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Friday, 6 December 2019
The Marquis de Condorcet meets Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
The first writers to treat the matter seriously were Rousseau and Condorcet, the latter - among other talents - a mathematician specialising in the theory of probabilities.
Condorcet showed that majority voting is a good guide to truth:
(1) the more enlightened (knowledgeable) is each individual voter, with a minimum requirement that they be more likely to be right than wrong on any one occasion (p = greater than 0.5)
(2) provided that when voting, voters are trying to give the right answer
(3) and provided that they vote independently of each other - if one voter follows the lead of another, that simply reduces the effective number of voters
If these conditions are met, then in a majority vote the probability of the majority being right increases (and quite dramatically, heading towards p = 1 [certainty])the larger the vote gap between majority and minority.
Since I did the work in the 1970s, the TV quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? has come along and it demonstrates Condorcet's theorem perfectly. When a contestant Asks The Audience to select the right answer from four possible answers, he or she can safely assume:
(1) that the Audience is quite knowledgeable- Quiz show live audiences are likely to contain a high proportion of people good at quizzes
(2) members of the audience have no motive to give answers they believe to be untrue (they enjoy giving right answers!)
(3) they vote independently of each other using push-button consoles with little or no time to consult the person sitting next to them
Hey Presto, the audience's choice of right answer will, almost certainly, BE the right answer. If some researcher checked back over Ask the Audience choices, I think they would rarely find that the Audience got it wrong. Ask the Audience is a No Brainer if you don't know the answer yourself.
There is more serious stuff in my essay "Majoritarianism" on my website www.selectedworks.co.uk
Originally published on this site on 25 August 2011
Wednesday, 25 September 2019
Is there a Right not to be Conceived?
Wednesday, 14 August 2019
Voice Mobility
Monday, 5 August 2019
Memory meets De tre vise men of Dalarna
Sunday, 28 July 2019
Do The Dead Have Any Rights?
Tuesday, 23 July 2019
The Bank Note Problem
Saturday, 20 July 2019
Boys from Slade Green are Under-represented in Hollywood films
Erith is in Kent - the "Garden of England" - I can only assume Erith is the outside toilet because it is a shit house.[1]
Would it make sense to say in some selected context that people from Slade Green are underepresented in that context? If you enlarged it a bit, would Erith or Crayford or even north-west Kent make sense as things which could be underepresented? I suspect not, because there are thousands of Slade Greens in the United Kingdom, thousands of places with nothing going for them and no special claim to be represented somewhere else. If someone from Slade Green became a Hollywood film actor ( Jade Anouka might) the fortuitous fact of coming from Slade Green would be of no relevance. If Jade Anouka got a part, no one would be asking the question, Are Slade Green actors under-represented (or over-represented) in Hollywood movies?
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Book Learning
Will the young people in the street now permanently attached to smartphones eventually turn to books and catch up with my kind of score, a score which must surely be common among older people?
Friday, 12 July 2019
A Niqab and a Panama hat
Rational
Dress
I don't know who invented high heels, but all
women owe him a lot.
Marilyn Monroe
In summer 2019 I spent
a week in Wiesbaden, working. I was helping to describe for auction a collection
of nineteenth century documents and correspondence originally sold off in the
1970s to pay the bills of declining and defunct Russian monasteries on Mont
Athos. In lunch breaks and evenings I
did my usual thing, strolling the city and taking in people and surroundings.
In a busy midday
pedestrianised shopping area a woman appears out of the crowd coming towards
me: tall, slender, dressed in an immaculately well-cut, dark blue and seemingly
brand new niqab. The man walking beside her is considerably shorter, hunched
over his smartphone, dressed according to regulations: a bit of stubble,
tee-shirt, jeans, and trainers. My rapid visual profiling doesn’t take in the
logo on the trainers so I don’t know if there is a brand he might favour.
The rules are sensible
which permit young men to dress in ways which are practical for life in any
European city. It means they can run after a bus, vault a barrier to cross a
road. They can pick up children with ease, put them on their shoulders and,
perhaps most importantly, kick a ball around.
I just wish the rules
were a bit more considerate about female dress. The niqab can look very
stylish; so too can high heels. But both are impractical. I guess the niqab can
be very hot inside on a climate warming summer day and that reminds me of how
on hot days in school, decades ago, we were always agitating for permission to
take off jackets and ties. More importantly, the niqab is isolating. I will
come to that.
I glance back at the
woman. She is staring at me, intensely, her eyes a perfect study in black and
white because those eyes are beautifully picked out with kohl. But I can’t
place the look as angry or friendly or just inquisitive - there is no facial
gesture to help out. I’m stumped to understand why I should be worth a very
frank stare. She has only her gaze to work with and I can’t interpret it. Maybe
it’s the fact that I’m wearing sunglasses that encourages a stare, since from
her point of view there is no eye contact and so she can’t figure out my gaze
either.
Then as we pass each
other, a penny drops and I laugh. I’m old and male and pale and I’m wearing a
Panama hat, a proper one with a broad black band. Hitherto I have understood
the Panama as standard issue for bald-headed elderly gentlemen on sunny days.
But I realise that on my stroll today I haven’t actually seen one. Maybe a
Panama is not a German thing, even for elderly bald-heads. Perhaps it’s like
this: she is my first niqab of the day and I am her first Panama. It’s the hat
which causes the stare.
People do sometimes
call out to me when I’m wearing a hat; there seems to be something about hats
(or at least, my hats) which frees people to address you. In the central park,
later the same day, a young woman sitting on a bench and making out with a boyfriend
calls after me, Bonjour, though I am
too slow to turn, lift my hat, incline my head, and reply - as one ought - Bonjour, Mam’selle. Anyway, it shows
that there’s at least one other person in this city who reckons a Panama
notable and, interestingly, French.
That brings me to the
point I skipped over. We are often led to believe that in modern urban
environments people walk around as if no one else exists, isolated monads who
don’t interact. That is not quite right. A lot goes on, an awful lot. I give an
example relevant to what I want to say.
If in the street a
child is behaving in a way which is charming, delightful or just funny, I will
almost certainly smile at whoever is doing the parenting. That is surely very
common, not an eccentricity. It is also the case that the parent will
acknowledge the compliment about the child which the smile implies - they will
smile back. Some who are more bold will end up exchanging a few words, not
quite “passing the time of day” but about things specific to the child, like
age or name. If I smile at a parent who happens to be wearing hijab, she will
smile back.
When women wearing
hijab began to appear at shop tills in London and then where I live, I behaved
at first in a correct but very restrained manner, as if attending a vicarage
tea-party. I didn’t engage, thinking it might be unwelcome. Now I will pass the
time of day, sometimes crack a joke, encouraged by the fact that there is
usually a smile on offer and even a riposte. It’s quite a good idea for old white
males in Panama hats to behave as if they might be ordinary human beings. We
can at least try to Pass.
The woman in the niqab
is pretty much excluded from the small change of everyday life. It really makes
a very big difference that you can’t see a face and from the face gauge whether
a compliment or a joke would be appreciated or has gone down well. Leave aside
that the man in tee-shirt, jeans, and trainers might not approve. Leave aside
that she is not going to initiate any exchange anyway. The face covering
inhibits any exchange. I suppose that is its purpose.
The exclusion is not
total: if there are women wearing hijab on the streets they do engage with
women wearing the niqab and vice versa (I’ve seen this on strolls elsewhere).
Perhaps the best hope for the future is that women who wear headscarves enable
women fully covered to change their style, at least for everyday street life.
Maybe the niqab would then become something reserved for special days, a
reminder of the past, like the traditional dress that jeans-and-trainers males
put on for formal occasions. It would cease to be a burdensome obligation of
everyday life. In the same way, though I can't understand why anyone would want
to wear impractical high heels for shopping or work - and most certainly should
not be obliged - it’s understandable that someone might want to wear them for
special occasions, even if they end up being kicked off and abandoned.
But there are more ways
of bringing on cultural change than imagined in my philosophy. In that same
lunch break stroll a five-abreast group of teenagers are coming towards me; in
the middle a tall, smiling, noisy girl has combined hijab with bright yellow
stiletto heels - or perhaps, vice versa.
This re-written version pasted in on 27 January 2023 replaces the original post. The substance is unchanged but the prose has been restyled.
Wednesday, 12 June 2019
Girl or Young Woman With a Rose: A Nineteenth Century Painting from Finland
A revised version of this essay appears in my book Between Remembering and Forgetting (degree zero 2020; hardback only £15) and the painting is reproduced on the cover.
Thursday, 6 June 2019
Motorway Service Stations: A Model for Universities?
This post from 6 January 2013 had a large number of readers; I'm not sure why. Maybe visitors who were looking for information on Brighton's club scene.
This week, The Economist has a very good piece about UK motorway service stations (5th January 2013, "Serviceable", page 21). If you want to open one, government regulations require you to keep it open 24/7/365 (and 366 in Leap Years). This seems like commonsense: people are on the move 24/7/365 and if they are on a motorway journey, they will need to stop for petrol, food, drink and the loo - and the loos (says the government) must also be open 24/7/365 and free of charge.
Of course, motorway service station workers don't work 24/7/365. Staff work rotas.
The other day, someone reminded me of a truth I used to know very well: at weekends, my local university campuses (there are two: Brighton, Sussex) are deserted and most of their services closed down. This ought to strike us as strange. Reading, writing, thinking, experimenting are 24/7/365 things. People's brains are on the move all the time. And since universities are supposed to be connected with - and supportive of - brains on the move you would expect this to be reflected in their opening hours. Universities are places where the lights should burn long into the night and all through the weekend.
Instead, the lights are burning in Brighton & Hove, the large town (or small city) which neighbours the university campuses. The pubs, the clubs, the cafes, the restaurants, the shops - some are open almost 24/7/365 but especially at weekends when Brighton fills up with students and other visitors arriving (often in tens of thousands) to sample its weekend delights (basically music, alcohol, drugs and maybe some sex though probably the alcohol and drugs are incompatible with much of that).
The only people missing from the Brighton late night and weekend scene are the majority of University staff, teachers and administrators who are busy doing Middling England kind of things: decorating the house, going for walks, giving dinner parties.
Innocent enough but the overall effect is to routinise intellectual life into some nine to five Monday to Friday office schedule.
Students - whatever they may think they are doing - are already living the kind of On / Off life their Middling England parents live - there's just more Off to it.
Academics have settled for attending their committees and meeting their Research Output quotas rather than pursuing the life of the mind which was once (perhaps) the vocation associated with their salary.
The life of the mind can of course be a troubling thing. Even what's left of my mind can have me sitting here banging away at the keyboard from 8 34 to 9 05 on a Sunday morning - almost a definition of Off time. But then I was always a bit defiant.
But I have learnt to compromise; the computer will go to Off and I will take a walk along the seafront.
Wednesday, 5 June 2019
Walking in Port Meadow, Oxford, May 2019
