Can never get enough free will

Well, yeah, it might be going over old ground that you and I have read before, but this "long read" in The Guardian about the philosophical and scientific argument about the existence of free will is very good.   

Buddhism gets a mention too, and as it happens, I decided to start reading Karen Armstrong's 2000 biography (of sorts, given the lack of clearly authentic source material) on its founder while I was in Sydney last weekend.  (I read her book on Muhammad too, many years ago.)   Stylistically, I think she's a very good writer.   I'm not always sure that some of her points are valid, but she's a pleasure to read at all times.

Anyway, the free will article mentions Buddhism in this context:

This is what Harris means when he declares that, on close inspection, it’s not merely that free will is an illusion, but that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion: watch yourself closely, and you don’t even seem to be free. “If one pays sufficient attention,” he told me by email, “one can notice that there’s no subject in the middle of experience – there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own.” This is an idea with roots in Buddhism, and echoed by others, including the philosopher David Hume: when you look within, there’s no trace of an internal commanding officer, autonomously issuing decisions. There’s only mental activity, flowing on. Or as Arthur Rimbaud wrote, in a letter to a friend in 1871: “I am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought; I watch it, I listen to it.”

There are reasons to agree with Saul Smilansky that it might be personally and societally detrimental for too many people to start thinking in this way, even if it turns out it’s the truth. (Dennett, although he thinks we do have free will, takes a similar position, arguing that it’s morally irresponsible to promote free-will denial.)

Not sure that I have thought about this much before, but I guess you would have to say that Buddhism is the religion most consistent with the free will sceptics, or disbelievers, or whatever they like to be called.   But then again, if you go to Mahayana Buddhism, with its bodhisattvas taking the similar role of the  Catholic equivalent of the Communion of Saints, you could hardly say that it's very consistent with a lack of free will.   

Mahayana Buddhism seems more fun to me, anyway.  That's how people choose religion, no?

 

A complete and utter jerk (not to mention, danger to civil society)

Following up from last week's media attention to the fact that rich college boy Tucker made a "joke" about supporting a murderer of gay politicians,  we get this today:

 

He is just an obnoxious jerk of the highest order.
 

Still talking about Sydney

Things I still like about Sydney after all these years:

*   The antique feeling about some of the old underground subway stations in the city - like St James - with the iron rails and such like.  It reminds me of the London Underground, except not built for hobbits.  (I was surprised when I went to London that I had not known beforehand their tube trains and tunnels - or some of them, at least - seemed so narrow and small, like they were not really built for modern sized humans at all.)

*   David Jones Elizabeth Street:  not sure when it was last refurbished, but it's looking very spectacular now - it's the most perfect example of what a classic, upmarket department store should look like, if you ask me, putting even many overseas examples to shame.  Yet, you can still buy a danish in their food court for less than $5, while thinking about how you would not buy the French cheese at $170 a kg, but it's nice to know its there, for when I win Lotto. 

*  A youthful feel about its East Asian-centric multiculturalism.  No doubt this comes partly from always staying in the inner city, and Chinatown being pretty close to Town Hall and Central; but the city always feels to me not just multicultural, but to enjoy a particularly energetic, youthful sort of multiculturalism.  Melbourne feels more like old people from other countries, and any of their young are all absorbed from the age of 3 into that mind meld that makes them think AFL is the only important thing in the universe, instead of the reality that it's an eccentric local religion. 

Sydney looking pretty good

I was last in Sydney when the George Street light rail was still under its lengthy and expensive construction. But now that it's finished, George Street is looking pretty nice, and the light rail is very convenient to use:

Mind you, they're still doing something to a section of George Street down near Chinatown.  Don't know what.

I also liked the newish looking precinct near the convention centre:

That new Ribbon building will look good when finished:

And what's this public depravity happening at Circular Quay:

Adam Creighton would be ecstatic with the number of people at The Rocks yesterday:

Not where we were staying:

But a nice view of cables outside where we did stay:

Anyway, a very pleasant trip, as Sydney in good weather always is.

An Australian Colbert

So, I'm in a hotel and watching BBC World news, and this guy Aaron Heslehurst turns up with  30 business Talking Business show.

He's Australian; I've never heard of him before; and both his appearance and his, shall we say, excitable and somewhat mannered delivery reminds me very much of Stephen Colbert in his Colbert Report incarnation.

It's very odd.  Has Colbert ever noticed him?  

The technology works

I still strongly suspect that its not worth the amount of orbital space that it's taking up, but I have to admit, even with it being far from complete, the download speeds people get from Musk's Starlink satellites is pretty impressive:

 

If you can be bothered watching - he easily gets 123Mbps without fussing too much about setting up the antenna.

In Australia, it apparently costs $139 per month.  And the equipment, about $800.

Blows out our NBN satellite service out of the water, it seems. 

I still don't like Musk personally, though...

More than a touch of "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

Look, it's not that I expect indigenous people to say they are grateful for European colonisation.   Of course, their experience is considered negatively.  But does it really help the cause of modern indigenous descendants to refuse to acknowledge that some things out of  a more technologically advanced Western culture were beneficial to them (at least, once they started being treated as people)?

Dumb, unhealthy, angry.... and happy?

Some stuff on Twitter has got me thinking about that favourite topic:  How the Right Got Consumed by the Culture Wars and Went Nuts.

This, for example:

And this:

That article by Richard Hanania (who I don't know) briefly makes the point that lots of research has shown that people who say they are on the Right are happier than those on the Left.   And I used to think that made sense when I was younger - the motivation to social change that is typical of the Left seemed to me to come mainly from people from unhappy family backgrounds.  

But the typical anger profile has, in large part, flipped now.   Sure, on the Left, there's lot of angry emotion over identity politics, but not all of it is ill founded.   And comedy has moved to be completely liberal dominated.  Happy people laugh more, don't they?

I wonder - is social research into happiness (which I suspect is actually quite a slippery thing to measure accurately) lagging behind the current state of the Right?   Because you sure as hell don't get the impression from social and Right wing media that the current Trumpy/Murdoch led American Right (and those Australians who align with it) has been happy for years.   A boiling pot of resentment that their ideas are not overwhelmingly accepted (by and large) by media, academia, big business and the public - yes.   A vast echo chamber of resentment and conspiracy mongering to explain why they find they find themselves in a minority - yeah.  

I note that some on the Right who were eulogising Rush Limbaugh recently said how much humour was a part of his early career - but I suspect that in the last decade, as with Right wing media generally, the attempts at humour became less important and got pushed out by anger, resentment and conspiracy.  

So, does it come down to the question - to what degree can you be angry all the time, and still count yourself as "happy"?      

Things to ponder over...

It does look like how science fiction imagined it

It is kind of surprising that the SpaceX Starship lunar lander could, apparently, be this big, going by this NASA illustration:

It does make the future look very much like it has the size imagined by science fiction writers and illustrators of the 50's and 60's.

Mind you, the Starship does not go from Earth to lunar landing.  I don't quite understand, really:

The agency’s powerful Space Launch System rocket will launch four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft for their multi-day journey to lunar orbit. There, two crew members will transfer to the SpaceX human landing system (HLS) for the final leg of their journey to the surface of the Moon. After approximately a week exploring the surface, they will board the lander for their short trip back to orbit where they will return to Orion and their colleagues before heading back to Earth.

The firm-fixed price, milestone-based contract total award value is $2.89 billion.

 So is the gigantic lander going to be re-fuelled - how?   

Took a while for it to get there, but India and COVID is bad

I wrote this a little over a year ago:

 And now:

And:

So, the prediction in the Science article that India might reach 300 million or more cases last year appears way out; but on the other hand, if they hit and maintain 300,000 cases a day, they are going to have a couple of million added each week.  (And also, really, how accurate are case numbers from that country, anyway?   There must be many not being diagnosed.)    Not to mention the problem of variants being spread.

And in Brazil, the news is also dire, with their local strain hitting more young people than old:

 When Covid first hit Brazil last February it was, as elsewhere, considered mainly a threat to the ageing or infirm. A year later, as Brazil grapples with by far the most traumatic phase of its epidemic, a troubling trend has emerged, as intensive care units fill with younger patients such as Castro, some seemingly battling more severe forms of the disease. An unusually high number of infant fatalities has also been reported with more than 1,000 Brazilian babies dying last year compared with 43 in the US.

Brazilians have been particularly shocked by the case of Paulo Gustavo, a 42-year-old television star who has spent the past month fighting for his life in a Rio ICU despite being previously fit and healthy. Last week, the Brazilian Association of Intensive Care Medicine said that for the first time, most Covid patients in ICU were under 40 – a finding echoed by frontline doctors.....

The explanation for the generational shift remains unclear, although some suspect a highly transmissible new variant linked to the Brazilian Amazon may be partly to blame. “It’s clearly connected to the P1 variant,” said Marcos Boulos, a infectious disease specialist from the University of São Paulo who believes the virus is now both spreading faster and hitting young people harder.

Boulos said the vaccination of older Brazilians partly explained the increasing proportion of younger patients in ICU. “But there’s no doubt young people are being [physically] more affected by this new variant. It’s unquestionable.”

“Sometimes … these young people will die after just a few hours or days with very acute, severe illnesses – and you won’t find any comorbidity or factor to explain why. It’s dramatic,” added Boulos, pointing to similar suspicions that the South African variant might be affecting the young more.

Makes me despise Adam Creighton all the more.  But just seeing his face tends to have that effect on me....

Deaths in custody, noted

At the risk of starting to sound like Andrew Bolt lite (and I really, really don't want to), there was article earlier this month in the SMH by someone from ACU pointing out things that mainstream journalists seem very reluctant to point out about aboriginal deaths in custody:

Let’s set the record straight. Yes, any death in custody is sad, but the reality is people die. Whether they are in custody or not, Aboriginal or not, people die. The Australian Institute of Criminology, reporting in 2019 on the first 25 years since the royal commission, found the majority of prison deaths for Aboriginal prisoners were due to natural causes.

The next highest group was due to hanging, and investigations must get to the bottom of suggestions that two of the recent deaths in custody occurred when prisoners found hanging points in their cells: the commission recommended the removal of all hanging points.

However, there has been a decrease in the hanging death rate of Indigenous prisoners. Indeed, the 2019 report found that since 2003–04, the hanging death rate of Indigenous prisoners had been lower or the same as that of non-Indigenous prisoners. The report also noted that to that time, no Indigenous hanging deaths had occurred in police custody (as opposed to jail) since 2008–09.

Further, an Aboriginal person in custody is less likely to die than a non-Aboriginal person in custody, and this fact it rarely reported in the media. According to David Biles, a criminologist, who for three years headed the criminology research group of the royal commission: “In the early days of the royal commission, when I and a small team of researchers were able to prove unequivocally that Aboriginal people were slightly less likely to die in prison or police custody than non-Aboriginal people, we were met with derision and disbelief. We were even accused of disloyalty to the royal commission.”

The Australian Institute of Criminology publication states that the same remains true today. “Indigenous people are now less likely than non-Indigenous people to die in custody, largely due to a decrease in the death rate of Indigenous prisoners from 1999–2000 to 2005–06. ”

However, these objective facts have not stopped some Aboriginal leaders from portraying an alternative narrative.

But on the matter of the high profile death in custody in the US (George Floyd), Sinclair Davidson's Home for Australian Rednecks is no doubt hopping.  Let's check:

Uhuh.

The Fox News, Tucker Carlson response to this will be ...interesting.  And, more than likely, appalling.

Update:   more from the Catholic conservatives of Catallaxy -

(And yeah, Pelosi did say something silly and kinda stupid.  But it's small change in offensiveness compared to the Right's attitude that it's the end of American civilisation caused by people being too sympathetic to a dead black guy.)

Update 2:   As expected, Carlson acts like the full blown jerk that he is:

 

It's not just a "not listening" problem - it's a "needing something concrete to listen to" problem

We're having another bout of "why won't governments stop incarcerating aborigines at such a high rate" commentary, because the high incarceration rate explains the high deaths in custody rate.    A lot of it is coming from aboriginal activists and academics.

I will find this more than mere useless handwringing when said academics - and all journalists sympathetic to the problem - come up with the very specific plans to deal with stuff like this without incarceration being the ultimate step:

2012:

The former manager of the community store at Kaltjiti in northern South Australia, says law and order has broken down, and the community is out of control.

Kaltjiti is in the Pitjantjatjara Lands, about 137 kilometres from Marla on the Stuart Highway.

About 200 people live there.

Allan Tremayne says he and his wife have lived and worked in other Aboriginal communities, but have never seen anything like the hostility they encountered in Kaltjiti.

He says they left before Christmas, following three months of physical and verbal abuse from customers, and after witnessing countless acts of violence.

"There is no respect for Australian law that we all have to live by," he said.

"What is even worse is there does not appear to be any respect for traditional law.

"Sometimes traditional law is far more effective than the white man's law.

"But there is no respect for either.

"The place is totally out of control as far as I am concerned."

 2020:

A retired remote area doctor who worked with murdered outback nurse Gayle Woodford has told a coronial inquest that Fregon was the most violent community she had ever worked in.

Key points:

• A coronial inquest began on Monday into the murder of nurse Gayle Woodford in 2016
• Former GP Glynis Johns told the inquest Fregon was the most violent place she had worked
• She suggested the community should be closed

Mrs Woodford's body was found in a shallow grave near Fregon in South Australia's remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in March 2016

Also in 2020:

Extra police officers have been flown into a remote Indigenous community in Far North Queensland after the fatal stabbing of a 37-year-old man on New Year's Day and a riot overnight, with police saying the situation remains volatile.  

More than 250 residents at Aurukun in Cape York took to the streets in the early hours of this morning, armed with star pickets, metal bars and spear guns.

Six homes were burnt to the ground and a further two are now uninhabitable.

The town's police station and government buildings were put in lockdown as an angry mob went from house to house "seeking retribution" after the man was stabbed in the stomach on New Year's Day.

So, not only was remote community housing destroyed, but hundreds fled the town out of fear of further clan violence, no doubt causing over-crowding in some other aboriginal person's house.

In 2021:

It is that widely held view — that youth crime is getting out of control — that in part explains Townsville's active vigilante community.

But Brett Geiszler said such people are misguided.

The youth in question are mainly, it would seem, aboriginal.  And stealing cars and causing (sometimes fatal) car accidents in them is what has brought it to national attention. 

Also in 2021:  Alice Springs appears to have the same problem:

Mario Nishikewa, the security guard, has lived in the town for the past decade and said he has watched the community deteriorate.

Police are forced to use capsicum spray and taser the man with the shovel, who they eventually corner in a carpark, where he surrenders.

Mr Nishikewa said the people who were just arrested will likely be released.

"The same day - the same day. The sad thing is you can have somebody that assaulted you, come out the next day and smile at you," he said.

And, again, just recently in 2021:

In some of the Northern Territory's biggest remote communities Aboriginal organisations say youth crime is now so out of control that they can no longer deliver essential services.

They had hoped after the Northern Territory's Royal Commission into Youth Justice they'd get more support to help break their young people out of a cycle of offending.

 

Did Creighton & Fritjers notice?

In the New Daily:

Fears COVID lockdowns would prompt global ‘suicide epidemic’ shot down by latest stats

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health has been profound, but the widespread warnings that it would see suicide rates soar has proved to be a myth.

“If anything, the opposite has been true,” according to Lifeline chairman John Brogden.

 (In truth, I know the situation is a little complicated in the US.  Still...)

As seen on Twitter

This made me laugh, and I have never even owned a cat:

Interesting, but...

The woman in the video makes the point I have before - you really need more context than the short video clips being enthusiastically accepted by some as proof of UFOs.  But on the other hand, we do seem to have Pentagon past or present officials indicating that there is substantial evidence out there of genuinely unidentified flying objects.  I mean, the account of the pilot as to how his tic tac sighting went I have always said is pretty compelling.

There is another video out, maddeningly short and with no context again, from 2019 which is genuinely from the US Navy, but what are we looking at?:

 

I don't find it all that compelling, because the flash rate looks normal aircraft flashing lights, doesn't it?  Is it something out of focus, or is the triangular shape real?  Was it filled for routine purposes, or because it looked weird to the crew? 

It's annoying the way we're getting this piecemeal stuff released.

Why did it have to be... clots in the brain?

Just a random Friday thought for you:   a large part of the PR problem for the AstraZeneca and now Johnson & Johnson vaccines is (I reckon) that the exceeding rare but very dangerous side effect is one that sounds like a particularly nasty way to die:

In another hiccup [you don't say?] for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, data suggest it is in fact linked to blood clots that have formed in the brains of some vaccinated people, the European Medicines Agency announced April 7....

The EMA had previously concluded that the vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, was not linked to blood clots overall (SN: 3/18/21). But experts were uncertain about 18 case reports of blood clots in the sinuses that drain blood from the brain, a rare condition called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis or CVST...

As of March 22, countries had reported 62 cases of CVST out of around 25 million people who got the AstraZeneca vaccine. There were also 24 reported cases of clots in veins that drain blood from the digestive system, called splanchnic vein thrombosis or SVT. Eighteen of the people with CVST or SVT died. 

It's only human to have risk assessment affected by the imagination of what it would be like to die from the particular danger.   I mean, do we really blame people for breaking out in a sweat if they hear someone yell "shark" at the surf beach while their kids are out in the waves, even though they will stand a million times bigger chance of dying in a car accident on the way home? 

And I mean, while I know a stroke is, basically, often just a single blockage in the brain, the idea that could develop several clots at once sounds very dire and, um, icky?

It's also the fact that the clotting problem arises (so it seems) a few days after the injection.   People are, I imagine, now going to be hypersensitive to headaches and stomach cramps post vaccination.   If it were a case of some people dying within, say, an hour due to immediate reaction, you could at least have people hanging around the clinic until the danger period is over. 

This is all very unfortunate, but people really hate the idea of dying accidentally from something meant to prevent death.

I haven't decided what I would do if told the AstraZeneca is available next month:  call me unscientific, if you want, but if I'm not planning on heading overseas soon, I would just as soon wait until the vaccine which does not cause clots in the brain is available.

Update:   speaking of serious blood clotting - I seemed to recall that was the way the outer space  bug in The Andromeda Strain killed people.  I was right:

The Wildfire team, led by Dr. Jeremy Stone, believes the satellite—intentionally designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms for bio-weapon exploitation—returned with a deadly microorganism that kills through nearly instantaneous blood clotting. 

Maybe my unreasonable fear of death by massive blood clot can be put on Michael Crichton.

Musk on the brain

 I hope the Chinese aren't interested in the technology.

Update:   an article at The Conversation explains the technology.   It also goes into the good and bad potential of using a brain link to swap information with another human or an AI.

George makes a case, but not entirely sure if I agree

George Will, who retains at least some credibility as a conservative due to his anti-Trump attitude, makes an interesting comparison between the technological changes that sped up communication in 19th century America (rail and the telegraph) and internet communication today.

I had missed this about Lincoln (my bold):

In the 1850s, the rhythm of Abraham Lincoln’s political career had been quickened to what he called the “eloquent music” of railroads that whisked him around the North and into the West. And as telegraph lines marched six miles a day toward the Pacific, the velocity of news — and fake news about Washington burning, enslaved people rebelling, President James Buchanan resigning, Republicans sharing their wives, Lincoln being a cannibal — increased exponentially.

Will's conclusion:

Today, the Internet and social media enable instantaneous dissemination of stupidity, thereby creating the sense that there is an increasing quantity of stupidity relative to the population’s size. This might be true, but blame it on animate, hence blameworthy, things — blowhards with big megaphones, incompetent educators, etc. — not technologies. Technologies are giving velocity to stupidity, but are not making people stupid. On Jan. 6 the Capitol was stormed by primitives wielding smartphones that, with social media, facilitated the assembling and exciting of the mob. But mobs predate mankind’s mastery of electricity.

Humanity is perpetually belabored by theories that human agency is, if not a chimera, substantially attenuated by the bombardment of individuals by promptings from culture, government propaganda and other forces supposedly capable of conscripting the public’s consciousnesses. A new version of such theorizing is today’s postulate that digital technologies are uniquely autonomous forces in need of supervision or even rearrangement by government because they rewire the brains of their users.

Like railroads and the telegraph, today’s technologies have consequences about how and what we think. They do not relieve anyone of responsibility for either.

Maybe Zuckerberg encouraged him to write this column?

A plausible rumour

 It feels so long since we had a not embarrassing Federal government.   

And what about this Andrew Laming?   Seems you can be a jerk in politics (and life) for years and years before members of the Party will finally act on it.

Not important in the scheme of things...

....but honestly, this really was one of the strangest and silliest ideas someone in Navy/Defence ever came up with: