The Bet

I gave Nick Smith his keys back - thanks for the loan of your apartment dude. Perhaps I ought to take this chance to record a bet me and Nick have. After a year of close observation (we shared an office when he was in Essex) I came to the conclusion that Nick was moving Rightwards. (Hurrah!) So when I was last in Chicago, at MPSA, I bet him that by 2020 [I think?] he would have voted Republican. If I win the bet, he has to buy a year's subscription to Socialist Worker - which by then will obviously be a huge punishment. On the other hand, if I lose, I have to buy the subscription - which is a huge punishment already.

Right now I'm pessimistic about my chances. Bush's strategy for reelection appears to be to use human rights as a wedge issue. That is, not only is he playing the terrorism card; he's also being extreme enough for it to be a defining difference between him and his opponents. They care about human rights for terrorists, while he's focussed on protecting Americans. Nice.

... and just one more.

No more Habeas Corpus for people in Guantanamo if the current administration gets its way.

The dangerous profession of software engineer

On a similar note to the previous post, but a little more clearcut, here's a NY Times story about a Canadian software engineer who, on false information provided by the Mounties, was detained by the CIA as he changed planes in New York, handed over to the Syrians and tortured. The most damning chunk actually comes from a US official:
"American officials have not discussed the case publicly. But in an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home."

The Mohammed Salah case

After class I turned up to what seemed an interesting talk. Mohammed Salah is being tried in Chicago for racketeering. A member of his defence team, and his wife, came to describe the case. The headline was "Justifying Torture in American Courts" - the reason being that the prime evidence against Mr Salah was obtained by confession in an Israeli prison, after he was allegedly tortured.

I left the talk with no strong belief in Mr Salah's innocence, despite the defence lawyer's impassioned speech. (He was, incidentally, among several defendants found civilly liable for the death of an American citizen killed in Israel by a Hamas attack. The trial took place 2 weeks after 9/11. ) The question is whether the court will allow evidence gathered under duress. More worrying for me is that the judge has heard prosecution evidence in secret without the defence being allowed to challenge it, and that evidence that supports Salah's claim of torture has been ruled inadmissible. Is this how liberal democracies ought to do things?

I feel so manly

I just replaced the screen in my Portege R100 laptop. I used the instructions from Screentekinc - everything was much as described there. There are four screws under rubber pads at the top of the R100 screen, and six under small square pads around the bottom and the sides. All of these can be removed with a sharp knife - I used a Stanley knife. You'll need a very small Phillips screwdriver to unscrew the screws. (Or you can just use the Stanley knife. But you'll probably damage the screws and your blade. Yeah, that's what I did.)

After that I unclicked the plastic surround to my screen - it requires a bit of a pull and is best started from the bottom left, once you've got the first bit the rest comes easily. Then you are face to face with the screen. The rest is pretty much as in the tutorial. You pull out the data plug (having first removed any sticky tape holding it down), and the inverter plug which provides the power. (You did remove the battery, right?) To remove the inverter plug it's much easier to unscrew the inverter first (it's the long thin circuitry on the right hand side of the screen, held in place by a single screw). Then you have to pull hard and use your fingernails to get the inverter plug out.

Once that is all done you just replace your screen, plug the new screen back into the inverter and the data connection, sticky tape it up, slot your plastic surround back in and screw everything back in place. Pah! Child's play.

Party strategies tournament results

The results from Fowler and Laver's Tournament of Party Strategies (previously blogged) are up here. I was chuffed to see that my strategy (Raptor) came in 8th - just beating Hunter, the pre-submitted strategy on which it was based. They plan to rerun the tournament using only those strategies which beat Hunter. I'm optimistic that with the smaller set of strategies used, Raptor (which uses a predefined step size to recognize and cooperate with conspecifics) will continue to do well.

Interestingly, Fowler and Laver would also like to develop evolutionary rules that allow successful party strategies to evolve and mutate. They worry about how to parametrize party strategies. One option would be to use genetic programming (not to be confused with genetic algorithms): each party strategy is a parse tree of R statements, and each round, the parse tree is set to work on the inputs, and outputs a new location. Mutations could consist of prunings and duplications of the tree, as well as adding new branches.

Cosmic injustice

Term is about to start. Clemency just came on gmail chat and told me she's got a new job working for these guys. I do economic theory. Clemency eats organic chocolate cake. Go figure.

skype

Madly busy - flathunting plus Maths class - but have found time to get Skype. If anyone else has it, drop me a line with your username.

he should be at the Tuesday seminar

He doesn't just fly at dusk, you know...

Chicago

Well, this is the first time I have a few minutes to spare. I arrived hot off the plane and crashed at Nick Smith's place - thanks Nick. The following Monday, Math camp began at Northwestern and my first discovery was that Evanston is a solid 90 minute commute from Southside Chicago - minimum. Often, 2 hours. So I began desperately searching for an apartment. I've found a couple of possible places and meanwhile, a kind couple has agreed to put me up a little closer to Evanston. They have two golden labradors, one of whom has the amiable habit of putting her head through your legs and staying there.

Math camp. As you may know, in Math camp you are not allowed to say your name, instead you have to say "this mathematician":

"SIR! THIS MATHEMATICIAN WOULD APPLY THE KAKUTANI FIXED POINT THEOREM SIR!"

Math camp is quite hardcore. One class from 9 until 12 with a ten minute break, then lunch, then problem set solutions at 1 pm, then you spend the afternoon trying to solve the next day's problems. It's particularly fun when you then have to look for apartments and commute 2 hours home.

I thought that Kellogg would be full of ruthless MBA sharks (yay), but they haven't arrived yet. Instead, everyone is a PhD student, but some of them are kind of business PhDs - a concept that makes my head hurt. You mean, you're a PhD student, but at some point you might make actual money?

Met up with John O'Brien last night. Some of you may remember John from my 29th birthday party - think extremely loud American. We went out with 6 firemen from San Francisco.
Let me rephrase that. We went out heterosexually, with 6 heterosexual firemen from San Francisco. Whenever somebody said "what do you guys do?" they all said "WE'RE FIREMEN" and I just nodded vaguely. Great night.

This mathematician was late for Math camp this morning ("drop and give me 100 definite integrals!")

I've got a temporary office with a computer and (at the moment) nobody else in it. Booya!

APSA is here and I'm missing it. I want to know the results of the Tournament of Party Strategies. Me and Thomas Pluemper both submitted something. I really want to see the complete ranking....

Lucy Reid is getting married. W00t! (Please try not to screw it up like some people we know, Lucy. Thanks. Nothing personal, Tzvi.)

mobile phone protests

protesting via mobile phone in the philippines
(via wired.com, via boingboing.net)

in Chicago and will post more when I have some time.

Counterfactuals

Valéria asked me whether I thought the British empire was a good thing.

There are all sorts of interesting things one can say about the good and bad things the British did. But ultimately to answer a question like this, which is a very reasonable one to ask, we need to compare what actually happened with what would have happened supposing that the Empire had not come into being. Which of these two courses of history would have been better? This is just the same sort of question political scientists are always asking and answering. For example, after performing a logit regression (a piece of statistics where the dependent variable is binary, for example, did a particular person turn out to vote or not?) we may say: if this person had been a woman instead of a man, but everything else had been the same - if she had had the same social class, education, religiosity and so on - she would have been ten per cent more likely to vote. Maybe in some cases the regression will be misspecified or based on inaccurate data or whatever. But in principle this can be valid.

If our historical knowledge - the application of our social science knowledge - is good enough, we can answer counterfactuals about history. For example, we can guess that Hong Kong would have been worse off if it had been colonized by the Portuguese and not by the British. We can make this guess without a deep understanding of history, because Macau, a small island rather like Hong Kong, actually was colonized by the Portuguese, and has not to date been nearly as economically successful as Hong Kong. Again, our guess is not infallible. Perhaps there is something we don't know that is specific to Hong Kong. But it is a reasonable guess.

Can we make the same kind of assessment of the Empire as a whole?

To do that we need to imagine an alternative history in which the British Empire does not come into being. Several problems at once present themselves. First, we need a coherent story. Why do the British fail to colonize large parts of the world in the 19th century? Well, they could have been unable to, if they had not had an industrial revolution. But now we are answering a very different question: what would have happened if the British had not had an industrial revolution? The consequences for human history would have been much broader than the question of empire. Or perhaps, the British simply chose not to pursue their empire. But then we run into a worry about psychological plausibility. For humans not to pursue power and empire when they can runs counter to the general tendency of most of history. If we assume this is what happened, are we assuming a different kind of humanity? Gentler and kinder, or simply more prone to take its own religious ideology (the Sermon on the Mount, say) seriously? Again, that's a different question from Valéria's question about the Empire.

It is not that we cannot coherently imagine histories without a British Empire. We can imagine many. The problem is that none of them will cut the Empire neatly out of the world without cutting a great deal more besides. Another problem is that there are very many of these histories: we do not have a useful criterion for choosing which one to use as a point of moral comparison. And many of these histories will be incomplete (no use for moral evaluation) without answering a lot of questions which, again, are irrelevant to what Valéria wants to know. For example, we could imagine that the French defeat the British in the eighteenth century struggle for power. Then we will need to know whether there is a counterfactual French empire, how far it will extend, and what it will be like. Our answers to these questions will determine how we evaluate the counterfactual history. Finally, when we construct our alternative history, we need to know what the British themselves were doing (instead of having an empire). After all, they were important actors in world history. To keep our counterfactual relevant, we will need them to be doing almost exactly what they actually did, except without having an empire. But this is rather like imagining a vertebrate except without its backbone. The empire was central to what the British were doing at the time. Again, we can always think of other things they might have done, but the problem is that there are too many of these alternative courses of action, all of them with widely differing impacts on history and human happiness.

Small-scale "what ifs" are answerable and important. (That's why I believe in social science and not just in, say, narrative history.) It's easy to believe that large scale "what ifs", which look just the same grammatically, must be equally meaningful. But these considerations lead me to believe they are not. At some point of scale, we lose the ability to construct the right kind of counterfactual.

Fullah dolls

The Middle Eastern barbie. Check out the veil.


From http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/ via http://www.blogiraq.net

Laurence, you weren't ambling, you were flânant.

back in São Paulo

... after 4 days in Rio. Rio is beautiful - Ipanema beach has big green waves which throw up explosions of powdery surf and the whole city has huge hills growing through it. But frankly São Paulo is bigger, and as far as cities go I'm a slut for size.

There seems to be a typical Carioca (Rio inhabitant) face, a kind of pleasant squinting expression. Paulistanos claim that this is a Lamarckian adaptation, from screwing up their faces to figure out more ways to extract money from São Paulo. I'm just repeating what I've heard, you understand.

In Fortaleza

... in an internet cafe, reviewing a Political Science article. Two cubicles down, a couple of teenagers are looking at porn.

OTOH

I am sure that nobody who really knows me could ever describe me as misanthropic. Still, it is only fair to record that shortly after writing my last entry, I had a very delicious pizza with the nice and interesting proprietress of an art shop. So not everything in "Jeri" can be bad. And she also told me that between March and May things are much quieter and the beach is a beautiful white. Your mileage may vary.

Jeri (Not Safe For Work)

Spent the last four days in Jericoacoara. Once an idyllic fishing village on Brazil's Northern coast, it was discovered by the hippies and is now a thriving tourist resort - thriving on its own evil spume, that is. Every evening the visitors to Jericoacoara gather on top of a nearby sand dune to watch the sun set. This is a diluted relic of an earlier tradition in which, after sundown, the hippies would have a communal circle jerk and then kill and eat one of their number in a bonding ritual to prevent outsiders ever learning about "The Beach". Well, it hasn't worked and now the town is full of beach bums, preening fools and creepy older men with their teenage girlfriends. The word Jericoacoara is often shortened to "Jeri" in much the same unspeakably self-satisfied way that Wivenhoe's inhabitants call it Wiv. Coincidentally, "Geri" is also the name of a singer and former Spice Girl who, like Jericoacoara, fucking sucks.

The first people I met in "Jeri" were three American sex tourists who kindly showed me their holiday pictures, of fellatio by some poor godforsaken puta from Fortaleza. Thanks, fuckers. The second person was a gentleman from Sao Paulo who had spent twenty years cycling around Brazil in order to discover his culture. At the end of this process he had worked out that he enjoyed reggae music and smoking dope. I am sure it will surprise you to learn that his conversation had a pecuniary goal: his ultimate aim was to "mend his bicycle" and with this in mind, he attempted to sell me a bracelet made of anaconda skin. I hope that by now a kind of general picture is forming in your mind.

In fairness it must be said that an hour's walk East from the town there is a solid mile of fabulously beautiful beach surrounded by rock formations and beaten by the Atlantic surf. You will have it all to yourself because none of the tourists in Jeri can get the brain cells together to leave the town beach, which, by the way, has been invaded by some kind of black, stinking seaweed, perhaps meant by God as some kind of metaphor.

More insight

I've worked it out: Brazilians are cockneys.

• They pronounce words the same way. Ask a black cab driver to say Costa del Sol and it'll be just the way a Brazilian would pronounce it, i.e. "de'w so'w".
• The Portuguese for "hi" is "oi" which must be short for "Oi oi my son!"
• Brazilians from the Northeast love forro, which is basically just knees-up Mavver Brahn with a funny beat.

Like looking at the future

Here's one of my (superficial but hopefully fresh) impressions. Imagine giving Britain's metropolitan elite [TM] - the chattering classes, the Islington set - total social control for twenty years, and imagine that their ideas actually worked. Well, that's Brazil in certain aspects. For example, it's ridiculously racially integrated. There is a complete chaos of ethnic types, and the melting pot seems genuinely to have melted here - compared to, say, the US. I don't say there's no racial injustice or discrimination. But there are no hard and fast colour lines.

Or take sexuality. In a town - OK, a university town - of one of the poorest states of the Northeast, they hold an annual gay pride parade, by golly. Picture that in our Northeast? Well... eesh, perhaps.

In this particular way, Brazil seems like a glimpse into our future, or at least like science fiction.