Aposematism and toy guns

Another person has been shot in the US because he was brandishing a toy gun.

Officers shot and killed a man who brandished what appeared to be a handgun but was actually an air gun after they told him to leave a restricted parking lot outside a San Francisco police station.

Police hit the 32-year-old man three times Sunday evening after he pulled from his waistband what was later determined to be an air gun, which fire metallic projectiles such as pellets or BBs, police spokesman Albie Esparza said.[…]

The air gun did not have a colored tip on it, which is a standard identifier of a toy gun, Officer Gordon Shyy said Monday.

Actually, this wasn’t even exactly a “toy”. More, a sublethal weapon. I’m generally not the most sympathetic to police officers who kill the citizens they are supposed to be protecting. (In Utah last year police were the leading category of homicide perpetrators.) And the case of the boy who was shot on a playground because he had a toy gun clearly seems tinged with racism. But I can’t blame the problem on a lack of coloured tips on the gun.

Surely a brief thought about warning colours and mimicry in nature suggests that a strategy that says “a red tip means the police don’t need to worry about this otherwise very dangerous-looking weapon” can’t be viable. It’s too easy to mimic the signal and gain the advantage (lessened police response to your weapon). This is not quite the same as aposematism — advertising ones inedibility to predators through defensive colouration — but the general problem of cheap signals undermined by mimicry is the same. Continue reading “Aposematism and toy guns”

Aren’t all famous people friends?

By way of Andrew Sullivan, I found this book review by Diane Johnson, referring to

Freud’s friend Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novel, the inspiration for the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut…

Poor Schnitzler. He’s one of my favourite authors, and Traumnovelle is one of his masterpieces, but he needs to be put into context for English readers by his connection to two people who are much better known.

I find the Freud hook particularly poignant because Freud was famously not a friend of Schnitzler. They were contemporaries, yes, and neighbours in Vienna. They read each other’s work. But they were not friends. There is one famous letter from Freud to Schnitzler (out of about 10 in total), on the occasion of the latter’s 60th birthday, in which Freud expresses his admiration, and explains why he had never made an effort to meet him. He says it was “Doppelgängerscheu”, fear of meeting his double. Schnitzler used a similar expression some years later in an interview with an American journalist, and he had long been fascinated by Freud’s theories, though also critical.

Freud did invite Schnitzler to his home after that letter, but there seem to have been only a few encounters after that. It would have been more accurate to call Schnitzler’s work “the inspiration for the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, and the inspiration for many of Freud’s theories of dream analysis”.

Towers of Power

In the week after the September 11 attacks, my Berkeley colleague George Lakoff got rounded up in a dragnet of conservative outrage for a heartfelt reckoning with the meaning of towers and the violent destruction thereof. Whether or not you agree with his points — which were mostly anodyne applications of his general theory that all abstract thought is at base metaphorical, but which seemed to offend people mainly for the brief mention of one very traditional metaphor, the tower as phallus — it was almost a prototype for what people think a public intellectual should be doing: bringing the fruits of his technical research to bear in making sense of confusing events, and public responses.

Anyway, I’ve just been visiting Washington DC for the first time since I was a young child, and I was struck by the differing levels of security at the two monuments to great American presidents that stand on opposite ends of the reflecting pool. The towering Washington monument has airport+ level security: Metal detectors, no large bags, no food or drink. The squat Lincoln memorial has no security at all — not even the health-and-safety guardians whom one would expect at any modest monument — with people walking freely in or out. It doesn’t seem wrong. Somehow it feels intuitively obvious that a tower would attract political violence in a way that a squat temple would not.

It’s similar to the issue of why terrorists always like to hijack airplanes. There are more people on a big train than on any airplane, but still terror attacks on trains are rare, despite the vastly tighter security at airports.

The REF Research Rating Agency

Among the many inefficiencies imposed by the hexennial ritual of centralised research evaluation in the UK is the requirement that some of the nation’s most esteemed academics (thankfully, I am not one of these) need to dial their research productivity down to nearly zero while they spend their waking hours — and some when they might otherwise be sleeping — reading and ranking hundreds of papers, and attending interminable meetings. And then, after the results are complete, the specialised skills they have developed during this sisyphean herculean task are of no use to anyone, other than helping their individual departments get a leg up on the next REF, of course. Wouldn’t it be great — and very British — to enable the researchers who have devoted so much time and effort to monetise the skills they have acquired for personal gain?

This is why I am proposing the creation of a public-private consortium (privately owned, but initially funded by the British taxpayers), to be called the REF Research Rating Agency (REFRRA). The idea is simple: One of the major outcomes of the REF is to induce British universities to hire leading researchers away from other British universities shortly before the REF census date, expecting that their 4* papers will pay their salaries for the next six years. They also hire researchers from outside the UK on 20% contracts to pop by occasionally and credit their  research output to their generous UK host. By these means, the University of Birmingham has had itself crowned the king of UK philosophy.

The problem is the amount of guesswork that goes into these hiring decisions. That is why we need the REFRRA, employing experienced former REF examiners, to provide researchers in the UK and worldwide with Audited REF Score Evaluations (ARSE). For a modest fee, academics can purchase a documented ARSE to list on their CV. This will ultimately lead, it is hoped to a complete automation of the appointments process, whereby academics can simply go to a web site of a university they would hope to work for, put in their ARSE and a few demographic details, and receive an immediate job offer or rejection, based on the calculation of whether their hiring would be a financial net gain or loss for the university.

When I told a colleague about this idea, she said that no one could trust ratings where the ones being rated are the agency’s paying customers. Too much conflict of interest. On further reflection we had a good laugh at her naïveté.

People who wore top hats

In thinking about the response of many Americans to the revelations of torture of prisoners by the CIA (not that it was a huge secret before, but I think most people still found something to be surprised and appalled by in the Senate report, such as the 26 people whom even the CIA acknowledges were held in error, or “rectal feeding”), but also the response of many American and British Jews to atrocities and human rights abuses by Israel, I often find myself coming back to the remarks of Aldous Huxley, in his 1958 Brave New World Revisited. In discussing the distinction between the old-fashioned totalitarianism of 1984 — innovative propaganda and mental manipulation, to be sure, but backed up by hard power and torture — and the purely medical and psychological manipulation of Brave New World, he admits that he was too hasty in consigning the crude atrocities to the ashheap of history:

Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, it seemed completely self-evident that the bad old days were over, that torture and massacre, slavery, and the persecution of heretics, were things of the past. Among people who wore top hats, traveled in trains, and took a bath every morning such horrors were simply out of the question. After all, we were living in the twentieth century. A few years later these people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats were committing atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asi­atics. In the light of recent history it would be foolish to suppose that this sort of thing cannot happen again. It can and, no doubt, it will. But in the immedi­ate future there is some reason to believe that the punitive methods of 1984 will give place to the rein­forcements and manipulations of Brave New World.

This phrasing is perfect. (I’m willing to give Huxley the benefit of the doubt by reading ironic scare quotes into “benighted Africans and Asiatics”.) Compare “people who took daily baths and went to church in top hats” with this excerpt from an interview with torturer-in-chief Dick Cheney:

CHUCK TODD:

Well, let me start with quoting you. You said earlier this week, “Torture was something that was very carefully avoided.” It implies that you have a definition of what torture is. What is it?

DICK CHENEY:

Well, torture, to me, Chuck, is an American citizen on a cell phone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York City on 9/11. There’s this notion that somehow there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists and what we do. And that’s absolutely not true. We were very careful to stop short of torture. The Senate has seen fit to label their report torture. But we worked hard to stay short of that definition.

CHUCK TODD:

Well, what is that definition?

DICK CHENEY:

Definitions, and one that was provided by the Office of Legal Counsel, we went specifically to them because we did not want to cross that line into where we violating some international agreement that we’d signed up to. They specifically authorized and okayed, for example, exactly what we did. All of the techniques that were authorized by the president were, in effect, blessed by the Justice Department opinion that we could go forward with those without, in fact, committing torture.

Instead of going to church in top hats to have their crimes blessed by God, they went to the Office of Legal Council in slick suits to have their crimes blessed by the Justice department. But the idea is, people like us don’t commit atrocities, because they’re people like us.

CHUCK TODD:

Let me go through some of those techniques that were used, Majid Khan, was subjected to involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. It included two bottles of Ensure, later in the same day Majid Khan’s lunch tray consisting of hummus, pasta, sauce, nuts and raisins was pureed and rectally infused.[…]  Does that meet the definition of torture in your mind?

DICK CHENEY:

–in my mind, I’ve told you what meets the definition of torture. It’s what 19 guys armed with airline tickets and box cutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. What was done here apparently certainly was not one of the techniques that was approved. I believe it was done for medical reasons.

Where USS puts its money

UK academics are all aware that the nationwide pension scheme, called the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), believes itself to have a huge budget shortfall, that can only be resolved with major cuts to pensions for future retirees (but no cut at all to current retirees, for some reason). So it was with some interest that I read about the recent crash of the national air traffic control system, caused by persistent underinvestment in critical infrastructure by the public-private company Nats:

Nats became a public-private partnership in 2001 under the last Labour government. It is 42% owned by Airlines Group, whose shareholders include the University Superannuation Scheme, British Airways, Monarch Airlines retirement benefit plan, easyJet, Virgin Atlantic, Deutsche Lufthansa, Thomson Airways and Thomas Cook Airlines.

When did you stop sexually assaulting women other than your wife?

It is a cliché of the legal trade: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” The paradigmatic damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t trick yes-or-no question. Everyone knows it. Thus it is with a sense of awe that I read of this comment by US Representative Steve Cohen:

“I don’t keep up with football, except college football, except Eli Manning or Peyton Manning. And Eli and Peyton don’t do sexual assaults against people other than their wives,” Cohen said during his rather perplexing response.

Amazingly, it appears that no sarcasm was intended:

“Congressman Cohen misspoke, abhors sexual violence of any kind, is a fan of both Manning brothers, and deeply regrets any confusion,” spokesman Ben Garmisa told The Tennessean. “His intention was simply to indicate that Eli and Peyton are committed to monogamous marriages.”

It seems like such a simple intention could have been realised more simply.

Muted outrage

Psychologists say that children under 4 or so are generally incapable of understanding that other people’s minds are distinct from their own, that to understand other people they need a distinct representation of the knowledge and beliefs of others. But some people take longer:

Brian Williams asked former NSA Director Michael Hayden how he would have felt had a member of his own family been tortured. Hayden’s flippant response: “I actually think that my concern or my outrage, if that were ever done to any of my family members, would be somewhat muted if my family member had just killed 3,000 of my citizens.”

What about a family member who had been piloting drones in attacks that killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen? I’m sure he believes that he can put himself in the place of a man whose entire extended family were wiped out because the CIA decided to bomb their wedding party. Simple herder that he is, he would nonetheless be aware that Americans only act with the best of intentions, and this unfortunate accident is only one more reason to support them in in their noble struggle to rid the world of those who are truly responsible for this mass slaughter, the terrorists. And anyone who does attribute evil intentions to Americans must be in the grip of a fanatical ideology, and so belongs on the target list anyway.

Wer es glaubt wird selig, is the German expression for such an exuberance of presumed naïveté. Only a saintly fool could believe that.

Examination socialism

I was talking with someone recently about the bizarre British practice of allowing the A-level exams to be set by competing exam boards. It’s bizarre because of the well-known agency problems in examinations: The customers are the schools, whose interest is in high marks, not in effective exams. So we get government ministers persistently fulminating against watering-down of exams.

This is typically presented as a capitalist approach, reflecting the British enthusiasm for market-based solutions instead of big government. In fact, while this solution has the trappings of capitalism, it suffers all the theoretical and practical defects of socialism. As I understand it, those who theorise the superiority of capitalism tend to focus on the diffusion of decision-making to the periphery, where the expertise resides, and the virtues of aligning incentives with goals, which is far more efficient than central planning. Then comes the bracing effect of competition to achieve those goals.

In this case, the natural incentives of those looking to make a profit by selling their product to schools are clearly misaligned. Yes, they can fruitfully compete on accuracy and speed of marking, but the essential content and rigour of the exams is a race to the bottom. (This might not be the case if they were providing distinct qualifications, that might be competing for influence with universities. There is the competing International Baccalaureate, adding an extra level of complexity, but the multiple exam boards are supposed to be producing evaluations of the same qualification, the A-levels. We have a similar problem with university degrees, where there seems to be a pious fiction that “first-class degree” is an absolute standard, whether from Imperial or London Metropolitan; but this is clearly not taken very seriously.) The bottom is set by elaborate government regulations — central planning — and all the competitive ingenuity goes into formally hitting those standards while maximising the marks. (I don’t know if this is really true; but that is what you would predict, theoretically, and it would explain the downward spiral of A-levels.)