No Escape From Reality ? HAH !

It arrived !

It took months and months, but I've wanted one for years, so in the end I guess the wait wasn't so bad. Here are my initial impressions after being plugged into the thing for about a month. Well, not literally, but certainly enough to give a decent overview.

Short answer : I'm hugely impressed. It blows my obscure MagicSee thing out of the water. It's not quite a holodeck, but honestly it comes closer to the holodeck experience than I thought I was ever likely to get. To cut to the chase, ten out of ten from me. But, I don't believe even ten out of ten should mean Platonic levels of perfection, so let's break that down a bit.


Setting up

Very straightforward. The only oddity here is that you need a phone to do this initially, for reasons that elude me. You use it to pair the headset to the phone (and presumably the controllers) and set the WiFi password. I've no idea why you can't just do this on the headset itself, but it's not any kind of difficulty, just odd. Then you plug it in and charge, which takes about 2 hours from zero (obviously less if the unit is already partially charged). You generally get about a 1:1 ratio of charge to usage time. There are a few other occasions when you need a phone, but after initial setup it's very rare.

The box contains the headset, two hand controllers with AA batteries included, a charging cable (USB C on both ends, with a mains adaptor but no USB A adaptor), and a separator to make it easier to wear for people with glasses. I've only just started using that - being shortsighted I can easily wear it without glasses, though after a while I feel my eyes start to go funny. The supplied picture-only instructions on how to fit the lens separator don't make a lot of sense, but it's actually very easy and it does improve things wearing glasses.

Initially I made a bigger deal out of putting the headset on than I needed to, because it has a cleverer design than I thought. The straps are attached to the unit by two rotatable side-tubes, and you can pull back on the strap to increase the distance like pulling on elastic. Then you can adjust the straps by pulling on the velcro and pulling through. Very easy, very effective. I would recommend a tight fit though, otherwise the image will bounce around and that's not a lot of fun.

The first thing you see is the "passthrough", the greyscale camera view the Quest uses for tracking. This is itself quite a strange experience to see the world in 3D grainy greyscale - the perceived depth doesn't quite match up to reality, though it's close enough to walk around comfortably. Despite the manual's warnings, I'd have no problems with tackling a flight of stairs. And while it's a grainy image, I could still read the time on my watch with it. I don't know if there are any current possibilities to use the camera feed for augmented reality*, but this seems at the very least like a possibility for the future. It would seem a logical option for further iterations to use hi-res colour cameras as a way of doing AR while ensuring a clear display.

* My guess is no, at least not officially. Oculus have adopted the "high quality or nothing" approach, and the camera quality is not high.

Then you set up the Guardian system that prevents you bumping into walls. You do this very easily by clicking and dragging to define an area with a controller, like spray painting a hologram. The Quest itself determined the floor level perfectly with no input from me - it's only now that I stop to think about it that I realise just how impressive this is.

And that's pretty much it. In five minutes or less you're ready to go. Though, I did initially find that there is one other essential step - I was finding it difficult for it to maintain a direct WiFi connection. This was causing annoying issues when trying to access the Store and, in particular, the setting for the virtual home environment (the former mostly worked, the latter never did, and kept insisting the WiFi wasn't working even when it was connected). My workaround for this was to use my phone to create a WiFi bridge (a trick I've found necessary in some hotels where the WiFi takes you to a landing page, which my laptop sometimes doesn't like). From thereon, I've had no further WiFi issues. Later, for other reasons, we changed router and then I was able to connect directly without any problems.


User interface

Like most things about the Oculus, this just works. It's super-sensible and intuitive and doesn't really need any explanation. The controllers are rendered as virtual objects which respond perfectly - absolutely perfectly - to how you orient them, projecting a beam showing you what you're pointing at. Then you click, or click+drag to scroll (or hold down the twiddly thumb stick thingies).

A very nice "experimental" feature (you have to enable it from the Settings menu) that works perfectly well is to double-tap the side of the headset to show the passthrough at any time. This is extremely helpful in finding somewhere to put the controllers so you can take the headset off. You can of course just venture outside the Guardian zone, but the switch to the passthrough can be a bit slow if you do it that way (and you might bump into something on the way). Occasionally the Guardian grid gets stuck on permanent display, but this can be fixed by changing from roomscale to standing and back again, though this hasn't happened at all since a recent update.

The only thing that does get somewhat irritating is nothing much to do with Oculus but certain apps, in particular Vader Immortal. Normally tapping the Oculus button brings you straight to the menu, but sometimes it just doesn't. Nothing happens, and you're stood there clicking a button over and over again pondering how the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It's a minor annoyance, but one I wish developers would pay a bit more attention to. Eventually it works, and this too has at least improved with a recent update.

None of these cause any real problems. Compared to the cheap Chinese knock-off that was my first headset, the ability to use apps that work reliably is a huge bonus.


Comfort

Excellent. I've heard that some people don't enjoy wearing it for long periods since it has a tight fit and is, they say, quite heavy, but for me I could wear it quite happily for at least an hour if not more - the only reason I tend to stop is because my feet need a break ! Watching full documentaries on the Quest is a genuinely immersive and engaging experience, though this needs a looser fit otherwise things do tend to become distracting. In a game, I barely notice that I'm wearing a headset at all - in a passive documentary, it's much more apparent. I also tend to end up with a bright red band across my forehead that fades after a few minutes, but I can't imagine this really bothering anyone.

I've heard that the battery pack accessory not only makes it last much longer but also much more comfortable for those who do notice the giant goggles strapped to their face. I haven't tried this, but maybe in the future I will.

Content

A headset is only as good as what it has to show. I've been using this pretty extensively and intensively, so I'll give a brief summary of my favourites so far below. There are two kinds of VR experiences : 3DOF (degrees of freedom), which means you can only rotate your view, and 6DOF, which means you can move anywhere inside a scene.

3DOF is really only necessary for pre-rendered content, i.e. videos. It's also used on older systems like the Oculus Go and Google Cardboard, but there's really no excuse for any interactive app to still be using this. Not that there isn't some great 3DOF content - especially videos ! - but 6DOF is incomparably better. The difference is a bit like being in a planetarium compared to actually flying a spaceship. In 6DOF scenes you can typically pick up objects, bring them close to you for inspection, and then chuck 'em away. You can crouch down to look underneath tables and peer over the edges of walls, or worriedly back off from dangerously high ledges. In 3DOF you can look in any direction from a strictly fixed viewpoint, so move up and down and the scene doesn't change. This is a bit weird and might be one reason for motion sickness (more later); with 6DOF that sensation is completely absent. It really is like teleporting to a new world. As the tagline to Pratchett & Baxter's The Long Earth puts it :

There are worlds waiting. All it takes is one small step.

It must be said, though, that unless you're willing to fork out some serious cash, it can seem at first glance that there's not that much 6DOF content natively available for the Quest at the moment. This is not really true, for several reasons. There are in fact five or six different ways to access content.

1) From the Quest Store

While there are a few totally free or very low cost apps, it's worth being aware that the official refund policy is pretty sensible. Personally I'd rather have an ask-permission system rather than ask-forgiveness model, i.e. if there isn't a free demo available, then a very short free trial period (say, 15 minutes) would be nice. The Store does feature some rather good "Daily" deals though, typically meaning a healthy 25-50% off. Such deals don't actually happen every single day, but most of them - and when there isn't a daily deal, there's usually something else that's very similar.

My biggest gripe is that many of the experiences available - and some of them do deserve to be called experiences rather than games - are awfully short for the price. If I'm going to fork out $30, I'll want to be sure it has replayability, which many apparently don't. For $5-$10, sure, I'll do an occasional impulse buy, but $30 ? That's the level where I start wanting either substantial content length (10-20 hours plus) or high replay value. And there's not too much of this available from the official sources as yet, though it is growing.

2) From the Oculus Go

There's a fair bit more content available for the older Oculus Go. Fortunately, some - not enough, but some - has been made Quest-compatible, and you can run these (official full list here) on your Quest no trouble. Oddly, you have to install these using your phone, as the Oculus Go library isn't available from the Quest. Why they couldn't just make the supported apps (unsupported apps will not work !) available directly in the Quest I don't know, but the procedure is very simple and miles better than letting them all go to waste. Once installed, you can then select them in the Quest like so. Most, but not all, have 6DOF support. I hope they'll add more in time, because some of these are really very good. Many of these are free or low cost. I don't know if it's the developers or Oculus who make whatever modifications are needed, but it'd be nice to see more regular updates on this.

3) Web-based VR content

This is harder to find and generally a lot more experimental - some of it simply doesn't work at all*, for reasons unknown. This is especially odd since it's supposed to be cross-platform by definition. A few things work in the Oculus native browser but not in Firefox's VR browser and vice-versa, so it's a bit strange. And some of it does work but just barely, like Sketchfab (which is a great shame given how many models there are, hopefully there'll be a dedicated Quest app in the future**) while some is just not very good. One that I do really like is Access Mars, which lets you walk around the Martian surface using real data from Curiosity, as well as examine the rover itself.

* Typically you press the headset button and it either doesn't do anything or gives you a hugely distorted display. I've yet to find a case where playing with the VR settings makes any difference - it either works straight away or not at all.

** It works but a at a distractingly low frame rate for all but the simplest of models.When it does work, it's great - I was able to walk around one of my own data sets as though an HI cloud were right in front of me. You can even scale things up interactively... but it's damned hard to scale them back down again. And it's just not well-optimised, so even simple models display at worse resolution/speed than they really should.

My impression is that WebVR has a bright future ahead of it, but it still needs a lot of work. It's difficult to find proper 6DOF content; often experiences labelled as "VR" are really just 360 degree images that aren't even stereo. Matterport is particularly disappointing as they have tonnes of 3D models but only let you explore the 360 images, and there are plenty of other cases where the models are ready to go but the VR setup just hasn't been done.

4) Quill Theatre

It's all too easy to overlook this. I assumed this was just some kind of built-in video player until I decided to check it - just in case - a few days ago. How wrong I was ! This is a whole library of creations from the Quill animation app. It's all 6DOF but not interactive, so this is the place to go if you just want something cool to look at. Some pieces are static models, others are full-on short story animations. Although it's all very cartoony, there's some really good stuff here and it's well worth checking out. Sadly, it isn't possible to create your own Quill content on the Quest, at least not yet.

5) SideQuest

This PC program is an absolute essential. It allows you to load content not officially supported by Oculus, which is a lot more extensive than the standard Quest library, especially free stuff (educational apps developed by amateur enthusiasts, but also demos and pre-releases for commercial games and the like). New content is added daily. It's super easy to use. You install it on PC, connect your Quest with a USB cable (which probably means finding an USB C-A cable or adaptor unless your PC has a USB C port*), then you browse the app to find stuff and install it directly onto the Quest. You can also use it to wirelessly stream content from your headset to your PC (not the other way around) so that everyone can see why you're flailing wildly around the living room... a feature which works far more easily than the Quest's native Casting facility, which I've never been able to get working at all. Oh, and many of these games are in active development, so if you post a review, you often get a quick response from the developers, something I really appreciate. I think I've had a response from every single review I've posted.

* Not to be confused with USB 3.0. USB C has a different physical connection.

6) Oculus Link
Finally, as Shakespeare said : "Oh God, I could be bounded by a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space... if I could only get this bloody Oculus Link to work". The Link system allows you to use your Quest as a display for content being rendered by your more powerful PC, a la the earlier Oculus Rift. The advantage, of course, is that this gives you access to graphically demanding programs, and good graphics are the heart and soul of immersive VR. I opted for the Quest over the cheaper Rift only because my laptop is apparently not powerful enough, though I was still hoping I might be able to get a few basic things to run on it. 

This is my biggest but only disappointment. Despite prolonged effort, I've been unable to get the Link to work at all - I just a momentary black screen which returns me to the main menu. I'm not sure if my cable is just incompatible (it's USB 2.0, not 3.0) or if there's some more technical reason my hardware doesn't support it (e.g. the USB port not going to the GPU ?). I haven't given up quite yet, but numerous experiments with free wireless streaming apps haven't accomplished anything except bugger my microphone setup for some reason. This is extremely frustrating : I can run Skyrim and Rome 2 Total War on maximum - actually more than maximum - at perfectly good frame rates, which are far more graphically demanding than anything on the Quest. Logically I ought to be able to do at least something with the Link system. But I shall leave that for another time. My next big investment may or may not be a high-end gaming PC to get this to work... we'll see.

Right, that's the various sources covered. What about the actual content itself ? Since the most graphically heavy stuff is out, I really only have access to stuff that runs directly on the Quest. This is basically hi-end smartphone quality but in VR. And, my goodness me, that makes the world of difference ! It's very dangerous to judge the content of an app by the screenshot - things that look naff in a 2D view actually look more than decent in 3D. Would better graphics help ? Sure, but there's plenty of fun to be had even running things directly on the Quest. For a good game, you're looking at World of Warcraft-level graphics only a bit more realistic (though a few games have managed to go a cut above that by various means).

But, don't forget the sound ! Surprisingly, the sound delivered by the Quest without headphones is excellent - so much so that I rarely bother using headphones except when there's too much exterior noise. Good sound in VR is even more important than in regular games, since it gives essential clues to what's going on in other directions, and it adds a lot to the sense of "being there". That you can just put on the Quest and not have to worry about messing around with headphones - since built-in speakers in mobile devices are usually utter crap - is a real plus.

Without further ado, here are apps and games I've tried so far.

Tutorials : First Steps, First Contact, Bogo (free, native Quest)

First Steps and First Contact are both Oculus tutorials on how to navigate in 3D VR and use the controllers. They're both excellent. You get to interact with a Short Circuit-style robot, launch model rockets, fly a model airship, dance with a creepy alien, shoot guns, all in a well-rendered environment. Essential for beginners. Bogo is not technically a tutorial but a virtual pet game, but it's so short I count it more of a tutorial than anything else. You get to take care of a strange-looking lizard thing with a fetish for belly rubs, but it's pretty nice for what it is.

Vader Immortal Episodes I & II ($9.99 each, native Quest)

Come for the story, stay for the dojo. From the minute you step on board a ship that's about to make the  jump to hyperspace, you really feel like you're inside the Star Wars universe. The story is short (about 2 hours apiece, I guestimate) but is superbly well-done and absolutely feels like genuine Star Wars canon, but the training dojo is where it really shines. The thing is that hitting things with a lightsabre is innately fun and never gets old. I play every day and I've just reached the final level (40) on the first dojo, and it's good exercise too* : duck and dodge the myriad of droid-based opponents, listen to hear the direction of the next attack, deflect blaster shots with your upgradable lightsabre... if you don't enjoy this, I don't think we can be friends. Worth every penny, and I'll be buying episode 3 as soon as I finish the second dojo or it's on sale. 10/10, easily.

* At least if you're bad at it, like I am. I rely on ducking quite a lot, and after about 30 minutes I'm sweating profusely and often too tired to play for much longer.

Bow Master & Arrows (free, SideQuest)

I've just bought  Elven Assassin, but I first tried these two free archery games. Both are well worth a go, but both have different strengths and weakness. Both follow the same format of defending a village from attacking hordes : you yourself are not in danger, instead you have to shoot the baddies before they enter the village. Both are very cartoonish in style.

Bow Master has a single nice-looking environment and features endless waves of a very wide variety of enemies which have different abilities. You can shoot ordinary arrows, flaming arrows, and even hurl a small number of bombs at your opponents or ignite well-placed explosive barrels. It has three difficulty settings and in most ways it's very well-done, but it has one serious flaw and one fatal. The serious one is that you have to continuously hold the grip button to avoid dropping your bow, which gets uncomfortable rather quickly - the natural inclination is to grip very tightly, which probably isn't good for the controller button. Worse, it doesn't appear to be possible to lose... once the orcs reach the main hall, it never gets destroyed. I stood around for a good ten minutes but nothing happened. It does, however, have a nice feature of displaying your current score and accuracy level very unobtrusively on a panel low down on the surrounding wall.

Arrows has three levels which you can unlock in different lighting levels at different difficulties. The environment isn't as nice as Bow Master, but you can teleport yourself to different vantage points, including one with a cannon. The variety of enemies isn't quite as great as Bow Master, but it doesn't have as many serious flaws. The collision detection could be better though, as many people have noticed that direct hits don't always do anything. The arrows are also slightly more difficult to load and fire than in Bow Master. But the enemy vikings have collision between each other, which slows them down, and shooting higher-level enemies also causes them to slow down (rather than speed up as in Bow Master).

Both of these games are tremendous fun but have various annoyances. 7/10 from me.

Elven Assassin ($14.99, native Quest)

Having so much fun with the free archery games, I was very curious about this graphically superior paid version. I got this on sale for $10 and it's definitely worth that. The graphics are indeed far better than either of the free archery games - being thumped by a giant orc or flamed by an enormous dragon is a fantastic experience. Contrary to this earlier review, by Quest standards the graphics are competent, though slightly higher resolution textures would be nice. And you get to be outside (in three different environments), which is quite unusual since large-scale environments are challenging to render.

For gameplay this one generally has the best of both worlds of the free games : the collision detection works, you get to teleport to different locations (cleverly designed so that no location is perfect), and you don't have to hold the damn button down to hold the bow. The feedback from the controllers is perfect : Bow Master doesn't have any, Arrows has simple vibration, but Elven Assassin cleverly varies the feedback so it feels like the bow is sticking slightly as you draw it back. It's really quite viscerally satisfying. The variety of enemies is good, though not as creative as Bow Master, while the different spells offer a nice way to keep things fresh. And you do need to use these to progress to the higher levels. It also has multiplayer, which I've only tried the once but found very enjoyable. In co-op you get to be part of a team defending the town, which is a lot more believable than being one lone dude taking out the oncoming hordes.

It's not without weaknesses however. You can upgrade your equipment but it's purely for show (a shame - the different helmets could at least affect visibility). The enemies can attack you (they can only attack the village in the other games), which gives extra tension, but the red-out effect is too strong : I want to get a good look at that giant dragon, dammit ! The main problem is the sound. It's... good enough, mostly, but only just. Somehow the directionality doesn't feel very 3D or immersive, and the music is neither loud nor epic enough. When the orcs reach the gates, some dude with an annoying voice keeps shouting, "they're breaking in !" with no variation at all. And when you lose, the game just ends. There's no sorrowful horn or music, you just get the "game over" screen. There's a token bit of dust and a crashing sound from the village, but it's nowhere near enough.

All in all, hugely addictive, and I'd pay for extra levels. Somewhere more atmospheric, preferably with a thunderstorm, would be well worth it. I'll give this one 8/10, pushing 9.

Matter VR (free, SideQuest)

This astronomy god game probably wins the "most potential" award. You create planets and stars of different masses by holding down a button, then you can launch them on different trajectories. It appears to be a true n-body simulator, so you can end up with some bewildering orbits. Planets can collide and explode, stars eventually supernova and leave behind a remnant (including black holes for the most massive), and sometimes collisions produce rings. The challenge is to create the most complex system possible. Like lightsabres and archery, the developers have here found that crucial aspect of something that's innately fun and doesn't get old. All it needs to bring this one to its full flowering is a more structured approach and some guidance on where to aim. 8/10 from me, looking forward to updates.

Masterworks Journey Through History (free, Oculus Go converted to full 6DOF on the Quest)

This is the right way to do a history app. Photogrammetry gives much more realistic results than modelling. Even if the textures could be a little sharper (especially the background images), and some more background audio noise would be welcome, you still get a very good sense of "being there". You get four different sites to explore, all of which are well-prepared. As well as the 3D models, there's also a selection of nicely done 360 3D photographs to show the sites from other perspectives. And there's plenty of narration, so it takes quite a bit of time to go through the whole thing. It would be nice, though, if the narrators were a bit more enthusiastic and talked more about history than the site-specific details - considering how impressive it is to feel like you're standing in these ancient monuments, the narration is a bit dry. Still, 9/10 from me - there desperately needs to be more stuff like this !

Omnigallery (free, SideQuest)

Another really good "history" app though this one is art-focused. The idea of an art gallery in VR sounds a bit daft at first, but it really isn't. Slipping on a headset is way more convenient than actually going to a gallery (especially since it's free), and you get to examine paintings - and more importantly sculptures - at their actual size. The scan resolution of both paintings and sculptures is really impressive. What this particular app does really well is provide narration about many of the exhibits, and this alone makes it better than most physical galleries, which in my experience tell you sod all. Actually being told something about the painting, its subject, and why it's important makes high art so much more friggin' accessible. Even though I'd like more narration and history, I'm giving this one 10/10 just for that.

Anne Frank's house (free, native Quest)

Another history exhibit, this time using conventional 3D modelling. You get a narrated or free-form interactive tour, which is excellently done. You can view this in a web browser here, but needless to say, being able to walk around it is far better. I can't really fault this, so 10/10.

Apollo 11 ($9.99, native Quest)

I bought this on sale for $5 for the Moon landing anniversary. It's nice, but $10 is really a bit much. Considerable effort has gone into accurately modelling the interior of the spacecraft, and it's fun to sit alongside the astronauts as venture into space. There's a couple of interactive sections where you get to dock the modules and land the ship, but I couldn't help feeling that these could have been a lot more interesting with only a little extra work. Most of the experience is passive. The graphics are generally good, especially the space scenes, though the astronauts facial expressions are frankly hilariously bad. A life-size vibrating astronaut sat next to you with his mouth half-open and his eyes half-closed ? It's a bit disconcerting to say the least ! Overall it's worth $5, so I give it 7/10. If they added, say, a chance to driver the lunar rover and more interactive functions through the journey it would easily be worth $10.

Mission ISS (free, native Quest)

A much more complete space experience, albeit one that feels more like a demo than a full product. You get to explore a very nice model of the ISS, including a really excellent mock-up of the cupola where I felt this would be genuinely useful in astronaut training. In fact manipulating the robot arm felt so difficult as to be too realistic, and I gave up in frustration. It's a bit of a shame - the environment is so good, the attention to detail is clear (with plenty of video clips to explain each section), but in other ways it falls flat. The narrator keeps telling me I'm going the wrong way even though I'm not, the robot arm needs either much better instructions or be made simpler to operate, and moving around is unnecessarily difficult and can induce strong motion sickness. A teleport option and/or greater air resistance to slow you down would be a huge improvement, even if it's not realistic. I had the most fun when somehow, due to a glitch, I found myself freely floating outside the station, calmly and serenely exploring the place without the bloody narrator getting on my nerves. 6/10 from me, but could so easily be bumped up to 10.

Multiverse (free, native Quest)

An odd but nice attempt to make an astronomy museum a place for socialising. Features a gigantic museum full of different rooms exploring the Solar System and space technology. The models are decent but a bit low resolution. Very informative, and it's always fun to hurl stuff at planets. There's even a history section with a model of Stonehenge you can wander around in. The man downside is that it's too reliant on the traditional gallery format and doesn't use models anywhere near as effectively as it could. Yes, you do need some big old-fashioned wall-panel displays, but VR can do so much more than that. Let me sit inside a Mercury capsule, or play golf on the lunar surface ! Don't tell me about Titan, show me the surface from the Huygens probe ! And why there's a social aspect to this I'm not really sure... a museum is hardly the most natural place to meet people. Still, a worthy effort - 7/10.

Notes On Blindness (free, native Quest)

You'd think that an experience of being blind would be easy enough on the Quest - just turn everything off except the audio. But this narrated, slightly interactive experience is so very much better than that. The narration, taken from diaries, describes how nothing exists except when heard. Simple but compelling graphics show us a variety of places as revealed through sound. The narration is top notch and the visuals are beautiful (the sound of course is perfect). It was so interesting an experience that I'd certainly do it again. 10/10.

The Key (free, native Quest)

Another slightly interactive emotion-driven experience. A more conventionally abstract (stylistic) approach than Notes on Blindness, it's a well-told and engaging tale. There's a photogrammetric environment at the end which further illustrates how this needs to be more widely-utilised : it lets the Quest leapfrog its limited rendering power into highly realistic settings. This experience is good, but at bit too stylised for me, and one of the main interactive features just didn't work. 8/10.

Puzzling Places (free, SideQuest)

More photogrammetry, but this time for a 3D jigsaw puzzle. Simple concept, perfectly executed, with nice little audio emanating from certain regions. Moving pieces around and dropping them in 3D space feels quite futuristic. Only one puzzle so far but it's rightly getting rave reviews - an almost therapeutic experience. 10/10.

Project Terminus (free, SideQuest)

Free prototype/demo of a Half-Life style FPS. Absolutely terrifying and I've yet to complete it. Realistic and highly immersive environments, with some impressive outdoor scenes at the start. This is what I'm longing for VR to do more of - really make me feel like I'm in a whole other place to explore, even if that exploration is limited to a tiny region. 

As a game, this plays well, with the minor difficulty that using your phone is a bit awkward at first. Lighting effects are excellent, sound is great, and did I mention it was terrifying ? It is. I also got a bit motion sick the first time I tried it - I've yet to get used to smooth scrolling. The second time I reduced the speed and this helped enormously, but a teleport option would be nice*. I'm leaving this one unrated because I couldn't complete it, but a must-try for horror fans.  

* Someone should develop a specialist get-over-motion-sickness app, where you could move around increasingly complex environments in increasingly nauseating ways. By all accounts overcoming motion sickness is entirely possible, but it takes effort.

High Seas (free, SideQuest)

From the makers of Project Terminus, experience life on a tiny boat stuck in the Arctic ocean. Navigate icebergs and fix problems. Great environments, but the gameplay is too limited - not bad, just limited. Each time you collide with an iceberg your boat develops a problem and you have to go and fix it (including the extremely strange approach of hitting a fire with a fire extinguisher, which is... worrying). If at least the iceberg density were to be lower, you'd have navigation as part of the gameplay, but it's so dense that collisions are rapidly inevitable, making trying to avoid them an exercise in futility. Good concept with brilliantly tense sound, but needs a lot more fleshing out (and removal of the CGI arms, which just look bizarre and get distracting). 6/10 from me - good so far, but needs development.

Operation Serpens (free, SideQuest)

Like shooters but hate motion sickness ? This is the game for you ! You play a member of a generic, very polite army unit (your commander greets with with a friendly "hello !") charged with taking out assorted generic terrorists. You're in a fixed location, e.g. firing from a building into a street, or behind a door into a room, so you can move around if you want but you don't need to move much at all - no need for scrolling, and indeed that feature is not enabled. You get a variety of guns and accessories, including a bulletproof shield. Decent graphics (cartoony but not overly-so in style), good sound, lots of fun. Potentially quite addictive, though holding my arms straight out for long periods gets very tiring. Challenging but not absurdly so. I'm giving this 8/10.

Dino Encounters (free, SideQuest)

This one definitely falls in the category "better than it should be". The concept is solid : in each environment, you walk (and/or teleport) through a short narrated tour to reach a dinosaur doing its thing. The environment is huge, the narration is quite good (apart from the same annoying welcome message each and every time), and the atmosphere looks nice. A big positive is the background sound, which I found very immersive. The downsides are that it's overly-ambitious. The graphics are crude (not awful, but crude), the dinosaur animations simplistic. If they'd made smaller, more detailed environments with just one or two dinosaurs, rather than whole packs of them roaming across silly-looking prehistoric landscapes, the experience would have been much better. On the other hand, you get to hand-feed life-size dinosaurs, and that counts for a lot in my book. 6/10.

Wonders of the World (free, Oculus Go converted to full 6DOF on the Quest)

In contrast, this one is very much worse than it should be. It's a history app about various notable historical sites, but the execution is poor. Even in the menu section the background image is far too low resolution. Throughout, the graphics are not merely cartoony - which would be understandable - but also highly stylistic, which utterly ruins the immersion (as does the poor, mostly very American narration). Like this dinosaur app, this one is also overly-ambitious. Instead of just letting you explore the sites, you play the role of some totally unknown character with terrible voice acting. Look, I'm here to visit the Colossus of Rhodes, why in the world would I care about some unknown girl's dead father ? I couldn't even see the Colossus from the front ! Bloody daft if you ask me. 2/10. 

Sports Scramble (free demo, native Quest)

At $30 the full version is way too expensive, but the free demo (bowling, tennis, and baseball) is fun. Happy little cartoon characters with a zany twist on each sport : for example, the baseball bat can turn into a fish, which I found hilarious. It's a really stupid game, too difficult, but quite enjoyable. If it was $5 I'd consider buying it, but $30 is hell no I'm not an idiot. 5/10, mainly because they've got the price catastrophically wrong.

Black Holes Light and Matter (free, SideQuest)

Fun, very small educational proof-of-concept app exploring how black holes affect light and matter. You get to examine lensing or orbits. With lensing you see a black hole in front of you that distorts the background image. With orbits you get to see how the black hole affects the trajectories of orbiting material. In each case you can set the size of the black hole and a few other parameters. It's nicely done, but it would a lot better if you could set parameters using the controllers, e.g. grabbing the black hole to scale it, launching particles with the controller. I'll leave this unrated since it's proof-of-concept.

Elixir (free, native Quest)

Proof-of-concept spellcasting thingy. Annoying narration, quite nice cartoony graphics, worth a go but nothing special. Needs a more fully-formed environment and stuff to do to be engaging. 6/10.

Epic Roller Coaster (free demo, native Quest)

If you want to experience extreme vertigo, then this is the game for you. You ride around on a bunch of ENORMOUS roller coasters, optionally trying to shoot targets as you go. The sensation of motion and height is, well, epic, and I'd recommend sitting down for this one in case you fall over. Surprisingly, I didn't get any feeling of nausea from this one, just an unprecedented feeling of ohholycrapImgonnacrashImgonnacrash ! Powerful, pointless stuff. It would be nice if I could see how much the paid coasters actually cost before having to sign up though. 7/10.

Dead Body Falls & Angest (free, Oculus Go converted to full 6DOF on Quest)
Two similar-in-style-and-format games from the same developers. Both are extremely well-made with engaging storytelling and immersive environments, good sound, and a pleasing graphical style. Dead Body Falls feels like a murder mystery in an old hotel whereas Angest is about a cosmonaut on a deep space mission. Both are surrealist, especially Dead Body Falls, and it's here where both come unstuck. I still have no idea what's even supposed to have happened inside the DBF hotel (literally I haven't got a soddin' clue), much less whodunnit. It's got some good scares along the way, but from start to finish it doesn't make a lick of sense. Angest is a bit better, but both would benefit enormously from exposition. I do plan to replay both though, so maybe it'll be second time lucky. I'll give both 7/10.

Videos

A few pre-rendered 360 VR videos worth mentioning. The Jurassic World video is totally amazeballs - if you want to know what it would feel like to have a T-Rex roar in your face, try this without delay. The Felix & Paul Studios app has a selection of videos of which I've only tried the one where Barack and Michelle Obama give a tour of the White House , which I enjoyed. Dear Angelica is a nicely made but overly-schmultzy short story about death (but with interesting animations); Henry is a silly story about a hedgehog narrated by Frodo Baggins; Tested has Mythbuster's Adam Savage explaining some really quite dull stuff about his workshop, and Ecosphere has some good uplifting things about humans interacting with nature. There are tonnes and tonnes more, but the Jurassic World one is my clear favourite.

Conclusion : yes, we're living in the future

We may not have actual sci-fi holograms free-floating in space, but we do have virtual holograms. VR is now firmly in the realm of being accessible and usable by the masses. Is it useful ?

In my opinion no, not yet - at least not for everyday office work. I tried a few "productivity" apps which are supposed to allow you to use your PC in VR in some more productive way, but I couldn't see the point of any of them. Compared to a big hi-res monitor with a keyboard and mouse, the effort of using VR controllers on the comparatively low-resolution headset display is not even remotely worth it. For that we'll need a substantial leap forward in resolution and true AR, not VR, because the plain fact is you need to be able to see your keyboard clearly. This is certainly possible, but we're not there yet.

But is VR fun ? Hell yes, with bells on. Is it just going to be a flash in the pan like 3D TV ? Oh gods, I hope not... the experience is too awesome for it to fade away. It's truly an introvert's dream : hide away in a virtual environment where you can do as you please, see things you couldn't otherwise see... why would anyone in their right mind not want this ?

Not only gaming : it makes exercising about two hundred billion times more fun. Lift weights ? Hell no, fight robots with lasers for eyes instead ! And the potential for education is huge. Imagine teaching history by showing kids what the world looked like in different eras, or how physics works on scales untestable in a classroom, or explore non-Euclidean geometry, or teaching painting with a whole new array of brushes impossible in the real world, or anatomy, or seeing the world with the eyes and perspective of an animal... the technology for all of this already exists, only the price remains a barrier. But the potential is there, no doubt about it.

It should be said that there differing opinions some of which are truly strange. Some describe Vader Immortal, for instance, as meaning that an "experience" is just a euphemism for "underdeveloped game". Others describe things like Anne Frank's House as "not suitable for VR" or, even weirder, complain about the small number of objects you can interact with. Because being able to mess up Anne Frank's house would make the experience... better... how ? I guess some people just don't get it. I'm biased in the other direction, mind you, but there is currently a lack of truly "you can't do this except in VR" apps (as opposed to, "this is better because it's in VR" apps, of which there are legion) and the price is a barrier.

VR deserves to go at least as fully mainstream as gaming consoles or even PCs. It should be normal to say, "I'll enjoy that more in VR" or "that'll make more sense in VR", just as people opt for blu-rays over regular DVDs. For that to happen will probably take one more iteration of the technology (e.g. combined VR/AR, substantially lower price, lighter equipment, greater compatibility with existing hardware) and/or a suite of "only fundamentally possible in VR" apps. If and when that happens, it's hard to see what would stop it from taking the world by storm. Should you buy one already ? Yes, if your main purpose is gaming, but no not quite yet if you want other experiences. Of course, it's easy to what what should happen, but much harder to predict what market forces will actually do...

Thus ends my gushing review. I'm itching to learn how to convert various Blender projects into VR (including my Arecibo model, which thanks to lockdown is ready to go), it's just a matter of tearing myself away from the existing stuff long enough to sit down and get on with it. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some orcs to kill.

An Obligatory Rant About Game Of Thrones (With Spoilers)

At least I assume it's obligatory for anyone with a blog. They probably come chop your arms off or something if you don't.

This post contains SPOILERS. If you don't want the show to be SPOILED, stop reading NOW. I mean it.






Seriously, there are SPOILERS ahead.







You haven't reached the SPOILERS yet. Keep scrolling.







Keep on scrolling.






Keep scrolling...








Okay, I think that should be fair warning to anyone who hasn't seen how it ends yet. I've got this news feed app on my phone which sometimes shows me articles with spoilers IN THE FRICKIN' TITLE. People who write such things ought to be drowned and beaten, and then drowned again just to make sure.

Anyway, the internet is full of people who hate the final season for some reason. I am not one of them. I, for one, want to hear other people's stories. If I wanted to write my own, I'd do that instead. Okay, there are exceptions, like the god-awful last five minutes of True Blood where I wanted to smack the writers in the mouth because come on what the hell were they thinking, but how anyone can feel that way about Game of Thrones completely escapes me.

The Battle of Winterfell was bloomin' epic and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.

That's not to say it didn't have the odd duff moment here and there, but personally, I felt it evolved in a natural and self-consistent way for the entire run. There were parts I felt could have been executed better (especially, in season 7, Littlefinger's... well, execution), but I have no qualms with any of the events that happened. All the faults I can see (which are not many and not major) are in presentation, not with the plotline.

A good, interesting development in any story (or character) is when they do something that's unexpected, unpredictable, but absolutely consistent with established patterns. Similarly, morally ambiguous characters are interesting when they choose to do both good and bad actions but in an internally consistent way. Game of Thrones did that in spades. Freakin' SPADES, people.

Yes, true, some people did predict certain events. But lots of people also predicted a whole bunch of other ridiculous shenanigans* that simply didn't happen, so it still counts as genuinely unpredictable.
Bran on the Iron Throne ? I thought was a bloody daft idea when people suggested it. And yet... after the fact, it does make a certain amount of weird sense. Could it have been explained better ? Yes, probably. On reflection I do think the final season - and possibly the seventh as well - was too short and might have been better with a regular ten episode run, but that's about all I'd change. If the writers didn't think they had enough material for an extra season, then chances are that getting them to write a whole other season would be a tremendously bad idea.

* I'd be willing to bet that someone, somewhere, predicted that the final scene would be Melisandre turning Jon Snow into a cactus and doing unspeakable things with said cactus.

Anyway, my money (if someone had held a gun to my head, which fortunately they didn't) was on the more obvious choice of Jon Snow. Everyone loved him, he didn't want to be king, he had the most legitimate claim to the throne, and was a proven battle commander and warrior. But a warrior is the very last thing anyone wants after a massacre, and legitimate claims clearly don't guarantee a good ruler. And of course there are extenuating circumstances : large numbers of formerly-enemy soldiers want him dead. So Jon Snow may be the more obvious narrative choice, but not actually the more realistic one.

Besides, Jon Snow wouldn't have broken the wheel, he'd have just kept in spinning more gently for a while. The lords of Westeros needed a major change, not a better version of what they'd had before. They weren't ready to accept full-on democracy, but they made a massive change to the system of government even so.

Democracy : what a hilarious idea.

But have they chosen the right king ? Probably. Originally I thought Bran would have been a stupid choice that made as much sense as... as.... as a...very.... senseless thing : a physically weak character in a war-dominated world, who's generally been ineffective, done largely bugger all, and has never expressed any previous interest in ruling anyone. I still think he should have done more besides having a bloody good memory and a weird affinity for birds : some more dramatic, obvious achievement would have made the final narrative work better. But the reasons for choosing Bran were good ones, but became apparent only after the event actually happened. Which is what a good plot twist is all about.

Daenerys set out to break the wheel. Well, the wheel was made from the flaws of hereditary monarchy, which is always vulnerable to problems of the luck of the draw. And after Kings Landing had been ground into dust so fine it'll give everyone sneezing fits, and consequently there being zero appetite for continued warmongering, choosing a near-omniscient disabled young three-eyed raven isn't crazy. He clearly knows everything he could possibly ever need to rule. He's also not going to go charging into battle*. He's never hurt anyone. Absolutely no-one has anything against him. He's got a heroic story (even if it's not quite as heroic as it should have been). Seems like a good choice, given the circumstances.

* Although being wheelchair-bound doesn't stop Mad Hamish in the Discworld novels.

And anyway, Jon Snow is clearly Batman : the hero Westeros deserves, but not the one it needs right now. Appointing Jon would have only reinforced the baseless legitimacy of the hereditary monarchy, and is just too obvious for a show that delights in plausible shock twists. It also tends to go for the, "what would happen with actual people doing this ?" angle more than it does "what would make for a good story ?".

Still, a major character like Jon has to have a major impact, and he does. Killing Daenerys was Jon's legacy, instituting a better ruler rather than taking power for himself. It's a very Jon thing to do.

Which brings us at last to Danny. Say what you will, I thought Daenerys' turn to evil was done extremely well. It could have been improved if they'd had a little more time, but the transition felt natural. Danny has always had an ambiguous moral element of a stern ruler : you never quite know if her threats are meant purely for deterrence or if she really does think people deserve the extremely harsh retribution she occasionally inflicted. What Danny says she wants - a better world, peace in our time, etc. - is all very well, but what everyone forgets is what she's prepared to do to get it.

Everyone seems to think the "let it be fear" line is critical - they're not wrong, but more important is Tyrion's summary of the evil men she executed on the road to power. The obvious cliché quotes are the "first they came for the socialists...", and ,"he who fights with monsters should take care he does not become a monster himself". Daenerys has never, ever had any qualms about killing those she perceives as enemies. Getting her to show mercy is like getting blood from a stone. She often claims to want criticism but rarely actually takes it on board - only partly because she usually turns out to be right in the end. She kept threatening fire and blood, and it's been abundantly clear that she's only held back because Tyrion begged her not to. It shouldn't come as any surprise that something eventually snapped.

Danny's decision to massacre the innocents is neither pre-planned nor a sudden impulse : it's both. In the after show the writers describe Danny as being partially a victim of circumstance, and had her life been different she might not have turned out the way she does. Compare her with the ever-virtuous Jon Snow. He starts off assuming he will achieve nothing in life at all, so anything he succeeds in is a nice bonus. Danny, on the other hand, starts from a much more complex position of abused privilege; molested, raped, abused, told she's destined for rule and loved by the people for her sheer legitimacy. Once she achieves power she really has no-one at all to tell her when to stop : there are advisers to tell her what she shouldn't do, but not what she can't do. Jon Snow, on the other hand, always has someone telling him to fuck off. And that's probably what you need to stop from turning to the dark side.

So the way I see Danny's thought processes on the back of the dragon is that she feels betrayed by the world. She's been told - and apparently believed, though god knows why - that the people love her. She's already lost huge numbers of troops and two dragons in her quest to "liberate" the people, i.e. bring about regime change in Westeros. She's been betrayed by Jon Snow and Varys, is deeply suspicious about Tyrion, and has seen that the whole people of the North will never accept her. In the heat of battle, that's enough - more than enough ! - for her to view surrender as just another betrayal, another of Tryion's clever plans to keep the wheel turning. If she has to choose the people over her own destiny, Danny would only ever make one choice : they become in her mind her enemy, and she only ever has one way of dealing with enemies.

Which is not and never has been Jon Snow's approach. He knows that sometimes you have to make peace with your enemies (as he did with the Wildlings) but sometimes you have to kill them (as he did with... umm.... well, the Wildlings, for starters). Whereas Danny's choice leads her to become the monster she was trying to fight, for Jon Snow this isn't the case at all. Danny fights for herself because she believes in her own myth. Jon Snow fights for the realm, an ideal of justice that everyone should obey, and that means fighting against literally anyone trying to harm it (he'd probably fall on his own sword if he thought it would help). So Jon has both an ideal of the common good, a personal moral code as to how he himself should act, and people telling him to, "fuck off, ya big bastard". Danny doesn't have any of those.

Finally, if Danny lives there would be nothing but a reign of terror : for Jon to take extreme action to prevent that doesn't make him the same. Rather, if he hadn't taken action, he'd have been guilty of aiding the rise of the worst tyrant in living memory. He who fights with monsters does not inevitably become a monster himself. And - making no apologies for ending this on a political point - when we have political figures who are openly racist but can't stand anyone saying nasty things about them, who feel comfortable in denigrating whole groups of people but can't stand the merest criticism themselves, well, I for one think this is much-needed message in the world.

Enlightenment.... soon ?

Immediately after finishing Niall Ferguson's rather gloomy network-based approach to history, I finally embarked on one of Stephen Pinker's happy-clappy books. Having seen much criticism of Pinker beforehand, I felt duty-bound to give him a go. After all, his main claim that standards of living have been largely improving throughout history seems like a no-brainer, and objecting to this feels like objecting to... I dunno, cute cuddly kitties or something.

Well, this is certainly true as far as materialistic concerns go. Today the minimum standard of living includes things like access to freeview digital television, whereas not so long ago it was more like being able to survive past age three and not eat your own dung. That the absolute standards have increased seems so obvious that I'm going to skip over this, even though it's by far the biggest section of the book. Kudos to Pinker for showing it statistically, but it hardly seems necessary.

Instead I want to tackle something much harder to directly measure, something that appears to have slipped through Pinker's detailed statistics. Perhaps civic harmony isn't something you can even measure at all. As the Upanishads say :

All those who are devoted to what is not real knowledge enter into blind darkness; those who delight only in knowledge, enter, as it were, into greater darkness.

The "too long didn't read" version of this post is that Stephen Pinker is utterly incapable of understanding this quote.


What's it like to read ?

It's not that Pinker doesn't attempt to tackle some more nebulous aspects of society : happiness, knowledge, freedoms, etc. It's that when he does so it feels like there's some critical aspect of the whole thing that he just doesn't (perhaps can't) understand. That's not to say he doesn't have some very good points, because he does. It's more that he veers wildly from insightful to amateurishly stupid, which makes the whole book difficult to deal with. I was constantly wondering about the claim in the blurb that "Stephen Pinker is one of the world's most influential thinkers", or of the gushing praise from the review quotes.

I often felt that Pinker was writing in a modern form of Gibbonish : using words as weapons so that argument is impossible. He's unapologetic for his opinions and ideologies to an absurd degree, refusing to acknowledge that they are opinions and ideologies. By way of contrast, I recently read Marc Morris's Norman Conquest. That books handles uncertainty with extreme deftness, making the missing information something interesting to examine rather than an inconvenience to be carefully avoided. Pinker, instead, simply cannot handle uncertainty or the prospect of different interpretations. All gaps must be plugged, all avenues of attack hastily plastered over. By completely omitting any hint of disagreement, except for the most crude and obvious alternatives, he avoids permitting the reader any line of argument at all. And since he's not as good at this as Edward Gibbon, it makes it a very frustrating experience.

It's made worse because the whole idea that society is getting more rational and less certain rests, by very definition, on its increased ability to analyse and handle uncertainty. Pinker, on the other hand, is almost at the level of, "you must think for yourself and agree with me !" as NewsThump once satirised.

And it's not that Pinker doesn't have some very good points or at least something provocative to say - he undeniably does. To be fair, since the, "everything is collapsing into ruin" vibe is infinitely more prevalent in the media, that point of view absolutely deserves a good hard kick in the teeth. But Pinker ends up fighting the narrow-mindedness he doesn't approve of with another kind of narrow-mindedness of which he does. His opinions and methods may be different to what he's refuting but something much more fundamental feels far too familiar.  For want of a better word, it's a strange and very perverse sort of dogmatism, just replacing one kind of ideology with another.

To his credit, Pinker is clear, lucid, and highly readable. The book is also incredibly focused and never strays from its central goal or narrative. I was never bored, even when the points raised were obvious. That said, Pinker's humour generally escapes me and usually feels weird and forced, like, say, randomly talking about GREAT BIG BOOBIES or enraged lemons or cataclysmic caterpillars just for the sake of enlivening the text. By his own admission he's not good at mass persuasion but I would hope this is more true than he would like to believe.

In the end, it's not so much good or bad as it is downright weird. I give it 6/10 overall, but it's highly variable with some chapters being as low as 2 and others maybe as high as 8 or 9.


What does the book say ?

Lots of things, some of which I've covered already. Overall I had the impression he plays fast and loose with the data : countries and data ranges (especially time) feel as though they've been selected arbitrarily, or worse chosen to support the desired conclusions. The book attempts to present a global view but often becomes extremely America-centric. Its conclusions and interpretations feel plausible but not robust; data completely lacks error bars and definitions are sometimes completely inadequate. It's also not at all clear which parts (if any) Pinker was personally involved in. That's a problem, because I'd like to know on what basis Pinker claims statistical expertise for a book primarily about statistics. It feels a lot like he's claiming an impossible breadth and depth of knowledge and never makes it clear what he holds to be his opinion and what he regards as fact (more on that later).

Pinker's central thesis is that Enlightenment philosophy has made absolutely everything better in every conceivable way. It would have been far better if he'd explicitly narrowed the range of data significantly, so as to present a much more homogeneous view and be in a much better position to see what works and what doesn't. His conclusions would have been massively strengthened if he'd looked for some exceptions that prove the rule, rather than taking the idea that everything is improving quite so bloody literally.

This all makes me sound like I despise the book, which I don't. If you're not following my other blog, let me briefly recap some of his more interesting sections :

• He notes that there are different interpretations as to the purpose of democracy - for example direct rule by the people, the peaceful transfer of power, and hearing grievances. Sometimes these purposes are at odds with each other.
• He is strongly in favour of incremental rather than revolutionary progress. I generally agree with this, but as he notes in the very interesting chapter on populism, overall cultural improvements are not necessarily uniform. This means that large demographics can persist in retaining very different values to everyone else and can, if provoked, lash out.
• He believes the underlying causes of improvements will eventually win out in the end. This, I believe, doesn't necessarily account for the strong variation between generations all that well, and seems to neglect his own conclusions about so many people feeling culturally left behind. That values are changing for the majority doesn't mean that a significant minority can't cause backsliding - after all, history shows that some disastrous choices have simply resulted in disasters. It's far from easy to tell the currents of history from the mere surface eddies.

There are three aspects of the book I found really irritating and kept thinking, "but you've got it all backwards, Pinker !". One was the chapter on environmentalism, which seems positively dangerous. The other two are more moralistic themes that run throughout the whole book : the nature of complaints about progress, and whether society really has become such a lovely place to live as Pinker thinks.


1) To complain or not to complain, that is the question

Pinker often says that progressives hate progress, essentially meaning that they want out-and-out revolutions whereas real progress is made incrementally. Yet it often feels like Pinker actively despises the crucial engine of progress : criticism. Throughout the book he rails against those who say the world is getting worse. While he does have many good arguments against painting a picture of the world as already sliding into ruin and decay, he never addresses what makes a complaint legitimate and what makes it counterproductive. He realises that activism and calls for (de)regulation have often driven improvements, but most of the time he just ends up ranting about how silly it is to whine about the state of the world when clearly everything's amazing and nobody's happy.

To be fair, I used to subscribe to that view myself. I think now I'm able to understand where I went wrong : it's the default nature of our comparisons to be relative, recent and local. Yes, aeroplanes are amazing - in a sense. But doors and wheels and light bulbs are amazing too, and no-one thinks we should be continuously standing awestruck by their majestic presence. If we did that, we'd be struck dumb every time we realised that the roof over our heads was keeping us dry. It wouldn't take long before we all became a bunch of raving lunatics, albeit very happy ones, which I suppose is better than a bunch of depressed lunatics but only slightly.

So aeroplanes are indeed amazing, but a more psychologically useful statement is that aeroplanes were amazing when they were invented. These days they are as technologically developed and ordinary as doors. We absolutely should take them for granted, because we've got them licked (sure we can still improve but the basics are there). Pinker says that it's the nature of progress to cover its tracks as we shift our standards, yet simultaneously he wants us to think in more absolute terms, that "we're not as happy as we ought to be".

The problem is you can't have it both ways. Pinker actively wants us to shift our standards, saying explicitly that this is what progress looks like. He even calls criticism of consumerism "thinly veiled snobbery", calling those who are against it hypocrites who simply indulge in their own form of consumerism :

The elites who condemn is tend themselves to be conspicuous consumers of exorbitant luxuries like hardcore books, good food and wine, live artistic performances, overseas travel, and Ivy-class education for their children.

I think it's a complete false equivalence to equate reading books with the vain pursuit of adornments, not to mention that many of those things are accessible to everyone and decried by no one. This is a classic Pinker straw man attack*, picking out weak arguments that few if any actually believe, whilst completely omitting more intelligent counterarguments that could be raised. More on consumerism itself later.

* In debates, a "straw man" fallacy is committed when someone attacks an argument their opponent didn't actually make. But in a book, where you get to pick which arguments you want to respond to, I think it's helpful to generalise this as the case of deliberately attacking weaker arguments when there are other, much stronger arguments against something. It creates a false impression of your opponents as being much stupider than they actually are.

Still, though he chooses terrible examples to support it, he does have a point that shifting standards are a desirable consequence of progress. The problem is that it necessarily follows that the topics and nature of complaints will shift too, but he never tries to develop a consistent framework - never defining helpful from unhelpful criticism or enlightening us as to what kinds of complaints he approves of. Certainly some complaints do smell strongly of people being over-indulged jerks who deserve a good kick in the shins, but others are inevitable thanks to progress. And without a system to distinguish the two, Pinker gets very confused and conflicted. As I said, you can't have it both ways.

For example, he decries warnings of the Y2K bug as being, "barely more serious than the lettering on the sidewalk prophet's sandwich board", citing dire apocalyptic prophecies which again smacks of a straw man (similarly, while I don't believe in a robot apocalypse, Pinker's arguments against it were so weak it almost made me think again). Sure, some loonies claimed the Y2K would be an instrument of divine wrath, but loonies would probably say that about my gonads if they thought it'd get them attention. Crazies are easy to refute by definition, because they're, well, crazies. Saying stupid stuff is what crazy people do.

A wiser approach is to seek out the warnings coming from the most intelligent people and listen to them instead. Indeed, most people seem to think that more serious, credible warnings resulted in fixes being applied so that the Y2K crisis never happened - a self unfulfilling prophecy. Similar claims have been made for limiting the damage to the rainforest and saving critically endangered animals from extinction. For example with still only a few thousand left in the wild, there appears with hindsight to have been every chance the tiger could have gone extinct years ago if not for the warnings of activists. The fact that it didn't does not mean the warnings were unnecessary - quite the opposite !

Sometimes dire warnings are necessary calls to action, but sometimes they do more harm than good. The whole book would have been substantially improved if Pinker had made the effort to work out the general conditions for complaining to have positive and negative effects, instead of just whining about whinging.

The irony that I'm complaining about his complaints about complaining is not lost on me.

What's particularly vexing is that sometimes he does, very eloquently, acknowledge the value of complaining, e.g. :

As we care more about humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of  how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen... But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years,we become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past.

... whereas at other times this notion gets a brusque dismissal. It's very frustrating.

As for Louis C.K.'s tirade about aeroplanes, yes, flying through the sky at 600 mph is impressive. But being stuck in a metal tube with very little room to move, bad food, low air pressure and hydration, minimal entertainment and no real possibility of sleeping for 12 hours... that's not impressive -  no-one has ever been impressed by those conditions. And we don't experience the sensation of travelling at 600 mph, so that purely intellectual knowledge is never going to override the much harder, more direct certainty of being tired and cramped. It's the age-old dilemma of knowing when to be happy with what you've got and when you can realistically expect something much better.

This isn't just about modern conveniences either. Pinker has several darker moments, such as when he's similarly dismissive of concerns about welfare in the Industrial Revolution. This is a major moral point he desperately fails to address.

The appropriate standard in considering the plight of the poor in industrialising countries is the set of alternatives available to them where and when they live... Radlet observes that, "while working on a factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labour, it is often better than  the granddaddy of all sweatshops : working in the fields as an agricultural day labourer."

Which feels like a lame attempt to justify unnecessary suffering and cruelty in the name of incremental progress. There was absolutely no need for the first factory owners to inflict harsh and dangerous working conditions on their employees, but they did. It is and always has been self-evident that inflicting cruelty on others for the sake of your own profit is unethical. That workers at the time chose to leave the fields for a perceived better alternative is a poor excuse to justify villainy; people, after all, do not always make the best choices. Consent is very far from being the whole of morality. Did the factory workers actually enjoy it more than farming, for instance ? Once they were employed were they free to leave ?

More fundamentally, this particular issue feels like a choice a shit sandwich and a shit hotdog, one of which could very, very easily been replaced with a delicious fruit flan* but wasn't. No, Pinker, incremental progress should not be seen as a moral license for exploitation. Material benefits do not equate with fairness or justice. It's activism that drives reform, not gratitude.

* Or something.

The consent issue is not an isolated case for factory workers either. Later on he describes "the hobbling of research", stating that in his view research has far too many pesky safety and ethical regulations :

Today anyone who wants to do research on human beings, even an interview on political opinions or a questionnaire about irregular verbs, must prove to a committee that he or she is not Josef Mengele... Anyone who talks to a human being with the intent of gaining generalisable knowledge must obtain prior permission from these committees, almost certainly in violation of the First Amendment. Anthropologists are forbidden to speak with illiterate peasants [what, we're in the Middle Ages now ?] who cannot sign a consent form, or interview would-be suicide bombers on the off-chance that they might blurt out information that puts them in jeopardy.

I find it very hard to take this seriously. I'm not in this field of research, so I've no idea when Pinker is trying to use hyperbole and when he means to be taken literally - the Nazi reference (Pinker has no truck with Godwin's Law) muddles the waters for no good reason. It's not credible to suggest people are forbidden from speaking with anyone, or that if there's really a conflict with the Constitution that no-one has tackled this already. It just leaves me feeling that Pinker is a a bit of an arse. And again, there's a clear conflict between raising ethical standards and complaining about the results. If he'd set out a framework to explain when complaints are legitimate, he'd be able to present a much better case for why he's so darn cross.


2) The environment

Pinker immediately falls into the same trap in this chapter, praising the environmental movement's successes but then instantly and repeatedly dismissing their apocalyptic warnings. But let's move on.

Probably the most obvious rebuttal to the undeniable achievement of technological progress is that it has come at a tremendous and unsustainable cost. The enormous habitat destruction and consequent loss of biodiversity, not to mention centuries of actively hunting animals to extinction, the problems of deep sea trawling and over-fishing, the obscene amounts of waste that's simply emptied onto the natural world... all these are cheerfully glossed over by Pinker in favour of success stories. This then completely avoids tackling a huge part of the sustainability issue he himself raises.

To be fair, he does have some very good points here on the topic he concentrates on : global warming. He favours a combination of carbon taxing, increased renewable and nuclear engineering, and geoengineering. I think he overstates the case for the world having reached peak carbon intensity (the amount of CO2 emitted per capita, as opposed to the absolute total) but generally the solutions proposed seem reasonable and recognise the severity of the problem they have to tackle.

And yet elsewhere Pinker falls into the trap of blindly trusting technological advancement to fix any and all problems. Statements that "we could do this that and the other" litter the whole book, often failing to distinguish "possible in principle" from "possible in real life", much less acknowledging whether people are actually likely to implement such suggestions. Probably the most spectacular example is this utterly pointless throwaway statement :

NASA has also figured out a way to pump water at high pressure into a supervolcano and extract the heat for geothermal energy, cooling the magma enough that it would never blow its top.

Umm, have they ? Have they really ? No, of course they bloody haven't.  This is like saying that NASA has figured out a way to travel at warp speeds by harnessing the power of perpetual motion from cats and buttered toast.

To be fair, he does have another good point that some particular ecowackies genuinely think that we should just go back to living in the trees, or better yet exterminate ourselves for the good of the planet. But throwing out wildly speculative ideas about how technology might progress only hurts his cause. Pinker is resolute in denying technology any role in the world's problems whatsoever, insisting that science only causes the beneficial things whereas it's only ever other forces that misuse it. More on that later, but it seems to be to be very stupid to pretend that some technologies aren't inevitably destructive. He quotes that Stone Age man may have had a greater per capita impact on the environment than modern humans - the kind of remark that deserves an extensive justification, but none is provided. Honestly, sometimes I just think the guy is a massive tit.

Perhaps the worst example of a Pinkersism might be :

High-tech agriculture, the critics said, consumes fossil fuels and groundwater, uses herbicides and pesticides, disrupts traditional subsistence agriculture, is biologically unnatural, and generates profits for corporations. Given that it saved a billion lives and helped consign major famines to the dustbin of history, this seems to me like a reasonable price to pay.

Bullshit. It's not the fact that fossil fuels or herbicides are being used that people object to, it's the effect that they had on the environment. Profits for corporations ? Again, that's fine as long as they use them wisely. Do they ? BWHAHAHAHA no. I find it absolutely bizarre that anyone would try and justify something in this way. Let's not worry about the massive loss of species and disruption to the global environment because overall things have got better for humans ? There can be only one response to that.

Finally, Pinker gets terribly confused by his own straw men arguments against apocalypses. He says that they have repeatedly failed to come true in modern times. And that's true. But he also acknowledges that sometimes apocalypses do happen :

As Ozymandias reminds the traveller in Shelly's poem, most of the civilisations that have ever existed have been destroyed. Conventional history blames the destruction on external events like plagues, conquests, earthquakes, or whatever. But David Deutsch points out that those civilisations could have thwarted the fatal blows had they had better agricultural, medical, or military technology.

For starters I'm pretty sure that conventional history comes up with a variety of causes, some internal and some external, after carefully considering the evidence in each case. For another thing, Romans with submachine guns* is a terrible idea. It's a completely pointless counterfactual because it ignores the changes to the sociopolitical structure that would be necessary for ancient peoples to have had made major scientific breakthroughs : if the Mongols had medical research centres, they would not have been Mongols as we understand them today. Or in cruder terms it ignores the fact that technological progress can be a mixed blessing.

* Look, if Pinker wants to make ridonclulous straw man attacks, then I'm going to fight fire with fire. Straw men hate fire.

In fact, so often does Pinker pick on poor defenceless straw men that I have to wonder if he's exalted it to a whole new fallacy. One could imagine a computer set to churn out endless idiotic predictions that are easy to refute. This one could proudly say, "most predictions are bollocks", which would be technically true but also completely stupid. People have always made stupid predictions throughout history. Picking on the idiots is just a mean way of sticking oneself on a taller pedestal - not by elevating oneself so much as by bashing everyone else into the ground.


3) Politics,ethics and society

As mentioned above I've already covered some chapters where I thought Pinker had something genuinely interesting to say elsewhere. He has plenty of other good points too, and he gives, I think, a very fair appraisal of the failings of the left and right, noting that political tribalism "scrambles people's judgement". He presents concrete examples in support of this, noting that identity demonstrably influences support of policies depending on who proposes them.

Pinker finds the main fault of the right to be a belief that:

... Western civilisation has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, will soon implode from terrorism, crime, and anomie.

Whereas the faults of the left are :

... its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism... Partly this is because their brains autocorrect these terms to unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets, perpetuating a false dichotomy : a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labour and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws.

Leaving aside Pinker's rather dubious environmental claims, this seems like a generally fair assessment to me. The left does tend to forget that capitalism has improved the economy and absolute standard of living. And the notion that we should default to assuming "freedom" to mean "freedom under law" rather than "absolute freedom" is, I think a very beneficial one. He goes on to note that the right is guilty of the same thing, taking any form of regulation to mean a complete loss of freedom (or at least a slippery slope towards one). This too seems fair.

The problem is that Pinker's own inclinations aren't much better. It's all very well to proclaim that politics makes us mean and nasty, but if you're going to claim that everyone else is screwing up, you'd better claim have an alternative. Pinker does, but it's disappointing :

Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance - a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.

It seems to me that without eugenics (we all know how that turns out) we can't fight evolution so it's pointless to consider; nor can we fight entropy. The main struggle of human societies, I think, has been to find a system which balances our strengths and weaknesses, allowing diverse beliefs to flourish rather than finding the One True Way. Though persuasion to get individuals to agree with each other is important, the real problem is in finding a system that best accommodates individuals who cannot agree. So it's not so much individuals who we should be fighting so much as the system itself - the system that engenders ignorance, pollution, corruption, and the Tragedy of the Commons, that enables cronyism and excuses arseholes rather than trying to mould them into something better.

Unfortunately Pinker utterly neglects any network analysis and instead simply opts for a straightforward "let's all believe this instead". It's a very dark aspect to the book, cloaked in optimism. More on that at the end. Suffice for now to say that Pinker takes a highly questionable approach to morality, bluntly stating his own judgements about what's right and wrong without ever examining why :

Life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Abundance is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. 

I would add :

Chocolate pudding is better than cauliflower soup. Shiny shoes are better than dirty ones. Long hair is preferable to short hair. More puppies are preferable to less. More puppies ! More I say ! Hang those who talk of less ! MORE ! MOOORRRRE ! MOAAAAARRRR !!!!

Okay, he may be trying to make a rhetorical point, but because the book is riddled with straw men I'm not going to let him get away with this. Is life better than death if life is permanent suffering, either your own or your infliction of suffering upon others ? Is abundance better than poverty if abundance is unsustainable ? Doesn't too much abundance sometimes lead to a sense of privilege, entitlement, and disrespect for those in poverty ? Is peace better than war if the cost is living under a brutal despot ? Don't some people enjoy genuine risk, and doesn't experiencing risk lead to us being more cautious and aware of difficulties while too much safety causes hubris, complacency, arrogance, and massive insecurity when things go wrong ? Isn't too much freedom a recipe for a Libertarian disaster, and don't some freedoms conflict with each other ?

All of these questions are never answered. He simply takes them as blunt, irrefutable facts : of course everyone wants to live a safe, prosperous world, even if that meant everyone was fat and stupid. These questions are philosophically and morally complex and deserve an extensive analysis, not simply plucked out of the air on an ideological whim.

There are a whole bunch of other points I'll gloss over : Pinker says wealth inequality is actually a good thing but then apologies for it; he dismisses gun control laws without any justification whatsoever; he largely ignores any problems social media may have caused in recent years - similarly he seems ignorant of Plato's observation that too much freedom results in tyranny (a.k.a. the Toleration Paradox). I could go on about these and others at length, but luckily for you, dear reader, I won't.

What I will mention though is whether society really is getting better overall. Accepting that societies in the past could not possibly have access to the technologies we do today, is it really fair to say that ours in the best way to live ? Are things really just improving all the time or are we, as I've speculated elsewhere, continually living on the edge of chaos ?

Pinker's defence of liberal democracies is a robust one : they are nice places to live. Plato, though, thought that they were unsustainable and vulnerable to demagogues skilled in persuasion but lacking in wisdom. And that certainly does feel like a serious, credible threat right now.

My main issue is with Pinker's claim that people are continually getting smarter. He says the Flynn effect shows that people's analytic intelligence is continually increasing, but while this is valuable, it doesn't meant that people are getting more critical, sincere, or less corrupt. He says that politics is a "flaming exception" to the general increase in intelligence. Yet that would seem, at the very least, to put at risk all the other gains, and it's very hard to agree that this is the case anyway. Is the existence of Instagram-based "influencers" really a good thing ? Isn't the shallow, hedonistic consumerism damaging from the environment which we all share* ? He says that "those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them". True, but it doesn't follow that they'd be impressed by how we live today.

* As well as ignoring how much leisure time was available in the distant past, he completely ignores what it is people are actually doing with their leisure time.

Hint : this didn't end well.

Here's my alternative interpretation (criticism welcome) : over the last few centuries, the best and brightest of society have shifted the Overton window in a generally favourable direction, and similarly have advanced science and technology to give us better opportunities. Because, as Pinker says, the gains aren't uniform or equal, there have been many setbacks along the way. While in absolute terms the values of all demographics have shifted, the relative difference between them might have remained roughly the same as it ever was. And just as in the earlier example of aircraft, we should take these new values for granted; it's not sensible for us to shut up and be happy with what we've got. That's how progress works.

What this means is that we haven't made everyone into intrinsically better people. We have the same shitty arseholes today as we had a thousand years ago, we've just made it harder for them to cause more serious problems. If the relative differences between the liberal left and conservative right are as strong as they've ever been, their absolute values are only different because they are largely a product of society. That's how we can appear to be perpetually on the edge of chaos but somehow keep getting lucky. It's the window of acceptability which has shifted, not the intrinsic properties of the people themselves.

And there are further caveats. Various hard right populists and religious ideologues around the world appear to be credible threats to many decades of social gains. It would be nice to think that these are momentary aberrations, but as with the rise of the Taliban in the Middle East*, sometimes backsliding can go a very long way. Even if they are eventually overturned, the fact that disasters are not actually full-on apocalypses doesn't make the situation the slightest bit more bearable to anyone actually experiencing them. Pinker seems to think that just because it's not actually literal Armageddon, complaints about real disasters are just overblown and shouldn't be taken seriously.

* Pinker says that Islam needs its own Enlightenment, supposing that while Middle Eastern nations were more tolerant and liberal than the West in the medieval era, this was only because the West was so abysmally awful. This neglects just how radically values can shift in the matter of a few decades : Afghanistan wasn't any less Muslim in the 1970s, but it was certainly a nicer place to live.
He also notes that sometimes the left are wont to apologise for Islamic atrocities. This is a claim I've heard before, but I've never once heard anyone make such apologies. Everyone condemns the recent atrocities; to say, "there's more than religion at work here" is not even close to excusing them.

That's my theory anyway. I'm sure there are much more sophisticated alternatives possible, but Pinker doesn't discuss any of them.

Pinker appears to contradict himself several times on the subject of increasing intelligence. He says that more educated people are both more and less likely to vote. This conflict appears to be due to glossing over some complex statistics : more education might mean a greater likelihood of voting in general, but it also causes a loss of religious faith - which decreases the chance of voting (perhaps especially in a religious country like the US). It's not impossible to reconcile this, but Pinker doesn't seem to even spot the contradiction. A more blunt contradiction is the observation that it's extremists, not the more intelligent moderates, who are more likely to vote. So I don't hold out much hope that intelligence really is rising as Pinker seems to think it is. There's more to society than intelligence anyway : in the wrong hands, greater analytic intelligence just enables more sophisticated bullshitting.

Finally, wealth inequality. As I said, Pinker seems very confused by this because he both defends it and apologises for it. He's convinced that what matters to people is their own personal absolute standard of living, not how well those at the top are doing. This is not entirely unreasonable, but it completely misses the undue influence that wealth begets, never mind privilege and an entirely unfair advantage given to the children of the very wealthy. Once again, major issues are badly shoved under the carpet of pointless optimism.

Nor is it really clear if those at the bottom are so free from problems as Pinker seems to think. Yes, the poorest no longer have to worry about fending off tigers, and we can be grateful for that. But they still have to worry about making ends meet, and again, it's absurd to pretend they should stop complaining about their measly salaries and instead be constantly jubilant that they didn't get their leg bitten off by a cave bear for the billionth time. Some threats - as Pinker quite correctly points out at length - are largely imaginary, like terrorism. So while we absolutely should stop worrying about those, by the same token we can't insist that people start being grateful for the lack of totally unrealistic problems. Asking us to feel grateful for not being sat on by a giant sloth necessitates that we first start to worry about being sat on by a giant sloth, which is stupid.

And moreover, unfairness does seem to be a major concern for a lot of people. That Pinker thinks it shouldn't be doesn't change the fact that it is : it's to some extent a self-fulfilling problem. Happiness, it's been said, is the correlation between expectation and reality, and none of Pinker's statistics seem to account for that. Self-reported happiness is no more than a beginning, because self knowledge can be flawed. Pinker does make a very important point that happiness is not the same as finding something meaningful, but I have little faith he could ever understand how individual this can be. It's just not something you can ever plot on a graph.

So we can now give at least one major reason why Pinker's book is full of weird contradictions. Complaints about the state of the world do ignore progress, but for a very good reason : we don't appreciate things unless we're deeply concerned about them; appreciating things which we have no chance of ever losing makes no sense. Whether or not mere technological progress can make us happier or lead more meaningful lives, or how to decide when complaints are those of spoiled idiots and when they are legitimate, I think we can leave for now. It's high time to finish this up by addressing an even more fundamental problem with Pinker's reasoning.



Conclusions : utilitarian scientism is a terrible idea

To recap :

• Materially our lives are generally improving, but huge questions remain as to sustainability.
• Pinker lacks a framework to distinguish sensible complains from ludicrous overreactions, and cannot tell when dire warnings were just noise and when they actually prevented disasters.
• Pinker forgets that major disasters do in fact happen, often ignores previous societal collapses, and does not have a clear strategy for selecting the data he chooses to display.
• Although he often has many insightful and carefully thought-out arguments, Pinker often ignores alternative interpretations by attacking straw men in droves.
• He claims that progressives hate progress, but he attacks the very engine of progress because he thinks we can and should judge the world by an absolute standard. More likely, the reason we can't and don't do this is not ingratitude but because we don't appreciate things when they are guaranteed.

Pinker does a good job of explaining the various psychological biases that prevent us from seeing some of the very real gains that have occurred. I would suggest another : the flaw of averages can be seen as a bias as well as a statistical observation. Hardly anyone, it turns out, is actually close to the average on more than a very few parameters. So the news reports all kinds of disasters and indeed some long-term trends that are getting worse, but hardly anyone at all actually suffers from all the things that are going downhill. Hence the reports and trends are real, but give a misleading picture of overall suffering.

Similarly, when it comes to safety, we may not perceive the improvements because their per-capita gains are simply too small and too slow. Overall this adds up to substantial numbers of lives saved, but a marginal change in probability per person is not something we can ever be consciously aware of. And gains in workplace efficiency may cause substantial economic improvements but be too small for any individuals to witness.

So in some ways Pinker does have a very good point : the world has got better without us noticing, while various biases conspire to make us think that it's getting worse than it is. And yet in his final chapter, for which he promises so much, he delivers little, collapsing instead into a prolonged vent, a mass of contradictions about all the evils of the world and how much of a moron everyone else is. It makes him sound like a colossal jerk.

What leads someone to such a weird and inscrutable mixture of the insightful and the "that's just fucking stupid" level of reasoning ? Take, for instance, the following line of "reasoning" which Pinker quotes in apparent agreement :

To delay by one year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you never see them.

Which is so stupid I'm not going to bother refuting it. But it nicely illustrates something at the very heart of Pinker's problems. For someone who professes to have no truck with political tribalism, he has no problems falling into other tribal groups - and quite fails to recognise what he's done. Pinker is nothing less than an anitheist feminist humanist scientismist utilitarian, which I imagine is as much fun at parties as it sounds.


Religion

I've dealt with the problems of antitheism before at length. Essentially this is the condition not of merely lacking a belief in deities as with agnosticism or atheism, but of believing so strongly that deities can't exist that one forgets that this is a belief and presumes that it's a simple fact (Pinker claims that the existence of an immortal soul predicts supernatural phenomena, which is is a bit like saying that the existence of immortal numbers predicts demonic forces). Adherents of this sort of cult often excuse the same sort of insulting hate speech they claim stems solely from religion, although I'd be surprised in Pinker ever does this.


Science

Scientism is something I've touched on several times before. Just as atheism isn't a religion but antitheism is, so science isn't just another ideology whereas scientism is what happens when you try and make it into one. It essentially presumes that empirical data and mathematical reasoning are the only forms of true knowledge, that we can know reality with absolute certainty. It ignores key assumptions about how we measure that data, forgets that those assumptions and other parameters are literally immeasurable and untestable, and tends to beat anyone who disagrees with an angry hammer.

While few would deny that science can inform us regarding ethical choices (e.g. by predicting the results of research or implementing policies), scientism - or at least Pinker's version of it - goes to the extreme of saying that only scientific methods can be used for moral inquiry. Hence Pinker doesn't think science can ever be blamed for anything but praised for everything. Perhaps most stupidly of all, he confuses the notions of scientists with scientism, as though everything a scientist ever does is proof of rationality (except for when they do something bad, of course).

It's just plain dumb. Need an example ? Pinker's got the perfect straw man again. He notes a Harvard statement about education reform :

"Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative : they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they have also shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdroping, and damage to the environment." 

Well, yes, and I suppose one could say that architecture has produced both museums and gas chambers, that classical music both stimulates economic activity and inspired the Nazis, and so on.

Riiiight. Pinker is right to point out that scientific knowledge also matters, because knowledge of how devastating nuclear and biological weapons could be has played an important role in preventing their deployment. Hence it has important moral consequences.

But this hasn't always happened : the end result of internet surveillance is far from known, for example, so the moral value of that aspect of technology is questionable at best. Nor did knowledge of the efficacy of machine guns prevent their widespread use. And to equate architecture with gas chambers is patently absurd : artistic design didn't lead to a desire for genocide, but scientific studies have led to more efficient killing tools. To view man's analytic investigations as being utterly blameless in the development of society is folly. If you accept that technologies have led to improvements, as, say, medication undoubtedly has, than you can't pretend that chemical warfare is somehow magically divorced from that. It's hardly as though there aren't other fields which are similarly seen as a mixed blessing (economics, for example), it's just that Pinker picks ludicrous counter-examples.


Utilitarianism

Of course I have no problems with feminism, saving that Pinker makes the dubious claim that women are actually superior to men which to be misses the whole point and probably isn't true. I shall skip also humanism, but it should be easy to see how utilitarianism fits into this somewhat toxic mix. Utilitarianism says that we should strive for the greatest good for the greatest number. There's obviously an appeal to someone who believes so staunchly in measurement and observation and utterly rejects any other form of knowledge.

Just as scientism stems from science, which is not itself at all objectionable, and antitheism stems from atheism, which is not at all an unreasonable philosophy, so too is utilitarianism not devoid of merit. But it cannot possibly be the whole story. Existential Comics has a hilarious rebuttal here, in which the corpse of its founder goes on a killing spree to harvest organs for transplants - thus increasing the total happiness in the world (with some obvious disadvantages). A more subtle aspect also brilliantly illustrated by Existential Comics is causally dismissed by Pinker :

Pinker says that utility monsters don't seem to have caused any problems. But utility monsters don't have to actually exist. Like the trolley problem, they point at a key issue which does occur all the time - and often goes unsolved. If an action causes someone happiness but another misery, how do we judge if the action is a good one ? Utilitarianism would say we can calculate in some way the net gain of happiness, but often this is impossible because happiness is not something you can truly measure, at least not with anything like sufficient accuracy.

You might think that maybe we could at least say an action is good if it causes happiness but no suffering, but this is not so either. Let's start with an extreme case. Suppose there's a serial killer who takes great pleasure in murdering hermits who never interact with the outside world in any way. This particular killer values stealth, so the victims are dispatched swiftly and without suffering. The serial killer's pleasure has increased and the victim hasn't actually suffered.

Or suppose someone hates you and secretly conspires to rid you of opportunities, say, preventing you from being offered a promotion or an award you were unaware of. They've gained pleasure, robbed you of something you deserved, but you haven't actually suffered. Maybe they do something even more minor, like adopting (and taking good care of) the cutest cat at the rescue shelter so you don't get it and have to settle for a less cute kitty but one which you still adore. And suppose they did intend harm to the kitty but ended up treating it kindly. Were they right or wrong to act as they did ?

Or take incest. For certain people this clearly does cause a great deal of happiness and doesn't - so long as precautions are taken - cause anyone to suffer.

It looks to me like trying to maximise happiness and goodness is fine as a general guideline, but as anything more than that - especially as guide to justice and fairness - it's pretty lousy. Intentions, surely, also play a role in determining morality, as perhaps do other, less tangible aspects.

Pinker doesn't seem to understand that. He asks the right questions, but dodges the answers by attacking the straw man of religious morality. From him it's a world of blunt statistics, and if it can't be measured, it isn't real; if morality can't be from God, it must flow from numbers. If people say they're getting happier, then it must be true. If people have enough wealth to avert poverty, then they ought to shut up and enjoy their bread and circuses expensive Nike trainers. Animals are going extinct ? Never mind, we're probably going to be able to figure something out at some point. Politicians are saying inflammatory hate-filled rhetoric as a means to power ? That's okay, the rise of fact-checking shows how rational people really are.


The underlying basis of these ideologies all have value. A dose of atheism cautions against ascribing everyday events to magical deities, while humanism provides a plausible basis for rational morality. Utilitarianism may not be complete, but neither is it wrong to remind us to consider the full consequences of our actions. And while making science into a religion is as mad as a bag of clams, a more scientific approach to politics would probably do the world an awful lot of good. Science has managed to find a system of establishing objective truth that is outstandingly good at self-correction and, perhaps most importantly, able to harness the power of dissenting voices rather than shutting them up. God knows it's a messy business, but it works. We ought to be extremely careful about applying the scientific approach of competitive collaborations in politics, but that doesn't mean there aren't lessons to be learned here.

Here's my take on Pinker's overall conclusion : the uncanny valley applies to more than just facial recognition. That is, cartoon people look fine, and realistic drawings look fine, but get the results slightly wrong and things... well, see for yourself.

The thing is, if the tattoo was of similar accuracy but of, say, a tree or a sheep or a lawnmower, you'd probably think it was pretty good. If you could somehow measure it, the accuracy is probably not that low. Yet those subtle differences make the world of difference. That's what I think is going on with society : objectively, we're probably a lot closer to a Golden Age than we suspect, but there's a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) but incredibly powerful wrongness to the final result. Like seeing a 99% solar eclipse, the result is very different from totality.

Even if this is correct, that doesn't mean the remaining improvements won't be tremendously difficult : we still don't have anywhere near a complete enough understanding of human psychology for that. But to end on an optimistic note, a wise man once said that it's easier to burn down a house than build a new one. I prefer a slightly different take, that it's also easier to improve a house than start from scratch. For all his faults, Pinker has some valuable contributions. His most important message is a work the problem vibe. Don't despair because your revolution failed. Don't insist on "perfection or bust", because often you'll get the latter and fall victim to self loathing. Instead, go for the gradatim ferocite approach of Blue Origin : step by step, ferociously.

This always makes me think of the Ankh-Morpork national anthem.