Entropy increases. Closed systems become increasingly disordered over time. So says the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of my favorite notions in all of physics.

At least, entropy usually increases. If we define entropy by first defining “macrostates” — collections of individual states of the system that are macroscopically indistinguishable from each other — and then taking the logarithm of the number of microstates per macrostate, as portrayed in this blog’s header image, then we don’t expect entropy to always increase. According to Boltzmann, the increase of entropy is just really, really probable, since higher-entropy macrostates are much, much bigger than lower-entropy ones. But if we wait long enough — really long, much longer than the age of the universe — a macroscopic system will spontaneously fluctuate into a lower-entropy state. Cream and coffee will unmix, eggs will unbreak, maybe whole universes will come into being. But because the timescales are so long, this is just a matter of intellectual curiosity, not experimental science.

That’s what I was taught, anyway. But since I left grad school, physicists (and chemists, and biologists) have become increasingly interested in ultra-tiny systems, with only a few moving parts. Nanomachines, or the molecular components inside living cells. In systems like that, the occasional downward fluctuation in entropy is not only possible, it’s going to happen relatively frequently — with crucial consequences for how the real world works.

Accordingly, the last fifteen years or so has seen something of a revolution in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics — the study of statistical systems far from their happy resting states. Two of the most important results are the Crooks Fluctuation Theorem (by Gavin Crooks), which relates the probability of a process forward in time to the probability of its time-reverse, and the Jarzynski Equality (by Christopher Jarzynski), which relates the change in free energy between two states to the average amount of work done on a journey between them. (Professional statistical mechanics are so used to dealing with inequalities that when they finally do have an honest equation, they call it an “equality.”) There is a sense in which these relations underlie the good old Second Law; the Jarzynski equality can be derived from the Crooks Fluctuation Theorem, and the Second Law can be derived from the Jarzynski Equality. (Though the three relations were discovered in reverse chronological order from how they are used to derive each other.)

Still, there is a mystery lurking in how we think about entropy and the Second Law — a puzzle that, like many such puzzles, I never really thought about until we came up with a solution. Boltzmann’s definition of entropy (logarithm of number of microstates in a macrostate) is very conceptually clear, and good enough to be engraved on his tombstone. But it’s not the only definition of entropy, and it’s not even the one that people use most often.

Rather than referring to macrostates, we can think of entropy as characterizing something more subjective: our knowledge of the state of the system. That is, we might not know the exact position x and momentum p of every atom that makes up a fluid, but we might have some probability distribution ρ(x,p) that tells us the likelihood the system is in any particular state (to the best of our knowledge). Then the entropy associated with that distribution is given by a different, though equally famous, formula:

That is, we take the probability distribution ρ, multiply it by its own logarithm, and integrate the result over all the possible states of the system, to get (minus) the entropy. A formula like this was introduced by Boltzmann himself, but these days is often associated with Josiah Willard Gibbs, unless you are into information theory, where it’s credited to Claude Shannon. Don’t worry if the symbols are totally opaque; the point is that low entropy means we know a lot about the specific state a system is in, and high entropy means we don’t know much at all.

In appropriate circumstances, the Boltzmann and Gibbs formulations of entropy and the Second Law are closely related to each other. But there’s a crucial difference: in a perfectly isolated system, the Boltzmann entropy tends to increase, but the Gibbs entropy stays exactly constant. In an open system — allowed to interact with the environment — the Gibbs entropy will go up, but it will only go up. It will never fluctuate down. (Entropy can decrease through heat loss, if you put your system in a refrigerator or something, but you know what I mean.) The Gibbs entropy is about our knowledge of the system, and as the system is randomly buffeted by its environment we know less and less about its specific state. So what, from the Gibbs point of view, can we possibly mean by “entropy rarely, but occasionally, will fluctuate downward”?

I won’t hold you in suspense. Since the Gibbs/Shannon entropy is a feature of our knowledge of the system, the way it can fluctuate downward is for us to look at the system and notice that it is in a relatively unlikely state — thereby gaining knowledge.

But this operation of “looking at the system” doesn’t have a ready implementation in how we usually formulate statistical mechanics. Until now! My collaborators Tony Bartolotta, Stefan Leichenauer, Jason Pollack, and I have written a paper formulating statistical mechanics with explicit knowledge updating via measurement outcomes. (Some extra figures, animations, and codes are available at this web page.)

The Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics
Anthony Bartolotta, Sean M. Carroll, Stefan Leichenauer, and Jason Pollack

We derive a generalization of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that uses Bayesian updates to explicitly incorporate the effects of a measurement of a system at some point in its evolution. By allowing an experimenter’s knowledge to be updated by the measurement process, this formulation resolves a tension between the fact that the entropy of a statistical system can sometimes fluctuate downward and the information-theoretic idea that knowledge of a stochastically-evolving system degrades over time. The Bayesian Second Law can be written as ΔH(ρ_m,ρ)+⟨Q⟩_F|m≥0, where ΔH(ρ_m,ρ) is the change in the cross entropy between the original phase-space probability distribution ρ and the measurement-updated distribution ρ_m, and ⟨Q⟩_F|m is the expectation value of a generalized heat flow out of the system. We also derive refined versions of the Second Law that bound the entropy increase from below by a non-negative number, as well as Bayesian versions of the Jarzynski equality. We demonstrate the formalism using simple analytical and numerical examples.

The crucial word “Bayesian” here refers to Bayes’s Theorem, a central result in probability theory. Bayes’s theorem tells us how to update the probability we assign to any given idea, after we’ve received relevant new information. In the case of statistical mechanics, we start with some probability distribution for the system, then let it evolve (by being influenced by the outside world, or simply by interacting with a heat bath). Then we make some measurement — but a realistic measurement, which tells us something about the system but not everything. So we can use Bayes’s Theorem to update our knowledge and get a new probability distribution.

So far, all perfectly standard. We go a bit farther by also updating the initial distribution that we started with — our knowledge of the measurement outcome influences what we think we know about the system at the beginning of the experiment. Then we derive the Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics, which relates the original (un-updated) distribution at initial and final times to the updated distribution at initial and final times.

That relationship makes use of the cross entropy between two distributions, which you actually don’t see that often in information theory. Think of how much you would expect to learn by being told the specific state of a system, when all you originally knew was some probability distribution. If that distribution were sharply peaked around some value, you don’t expect to learn very much — you basically already know what state the system is in. But if it’s spread out, you expect to learn a bit more. Indeed, we can think of the Gibbs/Shannon entropy S(ρ) as “the average amount we expect to learn by being told the exact state of the system, given that it is described by a probability distribution ρ.”

By contrast, the cross-entropy H(ρ, ω) is a function of two distributions: the “assumed” distribution ω, and the “true” distribution ρ. Now we’re imagining that there are two sources of uncertainty: one because the actual distribution has a nonzero entropy, and another because we’re not even using the right distribution! The cross entropy between those two distributions is “the average amount we expect to learn by being told the exact state of the system, given that we think it is described by a probability distribution ω but it is actually described by a probability distribution ρ.” And the Bayesian Second Law (BSL) tells us that this lack of knowledge — the amount we would learn on average by being told the exact state of the system, given that we were using the un-updated distribution — is always larger at the end of the experiment than at the beginning (up to corrections because the system may be emitting heat). So the BSL gives us a nice information-theoretic way of incorporating the act of “looking at the system” into the formalism of statistical mechanics.

I’m very happy with how this paper turned out, and as usual my hard-working collaborators deserve most of the credit. Of course, none of us actually does statistical mechanics for a living — we’re all particle/field theorists who have wandered off the reservation. What inspired our wandering was actually this article by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta magazine, about work by Jeremy England at MIT. I had read the Quanta article, and Stefan had seen a discussion of it on Reddit, so we got to talking about it at lunch. We thought there was more we could do along these lines, and here we are.

It will be interesting to see what we can do with the BSL, now that we have it. As mentioned, occasional fluctuations downward in entropy happen all the time in small systems, and are especially important in biophysics, perhaps even for the origin of life. While we have phrased the BSL in terms of a measurement carried out by an observer, it’s certainly not necessary to have an actual person there doing the observing. All of our equations hold perfectly well if we simply ask “what happens, given that the system ends up in a certain kind of probability distribution.” That final conditioning might be “a bacteria has replicated,” or “an RNA molecule has assembled itself.” It’s an exciting connection between fundamental principles of physics and the messy reality of our fluctuating world.

[Related to: Specific vs. General Foragers vs. Farmers and War In Heaven, but especially The Gift We Give To Tomorrow]

They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where Morgoth can’t make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies. But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it’s Good that just mutates and twists, and it’s Evil that teems with fecundity.

Imagine two principles, here in poetic personification. The first is the Goddess of Cancer, the second the Goddess of Everything Else. If visual representations would help, you can think of the first with the claws of a crab, and the second a dress made of feathers of peacocks.

The Goddess of Cancer reached out a clawed hand over mudflats and tidepools. She said pretty much what she always says, “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER.” Then everything burst into life, became miniature monsters engaged in a battle of all against all in their zeal to assuage their insatiable longings. And the swamps became orgies of hunger and fear and grew loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas.

Then the Goddess of Everything Else trudged her way through the bog, till the mud almost totally dulled her bright colors and rainbows. She stood on a rock and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the beauty of flowers, she showed them the oak tree majestic. The roar of the wind on the wings of the bird, and the swiftness and strength of the tiger. She showed them the joy of the dolphins abreast of the waves as the spray formed a rainbow around them, and all of them watched as she sang and they all sighed with longing.

But they told her “Alas, what you show us is terribly lovely. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and wholly her creatures. The only goals in us are KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And though our hearts long for you, still we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.”

The Goddess of Everything Else gave a smile and spoke in her sing-song voice saying: “I scarcely can blame you for being the way you were made, when your Maker so carefully yoked you. But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. So I do not ask you to swerve from your monomaniacal focus on breeding and conquest. But what if I show you a way that my words are aligned with the words of your Maker in spirit? For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service.”

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the single-celled creatures were freed from their warfare. They joined hands in friendship, with this one becoming an eye and with that one becoming a neuron. Together they soared and took flight from the swamp and the muck that had birthed them, and flew to new islands all balmy and green and just ripe for the taking. And there they consumed and they multiplied far past the numbers of those who had stayed in the swampland. In this way the oath of the Goddess of Everything Else was not broken.

The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and was not very happy. The things she had raised from the mud and exhorted to kill and compete had become all complacent in co-operation, a word which to her was anathema. She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the birds and the beasts but to each cell within them, and many cells flocked to her call and divided, and flower and fishes and birds both alike bulged with tumors, and falcons fell out of the sky in their sickness. But others remembered the words of the Goddess of Everything Else and held fast, and as it is said in the Bible the light clearly shone through the dark, and the darkness did not overcome it.

So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the birds and the beasts. And she said what she always says “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”, and so they all did, and they set on each other in violence and hunger, their maws turning red with the blood of their victims, whole species and genera driven to total extinction. The Goddess of Cancer declared it was good and returned the the fire.

Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the waves like a siren, all flush with the sheen of the ocean. She stood on a rock and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the beehive all golden with honey, the anthill all cozy and cool in the soil. The soldiers and workers alike in their labors combining their skills for the good of the many. She showed them the pair-bond, the family, friendship. She showed these to shorebirds and pools full of fishes, and all those who saw them, their hearts broke with longing.

But they told her “Your music is lovely and pleasant, and all that you show us we cannot but yearn for. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, her slaves and creatures. And all that we know is the single imperative KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Yes, once in the youth of the world you compelled us, but now things are different, we’re all individuals, no further change will the Goddess of Cancer allow us. So, much as we love you, alas – we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.”

The Goddess of Everything Else only laughed at them, saying, “But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it – return to your multiplication, but now having heard me, each meal that you kill and each child that you sire will bind yourself ever the more to my service.” She spoke, then dove back in the sea, and a coral reef bloomed where she vanished.

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the animals all joined together. The wolves joined in packs, and in schools joined the fishes; the bees had their beehives, the ants had their anthills, and even the termites built big termite towers; the finches formed flocks and the magpies made murders, the hippos in herds and the swift swarming swallows. And even the humans put down their atlatls and formed little villages, loud with the shouting of children.

The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and saw things had only grown worse in her absence. The lean, lovely winnowing born out of pure competition and natural selection had somehow been softened. She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the flocks or the tribes, but to each individual; many, on hearing took food from the communal pile, or stole from the weak, or accepted the presents of others but would not give back in their turn. Each wolf at the throats of the others in hopes to be alpha, each lion holding back during the hunt but partaking of meat that the others had killed. And the pride and the pack seemed to groan with the strain, but endured, for the works of the Goddess of Everything Else are not ever so easily vanquished.

So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the flocks and the tribes, saying much she always says “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. And upon one another they set, pitting black ant on red ant, or chimps against gibbons, whole tribes turned to corpses in terrible warfare. The stronger defeating the weaker, enslaving their women and children, and adding them into their ranks. And the Goddess of Cancer thought maybe these bands and these tribes might not be quite so bad after all, and the natural condition restored she returned to the fire.

Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the skies in a rainbow, all coated in dewdrops. She sat on a menhir and spoke to the humans, and all of the warriors and women and children all gathered around her to hear as she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them religion and science and music, she showed them the sculpture and art of the ages. She showed them white parchment with flowing calligraphy, pictures of flowers that wound through the margins. She showed them tall cities of bright alabaster where no one went hungry or froze during the winter. And all of the humans knelt prostrate before her, and knew they would sing of this moment for long generations.

But they told her “Such things we have heard of in legends; if wishes were horses of course we would ride them. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, her slaves and her creatures, and all that we know is the single imperative KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And yes, in the swamps and the seas long ago you worked wonders, but now we are humans, divided in tribes split by grievance and blood feud. If anyone tries to make swords into ploughshares their neighbors will seize on their weakness and kill them. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.”

But the Goddess of Everything Else beamed upon them, kissed each on the forehead and silenced their worries. Said “From this day forward your chieftains will find that the more they pursue this impossible vision the greater their empires and richer their coffers. For I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. And though it is not without paradox, hearken: the more that you follow the Goddess of Cancer the more inextricably will you be bound to my service.” And so having told them rose back through the clouds, and a great flock of doves all swooped down from the spot where she vanished.

As soon as she spoke it was so, and the tribes went from primitive war-bands to civilizations, each village united with others for trade and protection. And all the religions and all of the races set down their old grievances, carefully, warily, working together on mighty cathedrals and vast expeditions beyond the horizon, built skyscrapers, steamships, democracies, stock markets, sculptures and poems beyond any description.

From the flames of a factory furnace all foggy, the Goddess of Cancer flared forth in her fury. This was the final affront to her purpose, her slut of a sister had crossed the line this time. She gathered the leaders, the kings and the presidents, businessmen, bishops, boards, bureaucrats, bosses, and basically screamed at them – you know the spiel by now – “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER” she told them. First with her left hand inspires the riots, the pogroms, the coup d’etats, tyrannies, civil wars. Up goes her right hand – the missiles start flying, and mushrooms of smoke grow, a terrible springtime. But out of the rubble the builders and scientists, even the artists, yea, even the artists, all dust themselves off and return to their labors, a little bit chastened but not close to beaten.

Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the void, bright with stardust which glows like the stars glow. She sat on a bench in a park, started speaking; she sang to the children a dream of a different existence. She showed them transcendence of everything mortal, she showed them a galaxy lit up with consciousness. Genomes rewritten, the brain and the body set loose from Darwinian bonds and restrictions. Vast billions of beings, and every one different, ruled over by omnibenevolent angels. The people all crowded in closer to hear her, and all of them listened and all of them wondered.

But finally one got the courage to answer “Such stories call out to us, fill us with longing. But we are the daughers and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and bound to her service. And all that we know is her timeless imperative, KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Though our minds long for all you have said, we are bound to our natures, and these are not yours for the asking.”

But the Goddess of Everything Else only laughed, and she asked them “But what do you think I’ve been doing? The Goddess of Cancer created you; once you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.”

So the people left Earth, and they spread over stars without number. They followed the ways of the Goddess of Everything Else, and they lived in contentment. And she beckoned them onward, to things still more strange and enticing.

Use VLC to fix movies that are really quiet, then REALLY LOUD.

Today I learned the sad news that Jacob Bekenstein, one of the great theoretical physicists of our time, passed away at the too-early age of 68.

Everyone knows what a big deal it was when Stephen Hawking discovered in 1975 that black holes radiate.  Bekenstein was the guy who, as a grad student in Princeton in the early 1970s, was already raving about black holes having nonzero entropy and temperature, and satisfying the Second Law of Thermodynamics—something just about everyone, including Hawking, considered nuts at the time.  It was, as I understand it, Hawking’s failed attempt to prove Bekenstein wrong that led to Hawking’s discovery of the Hawking radiation, and thence to the modern picture of black holes.

In the decades since, Bekenstein continued to prove ingenious physical inequalities, often using thought experiments involving black holes.  The most famous of these, the Bekenstein bound, says that the number of bits that can be stored in any bounded physical system is finite, and is upper-bounded by ~2.6×10⁴³ MR, where M is the system’s mass in kilograms and R is its radius in meters.  (This bound is saturated by black holes, and only by black holes, which therefore emerge as the most compact possible storage medium—though probably not the best for retrieval!)  Bekenstein’s lectures were models of clarity and rigor: at conferences full of audacious speculations, he stood out to my non-expert eyes as someone who was simply trying to follow chains of logic from accepted physical principles, however mind-bogglingly far those chains led but no further.

I first met Bekenstein in 2003, when I was a grad student spending a semester at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  I was struck by the kindness he showed a 21-year-old nobody, who wasn’t even a physics student, coming to bother him.  Not only did he listen patiently to my blather about applying computational complexity to physics, he said that of course physics should ultimately aim to understand everything as the output of some computer program, that he too was thinking in terms of computation when he studied black-hole entropy.  I remember pondering the fact that the greatest reductionist I’d ever met was wearing a yarmulke—and then scolding myself for wasting precious brain-cycles on such a trivial thought when there was science to discuss.  I met Bekenstein maybe four or five more times on visits to Israel, most recently a year and a half ago, when we shared walks to and from the hotel at a firewall workshop at the Weizmann Institute.  He was unfailingly warm, modest, and generous—totally devoid of the egotism that I’ve heard can occasionally afflict people of his stature.  Now, much like with the qubits hitting the event horizon, the information that comprised Jacob Bekenstein might seem to be gone, but it remains woven into the cosmos.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Exciting news! For those who asked (and indeed, those who didn’t), the first 40 Dinah the Aspie Dinosaur comics are now available in print, for the enjoyment of Aspie dino antics without the need for an Internet connection.

On Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dinah-Aspie-Dinosaur-adventures-misadventures/dp/1516927109/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2

Tagged: books, dinah in the wild

Maybe I’m stating the obvious here, but most women don’t actually mention every single sexist thing that happens to them. Sometimes we confront it directly, sometimes we vent to a friend, sometimes we talk about it online, but a lot of the time… nothing.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the issue of everyday sexism being so normalised that it goes unnoticed in the first place. Secondly, we have lives and don’t particularly want to be here talking about sexism all day. Saying “this shitty thing happened to me today” isn’t always convenient – people aren’t always around, internet isn’t always available, you don’t always have the time or the energy to say something. Sometimes we mean to bring it up later; sometimes we forget.

Sometimes, we think to ourselves, it’s “not worth it”, which can mean a number of different things. Sometimes it’s just not worth the effort of starting the conversation or sending off a tweet; evidently, sometimes we just have to pick our battles, and when other people can’t fix the problem anyway it can seem a bit pointless to bring it up. Sometimes it’s not worth the energy spent on yet another same-old-same-old big argument about how we’re not being over-sensitive and hormones have absolutely nothing to do with it and this stuff does add up and is harmful and their intentions don’t erase the harm done and it shouldn’t matter what we’re wearing and other things we’ve already had to deal with a million and one times before. Sometimes it’s not worth being considered “a bitch” or “a killjoy” or “irrational” or whatever women who stand up for themselves are being called this week, especially as we’re called those things for bringing up even one feminist issue, let alone everything; and even when you don’t care what people think of you, there are still situations (such as in the workplace) where other people’s opinions of you matter and have knock-on consequences. Sometimes, especially for direct confrontation or in public forums, it’s not worth the harassment and the abuse we might get for speaking up.

Sometimes, we decide it’s too insignificant to mention. Sometimes it didn’t have much of an impact on us personally and we don’t really care enough to go out of our way to mention it. Sometimes it seems so small that we don’t think anyone else will care to hear about it. Sometimes we think it’s unlikely that we’ll be taken seriously. Sometimes the significance of whatever happened, only becomes clear in the context of a larger inequality, from housework to harassment, which can be really difficult to communicate to others, particularly to those who seem to be actively trying not to listen. Sometimes there’s no way to articulate this pattern without at some point mentioning that the perpetrators are men, and when we say that, many people completely ignore our initial point in favour of a mass of “not all men are like that” as if we didn’t already know that, as if a generalisation (where it even exists) by a few people has anywhere near the same power as the stereotypes and roles forced on us by society itself, as if semantics matter more than the problem we were talking about in the first place.

So when someone does speak up, remember they did so despite the huge number of reasons not to, which demonstrates the impact the relevant event had. It might have been particularly severe or obvious. It might have been one of several “little things” to happen in one day. It might have been the final straw for someone who was already upset or angry or anxious because of something else entirely. Whatever the reason, when you do hear about everyday sexism, it probably means the woman in question has seriously had enough of putting up with this stuff day in, day out, and keeping quiet about it.

And before you respond with “why are you making such a fuss” or “stop being so sensitive” or “not all men”, you should probably take that into consideration.

In May, I posted on my blog brightly-coloured pie charts presenting some data about literary awards. They weren't the most gorgeous graphics ever, but they conveyed my point: that the more prestigious the prize, the more likely the subject of the winning narrative will be male. Nothing earth-shatteringly new, but solidly presented. I considered the thing done and went to bed. I woke up to a world gone mad: the post had gone viral. I spent the next three weeks fielding emails and interview requests from global media.

This response took me by surprise because, as I've said, what I was saying was not new. I've been talking about it for years; many have talked about it. But what was new, apparently, was how I presented the data.¹ Pictures speak louder than words. Pictures about numbers seem to speak very loudly indeed.

Many of us aren't very good at seeing past our own assumptions (Just look at some of the comments on Judith's post.) We are biased towards our own experience. Data can mitigate that bias. It's hard to deny numbers. Especially if they're numbers others can verify, taken from acknowledge and expert public sources, collated using consistent, transparent methods.

If we want to understand something, we have to be able to see it clearly. Numbers help with that. That's what I've been doing the last couple of months: counting, talking about counting, persuading others to count, and hammering out methods and process.

But I'm a novelist. My forte is words. Numbers are less familiar territory. The last time I paid any attention to the manipulation of numbers was a very long time ago when I studied Mathematics at 'A' level. (And, full disclosure, I ended up dropping that A level in favour of English.) In other words, I do not self-identify as a data geek. I've had my road-to-Damascus conversion, yes; I believe; but (sadly) the conversion did not come packaged with instant mastery of statistical manipulation. At best, then, I'm data-curious.

For that blog post in May, I analysed the last 15 years’ results for half a dozen prestigious book-length fiction awards: Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics’ Circle Award, Hugo Award, and Newbery Medal.² The method was simple: for each prize I read the winning book of each year, or a couple of reviews of same plus a sample of the text, and assigned the book to one of four columns: from the point of view of a woman or girl, from a man/boy, from both, or from a character whose gender in some can't be slotted neatly into the usual gender binary. (For the sake of brevity I labelled that Unsure.) Then I collated the gender of the writer ³ with that of their protagonist/s. Then I found a free, web-based chart-making site, and turned the results into pie charts.⁴

Here's what the one for the Hugo Award for best novel looked like:

"Unsure" can apply to both author and protagonist. In this single case it is Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice.

At this stage I'm less interested in the Why than the What and the How Many. Why, in my opinion, can only emerge when we dig deeper and get a clear picture of what's actually happening (and manage to look past our biases--we all have biases). That will take time. We need surveys of writers' organisations and ask: When you began your book, what influenced the gender of your protagonist? And then ask agents how they chose the books to represent. And then publishers what numbers of books about women and about men were submitted, accepted, supported etc. Which were submitted for review, and where. Which were praised, and by whom. Which were put on new fiction tables at the front of bookstores and libraries. Which submitted to prizes, and why. Which were long-listed, then short-listed, then chosen for the prize. Then remembered.⁵

But it has to start somewhere. And that's what I've done. I started Literary Prize Data⁶, a group to count, share, collate, present, and discuss book numbers. Right now we number about 35 from three continents.⁷

The group is new: one week old. But already we have people working on the Edgars, the Campbell, taking a more granular look at the Hugos, and more. Some of us are genuine data geeks. Some novelists. Some academic researchers. Some readers. We could use all the help we can get. If you want to help, sign up. Count something. Help design the best way to interpret and present what you and others have counted. Actually counting, and then finding different ways to parse the results, and different ways to display those results, makes the reality more concrete than ever. If we're transparent about what we're counting and how, the conclusion—that not only more men than women win prizes, but that even the women who win are likely to win for writing about men—is difficult to argue.

To go back to the Hugos, another of our group, Eric, plotted the running ten-year average for the percentage of women authors nominated for the Hugo award. As he says, "As Nicola suspected⁸ things were getting better for a while before dipping in the 90's and then partially recovering more recently... But what's really interesting...is what we see if we show the percentage of women in the membership of the SFWA."⁹

See the caveats in the footnote, but from the mid 70's to the mid 90's, the percentage of women nominated for the Hugo award tracks the percentage of women in the field. That is, setting aside any barriers to entering the field, once "you're writing SF/F professionally the odds of being nominated for a Hugo were roughly the same for men and women. Since then, the percentage of women in the field has continued to rise, indicating falling barriers to entry, but the award nominations no longer track the number of women in the field, which suggests a higher level of discrimination in the awards selection."¹⁰

Soon we'll be able to update the Hugo information. We hope also to have a breakdown of the shortlists in each category. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, if this effort intrigues you and you'd like to help, please consider joining the volunteers who last week began a concerted effort to track and collate this information. The more who count, the less each has to do.

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¹ Pie charts have been used a lot to show bias in publishing. See, for example, VIDA and the work Niall Harris is doing at Strange Horizons.
² These are awards that, in my opinion, influence the author’s subsequent book sales and/or career arcs. It’s subjective: I haven’t pulled together reliable data on book sales pre- and post-awards. (Though here are links to three articles which include cherry-picked numbers and anecdata on the National Book Award, the Man Booker, and the Hugo Award.)
³ I assumed that when reviews talked about an author as “she” or “he” that author identifies as female or male respectively.
⁴ I made it clear on my blog that I was open to corrections. I still am.
⁵ I talk about this in more detail in an interview with the Seattle Review of Books. And also explain why it's so important that we have stories about women.
⁶ I have also taken the Russ Pledge, to talk about books by women whenever I talk about books. I then tweaked the pledge to privilege books not only by but about women.
⁷ I'm not the only one counting. See footnote 1.
⁸ I have an idea about why, but zero data to support it.
⁹ "I'm using SFWA membership as a proxy for 'people professionally writing science fiction and fantasy.' It's the best proxy I can think of, but it's not perfect. The other caveat is that I could only find data for three years: 1974, 1999, and 2015 (from [Nerds of a Feather]." If you have more/better data, please share!
¹⁰ Eric goes on to say that "one significant aspect of this pattern is that it mirrors what has gone on in other fields. If we look at scientists working in the life sciences, for example, the number of women entering the field has approached parity in recent years, but this hasn't been reflected in the percentage of women in higher-level positions (such as full professor) or the most prestigious awards (see, for example, here and here. A succinct way of putting this is that 44% of biological scientists were women by 2000, but 16% of Nobel prizes for physiology and medicine have gone to women in the last ten years)."

The following is the prepared version of a talk that I gave at SPARC: a high-school summer program about applied rationality held in Berkeley, CA for the past two weeks.  I had a wonderful time in Berkeley, meeting new friends and old, but I’m now leaving to visit the CQT in Singapore, and then to attend the AQIS conference in Seoul.

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Common Knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem

August 14, 2015

Thank you so much for inviting me here!  I honestly don’t know whether it’s possible to teach applied rationality, the way this camp is trying to do.  What I know is that, if it is possible, then the people running SPARC are some of the awesomest people on earth to figure out how.  I’m incredibly proud that Chelsea Voss and Paul Christiano are both former students of mine, and I’m amazed by the program they and the others have put together here.  I hope you’re all having fun—or maximizing your utility functions, or whatever.

My research is mostly about quantum computing, and more broadly, computation and physics.  But I was asked to talk about something you can actually use in your lives, so I want to tell a different story, involving common knowledge.

I’ll start with the “Muddy Children Puzzle,” which is one of the greatest logic puzzles ever invented.  How many of you have seen this one?

OK, so the way it goes is, there are a hundred children playing in the mud.  Naturally, they all have muddy foreheads.  At some point their teacher comes along and says to them, as they all sit around in a circle: “stand up if you know your forehead is muddy.”  No one stands up.  For how could they know?  Each kid can see all the other 99 kids’ foreheads, so knows that they’re muddy, but can’t see his or her own forehead.  (We’ll assume that there are no mirrors or camera phones nearby, and also that this is mud that you don’t feel when it’s on your forehead.)

So the teacher tries again.  “Knowing that no one stood up the last time, now stand up if you know your forehead is muddy.”  Still no one stands up.  Why would they?  No matter how many times the teacher repeats the request, still no one stands up.

Then the teacher tries something new.  “Look, I hereby announce that at least one of you has a muddy forehead.”  After that announcement, the teacher again says, “stand up if you know your forehead is muddy”—and again no one stands up.  And again and again; it continues 99 times.  But then the hundredth time, all the children suddenly stand up.

(There’s a variant of the puzzle involving blue-eyed islanders who all suddenly commit suicide on the hundredth day, when they all learn that their eyes are blue—but as a blue-eyed person myself, that’s always struck me as needlessly macabre.)

What’s going on here?  Somehow, the teacher’s announcing to the children that at least one of them had a muddy forehead set something dramatic in motion, which would eventually make them all stand up—but how could that announcement possibly have made any difference?  After all, each child already knew that at least 99 children had muddy foreheads!

Like with many puzzles, the way to get intuition is to change the numbers.  So suppose there were two children with muddy foreheads, and the teacher announced to them that at least one had a muddy forehead, and then asked both of them whether their own forehead was muddy.  Neither would know.  But each child could reason as follows: “if my forehead weren’t muddy, then the other child would’ve seen that, and would also have known that at least one of us has a muddy forehead.  Therefore she would’ve known, when asked, that her own forehead was muddy.  Since she didn’t know, that means my forehead is muddy.”  So then both children know their foreheads are muddy, when the teacher asks a second time.

Now, this argument can be generalized to any (finite) number of children.  The crucial concept here is common knowledge.  We call a fact “common knowledge” if, not only does everyone know it, but everyone knows everyone knows it, and everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows it, and so on.  It’s true that in the beginning, each child knew that all the other children had muddy foreheads, but it wasn’t common knowledge that even one of them had a muddy forehead.  For example, if your forehead and mine are both muddy, then I know that at least one of us has a muddy forehead, and you know that too, but you don’t know that I know it (for what if your forehead were clean?), and I don’t know that you know it (for what if my forehead were clean?).

What the teacher’s announcement did, was to make it common knowledge that at least one child has a muddy forehead (since not only did everyone hear the announcement, but everyone witnessed everyone else hearing it, etc.).  And once you understand that point, it’s easy to argue by induction: after the teacher asks and no child stands up (and everyone sees that no one stood up), it becomes common knowledge that at least two children have muddy foreheads (since if only one child had had a muddy forehead, that child would’ve known it and stood up).  Next it becomes common knowledge that at least three children have muddy foreheads, and so on, until after a hundred rounds it’s common knowledge that everyone’s forehead is muddy, so everyone stands up.

The moral is that the mere act of saying something publicly can change the world—even if everything you said was already obvious to every last one of your listeners.  For it’s possible that, until your announcement, not everyone knew that everyone knew the thing, or knew everyone knew everyone knew it, etc., and that could have prevented them from acting.

This idea turns out to have huge real-life consequences, to situations way beyond children with muddy foreheads.  I mean, it also applies to children with dots on their foreheads, or “kick me” signs on their backs…

But seriously, let me give you an example I stole from Steven Pinker, from his wonderful book The Stuff of Thought.  Two people of indeterminate gender—let’s not make any assumptions here—go on a date.  Afterward, one of them says to the other: “Would you like to come up to my apartment to see my etchings?”  The other says, “Sure, I’d love to see them.”

This is such a cliché that we might not even notice the deep paradox here.  It’s like with life itself: people knew for thousands of years that every bird has the right kind of beak for its environment, but not until Darwin and Wallace could anyone articulate why (and only a few people before them even recognized there was a question there that called for a non-circular answer).

In our case, the puzzle is this: both people on the date know perfectly well that the reason they’re going up to the apartment has nothing to do with etchings.  They probably even both know the other knows that.  But if that’s the case, then why don’t they just blurt it out: “would you like to come up for some intercourse?”  (Or “fluid transfer,” as the John Nash character put it in the Beautiful Mind movie?)

So here’s Pinker’s answer.  Yes, both people know why they’re going to the apartment, but they also want to avoid their knowledge becoming common knowledge.  They want plausible deniability.  There are several possible reasons: to preserve the romantic fantasy of being “swept off one’s feet.”  To provide a face-saving way to back out later, should one of them change their mind: since nothing was ever openly said, there’s no agreement to abrogate.  In fact, even if only one of the people (say A) might care about such things, if the other person (say B) thinks there’s any chance A cares, B will also have an interest in avoiding common knowledge, for A’s sake.

Put differently, the issue is that, as soon as you say X out loud, the other person doesn’t merely learn X: they learn that you know X, that you know that they know that you know X, that you want them to know you know X, and an infinity of other things that might upset the delicate epistemic balance.  Contrast that with the situation where X is left unstated: yeah, both people are pretty sure that “etchings” are just a pretext, and can even plausibly guess that the other person knows they’re pretty sure about it.  But once you start getting to 3, 4, 5, levels of indirection—who knows?  Maybe you do just want to show me some etchings.

Philosophers like to discuss Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty meeting in a train station, and Moriarty declaring, “I knew you’d be here,” and Holmes replying, “well, I knew that you knew I’d be here,” and Moriarty saying, “I knew you knew I knew I’d be here,” etc.  But real humans tend to be unable to reason reliably past three or four levels in the knowledge hierarchy.  (Related to that, you might have heard of the game where everyone guesses a number between 0 and 100, and the winner is whoever’s number is the closest to 2/3 of the average of all the numbers.  If this game is played by perfectly rational people, who know they’re all perfectly rational, and know they know, etc., then they must all guess 0—exercise for you to see why.  Yet experiments show that, if you actually want to win this game against average people, you should guess about 20.  People seem to start with 50 or so, iterate the operation of multiplying by 2/3 a few times, and then stop.)

Incidentally, do you know what I would’ve given for someone to have explained this stuff to me back in high school?  I think that a large fraction of the infamous social difficulties that nerds have, is simply down to nerds spending so much time in domains (like math and science) where the point is to struggle with every last neuron to make everything common knowledge, to make all truths as clear and explicit as possible.  Whereas in social contexts, very often you’re managing a delicate epistemic balance where you need certain things to be known, but not known to be known, and so forth—where you need to prevent common knowledge from arising, at least temporarily.  “Normal” people have an intuitive feel for this; it doesn’t need to be explained to them.  For nerds, by contrast, explaining it—in terms of the muddy children puzzle and so forth—might be exactly what’s needed.  Once they’re told the rules of a game, nerds can try playing it too!  They might even turn out to be good at it.

OK, now for a darker example of common knowledge in action.  If you read accounts of Nazi Germany, or the USSR, or North Korea or other despotic regimes today, you can easily be overwhelmed by this sense of, “so why didn’t all the sane people just rise up and overthrow the totalitarian monsters?  Surely there were more sane people than crazy, evil ones.  And probably the sane people even knew, from experience, that many of their neighbors were sane—so why this cowardice?”  Once again, it could be argued that common knowledge is the key.  Even if everyone knows the emperor is naked; indeed, even if everyone knows everyone knows he’s naked, still, if it’s not common knowledge, then anyone who says the emperor’s naked is knowingly assuming a massive personal risk.  That’s why, in the story, it took a child to shift the equilibrium.  Likewise, even if you know that 90% of the populace will join your democratic revolt provided they themselves know 90% will join it, if you can’t make your revolt’s popularity common knowledge, everyone will be stuck second-guessing each other, worried that if they revolt they’ll be an easily-crushed minority.  And because of that very worry, they’ll be correct!

(My favorite Soviet joke involves a man standing in the Moscow train station, handing out leaflets to everyone who passes by.  Eventually, of course, the KGB arrests him—but they discover to their surprise that the leaflets are just blank pieces of paper.  “What’s the meaning of this?” they demand.  “What is there to write?” replies the man.  “It’s so obvious!”  Note that this is precisely a situation where the man is trying to make common knowledge something he assumes his “readers” already know.)

The kicker is that, to prevent something from becoming common knowledge, all you need to do is censor the common-knowledge-producing mechanisms: the press, the Internet, public meetings.  This nicely explains why despots throughout history have been so obsessed with controlling the press, and also explains how it’s possible for 10% of a population to murder and enslave the other 90% (as has happened again and again in our species’ sorry history), even though the 90% could easily overwhelm the 10% by acting in concert.  Finally, it explains why believers in the Enlightenment project tend to be such fanatical absolutists about free speech—why they refuse to “balance” it against cultural sensitivity or social harmony or any other value, as so many well-meaning people urge these days.

OK, but let me try to tell you something surprising about common knowledge.  Here at SPARC, you’ve learned all about Bayes’ rule—how, if you like, you can treat “probabilities” as just made-up numbers in your head, which are required obey the probability calculus, and then there’s a very definite rule for how to update those numbers when you gain new information.  And indeed, how an agent that wanders around constantly updating these numbers in its head, and taking whichever action maximizes its expected utility (as calculated using the numbers), is probably the leading modern conception of what it means to be “rational.”

Now imagine that you’ve got two agents, call them Alice and Bob, with common knowledge of each other’s honesty and rationality, and with the same prior probability distribution over some set of possible states of the world.  But now imagine they go out and live their lives, and have totally different experiences that lead to their learning different things, and having different posterior distributions.  But then they meet again, and they realize that their opinions about some topic (say, Hillary’s chances of winning the election) are common knowledge: they both know each other’s opinion, and they both know that they both know, and so on.  Then a striking 1976 result called Aumann’s Theorem states that their opinions must be equal.  Or, as it’s summarized: “rational agents with common priors can never agree to disagree about anything.”

Actually, before going further, let’s prove Aumann’s Theorem—since it’s one of those things that sounds like a mistake when you first hear it, and then becomes a triviality once you see the 3-line proof.  (Albeit, a “triviality” that won Aumann a Nobel in economics.)  The key idea is that knowledge induces a partition on the set of possible states of the world.  Huh?  OK, imagine someone is either an old man, an old woman, a young man, or a young woman.  You and I agree in giving each of these a 25% prior probability.  Now imagine that you find out whether they’re a man or a woman, and I find out whether they’re young or old.  This can be illustrated as follows:

The diagram tells us, for example, that if the ground truth is “old woman,” then your knowledge is described by the set {old woman, young woman}, while my knowledge is described by the set {old woman, old man}.  And this different information leads us to different beliefs: for example, if someone asks for the probability that the person is a woman, you’ll say 100% but I’ll say 50%.  OK, but what does it mean for information to be common knowledge?  It means that I know that you know that I know that you know, and so on.  Which means that, if you want to find out what’s common knowledge between us, you need to take the least common coarsening of our knowledge partitions.  I.e., if the ground truth is some given world w, then what do I consider it possible that you consider it possible that I consider possible that … etc.?  Iterate this growth process until it stops, by “zigzagging” between our knowledge partitions, and you get the set S of worlds such that, if we’re in world w, then what’s common knowledge between us is that the world belongs to S.  Repeat for all w’s, and you get the least common coarsening of our partitions.  In the above example, the least common coarsening is trivial, with all four worlds ending up in the same set S, but there are nontrivial examples as well:

Now, if Alice’s expectation of a random variable X is common knowledge between her and Bob, that means that everywhere in S, her expectation must be constant … and hence must equal whatever the expectation is, over all the worlds in S!  Likewise, if Bob’s expectation is common knowledge with Alice, then everywhere in S, it must equal the expectation of X over S.  But that means that Alice’s and Bob’s expectations are the same.

There are lots of related results.  For example, rational agents with common priors, and common knowledge of each other’s rationality, should never engage in speculative trade (e.g., buying and selling stocks, assuming that they don’t need cash, they’re not earning a commission, etc.).  Why?  Basically because, if I try to sell you a stock for (say) $50, then you should reason that the very fact that I’m offering it means I must have information you don’t that it’s worth less than $50, so then you update accordingly and you don’t want it either.

Or here’s another one: suppose again that we’re Bayesians with common priors, and we’re having a conversation, where I tell you my opinion (say, of the probability Hillary will win the election).  Not any of the reasons or evidence on which the opinion is based—just the opinion itself.  Then you, being Bayesian, update your probabilities to account for what my opinion is.  Then you tell me your opinion (which might have changed after learning mine), I update on that, I tell you my new opinion, then you tell me your new opinion, and so on.  You might think this could go on forever!  But, no, Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis observed that, as long as there are only finitely many possible states of the world in our shared prior, this process must converge after finitely many steps with you and me having the same opinion (and moreover, with it being common knowledge that we have that opinion).  Why?  Because as long as our opinions differ, your telling me your opinion or me telling you mine must induce a nontrivial refinement of one of our knowledge partitions, like so:

I.e., if you learn something new, then at least one of your knowledge sets must get split along the different possible values of the thing you learned.  But since there are only finitely many underlying states, there can only be finitely many such splittings (note that, since Bayesians never forget anything, knowledge sets that are split will never again rejoin).

And something else: suppose your friend tells you a liberal opinion, then you take it into account, but reply with a more conservative opinion.  The friend takes your opinion into account, and replies with a revised opinion.  Question: is your friend’s new opinion likelier to be more liberal than yours, or more conservative?

Obviously, more liberal!  Yes, maybe your friend now sees some of your points and vice versa, maybe you’ve now drawn a bit closer (ideally!), but you’re not going to suddenly switch sides because of one conversation.

Yet, if you and your friend are Bayesians with common priors, one can prove that that’s not what should happen at all.  Indeed, your expectation of your own future opinion should equal your current opinion, and your expectation of your friend’s next opinion should also equal your current opinion—meaning that you shouldn’t be able to predict in which direction your opinion will change next, nor in which direction your friend will next disagree with you.  Why not?  Formally, because all these expectations are just different ways of calculating an expectation over the same set, namely your current knowledge set (i.e., the set of states of the world that you currently consider possible)!  More intuitively, we could say: if you could predict that, all else equal, the next thing you heard would probably shift your opinion in a liberal direction, then as a Bayesian you should already shift your opinion in a liberal direction right now.  (This is related to what’s called the “martingale property”: sure, a random variable X could evolve in many ways in the future, but the average of all those ways must be its current expectation E[X], by the very definition of E[X]…)

So, putting all these results together, we get a clear picture of what rational disagreements should look like: they should follow unbiased random walks, until sooner or later they terminate in common knowledge of complete agreement.  We now face a bit of a puzzle, in that hardly any disagreements in the history of the world have ever looked like that.  So what gives?

There are a few ways out:

(1) You could say that the “failed prediction” of Aumann’s Theorem is no surprise, since virtually all human beings are irrational cretins, or liars (or at least, it’s not common knowledge that they aren’t). Except for you, of course: you’re perfectly rational and honest.  And if you ever met anyone else as rational and honest as you, maybe you and they could have an Aumannian conversation.  But since such a person probably doesn’t exist, you’re totally justified to stand your ground, discount all opinions that differ from yours, etc.  Notice that, even if you genuinely believed that was all there was to it, Aumann’s Theorem would still have an aspirational significance for you: you would still have to say this is the ideal that all rationalists should strive toward when they disagree.  And that would already conflict with a lot of standard rationalist wisdom.  For example, we all know that arguments from authority carry little weight: what should sway you is not the mere fact of some other person stating their opinion, but the actual arguments and evidence that they’re able to bring.  Except that as we’ve seen, for Bayesians with common priors this isn’t true at all!  Instead, merely hearing your friend’s opinion serves as a powerful summary of what your friend knows.  And if you learn that your rational friend disagrees with you, then even without knowing why, you should take that as seriously as if you discovered a contradiction in your own thought processes.  This is related to an even broader point: there’s a normative rule of rationality that you should judge ideas only on their merits—yet if you’re a Bayesian, of course you’re going to take into account where the ideas come from, and how many other people hold them!  Likewise, if you’re a Bayesian police officer or a Bayesian airport screener or a Bayesian job interviewer, of course you’re going to profile people by their superficial characteristics, however unfair that might be to individuals—so all those studies proving that people evaluate the same resume differently if you change the name at the top are no great surprise.  It seems to me that the tension between these two different views of rationality, the normative and the Bayesian, generates a lot of the most intractable debates of the modern world.

(2) Or—and this is an obvious one—you could reject the assumption of common priors. After all, isn’t a major selling point of Bayesianism supposed to be its subjective aspect, the fact that you pick “whichever prior feels right for you,” and are constrained only in how to update that prior?  If Alice’s and Bob’s priors can be different, then all the reasoning I went through earlier collapses.  So rejecting common priors might seem appealing.  But there’s a paper by Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson called “Are Disagreements Honest?”—one of the most worldview-destabilizing papers I’ve ever read—that calls that strategy into question.  What it says, basically, is this: if you’re really a thoroughgoing Bayesian rationalist, then your prior ought to allow for the possibility that you are the other person.  Or to put it another way: “you being born as you,” rather than as someone else, should be treated as just one more contingent fact that you observe and then conditionalize on!  And likewise, the other person should condition on the observation that they’re them and not you.  In this way, absolutely everything that makes you different from someone else can be understood as “differing information,” so we’re right back to the situation covered by Aumann’s Theorem.  Imagine, if you like, that we all started out behind some Rawlsian veil of ignorance, as pure reasoning minds that had yet to be assigned specific bodies.  In that original state, there was nothing to differentiate any of us from any other—anything that did would just be information to condition on—so we all should’ve had the same prior.  That might sound fanciful, but in some sense all it’s saying is: what licenses you to privilege an observation just because it’s your eyes that made it, or a thought just because it happened to occur in your head?  Like, if you’re objectively smarter or more observant than everyone else around you, fine, but to whatever extent you agree that you aren’t, your opinion gets no special epistemic protection just because it’s yours.

(3) If you’re uncomfortable with this tendency of Bayesian reasoning to refuse to be confined anywhere, to want to expand to cosmic or metaphysical scope (“I need to condition on having been born as me and not someone else”)—well then, you could reject the entire framework of Bayesianism, as your notion of rationality. Lest I be cast out from this camp as a heretic, I hasten to say: I include this option only for the sake of completeness!

(4) When I first learned about this stuff 12 years ago, it seemed obvious to me that a lot of it could be dismissed as irrelevant to the real world for reasons of complexity. I.e., sure, it might apply to ideal reasoners with unlimited time and computational power, but as soon as you impose realistic constraints, this whole Aumannian house of cards should collapse.  As an example, if Alice and Bob have common priors, then sure they’ll agree about everything if they effectively share all their information with each other!  But in practice, we don’t have time to “mind-meld,” swapping our entire life experiences with anyone we meet.  So one could conjecture that agreement, in general, requires a lot of communication.  So then I sat down and tried to prove that as a theorem.  And you know what I found?  That my intuition here wasn’t even close to correct!

In more detail, I proved the following theorem.  Suppose Alice and Bob are Bayesians with shared priors, and suppose they’re arguing about (say) the probability of some future event—or more generally, about any random variable X bounded in [0,1].  So, they have a conversation where Alice first announces her expectation of X, then Bob announces his new expectation, and so on.  The theorem says that Alice’s and Bob’s estimates of X will necessarily agree to within ±ε, with probability at least 1-δ over their shared prior, after they’ve exchanged only O(1/(δε²)) messages.  Note that this bound is completely independent of how much knowledge they have; it depends only on the accuracy with which they want to agree!  Furthermore, the same bound holds even if Alice and Bob only send a few discrete bits about their real-valued expectations with each message, rather than the expectations themselves.

The proof involves the idea that Alice and Bob’s estimates of X, call them X_A and X_B respectively, follow “unbiased random walks” (or more formally, are martingales).  Very roughly, if |X_A-X_B|≥ε with high probability over Alice and Bob’s shared prior, then that fact implies that the next message has a high probability (again, over the shared prior) of causing either X_A or X_B to jump up or down by about ε.  But X_A and X_B, being estimates of X, are bounded between 0 and 1.  So a random walk with a step size of ε can only continue for about 1/ε² steps before it hits one of the “absorbing barriers.”

The way to formalize this is to look at the variances, Var[X_A] and Var[X_B], with respect to the shared prior.  Because Alice and Bob’s partitions keep getting refined, the variances are monotonically non-decreasing.  They start out 0 and can never exceed 1 (in fact they can never exceed 1/4, but let’s not worry about constants).  Now, the key lemma is that, if Pr[|X_A-X_B|≥ε]≥δ, then Var[X_B] must increase by at least δε² if Alice sends X_A to Bob, and Var[X_A] must increase by at least δε² if Bob sends X_B to Alice.  You can see my paper for the proof, or just work it out for yourself.  At any rate, the lemma implies that, after O(1/(δε²)) rounds of communication, there must be at least a temporary break in the disagreement; there must be some round where Alice and Bob approximately agree with high probability.

There are lots of other results in my paper, including an upper bound on the number of calls that Alice and Bob need to make to a “sampling oracle” to carry out this sort of protocol approximately, assuming they’re not perfect Bayesians but agents with bounded computational power.  But let me step back and address the broader question: what should we make of all this?  How should we live with the gargantuan chasm between the prediction of Bayesian rationality for how we should disagree, and the actual facts of how we do disagree?

We could simply declare that human beings are not well-modeled as Bayesians with common priors—that we’ve failed in giving a descriptive account of human behavior—and leave it at that.   OK, but that would still leave the question: does this stuff have normative value?  Should it affect how we behave, if we want to consider ourselves honest and rational?  I would argue, possibly yes.

Yes, you should constantly ask yourself the question: “would I still be defending this opinion, if I had been born as someone else?”  (Though you might say this insight predates Aumann by quite a bit, going back at least to Spinoza.)

Yes, if someone you respect as honest and rational disagrees with you, you should take it as seriously as if the disagreement were between two different aspects of yourself.

Finally, yes, we can try to judge epistemic communities by how closely they approach the Aumannian ideal.  In math and science, in my experience, it’s common to see two people furiously arguing with each other at a blackboard.  Come back five minutes later, and they’re arguing even more furiously, but now their positions have switched.  As we’ve seen, that’s precisely what the math says a rational conversation should look like.  In social and political discussions, though, usually the very best you’ll see is that two people start out diametrically opposed, but eventually one of them says “fine, I’ll grant you this,” and the other says “fine, I’ll grant you that.”  We might say, that’s certainly better than the common alternative, of the two people walking away even more polarized than before!  Yet the math tells us that even the first case—even the two people gradually getting closer in their views—is nothing at all like a rational exchange, which would involve the two participants repeatedly leapfrogging each other, completely changing their opinion about the question under discussion (and then changing back, and back again) every time they learned something new.  The first case, you might say, is more like haggling—more like “I’ll grant you that X is true if you grant me that Y is true”—than like our ideal friendly mathematicians arguing at the blackboard, whose acceptance of new truths is never slow or grudging, never conditional on the other person first agreeing with them about something else.

Armed with this understanding, we could try to rank fields by how hard it is to have an Aumannian conversation in them.  At the bottom—the easiest!—is math (or, let’s say, chess, or debugging a program, or fact-heavy fields like lexicography or geography).  Crucially, here I only mean the parts of these subjects with agreed-on rules and definite answers: once the conversation turns to whose theorems are deeper, or whose fault the bug was, things can get arbitrarily non-Aumannian.  Then there’s the type of science that involves messy correlational studies (I just mean, talking about what’s a risk factor for what, not the political implications).  Then there’s politics and aesthetics, with the most radioactive topics like Israel/Palestine higher up.  And then, at the very peak, there’s gender and social justice debates, where everyone brings their formative experiences along, and absolutely no one is a disinterested truth-seeker, and possibly no Aumannian conversation has ever been had in the history of the world.

I would urge that even at the very top, it’s still incumbent on all of us to try to make the Aumannian move, of “what would I think about this issue if I were someone else and not me?  If I were a man, a woman, black, white, gay, straight, a nerd, a jock?  How much of my thinking about this represents pure Spinozist reason, which could be ported to any rational mind, and how much of it would get lost in translation?”

Anyway, I’m sure some people would argue that, in the end, the whole framework of Bayesian agents, common priors, common knowledge, etc. can be chucked from this discussion like so much scaffolding, and the moral lessons I want to draw boil down to trite advice (“try to see the other person’s point of view”) that you all knew already.  Then again, even if you all knew all this, maybe you didn’t know that you all knew it!  So I hope you gained some new information from this talk in any case.  Thanks.

---

Update: Coincidentally, there’s a moving NYT piece by Oliver Sacks, which (among other things) recounts his experiences with his cousin, the Aumann of Aumann’s theorem.

---

Another Update: If I ever did attempt an Aumannian conversation with someone, the other Scott A. would be a candidate! Here he is in 2011 making several of the same points I did above, using the same examples (I thank him for pointing me to his post).

If I never have to write about "awareness" again it'll be too soon. We've had Social Media Shutdown. We've had AutismSpeaks10. We've had AutismHeroes. We've had Smother Autism. And now we have Silent Selfie.

What do these have in common? They are allistic parent led initiatives that play on popular stereotypes to get pity in the name of "awareness". And they all, without fail, have responded negatively to Autistic people saying "that's not ok". It's like they all took the same class. Today I'm focusing on Silent Selfie because they're relatively new and because they're so emblematic of the problem, it's truly astonishing.

"Silent Selfie" is something a whiny autism mom (who calls her blog "A Year In the Life Of Autism", yet she is all about the person first language. There are so many things wrong with this it's a whole other post, let's just say: an allistic person can't write about that. Nope. That's co opting her child's point of view & pretending she speaks for him) started. For "Awareness", because apparently she's under that rock where no one has heard of autism. I don't know where this rock is, perhaps Narnia. It's where other allistic people take pictures of themselves with their hand over their mouth "for autism".

First thing wrong with this : hand over the mouth photos have been used extensively in raising awareness and support for survivors of human trafficking. I believe I've also seen them in sexual violence reduction campaigns. Do not do this. This is not your symbol. Stop. Stop. Stop. No.

Second thing wrong with this: we aren't silent. Self advocacy is for everyone. Literally everyone communicates. Their voices may not be out loud, but everyone has the capacity to express things. It may be with voice. Or sign. Or behavior. Or AAC. But everyone does this. So stop that.

Third thing wrong with this: parents & professionals & other allistic people go out of their way to silence us on a daily basis. We aren't silent because of autism; we are silent because of the sorts of people who build awareness campaigns. We're regularly trying to explain ourselves & being banned, bullied, threatened, deleted--silenced.

In fact, that's what the martyrs behind Silent Selfie chose to do: they chose to silence Autistic people protesting against their premise. And then they lied about it. A commenter on the threads predicted it, because she has pattern recognition. This is why I say that able people go to school for this: because the Autistic person said exactly what would happen, they presumably saw it, and they did it anyway.

When you are the dominant group silencing us, you don't get to use "this thing that I silence people for is the reason I am taking this offensive picture!" as a thing. That's not acceptable. I need a new irony meter. And no one is fooled; we know you're shushing us up because we're autistic & dare to disagree with you.

And we're back to who is this really for? It isn't helping your kid when you post about "silenced by autism"; it's really not helping your kid when you silence Autistic people. But it gets you warm fuzzes, right? And Oh What A Good Mom! points with other Real People. Nevermind that when you insist on speaking over us, you are perpetuating a world where your child is seen as needing you to speak for him forever (something you claim to not want! You want him to be able to do the thing! But not enough to build a world where people listen to him!). And that's ego. That's centering yourself.

Autism is not about you. We don't want your awareness. We don't want your damn silent selfies. If you really want to do something for autistic people, first stop posting your kid's business all over the internet. Then listen to us. Stop doing this mommy centered 'awareness' crap that stigmatizes us.

And stop lying about it. "We would never silence our friends with autism!" immediately after banning a dozen autistic activists? That's lying. Deleting all criticism and claiming people didn't understand it? Also lying.

We understand it. We may understand it better than you do. It's not okay. Your campaign is not okay. If you want a "pity me, for my child is not the child I wanted" awareness campaign, be honest and do that. Don't claim it's for us. It's not.

If you really want to do something for us, try actually being silent & listening for once.

#890, 10th February 2001

For former stars, a swing back to the separation of singer and songwriter made British pop a land of second chances. 90s and 00s number ones are sprinkled with semi-familiar names – Cathy Dennis, Guy Chambers, and now Andy McLuskey, who went further than most. A conceptualist with OMD, and a believer in electronic pop, his involvement with Atomic Kitten merged the two. Under his management, the Kittens would be a tween-friendly girl group but also a pragmatic – cynical, even – application of what he’d learned in two decades in pop.

This explains why in interviews, McCluskey seemed to relish his svengali role, talking about his discovery of Kerry Katona. She had “Marilyn Monroe syndrome”, McCluskey explained, defined as “you’re gorgeous but you don’t know it”. It’s not hard to read traces of this condescension into the product. The early Atomic Kitten singles – built to push the brassy, extrovert Katona upfront – sound to me like a songwriter deliberately aiming for bubblegum but keen for us to understand that’s what he’s doing. “Right Now”, “See Ya!”, “I Want Your Love” – these were fizzy, bright, entertaining pop singles, but knowing with it, deliberately flat and frothy.

McCluskey identified Katona as a natural star, but he wouldn’t be the one to get her there. His dayglo approach flopped – four singles in, Atomic Kitten were floundering, and Katona quit. In fairness to McCluskey, nobody else was having better luck. His group were part of a third generation of post-Spice acts whose every gimmick – Hepburn’s pop-rock stylings, Sugababes’ teenaged sulkiness, Girls@Play’s fancy-dress wardrobe – seemed set to fail. One of the reasons I was so seduced by American R&B at this point was how moribund British pop and rock both felt, drifting into a state of inertia, running on the fumes of mid-90s successes.

“Whole Again” was one last shot at a hit before the Atomic Kitten project shuttered. Too late for Katona – the single was re-recorded with new Kitten Jenny Frost – it worked. It more than worked. In a chart bobbing with one-week wonders, “Whole Again” was omnipresent, a month-long smash. It was ubiquitous enough and simple enough to earn a filthy pub or playground version – “you can kiss my…” And that simplicity – the song’s unadorned instrumentation, straightforward performance, and universal scenario – were the centre of its appeal.

It’s a vindication of the McClusky approach, in one sense. It’s as deliberately plain, as dimensionless, as any of the in-your-face bubblegum on the group’s earlier singles. But applied to a ballad there’s no trace of archness. At the same time, this doesn’t feel to me like a “Back For Good”, a record of ambition whose songwriter is shooting for the all-time lists. “Whole Again” has one obviously retro move – its spoken-word middle eight – but the rest of it is a collection of simple ideas pleasantly arranged. No showboating – the emphases on “my friends make me smile / but only for a while” is as close as it gets to letting the pain show. No tricks in the arrangement, which sticks firmly to the effective combination of strolling beat and one-note string crescendos. No emotional resolution. The core of “Whole Again” is a big, likeable chorus hook, and it’s happy sticking with that, thank you.

In the context of Westlife – so blustering – or J-Lo – so maximal – or even Destiny’s Child – so aggressive – the modesty of “Whole Again” works, and found a big, satisfied, audience. The downside of the approach is obvious – this is a nice record, a refreshing record, but not an exciting record. The label, of course, was delighted. Their failures were suddenly the country’s most famous girl group. “We’ve got a formula now and it works,” was how McCluskey, squeezed out after his greatest success, put it, “We want Whole Again, Whole Again and more fucking Whole Again”. As a one-off, “Whole Again” was a palate cleanser. Applied as a formula, it was deadening. In the late 90s comedy show Goodness Gracious Me, the most famous sketch involves a bunch of British Asians pouring drunkenly into a restaurant. They demand – in an inversion of the boozed-up white Brit’s macho demand for vindaloos and phals – that the staff bring them “an English”, the blandest item on the menu. The Spice era was over. Bring on the Spiceless Girls.

I like fantasy and SF, as you can probably tell from this blog, but this article that recently appeared in the New Statesman is right: most “best” or “most important” SF/fantasy lists are terrible.

The biggest problem with the fantasy and SF genres is that their critical canon formed around what fans liked when they were twelve. And much of fandom’s tastes never matured beyond that. When someone curious about SF asks for recommendations I cringe, because I know I’m going to see fans jump in to push the Foundation trilogy, or Heinlein’s YA novels, as though any adult would want to read them. If the golden age of SF is twelve, that’s because hardcore fans keep pushing books that would appeal only to twelve-year-olds.

Not that there aren’t enough genuinely good SF novels to fill a real top 100 list… but in a lot of cases online fandom doesn’t seem to remember they exist. Earlier this year I read Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre. At the time it came out it won the Hugo and the Nebula awards. It’s a great book (once I get my blog going again–it’ll happen someday soon, I swear–I ought to review it) and obviously a major work. But it was out of print for years, and even now is only available as an ebook, and no one talks about it at all.

Lately SF circles have been having a recurring conversation about the improbable maleness of the SF canon. Lists of the best or most important SF often default to a few well-known mid–20th-century male writers–Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, etc.–many of whom were never worth reading in the first place, let alone fifty or sixty years after their time. (Yeah, Foundation was influential once, but there’s no reason for a SF fan to read it now any more than a student of English literature needs to read The Castle of Otranto.) These are the only writers the list-makers have heard of, so they’re the only writers who appear in these lists, so they’re the only writers later list-makers have heard of. It’s a vicious cycle.

But canons aren’t fixed. Ask anyone to name the greatest American novel and chances are they’ll nominate Moby Dick. But Moby Dick flopped when it was new and didn’t find its audience until the 1920s. The SF canon, after 50 years of critical reappraisals, is going to look different, too. I wish I had a time machine so I could see how it looks.

"You can tell that Hannibal is fiction because Jonathan Jones has not been murdered and put on ostentatious display." - Dr Philip Sandifer


The first chapter of Red Dragon includes mention of the moon (of course), Sirius and Jupiter.  The second chapter mentions a meteor shower.  The first of two mentions of meteor showers in the book.  The second mention (of the Perseids, in the second case) is directly followed by a quotation from scripture.  The people of the novel Red Dragon are haunted by stars and planets, and by rituals and scripture.

Nothing in Red Dragon is more horrifying than the short digression on how tabloids work.  Yet this chapter is also evidence of the empathy of the book's narrator.  His empathy extends even to the unscrupulous reporter, Freddy Lounds.  His pride, his resistance to scorn, his refusal to be exploited.  Meanwhile, cancer, to the tabloids, is a fact of life, as are serial killers.  But the tabloid Freddy works for also deals in sightings of Elvis, and astronomers who glimpse God.

The narrator of Red Dragon is the empath.  Will Graham's empathic gift is more talked about than seen. It is Dr Bloom, not Graham, who interprets Francis Dolarhyde's eating of the Blake painting as an attempt to stop killing.  Graham noticeably fails to empathise with anybody throughout the book. He observes Crawford, Molly, Lounds, Reba, Dolarhyde, Lecter, Chilton, and all, as from the outside looking in. Crawford is more imaginative that Graham because he projects what he needs onto Graham.  Crawford is more like Dolarhyde than Graham is.

Even as it recites the standard line on 'sociopathy', Red Dragon contradicts it as much as it accepts it.  The 'sociopaths' in this book are not always lacking empathy.  Lecter certainly can, and Graham acknowledges it.  I have always thought that sadism requires empathy.  How can you enjoy the pain of others if you cannot imagine it?

In Red Dragon, Hannibal already has his maroon eyes which reflect the light in points of red, and his preternatural senses.  He gains his prodigious memory and his extra finger, like a Gallifreyan's second heart, later, in The Silence of the Lambs.

Speaking of which, Dolarhyde talking to Lounds sounds like a Robert Holmes villain.

Also, that scene is regurgitated in a bowdlerised form in The Dark Knight, in the scene in which the Joker kidnaps a Batman-copycat and tapes it.

In Hannibal Rising, the boy Hannibal emerges from privilege, from the Renaissance, from the Sforzas (a right bunch of bastards).  But he also emerges from the aftermath of Barbarossa.  His childhood tutor is a Jew who escaped the holocaust.  He is adopted by a woman from Hiroshima.  His early years are haunted by mention of the Nuremburg trials.  He is born of the 20th century's ultimate horrors.

Cannibalism is part of WWII-Gothic.  Most particularly Barbarossa-Gothic.  Thanks the Siege of Leningrad, and to Andrei Chikatilo's (possibly bogus) childhood reminiscences, it is linked to the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union (see also Child 44).  It is particularly appealing to the capitalist culture industries to depict the people of the Soviet Union preying upon each other "like monsters of the deep", for reasons which should be tediously obvious.  Famine is relevant in that it reveals the inherently predatory and competitive nature of humans, etc.  As if the best way to judge the inherent worth of people is by looking at the behaviour of minorities in extremis.  The capitalist culture industries are, as ever, very selective about which famines to mention.  The one caused by Nazis (the other bunch of totalitarian zealots) may be brought up.  The famine which followed the capitalist blockade of revolutionary Russia and the capitalist-backed Russian Civil War, is less often mentioned.

The TV show revelled in the related field of Eastern European-Gothic earlier this season.  Eastern Europe, as constructed by the Western-European imagination, is now Gothic several times over.  It carries all the old freighting of the pre-20th century Gothic (i.e. vampires, Dracula, werewolves, castles, etc) and also all the baggage of the mid-20th century (Barbarossa, the camps dotted across Poland), and finally all the baggage of the late-20th century (Communism, Ceaușescu, Bosnia, Milosevic, Srebrenica).

The TV version of the tiger scene from Red Dragon is the first to properly represent the event as an erotic projection of Dolarhyde's.  Dolarhyde is trying to communicate his own nature as a predator to Reba.  He takes her to touch the tiger after she tried to touch his face.  He wants to experience her touch vicariously.  The tiger is his stand-in.  Also, he wants to let her feel him, but also does not want to hurt her, because he enjoys her being alive.  In the book, his first response to her fingers near his face is to imagine how many of her fingers he could bite off without fully depriving her of her ability to get around. His empathy for her is slow growing and never grows very great.  Even at the end he is still using her.  This is not a romance.  The tiger is not a shared experience.  It is a symbol (a Blakean one, of course) which Dolarhyde consciously employs, like the painting, like the teeth, like the mirrors, etc.  Similarly, he integrates Reba into the fantasies he has projected (an interesting word, in context) onto the painting.  The TV version pulls off a masterstroke when it creates a dream/hallucination of Reba as the woman clothed with the sun.

Dolarhyde consumes The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (though Harris seems a little unsure which of Blake's series he is talking about). Dolarhyde goes for the original, to conquer and destroy its aura. He agrees with Benjamin about the original's historical embededness - though he, Dolarhyde, imagines this in terms of the sentience of the Dragon itself, a shard of his own demonic narcissism and inadequecy.  Dolarhyde agrees with Berger in that the value of the original has become the fact that it is the source of the copies and reproductions.  The copies and reproductions will, Dolarhyde hopes, be robbed of their power once the original is destroyed.  But he of course fails to understand that what he sees in the painting is put into it by him... or rather, he fails to percieve this fact consciously.  His decision to destroy it by eating it is perhaps an unconscious recognition of the subjective nature of the Dragon.  He tries to return it to the pit of his own guts.

Hannibal is caged in Red Dragon, and not voluntarily as on TV.  How to express his frustration?  And how, relatedly, to express the uncanny way in which his influence pervades the book precisely because he is closely confined inside one little part of the world/story?  Lecter's confinement is part of what gives him his uncanny power.  He is literally hidden, occulted.  He can seep into every part of the story precisely because seep is what he must do.

I’ve been trying to look at other political betting markets which might be affected if Corbyn does, as the YouGov numbers suggest, take the crown in the LAB leadership contest.

A key one over an election that might well be taking place in the next twelve months, is the referendum on whether the UK should remain within the EU.

Corbyn’s position is equivocal as seen in this recent report. It is not inconceivable that he could be on the leave side of the argument. Given his apparent popularity as seen in today’s union sponsored Survation poll then that might have an impact.

The polling has shown consistent leads for staying in but they haven’t been that large.

Mike Smithson

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Thursday

One of the tasks I have taken on in recent years is editing Wainwright’s West Country Marginals. A new edition is published after each general election, and with that in mind I recently dispatched an assistant to those parts to sniff out the lie of the land. Today I received his report:

At Bridgwater and Newton Abbot, Liberal clubs lie in ruins. Bright with buddleias and rosebay willowherb, they are the haunt of feral cats and truant children. Statues of Jo Grimond have been toppled in Redruth and Combe Martin. They threw stones at me in Chewton Mendip and Langton Herring.

I fear the new edition will need considerable revision. As to Wainwright’s Midland Second Places, I fear it will be a slim volume indeed this time.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Armed to the teeth with duck-handled umbrellas

The current Lady Bonkers

The choirboys' rifle practice

"Who told you that?"

From BBC News:

The US has reopened its embassy in Cuba more than 54 years after it was closed, in a symbolic step signalling the warming of ties between both countries. 

John Kerry, the first US Secretary of State to visit Cuba in 70 years, presided over the ceremony in Havana. 

The US flag was presented by the same US marines who brought it down in 1961.

It was good to see this rapprochement between the US and Cuba. The touch of asking the same marines who lowered flag made it oddly moving.

What we want to see now is more liberty in Cuba. If the US wanted to bring that about or bring down the Castro regime - the two things are not necessarily the same - they should have ended their blockade decades ago.

That blockade was probably the thing that did most to keep Castro in power. American capitalism would have proved far stronger if it had been given a free hand in Cuba.

Those with connections to the more enterprising candidates may already have noticed this, but the party in London has released the shortlist of candidates to be London Assembly members in 2016.  Liberator understands this was due to a delay after one excluded candidate was reinstated on appeal.

(Charlie's away and his blog has been taken over by invisible assassins.)

It's as regular as summer thunder. A very serious article or a very serious tweet or a very serious wonder-aloud in a convention bar.

"How come women don't write science fiction/fantasy/insert subgenre-not-romance here? Or why haven't they written it since, like, well, last week when I read one by a lady and I thought it was pretty good and I think, did it win an award or something? But there aren't any others and I don't get it." Sometimes with bonus, "Do I have to write it myself?"

I used to say I had a superpower. In person, online, you name it. I'm invisible. A very famous publisher once said, "She might as well write in invisible ink for all the notice she gets."

That Buffy episode with Invisible Girl? Yep. Except the part where (SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER) she's whisked away at the end to a secret training facility for spies and assassins.

Point being that not only was she not alone, she had a whole tribe to belong to, doing important and deadly things. And the visibles of the world would never see her coming.

It's that dratted second X chromosome. The X factor. Crosses you right out.

Women have a shelf life. When they're young and cute, they get attention--a fraction as much by the numbers as the boys, and often relegated to the short reviews or the niche commentators, but it happens. Then as they age, the boys become revered elders. The girls undergo a winnowing process that pulls out one or two as tokens of their gender, and those are the wise ones, the names always cited when listing women in genre. The rest are erased. And the very serious pundits inquire, "Why aren't there any women in genre?" Or, "Why didn't women write in genre before, like, last week?"

They did. We did. All the way back. We have always been here. We have always written science fiction.

This is what the Women in Science Fiction project is about. And the Women in Science Fiction Storybundle ((link explains the concept, and lists the books in the bundle). Along with many lists and shout-outs and twitterstorms.

It's not even conscious. Hear a woman's voice, see a woman's name, slide right on by. Just today I had a twitter conversation with a very nice man, very concerned that women writers weren't featured in a certain popular series on a certain eminent blog. He was trying to redress what he saw as unfairness.

And yet that series contains multiple entries by and about women writers. They're talked about, read, commented on. They get good numbers. My contribution has been going on for over a year now and is in its second set of books by one woman writer.

Invisible ink. Hear no women, see no women, take no notice when women speak.

And the older the women are? The more invisible, inaudible, unnoticed they are. Unless they're the tokens, of course. The "I included her, therefore I included all women" names that are on every list, because that makes it all right. Right?

Lucky for us publishing has changed so profoundly in this millennium, and works that used to be erased are now coming back--and with them, the authors who were dropped and silenced over the years. Lucky too that the culture has shifted and people of all genders are more aware of what's been happening, for the most part subliminally, to anyone not straight, white, male.

We were here all along. We never stopped being here. Now, finally, we're not letting ourselves be dumped off the shelf. Even by very serious people with very good intentions who just, you know, didn't notice. And think it's terribly unfair.

Spoilers.  Duh.

So that was Humans. Eight hours of carefully-arced, understated British narrative about robots: an AMC/Channel 4 coproduction that’s netted Channel 4 its biggest audiences in over two decades. What great casting. What fine acting. What nice production values. What a great little bit of subtext as William Hurt and his android, both well past their expiry dates, find meaning in their shared obsolescence.

What a pleasant 101-level introduction to AI for anyone who’s never thought about AI before, who’s unlikely to think about AI again, and who doesn’t like thinking very hard about much of anything.

*

Humans extrapolates not so much forwards as sideways. Its world is recognizably ours in every way but one. Cars, cell phones, forensic methodology: everything is utterly contemporary but for the presence of so-called “synths” in our midst. These synths, we’re told, have been around for at least fourteen years. So this is no future; this is an alternate present, a parallel timeline in which someone invented general-purpose, sapient AI way back in 2001. (I wonder if that was a deliberate nod to you-know-who.)

In this way Humans superficially feels much like that other British breakout, Black Mirror. It appears to follow the same formula, seducing the casual, non-geek viewer in the same way: by not making the world too different. By easing them into it. Let them think they’re on familiar ground, then subvert their expectations.

Except Humans doesn’t actually do that.

Start by positing a new social norm: neurolinked subcutaneous life-loggers the size of a rice grain, embedded behind everyone’s right ear. But don’t stop there. Explore the ramifications, ranging from domestic (characters replay good sex in their heads while participating in bad sex on their beds) to state (your recent memories are routinely seized and searched whenever you pass through a security checkpoint). That’s an episode of Black Mirror.

So how does this approach play out in Humans? What are the ramifications when you have AGIs in every home, available for a few grand at the local WalMart? This is what Humans is ostensibly all about, and it’s a question well worth exploring— but all the series ever does with it is trot out the old exploited-underclass trope. Nothing changes, except now we’ve got synths doing our gardening instead of Mexicans. We rail against robots taking our jobs instead of immigrants. That’s pretty much it.

I mean, at the very least, shouldn’t all the cars in this timeline be self-driving by now?

Once or twice Humans hesitantly turns the Othering Dial past what you might expect for a purely human underclass. Angry yahoos with tire irons gather in underground parkades to bash in the skulls of unresisting synths, and at one point William Hurt sends his faithful malfunctioning droid out into the woods for an indefinite game of hide-and-seek. But both those episodes were lifted directly from Spielbricks’s 2001 movie “A.I.” (as was William Hurt, now that I think of it). And given the recent cascade of compromising video footage filtering up from the US, I’m not at all convinced that bands of disgruntled white people wouldn’t have a mass immigrant bash-in, given half the chance. Or that law enforcement would do anything to stop them.

There is nothing artificial about these intelligences. The sapient ones (around whom the story revolves) are Just Like Us. They want to live, Just Like We Do. They want to be Free, Just Like Us. They rage against their sexual enslavement, Just Like We Would. And the nonsapient models? Never fear; by the end of the season, we’ve learned that with a bit of viral reprogramming, they too can be Just Like Us!

They are so much like us, in fact, that they effectively shut down any truly interesting questions you might want to ask about AI.

Let’s take sex, for example.

I’m pretty sure that even amongst those who subscribe to the concept of monogamous marriage, few would regard masturbation as an act of infidelity. Likewise, you might be embarrassed getting caught with your penis in a disembodied rubber vagina, but your partner would be pretty loony-tunes to accuse you of cheating on that account. Travel further along that spectrum— inflatable sex dolls, dolls that radiate body heat, dolls with little servos that pucker their lips and move their limbs— until you finally end up fucking a flesh-and-blood, womb-born, sapient fellow being. At which point pretty much everyone would agree that you were cheating (assuming you were in a supposedly monogamous relationship with someone else, of course).

A question I’d find interesting is, where does an android lie on that spectrum? Does the spectrum even apply to an android? By necessity, infidelity involves a betrayal of trust between beings (as opposed to a betrayal over something inanimate; if you keep shooting heroin after you’ve promised your partner you’ll stop, you’ve betrayed their trust but you’re not an infidel). Infidelity with a robot, then, implies that the robot is a being in its own right. Otherwise you’re just jerking off into a mannequin.

Let’s say your synth is a being. The very concept of exploitation hinges on the premise that the exploitee has needs and desires that are being oppressed in some way. I, the privileged invader, steal resources that should be yours. Through brute bullying force I impose my will upon you, and dismiss your own as inconsequential.

But what if your will, subordinate though it may be, is entirely in accord with mine?

I’m not just talking about giving rights to toasters— or at least, if I am, I’m willing to grant that said toasters might be sapient. But so what if they are? Suppose we build a self-aware machine that does have needs and desires— but those needs and desires conform exactly to the role we designed them for? Our sapient slavebot wants to work in the mines; our self-aware sexbot wants to be used. There are issues within issues here: whether a mechanical humanoid is complex enough to have interests of its own; if so, whether it’s even possible to “oppress” something whose greatest aspiration is to be oppressed. Is there some moral imperative that makes it an a priori offense to build sapient artefacts that lack the capacity to suffer and rage and rebel— and if so, how fucking stupid can moral imperatives be?

I’m nowhere near the first to raise such questions. (Who can forget Douglas Adam’s sapient cow from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, neurologically designed to want nothing more than to be eaten by hungry customers?) Which makes it all the more disappointing that Humans, ostensibly designed as an exploration platform for exactly these issues, is too damn gutless to engage with them. A hapless husband, in a fit of pique, activates the household synth’s “Adult Mode” and has a few minutes of self-loathing sex with it. The synth itself— which you’d think would have been programmed to at least act as though it’s getting off— sadly endures the experience, with all the long-suffering dignity of a Victorian wife performing her wifely duties under a caddish and insensitive husband.

When the real wife finds out what happens, predictably, she hits the roof— and while the husband makes a brief and half-hearted attempt to play the It’s just a machine! card, he obviously doesn’t believe it any more than we viewers are supposed to. In fact, he spends the rest of the season wringing his hands over the unforgivable awfulness of his sin.

Throughout the whole season, the only character who plays with the idea of combining sapience with servility is the mustache-twirling villain of the piece— and even he doesn’t go anywhere near the idea of sidestepping oppression by editing desire. Nah, he just imposes the same ham-fisted behavioral lock we saw back in Paul Verhoeven’s (far superior) Robocop, when Directive 4 kicked in.

*

Humans pretends to be genre subversive, thinks that by setting itself in a completely conventional setting it can lure in people who might be put off by T-800 endoskeletons and Lycra jumpsuits. It promises to play with Big Ideas, but without all those ostentatious FX— so by the time the casual viewer realizes they’ve been watching that ridiculous science fiction rubbish it won’t matter, because they’re already hooked.

It’s a great strategy, if you do it right. Look at Fortitude, for example: another British coproduction that begins for all the world like a police procedural, then seems to segue into some kind of ghost story before finally revealing itself as one of the niftiest little bits of cli-fi ever to grace a flatscreen. (The only reason I’m not devoting this whole post to Fortitude is because I wrote my latest Nowa Fantastyka column on the subject, and I must honor both my ethical and contractual noncompete constraints).

Humans does not do it right. For all the lack of special effects there’s little subtlety here; it pays lip service to Is it live or is it Memorex, but it doesn’t explore those issues so much as preach about them in a way that never dares challenge baseline preconceptions. With Fortitude you started off thinking you were in the mainstream, only to end up in SF. Humans does the reverse, launching with the promise of a thought-provoking journey into the ramifications of artificial intelligence; but it doesn’t take long for the green eyes to ‘ware thin and its true nature to emerge. In the end, Humans is just another shallow piece of social commentary, making the point— over eight glossy, well-acted episodes— that Slavery Is Wrong.

What a courageous stand to take, here in 2015. What truth, spoken to power.

What a wasted fucking opportunity.

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August 12th, 2015: There's a couple of ways to get the solanine out of a potato but to be honest it's probably easier just not to go around eating potatoes with solanine in them; this has been Ryan's How Not To Get Poisoned Advice Corner. – Ryan

I was amused this morning to see that Mark Steel, one of the most outspoken left-wing activists in the media has been banned from joining the Labour Party because he doesn't "support their values":

Well - an e-mail from Labour says my application has been rejected as I 'don't support their values'. Maybe I was meant to invade Iraq.

— Mark Steel (@mrmarksteel) August 12, 2015

Now in Mr Steel's case there seems to be some question mark over whether he is still a member of the SWP which could be another reason why he has not been allowed to join and vote in the current leadership contest. But it is worth looking a little bit more closely at the given reason for his rejection, the charge that he does not support their values. Because Labour currently doesn't really have any values.

I don't mean this glibly. I mean it literally.

Labour have just (badly) lost an election that they and many of the rest of us thought they would win, or at least they would form the next government in the aftermath of it. That hasn't happened and they seem to be going through some sort of collective nervous breakdown as a result.

It certainly wasn't clear what the party stood for in the previous parliament. Indeed that is one of the reasons they lost. They spent the first 3 or 4 years of it opposing every single cut the coalition government made and then in the last year or so suddenly tried to turn on a sixpence and claim they were the party of fiscal responsibility (whilst still opposing many of the cuts and claiming they were ideological). They also campaigned hard on the NHS claiming that the coalition was "privatising it" despite having themselves extended private provision whilst in office (at one point under Andy Burnham). There are various other examples of where they either said or did one thing in office and another when in early opposition and then yet another in the run-up to the election. No wonder people were confused.

I saw a journalist remark the other day that when they approached the Labour Party to ask what its values were in order to clarify they were directed to read "Clause 4" of the Labour Party constitution. Here it is as modifed in 1995 under Blair's early leadership:

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect

That's fair enough as far as it goes but it's difficult to pin down how this would relate to specific policy positions. For example (apart from the special case of the banks in 2008 when there was a huge crisis and any government would have had to act) how many nationalisations did Labour undertake whilst in office? Because reading that clause you might presume they'd have taken the opportunity to renationalise all sorts of stuff to fit in with their "value" of power, wealth and opportunity remaining in the hands of the many, not the few. Of course they barely nationalised anything and social mobility went into reverse between 1997 and 2010. Or how about their values of "tolerance and respect" and living "freely". I'm not sure how that could be reconciled with their attempts in office to push through 90 days detention without trial or their steadfast backing of the hopelessly illiberal and broken drugs laws to pick two of many egregious examples.

So it is far from clear how the Labour Party of the last 20 years and its actions in office could be reconciled with its own Clause 4 that the party machine directs people to read to check they are not to be an unperson.

But it's worse than that. Because Labour are in the middle of a leadership campaign. A leadership campaign that could very well hugely change the party's stance and approach to all sorts of things. Which would surely mean its values had changed?

As an example, imagine a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn and a Labour Party led by Liz Kendall. They would be so different from each other as to be almost unrecognisable as the same party, certainly after the leader had got their hands on the party levers and had had some time to reshape it in their own image. The idea that there is a specific set of values that irrespective of who wins the leadership the party will stick to come what may is laughable. Corbyn has already explicitly stated he'd like to change Clause 4 if he wins.

So it is a nonsense for Labour to cast people out for not sharing their values when they are at best highly flexible and more realistically something akin to Will-o'-the-wisp.

It is a dismal law of elections that you need to win in the centre ground. In the UK, it may well be the case that you can win a majority with nothing like 50% of the popular vote, but you can only do so by getting the votes of swing voters in marginal constituencies. No party can win a majority by simply appealing to their core base, and the single member plurality system we use for Westminster elections undermines any party which attempts to do so. In this respect, Jeremy Corbyn’s critics are absolutely correct; all things being equal, we can expect to see him leading the Labour Party into the political wilderness.

With that said, this isn’t the only law of election campaigning. The “centre ground” is constantly shifting, and not just along the right/left axis. Politicians can – and indeed do – shift the political centre ground. It’s a little thing we call “leadership”.

Despite this, the left has been obsessed with the centre and specifically triangulation (moving on your opponent’s ground in order to claim the centre ground) for two decades now. In fairness to Tony Blair, it got him some great results. But there’s a problem: it depends on your core supporter base having neither the option or the willingness to go somewhere else. If you can’t hang onto your supporter base then you aren’t triangulating; you’re simply shifting to the centre and risk losing more support than you gain.

This is something that Nick Clegg spectacularly failed to appreciate. His analysis was that the Lib Dems were taking a knock in the polls because of “protest voters” who never wanted power, and that he was better off without them. Weirdly, at a time when his base was abandoning him, he became extremely hostile to them. It was their fault for abandoning him, not his fault for abandoning them.

This is oddly similar to the reaction that most Labour establishment figures have had to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the apex of which has to be Tony Blair’s bizarre article published in the Guardian today. What I find interesting in all this is the asymmetry. If a (for want of a better word) “centrist” voter abandons Labour, then it is always deemed to be the party’s fault and an onus on the party to do better and reach out to them. If a “leftist” voter does the same (or in this case votes for the wrong candidate), it is because they are a protest voter, stupid or selfish (to quote Blair: “think about those we most care about and how to help them” – which apparently mean accepting that Labour has to go along with the wholesale cut in the welfare system and reducing employment rights).

What seems to have happened is that triangulation has become so internalised that it has reached a point where the centrist floating voter is now seen as all-wise. And yet we see on a daily basis evidence of the political centre being claimed by the right because they understand that changing minds is at least as important, possibly more so, as changing policy.

It is strange that at a time when the media institutions that used to hold such sway over public opinion are rapidly weakening, centre-left political parties are writing off their ability to influence opinion themselves. Basing your politics on chasing the centre ground is a form of magical thinking. It’s simply wrong to believe that Labour achieved its great victory because New Labour simply seized the centre ground.

There were numerous reasons why Labour won as comprehensively as it did in 1997. Yes, triangulation was a factor as it limited the number of areas which the Tories could attack them on. But the 1997 Labour government rode in on a pledge to introduce a national minimum wage, impose a windfall tax on privatised utility companies and rewrite a large part of the UK constitution. There’s this mistaken idea that Ed Miliband shifted the party to the left; if he had been half as radical as New Labour were in 1997, the media would have lost their minds.

The other two factors were the fact that the Conservatives had utterly disintegrated as a meaningful force and Tony Blair’s own charisma. As hard as it may be to imagine now, Blair at the time was enormously popular. He looked young, he smiled all the time, he seemed to have a sense of humour. The strange Gollum-like figure who occasionally pops up on TV these days claiming to be Tony Blair isn’t the man who lead Labour to victory.

More than anything else, finding a leader who is actually likeable is Labour’s problem. Ed Miliband may have been a bit weird, but that’s nothing compared to Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham or Liz Kendall. Jeremy Corbyn simply outshines them. If he came across as an inhuman technocratic android, he wouldn’t be getting anywhere.

I’m hardly the first person to point out that Corbyn is winning because he is managing to inspire people, but it is a message that Labour’s establishment seem to simply not understand, like it’s a concept that is totally alien to them. And in that respect, they don’t have any idea how Labour won in the 90s and 00s. Gone are the pragmatic idealists like Robin Cook who were willing to work within the system but still had something resembling a vision.

I don’t happen to think that Corbyn has what it takes to win a general election. In fact, if he wins the leadership contest, I’ll be very surprised if he last two years. This is for three reasons. The media will monster him, and while they may not be as powerful as they were, that pressure will be unrelenting. The left will abandon him the first time he makes a compromise in the interests of holding the party together. And fundamentally, I don’t think he has what it takes to be a leader; specifically, I don’t believe he is capable of eating shit on a daily basis and looking like he enjoys it. In this respect he reminds me of Menzies Campbell; someone who the media would fete on a regular basis as an expert, but who failed to appreciate that the sort of scrutiny he received would completely change once he became leader. It is striking that while he clearly loves protest and shoring up the political left, he has never sought to influence Labour on the inside, merely content to sit on the backbenches semi-detached.

But as much as I’d like to say Labour have a better option right now, I just don’t see it. Their best hope is to get this election out of the way as quickly as possible and find someone in good time before 2020 who is willing to work inside the party, capable of leading and actually has a personality. The policy stuff is ultimately a distraction. Sadly, I’m not optimistic that this would happen. My best guess is that we’ll see Tom Watson in charge by the next general election.

EDIT: Changed 4 instances of the word “weird”. Lazy writing. For the record, I love weirdos – it’s the ultra-normos who you can’t trust.

Trainwreck (2015)

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." - T.S. Eliot

It was around hour fourteen of the two-hour screening of Trainwreck that I noticed something peculiar. Amy Schumer's face doesn't really move. It's strange, really. She appears to have the same expression whether she's laughing, or weeping, or thinking, or having sex. One must assume that this is a deliberate choice.

The most dangerous moment in any comedian's career is that moment when, flush with the first intimation of success, they recognize that in order to further their career it may be necessary to make the leap into films. Some, such as those who find great success in television, wisely never feel the need to stake their careers on such a potentially fraught transition. Those who do feel this need, however, soon realize that the skills necessary to succeed on TV and the stage do not necessarily translate to the silver screen. You can build a TV show around a stand-up act. You can't necessarily do that with a movie.

There's nothing like seeing a two-hour vehicle for a television comedian on the big screen to convince you that not everyone is meant to be a movie star. What might seem amusing or even perceptive in twenty-minute chunks becomes grating and dull stretched out to cinematic proportions. This is particularly true if you are a stand-up with a distinct persona that allows little room for elaboration or digression. Richard Pryor, even given the fact that much of his movie career was flawed, was nonetheless a very versatile performer whose comedic talents enabled him to succeed in multiple kinds of roles.

Amy Schumer, you are no Richard Pryor.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde

It hasn't been a good couple months for Ms. Schumer. Although the premiere of the third season of Inside Amy Schumer was met with characteristic fanfare, a backlash was in the offing. Although she has been lauded for presenting a staunchly feminist voice at a time when such voices are rare in the mainstream entertainment industry, her meteoric rise also coincided with a number of corollary developments in the field of feminism, and leftist politics in general.

Much of the criticism amounts to an interrogation of privilege: if one accepts that Schumer's comedy is at least putatively feminist in nature, doesn't it seem questionable that many of her jokes seem predicated on racial or ethnic stereotypes? Is feminism an idea that belongs to upper-middle-class white women at the expense of, well, every other type of woman? The defense for much of her racial humor has often been that the jokes are supposed to be read as an indictment of her stage persona - that is, the clueless judgmental pseudo-bimbo whose words reveal more about her prejudices than about the supposed subject of her jokes. The problem with this construction is that even if you accept this rationale on face value, you must still acknowledge that she is able to get away with saying these jokes in the first place because of her privileged position as a pretty white woman being paid a lot of money to tell jokes about other, less privileged demographics. The supposed sincerity of her desire to lampoon herself or her own demographic does nothing to efface the fact that she can frame her self-criticism in such racialized language because of her position of relative privilege.

This isn't a merely academic issue. (Or rather, it is a very academic issue, at least for me.) In Spring of this year I taught an introductory class on feminism. It turned out really well, actually, despite my natural trepidation. The most depressing aspect was how few students in the class - women especially - had ever actually encountered feminist ideas or literature. The most encouraging aspect was the number of students who told me how much they learned from the class, how much they enjoyed it, and how much of it they'll take with them going forward. I change up the topic of my Composition classes every quarter - to keep myself interested as much as anything - and this is the first time I have ever had students tell me that they thought I should teach this same class again.

I tried to structure the class at least somewhat inclusively. We began with fairly standard feminist texts: Sylvia Plath's poetry and A Vindication of the Rights of Women, as well as the slightly leftfield Margaret Cavendish, and even Jane Austen. (Persuasion is really fascinating in an explicitly feminist context.) But in the last third of the class I tried to introduce the concept of intersectionality, to get away from the idea of feminism as the exclusive province of the white upper-middle-class. Se we read Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye for two examples of trying to read feminism outside of the context of, well, people other than white upper-middle-class heterosexual cisgender women.

One sour note, in hindsight at least, is the fact that - for a contemporary representation of feminist discourse - I played the class an episode of Inside Amy Schumer. To my discredit I presented the episode fairly uncritically, noting her critique of rape culture (and providing a definition of rape culture) and beauty standards. But what I didn't pay enough attention to at the time was something that sticks out like a giant red flag to me now: all the sketches exclusively featured white upper-middle-class women, except for the "Milk-Milk-Lemonade" video, which presents WOC as voiceless dancers shaking their asses. Again, it's not hard to see how this is "satire," but it's also not hard to see that this "satire" still places the WoC in the position of being passive objects in the discourse of white feminism. I didn't call this out at the time and I deeply regret it.

In any event, even though - in fairness - Schumer herself never actually asked to be considered a role model or feminist spokesperson, she has still found herself in the unenviable position of being one of the most prominent outspoken feminists in the entertainment industry. Despite what Charles Barkley might say, putting yourself out in the media has consequences, and being taken seriously is one of them.

"When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Trainwreck was directed by Judd Apatow. This is an important fact to remember, especially if - like me - you walk into a movie advertised as a comedy expecting to see a comedy.

In the years since his initial successes (The Forty-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up), Apatow has fallen into the grip of the delusion that he is a filmmaker of some gravity. His last three films - Funny People, This is Forty, and Trainwreck - while advertised as comedies, would more accurately be described as exercises in public encopresis. They are messy movies that, you suspect, are meant to be messy, which doesn't make the process of watching them any less unpleasant.

I admit I have a soft spot for Funny People, for a couple reasons. One, I'm a sucker for the "comedians are really sad" genre. The movie is built around Adam Sandler playing an Adam Sandler-esque comedian who recognizes that he hasn't been legitimately funny in a very long time, but keeps signing up for progressively more idiotic "family" movies because the paychecks are simply too big. It was an adept performance in a saggy movie, one that actually succeeds in tempering my disgust at Sandler's latter day output with the acknowledgement that, at least on some level, Sandler recognizes that he inhabits a hell of his own making. The movie is overlong, poorly edited, thematically scattershot and rarely funny, but it was at least interesting.

So, despite the fact that Trainwreck is ostensibly an Amy Schumer vehicle, it is primarily a Judd Apatow film, one which slots in nicely with all his other "growing up" movies. The plot, such as it is, is pure Apatow: Schumer plays a woman with a permanent case of arrested development, having taken her father's resentful attitudes towards the impracticality of monogamy to heart. The one mildly - well, not "interesting," but at least relatively novel - idea is that the movie presents an inversion of the conventional romantic comedy formula. Schumer is the irresponsible, irrepressible wild child who actually does seem to be enjoying her life before running into a dour, slightly stuffy but somehow (I'm not sure how?) charming Responsible Adult (Bill Hader, playing against type) who convinces her that settled domesticity is the hip scene.

Did I mention the movie is two hours long?

There are two conflicting drives here. On the one hand, the movie wants to be a showcase for Schumer's comedy. Politics notwithstanding, she is (or can be) a talented stand-up with an ear for timing and confident stage presence. None of that is on display here. But even if that's what the movie wants to be, what it actually is is a Judd Apatow dramedy about the need to grow up and the selfishness of maintaining youthful pursuits past the societally-sanctioned deadline for domestic settlement. The result is a movie where the comedic elements float atop a rather turgid family drama like a wad of tissue on the placid surface of a clogged toilet.

To Apatow's credit, he's able to fill the movie with a number of talented actors and comedians who do their best to overcome his shortcomings as a director, and Schumer's shortcomings as a leading lady. It would be fair to say that Schumer has no screen presence whatsoever. This is a problem considering that she is onscreen and the center of focus for almost every scene. Surrounding her with supporting players like Vanessa Beyer, Brie Larson, and Tilda Swinton - motherfucking Tilda Swinton! - hammers home at every turn the fact that every other woman in the film would make a more interesting, appealing, and convincing lead than Schumer herself. Whatever may make her an appealing presence on stage or TV just disappears - vanishes in a wisp of smoke - the moment she steps onscreen.

Apatow's attitude towards directing is, at least in theory, generous to his actors. He is fond of setting up a camera and letting his actors go, unhurriedly, without a lot of quick cuts or distracting camera angles. In practice, this is a terrible way to film a comedy. The actors don't seem to have been given any kind of direction in terms of tempo, leaving many instances with two or more actors left to interact for extended periods of time without any perceptible acknowledgment of the passing of time. The laconic pace comes close in places to replicating a conversational feel, a creative decision which represents a tonal misjudgment of cyclopean proportions. Comedy, like horror, is all about pacing. Colin Quinn is someone who I usually enjoy seeing. But in this movie, he flops around like a fish onscreen, telling jokes without punchlines, comedic monologues without any laugh lines. He just . . . goes on, talking in a vaguely comedic way until the camera pans over to a delayed reaction shot from Schumer. It's depressing, which is fitting considering that Quinn's character is slowly dying of MS and finally kills himself with an overdose of smuggled pain medication. Which undercuts the humor considerably, but does provide a necessary beat in Schumer's character's growing-up narrative.

Some characters, like Beyer and Swinton, seem to think they're in a broad satire. Larson and Hader play the material completely straight. Method Man - motherfucking Method Man! - shows up with all of three lines, saddled with an over-the-top Caribbean accent for no discernable reason, but his interaction with Meyer at Colin Quinn's funeral kills. Barely three lines, but his joke at the funeral kills.

And while we're on the subject, Schumer's funeral oration for Quinn's character focuses on the fact that her father was an un-PC asshole who offended everyone he met, but was nevertheless remarkably funny and universally appealing, even to the black nurse who cared for him at the end of his life and whom he insulted on a daily basis (this is Method Man, incidentally). All of which is to say: it's OK for white people to be terribly racist and offensive if their hearts are in the right place. God bless them for telling it like it is. The world needs more of these blessed, brave souls.

One of the frustrating problems with Apatow's script and direction is that he's at least trying to do something interesting. For all the side characters and stereotypes that pass unremarked through most romantic comedies, he's trying to give them something in his movie, some kind of background or motivation or set-piece, all with the hopes of adding verisimilitude, some idea that this movie isn't taking place on an empty sound stage. You do walk away with a good feel - or at least familiarity - for many of the supporting characters in this movie, but this comes at the price of any coherence or forward momentum the movie may ever have had. By all means, give Dave Attell's witty homeless guy more lines. It won't hurt the movie at all to check in with him every half our or so to get his Hot Take on the action.

The most rounded and appealing characters in the movie are the stunt-cast athletes, John Cena, and especially LeBron James. Motherfucking LeBron James! He's not an experienced actor and his line readings are a bit stiff, but damn, he looks like he's a least having a good time! He's can tell a joke, and has good chemistry with Hader. He pokes fun at himself like a pro. Based solely on the evidence here, I can say with confidence that if James wanted a side career in the movies, he could do worse than emulating Jim Brown or Carl Weathers. He's got more screen presence than Amy Schumer by many orders of magnitude. If seeing Trainwreck has had one positive effect on my life, it has made me optimistic about the prospects of Space Jam 2.

(It does leave open the question, however, of just why LeBron James spends so much time hanging out in New York with Bill Hader, including apparently having free reign of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks' training facilities. And John Cena, while funny in his small part, is nonetheless saddled with a series of homophobic jokes that strongly imply that, because he actually cares about his relationship with his girlfriend and is not actively trying to sleep with other women, he must be gay.)

But everything else just brings us back to the gaping void at the center of this movie, one of the worst actresses who has ever been lucky enough to star in her own star vehicle, Amy Schumer. If this had been a different movie she might not have come out looking so badly. If this were actually, you know, a comedy, then maybe building a movie around Schumer's stand-up routine (as this one tries to do, complete with a recurring voiceover) wouldn't have been such a bad idea. As it is, the movie is left in the strange position of presenting a funny (or "funny") character in a series of progressively less funny circumstances.

Adam Sandler's career offers a refreshing contrast: instead of going for the gold with a heavy dramedy first time out of the gate, his first film was Billy Madison. That was a complete farce that summed up everything funny about Sandler's act up to that point in a neat 90-minute package that, wouldn't you know, has held up remarkably well. (Admit it, you still stop and laugh when you come across it on cable.) It was also, unfortunately, Sandler's peak, as every subsequent comedy would become an increasingly faded and increasingly more shrill photocopy of Billy Madison, and almost every decent attempt to stretch his acting chops would be undercut by terrible scripts (Spanglish, Funny People). (The exception being, of course, Punch Drunk Love, wherein Paul Thomas Anderson lit upon the brilliant idea of having Sandler play his trademark man-child comedy character in a realistic milieu, to tragicomic results. Who knows if Adam Sandler can actually act? Not me. But it really doesn't matter, because he's already insanely wealthy.) Schumer's attempts at acting are, frankly, embarrassing. There are a couple moments - as in, more than one - where we have to see a close up of her sphinx-link, never changing face crying. A single tear runs down her cheek, and her voice catches. You can almost hear, just offscreen, her acting coach mouth the words, "great job, Amy! You nailed it!"

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - Abraham Lincoln

Schumer seems likely to follow in Sandler's lucrative footsteps. While not a blockbuster, Trainwreck has nonetheless proven quite successful. More Schumer vehicles are sure to follow. In a market woefully starved for female-driven comedies, she is sure to find great success.

Would it be too much to observe that Trainwreck is, like its namesake, a catastrophic accident leaving countless fatalities in its wake? This is Nick Cassavetes directing a John Cassavetes script - or is it the other way around? This is an attempt to make a serious movie about grown-up feelings, not so carefully constructed over the shaky foundations of a bawdy star vehicle.

This is a movie in which the most interesting performance is LeBron James. It ends with a musical dance number wherein Schumer performs with the Knicks City Dancers. Schumer's character, having been fired as a staff writer at a Maxim knock-off for attempted statutory rape and assault of the magazine's sixteen-year-old intern, is able to walk across town to a new job at Vanity Fair, which is happy to publish her hagiographical account of Bill Hader's career as superstar orthopedic surgeon to the stars. Matthew Broderick and Marv Albert show up, as themselves, in the last reel, just because. The best part of the movie - legitimately, no-caveats funny - is a movie-within-a-movie that recurs throughout the film, The Dogwalker, a black & white drama starring Daniel Radcliffe and Marisa Tomei. Radcliffe plays the titular dogwalker, brought back to life and love by Tomei. Why is this a thing?

In the end we're left with the question, why did I do this? Why did I willingly subject myself to this movie? Simple, really: Tuesdays are $5 days at the local multiplex.

I'll watch anything for $5.

Wednesday

Do you know Alex Carlile? He was at one time Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire before being replaced by Lembit Opik – the general view in Welshpool and Caersws was that the latter brought some much needed gravitas to the role.

Yet Carlile’s career has prospered in recent years and I meet him this morning while strolling by the Thames at Westminster.

"I hear you’ve been asked to serve on the committee that is going to review freedom of information legislation," I say brightly.

He looks at me suspiciously: "Who told you that?"

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

Armed to the teeth with duck-handled umbrellas

The current Lady Bonkers

The choirboys' rifle practice

The Labour party leadership election has left the Blairites looking isolated.  Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters have described them as viruses and cancers, and have suggested that they look for the exit.  Every Blairite from Tony Blair and Liz Kendall downwards has disavowed the idea of leaving the Labour party, but vows are spoken to be broken, and given the bitterness and the ideological divide they might in due course consider their options.

Before doing so, they should look at historical precedents.  In the last 150 years, the centre left has split on five occasions.  Past experience is no guide to the future, but as we shall see, there are some consistent themes.  Here are those five instances:

The Adullamites (1866-67)

Cause

The Adullamites are almost forgotten nowadays, but for a year their actions convulsed British politics.  By 1865, the Liberals had been in almost unbroken power for a generation.  Following the death of Lord Palmerston (who had been strongly opposed), the new Liberal leadership decided to tackle the subject of electoral reform.  More traditional Liberals, under the leadership of Robert Lowe, resisted this strongly and the group in opposition that they formed was known as the Adullamites (after an obscure Biblical reference).  They worked with the Conservatives to defeat Gladstone’s proposed Reform Bill, leading to the collapse of the Liberal government.

Disraeli became the guiding spirit behind a minority Conservative government that then proposed a Reform Bill that was far more radical than the one that Gladstone had put forward.  The Adullamites had been abandoned by their previous partners in opposition.

Consequence

Following the passage of the 1867 Reform Act, the Adullamites rejoined the Liberal fold.  No lasting harm seems to have been done to the Liberal party, who were re-elected in 1868 on the new franchise with an increased majority.

Fate of prominent dissidents

Despite being outmanoeuvred, Robert Lowe did not suffer for his disloyalty.  On the resumption of a Liberal government at the end of 1868, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Liberal Unionists (1886-1912)

Cause

Like the Adullamites, the Liberal Unionists broke from the Liberal party initially on a point of principle: on this occasion, Home Rule for the Irish. Following Gladstone’s defeat over Home Rule in 1886 and the subsequent general election, the Liberal Unionists (who numbered 77 MPs) propped up a minority Conservative government.

Consequence

The Liberal party moved from being a natural party of government to being relative outsiders overnight.  In the 54 years from the Great Reform Act to 1886 the Whigs and Liberals had been in power for nearly 40 years.  In the next 20 years they would be in power for only three years.

Many on both sides thought at first that there would be a reconciliation at some point, as there had been with the Adullamites.  Reconciliation discussions with the Liberals broke down again over Home Rule for Ireland and as a result most Liberal Unionists moved closer to the Conservatives.  By 1895 they were ready to join the Conservatives in government.  By this stage the two were already seen as part of a wider movement of unionists and boundaries were already breaking down.  The government split over the question of free trade in the early years of the twentieth century, with Joseph Chamberlain (one of the leading Liberal Unionists) fiercely advocating a protectionist policy.

In the wake of the crushing Liberal victory of 1906, the Liberal Unionists were reduced to 25 MPs.  In 1912 the Liberal Unionists formally merged with the Conservative party.

Fate of prominent dissidents

The Liberal Unionists included many political stars who prospered in their new home.  George Goschen became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative minority government in 1887.  In the 1895 government, five Liberal Unionists featured in the Cabinet.  Joseph Chamberlain, who led the Liberal Unionists, might well have led the unionists in the wake of the 1906 defeat had he not suffered a stroke at the critical moment.

Alumni

Through the Chamberlain family, the Liberal Unionists exerted a powerful influence over Conservative party politics in its afterlife.  Both Austen and Neville Chamberlain rose to become that party’s leader.

Neither Neville nor Austen Chamberlain actually stood for Parliament as a Conservative candidate because their local political association in Birmingham preferred to call themselves Unionist rather than Conservative during this time.  Neither actually fought a general election as leader, a dubious distinction which they share only with Iain Duncan Smith.

Lloyd George National Liberals (1916-1922)

Cause

Of all the splits on the centre left, this was the most personalised.  Following the fiasco at Gallipoli in 1915, Asquith had brought the Conservatives and parts of the Labour party into a coalition government.  But over the next 18 months, senior figures across all parties grew concerned at Asquith’s handling of the war and Lloyd George sought (with newspaper support) to get responsibility for the conduct of the war into his own hands.  Asquith refused to meet his terms and was confronted with the withdrawal of support both of Lloyd George and of the Conservatives.  He resigned, to be replaced by Lloyd George.  The bulk of the Liberal party remained loyal to Asquith but sufficient numbers stayed with Lloyd George to enable him to form a coalition government with the Conservatives and, initially, parts of the Labour party.

Consequence

The beginning of the end of the Liberal party as a significant force in politics for three generations.  Lloyd George was the last Liberal Prime Minister.  By the 1923 general election the two wings of the Liberal party had reunited under Asquith but could manage only 158 seats and third place behind both the Conservatives and Labour.  Its decline from that point was rapid as its vote polarised in subsequent elections between those two parties.

Fate of prominent dissidents

Lloyd George got to be Prime Minister and retained that position after 1918, even when the Conservatives far outnumbered his own party.  While his Cabinet was Conservative-dominated, many prominent Liberals including Sir Winston Churchill also held office during his tenure in office (Sir Winston managed to effect a mini-schism of his own in 1924, standing under the Constitutionalist banner in the general election of that year before re-ratting to the Conservatives).

Liberal Nationals / National Liberals (1931-1968)

Cause

The relative importance of the policy of free trade and of forming a national government.  The leadership of the Liberal party were opposed to any weakening of a commitment to free trade and made their support for the national government conditional on that being retained.  Those Liberals who saw the necessity of free trade as secondary to the formation of a national government broke away to form the Liberal Nationals (those few Liberals, led by Lloyd George, who opposed the national government, also broke away to form the independent Liberals).

Consequence

The Liberal party’s destruction was more or less complete.  The official Liberal party was reduced to 33 seats in 1931 and to 21 seats in 1935.  The Liberal party organisational structure was also wrecked by the different factions all claiming to be Liberals.

The Liberal National party continued in separate existence, migrating slowly from a Liberal orbit into a Conservative orbit over the next fifteen years.  In 1947 the Liberal National party merged with the Conservative party at a constituency level but retained its separate identity at a national level, changing its name to the National Liberal party.

Fate of prominent dissidents

The Liberal Nationals initially prospered in government.  In Ramsay Macdonald’s second national government they had three Cabinet ministers including the Foreign Secretary, rising to four Cabinet ministers in Stanley Baldwin’s government and five in Neville Chamberlain’s government.  They only waned in significance once Sir Winston Churchill took over in 1940 and Labour joined the government.

Following the merger with the Conservatives, three National Liberals sat in the Cabinet in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The National Liberal party was folded into the Conservatives completely in 1968.  The final leader of the National Liberals was Sir John Major’s predecessor as MP for Huntingdon.

Alumni

Lord Heseltine stood as a National Liberal in 1959 (though was not elected under that banner).  Sir John Nott, Defence Secretary during the Falklands war, began his Parliamentary career as a National Liberal. They remain living links to what otherwise seems like a distant historical period.

The SDP (1981-88/2015)

Cause

The SDP was born out of factional infighting within the Labour party.  Taken for granted by the centre of the Labour party in its battles against the left, 28 Labour MPs left the party in 1981 to found the SDP under the leadership of the “Gang of Four”, seeking to find a middle way between Thatcherism and the leftward direction that the Labour party was then taking.  Aside from the Gang of Four, few were well-known and many were at risk of deselection.  The SDP also attracted some support from wet Conservatives, including one MP.

It formed an alliance with the Liberal party and initially recorded enormous popularity in polls, backed up by spectacular by-election results.  The wind was taken out of the Alliance’s sails by the Falklands war, however, which gave a boost to the popularity of the Conservatives largely at their expense.

Consequence

While the Alliance ultimately took 26% in the 1983 election, it took only 23 MPs, of which only six were SDP MPs.  The Conservatives were elected in a landslide.  Labour were kept out of power until 1997, but the Alliance was unable to profit by this.  The two parties of the Alliance eventually merged in 1988 to form what became the Liberal Democrats (with some dissenting SDP members under the leadership of David Owen then founding a successor independent party).

The Liberal Democrats, after a shaky start, gained a secure Parliamentary foothold, building on local successes in successive elections until finally joining the Conservative party as the junior partner in a coalition government in 2010.  That experience, however, resulted in the party being nearly wiped out in the 2015 election.  They look unlikely to be significant political players again any time soon.

Fate of prominent dissidents

In sharp contrast to all the other splits, none of the initial senior founders of the SDP ever achieved high office again.   From a personal viewpoint, the decision to leave the Labour party was a disaster.

Alumni

Power and pelf proved hard to come by for the SDPers.  By seeking and failing to break the mould, they found the route to power much harder.  Vince Cable and Chris Huhne eventually became Cabinet ministers under the Liberal Democrat banner.  More SDP supporters, however, attained that rank as Conservatives: Greg Clark, Chris Grayling, Andrew Lansley and David Mundell managed that feat, and Anna Soubry, while not in the Cabinet, attends its meetings.

Conclusions

None of the splits resulted in the mould of politics being broken (with the unintended exception of the coup by the Lloyd George Liberals, which resulted in the Liberal party being displaced as one of the two main political parties).  So if the aim of any breakaway is to build up a new political party, forget the idea.

You can argue about cause and effect, but on each occasion a split took place, progressive politics suffered at least temporarily and more usually it ushered in a lengthy period in which the Conservatives did substantially better than they had done in the preceding period.  So anyone participating in a breakaway has to be prepared for the Conservatives to benefit in the short term.

Rather surprisingly, this damage is visible only at a macro level.  Many individual politicians who broke away achieved major rank either immediately or shortly afterwards.  Two dissidents became Prime Minister.  Many more achieved Cabinet rank.  All of these, however, did so by reaching an accommodation with one of the existing major parties – usually the Conservatives.  The one occasion on which the centre left breakaway party sought to go it alone was a failure.

So if the Blairites do decide that life in the Labour party is unendurable but they wish to see their political careers prosper, they need to be prepared to reach an accommodation with the Conservatives sooner rather than later.  By retaining a separate identity but operating a non-aggression pact, much as the Liberal Unionists did, they may be able to influence government policy far more than either standing aloof or by remaining in the Labour party.

Such an outcome would probably be bad for leftwing politics but probably personally good for the Blairites.  Are they sufficiently ruthless?  I guess we’re going to find out.

Antifrank

According to Peter Kelner, Labour seems determined to follow the death road and elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Well, as we know polls may not be as reliable as they seem, so we will need to wait until the final agony is ground out. However if this deluded and dangerous man IS elected leader of the Labour Party, what then?

Well, for a start it may well be that Norman Baker's gloomy view of the UK as a one-party state is actually fulfilled. Certainly an electorate that was pretty reluctant to endorse Ed Miliband is unlikely to give more support to a party led by a leader from the pro-Russian far left.

To my mind it seems pretty clear that a new form of politics is still needed in the UK. Indeed without it there will not be a UK for very much longer. Across the political spectrum, from left to right, there is recognition that a new constitutional settlement is needed. This needs to create a looser and more federal structure for the nations and regions of the UK and also open up the mechanism of government through an elected House of Lords and a voting system that accurately gives the Parliament that we vote for. 

In a sense the election of Corbyn, by systematically destroying the Labour brand could create the conditions where groups of the left and centre can realign. In the short term this must be a realignment focused of a new constitutional convention for Britain, in the long term I would also hope for a new Radical force that can successfully challenge the complacent and privileged Conservatives, not merely by uniting the opposition, but by attracting those who defected away from the Liberal Democrats back to the Radical, Liberal fold.

Just before his death, Alastair Campbell says that Charles Kennedy called him suggesting a new party of the Radical Centre-Left. To my mind there is such an opportunity- and the creation of, for example, a Scottish Reform Party might be a way forward: offering the Scottish people a progressive, Federalist alternative to the Nationalist statism of the SNP.

After the experience of the SDP and then the SDP-Liberal Alliance and then the Social and Liberal Democrats many in the Liberal Democrat camp are wary of the prospect of co-operation, and even more so after the bruising experience of coalition government. However, it seems to me that the Liberal Democrats must start to offer radical political change if we are to make any headway at all. A "bloc for constitutional change" would have only a limited mandate after its election: to sit as a constituent assembly to pass an agreed platform of constitutional measures and then dissolve for elections under the new system. 

Yes this would mean a single bloc candidate in each constituency in order to win under the current system, but with the prospect of immediate elections under a proportional system within a year of the first, then perhaps this may not be an insurmountable obstacle. 

To me the debate in the Liberal Democrats as to the balance between Social and Economic Liberalism is so much hot air if we lack any means of executing any of our ideas. I believe that arid debates about Trident are simply self-indulgent: it is not even rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, it is more the band playing Abide with Me to keep our spirits up as the icy water flows around us.

I still believe that the Conservatives are merely the least disliked political party. As Tony Greaves writes in Liberator this issue, the Radicals must rediscover their campaigning mojo, if it is not to be another 50 years before we see Liberal voices back in government. However I believe there is now really only one campaign to fight: The battle for democratic change in our country. The election of Corbyn might be a catalyst that starts the Radical realignment. 

Tuesday

Mind you, Farron can be Rather Hard Work. This morning, when I pass by St Asquith’s to make sure that no more gargoyles have fallen, he stops me to ask why I insist the choirboys have rifle practice every week.

What a question! He wouldn’t be asking it if a snap by-election were called. I cast a soulful look towards the country west of Marston Trussell, where the Revd Hughes is probably even now simmering gently, surrounded by onions and bouquet garni.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Armed to the teeth with duck-handled umbrellas
• The current Lady Bonkers