Brian Clegg's Blog, page 28

Review - Nasty, Brutish and Short - Scott Hershovitz ****

Scott Hershovitz is a little harsh in applying Hobbes’ aphorism calling human life ‘nasty, brutish and short’  to children, but his idea of using children’s musings as a starting point for exploring some of the big philosophical ideas with an adult audience is little short of genius.

Hershovitz points out that until about the age of nine, children are naturally philosophically minded, as demonstrated by their perpetual asking of the question ‘Why?’ Science communicators find a similar effect with science - pretty well all children are fascinated by science until they are 11 or 12 (I’m sure there’s a research paper in there for why one interest dies before the other). Not only does Hershovitz encourage this exercise in thinking by turning the questions back on his children, but he also stimulates readers to think about these issues themselves. As he points out, you might not always agree with him (I certainly didn’t), but it’s a valuable exercise to think through these big ideas – and your personal prejudices – to discover more about reality and yourself.

Hershovitz’s speciality is philosophy of law (I didn’t even realise this was a thing, though when you think about the nature of law and justice, it’s an obvious topic), and law-like questions are well covered, from rights and revenge to punishment and authority. I was a bit disappointed when he talked about rights that, although he acknowledged that rights are twinned with responsibilities, he didn’t explore the idea that it’s better to think in terms of those responsibilities (which are outward looking) rather than rights, which are inward looking.

It’s almost inevitable that practically every reader will find some of Hershovitz’s views questionable. While I, for example, had little problem with his approach to swearing, others might be unhappy to find their children as foul-mouthed as Hershovitz’s are. Similarly, while Hershovitz’s ideas on God may be pretty much the norm in Europe, I would imagine a lot of Americans would struggle with them. (It may be to keep things simple, but I found his attitude to the Bible, say, was strangely flawed, in that he seemed to either assume the Bible had to be the truth in describing, say, the vengeful God of the Old Testament, or the whole thing was imaginary, rather than allowing for a circumstance where parts of this complex collection of ancient books could be folk tales while other parts could be more significant.)

I’ve leapt ahead a bit there in getting on to religion. Hershovitz gives us sections on ‘making sense of ourselves’, including gender and sports, race and responsibility , and on ‘making sense of the world’ which includes big topics such as knowledge, truth and the mind as well as the fun subject of infinity, which ties in well to both science (for example, the size of the universe) and maths. While I wouldn’t go as far as Hershovitz in suggesting science and maths are sub-disciplines of philosophy, I far prefer his approach to that of some well-known scientists who pompously and entirely inaccurately have declared that philosophy is no longer required as science has made it redundant. Inevitably, we also encounter the now very familiar trolley problem: though we get some of the less visited twists on the concept, I’ve seen this handled better. Hershovitz doesn’t really deal with the impossibility of being totally detached from real world concerns, such as the unlikeliness that pushing someone off a bridge could be guaranteed to stop a runaway tram.

Hershovitz is generally very good at pulling apart our assumptions, but his own US-centric cultural prejudices shine through particularly on gender and race, where he seems incapable of questioning the typical academic left wing liberal view. (This is particularly noticeable in his coverage of trans-athletes where the reality of sport has already changed significantly since the book was written). Interestingly, this is a point he makes himself later when talking about the echo chambers of both right and left wing figures, but seems to miss his own prejudices. For example,  most academics fail to recognise their hypocrisy in recognising the importance of reducing climate change but still fly all over the world to conferences. If we are going to be picky, it’s also amusing that he applies the ‘invisible Gardener’ logic to God, but not to the equally applicable topic of the simulation hypothesis.

Overall, this book employs a brilliant concept, though I wish he hadn’t used his own kids as the only examples of children and philosophy, as it can read like the boasting of one of those parents who bores you rigid by telling you all the clever things his precocious children have said. Even so, it's a great way to bring philosophy, a topic all of us should know more about, to a wider audience.

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I don't want to be entitled

Image by Maxim Mox from UnsplashThere are many things that are a bit irritating about the internet (though none that outweigh its usefulness). But the one that arguably gets up my nose the most is when you fill in an online form and it insists that you enter your title. I don't want a title. If you are writing to me, address it to Brian Clegg. I'm happy for anyone to call me Brian (or Cleggy if you must). But more to the point, why on earth should I have to provide a title to, say, buy a bunch of flowers?

 One of the reasons I really dislike titles is the way the media, particularly TV for the masses, make obsequious use of some titles. It really puts me in cringe mode when a grown adult refers to someone else as 'Doctor Phil' or 'Doctor Anita'. This reversion to childhood doesn't apply if you have a different title though. It's never 'Mister Brian.' (Of course someone called Ed* may be thankful for this.)

For that matter, I have two Master of Arts degrees, but no one seems to feel the urge to call me Master - though with a Dr Who hat on, I could definitely warm to being the Master.

That's academic titles, of course, and on top of this there is the nightmare creepiness of aristocratic titles (especially when you're a royal and have a string of these as long as your arm). Admittedly, someone I know in the literary world did find these things quite useful. When checking into a hotel in America, he would tell them that he was Sir X Y. (Name omitted to protect the guilty.) And he got extra-special treatment because of it. Which illustrates the absurdity of the whole thing.

I know some people love their titles. They even put them on book covers. And for them, I would be happy to leave the option on internet forms so they can show how entitled they are. But please, for the rest of us, make it optional.

* One for the elderly

Beyond Words - Science and Fiction - does science fiction have to be scientific?

I'm a huge fan of science fiction and regularly review SF books on my popularscience.co.uk blog. It seems a truism that science fiction should involve science and/or technology - but is it an essential? This is one the topics that is likely to be discussed when I meet up for an on-stage chat with bestselling French author Hervé Le Tellier, chaired by the translator of his remarkable novel Anomaly, Adriana Hunter.
If you are in London on 22 May 2022 and fancy coming along, the event, part of the Beyond Words Festival, is on at the Institut Français at 5pm. Tickets are available here.

What makes a book SF is always a subject of dispute, but for me it should reflect the human consequences of some kind science or technology. Sometimes this is straightforward - taking in the impact of, say, artificial intelligence or spaceflight. But science fiction also has certain standard concepts, such as faster than light travel or time travel that are not possible with current technology and may never be.

On the whole, the distinction between SF and fantasy in such circumstances is that science should not totally exclude the possibility of what's happening. There are physical mechanisms that could, in principle, get around the light speed limit, or the inability to travel through time. But what should we think when the 'science' that the premise is based on is not science at all?

That's where Anomaly comes in. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the plot of Anomaly involves the simulation hypothesis. This is the idea that everything we experience is not physically real but takes place in a vast computer simulation - The Matrix on steroids. For me, the simulation hypothesis is fun to consider, but is more a matter of philosophy than science.

For a hypothesis to be scientific there has to be some way in principle to test out that hypothesis. We may not be able to undertake the test right now, but it should be possible. Yet the simulation hypothesis does not allow us to do this. To see why, it's useful to bring in the similar but simpler invisible dragon hypothesis. I have a theory that there is an invisible dragon in my garage. Is that science? It's certainly possible to make any scientific test you propose incapable of disproving my hypothesis.

For example, if you try to detect the presence of my dragon by scattering flour on the floor to pick up footprints, I will point out that my invisible dragon is weightless, floating just above the surface of the ground. If you listen for its breathing I will tell you that my dragon does not breathe. If you want to detect it with a heat gun, I will point out that it emits no infra-red. My dragon could exist. But if there is nothing to measure, nothing to observe, science can say nothing useful about it. It isn't a scientific hypothesis. 

Some argue that the same problem applies to concepts that are often considered scientific, such as string theory. And it certainly also applies to the simulation hypothesis. If we accept that what we are dealing with is speculative philosophy rather than science, can it really be the basis for science fiction? Some like the term 'speculative fiction' a weak alternative meaning of SF, but (perhaps surprisingly) I think a book like Anomaly can still legitimately be regarded as science fiction. 

This is because, in the end, it's the 'fiction' part that matters most. It helps that I do like the occasional alternate history book, such as Kingsley Amis's The Alteration and Keith Roberts' Pavane. Arguably the mechanism of alternate history is not strictly science - but the result is still far closer to SF than it is to fantasy. Similarly, even though the 'science' of a book like Anomaly is totally speculative and incapable of being tested, it feels more like science fiction than fantasy - and that's good enough for me.

I hope you can join us on 22 May 2022 for what should be a lively discussion.

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I'm game

Something that never ceases to be a thrill is receiving my first copies of a new book - so I'm delighted to say that Game Theory, my latest entry in Icon Book's 'Hot Science' series (for which I am also series editor), is now on sale.

For me, game theory, the topic of the book, has always been a fascinating one. Below is an extract from the introduction to show why this is the case and to give a little background on game theory in case it's unfamiliar as a concept.

You can find out more about the book or buy a copy at my website.

1. Games and the real world

When I first bought a textbook on game theory many years ago, never having come across the term before, I felt cheated. I was expecting something fun that would tell me the optimal strategies for winning at card games, backgammon and Monopoly. I wanted an interesting analysis of how the games worked mathematically under the hood. Ideally there would also be guidance on how to create your own interesting board games. Instead, I found descriptions of a series of ‘games’ that no one had ever played, with tables of outcomes that did not so much give guidance as show just how impossible it often was to come up with a useful outcome. This was interspersed with a hefty load of mathematical equations. And yet, the more I read about game theory, the closer it seemed to one of my favourite classics of science fiction.

For his 1950s Foundation series of books (made into a so-so TV show in 2021), Isaac Asimov came up with the concept of ‘psychohistory’. This is an imaginary mathematical mechanism for predicting the future, based on an understanding of human psychology and the behaviour of masses of people. In practice, psychohistory was never going to happen. The repeated failures of pollsters who amass vast amounts of data to predict the outcomes of elections, or decisions such as the UK’s Brexit referendum, make it clear that people form far too complex a system to enable consistent, reliable mathematical predictions of outcomes. Yet game theory does achieve some of the promise of psychohistory by resorting to the classic approach used by science, particularly physics: modelling.

The mathematical models used in physics reduce complex systems to simpler combinations of objects and their interactions. Messy aspects of the system are often ignored (it will be noted that this is happening). So, for example, Newton’s familiar laws of motion at first glance don’t appear to describe the real world very well. The first law states that an object in motion will keep moving unless acted on by a force. In everyday experience, such countering forces – like friction and air resistance – are ubiquitous; yet for convenience, models often ignore such things, as they add complexity and can be difficult to account for. This means that the model does not reflect reality – without friction and air resistance, once you gave it a push, a ball on a flat surface would roll on for ever. But simplification makes calculations more manageable and gives an approximation to reality. Similarly, game theory uses mathematical models that simplify human interactions and decisions as much as is possible to help understand those processes.

The theory of games started with the development of the mathematical field of probability to deal with gambling games and other pastimes where the outcome was dependent on a random source, such as the throw of dice or the toss of a coin. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, a handful of individuals and a quasi-governmental American institution took some of the basic mathematics of games and began to apply it to decision-making problems, ranging from economics to the best strategy to win a nuclear war.

The field that was developed under the name of game theory became detached from ‘real’ games. It was all about strategy – what was the best approach to win, given a set of choices available to two or more players. Games were transformed from pastimes to something deadly serious. This shift was so strong that often those who deal with game theory totally ignore what the rest of the world calls games. However, I believe that this is a mistake. Real games still form part of the continuum – it is just that many familiar games are not interesting from a game theory perspective, either because they are too dependent on random chance, with no strategy, or because they are too complex for strategies to be developed. 

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Asteroids, climate change and hyperbole

Science communication is a delicate balance - but there is always a danger of someone highly invested in a particular aspect of science indulging in hyperbole and causing the opposite reaction to the one they intend. 
Arguably, the most dangerous topic for this is climate change. Getting our response to climate change right is crucially important - global warming and its consequences is something we have to take action on. But, as Al Gore demonstrated in the past, making overblown statements on the subject can have a negative impact on getting the message across.
The latest indulgence in this line, which made the news on 15 April, was from palaeontologist Robert DePalma, who apparently said at a screening of a documentary he made with David Attenborough 'What's going on in the world today is terrifyingly close to the scale and timeframe of the end-Cretaceous extinction.'
He was referring to the asteroid impact that wiped out most of the dinosaurs - in fact it did far more, destroying three quarters of the animal and plant species on Earth over a timescale of just a few years. Now, climate change really is causing extinctions. But even with the worst predictions, its impact would not come close to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event - and we are doing a lot to make sure that the worst predictions don't come true.
To be fair to Dr DePalma, he probably wasn't only talking about the impact of climate change, but the wider destruction of the environment caused by humans, which is responsible for a considerable amount of species loss on top of warming from greenhouse gasses. However, his comments led to newspaper headlines like "Climate change 'like asteroid hitting Earth''.
We have to consider the environment more. We have to get climate change under control. But telling the world that the sky is about to fall in is not the way to get people on your side. It's the same problem as then protests by Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain that prevent people getting to hospital or using green electric trains. All this badly thought out communication does is to turn the public against you. By all means get the facts across - but exaggeration is not the way to do it. Science should always be clear and accurate: this is essential if we are to maintain trust. It's not about misrepresenting reality to achieve a goal. 
This has been a  green heretic  production.

Review: Tremors in the Blood ****

There is something beguiling about the concept of the polygraph - the proper name for what is usually known as a lie detector. Surely it makes sense, if technology exists that can tell if a statement is true or false, that lie detectors should provide an important adjunct to the legal system? Unfortunately, though, despite a public assumption that they are scientific, there is absolutely no evidence that lie detectors work - and plenty of evidence that they don't.

What Amit Katwala does in this very readable account is give us an insight into the early development and deployment of the polygraph. In part this is the story of three key individuals - two behind the technology and one a police chief who instigated the polygraph's development, though the larger part of the book comprises a series of true crime stories, introducing in some depth a handful of early legal cases where the polygraph played a role.

The two developers, John Larsen and Leonarde Keeler, both seem to have had serious character flaws, and were single-minded in their assumption that monitoring blood pressure and breathing variations were sufficient to tell the difference between a true and a false statement. While there is no doubt that some people do experience shifts in these metrics when lying, some don't... and everyone, particularly in the scary circumstances of a police interview, is likely to have fluctuations that have nothing to do with the veracity of their answers - not helped by the way that many early attempts seemed to turn the whole thing into a media circus with crowds of reporters and onlookers present.

The crimes are described in immersive narrative fashion, some taking place in the febrile setting of Capone's Chicago, though things start in the rather more refined precincts of Berkeley, California. I don't usually read true crime books - I find reading about other people's suffering for entertainment rather ghoulish - but the context of the lie detector's development and public attitudes to it make it a rather different phenomenon here.

Katwala is clearly more than up to the challenge of presenting these stories in a gripping fashion, and it is genuinely fascinating to see how the polygraph gained its reputation. It would have been good to have had a bit more of the science as to why the device is unreliable and never can be trusted, especially in the context that it is still widely used around the world and is even creeping into use in the UK, where historically it has been treated with well-deserved suspicion. Developments since the 1930s, including using various other equally non-definitive measures such as brain wave patterns, is briefly summarised in an epilogue, which is understandable given the focus is the birth of the lie detector, but perhaps could have had more detail.

Katwala always makes it clear that this was (and is) a dangerous and untrustworthy device. Arguably it is on a par with astrology - both are based on scientific observations (astronomy and physiological measurements respectively), but both draw totally unjustified conclusions from those observations. This is a timely exploration of this dubious technology.

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Tremors in the Blood is available from Bookshop.org and Amazon.co.uk

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Gambling on a fallacy

Probability is at the heart of much of life - yet it can seem counter-intuitive. One of the best-known aspects of this is the so-called gambler's fallacy (and its inverted equivalent, the hot hand fallacy). 

Take a simple example of tossing a coin repeatedly. A head comes up ten times in a row. Now we all know that, on average and over time, a fair coin should give us the same percentage of heads and tails. So it can seem surprisingly reasonable that the next throw is more likely to be a tail. 

That's the gambler's fallacy, because, of course, the coin has no memory. It has no way of telling what came before, so the next toss is still equally likely to be heads or tails. (Some argue that actually it's more likely to come up a head again - for a demonstration of why this can be the case, see the start of my video below.)

At a simple level, it's quite easy to get your head around what's happening here, but some of the subtleties of the gambler's fallacy are still easy to miss - and that's where a new paper by Steven Tijms comes in (you can read the full thing here). Tijms points out how counter-intuitive the behaviour of randomness is. For example, he shows how to calculate the chances of getting, say, five or more heads or tails in a row in 100 coin tosses - the answer is remarkably 97.2%. Even a run of seven or more with the same face is more likely to occur than not in 100.

We also see how the law of large numbers - the idea that, for example, the ratio of heads to tails will get closer to 50:50 as we repeat the toss many times - doesn't work the way we tend to assume it will. In part this is because we underestimate what 'many times' means. Tijms points out, for example, to be 95% sure that the relative frequencies of heads and tails is in the 48-52% range it's necessary to toss a coin around 2,500 times. But also there's something more fundamental that fuels the gambler's fallacy.

Because the relative frequencies are tending towards 50:50 as we get more and more, it's tempting to think that the gap between number of heads and number of tails thrown must reduce. And so, if there's a big gap, say many more heads than tails, it's hard to resist the feeling that the coin needs to counter this by coming up with a lot more tails. But this is still the gambler's fallacy. It's perfectly possible for those relatively frequencies to get closer and closer to 50:50 yet to have the gap between numbers of heads and tails increase rather than decrease.

I've only been able to give a taster of Tijm's paper - I'd recommend taking a look as it is very readable and is not loaded with scary mathematics.

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Here's the video for the coin toss oddity:

A fake comment with a difference

One of the less enjoyable aspects of having a blog is having to dismiss all the fake comments that are blatant attempts at getting advertising links posted onto a website for free.

Traditionally, these fake comment adverts have been distinctly feeble. Some blatantly ignore the topic - so, for instance, a post about why I don't like opera might get links for the wonders of a brand of dog food. Others go for what they presumably hope is more subtlety. They start with a bland comment, something like 'Great post, I really agree with this! You should see this too'. But the lack of direct connection to the topic you are then directed to is a giveaway, as in a post about the totally shocking contents list of something I bought at the supermarket being linked to a site selling garden lights.

Today, though, and perhaps scarily, whatever algorithm is used to select a post to put a fake comment on has finally come up with something that appears to be directly relevant to the text of the post. There was an attempt to add to one of my book reviews what appears to be download links for that book, with links headed 'Download now', 'Download full' and 'Download LINK'. 

Of course I don't know if these actually are links to pirated copies of the book in question - I have no intention of clicking on one. But the fact remains that the comment looks far more legitimate than the other fakes - though the author of this pseudo-comment gave the game away by putting in a total of six links. And perhaps they should realise that no legitimate book review site would accept a comment with links to download pirate copies (or worse).

What did disappoint me was that they didn't choose one of my books as the one to award the honour of the first of these more sophisticated dodgy links. It wasn't even a review I wrote. It was a guest post by Michael Bycroft, reviewing the 2009 title Branches by the excellent Philip Ball. It's a good book, but I can't help but feel a little jealous.

Science and truth

Image by Ben Collins from UnsplashI was reading for review a book called The Joy of Science by Jim Al-Khalili recently and was struck by what seemed to me an odd statement. Al-Khalili said 'A physicist like me tries to uncover ultimate truths...' Let that sink in for a moment while I tell you a story.

Many years ago, a work colleague described being at a dinner party where he heard a remarkable tale. The storyteller had heard that someone was in the centre of the smallish town of Sunningdale and saw a man walking his dog. The town centre is unusual in that a railway line runs across the main road, so there's a level crossing there. The dog walker was picking up a takeaway from the tandoori restaurant right by the level crossing. He had clearly not thought this through before setting out. He couldn't take the dog into the restaurant while he collected his food. So he tied the dog's lead to the level crossing barrier and nipped inside. He was only going to be gone a minute.

What the dog walker hadn't noticed is that the barriers were in the down position because a train was about to pass by. Moments later, the train rumbled through and the barriers opened. Leaving the dog dangling from its lead high in the air, to the bewilderment of the emerging dog walker. Everyone at the dinner party thought this was hilarious. So did my colleague - even more so than the rest of them, for reasons we will explore in a moment.

If you heard that story, would you believe it was true? There's an old saying in science that the plural of anecdote is not evidence. You need something stronger than a tale or two told at a dinner party to think that something is a fact. Of course, plenty of anecdotes are true, but just because we hear a story like this is not sufficient to start accepting something. No one at the dinner table had seen this happen - the teller of the tale had heard it from someone else. There was no corroborating evidence, such as a photograph of the dangling dog. Again, this wouldn't enough in itself - it can be faked easily enough - but it would be a contribution to the balance of likelihood. And there was no way of finding out more, especially in those pre-internet days.

As it happens, my colleague knew something the others present didn't. When he was at a dinner party and the conversation was a little dull, he had a habit of throwing a fictional tale into the mix. Some months before, he had made up the story about a dog being tied to the Sunningdale railway barrier. This story had spread from person to person - and now he was hearing it back from someone who hadn't been present when he told it, as if it were fact. His fiction had taken on a life of its own.

When we were thinking about what we need to make it likely that the story was true, we were, in a loose way, indulging in the scientific method. If this had really happened it would have been true. A truth. And assuming we weren't there, whether or not we accepted that truth would depend on the quality of evidence supporting the assertion.

So isn't this exactly what Jim Al-Khalili was saying? Why do I consider it odd? This is because science works at two levels, something highlighted in a cruel but amusing fashion by the great physicist Ernest Rutherford, who is said to have remarked 'All science is either physics or stamp collecting.' This is clearly intended as a humorous jibe against sciences other than physics - and like most people with a physics background, it makes me grin. But if we take away the subject rivalry, there is a serious underlying point. Science involves two different things. One is to establish what happens. This is the stamp collecting part. It's vital. This is where we find the facts. The truth about what is observed. But arguably it's not the interesting part of science. Science only takes off when it attempts to establish how or why something happens. And there, we usually don't establish a truth, but rather develop a best theory given the present evidence that makes testable predictions and that may change in the future.

Al-Khalili gives as an example of a truth the value of the acceleration due to gravity on the Earth's surface. This is an easily established fact. Or even simpler, there is the fact that things with a positive weight fall to the Earth if we let go of them in mid-air. But the interesting science is where that value for acceleration comes from, or why things fall in the first place - and there we usually need to have a theory.

Take another example - it is an observational fact that galaxies appear to rotate faster than they should be capable of doing without flying apart. Leaving aside the possibility that there could be an error in the calculation of how fast a galaxy can rotate and remain stable (this has been suggested), it appears to be true. However, what we can't do is make the leap from this fact to saying that it's true that dark matter exists. Dark matter is a theory to explain what is happening. As it happens, there are other theories such as MOND based on modified gravity that explain the observations without resorting to the existence of dark matter. Some evidence supports dark matter better, other evidence supports modified gravity. So it is absolutely not a scientific truth that dark matter exists. The stability given the rotation speed is what happens (subject to the proviso above), but dark matter (or modified gravity) is an explanation of why it happens - this is the really interesting science, but it's not an absolute truth.

Note that this does not mean that we can treat all theories equally. Just as is the case with the dog at the level crossing, we need to examine the evidence. If we aren't able to do that personally, it makes sense to rely on experts to examine that evidence for us (just as it's better to have an expert undertake brain surgery on you, or to fly a plane). And in many cases (unlike dark matter), there is a widely supported theory that is the best we have, unless and until new evidence comes up. Human-created climate change is a good example of this. Although it's fine to continue to look for new evidence which may reinforce or disprove it, the only sensible course is to go with the current theory that is most widely supported by subject experts.

Science, then, is not about uncovering ultimate truths, but concerns something more subtle. And, I would suggest, is all the better for it.

Stretch your brain with a visual puzzle

A while ago, I wrote a book called Conundrum which takes the reader through a host of puzzles and ciphers. Now and again I like to add a bonus puzzle - the latest is now available.

The premise is that a spy has put the books shown here in a prominent position to send a hidden message to a confederate.

To the person in the know, what you can see in the image tells when a meeting will take place. But when is it?

Unlike a conventional cipher, the requirement here is not just to work out the relationship between one set of characters and another - you need to find the message in the first place.

This kind of puzzle is an aid to creative thinking - you need to look for ways that the book spines can convey information and decide how to extract the required information from surroundings that are simply there to distract. 

The message is concealed in a systematic way - it is not random. You are looking for a single word.

As a small incentive, I will send a signed copy of my brand new book Game Theory to one of the correct entrants who send in a solution by 10 April. 

You can see the image bigger by clicking on it - if you'd like to enter your solution, go to the bonus puzzle page on the Conundrum website.