Cuttings: September 2018

Say goodbye to suspicion - prayer by Phil Harrison SJ, circulated by the Jesuit Refugee Service. "Say goodbye to suspicion, say goodbye to despair, say goodbye to hate. Say goodbye to these three things and I will be revealed in your midst. When suspicion, despair and hate have left the room, I will enter, although cautiously because you may not recognise me at first. I am the one you have passed in the street. I am the one you ignored as I slept on a bed of concrete and nails. I am the one who has been serving you all this time, though you did not know it was me. I am the guest you did not invite, but I have come to invite you to the banquet prepared in the Kingdom of God at which all may rejoice. I will show you that suspicion, despair and hate can never have the last word. Say hello to faith, say hello to hope and say hello to love. Let these three remain among you and let me remain with you."

Ways to think about machine learning - blog post by Benedict Evans, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "One of the challenges in talking about machine learning is to find the middle ground between a mechanistic explanation of the mathematics on one hand and fantasies about general AI on the other. Machine learning is not going to create HAL 9000..., but it’s also not useful to call it ‘just statistics’. [Drawing] parallels with relational databases, this might be rather like talking about SQL in 1980 - how do you get from explaining table joins to thinking about Salesforce.com? It's all very well to say 'this lets you ask these new kinds of questions', but it isn't always very obvious what questions.... I think there are two sets of tools for thinking about this. The first is to think in terms of a procession of types of data and types of question: (1) Machine learning may well deliver better results for questions you're already asking about data you already have, simply as an analytic or optimization technique.... (2) Machine learning lets you ask new questions of the data you already have. For example, a lawyer doing discovery might search for 'angry’ emails, or 'anxious’ or anomalous threads or clusters of documents, as well as doing keyword searches, (3) Third, machine learning opens up new data types to analysis - computers could not really read audio, images or video before and now, increasingly, that will be possible.... Automation is the second tool for thinking about machine learning. ...One of my colleagues suggested that machine learning will be able to do anything you could train a dog to do... Andrew Ng has suggested that ML will be able to do anything you could do in less than one second. Talking about ML does tend to be a hunt for metaphors, but I prefer the metaphor that this gives you infinite interns, or, perhaps, infinite ten year olds."

Franken-algorithms: the deadly consequences of unpredictable code - article by Andrew Smith in The Guardian. " 'In some ways we’ve lost agency. When programs pass into code and code passes into algorithms and then algorithms start to create new algorithms, it gets farther and farther from human agency. Software is released into a code universe which no one can fully understand.' If these words sound shocking, they should, not least because Ellen Ullman, in addition to having been a distinguished professional programmer since the 1970s, is one of the few people to write revealingly about the process of coding. There’s not much she doesn’t know about software in the wild. 'People say, "Well, what about Facebook – they create and use algorithms and they can change them." But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves. Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on ...' "

How weak schools serve Trump's agenda - article by Arne Duncan in The Guardian. Education is a complicated issue, but for a long time it’s enjoyed bipartisan support. ... My tenure as education secretary was not perfect, but we were committed to aspirational goals and to students.... Today, no such goals exist. The Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos don’t talk about improving educational outcomes. The Trump administration has no position on increasing access to pre-K, or continuing the work of raising high school graduation rates, or of once again leading the world in college graduation rates.... Some maintain this is due to incompetence, but the more I listen to the president, the more I’m convinced that the administration’s lack of educational goals is by design. A healthy democracy requires an educated citizenry, while an authoritarian regime benefits from the lack of one. President Trump is on record as saying we should all listen to him – he wants to be the final authority and arbiter of truth. ... Upon winning the Nevada primary in February 2016, Trump observed: 'We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.' I wasn’t so amazed he said it, but I was amazed that he said nothing about educating people. Nothing. No goals, no aspirations, no unifying message. The quote succinctly reveals that this is right where he wants people to be: divided and preferably poorly educated."

The mood has shifted: now Corbyn really can transform the economy - article by Owen Jones in The Guardian. "The left did not learn from its opponents. The financial crash of a decade ago was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Hungry Thirties. Yet the left’s intellectual cupboard was bare. With little to offer other than fiery speeches about bankers’ greed and defensive slogans against cuts, it presented no coherent alternative. Years of austerity followed, endorsed or even implemented by centre-left parties that signed their own political death warrants in doing so. A decade later, a new intellectual ferment can be found on the left. ... The [IPPR] has attempted to embrace the spirit of our time: the latest report, published by its commission on economic justice, is a critical contribution to a left intellectual revival. Its underlying message is inarguable: the current system is broken. ... The report’s prescriptions challenge assumptions that until recently were considered to be as immovable as the weather. A well-funded national investment bank would modernise Britain’s creaking infrastructure and drive innovation, while a national economic council would design a 10-year plan for the economy. The commission recommends that a genuine, higher living wage should be introduced; and proposes that a target should be set to double the percentage of workers covered by collective bargaining ... Workers would get elected representatives on company boards; and the self-employed ... would be granted work-related benefits. The report also recommends reversing recent cuts to corporation tax, which have failed to increase investment as promised, and a cooperative development act to encourage the mutualisation of the economy."

The real Goldfinger: the London banker who broke the world - article by Oliver Bullough in The Guardian, based on his book Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back. "In the years after the first world war, money flowed between countries pretty much however its owners wished, destabilising currencies and economies in pursuit of profit. Many of the wealthy grew wealthier even while economies fell apart. The chaos led to the election of extremist governments in Germany and elsewhere, to competitive devaluations and beggar-my-neighbour tariffs, to trade wars and, ultimately, to the horrors of the second world war. The allies wanted to prevent this ever happening again. So, at a meeting at the Bretton Woods resort in New Hampshire in 1944, they negotiated the details of an economic architecture that would – in perpetuity – stop uncontrolled money flows. ... One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate [the controls]: Siegmund Warburg.... [He] had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?... If [Warburg's] bonds had been issued in Britain, there would have been a 4% tax on them, so [his colleague Ian Fraser] formally issued them at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. If the interest were to be paid in Britain, it would have attracted another tax, so Fraser arranged for it to be paid in Luxembourg. He managed to persuade the London Stock Exchange to list the bonds, despite their not being issued or redeemed in Britain, and talked around the central banks of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, all of which were rightly concerned about the eurobonds’ impact on currency controls. The final trick was to pretend that the borrower was Autostrade – the Italian state motorway company – when really it was IRI, a state holding company. If IRI had been the borrower, it would have had to deduct tax at source, while Autostrade did not have to. The cumulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that Fraser created a bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere.... There was no register of ownership or any obligation to record your holding, which was not written down anywhere.... The eurobonds set wealth free and were the first step towards creating the virtual country of the rich that I call Moneyland.... This is the dirty secret at the heart of the City’s rebirth, the beginning of the process that eventually led to today’s stratospheric inequality. It was all made possible by modern communications – the telegram, the phone, the telex, the fax, the email – and it allowed the world’s richest people to avoid the responsibilities of citizenship."

Here’s the science behind the Brexit vote and Trump’s rise - article by Michele Gelfand in The Guardian. "Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are rare.... We’ve shown that US states with histories punctuated by high threat, including more natural disasters, higher pathogen prevalence and food instability, are much tighter than those that enjoyed relative safety. Similarly, communities that face financial danger – hunger, poverty, bankruptcy – and higher occupational hazards, are substantially tighter. This helps explain why those on low incomes have consistently told us they desire strong rules and leaders. In fact, when we ask respondents to free-associate from the word 'rules', low-income subjects consistently write positive words such as 'good', 'safe' and 'structure', while wealthier ones write down words such as 'bad', 'frustrating', and 'constricting'. These preferences arise early: in our lab, three-year-olds from low-income families were more visibly upset than peers from wealthier homes when they saw puppets violate clear rules.... Threats lead to a desire for stronger rules – and obedience to leaders who promise to deliver a tight social order. Our research confirms that the strongest Trump supporters, as well as the supporters of Marine Le Pen in France, believe their country is threatened, whether by terrorism, illegal immigration, natural disasters or disease. They felt their countries were too loose, and they wanted tighter rules and stricter leaders. Fearful voters also drove the UK’s Brexit decision and the candidacies of far-right or autocratic politicians in Poland, Russia, the Philippines, Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Italy."

The Coddling of the American Mind: how elite US liberals have turned rightwards - review by Moira Weigel in The Guardian. "Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding 'protection' from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them....The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of 'cognitive distortions' that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think.... Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.... The Coddling of the American Mind is less interesting for its anecdotes or arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style. That style wants above all to be reasonable.... The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. ... The style that does befit an expert, apparently, is the style of TED talks, thinktanks and fellow Atlantic writers and psychologists. ...As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as 'clicktivism' or mere 'hashtags', right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking 'up their monopoly on discourse. ...The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.... As the right liberals insist that students are suffering from pathological 'distortions', a sense of unreality prevails. In their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and think pieces, the genteel crusaders against 'political correctness' create their own speech codes. As their constituency shrinks, their cant of progress starts to sound hysterical. The minds they coddle just may be their own."

Think we can rewind to the heady days before Trump and Brexit? Think again - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. The dominant mood among liberals is that we need to go backwards to better times. Brexit followed by the election of Donald Trump provide such undeniable illustrations of self-harm to some that they should be reversed or even erased. ... In pursuit of one enormous do-over, they want Trump impeached and another Brexit vote.... [These calls] not only don’t go far enough but ... could have unintended consequences that make things worse. For there is a crucial distinction between challenging a decision that is procedurally flawed or unlawfully enabled, and nullifying a decision because you think it’s a mistake. ... In both scenarios – impeachment or a second referendum – the suspicion of elites would become even greater, and the political alienation and economic marginalisation that contributed to it would still exist. That’s not a reason not to support them. It is a reason to be wary."

'It's impossible!' Christian Marclay and the 24-hour clock made of movie clips - article by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "The idea is brilliantly simple and completely audacious. Entitled The Clock and lasting 24 hours, the world’s most popular piece of concept art is a gigantic collage of film clips – old and new, black-and-white and colour – showing thousands of glimpses of clocks, watches, sundials and snatches of people telling each other the time, all set up to correspond to real time wherever it is shown, right round the clock. It is a staggering, almost superhuman feat of research that has gained a cult following ever since it was unveiled at the White Cube gallery in London in 2010. The Clock’s easy-to-grasp governing principle coexists with the almost ungraspable fact that its creator, Christian Marclay, really has pulled it off, beguilingly combining the utter randomness of each individual clip with the strict form of his overarching idea, allowing everyone to meditate on time, how we’re obsessed with it, how there’s never enough of it."