Spying on allies

Reading about President Obama’s speech on the significant but minimal changes he is planning to make to US intelligence gathering in the wake of (but in no way as a consequence of, it goes without saying) the Snowden revelations, I found myself wondering: How much shit are US allies expected to take? I don’t mean their leaders (who have been promised a personal exemption from espionage). I mean the average people, who have put legal regimes in place that prevent their own governments from spying on them. Why should they be more accepting of spying by the US?

And it’s not as though there’s nothing they can do about it. The solution would be to limit the role of American companies in the European market, particular with regard to sales of computer technology and collecting private information. As well as monitoring US embassies and diplomats more closely for engagement in illegal espionage. The US is assuming they won’t dare, because of the economic power of the US, the goverments’ reliance on US military and diplomatic power. That’s probably true, in the short term, but it’s clearly going to be an expensive, ongoing drain on US influence.

And then there’s the recent full court press by US legislators on the various intelligence committees to assert that Edward Snowden is a foreign agent — a pretty egregious assertion to be making publicly, since it would potentially make him liable to the death penalty. For example, here’s Michael McCaul, chairman of the House committee on homeland security:

Hey, listen, I don’t think … Mr Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself. I think he was helped by others. Again, I can’t give a definitive statement on that … but I’ve been given all the evidence, I know Mike Rogers has access to, you know, that I’ve seen that I don’t think he was acting alone.

What’s most interesting is that, for all the bluster about “evidence”, it sounds like the claim he’s making is, the NSA couldn’t possibly be so incompetent that some random guy could just come in and walk off with their complete files. Since Snowden is obviously not a master criminal, it can only be that he was being steered by brilliant, nefarious foreign intelligence services.

It’s not hard to guess who put the idea in his head that the NSA couldn’t possibly be so incompetent…

Hippie science

There are two books I’ve read sort of recently, From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner and How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser, that supplement each other as a picture of how antimaterialistic culture of the SF Bay area in the late 1960s through mid-1970s produced a lot of nonsense, but also hugely important new impulses in hard technical fields. Silicon Valley grew out of an ethos of DIY back-to-the-earth-ism (hence the “Homebrew Computer Club”), while the Fundamental Fysiks Group at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, took the energy of enthusiasm for parapsychology and mysticism, and channeled it into revival of an inquisitive style of physics that rediscovered entanglement and Bell’s Theorem, and laid the groundwork for quantum cryptography and quantum information science.

Math and taxes

Oxford University has a new mathematics building. It’s very nice, looks like it would be a good place to work. But I found it fascinating to learn that the building is split in half, one part for teaching, one for research, with undergraduates basically forbidden to enter the research part. It’s a bit of a nuisance for the faculty, who need to give tutorials, and would sometimes find it convenient to do it in their Maths Institute office rather than in their college. Why is it? The story — I can’t vouch for its truth, but I’ve heard this from several people — is that it is for tax reasons. Apparently, research is considered a charitable activity, while teaching is… I don’t know, commercial activity? By splitting the building this way, they were spared paying VAT (close to 20%) on the construction.

This suggests an updated version of an old Jewish joke:

(Student tries to enter the research side of the Maths Institute Building.)

Receptionist: Where do you think you’re going? You’re not allowed in there.

Student: I’m looking for my brother. He’s a graduate student here.

Receptionist: Why don’t you ring him?

Student: He’s probably in one of the interaction zones, which have been designed to facilitate informal discussion outside the framework of traditional office spaces.

Receptionist: You could ring his mobile.

Student: As you are probably aware, the lovely metal cladding on the interior walls has exactly the right dimensions to block all mobile telephone and computer wireless radio signals. (True, apparently.) Please, I just need to go in for two minutes.

Receptionist: Well, okay. But don’t let me catch you learning in there!

What is income?

A strange paradox has opened up in the magnificently cruel US healthcare system. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to subsidise people with modest incomes (above the federal poverty line) to purchase private health insurance. Those below the poverty line — in fact, 138% of the poverty line — were supposed to be moved onto free health insurance with Medicaid. But Medicaid is administered by the states, and quite unexpectedly many states with Republican governors have refused the Medicaid expansion, out of pure political spite, making a hash of this system: Now individuals in those states whose income is below the federal poverty line still don’t get Medicaid (unless they qualify for Medicaid under the old rules, which are much more restrictive), but they can’t get the health care subsidies because they don’t earn enough.

Ignoring the huge human suffering that is being intentionally inflicted, I find this situation fascinating, because it’s something that shouldn’t exist in the world imagined by quantitative finance. How can you have too little income to receive public assistance? After all, this isn’t about net income. They don’t have to do anything with the money. It just needs to be recorded as income. Someone can give me a cheque for $1000, in payment for “personal services”, and I can give it back to pay his bill for “financial services”. There. I’ve just gotten another $1000 in income. You’d have to put some extra organisational effort in to make sure that you don’t incur any tax obligations.

But the point is, in the world of high finance, there isn’t a category of “income”. There’s just money. And they don’t leave money on the table just because there’s not enough in one particular accounting category. But the poor don’t just lack money; they don’t have people to structure their transactions in beneficial ways.

American exceptionalism: Harassing tourists and others

A discussion broke out on The Dish about the high-handed and sometimes abusive treatment that foreigners entering the US are subjected to, even citizens of international peers, like the EU, compared with the treatment that Americans (and others) receive entering most European countries. All foreigners entering the US are, by law, treated as “an intending immigrant” when they arrive, and need to prove otherwise. Now, a former immigration official has replied with a justification:

Congress demands by law that every applicant for a tourist visa (or any nonimmigrant visa) be considered “an intending immigrant” until they prove otherwise. With good reason – a lot of them are intending immigrants. Why is it Americans have such an easier time traveling to other countries than citizens of those countries have traveling here? Because Americans go home, that’s why.

Even when US citizens work off the books for a year or two overseas, they almost always wind up coming home. The same can’t be said of most foreigners who come here, even Europeans.

Sounds pretty convincing. But is it true? How would he know? I’m always suspicious of categorical claims like this, even when I make them myself.

How about if we compare the number of people from different countries living abroad. According to the French government, there are 1.6 million French citizens living abroad, so about 2.7% of the population. About 2 million Germans (not counting the 600,000 or so Russians who are officially considered “Germans” by ancient descent), so about 2.5%. And Americans? According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs (part of the State Department) there are 7.6 million Americans living abroad. Divided into a population of 316 million, we get about 2.4%. Even if some of these estimates are off, it’s clearly not a qualitative difference.

Sorry, America, the world just isn’t as into you as you like to imagine.

Somebody to blame

Jonathan Cohn — one of the best-informed voices on healthcare in American journalism — has a new article in The New Republic about the reductions in provider networks that insurers are imposing, due to constraints in the Affordable Care Act. Except, as he points out,

Even before Obamacare, employers and insurers were already moving in the direction of limiting networks and penalizing costly hospitals like Cedars. Kominski notes that his employer, the University of California system, aggressively restricted its provider network two years ago. The change affected thousands of employees—and was one of many such decisions employers made around the country. But it didn’t generate a national controversy. The city of Los Angeles just took Cedars off the network for one large plan in order to keep premiums for city employees low. And while it’s possible Obamacare accelerated a trend toward limited networks for direct consumers, it’s also possible that insurers would have made that switch anyway—and that they’re introducing these changes now, in one big wave, because Obamacare gives them a convenient excuse.

This is a genuine bias, particularly in American democracy, toward leaving problems unaddressed, because as soon as you start trying to deal with the problem, voters will hold you responsible for any remaining defects.

I remarked on this shortly after I came to the UK, that it seemed to me that the British underrate the NHS, because any health problem that occurs anywhere in the country, whether it’s unhygienic conditions in a hospital, or GP surgeries not being open at sufficiently convenient hours, is blamed on “the NHS”. That is a strength, but it’s also a temptation for politicians to offload the responsibility onto “the market”. The political culture hasn’t  gone that far in this country, but that’s why there’s a major US political party whose political philosophy is, conveniently, essentially “There’s nothing we can do”.

(Physicist David Deutsch has written a book-length quantum-utopian manifesto whose main lesson seems to be that the fundamental criterion for the progress potential of a political system is the extent to which it makes it clear, when things go wrong, who is to blame.)

This is a well-known problem in torts law — a public danger that has never been touched is nobody’s responsibility. If you try to make it safer, but cannot eliminate the danger entirely, suddenly it has become your responsibility if someone is injured. I first encountered this many years ago, when The Economist published a somewhat surprising plea for a planetwide defence against rogue asteroids. Like (I think) most people, on the rare occasions when I do think about asteroid strikes, I generally do not consider the legal implications. The article pointed out, though, that while an unmolested asteroid that obliterates London is an Act of God, as soon as some government tries to divert it, it becomes a legal liability.

This is an issue that I’ve never seen raised in the famous trolley problems that moral philosophers love to natter about. If you’re the trolley driver then you have a real moral dilemma. If you’re a bystander who happens to see a switch that could be thrown, you’d best call your lawyer first. She’ll tell you, under no circumstances should you touch anything. If 5 people die, that’s not your fault. If you save the 5 but kill one — if you even hurt the one’s finger — his family will sue you.

Einstein and the Quantum

I just saw an ad (in Blackwell’s Books) for a book titled Einstein and the Quantum, with a text that began

Einstein himself famously rejected quantum mechanics with his God does not play dice theory…

Putting aside the fact that “God does not play dice with the universe” is a quip, not a theory, I’m fascinated by this extreme statement of a calumny on Einstein that I knew as standard when I first learned about quantum mechanics from popular science in the 1970s, that the old man, despite his revolutionary past (and he was only in his late 40s) simply lacked the intellectual flexibility to keep up, rejected the new science, and was proved wrong by the march of progress.

In fact, that famous remark (from a 1926 letter to Max Born) acknowledged up front that the emerging probabilistic view of quantum mechanics was proving very useful. He simply rejected the willingness to deny a micro-level interpretation. (And the so-called Copenhagen “Interpretation” of quantum mechanics is really an anti-interpretation, a programmatic refusal to interpret. For more comments on the pedagogical function, see here.) The fact that this approach went from strength to strength as a calculating tool does not mean that its interpretive framework, the one that said that probabilities are the fundamental objects and there is no use going deeper, has been proved, any more than the success of Maxwell’s equations proved the existence of molecular vortices in the luminiferous aether. In particular, proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation have tended to ignore the fact that they are helping themselves to a supposedly primitive concept, probability, that is actually complex, strange, and sorely in need of physical foundations.

Certainly one powerful strain of modern work on the foundations of physics — in particular, the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (cf. David Wallace’s The Emergent Multiverse) also rejects the notion that there is some randomness at the core of quantum mechanics, and takes as a point of departure the entanglement theory first proposed in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment.

* Einstein wrote, “Die Theorie liefert viel, aber dem Geheimnis des Alten bringt sie uns kaum näher. Jedenfalls bin ich überzeugt, daß der nicht würfelt.“ Literally: “The theory gives us much, but it hardly brings us nearer to the Ancient One’s secret. In any case, I am convinced that he does not throw dice.”

On learning to play an instrument

I was intrigued by Mark Oppenheimer’s article in The New Republic “Stop Forcing Your Kids to Learn a Musical Instrument” when it appeared in September, and a reread it now that it has been reposted. Obviously, the “forcing” alluded to in the headline sounds pretty bad, and few people would advocate it. But the article is not about forcing; more like “strongly encouraging”. Oppenheimer is willing to continue financing his daughter’s violin and ballet lessons, but he won’t encourage it. And he does not believe that it is worthwhile, unlike the weekly Hebrew lessons, or more valuable than watching comedies on television. I can accept his feelings on this point, and I wonder myself sometimes what motivates some parents to push their children into certain activities, given attitudes that are little different from Oppenheimer’s.

But if this were merely confessional breastbeating it would have been a 50-word blog post, rather than an article in TNR that helps pay for those useless violin lessons. So Oppenheimer provides a few hundred words of explanation, and chaos ensues. The arguments are so badly tangled that they come out almost as an advocacy of music lessons once you’ve unknotted them. I find it hard to escape the impression that it irks him that his daughter is enjoying something that he doesn’t understand or appreciate.

He has two main arguments:

  1. To they extent that playing an instrument is a useful skill, it is not classical music that children should be learning.
  2. Learning to play an instrument has no value beyond itself. (Ditto for learning to dance.) The claims commonly put forward are spurious.

Let’s look at argument 2 first. Oppenheimer writes

Why are so many children taking ballet, violin, piano? Lately, I have been asking my fellow middle-class urbanite parents that question. About dance, they say things like, “Ballet teaches them poise,” or, “Ballet helps them be graceful.” And about violin or piano they say, “It will give them a lifelong skill,” or, “They’ll always enjoy listening to music more.”

It does not take a rocket scientist, or a Juilliard-trained cellist, to see the flaws in these assertions. First, as to ballet, I propose a test. Imagine we took ten girls (or boys) who had studied ballet from the ages of five to twelve, and then quit, and mixed them in with ten girls (or boys) who had never taken dance. Let’s say that we watched these twenty tweens move around their schools for a day… Does anyone really believe we could spot the ones who had spent seven years in weekly or biweekly ballet class?

Interesting thought experiment. Does anyone really believe…? Obviously the parents who told him this believe that, or something similar. (Maybe “poise” and “grace” aren’t quite so conspicuous, so they wouldn’t quite know what to predict.) Are they right? I don’t know. But it’s weird to present as proof that these other parents are wrong the results of a made-up experiment that no one actually did. Continue reading “On learning to play an instrument”

Lazy headline clichés: Obesity edition

Am I the only one who is briefly bemused when a Guardian homepage headline refers to obesity “leaping” in the developing world, or when the headline on the article tells us

Obesity soars to ‘alarming’ levels in developing countries

I understand the need for colourful imagery in headlines, but it shouldn’t clash. Thinking about obesity leaping and soaring makes my head hurt. We might imagine a headline about a “Healthy increase in measles cases”, or “New NHS rules allow GPs to make a killing”.

The striving after punchy language sometimes makes for weird effects when combined with the English language’s exceptional parts-of-speech ambiguity, as in this BBC headline from the time of the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico:

BP caps shattered oil leak wellhead

At first I thought BP had put some caps on, which proved counterproductive because they shattered the wellhead. I forgot that headline writers like to put everything in the present tense (sounds more exciting that way, I guess), so what I thought was a noun (caps) was actually the verb, describing a success, and what looked like a past-tense verb describing the failed effort was actually a participle, referring to the state of affairs that started the whole story.

Compute the interest

Another comment based on Sharon Ann Murphy’s wonderful book on 19th century life insurance in the US: She describes an 1852 case in which the American Mutual Insurance Company tried to renege on a claim, where a preëxisting condition was found in an autopsy.

Not surprisingly, the jury sided with the beneficiaries; they “were out thirteen minutes, just long enough to compute the interest” on the original claim.

Indeed, the verdict is not surprising. What is most surprising, however, is that the jury computed the interest. I wonder how likely it is that a jury of twelve today would include even a single person capable of computing compound interest.