What have you got to hide?

It's one of the standard lines of argument for more surveillance - what have you got to hide? Well, I have a great deal to hide, and perfectly good reasons to hide it.

This argument implicitly assumes that none of the people in law enforcement who would be running this surveillance are corrupt. To which I say, as long as we're going to play pretend, why not pretend there are no criminals? Then we wouldn't need surveillance.

So let's imagine that there are, in fact, bad people with access to the system. Attracted there by that very power; corrupted in place; or falsely believing themselves to be working for the greater good. What can they reveal that I'd rather have hidden?

• I'm currently organizing a major protest against a new development by Megacorp. It'll be disastrous for my suburb, but it'll make a heap of money for the owners. I don't want them knowing where or when the next protest will be.
• I've been leaking evidence to the press of corruption in the local bureaucracy. I don't want anyone seeing me meet the journalist involved.
• I've been phoning in anonymous tips about drug dealers in the area, and getting them busted. And also I think I spotted where their lab is. I don't want anyone to know it was me.
• My child is a local celebrity, and the gossip mags are always trying to get pictures or rumors or dirt.
• My business has come up with a way to cut the cost of our product in half. We're developing it at top speed, and we don't want anyone getting in first.
• I'm going on holiday next week, and I don't want anyone taking the opportunity to break into my house.

And that's just the stuff I actively want hidden. There are a host of things that surveillance makes possible for dealing with people who are inconvenient to those in power:

• Have you read through all the laws that apply to you lately? Just kidding. There's a core of common sense, but around that is a vast thicket of arcane corners to get lost in. What are the odds that I could find a law you're breaking, if I looked hard enough?
• If you know where someone is at all times, it becomes much easier to frame them. Especially if they are trying to hide something - anything - from other people. You don't even need to make a case that will get a conviction; simply tying them up in years of court dates and legal expenses may be enough, not to mention the publicity effects of the "scandal".
• There's no need to directly go after the inconvenient person. You can often get the result by simply creating chaos in their personal lives. Find a spouse, a sibling, a child or a parent with a skeleton in the closet; expose it at the worst possible time.

I'm sure you can think of more. Knowledge is power, and the more of it you have the easier it is to remove obstacles from your way. Mere selective enforcement of the law is often enough, as any disliked minority can tell you.

My real life is - thankfully - nothing like what I've described above. But the people whose lives are like that are incredibly important to everyone else. The ones who stand up and fight against the powerful are rare and vital. I for one am prepared to tolerate a slightly higher risk of the crime du jour (drugs, terrorism, communists, etc) in the interests of keeping society free of entrenched corruption.

When you are thinking about security measures, it's important to bear in mind all of the threats you face, not merely the most spectacular or recent.

Knowing by faith

There is a common line of argument that says there are "other ways of knowing", and science can't tell you everything. Usually this is intended to counter a perceived lack of evidence for some supernatural belief or other, and usually it will cite either Godel's incompleteness theorem or some strong emotion like "love".

I have never seen such an argument that actually cited a piece of knowledge that is genuinely obtained other than by science (or some broadly similar approach), or mathematics (which is not about the real world until science connects the two).

Recently I ran into it yet again in a piece by Mehdi Hasan. Apart from trying to confuse "evidence" and "proof" (here's a tip for Mehdi: science doesn't prove anything, and doesn't claim to except in the sense of testing), he says that "...there are plenty of things that cannot be scientifically tested or proven but that we believe to be true, reasonable, obvious even." He gives some examples, all of which illustrate my claim.

"Which of these four pretty uncontroversial statements is scientifically testable? 1) Your spouse loves you. 2) The Taj Mahal is beautiful. 3) There are conscious minds other than your own. 4) The Nazis were evil." Taking these in order:

1) You can test this by formulating hypotheses of expected behavior, and comparing your spouse's actual behavior. Most people do. The word "spouse" implies some sort of commitment ceremony; there are major life adjustments, conversations, etc. Some of these might be evidence against; perhaps it's an arranged marriage, or an immigration scam. Perhaps there's been an affair, or perhaps they looked after you when you were broke. It's a tricky question - do you mean now, on average, on balance? How much love qualifies? What kind? For that matter, there are no doubt many people out there who know their spouse doesn't love them. This is far from uncontroversial. Science is improving in this area; one day we might be able to get a fairly useful answer with an MRI machine. 

None of this is helped by religious-style faith. You can't pray and find out an answer, or a lot of disastrous marriages might be avoided. And having faith without evidence that somebody loves you is often a good way to get a court order against you.

2) You investigate this scientifically the same way that Mehdi did - beauty is a subjective question, and something is beautiful if enough people think it is. What do people do with beautiful things? They visit them to look, and they report that they find them beautiful. So it is with the Taj Mahal. We have no need to take it on faith.

3) Once I have figured out what it means to be conscious, I can look for the signs in those around me. Most people accumulate sufficient evidence in early childhood. Indeed, a failure to do so is considered a clear-cut symptom of developmental problems. They don't do so by faith; they do so by overwhelming evidence. Later they can discover the science that shows their brains work the same way as everyone else's.

4) There's an enormous body of historical evidence documenting what the Nazis did and why. I'm certainly including such efforts in my definition of science. "Evil" is a more nebulous concept, but most people have no trouble applying it to mass murder. And there is plenty of evidence of choices taken where a good society would do one thing and the Nazis did another.

Faith, on the other hand, is more likely to get you into the land of conspiracy theories, of which there have been many over the years.

I am still waiting for some piece of knowledge that we can have without the testing of evidence. Mehdi's effort goes nowhere in this regard. Indeed, the people who think there is another way are never able to agree amongst themselves what that knowledge might be. Hence the huge variety of religions I see around me. That, to me, is evidence that they have not yet found another source.

Don't tell me what to wear!

A little while ago I heard a speech from someone in the arts, who quoted approvingly this dialog from "The Devil Wears Prada":
"You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff."

This particular person was in theatre, and from them it is a fair point. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard from someone that I really admired, how they had been inspired by someone - artist, composer, musician, author, playwright - who I have never heard of, don't care about, or even actively dislike.

But it doesn't apply to fashion. I have never heard anyone I admired wax lyrical about a fashion designer. Try this test - name a fashion designer who died before you were born. I don't know any. Now try that with artists, composers, sculptors, authors, poets... trivially easy. I have never seen anything that was identifiable as from a particular fashion designer that I thought was clearly well done, and usually the things that stand out are because they are bizarre or ridiculous. When I see really well-dressed people, they are invariably wearing something custom made for them.

When I saw that scene in the movie I was really hoping that Andy's character would serve up a counter-tirade, and I felt like yelling at the screen when she didn't. Don't get me wrong - it's a great movie, and it's a great line, expressing an attitude beautifully. But it's pure distilled rubbish.

See, Oscar de la Renta didn't invent cerulean. The word is 17th century, and derived from a much older word for a thing that has been around before there were humans. Oscar didn't invent a way to make clothing that color, or even a cheap way to make it. Some unsung chemist did that. Oscar didn't discover that it went really well with some other color - and even if he had, Andy isn't wearing the rest of his outfit. Oscar didn't decide that it went really well with Andy's eyes, because he's never met Andy. There might not even be any relationship at all between Oscar's gowns and Andy's sweater. Lots of people make decisions about what colors to make clothing in. Perhaps a Chinese factory owner liked it, or perhaps the apprentice mucked up a dye lot for topaz, and that's why it's in the bargain bin. And if Oscar had chosen vermilion instead, Andy wouldn't be wearing that; she'd be wearing some other color she liked.

The "people in this room" do have some influence over what's available. But they don't select for me from a pile of stuff. They throw some things into the pile, and I select things from it. If belts are wide this year, I will choose from the narrow end of the range. If they're narrow, I'll choose from the wide end. If they're ridiculous, I'll buy some of last year's stock from the bargain bins, or the year before's, or from some leather shop that doesn't follow fashions. If all the blues are lapis, I'll buy emerald, or perhaps a coat instead. Or maybe I'll just wait till next year.

The pile is smeared out in time by bargain bins and remainders and people who don't care, and second hand shops and my own cupboard, and by scissors and sewing machines if need be. Oscar would tell me not to wear cerulean because it's years out of date; Oscar would have selected something else from the pile. Oscar no longer thinks cerulean is even in the pile.

This is because the entire point of fashion is that it changes constantly. It's a way of showing that you're in the know, and you can't do that if there's no way to tell whether you're wearing this year's cerulean or last year's. Cerulean isn't better than topaz; it's just different. And if enough Andy's stop caring what's "in" this year, then Miranda Priestly will have to find honest work.

Or perhaps be reduced to advising individuals what will work for them. Which is much more likely to help actual people, because fashion tends to be displayed on walking clothes racks who are just this side of starvation. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as lucrative, because you only sell one instead of a few million.

If I felt like spending a heap of money on really nice clothes, I would not be going to the high fashion shops. I would find myself a tailor, who could make clothes that actually fit my slightly odd shape, instead of buying one size too big and cinching the belt and rolling the cuffs. And then maybe I'd be wearing clothes selected for me by someone else, but it'd be the tailor - based on what I actually look like - and not anyone in the treadmill that Miranda Priestly lives in.

And if we stop spending all that money on clothes, jobs will vanish from the clothing industry, but they will reappear somewhere else. The millions of dollars won't vanish - they just won't end up in Oscar's pocket. Some of it would end up in the pockets of a number of tailors. And some would pay for really nice health care facilities, or better schools, or any of the vast number of things we don't have enough money to do as well as we'd like.

No, Miranda, you don't decide what I wear. If you did, all the cool people would make sure to wear something else.