Rome is burning

For those of you who like to watch the decline of civilizations, I think that we have front row seats to a slightly less sexy Berlin Wall de(con)struction (though with far less immediacy, imagery or baaaadddddd music).

What caffeine fuelled apophenia am I babbling about this fair morn? Well, the call to re-consider the almighty U.S. dollar as the world's key reserve currency.

To paraphrase an advertorial 'its not happening overnight. But it is happening.'

Hello Pot, This Is Kettle.

Today Tony Abbott joined with Mr Sincerity Malcolm Turnbull in criticising Kevin Rudd's people skills.

This from Abott, Howard's gaffe-man of the 2007 election. Remember his attack of asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton, just days before Bernie died? And then there was his lovely handling of his late arrival to the health debate later that day.

Yes. Tony Abbott is a man whose people skills are second to none.

(Which isn't to say that Kevin 'working families' Rudd is not an automaton. I just don't really dig Abbott or Turnbull having a go at people for their personalities, or lack there-of.)

Best Book Review Ever

I've always admired AC Grayling, but this book review of his takes the cake.

Some choice excerpts:

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

And in the next paragraph:

[...] at the end of these nearly 300 pages of wasted forest he tells us what science needs in order to justify its continuation (oh dear, poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a theory he defended before a US Federal Court in the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to “realise its full potential in the public debate” – that is: how a theory trying to bend the facts to prove its antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed and created the world and all in it, can attain its full potential in the public debate. This, note, from a professor at a proper British university. Well: if this is not proof of the efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.

It just gets better from there.

Of course, it gets particularly interesting when Steve Fuller responds.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

And then Grayling has the last word:

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

...OR IS IT?






(Thanks to OTF Wank for drawing my attention to this.)

A little lightening of the mood.

With all the killing of puppies that's been going on ( see below), I thought I'd record an event that happened today that made me smile and remember that, despite all these terrible things happening in the world, and the way that the business world loves jerking us around, etc., that there are still nice people around. So, I little back story will be needed, but bear with me.

I'm building a bike at the moment from some old parts, and I needed to deconstruct an old 3-cog chainring setup. It requires a tool that looks a bit like this, a tool which (until now) I did not have access to. So, I rock into a bike shop at lunchtime, and enquire about said chainring wrench (the above tool). The guy doesn't have one for sale, but lends me his, on the verbal agreement that I'd bring it back tomorrow.

It sounds like a small thing, but little things are important. That a person would be willing to lend me a specialty tool instead of forcing me to order one is fantastic. An added bonus? When I enquired as to where I could purchase a T25 torx key, he gave me one of his. For free. Not every day one gets gifted like this.

Its been a good day. For those out there nerdy in their pursuits, I invite you to observe this. The orchestra isn't great, but it is a bunch of non-pros playing. Still, fantastic.

I think what is missing from Rawls is a theory of being awesome.

What is a good person? + Nature/nurture debate

After a couple of interesting talks at the AAP conference this week, I stumbled across this BBC article on goodness of character and the nature/nurture debate, both subjects of which I attended talks about throughout the week.

Luke Russell first off talked about what made an evil person, deciding that our intuitions were a good basis for this, but that current models of evil weren't quite up to the task, and Paul Griffiths today talked about the nature/nurture debate, and how you can't really separate nurture from nature (his example from the animal kingdom was the development of rats and their gene expression based on how much grooming they received from their mother (among other examples)), and that the idea of "human nature" is not just explicable by our DNA (or by our environment).

Anyway I'm a little tipsy right now after the AAP conference dinner so I'll leave it at that for now, IMO the BBC is a little behind in the most recent thinking on these debates! ;)

Neuroweapons, oh my!

From this post of Catie's. I'm not going to delve too much into the legal ramifications too much, the article mentioned in the post, and the mindhacks article go into this a lot.

Now this is a juicy dual-use dilemma. White, in his paper, mentions the beneficent side of this technology: enabling people with severe physical disabilities to gain back some of their independence. Specifically, White mentions mind-control prosthetics. Hello bionic revolution! This has numerous potential positive effects on the level of health care in western societies, and White notes that DARPA has plans for using the research to help out veterans. This is great news, to my mind, because the greatest cost to a country in terms of war is not necessarily the death toll, but the number of injuries. Now, I'm not saying that getting hurt is worse than dying (in all cases, at least), but in terms of the burdens inflicted upon the wounded soldier's psyche, the burdens on the health care system, and the families of all those involved. it'd be lovely if a quadriplegic could have some mobility. For a pentaplegics (so neck also immobilised, which often entails lack of speech, and essentially is full paralysis), this could mean better communication with the outside world, something terribly important.

What about the negative, though? Obviously, there is the new set of weapons coming out, which have many implications for what it means to commit a war crime, as White mentions in detail. But I'd like to raise another negative outcome of this new technology. This requires me to digress slightly, to fill in a couple of points about the nature of combat. I'm referring here primarily a conception taught to me by the late Philip D'Alton, who was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and I had the great fortune to be taught by personally. The conception of war we have, unsurprisingly, is a glorified one. Even to look at the dioramas in war memorials, in all their `realism,' we fail to understand the sheer brutality summed up best by Karl von Clausewitz, the immortal slogan: "War is Hell." We fail to understand that in the scenario of modern war, although casualties may be low compared to the advent of total war, or the analogues we can best envision in nuclear holocaust or world war, injuries are generally present in combat at a 1:8 ratio, death:injury. This ratio, in the case of certain recent maneuvers by the United States military, may be as high as 1:16. So imagine that in the current actions in Iraq, not claiming in excess of 3,000 lives, that between 24,000 and 48,000 men have been wounded in one aspect or another. not all of these are life threatening, and not all of these are disabling, but many are. We here "1 killed, 6 wounded" on the news, those 6 may be cuts and bruises, or amputations, internal bleeding, organ failure, etc. And those of us back home have no conception of this, short of the occasional movie that bothers to go partly into this detail (there have been more recently, but still not many compared to the swathe of rambo-esque movies out there).

So what does it mean for an army controlled from home? What does it mean to have a soldier whose understanding of the nature of war is, even after a tour of duty, no more than a kid's after a run through on a video game (although if you believe Jack Thompson, they are more likely to kill you...)? As war becomes not only more clinical and sterile on our TV screens, inuring many in our society to be tacitly accepting of whenever a country decides to head off to another conflict, but more sterile for the soldiers, it would be my opinion that the normative concepts that stay our hand when we conceive of going to war are eroded, and this is a terrible thing. The foundations of any conception of a Just War rely on an intuition that understands that war is hell. People die, limbs are shot off, landmines tear face apart, people walk in a daze with vital organs spilling out. I'm not sure how many of you, dear readers, have ever actually been in a fist fight of any kind, but for myself at least there is a certain understanding that if that's what getting punched in the face/ribs/ear feels like, getting shot is going to be a darn sight worse.

I'm not one of those guys who disagrees with the conflict in Iraq because I "don't support the troops." I support the sacrifice a career soldier makes in choosing to take the act of killing and dying on as his principal vocation. But what has to remain in the consciousness of those who sanction a war, and in a democratic society the citizen forms a part of that process, is that there is a fundamental aspect of war which, while necessary, should inform our decision. If we take the understanding of suffering away from the process of war, this could be highly problematic.

So, not so much a rant on neuroweapons, so much as a rant on what removing the soldier from combat could mean. It's almost 10, I should, you know, write my thesis. Or something.

Replies to Catherine

In response to This post

I'm not sure what I think. I'm personally not a fan of drugs,¹ and we do have sanctions against doping in such things as sports events. So why would this be any different?

I want to draw the readers attention to another set of disciplines that has associations with drugs: the creative arts. Music, in particular (at least according to my musician friends) has a thriving drug culture, far in excess of scientists in terms of the variety and regularity of consumption. And yet, while these artists may be committing crimes, it is not often expressed in terms of their cheating their field by taking drugs, which (and especially I suspect, considering some of the modern art scene) may enhance the `creative process.' It would seem that artists dope quite heavily in terms of using substance to enhance performance. And yet, despite the legal and health problems associated with drug use, it does seem to be a bit of a norm in society that painters, musicians and other dramatic and creative artists will use drugs.

This isn't just to target the arts. Any fan of my good mate Hunter S. Thompson will be aware of a certain precedent his story and indeed popular media (he says after watching an episode of about a drug-using journalist portraying the journalism industry as a bit drug-oriented, although perhaps I could go out on a limb and say that's less hallucinogenic (Thompson aside) and my stimulant-based.

So what would be wrong with scientists? I guess one way to look at this is to compare our intuitions as to which one of any of the variety of drug-using sections of society scientists can be most closely identified with, and what the drugs are actually doing. If we identify them with athletes, and the use of drugs to augment the scale of their performance based attributes, i.e. steroids, HGH, and diuretics all augment an attribute that directly relates to the performance of the skill of the athlete: strength, muscle building capacity, or weight. It is also very goal-driven: the drugs are consumed with the end of the drug use being a short period (generally) of competition.

It would seem that the use of scientists is more long-term - they use drugs to aid them in staying focused over long periods of time. In this case, I would compare them to journalists: they use stimulants or anti-anxiety meds to allow them to remain focused for long periods of time. The drugs (the study aid capacity of Ritalin I imagine is based around it's affects of ADHD - it actually allows you to think about one thing longer, while keeping the frantic energy of high-stress jobs intact) are designed not to enhance an attribute. If they were taking drugs to enhance data retention, mathematical ability, or some other cognitive function, we could compare them to the doping of athletes. If their drugs made them more creative, then maybe artists, but it seems to me that the primary end of these drugs is that one that escapes us all: time. Time not worrying, not procrastinating (he says writing in a blog instead of his thesis); time to study. That's a journalist mentality.

So the question now remains is: is this morally permissible? And that's a harder problem to examine. I can't go to the moral high ground here: I've had more than my fair share of 3am, wired-on-inconceivable-amounts-of-caffeine mathematics sessions during my honours thesis and previous to that in undergrad. What I can say is that it does reinforce a certain preconception about the sciences: that the big leaps in science is a young man's game. It's played like a high-stakes game, as the study shows with the higher proportions of drug users being in the younger age groups. Is this acceptable? In terms of data retention, the job of the young scientist (he'll need it all for later studies!), and mathematics that borders on the divine, it sure as hell helps. But I can't seem to grasp an opinion. My primary concern is that it promotes the increasing drug-oriented culture of our society, which I have some problems with on an intuitive level. I think that life needs to slow down, but I can understand why some people can't. Maybe the scientists should get into yoga? That is meant to help concentration. I can speak with personal experience on the advantages of meditation in improving composure and concentration.

But pills are a lot easier.





¹Okay, that's not the whole truth: I am a big fan of coffee, but after 4.5 years of strenuous study as a physics major I've developed such a tolerance to it that it doesn't do anything anymore to me, apart from the emotional feeling of contentment I get from the smell.