Security is a good thing

Sony have done much to attract the ire of their customers over the years, myself among them. It brings a smile to my face to see a company that tried to install a root kit on my PC getting hacked. But I have still been avoiding the stories that result, as much as I can, because even corporations deserve their privacy.
I would make an exception for stories that reveal corporate malfeasance of one kind or another, but revelations about which executive doesn't like which famous actor are purely invasive.

But the lesson I hope the corporate world takes away from this incident is that you can't afford weak security. The NSA and various government officials have been loudly saying that it is terrible that iPhone encryption isn't even breakable by them; what the Sony hack shows is that this what you want.
If there's a back door in your security, for no matter what good purpose, it will be found and abused by hackers. And those hackers can be anywhere in the world - Russia, North Korea, some random US town. The NSA and the FBI can't keep hackers out of the internet the way the US military can keep attackers out of the country, and it isn't even trying (nor should it).

The NSA used to have a reputation for being several steps ahead of the public when it came to security, and for guiding everyone else away from mistakes. It's thoroughly trashed that reputation, but it's where they need to get back to. It can ensure that US businesses and people have security that's at least as good as anyone else's - this will have commercial and social benefits.

As for the "can't catch criminals" argument - criminals are hugely outnumbered by ordinary people, and every tool that we have helps ordinary people far more than criminals. The only societies that won't find this to be true are the broken ones - repressive dictatorships, kleptocracies and the like. And why would we not want to make life hard for them? In making privacy a universal right, we are exporting democracy.

Land of the free and the home of the brave. Let's act like it.

Torture Still Bad.

Thanks to the report on torture, we now officially know that the CIA:

• Tortured people, by any definition of torture
• Tortured innocent people
• Tortured people to death
• Kept on torturing people even after the interrogators reported that they had no more information to provide
• Didn't get any important information that had not already been obtained elsewhere
• Didn't get more reliable information; rather, less.

So much for the "ticking time bomb" theory of torture.

Because the US is a signatory to the UN convention on torture (signed by St Ronald of Reagan, no less), we are now legally obliged to prosecute the torturers. And if we do not, how are we to prosecute torturers from other nations? After WWII we prosecuted torturers as war criminals - and rightly so. What will we do next time? How will we respond when our enemies capture our soldiers (or our civilians for that matter) and torture them?

Sadly this has now become a partisan thing. Especially (no) thanks to Dick Cheney, the Republicans will try to block any such prosecution. And so America's reputation is further trashed.

For those who say the report should not have been released - do not imagine that other people didn't already know about this. Foreign intelligence services will have already known. Al Qaeda will have already known. The whole planet already knew. What this report does is tell the American people, officially. And now the American people have a choice, officially: to prosecute or not to prosecute. We can't say we didn't know, we were not told; we have to make a decision and stick with it. Do we want a world where torture is used by governments and justified by our own actions? Or do we want a world of UN Convention on Torture, where prosecutions await such actions in every civilised country?

I want a world that stamps out barbarism. I am disgusted by all those in the Bush administration who instigated and defended the practice; and I am deeply disappointed by those since who were in a position to pursue them and not.

And incidentally, anyone who complains that "Muslim leaders don't condemn terrorism", and who does not themselves publicly condemn torture, has no credibility.

Investigate. Uncover. Prosecute. Never repeat.

Politics as a scientific endeavour

Go read this piece on shrimp treadmills, but you have my encouragement not to read any of the comments.

I would like to think that this kind of thing is all the fault of anti-science Republicans, but the truth is that accuracy in argument is a rare and precious gem all across the political spectrum.

One of my real yell-at-the-TV triggers is seeing a politician citing something in support of his or her arguments that I already know is rubbish because they said they same thing yesterday and I looked it up. This kind of thing will cost you dearly in scientific circles; in politics, it's par for the course. Fact checking setups have been proliferating in recent years, and they are great; but they are also (empirically speaking) easy for politicians to dismiss as biased in favor of "them", or to simply ignore and bull on through. The audience in political arguments is not nearly as inclined to check things as a scientific audience. And criticism from the other side is even easier to ignore than a fact checker.

What we need is more science in politics. By that I mean a commitment to being right instead of looking right, even at the cost of changing your mind. The sort of person who really needs to hear that is a politician, who will already be chuckling good naturedly and starting in on an explanation of why the World Just Doesn't Work Like That. We need to make the world Work Like That; politicians respond to votes.

So I issue a call. The other side won't listen to you, no matter how cogent and well researched your arguments. But your side will. I've previously said that everyone who cares about getting politics right should look for things that the other side is correct about. We must also do the reverse; look for things our side is wrong about and make them right. If that knocks a hole in our position, so much the worse for our position. Identify people on your side who make bogus arguments, and call them out; do it before the other side does. Join a political party and help get rid of bad candidates. Vote for people who are trying to get it right and are prepared to concede good arguments.

Politics won't treat science well of its own accord; science has to muscle in and force it. That doesn't mean forcing politicians to defer to scientists; it means forcing them to be more scientific themselves.

It's not usually money that trickles down.

Via twitter, a wonderful image of how trickle-down economics works:

This is not really surprising. The idea of trickle-down economics is that the government somehow has (control of) some surplus cash; it should give it to (or not take it from) rich people, who will invest in job-creating industries, and everyone will prosper.

But rich people do not start businesses out of the goodness of their hearts - not generally, and certainly not in the modelling world of trickle-down economics. They start them in the hope of making money. So they will invest in capital goods to make things more cheaply, which will destroy some jobs, and they will retain as earnings the money that would have been salaries. Don't get me wrong; destroying jobs is a good thing. It's the reason I am not slaving twelve hours a day harvesting crops. But that's not how wealth trickles down.

They may create new things to sell to people, and these new industries will involve new jobs. But the new things will be designed to appeal to people who have money to buy them, because that's how markets work. And the people who have money are the people you just gave it to - rich people.

Or they may just buy stuff themselves. But the goods that rich people buy are often quite wasteful, and particularly what they will buy with those extra dollars. Your million-dollar sports car will not go fifty times faster than a regular sedan; it will not get fifty times better mileage or last fifty times as long. And it is especially wasteful it's your third car and it sits in the garage and gets driven on Sundays.

Instead, I would like to introduce the idea of trickle-up economics. Give that extra money to poor people, the poorer the better. Poor people can be dug out of intractable holes with delightfully small amounts of money - a few hundred that gets them out of the payday loan cycle, or lets them repair a car properly, or fix a hole in the roof. Some of them will undoubtedly waste the money. Some will simply spend it in ways that bring them far more benefit than that small chunk would bring to a rich person. Some will invest it in training or equipment for the climb to prosperity. The far-sighted and the determined will be shaken out of the back streets and given the chance to apply their talents.

And as that money gets spent, it will find its way back to the rich, because it always does. But instead of just giving it to the rich, it will go to those who are good at making things that poor people want. In the process jobs will be created, just as trickle-down economics claims to do; but the economy will apply itself to making things that poor people need, that will be used efficiently and extensively - because the poor cannot afford to waste things as the rich can.

So when you hear a rich person complaining that the poor get too many benefits, ask them if they are incapable of providing those benefits and therefore getting paid for them.

What we want out of our market economy is that those who are most skilled at producing the goods society needs are given control of more resources. An efficient economy should get the most work and management skill out of those people with the least amount of wastage in the form of incentives (such as luxury cars). Trickle-down economics hands over the incentives first; trickle-up makes people compete.

And what is free market economics about, if not competition?

Criticism is not phobia

A while ago I returned to my car from shopping to discover a leaflet on the windshield. It purported to be from the local Imam, thanking me for helping to fund the imposition of Sharia law by shopping at my local chain supermarket. Apparently the store sells some items marked as Halal, and the theory is that license fees for this are funding radical Islam. Knowing how hard the chain squeezes their suppliers, Sharia law is apparently pretty cheap.

There is no doubt that some people campaign against Islam as a way of trying to exclude brown people, or religions other than their own. Islam makes an easy target to whip up fear against "them".

This does not mean Islam is innocent, however. The reason it's an easy target is that a significant number of the world's current trouble spots involve Muslims as the perpetrators of violence, using explicitly religious justifications. You can argue about the exact extent to which religion really is at fault... and you should be able to do so without being called "Islamophobic" or "racist".

After the recent blowup between Sam Harris/Bill Maher and Ben Affleck/Nicolas Kristof, Kristof wrote an article explaining his position. In it, he downplays the extent to which Muslims hold extreme views about religion. He points out that in Indonesia, only 16% of the population favour the death penalty for apostasy.

Wonderful. I was brought up going to church, and eventually decided it wasn't for me. My Indonesian equivalent would be walking the streets knowing that one in six of the people around him thought he should be killed; this in the world's most populous Muslim country, with a deserved reputation as a moderate democracy.

It certainly must be said that other religions and groups have had their turn at horrific violence; a list from the last century in Christian Europe alone would make sobering reading. But that does not mean no-one should be criticised for holding the sort of extreme views that lead to such tragedies. It means everyone who holds them should be criticised.

Humanity has made enormous progress over recorded history in the noble art of living with each other without committing mayhem. Violent death rates were lower in the 20th century than they have ever been, even with two world wars and numerous other conflicts.

When Islam ceases to be a prime motivator in mass violence, we will move on to whatever (hopefully lesser) force takes over the number one spot. Until then, the only way it can avoid criticism is to clean up its act. People who cry "Islamophobia" at such criticism need to quit labelling and start explaining why it is unjustified.

Any religion (some of) whose adherents think that I should be put to death merely for being an atheist is a dangerous one; and it is not "phobia" for me to say so. Moderates are welcome to defuse such criticism by persuading the extremists to change their minds.

The Playing Of Games

I have been watching "gamergate" at a distance; I don't follow it directly, but people I read are interested enough that it echoes into my newsfeeds periodically. I don't intend to comment on the exact details of who said what - all that has been gone over by people who actually know what they're talking about. Instead, here are some observations from a distance.

If a big part of your strategy is to find out personal details of your opponents so that you can make more realistic threats of rape, murder and other violence, then you are not the good guys. People who hear you will naturally assume you have no better arguments, and this is generally a reliable assumption in such cases. And next time there's a big panic about the effects of video games on impressionable minds, you are going to be exhibit A. So, as someone who enjoys playing video games: thanks for nothing.

The true gamer is all about the challenge, pitting him or herself against the best there is to see how they measure up. This requires a thriving community; if you are the only player of chess in your city, then you're the best player and the worst. Big deal. And so if half the population is excluded from your community, you're selling yourself short. You may never learn those really great moves that you would otherwise be driven to by competition.

Doing things that you know will drive away female gamers is alienating half your potential talent pool. It can be hard to tell what other people will find off-putting. If some women are prepared to stand up and explain exactly what you are doing that will drive away female gamers, the only rational response is to listen attentively. Maybe they are incorrect; you may wish to consult more women to find out. But very publicly telling them to shut up in crude and aggressively anti-female ways is just about the stupidest response imaginable. Even if the gaming community wasn't really driving women away, your own behaviour is now doing so. And if it was, your response says "yes, and that's just the way we like it".

Result: fewer female gamers, and a widespread public perception that women should stay away.

As someone who enjoys playing video games: thanks for nothing.

Difficult problems

Let the record show that I have no simple solution to sort out the Iraq mess, beyond building a time machine and undertaking a voter education campaign in Florida circa 2000. When you have your foot in a bear trap, the choice to wait for help or amputate the limb is a tricky one, and there are clear potential dangers in either approach.

It does seem to me that if ISIL (or whatever we want to call it these days) were not such a band of fanatically murderous thugs, it would be a great step forward to simply recognise their new state, negotiate some settled borders for it, and consider it a positive step towards unwinding some of the mistakes of European administration.

Neither Syria nor Iraq would be happy about such a thing (at least officially), but both would immediately become more cohesive countries. Both could afford to be less repressive since their authority would be less challenged. Those who particularly hated either regime would have somewhere to go. An infusion of cash and supplies to handle the inevitable population movements (voluntary or otherwise) would smooth things over. The whole thing would be much cheaper than trying to kill off everyone who finds the Iraqi or Syrian governments unbearably repressive.

In fact, this might be workable even with the current ISIS regime; some very short term military intervention could allow anyone who didn't like ISIS to leave, and the remainder could settle down to work out who cuts off whose head. The Sunni tribes that support ISIS purely on effectiveness grounds would now have a good reason to ditch them, and we might find that ISIS was suddenly just a few unconvincing fanatics.

The alternative is a very long period of military intervention, civilian casualties, opportunities for religious fanatics to rail against the decadent and murderous West, and general chaos. No matter who ends up winning (or more likely losing the least badly), I predict that by the middle of the century we will look back in horror at all the time spent on the problems of Iraq and its neighbours.

The grand problem of fitting a modern technological society and a growth-addicted economy into a resource-limited planet will need all our attention to solve. If we cannot lift our heads far enough to spend time on it, the cost of the shortfall will be immense.

And if we must manage the sharing of a diminishing pie over the next century, decades of practice in failing to solve such problems by the application of force will not be helpful.

I am grateful not to be in charge of solving the problems of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon etc; and even more grateful not to have to live there. But I fear no-one will escape the consequences of that mess, even without international terrorism.

Stupid Computer Tricks

I ran into an odd problem this week; a user found that whenever they started Chrome on their Mac, the bookmarks on the bookmark bar would spontaneously rearrange themselves. The user only noticed because he tried to put two bookmarks next to each other, and they kept ending up back where they started.

We investigated further. It didn't matter if we dragged the bookmarks around on the bookmark bar, or did it via the bookmark manager, they still got reverted to their original state. It only happened on quitting and restarting Chrome. They would come up in the desired order, and then a few seconds after starting they would jump back to the original.

I tried "Reorder by title" in the Bookmark manager; oddly enough some of the resulting changes got preserved on restart and some did not. Having done that, I wasn't able to put them back the way they had been, which didn't make the user very happy.

Dr Google was no help; I read a great many explanations of how to use or clear bookmark synching on your google account. But the user didn't have this set up and wasn't logged in anyway. I even tried disconnecting the internet connection; the problem remained.

I discovered that Chrome bookmarks are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks (you can get to the Library folders by holding down Option while you selection the Go menu in Finder). I had a look; it's a fairly readable text document. I took a copy after closing Chrome down with the bookmarks in the right spot, and the contents were as expected. Copying this over the main file (and the .bak file for luck) appeared to control what order the bookmarks appeared in at the start, before they were magically reordered. Where else could there be copies?

I looked through the rest of the contents of the Default folder, and found a folder called "Sync Data Backup". Sounded interesting; I closed down Chrome, moved the contents (an sqlite database) out to a temporary location, and restarted. Jackpot! The bookmarks remained unmoved. Changes to their order now persisted through restarts. A new sqlite database file had appeared, but this one apparently did not have delusions of grandeur.

I have no idea what state the database file had got into that caused it to override bookmark order in this way, but I report this in case it proves useful to someone else with the same problem.

I should add that messing with random config files may cause you untold grief; make sure you keep track of what you have done so that it may be undone if need be. Backups are your friend. I don't know what is the database file besides bookmark ordering, and if you commonly use synching you might be killing off other things that you want to keep.

Summary: if Chrome messes with your bookmarks, and you do not have syncing turned on, stop Chrome, delete ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Sync Data Backup/SyncData.sqlite3 and start it again.

Bingo!

Rebecca Watson shoots; she scores.

Richard Dawkins is a tireless campaigner for causes I support, but he does have a bit of a tin ear. I was going to say that I hoped he could read that parody and become enlightened, but it may be that he has already seen that particular error for what it was. In searching for the correct link, I ran into this:

"There should be no rivalry in victimhood, and I’m sorry I once said something similar to American women complaining of harassment, inviting them to contemplate the suffering of Muslim women by comparison."

Sadly, it came up because he was claiming Sam Harris was the victim of a witch hunt, for his comments about why his readership skewed male.

I don't know whether Sam Harris' readership (or atheists, or public atheists, or whatever it was) skews male. If it does, I don't know why. If it's rampant sexism, I am much less likely to notice than the targets of the sexism; sad but true. I find him an interesting writer, even if I sometimes think he's wildly wrong. I thought his comments were rather wooden, and if I'd been there I would have been wincing and hoping the interview would move on.

But when Sam Harris says that "There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women"... it's a bit rich to describe public criticism of this, by women, as a witch hunt.

There seems to be a bit of a low-level war going on in the atheist community over this issue (or maybe it's just the blogs I read). I am not surprised that there are sexist atheists out there, although I have been rather taken aback by the levels of vitriol they produce. But having that conversation in public is a good thing; the stifling of debate that religion can produce is one of its worst side-effects (short of actual physical violence).

Women should not be told to shut up and quit complaining. The way to stop them complaining is to listen and fix the problems. Sam Harris can maybe take an hour to think about how he could "modify his speaking or writing style" to double his audience; if he concludes that it's not worth it, that's his right.

But please no more complaints about coherent, articulate criticism.

Clickbait uses one weird trick: human curiosity.

I have been carefully trying to avoid seeing any coverage of the leaked celebrity pictures this week. Paparazzi annoy me at the best of times; I am a very private person, and having people buzzing around taking pictures of me and publishing the worst-looking ones would drive me into incandescent rage. It's bad enough when it's family.

Relatedly, it behooves anyone who would complain about the NSA spying on them, to object also to random individuals doing the same thing. You too can make a small contribution to the cause of privacy, by refusing to intrude on the privacy of others when given the chance. If news outlets learn that this kind of story nets them no page views, it won't be published. And these days, they get a lot more precise a picture of what people read than they used to.

The thing that really interested me about this effort was a sudden awareness of just how much click-bait there is in the world these days. "You won't believe...", "Eighteen things you must..." "The one thing that...". Many more that are not done in the classic style, but where the contents of the story are far less interesting than the headline would suggest.

Useless headlines are much older than the internet; in my youth the poster outside the newsagent (and the screaming headline on the paper itself) were notoriously misleading. The ads for the evening news (and the current affairs show after it) were another opportunity for creative writing. What's worse today is that there are so many more chances to do it and get feedback. The newspaper got one or two chances and the only feedback they got was a single sales figure. Regular readers who bought the paper anyway were completely opaque. TV was similar; the ratings were very much a blunt instrument.

But now that there is feedback on how many people read every single story, there is much more opportunity to refine the craft. This is a problem that will only get worse.

And so we must fight back. Pay attention to the classic click-bait forms, and avoid those stories. If you realise you have fallen for one, don't just close the page - leave the site and look elsewhere for news or entertainment. (Better yet, take it as a sign that you should create some content of your own. Read a book. Step outside). Reward sites that provide useful headlines by frequenting them. It will take time and numbers for the feedback to build up, and the signal may be diffuse. It's hard to pick that numbers dropped off a little today because there was a click-bait story in third position, especially if that story had the highest reader numbers, but these guys are smart enough to get the hint eventually. And if they don't, their advertisers will.

I'm probably pretty late to this party; @savedyouaclick has been skewering clickbait for a while. And it seems to have turned it into a crowd-sourced operation that hits high-traffic baiters particularly hard. So let me just say: I'm on their side.

The price of good news feeds is eternal vigilance.

A correction on compasses.

A while back I described my disgust with Dennis Prager's defense of mass murder. In that I said that the flood story might be more instructive if the focus was on Noah; thinking more about it later, I wondered what you might actually learn from it. So I re-read the story.

What I found was that there isn't really a lot of moral instruction there. Genesis 6:5 says "And the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." Genesis 6:11-13 says "And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.And God saw the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah: 'The end of all flesh is come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

Of Noah, we hear in Genesis 6:9 that "Noah was in his generations a man righteous and whole-hearted; Noah walked with God." In Genesis 7:1 we hear that "And the LORD said unto Noah: 'Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation."

Apart from generic complaints that the wrong thing is being done, the most specific thing is "violence", repeated twice. So we are taught not to be violent.

After the flood, there is the incident with Ham, Canaan and Noah. Exactly what this is supposed to teach is the subject of far more debate than I had ever realised; the only clear lesson I can see is that you should respect other people.

These are good things to learn, but it seems to me that an omniscient God could think of better ways to teach them than the actual destruction of almost all life on the planet.

But I also learned that Prager was right about something that I missed. I said that God had waited 800 years after the flood before providing laws; this is not correct. Genesis 9:6 says "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man." I expect that this is what Prager is referring to when he says "After the evil that led to the flood, God decided to reveal basic moral rules — such as that murder is wrong. So wrong that one of the moral rules revealed after the flood is that murderers must be put to death..."

Presumably when Prager says "one of the moral rules", the others are whatever one is supposed to learn from the story of Canaan and Ham. Otherwise, we're back to waiting hundreds of years for the rest. So part of my criticism of his logic was faulty; and my point about Moses doesn't hold.

But the rest of it is strongly reinforced; in Prager's world, God didn't tell humans that killing was wrong, and there was a lot of killing going on. To right the situation, he kills almost everybody - guilty and innocent alike - and then tells the few survivors that killing is wrong. Because he hates evil, such as killing.

If that makes sense to you, then your moral compass is broken.

Be careful who you listen to

I have no idea why anyone pays attention to what Dick Cheney has to say about the situation in Iraq. The best I can come up with is that if you discovered he was endorsing a plan you were considering, you'd want to rethink it very carefully.

Cheney and his associates were the ones who told us that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq; that the war would be over quickly; that it would pay for itself; that we'd be greeted as liberators. These are the people of "mission accomplished", the ones who invaded a country and tore down its government with no real plan for how to replace it. They did their best to convince everyone that there was some link to 9/11, when there was none.

I have to confess that I didn't expect the messy civil war that ensued (and which continues to worsen). Fortunately I am not attempting to shape US foreign policy. But you would hope Cheney would have studied the region carefully (or have taken advice from people who have) and would therefore have a clear idea of what he was getting into. I was astonished to discover that he really did understand what the risks were - or at the very least, knew enough to get advisers to look into it. I'm sure you've all seen the Cheney "quagmire" quote, but if not Google is your friend.

Either Cheney in 1994 didn't really believe what he was saying and was just covering for the real reason for not invading Iraq (whatever that was); or Cheney in 2003 was ridiculously careless with the power and prestige of the US. Either way, why would you believe what he has to say now? If he was making excuses then he'll be doing the same now, trying to pretend that his administration did the right thing and Iraq should now be a democratic paradise (if only his hard work hadn't been wasted). If he was careless and ill-informed in 2003, let us search out people with a better track record of knowing what they are talking about.

Dick Cheney should be focusing all his attention on an impending prosecution for war crimes. If only there was one for him to focus on...

Learn to cooperate

There are a lot of things that no government can accept from a neighbour. These include:

• Rocket attacks (against civilian or military targets)
• Suicide bombings (ditto)
• Border incursions, via tunnels, tanks, or anything else
• Air strikes
• Port blockades
• Assassination of government officials
• Establishment of colonies.

If two governments start doing these things in response to each other, and particularly if neither side gets as much out of them as they lose to the other's activities, you will end up with an intractable war, limited only by how much pain each side is prepared to inflict.

And so we get another iteration of Israeli / Palestinian military conflict. On the Israeli side we hear that "If Palestine were to lay down their guns tomorrow, there would be no war. If Israel were to lay down theirs, there would be no Israel." This is partly true; the history of the conflict shows that there are sufficient Palestinians willing to fight to destroy Israel. But that same history shows that if the Palestinians were to lay down their guns, the Israeli response would likely be to continue the creeping settlements that are turning the West Bank into Greater Israel.

Unfortunately there are many people on both sides who want nothing less than total victory and are willing to fight and die for it. As Rasib Kahn says of Iraq: "There will be no calm reasoning with Iraqis of any stripe because the march of history continues, and only sadness can convince all parties that moderation is necessary for the existence of modern nation-states."

It is a phrase the struck me deeply when I read it. Nor is this some middle eastern weakness, special to Jews or Moslems; you have only to look to the history of any continent to see it played out. If humanity can make the lesson permanent before it invents weapons powerful enough to erase our historical records, then it will have achieved something genuinely impressive.

I would love to report some simple solution, but all I have is daydreams. Barring the disaster of a total victory for one side, at some point the two groups will need to learn to trust each other, and I don't see how that will happen.

Humans who cooperate can get far more out of it than any of them has put in. The flip side of this is that humans who fight can lose far more than any of them get out of it.

New rules needed

Penalties are a lousy way of settling a football game. The whole point of the game is the teamwork of putting someone in a position to make that shot; or the skill of beating defenders to reach that position yourself; or often both. They also serve who only make dummy runs to distract the defence and threaten to open up other gaps.

(As an aside, one of the best goals I ever saw involved a ball fired across the penalty box; one forward raced up to it ready to shoot, the goalkeeper stepped forward to block... and the forward faked a shot and let it go to a second player on his outside. The second player's angle was not as good, but the goalkeeper was now hopelessly out of position and the shot was easy. The impressive part was for the first player to know - in a crowded penalty box - that the second player was there and in space, and to see the opportunity at that speed).

No-one wants to watch penalties being taken. Unless something weird happens, they're routine and uninteresting; even during the game they only exist to discourage certain types of play. And yet, they have decided more than a quarter of the knockout games at the world cup so far. Something must be done. There need to be experiments to work out a better way; even if some fail hopelessly or prove easy to game, let us try them out and learn from mistakes.

My theory is that as soon as extra time starts, the game should become seven-a-side. The other four players (fewer if there have been send-offs) become rotating substitutes - unlimited interchange allowed, but only within the eleven "on the team". That will open up space and allow the better players room to cut through the defence. The counter becomes more of a threat, so there will need to be encouragement to attack anyway. Perhaps a shot-clock style system (it need not be a shot, simply playing into the opposition's end might be enough), or perhaps even a half-field style game. And most certainly, unlimited time. If the tennis players can do it, so can soccer. Once teams know that they cannot just sit back, defend, and wait for the penalties, they will be forced to attack.

It might not work, but it would certainly be a lot more entertaining than watching a penalty shootout. If I wanted to watch the same setup over and over again, I'd tune into ten-pin bowling.

While I'm at it, it's time to get rid of the dive from top-class football. There are cameras everywhere; let's make use of them. There should be a team of referees watching for players taking a dive in real time. For penalties the answer could likely arrive before the penalty is taken, but even if not we can still have sanctions for diving. Yellow cards can be issued during the game even a few minutes after the event. Ideally, a dive should be punished with whatever penalty the dive would have inflicted on the other team. Including a penalty up the other end for diving in the box. It wouldn't take more than a couple of those to stamp diving out of the game.

I want to see a world cup champion decided by a piece of brilliance, not by a dreary shoot-out or blatant cheating.

Another broken compass

Via Why Evolution Is True, I found this piece by Dennis Prager about Noah's Flood. Like William Lane Craig, he is trying to defend a mass murder in the Bible and in the process making himself look like he does not know good from evil.

First I cannot help but find fault with his reasoning. Apparently exterminating every man, woman and child on earth (bar eight) is the act of someone who "values goodness" and "hates evil". Because the inhabitants of the earth at the time were treating each other "cruelly". That sets a pretty high bar for bad behaviour; what were they doing that couldn't be stopped except by killing them all?  After all, it must have been something that they were all doing, otherwise there would have been some victims who could have been saved instead of killed. And whatever it was, it was immediately transmitted to every child at birth - because an omnipotent God could have saved all the innocent babies, but clearly chose not to. How did Noah escape it, one wonders.

And why did things get this bad? Because God left them to their own consciences instead of giving them Laws. Surely, then, the correct first step would be to provide these laws instead of just killing everyone. Instead, God waited until long after the flood before providing laws - if I have the chronology right, about 800 years.

Hilariously, Prager's example of law is that "murder is wrong. So wrong that one of the moral rules revealed after the flood is that murderers must be put to death". So, killing everyone on earth would be really, really wrong - surely? And when we read the Biblical account of Moses, we find that humans already know that murder is wrong and punishable by death; Moses kills a man and fears that he will be put to death by the Pharaoh for it.

But these errors are not the real problem. The real problem is that Prager is trying to defend mass murder as moral, and that makes distortions inevitable. New Atheists are criticised for saying that moderate religion enables extremists, but here is a classic case to justify the claim. Prager is saying that a group of people (a culture or a race) can become so evil that even an omnibenevolent, omnipotent deity can find no better solution than to kill them all. What will such arguments become in the hands of extremists? It is a justification to kill, either other groups who have become "sufficiently evil", or dissenters in our midst who will lead us along the path to extermination at the hands of others.

Prager even explicitly rejects the idea that it's a fairy story, and claims that it conveys enduring wisdom. A story like that might be instructive if the God character was merely a plot point, and the focus was on Noah. But when it is supposed to have really happened, and God is supposed to be the focus of the story and someone for us to worship - then there is no escaping the implications of having a mass murderer in charge.

I would not want to live near Prager, or anyone that thought he was right. Like Craig, he provides a justification for those who feel someone else is an affront to God, that they may have God's blessing to kill. And there are no shortage of people who think that way.

If your moral compass won't point you away from wholesale genocide, what good is it?

Publish and be damned.

Adam Ozimek tries to make a case that GMO labelling is a bad idea. His basic point is that if labels are mandated, it will convey that the government thinks GMO is at least a little bit dangerous, and the anti-GMO luddites will have won.

I am not one of them. I think genetic engineering is a vital technology whose time has come. We've been using it for over ten thousand years (basically everything you eat is genetically engineered by generations of farmers), but we've been doing it with a sledge hammer. The source variation has come from background radiation, toxins both environmental and man-made, and just plain genetic accidents. Now we have developed scalpels.

I think the people who are opposed to eating GMO foods are largely just scared, and if you offered them "original organic wild millet" at $10/pound they'd lap it up. Of course, wild versions of plants come with all sorts of "natural" chemicals of unknown effect on humans. Some of which will be toxins, because that's how real plants survive in the wild; the engineered versions we eat are short on toxins, thorns etc in exchange for our protection. Nature is not benign; it is supremely self-interested.

The real problems with GMO are large-scale corporate control of agriculture, and enormous monocultures of the "best" varieties. Neither of these is specific to genetic modification, and indeed it can actually help with the monoculture problem by allowing favourable and useful genes to be extracted into a variety of other plants at high speed instead of waiting for cross-breeding to work its magic.

But labelling can help with both. Labelling allows our luddite friends to pay for alternative production methods. Labelling preserves small organic farmers producing their own varieties. And in the highly unlikely case that GMO foods really are dangerous, labelling provides a control natural population that hasn't eaten them and isn't affected. It's not perfect, because they've probably made a lot of other unusual dietary decisions, but it's a very good start.

Labelling also allows GMO foods to show their big advantage - cheap, high nutrition foods. If there's a premium on non-GMO foods, the GMO ones will have to provide a benefit or they'll be discarded by the marketplace. And it makes frightened people less scared of what they eat; instead of wondering what's in everything, they can see that there's no difference in the taste and no ill-effects. Far from the government endorsing fearfulness, labelling removes a big weapon from the arsenal of scaremongers.

And ultimately, if a large fraction of the population expresses a clear desire not to eat a particular thing, it's a fair to require that its presence be labelled on food. It's not hard to do; if you think your customers won't care you can just stick on a label that says "may contain GMO" and move on. If you think your customers do care, then you can go to the trouble of making sure your "GMO free" label is accurate. And if that's really hard, then the market can vote with its wallets on whether it's worth it.

This is a conversation we need to have, because we are going to have to develop a more nimble agriculture to adapt to climate change (no matter where you think it comes from) while keeping yields high to support our huge population without wrecking the land; and because agricultural pests have a habit of adjusting to monocultures and eating them.

Transparency is a virtue, and transparency about what's in your food is a very good thing. You need a powerful argument against it to prevail, and Ozimek has not come close.

Success is the best revenge

Clay Shirky likens the Donald Sterling case to Brendan Eich's firing. It's a fair point, and one that I saw brought up even before we had Donald Sterling to instantiate it. So I'm going to explain why they are different. At least to me.

First though, there are similarities. I said that Brendan Eich should be able to argue his opinion without getting fired from an unrelated job. And I'll say that Donald Sterling should be able to mouth off in a private phone conversation without having it plastered all over the web and getting him fired. There are plenty of reasons to kick him out anyway, but that's not one of them.

But let's say that Sterling had instead supported a pro-segregation referendum back in the 1960's. He was in his thirties then, and could well have done for all I know. No "private conversation" cover; he would have been trying to take away the rights of fellow citizens. Then no, I don't think he should have been fired.

The key difference between Eich and Sterling is that Eich, having made his case and ultimately lost, made no attempt to impose his opinions privately. Eich did not ask people not to bring LGBT developers to his company, or ban their hiring. Sterling has a record of doing that with black people, and his taped conversation merely confirms it.

Eich could also claim to have a principled opinion that gay marriage was not a social good. (I have no idea what his views are based on, and I've not heard such an argument that didn't boil down to bigotry or religion... but religious people find them convincing). Sterling cannot. Racial equality has been around a lot longer than marriage equality. There's been time to think through the arguments and clear away the rubbish. Forty years from now I expect Eich to be seen the way Sterling is now, but this is not then and such things take time.

Success is the best revenge, and that goes double for bigots. The best punishment for them is to live in a society that has rejected their views and allows their targets to prosper openly. Not only is this a cheap punishment, but it hits hardest those who are most bigoted, and automatically and instantly rewards those who reform. We can punish the actions of those who continue to discriminate, and leave their thoughts alone.

Punishing people for opinions is not a good idea. It sets a dangerous precedent, it's hard to enforce fairly, and it chills robust discussion. We should reserve such efforts to those with genuinely dangerous opinions - the ones who walk the line of calling for violence - and be cautious even then. But it is also good for people to express disgust for bigoted opinions, and that's how these cases have ended up as they did.

Both Eich and Sterling have been victims of the fact that their organisations relied on widespread community goodwill, and for better or worse their opinions have offended those communities. I think Sterling should have been thrown out in 2009 or earlier, and Eich should not have been fired. But that's just my opinion... which I would be outraged to be fired for.

The freedom to be wrong

Despite what you hear from the occasional religious nut, the purpose of a secular society is not to destroy Christianity. Indeed, by protecting everyone from the worst excesses of religion, a secular society may well prolong its existence.

This protective effect takes (at least) two forms. One is to make it as easy as possible for people to leave an abusive church, which causes such institutions to wither and die. The other is to render the contest for social dominance as unimportant as possible. When the rewards for victory are slight and the penalty for defeat minor, the struggle will hopefully be as peaceful and civilised as possible. In many ways it is a religion-specific version of the grand bargain that is human society.

This is what disturbs me about the dismissal of Brendan Eich. As far as I can see (and whether or not it's true, I've definitely seen a lot of people defending this position), his only sin was to donate some of his own money to a political campaign. It wasn't Mozilla money. He did not attempt to use his position as CTO or CEO to discriminate, and in fact he explicitly disclaimed any attempt to do so.

I am very happy that Proposition 8 has been found unconstitutional. It was an attempt to force a particular religious view onto everyone - a violation of the idea of a secular society. But to hound Brendan Eich out of an unrelated job because he argued for his religious views in public is also a violation of the idea of a secular society. It raises the stakes, and makes a free discussion less likely.

As in so many other cases, we must be careful that in fighting for something we do not destroy it. The benefits of a secular society must be extended even to those people who try to undermine it, because by doing so we make it easier to protect the next time. And we provide the dissenters with an example of exactly why it is important; perhaps winning their support as well.

In Russia you can be prosecuted merely for campaigning for gay rights. We don't want that here, no matter which side is winning.

Managing your reputation again

I do not really follow climate change debates. Certainly not as closely as I follow creationism. So I didn't know that Michael Mann had sued some journalist until I read about it at Popehat. I say "some journalist" not as belittlement, but because I really hadn't heard of Mark Steyn until now, and if you follow those two links you'll know about as much of him as I do.

As a legal issue, I have no expertise beyond an opinion that libel lawsuits are a club to be wielded by the rich. But having given the BCA a serve a while back about trying to squash opinions, I should think about how well the boot fits on the other foot.

There are some differences. Mark Steyn pretty much states that Michael Mann is a deliberate fraud. Simon Singh was much more trying to argue that chiropractors are simply wrong, and disclaimed the inference of deliberate deception. Mark Steyn is being much more offensive in bringing Jerry Sandusky's name into it. Steyn is also talking more about particular actions. It could be that climate changing is absolutely real, and Michael Mann still made everything up, although it's rather unlikely. Singh's claims were more specifically about whether chiropractory worked at all.

But ultimately, there's a lot of similarity between the two; if the science questions are settled, the articles become mere footnotes. Anyone who thinks climate change is a genuine phenomenon will conclude from Steyn's article that he's a partisan hack, just as anyone who thinks chiropractory is "good for what ails ye" will have dismissed Singh as a close-minded tool of Big Pharma.

Even if you accept the plaintiff's claim that the other guy called him a liar, it's unlikely in either case that there would be much damage to reputation; anyone who knows much about the controversy will have their own opinion already and is likely to draw much stronger conclusions about the defendant ("he's one of our guys" or "he's one of theirs").

Science should be settled by vigorous debate, not by lawsuits. The winner should be the one with the best theory, not the better lawyers. When's the last time you saw a lawyer change sides in a case because he thought the other side was right? That's not how it works, but it is how science works. If someone says something offensive enough to be libellous in a scientific debate, they should certainly be publicly called out for it; but the penalty should be apology, and the sanction should that your arguments come under closer scrutiny and more scepticism.

I have more sympathy for Mann than for the BCA. Steyn has been clearly more offensive (and I think Mann is scientifically right and the BCA wrong, so there's a tribal element there no doubt). But Mann should not be suing Steyn and if he wins he will set a bad precedent. (Continue a line of bad precedents is probably more accurate, but still). Suing makes him look like he doesn't have a good scientific argument.

The weather is going to make people like Steyn look like idiots soon enough. And if it doesn't, that's a much more important result than a piece of name-calling.

Get your DMCA off my breakfast

Cory Doctorow writes about some coffee-maker company that is adding DRM to its coffee pods. Cory is hoping that this will result in case law that makes it harder for other companies to pull this kind of stunt, and I am certainly on his side there. I am less hopeful of actual success, because the DMCA is an abomination of a law that any sensible legislature would have repealed long ago. But there are precedents for decent rulings.

I have a different hope: I hope that people boycott the company. I don't drink coffee, so I won't be involved here. But I can say that I have bought two printers since Lexmark tried this on, and in both cases they were not on my list of printers to consider. Nor will they be on the next one. It doesn't matter how exclusively you lock up your consumables - if no-one's buying, you're not making money. We have to punish this kind of behaviour.

It's not moral. Companies like this are not providing any more useful service to customers by doing it, they are just trying to charge more money. That's something they are entitled to do, but not with the force of the law behind them.

A company that had a patent on their cartridge design would be a different thing. That would mean they had some kind of new invention behind it; something worth protecting (well, at least in theory). I would need to be convinced it was something useful to me before I would accept such a product, but it's at least possible. A company that is just trying to make their product less usable has nothing at all going for them.

The constitution says copyrights and patents are intended "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

DRMing your coffee refills does not achieve progress of any kind. It deserves no protection whatsoever. I hope this company changes its mind or goes broke. The legal smackdown that Cory wants to see would be an excellent reason for either of these things to happen.

Correct terminology

When I first encountered the word 'tsunami', I immediately decided it was a better term than 'tidal wave'. After all, these things have nothing to do with tides, and like any other know-it-all I do appreciate finding out that what everyone else says is wrong.

Tsunami literally means 'harbour wave', which isn't really all that good a description either, but that actually doesn't matter when you hijack a foreign word. Moved to English, it has no other meaning than the correct one. You could argue that both English and Japanese could be improved if we swapped words.

But I had never actually seen a tsunami. They're difficult to get footage of, because they are quite unpredictable and the people who see them are usually busy running away. I had in my head a mental picture of a really big "dumper"-style wave, that crashed onto buildings and people from a great height and smashed them.

Recently I was able to see a show that consisted of footage taken during the Japanese tsunami of 2011, using the now-ubiquitous mobile phone. This was most enlightening. Much of it was far inland, with the sea initially not visible, and there were no dumpers.

Instead, we would see dry land, and then a flat wave like the last of an ordinary beach wave when it has broken and flowed past the current water's edge. Instead of stopping and flowing back again, it would keep going. It would flow up to doorways, and then through them; it would start to fill open spaces. Water would pour between the buildings, and then that would prove too slow and it would start to spray out of windows as well. Even that would prove too slow and it would pick the building up and move it bodily.

Each time I started to think "well, that's really impressive", it would get faster and deeper and more destructive. First flowing through the road tunnel under a railway embankment, then spraying through it, then flowing over the embankment, and then throwing large objects over it - such as cars and buildings.

The insistent and inexorable way it crept up made it immediately clear why its victims would call it a tidal wave; it is exactly like a tide, but faster, and of course it appears where tides usually do not. It is not a wave caused by a tide, but a wave that behaves like one.

So I've changed my mind. Tsunami is a still a good word for it, because it's precise in what it refers to. But tidal wave is also a good term - equally precise, and very evocative. It may mislead people as to the cause of the phenomenon; but that is what education is for. And after all, even with a shiny new imported word, I still had no idea what one looked like.

Often your ignorant ancestors are smarter than they first appear.

Jaw-jaw is better than war-war

It would be a very good thing if the US and Iran could come to an agreement over Iran's nuclear program. That seems like a motherhood statement, but as far as I can tell there are significant numbers of people in the US and Israeli governments who don't agree and would much rather it turned into a war. So here's a couple of independent reasons why.

Hassan Rouhani was born in 1948 according to the hivemind. So he was 5 years old when a CIA-backed coup removed an elected government; which means that as far back as he could remember anything political, the regime of the Shah was in place with US support. Very likely he would have been raised on tales of the perfidy of the US, since his father was politically active against the Shah. Once the Shah had been removed, he spent his 30's on the Defence Council organising the fight to eject US-backed Iraqi invaders. So he has good reason to worry about US intentions towards Iran. It is no surprise that Iran has spent considerable effort in the region making life difficult for the US; this is a time-honoured way of fending off an adversary.

And so a deal which lessens the likelihood of a US-Iran war will also lessen the incentive for Iran to make trouble around the region. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, Rouhani was one of the people involved in the Iranian end of the Iran-Contra affair. He would know that the US might be prepared to work with Iran if it is in their interests.

Of course, Iran might also be an ambitious budding hegemon with evil intentions. They are a theocracy whose control I would hate to live under. A deal would also remove sanctions and give them more freedom of action. Many of their neighbours view them with enormous suspicion. But even if that were the case, there would still be good reason to do a deal.

In 2002-3, the US claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and demanded they let the inspectors in. Iraq, under great pressure, eventually gave in and allowed access to everywhere. And the US said "not good enough, you're still hiding something" and invaded anyway. It is a matter of record that there were no WMD. The lesson that Iran - a neighbour and fellow Axis-of-evil member - might draw from this history is that if the US starts threatening attacks on WMD grounds, they're going to invade no matter what you do. And so they might well start building WMD, because the Iraqi conventional army that Iran spent a decade fighting got brushed aside by the US in a matter of months. Moreover, so might anyone else that felt they might one day come into conflict with the US.

But there's more. The current sanctions on Iran (which have certainly played a part in bringing them to the table) are maintained by a large coalition of countries, some of which are not naturally inclined to back the US. If it becomes clear that the US isn't really trying to defuse Iran's potential nuclear weapons program and just wants to invade, that coalition will evaporate and the sanctions with it.

But if the US and Iran do a deal and the Iranians renege in some way, that will strengthen the US hand in redoubling the sanctions. So both sides can mitigate their risks somewhat.

The effect on other countries will be similar. If there's a deal, then other countries will see that there is reward for good behaviour (which a cynic might say means going along with what the US wants, but I hope means civilised behaviour... a rant for another day). If there's no deal, then other countries will see that their best interests lie in frustrating US influence as much as possible, lest it be used against them.

Syria has provided an example, and likely helped create the current negotiating climate. At first it looked like the US was looking for an opportunity to knock over a regime it didn't like with a simple "chemical weapons" claim. No doubt that was the strategy in the minds of many. But the result - by whatever lucky accident - was an apparently genuine agreement to dismantle the chemical weapons. Assad has escaped US air attacks by getting rid of the WMD, instead of keeping them to ward off the inevitable invasion. There's still a horrible civil war there, but I see no indication that US air strikes would have improved that and we have Iraq and Afghanistan as examples to show that even a full-scale invasion might not help.

There will be no end to history as long as the humans are in charge. But Iran is a chance to steer towards negotiated settlement and away from the increasingly disastrous prospects of warfare between large states. I hope both sides can take it.