Casetlejo Rock Sculpture

I'm deep in the generation of a number of complicated ideas at the moment. There's stuff on statistics, algebraic geometry, the idea of revolution and Debord's idea of the spectacle, and various other things. However, it's all still in the oven, and you know what they say about opening oven door when the cakes are cooking.

So here's some pictures of a rock sculpture someone made on the beach at Castelejo on the Algarve. It's got a slightly Andy Goldsworthy look about it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't him.

Whoever it was, is pretty good at this stuff. It didn't survive a couple of tides, but then that's the point of these sculptures: that they are temporary and exist in the documentation.

New Year's Resolutions: The 2012 Mix

Of the Resolutions for 2011, I missed on: city breaks, reading all the books I'd bought but hadn't read yet, project Coriander, and I thought about my age rather more than I should.

City breaks are expensive, especially compared to twice as many days on the coast, because city hotels are expensive, unless I stay in some Holiday-Inn chain at the end of the transport lines. Reading the books is a never-ending task, as I keep buying new ones. Age? I know damn well I'm thinking about that as a way of staying away from women I know I won't choose well and will therefore want to be away from in a very short time. So those items are off the resolutions list. On the other hand, if I don't resolve to take holidays I won't, as not taking holidays is what I do by default, and if I don't count the gym as a resolution, I'm falling into the trap of making last year's resolutions this year's routines. Which is a fine way of filling my diary before I start. So I'm going to drop the ones that don't work and keep the ones that do and I need to make an effort to do.

What do I want to change about what I did in 2011? There's the not-having-a-girlfriend bit, which is a little beyind the scope of New Year's Resolutions. There's the fact that my Saturdays seem to go by in a haze of nothing-much and I have a very high reluctance to venture into the outside world then - unless it's sunny, I wake up early and the Metropolitan Line is working, when I may well go for breakfast in Notting Hill. I need to do something about Saturdays - I know I should be able to do nothing all day - except cook, iron and clean bits of the house (that's "nothing" when you're single) - and not get a guilty conscience about it, but I don't. Call it "Make Saturday Special" for the moment and make it mean something later.

So here's the list for 2012.

1.  Spitalfields isn't Soho - get over it and set off for the Central Line prompt at 17:00

2.  go to the gym at least three days a week

3.  not eat chocolate late in the evening and avoid excess carbs at lunchtime

4.1 take two week-long holidays abroad and a couple of short breaks in the UK

4.2 one weekend, take the sleeper to and from Penzance

5. spend more time researching stuff that's useful to my various projects

6  do my "36 Views of St Mary Axe" photography project

7  read "Finding Time Again" so I've "read Proust"

8. Make Saturday Special - details to follow

9. make the best of the seven-week Olympic period

10. errr... that's it.

(Resolution 9 does not mean what you think it means.)

So let's see how I do with this. I need to do a couple for work as well, but I'm not going to think about those just yet.

The Epistemological Problems of Privacy: (2) Why You Should Have Screamed

Privacy and secrecy are not epistemic concepts, and have nothing to do with ideas about the nature of knowledge. Epistemology is, or has been up to now, a normative theory: it is about what something should be if it is to be knowledge and what sorts of things can be knowledge-holders. What used to make the subject tricky was the need to include the revelations of faith, and what makes it tricky now is that the most useful and successful scientific theories, theories that send satellites to distant planets and identify brain tumours, are actually false. So if knowledge must be true, it excludes our best physical theories and is danger of being trivial, but how do we distinguish between "good" falsity and "bad" falsity? And no, mere predictive accuracy is not enough.

Privacy is the condition of being unobserved by your enemies - those who would seek to use what they observe to frustrate your intentions and plans, to ridicule or otherwise harm or irritate you. (I'm assuming you don't mind being observed by your friends.) Privacy is what we need when we are doing things other people disapprove of, or, of course, when we are living in a police state. Any right to privacy has to be conditional, because murderers, kidnappers, drug dealers and other assorted carteliers don't have a right to expect that they can hatch their plans un-monitored.

Secrecy is the condition of being kept from public knowledge, a secret is something that only a few people know and they intend to keep it that way. The contents of my kitchen cabinet are not a secret because I take no steps to hide them, the contents of an encrypted journal that I keep on my computer are a secret. Until, that is, some reads it and publishes it to my enemies - then it isn't a secret. A friend who says nothing about what they have read is "keeping the secret".

Neither privacy not secrecy feel to me like the kind of ideas that will take the weight of a philosophical debate: some robust, commonsense legal discussion, maybe. Anyway, the key ideas here aren't really secrecy and privacy, what's important is permission and control.

An unstated but driving idea in Western (Greco-Roman) culture is that we can, should and indeed must, control what others know about us. In the past people did so by behaving in a measured, self-controlled manner, not "giving away" their thoughts, feelings or plans, keeping a "poker face", behaving one way in public or in front of their enemies, and another in the supposed "privacy of our home" or with our friends. Many homes were not actually very private places - with servants coming and going at all times. There was little to know about us, simply because very few people did much and that infrequently. There was word-of-mouth amongst traders about people who didn't pay bills, but no credit-rating agencies, and very few people paid taxes or used banks. On the other hand, in a small town, everybody knew everybody else, if only by sight, because they all went to Church Sunday (or Saturday or whenever).

This worked fairly well for thousands of years, until, to pick a symbolic date, the first urban myth about the job applicant who was turned down because the employer's HR snoops found a Facebook photograph of them smoking a spliff on the beach at Goa. There had been fears about Big Brother government databases, but these subsided as governments and IT contractors showed time and time again that they were simply not capable of constructing such things, and as the huge costs of high-quality data cleansing, verification and stewardship dawned on everyone. (I would also like to think that by the 2000's governments realised that such systems would in practice be run offshore in countries over which they had no jurisdiction, or if onshore, then by people who would have no stake in the proper running and data-fill of the systems, and that the security and economic risks were simply too great.)

The issue is about who controls who uses what information about us. It isn't even about ownership of the data: the data a bank has about my current account transactions wouldn't exist without its computers or my activity, so we're both creators and owners of the data. I create it, they store it. Ownership isn't the way into this conundrum. It's data-about-me, and what makes that different from data-about-alpha-centauri is that I am a person, and alpha-centauri isn't. As a Western person, I expect to control the information you have about me - as I allow you to control the information I have about you. Applying this principle, if the banks want unlimited access to the information they gather about us, then in return we get to be able to gather unlimited information about the banks. Which their Directors do not want us to have.

The point is that I provide the bank with information so that it can act on my behalf, and that's it. The bank will use my payment record to make judgements about how much it is willing to lend me and for how long, and that feels like a legitimate use of the data. My record on paying my bills is a legitimate matter of public interest, even if the "public" is somewhat limited. Sending me "targeted" junk mail, or giving me discriminatory pricing based on my behavioural propensities derived from a model based on "my" data amongst others, doesn't feel as legitimate.

None of this has anything to do with the theory of knowledge. It does have to do with the management of information and data, and many of these issues have been raised and addressed. How long should "personal data", which I understand as data-about-people-and-what-we-do, be kept by what kinds of organisation? What protection should various kinds of data have? What purposes can various types of data be used for, without the explicit permission of the person-or-their-activities-it-is-about? Is personal data-driven advertising just a narrowcast version of broadcast advertising or is there a qualititaive difference involved?

Far from being less valuable than, say, pharmaceutical research, personal data is much more valuable to business and the State. Of course, it is transient and by definition non-universalisable, and so not the kinds of facts that science and technology are about. It doesn't tell us about "the world", only about some stranger in another town whom some company thinks will be a sucker for this special offer. Which is cosmically meaningless, even if all those strangers add up to a lot of money.

Perhaps the real task for epistemologists is to develop a criterion for "cosmically meaningful" information: the kind of knowledge that should be defended by the Western Liberal Rationalist knowledge-is-preferable-to-ignorance creed. This might sound simple, but I suspect that if it's simple then it's going to be trivial. I'd like weapons research not to be preferable to ignorance, but how about research into body armour? I'd like to think that medical research is preferable to ignorance, but some of the results are very, very expensive and have marginal effects or don't cure but merely manage symptoms, and the drug companies are very good at PR designed to get such drugs on the NICE list, thus costing the taxpayer money that should be spent elsewhere. David Hume never thought about these issues - nor has anyone had to prior to 1945.

The privacy and secrecy debates in the press and legal circles are a way of having a debate about who controls data-about-me-and-what-I-did. Very, very large sums of money are involved. If Facebook can't use what we "Like" to target advertising at us, it has de minimus financial value as a business, and neither does Google. The commercial basis of the Internet is that it offers highly targeted advertising, but if we can control ourselves out of it, the Internet starts to lose its commercial value. And it employs a lot of people who won't get jobs that pay as well anywhere else. Privacy and secrecy are about "the economy, stupid". Not the theory of knowledge.

The Epistemological Problems of Privacy: (1) The Conference Outline

I ran across the prospectus for a conference on the "Epistemological Problems of Privacy" to be held in June 2012 in Delft. Here are the "potential topics and themes". Read it carefully.

(begins)
Below follows a non-exhaustive list of topics and themes that might be addressed by the papers in the open sessions. Note that, even though the issue of privacy borders on several fiels of philosopy (such as epistemology, ethics and political philosophy), we have a decided preference for orientations that are heavily epistemological.

1. Privacy and the value of knowledge
A central thought in epistemology is that knowledge is distinctively valuable and that our social practices should therefore promote it. If that is true, however, how should we explain that with respect to private matters knowledge of these private matters doesn’t seem distinctively valuable at all and that knowledge seems to be even less valuable than true belief?

2. Privacy and the value of ignorance
Epistemology focuses on knowledge and tries to explain what its value is. Privacy suggests that there might also be a value to ignorance. What could the epistemic value of ignorance be?

3. Knowledge and secrecy
In contexts of the accessibility and transparency of information on the Internet one sometimes hears slogans like ‘Knowledge wants to be free’ (Compare, for instance, Wiki-leak activities). But what is meant by this? Should this be taken as a universal maxim that governs social-political policies? This would impact not only on issues of privacy but also on issues of secrecy. If there is a right to protect privacy, might there also be an argument to protect secrets?

4. Privacy and contexts of epistemic appraisal
Privacy seems to have a contextual element. In some contexts, one might want to protect one’s privacy, but in other contexts one might consent to opening up one’s privacy. This might, for instance, depend on the stakes the subject faces in a given context. How should we think of the relation between this kind of contextuality and the debate about the contextuality of knowledge, where the stakes are sometimes thought to play a role in evaluating the truth-value of a knowledge ascription?

5. Privacy and assertion
According to the knowledge account of assertion, one should assert that P only if one knows that P. Assertions of P can invade on someone’s privacy. Should norms for assertion be specified that accommodate this idea?

6. Knowing-who and personal data
The notion of ‘personal data’ is central in the privacy debate. But what exactly personal data are remains unclear. Can epistemology shed some light on this issue by, for instance, establishing a connection between knowing-who and personal data?

7. Privacy and epistemic justice
Knowledge is central to privacy. Privacy violations seem to be a form of injustice. If one’s privacy has been violated, has an epistemic injustice been done to the person whose privacy has been violated?

8. Privacy and trust
‘Trust’ is a central theme in contemporary epistemology. How do concerns about one’s privacy interact with the notion of trust?
(ends)

Okay. Now you can scream. If you don't know why you should scream, read the next post.

Clive James, A Point of View, Wisdom Literature Twaddle

There's a review by David Barrett of Clive James' programme A Point of View in which he praises James for reaching a deep and mature worldview in his later years. This being England, we can assume that Barrett and James are good friends. He quotes James as saying...

"There should be pride in it, that you behaved no worse. There should be gratitude, that you were allowed to get this far. And above all there should be no bitterness. The opposite, in fact. The future is no less sweet because you won't be there. The children will be there, taking their turn on earth. In consideration of them, we should refrain from pessimism, no matter how well founded that grim feeling might seem."

Maybe in the context - Radio Four listeners with decent pensions, children who didn't turn into criminals, wastrels or Bank CEO's and who gave them wonderful grandchildren - these sentiments make sense. They do for Clive James, and I have no doubt that he is really speaking for himself. What David Barrett really means is: Clive James has finally lost his sting and is now repeating the same old wisdom literature twaddle.

There should be pride in it, that you behaved no worse...

So give yourself a pass on all the times you were a jerk and an asshole, because you could have been a much bigger jerk and a much wider asshole. I guess what he really means is this: if you've been a decent person most of the time, don't beat yourself up that you weren't perfect. Which is not the same thing, and doesn't sound quite as well.

There should be gratitude, that you were allowed to get this far...

"Allowed' by whom? Some nine year-old with a Kalishnakov who didn't shoot me? The drunks who didn't run me over? I got this far because I didn't die yet, and that's nothing to either resent or be grateful for. This is a silly sentiment. And yes, I've been in a could-have-been-fatal accident, and I was grateful to be walking afterwards. Right up to the point where I had to go back to work. Maybe what James means is that people who have had lives like his should be grateful, and perhaps they should be. I haven't. But he covers that.

And above all there should be no bitterness. The opposite in fact...

Because? Bitterness is counter-productive for the person feeling it, but even more it's a pain for other people to have to live with. It's kinda, well, not polite. I don't think that's what James means. I think he means we should be thankful for the lives we've been "allowed" to lead. This may make sense for him, and a dying twenty-three year old drug dealer couldn't care, but for the rest of us? When we look back on the lost opportunities, the wasted talents, the pointless arguments, the empty, empty days and years, the long periods of unemployment kidding ourselves we can get back on the merry-go-round, the endless insolence of office we had to endure at work and dealing with the bureaucracies... you would have to be on drugs not to feel slightly bitter about it. This was it? Clive James lives in a world where Elle McPherson is a friend. Not our world.

The future is no less sweet because you won't be there...

It's no less ghastly either...

The children will be there, taking their turn on earth...

Pass the Desiderata poster! By the time they are "taking their turn", they will be frustrated adults who have been waiting for the career blockers to retire for at least a decade longer than they wanted. But then that's why he says "their turn" - to make it sound like he hasn't been keeping the kids waiting until he felt gracious enough to step aside.  It sounds like there is opportunity a-plenty for the young and freely given at that, when the truth is anything but.

In consideration of them, we should refrain from pessimism, no matter how well founded that grim feeling might seem...

I grant there's no point in telling the kids it's all going to be awful if you can't tell them how to avoid the awfulness. But I can't help wondering if he wants to refrain from pessimism because it was his generation who fucked it all up and he doesn't want to live with that consequence?

I know what I'd tell the young about the future: that it seems to balance improvements with losses and it's full of unintended consequences. In the 1970's, we could afford flats of our own but the nightlife was awful, the jobs were secure but working was a catalogue of pettiness. Now the nightlife is marvelous, jobs are all temporary, working is much more relaxed, and thirty-year-olds can't afford anywhere to live. Sure, it's great that the Iron Curtain has come down, but the first people across were those possessors of the ultimate transferrable skills, the gangsters, criminals, hookers and scroungers. The second bunch of people across helped take jobs from English workers because they were prepared to sleep on floors and had no intentions of staying, only of sending money home. We have expensive CCTV on every street corner, rendered useless by a £5 sweatshirt with a hoodie. We have a hundred channels when once we had four, and there's nothing on ninety-nine of them. But whatever happens, the Duke of Westminster still owns Mayfair, Belgravia and chunks of other prime property around the world. That won't change.

Oh Clive! How are the mighty fallen! I will cherish two lines of his. The first is the argument against banning abortion. That the choice isn't between legalised abortions or no abortions, it's between legal abortions and illegal abortions. The second is his opening line of a review of a TV series called Stay With Me Till Morning, "a title designed to evoke a more exotic mileu than the one the rest of us live in, which might on the same principle be called 'Shouldn't You Be Going Or You'll Miss The Last Tube Home?'".

If I ever start prattling on like a second-rate Seneca, or even a first-rate one, you can kill me. Headshot. Exploding bullet.

The Anatomy of Decisions and the Mobile Phone Contract

How do we make decisions? There's no right way: we could flip a coin. The "proper" answer is to make a list of all the pros and cons, weight those by utility, and pick the option with the highest utility. Then there's the one about taking the first option that's better than the first one you thought of - though that really applies to temporal processes like job offers and picking spouses. Some people who commit the sin of linguistic inflation call these "heuristics", though more homely terms are "rules of thumb" or "guidelines". 

These rules and guidelines assume many things, one of which is that the decision is really about what we think the decision is about. Here's an example of when it isn't.

Renewing the mobile phone contract sets my inner "proper" decision-maker up for the long haul. It triggers my inner scrooge and it also sets off my inner little-boy-who-likes-toys. My inner Scrooge thinks it's a huge waste of money to be on a monthly contract with 300 minutes when I barely make any calls. Or even receive any. My Scrooge accepts that one decent job offer justifies a good few years of minimum-cost mobile ownership, but that's as far as it goes. As for iPhones, mobile internet and the rest, Scrooge is having nothing of it. Meanwhile, in my left ear my Inner Boy is whispering that if I don't get a fun phone this time around, I'll spend another two years regretting the decision every time someone does something cool on their HTC or iPhone. The     last time I went through this process I was comparing the iPhone (horribly expensive) vs other phones that weren't really comparable but were almost as expensive, or free phones that had the core functionality but not the pizzazz. This time HTC are producing phones that have near-iPhone functionality and good, anonymous styling.I like anonymous styling; it doesn't say anything about you, and it doesn't attract thieves.

So I set off on a long cost-comparison exercise, complete with calculations of break-even minutes / month - which at 25p per minute on a PAYG contract aren't many - after taking into account data contracts and the like. Half-way through this, after putting together combinations of low-function PAYG phones and schlepping a £100 slim camera and my Nano everywhere, I suddenly wrote down what I wanted if I didn't give a damn about cost. Which was: a DSLR camera, a Macbook Air and a 5MP smartphone, most likely the Desire S, on the cheapest contract that made it free.

Which changed the nature of the decision. It wasn't just about the phone, it was about my personal, portable electronics. I have been finding my trusty Canon AS510 a little restrictive of late. What I was looking at was an upgrade. I did that with my TV and hi-fi a couple of years ago.

This is one of the many things that's wrong with the classical theory of decision-making: it assumes that you know what the decision is about. Whereas often you only think you do. In some parts of business what I did is called things like "scope creep" and frowned upon. But sometimes what you really want to do isn't what you start off thinking you need to decide. You might be thinking about which movie you want to see, but really all you want is to get out of the house and do something, anything, for a couple of hours. If you persist in seeing the decision as being about movies, you won't do what you really want to do, which is not-be-in-the-house.

Having decided that this was about upgrading, I could dump the Scrooge options and stop attempting to justify an HTC smartphone. An iPhone would need justification, because it's so much more expensive than the almost-comparable (for my purposes, maybe not yours) HTC's. The Desire S on the cheapest contract that makes it free, along with the company discount, now becomes a shoo-in. 

Now I could look for a DSLR. Since I work with a qualified (and very good, IMHO) wedding photographer, I asked him about cameras. For what I wanted to do, he said, I should get a mid-range (£400) consumer model and spend the money I saved over the next-up (£700) on a decent lens later. Which advice and some reading got me to the Canon 1100D. What Camera? liked it, Amazon reviewers  liked theirs, I like the pictures my AS510 takes and I don't see myself with a Nikon.

I need internet access and portable computing, since The Bank doesn't let us access our webmails and its internet access is a frustrating exerience (it still uses IE7!). I don't need that every day, but I should use it more often than I do. I have an Asus netbook (running Ubuntu Zonked Zebra - I'm cool) already. It's anonymous, already paid for and slightly heavier than the Macbook Air. I do notice its weight in my Eastpak messenger bag (Eastpak messenger bags are the epitome of "anonymous style"), but while the Air isn't that much lighter it is way, way more expensive. There's the iPad, of course, but it has no real keyboard. It's for media consumers, and I'm a text producer. 

Accepting that this was a decision about upgrading also changes the conversation with my inner Scrooge. I'm not now arguing about the details of various money-saving schemes and the relative value-for-money of the options. Details are how Scrooge distracts me from what the decision is really about. He knew he had no chance once I made it about quality-of-life. I'm not going out and splurging on a £1,000 DLSR, a £45pcm iPhone contract and a 128GB Macbook Air. The Air is on hold indefinitely, as it breaks the "anonymous" part of my chosen mode of "anonymous style". That's also why I can say NO to the iPhone.

Sometimes you make a decision by making another, larger, decision which is easier to make. I could quibble with my inner Scrooge about how many minutes of calls I expect to make for hours, but he's going to have a hard time telling me that I haven't felt the urge to upgrade my kit for a while now.

Here's a very important rule about decision-making. Money should never be the deciding factor. What you can afford sets the limits, but within those limits you decide what fits your style best. And if nothing does, either don't do it at all, or take the cheapest option with the least commitment. That way you can get what you want later, when you do have the money, with the least wasted spending.

Behavioural Psychology, Ultimatum Games and Trolley-ology

Behavioural psychology has been a hip thing for quite a while. Much of the research involves a thing called an "Ultimatum Game". In this A is given an amount of money or other good, and has to offer B some of it. If B doesn't like the offer, she can reject it and nobody gets any money. In the early versions of this game, the amount was $10 and A and B were undergraduates.

It's worth noting that, according to "rational economics", B should accept at offer of 0.01$, because it's a cent she didn't have before and how can it matter to her that A gets to keep $9.99. Well, that shows how much insight into human affairs, and hence the stock and bond markets, rational economics provides.

The Ultimatum Game is to economics and behavioural psychology what the Trolley Game is to moral philosophy. Both have a common fault, which is that neither side knows what relationship they are in. The other fault is that, at lease in the simple version,  there's no negotiation. B has to accept or reject. If she could negotiate, and A could reject her counter-offer, B would say: "split it 50-50 or I beggar both of us". At least a B with a healthy sense of self-regard and fairness would. Others might offer something less fair, but would be re-negotiated back to fairness - or of course, they could go on negotiating forever. A variant of the simple game that allowed for conditional negotiation revealed that the majority of people settled for a close to 50-50 split. Who would have guessed?

The essential condition of the game is that both sides know that it's not A's money. If it is A's money, there needs to be a relationship between A and B that makes sense of the idea that B should get any of it. Perhaps B is A's temporarily broke sibling who needs $5 to get home. Perhaps B is a charity offering to do something about a situation that A cares about. This is the familiar land of obligation and quid pro quo. Nothing to see here.

Except that there's a version, called the Dictator Game, due to Elizabeth Hoffman at the University of Arizona which shows that people will behave more generously if they suspect other people are watching (Wow! What these people find out about the depths of our souls!). William Poundstone, whose excellent book Priceless I have taken this stuff from, tells us we should not be shocked by finding out that people will keep more of what only they know they're getting than they will if they know other people know what they're getting. After all, he says, that's what we do when we don't donate a chunk of our salaries to charities.

That's too much Peter Singer. Donations to charities from our salaries are not the same as donations to charities from anonymous envelopes full of money given to us by researchers, or even by oil company executives. You need to be a very clever academic, or really to despise salarymen, to have that distinction blur in front of your moral vision. 

Ultimatum games don't really tell us anything we didn't know, except the extent to which people aren't willing to enforce fairness on each other (A shouldn't even think she could offer less than $5 to B for fear of being told off). Unless, of course, we are old-school economists, when it's all a huge surprise and a proof that people are crazy. Which attitude is almost as bad as the idea that people are cute in their erratic behaviour.

The attraction of the Ultimatum Game is that it can be, with the right squint, made to look like a lot of economic behaviour. Perhaps A is a supermarket and B is a supplier, and A's offer is what they are willing to pay for the goods. In which case, the fair answer is: cost plus an acceptable profit, plus a 50-50 split of any super-profit due to the consumers' willingness to pay a silly price for the product. (The super-profit is what's left after the supermarket takes it's fair profit.) Of course, in real life what happens is that the supermarket offers $3 and then when it actually has the £10 from the customer, only pays £1.50 because, well, like B has a choice?

The sad thing is that most of the research seems to be about how companies can exploit customers and suppliers. I guess that's what the academics can get grants for. Where's the research that helps customers, workers and suppliers exploit the faceless bureaucrats who own the shares in the companies?