I Like Locke (I) : Knowing What You Know

Okay people, you and I need to have a little talk.

I post a fair bit of philosophy stuff here, right ? I go on quite a bit about free will and the nature of mind versus matter, qualia, how we establish objectivity and all that, yes ? Yes, I do. You know it's true. Especially if you also follow Decoherency.

And yet... not a single bloody one of you has ever said to me, "You've never read John Locke ? You must go at once ! Here, take my car !".

You. Utter. Bastards.

Once you're done hanging your heads in shame, it's time for a trilogy on what I make of Locke's epic "Essay Concerning Human Understanding". I got it in this edition, which is an abridged version. Unlike most philosophy texts this one doesn't come with an extensive introduction, or indeed any introduction at all. So all I know about context is from the blurb on the back : that Locke himself advised the essay should be abridged, which is reassuring since I don't normally like abridgements.

The Essay, it must be said, is a bit rambling, but that's what you get in an era when everything had to be hand-written. I've chosen what I see as the three main themes of the work : (1) knowledge and reality; (2) free will and identity; (3) how belief relates to reason. Drawing all of Locke's related arguments together to from a more coherent whole seems like a worthwhile activity to me, so that's what I'm gonna do. Anyway, it's not as if I have anywhere better to go.

Although (surprisingly) Locke is infinitely more comprehensible than, say, Shakespeare, he does have the usual old style of long, flowing sentences. These read more like a recorded speech than modern text. There are some cases in which this makes it hard to discern if he means one thing or its exact opposite (though nowhere near as often as in Gibbon), but fortunately most of the time he clarifies things immensely with well-chosen examples. While eloquent, his long sentences don't lend themselves to easy quotations, so I'll largely be paraphrasing. If I misinterpret him, then that's obviously entirely my fault.

In this first post I'll look at the main topic of the Essay : knowledge. In this post truth age of fake news and bullshitting, fighting facts with fiction and vice-versa, it's surely more important than ever to understand what knowledge really is.

John Locke's Guide To Figuring Stuff Out : knowledge and reality

Everybody craves certainty. But can we ever really be certain of anything ? I'm not sure. And I'm not sure what Locke thought about it either.

What exactly do we mean by "knowledge" anyway ? Is it different from "certainty" ? Terms like knowledge, belief, faith, reason, certainty and opinion are all context-dependent and fraught with implicit assumptions. When we ourselves say, "I know this to be true", we usually count ourselves certain, or very nearly so. We generally say that this is quite different to the statement, "I think this is true". No real problem there.

But when someone else says to us, "I know this to be the case", unless that person has earned an exceptionally high level of trust, it doesn't have the same effect. We might be a bit more convinced of what they say than we were before, but we won't say we know it. We don't doubt that that other person thinks they know it, but we don't necessarily say, "Oh, you saw a mermaid eating a flaming avocado in your airing cupboard ? Are you sure ? Oh, you are sure ? Well I never ! I guess that's it for marine biology then." We view other people's "knowledge" as a sort-of opinion, no matter how fervent they seem in their sincerity.

Lots of caveats to this of course : it depends strongly on our relationship to the other person. For some interesting data on how much this matters, see this, along with some accompanying discussion here.

Locke is a bit confusing as to whether he means "knowledge" to mean true certainty or something else. But mainly he describes everything as ultimately "ideas", i.e. information : "we can have knowledge no further than we can have ideas". This renders true certainly uncomfortably impotent... but it's not all bad. After all, it's similar to my own notion that everything relies on certain basic assumptions about the world : ignore the assumptions that reality is objective, external, and (after a fashion) measurable and you basically say we can't know anything about the external world at all. 

The point is that those assumptions are themselves unprovable. So yes, we have only "ideas", but we are necessarily limited to those - so any discussion on knowledge simply has to work within that framework, not examine the unprovable assumptions themselves. And as Locke elaborates, our "knowledge" is certainly enough to be useful; if we are all suffering a dream, then it's a remarkably self-consistent one :

How vain, I say, it is to expect demonstration and certainty in things not capable of it; and refuse assent to very rational propositions, and act contrary to very plain and clear truths, because they cannot be made out as evident, as to surmount even the least pretence of doubting. He that, in the ordinary affairs of life, would admit of nothing by direct plain demonstration, would be sure of nothing in this world but of perishing quickly.

Elsewhere Locke is more unclear as to whether he means knowledge should be described as true certainty or only this more moderate, idea-limited variant. But I think his meaning is, overall, clear enough that I can gloss over this.

I think, therefore I'm certainly thinking, therefore, I can be certain, hurrah !

Locke doesn't tackle anything as mundane as how we form conclusions. Rather, he's concerned with the fundamental nature of our different types of ideas and whether we can call any of them "certain". His answer is here is happily unambiguous : yes. While all knowledge is a type of idea, not all ideas are knowledge. Just because ultimately everything we perceive happens inside our head (and is to a degree subjective) does not mean that some ideas aren't demonstrably correct and others demonstrably false. The idea of a mermaid eating avocado flambé doesn't have any claim on certainty just because our knowledge of, say, wooden chairs is also ultimately a type of idea.  

But how ? Locke emphasises that much of what we "know" is really just opinion, and true knowledge is very limited indeed. But we do have some. How, then, is this possible ? How can we distinguish our imaginary fancies from proper knowledge ?

One answer is that you can definitely fight people using chairs, but try using mermaids instead and see how well that goes.

Locke boils this down to two sorts of certainty. One is subjective, internal, and inherently unprovable to anyone except ourselves, while the other concerns the outside world.

On the first, there are some things that we can truly "know" all by ourselves. One, following Descartes, is our own existence : I think therefore I am. If I think I'm thinking, I must (a) be thinking and (b) exist, otherwise I couldn't be thinking that I'm thinking*. Locke expands on point (a) to go beyond Descartes. He says, for example, if I think I'm thinking of a circle, I must actually be thinking of a circle. While I might be mistaken about some things that I more deeply believe (more on that in part three), when it comes to the fundamentals of my own existence or my more superficial thoughts, I have no reason for doubt. I can be as certain of those as I ever can be about anything.

* Compare and contrast this with the truly ludicrous notion of illusionism**, which literally says, "I'm not really thinking, I just think I'm thinking."
** Only on reviewing that earlier post when this one was nearly complete did I realise just how similar my stance is to Locke.

What of the certainty of the external world, then ? All knowledge, says Lock, is derived from perception and our thoughts about what we've perceived. There are some ideas so fundamental that they essentially atomic : indivisible and only achievable via our senses. You cannot conceive of whiteness, or colour, or softness, based only on description. While Plato didn't hold with the idea of knowledge as perception (since perception can be fooled), Locke circumvents the problem by going to the most basic aspects of what our senses tell us : qualia.

In this remarkably strong illusion, the thick blue lines are actually parallel.

Objects, according to Locke, have primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are attributes that they really have : size, mass, motion, that sort of thing. Secondary qualities are "powers" that the objects have to induce sensation : pain, heat, taste, yellowness etc. A fire feels warmer depending on our proximity to it, and only causes actual pain if we're very close indeed. That heat is a sensation doesn't negate the fact that the fire is composed of energy-rich material, but the sensation itself is not the same as the matter inducing it. There are no teeny-weeny pain particles in the fire that are out to get us. Pain isn't physical, but it derives from physical phenomena - so you can't stick your hand in a fire and not have it hurt. 

In other words, there are certain irreducible properties that you cannot simply imagine, or imagine away : pain being a good example (also solidity, heat, colour). When you remember pain, it hardly seems but a pale shadow of the real experience, and you likewise can't voluntarily simply choose to stop experiencing it. These are what Locke calls "simple ideas", the indivisible atoms of perception. 

The different nature of these "simple ideas" from our internal images (specifically the weakness and voluntary nature of the latter) is what assures us that they indicate something real is at work. Unfortunately, we can never have knowledge of them that we can directly impart to anyone else. We must know them by ourselves. Likewise there are "intuitive" truths, not in the sense of setting the clock on the microwave without needing to read the manual, but in being self-evident.

My hypothesis : electronics designers of the late 20th century created such convoluted user interfaces that the collective emotions of millions of disgruntled users echoed back through time, where they intersected the head of one John Locke. This caused him such anguish that he came up with the notion of "intuitive" knowledge as a means to prevent this agony far in the future. He failed.

This again would seem to agree with my general anti-"reality is not perception" stance. Yes, it's very difficult indeed, perhaps impossible in the strictest sense, to know the true "primary qualities" of anything, but that doesn't mean we can't get a meaningful view of reality anyway. We define things as being the source of our perception. We don't really need to know their "true" Platonic forms. It's enough to treat our view as incomplete, not wrong, unless something comes along to contradict us.

What Locke sadly doesn't discuss much of is disagreement. It would seem impossible to disagree on intuitive truths, whereas I've posited the "fire is hot" problem where such a thing does appear to occur. But I suppose there's no real difficulty here : such disagreements are likely mere appearances, the result of different heuristics and abstract generalisations that people use to analyse problems that can't actually be reduced to first principles, even if a quick overview would suggest otherwise. We will, however, return to this in part three.

Seeing is believing, but not the other way around

Abstract notions in particular are very interesting. You cannot directly perceive justice or responsibility or desire or luck*. They are generalised from specific, perceptible examples, but the notions themselves defy direct perception : yet nevertheless we can be said to know them, in some sense - or at least understand them. They are not "real" in the ordinary, physical sense of the word. Yet, says Locke, despite this we can indeed say we have true knowledge of mathematics and - in an interesting juxtaposition - morality. When we prove (in Euclidian geometry) that the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, we have done so for all time for all triangles. The actual physical existence of any particular triangle is irrelevant; a mathematical proof is indeed certain.

* A friend of mine had this idea for a superhero who can literally smell crime. I would watch that show.

Yes, fine, clever clogs, it's not true in non-Euclidean space. I'm making implicit assumptions, so you shut up.

It's hard to deny this*. Yet Locke then makes the leap that by the same token we can have certain knowledge of morality as well as mathematics, which is much harder to swallow. Unfortunately he doesn't provide any examples, so this throwaway comment is left unexamined. It seems to me that Locke's statement that knowledge is a type of idea, but ideas are not necessarily knowledge, means that we can accept his basic premise without having to accept an objective morality if we don't want to.

* If you don't agree that 1+1 = 2, then we've probably reached a genuine "fire is hot" problem, a fundamental disagreement at the axiomatic level with no clear resolution. Or in other words, you're a nutter.

Anyway, external perception is quite different from the internal perception that Locke calls intuition. This is the highest, most certain sort of knowledge of all, e.g. knowing your own thoughts, understanding abstract generalisations that cannot be perceived with the external senses. The ordinary perception from our senses is not the same. Here's one of those confusing instances were Locke allows "knowledge" to have different levels of confidence :

The notice we have by our senses of the existing of things without us, though it be not altogether so certain as our intuitive knowledge, or the deductions of our reason employed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds; yet it is an assurance that deserves the name of knowledge. Nobody can, in earnest, be so skeptical as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels. At least, he that can doubt so far will never have any controversy with me, since he can never be sure that I say anything contrary to his own opinion.

Oh Locke, what a joker...

We might doubt that what we're seeing is correct (Plato's analogy that someone a long way off could be wrongly mistaken for Socrates), but not that we're seeing what we think we're seeing. I don't think there's any scope for doubt on this point. Less convincing is the argument we can know that our perception is basically accurate :

If any one say, "a dream may do the same thing, and all these ideas may be produced in us without any external objects", he may please to dream that I make this answer : 1. That it is no great matter, whether I remove his scruple or no : where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no uses, truth and knowledge nothing. 2. That I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire, and actually being in it.

The first point is then an implicit statement that we simply have to make assumptions, which I have no argument with, but the second is harder to sustain. Just because our dreams to tend to have a distinctly dreamlike quality to them, it does not follow that this is always necessarily the case. I don't see any really rigorous grounds by which we can prove anything about the external world with true, absolute certainty. Better to take the assumption that we're not in a dream as a given, and accept that our definition of knowledge is forever constrained by that : as he says, otherwise all argument collapses anyway, and we'd have to give up and go home.

A stronger argument is perhaps Locke's assertion that we cannot have "simple ideas" except through direct perception. This does indeed give us very strong grounds for accepting the existence of an external, objective world (something must exist externally to induce sensations within us) but, not, frustratingly, truly certain knowledge of it. Our memories could be being continually deceived - yes, something like yellowness must exist, but that's about as far as it goes. Whether the object we're looking at really has the properties which cause us to perceive it as yellow, even whether chairs truly exist, is something that will remain forever less than perfectly certain.

Well, if nothing else, that surely explains why philosophers haven't managed world domination yet.

Also Finland is totally fake. The philosopher's approach to world conquest is simply to redefine "world conquest" and then go home for cocoa.

Intuitive knowledge helps explain why maths is hard

Even the "knowledge" we can have under standard assumptions is necessarily limited :

I cannot be certain that the same man exists now, since there is no necessary connection of his existence a minute since with his existence now : by a thousand ways he may cease to be, since [the time when] I had the testimony of my senses for his existence. And therefore, though it be highly probable that millions of men do now exist, yet, whilst I am alone, writing this, I have not that certainty of it which we strictly call knowledge, though the great likelihood of it puts me past doubt, but this is probability, not knowledge.

Our intuitive knowledge is limited in that it cannot tell us fundamentally new truths about the universe. We cannot spontaneously imagine colour if we've never perceived it before. Our perceptive knowledge is also limited because not everything is directly perceptible. And both of these sorts of knowledge cannot be taught : you can acquire a probabilistic assessment of them, but not knowledge of them except directly through your own faculties. Fortunately, we possess another faculty, that of reason, which allows for the third type of demonstrative knowledge.

First, Locke deserves a lengthy quote on intuitive knowledge :

Thus the mind perceives that white is not black, that a circle is not a triangle, that three are more than two and equal to one and two. Such kinds of truths the mind perceives at the first sight of the ideas together, by bare intuition; without the intervention of any other ideas : and this kind of knowledge is the clearest and most certain that human frailty is capable of. This part of knowledge is irresistible, and, like bright sunshine, forces itself immediately to be perceived, as soon as ever the mind turns its view that way; and leaves no room for hesitation, doubt, or examination, but the mind is presently filled with the clear light of it. It is on this intuition that depends all the certainty and evidence of all our knowledge. He that demands a greater certainty than this, demands he knows not what, and shows only that he has a mind to be a skeptic, without being able to be so.

Again echoing the need for basic assumptions that cannot be inherently proven. But obviously not everything is intuitive; knowledge is an idea but ideas are not necessarily knowledge. However, sometimes we can create chains of intuitive knowledge that demonstrate other truths which are not immediately obvious. So long as each link in the chain is solidly intuitive, this allows for so-called demonstrative knowledge.

Although things get very tricky if a "proof" is so complicated that hardly anyone can understand it.

This allows us to circumvent our innately limited comprehension - but only to an extent. As a simple example, I can instantly identify a square or a triangle or maybe a hexagon or even an octagon. Much more complex than that, though, and I'll run into trouble. A hundred-sided shape ? There's no way I can tell you it has a hundred sides just by looking at it, because my brain can't hold that much information all at once*. 

* I could perhaps learn to recognise specific hundred-sided shapes and do pretty well by comparing them this way, but I definitely could not learn the general form as I could so easily do with a triangle.

So am I stuck ? No ! Of course, for each side I can intuitively determine that they're straight* and where each side ends. So I can demonstrate the number of sides by counting them, allowing me to leapfrog my raw mental processing power. My stage of reasoning is at every stage perfectly intuitive, so I can know the shape has a hundred sides with every bit of certainty as I can know it has sides at all, even though I cannot immediately or directly intuitively determine the number of sides from a simple inspection. And this skill, to a large degree, I can teach to other people. Hurrah !

* With caveats. In most situations I can see this directly with sufficient accuracy. But even if something confuses me, as in the optical illusion from earlier, I can take numerical measurements to confirm what I think I'm seeing.

This too has limitations though. My usual analogy is mathematics. Counting is simple enough, but complex numbers, integration, matrix transformations, anything to do with tensors... at some point of complexity I hit a wall beyond which I cannot progress. "Tensors ?!?!", I cry. "TENSORS !?!? AAAAAARRRGHHH !!!". And then I run screaming from the room, never to return.

This very nice answer on Quora* may help explain why. If a problem requires a certain level of working memory and processing speed, I won't ever be able to understand it. I can use a lot of heuristics, such as learning what typical polygons look like, to help me do surprising feats of mental agility, but if a problem has a limit below which it cannot be further simplified, and my brain can't handle even that, then I'm forever limited : if I need to hold a hundred different things in my head all at once, then it sucks to be me. Admittedly, "different things" presents a bit of quandary, since the brain can use its clever heuristics to simplify enormously complicated things into more manageable units, but still, there's a limit to how much it can do this.

* I would somewhat dispute the assertion there that mathematical ability is a good proxy for intelligence, though, or at least I'd say that mathematical prowess at best constitutes only a very particular form of intelligence and certainly shouldn't be mistaken for wisdom.

Locke calls the process of assessing the connections between intuitive ideas our faculty of reasoning. This too is something not dissimilar to something I've mentioned before : that understanding is a kind of knowledge of the connections between things. Combining this with Locke and the Quora answer, we can perhaps now improve on this. The reason I can't understand some things is because they require a simultaneous knowledge of a larger number of connections than my brain will allow, and/or more rapid processing than I'm capable of. 

These feels pleasantly satisfying. However, it doesn't help with artificial intelligence, which can have "knowledge" of an unlimited number of connections but still a piss-poor understanding of, say, frogs. Only in part is this down to heuristics (with the brain's ferocious ability to simplify allowing us to achieve more than the sum of our parts, whereas computers are currently limited to brute force approaches) - this only gets us so far... I don't think a computer's level of "understanding" of those atomic-level ideas, those that require an inner awareness (like whiteness) is in any way comparable to mine. More on that in part two.

Honestly I don't understand how anyone ever got anything done without tea.

Beyond reason

But I digress. The point is that deductive reasoning can produce true knowledge, not opinion, and thus we can learn more than our pure senses and intuition tell us. There are limits though - some philosophical, some technical. The philosophical variety concern our knowledge of the primary qualities of objects : "And seek ye in vain for certain and universal knowledge of unperceived qualities in substances", says Locke, "We neither know the real constitution of the minute parts on which their qualities do depend; nor, did we know them, could we discover any necessary connection between them and any of the secondary qualities."

You might say, but we could measure the chemical composition of chocolate and determine which ones give rise to the taste of chocolate. But exactly how we have the sensation of taste, that entirely non-physical experience of having taste, remains utterly mysterious. "It's electrical currents in the brain !" you might say. Oh yes, and why does one current correspond to taste and other to anger or an obsession with fish, then ? Do all electrical currents correspond to experiences ? If not, why not ?

The technical limitations are easier. Locke doesn't say it directly, but implies that the more sophisticated our measuring equipment, the more information we have to analyse regarding various connections. True, some connections are unknowable, but not all. Reason, says Locke, is also what lets us judge whether connections are certain or only probable, how we judge fact to be distinct from opinion, and this constitutes the bulk of our knowledge.

For where the mind does not perceive this probable connection, where it does not discern whether there be any such connection or no; there men's opinions are not the product of judgement, or the consequence of reason, but the effects of chance and hazard, of a mind floating at all adventures, without choice and without direction.

But though we have, here and there, a little of this clear light, some sparks of bright [intuitive] knowledge, yet the greatest part of our ideas are such that we cannot discern their agreement or disagreement by an immediate comparing them. And in all these we have need of reasoning, and must, by discourse and inference, make our discoveries.

......

So that's Locke's view of the world, a thoroughly common-sense view that I enthusiastically support. Mind you, I've inevitably read it with my own biases, and I've attempted to remove any apparent contradictions to paint a more cohesive picture than might be had with a more thorough reading. But any contradictions there may be are nowhere near as fatal as they are, say, in Stoic philosophy. Reality is external, we know it through direct perception, we can generally distinguish it from dreams and suchlike without any fatal problems. Our true knowledge is highly limited but there is a thing we can legitimately call certainty, and we aren't constrained to mere probability. Yes, it relies on assumptions, but :

After all, why even bother having a discussion if you're convinced that none of it is real ?

The blurb on the back warns, though, that its selection traces the rise and fall of empiricism, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out. But Locke has other ideas that should be explored first. So next time I'll cover that other Big Topic of philosophy : free will.

A Corona Christmas Carol

One of those rare, "yes, an actual blog post !" posts that's not about science or philosophy and will have an absolute bare minimum of politics.

I love Christmas. Christmas is a time to be jolly, and holly, and... other things ending in olly. Christmas is a reassuring rock of tradition in a sea of confusion. A few months ago, it looked like it might just be possible to have my traditional family Christmas, but it soon became clear that that wasn't going to happen. Our decision not to travel was, needless to say, undoubtedly the right one.

To be honest an entire year alone in the jungles of Puerto Rico would have driven me to despair. A year in Prague ? Not so much. In fact, by staying safely within our cosy little bubble, we managed to have an effin' lovely Christmas.

Actually, we put the decorations up in late November. Again. Last year we did this on the grounds that we'd only just bought them and we'd only be here for part of December. This year we did it because we wanted 2020 to be over all the sooner. The doggies seemed to appreciate it; we covered the tree in tinsel until we could barely see it (still not enough, so we ordered more but it never arrived !) and tree chocolates, and Shirley even found crackers. Perfect.

Oh... and we also had a lot of alcohol. A lot.

The Czech Republic has this bizarre scheme to give a small part of the salary back as meal vouchers. Why, I've not a clue. But they expire at the end of each calendar year and by the start of December I realised I'd accumulated 57 of them, worth 5,130 CZK : about £180, and food money goes a long way here. One of the consequences of this was that we got a 4 kg goose (that's more than the combined weight of both the dogs and considerably tastier) for the grand sum of 85 CZK (£3). Yes, £1 buys more than 1lb of goose. Ridiculous.

And so, in the end, we had a fabulously traditional Christmas that just wasn't where we were expecting it to be. Our neighbour came over for Christmas dinner the night before, and then we opened presents in the morning and watched the Muppet's Christmas Carol twice. Twice ! I mean, come on. If you can't appreciate the Muppet's Christmas Carol then you have no soul and are a pretty poor excuse for a human being, in my book. And we did a Lord of the Rings marathon, which I was sort of hoping to avoid this year because I watch it ever year and don't want to spoil it, but seen as how the year had been infinitely worse than usual this decision never stood much of a chance. And even after seeing it a billion times, it still gives me goose bumps. No other movie does that.

Of course the reality is that we're fabulously lucky. Other major crises have seen people march off to grim death in a muddy wasteland, but all society is asking of us is to stay at home. Fair enough if your job is at risk*, but if you're complaining because you can't go outside, you can sod off, thanks.

* Or indeed if you're suffering in any other way through no fault of your own. You can, and should, absolutely protest for better conditions. Just stop voting Tory though, mmkay ? You know, for the rich people only interested in lining their own pockets ? It would help, is all. Just sayin'. 

So screw you, pandemic. You've forced me to stay inside in my lovely snug flat underneath a Christmas tree with two cuddly doggies and a mountain of chocolate and a goose you could clobber someone with. Things could be a hell of a lot worse, and for all that 2020 is a shitty year, it's by no means the worst in living memory. Not even close.

Then Shirley got a big promotion and this was the result.

Really should have held out on that LOTR marathon. Ah well, there's always next year. But Aliens looks bloody fantastic with 4k upscaling from blu-ray and an ambilight creating a pseudo-disco background. That's the lifestyle of a big-shot HR project manager, I guess.

So all is well in the land of Rhysy. Of course, all is not well elsewhere. Both the Czech and British governments have done a singularly awful job of managing the pandemic and shows no signs of letting up anytime soon. Look, it shouldn't be this difficult. Other countries have managed to turn the tide, and indeed, the Czechs succeeded in keeping it at a manageable level for some months. 

Then they got complacent and things exploded.

Surely by now we know enough to tackle this more sensibly. So far as I can tell this involves :

• Lockdown hard or not at all. Scrap the ridiculous tiering system or reduce it to two levels : hard or severe restrictions. There's no point in doing this softly-softly, that doesn't do anything. Compensate all those who cannot work from home or who are forced not to work at all. Lockdowns, though, are a means to an end, not a solution in themselves, so :
• Use the lockdowns to develop a proper, localised track-and-trace system, emphasising the need for backwards tracing to find the super spreaders. Learn from the Eastern countries which have managed to do this.
• Focus on the positive percent rate of tests and follow the WHO advice not to ease restrictions until it's below 5%. Stop easing restrictions - I mean, completely stop any kind of easing whatsoever - when it drops, say, from 45 to 35%, which is what the Czech approach seems to be. The higher the positive rate, the higher the number of undetected cases and the more out of control the situation is. A huge number of undetected cases is better than an enormous number of undetected cases but it's still awful.

When it comes to people whining about civil liberties, I say fuck 'em. If you had to face closer monitoring for a few months in order to prevent 75,000 people (in the UK so far) from being wiped out by an asteroid, or shot by an invading army, of course you'd do it. You wouldn't hesitate. People would look at you like you'd gone mad if you suggested otherwise. It shouldn't be any different just because this is a slower burn.

Of course, I can't end on a negative note, so I'll finish by pointing out that my hypothetical path to a better future is, quite remarkably, well on course. America has indeed elected Biden and resistance has been all but negligible and completely pointless. We haven't really found a way of living with the virus, but the vaccine has been put in production much sooner than expected, so that works too. And we have, as I predicted months ago (even when everyone else was insisting otherwise) got a Brexit deal, even if a daft one - that's still better than none at all. It turns out that all the childish grandstanding really was just petty brinkmanship after all.

And one other thing has happened that came sooner than I dared hope was reasonably possible : Cummings has gone. Now, the Brexit deal may have given the Tories a bump in the polls, but I see no reason this won't collapse. Labour has climbed back well into the realm of electorally-competitive sanity (sorry Frankie Boyle : a boring leader is exactly what we need right now), and frankly, if the UK elects this farce beyond farce of a government again, given that it now faces a thoroughly sensible opposition, then it fully deserves to sink into the sea. But it won't. As David Attenborough says, what use is crying in a corner ? No ! Despair is the worse and most dangerous luxury of all. Go and do something, even if that only means raising awareness. Keep the faith : a better world is possible.

(Link if uplifting embedded video doesn't work)

A Sting In The Tail

Events overtook me while writing this. I've kept the text as it was originally written, with italics for necessary interjections.

Now you see it, now you don't.

One of the quite rightly forgotten disasters of 2016 - for there were far too many - was a funding threat to Arecibo. By that point the telescope had already been in a state of horrendous management for many years, and this felt like it could be the beginning of the end. Who knows, perhaps it would have been. But things didn't work out in the way anyone expected.

Mismanagement took many forms, but from the perspective of a lowly postdoc, it primarily manifested itself as overworking the staff and under-exploiting the telescope. It felt at times as though there was a deliberate attempt to show that the telescope was just not worth the investment, a sort of delenda est Arecibo, rather than giving it the extremely modest increase that would have kept it highly competitive in the modern world for decades to come. And not only were the uppermost, distant echelons a problem : there were plenty of larger-than-life characters on-site who were, frankly, downright strange. It wasn't always a happy working environment, but since I've already recounted my personal experience of this, I'll not go over that again.

That's not to say there wasn't plenty of fun to be had, or that some of the staff weren't among the nicest, most decent and most welcoming people you could ever hope to meet. Everyone on site, I think without exception, wanted the Observatory to be a success. The disagreements were over how best to do this, who should do this, what exactly would constitute "success", etc. All that bullshit didn't detract from a fundamental desire to make things work. If maintenance ever suffered, there was no indication that this was anything more than an inconvenience rather than a danger.

Like, for instance, that time I didn't get to sail around in boat with the British ambassador when the dish flooded.

I was unfortunate enough to witness the first management change in the Observatory's ~50 year history. This was a somewhat surreal experience for a freshly-minted postdoc having no real clue what was going on or how things were supposed to work. It's weird to find everyone telling you how unusual the situation is when you've no clue what normal is even supposed to be. It was certainly educational, but not something I'd like to ever repeat.

Fortunately I didn't have to. I escaped left a few years before, unbelievably, a second management change swept through like the over-rated hurricanes that occasionally devastate the island. Practically everyone I knew there left shortly afterwards, and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion about that.

It's safe to say I never, ever wanted to work there again. I hate the tropical climate, I despise being thousands of miles from home, and driving actually scares me. This was not a good combination. It's not that it was an awful place - not at all - it's that it was an awful place for me.

And that's not to say I wouldn't have ever visited again. Quite the opposite. Indeed, I rather took it for granted that at some point I almost certainly would, either for a conference or for observations. It's an entirely accurate cliché that though I wouldn't want to live there, it's a lovely place to visit. The island has some wonderful beaches... 

... and beautiful scenery :

Puerto Rico as a whole is a strange sort of little world. Food is perhaps a good example : it's either absolutely delicious or pretty bad, with not much middle ground. The touristy parts are generally very nice indeed, the heat and humidity notwithstanding, but at the same time it's very much a place where people live. It isn't, for instance, much like the centre of Prague, which has been virtually evacuated of residents so that they don't bother the all-important tourists  (or vice-versa). It was an interesting mixture of the mundane blended with the bizarre, where you could drive out of a pharmacy only to witness someone towing a horse. It was a powerful lesson that exotic really is a relative state.

And of course the telescope is a spectacular sight. You never really quite get used to it. I used to make sure I walked around the site quite frequently, just to make sure I availed myself of the opportunity. 

And I swam in the pool. I got blind drunk with the students. I went kayaking in the bioluminescent bay and watched boa constrictors try to catch bats swarming out of a cave. I tried to make the most of every opportunity that presented itself, not because of some foolhardy notion of carpe diem, or some hispster millennial idea of FOMO, but simply because for months at a time absolutely nothing happened.

Now those opportunities are ended. In August there was some serious damage inflicted to the dish by a snapped cable :

But this photo shows the damage in the worst possible light - other images showed that this catastrophic damage was relatively localised. And the dish, being made of lightweight aluminium panels and easily accessible, is relatively easy to repair*. What worried me more was the statement in the press that this failure actually moved the platform. This huge structure is what contains all the instruments, and at 900 tonnes any kind of accidental movement is something to be deeply concerned about. Still, the telescope wouldn't have lasted half a century and several hurricanes without some significant redundancy. So it looked like this would be a serious but survivable problem. Unless another hurricane happened to strike at the wrong moment, in a year it would be back to what passed for normal for a gigantic telescope lurking in the middle of the jungle.

*One idea floating around was to turn disused panels into coasters and sell them at the visitor centre, and I really wish this had happened so I still had a piece of the dish.

Such hopes were cruelly slashed by another cable failure. I could paint a narrative of shoddy management leading to collapse, but it wouldn't be accurate. However improbable it might be, all indications are that the telescope suffered two unexpected and unavoidable failures. Both cables seem to have had undetectable faults, with the second failing at just 60% of its design tolerance. And you just can't plan for those kinds of failures. With other cables showing signs of damage, it really is game over. Even deconstruction, the manner of which has yet to be determined, is going to be a dangerous business. Hell, even getting people to inspect the site is risky. At some point, one way or another, it's coming down.

It, has in fact, now collapsed. Any speculation about saving it by some last-minute miracle is over.

As I write this I'm in the process of backing up my 560 GB of data that I still have on my old account, which I use from time to time. Though I left in 2013, the most recent observing I did was in May of this year : we were about a week away from finishing a field when the hurricane hit. It's strange indeed that the collapsing structure potentially poses a risk to my data - the thought that the telescope will soon cease to exist is positively hard to grasp. Hearing the news was like taking a punch to the gut. It's the sort of thing you know could happen, but you never really expect to actually occur. 

I completed my data download a few days ago, honestly expecting that it would be demolished before it collapsed. Thankfully the observatory computers can still be remotely accessed, so it looks as if no-one need be concerned that their data was lost due to the collapse.

Other people seem horrified by the prospect but personally I hope they use explosives, as long as it can be done safely. Don't make me watch some long, drawn-out disassembly. Don't make me watch it being torn apart piece by piece. Such an awesome facility deserves a far better finale. Give it a good send-off and end it swiftly and in style. After all, if you're gonna fail, fail spectacularly. Failure is, perhaps, something like dancing : do it with great enthusiasm or great skill but not both. Let the end be magnificent, not pathetic; a bang, not a whimper.

I suppose my wish was granted, after a fashion. The accidental collapse doesn't appear to have injured anyone and it was mercifully quick. It still feels absolutely awful though, as it was always going to.

I should also say a few words about Arecibo's legacy, though doubtless you'll find better reports elsewhere. Arecibo's most prestigious discovery was the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, of which observations showed were perfectly consistent with the emission of gravitational waves (later leading to a Nobel prize). Arecibo had a bright future in gravitational wave research through pulsar timing arrays, and for a brief moment it was possible it might beat the laser interferometers to the first direct detection. And it measured the rotation of Mercury for the first time, discovered the first exoplanet, and detected tens of thousands of galaxies through their hydrogen gas emission. It found a weird ring of gas in our own cosmic backyard, enormous gaseous bridges, gave insight into some of the most important problems in cosmology, and helped defend us from nearby asteroids. It was a wholly remarkable device.

What made Arecibo truly unique was its combination of capabilities. It could hunt for pulsars at low frequencies or search for spectral lines in distant galaxies at high frequencies, or zap Saturn with its superlatively powerful radar or study our own atmosphere. No other facility comes close to doing all of this at once. It was astronomy's Swiss army knife and everything it did it did well.

This raises the question of a replacement*. There are other facilities that can pick up in most of these areas, but not all. For example, there's only one other planetary radar instrument in the world and it's very much smaller than Arecibo. And while plenty of new telescopes are being constructed to survey extragalactic hydrogen, none of them will have the sensitivity of Arecibo. For some things a whopping great single dish can massively out-perform an array of smaller telescopes (I describe this more in this recent podcast, and in this earlier blog post). While FAST is slowly coming online, it'll be years before this takes over from where Arecibo left off - and just how well this will work in practise, or what the data access policies will be, remains to be seen.

* There's a petition to save it here. I've not signed it though, and I'm not going to until people can convince me it can be done safely. Look, my own fucking data comes from that telescope, so I think I'm qualified to say : yeah, it's important, but come on, it's not worth anyone's life, for heaven's sake. Clearly I was right, the attempt to do this would have been foolish in the extreme.

Could it be replaced ? Sure. Should it ? I honestly don't know. Hard questions need to be asked about whether smaller, faster, cheaper, more specialised instruments might not be better overall, or if the unique abilities of a giant single dish are sufficient compensation. The use of Arecibo for the wider benefit of Puerto Rico needs to be taken into account; science does not exist outside of society. Most of all, the NSF should not be involved with any of this in any way whatsoever, having demonstrated repeatedly that they just don't get it.

As for me, I've got enough data to keep me going for many years. The last paper I published exploited the very first observations I took, so Arecibo's legacy is not done yet - not by a long shot. By the time we've squeezed all we can from Arecibo's vast depth of accumulated data, perhaps we can dare to hope something comparable will rise again. That'd be nice. But I doubt it.

Four All Things There Is A Season

A week is a "long time" in politics ? More like a bloody agony. It's been God-knows how long since I did a politics-as-movie-analogy post, but it's high time to resurrect this important form of super-serious socio-political commentary.

First, the mood right now is very much out of Star Wars :

Specifically it's like the very end of Return of the Jedi after the destruction of the second Death Star and the whole galaxy bursts into cheers :

Finally the citizens of the Empire can wake up knowing that they don't have to listen to endless Twitter rants about that "even bigger, so beautiful" Death Star for another four years.

Hell, if it wasn't for the pandemic, we'd all be entitled to a full-on global orgy right now. A literal, actual orgy the like of which even PornHub would disavow in disgust. For the moment  - just for the moment - we can leave any cautionary points aside : the myth of right-wing populist invincibility has been shattered.

Star Wars also works very well in terms of Trump as un even uglier version of Palpatine, using his opponent's hatred as Nzeitchean monster.  

He even looks a bit like Palpatine, but not nearly as much as the last pope.

Trouble is that none of the other characters or storyline really fit. Joe Biden as Luke, a forgotten and under-rated candidate living in the political wilderness ? Meh -  sort-of... nah, not really. There isn't really a good equivalent of Vader either, unless Mike Pence suddenly decides to turn away from the dark side*. I suppose Bernie Sanders might be Yoda and AOC could be Leia, with Nancy Pelosi as "many Bothans died" woman (and Obama as Lando Calrissian ?), but the story just doesn't fit.

* Technically there's still time for this to happen.

Though I think Bernie does also look a bit like Admiral Ackbar. 

To be honest, a few days ago I was thinking that Batman Begins would have been a better choice : not as an analogy exactly, but with the League of Shadows as the good guys.

Though if you want an analogy, I suppose you could cast Vladimir Putin as Ra's Al Ghul, and substitute "misinformation" for "economics". Trump works pretty well in the role of head mobster Flacone...

It may be terrible photoshopping, but on the upside I've somehow made him look like Prince Charles.

... but then we'd have to have Joe Biden as Batman, and that's just weird.

Some astute observer noted that Batman's actual mask is exactly the wrong way to stop the virus.

Any anyway, this is all missing the point : which is that I thought Liam Neeson might have been right. A society so corrupt as to vote for an insane fascist deserves to be burned to the ground, because it's the only way it'll learn. Just ask the nice people of Europe, where this actually fucking happened.

But now, a week later, and the League seem like the bad guys again. Order is restored ! Hooray !

No, the best analogy I've found is Gladiator. I watched in on Saturday, when things were looking good for Biden but it wasn't called yet. I wasn't ready to celebrate but I was ready to watch a movie about the fall of a horrible dictator. And it's way more topical than I thought.

The movie follows the story of a childish dictator with some serious daddy issues :

Obviously though, Fred Trump doesn't hold a candle to snuggly emperor Marcus Aurelius.

He's also a draft dodger, preferring opulence and luxury to chilly battlefields and hard work. 

He even deliberately makes an enemy of a war hero.

At least Commodus had a modicum of eloquence.

It gets better : he has disturbing incestuous tendencies.

And from the word go it's obvious to everyone that he has no political skill whatsoever. He vows to "bleed the Senate" and rid Rome of the corrupt politicians :

One of these is more articulate than the other.

On entering Rome itself he's greeted with cries of "usurper !" and "you'll never rule us Commodus !". Definitely a #NotMyEmperor moment. And he appeals firmly to idiotic populist tendencies, giving Rome an extended series of games as a distraction. "Fear and wonder... a powerful combination. He'll give them death - and they'll love him for it", says Derek Jacobi.

Eventually, after a battle that's closer than anyone expected, he gets stabbed with a big sword and democracy is restored.

It's an extremely satisfying moment, and it's interesting to reinterpret classic movies in a changing world. And it really does feel like there's been a paradigm shift. Suddenly we don't have to deal with all that bullshit any more ! I turned on the news today and was greeted by stories about a successful vaccine and a helicopter crash in which nobody died ! Amazeballs.

Except... the Trump era didn't much end like Gladiator : it was altogether stranger.

Yes, we genuinely had Trump's legal advisors protesting from a car park of the Four Seasons gardening centre. Four All Things There Is A Season... and one of those Things is to be bloody confused, and that Season is Right Now.

I just can't think of any good analogies to this one. In no standard narrative does the evil dictator's reign end in a gardening centre. The only vaguely-similar thing I can think of is that rubbish bit* at the end of The Lord of the Rings novel in which Saurman is reduced to pestering the Hobbits. Basically he goes around tearing up allotments out of spite, which is an ignominious end but an absolutely ridiculous way to end an epic story.

* You can argue all you want how important it is, but I'm firmly of the opinion that that section is just bad writing.

Rudolph Giuliani as a mad wizard ? You know it makes sense. What's really strange is that his nose is identical to Christopher Lee's.

The Serious Bit

But... what do we do next ? Trump didn't get stabbed and Republicanism hasn't gone away - far from it. Is it a time to kill or a time to heal ? Life isn't a movie or mythology.

I have to say I'm extremely conflicted about this. My first instinct is that those calling for naked injustice are people you fight, not appease. But what's the goal here : straightforward punishment and retribution, or building a society where fascism cannot flourish ? The two countervailing arguments are that those endorsing racism, fascism and entrenched inequality deserve to suffer the consequences of their actions or nothing will ever change, that opening the hand of friendship will simply embolden them; yet simultaneously, treating people like dirt is exactly the best way to make them fight back all the harder.

I'm really struggling here. On the one hand, basic justice demands that you stand up to bullies. On the other, you only make peace with your enemies, not your friends. And you simply cannot afford to have seventy million enemies - even if it feels good to have enemies.

 Please do watch this video before proceeding.

There is of course no symmetry between someone calling for the fascist suppression of minorities and someone calling for the suppression of fascists. These things are not the same. And certainly for the instigators and ringleaders I don't think there's any hope : being nice to Trump or Barr is as effective and morally stupid as appeasing any dictator. Even punishment won't help, because psychopaths simply don't work like that. Better by far to remove them from society completely. Imprison them, ignore them, whatever. I don't care. Just don't give them a platform to stand on. Shut them down utterly and completely.

But what of the followers, the armchair bigots who at most showed up to vote or maybe attend a rally ? This depends heavily on how deluded they actually are : if they were from a cult, no-one would have any hesitation in sending them for deprogramming. No-one would debate that they needed someone to reach out to them. But is this really an appropriate analogy ? A mass cultural brainwashing (which is entirely possible) is certainly an appealing explanation, but a more disturbing possibility altogether is that these people have looked at the evidence and thought, consciously or not, "nope, I'll stick with hurting the minorities, thanks." We have yet to solve this dilemma. 

One of the hardest aspects of the problem is that polarisation is so easily self-driving. Five years ago I wrote this little piece about the problem of uncompromising men and their ideals. Trump is, after all, a lot like Palpatine (and thoroughly deserving of similar treatment) : he thrives on hatred and creating a bias spiral, where the hatred he instills in his opponents is used to convince his followers that anyone against him is evil. That's the difficulty : hating those who support evil is by definition justified, but expressing that contempt is the very worst way to win them over. 

And yet... if you can turn a society from marauding Vikings to marauding Ikea salesmen, then perhaps Trump supporters too, in principle, can be saved. Even if they are a bunch of contemptible fuckwits.

(This post is not intended to actually persuade them, obviously. I'm in no mood to do that right now. This is only speculation of long-term strategy, nothing more. Obviously, it would be madness to expect immediate forgiveness from anyone - and I'm certainly hypocritical in that I block Trump activists on social media on sight.)

What might be going on with them ? All forms of extremism come with something positive : the problem is that they demand an incredibly high price in return. The last time the fascists were in power they offered a genuine concern for worker's rights. Nationalism, and other cults, do have some sort of (at least superficially) positive benefits for their supporters, but at the expense of everyone else. Trump supporters, presumably, at least think Trump is acting to their benefit, even if his real goal is nothing more than sheer megalomaniac powermongering. 

So if Trumpists follow the pattern, it follows that they too are in some way suffering, and those concerns should be addressed. Maybe it's poverty, maybe it's privilege - both are problematic, but need to be addressed in quite different ways. The overly-privileged need a slap in the face, the poor need more traditional forms of help. Whether economic or informatic, whatever sickness has infected these people, whatever's driving them to ally with such a figure of pure hate, needs to be expunged. If not, all that work in overthrowing a tyrant will have been for nothing. True they've done, or at least endorsed, despicable things, but if you go on hating them forever - if you refuse to figure out the structural problems that have led them down this path, all you'll have is more hate. With seventy million of the buggers, you can't fight them all. You have to reintegrate most of them.

You don't have to tolerate the intolerant. But you do have to distinguish the people from ideas, to recognise that most people are at least as much products of the system as they are the result of their own choices : there but for the grace of God... Given the right circumstances, ordinary people can turn villainous remarkably quickly, but so too can hatred be overcome. 

Ultimately, forgiving your friends is easy and generally unnecessary. Forgiving your enemies, acknowledging the harm done and accepting it, is far more challenging. So what's more important : to keep hating them, or stop them from being hateful ?

Two positive notes to end on. First, some regimes do fall peacefully and adherents and revolutionaries can peacefully co-exist afterwards. Forgiveness, sometimes, can be a powerful weapon. Second, Trumpism itself isn't an ideology, it's a movement for the glorification of one sad, pathetic little man, feeding parasitically off existing far-right ideologies. Without him driving it, as his loans are called in and he faces a barrage of lawsuits without Presidential protection, it's lost its driving force - Trump is not just a consequence but also a direct cause of the far right bullshit that characterises modern politics.

But alas, clearly not the only or even the main cause. And figuring out how to deal with that is far more challenging. I don't know what the answer will be, whether to punish or assist, but I strongly suspect it's some combination of both. Don't forgive Palpatine - but don't assume every minor technician who worked on the Death Star is equally guilty either.