Five-Sevenths A Saviour

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Here in the World, however, silence was incorrectly parsed as null and would not do. — The Pains

The Pains, John Sundman’s third novel, continues an experimental jag started with Cheap Complex Devices. There is an experimentation with media – it’s illustrated by Cheeseburger Brown. There is an experimentation with setting – a monastic SF alternate history sequel to 1984 not being obvious to most. This is rarely a bad thing in SF, though, and a protaganist both electrical engineer and monk does seem a particularly Sundmanite choice. That given, the choice of a fairly straight narrative was probably wise; there is not so much of the stylistic trickiness of CCD here, at least on the surface. It’s a successful experiment, for the most part. Part of the excitement of experiments is their potential for failure (and contradicting a hypothesis is itself an important result), but this book is very much an “aha, neat” rather than “seemed like a good idea” or “where are my eyebrows”.

The Pains has a real Philip K. Dick-ian quality, an intoxicating blend of readability and the everyday weirdness of an unstable reality. It’s a short book, and to me it felt too short. It does feel short the way many good books feel too short – you wish you could spend more time with them. But it also feels amputated, specifically at the end. Abbreviated by force. Spoilers follow.

Sundman is not averse to formal structures even in seemingly digestible narratives. He’s commented in other forums that in Acts of the Apostles, on the surface a Tom Clancy-style thriller, a key scene between the Nick Aubrey and Monty Meekman quite strictly follows the form of Satan tempting Jesus in the desert. I wonder if there is another formal device being used in The Pains. Given the parallel Christian, indeed Catholic, elements, I was reminded of the Stations of the Cross. Consider, in part:

  • 1. Norman Lux first experiences the pains, and has a disturbing audience with the abbott. Jesus is condemned to death.
  • 2. Xristi is given her letter of reassignment. Jesus is given his cross.
  • 3. Norman first meets the Eagle. Jesus falls the first time.
  • 6. Xristi Friedman meets and helps Norman Lux. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.
  • 7. Norman’s second meeting with the Eagle. Jesus falls the second time.

The Pains has ten chapters. There are fourteen stations of the cross.

I know it’s easy to OD on analysis, the whole Baconian thing. Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate strategy, or there was a different model, especially given screen time is mostly split between Norman and Xristi, rather than focused intently on one of them. Norman has time for redemption; the stations of the cross end in Jesus’ tomb.

On the other hand, the Christian mythos is potent stuff, with extensively documented and long lasting effects. Combining it with Dick Cheney’s frozen head should produce a highly reactive sublimate. These intertwinings might just be another side effect of Sundman’s experimental theology.

“I have made a machine for exploring chaos. An analogue computer. To study strange attractors and fractal geometries of the soul.”

The Robotic Oxen of Zhuge Liang

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P.W. Singer’s recent lecture on our daily reality of robotic warfare serves well as a witty and thoughtful overview of the topic. The lecture is very worthwhile, and draws from his book, but if you don’t have an hour right now you can get a taste from this earlier essay in Foreign Policy.

It brings to mind a favourite episode from Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义). This is excerpted from Chapter 102 of the Brewitt-Taylor translation available here. Since the estimable Brewitt-Taylor died in 1938 and I own a dead tree copy of the same with the Wade-Giles names, some kind soul must have since updated the Chinese names to pinyin for this edition.

One day Yang Yi went to Zhuge Liang and said, “The stores of grain are all at Saber Pass, and the labor of transport is very heavy. What can be done?”
Zhuge Liang replied, smiling, “I have had a scheme ready for a long time. The timber that I collected and bought in the Lands of Rivers was for the construction of wooden transport animals to convey grain. It will be very advantageous, as they will require neither food nor water and they can keep on the move day and night without resting.”

All those within hearing said, “From old days till now no one has ever heard of such a device. What excellent plan have you, O Minister, to make such marvelous creatures?”

“They are being made now after my plans, but they are not yet ready. Here I have the sketches for these mechanical oxen and horses, with all their dimensions written out in full. You may see the details.”

The opposing general, Sima Yi (司马懿), finds out about the oxen, and his army captures some.

When Sima Yi saw them, he had to confess they were very life-like. But what pleased him most was that he could imitate them now that he had models.
“If Zhuge Liang can use this sort of thing, it would be strange if I could not,” said he.
He called to him many clever craftspeople and made them then and there take the machines to pieces and make some exactly like them. In less than half a month, they had completed a couple of thousand after Zhuge Liang’s models, and the new mechanical animals could move. Then Sima Yi placed Cen Wei, General Who Guards the Frontiers, in charge of this new means of transport, and the “animals” began to ply between the camp and Xizhou. The Wei soldiers were filled with joy.
Gao Xiang returned to camp and reported the loss of a few of his wooden oxen and horses.
“I wished him to capture some of them,” said Zhuge Liang, much pleased. “I am just laying out these few, and before long I shall get some very solid help in exchange.”
“How do you know, O Minister,” said his officers.
“Because Sima Yi will certainly copy them; and when he has done that, I have another plan ready to play on him.”
Some days later Zhuge Liang received a report that the enemy were using the same sort of wooden bullocks and horses to bring up supplies from Xizhou.
“Exactly as I thought,” said he.
Calling Wang Ping, he said, “Dress up a thousand soldiers as those of Wei, and find your way quickly and secretly to Beiyuan. Tell them that you are escort for the convoy, and mingle with the real escort. Then suddenly turn on them so that they scatter. Next you will turn the herd this way. By and by you will be pursued. When that occurs, you will give a turn to the tongues of the wooden animals, and they will be locked from movement. Leave them where they are and run away. When the soldiers of Wei come up, they will be unable to drag the creatures and equally unable to carry them. I shall have soldiers ready, and you will go back with them, give the tongues a backward turn and bring the convoy here, The enemy will be greatly astonished.”
Next he called Zhang Ni and said, “Dress up five hundred soldiers in the costume of the Deities of the Six Layers so that they appear supernatural. Fit them with demon heads and wild beast shapes, and let them stain their faces various colors so as to look as strange as possible. Give them flags and swords and bottle-gourds with smoke issuing from combustibles inside. Let these soldiers hide among the hills till the convoy approaches, when they will start the smoke, rush out suddenly and drive off the wooden animals. No one will dare pursue such uncanny company.”
When Zhang Ni had left, Wei Yan and Jiang Wei were called.
“You will take ten thousand troops, go to the border of Beiyuan to receive the wooden transport creatures and
defend them against attack.”

My wife described this episode as like a fairy-tale, and perhaps it is. Unlike, say, Rumpelstiltskin, though, it has a striking amount of technical detail. Zhuge Liang (诸葛亮) has plans prepared. The mechanical oxen require wood to build and craftsmen to build them. It also has a rare science fictional quality of showing an idea unfolding into its consequences, and then again unfolding. It’s a parable of all technologies, but especially those of war – first mover advantage never lasts. Unlike a fairy tale, the educational message is not primarily moral, but very much in keeping with much of the Three Kingdoms, it is tactical. The tech involved is at the least sexy, but utterly crucial, end of the military, the supply lines. And of course, Zhuge Liang is several steps ahead. I guess he’s called the Marquis of War for a reason.

So while there are a number of pre-modern stories featuring tech, few are so illustrative of the way tech actually works in society and the way it transforms its environment over time.

Along the Saber Pass mountain roads
The running horses bore their loads,
And through Xie Valley’s narrow way
The wooden oxen paced each day.
O generals, use these means today,
And transport troubles take away.

Bicycle Parking At The Risk Obfuscation Theatre

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Stubborn Mule aka Sean Carmody has recently had an intriguing set of posts describing a data visualisation technique known as Risk Characterization Theatre, due to Erik Rifkin and Edward Bouwer. As all of the above point out, and reminiscent of behavioural economics, even highly technical professionals are pretty lousy at intuitions of risk, but our performance at this might improve if information is stated in a way that better suits our non-Bayesian brains.

I wondered if this might be useful in describing the balance of risks in this Virginia Postrel article on bikes. Economists Carpenter and Stehr examined US states during the introduction of bicycle helmet laws. As Postrel describes:

A new helmet law reduces bicycle deaths among the affected age group by about 19%. It doesn’t affect older riders. Since serious bicycle accidents are rare, however, the absolute numbers are still small, about eight fewer deaths a year among kids 5 to 15 than would otherwise occur in the states with helmet laws. “It’s not a ton of lives when you compare it to something like wearing your seat belt,” says Prof. Stehr.

One reason for the drop is, of course, that more kids wear helmets when they get into accidents. But another is that many give up cycling altogether. Using surveys of parents, the professors find that about 650,000 fewer children ride bikes each year after helmet laws go into effect. That’s about 81,000 fewer riders for every life saved.

She goes on to nicely contrast this to more innovative and less regulatory approaches in Europe, and has some more detail on her blog. Thinking about transport and health as an industrial design problem rather than a legal one can flag up other unintended consequences: obesity, asthma, and so on.

One “natural experiment” demonstrated this: In Atlanta during the Olympic Games, people drove less, taking public transit to get into the city center. As a result asthma hospitalizations dropped by some 30 percent.

Indeed, taking a lead from Free Range Kids and contrasting obesity and diabetes rates with abduction rates might be worthy of another performance at the Risk Characterization Theatre.

Back to bikes. Sourcing figures from a public draft of the paper mentioned above, Intended and Unintended Consequences of Youth Bicycle Helmet Laws (PDF), and making use of Mule’s kindly open sourced R scripts, I threw together the following, using the Always or Almost Always figures. Click through for the more readable large versions.

A clever aspect of Carpenter and Stehr’s paper is the use of parental and youth surveys on helmet usage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the youth surveys show much lower helmet takeup rates. Much as it was when I was a Queensland schoolchild and a helmet law was introduced. Style-wise, there has definitely been at least some progress since then.

So, do these diagrams make the ambiguous impact of these laws clearer? On balance, probably no. It’s not easy to pick the relatively subtle differences in numbers of riders. The most stark contrast is between the reported usage rates between parents and children. But that’s also pretty clear on a bar graph (black = helmet, grey = no helmet, expressed as natural frequency in 1000):

Much as the original post warned then, and with the unread spirit of Tufte floating over my shoulder and screaming in a smugly vindicated fashion, it’s a diagram that has to be used with caution. This little sketch hardly invalidates the technique though. Part of the original discussion was whether any benefit came from conveying extra information through shading, or the extra complexity undermined the explanatory power of the chart. The virtue of shading comes out nicely in conditional probability cases. As described again by Mule and based on research by Gigerenzer, the meaning of mammogram positives can be difficult to explain because the brain is lousy at conditional probability, and in this specific case, the false positive rate is a fairly high 7%.

In these cases, the shaded Risk Characterization Theatre seems an elegant way to illustrate related natural frequencies.

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.