Foreign funding of Facebook ads

You might have seen something about Russian organisations paying for advertising on Facebook in relation to the US elections last year. Hugo Rifkind, for one, thinks that this kind of thing is worrying.

Other than thinking that paying for political advertising is rather less worrying than various other ways countries have gone about trying to obtain their foreign policy objectives (wars, exploding cigars, etc), I am not sure what I think about it.

But I am sure that some people who are thinking about it are getting it completely wrong. I was struck by the reference to the Irish abortion referendum. Here is more from Gavin Sheridan:

Hmm. Is the real worry here that your mother and father - what are talking about? 50, 60, 70- somethings? - will be swayed by "anti-choice" ads on Facebook paid for by Russia? I don't think so. Russia had the highest number of abortions per woman of child-bearing age in the world in 2010, according to the UN. Meanwhile, George Soros is known to be funding pro-choice (let's be civil about this - the two sides go by 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life') campaigns in Ireland.

I am pretty sure that Facebook ads during the Irish abortion referendum are going to be (a) aimed at younger demographics than "your parents" (i.e. at the people who are actually influenced by what they see on Facebook), (b) pro-choice and (c) often funded by foreigners (i.e. non-Irish people) pursuing their own agendas.

If you are on Facebook and come across a well-made, heart-string-tugging viral video about (say) a teenage girl in difficult circumstances, you may be on the receiving end of foreign propaganda. How you feel about that fact should not depend on how you feel about the message in the video.

The liberal case for Brexit

You are a liberal.

Here is what you see when you look are some recent European parliamentary election results. This is the percentage of the vote won by the major party in that country that you would call "populist" (or perhaps something even ruder).

Germany (September 2017)                AfD: 13% – 3^rd place

France (June 2017)                              FN: 13% (first round) (and 21% in first round of presidential election) – 2^nd place

Netherlands (March 2017)                  PVV: 13% –2^nd place

Denmark (June 2015)                          Danish People's Party: 21% – 2^nd place

United Kingdom (May 2015)             UKIP: 13% – 3^rd place

Finland (April 2015)                           Finns Party: 18% – 2^nd place

Sweden (September 2014)                  Sweden Democrats: 13% – 3^rd place

Here we have the big rich successful countries of northern Europe displaying pretty similar voting patterns. There are differences between the countries, but let’s forget about them for the moment. (But perhaps note how those dour, respectable, liberal Scandinavians are even keener on the populists that those living further south: the Sweden Democrats are up at 20%+ in polls for their 2018 election.) Equally, I am not going to go into a discussion of the differences between these parties: you treat all these parties as well beyond the pale. (Although in fairness to UKIP, please note that there are many important differences.)

So these results worry you. If you are of the nervy, melodramatic type over-represented in the news media, you might even see echoes of the 1930s. If you are just keen on virtue-signalling your disapproval of the deplorables who vote for these parties then that’s fine. But you are the sort of person who wants to make things better. What is to be done?

Then you see this result:

United Kingdom (June 2017)     UKIP: 2% – 5^th place

Perhaps, you might think to yourself, the UK has done something to lance the boil of this horrible right-wing populism. Well, it has. It had a referendum on Brexit, voted for Brexit, and that destroyed the leadership, hopes, credibility and support of UKIP. And it turns out that there is no constituency for any other sort of populism.

Here’s a modest suggestion for you. Life is about trade-offs. You can’t have it all. At least entertain the possibility that Brexit (or Nexit, or Frexit, or ...) is the price you have to pay, in a rich northern European country, for having a political system 98% occupied by mainstream political parties – for dispelling the shades of the 1930s. Isn't that what the evidence shows you? Maybe you should just grin and bear it: some things are more important than the joys of the customs union and the jurisprudence of the CJEU.

(Or have I made the liberal case for allowing populism? Perhaps the price you are prepared to pay for having the EU is to be constantly goading increasingly large numbers of your compatriots into supporting fringe parties run by, at best, weirdos. Please say it ain’t so.) 

British vs US universities

In the US:

"At Harvard ... three biochemistry graduate students I knew and trusted all had an identical story. In the introductory course they taught, undergraduates weren’t required to show up at a single lecture or section; they could score in the teens on the final and still pass. The professor’s basis for leniency, they said, was that “they pay too much tuition for us to fail them.”"

And:

"Once an unhappy student emailed me after a mediocre performance and said, after receiving a B-, “I always get A’s. This is the lowest grade I’ve ever gotten. What’s your problem?”"

Meanwhile in the UK:

"A huge adjustment was also just getting accustomed to how classes in the UK were structured in general. When I read that my entire grade for my courses depended on the final, I was terrified. I'm so used to the American system, where there's plenty of homework and participation points – literally you get points just for showing up – to cushion your grade. Needless to say, I actually had to work my ass off and study like hell for all of my finals."

But I was most pleased with this one of the many, largely positive, comments from overseas students at British universities:

"What shocked me most about being in a British uni is just how much people love walking. It's not the walking itself that was particularly shocking, but the fact that even on nights out, when the club is 30 minutes away and it's the dead middle of winter, most people would rather trek up the hills of Bristol rather than get a cab back quickly and safely. In Jakarta people get cabs everywhere, and my friends who go to uni in the US tell me that Uber is their first, not last, option of transport on a night out. And I would understand if it's a price thing, but between a few friends in one cab it usually ends up being the same cost as an extra pint – and British people seem to have absolutely no qualms about spending a fortune on alcohol."

It's all about priorities, isn't it?

Three entertaining or interesting links

1. This is a great story. The headline is "The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1", but there is even more to it than that.

2. Sorority entry consultants. Crazy, and also a little bit sad. "Grant often starts workshops asking the crowd who’s spoken to their best friend today. “Nine out of ten girls will raise their hands,” she says. “Then I ask who’s spoken to them in person.” Crickets. As a result, says Grant, conversational nuances are getting lost. “Families don’t eat dinner at the same time,” she says. “The social niceties you need to have mastered are gone. ..." Brooke Howard, a consultant at the Midwest-based Go Greek Girl, says she spends hours helping girls learn how to have conversations they just don’t know how to have anymore." I earlier linked to a story about how you can pay vast sums of money to be taught how to talk to your children; it seems you pay slightly smaller sums of money to be taught how to talk to your friends. That, and how to get into one of these houses.

3. Somewhat longer, here is John Lanchester arguing Against Civilisation. "Jared Diamond called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake in human history.” The startling thing about this claim is that, among historians of the era, it isn’t very controversial." It seems that modern scholarship tells us that there was once a time when humans lived happy and egalitarian lives in a world of abundance, but we made a horrible mistake - which seems to be bound up with acquiring knowledge (in the form of writing) - and ever since then we have been condemned to hard labour. The story sounds familiar, but doesn't a snake come into it somewhere?

Mary Poppins - the only analysis you will ever need

Mary Poppins (1964) is a film in which the happy ending includes a man killing his boss and thereby securing promotion to the board of directors of an international bank. It is not your typical children’s film. 

I have set out below - at some length, I should warn you - the crystallised form of various thoughts I have had about this, my favourite film.

"He was again accompanied to court by his official clerical dog The Venerable Mr Piddles"

That's from a story about a fraudulent cleric here.

Also: "The court heard he has no connection to the Church of England and regularly travels to Moldova." (The owner, not the dog.) I feel that "regularly travels to Moldova" is a euphemism for something, but I have no idea what.

A follow-up on men, women and equality

I said something here (and a little here) about women being better educated than men. Here's some further thoughts, based on data from Canada.

The conclusion: "Put (too) simply the only men who are good enough to get into university are men who are good at STEM. Women are good enough to get into non-STEM and STEM fields. Thus, among university students, women dominate in the non-STEM fields and men survive in the STEM fields. [...] I don’t know whether this story will hold up but one attractive feature, as a theory, is that it is consistent with the worrying exit from the labor market of men at the bottom."

Going back to what I said earlier, I'm not certain that "good enough" is the right way of looking at this: it might be that universities favour female traits over male ones, or that men are more likely to decide that university is not for them, or something else. But it's worth being reminded that the problem (if there is a problem) is not that STEM is favouring men, but that men are falling behind everywhere else.

British society really has changed from the 1950s (or wherever it is that reformers seem to get their stereotypes from). Men and boys are well behind in the educational races; the white British are the worst performing students (allowing for income); Christian churches are not oppressive structures in society but rather tiny groups struggling to deal with their irrelevancy. Social reformers seem to be very keen to fight the last war when they should be preparing for the current one, not least because I'm pretty sure that it would be far better if the cause of less well-off white, Christian-heritage males is not left to be defended purely by the likes of some home-grown Donald Trump equivalent.

Parents Who Pay to Be Watched

"The family architects were the foot soldiers in the Cognition Builders team, but the most critical part of the company’s strategy involved the installation of a series of Nest Cams with microphones all around the house, which enabled round-the-clock observation and interaction in real time. At the end of each day, the architects would send the parents extensive emails and texts summarizing what they’d seen, which they’d use to develop a system of rules for the family to implement at home. Over time, the role of the family architects would evolve from observing to enforcing the rules. Through this kind of intensive scrutiny and constant behavioral intervention, they claimed to be able to change a family’s, and a child’s functioning from the ground up."

It's all here.

This is a sad story in many ways. Leaving aside the fact that people are paying vast sums of money to create a mixture of Big Brother and the Truman Show in their own homes (I hope that data is very secure), how about this:

"I asked him if it was hard coming back to America, and how things were different.

“There, I could always take a walk to my friends’ houses. Here we have to drive. The only really social time is at school or on my phone or video games or Xbox. That’s where I talk to my friends the most. Back there, I could see them every day, but here I can’t.”

I asked him what he thought the best thing about being a kid was, and the worst.

“I think the best thing is being able to talk to my friends and my family. And the worst thing is definitely having a lot of homework. I’m taking a lot of honors classes. And then I have therapy once a week, drums once a week, tutoring twice a week, and an executive-functioning tutor once a week.”"

Poor boy. 

Magic

This is an interesting post about what we mean by "magic", suggesting that JK Rowling's success is driven by her unerring instinct in using the concept correctly in the world of Harry Potter.

Rao's basic thesis is this: "Magic is an imaginative conception of the lawfulness of a universe where matter has the attributes of consciousness, and can be engaged purely through intention." He continues: "Here is a thought experiment to demonstrate the point of the definition: imagine a real magical broomstick that responds to Accio! Broomstick because it is, at some level, a dimly conscious and intentional entity that likes you. Now think about a broomstick that is really a Magnalev flying machine with a high-gain directional microphone for an ear and programmed to respond to a set Latin vocabulary via speech recognition algorithms. Unless you are an impossibly dull person, the idea of the former should make you yearn while the latter should make you yawn."

This is basically right, but I think Rao mis-steps a little in placing too much emphasis on connectedness rather than control. He suggests that at some level one becomes one with the broomstick. That might be right (although I doubt it), but he's probably started with the wrong example there. I think it is better to consider the primacy of human (or human-like) intention as the key concept. A magician can exercise dominion over wholly un-magical (i.e. unconscious) objects by, e.g., levitating them; and can also treat conscious objects without regard to their consciousness (e.g. levitating a human). Quite apart from that, there are also magical objects, e.g., broomsticks, which have their own powers of consciousness (e.g., they might not respond to evil commands, or what have you). The universe as a whole need not be connected on a conscious level for magic to operate, merely susceptible to the power of consciousness: the concept of magic has plenty of room for Muggles. Rao suggests that "We need to imagine magic because we want the entire universe to behave this way. To be intentionally one with us"; I would say that "subservient to us" instead. Magic is mind over matter.

This also illuminates the difference between magic and religion. (CS Lewis has it right.) Magic is like technology: both are practices aimed at controlling the universe; it is just that technology, rather more successfully than magic, uses physical rather than mental force to do so. Magic is not really that similar to religion, and indeed religions are often antipathetic to magic (you don't find many atheists burning witches). Why should this be? Because the ultimate aim of religion is not for us to control reality but rather, at a fundamental level, to understand reality such that it controls us.

Of course, in our day to day lives we need to control little bits of the physical universe, and religion will generally not care too much whether (for example) that bit of metal is flying using jet propulsion or magic power. A little bit of harmless magic, healing minor ailments and so on, is not too worrying. But magic opens up the possibility of the whole universe bowing to a human's intention: magic has inherently blasphemous tendencies.

Top-notch stuff

1. Farming challenge. The "planet must produce “more food in the next four decades than all farmers in history have harvested over the past 8,000 years.”" From here.

2. Lunching. "“There are two things you need to know,” she said. “The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.”" From here.

3. Optical illusion:

4. Journalism. List is here. I can't vouch for it all, but I'm prepared to trust Conor Friedersdorf on this.

5. OTT-ness: "In Britain, Atlas is about to shrug". Yes, honestly. That is from the Economist, here, suggesting that "The combination of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn could lead to the dystopia that Ayn Rand predicted". In a tone-deaf parody of what people who don't read the Economist think the Economist is all about, the article suggests that Britain should be grateful for the presence of investment bankers, and worried when demand for £2m+ houses dips slightly. I'm not saying the Economist is wrong, but I'm not sure that is quite the right line to take when trying to change the minds of the pro-Brexit or pro-Corbyn camps. (Compare that maniacal approach with the sanity on display here.)

6. Summing up the point in a nutshell: "is there a sort of law of conservation of coercion in well-functioning societies?" Further explained here as follows: "A community with a minimal state can only function if it is thick enough and homogeneous enough to enforce sanctions for antisocial behavior that are almost state-like in their severity, and, furthermore, can make them stick. Freeing individuals from their smothering parochialisms will lead to a compensating increase in the scope and reach of the state as people search for a new solution to social dilemmas formerly handled via informal means. Conversely, attempts to suddenly curtail state power may lead to chaos in the intervening period when social institutions have not yet reasserted themselves. Principled libertarians might still have good reasons to prefer the non-state forms of compulsion ... But “increased freedom” may not be one of them." (A further reason for left-wing political parties to favour immigration: a less homogeneous society requires a more active state?)

Who wears a black shirt to a political rally nowadays?

If my own experience is anything to go by, you will have seen many - far too many - attempts to draw parallels between events of the 1930s (and I'm talking about Nazis here) and current affairs. They are all, I find, very silly, tending to the "Nigel Farage grew a moustache - do you know who else had a moustache?" line of argument.

One reason why people reach for this period in history for their analogies is that it is one of the few periods that pretty much everyone knows about. Which means that, for example, it's a safe bet that no one who uses a swastika at their rallies nowadays is a nice person who spotted the device in a Hindu temple and liked the look of it. People understand the symbolism and iconography of the 1930s, and know what they are doing when they use it today.

All of which makes it seem extraordinary to me that there is in fact a sizeable number of people in America who put on black shirts and beat people up at political rallies. In California, no less. You should read this for an account of a half-Japanese man and a Samoan not getting killed by these people. It's even funny in parts.

The black shirted characters call themselves 'antifa' (meaning 'anti-fascist'), but then North Korea is officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.

Symbolism matters too. This is the caption to one photo: "Masked counterprotesters kick and punch a Hispanic man in Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, August 27". What is the symbolic impact of putting on a black shirt and then beating up a member of an ethnic minority in a park named after Martin Luther King?

The Platonic ideal of the Judas goat

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The story so far. Pirates introduced goats to the Galapagos as a source of food. The goats multiplied and ended up posing a threat to the native giant tortoises. The view was taken that the Galapagos' strength does not lie in diversity and rather than cherish the contribution these immigrants were making, the goats needed to be exterminated. So, an attempt was made to eradicate goats from parts of the Galapagos. What does that mean in practice? Helicopters, special hunting dogs from New Zealand, semi-automatic weapons from Italy and lots of rotting goat carcasses. "Carlos, another hunter, talked to me with embarrassment about his experience with corralled goats in Santiago. His task was to shoot goats, one by one, for hours." But the goats started to get good at hiding. So a vet called Karl Campbell suggested capturing goats, fitting them with radio collars and releasing them, as the natural sociability of these "Judas goats" would lead the hunters to other goats. That helped a bit, but sometimes the Judas goats would get pregnant, or just find other collared goats.

The story continues here:

"“I started then to think about how to improve this,” Campbell explained to me in an interview. “What would be the perfect, ideal Judas goats?” He was thinking about a Judas goat that would search for, and be searched for, by other goats in perpetuity. What may sound like a Platonic quest for an ideal animal in fact unfolded in the realm of actual goats. Since veterinarians identified males searching for mates as the main driver of gregariousness, strategies to increase estrus became key. According to Campbell and his colleagues, the literature had established that “estrus duration may be increased by denying penile intromission during estrus” (Campbell et al. 2007, 14)—admittedly rather impractical in the wild. The other known cause of a longer estrus is nymphomania, “a poorly understood condition often diagnosed as cystic ovarian disease” (Campbell et al. 2007, 14). Campbell and his colleagues went on to reflect that “while nymphomaniac behavior would be desirable in Judas goat operations, it is unknown how to induce this condition” (Campbell et al. 2007, 14).

Putting aside the desire for an always desiring goat, Campbell resolved to capture female goats, terminate any pregnancy, sterilize them, and inject hormone implants. As a result of a new procedure, estrus would not last for the typical twenty days per year but for an astonishing one hundred eighty days. Since transportation to a veterinary camp would have been costly and time-consuming, Campbell operated on goats, one by one, on the scorched slopes of Isabela’s volcanoes or the treeless volcanic plains of the lowland. Famous as “the natural laboratory of evolution” (Larson 2001, 125), the Galápagos became less a site for observing gradual changes over time and more a setting for artificial and deliberate variations on mattering: the making of a new goat. With a scalpel, anesthetics, and hormones, PI recombined the elements of female goats into oversexualized individuals, devoid of the ability to bear life but with an irresistible talent for delivering death."

This is clearly a metaphor for something. If you are in any doubt, consider this: after they had been finished with, they also killed the dogs.