Ergas and the elephant in the room

First, I am posting this after the horrible events in Christchurch today, a topic which will no doubt deserve some comment later.

But I just wanted to note Henry Ergas's column in The Australian this morning, purportedly looking at the "broader forces at work" behind the almost certain defeat of the Coalition at the coming election.  (It is very, very hard to imagine how Shorten could possibly blow an election where it seems half of the government has already resigned in disgust at its own internal divisions.)

Ergas notes how the Coalition came into power with Abbott having low approval rating, just that Rudd/Gillards was even lower due to their own shambolic internal divisions (true.)

But the rest of the column is about how the Australian electorate has moved Left, and how that's a long term problem for the Liberals.

What he doesn't seem to get into that noggin of his is that Australian's might have good reason for moving Left - because the Right's policies haven't exactly come out with the glorious results that would keep the voters happy.  

In fact, his treatment of policies is trite:

Yes, the Coalition has made more than its fair share of mistakes; nonetheless, one might have expected the prospect of a Shorten Labor government to induce more concern than it has.

Labor is, after all, committed to the largest peacetime tax rises since Federation, its energy policy threatens to convert a disaster into a catastrophe and its industrial ­relations policy risks replicating, albeit in a more benign macro­economic environment, the worst ­errors of the Whitlam years.

Each of those could have sent shivers down voters’ spines. ­Instead, they have been greeted with remarkable insouciance, even among their likely victims.

Blah blah blah:    The elephant in the room, dear Henry, dear Henry IS THAT THE COALITION HAS BEEN PARALYSED ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND (THEREFORE) ENERGY POLICY FOR 10 FREAKING YEARS.    THEY HAVE REEKED OF DISINGENUOUS CONCERN, UP TO AND INCLUDING THE CURRENT PM CARRYING COAL INTO PARLIAMENT WHILE NOW TRYING TO SELL HIMSELF AS WANTING TO MEET PARIS TARGETS.

If the Coalition wants to make a comeback, it needs to rid itself of climate change denialism.  My biggest regret about Turnbull's departure is that he did not call on the party to actually split to resolve that conflict once and for all.

Secondly, it needs to be centrist and not doggedly ideological about tax and economic policy, taking good ideas from where ever they may come; and in particular, not follow the poisonous populist corruption of the Right wing seen in the US which has become simply an intellectual embarrassment.  

So, yeah,  count me underwhelmed by his analysis, again.

In your own world

There's a MIT Technology Review article about this quantum experiment, but it sometimes throws up a paywall now, which is annoying.

So I'll go with this article instead:

A Wild New Quantum Physics Experiment Suggests That Objective Reality May Not Exist After All

It's all to do with the Wigner's friend thought experiment (now turned into an actual experiment). 

The actual arXiv paper is available at this link.  The abstract:

The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner's eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities. While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner's friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test. In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realise this extended Wigner's friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not.

Actually, it's worth downloading the paper and reading the discussion at the end.

Modulo the potential loopholes and accepting the pho-tons’ status as observers, the violation of inequality (2)implies that at least one of the three assumptions of freechoice, locality, and observer-independent facts must fail.Since abandoning free choice and locality might not re-solve the contradiction [5], one way to accommodate ourresult is by proclaiming that “facts of the world” canonly be established by a privileged observer—e.g., onethat would have access to the “global wavefunction” inthe many worlds interpretation [17] or Bohmian mechan-ics [18]. Another option is to give up observer indepen-dence completely by considering facts only relative toobservers [19], or by adopting an interpretation such asQBism, where quantum mechanics is just a a tool thatcaptures an agent’s subjective prediction of future mea-surement outcomes [20]. This choice, however, requiresus to embrace the possibility that different observers ir-reconcilably disagree about what happened in an exper-iment.

No nudes Buddha

Just one of those things one stumbles across on the internet:  an explanation as to why, despite India even back then having a tradition of asceticism involving nudity and little care for personal hygiene, Buddhism is not associated with such practices:

The Buddha mentioned that before his enlightenment he went naked which have led some to speculate that he was a follower of Jainism for at least some time (M.I,77). The âjãvakas and several other sects went naked and the Ekasàñaka ascetics only wore a small cloth over their genitals. Nakedness together with tearing the hair out, never cutting the hair and nails, allowing the hair become matted and never washing, were all believed to show an admirable detachment from the world.....

The Buddha made it a rule that monks should never go naked, even within their private quarters (Vin.II,121). He said: `Nakedness is unbecoming, unsuitable, improper, unworthy of an ascetic, not allowable and not to be done'(Vin.I,305). He objected to it on two grounds. The first was because like all austerities or surface changes, nudity does not lead to significant inner change. He said: `Not nakedness nor matted hair, not mud nor fasting, not lying on the ground, being unwashed or squatting on the heels will purify one who has not passed beyond doubt' (Dhp.141). He also objected to nudity because it contravened the norms of polite society for no good reason. Lady Visàkhà once saw some nuns bathing naked and commented: `Nakedness in women is ugly, abhorrent and objectionable'(Vin.I,293), which seems to have been the general opinion at that time. The Buddha wanted his monks and nuns to abide by the normal standards of decorum and good manners, the better to be able to communicate the Dhamma to others. He was also anxious that his monks and nuns should be distinct from those of other sects, inwardly but also outwardly. Because many of these other ascetics were either completely or partly naked or wore whatever they liked, the Buddha stipulated that his ordained disciples should wear a distinct and easily identifiable robe. 

 Sounds kind of sensible to me.  

Late summers

Brisbane did not have a terribly hot summer during December and January, but I had been commenting to people that my recollection seemed to be that high temperatures have in recent years been coming in late summer - February.

This year, it seems later still - record setting 41 degree days just west of Brisbane in mid March. 

Combined with the record breaking warm winter days in parts of Europe in February, this feels somewhat climate change-y to me.

Design issues

Slate writes that this may well be the cause of the Boeing 737 Max problem:

To maintain its lead, Boeing had to counter Airbus’ move. It had two options: either clear off the drafting tables and start working on a clean-sheet design, or keep the legacy 737 and polish it. The former would cost a vast amount—its last brand-new design, the 787, cost $32 billion to develop—and it would require airlines to retrain flight crews and maintenance personnel. 

Instead, it took the second and more economical route and upgraded the previous iteration. Boeing swapped out the engines for new models, which, together with airframe tweaks, promised a 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency. In order to accommodate the engine’s larger diameter, Boeing engineers had to move the point where the plane attaches to the wing. This, in turn, affected the way the plane handled. Most alarmingly, it left the plane with a tendency to pitch up, which could result in a dangerous aerodynamic stall. To prevent this, Boeing added a new autopilot system that would pitch the nose down if it looked like it was getting too high. According to a preliminary report, it was this system that apparently led to the Lion Air crash. 

If Boeing had designed a new plane from scratch, it wouldn’t have had to resort to this kind of kludge. It could have designed the airframe for the engines so that the pitch-up tendency did not exist. As it was, its engineers used automation to paper over the aircraft’s flaws. Automated systems can go a long way toward preventing the sorts of accidents that arise from human fecklessness or inattention, but they inherently add to a system’s complexity. When they go wrong, they can act in ways that are surprising to an unprepared pilot. That can be dangerous, especially in high-stress, novel situations. Air France 447 was lost in 2009 after pilots overreacted to minor malfunctions and became confused about what to expect from the autopilot.

The article notes that Boeing and Airbus basically split the commerical aircraft market between them.   Yet there was talk over the last few years of China trying to become a player too.  I wonder how that's going?   Oh - not so well:

Why China is no closer to rivalling Boeing or Airbus

At the risk of sounding a tad 4Chan...

I'm making my way through Umbrella Academy (on Netflix), and but after a promising first episode, the pace is too often dragging.     

In particular, I find it really starts to get more tedious whenever the two "sisters" are featuring heavily.  I realised this last night - the male members of this superhero family are all distinctive and interesting in their own oddball ways, and really make the females (especially mopey face Ellen Page) seem very dull in comparison.

Of course, it will probably turn out that Vanya will have a secret power that is, like, really powerful. But gee, she is written as a dull character.  As is her sister.

On the other hand, I am amused to see that culture warrior-ing against Captain Marvel has gotten nowhere, with the movie probably already over $500 million within days of release.  I might go see it, even though reviews are a little mixed.  As with all silly superhero stuff, my main question is:  is it funny enough?

Professor under attack

I see that Sinclair Davidson noted in his Open Forum yesterday that people have complained to his tertiary institution about various things:

That makes the complaints sound very ill founded, yet in the bigger picture, he deserves to be pilloried at every opportunity for running a blog full of offensive swill. 

Update:  typical example - from today, aviation expert "Tom":

Boeing’s mistake is selling its aeroplanes to Third World airlines employing Third World trash as pilots 

 Stand proud, Sinclair.  Stand proud.  

Sounds interesting

A very short review at Nature:

War Doctor
David Nott Picador (2019)
For more than 25 years, surgeon David Nott has lived periodically “in a liminal zone where most people have neither been nor want to go”: fields of war from Afghanistan to Bosnia. His memoir interweaves bold surgical feats on these sojourns in hell with his own psychological journey, a chronicle equally soaked in blood and insight. Now co-founder of a foundation training other physicians in this specialized work, Nott remains an important witness to the haunting human price of that modern triad: geopolitical instability, poor governance and ever more powerful weaponry.

Update:  an interesting, more detailed, review of the book appears in American New Statesman, by another author surgeon (who I think I heard interviewed on the ABC once.)  It opens as follows:

Most doctors do not want to be surgeons – indeed, many view them with a slight distaste, as a necessary evil. Surgeons are attracted to surgery by blood, by the excitement of operating and by the power over patients that comes with it, as well as by the technical challenges of the handwork involved. It is a power to help and to heal, but as with so many psychological truths, it is two-sided – the power can be attractive in its own right. All surgeons have to find a balance between these competing poles of altruism and egotism.

As with climate change denialism

David Frum tweeted this the other day:

and lots of people in comments noted that the same can be said about climate change denialism.  It gives them a thrill of being in the exclusive club of insiders who really know what's going on.

Is "paranoia" too strong a word for it?   Probably not, when the wingnut Right whips themselves into a frenzy about SOCIALISM and how its behind climate change; not to mention their idea that a vast network of scientists just deliberately and fraudulently adjust the temperature record to prove that climate change is real.   Firm belief in wildly improbable, or repeatedly disproved, conspiracy is paranoia.

Oh look - even Sinclair Davidson wants Labor to win the Federal election

Yet another - Weekend Update

*  It was my turn to cut my finger while cutting vegetables - I was experimenting with those stupid chef ways as to how to dice an onion.  Back to the old way, I think.

*  Watched "Get Out" on Netflix.   Look, it is very well made - very assured direction and acting, and the creepiness of the white family builds very nicely.   I can see how a key idea is satirically funny too, when written by a black comedian.   (Smart but physically bland white folk actually want to be sexy, physically powerful black folk.)  But really, when it turns out the big secret is actually like a cross between a Twilight Zone episode and The Man With Two Brains, it did lose me somewhat.  I read some reviews saying that the last act is a satire of 70's horror - but when the film works so well before that, a break into that kind of satire doesn't really make sense.  So I am not sure it really is meant to be that kind of satire at that point.   (I also read a user review claiming they were somewhat disturbed at the - largely black - excited audience reaction to the killings at the end.   If that is true, I would be a tad disturbed too.)   Anyway, it's interesting and worth watching - I suppose - but yes, did get way too much unreserved praise from the very liberal group that is mainstream American film critics.

*  Newspoll back to 54/46 TPP in favour of Labor.  Yay.  What changed in only a week?   I think it might be simply that with nearly all high profile Ministers leaving Parliament, the public doesn't see why it should support a side where everyone is leaving the sinking ship already.

Kant eat animals

It's a Philosophy Friday, with a rather good review by Thomas Nagel of a book by a Kantian academic on the matter of whether humans should be giving up on eating animals.

Kant thought we could eat them, because animals don't think as humans do, but this pro-Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard comes to a different conclusion.

Utilitarian ethics gets a look in as part of this review too.

Here are some extracts:

Since the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975, there has been a notable increase in vegetarianism or veganism as a personal choice by individuals, and in the protection of animals from cruel treatment in factory farms and scientific research, both through law and through public pressure on businesses and institutions. Yet most people are not vegetarians: approximately 9.5 billion animals die annually in food production in the United States, and the carnivores who think about it tend to console themselves with the belief that the cruelties of factory farming are being ameliorated, and that if this is done, there is nothing wrong with killing animals painlessly for food. Korsgaard firmly rejects this outlook, not just because it ignores the scale of suffering still imposed on farmed animals, but because it depends on a false contrast between the values of human and animal lives, according to which killing a human is wrong in a way that killing an animal is not.

Korsgaard deploys a complex account of morality to deal with this and many other questions. What makes the book especially interesting is the contrast between her approach and Singer’s. She writes, and Singer would certainly agree, that “the way human beings now treat the other animals is a moral atrocity of enormous proportions.” But beneath this agreement lie profound differences. Singer is a utilitarian and Korsgaard is a Kantian, and the deep division in contemporary ethical theory between these two conceptions of morality marks their different accounts of why we should radically change our treatment of animals. (Equally interesting is Korsgaard’s sharp divergence from Kant’s own implausible views on the subject. As we shall see, she argues persuasively that Kant’s general theory of the foundations of morality supports conclusions for this case completely different from what he supposed.)

To be honest, though, I'm not sure that Nagel's account of how utilitarianism views the matter would be agreed by all utilitarians:

Utilitarianism is the view that what makes actions right or wrong is their tendency to promote or diminish the total amount of happiness in the world, by causing pleasure or pain, gratification or suffering. Such experiences are taken to be good or bad absolutely, and not just for the being who undergoes them. The inclusion of nonhuman animals in the scope of moral concern is straightforward: the pleasure or pain of any conscious being is part of the impersonal balance of good and bad experiences that morality tells us to make as positive as possible.

But the existence or survival of such creatures matters only because they are vessels for the occurrence of good experiences. According to utilitarianism, if you kill an animal painlessly and replace it with another whose experiences are just as pleasant as those the first animal would have had if it had not been killed, the total balance of happiness is not affected, and you have done nothing wrong. Even in the case of humans, what makes killing them wrong is not the mere ending of their lives but the distress the prospect of death causes them because of their strong conscious sense of their own future existence, as well as the emotional pain their deaths cause to other humans connected with them.

Korsgaard, in contrast, denies that we can build morality on a foundation of the absolute value of anything, including pleasure and pain. She holds that there is no such thing as absolute or impersonal value in the sense proposed by utilitarianism—something being just good or bad, period. All value, she says, is “tethered.” Things are good or bad for some person or animal: your pleasure is “good-for” you, my pain is “bad-for” me. Korsgaard says that the only sense in which something could be absolutely good is if it were “good-for” everyone. In the end she will maintain that the lives and happiness of all conscious creatures are absolutely good in this sense, but she reaches this conclusion only by a complex ethical argument; it is not an axiom from which morality begins, as in utilitarianism.

And now we come to the really key part:

In Kant’s view, we impose the moral law on ourselves: it applies to us because of our rational nature. The other animals, because they are not rational, cannot engage in this kind of self-legislation. Kant concluded that they are not part of the moral community; they have no duties and we have no duties toward them.²

It is here that Korsgaard parts company with him. She distinguishes two senses in which someone can be a member of the moral community, an active and a passive sense. To be a member in the active sense is to be one of the community of reciprocal lawgivers who is obligated to obey the moral law. To be a member in the passive sense is to be one of those to whom duties are owed, who must be treated as an end. Kant believed that these two senses coincide, but Korsgaard says this is a mistake. The moral law that we rational beings give to ourselves can give us duties of concern for other, nonrational beings who are not themselves bound by the moral law—duties to treat them as ends in themselves:

There is no reason to think that because it is only autonomous rational beings who must make the normative presupposition that we are ends in ourselves, the normative presupposition is only about autonomous rational beings. And in fact it seems arbitrary, because of course we also value ourselves as animate beings. This becomes especially clear when we reflect on the fact that many of the things that we take to be good-for us are not good for us in our capacity as autonomous rational beings. Food, sex, comfort, freedom from pain and fear, are all things that are good for us insofar as we are animals.

I find this argument for a revision of Kant’s position completely convincing. Korsgaard sums up:

On a Kantian conception, what is special about human beings is not that we are the universe’s darlings, whose fate is absolutely more important than the fates of the other creatures who like us experience their own existence. It is exactly the opposite: What is special about us is the empathy that enables us to grasp that other creatures are important to themselves in just the way we are important to ourselves, and the reason that enables us to draw the conclusion that follows: that every animal must be regarded as an end in herself, whose fate matters, and matters absolutely, if anything matters at all.

 
I'm no doubt pushing the friendship if I cut and paste anything more, so go read the whole thing.

As I may have suggested before, I am started to worry that my brain and heart are becoming too easily persuaded against the interests of my taste buds and stomach that I should veer towards vegetarianism - or at least piscetarianism.   There is some way to go yet, though.... 

Roman army talk

At The Catholic Herald, a review of a book that is specifically about the Roman Army in the New Testament.

The interesting section from the review:

Units of the Roman army garrisoning Palestine at the time of Christ were not drawn from the famous legions. Use of the legions was limited to areas that were either of the greatest strategic significance, under ongoing threat or the scene of at least impending conflict. Less sensitive areas were garrisoned either by auxiliaries or by the armies of technically independent satellite states. Herod the Great and Herod Antipas were among those commanding satellite armies. Legionaries are to be encountered in portions of the New Testament which concern the travels of the Apostles. The “Roman soldiers” stationed in the Palestine of the Gospels were auxiliaries. These were, like legionaries, under the direct orders of the Roman government but, like satellite armies, they were recruited among men living in the area where they served and who did not hold Roman citizenship (a prerequisite for entry into the legions).

The Roman army in Palestine was, therefore, the army of a foreign imperial power without being an army of foreigners (the same combination later seen in the Indian Army of British India). Upholding imperial authority against possible rebellions was obviously among its purposes, but its normal daily functions were not those characteristic of an occupation force. Provision of labour for engineering work and policing were more typical of its responsibilities. In this, the auxiliary units serving in Palestine conformed to the standards of Roman soldiers elsewhere in an empire whose authority was generally acquiesced with.

Jews of the time were not, unlike later Christians, forced to participate in pagan rituals. Roman practices were not unusually brutal by the standards of the age. Depending on the disposition of local officials and military commanders, soldiers could either be little better than thugs running extortion rackets or upright administrators of justice.

This reminded me about Helen Dale's alt history novels:  I wonder, did they dealt with this accurately? 

Incidentally, I recently looked up the (not very many) reader reviews about the second book on some on line sites, and a prominent complaint was about the large number of  sex scenes: even more than the first book, apparently.  As I think I have said before, my impression overall is that, apart from a fan base of libertarians and assorted followers,  the books were not very well received. 

Plant compounds to the rescue

Any suggestions as to what may help stave off Alzheimers are welcome, I guess:

A diet containing compounds found in green tea and carrots reversed Alzheimer's-like symptoms in mice genetically programmed to develop the disease, USC researchers say.

Yay for fluoride

The Guardian has a story up about how Queensland is a good way to track the effectiveness of fluoridation of water:

Dentists and doctors in Queensland are reporting “extensive tooth decay” in parts of the state that refuse to add fluoride to the water supply, especially among children and the elderly.

One in four Queensland children admitted to hospital requires treatment for a dental condition, according to the most recent report by the state’s chief medical officer.

Indigenous children, many of whom live in communities without fluoride, have a staggering 70% rate of tooth decay. The rate is 55% among all Queensland children aged between five and 15.

The thing is, the State government has left it up to Councils to decide on the matter, with some not doing it citing cost concerns, but there are also anti-fluoride activists playing a role (or trying to) as well.  Which means you get evidence like this:

In Bundaberg, which does not have fluoride, the rate of tooth decay is about 2.5 times higher than the rest of the state. There were 244 admissions to hospital for dental conditions in the town last year. Across the state, the number is in excess of 4,000....

Neil Johnson, the foundation dean of the Griffith University dental school and an emeritus professor, has been involved in a long-running study of dental heath in a Cape York Indigenous community.

Fluoride was added to the water supply in 2006. About six years later, there had been “a considerable improvement” in the health of the community, and about a 40% reduction in tooth decay.