted in Sacred Monsters: Mysterious and Mythical Creatures of Scripture, Talmud and Midrash, Nosson Slifkin, p. 319.)

Truly the world’s first plant-based meat!

More metric-imperial conversion hijinks

A while back I noted how an article on Ebola in the NY Times had apparently translated “one millilitre of blood” in a medical context into “one-fifth of a teaspoon of blood”. Hilarity ensued. Now I see that the fun doesn’t go in only one direction. I just got a letter from the NHS about an upcoming appointment, including these instructions:

Do not come to your appointment if you or anyone living with you has the symptoms of a new continuous cough (in the last week) or a temperature above 37.8 degrees or loss or change to your sense of smell or taste.

37.8 degrees? Why exactly this number? It sounds both arbitrary and absurdly precise. A bit of reflection revealed that 37.8 degrees Celsius is precisely 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They obviously copied some American guidelines, and instead of rounding appropriately — or reconsidering the chosen level — they just calculated the corresponding Celsius temperature. The funny thing is, Americans are used to having the very non-round guideline of 98.6 degrees as the supposed “normal” body temperature, because someone* in the 19th Century decided 37 degrees Celsius was roughly the right number, and that magic number got translated precisely into Fahrenheit.

* Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, actually.

Free speech in England

From The Guardian today:

A man has been charged over comments made during a proclamation ceremony for the king.

Thames Valley police said on Friday that Symon Hill, 45, of Oxford, had been charged with using threatening or abusive words, or disorderly behaviour.

It relates to comments allegedly made during the event at Carfax Tower, Oxford, on 11 September.

Two weird things: First, they refer to comments “allegedly made”, but Mr Hill has himself written to publicly avow his statements.

Second, despite the fact that The Guardian finds the indictment newsworthy, nowhere in this reporting do they bother to inform the readers what he said. His “threatening or abusive words” were “who elected him?” The Guardian is very concerned with its own freedom of opinion, but when reporting on a person clearly being criminally prosecuted for his political expression they are too timid to even report what opinions he was expressing.

Shameful.

The end of the Turing test

The Turing test has always had a peculiar place in the philosophy of mind. Turing’s brilliant insight was that we should be able to replace the apparently impossible task of developing a consensus definition of the words ‘machine’ and ‘think’, with a possibly simpler procedural definition: Can a machine succeed at the “Imitation game”, whose goal is to convince a neutral examiner that it (and not its human opponent) is the real human? Or, to frame it more directly — and this is how it tends to be interpreted — can a computer carry on a natural language conversation without being unmasked by an interrogator who is primed to recognise that it might not be human?

Turing’s argument was that, while it certainly is possible without passing the test — even humans may be intelligent while being largely or entirely nonverbal — we should be able to agree on some observable activities, short of being literally human in all ways, that would certainly suffice to persuade us that the attribution of human-like intelligence is warranted. The range of skills required to carry on a wide-ranging conversation makes that ability a plausible stand-in for what is now referred to as general intelligence. (The alert interrogator is a crucial part of this claim, as humans are famously gullible about seeing human characteristics reflected in simple chat bots, forces of nature, or even the moon.)

If we won’t accept any observable criteria for intelligence, Turing points out, then it is hard to see how we can justify attributing intelligence even to other humans. He specifically takes on, in his essay, the argument (which he attributes specifically to a Professor Jefferson) that a machine cannot be intelligent merely because it performs certain tasks. Machine intelligence, Jefferson argued, is impossible because

No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.

Turing retorts that this leads to the solipsistic view that

the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man.

In principle everyone could doubt the content of everyone else’s consciousness, but “instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.” Turing then goes on to present an imagined dialogue that has since become a classic, in which the computer riffs on Shakespeare sonnets, Dickens, the seasons, and Christmas. The visceral impact of the computer’s free-flowing expression of sentiment and understanding, Turing then suggests, is such that “I think that most of those who support the argument from consciousness could be persuaded to abandon it rather than be forced into the solipsist position.” He compares it, charmingly, to a university oral exam, by which it is established that a student has genuinely understood the material, rather than being able simply to reproduce rote phrases mechanically.

I used to accept this argument, but reflecting on Chat-GPT has forced me to reconsider. This is a predictive text generation tool recently made available that can produce competent texts based on arbitrary prompts. It’s not quite ready to pass the Turing test*, but it’s easy to see how a successor program — maybe GPT-4, the version that is expected to be made available to the public next year — might. And it’s also clear that nothing like this software could be considered intelligent.

Thinking about why not helps to reveal flaws in Turing’s reasoning that were covered by his clever rhetoric. Turing specifically argues against judging the machine by its “disabilities”, or its lack of limbs, or its electronic rather than biological nervous system. This sounds very open-minded, but the inclination to assign mental states to fellow humans rather than to computers is not irrational. We know that other humans have similar mental architecture to our own, and so are not likely to be solving problems of intellectual performance in fundamentally different ways. Modern psychology and neurobiology have, in fact, shown this intuition to be occasionally untrue: apparently intelligent behaviours can be purely mechanical, and this is particularly true of calculation and language.

In this respect, GPT-3 may be seen as performing a kind of high-level glossolalia, or like receptive aphasia, where someone produces long strings of grammatical words, but devoid of meaning. Human brain architecture links the production of grammatical speech to representations of meaning, but these are still surprisingly independent mechanisms. Simple word associations can produce long sentences with little or no content. GPT-3 has much more complex associational mechanisms, but only the meanings that are implicit in verbal correlations. It turns out to be true that you can get very far — probably all the way to a convincing intellectual conversation — without any representation of the truth or significance of the propositions being formed.

It’s a bit like the obvious cheat that Turing referred to, “the inclusion in the machine of a record of someone reading a sonnet, with appropriate switching to turn it on from time to time”, but on a level and complexity that he could not imagine.

Chat-GPT does pass one test of human-like behaviour, though. It’s been programmed to refuse to answer certain kinds of questions. I heard a discussion where it was mentioned that it refused to give specific advice about travel destinations, responding with something like “I’m not a search engine. Try Google.” But when the query was changed to “Write a script in which the two characters are a travel agent and a customer, who comes with the following query…” it returned exactly the response that was being sought, with very precise information.

It reminds me of the Kasparov vs Deep Blue match in 1997, when a computer first defeated a world chess champion. The headlines were full of “human intelligence dethroned”, and so on. I commented at the time that it just showed that human understanding of chess had advanced to a point that we could mechanise it, and that I would consider a computer intelligent only when we have a program that is supposed to be doing accounting spreadsheets but instead insists on playing chess.

Continue reading “The end of the Turing test”

Strained historical comparisons: Holodomor edition

EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen today condemned Russia, comparing its actions to Stalin’s brutal engineered famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, and promising to take action to… export thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain.

Stalin was all in favour of exporting Ukrainian grain!

This is clearly a positive development, but the analogy needs some work…

The World Comeuppance

There are few turnabouts more satisfying than when the cynic who thinks he’s calculated everything to his own benefit finds himself suddenly betrayed by the evil to which he’d accommodated himself. Extra points if he mocked the boring sincerity of those who moralised blah blah blah.

Which brings us to the World Cup. Anyone planning to attend or support the games has to be willing to ignore the corrupt process by which Qatar was selected; the thousands of labourers worked to death to build the facilities; and the foul mistreatment of women and sexual minorities by the Qatari authorities.

Eight years ago it was reported that the Qataris were already breaking the promises they had made to be allowed to host these games. They broke their promises to improve working conditions. They broke promises to allow LGBT+ visitors to attend the games safely. Most fans were happy that these promises were made, providing them cover to enjoy the World Cup, and were indifferent to whether the promises were kept.

But can they enjoy the World Cup without beer? Personally, I have zero appreciation of sport, but I have always accepted that other people really seem to dig football. But I do need to point out that the number of people who enjoy watching football completely sober seems to be rather small. Hence the dismay, that the theocratic dictators turned out to actually sincere in opposing alcohol, and are willing to take an economic hit to ban it from the tournament sites. Shocking!

Suicides at universities, and elsewhere

The Guardian is reporting on the inquest results concerning the death by suicide of a physics student at Exeter University in 2021. Some details sound deeply disturbing, particularly the account of his family contacting the university “wellbeing team” to tell them about his problematic mental state, after poor exam results a few months earlier (about which he had also written to his personal tutor), but

that a welfare consultant pressed the “wrong” button on the computer system and accidentally closed the case. “I’d never phoned up before,” said Alice Armstrong Evans. “I thought they would take more notice. It never crossed my mind someone would lose the information.” She rang back about a week later but again the case was apparently accidentally closed.

Clearly this university has structural problems with the way it cares for student mental health. I’m inclined, though, to focus on the statistics, and the way they are used in the reporting to point at broader story. At Exeter, we are told, there have been (according to the deceased student’s mother) 11 suicides in the past 6 years. The university responds that “not all of the 11 deaths have been confirmed as suicides by a coroner,” and the head of physics and astronomy said “staff had tried to help Armstrong Evans and that he did not believe more suicides happened at Exeter than at other universities.”

This all sounds very defensive. But the article just leaves these statements there as duelling opinions, whereas some of the university’s claims are assertions of fact, which the journalists could have checked objectively. In particular, what about the claim that no more suicides happen at Exeter than at other universities?

While suicide rates for specific universities are not easily accessible, we do have national suicide rates broken down by age and gender (separately). Nationally, we see from ONS statistics that suicide rates have been roughly constant over the past 20 years, and that there were 11 suicides per 100,000 population in Britain in 2021. That is, 16/100,000 among men and 5.5/100,000 among women. In the relevant 20-24 age group the rate was also 11. Averaged over the previous 6 years the suicide rate in this age group was 9.9/100,000; if the gender ratio was the same, then we get 14.4/100,000 men and 5.0/100,000 women.

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the total number of person years of students between the 2015/2016 and 2020/2021 academic years were 81,795 female, 69,080 male, and 210 other. This yields a prediction of around 14.5 deaths by suicide in a comparable age group over a comparable time period. Thus, if the number 11 in six years is correct, it is still fewer deaths by suicide at the University of Exeter than in comparable random sample of the rest of the population.

It’s not that this young man’s family should be content that this is just one of those things that happens. There was a system in place that should have protected him, and it failed. Students are under a lot of stress, and need support. But non-students are also under a lot of stress, and also need support. It’s not that the students are being pampered. They definitely should have institutionalised well-trained and sympathetic personnel they can turn to in a crisis. Where where are the “personal tutors” for the 20-year-olds who aren’t studying, but who are struggling with their jobs, or their families, or just the daily grind of living? And what about the people in their 40s and 50s, whose suicide rates are 50% higher than those of younger people?

Again, it would be a standard conservative response to say, We don’t get that support, so no one should get it. Suck it up! A more compassionate response is to say, students obviously benefit from this support, so let’s make sure it’s delivered as effectively as possible. And then let’s think about how to ensure that everyone who needs it gets helped through their crises.

Diwali sweets and the tofu-eating wokerati

I’m always fascinated by the way foods define people’s identities — their own and other people’s — and particularly how they are politicised, used to recognise one’s own folk and reject the Other. Bush-era attacks on “latte-sipping liberals” made a big impression on me (“sipping” was a good touch there — not just expensive coffee, but effeminate sipping), as did the scandalised mockery of Obama when he remarked in 2008 on the price of arugula. (According to some, arugula was also effeminate.)

I find the ethnic dimension particularly interesting. It is no coincidence that these two foods that lefties were ridiculed for consuming have Italian names. Jews, of course, have always been attacked for their exotic food preferences, as with the probably anti-Semitic attack on Ed Miliband for looking insufficiently natural when eating a bacon sandwich.

Nowhere is the political valence of ethnic foods more complex than with Britain’s Asian population. Whereas I grew up in the US thinking “Asian” meant by default Chinese and Japanese, in the UK the term refers primarily to the former colonies of Indian subcontinent. Hence the justified pride, in the whole country, in the Indian community, and particularly among the conservatives, in having the first prime minister from an Asian background.

Interestingly, this was emphasised by the King providing Diwali sweets (marking this week’s Hindu festival) when Sunak visited the palace recently. But these gestures of pride and acceptance are not extended to Asians and their foods when their heritage is not British colonial. Particularly striking was the attack in Parliament just last week by the Tory Home Secretary on the “tofu-eating wokerati”.

Hindus can be good Britons and eat Diwali sweets, but those who indulge in other Asian foods are foreign, most especially if they don’t even have the excuse of ancestry. At least the Chinese eat pork…

The Tories can’t get no satisfaction

Proving that despite having acquired UK citizenship I understand nothing about the country’s politics, chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng has been forced out after less than a month in office. I had loudly declared this to be impossible, given that his defenestration would be predicated on the entirely implausible notion that the government’s Three-Stooges-level economic policy had its origins somewhere other than the reptilian complex of Liz Truss’s brain. Apparently, she’s willing to make a play for that political fantasy.

Anyway, I note that there seems to be some hope that the predicament of the entire loss of confidence in this government jointly and individually might be evaded simply by making their policy announcements and changes sufficiently difficult to parse on a purely logico-grammatical level. It seems to be policy-making by double (at least) negatives. To wit:

According to the Times, Truss will abandon the cancellation of a rise in corporation tax from 19 to 25 per cent, as well as a number of other measures announced in the mini-Budget on 23 September. The government has already been forced into a humiliating retreat on scrapping the 45p top rate of income tax.

I had to read this multiple times to figure out whether the corporation tax would be going up or down, and I guess the Conservatives are hoping that in a few months’ time they can counter charges of “U-turn” with “You’re misremembering. We didn’t never change no policy direction turns.” They’re opposing Labour socialism with Marxist politics of the Grouchoist tendency. (See here and below.)

Scant progress

In the middle of an economic slowdown and a huge expansion in spending to reduce households’ winter fuel costs, the new UK government has just announced, in its new “mini-budget” its intention to drastically cut taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Not surprisingly, the price of UK bonds has plummeted, and interest rates have risen to their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Guardian quotes international market experts from ING saying this was a “perfect storm” for the UK, as “global markets shun sterling and gilts.” They continue

Price action in UK gilts is going from bad to worse. A daunting list of challenges has arisen for sterling-denominated bond investors, and the Treasury’s mini-budget has done little to shore up confidence.

“Little to shore up confidence” is such an elegant bit of English understatement, so extreme as to amount almost to deception. Like “the expanded hours for flight departures at Heathrow have done little to improve the noise pollution problem for residents near the airport” or “Herr Hitler’s new ‘Nuremberg Laws’ have done little to shore up confidence in fair treatment among Germany’s half million Jewish citizens.”