Andrew Hickey

This is the speech I wrote for to address the marchers before London’s 2014 DykeMarch:

It’s amazing to be here, to be surrounded by so many inspirational women. Being invited to speak here is extremely humbling, and I’m a bit nervous, so I hope you’ll bear with me.

I’m nervous, because I have a confession to make. I have a confession about how I feel about my ability to participate in lesbian spaces, a confession about my ability to relate to the life experiences of other lesbian and queer women, a confession that, despite my best efforts to maintain a positive mental attitude, I still sometimes worry that I am a fraud.

There are those who hold the view that because of certain aspects of my biology, I do not, and can never, truly qualify as a lesbian. There are those who feel this very strongly. Some of them are active in lesbian and queer women’s spaces.

Now I want to stress that these people are, I am certain, a minority. Most lesbian and queer women I have the privilege to know are amazing people who have been nothing but understanding when I explain my situation to them. They have been wonderful, and accommodating, and told me that I am just as much a lesbian as they are.

But there is still a little voice inside my head that never quite shuts up – “they won’t accept you, not really, not properly, because they know, and they are disgusted.”

Make no mistake – this voice isn’t a reflection on any of you – it’s a realisation of my own insecurity, but I think I do have good reason to be insecure.

I like to socialise with other women. I like to socialise with other queer women. The vast majority of the time, my little problem is irrelevant to how I interact with other women, in mixed sex spaces and in single sex spaces, because there is no reason for it to be an issue.

But there are times when, and this very much depends on the nature of the space, it *is* an issue for me, and for the women who share my secret, and I know it can make other people in those spaces, other women in those spaces, feel a bit awkward. They want to be accepting, but … well, it’s maybe not seen as compatible with how lots of lesbian women live.

That’s just socialising though. I’m in my 40s now, and I mostly can’t be bothered with dating, and with what sometimes comes after – I’d rather have a nice cup of tea frankly, and how many of us can, hand on heart, say we haven’t felt like that on occasion?

But I wasn’t always in my 40s. Back in the day, I remember being with friends in venues which will be known to many of us, but which sadly no-longer exist. I look back with fondness on the Glass Bar, and its amazing location. I really miss First Out, which survived cross rail excavations only to be forced out by rent increases. I even look back with fondness on nights at the Candy Bar, as long as someone else was paying for the drinks, that is.

And these places always had lots of really interesting and cute women in, and sometimes we’d strike up a conversation, and then the dilemma came up.

“Is this going to go further? Might we meet again? Might we even spend the night together? At her place? Oh god, I have to tell her. When do I disclose? What if it’s a deal breaker for her? What if she reacts badly? What if I feel ashamed? I left my pills at home too, and I’ll feel awful by morning without them. What do I do?”

Disclosure of such things is, I think, a deeply personal issue, and I don’t presume to say there’s a right answer for everyone, but I tend to, and by and large, things have been OK.

But not everyone reacts well, not everyone can make the necessary accommodation, not everyone wants to make the necessary accommodation.

And so more often than not, when I’ve met someone really great, and when it could go somewhere, I find I’ve chickened out, and I hate that. I hate feeling frightened. I hate feeling like I can never properly belong.

And so, fellow marchers, here is my confession. My name is Sarah, and I, like many other self identified lesbians, through no fault of our own, feel excluded from living fully and openly as lesbians because we are … allergic to cats.

 

What happened when we tried to publish a scientific paper investigating time travel.

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June 18th, 2014: EARTH'S SECRET HISTORY: REVEALED, HERE ON DINOSAUR COMICS DOT COM – Ryan

DRM is how Amazon is holding Hachette hostage.

Many years ago, writer Jim Macdonald postulated “Yog’s Law,” a handy rule of thumb for writers about the direction money is meant to flow in publishing:

“Money flows toward the writer.”

This is handy because it will give the writer pause when she has a publisher (or agent, or editor) who says that in order to get published, the author needs to lay out some cash up front, and to that publisher/agent/editor. The author can step back, say, huh, this is not how Yog’s Law says it’s supposed to go, and then surmise, generally correctly, that the publisher/agent/editor in question is a scam artist and that she should run away as fast as her feet will carry her.

But does Yog’s Law apply in an age where many writers — and some even successfully — are self-publishing via digital? In self-publishing, authors are on the financial hook for the editorial services that publishers usually do: Editing, copy-editing, page and cover design and art, marketing, publicity and so on. In this case, unless the author does everything (which is possible but not advised if one want’s a professional-looking product), money is going to have to flow away from the writer, as he hired people to do work for him.

Does this mean Yog’s Law is now dead? Author Harry Connolly, who has published traditionally and also self-publishes, thinks so; a summation of his argument (presented in .jpg form because he did his own screencap of a Facebook comment on his site, and I’m too lazy to retype, although apparently not too lazy to to a screengrab, edit it down and then upload, which probably took even more time) is here:

Connolly is correct that the rise of digital self-publishing puts a new wrinkle on things. I disagree, however, that it means Yog’s Law no longer generally holds. I think it does, but with a corollary for self-publishers:

Yog’s Law: Money flows toward the writer.

Self-Pub Corollary to Yog’s Law: While in the process of self-publishing, money and rights are controlled by the writer.

Which is to say that when the self-published writer pays for editorial services, she’s at the head of the process; she’s employing the editor or copy editor or cover artist or whomever, and she’s calling the shots. If she’s smart she’s listening to them and allowing them to the job she’s paid them for, but at the end of the day the buck stops — literally — with her. This differs from the various scammy publishers, who would take the money and the author’s work, and then would effectively disappear down a dark hole, with the writer entirely out of the loop on what was going on (what as going on: generally, almost nothing).

This corollary, I think, is useful for self-publishers because there are still lots of ways for self-publishers to use their money foolishly, primarily by losing control of how it get spent and by whom. If at any step the self-published author asks, who controls this money I am about to spend? and the answer is not “me,” that’s a flag on the field. Likewise, if control of the work is somehow compromised by the process, that’s another flag.

And of course outside the self-publishing process, i.e., when the work is out there in the world, Yog’s Law continues to apply. It continues to apply however the work is published, actually.

So, Yog’s Law: Still not just a law, but a good idea. The self-publishing corollary to Yog’s Law: Also, I think, a good idea. Let me know what you think.

 

One thing always guaranteed to brighten the day is politicians repeating the most lazy, clichéd myths as though they were unquestionable laws of nature. Earlier in the week the British Social Attitudes survey found views on migrants hardening, with a quarter believing they principally came here to claim benefits.  Their take is of course nothing to do with the coalition repeatedly tightening the rules on when EU migrants are entitled to access the welfare system, despite having failed to present the slightest evidence of benefit tourism, and when studies have repeatedly showed migrants overwhelmingly paying more in than they take out.

Thank goodness we have Ed Miliband to make the case for social security then, eh? He wouldn't do something like claim we encourage 18-year-olds who don't go to university to pile straight onto benefits rather than carry on in training or learning, would he? Oh. Still, he wouldn't then try and get back into a triangulation battle with the Tories by restricting a benefit to the young, as the wicked Conservatives want to with housing benefit, right? Ah.

This isn't entirely fair, as Declan Gaffney valiantly while still expressing major reservations best sets out.  Those training for more than 16 hours a week can't currently claim Jobseeker's Allowance, so for them the change will obviously make a major difference.  Away from that, the problems quickly mount.  More than anything, Miliband seems to be suggesting training to A-level standard is a means to an end at a time when countless graduates are stuck in low-skilled work.  Sure, it undoubtedly will help some, but as Chris argues this is pure manageralism.  In part it's blaming young people for not being able to find work when the fundamental difficulty outside of the usual areas is there aren't enough jobs, regardless of the skills those unemployed have.  Once you've added on the extremely dubious further means test, meaning those with parents earning over £42,000 will be entitled to precisely zip, as clearly they should be reliant on them rather than the state, it gets worse.

Gaffney is nonetheless far too kind to Miliband, as it's transparent why this policy was picked out from the 28 recommendations made by the IPPR report.  Labour couldn't possibly announce they were intending to increase JSA payments to those who've been in work for 5 years, regardless of the welcome reintroduction of the contributory principle, without at the same time taking away from somewhere else.  Hence the young predictably get it straight in the neck, for the exact reasons we've gone over countless times before.  The spin to the Graun and the rest of the press gave the game away, making a policy which isn't quite as draconian as it seems once you look into it out to be Labour getting tough on the supposed "something for nothing" culture.

Such is the way the debate on welfare must now be conducted.  It doesn't matter how many contradictions there are when it comes to the public's view on welfare, with so many ignorant of the actual rates and amount of fraud, making it wholly unsurprisingly 72% take the view it doesn't reward those who've paid in adequately (which JSA doesn't, it must be said), or how those on one particular benefit are often convinced those on a separate scheme are playing the system, it seems the only way to propose a positive change is to at the same time make a negative one.

We shouldn't forget either this comes at a time when the welfare system is in utter chaos, with Labour doing next to nothing to pin Iain Duncan Smith down for his spectacular failings.  As the memo leaked to the BBC makes clear, the JSA system of sanctioning and various workfare schemes has reached such proportions many are being driven onto Employment and Support Allowance as a result.  ESA correspondingly is costing more than expected, and the backlog of cases keeps on growing, with the same problems affecting the new personal independence payment scheme.  Universal credit is a complete joke, having been "reset" and "recast" as an entirely new project, while the work programme remains one which simply doesn't.

The shame here is most of the other recommendations from the IPPR's Condition of Britain report are worthy (PDF), if we gloss over the national citizen service target and yet further attempts to get back to work schemes on track.  Especially important would be devolving powers over housing benefit to councils, and while "neighbourhood justice panels" sound ominous, promoting restorative justice locally could help bring back some faith in the system.  Miliband for his part again spoke of the reality of low skilled work not giving a sense of fulfilment, let alone managing to pay the bills, exactly the sort of message which could, should resonate.  Still though we then get other shadow ministers, like Chuka Umunna on Newsnight, saying this was really about "plugging people in to the global economy", which sounds like something a more deranged George Osborne would like to do to disobliging paups.  When they can't seem to decide what the narrative (ugh) is, and when they're so convinced they have to follow the Tory lead, why should anyone so much as slightly sympathetic to Labour take their apparently good motives at face value?

The Walk of Fame Selection Committee of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce has selected thirty individuals to receive stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015. Here's the list…

MOTION PICTURES: Raymond Chandler (posthumous), Eugenio Derbez, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Garner, Peter Jackson, Bob Kane (posthumous), Daniel Radcliffe, Paul Rudd, Snoopy, Melissa McCarthy and Christoph Waltz.

TELEVISION: James L. Brooks, Ken Ehrlich, Bobby Flay, Seth MacFarlane, Julianna Margulies, Chris O'Donnell, Jim Parsons, Amy Poehler, Kelly Ripa and Sofia Vergara.

RECORDING: Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, Kool & The Gang, Pitbull, Al Schmitt and Pharrell Williams.

RADIO: Larry Elder.

LIVE THEATRE/LIVE PERFORMANCE: Kristin Chenoweth, Dick Gregory and Ennio Morricone.

Well, that's not a bad list. I think Larry Elder's one of those guys who makes Libertarianism sound like a philosophical cover for not caring about anyone in the world but yourself, and it does bother me a bit when they honor fictional characters. How many human beings in the entertainment industry who deserve but will never get that kind of recognition will look down on the sidewalk, see the name of Snoopy and think, "They could give a star to a cartoon dog and not to me?" But it's not a bad list and —

Hey! I just noticed! They're giving one to Bob Kane? Bob Kane, the contractual sole creator of Batman?

We're talking about Bob Kane, the man who in his autobiography, regretted that he never put the name of his collaborator Bill Finger on the comics…but who never somehow got around to rectifying that and allowing it.

Hmm. Someone has to put up the $30,000 fee and do a lot of lobbying to get someone a star. Usually, it's done by a studio's public relations people…like maybe Time-Warner pressed to get Kane this star so they could stage a media event and promote some new Batman project. (The dedication ceremony will take place some time in 2015 but on a date of mutual agreement. This helps it to be timed in order to publicize some opening or release.)

Did Time-Warner get Kane this star? Or did Mr. Kane's family put up the money and crusade for it?

And will there be protesters at the dedication ceremony with big signs that say WHAT ABOUT BILL FINGER? It wouldn't surprise me.

I am honored today to present my exclusive interview with noted British theologian N.T. Wright. The former Anglican bishop of Durham is a prolific author whose works are both enormously popular and respected by scholars. I have read, enjoyed and learned from several of his books, and it is a great honor to have this opportunity to speak with him.

FC: Steve Chalke created a stir in the UK last year with his forceful argument in favor of same-sex marriage. That was a big deal not just because Chalke is a prominent leader in the evangelical Christian community in your country, but because his argument was so substantive and so thoroughly biblical. Given that Chalke’s theological argument reflects the influence of your own writing, I’m interested in hearing more about your response to it.

WRIGHT: When anybody — pressure groups, governments, civilizations — suddenly change the meaning of key words, you really should watch out. If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning National Socialist or Nazi. The Nazis gave those words a certain meaning. In post-1917 Russia, there were whole categories of people who were called “former persons,” because by the Communist diktat they had ceased to be relevant for the state, and once you call them former persons it was extremely easy to ship them off somewhere and have them killed.

FC: Very droll. Yes, I get it — we Christians here in America are known for our reckless rhetoric, violent imagery and post-Christian partisan allegiance. That’s a terrific imitation — especially going right for the Nazi analogies. But seriously, what did you make of Steve Chalke’s argument?

WRIGHT: When anybody — pressure groups, governments, civilizations — suddenly change the meaning of key words, you really should watch out. If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning National Socialist or Nazi. The Nazis gave those words a certain meaning. In post-1917 Russia, there were whole categories of people who were called “former persons,” because by the Communist diktat they had ceased to be relevant for the state, and once you call them former persons it was extremely easy to ship them off somewhere and have them killed.

FC: Oh. Oh my. You were … serious? Um, that’s kind of …

WRIGHT: National Socialist or Nazi. The Communist diktat.

FC: Ooookay. Well, then. I take it you disagree with Steve Chalke’s argument. What is it, substantively, that you find …?

WRIGHT: Nazi. Communist.

FC: You are aware that the Nazis weren’t exactly pro-gay, right?

WRIGHT: If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning National Socialist or …

FC: I mean, citing the Nazis in defense of denying civil rights to gay people is ironic. It’s worse than ironi …

WRIGHT: If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning …

FC: Especially given that you’re siding with people in your own Anglican communion in places like Uganda, where they’re actually following the Nazi playbook, rounding up …

WRIGHT: … National Socialist or Nazi. …

FC: Bonhoeffer was gay!

WRIGHT: … The Nazis gave those words a certain meaning. …

FC: Bonhoeffer’s gay ghost is going to gay-haunt you if you don’t knock off this Nazi crap!

WRIGHT: In post-1917 Russia, there were whole categories of people who were called “former persons” …

FC: Yeah, they have former persons in Uganda, too. And in your church, and …

WRIGHT: … because by the Communist diktat they had ceased to be relevant …

FC: I think we’re done here. Thank you for your time.

Well, that was … disappointing.

Oh what a noble mind and all that.

I apologize for losing my temper there a bit, and for presuming that Wright was going to have something thoughtful to say on this subject. He usually makes more sense than this.

If N.T. Wright ever does articulate a meaningful argument against same-sex marriage — one that doesn’t contradict the vast body of his impressive published theology — I will be sure to let you know here.

Or if he does the right thing and apologizes for his embarrassingly sloppy, dishonest, historically inept Nazi garbage.

 

This post is about an idea I had around 1997, when I was 16 years old and a freshman computer-science major at Cornell.  Back then, I was extremely impressed by a research project called CLEVER, which one of my professors, Jon Kleinberg, had led while working at IBM Almaden.  The idea was to use the link structure of the web itself to rank which web pages were most important, and therefore which ones should be returned first in a search query.  Specifically, Kleinberg defined “hubs” as pages that linked to lots of “authorities,” and “authorities” as pages that were linked to by lots of “hubs.”  At first glance, this definition seems hopelessly circular, but Kleinberg observed that one can break the circularity by just treating the World Wide Web as a giant directed graph, and doing some linear algebra on its adjacency matrix.  Equivalently, you can imagine an iterative process where each web page starts out with the same hub/authority “starting credits,” but then in each round, the pages distribute their credits among their neighbors, so that the most popular pages get more credits, which they can then, in turn, distribute to their neighbors by linking to them.

I was also impressed by a similar research project called PageRank, which was proposed later by two guys at Stanford named Sergey Brin and Larry Page.  Brin and Page dispensed with Kleinberg’s bipartite hubs-and-authorities structure in favor of a more uniform structure, and made some other changes, but otherwise their idea was very similar.  At the time, of course, I didn’t know that CLEVER was going to languish at IBM, while PageRank (renamed Google) was going to expand to roughly the size of the entire world’s economy.

In any case, the question I asked myself about CLEVER/PageRank was not the one that, maybe in retrospect, I should have asked: namely, “how can I leverage the fact that I know the importance of this idea before most people do, in order to make millions of dollars?”

Instead I asked myself: “what other ‘vicious circles’ in science and philosophy could one unravel using the same linear-algebra trick that CLEVER and PageRank exploit?”  After all, CLEVER and PageRank were both founded on what looked like a hopelessly circular intuition: “a web page is important if other important web pages link to it.”  Yet they both managed to use math to defeat the circularity.  All you had to do was find an “importance equilibrium,” in which your assignment of “importance” to each web page was stable under a certain linear map.  And such an equilibrium could be shown to exist—indeed, to exist uniquely.

Searching for other circular notions to elucidate using linear algebra, I hit on morality.  Philosophers from Socrates on, I was vaguely aware, had struggled to define what makes a person “moral” or “virtuous,” without tacitly presupposing the answer.  Well, it seemed to me that, as a first attempt, one could do a lot worse than the following:

A moral person is someone who cooperates with other moral people, and who refuses to cooperate with immoral people.

Obviously one can quibble with this definition on numerous grounds: for example, what exactly does it mean to “cooperate,” and which other people are relevant here?  If you don’t donate money to starving children in Africa, have you implicitly “refused to cooperate” with them?  What’s the relative importance of cooperating with good people and withholding cooperation with bad people, of kindness and justice?  Is there a duty not to cooperate with bad people, or merely the lack of a duty to cooperate with them?  Should we consider intent, or only outcomes?  Surely we shouldn’t hold someone accountable for sheltering a burglar, if they didn’t know about the burgling?  Also, should we compute your “total morality” by simply summing over your interactions with everyone else in your community?  If so, then can a career’s worth of lifesaving surgeries numerically overwhelm the badness of murdering a single child?

For now, I want you to set all of these important questions aside, and just focus on the fact that the definition doesn’t even seem to work on its own terms, because of circularity.  How can we possibly know which people are moral (and hence worthy of our cooperation), and which ones immoral (and hence unworthy), without presupposing the very thing that we seek to define?

Ah, I thought—this is precisely where linear algebra can come to the rescue!  Just like in CLEVER or PageRank, we can begin by giving everyone in the community an equal number of “morality starting credits.”  Then we can apply an iterative update rule, where each person A can gain morality credits by cooperating with each other person B, and A gains more credits the more credits B has already.  We apply the rule over and over, until the number of morality credits per person converges to an equilibrium.  (Or, of course, we can shortcut the process by simply finding the principal eigenvector of the “cooperation matrix,” using whatever algorithm we like.)  We then have our objective measure of morality for each individual, solving a 2400-year-old open problem in philosophy.

The next step, I figured, would be to hack together some code that computed this “eigenmorality” metric, and then see what happened when I ran the code to measure the morality of each participant in a simulated society.  What would happen?  Would the results conform to my pre-theoretic intuitions about what sort of behavior was moral and what wasn’t?  If not, then would watching the simulation give me new ideas about how to improve the morality metric?  Or would it be my intuitions themselves that would change?

Unfortunately, I never got around to the “coding it up” part—there’s a reason why I became a theorist!  The eigenmorality idea went onto my back burner, where it stayed for the next 16 years: 16 years in which our world descended ever further into darkness, lacking a principled way to quantify morality.  But finally, this year, just two separate things have happened on the eigenmorality front, and that’s why I’m blogging about it now.

Eigenjesus and Eigenmoses

The first thing that’s happened is that Tyler Singer-Clark, my superb former undergraduate advisee, did code up eigenmorality metrics and test them out on a simulated society, for his MIT senior thesis project.  You can read Tyler’s 12-page report here—it’s a fun, enjoyable, thought-provoking first research paper, one that I wholeheartedly recommend.  Or, if you’d like to experiment yourself with the Python code, you can download it here from github.  (Of course, all opinions expressed in this post are mine alone, not necessarily Tyler’s.)

Briefly, Tyler examined what eigenmorality has to say in the setting of an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) tournament.  The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is the famous game in which two players meet repeatedly, and in each turn can either “Cooperate” or “Defect.”  The absolute best thing, from your perspective, is if you defect while your partner cooperates.  But you’re also pretty happy if you both cooperate.  You’re less happy if you both defect, while the worst (from your standpoint) is if you cooperate while your partner defects.  At each turn, when contemplating what to do, you have the entire previous history of your interaction with this partner available to you.  And thus, for example, you can decide to “punish” your partner for past defections, “reward” her for past cooperations, or “try to take advantage” by unilaterally defecting and seeing what happens.  At each turn, the game has some small constant probability of ending—so you know approximately how many times you’ll meet this partner in the future, but you don’t know exactly when the last turn will be.  Your score, in the game, is then the sum-total of your score over all turns and all partners (where each player meets each other player once).

In the late 1970s, as recounted in his classic work The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod invited people all over the world to submit computer programs for playing this game, which were then pit against each other in the world’s first serious IPD tournament.  And, in a tale that’s been retold in hundreds of popular books, while many people submitted complicated programs that used machine learning, etc. to try to suss out their opponents, the program that won—hands-down, repeatedly—was TIT_FOR_TAT, a few lines of code submitted by the psychologist Anatol Rapaport to implement an ancient moral maxim.  TIT_FOR_TAT starts out by cooperating; thereafter, it simply does whatever its opponent did in the last move, swiftly rewarding every cooperation and punishing every defection, and ignoring the entire previous history.  In the decades since Axelrod, running Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma tournaments has become a minor industry, with countless variations explored (for example, “evolutionary” versions, and versions allowing side-communication between the players), countless new strategies invented, and countless papers published.  To make a long story short, TIT_FOR_TAT continues to do quite well across a wide range of environments, but depending on the mix of players present, other strategies can sometimes beat TIT_FOR_TAT.  (As one example, if there’s a sizable minority of colluding players, who recognize each other by cooperating and defecting in a prearranged sequence, then those players can destroy TIT_FOR_TAT and other “simple” strategies, by cooperating with one another while defecting against everyone else.)

Anyway, Tyler sets up and runs a fairly standard IPD tournament, with a mix of strategies that includes TIT_FOR_TAT, TIT_FOR_TWO_TATS, other TIT_FOR_TAT variations, PAVLOV, FRIEDMAN, EATHERLY, CHAMPION (see the paper for details), and degenerate strategies like always defecting, always cooperating, and playing randomly.  However, Tyler then asks an unusual question about the IPD tournament: namely, purely on the basis of the cooperate/defect sequences, which players should we judge to have acted morally toward their partners?

It might be objected that the players didn’t “know” they were going to be graded on morality: as far as they knew, they were just trying to maximize their individual utilities.  The trouble with that objection is that the players didn’t “know” they were trying to maximize their utilities either!  The players are bots, which do whatever their code tells them to do.  So in some sense, utility—no less than morality—is “merely an interpretation” that we impose on the raw cooperate/defect sequences!  There’s nothing to stop us from imposing some other interpretation (say, one that explicitly tries to measure morality) and seeing what happens.

In an attempt to measure the players’ morality, Tyler uses the eigenmorality idea from before.  The extent to which player A “cooperates” with player B is simply measured by the percentage of times A cooperates.  (One acknowledged limitation of this work is that, when two players both defect, there’s no attempt to take into account “who started it,” and to judge the aggressor more harshly than the retaliator—or to incorporate time in any other way.)  This then gives us a “cooperation matrix,” whose (i,j) entry records the total amount of niceness that player i displayed to player j.  Diagonalizing that matrix, and taking its largest eigenvector, then gives us our morality scores.

Now, there’s a very interesting ambiguity in what I said above.  Namely, should we define the “niceness scores” to lie in [0,1] (so that the lowest, meanest possible score is 0), or in [-1,1] (so that it’s possible to have negative niceness)?  This might sound like a triviality, but in our setting, it’s precisely the mathematical reflection of one of the philosophical conundrums I mentioned earlier.  The conundrum can be stated as follows: is your morality a monotone function of your niceness?  We all agree, presumably, that it’s better to be nice to Gandhi than to be nice to Hitler.  But do you have a positive obligation to be not-nice to Hitler: to make him suffer because he made others suffer?  Or, OK, how about not Hitler, but someone who’s somewhat bad?  Consider, for example, a woman who falls in love with, and marries, an unrepentant armed robber (with full knowledge of who he is, and with other options available to her).  Is the woman morally praiseworthy for loving her husband despite his bad behavior?  Or is she blameworthy because, by rewarding his behavior with her love, she helps to enable it?

To capture two possible extremes of opinion about such questions, Tyler and I defined two different morality metrics, which we called … wait for it … eigenmoses and eigenjesus.  Eigenmoses has the niceness scores in [-1,1], which means that you’re actively rewarded for punishing evildoers: that is, for defecting against those who defect against many moral players.  Eigenjesus, by contrast, has the niceness scores in [0,1], which means that you always do at least as well by “turning the other cheek” and cooperating.  (Though note that, even with eigenjesus, you get more morality credits by cooperating with moral players than by cooperating with immoral ones.)

This is probably a good place to mention a second limitation of Tyler’s current study.  Namely, with the current system, there’s no direct way for a player to find out how its partner has been behaving toward third parties.  The only information that A gets about the goodness or evilness of player B, comes from A and B’s direct interaction.  Ideally, one would like to design bots that take into account, not only the other bots’ behavior toward them, but the other bots’ behavior toward each other.  So for example, even if someone is unfailingly nice to you, if that person is an asshole to everyone else, then the eigenmoses moral code would demand that you return the person’s cooperation with icy defection.  Conversely, even if Gandhi is mean and hateful to you, you would still be morally obliged (interestingly, on both the eigenmoses and eigenjesus codes) to be nice to him, because of the amount of good he does for everyone else.

Anyway, you can read Tyler’s paper if you want to see the results of computing the eigenmoses and eigenjesus scores for a diverse population of bots.  Briefly, the results accord pretty well with intuition.  When we look at eigenjesus scores, the all-cooperate bot comes out on top and the all-defect bot on the bottom (as is mathematically necessary), with TIT_FOR_TAT somewhere in the middle, and generous versions of TIT_FOR_TAT higher up.  When we look at eigenmoses, by contrast, TIT_FOR_TWO_TATS comes out on top, with TIT_FOR_TAT in sixth place, and the all-cooperate bot scoring below the median.  Interestingly, once again, the all-defect bot gets the lowest score (though in this case, it wasn’t mathematically necessary).

Even though the measures acquit themselves well in this particular tournament, it’s admittedly easy to construct scenarios where the prescriptions of eigenjesus and eigenmoses alike violently diverge from most people’s moral intuitions.  We’ve already touched on a few such scenarios above (for example, are you really morally obligated to lick the boots of someone who kicks you, just because that person is a saint to everyone other than you?).  Another type of scenario involves minorities.  Imagine, for instance, that 98% of the players are unfailingly nice to each other, but unfailingly cruel to the remaining 2% (who they can recognize, let’s say, by their long noses or darker skin—some trivial feature like that).  Meanwhile, the put-upon 2% return the favor by being nice to each other and mean to the 98%.  Who, in this scenario, is moral, and who’s immoral?  The mathematical verdict of both eigenmoses and eigenjesus is unequivocal: the 98% are almost perfectly good, while the 2% are almost perfectly evil.  After all, the 98% are nice to almost everyone, while the 2% are mean to those who are nice to almost everyone, and nice only to a tiny minority who are mean to almost everyone.  Of course, for much of human history, this is precisely how morality worked, in many people’s minds.  But I dare say it’s a result that would make moderns uncomfortable.

In summary, it seems clear to me that neither eigenmoses nor eigenjesus correctly captures our intuitions about morality, any more than Φ captures our intuitions about consciousness.  But as they say, I think there’s plenty of scope here for further research: for coming up with new mathematical measures that sharpen our intuitive judgments about morality, and (if we like) testing those measures out using IPD tournaments.  It also seems to me that there’s something fundamentally right about the eigenvector idea: all else being equal, we’d like to say, being nice to others is good, except that aiding and abetting evildoers is not good, and the way we can recognize the evildoers in our midst is that they’re not nice to others—except that, if the people who someone isn’t nice to are themselves evildoers, then the person might again be good, and so on.  The only way to cut off the infinite regress, it seems, is to demand some sort of “reflective equilibrium” in our moral judgments, and that’s precisely what eigenmorality tries to capture.  On the other hand, no such idea can ever make moral debate obsolete—if for no other reason than that we still need to decide which specific eigenmorality metric to use, and that choice is itself a moral judgment.

Scooped by Plato

Which brings me, finally, to the second new thing that’s happened this year on the eigenmorality front.  Namely, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein—who’s far and away my favorite contemporary novelist—published a charming new book entitled Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away.  Here she imagines that Plato has reappeared in present-day America (she doesn’t bother to explain how), where he’s taught himself English and the basics of modern science, learned how to use the Internet, and otherwise gotten himself up to speed.  The book recounts Plato’s dialogues with various modern interlocutors, as he volunteers to have his brain scanned, guest-writes a relationship advice column, participates in a panel discussion on child-rearing, and gets interviewed on cable news by “Roy McCoy” (a thinly veiled Bill O’Reilly).  Often, Goldstein has Plato answer the moderns’ questions using direct quotes from the Timaeus, the Gorgias, the Meno, etc., which makes her Plato into a very intelligent sort of chatbot.  This is a genre that’s not often seriously attempted, and that I’d love to read more of (possible subjects: Shakespeare, Galileo, Jefferson, Lincoln, Einstein, Turing…).

Anyway, my favorite episode in the book is the first, eponymous one, where Plato visits the Googleplex in Mountain View.  While eating lunch in one of the many free cafeterias, Plato is cornered by a somewhat self-important, dreadlocked coder named Marcus, who tries to convince Plato that Google PageRank has finally solved the problem agonized over in the Republic, of how to define justice.  By using the Internet, we can simply crowd-source the answer, Marcus declares: get millions of people to render moral judgments on every conceivable question, and also moral judgments on each other’s judgments.  Then declare those judgments the most morally reliable, that are judged the most reliable by the people who are themselves the most morally reliable.  The circularity, as usual, is broken by taking the principal eigenvector of the graph of moral judgments (Goldstein doesn’t have Marcus put it that way, but it’s what she means).

Not surprisingly, Plato is skeptical.  Through Socratic questioning—the method he learned from the horse’s mouth—Plato manages to make Marcus realize that, in the very act of choosing which of several variants of PageRank to use in our crowd-sourced justice engine, we’ll implicitly be making moral choices already.  And therefore, we can’t use PageRank, or anything like it, as the ultimate ground of morality.

Whereas I imagined that the raw data for an “eigenmorality” metric would consist of numerical measures of how nice people had been to each other, Goldstein imagines the raw data to consist of abstract moral judgments, and of judgments about judgments.  Also, whereas the output of my kind of metric would be a measure of the “goodness” of each individual person, the outputs of hers would presumably be verdicts about general moral and political questions.  But, much like with CLEVER versus PageRank, it’s obvious that the ideas are similar—and that I should credit Goldstein with independently discovering my nerdy 16-year-old vision, in order to put it in the mouth of a nerdy character in her story.

As I said before, I agree with Goldstein’s Plato that eigenmorality can’t serve as the ultimate ground of morality.  But that’s a bit like saying that Google rank can’t serve as the ultimate ground of importance, because even just to design and evaluate their ranking algorithms, Google’s engineers must have some prior notion of “importance” to serve as a standard.  That’s true, of course, but it omits to mention that Google rank is still useful—useful enough to have changed civilization in the space of a few years.  Goldstein’s book has the wonderful property that even the ideas she gives to her secondary characters, the ones who serve as foils to Plato, are sometimes interesting enough to deserve book-length treatments of their own, and crowd-sourced morality strikes me as a perfect example.

In the two previous comment threads, we got into a discussion of anthropogenic climate change, and of my own preferred way to address it and related threats to our civilization’s survival, which is simply to tax every economic activity at a rate commensurate with the environmental damage that it does, and use the funds collected for cleanup, mitigation, and research into alternatives.  (Obviously, such ideas are nonstarters in the current political climate of the US, but I’m not talking here about what’s feasible, only about what’s necessary.)  As several commenters pointed out, my view raises an obvious question: who is to decide how much “damage” each activity causes, and thus how much it should be taxed?  Of course, this is merely a special case of the more general question: who is to decide on any question of public policy whatsoever?

For the past few centuries, our main method for answering such questions—in those parts of the world where a king or dictator or Politburo doesn’t decree the answer—has been representative democracy.  Democracy is, arguably, the best decision-making method that our sorry species has ever managed to put into practice, at least outside the hard sciences.  But in my view, representative democracy is now failing spectacularly at possibly the single most important problem it’s ever faced: namely, that of leaving our descendants a livable planet.  Even though, by and large, reasonable people mostly agree about what needs to be done—weaning ourselves off fossil fuels (especially the dirtier ones), switching to solar, wind, and nuclear, planting forests and stopping deforestation, etc.—after decades of debate we’re still taking only limping, token steps toward those goals, and in many cases we’re moving rapidly in the opposite direction.  Those who, for financial, theological, or ideological reasons, deny the very existence of a problem, have proved that despite being a minority, they can push hard enough on the levers of democracy to prevent anything meaningful from happening.

So what’s the solution?  To put the world under the thumb of an environmentalist dictator?  Absolutely not.  In all of history, I don’t think any dictatorial system has ever shown itself robust against takeover by murderous tyrants (people who probably aren’t too keen on alternative energy either).  The problem, I think, is epistemological.  Within physics and chemistry and climatology, the people who think anthropogenic climate change exists and is a serious problem have won the argument—but the news of their intellectual victory hasn’t yet spread to the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, or cable news, or the US Congress, or the minds of enough people to tip the scales of history.  Because our domination of the earth’s climate and biosphere is new and unfamiliar; because the evidence for rapid climate change is complicated and statistical; because the worst effects are still remote from us in time, space, or both; because the sacrifices needed to address the problem are real—for all of these reasons, the deniers have learned that they can subvert the Popperian process by which bad explanations are discarded and good explanations win.  If you just repeat debunked ideas through a loud enough megaphone, it turns out, many onlookers won’t be able to tell the difference between you and the people who have genuine knowledge—or they will eventually, but not until it’s too late.  If you have a few million dollars, you can even set up your own parody of the scientific process: your own phony experts, in their own phony think tanks, with their own phony publications, giving each other legitimacy by citing each other.  (Of course, all this is a problem for many fields, not just climate change.  Climate is special only because there, the future of life on earth might literally hinge on our ability to get epistemology right.)

Yet for all that, I’m an optimist—sort of.  For it seems to me that the Internet has given us new tools with which to try to fix our collective epistemology, without giving up on a democratic society.  Google, Wikipedia, Quora, and so forth have already improved our situation, if only by a little.  We could improve it a lot more.  Consider, for example, the following attempted definitions:

A trustworthy source of information is one that’s considered trustworthy by many sources who are themselves trustworthy (on the same topic or on closely related topics).  The current scientific consensus, on any given issue, is what the trustworthy sources consider to be the consensus.  A good decision-maker is someone who’s considered to be a good decision-maker by many other good decision-makers.

At first glance, the above definitions sound ludicrously circular—even Orwellian—but we now know that all that’s needed to unravel the circularity is a principal eigenvector computation on the matrix of trust.  And the computation of such an eigenvector need be no more “Orwellian” than … well, Google.  If enough people want it, then we have the tools today to put flesh on these definitions, to give them agency: to build a crowd-sourced deliberative democracy, one that “usually just works” in much the same way Google usually just works.

Now, would those with axes to grind try to subvert such a system the instant it went online?  Certainly.  For example, I assume that millions of people would rate Conservapedia as a more trustworthy source than Wikipedia—and would rate other people who had done so as, themselves, trustworthy sources, while rating as untrustworthy anyone who called Conservapedia untrustworthy.  So there would arise a parallel world of trust and consensus and “expertise,” mutually-reinforcing yet nearly disjoint from the world of the real.  But here’s the thing: anyone would be able to see, with the click of a mouse, the extent to which this parallel world had diverged from the real one.  They’d see that there was a huge, central connected component in the trust graph—including almost all of the Nobel laureates, physicists from the US nuclear weapons labs, military planners, actuaries, other hardheaded people—who all accepted the reality of humans warming the planet, and only tiny, isolated tendrils of trust reaching from that component into the component of Rush Limbaugh and James Inhofe.  The deniers and their think-tanks would be exposed to the sun; they’d lose their thin cover of legitimacy.  It should go without saying that the same would happen to various charlatans on the left, and should go without saying that I’d cheer that outcome as well.

Some will object: but people who believe in pseudosciences—whether creationists or anti-vaxxers or climate change deniers—already know they’re in a minority!  And far from being worried about it, they treat it as a badge of honor.  They think they’re Galileo, that their belief in spite of a scientific consensus makes them heroes, while those in the giant central component of the trust graph are merely slavish followers.

I admit all this.  But the point of an eigentrust system wouldn’t be to convince everyone.  As long as I’m fantasizing, the point would be that, once people’s individual decisions did give rise to a giant connected trust component, the recommendations of that component could acquire the force of law.  The formation of the giant component would be the signal that there’s now enough of a consensus to warrant action, despite the continuing existence of a vocal dissenting minority—that the minority has, in effect, withdrawn itself from the main conversation and retreated into a different discourse.  Conversely, it’s essential to note, if there were a dissenting minority, but that minority had strong trunks of topic-relevant trust pointing toward it from the main component (for example, because the minority contained a large fraction of the experts in the relevant field), then the minority’s objections might be enough to veto action, even if it was numerically small.  This is still democracy; it’s just democracy enhanced by linear algebra.

Other people will object that, while we should use the Internet to improve the democratic process, the idea we’re looking for is not eigentrust or eigenmorality but rather prediction markets.  Such markets would allow us to, as my friend Robin Hanson advocates, “vote on values but bet on beliefs.”  For example, a country could vote for the conditional policy that, if business-as-usual is predicted to cause sea levels to rise at least 4 meters by the year 2200, then an aggressive emissions reduction plan will be triggered, but not otherwise.  But as for the prediction itself, that would be left to a futures market: a place where, unlike with voting, there’s a serious penalty for being wrong, namely losing your shirt.  If the futures market assigned the prediction at least such-and-such a probability, then the policy tied to that prediction would become law.

I actually like the idea of prediction markets—I have ever since I heard about them—but I consider them limited in scope.  My example above, involving the year 2200, gives a hint as to why.  Prediction markets are great whenever our disagreements are over something that will be settled one way or the other, to everyone’s assent, in the near future (e.g., who will win the World Cup, or next year’s GDP).  But most of our important disagreements aren’t like that: they’re over which direction society should move in, which issues to care about, which statistical indicators are even the right ones to measure a country’s health.  Now, those broader questions can sometimes be settled empirically, in a sense: they can be settled by the overwhelming judgment of history, as the slavery, women’s suffrage, and fascism debates were.  But that kind of empirical confirmation typically takes way too long to set up a decent betting market around it.  And for the non-bettable questions, a carefully-crafted eigendemocracy really is the best system I can think of.

Again, I think Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato is completely right that such a system, were it implemented, couldn’t possibly solve the philosophical problem of finding the “ultimate ground of justice,” just like Google can’t provide us with the “ultimate ground of importance.”  If nothing else, we’d still need to decide which of the many possible eigentrust metrics to use, and we couldn’t use eigentrust for that without risking an infinite regress.  But just like Google, whatever its flaws, works well enough for you to use it dozens of times per day, so a crowd-sourced eigendemocracy might—just might—work well enough to save civilization.

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Update (6/20): If you haven’t been following, there’s an excellent discussion in the comments, with, as I’d hoped, many commenters raising strong and pertinent objections to the eigenmorality and eigendemocracy concepts, while also proposing possible fixes.  Let me now mention what I think are the most important problems with eigenmorality and eigendemocracy respectively—both of them things that had occurred to me also, but that the commenters have brought out very clearly and explicitly.

With eigenmorality, perhaps the most glaring problem is that, as I mentioned before, there’s no notion of time-ordering, or of “who started it,” in the definition that Tyler and I were using.  As Luca Trevisan aptly points out in the comments, this has the consequence that eigenmorality, as it stands, is completely unable to distinguish between a crime syndicate that’s hated by the majority because of its crimes, and an equally-large ethnic minority that’s hated by the majority solely because it’s different, and that therefore hates the majority.  However, unlike with mathematical theories of consciousness—where I used counterexamples to try to show that no mathematical definition of a certain kind could possibly capture our intuitions about consciousness—here the problem strikes me as much more circumscribed and bounded.  It’s far from obvious to me that we can’t easily improve the definition of eigenmorality so that it does agree with most people’s moral intuition, whenever intuition renders a clear verdict, at least in the limited setting of Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma tournaments.

Let’s see, in particular, how to solve the problem that Luca stressed.  As a first pass, we could do so as follows:

A moral agent is one who only initiates defection against agents who it has good reason to believe are immoral (where, as usual, linear algebra is used to unravel the definition’s apparent circularity).

Notice that I’ve added two elements to the setup: not only time but also knowledge.  If you shun someone solely because you don’t like how they look, then we’d like to say that reflects poorly on you, even if (unbeknownst to you) it turns out that the person really is an asshole.  Now, several more clauses would need to be added to the above definition to flesh it out: for example, if you’ve initiated defection against an immoral person, but then the person stops being immoral, at what point do you have a moral duty to “forgive and forget”?  Also, just like with the eigenmoses/eigenjesus distinction, do you have a positive duty to initiate defection against an agent who you learn is immoral, or merely no duty not to do so?

OK, so after we handle the above issues, will there still be examples that our time-sensitive, knowledge-sensitive eigenmorality definition gets badly, egregiously wrong?  Maybe—I don’t know!  Please let me know in the comments.

Moving on to eigendemocracy, here I think the biggest problem is one pointed out by commenter Rahul.  Namely, an essential aspect of how Google is able to work so well is that people have reasons for linking to webpages other than boosting those pages’ Google rank.  In other words, Google takes a link structure that already exists, independently of its ranking algorithm, and that (as the economists would put it) encodes people’s “revealed preferences,” and exploits that structure for its own purposes.  Of course, now that Google is the main way many of us navigate the web, increasing Google rank has become a major reason for linking to a webpage, and an entire SEO industry has arisen to try to game the rankings.  But Google still isn’t the only reason for linking, so the link structure still contains real information.

By contrast, consider an eigendemocracy, with a giant network encoding who trusts whom on what subject.  If the only reason why this trust network existed was to help make political decisions, then gaming the system would probably be rampant: people could simply decide first which political outcome they wanted, then choose the “experts” such that claiming to “trust” them would do the most for their favored outcome.  It follows that this system can only improve on ordinary democracy if the trust network has some other purpose, so that the participants have an actual incentive to reveal the truth about who they trust.  So, how would an eigendemocracy suss out the truth about who trusts whom on which subject?  I don’t have a very good answer to this, and am open to suggestions.  The best idea so far is to use Facebook for this purpose, but I don’t know exactly how.

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Update (6/22): Many commenters, both here and on Hacker News, interpreted me to be saying something obviously stupid: namely, that any belief identified as “the consensus” by an eigenvector analysis is therefore the morally right one. They then energetically knocked down this strawman, with the standard examples (Hitler, slavery, discrimination against gays).

Admittedly, I probably contributed to this confusion by my ill-advised decision to discuss eigenmorality and eigendemocracy in the same blog post—solely because of their mathematical similarity, and the ease with which thinking about one leads to thinking about the other. But the two are different, as are my claims about them. For the record:

• Eigenmorality: Within the stylized setting of an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, with side-channels allowing agents to learn who are doing what to each other, I believe it ought to be possible, by looking at who initiated rounds of defection and forgiveness, and then doing an eigenvector analysis on the result, to identify the “moral” and “immoral” agents in a way that more-or-less accords with our moral intuitions. Even if true, of course, this wouldn’t have any obvious moral implications for hot-button issues such as abortion, gun control, or climate change, which it’s far from obvious how to encode in terms of IPD tournaments.
• Eigendemocracy: By doing an eigenvector analysis, to identify who people implicitly acknowledge as the “experts” within each field, I believe that it might be possible to produce results that, on average, in practice, and in contemporary society, are better and more rational than those produced by ordinary majority-voting. Obviously, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that the results of eigendemocracy would be morally acceptable ones: if the public acknowledges as “experts” people who believe evil things (as in Nazi Germany), then eigendemocracy will produce evil results. But democracy itself suffers from a precisely analogous problem. The situation that interests me is one that’s been with us since the time of ancient Athens: one where there is a consensus among the experts about the wisest course of action, and there’s also an implicit consensus among the public that those experts are indeed the experts, but the democratic system is somehow “unable to complete the modus ponens,” because of manipulation by powerful interests and the sway of demagogues. In such cases, it seems possible to me that an eigendemocracy could improve on the results of ordinary democracy—perhaps dramatically so—while still avoiding the evils of dictatorship.

Crucially, in neither of the above bullet points, nor in their combination, is there any hint of a belief that “the will of the majority always defines what’s morally right” (if anything, there’s a belief in the opposite).

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Update (7/4): While this isn’t really a surprise—I’d astonished if it weren’t the case—I’ve now learned that several people, besides me and Rebecca Goldstein, have previously written about the ideas of eigentrust and eigendemocracy. Perhaps more surprising is that one of the earlier groups—consisting of Sep Kamvar, Mario Schlosser, and Hector Garcia-Molina from Stanford—literally called the idea “EigenTrust,” when they published about it in 2003. (Note that Garcia-Molina, in a likely non-coincidence, was Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PhD adviser.) Kamvar et al.’s intended application for EigenTrust was to determine which nodes are trustworthy in a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, rather than (say) to reinvent democracy, or to address conundrums of epistemology and ethics that have been with us since Plato. But while the scope might be more modest, the core idea is the same. (Hat tip to commenter Babak.)

As for enhancing democracy using linear algebra, it turns out that that too has already been discussed: see for example this presentation by Rob Spekkens of the Perimeter Institute, which Michael Nielsen pointed me to. (In yet another small-world phenomenon, Rob’s main interest is in quantum foundations, and in that context I’ve known him for a decade! But his interest in eigendemocracy was news to me.)

If you’re wondering whether anything in this post was original … well, so far, I haven’t learned of prior work specifically about eigenmorality (e.g., in Iterated Prisoners Dilemma tournaments), much less about eigenmoses and eigenjesus.

When I’m not doing politics, I work in IT as a systems and network administrator. This involves dealing with the Internet Protocol (IP) a lot. This is basically the thing that makes the Internet (and hence the Web, which is a subset of the Internet) work. Trouble is, it’s based on an assumption that everything directly connected to the Internet (like your BT HomeHub, Virgin box or whatever) can have a unique identifier called an IP address. But there’s so much stuff connected to the Internet these days from smartphones to lamp-posts that we’re running out of unique identifiers allowed by the current version of the Internet Protocol.

Networking geeks basically solved this problem over 15 years ago in 1998 with a new version of the Internet Protocol, but we’re still using the old one because there’s no real incentive for anybody to switch before anybody else does. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, so wearing my political hat I think there’s a case for the Government to lean on the industries.

I’ve drafted a policy motion on mandating rollout of IPv6 to end users for Lib Dem Conference in Glasgow. It’s aimed at a non-technical audience, so I’ve elided or hinted at some of the problems of address space exhaustion such as route fragmentation. I’ve had a couple of non-technical people read it, and they can grasp the gist: “There is a problem. There is a solution, but nobody’s doing anything about it. The Government should make them.” Note that I’m only addressing the ISP side; hosting and content providers are largely based outside the UK, particularly cloud-based ones, and it’s a business with tight profit margins; I think that if everybody has the ability to reach you on IPv6, then increasing IPv4 prices (and policies of IPv4 allocators such as RIPE) will encourage those providers to implement IPv6 of their own accord.

I’ll be encouraging my local party to support it, but the more LPs we get behind it (and individual conference reps) the better. Let me know if you have any suggested alterations to the text, or whether you or your local party would like to support the motion.

Maybe in 10 years I’ll be proposing a motion to deprecate IPv4…

Policy Motion: Connecting More Devices to the Internet

Conference understands that:

1. the Internet provides many opportunities for building a stronger economy and a fairer society, in line with the UN Special Rapporteur’s report from 2011 which states that “ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all States”
2. the Internet uses the Internet Protocol to allow computers to talk to each other
3. the Internet Protocol currently in use (IPv4, from 1981) only allows around 4 billion direct connections to the Internet
4. these direct connections are nearly exhausted, which will prevent new direct connections to the Internet
5. there is increased demand for Internet-connected devices from phones and tablets, through to lamp posts and paving slabs, for building dynamic and interactive networked systems
6. allowing more direct Internet connections creates opportunity for new technologies and businesses, creating jobs and growth
7. a new version of the Internet Protocol (IPv6, from 1998) allows 380 billion billion billion billion direct Internet connection
8. IPv6 is seeing active daily use and is ready for wider deployment, but is not offered by most UK Internet Service Providers to their customers
9. IPv6 is supported by recent versions of Windows, OS X and GNU/Linux operating systems among others
10. IPv6 can co-exist with IPv4 (“dual stack”) for computers to access services over both protocols during the transition
11. IPv6 can make services such as video conferencing easier to implement

Conference notes that:

1. major providers such as Microsoft are having to take measures to compensate for lack of available connections which has side-effects such as slowing connections
2. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are working around lack of IPv4 addresses with “Carrier Grade NAT” which can result in one customer being blocked from a service due to the actions of another customer
3. any attempt to extend usage of the old Internet Protocol is a short-term measure given increased demand for direct connections
4. there is little incentive for ISPs to offer IPv6 to customers while it is not needed to access services and content
5. there is little incentive for content and service providers to use IPv6 while it is not offered by ISPs
6. the lack of a market incentive to lead ISPs and providers towards deployment of a superior solution makes it appropriate for the Government to intervene

Conference calls for:

1. the Liberal Democrats in Government to require ISPs in the UK to provide global IPv6 addresses to their customers to allow more direct connections to the Internet
2. all Government websites and online services to be accessible over IPv6 within 5 years
3. ISP-provided routers to allow use of IPv6 addresses by the customer’s computers
4. the rollout to be completed by a fixed deadline no more than 5 years after legislation is passed or an agreement is made
5. Liberal Democrats in Europe to call for European-wide legislation or agreement on the roll-out of IPv6

Update: My policy motion was not accepted for Autumn Conference 2014.

I wonder to what extent William Hartnell’s look as the first Doctor Who was based on eminent Victorian naturalist Richard Owen?

Perhaps the irascible character of the first Doctor was also informed by Owen?

Turns out he has a few cogent reservations. I would agree with them.

Relatedly, I suspect it would surprise a number of people to know I don’t have a philosophical issue with gun ownership. Own them if you like; please take substantial training with them and learn to operate them responsibly, since they really are designed to kill things, including people. I live in a rural area that has a large amount of gun ownership; on many evenings I can hear my neighbors having target practice. There’s never been a problem. I prefer a bow myself.

Likewise, gun ownership, sensibly practiced, as part of (but not solely comprising) an overall security regimen? Sure. Keep the weapon instructor’s reservations in mind; he has experience on the matter. There are lots of ways that introducing a gun to a self-defense situation can go very wrong.

On the other hand, gun as fetish object? Creeps me out. When I see a picture of some dude hoisting some big damn gun about, often with appallingly poor trigger discipline, the first thing that comes to my mind is not look out, we have a badass on our hands, but, rather, here’s a dude who’s afraid of every fucking thing in the world. The big damn gun is like the eyes on the wings of a butterfly or a pufferfish sucking in seawater — a way to look bigger and maybe not get eaten. By whom? By whomever, man, I don’t know — when you’re afraid of every fucking thing in the world, I guess you spend a lot of time worrying about getting eaten.

So wait, are you calling me a coward? I hear some of these dudes saying, hoisting their guns. No, not a coward. Just afraid.

I’m not afraid! I have a big damn gun! Yes, well. Whatever makes you feel not afraid, chuckles.

You wouldn’t be saying that if I were in front of you, with my big damn gun! Indeed, I probably wouldn’t, because when people who are afraid of every fucking thing in the world wander about with big damn guns, bad things have an increasingly likely chance of happening. I’ll just go have lunch in Chipotle until you wander off, if it’s all the same to you.

Knowledgeable about guns? Sweet. Geeked out about guns in all their varieties? Hey, everyone’s a geek about something, and this is one of your things. Rock on. Wanting to share the joys of responsible ownership and use of guns with others? I am all for positive role models with these particular machines. Please do. Have to display yourself with your guns and/or can’t bear to part with them for a moment? Dude, you’re afraid of every fucking thing in the world.

I’m gonna be thinking that every time I see that picture of you with your big damn gun. I doubt I’ll be the only one.

As we're two weeks out from publication of "The Rhesus Chart", we in Human Resources at SOE (Q Division) thought it would be amusing to run a competition for the worst, most embarrassing, disciplinary hearing we in the Laundry have ever had the misfortune to be involved in.

Post your worst workplace disciplinary problems in the comments below. (Please remember to check that your name appears correctly on your comment. Due to a bug in the way the blog handles logins with Google OpenID, some names are mangled: if this happens to you, add another comment identifying yourself.)

Five lucky winners will receive signed first-edition hardcovers of "The Rhesus Chart"; five runners-up will receive "Magic Circle of Safety" public awareness mugs, and/or a surprise visit from the Black Assizes.

Entries will be judged by me (Charlie Stross) on July 7th, and announced in a separate blog post. (Many thanks to co-sponsors Orbit Books for ideas, support, and the clipboard above.) I'll arbitrarily pick the cleverest reasons, or just the ones that make me laugh the loudest and the longest. Here are some brief examples to get you started (extra points for florid and unforgettable details):

* Employee called in three OCCULUS teams to bring down the Bird-God of Balsagoð, which turned out to be a pigeon.

* Failed to attend mandatory diversity awareness training due to being trapped in another dimension.

* Made inappropriate sashimi-themed jokes when attending reception for treaty negotiation delegation from BLUE HADES.

* Emailed selfie of own genitalia to another employee, resulting in PTSD and nightmares about ovipositors and traumatic insemination.

I don’t trust books about “leadership.” Such books invariably include lots of anecdotes about great leaders and the things that inspired them to become great leaders, yet none of those anecdotes ever seems to recount any of them having read a book about leadership. And that ought to tell us all we need to know about such books.

But more than that, I don’t trust such books (or magazines) because I think the main function of this sub-genre of self-help literature is dubious and kind of evil. Books on leadership are written for and read by people in positions of “leadership,” which is to say by people with fancy titles, offices and salaries. Which is to say, they are written for and read by people haunted by the crippling fear of impostor syndrome.

That’s not quite it, though. Impostor syndrome is a neurosis based on irrational fear and the inability to accept that one has legitimately earned and achieved one’s successes. But the target audience for “leadership” books and magazines isn’t dealing with a neurosis. Their fears are legitimate. They know their privilege truly is unearned and unmerited. They know they actually are impostors.

That’s why they’re so desperate to gobble up books about “leadership,” hoping to learn the Six Secrets or the Seven Habits that might provide some defense when that inevitable knock at the door finally comes. They’re hoping to legitimize their position as “leaders” after the fact, and to do so they’re willing to read anything, subscribe to any journal, attend any seminar, follow any guru — do almost anything short of, you know, actually leading.

This was illustrated in that report by Dana Milbank that I linked to yesterday on “Heritage’s ugly Benghazi panel.”

The right-wing PR-tank’s session had worked itself into an anti-Muslim frenzy of hate-driven conspiracy theorizing. The lies being told in that room went unchallenged until:

Saba Ahmed, an American University law student, stood in the back of the room and asked a question in a soft voice. “We portray Islam and all Muslims as bad, but there’s 1.8 billion followers of Islam,” she told them. “We have 8 million-plus Muslim Americans in this country and I don’t see them represented here.”

Panelist Brigitte Gabriel of a group called ACT! for America pounced. She said “180 million to 300 million” Muslims are “dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.” She told Ahmed that the “peaceful majority were irrelevant” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and she drew a Hitler comparison: “Most Germans were peaceful, yet the Nazis drove the agenda and as a result, 60 million died.”

“Are you an American?” Gabriel demanded of Ahmed, after accusing her of taking “the limelight” and before informing her that her “political correctness” belongs “in the garbage.”

“Where are the others speaking out?” Ahmed was asked. This drew an extended standing ovation from the nearly 150 people in the room, complete with cheers.

The panel’s moderator, conservative radio host Chris Plante, grinned and joined in the assault. “Can you tell me who the head of the Muslim peace movement is?” he demanded of Ahmed.

“Yeah,” audience members taunted, “yeah.”

Ahmed answered quietly, as before. “I guess it’s me right now,” she said.

This is what leadership looks like.

The members of that Heritage panel couldn’t recognize that because they imagine that they are themselves leaders. For them, a “leader” is someone with a title, an office and a large paycheck. Leaders give orders, they hire and fire other people — little people, non-leader types. They invite one another to sit on panels. They expect deference.

Brigitte Gabriel is the “founder, president and CEO” of her institution. (Anyone who feels the need for all those titles might as well add, “King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm.”) Founders, presidents and CEOs think of themselves as leaders — people above other people whose only peers are others who bear such lofty titles. They cannot bear to be questioned or challenged by commoners and students who bear no titles.

But all the titled lords and ladies of that Heritage panel were wrong and Saba Ahmed was right. She may not have some aggrandizing title, but she stood up and spoke truth. They declared themselves to be leaders. She led.

That’s the same dynamic we saw last week with the dubiously titled magazine Leadership Journal. The Lords of Leadership were shaken when their appalling decision to publish a rapist’s memoir was challenged by a bunch of uppity young women. No one asked these women for their opinion. No one — by which they meant no “leaders,” no titled Lords, no presidents, founders, CEOs or senior pastors — wanted to hear what these women had to say. Such women were supposed to know their place, not to presume to challenge the judgement of leaders.

But the leaders and the experts on “leadership” were wrong and those women were right. They stood up and spoke truth, together, amplifying one another’s voices. They led.

One more example:

The man at the front of that phalanx of Alabama state troopers on the left is a “leader.” He had the title, the office, the uniform and the salary to prove it. He was a man who gave orders. And that’s what you can see him doing here — giving orders instead of leading, and refusing to listen to the uppity students who dared to challenge his authority.

That’s John Lewis and Hosea Williams at the head of the line of students on the right, showing us what actually leading actually looks like.

John Lewis could probably make a tidy sum by writing a self-help book for self-described “leaders.” But Lewis hasn’t done that. Instead of writing books about “leadership,” he’s written books about walking. Those books are well worth your time. The man knows how to walk.

Some prime ministers are luckier than others. Tony Blair was probably the luckiest post-war prime minister. During his 10 years in power he faced a succession of struggling Conservative Party leaders, he won an overall majority in 2005 on only 35.2% of the vote, the economy grew, inflation stayed low and his health held out.

Tuesday:

(Warning: Contains Maths!)

I've seen a couple of people linking to this story: "British public wrongly believe rich pay most in tax, new research shows".


It claims that most people want a tax system that is fairer (good) but that they are wrong to think it's fair now (bad!).

Of course, this is a piece in the Grauniad cherry-picking from a report for The Equality Trust cherry-picking data from the Office for National Statistics and before you can say "confirmation bias" it's proved to the Internets that the Evul Condums are Evul.

Except, of course, it's not true.

Obviously, there's the usual exaggeration by some Graun sub-editor in the headline: we've lost the nuance of "as a proportion of their income". Of course the rich pay most in tax. 35% of more is obviously more. The question is do they pay a higher SHARE (we'll not even get into SHOULD they pay a higher share; we'll take that as read).

Then there's the point that the Equality Trust's research is actually a poll into public perceptions, NOT research into the effects of the tax system.

Just because they're a charity doesn't mean that we should not be cautious of this sort of polling – it's very similar to the sort of puff piece that marketing teams place in papers all the time, you know the sort of thing: "90% of housewives say sunny days are nicer says poll for insert name of suntan lotion retailer here". It's about getting their name in print – i.e. advertising.

Another point that's interesting is that the ONS data excludes Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax, which amount to about eight billion quid between them, not a lot in the grand scheme of things – about 2% of all taxes, but more than cigarette duty which the figures do include – and these are taxes that tend to impact the higher earner more. But the report's methodology does say they specifically do mention Capital Gains Tax when asking poll respondents to think about the taxes that they pay. So you're asking people to remember a tax paid mainly by the better-off that you then exclude from your calculations.

In addition, the ONS figures show that most households benefit "in kind" mainly from state-provided schools and health service equivalent to about seven-and-a-half thousand pounds (which again is less for the top earners, I'd guess because of higher take-up of private schools and health insurance by those able to afford it). The Equality Trust report does not include this benefit in the "total of benefits and income" which they use to compute the tax rates. You may say "fair enough" (and I'd probably agree), but it is still a bit dodgy to ignore SOME of the ONS data you claim to be using.

And there's the very serious fact that the figures are based on EARNINGS, rather than WEALTH. Earnings at least demonstrate some work being done. It may not be entirely USEFUL work, but at least it's being done, whereas wealth, particularly when tied up in land, is more often a dead weight or leads to rentiering.

But, if we move past all of that there is still this BIG problem: the central assertion that the public believe that the tax system is fairer – and that they would like it to be fairer still (nicely coinciding with the aims of the Equality Trust, of course, but fair enough) – and that this belief is WRONG.

This rests on the claim that the tax system actually isn't fair. In fact, the report says in these words:

"The UK’s tax distribution is not only less progressive than the public’s perceived and preferred distribution, it is actually regressive when comparing the richest and poorest 10%"

This is, at best, in error and more than likely actually deceitful.

A regressive system would take money from the less well-off (in this example the lowest 10%) and transfer it to the better-off (i.e. here the top-earning 10%).

And that is very clearly NOT what is happening.

Why not? Because the way they have sliced the data is to compare income INCLUDING BENEFITS against taxes paid.


Here's now the report puts it:

10% of households with lowest income:
Total Income and Benefits: £10,253
Total Direct and Indirect Tax: £4,424
Income after taxes: £5,830
Effective tax rate: 43%

10% of households with highest income:
Total Income and Benefits: £101,291
Total Direct and Indirect Tax: £35,627
Income after taxes: £65,664
Effective tax rate: 35%

Cue shock and outrage!

But let's cut that data up a slightly different way:

10% of households with lowest income:
Total Income: £3,835
Total Benefits less Direct and Indirect Tax: £1,994
Income after tax and benefits: £5,830
Effective tax rate: -52% (yes, that's a negative tax rate of MINUS 52%)

10% of households with highest income:
Total Income and Benefits: £101,291
Total Direct and Indirect Tax: £33,424
Income after tax and benefits: £65,664
Effective tax rate: 34%

Clearly there is a net cost to the top 10% and a net benefit to the bottom 10%. Actually, all the lower four deciles (or 40% of households) receive more in benefits than they pay out in taxes.

The combined tax/benefit rates for all deciles are as follows:

Bottom: RECEIVE 52% (receiving more than paying)
2nd: RECEIVE 49%
3rd: RECEIVE 26%
4th: RECEIVE 13%
5th: PAY 9% (paying more tax than receiving benefit)
6th: PAY 15%
7th: PAY 24%
8th: PAY 30%
9th: PAY 33%
Top: PAY 34%

On that basis the tax and benefit system is pretty positively progressive.

Far from being wrong because the system is unfair, the public hugely underestimate how much the least-well-off are helped. (And probably just as vastly underestimate just how little the least-well-off get paid!)

Does this just mean we're playing with numbers matter? Does it just mean you pays your money and takes your choice? As Obi-Wan Kenobi puts it: "it all depends on a certain point of view". I don't think it does.

To ignore the fact that benefits are a part of the government's effect on household incomes is absurd; worse, it distorts the picture entirely. It suggests that the lowest-earning households actually pay more in tax than they earn altogether, which is clearly impossible.

It matters that statistics are used to tell a story that is true. And by abusing the ONS's numbers this report doesn't just discredit their own version – they discredit mine. People will just go (as my title suggests) "ugh, maths means nothing". Far too many CiF commentators are ready to leap to their own prejudices that Evul Condums are Evul and they pick the numbers that support that story.

(And there's enough "maths blindness" in the world as it is, without deliberately reinforcing it.)

As a Liberal I am anyway naturally wary of putting a society that is "more equal" ahead of a society that has more freedom.

I want to lift people out of poverty so that they are free to live their life the way they want; I care less about how much they earn after that, so long as it's a fair return for their work.

I do think that the tax system does need to be a lot simpler and clearer – it would be fairer if it were easier to understand what tax you pay.

And if we are to balance the government's budget then – like Cap'n Clegg – I say that it's right to ask the better-off to be first to contribute. I'm just not sold on raising taxes – particularly not to punitive levels – as a "good" in themselves. There MAY be something in "The Spirit Level" idea that more equal societies are healthier ones, but I find they (too) pick their evidence to agree with their case.

If we deplore – and we do – Tory (and Labour) ministers pushing the lie that "scroungers" and "benefit fraud" are bankrupting the economy, then we must equally deplore the reverse when I'll have to label them broadly "the left" say that the government are ripping off the poor to pay to the rich. We should not endorse wrong figures from either end of the spectrum.

It is GOOD that the public want and endorse a fair, progressive tax system. Lying to them about it will only induce more apathy and KIPpery. Let's not.

PS:

I encourage you to check sources:

The Equality Trust's report [pdf]
and
The Office of National Statistics data

The other day I posted Tony Hancock's take on Magna Carta (as written for him by Galton and Simpson, of course).

Since then I have seen an awful lot of people rubbishing any thought of commemorating the 800th anniversary of its signing next year. Nothing of Magna Carta remains part of our law and the whole thing was irredeemably sexist and all sorts of other ists too.

There is something deeply silly about someone who is shocked to find that the social attitudes of the 13th century were different from those of our own. And even if nothing of Magna Carta remains in law, it remains a symbol somewhere deep in the public mind of the idea that the powers of government can be curbed.

Those who resist this seem to feel that if only they could strip all symbols away the votes would sweep them and their radical ideas to power. I wish them luck with that project.

And their rubbishing of Magna Carta reminds me of one of the sillier speeches given in the House of Lords in recent years.

On 13 October 2008 Lord Carlile decided it was part of brief as the government's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation to speak in favour of Labour's Counter-Terrorism Bill and join the payroll vote (and no one else) in voting for it.

Then he said:

I have heard it said that this is a breach of Magna Carta. I disqualify that on the grounds of misrepresentation and over-reliance on a document that, although of its time, by today's values is sexist and racist. I would expect Liberty to be marching in the streets against it.

Perhaps the best summation of Magna Carta's place in modern life was that given by Marriott Edgar, who was once famous for his monologues - including The Lion and Albert.

His The Magna Charter concludes:

And it's through that there Magna Charter,
As were made by the Barons of old,
That in England today we can do what we like,
So long as we do what we're told.

Thomas Kidd’s short post today on African American poet Phillis Wheatley gave me pause when it came to his discussion of George Whitefield — the great evangelist of the Great Awakening whose death was the subject of Wheatley’s first popular poem.

I didn’t realize that Whitefield was a slave-owner — an untroubled, unrepentant, complacent slave-owner.

But he was actually worse than that.

Growing up in the white evangelical subculture, I knew a bit about Whitefield. We studied the Great Awakening in history classes at my evangelical Christian school, and every such lesson included descriptions of Whitefield’s spectacular gifts as a preacher, the huge crowds his outdoor sermons drew, and the revival that followed in his wake.

Nearly everything I encountered about Whitefield was along the lines of this brief hagiography from a few years ago in Christian History magazine. That article mentions that Whitefield first came to the colonies as a missionary to Georgia. And it recalls the famous orphanage he founded in Georgia — without mentioning that this orphanage was also a plantation built upon stolen labor and stolen lives.

Here is all that history has to say about Whitefield and slavery and Georgia:

Whitefield also made the slave community a part of his revivals, though he was far from an abolitionist. Nonetheless, he increasingly sought out audiences of slaves and wrote on their behalf. The response was so great that some historians date it as the genesis of African-American Christianity.

Everywhere Whitefield preached, he collected support for an orphanage he had founded in Georgia during his brief stay there in 1738, though the orphanage left him deep in debt for most of his life.

But its’ far, far worse than that.

When Whitefield first founded his orphanage in 1738, slavery was illegal in the colony of Georgia. The evangelist was certain, however, that “hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes,” and that legal slavery would be the key to making his endeavors there profitable. So George Whitfield — who was, as Christian History said, “probably the most famous religious figure of the 18th century” — began lobbying the crown and the trustees of the colony to make slavery legal there.

Whitefield’s efforts were essential to that cause. Without his hard work, slavery might never have become legal in Georgia.

Let that sink in. Ponder that — the immensity of it, the consequences of it, the incalculable toll and immeasurable injustice of it.

And then ask yourself whether it is possible that such a grievous evil could be so inextricably woven in with the revivalism of the Great Awakening without in any way influencing the form, shape, and substance of that revival and the kind of Christianity it planted here in American soil.

Ah, but Whitefield was simply a “man of his time.” Hogwash. John Woolman was also a man of Whitefield’s time.

But my point here is not to pass judgment on George Whitefield. My point here is to learn from corrosive rot that infected the gospel according to George Whitefield so that we can learn to guard ourselves against the same lethally evil disease — to identify, root out, and cauterize every instance of its lingering presence in our faith, theology, culture and law.

Here are the symptoms. This is deadly. This is what death looks like, from Whitefield’s correspondence — a letter he wrote on March 22, 1751:

As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves, I have no doubt, since I hear of some that were bought with Abraham’s money, and some that were born in his house.—And I cannot help thinking, that some of those servants mentioned by the Apostles in their epistles, were or had been slaves. It is plain, that the Gibeonites were doomed to perpetual slavery, and though liberty is a sweet thing to such as are born free, yet to those who never knew the sweets of it, slavery perhaps may not be so irksome. However this be, it is plain to a demonstration, that hot countries cannot be cultivated without negroes. What a flourishing country might Georgia have been, had the use of them been permitted years ago? How many white people have been destroyed for want of them, and how many thousands of pounds spent to no purpose at all? Had Mr Henry been in America, I believe he would have seen the lawfulness and necessity of having negroes there. And though it is true, that they are brought in a wrong way from their own country, and it is a trade not to be approved of, yet as it will be carried on whether we will or not; I should think myself highly favoured if I could purchase a good number of them, in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. You know, dear Sir, that I had no hand in bringing them into Georgia; though my judgement was for it, and so much money was yearly spent to no purpose, and I was strongly importuned thereto, yet I would not have a negro upon my plantation, till the use of them was publicly allowed in the colony. Now this is done, dear Sir, let us reason no more about it, but diligently improve the present opportunity for their instruction. The trustees favour it, and we may never have a like prospect. It rejoiced my soul, to hear that one of my poor negroes in Carolina was made a brother in Christ. How know we but we may have many such instances in Georgia ere it be long?

This is not good news. This is not salvation. This cannot be reconciled with the gospel.

The man who wrote those words was surely, at some fundamental, essential level, wrong about the meaning of the good news and of salvation.

And yet today, in 2014, the white evangelical understanding of good news and salvation is still shaped and bounded by the model and teachings of the man who wrote that passage above.

That’s a problem.

That’s a huge problem.

 

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June 16th, 2014: The teen you give this to doesn't have to be one that lives with you. You can just hand them out on the street, or, say, at next year's E3?? – Ryan

Some of my friends have depression and have asked me for some suggestions.

These will be inferior to reading official suggestions, but you will probably not read official suggestions, and you may read this. Just so we’re clear, all opinions here are my own, they are not endorsed by the hospital I work at, they do not constitute medical advice, I have a known habit of being too intrigued by extremely weird experimental ideas for my own good, and you read this at your own risk. I am still an intern (a very new doctor) and my knowledge is still very slim compared to more experienced professionals.

Overall I think this is more of a starting point for your own research rather than something I would expect people to have good results following exactly as written.

And one more apology: originally I tried to include links to appropriate studies with each intervention, but there are so many different studies, and it’s so easy to pick apart each, and so much of the research is based on a gestalt impression after having read three dozen studies rather than on any individual one – that I decided that listing the evidence fairly would require this to be ten times as long and much more academic. I’m doing that thing where “perfect is the enemy of good enough” and trying to actually get this up online. I’m happy to discuss evidence or lack thereof for any particular therapy in the comments.

Now that that’s over: first I’m going to talk about figuring out if you need help. Then I’m going to recommend you see a psychiatrist. Then I’m going to accept that in reality a lot of people for whatever reason can’t or won’t see a psychiatrist, and grudgingly recommend some lifestyle interventions you can make. Then I’m going to accept that in reality a lot of people for whatever reason can’t or won’t make lifestyle interventions, and grudgingly recommend some over-the-counter medications and supplements that might be helpful.

I. Do You Have Depression?

Major depressive disorder is the clinical condition that best corresponds to what people usually mean when they say “depression”. Only a licensed professional can officially determine whether or not you have major depressive disorder. But if you feel miserable all the time, you might be able to make one heck of a good guess.

The PHQ-9 is a well-known and validated screening tool for depression; you can take it at the linked site. It cannot diagnose you officially, but once again, it can help you make one heck of a good guess, and if you get a high score it might inspire you to get to a doctor’s office.

Overall there’s not exactly an epidemic of perfectly healthy people misdiagnosing themselves as depressed, but there are a couple of things worth keeping in mind:

- You can have depression even if there is a good reason for you to be depressed – for example, if you’re depressed because you lost your job. If you have the symptoms, and it’s been going on more than two weeks, it counts. These kinds of depression seem to respond to treatment about the same as kinds that come on for no reason at all.

- Depression usually lasts a long time. Depressive episodes usually last weeks to months. Someone who is depressed for a day or two after something happens probably does not have depression. Even if they are unreasonably depressed for a day or two after something happens, so much so that they seem to have a mental disorder, it may be a different mental disorder.

- People with bipolar disorder (“manic-depressive disorder”) are often depressed some of the time. These depressive episodes can last a long time, just like the ones in traditional depression. However, bipolar disorder is a completely different disease and needs completely different treatment. If you sometimes have “manic” or “hypomanic” episodes – several days to weeks of having abnormally high energy, abnormally low sleep, abnormally high self-esteem, abnormally short temper, and poor impulse control – then you probably have bipolar disorder instead of depression. If your doctor or psychiatrist has diagnosed you with depression and started treating you with antidepressants and you don’t seem to be getting better, then you have found your problem. Politely bring up your history of manic or hypomanic episodes and ask whether she wouldn’t prefer to diagnose you with bipolar disorder instead.

II. Please Go To A Doctor

If you have depression, your best bet is to go to a doctor. A doctor can diagnose you and connect you with useful prescription-only medications like antidepressants. You do not need to go to a psychiatrist to get antidepressants. Your family doctor will be able to prescribe them. You will only need to go to a psychiatrist if your depression fails treatment with normal medications and someone needs to figure out a more complicated plan.

The failure mode of medical professionals I see most often seems to be something like this:

Patient: I’m depressed.
Doctor: Here, have an SSRI
Patient: (three months later) I’m still depressed.
Doctor: Well, keep taking that SSRI I gave you, I’m sure you’ll get better eventually.
Patient: (six months later) I’m still depressed.
Doctor: Sheesh! I already gave you an SSRI, what else do you want from me?

There are dozens of different depression medications. If one doesn’t work, very commonly another one will. Depression treatment is difficult, because there’s no way of knowing beforehand what medications will or won’t work for any individual person. The correct solution is to start with the safest medications, see if they work or not, and gradually move up to stronger medications with more side effects. But this doesn’t work if your doctor just tells you to keep taking whatever you’re taking forever whether or not it’s doing anything.

A lot of people are reluctant to second-guess their doctor on this sort of thing. So let me provide you with a loose approximate algorithm that you can follow when going to a doctor or psychiatrist about depression. Many doctors have very good reasons for deviating from this algorithm, but if they are nice people they should be willing to explain what their reasons are to your satisfaction.

1. Rule out organic causes

When your doctor diagnoses you with depression, they may perform several blood tests. The most important ones are a thyroid test for hypothyroidism, and a blood count for anaemia. Hypothyroidism and anaemia are medical illnesses that can cause depression. If you have them, then psychiatric treatment for depression won’t help and won’t treat the underlying potentially dangerous condition.

Symptoms of hypothyroidism besides depression include feeling unusually cold, gaining weight despite good diet, constipation, pale dry skin, weakness, and disturbed menstrual periods if female. It is easily detectable with blood tests and easily treatable with thyroid hormone, but someone’s got to look for it.

Symptoms of anaemia besides depression include looking very pale, feeling weak and tired, and occasionally pica, the compulsion to eat non-food items like ice or dirt. It is very common in women with heavy periods. It is easily detectable with blood tests and usually easily treatable with iron supplements.

If you’re being treated for depression with psychiatric medication, and it’s not helping, and you have some of those symptoms, and nobody ever did blood tests on you, politely ask your doctor if you’ve been tested for hypothyroidism and anaemia (people get lots of blood draws all the time and lots of the time they’ve just forgotten). If you haven’t been, politely ask why not. If your doctor doesn’t have a good reason, and your depression isn’t getting better, politely ask if they think it would be a good idea to check for at least those two conditions and maybe some vitamin deficiencies.

2. Choose between pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, or both

Many to most doctors and psychiatrists will assume that you want medication. This is a pretty good assumption most of the time. Medications and psychotherapy are about equally effective in treating depression, but psychotherapy costs a lot more, takes more time, and is harder to get your insurance to cover.

Still, a lot of people who would have preferred psychotherapy never get the option. And if you’ve tried lots of medications that haven’t worked, maybe you’ll luck out with psychotherapy. You can either get your doctor to recommend someone or find someone yourself.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a nice neutral therapy for depression with as high a success rate as any other. It usually consists of a couple of sessions in which somebody talks to you about the way you deal with and think about problems and maybe assigns you some homework. There’s no talking about your mother or about your sexual fetishes. 6 to 12 one hour sessions would be a pretty standard starter course.

Having both psychotherapy and medication has been associated with a better treatment rate than either one alone.

3. Start with an SSRI

SSRIs are the most commonly used antidepressant medication. They are no stronger or weaker than other antidepressants, but they do have fewer side effects, which makes them first-line.

There is a lot of worry that SSRIs are not much better than a placebo for people with mild to moderate depression (almost everyone agrees they are effective for severe depression). Some studies have seemed to confirm these fears, others have seemed to refute them. I am leaning towards “marginally better than placebo”. However, this is a completely academic debate for you, because you are not going to get placebo. Your choice is between SSRIs or nothing. Everyone everywhere agrees SSRIs are much better than nothing.

All SSRIs are approximately equally effective. Your doctor or psychiatrist’s choice of SSRI comes down to which side effects you are most willing to tolerate, the exact shape of your depressive symptoms, and which drug company gives out the most pens and coffee mugs with the name of their medication on them. Celexa or Lexapro (citalopram or escitalopram) are good first choices for most people, but it is hard to go disastrously wrong here.

Bupropion is not an SSRI, but is also an appropriate first choice. SNRIs like Effexor (venlafaxine), as well as mirtazapine which is sort of in a weird little class of its own, are also okay for certain people. If your depression is very severe, your doctor might skip this step and go further down in the algorithm, which is also okay. Some psychiatrists also may have their own idiosyncratic preferences which are probably okay as well if they can explain their reasoning to you.

Many people worry about the side effects of SSRIs. In my opinion many of these worries are exaggerated. The most common side effect is decreased sexual drive and performance, which can occur in more than half of users. Other side effects include nausea, diarrhea, insomnia, and weight gain, which occur less frequently. These side effects are usually temporary and go away when you stop using the drug. If you’re worried about sexual side effects, bupropion is much less likely to have these, with the tradeoff being a few other effects like more insomnia.

Some antidepressants have discontinuation syndromes, which mean you feel sick when you’re withdrawing from them. Effexor (venlafaxine) and Paxil (paroxetine) are particularly bad. A competent doctor or psychiatrist will take you off these slowly so that you avoid any bad effects.

4. Give it a little while to work

Antidepressants take some time to start working.

This is less true now than it was a while ago – it used to be believed they almost never worked until a few weeks had gone by, whereas now we know that there can sometimes be some improvement pretty quickly. But other times there isn’t. Although you can hope for improvement within a week or two, give an antidepressant at least four weeks, just to be sure you’re not selling it short.

If you can’t wait four weeks, you may want to consider mirtazapine, which works a little more quickly. But you’re still not going to pop a single pill and start feeling much better.

5. Fiddle around

If a drug seems to work a little bit in the first month or two, it might be worth raising the dose.

If it doesn’t work at all within the first month or two, you could still try raising the dose, but you might also want to try switching to a different drug. For example, if one SSRI doesn’t work, you could try switching to a different SSRI.

If SSRIs don’t work, this might be a good time to try antidepressants from other newer classes. Effexor (venlafaxine), mirtazapine, and bupropion would be three very good choices here. All three are pretty safe and very commonly used. You could also move to a tricyclic antidepressant, which have just a little bit more side effects than some of the newer classes that have replaced them by which can sometimes be very successful in certain patients when SSRIs have failed.

If nothing works alone, your doctor will probably try combining a couple of these drugs and seeing if that helps.

6. Get serious

Once treatment with SSRIs and the usual SSRI replacements has failed, you get to start trying more serious stuff. Usually the drugs here either have worse side effects or are still a little bit experimental. These will probably be prescribed by a psychiatrist and not your regular family doctor.

Atypical antipsychotics have been found to be quite effective in depression. Unfortunately, many have side effects, including weight gain and increased risk of diabetes. Abilify has fewer of these, which makes it a very popular choice. Seroquel has a few more, but it also relieves anxiety and helps sleep, which makes it very popular as well. Olanzapine has a lot of good evidence behind its antidepressant properties, but its side effects can be very severe, so I would be more reluctant to prescribe it than either of the other two.

MAOIs are an old antidepressant medication that went out of fashion when SSRIs came around. A lot of patients remember them very fondly; according to anecdote they are very powerful and can give people a very good mood. However, they have a bad habit of causing life-threatening hypertensive crises at inconvenient times if you eat the wrong thing, where “the wrong thing” includes everything on a long list of foods your doctor has to give you and lecture you about before they can be prescribed. And just to warn you, cheese, beer, and chocolate are definitely included. The Europeans seem to have a less dangerous MAOI called mobeclomide which hasn’t been approved in the US yet, but I don’t know anything about it.

Thyroid hormone is very rarely used as an antidepressant augmentation, but there is some preliminary evidence that it is as effective as lithium with fewer side effects, even for people without obvious underlying thyroid problems.

Lithium is a mood stabilizer more commonly used in bipolar disorder, but which has some indication for depression as well. Usually it is taken along with another antidepressant as “augmentation”. It works pretty well, and is especially good at decreasing suicidality, impulsivity, and aggression. Unfortunately it’s not the safest medication in the world and usually requires some annoying blood tests to make sure you keep getting the right amount of it.

Modafinil shows some promise as an antidepressant supplementation strategy and is discussed in more detail in section IV below.

This might also be a good time to double-check that you were definitely tested for underlying medical conditions like hypothyroidism and anaemia, and that you definitely don’t have bipolar disorder or some other condition mimicking depression. Or you might want to look down and try some of the lifestyle interventions and supplements later in this list.

7. Get very, very serious

Electroconvulsive therapy gets a bad rap from old movies where we see people who “misbehave” in the mental institution getting what look like very painful electric shocks.

Modern electroconvulsive therapy is done with the patient sedated. You are pleasantly asleep, your limbs aren’t flailing about or anything, and it can be done on an outpatient basis with you going home as soon as you’re done.

There are a lot of worries about side effects. Some people experience some memory loss, especially of the couple of weeks before the treatment. Most of the time these memories come back. Sometimes they don’t. But how much do you want to remember the week when you were so depressed you needed ECT, anyway? Longer-term side effects are less well-known. Some people think a lot of ECT isn’t good for your brain, but if the effect exists it’s small enough that people are still debating whether or not they’ve really picked it up.

But the thing is, ECT really, really works. People get to the point where everything else has failed, and they’ve been on seven hundred different medications without feeling any better, and they’re ready to give up, and then they get ECT and start whistling happy songs and dancing the polka. I won’t say it works 100% of the time, because no medical treatment works 100% of the time. But in psychiatry, where expectations are always low, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to a miracle cure.

Speaking of miracle cures, a couple of people have asked me about ketamine. Ketamine does show unusually rapid and effective action in treating depression. However, it is currently still very experimental and your doctor or psychiatrist will not be able to give it to you unless by a strange coincidence they are one of the few researchers working with this drug. Further, there are still a lot of problems with ketamine therapy for depression. First, the drug is highly hallucinogenic, sometimes in very scary ways; in experiments subjects are put under anaesthetic first so they don’t have to consciously experience the hallucinations. Second, it’s not yet clear how long-acting it is; anything that required long-term ketamine therapy (say, a ketamine dose a week) would be impractical both because of the hallucinations and because the drug has serious side effects and is addictive. Although it is very exciting to researchers, it is probably not very useful to you.

Anyway, that’s the algorithm – which I lifted from a couple of treatment guidelines – that I would recommend people watch to see if their doctor follows. Because I feel like – if someone is really really depressed, to the point where it’s ruining their lives, and they are begging for help, and their psychiatrist tries all of steps one to seven, and even the ECT doesn’t help them, then they can consider saying “Well, I’ve done everything I can”, giving up, and lowering their expectations. Any doctor who gives up before they’ve reached that point has no excuse.

How do you find a good psychiatrist?

I have no great advice here, except that if you think your psychiatrist is terrible, you are probably right. Even if you are not right, your psychiatrist is apparently terrible for you. See if your insurance allows you to switch psychiatrists. If they do, try it and see if the next one is any better.

If a psychiatrist is doing something completely unlike the treatment algorithm in Part A, ask them to explain why. Be willing to accept any explanation, because treating depression is hard and there are a lot of different valid approaches. But if they refuse to explain and tell you that you’re a bad person for asking, you miiiiiiight want to see if you have other options.

There are a lot of doctor rating sites. Ratemds.com or healthgrades.com are among the bigger ones. These sites are not very valuable on the margin; you do sometimes get one guy who had to sit in the waiting room a little too long going on a personal campaign to destroy someone’s reputation. But on the tails, if there’s a doctor who is universally hated by every single one of her patients, this can be a strong warning sign.

People in mental health support groups are absurdly willing to share their opinions of various psychiatrists. Just don’t be surprised if you can’t get them to shut up once you’ve gotten your information.

Kate Donovan has a good guide to finding a psychotherapist, with partial crossover to the skill of finding a psychiatrist.

How do you see a psychiatrist without worrying you will be committed to an institution?

This is something I see a lot of people worry about, and something that prevents a lot of people from seeing a doctor or especially a psychiatrist. I think it happens less in reality than it does in people’s fears, but it does sometimes happen in reality, and enough people avoid getting help for this reason that it’s worth discussing briefly, at the possible risk of giving more airtime to something most people should not be worrying about.

The first and most important point is that very very few psychiatrists, whether good or bad, will commit people to a mental institution unless they are very sick. Even if you are very sick, there is only a small chance of a psychiatrist committing you against your will unless you say exactly the wrong thing.

Doctors and psychiatrists are legally required to commit patients to mental institutions if those patients are “a threat to themselves or others”. Usually this means a patient has said they want to commit suicide and they are probably really going to go through with it soon, or a patient has said they’re going to hurt someone else (or implied it: “He’s gonna get what’s coming to him”) and it wasn’t clearly meant metaphorically. They may also commit you if you are very paranoid on the grounds that paranoid people may try to pre-emptively attack those they believe are plotting against them – or if you are refusing to eat, on the grounds that if you don’t eat you die.

A good psychiatrist will differentiate between vague suicidal ideation (“Sometimes I feel like life isn’t even worth living, do you know what I mean?”) and specific suicidal ideation (“I will kill myself tomorrow using the gun hidden in the back of my pantry”), will explore the first type with an aim toward helping you, and will only involuntarily commit for the second type. I do not guarantee you will have a good psychiatrist.

Until you are sure your psychiatrist is trustworthy, you may want to steer clear of statements that sound suicidal, homicidal, or paranoid. Even in jest. Especially in jest. Until you have established absolute trust, please treat joking about suicide or homicide around your psychiatrist the same way you would treat joking about terrorism around airport security agents. I cannot overemphasize how important this is. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the sake of your poor overworked local inpatient psychiatrist, who is sick of hearing all his new patients say “I shouldn’t be here, I promise I was only joking!”

If you are genuinely suicidal, homicidal, or paranoid, but you are absolutely sure you are not an acute danger to anybody, and you trust your psychiatrist enough to tell him or her about these things – then make sure you phrase it in a way that specifies you are not an acute danger to anybody. For example “Sometimes I feel like I would be better off dead…BUT I AM DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE BECAUSE THAT IS MORALLY WRONG AND I CARE A LOT ABOUT MY FAMILY AND I WANT TO LIVE!!!”. Or “Sometimes I feel like people are plotting against me…BUT NOT ANYBODY SPECIFIC AND I KNOW THAT’S NOT ACTUALLY TRUE!!!”

This should keep you relatively safe from involuntary committment unless your psychiatrist is truly awful.

III. Lifestyle Interventions

Not everyone can or will go to a doctor, and even those who do go to a doctor might want to try something more proactive on the side, so in this section I’m going to list some lifestyle interventions you can make.

1. Do therapy on yourself

If you can’t or won’t go to a therapist, a therapy workbook is a practical alternative. Cognitive Behavioral Workbook For Depression is rated 4.3/5 stars on Amazon, which I guess is sort of like being evidence-based. Many very smart people find these sorts of therapy workbooks to be a little condescending (“Really? I need to stop catastrophizing all the time? I never would have thought of that on my own!”) but other equally smart people find them useful, whether because they have new insights or because they repackage, remind, and rehearse what they already know. For 3$ for a used copy, that’s about 1% of the cost of most of the other interventions you could try.

2. SLEEP!

Put in all capitals with an exclamation point at the end of it to show how important I think it is.

Depression is weirdly linked to circadian rhythm and sleep. Poor sleep habits probably help cause and exacerbate depression. Unfortunately, depression also causes and helps exacerbate poor sleep habits, so it’s a kind of vicious cycle.

In a recent study, people who received cognitive behavioral therapy for sleep disturbances had double the recovery rate from depression of people who didn’t, suggesting that attacking insomnia is pretty much just as effective as the strongest drugs known. This avenue is severely underexplored and very promising.

The cognitive behavioral therapy for sleep disturbance is about one part basic CBT techniques of challenging your perceptions and beliefs, and one part the things your mother told you about sleeping in a dark room and not watching exciting TV shows right before bedtime. This therapy also has a cheap workbook with a 4.6 star Amazon rating. You can add whatever other high-tech exciting sleep cycle correctives you know – melatonin, magnesium, whatever – to what it tells you.

3. Exercise

I work in a psychiatric hospital. Once a week or so a social worker leads an exercise group there, and it is amazing how much better everyone does that day compared to the days before and after. Exercise seems to increase release of BDNF, an important brain chemical that depressed people don’t have enough of, and there have been several studies showing good effect.

Fast walking for a half hour five days a week seems to be enough to help. More exercise might help more. And exercising outside will get you more sunlight and vitamin D, whose relationship to depression remains controversial but which certainly can’t hurt.

4. Light therapy

Light therapy is hanging out around really bright lights for a while and hoping they cheer you up. The Cochrane Collaboration and a meta-analysis in a major psychiatric journal agree that they do, quite robustly (although there is still uncertainty about whether they add extra treatment to somebody already being treated with antidepressants).

Experts recommend a light therapy box emit 10,000 lux (a unit of light). Here’s a very official looking one that costs $200 and a somewhat less expensive one at $70.

Best practice is to keep it above your line of vision so your brain feels like it’s the sun, and sit near it for at least a half hour in the morning. Mayo Clinic tells you a little more about how to do it here.

5. Drugs are bad for you, mmkay?

The Simpsons described alcohol’s role in treatment far better than I can: “There’s nothing like a depressant to cure depression.” Except I think they were being sarcastic, and a lot of patients are serious.

Alcohol probably works in helping you forget about depression for a little while, but over the long term it makes you much more depressed. If you abuse alcohol, stop doing that.

Benzodiazepines (Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin) are, once again, good short-term solutions to anxiety. If you abuse them, they will probably contribute to your depression.

Smokers have more than twice the rate of depression than nonsmokers. There’s a lot of debate about whether it’s causal or noncausal, but some sophisticated statistical modeling seems to suggest there is indeed a real link. Also, getting lung cancer is depressing as heck.

I don’t know any studies linking heroin or cocaine to depression directly, but they probably take your life in a pretty depressing direction.

Obviously all of these drugs are hard to quit, and you might need the help of a medical practitioner.

6. Other things that make you happy

Cure Together is a really neat website where people with illnesses record all the things – medical and nonmedical – they tried and how well it worked for them. It obviously trades off the well-controlled conditions of an experiment in exchange for sheer amount of data, but it’s a useful adjunct to other ways of getting information. You can find their chart for depression here.

Just from looking at it, exercise and SLEEP! are right up at the top, but people also mention things that more scientifically-inclined people would probably never think of, like spending time with a pet, listening to music, and watching funny TV shows.

IV. Supplements

Despite the best of intentions, I think a lot of people are going to skip parts II and III and start down here. I think that would be a mistake, but I understand depressed people don’t always have the energy for big lifestyle changes or the willpower to take the anxiety-provoking step of seeing a psychiatrist. So sure. Let’s try supplements.

A reminder – supplements are chemically active compounds. They can have side effects. You should look up what they are. In particular, some of them can disrupt the metabolism of other medications. Contraception is another medication. If its metabolism was disrupted without your realizing it, that could be very bad. Be careful. If you’re taking other medications, tell your doctor about any supplements you’re taking. Don’t take supplements without a doctor’s okay if you have liver damage, kidney damage, or any chronic medical condition.

And with that stirring recommendation, here are some supplements that seem promising for depression, in approximate order of recommendedness.

1. S-Adenosyl methionine (SAM-e)

This would be my first choice if you’re trying to treat depression with supplements. It has a good evidence base, big effect size, it’s pretty safe, and it’s available on Amazon for $20 a jar. It probably works both on its own and as an adjunct to antidepressants, although there’s only partial evidence for the first claim. One experiment got good results with 800 mg two times a day for six weeks, though aside from that proper dosage is anyone’s guess.

2. Creatine

Yes, the same stuff bodybuilders use. One RCT found good results at 5g per day. May be more effective in people likely to be protein-deficient (eg vegetarians) and possibly in women.

3. Folate or l-methylfolate

Folate is a form of Vitamin B9 that most people get in food. Several RCTs have found positive effects from supplementing antidepressants with folate, although the evidence for folate on its own is still lacking. Some people with a mutant version of a gene called MTHFR are unable to process folate very well, and may get better results from an “optimized” version called l-methylfolate. A psychiatric medication commonly prescribed for treatment-resistant depression, Deplin, is l-methylfolate, but the supplement version is exactly the same. 5 – 15 mg / day seems to be a common dose, even though a lot of the supplements seem to contain a lot less.

4. Saffron

Yes, the spice. I’d never even heard about this until I checked examine.com, but it seems to check out. Five different randomized controlled trials found saffron to be more effective than placebo and as effective as conventional antidepressants. Amazon seems to be flooded with sellers ever since Dr. Oz apparently said it might be a weight loss supplement. [some problems, especially for pregnant women]

5. Fish oil

A lot of people are very excited about this, including examine.com. I’m more skeptical. There have been a lot of studies that suggest fish oil can improve mood in depression, and a lot of others that find no effect. And fish oil is a complicated supplement to deal with – most of the commonly sold pills don’t have enough to do any good, and if you don’t store it right it goes rancid and is worse than nothing.

Instead, I would eat a lot of fish. The degree to which the level of depression in a country correlates with the amount of fish eaten in that country is staggering. Two salmon dishes a week ought to be a good start.

6. -afinil

Modafinil is a wonder drug that gets used for everything, both legally (with prescription) and illegally (without). It was only a matter of time before someone tried it for depression, and it seems to work pretty well, at least as an adjunct to antidepressants. There are fewer studies about whether it works on its own. I would guess that it does, because the most likely mechanism is its well known tendency to increases energy and alertness, which is pretty useful against depression’s fatigue and tiredness. The strongest argument against modafinil is that it lacks a plausible mechanism for antidepressant action and so realistically you’re probably just treating symptoms. The strongest argument for is that you’re probably treating symptoms very well. Also worth noting that modafinil disturbs sleep and disturbing sleep is very bad in depression, so take it at the beginning of the day and if you still can’t sleep at night, cut the dose.

Modafinil is illegal without a prescription, but everyone on the Internet sells it anyway. Adrafinil is a prodrug that turns into modafinil once in the body. It is perfectly legal without a prescription, because the medical licensing regime makes no sense. You might as well just get that – as far as I can tell the risk of liver damage is overhyped if your liver is otherwise healthy.

7. Other things

Things I find interesting but which have conflicting evidence and/or don’t deserve a whole paragraph of their own include: lithium orotate microdosing, rhodiola, vitamin D, zinc, and curcumin. Look them up and see what you think.

Not exactly a supplement, but I’m pretty sure you can get Botox without a prescription, and if done correctly it might help substantially.

What if you want to buy antidepressants illegally without prescription?

Well, you probably won’t get caught. And you probably won’t kill yourself if you go into it semi-well-informed. I can’t in good conscience recommend it, but I’m sure it’s something a lot of people think about. Consider yourself scowled at, and at least take the following advice:

Definitely definitely do not take any tricyclics (hint: if it ends in -pramine, it’s a tricyclic) without a prescription. Those are seriously potentially dangerous. Taking MAOIs (phenelzine, tranylcypromine) without a prescription is the worst idea and you will die (note: some over the counter supplements claim to work through “MAOI-like action” or “being reversible MAOIs”. As far as I can tell these are safe, though I can’t vouch for their efficacy. Just don’t take the real thing.) I don’t even think anyone sells antipsychotics without prescription, but also the worst idea. If you are thinking of buying any of these without prescription, and you won’t accept advice to not buy prescription medications at all, can I at least talk you down into buying an ordinary relatively harmless SSRI?

For weird political reasons, tianeptine, a well-regarded foreign antidepressant, is not a prescription drug in the United States. I think it is still illegal, but everyone sells it all over the Internet, even respectable sites that wouldn’t dare sell the normal prescription antidepressants. It has a large Internet fan club that swears by it, and its side effects are less than those of many other antidepressant classes. It is available from nootropicsdepot, a supplier I regard pretty highly. If you can’t just buy normal supplements from a health food store like a normal person, it is very likely your best bet.

V. Other things

The average length of an untreated depressive episode is six months. People who have one depressive episode have an 80% chance of having another sometime in their life. The average person with major depressive disorder gets four depressive episodes during their lifetime. Take these statistics into account when deciding how proactive you want to be with treatment.

People with depression have about a 2% chance of going on to commit suicide, though obviously this varies a lot with the intensity of depression. Most people who attempt suicide later regret it and go on to live enjoyable lives. If you are feeling suicidal, there are suicide hotlines operating both by phone and by online chat. You can also go to any emergency room and ask for help. If you have health insurance, this will probably be covered. Warning: this will quite possibly result in committment to a psychiatric hospital.

If you are feeling very suicidal and don’t trust yourself not to attempt something, going to a psychiatric hospital is probably your best bet. The average length of stay at an average hospital is three to seven days. Two weeks is rare. A month is totally unheard of. You usually get intense attention from doctors, nurses, and social workers, and there are strict regulations giving you certain rights (ie you can’t be denied necessities of daily living and you can’t be locked up in any kind of restraints or solitary confinement without extremely good documentation that you are very dangerous). Psychiatric patients cannot be given non-emergency medication or other treatment against their wishes without a court order; psychiatrists are usually very good at pressuring patients to take medications in some kind of tricky ways, but in practice few of them will go through the difficulty of trying to get the court order unless the patient is extremely dangerous. People who complain about psychiatric hospitals most often complain that they are noisy (true), that they can’t leave when they want to (true), and that they are around some scary people (true, though very few are actually violent). Good psychiatric hospitals will have procedures in place for trying to minimize these problems; for example, there is a big movement to switch to private rooms. In my experience most suicidal depressed patients who go to a psychiatric hospital become less suicidal very quickly, end up on a good regimen of appropriate antidepressant medication, and are glad they went.

About a third of patients will recover completely on their first antidepressant within three months. Another third will get somewhat better (>50% decrease on some test of depressive symptoms). Another third will have no benefit.

But outcomes get better the more stuff you try. According to STAR*D, which tested an algorithm a lot like the one I mentioned above, by the last step of the algorithm 70% of patients experienced complete remission, and many more experienced significant symptom reduction.

This is not a resounding victory, because the average depressive episode only lasts six months and the study took more than six months to complete, which makes it really hard to figure out how much of the improvement was due to the drugs. The answer appears to be “some, maybe”. But I will add that patients who recovered because of the study drugs had decreased chance of relapse compared to patients who recover by waiting it out.

I think the important lesson here is that with sufficient work depression either is treatable, or it will go away on its own before you get a chance to finish the treatment algorithm, which is annoying for researchers but probably pretty acceptable to the patient. And once it does, you know what drug works for you, you can sometimes stay on it to decrease chance of relapse (maintenance treatment is a totally different ball game I’m not getting into here) and you can restart first thing when you start feeling depressed again.

The most important thing I’m writing this for, and the lesson I want to hammer home, is that if your doctor just gives you an SSRI and tells you to stay on it even when it clearly isn’t working, there are other options. If your depression is seriously impacting your life, you should explore them, either with your doctor or with a replacement doctor who is more willing to help or – if necessary – on your own.

Conan Doyle estate loses its copyright claim on public domain Sherlock Holmes stories.

So, Part II of my two-part series for American Scientist magazine about how to recognize random numbers is now out.  This part—whose original title was the one above, but was changed to “Quantum Randomness” to fit the allotted space—is all about quantum mechanics and the Bell inequality, and their use in generating “Einstein-certified random numbers.”  I discuss the CHSH game, the Free Will Theorem, and Gerard ‘t Hooft’s “superdeterminism” (just a bit), before explaining the striking recent protocols of Colbeck, Pironio et al., Vazirani and Vidick, Couldron and Yuen, and Miller and Shi, all of which expand a short random seed into additional random bits that are “guaranteed to be random unless Nature resorted to faster-than-light communication to bias them.”  I hope you like it.

[Update: See here for Hacker News thread]

In totally unrelated news, President Obama’s commencement speech at UC Irvine, about climate change and the people who still deny its reality, is worth reading.

I keep telling myself, it only seems like I’m telling the story for the millionth time. It can’t be more than, say, the three hundredth. But the kids are ruthless. Fall back on a stock phrase and they’ll eat you alive. There’s no ‘wine-dark sea’ in my living room; Homer’s grandkids were obviously a lot more easily amused than mine. Maybe they went easy on him because he was blind. I have a bad knee, but that cuts no ice with this brood.

“And he said, ‘All right, Cowboy. Let’s see what’s in your saddle bags.’ Well, I wasn’t about to let him get his hooks on Leticia’s medicine…”

“You mean drugs, right?” Eric has a hard time staying current with the story. He’s taking that medication for when you can’t concentrate. I used to have that problem too, but the only medication I got was the back of my old man’s hand.

“No, Eric,” I reply. I have to be patient without disrupting the pace of the story. If I slip, they lose interest, and the knives come out. Then it’s straight to my back garden, if I’m lucky. The last thing I need is them ripping up the terrarium. “He was looking for drugs, that’s for sure. But the only thing I was hauling across country on my motorbike was medicine for your grandmother.”

“Hold on, Don,” comes this reedy voice, a little older than the rest. Mickey. He’s a fucking smartass. He’s the only one who calls me by my first name. “I thought you were a Hell’s Angel.”

“I was! Haven’t I shown you kids my cut?”

“Only about a million times, Grandpa.” That’s Letty, named after my wife. Goddamn Mickey. He’s trying to sidetrack me so the rest of the kids get bored. He knows they’ll tear up my garden.  He wants them to do it.

“But,” he sneers — eleven years old and he’s sneering already, I swear it — “I thought Hell’s Angels were, like, real bad-asses.”

“Watch your language, mister,” comes my Leticia’s voice, from the kitchen. That woman has ears like a cat. I spent six years in a bar band and twelve on the back of a hog. I’m lucky if I can hear fire engines.

“Sorry, grandma,” says Mickey, and just as I think I’ve got a reprieve, he turns those nasty blue eyes on me. Kid has eyes like Liz Taylor. Not from my side of the family, I’ll tell you that. They don’t tell you when you’re young and dumb and full of cum that if you get that frosty Nordic ice queen you always wanted, your grandkids are gonna look like they came out of fuckin’ Village of the Damned. “But, Don, I thought that Hell’s Angels did drugs.”

“Well, look. Some of them did.” Little bastard. “The bad ones.”

Liz pipes up. “Grandpa, did you run a meth lab?”

Christ. “A meth…what?  Where did you hear a thing like that?” Liz is six years old. Man. She looks like Shirley fucking Temple.

“Jimmy Pritikin ran a meth lab. He got sent upstate. They busted it because he was buying a Clorox in bulk and the DEA got suspicious. That’s what mom says.”

“Who the heck is Jimmy Pritikin?”, I ask. Even I’m starting to get bored with my story. I eye the back porch door nervously. They can smell fear. It smells like rutabagas.  My rutabagas.

“Una’s friend Milena went out with him for a while,” says Mickey. Una is the oldest. She’s outside smoking and reading that Zerzan crap. I know for a fact that I didn’t even hear about anarchism until I was in college. Anyway, at least she’ll just glare at me instead of trampling my tomato stakes. “Go on with your story.”

“Oh, right,” I say. I have to get my composure back. Little son of a bitch has got me on the ropes already. “Well, let me tell you something, kids. I may have been a pacifist,” and here I crack my knuckles a good one, so they can see my hands. They’re still big. Just the right size to pick some spoiled kid up by his coconut. All eyes are on me, at least for the moment. “But that doesn’t mean I was going to lay down in a fight.”  They’re rapt for a minute. I get the twinkle in my eye, and turn on a little of that crooked, knowing smile that got me little Letty’s grandmother in the first place. I shrug my shoulders so that the collar of my leather vest turns just so.

“Sure it does,” comes Mickey’s ratty little snarl. “That’s what a pacifist does. He lays down instead of fights. We read all about it in class. Gandhi. And that Martin Luther Kang. What kind of a hippie were you, anyway?”

Fucking grandkids. Some blessing. When Becky and her dumb-shit husband get back from the Whole Foods, I’m gonna ask them if they ever thought about sending Mickey to military school.

 

Here’s a town that’s an idyllic cocktail, of stunning Cotswold soothing stoniness, and yet reviled by much of Oxfordshire as its ‘chav’ town. It fuses its two images with attention to detail embodied by its shopping centre –

It even has a canal, with a lock and everything, that goes through the middle of the pedestrianised shopping centre.

 

Travelling at one mile an hour on a pretty green canal boat past WH Smiths in Banbury is such a splendidly pointless activity that everyone should be made to it once, like a pilgrimage.

But it’s also famous for its role in a nursery rhyme, on account of Banbury Cross not quite rhyming with riding a white horse.

But Banbury is much more than this, which is why it doesn’t make a scene about its place in the rhyme. Apart from this statue in the middle of the town

 

And tiny references to it in the museum, such as here

And here

They hardly mention it.

But Banbury has much more to offer than this. For example there’s the beautiful scent, mentioned recently on the BBC news website –

“A bad smell in Banbury will be discussed at a public meeting this week after residents kicked up a stink. Pam Driscoll, who lives nearby, described it like a ‘tomcat had sprayed’ saying: ‘It really reeks. It makes your throat sore; it makes your eyes water’.

Not everyone agrees, and on a forum called ‘Trucknet’ for lorry drivers, one of them wrote “My favourite smells on the road are the Weetabix factory on the A14, and a smell from Banbury that I’m not sure what it is.”

But Banbury has a rebellious tradition, in the heart of sixteenth century rebellion, when small farmers and tradesmen rejected the religion that justified a natural hierarchy, for a Puritan one that insisted we are all equal before GOD.

Out of context this can sometimes appear to be slightly mental, such as when Banbury’s Puritan preacher was in full preaching flow as a fire began to destroy the town, and proclaimed “The fire rides in triumph due to God’s displeasure for our sinners.”

In his defence, by sinners he meant the nobility rather than gays, as suggested by a certain UKIP councillor, though while he may be excused from homophobia it would be hard to back him up on grounds of rational thought.

Banbury was so gripped by Puritanism a poem of the time went “To Banbury came I, O prophane one, where I saw a Puritan hanging a cat on a Monday, for killing a mouse on a Sunday.”

However smug the Puritans were, and if they had a flaw it is that they could be a little Puritan at times, there’s no doubting their selfless commitment. Oliver Cromwell once boasted (I think at the battle of Cropredy Bridge, just next to Banbury, though I’m not sure)  “Our army has the virtues of prayer, godliness, integrity, solemnity and honesty, whereas the King’s army can offer only vice, drinking and wenching.”

Surely at least a few Puritan soldiers must have heard that speech and gone “Really? Do you mind all that much if I swap sides, just for a weekend.”

Something must remain of these fiery times. There’s the Cromwell pub, a huge stone hostelry in the centre of town, though remembering him with a pub suggests maybe they haven’t grasped all the Puritan’s policies. And the football team is known as the Puritans. Presumably when they’re in a huddle at the start of the game the captain reminds them “Remember, our side has the virtues of prayer and godliness, whereas Aylsebury Rovers can offer only vice, drinking and wenching.”

But not in Banbury, which is now relegated in the league of politically important towns behind Chipping Norton, home to such nationally important statespeople as David Cameron, Rebekah Brooks and Jeremy Clarkson.

But the Cotswolds is never one-dimensional, so author Dominic Sandbrook, who lives in Chipping Norton, wrote in reply to someone who suggested it was power-hungry, amoral and louche,

“You want louche? Try Stow-on-the-Wold. Amoral? Then go to Bourton-on-the-Water. Power-hungry? You don’t know power-hungry until you’ve been to Moreton-on-the-Marsh.”

This week’s inspiring thought in my occasional series of Liberal moments is close to my heart: it is, of course, from Doctor Who. A confrontation between the Doctor and a much more dictatorial egomaniac, it’s taken from Episode Five of The Green Death, first broadcast forty-one years ago today. From the same story that featured Jeremy Thorpe as Prime Minister, this pits a monopolistic megacorporation, totalitarianism and pollution against the Doctor’s freedom, ecology and individualism. The argument crystallises in one especially memorable exchange that says benevolent authoritarianism is not enough if it means absolute ignorance and conformity. It’s about freedom:

“Doctor, believe me, we wish you no harm…”
“Ah, don’t worry, my dear feller. I’m having a whale of a time.”
“In the end, we all want the same thing; an ordered society, with everyone happy, well-fed…”
“Global Chemicals taking all the profits…”
“What’s best for Global Chemicals is best for the world – is best for you!”
“Such as a little touch of brain-washing.”
“Freedom from fear, freedom from pain…”
“Freedom from freedom!”

This 1973 story was co-written by Robert Sloman and then-producer Barry Letts, who it appears was rather pro-Liberal. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) had spent a few years exiled to Earth in the near future, and was still popping back on occasion to help out his friends at UNIT; The Green Death has one of the slyer little suggestions about their stories being set a few years later than broadcast, as the phone is at one point handed to a Prime Minister called “Jeremy”. Unfortunately, the striking Liberal revival in the following year’s elections didn’t quite carry him that far, and the 1975-but-set-in-1980 story which suggested Mrs Thatcher as PM was altogether more on the button. Since then, actual Liberal politicians have mostly just had backward references, such as Mr Asquith springing one of the Doctor’s companions from Holloway or Mr Lloyd George drinking the Doctor under the table. A Liberal worldsview, on the other hand, has always been part of Doctor Who’s RNA. I argued that most comprehensively in my “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”, but it’s summed up with particular clarity here.

The Doctor’s been captured and is being interrogated by the managing director of Global Chemicals, himself only a cog in the company machine (and that taken to extremes). For greater efficiency, productivity and profit, the company’s BOSS has decided to take over the world. Just as its workforce are brainwashed into servitude, a signal will be transmitted from the sinister multinational’s subsidiaries all across the world to bring the entire human race under its control in a literal ‘command economy’. So far, so familiar. But as you’ll have seen from the key quotation above, this particular mind-control story has thought about its message and argues it in unambiguously Liberal terms.

All Power Is Dangerous – Especially If It’s ‘For Your Own Good’

My favourite contribution to Mark Pack’s “What do the Liberal Democrats Believe?” is on the basic conviction that unites social and economic Liberals:

“All POWER (be it government, business or other people) can both PROTECT and THREATEN LIBERTY.

“Economic and Social Liberals put different emphasis on the BEST DEFENCES and the BIGGEST BULLIES.”

The Green Death’s Liberal analysis is dead-on that same line. It chooses as its main target a monopolistic mega-corporation – but it’s just as applicable to totalitarian government that would exert the same degree of power over individuals. Indeed, part of its point is that any body that exerts total power can be exactly as dangerous and as illiberal as any other. When the Doctor carelessly resists the brainwashing, the political applicability comes as thick and fast as Global Chemicals’ poisonous pollution. First, the machine grumbles that:

“The subject is not responding to therapy.”

“Therapy” is exactly the “pretty euphemism” for what political opponents in the Eastern Bloc of the time were often subjected to – and this story would have exactly the same philosophical underpinning were the villains, say, Evil Space Communists with the same plan. No doubt many of those who praise The Green Death for being ‘left-wing’ because it’s ‘anti-big business’ would have criticised it as ‘right-wing propaganda’ had the allegory apparently pointed against big government instead, but that’s missing the point: it’s not a left-wing or right-wing critique of the ‘wrong’ sort of big power, but a Liberal critique of any sort of Big Power.

The crux of the argument above isn’t simply that ‘turning the entire human race into zombies is bad’, though. I’ll admit that even most of my political opponents would agree that’s a bit much. It’s that what Global Chemicals wants to impose is in many ways tempting. It’s simply taking to a sci-fi extreme the ‘perfectly reasonable’ exercise of power to ‘help’, and that’s an argument that this scene ruthlessly exposes and explodes:

“You’re not trying to tell me this is all for my own good?”

Which, of course, is exactly the point. Pay attention to the characters and their motivations, and no-one here is simply perfect or simply evil: the Doctor’s attitudes aren’t always appealing, with his own insufferable prejudices showing through, and the villains are at times endearing and well-meaning. From their point of view, it is all ‘for people’s own good’. Which is one of the political phrases that always sets alarm bells ringing for me, along with “we all want the same thing”. Who could object to an end to pain and hunger? To universal happiness? Well, what if my idea of happiness is different to yours? Liberals don’t say ‘We know best’, because everyone’s best is different.

This goes right back to my first Liberal Monday choice, when I observed how over the course of a century the most-quoted Liberal creed had thankfully moved from utilitarianism to Mill-and-Taylor-flavoured social Liberalism. I said there that utilitarianism and utopia had a superficial attraction, but gave me the creeps. Here’s the difference in a nutshell: today’s Liberals prize freedom from conformity for every individual to live their own life; Global Chemicals offers a perfect utilitarian future of absolute happiness, absolute equality and absolute mindlessness, forever. Even Liberals need to guard against the price some would too eagerly pay ‘for your own good’.

I was only a year old forty-one years ago, but as a boy the novelisation of this story was one of my favourites, and one of the books I credit with making me a green Liberal. And yet this most cuttingly Liberal of all scenes, as blatantly applicable to big states as big business, wasn’t even in the book. I didn’t see it until repeats nearly twenty years later, when it instantly struck an unforgettable chord with me. So why wasn’t it in the book? Well, the story was novelised by Malcolm Hulke, one of Target’s most talented writers, the one most likely to chop out scenes from the script and add his own that fleshed out the characters – so that’s probably it – but also the range’s card-carrying Communist Party member, so it’s just possible that like me he saw the Doctor objecting to an utopian regime promising freedom from material want at the price of “Freedom from freedom” for exactly what it was…

Or you may simply remember this as The One With The Maggots.

The death of Tony Benn, third of four generations of his family to sit in the House of Commons, and the selection of Stephen Kinnock, son of the former Labour leader, as a candidate for the next general election, thrust the spotlight onto political dynasties.

Magna Carta was sealed under oath by King John at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. It was the first document imposed upon a King of England by a group of his subjects (the feudal barons) in an attempt to limit his powers by law and protect their rights.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the legendary disc jockey, announcer and cartoon voice actor Casey Kasem has died. He was 82 and this sure sounds like one of those "glad it's finally over" deaths. He had been in terrible health for some time with his family fighting over what was best for him. It sure gave you the feeling that this is what was best for him.

There are some tapes that circulate of Mr. Kasem losing his temper during a couple of recording sessions and being less than a nice person. In fairness to the guy, let's remember these are three or four sessions out of tens of thousands that he did. I've never heard anyone else in his profession, when his name has come up, indicate that kind of thing occurred when they worked with him. My friend Frank Welker was in every one of the million-and-a-half episodes of Scooby Doo, the series on which Casey played the role of Shaggy. Frank said on several occasions that Casey was a joy to work with.

I was around him on a half-dozen occasions and that was sure my impression, too. What I didn't want to do was eat with the guy because he had very firm beliefs on what humans should and should not consume and he could get a little scolding in his expression of these views. When Hanna-Barbera set up a retirement dinner for Don Messick (the voice of Scooby), Casey insisted on dictating the menu at the Chinese Restaurant. We were all served huge platters of food some of us could not eat.

That was the most negative thing I can write here about Casey Kasem. The positive things would all have to be amazement and admiration for how much he worked and how good he was at what he did. For decades, you heard him everywhere — cartoons, network promos, commercials, radio shows, movie trailers, etc. He ushered in a new style of voiceover guy who favored personality over sheer testosterone. Someone once called him "The most successful off-screen announcer who wasn't trying to sound like God." If that's so and if there's a Heaven, he's probably finding out about now how far off he was.