Cads and the law

My previous post, on divorce, lying and the internet, prompted a couple of interesting exchanges on the Site Formerly Known as Twitter and prompted me to do a little more research and thinking. After the break, I set out below some reflections on cads, duels and dobbing.

Lies, damned lies, matrimony and the internet

I was recently reading Uncommon Law, AP Herbert's book of spoof law reports first published in 1935, and it made me wonder whether ordinary, decent, middle-class people are more or less honest than they used to be. To cut a long story short: yes and no.

Even today, there is still much in Uncommon Law to enjoy, or at least there is if you are a lawyer or interested in the law. It's a mixture of 'law is an ass'-type invented but more or less plausible cases, poking fun at judges and judge-ese, liberal/libertarian fulminations at silly legal restrictions and the occasional clever observation. To give you an idea of the kind of thing, in one case a judge muses whether a marriage contract is unenforceable because it is in effect gambling, given that one never quite really knows what one is getting oneself into when marrying.

But whether that sort of thing is your cup of tea or not, you might want to think about divorce. 

One of Herbert's imagined cases is an old barrister doing his last case who has stopped caring about keeping up the pretences involved in 1920s divorces. So he tells the judge that evidence will be given that the husband's ardour for his wife cooled quickly after marriage, but the reality is that the wife wants the divorce and the husband is still keen on her; he says that Mrs So-and-so will give evidence that she had a liaison with the husband, but in fact she's been paid; he says that the wife will ask for alimony but in fact her family are having to pay money to the husband to get him to agree to this charade; and so on and so forth. The barrister says that everyone involved is perfectly decent, but, in effect, they are all going to perjure themselves.

Now of course I knew that this kind of rigmarole was how divorces were conducted under the old law: you see an example in Waugh's A Handful of Dust, perhaps based on his own experiences, and I have vague memories of reading about rooms rented in Brighton, private detectives primed to pounce at the right time and so on, all to ensure that a decent husband was the respondent rather than the petitioner. But it had not previously dawned on me that the parties would go to court, swear on Bibles and straightforwardly lie in the face of His Majesty's judiciary. It may be pearl-clutching on my part, but wasn't this an awful lot of perjury or perverting the course of justice? And does it make it better or worse to think that the judges knew (sometimes? always?) that everyone was making it up and that it was their job, in order to make society (and Society) work, to go along with it?

Herbert's point was that ordinary decent people were forced into these expedients by the restrictive divorce laws of the time. His argument has won the day and divorces can be had nowadays without anyone being required to choose between ruining a decent woman's reputation or committing perjury. 

There is, it seems to me, something very positive about that development. A world in which one can consider oneself a fine and upstanding gentleman despite deliberately conspiring to break the law (or perhaps because one is so conspiring) is, other things being equal, not as good in which fine and upstanding people hesitate and quail before misleading the legal authorities. It would not surprise me if an ordinary decent man who considered himself above the law when it came to divorce then came to consider himself above the law on other subjects too. Truthfulness is a habit, at least to some extent, and habits are formed by behaviour. 

Even today, I don't think that everyone follows the law all the time - I'm a lawyer! - but the instances in which a decent person can hold their head up high while lying to the courts are pretty few. I can imagine that someone might consider it to be "doing the decent thing" to take points on a driving licence that should properly go to a spouse in order to prevent the loss of that licence. I can also imagine family members concealing crimes even to the extent of barefaced lying to the authorities: perhaps to hush up a repentant teenager's drug use, for example. But even these examples seem to be different from deliberately setting out, with a plan formulated in advance, to mislead the court in order to obtain a desired outcome. So the world has improved, in one respect at least.

On the other hand, there is a big part of our lives that is forcing us the other way: clicking online forms. Forms require us to say that we have read and understood vast screeds of terms and conditions that we have no intention of even looking at, or they ask questions when we know that, if we give the honest answer, we will be taken down a rabbit hole of unnecessary extra steps. What's your view on cookies? Do you have the consent of everyone involved in this booking? How did you hear about us? Have you forgotten your password (maybe ...?)? Once upon a time, someone might be able to say, with a straight face, that they always read the small print; but now no-one does (no-one always does) and yet everyone says that they do. 

The whole world of doing business on the internet relies on, to put it at its lowest, a lot of polite fictions. On the one hand, that is not as bad as perjury but, on the other hand, this kind of lying is far more prevalent than divorce was in the 1920s. 

"Ah", you might say, "but that doesn't really count. It'sjust online forms - it's just computers". But if AI is anywhere near as successful as both its proponents and its chief opponents suspect, filling in online forms is only going to become a bigger part of our everyday life. 

We have trained ourselves to lie to computers. That wasn't so much of a problem when we mostly talked to humans. But it might be when we mostly talk to computers. In fact, once ChatGPT gets any good at humour, I might ask an it to write an AP Herbert-style story with that theme.

Some short film reviews

I have been on a couple of long flights recently and, as we all know, flights mean films, so here are some brief and helpful film reviews for you. To be especially useful, I will start with the best and work down to the worst.

The Castle of Otranto, Shakespeare, Voltaire and the ancestry of suburban magic

I have just finished reading Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Below the break, I will review it in my usual manner (i.e., quickly and usefully), but I am really here to talk about what Walpole said he was trying to do when he wrote the book.

What chess teaches us about AI - and what AI teaches us about chess

It sometimes strikes me as odd that humans still play chess despite the fact that computers can do it much better than us.

I know that people still delight in foot races or contests of strength despite there being machines that are much faster and stronger than any of us, but I don't find that odd. Humanity has grown up in the knowledge that it is a physically weak creature: there have pretty much always been domesticated animals that are faster or stronger than us, let alone wild ones. 

But, although we weren't the stongest or fastest animal out there, we knew we were the cleverest, with minds that far surpass anything else we encountered, minds that allowed us eventually to outwit and subdue all the alpha predators and alpha prey (if that's a thing - think mammoths) that we came across. 

Chess was a kind of symbol of this intellectual mastery. The 100m Olympic final might tell you who the fastest man in the world is, but the world chess championship plausibly used to tell you who was the best entity in the entire universe at a particularly demanding mental endeavour. It doesn't surprise me that when Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, it was a pretty big deal. 

Yet on we go, playing games that once would have been regarded as the among highest intellectual achievements in the known universe, but are now the equivalent of washing up by hand when you could use the dishwasher. 

What's going on? Why has our self-regard - our self-conception as the intellectual monarchs of creation - not been badly dented?

Part of the reason is that we have changed our view of what chess is. No-one really thinks it's like discovering the Grand Unified Theory of Everything or writing a symphony any more. It's not even brain surgery or rocket science. It's just a diversion, like noughts and crosses but a bit more tricky. 

One question that immediately arises is: when (and surely it is when) AI does produce cutting edge science, or a mathematical proof no human could hope to achieve, or write a symphony beyond Beethoven's wildest dreams ... what then? Will we then regard those achievements as nothing more than mere arithmetic, better handled by machines than humans? Presumably brain surgery and rocket science are even closer to losing their lustre: what then will we say about easy tasks?

But I want to leave that high-falutin' stuff to one side for the moment. I've got a more prosaic point: AI will be really good at teaching us how to do the things we want to do. (By "AI", I don't mean to refer to the latest LLMs, simply to any computer process.) And it turns out that what we want to do involves other people.

I have recently come across this website called lichess.org. It's amazing and I recommend it to anyone who plays chess. You can play against a seemingly limitless pool of humans or against a computer at various different levels of difficulty. But it does a number of other cool things besides. And it's all free. 

I'm going to show you some of the cool things that it does. You won't need to understand anything about chess to understand the points I am going to make, but if you are completely allergic to chess-chat then just skim until I shout NO MORE CHESS below.

As an illustration, I will use a very low quality game of chess that I played recently (against another human). If you play chess then you will see that I am not using this example as a boast: it is not a game on which either I (white) or my opponent (black) can look back with any great pride.

After you finish a game on lichess, you can get the computer to give you an analysis of it. That is what I show here. 

This is the game as at move 20, when black has just blundered with Nd4. Black's idea is to put pressure on the bishop on e6 and simultaneously be threatening against the white king, which is looking a little exposed and has a few pieces pointing ominously towards him. But it's a blunder nonetheless, as we shall see. This is what you see on lichess (click on it to see it properly):

You'll see that black has 3:28 left and I have 3:03. It's a fast game (5 minutes each side plus 3 seconds per move), which in part explains the poor quality of play.

You can see that black's move, Nd4, is highlighted in red and described as "??", i.e. it's a blunder. You'll also see that the computer recommends Bc4 for my next move - but that I also blundered with Bxf6 instead (also in red, also with "??"). Then you can see that black blundered one more time by re-taking the bishop with the pawn rather with the knight. That allowed me to play Bc4 next move (which I should have done before) and that won the game.

You can also see that the computer identifies not only "blunders", but also "mistakes" (less serious errors, in a kind of gold colour) and the even more minor "inaccuracies" (in blue): I have taken this passage of play in part because it is so full of sub-optimal moves that it's a good example of quite how colourful lichess' analysis of fast and messy play can be.

 

Below that, you get this overview of the game as a whole:

The red line shows who is winning - if it is above the horizontal line then white is winning and if it's below the line then black is ahead. I was marginally ahead in the opening, notably behind thereafter, but you can see that black's blunder has put me well ahead - although I'm about to throw it away with my next blunder - except that black will then re-blunder and put me back in the lead.

NO MORE CHESS

That's enough chess-chat. All I meant to show you was that about 5 minutes of human diversion - a quick break in the working day - can be rigorously analysed by a computer and used as a highly personalised teaching tool. If I were to click on the blue "learn from your mistakes" button then the computer would give me actual examples of my own games, show me where I went wrong, and ask me to work out the better moves. It recommends specific training using its wider library of puzzles (you'll see that it recommends Two Knights Defence puzzles in the picture above). And it does all of that, tirelessly, without complaining that it is working with an idiot who can't even play an obvious move like Bc4 and for free. This is a really extraordinary resource. And it is used, by thousands of people, in order to improve their ability to beat other people at chess.

Now imagine that kind of resource being available in other fields of human endeavour. "That character was introduced too early in your novel", "this is the kind of problem in which it's helpful to take logs" or "here are some changes that might get your project funded by these institutions". There is no inherent reason why AI would not be able to produce advice like that, just as it can tell me that Bc4 was the right move.

Almost 12 years ago, i.e. well before the wonders of recent AIs, Tyler Cowen went even further:

I think we can all agree that "you are sampling optimally in the quest for a lifetime companion" is not quite how the user interfaces of today would put it, but the idea is there. The kinds of advice that lichess can give you about your chess game could soon be provided about your game game, so to speak. 

Would we take such guidance from computers? Of course! As Cowen points out, GPS was already so standard even back then as to be unremarkable. Food preparation is not far behind now. Many people already use AI for low-level social or professional correspondence (the suggested replies to emails or, for example, LinkedIn posts are getting more useful all the time). 

So I'm inclined to think that we'll carry on quite happily competing with (or trying to get off with) each other even when there are AIs whose intelligence compares to us as the speed of a cheetah or the strength of an elephant do.  

I said above that we have always known that we are in the company of physical giants but regarded ourselves as the intellectual giants. But on reflection I'm not sure that's entirely true. Until recently, it was pretty common to think that the Earth was also inhabited by entities with intellectual powers well beyond our own: various gods and spirits with foresight, wisdom and knowledge that humans could never hope to match. We may well now be creating them for real. Perhaps it's just as well that we already have mental models of how to deal with them.

One final point. There are various stories about gods with amazing powers - gods who move the sun or throw down thunderbolts - or gods of various powerful things - rivers, mountains or seas - but we're a pretty self-regarding species and we never had any difficulty in supposing that these powerful creatures would be interested in what we get up to. Poor old Odysseus, for example, was a small and weak chap compared to the Olympians, but they nonetheless took a keen interest in his doings. At present, AIs are pretty interested in our doings too: they'll patiently answer your trivial questions and draw you silly pictures without pointing once out that you might be wasting the time and energy of an incredibly intelligent being. Perhaps the real problem for humans would come, not if we are surpassed by AIs, but if we are ignored by them. Then again, we might be sufficiently self-regarding to shrug that off too. I asked above why our self-regard has not been badly dented: perhaps self-regard is the one axis on which humans truly excel.

In which the writer praises Stephen Bush and tentatively suggests some ideas that differ from his

Stephen Bush is an interesting and thoughtful writer. I recommend that you look out for his work in the FT, and not only his political writing but also his comments on cultural matters. He seems to me to be a man of both intelligence and taste.

That's my (glowing) review of him. But what does he say about me? I'm sorry to say that the picture here is a little more mixed. I make "smug asides" and my "analysis, such as it is, is a greatest hits of partisan wishful thinking". I say "increasingly ridiculous things". At one point, he gave the (sensible, but I think inapposite) advice to "Live in the real world, stand up for decency regardless of the rosette colour, don't excuse-make for opening up the tent to include people who don't think I [Bush] am English." (In fact, the advice to live "in the real world" was given to me twice.) I was also said to have caricatured Bush's point and he suggested that my "need" to do so "tells its own story". 

Gosh. 

(More below the break.)

An email from a WEIRDO ...

I want to explain (and apologise for) the break in posting.

Over the Christmas holidays, I received an interesting email from one of my old tutors, now a big name in behavioural economics. For reasons that will appear from the email itself, I was keen to publish it. The negotiations for that took a bit of time (hence the delay in posting), but the author has now very kindly agreed to my request, after I made certain changes to preserve his anonymity. 

I am not entirely sure what to make of it all, but I don’t want to influence you in advance of reading it and so, without further comment, here is the email.