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Contemporary Eldritch San Francisco Design

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I created a database for dead bodies and added the first one. — Annabel Scheme

The ever marvellous Helen recently handed me a corker of a short novel, Annabel Scheme. Nominally a detective story, it’s really a steeplechase through an alt-future San Franscisco. Plus demons, quantum computing and the internet. It’s played straight-up, not satirically, but with a lightness of tone and a fluency of detail that recalls early Douglas Adams.

Sloan’s name for throwaway details that enrich a world is gold coins, and it’s a good one. Annabel Scheme is packed with the things. There are just one or two moments where this tips slightly over the line to cutesiness, but mostly the tone is bang on. Seeing the gold coins along the way is one of the delights of the book, so much so that I’d rather not cite them here; it’s better to just discover them.

The book was funded by a kickstarter project, which is an interesting data point. It’s not why you should read it though. You should read it because it kicks arse.

Rationality and Society

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Oh those silly rational agents! What ridiculous duffers we were to ever believe in them. If you’ve read anything about business since the 2007/8 crisis you’ll already have read enough of this sentiment to wallpaper your flat with, but in the unlikely event you missed out, it was all pretty much covered in this op-ed by Joe Stiglitz in 2002 anyway.

And of course he’s right to a point. People aren’t perfectly rational, they are biased in certain ways being fascinatingly explored by behavioural economists, economists can be fixated on nice mathematical models.

And yet, and yet.

A lot of these attacks on rationality are intended as attacks on free markets, that rationality in this sense captures people at our worst. But despite the bad press of late, rationality isn’t just the domain of sociopathic capitalist uber-robot-mensch. It is, for instance, a key premise of Rawls argument in A Theory of Justice:

25. THE RATIONALITY OF THE PARTIES

I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position are rational. In choosing between principles each tries as best he can to advance his interests.

Rawls fuller argument, in a nutshell, said a just society would be the one chosen by rational but ordinary people who did not know what role they would play in it. They would have to choose the structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance which concealed whether they would be rich and priveleged, or poor, or a redhead. Under these conditions, Rawls argued they would choose two rules; firstly liberty, secondly the prosperity of the weakest class. He then argues that redistribution is just to the extent it benefits the poorest in absolute terms; you can’t sacrifice the wealth of the poorest for pure equality where everyone would be poorer.

Rawls cites Amartya Sen and social choice theory, looking to economics not just for part of his argument but part of his premises. A Theory of Justice effectively revived the idealist or contract tradition as a counterpoint to the utilitarian tradition then dominant. He was also a defender of the welfare state liberalism of his time, and a good one. One marker of the breadth of his contribution in reviving an idealist tradition is the phenomenon of libertarian Rawlsians, like, say, Will Wilkinson; they tend to like the veil of ignorance but not the distributive principle.

Only in a social union is the individual complete. — Rawls, A Theory of Justice, again

((Rawls was too much the careful scholar to go in much for quotable quotes: he is readable but longwinded. He also preferred to caveat his sentences with learned references and restrictions on their scope. The sentence above he only let slip in an unguarded moment at the end of a footnote.))

There are two contrasting uses of rationality here, one from social choice theory, one from efficient markets theory, that are slightly different, but only slightly. The point is that rational agents aren’t just a vision of utility maximising robots chewing each other to pieces. The considered reasoning behind the veil of ignorance also shows rationality as a vision of people at their best.

Flu Seasonally Adjusted

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Permutations points out an elegant paper from Christakis and Fowler (gloriously open access). They exploit a clever result from social network theory called the friends paradox. This is the phenomenon that your friends have more friends than you do – because social networks typically have a few very connected spoke nodes. They use this to track flu within a university student population. By separately tracking the friend cohort they were able to note the evolution of a flu epidemic several weeks before its full arrival in the general population as represented by the random cohort.

Current surveillance methods for the flu, such as those implemented by the CDC that require collection of data from subjects seeking outpatient care or having lab tests, are typically lagging indicators about the timing of the epidemic (information is typically one to two weeks behind the actual course of the epidemic). […] [W]hile potentially instantaneous, the Google Trends and prediction market methods would only, at best, give contemporaneous information about rates of infection. In contrast, we show that the sensor method described here can detect an outbreak of flu two weeks in advance. That is, the sensor network method provides early detection rather than just rapid warning.

Wiring up a distributed computer of neighbourhood gossips to see into the future is presumably a trick with wider applications. For instance, economic data is not only notoriously bad, but notoriously slow. It’s a field where price data from three month old lagging indicators are siezed on with delight at their timeliness, and GDP figures have to be seasonally adjusted a year after the period they apply to. Economic actors also behave as a network for the flow of information and beer.

So, you should be able to systematically exploit this effect in economic surveys to get both more timely results, and information on the velocity of effects throughout an economy. Eg, if you are surveying businesses, get those businesses to also nominate their suppliers and customers, and track that group as well. It’s possible this technique is already used, and I’d be interested to hear about it. I suspect that its main use is though data collection folk wisdom rather than systematically. So it’s well known that health workers are vulnerable, highly connected nodes for disease spread / containment, and that banks and large retailers are hubs of economic activity, but that knowledge is not generalisable in the same way as the friend cohort in the paper. Perhaps you could even use techniques like this to build a network model of critical financial institutions, from the perspective of vulnerability to systemic failure under a catastrophic crisis.

The Napkin Scrawls of Dining Philosophers

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Technologists are, by their vocational commitment to new things, manufacturers and early adopters of language. Our commitment to language is however generally one of casual incompetence. The artifact being built, or fixed, is the focus of our attention, and the language referring to it is an after thought for the tormenting of poets, grammarians and the marketing department. Perhaps that’s as it should be, but it’s still a pleasure to read a book like Java Concurrency In Practice, which has a mastery of both language and its topic.

JCIP has already been well reviewed on its technical merits. [NB: These notes are also from 2006 and written about the first edition.] In summary, it’s a great reference. As the jacket copy points out, concurrency in software is both difficult to deal with and of renewed importance. Problems like these put stress not only on software artifacts being developed, but the context in which that artifact is built and used, like collaboration in its construction, or human and computer interfaces, or eventual maintenance. Java Concurrency In Practice also has some insights into this, but it’s not foregrounded, and seems worth exploring.

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Scribed On Demand

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Two opposite poles of art creation in Paul Clark’s acclaimed art history of the Cultural Revolution, the slightly misleadingly titled The Cultural Revolution: A History, illustrate his thesis marvellously. Clark argues, with voluminous examples, that the Cultural Revolution was an artistically productive time, even if it was also a politically terrifying one. He takes aim particularly at the received wisdom in a common joke; 800 million people watching 8 performances (八亿人看八个系).

方海珍（李丽芳饰）是《海港》里的女主角； Fang Haizhen (played by Li Lifang) from The Harbour

The first pole of art creation is the model operas (样板戏). These were highly professional productions closely supervised by the cultural leadership including Jiang Qing (江青). These have a reputation as clumsy kitsch. Clark points out, with their production values, long lead time, and close executive supervision they are actually the very pinnacle of high kitsch. They made a number of technical innovations that moved Chinese opera smack in the middle of the twentieth century. Their focus on clearly delineated roles, modern settings, post-war language and ideological agenda – arias about revolutionaries and Mao Zedong are commonplace – make them distinctively modernist projects. Also, far from cultural troupes being entirely disbanded, certain parts of the culture industry were kept very busy on large productions of this kind. The striking film still above is from one of these model operas, 《海港》 (The Harbour).

To me, the Antarctic counter-pole to the model operas are the hand-published books. Amongst metropolitan youth sent into the countryside when schools and universities closed, there developed a subculture of letters, poems and entire novels written by hand, copied by transcript or mimeograph, and distributed by being passed from person to person. 《第二次握手》(The Second Handshake) was the most successful of these, eventually landing its author in jail for two years, followed by being published and filmed in the eighties. Works written in this fashion were enhanced and edited by their readers and transcribers, in a　cultural movement part schoolroom note, part monastic rescribe and part wikipedia collective publication.

Clark was a student in Beijing at the end of the seventies, so he’s able to add personal anecdote to careful scholarly description in a tone reminiscent of antiquarian journal Arts of Asia. Though a fair number of pictures are included, it’s best annotated by Google to get a fuller impression of the many works he mentions.

Finally a minor quibble – why do academic books on China, written in English, use (non diacritical) pinyin rather than Chinese character translations? I doubt much of the audience is able to use the pinyin that is not able to use the characters themselves, which are also far less ambiguous. Is it a printing cost limitation? It seems archaic in a time of Unicode and print on demand PDFs.